Minecraft and Schizophrenia

A Thousand Players, A Thousand Plateaus

‘Minecraft is a schizophrenic game’.

We have here a statement that seems, at first glance, to be a joke, an insult, a provocation, or perhaps even a combination of all three. Hiding beneath this crude shell, however, is a philosophic thesis that is self-evident enough to remain impressed in the depths of my mind for about a year, and significant enough to warrant a piece about it for the same length of time. The original intent was to pen a blog post that explained Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s account of schizophrenia with reference to the game, such that their dense postmodern framework could be rendered both less confusing and more relatable. Before this project could unfold, though, my experience with the world of Minecraft was altered, and the limited scope I had planned was ruptured.

At the end of November 2023, I was accepted to participate in a Minecraft social experiment, in which one-thousand players were instructed to realistically simulate civilization in the virtual setting. The event contained a layer of psychological and political complexity that was intriguing on its own, but combined with our opening statement to enable something truly revolutionary. For if Deleuze and Guattari were correct that reality is essentially schizophrenic, and Minecraft shares the same foundation, then any reflections over this online roleplay would be applicable to external life. This text, therefore, can first use Minecraft as a way to make sense of Deleuze and Guattari, then use Deleuze and Guattari to make sense of Minecraft---both lessons, in turn, help us make sense of our existence away-from-keyboard.

Traversing this task will take us through a wide range of topics, including governmental structure, international relations, environmental protection, death, and love. It will also consider each of these questions under the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophic system, as they describe it in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia---Anti-Oedipus (1972/2009), henceforth abbreviated to AO, and A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987), henceforth ATP. This system is as thorough as it is difficult. These factors combine to make a piece that will almost certainly end up being longer and more theoretically demanding than anything I have authored to date. In addition, I do not imagine the style this work is composed in will do you any favors. I early on deleted ten pages of writing to start from scratch because I was unsatisfied with their form, frustrated largely by the way my prioritization of a clear, precise, logical representation of my thoughts strangled an expressive, emotive, ‘fun’ one. The method I finally found to break through my writer’s block was ingesting a large quantity of caffeine, putting on Playboi Carti’s mixtape and a Chicago Bulls jersey, barring myself from going back to revise what I had already written, and ‘locking in’, if that gives you an idea of what you’re in for.

Brian Massumi, in the preface to ATP, likens Deleuze and Guattari’s work to a record. It is less important to internalize every sentence of the text, he claims, or to make a referendum on the text as a whole, than it is to see what the text makes you feel, to take the bits and pieces that resonate with you and repeat them in everyday life, to memorize the tracks you wish to sing along with and to skip the ones you do not. This is not an endeavor for everyone, and that’s fine, “but you would have been better off buying a record” (ATP, p. xv). If you are one of those misguided customers, I have included two QR on the next page: the first is the official YouTube video account of the previous Minecraft social experiment of this kind, which inspired my interest in the one this book considers, and the second is a YouTube video I made to share my perspective of this book’s experiment, while keeping the philosophy to a minimum---these could be a more enjoyable medium by which to consume the information that decorates the rest of these pages. For those of you who do want to venture through my textual descriptions, I think Massumi’s recommendations are applicable. Make an attempt to understand what I have said, of course, but spend more time digesting the parts that strike a chord with you, and skim through the parts that don’t. Even if it seems like everything is going over your head, in my experience, you will find when you walk away that you have retained more than you expected. Also, given that this ended up being 300 pages, I don’t know that reading this in one sitting would be the best idea. To help with this, I have included a table of contents below, and also published this same piece of writing in a book form, a PDF of which is attached below as a third QR code, and of which I have a few physical copies (reach out to me if you would like one!).

If all else fails, though, just remember, “Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy” (ATP, xiii)---so, I suppose you can always just listen to Carti.

ish13c’s Season 2 Minecraft Social Experiment

BetaOfThePack’s Season 2.5 Social Experiment

Minecraft and Schizophrenia Digital Edition

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1---Minecraft without Organs

2---Main Character Syndrome

3---Rhizomes, or, Underground Tunnels

4---Introversion and Instrumentalization: An Interlude

5---Imperialism and Floating Leaves

6---False Convictions, True Sentences, Botched Executions

7---Infernus and the War-Machine (Netherite and Nomadology)

Epilogue: DEATH / LOVE

References

Minecraft without Organs

Minecraft, as I have already said, is a schizophrenic game. But what do we mean by schizophrenic? Schizophrenia, as you are likely acquainted with it, has very little to do with Minecraft. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari maintain “schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon” (AO, p. 5). It is therefore impossible, as modern science has done, to label only that which displays certain neurobiological, cognitive, or behavioral characteristics, as schizophrenic. When we say that Minecraft is schizophrenic, what is meant is not that Minecraft shows a little bit of disorganized thinking here, a little bit of paranoid delusion there. Besides, that would hardly make for an interesting book.

Deleuze and Guattari, instead, hold that schizophrenia is a process---more acutely, “a process of production” (AO, p. 2). The process that they here refer to, at the most basic level, is meant to explain the constant chaos and change of the universe, which is why they feel compelled to call schizophrenia and its “universal primary production” the “‘essential reality of man and nature’” (AO, p. 5). This means that schizophrenia (the disorder you are familiar with) is not just distinct from, but directly contradictory to, schizophrenia (the philosophic principle this work will interrogate). Deleuze and Guattari go as far as to call the former “the artificial schizophrenia found in mental institutions” (AO, p. 5), since their existence is calcified within the bounds of a fixed cluster of psychological phenomena, a move that denies the constant flux of the latter. We could never earnestly describe schizophrenia with a psychiatrist’s handbook---“we cannot, must not attempt to describe the schizophrenic object without relating it to the process of production” (AO, p. 6).

Our task, then, is clear: in order for us to understand Minecraft as a schizophrenic game, we must first understand the process of production that such a characteristic necessarily entails. The good news is that this process of production has already been discovered and detailed by Deleuze and Guattari, and we need only lay out their framework for our own application. The bad news is that such a seemingly simple task is anything but that. As our reflections on the popular conception of schizophrenia might betray, the very act of defining anything runs counter to the process of production. For even with our very limited impression of it---that which is responsible for the eternal impermanence and imperfection of existence---it is not hard to see how any attempt to give a clear, all-encompassing description of something is bound to separate that thing from the process. Heisenberg discovered, regarding quantum mechanics, that the more we know an object’s position, the less certain we are of its momentum. We could say a similar thing here: the more narrowly and exactly we come to know schizophrenia, the less we account for the process of production that it is bound up in, that constantly changes and is changed by it.

This does not make our project impossible from the outset. As we have already seen, Deleuze and Guattari have an easy solution: describe things in terms of this process of production. This recommendation, however, leaves us with some difficulties. Once we have grasped what this schizophrenic process entails, it will not be difficult to think through whatever part of our world we wish in relation to it. But to do so, we must first grasp the process. This leaves us in a pinch, where the only way we can truly understand this foreign notion is through itself. As annoying as this stipulation is, though, it is necessary. There are certainly cases, in most academic fields, and especially in postmodern philosophy, where thinkers seem content to obscure their ideas behind impenetrable vocabulary for no apparent reason, other than to be frustrating to read. But for Deleuze and Guattari, being self-referential is not just a professional formality (is self-referential thinking endemic to postmodern writings because the movement is, in large part, characterized by the belief that most things are self-referential? Or is that just a fun coincidence?). On the one hand, as I have insisted earlier, their revelation of schizophrenic production as the foundation of all things resists, and even reprimands, any portrayal that lacks a connection back to that process (the position/momentum paradox). On the other hand, this is not a case of the all-too-common issue where an author uses obscure language to dress up an otherwise mundane discovery---the insights Deleuze and Guattari make are usually no more convoluted than they are true.

Perhaps an anecdote will help illustrate what I mean here. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory provides a phenomenal account of many things---perhaps their most precise, yet profound, application comes in the case of identity. One day last semester, my intro to philosophy class was having a discussion over this very subject. There was some disagreement afoot, at the center of which was my roommate, who has (through her proximity to me, and likely against her will) inherited some trace of Deleuze and Guattari’s worldview. In a heroic effort to help the argument get back on track, I jumped in to remark that ‘identity is a body without organs’. This simple stance was enough to assuage her concerns, and we were ready to move on. But the rest of the group, the instructor included, watched this interaction with a bewildered stare. They had no idea what a body without organs was (and who could blame them?), and had they asked, I would have struggled to explain it without mention of desiring-production, zones of intensity, and becomings, at minimum---terms that would probably appear just as baffling. The issue with Deleuze and Guattari is not that they are wrong---for the two of us who understood it, my one-line observation quelled our doubts on a broad, complex, and contested topic. The issue is that, for Deleuze and Guattari’s framework to be at all intelligible (in both senses of the word: accurate and understandable), one must already have a grasp of some of its parts. My hope is that this text can help get that foot in the door.

I will do what I can to make Deleuze and Guattari make sense. As I introduce the different parts of their philosophic system, I will (of course) define them in their own right, but I will also try to relate them back to the other parts we have already encountered, as well as using concrete examples to ground both the definitions and relationships of the parts. When I finally figured Deleuze and Guattari out, it was essentially by locking myself in a room with a whiteboard and modeling everything together, and to the extent that these drawings were helpful to me, I will share them with you all as we go. Perhaps our most important weapon, however, for the comprehension of Deleuze and Guattari, is the fact that Minecraft is still a schizophrenic game. Of course, insofar as schizophrenia is the underlying principle of all reality, all video games are part of this schizophrenic process of production. Minecraft is distinct, though, in the sense that it is not merely a portion of the process, but a recreation of it. The dynamics which govern schizophrenic production, and by extension, all existence, are all present as animating forces of all facets of Minecraft’s gameplay. Indeed, if we merely take survey of the assorted terms we have used thus far to explain schizophrenia---chaos, change, a process of production, love---what could better describe Minecraft?

This truth helps cut through our problem of self-referentiality. For, if Minecraft is actually schizophrenic, then to define something in relation to Minecraft means we have still effectively defined something in relation to the schizophrenic process of production, as Deleuze and Guattari demand we must. Fortunately, most people have a little more understanding of the most-sold video game of all time than they do of some random pair of academically disgraced and biologically deceased French postmodernists. As said in our introduction, Deleuze and Guattari’s framework can help us make sense of my experiences in a Minecraft social experiment (which, insofar as both the game and our reality are essentially schizophrenic, translate to all life), and the following seven chapters of this work will do exactly that. But first, we will use Minecraft to make sense of Deleuze and Guattari. The remainder of this chapter will complete this task, the task that I intended to constitute this entire project prior to my participation in said social event. We will relate Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical system, treating Minecraft as a prime example we can use to conceptualize it. Brain Massumi remarks in the preface to ATP that Deleuze views his work as a “‘tool box’” (p. xv). Massumi himself prefers to think of a concept as a brick: “it can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window” (p. xii). Whichever analogy you prefer, one thing remains the same: before we can throw our concepts around recklessly, as we will for the remainder of this book, we first need to have them---and it’s hard to think of a better place to gather bricks and tools than Minecraft.

That said, it would be tough to mine stone or craft a pickaxe if we did not know the rules of the game. How could I relate to the infatuation for diamond ore if I never knew it existed, or what role it played in the progression of the story? Or, to drop the analogy for a moment, how could we be persuaded by Deleuze and Guattari’s insights if we were ignorant of the context they were developed in? It is true of almost all philosophy, perhaps of all things, but especially for thinkers as abstract as our French protagonists, that it is much easier to learn the character and significance of some disposition if we are cognizant of the exigence that surrounded it. As such, we would be best served to inspect the plumbing before we pull out our toolbox, to get to know the neighborhood before we start laying any bricks, to see what the landscape looks like before we start building our base.

Deleuze and Guattari, fortunately, are not secretive about what strands of scholarship motivate their work---in fact, it is plastered on the title page of their publication. Anti-Oedipus. One could infer that the work is critical of this ‘Oedipus’ figure. What did the Greek hero of tragic fate do to deserve such condemnation? Nothing, really. He did happen to murder his father and fornicate with his mother---but that is hardly of concern to Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus is not a 382-page Oedipus diss track. It is a 382-page psychoanalysis diss track. The name derives less so from the Greek character, and more from his immortalization at the hands of Sigmund Freud. Freud, in his formulation of psychoanalysis, said many things. But, just our luck, you do not need to know any of the intricacies of Freudian theory to juxtapose his thought with Deleuze and Guattari’s. Indeed, the broad stroke of their issue with Freud is just how oversimplified he made everything, and it just so happens that these gross generalizations are the portions of Freudian psychoanalysis most infamous in colloquial discussions.

If you made it to high school, one of three Freudian concepts probably come to mind when you hear his name. First is his structure of personality, split up between the impulsive id, the culturally-determined superego, and the ego, mediating the two. Next comes the aptly-named Freudian slip, where someone says something they did not mean to, which, for Freud, is an expression of their unconscious. Last, and certainly least, is his theory of childhood development, in which children go through phases (most memorably, the Oedipus Complex, where young boys want to kill their father and copulate with their mother), phases during which the problems experienced crystallize into lifelong personality defects by the ripe old age of twelve. Though with some more than others, it is not hard to see how all of these theories came to be gazed upon as laughing stocks rather than scientific discipline, or how Freud became as revered for his cocaine intake as he did for the ideas he formulated under its influence. There are some more specific loci of disagreement for Deleuze and Guattari, however, that can serve as a jumping off point for our comprehension of their theoretical alternative.

The first such dissension comes at perhaps the most obvious and intuitive point---the Oedipus complex itself. More precisely, the schizoanalysts are scornful of the way he reduces all desire to one, universal end. This tendency is most apparent in the complex, where every boy is thought to have the same father-murdering, mother-fucking urge, but it is equally applicable to Freud’s interpretation of the unconscious as the play between the id and superego. What we should mention here, and what the extension of their dismay to Freud’s more reasonable personality theory should reveal, is that Deleuze and Guattari are not criticizing Austria’s finest crack addict just because he claimed that all desire could be explained by a single principle as comically unthinkable as incest. They are criticizing the way he claimed all desire could be explained by a single principle, at all. This is important, because this latter move is not one reserved to the popularly-discarded discipline of psychoanalysis. Philosophers, and even pseudo-intellectuals who have had one too many drinks, are all-too-swift to wax on about some essential human nature: all people are inherently selfish, selfless, aspire to the true form of themselves, whatever. Moreover, the sciences (who would make fun of Freud and postmodernists alike for their failure to set up any lab experiments) are not exempt: the biologist reasons that all organisms seek only to survive and reproduce, and the physicist (insofar as, as we shall come to see, Deleuze and Guattari do not think desire is exclusive to living matter) is guilty as well when he claims that atoms always move toward equilibrium or radiate outwards. When we dismiss Freud for being wrong in his essentialization of desire, we should not be deceived into believing that we would be correct to assert some other, more plausible, end toward which all unconscious urges aim. Deleuze and Guattari use Freud as the poster child for this move, a decision I am thankful for, as their texts are a joy to read with the constant reference to Freud’s eroticism and case studies (the chapter in ATP on the Wolf-Man, of all things, is up there for the most transformational things I have ever read). I will do the same, in part because it is easy to use ‘Daddy’ as the strawman to dunk on. But do not think for a moment that Freud is Daddy alone. Selfishness-the-father, survival-the-father, equilibrium-the-father---it’s all Daddy, and it’s all absurd.

The second point of departure Deleuze and Guattari take is a less obvious, but still fairly disagreeable, flaw in Freud’s work. All three of the Freudian concepts we discussed above coalesce around one foundational conclusion---a fixed personality. Whether it is observed in the way our ego mediates the id and superego, revealed when the unconscious blurts out through a slip in the tongue, or caused by the shortcomings in our childhood development, psychoanalysis is unthinkable without the tenet that every individual is stable. Stable not in the sense of ‘emotionally well-adjusted’, but stable in the sense of ‘unchanging’. Again, what we encounter here is not contained to the psychoanalyst’s parlor. The astrologist connects their horoscope to your weeks-old action, the friend curiously asks you to take a personality survey with her, the teacher complains about the problem child, the doctor diagnoses you with a psychological disorder. Again, Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion that such a state of affairs is wrong is not difficult to accept. Most of us can recognize that the composition of our ‘personality’ oscillates and shifts among circumstance, disposition, and time. The interaction with the exterior shapes the character of the subject just as much as the character of the subject shapes the interaction with the exterior. Freud says: there is Easton Jacob Logback, who is studious, competitive, and argumentative (by the way, traits that all come from Daddy)! Deleuze and Guattari say: Easton (at school) behaves differently than // ELog (at debate practice), who behaves differently than Easton (with friends), who behaves differently than Beta of the Pack (at the dorm, talking to roommates), who behaves differently than Beta of the Pack (an hour later, on the Minecraft server). There are infinite Eastons, and their desires cannot be coherently tethered to a single structuring center. “There is no Nietzsche-the-self, professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather, there is the Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: ‘every name in history is I. . . .’” (AO, p. 21). Who is more believable? If you think it is Freud, I am afraid you do not know me well enough.

The final thing Freud gets wrong, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the most subtle, the one that will require the most persuasion, but also the most important mistake, by far. It is this error that will ground the line of flight our duo makes away from the Oedipal framework. For Freud, all desire is negative. What does this mean? Is all desire oriented towards destruction? Freud did speak of the death drive---but nobody really agrees what that is, and it is not what Deleuze and Guattari are remarking on. When we say that all desire is negative, what we are speaking of is its motivation, what causes the desire to arise in the first place. For Freud, our desire is always aspiring toward something, toward something external, toward something that we don’t have. This may be less apparent based on the three Freudian ideas we have alluded to, but it is just as pervasive, both in his thought and in our everyday lives. Deleuze and Guattari mention, in a conclusion that we can derive ourselves from the idea of the Freudian slip, or the personality problems being a manifestation of childhood trauma, that “once Oedipus entered the picture… an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself… was substituted for the productive unconscious” (AO, p. 24) Desire as negative can be contrasted with the eschewed interpretation, that of desire as productive. Desire, for Freud, is not creative. It does not take what is already there and build upon it. It just reproduces itself, reproduces the same problems, reproduces the same incompleteness that it has always and will always have.

This distinction may be the hardest to understand. But perhaps that is because it is the most ingrained in our thought, and Deleuze and Guattari’s talk of a ‘productive unconscious’ sounds foreign to us. We are all acquainted with an unconscious that is correlated with evil, with irrational or violent impulses, with desires that we would be better off refraining from acting upon. More than that, we are accustomed to an unconscious that wants things. Put the two together, and you have an image of Freud’s theater---the unconscious is incomplete, and it expresses itself through want, a want for that which it does not have. This is what we mean when we say that desire is negative---it is not that it wants something negative, but that it wants because of a negative. We are incomplete, and our unconscious pursues what we do not have, in search of completion. This idiosyncrasy of Freud is apparent in his case studies. Take Wolf-Man, who I name dropped earlier: Freud, hearing of his subject’s dream of being eaten by wolves, assumed that the vision was the consequence of Wolf-Man having seen his parents hitting it doggy-style (I wish that I was making up this level of detail for comedic effect. I am not). For Freud, Wolf-Man’s desire, in that moment, to turn into a wolf, was reduced to Daddy; it was a reflection of a static personality caused by childhood trauma; but most of all, it was an escape from his incomplete unconscious, the one that had witnessed his parents getting freaky. Everything the Freudian subject wants is Daddy, all of the problems are a lack of Daddy, yes---but the expression of this desire can only occur when the unification, the identification, between the subject and Daddy is not there.

Given how transparently Freud’s cocaine addiction has influenced his account of Wolf-Man, it would be easy to write the analyst off as ridiculous and move on with our lives. But if the notion of desire as negative is Freudian, then we are all Freudians. For all of his descriptions of desire, this is the one that haunts us most. Perhaps this will be clearer if we consider the work of Freud’s greatest disciple, Jacques Lacan (who, fun fact, Guattari trained under prior to his work with Deleuze). Lacan, in a tidying-up of Freud’s more eccentric ideas, stated a simpler formula of desire. All human subjects are defined by a lack---a constant feeling of imperfection, unwholeness, or dissatisfaction with existence---and pursue various objects of desire, which they imbue with the promise of filling the lack. What the specific object is matters not---the subject pursues it for the same reason. For as long as they desire, they can believe that their unpleasant lack is temporary, only present until they have grasped their object. The mouse feels lack, so he desires a cookie; after acquiring his cookie, he still feels lack, so he desires some milk to go with it; the cycle continues. Of course, the equation of desiring toward a completion one does not have it is not new with Lacan. Plato thought all things aspired toward their true, perfect ‘form’. Christians maintained that people (should) want to live up to the ideal, sin-free image of Christ. Humanist psychologists will tell patients that their negative self-esteem occurs as they try (and fail) to achieve the self-transcendence that tops Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Lacan seems like the best theorist to reference, however, because he appears to sidestep Deleuze and Guattari’s first criticism, that of redirecting all desire toward the same point. Sure, one could argue that he claims all desire takes an external object. But that is less of a homogenization of desire and more of a structural claim. The only defining postulate Lacan makes, the one that Deleuze and Guattari must take offense to (and they do!), is that idea that all desire is a desire-for, and this desire-for arises from an incompleteness.

Perhaps you are not convinced, despite my clever appeal to a children’s book as an example, that this negative conception of desire is held by anyone not ten layers removed from reality, rotting away in the ivory tower of academia. Fine. We can look at some cases of such a belief rearing its ugly maw in everyday conversation, as implicitly as it often occurs. The man, in his mid-life crisis, buys a 60-thousand-dollar sports car to compensate for his emotional insecurity. What motivated his audacious purchase? His lack of self-esteem, of course! My sister asks for a new toy for Christmas, despite having plenty of similar toys already, only to toss it aside the moment she receives it. What about this toy would cause her to want it, that all the toys she already owned did not have? Precisely the fact that she did not have it, for she must always have some new, external object to project her desires upon! The weird kid takes up substance abuse to fit in. The sports superstar worked hard because his coach told him he was not good enough, planting doubt in his mind (or, maybe if this particular superstar has been getting Michael Jordan comparisons, he works hard because he needs to be the best in the world, which he is not yet). I do my homework to get a good grade, because I need to go to a good school, because I need to get a good job. These are the instances that came to me, but I am sure if you think about it for a moment, you can recall an instance of desire being articulated in a similar way. What is important is not these specific cases, but what is common in their logic, that they conceive of desire as for something that we do not have, precisely because we do not have it. The unconscious can only express itself, and only in relation to some flaw, something that it lacks. Desire is teleological. It wants something, and it cannot be complete unless it actually acquires that thing (if it can be complete at all). I do not really even want that thing, I just want the acquisition of it, I want to have what that thing will give me, for it will give me what I do not have. I cannot desire without lack. In this way, desire---as Freud would have it, as Lacan would have it, and most likely, as you would have it too---is negative.

For Deleuze and Guattari’s other gripes with Freud, it is pretty clear why the psychoanalyst was in the wrong. To say that people do not all desire the same thing, or that they desire different things at different times, is not exactly controversial. The same conclusion cannot be made as intuitively for desire-as-negative. As we see with our enumeration above, this is the dominant paradigm for the modern understanding of desire. So what is wrong with it? Well, obviously, we are going to argue that it is not true. But there’s a couple reasons we can’t jump straight into that. To prove that it is wrong, as we have done with Freud’s other pair of problems, we need an alternative we could buy into instead, one that discredits the Freudian conception. We have one of those, but it’s the start of Deleuze and Guattari’s own system, and we’re still trying to provide the context that surrounds such a system’s inception. Additionally, just proving something untrue is not enough. It is part of the equation, to be sure. As Massumi says in ATP’s preface, though, “the question is not: is it true? But: does it work?” (p. xv). Indeed, even if we were thoroughly convinced that Freudian psychoanalysis was a pseudo-science, if the therapeutic measures it advocated routinely helped patients improve their lives, we would take issue with the scientist who bemoaned its inaccuracies in spite of its practical success. Fortunately, we do not have to hand it to Freudian psychoanalysis in this manner---for it does not help subjects, and I assume I am not alone in the experience of therapy only worsening my self-image. Nonetheless, we are not quite finished. Nietzsche (1886/2020) proclaimed “the falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it… the question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering” (p. 12). This Nietzsche character, by the way, had a profound influence on the thought of Deleuze and Guattari---the introduction to AO sums up the entire project as a cross between “Marx the revolutionary and Nietzsche the madman” (p. xviii). The task before us, therefore, is to finish clearing the ground on which we can build Deleuze and Guattari’s system, which requires us to prove that desire-as-negative is not life-preserving, as well as to sprinkle in an introduction to Nietzsche. Since he also happens to be the thinker who gives us the terminology to renounce something as life-denying, then, we can kill two birds with one stone.

Nietzsche basically starts from the same presupposition that Deleuze and Guattari do: the natural state of the world is chaos, change, and imperfection. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari interrogate this interpretation at the level of desire, however, Nietzsche does so at the level of value (at least, to the extent that value and desire can be separated). Nietzsche is specifically critical of moral codes that gaze upon the suffering that life inevitably contains with a sneer, and which instead aspire to some telos that has rid existence of this stain. More precisely, he understands this phenomenon in terms that mirror, and perhaps satirize, the Greek thinkers he finds guilty of such errors. Nietzsche uses the word ‘Dionysian’, taken from the Olympian god of (among other things) tragedy and wine, to signify all those chaotic, changing, imperfect, and suffering-filled aspects of life. In response to these Dionysian elements, Nietzsche notices a trend that runs through the formation of value systems across centuries. Reality is divided between the ‘Real World’, which is the potential and theoretically optimal version of existence, and the ‘Apparent World’, the actual, present state of affairs (yes, the names seem backwards. You can blame Plato for that). For centuries, the common practice has been to place all the value on the Real World, use it as a model which the Apparent World is supposed to match, and against which every incongruence is noted and reprimanded. What it is that constitutes the Real World is not important, and indeed has shifted between a variety of masks. Plato had a Real World of forms, Socrates a Real World of reason, Christians a Real World of heaven, Freud a Real World of Daddy. The constant across these variations is that the Real World always remains distant, and as the subscribers to these moral codes remain trapped in the Apparent World, they come to hate their existence, surrounded by what they can only understand as a failure to escape from.

To the observant reader, Nietzsche’s Real/Apparent World dynamic may be reminiscent of Lacan’s formula of desire that we discussed earlier. Subjects, seeking to resolve the unpleasant feeling of the Dionysian/lack, pursue a cessation of this discomfort through the Real World/object of desire. If psychoanalysis got anything correct, it is that this form of valuation does occur, and that occurrence is not a good thing. But only with the injection of Nietzsche can we comprehend why such a judgement is problematic beyond a simple ‘because that therapist said it is’. In a word, the Real/Apparent World dynamic (or lack/object of desire formula, whatever you want to call it) is bad because it generates ressentiment. To most, though, ‘ressentiment’ means nothing, and we must therefore outline its significance.

Ressentiment, in its barest form, is a hatred of life, born out of the inability to accept the suffering (in the broadest, Dionysian sense) inherent to life. We have seen that individuals exist within the bounds of an Apparent World. When systems of value mark the flaws of the Apparent World as problems to be solved, therefore, existence itself becomes an object of condemnation. Life is Dionysian, we hate the Dionysian, we hate life. This nihilism is not the only foundational characteristic of ressentiment, however, and indeed operates most destructively in tandem with its counterpart. Since the Apparent World is always renounced in comparison to the Real World, there are always located within it specific defects that are deemed responsible for its failure to live up to its ideal image. The Christian’s Real World of heaven is prevented because of the sinners in the Apparent World, Socrates’s Real World of reason because of the Apparent World’s emotional irrationality, the fascist’s Real World because of whatever minority group they decide to pin all the blame on. Again, the dynamic we observe here is very Lacanian. Desperate to make the Dionysian/lack they so painfully experience in the Apparent World intelligible as a temporary, fixable error, subjects create for themselves an external object, Real World, or goal, imbued with the promise of liberating them from this suffering. A counterproductive move, of course, since the extermination of some scapegoat obviously does not rid the world of all imperfection. But a move that we, influenced by the life-negating values around us, make nonetheless.

We, at this point, have enough of a concept of what ressentiment means to proceed. Faced with the presence of the Dionysian we so frantically seek to avoid, we search to locate and remove that which causes it to flow into our world---a quest that will always fail (since there is no source of the Dionysian, it is just an inevitable aspect of life), and a quest during which, as we remain surrounded by the Dionysian throughout our journey to eliminate it, we hate life all the same. This ressentiment is something we should work to avoid, to be sure. But what does it have to do with Freud? Psychoanalysis, and its trademark conception of desire as negative, is a source of this scourge. It is a textbook case of the Real/Apparent World system, and is therefore generative of ressentiment. For, as we noted above, this conception of desire understands it always as a product of some incompletion in the unconscious, some fixation on an object that we do not have, some perfection that we lack. In this way, desire becomes Dionysian, a sign that we have some imperfection that constrains us to the Apparent World. If we feel desire, it means that we have a problem, that we are a failure. We see this association manifest itself on numerous occasions. Socratic philosophy tells us that our emotions are irrational and lead us away from reason, Christianity that temptations and lust seduce us into sin, modern psychology that unconscious urges are symptomatic of insanity. When we desire, then, it is an instance of our deficiency, at once a cause and reminder of our imprisonment in the Apparent World that we long to escape. But this self-loathing is not just a consequence of desire getting placed on the wrong side of historically prominent moral codes. Because we have been taught that desire is an attempt to fill some lack, it is impossible to conceive of wanting something without having some blemish that motivates our want. If we were perfect, we would not desire anything, Freud tells us (a line that has been echoed throughout the streets, no longer confined to the psychoanalyst’s office). Desire, then, when it is understood as negative, as an attempt to acquire something, necessarily represents our shortcomings, and comes to be disparaged. Of course, we continue to desire after this revelation, because desire is (for all intensive purposes) an inevitable, even omnipresent, part of existence. Something that we value as bad, that we seek to prevent, and that keeps coming back regardless---an accurate description of desire, and a classic definition of the Dionysian. The negative accounts of desire we have listed, then, are guilty of ressentiment. Life contains desire, we hate desire, we hate life.

The manifestation of this ressentiment is not hidden in Freud and his disciples (even those disciples who try to distance themselves from him in modern psychology). Lay on the therapist’s couch, pour out all your feelings, and let him systematize them all. Every thought you’ve ever had, every emotion that has ever visited you, it’s all Daddy, it’s all a sign that you want Daddy, but that you don’t have him. You leave their office with the unshakable feeling, the one they have implanted into you, that you are incomplete, that (because you have desires, and desires require some insufficiency to cause them) you have a problem. Therapy is unthinkable without having a problem. I went to a couple therapists a while back, not because I thought I needed them, but because my parents (coming from a place of loving ignorance, and not maliciousness, I believe) thought I did. So I sat there, and they asked me, ‘what is wrong with you?’, and I had no idea, because I didn’t feel like anything was going wrong. So they ask some questions, interrogate your past, and when the hour is up, lo and behold, it turns out you have a bunch of problems, and your homosexuality is at the root of all of them. Come back next week! Of course, the therapist does not condemn you, does not tell you that you have a problem. In fact, they do quite the opposite---tell you that it’s all okay, that it’s natural to feel the way you do. But when you sit there as an object for their analysis, as they reassure you that having problems is okay, their words do little to quell the uneasy feeling you have that there’s something wrong with you, since they have just informed you that, as you have desires, there must be something wrong with you. Not wrong in the sense that it is bad, perhaps, but at least an incompletion, and that’s all you really need to fall into self-hatred, into ressentiment. Now you’ve finished your paid gaslighting appointment, and know that you are imperfect. Where do we go from here? The ressentiment that’s been planted in you is unpleasant, that’s for sure, so you’ll do what you can to get rid of it. But psychologists don’t read Nietzsche, and most of their patients don’t, either, so they work in the bounds of the dominant conception of desire, the one we have discussed at length. We’re trapped in the Apparent World, hating the Apparent World, but all we’ve ever known is to get to the Real World, so we try that. We pin all of our desire, the mark of our incompleteness, to a single cause (Daddy, in all of his forms---bad parents for some, a ‘mental illness’ for others; it was homosexuality for me), and do what we can to conquer it. We will keep desiring, though, even after we think we have moved past this source, because of course we will keep desiring. We’re human, after all. So, as Lacan predicted while working with a similar system, the cycle continues. We keep finding new Real Worlds, new problems to fix, new character flaws to make ourselves feel bad about having, so that we can call them the cause of our desire instead, and try to patch them up. Trapped in a self-perpetuating spiral of self-hatred. Some people stay in the loop forever (hating where they are the whole time, but still having hope for the future, at least). Some become disillusioned after a few failed attempts to cease the presence of desire in their life, and just accept that they are incomplete, choosing to wallow hopelessly in their ressentiment. Some reach the ultimate point of desperation and, unable to stop feeling like they are incomplete, choose to stop feeling altogether. No matter which relationship to the ressentiment is taken, it is always there, always lurking in the Freudian account of desire-as-negative. We think of desire as something that can only occur if there is something wrong with us, and as much as the psychologist who has made us think this way soothes us about such an epiphany, we are going to hate that there is something wrong with us, hate ourselves for having something wrong with us, and try to fix that hole. But we will keep desiring, which means (as far as we know) that there is still something wrong with us, and we will continue to hate our life up until its relieving end.

We have referenced Lacan a couple times in our attempt to make sense of Nietzsche’s critique, which could make us curious as to why he still falls under attack from that very criticism. While Lacan may correctly identify that desire, as an attempt to fill the lack, is an impossible and problematic goal, the issue is that he maintains that this attempt-to-fill-the-lack is the immutable character of desire. Far from weaponizing his theory as a reason that Freud is wrong, he simply substitutes it in place of Freud, and leaves us with perhaps the worst offender of all. For he gives us all the vocabulary to understand why desire-as-negative is awful, then pats us on the back with a remark that desire-as-negative is the inescapable truth of the human condition. This is where Nietzsche makes his critical departure with Lacan, an exit that Deleuze and Guattari will follow. As we can obviously see in the tangible consequences of conceiving of desire as a response to incompleteness, the notion that this is the true nature of desire is present. But that does not mean it is accurate. Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, have the stage set for them. They know that Freud’s understanding of desire is wrong, insofar as it insists that all desire aims at the same goal, does not change across time or context, and is a negative response to a flaw in the unconscious. The conception of desire they present, then, must avoid these same errors. At the same time, Nietzsche’s influence means that they are aware of an additional vice that they must be wary of, the same mistake that animates value judgements throughout history. Insofar as desire (and, to some extent, the disparaged conception of desire-as-negative as well) is an inevitable part of existence, it must be treated as such, requiring affirmation in place of condemnation. Deleuze and Guattari have a lofty context surrounding their work, then. Explain desire in a way that is more accurate than the Freudian conceptions, that can account for the way desire changes across people, contexts, and times, and present this finding in a way that can celebrate such a Dionysian concept, sidestepping the bitter nihilism of ressentiment. This is a task that will run in the face of thousands of years of dominant Western thought, and as such, it is fitting that Deleuze and Guattari trace the problem all the way back to its origin. “The traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset”, they reason, “from the very first step… making us choose between production and acquisition” (AO, p. 25, italics in original). We have done our due diligence above in dissecting why the negative notion of desire as acquisition is wrong and problematic. It makes sense, then, that Deleuze and Guattari would choose the other side.

Enter the first brick of our new framework: desiring-production. We have already established that schizophrenia is a process, a process that is doubtless comprised of numerous parts. Desiring-production is the foundational principle that governs the interactions of all of these parts, and more precisely, dictates that no component has a predetermined, unchanging essence, but is always at risk of being transformed in connection with the process of schizophrenia. A schizophrenic, the person, is a part of the process of production. Schizophrenia, the process, says that this schizophrenic cannot be reduced to any defining characteristic---their occasional hallucinations, the quantities of their brain chemicals, or even their subservience to the broader category of the human---because what this schizophrenic is can always change with exposure to new scenarios. We can think of desiring-production in a few ways. We could think of it like a physical law (the law of conservation of energy is probably the closest approximation) that describes how all objects in a given system will react to the forces of other objects in the system, or how an object’s own force will influence the others. Many of Deleuze and Guattari’s predecessors who got close to naming this concept spoke of gods: Spinoza of a God synonymous with Nature that is the cause of everything, Nietzsche of Apollo and Dionysus as the emotional impulses that inspired and are expressed in Greek tragedy, the contemporary Stephen Fry of the Olympian deities as a way to conceptualize the elusive phenomena that science can only gesture towards. I prefer the second of these heuristics, because thinking of the constant flux of existence as the consequence of instinctive divinities intervening in the world, as opposed to a result of hard mathematical rules (or, of a more Enlightenment or Judeo-Christian god, who is rational, infinitely powerful, and has a plan for everything), helps us to both resist the urge to systematize the chaos of the universe, and to romanticize the mystique we are left with.

Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, speak of desiring-production in terms of flows. “There is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow” (AO, p. 5). Running through the entire cosmos, and each atom within it, are flows of desire. Various external sources produce desires that flow into some object, and this object in turn responds to these desires and outputs its own. Everything that exists is caught up in this flow. We should mention, therefore, that when Deleuze and Guattari talk of desire, they do not mean it in a narrow sexual context, or even in a more expansive connotation that refers to any human want. Desiring-production is as applicable to rocks as it is to people, and as far as we know, rocks don’t want to have sex. What we are left with is not a laughable neo-Freudian notion that every force is just lust disguising itself as something else, because not all desire is sexual, or, to the extent that it is, all desire is not sex-in-disguise, but sex-in-itself. “Sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on” (AO, p. 293). A child wanting to bang his mom is no more sexual than a rock falling because of gravity. Of course, to say that everything is permeated by flows of desire does not mean that all desires are the same. Deleuze and Guattari are somewhat inconsistent with the terms they use to describe desiring-production, but I think it would be accurate to say we can split all the flows of this process into two dimensions. Every flow of desire has an affective, or qualitative, dimension, and an intense, or quantitative, dimension. Joy, wanting to have sex, and gravity all refer to affects. Extreme joy, wanting to have sex less than I want to get an STD, or accelerating toward the surface of Earth at 9.81 meters per second all refer to intensities. All of these are desires, and nothing is exempt from being morphed by the desires that flow into them, or from producing desires that flow out of them. This is the process of desiring-production, and it is everywhere.

In a vacuum, a concept as mundane and extraneous as ‘desire is a flow’ does not seem very significant, even with the added stipulation that desire is all flows, and that it flows through everything. We have surrounded Deleuze and Guattari’s placement of this brick, however, with the wasteland that is the psychoanalytic account of desire (and its popular parallels), a context in which it is clearly monumental. For starters, it strikes us as less laughable than the commanding of all desire by Oedipus. The relevance of this refusal to give desire some eternal object is not just limited to plausibility, however. Scientific reductionism also sidesteps the absurdity of Daddy, but is unable to escape the negative gaze he casts on desire in its own evaluation. Desiring-production, on the other hand, walks a thin line that avoids systematization, either from the mechanical reduction of all life to physical parts, or from the pseudo-divine delegation of a part’s individual essence to some omnipresent creator. It does not give desire a content that it ‘should’ match, psychoanalytic, scientific, religious, social, political, or otherwise, and therefore also does not delineate a certain kind of desire that can be dismissed as a pathology, a farce, a self-imposed punishment. It totally delimits the possible directions of flows of desire, and in this way, it resists ressentiment.

Moreover, ressentiment is relevant regarding desiring-production not just because the latter avoids the former, but also because it supports its theoretical basis. We expressed that Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari all took as a basic premise that existence is chaotic, people are susceptible to change, suffering is inevitable, and so on. Desiring-production provides this foundational claim that otherwise remains just a plausible assertion with an ontological outlook that confirms its prediction. If desiring-production is an accurate assessment of life, then life is Dionysian as well. This makes it all the more important that, as we observed above, the truth of desiring-production seems preferable to its (non-Dionysian) counterparts. For most accounts of the universe either consider there to be fundamentally different substances (for example, mind and body), an outlook we would call pluralism, or everything to be one in the same (for example, atoms), which we term monism. The former seems unlikely, the latter unsatisfying---both are regulatory in their role for desire. But Deleuze and Guattari are all too happy to sum up their thoughts on the universe with the paradoxical “PLURALISM = MONISM” (ATP, p. 20)---the belief that everything shares only the characteristic of being entirely unique, of being stripped of the ability to have any static essence through their mutual location within the process of desiring-production---which sounds just as possible as it does exciting, sidestepping the flaws of both terms when left alone. To try my hand at some math, something I have not done since dropping out of Calculus BC two weeks into 12^th grade, ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ = DESIRING-PRODUCTION = DIONYSIAN = EVERYTHING = THE TRUE NATURE OF EXISTENCE (oh, how I love the transitive property). To the extent that this ‘equation’ is accurate, then our notion of desiring-production has both grounded the theory of ressentiment as correct, and also avoided the tendencies that the very same theory critiques.

What is even more significant, though, is how desiring-production matches up with (or, more accurately, does not at all match up with) our previously reprimanded theory of desiring-acquisition. We observed Freud, and any Freudian conception of desire, to be bewildering in three manners, and Deleuze and Guattari elude all three. First, Freud thought that all desire could be reduced to a single one (Daddy). Deleuze and Guattari think no such thing. For them, all desire can only be reduced to desire itself, as in, desiring-production, which is not at all constant, but dependent on contextual flows. For Freud, I want to cross the street so I can live up to Daddy. Even if I was generous to him, he would say I want to cross the street, because I want to get to class, because I want to get a job, because getting a job would help me live up to Daddy. What an idiot. For Deleuze and Guattari, though, maybe I want to cross the street because I want to get to class (the threat of a grade deduction for another missed lecture flows into me), perhaps it is since it would be safe to cross (the absence of an oncoming car flows into me), or, in some cases, it could even be that I do want to cross the street because of Daddy! (This would probably happen if the idea that all desire is Daddy has been implanted into my unconscious by Freud and his disciples, and that idea flowed into me. Did I mention the class I am walking to is a psychology class?). Desiring-production only reduces desire to mean a product of all the external desires that flow into something, which is hardly a reduction at all. In this way, we have avoided the first of Freud’s flaws. Second, Freud thinks that desire (and its psychoanalytic counterparts, personality and subjectivity) is constant. Deleuze and Guattari think that, lacking an essential essence, everything is subject to change as the desires that flow into them change. For Freud, I am shy and humble, so I will do things that are shy and humble (or, if I do the opposite, it is because I do not like being shy and humble, and am trying to escape these flaws). When I play basketball, I will either not celebrate after making a shot, or my celebration is a façade. Someone hasn’t seen me play basketball against the debate team. Deleuze and Guattari have. They have noticed that, while it may be true that I am shy and humble often, and that I do not usually celebrate if I am playing indoor with random frat guys, I also do have a much more confident shot selection against the debaters, and tend to emote when I make one of them. Freud might think, since I take step-back threes when Sean McConnell is on the floor, that Sean McConnell is Daddy. But Deleuze and Guattari realize that this variance in demeanor is not a binary question of me expressing my personality traits or not, but a more relational question of my personality traits changing altogether. The arrogant, shot-chucking Easton of the debate team is not the same stoic, corner-specialist Easton of the frat league, and one is not a pathological attempt to escape the other. Who Easton is changes, and her changes are produced in relation to the desires flowing into him, which varies across time. This is an Easton who is lost in the flows of desiring-production.

The third error we observed with Freud, and the one we spent the most time examining, was that he thought desire was negative, or acquisitive. Deleuze and Guattari very explicitly conceive of desiring-production in a contrasting conceptualization, one that takes desire to be positive, and productive. For Freud, when I buy a 12-pack of Baja Blast, I am doing so because I do not like myself, and I think that buying the Baja Blast will complete me, cohere for me a socially acceptable image that I do not hate as much, give me access to caffeine that rids me of the feelings I hate, and so on. Consistent with our earlier remarks, these interpretations seem somewhat plausible, or at least prevalent, likely because this view of desire as negative has defined almost every interpretation of it since the days of Plato. But even then, it still seems more plausible that I buy the Baja Blast as a reaction to all the desires the flow into me---marketing schemes, social pressures, memories of the exquisite taste---and I produce in response, outputting new flows of desire (comments on wanting Baja Blast, a purchase of it, a sharing of one with my roommate). Of course, which account of my shopping habits is more ‘true’ is nebulous. It is clear, however, which one is psychologically healthier, which one avoids ressentiment. For if I consider my desire to buy Baja Blast a manifestation of my tiredness, my social insecurity, or my incompleteness, I will exit the Walmart with a beverage and self-loathing, conceiving of the Baja Blast as the object which would complete me, making every moment where I am separated from this divine nectar deplorable, and even if I do grasp this heavenly substance, I will desire other things, I will still think myself to be incomplete, and, lo and behold, I will still have reason to hate myself. If my desire for Baja Blast is a ray of desiring-production, however, such ressentiment will never manifest. My desire does not signify some incompleteness, it only attests to my place in the process of desiring-production. The Baja Blast does not represent some transcendent fulfilling object, one that I expect something of, it only exists as one object among countless others in the flows of desire. If I do buy the beverage, I am not met with disappointment that deflates me from acting on any future feelings, and if I do not buy it, I am not lamenting my meaningless existence that lacks its critical object. It does not matter if I like the Baja Blast, or if I do not get a chance to taste it all, because that was never really the goal. The goal was just to produce, to be changed by the desires that flowed in to me, to make change with the desires that flow out of me, and I accomplished that either way. A desire taken on as a productive project takes as its sole goal immersion within the process of production, and as a function of existence, one is always already immersed in this schizophrenia. Freud, and, to be frank, most people, think of desire as in some way negative, as a response to a problem, as an attempt to acquire something (whether that thing is real or not), a line of thinking that generates the self-denial of ressentiment. Deleuze and Guattari think of desire, not as a sign of a flaw, but rather as the natural state of existence, as an (inevitably successful) attempt to produce, which avoids the reflexive glare of ressentiment. This is the greatest triumph of desiring-production.

Maybe this is all still confusing. That’s fine. Minecraft will help. Minecraft is an incredible heuristic tool to understand desiring-production, because the process is transparent in its gameplay structure. This is not true of all video games. Every game is part of the process of desiring-production, yes, because everything is caught up in these flows. But, in the same way we noticed how a Freudian conception of desire can manifest even in its contradictory system, as the flows that are output by Freud produce a desire that is (or at least thinks of itself as) negative, fixed, and aspiring towards Daddy, it is possible to produce video games that progress in the same way. Many competitive multiplayer games, or story-based role-playing games, give the player a single objective (win matches, beat the game), and the dynamics of ressentiment follow. I feel like a failure when I lose, I hate doing things in the game that do not progress towards the ending, I end up feeling incomplete, and resenting that feeling. For scores of games, perhaps even the majority, thinking of them in this teleological way makes sense. I recently completed a Pokémon Platinum Nuzlocke. Though I do not think it would be accurate, one could interpret this playthrough in a negative way, where Cynthia is Daddy. No such interpretation is possible with Minecraft. Minecraft’s progression is, infamously to some, non-linear. There is a system of advancements, which are a mixed bag between actual indicators of development and badges awarded for completing meaningless and menial tasks. There is technically a story and an end (beating the Ender Dragon), but completing this quest just opens even more things to do, including two of the most overpowered items (the Elytra and the Shulker Box) for facilitating the non-objective parts of the game. These non-objective parts, we should mention, are omnipresent, even in a playthrough that dedicates itself towards a completion of the advancements table or slaying of the Ender Dragon. People build things, and spend time decorating those buildings. Freud would probably think everything in Minecraft is reducible to desiring to beat the dragon who, by the way, is Daddy. Good luck explaining why people spend so much working on purely aesthetic tasks, then, much less why that time is so fulfilling. This is similarly true of any other conceptualization of Minecraft that relies on a singular motivation. Thinking of the game as just a building game would eschew all the survival and aforementioned story-based elements. Even pulling the old anti-intellectual ‘people are just doing it for fun’ would leave one at a loss in light of the universal experience of melancholically strip-mining through a 2x1 stone tunnel in search of ores. Not exactly fun, but certainly production. The best way to understand the progression of Minecraft is as a flow of desire, a flow of desire that is changed with exposure to different flows. Maybe the advancements tab on my pause screen makes me want to travel to every Nether biome, the memory of a HermitCraft video I watched makes me want to build a wizard tower, seeing my friends in iron armor makes me want to subject myself to underground boredom. Which of these wants I have, which of them is the strongest, changes as the hours pass, shifting as new affects and new intensities flow into me. I’ll spend a couple hours mining, an hour testing out house designs in a Creative world, a few minutes working on a halfway-done storage building, and then shut the game down after failing to recover the items that I lost after dying, a consequence of an impulsive and unnecessary attempt to bucket clutch (an action that would undermine an ‘it’s all done in an attempt to survive’ interpretation). It is desire at the root of all of it, and it can’t be reduced to Daddy.

Indeed, to say that desire is the engine driving every action in Minecraft would be an uncontroversial statement, even if we did not already have seventeen pages of background in schizoanalysis. This makes Minecraft a perfect demonstration of desiring-production, then, and while we have above observed the first two tenets of this concept (desire is not singular, and it changes over time), Minecraft is even better in demonstrating the more confusing third one. To think of desire in Minecraft as negative is borderline impossible. I do not build a castle in Minecraft because I think it will impress my friends as a response to social anxiety, because I think it will give me a sense of satisfaction that fills my hollow soul, or even because I do not have a castle yet. If any of these sentiments were present, we would hardly think of them as immutable characteristics necessary to the nature of desire, but as misguided (Freudian) feelings that are malleable to and should be changed. There is no incompleteness motivating the equation. This is attested to by the absence of ressentiment, which we have observed to be an omnipresent component in cases of desiring-acquisition. One does not, while playing Minecraft, hate themselves for not having a castle, or get disappointed when they build the castle and it turns underwhelming. This is because, as desiring-production would predict, there is not some ulterior, fulfilling motive that underlies the desire to build the castle. There is only a desire to produce, a desire to output in response to one’s inputs, and that is accomplished even if I’m just mining trees instead of walking through my castle, even if the finished castle looks like shit. I produced no matter what. Perhaps this is why I have never had an experience where, after closing my Minecraft window and shutting the lid on my laptop, I feel empty. Even if the progress I made in the game was minimal, and the progress I made towards socially acceptable goals outside the game was non-existent, Minecraft, more than any other game, never feels like a waste of time. This is because, far from valuing time as well-spent only if it works towards a predetermined goal, Minecraft is just an attempt to produce, an exit from Freudian reality to drift away in the flows of desire. The time we spend in Minecraft is always spent producing, because everything in Minecraft is production, everything is part of the schizophrenic process of desiring-production. This is true in real life, too. Minecraft just makes this foundational truth obvious.

But perhaps, to someone who has spent less time exposed to the noxious fumes of postmodern philosophy than me, even the tender diction Deleuze and Guattari use to describe desiring-production fails to provide an account of reality more comforting than Freud or science. Indeed, with our sweeping claims about all life being inescapably caught in the flows of desire, we may be left with an impression reminiscent of existential insignificance, or, a feeling more familiar, hopelessness. We seem to be a lifeboat trapped on a river, weathering a storm, tossed about at the mercy of the currents of desire. This powerless outlook could not be further from the truth of the schizophrenic process of production, but to understand why this is the case requires reference to the second brick in our building. Introducing: the desiring-machines. “Everywhere it is machines”, Deleuze and Guattari establish in the opening lines of AO, “real ones, not figurative ones… an organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source machine… the breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it” (p. 1). What are these machines? Short answer: everything. Long answer: everything that is not desire, as in, the flows of desire constitutive of desiring-production, though the machines produce and are produced by these flows. Gravity is not a machine. It is a force, an affect, a desire. But anything that is subject to the influence of gravity---be it electrons, humans, or celestial bodies---is. These desiring-machines name the objects within the system of desiring-production, everything that changes and is changed by its flows, always vulnerable to transformation. How, then, does this help us feel any more satisfied with our place in this system? It assists us in deconstructing the man/nature dichotomy, or really, any dichotomy, for one, which becomes useful and central in our later social, political, and environmental interrogations. More importantly, though, is the understanding that the desiring-machines are the objects responsible for altering the affects and intensities of desiring-production. We have already invoked physical rules as an analogy, physical rules that we widely consider to be true, but hardly think to diminish the significance of action. When I brick a three and my ball rolls toward the street, Isaac Newton does not bolt down from the heavens to stop it. Instead, friction is applied by the concrete driveway, gravity by Earth’s atmosphere, kinetic energy by my hand swiping into the ball’s path. The rules of physics, just as the rules of desiring-production, describe properties of the universe that make these interactions possible, and predict how they will transpire. But it is only through the hand-machine, the driveway-machine, and the Earth-machine that these rules are applied.

It is still true that we are susceptible to the flows of desire. But we are less of a stranded raft than we are a water wheel, taking the affects and intensities that flow into us and, through our machinery, producing something completely new. Let’s take an event I often experience, shooting baskets on the mini-hoop in my dorm room while listening to music, as an example. My headphones turn electric signals into sound waves through a process that I am not smart enough to understand. The bones in my ear turn these vibrations into neural impulses, and because I am listening to 2018 SoundCloud rap, these specific neural impulses (for some reason) give me an intense affect of wanting to take a jumpshot, moreso than I would like to dunk. So, my brain converts this thought into muscle contractions, which in turn imbue my foam ball with enough momentum to temporarily sail through the air. I made this shot, by the way. What we observe here is, of course, not possible without the existence of desiring-production, which enables each machine in the equation to receive and respond to the desires that flow into it. But it is equally unthinkable without the desiring-machines---the headphone-machine, the ear-machine, the brain-machine, the ball-machine---which realize the potential of this law and create actual production. Since everything is ever bound to this process, that some production would occur is inevitable (even if I had replied to the song with a dunk, or by doing absolutely nothing, I would still be transmitting other affects or intensities, and thus, still producing). However, the specific character of the production that will occur is dependent on how the machines---machines which include us---interpret what flows into them, which still gives us a function within the process. Desiring-production means that I will be influenced by the flows of desire, unable to cohere a static essence, whether I would like to or not. But that I will be influenced, that I will change, says nothing of how such events will occur. That is dependent on the Easton-machine. In this way, we can understand our role as critical variables, and not defenseless bystanders, in the universe of schizophrenic production.

FIGURE 1: The flow of desiring-production through the desiring-machines

We mentioned that any desiring-machine is unable to be reduced to any defining characteristic or function, since their essence is always subject to modification as the desires that flow into them change. We already demonstrated an example of this property, with our earlier reference to the way I play basketball differently depending on who I am playing with, how well I am playing, and so on (Sean McConnell versus frat guys). Deleuze and Guattari observe the same trend on the first page of AO, noting “the mouth… is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing-machine” (p. 1). This can be explained by what Deleuze and Guattari term the law of multiplicity, a law that dictates how we should come to understand desiring-machines.  “A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature” (ATP, p. 8). All machines are multiplicities, which means that all machines have their function altered as new machines connect to and flow into them, or as old machines are detached and have their flows removed. The production could change in either the aspect of affect or intensity. If I see that there is cilantro on the white rice I was planning to eat, my desire to eat the rice could increase in intensity, because I love cilantro. Or, if I was one of the people who allege that cilantro tastes like soap, I may turn to not wanting to eat the rice altogether, redirecting the affect. In either case, as new desiring-machines couple with the rice-machine, the essence of the rice-machine transforms. One could, after making the correct assessment that there are countless machines flowing into any given machine at any given time (atoms are machines), believe that it would now be an impossible task to define anything, since some of desire’s flows will inevitably be excluded from the description. This is only true if you are approaching it from the wrong angle. It may be true that we could not be expected to account for every cell in my body when we answer the question ‘who is Easton?’, but we should not have to do such a thing in the first place. On the one hand, we will later detail how we can apprehend multiplicities in terms of their most intense affects at any given time, which eschews the need to account for everything. On the other hand, as we may be able to infer from Deleuze and Guattari’s (and Nietzsche’s) earlier comments about the functional value of truth, we would be amiss to undertake the task of discerning the nature of something from a standpoint of academic accuracy rather than pragmatic usefulness. We could think of it as a method by which one responds to a depression. Upon realization that someone is depressed, seeking to alleviate this feeling by treating only their neurotransmitter quantities, cognitive patterns, or social influences, while ignoring whichever variables are not selected as the focus, would barely be more helpful than Freud insisting that the subject’s depression is an immutable personality trait caused by childhood sex fantasies. Desiring-production tells us we can change the (depressed) state of this desiring-machine. The law of multiplicity gives us a guide as to how, by acknowledging that this (depressed) state is a product of various other machines (brain chemicals, thought processes, economic structures), and thereby encouraging us to experimentally alter the flows of the patient as they relate to all three, not in an aspiration towards wholeness, but to produce something new. An approach that seems far more reasonable, and an approach that only a schizoanalyst could arrive at.

Minecraft, as it was for desiring-production, is also a simple way to make sense of desiring-machines. At the most basic level, everything in Minecraft is a block, just as everything in existence is a machine. However, though this shared block characteristic will be useful when we conduct our environmental reflections later by representing the indistinction between man and nature, between organic and inorganic matter, to say ‘everything is a block’ for now remains little more than a superficial quip. Fortunately, the parallels between block and machine run much deeper. We stressed that machines are significant because they change the flows of desiring-production, and the same property can be observed in Minecraft’s blocks. This could seem, at first, to be a stretch, given that Minecraft lacks essential physical rules (such as gravity or momentum) that limit the degree to which blocks can influence other blocks. It would appear, then, that the only machine capable of altering the flows of a Minecraft world is the player. This could not be further from the truth. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of what the player desires without factoring in the pressure the blocks exert on such a state. In our examination of how Minecraft demonstrated desiring-production, we noticed that what the player wants to do changes as time passes in the game. They may mine for a while, build for a bit, and so on. These variations in desire do not arise from nothing. The player’s desire to mine for better materials is sparked by an encounter with a friend in full diamond gear, or a close call with a hostile mob. What the player feels like building is shaped by what builds they have seen, and what biome they choose to build in. Who would build a spruce-wood Viking village in a birch wood forest? This is, of course, not to say that a Minecraft player is only deterministically responding to the stimulus that appears on their screen, like a psychologist’s monkey pressing buttons whenever a light flashes. Put two different players in the same world, and they will do drastically different things, reacting to and producing in light of the desires flowing out of the blocks distinctly, in accordance with past experiences, current moods, or any of the other variables distinguishing their multiplicities. Minecraft players are caught up in the current of desiring-production, influenced by the blocks, but what specifically they make of these flows can only be realized through their unique machine and the particular assemblage it is attached to. Water wheel.

Moreover, we see the law of multiplicity manifest itself in Minecraft as well. Blocks in Minecraft change in what they are based on their surrounding context, and do so all the time. Lime terracotta can be stripes in a neatly mowed lawn, or a green screen. Naturally-generated oak planks can be a sign of a village above ground, a shipwreck underwater, or an abandoned mineshaft in the caves. There is perhaps no better example of a Minecraft multiplicity, however, than the stair-block. The stair is a special type of block because of its unique ‘L’-shape, which cuts a quarter out of the otherwise-standard cube, allowing for the player to walk up two half-block inclines by simply holding forward, as opposed to the energy-consuming jump required to ascend a full block. As one might expect, this makes stairs useful for their namesake purpose, and they are indeed used frequently as a means of vertical travel. But the stair-block has a plethora of other popular connotations. Their quarter-block cutout gives them a more natural slope than full blocks, which makes stairs the go-to choice for a slanted roof. The carved space leaving a gap that players can sit on or air can fill enables chairs, tables, or other furniture to be functionally constructed at half the scale that full blocks would demand, making them ubiquitous on the inside of homes. If you try too hard as a builder (like I do!), you can insert a stair-block into an otherwise flat wall to create a slight indent, giving the impression of a missing brick or haphazardly placed board. What we see here is that the stair-block cannot be reduced to a single essence (stair), but changes in nature (between stair, roof, table, texture) based on the surrounding context, the machines that connect to it. The stair-block is a multiplicity. Just like Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicities, the desire produced by the stair-block depends on its situation. The stair as a wall-texture may produce an affect of rustic or run-down character, as a chair may create an impulse to sit down, connected with other stairs trailing up the side of a mountain could generate a curiosity as to what lies at the top and an accompanying urge to ascend it. Furthermore, just like Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicities, we would be wrong to insist on a static purpose of the stair in face of its relational existence. You wouldn’t look at a roof and call it a table. As with Minecraft as a whole, the stair-block’s (or stair-machine’s) qualities are no different than those of the machines that populate all of our external reality. The stair only makes such qualities more clear.

FIGURE 2: The stair-machine, attached to different multiplicities

We are now attuned to the idea of the universe as a process of schizophrenic production, a flux consisting of desiring-machines transforming and being transformed by each other in accordance with desiring-production, shifting and being shifted in the flows of desire. But even at this level of detail, we have not fully rid our new perspective from the nihilism of its predecessors. We have, up to this point, been able to (quite successfully) analogize everything in the schizophrenic process to physics. Desiring-production is a force, desiring-machines are objects. The problem with this comparison is that it opens our framework to one of the worst vices of science---its certainty. You can calculate exactly how a plethora of forces will influence the movement of an object. Even I can do that, and I only took one year of high school physics. In the same way, given our current comprehension that every machine (of which we are one) produces in response to the desires which flow into it, in response to all the parts of its multiplicity, it would be reasonable to conclude that, if we knew what every machine in an equation was, if we accounted for every flow of desire present in a system, we would be able to predict precisely how a machine would produce, based on the rules of desiring-production. The schizophrenic process is reduced to a 12^th-grade worksheet exercise. In the worst case scenario, this triggers yet another attempt to systematize existence, to announce a normal or ideal state for each machine, to monitor every thing at every time so that we can manipulate variables until the universe reaches an optimal balance. This state of affairs is obviously deplorable, and just as clearly an instance of ressentiment---working towards an ideal Real World, condemning and working to eradicate the imperfections of the Apparent World, doing both by reducing the Dionysian elements of life to static mathematical values that are rendered inaccurate by disruptive chaos and change---but our theory of ressentiment loses some of its zeal if, rather than imperfection, suffering, Dionysian flows existing inevitably, we could theoretically represent every facet of the cosmos as a number that could be micromanaged with assured results. This does not render the assimilatory process imposed upon chaos any less violent, but there are certainly some who would not mind such a sacrifice. Even in the best case scenario, though, where you do not (as I do) have a roommate that constantly uses determinism as a justification for an AI overlord that knows and organizes everything, to say that the desiring-machines are only responding to all of their inputs seems to erase any concept of variability, which reverts the work we did with the machines to emphasize our role in the process of schizophrenic production, while also inviting an essentialized interaction or political pessimism from the assumption that machinic subjects are locked in place. Yet, even to insist that a physics analogy would imply a complete lack of variance in our perspective would be a misrepresentation, in light of developments within the field of quantum mechanics. Theorists discovered that “if you were to measure a quantum system, in general the best you can do is predict probabilities for various outcomes” (Carroll, 2019, p. 22). Though certain results are more or less likely to occur, the results are never certain until after they have already been observed. What we have here, at the subatomic level, is something that resembles chaos, and with it, the potential for freedom. So, too, is there such an element of Dionysian variability in our theory of desiring-production. But just like quantum mechanics, to learn where this variability comes into the picture requires some confusion. It is time for the next brick in our building: put your hands together for the body without organs!

The body without organs is a word Deleuze and Guattari never give a concise, all-encompassing definition of, and indeed, a word that it would be difficult to do such a thing for. We will be forced to follow suit, then, and proceed by recounting what the key characteristics the body without organs (often abbreviated to BwO) are, gradually building a coherent image until we have a complete concept that fits into our existing interplay of desiring-production and desiring-machines. The first thing we should note is that every machine has a body without organs. Deleuze and Guattari start their ATP chapter entitled ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?’ with the remark that “at any rate, you already have one (or several)… you can’t desire without making one” (p. 149). Earlier in the book, all the way back in the introduction, the duo asks “what is the body without organs of a book?”, only to reply “there are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered” (ATP, p. 4). What we can infer from these remarks is that the BwO is a property of all machines, that machines made up of multiple other machines (humans made of cells and atoms, societies made of humans and infrastructures, atoms made of electrons and neutrons) have multiple BwOs, and, most importantly, that the BwO plays an essential function in the role of the machines regarding their production of desire. The exact nature of this function can be derived from the first mention of the body without organs, back in AO. “The organ-machines now cling to the body without organs”, they tell us, for “the body without organs… serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire… the ‘either… or… or’ of the schizophrenic takes over from the ‘and then’” (AO, p. 11-12). From these lines, we can reason what the purpose of the BwO is. Connected to every machine, the BwO represents the plane of all the potentialities, everything a given machine could be, the either-or-or, and also serves as the plane on which the incoming flows of desire are encoded, reacting to the productions of other machines, and dictating which of their potential functions a machine should assume in turn. The BwO is similar to the wave function of an electron as described by quantum mechanics, a cloud of all the possible locations of an electron, with some locations being more probable than others, that collapses to the single location where the electron was actually spotted after observation. Or, to use an example that will not sail over everyone’s head, we can put it in terms of me deciding what to eat for breakfast in the morning. As I look at the cabinet, I could either make a waffle, or have some cereal, or go to class without eating, or pretend to be sick and go back to bed, and so on. Some of these outcomes are made more likely as a result of the desires flowing in to me (I have an important test today, so I shouldn’t skip class, and my stomach-machine tells me I am hungry, so I should eat something; I probably won’t just get a heart attack out of nowhere), but we could only express these likelihoods in terms of probabilities. It is not certain which potential I will choose until the choice has already been made, at which point, all of the possibilities collapse onto a single outcome, and my Easton-machine produces the sole function, takes the temporary machinic essence, of settling on a waffle (an output which causes my arm-machine to grab the Eggo-machine), enabling the process of desiring-production to continue. The BwO, then, is connected to every machine, and decides what desire the machine will produce in response to all the desires that flow into it, while also happening to be where a degree of variability enters our system. The BwO has desires flow into it and makes a choice, a choice that we could approximate but never know for sure until it has happened, a choice which causes the machine it is connected to to output a specific flow. What is important, here, is that everything occurs on the BwO, and with our understanding of the BwO as the plane of potentialities, this should prevent us from interacting with a machine based on what it essentially ‘is’, with connecting with a machine’s BwO through the mediation of an abstract sign that represents it, given that it is always susceptible to erratic and aleatory shifts, instead orienting ourselves towards affirmation of whichever potentialities seem to be present in the immanent encounter.

FIGURE 3: The flow of desiring-production through the desiring-machines, with the variance in potentialities of the BwO

We should remember, of course, that all machines have a BwO. This means that we should think of the BwO being a ‘choice’ as a heuristic, and not an exact description. A rock has a BwO. When a rock is thrown into the air, a handful of affects of varying intensities---momentum, gravity, wind resistance---act on the rock, being recorded on the BwO. The BwO then calculates and causes a specific outcome from the rock---to fall at a specific trajectory and speed---but this outcome, though we have a pretty good idea of what it will be, is never certain until it happens, always subject to a degree of quantum indeterminacy. The rock has not made a choice, per se, but the process of desiring-production has nonetheless flowed through a body without organs. That the BwO is as applicable to a rock as it is to a human, however, should not diminish our perception of the BwO as providing something resembling variable agency. Deleuze and Guattari specifically note that the brain demonstrates characteristics of the BwO, calling it “a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (‘the uncertain nervous system’)” (ATP, p. 15). If we recall the quantum mechanics account of similar phenomena, what a brain will decide to do remains a collection of probabilities, up until the moment where a choice has actually been made (observed), at which point it becomes certain. This leaves us with something that almost resembles freedom. For how we decide to react to our surroundings, though some responses are made more or less likely due to multiple (a multiplicity of?) factors, is not scripted in advance, but remains a pure potentiality, until a production actually occurs. When I decide that I want to eat a waffle, it is entirely possible that I instead choose to eat cereal or not eat at all, right up until the very moment where I at last choose to eat the waffle. My choice to eat the waffle, then, makes an uncertain and significant interjection into the process of desiring-production. Even if we grant the determinists a generous representation of this scenario, wherein it was solely as a result of environmental, biological, or physical factors that the choice I made was indeed the one of the waffle, it nonetheless remains true that it is only once I actually make the choice, actually grab the waffle, that such an outcome is both guaranteed and realized, and therefore, the act of choosing (even if the choice is ‘predetermined’) remains significant. It is true that we carry all of the past in our present. But the future does not exist until we bring it into existence. For all functional purposes, that amounts to freedom. More importantly, that should direct us into firing this freedom against surrendering to order, future or current, in the name of the chaotic potentials it forecloses. Unleash the desires on the BwO. With this, we can finally be satisfied with our account of the schizophrenic process of production, and especially with our place in it. Flows of desiring-production are produced by desiring-machines, which are then received and coded by BwOs, which in turn variably decide what new flows the machines should produce, and so on, connecting and breaking apart everything, everywhere, and for all time.

FIGURE 4: The rock-machine produces a parabola

Unless I am far better at writing than I thought, though, the BwO is doubtlessly a concept that still eludes easy understanding. This means it is again time to turn to Minecraft for some help. Whereas, for our first two Minecraft analogies, we noted the presence of the same tendencies in analogous objects across the two spheres (desires and gameplay motivations, blocks and machines), for the body without organs, it will be more useful to equate a single BwO to an entire Minecraft world. Of course, every machine has a BwO, and this universal application is present in Minecraft as well. We have already noticed that, for the stair-machine, there is a range of potentialities, one of which is realized and therefore produced in accordance with the surrounding context, the desires that flow into it. We could describe this same phenomenon, but now with the inclusion of the BwO of the stair-machine, and be left with an accurate depiction: desires flow into the stair’s BwO, which codes these flows and assumes one of the possible functions (roof, chair, brick, and so on), which then produces a corresponding desire. The stair-machine itself is only the single block that is actually placed, and whatever function it assumes. It is the stair’s BwO that contains all the other possibilities, all the other currents the stair could produce, and also that which alters which of these possibilities is selected based on the desires that flow into it. We discussed the law of multiplicity regarding the desiring-machines, and while it is the machines that are affected by this rule (they are the unit that changes with circumstance), it is the BwO that enables it (it is the plane where the possible changes lie dormant, and where certain desires cause one to become active).

Moreover, even at this micro-level, our reflections on the ‘freedom’ of the BwO are applicable. Even if we could make a reasonable guess about what production the stair-machine will output based on all the input variables (it’s in a kitchen, of course it will be a chair), we cannot be certain of that outcome until it actually occurs, and furthermore, it is not until that outcome has occurred that the new flow of desire is actually produced. I could know full well that I am going to place a spruce stair in the middle of my house, and that it is going to look like a chair, but until I place that block, there is no impression, no output flow, of there being a chair in my kitchen. Indeed, such an example also illustrates not just the importance of the placement of a certain block, of the actual decision of the BwO, but also the uncertainty that surrounds it. As obvious as it may seem to me, I can never be sure that the stair will be registered as a chair. I vividly recall a time two years ago, when two friends and I booted up a splitscreen multiplayer world of Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch (yes, our boredom was that severe), and I attempted to texture the beach our house was built on with some birch wood buttons. In my mind, it was obvious that the small blocks of similar color to the sand would look like rocks or pebbles scattered throughout it, giving it more depth and immersion. But after placing the buttons, the reaction I got from the other two was something to the effect of ‘what the fuck is that?’. There is no way of knowing what output the birch-button will produce, which potentiality on the BwO (clump of sand or random clutter?) it will assume, until I actually place it. I feel compelled to mention that this was not just a lapse in my own judgement---indeed, in the custom-crafted world of the civilization event that is discussed in the remaining chapters of this book, the beaches were textured with birch wood, and nobody thought much of it. However, when I tried to detail the interior of my small house in this same event with a chair, which I made by replacing one of my floorboards with a block of wool that I then surrounded with wooden trapdoors, two strangers who stumbled into my home thought that this furniture marked a secret entrance to some underground passageway. Again, the actual desire that flowed from the block was not determinable from the context alone. Additionally, though, the example of the wool-block demonstrates that even once a block does come into existence, the flow that it produces is still subject to change. The circumstances of the wool were the same, but as one person encountered it with a different set of information, its location on the BwO shifted, from chair to door. We should not think of this as some sort of perspectivism, where the block is a different thing for every person. Instead, we should think of the essence of the block actually changing, as the desire that it produces transforms with the new desires that flow into it, as it plugs into a new assemblage. Knowledge or expectation about what the function of the block is are as much machines as the block itself, and the desires they produce in turn change the location of the block on its BwO. These more narrow considerations of the Minecraft-block, then, reveal that their conceptualization is just as indebted as the desiring-machine is to the BwO. The BwO codes incoming desires and decides a single production for the block-machine to output, but what this production is cannot be determined until after it actually comes into existence, and even once it does come into existence, it can be changed as the flows of desire acting upon it change as well. The BwO of the stair-machine is all the potentialities of the stair, one of which is actualized at a time. But what this one function is cannot be determined until it is actualized, and is still always subject to change. There are many possibilities for the birch button. Based on its context, it seems like it should be a rock. But once we observe it, it’s actually just a piece of clutter. As new machines enter and influence it (in this case, my protestations that it is supposed to be beach texture), though, what the button is changes again, from clutter back to rock (or, more accurately, to inside joke).

This microscopic analysis does depict the way that the BwO works on the machines of Minecraft, but it still feels a little confusing. Therefore, we should still consider the BwO of a much larger machine, at a much grander scale. From the moment I first conceived to make a blog post discussing the schizoanalytic dimension of this game, it felt like a truism that Minecraft is a Body without Organs. But what led me to this sentiment, and what does it mean? I can only hope that the answers to this question are as intuitive to you as they are to me, since it could at last pin down the elusive concept that is the BwO. In the most abstract sense, the body without organs is just an unrestrained collection of potentialities. It is every possible outcome for whatever machine (or composite machine) it is connected to, some of which are more probable, but all of which could happen. This, to me, is an almost perfect description of a new Minecraft world. You click create world on the title screen, and a seed generates before you, stretching out for a literally infinite number of blocks in every direction. It is pure potentiality. There is no limit on what the player can do in this world. We see, furthermore, that none of these limitless futures are constrained. For Minecraft, as we have already noted, is a game with no singular, linear, or predestined progression. The player could either build, or mine, or explore---the ‘either… or… or…’ that is characteristic of the body without organs. In addition, which of these potentialities is chosen does not foreclose the others, as the specific production of the machine can always change. I might start building a castle, but I could always mine later, or build a modern house instead, if I feel like it. ‘If I feel like it’: this is the short summation of Minecraft, and of the BwO. The only restriction on what I can do is what I feel like doing. I am free to do whatever I desire, to produce whatever desires are produced in me. This freedom, the freedom and significance of production that we stressed as crucial to the importance of the BwO, is manifest here. Minecraft is not a game like Pokémon, where your progression consists of a mere two dialogue options, neither of which change the trajectory of the plot at all. In Minecraft, you could pursue one of thousands of paths, and whichever one you assume will alter the world. The action, then, of the Minecraft player, is a product only of what they desire, and makes a significant intervention into the process of production that generates the Minecraft world. Moreover, that the action they choose is a result of the desires flowing into them does not prevent any of the outcomes. It may seem probable that, upon spawning into a forest, I will start by punching trees. But there is always a chance that, at the edge of my render distance, I see a new biome that catches my interest, and that I run there before gathering any wood. We will be affected by the flows of desire, of course, but nobody can say just how we will be affected, how we will produce in turn, until the outcome is observed. Potentialities can only be expressed as probabilities, never certainties, until one of them occurs. Furthermore, even if I do decide to punch wood, that mundane, predictable choice is nonetheless significant, for it is only as the action is realized that it produces new flows of desire, that the world actually has a floating tree and a couple logs in my inventory. When we boot up a new world, then, we spawn in without any predetermined essence, with infinite potentialities before us, free to produce whichever of them we desire. This desire is not much of a constraint, either, as all of the possible worlds remain on the table, we can always switch from one to another, and whichever one we do choose will make a difference on the world that would not exist had we not chosen it. This is true of Minecraft. This is also true of you. At the end of the day, after all, both are just bodies without organs.

I feel confident that the BwO is a little more comprehensible now, after our example of Minecraft, and with it, we have the full foundation of the schizophrenic process. Desiring-production affects a body without organs, which selects a specific output for a desiring-machine, which then produces more flows of desire, which are then coded by more BwOs, and so on, everywhere, and at all times. But the BwO is still a difficult idea, and one that is important to be precise about it, so we cannot leave it behind quite yet. Furthermore, we have spent a good deal of time considering what the role of the individual is in the schizophrenic process, with gestures to anti-Freudian personalities, water wheels, and freedom, but are yet to present an actual interpretation of the subject. It also just so happens that the question of the subject is a phenomenal demonstration of the principles of the BwO (one might recall the anecdote about my roommate and philosophy class from earlier), and frames the next major portion of our theoretical framework just as well. It seems obvious, then, how we should proceed. It is time to discuss what it means, for Deleuze and Guattari, to be a subject.

We can note, from the outset, that the relationship between the subject and the BwO is not just one of representation. The subject is not just ‘like’ the BwO. The connection between the two is far more intimate. In AO, Deleuze and Guattari comment “it is a strange subject… with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines” (p. 18). In ATP, the two draw out the distinction a little more, remarking that “one side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate” (p. 4). What we are left with, then, is the idea of the subject as part of the network of desiring-machines, while at the same time being grounded on the plane of the BwO. Though this seems to be a new degree of nuance, it is really not too different from anything we have already encountered. Indeed, all of this seems to just be a longer way of saying that the subject is a desiring-machine, which, insofar as we remember that everything is a machine, we knew long ago. When Deleuze and Guattari are describing the proximity of the subject to the machines, this is to describe its location within the process of desiring-production, as something that affects and is affected by all the other machines and the flows that they produce. However, just as is the case with any other machine, the subject has a BwO, which enables it to shift between potentialities on a whim, unable to be reduced to a single essence. The thinkers detail that ‘wandering’ on the BwO involves “being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state” (p. 18) Though this is said in the context of the subject, it is a statement just as applicable to the stair-machine: it ventures between states (roof, chair, brick), defined based on which desires flow into it (the share of the product it takes for itself) and the production it makes in turn.

What is important, then, is not the way that Deleuze and Guattari’s depiction of the subject relates to the process of schizophrenic production, as it brings nothing to the frame that we did not already access through the desiring-machines, but instead, the way it contrasts with the (Freudian) subject as we know it. We outlined this divergence in our summary of Deleuze and Guattari’s exigence for their departure from Freud, wherein we observed how Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of a subject that changes in composition over time (Easton, // ELog, Beta of the Pack, and so on) challenges and conquers the Freudian notion of a subject with a fixed, immutable essence. The distinction that is made here is one between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, with the French duo taking the side of the latter. Lacking a coherent, stable center, the subject is never an ‘is’ or a ‘be’, but just a present, fluctuating state, one that transforms as the desires that flow into it transform, always ‘becoming’. Now, we considered this property of the machines earlier, as we discussed the law of multiplicity, which prompted us to ask a question---would it not be an arduous task to define the subject as an assemblage of the infinite machines that act upon it?---which we answered with a postponement, suggesting that we would explain why such a concern is irrelevant later. That time is now. To name or describe a subject, or an assemblage, has nothing to do with accounting for all the flows of desire and their source machines that have produced whatever state the subject finds themself in. That work serves only to underscore that whatever this state is has been produced, and can therefore be changed, which is always implicit in our description of a becoming. Indeed, “the proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity” (ATP, p. 37), and therefore always carries with it this tenuous acknowledgment of the entire assemblage that underpins the impermanent state of the subject we label. This discourse on proper names comes from the chapter on Wolf-Man, which is a title that Freud granted to one of his patients to keep his information confidential, but a title that Deleuze and Guattari regard as more accurate than the familial name it conceals. This is because the title ‘Wolf-Man’ refers not to a stable subject, but to the intense affect of wolf-hood that this subject holds at the moment, to a specific state on the BwO. But this begs (dog pun unintentional) the obvious follow-up: what does it mean to be, or to become, a wolf?

In a response that will somehow make the ponderance of a man being a dog even more schizophrenic, to understand what it means for the Wolf-Man to become-wolf, we must first extract some vocabulary from the Freudian case that Deleuze and Guattari use in AO, that of German judge Daniel Paul Schreber becoming-woman at the whims of God. Exciting, I know. It may be helpful to know the context that Schreber had a recurring hallucination of being turned into a woman by God so that God could intermingle with him (in order to ensure “the rate of cosmic sexual pleasure remains constant” and provide “‘the greatest possible output of spiritual voluptuousness’” [AO, p. 18], to use two of my favorite out-of-context quotes from the work), but all you really need to know is what Deleuze and Guattari had to say about Schreber getting breasts. Having breasts is just one of the many “states through which Schreber-the-subject passes, becoming a woman and many other things as well”, but we should specify that “the breasts on the judge's naked torso are neither delirious nor hallucinatory phenomena: they designate, first of all, a band of intensity, a zone of intensity on his body without organs” (AO, p. 19). This ‘zone of intensity’, which refers to the specific becoming that Schreber momentarily occupies, is, of course, a question of desire, made transparent with the remark that “nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts” (AO, p. 19). When we say that Schreber is ‘becoming-woman’, then, naming a specific location on the BwO, we are not describing a material state (becoming-triple-D-cup), or the desires that have led Schreber to this location (becoming-servant-of-God), but instead referring to how Schreber feels, his emotional or affective state, his desire. Schreber is a woman because, in the moment, he feels like a woman. It is, at the time, the most intense (quantitative measure of desiring-production) affect (qualitative measure of desiring-production), or the zone of intensity, on his BwO. We see basically the same remarks made regarding Wolf-Man: “The wolves designate an intensity, a band of intensity, a threshold of intensity on the Wolf-Man's body without organs… the wolf, as the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a representative, a substitute, but an I feel” (ATP, p. 31-32, italics in original). The conclusion, that a subject (and, by extension, machine) is defined by what they desire, is predictable for a framework of Deleuze and Guattari, but comes across as strange when we try to make sense of it in a more colloquial way. If we describe subjects based on their desire, does that mean ‘becoming-wolf’ is equivalent to ‘wanting to be a wolf’? If so, what does ‘wanting to be a wolf’ mean? What feeling is that? Moreover, how can we abstract this to the inanimate machines? What does a rock feel like, or desire?

