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6 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

matter on the plane of consistency. In a certain sense, the acceleration of 

relative deterritorializations reaches the sound barrier: if the particles 

bounce off this wall, or allow themselves to be captured by black holes, they 

fall back onto the strata, into the strata's relations and milieus; but if they 

cross the barrier they reach the unformed, destratified element of the plane 

of consistency. We may even say the the abstract machines that emit and 

combine particles have two very different modes of existence: the Ecumenon 

and the Planomenon. Either the abstract machines remain prisoner to 

stratifications, are enveloped in a certain specific stratum whose program 

or unity of composition they define (the abstract Animal, the abstract 

chemical Body, Energy in itself) and whose movements of relative 

deterritorialization they regulate, Or, on the contrary, the abstract machine 

cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the 

plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes, the same machine at 

work in astrophysics and in microphysics, in the natural and in the artifi-

cial, piloting flows of absolute deterritorialization (in no sense, of course, is 

unformed matter chaos of any kind). But this presentation is still too 

simplified.

 

First, one does not go from the relative to the absolute simply by acceler-

ation, even though increases in speed tend to have this comparative and 

global result. Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant acceler-

ator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possi-

ble to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay. 

Retarded development is an example. What qualifies a deterritorialization 

is not its speed (some are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes 

epistrata and parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the 

contrary, jumps from one singularity to another following a 

nondecom-posable, nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane 

of consistency. Second, under no circumstances must it be thought that 

absolute deterritorialization comes suddenly of afterward, is in excess or 

beyond. That would preclude any understanding of why the strata 

themselves are animated by movements of relative deterritorialization and 

decoding that are not like accidents occurring on them. In fact, what is 

primary is an absolute deterritorialization an absolute line of flight, 

however complex or multiple—that of the plane of consistency or body 

without organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This absolute 

deterritorialization becomes relative only after stratification occurs on 

that plane or body: It is the strata that are always residue, not the 

opposite. The question is not how something manages to leave the strata 

by how things get into them in the first place. There is a perpetual 

immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative 

deterritorialization; and the machinic assemblages between strata that 

regulate the differential relations and relative

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 57

 

movements also have cutting edges of deterritorialization oriented toward 

the absolute. The plane of consistency is always immanent to the strata; the 

two states of the abstract machine always coexist as two different states of 

intensities.

 

Most of the audience had left (the first to go were the Marinetians with 

their double articulation, followed by the Hjelmslevians with their content 

and expression, and the biologists with their proteins and nucleic acids). 

The only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed to other follies, 

along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and scattered individuals. 

Challenger, moreover, had changed since the beginning of his talk. His 

voice had become hoarser, broken occasionally by an apish cough. His 

dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program 

for pure computers. Or else he was dreaming of an axiomatic, for 

axi-omatics deals essentially with stratification. Challenger was 

addressing himself to memory only. Now that we had discussed what was 

constant and what varied in a stratum from the standpoint of substances 

and forms, the question remaining to be answered was what varied 

between strata from the standpoint of content and expression. For if it is 

true that there is always a real distinction constitutive of double 

articulation, a reciprocal presupposition of content and expression, then 

what varies from one stratum to another is the nature of this real 

distinction, and the nature and respective positions of the terms 

distinguished. Let us start with a certain group of strata that can be 

characterized summarily as follows: on these strata, content (form and 

substance) is molecular, and expression (form and substance) is molar. 

The difference between the two is primarily one of order of magnitude or 

scale. Resonance, or the communication occurring between the two 

independent orders, is what institutes the stratified system. The molecular 

content of that system has its own form corresponding to the distribution 

of elemental masses and the action of one molecule upon another; 

similarly, expression has a form manifesting the statistical aggregate and 

state of equilibrium existing on the macroscopic level. Expression is like 

an "operation of amplifying structuration carrying the active properties of 

the originally microphysical discontinuity to the macrophysical level."

 

We took as our point of departure cases of this kind on the geological 

stratum, the crystalline stratum, and physicochemical strata, wherever the 

molar can be said to express microscopic molecular interactions ("the crys-

tal is the macroscopic expression of a microscopic structure"; the "crystal-

line form expresses certain atomic or molecular characteristics of the 

constituent chemical categories"). Of course, this still leaves numerous 

possibilities, depending on the number and nature of the intermediate

 

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