The line going from Marx's Manuscripts (and concepts such as abstract work, alienation, the triumph of movement over immobility) to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (and concepts such as desiring machines and schizo limits) always intrigued me. If we understand what there is in terms of what is being produced (at work, en-ergo, energeia), there could be units and assemblages of producing machines that divide what there is in small, coordinated and yet independent bits. Marx believes abstract work is somehow the route to the emancipation of the proletarian that is forced into working with machines and like them. The machinic transformation is what produces abstract work and the proletarian class. The idea of desiring machines producing an immanent excess mimics the producing couplings of producing units. Marx holds that machines are communal, they bring a lot of people together in a producing assemblage. Because of that, they are part of the emancipation that capitalism has in store for proletarians after their appropriate upheaval. Their emancipation is also the emancipation of the machines they work. They get out of the boss's hands. They become free of their chains - nothing transcendent determine what they produce. Their production becomes immanent - as in fact it has always been. They are made to work for a transcendent goal, but they harbor desire within them; not lack, just something at work. Freed automatons, desiring machines. (Desiring machines are workers, work like proletarians and with proletarians - they expand humanity just in the way inhumanists believe norm-driven devices do. In the limit, desiring machines have the speed of the schizo; finally free they just produce, they are like bodies without organs.)
I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
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