ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 10 number 3 december 2005

Not man as the king of creation, but rather as

the being who is in intimate contact with the

profound life of all forms or all types of

beings, who is responsible for even the stars

and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an

organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree

into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun

into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the

machines of the universe.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 4

i introduction

The aim of this article is to outline the various

aspects of machinic thought relevant to the

theorising of environmental problems. Whilst

there is a considerable literature devoted to

applying poststructuralist (as well as postmodern-

ist) thought to environmental dilemmas,1 there is,

somewhat incredibly, very little work examining

the environmental implications of two of the

most important poststructuralist thinkers of

the last three decades – Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari.2 This may simply be due to the fact that

Deleuze, but less so Guattari, spend very little time

actually talking about environmental problems

(at least in the orthodox sense). Or it may be due to

the dense and frustratingly elusive nature of their

work. Whatever the reason, the prime objective of

the present article is to demonstrate that Deleuze

and Guattari are highly relevant to environmental

matters.

On a first count, and in the tradition of

Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari make thinking

an inherently ethical project – meaning that when

one thinks one is in fact never ‘‘One’’ (a rational,

independent subject) but a site always already

infused by multiple forces and trajectories

(or machines, see below for clarification of this

concept).

There are no individual statements, there never

are. Every statement is the product of a

machinic assemblage, in other words, of collec-

tive agents of enunciation (take ‘‘collective

agents’’ to mean not peoples or societies but

multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre)

does not designate an individual: it is on the

contrary when the individual opens up to

the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the

outcome of the most severe operation of

depersonalization, that he or she acquires his

or her true proper name. The proper name is

the instantaneous apprehension of a multi-

plicity. The proper name is the subject of a

pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field

if intensity.3

There can be, therefore, no proper or authentic

voice of/for the environment. Further to this,

mark halsey

ECOLOGYANDMACHINIC THOUGHTnietzsche, deleuze,guattari

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/05/030033^23 � 2005 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/09697250500423017

33

Deleuze and Guattari argue that the only ‘‘true’’

form of thought is that which breaks with

orthodox or traditional understandings of what

it is to think. This orthodox understanding of

thinking is termed by Deleuze the image of

thought (and later in conjunction with Guattari

the strata). The image of thought – the discursive

structuring and limiting of what can be said and

done – rigidly marks out the thresholds dividing

self from other, inside from outside, the familiar

from the unfamiliar, and, importantly, the eco-

logically significant from the ecologically expend-

able. On this basis, disengaging the image of

thought – or ‘‘the figure in which doxa is

universalized by being elevated to the rational

level’’ – becomes, for Deleuze and Guattari, the

key to rewriting the world, and thereby socio-

environmental issues, anew.4 But it is their

sustained capacity to contort and invent the

world through conceptual phenomena that

makes them integral to theorising environmental

dilemmas. Whether it be the concept of socius or

assemblage or that of the plane of consistency or

the fold, there is something in their work (both

independently and collectively) that provides the

basis from which to think about environmental

harm and regulation in quite different ways than

has hitherto been the case.

On a second count, the work of Deleuze and

Guattari provides a means for keeping pace with

the mobility of environmental problems by

considering Nature and systems of environmental

regulation as always already discursively produced

and contested. They make no grand claims

concerning ‘‘solutions’’ or the precise conditions

for long-term ‘‘ecological sustainability.’’ Indeed,

terms such as these should be subjected to

rigorous interrogation and perhaps ultimately

effaced from the lexicon of environmental

struggle. In a sense, it may be better to do to

Society and Nature what Nietzsche did to God and

Man. The claims, therefore, made by Deleuze and

Guattari are decidedly modest.

In the remainder of this paper I want to do

two things. The first – foreign as it may seem –

involves very briefly surveying the significance of

Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought. For in many ways

Nietzsche was the thinker who provided the bridge

between the processual/machinic philosophies

formulated in Greek thought (predominantly

Ionian cosmology) and the poststructuralist/

postmodernist enterprises emanating from France

during the 1960s and beyond with such figures as

Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida. The second and

more extensive task will be to introduce several

of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts in order to

offer an account of how they might be put to work

with respect to environmental problems.

ii precedents to machinic thought

To think machinically is to view the world in terms

of an incessant mutability or flux. Perhaps the first

individual to articulate the machinic or processual

nature of the world was Thales. His speculations

(and subsequently those of Heraclitus, Homer,

Anaximander and Cratylus) seriously undermined

the deifying/Apollonian overtones of ancient

Greek thought. Although Thales’ work on the

subject is thought never to have existed in

chirographic form, it is commonly understood

that he conceived water – rather than Man or

God – to be ‘‘the reality of all things.’’5 The

interesting issue here is why water should be

chosen to fulfil this role. Thales himself left no

explanation.6 However, several reasons come to

mind. First, and as Aristotle ventured, ‘‘moisture

is necessary for the nourishment of every organ-

ism’’ whereas Man has long posed a threat to such

organisms. Second, and again as Aristotle prof-

fered, ‘‘every animal’s life begins in seminal fluid’’

making Man – from the very ‘‘first’’ – the subject

of a flow rather than a structure or teleology.7

Third, water is active and transformative whereas

Man is reactive and imitative. Fourth, water is

always arriving or exiting whereas Man is char-

acterised by a becoming-still. Fifth, water is

composed of infinitely varied speeds whereas

Man is something constant, predictable and

habitual. Finally, water – through processes such

as evaporation and osmosis – makes a mockery of

the reactive forces of containing, trapping, fixing

and dominating. Man, on the other hand, revels in

being the object of such forces – that is, reactive

Man desires to be folded, subjected, limited. In

effect, water is chosen by Thales for its ability to

proliferate a philosophy of flows and becomings

instead of a metaphysics of structures and beings.

ecology andmachinic thought

34

It was precisely this philosophy of fluxes and

becomings (of decentred subjects (humans) and

objects (world)) that proved too much for the

ancients (and nearly all subsequent epochs) to

bear. Why? Chiefly because a philosophy of

flows – living one’s life as a becoming-other – is

both liberating and dangerous. Liberating in the

sense that a philosophy of flows promotes a new-

found lightness of the relation between culture and

earth – a space where life can be affirmed as

something joyful, active, creative and as existing

in a realm ‘‘beyond good and evil.’’ As Zarathustra

remarks: ‘‘And this is the great noontide; it is

when man stands at the middle of his course

between animal and Superman and celebrates his

journey to the evening as his highest hope: for it is

the journey to a new morning.’’8 Dangerous in the

sense that this freeing of active or Dionysian forces

demands that each and every body becomes a

commander of its own capacities and desires – that

each invents what Nietzsche called a radical ‘‘will

to self-responsibility.’’9 The risks inherent within

such a task (of becoming-legislator of one’s own

existence) are many. Again, as Zarathustra

declares:

[C]ommanding is more difficult than obeying.

And not only because the commander [active

force] bears the burden of all who obey

[reactive force], and that this burden can

easily crush him. In commanding there

appear[s] . . . to be an experiment and a risk:

and the living creature risks himself when he

commands. Yes, even when he commands

himself: then also must he make amends for

his commanding. He must become judge and

avenger and victim of his own law.10

What is crushing here is the preponderance of

Dionysian forces (flux, flow, change, chaos) over

Apollonian forms (stasis, structure, sameness,

order). Here, Man is like a child who gets the toy

(i.e., freedom from Idols/Ideals) he desires minus

instructions for its safe or benign use. The

question emerging here is: how does one impose

form and predictability in a world declared (by

Ionian cosmology, at least) to be in a constant state

of flux? Relatedly, by what authority does one

begin to legislate where God, Reason, Logic and so

forth have all imploded? These are the questions

which have for so long haunted modernity.

Indeed, they have functioned, as Bauman shows,

as its essential aporia.11

The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be,

the impermanence of everything actual, which

constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as

Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing

thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be

likened to the sensation during an earthquake

when one loses one’s familiar confidence in a

firmly grounded earth.12

This is where the journey of self-overcoming,

of embracing the great noontide, of starting the

perilous journey toward the overman (or toward

what Deleuze and Guattari term a body without

organs) proves too hard for the majority – and

most certainly for all social and political systems

(of modernity). At such a point, Man recoils on

‘‘ultimate man’’ instead of unleashing the uber-

mensch.13 Man, in other words, continues to be a

slave (of other people’s drives) rather than a

master (of ‘‘his’’ own desires). And Nature

continues to be something fixed, exterior,

explicable, and controllable.

In terms of those who have struggled to free

the human subject – and indeed Nature – from the

discourses spawned by the Enlightenment (i.e.,

discourses of right, rationality, consciousness,

cause, effect), Nietzsche stands alone as the

figure who never tired of proclaiming processual-

ity as the defining (or in Deleuzian terms imma-

nent) aspect of the cosmos. With a vigour and style

like none before him, Nietzsche writes:

And do you know what ‘‘the world’’ is to me?

. . . This world: a monster of energy, without

beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude

of force that does not grow bigger or smaller,

that does not expend itself but only transforms

itself; . . . enclosed by ‘‘nothingness’’ as a boun-

dary; . . . not a space that might be ‘‘empty’’

here or there, but rather as a force throughout,

as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the

same time one and many, increasing here and at

the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces

flowing and rushing together, eternally chan-

ging, eternally flooding back, with tremendous

years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of

its forms; out of the simplest forms striving

toward the complex, out of the stillest, most

halsey

35

rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most

turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then

again returning home to the simple out of this

abundance, out of the play of contradictions

back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself

. . . as a becoming that knows no satiety, no

disgust, no weariness: this my Dionysian world

of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-

destroying, this mystery world of the twofold

voluptuous delight, my ‘‘beyond good and

evil,’’ without goal unless the joy of the circle

is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels

good will toward itself – do you want a name for

this world? A solution for all its riddles? . . .

