Schizobiology and Literature

Keith Ansell Pearson

I want to unfold further the theme of germinal life (and death) by examining with the
schizo-biology of Anti-Oedipus and its critique of Weismann and Freud's privileging
of the reproduction of the species. Deleuze and Guattari contend that both end up
providing an anthropomorphic conception of sexuality and of generative life. They
also maintain that Freud's novel introduction of a death-instinct into biological
thinking does not provide insight into the machinic character of germinal life, that it
is characterized by breaks and flows which cut across lineages (transversal
communications). In the second half of this essay I have selected Lawrence's novel
on 'Australia', Kangaroo, as an instructive and problematic example of what is
involved in the dismantling (death) of the (molar) self that takes place through a
becoming-intense, a becoming-animal, a becoming-molecule, and a becoming-
imperceptible.

I: Biology Beyond Weismann and Freud

Oedipe, c'est l'entropie de la machine desirante...(Deleuze and Guatarri 1973:

471).

...the rhizome...is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also
from genitality... (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 28; 1988: 18)

Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree but a
machine...a music more maddening than the siren's long ago...They aroused a
strange, nostalgic ache of desire, something almost demoniacal, never to be
fulfilled...but incalculable, incalculable (Lawrence 1995c: 116-117).

Thinking 'beyond' Weismann and Freud requires insisting upon the independence of
sexuality (understood in its widest sense of energy-flows and desiring-machines) with
regard to species reproduction. Even the introduction of the death-instinct does not
alter the fact that for Freud the sexual instincts solely serve the reproduction of the
species (see Freud 1991: 318, for the link between the germ-plasm and species
reproduction). We need to configure the body without organs and the 'partial objects'1
in a manner that is neither a replication of either Weismann's distinction between the
germ plasm and the soma plasm nor a simple repetition of Freud's distinction between
the life and death drives.2 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud speaks of
the 'striking similarity' between Weismann's distinction of soma plasm and germ
plasm and his own separation of the death instincts from the life instincts, noting that
the Weismann's treatment of the 'duration of life and the death of organisms' is of the
greatest interest to psychoanalysis (1991: 318, 322). Freud proposes to provide a
'dynamic corollary ' to Weismann's morphological theory by distinguishing two kinds
of instincts within the living substance, the drive towards to death in the living and
the drive towards the perpetual renewal of life. Freud responds to the challenge
implicit in Weismann's account of organismic life, which stresses that death is a late
acquisition in evolutionary life, peculiar to multicellular organisms and not
characteristic of protista - so that death is not a drive or an urge but simply a matter of
expediency, 'a manifestation of adaptation to the external conditions of life' - by
asserting that such a death, death as a late acquisition, applies only to its 'manifest
phenomena' and does not, therefore, render impossible 'the assumption of processes
tending towards it' (ibid.: 322). It is important to appreciate the extent to which Freud
proffers the death-drive from the perspective of the prejudices of organismic life. The
creativity of evolution (variation, vital differences) is seen by Freud to amount to little
more than a circuitous detour from the path of death, where the organism fulfils its
desire for self-preservation by attaining perfect, self-sufficient stasis (it is this which
informs Deleuze's claim that Freud's model of death is individualist, solipsistic, and
monadic). No matter how much life diverges from its original unity as substance
through the complexity and creativity of evolution it remains the same subject - the
life that desires death (see ibid.: 311). This is how it is possible for Freud to state
that the self-preservative instincts are not instincts of life but rather, ultimately, ones
of death, to be regarded as 'component instincts whose function' is simply 'to assure
that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible way
of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the
organism itself' (ibid.). This insight explains the paradoxical behaviour of all living
organisms who struggle energetically against events that if embraced would help
them to achieve their life's goal quite rapidly 'by a kind of short-circuit' (ibid.: 312).
We are, then, at least to be granted the freedom and dignity to die in our own way and
to take our time in doing it.

It is on the basis of this privileged life and death accorded to the organism - the
freedom to die in its own fashion through the prolongation of life - that Freud judges
germinal life (the life of Weismann's germ-cells). In working against 'the death of the
living substance' the germ-cells do not introduce any new life but merely gain for life
a temporary reprieve from the final execution, simply attaining 'a lengthening of the
road to death' (ibid.: 313). Any 'fresh start' in life, therefore, is to be treated as more
than a prolongation of the journey: regression is the name of the game, and all throws
of the dice lead to this ultimate death. All moving-foward or progression, whether as
deviation, degeneration, or variation, a cornucopia of good and bad, the monstrous
itself, remains implicated in the ultimate moving-backward (regression). 'Fresh vital
differences' exist to be '"lived off"': 'The dominating tendency of mental life, and
perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to
remove internal tension due to stimuli...- a tendency which finds expression in the
pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for
believing in the existence of death instincts' (ibid.: 329).

Freud must retain death as a fundamental and originary causal instinct or drive at all
costs in order to sustain his argument that it operates regressively as the desire to
'return' to the early, inorganic state from which all life has evolved. However, while
insisting that modern biology does not at all contradict the theory of the death
instincts, and while openly stating that his argument could benefit from more
information on the origin of sexual reproduction and on the sexual instincts in
general, he concludes the essay by speaking of biology as a land of 'unlimited
possibilities' which at some point in the near future may 'blow away the whole of our
artificial structure of hypotheses' (ibid.: 334). But in the essay on the pleasure
principle, and elsewhere, Freud insists upon all new life, evidenced, he notes, in the
processes of embryology and germinal-cellular life, is merely a straightforward
repetition of the 'beginnings of organic life' - including, and especially, a repetition of
the original entropic desire of organic life (1991: 329; see also 1991b: 139-41; in this
essay on 'Anxiety and Instinctual Life' Freud maintains that everything that is
described as the manifestation of instinctual behaviour in animals, from the spawning
migrations of fishes to the migratory flights of birds, takes place 'under the orders of
the compulsion to repeat', meaning that all instincts express an essentially
conservative nature). He remains keen throughout, therefore, even though it proves
so difficult, to ascribe to the sexual instinct - to that which keep alive the 'vital
differences' and makes life live on - the 'repetition-compulsion' that so securely puts
us 'on the track of the death instincts'.3 The goal of final death can only be
temporarily derailed by life conceived as creative evolution.

'There is no end. There is only the rupture of death' (Lawrence 1964: 77). In Anti-
Oedipus the notion of the death-instinct is abandoned in favour of a model and
experience of death that belong to the productive and nonpersonal unconscious: 'The
experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely
because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity
as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within
itself the zero intensity starting from which it is produced, in one moment...' (1972:
394; 1984: 330). This is to think death not as an existential being-towards death but
as the return from the 'experience' of death to the 'model' of death 'in the cycle of the
desiring-machines' (ibid.: 395; 331). Death is to be evaluated by schizoanalysis by
focussing on its functioning in a machinic assemblage and the system of its energetic
conversions, never in accordance with an abstract principle or schema. This is why
Deleuze always insists on thinking beyond the death which is apodeictic knowledge
(our sense of the mortality of the self is both empty and abstract) and placing the
stress on the importance of coming to know the 'event' of death that always enjoys an
open problematic structure ('where and when?') (Deleuze 1969: 170-1; 1990: 145).
The 'real opposition' is not between the body without organs and the organs
considered as partial objects, since both attack the integrity of the organism. There
are not, therefore, two desires but only two kinds of desiring-machine parts that are
dispersed and caught up in a machinic evolution/involution. Everything 'works' only
by breaking down. The task, therefore, is to convert the model of death into the
experience of death: 'Converting the death that arises from within (in the body
without organs) into the death that comes from without (on the body without
organs)' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 394; 1984: 330).

Deleuze and Guattari locate Freud's error in his attempt to map out the dualism of the
sexual and ego-instincts topologically. As a result of such a distribution the machinic
element of desire gets eliminated from Freud's model of death:4 'The purpose of the
topological and dynamic dualities is to thrust aside the point of view of the functional
multiplicity that alone is economic' (1972: 398; 1984: 333). Why posit only two
kinds of drives which function in molar and mysterious fashion rather than n genes of
drives? Is it because psychoanalysis is a new ascetic ideal which needs to erect an
abstract and transcendent death instinct so as to better assure itself of control over the
wild populations which make up desire?5 In Freud the positing of a death-drive
serves to effect a complete liquidation of the libido and to deprive death of its vitality
and becoming.

Death is, in fact, in Freud being modelled in terms of an arborescent schema, with
death itself getting configured as a central unifying agent of life: life and death
functioning as the great One-Two, a hydra and medusa, producing an organized
memory of life that makes escape impossible (think of the way in which Freud
constructs an Oedipal hauntology in Totem and Taboo, in which the dead father, who
has been killed at the primal scene that marks the beginnings of civilization, as well
as the prohibitions of religion and the categorical imperatives of morality, is more
powerful for being dead. On account of his death the guilt lives on - and on). On this
model the channels of transmission are pre-established, given once and for all, and
the individual has to merely assume their allotted place in the grim scheme of things.
Life is merely the stunted tree of death that never sprouts a rhizome. 'Trees may
correspond to the rhizome, or they may burgeon into a rhizome' (1980: 27; 1988: 17).
A different model of death recommends itself, replacing the death that merely sows
and reeps seeds with the death that replants and unearths offshoots.6

We may note by way of a contrast with Freud that the figuration of death and desire in
Nietzsche takes place in the context of a machinic, or nonorganismic, appreciation:
'even the partial reduction in usefulness, decay and degeneration, loss of meaning and
functional purpose, in short death, make up the conditions of a true
progressus' (Nietzsche 1994: 56). There is, in fact, a Nietzschean basis to Deleuze's
quarrel with Freud's model of death. The contention would be that in Freud death is
always being judged from the standpoint of the molar (the organism, society, etc).
This takes two strikingly different forms in Freud's work evident in the kind of
affirmation of death offered in his reflections of 1915 on the disillusionment of war
and his classic essay of 1929/30, 'Das Unbehagen in der Kultur', the text which,
according to Lacan, remains 'unsurpassed for an understanding of Freud's thought and
the summation of his experience' (Lacan 1992: 7). I shall reverse the order of these
essays and deal with the later (postwar) manifestation of his molar prejudices first.
The entire 'evolution of civilization' is to be understood in terms of the struggle
between Eros and Death, the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, 'as it works
itself out in the human species' (Freud 1987: 314; my emphasis). Whether 'eternal
Eros' will succeed in its battle against its immortal enemy is a question Freud can
only leave to the future. In this essay Freud contends that the 'inclination to
aggression', conceived as the supreme, most alarming and persistent, manifestation
of the death-instinct, 'is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and
I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization' (ibid.:
313). In contrast to the essay that I shall discuss shortly, written in 1915 during the
war, where the inclination to aggression is perceived to be a highly rational desire and
receives problematically the highest affirmation, in this piece on the discontents of
civilization Freud's concern is to understand how it and the hindrance it presents to
the progress of civilization can be best got rid of (ibid.: 336). This produces the
ironical effect that the 'aggression' of the death-instinct is to be made subject to the
violence peculiar to 'civilization', to civilization's own death-instinct, in order to
prevent, or at least contain, the rebellion of the disorganized body ('The return of the
repressed makes up the tabooed and subterranean history of civilization', Marcuse,
1987: 16; compare Baudrillard 1993: 148) . We are presented with a simple choice:
either 'civilization' or a 'return to primitive conditions'. In such an argument the
experience and model of death are being stratified on a completely molar level since
the integrity of civilization must be upheld and preserved at all costs. It is thus
difficult to take seriously Lacan's presentation of 'Civilization and Its Discontents' as
a discourse on the ancient problem of evil (Lacan 1992: 185). Freud's ethics, he
claims, are 'humanitarian', 'which is not exactly to say that he was a
reactionary' (ibid.: 207). Lacan himself notes, enigmatically, that the death-drive is
neither true nor false, simply 'suspect' (ibid.: 213).

In a recent reading of the death-drive, as it figures in Freud and Lacan, Zizek takes
the drastic step of divorcing it from the unconscious altogether, marking it as the site
of the symbolic order. On this reading the drive is not to be defined in terms of a
simple opposition between life and death since its space is occupied by, on the one
hand, the monstrous split within life itself between ordinary or normal life and
'horrifying "undead" life', and, on the other hand, that within death between the
ordinary dead and the 'undead' machine. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Zizek wishes to
separate the Freudian death-drive from any Heideggerean 'being-towards-death', but
maintains that, although the drive itself is 'immortal, eternal, "undead" (the
annihilation towards which the death drive tends is not death as the unsurpassable
limit of man qua finite being'), death belongs, along with mortality, to the domain of
consciousness. For the unconscious there is no death-anxiety since such anxiety
belongs only to consciousness (Zizek 1997: 89; see also Zizek's Lacanian remarks on
the death-drive - it is not a biological fact but 'defines la condition humaine...' - in
Zizek 1989: 4-5; and on its complex relation to the symbolic order, ibid.: 131-6).7
Zizek's move succeeds in drawing attention to the strange role occupied by the death-
drive in Freud's psychoanalysis. By associating the drive and its anxiety with
consciousness we begin to appreciate the extent to which the drive is posited in Freud
from the perspective of organismic life, in which even the unconscious is not free
from the paranoid self-destructiveness that marks the consciousness of the organism
or organic self. It is not only on the level of civilization that Freud reveals his molar
prejudices; on the contrary, they extend as far down as the unconscious and the
desires of primeval man. This is clear in Freud's remarks on his 'attitude towards
death', which provides the context in which to think through the paradoxes and
complications of Freud's position, which is lacking in Zizek's novel account (a
context also ignored by Rose in her analysis of Freud, repetition, and death, 1992:
101-110, especially 107). These speculations on death of 1915 provide us with a
different Freud from the one found in the 'Civilization' piece only insofar as his
'attitude' toward destruction and death are concerned. Freud's theoretical schema
remains molar and organismic. Freud writes the essay in order to 'overcome', or work
through, the sense of disillusionment which has accompanied the onset of war among
those who are not combatants and cogs in the huge machine of war. How can the
unexpected, the worst, happen in the midst of European civilization? How could the
'world-dominating nations of the white race' regress to such tribal instincts and
brutality? The aim is to learn something ancient and buried about death from this
destructive experience. We are to discover that war gives way to dis-illusionment
only because it is the result of fundamental illusion regarding the real character of
life, a truth hidden to us by the veneer of civilization. In this essay Freud does not
simply declare the unconscious to be ignorant of death, but rather ascribes to it a lust
for annihilation and war. On the one hand, the unconscious, Freud says, does not
believe in its own death but considers itself to be immortal. The deepest strata of our
minds that is made up of only so-called 'instinctual impulses' is said to know 'nothing
negative...no negation' (Freud 1987: 85). In this denial of death deep within our
unconscious there resides, speculates Freud, the 'secret' and illusion of heroism. On
the other hand, the unconscious houses the desires of the ultimate paranoid monad
that is full of death-wishes towards strangers and outsiders. In our unconscious
impulses we thus 'daily and hourly get rid of anyone who stands in our way...The
expression "Devil take him!"...which really means "Death take him!", is in our
unconscious a serious and powerful death wish' (ibid.: 86). Our unconscious, says
Freud, murders over trifles and can be compared to the Athenian code of Draco which
knows only death as the punishment for some perceived crime (in this case, the crime
of being strange, a stranger, to the 'unconscious'). It is such an 'insight' which leads
Freud to declare that 'if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishful impulses, we
ourselves are, like primeval man, a gang of murderers' (ibid.). It is on the basis of
these claims that Freud then arrives at his so-called 'positive' or affirmative
conception of death (Rose 1992: 104): the risk of death must be affirmed if life is not
to become impoverished. But what commentators such as Rose ignore is the
organismic prejudices of Freud's account. 8 For the death and war that Freud affirms
are those based on a paranoid model of desire (in this specific instance, nationalism).
War, Freud tells us, strips away from us the 'later accretions of civilisation', so laying
bare before each and every one of us our real primeval self. Moreover, it 'compels us
to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death; it stamps strangers as enemies,
whose death is to be brought about or desired...' (ibid.: 88). The issue for Freud,
therefore, is not one of abolishing war but, on the contrary, adapting ourselves to its
inescapable and positive reality and affirming the primeval pleasures it allows the self
that risks life to indulge in (the destruction of what is outside and strange to itself).
This, Freud notes with due cruel irony, amounts to a positive regression (war brings
about an 'involution', ibid.: 74), one which at least has 'truth' on its side. The illusion
that we can live life without us all being, at some point in time, mass murderers is
what makes life intolerable, Freud challenges - so let's become just like the savages
we have civilized and engage in mindless murder and wanton destruction. Such is the
character of Freud's association of the regression of the death-drive with that of the
trials of modern war.9 This, ultimately, is what Freud means when he says that death
must be given a place in our reality and given its due (given its rewards). It is not
simply Rousseauian naivete which leads Deleuze and Guattari to question the
'scientific' basis of these remarkably phobic claims concerning war, death, and
civilization, and to insist upon a comprehension of their molar determinations.

