It seems that inter-assemblage relations are organised into aggregates that are all the more complex and all the more capable of adaptation and creativity for the existence of intra-assemblage relations that make deterritorialised components, specialised in transformations, in diagrammatic phase transitions appear – and not simply transcodings without any assemblage modification, that is to say, in the passage from one form to another, from one assemblage to another, through the decomposition of stratified form-substance relations. It is all this rhizomatic creativity that is systematically lacking, or lacking in the systems of information processing, signifying structuralisms, axiomatics that operate through ‘arborescent’ deductions. But before coming back to what seems to us to be their common characteristic, that is, a method of binary reduction of the specific characteristics of their components, let us examine – on the basis of examples taken from the domain of ethology – diverse modes of intra- and inter-assemblage organisation. This choice of examples will be oriented as a function of two kinds of preoccupation:
1The concern to relativise the notion of a hierarchy of instinctive behaviours based on a hierarchy of nerve centres, such as has been developed following the work of N. Tinbergen.
2The desire to group several suggestive markers concerning the assemblage of faciality and refrain components in the phylum of deterritorialised semiotics, and to demonstrate their position of transition between systems of reterritorialisation and diagrammatic processes that produce new spatio-temporal, ecological, social coordinates, etc.
In effect, it seems to us that a ‘rhizomatic’ conception of inter-assemblage relations (and not an arborescent one like that proposed by Tinbergen, with his celebrated schema1), should authorise an innovative opening up of the behavioural programming of the animal world as much as, if the case arises, a ‘determinist’ closure of that of the human world. Now, what it seems must be remembered with faciality and refrain components, is that they play in the human and animal registers precisely without having a rigid opposition between the innate and the acquired stuck onto them, without projecting a fictitious freedom onto the human or a strict determinism onto the animal. In our opinion, in the course of the ‘ethological misunderstanding’ a mechanistic coupling between inhibiting factors for a components and innate triggering mechanisms rules.
All conceptions that result in arborescent descriptions of chains of behaviour rest on this basic binary operation – one that is, in addition, very close to that of the ideology secreted by information theory. In wanting to specify too positively the nature of ‘what inhibits’ or of ‘what triggers’, one ends up postulating a purposiveness, a teleological signification, or the existence of a soul to or for these chains. In effect, as they have been arbitrarily mechanised at the outset, one ends up being obliged to clamp on to them transcendent structures so as to make them function. It is always the same politics of worlds beyond or of ‘objects on high’, which only results in the reconstitution of linear causalities and in the process loses the points of singularity borne by abstract machinisms. Now one is perhaps dealing here with something similar to the action of catalysts in the domain of chemistry, the intervention of which is not linked to the chemical reactions proper to them but to the kind of molecular connections that they facilitate. What counts, in these ‘crystallisations’ of behaviour, is perhaps less the nature of such and such a – hormonal, perceptual, ecological, etc. – component, than the spatial apparatuses that determine the strategies and tactics, the linking rhythms that do or don’t succeed in being stabilised and triggered on the basis of ‘automatic’ codings, and the existence of certain deterritorialised (diagrammatic) components that establishes bridges, semiotic, transcoding exchangers, between these spaces and rhythms. This ‘machinics’, this biologico-behavioural engineering could engender chains of the ‘stigmergic’ kind (each sequence being articulated to the next without any ‘knowledge’ that would preside over the whole of a conscious project being implied), or chains that imply a semiotisation on the spot, a questioning regarding the ‘sense’ of an intentional arc, or even black hole effects, that is to say, the fact that a semiotic or ‘natural’ coding component turns around on itself emptily, issues in nothing, and no longer echoes anything except other systems of inhibition. Perhaps nothing is played out between inhibition and ‘triggering’ in an absolutely mechanical, ‘bi-univocal’ way; perhaps a rhizomatic opening always remains possible, if only at the microscopic scale, and it is always on the basis of minuscule creative lines of flight that evolution finally finds its adaptive path?