This world is the will to power – and nothing

besides! And you yourselves are also this will

to power – and nothing besides!14

The objective in this remarkable passage is to

destroy the bodies, images and representations

(of thought) constructed by certain metaphysi-

cians (Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Rousseau)

– bodies, images and representations which have

long served to imprison or tame the active forces

within human beings/Nature.15 The concept ‘‘will

to power’’ was invented by Nietzsche because

he felt it best reflected the world of which he was

a part. This was a world where seasons, friends,

conversations, diets, thoughts, kings, cities,

diseases – in a word, everything – came to pass.

The will to power is therefore immanently anti-

arborescent in that it is opposed to foundations

or original causes. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s

conception of desire (see below) it proliferates

beyond itself, beyond its own image of the

universe and the established ‘‘order of things.’’

As Deleuze writes:

The will to power is the element from which

derive both the quantitative difference of

related forces and the quality that devolves

into each force in this relation. The will to

power here reveals its nature as the principle of

the synthesis of forces. In this synthesis – which

relates to time – forces pass through the same

differences again or diversity is reproduced.16

For Nietzsche, the production of differential forces

could only be realised via an ongoing pathos of

distance and a belief in the transience of all things

(even of his own philosophy). In the first case, this

meant upholding a pathos within and between

cultures: ‘‘No people could live without evaluat-

ing; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not

evaluate as its neighbour evaluates’’;17 as well as

within and between institutions:

Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as

they are attained: subsequently there is nothing

more thoroughly harmful to freedom than

liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what

they bring about: they undermine the will to

power, they are the levelling of mountain and

valley exalted to a moral principle, they make

small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd

animal that triumphs with them every time.

Liberalism: in plain words, reduction to the

herd animal.18

In the second case, the production of difference

meant believing in the transience of scientific

knowledge: ‘‘There are no facts, everything is in

flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively

most enduring is – our opinions’’;19 the transience

of first principles:

It is we alone who have fabricated causes,

succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion,

number, law, freedom, motive, purpose; and

when we falsely introduce this world of symbols

into things and mingle it with them as though

this symbol-world were an ‘‘in-itself’’, we once

more behave as we have always behaved,

namely mythologically[;]20 and the transience

of being: cogito ergo sum: that means:

Something is believed therefore something is

believed – a vicious circle. One would have to

know what being is in order to get the sum from

the cogito; one would also have to know what

‘‘knowing’’ is: one starts from the belief in logic

– in the ergo before all else – and not uniquely

from the position of fact!21

But Nietzsche also insisted that if one was to

fully comprehend those factors which contributed

to the demise of difference (to the colonisation of

earth as unbounded matter and energy) one had

necessarily to be aware of the hypostatising and

reifying effects of language, of the manner by

which the intra- and intergenerational qualities of

discourse (re)present certain ways of articulating

bodies as natural and/or timeless. ‘‘I shall reiterate

a hundred times that ‘immediate certainty’, like

‘absolute knowledge’ and ‘thing in itself’, contains

ecology andmachinic thought

36

a contradictio in adjecto: we really ought to get

free from the seduction of words!’’22 ‘‘I fear we are

not getting rid of God because we still believe

in grammar.’’23 And again, ‘‘The significance of

language for the evolution of culture lies in this,

that mankind set up in language a separate world

beside the other world, a place it took to be so

firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the

rest of the world off its hinges and make itself

master of it.’’24 Nietzsche was one of the first to

point out the violence attached to speaking and

writing – or, to what amounts to the same thing,

the violence of concepts, categories and names.

In or around 1870, he observed:

All the knowledge which is of assistance to us

involves the identification of things which are

not the same, of things which are only similar.

In other words, such knowledge is essentially

illogical.

Only in this way do we obtain a concept.

Then afterwards we behave as if the concept,

e.g. the concept ‘‘man’’, were something

factual, whereas it is surely only something

we have constructed through a process of

ignoring all individual features. We presuppose

that nature behaves in accordance with such a

concept. But in this case first nature and then

the concept are anthropomorphic. The omit-

ting of what is individual provides us with the

concept, and with this our knowledge begins: in

categorizing, in the establishment of classes.

But the essence of things does not correspond

to this: it is a process of knowledge which does

not touch upon the essence of things. . .

We produce beings as the bearers of proper-

ties and abstractions as the causes of these

properties. That a unity, e.g. a tree, appears to

us to be a multiplicity of properties and

relations is something doubly anthropo-

morphic: in the first place, this delimited

unity, ‘‘tree’’, does not exist; it is arbitrary to

carve out a thing in this manner (according to

the eye, according to the form). Furthermore,

each relation is not the true, absolute relation,

but is again anthropomorphically colored.25

It should come as no surprise that Nietzsche – well

before, even, the publication of such works as

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations –

would comment on the limits of language.

He was, after all, convenor of a course on

Rhetoric at Basel University (taught, purportedly,

to an audience of two). The fact that Nietzsche

took seriously the epistemological and ethical

issues at stake in the relation between word and

world means that he must stand at the forefront of

any poststructuralist analysis of the discursive and

textual (re)production of environmental conflict

and its regulation.

Like any erudite thinker, Nietzsche knew better

than most the danger(s) of ignoring his word. ‘‘The

time for petty politics is past: the very next century

will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the

whole earth – the compulsion to grand politics.’’26

One might also include here the compulsion to

‘‘grand corporatism’’ and the commodification of

the Other. ‘‘For some time now, our whole

European [read global] culture has been moving

as toward a catastrophe, with tortured tension that

is growing from decade to decade: restlessly,

violently, headlong, like a river that wants to

reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid

to reflect.’’27 Does this not speak directly of the

politics of denial currently practised in respect of

ecological ruin? ‘‘[T]here will be wars such as there

have never yet been on earth.’’28 Wars over ozone,

fresh water, oil, fishing stocks, biodiversity,

salinity, uranium and so forth. ‘‘No herdsman

and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing,

everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise

goes voluntarily into the madhouse.’’29 The

marginalisation of the ‘‘loony Left,’’ the hippies,

the monkey-wrenchers, the new-agers, the tree

huggers, the ‘‘full-time’’ dissenters. From the

present vantage point, it was as if Nietzsche was

gazing into a crystal ball. The twentieth century

indeed fostered a will to fascism (to a becoming-

the-same, to a becoming-herd-conscious) across

much of the earth. But this is a fascism not only

rooted within those so-called ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘barba-

ric’’ nations of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s

Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Deng’s China or

Castro’s Cuba. Rather, it is a fascism which

holds equal sway (under different guises and

channels) in Bush’s USA, Blair’s Britain,

Howard’s Australia, and elsewhere. In fact, differ-

ence (flow, process) is threatened whenever and

wherever a will to a system predominates. For

all systems are founded on – take root around

– arborescent principles. And arborescence,

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37

according to Deleuze and Guattari, is antithetical

to processuality, to a maintenance of the condi-

tions for difference, to a fostering of forces which

allow for the proliferation of active bodies and, of

course, socio-ecological vitality.

iii deleuze and guattari

It is within the above context that the work of

Deleuze and Guattari gains much of its signifi-

cance. Like Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari are

deeply troubled by the subjectivities holding sway

in contemporary culture. And like Nietzsche they

interpret the so-called ‘‘lack’’ of a transcendental

foundation or teleology as leading to more, not

fewer, ethical decisions. Here, the unfolding of life

becomes an immanently ethical process since

it is always already tied to all manner of other

bodies – social, legal, political, biological, geo-

logical, geographic, industrial, molecular, scienti-

fic, technological and so forth. All this in a world

where there is and can be no intrinsic congruency

between reality (world) and representation (signs)

and no definitive or consistent ontological divide

between subject (‘‘Man’’) and object (‘‘Nature’’).

For present matters, then, the crucial question is

this: on what authority – by what epistemological

criteria – do we presently name particular kinds of

bodies and force them to stand in multifarious

(indeed some would say, monstrous) alignments?

What is it, for example, that we do, when we make

the body of the Slender Tree Fern stand alongside

the body of a forest coupe plan? What kinds of

becomings are either facilitated or cast aside in

such scenarios? These kinds of questions guide the

tenor of this article. They are questions which arise

from a realisation that current methods of regulat-

ing environmental harm/conflict tend too often

toward the preservation and legitimisation of the

kinds of subjectivities or existential territories30

responsible for such conflict. They are also

questions formulated in the knowledge that there

can be no single solution to socio-ecological

problems – that the destruction of the earth

derives from a multiplicity of sources (hence the

need for a schizoanalytic rather than purely

structuralist or modernist account of socio-

ecological ruin). Finally, they are questions that

treat seriously the cultural (masculine, feminine,

Indigenous), economic (material) and epistemolo-

gical (philosophical) dimensions of human-

induced environmental damage. There is no

disputing the idea, in other words, that politico-

social ‘‘systems’’ founded on, for instance, the

subjugation of women and men, exponential

material growth, and/or a fervent disdain of

philosophical inquiry, will eventually ruin the

entropic limits of the earth (not to mention other

planets/bodies – witness the geological and topo-

graphical surveys of Mars and the moon). My

objective now will be to offer a general overview of

Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and its significance

for thinking through environmental issues. In

order to bring their concepts into clearer relief –

and to show their transversality – I will discuss

each of them with reference to the key terms most

often associated with forest conflict. This is,

arguably, the kind of conflict that has at one

time or another featured in most regions of the

globe. Moreover, this is a central environmental

issue given the fact that more than eighty per cent

of the world’s ‘‘original’’ or old-growth ecosystems

have been demolished in the last two centuries

or so.31

schizoanalysis (thinking machinically)

As already explained, to think machinically is

to invoke a processual conception of society and

subjectivity.32

[The] idea of process is fundamental.

