smooth muscles are involuntary muscles (arteries, digestion, sexual organs) striated muscles are voluntary muscles (skeletal mostly)
“Earlier we encountered a distinction between “free action” in smooth space and “work” in striated space”(490). In this paragraph from the section “the Physical Model,” D&G complicate the apparent dichotomy between the nexus of smooth space/nomadism/war-machine and that of striated space/sedentary/state-apparatus. They focus on the emergence, during the 19th Century, of “work” as a primary category in both physics and (proto)sociology and its imposition on virtually all realms of human activity.
The sociology that they refer to is, of course, primarily the writings of Marx. “Abstract labor” according Deleuze and Guattari, became the socioeconomic equivalent to the physicoscientific concept of Work (as in ergs or foot-pounds). Their implicit claim is that even as Marx's political writings may have functioned to incite workers to organize, his economic writings were descriptive of the nineteenth century move to (fully) striate the realm of productive activity. Thus, in some regards, a great deal of Marx's works (certainly much of Capital) amounts, for Deleuze and Guattari, to tracing the trajectory of the emergence of work-as-such.
“The wage regime had its correlate in a mechanics of force”(490). Regardless of anachronistic readings of Marx, it was surely in the “Scientific-Management” writings of Fredrick Winslow Taylor that the physics of human efficiency came into its own. What we see in Taylorism is the conscription of the body into the perspectival/Euclidean space of metrics for the purpose of profit maximization.
“We now understand why the Work-model, in both it's physical and social aspects, is a fundamental part of the State apparatus,” they go on, claiming that the work-activities of public-works commissioned by the State, as much as the ideological affect of such architectures (I'm thinking here of something akin to Anderson's “imagined communities,” figured in monumental architecture rather than in the novel or newspaper form), forged the subjectivity of 19th Century “manhood”1.
“...(T)he State apparatus, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found a new way of appropriating the war machine: by subjugating it before all else to the Work-model of the construction site and the factory, which were in the process of developing elsewhere, but more slowly” (490). It is in this sense that D&G begin to re-complicate the relationship between the smooth and the striated; the striation of the war machine moves it from the sign of the nomos to that of logos. This “appropriation” was rendered especially effective at the hands of the bourgeois/democratic State apparatus, which, notably, sought to institute “standing armies” (even the phrase speaks to their sedentary character) primarily as a defense against internal rebellion/insurgency2.
“The physicosocial model of Work pertains to the State apparatus, it is one of its inventions, and for two reasons. First, because labor appears only with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labor that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labor (in a strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labor” (490).
So we're back to Marx here in some critically important ways. D & G are not claiming that effort isn't expended in the meeting of needs within nomadic nor subsistence societies, but, rather, that only with the emergence of the nation-state (and it's tributary taxes and army conscriptions) does excess labor begin to be conceived in abstract, quantifiable (striated) terms. The state-apparatus, however, must generally appropriate such surplus labor by employing the threat of (and monopoly on) violence (hence the conquest of the war machine). The great revelation of capitalism was that there's an easier way to appropriate those labor surpluses; through the imposition, and naturalization, of Work. That is to say that even as the State “invented” alienated labor in its abstract/striated form, the capitalist was already busy re-smoothing work-activity such that today Work appears to the worker as so ubiquitous that it has ceased to be quantifiable.
“How would the worker be able to affront the product of his work as an alien being if he did not alienate himself in the act of production itself? The worker feels himself to be a stranger. He is at home when he is not working and when he works he is not at home…”
(‘Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts’ 1844)
The famous quotation is useful here not only for it's spacio-temporal metaphors, but also because it sums up nicely the sense in Marx (indeed, the sense throughout modernity) that there is an outside to work. That distinction, of inside/outside, of work/home, has been obliterated in post-modernity precisely by the completion of the capitalist project to impose the logic of Work onto all areas of activity. Skipping forward a page, D&G remark that “modern public works have a different status from that of large-scale imperial works” (491). Imagine here not only the ways in which, say, the Hoover dam is the product of a striation never conceivable in ancient Rome, but also (maybe for our purposes more importantly) the ways in which the fiber-optic networks that form the sub-structure of the internet constitute a public work (as a publicly funded project of the military-industrial complex) that is striated to an unfathomable degree.
“How could one possibly distinguish between the time necessary for reproduction and “extorted” time, when they are no longer separated in time?” (491). The time necessary for reproduction includes, following Althusseur, the reproduction of the means of production, which is to say, not only the child, but the education/indoctrination/entertainment which Althusseur attributed to ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISAs). In any case, here can be seen most clearly the prophetic/predictive capacity of D&G to describe conditions that have only recently–some twenty plus years after the publication of Mil Plateaus– become fully apparent (the utopianism of “working from home” has given way to the fatigue of a population that is at work “24/7”).
twitter
flickr
facebook
Equipment