“It was over. Only later would all of this take on concrete meaning.”(73) Despite my complete exasperation I couldn’t help but laugh on reading this at the end of The Geology of Morals. While I appreciate their pockets of lighthearted self-mockery and good humor I can’t help but ask, instead of ‘who does the Earth think it is,’ who do they think they are? It strikes me as presumptuous of Deleuze and Guattari to assume that a reader would voluntarily struggle through an entire chapter just to read those lines, even if the authors are acquiescent towards their convoluted technique. I found myself wondering frequently about the audience for such a text, as it must necessarily be a very elite and determined crowd. How effectively radical is a text like this if it is so inaccessible, and how much thought-provoking change can it effect?

Nonetheless, I was interested by their decision to couch the discussion of meaning, morals, and (to a degree) linguistics in an allegory of geology and science. Perhaps they chose to do so in order to assert that morality/everything is, literally, 'grounded?'  How does their use of allegory affect their methodology, other than being poetic?

 I am attracted to their position on Darwin's contributions to science as "nomadic contributions with shifting boundaries"(48), a science of 'multiplicities.' According to D and G, by substituting 'populations' for 'types' and 'rates' for 'degrees,' Darwin established a) the 'porous boundaries' between species and b) that geographical areas 'harbour chaos' in temporary equilibriums. (Tangentially, the idea that geographical areas create temporary equilibriums reminded me strongly of Wiener and his cybernetic theory. Both tackle pattern vs. chaos, where life is 'pattern' or code, but the random element isn't nearly as threatening to D and G. In fact, it is essential for perpetuation, and life rests on this very temporality (as language and code rely on the overproduction of code), so chaos and randomness don't seem entropic, rather, a necessary corollary in the continuation of pattern. What is at stake in this difference? Their fear of ideological rigidity?)

Back to porous boundaries and temporary equilibriums: these two points are essential because they move discourse into a field in which nothing is fixed and everything is relational. How is this related to morality? I think they are arguing for a multiplicity of morality, and within that, a porous and nomadic relationship between codes. Morality exists, but it is a 'population' rather than a 'type;' it isn't fixed. There is 'bad' and 'good,' but no Bad or Good. 

This fear of structure and rigidity extends to "Postulates of Linguistics," in which they seemingly lament the necessary nature of language as "made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience."(76) Since language is unique in its transmission from 2nd to 3rd party, it is not about communication of sign as information, but about the order-word, and is thus redundant; a kind of prison of structure/expression, because we are instructed what to think before we can think it, solidifying, for example, the role of subjectivity in communication and relational communication.