It assumes that one has discarded the idea

that one must absolutely master an object or a

subject – and that . . . analytical research is

given a dimension of finitude, singularity,

existential delimitation, precariousness in rela-

tion to time and values . . . [T]here are neither

ends nor means; only processes; nothing but

processes; processes auto-constructing life,

auto-constructing the world, with mutant,

unforeseen, unheard-of affects.33

This is, quite clearly, a very different conception

of social relations and ‘‘self-hood’’ than that

configured by modernity. Processes or machines

bring an omnipresent volatility to the concepts

(ways of thinking) and subjectivities (ways of

existing) previously understood to be immutable,

normal, and otherwise wholly sufficient to their

ecology andmachinic thought

38

task. The kinds of concepts of relevance here are

those such as ‘‘sustainable yield,’’ ‘‘geographic

representation unit,’’ ‘‘forest perimeter,’’ and

‘‘old-growth.’’ The subjectivities at stake are

those such as ‘‘forester,’’ ‘‘conservationist,’’

‘‘protester,’’ and ‘‘consumer.’’ Arguably, some-

thing highly unsettling happens to each of these

once the idea of process has taken the place of

structure (i.e., once the privileged position of the

signifier has been undermined). For when, it may

be asked, does a heathland ‘‘end’’ and a forest

‘‘begin’’? At what point, precisely, does/should/

can a forest be classified as ‘‘negligibly disturbed’’

rather than ‘‘old-growth’’? How does/can one

know that a forest is adequately represented or

conserved? On what basis do we chart the

distinction between the ‘‘ecologically significant’’

and the ‘‘ecologically insignificant’’? Questions

such as these have no definitive answers and yet

modern environmental regulatory strategies have

always given the opposite impression – as if the

aporia at work here were merely a fleeting itch

to be scratched rather than an enduring ethical

moment to be seriously contemplated. One could

also ask: how is it that consumers of, say, building

products or copying paper are conceived as

inhabiting logically distinct worlds to that of a

forest? Is it not possible that the divisions erected

between ‘‘everyday’’ consumers and so-called

‘‘distant’’ forests are sustained by nothing other

than rhetoric (i.e., the tropes of metonymy,

synecdoche, metaphor, mimesis and so forth)?

In other words, is it not probable that, as

Nietzsche would say, such divisions hold good

only to the extent that Aristotle’s law of contra-

diction is uncritically assented to? – a law which

dictates that ‘‘we are unable to affirm and deny one

and the same thing,’’ such as that a consumer is

always already immersed in urban and rural flows

and that even the division between these flows is

one which has more to do with grammar than some

enduring ‘‘reality.’’34 Alternatively, one could

pose the question: on what authority do we

assert the forester body to be wholly divorced

from that of the protester body? Might there not

be, in other words, something of a ‘‘minor

protester’’ in the forest bureaucrat? Equally,

might there not be something of a ‘‘minor

bureaucrat’’ in the forest protester? There is no

good reason for thinking that the hands which

operate a chainsaw cannot or will not one day be

those holding an anti-logging placard. But neither

is there good reason for thinking the opposite.

All that can be said is that ‘‘reality’’ – the common

ordering of uncommon events – assumes its forms

according to the lines or machines which run

through and across the plane of consistency (earth)

from moment to moment. Mapping the lived and

potential effects and affects of these lines is the

task that Deleuze and Guattari set themselves.

Deleuze and Guattari call their philosophy

schizoanalysis (also termed throughout their

work micropolitics, pragmatics, rhizomatics and

nomadology). Schizoanalysis is intimately inter-

ested in the machines or lines which, on the one

hand, divide the world into subjects and objects

and make certain bodies knowable and recogni-

sable, and, on the other, implode the division

between subjects and objects and cause certain

bodies to resist or complicate the roles and

categories to which they have been assigned.

Schizoanalysis is therefore concerned both with

what gets captured and with what eludes categor-

isation – whether this be a crime, a certain section

of forest, a form of protest, a kind of odour, or

whatever. Under this scenario, the ‘‘world’’ is no

longer conceived (as is in Foucault’s writings on

panopticism) as some kind of unity or series of

disciplinary regimes where nothing flees. Instead,

the guiding thought is that ‘‘Everything escapes,

everything creates – never alone, but through

an abstract machine that produces continuums of

intensity, effects conjunctions of deterritorializa-

tion, and extracts expressions [i.e., statements,

words, signs] and contents [i.e., bodies, represen-

tations, things].’’35 The social, in Deleuze’s own

terms, ‘‘is something that never stops slipping

away.’’36 Such a view of socio-ecological relations,

or of what Deleuze and Guattari term the

mechanosphere, has the effect of circumventing

the arborescence of state philosophy (or Royal

science) and its longing for permanent closure

around such notions as ‘‘subject,’’ ‘‘object,’’

‘‘crime,’’ ‘‘environment,’’ ‘‘sustainability,’’

‘‘rationality,’’ ‘‘cause’’ and ‘‘effect.’’

The notion that society is constantly ‘‘slipping

away’’ is an extremely important one. It suggests

that the greatest problem confronting ‘‘humanity’’

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39

and, more particularly, the numerous ‘‘directors’’

of apparatuses of control (politicians, judges,

police, army, CEOs, scientists, parents, teachers)

is how to prevent the world from fleeing in all

directions and not, as some would have it, how to

incite change.

It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular)

that a society is defined by its contradictions.

That is true only on the larger scale of things.

From the point of view of micropolitics, a

society is defined by its lines of flight, which are

molecular. There is always something that flows

or flees, that escapes the binary organizations,

the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding

machine: things that are attributed to a ‘‘change

in values,’’ the youth, women, the mad, etc.37

In short, a ‘‘leak’’ may in fact become a ‘‘rupture.’’

The persistence of environmental conflict works

on, eats away and brings about leakages in political

notions of resource use (leading to the establish-

ment, in Australia in the late 1980s, of the national

body known as the Resource Assessment

Commission). These leaks in the notion of

resource use can and sometimes do effect leakages

in the concept of economic rationalism (leading to

the concept of ‘‘ecologically sustainable develop-

ment’’). Leakages in the notion of ecologically

sustainable development on occasion produce

leaks in the practices of heavy industry (heralding

the establishment of public databases such as the

National Pollution Inventory). Leakages here – in

the form of publicly disseminated information

about greenhouse gas emissions – could effect a

rupture in the equation ‘‘economic growth¼

ecosystemic health.’’ This in turn could lead to

ruptures in the ethic driving consumer culture.

Leakages in this notion may secrete new forms

of subjectivity or ‘‘singularised existential terri-

tories’’ freed from the constraints and neuroses

produced by present configurations of the social

machinery.38

And then again, none or only one or two of these

mutations may occur. Worse still, leaks may be

met by a proliferation of molar blockages (e.g.,

waiving of environmental impact statements for

large firms which bring money to governments,

the approval of pollution permits, the subsidisa-

tion of the practice of clearing native vegetation,

tougher penalties for protesters). In Deleuze and

Guattari’s terminology, the trace (same) may well

prevail over the map (diagram). The potentially

liberating affects of smooth space may be forsaken

for the ‘‘security’’ of striated space.39 The oppor-

tunity for a relative deterritorialisation40 of the

ecologically injurious body may be passed over

in favour of a reterritorialisation of the consumer-

driven subject. Incorporeal universes and asigni-

fying regimes may cease to proliferate. All this

depends largely on the nature of the various

apparatuses of capture and the speed with which

they are able to recode those bodies attempting to

give force to a particular mode of becoming. But it

is this fleeing, this continual secretion of difference

in the face of representation, which needs to be

carefully theorised in the context of environmental

struggle. For such representation equates to what

Deleuze and Guattari term the organisation or

‘‘machining’’ of the plane of consistency.

plane of consistency

Schizoanalysis posits the operation of multiple

abstract machines across what Deleuze and

Guattari call the ‘‘plane of consistency’’ – which

is, in some sense, the equivalent to saying that

earth is coded and inscribed in multiple ways

producing a certain alignment of bodies. Two

points are worth making here. First, the function

of machines is to break and redirect flows – flows

of capital, wood, metal, genes, friendship, knowl-

edge, work and so forth.41 Second, when Deleuze

and Guattari talk about machines they are not

talking about some inhuman or purely mechanical

device. Instead, they are talking about the

processes which give to the earth its discursive

qualities and quantities (the effects levied by

abstract machines of coding) and which, on

occasion, implode the logic underpinning such

qualities and quantities (the effects levied by

abstract machines of absolute decoding).

Without machines, then, there would be no such

thing as Nature, Man, Woman, Species,

Environmental Harm, Conflict, Forest, and the

like. Instead, and most significantly, there would

pass the continual variation and return of the flow

of unformed elements unmarked by anthropo-

morphisms or distinctions between words and

ecology andmachinic thought

40

things. This moment of ‘‘pure intensities’’ is the

plane of consistency and presents as an important

concept for teasing out the effects of naming,

dividing, and dichotomising earth.

The plane of consistency . . . is opposed to

the plane of organization and development.

Organization and development concern form

and substance: at once the development of

form and the formation of substance or a

subject. But the plane of consistency knows

nothing of substance and form: haecceities,

which are inscribed on this plane, are precisely

modes of individuation proceeding neither by

form nor by the subject. The plane consists

abstractly, but really, in relations of speed and

slowness between unformed elements, and in

compositions of corresponding intensive affects

. . . Spinoza, Holderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche are

the surveyors of such a plane of consistency.