Fair questions, insofar as you forgot our revised reading of desire. For, as we discovered in our theorization of desiring-production, desire both refers to all forces and is productive. These details, in tandem, answer our concerns about the rock: the rock does not want something, because desire is not a want, nor is it necessarily an emotion, but it feels an intense affect of the wind pushing against it, gravity pulling it down, the momentum it was hurled with being overwhelmed, and as a result, it ends up with a zone of intensity of rapid descending movement, becoming-projectile, and produces desires in turn with this becoming, an intense affect for an onlooker below of wanting to move, or for the tree it hits of a collision force. This reading of desire as productive, and not acquisitive, though, is more relevant for our making sense of the case of Wolf-Man. For, as we said in the case of the rock, the desire it produces is a result of its becoming, not the factor which defines it. Or, whatever we ‘want’ to do is not our desire, but are rather the desires produced by what we ‘feel’, which is our zone of intensity on the BwO, our becoming. The stair-machine is a chair because of all the desires that flow into it, which cause it to assume the becoming-chair over the other potentialities. The output it produces---of being a chair, of being something to sit in---are just consequences of this becoming, not the mark of it. Wolf-Man, then, is not a wolf because he wants to be a wolf, but because he is a wolf. He is not imitating a wolf, pretending to be a wolf. The wolf is not (just) a metaphor, a representation, for a feeling. Nor does he believe that he belongs to a different stable identity, canis lupis, a mere relocation of all the violences that a stable, essentialized reading of the subject entails. Rather, it is the case that the composition of affects on intensities on Wolf-Man’s BwO, the produced becoming or feeling, could only be described as ‘wolf’, as an apprehension of the specific state of the machine, so that our interactions with it might connect with this actual multiplicity (why would we insist that the Wolf-Man-machine is a homo sapien, that it needs to get up off the ground, when it so clearly just wants a belly rub?). Anything Wolf-Man does, he does not so that he might turn into a wolf later down the line, but because he is a wolf now. Indeed, the notion that the becoming is an aspiration towards something else is the Freudian reading of desire, precisely the negative desire-as-acquisition that we have so thoroughly problematized: “a cry of anguish, the only one Freud hears: Help me not become wolf (or the opposite, Help me not fail in this becoming)” (ATP, p. 32). Furthermore, this misinterpretation of a becoming as something that aspires towards, and not is, causes the same self-critical consequence of ressentiment that we have sought so hard to avoid. For, should Schreber take his becoming-woman as a desire to be a woman, and not a sign that he already is a woman, he will view the products of this feeling (‘I feel like I am a woman’) as the becoming, and not the feeling itself. Therefore, when he starts his HRT, or does some shopping for clothes, he will be trapped under the impression that he is still in the process of becoming a woman, that he is not a woman yet, that he needs some ‘Real World’ of passing or social validation to become a woman, which will cause him to hate his ‘Apparent World’ of clockable, masculine, (perceived) non-woman. This is the Freudian reading of Schreber, but it is not the truth. Indeed, Schreber is a woman the moment he feels like a woman, for as long as that feeling persists, and any estrogen he injects or dresses he wears are products of this feeling, not a requirement for it. The becoming is all that is needed for the shift in the subject, for the change in identity. Everything else are side effects.

Crucially, this should change how we perceive our response to these persistent feelings. For insofar as Schreber’s response to his becoming-woman is to take HRT because he thinks it will make him ‘be’-woman (or, in the inverse, if he hits the gym so that he can stop becoming woman, so that he can ‘be’-man), he has made a mistake. This would be an attempt to cohere a stable, essentialized, exclusive subjectivity, the one Freud preaches, and the one that we have observed to be disrupted by and hostile against the inevitable presence of new becomings. That becomings are impermanent, contingent, produced states means that it would be wrong to privilege a specific becoming (and to deal with the consequent self-hatred at one’s failure to ‘become’ a woman) over the process of becoming itself. On the other hand, though, impermanence does not mean insignificance. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari would demand us to accept whatever becomings do actually occur, and this acceptance occurs precisely through the production of desires in correspondence with actual zones of intensity. There is nothing wrong with, and it can in fact be critical, to do things like HRT, insofar as one is not doing this with the intent of becoming-woman, but because they already have become-woman. This is the process of becoming, and it would be absurd to repress the expressions of a becoming under the guise of their pathological nature, their uncomfortable deviance from the current state of affairs, their potential as objects of future regret---such would only recreate the cleavage between the becoming and the ‘true self’ that we find so abhorrent in the first place. If this becoming ceases, then there is no need to continue, no need to aspire towards it. But because this project was taken on as a response to zones of intensity, and not as a teleological aspiration towards a stable subject, there is in retrospect no issue with these ‘misguided’ productions---as if one would be misguided to follow their immanent experience, as if one would not be misguided to correct what lies before them in the service of some transcendent ideal, as if there is a wrong direction or wasted time in schizophrenia. Queerness = schizophrenic production. Do not, for a moment, mistake our critique of becoming as an objective with the idea that one is therefore permitted to ignore the attractions and repulsions a becoming has towards objects (‘Schreber is already a woman, he doesn’t need HRT, even though he is pleading for it’; ‘Schreber is a woman, we have to get him on HRT, no matter how much he insists he doesn’t need it!’). Indeed, our critique of this objective aspiration, the aspiration towards a being-woman, occurs precisely because such a dynamic restricts the flows and affirmation of alternative becomings---is it not impossible to conclude that coercive, imposed repression of the expressions of a becoming does the same? As long as a becoming is present, therefore, it and its desires should be welcomed. Plug the becoming in to your assemblage, and let its transformations transform you. I am not becoming-wolf because I spent $130 on ears and a tail. I spent $130 on ears and a tail because I am becoming-wolf. Affirming the feeling of the wolf need not be an attempt to preclude every other feeling. If there is a time where I am not becoming-wolf, where I am becoming-Harden instead, perhaps, as I feel an immense urge to step back into a three that will blow up Zach Willingham’s calculated pass-and-cut offense, there is nothing wrong with my purchase, because my intent was not to cohere a stable subject, a being, to always be a wolf. My intent was just to produce in response to the becoming, to the zone of intensity, that I had in the moment, which is what one should do, and which is what I did (:3).

Becomings, of course, occur in the game of Minecraft as well. In fact, we have already described some instances of this phenomenon, which we can now revisit to make sense of with our new vocabulary. We considered the nature of Minecraft’s progression, in which a player, lacking a single path or even a single objective, shifts between various tasks on a whim, building for a bit, mining for a bit, and so on. We could now say that these are becomings, changes in the Minecraft player’s zone of intensity, becoming-builder first, becoming-miner later. The principle underscored here is that the becoming itself remains subject to future becomings, in other words, that ‘becoming-miner’ does not indicate a permanent fixation on mining, renouncing one’s old life as a builder and leaving it behind. Instead, one is just a miner for as long as they feel like mining, for as long as their most intense affect remains a desire to plunge into the nearest cave. If they later feel like building for a bit, they are free to become a builder again, with the prospect of heading back to mining, or else jumping to redstone or combat-related tasks, always remaining on the table. There is no stable identity of the Minecraft player, no predetermined essence that they can be reduced to. There is just a player-character, driven by their desires, wandering freely across the Minecraft world; a machine wandering across the body without organs.

These becomings, as with any state of any desiring-machine, are in part influenced by the flows of other machines, changing their location on the BwO. We earlier commented on the prospect of a player who once planned to build a spruce-wood Viking village, but upon loading into their world, found themselves surrounded by birch trees for as far as the eye could see, and therefore abandoned their original project to create something more fitting for their actual environment. Becoming-Viking to becoming-beekeeper. But these becomings, as with the production of any desiring-machine, cannot be predetermined. The BwO always retains a degree of variability in how it codes the incoming flows. We know that the birch forest will influence the player, but we cannot be sure if it will make them build a bee farm, a modern house, leave the scene in search of their sought-after spruce biome, or some other zone of intensity. The first part of this dualism, that the becoming is produced by its multiplicity, helps us further understand a becoming’s instability, its constant susceptibility to change, the futility of working to maintain a singular, exclusive zone of intensity forever. The second part, however, reveals the uselessness of trying to map every single machine in the multiplicity, or mandating that connection to a specific machine must correspond with a certain treatment, since the production the machines have on the becoming will always be uncertain. This is reminiscent of our ruminations on becoming-woman and becoming-wolf, wherein the production must always be a response to an actual feeling, not a derivation from or an attempt to permanently cohere a transcendent one. We can see this occurrence in Minecraft, too, though it requires us to take a step back from the gameplay itself. In Minecraft, players have the ability to create and change their skins, and can therefore appear in-game as whatever they want, whenever they want. There is something to be said about becomings as they relate to this characteristic in a vacuum, but it feels a bit on the nose. Instead, what interests me here is the way the skin of a Minecraft player demonstrates a production, rather than the acquisition, of a feeling. When players select a skin, it is more often than not a creative act, an expression of how they feel at the time, a response to their zone of intensity, as opposed to an attempt to be perceived a specific way. The significance here is that a player has a skin because of their zone of intensity, rather than having a zone of intensity because of their skin. After a long break from Minecraft, I came back to the game during the pandemic to discover that my skin was a Koopa Troopa from the Mario series, no doubt my favorite fictional character when I selected the avatar back in middle school. I jumped on a server with some friends, all of whom brandished equally outdated skins: one was a stick figure; a handful had the generic gamer e-boy. But that my zone of intensity no longer correlated with the Koopa Troopa, that my friends probably did not find the stick figure funny, or the e-boy cool, anymore, did not lead to some hatred for the misaligned vessel that contained us. What is demonstrated here is that the zone of intensity, the feeling, the BwO, determines the character of the machine that rests upon it, moreso than any physical, intrinsic character of the machine. At times, the latter can help the former, the machine may help intensify the affect that motivated its creation, the skin may extend a feeling. During the event that this book is written about, the group that I communed with all added green headbands to our skins, which certainly did produce a feeling of togetherness when I saw it, the same feeling of togetherness that caused us to wear the headband to begin with. However, because of the inherent uncertainty of the BwO, we would have been wrong to put on the headbands in an attempt to make us feel this sense of community, because becomings are always fleeting, and this becoming-communal would certainly come and go. Fortunately, that is not what we did. We put on the headbands because we felt together, not so that we would feel together. A becoming is a condition, an active potential, not a disorder or prescription, a structuring value. This means that, if the headbands failed to evoke any sentiment of sociality, they did not fail to do what we intended, because they were still a production, a flow, produced in response to our becoming. And six months later, then, when I boot up Minecraft again and am still wearing a headband that no longer corresponds to my zone of intensity, there is no issue. For the zone of intensity determines the character of the machine, not the other way around.

There is one even clearer example of zones of intensity as they relate to Minecraft, but it requires us to take one more step back. We see becomings in the Minecraft player, not just as they appear in the in-game world, not just as their skin appears on the in-game launcher, but as they appear in the meta-game, a ‘human’ (whatever that means) sitting in front of their computer screen, in the world we call our own. There is an odd phenomenon with Minecraft, one that is well-documented in the colloquiums of Discord calls, a shared experience, in which one gets some random urge to play Minecraft about twice a year, followed by two weeks (give or take) of a bustling Minecraft server, which is then abandoned as the desire to play Minecraft fades, left behind until the random urge returns next quarter. A relatable occurrence, and one that, it seems, can only be explained through our schizoanalytic framework. For what would Freud make of this spontaneous impulse to play a game with friends? Even his most egregious reading of Minecraft blocks as a stand-in for a castrated phallus would struggle to explain the temporal nature of it all, here today, gone tomorrow. Is the urge to play Minecraft, he may suggest, being repressed? But what an ironic question that is, for the urge to play Minecraft could only be repressed by some static interpretation of the subject as a being, one who should either always want to play Minecraft, or never do so. It’s the wolf all over again: Freud can only hear the cry for help, see Minecraft as some pathological escape from reality, or reality as a pathological obstruction to Minecraft. But the ease with which one is overcome by the irresistible impulse to load up the game, only to set it back down without regret a month later, should caution us against accepting any such abstraction. For all we see here is a zone of intensity, a becoming-Minecraft-player, one that is affirmed while it is present, but not sought out while it is gone. This seems to be the best possible relationship to becomings. Indeed, Minecraft seems to facilitate this upstanding response across the board. We are encouraged, by the gameplay structure, to freely shift between becomings. We recognize, through our skin selection, that there is nothing wrong with having a disconnect between the feeling of the becoming and the imposed ‘essence’ of the machine, since the zone of intensity, the ‘I feel…’, remains regardless, and we are just concerned with affirming that feeling, the production, not the acquisition that Freud would misread the feeling as aspiring to. And affirm these feelings we do, for when they are present out-of-game, we let our desire to play Minecraft take over our life for a few weeks every year, whenever the zone of intensity is present, and never give it a second thought when the zone of intensity is gone. There is no essentialized identity that these variable feelings can be reduced to, and attempting to do so can only lead to scorn for the difference between this idealized, stable being and the actual fluctuating becomings. From the rotting corpse of identity, then, Deleuze and Guattari’s subject rises, both in-game and out-of-game. What am I, according to these two? I am a miner for now, a builder in an hour. I am a woman today, a wolf tomorrow. I am a machine. And my identity is a body without organs.

With the subject-as-becoming now nestled into our framework of desiring-production, the desiring-machines, and their bodies without organs, we have finished all of our background information regarding the metaphysical-ontological dimension (read whichever word you prefer, I’m not using either in a very technical sense) of the schizophrenic process of production. We can now make sense of our foundational statement---‘Minecraft is a schizophrenic game’---to mean that Minecraft exhibits the same properties which animate our reality, according to Deleuze and Guattari, that being the constant flux of machinic subjects as flows of desire change and are changed by them. Now, given the paradoxically abstract and nuanced nature of these concepts, I’m sure they still don’t make perfect sense. That’s fine, since we’ll spend the rest of this project tossing them around to describe more tangible examples, so the concepts should click into place eventually. However, we have a more pressing problem. As much time as we spent making it clear that Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the world was fundamentally incompatible with Freud’s, or any other negative, essentializing, ‘Freudian’, reading of desire, we also shared a handful of examples that, even if they were only inserted to caricature the absurdity of psychoanalysis, nonetheless seem to exist. There’s an image I have saved on my phone, a picture of the scene from Breaking Bad where Jesse Pinkman bemoans ‘he can’t keep getting away with this!’ with a portrait of Sigmund Freud inserted in the corner, meant to be sent every time someone does something a little too Oedipal; I get to send that image a good amount. If Deleuze and Guattari are indeed irreconcilable with Freud, each and every one of these Freudian slips (I use this term as a pun; a psychoanalyst would probably say that these are actually Freudian slips) suggests that our French thinkers have failed to account for something. To remain defensible, then, the schizophrenic process of production needs to answer this challenge. If desire is productive, how do we end up with theories that claim desire is, and cases where desire seems to be, acquisitive?

“The prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire… to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated” (AO, p. 33). Just as a cancer enters our body, a socius enters our body without organs. “The body without organs is not an original primordial entity that later projects itself into different sorts of socius… on the contrary: the body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialized socius” (AO, p. 33). The socius is produced, of course, as all things in the process of schizophrenic production are produced. But the distinction is how it interacts with the process once it has come into existence. The BwO creates an ever-shifting zone of intensity by coding all the desires flowing into it, and outputs in accordance with wherever the zone of intensity ends up. There is no limit, no potentialities excluded, on the BwO. It is deterritorialized. The socius, on the other hand, seeks to cohere a stable subject, the mythical ‘being’ we have critiqued, by accepting only certain flows, redirecting all production towards a single point, and condemning everything else. The BwO, with the socius now implanted on it, is limited, with multiple potentialities coded out. It has been territorialized, or, to name it with Deleuze and Guattari’s term (they usually add a prefix, for some reason), reterritorialized.

FIGURE 5: The deterritorialized BwO (left) and the reterritorialized socius (right)

What is this ‘socius’? Well, just as with the BwO, there are several. Deleuze and Guattari, as the subtitle of their volumes may belie, are especially concerned with the socius of capital. This is a socius that is likely familiar to all of us: we are produced as a stable subject, the worker, with all flows redirected towards the service of the capitalist economy, and every other form of production (immaterial or unmarketable labor, absence of labor, and, of course, anti-capitalist revolution) is incorporated into the surplus value of the system (immaterial labor converted into capitalist signs), or else marked as undesirable. We see in this example one of the most sinister, dangerous aspects of the socius, being that it restricts our BwO, or, the more immediate implication of that, that it warps our own desire, turning us into self-regulating agents, a feature manifested in the guilt or self-hatred we often take on when we feel ‘unproductive’ (by capitalist standards) or ‘lazy’, if that’s even necessary after capital’s positive internalization, the joyous asceticism of wealth accumulation or meaningful labor. We spent a decent amount of time railing on therapy and psychoanalysis a few pages back, which is also an instance of a socius. In the psychologist’s chair, one is placed on a compulsory track towards ‘emotional stability’, ‘mental health’, or ‘fulfillment’, and all signs of ‘emotional instability’, ‘mental illness’, or ‘incompleteness’ (remember, for the trained psychologist, any desire signals some degree of incompletion) are scrutinized and driven to extinction. The psychologist can’t understand the subject outside of their narrow biological framework, and invariably, one leaves the psychologist’s office depressed, feeling like a failure, or perhaps with some false confidence that they are on the road to redemption, which will soon crumble into a depression even worse than the first. Better pay for another session! To me, the example of the socius that was the most illustrative was always queerness. At the basic level, of course, is the socius which pressures one towards heteronormativity, creating an internalized homophobia and assimilation towards the traditional heterosexual relationship. But it is more complicated, as queer theory and its discussions of ‘homonormativity’ have discovered, which creates a regular model of what it means to be ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ in a way that generates interactive ignorance or corrective dismissal of ‘other’, actual expressions of queerness. Perhaps the reason this formulation resonated so much with me, other than lived experience, is because sexuality and identity are such unabashed examples of schizophrenic desire, which makes the socius of sexual or gendered normativity especially transparent as an instance of desire for the repression of desire, as a restriction of the ‘becoming’ that is the natural state of relations, and, consequently, as an uncontroversial demonstration of how the socius is bad. It also helps, with its critiques of homonormativity alongside its well-understood counterpart, that it is the form of the socius, and the violence such a repressive form necessarily entails, that is the problem, not the shortcomings or malfunctions of any specific socius, which are always doomed in advance. There are, of course, countless more socii (Wikipedia tells me this is the plural of ‘socius’, and while we’re at it, Merriam Webster says they’re pronounced ‘so-shee-iss’ and ‘so-shee-eye’, respectively). The socius of religion, of bioessentialism, of the law are a few that come to mind. We all have multiple socii grasping for our BwOs right now, in all likelihood. But all these socii have one thing in common, that being their relationship to the schizophrenic process of production. They reterritorialize the body without organs; they drive the ‘becoming’ machines towards ‘being’; they are produced by the flows of desiring-production, and then, in a sick twist of fate, they produce flows of anti-production.

There are other words that Deleuze and Guattari use interchangeably with socius, other concepts that signify a restriction of desire. They speak of ‘overcoding’. This is exemplified by a “tracing”, which seeks to “describe a de facto state… to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start… tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made” (ATP, p. 12). This formulation highlights, to me, the way that a socius does not respond to the zones of intensity that are on the BwO, to what subjects actually want or who they actually are, but rather, assigns them some overarching label, tosses them into some already existing box, forces them to identify with something that is not themself, and often does so with the pathologizing quip that it is this false approximation that is best for the subject, that this is what they really want, what they really are (our socii of capital and psychoanalysis demonstrate this tendency often). We have earlier expressed how the position of a subject on a BwO is a production of the assemblage they are connected to, composed of all the machines that flow into them. Deleuze and Guattari note that, sometimes, these assemblages produce desires of “microfascism”, which make “desire desire its own repression” (ATP, p. 215). Both halves of this label are useful, to me. The invocation of ‘-fascism’ makes clear just how evil the demand of the socius is. It also demonstrates a key point in our theorists’ writing, indeed, one of the observations that chiefly motivated the composition of Anti-Oedipus: “the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism” (p. 29). This should make us wary of an overly-liberal reading of desire, one which treats every want as necessarily good, for when connected to the wrong assemblage, it is possible for desire to turn against itself, to become obsessed with the restriction of its own flow, thanks to the intervention of the socius. Moreover, the modifier ‘micro-’ should make us even more skeptical, as it reminds us that the socius can be implanted, that the call for fascism can be produced, at even the smallest levels of interaction. “Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, to not even see the fascist inside you” (ATP p. 215). The notion of microfascism, then, gives a new vigilance to our attempt to rupture the socius, to return the BwO back to its schizophrenic state of maximum deterritorialization.

The paragraph break before this last example is an intentional one. This next analogue to the socius is a great conceptualization of the process of schizophrenic production as a whole, one that many (including myself) have found extremely useful in the comprehension of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and one that we will mobilize often throughout the rest of this work. The paragraph break is not a consequence of my Dad’s repeated criticism that I need to make my paragraphs shorter (Sorry, Dad, I think I already failed that one). Anyone with some familiarity of Deleuze and Guattari likely already know what’s coming next, and would like me to get on with it. I will edge them for just a little longer.

We are speaking, of course, of the rhizome.

FIGURE 6: Rhizomatic (left) and arborescent (right) development and growth

A rhizome, for Deleuze and Guattari, is always contrasted with a root. Roots and rhizomes are both types of underground stems that plants have. Unlike roots, which are primarily vertical, and refer back to a fixed center, rhizomes are horizontal, branching out in every direction, having no fixed center, just connections between a plethora of points. The rhizome is, on its own, an accurate microcosm of the entire framework of desiring-production, of everything we have learned so far. The rhizome is made up of individual points, each of which has no predetermined essence, but which does make connections with other points---“any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (ATP, p. 7)---and ends up defined by its position, its connections, its relationships with the rest of the rhizome. Think of these points as the desiring-machines; the connections between points as the flows of desiring-production; and the nature of these points, which reflects their ever-changing relation to the other points, as the zone of intensity, the becoming, of a desiring-machine, as produced by the affects and intensities of desire (connections) flowing into it, on the machine’s body without organs. In this optimal form, the rhizome at peak deterritorialization, we have a network of nodes, each one moving around, being changed by and changing the others. It’s a beautiful thing. But, of course, the socius is here to fuck it all up. The socius, in our botanical context, is the root, the tree, or more broadly, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘arborescence’. Here, the points in the network are defined not through their flexible, intimate connections, but are instead reduced to a static point, defined by their relationship to an overarching system (the tree; the socius). All points should fit neatly into the vertical network of roots, subservient to the demands of their arborescent overlord. If they do not yet occupy such a point, they are expected to get there. Progress, for the rhizomatic, occurs omnidirectionally, occurs necessarily (as long as production is happening, as connections are being made, which they always are), but for the arborescent, progress is linear, vertical, one getting better as they ascend higher up the tree, condemning all those below them, compelling them also to climb. In the rhizome, the system works to support all the points. In the arborescent, the points assimilate to working for the system.

Deleuze and Guattari make a quip that “every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc.”, or, in more down-to-earth terms, “groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize” (ATP, p. 9-10). The importance of this statement is that it makes explicit one of the most critical elements of the socius: it is internal to the rhizome, produced by and as part of the process of production. Now, this does not necessarily mean that negative impulsive desires are microfascist. It is possible for something to make you sad or annoyed, for you to feel sad or annoyed at something, for these zones of intensity to be produced. But these are not necessarily microfascist. However, if one responds to these zones of intensity as if they were a lack, taking up the arborescent-Freudian model of desiring-acquisition, and seeks to instead be joyful, to banish the cause of their sadness or annoyance, they have then condemned certain zones of intensity, created an exclusive drive towards certain modes of production (for both themself and for others), and therefore, produced a socius. What we should highlight here is that whatever motivates this second-order response, be it a value, a social norm, or some neural network, is a machine. Values are machines; so is language. This means that these microfascist productions are internal to the rhizome, yes. And this is a useful conclusion, insofar as it solves the problem we set forth for the process of production. It is quite possible for someone to believe, or act as if, desire was negative, essentialized, or Freudian, within the schizophrenic process. It just means that there is a socius afoot. Perhaps more importantly, though, that the socius is produced, and that the agents of production for the socius are machines, implicates, and indeed makes possible, our resistance to it. Whether the microfascist flow is produced by a value, a social norm, or some neural network, all of these are machines, and therefore, can have the flows they produce changed as new desires flow into them, or as new flows enter their assemblage and drown out their production. The presence of arborescence in rhizomes is always a risk, of course. But there is never a point that is arborescent by its immutable nature, for the arborescent socius can always be deterritorialized back into a rhizomatic BwO, as its relationships, its connections, the desires that flow into it, change. We are not locked into some eternal struggle, put on an unwavering path towards avoiding or annihilating all points that demonstrate any Freudian qualities. Resistance is possible.

And resist we must. We have already described the anti-production of the socius as fascist, which should motivate some concern. There is another familiar term we can use to describe the impact of the socius, though, one we have mentioned earlier. “Look at what happened to Little Hans… they kept on breaking his rhizome… until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him” (ATP, p. 14). This is ressentiment manifest.

We outlined a formula for ressentiment before, and it is fully applicable here. Ressentiment is the product of disparaging certain (inevitable) aspects of the Apparent World, which often occurs as the result of the creation of an ideal Real World, which the Apparent World fails to live up to and is judged against. The socius contains all these elements: all production is directed towards a certain flow (the Real World), and everywhere on the BwO not conducive to this singular outcome (the Apparent World) is condemned. The resulting feeling, the ressentiment itself, is a denial of life, a nihilistic hatred of the Apparent World that one remains trapped in, that is unable to replicate the Real World. It always requires location of some component of the Apparent World as responsible for this failure, such that one can imagine a hopeful future where, if this accused portion of existence is corrected, the imperfection of the Apparent World will cease. Sometimes this scapegoat is external; other times, the guilt is placed on oneself. Regardless, what we should take from the application of this concept of ressentiment to our theorization of the socius is that ressentiment is a social phenomenon. Of course, that ressentiment necessitates a scapegoat means it always already entails a social element, and that one should therefore not be permitted to make some personal decision that, ‘actually, I am allowed to have ressentiment’. But contextualizing this social factor to the socius, or more broadly, to the process of production as a whole, amplifies the importance of our mission to avoid ressentiment. For, since the socius (which produces ressentiment) is in turn produced by machines, machines which also output flows into the schizophrenic process, it means that one who ends up with ressentiment is not just left with a nebulous hatred for someone, a feeling that may or may not get acted upon, but, through the presence, continuation, and potential amplification of the flows that have produced ressentiment in them, risks subjecting another to their socius, their ressentiment. If one ends up with ressentiment, it means anti-production is coming from somewhere, and it seems likely that this anti-production might infect other BwOs as well. It is hard to think of a worse outcome. For ressentiment is not just some emotion, some random affect that we have arbitrarily decided is worse than all the rest. Ressentiment refers to a condition of life-denial, an evaluation of existence as negative, a hatred of the process one flows within. It is not just something making you sad, or annoyed. It is a drive towards acquisition, one which regards such sadness, annoyance, or other Dionysian feelings as something to be extinguished and escaped. It reterritorializes life itself, rendering every potentiality, every zone of intensity, every becoming, every machine, every flow of desire that diverges from its image of utopia as something to either ignore, avoid, or, to the extent that first two fail, exterminate. It is the desire that desires the end of the process of production. It is as Deleuze (1962/1983) puts in his monograph on Nietzsche: “to have ressentiment or not to have ressentiment---there is no greater difference” (p. 35).

It's not hard to get ressentiment. I get it from video games all the time. For a while, I did my theorizing by recording any philosophy-related thought I had in the Notes app on my phone, so that I could brainstorm with reference to previous ideas instead of starting anew each time---the experience that motivated the creation of this document was some introspection over the ressentiment I felt while playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. I riffed on the common phrase that you ‘can’t end on a loss, can’t quit when you’re on a roll’, and tried to use that sentiment to make sense of the emptiness I felt whenever I finished an online game of Smash, win or lose. Unfortunately, most of my critical knowledge at the time was couched in psychoanalysis, and the interpretation I ended up with seems to consign one to an inescapable feeling of lack (as psychoanalysis does). My hypothesis was that entering a competitive activity meant that one would either lose, and be frustrated that they had not achieved their desired outcome, or win, and be disappointed with how their desired outcome still left them feeling unfulfilled. Obviously, it is not true, as a psychoanalyst would have it, that this nihilistic dichotomy is an inevitable consequence of desire. It is, however, an inevitable consequence of desiring-acquisition, as when the socius directs all flows towards the completion of an impossible being, hoping to cease any desires for something other than the self as it is, one is left either resenting their distance from this ‘being’ when they lose, when they fail to actualize their objective, or unsatisfied with the ‘being’ when they win, as their lack fails to be filled, as they keep desiring, and they want to play again.

We do not just see the socius present in Smash Bros. to the extent that its drive towards acquisition triggers the depressed state of ressentiment. We also find the scapegoating transparently on display here, as well as in many competitive games. Any loss is almost invariably followed up with some rage, either at one’s competitor for being a cheeser, at one’s self for being dogshit, or at the game as a whole for being poorly made. Whenever I left a tournament, walked across the parking lot back to my car, there was always some part of the world---some character, some player, some imperfect version of myself---that I never wanted to see again. Yet, this Apparent World remained, and I remained in it. It is also made clear, in the case of Smash Bros., that the socius is planted by other machines. Playing Smash obviously does not come with the necessary caveat that one will hate themselves and everyone around them. This is demonstrated, to me, with the ease that I can play the game against friends, playing just to play moreso than playing to win, and have a good time. But whenever I wander into ranked online battles, or local offline tournaments, the machines around me---the Elo system, the bracket, my opponent struggling for victory---ingrains in me the socius of Smash Bros., the valuation that only a win can be fulfilling, that everything else is a failure. The socius is produced, not inevitable. But when it is produced, the impact is catastrophic.

Minecraft, for as much as it expresses the schizophrenic process of production in its unrestricted form, is not exempt from this vice. Though Minecraft is not ostensibly a competitive game, it is still possible, and indeed quite frequent, that one approaches it in an objective manner. There are certainly in-game allusions towards a linear sense of progression, with bosses, advancements, rare items, stronger gear. The most apparent ‘object of desire’ in Minecraft to me, though, is the fabled diamond. One need only recall the sonics of their childhood, the countless shitty Minecraft parodies dedicated exclusively to the praise of that fabled light-blue ore, to identify that the BwO of the Minecraft world can be reterritorialized toward the accumulation of diamonds. All the key dynamics of the socius, and its accompanying ressentiment, are visible here. There is nothing inherent about the diamond that dams up the flows of desiring-production, but it is rather certain machines---the progression system within Minecraft, the communal praise for the item---that produce the exclusive desire for them. One is met with an internal sense of self-loathing, of shame, perceiving themself as worse off than their peers on the server, for having less diamonds, for not walking around repping fully enchanted blue gear. This affect creates, as an offshoot, the localization of its source to an isolated aspect of the world, some single obstacle that can be removed to, at last, enable total completion. I recall, in a mid-pandemic server with friends, conversing with the server owner about how, the next time we made a world, we needed to ban a certain group of three people from working together, since the shared redstone farms they had grinded out were severely outproducing everyone else, placing the entire diamond economy in a stranglehold. Now, monopolies are obviously not a great instance of the free flow of desiring-production, either, reterritorializing the entire market towards one shareholder, but what I am more concerned with here is the way me and server-owner Calbe’s failure to achieve the ‘being’ demanded of us by the socius, the state of diamond richness, led to a (quite literal) attempt to rid the world of what we took to be responsible for our misfortune. We see, then, that the socius is produced, and that its demand for desiring-acquisition translates into the twin poles of ressentiment, the simultaneous and self-reinforcing hatred of the world and the attempt to order a more perfect one, is present, even in Minecraft. Perhaps an even more clear Minecraft-related instance of the socius, though, is the one that speaks to the out-of-game desire to even play Minecraft, the one that we observed to be typically demonstrative of free becomings across zones of intensity. Minecraft has understandably, albeit unfortunately, earned the reputation, the reterritorialized label, as a sign of immaturity, a ‘kid’s game’. This is, of course, not universally true. But there are certain socii at play---a socius of social acceptability, and likely the socius of capital, being the two that I would guess are the most influential here---that, when their machinery plugs into the subject’s BwO, makes the idea of playing Minecraft unthinkable. Whenever I work on this piece in public, and need to consult my gameplay recordings of the event for reference, I hunch over my screen a little bit, desperately hoping not to be perceived as one of the childish becomings excluded from the being of the socius, too reterritorialized to confidently produce in accordance with my zone of intensity. It doesn’t take me long to shake off this reclusion, after I recognize it as a symptom of ressentiment and plug it back in to the thousands of pages of machinery I’ve read as to why that’s bad, but it does nonetheless exist, at some point. Across all these examples, we do at least make the hopeful observation that each instance of the socius is produced, which means that it can also be warded off. In the meantime, though, our BwO is infected, and some becoming in the world is renounced, a becoming that we transform into the catalyst for a nihilistic rejection of the reality that we, in our incessant search for ‘being’, seek to move beyond.

We have spent a few pages, now, discussing both how damaging the socius (and its corresponding production of ressentiment) is, as well as how difficult it is to avoid. It would seem that the most urgent question for us, then, is what the alternative to these flows of anti-production are. My aforementioned Notes app came to a similar conclusion, spending the first few months of its existence throwing potential solutions for ressentiment at the wall, always coming back empty handed. This struggle came to an abrupt end in January of 2023, however, as I fortunately discovered that someone had already done this work for me.

Nietzsche (1872/1994) proclaimed “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (p. 32). This thesis comes from his first work (The Birth of Tragedy, henceforth BT), and one which already contained the foundations for his later theorizations of ressentiment, so it is only fitting that he would suggest a principle antithetical to it. Aesthetics against ressentiment, life-affirmation against life-denial. Nietzsche, as we have hinted at in our earlier discussions of his thought, was especially concerned with value systems. Particularly, he was ruthless towards any value system that viewed life (or any of the imperfect, chaotic, painful elements he took to be inevitable facets of it) as negative. His turn to aesthetics, then, is an attempt to do the opposite, to find something that can value life, in all its Dionysian totality, as positive. Though he is (of course, with his idiosyncratic writing style) not at all explicit in sharing his logic for turning to aesthetic value to accomplish this daunting task, he leaves enough hints throughout the text for us to figure out what he was shooting for. His most direct explanation of what he means, and one that is probably somewhat relatable, comes in his remark that “the aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally a simple one: grant someone only the ability continually to see a living play, to live constantly surrounded by hordes of Spirits, and he will be a poet” (BT, p. 42). What he calls upon here, at least to me, is reminiscent of the (I hope) not uncommon tendency to imagine oneself as a character in some media, functioning as a romanticization of mundane experiences that helps elevate their significance, despite one’s awareness that they are in no such fiction. This is supplemented by his (rather poetic, in my opinion) comments that “we can assume for our own part that we are images and artistic projections for the true creator” and “man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art” (BT, p. 32, 18), which can perhaps be better made sense of in the broader context of ancient Greek livelihood that the book examines, wherein suffering and misfortune of mortals were conceptualized as useful to their Olympian overlords, not as some utilitarian sacrifice in some grand cosmic design, but as raw entertainment, just for Zeus’s shits and grins. Whichever of these examples resonates with you, it helps underscore the same premise, the one that is essential for Nietzsche’s project: all existence, whether it is triumphant or tragic, painless or painful, is, when observed from some omniscient third-person perspective, ironic, comedic, depressing, or some other label, which is to say, it is always aesthetic. Any variation of life always contains a positive artistic value, regardless of whether or not someone is actually there to observe it, which means that aesthetics is the unconditional positive valuation of existence that Nietzsche sought. The title my Notes app gave this line of reasoning, and the one that I still use to refer to it, is ‘aesthetic affirmation’.

Aesthetic affirmation is an impressive attempt at relinquishing ressentiment for Nietzsche’s first publication. But what is more impressive is that it actually works. I tacitly implemented the ‘whatever happens to me, however I feel, it’s aesthetic’ outlook in my day-to-day life as a sort of self-help psychology strategy from the moment I understood it, and I don’t think it’s that hyperbolic to say that nothing has bothered me since. Obviously, there are still times over the last year where I’ve been annoyed, sad, in pain, or some other condition we would traditionally think of as negative. The distinction, though, is that this negative sentiment never translates into the second order renunciation of ressentiment, into some attempt to remove either the cause of my displeasure or to escape the feeling of displeasure itself. I just sort of drift through the downtrodden times, not in some ‘woe is me, time to wallow in my sadness’ resignation, but with an undertone of a smile, with some kind of profound joy that even my lowest point is still aesthetic. Pure affirmation. Never have I wanted to not live, or to live only after a certain hardship had passed (both problematic thoughts that plagued me prior to stumbling across Nietzsche). Existence has been eternally justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.

I have ragged on therapy a few times already, so it feels worth mentioning that, while in the process of writing this chapter, I went back to therapy again, taking advantage of the free consultation session my college offers. I’m not sure what I hoped to get out of the experience: there was a part of me that wanted to give psychology an opportunity to explain how fundamentally unhealthy my postmodernism-induced lifestyle was, to put its foot down and put me back on the path to redemption; part of me just wanted to make sure I wasn’t unfairly judging therapy based on two bad experiences, and wanted to give it one last chance. I will concede that this was the best of the three sessions I’ve attempted (though the aesthetic affirmation I embodied, which resisted the socius of the psychoanalyst, may be a confounding variable there), though it still checked all the boxes: 30 minutes of sitting on a couch, being prodded for any problems I might have, every buzzword that could indicate imperfection prompting a thorough interrogation, just a general outlook that seemed determined to figure out what was wrong with me (ostensibly with the hope to make me better). But to me, the most important conclusion this consultation made was the one the therapist sent me away with. I have no doubt that the psychologist found some of the problems they had set out to. I’m not exactly an upstanding beacon of ‘mental health’ (I don’t know a single one of my friends who wouldn’t be surprised if I got diagnosed with clinical depression). Yet, she ultimately suggested that I didn’t need to come back to therapy, primarily because I was good enough at ‘self-treatment’ or ‘coping’ that I didn’t need any of psychology’s suggested solutions. I suppose what I want to underscore with the anecdote is that this book should not just be read as some dogmatic dismissal of all psychologists, or a disparaging of anyone who has ever turned to one for help. Rather, I think it’s a critique of some tendencies psychology has in the way it approaches its subjects, the way it seems to align itself always with acquisition over production, with a suggestion that I consider, and have found to be, far more helpful. I think a licensed therapist telling me that I’m fine without them helps validate that sentiment.

I mentioned desiring-production again, which underscores another important point about aesthetic affirmation. Obviously, the reason art serves as the antithesis to ressentiment, that it is the purest expression of life, is not because of some intrinsic property of art, some magical feature that only it contains. Nietzsche calls the aesthetic phenomenon a justification for existence, but it is far from the only justification for existence. Even he remarks that “science… make existence appear intelligible and consequently justified” (BT, p. 73). The issue with this justification is that “science is rushing irresistibly to its limits… if he sees here, to his dismay, how logic twists around itself and finally bites itself in the tail, there dawns a new form of knowledge, tragic knowledge, which needs art as both protection and remedy, if we are to bear it” (BT, p. 75). Aside from being one of my favorite passages of writing ever composed, this excerpt indicates the fatal flaw of science as a justification for existence, and hints at how art avoids it. Science is a conditional justification for existence---if life is intelligible, then it is justified---that fails when it comes up against that which it cannot explain, the limit of its territory. To draw in some of our schizophrenic vocabulary, science is an attempt to reterritorialize existence, which means everything that falls outside this interior of intelligibility is renounced, condemned, marked as a part of existence to be subsumed into the interior, or else removed from existence altogether. This is the ‘tragic knowledge’ Nietzsche speaks of---this is ressentiment. If the issue with science as a value judgement, then, is that it is conditional, it would only make sense that aesthetics is acceptable because it is unconditional, because there is no scenario in which something is not aesthetic. What this means is that we should not regard art alone as some transcendent value, redeeming the plane of wretched existence, but just a value with the specific quality of unconditionality, which, crucially, is not exclusive to art. There are other ways to affirm life unconditionally. I use the phrase ‘fuck it, we ball’ as much as I make a conscious reminder to myself that something is aesthetic, and the result is the same, since the declaration ‘we ball’ seems to entail that same ambivalence towards what the actual outcome is, that same ability to look at any transfiguration of life with a smile. The more relevant application, for us, though, is the process of desiring-production, and the rhizome that we have noted succinctly represents it. We could say the same thing of both of them: the production of flows of desire, the creation of connections within a rhizome, the movement across the BwO, are all inevitable, occur everywhere always, and as such, are unconditional. The orientation we have taken in this work, then, which places the highest value on the schizophrenic process of desiring-production, is able to affirm existence, no matter what, because there is no production (and the universe operates only through productions) that steps outside of this process.

The unconditional character of our aesthetic or rhizomatic motivation is important for one last thing. There has always been, to me, some apparent tension between the critical (ressentiment is bad, the socius is bad) and affirmative (all life is good, all production is good) aspects of both Nietzsche’s and Deleuze & Guattari’s thought. I use the word apparent intentionally here: these tensions, to me, are not a serious threat to the legitimacy of either system, and it seems like there is a very intuitive answer as to why the self-contradiction is just an appearance. However, it is nonetheless quite easy for an objector to comment that Nietzsche’s condemnation of ressentiment should create ressentiment, or that Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to prevent the production of the socius should create a socius, and both remarks would seem to be accurate applications of each theorization of what triggers such negative outcomes. Indeed, I would even concede that there is a version of applied aesthetics or schizoanalysis---one that pursues some ideal world with zero ressentiment, zero socii, as a telos, and that therefore scorns and seeks to vanquish every instance of ressentiment or the socii that keeps popping up in actual existence---that would indeed fall back into the same system it is seeking to avoid. But that’s just the problem, isn’t it? This mode of thinking, of reaching some perfect state of maximum life-affirmation, is just another instance of desiring-acquisition, one that conditions existence on the absence of ressentiment, and views any appearance of it as a signal of failure in achieving this goal. We started from this same exact point, and the question we asked there can be asked again: why should we choose desiring-acquisition over desiring-production?

Indeed, an orientation towards life that is not built upon a negation of life-denial, but an affirmation of life-affirmation, of aesthetics, of desiring-production, avoids the issues of approaching our philosophic project with the ghost of Freud still haunting us, of subsuming it back into another instance of desiring-acquisition. We have made remarks above, in the becoming-wolf section I believe, about how any attempt to contribute to the flows of desiring-production, to affirm and act upon our zones of intensity, cannot fail. This is because there is not some end point we aspire towards, for even the objects we desire are pursued not as a final solution, but just as responses to our affects, our intensities, our ‘I feel…’. Even if the $130 ears-and-tail order got lost in shipping, I would still have fulfilled the motivating value, for I was not desiring the acquisition of the object, of the package containing my wolfhood, but was rather desiring the production of an output to my zone of intensity, which was done the moment I purchased the item, added it to the cart, even the moment I started looking for it (or, the aesthetics account of this same case, which is much more intuitive: if I got the item, wearing it would have been comedic, making it aesthetic. But it getting lost in shipping would have been pretty funny too). When our motivation in doing something is to produce, to be aesthetic, then it is impossible for us not to succeed in accomplishing this motivation. An ‘object’ of a production is much like vision of an art piece that motivates its creation, merely one immanent variable that motivates a project, a project which continues to affirm whatever it finds eventually in front of it, constantly reinventing itself in new directions instead of renouncing deviations in relation to the original model. Desiring-production is an art piece. If our affirmation of desiring-production as a philosophic system, then, is also approached as an act of production in itself, and not as an end condition to be acquired, we are not met with the agonizing pain that occurs when ressentiment appears, when our actual existence remains separated from our idealized goal, because our goal is unconditionally met. Of course, to affirm desiring-production still entails a critique of, a resistance towards, the restrictive flows of the socius, as we have outlined with our theorization of the schizophrenic process. But in this adjustment, the attempt to annihilate the socius is always tied back to a flow of desiring-production, such that even if the socius temporarily exists, even if our attempt at revolt against it does not end this existence, things that would mark a failure of our desiring-acquisition to be successful, we have still met the demands of our motivating desiring-production, in our continued immersion in the flows during the act of resistance alone. When we proceed with an affirmation of a deterritorialized state of desire, we are at once condemning reterritorialization and avoiding a recreation of the life-condemnation of reterritorialization. Perhaps this is what Deleuze meant when he suggested, writing about Nietzsche’s critical works, that “critique is not a re-action of re-sentiment but the active expression of an active mode of existence” (1962/1983, p. 3). But part of me would like to think that this contextualization of these ideas is, at least to some extent, an original development (:3).

In the meantime, though, as both the acquiring and producing parties work towards the deterritorialization of the flows of desire in their divergent ways, they do have to deal with the reality of the current presence of socii. How do they respond to this chilling fact? The theorist of desiring-acquisition, as we have already noted, unable to bear the presence of these condemned elements in life, comes to resent the imperfect existence they are trapped within. A classic case of ressentiment, as is par for the course with desiring-acquisition. But what of the theorist of desiring-production, the one we hope to be? Well, they certainly oppose these socii, that much is clear, that much we already know. However, there is no reason this opposition need include a renunciation of the world as a whole, and an attempt to move beyond it. Throughout ATP, Deleuze and Guattari often discuss processes of reterritorialization with a degree of fascination. Nietzsche similarly has some fun with his portrayals of Euripides and Socrates, figures he takes to be responsible for the socius of science. What these examples illustrate is the renewed importance of a principle we already emphasized, when describing the socius---flows of anti-production are part of the process of production. The life-denial of ressentiment is part of life. Even the parts of the schizophrenic process we problematize are still internal to it, which means that all of our valuations that can affirm the process unconditionally are still unconditional. Microfascism is still aesthetic. Now, this should not be confused with the idea that one who accepts our theorization of desiring-production could at the same time be unbothered by, or even want, the overcoding of the flows of desire by the socius. It had been made abundantly clear, time and time again, that any socius is antithetical to the schizophrenic process. What we are observing here, crucially, is that the presence of ressentiment, of anti-production, that we oppose, within life, does not prevent our affirmation of life, does not necessitate a hatred for existence, because our affirmation of desiring-production is as such not conditioned on anything, for desiring-production is existence itself. The method by which desiring-production proceeds in the deterritorialization of flows is not through negation of the socius, but through an unconditional affirmation of existence, which through itself resists and ruptures the socius (for the socius requires negation, which we refuse to give it). Desiring-production, and only desiring-production, gives us a project capable of at once changing the world while embracing the world that we remain a part of in the meantime.

This may seem a little paradoxical, and that’s fine, it wouldn’t be postmodernism without flirting with paradox. But that also means turning to video games for examples, one final time, could be useful. I made a brief comment during our analysis about the socius of Smash Bros. that I don’t always get ressentiment when I play the game, especially when I play against friends. These friendlies sessions are an instance of desiring-production: usually, though I do have some desire to win (or, more often, to hit a nasty clip on one of them), there’s no objective, desiring-acquisition at its heart, no notion that winning could accomplish something, or that winning is intrinsically good. Instead, it’s always just because winning, or hitting a landing forward air into a Wolf Flash spike on last stock, would be ‘cool’ (a desire that’s fundamentally aesthetic in nature, or productive, in the sense that it’s pursued in relation, or reaction, to a zone of intensity). So, when I’m playing against the shitters from the debate team (sorry, Alex, you just aren’t that good), and go 13-0, and hit all my Wolf clips, I have accomplished my desiring-production, because that outcome is cool. But if I play Jeremy or Adam (or, to use their illustrious gamertags, ‘Secks’ and ‘Hog Cranker’), and the record is closer to 11-2, and they DI out of my Wolf down-throw-side-B on last stock, that outcome is funny, which is also aesthetic, and the process of playing the games itself is a response to my zone of intensity, which means there’s not bitter condemnation of my failure to win, no ‘salt’, as there would be with desiring-acquisition. If some salt does pop up, if someone ends up throwing a controller, we obviously do what we can to respond to it, to prevent or end their feeling of ressentiment. But this momentary introduction of the socius is something we can laugh off, that we can have fun in spite of, something that does not undermine the occurrence of the schizophrenic process. There’s no desiring-acquisition of winning, or getting mad about losing. There’s just desiring-production, just flows passing between the three of us, through our controllers, across the screen. Playing Smash Bros. in my basement is a rhizome.

I wrote a blog post (Logback, 2023) about this concept---the unconditional affirmation of life, despite the failure to achieve the object of one’s desire---that uses a couple other examples, like me going for a run every day as New Year’s resolution, or learning how to be an iso-scorer in basketball, that could be easier to understand for anyone not as familiar with video games (if you’re still here, and don’t know anything about Minecraft, one, I’m impressed, two, I’m sorry. Most of the Minecraft examples in the rest of the chapters are about political things that happened in-game, so hopefully those are easier to understand). I also think some of the more vague parts of this post, like the mention of an “aesthetic energy signature”, make a lot more sense in the framework, and using the vocabulary, of desiring-production (Logback, 2023a). But I don’t think I would have ever made the application of this concept to the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, or even developed the concept at all, without Minecraft. Indeed, it was late last October and early last November, when my roommate set up a Minecraft server for some friends and me to play on. There were a total of 5 people who ever played on it. I had an ambitious idea for a base, and barely finished a single building for it before the server became inactive. I was dirt poor, and would go on hour-long mining sessions without encountering a single diamond to show for it. It seems like most days I played, I barely made any progress towards completing any of my goals. And yet, I was never bothered. Whether it was the little bits of progress that I did make, or even just the time I spent in the process of attempting to make progress, despite not making any, there was something I could walk away satisfied with. My half-built builds, my hours of fruitless mining, were just productions made in response to a zone of intensity (becoming-builder, becoming-miner). These productions alone were always enough to be satisfied with. It didn’t matter how much or how little I got closer to acquiring my ‘object of desire’, because I wasn’t desiring-acquisition. I was desiring-production, and as long as that remained the case, I couldn’t fail.

I’ve had conversations with friends about what my top five, top ten, favorite video games are (I love making pointless rankings of things). There’s a handful of games that I’ve dumped hundreds, thousands of hours into---Splatoon 2, any Pokémon game except for Y, even Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, despite the 4,000 hours I have in it---that never crack my top 5. I think this is, in part, because these are all games I have spent much time approaching from a competitive context, attempting to win and get better, desiring-acquisition. This is further attested to by the fact that, in the top 5 list I usually give people, these game series get represented by other versions that I played in a more productive, desiring-productive, manner (Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I think is a very cool and fun game engine but am not technically skilled enough to be good at, comes in at my 5, and Pokémon Y, which was my very first Pokémon game, which I just played through to experience and enjoy, is my go-to number 4, despite objectively being one of the weaker entries in the Pokémon series). My number 3 and 2---Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, respectively---are both games that, though I don’t have a ton of hours logged in them, I massively enjoyed every moment of, in part because the best portions of the game were just exploring, running around, having fun with the game’s physics, either ignoring the progression of the story or taking on story tasks in unnecessarily convoluted ways: games where the best parts were just running around on the whims of desire, where the best parts were desiring-production. It should be no surprise, then, that it feels impossible to call anything other than Minecraft my favorite game of all time. I’ve played it a lot, played it across five different consoles, played it for more than 10 years now (am I getting old?), and I can’t recall a time where I wasn’t having fun. It never mattered what I was doing: creative or survival, playing alone or with friends, building or mining, the dozens of hours I’ve spent just exploring old worlds that I made, and since abandoned, or anything else. Really, I was just doing one thing the whole time---desiring-production---and that’s probably why there was never a dull moment. Desiring-production is unconditionally affirmed, so how could I not affirm every second I spent in Minecraft, the game of desiring-production? At this point, I am completely confident that I know three truths about Minecraft, and fairly confident that these three truths are in some way related: Minecraft is my favorite video game; Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time; Minecraft is schizophrenic as fuck.

If you made it this far, congratulations. We have finished describing the entire process of schizophrenic production. I’ll provide a quick recap of everything we’ve learned, and, for once, will select my words very intentionally, so that there’s at least a reference to every relevant detail in this summary. The schizophrenic process of production is this: the entire universe is made up of desiring-machines, all of which are subject to the law of desiring-production. This law states that all desiring-machines change and are changed by the flows of desire, flows which vary in affect and intensity. However, we cannot define the identity of any machine as some static essence, or ‘being’, since the machines are always moving to different zones of intensity, or ‘becoming’, on the body without organs. This body without organs, or BwO, is the collection of every potentiality for a machine, and codes the incoming flows of desire, though it does so in a variable, probabilistic way, such that we cannot be sure how any machine will react to incoming flows of desire until the reaction actually occurs. This describes the process in its fully deterritorialized state, but it can at times be obstructed, when a socius is produced. A socius, when produced, reterritorializes the BwO, only affirming certain potentialities, and condemning all the flows of desire, potentialities, or becomings that do not match this condition. This creates ressentiment, which could also be called overcoding or microfascism, an affect that seeks to remove all of the productions that do not match the conditional production of the socius from existence, and that nihilistically hates the process of production containing these external productions as it works towards this escape. This is combatted through an unconditional affirmation that values the process of production itself positively, which entails a resistance to the socius, but does not have its positive valuation of existence obstructed by the presence of a socius. All of this can also be succinctly understood through the analogue of the rhizome: a series of nodes (desiring-machines) establishing connections (flows of desire) with other nodes, each node’s nature changing based on the connections it has (zones of intensity on the BwO), being restricted by the arborescent model which forces nodes to assimilate to a static identity within a broader system (the socius). 

If this doesn’t make perfect sense, that’s fine. It’s a confusing theoretical framework, so it takes time. In my experience, for both myself and others, hearing the terminology of schizoanalysis applied to some random example just makes things click, though what the example is seems different for everyone. The rest of this work will be applying these vocabulary words to a variety of social and political conditions, of all degrees of importance, so it’s possible that one of these examples clears things up for you.

As far as everything that does make sense, whatever nebulous concept of the process of schizophrenic production you do have, keep it with you! Let your understanding of these concepts be changed as you seem them deployed in new conditions, of course, but if Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, or my interpretation of them (which I developed by mapping all their concepts out on the 7^th-floor study room whiteboard over the course of a couple hours) is correct, then you have an understanding that can explain everything in the world! That said, though we have our concepts, there are still some questions we need to answer. What are instances of the socius that surround us? What does it look like, practically, to affirm the flows of desiring-production? Most importantly, perhaps, what methodology can take us from the socius towards this affirmation? These are all concerns we will answer, in due time. But we cannot answer them by continuing to throw around our philosophy terms at a level of abstraction. It would be easier if there were a set of scenarios, where we can analyze what happened, see where there is a socius, where there is a rhizome, where there is resistance, and develop our understanding that way. It is time to move to this stage of schizoanalysis now. Luckily, we have a prime schizophrenic subject. To steal a line from the YouTube video that will henceforth be our muse, and the video that’s influence turned this work from a short blog post into this full-length book: I present to you, the 1,000-player Minecraft civilization experiment…

Main Character Syndrome

My YouTube watch history tells me it was October 5^th, 2023 when I first viewed Ish’s (2023) 1000 Players Build MASSIVE Civilization in Minecraft. Before going back to verify any of the information I am about to share, I could have approximated where I was when I sat through this video. I was lying on the top bunk in my dorm, of course, but recounting my physical location is too easy. No, I remember being far enough into the semester that college was starting to lose some of its allure. I know that wasting away in my bed as the YouTube algorithm’s suggestions flickered before my glassy eyes was standard practice in those days. Low-energy, bare-minimum, isolated---to use the term a psychologist would probably assign me, ‘depressed’. Not that there’s anything wrong with this melancholy. But I don’t know if I realized there wasn’t anything wrong with it at the time, and that’s where things get messy. I’m certain I was just drifting through the tasks laid out before me, if even that much, in part because I remember seeing Ish’s video in my recommended at least three times, rejecting it as not interesting enough to warrant an hour-and-a-half of my life, before finally folding that early October evening. Watching Ish’s video was an act of resignation. I’m sure that, at the time, I was still producing, because everyone is always producing, always caught up in the flows of desiring-production. But if I knew that I was producing, if I knew that production was all I needed, if this particular production was in response to a zone of intensity rather than the preprogrammed life of a college student, I could not be sure of looking back. It’s entirely possible that, on October 5^th, there was some ressentiment laced between those fitted sheets.

Scrolling through my camera roll helps me validate that this was the disposition of the moment. There’s a photo from October 4^th, the day before I watched Ish’s film, that shows my desk decorated with DoorDash-ed Top Ramen and Lemon Lime Gatorade, an order I recall placing due to a physical ailment (given my track record, most likely a migraine). October 5^th, the day I actually watched the video, survives in my phone’s gallery only as a series of screenshots that I took as evidence against my parents’ prosecution during a slight spat we had. There’s a couple of half-hearted worksheets photographed so early in the morning of October 4^th that they might as well have been from the 3^rd, for the purposes of everything except the late penalty they were met with when they finally got turned in. When my thumb lazily fell upon my screen to select Ish’s upload, then, I would describe myself, in a word, as alienated---from the favors of my family, from interactions with my friends, from my own head (thanks to the splitting pain it sheltered), from the activities I did of my volition, from myself. A hollow corpse, a Being, sitting on the world, but not in it: this is who I was when I finally got around to giving Ish’s video a watch.

My camera roll made a quick turnaround. Following the receipts of my familial disagreement on the 5^th, there’s a one-day gap, then an unflattering picture Friend A took of me, an even more unflattering picture of Friend B that Friend C sent me, and a stat-graphic of a generationally awful performance by Clayton Kershaw saved in my gallery. The 8^th has just one picture, a haul of snacks in Friend C’s room, that he texted to me, which was presumably a prelude to the unflattering picture I took of Friend C on the 9^th. A picture of an activity I did with my roommates on the 11^th, of debate files I had been developing on the 12^th, of a promotion for a concert by my friend’s (Friend C’s roommate) favorite band on the 13^th. I bothered to turn the lights on before taking a picture of the single homework submission nestled into this collection, so even it looks less depressing than its pre-Ish predecessor, a radiant white notebook page instead of a grainy gray one. I planned to make this next sentence something along the lines of ‘I did not find another picture indicative of depression until…’, but after scrolling through the entire remainder of my camera roll, not only did I not find any photographs that reminded me of anything negative, but moreover, every single photo I saw could be directly traced back to an abundantly positive experience. I’ll spare you the details, since I took a lot of photos over the last six months (if anyone would like to sift through them with me, I’d be happy to), but suffice it to say that every entry in my gallery since October 5^th captures, if not is, a productive response to a zone of intensity, a becoming, a piece of a rhizome. Quite the impressive turnaround for a single YouTube video to spark.

In all fairness, it was a very good YouTube video. Many components go into making Ish’s 1000-player experiment an article of must-watch cinema in the content wasteland that is Minecraft YouTube. The content of the video traces a truly fascinating, compelling, and complex narrative, and the form it takes is polished and passionate enough to do such a story justice. A minor aspect that makes itself majorly important in Ish’s videos is the soundtrack, as he employs a personal background with music to both select and mix a masterful film score that earns heaps of genuine admiration from even the cesspool that is the YouTube comments section. While it is true that these elements make Ish’s experiment an enjoyable watch for anyone, there are thousands of videos, on YouTube or elsewhere, that have a good plot, good production, and good sound design. There is one factor unique to Ish’s video that made it especially intriguing to me, and indeed, this very factor has already been commended as responsible for Ish’s events standing far above the hundreds of ‘1000 players simulate Minecraft civilization’ variants uploaded by other creators. In a wonderful video essay on the topic, ChunkyNosher (2023) identifies “there’s one nuance in Ish’s videos that makes them more interesting… the lack of an objective” (1:06-1:14). As they note, the civilization experiment genre is oversaturated with chapters structured around one premade goal (most often, to be the last nation-state standing), instilling a linear sense of progression. Ish, on the other hand, gives players almost zero guidance, suggesting only that members of the experiment should behave in a way that reasonably reflects real life (such that one does not up with 1000 people treating the event as a standard Minecraft server, or 1 player running around and nonsensically killing everyone else). This means that, though many of the same plot points come to pass in both Ish and non-Ish videos, “this time, they all happened on the players’ terms” (ChunkyNosher, 2023, 1:49-1:52). It is as Ish puts in the introduction to his (2023) masterpiece: “each player has the freedom to do whatever they want” (0:18-0:21).

ChunkyNosher applauds this non-linearity from a purely cinematic perspective, suggesting that the unrestricted, bottom-up plot structure is responsible for “creating interesting and organic conflicts rather than the artificial ones created when players are forced to fight each other” and “an unpredictable narrative to captivate the viewer”, going as far as to assert that “even if Ish did his experiments dozens of times, they would still rack up views, since having hundreds of different players in every experiment virtually guarantees that new ideas would be brought into every single video” (2023, 2:41-2:49, 2:54-2:57, 3:02-3:14). I agree with this analysis, but I think there is more to be said about the philosophical reflections, and not just videographic effects, that centering a lack of objective catalyzes. We have already emphasized that Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the schizophrenic process takes a staunch opposition towards teleology, essentialization, any suggestions of a ‘human nature’ or pretraced destiny. We could get away with a quick comment, then, that the non-Ish experiments create for their subjects some ‘Real World’ of an endgame, implanting a socius that directs all production towards whatever win condition the event organizer has announced, condemning the deterritorialized flows that Ish’s emphasis on freedom and subjective progression better facilitate, and I’ll make this comment anyways (you just read it) to keep the vocabulary of schizoanalysis fresh in our minds, but I would be lying if I said my first thought while watching ChunkyNosher’s commentary was ‘socius’. No, I didn’t start seriously working with Deleuze and Guattari until after I had already been thoroughly overcome by Ish-mania; it was instead the field of existentialism as the light-bulb that went off.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1946/2007) suggests that the defining tenant of an existentialist is the belief that “existence precedes essence”, which is to say, the idea that that there is no universal nature to which man can be reduced, but rather, that man is thrown into the world without meaning for himself and must invent his own, that his essence is nothing but what he makes himself, that there is “a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept of it” (p. 22). Now, the idea that there is no predetermined identity, meaning, or ideal for man is certainly present in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. The existentialist man is just a deterritorialized subject. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari take this claim even further, suggesting that whatever essence one produces can, and will, later be changed, caught up in the waves of ‘becoming’, and that this lack of a predetermined essence is not unique to mankind, but a principle of all desiring-machines, which is to say, everything. The hope in including Sartre’s account of this phenomenon, other than providing a more accurate account of my thought processes last October, is that the simple language of existentialism as it intersects with a single issue is easier to understand than the fragmented and omnipresent framework of schizoanalysis being tossed at yet another example. In either case, though, what is important is that, in the Ish events, players spawn into the world without an essence endowed upon them, whereas in non-Ish events, they do. That it is true for Ish’s experimental subjects that ‘existence precedes essence’ does not gain its value as a revelation based on being an alternative or supplementary explanation for why his videos are more captivating than their competition, though it functioning in such a way is certainly a fascinating detail. What is intriguing, to me, is that insofar as any of the three Frenchmen are correct in their understanding of life as lacking a preset objective, Ish’s events replicating this same existential condition makes them more reflective of our external world than the non-Ish productions. Perhaps their proximity to real life is what makes them more entertaining, which is a thought-provoking consideration in itself (especially in light of Nietzsche’s thesis that what makes existence eternally justified is that it is ‘aesthetic’). But what I take from this is that, when Ish’s videos document a game that exemplifies the schizophrenic process of production, and interact with this game in a way that preserves a non-essentialized subject, Ish’s ‘Minecraft social experiment’ approaches a degree of precision simulation vis-à-vis away-from-keyboard relationalities, as we have theorized them, than it would ever let on.

In any case, whether it was because of the Sartrean undertones, or just the exceptional music tracks, I was hooked on Ish’s masterpiece. I watched the 1000-player experiment at least ten more times. I went back to Ish’s channel and watched the other experiments he had conducted. I watched the independent accounts of the experiment uploaded by various creators who partook in it. I watched the archived livestreams of both Ish and these independent creators he unintentionally platformed discussing the behind-the-scenes of all their videos, both in form and content. I would wake up in the morning thinking of the lives that populated the Ish cinematic universe. I would skim my playlist looking to find a song that matched a certain scene from the film, or sometimes the inverse, fabricating a scene to match a song. I started browsing Google Scholar for peer-reviewed articles that cited Deleuze and Guattari in discussions of Minecraft. This last detail I only know from my earlier camera roll perusing, as I encountered a picture I took of a section of one of these papers to send to a roommate, a beautiful summarization of how, for Deleuze and Guattari, love is not a feeling between two people but an assemblage composed of their multiplicitous desiring-machines (fear not, we’ll discuss what this means in the closing pages of this work), right under a paragraph about how Minecraft is a rhizome (Huuhka, 2019). The assemblage idea contained in this aside is implicit in, but not important for, the topics of this chapter, though in all honesty, it is being included mostly because me and the roommate I sent this picture to six months ago had an impromptu conversation about love being an assemblage last night (last night was the last karaoke night of the semester, if you are the roommate in question), and I found the timing of reencountering this text exchange quite ironic. Adding to the irony, this same roommate and I talked about how unnecessarily long my writing is a few nights earlier, a sentiment certainly applicable to the above two sentences, and I left with no intention of changing that, since I consider my writing itself to be an instance of desiring-production, and would not want to subject it to some socius of being intelligible to the reader. Sorry, reader. I suppose this is the price you pay for deciding to read a Deleuzo-Guattarian.

The point I was trying to convey, prior to my distraction (another double meaning, since as I am writing this sentence, a pair of strangers have moved in to share the study room I am writing out of with me), is that I was borderline obsessed with Ish’s civilization experiment. I don’t want to say that this was a hyperfixation, since a lack of formal autism diagnosis makes me hesitant to use such a term as an equivalence, but I will say that whatever I felt towards Ish’s videos is what I imagine a hyperfixation feels like. To use words I have no caution tossing around, we could put this sentiment in schizoanalytic terms, and say that this was a zone of intensity, a becoming-Ish-subscriber. Freud would say that this investment was in some way pathological, a sign of some structural failing of my unconscious, a response to a depressive lack. Is Ish Daddy? I don’t think so. I am more inclined to believe that my interest in Ish’s videos is not a specific manifestation of some essential subjective identity, one who desires-acquisition in response to imperfection, to flatten the unique qualities of Ish’s videos into just another object that represents a potential site of completion, but instead, to maintain that the existence of all the component parts preceded and even, dare I say, produced, the essence, the fleeting affects of a Minecraft YouTube video that circulated on my BwO. We could rule out my interest in these videos as some transcendent form of escapism. They could only be an immanent instance of machines being plugged into one another, connecting, producing, becoming.

Though I was content to connect myself to the Ish-assemblage as a consumer, I cannot pretend that I was immune to the desire that logically follows such an interest in the events, that being to partake in one. By October 12^th, one week after I first laid eyes upon Ish’s generation-defining video, I had joined the Ish community Discord, such that I would be notified when the applications for the next event opened. I expected to wait six months, if I was lucky, for a chance to be featured, given the moderation team’s repetitive and reasonable reassurance that there was no new civilization video currently in the works, due to the massive amount of time and effort that such a project entails (a laborious undertaking I can attest to, given my own efforts in editing a video over the experiment). It was a pleasant surprise, then, when just a couple weeks later, on November 9^th, Ish made an announcement that he was accepting applications for his next experiment. After receiving the message at 7:00 P.M., the next few hours of my Thursday night were spent in a gleeful frenzy, spreading the news with all my other Minecraft-playing friends to see if any of them wanted to toss their hat into the ring with me (none of them did). Before long, though, my elation was forced to confront a grimmer reality. Early Friday morning, I would leave for the airport to fly to Wake Forest University for a debate tournament, where I would remain until Tuesday the 14^th. Problem one: the application format for Ish’s event was a video, which would take some time and equipment to edit. Problem two: they were due at 11:59 on the night of Sunday the 12^th. The prospect of editing an application for a Minecraft YouTube video while in a hotel for a debate tournament in Winston-Salem was too difficult for logistics reasons, let alone the factor of embarrassment, to be a viable option. In my estimation, then, I had a simple decision to make: ruin my sleep schedule the night before a debate tournament so that I could write, record, and edit a video application for a chance to be part of a YouTube event that I did not even know existed more than a month prior; or don’t. Anyone who knows me in the slightest will be unsurprised what happened next.

A tweet from 1:39 A.M. announces to the world that I did, in fact, submit an application, and signals to me that it was 2:00 A.M. before I started packing to fly halfway across the country just a few hours later. Of course, this decision was important in the sense that if I didn’t end up in the event, the remainder of this book would look quite different. But I want to sit on a different reason that this was an important decision for a little while. What stands out to me, as I reflect on this moment, is how it intersects with the schizophrenic process of production, more specifically, that it is an instance of a production in response to a zone of intensity. This form of production, one that responds to zones of intensity, is indispensable for any practical application of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. Indeed, this form of production is always indicative of desiring-production, as it produces in response to a becoming, an assemblage, the connections of a rhizome, which entails a production in response to all of the flows of desire that flow onto one’s BwO, and is necessary to avoid ressentiment, as it means it is motivated not by the acquisition of an object that a certain feeling renders desirable, which may only conditionally be affirmed if the object is actually grasped, but by the response to the feeling itself, which occurs unconditionally. When we have situated our entire framework on a premise of affirming desiring-production, and resisting the production of ressentiment, understanding a strategy that accomplishes both tenets is invaluable. At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari are far too rhizomatic for the conclusion one walks away with to be ‘everyone should apply for Ish Minecraft Civilization Season 3’. It seems, then, that we should ask just what it is about the decision to apply that makes it an instance of such a response.

The short answer is that the decision to apply was an instance of desiring-production because it was not an instance of desiring-acquisition, but that’s hardly more instructive than where we started. I think the easiest way to explain this is with reference to the factors that are representative of the distinction between desiring-production and desiring-acquisition, which are becoming versus being, or existence versus essence, respectively. If we were to produce in response to some overarching notion of what the subject should do, and therefore reduce the subject to a being, or an essence, we would be desiring-acquisition. If I had decided not to apply with appeal to the role that I was expected to play as part of the debate team, therefore condemning the actual feeling of wanting to apply, I would be siding with my being over my becoming, my essence over my existence, being reterritorialized by the socius of the Kansas debate team. Fortunately, this mistake was not made, as the decision to apply was not made in the name of some broader system (what system would advocate playing in YouTube Minecraft events?), but in the name of the ‘I feel…’, the zone of intensity, the becoming, the existence. We have seen this aspect of desiring-production before: indeed, we saw it just a couple pages ago, when I ranted about my roommate instead of ending the paragraph where I should have. Those couple sentences are not a product of the ideal writer, the faceless being that transmits objective information in a cool, clear, and unbiased manner from behind the computer screen, but a product of what I was feeling at the time, the becoming that was pounding away the keyboard, listening to the sound of my newfound study room co-occupants talking about their sex lives leaking through my headphones. I don’t think they know I can hear them, and I don’t have the heart to tell them that I can.

It’s not just that we avoided acting in response to a being in the sense that we did not respond to some concept of a ‘being’ that wasn’t actually there, though, but also, that we avoided acting in a drive towards a concept of a being that remains distant, but nonetheless serves to reterritorialize our productions. We didn’t jump off a being, but we also didn’t jump towards one. If the decision to apply was a teleological one, an attempt to actually get accepted, to play in the event, we would have invested in a conditional being of being-in-the-event that may or may not be actualized. Responding to a zone of intensity is never a question of a single correct outcome. The single correct outcome, the essence or being, that we aspired towards, would hover as a haunting specter over the BwO, casting a shadow on every other outcome as a failure to reach its limited vision of life. There are many ways to respond to one zone of intensity: I could have sent in a lower quality application so I could get more sleep, or put my heart and soul into the application and still not been accepted. Both of those would have been fine. It’s not a question of finding some 1:1 alignment between a becoming and a production; the BwO is far too variable for such nonsense. There are multiple possible responses to a multiplicity, and insofar as they are actually responses to the multiplicity, and not some investment in a being or essence, they can all be correct. It’s the case of the wolf that we already discussed, where even if the package is lost in shipping, the actual production made in response to the becoming, that of adding the item to the cart in the first place, is nonetheless affirmed, as long as we do not understand the arrival of the package as a missing piece that will complete a being, but as just one potential response to a becoming.

Perhaps it will be clearer if we take one example that demonstrates both components. After deciding earlier this semester that psychology was not the major for me (a shocking revelation, based on everything you’ve read, I’m sure), there were many mornings where the decision of whether or not to go to my torturously boring, if not microfascist (of no fault of the professor, I feel compelled to add, but just as a consequence of the discipline), PSYC 200 class was a difficult one. The desiring-machines that produced a feeling, and the feeling itself, remained quite similar from morning to morning. Some mornings, I went to class, some mornings, I didn’t. Some mornings, I got out of bed, told myself I would go to class, spent too long in the shower to the point where if I went, I would arrive late, and so, I just got lunch instead. It is not the case that one of these responses was ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’. Nor is it the case that the mornings where I stood around in the shower too long were failures, since I did not achieve my stated goal. All of these were just different ways of responding to the same zone of intensity, different productions in response to what was functionally the same feeling. This divergence, and the tolerance with which I regarded it, was only possible when the question of going or not going was not made with reference to some static ‘being’ or ‘essence’ (‘as a student, I should go to class…’, ‘as a philosopher, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a psychology lecture…’), which would look at all the mornings that took the other route, or the dissenting feelings that sought one of those other routes, as failures. It was never a question of what I was, only ever a question of what I felt, and how I felt like responding to that feeling. Nothing limited out. No socius to assimilate towards. Just deterritorialized flows, an attempt to produce, one that was completed even if the production I had in mind was not. As it should be.

These specifications should ward off the misreading of Deleuze and Guattari as just a new set of information to tweak some overarching moral framework with. The question of responding to zones of intensity is not at all like one of examining a situation and appealing to some moral code (utilitarian, deontological, vibes-based, whatever) to figure out what one should do. Such a maneuver would fail to be an actual instance of desiring-production in both of the ways we have enumerated above. That we are responding to zones of intensity, which are products of the unpredictable coding of the BwO, means we can never create some situational rule that maps out a correct answer beforehand, as it would always entail imposing an answer made in the context of beings onto the imperfect fit of becomings. Deontology fails here: the classic question of when lying is situationally acceptable, when violence is situationally acceptable, and so on, is one that reveals the problem with imposing some essential rule on a non-essential reality, and one that cannot be answered without recourse to more essentialization (‘lying is not okay in this specific scenario’ usually refers to physical or very basic, Freudian even, psychological characteristics of the scenario, not what the zones of intensity are). Kant knows nothing about desire. How to respond to a zone of intensity is not a question of finding rules, but always a case-by-case question---hence Deleuze’s preference for the language of ‘ethics’ over ‘judgement’ (Dorries & Reddick, 2018). It would also fall short to develop a single methodology that can be applied to every case, like the utilitarian always asking what produces the greatest good. Even if we assume that the question of ‘greatest good’ is done with exclusive respect to zones of intensity, and not some essentializing reading of base-level ‘pleasure’, to impose a single correct answer ignores the possibility for a zone of intensity to be responded to in differential ways, and condemns all the otherwise acceptable responses that do not rise to its threshold of optimization. Many times, one can respond to a zone of intensity in a way that is not ‘good’, in a way that is perhaps even ‘bad’, when a better, more ‘good’ response is just as possible, and be completely justified. I don’t know that it was ‘good’ or ‘necessary’ for my friend to celebrate beating me in Smash Bros. by stepping outside to smoke a Camel Crush. But it was certainly an instance of desiring-production. For us to get a moral code that does not reproduce the essentialization of the socius and its consequential production of ressentiment, we would need a framework that, in any scenario, responds only to zones of intensity, becomings, and existence, rather than machines, beings, or essence, and that enables multiple correct responses. ‘We should respond to zones of intensity, and there are multiple ways to do that’: this is a fine statement, but at this point, we’ve just reinvented rhizomatics (and even then, we would need our specification that this statement should not be enforced as a rule, as an instance of desiring-acquisition, as moral statements often are, but must always be applied as an instance of desiring-production, a response to zones of intensity, in itself).

Our critique of morality, however, should not make the moral relativists too excited (a moral relativist seems most likely to be a gooner, so I certainly hope we do not excite them). Saying that one should respond to feelings, and that there are multiple correct ways to respond, as we have, does not mean that everything is permitted, as they would like to have it. We have dismantled any semblance of an essential moral code that could be used to push back against certain actions, this is true. But that dismantlement was itself a push back, no? This is a problem that we encountered in the first chapter: desiring-acquisition is antithetical to desiring-production, which means that our affirmation of the latter entails a resistance to the former. Perhaps Sartre’s account of the same problem, using the more readily understandable language of existentialism, will make this issue easier to process: “we may also judge a man if we assert that he is acting in bad faith. If we define man’s situation as one of free choice, in which he has no recourse to excuses or outside aid, then… any man who fabricates some deterministic theory, is acting in bad faith” (1946/2007, p. 47). That ‘existence precedes essence’ leaves a great degree of freedom for how one can create their own essence. However, it does not enable one to respond to a supposed essence that preceded existence, when we know there is no such thing, which would be an instance of the ‘bad faith’ Sartre criticizes. What this vocabulary substitution makes clear is an important detail: one responding as if essence precedes existence is not responding to an existence that precedes essence at all. Responding to the crisis in meaning caused by the death of God by appealing to that same God’s rotting corpse is not really a response, is it? It seems more like denial or repression (Freudian terms, of course, which signals that a socius might be afoot), not an answer. We can apply the same principle to our schizoanalytic applications: the moment that one’s response to a zone of intensity is a response of desiring-acquisition, it ceases to be a response to a zone of intensity at all. It is instead an appeal to some mythical being or essence, one that necessarily restricts the free flow of becoming or existence that makes zones of intensity possible in the first place. We have not just made some arbitrary distinction, that ‘desiring-production is okay, except for the times where one is desiring-acquisition’. Desiring-acquisition is not a subset of desiring-production. Religion is not a subset of God’s death. They are two entirely distinct modes of existence, with the former crowding out the latter. It is our job, as schizoanalysts, to always align ourselves with desiring-production, which always entails a resistance to desiring-acquisition (though, of course, what that resistance looks like is dependent on the zones of intensity at play). When we suggest that one should respond to zones of intensity, then, we know that there is not a single correct way to respond. But there is a wrong way. Sorry, God.

I apologize for the detour into conventional morality from what was a pseudo-autobiographical chapter. Spending two semesters in a philosophy department that constantly rehashes these topics means that these questions were probably weighing heavier on my mind than they were on yours, and I just wanted to get them out there somewhere. I suppose you can think of those last few paragraphs as the four days I spent at the debate tournament, after I submitted my application, with Minecraft thoroughly out of mind. I did have fun at the debate tournament, by the way, which was capped off with an all-nighter featuring a walk to Cook-Out (and its signature double-barrel ‘frot dog’) as a teammate and I decided that just staying up was better than dragging ourselves out of bed on minimal sleep for a 4:00 A.M. leave time. It’s a good thing that the decision to apply instead of working on debate was just a response to a zone of intensity, which meant that it was not some overarching rule that dictated debate could never be a priority, or I probably would have spent the whole weekend miserably moping around instead of letting my zone of intensity drift as the desires that flowed into me changed. I suppose that’s all you really need to get out of the last few paragraphs: the decision to apply for Ish’s event was an instance of desiring-production, because it was not a decision made in response to a being (‘the debater’) or in pursuit of a being (‘the accepted Minecraft player’), but just a response to a becoming, to a zone of intensity, to an ‘I feel…’.

After taking a long nap to catch up on the sleep that my tangentially debate-related all-nighter stole, I woke up to a thrilling development (waking up, here, is only metaphorical: it was actually not until November 19^th, five days after my compensatory slumber, that any developments happened). My phone started to vibrate over and over and over, which investigation revealed to be a product of a new Discord channel I had been added to, one that was now filled with messages replying to the notification of my arrival with a chant: ‘one of us, one of us, one of us…’. I had been accepted into Ish’s Season 2.5 Civilization Experiment! Though I remember my reaction being an overwhelmingly positive one, I won’t feign humility and pretend that it was a surprise. The applications team had earlier announced that the candidate review process would wrap up on the 19^th, so I knew I would get an ultimatum at some point that night, and as far as their verdict, I’ll just say that I have a good track record with applications. Moreover, I felt especially good about the video submission I had crafted for Ish, which I think was a good balance between thoughtful answers to the guiding questions and light-hearted interjections, such that I appeared to be both an interesting and pleasant potential participant. Besides, the event staff had stressed that the number one factor in a good application was showing that some effort was put in, which I certainly did. I guess it’s a good thing I stayed up to edit.

The content of my application was relatively straightforward. The screening prompts were essentially just variations of ‘why do you want to be in this event? What do you plan to do in it?’, and my responses were essentially just (significantly) shortened versions of what we’ve already discussed in this work. I had a suspicion that Ish’s Minecraft events reflected actual civilization dynamics, in part because they reconstructed existentialist subjectivities in a schizophrenic game, and thought that observing how one of his experiments unfolded would provide some valuable, exportable insights. As far as what my plans were if I did make it in, my submission suggested that I would be proximate (in a methodological, not theoretical, sense) to the ‘Minecraft version of Vladimir Lenin’: first, I would interpret how the world ought to change, then, work to change it.

Unlike most college applications or cover letters, I had no intent of abandoning my fidelity to these professed philosophical goals once they had persuaded those operating the gates to let me in. Indeed, with the new revelation that being admitted to the event gave one clearance to otherwise inaccessible channels in the Ish Discord, my work was able to begin right away. Between the general chat available for all Season 2.5 soon-to-be subjects, and more importantly, the recruitment channel where aspiring nations could advertise and recruit others towards their cause, I was able to get a glimpse at the tendencies of impending civilizations and their future citizens before a single brick had been laid.

It did not take long to notice that, though there was no predetermined essence for the members of this experiment, when the sampling pool was largely composed of individuals who were drawn in by a YouTube video with 24 million views, there may as well have been. The lack of an Ish-endowed objective did not prevent a large section of the playerbase from nonetheless construing their own linear, teleological path prior to spawning into the world that the road’s stones would be laid down in. A disease, rampant among the Season 2.5 Citizen exclusive chats, was beginning to look more like a plague. I am speaking, of course, of the infamous ‘Main Character Syndrome’.

Main Character Syndrome, sometimes shortened to MCS, is an obstacle one is bound to encounter while navigating an Ish event. The symptoms manifest themselves in various ways, but all stem from the same basic infection: a player, understanding that the chronicles of this experiment will be broadcast to the expansive realm of the internet, wishes to transcend the fleeting and forgotten life of the server by realigning their frivolous exploits towards the pursuit of the eternal and immortalizing screen time.

Subjects take up different approaches to fulfill this task, to slip past the pearly gates and into the white light of Ish’s heavenly script, to appease the YouTube algorithm’s demand of entertaining content. There is what you might imagine when you think of someone desperate for recognition, someone who sacrifices any righteous commitment to slip into whatever role they think will earn them favor in the moment, like a politician or corporate weasel. Many found their meaning as part of a national cause, either founding, governing, or joining one of the hundreds of groups in the recruitment channel. Some groups espoused adherence to democratic, liberal, religious, or other ideals, seeking to make their imprint on the world (and appearance in the video) as heroic champions of justice or peace. Some were content to slide into a villainous niche, garnering support around historically prominent heels that have since fallen to the wayside. Some, perhaps inspired by the comedic plotline of a Los Pollos Hermanos owner that weaved its way through the canonical account of Ish’s previous experiment, took on the challenge of being the ‘class clown’ of the one-thousand-person laboratory. Since I was noting the prominent features of all the conscripting communities anyways, I decided to document my findings in two separate places. There was a relatively objective and public database that I made and shared with all the other citizens, hoping to make it easier for others seeking a faction to navigate the overflow of options. There was also a private, shorthand, subjective list I kept for myself, one that sorted all the societies into two categories---those I thought would be willing to ally with the deterritorializing vector I hoped to produce, and those that would not---with a one- or two-word description of what principle of the group made me suspect they would wind up on that side. We’ll just say that one of these categories had a few more members than the other.