Perhaps inhibiting black hole and rhizomatic connection should not be opposed, anyway. In effect, it is possible that it is precisely only from such a black hole that these minuscule lines of flight that will deterritorialise a stratified system can emerge. Perhaps it is inevitable that to be in a position to be triggered, certain innovative processes have previously to be engaged in blockages, black holes, that can only end up – outside of any ‘constructive dialectics’ – in ‘catastrophes’, in the sense given to this term by René Thom.2 (Examples: invasions, epidemics, the Hundred Years War, etc. on the eve of the great revolutions of capitalism.) And the ‘equipment’ of faciality and refrain perhaps have as their function precisely one of regulating new ‘rhythms of catastrophe’ and the unprecedented metabolisms for exiting the black holes of absolute deterritorialisation. Whatever the case may be, one comes across stases of inhibition associated with the triggering of crossroad-behaviours, which turn out additionally to be genetically programmed, everywhere in the animal kingdom. They can appear in the form of a pause, of blocked time – a sort of ‘time for comprehending’, to use Jacques Lacan’s expression – or the time of the palaver, of the festival or the sacrifice. A ‘spectacular’ example: the courting ritual of the peacock who holds the hen at a distance for a period of time through captivation: she pecks at an imaginary food at the focal point determined by the slightly tilted concavity of his black hole tail. What can be happening in that period of time? Although the existence of orgasm amongst animals is sometimes denied, isn’t that what it is a matter of here? An orgasm at a distance that attaches itself to the couple relation by means of an image and which probably triggers the hormonal components necessary to the sequences of events that follow. Biochemical causality, the survival strategies of the species, the ruses and improvisations of desire overlap each other incessantly in the same rhizome. One can only find one’s way here on condition that one determines one’s point of view, the kind of assemblage of enunciation one is seeking to account for here, at the outset. Whilst selective pressure brings to the fore and automates certain processes, it repels others, which as a consequence can only subsist in a trace state. This doesn’t in the slightest prohibit the existence of marginal assemblages which are trying to ‘find themselves’, seeking their own rules. And equally nor does it prohibit the deployment of a whole economy of desire marked by the same freedom as that which characterises humans face-to-face, with the consciousness of finitude and death.
It would be absurd to separate human desire radically from that of the animal, as certain structuralist psychoanalysts do, on the pretext of the privileged support of language and the Law. The ritualistic fascination of animal desire depends just as much on semiotic constraints that are adorned by ostentatious expenditure and gratuitous games. But will we find the same kind of individuated assemblage of enunciation or the same function of signifying subjectivation with the animal? Will we find the same sort of human politics of the abolition of desire, of black holes or aphanisis (to borrow Ernest Jones’s expression) amongst birds, for example? One frequently sees sudden reversals of behaviour amongst them (during fitful nuptial displays, in aggressive attitudes, rituals of submission, simulated grooming, etc.). It is as if behavioural sequences detached themselves in indivisible pieces, that have to be taken or left in their entirety, because of the ‘too’ territorialised character of their assemblage. In truth, one will find this same mode of semiotisation en bloc amongst humans – when someone, who has been interrupted accidentally whilst reciting something, has to ‘start all over again’ – but the blocs are less delimited, more open, as if they were chipped. It seems that this difference is particularly accentuated with regard to human assemblages of desire, which seem to be much more closely fitted to a certain kind of black hole impasse than with animals, one that can go as far as ‘apathy’ or even neurotic disturbances. Without even going as far as the ‘pathological’ excesses of myaesthenia, or neuroses, with their cortege of inhibitions, vertigo, somatisation, inhibition – the infinite looking backwards of the obsessive, the semiotic impasse of the phobic … – it is obvious that in the capitalist social field, human desire usually ceases to be a productive pause, a ‘time for comprehending’ and that its black hole micropolitics, at least on the scale of the individual condition, is well and truly stuck in a desperate contemplation of its futility.3 It is only on a much bigger scale that this heap of empty consciousnesses might succeed in launching super-deterritorialised modes of semiotisation, such as speech, writing, religious or scientific symbolism, that can create the conditions for a reversal of the situation. But in the last resort it is only on the scale of revolutionary – or perhaps one ought instead to say ‘trans-revolutionary’ – collective assemblages that this excess of consciential deterritorialisation, this detachment of every thing, this de-short-circuiting of the real and of desire, can produce a new reality and a new desire. What separates the Umwelt of the animal from that of the human is thus perhaps the fact that for the latter, the diverse black holes carried by components of semiotisation