The War Machine

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The War Machine
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As part of our engagement with the world we as
human beings spend much of our lives limiting and
constraining our experiences, our sensations, our
encounters, our knowledges, through processes of
repetition and developing habits, that allow us
to approach these engagements without thinking
and without challenging our own particular
perspectives. It is a tactic of survival at times
at other times a tactic that captures us and
therefore stops us from developing new
perspectives, new approaches new encounters with
the worlds we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit
us.
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Thinking might be understood as those moments
when we encounter something for the first time
and we become part of a relationship or
connection.
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What would it mean if we thought of ourselves as
processes connected with other processes,
entangled flows and forces rather than things
defined, categorised, limited, separated,
identified?
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What would it mean if we didnt invest quite so
heavily in quantification and measurement and
representation and identification and offered
more value in our response to the world in terms
of qualities, difference, and process?
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What would it be if we thought that there was a
possibility that we were connected to asignifying
processes operating as important shaping forces
creating and mutating through our significations?
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Deleuze is considering these issues and is driven
by a desire to create new images of thought?
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What might some of his tactics be to explore
these new images? How can we change our approach
to thinking, our approach to containment or
capture or categorisation?
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What strategies can we employ to rethinking our
thinking?
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Develop new concepts that allow us to reconfigure
our thinking. Utilise new modes of creation,
distribution and connection that allow new
combinations, new connections and a different
awareness of the affects of our
encounters. Examine the micro levels of our
encounters, the particular and singular events,
rather than continually seeking to delimit or
contain or reduce our experiences on the macro
levels. To experience these different
possibilities we need to experiment, ask
different questions, play, risk, and finally,
believe that different approaches are actually
useful for us in terms of how we encounter the
world and how the world might encounter us.
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An array of concepts that Deleuze uses to help in
his own reconfiguration of thinking can be
understood around the idea of mutation or
becoming.
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He establishes concepts that play with the ideas
of capture or containment and that seek to to
destabilise their limits to show that there
remains possibilites for new ways of thinking. A
creativity of thinking that mutates the limits,
allows passageways beyond the borders, wormholes
to new ideas. A creativity and poetics of
thinking rather than a rigidification and
correctness of thinking.
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State apparatus and the war machine Striated
spaces and smooth spaces Sedantry and
nomadic Laminar and hydraulic Macro and
micro Royal science minor science Transcedent and
immanent Teleological and emmergent
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These confluence of concepts which in themselves
are attractors for other concepts map a rhizome
of connections and disconnections while at the
same time being shaped by processes of channeling
power.
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The organised, the formed, the actual, the
separate, the composed, the repeatable, the
identifiable, the quantifiable, the meaningful,
the habitual, the represented, the laminar, the
established, the boundried, the channelled, the
stable, the closed, the stopped, being, sedantry,
extensive, macropolitical, discursive, the
same the stratified State space Royal
science Macro Sendantry identity
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Limitless, open, dynamic, changing, fluid,
flowing, unorganised, virtual, multiple,
changing, hydraulic, qualitative, asignifying,
interconnected, speeding, affective, becoming,
verb, nomadic, intensive, micropolitical,
performative, singular, catalytic,
difference Smooth space Micro Nomadic War
machine minor
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Although they are mapped as though there is a
binary differentiation these concepts work
alongside each and within each other. Maybe you
could suggest that they are folded together
rather than operating on an either or good, bad
structuring arrangement. They work with each
other as a process of sedimentation and erosion
and re-sedimentation and erosion.
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The war machine or metamorphosis machine A
metamorphosis machine would then be one that does
not simply support the repetition of the same but
rather engenders the production of something
altogether different (Patton 2000 110). A
metamorphosis machines leverages coonections
against apparatuses of capture or domination
(kanarinka, 200510). Patton, P. (2000) Deleuze
and the Political,London and New York
Routledge) Kararinka (2005) http//www.turbulence.
org/studios/kanarinka accessed 9th October 2006.
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Media and cartography becoming
cartographic Generating new considerations of
both, new connections, new captures, new
coceptualisations, new tactics, new approaches,
new catalysts. Utilising the war machine to
produce a thinking about the media and
cartography as something altogether different.
The mutation of the ordered, accepted, habituated
system of meanings. This extends beyond simply a
new conceptualisation of these connections but
allows for a consideration of their processes of
affecting and shaping the modalities of thinking
and the modalities of reception. An
understanding that the encounters between media
and cartography generate attractors that offer us
experiences that are new, are different, are
multiple and catalytic. The operation of smooth
space within struated space but also a different
stratification or organisation of the
potentialities of striated space or the space of
organisation. Creating events rather than
capturing things.
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What other conceptual fields might we intersect
to generate different images of the media?
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A generation of ideas or capturing new concepts
from the smooth spaces of cartomedia. What is the
point of conceptualising through installation
practices? How can we use these practices or this
approach to generate new connections new
concepts? playing with the ideas of capture or
containment and that seek to to destabilise their
limits to show that there remains possibilites
for new ways of conceptualising. Challenging the
territory through a deterritorialisation and the
a reterritorialisation. Escaping the borders of
capture to exist in smooth space and then a new
return to a new capture.
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The first assignment was designed for us to see
the difficulties that occurs when we try to
capture a perceived smooth space and then have to
constrain this experience in a presentation mode
that we usually respond to habitually. It was
noticable that most people stated that the
engagement was frustration or worse even boring
because there had to be a point, a goal or a
desired outcome, that the experience of
connecting elements with other elements was not
fulfilling or maybe not reassuring enough. I
hope that at least we realised the challenge of
thinking differently of breaking out of old
images of thinking old expectations.
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The second assignment was designed for us to
think about possible concepts that might be
useful, alone or in a consortium with others, so
that we could begin to bridge or transition
ourselves from expected ways of understanding the
media experience to different ways because of the
collision between cartography as a field and
media as a field. A speculative folding of media
and cartography into each other so that something
else, a possible new way of thinking media a
becoming cartographic might result. Again the
experience is fraught and difficult because of
the forces of habit and expectation and the
shaping of our discussion through established
presentation modes that have their own rules, own
habits own affects. In class we examined some of
the ideas of cartography and discovered that
there was a whole movement challenging
traditional approaches to map making and the
understanding of what maps might and could be.
This challenge comes from what has been named as
critical cartography which realises that maps are
not necessarily connected to real locations as
some representation but that they are events in
themselves about power relationships rather than
specific objectifiable locations. This new
critique of cartography an examination of the
assumptions of the field, the conditions of the
creatiuon of maps has been a useful platform
for our own understandings of the possibilities
of mapping practices as they might connect with
media practices.
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The third assignment is a process of developing
some of the ideas that you might have thought
useful as a trigger for questions, attitudes,
pathways and then capture these as well as
exploit these in a more active participation with
yourselves and mediation processes. This
mediation needs to be a recapturing of these
concepts and this recapturing as part of the
processes needs to allow those engaing with your
approach to be able to engae with your approach.
The challenge here then is to open out to new
images of thinking and expression of these images
but keep open a bridge to offer pathways for
those of us who have not been able to break out
of the old ways of thinking the old
responses. Certainly the first step for ourselves
is to establish new images of thinking new
conceptualisations of the intersecting of media
and cartography, new stratifications of smooth
space, but at the same time we need to be able to
share these ideas so that others might also be
convinced that our new images are useful for them.
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We are operating war machines or metamorphosis
machines to mutate our old concepts of media to
escape from the capture of these concepts and our
habits of understanding to revitalise our
connection with the media by becoming
cartographic.