ABSTRACT
If I try to think about what is going on in my body right now, based only on
what I can feel, then I really have no idea what is happening. I have heard about
some of the things that go on in bodies, and I can make myself aware of my
breathing and my heartbeat, but from my own experience of my own body
I can’t say what it’s like in my liver today, or in my bloodstream. I learnt,
somewhere along the line, that I have a heart and a liver and that my blood
circulates – but they’re not things I would have been inferred just by sitting still
and thinking about it. My conscious thought is a very small part of what I am,
but somehow the part of me that consciously thinks is under the impression
that the body is there mainly for its benefit. My liver might be under a different
impression. So far as it is concerned, my body is the environment where it
thrives. Similarly at the molecular level, the various parts of my body are made
up of molecules from the food that I have taken in. Iron, calcium, hydrogen,
carbon and oxygen and so on, have been rearranged by the little machines that
do these things without my knowing much about it. I feel thirsty, or hungry,
so I eat and drink, and then the various tissues and membranes sort out what I
need and deal with it without troubling me with very much more information,
and without my needing to use my conscious will to make my body digest
better or in novel ways. From the ‘point of view’ of a molecule I am an
intensification of certain sorts of molecule, a densification of molecules that are
in my environment and in me; not that an individual molecule notices me as it
passes through. Richard Dawkins has suggested that species make sense best as
mechanisms that ensure the survival of genes (Dawkins, 1976) which is not
what we would infer directly from consulting our own feelings about why we
do things. At another scale: if I am in search of an intensification of humans,
This is an analysis of the forces necessary to make a town live. It is, at least at the
outset, uncontentious, translating into Deleuze and Guattari’s characteristic
vocabulary the key idea of Walter Christaller’s central place theory, which has had
a pervasive influence on the field of geography. Notice, though, that Deleuze and
Guattari might say much the same things about what makes an individual – a
schizoanalytic subject. Notice also that this town, which is always part of a
network, constitutes a power of the milieu, a power of the environment, the
Umwelt. If I am in the town, then it is my environment, but the town itself is
between other towns, which make its environment. Any ‘thing’ can be described
environment. Each species of animal lives in its own world, distinct from
the worlds of other creatures that have other mechanisms for sensing their
world and for surviving in it. The opening section of Uexküll’s book Mondes
animaux et monde humain [Animal Worlds and the Human World] is entitled
‘La tique et son milieu’ [‘The Tick and its Environment’] (Uexküll, 1965, 17)
and the page is dominated by an illustration of a swollen tick inflated to
many times life size. Deleuze and Guattari were fascinated by the simplicity
of its world.
