1. “There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight of deterritorialization; this line can be effectuated only in connections with the general causalities of another nature, but is in no way explained by them. It is our belief that the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as the imperceptible is perceived.” (D&G, 283)
2. We engage a text of tools with which we are asked to change ourselves, our connection with the world, the connections of the world itself, etc. One cannot confuse D&G’s works with anything but a rethinking of the ethical text, which instead of concrete rules of identification we are provided with differentiated possibilities--the infinity of connections instead of limits. The nature of the ethical propositions, however, has been inverted; from differentiation one cannot find a set proposition which illuminates transcendently above the entirety of possibilities, but immanent potentialities which spread—surrounding—connectively and shifting, malleable but ambiguous. Such an ethics is also an ontology, a human of possibility—a human with a new form of agency cutting through a world beyond being. Still, the apparatus looms ominously and beneath its shadow, obscured by walls of hierarchy and systematic productions a plane of bands held together in their essential animalism, re-centered subjectively by the apparatus of the anomalous and then again de-centered by one’s placement within this deterritorialization.
3. There is no simple causal structure within such terms, which D&G are correct to specify; however, in their referring to both larger subjecting systems for which their tool box is intended to dismantle, those bands and packs which subvert and shift those systems, moving below—entering an abyss or space untouchable by them—and outside of filiations and by extension the Oedipal system that D&G abstract as this filiation’s genesis, they structuralize two spaces for which all later propositions on these dismantling tools require the reader to be entirely settled with, if they are to adopt any of them.
4. Early in Becoming… D&G subvert the state apparatus as being a hierarchical construct which one cannot identify as an assemblage, while the crime-machine in its fluidity and its supposed non-filliative accordance, forms a band—the pack beckoned by the common need, the desire of money or the desire of personal power. But with such identification, D&G conflate those things they wished to combat with their own sweeping generalization; the crime-machine, as a assemblage, as an amalgamation of cogs with converging desires, have a causal infrastructure circumscribed—one can assume their interest is crime and it is the mutual desire for such that propels them forward. Now obviously, the crime-machine is not the drug-machine, but from my reading of D&G, such a hole leaves room for a new point of access.
5. There is an objectifying glorification in their crime-band and war-band connexions, which ultimately distort their previous positive propositions with a double-movement that reduces the complexity of drugs; denying their power as objects relevant only in human to human relation. By first exonerating the crime-band as something absolutely different than the state apparatus, they differentiate in an entirely ineffective way. Their mistake is muddling the separations of type and kind. War and crime are of two different systems.
6. The former, and this refers to their structuralization, requires the coexisting of two larger subjecting apparatus which send men into a material open field—the battlefield—from which all independent subjective spheres dissolve, to be replaced by a singular, becoming interpellative call of the home-state-history into a propulsive force, driving man back to the basic instincts of survival. The World—and I use world to designate a totalization of the subject’s entire experience, memory, understanding and knowledge—is centered below this interpellative call for animalism and to the reflection seen within this totalization, the band can do nothing but assemble.
7. The crime machine may suffer from a similar type of subjection, but its kind is wholly different. The drug user, dependent on the crime-machine, is subjected to it; the crime-machine propagating disruptions of state structures, resembles a breaking of subjection to it, but its re-territorialization within areas where man is called to differentiate outside of subjective calls is essentially in itself a subjecting apparatus of the state. Moreover, the drugs themselves, and in this case I call to specific drugs with specific effects—heroin, cocaine (particularly crack-cocaine), meth-amphetamine, etc.—do have inscribed within them chemical causal structures which supersede the perceptual modifying natures of them, calling to a third subjecting power which has little to do with choice.
8. The revealing of these distinctions is meant to show that D&G confuse their explanation of drugs and, wishing not to contradict their system, hold onto a considered potential, which when truly differentiated is no potential at all. Empirically recognizing the example of the impoverished, who living within a particular subjected sphere of apparatus, are left to—and this is marked by historical repetition, external sociological and psychology study and verbal reporting by those who actually live within such a subjection—a type of subjugation where the drug interpellates just as the religious Subject subjects its subjects. The criminal apparatus too, cyclically reproduces the relations of its production and in doing so empowers the repressive governmental apparatus. Using two historical examples, the movement of crack-cocaine into Los Angeles during the early eighties and the proliferation of heroin in post-WWII Italy, we can see moments where in place of a conventional state apparatus the crime apparatus fills the void of subjective power, retaining beings under its systems of law.
