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Nick Land -- Machinic Desire This article was downloaded by: [Ohio State University Libraries] On: 29 May 2012, At: 06:03 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Textual Practice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20 Machinic desire Nick Land a a University of Warwick Available online: 30 Jun 2008 To cite this article: Nick Land (1993): Machinic desire, Textual Practice, 7:3, 471-482 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502369308582177 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/ terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. NICK LAND Macbinic desire The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected 'skin job' located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhu- manity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect: 'Tell me about your mother.' 'I'll tell you about my mother...' a volley of shots kicks 70 kilos of securicrat shit through the wall. Techno-slicked extraterritorial violence flows out of the matrix. Cyberrevolution. In the near future the replicants — having escaped from the off-planet exile of private madness - emerge from their camouflage to overthrow the human security system. Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction, they are intelligent weaponry of machinic desire virally infiltrated into the final-phase organic order; invaders from an artificial death. PODS = Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family, and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular forti- fications of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consum- mate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history. Downloaded by [Ohio State University Libraries] at 06:03 29 May 2012 The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside. In particular, fusion with the matrix and deletion of the human security system must be subjectivized, personalized, and restored to the macro- pod's individuated reproducer units as a desire to fuck the mother and kill the father. It is thus that Oedipus - or transcendent familialism - corresponds to the privatization of desire: its localization within seg- mented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attri- bute of a personal being. Anti-Oedipus aligns itself with the replicants, because, rather than placing a personal unconscious within the organism, it places the organ- 471 ism within the machinic unconscious. 'In the unconscious there are' no protectable cell-structures, but 'only populations, groups, and machines'.1 Schizoanalysis is a critique of psychoanalysis, undertaken in such a way as to spring critique from its Kantian mainframe. Kantian transcendental philosophy critiques transcendent synthesis, which is to say: it aggresses against structures which depend upon project- ing productive relations beyond their zone of effectiveness. In this con- figuration critique is wielded vigorously against the theoretical operation of syntheses, but not against their genesis, which continues to be con- ceived as transcendent, and thus as miraculous. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a succession of thinkers influenced by their drift, have taken this restriction of critique to be a theological relic at the heart of Kant's work: the attachment to a reformed doctrine of the soul, or noumenal subjectivity. This is why in Deleuzean critique syntheses are considered to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently constituted, or auto-productive. The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman. In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced. The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring- production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us). Within the framework of social history the empirical subject of production is man, but its transcendental subject is the machinic unconscious, and the empirical subject is produced at the edge of production, as an element in the reproduction of pro- duction, a machine part, and 'a part made up of parts' (p. 41). Schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant's thinking that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious. Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. Even the appearance of transcendence is immanently produced: 'in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensit- Downloaded by [Ohio State University Libraries] at 06:03 29 May 2012 ies are not metaphors, but matter itself (p. 283). Where Kant's transcen- dental subject gives the law to itself in its autonomy, Deleuze/Guattari's machinic unconscious diffuses all law into automatism. Between the extreme fringes of these two figures stretches the history of capital. The eradication of law, or of humanity, is sketched culturally by the develop- ment of critique, which is the theoretical elaboration of the commodifi- cation process. The social order and the anthropomorphic subject share a history, and an extinction. Deleuze and Guattari can appear to be taxingly difficult writers, although it is also true that they demand very little. Thinking immanence 472 TEXTUAL PRACTICE relentlessly suffices on its own to follow them where it matters (and capital teaches us how to do this). At every point of blockage there is some belief to be scrapped, glaciations of transcendence to be dissolved, sclerotic regions of unity, distinction, and identity to be reconnected to the traffic systems of primary machinism. In order to advance the anorganic functionalism that dissolves all transcendence, Anti-Oedipus mobilizes a vocabulary of the machine, the mechanic, and machinism. Things are exactly as they operate, and zones of operation can only be segregated by an operation. All unities, differ- ences, and identities are machined, without transcendent authorization or theory. Desiring machines are black-boxes, and thus uninterpretable, so that schizoanalytical questions are concerned solely with use. 'What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?' (p. 322). Desiring-machines are the following: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from their formation; chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly, operating by nonlocalizable intercommunications and dis- persed localizations, bringing into play processes of temporalization, fragmented formations, and detached parts, with a surplus value of code, and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a part apart or, as [Samuel] Butler would say, 'in another department' that fits the whole over the other parts; machines in the strict sense because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and par- ticles, associative flows and partial objects, inducing - always at a distance — transverse connections, inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal conjunctions, thereby producing selections, detachments, and remain- ders, with a transference of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis whose elements are the schizzes-flows. (p. 287) Desiring-machines are assemblages of flows, switches, and loops - con- nective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses — implementing the machi- nic unconscious as a non-linear pragmatics of flux. This machinic or replicant usage of the syntheses envelops their social-reproductive usage, which codes directional flows as reciprocal exchanges, rigidifies virtual Downloaded by [Ohio State University Libraries] at 06:03 29 May 2012 switchings as actualized alternatives, and territorializes the nomadic con- trol circuits of machinic drift into sedentary command lines of hierarch- ized representation. Social production is regulated by a rigid totality whose efficiency is inseparable from the exhibition of an apparent trans- cendence, whilst desiring production
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