Let me return to the problem of reproduction, which is equally a problem of the

discomforts of civilization and of our attachment to species-thinking. Failure to
separate sexuality from reproduction plunges desire back into sedentary stratification
where it comes to feel at home amongst people, places, and things, and is no longer a
free-flowing ambulant population: 'For the prime evidence points to the fact that
desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it
traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing
breaks and captures - an always nomadic and migrant desire...the truth is that
sexuality is everywhere' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 348; 1984: 292-3). When Freud
writes of sexuality it is always under, Deleuze and Guattari contend, a Weismannian
influence with it coming 'under the sway of the species and the germen' (ibid.: 347
note; 292 note). Sexuality, they maintain, is not in the service of generation, in the
manner of Weismann's germ-plasm; rather generation, whether progressive or
regressive, evolutive or involutive, is in the service of sexuality 'as a cyclical
movement by which the unconscious...reproduces itself' (ibid.: 328; 275-6).
Lawrence, Deleuze and Guattari maintain, enables us to map this molecular
unconscious beyond Weismann and Freud simply because he has a more accurate
evaluation of sexuality than Freud, 'even from the viewpoint of the famous
scientificity' (ibid.: 347; 292). Lawrence shows that 'sexuality' is a matter of flows,
that it cannot be trapped within a limited framework, while love needs to be portrayed
as a complex of deterritorialization and reterritorialization always bound up with a
field of socio-historical investment: 'A love is neither reactionary nor revolutionary,
but it is the index of the reactionary or revolutionary character of the social
investments of the libido' (ibid.: 422; 352; compare Deleuze on Lawrence in 1993b:
63-4, 163-4). The moment of anti-oedipal critique, therefore, cannot be an abstract
one executed merely mechanically. As Deleuze and Guattari note in a passage in
Anti-Oedipus that may surprise its readers, it is not a question of 'denying the vital
importance of parents' or the love children feel towards them, but rather of 'knowing
the place and function of parents within desiring-production', as opposed to 'forcing
the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within the restricted code of
Oedipus' (1972: 56; 1984: 47; translation modified). They note that a child has, from
its earliest infancy, a 'wide-ranging life of desire' which, although ascribed to parental
influence, cannot from the point of view of the production of desire be related to
them. This open field of desire concerns an entire set of nonfamilial relations,
including machines of desire connected to multiple universes and often involving
animal-becomings. On the plane of the transcendental, therefore, 'the unconscious is
an orphan' (ibid.: 57; 49). They conclude the point by affirming the superiority of
Lawrence's intimation that there is more to 'sexuality' than the private theatre set up
by psychoanalysis allows for: there is 'the fantastic factory of Nature and
Production' (ibid.).

Such an appraisal of Lawrence is consonant with the conception of desire as positive

production, within which it is unnecessary to make an arbitrary distinction between
production and acquisition (at which point desire becomes lack, chiefly, the lack of a
real object) and to condemn the fantastic productions of desire to the realm of the
merely hallucinatory. Foucault was one of the first to note that an achievement of
Deleuze's texts of the late 1960s was to show the extent to which phantasms do not
extend organisms into imaginary domains but actually 'topologize' the materiality of
bodies (Foucault 1977: 170). For Deleuze it is necessary to break with the conception
of the transcendental that we have inherited from Kant in order to free thought from
the imperial claims of the subject and from effecting transcendental complicity or
identification with common sense and doxa. In this way desire itself becomes
liberated from the idea of a fixed subject. Kant's Copernican Revolution is significant
in that it brings about a critical revolution for the theory of desire by attributing to
desire a causal power of production. Kant's error was to limit such production to the
realm of superstitious beliefs, fantasies, and hallucinations (in attacking the
transcendent employment of Ideas the aim is to preserve the sanity and integrity of
the good sense of the normal subject at all costs; compare Adorno and Horkheimer:
'Kant foretold what Hollywood consciously put into practice: in the very process of
production, images are pre-censored according to the norm of the understanding
which will later govern their apprehension', 1979: 84). On account of the restricted
domain Kant places it in desire remains on his schema based on the classical model of
lack. Deleuze and Guattari contend in Anti-Oedipus that a fixed subject only arises
through the repression of desire; considered independently of a subject desire lacks
nothing: 'Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected
to it' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 34; 1984: 26). The analysis of desire assumes the
form of a transcendental analysis in that it treats the unconscious as the material, not
ideological, site of the production of desire which precedes and can account for the
emergence of molar identity formation (subjects, persons, and organisms conceived
as unitary wholes). Such formations of identity are implicated in a series of
transcendental illusions insofar as they abstract molar forms from their molecular
conditions of production. The break with modern transcendental philosophy must
involve, therefore, formulating a 'qualitative duration of consciousness without self',
so that experience is conceived and explored as asubjective and impersonal (Deleuze
1997b: 3).
In its movements and becomings desire is entirely machinic, neither requiring a fixed
subject nor lacking an object: 'Desire does not express a molar lack within the
subject; rather the molar organization deprives desire of its objective being' (Deleuze
and Guattari 1972: 35; 1984: 27). Desire is not a natural given, Deleuze notes, but
rather an assemblage (agencement) of heterogeneous elements that involves a process
rather than a genesis or a structure. It is, he says, an affect rather than a sentiment, a
'haecceity' rather than a subjectivity, an event rather than a person or a thing, the
becoming of which requires the constitution of a plane of immanence (Deleuze
1997a: 189). In other words, desire is being conceived in a thoroughly Bergsonian
manner, as process never product, and as germinal life not final life. The plane of
immanence, or body without organs, it presupposes, is to be 'defined solely by zones
of intensity' such as 'thresholds, gradients, flows' (ibid.). On this plane the body
exists free of the organization of the strata, including the organism, and the effect of
(formal) power. Deleuze always returned to Lawrence in his writings because he
believed that in his work there was actual an entire machine of literature capable of
demonstrating the workings of desire conceived along these lines, life conceived not
as naive nature but as a variable plane of immanence (see, for example, the important
remark in Deleuze 1997a: 190). The last thing Lawrence's writings are about, he
insists, is some return to nature (Deleuze 1993: 70 & 1997a: 189) (see also the deft
rebuttal of Lawrence's alleged nostalgic projections and sentimentalism in the
important philosophical study by Bell 1992: 78, 92).

From the point of view of 'community' (la communaute) evolution is always

disjunctive simply because the cycle is marked by disjunctions. This means that
generation is secondary in relation to the cycle and also that the 'transmission' - of
genes, for example - is secondary in relation to information and communication.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that the 'genetic revolution' of modern biology consists in
the discovery that, strictly speaking, there is not a transmission of flows but rather the
'communication of a code or an axiomatic' which informs the flows. To give primacy
to the phenomenon of communication in this way is to push into the background the
problems of hereditary transmission. The boldness of Deleuze's move consists in
extending this insight into the phenomenon of communication to the social field of
desire (see Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 328; 1984: 276).

The problem with the Weismannian account is that it reifies the role of the germ-
plasm, or of DNA, in the various cycles of life. DNA, for example, does not function
as an independent 'replicator' but is dependent on the environment provided by the
dividing cell.10 Similarly, the replicating molecules, that is the nucleic acid templates,
need an energy source, the building blocks provided by the the nucleotide bases, as
well as an enzyme, to faciliate the process of polymerization which is involved in the
self-copying of the templates (see Goodwin 1995: 34). Brian Goodwin argues that in
all unicellular organisms and plants, as well as in many species of animal, there is no
separation of germ plasm from somatoplasm, 11 meaning that there is no 'hereditary
essence', such as the germ or DNA, which is responsible for the replication of life.12
The new biology of complexity theory argues that the molecular mechanisms which
make up DNA enjoy a versatility, making it a fluid rather than a stable polymer (ibid.:
35). All the molecular components of cellular life, such as the DNA, the RNA, and
proteins, undergo a 'molecular turnover' in which their constituent parts get replaced
(ibid.).13 The hereditary material of life, therefore, plays an important role in
stabilizing certain aspects of the spatial and temporal order of the dynamic field in
which life evolves and involves. For complexity theorists such as Goodwin, however,
what is decisive is the 'generative field' which provides the dynamical context in
which the organization of the egg cell or the organism takes place. Note the emphasis
is not on a physical 'essence' but on a dynamic field of forces. It is not the actual
nature of components involved in a physical field, such as molecules and cells, that is
decisive in the production of spatial patterns, but rather the manner of interaction with
one another in time (the kinematics of the egg) and in space (their relational order,
that is, how the state of one region depends upon the state of neighbouring regions)
(Goodwin 1995: 49). 'Nude DNA', therefore, does not replicate itself but requires a
complex assemblage of protein enzymes: '...the cellular dance is mediated by a host
of protein enzymes' (Kauffman 1995: 39).

On the mapping of the molecular carried out by schizoanalysis the unconscious

'cannot confine itself to genes as units of reproduction', since such units remain too
expressive and bound up with molar formations (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 344-5;
1984: 290). The molecular unconscious is implicated not in the continuity of the
germ-plasm or of DNA but in the production of proteins which are never the subject
of a simple reproduction: 'Proteins are both products and units of production; they
are what constitutes the unconscious as a cycle or as the autoproduction of the
unconscious - the ultimate molecular elements in the arrangement of the desiring-
machines and the syntheses of desire' (ibid.). Beyond the limit of the molar
formations the molecular chain no longer has any other function than one of effecting
a deterritorialization of flows, causing them to pass through the great signifying wall,
so undoing the codes: 'It is a chain of escape and no longer a code' (Deleuze and
Guattari 1972: 392; 1984: 328). A molecular chain still signifies of course, since it is
composed of signs or marks of desire; such signs and marks, however, 'are no longer
signifying given the fact that they are under the regime of the inclusive disjunctions
where everything is possible' (ibid.). The nature of these signs is 'a matter of
indifference' because they function as 'abstract machinic figures that play freely on
the body without organs' and do not form any structured configuration. The genetic
code, therefore, is fundamentally ambiguous, a two-headed monster, since it both
forms codes, unfolding into exclusive molar configurations, and undoes codes by
enfolding along a molecular fibre which includes many possible figurations. A chain
exists as a metastable reality, in which the genetic code points to a 'genic decoding'.
Forms of life do not develop in accord with predetermined degrees but depend on
codes which, in turn, are subject to decoding and drift. This is not, however, simply
to posit a simple correspondence between a code and territoriality and between a
decoding and a deterritorialization: a code may function as a deterritorialization in a
particular context, while decoding can promote reterritorialization. The problem is
not, in fact, one of reterritorialization. The key point is that it is always populations
that are the 'subjects' of the twin processes of coding and decoding,
deterritorialization and reterritorialization (1980: 71; 1988: 54): 'It is through
populations that one is formed, assumes forms' (ibid.: 64; 48). A molecular
Darwinism is one which grants 'decisive importance' to 'molecular populations and
microbiological rates' (such as the endlessness of the sequence which composes a
chain, within which a single segment is capable of chance variation) (ibid.: 65; 49).