resonate together more easily, because of the starting up of super-deterritorialised semiotic machines, which thus facilitate a general translateabilisation of all components – at the cost of unbearable anxiety, solitude, and guilt. Thus a central subjectivity, a grand, fascinating hollow whose focal point – unlike the peacock’s tail – is everywhere at once, like a laser beam of deterritorialisation, taking control of, hierachising, ‘managing’4 all inter-assemblage relations, all residual territorialities, so as to extinguish and recuperate all possibilities in their nascent state. The animal world, with less difficulty, doubtless, avoided black hole effects and arranges them in a non-rhizomatic, arborescent way. (From this point of view, Tinbergen’s hierarchy might be considered an anthropocentric projection.) Certainly, starting from this kind of central machine of consciential subjectivation, human semiotisation seems to have multiplied its powers of intervention infinitely and to have created exceptional possibilities for human survival, through a sort of headlong flight outside the ‘usual’ evolutionary contexts. But it can just as easily be reduced to totalitarian systems of all kind, which (if nothing prevents them) tend to make the fate of industrial societies more closely approximate that of ant societies – production for production’s sake, generalised gulags, etc.
We know that in general in the animal world, collective assemblages of territorialisation bring into play marking ‘techniques’ that are very different from one another – markers of smell, with excrement or special secretions, distancing, through ‘territorial song’, intimidating sexual displays, etc. Considered separately, these diverse intra-assemblage components seem only to arise from innate codings, functioning in the same way as reflexes or taxes. Anticipating an example to which we will return at length, it thus seems that the function of the highly coloured plumage of zebra finches studied by K. Immelman5 can be reduced to the inhibition of relations of proximity and to the ordering of the distribution of individuals in a given space. (In the case of the white birds of the same species, one effectively sees a collapse of this critical distance and a strengthening of groups.) But let us now examine a certain number of ‘methods’ for the deterritorialisation of inter-assemblage relations that allow us to glimpse the ‘play’ that is possible, the opening, the lines of flight, on which selective pressure will ‘bet’ (without, we repeat, any idea of progress being associated with this evolution, which can just as easily lead to a totalitarian specialisation of roles, of the sexes, of species …).
Let’s return to an example of symbiosis made popular by Remy Chauvin, one which has been established between certain species of wasp and orchid.6 We know that in simulating a sexual act with the olfactory and morphological lure constituted by the orchid’s rostellum, pollen is freed up and attaches to the wasp, which then transports it to other plants, thereby ensuring the reproduction of this species. The set of systems of transcoding that allows this back and forth between the plant and the animal kingdoms seems completely closed to any individual experimentation, any learning, any innovation. Selective pressure has retained encounters which were perhaps originally only accidental and improvised, sequences that it has succeeded in systematising, in controlling, on the basis of an abstract machinism closed on itself, stratified in the genome of the species, which ontogeny will only need to decipher and trace out mechanically. But one would be wrong, to our mind, to reduce such inter-assemblage systems to a simple ‘commonality’ of a certain quantity of information carried by the genes of each species respectively. How, then, is one to apprehend the passages between the innate and the acquired, the acquired and the experimental, between biological encoding, ecological adaptation and collective semiotisation? In fact, as we will try to demonstrate on the basis of the following examples, even (and perhaps above all) when inter-assemblage relations make such ‘mechanised’ encoding components intervene, they give a bit of ‘play’ to the intra-assemblage relations, they favour the appearance of new dimensions in the environment, they trigger processes of specialisation, of the ‘contraction’ of certain systems of coding or semiotisation, they create the conditions for an acceleration of deterritorialising innovations. In short, they open up new possibilities. Doubtless there is nothing to be gained by reducing the symbiosis between the wasp and the orchid to a simple linking together of two heterogeneous worlds. This encounter is certainly productive of what we have called elsewhere a ‘surplus value of code’, that is to say, a result that exceeds the simple totalisation of the codings in questions (the sexual goal of the orchid plus the feeding goal of the wasp). The new symbiotic assemblage functions as a mutant wasp-orchid species, evolving on its own count, redistributing genetic and semiotic components taken from both original species (morphological, physiological, ethological, ecological components, semiotisation of visual, olfactory, sexual lures, etc.), according to its own norms. A new evolutionary line of flight is thus created on the bio-ecological rhizome, which, moreover, finds itself hidden, gridded, by the genetic codes that limit the affection to species and phylogenetically circumscribed species.
