A Guide to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception Book

A conversation is never between two people but rather between a multitude, a peoples; a whole geography of regions, territories and movements. So it becomes that the point of a question, properly speaking, is to get out of the question. The only useful questions serve as stimuli: stimuli to movements and becomings, lines of flight and of action; and best be clear: there is no history in becomings, only geography, nomadism. Nomads know nothing of 'history', or even 'future', everything is played out in the present-becoming. Memories themselves do not belong to the realm of the past; the unconscious has nothing to do with childhood memories, but it does have something to do with a child-becoming: a double capture and a-parallel evolution that sees each drawn in to the regimes of signs of one another. 

Is there a certain combination of flows, intensities and affects that would make the horse bare its teeth and little Hans show his peepee? There are infinite bodies without organs and likewise an infinitude of concrete assemblages that are constantly being actualised, but there are nonetheless specific bodies without organs, marked by specific regimes of signs that do trace a broken line through world-history and become actualised in concrete assemblages. Regimes of signs are constituted by particular populations on a body without organs; they demarcate certain becomings, transitions, gradients, combinations of flows, emissions and absorptions of particles. Anorexia is a regime of signs, but so is bureaucracy and even capitalism. Sadism and masochism: these regimes attest to the proper use of the proper noun; Felix Guattari does not designate a global person or subject but rather something that is happening; Parkinson's disease is another example, even when the name used is that of the diagnoser of the symptoms.

Desire has nothing to do with subjects or even objects; "there is no subject unless there is repression". Desire is the set of passive syntheses, the immanent field of flows of energy and bodies. It is the Will to Power, a will to life that vitalises all life, but that also goes beyond even this: that interpenetrates organic and non-organic phenomena to create an entire plane of immanence. The plane is not pre-existent, it is created. We must each of us construct with meticulous prudence our own immanent fields of desire. Desire is not spontaneist but rather constructivist; we must bring forth desire into the world. It is not about pleasure or even sexuality, these flows are already always in combination with other flows. Where there is ascesis there is flourishing desire.

We must be the most prudent of experimenters, we the multiple. How do we carry ourselves along lines of flight without destroying ourselves in the process? Why are the deaths of so many visionaries so tragic? Virginia Woolf's suicide, Fitzgerald's alcoholism (Nietzsche's breakdown and isolation?). The destructive tendency of nomadism will always come up against the self-preservation of the state; all war-wachines have their victims. We must have the prudence of men of the line, the thoughtfulness and organised flight of experimenters.

There is no desire for revolution, or even for power, to oppress or be oppressed. There is only revolutionary desire, desire that exerts power or that submits to it, desire that oppresses or that constitutes its own oppression. All collectives, whether individual or group, already contain these lines of desire crossing each other, encountering each other and getting entangled. There is no dualism, properly speaking, between the transcendent plane of organisation and the plane of immanence: all collectives are constituted by these entangled lines and planes in their nature as living multiplicities. A so-called desire for revolution is already fabricated after-the-fact, already victim to the traps of the state, already transcendentalised. Again, this doesn't mean that desire is spontaneist: the plane of desire and the regimes of signs must be organised, intimately experimented with and upon, schizoanalysed and micro-politicised.