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari suggest that genetic linearity is above
all spatial even though the segments are constructed successively. It is best not to
compare the genetic code to language since, they point out, it has neither emitter nor
receiver, and concerns redundancies and surplus values rather than comprehension
and translation14 (ibid.: 1980: 81; 62) (on the genetic code and language see Jacob
1974: 306). As a protein molecule that reorders molecular components DNA cannot
be said to 'translate' in the way language translates. Coded within the genetic material
is a scheme by which particular sequences of nucleotides (the four bases of adenine,
cytosine, guanine, and thymine) correspond to specific amino acids. But, as Brian
Massumi notes, the transformations effected as a result of DNA mechanisms are 'not a
function of the code itself, but of the successive syntheses its reorderings are taken up
by', such as metabolism, natural selection, reproduction, and viral transfer (Massumi
1992: 187). The 'code' of the molecular unconscious also cannot be said to resemble
a language, but is rather a 'jargon', an 'open-ended, polyvocal formation' (Deleuze and
Guattari 1972: 46; 1984: 38). Only the constitution of fixed, unitary subjects
(persons and organisms) leads to the establishment of exclusive disjunctions.15

Orthodox biology would contest these claims by pointing to the invariant character of
DNA replication and reproduction. Deleuze and Guattari accept, of course, that
invariance is not simply a feature of molar organizations but constitutes the essential
nature of nucleotides and nucleic acids whose 'expression' is independent of either
molecules of 'content', such as proteins, or of any directed action in an external
milieu.16 At the same time proteins can be seen to be equally independent of
nucleotides in the form and substance of their 'content'. In the linear determination of
a nucleic sequence 'expression' takes on a form that is relative to 'content', and
involves a 'folding back upon itself of the protein sequence of amino acids', thus
yielding the characteristic three-dimensional structures. However, the critical point
Deleuze and Guattari insist upon is that while this configuration of expression and
content determines an organism's capacity for reproduction, it also enhances the
capacity for deterritorialization: 'The more interior milieus an organism has...assuring
its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more
deterritorialized it is...Every voyage is intensive, occurring in relation to thresholds of
intensity between which it evolves or that it crosses' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980:
70-1; 1988: 53-4). This is a radical inversion of standard Darwinian dogma since
recognition of the invariant structure of DNA does not necessarily lead to a reification
of reproduction of the species as the telos of life, but rather is able to point out that
reproduction is dependent upon a primary deterritorialization (see ibid.: 77-8;
59-60).17 If reproduction is always inseparable from deterritorialization then
'evolution' must involve something more than the simple reproduction of species. If
codings are inseparable from intrinsic and extrinsic processes of decoding (through
supplementation and 'side-communication'), and if territorialities are equally involved
in these processes, then the key insight is that it is populations that are the 'subject' of
these mutually implicated processes of coding, decoding and deterritorialization. On
this model 'evolution' does not simply entail the passage from one preestablished
form of life to another, involving only the translation of one code into another.
Rather, there are the phenomena of mutations,18 genetic drift, and the transferral of
cells of one species to another that takes place not in terms of 'translation' but in
rather in terms of a surplus value of code ('side-communication') (viruses, for
example, do not translate code but side-communicate via fragments of code).19
Ultimately, this signals a schizo-break from the molar norms of orthodox Darwinian
theory with its emphasis on large numbers and statistical aggregates, allowing for
anomalous animal-becomings, and affording a significant insight into how Deleuze
and Guattari are able to break free of the grip of Weismann's germ-plasm. The
attachment to a molar, stratified biology (and socio-biology)20 continues to inform
biological thinking up to the present day. On a rhizomatic model, however, it is not
so much a question of 'evolution', with its perfectionist and progressivist values, but
more a question of passages, bridges, and tunnels; a question neither of regression nor
of progression but of 'becomings': 'There is no plasmic finality...Life knows no
finality, no finished crystallisation' (Lawrence 1993: 182).

A productive reading of Freud would be one that claimed him for population thinking.
'Freud was Darwinian, neo-Darwinian', Deleuze and Guattari write, 'when he said that
in the unconscious everything was a problem of populations' (Deleuze and Guattari
1972: 333; 1984: 280). It becomes, however, a matter of two types of populations, of
large aggregates and micromultiplicities. Both are invested in a collective field of
social reality, for 'even a lone particle has an associated wave as a flow that defines
the coexisting space of its presences'. 'Transverse multiplicities' serve to convey
desire as a molecular phenomenon, 'as partial objects and flows, as opposed to
aggregates and persons' (ibid.). In the unconscious there exists only populations and
micro-machines that function on a plane of inextricably linked forces. The question
arises concerning how in this populated world of the molecular unconscious the
formation and autoproduction of the (desiring-) machine is to be explained. To think
through this problematic it is first necessary to dispel the myth of autopoiesis or
autogenesis by mapping the genesis of the machine disjunctively or heterogeneously.
This is where Deleuze and Guattari draw upon Butler and his attempt to think beyond
the antinomy of mechanism and vitalism (Butler 1985: 198ff.). The vitalist position
is destroyed by calling into question the alleged personal unity of the organism, while
the position of the mechanist is destroyed by calling into question the alleged
structural unity of the machine. The relationship between desire and machine has to
be thought intrinsically. Desire is engineered but in a manner which does not require
either the personal unity and integrity of the organism or the structural unity of the
machine. Every machine is a city or a society, a population of micromolecules in
which reproductive action does not arise from a single centre. The assumption of a
single centre to account for reproduction is 'unscientific'. The idea of a surplus value
of code refers to the phenomenon of a machine capturing within its own code a code
fragment of another machine, in which it owes its reproduction to a part of something
other than itself, such as is found for example in the red clover and bumble bee and
the wasp and the orchid. At this 'point of dispersion' between machines 'the machine
passes to the heart of desire' and the 'machine is desiring and desire, machined' (1972:
339; 1984: 285).

A principal task of schizoanalysis is to expose the transcendental illusion of mass

phenomena and molar aggregates by giving primacy to the molecular multiplicities
which do not function in accordance with the superior laws of race or blood, genus or
species. This is the 'domain of nondifference between the microphysical and the
biological, there being as many living beings in the machine as there are machines in
the living' (ibid.: 340; 286). At this molecular level of the formation and deformation
of machines even the laws of thermodynamics will not be obeyed simply because 'the
chain of assembly begins in a domain where by definition there are as yet no
statistical laws' (ibid.) Deleuze and Guattari here are making a crucially important
citation from Raymond Ruyer's La genese des formes vivantes of 1958. Ruyer's point
is that no matter how large or complicated an organism remains 'microscopic'. The
only genesis of a machine worth talking about scientifically - or artistically as in the
case of Lawrence's Kangaroo - is that of a schizogenesis, that is, to focus on
machines which evolve by way of breaks and flows, molecular becomings which
induce action at a distance - transversal communications, inclusive disjunctions, and
polyvocal conjunctions - and which produce and reproduce only 'selections,
detachments, and remainders' (ibid.: 341; 287). No matter how structured and
stratified a machine becomes, say through the imposition of a single object on a
molecular mass, or the production of an organism as a single subject, these molar
manifestations and statistical determinations can nevertheless still be treated as the
'same' machines as the desiring-machines, that is, as organic, technological, and social
machines treated in their mass phenomenon. These are the same machines under
determinate conditions (one being the selective pressures exerted by natural
selection): 'There is only desire and environments, fields, forms, of herd instinct'.
However, it is necessary to appreciate that the real engineering of desire only takes
place at the submicroscopic level of the desiring-machines. This is simply because all
'molar functionalism' is false 'since the organic or social machines are not formed in
the same way they function, and the technological machines are not assembled in the
same way they are used' (ibid.: 342; 288). This means that large formations or
aggregates function in a molar fashion but owe their production to a molecular
assembling. They are false, or illusions, therefore, because they separate their own
process of production from their distinct product. These molar formations come to
signify and represent things and, in the process, divorce what is produced, such as
reified persons and things, from their molecular conditions of production. It is for
these reasons that Deleuze and Guattari enlist the support of Jacques Monod's
mapping of the field of biology in terms of a microscopic cybernetics in which
allosteric proteins,21 for example, are seen as specialized products of a kind of
molecular engineering: they enable interactions, positive or negative, to come about
between compounds without chemical affinity, so subordinating any reaction that
comes about to the intervention of compounds which are chemically foreign and
indifferent to this reaction (see Monod 1971: 62ff.). It is, therefore, the very
'gratuitousness' of such cellular systems which gives molecular evolution an almost
'limitless field for exploration and experiment' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 343;
1984: 288-9).

This is not deny that the formation of molarities is without significance and real
effect. Molar formations effect a unification and totalization of the molecular forces,
whether this unity be a biological species or a socius. It is only in relation to this new
order of unity that the partial objects of a molecular disorder now appear as a lack:
'In this way all desire will be fused to lack' (ibid.: 409; 342). In psychoanalysis, for
example, one is longer dealing with the positive dispersion in a molecular multiplicity
but solely with 'large vacuoles' that are the subjects of a global determination, such as
those of neurosis and castration types. It is this welding of desire to lack which gives
desire ends, goals, and intentions, whether defined and articulated personally or
collectively. With this conquest of the molecular by the molar, desire is no longer
being conceived in the 'real order of production', where it behaves as a molecular
phenomenon devoid of goal or intention. Such statistical accumulation by molar
aggregates is not, however, to be modelled along the lines of chance, as the result of a
purely random result. Rather, it is the 'fruit of a selection' which exerts its nonrandom
pressures on the elements of chance. On account of his insight into the entropic and
molar character of natural selection Deleuze and Guattari rightly credit Nietzsche
with inaugurating a 'fundamental intuition' that proves decisive for modern thought.
Nietzsche suggests that large aggregates and numbers 'do not exist prior to a selective
pressure that might elicit singular lines from them'; rather, such aggregates are the
product of this selective pressure which crushes and regularizes the singularities of
microevolution (ibid.: 410; 342-3; for Nietzsche 'contra Darwin', see Nietzsche 1968:
sections 684-5). Statistics, therefore, is never functional but always structural,
serving to extract from molecular breaks and flows regularity of function and purpose
of potentially chaotic behaviour. It concerns chains of phenomena which selection
has already placed in a condition of partial dependence (such as the Markov chains)
(see also Deleuze 1986: 125; 1988: 117) (for further insight into these chains see
Prigogine & Stengers 1985: 236-8, 273-6). In a genetic code, for example, the forms
of gregariousness are never indifferent but 'refer back to the qualified forms that
produce them by creative selection' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 410; 1984: 343).
Molar and gregarious aggregates must never be viewed as the 'ground' of, but always
as the result of, a process of selection.

Is not this recognition of the the molar formations simply an Oedipal trap? To avoid
this trap desire has to be opened out onto the social field, in which we move from
questions of hereditary to ones of destiny, from Tess as victim of a germ-plasm fate to
Tess as the war machine of a germinal life that is all the more potent for being intense
and nonorganic: 'The hereditary genes of drives therefore play the role of simple
stimuli that enter into variable combinations following vectors that survey an entire
social historical field - an analysis of destiny' (ibid.: 344-5; 290). This destiny does
not follow the path of a linear evolution, which is why the category of destiny accords
badly with determinism but very well with freedom. In the freedom that belongs to
destiny it is a question of levels and resonances; it is never the same story that is
being told or experienced. Destiny does not, therefore, consist in step-by-step pre-
determined relations between successive presents that have evolved in accordance
with the order of a represented time. Between the successive presents there are
always 'non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of relay, resonance
and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial
locations and temporal successions' (Deleuze 1969: 113; 1990: 83).

II: Lawrence and Literature Down Under

(Australia, Death, and Me)

All the shibboleths of mankind are so trumpery. Australia is outside

everything. (D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo)

The traitor is the essential character of the novel, the hero...The creative theft
of the traitor, as against the plagiarisms of the trickster (Deleuze 1977: 53;
1987: 41).

I now want to apply the schema of desiring-machines to Lawrence's novel Kangaroo,

showing both the productive capacities and the problematic dimensions of a
molecular reading of it. I shall read Lawrence as a writer of animal becomings and
populations. Writing and literature are affairs of becoming (devenir), unfinished
because always in process: 'C'est un processus, c'est-a-dire un passage de Vie qui
traverse le vivable et le vecu' (Deleuze 1993: 11). Such becomings never concern
fixed forms, involving identifications and imitations, but require finding zones of
proximity (voisinage), indiscernibility, and indifferenciation that are 'neither
imprecise nor general, but unexpected', with as many determinations of form as there
are singularities within a population (ibid.). There is no literature that does not
involve fabulation, but the fabulatory function does not concern the imaginary
projection of myself, but rather the visions that reveal the powers (puissances) of
modes of becoming (ibid.: 13). Toni Morrison has also placed the emphasis on the
process of becoming in writing. Both writing and reading, she argues, require being
alert for the novelty and beauty of the writer's 'imagination' but also being mindful of
those places where the imagination sabotages itself, gets locked in its own gates, and
pollutes its own vision. This is a task of reading and writing that requires both risk
and response-ability (Morrison 1990: xiii). She further insists that the work of the
imagining, whether in philosophy or in literature, cannot take the form of either
'merely looking or looking at' or 'taking oneself intact into the other'. For the
purposes of the work there is only 'becoming' (ibid.: 4). It is in terms of both Deleuze
and Morrison's conception of 'becoming' that I shall approach Lawrence and his novel
Kangaroo, the one stressing the machinic transformations (de- and re-
territorializations) involved in becoming-animal and becoming-indiscernible, the
other stressing the non-imperial response-ability of the movement beyond and
outside.

Deleuze points out that in Lawrence there is always a double determination of

characters through, on the one hand, the sentiments of an organic person, but, on the
other hand, and more importantly, the traversing of the inorganic power of a vital
body. This is the 'body without organs' that names an affectiv and intense body, a
body of zones, gradients, and of poles such as the sun and the moon, Venus and
Saturn (see Lawrence 1995: 77ff.). In his fictional and nonfictional writings
Lawrence presents us with this intense vitalism of a body-becoming that defies the
organs and that defeats organization (Deleuze 1993: 164). Or, as Lawrence expressed
himself in a powerful essay on Poe to be found in his Studies in Classic American
Literature: 'It is the souls of men that subtly impregnate stones, houses, mountains,
continents, and give these their subtlest form. People only become subject to stones
after having lost their integral souls'. In his fiction what is undergone is the
transformation of people into multiplicities and the invention of proper names. On
the one hand there is the death of love; but this is the death of a cloying, sentimental
love that destroys life by insidiously trapping it within persons, places, and things.
But on the other hand, there is the production of a new kind of love, a love that allows
people to freely populate as multiplicities and escape the statistical capture effected
by molar aggregates. The shedding of death presumes 'no carnage, but this single
change', the 'silken skilled transmemberment of song...Permit me voyage, love, into
your hands' (Crane 'Voyages' 1966: 37). The proper name of a person is only received
when they have been depersonalized on the body without organs. For whether we
think of ourselves as individuals or groups, we are 'traversed by lines, meridians,
geodesics, tropics, and zones' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 247; 1988: 202). The
mystery of dissolution, as Lawrence called it, involves learning that 'There is a long
way we can travel, after the death-brak: after that point where the soul in intense
suffering breaks, breaks away from its organic hold like a leaf that falls'. There are
subtle realities far beyond 'phallic knowledge' and beyond the scope of 'phallic
investigation' (Lawrence 1995c: 253-4).

