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2 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

by cutting it off from the plane of consistency as destratification. We had to 

summarize before we lost our voice. Challenger was finishing up. His voice 

had become unbearably shrill. He was suffocating. His hands were becom-

ing elongated pincers that had become incapable of grasping anything but 

could still vaguely point to things. Some kind of matter seemed to be pour-

ing out from the double mask, the two heads; it was impossible to tell 

whether it was getting thicker or more watery. Some of the audience had 

returned, but only shadows and prowlers. "You hear that? It's an animal's 

voice." So the summary would have to be quick, the terminology would 

have to be set down as well as possible, for no good reason. There was a first 

group of notions: the Body without Organs or the destratified Plane of 

Consistency; the Matter of the Plane, that which occurs on the body or 

plane (singular, nonsegmented multiplicities composed of intensive con-

tinuums, emissions of particles-signs, conjunctions of flows); and the 

abstract Machine, or abstract Machines, insofar as they construct that 

body or draw that plane or "diagram" what occurs (lines of flight, or abso-

lute deterritorializations).

 

Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the 

strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emis-

sions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of 

expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In con-

junctions, they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and 

diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary 

reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articula-

tions animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms 

and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with 

relations that are determinable in every case. Such are the strata. Each stra-

tum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are 

really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and 

expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that 

place their segments in relation. What varies from stratum to stratum is the 

nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the nature of 

the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative move-

ments. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of 

real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude, 

with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the 

real-real distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of 

a linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction 

between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a 

superlinearity of expression (translation).

 

Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stra-

tum has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements,

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 73

 

and formal traits (Ecumenon). But it divides into parastrata according to 

its irreducible forms and associated milieus, and into epistrata according 

to its layers of formed substances and intermediary milieus. Epistrata and 

parastrata must themselves be thought of as strata. A machinic assemblage 

is an interstratum insofar as it regulates the relations between strata, as well 

as the relations between contents and expressions on each stratum, in 

conformity with the preceding divisions. A single assemblage can borrow 

from different strata, and with a certain amount of apparent disorder; 

conversely, a stratum or element of a stratum can join others in function-

ing in a different assemblage. Finally, the machinic assemblage is a 

metastratum because it is also in touch with the plane of consistency and 

necessarily effectuates the abstract machine. The abstract machine exists 

enveloped in each stratum, whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it 

defines, and developed on the plane of consistency, whose destratification 

it performs (the Planomenon). Thus when the assemblages fit together the 

variables of a stratum as a function of its unity, they also bring about a spe-

cific effectuation of the abstract machine as it exists outside the strata. 

Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of the 

contents and expression on each stratum, and at the intersection of all of 

the strata with the plane of consistency. They rotate in all directions, like 

beacons.

 

It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning. The 

double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the 

tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to 

eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of olibanum 

and "hung with strangely figured arras." Disarticulated, deterritorialized, 

Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was 

leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. He whispered some-

thing else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs proliferate. 

Panic is creation. A young woman cried out, her face "convulsed with a 

wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than they had seen 

on human countenance before." No one had heard the summary, and no 

one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of 

him, slowly hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre tra-

jectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assem-

blage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking 

and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: "The figure slumped 

oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort

 

of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock ___ The figure had now reached

 

the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a 

blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling 

made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped

 

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