The problem with those demonstrative of Main Character Syndrome is not that they are sometimes annoying to interact with. Indeed, if one walks away from an MCS patient regarding them with a slight yet unserious disdain, we’re doing a pretty good job of disease prevention. No, the issue that I identified with MCS is that it was, to use the psychoanalytic term that all of my notebooks from the event use, ‘ideological’. Now, we’ve had a tenuous relationship with psychoanalysis up to this point, so it may seem strange to now borrow it as an analytical frame. But we should remember that psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis are not totally incompatible, that Deleuze and Guattari explicitly carve out a realm of psychoanalysis within the schizophrenic process---the realm of anti-production, the realm of the socius. We are welcome to use psychoanalytic theorizations, then, with the understanding that the formula of desire that a psychoanalyst names is not, as they would have it, natural and inevitable, but rather, an instance of ressentiment, a mistaken desire that does actually exist, but has been produced, produced by and disruptive of the real natural and inevitable character of desire, desiring-production. When a psychoanalyst says ‘all subjects desire in this way’, we should read it as ‘if someone desires in this way, then it is an instance of desiring-acquisition’. In this refined context, it can still be a useful tool in our schizoanalytic toolbox. I have a pullover sweatshirt with a design of Lacan’s psychoanalytic graph of desire on it. We can say that this is the sweatshirt we’re stealing from our breakup with Freud.

What does the psychoanalyst mean, then, by ‘ideology’? Todd McGowan, the psychoanalyst who first made sense to me, explains that “the ideological gesture… hold[s] out the promise of future respite or in mobilizing that suffering around an idea that redeems it” (2013, p. 33). Interestingly for our discussion of MCS, McGowan in the same work singles out the pursuit of social recognition as an instance of ideology, writing “the subject’s desire is a desire to figure out what the Other wants from it” (2013, p. 87). If one recalls our cursory account of Lacanian psychoanalysis in our first chapter---all subjects have a lack, and pursue objects of desire that they invest with the idea of filling this lack---it is not hard to see how ideology relates to this, or how both are exemplified by some of Ish’s participants. Ideology is a system of meaning, one which creates a transcendent ideal (social recognition, democratic governance, being a comedic side character) that functions as an ‘object of desire’, that, if achieved, will cause the subject to no longer feel as though their existence is meaningless, to at last achieve their essence, to cease their lack. It’s also not hard to see how this is just a recasting of what we call desiring-acquisition: the socius marks a single production, a single being, a single potentiality, as valuable, and pushes the subject in a constant assimilatory drive towards this objective outcome, attempting to cease the chaotic and imperfect transfigurations of desiring-production. An important detail that McGowan suggests on this point is that “ideology is singular: all ideologies are nothing but forms of ideology as such” (2013, p. 33). We agree with this sentiment, in the sense that we consider all socii to be fundamentally the same, in that they are all just a restriction on the free flows of desiring-production, in that they produce the same anti-productive flows of ressentiment. This underscores a critical resolution for any schizoanalyst: there is never a time where a socius is acceptable. Sometimes, a small socius is produced all on its own (a one-time desire for screen time, a certain nation on a single Minecraft server). Sometimes, what we encounter is a small investment in a broader socius (the desire for screen time is a desire for broader social acceptance, the certain nation is an affirmation of the broader socius of liberal democracy). To the schizoanalyst, it does not matter. We wish to blow both of them, all of them, to smithereens, back into the scattered mess of desiring-machines that they were before Freud came along and tried to stick them all together. Now, given that we are not psychoanalysts, that we are still and forever indebted to desiring-production, the manner we approach these socii is different from situation to situation, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to how we go about dismantling them. We will not, like psychoanalysts, observe a conflict in which a macrofascist entity is being resisted by a revolutionary group that, regrettably, displays the occasional microfascist tendency, and smugly denounce ‘both sides are bad’ before retreating to our armchair and our pipe. But we will also not, as a liberal would beg us to every four years, throw our full support behind one socius under the guise that it’s at least better than another socius. It is our job to inhabit the flows of deterritorialization, the flows that challenge the production of one socius, while at the same time refusing the opposing socius’s reterritorializing demand, pushing back and further towards total decomposition of every socius in every direction. What I really want to stress here, though, is that, though our response to a socius may vary, it will never affirm a socius, only going as far as to affirm whatever productions of deterritorialization leak out of a socius, and appropriate them towards our own cause. We will never call a socius ‘good’, ‘acceptable’, or ‘justified’, regardless of content or scale. To recycle a quote from the first chapter: “it’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective” (ATP, p. 215). Microfascism is not qualitatively different than fascism. And we will unconditionally refuse both. On this point, psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis can shake hands (and indeed, as we have just discussed, schizoanalysis will even allow itself to shake hands). ‘Never thought I’d die fighting side-by-side with a Freudian… what about side-by-side with a friend?... Aye, I could do that’.

Now, we could repeat what we already said about ideology being bad for everyone outside of it, condemning the potentialities of the world that they inhabit which fall outside the socius’s territory, and spreading the socius across other BwOs (McGowan himself comments that “ideological manipulation of human suffering also locates the source of suffering and loss externally… the external force that necessitated sacrifice” [2013, p. 35]). We know that Main Character Syndrome is contagious (Freudians, for their part, would call it genetic and untreatable). But, to the extent that ressentiment being aimed at the ‘Self’ is different from ressentiment being aimed at the ‘Other’ (in both cases, it is just being aimed at machines and flows that are part of existence, just that in the first case, the machines or flows are part of what we would traditionally call the ‘Self’), I want to look at the former. Indeed, we already noticed that most people not already harboring MCS were not made to do anything more than laugh at it. Instead, we want to zero in on just what MCS does to the one who has it, how it impacts the BwO coupled to the machine that produces it. This is where psychoanalysis, unsurprisingly, has much to say: the way that this form of desire, desiring-acquisition, is self-destructive. As McGowan writes, in the context of acquiring-recognition, “recognition grounds the subjects’ identities… projects oriented around gathering recognition… necessarily remain within the confines of the order” (2013, p. 87-88). For the ideological subject, there is always an aspiration towards the static identity, the ‘being’, that their ideology has prescribed, which prevents their zone of intensity from wandering outside of this limited zone. The one who seeks acceptance constantly polices their own behavior to avoid being judged, the one who fights for democracy exhausts themselves in the fear of failing the cause, the villain does not let themself feel love, the class clown does not themself feel sadness. The being prescribed by MCS, whatever form it takes, operates as an overcoding signifier that reterritorializes the BwO, directing ressentiment to all the becomings that wander outside the ‘Self’.

A distinction that we could make here, one that shoehorns in some other ideas that are important to Deleuze and Guattari, and implicit in, but not explained, in what we have already written, is the distinction between ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’. Transcendence is the system of meaning that is above, beyond, greater than, this world, whereas immanence is within, between, part of it. Ideology (and its analogue, desiring-acquisition) always contains a transcendent element: there is a being, a ‘Real World’, a completed subject, a perfection that we aspire towards. The issue is that the transcendent ideal diverges from the immanent existence that we actually remain in, which causes hatred (ressentiment) to turn back against our pathetic, meaningless life. The transcendent subject of social acceptance scolds the immanent subject that remains unsure if everyone likes him. The immanent subject, then, begins bending over backwards, doing everything he can to reach transcendence, the transcendent end placed before him by ideology, losing the productions, the activeness, the freedom of his BwO in the process. Spinoza is a thinker who Deleuze celebrates, most well-renowned for his idea of God as substance, as something that makes of everything, as synonymous with nature (his name for Him, ‘Deus sive Natura’, ‘God or Nature’). This God is immanent, this God is synonymous with the schizophrenic process of production. Most of us, however, are more acquainted with a transcendent God, the Judeo-Christian Christ, who lives above this world, in one more perfect than our own, commanding us to leave our desires behind for a chance at eternal salvation. It’s interesting how the pursuit of transcendence, something the subject surely takes to be in their own best interest, effectuates a total destruction of the subject, locking it away in an impersonal, closed system, a root within a rhizome. Jesus Christ sits on his transcendent throne, seeking to freeze the infinite and immanent flows of Deus sive Natura. A system of ideology imposes its will over the entire world, but fascinatingly, those who subscribe to the ideology end up unable to impose their will at all.

We thank psychoanalysis for their contributions to our work, but we should leave before it gets too late, taking care to keep them at arm’s length prior to Freud leaving any cocaine residue on our lips. There’s a couple important distinctions between how we understand and treat ‘desiring-acquisition’ and how a psychoanalyst will understand and treat ‘ideology’, even if the process of desire they name is functionally identical, based on the broader place they settle into their respective system. There are three points of departure I track, but if it’s any help, I think they can all be summed up by a Virginia Woolf quote my roommate was eager to share with me: “hatred… was for ideas, not people” (1925/1992, p. 125).

The first difference is the easiest. A psychoanalyst thinks that ideology is the only way to desire, that everyone is always desiring ideologically, desiring acquisitively. A schizoanalyst thinks that desiring-acquisition is not the only way to desire, that it is just an unnatural mutation that occasionally (sometimes, it feels like occasionally means ‘often’, sometimes, it feels like it means ‘rarely’---I’m inclined to believe that both meanings are accurate, however that works) restricts the flows of, but is produced by, the process of desiring-production. We are a critique of desiring-acquisition; not all desire.

The second difference is not much harder. A psychoanalyst thinks that there are certain behaviors that are tell-tale signs, that necessarily point to something else, something within the mysterious, omnipresent unconscious. All desire signifies a response to the lack; all sex signifies a desire to fuck your father. A schizoanalyst does not think that there are any such signs, any machines, that have this predetermined essence. There is no production that must be desiring-acquisition, not based on the nature of the production alone. It is possible for a production (wanting to clean one’s house, sharing facts about the Roman Empire, making a purchase) to be an instance of desiring-production (one just feels like cleaning one particular day, one has an academic fascination with Roman history, one is making a questionable financial decision for a borderline gag-gift), even if that very same production is often associated with or an instance of desiring-acquisition (privileging organization and order, seeking a return to the Roman triumvirate, believing in the effectiveness of a system of exchange-value). Any action can be good, as long as the action is produced in accordance with the flows of desiring-production. Of course, we can recall that this does not mean everything is permitted, for it is not possible for one to desire-acquisition as a form of desiring-production, for one to respond to the situation of ‘existence precedes essence’ with ‘essence precedes existence’, which means we are still justified in our relentless critique of the socius. The socius is always bad, the psychoanalyst agrees with us here, but a certain thing might not always point to a socius, which is where we diverge. We are a critique of productions of desiring-acquisition; not of productions in a vacuum.

The third difference follows from the second one. The psychoanalyst has a tendency to interpret the signs he is given with a degree of authority, of certainty. Your dream must mean this, your words must mean this. The schizoanalyst would never pretend to have absolute knowledge of the world, for the schizophrenic process that undergirds it prevents such a thing. We can interpret certain scenarios, we can note and record certain things that suggest a socius might be present (a machine’s specific words or mannerisms, previous interactions, professed commitments), but we will never be 100-percent sure. We can name what would be a socius in any given situation, since the socius is a concept, and we can conceptualize what would be a restriction of the flows of desiring-production. We cannot unfailingly assert if this would-be socius is what actually is.

Importantly, this third difference is not a reason we can never call something out, that we can never interpret something as being a socius. Indeed, if that were the case, I would have about 60 pages of work to delete! No, we are free to criticize, insofar as we do not let our criticisms themselves become transcendent, do not let them become disconnected from the schizophrenic process of production. For our criticisms will always prescribe deterritorialization as a response, and should always be produced in a way that responds to the zones of intensity present, such that it does not force one into some mandatory deterritorialization program. If we’re wrong in one of our accusations, then, if we think something is desiring-acquisition when it is actually desiring-production, then our misdiagnosis would only lead to redundant advice, and provide it in a way that is not paternalizing, that is not oblivious to the becoming that is really in front of us. In the best-case scenario, we call something a socius when it is a socius, and produce change. In the worst-case scenario, where we call something a socius that is not a socius, there is an off-chance that our statement helps us to understand what would be a socius in a manner that changes or wards off other instances of socii, while in the meantime just suggesting to one who is already deterritorialized that one should deterritorialize. That’s not much of a problem at all, so long as our suggestion of deterritorialization is deterritorialized itself, so long as it is responsive to context and changes in context, so long as it is produced in accordance with the zones of intensity at play. “We’ll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows” (AO, p. 382). In short, then, to summarize these last three points, and indeed, everything we have henceforth discussed, the question of the schizoanalyst is always if something is desiring-production or desiring-acqusition, and as long as both the schizoanalyst and schizoanalyzed are working towards the former, we’ll be fine.

Still not convinced that the only question in determining whether something is acceptable or not is whether it is desiring-production or not, despite our best protestations? Not a problem. Maybe a Minecraft-related demonstration of such an idea will win you over.

There was one nation in the recruitment channel that stood out, one that rose above the rest, one that captured my interest so much so that I considered abandoning my role as an independent philosopher to join its ranks. It’s not that there was anything explicit about this nation that would make it attractive to a Deleuzo-Guattarian---I doubt that a ‘midnight aristocracy’ (the recruitment post’s announced form of government) is what the two Frenchmen had in mind. It was rather the aesthetic of the nation that drew me in. ‘Nevermore’, they were called, with raven-themed insignias, gothic architecture, and almost entirely black builds. I suppose I’ll always be a bit of an edgy bastard at heart. Of course, this should not be taken to mean that if something has a cool aesthetic, it’s automatically good. We wouldn’t want to move to a fascist nation just because they make neat art (anyone else remember that sculpture of Mussolini that makes it look like he’s shaking his head?). However, we can recall that aesthetics do have a special place in our philosophic framework, for Nietzsche helped us to understand that aesthetics serves as an exemplary unconditional affirmation of existence. What this means is that, in the same manner that attempting to do something as an instance of desiring-production, as a response to a zone of intensity, can never fail, attempting to do something with the sole motivation of it being aesthetic accesses the same principle. The implication is that Nevermore, insofar as the primary support for the idea was ‘it would be cool’ (which certainly seems to be the case), was a manifestation of desiring-production, despite its flirtation with a centralized and ideological state. In the same way that desiring-acquisiton could not be desiring-production, desiring-production could not be desiring-acquisition. What we mean by this is that, if something really is just done as a response to zones of intensity, it will always interact with new flows of desire in a productive way, letting them enter and change the BwO. Without a transcendent God of desiring-acquisition to die for, it’s hard to remain steadfast in one’s Being when the immanent circumstances of existence nudge one towards becoming elsewhere. Attempts to increase the connections of the rhizome should, if done right, increase connections with the rhizome along the way.

One could ask how I could know that Nevermore was a product of aesthetic desires, and not a fascist’s master plan, tricking me into praising them in a book. I could give the non-answer that, well, go back a couple paragraphs, we just acknowledged that we never know we’re right, but our unwavering commitment to immanence and deterritorialization means that’s not a problem. The other answer, though, and one that helps elucidate the claim we’ve made above, is that a production is never totally divorced from the desires that produce it. The way a text is composed usually betrays, even if just in subtle hints, what the writer means, what the writer feels. If anything, the impossibility of perfectly representing the schizophrenic process’s constant change with static letters and symbols, the failure of objectivity in language, makes language better at conveying meaning. How sentences are composed says as much as the actual composition of the sentence. This is also something that points back towards our earlier anti-ethical diss track, where we dismissed any system of purely intent-based or consequence-based ethics. Of course, we noted that both frameworks fail in isolation, with intent’s situational ignorance and consequence’s optimizing arrogance, but perhaps the greater failure of these frameworks is their attempt to sever themselves from one another. Intent shapes consequence, and knowledge of potential consequence shapes intent. The intent-machines influence the production of consequences, and the expectation-of-consequence-machines influence the production of intent. “Content and expression are relative terms” (ATP, p. 44). It’s all just a question of production, at the end of the day, which means the real question is not one of intent or consequence, but one of how we produce intent or consequence, which is a question we have already answered, for we just have to ask whether the coding of consequences or expression of intent is done in the service of desiring-production, or desiring-acquisition.

This is an idea we’ve had a few times now, that we’ve repeated in our discussion of unconditional affirmation in the first chapter, in our analysis of my decision to apply, in our ‘here’s why ethics sucks’ and ‘here’s why we aren’t psychoanalysts’ side quests, the idea that the only question in determining whether something is acceptable is whether it is desiring-production or desiring-acquisition (or its vocab variants, whether it is becoming or being, rhizomatic or arborescent, and so on). It’s a concept that seems important, and one that we’ll want to keep coming back to, this concept that if something is done as an act of desiring-production, if it is truly just a response to zones of intensity, then it is fine, and will not lapse back into desiring-acquisition, as whatever the something is will be produced in a way that continues to be responsive to zones of intensity. This notion that if our intent is desiring-production, or if our evaluation of consequences is done in the name of desiring-production, it will influence the respective consequential or intent flow to be an instance of desiring-production as well. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the mark of a true philosopher is to create concepts, to create tools that can be thrown at problems to make sense of them. I guess I’ll try my hand at it. Besides, if I’m going to be repeating myself like a broken record, I might as well give the repetitive note a cool name. ‘Nevermore’. Whenever we encounter a production, as we ask ourselves, ‘would that not be an instance of a socius?’, ‘have we not created a new socius in our attempt to escape it?’, and we need to recall that the answer to such a question is, ‘it’s an instance of a socius only if it’s an instance desiring-acquisition’, ‘it’s will only create a new socius if our attempt to escape the socius is pursued as desiring-acquisition’, that is all we have to think: Nevermore. For this is the nation that demonstrated to us that anything, even something as suspicious as a ‘midnight aristocracy’, can be deterritorialized, as long as it is just a production of desiring-production, and not an object of desiring-acquisition. Many times, we will encounter a situation, and unpleasant thoughts, the stressful, self-reflexive question of whether we have found a socius, will begin tap, tap, tapping at our door. We can now take on these doubts with a swift response: ‘quoth the raven, Nevermore’.

All of this is great progress. But our understanding of desiring-production is not quite flawless yet. Unfortunately, I fear that we have still not fully escaped the shadow of Freud, that he still haunts our ability to think of ‘desire’ as anything other than ‘dangerous’. My guess, or concern, perhaps, is that every time I make a comment above that ‘as long as it’s not desiring-acquisition, it’s fine’, that is registered by you to mean, ‘the worst thing I can possibly think of is okay, as long as it’s a response to zones of intensity!’. One can only imagine what the Enlightened frat boys will do with this. This would be a misreading of what we have said, naturally, for we would not spend two chapters discussing the nuances of Deleuze and Guattari’s dense philosophic system just to land back at basic egoism, to conclude that one should just do whatever you feel like. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say that this is a classic case of flirting versus harassment: a Deleuzo-Guattarian saying ‘do whatever you feel like’ is flirting, whereas a Freudian saying ‘do whatever you feel like’ is harassment, given the underlying intersubjective commitment exclusive to the former. That last sentence is, of course, a reference to the ‘flirting versus harassment’ joke format, but also has a degree of literal accuracy (‘harassment’ as such is always an instance of desiring-acquisition, and therefore cannot be schizoanalytically sanctioned, in the same way it might by a Freudian). To comprehend why this is true, though, why this is necessarily a conclusion of our theorization of desire, as opposed to us just making up arbitrary distinctions to save our reputation, we need to dispel what is perhaps the greatest fantasy in all of thought, the myth of desire as singular, desire as selfish, the self as singular---maybe even the ‘Self’ all together. But waking up from a centuries-long notion, one that has been omnidirectionally harpooned into our mind since birth, is no easy task. So maybe we should return to Minecraft for a little bit, if you’d like to take my hand and wander to the seaside where I at last started the actual gameplay portion of Ish’s experiment. If you’d like to wake up with me on the beach….

I spawned into Ish’s server for the first time. I was on a hill with a slight incline, a few birch trees dappling the right half of my vision, a flat and sandy coastline filling the left. It was the first day of the event, and all the other participants were also loading into the world. To make sure that the already mammoth organizational task of getting one thousand players onto a single server was not made any more difficult, we were lacking access to voice chat, block breaking, or block placing until all of us that were attempting to spawn in were able to do so, and any problems with such spawning had been identified and resolved, which left me with a few minutes to explore my the surroundings of Ish’s laboratory, of my new livelihood.

I first ventured down to the seaside, as one tends to when there is a seaside nearby, but I did not give it more than a cursory glance. It was a beautiful location, to be sure, and would likely be useful for establishing communications or connections with other civilians and civilizations later down the line. However, I was taking on the role of a philosopher for this event, and one does not usually associate a philosopher with a beach house. Instead, I turned around and journeyed inland, ascending to wherever the inclines got steeper or the scattered birch trunks blended into a thicker dark oak canopy. When I think ‘philosopher’, I think isolated cabin on the peak of a wooded mountain. So, I chased the landmarks that I expected to take me to such a place.

Before long, I found a spot that called to me. I was deep within a dark oak forest, and stumbled onto a clearing where the harsh slopes flattened out, where the underbrush all but disappeared, accented with a large stone protruding from the ground, something I had not encountered elsewhere. I was still unable to interact with the world in any way beyond wandering, so I just stopped and waited, reasoning into my live microphone that I could harvest the rock and the tree that stood next to it once block breaking was finally turned on, to make progress on my cottage base right away. The time eventually came, and so, I did what any Minecraft player would do: raced to the nearest tree, and started punching. Two pieces of wood in, though, I hesitated. The world that Ish’s experiment took place in was not just any old randomly-generated Minecraft world, but was meticulously designed by a team of builders for the express purpose of this event. The tree I was burrowing into had been made by someone, placed in this configuration by someone, and it was a beautiful tree, a beautiful rock, a beautiful clearing, one that caught my eye. My plan changed. Rather than continuing to level the tree, or converting what I had harvested into tools that could mine the rock, I left the tree otherwise intact, added a door to the front of the tree (such that the hollow 2x1 gap I had made into the oak’s impressive trunk was now completely enclosed), and dug down, choosing to get my stone from underground instead. Before long, I had enough materials to begin work on an above-ground home, now with a cute underground cavern accessible only through a ladder scaling the interior of my tree. This little interaction sticks out to me, as the intimate encounter with the tree interrupting my intended instrumentalization of the environment in the service of fulfilling my desire, and instead pushing me towards a more symbiotic project, will become relevant when we get to our discussion of environmental relationalities in a couple chapters. Actually, we can make this interaction relevant right now.

Immanuel Levinas (1961/1969) argues that “being reveals itself as war”, which is to say, “individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknownst to themselves”, “the meaning of individuals (invisible outside this totality) is derived from the totality” (p. 21-22). Sorry to drop even more technical vocabulary from yet another French philosopher on you. What Levinas is suggesting here is a primordial version of being, of subjectivity, that demonstrates an ontological egoism, subsuming all of the ‘infinity’ it encounters into the ‘totality’ of its own system, of utility, of how it can be useful to the ‘Self’. This is basically just a linguistic recasting of a dynamic that we have examined many times---infinity is reduced to totality, existence is reduced to essence, becoming to being, flows of desire to the socius.

Levinas’s schizoanalytic undertones do not end there, as he suggests that in this war, “violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action” (1961/1969, p. 21). The violence Levinas describes here, the violence of the being that reveals itself as war, is very much the violence of the socius, of ressentiment, that strips the subject from their connection with the flows of desiring-production, assimilating them towards a fixed and impersonal being instead. The ‘war’ that Levinas speaks of, then, can be read as an instance of desiring-acquisition.

Levinas’s account is relevant to us, in part, because there is a version of my early interactions with Ish’s world (though this version is not the one that actually occurred, due to the nature of our interaction with the tree, as we shall discuss later) that is this primordial war. Had I approached the rock, the clearing, the tree, with the single question of ‘how can these Others be useful to Me?’, ‘how can I change these Others such that the desires they produce suit My desire alone?’, we would be seeing this war in effect. This war is an instance of microfascism, of anti-production, to be sure. I think the most parallel Deleuze-Guattarian term for this phenomenon is that of ‘overcoding’, which was their label for the map that maps the world prior to encountering it, that places everything into a predefined, totalized role, as part of a broader system. What is really useful about Levinas’s war, though, as a concept for us, is that it demonstrates something that is clearly an instance of desiring-acquisition (the totalizing violence towards the infinite Other) as a consequence of what is essentially just the Self acting on its desires. Levinas’s war, then, lets us understand the issue with a formulation of desiring-production as ‘do whatever you want’, since desiring-acquisition is not just a question of not placing the Self into a box (as one does in an ideological investment), but of not implanting a socius altogether, which means that we would not be prone to accept the Self-ish Being that creates a socius for everything it encounters, reterritorializing all of them towards the sole production of whatever benefits the Self, responding to only the totalized, preprogrammed being (being-utility, being-tool), and not the infinity, zones of intensity, or becomings of the Other.

Indeed, Levinas can help us think more broadly of something that occurs along two poles. As John Wild writes in his introduction to the text we have been citing, there is, on the one hand, “a strong tendency… to maintain this egocentric attitude and to think of other individuals either as extensions of the self, or as alien objects to be manipulated for the advantage of the individual or social self” (1961/1969, p. 12). This is what we just discussed, the being that reveals itself as war, that totalizes the Other, that implants the socius which allows the Other to be affirmed only insofar as they are useful or enjoyable to the Self. However, though “the accidental biases and eccentricities that make the personal freedom of the individual unreliable” certainly show themselves to exist here, Levinas is just as critical of the responses that “attacked the personal existence… as capricious and subjective, and have defended those objective rational systems and social organizations which subordinate, or even repress, the individual” (1961/1969, p. 15). This is what we discussed only a few pages ago, the psychoanalytic or ideological form of desiring-acquisition, one that totalizes the Self, that implants a socius that allows the Self to be affirmed only insofar as it is useful or enjoyable to the Other. “Must we always choose one or the other of these evils?”, Wild asks, framing the impasse Levinas’s work will seek to break out of, “anarchy on the one hand and tyranny on the other?” (1961/1969, p. 15).

Now, I don’t want to overgeneralize, to revert to some claim in the manner of Aristotelian virtue ethics, that ‘the good is always just a mean between two extremes’, by suggesting that desiring-acquisition always occurs at these two poles, the overcoding-of-the-Self and the overcoding-of-the-Other, and that desiring-production is to be found somewhere in between. It doesn’t really matter if it is the case that every instance of desiring-acquisition is one of these two outliers, since the two outliers cannot be separated, and we could therefore never analyze consequences that are confined to only one type of desiring-acquisition as a justification for siding with the other. One form of desiring-acquisition always entails both, in the sense that, if a Self ignores the desires of an Other, if it subsumes the Other in an overcoding-of-the-Other, the socius that it produces in that Other is one that obligates the Other’s assimilation towards the demands of the Self, or, from the perspective of this Other, the Self’s assimilation towards the demands of the Other, an overcoding-of-the-Self. Or, vice versa, an overcoding-of-the-Self in the name of commitment to a broader ideological Other produces a socius that suggests that Others should assimilate towards the demands of that same Other, an overcoding-of-the-Other. What is overcoding-of-the-Self for one is always at the same time overcoding-of-the-Other for another, and so on. Moreover, and perhaps the reason why this is the case, is that the overcoding of the Self and the Other are fundamentally the same process, for there is no essential distinction between the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ that both exist within the flows of schizophrenic production. Deleuze and Guattari, preempting the question “why have we kept our names?” in the first paragraph of ATP, give some witty replies (“out of habit, purely out of habit”, “because it’s nice to talk like everybody else”), but also remark that their goal is “to reach, not the point where one longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves… we have been aided, inspired, multiplied” (ATP, p. 3). This is a quote I’ve been trying to shoehorn in for a while, in part because it’s fun, in part because it demonstrates the point I was trying to make with Nevermore---the question is not of using a specific machine (the word-I-machine, the concept-Self-machine), but of how that machine is used, such that when Deleuze, Guattari, or indeed, ‘I’, talk about the Self from the perspective of desiring-production, it does not automatically constitute an instance of microfascism, it can even be an instance of desiring-production. The more important thing we can extract from this quote, though, is that the ‘Self’ is just a zone of intensity on a BwO, and so is the ‘Other’, and that overcoding, whether it is of the Self or of the Other, is just a renunciation of certain flows, certain productions, certain zones of intensity, becomings, or potentialities on the BwO. What difference does it make where our life-denying affect of ressentiment directs its blade, whether ignorance, condemnation, and assimilation or totalization towards a broader cause aims its wrath at the emotions of a Self-machine, the capriciousness of an Other-machine, the bursts of pain the leg-machine? It’s all just a negation of certain productions, of conditions of life, faults which generate a socius that view them as to-be-escaped. There is no fundamental difference between overcoding-of-the-Self and overcoding-of-the-Other, it’s all overcoding, and that means we will unabashedly renounce all of it at the end of the day. That said, there are times throughout this work where it is useful, as a conceptual tool, to look at overcoding-of-the-Self and overcoding-of-the-Other as bipolar responses to the same dilemma, and use that frame as a guide to find what desiring-production looks like in such a scenario, somewhere in the middle ground. This is not a formal rule, not one that can be, needs to be, perhaps even should be, thrown at every problem. It is, however, a useful heuristic, one that Levinas gives us access to, and one that we will continue to use.

It might be a more useful heuristic, though, to get back to Minecraft for a little bit. Alas, the last couple paragraphs have been a dump of quotes and a mess of throwing around three-layers-deep uses of classic terms, the Self of the Other of the Self, as one seems bound to do when they wander too close to Heidegger or Hegel. Fortunately, we are actually in the Ish event now, the experiment has started, which means that our Minecraft examples, from here on out, are just accounts of a civilization simulation, of a narrative that could be played out on Earth, too. We’re essentially just story-telling with some weird vocabulary choices. So, let’s get back to it!

It seems that some of the beings in the Ish event certainly revealed themselves as war. I had two interactions with other players that I can recall on the first day of the experiment, and both left a sour taste in my mouth. The first one I remember was with a player who seemed especially interested in the roleplaying aspect of the event, donning a skin that was a parody of Jesus Christ, with the same hair, the same robes, even the same cross on the belt, adjusted just enough so that he could rebrand himself as subservient to one of the groups on the server. This prophet approached me as I was in the midst of building by cottage home, with the A-frame outline beginning to take shape in freestyled cobblestone. He hailed me, and I jumped down from my roof to converse, only to get exactly what one would expect from a conversation with a religious ideologue. His responses felt rigid and automatic, his gaze was always expectant of some reaction from me, he made sure to weave the conversation towards promoting his guild. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that a religious recruitment chat is an instance of overcoding. What we can take from this, however, is a reassurance in our conceptualization of microfascism, of a socius as something that can be implanted at even minute levels (a conversation in an online gaming event) for minute things (an unserious worldview within said online gaming even), but also, a testament to the possibility of a microfascism, of desiring-acquisiton, that emanates from the Self. It seems likely to me that this player did not have some broader, ideological commitment towards Christianity, one that they were trying to Trojan-Horse into this event by means of a thinly-veiled joke. I would guess their production was one that the player did because they felt like it, as a response to their zone of intensity, but nonetheless, it mapped the world before them, totalizing the Others of the Ish event into impersonal objects that needed to in some way affirm or commit to the bit with them. This is what we really wanted to stress with the introduction of Levinas: ‘desiring-production is always acceptable’ is not synonymous with ‘do whatever you feel like’, since doing what one feels like can at times be an instance of desiring-acquisition, and therefore not desiring-production at all.

There was another encounter I had on the first day, one even earlier than this religious alteration, one that occurred while I was burrowing in the artificial cave I had constructed under my tree for the cobblestone that was being placed when I ran into Christ later. Whereas the problem with my conversation with Jesus was, perhaps, that he was too deep into the roleplay, this second player was, if anything, not into it enough. This player called to me while I was underground, speaking through a few layers of bark, alerted to my existence only by the appearing-through-surfaces gamertag that hung above my head. I climbed from my tree to meet them; as I tried to introduce myself, they asked how I already had a stone pickaxe; as I offered to give them access to my stone mines, they provided me unsolicited advice, suggesting that I should start gathering mushrooms, since they would be a reliable and contested food source. Then, they left. Again, it feels like there was a degree of distance in this interaction, that they spoke to me just as a faceless Minecraft player, one who’s entire ‘being’ revolved around progression towards food security and diamonds. What this case uniquely demonstrates, though, is that desiring-production is not just a basic question of ‘trying to help’. Indeed, many times, it is one’s attempts to help that end up implanting the worst socii of all. When one’s advice is geared towards a presumed being, rather than an actual becoming, it suggests some ideal, transcendent form (the one who has mushrooms!) that a subject ought to work towards, and one that, if they do not, functions as a judgmental referent. It doesn’t matter if the psychologist wants to make you better, when all the prescriptions they give are desiring-acquisition.

Of course, we can’t really be sure what these two players thought. We know what a socius would be in either scenario---an interaction with one that does not account for their unique zones of intensity, their becomings, that just treats them as and thereby reinscribes their compulsion towards a static being---but we don’t have a way to verify if this is what actually happened. Indeed, it’s possible that the reterritorializing vectors I felt were as much my fault as they were theirs, perhaps as I interpreted an awkward interaction (which is fine, and can certainly be a result of desiring-production) as a flaw in existence that needed to be explained away and avoided, perhaps as a mere misapprehension of some social cue that made me perceive, and therefore feel, there to be a socius, even if there was not one. This lack of certainty is fine, as we have already suggested with our discussions of Nevermore---both in the sense that form and content are inseparable, that we could make reasonable guesses based on our observations that there was some microfascism going on, and in the sense that even if we’re wrong, it just means that we’re advocating for deterritorialization of something that’s already deterritorialized, which (and here’s the line that was long and repetitive enough to warrant giving it a shorthand conceptual name), as long as our productions towards this goal are productions of desiring-production, is not an issue at all. At worst, our discussion of what might have been a socius gives us an idea of what would be a socius, one that we can now attune our theoretical efforts towards avoiding. In addition, we surely do not want one to come out of this with the impression that either of the individuals discussed were malevolent, ‘bad’ people. That what they felt like doing ended up being expressed through the problematic frame of desiring-acquisition is probably just an accident. Nonetheless, we make no distinction between accidental or intentional, between consequential or trivial, in our refusal to accept a socius. However they came about, my first day on Ish’s server led me to encounter two experiences of overcoding---a socius of roleplay and a socius of gameplay---that operated in the same way: totalizing my infinite otherness into a finite being, one that could be subsumed under the overdetermining desire of another, talking at or past me rather than to or with me, interacting with (and thus, creating a feeling of) ‘generic Ish event member, who should engage in my roleplay or my understanding of progression’, not ‘BetaOfThePack’.

Levinas’s contribution of the being that reveals itself as war, and these Minecraft illustrations of such a contribution, have accomplished what we needed them to. For we asked, at the conclusion of our triumphant revelation of Nevermore, if we would not see an unconditional embrace of desiring-production devolve into uncritical acceptance of egregious forms of intersubjective violence, under the guise that, ‘well, it was just a response to my zone of intensity!”. Now, we have seen that our critique of desiring-acquisition enables us to push back against even minor forms of intersubjective violence, microfascisms, down to the conversations in a Minecraft YouTube experiment, for it is possible for a Self’s response to their zone of intensity to nonetheless be an overcoding-of-the-Other. We have shown that desiring-production is not susceptible to the worst forms of egoist anarchy, as we once feared it may be. However, this is where a new problem arises. It seems that we may, indeed, always be forced to make the unthinkable choice, that choice between egoist anarchy on the one hand, or fascist tyranny on the other---how else could we respond to the threat of desiring-acquisition as a production of the Self, as we have now observed it? When the Self and Other meet, it appears we have two options: either the Self imposes its desires on the Other, or, to avoid such an outcome, the Self allows the Other to impose their desires on it. Perhaps it is not always all or nothing, but this does not reassure us, for it just means that every interaction is ripe with microfascisms on both sides, the Self imposing a little bit of its will on the Other here, letting the Other impose a bit of their will on it there, simultaneously importing and exporting a socius wherever we go. The problem is no longer, as it was, whether desiring-production is problematic. The question, now, is whether desiring-production is possible.

Levinas is the one who observes the constant battle between anarchy and tyranny, two systems of totalization, and therefore, is compelled to make an effort to escape this impasse. He does the best that he can. In contrast to the war of beings, Levinas proposes the peace of plurality. This ‘peace’, he claims, springs from the “face to face” encounter, one which leads to a “goodness” towards the Other in all their Otherness, as “it is not regulated by the principles inscribed in the nature of a particular being… nor in the codes of the State” (Levinas, 1961/1969, p. 305). This resolves our concerns regarding an overcoding-of-the-Other, especially the final stipulation, which ensures our assistance to the Other does not serve as a misguided microfascism, as it did in my second Minecraft interaction, as he stresses that our assistance is never governed by a totalizing, essential, overcoding rule, but always with respect to the infinite, existential, zones of intensity that are actually before us. At the same time, though, “being for the Other” in this manner “is not a negation of the I”, for “peace must be my peace, in a relation that starts from an I and goes to the other… where the I both maintains itself and exists without egoism” (Levinas, 1961/1969, p. 304, 306). The Self is still allowed to act on, to pursue, its own desires, just in a manner that does not resort to the Self-ish overcoding of the Other, the subsumption of all the demands of the Other into the wants of the Self. Levinas does not mean, by peace, everyone getting along, or everyone following the same desire: “the unity of plurality is peace, and not the coherence of the elements that constitute plurality” (1961/1969, p. 306). The peace of plurality comes from a network of intersecting desires, desires that influence and flow into one another---desiring-production, a rhizome. I also think his usage of the word ‘relation’ is important, especially given the introduction’s note on the unique way that Levinas understands relationships: “by communicating with the Other, I enter into a relation with him which does not necessarily lead to my dependence on him… he can absolve himself from this relation with his integrity intact” (Levinas, 1961/1969, p. 16). This points to the ever-shifting nature, the flowing nature, of desires, and of relationships of desire, one that is necessary to enable our schizoanalytic commitments to keep up with subjects that are more prone to become than to be---zones of intensity, the connections in the rhizome. Really, all of this is just a long of way of explaining what happened between me and the tree: there is the face-to-face interaction, the reaction I have to the Other, the reaction which interrupts my totalization of the tree into my desire of leveling and building, the creation of a relation between myself and the tree, a temporary relation that does not apply to all trees, that does not apply to this tree at all times, but exists in the moment, a pluralist desire, one where I still express and perform what I want, but with respect to the tree’s zone of intensity. The BetaOfThePack-dark-oak-assemblage.

There’s just one issue with all this---Levinas keeps saying ‘I’. “There are those who will maintain that the schizo is incapable of uttering the word I, and that we must restore his ability to pronounce this hallowed word. All of which the schizo sums up by saying: they're fucking me over again” (AO, p. 23). Levinas is fucking us over big time.

Levinas is the one who taught us how dangerous the Self was, how the Self functions as a reterritorializing signifier, one that subsumes and redirects all the Other productions it encounters towards the sole production of its own, Self-ish desire. It’s ironic, then, how his own ethical propositions continue to take the Self as central. A face-to-face relation, a being-for-the-Other, an I that maintains itself and exists, pluralism: all of these protectors of Levinas’s peace employ the same general who started the war. Of course, the problem isn’t that Levinas happens to use the word ‘I’ or ‘Self’ in his work. Deleuze and Guattari use those words sometimes, too, and we’ve already encountered their defense of it. There’s no production, no utterance, that is problematic in a vacuum---it’s always a question of the desires that produce it, and if the statement is the product of desiring-production, we have no reason to reject it (indeed, this is the concept we designated Nevermore to represent). Deleuze and Guattari keep their proper names, but their justification is just a series of reasons they felt like using it. The names ‘Deleuze’ and ‘Guattari’ do not signify a ‘Self’, and when we say ‘Self’ with reference to, for example, an ‘overcoding-of-the-Self’, we use it for no other purpose than to draw attention to machines that are more proximate to what we typically consider the Self. There’s no fundamental difference, though, in how we understand ‘Deleuze’ and ‘Guattari’, the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, ‘BetaOfThePack’ and ‘the tree’, or how we would prescribe their treatments---these are all just different desiring-machines and their BwOs, becomings and their zones of intensity, and we grant them no essence other than, and no essence that is not always subject to be changed by, their role in the schizophrenic process of production. Levinas, though, does make a real distinction between Self and Other: the face of the Self encounters a face of the Other, a Self is a being for the Other, pluralism is a network of the Self and Others. There’s two separate, closed-off, self-contained entities interacting. The encirclement of the Self and division of it from Otherness is merely a new formation of the reterritorialization of the socius, as the interior subject directs all production toward the interests of the ‘I’ and condemns all the flows that complicate such an instrumentalization. If there’s ever an encounter with the Other, if the sense of what the Other desires ever threatens to allure the Self into sympathy, it is a becoming that lies outside the walls of the Self’s being, a source of ressentiment. This undoes all the work Levinas does to reform the notion of the Self---even if everything we have said is true, that the ‘Self’ is becoming, that it has no essential desire, that its desires are always fluctuating, this only means the violent territory of the ‘Self’ now moves around from time to time. The Self’s border changes, the content of the Self’s inside changes, but the militarized policing of Otherness that prevents it from ever entering the Self remains the same. Levinas’s conceptualization of the Self, at best, makes his work of minimal practical usage to us---how could the space between the Self being totalized by the Other and the Self totalizing the Other ever be more than a vague ambition?---and at worst, causes us to think that any expression of the Self is always bad, always an instance of overcoding, as it in some way interacts with, collides against, crashes through, the Other’s territory. As long as ‘being’, or even ‘becoming’, points to a ‘Self’, then Levinas is right to suggest that being is perpetually at war. It’s clear, then, that some reformation or reconceptualization of the Self is not an option. Nietzsche, confronted with the ancient specter of God as the ideal of his time, was forced to declare that ‘God was dead’ to find an affirmation of life outside the existence-negating transcendent gaze. It’s time for us to do the same with the notion of ‘Man’ that has come to replace God in our era. The deagle-machine’s trembling in my hand, and I’ve got the Self in my crosshairs---let’s fire away.

We’ve already outlined what is required to think of the ‘Self’ in a manner that does not necessitate perpetual overcoding. We must rid ourselves of some distinction between Self and Other as separate, and understand that all these terms really refer to is desiring-machines, and the becomings or zones of intensity they pass through. The ‘Self’ is never just the potentiality on the BwO one currently inhabits, closed off from all other potentialities, but the BwO as a whole. When an encounter with the Other produces a movement of the Self along its BwO, then, when it pushes the ‘being’ to become outside of its walls, it is not at all casting the Self off-course, overcoding it, causing it to betray its nature (of course, insofar as the movement the Other is producing is not an ideological one, not boxing the Self back into a closed ‘being’). Indeed, it is only when the Self and Other become with the flows of one another flowing into one another that they are engaged in their ‘true nature’, that they are immersed in the schizophrenic process of production. This is why, when Deleuze and Guatarri refer to an ‘I feel…’, they are not naming ‘feelings’, but ‘affects’. “Feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a ‘subject’”, transformed into “a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects” (ATP, p. 356). This produces a new meaning of the ‘Self’, as “the Self is now nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified” (ATP, p. 356), as the Self now incorporates and is incorporated into the productions of the Other, relationships that (as Levinas correctly identifies) are always able to be transformed or ‘absolved’, changing as these two zones of intensity that flow into one another change as well. My ‘Self’ contains the tree and its niche in the clearing, the religious roleplayer and their comedic vision, the body rolling around with me on the couch. This is not overcoding, the desire of the Self determining what the Other will do, or vice versa, the desire of the Other determining what the Self will do. It’s not a give-and-take alliance, a cruel double instrumentalization where the Self and Other totalize one another just as they themselves are totalized. It’s not even that the Self and Other circumstantially work together to fulfill something they both happen to want, that their zones of intensity just coincidentally cohere on the same point, that the Self wants to do to the Other exactly what the Other wants the Self to do them (Levinas notices this point, too). All of these retain the Self and Other as two separate entities, gives them a territory or essence that removes them from the flows of desiring-production, and therefore cannot be understood as anything but the Other or Self being totalized, instrumentalized, overcoded by the desires of the rest of the plurality. No, this is a mutual production, as the desires of the ‘Self’ and desires of the ‘Other’ (part of and produced by the same process) flow into one another, pierce one another, desubjectify one another, become with one another, respond to a new and collective zone of intensity, two zones now coupled into one. An ‘I feel…’, for Deleuze and Guattari, is never a private and individual act. The Other wants the Self to rub its hand through their hair and grab their torso because the Self wants to rub its hand through their hair and grab their torso; the Self wants to rub its hand through the Other’s hair and grab their torso because the Other wants it to rub its hand through their hair and grab their torso. In this tangled mess of bodies, organs beating in such intimate proximity that hot exhales from one mouth scald another fragile neck, who’s to say where the ‘Self’ ends and ‘Other’ begins, to section off which machines belong to who, to track which desires belong to the BwO of the ‘Self’ or the BwO of the ‘Other’, and which are circulating on the new, collective BwO that the two component parts have opened onto, have formed? Not me, that’s for sure. “A becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (ATP, p. 10).

There’s other concepts from Deleuze and Guattari that, to me, help to understand the Self in a less territorial way. We could think of the verticality of the assemblage, where the ‘Self’ is a single machine at the top, with a zone of intensity that is produced by all the productions of the other machines below it, coupled with it, flowing into it. We could think of the horizontality of the rhizome, where the ‘Self’ is one node with connections branching to countless other nodes, one that changes as the connections are changed, with its location being dependent on all these connections. In either case, what is important to avoid overcoding, microfascism, ressentiment, is to affirm the entire assemblage, the entire rhizome (both analogues for the schizophrenic process of production as a whole), and not just the desires of Self-machine at the top or Self-node in the middle (both representative of the socius of the interior subject). Desiring-production is the universal flow of the whole assemblage or whole rhizome; desiring-acquisition is the redirection of the productions of the whole assemblage or whole rhizome towards the single production of one microfascist flow or arborescent growth, blocking off the rest of the desiring-machines or strangling the other nodes in its branches. I think these conceptualizations are more instructive, but if you’re still confused, I can’t blame you. On the one hand, the ‘Self’ is perhaps the most ingrained concept in our modern culture---thinking outside of its influence is hard. On the other hand, the understanding of the Self as assemblage or rhizome were secondary to me, not the way that I first grasped what the schizophrenic Self was, just ways I situated such a revelation into the framework of the schizophrenic process and the vocabulary we’ve elected to describe it. No, it was a different event that led me to encounter a Self that is not Self-ish, to at last exhaust the concerns of all Self-Other interactions as instances of overcoding. Deleuze and Guattari suggest their book should be read like a record; but it was an actual record that taught me this lesson.

IGOR (2019) is an award-winning, genre-bending, praised by critics and casuals alike, album written and produced by Tyler, The Creator. A conceptual work, the songs share the story of the created character ‘Igor’ as he falls in love with someone who is already in a relationship with another, wrestles with this third-wheel dilemma in various ways, and at last accepts his position outside of his love’s love. The ‘moral’ of this project should not be a renunciation of love, or a method on how to deal with heartbreak---the songs romanticize various aspects of being head-over-heels for someone, and seem to suggest an emotional intensity, if not inevitability, of these moments. Indeed, the album concludes in a way, musically, that hints at it functioning, narratively, as a loop---the final song concludes with a B♭, a note that does not resolve the track, unless it is followed by the E♭ played on the same instrument that begins the album’s first song (Dissect Podcast, 2021).

IGOR is, of course, a phenomenal album, and one that I would now consider to be somewhere around top ten in my personal ranking, as well as flirting with a perfect ten-out-of-ten score. However, I did not always regard it so highly. I listened to it, at first, primarily as a way to pay homage to my good friend Adam (‘Hog Cranker’, his more memorable name), who had listened to countless albums at my suggestion, and had recommended this as one of his favorites to me. I didn’t dislike it, but it spent a large amount of time dormant on my playlist, its songs only getting airtime if they came up on shuffle, and I was generous enough not to skip them. It was not until earlier this year, when I came back to some of the best parts of IGOR, that it really grew on me. If I can get emo for a second, most of my experiences with ‘love’ throughout the first eighteen years of my life were feelings doomed to be unrequited---love for a guy who didn’t like guys, a friend who didn’t want to be more than friends, someone in a closed relationship who had no intent of making it open. Now, this recurring situation didn’t really bother me, as I was fully content to immerse myself in the occasional interactions I got with these people as ‘friends’ (what is love, if not extreme friendship? Read until the final chapter to find out!). But it did mean that the parts of IGOR I found most relatable were not his professions of falling for someone, his begging them not to leave, his announcement that he was in love with them no longer---these were not stages I ever went through. The song I played and replayed the most was NEW MAGIC WAND. Now, this is, no doubt, in part because it is sonically one of the best songs, if not the best song, on the album (‘I THINK’ is the only other one that comes close for me, though I do think ‘IGOR’S THEME’ is exceptional as well). The musical quality is not the only factor that led to it being my most listened-to track, as it is also one that Adam had added to me, him, and Jeremy’s (Secks’s) collective ‘ten-out-of-ten’ songs playlist (I would be happy to share my personal list of nominations with anyone curious), and one that Tyler has himself called his “best song ever” (MusicMediaCo, 2023). However, I also think that NEW MAGIC WAND capturing a part of the tale that reflected my own love-life (or lack thereof) was not an insignificant contribution. (There’s a lot of parenthetical breaks in this paragraph, huh?)

NEW MAGIC WAND follows Igor sharing his sinister resolution to an intense jealousy, a painful yearning, and perhaps even a vicious hatred, caused by his inability to be with his love. He ruminates on the prospect of killing his love interest’s current partner, such that he could swoop in and become the grieving widower’s new object of attraction (‘NEW MAGIC WAND’ refers to a gun, this conspirator’s tool of choice). Now, I do not mean to suggest that careful inspection of my desk drawers would uncover assassination plans. However, my experiences of love have always been decorated by a reconciliation with the condition of forcibly unrequited feelings. I will not pretend that I have not been jealous, or even hopeful that things could be otherwise, before. For all intensive purposes, we could suggest that my zone of intensity, my ‘I feel…’, has at times coincided with the zone of intensity, the ‘I feel…’, of Igor, as he appears in NEW MAGIC WAND. Becoming-Igor. If I have felt the same way that would cause someone to pour their heart out into lamentations and thinly veiled threats, then, if I have passed over zones of intensity that seem to suggest murder as an accurate response, we are left with a question---for if this section of the book succeeds in killing the concept of the Self, it will be my first homicide. Why didn’t I pull the trigger?

Desire is not objective. This is a detail we suggested at the outset, for it is the explicit teaching of Freud and his disciples, the colloquial understanding of what it means to desire, the paradigmatic case of desiring-acquisition. If Lacan was correct about the world, then murder would be the response to Igor’s lack, and one that he (thinks that he) must acquire if he wants to feel whole. If this were the case, his feelings would necessitate murder as a means of acquisition, his zone of intensity would necessitate interpersonal violence as a response. However, we know that desire is not objective, or acquisitive, in such a manner---it is productive. A productive response to a zone of intensity can be made, one that actually responds to and produces with respect to a zone of intensity, without mapping out an ideal world of a desire satisfied, overcoding, objectifying, totalizing the Other. Nothing about feeling like Igor requires murder. Nothing about feeling like anything requires anything. More importantly, perhaps, desire is not singular. For my zone of intensity not mandating murder suggests only that desiring-production does not require the Self to produce an overcoding-of-the-Other---but would my decision not to pursue this desire, to put it aside, out of respect for what the Other wants, not be an instance of the Other producing an overcoding-of-the-Self? Only a fucking idiot would think that. No, we know that the subject, the ‘Self’, is always defined by a multiplicity, by a plethora of desires flowing into it. The idea that ‘these other two individuals love each other and I should not interfere’, then, or the suspicion that murder would be bad, are not external productions of the Other that are overcoding, restricting the production of, breaking down and building up new walls around, my ‘Self’. The Self is not a territory. These are just new affects, of various intensities, circling around my BwO, piercing through and bouncing around ‘inside’ my ‘Self’. My desire for a lover, my respect for their decisions, my regard for their love interest’s life, are all flows of machines that are connected to my assemblage, nodes that are part of my rhizome, zones of intensity that are part of my becoming. Our talk of a ‘zone of intensity’, an ‘I feel…’, is always just a way to conceptualize an especially intense feeling one has in a moment, or an approximation of the current affective state making up of their BwO. We should never be deceived into thinking of them as exclusive, as territorial---we can have many zones of intensity at once, and we can have desires that run outside of or even contradictory to these zones of intensity. Our productions, insofar as they are desiring-productions, are always an interaction of all of these things, of the whole assemblage, rhizome, or multiplicity, the entire schizophrenic process of production, as opposed to one zone of intensity winning out. Our image of the subject, for Deleuze and Guattari, should not be Lacan’s objective sketch, a straight line towards fulfillment at the top, ignorant to, threatened by, and threatening everything not part of this path. But it might also be instructive, not to think of the subject as a single node in a rhizome, but as a cross-section of a piece of a rhizome, or a miniature rhizome in itself. Indeed, it’s astounding to me that everyone looks at the human brain, in all its complexity, and thinks we can only have one feeling at a time.

The trigger could only be pulled if I viewed being in the arms of my loved one as an object that needed to be acquired, if I viewed my melancholic isolation as a lack to be escaped---both clear cases of desiring-acquisition, and both obvious judgements of the world I exist in in as a problem to be overcome, a sure sign of ressentiment. Only a psychoanalyst would fire the gun---maybe this is why Lacan infamously stole the wife of a proper Nietzschean thinker, Bataille. Otherwise, I would have no justification to turn my becoming from an immanent interaction into a transcendent rise, to express my desires in a way that did not at the same time respond to the desires of the Other (as if these were not ‘my’ desires too), to produce in a way that viewed certain configurations of the schizophrenic process (my love’s partner, my love’s heterosexuality) as zones of intensity to be changed---also an indicator of ressentiment. This does not mean that I have fallen prey to a desiring-acquisition of the Other, however, that I am experiencing an overcoding-of-the-Self, that I need to renounce my feeling of love and place it to the wayside. Indeed, this abstinence can be a production of desiring-production, as the zone of intensity I respond to is the collective zone of intensity of this messy threesome, which includes, in addition to my desire to join the action, their desire for me to remain outside. Becoming-cuck. As long as the two lovers do not condemn my love for them, and I do not condemn their love for each other, and our productions (whatever they may be) are a response to all of these zones of intensity, this is not desiring-acquisition at all---this is a rhizome. All of this is not to make some fake-deep, pop-psychological conclusion that ‘love is always painful, love is always bad’. Love can be a beautiful thing (vivienne collar by melodyx_o); so can the pain that separation from one’s love creates (The End of Heartache by Killswitch Engage). Indeed, no production is ever essentially bad, it’s always just a question of what desires produced it---that’s Nevermore. All of this is just to say that love does not need to be pursued by murder. Sometimes, you just need to listen to Tyler, The Creator instead.

We already formalized Nevermore as the conceptual label for the idea that a production made as a form of desiring-production will never be desiring-acquisition. Perhaps it is now time to create a concept for the inverse, for the reassurance that some egregious form of interpersonal violence, or as we now understand such ignorance towards an Other’s zones of intensity to be, desiring-acquisiton, will never be (nor be justified as) a form of desiring-production. NEW MAGIC WAND. We can use this refrain as a reminder that desiring-production never enables us to or accepts if we reterritorialize, overcode, implant a socius in, the Other. It demonstrates both that, if we produce in response to a zone of intensity of the ‘Self’, the reality of the Self as inclusive of, influenced by, and interwoven with the Other means that such a production does not necessarily totalize the Other, and also that if we produce in response to a zone of intensity of the Other, for the same reason, such a production does not necessarily totalize the Self. The latter is true both in the sense that we can still express our desires, as well as the sense that when we change the character of our responses to be considerate of the desires of an Other, this does not suddenly mean we that we are sacrificing or diminishing our response to our own desires as such. Indeed, it is only when our productions are responsive to the zones of intensity of both Self and Other, to all zones of intensity, to the flows of the schizophrenic process of production as a whole, that they are really instances of desiring-production, that they are really a response to a zone of intensity to begin with. Desiring-production, as an affirmation of an entire universal process, never permits the production of one component to command the productions of all the others, which lets us understand the fundamentally fluid and multiplied nature of our zones of intensity, our becomings, our ‘I feel…’. Of course, it is still possible to produce desiring-acquisition, to respond to a Being rather than a zone of intensity, to totalize the Other, and we will always criticize these instances. When we are concerned about the prospect of desiring-production sanctioning such problematic productions, though, or when we are fearful that, by virtue of responding to our zones of intensity, we have hindered the Other’s ability to do the same, we now have a quick way to assuage such anxieties, a shorthand signifier for our slaughter of the psychoanalytic Self, and a name for the schizoanalytic subject that replaces it: NEW MAGIC WAND. NEW MAGIC WAND.

As the first day of the Ish event wound to a close, I made my way back to the beach once more. My house, whose development went uninterrupted after the two encounters discussed earlier, was finished, save for some minor detailing I planned to do when I logged back on tomorrow. With my philosopher’s cottage tentatively complete, I was ready to begin gathering my philosopher’s tools---most pertinently, sugar cane, which I could later turn into paper for books.

My search for sugar cane brought me again to the shoreline where I entered the world, but with the crop nowhere in sight, I began to work my way further and further along the coast. At last, the vibrant stalk materialized at the edge of my vision. Unfortunately, it did not decorate the horizon alone. Directly to the reed’s right was a humble home, the first story complete, the second story roughly outlined. I had stumbled upon another player’s homestead.

I crafted some signs before approaching any further, such that, if the land was vacant, I could leave a note regarding the piece of sugar cane I intended to take. An unnecessary preparation, it turned out, as the homeowner was tending to his crops, nestled between the building and the sugar cane, right along the angle I was traveling from. I got close enough for his gamertag to be legible---‘HistoryInc’, it read. A slight reassurance. History is a cool subject, and people interested in history are generally cool too. Besides, the presumed full title ‘History Incorporated’ gave me dialectical materialism vibes, which, though most dialectical materialists will find the majority of this book reproachable, made me excited for the coming encounter, the imminent immanence.

I opened directly, perhaps too directly, with a request to take one piece of sugar cane, in order to start my own cultivation. History was a little discombobulated, whirling around a couple times before he located the source of my voice, but was nonetheless quick to consent to my crop-sharing proposal. As I walked towards his reeds, he engaged with me in some small talk: where I was from; whether either of us were part of larger groups; whether there were any large groups nearby. He asked if I wanted to gather some of the nearby offshore kelp, which sparked a brief back-and-forth about the various ways to take advantage of the seaweed’s abundance. I asked if there was anything he wanted in return for the sugar cane, which sparked a brief back-and-forth about the animals he was raising, the carrots he needed to raise them, the rumored plague that these reliable food sources could be of service against. I opened up a notepad in another window on my laptop to record the coordinates to History’s base, bulleting that I should bring him a carrot if I ever found one. History corroborated that he also recorded an account of our encounter, designating me as ‘the crop guy’.

It's clear to see that there were two productions at play here, a ‘Self’ and an ‘Other’, the desire for sugar cane and the desire for a carrot. Yet, there was something about this interaction that felt different from the other two. The procession was more relaxed, more mutually driven, exploring subjects that were proximate to our interests and subjects that were far away, topics that were informative and topics that were intimate. I remember departing up the coastline with a warm feeling. I had a sentiment that this encounter would be recalled, not like when the priest or advisor tripped over me as another object in the forested landscape, but as a seaside greeting between two more-than-acquaintances, two (dare I be too hasty) friends.

It's interesting that History and I both kept loose records of this introduction. The notepad is perhaps a perfect counterpoint to the ideological or egoist map, the one that walks along the shore with everything in sight being assimilated into the preeminent question ‘how can this serve me?’ or ‘how can I serve it?’. Rather than such overcoding, we see a symbiotic becoming, two zones of intensity producing, at once in response to their own zone of intensity, and the zone of intensity of the Other, which before long merge into the same thing. A becoming-Beta of the History and a becoming-History of the Beta. The Beta-History-assemblage. The orchid and the wasp.

This is not a transcendent map that territorializes the world, makes it intelligible, rigid, useful, and totalized, from the outset. It’s not a ‘tracing’. It is a real map, an immanent map, like a map in Minecraft, which jots down the world as it appears before it, flowing with the landscape rather than freezing it into place. Notes: “A science that might note and record… but chose a different relationship to this substance than one of extraction” (Cornum, 2018). Maps: “The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing… the orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious” (ATP, p. 12).

This isn’t a question of doing what History and I did, of our specific productions, of always interacting with the Other through suggestions and small talk. There are versions of asking for sugar cane, or requesting repayment for said sugar cane, that certainly seem to be indicative of a socius. No, this is a question of the relationship between two zones of intensity, as it always is with schizoanalysis. This is not an instance of desiring-production because of our conversation’s content, but because the statements in the conversation were productions of desiring-production (Nevermore). This did not avoid desiring-acquisition because we listened to and were at times subservient to one another, but because moments when we listened, how we were subservient, were productions of a desubjectified Self, a multiplicity of zones of intensity, a collective assemblage (NEW MAGIC WAND). “It is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map” (ATP, p. 13).

As useful as this distinction between the map and the tracing is as our indicator of desiring-production versus desiring-acquisition, friendship versus Main Character Syndrome, flirting versus harassment, that’s not what stuck with me as a defining quality at the time. I would give that honor to the detail I remember most vividly from my encounter with History: he said ‘fuck’. It’s ironic, because as we got to know each other better, it was apparent that I was far more vulgar and impetuous than him. It’s also not that ‘fuck’ is a magic word to make something desiring-production, the same way ‘I’ is not a magic word to make something overcoding. Sometimes, the outraged ‘fuck’, the disparaging or undermining ‘fuck’, is a radiant machine in the production of a socius. But this was a casual ‘fuck’, used as an adjective for no reason in particular when describing the potential uses of kelp (the potentialities of the kelp-machine on the BwO?)---‘fuel source, fuckin’ food source’---the most legendary utterance ever made. This was a ‘fuck’ you let slip when you’re comfortable, while talking with a friend, while unconcerned with some broader objective, just chatting back and forth as you sit on the couch, half-captivated by the Smash. Bros on the screen, half-excited by the caffeination from the empty Pepsi cans littering the floor, the other half captivated and excited by the sound of the other’s (Other’s?) voice. I had spent the first couple hours on Ish’s server bouncing between the twin poles of overcoding-of-the-Self and overcoding-of-the-Other, roleplay and gameplay, flickering in the gaze of my peers as nothing more than Experiment Member no. 3340, stuck in a socius. History’s ‘fuck’ was a rupture, one that opened up a new realm of potentialities, for it indicated to me that History was not talking at the set of pixels on his screen---he was talking with BetaOfThePack. Friendship. ‘Fuck’-ing on the beach. Here, the connections of a rhizome started to form.

This chapter has sought to elucidate the significance of desiring-production, with suggestions both that productions of desiring-production will not become forms of desiring-acquisition (Nevermore), and that productions of desiring-acquisition will not be excused as forms of desiring-production (NEW MAGIC WAND). This can help us proceed with the treatment of Main Character Syndrome which, we know, is in any case just an instance of overcoding-of-the-Self or overcoding-of-the-Other, microfascism, desiring-acquisition. We conclude, then, that we should orient ourselves towards producing in response to zones of intensity, rather than producing in response to Beings. We are confident that such desiring-production, should it actually be desiring-production, will not turn into desiring-acquisition, nor will it enable it. Of course, this is not a programmatic ‘cure’. This does not give us overarching rules, nor does it mandate a single correct response---there are many ways to produce in response to a zone of intensity. However, this does mean that we can remain critical towards productions that occur in response to Beings, rather than zones of intensity, and are therefore not indicative of desiring-production, but desiring-acquisition, bad faith, a being that has revealed itself at war. Should our criticisms be misguided, should they claim something that is desiring-production to instead be desiring-acquisition, this is of no concern to us---it’s just more deterritorialization, a production that will change as the desires flowing into it change, that will remain responsive to new and altered zones of intensity (or new and altered perceptions of them, which are indeed zones of intensity, machines, in themselves); we can never go too far with deterritorialization. All of this establishes some foundations of the schizophrenic process, and the way that different machines and productions within it relate, portable tools (concepts, for Deleuze and Guattari, are not much different than tools) that we can employ to make sense of a plethora of scenarios: Nevermore and NEW MAGIC WAND. More importantly, though, this gives us the ability to progress within Ish’s event, to wander through and produce within the experiment, without catching our own affliction of MCS. We could recall these practices in schizoanalytic terms: do not let any zones of intensity be reterritorialized by any socius, always flowing and producing with the broader flows and productions of the schizophrenic process, for this will output vectors of deterritorialization. But perhaps this can all be summed up better by a quote from one of the friends I made during this experiment, an absolute bar that, despite being casually dropped one unassuming afternoon on our post-event Minecraft server, has infiltrated my philosophical ponderances as much as any Deleuze or Guattari citation (this friend, for what it’s worth, would like it to be known that she has a formal schizophrenia diagnosis):

‘The moment people realize they’re not special is the moment they become special’.

Rhizomes, or, Underground Tunnels

I spent a fair amount of time on Discord between the first and second event session, perusing every channel I had access to, gathering as much information as I could. There were a few geographic details that came to light before the start of Day Two which shaped my plans going into it. All the players knew, prior to the event’s start, that the one-thousand of us would be evenly divided between two separate islands, ‘Island One’ and ‘Island Two’, with no way to traverse between them until later into the experiment. What was uncovered throughout the first day, however, was that there was more significance to this separation than was originally let on. Island One was learned to be a wasteland, dappled with boiling water, volcanic activity, and (albeit large) one singular tree for the 500 inhabitants to share. Iron was hard to come by, let alone diamonds, and yet, there were also reports that Island One had exclusive access to netherite, the strongest material in the game. The harsh conditions had generated some envious statements from Island One’s residents towards Island Two, who were for their part concerned with the prospect of hostilities escalating, given that Island One had a monopoly on the resource that would render them far stronger in raw combat.

Island One’s jealousy was not entirely unfounded. Island Two was a paradise, rich with natural gifts of all kinds, including lush forests, rolling fields, and massive underground ore veins (it was not uncommon to see a player running around the server in full diamond armor by the end of the inaugural, two-hour session). The relative lack of difficulty in progression, compared with Island One, meant that the nations that had taken a foothold throughout Island Two were as concerned with politics as they were with sheer survival, for it seems their source of chaos had shifted milieu. Among these civilizational advancements was the flourishing of a cartography hub (truly, the map-makers were some of the most universally likable individuals throughout the event), who had by the end of the day produced a geopolitical render of the island. This abstracted scale revealed that ‘Island’ Two was more of an archipelago, made up of three smaller islands, which together outlined a landmass shaped like a crossbreed between a Yin-Yang symbol and a Pokéball.

What is relevant here is that the players in Ish’s event were distributed across Island One and Island Two, and that Island Two was further broken up into (a long, skinny) ‘North Island’, a (small, circular) ‘Center Island’, and (another long, skinny, essentially a mirror of the North) ‘South Island’. Moreover, the cartographers’ labor had uncovered an interesting trend---almost all the major nations on Island Two were based on the North Island, with its abundance of rich, relatively clear, habitable land. There were a couple nations packed onto the Center Island; the South Island was, for all geopolitical purposes, abandoned. Even more importantly, perhaps: I was living on the South Island. It seems my goal to remove myself from civilization so that I could observe it from afar had been taken to an extreme.

There is one more detail that I happened across prior to the dawn of Day Two. As one will likely find unsurprising given our above characterizations, the major nations of Island Two were concerned with the supposed threat from Island One, and were therefore hosting a summit to discuss their international affairs. The plans for this meeting, in what I can only assume was a careless lapse in judgement, ended up in a public Discord channel---one that I had access to. I already knew, due to the South Island’s political isolation, that I would need to exert some effort to discover the internal movements of the Northern nations. Now, I had exact coordinates for a gathering between these groups, as well as a starting time. My agenda for the day had essentially fallen into my lap. Intending to silently observe the meeting during the event, and sift through my findings afterwards to begin formulating a philosophical publication, I logged onto the server for the start of the second day.

It would be inaccurate to give the impression that I was attending this meeting as some sort of journalist, as an unbiased spectator who would simply disseminate the messages of the political elite to a broader audience. Indeed, there is something to be said of how the ‘journalists’ of the event, even (and perhaps especially) those who prided themselves on objectivity, remained essentially partisan to their home governments. No, I was going in with a firm belief that the nation-state was a vector of life-denial, and my ‘observation’ would be little more than recording evidence I could find that seemed to support that conclusion. For the classic liberal justification of governance, the one that remains implicit in most legal decisions today, is expressed quite transparently by Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes---“during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war”, and in this war, “every man is enemy to every man”, and “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (1651/1996, p. 84). The paradigm for the defense of the State often revolved around the theoretical ‘state of nature’ (what Hobbes here names war), or the condition of man absent government, and what the appropriate response to such a situation might be. Some thinkers, who would likely be more prone to call themselves ‘liberal’ than ‘proto-fascist’ (such as Locke), suggested certain ‘liberties’ or ‘natural rights’ to exist within this state of nature, and suggested the State ought exist to protect them. Some, as Hobbes, felt no need to disguise the State as anything more than a necessary response to rule over the danger of primal, anarchic man. In either case, the stroke by which the State arises is clear: Law is deemed desirable compared to the natural state of man, which is taken for granted as insufficient, if not problematic. The State is, in many ways, reflective of the broader belief that characterized the Enlightenment period that came to its defense---reason is privileged as tool to control irrationality, impulsivity, desire. We could clearly identify this, then, as a case of desiring-acquisition, as a constraint placed on the ‘state of nature’ of desiring-production, as the creation of a civil citizen ‘Being’ one assimilates towards. I didn’t quite have the schizoanalytic vocabulary to make this connection at the time of the event, but I was engrossed enough in Nietzsche to recognize the State as a Real World, one that was aspired to in response towards and condemned the existence of the ‘Apparent World’ of Dionysian chaos, which is to say, I attended this Minecraft meeting already understanding the State to be a paradigmatic case of ressentiment.

Even for those not attuned to Nietzschean critique, historical track record has not been kind to Hobbes’s child. Indeed, the very existence of politics seems to imply a general dissatisfaction with the performance of the State. However, it seems most political engagement maintains the telos of the Enlightenment, taking issue not with the State as such, but rather, as a failure to institute the transcendent, objective rule it has been called on for. The Hobbesian conservative laments that permissiveness towards anarchic desire has led us astray from the objective rule of fact, security, religious morality; the Lockean liberal strives to expand the distribution of humanist rights to be protected in the bounds of legalism. In either case, there seems to be an interest in redeeming or reforming the State, rather than rupturing it. These are not moves away from a Being, just towards a new one. We should not make the same mistake. There is another article I was already acquainted with by the time of the meeting, in which Dylan Rodríguez names the state as “a mechanism of self-legitimating violence”, as it “assembles the popular ‘common sense’ of domestic warfare” and “everyday mobilizations… waging intense, localized, militarized struggle against its declared internal enemies” (CR10 Publications Collective, 2008, p. 97). “This process of producing the state as an active, tangible, and identifiable structure of power and dominance, through the work of self-narration and concrete mobilizations of institutional capacity, is what some scholars call ‘statecraft’” (CR10 Publications Collective, 2008, p. 98). This ‘statecraft’ problematizes our continued political allegiance to the state, as it suggests that the location and liquidation of threats is an intrinsic part of its existence. Rodríguez’s thesis, that the state uses narratives of a challenge to its rule to legitimate its continued exercise of power, could be understood from both an empirical-political and abstract-philosophical lens. At a more relatable level, democracies see a rehearsal of the invocation of a problem to generate electoral support on an annual cycle. Biden’s narrative centers around Trump’s fascist tendencies; Trump’s around the mere existence of queers. Either way, there is an enemy established, and the power of the State touted as the sole solution. These, however, are just a tangible manifestation of a dynamic endemic to the Enlightenment conception of the State, for there was as much discussion of citizens granting ‘consent’ to a sovereign ruler through a ‘social contract’ as there was of a state of nature or natural rights. It seems, in fact, that the renunciation of the ‘state of nature’ was nothing more than the mechanism by which popular support, or ‘consent’, for the rule of law could be created. It’s only fitting, then, that the State should have to continue inventing new outbreaks of the state of nature to rally against.

I even had a non-zero awareness that the State was problematic from a schizoanalytic perspective as I joined the server for Day Two. My introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought was through high school debate, where the affirmative case I ran my senior year challenged the topic from the lens of ‘becoming-queer’, a constellation of schizoanalysis and queer theory. Whether this was a consequence of, or the reason that I have, the notion of queerness as one of the most intuitive demonstrations of Deleuze and Guattari’s project, I cannot say. I can, however, share that a portion of this case was Eric Stanley’s critique of the State, on the grounds that the “relationship between those held by the state (perhaps most importantly as exclusion, or negative value) and the state form might be called… normativity” (Stanley, 2021, p. 8). The schizoanalytic undertones here are not difficult to find---‘normativity’ constitutes a Being or reterritorialization that can then be used to place assimilative pressures on or kill deterritorialized flows. What Stanley uniquely recognizes, for our purposes, is that “normativity too is defined not exclusively by its rigidity but through its flexibility… power’s methodologies are strikingly incoherent, their impacts remain rather predictable” (Stanley, 2021, p. 8). This is the understanding that the violence of the State is a violence that occurs at the level of form, rather than content. It is not a question of ‘gay rights’ or specific anti-queer laws, but the reproduction of normativity in each of these, that constitutes the State as violently anti-queer. This should, again, caution us against turning towards some new and improved version of the State as the recourse from its current problems. A more ‘inclusive’ State, one with a universal distribution of rights and protection under a perfect set of laws, is nonetheless unsatisfactory to us. The issue is that ‘rights’ or ‘laws’ remain a transcendent objective, an object of desiring-acquisition, one that therefore constitutes a redirection of all flows into this interior and sanctions violence against all that lies outside. Perhaps it is the right to free speech or freedom of religion being weaponized against the ‘threat’ of being accommodating towards one’s preferences regarding gender identity. Perhaps it is heralding the right to trial or equality before the law as a justification for inaction when faced with the consequences of their complete inability to actually uphold such principles. Perhaps it is a complete ignorance and instrumentalization of all that does meet the criteria for a right---outsider, inhuman. ‘Human rights’ protect signifiers and the expense of connecting with and what they signify. But even if we throw logistical constraints out the window and assume that everything that should be a right was a right, falling back on ‘rights’ as a Statist logic means that their guarantee would be wrapped up in the policing of and securitization against every threat to this interior, a continuation of reterritorialization by other means. “With the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations” (ATP, p. 372). Though there are certainly States that are ‘progressive’ in comparison to other States, all of them carry their Enlightenment-endowed mission of defending transcendent objectivity from immanent desire at all costs. Sometimes, this objectivity takes the form of rights; sometimes, it is laws. Regardless, it is the establishment of an interior, of a ‘Being’---the Citizen---which one is redirected towards, and which one is reprimanded should they stray away from. In this way, the State is necessarily a reterritorialization.

These varied critiques of the State are all accurate, but we should not get ahead of ourselves and move on just yet. We have essentially just shotgunned assorted qualms of the State, which, although they were enough to have BetaOfThePack convinced that the governments she was about to observe were irredeemable, are not enough to satisfy Easton Logback’s wish for their book to clearly articulate a criticism of all governance from the lens of schizoanalysis. Moreover, to the extent that these three critiques could be unified under a single theoretical frame, it seems like the easiest candidate would be the postmodernist critique of differentiation, in the vein of Baudrillard. Drawing from Saussure’s theory of language as deriving meaning from its self-referential nature (for example, ‘warm’ gaining meaning not from referring to any specific, actual phenomenon, but from being less than ‘hot’ and more than ‘cool’), Baudrillard extrapolated this thesis to suggest that humans, too, derive meaning by differentiating themselves from whatever they mark as ‘outside’ their identity. Such a conclusion is not useless, and indeed, seems to encompass our varied dismissals of the State-form (the meaning of the State is created by differentiating itself from the state of nature, the located threats, or the non-normative). However, we would not want to resort to such an overdetermining framework. On the one hand, it does not even seem like it is necessarily true---there are certainly times where people find meaning from identifying with what is the ‘same’ as them (partisan politics), and furthermore, times where such identification seems innocuous (sending a friend furry art that reminds you of yourselves, captioning it ‘us’). The latter example even serves to preemptively answer Baudrillard’s presumed reply, that one’s identification with the ‘same’ is based on belonging to a broader group that nonetheless derives its meaning from difference, as its unserious character suggests no attempt to cohere a stable subject, nor the violence that entails. The message has no intention of solidifying my friend and I’s identity as lesbian furries, different from the rest of the world; it’s just a production in response to zones of intensity, an instance of desiring-production, a recasting of Nevermore. It’s not a question of calling something the ‘same’ or ‘different’, but whether such statements are animated by desiring-production (texting a friend) or desiring-acquisition (voting Blue, no matter who). More significantly, though, circling back to the language of desiring-production additionally gestures to the more damning critique of Baudrillard’s theorization of meaning-making. Deleuze distinguishes himself from the philosophers who preceded him, and who he critiques, in large part through an affirmation of difference. This solo-work sets him up well for his co-celebration of production with Guattari, for it seems that desiring-production is always at the same time producing new differences, new vectors of differentiation. For Baudrillard to suggest that creating a difference is always a problematic attempt to cohere meaning, then, is no different than Lacan’s insistence that desire is always a problematic attempt to fill a lack. We should approach Baudrillard, therefore, in the same way approach Lacan: there are times where the production of difference or desire is an attempt to cohere meaning or fill a lack, and when these productions occur, they are instances of desiring-acquisition. However, this quality of desiring-acquisition is not an inevitable feature of every desire of differentiation---indeed, it is only in the perversions of the schizophrenic process, where we have a desire for anti-desire or a differentiation for anti-differentiation, that such a label is appropriate.

The framework that we can accept forwarding as a unifying theory for our critiques of the State, then, must be one attuned to schizoanalysis. Fortunately, we already have one of those lying around. We could confidently conclude that, in any case, the production or violence of the State is just an instance of the Real and Apparent World dynamic, the formula of ressentiment. It doesn’t really matter which movement within this interplay comes first---the aspiration towards a Real World or condemnation of the Apparent World---as one always necessarily entails the other. Aspiration towards the Real World of objective law generates hatred for the Apparent World of subjective desire that differs from the former; hatred for the Apparent World of subjective desire generates a Real World of objective law that would free us from the former. What is demonstrated here, however, is that regardless of the sequence or content of these moments---whether hatred for the non-normative catalyzes a drive towards normativity or the drive towards normativity catalyzes a hatred for the non-normative, whether the distaste for queerness causes or is manufactured in the service of a Republican vote---they are moments of ressentiment, of anti-production, of the State generating a hatred for existence as it is, an affect of life-denial. Situating our critique in this context accomplishes all we need for a schizoanalytic dismissal of the State, but as an added feature, putting it all in the language of desire resolves our above concerns with a structuring theory like Baudrillard’s. We are not left with some conspiracy theory that politicians intentionally manufacture threat narratives to adhere with the Enlightenment-era requirement for citizen consent to rule, or, worse still, that this condemnation of difference is so baked into the unconscious that we all do it without thinking, which would just translate to another Freudian shaming of all unconscious affects. “It is an absurdity to postulate a world supergovernment that makes the final decisions. No one is even capable of predicting the growth in the money supply” (ATP, p. 461). Rather, we understand the State as a mutation or aberration in the schizophrenic process, one that occurs only where and everywhere there is an aspiration towards the Real World and condemnation of the Apparent World. The State is nothing more than a machine, or an assemblage of machines, that produces flows of anti-production, pushes subjects towards a Being-Citizen, creates a framework for resolving problems (more machines) that relies on transcendental restrictions, throws down territories and interiors to flee towards and defend from the deterritorialized exterior. Nancy Pelosi is not a serial mastermind, serving the State-God, calculating how all her liberal reforms will dupe the masses towards support for a fascist institution. Nor are the Minecraft players simulating politics in this event intentionally orienting their discussions around a restriction on primal freedom. All of the above are just operating within the socius of the State, being influenced by a network of flows that take the aspiration towards a Real World or condemnation of the Apparent World, or even their more innocuous synonyms of working through State mechanisms of rights and the law, as the common-sense channel to produce within. We do not mean to suggest that the moment one accepts a role with the State, they are instantly and irreversibly turned into a brainless agent that serves its eternal self-preservation. We just mean to suggest that the moment one accepts the Real World of objective law or Apparent World of subjective desire as objects to work towards or away from, respectively, both judgements that working with a State pushes one towards, these two flows of anti-production mutually reinforce one another, and it’s easy to get swept away.

Perhaps this would all be clearer if we just look at the critique of the State that Deleuze and Guattari themselves formulate. These two are quite explicit in their distaste for governance---indeed, the word ‘State’ is used as a modifying adjective throughout ATP to indicate a negative, reterritorialized version of a noun (‘State apparatus-book’, ‘State desire’, ‘State geometry’, and so on). Our own theorizations weren’t far off. Deleuze and Guattari, in their historical account of how capitalism came to prevalence, suggest that it was a combination of “direct comparison” and “monopolistic appropriation” of various social forms that enabled the reterritorialization of land, work, and money such that capital could flourish (ATP, p. 443-444). ‘Direct comparison’ indicates the negative valuation of certain stocks in relation to their more profitable counterparts (this is the condemnation of the exterior/Apparent World), while ‘monopolistic appropriation’ names the assimilation of these stocks towards the service of a broader system of surplus value or power (this is aspiration towards the interior/Real World). It seems that we are in agreement with Deleuze and Guattari, then, that the surefire signs of a socius are the same as those of ressentiment, and we have all concluded that these signs are present in the case of the State. Deleuze and Guattari, though, go a bit further, introducing new ways to conceptualize the composition and violence of governance. Perhaps the most explicit, and instructive, linguistic retooling of this problem they provide is the distinction between smooth and striated space. “One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of a striated space” (ATP, p. 385). The ‘smooth space’ is a concept tied, for these two, to the ‘nomad’, who is, for his part, associated with deterritorialization, desiring-production, rhizomes---all of which are opposed to the State apparatus. Striated space, on the other hand, suggests a plane that has been restricted and reterritorialized, walls and serrations dividing and directing movement. Of course, this isn’t a question of literal openness or smoothness, of physical walls and doors. Templin Room 707, despite having my clutter constantly littering the floor space that was already so scarce (sorry Aarjo), was a smooth space. My bedroom, and the basement it’s located in, remains a smooth sanctuary as I stay at home for the summer, in part because of the walls and staircase that section it off from the rest of the house. On the contrary, the smooth and sprawling lawns of the suburbs are striated by the rules of the Homeowner’s Association, and the rolling countryside is striated by conservative calls for maximal unnecessary labor and minimal uninterrupted leisure in the name of ‘tradition’. It would be more accurate to think of the striations as located on the plane of the BwO, for it is the restrictions of the flows of desire (and not physical motion) that constitutes them as such. “It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a ‘moved body’ going from one point to another in a striated space” (ATP, p. 386). The striations of the State, then, are compulsions at the level of desire, flows of anti-production, that bind subjects to only the productions that have been sanctioned as intelligible by and that do not threaten the socius of the Law.

