The Extinction of Being
The Task: Destroy Worlds, Not Create Conceptions
The conspiracy against this world will be known through its war machines. A war machine is itself a pure form of exteriority that explains nothing, but there are plenty of stories to tell about them (TP, 354, 427). They are the heroes of A Thousand Plateaus—Kleists skull-crushing war machine, the migratory war machine that the Vandals used to sack Rome, the gun that Black Panther George Jackson grabs on the run, and the queer war machine that excretes a thousand tiny sexes. Each time there is an operation against the state—insubordination, rioting, guerilla warfare, or revolution as an act—it can be said that a war machine has revived (386). War machines are also the greatest villains of A Thousand Plateaus, making all other dangers pale by comparison (231)—there is the constant state appropriation of the war machine that subordinates war to its own aims (418), the folly of the commercial war machine (15), the paranoia of the fascist war machine (not the state army of totalitarianism) (230–31), and, worst of them all, the worldwide war machine of capitalism, whose organization exceeds the State apparatus and passes into energy, military–industrial, and multinational complexes to wage peace on the whole world (387, 419–21, 467).
Make thought a war machine, Deleuze and Guattari insist. Place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside (TP, 376–77). Two important inventions follow: speed and secrecy. These are the affects of the war machine, its weapons of war, which transpierce the body like arrows (356, 394). The resulting violence is not so vulgar as to encourage blow-by-blow bloodletting or a once-and-for-all immediate killing but institutes an economy of violence whose hatred is unlimited and therefore durable. The war machine engages in war along two poles: one forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe, while the other draws a line of flight for the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space (422). Deleuze and Guattari would prefer to promote the connectivist line by saying they make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else (423). But today, that path leads to collusion with capitalisms drive toward creative destruction (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, 87). This is certainly not lost on those in Silicon Valley who spread the mantra of disruptive innovation. We can thus take heed of Deleuze and Guattaris warning against treating terms as having an irresistible revolutionary calling (387). It is time to accept Nietzsches invitation to philosophize with a hammer, rendered here in the voice of Krishna: I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds. We must find an appetite for destruction that does not betray Deleuze and Guattaris abolitionist dream. This takes the progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation that destroying worlds is just another way of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means (385, 417, 372).
Make the whole world stand still. Indeed, it may be the only way to think the present in any significant sense. To be clear: the suspension of the world is not a hunt for its conditions of reproduction or a meditative rhapsody of sensations (DR, 56). It is thought that treats the world as if struck by an unspecified disaster, where the best friends you have left are your own ideas. This is not the banal disaster movie, whose ambitions are usually limited to teaching us what are the bare essentials to survive. Writing the disaster is how we break free from the stifling perpetual present, for the present carries with itself a suffocating urgency. The present imposes material limits. To it, the past and the future are the empty form of time, and they must endure the complications of having a body to become part of the present (LS, 146–47, 165). The past and the future exist in their own right only through representation—the former in history as the present memorialization of things passed and the latter in the yet to come as the projection of an image of the present (147). Such re-presentation is why the future appears with the distinct impression that we have seen it all before (Flaxman, Fabulation of Philosophy, 392). The productivist sees the event of thought as an eminently practical reorientation toward the present achieved while generating a new image of the future (WP, 58). In contrast, those learning to hate the world must short-circuit the here and now to play out the scene differently. While still being in this world, they turn away from it. This is the life of characters so agitated that they force the world to stand still—Dostoyevskys Idiot, the head of Kurosawas seven samurai (TR, 317–18). Against bleating urgency that there a fire, theres fire . . . Ive got to go, they insist that everything could burn to the ground but nothing happens, because one must seek out a more urgent problem!
There are those who say that we already have one foot in utopia; but would it not be more suitable to say that we have both feet firmly planted in a present slouching toward dystopia? Deleuze and Guattari call on utopia in their search for a new people and a new earth (WP, 99). They look to Samuel Butler, dissecting his Erewhon as a simultaneous now-here and no-where (100). Yet a closer examination of his novel reveals utopia to be a farce. While not exactly a dystopia, the utopia Erewhon is a comic satire of the British Empire. The narrator is a crass traveler with settler colonial dreams who catalogs the strange ways of Erewhon—in chapters 10 and 11, he outlines how they punish the sick (convicted of aggravated bronchitis) and sentence the misfortunate to hard labor (ill luck of any kind . . . is considered an offense against society) but nurture financial transgressions with medicine (taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense). Beyond being an object lesson in reading footnotes, Deleuze and Guattaris reference to Erewhon demands an attention to the exact configuration of conceptual devices (dispositifs) and how power flows through them. Link thought with its epoch, they suggest, begin with a survey to identify whatever forces are already circulating and then work with them—connecting up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed (100). They warn of proud affirmation as the guise of restoration that opens the door to transcendence, such as appeals to truth, right, or authority (100). For Butler, Erewhon summons neither a new people nor a new earth but is instead a field guide to negate everything he finds intolerable in his present. Utopia becomes the map to transform the now-here into the no-where.
It should have been an apocalyptic book, laments Deleuze, disappointed that the old style Difference and Repetition did not make apparent a key implication—he killed God, humankind, and even the world (xxi). The Death of God began long before Deleuze, who sees Feuerbach as completing it long before Nietzsche with the proposition that since man has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and refold God (F, 130). Nietzsche identifies a different problem: that God was reborn in the form of Man. For Deleuze, it takes Foucault to establish the finitude of humanity—Man has not always existed, and will not exist forever—thus sealing its fate (F, 124). But to destroy the world . . . that is the truly heretical proposition. A small group of dissident Deleuze scholars have rallied around the slogan that there is no ‘ontology of Deleuze—Gregory Flaxman, Anne Sauvagnargues, Gregg Lambert, and François Zourabichvili, to name a few (Zourabichvili, A Philosophy of the Event, 36). The statement does not imply that ontology is an illusion, but criticizing those who build a Deleuzian system around a coherent ontology of the world is ill considered, as it fails draw a line to the outside—to incalculable forces, to chance and improvisation, to the future (Flaxman, Politics and Ontology, XX). Blazing such a path may require the extinction of the term ‘being and therefore of ontology, or in so many words, a destruction of this world (37). Deleuze and Guattari suggest as much when they propose to overthrow ontology (TP, 25). Summed up, this stance names the joyful pessimist Deleuze. Too restless to stop there, the Dark Deleuze broadens the coup de force into a fierce pessimism that shatters the cosmos.