The work regime

this is very dense, if you like, or read it 'poetically', freely associating
me likey, kasS



War Machine, Milles Plateaux, D&G


“Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has

nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no

desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the efficiency, of

an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into

play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them.

Detienne has shown that the Greek phalanx was inseparable from a whole

reversal of values, and from a passional mutation that drastically changed

the relations between desire and the war machine. It is a case of man

dismounting from the horse, and of the man-animal relation being

replaced by a relation between men in an infantry assemblage that paves

the way for the advent of the peasant-soldier, the citizen-soldier: the entire

Eros of war changes, a group homosexual Eros tends to replace the

zoosexual Eros of the horseman. Undoubtedly, whenever a State appropriates

the war machine, it tends to assimilate the education of the citizen to

the training of the worker to the apprenticeship of the soldier. But if it is

true that all assemblages are assemblages of desire, the question is whether

the assemblages of war and work, considered in themselves, do not fundamentally

mobilize passions of different orders. Passions are effectuations

of desire that differ according to the assemblage: it is not the same justice or

the same cruelty, the same pity, etc. The work regime is inseparable from an

organization and a development of Form, corresponding to which is the

formation of the subject. This is the passional regime of feeling as "the

form of the worker." Feeling implies an evaluation of matter and its resistances,

a direction (sens, also "meaning") to form and its developments, an

economy of force and its displacements, an entire gravity. But the regime of

the war machine is on the contrary that of affects, which relate only to the

moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among elements.

Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack,

whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects

are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools. There

is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in

mythology but also in the chanson degeste, and the chivalric novel or novel

of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons. From this standpoint,

the most absolute immobility, pure catatonia, is a part of the speed

vector, is carried by this vector, which links the petrification of the act to

the precipitation of movement. The knight sleeps on his mount, then

departs like an arrow. Kleist is the author who best integrated these sudden

catatonic fits, swoons, suspenses, with the utmost speeds of a war machine.

He presents us with a becoming-weapon of the technical element simultaneous

to a becoming-affect of the passional element (the Penthesilea equation).

The martial arts have always subordinated weapons to speed, and

above all to mental (absolute) speed; for this reason, they are also the arts of

suspense and immobility. The affect passes through both extremes. Thus

the martial arts do not adhere to a code, as an affair of the State, but follow

ways, which are so many paths of the affect; upon these ways, one learns to

"unuse" weapons as much as one learns to use them, as if the power and cultivation

of the affect were the true goal of the assemblage, the weapon being

only a provisory means. Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is

proper to the war machine: the "not-doing" of the warrior, the undoing of

the subject. A movement of decoding runs through the war machine, while

overcoding solders the tool to an organization of work and of the State (the

tool is never unlearned; one can only compensate for its absence). It is true

that the martial arts continually invoke the center of gravity and the rules

for its displacement. That is because these ways are not the ultimate ones.

However far they go, they are still in the domain of Being, and only translate

absolute movements of another nature into the common space—those

effectuated in the Void, not in nothingness, but in the smooth of the void

where there is no longer any goal: attacks, counterattacks, and headlong

plunges.80”