§97. A Magical Formula
Deleuze revisits these arguments from Difference and Repetition in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), with his coauthor Felix Guattari. While profoundly recast to support a host of new concepts, the later work is a consistent development of earlier themes of pluralism and radical empiricism.
Take for example their concept of anorganic life, something they compare to the flow of metal, which they say is “neither a thing nor an organism but a body without organs.” They are not saying the metal is alive, or a case of inorganic life. The flow of metal is like life in being a movement in advance of form, a flowing body without naturally demarcated organs or parts. The difference is that the forms metal takes are not viable individuals, being artifactual forms endlessly changing, not organisms in evolution. The metal is always already everything it can be. Even forms no smith has made are in the present competence of the metal, unlike a biological individual, which is never all that it can be until it is no more.37The geological flow of metals in the earth stands to the series of actually manufactured forms, as the species of organisms in evolution stand to—what? Deleuze and Guattari say anorganic life, a non-organized, non- speciated, pre-individual vitality, Bergson's elan vital. Anorganic life is the vital virtual tendency of which the terrestrial evolution and proliferation of species are traces. “Not all Life is confined to the organic strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against itself in order to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more powerful for being anorganic.” Words of a sober biologist are unintentionally apropos: “Life is older than organisms” Organisms, whether species or individuals, are “a diversion of life” whereas life itself, the vital tendency, “is anorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs” This body without organs stands to speciated individuals as the flow of metal to smithed forms.
Its vital flow is a tendency and a duration, an active interval, an unfinished event, a vital impetus expressed not in species but in phylogenesis, not in individuals but in ontogenesis, not in finished forms but in local becoming.38The authors equate anorganic life with their major concept of deterrito- rialization. This is their word for any element's tendency to take flight down a line from one assemblage and function to something different. To explain the concept's derivation requires a word on their distinction between molecular and molar. Usually the distinction is quantitative, a few molecules on one side, and moles of them, grams, or kilos on the other, but Deleuze and Guattari apply the distinction qualitatively to the difference between flow, which is molecular, and segmentation, which is molar, referring to divisions of facilitation and impediment that channel flows. A molecular event is local, without reference to a center or standard, but with molar organization, segmentation brings effects of an entire network to bear locally.
It is a thesis of A Thousand Plateaus that molar organization is always undergoing deterritorialization, becoming molecular. The tendency of assembled forces to fly apart requires constant counteraction by normalizing, order-restoring molar forces. By its dynamism, flow is inherently deterritorializing, tending to swamp the normative segmentation enforced by any durable assemblage, requiring more and more coding—over-coding. A relentless struggle ensues between flow and form, molecular and molar, assemblage and deterritorialization, to contain and escape containment. Typically, deterritorialization provokes reterritorialization, the rogue element eventually captured by a new assemblage, though Deleuze and Guattari also write of an absolute deterritorialization, a deterritorialization that eludes every effort of territory to capture it. It is this absolute deterritorialization which they identify with anorganic life.
Absolute deterritorialization is not a passage from formed matter to (new) formed matter; it is all flow, all force, virtual intensity, the vital tendency of which the history of life is the trace, a dynamism no molar stratum can capture. Ever not quite! Something always escapes, the constitutive “and” that reduces ontology to a stammer. Anorganic life, understood as absolute de- territorialization, is their gloss on Bergson's elan vital, his name for the tendency of which life's species are the traces. He also thought this tendency is the matrix of tendency generally. Tendency enters matter with life, and not independently. A stone is always already all it can be, and changes only when moved by external force, whereas organisms, no matter how simple, tend, and do not mechanically repeat the past. Bergson stressed temporal interpenetration. Time has no parts, so the least change anywhere qualitatively changes everything everywhere, not instantaneously but eventually. The least change in any milieu (deterritorialization) must solicit the tendency of every organ in every organism to change. You cannot alter a milieu without changing the tendency of its every part.39
The tendency of life is the being of tendency, its virtual puissance, pressing for actuality, being not an event in time but the very happening of time, the being of time. Deleuze and Guattari write of “the magic formula we all seek—pluralism = monism.” They find their magic in a One that is originally many, the one-becoming of an original manyness, a qualitative multiplicity, which is time (duree) as Bergson understands it, namely, as duration, an interval of bottomless heterogeneity, originally many, originally different, in advance of repetition, invariance, and “beings.” “Duration is everything,” Deleuze explains. “We are dealing with a monism that retains all the powers of plurality.” The oneness of an infinitely heterogeneous duration is a qualitative multiplicity, an original many, obscurely but distinctly distinguished in advance of repetition or identity.40
Anorganic life may be another word for what James refers to when he says, “Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it” Again, “Reality/alls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates.” When relations are empirically real and logically external, the becoming of things (“pure experience”) is prior to all being or form, just as anorganic vitality is an obscure and distinct tendency prior to organisms.
Original becoming is not just multiple or originally many; it is vital, an elan vital, the deterritorializing “impetus” of anorganic life, of which form and species are a residue.41Nominalism is completely undone. Actual individuals are an outcome of a vast process and not the ground floor ontology of nature. It is undone by a kind of vitalism, which is not usual in empirical philosophy, certainly not in modern, epistemological empiricism. It is perhaps latent in ancient medical empiricism, which lacked motive and experience to work up this much philosophy. But pressing for a more consistent empiricism leads James, Bergson, Dewey, and Deleuze to the vital, the virtual, and tending, because from nowhere else can we understand the empirical genesis of the individual.