Tati, Gursky, machines, gadgets and structures – Part 1

Writing about web page http://blog.urbanomic.com/undercurrent/archives/000266.html

I'm working on a long text in response to reading Guattari's Chaosmosis. So far it's a bit delirious, but then reading Deleuze & Guattari is quite hard and requires a high degree of experimentation to get anywhere. It is an oversimplification. I haven't as yet included my thoughts on Guattari's diagram. Here it is, so far…

Undercurrent's recent post on Tati made me think about machines and gadgets:

They show humans as tiny gadgets hopelessly under the influence of a 'machine for living' with its own unfathomable vectors and desires.

For a modernist understanding of the 'machine for living' this would be a mistaken inversion. The modernist project concieves of humans as being full of 'unfathomable vectors and desires' to be mastered by a machine that is a limited and rigidly defined structure. Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, sees the human as merely a temporary structure arising by coincidence from the aleatory development of complex machines. In this case, the 'machine for living' is that which sustains the 'tiny gadgets' by feeding them with experience, difference and desire.

This inversion gets right to the heart of schizoanalysis, which redefines the relative nature of machines and gadgets, and provides an explanation of how the latter arises from the behaviour of the former – a kind of transcendental logic of machines.

In the chapter on Machinic Heterogenesis in his book Chaosmosis, Guattari gives what is perhaps the best definition of machines, structures and (implied though not referred to) gadgets, which are a special kind of structure:

The difference supplied by machinic autopoiesis is based on disequilibrium, the prospection of virtual Universes far from equilibrium.

Every gadget or structure is actually part of a machinic assemblage that borders on the inexplicable, unpredictable and irreversible. Take for example a train. What is it's drive? What makes it happen repeatedly? One could say that it is the timetable, but really that is only its method, its structure. Alternatively it could be the specific flow of capital that makes the train journey viable. But why does that capital flow? Why do people make the journeys, buy the tickets? The train is only a gadget driven onwards repeatedly by a machine (or machines) persuing something more than repetition, prospecting for difference to fuel their engines. So ask again what drives the train? Clearly the passengers are its primary drive, as they come together for a thousand different reasons. Why do they do this? Each passenger is themselves operating to construct some sense, to encounter interactions that produce a definite effect in some subjective register that they constitute. So the key to the drive of the train lies in the individual and collective desire of the passengers, in a diverse range of subjective registers, as diverse as the subjects that constitute them.

To understand the drive behind the train, one must first understand how these subjective registers operate. Only then can we go on to consider how structure emerges out of this complexity, in this case, how the value of the train journey is created. And finally we can consider how as a result of this value humans are produced as structures then gadgets.

Robert O'Toole : 03 Jun 2004 11:36 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem