Edward Thornton's Deluezian 'lines of flight'

In a 2020 paper titled 'On Lines of Flight: The Theory of Political Transformation in A Thousand Plateaus', Edward Thornton explains why Deleuze & Guatarri wrote nonsense. Apparently, it is because they had got hold of a copy of Samuel Butler's 'Erewhon'.

Deleuze and Guattari borrow this example (of the symbiotic relationship between wasps and orchids) from the work of Samuel Butler, who helps them to elucidate the machinic character of organic life. In his satirical science-fiction novel Erewhon, Butler makes the point that humans and machines are intertwined in much the same way that plants and pollinators are intertwined.

They aren't. If orchids go extinct, some wasps will evolve to eat insects. Equally, some orchids may survive as a result of hothouse cultivation in distant lands.  

Orchids cannot reproduce themselves without wasps, and wasps cannot survive without orchids, but we do not say that the orchid lacks a reproductive system of its own. Butler concludes that ‘the bare fact that no vapour-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapour-engines have no reproductive system’,

Yes it does. We can safely say than nothing inorganic has a reproductive system.  

and that in fact humans are part of ‘the mechanical reproductive system’ of these machines.

Only in the sense that Butler was part of the reproduction system of piss and shit.  

Organic life is machinic

No. Even a highly domesticated species the vast majority of whose members would die if left to fend for themselves, will develop a feral variant which may become invasive. This is not the case with anything inorganic. On the other hand, there may be a law of increasing functional information which applies equally to organic and inorganic matter. But this occurs where there is selection pressure. There is a clear line of development from Wright's 'path analysis' to Judea Pearl's Structural Causal Models. At every step there is greater functionality. We don't care whether the thing is 'causation' or 'correlation' provided we can tinker with parameters and improve outcomes. This is a type of research which pays for itself. It causes revolutions in Society because it changes the economic substructure. It may bring down an oppressive regime because it changes how people communicate. Alternatively, it may make that regime stronger as surveillance becomes cheaper.

Organic life remains organic. Demographic replacement may occur such that power shifts from a particular race to one previously enslaved or discriminated against. But a shift in power may not translate into improved life-chances. The reverse may be the case. 

and species-assemblages are constituted in part by their lines of flight

No. It is not the case that genetic engineers creating new species waste any time plotting 'lines of flight'. Organic life is organic merely. Its building blocks are chemical. Consider the 'GloFish'. Is it a separate species? No. It can interbreed with other zebra fish. As with domesticated or specially bred plants and animals, it probably has a degree of robustness such that it can survive when the source of selection pressure is removed. 

The example of the wasp and the orchid can also help us to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the term ‘becoming’.

It really can't. The fact is genetically engineered wasps are being used for various purposes- e.g. pest control- in a manner those two cretins never envisaged. Orchids, similarly, are being engineered for desirable commercial properties- e.g. cut flower longevity.  

When the orchid evolves to reproduce the image of the wasp on its petals, it is not enough to say that it is simply imitating the wasp.

It isn't imitating the wasp. Wasps can fly. It is attracting the wasp for a specific purpose. But one might say orchids 'attract' flower-lovers for the purpose of gaining more resources and thus succeeding as a species.  

The orchid is quite literally transforming itself into part of the wasp-assemblage,

It quite literally is doing nothing of the sort. On the other hand, it is true that several orchids who had made a deep study of the sartorial practices of the European upper class, cunningly inserted themselves into part of the buttonhole assemblage of the man about town.

while the wasp is becoming part of the orchid-assemblage. In keeping with their machinic analysis of assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari will say that in this process there is ‘neither imitation nor resemblance’ but only ‘an exploding of the two heterogeneous series on the line of flight’, by which there is both ‘a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp’.

Why stop there? Why not speak of the 'becoming-a-fucking-stockbroker-on-his-wedding-day' of the orchid'? Wasps on the other hand, probably for political reasons, embraced a 'becoming-a-fucking-nuisance-at-the-picnic' strategy.  

These processes of becoming are not be understood as intentional or teleological,

they are understood well enough as stupid shit produced by deeply provincial French cretins.  

but as the unintended machinic effects that are produced when a line of flight connects one assemblage with another.

Might the wasps-at-the-picnic ally with disabled Lesbian orchids who resent being placed in the buttonholes of bridegrooms who are also stock-brokers? Will their be an exploding 'line of flight' which causes Macron to turn into a macaroon? Perhaps. Watch this space.  

In line with their analysis of desire in Anti-Oedipus, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari are clear that machines only develop by ‘breaking down’ .

No. That's what causes them to be sent to the scrap-yard. Selection pressure militates for increased functionality, not being a useless pile of shite.  

Just as evolution relies on the mutations that occur when genetic code is incorrectly reproduced,

That is Wright's 'genetic drift'. But more active selection works faster.  

transformations of machines always rely on a break down.

No. What matters is cost vs value added. The law of diminishing marginal product says, a particular machine will be employed more and more if its marginal cost is falling- i.e. there are economies of scope and scale.  'Break down' raises costs. A qualitatively better product may be driven out of the market if it is more subject to break-down or is less 'robust'. 