Never unifications, never totalizations, but

rather consistencies or consolidations.42

From this passage it can be said that schizoanalysis

is concerned to show the price paid for blocking/

filling out the plane of consistency with particular

kinds of bodies – forests, rivers, races, genders,

economies, chronologies, legalities, policies. A

sustained engagement with Deleuze and Guattari

prompts the question: at what social, cultural and

ecological cost do – indeed can – we presently

name, divide, and regulate the plane of consis-

tency? It should not in any way be supposed that

the plane of consistency resides as some kind of

lost panacea for current ills. For how could, in any

case, something be considered ‘‘lost’’ that is

always already there? Rather, the plane of

consistency (the plane of supermolecular nature)

is that which has the potential to radically

problematise present ways of conceiving the

society–economy–culture–nature nexus. More

than this, it causes each rendering of ‘‘the real’’

(e.g., forest or mountain range), ‘‘the proper’’

(e.g., form or function), and ‘‘the authentic’’ (e.g.,

custodian or administrator) to be put asunder.

Through its concern to map both the ambiguity

of bodies and the (traditionally molar) responses

levied by particular agencies to such ambiguity,

schizoanalysis stands as a technique for problem-

atising and perhaps even disengaging the

structures of modernity (or the image of

(environmental) thought).43 As Guattari remarks:

‘‘Destiny is not inscribed in an infrastructure.

Capitalist societies secrete a society, a subjectivity

which is in no way natural, in no way necessary.

One could very well do something else. What I

refuse is the idea of an inevitable and necessary

program.’’44 For Deleuze and Guattari, the struc-

turing of what is necessary and what is inevitable –

whether this be in relation to environmental

conflict and its regulation or something other –

occurs at the level of the socius.

socius

The socius (also termed the ‘‘mechanosphere’’)

inscribes the plane of consistency with words

(e.g., ‘‘integrated harvesting,’’ ‘‘old-growth’’)

and things (‘‘loggers,’’ ‘‘trees’’). It assembles the

subject (the organism, the forester, the adminis-

trator) and the object (the organs, the forest, the

management plan) and makes historically and

politically specific relations seem timeless and

immutable. The term ‘‘socius’’ is indicative of the

fact that social relations always already involve a

contorting of individuality and a limiting of

various bodies’ potentials.

The social machine or socius may be the body

of the earth, the body of the Despot, the body of

Money . . . The prime function incumbent upon

the socius . . . [is] . . . to codify the flows of

desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see

to it that no flow exists that is not properly

dammed up, channeled, regulated.45

The socius is therefore anti-Spinozist and anti-

Nietzschean. It does everything within its power

to keep the question: ‘‘Of what is a body capable?’’

(and responses such as becoming-ecological,

becoming-subsistent) permanently to one side.46

It has as its aim the subversion of Nietzsche’s

message that ‘‘The body is a great intelligence, a

multiplicity’’ and that this body has as its most

fervent object a desire ‘‘to create beyond itself.’’47

It is, in other terms, the role of the socius to

bring together the molar machines (of agriculture,

town planning, transport, health, water quality,

law enforcement, work, leisure, etc.) and collective

assemblages of enunciation (farming bodies, archi-

tectural and engineering bodies, transport bodies,

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41

medicinal bodies, regulatory bodies, prosecution

bodies, employment and training bodies, tourism

and sporting bodies) in order to ensure the

arrangement, location, segmentation, coding and,

where necessary, decoding and recoding of all

such bodies (the (un)fed, the (un)housed, the

(im)mobile, the (un)well, the (un)lawful, the

(un)employed, the (un)productive) in a manner

conducive to the reproduction of capital on ever

increasing scales.

In this sense the socius functions only by

producing and attaching itself to bodies (student,

politician, judge, forest, environmental activist)

and statements (end-of-term reports, maiden

speeches, sentences, coupe plans, slogans).

Massumi, in tracing the work of Deleuze and

Guattari, writes:

A society is a dissipative structure with its own

determining tension between a limitative body

without organs and a nonlimitative one.

Together, in their interaction, they are called

a ‘‘socius’’ (the abstract machine of society).

The nonlimitative body without organs of a

socius is the sum total of its constituent

supermolecular bodies, or individuals, from

the point of view of their potential for ‘‘free’’

or ‘‘willful’’ action, in other words for the

undetermined selection of singular states as a

locally–globally correlated population. The

limitative body without organs of a socius is a

set of whole attractors proposed by a society

for its individuals, the better to exploit their

habit-forming potential.48

The idea expressed here is thoroughly

Nietzschean. Far from cultivating freedom and

spontaneity, society and culture are structures

which tame and subdue creative forces. Witness,

for instance, the censoring of art, the margin-

alisation of subsistence living, the delineation and

othering of wilderness, and the suppression of

‘‘youthful’’ desires. The socius is the abstract

machine par excellence since it extracts bodies of

finitude and molarity (similarity) from a sea

of infinitude and multiplicity (difference/plane of

consistency). It is, in Massumi’s terms, ‘‘the

overall abstract machine [which] brings the

content formed by the machinic assemblage

and the expression formed by the collective

assemblage of enunciation into an asymptotic

encounter’’49 What Massumi is saying here is

that the socius brings together words (e.g.,

environmental crime, ecological sustainability)

and things (e.g., faulty exhaust, regrowth forest)

and makes them stand in an orderly and knowable

(or ‘‘asymptotic’’) fashion (e.g., ‘‘this is pollu-

tion,’’ ‘‘this is good environmental manage-

ment’’). Money is an obvious example of an

abstract machine feeding into and transforming

the socius. But so too is the idea/stereotype/

moralised construct Nature or the conceptions of

‘‘nonhumanity’’ erected by government, law,

science and so forth. And it is here that another

of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts comes to the

fore. For whatever the machine, whatever its

powers of extraction or coding, the socius conti-

nually contorts and assembles the flow of desire.

desire

Desire is an incredibly important, if complex,

notion. In very simple terms it is that which flows

at different speeds and intensities across the plane

of consistency. In contrast to authors such as

Freud and Lacan, desire is held by Deleuze and

Guattari to be ‘‘a process of production without

reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a

lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it.’’50

Elaborating on this definition, Guattari states:

[D]esire is everything that exists before

the opposition between subject and object,

before representation and production. It’s

everything whereby the world and affects

constitute us outside of ourselves, in spite of

ourselves. It’s everything that overflows from

us. That’s why we define it as flow [ flux].

Within this context we were led to forge a

new notion in order to specify in what way this

kind of desire is not some sort of undiffer-

entiated magma, and thereby dangerous,

suspicious, or incestuous. So we speak of

machines, of ‘‘desiring machines’’, in order to

indicate that there is as yet no question here

of ‘‘structure’’, that is, of any subjective

position, objective redundancy, or coordinates

of reference. Machines arrange and connect

flows. They do not recognize distinctions

between persons, organs, material flows, and

semiotic flows.51

ecology andmachinic thought

42

This is a beautiful passage for it expresses what so

often passes as inexpressible in the context of

environmental conflict and regulation. This inex-

pressible, this acategorical, is earth minus anthro-

pomorphic inventions and interferences. Earth

without Machines. Desire in one sense is this

‘‘first’’ nature. But not ‘‘first’’ in the sense of a

chronological antecedent. And not the (molar)

Nature which (molar) Man has constructed.

Rather, this nature (or Earth without Machines)

is that which gets inscribed (given form and

function) by all manner of discursive and textual

forces. It is critical to distinguish, therefore,

‘‘molar Nature’’ (plane of organisation) as against

‘‘molecular nature’’ (plane of consistency) – just

as it is important to distinguish molar Man and

Woman (the becoming-the-same of humanity)

from molecular man and woman (the becoming-

other of humanity). ‘‘The . . . molar and the

molecular are distinguished not by size, scale,

or dimension but by the nature of the system of

reference envisioned.’’52 Thus, when Deleuze and

Guattari write that ‘‘Desire is always assembled; it

is what the assemblage determines it to be’’53 they

are saying that molar Nature – the Nature that

resides within and through official or popular

discourse – emerges from the combination of

particular kinds of captured bodies (political,

legal, departmental, green) and well-rehearsed

enunciations (laws, policies, codes of practice,

slogans). To speak of ‘‘a forest,’’ ‘‘a river,’’ or ‘‘a

mountain’’ is already to have said too much and

not enough. It is to arrest difference and subordi-

nate it to the constraints of thinking (and speak-

ing) categorically. Molar Nature – those places and

bodies habitually associated with the ‘‘pristine,’’

or with what it really means to be ‘‘green’’ or to

have an ‘‘environmental conscience’’ – is the worst

kind of abstraction because it hypostatises

becoming. Accordingly, when Deleuze and

Guattari write that ‘‘There is only desire and the

social and nothing else’’ they mean there is only

flow (molecular nature) and the machinic assem-

blages of enunciation which extract and ascribe a

particular order or (common) sense to such flow.54

Orders such as: subspecies, species, family, genus;

understorey, overstorey, canopy; ecological vege-

tation class, broad vegetation type, forest type.

Common-sense scenarios such as: ‘‘economic

growth is essential for ecological sustainability’’;

‘‘Nature needs to be managed’’; ‘‘regrowth forest

is the sign of sustainability.’’

And here we return to the concept of socius.