Lawrence speaks revealingly of his writing in an important letter to his literary

adviser Edward Garnett dated 5 June 1914 (Lawrence 1997b: 77-9). He speaks of
the 'moral scheme' in which the likes of Tolstoi and Dostoievski fit their characters as
'dull, old, and dead'. He is influenced by the futurist Marinetti and his call for a new
philosophy of life to be developed on the basis of an 'intuitive physiology of matter'. 22
Lawrence says that his own work is 'a bit futuristic', concerned with that which is
'physic - non-human, in humanity', which contains more possibilities than the old and
tired 'human element' in which characters behave consistently in accordance with a
moral scheme. At the same time, he is keen to distance himself from what he deems
to be the crass stupidity of the futurists' sensibility who, instead 'of looking for the
new human phenomenon' look only for 'the phenomena of the science of physics to
be found in the human being'. Lawrence cites Marinetti's examples of the solidity of
a blade of steel as being of interest in itself in the 'inhuman alliance of its molecules
in resistance' say to a bullet, and of the heat of a piece of wood or iron as being far
more 'passionate' than the laughter or tears of a woman. For Lawrence what is
'crassly stupid' is the contrast of the heat of the metal and the laugh of the woman:
'Because what is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of
the molecules of steel or their action in heat: it is the inhuman will, call
it....physiology of matter' (ibid.: 78). Lawrence finds himself uninterested in what the
woman 'feels' ('in the ordinary usage of the word'), since this presumes some unitary
stable ego that one feels with; what interests him as a writer is what she 'is -
inhumanly, physiologically, materially'. Characters with stable egos who develop
through plots belong to a moribund tradition of literature: 'There is another ego,
according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it
were, allotropic states...' (ibid.). Lawrence advises Garnett not to look in his fiction
for straight lines of evolution in relation to his 'characters', since they all 'fall into the
form of some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine
tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown' (ibid.: 79).

Many commentators on Lawrence have puzzled over this letter, wondering what this
alternative 'ego' might be (see, for example Donoghue 1973: 202-3). Also, we might
ask, how can there be an ego that passes out of phase itself, retaining the semblance
of a 'substance' but capable of continuous variation and of assuming distinct forms, as
in allotropy? Perhaps one productive way of thinking through this conundrum is to
conceive the 'ego' Lawrence is referring to in terms of Deleuze's stress on the 'passive
syntheses' that inform the oscillatory becoming of the self. This is a 'larval self'
which is the subject 'of' a becoming only in a complicated and implicated sense,
contracting and contemplating matter (see the preceding essay for further insight into
the character of this self).23 Rimbaud's formula that the 'I is always another' can be
rendered truly schizoid by recognizing the 'I' as the site of an originary internal
splitting (this is how Deleuze conceives Kant's rethinking of time as an autonomous
form, see Deleuze's preface to the English translation of his 'Kant' book, 1963/1984:
viii-ix; this has been deftly handled by Smith 1996: 37). The 'I' is an Other precisely
because the self is not only a unique and active subject but also the passive and
receptive ego to which acts get attributed. But this is to think the self - as made up of
a number of local egos - not as a mould but as an infinite modulation. In Lawrence's
own language the self is a chemistry of modulated colours, densities, intensities,
textures, and smells. The 'ego', therefore, is nothing other than its allotropic states
(philosophically the 'I' merely serves to establish a formal/logical unity of
apperception) (for another relevant re-working of the distinction between the 'I' and
the 'ego', between je and moi, see Sartre1972).24
In the reading developed here I am, in addition to leads and hints given by Lawrence
himself in his letters and even in the fiction itself, following, in part, those given by
Deleuze in Critique et Clinique on how to read Lawrence. In this work (1993) there
is a lengthy essay on Lawrence's Apocalypse, but references to, and utilizations of,
Lawrence can be found throughout the collection of essays. Deleuze locates all the
novel modes of becoming in Lawrence, such as becoming-woman, becoming-animal,
becoming-intense, becoming-imperceptible and nonhuman. For example, as his
becoming enfolds in Kangaroo, Somers desires to have 'all the terrific, icy energy of a
fish' and learns to sympathize with the yearning contained in the croon of a seal-
woman as she dives back into sea 'leaving her husband and her children of warm
flesh. No more cloying warmth. No more of this horrible stuffy heat of human
beings...fierce with cold, cold life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created
to clog us' (Lawrence 1997: 125). Mankind? 'Ha, he turned his face to the centre of
the seas, away from any land', into that cold silence before crying and calling were
invented' (ibid.). Of course Somers is not going back into the sea, but undergoing the
experience of deterritorialization, becoming imperceptible. What Lawrence admires
about Melville, he tells us, is that he never personified the sea or sentimentalized the
ocean; instead, he kept alive 'the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is non-
human' (Lawrence 1964: 127). Melville was 'neither mad nor crazy', just 'over the
border' (ibid.: 124). He takes us far back to the days of palm trees, lizards, and stone
implements, to the 'sunny stone age' (ibid.). But this going far back should never be a
regression for Lawrence: 'We can't go back to the savages: not a stride...we cannot
turn the current of our life backwards, back towards their soft warm twilight and the
uncreate mud'. All we can aspire to do is to 'take a great curve in their direction,
onwards' (ibid.: 130). It is not for us, says Lawrence, to arrange fossils or decipher
hieroglyphics (Lawrence 1961: 8). Only the renegade, who is full of ressentiment,
desires to go right back, since he hates life and wants only 'the death of life', to drive
death in reverse gear (Lawrence 1964: 130).

One might suppose that to travel is to leave home so at to arrive at new lands and
explore alien places. Learning to travel, however, is a question of style, so that
deterritorialization cannot simply be about 'leaving home and travelling in foreign
parts' (Goodchild 1996: 218). As Nietzsche notes, there is a more subtle art of travel
which does not require that we move from place to place in order to traverse
thousands of miles; rather, it is a question of learning that the strata lie neatly and
clearly on top of one another, and that they are fissured by dislocations and faults
(Nietzsche 1986: 268). Lawrence is well aware of the imperialist character of
journeying into foreign hearts of darkness. Only the most unfree souls go wildly
west, he notes (Lawrence 1964: 6). When such souls shout of freedom this is merely
the shout of 'rattling chains' and 'always was'. Travel can often be little more than an
excuse for oblivion, and oblivion can be a retreat from the world and its exigencies
(see Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 243; 1988: 199). Of course, one does embark upon,
and engage in, extensive travel, but the lessons and experience of travel are always
intensive. This is certainly the case with Lawrence's 'trip' down under.
When Lawrence first gets down under he discovers that he has taken his old
European/colonial self, with him. Taking his little entropy machine along with him
on this epic voyage to the other side of the world, all he can see in this new land is an
'awful piggling suburban place'. And yet he is haunted by the Australian 'underdark',
which, in time, will save him from himself. Sydney is totally unreal, nothing more
than a dust cloud sprinkled on the surface of a darkness it never penetrates. Nothing
or nobody can penetrate this darkness, 'he couldn't get at it. Nobody could get at it'.
One can only wait to find out what it is waiting for. Lawrence only discovers
Australia when he unselfs himself and abandons 'me'. Travelling intensively means
leaving behind, like shedded skin, the known world - what Lawrence calls the world
inside the gate, which is no more than a clearing of morality and reason - so as to
place oneself within the wider, darker, inhuman outer-space. 'Three-dimensional
space', writes Lawrence, 'is homogeneous', and no matter how big it is or extends it is
a kind of prison, so that 'No matter how vast the range of space, there is no release'.
One must find an entry into 'another kind of world, measured by another dimension'
altogether (Lawrence 1995: 46). One might undertake, therefore, the kind of journey
into the paradoxical and anomalous undergone by Randolph Carter beyond the world
of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic, a kind of dreamtime in which
'Imperceptibly, such things as age and location' cease to have significance and
signification, experiencing 'incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space',
yet one which holds 'no hint of what we recognize as motion and duration'. This is
travel in a region whose place cannot be foretold by the Earth's geographers and
whose age no historians can fix a date on (Lovecraft 1994: 516). There are no stable
forms or positions any longer, only 'alien and incomprehensible designs' that are
'disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry...absolute
outsidedness...dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of
man' (ibid.: 519, 523, 530). Carter has reached the plane of consistency through
doors of imperception in which 'every figure of space is but the result of the
intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension - as a
square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere' (ibid.: 531). In such a dislocated
and inhuman timeSpace one finds Carter among the Hyperboreans 'at all ages' with
'all his ancestors, both human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial...' (ibid.:
533-4). But, as can be shown in the case of the futurism of Lawrence, it is not only in
science fiction that modern literature is able to presage a becoming-animal,
becoming-molecule and becoming-imperceptible: 'Waves of delirious darkness ran
through her soul. She wanted to let go. She wanted to reach and be amongst the
flashing stars, she wanted to race with her feet and be beyond the confines of this
earth...- and how could she let go? She must leap from the known into the
unknown' (Lawrence 1995b: 295).

Lawrence is well-known for his rage against the machine and tirades against
machine-civilization (see Lawrence 1995b: 325 on the 'monstrous mechanism' of
entropic matter). But Kangaroo shows that Lawrence's writings make a distinction
between two minds of machine: the solely mechanical machine that traps life in the
death of the same (the 'repetition of repetitions', 1995c: 192), and the vital machine
which draws on decay in a perpetual movement of disseminatory growth, sprouting
unpredicted shoots that pulsate with the rhythms of cosmic life. Somers, for example,
does not prevent his own becoming-machine but positively affirms it. The novel
itself is constructed as an elaborate machine of partial objects, discarded bits,
fragments of people, with broken middles populating every nook and cranny in the
faultlines of Lawrence's/Somers' mind. 'For a quite a long time', the narrator notes,
'the thing just goes by itself', but then it begins to run down just like a machine which
cannot run on without running down. The 'thing' can be anything you want, as
abstract as life itself. It's the 'throb-throb, throb-throb throb' which Lawrence speaks
of in the novel. A morse-code could not decode this inaudible signal since every 'new
message more or less supersedes the current code':

Nowadays, when we feel the throb, vaguely we cry: 'More love, more
peace, more charity, more freedom, more self-sacrifice.' Which makes
matters all the worse, because the new throb interpreted mechanically
according to the old code breeds madness and insanity. It may be that
there is an insufficient activity of the thyroid glands, or the adrenalin
cortex isn't making its secretions, or the pituitary or the pineal body is
not working adequately. But this is result, not the cause of our neurasthenia and
complexes. (Lawrence 1997: 296).

Desiring-machines work only by breaking down. It is as if everything stops dead for

a moment with everything freezing in place, then the whole process begins all over
again (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 13; 1984: 7). Kangaroo is the story of a man
breaking down who also desires the breaking-through, leaving a people and a land
behind.25 Farewell Britain and the great empire, farewell, farewell...'like broken
attachments, broken' (358). Mid-way through the novel we find Somers leaning back
and stretching himself in 'that intense physical way' that is 'just a trifle less than
human'. He has become all body, 'a strong body full of energy like a machine that has
got steam up, but is inactive': no mind, no spirit, no soul, 'the old psyche slowly
disintegrating' (182). Imperceptibly he undergoes his melt down into the void that is
the unconscious Australia. He has left behind Europe and its great idol of 'progress':
'Away from his own white world, his own machine-conscious day' (238). Into
marvellous indifference (not 'the static fatalism of the east'). Turning the evolutions
of chance into fate, he's become a bomb that wants only to go off: 'Ready to break
into a kind of frenzy, a berserk frenzy, running amok in wild generosity or still more
wild smashing up. The wild joy in letting loose, in a smash-up' (181).

'Time is so huge, and in Australia the next step back is to the fern-age'. The
involution Somers undergoes in Kangaroo is not so much a regression as a becoming-
Australian in zones of indiscernibility. His is not a tracing but a mapping of
Australia, in which 'Australia' becomes an Event enjoying the geography of an
assemblage, peopled not by subjects and objects but by 'n' dimensions: '...the
southern sky at night, with that swarming milky way all bushy with stars, and yet
with black gaps, holes in the white-star road, while misty blotches of star-mist float
detached, like cloud-vapours, in the side-darkness, away from the road; the wonderful
southern night-sky, that makes a man feel so lonely, alien...' (15). In the story of
Somers' becoming Lawrence makes a highly novel contribution to our construction of
evolutionary theory by speculating on what it might mean to remove Darwin from
his specific historical context, so placing the Darwinian revolution outside the
confines of bourgeois thought: 'Perhaps everything was different from all he had
known. Perhaps if...Darwin had lived south of the equator, we might have known the
world all different, quite different' (15). To read Darwin as if situated down under is,
I would contend, to arrive at a 'biology of schizophrenia', which means eschewing
simple notions of progress and the questionable thesis on the survival of the fittest,
allowing for a molecular Darwinism in which the focus is on the movement of animal
becomings and heterogeneous populations.

In key respects it is a 'Bergsonian' novel exploring the nature of creative evolution.26

Somers has the 'roots' of his life with his Aussie mate Jack, but his desire is not to
identify with any other person (hence his rejection ultimately of everyone around
him, including, and especially, the Kangaroo character) but to give all to that intense
nonorganic life which sends out 'a new shoot in the life of mankind' in order to ensure
that there is growth 'into new forms' (69). Science is hastily dismissed because it
reduces life to mere cause and effect, it is unable to tackle 'the unstable creative
element present in life'. Life never admits an exact definition since it is ceaseless
transformation: '...a rabbit might evolve into something which is still rabbit, and yet
different from that which is a rabbit now. So how can you define or precisely
describe a rabbit?' (295). The hypothesis of a 'will to persist' or survive is a limited
one, and the reflection perhaps of a view of evolution from the northern hemisphere.
While there is an 'urge towards evolution', life is 'more than evolution' as all creative
becomings involve more than a simple cause and effect sequence (295). Animal
becomings are creative in the sense that they involve the spontaneous expression of
new gestures whose evolution cannot be simply articulated in terms of notions of self-
preservation or persistence.

It is also a novel caught up in a complicated movement of deterritorializations and

reterritorializations. When Deleuze and Guattari ask whether it isn't the destiny of
American literature to oscillate between the crossing of limits and frontiers, causing
deterritorialized flows to circulate, and the recapturing of unleashed desire so as to
transport ever more effectively fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan territorialities, they are
providing a productive insight into all and any frontier literature. 27 This is nowhere
more apparent and tangible than in Lawrence's novel about a place called 'Australia'
with its dark skies, and always the 'ever-dark bush' waiting silently and moving
imperceptibly. Faced with the challenge of a new climate and a new land, Somers,
the anti-hero of the book, dreams of being back in lovely old Europe, the Europe
which until now he had hated so thoroughly, considering it to be a moribund and stale
place. He wants to go home, towards Europe once again, no longer to feel alien. All
he can do is to survey the coarse Aussies with an immense distance and horror: 'The
most loutish Neopolitan loafer was nearer to him in pulse than these British
Australians with their aggressive familiarity' (21). So he reminisces about the good
old days of aristocratic Europe, old 'cultured, ethical England', where everyone knew
their place, one was either a master or a servant, the class distinctions made
everything so simple and straightforward. The new choice before him would seem to
be equally simple: on the immanent plane of desire one is either a fascist or an
anarchist. At the start of the novel there is no way of telling which road Somers will
travel, and for the most part he travels both as if caught up in a complex network of
intertwining desires. Slowly but surely he succumbs to 'Australia', coming to
embrace that which he had previously feared: the 'absence of control, or will or
form...The vacancy of this freedom....this Englishness all crumbled out into
formlessness and chaos...The absence of any inner meaning' (27). Poor Somers, aka
Richard Lovatt, wearies himself and his readers to death 'struggling with the problem
of himself, and calling it Australia' (28).