Only a constructive – one is tempted to say ‘constructivist’ – micropolitics of assemblages of desire and social assemblages, which sets out to discernabilise the deterritorialising components ‘of passage’ between assemblages or the components that are ‘predisposed’ to such a transversality function, in whatever domain that may be, of thwarting the too solid oppositions between the innate and the acquired, the biochemical and the ‘adaptive’, the individual and the social, the economic and the cultural, etc. To be sure, a destratifying transversality of this kind between behavioural assemblages is always found, to one degree or another, at every level of the animal phylum, but it is evidently easier to locate it in the most ‘evolved’ animals. Let us consider, for example, three types of social assemblage amongst baboons and vervets, which principally put sexual components and territorialisation components in the dominant position:
aAn assemblage that particularly concerns the hierarchical relations internal to a group, fixing the place and the rights of dominant and marginal males, females and the young: ethologists underline the fact that the internal disputes that the functioning of this assemblage is likely to entail must be distinguished from external territorial disputes. As Eibl-Eibesfeldt, from whom we take this example, writes7 ‘disputes of a hierarchical order are not linked to territorial possession, rivals of different hierarchical ranks unite in a common action against foreign aggressors.’
bAn assemblage for the collective defence of the territory: certain male baboons act as sentries on the periphery of their group, turning their backs on them, whilst quite conspicuously displaying their highly coloured sexual organs (sometimes, when an intruder approaches, their penises become erect and rhythmically animated). But it has been observed that this collective assemblage only functions in relation to neighbouring fighters of the same species.
cAn individuated flight assemblage: in the case in which predators appear ‘each baboon is free again and flees as discretely as possible’.
The collective semiotisation of the defence of the territory is thus connected to ‘originally’ intra-assemblage sexual components and to ‘originally’ inter-assemblage faciality-corporeality components (the decisive role played by the fact of looking into another’s eyes as a trigger for aggression or submission, amongst monkeys). Other ‘formulae’ for other animal species demonstrate an inversion of this sex-aggression vector, in which simulated aggression becomes a component in seduction rituals. Whatever the case may be, one can already admit, against the good sense of those who only tolerate strict classifications, that the penis isn’t just related to a stratum of the organism or a reproductive function, nor is the hostile grimace solely related to a certain state of social tension and a communication function. Both function as components of passage between particular assemblages – the sexual organ, in reality the image of the sexual organ, only intervenes at the level of individuated assemblages, as a sort of ‘survival discriminator’. The sexual organ and faciality ought not to be considered as part objects, in the Kleinian sense or as objects a little in the Lacanian sense, but as operators, as concrete machines for the collective and individual semiotisation of a certain exterior. They have become bridges or tunnels of deterritorialisation that articulate the assemblages of internal hierarchy, assemblages of collective defence (the external demarcation of a territory, the limit or border beyond which collective semiotisation ceases, and there is a black hole effect) and diverse individuated assemblages like those of flight.
