Date: Wed, 18 Dec 96 08:31 PST
From: Sin-yore Barbascolores <solipsis-AT-hevanet.com>
Subject: Re: The Return of El Cervelate'


 The first theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war
machine has many varied meanings, and this is PRECISELY BECAUSE 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. 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------


Interlude of shabby prosodic comment:


the room bore a resemblance to a kind of gallery where pictures were
displayed.....

one painting depicted another room in which figured prominently a table upon
which a large cup of coffee sits steaming beside which is a burnt fragment
of a document, a kind of letter as it were. With a magnifying glass one can
easily read the text written in long-hand:

.....beneathe us. It was soon accounted for and lay there wheels uppermost.
Gustav smiled. "Yes, there are indeed too many men in the world. In earlier
days it wasn't so noticeable. But now that everyone wants air to breathe,
and a car to drive as well, one does notice it. Of course, what we are doing
isn't rational. It's childishness, just as war is childishness on a gigantic
scale. In time, mankind will learn to keep its numbers in check by rational
means. Meanwhile, we are meeting an intolerable situation in a rather
irrational way. However, the principle's correct --- we eliminate." "Yes,"
said I, "what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and
necessary all the same. It......

another painting depicts a man, a rather tall skinny man in a suit with a
bald head and a clearly defined halo. He has no face, but the smooth
facelessness IS interrupted by a dainty pair of lips tatooed in the area
which would normally be associated with the forehead.

In still another painting a kind of machine is depicted, a nonsensical
machine whose parts are purely fictional, an almost cubist painting, it
could be a kind of calculator or tellurion developed by an ancient an
forgotted race, The Garamanteans.

In the final painting is a clown holding a saxophone in one hand and
gesturing with the other. His extended index finger points to the sky and
one of his legs has been injured and blood stains his clown-suit making a
small puddle of blood on the canvas floor of the circus tent....

One last detail of the room is a large banner draped over the exit:

17.
                 ------------}  H H
                                C-C
see prep 16                     o=c CH3
                           Polyvinyl Acetate

End of interlude.


----limited war, total war, worldwide organisation-  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, even going so far as to project it to the horizon of the world, or
the dominant order of which the States themselves are now only parts. 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.



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