Why distinguish between the machinic and the organic?
If the machine is a contrivance of power; one which enables the possession of power through devices, stratagems, and tricks; then is it not an engine of decisive resolutions?
Whence the culture of decision? Is it only organic? Or is every so-called ‘natural event’, a ‘decision’? Are ‘natural laws’, ‘decisions’?
Because, are not all of these, arrangements and machinations?
A decision, is a determination.
Preoccupying itself with the culture of decision, the contemporary philosophical scene’s enthusiasm for those, like Laruelle, who return to the comforts of its metaphysical habitat, can be seen perhaps as a nostalgia for conventional modes of determination, the wish to escape the ever more tangible possibilities of synergy that are in play. It is an anxiety of both power and understanding, as those occur in fixated forms. The irony is that such fixations are mechanical, ‘machinic’; traditions, habits, are ‘machines’. On this basis, organic economies, insofar as they are habitual economies, or economies of habit, likewise, can be said to be machines.
If decisional enthusiasm is the anxious nostalgia of and for determination, what else could this be, but the Occidental android’s desire to objectify, according to the metaphysics of machine?
The denial of lack, is the denial of desire. If the ‘becoming’ of any process or tendency requires the concept of need or desire to explain transitions between initially posited and alleged forms or states, this of course implies that those forms or states are not complete in themselves, that they are lacking, and that this lack powers transformation. Of course, this metaphysical scheme is contingent on the initial positings of ‘forms or states’ that it simply assumes. But given such assumption, the calculus of presence and absence, regarding forms and states, is unavoidable, at the level of their transactions.
To view this metaphysical mechanism of becoming only through its presences as configured by the substance of desire, whilst denying lack (absence), as both Deleuze and Lyotard do, in their libidinal philosophies, uses the conventional intuitions and common sense habits of substantial presence to elide the ‘negativity’ of absence implicit in any objective metaphysics. This partiality to the positivity of substantial presence, is bought at the expense of both; a loss of negative perspective; and of
the systematic and objectifying origination giving rise to the categories of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, in the first place.
The concern is not so much with Deleuze and Lyotard’s libidinal investigations, in themselves, and the contexts which they were addressing, but rather, in the potential appropriations to which they had been subjected since then. Whilst, for me, their works are brilliant openings out of constrictive tendencies, it seems to me that the areas, zones, and territories, they opened up have merely become the sites of constricted and closured nostalgic development. They have become guidebooks of a continuing positivist instrumentalisation, which to some degree, their texts can’t be said to not entirely support.