The wasp’s sexual attraction to the orchid is like a perversion,

It does not have a sexual attraction to the orchid. This is a case of 'eusocial' public signals and is explained by Aumann's theory of correlated equilibria.  

but one which produces a new connection that will transform the whole species.

It may do. It may not.  

This is what a line of flight is: it is an operation or a breakdown of a machinic assemblage, which reaches outside of that assemblage, connects it up with another assemblage, and instigates a mutual process of becoming, by which a transformation occurs.

So, the thing just means 'interaction' with the environment. Big whoop. The point about Wright's 'path analysis' was that it was actually useful to the agricultural sector. Irving Fischer was against it, but it had found its own market. Later Economists developed their own version of it- viz. SEM. The thing wasn't bullshit out of which only a couple of crazy pedants could make a bit of money. It provided jobs- of a boring but utile kind- for thousands of people. This helped raise living standards and thus reduced ardour for an apocalyptic Revolution. If you have nothing, you may not care if your City is burnt to the ground. But if you have a comfortable enough dwelling and a car you are fond off, you don't want everything to be reduced to ashes. 

Marxism reinvented itself in the early Eighties in China. The Party understood that 'ownership' or 'residuary control' rights are relatively independent of effective 'control rights'. Mechanism design is about making the latter more 'incentive compatible'. The Party could retain residuary control rights while still permitting the Market to work its magic. True, there was great economic dislocation caused by the smashing of the 'iron rice bowl'. There was also the risk of corruption and criminality becoming entrenched. But, the Party has been able to deal with such challenges. It may be taking the lead in new technologies vital to reversing the effects of Climate Change. 

Deleuze & Guatarri may be forgiven for not foreseeing these developments. But rising young academics must be aware of them.

In a move that can be seen as an attempt to purge Marxist theory of its latent Hegelianism,

I suppose one could say William Lawvere showed how Marxian economics could be given a category theoretical description of a Hegelian sort. To purge that- if it has indeed gained currency- you'd need to be hella smart.  

Deleuze and Guattari reject the supposed prominence of internal contradictions

in other words, they reject stuff which exists- e.g. Billionaires paying a smaller portion of their income in tax than their janitorial staff- in order to inhabit a fairy-tale world of birds & bees saying boo to Oedipus.  

and replace the transformative role played by them with the concept of the line of flight.

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys may be very interested in such lines, but it's a bit on the nose, if you ask me.  

This move is part of a larger critique of Marxist theory,

Kantorovich had given Marxist theory a mathematical representation by then. You could critique him by mentioning concurrency, complexity, computability, categoricity etc. The problem was that networked computers could always be provided with a good enough workaround. It doesn't matter if there is no 'canonical' solution or if 'naturality' is far to seek. What matters is whether there is a good enough algorithm to be getting on with.  

in which Deleuze and Guattari reject the traditional distinction between a society’s material base and its ideological superstructure.

I suppose Europe was indeed becoming 'Americanized'. Ideology didn't matter. Look at Mitterrand. If Leftist policies tank the economy, shift to the Right. But Reagan & Thatcher too had done a U turn, on monetary policy, within a year or two of taking power. What was unexpected was the support they received for standing up to the Air Traffic controllers and the Miners respectively. But the British coal industry had been in trouble even in the Nineteen Twenties. Ideology can't change the brute facts provided by Accountants. 

In place of this distinction, Deleuze and Guattari substitute an analysis of social forms as assemblages, much like the assemblage of the wasp, which combine heterogeneous elements and which are defined by the external relations that they maintain with their outside.

I suppose guys in marketing were doing such analysis to a better purpose- viz. making money. Consider the focus, in the Eighties, on the relatively high disposable income C2DE social category. They had complex affiliations and moved between milieus to a greater extent than had ever happened in the past. It turned out that they were highly cost-sensitive when it came to 'white goods' but would pay a premium for 'affiliation' in the leisure sector. At least, that is what I remember of the period. Then came the AIDS epidemic. Suddenly, 'intermingling bodies' appeared less attractive. What mattered was locking in to a fixed rate mortgage while the going was good. 

Deleuze and Guattari will claim that ‘the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society’ .

Bodies smell bad. They may have diseases. Also, house prices are going up as are stock prices in Privatized industries. Let's save the 'intermingling of bodies' for when we go on holiday. 

The exact way in which bodies are intermingled is determined in part by the modes of enunciation of that society.

The Queen, Gor' bless 'er, had good enunciation. She didn't intermingle her body with Mrs. Thatcher. Sad.  

As Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘the semiotic or collective aspect of an assemblage

It can either have a semiotic aspect or a collective aspect. Not both. A collective is a thing. Semiotics is about signs, not things.  

relates not to a productivity of language but to regimes of signs,

there are no such 'regimes'. Japan isn't really an 'Empire of Signs'. It is a constitutional monarchy which exports a lot of cars. Apparently, Barthes was hit by a laundry van while walking home after a lunch with Mitterrand. Clearly, the regime of traffic signs wasn't strict enough in France.  

to a machine of expression whose variables determine the usage of language elements’ .