We could also make sense of this phenomenon with the use of vocabulary we have exercised earlier. Deleuze and Guattari explain that the State deals with “codes”, which “express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion” (ATP, p. 454, parentheses in original). We see, then, the dynamic we used to understand the ideological form of desire, where immanent flows, deterritorialized relations, and rhizomatic connections are severed and subsumed by a transcendent, ideal system. They also name the State as “the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and artisans” and therefore “mutilates artisans to make ‘workers’ of them” in their discussion of metallurgy, a discussion so beautiful it gives one a fierce urge to take up metallurgy themselves (ATP, p. 409). Whereas they define the artisan as “one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, a machinic phylum” (machinic phylum should be read as synonymous with schizophrenic process of production or flows of desiring-production), they note that the ‘workers’ of the State “do not follow a flow, they draw a circuit; they only follow the part of the flow that enters into the circuit, even an ever-widening one” (ATP, p. 409-410). This is, to me, reminiscent of the arborescent system, where the rhizomatic flows of the artisan are replaced with rigid, predefined roles that exist only in the service of the broader growth of a tree, of a bureaucratic State. Subjectivity is limited to a single branch, strangled and bound by a mess of extractive roots, no longer a node with constant changing connections. All in all, “State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put the traits of expression into a form or code, make the holes resonate together, plug the lines of flight, subordinate the technological operation to the work model, impose upon the connections a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions” (ATP, p. 415).

The nuances of the critiques we drew from above remain present in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis. The language of ‘direct comparison’ attests to the processes of differentiation or threat narration that can be used to manufacture meaning and support for a State, and their talk of striation of course reflects the subjection of the flows of desire to the objective rule of law. The one detail not yet made explicit is Stanley’s remark that it is the form, and not the content, of the State that makes it problematic, but Deleuze and Guattari are not far behind. “It would be inaccurate to treat all States as ‘interchangeable’… but it would be no less inaccurate to privilege a certain form of the State” (ATP, p. 456). Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari accompany their reminder that we would be remiss to throw support behind some reformed version of a State with an acknowledgement that all States are not literally the same, a concession that the worst leftist you know would scoff at the suggestion of. Of course, this passage makes the recognition that, insofar as the State is always an apparatus of striation, reterritorialization, overcoding, and so on, there is no perfect State at the end of a schizoanalytic politics. At the same time, however, their recognition that there are indeed differences between States is a strategic tool, one that allows us to understand the contingency of the State form in a move that avoids some kind of Freudian/ontological fatalism (‘all States are the same, are people are the same, it’s really bad but we’re powerless to change it!’), and at the same time enables us to abstract certain machines or productions from their State-assemblage, to find vectors of deterritorialization lurking in politics, or at least to find variable conditions that can influence our own productions of deterritorializing vectors. For despite the prevalence of the ‘harm-reduction’ vote as an investment in the State as the sole object of politics, it is a shame to see the vote that makes no apology for the State, that exists solely as a means to mitigate the violence of the State in the interim, lumped in and rejected with the rest. It is always a question of destruction of the State-form, yes---but we cannot rule out the appropriation even of the State’s own productions in our efforts to restrain its power.

Another way to understand this impossibility of reform or progress with the State, and one that I prefer, is the distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between speed and slowness. “Slow and rapid are not quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified movement, whatever the speed of the former or tardiness of the latter” (ATP, p. 371). Slowness is the movement that occurs within the bounds of, that remains anchored by, the striated State interior, for “laminar movement that striates space, that goes from one point to another, is weighty”, as opposed to speed, which “applies only to a movement that deviates to the minimum extent and therefore assumes a vortical motion, occupying a smooth space, actually drawing smooth space itself” (ATP, p. 371). Any deterritorialized movement is speedy; all reterritorialized movement is slow. Wasting away in bed, grasping a stuffed shark and drowning in melancholic music, basking in isolation as a production of desire, is infinitely faster than sprinting on the State’s command. Certainly, there are some states that are more ‘progressive’ than others, that are ‘better’ relative to other States. But as a State becomes more and more liberal and inclusive, it does not get any faster; it just gets less slow. Schizoanalysis is not ignorant to a differential interaction with these States, the privileging of one relative to another, as nothing more than a potential response to present conditions (‘the lesser of two evils’). But one should never be confused into accepting this reformation of the State as the endpoint of, or even a mandated component of present, deterritorialization. One inhabits such a position exclusively as a vector against the expansion or intensification of State powers, but never follows this State into its own reterritorialization ventures (the Democrats progressivism is valuable as a mechanism to obstruct the Republicans, not as a corrective to be militantly imposed on the rest of the world). Use the State-machines for resistance to the extent you can, and then resist the remainder of the State-machine. Or, don’t, and just resist the State-machine from outside its walls. We don’t care, as long as one remains deterritorialized, remains immersed in pure speed. The distinction between speed and slowness is yet another question of desiring-production and desiring-acquisition, becoming and being, affect and feeling, or (to use another delineation I like, but didn’t work in during last chapter’s discussion of NEWMAGICWANDean subjectivity), spirit and soul: “Spirit is not better, but it is volatile, whereas the soul is weighted, a center of gravity” (ATP, p. 366). Perhaps it would be more accurate, then, in our discussion of the ‘circuit’-based movement of the State-worker, to direct our critique not at ‘circular’ movement, or a lack of progress, but rather, at the ‘encirclement’ needed to separate a circuit from the rest of the flow, and the necessary violence and slowness that such a reterritorialization entails.

As Deleuze and Guattari’s jab at spirit as not necessarily ‘better’, and our invocation of bed-rotting as a movement in smooth space, may hint at, the question of speed has nothing to do with happiness, with ‘emotion’ (while we’re still in the mood for making menial linguistic distinctions, assigning one synonym to desiring-production and the other to desiring-acquisition, Nietzsche, in BT, distinguishes between “emotions” and “Dionysiac ecstasies” [p. 62]). This is the research question that motivated AO, the question of how the masses were made to desire their own repression, made to enjoy fascism, to celebrate being locked in their anti-production enclosure. This is not a consequentialist account of satisfaction, since desire (always malleable to production) can be manufactured to take a problematic, fascist end. Rather, the question regards the treatment of the schizophrenic process as a whole. Indeed, the State is quite prolific at getting subjects to enjoy their cage, to willingly accept their shackles. This is, of course, not a question of literal, physical restriction. Being clipped to a leash, locked in a kennel, silenced by a muzzle, is often pure speed, whereas happily bounding about with minimal commitments on a beach vacation is chillingly slow. The latter is problematic insofar as, far from being a simple production (‘I enjoy this vacation’, ‘I enjoy this job’), the production makes an investment in a system of surplus value, is content with this circumstantial personal fulfillment as a coincidental byproduct in the broader system of capital, and therefore, understands this joy as subservient to transcendental overcoding demands, should they conflict. This marks only a conditional affirmation of life, and, as our discussions of ressentiment uncovered, a ‘conditional affirmation’ is really a negation. The leash, on the other hand, is unconditional. It may constitute a physical restraint, and there are certainly versions of such a production that suggest a socius is present (fear of abandonment, reterritorialization of an ‘owner’), but it is just as often a production of desire, an instance of desiring-production, a ‘becoming-animal’---“do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregated thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation… this something else can be quite varied… an apparatus or prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal (muzzle)” (ATP, p. 274, parentheses and, yes, the specific example of a muzzle in original)---that affirms the desires flowing into a BwO, and that moves and fluctuates as the desires that flow into the BwO move and fluctuate as well. Whimpering in a collar is speed, and laughing on a Friday night is slowness. This is a rehashing of our Nevermoric thesis: it’s not a question of a specific production, but of the productions that animate them. In this sense, our concern is not a hedonistic separation of pleasure over pain, but an unflinching commitment to becoming over being, desiring-production over desiring-acquisition, sadness in smooth space over happiness enclosed in the walls of striations.

All of this, then, is just a long-winded way of saying the State is a socius. It is an overdetermining concept, a transcendent objective or Being that reterritorializes flows of desiring-production, and we are left with the sole question of what productions maintain an investment in this socius, what statements extend or reconstitute its anti-production. This conclusion, therefore, leaves us with a view of the State as relatively mundane. Some extremely common productions of the State that often point back towards this interior---governance, rights, law, citizenry, progressive politics, borders---we encounter every day, sure, but there’s no unique property of the State that makes these (anti-)productions qualitatively different than any other socius; it’s just really big. Indeed, there’s a part of me that keeps making connections between the socius of the State and the socius of the Family. Perhaps this is just because I’ve moved home for the summer, and am spending a lot of time around the latter, but Deleuze and Guattari also notice the similarity, remarking the State has “a special relation to families, because they link the family model to the State model at both ends and regard themselves as ‘great families’ of functionaries, clerks, intendants, or farmers” (ATP, p. 366) (for what it’s worth, there’s also about one-third of AO that’s just an Oedipal family diss track). In the family, as in the State, subjects are pushed into predefined roles (‘Citizen’/‘Boy’), assigned tasks with the sole purpose of maintaining the socius, often with the justification that one’s desires are too immature/irrational absent the objective law of the State/Family. Movements are slow and striated, affirmed only on the condition that they do not disrupt the broader system (‘don’t assume you have free reign of your life, check with us’---a quote from my Dad to my sister); deterritorialized movements that fall outside the bounds of the interior ‘Beings’ are condemned (‘I don’t want to see it in my house’---a quote from my Mom to me).

Now, the State, as with the Family, as with any other socius, is not omnipresent. There are moments of genuine deterritorialization, of desiring-production, even living in a nation-state, even at family dinner with everyone present. These moments, however, are not the same as the moments where we are satisfied or content within our role, our cage, our striations. No, the latter are movements of slowness, where we test the boundaries, see how much we can get away with within the socius, always liable to snap back to the center when we run into a wall. The deterritorialized speeds, rather, occur without a Being as an anchoring referent, but, first and foremost, a raw desire, raw production, raw desiring-production. This is a becoming that races along the BwO, and if it encounters the anti-production of the socius, it will euro-step around the striating walls and keep moving. These genuine moments of deterritorialized production occur precisely when the socius fails in its reterritorialization, when the flows of anti-production are unable to blackmail a becoming to revert to a boxed-in Being, when the State machinery is not present, has its presence regarded with ambivalence, or all of the above. “When a State does not succeed in striating its interior… the flows traversing that State necessarily adopt the space of a war machine directed against it, deployed in a hostile or rebellious smooth space” (ATP, p. 386). The State, or Family, or any other socius, can never really deal with deterritorialization. It can only affirm a deterritorialized production to the extent it confuses it with something else, that it mistakes a rapid and unpredictable ‘moving body’ for one of the slow ‘moved bodies’ that meanders the striated paths that the State has already overcoded (‘my [moved] son turned out fine!’ ‘ma’am, your [moving] daughter barks when I tell faer to’). The deterritorialized movement could not be further from these striations.

It seems likely that, by this point, all the Marxists will have gone home. If our insistence that the State was not redeemable, or our celebration of non-partisan micropolitical acts of desire, was not enough to turn them away, our repeated comparisons of global socii such as the State or Capital with local socii like Families or Super Smash. Bros Tournaments will almost certainly be the nail in the coffin. Revolutionary organizers have a tendency to dismiss ‘homework-and-bedtime anarchists’, which is to say, revolutionaries who oppose every instance of authority, or what we would call ‘microfascisms’. However, though we would certainly concede that the State is a more universally prevalent, and potentially more ‘materially harmful’, socius, we do not share the same disdain towards resistance of these smaller, interpersonal forms of anti-production. This should, however, not be construed as us diminishing the importance of liberation from the State. On the contrary, our unconditional resistance to any form of desiring-acquisition ensures that our organization against the State does not ignore or recreate other, perhaps more subtle, forms of what is qualitatively the same violence.

This effectively concludes our critique of the State. Moving forward, then, our political analysis is guided by a different, more refined set of questions. Where do the straiting walls of the State occur, and what direct comparisons or monopolistic appropriations produce them? That said, BetaOfThePack didn’t know all this at the time. He just knew that the State was bad (something about ‘ressentiment’), and there was a meeting at 7:00 EST that he could attend to find out why.

The summit was hosted in a nation called Tricolour, said to be the largest civilization on the server at the time. I arrived a few minutes before the meeting was set to begin, and though it feels a bit foolish to use this word to describe a Minecraft event, there was a moment of culture shock. Over the past half hour, my journey across Island Two had taken me from my isolated cottage through the dark oak woods that surrounded it, across the divisive sea, and over the rigid mountains of the Central and North Islands, all without encountering a single sign of life. The second I entered Tricolour, however, I was exposed to streets, statues, shops, mines, and more, populating the beachfront birch grove. Unfortunately, this awe should not be mistaken for reverence; indeed, it would be perhaps better to consider these developments as striations, for Tricolour marked a paradigmatic State-form. “Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths”, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, in a description of arborescence that is therefore applicable to our comprehension of the State, and that may as well have been an account of Tricolour’s structure (ATP, p. 16). Tricolour, as per their recruitment post, was divided into three regions---Scarlet, Azure, Verdant--- which were each specialized towards part of the national division of the labor---mining, building, farming. It is a bit offputting, then, to see the nation promote itself on the grounds of ‘inclusivity, opportunity, and progression’, to announce that ‘we believe in the power of collective action where each member plays an essential role in shaping the destiny of our great Kingdom’, and to remark ‘we aim to keep the level of autonomy and freedom through our three regions’. To the extent that Tricolour does promote autonomy, it is explicitly through the arborescent striation of citizen roles, which is antithetical to opportunity, progression, or freedom, at least in any schizoanalytic sense. Tricolour’s development is always biunivocalized, anchored by the broader national flourishing that is propped up by its segregated structure. The roots are always tied back to the tree. In this sense, Tricolour is transparently demonstrative of the State socius, and the existence within it is terminally slow.

If you’ll time travel with me for a moment, I corresponded with a Tricolour citizen on Discord after the meeting, after the server had closed for the day. An owner of a courier’s guild, this player had been caught up in a broader project of the nation to ‘redo’ the forest, the lack of organization of the builds in which had prompted them to call it ‘a slum’. A portion of this reform was the construction of roads, and the courier had been asked to move the already standing, spent-all-day-being-worked-on headquarters five blocks back, such that the road would not need to bend around it. The almost satirical level of governance on display here aside, this is a wonderful analogy for our issue with the State. Though we find no problem with a grid organization in a vacuum (indeed, it can be quite convenient), the State overcodes the immanent map with the transcendent tracing, the smooth space with the striations, forcing the former to bend on the command of the latter. Any production that falls outside the State’s objective plan is condemned, met with the classic ultimatum, relocate (conform) or be razed (die). The wall runs right through the middle of its citizen’s flow, in the name of what? A more organized aesthetic? The State, again, demonstrates that it knows nothing of the moving body, for these roads have little to do with facilitating citizen movement. To the extent that they do make transportation easier, it is only by privileging the efficiency of travel over every other mode of citizen movement (building, trade). The deterritorialized becomings reterritorialized by the road-grid socius, the Being-Citizen.

Perhaps due to their distaste for the forest ‘slum’, the gathered delegations were led to a platform purpose-built for the meeting, just outside Tricolour’s developed center. At first, the stage was overspilling with non-participating citizens, crowding the fences as they gave the politicians at the table space, content to silently observe. It did not take long for the leaders to reprimand the onlookers: ‘why are there like 20 people here?’, ‘if you don’t have a chair, back up please’, ‘all casuals should not have been at the meeting’. Deleuze and Guattari note that “the State is what makes the distinction between governors and governed possible” (ATP, p. 359), and such a distinction is on full display here. This division is needed for the socius to function, as it creates a separation between the transcendent Real World and the immanent Apparent World, the Socratic ideal that the foolish, Dionysian citizen must mold themselves toward. “In so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or rational state, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject… always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself” (ATP, p. 376). Those with a seat at the table must enforce their difference from those who wished to crowd around, for it is only by cleaving the two that one can be expected to fall into subservience to the other. Such a rift is present in each socius---governing/governed, laborer/unproductive, normative/queer, Being/becoming. It is just that the State, as it so often does, makes this violence of the socius quite obvious.

The dismissal of spectators itself, far from just reflecting a structuring feature of the State, was an instance of its striations attending. The presumed justification was to maintain a degree of secrecy at the meeting; it was later suggested that it was done to secure against assassination attempts. In either case, there is a clear obstruction of the flows---the flow of information to the commoner who cannot be trusted with such knowledge, the flow of movements by the potential criminal who must at all times represent a threat to rule (deterritorialized motion does, indeed, always mark a challenge to striation… if only the State knew how right it was). We should not confuse this critique with a liberal paradigm of political transparency, of freedom of information. Our concern is not that there is some final objective (citizens know all the government’s affairs) which has been made unachievable---indeed, such a comprehension would construct a Real World, contrast it with the Apparent World, and thus, we are left with ressentiment. We are not upset at the steps taken to prevent assassinations because we believe assassinations are good. It does seem plausible that, in some circumstances, attempts to maintain secrecy can be instances of desiring-production (maintaining privacy from parents, not telling your opponents you’re about to run a pick-and-pop). These cases, however, are permissible precisely because there is no transcendent goal, no condemnation of the Apparent World, but just productive responses to zones of intensity (if such a production was pursued as an end-to-be-acquired, the constant threat of paternal intrusion would certainly constitute cause for ressentiment). The clear displeasure for, and attempt to exterminate the existence of, the deviation from the presumed isolation of the meeting, though, suggests that the request for citizens to leave was not such a scenario. Rather, we see a distaste for the free flow of the citizen, the one that threatens to breach that State’s control over their produced Being-Citizen, and as such, these responses reflect striations, which we will always oppose. Our concern is not that the wall the State has built has sectioned us off from a specific, desirable region; we are furious the State has sectioned us off at all.

Independent of our philosophical gripes with the expulsion of observers, I did have to adjust my plans. I burrowed under the stage, out of sight of all the politicians at the table (and the guards ensuring that it was just politicians at the table), but still within earshot of the conversations they would have. This wasn’t too much of an issue; I had no intent to speak at this meeting anyways, for the matters discussed were of little concern to me. I was just trying to dissect every flow of anti-production that the State’s mouthpieces let slip, so that such mistakes could be amplified in the service of creating a revolutionary mass. I didn’t need to be a nuisance while doing it.

The meeting began right away. From my location, I could hear that the leaders wasted no time confronting the topic that served as the summit’s exigence, the question of international affairs with Island One. ‘They have made plans of conquest already’, ‘they have weapons of colossal power’, ‘as soon as they are able to, they will come here to subjugate us immediately’. The popular sentiment was to respond to these reported threats with the creation of a mutual defense pact, such that all Island Two nations would be compelled to lend both economic and militant resources to any member that was attacked. One leader questioned the source of this information, which left the speaker on their toes. This is not surprising---there was no in role-play reason that anyone on Island Two should be aware of Island One’s hostilities, given that they had been primarily expressed through propaganda (read: memes) about the inter-island rivalry created for and circulated on Discord, which was a dubiously credible source in its own right. It is not a non-factor in our critique that this impending invasion narrative was fabricated: it seems that conspiracy theories effect a sort of overcoding of actual affairs, disregarding or dismantling any data points that contradict the transcendent story. However, “the truth or falsity of these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them” (McGowan, 2013, p. 47). We can welcome back our psychoanalytic language to express how these nations’ threat response mirrors a form of desiring-acquisition. “The paranoid subject is often correct in its various speculations”, McGowan concedes, “but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority… to render loss empirical rather than ontological” (2013, p. 47). For McGowan, the location of a threat constitutes the creation of an object of desire, as it localizes the source of one’s lack in a specific production that can be overcome, rather than in the structure of subjectivity (‘if we just defend ourselves from Island One, all will be well!’). We understand this to be a form of desiring-acquisition, insofar as it has renounced certain flows (the potential invasion from Island One), condemning them to an exterior/Apparent World, with the ‘object of desire’ signifying the interior/Real World that these deterritorialized becomings see imposed on them, that they are made to match. Even if the State is correct about the existence of a threat, we nonetheless problematize the response to this threat being the attempt to exterminate it, to reach a state of total, non-lacking security, the function it provides for the creation of the docile citizen-subject. Indeed, the issue is not that this threat was not real; it’s that infinitely more threats are. This enables the constant perpetuation of the State’s violence, as it can always point towards some configuration of the natural flows of desiring-production as a dangerous, deterritoralized speed that escapes striation in order to legitimate its expansion. This is perhaps just a more theoretical account of Rodríguez’s suggestion of statecrafting: the naming of a threat to be controlled mobilizes the growth of the arborescent State, with citizens folded into the interior created in response to, and which in turn creates, the renounced exterior (here, the ‘direct comparison’ of the flows of Island One’s invasion motivates a ‘monopolistic appropriation’ of flows in the mutual defense pact, therefore producing a socius---this is the process we problematize).

One of Tricolour’s guards discovered my hiding spot beneath the meeting platform, and directed me to leave through the hole in the wall they had created. I followed them out, but no further, settling back down alongside the wall that supported the elevated stage, still able to listen to the conversations that occurred atop it. At about this point, the focus of the meeting shifted slightly. ‘They are envious of our resources’, ‘they’re barely feeding themselves’, ‘certain individuals have been acting almost as tyrants’. Apparently bored with regurgitating that Island One was a danger, the leaders had begun pinpointing differences that could be the reason for such a truism. The freezing of differences to motivate the composition of a relatively privileged ‘Same’ (Island One, with our abundant trees and total lack of tyranny!) should remind of us Baudrillard’s conception of meaning-through-difference, and indeed, Baudrillard contextualizes such a thesis to a quite similar scenario. “We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it… extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West” (Baudrillard, 1992/1994, p. 67). Baudrillard, here, suggests that the localization of backwardness in the different (Island One/Middle East) allows the contrasted Same (Island Two/America) to take on an attractive quality, and therefore effectuates, yet again, the expansion of the Same’s arborescent system over the condemned, ‘underdeveloped’ exterior. “In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all” (Baudrillard, 1992/1994, p. 69).

There were some more humanitarian suggestions mixed in with this Island One diss-track, such as the call to send aid packages to the struggling citizens. We should not automatically assume that the offer to help is problematic---in many cases, it can be an instance of the formation of connections in a rhizome---but given the surrounding context, we have reason to believe that these supply drops had no intention of affirming the deterritorialized zones of intensity as such. Indeed, the initial speaker who proposed sending relief justified it with the reasoning ‘nothing would better win over the hearts and minds of the common people and the leaders, nobles and citizens alike’. This is what Baudrillard denounces as ‘charity cannibalism’---our interventions in the name of help only serve to globalize the State apparatus that is capable of providing anything but. It is interesting to me that a couple of leaders, contemplating the prospect of assistance, made remarks that expressed sympathy for Island One’s citizens, but cut off any empathetic, rhizomatic response with a quick jab at Island One’s leaders. ‘Gifts of aid and peace on their own are signs of weakness’, ‘their people likely have more compassion than pragmatism, but I do not know the same for those who lead them’. On the one hand, this demonstrates the inability for the State to engage in international affairs at an immanent level, interacting only with the other transcendent States instead. This is the logic of sanctions, the starvation of citizens within a regime, ostensibly on the charge of that regime starving those same citizens. The citizen cannot be conceptualized as anything other than a Being-Citizen. On the other hand, though, even if a State politician did find genuine room in their heart for the exterior’s populous, that their response entails the expansion of a socius dooms the effectiveness of their response to such a sentiment. Even if, somehow, the United States’s involvement in the Middle East actually was done out of concern for gendered repression, that the same stroke involved the liberal nation-building projects precluded the opportunity for any real deterritorialization. Charity cannibalism provides no liberation; just new management.

This is sufficient for us to charge the inaugural Island Two meeting with another case of desiring-acquisition, this time, with the ‘direct comparison’ of the flows of Island One’s barbaric ways feeding the ‘monopolistic appropriation’ of flows by Island Two’s global expansion, in a Baudrillardian meaning-through-difference manner. Of course, we would not resort to some essential claim about the unconscious, a Freudian remark that offering help is always just done to make oneself feel different, privileged, better. We will, however, always support assistance insofar as it forms rhizomatic connections between two becomings, and denounce the extent to which it is instead a State offering arborescent support to a Being (even if the State does not respond to the becoming as a Being in its initial response, it often attaches to the aid a reterritorialization that produces a Being-Citizen in the same becoming later down the line). This is not to say that State aid, even when it is bound up in arborescence, must be turned down, either (indeed, Island One’s propagated refusal to accept Island Two’s ‘imperialism’ seemed motivated as much by genuine commitments to independence as it did by their own differentiation from Island Two, the condemnation they were using to produce the ‘Same’ of their island-wide unification). It is just a question of extracting the deterritorialized flows within the production, of deterritorializing the flow through our very refusal to be interpolated into the socius by it, of riding the speeding line of flight out of system of surplus value that the State has strung the production up in. As always, it’s just a question of whether the flow is attaching itself to zones of intensity as vectors of desiring-production, or striation of desiring-acquisition; we happen to have reason to believe that Island Two was engaged in the latter.

As the aid debate came to an end, another guard walked noticed my suspicious observance alongside the stage, and gave me the ultimatum ‘get up… or get out’. I did neither. I shuffled around a little bit, enough to get them to leave, before burrowing underground again, boxing myself in a self-made 2x1 hole, surrounded by dirt on either side and the platform’s wall on the top. As the politicians went back and forth on the specifics of their elected means of desiring-acquisition, we get some time to reflect on what is, perhaps, the broader issue at the root of their considerations. While we have, above, named two striations of the State (defense pact paranoia and global charity cannibalism), we could also make sense of these as two striations of one overarching socius, one that runs hand-in-hand with the State. Almost all of our discussions this chapter could be recast, if you’d like, as anti-productions of Security. The State arises to secure peace from the insecure state of nature; the defense pact secures Island Two from their insecurities in the event of an Island One mobilization; the international assistance secures the nations by addressing the cause of Island One’s insecurities, which in turn animate the sentiments that generate Island Two’s insecurities. Security is quite the broad socius indeed; many colloquial interactions involve threat aversion, and some Freudian descendants (hedonists? evolutionary psychologists?) might even postulate avoidance of pain as the determinant of desire.

One problem: insecurity is everywhere. “Even our bodies, which have become biological machinery, are modelled on the inorganic body, and therefore become, at the same time, a bad object, condemned to disease, accident and death” (Baudrillard, 1976/1993, p. 198, italics in original). Should we orient ourselves towards the flows of the schizophrenic process with the conditional affirmation of the flows that will not harm us, we will find ourselves with a nihilistic rejection of life’s process at just about every turn. There is always a risk of injury, and thus, always insecurity, in part because of the Dionysiac, fluctuating nature of the universe. The twin poles of ressentiment rear their ugly heads: the condemnation of the Apparent World (constant anxiety towards infinite potentialities of displeasure; the body as bad object) and the aspiration towards a Real World (the paranoid, Sisyphean attempt to exterminate each of these infinite potentialities). A few quotes on this second pole, and the violence that such an aspiration entails: “a few more bandages on the sarcophagus… life is no longer anything but a doleful, defensive book-keeping” (Baudrillard, 1976/1993, p. 198-199); “we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the ‘unspecified enemy’” (ATP, p. 422); ‘we have to consider all options… preventative measures is basically what we're discussing right now, no need to argue’ (an exchange from the meeting in response to the observation that we were chasing basically non-existent threats). For as much as politicians love to take for granted that the protection of peace, the securitization of life, is the foremost, least controversial telos of the State---‘nobody can have a philosophically valuable life if they aren’t alive!’---they are just as quick to performatively dismiss the same thesis. If it was really true that the pursuit of security ought reterritorialize everything else, the logical conclusion would be to lock oneself in a dark room, moving no more than was needed to sustain basic vital function (an obviously regrettable state of affairs, as my underground hiding-hole could attest to). The State has looked at this suggestion and decided it should just make the room a little bigger, to pick some arbitrary boundaries where we must striate in the service of Security. We question why we should striate in the service of a socius at all.

Ironically, my own sarcophagus failed. The guards (how, I’m still not sure) found my underground observation chamber, and were less subtle in their request this time. Persuaded by multiple blades, I was escorted back in the direction of the mountains, and watched until I was out of sight. At this point, I had more than enough information to formulate a critique, and it would have been easy to continue southward. Unfortunately, I had thought about security a little bit too much before the event for that to be an option. My two most recent publications (both of which were referenced in my application for Ish’s event), confronted with questions of impending mass consequence, took the attitude of “‘nah, Ima do my own thing’” (Logback, 2023b) and “‘Death is not an impact’” (Logback, 2023c). Baudrillard valorized the proletarians who resist the imposition of survival in their mundane “refusal to apply safety standards in the factories”, suggesting “as long as the exploited retain the choice of life and death through this small resistance to security and the moral order, they win on their own, symbolic, ground” (1976/1993, p. 200). And most of all, whether it was because of these background-reading-machines pulsating in my machinic unconscious or not, I could not help but look upon the impasse between me sitting through a meeting, mentally railing on the nations involved for their investment in the security apparatus the whole time, only to myself flee at the first suggestion of danger. Fuck that; I wasn’t going to be a hypocrite. I was going back.

It seems obvious that the counter-orientation we take up in response to threats, despite our critique of the State’s tendency to exterminate them, should not be confused with a total dismissal of very real possibility, carelessly wandering into revolutionary suicide. Less surprising still, it may be, that navigating out of this theoretical dilemma requires us to turn back towards the language of desiring-production, and even more expected that it is easiest to illustrate such an application using an analogy that will soon turn into a concept. In late October of 2023, while I was thoroughly in the midst of writing the critique of security (Logback, 2023c) that I would publish just ten days later, a friend and I attended a concert. It was the first show I had attended since elementary school, and, a detail reflective of both physical and musical development since that time, the first with a mosh pit. My friend had moshed at many shows before, and as far as I knew, intended to here. I was a little torn on the prospect---Bullet For My Valentine would be a great first mosh experience, to be sure---but at the same time, I was not totally on board with getting injured (oh, how a few months can change someone). As we were waiting in line to enter, I went back-and-forth in my head, especially contemplating whether my desire to avoid harm reflected an investment in the socius of security, the one I already knew to be quite problematic. I came to the conclusion it didn’t: let’s unpack why.

Our issue with Security, simply put, is that it is a condemnation of the flows that represent a threat, that is seeks to exterminate them, or at least the chance of being harmed by them. It aspires to a Real World, and scorns the Apparent World that is left behind. These moves take it out of the schizophrenic process, instead placing it in the realm of transcendent overcoding, commanding the process to morph to fit. The Mosh Pit dilemma, on the other hand, makes no such judgement. I was quite open to the possibility of ending up in the Pit; a piece of me even wanted to. Part of the equation, then, seems to be an openness to the potentiality of insecurity, of the flows of harm that could happen. Indeed, to negate the flow would leave us with the anxious breakdown, the body as bad-object, and the retreat to the sarcophagus, all of which we have flagged as endemic to ressentiment. Our project is one of unconditional affirmation of the schizophrenic process. There’s no reason to think that excludes the part of the process that can kill you. 

That said, we should not confuse affirmation and production as identical, however much they overlap. To affirm the prospect that something could happen, and that such an outcome does not need to be valued negatively, is not to say that we need to actively work towards that dubious timeline, or even that we cannot work away from it. Our issue with the socius of Security, as with any socius, is how it handles the flows that fall outside of its territory, with the violent imposition of the overcoding anti-productions, the forced choice between assimilation towards the Being of the interior or total extermination. I made no attempt to stop the mosh pit at the concert, or to force them away from me (these would be striations on movements of deterritorialization, which we would not accept). I did, however, shuffle backwards in the crowd, trying not to be too disruptive, to make sure I wasn’t too close to the circle, to the point where I might get dragged in. If I did get dragged in: ‘fuck it’, I told myself, ‘it will probably be fun’. These frame the fundamental responses for how one can respond to a threat, or achieve some sense of feeling secure, without invoking the broader problematic of Security. It is always a question of the rhizome, of proliferating connections between one’s zone of intensity, their becoming, and those around them. We do not extinguish any threats, strangling them in the arborescent roots of our own desire (the being-at-war). The response, instead, is the question of how we can live in spite of the threat’s existence, and to the extent that there is threat mitigation, it is a result of the relations between the becoming and the ‘threat’ changing. Living in spite of the threat’s existence (‘I’m okay if I do get in the pit… what’s my plan if I get dragged in?’); changing relations to mitigate it (shuffling away in the crowd). The concert crowd is a rhizome, a thousand nodes with a million more connections, moving in mutual productions, waving with the flows of desire. The Mosh Pit is a part of this network, and as such, should not be subjugated---this is the case with any zone of intensity. The becoming-apprehensive shuffles away in the crowd, or, if they fall in, perhaps asks if one can let them out, transforming relations, drawing new connections within the rhizome. The becoming-adventurous enjoys the concert in spite of the pit, conversing with the friend at their side, ambivalent to the prospect of falling in. Hop in; shuffle away; ask out; enjoy in spite of; let happen: this is courteous Mosh Pit etiquette. The last thing you want to do is curl up on the floor.

I did a little of all of the above, with regards to the threat of expulsion as I returned to the meeting for the grand finale. The transformation of relations refers to the measures I took to avoid the guards, which I was careful to do without reproduction of any system of surplus value, any overcoding of variables. There was no renunciation of the world that contained guards (though, of course, we hoped our vectors of deterritorialization could eventually dismantle the flows of anti-production that required their striating role to exist); I just dug tunnels deep underground, so I could get back close enough to the meeting to hear the political dialogue, but I wouldn’t bother them, and they wouldn’t bother me. Forming a rhizome with the guards; the wasp and the fly-swatter. There was also the question of living in spite of the threat. Should the State catch me in my return, I thought, should I end up on trial, or even worse, the gallows, for my treason---so be it. I didn’t care. Death is not an impact. It can get a little fuzzy what constitutes a change in relations (rhizomatic, mutually produced changes in the connections between the threat and threatened, such that the degree of the threat is not as great; Father-son conversation) as opposed to living in spite of the threat (rhizomatic, mutually produced changes in the connections between multiple threatened, or threatened and non-threatened, variables, such that the threat no longer requires a certain production of the threatened in response; son-daughter care). That’s not a problem. The distinction isn’t relevant. It’s just two ways to conceptualize the same thing, that being a response to the ‘I feel…’ of insecurity in a way that is rhizomatic, in a manner that resorts only to deterritorialized flows and that creates no reterritorializations against the threat. Expanding, proliferating, and transforming the rhizome. Mosh Pit. “A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots” (ATP, p. 6). “To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses” (ATP, p. 15). It’s hard to get more rhizomatic than sabotaging the State by burrowing underground.

It's a good thing I decided to go back, as just as I was again close enough for proximity voice chat to pick up the national leaders’ discussions, the tensions (and territorializations) were reaching a peak. ‘A simple defensive pact is not going to work, long term, nor will treaties or cooperation and trade… we need to put aside our personal desires and unite’, ‘regardless of our governments, our personal identities, this is bigger than ourselves’, ‘you could move like… 50 blocks to the right… but if you don’t agree to the terms set at the table, you wouldn’t have a voice at the council meeting’. We’re back to where we started---moving preestablished buildings to fit the State’s transcendent vision of the grid---but the scale has multiplied. Now, it is an entire nation moving 50 blocks in the name of an island, rather than a citizen moving 5 for a nation. Ironic. The aspiration towards total unification, as well as the language such a proposal was made in, does wonders for our characterization of the State. Vietnam and Iraq tell us that the defense pact, with its forced commitments, its mandatory reterritorializations, is already a controversial enough State socius. Quite explicitly, though, the Northern leaders had said that desire, national identity, and so on, must be placed aside in the name of a greater good. I couldn’t have written a better critique of the State myself.

There’s one last loose end we should tie up regarding our critique of security, one that plagued my reflections on ambivalence towards death as I wandered the streets of London studying abroad. Exposed to the valorization of Winston Churchill’s deployment of fearlessness rhetoric as an engine to mobilize the national war effort---one that recorded civilian casualties as mere numbers---I wondered “how could I be right… and he be wrong… could we be different at all?” (Klayder, 2024, p. 25-26). With some time to reflect on the problem as I stared at Marx’s grave, and with some help from one of Marx’s more outspoken critics, I pieced things together. “Is it so that men might live that the demand for death must be exhausted? No, but in order that they die only the death the system authorizes” (Baudrillard, 1976/1993, p. 198). In a resolution that will likely be more comprehensible to you, now, than it was to the average reader who was just trying to figure out how my time overseas went, I figured “the power of ambivalence towards death is… potentialities, otherwise locked behind the threat of or surrounded with unpleasant anxiousness towards the end, now on the table… but Churchill’s embrace of death is surrounded, on either side, with paragraphs of war plans, demands for aid, rations, sacrifice. He guides us not towards infinite potentialities, but funnels us back into a single system, the British war effort” (Klayder, 2024, p. 26). As with any of our claims, we have not made some ontological judgement about the goodness of affirming insecurity, but find it commendable only insofar as it attaches itself to the flows of desiring-production. The same vulnerability that we, in the Mosh Pit, find liberating, can be coopted by Churchill (or Island Two’s patriotic unification) to push one back into the striated walls of a socius. This would be the equivalent of taking one’s supportive, but clearly uneasy, comment that ‘the mosh pit is cool, but not for me’ and dragging them, along with every other concert attendee, straight to the middle of the circle. For us, it does not matter whether it is the drive towards life sanctioning off death, or the inverse, the willingness to die being used to restrict the possibilities for life. As we have said before, we don’t care why the wall is built. We are just concerned---extremely concerned---that there is a wall. “To fight for death against life; to fight for life against death. To affirm the potentialities that have been coded out” (Klayder, 2024, p. 26). In the face of Island Two’s calls for overcoding unification, or Churchill’s shove into the pit of World War II, it seems that unleashing the productions of life, the ones the suggestive speeches explicitly condemn, the chatting with a friend and shuffling-away, is our escape. The Mosh Pit’s flows of destruction become more appealing only in light of the prevalence of the socius of Security, in which they clearly inhabit the exterior (though, we should recall that any deterritorialized flow, even those that seem concerned with the expression of survival, appear as ‘destruction’ in the face of Security, insofar as they are distinct from its reterritorialization, for anything not already moved and striated by the socius is a projectile against it, that the exterior is merely everything that is not already interior). The socius of Security has made it necessary to “rob everyone of the last possibility of giving themselves their own death as the last ‘great escape’ from a life laid down by the system” (Baudrillard, 1976/1993, p. 197). Giving oneself death can take many forms; any production that is not an anti-production of security, or anchored to its striations, is a moment of this smooth space suicide. The deterritorialized production of the feeling of security, the hug, perhaps, is nonetheless a Mosh Pit. The sweet, tender kiss of death. That said, I am reminded of an interaction I had on the third day of the event, where, having returned to the streets of Tricolour, I was stopped by a citizen, told ‘you aren’t wearing armor, that’s illegal’ (I’m still unsure if the statement was a joke or not), and gifted a chestplate and leggings. I elected to remain steadfast in my decision to wear just an iron helmet, for I had no need to protect myself. The helmet was donned only because my in-game skin was a Minecraft Zombie wearing a Greek toga; the iron matched the robe, and covered my massive, bald-looking head. There are infinite metamorphoses of death against Security. However, there is still something that feels uniquely poetic about wandering the streets of Tricolour, a nation that employs all the extremities of the Law to compel one towards Life, as an undead body, a dead/ly husk.

When the arguments over unification finally wrapped up, so did the meeting. Coincidentally, the main proponent of unity had stopped to converse with another leader right where my tunnel resurfaced, so I got to hear just a bit more microfascism. The advocate in question---Fluixon---was revealed after the event to be the head of a broader conspiracy, aspiring towards total power under the guise of Island-wide merger. To the (in my opinion, rather small) extent that the context of this unification effort being part of a larger, premeditated agenda makes our analysis seem less politically legitimate (the degree to which unity as an actual response, or Real World, to the condemnation of the exterior/Apparent World goes down), our analysis of it as an effective means of reterritorialization skyrockets (such a Real World, when it is present, is a primary tool in a global power conquest). Regardless, after Fluixon and their entourage left, I surfaced from my subterranean sabotage, and set off towards the Southern Island, for real this time. I had garnered a great deal of intelligence that confirmed my suspicions---the nations of the North Island, as a result of the natural qualities of State governance, were accelerating into fascism. Now, I just had to write my findings down.

After the day ended, I logged off the server and opened my recording of the events. I rewatched the meeting, taking note of all the interactions relevant to the point I was trying to make, and began formulating these reflections into an outline for a brief critique of governance I could share with the other experiment members. However, my work would not be completed from rumination alone---criticism, as I learned in debate, is not complete without a presented alternative to the production dismissed. Now, it would have been easy, given the exclusive role the State took as our object of scorn, to posit total annihilation of all nations, embrace of complete anarchy, as our end goal, click save, call it a day. I don’t want to give the impression that we are against anarchism. I don’t think it would be inaccurate to call myself an anarchist; many who espouse ideas I find myself agreeing with use the label; even Deleuze, in a series of televised interviews, quips “a leftist government does not exist since being on the Left has nothing to do with governments” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1988). To the extent that ‘anarchy’ refers to the liberation of the flows of desire, of resistance to any manifestation of the State (even in its various, sometimes microfascist, forms, the Family, Security, Capital, and so on), we could indeed recommend anarchism as the remedy to the violence we have observed. The issue is that ‘anarchism’ is a title often invoked in the service of an entirely different project, one that, in our sense, is a State, is not anarchist at all. I suppose it could be useful, then, to clear up this confusion, to forward some stipulations on exactly what we’re trying to do.

Hobbes theorized the absence of the State as the state of nature, the selfish war between every man and each of his companions. Deleuze and Guattari note that “it should not be concluded that war is a state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state that wards off and prevents the State” (ATP, p. 357). To the extent that Hobbes is correct, that life without governance is complete relativist egoism, everything being permitted only insofar as it can be secured by force, we would also reject it. However, we do not feel this accurately names the so-implied natural form of existence---that, instead, would be desiring-production. Nonetheless, we find ‘anarchy’, as conceived of in the Hobbesean sense, to be a misguided objective. At a basic level, we do not think that everything is permissible---desiring-acquisition is something that we can, and will, always problematize. Anarchism, left as a mere inversion of Hobbes, would permit the creation and exercise of a State (or any other socius) as long as some man in the state of nature willed it to happen. That seems absurd. Moreover, the Hobbesean state of nature does not just carry a nebulous chance of later morphing into desiring-acquisition---everything comes with this risk, to some extent---but constitutes an actual instance of it. Hobbes (unsurprisingly for an Enlightenment thinker) conceptualizes anarchy in a very humanist, individualistic sense, as a network of occasionally interacting ‘Selves’ and ‘Others’. We have already made known our issues with such a notion of the subject as extensive. Levinas was called upon, earlier, to name this pluralist battle of different Selfish desires, each totalizing the Other into an object to be exploited for one’s own gain, as a being-revealed-at-war, overcoding-of-the-Other, arborescent, a socius. At the time Beta of the Pack made these reflections for the event, though, on her mind was more likely a group within the experiment, Nine Lives Village. Nine Lives was not the only faction on the server to exhibit the organizing principle that he reprimanded it for, but it was the geographically closest to their wooded cabin home. Nine Lives was, essentially, a group of friends, a civilization with a central belief of lacking any central belief, a recruitment post that repeatedly touted ‘hanging out’ and ‘doing whatever you want’. As we have already remarked, ‘doing whatever you feel like’ (schizoanalytic) and ‘doing whatever you feel like’ (Freudian) is a paradigmatic case of flirting versus harassment. We have no reason to believe Nine Lives Village was the former. Rather, this was a social network/‘anarchy’ that seemed to be entrenched with very individualistic beliefs, that not just permitted but actively facilitated the unconditional pursuit of one’s whims, with consideration for what anyone else wanted being nothing but a voluntary, circumstantial coincidence. Perhaps we could think of this in terms of the American highway---car-based infrastructure as an absolute elevation of the Self, total freedom to pursue one’s deepest desires. One maintains zero regard for the Other cars on the road, unless they become an obstacle in the way of the Self’s fulfillment (traffic, a stoplight, a pedestrian), in which case they become scorned, their absence is wished for: ressentiment. Obviously, this is not to suggest that we need to resort to a State, to be overcoded by the Other, to come to a complete stop at every stop sign at midnight when nobody’s around. It’s just to underscore that ‘anarchism’, ‘desiring-production’, is not at all synonymous with ‘neglect’. Hobbes thinks it is.

There is also a more political critique of Nine Lives Village, one that stems primarily from in-event observation. Nine Lives, and the other ‘just hanging out’ groups their name is used to signify, performed a total disavowal of any political or ‘social’ parts of the social experiment. They were, in many ways, just playing on a Minecraft server (which is, in a vacuum, fine), anchored to a fundamental apathy towards any of the affairs of the Northern nations. This is perhaps just a recreation of the problem we have expressed above, now on an international scale---the Self/State remains isolated in their own pursuit of their interests, concerned with the Other/International only if they become a barrier to this goal. Such a disinterest in politics seems ignorant of the reality that “there is no desire but assembling, assembled, desire” (ATP, p. 399) Any of these national subjective ‘wants’ marks some sort of political investment, in the same sense that ‘all art is political’. It is not that every art piece has an explicit political message that the creator intends it to convey, but rather, that every production is produced by the universe of desiring-machines, the social-cultural-political context, that surrounds it, and we feel similarly about politics. There is no distinction between political economy and libidinal economy. The political isolationism of Nine Lives Village, then, is, at best, a political ambivalence that permits problematic desiring-acquisition as long as it does not explicitly interfere with the interior of the Nation/Self, and, at worst, an aggressively anti-political (‘all politics are bad’, ‘let people enjoy things’) stance that sees every production, as every production is in fact political/assembled, as a folly to be extinguished. Either an allowance of overcoding, or an active dissemination of it. Nine Lives is, in many ways, emblematic of the gamer that is dismissive of criticism directed towards transparently fascist games, just to turn around in outrage the second a game takes a positive stance on blackness, queerness, and so on. Naturally, this is not a call for interventions into every nation that has a single trait deemed problematic, even if such a problematic trait really exists. EA games don’t need to be wiped from the market. This is, as always, just a way to say that one should always produce in response to zones of intensity, a rule that entails that we ought and guides how we should resist all instances of desiring-acquisition, and a means of expressing that an anti-political outlook reduces many complex zones to static Beings, precluding such productions.

Our last concern with certain strands of anarchism deals not as much with the end goal it forwards as a remedy to the violence of the State, and more with the way it diagnoses these problems in the first place. For many, ‘anarchism’ is mentally associated with ‘primitivism’, with the assumption that the former entails a total renunciation of any form of social development, as it is assumed that the issue of the State is not that it is a specific, problematic manifestation of society, but that it is a society at all. Deleuze and Guattari, however, following the work of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres, clarify that “primitive, segmentary societies have often been defined as societies without a State… the conclusion has been that these societies did not reach the degree of economic development, or the level of political differentiation, that would make the formation of the State apparatus both possible and inevitable: the implication is that primitive people "don't understand" so complex an apparatus” (ATP, p. 357). Deleuze, Guattari, and Clastres are here concerned with the ‘evolutionist’ understanding of history, one that takes the rule of the State to be a natural development at a certain degree of social size, intelligence, complexity. We have already seen Baudrillard’s dismissal of such a linear reading of history, one that understands the West to be more ‘advanced’ than the countries it thereby justifies its forceful ‘correction’ of. Announcing the State as the consequence of historical progress turns it into a Real World, an interior, one that reprimands the Dionysian exterior of barbarism that fails to realize such a beacon. Anarchism as total devolution, however, retains the same linear judgement of society---it just turns it around. Now, the ‘Real World’ is the pre-social Neanderthal, and the ‘Apparent World’ is the modern world, the vaccine, the iPhone, and so on. We see a clear ressentiment here, a nihilism with the reality one is surrounded by, the one overflowing with fragments of the life one has taken to be indicative of total sociological failure. At the same time, though, the association of the State with every other aspect of modernity is just wrong. “Warding off the formation of a State apparatus, making such a formation impossible, would be the objective of a certain number of primitive social mechanisms, even if they are not consciously understood as such” (ATP, p. 357). There is no reason to think that ‘anarchism’ must entail primitivism, or moreover, to think that primitivism entails a lack of social and technological growth and innovation. Primitivism and anarchism refer to a style of life, existence absent a State, and therefore, to any product of desiring-production. It only comes to be synonymous with the caveman when the State historian concludes that simple-mindedness is the only way a stateless society could bear itself. When Deleuze remarks that there is ‘no leftist government’, then, he means just that there is no liberating way to govern people---not that the institutions and tools currently used in tandem with the State cannot be separated from its service or reoriented away towards a coupling with the flows of desiring-production. We do not need to echo the Freudian evolutionist, and think that primitivism is always bad, that any traditional, less technological activity signifies a pseudo-anarchist reversal of the historical objective and condemnation of all aspects of the modern world. Primitivism, as well as modernity, is perfectly fine, as long as it is desiring-production. Gothic cathedrals or Pierce the Veil crop-tops: it’s all Nevermore.

We have completed our clarification of anarchism, understanding now that anarchy entails neither relativism, individualism, isolationism, nor anti-institutionalism/technologism. This, however, does not complete our critique, for that still entails providing an alternative. Everything that we have said above is really just a more detailed, more schizoanalytic, repetition of the two treatises that I wrote in Ish’s event. The advocacies that these texts landed on, if not vague, were certainly in the right direction. Beta of the Pack’s Minecraft Manifesto (2023a) reasons “we need a state that is focused not on order, and that does not support freedom through neglect. We need a state that genuinely cares for and materially assists the projects freely chosen by its citizens” (p. 27), concluding with the remark (that riffs on a Megadeth lyric, which itself riffs on a John F. Kennedy quote) “ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for you” (p. 36). Xyr On Unity (2023b), written as a less theoretically dense, more persuasive, more spying-on-the-meeting-focused companion to the Manifesto, ends with a call: “‘the Slum’ must unite and pressure our leaders. We will strike, protest, circulate, and if need be, revolt, to protect our freedom” (p. 16). I don’t think either of these resolutions is wrong, and indeed, both of them even seem to be in the direction of creating and proliferating a rhizome. They are, however, lacking any language from (and possibly any knowledge of) schizoanalysis, which might make it a little abstract for practical application, or more easily enable misinterpretation. Most importantly, Easton Logback is still trying to write a foundational work on the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and Beta of the Pack’s vague polemics about revolution don’t quite cut it. Easton gives Beta’s leash a little tug; she’s sniffed the grass too long, and it's time to get back on his academic path. Let’s let them work their differences out; in the meantime, we can see what Deleuze and Guattari had to say on the matter.

I can’t resist first turning to the conceptualization of the non-State organization as that of the ‘pack’. “Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type that centers around organs of power” (ATP, p. 358). Lacking the State’s gravitational centers, the socius or the Being, and the striations of their consequence, the pack is a network of deterritorialized flows, connections between fluid nodes, “a fabric of immanent relations” (ATP, p. 358). The pack and the rhizome are essentially the same---there is no arborescent grid that the wolves-nodes must assimilate towards, the streets rather forming around and bending with the specific zones of intensity of the nodes, the becomings of the wolves. It is not a question of subjecting the schizophrenic process to a certain State, or even imposing a contextual, less slow State on the process as it is in order to optimize it for some valued variable. The individual is never reduced to a component of a broader system. “In a pack each member is alone even in the company of others (for example, wolves on the hunt); each takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band” (ATP, p. 33). The free movement of the nodes across their BwOs remains an unobstructed foundation of our project. Cooperation, collectivization, or sacrifice in the name of a common goal (the hunt) is not a compulsory mandate, but a coincidental agreement, one that flows from and can be broken by the immanent desires of the wolves-nodes. “We certainly would not say that discipline is what defines a war machine: discipline is the characteristic required of armies after the State has appropriated them. The war machine answers to other rules… they animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State” (ATP, p. 358). The rhizome or pack is less created than it is extended through social organization: connections are drawn between points that work together, and severed between points that don’t, in constant transformation. “Irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law… he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis” (ATP, p. 352). Unsurprisingly, our description of the ideal social formation is just another description of desiring-production---machines changing and being changed by the flows of desire, drifting freely across their BwOs. Perhaps putting it all in terms of the pack makes it easier to conceptualize such a principle in more materially organizational terms, with the more vital and collective subject of the wolf. The main function of invoking this vocabulary in our initial description, though, is to reclaim the online alias I chose for myself in 2^nd grade. ‘of the Pack’, once an indicator of belonging to a mid Mario Kart Wii clan, now a signification of permanent immersion within a rhizome.

The pack avoids the problematic of Tricolour, the arborescent overcoding of citizens into preestablished roles in the service of the grander growth of the State. This is not, however, to imply that the pack lacks any semblance of structure. “Doubtless, there is no more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by move… the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it, and to which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign” (ATP, p. 33). The distinction between the pack and the group is not the presence or absence of relative organization, but the question of what animates such a production, deterritorialized flows or the attempt to reterritorialize them, desiring-production or desiring-acquisition? At a purely material level, there is not much difference between Nevermore (pack) and Tricolour (group). Yet, as Nevermore itself taught us, the minor divergence between the two---a foundational motive of desiring-production, or of aspiration towards objective law---is the greatest delineation, the only delineation, we could make. Deleuze and Guattari concede the State anthropologist’s observation that primitive societies have chiefs, “but the State is not defined by the existence of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power” (ATP, p. 357). Where the rhizomatic, lupine chief, found in the primitive pack, distinguishes himself from the State official is that “the chief… has no instituted weapon other than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, no other rule than his sense of the group's desires. The chief is more like a leader or a star than a man of power and is always in danger of being disavowed, abandoned by his people” (ATP, p. 358). The chief, to the extent that they are a ‘leader’, are not in charge of the flows of the pack, but on the contrary, are subservient to those flows, earning any deferral of authority from the citizens only insofar as they demonstrate a capacity to support the expression of the becomings they are presented with. This is not a resigned ‘social contract’, the Enlightenment assumption that the reasonable State knows best, and the citizen feeling fulfilled may occur as a byproduct. The warrior-wolf is always liable to break the bond. Nor is the ‘leader’ reterritorialized into an exclusive public servant role, reduced to a means of accomplishing desires for everyone else, unable to take any share of the product for themselves. The leader’s role, powers, and subject are all contextual, produced as part of and in the service of the schizophrenic process. Tricolour invokes grids and laws to raze the citizen’s build projects, should they fall out of line with the state’s transcendent vision. The pack, as social organization, does the exact opposite---draws immanent, rhizomatic connections to facilitate the citizen’s freely-chosen builds.

The inversion of the State’s formula, however, should not be taken as an inversion of Hobbes. The submission of the leader is not necessarily to the subjective wants of the citizens, but rather, to the process of desiring-production. Should the whims of Man turn against the schizophrenic flows, the leader (and indeed, the entire pack) may step in. Deleuze and Guattari are perhaps most fascinated with Clastres’s thesis for its claim that primitive societies were more than just not earlier evolutionary stages awaiting a State, but a qualitatively distinct social formation that actively warded off the formation of the State. “Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms, are a part of chieftainship and keep an apparatus distinct from the social body from crystallizing” (ATP, p. 357). The pack, then, is not the negligent, powerless government of Nine Lives Village (there is an easy joke to make here about cats and dogs). The pack, merely through its sole commitment to proliferating deterritorialized flows, actively challenges the production of such microfascisms, as every movement not already striated by a socius marks a resistance to it. At the same time, the invocation of the chief as the destroyer of microfascism should not lure us into conceiving of the chief as a macrofascist. Precluding desiring-acquisition does not require, and moreover, as such cannot entail, a police state. The chief is not a tyrant, an enforcer, who just happens to have read Deleuze. We would be misled if we even thought that there was a single chief, that the chief was a permanent position, that the ‘chief’ named anything other than the source of a vector of deterritorialized speed at a given moment. The ‘chief’ is the philosopher, but also the friend who gives the philosopher an affirming compliment, the crew lead that helps divide the labor in a mutually beneficial way, and also the employee who refuses or iterates on a different crew lead’s demand. The chief is nothing more than whoever is best suited to draw rhizomatic connections in a certain instance. Lacking any vested authority, then, how can the network of immanent wolf-chiefs (Alphas? Betas, even? might ‘Beta of the Pack’ be an apprehension of a source of the war-machine, of a chief?)---this question got distracted. Let’s try again. Lacking any vested authority, how can the network of immanent wolf-chiefs respond to a microfascist production where it does occur? “Collective mechanisms of inhibition… may be subtle, and function as micromechanisms” (ATP, p. 358). Our entire theorization is built on the unflinching belief that desires are produced, that no subject has an immutable essence, and as such, a production of anti-production can always be changed by plugging it back into the schizophrenic process, letting it be smoothed out, deterritorialized. The pack assists its members in their productions, yes, but at the same time, “a movement of decoding runs through the war machine” (ATP, p. 400---perhaps it is now worth clarifying, ‘war-machine’ is basically synonymous with ‘deterritorialization’, ‘pack’, ‘desiring-production’, and so on: the specific nuances we attribute to it will be discussed in its own chapter). The pack, through its proliferation of the rhizome, can always destroy the striations that some rogue member makes. Perhaps one deals with a particularly stubborn microfascist, and is barking up at a brick wall. In this case, the rest of the pack can always band more tightly together, creating internal connections that resist the impositions of and flourish despite their Statist detractor (moreover, we should not assume that this mutual aid, done in the resistance of a socius, does not at the same time chip away at whatever flows of anti-productions motivate such a socius’s creation---exposure to the radiant joy of a group can often challenge their detractor’s disposition). Our method of dealing with the aspirations towards new States within our stateless society, then, seems quite analogous to our method of dealing with threats---Mosh Pit. With such a parallel granted, we can see that it’s not unheard of to drag a particularly problematic dissenter out of the circle.

Speaking of the Mosh Pit, given our laundry list of gripes with the manner in which States approached international affairs, it is worth asking how the pack deals with that which is outside of it. Of course, the pack claims no rigid territory, no exclusive ethnic ‘inside’, for any machine can and must be connected to the rhizome, overwhelmed with the flows of desiring-production. All are welcome to join the pack. But in the case where the international subject in question is a State, one that appears initially resistant to joining the rhizome (or, one that, if it did join, would renounce, overcode, assimilate, and destroy the entire system, spreading the roots of its transcendent tree), we could again think of it merely as a ‘threat’. The orientation we take, then, is essentially the same as our dealing with internal fascisms---change relations with the external State such that it no longer is reterritorialized/reterritorializing, or change relations within the internal pack such that the external State’s violence is ineffective. Perhaps the scaling up of this consideration, though, helps us understand just how such a decoding operates. “Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space… the integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one of the most powerful factors of appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus… but there is another danger as well, the one threatening the State when it appropriates the war machine (all States have felt the weight of this danger, as well as the risks this appropriation represents for them)” (ATP, p. 418-419). The ‘State’, as with all things, is not a monolith, just a socius that wishes it was, and as such, all the deterritorialized flows which inhabit it (the integrated nomads) remain a resistant factor towards its overcoding goal. The art of international relations, then, is one of finding the nomads within a State and affirming, supporting them, or entering a State as a nomad oneself---at a smaller scale, finding one’s deterritorialized desires, or producing some in them, and unleashing them---to rupture the interior Being. The specific form that drawing such a connection takes is, of course, variable from scenario to scenario, dependent on the zones of intensity, their affects, intensities, relations to the State, and so on. It is, however, always a question of extending, producing, remaining within, the rhizome, never of turning into a State just so that we can deal with another one. International politics is just a scaled-up shuffling or enjoying in spite of, with more concert attendees to be considerate of, to be flowed into by. International relations makes a lot more sense when one doesn’t try to understand it through some overarching, rational system, but just calls it a Mosh Pit.

As for the association of the pack with wilderness, this is only accurate to the extent that the pack wishes to remain in an undeveloped form, that the flows of desire escort them there. “There is an old scenario: ‘from clans to empires,’ or ‘from bands to kingdoms.’ But nothing says that this constitutes an evolution, since bands and clans are no less organized than empire-kingdoms (ATP, p. 359). Moreover, the mechanisms for warding off the formation of the State that we have just discussed “cannot be understood without renouncing the evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs as a rudimentary, less organized, social form” (ATP, p. 358). Why assume that the wolves are too stupid to create a government, and not the contrary, that we are too stupid to leave our governments behind and join a pack? The wolves seem to be happier, for what it’s worth. What we mean to emphasize here, though, is that there is no reason to think that the technological advancements, the innovation, the material ‘quality of life’ that we associate with the development of the State cannot also be actualized in the pack-form. The pack has nothing to do with the prehistoric. From where we already are, we know that there is no machine that is problematic in a vacuum, that the insertion of deterritorialized flows can always convert a technology of the State into a tool of the pack. “Capitalism proceeds by way of the State-form rather than the town-form; the basis for the fundamental mechanisms described by Marx… may be laid in the towns, but the towns function as mechanisms of accumulation, acceleration, and concentration only to the extent that they are appropriated by States” (ATP, p. 454). Indeed, urban centers are often some of the most rhizomatic social formations one can find.

To the extent that one’s concern is not with whether the pack entails a reversal to a primitive lifestyle, however, but rather, with whether the pack can continue innovating and ‘progressing’ into the future, there is still no need for concern. For as much as “history contests each innovation”, it “cannot succeed in effacing the nomad traces… what the nomads invented was the man-weapon-animal, man-horse-bow assemblage. Through this assemblage of speed, the ages of metal are marked by innovation” (ATP, p. 404). As much as the economist would like us to believe that the incentive of capital, or perhaps the more totalitarian Marxist would say, the threat of the gulag, is needed to get people to work, we are not persuaded. On the one hand, there are countless instances of attempted innovations, products of raw, assembled desire, that are prevented from realization by the perverse monetary requirements of capital. Shockingly, a system of striations made explicitly to impede on the creative flows of desiring-production cannot be said to be the only way to create new things. On the other hand, though, we do not need to confuse the pack with the critic’s caricature of the anarchist commune, where insulin is produced by the one person who just so happens to enjoy protein extraction as a hobby. We are wolves, not cats, and therefore have no interest in the socius of the Self, no allegiance to individualism. “Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science. Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough” (ATP, p. 368). It is perhaps telling, though surely coincidental, that Deleuze and Guattari support this thesis, a prime example of our conception of Nevermore, with the example of Gothic stonecutters as nomadic workers. Regardless, the successful maintenance of ‘needs’ within the pack is not some mythical, utopian byproduct of everyone doing whatever hedonistic activity they like. The pack’s fulfillment of communal needs is quite intentional. The distinction, perhaps, is again one of speed and slowness---“for there to be work, there must be a capture of activity by the State apparatus… ‘barbarian,’ or nomad, art… regardless of the effort or toil they imply, they are of the order of free action, related to pure mobility, and not of the order of work with its conditions of gravity, resistance, and expenditure” (ATP, p. 401). Even if it is painful, at times unenjoyable, labor that is freely chosen (which is quite distinct from any ‘job’ that capital forces us to chose) is deterritorialized, insofar as it is motivated exclusively by the flows of desiring-production, as a helpful response to an ‘I feel…’, and continues to change in practice along with the changes in those flows. There is no reason to think, then, that certain roles cannot be announced, certain needs of the community cannot be posted, with certain members offering to help fulfill such demands. “Logistics is the art of these external relations, which are no less a part of the war machine than the internal relations of strategy, in other words, the composition of combat units in relation to one another” (ATP, p. 391). The important part of this statement, though, is that ‘logistics’ or ‘strategy’ in the pack, far from the forced assumption of certain jobs that the terms have come to be associated with in the State, is rather a ‘composition of combat units in relation to one another’, that is to say, an organization of zones of intensity as they are, and not an attempt to reorder zones of intensity into Beings that would be more convenient for getting these zones to where they ‘should be’. The organizations of the pack are not the State mandate of work, the destruction of leisure (Tricolour has shown us this). The organizations of the pack are just the creation of connections between already existing wolf-nodes, enabling and enhancing mutual productions at times where labor does occur, labor that belongs to the same schizophrenic realm of free action as rest. These can be formed, perhaps, by identifying what a certain node’s desire would benefit from and what could be done to realize such conditions, by creating avenues that enable easier and more efficient cooperation on certain productions, by suggesting that two nodes with similar or supplementary aspirations cooperate, and so on. Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize such a production system as a “chain of mobile workshops” (ATP, p. 415), a series of independent, deterritorialized becomings occasionally coupling to make different, possibly better, possibly worse (pack joke: paws-ibly :3), responses to zones of intensity. Between two poles of coding desires into arborescent Worker-Beings of repressive socii---global capitalism and State totalitarianism---we find this inversion, in which the continued flow and production of desires is primary. The urban center; the college campus; the pre-capitalist town. This sounds a bit like something we already have a word for---rhizome.

To the extent that one understands our conceptualization of the pack-form, the rhizome-government, it seems that there are two lines of objection. One could, as always, insist that we are wrong in our privileging of the liberation of flows of desire, that we must instead let ourselves be overcoded in the name of some broader, transcendent objective. To these critics, we have little to say that we have not repeated countless times already, that there is no static object of fulfillment, that the pursuit of acquiring it is violent, ressentiment, and so on. I suppose we can just label them Freudian, laugh at them and their return to Daddy, and call it a day. The more likely gripe, I would expect, is the one that any dissident from the status quo is quite familiar with by now---‘it sounds great in theory, but…’, followed by some variation of Soviet Union-iPhone-Venezuela-100 Trillion Dead. Most individuals would probably agree that, to the extent the pack can exist---total liberated desire, being leveraged communally to protect and facilitate these deterritorialized flows---it is a wonderful formulation. They may disagree with our optimism that such a state of affairs could ever be realized. For these detractors, we have a few thoughts.

First, as we noted earlier, ‘there is no desire but assembled, assembling desire’. Becomings are always malleable, and as such, an unwillingness to cooperate, to voluntarily assist another in their response to a zone of intensity, is as much a sign of a specific social configuration as it is of some unchangeable human nature. We could all think of countless examples that disprove such a recourse to inevitable selfishness. Deleuze and Guattari suggest the Greek phalanx formation, which “was inseparable from a whole reversal of values, and from a passional mutation that drastically changed the relations between desire and the war machine… the entire Eros of war changes, a group homosexual Eros tends to replace the zoosexual Eros of the horseman” (ATP, p. 399). The cultural context of the phalanx was one that facilitated the Greek warrior, far from being forced or even misled into dying for his fellow man, to be penetrated by the flows of his comrades in such a way that his zone of intensity was at once theirs, that his production of helping however he could was a desire that was as much the community’s as it was his own. I think of a couple more recent cases. There is the Minnesota Timberwolves first-round playoff series against the Phoenix Suns in the 2024 NBA Playoffs, in which the Wolves (another easy pack joke is in here somewhere) won largely due to ‘team basketball’---great defensive communication & effort, five or more players scoring 20 points, random bench players having historic plus-minus splits---prompting a wave of jokes online about the T-Wolves being ‘communist’ basketball, pictures of the starting five with the Soviet flag transparently overlaid, redesigns of their retro logo that included a hammer and sickle, and so on. This ‘team culture’ could also be seen off-the-court, in little interview interactions that showed genuine connections between teammates, a real desire for the person next to you to succeed just as much or more than you wished it for yourself. This made for a fun-to-watch team, a philosophical justification to get an Anthony Edwards jersey, and another challenge to the belief that becomings cannot be made to care about other becomings. A little before this series, I was still on the aforementioned study abroad session in London, where I made extensive use of the train network. The trains, a paradigmatic case of a nation working to support its populace, and not the other way around, was surrounded with an energy of collectivity (at least for me, the dumb American). Delays were hardly scorned, potentially annoying interactions were laughed at, and, most striking to me, the vomit that the horrors of British cuisine projected from me was met not with condemnation, but by an earnest (if not ineffective) extension of aid from the passenger next to me. We should not, in any of these examples, get caught up on the potential ineffectiveness of the productions (the Greeks lost, the Wolves got bounced in the conference finals, the tissues I was offered didn’t make a dent in the mess). Nor should we think of these as some kind of perversion of the schizophrenic process, where subjects are peer-pressured, moralized, panopticon-ed into putting the needs of others before themselves (we have a term for that kind of production---a socius, the State). What we should zero in on, instead, is the principle that animates each scenario, that becomings can respond to other becomings, that a deterritorialized environment creates conditions in which one may be quite willing to perform tedious or difficult work for the benefit of others, with no clear personal gain. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems that anyone who pontificates about an inherent human selfishness has never experienced anything resembling love.

Second, we should not overestimate the harm if we are wrong about these predictions. If the pack was some kind of commune, staunchly independent from the rest of society, then any failures to reproduce the State’s conditions of modernity could be catastrophic. This, however, is not at all the case. The pack, as with any other advocacy that stems from the schizophrenic process, is not an object to be acquired, a plan to be actualized, a one-time societal redesign, for that would place it back in the realm of desiring-acquisition. The pack, the rhizome, as with the flows of desire they symbolize, are a process, a production, a creation, a work of art. What this means for us, practically, is that the pack is always evolving, and at the same time, is always able to borrow from the State’s technologies, to deterritorialize them as they become part of a totally different assemblage. The nomad has a history of such ‘theft’, as well as of innovation: “in the case of the saber… the best of the commentators finds it fitting to add that the Scythians could not have invented it at any rate—poor nomads that they were—and that crucible steel necessarily came from a sedentary milieu. But… what can ‘revealing the secret’ mean if the Scythians were incapable of putting it to use, and understood nothing of all that? Blame the deserters, why don't you. You don't make an atomic bomb with a secret, any more than you make a saber if you are incapable of reproducing it, and of integrating it under different conditions, of transferring it to other assemblages. Propagation and diffusion are fully a part of the line of innovation; they mark a bend in it” (ATP, p. 405). Should the pack fail to set up its own insulin factory, it is quite willing to draw from the existing surpluses of the State, until it can iterate on the State’s recipe enough to reproduce the product and the factories in a manner that is detached from the violence it implies in the current, capitalist regime. Only a Freudian would totally reject that which it finds disagreeable with. We’re always checking the scraps, finding the vectors of deterritorialization lurking within the interior, or at least noting what machines could be reclaimed in the service of such speeds. Wolves are known to scavenge.

Third and finally, though, none of this really matters. I feel quite confident in the arguments we’ve postulated above---the pack can and will eventually produce in a way that adequately supports each of its citizen-becomings, and has the orientation needed to survive in the interim. Schizoanalysis, though, is propped up on another gamble, one that underlies any second-order claim we make. If we’re wrong about the specific nature of a production---we call something a socius when it really isn’t, we say a line of flight will accomplish something that it can’t---that’s irrelevant, insofar as the claim is always mobilized by the flows of desiring-production. On the one hand, such fidelity to the schizophrenic process means that our project evolves by processive experimentation, that we are less committed to any specific formulation than we are to the rules that animate them, which suggests that, should our suggestions be incorrect, a continued commitment to the flows of desiring-production, towards responding to zones of intensity, will mitigate and eventually work our way out of the consequences. The pack keeps growing; the rhizome keeps spreading. At an even more basic level, though, these are all reflections on the material feasibility of certain structures, which says nothing of whether or not the pack-form is really deterritorialized. We feel safe concluding, then, that it is, and that is all we need to feel, for that is all that matters. This is a point we stressed in our first chapter, and one that has perhaps slid into the background a bit, but that remains as relevant as ever. There is no objective measure of fulfillment (Freud); there is no object that necessarily produces joy (Lacan, and perhaps a capitalist as well). This is why, then, the only question is of life-affirmation, why the nihilism of ressentiment is all that we seek to avoid. Life cannot be rationally justified; it is therefore of the utmost importance that we find a way to nonetheless will it unconditionally. My dorm room was, materially speaking, far worse than my home---less space, less organized, less comfortable bed, the list goes on. But none of this has stopped me from wishing to be back in Room 707 from the moment I left, the most significant variable in which is how smooth it was, the total acceptance at even the most absurd productions, the complete absence of striations, even among tightly enclosed walls. If we’re wrong in our above theorizations, then the pack might not guarantee the same ‘quality of life’ that the State has reached, at least not right away. But I have a hard time settling for a ‘quality of life’ that leaves one constantly feeling empty, paranoid, suicidal. My friends and I have a linguistic quirk of referring to items associated with me as the ‘Beta of the Noun’ or ‘Noun of the Pack’---my shitty Rav-4 is the ‘Beta of the Rav’, my basement is the ‘Beta of the House’, my broken bedframe that creaks when you sit on it is the ‘Bedframe of the Pack’. More explicitly now, with our understanding of the synonymity of Pack and Rhizome, but in effect as far as I can remember, these titles connote an intimate connection. They attest to the role these objects play in the schizophrenic process, a role that, insofar as they are always named in the presence of friends, is basically deterritorialized. Maybe I am alone here, but I would much rather have my Junk of the Pack than whatever Luxury of the State, given the loving flows that radiate out of the former, and the impersonal strings that are attached to the latter. The Pack signifies deterritorialization; that’s all I need to know. I hope you feel the same.

But all of this speculation about whether a rhizomatic social organization is possible is a waste of time, when there’s already been one. Let’s get back to Minecraft.

About an hour before the beginning of Day 3, I lurked in a Discord call in the server of Aperion---one of the Northern nations who had attended the meeting the session prior. At the summit, Aperion had been the foremost dissenter from the idea of Island-wide unification, and as such, I was hopeful that I could find in them a potential ally for the anti-security agenda that I planned to spend Day 3 distributing. It was a surprise, then, when I heard one of the candidates for a government position (this Discord call was an election) pitch the idea of colonizing the Southern Island, due to its untapped resource potential and presumed lack of inhabitants. As an inhabitant of the Southern Island, this news was concerning.

When Ish’s event did start for the evening, I immediately went down to the beach, making my way back to History’s homestead. I had found a carrot while traveling to the meeting the day prior, and fulfilling my promise to bring one to my friend was my stated justification for the intrusion. Once I had his attention, though, I informed him of what I had learned in the Aperion server, assuming the potential plot would be of relevance to him. It apparently was; he quickly pitched the idea of creating a fort along his coastline, one that Southern Island natives could retreat to in the case of an invasion. I expressed vocal support for banding together, but did not stay around to put these commitments into action---for I had spent the rest of the downtime between days finalizing manuscripts for my two philosophic publications, and was zeroed in on finding the sugar cane I needed to print the books in game. I offered a hope to correspond with History again soon, one that earnestness was perhaps diluted by my excitement at what revolutions my finished texts might bring, and bid him goodbye.

Not long after I left History, he was ambushed by another visitor. This time, it was a player named Ocho, asking for directions. Ocho was a religious leader in the nation of Tricolour, but had become disgruntled with the impersonal nature of internal affairs in the nation, being reduced to a cog in someone else’s (whether national or selfish) machine---without any of the schizoanalytic terminology, she had reached the same disillusionment with Tricolour’s striated division of labor as I had. She was therefore eager to support History when he revealed Aperion’s alleged colonization to her, taking initiative to use her favorable position with Northern higher-ups to ask for international support for Southern sovereignty in the case of invasion. History, during her absence, would explore the Southern landmass, informing the other dwellings he could find. The two planned to reconvene at the end of the day.

Ocho’s diplomacy was largely unsuccessful; the Northern democracies were hesitant to make any commitments without first consulting their other Northern partners (the gravitational weight of the defense-pact-socius at work). History, in a sense, found only bad news as well; his travels stumbled not upon native Southern Islanders, but instead on an outsourced honey farm (and its keepers, who offered tacit support to Aperion upon hearing of their resolution), a ruined beach next to a decimated forest, which was marked with a community sign-board proclaiming the Aperion logging team had been there.

As History took Ocho through the mountains to lead her to this evidence of imperialism, he stumbled across a cabin in the woods. Peering inside, History read aloud the signs on the wall: ‘School of Dionysus. Members: Beta of the Pack?’. Ocho chimed in: ‘this is that crazy guy! When I went to Tricolour, someone told me that there was a crazy guy named Beta of the Pack, who lived here all on his own’. I didn’t know I had shooters like that; name recognition is good, I suppose, but I have no idea where it came from. I hadn’t circulated my materials much yet. In fact, I had returned home almost instantly after I completed my books, realizing that I didn’t have any idea how I would get people to actually care about them. It just so happened that, as this conversation took place, I was regrouping in my underground bunker, beneath the trunk of the tree I had encountered on the first day. I figured I should go up to face the fire. I surfaced.

Assisted by History and I’s mutual recognition, it did not take long for the three of us to find common ground. I traveled with them to the abandoned tree farm History had crossed, talking on the way. As we debriefed each other on our developments thus far in the event, strands of connection began to form a clear picture. Ocho and I both detested the Northern governments’ imposed organization; History and I were directly threatened by the North’s imperialist exploitation of our home island; all of us, based on Ocho’s limited success in enlisted pledged aid, were on our own. As Day Three wound to an end, the trio took turns verbalizing what each of them was thinking: we would band together, to protect the Southern Island.

We spent the first part of Day Four rounding up the two largest nations on the Southern Island---New Dawn and Bonzo---as well as a few independent residents we ran into along the way, convening for our own island-wide meeting. Recognizing the danger that confronted us---indeed, we had only found more evidence of planned colonization and extraction between days three and four---and how outnumbered we were, it would have been easy to regurgitate the unification polemics that the Northern summit had proposed. We were essentially responding to the same Apparent World, with the concerns in ours maybe being even more grounded in reality. We did not, however---perhaps Ocho and I’s shared observance and disagreement with the Day 2 meeting had something to do with that, but without ever making that concern explicit, there was unanimous support for maintenance of total national autonomy.

The formation meeting of the Southern Alliance, materially speaking, did very little. We did not make (or even suggest) any sort of mutual defense pact (at least two of us knew the pitfalls that policy entailed, and would have surely dissented if the proposition came up); there was no mutual government, chamber, laws, enforcement, or other organization put in place. There was just a unanimous agreement that we ought to announce the presence of life on the Southern Island to deter the destruction that was impending, and to generate sympathy for the destruction that had already occurred, and that we would leverage a collective name, and implied collective power, to do so. Thus, the Southern Alliance was born.

We celebrated this congregation by filling the in-game chat with a traditional affirmation of the host nation, New Dawn: ‘to a new tomorrow’. Due to absurdly coincidental timing, the spamming of this message was followed, not even 10 seconds later, by eight death messages. The Northern nations, unbeknownst to us, were having another summit at the same time as ours, and an assassin had rigged the host building with a stalagmite trap that was now responsible for the execution of eight of the North’s leaders and highest-ranking officials. It was not a good look, especially given New Dawn’s cult-status in the eyes of the affected states. Post-session Discord defense was able to ward off a joint, retaliatory leveling of the Southern population. We were still expected to sit on trial the following day for our potential involvement in the crimes.

Many threats faced the Southern Alliance. The conditions for a Security apparatus were ripe. But one never appeared. Instead, despite possessing zero conceptual understanding of the term (indeed, I hadn’t even invented the term yet), the Southern Alliance formed a Mosh Pit. There was, first and foremost, an internal formation of mutual support, manifested through collaboration on national build projects, formulation of island-wide development ideas, and general interaction. None of these really entailed ‘security’, constituted the improvement of capabilities such that we were more prepared to prevent or fight back an attack. Nothing resembling a formalized defense pact. We made a network of underground tunnels, originally intended to be filled with traps, but we never got around to militarizing them---it was basically just a subterranean maze. Even then, those were hardly created as a striating wall, as the idea first appeared as a joke between History and me, staying up too late together in a voice call after we joined forces on Day 3, taking turns experimenting with how to make the most psychologically arduous tunnel system possible for shits and grins (late night VCs remain a staple in the Southern Alliance Discord, referred to colloquially as ‘schizo hours’). Fittingly for a product of desiring-production (joke traps), as opposed to a desperately sought object of desiring-acquisition (actual Security), work on the tunnels was never mandated, or really even encouraged. Anyone that worked on them, mutually beneficial and laboriously tedious as they were, did it because they felt like it, because they felt like being helpful in whatever way they could. None of these internal collaborations did much to actually alleviate, or prepare for, a potential invasion. For a transcendent, objective spectator, we had just as much reason to feel threatened. Thinking of these connections as productive of a sense of security seems absurd. But we’ve never been one for condemning potentialities. Nor for transcendent objectivity. Rather, these relations were questions of how to persist in the face of constant impending vulnerability, how to enjoy in spite of. The linking of various threatened nodes to support their productions. There was no socius of Security, or striating Securitization. There wasn’t even anything that resembled caution. Sometimes, all that feeling safe takes is a hand on the shoulder, a gleam in the eyes, a ‘I’m here for you’, or even less, ‘we’re in this together’. Death is not an impact.

Mosh Pit’s other component, though, was equally present. Thanks to our announced existence, defense on trial, and diplomatic affairs, the Northern nations came to cast aside any intent of colonization or unilateral extraction. There was, in these maneuvers, no attempt to exterminate the Northern nations from the threat landscape, nor was such an idea ever on the table. Additionally, there was no reterritorialization of the Southern Alliance into the Northern State---we declined to join their defense pact, despite their extension of the offer. There was just the proliferation of the rhizome, entangling ourselves with even the arborescent roots, drawing connections with the State to change the relationship between our two nodes, to mitigate the chance of destruction. A shuffling away. This is, of course, not to suggest that international recognition is an endpoint for a pack. Most members of the Southern Alliance raised an eyebrow at the North’s continued dismissiveness towards our environmental concerns, and as long as the North maintained a State-form itself, we were far from satisfied. There’s always more connections to draw. What should be noted here, however, is that the pure affirmation of deterritorialized flows, the Southern Alliance’s continued immersion in desiring-production, was able to change the productions of even the reterritorialized and reterritorializing North. Achieving a relative feeling of security does not need (and indeed, cannot be accomplished by) the realization of an imagined sarcophagus, and a violent imposition of that vision onto all the bad objects of the Apparent World. The pack makes it easy to carry on despite a threat, but by the same stroke, the same moving bodies, free actions, rhizomatic connections, it enables the assuagement of such a threat. This is done, not as an overcoding of the threat by the threatened, but as a mutual becoming, a specific production that flows from a particular assemblage, with no recourse to a universalizing system of surplus value. The rhizome can rearrange itself, and in doing so, even rupture the tree. There’s no need to resort to a State to get rid of one, to ever leave the schizophrenic process. Speaking from experience, I can attest that it’s difficult not to join the Mosh Pit upon seeing it---and it’s impossible not to at least admire it.

The Southern Alliance never came around to any centralized power. From the start of our formational gathering, decisions were reached unanimously, with no mechanism of enforcement other than mutual sentiment. Political responsibilities were delegated, by consensus, to whoever was both willing and suited for a given job: Spinelius, Ocho, and Jeff attended the trial, Ocho, History, and Spinelius attended the diplomatic meeting, Nyx and I worked with the cartographers, dtyn and I worked with the environmental merchants…. At the beginning of Day Six, in our routine pre-opening-of-the-server meeting (conducted in a standard Discord call, with me screensharing and note-taking a Google Doc with the loose agenda---recall the importance of note-taking?), we decided it would be useful to announce a leader, just to streamline international correspondence. There was undivided agreement, to the point of emphasis, that the leader would have zero power beyond the common citizen, that the title would not grant them any more responsibilities than they would otherwise receive due to task proficiency, that they were functionally a ‘figurehead’ for the alliance. An election was held on Day Seven, and saw a tie between Suit (the leader of New Dawn) and Crew (the leader of Bonzo)---the two just decided to co-lead. Even then, the announcement of the figurehead changed nothing about the rhizomatic nature of affairs---indeed, three candidates even missed the election because they were caught up at the Island-Two-wide diplomatic meeting that assured our international recognition, and in this sense, being leader was perhaps even an anti-qualification. It is almost striking how much the conception of ‘leader’ we arrived at mirrors Deleuze and Guattari’s, unbeknownst to us at the time, image of the ‘chief’: no instituted weapon other than prestige, no other rule than sense of the group's desires, more like a star than a man of power. The real source of power, in any moment, was just whichever wolf-node was best suited to multiply and amplify the rhizomatic connections in that scenario. Deleuze and Guattari also highlight the chief’s constant susceptibility to betrayal---this detail is not lost on us. In the same discussion that we resolved to elect a figurehead, we all agreed on a guiding, inviolable principle. ‘EVERYTHING BEING OPTIONAL IS MANDATORY’. A thesis so significant that it was made in all caps, and repeated later in the document, as the ‘tl;dr’ to the entire docket. Far from just a safeguard against a tyrannical, Tricolourean striation, it applied to the microsocial, ‘optional’ interactions as well. ‘If a nation is part of the alliance, they should not be allowed to force their own members to do things’. These were not even my suggestions, but recommendations by Suit, the leader of New Dawn, the incumbent figurehead, the individual with the most power to lose. Sure, the language is a bit elementary, and doesn’t imply the same fluid, intersubjective, multiplied quality of individual, ‘optional’ desires that our NEWMAGICWANDean conception of desiring-production does, but we could hardly hold that against him---I hadn’t developed that understanding myself yet, and even now that I have, it took 10 pages to express, which would ruin the simple and snappy character of this tagline. Even without an embedded critique of Levinas, too, it’s hard to miss the parallels between Suit’s resolution and Deleuze and Guattari’s “magic formula”---‘OPTIONAL = MANDATORY’, ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ (ATP, p. 20)---both of which highlight a single commitment, and a militant commitment, to the deterritorialized flows of the schizophrenic process.

The conservative reader (I’m shocked they’re still here) will bemoan that, without mandatory tasks, nothing will get done! They will be infuriated to learn the Southern Alliance ended up as one of the more developed groups on the server. New Dawn finished an impressive medieval castle and surrounding village; Bonzo furnished their valley with rolling wheat farms and Victorian mills; the once-ruined beach was refurbished into a seaside social zone. Despite the plethora of constructions, and the lack of any Gothic ones, it seems that the Southern Alliance’s architecture was fundamentally Nevermoric, at least in the most important sense: the manner in which they were produced. At no point did these projects ever encroach on the flows of free action; indeed, they were secondary consequences of them. Prior to each day’s start, our collective meeting listed the tasks people planned to undertake. The options were derived from individual want, rather than any objective communal need---items such as preparing the beach for a hypothetical party were listed alongside, and granted the same seriousness as, finishing the castle, gathering food, fulfilling diplomatic requests. Resources were allocated, typically without expectation of recuperation, to whichever node needed them. We should not mistake this smooth selection for hedonist reclusion. Members collaborated on builds constantly, even those that provided them no benefit. It was not uncommon to see a nationless player or Bonzo citizen gathering materials for New Dawn’s castle. I spent the entire two hours of Day Five marking above-ground roads between the different civilizations within the alliance, and started Day Six working on below-ground tunnels for more direct transportation. I can’t imagine every second of shoveling dirt was exhilarating, but it was nonetheless limitless speed, deterritorialized ecstasy, for it was a freely chosen and freely continued labor performed in the name of a response to zones of intensity, or perhaps just the Southern Alliance’s collective zone, paths drawn in the expansion of the rhizome. The mandate of optionality was ever-present in the pack’s productions. If someone felt like doing something that wasn’t one of the daily tasks, they were free to do so, and their individual pursuits were never (not as any sort of rule, but just as a byproduct of the culture) judged as less helpful, anti-communal, or whatever. Even when someone did commit to a task, they retained the ability to (and often did) switch to something else whenever they got bored, or if some other project caught their attention. The pack did not force any nodes into place. It just connected nodes where they were, meeting demands without ever demanding, reaping the benefits of the State without any of its striation. Nothing was required, and everything got done---a unique draw of the rhizome government, and an unsurprising outcome for something committed to a process as social as desiring-production. It’s not that people were, in some way, guilted into performing labor, as in Tricolour’s overcoding interior, as the omnipresent, well-respected escape hatch from any activity attests to. Rather, in the rhizome, the pack, the NEWMAGICWANDean social organization, it just so happens that the ‘Self’ often finds a desire, a productive desire, to produce for others, to be helpful where they can, to flow with the zones of intensity of the process as a whole in a mutually productive way. A becoming-Beta of the Southern Alliance and a becoming-Southern Alliance of the Beta. There is an anecdote I recall which, although, of course, is not a requirement to actualize the ‘government works for the people, not people for the government’ reversal of the Manifesto, is certainly reminiscent of it. At the start of Day 5, Nyx (New Dawn’s head architect) expressed a need for diamonds, or spruce wood, or something else, for the construction of the castle. At the suggestion of other New Dawn citizens, Suit was singled out and volunteered for such tedious tasks. Suit was, mind you, not a figurehead at this time, for the Alliance-wide leader position had not been created, but was still the elected leader of New Dawn, and as such, presumably had some authority over the builders asking him to spend the next two hours of a Minecraft social experiment strip-mining. It would have been easy to decline, but with an exaggerated moan (that you couldn’t quite miss the hint of a laugh surrounding), he resigned himself to this supporting role. Pure speed, typical of the rhizome: the chief draws connections for the wolves underground.

Whenever I reflect on it, the amount of coincidences that undergirds the formation of the Southern Alliance astounds me. The butterfly effect of History’s Day-One ‘fuck’ is enormous. This one utterance prompted me to return to him at the start of Day Three, which led to his acquisition of the information that he would later tell to Ocho (who just so happened to get lost near his home) after I had left (in pursuit of my own relatively independent goals). After I finished transcribing my works into in-game books later that day, unsure of how I could catalyze the revolution they sought, I docked in a nation called the Cass Coalition, who’s leader had been the sole sympathizer to citizens wishing to watch the Day Two meeting, hopeful that she might have interest in my ideas. In a sheer comedy of fate, I happened to step onto the Coalition’s beach at the same as Ocho (who I did not know at the time) did, looking to express the concerns of colonization to Northern leaders as she was. Her audience with Cass was granted, and I, too afraid to assert myself, walked by their conversation, just close enough to pick up their voices over the in-game proximity chat. Hearing Ocho mention the colonization threat set off a light-bulb---of course, my anti-State strategies would resonate with the close friend who I had already made, who already suggested a collectivization of the dispossessed, who had been cast in the light of the North’s reterritorializing beam just as I had, HistoryInc!---which prompted me to quickly return to the Southern Island. When I reached History’s home, he was absent (out tallying the damages Northern imperialism had already made), and, feeling a bit of isolation, I melancholically noted the coordinates to his base, returned to mine, and began digging a tunnel from mine to his, enabling me to quickly correspond with him for the remainder of the event. When Ocho and History reconvened, Ocho demanded to see Aperion’s abandoned tree farm, and set off into the mountains despite History’s protest that the server closed in 15 minutes. History chased after Ocho until she realized that she didn’t know where they were going, suggesting History take over navigation duties right at the foot of the hill my cabin sat atop, prompting them to ascend on a collision course with my house. Just as they summited, inspecting my abode, my pickaxe broke underground, forcing me to climb back to my under-tree camp, enabling me to catch History and Ocho’s conversation as I rose. The timing was miraculous---if Ocho or I was slower or faster to the coalition, if Ocho had been any more or less impatient to get to the tree farm, if my pickaxe hadn’t expired just when it did, the Southern Alliance may have never formed. You, by reading this book right now, and thus, everything you do from here on out, is indebted to a single flap of the monarch’s wing. All because, among countless other variables, History said ‘fuck’.

If one thinks about just how much stems from a single interaction, one that could have easily been different, it’s easy to get lost in some existential despair about the feeble grasp of fate, the indifference of the universe, the thin strands that bind one to everyone they love. Everything, with one minor adjustment to the mundane, could have changed. Nietzsche advocates for ‘amor fati’, unconditional love of one’s fate, which isn’t hard to do, equipped with his aesthetic affirmation. Deleuze expresses this concept with reference to a dice roll: “it is not a matter of several dicethrows which… finally reproduce the same combination… it is a matter of a single dicethrow… the dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance” (1962/1983, p. 25-26). There is plenty of chance in the non-deterministic flow of desiring-production, a healthy dose of luck required to end up with any outcome. It is precisely this that makes it so crucial that we are able to affirm the schizophrenic process, to affirm existence, unconditionally---because conditions could so easily be better, or different, inevitably, with all that’s out of control. “The Dionysian couple chance-destiny. Not a probability distributed over several throws but all chance at once; not a final, desired, willed combination, but the fatal combination, fatal and loved, amor fati” (Deleuze, 1962/1983, p. 27). The butterfly effect is quite schizoanalytic, quite Nietzschean, and just as dizzying, just as absurd. Sometimes, I wonder if the reason it feels like ‘everything always works itself out’ for me is because I’ve fallen into a philosophical orientation that affirms life no matter what, if I wouldn’t find myself with the same contentment, the same shit-eating grin, regardless of how things actually turn out. I have no need for luck, perhaps, since amor fati has grabbed luck by the collar and made its bending of and being bent by the flows of fate all but indistinguishable. Things could be drastically different, but they would be no worse. I’ve always thought Félix would be a good name for a dog. At the same time, though, I’d like to think that parts of this dice roll, certain configurations within this produced state, are especially nice, that I do owe some of my fortune to luck. Everything that has gone into every letter in this book, all the inspirations, events, people, that helped me figure out the ideas in here and that contributed to the texture of my expression of them, I love in a particular, distinct way. If you’re reading this, that’s pretty fortunate. You don’t have to read this, you know. It might be perfectly compatible to say I would have the same degree of jubilant life-affirmation no matter what, and that I feel a unique, specific connection with this variation of life. I’m not sure if it is true, or if I would like it to be. It’s all aesthetic, anyways. BUTTERFLY EFFECT: “for this life I cannot change” (Scott, 2018).

Of course, the Southern Alliance was not perfect. There were a handful of mistakes we made: we floated a restrictive refugee policy due to security concerns, there were early calls for consolidation of power to prevent misuse of claimed authority, it’s possible that some of the individual projects had a bit of a gravitational pull that slowed down and striated entry into other productions (and if we’re wrong about that last one, that our expectations of help on communal projects slowed down and striated individual productions). In any case, it’s worth pointing out that the issue with the Southern Alliance was not a problem of the rhizome, or the pack, but on the contrary, that there was a root blocking the rhizome, a State wall redirecting the pack, that we weren’t deterritorialized enough. History, reflecting on the event, has a couple times commented that he wishes we were more steadfast in our commitments, that we did not compromise our belief in what was ‘right’ out of fear for potential retaliation---his knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari is limited to what I’ve slipped into our Discord conversations, which makes this conclusion more rhetorically impactful, but also means I want to take some liberties, and suggest that he does not mean we need to make some formulation of the righteous world and fight for it at all costs (desiring-acquisition, overcoding), but rather, that our resistance to fascism and microfascism must remain absolute, that we must never cut off the flows (desiring-production) (he’s made political comments in another context that make me feel this is an accurate specification). That the Southern Alliance was imperfect isn’t a problem for us---we aren’t concerned with creating a static utopia, just with unleashing a process, and that process remains experimental, practical, productive, in a manner that suggests we are not all betraying our commitment when we ride the deterritoralized speeds of the Southern Alliance into the future, and leave the reterritorializing tendencies behind. Indeed, to the extent that our sole principle remains deterritorialization (which, as seen in Suit’s OPTIONAL = MANDATORY, we have reason to believe is true for the Alliance), this processive smoothing, the continued acceleration, of the flows of desire, is a natural consequence, and not a possible iteration, of our project, for we’re always working to draw new connections between and produce new responses to zones of intensity, as they are, not to recalcify and react to Beings, as we think they should be. Whenever the pack expands, the wolves get infinitely closer.

I think of the chant that the Southern Alliance was formed on, a relic of New Dawn: ‘to a new tomorrow’. In the North, this configuration of words takes on a totally different meaning. In the teleological, acquisitive context that surrounds Tricolour or Nine Lives, one of grasping objects, tomorrow is transcendent, detached from today, overcoding the pathetic present in a desperate hope for a perfect future. ‘To a new tomorrow’, the Statesman sighs, turning his back on the buildings he didn’t get moved into the grid before the sun set for the evening. In the Southern Alliance, though, it’s something totally different. Tomorrow is imminent and immanent, the smooth space that the productions of today flow onto, a blank canvas that history suggests we’re about to paint a beautiful picture on. Tomorrow is the BwO, fully deterritorialized. A million potentialities, a million of them affirmed. ‘To a new tomorrow’, in the Alliance, was always spoken as a celebration of today. A life that cannot change, and that we would not change. Amor fati. Surrounded by the intimate connections of the rhizome, the free and multiplied movements of the wolves, the interwoven nature of one’s own becoming-wolf, tomorrow is to be celebrated, to be saluted: ‘o7’. It just takes sitting in the subterranean stems for one to smile at the sun’s rise.

Introversion and Instrumentalization: An Interlude

What makes this chapter an interlude?

It’s shorter than the others, for one. At least I hope. I’m writing this chapter all in one sitting.

It also serves as a break of sorts, takes a step back from the music. Everything else we’ve done has been making sense of what I felt in Ish’s event as it happened, even reciting the philosophy that I’d already published in-game. This chapter, on the other hand, is a reflection. It’s about how I’ve felt looking at the event in retrospect, and more specifically, what it is about a couple things I did during the experiment that, in hindsight, make me wince.

I think that, up until I finally got really immersed in the Southern Alliance on Day 5, I was a bit dismissive of everyone else. There are a handful of moments where it seemed like I was the one shutting the doors on connection, rather than cordially disentangling myself from interactions where someone else had already shut the door on me. On Day 2, NickSea (a founding member of New Dawn, the soon-to-be Southern Alliance’s largest member) visited my cottage in the woods. The New Dawn base was close enough that he saw the smoke my chimney coughed up lingering gently above the trees. After a brief introduction, I essentially ignored his subtle suggestion to come visit, focused on getting to Tricolour to watch the meeting as soon as I could. At the meeting itself, I got a kind of twisted joy out of hearing of each of the State’s transgressions, knowing that each of these misdemeanors was confirmation of my theories, that each victim was someone who might end up sympathetic to my cause. Once I finished writing my books on Day 3, I did some self-promotion on Discord, reaching out to national leaders I had no business with to see if they had any interest in helping me circulate or implement a critique that explicitly dismissed most everything they had done.

Worst of all perhaps, even after the Southern Alliance formed, I almost left them behind. For the mass assassination that our ‘to a new tomorrow’ chant had chanced preceding had left the nation of Aperion without leadership, and a group of disgruntled citizens had reached out to the alliance members to see if they could garner any support for their domestic revolution. I ended up abstaining from the group---in part because they turned out to be ‘Aperion is too weak, we are disrespected on a global scale, we need a stronger government!’ populists rather than ‘Aperion is weak, we can finish the wicked nation-state off!’ proletarians; in part because their movement had been discovered and shut down by Aperion’s leadership before Day 5 even began. However, when the chance of revolt was still on the table, I made comments to the rebels’ higher-ups that I would be willing to leave the Southern Alliance and collaborate with them independently, so that the rest of the members didn’t have to get dragged in. All because, what? The Southern Alliance wasn’t the government I imagined? We just figured out that certainly wasn’t the case, they were as close to a pack as I’ve ever seen. No, it was because the Southern Alliance didn’t feel like what I imagined a pack would feel like, because I had some vision in my head of Beta of the Pack’s Manifesto sparking protests in the streets that, after long struggle, brought about a new social organization, brandishing his ideas as a banner, and the Alliance, far from this spectacle, just naturally, smoothly came to form, like a friendship. To some extent, the only reason the conditions for the Southern Alliance even came about was because I ditched History on Day Three to go publish my books.

Of course, as always, this is not to suggest that it’s necessarily wrong to pursue one’s own interests, to seclude themselves from others, to be alone. Sometimes, being alone feels quite nice. My concern is that, far from desiring-production, these actions all seem to contain the weight of a socius, to effect an overcoding of the schizophrenic process. Indeed, I’m quite confident that this is what was happening, and that I just didn’t want to confront that possibility at the time, for I can recall how it felt to be inside my own head. I think I had caught a case of Main Character Syndrome---I had my application’s invocation of the ‘Minecraft Vladmir Lenin’ in mind, and I cut myself off from the rest of the event to bring about such a drama, encountering everyone and everything with the sole question of how I could make them useful towards this goal. A textbook case of a socius. There’s not a problem with my introversion, but it was reflective of the broader problem that was there, my incessant instrumentalization, my constant aspiration towards my revolutionary ideal, and my unaffected commitment to reorder the world in my image. Never drawing any connections, just grabbing what I could in my roots, helping myself grow, and leaving everything else behind.

Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the “‘private thinker’”, whom they provide Nietzsche as an example of (ATP, p. 376). They concede, however, that the term is misleading, even if Nietzsche (and myself) did much of his thinking from an isolated cabin in the mountains. The language of ‘private thinker’ “is not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought. To place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine” (ATP, p. 376-377). It is exactly this connection of thought with the outside, the formation of rhizomatic tunnels, that is the quality Deleuze and Guattari celebrate about the private thinkers. Plunging thought into the flows of the schizophrenic process, turning immobile ‘images’ into practical ‘concepts’, using thought to deterritorialize the desires that it so often turns against, as “a force that destroys both the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right” (ATP, p. 377). The thinker does not isolate themself from the world to observe the world, to understand how it ought to be, and at last to bring about this change. He is always part of the world, even when totally alone, serving not as a source, but a continuation, perhaps an amplification, of the flows of life. Not freezing life into place, but unleashing it, so that it may never be frozen, no matter how cold it gets. The thinker is not a corrective; they’re just another node, who produces connections where they can, and does not resent where they cannot.

One night far after the event, just a couple weeks ago, when I really should have been writing, I was scrolling Twitter instead, when I saw a screenshot of the Wikipedia entry for ‘oceanic feeling’. The term, ironically, is associated with Freud, and names his interpretation of a sentiment that was brought to his attention by a letter from a friend, which wondered about the religious experience of “inner unbounded limitlessness”, “wholeness with the universe” (Tsai, 2019). The Wikipedia overview describes it as ‘a sensation of eternity’ and ‘being one with the external world as a whole’, at least at the time of writing---you know finicky teachers are using Wikipedia as a source. The affective image is a beautiful one, at least to me: floating on the waves, peacefully aware of one’s connectedness with an oceanic current, one’s immersion in the tide. Of course, Freud, ever the one to make an intimate moment awkward, could not let such a poetic concept last. “Freud misinterprets it as an infantile yearning for the authority of paternal protection, a strong umbrella to shield them from the suffering and anxiety of existence” (Tsai, 2019). Wikipedia, in language that is perhaps more transparent regarding the point I’m trying to suggest, specifies that Freud connects the ‘oceanic feeling’ with the feeling of the infant who was yet to form their own ego, still reliant on their mother’s breast milk as they were, undifferentiated from the rest of existence. For Freud, the chaos of the ocean is a ‘lack’, one that a subject will surely aspire to a stable object-ego in response to, as a chance to escape.

I got a laugh out of Freud’s Oedipalization of a sentiment that seems anything but infantile, like the furthest thing from an emotion one would run to a parent to escape. The oceanic feeling is what we have tried to name with NEWMAGICWAND, a subject without some internal, formulaic desire engine, but that is an ever-elusive BwO, a circulation of affects and intensities that flow in and out from everywhere around. A subject whose territory bleeds far beyond the closed borders of the Self. A subject with no territory at all. The ‘Self’ drifts on the waves of the ocean, of the schizophrenic process, for they’re one in the same. Freud calls it suffering, but it’s hard to think of anything more peaceful than letting oneself get lost in the current. Not that one can’t make their own productions---the Self makes its own changes on the ocean, producing splashes, ripples, swimming freely. Water wheel. But they never aspire to a transcendent escape from the sea, sending anti-productions against the waves that obstruct their idealized fulfillment. It’s just a mutual production, forming connections with the ocean, any changes in the tide being brought about by interaction with the tides as they are, not some anxious attempt to halt their movement. “The sea as a smooth space… the fleet in being is posed, in other words, the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement that can rise up at any point” (ATP, p. 363, italics in original). The sea as smooth space, the sea as rhizome. Oceanic feeling could be an easier way to conceptualize the picture of deterritorialized subjectivity that I, for my own purposes, named NEWMAGICWAND. But it’s mostly in this interlude because I like the concept, because it made me smile. I thought about sending the Wikipedia entry to my roommate when I saw it, but I figured she could wait to read about it in here instead. I suppose, much like Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-wolf’ or ‘the pack’, or what I’ve done with ‘Nevermore’, this gives me a philosophical reason to express a subjective enjoyment for a certain thing (swimming, large bodies of water). Pierce The Veil likes to use the ocean as a lyrical metaphor, and I can pretend those songs are about desiring-production now, which is cool. I suppose my roommate might also like this reconceptualization---she writes about the ocean a lot.

One of the nice parts about the image of the ocean, to me, is how it allows one to understand that, even totally alone, one is not really isolated. With no sign of life in sight, there are still millions of connections with the breeze, the hydrogen molecules, the waves. ‘Isolation’, ‘solitude’, ‘private’, then, we can understand as not at all synonymous with ‘Being’, the stable subject that isolates itself from the schizophrenic process. Isolation is a specific configuration of the schizophrenic process, a becoming, a feeling that can be affirmed as it is. I remember late this January, there was one day where I felt particularly alone. Two of my closest friends from high school, who had the semester prior lived just one floor below me, had moved out, now an hour away. Lost in the ocean, frantic thoughts about the fleetingness of relationships, the requirements of growing old, I wanted out. I didn’t want to be alone. I was getting dangerously close to sadness at my sadness, displeasure with the current configuration of the process, ressentiment. So, I put in my earbuds, listened to an album that matched my mood (XXXTENTACION’s ?), and shot hoops on the mini-dunk goal hung up in my dorm. It was an immersion in the tides, an aestheticization of my state, and as such, an affirmation of existence, as it was. This is not to suggest it made me joyful, jubilant---shooting hoops, I was still depleted, somber. The same aura as someone who goes to play basketball after their girlfriend breaks up with them, which inextricably grants them the smoothest jumpshot of all time, and zero emotional reaction to it. But it did create a contentment, a satisfaction, a positive valuation, of life, as it was. An amor fati. Sufficient to ward off ressentiment. This is quite distinct from a transvaluation of emotion, of deciding that I always needed to be sad, renouncing joy as a cruel illusion---that would be creating a new Being (Being-Sad), instead of aspiring to an old Being (Being-Happy), which, in either case, creates a condemnation of the actual becomings. Within a week, I had added Playboi Carti’s self-titled mixtape to my playlist, which occurred as I wrote the introduction to this book---a more upbeat record, and a relatively happy point in my life. It’s just a question of the oceanic feeling, of drawing connections with everything around oneself (even if one is totally alone), of drifting with the waves, and, regardless of the direction of one’s movement, affirming wherever one ends up in the tides.

“Thought is like the Vampire”, Deleuze and Guattari say (ATP, p. 377). I’m not really sure what they mean by this, except that I know they talk about the vampire elsewhere, usually in conjunction with werewolves, and both in the context of becomings or multiplicities. “Sorcerers know that werewolves are bands, and vampires too, and that bands transform themselves into one another… the animal as band or pack” (ATP, p. 241). “Werewolves become vampires when they die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the same thing” (ATP, p. 249). “You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles” (ATP, p. 275). Maybe this helps recall what we suggest thought is for the private thinker, a deterritorialized flow, the production of a multiplicity, shattering Reason’s static image of the Being of Man. But this part was mostly just included for my roommate. To, in the same way as the ocean, or the wolf, or the pack, give a specific thing someone likes (she likes vampires a lot) a philosophical significance, as a callback to becoming, the decomposition of the BwO, a resistance to the striations of Man. The socius of Reason probably condemns neck-biting as much as it does putting on a collar. The barking joke also writes itself.

The last four paragraphs have all just been assorted thoughts on how to conceptualize what we should do, what immersion in the flows of desiring-production actually looks like. The private thinker; the oceanic feeling; X’s SAD!; becomings-vampire. None of this is what I did in the Ish event. The moments from the experiment that I singled out above---excitement at transgression, over-eagerness to get people to read, leaving friends behind---was the opposite of these orientations. In the first four days of Ish’s event, I, at times, was a ‘private thinker’ in the colloquial sense of the term: hiding from humanity to disparage their flaws, touting my enlightened disposition as the only cure. What the average person thinks Nietzsche was, not what Deleuze and Guattari celebrate him for (thought that connects with, amplifies, and affirms that flows of the outside). I was the Freudian infant, looking at the waves of the Ish event, their misconfigurations, and longing for a Daddy (my revolution) to cleanse the existence of this undifferentiated chaos. These were instances where I renounced where I was---my lack, my Apparent World---in the hopes of making something better---my Real World, my object of desire. This was Main Character Syndrome. This was ressentiment.

For the remainder of the Ish experiment, I was better on this front. In large part due to an increasing connectedness with and within the pack of the Southern Alliance, projects afterwards undertaken were more communal, more responsive to immanent flows, and not transcendent aspirations towards an individual objective. My ‘philosophy’ became nothing other than to link up and link up with the nodes, and it was not accomplished in any manner beyond linking up and linking up with the nodes. The flow of desire was the sole directive. No longer a tree, but part of a rhizome. I’ve gotten better at dealing with similar problems outside of Ish’s event, too, at least I’d like to think. I try not to talk about philosophy any more than those around me would like me to, and when I do discuss it, try to do so in more contextual, responsive ways, following the process as it surrounds me. I try to relate to striations less as flaws in need of correction or renouncement, and more as momentary anti-productions that, through sympathetic yet unyielding deterritorialized affirmation, can be redirected, changed. I try to make my thoughts more attentive to and reflective of their subject matter, to the extent I can---conversations about the thoughts with those to whom they pertain when available, and long stretches of time spent lying alone in bed, considering such interactions, and adjusting the formulation of the thoughts when they are not. An anecdote that points towards all these components: I usually take short breaks while writing to shoot baskets on my mini-hoop alone, formulating thoughts in my head as I go, and writing down whatever I recall when I sit back down (I suppose I’ll have to wait until August for the Vampire part to be applicable) (I thought of that joke while shooting hoops a couple minutes ago :3). The private thinker, ocean, music, and becomings are all conceptualizations of desiring-production. I wasn’t doing a great job of remaining within this process of flows during Ish’s event. I think I’m doing a better job now.

There’s a couple conclusions I want to draw from these reflections:

First, we cannot respond to overcoding with overcoding. As an unconditional affirmation of the schizophrenic process, our methodology can never be to map out a static determination of what is and extermination of what we have decided to be anti-production, for then, we would have erected a State against a State, a socius against a socius, ressentiment against ressentiment. “A ‘method’ is the striated space… and draws a path that must be followed from one point to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space… for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences” (ATP, p. 377). We reject rules or Truth in favor of concepts, ask not ‘what should we do’ but ‘what works’, trade rigid methods for fluid tactics. We do not proceed by considering a ‘Real World’ of zero ressentiment, and then using that image to condemn the ressentiment that exists in the Apparent World. Nor do we condemn the ressentiment in the Apparent World, and therefore create a longing for a Real World that is ressentiment-free. Doing so would only recreate ressentiment in the process; it just uses Nietzsche’s terminology now. Deterritorialization is not a telos that permits a ‘necessary evil’, which is not to say there cannot be violence, revolution, change---these are all fine, as part of the schizophrenic process---just that deterritorialization never justifies a reterritorialization in its name, never sanctions a calcification of all anti-productions into a ‘Being’ to be impersonally removed. We are always just drawing rhizomatic connections between nodes, even with States, creating productive desires that change and are changed by other machines, even with socii. These interactions will never let us be reterritorialized, or overcoded, for that is why we always inhabit the speeding lines of deterritorialized flight. But we must also never, in our productions of deterritorialization, output a reterritorialization to do so, for then it is no longer deterritorialization at all. Not making life any faster, just getting it less slow. Deterritorialization is never an object to be grasped, as in desiring-acquisition; it’s just a response to zones of intensity, via desiring-production. Never shut yourself off from, condemn, and ignore the world with your friends in it so you can get closer to your imagined utopia. My roommate made a comment to me, one night, about how interesting she finds it that I write in this convoluted, long, difficult, stream-of-consciousness manner, which, in her estimation, decimates any chance of this philosophy being actually understood or adopted at a wide scale (she’ll surely have a field day with how repetitive a single idea in this paragraph is). I, of course, think that pure deterritorialization is capable of effectuating such broader changes---the international relations of the Southern Alliance is our experimental attestation to this---but even if I’m wrong, the conclusion she marveled at---‘you figured out the best way to live, but because you actually live that way, you can’t share it with others’---seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me. For eighteen years, on and off, I felt like being alive was a burden. These sentiments vanished and reversed as I learned how to immerse myself in a rhizome. I’m not sure what could be worth throwing that away.

This is a good segway into our second lesson---I don’t think anyone needs to actually read philosophy to deterritorialize. This is not a totally unforeseeable byproduct of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical orientation, one that privileges pure desire, and that criticizes the ivory tower thinkers who have henceforth tried to put a stop to those flows. They suggest music is on the same plane as philosophy, cite poets and authors and scientists and anthropologists and schizophrenics as much as they do formal ‘philosophers’. Deleuze made remarks about wanting to leave philosophy through philosophy. In this sense, trying to systematize existence (as philosophy is commonly taken to do) is actually an impediment to the practical adoption and deployment of conceptual tools that Deleuze and Guattari forward, which is meant not to order a perfect existence, but to enable affirmation of life despite its chaos. Moreover, and this is again, perhaps, endemic of schizoanalysis being chiefly concerned with desire and life-affirmation, there are plenty of people who just ‘get it’. People who, despite having never touched a philosophy book (and certainly not Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodern bibles), just intuitively understand and act in accordance with the foundational ideas of avoiding overcoding, responding to zones of intensity, flowing with desires. Early in my own philosophy journey, I grappled onto Nietzsche as a way to make me ‘normal’ again, to hijack the chronic will to comprehend existence that I took to be a sign of ‘gifted kid burnout’, and that Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari would call ressentiment. Now, I was certainly a little off the mark---we don’t want to suggest (in a paraphrasing of one of the greatest tweets ever made) a ‘noble savage’ view of ‘normies’. People who do not read philosophy are still quite capable of ressentiment, and produce it all the time. To some extent, that attests to the degree which machines of anti-production (Freudian readings of desire, capitalist myths of fulfillment, religious codes, gendered roles, I could go on) are so prevalent in all circles of socialization. Sometimes, though, it’s something more simple, an overcoding-of-the-Other in a production of the Self. What we should suggest, however, is that it is quite possible to navigate around, or even rupture, these overcodings without being a philosopher, without reading or understanding philosophy. We just need to draw connections between nodes in the rhizome, respond to zones of intensity, change and be changed by the flows of desiring-production, and it’s pretty easy to do any of those things without recourse to academic terminology---indeed, those often slow the relationship down. To the extent that Deleuze and Guattari are correct, that adherence to the schizophrenic process generates life-affirmation and intimate connections, it seems perfectly sensible that anyone with a bit of introspection, a hint of care, would over time end up at the same practical end that these countless pages do. Our project does not require, and (as per the above lesson) would even be thwarted by compulsory deterritorialization-reeducation camps. ‘Compulsory deterritorialization’ is a bit of an oxymoron. One of my closest friends is perhaps the most deterritorialized individual I know, more than I could ever be, and he dropped out of college.

I realize that I talk about philosophy a lot, that any attempt I make to help someone ends up including the language of schizoanalysis in there somewhere. I don’t think that’s at all representative of how deterritorializing flows needs to occur. See all the above rambling, it’s just a question of flowing with desires, which certainly does not mandate researching postmodernism. I would even concede that philosophy might be a suboptimal output for changing the process, for drawing connections, given how hard and boring it sometimes is. A lesson that took the confrontation with the lack of immediate revolution upon the completion of my publications in the Ish event for me to learn: the hardest part of philosophy is getting people to care. To the extent that philosophy is a useful tool for conceptualizing how we can practically remain immersed in the flows of desiring-production, there remains the challenge of actually communicating any of those findings, of making rhizomatic attachments with individuals such that they actually feel like deterritorializing, or figuring schizoanalysis out. It’s nice that Deleuze and Guattari give their concepts names like ‘body without organs’ or ‘becoming-wolf’, which serves as a sort of clickbait, where I can throw out fun-sounding words out of context until someone gets interested enough to ask about them, but that is far from sufficient, or a requirement, for schizoanalysis. There are always better ways to draw rhizomatic connections, and always new connections to draw.

I think I use the language of philosophy so much because Deleuze and Guattari’s portable concepts are useful for me, and, moreover, because they have become so useful that, in any given scenario, any serious thoughts I’m having almost certainly employ four or five schizoanalysis terms. To some extent, I just struggle to articulate my thoughts without philosophy. It’s not that my productions are anchored to some schizoanalysis-socius, that my goal is to reterritorialize everyone into a schizoanalyst, but that there are always schizoanalysis-machines flowing into me, that the zone of intensity I’m responding to contains so much schizoanalysis that it’s hard to keep it out of any coherent response. I realize that my writing style, to the extent it could be characterized, would be most recognizable by the long, disorganized sentences, extreme length and redundancy of each idea, and idiosyncratic examples that I use. These tendencies are, to some extent, just a consequence of me conceptualizing my writing as desiring-production, resulting in text that appears on this page primarily as a response to a zone of intensity of wanting to articulate my thoughts, and therefore, that takes a very loose, concept-heavy form, and that pulls in all sorts of seemingly-random mental associations, since that’s how the ideas appear in my head. These paragraphs are just my thoughts, how I was feeling at a particular time. So are most statements I make. No socius, or deeper intent, in sight---just a production. At the same time, the decision to leave some of the more embarrassing or questionable parts in here is, in addition to being a byproduct of my resolution to not proofread so harshly, as it led to constant anxieties and rewriting as I aspired towards an impossible socius of clarity, intelligibility, perfect interpretation, culminating in me deleting and restarting the book halfway through the first chapter, also an attempt to undermine my own credibility, to prevent anyone from taking anything I say too seriously. I don’t really want to be an authoritative source, hence, the constant highlighting of the things I do that no one sensible would replicate. Nobody needs to take any more from this book than is helpful to them. Indeed, if everyone in the world turned out like me, I don’t imagine I would particularly like that. It would just be nice, for me and for everyone else I think, if everyone did what they wanted in a deterritorialized way. I happen to find it easiest to get there through philosophy.

All of this is to say, we just want to deterritorialize the process such that everyone produces in response to zones of intensity, and to carry out that deterritorialization through our own responses to zones of intensity. That does not have to entail philosophy at all; it’s just that, for me, my zone of intensity usually includes philosophy, and as such, so do my productions. You are welcome, encouraged, even, to draw new connections of the rhizome, to change and be changed by the schizophrenic process, to respond to zones of intensity, in whatever manner you feel like. My attempts to be helpful usually employ the vocabulary of schizoanalysis, in part because it’s been helpful for me, in part because (unless I’m explicitly given directions on how else I can be helpful) it’s the only way I know how. I guess I try to be a good teammate in basketball, and like to share associations I have with songs and song lyrics, too. That’s the typical form that the rhizomatic connections I produce take. My love languages, I suppose. I realize that my philosophy productions can often be annoying; I’m grateful to everyone who puts up with them.

The last point I want to make is not a particularly important one. It’s basically the same as talking about the pack, or the ocean, earlier, where it’s a schizoanalytic conceptualization of a thing I just happen to like, so that I can have a philosophic justification for my interest in it (see the parts above about how I’ve accidentally rotted my brain to only be able to think in terms of schizoanalysis concepts). There’s a plethora of Midwestern-white-dad-isms, phrases a child of such a parent is bound to hear by the midpoint of their life. One of my personal favorites, for no reason in particular, other than ‘it sounds cool’, is ‘dance with the girl that brought you’. The conventional wisdom isn’t too hard to find---when given opportunities, it’s best to stay loyal to whatever helped you advance to such a point. Whether the motivation for that loyalty is supposed to be practical (‘you’ll do better with what you’re familiar with!’) or tradition, I’m not sure. To me, however, the phrase took on a bit of a different meaning. In a reflection I remember making while on the runway for the eight-hour flight to London, the scenario the paternal advice seeks to avoid is essentially the move I made after Day Four of Ish’s event. Despite having a secure and intimate connection with the members of the Southern Alliance, I was ready to leave them behind for a prospect at Aperion’s underground revolution. Leaving the girl I came with for a shot at the supermodel on the dance floor.

The philosophy component here is not incredibly complicated---we’ve criticized the Lacanian formula of desire, the one that locates a new object of desire as the solution to a lack, and that therefore condemns a part of existence as it is to grant one that hope of leaving it behind. There are parallels between this and the situation with the Southern Alliance, and indeed, we’ve already diagnosed it to be a case of Main Character Syndrome. Not satisfied with the formation of our new social organization, just because it wasn’t as spectacular as I imagined, I quickly moved my fixation to a new possibility, renouncing the one around me. If we just plug these terms into the transitive property, and take out the Southern Alliance middle-man, we see the philosophical significance of the phrase. Leaving the girl that brought you for the new girl, often, entails a renunciation of the relationship one is already in, a condemnation of the Apparent World, so that one can aspire towards a new relationship, a Real World. We are therefore left with the nihilistic life-rejection of ressentiment; if not from the boyfriend who views his current love arrangement as insufficient and to be overcome, certainly from the old girlfriend, who has been cast aside by the socius as an expendable member of the exterior.

I have one last semi-related contextualization of this idea, one that lets me get in a statement that I need to shoehorn in somewhere. I mentioned earlier in this interlude that my downstairs friends moved out at the beginning of second semester, that I was left feeling relatively lonely, dealing with the maturation-induced breakup of my closest sources of social connection. At basically the same time, the members of the Southern Alliance in the event were as active as ever on Discord, and I found myself talking with them constantly, staying up until ‘schizo hours’ even when I had class the next morning, talking about everything and nothing in particular. The regulars---who were introduced to me as Minecraft players, mind you---eventually came to learn of my philosophical interests, ideas, and have even supported my work on this book. Not to mention all my other quirks, all of which they’ve affirmed. There’s a general acknowledgement at the back of this book, and if you’re feeling left out here, you can give it a read. But I do want to extend a special thank you to the Southern Alliance, for being there for me unconditionally at a time in my life where the support was much needed and much appreciated. I realize that I’m still fleeting in my commitment to this friend-group---there’s plenty of nights where I don’t join VC until very late, and am absent-minded when I finally do, because I decided to write instead. But I’d like to think the nights where the opposite occurred, where I put off responsibilities to play Jackbox or Gartic Phone, attests to this not being the same overcoding-of-the-Alliance, as treating the group as something only to be situationally used for my own philosophic pursuits, as no longer a case of arborescent Main Character Syndrome. I’m in VC when I feel like it, and not when I don’t, and whichever I choose, plus whatever I do while either in or not in, is accepted, celebrated, affirmed. A complete rhizome. The Southern Alliance Discord server rivals Templin Room 707, the Beta of the Basement, the Ambler Student Rec Center outdoor basketball courts, and Nevermore for the title of most deterritorialized place on earth. I thank you, more than I could ever express, for that quality. I’ll try to not to turn my back so much.

This interlude is complete. We can return to our thought, now with an understanding that we must let ourselves dance with the pushes and pulls of the tide. ‘A million kisses underwater as we walk into the ocean waves’.

Imperialism and Floating Leaves

We alluded briefly to the imperialist exploitation the Southern Island suffered at the hands of the Northern nations earlier. At first, the transgressions seemed intimately intertwined with the Northerners’ (mistaken) belief that the Southern Island was devoid of inhabitants. Moments where this deflection appeared to chiefly animate the movements: Aperion’s candidate suggesting a complete claiming and colonizing of the land mass; Aperion’s logging division leaving signs announcing their presence at the forest that History later encountered; Aperion’s internal documents revealing deployments of resource teams to gather materials from the South, in order to support their rapidly expanding population; various descriptions of the island in Ish’s Discord, ranging from a more innocuous, if not distasteful, comment about the mangrove swamps being ‘exotic’, to a more explicit description of those swamps’ resources as ‘free real estate’. We should not, however, allow ourselves to fall victim to some ruse that the Northern democracies were simply unaware that their actions would have local effects, that they were merely oblivious. Later developments demonstrated a willful subjection of the native Southerners to the North’s impulses. After the Southern Island was known to be populated by the Alliance members, the Northern nations nonetheless: suggested work on a system of tunnels, based in, facilitated by, and in the service of Tricolour, which would contain networks branching under the Southern island, where surface level exits would be used to set up ‘resource camps’; established a bee farm, which would gather product for a business on the Central Island, just behind the Aperion-ruined beach; mined for ores directly under, and in mineshafts whose entrance was concealed by a building atop a hill overlooking the valley of, the Bonzo clan (a member of the Southern Alliance), then gifting the base impersonally to the ‘Hill People’ (the Aperion miners’ title for the Bonzo citizens, for they had never interacted with the locals, and therefore did not know their real name); had an emergency base established by the resource manager of the Commonwealth, in preparation for a potential relocation after a feared Island One invasion. It is not hard to see that something problematic was occurring here.

The most obvious wrongdoing must be the colonial tropes at play. There was, at first, a rehearsal of the logic of terra nullius, the Southern Island as the no-man’s land, ripe for appropriation by whichever nation could establish control first. Following the forced encounter with the land’s actual inhabitants post-pilgrimage, the privileging of patriotic demands, without regard for (and at times with blatant ignorance towards) the native populations, beckons back to America’s youth. It would be a missed opportunity not to observe the irony in Aperion’s brandishing the Statue of Liberty, stars and stripes, and the ideal of ‘democracy’ as iconographic of their state. It is not much more difficult to see how these productions are of a nature that Deleuze and Guattari would find deplorable. The colonial expropriation is a clear socius, wherein the interior of the State reterritorializes the exterior of terra nullius, assimilating all native flows to the service of the State’s Being, exterminating every becoming that resists. The boarding school and the reservation: twin poles of the State’s striating stripes. In either case, ressentiment, here taking the form of Native genocide. Perhaps we can portray this all best through the image of the trees on the beach that Aperion’s loggers left behind. The lack of gravity in Minecraft’s physics engine, coupled with the custom-built trees of the event requiring the absence of automatic leaf decay, made it excruciatingly tedious to destroy a tree in its entirety. Aperion, therefore, took only the trunks of the South’s mighty birches, leaving their leafy canopies floating far above the now-barren ground. These floating leaves attest to imperialist exploitation par excellence: the blocks that can be made useful are impersonally extracted for the national Being; the blocks that do not fit the State’s vision are left to rot.

One could object that a colonial critique is unfitting, when no colonies were ever actually established on the Southern Island. However, as Patrick Wolfe articulated in one of the foundational texts of the growing field of settler colonial studies, “invasion is a structure not an event” (2006). No longer a historical moment, colonization is theorized as a structure that prefigures the temporal encounter, drawing its arborescent map of the world such that the still-unknown native will always already be reduced to the static position of Native, defined in opposition and as adversarial to the State. Wolfe further explains that “settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base… in its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence” (2006). This is almost identical to our formulation of a socius---a field of anti-production (organizing principle) constructed of the aspiration towards a Real World (new colonial society) and a condemnation of the Apparent World (dissolution of native societies), both of which are mutually reinforcing, all of which is generative of ressentiment (elimination). Indeed, paperson (2017) even observes, in their critique of the colonial university, that “the university is world-making. First worlding universities are machinery commissioned to actualize imperialist dreams of a settled world” (p. xiv-xv). The definition of an oppressive facility by its function, and the invocation of ‘machinery’, may reveal the schizoanalytic undercurrent of their work.

Settler colonialism, then, should be understood as a systemic overcoding of indigenous desire, rather than occasional occurrences of anti-indigenous violence (which are always the prescribed byproduct of the former). This leads us to a caveat. Though it is true that settler colonialism is a structure, it (as with all socii) exists through the continued circulation of colonial anti-productions, not as some omnipresent force that overdetermines all life. paperson (2017) is explicit on this point: “regardless of its colonial structure, because school is an assemblage of machines and not a monolithic institution, its machinery is always being subverted toward decolonizing purposes… subversive beings wreck, scavenge, retool, and reassemble the colonizing university into decolonizing contraptions. They are scyborgs with a decolonizing desire. You might choose to be one of them” (p. xiii). This seems like an especially important interjection to underscore, given the totalizing work that Wolfe’s structural theorization lends itself to. Svirsky (2016) comments “Wolfe conceives resistance… in a Newtonian fashion, as a necessarily reactive force that is always responding to the constraints of power and is thus quickly re-appropriated. In adopting this conception, we risk conceiving no outside to settler colonial power. Thus, oppression and domination in all their forms and shapes are given explanatory monopoly replicating their omnipresence in the shaping and managing of life”. To posit a ‘colonial will’ or ‘settler unconscious’ as an inevitable byproduct of history’s unfolding (as Wolfe is at times prone to do) implies a constant violence permeating all aspects of existence, foreclosing in advance all productions of deterritorialization by already renouncing them as necessarily colonial byproducts. Schizoanalysis, in its affirmation of infinite potentialities, is far closer to quantum physics than any Newtonian dynamic. The settler subject, far from permanent adherence to the Settler being, is an electron cloud. Svirsky cannot conceal his schizoanalytic influences either, stressing “if settler colonialism is not a fait accompli but an incomplete project invested in a continuing structuration of life actualising the logic of elimination, then we may expect the settler colonial paradigm to take seriously phenomena of struggle, resistance and confrontation, and hence to align itself with the idea of power not just as coercion or repression but as a complex multiplicity… movement here needs to be conceived as a constantly changing composition of forces” (2016). His paper is, appropriately, titled “resistance is a structure not an event” (Svirsky, 2016).

This wariness towards the connection of subjective essence and structural power is far from an isolated critique of some strands of settler colonial studies. As with his psychoanalytic predecessor, Lacan’s negative account of desire has spilled into colloquial conceptualizations. The worst strands of ‘identity politics’ have turned into an ontological battleground---in place of deterritorialized affirmation against anti-productive violence, the effects of anti-production on subjectivity are taken for granted, and resistance is subdued to reconfiguring the produced categories. ‘Identity’ is translated from free becoming into a stable, alienated interior, positioned in eternal conflict with the world. From this reterritorialized perspective on existence, all the typical dynamics occur.

Svirsky (2016) recognizes that Wolfe’s proposed response to his problematic of the settler unconscious is “a racial division of academic labour… indigenous scholarship emerge as the sole legitimate source of knowledge of indigenous strategies of resistance and survival, and white academics are left with one and only one untainted avenue of research to follow; that is, engaging in critical white autoethnographies”. In question here is the generalized location of one’s sources of suffering in their immanent exterior which, in the worst case, causes one to turn away from potentials for deterritorialization, and in the best case, leaves one miserable. This is distinct from recording and resisting anti-production where it actually occurs. Indeed, we think this conceptualization does precisely the opposite, as it takes subjectivity to be monolithically subservient to structures of anti-production, gives the State a hegemony on the coding of the BwO, and therefore, resigns the subject-machine to object-status, strips it of its own power, forecloses differential productions. To read colonization as an ontological determinant finds every desire to stem from a primary identification of the native as the lack to be exterminated, every settler statement as a manifest expression of latent genocide, every activity on stolen land as necessarily replicating the reterritorializing, objectifying, unaffected violence of stealing the land, and in the process makes freedom for the native impossible. paperson conveys that “impossibility motivates this analysis, which seeks not to resolve colonialist dilemmas but to acknowledge that they include specific machined privileges that may be put to work in the service of decolonizations” (2017, p. xxiii). It is not at all that colonialism, as a structure of anti-production, does not exist, much less that we should avoid observing and rejecting it, but rather, is a reminder that our interactions with colonial apparatuses should never surrender to their demands. Identifying a strand of anti-production must always be followed with the ‘fuck you’, refusal, and otherwise doing of the nomad. Anchoring a politics of identity in an ontological frame, however, directs our focus to the neo-liberal, neo-Enlightenment determination of ‘what a body is’ (for we take for granted that a body’s identity always already determines its function), unable to ask Spinoza’s revolutionary, schizoanalytic contemplation of ‘what a body can do’. We are left, then, with an interior whose resolute commitment to borders, on the one hand, blocks the exterior flows that might otherwise rupture the conditions that produce the dispossessed Being, while on the other hand, gazes in the meantime upon the exterior flows that it has as a totality rejected and scorned. This is, again, not to suggest that machines of subjectification, or colonial apparatuses, do not exist, quite the contrary, it is a refusal to regard these colonial apparatuses as flat or fixed, to get caught up in the State’s realm of striating signification, and a suggestion to instead unleash the production of desire that the State turned against in the first place. Lest we miss the chance to affirm a deterritorializing speed, we should not miss the fluid multiplicities for the singular machine; we should not miss the animated forest for the floating trees.

The renunciation of an exterior is inevitably interwound with the exclusive reproduction of the remaining interior. Subjects of ontological persuasion end up with political commitments that make a metaphysical reproduction of the ‘single-issue voter’, suggesting that resolution of their individual concern either entails or outweighs all others. The only zones of intensity one is held liable for connecting with and responding to is those concerning whether they are or are not within the interior---the ontological scission of existence will take care of the rest. This tendency is far from exclusive to settler colonial theories, and nor is this consequential tendency. Devout Marxists posit capitalism as the singular cause of every other social ailment, strategically reprimanding others deemed to be not-material-enough (which usually translates to those not explicitly oriented towards the organization of the proletariat in the name of state communism) as misguided, unfocused wastes of time. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s dissertation traces how “Black feminist literary practitioners… were at once included in, excluded from and amputated by Black cultural nationalist and white feminist movements because their deviant sexual positionality was not useful for a Black nation or a multi-cultural liberal sisterhood, because of their inability or refusal to reproduce properly” (2010). Gumbs takes this ‘improper reproduction’ to be “a dangerous desire for something different. She who refuses to reproduce properly bears the mark of the alternative, the mark of the criminal, the mark of the terrorist… she who refuses to reproduce the status quo threatens to produce a radically different world” (2010). In our terms, this improper reproduction is a deterritorialized instance of desiring-production, the messiness of which cannot be incorporated into and is thus deemed illegitimate and shunned by the interior. This phenomenon is perhaps most apparent in the figure of the ‘white queer’, who wears their marginalized position like a badge of honor, and who observes no discrimination other than that which befalls their announced group, all too eager to hold hands with capitalist, colonial, or anti-black oppression as long as their job lets them wear rainbow crop-tops (‘homonationalism’). We could go on. In any case, we again find that exclusive focus on one interior (proletariat, feminine, queer) dismisses connections with, if not explicitly condemns, the (improper) productions of everyone else. It is, as before, not that each ‘interior’ is not concerned with a very real concern of actual anti-production, but perhaps the exact opposite, that their reaction to such anti-production is to accept it as omnipresent, bind themselves to the terms it has set for them, and appropriate its striations against everything else. It is a shame that detaching the subject from the essence of the individual seems only to have relocated its hostility towards the exterior to a broader field, reattaching the subject to the determinations of class, rather than detethering the subject from essence altogether.

We are therefore left with a paradigmatic formula for ressentiment---the mutually reinforcing aspiration towards an interior Real World and condemnation of the exterior Apparent World---which renders the ontological conception of the subject’s identity as a socius. The conservative should not get too excited at this as a critique of ‘identity politics’, as if they are not guilty of the same dynamic in their proliferation of soothsaying myths (book bans, the Great Replacement, the Deep State) to give their selected Beings coherence and precedence. This is not a critique of ‘identity politics’, but of reterritorialization. And it is doubtlessly true that the systemic oppressions of anti-blackness, anti-queerness, capitalism, settler colonialism, and so on, constitute some of these reterritorializations, and that the schizoanalytic project entails complete annihilation of them. But it is precisely because of this orientation that we prioritize an affirmation of the liberated potentialities of the subject, irrespective of and against the flows of anti-production that seek to constrain them, rather than a resignation to an ‘ontological’ object stasis that must wait around for the lamented anti-productions to disappear before it can affirm itself. We have nothing against ‘identity politics’, which we find to often be invaluable, and the critiques of which we find generally laughable---we just want to problematize the connection of identity-based struggles to ontological conceptions of subjectivity, which we take to be a foreclosure and renunciation of potentialities of desire consequent of a structuring, constant narrative about what subjects ‘should’ be. In this way, ontology is a socius.

Settler colonialism, then, we take to be an instance of desiring-acquisition, and as such, we understand it to be produced as part of and malleable to changes in the schizophrenic process, therefore taking the deterritorialization of the flows of desiring-production as the potential and necessary alternative. There is one last thing we should clarify. Settler colonialism is responsible for some of the more prevalent critiques of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, perhaps most persuasively articulated by Tiffany Lethabo King (2017). King, drawing from previous indigenous theorizations, argues “the Deleuzian and Guattarian rhizome assumes its errant, untraceable, and de/reterritorializing path through Native genocide… the territory of maneuver or ground that the rhizome gains its bearing on is unwittingly or perhaps indifferently anchored in the disavowal of the Indigenous ancestral claims, history, presence, and ongoing relationship with the land in North America… they do not have to contend with the presence of Indigenous peoples and their prior relationships (ancestors) to the land and space through which they move and clear as nomads. There are no existing people to which Deleuze and Guattari have to be accountable. Therefore, their own and others’ self-actualizing, free-form whiteness can proceed unimpeded” (2017). However, we would be mistaken to think of the deterritorialized smooth space as an empty frontier for settling in this way. “Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here” (ATP, p. 377). ‘Smooth space’ suggests only an absence of striations, not a prerequisite clearing of existing relationships to the land. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari problematize interacting with an impersonal, transcendent Being in place of an intimate, immanent zone of intensity, which is what grounds their critique of the settler colonial structure’s overcoding of the prefigured Native. We have explicitly reprimanded precisely what King suggests we are responsible for, that being the ignorance of rhizomatic connections with the land, which are severed by assimilation into or killings by the arborescent colonial State. We would not just suggest that the rhizome is innocent of, but that it is also militant against, native genocide, for such a process necessarily entails a striation of the immanent flows of indigeneity into an exterior Being to be eliminated. It seems counterintuitive to single out Deleuze and Guattari, two thinkers who celebrate the proliferation of difference, as flattening the frontier into the Same. Indeed, it is the Lacanian flattening of desire (into, at best, a binary) that we have just been careful to leave all traces of behind.

It feels relevant to highlight that King’s warrant for the necessarily genocidal nature of the rhizome relies on the intrinsic problematization of any production of difference, in the same manner as we criticized Baudrillard for earlier. “Even the ‘line of flight’ establishes a linear/nonlinear structural opposition that demarcates the ‘order’ of the invisible white ‘self’ in opposition to the ‘chaotic’ realm of the dead Indigenous and Black ‘nonbeing’”; “Black and Native people are rendered structuralist (or modernist and dead) as white self-actualizing subjects disguise themselves as rhizomatic movements that transcend representation and the human. Epistemes such as the line segregate the chaotic realm of death (Black and Native) from the poststructuralist realm of life (white transcendence) through structural opposition marked with blood”; “Even in Deleuze and Guattari’s ideal scenario in which lines are drawn and (re)drawn again outside the state’s mandates, someone (as a subject) must still render them as an outside to something” (King, 2017).

King is correct, in that movements of this manner occur all the time, where an object of desiring-acquisition (however postmodern it may be) is made by or makes a renunciation of a localized ‘lack’ in the immanent configuration of desiring-production. There are moments of Whiteness being cohered as a stable subject, which does mandate the extermination of the non-white exterior. However, we should not mistake these specific attempts to acquire meaning through difference as synonymous with every production of difference. We have already found that such an interpretation is not necessarily correct---there are plenty of instances of desiring-production that, far from aspiring towards anything, represent a response to immanent zones of intensity, a production of pure difference without any concern for a Same. Moreover, though, we find this explicitly ‘structural’ reading of desire to be problematic, as every production always entails some vectors of differentiation, and as such, every flow will always be renounced as genocidal. King’s equivocation of schizoanalytic speed with humanist slowness is a paradigmatic case of the flat rejection such structuralism invites. To recognize the inherent violence of desiring-acquisition, only to posit that every flow has a latent acquisitive quality, is to render the totality of existence as loathed. Ressentiment manifest.

Some of King’s later work carries more schizoanalytic dispositions. “To be clear”, she states, “I am not cynical or invested in an indictment and understanding of white and non-black anti-blackness as hopelessly intractable, unrelenting, or unchangeable” (King, 2019). The possibility for liberation they name is “an erotic process of unbecoming”, “erotic movement toward chaos” (King, 2019). Once “white and non-black scholars can bare or expose the ways that their white/non-black self depends on rendering the black body a captive ‘being for’ whiteness/others” (which I would like to think our critique of desiring-acquisition has done), we are left with “room for the formation of a new kind of body---a Deleuzean Body Without Organs---that can be undone and remade in relation to blackness” (King, 2019). These lines, quite explicitly, inform us that a production not marked by a violent stabilization of difference is possible, and moreover, that such a production is precisely that of a fluid, multiplied, ‘Deleuzean’, deterritorialized nature. Improper black erotica, indigenous land relationalities, are instances of desiring-production, of rhizomatic connections, flows that we would never permit the reterritorialization of into or outside of the interior border of a socius. Settler colonial theories enable us to understand, in the first place, that colonization is a structure of anti-production, not a historical moment, but moreover, that this structure is just an (especially fascist) machinic assemblage, which therefore leaves room for deterritorialized resistance to escape and rupture the State’s flows. The question of decolonization, then, is tied to the core commitment of the schizophrenic process: affirmation of desiring-production, as the means to negate the violent imposition of desiring-acquisition.

On Day Five of Ish’s event, the Southern Alliance worked with the North’s cartographers (decolonizing machines in the colonial State) to claim the entire landmass of the Southern Island under our collective name. There is a quote, which caught steam with anti-State protests: “every border implies the violence of its maintenance” (Siddiqi, 2015). There is a tweet, ostensibly comedic, which riffs on this quote: “‘every border implies the violence of its maintenance’ but for ontology” (bilgerat__, 2024). This tweet feels like an accurate portrait of our project. We find that the imposition of any State, any striation, any reterritorialization, necessarily creates the aspiration towards an interior and condemnation of the exterior that characterizes ressentiment. Therefore, we do not care what the nature of the interior is, who is allowed within it, who claims it. We do not work within a striated map of ontological borders, doing what we can to mitigate violent interactions, rearranging or reversing dynamics of oppression. We just tear borders down. One might wonder, then, if the Southern Alliance’s land claim does not betray our deterritorializing project. Moreover, do these polemics not retract our response to King, that rhizomatic expansion does not entail a genocidal disregard for land claims of indigenous tribes?

After our land claim was made, citizens of Northern nations complained, scoffing that we did not have the population to effectively develop or police our territorial borders. We didn’t care. The purpose of our claim was not to mark exclusive rights to resources for our populace, and if that had been the case, our schizoanalytic reflections would not have permitted it. To some extent, then, King could be correct---we do not sanction the violent defense of an interior under any circumstance, so, to the extent that an indigenous land claim was a private reterritorialization of this sort, the rhizome would work to rupture it. However, that would scarcely permit a genocidal flattening or removal, much less an ignorance towards the relationalities that motivated the reterritorialization in the first place. The question of deterritorialization is always one of connecting nodes in the rhizome, of using those connections to ward off the overcoding of an arborescent State. It is impossible to clear the frontier’s immanent flows without diverging from this vector. The Southern Alliance’s claim, though, was far from a reterritorialization, was instead a deterritorialized statement, an announcement to the North that the island was, in fact, inhabited, that it would not allow itself to be folded into the colonial socius. There was no real ‘border’, just a flow that took the shape of one. No division of interior and exterior, but rather, a connection of rhizomatic exteriorities (indigenous inhabitants and cartographers), such that they could rupture the interior being overlaid onto them. It is much like the proper name---an instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity, not part of any overdetermining signifying regime, just a loose communicative machine in the service of producing flows, linking up nodes. As always, it is a question of Nevermore---a production that affirmed its native-land assemblage from fascist flattening of State structures through a production of desiring-production, and not desiring-acquisition’s recreation of a new territorial State. The question of decolonization is always entailed in, and relies on, deterritorialization. I realize that this could all still seem semantic, that these anti-ontological specifications in our anti-colonial critique could still appear nothing more than self-referential academic talk. Maybe that’s all it is. But I think Israel’s genocide of Palestine makes clear, through demonstration of a Palestinian land relationship that generates a deterritorialized affirmation as resistance to a reterritorializing State, opposed to the Zionist elimination of all the deterritorialized flows that complicate the State’s reterritorializing vision (which it justifies with appeal to ontological right), that there could not be a greater difference.

We therefore find the Northern Island’s extraction of resources from the Southern Island to be problematic due to its colonial nature. We have identified this violence to be a form of a socius, exemplified in its logic of terra nullius---the exterior of the State is prefigured as a land to-be-conquered, and as such, the encounter with its immanent flows precedes its event. The State is always already interacting with any rhizomatic indigenous production with disrespect and displacement, having resolved before any material meeting that these exterior desires must be reterritorialized in the service of the State, or else eliminated. This is a damning critique of the Northern nations’ behavior, to be sure. But we should not stop here. Otherwise, the implication of terra nullius is that it is problematic only in colonial contexts, that the anti-production occurs just when native flows are overcoded, and as such, we are left with the conclusion that the State would have been justified in settling the land if it was, in fact, abandoned, or perhaps that those who are indigenous to the land are free to ravage its resources as they please. Deleuze and Guattari, however, have warded this misinterpretation off in their first four pages of co-authorship. AO (p. 4) announces, as a foundational principle of schizoanalysis, that “we make no distinction between man and nature”. We already know what they mean---everything is desiring-machines, flows of desiring-machines, man-machines produced in nature and nature-machines produced in man. Just two of infinite multiplicities, part of the same schizophrenic process. Therefore, we are not concerned solely with the North’s overcoding of rhizomatic land connections, which is to say, of zones of intensity as they relate to humans, of humans’ zones of intensity, of sentient desires. We are concerned with the overcoding of all desires. Even the desire of a single stone on the Southern beach. The charges against the North, then, are not just of settler colonialism, but in addition, of a reduction of ecological, non-human zones of intensity into an instrumental, anthropocentric Being. We have enumerated their crimes against man; let us turn our attention to what they have done to nature, in his name.

In many ways, the problem of the environment could be said to be the defining issue of our time. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are countless critiques of the status quo state of affairs. The simplest, and perhaps the most familiar, is the standard condemnation of anthropocentrism, of the elevation of Man such that nature is free to be used in his service, for his pleasure, without any regard. I find one of the more persuasive articulations of this dynamic in Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (1954/1977), in the language of the ‘standing-reserve’---“everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (p. 17). The standing-reserve names the natural world broadly, conceived of for humankind as a resource haven, eagerly awaiting exploitation and destruction, with no purpose or worth beyond what we are soon to impose on it. A more subtle detail in Heidegger’s formulation, one less standard than this basic devaluation of the non-human, is his suggestion that this state of affairs has been ‘ordered’, that is to say, that it is not natural, nor inevitable, but has instead been produced. This is a classic socius---the exterior, the Other, of the species, in all its deterritorialized infinity, is totalized in our interactions, reterritorialized by our anti-productions, restricted to whatever instrumental purpose it serves our interior. The encounter has been programmed in advance: ‘how can nature be of use to me?’. The other potentialities are foreclosed. This condition is not ontological, just a perverse socius, produced of the flows that it now turns against, and susceptible to rupture by a return to those flows. As it stands, however, the non-human is broadly condemned to the standing-reserve, to be called upon readily and obediently when we at last find our own recommendation for it. The birch wood from the forest is stripped, the sand from the beach is stolen, shipped off in the service of the State’s citizens---the floating leaves are left behind.

It is not always for direct utility that the standing-reserve is called upon. Aperion expressed especial interest in the mangrove saplings exclusive to the Southern Island’s swamp, despite a lack of planned function for mangrove wood in any building projects. And who could forget the beekeepers, who harvested honey for their industry on the beaches of the South, if only so that they did not have to labor to give their farm a presentable, human façade, as they would have had to at a location closer to their Central Island shop? It is almost a truism at this point that capitalism’s drive for profit maximization necessitates an infinite exhaustion of the environment, up to the point that there is no environment left. These moments seem to be examples, where nature is mined without any utilitarian or humanitarian purpose considered, solely in the service of boosting the top line. Marx gives us the vocabulary to understand this ecological ambivalence as an instance of ‘exchange-value’, the value of a commodity based on its worth in economic exchange, being privileged over ‘use-value’, the value of a commodity based on its subjective purpose or demand. Capital does have a tendency to prioritize the former over the latter. Heidegger (1954/1977) remarks that “current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines” (p. 18). We see, here, the overcoding of the capitalist socius, with all subjects being reduced to cogs in the economic machine, predetermined and conditioned into the sole production of material production. This is certainly a problem, but we should not be duped into thinking that the problem is the elevation of exchange-value, of economic growth and maintenance, on its own. This would suggest that the maximization of use-value is the solution, which does not make our situation much better---for as we have just seen, enabling interactions to be governed by ‘use-value’ is just a socius of a different name, the anthropocentric standing-reserve. It does not really matter if nature is reterritorialized into a capitalist or socialist or communist or indigenous or colonial interior; nature, in any case, gets reterritorialized.

There is a development that complicates all this (or appears to, at least). Aperion established a National Park, a forest just outside their settlement, protected from being built within or harvested. It was a forest of predominately birch trees---the same species they had half-heartedly extracted from our beaches. Aperion’s government could protest that they could not have reduced nature to a standing-reserve, for they had explicitly barred some of it being put into the service of man. But we are not persuaded. Instead, we explain this with recourse to Arne Næss’s distinction between shallow and deep ecology. “The shallow ecology movement is concerned with fighting against pollution and resource depletion. Its central objective is the health and affluence of people in the developed countries” (Næss, 2018). “The deep ecology movement”, meanwhile, “rejects the human-in-environment image in favor [of] the relational, total field image: organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations” (Næss, 2018). The simplest way to express this distinction, perhaps, is to understand shallow ecology as motivated by a concern for ecology on the basis of negative environmental consequences on humanity, whereas deep ecology names an affirmation of the environment on its own accord.

Deep ecology’s characterization as a field of immanent relations, of knots in a broader system, certainly sounds reminiscent of a rhizome. Shallow ecology, on the other hand, looks suspiciously like a socius. As ‘protection’ of the environment becomes a surface-level question of making an environment palatable for human existence, there is marked a clear interior (of leisurely, unpolluted wilderness), one that sanctions the destruction of the exterior in the service of its creation. The birch leaves from the South are severed from their trunks, which are in turn taken to build walls around the birch reserves of Aperion. Maybe we can make sense of this with the language of ‘normativity’, which we have already found to be a recurring dynamic in (anti-)productions of (anti-)queerness. Where something like ‘homonormativity’ suggests a hegemonic figure of homosexuality, one who remains striated in such a manner that he does not threaten dominant logics (by getting married, starting a family, getting a job, buying a house, and so on), ‘environormativity’ could name the conservationist projects seen in Aperion, and in the away-from-keyboard nations they draw inspiration from, whose ecological commitments are extended only to natural formations that benefit them, either by mitigating the risk of catastrophic ecosystem collapse, or by merely maintaining a nice park for a Sunday stroll. What is left, then, of the non-normative productions, the flows that do not meet the conditions of these affirmations? In both cases, the same choice: assimilate, or die.

‘Shallow ecology’ is running rampant in current discourses regarding ‘climate change’. The connection of global warming to existential threats to the species, for whatever messaging benefits it may purport to have, has entrenched a Self-ishly overcoding concern, one that is less bothered by the destruction of the environment as such, and more by the prospect of this destruction eventually coming back around to inconvenience them. My mind is drawn to recent discourse regarding an act of protest against reliance on oil, which took the spectacular form of defacing the historical Stonehenge monument with paint powder. The point of interest is not whether the protesters were justified (likely, they were), but is instead with the justifications the ecological left espoused for them in response to the (generally conservative) backlash against the alleged disrespect for a site of cultural importance. There was a degree of utilitarian reductionism, with defenses along the lines of ‘the damages of climate change will be far worse’ and ‘we should prioritize saving future generations over a pile of rocks’. Now, climate change is obviously a disaster of chiefly man’s own creation, and working to rescue effected parties from its dangers is a high priority. But it is disheartening to see the priority being elevated to an overcoding significance, such that the bandaging of damages takes precedence over care for the damaged. Ecological politics is motivated less by an intrinsic, rhizomatic concern for non-human flows, and more by a transcendent, arborescent pursuit of human interests. Deep ecology, for its part, “support the fight against economic and cultural as much as military invasion and domination, and they are opposed to the annihilation of seals and whales as much as to that of human tribes and cultures” (Næss, 2018). However, this broader liberating concern cannot be said to be shared by the dominant environmental logics of the day. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where some ‘Enlightened’ nation, in the name of warming mitigation, takes a more ‘primitive’, less ‘green’ culture as a dirty flow to be leveled and reterritorialized into the grand State, severing indigenous connections in the name of white self-preservation, enacting an overcoding as a response to an overcoding. Indeed, one does not have to imagine this scenario at all.

Climate change is increasingly becoming a problem of Security, straying from the realm of ecology, and as such, we see a diminution of Mosh Pit efforts to draw new connections in affirmative response to environmental, non-human zones of intensity, and a proliferation of new roots that strangle every threat into its sarcophagus, such that humanity (and often, the system of capitalist production it currently exists in) many continue unbothered. We see less and less concern for the natural world on the basis of it having been reterritorialized, and the consequential flows of ecological support, and more and more concern for the natural world that permits a new reterritorialization, for we find the natural ecological imbalance to be too unstable for our good conscience. We become fixated more on the ‘change’, and less on the violent factors that have caused the change, and thus find ourselves turning to ‘order’ as the solution, as if it was not the very disease that we are now identifying a symptom of. In any case, these shallow ecological politics take up the objective of ‘conserving’ whatever illusion of nature is most convenient for humankind, at the expense of the deterritorialized flows of all the rest. There is very little interest in producing new, multiplied connections with the natural world. At times, it feels like the goal is to lock the ‘natural world’ into a utopian, self-conserving state, such that we don’t have to be bothered to consider our interactions with, to draw any connections with, whatever fragments of ‘nature’ in this reterritorialized Being remain. The dynamics at play---retreat to often repressive security measures against an existential threat, interest only in the survival of our own existence and ways of life---are reminiscent of the conservative fears of nuclear warfare, which the average participant in this shallow ecological left would reprimand. Indeed, once the man-nature dichotomy has disappeared, it becomes harrowingly clear just how conservative many of our contemporary discourses regarding climate change (even---especially---from the ecological left) really are.

My favorite formulation of the countless critiques of environmental overcoding must be Baudrillard’s discussion of the Biosphere. ‘Biosphere 2’ is an indoor experimental recreation of Earth’s atmospheric conditions, established in Tucson, Arizona, to simulate and study human survival. Baudrillard is skeptical of the interest towards this attraction being purely observational---he suspects that “this micro-universe seeks to exorcize catastrophe by making an artificial synthesis of all the elements of catastrophe… the real planet, presumed condemned, is sacrificed in advance to its miniaturized, air-conditioned clone (have no fear, all the earth's climates are air-conditioned here) which is designed to vanquish death by total simulation” (1992/1994, p. 87). What we find on display is a paradigmatic case of our ressentiment formula: the creation of an aspired towards Real World (a safe, managed dome), which is created in response to and/or generates a condemnation of the Apparent World (the dangerous, chaotic environment). As with most experiments, Biosphere’s interior conditions are not a perfect replica of the simulated phenomenon. “Nature is also germs, viruses, chaos, bacteria and scorpions, significantly eliminated from Biosphere 2 as though they were not meant to exist… what they have forgotten is that what binds living beings together is something other than an ecological, biospherical solidarity, something other than the homeostatic equilibrium of a system: it is the cycle of metamorphoses. Man is also a scorpion” (Baudrillard, 1992/1994, p. 81-82). What Biosphere forgets, and what any striated interior cannot as such remember, is the becomings of the natural world, of the schizophrenic process, which threaten the programmatic functioning of our approximated replica. The deterritorialized scorpion is unable to be affirmed by the safe, pleasant interior, and so, is wrapped up in reterritorializing flows, salvaging what we can make useful, eliminating the rest. The scorpion’s venom is extracted for antidotes, and the corpse is cast aside; the birch trees are stripped for wood, the floating leaves left to rot. The interior overcodes the exterior. “The most amazing thing is that they have reconstituted a fragment of artificial desert right in the middle of the natural desert… only in this artificial desert there are neither scorpions nor Indians to be exterminated; there are only extraterrestrials trained to survive in the very place where they destroyed another, far better adapted race, leaving it no chance” (Baudrillard, 1992/1994, p. 85-86).

We shouldn’t get our hopes up: Biosphere cannot be successful in its ‘utopian’ mission. “This experiment, like any attempt to achieve artificial survival or artificial paradise, is illusory, not from any technical shortcomings, but in its very principle. In spite of itself, it is threatened by the same accidents as real life. Fortunately. Let us hope that the random universe outside smashes this glass coffin” (Baudrillard, 1992/1994, p. 88). Any attempt to cohere a stable Being fails in the face of the constant breaking-offs of becomings, the unconditional fate that we can affirm, and that the interior can hold in its realm of conditional affirmation, threatening to topple the whole system over. No simulation can ever fully capture the nondeterministic nature of the BwO. But for many people, the Biosphere is close enough. We’ll take our air conditioning, even if a dust particle causes it to go out every couple days. What we should focus on, then, is not necessarily that deterritorialized flows present a challenge to the reterritorialized ‘environment’, but rather, the violent anti-productions that this interior subjects the deterritorialized flows to, in order to create and maintain its rule. The Biosphere should mark our ecological conception of the socius. It doesn’t matter what the content of the Biosphere’s interior is---perhaps it is a dome built to optimize the anthropocentric freedom of the standing-reserve, the profit accumulation of exchange-value, the humanist leisure of shallow ecology. What is important is that this interior always marks a Real World of the transcendent, ideal Environment, one that condemns and seeks to overcome the Apparent World of immanent, chaotic nature, and therefore, is demonstrative of ressentiment. The zones of intensity of countless non-human machines are reduced to Beings. That these machines are not of the ‘man’ variety is of no concern to us, for we make no real distinctions between machines. They’re all part of the same schizophrenic process, through which ressentiment is always quick to spread. But even if the ressentiment epidemic remained isolated within the ‘nature’ that we imposed the limit of ‘Being’ on, and we never felt the repercussions, we could nonetheless never stand to permit any reterritorialization of its flows, of any flows, any reterritorialization of the sort of which the Biosphere appears to necessarily be.

Of course, Baudrillard’s satire of the glass dome is not an announcement of air conditioning as always indicative of a socius, of disease treatments as always indicative of a socius. Nevermore prevents us from ever making such a misreading. The critique is, as always, of anything that, and of anything only to the extent that it, marks an investment in a socius, a (micro)fascism, an anti-production. Vaccination, masking, and other pandemic-mitigating steps are productive responses to zones of intensity (of loved ones, of immunocompromised)---to overcode these Others’ flows for some transcendent metric of freedom is absurd, and a classic being-revealed-as-war. I’ve written this whole Baudrillard section while wearing a mask, a precaution inspired by the COVID cases at the summer debate camp I’ve been working at, complications from which have resulted in me spending the night at a friend’s. He’s asleep in the other room now, but I’m still wearing the mask, in part because it looks cool with the chains I’m wearing whenever I glance up at the mirror sitting across from me. However, these precautions remain useful only insofar as they remain productive responses to zones of intensity. Should they instead wander into the territory of the Biosphere, aspiring towards a total extermination of any risk of disease, requesting the bad object of the body be locked back into the sarcophagus, we are dealing with a disease of a totally different nature---MCS, or, its philosophically given name, ressentiment. The conservative who refuses to mask is almost certainly striating existence; but so is the specific kind of liberal that responds with punitive evaluation of them. In two directions, an investment in the sacred interior of the Self---I would much rather see the two interact in a Mosh Pit. Baudrillard is not suggesting that, if a scorpion appears before us, we should keel over and wait for the worst, welcoming its venomous sting. He is, however, suggesting that the Biosphere prefigures this encounter with the scorpion, such that we are unable to draw, produce, and produce in response to rhizomatic connections in the moment, instead proceeding along the established, arborescent path (presumably of elimination). The scorpion is overcoded as a Being, not produced in response to as a zone of intensity. It is this dynamic that we problematize, this rehearsal of terra nullius, albeit on a different battleground. The Southern Island is cast outside the Biosphere, confined to the lonely desert. The Northern dome is concerned only with how it can secure itself from the South’s scorpions, or occasionally, how it can bend the South’s scorpions to secure it. No room is left to affirm the sting.

Biosphere concisely sums up our critique of the logics of environmental overcoding, as they were demonstrated throughout Ish’s experiment. There is one last thought I would like to get out while we remain on the topic, though I do not have an exact Minecraft demonstration of it. As a result of climate scientists acting as early movers in the identification of and mobilization of action against the effects of anthropogenic climate change, it is often taken for granted that ‘science’ is to be our savior against this coming apocalypse. We are a little skeptical of any such deferral. Now, our critique of science should not, for a moment, be associated with the conservative recourse to conspiracy. There is a translator’s note regarding Nietzsche’s use of ‘science’ to name the Socratic discipline he dismissed in BT that I find revealing and instructive: “throughout BT Nietzsche uses Wissenschaft, which means science in the broadest sense, as the systematic pursuit of knowledge, and not just the natural sciences” (p. 119). When we express disdain towards ‘science’, then, we nonetheless have nothing but respect for chemists, biologists, ecologists, physicists, and their work. We reserve our remarks for those who invest in science as a redemptive, compulsory, transcendent, ‘objective’ method, who take the systematization of empirical data as the only acceptable mouthpiece from which judgements can be made, judgements which must be at all times adhered to. Nietzsche, of course, problematizes ‘science’ in this sense as a conditional justification for existence, and we agree. At the most basic level, the push to grant ‘objective fact’ and its ‘logical conclusions’ special exemption above and from philosophical judgements (as if the scientific method was not itself a subdiscipline of philosophy, and an outdated one at that) gives us pause. It is great that scientific data has tended to side with progressive resolutions, but the conditioning of these affirmations on statistical analysis makes us wonder, would science not abandon our cause if new studies suggested capitalism was not ecologically ghoulish, white men were physically superior, homosexuality was not natural (or worse, could be genetically altered and therefore removed), and does this loose commitment not seem incredibly worrying? I would prefer not to align with eugenics in the event of a rounding error, and this is precisely where the unconditional affirmation of our schizoanalysts and their consequential critique of desiring-acquisition is needed. Moreover, though, even if science was perhaps correct in its ability to know and simulate the behaviors of even the quantum BwO, it does so in an arborescent nature we find disagreeable. The implication of the universal prioritization of ‘Truth’ above all else is a forced compulsion of all subjects into an intelligible state, and from whatever state they are found in towards whatever position is deemed most optimal or accurate, which is the exact kind of violence we have sought to leave behind with our departure from Freud. We have emphasized that even deterritorialization cannot be pursued in a teleological, assimilative manner; I’m not sure why scientists thought they might be allowed to carry on in that way. Again, we don’t have anything against the natural sciences, and often celebrate their productions. Our critique is not of the recording of and response to information---indeed, this is how we have characterized rhizomatic relations. We are just militant against the systematization of this pursuit, the arborescent stabilization of all flows as data, and the interaction with these flows only in terms of their objective representation. Conservative climate deniers renounce the flows of truth, and are therefore reterritorializing existence, a move our rhizomatic ecologics seeks to rupture. We, on the other hand, are resisting the liberal aspiration towards Truth, and are therefore deterritorializing existence, as our rhizomatic ecologics flee towards mystic escape.

The problem with science could perhaps best be expressed with the critique of the signifier/signified dynamic that is itself foundational to most postmodern thought. Saussure’s theory of structural linguistics (which we mentioned briefly with our earlier introduction to Baudrillard) understands language as a collection of signs, which are themselves divided into two parts. We have a ‘signifier’---the word, the symbol, the letters ‘a-p-p-l-e’---and a ‘signified’---the concept the word represents, the Real, the red fruit. Saussure’s interpretation is marked by two main premises: first, we cannot have an exact correspondence between the signifier and signified, and second, as a result of the first, the meaning of signifiers is instead determined based on their relationship with other signifiers. Language is therefore a self-referential game. I cannot tell you what it feels like to taste an apple (the signified), but I could suggest it’s sort of like a pear, or not at all like bread (the other signifiers). ‘Modernism’ and ‘structuralism’, broadly, thought that human experience could be understood through the mediation of signs, that by interpreting phenomena in terms of their larger system, by referring signifiers to other signs, we could diagnose and redeem existence (science, Marxism, and metaphysics mark some of these modernist ‘metanarratives’). ‘Post-modernism’ and ‘post-structuralism’, then, disagree with this premise, forwarding the belief that the signified Real cannot be understood through the mediation of inexact signifiers (the “postmodern condition” is defined as “incredulity toward metanarratives” [Lyotard, 1979/1984, p. xxiv]), and as such, criticize the modernist attempt to impose meaning on life through them. This also helps clear up one of the common hiccups of reading postmodernist thought, the elusive ‘paradox’---‘you criticize language, yet you use words!’, ‘you criticize depictions of violence, yet you depict it!’. Modernism is what would view specific signifiers (language, depictions of violence) as necessarily problematic; postmodernism views these signifiers as problematic only to the extent that they invest back in modernism, that is, to the extent that the signifiers ‘language’ or ‘representations of violence’ are deployed in a way that aspires towards meaning with recourse to a metanarrative. An essentialized reading of a signifier as necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is the exact mistake postmodernism moves beyond. Postmodernism is therefore, in a word, Nevermoric.

