Production and Anti-production

G+D equate identity within the desiring-machine to production, and the inability of separating that machine's only purpose of production from the essence of that machine: "Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow connective synthesis also has another form: product/producing. Producing is always something "grafted onto" the production.... We cannot accept the idealist category of 'expression'" (AO 6). This lack of expression seems almost like a question of agency or will. There are no actions (or as G+D point out, no difference between inside/outside), but instead this constant direction and interruption of connected energy. We are left with these connections or patterns as identity itself, or identity, more specifically, is this constantly cycling state within these intertwined machines. What I take away from this is a machine only exists because it produces, for that is how we identify the machine.

What I am not sure of is how nonproductive or anti production fits into the picture (I assume G+D use this terminology from Marx). "The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs" (AO 8). The schizophrenic table is only described as being a table because it contains the remnants of a table, or a shell, and acts as an assemblage of different furniture parts. Would nonproductive here refer to the table's lack of flat surface to hold things (i.e., the schizophrenic table does a poor job of what we desire a table to do)? I assume this means the avatar of a table automatically assumes productive properties by "going about with its business" but does not assume the functionality or comforts we assume of a table. Thus, is that the anti productive aspect of the table? This ability to assume an identity through the shell of production, and not in fact live up to that identity, but instead continue on as something completely different?

I then took this anti production into account with the socius (the socius being the record of production) within this body without organs (BWO) so that anti productive process allowed for the appropriation of these productive forces. "The forms of social production, like those of desiring production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of anti-production coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius.... It falls back on [il se rabat sur] all production... thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause" (AO 10).

Initially, I viewed this socius, in collaboration with the anti-productive forces, as a negative/hostile device within the BWO. However, am I on the right track in thinking that this is exactly what allows the schizo subject to reject rigidly imposed subject determination? "The full BWO is produced as antiproduction to keep itself from having any sort of triangulation imposed on it" (AO 13). G+D give the schizo this "recording code" that allows the BWO to get outside of the "social code." And this is how we arrive at the anti-Oedipal table? The table without a mother, a father; the table that has been everything (the bricolage of spare parts). I get this last point, but I am not sure how we arrive at the "either,... or, ... or, ... or" through this nonproduction, other than it's ability to allow the subject to appropriate his/her/it's own memory via the socius.

As is noted by D+G, identity here is the ability to be constantly born and reborn here (Klossowski commenting on Nietzsche) "As a result, an identity is essentially fortuitous, and a series of individualities must be undergone by each of these oscillations, so that as a consequence the fortuitousness of this particular individuality will render all of them necessary” (AO 21). Identity is this oscillation through "series of individualities," or a production, but is antiproduction here only to claim this socius for use within production? A socius in this case seems so internal, and identity acts as if it were an expression.

The Rhizome Datastructure

For some reason when I kept reading the rhizome I kept thinking of CS datastructures. I always thought of Saussure as an influential datatype creator: signifier/signified (Sign) vs. key/value (Hashtable). G+D come across to attack this Structuralist thinking, where we must now feal with "collective assemblages of enunciation function direct within machinic assemblages" (ATP 7). Enunciation comes arcross as essential here, we must not confine ourselves to these classic datatypes, but must break out of this one to one correlation we are used to. Could one create the Rhizome datatype? Is this even possible?

CS datastructures are exactly what G+D argue against. The Chomskian tree (the ever revered binary tree), the pivot (the top node), the n+1 (the addition to the ONE node). Hashtables, dictionaries, trees, stacks- they are all the same in this case.

The rhizome must accommodate (ATP 21):
"Signs and nonsign states"- is that just allowing different object types (like a Java Vector), or the ability to allow non-objects?
"anti-genealogy"- No child nodes allowed, no hierarchy traversal
"n-1 dimensions"- I might need a better working definition of this, but it looks like recursion as we typically know it isn't allowed here.
"Not points and positions, but lines"- seems to count out vectors, and digital representation on the whole.
"Not a representation"- This seems possible.

Interesting:
http://capitalismandschizophrenia.org