Yet by the end of the journey Somers is no longer 'himself', but has become-
Australian; neither one thing nor the other, a set of inclusive disjunctions. Beyond all
familial pseudo etiologies one invests the social field not with the name of the father,
not even with all the names in history, but with all the places in geography. One no
longer sings the blues, for, as Somers comes to appreciate one wastes time by
deluding oneself with 'the fallacy of home' (333). 'Far off, far off, as if he had landed
on another planet, as a man might land after death....Shed. All that had meant so
much to him, shed. All the old world and self of care, the beautiful care as well as the
weary care, shed like a dead body. The landscape - he cared not a thing about the
landscape. Love? - he was absolved from love, as if by a great pardon. Humanity?
- there was none. Thought? - fallen like a stone into the sea. The great, glamorous
past? - worn thin, frail, like a frail, translucent film of shell thrown up on the
shore' (331-2). He has, in short, become 'mindless and memoryless' (332). Somers
was once the paranoiac fantasizing about engineering masses, the artist of large molar
aggregates, fascinated with statistical formulations and the phenomena of organized
crowds. To the great humanist, Ben Cooley, the character of Kangaroo himself, who
is doing all he can to seduce Somers to the cause of cloying humanity, Somers
appears as a pointless perversity (208). Somers becomes the schizo who gets
seriously attracted and repulsed by the microphysics of molecules which no longer
obey statistical laws and averages: 'waves and corpuscles, flows and partial objects
that are no longer dependent upon the large numbers; infinitesimal lines of escape,
instead of the perspective of the large aggregates' (ibid.: 332; 280). The character
Kangaroo fears chaos, holding that once the last restraints on humanity are broken it
will be the end and the flood-gates will burst open with no chance of ever getting the
water under control again (207). For Somers, however, a molecular becoming entails
extracting oneself from the 'lit-cloy of humanity', while the exhaustion of love entails
moving beyond the 'fretfulness of desire': 'Why should desire always be fretting,
fretting like a tugged chain'. (138). A meeting of fate should not be an urging of
oneself down the causeways of desirous love but a stoop just like a gannet stoops into
the sea 'in a swift rapacious parabola downwards', touching at the lowermost turn of
the curve and then up again. Here there are no longer 'flashes of desire for a visual
object', one has no use for them as one undergoes the downslope into Orcus, into the
'Egyptian darkness', undergoing sleepless nights of transformation and transfiguration
as the 'aboriginal daimon' enters the body and destroys its old constitution (143).

'But the day of the absolute is over, and we're in for strange gods once more' (149).
Kangaroo is not the story of a becoming-nihilist simply because nihilism is a human,
all too human affliction (one suffers from meaninglessness, what more can one add?).
The dark of night enters when 'He began to forget'. He no longer believes in 'great
events' like the Great War (he has, he confesses, eaten up all his Nietzsche). Somers
drifts and drifts into 'a sort of obscurity', moving 'backwards into a nameless past,
hoary as the country is hoary. Strange old feelings wake in the soul: old, non-human
feelings. And an old, old indifference, like a torpor, invades the spirit. An old,
saurian torpor...Was the land awake? Would the people awaken this ancient land, or
would the land put them to sleep, drift them back into the torpid semi-consciousness
of the world of the twilight' (178). As the torpor comes over one, as the self sheds its
skin, one profoundly and darkly no longer 'cares'. 'Even the never-slumbering urge of
sex sinks down into something darker, more monotonous...: like sex in trees. The
dark world before conscious responsibility was born' (ibid.). The 'great indifference',
the darkness of the fern-world, preys on the mind. Travel broadens the mind, they
say. Well, intensive travel, Lawrence is reminding us, slowly eats it away. The dark
twilight world can only be inhabited and populated by those who have lost their
minds and had their memories destroyed: 'Only in the black hole of subjective
consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated, captured particles
you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with
unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which the lines
composed are broken lines' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 232; 1988: 189).

It is not a question in intensive voyages of plunging into the void, of displacing

oneself to the point where one becomes completely without place. As Deleuze and
Guattari note, the ones who are accomplished at 'leaving' and who make leaving seem
as natural as being born or dying, those who set off in search of nonhuman sex, such
as Miller and Lawrence, always 'stake out a far-off territoriality that still forms an
anthropomorphic and phallic representation' They mention 'the Orient, Mexico, or
Peru', noting that the stroll of the schizo 'does not effect great deterritorializations
without borrowing from territorial circuits' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 376; 1984:
315). One might add 'Australia' to this list, but this would be to underestimate the
extent to which in his novel 'Australia' has the status of a machinic assemblage in
Lawrence's text. Of course, it's a territory, but only in the sense that a territory is
constituted as an assemblage, by the refrain for example. 28 Territory here denotes not
a block of land hemmed in by frontiers, but rather an 'interlocking network of "lines"
or "ways through"': 'All our words for "country"', he said, 'are the same as the words
for "line"' (Chatwin 1987: 62). To feel at home in this 'country', or rather, among
these lines', is to feel able to leave it, or them (ibid.: 63). It is the refrain (the
birdsong, the songline) which fabricates time and organizes, selects, and distributes
space. Time is an a priori form only insofar as it is constituted by the refrain which
gives and marks time. The refrain, moreover, performs a catalytic function, not
simply regulating speeds and reactions in the environment, but also bringing into play
interactions between elements that are devoid of so-called 'natural affinity', serving in
this regard the same function as allosteric proteins. But the refrain is double
(zweideutig), capable of leading both to the formation of organized masses, moving
retrogressively from the extremes back to a centre-point, and to the constitution of
fractal space, travelling in multiple and molecular directions from the centre to the
outside (involving songlines of 'baffling complexity', Chatwin 1987: 79). In the
former case the refrain is reduced to nothing more than a formula for evoking a
character or a landscape; in the latter case it constitutes a rhythmic (not metric)
character or a melodic landscape. To follow, or track, Somers going down under is to
find him working out his refrains, constituting his own lines of song with probes in
his head and with the wildlife having gone berserk in a smash-up. He is a
'disturbance', a 'whirlwind in turbulent nature' (Serres 1977: 162). The abandonment
of the self, surrendering to the lines of flight and finding holes of escape, does not
simply amount to a negative flight from ancestry, but marks the construction-site of a
rhizomatic animal tunnelling its way through subterranean passages, spraying life
with new lines, engaged in a geomorphism that produces a harnessing of the forces of
the cosmos: 'Now we are at home but home does not preexist' (Deleuze and Guattari
1980: 382; 1988: 311). In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari credit
Lawrence with a genuine abandonment of the idea of homeland or Heimat. Melville,
for example, remained for Lawrence, in spite of his knowing how to cross the face,
the eyes, and the horizon, while avoiding the black hole and the brick wall, almost
better than any other writer, always desired to make the impossible return journey
home, back to 'Home and Mother' (see Lawrence 1964: 129). This is what informed
his remaining an artist and hating life (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 231; 1988:
188-9). Melville, Lawrence charges, remained an idealist and a mystic, sticking to
his 'ideal guns'. But one should let the old guns rot, 'get new ones and shoot
straight' (ibid., quoting from Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature,
Lawrence 1964: 136). However, as Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge themselves,
it is so much a question of jettisoning the territory of home altogether, but more a
matter of constructing it from out of the powers of the cosmos, harnessing the forces
of chaos and venturing home on the thread of a tune. Within the circle there is a crack
which lets someone in and oneself out. This opening onto the outside and to the
future lies within the forces that the circle shelters, it is not exterior to it.

Psychoanalysis has, on account of its Oedipal stubborness, only a poor understanding

of the complexes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. One reterritorializes
on persons and surroundings, but one always deterritorializes on machines. 'The
opposition still holds', Deleuze and Guattari insist, 'between the neurotic on the couch
- as an ultimate and sterile land, the last exhausted colony - and the schizo out for a
walk in a deterritorialized circuit' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 377; 1984: 316).
Schizoanalysis is said to be geographical before it is historical (compare Deleuze
1969: 113-14; 1990: 92-3). The problem with psychoanalysis is that it wants to
understand the strange phenomena of the body without organs as regressions and
phantasies 'in terms of an image of the body' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 203; 1988:
165). As a result, it grasps only the flipside of this life becoming body, giving us
family snapshots and childhood memories instead of the 'worldwide intensity map'.
As processes, as complex movements of becoming, schizophrenia and
deterritorialization cannot be rendered inseparable from the stases that interrupt them
and which reterritorialize them into neurosis, perversion, and psychosis. One
traverses a new land by way of old lands, studying their nature and densities, learning
how the machinic indices get grouped on each of these lands and which permit a
going beyond them. It is these machinic indices which serve to break apart and
undermine exclusive disjunctions. The voyager continues their own affair until they
discover the unknown land which is created by their work in progress. Such a land is
unformed by partial and nonpersonal connections, nomadic and polyvocal
conjunctions, a 'place' where distinctions of sexuality are risible, human all too
human, a world of transverse communications beyond the exclusive disjunctions of
human sexuality, where 'nonhuman sex mingles with the flowers, a new earth where
desire functions according to its molecular elements and flows' (ibid.: 380-1; 319).
Such a voyage implies no great movements in extension; there is rather only a
becoming-intense (the land of Lawrence's great indifference) 'in a room and on a
body without organs - an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of
the one it is creating' (ibid.). One can never go far enough in the 'direction' of
deterritorialization, though going some distance through intensity is quite far enough
at times. '"More perversion! More artifice!" - to a point where the earth becomes so
artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a
new earth' (ibid.: 384; 321). The 'completion' of such a process is not the reaching of
a promised land but only a world that is created in the process of its tendency, its
coming undone, self and world unmade, deterritorialized, the 'movement of the
theatre of cruelty' as a theatre of production, reaching an 'active point of escape where
the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine, and the
schizoanalytic machine become parts and pieces of one another' (384; 322).

Dramatizing the life that is the becoming of the body without organs in no way entails
a regression into primitivism. Artaud makes this very clear in his exploration of a
new theatre of cruelty, where the construction of a 'pure theatre' entails a quite
different model to the tragic, representationalist, and psychological theatre of the
European West. Artaud gives primacy to gesture over speech, to the language of the
body, gesticulation and gesture (nonsense) that exists prior to the language of words
(sense and meaning). This is why Artaud insisted upon the necessity of doing away
with both the mind and literature (Artaud 1965: 26). In the Balinese theatre Artaud
locates a becoming of life and matter, the theatre as an abstract machine that has done
away with words. States of mind are not reduced to an anarchic play of emotions but
get epitomized in gestures, song, dance, mime, costume, and mask, amounting to a
depersonalization that is capable of producing and conveying the utmost effect,
revealing matter as chaosmos, effectuating the concretization of the abstract, with
everything raised 'to the nth power and absolutely stylized' (Artaud 1993: 41-2).
Music is the condition of possibility for this staging of the drama of larval and virtual
life (ibid.: 44-5). Through the dance of angular, jerky postures, the actors'
scyncopated inflexions, the cutting short of musical phrases as so many partial objects
of machinic desire, the sharded flights, hollow drum sounds, robot creaking, and
animated dancing puppets, a new language of the body not based on words but on
signatures and gestures emerges from the maze of becomings and the cacophony of
sounds, postures, and cries. A veritable becoming-animal takes place on stage with a
harnessing of the cosmicization of forces evolving in the way of gestures, sound,
colours, movement (ibid.: 51): 'All bestiality and animalism are brought down to that
dry gesture, striking sounds as the earth splits open, frozen trees, lowing
animals' (ibid.: 48). New concepts of life are crystallized through the (auto-) catalytic
function of the different components of the pure theatre, an abstract expressionism
that effects movement like some great discordant refrain, producing howl-words,
rolling eyes, unceasing abstraction, a 'vast expanse of sounds flowing out from
several outlets at once', resulting in a 'concrete concept of the abstract' (ibid.: 46).
Such a theatre is always close to chaos but never actually sinks into it; it is capable of
remaining on its edge (ibid.: 46). Moreover, whenever this abstract expressionism
encounters impressions of the world of nature in motion it 'always grasps them at the
point where they penetrate their molecular grouping' (ibid.). The creative praxis
draws from chaos while not allowing the self to be taken over by it, which would
bring about the end of both creator and creation. This is how Deleuze and Guattari
construe the building of the place we call 'home': '...home does not preexist: it was
necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a
limited space...now the components are used for organizing a space, not for the
momentary determination of a centre. The forces of chaos are kept outside as much
as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces...This involves an
activity of selection, elimination and extraction, in order to prevent the interior forces
of the earth from being submerged, to enable them to resist, or event ot take
something from chaos across the filter or sieve of the space that has been
drawn' (1980: 382; 1988: 311).