For it is the socius which arrests desire or

molecular nature and puts it to work in a certain

manner – moulding it (forest block, logging coupe)

and sending it in one direction (contributor to

GDP) instead of another (destroyer of biodiver-

sity). Hence the importance in Deleuze and

Guattari’s work of what they term the three

apparatuses of capture – ‘‘LAND (as opposed to

territory), WORK (as opposed to activity) and

MONEY (as opposed to exchange).’’55 These are,

in many ways, the three main abstract machines of

coding scarring or running across the plane of

consistency – each working to produce alignments

of bodies conducive to the extension of capitalism.

However, one should not assume that such appara-

tuses represent a complete blockage of desire – that

molecular nature is everywhere moralised.

flow and multiplicity

One of the key heuristic devices for Deleuze and

Guattari is the notion of flow. Deleuze asks:

What is it that moves over the body of a society?

It is always flows, and a person is always a

cutting off of a flow. A person is always a point

of departure for the production of a flow, a

point of destination for the reception of a flow,

a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an intercep-

tion of many flows.56

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari

assert that

The four principal flows that torment the

representatives of the world economy, or of

the axiomatic, are the flow of matter–energy,

the flow of population, the flow of food, and the

urban flow. The situation seems inextricable

because the axiomatic never ceases to create all

of these problems, while at the same time its

axioms, even multiplied, deny it the means of

resolving them (for example the circulation

and distribution that would make it possible

to feed the world).57

What these passages point toward is a cosmos

traversed by flux – by the ceaseless movement of

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43

unformed elements and intensities (i.e., the plane

of consistency) made periodically into bodies

of one kind or another. ‘‘Societies,’’ ‘‘selves,’’

‘‘knowledges,’’ and ‘‘forests’’ all occur only as

particular kinds of discursive and textual arrange-

ments of the otherwise unbounded and asignificant

flow of unformed elements and intensities. For

instance, the scientific names Eucalyptus obliqua

(Messmate Gum) or Sequoia sempervirens (Coast

Redwood) not only delineate particular kinds of

botanical bodies or a specific field of knowledge so

much as they form part of a much wider effort to

transform the chaos and dangers of the plane

of consistency into knowable and quantifiable

terms and images.

Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly point to the

ethical weight attached to naming and ordering the

world. In socio-ecological terms, this translates

into thinking about the size and scale of the units

of management ushered in by various politico-

legal-scientific machines and the kinds of bodies

and processes these units allow one to envisage

or speak of. There is no escaping the fact that

environmental law and regulation are violent

activities in so far as they distribute and demarcate

bodies in places once occupied only by the four

previously mentioned flows (but principally that

of matter–energy). The tension between having to

order difference (having to control flows) whilst

maintaining a continuity of resemblance is, in

many senses, the point at which ‘‘environmental

issues’’ emerge. The problem is that there are,

in fact, no individual differences and no single

field of resemblances. This has not, however,

prevented modern systems of environmental

management acting to the contrary. Indeed, the

naming of forest types, species conservation

thresholds, national parks, waste management

stations and the like proceeds precisely according

to this logic. As Deleuze puts it:

We invoke a field of individuation or individ-

uating difference as the condition of the

organisation and determination of species.

However, this field of individuation is posited

only formally and in general: it seems to be

‘‘the same’’ for a given species, and to vary in

intensity from one species to another. It seems,

therefore, to depend upon the species and the

determination of species, and to refer us once

more to differences borne by the individual, not

to individual differences. In order for this

difficulty to disappear, the individuating differ-

ence must not only be conceived within a field

of individuation in general, but must itself be

conceived as an individual difference. The form

of the field must be necessarily and in itself

filled with individual differences.58

The primary – and one might say, critical –

consequence of constructing a field of individua-

tion (equivalent in many ways to the plane of

organisation) is that it enables environmental

administrators to classify the world according to

the distribution and repetition of so-called ‘‘like

groups’’ rather than, as would seem preferable,

in terms of the ‘‘differences borne by individuals.’’

This is, to be clear, an incredibly important

moment in the will to produce Nature. For here

the guiding objective of environmental regulatory

bodies becomes the location and categorisation of

a delimited series of attributes common to a field

(of species, of classes, of types) as opposed to

establishing categories on the basis of the rela-

tions pertaining between individuals and their

associated becomings.

What Deleuze and Guattari allow us to recog-

nise, therefore, is that environmental management

is a machine whose effects are levied without

regard for the differences borne by individuals

(and the significance of such differences for

ecological renewal). To admit as much would

mean the sudden and dramatic demise of modern

environmental management principles – premised

as they are on the notion that great sections of

earth can be seriously, rapidly and irrevocably

transformed without serious consequence since

there also exist, when all is said and done, other

sections ‘‘just like’’ them (whether these be extant

in national parks, other bioregions, other coun-

tries, other oceans, or elsewhere). There is, there-

fore, when viewed from a Deleuzo-Guattarian

perspective, a line of thought which environmental

regulators want at all costs to keep at bay: namely,

that ‘‘The great taxonomic units – genera,

families, orders and classes – no longer provide

a means of understanding difference by relating

it to such apparent conditions as resemblances,

identities, analogies and determined opposi-

tions.’’59 Deleuze and Guattari, it could be said,

ecology andmachinic thought

44

force the key critical question: what would it mean

to cease mapping earth? Alternatively, what might

it mean to map earth according to, for instance,

a becoming-eagle, a becoming-fish, a becoming-

redwood, a becoming-worm, or a becoming-river?

This is what Deleuze and Guattari demand of us –

that we move beyond the bodies, lexicons and

modes of envisioning traditionally associated with

late capitalist subjectivities in order to develop and

inhabit the worlds of others.60 For it is only by

doing so that one begins to move beyond the

images of Nature, Progress and Reason that have

dictated what it is logically possible to say and do

about ‘‘environmental problems’’ in recent times.

To sense like a worm within soils which have

evolved over countless millennia, to move like a

two-thousand-year-old redwood, to envision in the

way of an eagle at a thousand feet, and to breathe

like a fish within a remote freshwater stream,

would be to withdraw from the fields of resem-

blance and the units of environmental manage-

ment which presently guide modern thinking

about what is sustainable and what is not. The

problem with human bodies is that they are, as

Nietzsche reminds us, all too human. Few, in other

words, have recognised what it means to live as a

multiplicity rather than in terms of an identity.

In this context, modernity can be said to be

the era marked by repeated attempts to perfect

the kinds of (regulatory) bodies and thresholds

capable of dealing with difference – or with things

and processes which do not resemble each other

but are made to do so for political, cultural and

economic purposes. The body of science conceived

to combat the flow of unknown variables, the body

of law designed to combat the flow of criminality

and dissent, the body of conservation founded

to combat the flows of biotic degradation, and so

forth. And yet the attempt to plug up or seal off

each of these and other flows has been anything

but successful. In fact, efforts to ‘‘contain’’

various flows have brought with them all

manner of monstrous secretions (the containment

of uranium-secreting Chernobyl, the contain-

ment of crude oil secreting from the Exxon

Valdez, the containment of chloroflourocarbons

secreting increased skin cancers, the containment

of Third World labour secreting tropical

deforestation).61

For Deleuze and Guattari the disjunction in

evidence here has largely to do with the fact that

each body – each force erected to capture or

contain a flow – is always already a site of

instability. In other words, far from being homo-

geneous or sutured entities, bodies are a multi-

plicity. ‘‘A multiplicity,’’ write Deleuze and

Guattari,

is defined not by its elements, nor by a center

of unification or comprehension. It is defined

by the number of dimensions it has; it is not

divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension

without changing its nature. Since its varia-

tions and dimensions are immanent to it, it

amounts to the same thing to say that each

multiplicity is already composed of hetero-

geneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multi-

plicity is continually transforming itself into a

string of other multiplicities, according to its

thresholds and doors.62

The idea that bodies are multiplicities applies as

much to the so-called ‘‘nonhuman’’ body of a

spent nuclear fuel rod, or an electorate, or a forest,

as it does to the ‘‘human’’ body of a scientist, a

politician or an environmental protester. What is

most significant about multiplicities is that they

never cease to pervade or break through the

organised spaces borne by the Signifier – that

‘‘despotic agency that substitutes itself for asigni-

fying proper names and replaces multiplicities

with the dismal unity of an object declared lost.’’63

A good example of a despotic agency or overcoded

concept is the signifier ‘‘environmental activist.’’

This phrase tends to conjure a particular kind of

image or body – one that, for instance, has little

or no respect for authority, is unclean, probably

unemployed, and acts on their own rather than on

behalf of the ‘‘national interest.’’ At the same time,

environmental activists are much more than the

sum total of these things. Indeed, when written as a

multiplicity this body begins to extrude all manner

of other meanings and possibilities. The environ-

mental activist body could also be the body

of a concerned resident, a mother, a father, a

child, a fully paid professional, a retiree, a student,

a member of the local Council, or whoever.

As Deleuze and Guattari assert: ‘‘[A] rhizome or

multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded’’

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45

since each of these is ‘‘defined by the outside: by

the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritor-

ialization according to which they change in nature

and connect with other multiplicities.’’64

In contrast to the structures erected by binary

(or arborescent/modernist) thought, the concept

of multiplicity

ceases to have any relation to the One as subject

or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and

world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose

arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they

are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the

object or to divide the subject. There is not

even the unity to abort in the object or ‘‘return’’

in the subject.65

It is no longer possible, in other words, to posit the

existence of essences (Truth, good, evil, harm) or

enduring entities (self, other, society, nature) –

although this is in no way to imply that these

particular abstract machines have no significant or

knowable effect(s). Instead, everything that can or

ever could be conceived or spoken of (e.g., a forest,

a crime, etc.) must now be considered as a

blockage on the plane of consistency and as a

body waiting to flee the categories, codes and laws

that produce it.

Recognising multiplicities is to admit that

being is incapable of subsuming becoming.

