Deleuze 2: Desiring Machines
Part of a conversation in a separate blog with two colleagues, Mary and CeCe.
First a note to you, CeCe. I’m writing this little series on Deleuze for my own pleasure. Maybe I’ll continue, maybe I won’t. Maybe you’ll read them, maybe you won’t. Maybe they’ll be a part of a process that leads to a book (written by me, or by both of us), and maybe they won’t.
This business about Deleuze has been an ongoing and unreachable and enticing irritant for me for years and, for the next little while at least, I want to give it another crack.
Deleuze and Guattari begin Anti-Oedipus with a section called ‘The Desiring Machines’. Everywhere, they say, it is machines we see, machines producing flows and machines interrupting flows. We are machines, our organs are machines, our groups and nations are machines, trees are machines, as are leaves and trunks and forests. The planet is a machine, and the universe. Everywhere there are machines, machines plugged into other machines, desiring-machines needing other desiring-machines.
Jung used to talk about the circumambulation of the self. I love the word ‘circumambulation’. Ambling around a thing, looking at it from different vantage points and in different moods. Letting thoughts arise from the process. That’s what I’m wanting to do with this little series on Deleuze and English teaching.
One machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: “and then …” “and then …” This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast - the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. (p. 5)
I had this kind of picture in my mind when I was working on that first draft of our story ‘The Poetry Lesson’. The poem was a desiring-machine, the result of Auden (another desiring-machine) directing flows into words and lines and stanzas (each a machine, interrupting Auden’s flows and producing flows of its own), which then entered other machines (teacher, students) and mixed with other flows produced by other machines (the room, Scott’s memories of his dying grandfather, Andrew’s heavy heart having read his girlfriend’s text, the teacher Jess’s ambitions for the lesson), and so on without end).
Countless binary flows and interruptions in every direction.
A web is an inadequate metaphor. It’s too static. It’s the movement in every direction, the flows produced by desire of one form or another, that is the central constituent of the drama.
What is primary in the scene, what exerts the greatest influence, what characterises its essential nature or being, is not the teacher. It’s not the curriculum. It’s not the students. It’s not the outcomes. It’s not the socio-economic characteristic of the school. It’s not the teacher’s expectations or the parents’ ambitions. It’s not the temperature inside the classroom or whether the students are allowed to have their phones in class. What is primary is no single thing. It’s each one of these things operating in conjunction with all the others. It’s the couplings of machines and flows of desire.
It has taken me years to come to terms with the use of the term ‘machines’ in this context. I’m closer to accepting it now. It puts the emphasis on what is flowing, enlivening, being blocked, on what is complicatingly animating. It allows for the unconscious and the unseen. It reminds us as teachers that while it’s necessary as part of our machinic function to direct flows, it’s also necessary to allow flows. It reminds us that the flows are not just the result of our conscious will or the school’s stated aims.