In Kangaroo the character of Somers is leaving the home he has arbitrarily inherited
in order to construct a home fit for the selective activity of self-dismantling, which
will involve turning his destiny inside out. Lawrence desires not to speak of the
'Unutterable Name', the 'great living darkness', but to free it for silence. This is it.
This unutterable that is 'like a germ' (266). There is little point in preaching the love
of thy neighbour as thyself when the process of production involves unselfing
oneself. Unless one is a conceited prig of course. Point of catastrophe (267). How
about preaching revolution to the masses? But the masses are nothing other than
swarming populations, 'strictly, non-mental...preponderantly vertebral' (301). We find
ourselves then, 'between the devil and a deep sea' (303). But there's 'Only the
sea' (331). 'The far-off, far-off, far-off indifference. The world revolved and revolved
and disappeared' (ibid.). Now Somers exists soulless amidst the the 'strange falling-
away of everything' as absent and as present 'as an aboriginal dark on the sand in the
sun' with the 'perpetual refrain' at the back of his mindless mind: to be soulless by the
Southern Ocean in Australia (332). Somers is now 'beyond man and time' with the
four walls being nothing more than a blanket which he wraps around himself, 'in
timelessness and nowhere, to go to sleep' (333). Meaning has become the most
meaningless of illusions: 'When a man has no soul, he has no feelings to talk about'
and meaning simply becomes a dead letter (ibid.). Like a lot of other things which
were once cherished, meaning has become an outworn garment. There is now only
the becoming-animal: 'Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries,
like the animals...' (333). Time to embrace the fact that home has gone to tea, that
there is 'No home, no tea. Insouciant soullessness. Eternal indifference' and the 'great
pause' in which it is possible to find the meaninglessness of meanings (ibid.). As 'for
now - like snow in aboriginal wine one could float and deliciously melt down, to
nothingness, having no choice' (334). Somers has gone down under, to a nonhuman
place, experiencing the radium-effect, 'the mystic virtue of vivid decomposition,
liquid-gushing lucidity...Rocking with cold, radium-burning passion, swinging and
flinging itself with venomous desire' (340). Talking to the animals Somers already
knows that now no 'animate answer' will be forthcoming this time since the 'radium-
rocking, wave-knocking night' is his only call and his answer both. A 'God' without
eyes, feet, or face, no tongue, no mouth, no anus. She's just like a woman 'with
unspeakable desire' but only a woman with 'no thighs or breast, no body'. Only 'Non-
human Gods, non-human human being' (341). The thick aboriginal dust begins to
settle down on the continent that is void of recognisable (human) speech and the
'heavy established European way of life' with its 'huge ponderous cathedrals and
factories', and its 'enormous encumbrances of stone and steel and brick weighing
upon the surface of the earth', begins to collapse and disintegrate (346).29 Now 'Retro
me' is the only call Somers can summon up to the court of human judgement. Out
there back in Australia one had the time of one's death: 'It was like the end of the
world' (349). 'Few people wept....Farewell! Farewell!...The last streamers blowing
away, like broken attachments, broken', quite simply broken. All lines and channels
of communication are broken.

***

In this experiment in Australian Gothic Lawrence succeeds in opposing the elan vital
to organic representation, creating the 'broken line' which does not form a contour
that would enable us to distinguish between form and background but 'passes in a
zigzag between things', drawing them into the void and 'whirling them in a
formlessness' (Deleuze 1983: 76: 1986: 51). This is it - the becoming-animal, intense,
imperceptible and becoming-germinal that speaks of the anomalous and demonic,
which communes with the diabolical powers of the future, and, as such, both frees life
and gets caught in black holes.

III: A Postmodern Nomad?

 It is the function of the libido to invest the social field in unconscious
forms, thereby hallucinating all history, reproducing in delirium entire
civilizations, races, and continents, and intensely 'feeling' the becoming of the
world. There is no signifying chain without a Chinman an Arab, and a black
who drop in to trouble the night of a white paranoiac (Deleuze and Guattari
1972: 117; 1983: 98).

The problem of the unconscious has most certainly nothing to do with

generation but with peopling, population (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 43;
1988: 30).

Kangaroo is a novel which cannot be read in a manner that divorces its peculiar
becomings from their historical contexts, which are quite specific and dramatically
so. The novel is typically treated an anomalous realist work, merging high and low
culture, converging elements of art and science, mixing philosophical speculation of
the strangest kind with thinly disguised autobiography. It is, in fact, an experiment in
writing as becoming that contains an affirmation of the anomalous. Its status as a
paradigmatic example of literary modernism is well assured in the explicit manner in
which the text constantly calls into question its narrative authority, reinventing the
'beginning' with each new stab at reality, and caught within vicious circles of desire.
But the mythopoeic dimension of Lawrence's modernism also brings him into contact
with diabolical powers that presage a new experience of time and of becoming. We
are not simply trapped in the despair of desire ('To make some kind of an opening -
some kind of a way for the afterwards', 1997: 68). A rhizomatic reading selects as its
focus the molecular aspects of the novel's becomings, such as the becoming-inhuman
and nonhuman (becoming-animal) of Somers. It is, however, a specific historical
event, namely, the 'nightmare' of the First World War, that informs Somers' journey
down under into the Australian void. It is out of this alienating experience that he
comes to exist 'Without a people, without a land', assuming the identity of a
peripheral isolate, 'He was broken apart, apart he would remain' (Lawrence 1997:
259). It is in the context of social upheaval and personal breakdown, the loss of a
world and an identity, that Somers abandonment of his white and European molar
identity and entry into a molecular becoming, a becoming-Australian and aboriginal,
takes place. It is the quest of a 'spontaneous soul' seeking to extricate itself 'from the
meshes of the almost automatic white octopus of the human ideal, the octopus of
humanity' (ibid.: 266). Such a becoming contains a rejection of 'herd-unity, equality,
domestication, civilisation', entailing a becoming-molecule and becoming-animal
through a telepathic communication with molecules and animal life-forms that is
'away from these all-too-white people' (ibid.: 279). This, however, the reader is
informed, is an avowedly male story, with 'man' conceived as the 'thought-adventurer,
an emotion-adventurer, a discoverer of himself and and of the outer universe' (ibid.).
It may be that the novel is the story of the writer's 'ideological collapse', as the
Marxian reading would have it 30 (Deleuze and Guattari's assertion that literature has
nothing to do with ideology is difficult to sustain, see 1980: 10; 1988: 4). Today, the
novel is easily read in terms of the established tropes of postmodernity: 'Somers is a
prototype of the nomadic, restless, rootless postmodernist subject', writes one
commentator (see the Introduction to Lawrence 1997: xxviii). One wonders to what
extent the postmodern subject is the classic imperialist subject, now dressed up in the
language of irony and fashionable nomadism. It could be argued, for example, that
Somers, for all his becomings, merely confirms in his becoming-intense and
becoming-imperceptible the power of his imperial and colonial self, able to freely
deterritorialize while the aborigine remains no more than a static referent, of
significance only to the extent that he becomes part of the nomadic wanderings of a
late-modern Occidental schizo and capitalist subject. Woman is never shown to move
or become in the novel. Somers' wife Harriett, for example, who is said to be 'rooted
right in the centre of everything' (Lawrence 1997: 75), identifies the self-dissolution
involved in the process of becoming-intense and becoming-imperceptible as an
exclusively masculine activity, the act of 'the impersonal man' (ibid.: 98). Such
'hateful male impersonal activity' is a way of shutting out females, a turning away
from personal life in the vain hope of creating a new world or a new politics (ibid.:
95-6), making an 'excursion into the future, into the unknown' (ibid.: 101). For her
'Australia' is the 'poor prostitute' who gets bullied by the intrusion of white males,
getting out of her what they can and then treating her like dirt (ibid.: 78). What
becomes of woman in the novel? Is she to remain a fixed referent with the sole
function of serving as a bedrock for the deterritorialized becomings of the male
schizonomad? The becoming of any isolate is of limited value. As Brian Massumi
has noted, 'the becomings of typically individualist Standard Man are almost always
destined to fail, because they do not draw on the power of an actual
population' (Massumi 1992: 103). He goes on to note that it is only populations that
offer the resources required for a revolutionary-becoming since a population, no
matter how oppressed or compressed as a molar organization, envelops more affects
and potentialities than the most ingenious individual body: 'The social movements of
Blacks, aboriginals, feminists, gays and lesbians...provide far better frames of
reference than Standard Man alone at home with his dog, em-barking on an anti-
Oedipal adventure' (ibid.).

Today, Lawrence's novel makes for difficult reading, simply because to affirm, as
Lawrence and Deleuze do, a becoming-imperceptible, and to write of the positivity of
a becoming that involves becoming devoid of speech and embracing the void of
language, resonates unkindly with those populations that have been rendered silent
and imperceptible in history through the triumph of entropic forces. Writing, Deleuze
and Guattari maintain, is nothing other than a becoming, not the story of a
representation, but the production of new lines of life: 'blazing life lines...asignifying,
asubjective, and faceless (sans-visage)' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 230; 1988: 187).
The writer is a sorcerer who dismantles the self and who 'experiences the animal as
the only population before which they are responsible...' (ibid.: 294; 240). Love is
dismantled so that we may become capable of a greater loving: 'To have dismantled
one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the
line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody
else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to
no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray' (ibid.: 242; 197). However, to
strip this kind of becoming-imperceptible and becoming-animal of historical
contextualization in the case of works of literature, such as Hardy's 'Tess', is both
naive and apolitical. Deleuze's conception of becomings cannot be offered as an
essential or ahistorical universalist 'truth', divorced from particular historical realities,
but has to be made to work in specific contexts of race and gender that are at once
historical, geographical, cultural, and political. The 'people to come' that 'Tess'
invokes is a new molecular population that requires a revolution of the question of
woman in society. However, Somers' becoming-anomalous cannot be simply reduced
to the ideological level, since this would be to foreclose the question of movement, to
disqualify it as an event of virtuality, never giving it a chance at life, and to stratify
the becomings prefigured by imposing upon them spurious universalisms. It also
runs the risk of accepting molarization as are only reality and molarity as our only
possible and actual identity.31

It is never in Deleuze and Guattari a question of positing a simple opposition between

molecular machines and molar machines, but of seeking to demonstrate that every
machine has a molecular unconscious (a multiplicity or a population) which both
marks its tendency to decompose and haunts its operation and organization. It would
be too easy to claim that a becoming-molecular involves little more than a reaction to
molar determination, so consigning it to a parasitic status, simply because rhizomatics
wants to show the extent of co-implication of molecular and molar within any given
assemblage. This means that lines of deterritorialization are inconceivable outside of
circuits of territoriality. Moreover, becomings (molecular, animal, inhuman) always
involve a 'molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or prepares the way for
them' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 48; 1988: 34). The critique of pyschoanalysis
emerges out of this insight. Psychoanalysis is to be critiqued for reducing becomings
to the one complex, the complex of molar determination (Oedipus, castration). The
point is not to deny that an assemblage of desire that involves a becoming-inhuman is
devoid of an Oedipal apparatus; on the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there
are many Oedipal statements entailed in such a becoming (ibid.: 50; 36). We are
involved in a social formation, and we are caught up in Oedipal relations. Freud's
psychoanalysis is critiqued not only because it reduces becomings solely to
articulations of Oedipal desire, but rather for employing this enunciation in order to
delude patients with the belief that through therapy they will be able to speak finally
in their own name as unitary organisms: 'No sooner does Freud discover the greatest
art of the unconscious, this art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly
at work bringing back molar unities...the father, the penis, the vagina' (ibid.: 39-40;
27). We have only to think of the case of the Wolf Man who has to learn to accept
that there are not several wolves but only one, and that this is his father; or the case of
the little boy Arpad with his 'poultry perversion' playing the game of the child as the
small chicken and daddy as the big cock. The events in the poultry-yard do not
simply gratify the young lad's sexual curiosity, but teach him a lesson in 'human
family-life' (Freud 1990: 191). Then there is the case of the dog phobia examined by
who else but 'Dr Wulff', in which fear of the father is displaced, as are all animal
identifications for Freud, on to dogs: '"Doggie, I'll be good!" - that is, "I won't
masturbate"' (ibid.: 188). Indeed, it would be interesting to examine the extent to
which Freud's entire analysis of totemism in 'Totem and Taboo' reduces the
rhizomatic animal becomings contained within, and constrained by,32 totemic
practices to an Oedipal filiative model. The case of animal identifications among
children is clearly reduced to such a model by Freud in every single case study.

Kangaroo is a novel of the event, of the crack-up and the smash-up, in which the
Other figures neither as a subject nor an object but as a possible world and a possible
future that can never simply be located 'in' time since it concerns a becoming (on the
Other see Deleuze 1990: 201-2; 1995: 147). This 'other' is necessarily indeterminate
and unpredictable since molecular becomings concern new connections and novel
flows of desire. Deleuze and Guattari note that one of the defining features of racism
is its extermination of the outside: 'From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior,
there are no people on the outside. There are only people like us and whose only
crime it is not to be' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 218; 1988: 178). As a centre of
power that grows out of impotence, racism is incapable of becoming since it 'never
detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who
resist identification have been wiped out' (ibid.). 'Race' is, in fact, a minoritarian
becoming defined not by its 'pureness' but by an impurity conferred upon it by the
system of oppression and domination. This is why, Deleuze and Guattari argue,
bastard and mixed blood are the true names of race.

In Lawrence's novel we find an affirmation of the outside, and, in the final analysis, it
has to remain an open question whether or not the becomings taking place are
restricted to the 'evolutions' of a peripheral isolate. Lawrence's fictional and
nonfictional writings dramatize the predicaments of modernity in this regard, noting
that our peculiar modern malady is that we 'cannot bear connection’ but feel the need
to break away and 'be isolate'. But the practice of individual freedom and the modern
precoccupation with merely petty personal salvation are also our particular
'suicide' (Lawrence 1995: 148). Lawrence does not only draw our attention to the
absence of conditions which would give rise to collective becoming, but is also
concerned to redefine and invent anew the character of such becomings (this is stated
clearly in Apocalypse, 1995: 73ff.; see also Deleuze's reading of this text in Deleuze
1993: 50-71). The difficult case of Somers and his becoming-animal/imperceptible/
aboriginal shows that the Deleuzian conception of becomings cannot be offered as an
essential or ahistorical universalist 'truth', divorced from particular historical realities,
but has to be made to work in specific contexts of race and gender that are at once
historical, geographical, cultural, and political.
This is a point that has been noted by Robert Young in the context of an analysis of
colonial identity. On the one hand, he suggests that the 'desiring-machine' of Anti-
Oedipus enables us to articulate the violent manner in which colonial practices were
inscribed both physically and psychically on territories and populations. It thus
provides a 'material geopolitics of colonial history' that allows for the specific
character of incommensurable, conflictual histories forced together in the unified
molar memories and histories that are artificially produced by colonialism. This is a
'disavowed' and 'obsessional tale' involving disjunctive connections between
territories and bodies 'caught up in a process of breaks and flows, couplings and
uncouplings' (Young 1995: 174). On the other hand, however, Young argues that the
model of Anti-Oedipus, including the processes of coding, decoding, and overcoding
it draws attention to, are too abstract to do justice to the complexities of the way in
which cultures interact and respond to the experiences of colonial subjugation. A
more nuanced historical analysis needs to show that cultures are never simply
destroyed or exterminated 'but rather layered on top of each other, giving rise to
struggles that themselves only increased the imbrication of each with the other and
their translation into uncertain patchwork identities' (ibid.) (it could be argued that
such an approach, in which the emphasis is placed on the stratification and
destratification of cultural and racial identity fully informs the analysis of the later A
Thousand Plateaus).