I suppose, if you write and talk shite, you have a natural desire to shift the blame to the 'regime of signs' or 'the teaching machine' or some such abstraction.  

Fortunately, Deleuze and Guattari do not only develop this political terminology in the abstract. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari work through this new theory by taking a number of examples. Perhaps the most enlightening example for our purposes comes with Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the role of the line of flight in the transformation from the feudal assemblage to a capitalist assemblage.

This happened when the King said he'd prefer the Baron sending him money rather than soldiers. The Baron, in turn, sold the right to gather tax to tax-farmers who may have started out as clerks or accountants and who were related by marriage to merchants, money lenders and proto-industrialists.  

 Interestingly, the first modern, wholly secular, State was created by a multi-national trading company which took over first the Diwani (right to collect taxes) and then the Nizami (administration) of 'Golden Bengal' in return for a cash payment to the not so grand 'Grand Mughal'. 

According to Deleuze and Guattari, feudalism is partially composed of a machinic assemblage of bodies, which includes ‘the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies’ .

This is nonsense. Feudalism was created by a War Lord who appointed vassals to take control of particular territories. Initially, they offered personal military service in return. Then, they paid tribute in cash and kind. What mattered was whether the Sovereign could suddenly turn up with a big Army. If he couldn't, the thing decayed. A foreign conqueror, commanding the loyalty of nomadic horse-men, might take the place of the existing Tzar or Sultan. If an efficient fiscal bureaucracy was created, you had Despotism. If not, mercantile classes might rise up and there might be a transition to representative government and the rule of law.  

Some of the aspects of this corporeal assemblage can be understood as molar lines of segmentarity.

by cretins- sure.  

For example, the rigid organisation of fields on the earth, or the strict differentiation between the lord and the serf.

Which has always existed. People knew which land was theirs and who their wife was. It was fucking obvious that they guy you addressed as 'my Lord' was the lord. The serf was the chap you could capture and beat if he ran away.  

The feudal assemblage is also composed of more supple lines of molecular segmentation, which might include the meandering bodies of water, or the encroaching forests, which impinge on the fields, or the bodies of travelling troubadours who cut across the stratified social divisions.

Very true. Feudal Barons often got hitched to rivers or mountains. King Arthur, however, went too far, when he appointed Sherwood Forest as his Chief Actuary and CFO. This is because Sherwood Forest had lied about having a Wharton MBA. True, it did have a PhD from Rutgers but that was in Queer Theory. Not the good sort- i.e. sodomy with giraffes. Its thesis was on Lesbic lizards in Ludhiana. 

Incidentally, troubadours didn't 'cut across' stratified social divisions. Their status was determined by birth, patronage, and whether or not they had 'benefit of clergy'. But the same could be said of men-at-arms. Consider the German Minnesanger. Some were 'ministriales'- i.e. technically not free but officials of high social rank. Others were pure blooded Dukes or Counts and suffered no loss or gain of status by their literary activities. The word minstrel is derived from ministriales which meant servant but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, though a servant of the State wields more power and has greater social prestige then many a Duke or Earl. 

However, as well as being composed of these bodies, feudalism is governed by a particular collective assemblage of enunciation, which involves the statements and expressions specific to the feudal social order.

No. Government was about killing people and carrying away any nice shiny stuff they might own. Enunciation didn't matter in the slightest.  

These include, ‘the juridical regime of heraldry,

which post-dated the noon-tide of feudalism. I suppose, it gained currency because of the revival of trade routes and the expansion of industry.  

all of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.)’ .

You could pay money to be released from them. But only one thing mattered. Killing. If you could kill with impunity, people were very obsequious to you.  

Once again, on the side of enunciation, it is possible to pick out both the molar and the molecular lines that compose the assemblage.

It is easy to pick out stupid shit if you have nothing better to do.  

What is of most interest to us here, however, is the way in which Deleuze and Guattari show how the feudal assemblage is composed from the very beginning by certain lines of flight which escape from it in all directions.

Lots of people did run away from feudalism. Marchlands were 'shatter zones' for Empires. But they could themselves become the nucleus of Imperial States.  

They take at least two examples of lines of flight that operate in the feudal assemblage, namely the knight of courtly love and the merchant.

This is a fairy tale. Why not talk of Merlin and Excalibur instead? Add in some fire breathing dragons and you may make as much money as George. R.R Martin.  

Speaking of the knight, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the ‘complex assemblage of secrecy in courtly love’ which is characterised by the ‘celerity of the war machine against the gravity of the State apparatus’ .

Where? At Eleanor of Aquitaine's 'Court of Love'? But it wasn't so different from that of Wallada bint al-Mustakfi. Commerce had created a degree of affluence in their domains but 'war machines' decided outcomes. The State apparatus had no 'gravity' or other power of its own. 

The knight of courtly love escapes from the rigid social stratification of feudal life on a passional and romantic line that allows him to ‘[j]ump from one assemblage to another’ .

only in fairy tales. Actual knights needed money. Kidnapping an heiress might be profitable. But it might also get you killed.  