Trees, for example, are a multiplicity (an excess)

in that they open onto a plethora of other

machinic assemblages (construction-machines,

bird-machines, insect-machines, sun-machines,

playhouse-machines, etc.). And these ‘‘secondary’’

machines all deterritorialise and reterritorialise

around other multiplicities (resident-machines,

worm-machines, leaf-machines, seed-machines,

nostalgia-machines) and infuse different kinds

of flows (familial, invertebrate, cellular, granular,

neuronal). Wood is also an excellent example

of the immanence of becoming-other. Under the

right conditions and left long enough wood

becomes stone or coal. Coal eventually turns to

diamond. Diamond, with the continued movement

of tectonic plates returns to earth. Earth becomes

nutriment for seeds. Seeds, with a little bit of luck,

sunshine and rain become trees. Over time, trees

decay and become wood. And wood becomes coal,

or canoe, or plank, or shelter, or bridge, or roost,

or status symbol (mahogany). A rhizome rather

than the root. Proliferation in place of arbores-

cence. Here, Nature needs to be viewed not in

terms of some primordial or eternal entity

occupying a space beyond or outside ‘‘humanity’’

but as an affect produced continually alongside –

indeed through – the various machines (political,

scientific, industrial) that spill forth various

bodies, statements, and signifying regimes from

one moment to the next.

iv making concepts work

Prior to concluding, I want to offer a brief concrete

example of how Deleuze and Guattari can be

productively applied to environmental issues.

I will focus specifically on a site in south-eastern

Australia which at the time of writing stands as

witness to the world’s longest-running forest

conflict (excepting battles between corporations

and remnant tribes in places such as Brazil,

Malaysia and Papua New Guinea).66 The space

to which I refer is known to green groups, logging

advocates, politicians and the (Australian) popula-

tion more generally simply as ‘‘Goolengook’’ – a

word most probably derived from the lexicon of

the Bidwell tribe which inhabited this region for

approximately eighteen thousand years prior to,

and for a short period following, European

‘‘settlement’’ in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the last eight years, Goolengook has become

emblematic of the struggles not only in Victoria

but in Western Australia, New South Wales,

Queensland and Tasmania to protect areas

of old-growth forest from clearfell forestry

(a method which removes all vegetation except

for several ‘‘habitat’’ trees over an area of up to 120

hectares). Conflict over Goolengook has been

particularly pronounced ever since during the

mid-1990s the Victorian government chose to

ignore the advice of its own scientists who

recommended that the vast majority of forest at

Goolengook (including nationally rare occur-

rences of warm and cool temperate rainforest

overlap) should remain free from intensive

resource exploitation. In excess of three hundred

individuals have been charged with obstructing

forest operations at Goolengook (this includes

loggers charged with assault whilst attempting

ecology andmachinic thought

46

to reclaim ‘‘their’’ workplace from protesters). In

1998, the Supreme Court of Victoria ruled that

logging operations had been carried out illegally

in breach of the Heritage Rivers Act 1992. The

relevant minister subsequently and retrospectively

amended the Act to make all future logging

operations lawful. Sites of potential and actual

Indigenous significance have been wantonly and

deliberately desecrated by the department respon-

sible for preventing such behaviour. Forest opera-

tion zones have, for the first time, been established

making it a criminal offence for any unauthorised

person (protester) to be within or near current or

future sites scheduled for logging. Trees and tree

ferns up to four hundred and one thousand years

old, respectively, have been bulldozed, set alight,

and pushed into Goolengook River (heritage

listed). Bridges have been dynamited by protesters

in an attempt to stop heavy machinery accessing

logging areas. The department overseeing logging

operations has given permission for heavy machin-

ery (trucks, bulldozers) to drive directly through

the river corridor. And so forth, and so on.

Molar response pitted against molar response.

The eternal recurrence (in the crudest sense of

the phrase) of the dialectic – loggers vs. protesters,

scientists vs. laypeople, jobs vs. environment,

logging zones vs. national parks, old-growth vs.

regrowth forest, endangered species vs. common.

How might it be possible to think through and

beyond the territories charted by these and other

binaries?

Along with Deleuze and Guattari, start with the

idea of multiplicity. In other words, think and

write Goolengook in terms of the many rather than

the One. Move away from Goolengook in its

molarity (as a body with a prescribed set of

attributes and functions) toward Goolengook in

its molecularity. This is easier said than done

because Goolengook has become shorthand for

‘‘Goolengook forest management block’’ (indeed,

this is how it was formally enunciated from 1972).

The effect of this has been to give this space

an historically located spine which is nonetheless

taken to be an a priori/timeless feature. In short,

Goolengook is most often enunciated as a

site of untapped timber and nothing besides.

But for ‘‘green’’ groups, Goolengook’s ontological

primacy remains bound to its ecological processes

and aesthetic attributes. Here, Goolengook is

shorthand for natural wonder and nothing

besides. The problem, of course, is that neither

of these reflects the ‘‘true’’ Goolengook. Such a

place or thing does not exist except in relation to

the machines that summon forth a particular kind

of stratified image of the authentic forest or the

proper use to which such a terrain should be put.

To think Goolengook in its multiplicity – to get

past the authentic and the proper images of Nature

which constrain thought about socio-ecological

issues – it is necessary to decode that which has

been overcoded. For, in effect, Goolengook has

been given over to the hermeneutician (where its

final referents have been rendered apparent) at the

expense of ongoing genealogical or schizoanalytic

inquiry. As currently written and spoken,

Goolengook reveals little or no trace of the plane

of consistency which threatens to rise up within

it from moment to moment. How, then, does one

make a body (in this case, the body of forest

conflict) turn slowly away from stratifying forces

toward those places where judgement is yet to fall

(or at least is of a less categorical kind)? For

Deleuze and Guattari, the answer is quite simple:

experiment. Experiment with the Real. Seek

the acategorical. Understand how bodies are put

together in order that they may be pulled apart and

reassembled anew. Desire not a pure Nature but a

new problematics of Nature. Look, in other words,

for the body without organs accompanying the

organised body.

In the case of Goolengook, the first key

challenge is to (re)present this term in a manner

which speaks both to the forms and functions

traditionally attributed to it but also to the

multitude of flows, speeds and intensities which

are violently excluded through use of the signifier

Goolengook. As such, one strategy would be to

invoke the use of the strikethrough67 as a means

of demonstrating that any site of environmental

struggle exceeds the meanings associated with one

particular term. Goolengook has the effect of

dislodging this space from any preconceived

notion of what it has been or might become.

In fact, Goolengook sets in motion a presence–

absence dynamic such that the naming of this

space becomes an act of the utmost ethical weight.

Like Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate

halsey

47

that the most subtle and insidious forms of

violence are bound up with the lexicon.68 This is

the key task, to make mutable and unknowable

that which previously presented as unified and

plain – to turn a molarity into a multiplicity.

More needs to be done. It is not enough to

rename the world in order to change it. Indeed,

Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in chang-

ing the world so much as they are interested

in changing the tree (the seed of arborescence)

growing in people’s heads. Here, it is necessary to

understand the interaction between the socius and

desire. More specifically, the task becomes one of

understanding how the socius assembles desire

(how the former contorts the latter, plugs it in,

subjects it to flows of money, science, law and

so forth). For Deleuze and Guattari, machines play

a critical role in this regard. Machines mark and

cut into bodies without organs. In Anti-Oedipus

Deleuze and Guattari write that the sound of a

machine is ‘‘unbearable’’ to each body without

organs (9). Organisation (of the subject) is painful.

Organisation of the object (forest, river, mountain)

is equally difficult. And so is the division of the

world into subjects and objects. But it is not

‘‘unnatural.’’ It may not even be avoidable. It is,

however, contestable and negotiable. In the case of

Goolengook, therefore, it is necessary to bring to

light and scrupulously name each machine that has

contributed to the lexical/material folding of this

space over time – to juxtapose the various visions,

speeds, names and affects that have contributed

to the construction of Goolengook. This must be

done in order to render defunct any attempt to

align this site with the possibilities attached to this

or that political platform, legislative decree, or

epistemological foundation.

This is more than simply an enumerating or

historical exercise. Instead, for Deleuze and

Guattari it is about the transformative potential

accompanying the writing or enunciation of the

machinic phylum of a particular body. To know,

for instance, that Goolengook was once a site of

banishment for those who broke ancient tribal law

renders impossible the idea that this same site

is really just a mix of suitable and unsuitable

stands of sawlogs or unprocessed woodchips.

Schizoanalysis kills teleology. There can be no

recourse by various industries to a Nature whose

sole and timeless purpose is to surrender its

bounty to Man. But neither can there be recourse

by green groups to an unadulterated Nature which

must be preserved at all costs. This is the kind of

situation which forces, in Deleuze’s terms, each

to encounter rather than recognise the world.

Schizoanalysis forces each to invent ways of living

and connecting to the world which go beyond the

orthodoxy. Schizoanalysis – in so far as it coaxes

the virtual through incessant engagement with the

actual – helps get us to the point where other

things are possible.

But this is only half the task. For although

schizoanalysis requires that the lines (molar,

molecular, supermolecular) composing bodies be

carefully traced prior to being diagrammed (or put

back together in new ways), it does nonetheless

require that engagement with the strata (world)

continue. In Deleuze and Guattari’s parlance, little

good ever comes from permanent destratification.

Even though destruction is necessary, it is, as

Nietzsche says somewhere, even more necessary to

create. This raises the final point to be dealt with

here concerning how best to (re)build a deterritor-

ialised body (or ‘‘forest’’).

To rebuild Goolengook it is necessary to reflect

upon the machinic phylum which has contributed

to the production of Goolengook as event.

