u/oohoollow

So can I just ask, since Im uninformed, what is the overall tradition that Deleuze and Guattari are getting their theory of Strata from.

I'm asking because NIckLand connects their idea of Strata to another book by Benjamin Bratton called "The Stack". But acccording to Nick the Bratton guy who wrote that book didn't consider D&G to be an influence so I was just wondering if they were merely inspired by the same wider tradition or if they simply came to the conclusion independently. As for Nick, his theory seems to be that the idea of the Strata for both came to them from using a QWERTY keyboard which I mean okay but whatever.

And what the Stack is meant to explain, is essentially the phenomenon of Verticality, in our Horizontalist system. It analyzes how Society is not just organized as a web of horizontal States or companies in a market, but also into vertical layers, and these layers are like a Stack that one has to pass through in order to participate in the whole system.

So for example, Oil is like a Stratum or stack layer on top of which all industry is built, in order for everything that we have built industrially works, we need to have this basis of Oil, and that's what makes, for example, Iran so important because it controls the flow of oil which if it is halted, undermines the entire structure built on top of it. So rather than dealing with horizontal nodes in a network we have these semi indispensable nodes which are the Strata, and that condition the entire horizontal system as base or support, and these Strata often come in multiples, like for example Microchips are also an example of a Stratum, as in they are something that all computer technology depends upon as base or presupposition. So similar to Oil and Iran, Taiwan is an important semi indispensable node because it is the source of the best micro chip technology.

So here we can see how the Power of States, or sovereignty over land, is partially conditioned on their ability to control these semi indispensable nodes like Oil or microhips, which can't simply be rooted around but are the ground or basis for world wide systems and serve as platforms for the entire social field.

The Strata here are very mobile, and not at all rigid and indisputable, they can be replaced or exchanged for one another, and D&G say this as well, that the Strata constantly change places, there's no fixed order of the layers, where layer 1 necessarily is below 2 and below 3. These concentric, layered systems do form, but they are not immutable. And also there's not one single system of layers, but several. Like okay human beings are built on top of a genetic Stratum or stack, and then human beings themselves are like a layer on top of which the global economy is built but also the global economy can alter human genetics as well so there's no fixed order.

In addition to this, it feels like D&G combine the idea of Strata or stack with the idea of content and Expression that i don't seem to find as a factor in the Bratton book? The whole idea here ties to the factor of Isomorphism. For D&G inside of a Stratum, there are two poles, which are isomorphic with a third abstract machine element. does this all come from somewhere or what?

D&G say:

The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other: ....

They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding—or allowing the decoding of—the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations.

There is this idea that Capital is somehow a trend of deterritorialization that is Reterritoiralized by Police but this to me does not seem to be true at all.

What the "All powerful police" is, is nothing more than just division of labor. IT's like Durkheim says, the defining characteristic of modern society is the division of labor. Police is merely the way society specializes in social order, rather than everyone carrying around spears, everyone doing everything a society needs, there is organic specialization, this is just fundamentally and essentially Capitalistic. Capital is nothing but a division of labor that allows you to improve efficiency that is its essence. In that sense, police as a specialized sector is no different than baking as a specialized sector, or screw production or soap production as a specialized sector. It's simply more efficient to have one organ do the work of keeping people in check, just as it is more efficient to keep one organ that finds food.

So in A Thousand Plateaus D&G present the human Face as something to dismantle, since it's the ground or support for all the various social hierarchies, like gender or race. We could also classify looks in there with the extreme emphasis on looks that our modern society has, with lookism and ovverall incel discourse.

So let's say we're on board with dismantling the Face. But D&G also constantly say that it is by way of the Face or what they call Faciality traits, that the Face must be dismantled? So does anyone have any concrete ideas of what they mean by that?

They say: Only on your face and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds.

Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.

So this makes some sense to me conceptually, but trying to think of it as anythign concrete I struggle.

I understand intimately feeling opressed by your face, or other faces, but it's ultimately a unified thing. Like a good looking Face, there's not much to it, I don't see any traits that can be turned against the Face, i only see a kind of unified thing? I really don't know what they mean by this

honestly I hardly expect anyone to know the answer to this that is helpful but hey here goes nothing

This is an Anti Oedipus question, but why do Deleuze and Guattari spend so much time explaining the way that Savege/Primitive codes worked and to a lesser extent the way Despotic overcodes worked.

I've asked similar questions to this before but I just don't get it. I don't understand why spend so much time on something that is so far back in the past. What is the current day functional use for these models that explain the way society worked before but no longer does. I feel like there has to be some reason that I'm not seeing here