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The Geology of Morals 

(Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)

 

 

 

Double Articulation

 

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0 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain 

machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing 

several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his simian 

disposition. He explained that the Earth—the Deterritorialized, the 

Glacial, the giant Molecule—is a body without organs. This body without 

organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all direc-

tions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory par-

ticles. That, however, was not the question at hand. For there simultane-

ously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that 

is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratifica-

tion. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of 

imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance 

and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large 

and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of 

capture, they are like "black holes" or occlusions striving to seize whatever 

comes within their reach.

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 They operate by coding and territorialization 

upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. 

The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire sys-

tem of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, con-

stantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, 

deterritorialized).

 

Challenger quoted a sentence he said he came across in a geology text-

book. He said we needed to learn it by heart because we would only be in a 

position to understand it later on: "A surface of stratification is a more 

compact plane of consistency lying between two layers." The layers are the 

strata. They come at least in pairs, one serving as substratum for the other. 

The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the 

strata. The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one 

side it faces the strata (in this direction, the assemblage is an interstratum), 

but the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of 

consistency (here, it is a metastratum). In effect, the body without organs is 

itself the plane of consistency, which becomes compact or thickens at the 

level of the strata.

 

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata 

come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself 

has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of dou-

ble articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the 

strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely var-

iable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple 

case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable 

particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units 

{substances)  upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and 

successions (forms).

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 41

 

The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures 

(forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are 

simultaneously actualized {substances). In a geological stratum, for exam-

ple, the first articulation is the process of "sedimentation," which deposits 

units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its 

succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the "fold-

ing" that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from 

sediment to sedimentary rock.

 

It is clear that the distinction between the two articulations is not 

between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed 

matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as 

formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and 

deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territoriality; 

therefore each possesses both form and substance. For now, all we can say is 

that each articulation has a corresponding type of segmentarity or multi-

plicity: one type is supple, more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is 

more rigid, molar, and organized. Although the first articulation is not 

lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in partic-

ular that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenom-

ena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, 

and finalization. Both articulations establish binary relations between 

their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation 

and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far 

more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the 

sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that 

structure is the earth's last word. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted 

that the distinction between the two articulations is always that of the 

molecular and the molar.

 

He skipped over the immense diversity of the energetic, 

physico-chemical, and geological strata. He went straight to the organic 

strata, or the existence of a great organic stratification. The problem of 

the organism—how to "make" the body an organism—is once again a 

problem of articulation, of the articulatory relation. The Dogons, well 

known to the professor, formulate the problem as follows: an organism 

befalls the body of the smith, by virtue of a machine or machinic 

assemblage that stratifies it. "The shock of the hammer and the anvil 

broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that 

moment he had not possessed. In this way, he received the articulations 

specific to the new human form that was to spread across the earth, a form 

dedicated to work.... His arm became folded with a view to work."

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 It is 

obviously only a manner of speaking to limit the articulatory relation to 

the bones. The entire organism must be considered in relation to a 

double articulation, and on different levels.

 

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