Flows and Rhythms

"The war will come, the wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will remain suffocated by all he had to say. All we will be told is that he became well behaved, polite, and resigned again, "honest and scrupulous." In short, cured. He gets back by pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological vision: "Nothing can be more valuable for a young person than the love of nature and a comprehension of the natural sciences, in particular zoology.""

- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", p43

In "Exploring Our Interconnectedness" there is emphasis upon microbial organization and a certain networking tendency amongst microscopic species as an indication of how to organize and web human activities in a regenerative form. For instance, the industrial complex and manufacturing interior of China is part of an attempt to, with intensive measures and specialization of labor, secure control. The actions and movements are semiological, like the movements in Chess. Movements become particular and flows become restricted, in stark contrast to that game Go, which implies movements that are formed by close inter-linking movements, based upon a pattern of connection rather than of rules and social restrictions. The formation of our landscape is microbial, the soil's effect manifested by the hyphae of mycelium in its weave-like pattern beneath forests and vegetation. Our bodies are ninety-percent microbial, suggesting that our very cognitive existence is that of the spectator or the consumer. Of course, in establishing an arborescence within culture, architecture, city planning, centrally-planned irrigation systems/ industrial complex, we become a more singular presence and our variation becomes strained. If we striate and conquer the very relations that exist between us and the soil we undermine the variations of all of those microbes and mineral deposits in the soil that allow for supplicant relations to evolve and maintain. The importance of microbial landscapes undermines the very concept of capital, the essence of work and taxation, the competitive landscape above.

To look at the mycelium one witnesses the very essence of our geo-historical existence, currently being excavated by Manuel de Landa in "A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History":

"In the organic world ... soft tissue (gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned supreme until 500 million years ago. At that point, some of the conglomerations of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden mineralization, and a new material for constructing living creatures emerged: bone. It is almost as if the mineral world that had served as a substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reasserting itself, confirming that geology, far from having been left behind at a primitive stage of the earth’s evolution, fully coexisted with the soft, gelatinous newcomers Primitive bone, a stiff, calcified central rod that would later become the vertebral column, made new forms of movement possible among animals, freeing them from many constraints and literally setting them in motion to conquer every available niche in the air, in water, and on land. And yet, while bone allowed the complexification of the animal phylum to which we, as vertebrates, belong, it never forgot its mineral origins: it is the living material that most easily petrifies, that most readily crosses the threshold back into the world of rocks. For that reason, much of the geological record is written with fossil bone. The human endoskeleton was one of the many products of that ancient mineralization. Yet that is not the only geological infiltration that the human species has undergone. About eight thousand years ago, human populations began mineralizing again when they developed an urban exoskeleton: bricks of sundried clay became building materials for their homes, which in turn surrounded and were surrounded by stone monuments and defensive walls. This exoskeleton served a purpose similar to its internal counterpart: to control the movement of human flesh in and out of a town’s walls. The urban exoskeleton also regulated the movement of many other things: luxury objects, news, and food…Thus, the urban infrastructure may be said to perform, for tightly packed populations of humans, the same function of motion control that our bones do in relation to our fleshy parts. And, in both cases, adding minerals to the mix resulted in a fantastic combinatorial explosion.” (24-6)

Mineral deposits and a soft, fragile frame of existence. The bloodstream of humanity and exoskeleton make the species host to a wide variety on mineral combinations, the relief and hosting of microbes with mitochondria and vast clarifying networks which allow for a self-reflecting culture to expand. Somewhere deep within the human species is a complex relation of deeply social micro-organisms hosting develpments which expand into the very essence of matter. The fragility of human existence as a means of clarity and movement, of integrated flows and rhythms. The capacity to be artistic, to become musical. The geology of morals, as it would be deemed in "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is founded in the extremely complex and integrated series of flows that operate beneath our own consciousness. To regard humanity's vulnerabilities and tendency towards illness as a result of the open spaces and possibilities effected by these changing connections at a microscopic, cellular level, then the world begins to become somewhat fair, reaching thresholds that acquire more depth, though they striate and contain the environment; a greater sense of environment and more possibilities of working inside the environment. The striated state of China might become a rust belt, but this is merely a new threshold. 