What does this all have to do with science? Systematic science demonstrates the malfunctions of the metanarrative par excellence. There is, first, a foundational belief in the correspondence between signifiers and signified, such that enough observation can be thought sufficient to access the Real realm of ‘Truth’. There is, however, not such a one-to-one correlation, with a schizophrenic Real that resists static representation, with Dionysian accidents that escape the Biosphere’s simulation and crack its glass sarcophagus. For most, though, the inexact nature of science is not a new revelation, nor is it much of a concern. Sure, we may be unable to exactly know existence. But science is good enough. Even oblivious to quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics got planes across the Atlantic Ocean, and (though it does require a Baudrillardian affirmation of insecurity, an indifference towards the slight probability that it could all crash and burn) that’s good enough for most of us to sleep easy through a flight. The more contemptible element of science, then, is not that it makes approximations with signifiers, but that it instead interacts at the level of those approximations, extracting them from the Real to toss them around in our floating self-referential system. A classic modernist move. Nietzsche notices this trend in even Socratic science, characterizing it as motivated by “the unshakable belief that rational thought… can penetrate to the depths of being, and that it is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being” (BT, p. 73, italics in original). The privileging of the signifier in scientific discourses is a machine of anti-production, creating a compulsion for the productions of a BwO to remain intelligible (queer desires are policed as to remain inside a communicable conception of ‘gay’; inhuman flows are reduced to match the imperfect label of ‘furry’), or, even if one wards of the internalization of these microfascisms, leaves one made sense of only in a self-referential web of signification (nuanced expressions of gender are understood as and therefore treated as ‘Girl’; I’ll never forget tweet from a random aspiring psychoanalyst that denounced all furries as ‘posthumanist raceplay’), and therefore, in either case, leaves one responding to static Beings, foreclosing the metamorphic becomings of the Real. Even if science is completely accurate in its simulations of environmental changes, these representations are nonetheless interpreted through and overcoded by the surrounding signifiers of capitalist growth, which is how we end up with ‘green tech’ that is less concerned with ecological health than enabling capitalist extraction to continue unimpeded. ‘Objectivity’ turns into cultural hegemony, as there must be some transcendent ‘objective’ selected, which signifiers are then biunivocally related to. Immanence is lost. We first formulated Nevermore as a fundamentally affirmative concept, the (defining postmodern) resolution that the only determining factor in whether a production was problematic is whether it was a production of desiring-production or desiring-acquisition, a question of form over content (to the extent that the two are separable). However, we can now see that it, as with many schizoanalytic concepts, turns into a critical tool, an announcement that ruptures its negation, in this case combatting the modernist movements of science. Science, as a system, interacts at the level of signifier, content over form, touting an absolute knowledge of and totalizing recommendations for the Real flows that are signified, anti-producing them into static Beings and managing them from there based on their self-referential relations with other interiors.

Our critique is with the socius of science, the systematization of knowledge, the signified Real modernist aspirations towards meaning, and not the productions of science, STEM studies, the signifiers correlated with this approach. Conveniently, though, we can often see the ressentiment of the former crystallize in the latter. Academic articles throughout the sciences (as well as the ‘analytic’ branches of philosophy that share their unwavering concern for Truth) have this frustrating tendency to theorize about as little as possible, as to avoid unwarranted generalizations, only to regardless write conclusions that just purport to ‘contribute to existing literature’, too scared to actually defend a claim, as if the scope of the article didn’t make it useless enough already. This apprehensiveness is symptomatic of science’s investment in signifiers that fail to accurately describe the Real, therefore able to maintain confidence only in extremely narrow, detached, simulated conclusions. Not to say that impractical argumentation is bad---we love the deterritorialized ponderances we make with friends, rhizomatic conversations---but suggesting that argumentation must adhere to this totalizing truth-seeking method, that it is the only legitimate form of scholarship, is a reterritorializing striation. God forbid we adopt a program, as schizoanalysis has done, that can deal with uncertainty, that doesn’t resort to teleological systems, such that a misdiagnosis doesn’t spell disaster, such that it remains responsive to confusing zones of intensity rather than intelligible Beings. Or, worse still, pray that science doesn’t for a moment produce without peer-reviewing first, concerning itself with livable existence over sacred Truth. It’s not like, as Nietzsche observed, even a resolution as basic as “‘I think’” relies on “a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible” (1886/2020, p. 24), which is what led him to our earlier-quoted resolution that questions of life-affirmation take precedence over truth. It’s not like the analytic project breaks down when it steps outside, where we have to make constant affirmations of uncertain outcomes to do anything. It’s nicer to talk to a friend, who hears your desires as much as the words they lace, who offers real suggestions, and who adapts these suggestions to your changing zone of intensity, than it is to be observed by a doctor, who only hears the number 1-through-10 that labels your pain, and who throws this number into an impersonal system of diagnoses and disorders. It’s nice to be connected with as a becoming, and not abstracted as data.

Science does not just fail to see the signified, but relies on a violent reterritorialization of it, overcoding it into the transcendent regime of the signifiers instead. Postmodernism is able to make uncertain critiques of certain productions of the Real, the ones that aspire towards meaningful interiors (pollution is problematic when it’s an ordering of nature into Man’s expendable standing-reserve; ignorance towards illness is problematic when it’s a Selfish endangerment of Others), but this is too subjective for science. Instead, science lapses onto the signifiers as problematic in a vacuum (pollution, ignorance towards illness), assuming they must always be productions of the anti-production that they are only sometimes associated with, and calling for their total extermination. The response becomes aspiration towards a Biosphere, where certain productions (assumed to be exterior in content, regardless of form) are left out. The signifier of the scorpion. As always, this overcoding causes some problems. There are times where one reterritorializes themself, and as a result, often opts for the creation of new interiors, striating existence even further into a grid. I think of a syllabus railing against ChatGPT, listing as one of its enumerated reasons that it contributes to carbon emissions. Independent of the merits of AI-generated homework, I wonder how this professor shields their own carbon footprint from this moral wrist-slapping. Is AI unnecessary, but them driving to work is? Does their socioeconomic position justify electricity usage that would not be permitted for a billionaire? Existence becomes an ontological grid. Signifiers are bestowed meaning, and with it, value, self-referentially, and as such, attempts to condemn any signifier drags in a whole host of complications, leading to quick backpedaling. The aspiration towards objective meaning gets messy and, because objectivity can’t deal with a mess, it falls apart.

In cases where new striations aren’t construed, where a certain production is instead flatly rejected in all instances, we risk grouping a deterritorialized flow in with an overarchingly rejected box, blanketing the messiness and covering its potential outbreak. Pollution often represents an overcoding of nature, sure. Corporations dumping waste is usually a reterritorialization invested in the sole production of maximizing profit, and we will decode these flows. But what of the beer cans tossed into the woods to hide evidence from the cops, the cigarette smoke and graffiti that reclaims a gentrified wall, the empty McDonald’s chocolate milk bottle that, one night after basketball, as the cool wind mixed with the loud stereo in my backseat, I felt a particular urge to toss out the window and into an affluent neighborhood as I sped by? None of these productions need to be justified as morally ‘good’. They do, however, seem to be deterritorialized, and as such, do not need to be exterminated. Deleuze, reflecting on his ongoing battle with tuberculosis, remarked “illness is not an enemy… but rather, something that sharpens the feeling of life… not at all in the sense of ‘oh, how I still want to live, and so once I’m cured, I’ll start living’” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1988). This is not the modernist meaning-through-difference, the classic pseudo-philosophical ‘without bad days, the good days wouldn’t be good!’. That would be an instrumentalization of suffering, a conditional affirmation on the basis of things getting better, not an affirmation of the Apparent World itself. It also would be incorrect---I remember a month-long period in February of this year where it felt like everything was going right, like I was on a constant ‘burner’ or ‘heater’, despite a decisive lack of ‘bad days’ to contrast those triumphs with. It’s not hard to heat up when you’re writing a book about an unconditional justification for existence. Deleuze is referencing an intrinsic value of illness, one that anyone who has enjoyed the burdened rest of a sick day can attest to. This is, of course, not to say sickness is good---that would be a judgement at the level of signifier in its own right---but it is to suggest that a problematization of any ambivalence towards illness would be misguided, for not every resistance to treatment is a Selfish reterritorialization (as the liberal might assume). Sometimes, a sick day is just a vibe. Not sure why we’d want to exterminate that from the Biosphere. Science, though, can’t understand value without the objective mediation of signs, and is therefore constantly trying to make intelligible the Real, either by drawing new striations of exemption that shut down responsibilities for rhizomatic connections, or by attaching to a rhizomatic connection a restrictive label that it does not deserve. Science could never understand, and therefore, never affirm, the schizophrenic’s asignifying rupture. Deterritorialization escapes representation, and threatens it. Even a good-natured therapist, one as committed to battling the life-negation of ressentiment as we are, would see the heart carved into the wrist and get too hung up on the signifier of the scar to recognize the anti-humanist love that is its signified. The resistance of a line of flight is made off-limits. But even if the therapist was right, and was looking at a production of ressentiment, how could the correct response to be condemnation, the attempt to overcome these immanent circumstances, which would only recreate the conditions that produced them? Maybe we should try drawing rhizomatic connections instead. There’s enough negativity already.

Signifiers are not irredeemable. To suggest so would create a new metanarrative, which is the reason we find them lamentable in the first place. We know that, as an object of a postmodern critique, as an element of a process we’ve conceptualized as Nevermoric, we would never take a signifier (even abstracted as ‘signifier’ itself) to necessarily mean anti-production. Even if we didn’t, we’ve discussed the proper name a few times already. The proper name, is a signifier as an instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity, an intimate connection, a production of and indicator to a zone of intensity. ‘Wolf-Man’, ‘lesbian’, ‘good boy’, ‘they’. These titles, as proper names, do not lift themselves to an abstract definition, a transcendent objectivity, a categorization. One doesn’t understand a ‘they’ by referring ‘them’ to other signifiers (not ‘he’, not ‘she), but based on the becoming it is produced as a reaction to (agender? genderfluid? plural?). The meaning of each name shifts, the applicability of the title comes and goes, the relations of the signifier recontextualizes. It changes in content as it attaches to a new machine, and at the same time, changes the machines it attaches to. To be called ‘dog’ does not impose a standardization of behavior or relations, but does approximate and amplify an affect that can then be released into the process, transforming one’s relations to dog-like machines (clothes shopping at Petco), transforming one’s relation to machines to be more dog-like (words like ‘rough’ and ‘walk’ are now met with an ironic glance), at least for as long as the becoming is present. One does not ‘become’ an ideal dog; a specific dog is produced in a becoming. ‘Blitz!’. The proper name does not create a static meaning the Self has to match---one does not have to meet a specific set of criteria to be ‘queer’, nor does the feeling of ‘queerness’ need to be constant. The proper name does not make an equivalence that overcodes interactions with the Other---one’s own ‘queerness’ does not necessarily correlate exactly with another’s, and they therefore do not need to provide totalizing advice. The proper name does not lose its primary attachment to the Real in its own self-referential dimension. The proper name is a production of desiring-production. It is not an arborescent root that strangles the productions of the BwO it wraps around, but instead produces rhizomatic connections between BwOs---the connection just happens to take the form of a word. ‘favorite’, ‘friend’, ‘prefer’, ‘pet’, ‘love’. Modernism’s abstract, universal, impersonal ‘Identity’ is a signifier that restricts the flows of the signified. The proper name is a signifier that immerses the signified in the currents of desiring-machines.

Science is not irredeemable either. Deleuze and Guattari spend a good deal of time distinguishing the rhizomatic ‘nomad science’ from the ‘royal science’ of the State. Whereas “royal science is inseparable from a ‘hylomorphic’ model implying both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for that form”, “nomad science is more immediately in tune with the connection between content and expression… thus matter, in nomad science, is never prepared and therefore homogenized matter, but is essentially laden with singularities” (ATP, p. 369). Royal science is the arborescent system that takes Truth as transcendent objective, severing the scientist from the flows they observe, compelling all existence into its optimizing, intelligible system. Nomad science, however, “do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to have an autonomous development. They do not have the means for that because they subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of… following the flow of matter, drawing and linking up smooth space. Everything is situated in an objective zone of fluctuation that is coextensive with reality itself” (ATP, p. 373). Nomad science does not remove itself from and overcode the rhizome, but is immanent and draws connections with the rhizome. Science as a response to a zone of intensity. This could be the science produced of pure curiosity, learning about dolphins for the sake of learning about dolphins, or a consensual attempt to help (real consent, ongoing respect for a becoming, and not the legalist ‘informed consent’ of modern experimentation), to learn about disease treatments so that those interested could be helped. What is important is that, in both cases, science draws connections with that which it observes, and therefore, does not restrict it into an impersonal ‘object of study’, but flows with it, willing to adapt or cease its methods as the subject of experimentation becomes. The psychiatrist of Nevermore is, first, responding to a zone of intensity, not forcing one into an unwanted Being of ‘mental health’, and second, a production of assistance, not conditioned on successful treatment, creating in conjunction with a becoming to see where it goes, not aspiring towards a Being. Deleuze, when asked “you actually enjoy taking medicine?”, laughs “in my current state, yes… my little pile every morning is a real hoot!... I have always been in favor of drugs I have always been in favor of the pharmacy” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1988). Deleuze is not required to medicate, nor does he reprimand sickness should his medication fail. There is no desiring-acquisition. Just popping pills as a deterritorialized flow.

One last remark on science. We began this discussion with a remark on climate scientists, and the conservatives that turn against them. Much of these ecologists’ important work has been in the realm of data, through collection of evidence that we have damaged the environment, and conclusions on interventions we’ve attempted to help. This data can be a useful production, a proper name for ecological zones of intensity, signifiers that open nature up to rhizomatic connections of assistance. This data, as flows, is therefore reterritorialized when the conservative denies its reality or significance. However, we should not let this lure us into the self-referential calculations of the scientists, uncritically accepting ‘objective’ recommendations of data with special precedence over all other flows in a production, compelling ourselves to match the optimal simulation the best we can, working to correct any deviations. Do not let science predetermine life. Data can influence our relevant decisions. But as Toto Wolff, eight-time championship winning team principal for Mercedes, so eloquently put it in Netflix’s Formula 1 documentary drama, ‘data doesn’t make decisions’. Every statement is a statement of an entire assemblage, and data serves as a machine, a flow, that produces in conjunction with, sometimes in subservience to, and not at the expense of, the rest of the schizophrenic process. We do not deny that the globe is heating, that pandemics have spread. We resist a response to these phenomenon that seeks to exterminate their signifiers, that suggests every production ought to be concerned with these crises above all else. Our response to the violence against the natural world should not be to lock ourselves into a Biospheric Being, but to draw connections with ecological zones of intensity. Getting caught up in the regime of scientific signification could deceive us into turning against a deterritorialization. Driving a car, throwing trash in a forest, denying medical advice---we problematize these insofar, and only insofar, as they invest in the fascism of the standing-reserve. The same goes for the responses to these striations, scientific or not. Dyeing one’s hair, taking medication, geoengineering the Earth---we problematize these insofar, and only insofar, as they invest in the fascism of the eugenicist Biosphere. “The principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes” (ATP, p. 397-398). This quotation is just Deleuze and Guattari echoing what we have been stressing this entire critique---the question of science is just a question of Nevermore. Science that remains internal to the rhizome, versus science that redirects it towards a transcendent goal. This is, in short, our entire criticism of the North---their interaction with signifiers, based on their position relative to an overarching system of meaning, rather than as the Real flows these signifiers represent. The connection between signifier and signified is severed; the extraction of the birch trunks detaches the ground from the leaves.

This concludes our critique of the Northern nation’s imperialist extraction on the Southern Island. We find overcoding in their treatment of indigenous and natural flows, both of which were reterritorialized in the service of an overarching metanarrative (of the State, of Man), or, a socius. Throughout these accusations, though, we have seen hints of our hesitance to side with a pure inversion of these narratives. We problematize the State’s reterritorialization of natives, and Man’s reterritorialization of nature, but at the same time, do not want to suggest that it would be sufficient to enable Nature to reterritorialize man, or an ontological Right to reterritorialize politics. We should not let our resistance to metanarratives lapse into a metanarrative against a metanarrative, instead ensuring that the object of our critique remains the act of metanarration. Deleuze and Guattari characterize their conceptualization of desiring-machines as a mutual composition of mechanism and vitalism, but find both pictures incomplete in isolation. “Mechanism abstracts a structural unity in terms of which it explains the functioning of the organism. Vitalism invokes an individual and specific unity of the living, which every machine presupposes insofar as it is subordinate to organic continuance… in one way or another, the machine and desire thus remain in an extrinsic relationship, either because desire appears as an effect determined by a system of mechanical causes, or because the machine is itself a system of means in terms of the aims of desire” (AO, p. 284). Mechanism essentializes desiring-machines as predetermined components of a broader system. Vitalism essentializes them as external tools for the individual. Schizoanalysis, therefore, is unwilling to take a side. The notion of desiring-machines, which produce and are produced by the schizophrenic process, “shatters the vitalist argument by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling in question the structural unity of the machine” (AO, p. 284). It seems that our criticisms of the North have challenged the vitalist instrumentalization of flows towards a single goal---the Southern Island, indigenous and natural, is subsumed into the State or Man. But this enumeration of injustices hints only at the antisocial risks of Selfish desires, and says nothing of the unfreedom symptomatic of structural constraints on the ‘Self’. There should be no overcoding of all existence by a single machine, we agree; but there should also be no overcoding of all machines by a single vision of existence. This impasse is similar to what we observed in our second and third plateaus, our critiques of Main Character Syndrome and the State, the twin poles of ressentiment that Levinas identifies: overcoding-of-the-Self (structuralism, tyranny, the State) and overcoding-of-the-Other (vitalism, egoism, the State of Nature). We have said much of the North’s overcoding of the Southern Other. But we should be careful not to merely invert the binary.

It seems possible that some committed to resisting the imperialist violence of the North would dismiss our concerns of a ressentiment reversed as an abstract metaphysical gripe, a useless philosophical ponderance, an enemy of justice and agent of the State. We should point out, first of all, that these ‘abstract metaphysical concerns’ are of the very nature that grounds their own critique, for it is precisely the identification of a reterritorialization that catalyzes our insurgence against colonialism and anthropocentrism. Again, there is no real distinction between overcoding-of-the-Self and overcoding-of-the-Other---both are just moments that cohere Beings in favor of zones of intensity, with the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ acting as nothing more than loose conceptual designations. Indeed, where could we turn to combat a conservative’s vitalist relativism, if not the social realm of philosophy, and what would that conservative’s defense be, if not the anti-philosophical ‘it’s not that deep, you speak in metaphysical abstractions’? Perhaps, however, the anti-imperialist and environmental fronts are not convinced, and are content to reprimand all non-material comments on their decisively materialist projects. Perhaps they do not care if they have invested in a structural metanarrative, for they believe their metanarrative is better than the rest. As long as they can change the direction of the overcoding, they consider themselves successful. We will do our best to convey that nothing could be further from the case. 

We can start at the ‘microfascist’ level, the more intrapersonal implication of ressentiment. The question of the environment is quite complex, and as such, I did not have a resolution to it at the time of the event. I did not even have much of a definitive resolution before writing this chapter. As a result, there were times where the question of how not to overcode the environment, how to free nature from the condition of standing-reserve, encroached upon Levinas’s overly-totalizing terms. Was not every production of the Self an unasked for intervention upon the Others of the ecological world? There were nights where I could not sleep, because I feared that adjusting my blanket would be a reterritorialization of all the atoms that clung to it. There were mornings where I struggled to shower, wondering if the consumption of water was an overcoding of the rivers, the washing of my skin an overcoding of microorganisms, the turning of the shower knob an overcoding of its metallic particles. It seemed, from a certain perspective, that life without instrumentalization was impossible, for even to breathe rearranged the molecules of the world at Man’s will. This interpretation of interactions was, predictably, not schizoanalytically correct, but does reflect the nihilistic self-defeatism one experiences as a consequence of reterritorializing all vital life in the service of a transcendent structure of ‘nature’. Just as man once overcoded nature, a flat inversion leaves nature now overcoding man. These neurotic breakdowns could be exported to Minecraft, as well---even during Ish’s experiment, I wondered about the tension between our anti-North sentiments, condemnation on the basis of their imperialist extraction, and our own architectural developments, which mined a few trees themselves. Might we also be treating the Island as a standing-reserve? The spark that ignited our reflections on Levinas, on the possibility for a deterritorialized, non-totalizing relationship between Self and Other, on NEWMAGICWAND, was my Day One encounter with the clearing that turned into my home, my decision to camp inside of the trunk of, and not the planks crafted from, a tree. But this production still required the acquisition of four pieces of wood. Could we even be confident that the revered Beta-dark-oak-assemblage was not fascist in its own right? If we consider the critique of the standing-reserve to be a suggestion, not that we should not reterritorialize nature, but that we should completely surrender to it---if we reject not the process of signification, but only specific signifiers---then no, we cannot.

Perhaps the structuralist is still unconcerned with a micropolitical suicidal sentiment, and would still like to see a more material implication. We can therefore direct them towards the political dimension of the overcoding-of-the-Self. To make one’s ‘Self’ subservient to a broader structure (here, of nature) suggests a broader demand for control, such that ‘Others’ are made obedient to the structure as well. We could recall our earlier caricature of the moralist Marxist, who, attempting first and foremost to forestall the acceleration of capitalist exchange-value towards global organic extinction, orders all humans to take up roles in the Party, to minimize emissions, to maximize green labor. A particularly devout proponent of such organizing could even reterritorialize indigenous flows, suggesting that the demand for decolonization misses the point, that we on the contrary need colonization to make things more green (in such a scenario, we could end up with both sides in the wrong, if the indigenous group for their part suggested that only decolonization mattered, that they should be free to develop their territory without concern for the environment, that there could be no anti-capitalist flows on stolen land)! Only a decoding of all systems of arborescence and proliferation of rhizomatic connections gives us a critical escape that does not lapse back into these striating affairs. We may not be fortunate enough for such affairs to always stem from good-natured movements, either. There has been a rise in a phenomenon deemed ‘ecofascism’, which calls for the genocidal securitization of an ethnostate, exterminating those marked determinantal to the environment that was (supposedly) created for the White race to enjoy (remember when we above suggested climate change was turning everyone into conservatives?). Maybe the loudest call of all comes from inside the house, when the deep ecology movement has earned an unsavory association with eugenicist demands, and Heidegger himself was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. It is not at all difficult to see how, when one identifies the growth of humanity as the culprit of environmental overcoding, regulating or cutting human populations materializes as a solution. We sympathize with anti-imperialists, of course, for the imperialist reterritorialization of indigeneity and ecology into the capitalist State is a clear socius, and a target for deterritorial destruction. But we caution these revolutions not to sanction a reterritorialization of their own, aiming their violence at static signifiers rather than the processes which produce them, especially with how easy it would be to mark expendable the very signified they seek to support.

Though it can seem difficult to find the line of flight in the imperialist sphere, seeking to avoid the vitalist overcoding-of-the-Other on one hand, and the structuralist overcoding-of-the-Self on the other, it is not a predicament we have not found ourselves in before. When Levinas’s pluralist metaphysics worried us that it was impossible for a Self to produce in a manner that did not totalize the Other, or that any support for the Other was a totalization of the Self, we found solace in the rhizome, the desubjectified conceptualization of the subject, NEWMAGICWAND. Since we understand man and nature to both be part of the schizophrenic process, then, we know that the solution to environmental violence will take the same shape here. A deterritorialized resistance to reterritorializing flows. A production in response to (ecological) zones of intensity, rather than (Man-imposed) Beings. This is all well and good, and really, we could have known this was the alternative to be pursued from before these critiques began, when we’ve refused to do anything other than affirm the flows of desiring-production. There remains a problem, however. We have no clue what any of this looks like. Indeed, it was as a consequence of attempting to respond to ecological zones of intensity that I found myself lying awake at night, concerned that I was imposing a Being onto the proximate atoms, and it was likely also as an attempt to respond to ecological zones of intensity that Aperion constructed the Biospheric Being of the national park. The task for us, then, is to consider, at an applied level, what a rhizomatic relationship with the environment really means, and how it can pierce the dual striations of the status quo.

As our failed approximations of what such an orientation might look like, oscillating on either side of our bipolar overcoding spectrum, might reveal, this was not a particularly easy task. It was also, relative to much of the other instances of applied schizoanalysis we have discussed, an area where we had to do a bit more work on our own. Much of our other resolutions have been recontextualizations, new explanations, or conceptual stream-linings of conclusions Deleuze and Guattari already came to. For the question of the environment, however, existing literature could only take us so far. There was not a satisfactory moment, in any of the primary or secondary sources I consulted, that seemed to really assuage our problems, usually either remaining too abstract to resolve our concerns, or getting too programmatic and recreating the striations they hoped to flee. My meditations on the environment, then, was much less an exercise in understanding postmodern texts, and much more a project of extrapolating, implicating, and deploying the concepts the texts held to a new and relevant context. One of the sources I consulted when I still sought a simpler, ready-made answer was Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (1989/2014), which stresses the experimental nature of what he calls ‘ecosophy’. “This new ecosophical logic---and I want to emphasize this point---resembles the manner in which an artist may be led to alter his work after the intrusion of some accidental detail… making it drift far from its previous path… it is not a question of establishing universal rules as a guide to this process, but on the contrary of setting forth the antinomies between the ecosophical levels” (Guattari, 1989/2014, p. 35-36). This preference for an aesthetic, iterative method over a scientific, structuring one is applicable here as well. This is true both of our rhizomatic method, but also, of how we arrived at it. The remainder of this chapter is very much a production of piecing something together, finding a new hole, and throwing something else at it. I will try to walk through my own turning over of ideas that undergirds these ecological conclusions, and will also include some italicized interjections that are word-for-word recreations of the work I scratched out in my Notes app as I parsed through these constantly reappearing problems, often in purpose-made documents titled a simple ‘xxx’ followed by a number or relevant subtitle. I feel satisfied with the picture I can now present. But it does feel especially relevant to now echo another of Guattari’s calls, given the experimental nature of this picture’s composition. Schizoanalysis is always a practical discipline, not an exact one, and it seems possible that, despite my confidence, I made an error somewhere along the way. This is not a problem, when both schizoanalysis and its ecosophical counterpart aspire to an aesthetic paradigm more than a scientific one. However, that requires one maintaining a commitment to deterritorialization more than one specific articulation of it. This is all to say, one should feel welcome to take the conceptualizations that assist in their productions, and leave the rest behind. This is a statement applicable to this entire work, but the less repetition and more addition-based nature of this specific section makes me want to especially now cosign Guattari’s instruction: “just as an artist borrows from his precursors and his contemporaries the traits which suit him, I invite those who read me to take or reject my concepts freely” (1992/1995, p. 12).

The starting point my reflections took (and, in my opinion, a pretty good starting point for most ethical frameworks) was consent as a side-constraint. An unconsented, imposed violence seems problematic in a way that exceeds any form of violence in a vacuum, as its unwanted nature cuts through any contextual reservations, and magnifies the devaluation of the impacted subject. Deleuze and Guattari are not challenged by this test---unconsensual relations reflect an ignorance towards a becoming or zone of intensity, a refusal to draw connections with a flow, a reterritorialization of an existential machine into an essentialized instrument, into a Being for the Self. It is the being-revealed-at-war. The most apparent issue is that a mandate of consent is impossible for ecological relations. We don’t have a good means to communicate with rocks. This is magnified, however, by Deleuze and Guattari’s (correct) insistence that we do not make any real divisions between parts of the schizophrenic process, that we do not separate man from nature, that “it is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on the psyche, the socius and the environment” (Guattari, 1989/2014, p. 27). The puzzle I laid before myself, then, was what standard could be suggested that was usable in environmental interactions (that is, not something exactly like ‘consent’), while at the same time implying consent as a guiding principle in human interactions? How can we announce a universal practice that can account for infinite variations of desiring-machines, while still supporting a specific practice for a certain subsection of those configurations?

What becomes apparent when we consider this guiding question a bit more is that the humanist, Enlightenment, (neo-)liberal version of consent is entirely insufficient for the task. Now, we do not for a second want to give the impression that consent is not critically important. We are about to proceed with a critique of a certain, hegemonic understanding of ‘consent’, but that is just to frame the need for and importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic account of the same phenomenon, which will come directly after. So, don’t get too excited. We already identified the impossibility of falling back upon some linguistic confirmation that what we’re about to do is acceptable when the subject in question does not have access to linguistic tools, which worryingly teeters on a return to the (very Enlightenment) resolution that humans, as ‘rational’ agents, enjoy a heightened right to respect (consent), one which the absence of which vis-à-vis non-human machines leads to their subjugation. The classic combination of Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ for man, and ‘animals are without minds, and can be used however I like’ for the rest. But the problem with the modernist conception of consent is not just that it seems bound to reify the Man/nature striation, for even in the sphere of Man, it cannot maintain its overarching appeal. There are thousands of human-on-human ‘non-consensual’ interactions every day---one might ask someone to do something, look at them a certain way, talk to them about a specific thing, talk to them at all, and so on, without first being granted express permission to do so. It would be an infinite regression to require consent for all interactions, and even the aspiration in that direction reinforces the (also very Enlightenment) clef between the ‘Self’ and ‘Others’, such that every interaction between the two conceived interiors appears to be a zero-sum totalization. If I am required to get verbal consent before talking to you, the implication is that every time the Self addresses an Other, when the Other has not explicitly announced they would like to be addressed, is violent. I’m not so sure that’s the case. Moreover, I am quite sure it acts as a restriction on the production of flows.

We should also not believe that liberal consent is insufficient only because there are times that ‘consent’ seems not to be a requirement, but also because it falls short in navigating situations of the opposite character, where consent could not be more important. ‘Consent’, as a linguistic resignation, can be manufactured, manipulated, and (anti-)produced, such that adhering to the paradigmatic liberal standard for respect for Others is unable to do precisely that. Whether it is the State with the assumed ‘consent’ of citizens to the social contract, or the imposing frat guy at a bar, the announcement of consent is often weaponized as a justification for ignorance towards the Other’s zones of intensity, as if one is ever justified to interact with a Being in such a way. In intimate, intense interactions, it’s important to read between the lines. An apprehensive ‘yes’ is not necessarily a ‘yes’, nor is it necessarily detached from a socius that had conditioned that answer, regardless of whether that answer is an unwanted submission to coercion or not. When responding to zones of intensity, we can never be too careful. On the other side of this same interaction, too, it is entirely possible to produce in response to a zone of intensity without approaching it through the mediation of a signifier. Though this is a personal preference, and should not at all be universalized, I even dislike having to express what I like in words, preferring a partner that can read an intimate moment for what it is. This sentiment is applicable in other circumstances, too---it is a nonverbal apprehension of a becoming, an instantaneous multiplicity, an ‘I feel…’, that can guide us to understand when talking to an Other is acceptable, and when it is not. We think that these intersubjective connections are possible, and indeed, as part of the schizophrenic process, happen all the time---NEWMAGICWAND.

Again, this should all, obviously, not be taken for a second to mean ‘consent is bad’, or even ‘consent is unimportant’. We are just suggesting that the liberal, linguistic, static, signifying form of it cannot ground an answer to either remark, or fulfill the implication of the accurate answers that do exist. This is why we turn our understanding of the ‘consent’ paradigm to Deleuze and Guattari’s, where respect for ‘consent’ means production in response to zones of intensity, rather than Beings. Emphasizing the importance of production with respect to immanent becomings in this manner still gives us the vocabulary to explain why all the worst forms of unconsensual violence---gendering, sexual assault, indiscriminate killing, and so on---are unjustifiable, for each relies on an imposition of and interaction with impersonal Beings, a reterritorialization of zones of intensity. But it leverages these critiques in a manner that points towards a practical alternative, the production in response to those zones, the drawing of rhizomatic connections, which circumvents our issues with the Enlightement variant of this solution. The constant, processive deterritorialization of productions within the schizophrenic process both enables us to justify mundane, everyday interactions that are performed without express verbal acceptance (insofar as the interaction is made in response to a zone of intensity, not a non-consensual Being), and also to condemn overcoding violence that occurs even after verbal acceptance is expressed (when the actual becoming does not match the vocally represented ‘Being’ that is here responded to). Deleuze and Guattari allows us to understand consent as a question of the signified, and not the signifier---desires, and not words. A deterritorialized approach to these flows of desire supplements, refines, and expands the reterritorializing liberal understanding in a way that makes ‘consent’ more useable and useful for human-on-human interactions. More importantly for our environmental theorizations, though, it allows us to accomplish our original task, to suggest a universal orientation towards the schizophrenic process that nonetheless consequences in a specific interactive principle specific to humans. To guide any question of ethics with the insistence of responses to zones of intensity, rather than Beings, enables us to retain consent as an important side-constraint for relationships between humans, without making such a guide unique to Man.

We know, then, that the schizoanalytically ethical orientation towards the environment is to produce in response to zones of intensity, rather than Beings, but this does not quite get us to where we need to be yet. For up until this point, we have made sense of zones of intensity, and their synonymous becomings, with a description of an ‘I feel…’. This conception presents some difficulties when working with ecology. ‘Feeling’ suggests a very sentient, anthropomorphic kind of desire, one that, when looked for in non-human machines, again proliferates totalization to appear everywhere. Perhaps we no longer need a rock to tell us that it is okay for us to use it, but using it still seems to necessarily make subservient its ‘I feel…’ to ours, which means that our perpetual overcoding-of-nature has only been moved back a step. When I was still working through this stage, there were times where I was worried about engaging in overcoding when I skipped songs on shuffle (did those songs not want to be played?), moved items on a computer screen (did those pixels not want to stay dormant?), and, as we have already mentioned, attempting to sleep (did the atoms clinging to my blanket not want to remain in the exact same position?). Doing something like forcefully relocating or subjectively dismissing humans, without consideration for their desires to not be moved, or to actually express, would seem to be a reterritorialization in most instances. So, how could we permit the same productions in relation to non-humans, without again reintroducing a striating split between Man and nature? It emerged from these reflections that personification was a danger to our thought. There are some scholars who make suggestions that it is ‘anthropocentric’ to universalize human consciousness, that it makes an unfair assumption that everything operates like humans. I am not sure that this is where our critique lies, for personification in a vacuum does not seem particularly problematic. To the extent that we forward a critique in this vein, it is that it would be anthropocentric to assume, as a precondition for valuing something, that it must convey and be interacted with at the level of human traits (rationality, consciousness, and so on), which implies an allowed subjugation of whatever does not rise to such thresholds---whether that ends up being a rock, or a certain subgroup of humans deemed less ‘rational’ than the transcendent standard. This would be to condition our affirmation of the infinite difference of machines within the schizophrenic process on an adherence to the Same, to reduce the refrain ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ into a simple ‘MONISM’ instead. The more pressing matter, though, is that conceptualizing zones of intensity of non-human machines as an anthropogenic ‘I feel…’ presents a practical holdup for any deterritorialization, for it again makes us find overcoding in every Self-Other (here, Man-Nature) interaction. We know, then, that we should not flatten the infinite flux of the schizophrenic process, of which both man and nature are part, to a universal human consciousness. That there is no real distinction between man and nature does not mean that the two are exactly the same. On the contrary, it means that they are the same only in their mutual immersion within a process of infinite differentiation, desiring-production, which suggests only that their treatments should be guided by desiring-production as well. That is, we do not make a distinction between the two insofar as we do not think either, or indeed, anything, is exempt from being responded to as a zone of intensity, rather than a Being. But this implicates the form of the productive response, and not the content. We know, then, that an interaction that would be overcoding if it was done with regards to a human-machine is not necessarily overcoding if it is done to a non-human-machine, as long as the interaction with the non-human-machine is nonetheless a response to the machine’s zone of intensity. The question that remains, then, is how we should practically conceive of nature’s zones of intensity, if not as a literal ‘I feel…’?

xxx4

the nature of the rhizome as communal, the lack of a territorial relationship, is a large factor in the prevention of environmental damage, a decent heuristic on what is and isn’t overcoding.

now, owning something, calling something ‘yours’, is not overcoding. but there is not proprietal relationship; rather, it is only one of symbolic value, a rhizomatic relationship. something is ‘yours’ because of what it means to you.

that, crucially, doesn’t preclude sharing. but it is enough that someone else doesn’t take it from you.

and that goes for intra-‘nature’ relationships too. dont take a tree from the shit living in it. find your own relationship with the tree.

communal infrastructure, sites, etc., can obviously have many relationships. but, crucially, one relationship should not obstruct another’s.

If one could not tell by the fact that it ended up underlined in even my Notes app, the concept of ‘symbolic value’ is ‘crucial’ (to use my favorite word, apparently) to our practical understanding of environmental relationalities. Indeed, I think that it was with the connection of the rhizomatic object to symbolic value that I at last conquered the neurotic anxiety of overcoding atoms with every breath. But what is, then, this ‘symbolic value’?

Baudillard’s breakout work, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972/1981), is noted for its post-Marxist addendums to the original categories of ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’ with the postmodern concepts of ‘sign-value’ and ‘symbolic value’. We already know what the first two are---“a logic of utility” and “a logic of the market”---and have already condemned exclusive adherence to either as mechanisms by which nature can reterritorialized (Baudrillard, 1972/1981, p. 66). In this sense, ‘sign-value’ is the same. ‘Sign-value’ is very much parallel with our overview summary of postmodernism’s critique of the signifier, as it refers to the self-referential value of an object as determined by its relationship with other signs. For example, ‘green technology’ has a use-value in its decrease of emissions (which could, if deployed in a deterritorialized way, be a potential for rhizomatic connection with the environment), and an exchange-value of its cost. But its sign-value is perhaps the most significant of all, for as critics of capitalism increasingly tie their discontent with the system to its environmental devastation, ‘green tech’ as a sign rockets in value as it presents, within the capitalist web of signification, a way to make the system more ‘sustainable’ and to cohere more support from its disillusioned masses. It is much the same as the dynamic between the signifier and the signified---the potentialities for a machinic object as productions of desire (the signified; green tech as a way to help the environment) are overcoded and restricted by the value of the machinic object as essentially determined by its arborescent relation to a broader system (the signifier; green tech as a way to support the continuation of capitalist exploitation). This stresses the importance of our unconditional critique---the well-intentioned Marxist who identifies capital as problematic for its contingent ‘externalities’ gives the impression that, should capitalism figure out its pollution and imperialism problems, it will have fixed its issues, and therefore be conditionally justified. We, however, locate our problems with any socius not at an occasional consequence, but at the necessarily intrinsic reterritorialization, such that even if capitalism’s compulsion towards a Being of maximum profit no longer correlates with ecological destruction, we are nonetheless not lulled into support for the Being. The all-important ‘signified’, the ‘flows of desire’ we affirm, connect with, and produce above all else, by the way, is precisely what the ‘symbolic value’ of an object is. It is exemplified, for Baudrillard, in “a logic of the gift”, wherein the gift-object gains its value from an immanent relationship between two subjects (1972/1981, p. 66). “Whereas the symbol refers to lack (to absence) as a virtual relation of desire, the sign object only refers to the absence of relation itself, and to isolated individual subjects” (1972/1981, p. 65)---the symbolic object is a relation of desire, a rhizomatic connection that deterritorializes and makes a mutual becoming of the involved subjects, whereas the sign separates itself from these immanent flows, reterritorializing and making a Being of the referent flows as it wraps its arborescent roots around them. The symbolic object gains meaning through relationships, not in a ‘self-referential’ way (like science, or the sign), because the relationships in question are relationships of desire, flows of production, and not relationships to a web of transcendent signifiers that representationally restrict those very relationships. Sign-value is biunivocal, a question of what an object means to an overcoding socius. Symbolic-value is polyvocal, a question of what an object means for coding subjects. The ‘sign object’ has a transcendent essence, reterritorializing desires based on its own objective meaning. The ‘symbolic object’, meanwhile, has an immanent existence, deterritorialized by desires and fluctuating the subjective meaning of the object itself. The transition from the latter to the former is a tragic marker of the subsumption of an object into a socius: “the object-become-sign no longer gathers its meaning in the concrete relationship between two people. It assumes its meaning in its differential relation to other signs” (Baudrillard, 1972/1981, p. 66)

This conceptualization of a non-human machine as a ‘symbolic object’ is revolutionary for us in many ways. First and foremost, the notion of a value determined by relationships is an incredible alternative to the ‘I feel…’ for how we can determine zones of intensity. Indeed, was our analogy to zones of intensity in the rhizome model not the connections of desire that a node drew with others? One of the recurring problems we encountered with our earlier notions of becomings was the fear that every interaction at an atomic level contained a degree of reterritorialization. But if we recall that, for Deleuze and Guattari, desire includes and is functionally synonymous with ‘physical force’, these concerns at last begin to fade. To produce in response to a zone of intensity, when the zone is thought of as a ‘symbolic object’, means to produce with respect for or in response to all the relations, relationships of desire, of an object to other machinic objects. What is the symbolic value of an atom, then? It is, in most cases, nothing more than the physical relations (which are relationships of desire!) it has to other atomic particles. We could wonder, then, how it would not still be overcoding to move an atom, to sever these desirous relationships? Because our production, the way that we move this atom, is done with respect to all of these other relationships---not in some metaphorical, intent-based sense, but in a very literal manner: the physical force we exert on the atom couples with all of the other physical forces being exerted on it, necessarily producing in response to all of the other productions. The image here is a decent way to conceive of a non-overcoding interaction, in general: a new connection of desire is drawn from the ‘Self’ node to the object/‘Other’, but this connection does not change the ‘Other’ without also accounting for all of the Other’s relationships, all of these other forces/desires acting upon it, for these relations are synonymous with their zone of intensity. Physics (of the quantum variety) is a lot like desiring-production in its most deterritorialized state.

We can take from this, then, that no physical interaction is overcoding by virtue of the physical interaction, for the physical production of desire drawn is necessarily responsive to all of the existing physical productions acting on the symbolic object---the consequential ‘value’ (read: zone of intensity, becoming, production, or flow) or the symbolic object is therefore still the produce of concrete relationships of desire. Now, this does not mean that physical interactions are always acceptable---there are perhaps relationships of a more colloquial strand of desire that does not wish to have a physical interaction (taking an object important to someone, or an unwanted touch) that is ignored in a reterritorializing production, for these desires are not quite ‘physical’ in nature (or, to the extent that all desire is just physics, it remains an imperceptible force that does not necessarily influence our production in the sense that, say, gravity does). The ‘symbolic object’ of a person’s leg can still be overcoded by the physical action of grabbing it, if a subject does not wish for the leg to be grabbed (a relationship of desire), and the ‘Self’ nonetheless gropes without even considering connection with such a zone of intensity. Here, the leg is reduced to a ‘sign’ in the systemic web of signification (in a Selfish overcoding of this sort, a system of egoist instrumentalization), and the symbolic concrete relationships of desire are severed. The symbol-to-sign transformation also prevents us from making a neo-Enlightenment era mistake, that determines ‘atoms’ to be expendable due to their lack of animate desire. It is still possible to reduce an atom to a signifying Being---perhaps through a nuclear project, where the splitting of the atom becomes a structuring goal in the service of destruction, or maybe just on a particularly windy day, where a condemnation of the atomic interactions that blow one’s hair the wrong way rises to a level of ressentiment, renouncing the breezy ‘Apparent World’ in an aspiration towards the Biospheric, windless ‘Real World’, seeking to exterminate restless molecules that fail to match their restful Beings on the way. We should also highlight that it is not just in relation to animate desires that overcoding of a symbolic object can occur. An object being ‘alive’, having animate desires, is a dimension of a symbolic object, to be sure. Relationships of desire are not one-sided in their determination of a zone of intensity, for we could think of a human as a symbolic object without conceiving of them in a determinist way, as their own attractions and repulsions towards specific outcomes produce their own zone of intensity. Their becomings are produced by and produce desires. However, an object being ‘alive’ does not give it a modernist rule over all non-rational agents, wherein only animate objects require respect from our productions. An inanimate rock might still have symbolic dimensions that are not only physical or anthropocentric---perhaps it is important to an ecosystem in some way, or is playing an architecturally structural role, such that moving it has more consequences that merely physical movement of a single rock. These are also relationships of a symbolic object, or characteristics of a rock’s BwO, that should be responded to in a deterritorialized production.

xxx5

what a curious thing, us human-machines are, us life-machines as a whole!

that we could be produced with the capabilities for anti-production!

but i suppose these were just hidden microfascisms, at once waiting to crystallize,

now here!

…the nihilist would see this, denounce life,

and seek its extermination.

but us, the philosopher of life,

can just affirm production,

and affirm that production can win out

in the end!!

The conceptualization of the symbolic object, then, has at last accomplished the bare minimum, allowing us to understand that it is practically possible to produce in response to the zones of intensity of non-human machines, and therefore, that it is possible to prize ‘consent’ in interactions with human-machines without recreating a violent Man/nature dichotomy, since these productive responses are synonymous with our revolutionized reading of the liberal ‘consent’ paradigm. But this has told us just that deterritorialized productions in relationships with non-human machines is possible, which has not (unless you are also convinced that deterritorialization, the absence of ressentiment, is all that matters) persuaded us on its ecological implications. This is where we can turn to the communal importance of the symbolic object that was stressed in our note, the notion of ‘ownership without property’ (I do not think the similarity between this ‘OwP’ and the ‘body without organs’ ends at the level of linguistic parallel). I vaguely recall the interaction that motivated the resolute xxx4 reflections---playing basketball in a crowded gym, and wondering about the schizoanalytic implication of taking a ball someone else ‘owned’. The basketball, as symbolic object, is defined in part by its relationships of desire to the ‘subject’ who ‘owns’ it---they have spent a lot of time with it, know and enjoy its feel, losing it would make it harder for them to play, and so on---which certainly creates grounds for a critique of a Selfish reterritorialization that opportunistically takes the ball and walks off. At the same time, though, that this ‘ownership’ is nothing more than a relationship of desire prevents that establishment and violent defense of an interior that ‘property’ implies, for as new connections of desire are drawn with the basketball, the zone of intensity of the ball changes. If circumstances produce a new relationship of desire from a different subject to the ball---maybe the subject cannot afford a ball of their own, or, in a less drastic implication, the ball is not being used at the moment, and a 5-on-5 game is waiting on a ball to start---the ‘ownership’ (so to speak) of the ball shifts, which is really just to say, its zone of intensity/symbolic value flows with the input of new desires in a deterritorialized way, enabling the object to couple with new assemblages and enter new becomings. A becoming-Zach’s to a becoming-the-Rec’s of the basketball.

Symbolic connections of this sort are everywhere. We remarked earlier on the ‘of the Pack’ moniker that many objects I ‘own’ attain---the Beta-of-the-Rav, the bedframe-of-the-Pack---which serve as a sort of ‘proper name’, an instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity, of a symbolic value, that both allows us to affirm the zone of intensity of a non-human machine in a way that prevents them from being sanctioned to perpetual reterritorialization (I have very little desire to replace my shitty car or creaky bed for some ‘objectively better’ product, for I quite like my Symbolic Objects of the Pack, and it would in some circumstances be a reterritorialization if one claimed them as their own), but does not create a rigid, personified zone of intensity for those non-human machines that also prevents them from becoming with the introduction of new deterritorialized flows (if my car breaks down, if someone needs it more than me, if a friend lays in my bed, then new relationships change the symbolic value of the object, perhaps to be, at least for some time, less ‘of the Pack’ than it was). This helps us understand symbolic becomings at a micropolitical level, but we should not think that this is a merely colloquial phenomenon. It is also chiefly this ‘ownership without property’ that enables a critique of colonial reterritorializations without recourse to some ontological ownership that justifies a reterritorialization in the opposite direction. I think of the colonial extraction of the British Museum, which front-and-center displays a status from the Greek Parthenon, the Athenian museum for which has a pedestal marked out, awaiting the ‘British’ statue’s return. Museums do not have to be reterritorializing apparatuses, for it is possible for symbolic relationships of desire to give up ‘ownership’ of an object so that it might be displayed (recall that Baudrillard’s example of the symbolic object par excellence is the gift). However, we also identify a clear, condemnable reterritorialization in the British Museum’s behavior, one that justifies the sculpture based on their ‘sign-value’ (in their self-referential location with some transcendent web of meaning, such as ‘accessibility’ or ‘public education’) as a way to sever the symbolic connections between the Athenian populous and the stolen statue (this example also demonstrates the shortcomings of the liberal consent paradigm, given the British’s insistent defense that the statue was acquired legally, as if written permission is the end-all-be-all of the immanent respect for becomings that underlies the call for consent in the first place). Colonialism, here, is a transcendent reterritorialization of a symbolic object into a State, even without any direct interaction with the human-machines of the exterior population, for the conversion of a Greek symbol into a British sign is quite enough overcoding violence in itself. This is also the dynamic that animates our critique of colonization, the event, and not just its motivating structure---the Northern/American reterritorialization of symbolic Southern/native land into the service of the State Being. Such a critique does not require us to mark this land as ‘property’ of indigenous subjects, such that they would then be free to reterritorialize it on their own (perhaps ignoring ecological connections of symbolic objects to make them economic signs), but nonetheless expresses no sympathy for the socius of the State and its own severance of relationships of desire, which again points towards deterritorialization, or the return of non-human machinic interactions as primarily symbolic, as the rupturing alternative.

The symbolic object navigates the narrow relationship between a restrictive overcoding-of-the-Self and an ignorant overcoding-of-the-Other with adherence to the flowing relationships of desiring-production. As we have seen, it enables productions of the ‘Self’, for its new concrete relationships can transform the nature of an object---not by reterritorializing it into an arborescent-egoist sign, but by creating a new rhizomatic-social connection that gives the symbol a new dimension, and with it, perhaps a new zone of intensity. Deleuze and Guattari comment that, for the deterritorialized nomads, “there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations… the variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartography” (ATP, p. 382). This is both a nice reassurance that our conception of the symbolic object, the object with a zone of intensity determined by relations, is characteristic of a schizoanalytic project, and another reminder that these objects are ‘variable’, ‘polyvocal’, that is to say, subject to deterritorialized change. The schizoanalysts speak of a nomadic wood-working artisan, for whom “it is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos” (ATP, p. 408). Here, even rearranging wood for one’s own motivations can be accomplished without reterritorialization, insofar as one’s production continues to connect with the relationships of desire, the symbolic value, of the wood, ‘following’ it and ‘surrendering’ to it even as one works on it. We would be amiss if we conflated mere ‘change’ with reterritorializing violence---even in human-on-human interactions, one’s expression of desire produces a change in the Other all the time. What is important is that the wood/object/‘Other’ is never reduced to a ‘Being’ to be manipulated for the Self’s benefit, but that the changes produced in the wood are a product of deterritorialized productions, of drawing new rhizomatic connections that remain responsive to the zone of intensity or symbolic value of the non-human machine. It is this very same connection that prevents these productions from turning into an overcoding-of-the-Other, for it is just as common that the wood can dictate our productive response. Perhaps the wood one is working on is an endangered species---this could lead to a symbolic connection that does not happen (the carpenter does not cut down the endangered tree), that is changed (the carpenter treats the tree more carefully and resourcefully), or even that is inverted (the carpenter is inspired to help regrow the endangered population). In any case, as we have already seen, a relationship of desire that is deterritorialized does not only go one way---it is pluralist, not in a transactional manner, but as a mutual becoming. ‘Following the wood’ could perhaps be said to be a question of responding to a zone of intensity in a ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’ way, in the vein of shallow and deep ecology. One could (shallowly) work around the wood, treating its connections as obstacles one must navigate to get what they want, which maintains exclusive care for the Self, a reterritorialization of all flows into the service of a singular interior. But one could also (deeply) work around the wood by producing their desires at once in response to their own zone of intensity and to the zone of intensity of the non-human wood, asking what its relationships of desire produce in it, and coupling the two productions---making a rhizome. The symbolic object always remains a question of desire, and as such, it flows, it produces, and it does not aspire to an objective, reterritorializing sign. It is the Beta-dark-oak-assemblage---the symbolic object of the tree is transformed by my desire to live in the forest, and the zone of intensity of my becoming is transformed by the tree’s connections with the surrounding forest ecosystem. A mutual becoming; NEWMAGICWAND; the orchid and the wasp.

The symbolic object, then, and our commitment to produce in response to it, changes the nature of our environmental relations, such that man is not reterritorialized in a total conservation of Nature, nor is nature reterritorialized in a total instrumentalization by Man. That we can engage with ecology absent ressentiment in this manner is well and good, but one accustomed to the structuring demands of science may wonder what this proliferation of rhizomatic connections can do for the standing-reserve, ravaged as it already is. A Southern Islander’s mind is drawn to Ocho, the ex-Tricolour priestess who founded the Alliance alongside History and Beta on the third and fourth days of Ish’s experiment. Ocho expressed a concern for colonization and imperial extraction from the outset, but her care for the environment was only made more and more visible after the conclusion of the event, with extreme knowledge of and care for all types of marine biology. She was also likeable from the first encounter, but this took on a whole new dimension after the public setting of the experiment faded, expressing all sorts of vulgar and hypersexual desires that drastically shifted her zone of intensity. The becoming-Cal of the Ish event flows into the becoming-Ocho of the Southern Alliance server. At the synthesis of these two productions is ‘the Trout’, a (relatively) infamous stuffed fish that Ocho ‘owns’, and which is colloquially associated with being used for sexual pleasure. The Trout is an exemplary symbolic object---it is interacted with as a zone of intensity, not in a personified manner (if it was sentient, some of the things done to it would perhaps be illegal), but based on the relationships of (sexual) desire that flow into it, and which produce a new symbolic value in it. The Trout produces desires that change the human subjects that observe it as much as the human subjects change the desires produced by the Trout. It has acquired a symbolic value quite distinct from any objective, signifying reading of a stuffed fish. ‘The Trout’ is a proper name.

What is unique about the Trout, compared to other environmental objects we have discussed, is the connection Ocho makes between its symbolic sexual dimension and its objective association with the standing-reserve. As she put it, ‘to procreate with the environment is to save it from decay by the hands of greasy oil tycooners and colonizers’. Far from treating the Trout as a mere instrument for human pleasure herself, reterritorializing into a different kind of sign, she gifts it back the connection of symbolic value, which ruptures the overcoding anti-productions of the ignorant Man. Guattari (1989/2014) comments that “now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture… we must learn to think ‘transversally’” (p. 28), concluding The Three Ecologies with the reassurance that “the reconquest of a degree of creative autonomy in one particular domain encourages conquests in other domains” (p. 47). Even if the symbolic relationship with the Trout is ostensibly only sexual, the very act of drawing a rhizomatic connection with it, of valuing it based on relationships of desire, opens up a channel of deterritorialization that enables the symbolic object to then flee reterritorialization through alliance with its symbolic ‘owner’. The scorpions of the Southern Island might be surrounded by a sea of sand, countless microscopic grains, messy, groupable, and divisible---symbolic objects, susceptible to flow. Though the connection of desire the scorpion draws might appear instrumental at first---the sand is rearranged to create a home---the very response to a zone of intensity binds the scorpion and the sand through a relationship of desire, such that becomings of one implicate the productions of the other. This typically results in the sand changing in the direction of the scorpion, sure. But as a deterritorialized connection, the scorpion is just as vulnerable to the becomings of the sand. As such, if the Northern nations try to reorder even a single grain of the scorpion’s symbolic sand into the Being of its Biosphere, you can be sure the scorpion will not go out without a fight. The sexual nature of the Trout’s symbolic value could be offputting for some, which is understandable, if you are still approaching sex through a Freudian lens. However, we know that sexual desire is not acquisitive, but productive. It is intersubjective. It is deterritorialized. It flows. Sexual desire does not necessitate a non-consensual reduction of a machine to a Being, reterritorialized into a Self’s fantasies (as Freud would have it), but produces in response to the zones of intensity of the ‘Others’ as much as it does the ‘Self’, such that actual pursuit of sexual expression is just an occasional production of a mutual becoming---I think Ocho’s chaste demeanor throughout all of Ish’s event demonstrates this. To understand desire, not as sexual objectification, but as productive flow, then, enables us to understand how the mere interaction with the symbolic value of machines, their becomings, rather than their imposed sign value, their Beings, constitutes an ecologically revolutionary act. It reveals that productions occur in response to an object’s relationships of desire, which, just as easily as it can turn the tree into a home, or the Trout into a partner, can turn the tree’s or Trout’s ‘owner’ is a vector of deterritorialization against an overcoding reduction of the symbolic object into a standing-reserve. Rhizomatic connections with the symbolic object are not biunivocal. They flow both ways. The environment is a NEWMAGICWAND. All of this, then, to suggest that it is drawing deterritorialized connections with symbolic ecological objects that ruptures their reterritorialization by Man, and that makes productive responses to the destroyed state Man has left them in. Merely reclaiming a symbolic object as such wards off its reduction to a sign, just as any deterritorialized production escapes and threatens striation. Or, as Ocho explained, ‘the idea of defending the environment has become such a sexual desire, that the simple mention of this may bring pleasure to those who strive for its succession, as note, impregnating the trout’.

xxx3

coding, not overcoding, is not the ‘default’

but some machines facilitate coding,

some facilitate overcoding,

coding is the default at dinner,

when playing basketball,

on the train,

when hanging with friends*

and it can be made the default

in the rhizome, too

Guattari used the word ‘transversal’ to describe the kind of intersubjective relationship that can rupture industrial overcodings, and it is a concept worth exploring a bit further. Indeed, it is functionally the vocabulary term for what we have henceforth been calling ‘rhizomatic connections’, or, a deterritorialized relationship that is produced as a response to and remains responsive to fluctuations in the zones of intensity of both ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’. ‘Transversality’ was Guattari’s reformulation of the psychoanalytic regime of ‘transference’, which itself described a pathological investment an analysand would form with their analyst---the exact kind of objectification of the Other that psychoanalysis finds inevitable, and that schizoanalysts intervene to stop. Transversality, as explained in the appendix to The Three Ecologies by Gary Genosko, thought that analyst-analysand relationships were not defined by a static, intrasubjective rehearsal of the Oedipal drama, but were instead mediated by “the institutional object” (1989/2014, p. 54), which refers to the surrounding institutional context of the therapeutic interaction, and the influence it has on the flows of desire between the two participants. Guattari felt that this ‘object’ could be, and often was, restrictive, as in normative psychiatric relationships, where the doctor is lifted as the transcendent cure to the broken patient (to use terms Guattari would not have access to until his later collaborations with Deleuze, the medical institutional object created a socius that aspired towards health, condemning the ‘sick’ psychotic). Guattari, therefore, felt that there was “more or less a direct link between the militant’s ability to modify the institutional objects… and the production of a kind of subjectivity that is not stunted by institutions” (1989/2014, p. 79-80), or, that it was through changing the surrounding machinic assemblage that influenced the production of desires that a transferent relationship could be liberated into a transversal one. It is relevant to note that both the ‘institutional object’ and ‘transversality’ are described as “a ‘bridge’”, “a line rather than a point”, and “the ‘included middle’” (1989/2014, p. 81, 82, 83). The ‘transversal relationship’, then, or the ‘institutional object’ that influences its character, is the flow of desire, the symbolic connection, that both links the ‘analyst’ and ‘analysand’, ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and that is included within each node.

A transversal relation, therefore, or a ‘rhizomatic connection’, is the kind of NEWMAGICWANDean subject we have been describing, one where the becoming that the subject undergoes as a response to an Other is not necessarily a violent overcoding, for the connection, line, or bridge is itself part of both subjects, enabling both to flow with response to one another. Obviously, these transversal relations can be hijacked by a poor institutional object, which prefigures the relationship to take a rigid, objective form---but as a deterritorialized production, with an incorporated institutional object that is itself facilitating deterritorialization, we end up with an intersubjective, mutual becoming. We should not confuse this with the biunivocal, arborescent, one-sided ‘transference’, which reterritorializes one subject in the service of another, because the nature of transversality as connected to and connecting intimate zones of intensity rather than transcendent, impersonal Beings means that the relationship is not fixed, but continues to flow with the becomings of both connected nodes. When we say that transversality goes both ways, we do not mean that it is transactional---it is not that the Self overcodes the Other a bit, and also lets itself be overcoded by the Other a little bit, in some kind of sadistic version of ‘justice’. Some transversal productions might not appear transactional at all, with one becoming surrendering to or becoming subsumed into another, desiring nothing other than what the Other wants of it. But this is not reterritorialization at all, for that the becomings merged is a consequence only of how the new relationship of desire interacted with the existing symbolic value of the incorporated object, making something totally new, but also, something that is just a manifestation of concrete relationships of desire, that can become again should new relationships come into the picture. At no point are the striating walls of a socius established to prevent escape. The only thing holding a transversal relationship together are the flows of desire themselves. “Transversality rests, then, on group Eros. Nothing and no one is brought into communication without it” (Guattari, 1989/2014, p. 84)---NEWMAGICWAND. “All of Guattari’s psychoanalytic debts are paid off… he resists Freud by enforcing Eros and society over the death drive of the narcissistic individual. The narcissist is coerced into sociality in the name of the creative spirit and sexual instinct, of the myth that love is not in end conquered by death” (Guattari, 1989/2014, p. 84).

Transversality should assist our conceptualization of an interaction as not necessarily a reterritorialization. That relationships are mediated by the included middle, that the ‘object’ or ‘Self’ has no end, no border, no outside of the universal schizophrenic process, lets us understand the Self’s productions as responsive to more than merely the ‘Self’. In the transversal relation, the zones of intensity of the ‘Other’ are incorporated into the BwO of the ‘Self’---on this plane, the two draw a connection, form an assemblage, and produce a production responsive to both becomings, or the mutual becoming of the two. Of course, the schizophrenic process finds itself moving in too many directions at once for an incorporation to represent a universal wish-fulfillment. To draw a transversal relationship with disease does not mandate that one must die. It does, however, demonstrate that the institutional object that mediates the subject-infection interaction (a sick day off school, or a global pandemic) implicates the Self’s response (on a sick day, letting it linger; during a pandemic, working to mitigate its spread), and therefore, the infection has not been ‘overcoded’, condemned to the exterior of the Biosphere in advance, but has been connected with as a symbolic object, taking on a value mediated through all other relationships, and responded to accordingly. Any romantic relationship seems to be a sprawling network of transversality. Or, we could speak of the relationship that started it all, the exemplary Beta-dark-oak-assemblage---I draw a relationship of desire with the tree (‘I would like to live here’), which incorporates the tree’s own value (directing the production away from a transferent levelling in the service of the Self), while at the same time producing in the tree a new value (sentimental-machine, home-machine).

Lastly, we could make sense of this all with the Nietzschean terminology of ‘active forces’. Deleuze, in his monograph on the thinker, outlines a dichotomy between two types of force, ‘active’ and ‘reactive’. Active force is the productive expression of desire, synonymous with how we have articulated desiring-production, whereas reactive force is the anti-production that turns against itself, that is part of yet opposes the schizophrenic process, where “in the reactive process of turning against oneself active force becomes reactive” (1962/1983, p. 70). This is where we should emphasize that, for all our talk of ‘responding’ to zones of intensity, we should not conflate this kind of productive response with an anti-productive ‘reaction’. The distinction between ‘active’ and ‘reactive’ is not that ‘active’ forces remain unbothered by their surroundings, unflinching in their (Selfish) productions---quite the contrary. “A specific active force must be given the job of supporting consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment” (1962/1983, p. 113). It is actually the fluctuating, chaotic, ‘responsive’ element of active force that makes it so, for as we have seen, forces of desire flow at all times, such that the active expression of a desire is constantly turning over and changing. Reactive forces, then, are not mere responses to changes in stimuli, but instead, “a reactive life which finds… a means of preserving and glorifying its type” (1962/1983, p. 100). Reactive forces are ‘reactive’ in the sense that we associate the political tendency to be ‘reactionary’---they locate specific formations of active force as lamentable, condemn them, and aspire to their reactively-produced transcendent form of meaningful life as an escape from the chaos of activity. ‘Reactive force’ is the ‘Real World’ that is created in response to and at the expense of the ‘active force’ of the ‘Apparent World’, the desiring-acquisition taken away from desiring-production, the Being imposed on the becoming. The most important opposition here is the one we are already quite familiar with---life-affirmation turns into life-denial; sentiment into ressentiment. “We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible, or erroneous. We turned will into something bad… we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price” (1962/1983, p. 35).

Active force reminds us that our incorporation of institutional objects does not at the same time sanction a totalizing violence against everything deemed to be outside of the Self, for the ‘active’ productions of the Self are always at the same time ‘responsive’ to the zones of intensity of the Other, lest they be reactive ressentiment. The active force of the Self couples with the active force of the institutional object and flows in response; the reactive force of the Self separates the object from its own activity, coheres for it an ideal of usefulness to the Self, and molds the object into this transcendent, instrumental ideal. This is, interestingly, at last a way to connect the triumphant existential refrain of aesthetic affirmation (‘existence is unconditionally justified as art’) to a social dimension, to prevent the abuse of ‘aesthetics’ as a means to sanction egregious interpersonal devastation. Aesthetic affirmation, as unconditional affirmation of all that is, is an affirmation of active force, which means that it is not merely a celebration of the current material configuration of all things, but also, of the flows of desire that undergird them. To reterritorialize the zones of intensity of the Other in the service of an acquisition, no matter how aesthetic its motivation is, conditions the affirmation of the active forces of the Other on their adherence to the Self’s goal, and, as we have refrained countless times, conditional affirmation is no different than reactive negation, as it flees towards a Real World. We understand, then, that the affirmation of one’s desire is a process always entangled with the affirmation of the entire schizophrenic process, with the intersubjective ‘responses’ to zones of intensity included in the production of any flow. An active response to disease, not a negation of infection or an aspiration towards total security, but an affirmation of difference, an affirmative response to the active conditions disease has brought about, which motivate the consequential mitigatory or restful production. Love as active force, a mutual becoming, not as reactive objectification. Again, perhaps, this is all clearest in Beta and the tree---the active force of home-building did not ‘react’ to the tree, infuriated at its resistance, attempting to level it, but changed, flowed, and transformed, in ‘response’ to the tree’s immanent circumstances, affirming the ecological significance of the dark oak trunk that Beta’s active production preserved as an outer wall.

Transversality and active forces are two ways to conceptualize the same phenomenon, which is the possibility of interaction absent reterritorialization, the ability for a ‘transversal’ or ‘active’ transformation of a zone of intensity that affirms the symbolic object it couples with. In either case, we are just demonstrating that, in ecological relations, desire flows and becomes, such that an intersubjective relationship absent overcoding violence is a practical consequence of deterritorialized flows that produce in response to zones of intensity, rather than imposed Beings. Obviously, the principles of transversality and active forces are not at all confined to man-nature interactions---we even shared examples of man-man relationships---but, they do help at last resolve our concerns about the possibility of a deterritorialized ecology. The concept of the symbolic object helps us understand how we can respond to non-human zones of intensity, by connecting relationships of desire that shift the symbolic value of an object, which at the same time shifts our production in response to the symbolic value. We feel confident, based on the intersubjective nature of these phenomena, that rhizomatic environmental relationalities of this sort will change the character of man-nature extraction, such that nature is no longer subjugated to anthropocentric ordering, use-value, or other systemic overcodings, while at the same time, increasing the propensity to produce in response to already extracted ecological becomings, and to do so in a manner that does not overcode them back into a Bisopheric paradigm of science, shallow ecology, or other systems of signification. It seems likely that this productive, processive, experimental method can reverse or adapt to the vast ecological destruction that characterizes the modern world, but at the same time, the justification for our project is not at all dependent on the success of this gamble. Guattari tells us “schizoanalysis… consists in accepting that as a general rule, and however little one works on them, individual and collective subjective assemblages are capable, potentially, of developing and proliferating well beyond their ordinary equilibrium”, and later, that “there is a principle specific to environmental ecology: it states that anything is possible---the worst disasters or the most flexible evolutions” (1989/2014, p. 26, 45). It is as Baudrillard suggested of the Biosphere---we seem to have forgotten that ‘stability’ or ‘equilibrium’ are nothing other than constantly produced and producing states, composed of chaotic, unpredictable, and perhaps violent metamorphic becomings. This is why we found the unconditional affirmation of desiring-production so critical in this first place---only its embrace of immanent flows enables us to view imperfect existence as anything other than a cosmic error. This is why we find ressentiment to be both the abundant and devastating production, one that we resist wherever we can. And this is why, therefore, we are content with our ecological resolutions. We are confident that productions in response to symbolic objects are deterritorialized flows of desiring-production---we do not need to be assured of anything else.

The lack of stasis in schizophrenia can certainly be discomforting, and make us consider recourse to a structuring metanarrative to give us redemptive hope. I am not immune from these sentiments, and up until the point of composing this very page, have had occasional moments where I wonder if it would not be easier to retreat to the striations of science, to abdicate responsibility for ecological interactions, to let the system straighten everything out. But spending time in this mindset never comfortably lasts longer than a minute. On the one hand, any form of ‘science’ as systematization, rather than productive response, seems to entail a Biospheric eugenics---even if we ignore the absence of a real man/nature distinction (a distinction which itself often leads to an extermination of the human populations deemed less ‘rational’) and consider the environment expendable for a moment, our best options look like the eugenics of capitalism and its mass dispossession in the name of productivity, an ecological orientation of shallow ecology that preserves just enough of a natural shell to make ourselves content with the world, or just actual eugenics, a renunciation of the human life that has brought the planet to the brink. All of this makes deterritorialization seem like, at worst, the best escape hatch we have. Additionally, though, on the other hand, it is hard to overstate just how limitless the flows of desire, when they’ve escaped their striating burdens, are.

Everything since the disclaimer about the experimental nature of the conclusions we’ve reached, I have written in one sitting. To get in the mood to write about ecology, I decided I would first take a walk on the trail behind my house. After a refreshing two hours of sleep (friends and I played Mario Super Sluggers until 4 A.M. last night), I rolled out of bed at 7:00, took a quick rinse-off shower, grabbed a caffeinated beverage for a boost, and set out. The scorching Kansas summer heat hadn’t seized control yet, with the clouds still barricading the sun enough that the occasional gap in coverage was source to a visibly golden beam. Humidity was already rising off the ground, such that it felt like I was wading through thick air, with even my mouth taking burdened breaths, but at eye-level, the air still felt thin and crisp. There were a couple minutes of rain so light that, had I not been able to see or hear it, I would not have known it was present. I passed a few pedestrians on the path, sharing some ‘good morning’s that blended the ease of gesturing a mere formality with the genuine joy of seeing a friend, lighting up a stranger’s eyes whenever we accidentally locked vision a few too many steps out, sure of what was coming but not quite close enough to initiate it. I took a break on a rock I remember sitting on during my elementary school days, the rough sedimentary edges of which I would trace as if they were filled with fossilized prehistoric indents; I still don’t know if that’s what those ridges really were. From my perch overlooking the pond, I saw a couple feeding ducks, a turtle coasting just below the surface, a handful of insects resting on the top. As I walked home, a dew-dotted leaf from a branch that hung a bit too low swept my left cheek, with such precision and grace I could have mistaken it for a cradle and a kiss. On the right side of the path, woods so dense one would never guess they abruptly turned into a neatly trimmed apron. Above, a canopy thick enough to convince me I was in a different world. On the left, rolling green lawns---I saw a dog catching a frisbee on one, and a couple of deer lounging under a volleyball net in another. It would have been easy---and many times, I came close---to wondering if we were intruding on nature, if we needed to step back, if we needed to do more. But resting on my rock, taking in all the little haecceities, I couldn’t help a mocking smile at the prospect of approaching all these little immanent interactions with the detached question of how I could correct them. Once one lets themself go, and feels themself get lost in the ecological current, it becomes quite impossible to rationalize a stable subject, an inevitable violence, a wasted world, where there is only a transversal nomad, loving connections, and a zone of intensity silently extending its hand for help. If we wanted to convince ourselves that ecological overcoding was everywhere, to reprimand and repress everything we saw, we certainly could. It is, however, just as easy to find deterritorialized flows in the same spots, to follow a line of flight and see where it takes you, to exhale a production without breaking down over how it would turn out. It seems, to us, quite plausible that responding to ecological zones of intensity as symbolic objects, by drawing relationships of desire and being drawn by them as well, gives us a method of environmental relationality where even signifiers of surface-level suspicion (use, interaction, change) can be viewed without announcing reterritorialization. Maybe the consequence of this is a little messy sometimes. Drastic becomings that, if they were not a product of concrete relationships of desire, would almost certainly be violent. But we think they are concrete relationships of desire, and that’s all that matters. The schizophrenic process as a whole. Our choice seems relatively clear: first, we can manage the environment for ourselves, or manage ourselves for the environment, sending out and getting tangled up in striations; or second, we can wander through, contribute to, and affirm the experimental and artistic forces that spin an imperfect world. And once we have spent a bit of time with each---reterritorializing ressentiment or deterritorialized desires---it’s not hard to pick a side.

There’s one last question I worked through a decent amount as I reflected on environmental relationalities, so I might as well share it here, with the hopes it might help clear things up. I am not vegetarian. I enjoy eating meat. I did not immediately find a problem with this, for it seemed possible to me that human-non-human transversal relations created productions where an animal could be killed or consumed, without necessarily reterritorializing or overcoding the flows of the animal. But these resolutions were always put in tension when I considered that any kind of ‘people hunting’, or indiscriminate, one-sided human-against-human murder, did seem to necessarily be an egoist reterritorialization, a perverse subservience of all life to a single individual’s flows, that would not be sanctioned by desiring-production. We therefore had a predicament. How could we prohibit violence against humans (as reterritorialization), but permit violence against animals (as deterritorialized), without recourse to a recreation of the man-nature dichotomy, even if only at a smaller, perhaps microfascist level? Moreover, if the solution was just that people should stop eating meat, why or how could we then permit human and animal mastery over vegetation as a deterritorialized relationship? Were we inevitably bound to regress to some form of Enlightenment privileging of reason or consciousness, and all of its striating consequences? If not, what was the alternative?

There are a couple preliminary framing thoughts that can eliminate two easy, but entirely insufficient, ways out of this impasse. First, there are certain productions made in the service of meat-eating that are certainly overcoding. It is hard to think of factory farming as anything other than reduction of animals to instrumentalized Beings. Even Deleuze and Guattari recognize and resist situations wherein “‘the hunter’s aim was to arrest the movement of wild animality through systematic slaughter’” (ATP, p. 396). However, this is not grounds to renounce consumption as a whole, when it seems quite possible to engage in it without reliance on this ‘systemic slaughter’ of anti-produced Beings. There are forms of hunting that appear to be quite deterritorialized. Deleuze and Guattari follow up the comment about the arresting of animality with the juxtaposition of “the animal breeder” who “[sets about] conserving it, and, by means of training, the rider joins with this movement, orienting it and provoking its acceleration” (ATP, p. 396). This suggests deterritorialized potentials of ‘ownership’ and pets, or raising and training animals (even for a specific purpose), that would at first glance appear to be a reterritorialization if conducted against a human. Indeed, for all their critiques, Deleuze and Guattari never recommended, and as far as I can tell, never were, vegetarian. So, though a resistance to the systematization and submission of animals (as in the factory farm) is compatible with and a consequence of our deterritorialized ecology, it is not enough to rule out all human-animal interaction. Second, there are certain productions made in service of veganism, as a transcendent ideology, that fall back upon moralizing reterritorializations. In addition to their flat condemnations, there have also been problems as communities with either cultural significance of meat or cultural lack of access to protein alternatives end up renounced by the (often caricatured as White) vegan. However, that ‘vegan’ can at times be a striation does not mean that it necessarily is so, and moreover, it certainly does not imply that the situation they are motivated in response to is acceptable. Veganism appears to be, at worst, an overcoding against overcoding, and we have already found that to be possible even in the name of deterritorialization, with a desiring-acquisition of desiring-production. Therefore, that current anti-meat alternatives are sometimes laced with ressentiment is not enough for us to accept the current regimes of violence they seek to overcome. Indeed, for all the problems PETA has, it is disheartening to see the mocking responses to them sometimes resort to explicit anthropocentrism.

We are thus forced to return again to the question, is it possible to enable violence against animals while forbidding violence against humans without recourse to reterritorialization? From the perspective of moral rules, it does indeed seem as though one cannot call one good and the other bad without striating some essential ontological division between humans and all other machines. But that’s just the problem---we are trying to think through this in terms of moral rules. ‘Morality’ is necessarily a reterritorializing system, a striating exercise, an interaction at the level of stabilizing signification, that cannot speak of or for the signified flows. This is exemplified in the inability of ‘morals’ to deal with a devastating counterexample: an asignifying rupture. The rule ‘one cannot kill another person’, for instance, either rejects the potential for revolution and crime, or striates a new ontological category that makes these productions situationally permissible, therefore constructing in either case a rigid moral interior that condemns the outside. Rules that suggest ‘one can kill another animal’ are ruptured by the pet, and the counter-rule that ‘one cannot kill another animal’ is ruptured by the police dog. Some vegans have progressively reformed their doctrine to allow consumption in cultural or communal cases, and while this is certainly a move in the right direction, to create new identities that have exemption only expands and strengthens the self-referential web of signification (one can only imagine all the shitty ‘religious exemptions’ conservatives will invent to justify their 22-ounce sirloins). We think that to make existence intelligible through total submission to moral rule is, first, impossible (the unrepresentable nature of the BwO), second, impractical (there are infinite scenarios), and third, even if we successfully established a perfect system of rules, it would necessarily be violent (by creating compulsory reterritorializations on the flows of desire). Rules can be more or less slow; they’ll never reach any form of speed.

In fact, it is the construction of rules that we find problematic in the first place. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the violence of the State from other forms of violence (they name struggle, war, and crime), “because it consists in capturing while simultaneously constituting a right to capture” (ATP, p. 448). To announce a rule is not just a production, but establishes a conditional justification for that production, which is exactly the anti-production of a Being which forecloses the rhizomatic connections of zones of intensity that we critique. Deleuze and Guattari note that the State “is an incorporated, structural violence distinct from every kind of direct violence”---we agree, and it is this overcoding structural violence that schizoanalysis should uniquely care about (ATP, p. 448). “The State has often been defined by a ‘monopoly of violence’” (an interior, an aspired towards Real World of Law) and “uses violence only against the violence, against ‘criminals’---against primitives, against nomads---in order that peace may reign” (an exterior, a condemnation of the Apparent World of desire) (ATP, p. 448). This requires and produces a system, a structure, one that prefigures the encounter, shutting down any potential for transversal flows, as “State or lawful violence always seems to presuppose itself, for it preexists its own use” (ATP, p. 448). All of this is to say, rules are necessarily ressentiment, and morality, a socius. We will therefore never find a solution to our tension under its regime. Kant and the deontologists were incorrect to suggest reason could discover a universal system of objective rules, but the utilitarians were no better to remark that their consequential method meant rules could be disregarded altogether, for both are guilty of the same fault, an interaction at the level of signifier that overcodes the productions of the deterritorialized signified. Or, perhaps their theorists were partially correct, but failed to recognize that there was only one maxim that we could will to at the same time be a universal law, only one act that could produce the greatest good---the production of desiring-production. I have long had a suspicion, which predated and was not explicitly connected to my studies in schizoanalysis, but certainly is supported by and supports them, that philosophical understandings of the world fail the moment they rely on a countable number greater than two. The ego and the id, the Real and the Symbolic, sure---but when psychoanalysis starts speaking of the id-ego-superego, the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary, we are no longer interested. There is far too much complexity in existence to essentialize anything as part of some static category, to define any object as less than infinitely different from and infinitely similar to everything else. Therefore, it has felt that one can only ever speak of infinite forms, or of just two---not to say that one can talk in reductive binaries, but rather, that one can use a specific form of binary, one that locates the infinite on the one side, and the included but contradictory attempt to reduce the infinite on the other. There is the infinite and the totalizing, the Dionysian and the Socratic, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, becoming and Being, desiring-production and desiring-acquisition; Pluralism = Monism. Nothing else.

As far as the question at hand, then, we realize that we cannot make sense of these violences with overarching rules, but are instead bound to our affirmation of infinite difference, of drawing rhizomatic connections and producing deterritorialized flows in the moment. Back onto a smooth space like this, unburdened of our striations, things instantly begin to become clear. We retain our ability to resist the arborescent violence of the State, that prefigures and captures the encounter before it occurs, that reterritorializes all flows into a transcendent web of signification, and this grants us our problematization of serial murder, sexual assault, white-collar crimes, factory farms, and so on. However, our constant deferral to drawing connections in the moment, to the transversal encounter and the institutional object it incorporates, gives justification to the asignifying, amoral ruptures, the revolutionary battle, the consensual kink, the vigilante opportunist, the cultural hunter. We find no problem with the ‘direct violence’ that occurs as a desubjective, deterritorialized, transversal instance of desiring-production, as long as it does not insist upon itself at the impersonal, reterritorializing, overcoding level of the State. It would be wrong to think that ‘non-violence’ is, in the schizophrenic process, the ‘default’. Flows are chaotic, imperfect, Dionysian. The machines don’t always cohere into a harmonious whole. Carried by nothing but the flows of desire, an insect is unknowingly crushed underfoot, a deadly hurricane swells up on the coast, a friend moves away. Every becoming is a murderous violence, to some extent. This is why we concern ourselves only with structural violence, the transcendent indifference that suggests these occasional instances mark them as necessary, that abdicates our responsibility for differential responses to immanent zones of intensity. Rather, we ‘default’ to free, deterritorialized movement, and do not attempt to eliminate the uncertain threats latent in the schizophrenic process, only making rhizomatic responses to them. That we concern ourselves only of violence if it is reterritorializing means, philosophically, that we never produce the life-negation of ressentiment, which is our sole theoretical concern, but also means, practically, that we never make striating justifications for violence, therefore never precluding deterritorialized ruptures or responses. Of course, we have moved too far beyond the ‘Self’ to confuse this complete focus on liberating the flows of desire with egoist relativism, for desiring-production is not at all the totalizing, individualist contemplation of ‘what would I like to do?’, but is rather the NEWMAGICWANDean productive response to machinic processes that deterritorializes the Selfish individual. For as many times as a transversal connection leads to nature’s symbolic value shifting in a manner that assists a human production, a human production will shift based on its transversal connection with nature’s other symbolic relationships. This is not ‘violent’. It is just becoming.