It is important to point out here that unlike the line of flight which connects the wasp to the orchid, the line of flight of the courtly knight is continually blocked from ever making a real connection with another assemblage.

Nonsense! The knight could go off to a Marchland and raise troops there. In Germany, it was more common for knights and burghers to ally against the higher nobility and clergy. Other options included joining a Military Order- e.g. the Teutonic or Maltese knights- or taking service under a distant Emperor. 

In their analysis of the ‘flows that escape’ from the ‘micropolitics of the Middle Ages’, Deleuze and Guattari will attempt to show that, while the feudal assemblage ‘can only function with decoded flows’, the apparatuses of feudalism ‘do not let them stream together; they perform topical conjunctions that stand as so many knots or recodings’ .

Why? The answer is specialization and division of labour in feudal domains. But there were Marchlands not too far off where discontented serfs or friars might hole up. Marcher-lords made it their business to manage such discontent and harness it to their own advantage. Feudalism is just a name given by pedagogues to a period in History. It has no 'essence' or 'internal logic'. It must be said, the history of Western Europe changed with the Guttenberg or 'German' revolution. A class of Humanistic knights- like Ulrich von Hutten,

-- could enable the Reformation to gain ground. England and France were playing catch-up during this period. What gave the West European littoral greater salience was the discovery of the New World and the rapid growth of transoceanic Trade & Empery.   

In this sense, the knight of courtly love continually draws a line of flight, but one which is always cut short of producing a transformation in the social field.

Yet the social field was being transformed. There was urbanization and specialization and gains from trade. The problem was that growth was not always incremental. It could easily be reversed. Climate events and epidemics could wipe out a large section of the population. 

The lines of flight drawn by the merchant class do not suffer the same fate.

No. Trade was risky. A family of Knights might rise in trade- as did that of Thomas Beckett- but it might fall just as easily. In economic analysis, we find a constant drive to turn present profit into future rents. But it is the State apparatus which secures rents and thus, at some point, everybody seeks its interessement.  

It is these lines that Deleuze and Guattari credit with the transformation that brought about the end of feudalism and the birth of capitalism.

So, two cretins who didn't economics or history, credited some fairy tales they had read as kids with magical powers. I suppose, one might say, universal conscription is 'feudal'. The subject offers military service to the Sovereign. True, in France, prior to about 1905, you could buy your way out of this obligation, but that too smacks of feudalism. But then feudalism too was about money- sometimes you have to get in more Jews or Lombards to have more of it- and thus was Capitalist. What Deleuze & Guatarri fail to mention is the prevalence of dicks in days of yore. Dicks cause RAPE. Ban them immediately.  

This observation originally appears in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari show how the despotic rule of the feudal lords only collapses when

they are killed or they run the fuck away.  

‘the flow of merchant capital’ connects one feudal regime to another, disrupting the despotic centralisation of power .

Hilarious! These cunts could see, over the course of their own life-times, 'merchant capital' flowing into various wholly feudal, oil rich, states. This didn't 'disrupt' centralization of power. It greatly increased it. What was unexpected was that North Korea would become even more feudal and despotic than Saudi Arabia. 

When this occurs, the previous feudal system of guilds breaks down,

Some feudal territories had guilds. Some did not. Russia only introduced a guild system in the eighteenth century. It had no particular importance. Serfdom, in one form or another, had been around from the 12th Century. It did have great importance.  

bringing about both ‘the decoding of the worker’

I suppose they mean a free labour market. But Capitalism can exist without any such thing. What matters is how investible resources are allocated.  

and ‘the deterritorialization of wealth’ .

Which had occurred thousands of years ago when people developed a liking for shiny stuff like gold or diamonds.  

It is the conjunction of these two deterritorialised flows that brings about the historical birth of capitalism.

Nope. Properly so called, Capitalism comes into existence with the increased ubiquity and importance of Joint Stock Companies which are publicly listed on a Stock Market. If the people who buy and sell stocks and bonds can also ensure that the Judiciary is independent and if they can influence fiscal policy through Parliament, then you have a Capitalist regime. There may be other 'mixed' regimes where the State has 'residuary control rights' or can act arbitrarily. 

According to this analysis, feudalism does not fail when its internal contradictions become dialectically expressed in revolution.

Yet, if the peasants kill the lords and burn down their castles, feudalism has in fact failed.  

Instead, the feudal assemblage is transformed when the lines of flight that constitute it are not cut off and are able to connect up with something outside of the assemblage.

This could also be said of the power my farts have of propelling me past the farthest galaxy- were it not for the fact that the lines of flight which constitute are not cut off from the nostrils of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the hyperdimensional cat whose assemblages are the multiverse.  

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari are clear that it is the ‘merchant bourgeoisie of the cities’ that acts as the ‘cutting edge of deterritorialization’ that escapes feudal domination and acts as the line of flight that will produce a new capitalist assemblage. 

It is interesting that for the Stock Market to really take off you need to have a 'risk-free asset'- i.e. Consols. Paying off reparations was actually very good for the French economy after the wars of the two Napoleons.  

