know the significance of the concept of ‘plane’ of immanence or coherence
in Deleuze’s thinking: smooth or striated space, nomosand war machine,
cards and strata, decalcomania). The displacement of the series of modes of
production is therefore twofold: by translation from the economic into the
semiotic and the corporeal, in the form of a correlation; and by inversion of
centre and periphery, with a correlative change in the plane of organisation
(space and no longer time). This shift, while it might leave Marxists wondering,
will not surprise readers of Wallerstein or Braudel. And, here, we see how the
concept of sociusis not the same as the concept of society. It involves rendering
the metaphor of the body politic literal (a tactic our authors are fond of): the
social body is as material/corporeal as the body of the earth; it is traversed
by energy flows, segmented by coding operations. And this material body
is, of course, a collective body whereas society – in its dominant liberal version
at least – is a collection of individuals. But it will also be noted, with a
resignation tinged with regret, that the concept of class has paid the price for
this dual shift.
Third shift: from labour to desire. This is because the concept of class is
based on the productive structure of society, the contradictions that propel it
forward, and the struggles that this entails. And the productive structure
foregrounds labour as the basic human practice and as the measure of value.
Deleuze and Guattari – such was the climate of the time – are hostile to
productivism, the appropriation of nature by humanity (as is well known,
towards the end of his life, Guattari, independently of Deleuze, attempted to
develop an ecological philosophy that had hardly any resonance). We therefore
pass from the centrality of labour as praxisto that of desire, as the motor of
energy flows. It must be admitted that this concept of desire is not uninteresting.
Contrary to the Freudian concept, predicated on lack and hence negative (it
is of the essence of desire never to be satisfied, never assuaged, except by the
death of the subject, which puts an end to it), it is a positive concept: an
energy traversing and animating a machine. In Abécédaire, where the letter D
is devoted to desire, Deleuze insists on the fact that there is no desire except
within an assemblage. We can see how the subject is once again erased. A
transitive binary relation – a subject desires an object – gives way to the
complex structure of an assemblage. Desire is the energy that holds together
the assemblages and circulates in them. We understand the new meaning
assumed by the concept of machine (which, in one of his first texts, Guattari
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