Bradley McLean
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Monograph in Progress
The Rise of the Christ Machines: A Deleuze-Guattari Analysis of the Emergence of Early Christianity |
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'Machines’ and ‘machinic processes’ entail the flow of non-exchangeable and non-substitutable a-signifying singularities -- material, libidinal and semiotic -- that act on structures from the outside. Such ’machines’ are always binary, at least, with one machine being coupled with another to produce, or draw in, a flow.
In this book I argue that machines, not structures, are the key to understanding the emergence of early Christianity in the first three centuries: ‘Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections’ (D&G 1983: 8). Through machines, semiotic flows poured from one structure to another, allowing structures to communicate with one another, to adapt to one another, and to transformation and even rupture over time. Through the machines of the Hellenistic world, discursive structures and non-discursive structures reinforced one another in the state apparatus. But a plethora of other machines were part of this mix of social production including Christ groups and synagogues. All is all, this communication between machines was nothing more than 'desiring production itself under determinate conditions” (D&G 1983: 29). The structural transformations of early Christianity over the first three centuries were produced by machinic processes that were exterior to such structures. For machines constitute the silent beginnings of all structured entities, including institutional Christianity. The structuration of Christ groups was a secondary effect of the ‘differenciation’ of non-structural, machines, and subordinate to them. |
Machinic processes
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