Specifically, it is by drawing quantitative equivalences between the value of goods in different feudal regions that the merchants produced a global market which undercut the qualitative power of the feudal lords.

No. Lords were perfectly capable of sending their corn or wool or timber or slaves to whichever emporium city paid the highest price. Merchants needed to spot gaps in the market and take risks with their own capital.  

It is this shift from local centres of qualitative power to a generalized quantitative axiomatic of the market that Deleuze and Guattari see as the birth of capitalism.

This is foolish. Empires which strictly suppressed the merchant class nevertheless conducted long distance trade based on 'absolute advantage'. But so did the Soviet Union under Stalin.  

What is important to note in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of both the knight of courtly love and the merchant bourgeoisie, is that while they both constitute lines of flight in the feudal assemblage,

even though they weren't flying anywhere. They stayed put and tried to ensure they got a nice bit of sausage to eat along with a flagon of ale.  

these lines only bring about a transformation when they connect up with something outside of themselves.

Extra-terrestrials? No. The fact is 'intra-industry' trade burgeons more than that based on absolute advantage. This was why the Common Market was initially such a success. Sadly, it seems there is now less and less 'trade creation' and more 'diversion'. Europe must make a bonfire of its internal regulatory barriers and greatly reduce 'compliance costs'.  

Deleuze and Guattari regularly come back to the fact that these connections are not historical necessities, but contingent events that could have happened otherwise .

No. The cost of preventing such developments rose exponentially while the benefits of encouraging them rose almost as rapidly. There is a reason Napoleon's 'Continental System' didn't work. French dudes should understand this.  

In both AntiOedipus  and A Thousand Plateaus (2004, 499), Deleuze and Guattari

display their ignorance and stupidity.  

ask why capitalism did not arise in China in the fourteenth century, despite the fact that the technological and material conditions seemed to be right.

The answer is obvious. Like India, China was focussed on defence along its northern borders- i.e. the threat posed by Mongols, Manchus etc. The big difference was that it was more vulnerable to a peasant rebellion like that of the Red Turbans which put an end to the Mongolian origin Yuan dynasty. 

I suppose, if the littoral had been allowed to take off economically, the focus would have been on oceanic trade and greater emigration (which occurred anyway at a later point). The merchants of the maritime ports wouldn't greatly care who ruled the hinterland because it would be just a case of paying off one war-lord rather another. Indeed, a foreign ruler generally reduced effective tax-rates because of ignorance of local conditions. It should also be remembered that China and India benefitted from the positive monetary shock represented by Mexican silver at a later period. This meant that lots of people lived well without too much effort. But this could breed sloth or fatalism.  

Their answer is that the lines of flight produced by merchants crossing the smooth space of the sea were recaptured by the state and were not allowed to conjugate.

Why? The answer is the traditional focus on the warlike tribes to the North and West despite the increasing severity of peasant rebellions. The Jesuits at the Ming court appeared to be revitalizing the Empire. Indeed, even the Manchu conquest initially appeared promising. Suddenly there was a great Mongolian mathematician fully equal to any in Europe. But, as in India, literary culture of a sycophantic or scolding type was a secure enough path to a comfortable life. 

It is interesting that first Japan, then South Korea and now China have turned into great ship-building nations as they sought to catch up with the West. Taken together those three nations build 95 percent of all new ships. Europe produces about 2.4 percent. The US is down to 0.1 percent.  

Speaking of the ‘adventure of China’, Deleuze and Guattari write that, ‘in spite of its very high level of technology in ships and navigation,

No. Europe's North Atlantic fishermen took the lead and made it wider and wider.  

it turned its back on its huge maritime space, saw its commercial flows turn against it and ally themselves with piracy, and was unable to react except by a politics of immobility’ .

Why did Japan, turn its back on the Sea in the Seventeenth Century? That is a better question to ask.  I suppose, back then, the answer was 'the Japs didn't want Christianity' or 'Japs didn't like guns. They wanted to slice each up with Samurai swords' or 'Japs looked down on Merchants because of their Confucian ideology' or something of that sort. The truth is, restricting trade increased the power of a specific group. 

This insight is important when we consider the role that the concept of the line of flight plays in Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy.

But the role played by that political philosophy is a headlong flight from politics, philosophy and common sense.  

Money has a magical power. It enables you to get stuff you want. Words may enable transactions to proceed more smoothly. But they aren't necessary. If you have enough money, you can let your money do the talking.

It may be that  French savants did not know about money's magical power. Consider

two other conceptual innovations that Deleuze and Guattari introduce in A Thousand Plateaus, namely the use of ‘order words’ to bring about ‘incorporeal transformations’ ,

e.g. ordering a Big Mac and then getting a Big Mac. However, eating the Big Mac leads to 'corporeal transformation' which is why you need to take a shit later on.  

and their solidification into ‘regimes of signs’ .

Like traffic signs. What I don't get is why a Revolution does not break out every time they turn red? Is it because Macron is actually a macaroon?  