For close on two centuries Goolengook has been

enunciated in terms of a lack – as something

that needs improving, filling out, developing,

managing. For the Bidwell tribe which once

inhabited the region, Goolengook was a place

that no one should enter – lest they wear the mark

of social transgression. Similarly, the first legisla-

tive decrees from the British Empire in the late

eighteenth century declared Goolengook to fall

within the ‘‘wastelands of the Crown,’’ and,

subsequently, within the ‘‘unsettled districts.’’69

The first (formally archived) handwritten notes

taken of the area (by botanists, geologists,

surveyors) spoke of Goolengook as ‘‘back coun-

try,’’ ‘‘dense jungle,’’ ‘‘poor pastoral land’’ and as

‘‘economically worthless’’ – especially to would-be

miners.70 With the exception of several pastoral-

ists who grazed their cattle on the alluvial flats of

various rivers and streams, and the occasional tree

felled for firewood to power the steam engines of

the gold rush era, Goolengook experienced little

ecology andmachinic thought

48

human-induced impact from 1788 to the mid-

1970s. Goolengook as forbidding, as exemplifying

the unknown, as anti-civilisation. Goolengook as

heart of darkness. And yet, in spite of (or perhaps

because of ) its mysterious and intangible status,

Goolengook remained subject throughout this

period to all manner of political (a bureaucratised

and rationalised system of natural resource

management), social (increased consumerism

matched with a decline in rural populations),

economic (post-war housing boom) and techno-

logical changes (footed track, oscillation ring,

chainsaw).

All of these, but especially the last, brought

with them new speeds and intensities and new

ways of envisioning, knowing, and consuming

Nature to the Western world generally and south-

eastern Victoria specifically. Bulldozers turned

dense and forbidding territories into economically

viable resources. Articulated vehicles meant that

logging trucks could climb roads and access

previously inaccessible areas. One person could

fell in an hour what previously took one week

to fell with an axe. Here, the smallest inventions

levied – and continue to result in – the most

intense deterritorialisations. For nearly 150 years,

Goolengook was cast as Other, as peripheral, as

waste – indeed less than a dozen texts (historical

notes, memoirs, Orders in Council, pastoral run

applications) spoke its name during this period.

But from around 1970, the textual production of

Goolengook increased more than ten-fold. Some of

these texts spoke of the logic underpinning the

positioning of the boundary of the forest block,

some spoke of its rare and visually spectacular

attributes. Others spoke of the different kinds of

forest within its borders, whilst others mentioned

the volume of timber extant at the site. Still others

outlined how various ‘‘parts’’ of Goolengook

should be ‘‘managed,’’ whilst some lamented the

deliberate destruction of biodiversity and tried,

for the sake of political leverage, to quantify this in

economic terms. Goolengook – the body once cast

as the distant remainder of the city and all that is

ordered, proper and legitimate – even featured

in the pronouncements of the Supreme Court

of Victoria.

The critical point is that no matter what the

text, each text cuts across the body of Goolengook

dividing it into various zones (general manage-

ment, special protection) and ascribing it partic-

ular dimensions (15 compartments, 181 stands),

heights (foothill forest), volumes (200,000 cubic

metres of sawlog material of Cþ grade or better),

classes (lowland forest, riparian forest, damp

forest, wet forest, shrubby dry forest, montane

damp forest, montane wet forest, cool temperate

rainforest, warm temperate rainforest), ages (old-

growth, regrowth), histories (undisturbed, negli-

gible disturbance, significant disturbance), species

(328 vascular plant, 34 mammal, 77 bird,

8 amphibian, 15 reptile), and so forth. The texts

which enunciate Goolengook are machinic because

they literally transform (both corporeally and

incorporeally) the assemblages common to this

site from moment to moment. They bring bodies

into being – those of police, loggers, protesters but

also those of heritage rivers, slender tree ferns,

negligibly disturbed forests and the Powerful Owl.

Goolengook is contested because each machine

(protest, scientific, law, political) carries with it the

force of the moral high ground, scientific data,

public opinion, legal precedent, or Truth. But,

in fact, Goolengook flows beyond all these

machines. Its precise form and function is to

have no precise form and function. For Deleuze

and Guattari, the object is not to eliminate

machines (an impossible task) but to influence

the nature and speed of becomings-other capable

of arising within particular contexts.

Common sense suggests that if Goolengook

has been overcoded then the task should be one

of pulling back, of disengagement, of subtracting

or destroying machines one by one. But, and this

goes against virtually every environmental strat-

egy employed around the globe, there is also

an argument to say that Goolengook needs to be

subject to a more intense coding. Instead of

withdrawing, retiring, leaving Nature ‘‘alone,’’

perhaps the way to rebuild the body of

Goolengook is to insist that this space be

mapped more frequently using a multitude of

techniques and scales. There comes a point where

each machine runs up against a limit. But it is only

possible to approach this limit by imposing upon

the machine the obligation to move, see, feel

(in short, sense) in ways previously discounted.

This again goes to the importance of Deleuze’s

halsey

49

idea concerning the differences borne by indivi-

duals. Rebuilding the body of Goolengook entails

that the units of (natural resource) management –

whether those of the forestry machine (forest

management area, district, block, compartment,

stand, coupe), science machine (geographic

representation unit, bioregion, quadrat), or the

conservation machine (national park, industrial

zone) – be recast. These machines all enunciate the

bodies of Nature through the logics of mimesis.

One stand of trees is appraised and then duly used

as a template for the (supposed) form and content

of all surrounding stands. The same goes for the

quadrat (which denotes a randomly prescribed

area where all biota are manually listed/recorded)

and the concept of the national park (which

discursively produces surrounding terrains as

less than sufficient to their task as forest, as

river, as geological formation, and so forth).

Goolengook and places/spaces like it (although

there can be no such additional spaces/places, and

there can be no ‘‘it’’) should be studied, experi-

enced and enunciated using smaller and smaller

units of measurement. Aerial photographs of

Goolengook create the impression of one vast

forest. Driving through the terrain gives the idea

of similar stands of trees and plants. Walking gives

a different image again. But what if the key unit of

management and way of moving were dictated by

an earthworm? What if one was required to map

and enunciate all bodies competing for and

occupying each and every square metre?

(And this for two metres below the topsoil and

100 metres above the forest floor.) It is likely that

one would begin to speak in terms of the

irreducible differences between bodies and

terrains, and, in so doing, a new ethics of

(human) conduct would begin to emerge (which

would, of course, bring with it new sets of

dilemmas but of distinct speeds and proportions).

Clearfell logging – the monstrous body upon

which much forest conflict feeds – proceeds on the

basis that similar areas and their associated biota

and landforms are elsewhere ‘‘adequately repre-

sented’’ (in national parks, in other states, in other

countries). But the Powerful Owl knows every

inch of the tree it dwells within and those of its

home range. It does not, one would venture to say,

consider one tree to be ‘‘just like the next.’’ The

same most likely goes for the Spotted Quoll,

the Long-Footed Potoroo and the countless other

organisms which dwell within and beyond

Goolengook. How, therefore, does one reassemble

Goolengook? By becoming-inhuman. By resisting

the tendency to conflate one body with another.

By engaging the speeds and flows of matter(s)

typically deemed outside political, industrial and

even ecological purviews. In sum, one creates a

more intense body by pushing past the point where

molar politics can do nothing other than recoil.

For, in effect, such recoiling is a reaction to

sensing (or momentarily glimpsing) bodies and

worlds which threaten to transform how each

engenders the ‘‘human’’ and the ‘‘Natural.’’ This

is precisely the point where a Deleuzo-Guattarian

approach to ecological problems begins.

v conclusion

The proliferation of multiplicities – the immanent

deterritorialisation or dissipation of bodies – ena-

bles machinic thought to replace the traditional

pedagogical concern with structures (of the brain,

family, society, economy, environment) with a

preference for mapping the composition, direc-

tion, effects and affects of bodies and their

alignments.71 The importance of deterritorialisa-

tion to machinic thought is borne out by Deleuze’s

remark that ‘‘A society, but also a collective

assemblage, is defined first by its points of

deterritorialization, its fluxes of deterritorializa-

tion.’’72 ‘‘Immanent deterritorialization’’ means

that everybody – whether it be a flower, bird,

forest, regulatory institution, or whatever – conti-

nually faces, intermingles with, draws energy

from, or opens onto other bodies which are

themselves multiplicities. One commentator has

written that ‘‘[T]he brain is as much in the world

as it is in the head.’’73 In keeping with the ideas

presented above, one can add that (molar) Nature

is as much in our heads as in the world. This is not

to say that writing the world in its multiplicity

leads automatically to chaos or disorder – to a

random distribution of bodies and abstract

machines with no way of unfolding an ethic.