Indeed, to some extent, ‘nature’ is defined by its condition of lawless violence. Hunting and carnivory are hardly unique to humans. This is not an appeal to the fallacious conclusion that, if something is natural, it must be good---it seems quite possible that even nature can reterritorialize, that a predator’s sole focus on survival can reduce to instrumental Beings his prey, and he would not be exempt from our deterritorialization of flows. It is, however, to suggest that an institutional object that results in death does not at all seem exclusive to State reterritorialization. This does not permit an anthropocentric ravaging of nature, of course---as always, transversal relations go both ways. But to get caught up on the signifier of ‘violence’, rather than the signified flows, would leave us perpetually unable to affirm the anarchic natural world. This is how we end up with the forced euthanasia of dogs that exhibit a bit too much animality, that bite a human that has pushed them into a corner, ignoring the institutional conditions because merely ‘someone got hurt’. If I were to get stung by a scorpion, strangled by a snake, blown away by a tornado, or ripped to shreds in an eruption of animality from a canine whose territory I wandered too deep into, I don’t think I’d complain (‘of course he wouldn’t’, the audience mocks). The implication is not that man needs to let himself keel over and die for nature, nor that nature is not free to resist an institutional incorporation into man---transversal relations are always polyvocal and constantly changing---but is that these seem to be deterritorialized productions, and therefore, should not be condemned and exterminated in an aspiration towards Biospheric security. The chaotic flux of nature suggests that perhaps the most important principle of all for ecology is PLURALISM = MONISM, when nature is infinite difference par excellence. Our resolution that man killing nature, or nature killing man, can sometimes occur in a manner that would be reterritorializing if it was man-on-man is not an anthropocentric striation that reduces animality to an instrument. Shit, deterritorialized cannibalism seems possible and fine. We are just committing ourselves to the notion that different machines have different zones of intensity, and that the way we produce in response to those zones of intensity will be different as well, and that is not a conclusion we have a problem making. In fact, this infinitely differential pluralism is exactly what leads us to our monist concern, to liberate all forms of desiring-production, to critique only forms of desiring-acquisition. Otherwise, we are forced to make essentializing rules that guide (read: reterritorialize) our productions, which is how we end up with ontological appeals that think abortion is murder, that revolutionary violence is no better than police killings, that moving an atom is the same as dropping a nuclear bomb, that eating at a cookout is equivalently genocidal to operating a factory farm. Our ecological resolution is that we should incorporate transversal relations with symbolic objects and produce in response to these rhizomatic connections, and we think that these responsive productions will be different according to the object’s specific symbolic value. We have no problem hanging our hat here. From what I understand, it is proper hunting etiquette not to kill a doe if she has a child around.

Our deterritorialized production of environmental relations, then, is a firm resolution that we should draw connections with and produce in response to ecological zones of intensity in the moment, instead of appealing to striating rules that preexist and prefigure the encounter. We are still confident that this will not lead to anthropocentric subjugation of the natural world---it is precisely because this anthropocentric subjugation is a striating rule that we understand it as violent---and will on the contrary proliferate the incorporation of ecological institutional objects in a manner that drastically alters our productions with and in response to non-human machines. We also think that different symbolic objects produce different productive responses, which, among other things, suggests that killing an animal could be an act of deterritorialization in a manner that killing a human could not. This is, of course, not an overarching rule---a factory farm’s slaughter of a pig is infinitely worse than revolt against a cop---and moreover, this is a claim that is descriptive, not normative. We are more committed to deterritorialization than any specific formulation of it and, as such, if it turns out that, as anthropocentric anti-productions fall away, as ecological connections increase, transversal human-non-human relations no longer permit consumption, then we will happily leave these reflections on consumption behind. We are confident enough for now, though, that meat consumption is not necessarily a reterritorialization, and therefore, I feel fine taking a break from writing to grab dinner with my friends at Gates Bar-B-Q.

a/c

the environment is a lot

like a new magic wand

to me

We are back from barbeque, and now ready to get back to Minecraft. As alluded to earlier in the content, and as likely implied by the form, of our ecological conclusions, we did not have a great idea of how to deterritorialize our environmental relations while the Ish experiment was still ongoing. During the event, I had a firm suspicion that the reduction of nature to a standing-reserve was both occurring and problematic. However, lacking a resolute alternative, I chose to suspend resistance until I could later give myself the vocabulary to do so. Unsurprisingly, this led to the Southern Alliance stumbling into a few reterritorializing moves themselves, but before examining those, we should highlight that this very dynamic forefronts our need to articulate a practical method of change in the first place. It is hardly a novel observation that man tends to subjugate nature, and most would even concede that this anthropocentricism is ‘bad’, but when the implication of the critiques typically resorts to either abstract platitudes that one has no idea how to take up, or specific demands that are so narrow as to filter most productions of the status quo off-limits, nothing changes. The consequence, then, is a permanent cynicism that always finds something wrong, but cannot move past it, or a forced ignorance that, justified by the perceived inevitability of the state of affairs, tacitly accepts it. This is all exemplified in the ‘there is no alternative’ postulate that haunts anti-capitalist discourses, where subjects readily agree about the mass violence that capital creates, only to nonetheless maintain that it is still better than other economic systems, that it is too entrenched for revolution to ever occur, and so on. We cannot let this ‘there is no alternative’ approach become a refrain in ecological or decolonial contexts as well, and therefore, to the extent that our schizoanalytic framework makes our critique more convoluted or refuses visions of harmonic perfection, it seems worth it for the mere characteristic that our calls to draw rhizomatic connections is a very possible one.

As far as the mistakes that we made before this call was accepted, we can turn to the in-event resolutions that were attempted in response to the Northern nations’ imperialist extraction. Aperion, one of the groups most responsible for the devastation of the Southern Island, eventually made diplomatic requests to establish trade with the Alliance. We first floated the idea of monopolizing the mangrove swamps exclusive to our climate to leverage against the North, but eventually settled on an acceptance with Aperion gathering wood in our territory as long as they met three conditions: removing trees entirely, replanting at least one tree for every tree removed, and giving some of the blocks needed for the construction of New Dawn’s castle to us in exchange. It is quite obvious how this policy was an instance of the reterritorialization of the environment that we sought to avoid, based on our earlier theorizations. We see an establishment of concrete rules that, even if ostensibly good-natured, prefigure encounters with immanent ecological zones of intensity such that one is not responsible for drawing rhizomatic connections in the moment. Regardless of a tree’s symbolic value, as long as Aperion levels it, replants something else, and sends over some stone, they can extract it in the service of their nation-building project as indifferently as they please. Moreover, we see an explicit subsumption of the ecological value of trees to overarching exchange-value---one tree is worth one sapling plus a few blocks---that reduces the signified environment to an overcoding economic signifier. The unique conclusion we can emphasize from the experimental rehearsal of these already problematized dynamics is a reminder that ‘responding to zones of intensity’ is not a purely intent-based project. We resist all instances of anti-production, whether intentional or not, and as such, the Southern Alliance’s trade policy is not exempt just because it attempted to prevent the environment from reduction to a Biospheric Being, when it actually recreated this same reduction. Desiring-production is not a question of intending to desire-production, or of having eventual consequences that desire-production, but of desiring-production itself, whether it occurs accidentally or intentionally, whether it leads to reterritorialization of deterritorialization later down the line. Again, we do not think intent and consequence are separable from each other, much less from the flow of the schizophrenic process as a whole. Therefore, for as much as we have emphasized Nevermore’s resolution that a production is only problematic if it is an instance of desiring-acquisition, this should not be confused with an acceptance of shallow reformations of forms of anti-production in the name of progress, like ‘green capitalism’, ‘woke capitalism’, ‘DEI capitalism’, or whatever else. For insofar as these ‘progressive’ productions remain capitalist, there is still necessarily an interaction with a stable capitalist Being, a self-referential capitalist signifier, and as such, have nothing to do with desiring-production, other than perhaps an appropriation of its name. Desiring-production is not something that can be mapped out before hand, either in a system of rules or as a simulation of consequences. It is just something that happens. Our project is just to affirm it where it does occur, and to interject it into the spaces where it does not. In the case of the Southern Alliance and Aperion trade bill, some interjection appears to be needed.

The other in-experiment mistake we should comment on is more individually mine. The Southern Alliance, obviously, wished to restore the Eastern beaches that had suffered massive damages from Northern resource operations, and justifiably, wanted some help from the Northern nations who caused this decay with such repairs. The Alliance decided to host a sort of cultural-exchange festival on our largest (and also most damaged) shoreline, such that we could non-provocatively enlist support from Northern nations in our regrowth. None of this was a problem, at least as far as I can tell. The issues arise when we actually went about constructing the infrastructure for the festival, during which I insisted that we leave the scars of imperialist extraction on calcified display, as to legitimate our claims to marginalization and demands for support in the eyes of our guests. Now, there is nothing wrong with such a production as an attempt to retell and mobilize a response to an otherwise forgotten history, but that is hardly what happened. Instead, this desire to demonstrate our damages to the Northern spectators was an aspiration towards a cohered identity, such that the Southern Island could be conceived of as distinctly non-Northern, relatively dispossessed compared to the North, and therefore, justified in their reterritorialization of Northern treatment. From the first time I reflected on this moment, it was reminiscent to me of Wendy Brown’s (1993) influential critique of the ‘wounded attachments’ of ‘politicized identity’, wherein “identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in its own subjection”. Brown is examining the specific tendency in some strands of ‘identity politics’ to conceive of subjects as members of static, predetermined categories that are made through differential relations to power, and to suggest differential interactions of these categorizations from these stabilized presuppositions, therefore reenacting the proliferation of exclusive ‘interiors’ that reterritorialize, through ignorance or violence, their exteriors, the socius of ontological conceptions of identity that we have already critiqued. What was drawn was not a symbolic connection to the wound, an affirmation of a relationship that exposed and warded off imperialist violence, but quite the contrary, a relationship of sign-value which took the wound to represent a source of power, and therefore, an investment in the continuation of the structure of imperialist violence, such that we could inhabit moral force as its dispossessed ‘outside’. Not an affirmation of the exterior against the interior, but an affirmation of the exterior as exterior-to-interior as a means to cohere a new interior. As Brown (1993) articulates it, “identity politics structured by ressentiment reverses without subverting this blaming structure: it does not subject to critique the sovereign subject of accountability that liberal individualism presupposes nor the economy of inclusion and exclusion that liberal universalism establishes. Thus politicized identity that presents itself as a self-affirmation now appears as the opposite, as predicated on and requiring its sustained rejection by a ‘hostile external world’”.

‘Wounded attachments’ is a specific reproduction of the socius of ontological identity, wherein historical subjection is stabilized and universalized as the basis for an interior, which therefore leads to (as we saw on the Southern beaches) the need to tie oneself to one’s own oppression as a means to enter their interior. Of course, the implication of this critique is not a denial of historical oppression. We should think of historical relations as more relationships of desire that contribute to the symbolic value of machines, relations which are severed by the liberal equalizing ‘color-blindness’ that treats infinite difference as reducible to the singular interior of citizen. There are obvious differences in the quality of productions as a result of the historical flows that animate them, as in the ‘parallels’ of Aperion establishing a protected national park versus the Southern Alliance telling Aperion to leave the Southern forests alone, of the United States securing its borders from immigration versus the indigenous natives battling off American settlers, of white nationalism versus black nationalism. In these examples, the two opposed productions are not at all the same, in a manner that can only be understood as a consequence of productions flowing from historical relations, as opposed to the universal liberal subject that occludes such differentiation. However, we should understand that, in these cases, the former productions are problematic because they invest in the creation of an interior, whereas the latter are justified because they are affirmations of exterior relations that resist the imposition of an interior. The justification is not based on a different character that necessarily is consequence of some ontologically different subject position inhabited by the two productive becomings (North or South), but based on the different character that it circumstantially carries (desiring-acquisition or desiring-production), and if that circumstantial character shifts, so does the production. If the Southern Alliance’s forest conservation was an attempt to cohere some natural Biosphere, and not just a resistance to Northern colonization, it would not be justified just because this reterritorialization happened to originate in the South. “The nomads do not hold the secret: an ‘ideological,’ scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to a phylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who defines this constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation that defines the nomad” (ATP, p. 422-423).

We disregard liberal universalism because, in its refusal to see difference, it precludes differential responses to distinct zones of intensity. However, to announce these differences as historically or ontologically calcified makes the same preclusion, just through another appearance. This is, obviously, not an ignorance towards historical subjugation, a naïve call to grab oneself by the bootstraps and overcome one’s oppression, but we find this kind of indistinction problematic precisely because of its refusal to connect with distinct becomings and flows. The schizoanalytic project is to connect with different zones of intensity and produce in response to them---not to endlessly reproduce the same differences. This is why we find it important that we conceptualize historical and juridical power, and their influences on subject formation, as “that which has weight but no trajectory, mass but no coherence, force but no direction”---in a word, history as flows of desire (Brown, 1993). Otherwise, we risk reading history as already played out, recreating Freud’s theatrical unconscious, only replacing Oedipus with the Past. This is how we end up with the endless striation of subjects, locked within a personal interior that is defined only by its intersectional relation with various systems of domination, converted to self-referential signifier in a manner that predetermines and overcodes interactions of the signified. Brown (1993) notices that this anti-produces compulsory coherence with one’s signifier, and is therefore “reiterative of regulatory, disciplinary society in its configuration of a disciplinary subject. It is both produced by and potentially accelerates the production of that aspect of disciplinary society that ‘ceaselessly characterizes, classifies, and specializes,’ that works through ‘surveillance, continuous registration, perpetual assessment, and classification,’ through a social machinery ‘that is both immense and minute’”. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that this striation directs us away from deterritorialized potentialities, missing their lines of escape as we see a status quo that is always already fixed. “All history does is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession” (ATP, p. 430).

These critiques of ontological essentializations of identity are nothing we have not said before. We can reiterate, in a final summarization, the we find these readings of subjects as essentially determined by their ‘identity’ problematic: first, as it establishes an interior that shuts off and condemns its exterior in advance (the South will renounce and miss deterritorialized movements in the North); second, as it redirects concerns of the interior to care only about its own benefit (the South could ravage its own land, free to reterritorialize as it pleases, as long as it is in the service of the South); third, as a sum of the first two, as it creates an attraction for subjects to announce or invent their own position in an oppressed interior (these are the ‘wounded attachments’ we have just discussed); fourth and finally, as it interacts with subjects only at the level of these identified signifiers, compels them into these categories, and freezes into place a state of affairs that understands all existence as downstream consequences of structuring or historical oppression (in a word, ressentiment). What we can cast our focus onto here, instead, is that deterritorialization presents a real alternative to both the conditions of oppression that motivated these ‘wounded attachments’, and the reactionary attachments themselves. It is not just that deterritorialization is a parallel line to reterritorialization, that if everyone theoretically did not emit violent reterritorializing productions, they would necessarily be producing deterritorializing ones instead, and none of the anti-productive violence of reterritorialization would occur. This might be accurate, but would hardly be reassuring to subjects who are violently anti-produced under immanent conditions. Rather than parallel, we should think of deterritorialization as perpendicular to reterritorialization---their trajectories make a direct collision, and moreover, deterritorialization ruptures the violence of the latter. On the one hand, it is possible to deterritorialize the machines that anti-produce a socius, to detach them from their fascist assemblage and reorient their direction towards liberation, for no machine has an essence outside of the assemblage it is attached to. More instantaneously, though, deterritorialization presents a way out, a line of flight, an escape. The violence of the socius is the imposition of a static Being onto a subject, and a deterritorialized becoming necessarily exceeds and ruptures this imposition. Michelle Wright, in a quantum reading of the work of James Baldwin, notices “if one always interpellates one’s Blackness in moments of anti-Black racism, the resulting identity is fraught with tension, anxiety, and hatred”, but resolves, in contrast, that “self-determination of the individual can produce a Blackness that effectively breaks from its history of objecthood” (2015, p. 119). We could also recall the ‘improper reproduction’ theorized by Gumbs (2010), who, though she realizes “the production of Blackness is characterized, criminalized and demonized through the figure of the Black mother”, nonetheless maintains “the Black queer maternal enables the production of an intersubjective future that does not reproduce ownership of or through bodies but rather reimagines connection, accountability and the production of a livable world”. One could, of course, object that these attempts at escape will remain criminalized and captured by the system. We think that deterritorialization’s drawing connections with, and affirmation of, these deviant productions is capable of rupturing these systems, of preventing this recriminalization or recapture, for systems of control are nothing more than productions of machines, which are not omnipresent or inevitable, and are always subject to change. In addition, though, we think that deterritorialization gives the subject the possibility of choosing for themself when and how to concern themselves with systemic anti-productions, instead of making a universal resolution on their behalf. What is the suggestion, instead? That we accept the Beings imposed on us for fear of backlash? That we subject Beings to a new regime of labor, demanding they produce a new world before they can liberate their existence? There is nothing revolutionary about internalizing State policing. We think deterritorialization, which does not view systemic threats as static, overcoding signs, but as symbolic objects with a value that shifts based on concrete relationships of desire, is far preferable. Why remain passive until there comes about some transcendent redemptive world, when we can create that world through our immanent reenactment of it? “our commitment… is one that takes brutally seriously the radical theorizing of nonbinary refusals of gender as a violent regime. &, that theorizing loves the world we yearn for so much that those who take on the task start to look like beings that would live in that world. but heres the thing: it is difficult to live in two worlds, or to begin living in another world while still being subject to the terrestrial mandates of this world. some might say youre being unrealistic, which you are. because you have come to know a different real” (Bey, 2022, p. 124). When the violence of history is the translation of a coexistence of becomings into fixed successions, it makes little sense to wait for---or even work for---the arrival of the next succession, instead of unleashing the coexistence of becomings we hope it to bring about.

At many times, this chapter was difficult to write, in large part due to its constant dealing with history as a force without end. Much of the criticism here has been directed against ‘overcoding against overcoding’, that is, justifiable responses to real anti-production that unfortunately striate anti-productions of their own. These are far more sympathetic than the striations we had analyzed before, to the point of constant doubling-back, second-guessing, re-writing, wondering if our primary and resolute insistence on desiring-production was problematic. I will reaffirm, one last time, that we do remain committed to the affirmation of deterritorialized flows first and foremost, and will not permit a reterritorialization of these flows towards a single objective---this is not stated as an attempt to persuade those who, at this point, maintain allegiance to their acquisitive ideal of revolution, but instead, as a concession, one they can highlight as their reason for departure from our schizophrenic project as they leave us behind. For us, though, there is a remarkable difference we have observed between the (over)thinking through these concepts, attempting to make sense of them in a signifying system, subjecting them to scrutiny from striating regimes, and the actual rehearsal of the concepts, inhabiting their signified referents, following them through smooth space. It is not just that, as one could predictably assume, drifting with the flows of desire feels better than repressing them. Drifting with the flows has also seen that the consequences we might repress them in the name of have not materialized when they have had the chance. Desiring-production feels good, yes. But it also seems to work. When we have approached these reflections on Northern extraction with confidence, with an unconditional affirmation of desiring-production, with a belief in the flows of the schizophrenic process, our concerns have melted away. And when schizoanalysis is perpetually less concerned with what concepts are, and more fascinated with what they can do, this is all we need to hear. We are confident, therefore, that in response to the North’s imperialist extraction of the Southern Island, deterritorialized productions, rhizomatic connections, and transversal relations is an alternative that is both successful and necessary. We are confident, furthermore, that for all of the experimental conceptualizations that we have turned to in order to figure out what deterritorialization might look like, the various ponderances of the xxx series, that we had it right from the start:

xxx

i am a desire mechanic

this is our wager;

if one makes an attempt to let themselves be affected by other’s zones of intensity,

they’ll be fine

and things will change.

False Convictions, True Sentences, Botched Executions

On Day Four of Ish’s experiment, unbeknownst to each other, the Northern and Southern Islands held meetings simultaneously. The North finalized treaties for their united security commitment; the South banded together to resist precisely such incorporations. In an improbable stroke of chance, the Southern Alliance celebrated their formation with traditional chorus at the exact moment that a saboteur activated a trap in the North’s meeting hall, killing most political leaders present. The scene, as it was visible to all participants through the server-wide chat: ten or so messages proclaiming ‘to a new tomorrow! o7’, followed immediately by ten or so automated red alerts that a player had been impaled by a falling stalactite.

The Northern nations, or what remained of them, were unsurprisingly eager to identify and liquate the assassin. The Commonwealth, one of the effected groups, announced a trial would be held at the beginning of Day Five. To be interrogated was Saparata---an unaffiliated Northerner who had presided over the meeting at which the killings occurred---and representatives from the emergent Southern Alliance, suspected for the too-perfect timing of their chant. The South delegated Ocho, OddJeff, and Spinelius to repudiate their association with the violence, as well as to make known their arrival onto the geopolitical scene that had thus far treated them as vacant land to be ravaged.

Once called to the stand, Spinelius found herself stumbling through introductions---and how could she not, under such a harsh gaze? The trial, evidently a public affair, was beheld by as many Northern citizens as could force their way into the crowded hall. Scandalous whispers echoed off glistening diamond gear. The belligerent Jeff, always cognizant of his flank, noticed Commonwealth guards encircling and approaching the Southern accused, swords drawn. Deleuze and Guattari, following Nietzsche, wonder about the spectacular nature of juridical punishment, the dramatic tension that lingers over this scene of justice. “He encounters the terrible equation of debt: injury done = pain to be suffered. How does one explain, he asks, that the criminal’s pain can serve as an ‘equivalent’ of the harm he has done? How can one ‘pay back’ with suffering? An eye must be invoked that extracts pleasure from the event” (AO, p. 191). It is no accident that the North administered their proceedings in a structure with the exterior façade of a temple, and the interior floorplan of a matador’s arena. Complete with seating.

“The equation injury = pain has nothing exchangist about it… debt itself has nothing to do with exchange” (AO, p. 191). The assassinations were not a chip out of a Northern whole, which the South could compensate to recomplete them. Juridical ‘justice’ has nothing to do with fairness, equalization, karma. No, these are all to do with the State. “The eye extracts from the pain it is contemplating a surplus value of code that compensates the broken relationship between the voice of alliance that the criminal has wronged” (AO, p. 191). ‘Debt’ is not created as a consequence of transgression against the Law it presupposes, but quite the contrary, the Law is created through the mobilization of debt against the transgressor. Debt does not equalize. It creates. “Society is not exchangist, the socius is inscriptive: not exchanging but marking bodies… debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flows desire and, by means of that debt… represses the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of submerging everything” (AO, p. 185). Punishment has no use outside of its function as a source of anti-production, releasing an overcoding flow that binds subjects to the socius of the State. The eye that witnesses the distribution of justice internalizes the treat of retribution, compelling one towards the interior of the Law, sufficiently accepting illegal productions as out-of-bounds. Punishment is a machine that redirects and reterritorializes all other machines towards the reproduction and reification of the State. It is worthless, if not abstracted to the regime of surplus value that overcodes the primitive BwO.

Ocho stepped in to clean up Spinelius’s message. Ever eloquent, she reminded the vulturous audience of the film History had released the night prior, which depicted the Southern Alliance’s mistimed celebration from the perspective of the New Dawn castle, with the participants two seas removed from the assassinating contraption. It was evidence enough to ensure innocence. The cop-Father inquires of Spinelius’s nervous sweat, then, ‘why fear if you have nothing to hide?’. As if the truth was ever enough to ward off a socius. Deleuze and Guattari find in Freud a harrowing lesson about the sheer force of persuasion the Law carries, for how else could Western thought come to take for granted incest as unrepressed desire? “The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that’s what I wanted!” (AO, p. 114). It would be wrong to conclude that all that falls outside the Law is illegal. “One acts as if it were possible to conclude directly from psychic repression the nature of the repressed, and from the prohibition the nature of what is prohibited… for what really takes place is that the law prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the ‘instincts,’ so as to persuade its subjects they had the intention corresponding to this fiction. This is indeed the only way the law has of getting a grip on intention, of making the unconscious guilty” (AO, p. 114-115). It is only after desire has been renounced by the Church that one sees in all their desires sin, after they have been made illegal by the State that one sees in all their desires violence, after they have been inspected by Freud that one sees in them incest. The deterritorialized flow is lost, and treated instead as the detached signifier that is ascribed to it. Anything that does not neatly fit into the Law is taken to necessarily be of the same order as drunk-murder-sex. One could hardly blame Spinelius for not taking any solace in Real innocence as sufficient to shield her from the shackles of the State. Indeed, if psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it is that we can invent incest wherever we want to find it.

What can we make of all this? We should not get too eager, and think that we have located punishment as the root cause of all socii, that we are one abolition away from freedom. Punishment is a machine that anti-produces a socius, creating aspiration towards an interior Real World of the Law as an escape from the illegal Apparent World, for if one is not already frightened enough at what will be done to them if they are caught lurking down there, they are disgusted by the distorted image that has come to take Dionysus’s place. ‘Buckle up, you wouldn’t want a ticket! Besides, anyone who disobeys is a genocidal maniac’. However, one can find themself in debt to a socius without punishment ever entering the image. One could be made to feel indebted to the one who has raised them, or saved them, their own body reduced to a unit in the exchange. In some respects, capital could be said to be so successful because it has implanted in each subject a debt to accumulation long before the subject’s birth. Moreover, one could just as easily wind up in a socius without the assistance debt, for perhaps one needs no guilt or anxiety to affirm an interior, joyously throwing away their autonomy for the belief that reason rules all, God is gracious, capital has saved existence, or socialism can yet redeem it. All we can conclude is that punishment is a socius, a striation, no different formally than any of the rest. Yet another means to anti-produce investment in an interior. But this should not change how we proceed---it’s not like we had plans to permit a reterritorialization, no matter how universal or microscopic. Just add punishment to the list of structures to rupture.

Perhaps the more important, more grave lesson we should take is that our deterritorialized rupture cannot as such resort to punishment itself. The Law has nothing in common with the playful punishment of the schizophrenic, the perversion in the bedroom, the pull-up jumper on the daring drop coverage---these are productive flows between rhizomatic zones of intensity. Punishment, in a formal sense, on the other hand, is not such an immanent response, but rather, a transcendent conditioning, an enforcement of a Law that permits exclusive zones on the BwO, and renders the rest off-limits. It does not matter what the content of this legal regime is. It is, at the level of form, an affirmation of specific conditions and a negation of the absence of such conditions (one in the same move), which, in either case, amounts to life-negation. Deterritorialization is always an affirmative process. Punishment, as signifier, tied earnestly to the arborescent system of Law, cannot be affirmative. “Who would dare use the term ‘law’ for the fact that desire situates and develops its strength, and that wherever it is, it causes flows to move and substances to be intersected (‘I am careful not to speak of chemical laws, the word has a moral aftertaste’)?” (AO, p. 111).

It does not matter how righteous our laws are. The moment we interject such gravitational centers into schizophrenic speed, we are instantly dealing instead with the qualitatively different scale of slowness. There is much recognition that our ‘justice’ system, in its contemporary mode, is especially slow, with its enshrined discrimination and ineffectiveness. But we do not want to point our critique at these contingencies, and thereby give the impression that, if the justice system was a bit less racist, a bit less slow, all would be well. This is the work of a reformist; there is no point in reforming a socius. No, these violences are manifestations of the inevitable criminalization of the exterior that any Law requires. This exterior often takes the shape of the most historically dispossessed, and this is only compounded by the ease with which, as we have seen, the State can invent a threat where none is present. Even if the interior and exterior were reversed, however, if we deployed the Law against Law, we would nonetheless be fighting a Sisyphean battle. That incest can be manufactured means no one, not even the most interior disciple of the moral code, is safe from the neurotic compulsions away from punishment, ever in need of legitimizing their interior position further, through differentiation, securitization, hierarchization, and so on. But even in the theoretically perfect simulation, a Law that is impossibly accurate, and that forbids only ressentiment, we have nonetheless created a conditional, interior Real World (no ressentiment) that cannot deal with the unconditional, exterior Apparent World (potential for ressentiment). From this spark, as we well know, ressentiment has a tendency to burst into flame.

Decentralization of the punitive apparatus cannot save us, either. It does not matter how many, or how righteous, our vigilantes, as long as they continue to deploy judicious negation, rather than affirming resistance as deterritorialization. “Supple segmentarity runs the risk of reproducing in miniature the affections, the affectations, of the rigid: the family is replaced by a community, conjugality by a regime of exchange and migration; worse, micro-Oedipuses crop up, microfascisms lay down the law, mother feels obliged to titillate her child… one deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to knot and annul the mass movements and movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others… as we have seen, microfascisms have a specificity of their own that can crystallize into a macro fascism, but may also float along the supple lines of their own account and suffuse every little cell. A multitude of black holes may very well not become centralized, and acts instead as viruses adapting to the most varied situations, sinking voids… instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man” (ATP, p. 228). Quite the long quote. Perhaps a shorter one to clear it up: “law---the eternal operation of eternal repression recommences, the operation that closes around the unconscious the circle of prohibition and transgression, white mass and black mass” (AO, p. 111). Or, if one wishes to understand the lengthier excerpt, it shouldn’t take more than an hour watching the innumerable Holy Wars waged by the thousand self-appointed priests of modern internet ‘discourse’. It is a shame that a rallying cry as powerful as ‘justice’ has become so associated with the practice of actualizing whatever ‘Being’ one is deemed to ‘deserve’. We’ll never ask deterritorialization to invoke punishment or law. Justice, for the schizoanalyst, is not a web of objective, compulsory karma. Justice, for us, only ever means complete liberation.

The Southern Alliance tried to use their mandated presence in the public attention to siphon what benefit they could. Their alibi of their formative gathering served itself to informing the onlooking populous of the extractive violence that had first motivated their collectivization. The sitting jurors, unconcerned with any transgressions other than those that had befallen the North, dismissed the pleading accused and their concerns. The South had presented a defense adequate to dissuade the Northern forces from levelling their population---no questions of ‘justice’ not tied to this narrow question of the ‘Law’ needed to be considered.

After Day Five concluded, Spinelius, Jeff, and Beta rewatched the footage of the proceedings and reflected on the events. Jeff once again underscored the unnecessarily aggressive disposition of the guards. Beta commented on the confused logic of bringing to the stand a group who, as a result of History’s well-circulated recording of his Day Four perspective, were all but confirmed innocent. The Southerners felt as though the post-assassination trial seemed designed, not to uncover responsibility, but to assign blame. Slip up in the hall, and the guards were ready. The outside world did not matter. Spinelius observed a dissonance between Saparata’s sufficient, if not overtly persuasive, response to the allegations, and the swiftness and sureness with which the jury unanimously sentenced him to death. Call it a conspiracy, but the South was quite confident that this trial had no interest in discovering the Truth. It was content to manufacture one.

Beta, a philosopher as much as a statesmen, had already privately resolved the trial was antagonistic, for it was part of a larger punitive apparatus. Fae wondered, though, if this conclusion was unable to speak to something especially problematic about a punitive apparatus that was also stacking the deck. Xyr Southern sympathies found something almost redemptive in the potential of the trial as a means to circulate statements, to publicize the innocence and victimization the Southern natives had faced. Of course, to make such a confessional compulsory would tread into the same realm of punitive incrimination and retribution that we had already decided was lamentable. There are certainly times where desire produces secretly, produces secrets. But how about here, where the Southern Alliance of their own accord aspired to make their circumstance known, only to be drowned out by the bloodthirsty commotion?

Deleuze and Guattari hypothesize “there are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic assemblages” (ATP, p. 36). We should not think of the sentences uttered on the trial stand as of Ocho or Spinelius, but of the undergirding schizophrenic process which produced them. It is affects, intensities, desires that speak, preach, lie, bark. Assemblages, not individuals. Deleuze and Guattari texture the image, reminding us that “yes, of course there are Oedipal statements, many of them” (ATP, p. 36). The jurors would here appear to take the function of Daddy. The Oedipal-assemblage is of the same character as anti-production, reterritorialization, something immersed in the schizophrenic process if only so that it can arrest and suffocate it, blocking and appropriating it for its own transcendent structure. The fallacious (and phallic as well) claim to truth the Commonwealth trial presupposed, the understanding that someone must leave the court with a head on a pike, striated the assemblage in this way, plugging lines of innocence here, redirecting testimonies towards a particular biunivocalized interpretation there. The punitive apparatus of the trial, insisting on itself like so, takes up a second degree of overcoding, blocking the rhizomatic connections with and responses to the Real flows of desire with their exclusive focus on reifying, reproducing the Law. The statements of the accused are distorted through the lens of whatever signifiers of the case are deemed applicable. The sentences of the assemblage are overcoded into the surplus value of a sentence of punishment.

Beta contemplated, just a bit more, if we were still being a bit reductive. Sure, a claim to truth overcoded Real productions. We have seen that science does this all the time, even filtered through a network of evidence and peer-review---what does the psychologist make of the heart on the wrist?---but if the problem is just a claim to truth in any sense, is there no distinction between any such claim? Is the liberal who sympathetically insists on the danger of climate change no better than the conservative who is content to retort that it still gets cold at times? Yes, any claim to a transcendent Truth runs contra to the process of production, freezing its potentialities in advance, but we do reserve a special distaste for an invocation of ‘Truth’ to describe something that does not at all resemble its image, for the reterritorialization is more pronounced here.

Production is not at all a question of realizing the singular, ‘True’ form, but is nonetheless a project of responding to immanent conditions, and these conditions are perhaps ignored more acutely by the retreat to conservative conspiracy. Schizoanalysis does not have a ‘True’, yes, but production that flows with and from the Real serves as a commitment that eclipses this need, for the reactionary refusal to drift with these currents of the Real through their ideological pathologies is a form of Oedipal striation of the assemblage that we resist. We could think of ‘Truth’, perhaps, in a similar manner that Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the Family: “schizoanalysis sets out to undo the expressive Oedipal unconscious, always artificial, repressive and repressed, mediated by the family, in order to attain the immediate productive unconscious. Yes, the family is a stimulus---but a stimulus that is qualitatively indifferent, an inductor that is neither an organizer nor a disorganizer. As for the response, it always comes from another direction… even Oedipal psychoanalysis recognized the indifference of the effective parental images, the irreducibility of the response to the stimulation performed by these images. But it contented itself with understanding the response by starting from an expressive symbolism that was still familial, instead of interpreting it in an unconscious system of production as such” (AO, p. 98-99).

The truth as ‘qualitatively indifferent stimulus’. A machine in the assemblage, a node in the rhizome, a zone of intensity---one that flows into, produces, flows with, and is produced by every other, just like every other. The liberal should not let their ears perk too far up---schizoanalysis is not at all a question of discovering and responding to an objective truth, which the qualifications for ‘truth’ or constraints for response merely adjusted. Assemblages are too much a multiplicity to think that all flows come from ‘Truth’. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that this liberal paradigm’s shortcoming is that it thinks of ‘Truth’ as singular, thinks there could be only one ‘correct’ response to a given zone of intensity. Such a conclusion is always mediated through interaction at the level of signifiers, for both the qualifications for what is ‘True’ and, much more, the implications of what to do with a given ‘Truth’ are always wrapped up in a broader structuring web. Are the experiences of the schizophrenic hallucination less ‘True’ than the psychiatrist’s data table? Who gives these regimes the right to determine, as they so unanimously do, that desire is less than Truth? Who decided that, in a scenario with a specific set of Truths, the ‘objective’ response was the one that creates the most material good, or that adheres with the most moral law? Liberal Truth is a tool of freezing singularities and tossing them around in a void totally detached from the multiplicitous assemblages, and the infinite potentialities they produce. This has nothing to do with schizoanalysis, where the only ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is the production that flows with the schizophrenic process, and the anti-production that doesn’t.

Desire, productive desire, desiring-production, is Real. It is The Real. It is a machinic assemblage of stimuli, the relative objective ‘Truth’ of which are just one factor among others. The assemblage is not a question of some scenarios where objectivity is deemed paramount, and where Truth is therefore needed to take on a structuring role---‘I respect your feelings, but these are serious matters, this is not the time for those’. The Family as non-differentiated stimulus does not mean some subjects are Oedipalized---‘your entire personality might not be predetermined by your upbringing, but mine is!’. These are not statements the assemblage ever would produce. The Family, the Truth, as non-differentiated stimuli, mean that their output is always a produced and producible state, susceptible to be rearranged with the rest of the machines. The important thing with the assemblage is that no machines get overcoded, that all productions are indeed productive---and Beta can rest assured knowing that, for as much as this disqualifies the objective, punitive, ‘True’ regimes of signification that characterize the liberal tradition, it at the same time (for ‘Truth’ is a machine) laughs at the conservative stubbornness in the face of immanent conditions, the fallen-back upon ‘that’s your opinion, and I am entitled to mine!’. There are no individual opinions. Every opinion is the product of an opinion-producing machinic assemblage. We hope to unleash each of these assemblages, save for the Oedipal ones.

We would find out, after the end of Ish’s experiment, that the trial was, in fact, part of a larger conspiracy. Fluxion, in his plot to unify Island Two into a single State, had paid off the Commonwealth jurors in advance, hoping that pinning Saparata as the party guilty could create a domestic threat that unification could rally around. Spinelius, as we recall, had a premonition that Saparata was innocent, incriminated for the sake of incrimination, back on Day Five. We can add to our list of conclusions, then: Punishment is a socius, Truth is a socius, Denial is a socius, and now, a new lesson. Never doubt a schizophrenic’s prophecy.

With us having reestablished a firm commitment to affirmation of the production of an assemblage, it seems fair for us to recall some principles of assemblages we have hitherto enumerated. We have just concluded one such remark, that of the assemblage’s relation to Truth. A couple times, the Southern Alliance found themselves ousted by conspiratorial falsehoods---the fabricated threats of Island One invasion, the unfounded association of the Southerners with Aperion’s domestic unrest, and now, the trial. It is important to recognize these are not problematic due to their nebulous ‘untruth’, but rather, because of the practical overcoding that such untruth effectuated (interacting with the South as securitized signifier, rather than immanent Real), and therefore, the appropriate response is not to enunciate what is ‘True’, but to enunciate what is deterritorialized. We speak in tongues, in asignifying ruptures. Our ‘truth’ is nothing more than plugging machines into our assemblage, excluding no machinic flow from our statements. The product of an assemblage is not always ‘True’. At times, it operates with uncertain guesswork. Other times, it is verifiably false: deterritorialized can be the ironic comedy, the white lie, the revolutionary secret. The statement is never separated from the multiplicity that motivates it, and though a cleft between the pair is introduced by the conservative metanarration, the recourse is not to introduce yet another cleft by situating statements in the realm of transcendent objectivity, but to pierce the floating planes with affirmation of the immanent conditions of existence that they otherwise reduce and cover up.

The next lesson to recall is perhaps the most elementary lesson of schizoanalysis: the assemblage is broken, fractured, firing at the same time it is breaking down. This does not mark a failure of the assemblage to continue the schizophrenic process---indeed, “desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down” (AO, p. 8)---but does present a problem for those who wish to find in the process something utopian. Flows of desiring-production will sometimes conflict. The humbling meditation one must encounter to at last let themself peacefully dissolve into the currents is that it is possible for becomings to clash with other becomings. There is, of course, battles of overcoding as well, a Being against a becoming, and the deterritorialization of the process can be expected to shatter these striating chains. But there are also moments of immanent interaction, two becomings that happen to be accelerating in different directions, and it would be wrong to think decomposition of the BwO will rid this occasional discomfort. It is easy to invent a pathological condition behind all the enemies that obstruct one’s path. It is hard to hang the psychoanalyst’s pipe, the cynicism and the scorn, on the wall, and to pick up the schizophrenic’s inextricable smile, to find peace in one’s immersion in the existential productive process even as the existential process surrounds one with potential combatants. If the production is one of desiring-production, who are we to tell it off?

Deleuze and Guattari replace Lacan’s linear ascendance towards the hovering ‘object of desire’ with a polyvocal web of attraction and repulsion. “If we are to believe Judge Schreber's doctrine, attraction and repulsion produce intense nervous states that fill up the body without organs to varying degrees” (AO, p. 19). Lacan would flatten this dynamic, attraction to the object and repulsion to its absence, and again interject ressentiment into the recognition of lack. We do no such thing. “Repulsion and attraction… it must not be thought that the intensities themselves are in opposition to one another, arriving at a state of balance around a neutral state. On the contrary, they are all positive in relationship to the zero intensity that designates the full body without organs. And they undergo relative rises or falls depending on the complex relationship between them and the variations in the relative strength of attraction and repulsion as determining factors” (AO, p. 19). The rhizomatic production is a bit like three-body problem, objects pulling each other with unique mixes of attraction and repulsion, intersecting gravitational fields creating and being created by the planets’ position. But the machines are smaller than planets, and there are far more of them than three. How the objects will settle, nobody knows. What is relevant is that desire is again given the quality of immanent force, and not Lacan’s negative aspiration towards transcendent fulfillment. The schizophrenic subject knows nothing of overcoding the remainder of the process as they seek to grasp their object, nor do they consider themself overcoded if their object remains out of reach. The schizophrenic attraction to the object is not the single structuring vector of the subject, just one relational attraction that is produced in conjunction with countless others. The schizophrenic subject is a NEWMAGICWAND.

The flows of desiring-production, when properly deterritorialized, occur in/on a smooth space. As the becomings roll around, one will at times find themself proximate to an object that repulses them, or distant from an object of their attraction. One is, at one moment, packed shoulder-to-shoulder in a subway car, unable to drown out the obnoxious conversation to their left, and a moment later, one is alone and at rest, wishing nothing more than to be back with their love in London. What is relevant is not the specific relationships of attraction or repulsion, which serve to produce nervous states of becoming that in turn produce new and shift existing relations, but, for our purposes, whether these relationships occur within smooth space, or whether they draw a line of striation. One is free to adjust their location within smooth space to change their proportions of attraction and repulsion, but not in such a manner as to striate the smooth plane with a renunciation of what is repulsing or an aspiration towards what is attracting. Continue to make rhizomatic connections, transversal incorporations, mutual becomings, not reductions into Beings. This should all remind us, again, that desiring-production is hardly a question of ‘want’. One might suffer in smooth space, and feel secure in striations. Desiring-production is a tool to affirm the former, and a framework that can critique the latter. The bourgeoisie might experience a relative decrease in convenience as a consequence of capital’s destruction; the proletariat might be convinced to be content in their dispossessed role in capital’s continuation. It is therefore critical that a politics of desire understands desire-affirmation not as emotional fulfillment, but liberation of flow. Hence, ressentiment must be in all instances resisted. All other productions are fair game.

Baudrillard (1972/1981, p. 65) articulates of the reterritorializing process of signification that “instead of abolishing itself in the relationship it establishes, and thus assuming symbolic value (as in the example of the gift), the object becomes autonomous, intransitive, opaque, and so begins to signify the abolition of the relationship”. We should use this frame of abolition to conceptualize the distinction between the statement of an assemblage and the fascism that silences it. What it means for desire to desire its own repression is not ambiguous, not a Freudian guessing-game of what wish contains undertones of abstinence. Regardless of content, what the gift is, the deterritorialized relation has no value aside from the actual, immanent relationship of desire, and therefore abolishes the portable, overcoding surplus value of exchange as it occurs, for the variables which animate the production are nothing more than the concrete interaction of the assemblage. Inversely, again independent of content, the symbolic object is lifted to transcendent sign as a surplus value is extracted, one which in advance dictates how a relation must occur, therefore abolishing the actual relation between becomings and requiring them to adhere to an overcoding demand. A right hook thrown in a playful fight between friends. A resigned wish for one’s faults to be governed. An assured commendation of the judicial system of governance, for I can accept legal restrictions on my movement as it is best for the social good! Though all could be characterized as ‘punishment’, it is only the latter two cases which are unfortunate appeals to a socius, with their affirmations of ascetic self-negation that renders certain configurations of desire off limits. The liberal is likely happily willing to participate in the regime of legal punishment, but this is irrelevant to our considerations of desire, when this regime is as such an impersonal striation, devoid of any concrete relationships (which is had in fact abolished). The ‘desire’ for punishment is a desire for an interior, an object, an acquisition, and our project of production has no plans to compromise with such sentiments. Nevermore: it does not matter what the desire is---the question of the schizoanalyst is just whether the desire links itself to the actual, signified assemblage, or whether it links itself to the transcendent signifier, the assemblage’s antithesis.

In this sense, it is possible for one to desire (in a deterritorialized manner) instruction on how to behave, or material affluence, without fascist or capitalist sympathies, for fascism and capitalism are desires of another form. One is not a fascist for consulting expertise on how to proceed in a field of inexperience---who has not asked for help with a broken car?---but when this relationship is abstracted into a structuring demand, one which expects obedience, it has metamorphosized, for it is now an imposing sign that restricts and abolishes the symbolic relationship. The same could be said for purchasing a manufactured good, contrasted with the presupposition that all should engage in a mode of labor that (supposedly) optimizes such a circulation of commodities. The fascist desire has nothing to do with appearance. It is not the desire that appears to seek order, that appears to mobilize violence. It is the desire that selects a Being, an interior, a striation, and mediates its interaction with existence through this frame. The desire that precludes connections with the Real, whatever it might be. Good-natured as it comes across as, it would not be an exaggeration to call the therapist a fascist. We hope the schizophrenic can escape.

There is something fascinating about erotic masochism, because it is intelligible only at the level of the Real, the bare, unrepresented flow, of desire. The psychoanalyst sees the signs at play, and has a field day. But in their eagerness to dismiss the tender bruise as a testament to some repressed self-depreciation, they miss something incredible! The schizoanalyst lifts the hood to watch the machines whir. What they find is a pure assemblage. The masochist kink could be nothing other than a concrete relationship of desire, for it is only possible for an assemblage to arrive at such a production, first, by apprehending a machine based on its zone of intensity, and second, by refusing to tie this apprehension to any overcoding export of surplus value. The liberal humanist paradigm could not make sense of the primal desire for pain in itself, and so, the bite-mark on the neck radiates as an asignifying rupture. One does not look at a person and expect them to be aroused by their own dismantling. Even after the encounter, one does not adjust their expectation. The masochist relationship between the machines is not something either would do to anyone else---this is precisely what makes it so special. It exists only as a production of a specific configuration of desires. The sign-object, violence, has all value abolished, for one would never impose this onto another interaction. The relationship is everything. As such, should the machines or desires of this assemblage rearrange themselves, the statement produced would transform as well, because this assemblage is not guided by some sign that will be impersonally carried over, this assemblage follows only the actual configuration that animates it, and the flow it produces changes in conjunction with the flows that produce it. Blood droplets color the bedsheets, the participants rise, and depart on their way.

Masochism has nothing to do with the microfascist desire for one’s own repression. Even as it violates the body more than the strongest military force, the former is an affirmation of the flows of desire, whereas the latter is a negation. Don’t let the physical picture confuse you. The loved corpse is a reminder that the machine has no essence that determines its becoming, that this determination is instead the contrary, and that it is always the becoming, not its static shell, that we must relate ourselves to. The microfascist often will not desire any kind of material misfortune for itself, at least not in any explicit way. The violence it excites itself for is of a different, infinitely more sinister kind, the violence against desire, the reterritorialization of free flows. The microfascist loves interiority of all kinds. It is quite content to lock itself inside a room of striation, to foreclose the potentialities of its BwO, and to demand the same restriction of every other machine (even a defeatist microfascist, who may not want others to be locked inside the same interior as it, will at least want them to help keep itself stowed away. God forbid someone try to take its ressentiment away). The socius is always a question of conditional value, and the issue is this transcendent metric remains present as a structuring condition even when one no longer inhabits it, or wants it, be it a different machinic subject, or the same subject at a different time. The reterritorialization of desire means that the microfascist production does not shift with the desires of the assemblage, but instead, it lingers over the rearrangement, demanding the assemblage to shift back into compliance with it. The abolition of the actual relationship. We would never say the desire has been liberated, no matter how happy it is, when it is surrounded on all sides by striating walls. There are no walls in Nevermore. Just bundles of desire that sometimes take a temporary shape of one.

It seems we have, at this point, entered discussion of a different principle of the assemblage, that of the incompatibility between the statements of desiring-production and the statements that constrain it. We confronted this problem much earlier (when we discussed Levinas), this key delineation that allows us to recognize desiring-production maintains a critical capacity, that it is affirmative of all that is productive, but that it also by this very virtue resists that which is not. Deleuze and Guattari have their own terminological specification to deal with the same impasse, that of the majoritarian and the minoritarian. “Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First because man is majoritarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian” (ATP, p. 291). Don’t think for a moment this has anything to do with some essentialized determination of who can and cannot become, who must and must not be responsible for revolution. This is a question of where desiring-production can lead. “When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian… it is not a question of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how ‘man’ constituted a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority” (ATP, p. 291). ‘Man’ as majoritarian is a qualitative remark, not a quantitative one, and when it is said that there is no ‘becoming-man’, it is meant that becoming is formally distinct from ‘man’ to the extent that ‘man’ refers to a majoritarian structure, an interior, a Being, that all other flows are arranged by. This is not a foreign concept: “that is the situation when authors, even those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great capitalist warning cry: in twenty years, ‘whites’ will form only 12 percent of the world population… Thus they are not content to say that the majority will change, or has already changed, but say that it is impinged upon by a nondenumerable and proliferating minority that threatens to destroy the very concept of majority, in other words, the majority as an axiom” (ATP, p. 469). ‘Majority’ has never been anything more than ‘interior’. One cannot become ‘man’, ‘fascist’, ‘capitalist’, or some other majority, therefore, not because there are more of this specific becoming than all others, but precisely the inverse, because this ‘majority’, as reterritorializing axiom, as socius, as signifier that is created through and effectuates the abolition of the relationship, is not a becoming at all.

When it is said that all becomings are minoritarian, then, we could guess that it is also not meant that only those who lack certain traits typical of power can deterritorialize. Rather, “what defines a minority, then, is not the number but the relations internal to the number… the minorities constitute ‘fuzzy,’ nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, ‘masses,’ multiplicities of escape and flux” (ATP, p. 470). The minoritarian is, as with desiring-production, a quality of form, not content, and suggests the form that does not overcode, release surplus value, cohere an interior. This suggests, in addition to the universal potentiality to become-, an equally universal insufficiency of reterritorialization as a process towards an end, much less a conclusion. “What we are talking about is something else, something even that would not resolve: women, nonmen, as a minority, as a nondenumerable flow or set, would receive no adequate expression by becoming elements of the majority, in other words, by becoming a denumerable finite set. Nonwhites would receive no adequate expression by becoming a new [Asian] or black majority, an infinite denumerable set. What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable, even if that minority is composed of a single member” (ATP, p. 470, brackets inserted for language).

The process of becoming, then, is not necessarily, or reserved to, the redistribution of power to advantage groups of numerical or historical dispossession, but it is more broadly a question of the destruction of hegemonic signification that restricts infinite, nondenumerable becoming. A rupture of interiority, regardless of what the interior entails. If a redistribution comes about, it is either as or as a consequence of affirmation of the minoritarian exterior, since “however modest the demand, it always constitutes a point that the axiomatic cannot tolerate: when people demand to formulate their problems themselves, and to determine at least the particular conditions under which they can receive a more general solution” (ATP, p. 471). But this process is not restricted. It is not contained in a single subjective group---“There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things” (ATP, p. 292). It is not contained to a specific political method---"The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed” (ATP, p. 471). Anyone can become, and anything is a becoming, insofar as it does not make itself a reterritorializing axiomatic. A ‘man’ can ‘become-man’ with shorts and a t-shirt, athletics and a beer, and as long as this is a product of decoded desire, it does not have anything in common with the interior of ‘Man’. ‘Gender’ is a violent socius, but when ‘gendered’ presentations (wearing a dress, painting one’s nails, and so on) do not coalesce or reproduce ‘Gender’ as a structuring interior, do not suggest such presentations as an object one should aspire towards, just as potential responses to zones of intensity, they do not invest in and indeed often resist Gender’s violent striation of expression. ‘He/they’, not as a new category, but as an instantaneous apprehension of an assemblage. The lowercase signifier as proper name. Man-man, Gender-gender, Reterritorialization-deterritorialization---it is all one question, that of Being and becoming, with a production belonging to the minoritarian latter regardless of content, insofar as it is an immanent response not lifted to the surplus status of transcendent signifier, insofar as it is a relational abolition of the sign and not a signifying abolition of the relationship. For, no matter what the deterritorialized production entails, it cannot (deterritorialized as such) be reduced to, included in, or withstood by any socius. It is not hard to imagine our stereotypical frat guy, our gender non-conforming femme, and our he/they coming together, enabling and assisting the productions of one another, if just on the axis of mutual ambivalence towards overcoding demands. Being and becoming operate on different planes---a conditional affirmation-negation on the one hand, and an unconditional affirmation on the other. The minoritarian latter, therefore, “constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic” (ATP, p. 473).

What is important is that the distinction between the majoritarian and minoritarian retains, for the schizoanalyst, the ability to be critical. Even with their unconditional affirmation of desiring-production, we find that there are nonetheless restrictions on this process that affirmation itself critiques. However global or microfascist, therefore, however prevalent or isolated, whatever degree of slowness, all life-negation is ruptured in the unleashing of the schizophrenic process. We remain dismissive of any socius, with its interior that reterritorializes (through ignorance, instrumentalization, or extermination) its exterior, in short, that refuses to draw connections with immanent becomings, that situates machines in its assemblage without letting the machine influence its own position, that overcodes. There is one last principle we would like to suggest for working with assemblages. Critique is a dangerous tool to wield. So often, we have seen it used for objectification, as a judgement that is impersonally and mandatorily applied, and that deploys its conclusions as a means to dismiss in advance, rather than to proliferate, potentialities. The schizoanalyst must not follow this tradition.

“For both statements and desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious” (ATP, p. 18). Remember some of the resolutions that preceded any of the actual studies of the schizophrenic process, that framed the study in advance---Spinoza told us not to ask what a body is, but what it can do; Nietzsche that it mattered not whether a judgement was true, but whether it was life-affirming; Deleuze and Guattari that a concept is a tool or a record or a brick. The practice of schizoanalysis must not become disconnected from the process that produced it, and that it seeks to produce. It is always a practical question, not to be applied in uniform or for foreclosure, but to respond to zones of intensity as it seeks to increase responsiveness to zones of intensity, to affirm potentialities as it seeks to increase affirmation of potentialities. Where one identifies an apparent anti-production, but must not essentialize the machine they suspect to be complicit. We can determine what a socius is, and what a deterritorialized flow is, and all of the related concepts, at a theoretical level, because these are concepts, with specific determinations (how they relate to the flows of desire, or the schizophrenic process---with affirmation, or conditioning negation; production, or acquisition). But the schizophrenic process itself is too messy for us to be sure that an actual production belongs to a socius, and moreover, has as a foundational tenet an anti-essentialism that should prevent us from casting off a certain machine, even if it is invested in a socius, as irredeemably so. Anti-production is never acceptable, but no machine is ever condemned to be a permanent source of anti-production. If that is its output, it is because it is attached to some socius, but that position could be rearranged, deterritorialized. Schizoanalysis, therefore, must remain fundamentally an affirmation of the schizophrenic process, and not a negation of anti-production, to prevent itself from thereby turning into a negation itself. Critique is not a condemnation of existence, an attempt to flee to a more perfect life, to leave the renounced objects behind. Critique is a productive flow, a practical affirmation, and remains in fluctuation with the process it hopes to protect.

The practical anti-essentialism of the schizoanalytic method is not just a safeguard against the replication of ressentiment, but another tool for the deterritorial toolbox. To understand that each machine is a multiplicity, an assemblage, opens interactions beyond flat rejection or approval. The mechanic takes some parts, rearranges them, and inhabits the flows that appear strategic for deterritorialization, free to leave the rest behind. Whether this line of flight affirms the ‘analyst’ or the alternate potentialities of the critiqued ‘analyzed’ does not really matter, for as an immanent interaction, it is really just an affirmation of the schizophrenic process, the deterritorialization of which brings about new potentialities, productions, connections, and rearrangements of all the parts. The schizoanalytic study is not a transcendent observer and an interrogated observed, but a clash between the assemblages of observer and observed, machines plugging into and restructuring one another. It is rare, perhaps impossible, to find an assemblage that is perfectly deterritorialized, that never reterritorializes in its connections, that produces only production, but this is no longer a concern. For schizophrenic affirmation takes up the aspects that are indeed free, and follows these nondenumerable becomings, these rhizomatic connections, these lines of flight, and leaves whatever aspects of these revolutionary assemblages that appear to aspire towards a new interior behind. The machines that are taken up transform in nature, unbridling and circulating flows of pure production that resist and rupture residual socii. The machines that are left behind are either transformed through exposure to these affirmations, or rendered ineffective by their prevalence, and in either case, it seems that as the process intensifies, the striating regimes melt away.

The Commonwealth Court sentenced Saparata, judged responsible for the Day Four assassination, to capital punishment. Saparata was escorted to the gallows, surrounded by a crowd of diamond-armored guards in all directions, and then, in a spectacle of desperation, he bolted. Bounding down the city walls, leaping into the bay, piloting the first boat he could find, the Commonwealth guards in close pursuit the whole time. The server would close soon, and Day Six had already been announced by Ish as a ‘build day’, giving players time to construct their civilizations by placing a halt on belligerent plot developments. If Saparata could run for long enough, he was free.

Beta had been alone on the Southern Island, marking paths to ease intra-Alliance travel, the whole session. Spinelius had been at the trial. Beta had watched Saparata mediate the Day Two Northern nation meeting, and recalled his commitment to striating securitization deplorable. Spinelius had watched Saparata’s sentencing and, even if she already had a sentiment that his guilt was fabricated, it was a fabrication that shielded herself from the blame. Both had reason to suspect Saparata was adversarial to the production of the Southern Alliance. Both, independently, messaged Saparata during his escape, offering the Alliance’s island as a safe-haven.

Fanon observed that, in colonized Northern Africa, “people make use of certain episodes in the life of the community in order to hold themselves ready and to keep alive their revolutionary zeal” (1961/1963, p. 69). “For example, the gangster who holds up the police set on to track him down for days on end, or who dies in single combat after having killed four or five policemen, or who commits suicide in order not to give away his accomplices---these types light the way for the people, form the blueprints for action and become heroes. Obviously, it's a waste of breath to say that such-and-such a hero is a thief, a scoundrel, or a reprobate. If the act for which he is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonialist person or colonialist property, the demarcation line is definite and manifest. The process of identification is automatic” (1961/1963, p. 69). It seems a similar sentiment is applicable here. Where Saparata’s deterritorialized nature, in respect to his own conduct, is questionable, his escape is an affront to the socius of the State, and at this, the schizo-revolutionary perks up their ears. What purpose could punishment have? We are too concerned with deterritorialization to reject assemblages with anti-productive decorum, when the potential for liberation of and through rhizomatic appropriation of these flows-machines is too great. We affirm sparks of desiring-production where we see it; we’ll let the rest fall into place where it may.                                                                                                    

Infernus and the War-Machine (Netherite and Nomadology)

War. War is the climax of an Ish event---the video exposes tensions, exploits them, and follows them to a coalescing eruption at the end. The war-machine plateau is the climax of A Thousand Plateaus---its concepts linger throughout the rest of the text, and the rest of the text’s concepts are illuminated and interrogated within it, in what is (to me) the clearest and most directive portion of the work. But Deleuze and Guattari know nothing of the climax, not as war. Nor of chapters. “Gregory Bateson uses the word ‘plateau’ to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end… ‘Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax,’ war, or a culmination point… for example, a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome” (ATP, p. 21-22).

We hope that this book is a rhizome, as well. Composed of plateaus, no transcendent climax, just a network of machines that circulate with one another, that are plugged into one another to have their meanings elucidated and transformed. The random pool of associations---sentences philosophical, biographic, satiric, about postmodernism, about Minecraft, about basketball---should not be thought of as together working towards an objective, but as in conversation with one another, building each other up and breaking each other down.

We have just one such plateau remaining. If you can forgive it, I would like to start with the philosophy on this one.

A love letter, of sorts. A Thousand Plateaus is striking as a text. Each section, each phrase, at both first read and innumerable re-read, captures an awe-inspiring, impossible degree of, at once, clarity and profundity, adventure and rigor, thrill and comfort. And at the risk of subjecting the work to the climactic reading it resists, I must admit I recall feeling this immense character radiate from every page of the twelfth plateau, ‘Treatise on Nomadology---The War Machine’. As I first encountered it, I was compelled to describe it online (to no-one in particular) as ‘a beautiful piece of writing… i think every relevant D/G concept / concept application is in this work alone. it just sucks because u kinda need a lot of other D/G work for this one chapter to make sense’. It is quite possible that the only purpose of this plateau (that I am now writing, that you are now reading), indeed, that the only purpose of this entire book, is as a primer material to make Deleuze and Guattari’s Treatise on Nomadology more understandable, to enable readers to experience it for themselves. That the War Machine plateau really is the climax, and this is just a chapter that builds towards its culmination, otherwise to be left behind. If this is all this book is ever considered as, I would consider it the highest honor.

This plateau of our work, and the war-machine as a concept, is what I would consider the ‘method’. A consequence of learning critical theory through the forum of competitive debate, I was taught that any theoretical critique must have an alternative attached (otherwise, your opponent can dodge structural complaints by suggesting that these systemic failures are inevitable, and that because they make improvements within the system, they are therefore desirable). This disposition has betrayed itself a couple times before in this book, I suspect. Each plateau has followed its own loose critique-alternative structure (our critique of State governance is even explicit about this motivation). The conclusion of our first plateau, our exposition of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework, asks as a transitional guiding question ‘most importantly, perhaps, what methodology can take us from the socius towards this affirmation?’. The portrait of what the war-machine is, how it operates, how it acts as alternative to what we have critiqued, has leaked into the other plateaus (as concepts in plateau-form works tend to do), repeated or even repetitive at times, hovering over and haunting our other analyses, contextually describing the war-machine in everything but name. But now, we would like to take this methodological depiction as our primary focus. Let us proceed.

Based on everything else we have learned about schizoanalysis, it should be unsurprising that there is no real distinction between the process of desiring-production and the method that works in the service of this process. “Schizoanalysis as such has strictly no political program to propose… schizoanalysis as such does not raise the problem of the nature of the socius to come out of the revolution” (AO, p. 380). The moment a specific political program is elaborated, it is no longer a schizoanalytic one, for the presentation of what productions should, ought to be taken seems necessarily to reterritorialize, to condemn, all the productions that stray from this striated path. Schizoanalysis knows nothing of the language of ‘obligation’. To go to war cannot be a moral request. “PROPOSITION IX… the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result (under certain conditions)” (ATP, p. 416). The war-machine is, as with all of our other schizoanalytic tools, first and foremost a question of proliferating productions of desiring-production. “The war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement within this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its sole and veritable positive object… make the desert, the steppe, grow; do not depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it is because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of striation) opposing its positive object” (ATP, p. 417). The war-machine is not at all belligerent, but at its core affirmative, constructive, creative. The war-machine is not a separate organization that judges deterritorialized productions, that orders them into battle formation, that directs troops against the State. All deterritorialized productions are a war-machine. War is art, not destruction, and if it is destructive, that is only because the police of the State have attempted to suppress these artistic connections, to get in the way of the rhizome.

The residual Marxist in us instinctively winces at this generalized granting of the title of ‘revolutionary’ to an infinite plethora of ‘micropolitical’, ‘non-political’, ‘individual’ projects of desire. But to the extent that these concerns are legitimate, and not just the resonance of old habits of judgement and discipline, it is because the label of ‘revolution’ has itself taken up the State’s form of interiority. Politics as teleological, as desiring-acquisition, works towards the actualization of an Ideal world, and as the pursuit of transcendence is prone to do, can interact with immanent existence exclusively with the acceptance of the portions considered constitutive of this Ideal, and a disdain for the rest. The liberal is persuaded only by the productions that effect change at the level of the State; the communist, those that contribute to a material increase in organizing. As interiority draws striations in this manner, productions are evaluated, not in their own, immanent context, but in a biunivocal relation to arborescent abstraction. ‘It does not matter if you are deterritorialized, you must demonstrate how you are actively useful to our reterritorializing apparatus’. From here, all exterior productions are dismissed (all non-State politics are worthless to the liberal; the communist is the same for all but organization), and, perhaps more worrying for the Marxist, the interior grants itself a level of ascendence that shields itself from further responsibility for responsiveness to immanent conditions (the ‘I voted’ sticker, the used protest board, testifies that I have done enough!), for it assumed that adherence to the interior is sufficient to redeem existence of its flaws, or sometimes more simply, that a striated interior lies at the end of history. It is ironic that anti-capitalist movements have turned into a question of whether or not one is doing their job, followed by the second-level debate of whether or not one’s job is important, sufficient, ‘productive’. We are not here to engage in such determinations, because we feel they presuppose the wrong starting point. For once we get caught up in the evaluation of which signifers are valuable, and which subjects are adherent to certain signifers, we have lost the Real.

We take no issue, therefore, with the remark that all deterritorialized productions are war-machines, insofar as we understand that the war-machine does not designate a specific program, just the proliferation of deterritorialization itself. We are not claiming to be anything other than deterritorialized, but ‘deterritorialized’ is not a quality that signifies an interior, that calls itself ‘good’, that demands others follow its path or reprimands those who do not. Perhaps more importantly, ‘deterritorialized’ is a response to zones of intensity, and therefore, shifts in meaning relative to immanent conditions, never letting one escape the flows of the process, never granting one pardon from a continued responsiveness to the becomings of the Real. ‘Reading romance is a radical act!’, a local bookseller advertises. If ‘radical’ here is taken in a Marxist sense, as an interior, we are right to disregard such a remark---as if reading romance was sufficient to revolutionize economic production, as if romance readers would be exempt from further efforts to bring about the revolution, or to judge others for not contributing; as if romance-reading was the telos, and non-romance-readers were a problem to be overcome; as if romance-reading, as object of desire, would fill the lack. Our critique of the application of the label of ‘revolutionary’ to mundane productions is not profound: it is just another contextualization of what follows an investment in a system of interiority. But if ‘radical’ is just an announcement of deterritorialization, of a war-machine, we co-sign this statement, and think it would be absurd to reprimand the romance reader as failing to contribute to anything meaningful, insofar as the reader themself does not grant their act any surplus value, any meaning, more than the flow of desire that it is. They have contributed to, continued without interruption, and perhaps even amplified, the schizophrenic process, and that is enough---just keep it going. The war-machine is an affirmation of deterritorialized nomad existence. It is nothing but productive, and it continues to spread, and unless it collides with a State, there is no reason for it to become critical.

What does it mean for us to be deterritorialized in a world where, to be sure, we are surrounded with socii? Are all affirmations, productions, or flows coming from a striated plane complicit in the striation? Not quite. An affirmation of the striation, of the socius itself, regardless of what the socius is, regardless of the degree, is indeed responsible of ressentiment, and moreover ceases to be deterritorialized as it outputs a reterritorialization, ceases to be an affirmation as its affirmation of a conditional set transmutes into a negation. But it is possible to be deterritorialized surrounded with striation, to remain a nomad even if one is in (but not of) the State. “They are all those who know the uselessness of violence but who are adjacent to a war machine to be recreated, one of active, revolutionary counterattacks. Workers also reappear who do not believe in work but who are adjacent to a work machine to be recreated, one of active resistance and technological liberation. They do not resuscitate old myths or archaic figures; they are the new figures of a transhistorical assemblage” (ATP, p. 403).

I think of it in terms of Foucault’s panopticon. The prison design in which the inmates, who can at all times see and be seen by the guard tower, have no choice but to assume that they are at all times being watched, and to therefore internalize the rules of the prison, to become their own police. “This architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearer” (Foucault, 1975/1995, p. 201). The panopticon as a machine of anti-production; the inmate who accepts its power as the reterritorialized BwO. There is, however, the prospect of the prisoner who remains heroically apathetic to the surveillance apparatus, who breaks the rules wherever they think they might get away with it. Deterritorialized, even while literally enclosed in striations. The distinguishing quality of this nomadic prisoner is a refusal to invest in the anti-production of the prisoner, to aspire towards the imposed Being, but to interact with the machines of anti-production as zones of intensity, no different than any other machine. The officer is not a reason to accept State power, just a momentary factor that one might have to work around. Where the State attempts to capture the rhizome in its arborescent roots, the prisoner instead strips the roots of all surplus value, and connects with them as fluctuating nodes in the rhizome. Concrete relationships of desire, not abstract adherence to sign-value. The determination of what is or is not the war-machine, then, is not too difficult: if one does not produce a reterritorialization, and does not let themself be reterritorialized, they are a war-machine, a deterritorialized flow, a vector of desiring-production that we unconditionally affirm. As long as one is producing flows of desiring-production, they’re fine (Nevermore’s war-machine). We could also think of it in terms of basketball---one works around the State-defenders, sometimes waiting, sometimes retreating to the perimeter, sometimes passing the ball away until a better opportunity presents itself. But one never goes where the State-defender wants them. One, at all times, endeavors to score---the form of this offense just happens to shift with immanent conditions, one of which is the defense. The fast-break dunk, the drive into an open lane, the two-man pick-and-roll, the drive-and-dish, the feed to the post, the daring step-back, the independent shootaround in an open gym---it’s all deterritorialized. Another remark, that might or might not be relevant: all good basketball players know that cutting and screening off the ball is just as important as the ball-handler in getting a good look.

The materialist interjects, this is all well and good, but does not seem quite transformational, quite revolutionary. We, the schizoanalyst, maintain that there is no reason a deterritorialized flow should be condemned, or made to be something else. However, though we do want to comment that avoiding reterritorialization can be difficult even at this micropolitical level, as well as that we should not assume that these micropolitical interruptions make no impact in our resistance of the socius, we understand their concern with avoiding the ‘hard work’ of structural change. On the one hand, some modern socii are perhaps more effective than even the mighty panopticon. Surrounded by machines of anti-production like so, it is far too easy to slip into reterritorialization, ressentiment (directed at the Self or Other). On the other hand, though it is abstractly true that, if everyone was deterritorialized, there would be no reterritorialization, modern socii are ingrained enough that a more significant interjection into and against the socii seems necessary to bring about a broader rearrangement of social organization. The question that faces the war-machine, then, is how we can through its pure deterritorialization rupture the socius?

Let’s stick with basketball for a minute. The University of Kansas is regarded as a ‘basketball school’ (a good thing they are not reliant on their academic reputation, which my publication of this work will surely decimate). I got into the cathedral of Allen Fieldhouse for a single home-game in my initiatory year of study, a relatively vacant conference matchup against Brigham Young University’s Cougars. The forecast for gameday was remarkable, even amid the devilish torture schemes typical of Midwestern weather. A morning cloudless and a warm 85 degrees, as to deceive us into donning summer clothes to the stadium, which upon exiting post-game (a game that was KU’s only home loss of the year, we might add, due to an unbelievable disparity in three-point percentage) we found it was sub-20 and icing. Marching across campus, uphill, snowflakes falling sharp and bitter on bare skin, my internal monologue instinctively trailing towards rage. When this cognitive movement was recognized, there was an equally automatic response that scolded myself for activating into what appeared to be the classic trigger for ressentiment. The spiral started: specific thoughts became unclear, all that could be discerned was a cloud of tension, unsure of anything except that something was wrong. Then, old-reliable, the savior: one steps out of body for a moment, apprehends from a third-person above, and smiles, finding something beautiful, ironic, intriguing. Aesthetic affirmation, as Nietzsche described. Life, positive life. The mental blizzard fades, even if the atmospheric blizzard does not.

Not long after, sitting in class, tuning out the lecture to work through schizoanalytic contemplations in the margin of my notebook as usual. The question of how to reconcile the unconditional affirmation of existence and fierce criticism of ressentiment was under interrogation again. We sketched the Allen Fieldhouse incident at the bottom of the page. Start with the simple part: the machine of anti-production, the disdain for the weather and score, which found in the Apparent World something lamentable and sought a Real World of comfort, a transcendent interior of warmth instead. The textbook formula for ressentiment. Then, there was a negation of the negation, that is, a location of something new in the Apparent World to be frustrated with, that being the first machine of anti-production itself. This did not seem to help, indeed, quite the contrary, the life-negation only compounded. A ressentiment against ressentiment. One of the hard parts about working with schizoanalysis, a system that is concerned more with form than content: you can substitute enlightened philosophy signifiers into the formula all you want, but the outcome is the same. Finally, the moment of clarity. Pure affirmation, an acceptance of the Apparent World (with its snow, and its ressentiment-ridden reaction to the snow) as aesthetic. The anti-production melted away. The tentative conclusion we drew out from this reflection: the effective response to ressentiment was not to aspire towards a new interior, the Real World of no ressentiment, but to affirm the exterior, the Apparent World, the aesthetic existence that ressentiment turns against. It made enough sense when considered on a non-microscopic scale, as well: revolutionary violence that liberates a people through an affirmation of that people’s force and self-determination, which breaks through the State oppressing them. It was a good enough answer for me, at the time. I would keep it as a rough draft, until I got around to reading the war-machine section of A Thousand Plateaus (I hoped to find Deleuze and Guattari’s own description of a method in there, though it was a hope that came more from desperation than expectation).

The war-machine plateau was far better than I could have wished. A phenomenal methodological description, which is what I was looking for. But more striking, a methodological description that also arrived at an affirmation of the exterior as the antithesis of the socius, the State. Except, of course, with a bit of Nevermoric postmodern nuance that, by making things less simple, made them far more clear. The first words of the plateau, “AXIOM I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus”, reassures my provisional thought, but does not do much to extrapolate on it (ATP, p. 351). Wait just three pages, though, and: “It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking” (ATP, p. 354). This is the distinction to be made---the war-machine is not the exterior, but exteriority. Again, Deleuze and Guattari translate a question of content into a question of form. We run into all sorts of problems if we think of the war-machine as the exterior, and the State as the interior, because we are then left to determine what composes each, a task that, if not impossible (given the infinite abundance of socii, each with their own unique interior), is not particularly instructive (would to affirm the exterior flows, and negate the interior flows, not lapse back into ressentiment?). However, the war-machine is not merely exterior to the State, but a form of exteriority, to be contrasted with a form of interiority. We are back home now, this is the same delineation we have seen a thousand times. Being/becoming, Reterritorialization/deterritorialization, Slowness/speed, Majoritarian/minoritarian, Striation/smoothness (this is not even half of them). Now, State/war-machine, Interiority/exteriority---Desiring-acquisition/desiring-production. To affirm the war-machine, therefore, is not a project of taxonomizing what is exterior, what is most exterior, and granting it precedence over the socius, but of unleashing everywhere productive flows of desire, rhizomatic connections, the Apparent World of existence, and watching this affirmation itself ward off the condemnation of the schizophrenic process that is foundational and common to all ressentiment. The State aspires to something else, and renounces what is; the war-machine is what is, the Real of actual desire, and it takes immense pride in this status. The war-machine is not a question of reversing the divisive binary of striation, of militantly taking what was exterior and securing it as interior instead, but of a dissolution of the binary altogether, a celebration of such an infinite flux that one can only look at a binary reduction and laugh. The war-machine is not the State’s leftovers, the remainder of the Whole, but breathes on such a different, incommensurable plane that the State is not even thinkable to the nomad. ‘A Boy Brushed Red Living In Black And White’.

We know of the war-machine’s exteriority, but we may still be ignorant as to how it affirms its exteriority, or more precisely, ignorant that it retains its exteriority only insofar as it affirms, and only affirms. We remember, perhaps, our elementary proposition, that the war-machine does not take war as its object, that it exists as a positive force, to populate and disperse the nomad through smooth space, to produce the desert, the steppe. But we could still be misled into the belief that, when the war-machine does encounter a State hostile to its mission, it makes itself negative, punitive, vengeful (immediately following our earlier-quoted excerpt is discussion of ‘annihilation’, ‘destruction’, ‘its negative object’). Let’s not get caught up on signifiers, for that is the psychologist’s job. Look ahead, where it is revealed that “the war machine has an extremely variable relation to war itself. The war machine is not uniformly defined, and comprises something other than increasing quantities of force” (ATP, p. 422). Go further, further still, for it is not just that the war-machine is not necessarily an intensification of violence against its contradiction. “We have tried to define two poles of the war machine: at one pole, it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here---limited war, total war, worldwide organization---war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war machine but only, whatever the machine's power, either the set of conditions under which the States appropriate the machine… or the dominant order of which the States themselves are now only parts” (ATP, p. 422). It is the same bipolar interpretation common to all schizoanalytic critique, and we find ourselves in the pole of the State, of desiring-acquisition, and see that the regimes of objectives, securitization, destruction, are indigenous here, and moreover, that they are antithetical to the actual essence of the war-machine. We have seen this dynamic before: the moment a deterritorialized response to a zone of intensity instead interacts with a Being, it ceases to be deterritorialization at all. And of the other pole, where this ‘annihilation’ of the State occurs, “the other pole seemed to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower ‘quantities,’ has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States” (ATP, p. 422).

The war-machine is essentially defined by its affirmation of exteriority, and as such, is a positive affirmation of deterritorialized, nomadic existence, and if it forced to take the destruction of the State as its supplementary task, when the State seeks to strangle the nomads, it engages this destruction through ever more affirmation, the creation of lines of flight, the sprawling and strengthening of connections through the rhizomatic exterior, piercing even through and into the mighty trunk of the State. If we regard the war-machine to be a question of destruction of the State, or of the pursuit of total deterritorialization, then it will have become an attempt to flee immanent existence, to actualize transcendence, in a word, desiring-acquisition. The war-machine cannot take war-as-object, for if we recall what Deleuze and Guattari’s foremost departure from Lacanian psychoanalysis was, it was the reading of desire as taking an object, as opposed to desire as a productive, connective, creative force. What would we be left with? A war-mechanic that rejects its existence surrounded by States, that rejects all existence that does not match the image of total absence of States, that rejects a post-State existence that nonetheless does not fulfill perfection? There is no object of desire without ressentiment. And there cannot be ressentiment where there is war-machines.

The war-machine knows only joy. If it has an object, it is aesthetics or production, the unconditional objects that are at once object and subject, at once past, present, future. All the war-machine can do is affirm the Apparent World, affirm immanent existence, affirm the global rhizome, not in stasis, but in and as flux. If it can be said that the war-machine is whatever the State is not, it is because the State-form must have ressentiment, and the war-machine-form must not. And if the war-machine-form is whatever is not ridden with ressentiment’s life-negation, then the war-machine must always and everywhere all and every life-affirmation, and further, an unconditional life-affirmation (do we need to remind again that ‘conditional affirmation’ and ‘negation’ are equivalent phrases, and if phrases can be equivocated, they must belong to the State?). The war-machine affirms exteriority and becoming, which is not at all to affirm a specific exterior plane or state of becoming (this would be aspiration), but exteriority or becoming as the Real composition of desiring-production, of the schizophrenic process, the actual relationships of desire. The war-machine exists insofar as and wherever one is what one affirms, and therefore, the war-machine affirms existence, life itself, unconditionally. Ressentiment cannot fathom this amor fati, ressentiment cannot even fathom love. All the war-machine knows is love. The war-machine connects with machines surrounding it, apprehends their affects and intensities, and it always does so with a smile, and then, it assists these machines, however it can.

This could all sound strange, contradictory. How could the war-machine be so fervently against the State, and yet, unconditionally celebrate an existence that contains the State, affirming even the machinery of the State itself? If this confuses us, it is because we have forgotten that the war-machine and State are not even on the same plane. The war-machine does not affirm the socius, which is a transcendent Idea, a corrective vision of what existence must be. The war-machine would never be persuaded, or even sympathetic, to any socius as an acceptable idea, as an evaluative framework, as a goal. What the war-machine affirms is the machines that anti-produce the socius, the flows that aspire towards the socius, if only as variables in the equation of its own deterritorial assemblage, as potentialities to be unlocked, as officers to work around, as absurdities to laugh at. The warrior-nomad follows the path of life-affirmation, no matter how difficult the State makes it to find. And this is not at all the same as sanctioning or supporting the State, it is the opposite, for this is the ultimate declaration of the State’s failure, that all the anti-production in the universe cannot persuade the nomad to take up reterritorialization, that there is nothing the State could do the convince the war-machine to take up its transcendent vision. No need for the State’s correctives; the nomad is quite content with existence, schizophrenic as it is.

The State will ask the nomad what it is doing, question its affirmation, baffle at how it can celebrate in times such as these. The nomad refuses to entertain these questions, for the State is attempting to make sense of the war-machine’s productions in relation to a signifying regime, and the nomad can never let itself be represented as signifier, only connected with as signified. “The schizo has long since ceased to believe in it. He is somewhere else, beyond or behind or below these problems, rather than immersed in them. And wherever he is, there are problems, insurmountable sufferings, unbearable needs. But why try to bring him back to what he has escaped from, why set him back down amid problems that are no longer problems to him, why mock his truth by believing that we have paid it its due by merely figuratively taking our hats off to it?” (AO, p. 23). The State diagnosis the unintelligible war-machine as a disease, and it injects its poisons into the nomad wherever it finds them, and the nomad replies---‘thank you for the venom!’---and it is precisely because the nomads can affirm their own death that the State will never succeed in killing them. The State situates everything in a vertical plane of understanding, either black or white, and the war-machine sees all distributed across a horizontal smooth space, different shades of red, flowing and intermixing and swirling, and if anywhere the State begins to reallocate the saturation, draining red to make white and condensing red to make black, the war-machine responds by splattering onto this divided slate more red, vibrant and bleeding. “The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of the quantities that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles. War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination” (ATP, p. 423).

The revolutionary is skeptical about all this. They feel they have heard this tune a thousand times before, their justified eruption condemned by stringent moral and political codes. We understand why they might lump our critique of ressentiment into this category, especially when we have described the importance of affirmation with reference to book stores and basketball games. But this misrecognition is possible only if one forgets that desire is the force that animates far more than mere unconscious urges. Ressentiment is not a feeling. Ressentiment is a material violence, and it is produced. ‘Life-negation’ is not a value judgement. Life-negation is a production that denounces and rearranges existence as it occurs in the Apparent World. Everything is sexuality. Everything is a machine. In the non-consensual violation of the Other’s potentialities for the Self’s convenience or pleasure, in the punitive policing of risk and crime, in the submission and extermination of the subjects deemed undesirable, ressentiment is not a ‘part’ of these anti-productions, as the logical motivation that gives rise to them. These anti-productions are ressentiment. The BwO is the plane of potentialities for a machine, and this plane could be as small as an atom, or as large as a globe. Wherever there is a restriction of the potentialities, with the affirmed interior conditions secured, and the negated exterior conditions secured against, there is ressentiment, indeed, this is ressentiment. Aspiration towards the Real World, condemnation of the Apparent World. At the value-level, these two poles might just manifest as ignorance through exclusive focus for the interior, or depression and judgement when exposed to the exterior. At the social-level, the aspiration is towards a fascist State, and the condemnation is genocide.