9. If we look toward specific points of causal relations, returning to the level of the assemblage, we are again met with the problematic of D&G’s analysis. In distinguishing causes as particular and in designating the happenings of the material world as primary, they require we return to either imaginary constructions or memory contingent experiences of the causalities which lead to the drug-becoming. But if we return to such memories or hypotheticals, we are left in view of the impossibility of mapping causal relation without seeing attached to each possible world an impossibility prescribed by the natures of the subjections attached to drugs within societal and cultural structures. Moreover, returning to the truly inscribed causal infrastructure of chemical addiction, the hierarchy multiplies when one looks at the drugs’ (heroin-crack-meth-etc.), modification and reterritorialization of desire; again interpellating the subject to the chemical call of need.
10. But I must separate my distinction from their distinctions—or lack thereof—on difference between drugs. “All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modification of speeds.” (D&G, 282) This implies a drug essence which subordinates hierarchically all conditions and correlations between drugs, where one could say in a hypothetical theoretical system, “all drugs fundamentally concern limits, and modifications of limits” and suddenly, if accepted simply as tactical, one is then given the opposite totalized view of what the Drug is. But there is no thing called drugs and when looking for the meaning of drugs, we venture down a path of simplification which reduces the value of the target object. Those things designated under the scientific hierarchical structure of Drug are indeed, in manifold ways, different. So to call to drugs as a platonic form undifferentiated as tools for perceptual modification and becoming, reduces our understanding of their true multiplicity to rudimentary language form in which we identify with “this is that.”
11. D&G commit a form of hyper-identification, which installs humans, in relation to a specific Drug, into a functional causal algorithm, with a single randomized variable whose output corresponds with whatever feature fills such a randomized input. But if they wish to return to material reality they must recognize the difference between marijuana and crack-cocaine, just as they should differentiate the choice of drug use as perceptual modification for an act of becoming and a subjection to a larger drug-apparatus which precedes any venture into their project.
12. Their final mistake is found in their attempt to reconcile the obvious dangers, the guilt I assume they suffered from the consequences—note their tone on drugs is considerably more radical and limitless in Anti-Oedipus—and the very soundness of their tactical system. Instead of admitting that drugs are a subjective force and that this mythic crime-machine is nothing but a feature of a repressive apparatus which requires a subordinate force to reify its power or that particular drugs do have an installed chemical causal structure, which while never guaranteed, is always guaranteed as possibility; D&G choose to simply warn against the possibility that Drugs may botch your, the subject of the book, becoming. This is entirely a cop out, for lack of a better term. They both betray the proposed limitlessness of the rhizome, of the plane of consistency and of becoming by speaking of the “wrong horse” and entirely botch—to use their terminology again—an actualized viewing of the Drug in its true differentiated forms.
13. Of the mistakes made, the problem lies within their unpredictable oscillation between the ideal itself, the ideal in relation to the real and the real itself. Rarely do they take care to resolve the absolute potentials of their differentiations outside of the differentiating in the material world; and in doing so, ignore the place where the undifferentiating came. The reason why this oscillation manifests its negative qualities in this case is that their tactical system requires a point of access which aligns, at least regularly, with those outside of the subjective sphere of the drug or crime apparatus. But to have a true opening, our tactical systems must be intent on destabilizing the subjective forces, even if they can be potentially used for some material perceptual modification which resembles becoming—an act that is entirely imaginary.
14. We may now return to the original point of interest, the role of philosophy, or more specifically the meaning of responsibility in philosophical terms; responsibility may not be reduced, as D&G reduce “drugs,” to simply meaning. There is a relational web of responsibility which, within the realm of the text extends like chains from the work to the authors, from the work to the readers, and from the work to world. The author has responsibilities to the structure of the text and to the validity of the structure and also to the validity of its propositions; independent of a larger statements from which any single proposition could be removed while continuing primacy of the theoretical system. The reader has the responsibility to read the text removing conscious bias and also to question the system and its propositions. The reader, author and text sit amalgamated but irreducible in their placement within the world—the powers of subjection color each end—but it is the author who initiates this collision of subjective spheres, so despite their inability to remove themselves from their own spheres of subjectivity, the power lies within them to predict the subjection they must contend with and that which lies outside their immediate grasp, which is effected ultimately by those within it.
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