To understand how the two sides of an assemblage interact, we must give some account of how statements can be used to organise bodies. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s assessment of linguistics, this occurs when the ‘illocutionary’ dimension of speech

e.g. if a promise is made 

is used to bring about an ‘incorporeal transformation’ in a state of affairs .

e.g. you are waiting for your Burger because the waiter said he'd bring it to you.  

Deleuze and Guattari offer a number of examples of this process: when a judge says the word ‘guilty’ the body of the defendant is instantaneously transformed into the body of a convict ;

Not necessarily. The trial may be held in absentia. A Belgian Court pronounced such a verdict on Paul de Man but he was living in America.  

while the process of ageing is continuous, the sudden shift from being a worker to being retired is a transformation brought about by a certain regime of enunciation ;

There may be no 'enunciation'. You may not even get a gold watch or some other such testimonial. You just don't get a wage slip anymore. Hopefully, you get a pension check.  

when a hijacker on an aeroplane states his intentions, there is an immediate ‘transformation of the passengers into hostages, and of the plane-body into a prison-body’.

unless they kill him first. The plain fact is words don't have any magical power. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you.  

In each of these cases, the collective assemblage of enunciation determines the relations of bodies.

No. Something more is required.  

It is the words, said by the right person at the right moment, which mark an instantaneous event in which the relations of the social field are suddenly shifted.

Unless you tell them to fuck the fuck off and they do actually fuck the fuck off.  

This illocutionary dimension of language is political, because not everyone’s speech has the same power.

Because not everyone has the same power.  

When a judge says ‘you are guilty’

and you kill his family and take your time carving him up till he says 'I meant 'not guilty', then people pretty much get the idea that you can do what you like.  

then your body is transformed, but if you were to say the same to him or her, then nothing would change. The words that bring about incorporeal transformations are known as ‘order words’ because they can be used to organise bodies in a specific way.

There is an uncorrelated asymmetry and public signals based on this can be eusocial by promoting bourgeois strategies. John Maynard Smith's work was useful. It explains lots of stuff in the animal kingdom and in Economics and politics and so on. What does not exist is an 'order word' or a magical mantra. Where there is an uncorrelated asymmetry- e.g. this guy has power and that guy does not- then no word needs to be uttered for the first guy to get the shit beaten out of the second guy.  

According to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, the illocutionary dimensions of language are in a state of flux, so that at different moments in history, and in different sociocultural contexts, different words, spoken by different people, will act as order words.

This really isn't the case. What changes is 'uncorrelated asymmetries'.  

Despite these changes, it is also possible to discern relatively stable systems of illocution operating at different historico-geographical junctures.

It is always possible to discern useless shite.  

These stable systems of the use of language to organise bodies are named ‘regimes of signs’ .

Why stop there? Why not gave nice names to your farts?  

As Deleuze and Guattari clarify: ‘We call any specific formalization of expression

e.g. my farts 

a regime of signs’, and therefore a ‘regime of signs constitutes a semiotic system’ .

No. Only if the thing is actually used is it a semiotic system. Nobody uses Deleuze & Guattari's stupid nomenclature.  

Earlier on, we saw how feudalism must be understood not only as a particular mixture of bodies, but also as a system of enunciative practices that are contained in a system of workers guilds and oaths of obedience, and in the legal structures of heraldry.

This could be said of any bunch of guys. A busload of fruit-pickers must be understood not only as a particular mixture of bodies, but also as a system of enunciative and flatulent practices that are contained in a system of hiring agricultural labour based on verbal contracts and legal structures of a customary type. 

These semiotic norms constitute the regime of signs of feudalism.

No. You can have feudalism without guilds or heraldry (which is what obtained prior to the Eleventh Century in Europe) and absent any oath taking (where the prevailing religion prevented this course being taken). 

Equally, you can have all these things- e.g. the Guilds of the City of London, the Herald's Office, the Prince of Wales taking an oath of fealty to the King etc. etc- without feudalism existing. 

The four different regimes of signs that Deleuze and Guattari pick out are named as the ‘presignifying’, ‘signifying’, ‘postsignifying’, and ‘countersignifying’ regimes.

They resemble the pre-fart, the fart, the post-fart, and the counter-fart where I pretend what you heard and smelled was actually a floor-board creaking or a sudden gust of sewer gas polluting the air.  

The presignifying regime of signs is the semiotic system of what Deleuze and Guattari had called primitive societies in Anti-Oedipus. It operates by keeping a range of polyvocal forms of expression in operation at the same time, so that various forms of enunciation, including ‘corporeality, gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite’ can ‘coexist heterogeneously with the vocal form’ .

Savages say 'ooga booga' and dance naked around a fire. What this signifies is that they want to eat you.  

Under this regime, signs are used to make marks on the flesh and on the earth, in order to specify to which order of expression a body belongs.

Delueze's body was a fart. Guatarri's body belonged to a different order of expression- that of the medieval Noh play.  

This regime of signs can be diagrammed by a series of parallel lines which are continually kept separate from one another.

Because if you don't do this continually, they are bound to get jiggy with each other.  

Under the presignifying regime of signs, lines of flight are taken to be negative and destructive, because they threaten to cut across the different parallel registers of expression, bringing about the end of the regime.

