“It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element,” insist Gillies Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their compact and controversial Nomadology: The War Machine, “not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.” In once trying to describe what an artist does to a normal person of limited imagination, I came upon the fanciful framing operation that would have us situate the artist as cousin to the inventor, shopping their wares to financiers and independently wealthy cutthroats until somebody finally says: yup, that’s a thing alright. Like Nikola Tesla trying to pitch Thomas Edison on AC current. That’s how you survive as an artist with the basic amenities. Deleuze has stipulated elsewhere that the nomad would surely remain stationary and happily inert if only for the fact that the coiled, ouroboros world of cosmic planetarity doesn’t work that way…that is, perhaps, unless you are dead set on dying of hunger, dehydration, and/or exposure. “Assemblages are passional,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “they are compositions of desire,” further compounding and transassembling themselves in this specialized moment as two-men-as-teeming-multiplicity by casually incorporating into their organic Blob-like roaming additive plurality the uncommonly wise and sagacious Susan Sontag of Against Interpretation, who we should all be thanking every night in our prayers for prioritizing the erotics of the living, sensory encounter over having neat little ironclad opinions and beliefs you can trot out for literally every occasion, boring all in earshot to tears. “Holy Lord and God!,” exclaims Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March, “I know man’s labor must be one of those deals figured out by Providence that saves him by preserving him, or he would be hungry, he would freeze, or his brittle neck would be broke. But what curious and strange forms he ends up surviving in, becoming them in the process.” Is the rudderless man above all a succession of botched shapes?
In the earlier and much more hefty A Thousand Pleateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari put a rhetorical question to us that we might well expect clinical mania itself the ask: “Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything one could?” The line of flight is what works after for a very long time nothing at all did, and it is called a flight because it survives and indeed flourishes in opposition to and frantic discord with the dominant monoculture. The great agent of the line of flight in the popular cinema is Jennifer Jones as Cluny Brown in the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch masterpiece named for the spirited lass, aspirant lady plumber, unbelievably comely of looks but with the tenacity of a bulldog, who finds out sure and true even before escaping England in the arms of a mindful Lothario that just clearing blocked pipes is already a line of flight. The heave of oceans and the natural instability of gravity. Into the geology crockpot go the bones of everything. A Thousand Plateaus: “Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.” You will require a logic of multiplicities if you wish to observe how the earth is populated. Consider it a do-it-yourself model set and therefore a study in mechanics: plane of consistency, abstract machines, concrete assemblages, the three strata (physicochemical, organic, anthropomorphic). All beings and all becomings are molecular movement within the plural unity. The idea of an entirely personal journey of transformation is naturally anathema to a logic of multiplicities. This was already the point most crucial in Michel Foucault’s visionary essay “What Is an Author?” Art renders from within a collectivized experience and in its rendering comes back to the collective sense apparatus of persons with something noteworthy and significantly transformed. Nous rendons. Philosophy is jiu-jitsu waged against the enslavement and ultimate atrophy of mind itself.
Another line of flight—brief, bleak, and decisive—can be found glaring as a bruise to the eye in the typically excellent Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by Susan Sontag-anointed Hungarian Master of the Apocalypse László Krasznahorkai. The most we might say for the Baron Wenckheim is that though he would appear to be suffering from at least mild dementia he does remain plenty able-bodied. He desires it would seem nothing more at the outset than to return to the Hungarian town of his youth so as to reconnect with his first love, Marika (or Marietta). The Baron in an emblematic revenant, spectral, uncanny, in some sense hardly there at all. He cannot stand to be touched, he presents as aphasic, borderline delusional. Oh, the ring of destiny’s severe bell: “when still in his forties the doctors had told him that this would happen, that he would become an idiot…” Finally arriving at her domicile, the Baron does not recognize Marika as herself, though he does fleetingly note a passing resemblance. She is flummoxed, assuredly, “was it possible something had really happened with the Baron’s mind?! because it just wasn’t possible for him to come here, to sit down in front of her, look at her, and not remember who she was, that simply wasn’t possible …” It proves a cataclysmic encounter. Marika is shattered. More calamity is on its way, all of it pooling together, this another big Krasznahorkai narrative shaped like a hurricane. The Baron himself escapes a diabolic meddler, walks into the forest and effectively, with a good third still left to go, out of the novel. It may be that one man walking off the precipice and into the abyss one single time could conceivably bring down all the carpet bombing and hellfire you’d ever need. Krasznahorkai: “The whole thing will go up in flames.” The revenant also represents the return of the repressed, of course, and accompanying the return of the repressed we expect unseemly psychic derivatives to rise to the surface of the big smelly drum in the big chilly warehouse. The panic of shame and denial, various kinds of variegated outcry. Another thing that rises to the surface is body bags. Krasznahorkai’s cosmology presents the universe and the human being as fielded within a constitutive condition of extreme molecular agitation, except most people in this world would prefer not to physically move if they don’t have to, I don’t think. Krasznahorkai is like Russian speculative fiction guru Viktor Pelevin a genuine student and adherent of Zen and transcendental meditation and he knows that sometimes your day’s job is to sit on a rock in the middle of a river and be silent in as busy and violent a way as silence itself can withstand.
In the self-explanatory-of-title Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death], Simeon Wade writes with energy and good humour about dropping acid with philosopher and leather aficionado Michel Foucault in California’s Death Valley in 1975, five years after Michelangelo Antonioni shot memorably druggy footage there for his counterculture classic Zabriskie Point. To protect him against the intense desert light, Foucault is provided a pair of reflector sunglasses and is told by Simeon that they make him “look like the son of Kojak and Elton John.” The philosopher is reported to be “delighted.” Deep in the desert the lysergic potion—the Philosopher’s Stone—is ingested. It is Foucault’s first experience with psychedelics, a deferment of the basic sacramental rite to which he attributes his current lover’s skittishness respective of such drugs. The potion is taken, cannabis smoked, and Grand Marnier quaffed. Wade’s partner Michael plays his tape recorder. “Charles Ives swept through us into the salt flats glistening like icing on a wedding cake.” Properly high, the men relocate to Zabriskie Point. Richard Strauss and Stockhausen are played. Asked about a possible decisive moment in his intellectual development, Foucault recalls revealing his homosexuality to the headmaster of the École normale and facing more than mere censure as a result, causing him to thereafter understand the “fundamental impulse of our society: normalization.” Later Foucault will say that though the initiatory psychedelic experience was perhaps the greatest experience of his life he did not waste his time thinking about concepts whilst tripping. He says that the psychedelic experience “affords an experience of the Truth” not entirely dissimilar to sex with a stranger. If he articulates anything like a revelation it would appear to be by way of his passing repetition of a gnomic mantra: “We must go home again.” The men retreat to their lodgings for the remainder of the night, returning to Zabriskie Point in daylight for photographs and then for a final look out from Dante’s View. At a small improvised symposium Foucault tells a young student that “the young very much should feel lost, that there are no solutions, no answers.”