Imprinting by the image of a congener (or accidental imprinting by an intrusive faciality) during a sensitive period can only be dissociated from and opposed to the diverse modes of learning that accompany it in the context of experimental protocols that disorganise the entangling of behavioural components.8 A study that endeavoured not to crush the rhizome of socio-biological assemblages of animals would, in our opinion, make it possible to talk about ‘imprinting choices’ that coexist with ‘genetic choices’, ‘learning choices’ and ‘experimental choices’. Happily, though, ethologists have not fallen into the [trap] of most ethnologists, who divide up their ‘terrain’ into clearly separated parts (kinship relations, analysis of myths, politics, economics, etc.). And whatever the psychoanalytic temptations of some of them – in the domain of imprinting in particular, which they often compare to the ‘childhood fixations’ of Freudian psychogenesis, the idea of a signifying structuralism that would have to account for all behaviour still hasn’t made an appearance. (However, one can easily imagine an ‘interpretation’ of so-called ‘forced copulation’ amongst chimpanzees in terms of more or less repressed homosexual drives.) But in this domain the facts have not yet been submerged by theories, and complex behaviours such as submission rituals and courtship displays must be inscribed on the rhizome of innateness, imprinting, learning and individual initiatives. War and sex here still participate too heavily in a common economy of desire to be able to be separated into antagonistic drives.9
Is it really such a paradox to aim to inscribe components that arise from domains that are apparently as heterogeneous as those of:
•the individual, with its biological rhythms, its reflexes, its conditioning, its improvisation, its dysfunctioning;
•the group, with its rituals, its collective movements, its ecological regulations, its modes of initiation and learning;
•the species, with its genetic mutations and adaptations, its demarcation techniques,10 its symbolic options, etc.
on the same ‘rhizome of choices’? Is affirming that a finality, an abstract machinism, a ‘thought’, if you wish, presides over the evolution of each branch of the animal phylum really such a paradox? Not a thought that is assembled individually, of course, but an n-dimensional thought in which everything thinks at the same time, individuals as well as groups, the ‘chemical’ as well as the ‘chromosome’, and the biosphere. Despite much methodological reluctance their conflict in the living rhizome of animal behaviour actually leads a certain number of primatologists to some ‘painful reappraisals’. To account for the facts observed, they have thus been led to hypothesise the existence of ‘altruistic behaviour’ amongst primates, a collective behaviour, which ‘implies a sacrifice in which the individual “renounces” its own opportunities to benefit in favour of those of a parent’.11 In other words, the molecular phylum of genes that moves across individuals, species, and milieus, is substituted for molar causalities, which imply individuals and clearly delimited functions.
Freedom is not just freedom of the mind but also the rhizomatic play that can appear at the level of any of the components of an assemblage. There is a ‘grace’ for the nervous system or the digestive system, the existence of which is clearly perceived a contrario with tics and stomach aches! A semiotisation that has the task of generic regulation or that is automated by harmonious learning is evidently worth more than a perpetual questioning or a cascade of blockages that gnaws away at an intentional arc. ‘Machinic freedom’ begins at the moment that things which are boring or without interest can be accomplished as if ‘by themselves’ and where one can focus one’s capacities for life and for semiotisation on what moves, what creates, what changes the world and humans, that is to say, on individual or collective choices of desire, without falling into a generalised and blind automatism. The opposition between a pure individuated signifying subjectivity and a collective biologico-economic destiny that consciousness – class consciousness, for example – would have to take charge of from the outside, is not tenable: just like the opposition between freedom and innateness, it plays the game of power formations, which use it in order to select creative assemblages. Neither the absolute deterritorialisation of pure consciousness of self, nor the automatism of an ant society, freedom consists in playing and thwarting the quanta of deterritorialisation – refrains, faciality, etc. – borne by the ensemble of components of an assemblage, whether they are material or desiring, individual or group, public or private. And the fact that the obsessive cautiousness of researchers, who above all else are concerned about falling into paradoxes that lead them to confuse ‘mind’ and ‘matter’, only drags along with it old dogmatic conflicts, ought not to mask the entirely actual political stakes of themes that they refuse to call into question and which we have previously evoked with regard to the false dilemmas between centralism and spontaneity, superstructure and infrastructure, public life and home life, conscious thought for the other and private unconscious. Because no struggle for freedom can be conceived today that does not engage the socius and the private realm at the same time, the ‘mental’ and the body, the economic and unexchangeable desire, the unconscious and deliberate programming …