Primitive peeps don't have a regime. They may have a Chief but then they eat him. Oooga-booga, me sad, ooga-booga.  

As such, lines of flight are continually warded off. The signifying regime of signs takes hold exactly when the presignifying regime fails to ward off its lines of flight.

i.e. the Chief escapes being eaten.  

When this happens, an equivalence is created between the different polyvocal forms of expression and all use of signs becomes organised around a single centre of reference.

The Chief is the Chief because we didn't eat him unlike all the other Chiefs we had. In nuce, this is the story of how Donald Trump gained control of the Republican Party.  

Subsequently, all language becomes signifying in the strict sense of a structural linguistics.

Because Saussure was very strict. If a language was showing a tendency to be mystifying rather than signifying, he would scold it mercilessly.  

In the signifying regime ‘the network of signs is infinitely circular’ leading to a semiotics based on a ‘multiplicity of the circles or chains’, in which the centre of the circle becomes an always-implicit centre of power.

Sadly, guys who set up networks of signs, however circular, don't hold power. If they do, they don't need signs. It is enough that people understand that you are a sadistic bastard and will enjoy killing them slowly.  

This regime of signs is equivalent to the despotic mode of social organisation described in Anti-Oedipus, and the centre of this system of reference is the face of the despot, which acts as the wall on which signs are inscribed.

The opposite is the case. A place with lots of helpful signs posted up all over the place is likely to be administered by sweet and nice old ladies. It is where people walk in fear and speak in whispers that you know a tyrant prevails. 

In the signifying regime, lines of flight are not warded off, but they are expelled, or cast out, from the circular signifying web of social life.

STEM subjects have 'signifying regimes'.  A line of inquiry which looks promising is likely to receive encouragement. Nobody wants a 'circular' web. They want one which reaches out farther and farther towards noumenal reality.  

The example that Deleuze and Guattari take is the scapegoat:

which, like the Voodoo doll, is not something we come across in our daily lives.  

‘In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs… it incarnates that line of flight the signifying regime cannot tolerate’ .

In France, there was a history of mob violence against supposed traitors or, after the withdrawal of the Germans, 'collaborators'. But the Vichy regimes Jewish victims too may be considered scapegoats.

However, to an Englishman, what is incarnated here is the greater suspicion that the French had for their much more centralized system of Justice. In England, not even the King could hang a thief caught in the Act save after a Jury had rendered a guilty verdict.  

Through the incorporeal transformation by which an animal is made into a scapegoat and cast out into the desert, the signifying regime of signs nullifies the dangers of the line of flight, and casts them out of society for good.

The Jews last performed this ritual in 70 CE. Why did Guatarri & Deleuze drag up the matter? They had themselves lived through human scapegoating on an industrial scale. In any case, Nietzsche had settled the matter long ago when he said 'not a few who cast out devils entered into the swine themselves'. The more a system of signs seek a magical protection against even imaginary dangers, the more real and menacing those dangers appear.  

The postsignifying regime is produced when the line of flight that is cast out of the despotic signifying system is affirmed by a subject, who uses this line to define their subject position. The example that Deleuze and Guattari take here is the Jewish escape from Egypt, in which the arc of the covenant  becomes ‘a little portable packet of signs’, something which had been cast out of the Egyptian signifying regime

It was never in it. Sinai was a border territory not part of Egypt itself.  

as a ‘negative line of flight occupied by the animal or scapegoat’ but which the Jewish people affirm and make into a positive line of flight, or deterritorialisation: ‘It is we who must follow the most deterritorialized line, the line of the scapegoat, but we will change its sign, we will turn it into the positive line of our subjectivity, our Passion, our proceeding or grievance’ .

This simply isn't true. Moses's task is to lead the Jews to a specific territory 'promised' to them. One might say the Jews in Egypt or Babylon were 'deterritorialized' but this was not the case when they went to Canaan.  

Deleuze and Guattari refer to this regime as ‘subjective’ and ‘passional’ .

It is ignorant nonsense. There was a question as to whether the Jews should settle where they were or press on even if it meant having to fight 'gigantic' Philistines. God decides the matter. It is He who sends signs- e.g. by day, a column of smoke, and by night a column of fire. As with the parting of the Red Sea, these are miraculous events portrayed as actually, objectively, occurring. They are not 'subjective' or 'passional' or brought on by drinking too much boozah.  

In signifying regimes, statements gain their efficacy by referring back to the despot as the totalizing centre of all power,

No. They gain efficacy by being backed with force or the rational expectation that such force will materialize. The problem is that God has superior power. Even Pharoah dare not defy Him.  

but in subjectifying regimes, statements gain their efficacy by extending the passional proceeding of a single authoritarian aim.

No. What had efficacy was Pinchas slaying Zimri & Kosbi. God rewarded him by making his descendants hereditary priests.  

For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari use the distinction between the signifying and the postsignifying regimes to mark the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

The difference is that authoritarianism becomes totalitarian under conditions of total war or a complete reordering of society. But Democracies may take the same path under exigent circumstances.  

