Nick Crowley

In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (D&G) write that “a book itself is a little machine”. Reading, in turn, is a matter of plugging oneself into this machine. The book-machine. For D&G, a book is not a representation of reality; it is a flow of symbols and affects, and when you read you are plugging your body into that flow. In one way or another, you get “jacked up” on the flow in the same way you might get “jacked up” on anything you ingest. D&G declare, “We will never ask what a book means[…] We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities”. A book is not a grid that you superimpose on reality in order to understand it—as if our eyes were blurry and a good text were a necessary prescription lens.  Rather, a book is something you eat and metabolise. And like any food, the way it affects us is a much more pertinent question than what it means. 

For D&G a book is something in the world before it is something about the world. “What a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world.” We pick up a book. We live in a world and sometimes we pick up books and read them, and when we do this we experience a movement of ideas, a passage of affect in our bodies. A book happens to us. Of course, a book can “stay with us” beyond the event of it being read. But we ought to think of the way a text “stays with us” as akin to the way something we eat stays with us; it is metabolised; it strengthens us, modulates us, strangles us, changes us. But it does not necessarily change us by giving us a “better grasp on the world.” Reading is not a break we take from world in order to sharpen our thoughts such that we can return to it with finer representational nets. A book happens.

This desire for representational knowledge of reality—the desire to bulk-up on books and “know more stuff”—is often subtended by guilt and a sense of deficit: “I do no know enough, I am mystified, I need to add height to my trembling tower of knowledge.” D&G’s “machinic” reading provides a nice corrective to us guilty readers, to us who want to bag life in our knowledge-nets and sooth our epistemic deficit. Where the guilty reader proceeds from a sense of lack, the machinic reader proceeds from a positive desire to be innervated and transformed. Where the guilty reader wants to weave finer meshes with which to catch the world, our machinic reader says; “Beware! These meshes inevitably become so tight that they turn into walls!”

The machinic reader wants to be broken down. They want to be fatigued, shot through, delighted. They read in pursuit of events that are strictly unthinkable (although they might delight in poetry or trying to think them nonetheless). They read in search of events that are immediately there. They read in search of an enlightenment that disappears as soon as they shut the cover. The guilty reader, of course, knows these revelations. They feel them and want them and fear that they have not had enough of them. They tend to treat these moments of revelation as rare portals into a “true picture of the world.” And when the revelation strikes, a miserly fear is never far behind as they worry they might lose the sacred moment insight. And so they try to capture it, summarise it, generalise it, preach about it, and stitch it into their representational account of the world, stitch it into their personalities. And so before the moment can be savoured and enjoyed, they are already trying to preserve it. Conversely, for the machinic reader it is enough to have had these moments of enlightenment. To the guilty reader they say, “Let the insight go! Other moments will come. There are more than enough good books to keep you jacked up for a life time.”

In fact, the machinic reader values these transcendental moments in direct proportion to their mutability; they live by the dictum that, “a perception, a memory, a supposition, is enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others”. This quote from The Planes by Gerard Murnane is the perfect slogan for this anti-representational manifesto.

This manifesto is not an argument against truth. This is not an argument against memory. This is not an attempt to deepen our already-acute historical amnesia. Go read history. Pass down traditions. Remember important facts. Believe in good science. Value good theory. Representations can be useful. Some of them might even be true. We are not against the keepers of wisdom, we are just worried about guilty readers who are unwittingly burying the experiential body under a thick crust of representational netting. 

We are not seeking the abolition of knowledge. Nor are we denying the possibility or utility of representations. We are simply memorialising that part of a text which can only be viewed; that vital thing in a text that exists in excess of any representational relation it might have to the world around it.  We are valorising the reciprocal flow between our bodily flesh and the flesh of the book. We are reminding the reading public of something we feel we are losing; the event of the written word, the gustation of the written word, the nourishment of the written word. With the rise of AI, language is increasingly reduced to a mere medium for the transmission of information, and we are forgetting its primordial scene; the meeting, through symbols, with the intimacy of another being. Writing can be information, but it is not only information. We must remember that it is also this thing I do where I try to send the richness in me into the richness in you. Language as gift. Writing as a reaching. Reading as a welcoming of the other, rather than the consumption of digestible parcels of information. Reading as an encounter, through the distance of the text, with a feeling, moving, foreign friend. When we treat language as representational information, we reduce it to something that can be totalised and assimilated into the self and its view of the world. The text is dissolved into the subject’s representational account of the world, and so there is no room for the Other—there is no room for their strangeness, there is no room for their affect, there is no room for their dance.

 Speaking less philosophically, we are commending the stories that plug nicely into our sockets. We are adventurers in the field of words. We are cosmic cowgirls who ride books like horses, who read books in search of crystals of fugitive clarity, who read books as if we were going to a gallery; walking through, taking it all in, walking out, going back home and feeling changed in ways that are wholly imprecise. Then we dive into the next thing; a plate, a social encounter, a park, lamplight, the wind—you see, a book is a thing among things; it is something to do, it is a place to go, it is something to see. Above all else, it is something to eat.

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