In his reading of modern cinema, such as contemporary black American cinema,

Deleuze shows that he is sensitive to these issues. In a condition where a people and
the conditions for the expression of its revolutionary desire are missing, Deleuze
notes, the writer and cinema author perform a catalytic function, able through their
solitude and marginality to articulate potential forces of change and produce
utterances that are like the germs or 'seeds of a people to come' (les germes du peuple
a venir) (Deleuze 1985: 288; 1989: 221).33 The cinema author, Deleuze notes, 'finds
himself before a people which, from the point of view of culture, is doubly colonized',
finding itself colonized by both stories that come from another place and by their own
myths that have become like impersonal entities now at the service of the colonizer
and the imperial presence. Under these conditions the author cannot allow himself to
become the ethnologist of a people or invent a fiction that is solely of private interest.
The art of storytelling, whether in literature or film, should assume neither the form of
an impersonal myth nor that of a personal fiction ( a predicament Kangaroo
necessarily finds itself in), but rather take the form of a 'speech-act' through which
characters are made to cross the boundary between that which separates the private
from the political, so producing 'collective utterances' that perform the catalytic
function of addressing the injustices of time and expressing 'the intolerable' in way
that gives a renewed vitality to the movement (the event) of time (ibid.: 286, 289;
219, 222). It is in this respect that all art is political, not addressing a people but
contributing to the invention of one (ibid.: 283; 217).
For the revolutionary artist it is always a question of populations: where statistics
concern individual phenomena, 'antistatistical individuality operates only in relation
to molecular populations' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 413; 1988: 335). It is here that
one might develop a productive perspective on Somers' rejection of the romantic
figure of Kangaroo and of the people: 'The artist discards romantic figures,
relinquishes both the forces of the earth and the forces of the people. The combat, if
combat there is, has moved...The established powers have placed us in the situation of
combat at once atomic and cosmic, galactic' (ibid.: 426; 345). To be a poet or an
assassin? The poet is one who 'lets loose molecular populations in the hope that this
will sow the seeds of, or even engender, the people to come, that these populations
will pass into a people to come, open a cosmos' (ibid.). This would seem to
appositely capture something of the complexity of Lawrence as a writer and poet,
concerned not simply with local and parochial energies but with cosmic ones (see, for
example, the foreword to 'Fantasia of the Unconscious'). Somers, for example,
desires not so much a renewed phallic politics, but 'a new feeling', a 'new life-form, a
new social-form' (Lawrence 1997: 98). He recognizes that the construction of a new
way of life requires new terms of speech to be invented: 'A whole new concept of the
universe gradually born, shedding the old concept' (297). It is at such thresholds of
desire and expression that one might locate within a male writer such as Lawrence an
important and germinal becoming implicated in a complex entwinement of molecular
becomings and molar identities - a becoming which involves woman but which would
take us beyond the molar genderization which identity is forced to endure under
patriarchy.34

Deleuze and Guattari criticize oedipalized readings of literature for preventing us

from seizing the connection between a literary or writing machine and a field of
social desiring-production that interrupts the order of the signifier. Literature is
always a writing of the near-future that concerns a revolution to-come. The language
of literature, therefore, is not to be defined solely in terms of what it says or what it
signifies but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode: 'The only literature is
that which places an explosive device in its package...' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972:
160; 1984: 134). Oedipalized readings, by contrast, fail in that they reduce literature
to an object of consumption that conforms to the established order. The result is to
enslave the work. Of course, the 'great voices' of literature, the ones capable of
performing breakthroughs in grammar and syntax, of making language a desiring-
machine, almost always speak from the depths of psychosis (see Deleuze 1993: 13-14
for further insight into links between psychosis, illness, the life-process and the
peculiar 'health' of writing). This neither needs justifying or explaining away; the
point is to appreciate that such writing demonstrates the revolutionary means of
escape from molar capture and entry into the kind of molecular becomings available
to us under modern or late-modern conditions. In a revolutionary-becoming it is
always a question of bringing into transversal communication the writing-machine,
the painting-machine, the analytical engine, the social machine, and the technical
machines, removing them from their reified existence in the system of social and
psychic repression, so that they become partial objects connected to one another 'in
the flow that feeds one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently
kindled for a generalized explosion' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 162; 1984: 137).

In a reading of Kafka and 'minor' literature Deleuze and Guattari argue that literature
is 'positively charged with the role and function of the collective, and even
revolutionary, enunciation' (Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 31; 1986: 17; and compare
the reading of Kafka given in Deleuze 1985: 283-6; 1989: 217-19). The individual
always finds itself implicated in values that are economic, juridical, bureaucratic,
technological, and so on. The writer may exist in the margins of society, outside his
or her community, but is nevertheless capable of producing an 'active solidarity' in the
face of skepticism and irony. Indeed, their position 'outside' allows them to express
the possibility of another community and 'to forge the means of another
consciousness and another sensibility' (ibid.). In modernity literature provides the
relay for a revolutionary machine to come because the conditions for a collective
enunciation are lacking elsewhere due to molar take-over. In Kafka's fiction the
letter, or rather 'proper name', K designates neither a narrator nor a character but an
assemblage of desire that has no subject (only the individual conceived as a monadic
subject would be separable from the collective and capable of leading its own life).
A minor literature, however, subjects the inside to the forces of the outside, the Czech
Jew writing in German for example, writing 'like a dog digging a hole, a rat digging
its burrow...finding his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third
world, his own desert' (ibid.: 33; 18). In this way Kafka's characters' are all
'becoming-animals', functioning as polyvalent assemblages 'of which the solitary
individual is only a part' (ibid.: 152; 85). Deleuze and Guattari consider 'grotesque'
the reading which would condemn Kafka and the fate of his writing to that of solitary
individuals, presupposing a fundamental opposition between life and writing, and
reflecting only an impotence in the face of life. Rather, they locate in his praxis of
writing a rhizomatics: 'A rhizome, a burrow, yes - but not an ivory tower. A line of
escape, yes - but not a refuge' (ibid.: 74; 41). Such a creative line of escape sucks
vampirically into its movement and territorialities politics, economy, bureaucracy, and
judiciary, but 'in order to make them render still unknown sounds that come from the
near future...' (ibid.). Literature is to be conceived not as 'criticism', which remains
too caught up in representation, but rather as an 'active dismantling' that operates in a
field of virtual becoming, a virtuality that is real without yet being actual. This is to
construe the virtual movement as procedure, process, and trial, in which 'critique' -
philosophy and literature as invention, as chaosmosis - is transformed into a method
of intensity.
1 On the model of machinic desire adopted by Deleuze and Guattari machines
function as breaks in the flows which connect machine to machine and are nothing
but flows themselves. 'This is the law of the production of production', they maintain
(1972: 44; 1984: 36). This means that at the 'limit point' of all transversal
connections and communications the 'partial object', or molecular machine, and the
continuous flux of matter in variation 'fuse into one'. They criticize Melanie Klein,
from whom they derive the notion of 'partial objects', for failing to grasp the peculiar
logic of these objects, with the result that she short-circuits the connections of desire
by not reaching the insight that that partial objects are nothing other than flows and
breaks. Instead she chose to construe them from the point of view of a theoretical
idealism as fantasies. The reason Klein was unable to develop an 'anoedipal'
conception of the production of desire is because she insisted on mapping desire from
the viewpoint of global persons and complete objects. The result of this top-down
approach to the molecular is that Oedipus gets miniaturized and is found everywhere,
including in the very earliest years of life (ibid.: 52-3; 44-5). On partial objects see
also Deleuze 1969: 228ff.; 1990: 196ff.

2 For Weismann see Das Keimplasma: Eine Theorie der Vererbung, Jena, G.
Fischer, 1893. In English I have consulted A. Weismann, Studies in the Theory of
Descent in two volumes (1882), especially the final section on 'mechanism and
teleology', and 'The Selection Theory' in Seward 1909: 18-66, which contrasts
'germinal selection' with 'organic selection' in order to discredit the 'Lamarckian
principle' of adaptation. Lawrence offers his own version of Weismann in his
speculations on the daddy-germ and mommy-germ in 'The Holy Family' chapter in
his Fantasia of the Unconscious: 'And so, the blood-stream of race is one stream, for
ever. But the moment the mystery of pure individual newness ceased to be enacted
and fulfilled, the blood-stream would dry up and be finished' (Lawrence 1961: 26).
So while there is an endless flow of 'vitalistic communication' between the members
of a family or species, entailing a long, strange rapport between the generations, there
is also the 'jolt' and 'rupture' in which the new individual life asserts itself beyond the
constraints of all previously binding ties. Lawrence denies that one can explain the
nature of a new creature in terms of parental descent, maintaining that the 'whole
cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution' cannot explain the reality of the
new individual (Lawrence 1964. 214).

3 Deleuze offers an incisive discussion of this predicament Freud finds himself

in, in which the repetition peculiar to the death-drive is modelled on the model of
'cancelled difference' while Eros is left free to generate new differences, in Difference
and Repetition, 1968: 144; 1994: 109 & 317, note 18.
4 See Freud 1991: 325-6: 'Thus the original opposition between the ego-
instincts and the sexual instincts proved to be inadequate. A portion of the ego-
instincts was seen to be libidinal; sexual instincts...operated in the ego. Nevertheless
we are justified in saying that the old formula which lays it down that psychoneuroses
are based on a conflict between ego-instincts and sexual instincts contains nothing
that we need reject to-day. It is merely that the distinction between the two kinds of
instinct, which was originally regarded as in some sort of way qualitative, must now
be characterized differently - namely as being topographical...Our argument had as its
point of departure a sharp distinction between ego-instincts, which we equated with
death-instincts, and sexual instincts, which we equated with life instincts...Our views
have from the very first been dualistic, and to-day they are even more definitely
dualistic than before - now that we describe the opposition as being, not between ego-
instincts and sexual instincts but between life instincts and death instincts'.

5 Elisabeth Grosz, for whom the notion of the death-drive does not amount to a
'new discovery' in Freud's work but one that is already inscribed in the articulation of
the pleasure principle found in his earliest texts, has contested the linkage of sex and
death by suggesting that it conceals the 'fantasy of a hydraulic sexuality' which
reduces sexuality to a biologically regulated need, instinct, compulsion, or urge -
nothing more than a (masculinist) 'mode of physical release'. She wishes to expand
the field of desire beyond simple reproduction or mere communication between
subjects involving recognition or exchange, so that it becomes possible to identify it
with a process that 'engenders and induces transformations, intensifications, a
becoming something other. Not simply a rise and fall, a waxing and waning, but
movement...transmutations' (Grosz 1995: 204). The molecular and rhizomatic
conception of desire offered in this essay does, I believe, resonate morphically with
the move proposed by Grosz, but the linkage with death, I would argue, does not need
to be severed; rather, we need a molecular mapping of death and desire.

6 In constructing and considering the dual character of rhizomatic thinking -

molecular and molar, consistency and organization, the destratified body without
organs and the stratified organism, etc. - it is necessary to appreciate its involvement
in a pragmatics: a dualism of models is employed only in order to reveal the limits of
all models. This is why it is necessary, in the middle, to arrive at the 'magic
formula...PLURALISM=MONISM - via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an
entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging' (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980: 31; 1988: 20-1). Moreover, just as there are knots of arborescence in
rhizomes, so it is possible to find rhizomatic offshoots in roots: 'Immanence
partout' (ibid.: 1980: 251).
7 In a different reading of Freud on the death-drive through Lacan, Boothby is
inclined to associate it more with the 'Real' and the 'ineffable exigency of the
body' (1991: 20). By disassociating the notion from Freud's dubious biologism, and
the conundrums it leads to, he actually produces a reading of the death-drive that
comes close to the position of Deleuze and Guattari regarding the vitality of
nonorganismic life. His argument is that for Lacan the traumatic force of the death-
drive is to be related not to the biological organism but rather against the authoritarian
unity of the imaginary ego. Boothby notes that in the essay on the pleasure principle
Freud offers two conflicting and mutually exclusive accounts of what it means to
posit the death drive as being 'beyond' the pleasure principle (as both an
intensification of tension and its reduction toward absolute minimum), and suggests
that it is the unacknowledged, but decisive, shift in the essay from a pyschological to
a biological discourse that explains this confusing turnaround on Freud's part.
Boothby is right to claim that the productive basis of the notion of the death-drive lies
in the way it draws attention, albeit tortuously, to the excessive discharge of vital
energies that are compelled to struggle against the constraints of the unitary ego
(ibid.: 77, 87). The death-drive names that 'force of destructiveness' that is directed
not against the other but against the self. It is, therefore, to be construed not as a
drive to murder but rather as a drive to 'suicide', and helps to explain certain
enigmatic features of human existence such as bodily violation and dismemberment
(ibid.: 11, 40). Of course, what is missing from this helpful and incisive reading of
the death drive is an account of the molar formation of the organism or the unitary
ego. As a result, Boothby is forced to sever the link with biology completely, rather
than re-think the character of Freud's biology and biologism, jettisoning in the process
the contrast between organic and inorganic (or nonorganic) life in favour of the
polarity between the organic and the psychological (that is, the force of unbound
instinctual energies and the bound structure of the ego) (ibid.: 83) (and see Ansell
Pearson 1997b: 'Dead or Alive', 57ff. for further exploration). We remain condemned
to the 'human condition', prisoners of organismic life.
8 Rose argues that death, like repetition, enjoys two meanings in Freud: on the
one hand it is linked, negatively, with the compulsion to repeat, and amounts to a
blocked memory and a passive relation to death; on the other hand it is linked,
positively, to the risking of one's life, the 'daring death' that heralds a 'perfect
memory', an 'active relation to death' and a positive repetition forwards (see 1992:
104, 109). But what this distinction between two deaths fails to appreciate is the
extent to which for Freud the active desire for death, through the risking of life (one's
own and that of others), is equally implicated in regression and the latent destructive
tendencies of the instincts (enduring life by preparing oneself for death means, says
Freud in the 1915 essay, taking 'the backward step') (Rose recognizes this in the case
of the 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' essay but restricts it to this piece). This is the
basis of our disillusionment with Freud - the fact that on his model there is posited
and affirmed only the one death, only involution as regression, only the murdering of
strangers, only uncreative evolution and tragic life.

9 By the time of his 1932/33 reflections Freud has 'outgrown' his earlier
'attitude' towards war: 'Now war is the crassest opposition to the psychical attitude
imposed on us by the process of civilisation...we simply cannot any longer put up
with it' ('Why War?', an exchange between Einstein and Freud, in Freud 1987:
343-62, 362).