The opening escapes that are opened by the excesses of capitalism and industrial outsourcing of labor have been notable within internet communication, that space that is currently a weakening public sphere. The mycelium of human consciousness, the internet offers resources and feedback loops that have not been a distinctive part of the education system of states, the formation of culture, or for that matter the political surface of a state. Instead of living in a space that has been striated, humanity is met with the physical manifestation of matter as it actually is; interconnected by the energy and symbiosis of photosynthesis, random gene transfer in the case of microbes, hosting a fast rate of change in open spaces. The hewn pylons and fiber optic cables carry over oceans and cut through landscape communicating ideas and concepts at the speed of light, those splayed remnants of an industry that is based on encirclement, the need to traverse the enemy, to occupy space and entrench before the enemy arrives. But the enemy is not, after all, the enemy; it is the unknown. The lice and cholera, the sickness and distance from home. The heaving sound of buildings and bricks toppling and the way that guns tear the calm from the air. As Ballard states in the opening quote, the enemy does not exist; it is the proximity of the unknown and the feeling of being overwhelmed by a power that has not been delimited or captured.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Franz Kafka demonstrated the pretensions of human knowledge and organization before they became apparent, and in the previous article it was demonstrated that the logical conclusion of capitalism is to smooth the striated, and articulate every opportunity available. But it is a viral process, and the only way that bureaucracy asserts itself is through miniature arrangements, as fascism extends only through cultural isolation, the sense of power, of the control of nature. These microscopic instances of self-sacrifice exist everywhere, in the displacement of communities in China, in the way that entire communities are displaced by the industrialization and machinisation of labor, that fabrication that is so similar to the forced irrigation of land, the way that in order to harness something it must be displaced, must forget that the very lines it is cutting through are identical to the kind that mycelium harness underground, that create the earth's mineral component. 

"Surplus labor, capitalist organization in its entirety, operates less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding to the physicosocial concept of work. Rather, it is as though human alienation through surplus labor were replaced by generalized "machinic enslavement," such that one may furnish surplus-value without doing any work (children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc.) Not only does the user as such tend to become and employee, but capitalism operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling- every semiotic system. It is as though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was able to carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital necessarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooth space in which the destiny of human beings is recast. Striation, of course, survives in the most perfect and severest of forms (it is not only vertical but operates in all directions).; however, it relates primarily to the state pole of capitalism, in other words, to the role of the modern State apparatuses in the organization of capital."
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", p542-3 

Like Deleuze and Guattari, French philosopher Michel Foucault also responds to the problem of an overcoded urban environment in which social growth is restricted by surveillance, the binary-rhythm of commerce and social mobility, amongst other items; he writes about the possibility of "heterotopias", stating that:

"The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration."

 - Michel Foucault, "Des Espace Autres"

In other words, the discussions and disagreements that define the political space in this present epoch are symptomatic of the sociocultural constellation, that organization present on an underlying level which Deleuze and Guattari describe. The necessity of increasing intersections and compatibilities in a heterogenous environment involves moving past certain polemics and binary-rhythms; the deeply structural nature of both conservatism and Marxism, which has partly lost its original ecological motivation. The nature of space does not allow for deep differences and contrasts, only different parts of the same configuration. Foucault notes the effects that Galileo's discoveries had on the worldview of social Europe and concluded that it was not his specific discoveries but the consequences of infinite possibilities for the social constellation of societies on earth. Thus the opposition of the state and the religious authorities, and the very gradual nature of the change that it implied. Foucault also describes the work of Gaston Bachelard on evoking mysterious depths in spaces, by opening the world beyond the distinct set of relations that make up our social environment. It could be claimed that this evokes possibilities of more smooth spaces within, and evading the striation and homogenous force of an extensive capitalism.

Foucault explains by heterotopias, looking at places where deviation and non-social activities take place such as prisons, mental institutions, grave yards, museums, etc. These are spaces that allow for the displacement of time, the extension of the self beyond social presence. Places to invent and re-fashion ourselves in opposition to the expectations that are cultivated within us by systems and social being. The carnival and festival displace time, conjure this certain timelessness and sense of something beyond direct materialism, and the garden a source of a certain thoughtfulness, relationship, which extends the self beyond being simply "labor" or "consumer". The micro- fascisms that exist within Deleuze and Guattari are mostly due to the decline of personal heterotopias, spaces of becoming and growing. That distinct feeling that security is to be found in a personal space, a sense of measurable time and secure future is to be found in the soul of a gardener, a pensioner, a carnival performer, whose mind can extend into remote places and be beyond time. Foucault, of course, is in a parallel agreement with Deleuze and Guattari:

 
"Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."

With Deleuze and Guattari's example of the striation of the ocean, it becomes clear that these heterotopic spaces are fundamental to the extreme excesses of capitalism and also the gradual narrowing out of possibilities for humans to territorialise and use their imagination. An example of extremely smooth space and a space for all kinds of heterotopias to form is the internet. It reflects upon the invisible landscapes (for Deleuze and Guattari these are defined by music and mathematics) which take whoever visits the heterotopia into obscure and mysterious places, and they are taken to the virtual brothel, the online flood of information that has become almost an ocean. The problem, of course, is how to striate the space and preserve the state, without establishing a power that effaces the individuals ability to occupy a smooth space without digging into the mineral layer, without becoming physically or virtually piratical. Without the mechanism of control, the state taxation that leads to the forming of secure public mechanisms and systems the organizing principle of capitalism becomes less transparent, more nomadic, less accountable. The speculations about the inhibiting force of striating the internet are convincing, and come in the latest publication of Julian Assange in which he advocates the importance of cryptography and resistance to striation and controlling the internet, but the excesses of capitalism are also only possible to fathom and resist in there is some sort of democratic dissolution of the industrial excesses and socio-ecological damage that is being done.