May 5, 2004
I the last post I briefly mentioned that Hardt and Negri's conception of empire as machine linked back to Delueze and Guattari. I left it at that.
I had in mind Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus where the terminology of machines, connections and production is deployed. I read these texts several years ago and found them a hard going indeed. But I do remember some core concepts---most notably machines--as these were notably anti-organic. They distinquished 'mechanism'--a closed machine with a specific purpose such as the clock mechanism of the early modernists -------from 'machine', which was composed of its connections.
Machinic becoming: it kind of caught my fancy. I understood it to be used to describe not the production of something by someone--but production for the sake of production. So it had no organizing centre and it was in a constant state of becoming.
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