Rather than being diagrammed by a radiating series of circles, the postsignifying regime is diagrammed by a series of lines of flight, which each end in a ‘black hole’

as opposed to an arsehole.  

: the passional proceeding of the postsignifying regime always fails,

which is why King Charles still rules over the US 

but it is taken up again and again. In Deleuze and Guattari’s example, the Jewish people use the arc to build a new temple, but when this is destroyed their proceeding must begin again.

or remain in abeyance. There was a Second Temple. There has been no Third. 

The countersignifying regime is also organised on a line of flight that escapes from the signifying regime.

In which case it signifies running away- a theme dear to the heart of cheese-eating surrender monkeys 

However, unlike in the postsignifying situation, in this case the line of flight does not remain singular and subjective, but connects up with a multiplicity of other lines of flight in order to draw what Deleuze and Guattari will call a ‘smooth space’ of deterritorialisation .

Where? If it occurs within Nation-States then it is territorialized. If it is done at the UN, it is mere virtue signalling bollocks.  

Under the countersignifying regime, signs are used to produce ‘a mobile and plural distribution’ of the social field, ‘which arrives at arrangements rather than totals, distributions rather than collections, which operates more by breaks, transitions, migration, and accumulation than by combining units’.

i.e. talks bollocks in between nibbling canapes.  

If the signifying regime is operative in despotic states, and the postsignifying regime is operative in social groups who are fleeing the state form, then the countersignifying regime can be found in nomadism.

It really can't. Nomads are hardy folk.  

Each of the four regimes of signs discussed by Deleuze and Guattari is

under-specified for any useful purpose. The law of increasing functional information militates for keeping astride of cutting edge research. There is no point reinventing the wheel so that its roundness will be seen as less insulting to those of a rectangular disposition.  

a particular organisation of the collective assemblage of enunciation, which forms one side of the social assemblage. In each case, it is the regime of signs that determines which order words will bring about which incorporeal transformations:

No. It is people who do so. Anyone can use signs or words. What they have to say determines whether they will gain power and influence. However, over the last four decades the type of language which has led to 'incorporeal transformation' is machine code and computer languages of various types. This has meant that 'Copilot' can write a paragraph on a nonsensical topic- viz. why Haskell is better than LISP for AI applications in the style of Deleuze- 

---

In the machinic phylum of programming languages, LISP emerges as a rhizomatic ancestor—flexible, recursive, a language of pure becoming—but it remains trapped in a molar regime of symbolic manipulation, endlessly folding upon itself in parentheses that mirror its own solipsism. Haskell, by contrast, deterritorializes the imperative paradigm through its embrace of pure functions and lazy evaluation, allowing for a smooth space of computation where effects are traced, not imposed. It is not that Haskell is superior in a hierarchical sense, but that it operates on a different plane of consistency—one that aligns more intimately with the abstract machines of contemporary AI, where compositionality and type safety form assemblages that resist the chaosmos of mutable state. LISP codes the past; Haskell diagrams the future.

---

Would you like to push this further—perhaps into a dialogue between Deleuze and Guattari on neural nets as desiring-machines?

My point is, if you want bright and breezy nonsense which looks Deleuzian, Copilot can generate it for you by the bucketload in 5 seconds. But shite like this is misleading. The fact is AI is statistical, not logical or type theoretic and thus neither LISP nor Haskell matter to it. 

 under the signifying regime of signs that is operative in sedentary state societies the words of the judge have the power to transform the relations between bodies,

No. Something more is called for- viz. bodies which perform operations with the result that the judge's sentence is carried out. Whether such bodies exist is a matter for mechanism design- i.e. incentive compatibility.  

but this only works because the words of the judge refer back to the power centre of the despot who sits at the axis of the circular network of signs.

No. The Judge may be able to defy the despot. What matters is which bodies obey or act in conformity with the wishes of which agent.  

In a countersignifying semiotic, the judge’s words would have no more power than the words of the defendant.

It may have less. It may have more. It all depends. If your model is underspecified, it is useless. To be useful, you have to build upon what is communicated by those with existing domain expertise. If you can say, 'LISP is currently underexploited in hybrid AI pattern recognition for volatility connectedness in such and such branch of FinTech' that may be useful if it is true. But not for long. It is likely that any such gap would be spotted and filled one way or another. But judgment often has this quality. It is interesting and may be adopted as a solution to a coordination problem even if it has no coercive or other reinforcement mechanism. But if that judgment does not come from this jurisdiction, it will come from somewhere else or just turn into 'best practice' without anybody noticing. 

I suppose what I have written misses the point Thornton is trying to make. Sure, you can go to Uni and then get a job doing something useful. But what if you find a 'line of flight' so you can stay on at Uni talking bollocks to cretins? Some of those cretins may be nomads or serial killers or other such bogus asylum seekers. Surely, they'd enjoy occupying Wall Street? That's bound to bring about a really nice Revolution. Trump's supporters, however, may storm Capitol Hill to protest this outcome. They are very nasty. Mummy says I am not allowed to talk to them. I will tell 'Copilot' to say mean things about them. They will cry and cry.