#guatarri

Curiously, in acquiring more and more life, machines demand in return more and more abstract human vitality: and this has occurred throughout their evolutionary development. Computers, expert systems and artificial intelligence add as much to thought as they subtract from thinking. They relieve thought of inert schemas. The forms of thought assisted by computer are mutant, relating to other musics, other Universes of reference. It is, then, impossible to deny the participation of human thought in the essence of machinism. But up to what point can this thought still be described as human? Doesn't technico-scientific thought fall within the province of a certain type of mental and semiotic machinism?

Do Caos ao Cubo

In a conversation with Foucault, Deleuze talks about the relationship between theory and practice as a fragmented relationship. Neither theory nor practice must totally embrace, explain, apply or be the cause of the other. You can never apply a theory to a practice but, this also goes for the other way around, you can never glorify practice and make it embrace theory, or be the origin of theory. There can never be resemblance between theory and practice, they are both practices but not of the same sort. According to Deleuze, a theory always, sooner or later, runs into a wall. To pierce a hole in that wall, theory needs a practice. In relation to this it could be proposed that both the concept (or science and theory) and the practice (or the empirical data) need to experiment together so as to awaken something within each other, and bring forward something yet not known. A good way of putting it might be how Foucault describes it in the foreword of Anti-Oedipus (1984): 'Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.'