10 Within a few days of completing an early draft of this essay I read a news
notice in the New Scientist (19 April 1997), bearing the headline 'There is more to
heredity than DNA' and beginning with the sentence: 'It's official - it's not all in your
genes'. The item reports on recent research conducted on the embryo environment of
mice, which found that not only the sequences of DNA are 'passed on through
generations', but also that 'epigenetic' changes to DNA, that is modifications that do
not affect the sequencing of DNA but the way it works, 'can be inherited'. This
research, which concerns 'transgenerational effects', shows that the environment of
the nucleus of an embryonic cell affects and modifies the functioning of key genes.
This is not the same as the point being made in this essay in relation to protein life,
but it serves to show I think that biology remains shrouded in a DNA mythology. The
classic example of this, of course, is the Human Genome Project. In the following
week's edition there was a piece on self-sustaining proteins, with a research team at
the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, locating molecular ecosystems consisting
only a few proteins, but which were found to be capable of self-replication and of
forming 'complex interactions that are signatures of living systems' (New Scientist, 26
April, 1997: 18).
11 We might also note that new experimental evidence of the late 1980s showed
that unicellular organisms, such as bacteria, can modify their DNA in a directed,
adaptive manner.

12 See also Kauffman 1995: 50-1: 'DNA replicates only as part of a complex,
collectively autocatalytic network of reactions and enzymes in cells. No RNA
molecules replicate themselves...life is the natural accomplishment of catalysts in
sufficiently complex nonequilibrium chemical systems'. An extensive treatment of
Kauffman's ideas can be found in chapter sixteen of Depew and Weber 1995: 429ff.
On the feedback role played by enzymes in the autocatalysis of DNA replication see
also Prigogine and Stengers 1985: 153-4. It is interesting to note that in their critique
of the tendency among molecular biologists to reduce the production of global order
to the actions of individual molecules, Prigogine and Stengers have recourse to
Bergson's attack on naive vitalist conceptions of his day, in which evolution can only
be conceived by referring it to some preexisting goal. The same error is committed by
molecular biologists who deploy metaphors of 'organizer', 'regulator', and 'genetic
program' (ibid.: 174-5).

13 For an excellent outline of the biochemical principles undergirding the

engineering of life see the appendix on 'The Chemistry of Life' in Behe 1996:
255-76.

14 The evolution of the proofreading capabilities of DNA is based on sound

engineering principles: the way in which to send a message through a noisy channel
(one that is subject to mistakes) is to send the message more than once by deploying
redundancy. The important feature of the double helix is that it is 'double', since the
existence of the two chains means that the memory of genes is redundantly coded,
making proofreading possible. The peculiar character of DNA's redundancy is that
the genetic message is represented in complementary, not identical, copies (see
Watson 1970: 163ff.). For further insight into redundancy see Reanney 1995: 54ff.
15 According to Deleuze, Nietzsche's perspectivism operates as an art of
inclusive disjunctions, in which divergence is not a principle of exclusion and
disjunction is not a means of separation; rather, incompossibility 'is now a means of
communication' (Deleuze 1969: 203; 1990: 174). Deleuze stresses that in the case of
inclusive disjunctions it is not a question of making the disjunction a conjunction;
rather, it remains a disjunction that continues to bear on divergence: 'But this
divergence is affirmed in such a way that the either...or itself becomes a pure
affirmation. Instead of a certain number of predicates being excluded from a thing in
virtue of the identity of its concept, each "thing" opens itself up to the infinity of
predicates through which it passes, as it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept
or as self. The communication of events replaces the exclusion of predicates' (ibid.).
The 'schizo' experience or becoming, for example, 'is and remains in disjunction', not
reducing two contraries to an identity of the same, but affirming their 'distance as that
which relates the two as different' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 96; 1984: 76-7).
Perspectivism, on Deleuze's reading, is not a relativism, in which truth would vary
according to the subject in question; rather, perspectives denote the conditions within
which 'the truth of a variation appears to the subject' (Deleuze 1988: 27; 1993: 20).

16 On content and expression, and their mutual solidarity, see Hjelmslev 1969:
47-60, and Deleuze and Guattari's modification in 1980: 58-9; 1988: 43-4.

17 For further insight into invariance see chapter six of Monod on 'Invariance
and Perturbations' (1971: 99ff.). As Monod notes, the quest for invariants has always
revealed a 'Platonic ambition' at the heart of science (101). See also the critical, but
one-sided, analysis of Monod ('The theologian of molecular transcendence') and
science in Baudrillard 1993: 59-61.

18 Mutations are typically grouped into four major types, including 'base
substitution' when one nucleotide base in a DNA sequence gets replaced by another; a
change in a DNA sequence produced by the insertion or deletion of a nucleotide base;
and alterations to DNA sequences involving either a reconfiguaration that results
from the chopping out and re-insertion of part of the sequence in an inverted order or
the duplication, or deletion, of a whole sequence. See also Eigen 1992: 25-30 &
Pollock 1994: 30-4.
19 All these phenomena, which effect an 'enlargement' of the genetic programme
are, examined at length in Jacob 1974: 291ff. Jacob treats recombination as the
example of a non-additive reassortment of the genetic programme, but he also gives
the example of the production of 'added' genetic material that allows a cell to acquire
new structures and execute new functions, such as is involved, for example, in the
sexual differentiation in certain kinds of bacteria. Interestingly, he sees the nucleic-
acid sequence contained in these supernumerary elements as escaping the constraints
of stability and normalization imposed by natural selection on account of their
gratuitous ('dispensable') character. Such elements amount to a 'free addition for the
cell', a sort of virtual 'reserve' of code. The lesson is that if one is to talk of stability
(normality) one must equally speak in the same breath of variability (abnormality):
'...at the level of the bacterial population...the nucleic-acid text appears to be
perpetually disorganized by copying errors, by recombinatorial spoonerisms, by
additions or omissions' (Jacob 1974: 292). This insight, however, needs to be linked
up with Deleuze and Guattari's insight into deterritorialization regarding the code and
the territory.

20 Anyone who doubts the molar commitments of orthodox modern Darwinism -

which has functioned as a social Darwinism from its inception - should take a look at
work in sociobiology, such as this from Wright 1994: 13: '...I believe some - some -
of the conservative norms that prevailed in Victorian England reflect, if obliquely, a
surer grasp of human nature than has prevailed in social sciences for most of this
century; and that some of the resurgent moral conservatism of the past decade,
especially in the realm of sex, rests on an implicit rediscovery of truths about human
nature that have long been denied'.
21 Allosteric proteins are molecules whose conformations alter in response to
environmental situations. They play a key role in the regulation of critical
biochemical pathways, acting as a feedback monitoring device in cybernetic circuits
both inside and outside cells. There is a thorough treatment of protein life in chapters
three, four, and five of Monod's Chance and Necessity, covering their catalytic,
regulatory, and constructive functions (1971: 45ff.), while their importance has been
recently argued for in Cairns-Smith 1996: 76-8. Monod sees the stereospecific
interactions of protein regulation and construction playing a crucial role in what he
calls the 'teleonomic performance' of a living being, where teleonomy refers to its
existence as an 'oriented, coherent, and constructive activity'. He treats allosteric
enzymes in chapter four, which is on 'microscopic cybernetics', and examines the
phenomena of feedback inhibition and feedback activation - which also includes a
discussion of the role played by certain 'dark' precursors in the activation of enzymes
(62-4). His key insight, articulated in chapter five on 'molecular ontogenesis', is that
the process of 'spontaneous and autonomous morphogenesis' rests upon the
stereospecific recognition properties of proteins; in other words, morphogenesis is
primarily a microscopic process that manifests itself in macroscopic structures (81).
Deleuze and Guattari will make extensive use of Monod's insights in both Anti-
Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. On proteins see also Eigen 1992: 72-4, and Jacob
1974: 304-6, where he poses the question of which comes first, proteins or nucleic
acids?, as a chicken and egg question, noting that without nucleic acids, proteins have
no future, while without proteins, nucleic acids remain inert.

22 In a 'technical manifesto' of 1913, for example, Marinetti writes of the futurist

desire to rid poetry of the 'obsessive I', which entails abandoning 'the habit of
humanizing nature by attributing human passions and preoccupations to animals,
plants, water, stone, and clouds. Instead we should express the infinite smallness that
surrounds us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms, the Brownian
movements...I want to introduce the infinite molecular life into poetry not as a
scientific document but as an intuitive element' (Marinetti 1973: 102-3).

23 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze quite clearly divorces his understanding

of the passive self from Kant's conception of receptivity. Deleuze contends that the
Kantian account assumes sensations that are already formed, which then need to be
linked the a a priori forms of their representation determined as space and time. In
the process, the passive self is deprived of any 'power of synthesis' (synthesis is
reserved for activity) (Deleuze 1968: 130; 1994: 98).
24 Sartre construes the distinction as one between the 'I' conceived as the ego in
the sense of a unity of action and the 'me' as the ego in the sense of a unity of states
and qualities. He argues that this is merely a functional and grammatical distinction
between two aspects of one and the same reality (1972: 60). Sartre's entire thesis in
this work is to de-posit the 'transcendental I' in order to overcome the subject-object
duality whose function in philosophy is 'purely logical': 'The World has not created
the me: the me has not created the World. These are two aspects for absolute,
impersonal consciousness, and it is by virtue of this consciousness that they are
connected' (105-6).

25 There is an instructive account of the play between breakdown and

breakthrough in Deleuze in James Williams' essay on Deleuze's reading of the motif
of catastrophe in the paintings of Turner (Williams 1997: 233-47).

26 See also Lawrence 1993: 182-3: 'The perfect rose is only a running flame,
emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished...the
incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly
open in their transit, nude in their movement before us...the heavy, silting, sucking
mud, the spinning of sky winds...up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of
futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past. The source, the issue, the creative
quick...This is the immanence'.

27 On the theme of 'terror and wonder at the frontier' in American literature see
the excellent collection of essays edited by Mogen et. al (1993). In their introduction
the editors of this volume situate the new readings offered of the American Gothic
tradition in relation to Lawrence's Classic Studies in American Literature.

28 An assemblage is always Janus-faced, both oriented toward the strata and

'relative' reterritorializations and deterritorializations, and toward destratification and
the plane of consistency in which 'absolute' movement is possible. Somers, it could
be suggested, is moving between these two poles or vectors in his becoming-
Australian. On the distinction between 'machine' and 'assemblage', and on what
makes the effects of a machine machinic, and never simply 'mechanical', see Deleuze
and Guattari 1980: 410; 1988: 333.
29 In his letters from his residence at 'Wyewurk', Thirroul in Australia of June
1922 Lawrence speaks of his writing Kangaroo and calls it his 'mad' and 'queer' novel
about 'Australia', and notes: 'I feel if I lived in Australia for ever I should never open
my mouth once to say one word that meant anything' (in Frieda Lawrence 1935:
119-24).

30 Numerous critics have felt the need to play the role of doctor in relation to
Lawrence, who is cast in the role of mental patient. A good example of this strategy
is Eliot who deems Lawrence's preoccupation with cosmic flux and libidinal flows to
be decadent and morbid, while his 'acute sensibility' and 'violent prejudices and
passions' can be put down to a distinct 'lack of intellectual and social training' (in
contrast to the 'trained mind' of a certain Mr. Joyce). Eliot concludes by describing
Lawrence as a menace to future generations, his works will transmit like a bad
infection, a sexual disease, appealing to 'the sick and debile and confused' (Eliot
1934: 58-9, 61).
31 For an instructive and incisive treatment of Deleuze and Guattari on
'becoming-woman' -a cliche that offers for Deleuze and Guattari more resources for a
deviant becoming than 'becoming-man' since it resides more outside history - can be
found in Grosz (1994: 187-213). See also Massumi, for whom: 'Gender is a fatal
detour from desire-in-deviation (every body's secret potential and birthright). It is
akin to a mineralogical typecast; it is a reactive overlay, a molar overcoding
(reproduction). A body does not have a gender: it is gendered...Gendering is a
process by which a body is socially to be determined by biology' (1992: 87) (an
astute insight, but one which also takes as given the molar over-determination of
biology). A recent and challenging philosophical engagement with Deleuze and
Guattari's metaphorical' exploitation of 'becoming-woman' can be found in Christine
Battersby's The Phenomenal Woman (1998). Her argument is that Deleuze's
conception of desire is not gender-neutral since it takes maleness as the only possible
norm for identity. 'Becoming-woman' can, therefore, be shown to abstract from the
repetitions and rhythms of embodied lives that are 'sexually specific'. Her critical
reading of Deleuze and Guattari on the wolf-pack, 'on the road' beatniks, and the way
in which they
transform the American Indian into the image of a young American (always fit, male,
and brave) is highly incisive and challenging (1998: 195-6). I have difficulty,
however, with the claim that Deleuze never considers 'natality' (ibid.: 206). My
reading of 'germinal life' is designed to show that natality is everywhere in Deleuze -
in his rereading of Freud on the death-drive, in his reading of Hardy, in his
Lamarckism of the crack, in the mapping of the body without organs in terms of the
molecular freedoms - and dangers, always danger - it offers us, and generally in his
reconfiguration of life and death in terms of rhizomatics, alliances, and becomings as
opposed to genealogies, filiations, and memories. One cannot say natality is not there
in Deleuze when it clearly informs the entire program of rhizomatics as a novel
remapping of the very phenomena of birth, growth, and death. Deleuze, however,
always thinks of birth overhumanly, so that 'germinal life' is nothing other than a
thought of the over-birth. This means that it cannot be reduced to a material model
(the mere fact of being born). Battersby's position seems to be close to this - birthing
is a process of repetition - but for her sexual difference and the specificity of female
morphology are crucial.
Note should also be taken of the critique of Deleuze (and Foucault) by G. Spivak
in her essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (Spivak 1988). Here the alleged political or
ideological neutrality of Deleuze's demolition of the subject of desire is contested.
See note 35 below.

32 It is because societies, primitive and other, reduce animal becomings to

relations of totemic and symbolic correspondence that Deleuze and Guattari deem the
politics of such becomings to be so ambiguous (1980: 303; 1988: 247-8).
33 Such a people will, of course, both come and not come - not come since this
unnameable people is nothing but a 'com-ing'; to come completely would be to
exhaust the potentialities of the event. For further insight into the distinction between
the future (conceived as an ontological category of being present) and 'what is to
come' (a-venir, venire) (which enjoys a structure of non-realizable and nonpredicatble
virtuality), see Derrida in Dronsfield & Midgley 1997: 2, 30.

34 See in this regard Lawrence's letter to Gordon Campbell dated 21 September

1914, where he describes himself as 'not Freudian' and insists upon the need to make
a distinction between the 'female' and the 'feminine' in order to produce a 'female'
vision that will 'realise the tremendous non-human quality of life...' (Lawrence 1997b:
80).