In fact, configuring an individual, or a group, or

a corporation, or a forest as a multiplicity is an

act which has very serious consequences for the

ecology andmachinic thought

50

socius. Why? Because ‘‘the social’’ and ‘‘the

environmental’’ is a decidedly false (reactive)

dichotomy. As Deleuze and Guattari put it:

[M]an and nature are not like two opposite

terms confronting each other – not even in the

sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship

of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and

effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they

are one and the same essential reality, the

producer-product. Production as process over-

takes all idealistic categories and constitutes

a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of

an immanent principle.74

A decade later – using slightly different terminol-

ogy – they write:

[E]ach individual is an infinite multiplicity,

and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity

of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The

plane of consistency of Nature is like an

immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real

and individual; its pieces are the various

assemblages and individuals, each of which

groups together an infinity of particles entering

into an infinity of more or less interconnected

relations. There is therefore a unity to the plane

of nature, which applies equally to the inani-

mate and the animate, the artificial and the

natural.75

What else are environmental problems other than

the visible and audible result of attempts to

constitute various portions of earth as a unity in

spite of its being a multiplicity? The challenge,

it would seem, is to develop a lexicon which does

the least violence to the nuances of each (socio-

ecological) event.76 In this regard, Deleuze and

Guattari provide a means of speaking and writing

about the machines which configure/stratify earth

without having to ascribe humanity an enduring

ontological place – a place that has historically

taken as its starting point the dichotomy human/

nonhuman.77 The politico-ethical strength of

a schizoanalytic of environmental problems is

that such an approach views all bodies as conduits

for the varying flows, speeds and intensities

of the cosmos, and, therefore, as sites for

the possible diminution of human-induced

environmental damage. Knowing something

about environmental problems, therefore, means

to become cognisant of the flows, speeds and

intensities of matter (organic and inorganic) and

energy (kinetic and potential) which pass through

and across particular kinds of bodies (atmo-

spheric, aquatic, terrestrial). But, as illustrated

above, the bodies at stake here necessarily go far

beyond the ‘‘human’’ subject. Of equal impor-

tance are the bodies of experts, forest blocks,

endangered species, logging coupes, heritage

rivers, national parks, and so forth. In all

instances, the task would be to dislodge the

image of thought currently investing those assem-

blages deemed responsible for ‘‘managing’’

Nature. In other words, the challenge set by

Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari

is to experiment with the plane

of consistency in order to implode

the (modernist) will toward the

categorical.

notesThe author would like to express his gratitudeto the reviewers of this article. Their commentswere of great assistance in preparing this piecefor publication.

1 Cf.Cheney,‘‘Postmodern Environmental Ethics’’;Chawla, ‘‘Linguistic and Philosophical Roots ofOur Environmental Crisis’’; Hallman, ‘‘Nietzsche’sEnvironmental Ethics’’; Acampora, ‘‘Using andAbusing Nietzsche for Environmental Ethics’’;Bruner and Oelschlaeger, ‘‘Rhetoric, Environ-mentalism, and Environmental Ethics’’; Litfin,Ozone Discourses; Gare, Postmodernism and theEnvironmental Crisis; Luke, ‘‘On Environmentality’’and Ecocritique; Lash, Szerszynski and Wynne,Risk, Environment andModernity; Conley, Ecopolitics;Peace, ‘‘Governing the Environment’’; Rutherford,‘‘Policing Nature’’; Seddon, Landprints; Virilio,Open Sky; Darrier,Discourses ofthe Environment.

2 For notable exceptions, cf. Conley, Ecopolitics;Hayden, ‘‘Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism’’; Halsey,‘‘Environmental Discontinuities.’’

3 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus 37.

4 Deleuze,Difference and Repetition134.

5 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of theGreeks 42.

6 Collingwood,The Idea of Nature 30^32.

halsey

51

7 Ibid. 31.

8 Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra104.

9 Nietzsche,Twilight ofthe Idols/The Anti-Christ102.

10 Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra137.

11 Bauman, Postmodern Ethics.

12 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of theGreeks 54.

13 Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra 46^47.

14 Nietzsche, The Will to Power ‰ 1067; originalemphasis, here and throughout, unless statedotherwise.

15 Cf. Hallman, ‘‘Nietzsche’s EnvironmentalEthics’’; Parkes,‘‘Staying Loyal to the Earth.’’

16 Deleuze,Nietzsche and Philosophy 50.

17 Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra 84.

18 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ102.

19 Nietzsche,TheWill to Power ‰ 604.

20 Nietzsche, Beyond Goodand Evil 51.

21 Nietzsche quoted in Kofman, ‘‘DescartesEntrapped’’ 178.

22 Nietzsche, Beyond Goodand Evil 46.

23 Nietzsche,Twilightofthe Idols/The Anti-Christ 48.

24 Nietzsche,Human, All Too Human11.

25 Nietzsche, Philosophyand Truth 51^52.

26 Nietzsche, Beyond Goodand Evil138.

27 Nietzsche,TheWill to Power ‰ 2.

28 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo127.

29 Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra 46.

30 Guattari,Chaosmosis.

31 Cf.Halsey,‘‘TheWood for the Paper.’’

32 Cf.Guattari,Chaosmosis1^32.

33 Guattari, Soft Subversions 277.

34 Cf.Nietzsche,TheWill to Power ‰ 516.

35 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus142.

36 Deleuze,‘‘Codes’’ 271.

37 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus 216.

38 Guattari,Chaosmosis 52.

39 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus14.

40 ‘‘Deterritorialisation’’denotes an‘‘uprooting ofstructure organized within a definite territory’’(Guattari,‘‘Three Ecologies’’).

41 Cf.Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 36.

42 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus 507.

43 As ametamodel, schizoanalysis knows nothingof the model, of representation, of authenticity.‘‘Whatdistinguishesmetamodelization frommod-elization is theway it uses terms to develop possi-ble openings onto the virtual and onto creativeprocessuality’’ (Guattari,Chaosmosis 31).

44 Guattari, Soft Subversions 277.

45 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 33.

46 Cf. Spinoza, Ethics 71^74.

47 Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra 61^63.

48 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism andSchizophrenia 76.

49 Ibid. 27; emphasis added.

50 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus154.

51 Guattari,‘‘A Liberation of Desire’’ 205.

52 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus 217.

53 Ibid. 229.

54 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 29.

55 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus443^44.

56 Deleuze,‘‘Codes.’’ In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze andGuattari write:

Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac andkidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle,a flow of sperm, shit, or urine that areproduced by partial objects and constantlycut off by other partial objects, which inturn produce other flows, interrupted byother partial objects. Every ‘‘object’’ presup-poses the continuity of a flow; every flow,the fragmentation of the object. (6)

57 Deleuze andGuattari, AThousand Plateaus 468.

58 Deleuze,Difference and Repetition 251^52.

ecology andmachinic thought

52

59 Ibid. 248.

60 Cf.Halsey,‘‘Environmental Visions.’’

61 The ideas expressed here echo the distinctiondrawnbyVirilio between the‘‘specific’’ and ‘‘gener-alised’’ accident. In relation to the former heremarks, ‘‘[E]very time a technology is invented,take shipping for instance, an accident is inventedtogether with it, in this case, the shipwreck,whichis exactly contemporaneous with the invention ofthe ship’’ (‘‘From Modernism to Hypermodernismand Beyond’’ 40). Virilio goes on to contend thatwith the application of the ‘‘absolute velocity ofelectromagnetic waves’’ to certain bodies (such asnuclear reactors) we are now in themidst of tech-nologies that allow for the occurrence of theintegrated or generalised accident (40). As hecomments: ‘‘[W]hen an event takes place some-where today, the possibility arises that it mightdestroy everything’’ (41). Arguably, the divisionandorganisation of terrains such as those spanningsouth-eastern Australia or California’s coast areapt to produce the generalised accident of habitatloss/depletion of biodiversity.

62 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus 249.

63 Ibid. 28.

64 Ibid.9.

65 Ibid. 8.

66 Since late 1996, a dedicated group of people(sometimes called protesters, other times‘‘ferals,’’ ‘‘greenies,’’ ‘‘dole bludgers,’’ and the like)have agitated against the logging activities carriedout in Goolengook forest block in far easternVictoria, Australia (situated about five hundredkilometres east of Melbourne and about ninetyminutes over unsealed roads to the nearesttown).The block itself (shaped almost exactly likea pear) envelopes an area of around nine thousandhectares (about the size of Manhattan).

67 This borrows from Derrida’s analytic that allwords are always already under erasure (sousrature). Derrida, as is well known, is concernedwith originary presence. I am not, and neither,more importantly, are Deleuze and Guattari. Inthe context of the present argument, therefore,the omnipresence of erasure functions as amachine of deterritorialisation. It helps bringforth the virtual from the actual in order thatso-called forested, industrial or conservationareas lose their signfi(c)ance as forest, as logging

zone, as ecological site. The strikethrough forceseach and every body (word and interpreter) toreckon with multiplicities in place of unities. Andthis, in turn, is to commence a line of flight (how-ever treacherous) toward a different kind ofethic(s). (Thanks to John Fitzgerald for assistingthe author with thismatter.)

68 Cf. Lecercle,Deleuze and Language.

69 For the term ‘‘waste lands’’ see HistoricalSubcommittee of Centenary CelebrationsCouncil, Victoria the First Century: An HistoricalSurvey (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1934)124. For ‘‘unsettled districts’’ see Order in Councilof 9 Mar.1847, as published in the New SouthWalesGovernment Gazette (7 Oct.1847).

70 These are examples of the handwrittenterms (dating from the late nineteenth century)displayed on the Survey Plans for variousparishes which intersect Goolengook forestblock. The term ‘‘back country,’’ for instance,appears on Plan 44E/8248, ‘‘Tracks, Rivers andCreeks, County of Croajingolong,’’ and is dated23 Apr. 1888. ‘‘Croajingolong’’ is a variation onthe Aboriginal term for the area now calledEast Gippsland.

71 Massumi, Parables for theVirtual.

72 Deleuze and Parnet,Dialogues II125.

73 Ansell Pearson,Germinal Life178.

74 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 4^5.

75 Deleuze and Guattari, AThousand Plateaus 254.

76 Cf.Halsey,Deleuze and Environmental Damage.

77 In conversation, Peter Rush, Aug.1997.

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Mark Halsey

Department of Criminology

University of Melbourne

Level 4

234 Queensberry Street

Carlton

Victoria 3053

Australia

E-mail: mhalsey@unimelb.edu.au

halsey