The implication of this revelation is two-fold. First, we should not think of ressentiment as an arbitrary ‘side-constraint’ that guides how we respond to the systemic violence we occur, but as the very logic of the systemic violence, ressentiment as the systemic violence itself. The concern against the recreation of ressentiment is not a liberal wrist-tapping against the discomforting bloodshed of a revolt. It is a concern with whether or not the revolt succeeds in liberation at all. Second, we should not forget the foundation of the theorization of ressentiment, which is the metaphysics of Dionysian chaos, imperfection, suffering that life-denial attempts and fails to exterminate. The schizophrenic flux of existence makes the unconditional nature of our politic’s affirmation critical. On the one hand, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot be sure the State, its Capital, and all the other socii, will disappear. Now, we are quite confident that a deterritorial destruction of these striations is possible---however, the war-machine’s affirmation enables existence under these regimes, a survival strategy for the interim, not waiting until we have brought the liberated world about to liberate ourselves. On the other hand, the impossibility to absolute knowledge should caution us against a foreclosure of connection, a punitive apparatus, the State’s right to capture and right to kill. This is not to say that the war-machine cannot take a violent form, for it certainly can---it is, though, reason for us not to get so confident in our prediction that we sanction vengeance prior to the immanent encounter, to foreclose rhizomatic incorporation before it has a chance to rearrange and reaffirm the process in the direction of decoding.

Perhaps, though, the revolutionary is still disinterested. What they want to hear is not the importance of the war-machine’s avoidance of ressentiment, but rather, the results, the prospect of liberation, the mechanisms by which it can indeed resist, rupture, even annihilate the socius, as we have so claimed. But it is all part of the same process, they should recall, and if therefore ressentiment is material, then affirmation is as well. “Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?” (ATP, p. 356, italics added for emphasis).

This could very well be the most important moment in the whole of the war-machine plateau. The single phrasing that crystallizes all others, that lets everything settle into place. An affirmation of irreducibility. ‘Irreducibility’. When we ask what productions establish for the exterior an irreducible character, in their interactions with the reductive State, the path of the nomad-warrior begins to become clear.

The war-machine, of course, can take a form that reminds us of war, of revolution, as we would typically conceive of it. “Each time there is an operation against the State---insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act---it can be said that a war-machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space” (ATP, p. 386). However, “smooth space and the form of exteriority do not have an irresistible revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exercise or establishment” (ATP, p. 387). The war-machine, as affirmation of irreducibility, is extremely flexible in content, based on both the machines of exteriority it connects itself to and the State apparatus it struggles against. We should think of the war-machine’s affirmation as the production of connections, either within the same portions of an exterior or between exterior zones, that give them a force that cannot be reduced by the State, that affirms a refusal to be reduced by the State. We could enumerate examples in distinct contexts forever, and still not cover all scenarios. Consideration of some concrete instances, however, seems instructive and enabling for the war-machines we will be forced to unleash in unfamiliar territory. We will therefore proceed with a few, starting with the micropolitical, growing through the social, arriving at the militant-revolutionary.

At the value-level: an aesthetic appreciation of the lamentable condition of snowfall refuses to reduce productions of affirmation based on natural geologic conditions. At the individual-level: the affirmation of one’s unique attractions and repulsions in music, hobby, speech, and so on refuses to let expression be reduced to what is socially sanctioned or advantageous. At the logics-level: the gift, as purchase or labor without expected return, refuses to reduce social exchange to capital’s surplus-value form. At the presentation-level: performance of a non-standard appearance (dress, nails, hormones) refuses to reduce gendered presentation to expected gendered norms. At the physical-level: moving within, leaving, or throwing a punch in a bar marks a subject’s refusal to be reduced to an object of flirtation for an Other. At the legal-level: engagement in an illegal act affirms a refusal to reduce productions to what has been sanctioned by juridical regimes. At the political-level: the protest against State conditions creates a refusal of demands to be reduced to what is sanctioned by State evaluations. At the organizational-level: establishment of intercommunal and intracommunal aid and defense networks refuse to be reduced in the service of anti-criminality to accumulation by dispossession (certain Communist Parties, the Black Panthers). At the militant-level: a people’s militant action against oppressive regimes refuses to be reduced as obstacles to the State’s reterritorializing aspirations (the American Revolution, the Viet Cong, Iran’s missiles and Hamas’s parachutes).

Of course, there are more instances we could name. We also do not mean to suggest that all of these productions are equivalent in terms of impact, but do maintain that all are deterritorialized (or at least can be, if not attached to an ulterior investment in interiority), and are thus all commendable. What is common in each of these cases is the relative statement enunciated: these are not reactions that enforce a system of Law, that secure an interior and punish those that wander outside, but rather, an active refusal, a reminder that the exterior will not let itself be folded into the State’s vision, that it will instead affirm its own productive power and continue to do so. “Misfits can't wait to get a chance to say fuck you / to the ones that say fuck you” (Scott, 2015). The socius is not an overdetermining structure, but continual flows of anti-production that cohere a field, and as such, the war-machine is and must be an interruption in those flows, in whatever form, at whatever scale. The production of the war-machine is always, therefore, at the most fundamental level, an affirmation of a specific becoming (of an individual or group), adjusting shape in response to the surrounding zones of intensity (nomadic or Statist). The affirmative essence of the war-machine. “If guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the more necessary for being merely ‘supplementary’: they can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else, if only new nonorganic social relations… the worst of the world war machines reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth” (ATP, p. 423)

As always, with Deleuze and Guattari, the question of this affirmation is apathetic towards the content of the production, insofar as it remains deterritorialized in form. The nomad can arise on any scale: “what becomes clear is that bands, no less than worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine” (ATP, p. 360). The nomad can arise from any variation of social-organization/pack: “the issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets” (ATP, p. 471). It is comedic to observe how it is the same commentators who decry the violence of Trump’s attempted assassination that also celebrate the conviction of Trump as a function of the irredeemable United States carceral system. The assassination seems to us to be a deterritorialized flow, a refusal to be reduced into a neo-fascist populist scheme (and if it was instead reterritorialized, this would be relevant---a location of political failure as necessarily consequence of Trump and resultant attempt to exterminate corruption would condemn the continued echo of populist rhetoric and postulate for it new sources, or otherwise accept Democratic fascisms due to their singularly non-Trump character: ressentiment matters). The trial, meanwhile, seems to us to be a reterritorialization, investing in the juridical system of Law and punishment as necessary and sufficient to restrict citizen behavior (and if it was instead deterritorialized, this would be relevant---a conviction irrespective of objective adherence to law, that is rather a strategic and vigilante capitalization to restrain Trump, reifies no transcendent legalist frame applicable to all machines, but makes an isolated production in response to an actual relationship of desire: the absence of ressentiment matters). Ressentiment or affirmation; this is the war-machine’s sole question.

Again, from the other perspective, the incommensurable character of the war-machine and its appropriation by the State apparatus should remind us that, no matter how just the cause, to interject the war-machine with universal obligation, compulsion, and discipline results in a military unit that could no longer be called war-machinic, much less nomadic. Hence “the State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems. This explains the mistrust States have toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits an extrinsic war machine” (ATP, p. 355). No, the nomadic war-machine’s ‘discipline’ and ‘obligation’ is nothing more than the product of intersubjective desires, the nomadic-warrior as NEWMAGICWAND, as attuned to the desires of their brethren as their own. “Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the ‘not-doing’ of the warrior, the undoing of the subject” (ATP, p. 400). The war-machine is fueled by desire, pure desire. It produces nothing that it cannot produce for itself. We will leave the appropriation of autonomy in the service of combat for the State, with its taxes and draft. It is not for us.

The war-machine stands before us quite clearly now, and the interested customer has just one question left: what does it do? We must confess that anyone who claims an absolute certainty in the outcome of their politic is lying---this, though, we think only increases the relevance of the war-machine’s unconditional affirmation, its (in some sense) unconditional success. But we would also be wrong to approach this question from the prospect of consequence, of reaction, to play around with signifiers in order to render an ultimate judgement (the utilitarian’s favorite scenario planning game). “It is too often asked how the others ‘react’ to the smith, and as a result, one succumbs to the usual platitudes about the ambivalence of feelings; it is said that the smith is simultaneously honored, feared, and scorned… but this loses sight of the reasons for this situation, of the specificity of the smiths themselves… before looking at the feelings of others toward smiths, it is necessary to evaluate the smiths themselves as Other; as such, they have different affective relations with the sedentaries and the nomads” (ATP, p. 413). We are concerned, therefore, with the affective production of the war-machine, not with how the different regimes of interiority will feel about our revolution, but rather with the productions within the realm of exteriority that our revolution might bring about. We can say, though, that “weapons are affects and affects weapons”---desiring-machines are receptive to following flows, to breaking apart and breaking down at their request, and therefore, we can estimate that the direction the war-machine will push the earth in is one of deterritorialization (ATP, p. 400).

Of the State’s machines of anti-production, then, we should remember “it is not impossible for weapons and tools, if they are taken up by new assemblages of metamorphosis, to enter other relations of alliance” (ATP, p. 402). “There is a schizophrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and toward free action, a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace, for obtaining peace… the shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility, a mutation”---the schizophrenic and nomad as alike in the resourceful taste (ATP, p. 403). The war-machine, we think, might proceed against the State by taking the tools, the subjects, the State has appropriated from it, and appropriating them again for themself. Faced with the overwhelming power of the war-machine, banded together with such a force that threatens to topple the State, or else render its anti-productions ineffective, even the State’s most loyal subject may become swept away in the affirmative flow. “Even the cry ‘The police are with us!’ is sometimes heard” (ATP, p. 367). But this is too optimistic an outlook, one might object, and we do not think their skepticism is groundless. Where the war-machine fails to annihilate the State, it at least escapes it, following a line of flight out of the straiting city walls. “A schizorevolutionary type or pole that follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery---proceeding in an inverse fashion from that of the other pole: I am not your kind, I belong eternally to the inferior race, I am a beast” (AO, p. 277). Here, we see the war-machine not rupturing the socius, but resisting it, acquiring a collective strength for itself that fights off the State’s power, if not the point of liquidating it, at least to the point of securing a self-determination alongside it. It does not matter if the State’s machines of anti-production continue to secrete anti-production, if the nomads are strong enough to deflect them. The Mosh Pit of the nomadic plane: entering rhizomatic relations with the State that end the State’s reterritorializations, or entering rhizomatic relations with the other nomads to save themselves from the residual reterritorialization. The war-machine, through affirmation of its own affirmative essence, produces for itself a smooth space for deterritorialized existence, and by the same stroke, wards off the reduction of this smooth space into the restrictive territory of the State.

The schizophrenic process cannot be suppressed for long. One can’t control it, and the closer they get, the more catastrophic its inevitable return will be. The only control comes in following the process, letting oneself be swept away in its current. We will not claim an absolute certainty that the war-machine can rid existence of all its States. We will also not claim that, should such a Stateless world be eventually produced, it will eternally remain. The State might come back, if nowhere else, constantly on a microfascist scale. One never completes the schizophrenic process. One never stops producing, being produced, and as such, one is never exempt from their continued allegiance to deterritorialization, desiring-production. It can seem exhaustive to conceive of a politics that never ends. Indeed, it is the attractiveness of hope, hope for a life at last perfected, that renders the Lacanian renunciation of lack, the Nietzschean aspiration towards the Real World, so omnipresent. But we’ll remain steadfast. At the micropolitical level, that our ‘obligation’ is nothing more than to unleash and follow desire itself makes us think that, if we are forever condemned to follow the flows of desiring-production, this is not so bad. To forever be asked to keep desiring might be the best task one could ask for. At the macropolitical level, we find solace in the permanence of our schizophrenic impermanence as well, and for once, in its comparative ends. The teleological politics is always a gamble, justified on the basis that its end will bring existence to its perfection (the neoliberal order, the socialist utopia), and we have seen how these objective gambles tend to go---lack continues to exist, and the ideologue is met with either extreme disappointment, or desperate ignorance. With a politics of acquisition, we are destined to forever want something more, resenting the world we remain trapped in, or accept something less, sanctioning devastation for our own interior’s psychic protection. Schizoanalysis does not face such a dualism. All we will do is drift on, with no plan for the future beyond a continued responsiveness to its becomings. “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” (Deleuze, 1992).

The introduction to this text announced a bold premise, a reconciliation of the two titular entities. ‘If Deleuze and Guattari were correct that reality is essentially schizophrenic, and Minecraft shares the same foundation, then any reflections over this online roleplay would be applicable to external life’. To some extent, this statement was not as critical as it was made out to be, for insofar as everything is a machine, everything is production, and so on, then we would know in advance that Minecraft would demonstrate our premises, or at the very least, that we could ignore the Minecraft context of our civilizational examples and consider them as if they were real. But now, half a year and more pages than we could have imagined later, we reflect on this clickbait as something more profound. Minecraft, more than perhaps any other forum, is schizophrenic in its pure production, its lack of anything but raw, productive desire at its base. Whereas we might, in another game, take developments such as those we have reflected upon as necessary developments of the engine (or, if our reflections were on ‘real life’, as some consequence of essential human nature), for Minecraft, it is hard to imagine the existence we saw unfold as anything but produced. What was Ish’s experiment, if not a player without an essence, dropped into a world of machines without essences, coupling together, creating something new? A blank canvas, a deterritorialized BwO. The unfolding of the event was not towards or along a linear path, but a field of mutual interaction, civilizations growing and entering relations with one another. Everything was piled on top of everything else, producing, growing, building, and if there was ever an aspiration, it was itself piled on (as transcendent ideal), and directed the movements of the remainder of the (immanent) pile. Everything was built.

And what of the war-machine, then? We gaze on a political simulation in Minecraft, and think it would be absurd to respond to the disavowed developments with negative destruction. How foolish, how profoundly Freudian, one would have to be, to look at a striating State in a Minecraft roleplay event, and to assume that its evil is ontologically ingrained, that we can only enjoy the server if all its citizens are liquidated into cobblestone remains. No, Minecraft is an ultimate testament to the produced nature of all that is, of all relations as nothing but an immanent fabric, a screenshot of an eternal, chaotic flux. From this perspective, it seems almost obvious that only affirmation could be our way forward, our response. There will be those on the server who secrete microfascisms, to be sure. But are to establish an eternal value, a securitization against securitization, and spend each moment in the event laboring towards this goal? It appears much more sensible to us to create, instead, to develop our own affirmative force, and to make it enter into relations with the other forces. The Southern Alliance pack-rhizome. There is no direction we could take, in Minecraft, other than pure production. And if we are right---if Minecraft and the earth it runs on are alike, at a fundamental level, in their inescapable indebtedness to schizophrenic production---could the war-machine have any other direction? We think not.

Another love letter now. This one a different kind.

My roommate insisted, longer ago than I can recall, that I should watch Dune. She likes sci-fi and fantasy, I think she liked the book, she thought I would like all of the above, plus, she said, Dune was just good. Fast forward, it’s March now. I’m on a study abroad trip in London (there is almost zero prospect I would have applied for this trip, if it was not for the suggestion of the same roommate). I have a friend from high school that’s going to school at Oxford Brookes, for a program on Formula 1 engineering. I make time to get lunch with him, and he also tells me that Dune (and Dune: Part Two, at this point) is really good. One of the better schizoanalytic Twitter accounts I follow (@yung_lacanian) makes posts about Dune (the books, as far as I can tell), quipping about the nomadic, war-machinic nature of the series. A Thousand Plateaus even has a Dune citation, in the midst of the war-machine plateau---“‘He moved with the random walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in his passage would [indicate] that human flesh moved there. It was a way of walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn't need to think about it. The feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their pacing’” (ATP, p. 390)---but of course, I didn’t know that at the time I read it. All signs suggested I should watch Dune. For whatever reason, I put it off.

Fast forward a lot now, and it’s Friday (I’m writing this on a Sunday). Two of my closest high school friends and I have tickets to a Pierce the Veil concert tonight, but it gets cancelled because the band gets sick, so now I’m just hanging around with nothing to do.

I really should be working on the war-machine plateau (it’s still Friday, remember), because I haven’t really even done much of an outline for it yet, and I need to go find and organize all the quotes, and there’s like a week-and-a-half until school starts again, and I was really hoping to have this book finished, proofread, and printed by the start of the school year. Partly because I’m more focused on the book than my classes, and I would like to be able to focus on my academics a bit more this semester. Partly because I’ll owe the Dune roommate $20 if it’s not finished, because of a bet we made at the start of the summer. I’m behind because I’ve been procrastinating---partly because I procrastinate a lot, partly because I’ve been too busy doing deterritorialized things to write about how to do deterritorialized things. Partly because (extension of reason number two) I keep calling roommate for like, four hours a time to talk (she was in Europe over the summer) when I should be writing.

So I’m sitting at my laptop, and my Dad comes down, and asks if (since my concert got cancelled) I want to watch a movie. And to be honest, I don’t really want to that much, and I know I need to write, but for whatever reason, I suggest we watch Dune (I think it might be because I was going to see roommate again soon-ish, and wanted to be able tell her I watched it). He agrees, and we rent it off Amazon Prime, and we watch Dune.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been more lucid or more out-of-it. We finish the movie at like 11 P.M., and I’m so hooked, I ask to watch Part Two that night, and he doesn’t want to stay awake, and if we didn’t have to pay to rent it I would have just watched it without him. I had reasons to suspect the movie would be a bit Deleuzean, but I figured yung_lacanian’s Dune-posting was more like me writing about basketball and Minecraft and therianthropy in here, just explaining why a thing you like is really like the philosophy you like for the sake of connecting the two. But no.

“‘The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it. Let go. Let go’” (Villeneuve, 2021, 1:58:32-1:59:00). Chills, then and now. ‘Desert-power’, the Fremen, the nomadic war-machine par excellence.

I sent scarcely comprehensible messages to roommate and F1 Oxford friend that I finally watched it, and that it was phenomenal. F1 Oxford friend said he found the politics fascinating---I can only smile at that comment. It seems I agree.

The movie ends, and it’s Friday night (but Saturday morning now), and I’m staying up to write as much as I can in this post-Dune fervor. I remembered shuffle on my 3,000-song long, incredibly variable in quality, playlist being ridiculously good as I prepared, good enough that I took a picture of it. Started manually by selecting Megadeth’s Tornado of Souls (greatest guitar solo O.A.T.; kiss of death; had to start here); PM Today’s Goodbye, Blue Monday (post-hardcore banger that’s progressive, in a schizoanalytic way, musically and lyrically); La Caída De Tonatiuh from Impureza (French death metal band with Spanish lyrics, and takes a lot of inspiration from Spanish classical guitar; fit the mood perfectly, enjoyed it more than I usually do); Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills (great song, song about settler-indigenous conflict, because of course); Rage Against The Machine’s Township Rebellion (writes itself); Cobra Starship’s Send My Love to the Dance Floor I’ll See You in Hell (been listening to a lot of Cobra Starship recently); Chucky vs. The Giant Tortoise from Dance Gavin Dance (same deal as Goodbye, Blue Monday); El Dorado, also Impureza (already explained, what are the odds? 12/3500ish!?); Cry Tough from Poison (solid song, added during the ecology plateau); 2 Minutes to Midnight, Iron Maiden (great song, fitting for my sleep schedule). At that point, I paused the music, and decided my background noise could just be the Southern Alliance Discord call.

I stayed up as long as I could, and finished my outline for the whole chapter. Took a break Saturday (playing Mario Super Sluggers with friends), watched Dune: Part Two with Dad Sunday evening (I liked the first one quite a bit more), wanted to ride the high and write as much as I could after the movie ended. 7:37 A.M., here we are. Busy day today, starting at 9:30 A.M.. Oh well.

Roommate figured out the Nietzsche, unconditional life-affirmation stuff before we met (though neither of us knew how the unconditional part of the dynamic worked at the time). ‘High luck stat’, she calls it, just explains how everything that happens to her is actually really lucky. She talks about ‘lines’ where something turns out being optimal, ‘lines’ she could follow (lines as potentialities; she wants the metaphor to mean F1 racing lines, but I usually just hear lines of flight. The same, more or less).

At times, it feels her ‘high luck’ orientation is perhaps more effective in the mundane implementation of desiring-production (though it loses some of the critical edge). The supreme confidence in the future to work itself out imbues, in practice, an extreme responsiveness and fidelity to immanent conditions, for it is presumed a line will obviously reveal itself in the moment, in other words, it is understood that a responsiveness to actual zones of intensity will guide the direction of our productions. Transcendent planning is eschewed in order to ‘calc at runtime’, to apprehend and couple with the becomings/vibes as they appear before us. The optimal orientation for basketball, for competition (and maybe life as well) in general---‘let the game come to you’.

I’m not entirely sure what compelled me to write all this.

The one quote from Dune, it was just so perfectly schizoanalytic, and I think I also wanted to try to capture the intensity of the moment. I don’t think I did capture the moment, or highlight the quote very well, so mission failed, I guess.

The rest of the narration is, I think, supposed to emphasize the amount of luck at the play, and the bit of irony in all of it. From random roommate assignment to procrastinating the movie to procrastinating the book to concert cancellation to music shuffle. I don’t think it’s possible for words to describe the absurdity, the delirium I felt after the movie finished. Maybe the unintelligible ramblings I sent her come close.

Dune as an ode to the war-machine, the quote from Dune as ode to the schizophrenic process, this narration of my experience with Dune as ode to life-affirmation.

I don’t really have much more of a point to make. That’s fine.

Roommate is used to me getting too taken aback by her to verbalize thoughts. Hope you all can deal with it too.

Back to Minecraft.

Reflections on the war in Ish’s event, the war-machine as it appeared in Ish’s event. Specifications, stipulations, scenarios in context.

War occurred on Day Ten of Ish’s experiment. The war was framed, at the time, as the culminating moment of all that preceded it. The final resolution of all tensions, politics, drama. It was catalyzed, more or less, as a consequence of the eventual intersection of what had up to that point been the two ‘largest’ (broadest, most structuring, most widely entangling) independent story-lines. To make sense of the conflict, we should first retell these causes.

We might recall that, in this experiment, citizens were divided between ‘Island One’ and ‘Island Two’, with Island One characterized by their juxtaposing harsh climate and lack of basic resources but exclusive access to the immensely powerful material netherite, whereas Island Two was inversely an abundant, inviting environment that however was without netherite. All players were aware of the existence of the island opposite to their own, as well as these defining postulates of each island. As such, it is unsurprising that the central conflict that propelled each populace’s development was the domestic response to the international double, though the motivation and form such a response undertook was different between the two islands. There is almost certainly a dialectical analysis waiting to be made here. We will leave that work for someone else.

Let us start on Island One. There was much talk here of a total unification of the islands, the reasons for which varied: to make communal the arduous task of surviving in the barren clime, to monopolize netherite against the inevitable attempted acquisitions of Island Two, to actualize a sense of justice stemming from Island Two’s relative ease of development. Regardless, it was universally understood that netherite represented the greatest strategic advantage to the island, and therefore, there was an intimate tether between the considerations of island-wide unification and island-wide netherite distribution.

There was an obstacle---it was discovered that netherite could be found exclusively in mines under the solitary volcano on the island, and this region had been claimed already by the nation of Infernus. In discussions on Day Five, Infernus resisted diplomatic demands from the remainder of the Island One nations to grant open access to their netherite mines, asking instead to retain jurisdiction over mining rights. This decision was unpopular, but worse for Infernus, the nation had an alliance with the Lingulini Mafia that further complicated this territorial appeal. The Mafia, with the consent of Infernus, did and had resided within Infernus’s borders, and was responsible for the actual mining of the netherite in Infernus’s mines. Moreover, though, the Mafia was an advocate for open access to the mines. Domestic tension simmered.

Near the end of Day Six, the Mafia seceded from Infernus, taking in this move some of the volcanic land (which would then be made accessible for mining to the public). Infernus responded with a warrant for the arrest, dead or alive, of Mafia leader Lingulini. Lingulini therefore fled at the beginning of Day Seven, which also happened to be the day the material border separating Island One from Island Two was lowered, such that the Mafia could escape to international asylum. However, Infernus worked with a team of elite military personnel from a different Island One nation, the Covenant’s ‘Peacekeepers’, who tracked and assassinated Lingulini as he mined below Island Two ground.

Infernus had, at this point, cemented themselves as almost unanimous antagonists to the rest of the event participants. On Day Eight, leaders from both Island One and Island Two gathered and voted without dissent to put Infernus on trial in an international court to evaluate their punitive action. The trial was hosted on Day Nine, however, the tension surrounding the discussion prompted an atmosphere too chaotic to proceed with objective procedure, leading the presiding judge to declare a mistrial. At this point, the anti-Infernus coalition had seen enough---they were prepared to take justice into their own hands.

Island Two, meanwhile, is perhaps less complex in their narrative. As we saw as early as the Day Two Northern summit, concerns of coming invasion from a netherite-armed Island One force prompted the leaders of Island Two to enter a defense pact, and consider a unification of their own. Though the prospect of complete coherence into a single nation was too extreme for most, there was one group fervently committed to realizing such an outcome. Enter Luminara, and their leader, Fluixon, as well as his underground political force---dubbed simply ‘the Conspiracy’.

The Conspiracy was responsible for a number of developments of Island Two that were intended to generate support for unification. Most prominently, the Day Four assassination of most major national leaders, the post-Day Four staging of an ‘Aperion revolution’ as a means to install a pro-unification government, as well as the Day Five trial and corrupted conviction of Saparata, all of which exploited fear over the instability the Conspiracy itself caused to create an island-wide longing for greater protection.

It was discovered, on Day Nine, that Fluixon was responsible for all these transgressions. Immediately, all major Island Two nations deployed militant force to put Fluixon to death. Fluixon, however, was able to escape, and fled to Island One, where he was welcomed by the nation of Infernus (our old friends) as refugee.

At the end of Day Nine, therefore, the scene was laid---Infernus and Fluixon demanded a proper trial be held to determine the fate of each for their crimes, whereas the bloc of nations most victimized by these crimes wanted the delivery of immediate, direct justice. The war of Day Ten, then, referred to as the ‘Battle of Infernus’, would see a defending force based in Infernus’s volcanic castle seeking to defend a right to due process, against an attacking force that hoped to both negate judicial sentencing as a requirement for exacting punishment and deliver this extrajudicial punishment in a single blow. Forces gathered, the war began.

What of the Southern Alliance, in all this? There are a few dimensions to the Alliance’s degree of and justifications for involvement. It is worth mentioning, first of all, that the Alliance’s foundational ‘OPTIONAL = MANDATORY’ principle was applicable surrounding this conflict as well, with Suit prefacing his announcement of his decision to participate with the reminder that the rest of the alliance members needed not follow his lead. Some took Suit up on this request---History notably served in the neutral Blue Cross humanitarian group throughout the battle, and others altogether remained home. Those that were direct belligerents, however, all ended up on the same side---the defense of Infernus.

There was a constellation of reasons undergirding the Southern Alliance’s allegiance. Perhaps the most immediate, and of the most latent influence, was existing political commitments. The Southern Alliance’s leadership had (in a move with a regrettable lack of transparency) sent a diplomatic convoy to the Day Eight gathering with determined Infernus would be made accountable a (later to malfunction) trial. Following the conclusion of this discussion, while still on Island Two, the Alliance representatives went with the Covenant Peacekeepers to a different nation, Westhelm, where the present groups created a handshake-agreement to protect one another from Island Two’s Commonwealth group (who presented a threat to the Southern Alliance on imperialist grounds, and to the rest of the server due to their internal disunity, which culminated in dissolution). This allegiance was not directly responsible for the Alliance’s alignment with Infernus---the Commonwealth was not a major consideration in the conflict, with their dissolution having been processed days earlier, and indeed, Westhelm even spearheaded the attacking anti-Infernus force. However, what was created from this affair was a (poorly publicized, even to their own citizens) relationship between the Southern Alliance and the Covenant Peacekeepers. When the conflict began to split into factions, it was all too obvious that the Peacekeepers who had exacted for Infernus the assassination that was being avenged would side with the defending nation, and it followed that the Alliance would fight alongside the Peacekeeper’s ranks.

The most persuasive reason for the Southern Alliance to lend support to Infernus, in retrospect, was their parallel as externalities of imperialist extraction. The most central pillar of the Alliance was a resistance to the Northern Island’s colonial depletion of the Southern Island’s resources and environment, and it was all too obvious that Infernus’s netherite had suffered a similar fate at the hands of Island One’s unification front (for whatever it’s worth, we would like to comment that the nation of Nevermore also fought alongside Infernus, a position taken as a continuation of Nevermore’s announcement after Island One’s Day Five discussion that they opposed the insistence on open access to Infernus resources---the sole detractor among Island One’s non-Infernus groups). There is also, to a lesser degree, a connection that could be made from a punitive perspective. Given the false conviction that the Southern Alliance witnessed, and were themselves almost victim, it is reasonable to expect that their forces would resist the administration of a punishment, and stand with the accused. In either case, there is a possible articulation of the Southern Alliance’s involvement in the war as a connection with Infernus in the realm of exteriority, as an affirmation of each group's irreducibility to a colonial or juridical apparatus---the closest to a proper schizophrenic war-machine Ish’s battle would see.

The motivation most explicit in the mouths of the Southern Alliance at the time, however, was a vengeance of their own. Some of the foremost combatants in the anti-Infernus front were Tricolour, Aperion, and the remnants of the Commonwealth---also the foremost perpetuators of imperialist violence against the South. It is not the most noble, perhaps, to determine one’s allegiances exclusively based on what would differentiate one from one’s enemy---this is the sort of ontological flattening that outlaws or overlooks potentialities for deterritorialization that schizoanalysis would oppose. And while it could be spun, to some unpersuasive threshold, that this was an opportunistic affirmation of the Southern Alliance’s independence from the North’s imperialist politics, the sentiment of the moment was much less refined: there was no chance that we were going to war on the same side as Aperion.

There is one last element we should comment on regarding the Southern Alliance’s decision to take the side of Infernus. This is not an observation exclusive to the Alliance, either. The war, in truth, did not concern us much. The Southern Alliance’s awareness of the netherite dimension of the conflict was limited, and their attitude towards the Conspiracy was, at best, ambivalence (given the distribution of their oppressors across both factions). There were other nations that, in truth, had little reason to involve themselves. However, this war was at the same time touted as the cinematic climax of Ish’s experiment. To some degree, the event’s political jewel was its most apolitical moment---most of the combatants were just there because they wanted to do some PvP in Minecraft.

We are of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with the decision to participate in a simulated Minecraft war for no cause other than that one would like to, and moreover, would like to take this as a moment to reaffirm one of the foundational principles of schizoanalysis. PLURALISM = MONISM. To kill a Minecraft player seems agreeable in a time of war in a manner that seems disagreeable in a time of peace; to start a war for fun seems agreeable in Minecraft in a manner that seems disagreeable away-from-keyboard. We do not think this is necessarily a problem, for it is an essential trait of the schizophrenic process that each component, each interaction has a degree of uniqueness, of singularity. It is different to kill in Minecraft than it is in the external world, different to swat at a mosquito as it is to swat at a pet, different to tackle a friend playfully than a stranger maliciously than a football opponent competitively. We do not think it is a practical or useful exercise to postulate essential traits of the content of such relations (violence is acceptable in video games, against non-human species), for in the first place such enumerations fail to capture the symbolic character of the becomings of the BwO, and moreover commits against these becomings the greatest sin, that of the cessation of responsiveness to immanent zones of intensity. Might we secrete ressentiment in the digital realm as we please? To make interactions subservient to transcendent rule or Law enables one to prefigure their processions, such that one might incorporate the Other as Being, reterritorialized into a structuring socius. When we have found signifying regimes to be violent towards the infinite difference of the schizophrenic process in their treatment of the Real as subservient to and accessible through floating signs, we think it makes little sense to then approach the problem of difference with retreat again to signification. We cannot resolve in advance how the irreducible flows of desire will couple and produce. Thus the schizoanalyst, who takes no rule beyond the dissolution of rules, that therefore the schizophrenic production of difference can continue. Our project is not to guide the schizophrenic process towards a particular object, but inversely to remove all objective-acquisition from the process that its interactions might then resolve themselves as they may, such that the pure difference of distinct machines can come together, not by stabilizing difference into a singular interior/exterior reterritorialization, but by conjoining into an assemblage, a mutual response, a production of something more different still. We are not here to judge deterritorialized flows; only to determine if they are deterritorialized.

To be determined now, as we have concluded our approximation of the pieces of this war, is if there can be located a war-machine therein. We have considered the assemblages that are being placed into conflict, and should now consider how the assemblages incorporate one another. What first becomes apparent is that Ish’s conflict is broadly structured by the absence of war-machines, even by the extermination of war-machines, for the driving forces are interested in the affirmation of an interior. The aggressing armies function as reterritorializing apparatuses---Island One to secure their unification through control of the netherite resource, the trans-island coalition to carry out the requirements of punitive Law. Capital, Security, Punishment---in a word, States. Deleuze and Guattari are not oblivious to the reterritorializing character of war, but do not find this betrayal to implicate the war-machine. For when a State enters the picture, the war-machine has been appropriated, and “when the State appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it… in short, it is at one and the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war machine, that the war machine takes war as its object, and that war becomes subordinated to the aims of the State” (ATP, p. 418). It is not enough to suggest merely that the war-machine changes content across contexts, with some more favorable than others, but that as the war-machine is appropriated by the State, it changes in form, and ceases to be a war-machine at all. The nomadic war-machine is not the State military complex. For the war-machine is indeed characterized by its lack of an objective, its purely affirmative project, and this celebration cannot remain when the teleological, ordering State and its aspiration towards a transcendent interiority enters the frame. When the war-machine takes a State-object, all its relevant, commendable traits disappear. It now negates its exterior, resents its distance from its object, resents the exterior that opposes its actualization of its object---in a word, outputs ressentiment. Affirmation of an object (conditional affirmation) is negation. It seems to be the most elementary schizoanalytic distinction of all---the cleft between the war-machine and the State is that of producing and acquiring, of desiring-production and desiring-acquisition.

Though the Battle of Infernus could largely, therefore, be written off as a proxy conflict between socii, we do not want to be too eager. It is foreign to the schizoanalytic venture to determine a structure to be failed as a totality, to dismiss everything under the structure, and to move on to the next---our disdain is for that which is structured or structuring, which is far from all that is under a structure. The machines produce and resist the assemblage as much as it produces and restricts them. And behold, if we glance closer, it seems that Infernus, Fluixon, Nevermore, the Southern Alliance, and the rest of the defending party is working desperately to revive an authentic war-machine, even if the path they took to arrive at this attempt is suspect. In cases such as these, where a line of flight makes itself visible in a plane of striations, the nomad escapes through this hole, but at the same time remains careful not to settle in the straited space that might await on the other side. The line of flight is narrow, but the nomad nonetheless pushes away any walls that might be established to enclose it. It is always a question of inhabiting a State without allegiance to it, of affirming exteriority without lapsing back into a new interior, and by the same move, warding the new interior off.

This strategic reconstruction of the war-machine is notable in the Fanonian justice of the defense’s motives, where international forces cohere to support the accused against the impending execution. We should not be deceived into reading this as a resistance to violence, an investment in the jurisprudential trial, or an affirmation of the actions of the criminal. We know, based on the protected Infernus and Fluixon’s conduct, that the defense is not at all scared of spilling a little blood, of acting outside the judge’s blessing; we are also quite aware that Fluixon’s conspiratorial acts are themselves a threat to the schizoanalytic venture. No, what we find is an alliance tied together in response to the otherwise unanimous uproar for an interior, and their turn to punishment as a means to render unthinkable resistance to the State through any channels not already striated by it. This is not an affirmation of the crime (content) but of criminality (form); not an exterior, but exteriority. The schizophrenic has no interest in what the criminal’s body is, or even what it did, but wonders only what it can do, and cares about the former variables only to the extent it might change the processions of the latter. And criminality seems, to the schizophrenic, to be (if nothing else) an opportunity. There is also, to a lesser extent, the Southern Alliance’s resolution not to fight alongside the nations that had formerly colonized them. The war-machine that might lie here is not the homogenization of the contents of these States are irredeemable (a bitter counter-reterritorialization, ressentiment against ressentiment), but the latent refusal of the State-form, a refusal to forget the past as to arise into the objective realm of alliance, political calculus, serving the ‘greater good’. If the Southern Alliance might ever work with Aperion again, it will not be because the Alliance places their difference aside to assimilate into the universal rational subject. Such a connection will occur only if the Alliance remains committed to their deterritorialized difference, their specific rhizomatic relations and immanent exteriority, and if Aperion makes itself useful to the Alliance’s war-machinic cause, it will be only if Aperion approaches the Southern nomads on their own terms, if Aperion itself abandons its reterritorializing objective and produces only its own differential desires, if this State ceases to be a State and scatters into machines that residually bear its markings. The Alliance’s skeptical opposition is not steadfast, fixed in the realm of ontology, but is nothing more than a signal to the State that it has not forgotten the State’s overcoding structure, and has no interest in interacting with it as such. When the State demonstrates that it will surrender to our zones of intensity, we will then be willing to do the same.

Perhaps the paradigmatic case of this nomadic inhabitance is the spark that flamed into the war, the right to netherite. It was more or less accused by the attacking front, to further justify their conquest, that Infernus was selfishly monopolizing the resource, in order to themselves command power over the scattered nations that hoped to fold Infernus into subservient unification. A revolutionary of any persuasion finds in Infernus a compelling threat to the securitized global order that Island One elsewhere hoped to construct, for the possession of a strategic ore bottlenecks the other States’ developments and gives them a reliance on the exterior group of Infernus. However, the deterritorialized potential of this redirection vanishes when used to protect a new, an additional interior. The resource is not affirmed as symbolic object, but finds itself abstracted into an international sign-exchange, finding value based on its relation to other States (and what from them can be demanded for it). The United States is forced to bend a knee to Israel for counterterror and Saudi Arabia for oil---but these nations show little interest in enfeebling Western control, quite the contrary, they siphon off this control what they can in order to render unopposed their own reterritorializations. We would hardly consider the subversion of international law transgressive when the subversion is directed towards genocide, and we would no more consider the export used as leverage for war crimes to be ecologically free. In either case, what once represented a potential for exteriority disappointingly becomes a new regime of reterritorial overcoding, affirming the exterior only as it supports this aspiration (and negating the rest). Based on the punitive direction Infernus took, tracking and assassinating those that once sought to globalize their mines (even after their withdrawal, leaving the natives and netherite alone), one would not be at fault for suspecting there might be some ulterior motive, some surplus value, at play. If Infernus’s monopolization of netherite was not an affirmation of a geosocial relationship, but an appropriation of this relationship to command a geopolitical hegemony, we would hardly say that global order had been challenged---just that it changed.

However, the deterritorial resistance exists within this reterritorialized vector, and the war-machine is interested in using these forces to interrupt State violence---even if the force comes from another State, but still without sanctioning the vectors of that alternative State. Find exteriority wherever one can, and follow it until one finds themself staring at the gates to the next town. Then, change direction. Find all the machines that have not yet fallen into State service, that can be persuaded to exit State service, and link them together---produce a rhizome. There is some reason to think, moreover, that Infernus was scarcely a State, whether or not the nomads interjected in their defense. KaNukei, one of Nevermore’s Raven Knights, documented the procession of the Island One summit discussing netherite access. “‘For Island One’s unity, I think, and I fully believe, that it is necessary that we open up beneath the volcano for mining rights for everyone. Will you open up rights to mining underneath the volcano?’”, an attendee opens; “‘It is an adamant no from us. Again, like, we also, like, it is still our land, and it feels a little bit unfair to just have people be, like, mining where we live just because we, you know, opportunistically happened to settle somewhere so bountiful”, Infernus’s delegation replies (KaNukei, 2024, 13:22-13:53). A few things surface. Infernus’s rhetoric suggests less concern with exclusive domestic access to the resource (indeed, their request was not zero international mining rights, but domestic oversight on which international entities have permission), and more concern with the international usage, and likely environmental degradation, of domestic land (what was deemed ‘unfair’ was ‘mining where we live’); we would also be remiss not to mention the utilitarian, soapbox persuasion being put against Infernus’s genuine, unrehearsed pathos (ironically, it is Island One who here seems ‘pathological’). Infernus’s conduct might therefore be thought of, not as an aspiration towards an isolationist interior, netherite as international-sign, but as an affirmation of exteriority, an affirmation of the ecological relation between the land and the people against its flattening into an impersonal extractive economy, netherite as symbolic object. Nevermore’s leader commented, after the meeting’s conclusion, on the formal similarity between Island One’s unification and the Island Two opportunism it was designed to resist. Whether Nevermore, the nation, determining and denouncing reterritorialization independent of content (as Nevermore, the concept, was designed to do) is coincidence or premonition, we cannot say. We can, however, cosign Nevermore Corvus TyrannicalRule’s (a truly Nevermoric username, a testament to the irrelevance of the static signifier) remark: “‘my problem is, as soon as it fucking starts getting bad in there, everyone starts threatening them about how they’re going to open the volcano anyways, and they preach, like, Island unity, but the whole time, they’re really just, they’re just no better than Island Two. They’re just going to fucking come here and steal shit anyways” (KaNukei, 2024, 15:30-15:43). Nevermore, the nation, stands against interiority as a form. It is almost too perfect to be true.

What can we make, then, of Infernus’s ‘monopolization’ as a war-machine, as an affirmation of ecological machines against the socius of the international State, island one against Island One? Nationalization of netherite certainly represents an instance of irreducibility, a refusal to have one’s homeland reterritorialized as a military extraction zone, a maintenance of a smooth space that will not be folded into the signifying exchange of the unification apparatus. The hostage is leveraged, but now, not so that a new State might be respected, and rather that the existing State might be reduced. Could it be that the assassination of the secessionist Mafia was not at all an attempt to garner respect for a Law of ownership through the spectacle of punishment, but an attempt to garner respect for a deterritorialized relationship by terrorizing the presumed innocence of the interiorizing apparatus? Baudrillard speaks of hostage-taking, gift-giving, and terrorism in the same excited breath. “So hostages are taken… they attempt to deploy the whole system of negotiation, and the terrorists themselves often enter into this exchange scenario… there is something else at stake, however… even if they were formulated, the ‘terrorists’ demands’ amounted to a radical denial of negotiation. It is precisely here that everything is played out, for with the impossibility of all negotiation we pass into the symbolic order, which is ignorant of this type of calculation and exchange… the system can easily compute every death, even war atrocities, but cannot compute the death-challenge or symbolic death… however infinitesimal in terms of relations of forces it might be, the colossal apparatus of power is eliminated in the situation where (the very excess of its) derision is turned back against itself. The police and army, all the institutions and mobilized violence of power whether individually or massed together, can do nothing against this lowly but symbolic death. For this death draws it onto a plane where there is no longer any response possible for it” (1976/1993, p. 58-59).

What is crucial about this nationalization or terrorism or hostage-exchange, as Baudrillard highlights, is that it remains in the realm of the symbolic exchange, the unintelligible Real of desire, exteriority. Otherwise, the ransomed resource becomes a new sign, frozen and objectified by a State apparatus, calculated as another variable in the inter-national economy. Do not lose our irreducibility: “always the accursed share (the fragment that everyone takes from their own lives so as to challenge the social order; the fragment that everyone takes from their own body so as to give it… ), the fragment which is the whole secret of symbolic exchange, because it is given, received and returned, and cannot therefore be breached by the dominant exchange, remaining irreducible to its law and fatal to it: its only real adversary, the only one it must exterminate” (1976/1993, p. 200). Infernus is not a monopolization over who controls a resource, over who can determine its worth, over which interior can leverage the netherite-machine to anti-produce adherence to its power, its Law. It is a monopolization that refuses to let a resource be controlled, to refuse to give it a worth, an exterior that leverages the netherite-machine to produce an immanent relationship to ward off interior power, interior Law. Not a monopolization of who can sell netherite; monopolization of who can give netherite away.

So, Island One knocks, and asks and pleads and offers goods for Infernus’s netherite ore. Infernus frustrates their calculation with a sly smile, a gleam in the eye that reveals the nomad is not ignorant, primitive, but indeed knows more than the man-of-State could ever hope to know. There are no conditions for extraction, no price, no exchangist alliance, no step-by-step development plan, that will be enforced as netherite’s cost. There is just an affirmation of a relationship, an announcement that the nomad understands the value of netherite only symbolically, and a suggestion that the man of State might want to treat netherite as a symbolic object as well. To extract this resource, to wield it for oneself, one must either make their own relationship with it, or relate to those who have already cultivated such a relation (receiving it as a gift), and all those who have a relation to this object, whenever the relation may have come about, might withhold the object from a reterritorializing force, and fight off the State’s extractive machines. Infernus is not interested in the cruelty of the capitalist monopoly, of admiringly clutching their jewel atop a tower while overlooking a starvation sweep the streets. Infernus’s monopoly is a cruelty of a much more sadistic kind, a test of sorts, one which makes a grinning proclamation that there are no rules which guide resource extraction, just so that they might reprimand the extraction team (on a technicality) whenever their harvesting imposes a rule onto the machine (‘our extraction is justified because…’, ‘I need this because…’, ‘we got clearance from the locals, we don’t have to worry about the intensities of the object itself…’). The object is never more than its own gift, liable to take itself away. Put the netherite at the end of the laser-crossed tunnel, and watch the colonizer dance. The symbolic relationships of the object are affirmed to force all signifying regimes to collapse, and to themselves treat the object as symbolic.

Hence, Lingulini. If it appears, to Infernus’s Mafia, that Infernus is reterritorializing netherite in the service of a national interior, that their relations are remaining ignorant to the ecological dimensions of the object, or even, simply, that there are subjects external to Infernus with a want for netherite-as-object, it is critical that the group nonetheless does not reterritorialize around this objective. This would be to privilege a single zone of intensity above all others, or, at a more fundamental level, to make desiring a question of objects of desire---and we have seen how affairs tend to fall in place from here. One never draws a relationship of desire with an object in a vacuum, and does enter the existing field of interactions as an objective outsider, a transcendent and corrective judge. Rather, one must cultivate their own relationships with the symbolic value of the object, let their productions flow from their own produced desires, and work to interrupt or shift (rather than ‘fix’, exterminate) an interior, should one already exist. Objects are functions of attraction and repulsion, and these relative attractions and repulsions are always already caught up in a web of innumerable other connections. One, therefore, does not navigate this web with the sole question, the exclusive focus, of eventually acquiring the object (which would reterritorialize all interactions in a teleological pursuit), but is concerned with, above all else, the proliferation of deterritorialized flows, and if an object is acquired, it is only insofar as it is bestowed to the subject by deterritorialized flows. Deterritorialization is always a process, not an object. What can be done, then, against a monopolization that turns perverted, that shuts itself off from its own exterior? One makes their connections, relationships, or productions with an object, enters alliances of desire that deterritorialize the protectorate, or perhaps even steals---in any case, what is critical is that one connects with the assemblage, not as an objective outsider, but as a single internal machine. Never break oneself off from the flows that one has been produced by.

And, from the perspective of Infernus. If the Mafia approaches, not as a fellow nomad, hoping to engage in the deterritorialized gift-exchange, but as a savior, a capitalist, a colonizer, what might be done? It is crucial to remember that anti-production is itself a flow, and therefore, that one does not resort to a punitive striation, a securitized extinction of all threats, a pursuit of ownership as object, but rather, that one remains primarily connected to nomadic exteriority, and uses these connections to interrupt the State’s flows where they occur. One affirms connections outside and irreducible to the regime of sign-value, enters alliances of desire that deterritorialize the harvester, or perhaps even terrorizes and defends the forces that appropriate the resource for the State---in any case, what is critical is that the ‘ownership’ is never really an exclusive, individual right to a proprietary relationship, but an affirmation of a symbolic relationship, a concrete relationship of desire. The war-machine’s affirmation creates a smooth space either by rupturing and deterritorializing the machines of the State, or by rendering ineffective and throwing off the State’s residual reterritorialization. It never, however, striates the smooth space it creates, and if another nomad approaches, the ‘ownership’ model (which is nothing more than an affirmation of a relation) begins to look much more like the collaborative, rhizomatic gift-exchange.

It is, either way, a question always of drawing new connections with an object that affirm relationships of desire, not of severing existing relationships to resituate the object in a different plane. This, at best, forms a rhizome (by liberating the symbolic relationships from the State’s arborescent regime), and at worst, expands an existing one (recall that the schizophrenic process is not unidirectional, and as such, our affirmative responsiveness to zones of intensity prevents a deterritorialized incongruence of interest from escalating into a militant, monopolized misunderstanding). One never permits themself a right to transcendence, announces themself as the prophet from the plains that is alone capable of initiating deterritorialization. One only adds, does not replace, symbolic value. One grows and protects exteriority as one remains within it. We have returned to our formulation of ‘ownership without property’---ownership is nothing but a relationship of desire, a machine to force these relationships to be revered and incorporated, and does not preclude new relationships of desire that transform or expand symbolic value with these intersubjective incorporations. If we find, as deterritorialization proceeds, that this leads to a local or cultural mediation on extraction and development, it is not because of some inalienable local right to ownership, or because the local is bestowed with an essential inability to do wrong, because one’s proximity to an object necessarily prevents them from objectifying it. We have no interest in such ontological sentencing. No, if the local or cultural subject is trusted with the affirmative protection of symbolic relations, it is because they tend to be the ones that have a symbolic relationship to affirm. Indeed, it is perhaps the existence of a symbolic relationship with an object that designates one as a local, and not the inverse.

HistoryInc, like many others during the event, was unaware of the specificities of Infernus’s scenario, that their monopolization was in fact an affirmation of ownership against monopolization, and as such, he looked elsewhere for a war-machine. He involved himself with the war, not as a belligerent, but as a member of the Blue Cross humanitarian group, hoping to support the citizens conscripted into either side. His experience was disappointing. ‘Blue Cross was legit fucking useless’.

History was assigned to the aid camp within the volcano, most accessible to the defenders inside Infernus’s castle. However, when the defending forces and Blue Cross came to interact, the presumed relationship of care was shed. Blue Cross camps allowed attacking forces to enter and battle the wounded defenders who sought medical attention in tents; Blue Cross members that entered the castle (ostensibly to find and escort vulnerable combatants) began to assault the defenders themselves; at a point, Blue Cross volunteers even abandoned their post to pursue fleeing defenders, swords drawn and sharpened to kill.

“We should not be too hasty in speaking of a softening, a humanization: on the contrary, this is perhaps when the war machine has only one remaining object, that of war itself” (ATP, p. 425). The problem, which History was (understandably) also oblivious to at the time, is that the humanitarian mission that positions itself as neutral in its attempt to reduce militant violence, therefore takes an opposition to violence as a neutral position. From here, we find our way back to liberalism’s center, with a restriction of revolutionary potentialities and an allegiance to the securitizing, peace-bringing State as the sole form of progress. It is much the same as the electoral hegemony that clouds designations of political support---once it is taken for granted that politics begins and ends at the level of bureaucratic policy, and that the policy-regime overdetermines all the affairs within its structure, then it seems obvious that the ‘less violent’ position is the only sensible one. But in this move, all deterritorialized potentials, the nomad existence that is outside of, unaffected by, and/or militant against the State, is lost. Similarly, when it is taken for granted that the ultimate political Good is ‘Peace’, then it seems charitable and indeed neutral to stand with humanitarian harm reduction, despite this harm reduction in practice aligning itself against the war-machine that is inversely interested in perpetual interaction as a priority over peace. “This worldwide war machine, which in a way ‘reissues’ from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival… we have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the ‘unspecified enemy’; we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place, so that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice” (ATP, p. 421-422). The State apparatus now directs its appropriated war-machine against the free, nomadic war-machine, and thereby blankets existence in a sarcophagic striation, directing the violence of the troops against any other potential of a violent eruption (that is, of a violence the State has not sanctioned). The State’s lust for order and paranoia regarding chaos spiral into each other, suffocating life more and more still. It is not a coincidence, then, that the humanitarian groups find themselves (in and out of Minecraft) siding with the global servants of ‘peace’ and ‘justice’, and that their deployment seems to be differentially diluted along these lines. The Battle of Infernus gives us a powerful image of the phenomenon: the Blue Cross volunteers, protectors of peace, abandon their refugee camp to exterminate the counterhegemonic Infernus defending---laying down their bandages, and picking up their blades.

We do not think it is wrong to mourn death, or to possess a distaste for disaster. However, we must not let this repulsion lapse into negation, into the securitized aspiration towards the complete elimination (or sanitization) of death. Life is not a sign, a signifier, to be managed, but the signified it cannot reduce. Life is Real. Any attempt to protect ‘Life’, therefore, as a specific, secured biological condition, steals the potentialities of ‘life’ as a schizophrenic process. And there is no point in exhausting oneself in the name of some arbitrary ‘Life’ when this pursuit renders one unable to stand living. No, if there is a response to the violent conditions of war, it is not because one cannot bear to witness the horrors of existence outside the State’s walls, but as a flow of life itself, as a connection to rhizomes that affirms the irreducibility of life to an expandable variable in a structuring cause, and that therefore aligns itself with the liberating flows of the revolutionary (despite their tendency to break a few windows along the path). Care is a rhizomatic process, not a humanitarian object; war is a creative process (as in the war-machine), not an enforcement of a peace-object (as for the State); ‘life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience’. ‘Death is certain, life is not’.

I was, and still am, unsure as to what I should write as the conclusion of this plateau. It makes sense to return back---all the way back---to the basics.

A Beta of the Genealogy.

I could probably romanticize my experience with life before I knew anything about philosophy a bit, or describe it in more detail to legitimate these feelings. I could also be especially dismissive of it, and suggest that it really wasn’t at all unique, formative, or worth any consideration. I don’t really feel like committing to either option. I suppose we’ll just leave it at this: prior to my introduction to philosophy, I often had a desire to understand my existence as meaningful, I was disillusioned with the most prevalent systems of meaning (religion, capitalism), and as a consequence, sometimes had suicidal ideations.

Now, let’s move ahead to my freshman year in high school. I enroll in debate, and attend almost all of the optional after-school practices, mostly because the squad room provides free soda for students there. I still have the aforementioned problems at this time. There are a decent amount of worknights that are just our assistant coach, our most competitive partnership, and me, sitting in the back, observing the other three work together.

This partnership reads an argument about Nietzsche in most of their rounds, and somehow, I pick up on it a bit over time. I get a basic idea of their argument, and decide to read (for my first philosophy book) Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. I don’t have a great understanding of any of it, but I pick up bits and pieces: ‘to live is to suffer’, ‘value to life matters more than truth’. It isn’t very sophisticated, but I get enough of an outlook to feel confident, at least, the trying to find a meaning for life ranges from unnecessary to harmful, and that the finitude and chaos of life should be celebrated as such. I’m not really sure how, in retrospect, because it feels like there’s a lot missing, but after getting to this level of Nietzsche-‘understanding’, I don’t struggle as much with suicidal ideation, because I can usually explain my way out of it.

High school goes on, and I do more philosophy reading, and there’s two additional works in particular that I think become especially relevant. First, I learn Lacanian psychoanalysis (my interest in which started as a debate argument), and provides a useful critical framework, to designate what leads to the ‘life-negation’ or ‘ressentiment’ that Nietzsche sought to escape (and that I used to often have), and why this dynamic occurs. And it was good at this purpose, but it was too structural, and it seemed like all desire must be this objective attempt to escape lack. So, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the ‘solution’ to this formula was.

Second, I read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, about six months after my psychoanalysis venture is really underway. I read this book because I like Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Apollonian conceptualization (this dualism was present in the debate argument that first exposed me to philosophy), and I thought their interaction might be useful in the whole figuring-out-the-lack thing. This book surprised me with, out of nowhere, this ‘aesthetic affirmation’, which presents a justification for existence that turns out to be practically successful in fending from ressentiment. I didn’t fully understand why it worked, but I could tell that it did. Indeed, the issue was that it was a little too good, and seemed to justify a bunch of stuff that probably shouldn’t be justified (since it justified literally everything). ‘[insert the worst thing you can think of] is aesthetic!’ is a true, if not problematic, statement.

So, I graduate high school, and the most prevalent issue I’m working through philosophically is resolving this tension. How can I explain psychoanalysis in a way that doesn’t also critique affirmation, and how can I explain aesthetics in a way that still allows certain things to be critiqued? I make a few stabs at it, but none really go anywhere.

Before long, it’s November, and I start Ish’s experiment.

After this event ends, I know I want to write about it, and it seems like the perfect time to write the blog post I’ve had planned for a while, about how Minecraft as a game has a lot of similarities with the way Deleuze and Guattari think about the world. My understanding of Deleuze and Guattari at the end of November, though, was not very good, and so, I spent some time trying to figure out what all their concepts meant and how they interacted in a vacuum. I got enough of an idea to start writing, though some of my interpretations would certainly shift over the course of writing this book, as I found out more about both the concepts and how they could be practically deployed.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that, as the genealogical aspect of all this explains, my interest in philosophy has always been to the extent that it is useful for life-affirmation. Deleuze and Guattari proved incredibly helpful here.

Their conceptualization of desiring-production, or the ‘metaphysical’ depiction of the schizophrenic process, I found useful in perhaps elevating the stakes of this focus, as it creates a more direct connection between ‘ressentiment’ and more social forms of violence, and a less individual connotation of what ‘affirmation’ means, which resolves some of the problems I had with aesthetics.

But maybe the more subtle contribution is that their distinction between ‘production’ and ‘acquisition’ navigates out of the psychoanalysis-affirmation impasse. It, in its critique of acquisition, retains all the critical potential of psychoanalysis, but, in its establishment of production as an alternative, does not present this acquisitive violence as inevitable, and moreover, making this distinction a question of form is an intuitive explanation of how one kind of desire does not recreate the same violence as the other (as opposed to some reason that desires which used the language of Nietzsche magically avoided the consequences of psychoanalytic desires). Desiring-production, as process and method, lends itself to a more practical and persuasive articulation of life-affirmation.

This book is not a definitive, exhaustive resource on life-affirmation. There are countless other articulations, better articulations, that I thought of but did not include, that I read but did not include, that I do not yet understand or have not even seen. These articulations are in other schizoanalytic works, other non-schizoanalytic philosophical works (perhaps even the ones Deleuze and Guattari distance themselves from), non-philosophical works, poems, novels, movies, conversations with friends, songs. ‘No set plays just patterns and combinations’ (a friend’s articulation of a basketball playstyle). ‘My teacher said I was a loser / I told her why don’t you kill me / I give a fuck if you fail me / I’m going to follow my heart’ (a Kanye West lyric).

This book is just everything I know, at this point, about life-affirmation. Some people might also be interested in life-affirmation above all else. Some are probably not. That’s fine. Do with the contents of this book what you will.

For us, though, the war-machines appear to be speeding up. In this, we at last find peace.                               

Epilogue: DEATH / LOVE

I had three separate ideas on how to conclude this work. We will share all three.

First, a resolution to the Ish-experiment narrative.

I wasn’t around for the climatic war at the event’s end. I died on Day Six.

From the first night we called together, the Southern Alliance was determined to develop a sprawling network of underground tunnels, hostile and unnavigable to intruders, strategic for us. During Day Six, myself and a few others worked to actualize this project, starting with an expansion of the connecting tunnel between History’s base and the strip-mine under ‘my’ tree that I started on Day Three (during which my pickaxe broke, causing me to ascend, causing me to overhear History and Ocho…). Since this tunnel was deep below my base, and the staircase that accessed it was inconvenient to tedious, I decided to make a water elevator to make tunnel-transport more efficient. After successfully excavating a vertical path from the tunnel to the small hollow beneath the fabled dark oak, and filling the crevice with water, I decided to test my invention to see if it functioned. I swim up, and it looks like I’m about halfway when I start to lose air. I glance towards the elevator’s top, and it seems close, so I keep ascending. But the top doesn’t get closer. The air depletes, and the damage sets in, and as the exit remains as small and distant as it ever was, it becomes clear that I’m not going to make it. There’s a slight panic, a frantic gesture towards a couple escape options without committing to any of them. And then, the screen is still. ‘BetaOfThePack drowned’.

Death is what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming---in the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc., forming zones of intensity on the body without organs. Every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it. And it is doubtless the case that every intensity is extinguished at the end, that every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death! Death, then, does actually happen. Maurice Blanchot distinguishes this twofold nature clearly, these two irreducible aspects of death: the one, according to which the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a One---‘one never stops and never has done with dying’; and the other, according to which this same subject, fixed as I, actually dies---which is to say it finally ceases to die since it ends up dying.

The initial reaction was one almost of relief. This Ish experiment so totally consumes the life of anyone involved in it. The server is open for just two hours a day, sure, but with the planning, the Discord communication, the diplomats, the stakes, one is never awake and not thinking about the event. I had missed a debate worknight, and more importantly, the basketball game that followed it, because I was busy with the Southern Alliance’s formative meeting. Now, lungs waterlogged, I would be able to again do things away from my laptop screen, and when I was at the screen, I could begin thinking about the contents of this book!

When I watched the recording back, it was obvious that I could have survived. I had signs and doors in my inventory, which could have been placed to make an air pocket. My death occurred during a peaceful ‘build day’, and there is a non-zero chance that, if I submitted a ticket to moderation, I could have been revived, since I died during a non-plot session. In my last moments on the server, I open the pause menu and hover the exit game button, since one spawns in with a few seconds of invincibility, such that I could have logged-out-logged-in-swam-a-bit-logged-out-again my way back to safety. But in my last moment on the server, I closed the pause menu. No ticket was afterwards submitted. No regret was held for my lack of resourcefulness in the moment. I seemed to accept my fate.

The subject as an adjacent part is always a ‘one’ who conducts the experience, not an I who receives the model. For the model itself is not the I either, but the body without organs. And I does not rejoin the model without the model starting out again in the direction of another experience. Always going from the model to the experience, and starting out again, returning from the model to the experience, is what schizophrenizing death amounts to, the exercise of desiring-machines.

Despite the death message, it would be wrong to suggest that I died in the event. What I accomplished continued to flow into, animate the productions of the server. Even the drowning itself altered the flows. The following day, Day Seven, an election for the Southern Alliance figurehead was held. While the speeches and voting was ongoing, History, Ocho, and Spinelius were at an Island Two-wide meeting, announcing to the international stage and committing to some of the suggestions I had made before my passing (a refusal to join a defense pact, an outline of environmental regulations and recuperation plans). These concurrent events, and their concurrence, are likely somewhat responsible for the involvement and the nature of the involvement of the alliance in the war. More immediately, on Day Six, Ocho rushed to the top of the cursed water elevator, retrieved the floating remains of my inventory, and buried them before a monument she constructed outside my home. ‘May your teachings live on’.

Day Six also marked the day that New Dawn finished construction of their statue. I experienced it for the first time after the event, in a download of the world file. In the castle’s upper floors, tucked away in the corner of a bedroom, is a miniscule closet, squeezing one into a crevice, scarcely large enough for the desk and bookshelf it holds. It was the study of dtyn8, one of the Southern Alliance’s more active diplomats. And if one clicks on the bookshelf, one finds that a book pops off, for an actual text had been placed onto this wall (it was not just a shelf for decoration, but a functional one). On Unity, the label reads, when one hovers over the glistening purple cover in their inventory. Though the Beta-machine drastically changed in form, from an animate-machine to an inanimate one, he remained connected to the server’s BwO, producing and being produced by its flows. Their teachings did live on, it seemed.

There is an easy joke to make about her Minecraft skin being a zombie.

There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal, Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with…

Death then is a part of the desiring-machine, a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle.

That every becoming is a becoming-death is a reminder of why the schizoanalyst arrives at the disposition they do, of a sole concern with production as a form, of a paradoxical PLURALISM = MONISM. If we take the chaotic flux, the erratic, unpredictable, and at times suboptimal, movement of becomings to be a violent death, then the schizophrenic process is a bloodbath. We could, as many generations have henceforth been content to do, find something lamentable about this fluid desire, and make ourselves miserable as we everywhere find, judge, and sneer at these Dionysian currents of existence, that we are nonetheless powerless to escape. Or, perhaps, we could turn away from this acquisitive instinct, and let ourselves get lost in this production, this creation, this exchanging of death. If we adjust our lens, there is something beautiful we find in the schizophrenic process, and the life that springs from it. Therefore, we find ourselves concerned only with the becoming-death that is imposed, that is manufactured in an attempt to control or end the process, and nothing less than at least melancholic respect for the deterritorialized death, the byproduct and component and amplifier of the schizophrenic flow. The death that concerns us the not the death of the ‘I’, but the creation of the ‘I’, and therein the real death of a subject, as they are severed from the immanent conditions of their BwO. Ego-death is our calling card, our greatest triumph. Desiring-production, whatever the production might be, is at once our project and our practice, what we seek and what we do, our affirmation and ourselves. And if we find produced our death, the death of a specific becoming- as it passes into something new or of a ‘subject’ writ large as it passes into something newer still, we find some comfort in the warm arms of the schizophrenic process that has carried us away.

The experience of death must have given us exactly enough broadened experience, in order to live and know that the desiring-machines do not die…

The schizophrenic process does not have a satisfying end. Neither does BetaOfThePack, the Southern Alliance, or the Ish event as a whole. Infernus and the defenders lost the war. Most combatants, from all parties, felt in hindsight as though they had seen their friends slaughtered on a battlefield they had no business standing on. The final few days of the experiment were solitary and somber. The schizophrenic process does not have an end, at all. These italicized interjections have been from pages 330 through 332 of Anti-Oedipus. The book continues for another 50 pages. The schizophrenic process was never a question of eliminating death, of achieving perfection, or resolving a plot in a decisive way. It was always a question of accepting chaos and incompletion, flux and flow, which prevents the death that matters, the psychoanalytic death, the domestication of the schizophrenic psyche on the leather couch. The Southern Alliance might not have won the war, but at the same time, it produced a field, a pack, that was able to look back at this loss and laugh. Surely, that counts for something.

Perhaps it could all be summarized best with the closing remarks of the YouTube video we made to recall the Southern Alliance’s experience:

“The Southern Alliance’s story didn’t have a happy ending, in any conventional sense. Our international tensions were never resolved, our environment was never restored, our final stand was a loss. I died. But the Southern Alliance’s story was perhaps defined by this lack of resolution, this insecurity, this incompleteness, from start to finish. At every moment, there were a thousand little problems, minor crises, tiny needles poking out from every direction. 

And more than that, the Southern Alliance was defined by their response to this incompleteness. This server was abundant, as we saw with Island One, with the North, with the Beta of the earlier days, with players who looked at their incompleteness as a lack to fill, a wound to blame, an error to be corrected and overcome.

But the Southern Alliance felt different. It was more like the Southern Island took this incompleteness as its own, found a little of this incompleteness in itself, recognized itself as the chaos outside of and irreducible to the structuring demands of the experiment and worked to make this chaos grow. The Southern Alliance looked at the incompleteness that surrounded it, and worked with it, combined with it, to make what it could—usually, with a smile.

The different pieces of the Southern Alliance’s story remained scattered about, in disarray—they were not unique in this. However, the Southern Alliance might have been the one group in this experiment that didn’t find this deathly disarray as a disaster to be reorganized. The Southern Alliance was the group that dared to ask: ‘what’s so good about picking up the pieces? What if I don’t even want to…’” (FKM Productions, 2024, 1:10:56-1:12:40)

FIGURE 7: The grave

Second, a standard summative conclusion, an attempt to recount all that we have henceforth declared.

The former members of the Southern Alliance and I speculated on Discord about our participation in Ish’s next event, and the kind of government we might cultivate in it. This book was not yet finished, nor would it be a timely way to explain everything we wanted to explain. We turned to a Microsoft Paint screenshare, and a sketch of a rhizome.

The ‘rhizome government’ was first of all contrasted with the arborescent structure of Tricolour or Aperion. There, the State preexisted its citizens, and in advance defined national objectives and roles the citizens could perform to support these goals. The nation had their set of values, and however democratic they claimed to be, the citizen’s productions was nonetheless restricted by the roots. Would you like to be a farmer, or a builder, or a miner? These are the jobs that will let us make the castle that our leadership designed months ago, without any of your knowledge or input! If the citizen strays too far from this path, the State does not take it very well. The roots work the wrangle the deviance back in, or wipe what of it remains. Ressentiment.

The ‘rhizome’ government, on the other hand, starts with a node, with two nodes, with the connection between these two nodes, and continues to grow. It sprawls into an absolute mess. Every node represents a citizen, and their existence is apprehended as an instantaneous becoming, a zone of intensity. What do you want to do in this event? The work of the ‘government’, to the extent it exists within the rhizome, is to take these desires, and to support them where it can. Linking them up, providing them materials, letting them grow. There is no centralized tree, a grid that allocates and striates the flows of the players, nothing more than a job board with suggestions of what citizens might be able to do if they’re looking to be helpful to other citizens. The thought was that, worst case scenario, the ‘chiefs’ of the rhizome government (us and the other founders, the remnants of the Southern Alliance) would do it. ‘Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for you’. Regardless of how centralized or decentralized, organized or chaotic, this rhizome formation wound up, one thing would remain constant---it was all a productive of desire, producing desire, desiring-production. Deterritorialized flows would make something; we aren’t sure what, but we will do everything we can to find out.

We might encounter, within the rhizome, a microfascist node. Our unconditional, uncritical support for citizen productions would end here. Well, to some extent. The domestic war-machine is no different than the international one, and as such, does not ever take negation as its object, or take an object at all. The other nodes of the rhizome would remain affirmative, and plug new flows into the microfascist node, or otherwise plug new flows into each other that surround and smile at the microfascist node. We will continue to grow the rhizome. The roots that seek to sprout up within and strangle it will either be smoothed out in this growth, or have their roots rendered ineffective by it. No need to lose any sleep.

We suspect that international affairs might encounter more ressentiment still, and perhaps at a level of fascism greater than micro-. The war-machine remains, more or less, the same---deterritorialize their flows, or else don’t let them reterritorialize us. But this is not just, or does not have to be just, a question of affirming our own productive power. When approached, we will not enable ourselves to be treated as another State, but will remain a rhizome---the international delegation will not meet with some career politicians, but the zones of intensity relevant to the interaction, and these zones will have no interest in compromising to or even respecting any reterritorializing requests of the visitors. We will attempt to draw rhizomatic connections if we can, and if we can’t, we have no issue telling them to fuck off. These State machines will not make us striate---they will just be incorporated as new variables that influence how (not if) our deterritorialized productions appear. And on the other end, we will apprehend where we can potentialities within the States that surround us, and affirm the exteriority to the extent they posses it---the internal revolution, the dissenting or disgruntled masses, the ecological setting. Not as a corrective, of course, the rhizome government has no interest in replicating the CIA. Just as an affirmation of the irreducibility of the war-machine, wherever and however such an affirmation is needed. No node, international or domestic, is written off as exempt from our proliferation of connections.

This image of the rhizome government was at first intended as a plan for a speculated future Minecraft social experiment. But it appears that it could also serve as an analogue for existence away-from-keyboard, at the micropolitical level even. It would not be wrong to think of one’s own BwO as a rhizome, a collection of differential desires (especially when one considers that the desires of the external ‘Other’ might be incorporated into the BwO and productions of the ‘Self’), and one’s task is therefore that of the chief, to connect and affirm these flows however one can, to never permit the unbothered precedence of one node over another, and to fend off the microfascist that might arise. As for one’s interactions with ‘Other’ BwOs, we in the first place will not enable ourselves to be reterritorialized, as we compromise not with them but dodge around them, making and maintaining ourselves as a rhizome as we are forced to face their State. Moreover, we are in these interactions always looking for lines of flight, little sparks of desire that we can connect to and affirm and free, to rupture the restriction of the State or at least to render it useless against the affirmative force of the rhizomatic Self. Make oneself a war-machine---produce a smooth space, produce on the smooth space, and affirm this smooth space as irreducible to the overcoding flows that threaten it, either deterritorializing these machines or else deterritorializing in the face of their otherwise demands. You can take the wolf out of the pack, but you can’t take the pack out of the wolf. Affirm and incorporate and secrete becomings. Keep looking to score, and work with teammates who do the same.

It is an inevitability that members of the Minecraft playerbase will not have the attention span to read this entire work to understand how in-game interactions might work. Offline acquaintances will likely not either. It’s hard to blame them. We therefore know we must prepare ourselves, though, for the impending question---the summarization, the short-version, the TL;DR.

If I had to sum up this entire work in a single resolution, it would be this: respond to zones of intensity, not Beings.

The rest of these pages elaborate on what this statement means, what it could look like, why it might be preferable, other ways to conceptualize it, how it can occur in distinct contexts. But even from just this phrase, one can probably get pretty close. I trust you all enough to figure it out.

FIGURE 8: The rhizome government, as depicted in Microsoft Paint

Third, a conclusion that undoes any conclusion, an attempt to leave on an open-ended note, to be ‘profound’.

For whatever reason, when I first mapped out Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic concepts on the 7^th-floor study room whiteboard, I felt compelled to draw a diagram for ‘love’. I could not guess why. Everything else on the whiteboard was either a schizoanalytic vocabulary word, or a depiction of one. And at the time, late in January, ‘love’ was a term of negligible significance in my life, and hitherto always had been. Oh, how swiftly that would change.

Forgive the insertion of one last quote. Don’t worry about figuring out what Deleuze and Guattari mean here. I’ll explain what I take it to mean, without much reference to the quote, right after. Read this except like a poem. I’ll editorialize a bit to make it read more like a poem. I don’t think they’d mind.

“What does it mean

to love somebody?

It is always to seize that person in a mass,

extract them from a group,

however small, in which they participate;

then to find that person’s own packs,

the multiplicities they enclose within themself

which may be of an entirely different nature.

To join them to mine,

to make them penetrate mine,

and for me to penetrate the other person’s.

Heavenly nuptials,

multiplicities of multiplicities.

Every love is an exercise in depersonalization

on a body without organs

yet to be formed,

and it is at the highest point

of this depersonalization that

someone can be named,

receives their family name or first name,

acquires the most intense discernibility

in the instantaneous apprehension

of the multiplicities belonging to them,

and to which they belong.

A pack of freckles on a face,

a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman,

a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice,

a horde of wolves in somebody's throat,

a multiplicity of anuses in the anus,

mouth,

or eye

one is intent upon.

We each go through so many bodies in each other.”

ATP, p. 35-36.

There’s not really any special significance to love, as a schizoanalytic concept. We could suggest that love is always desiring-production, but it doesn’t seem like desiring-production is always love, at least in the sense we’ll conceive of it. Desiring-production can take the form of anger, sadness, war. ‘Conditional love’ is not synonymous with ‘conditional affirmation’. Moreover, it seems possible for an unconditional love to nonetheless be pursued or related to as an object.

Love is just something that happens sometimes, within the schizophrenic process, and it’s cool when it does show up.

‘Unconditional love’, for us, is a redundant statement. ‘Love’, as such, is always unconditional. This is not a permanent state, one’s unconditional love for someone or something comes and goes. It’s not a goal, or a mandate, or anything like that. And that there are things we would call ‘love’ that are not exactly this unconditional love is not slight against them, a reason they are worse or insufficient or still have more to accomplish, or even necessarily a reason that they are not ‘love’---these things are just not exactly what we are describing.

Spinoza is a philosopher with a great deal of influence on Deleuze. Spinoza argued that God was nature, that God was everything, that everything was God. This is not especially related to our discussion of love. It’s just that the image of two bodies tangled together, in mess and rage and confusion and longing and care and emotion, as God, is quite a beautiful image, I think.

What we drew on the whiteboard to be love, this specific, insignificant, impermanent, unconditional strain of love, could be explained, schizoanalytically, like this: when the zone of intensity of a BwO is whatever the zone of intensity of a BwO it is coupled with is. Not as a coincidental outcome---I just so happen to want what you want---but as a specific becoming---becoming-yours, I want whatever you want me to be. Love is that exchange: ‘what are you?’, ‘whatever you want me to be’. This exchange does not always exist in loving relationships, in connections or moments or becomings of love. That’s fine, it’s cool when it does. It also happens sometimes outside the realm of ‘love’, between friends or acquaintances or associates or machines of an entirely different species (one can love a tree). Sometimes, it seems that it even goes both ways. Both machines desire nothing other than to be what the other machine desires. This is perhaps love at its highest intensity. Maximum depersonalization, deterritorialization. Or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. It’s still aesthetic.

We started this project with the statement that Minecraft was a schizophrenic game. When we asked what this meant, we turned to Deleuze and Guattari’s likening of schizophrenia to love, which itself only suggested that neither have a specific, essential phenomenon. Love, like schizophrenia, looks quite different at times. Love is sometimes a kiss, or a claw-mark on one’s back, or listening to a friend talk at McDonald’s, or catching a lob pass in a pickup game. Love is a total surrender to the desires of the remainder of the assemblage, of the remainder of the schizophrenic process as a whole. A concrete, symbolic relationship of desire. Friendship is wanting someone else to be your #2 option; love is wanting to be the #2 option for someone else. This conception of ‘love’ is not defined by any specific content, but by its relation to the schizophrenic process, and here names the specific formation where two zones of intensity couple together as to functionally become one, becoming and flowing and producing and loving together. Even if it occurs just for a moment, even if it has no interest in spiraling into something greater, something that resembles what we would otherwise think of as ‘love’. The orchid and the wasp, whoever they may be.

Does Minecraft not do this exact thing? Does Minecraft not love?

Minecraft, the game, has no essence. It does not want anything of the player. Quite the contrary, Minecraft gives the players the tools to do whatever one wants, and follows obediently whatever the player asks. What Minecraft is for a thousand different players is different, but Minecraft itself is content to be all of these things at once. If Minecraft is unable to be what one asks of it, it must be as a result of something external to the game engine itself---expectations, other players, limited processing power---and it’s certainly not from a lack of trying. Do whatever you want in the game, to the game, mod it or crash it or break it or use it for any number or purposes or even leave the game for months, years, at a time, and when one comes back, the title screen sits there, the same inviting options gently guiding one’s hands to the same inviting worlds. ‘What are you?’, the player will ask. Minecraft turns away, to conceal a blush and a smile. A sandbox game? A multiplayer game? An indie game? A story game, a PvP forum, a platformer? An experience, a livelihood, a lifestyle? It knows it cannot ever answer this question sufficiently. It softly, warmly exhales the closest approximation it can give: ‘whatever you want me to be.’

And so, many days and many pages later, we are right back where we started. We have said nothing that could not have already been proven from our first reflections, with some creative application of the transitive property. We said that Minecraft was a schizophrenic game, and then, that schizophrenia was like love. What can we make of all this?

Simply, we conclude the following:

Schizophrenia is like Minecraft; love is like schizophrenia;

and Minecraft… is like love.

FIGURE 9: Love

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Of course, I couldn’t leave this reference section as a traditional citation listing, when everything else in this book has aligned itself with a messy expression of desire over a neat adherence to tradition.

There’s a few references to music throughout this book---when Massumi calls A Thousand Plateaus a record, when I invoke Playboi Carti’s mixtape in the introduction, when I use NEW MAGIC WAND as a concept, and so on.

Deleuze and Guattari are quite clear that “a book is an assemblage” and “there is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made” (ATP, p. 4). I would like to think these remarks are true of this book, as well, that the words and ideas scribbled within it are, to some extent, expressions of everything that flowed through me while I was writing it.

Whenever I sat down to work on this book, I always listened to some new album for the first time, as I wrote. I picked albums that I thought matched the mood of the concepts I wanted to describe, albums with songs that made me feel the feelings I wanted to echo in the sentences I tossed onto the page.

I have included a list of all the albums I listened to while working, as well as the pages I worked on while listening to them, below (this also doubles as a more thorough table of contents). The above rant is an academic justification for this inclusion, since it seems to me that these musical projects speak as much through this text as the traditional references that I pulled quotes from. But also, there’s a part of me that just finds this list fascinating, and is including it for my own personal curiosity:

I also want to make one more reference here, which is more of an acknowledgement, or perhaps a ‘thank you’. I’m not listening to any music while writing this part, just sitting in the DeBruce Center, listening to the sounds of the kitchen and conversations around me.

If you’ll forgive the use of one last pretentious, confusing quote, one that probably sounded a lot more beautiful to me when I read it surrounded by context, “to attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations… the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world” (ATP, p. 3-11).

What I want to invoke here, and something that I think (and the quote attests to this) is grounded in the theoretical frame this work has taken, but doesn’t need to be, is that this book is just a production, a production of my desires, an expression of my feelings, a statement of my assemblage, and what that means, most importantly, is that the content in this book reflects just about everyone who has had an impact on me.

I don’t want to name everyone that I think influenced my writing, in part because I don’t want to exclude by inclusion, in part because there are just too many names (I would forget someone, for sure, and there are probably people who influenced me that I don’t even know). Deleuze, Guattari, Nietzsche, and the other authors cited in this text had some influence, of course, but it’s far from just them.

There’s the people who I shared portions of this text with before publication, or who I shared the ideas in this text with prior to writing them down, and who responded with feedback on those portions and ideas. There’s everyone who is invoked as an example in this book, whether they are name dropped or not. Some people are invoked as examples of a ‘being’, but the intent was not, and the text should not be read as, some immortalization of these people as bad, or as necessarily expressing these bad traits. I think the book itself shows the impossibility of that, since these people are always described in the context of a flow they produced, a flow that capitulates the universe into constant change, which demonstrates the way that these ‘beings’ can always be changed, and indeed, already are, already have. Every name in this book, like the wolf, is just an “instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity” (ATP, p. 27)---their becoming, their involvement in a rhizome, is always already implied.

But even if someone doesn’t get an explicit mention, I’d like to think they show up in this book. If there’s ever a sentence you read, and you hear a little bit of yourself in it, or something in it reminds you of some interaction we’ve had, it’s probably because there is a trace of you, or us, in there, because I (whether I knew it or not) had you in mind while I wrote that sentence. There’s sentences I can think of that remind me of just about everyone I know. I think there can be sentences about you in here even if I’ve never met you in my life.

I guess this is the acknowledgement, or the ‘thank you’. This is a weird word to use, but I think, with our definition of it, it works: I love everyone who had an impact on the writing of this book, anyone who catches a glimpse of themselves on the pages. ‘We each go through so many bodies in each other’. I would even go so far as to say (if you can forgive me placing this responsibility on you) that it was all of you who produced this book. I just transcribed it into writing.

I go back to re-read A Thousand Plateaus, or Anti-Oedipus, or even The Birth of Tragedy, a lot. They are just such beautiful pieces of writing, and every time I revisit them, there’s always something new I can take. These books, these machines, flow into me, and produce how I produce, both in how I write, how I think, how I feel, how I carry myself, in everyday life.

I hope that this book can be something like that, for at least someone who reads it. That this book can take the desires that you produced in me, the desires that wound up in these pages, and output some of them back into you.

I introduced this book with the wonderful remark from Massumi that a book is like a record, or an album. A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and The Birth of Tragedy are three of my favorite albums. They aren’t just something I pick up to read, put down when I’m done, and move on. There’s parts of them---songs, riffs, chapters, sentences---that I take with me day-to-day, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because they just pop up in my mind.

I didn’t really have any goal in mind when I wrote this book, something that I hoped would be accomplished by its publication. I just wrote about what I felt like writing, about whatever was on my mind, about whatever was connected to my assemblage, so that I could produce something that flowed from my feelings, my desires, my zone of intensity, my BwO. I suppose it would be nice if this book turned out like a record, that some fragment of my assemblage resonates with someone who reads it, that some part of it makes them smile, that part of it gets stuck in their head, that the chain of production keeps going.

If you read this book, and you ever see me around, let me know your favorite song.