Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 11:38:16 -0600
From: wise john macgregor <jwise-AT-uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: becoming technology and death




On Sun, 27 Nov 1994 DAYR-AT-ALM.ADMIN.USFCA.EDU wrote:

> Rereading Deleuze and Guattari's examples of becoming in "Becoming-
> intense, Becoming-animal..." I realize that the examples are often 
> naturalistic, which leads me to wonder if one can become with the 
> technological.

	[snip]

A distinction that I draw on when dealing with D&G on/and technology is 
that between "technology" and "concrete machines."

According to my reading of D&G (coming off of Plateau 3:  The Geology of 
Morals), what makes humans human is the double articulation of technology 
and language to form the anthropomorphic stratum.  What is considered 
human is not based on an essence (the problematic of identity) but rather 
on this particular relation of technology and language.  Technology, as 
content in this stratification, is called a machinic assemblage, and 
language, as expression, is an assemblage of enunciation.  Technology, in 
this sense, concerns "a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a 
society" (p.90).  And language is similar to what Foucault would call the 
discursive:  "the statements or expressions express _incorporeal_ 
transformations that are `attributed' as such (properties) to bodies or 
contents" (p. 504)..

So I'm not sure if one could "become-technology" per se, since one is 
always already constituted by this stratification.  However, I suppose 
one could set up blocks of resonance with different machinic assemblages...

But with regards to concrete machines  I refer to Plateau 13:  The 
Apparatus of Capture where there is the discussion of machinic 
enslavement.  I think one could become-concrete-machine (become-car; 
become-bomb), but would have to be wary of simply perpetuating machinic 
enslavement or capital's subjection of workers to the machine (the 
difference between these two, in my reading at least, is that with 
machinic enslavement one is part of the machine, and enslaved by the 
machine, but with modern capitalism comes a scheme of subjectification in 
which the higher unity posits the human component as a subject set over 
and against the object which is the rest of the machine [p. 457]). But 
that's a danger in any becoming....

But maybe this is just me.  I'm currently struggling with a dissertation 
that deals in part with D&G on/and technology, so I thought I'd delurk 
and try some of these things out.  Feedback would be appreciated.

greg

J. Macgregor Wise
Department of Speech Communication
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign


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