Machines and becoming

From “who am I?” to “what can happen here?”

From personal models to a sinthome begins with the person’s existing agency and examines how personal material can ground the organization of personal and counterpart models, expression, and actual realization into a usable, revisable personal practical arrangement. Along this path we can also encounter Deleuze and Guattari: how can established relations keep producing new capacities? After borrowing fire, how can a person become fire through connections and trials?

This encounter adds an entrance to personal philosophy. Alongside expressing who we are and how we wish to live, we can observe what happens when bodies, words, tools, and counterparts come together. The everyday examples and Harness comparisons below are this essay’s extensions from their concepts.

Desiring-machines: how connections produce reality

Anti-Oedipus develops production, flows, and interruptions through desiring-machines; desire participates in producing reality. One positive task of schizoanalysis concerns how these machines form and function. The authors also distinguish the schizophrenic process from the clinical entity. [1]

This makes “machine” a useful way to ask which connections make an activity possible.

Imagine someone writing a song. Melody, breath, recording equipment, and another listener’s response jointly change the next performance. A model can help compare versions, develop images, or try an arrangement; an unfamiliar sound may also change the song the person intended to write. Intention moves the activity forward, and what emerges changes intention. Creation acquires a route back.

In this example the machine perspective asks what the connections produce: who can feel, recognize, respond, and continue, and how the work and desire change through this activity.

Assemblages: bring the relations into the work

The assemblage concept in A Thousand Plateaus brings relations of bodies and expression into the analysis. [2] Through this entrance, a personal environment can itself become material for creation. How bodies encounter materials, equipment, and others works together with how expression organizes purposes, contributions, and responses. Listing the available tools has not yet explained how they compose this practice.

The same text encounters different responses in a notebook, a conversation, or on a stage. One model excels at proposing images, another at exposing contradictions; pen and paper slow someone down, while a voice reveals a sentence’s rhythm. How these contributions are arranged changes the understanding that can emerge.

Writing a personal philosophy can therefore include writing interfaces between relations: how an unclear thought receives a response, how another interpretation enters comparison, and how a work returns to its author. The person develops their judgment alongside counterparts and tools that reliably carry it forward. Capacity gains a distributed body through these relations.

The body without organs: leave room beyond assigned uses

In A Thousand Plateaus, the body without organs is not flesh without organs. The issue concerns their fixed organization and experimentation with intensities and connections; the authors explicitly retain organization needed for life and emphasize prudence. [2]

Borrowing this concept to reconsider personal practice, we can ask whether existing arrangements have already assigned every capacity a single use.

For example, a writing routine might use a model only for proofreading. One collaboration could instead invite it to propose a structure, have the author read a draft aloud, and let both participants recognize which expression deserves further work. Besides adding a use for a tool, the change loosens the fixed organization in which the author must first settle the entire structure before a counterpart can participate. The trial needs to retain conditions for a work, judgment, and another collaboration.

Sustain a life while allowing it to become different

This site names the concrete arrangement of personal models, expression, and actual realization described above a sinthome, and examines how it forms, is used, and is revised. The machine perspective further prompts us to ask what else these organized relations can produce and which arrangements close possibilities prematurely. An arrangement can help life continue while also limiting new trials; both consequences need examination.

A highly convenient Harness might repeatedly produce the same kind of answer; a fresh trial might interrupt an existing continuity. Judgment must enter the particular activity: what understanding did this change bring, which conditions for continuing did it retain, and what did it cost?

This site retains the orientation of Personal-First Humanism: new connections should support concrete lives, judgment, and creation, while considering other participants’ circumstances. That choice is the site’s position; “machine” and “becoming” cannot automatically establish it. We can therefore borrow their questions while retaining our own value judgments.

Bring experimentation back into life

A trial can begin with a small change: another medium of expression, a counterpart’s interpretation we have yet to consider, or a conception made into a work that can answer back. Then observe whether we understand, choose, and create more capably, and whether activity brings a little more joy. Novelty can open an entrance; consequences in life help determine the next step.

If the trial makes work more rigid or leaves someone busy only maintaining tools, rearrange the connections. Conditions for stopping, sleeping, spending time with others, and returning to the work also belong within this personal philosophy.

Becoming here acquires a form we can try: change the connections making an activity possible, observe how works return, and judge which new capacities deserve a place in life. What kind of person do we want to cultivate? — Baby Heraclitus gives this openness a character; The trinity of philosophy, psychology, and engineering develops how trials leave expressions others can continue, making another person's reading a new encounter.

Reading sources and scope of comparison

The following English translations supply conceptual entrances; songwriting, model cooperation, Harnesses, and the personal-first connections are this essay’s comparative extensions.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Opening of chapter 1; chapter 4, section 4, “The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis”; the appendix’s closing distinction between process and clinical entity. Translated primary text.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, 1987. Plateau 4, pp. 88–89, on the two aspects of an assemblage; plateau 6, “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?”, especially pp. 158–161. Translated primary text.