This synthesis is a long time coming. The whole of pneuminous accretive theory thus far is born of Husserlian/Heideggerian phenomenology, the later Wittgenstein and chaos magic. I can hardly have failed to be aware of the pathway opened up to occult thought by D&G, very specifically through the CCRU. Though this doesn’t seem to do D&G justice, it is possible to read TP as if  they actually allow the possibility of sorcery. Philosophy doesn’t really like sorcery, philosophy doesn’t really want to deal with it. This is understandable, magickal effects are easy prey for scepticism. If you want to create systems that give solid epistemological results then magick is not going to help.

Like sorcery itself D&G seem to hover on precisely the agnostic disjunctive border. It is perfectly possible to read the sorcerous references in TP as just analogy for how things function (capital, assemblages in general)  whilst accepting a broad albeit Spinozist materialist kind of ontology. It is also possible to read it as if any ontology therein is utterly open the actuality of magick. Such a reading would mean assemblages as crossing different strata would not just be crossing over layers of materiality, it would have to include connecting lines that crossed time, that crossed worlds. A synchronicity as assemblage.

The influence of Castaneda on TP does not seem to be readily understood. Maybe the ridicule that Castaneda’s works received have brought about an airbrushing. Brent Adkins’ guide to TP contains not one index reference to Castaneda and yet if you have read Castaneda it is startlingly obvious that TP draws on it massively. Castaneda is certainly mentioned overtly but the line of flight is mentioned many times before it is made clearer that this too seems drawn from there. In Castaneda’s system, luminous fibres extend from the egg shaped energy blob of humans. This world is carefully described to not be thought of as luminous eggs wandering round in the same kind of space-time as we normally experience things. The fibres extend not simply in space but in directions we cannot conceive. They are lines of flight connecting things in a very real sense by contagion. The egg is a theme that peppers D&G which may not be drawn from the luminous egg yet certainly they were aware of this resonance. The key term assemblage itself may be taken from the Castaneda’s term assemblage point -the point of light in the luminous fibres that determines what reality we will experience. It may be that they do indeed just appropriate the ideas to deterritorialize them but equally maybe the usage of such material is there to hint at the extreme possibilities available in becoming.

In the pneuminous accretive theory I have been developing over the past 8 or so years we say that if such phenomena obtain and we bracket off magickal objectivity (this colour, smell really means such and such etc) then we are left with conceptuality being formed of a more active principle which is, under certain circumstances capable of altering what looks like solidity. This active principle we call the pneuma; it gives conceptuality the nature of a substance in the sense that it can interact with what we take to be the regular solidity of the world. All concepts are what we call accretions of pneuma: concepts stuck to concepts stuck to concepts: a multiplicity. Each accretion is formed around a signifier which enables its designation to function both in a regular sense and a magickal sense. Here we see the line of flight in action. When I think of something I am connected to it through such a pneuminous line. The thought is the accretion. They are not two separate things.

In considering D&G then we need to emphasise the sorcerous aspect by basically saying ‘if we treat the work as it is ontologically open to the possibility of magick then how does it account for it?’ Furthermore can we translate the accretive theory into language of D&G to productive effect?

I cannot make detailed progress with this today but I do note that there is clearly something to be worked on with the accretion, the abstract machine and the assemblage. The accretive theory was partly formed as it answers the problem of designation by the pneuminous connecting line: this really means this and it does it like this. It recognises the molar stasis of things. The accretion is the manifestation of this stability, it often appears in an archetypal form, it subsumes its incoherent edges of possibility until reluctantly a new image overtakes it -think of how TVs have changed. A television is a part of a machinic assemblage. An accretion is pure concept, it is the shiny surface and what it does. To many it has the incoherent edge of technology: the necessity that technology runs it yet a general blank as to how it does so. The acknowledgement connects even the most naive TV viewer to the technological axis yet the television runs along so many others also: entertainment, status, sexual, favourite shows and so on. What seems to be happening (as I work this through) is that the assemblage notion can be seen to run within the pneuminous. The big difference I am feeling is that there is a kind of comfort with materiality in D&G that accretive theory feels the need to bracket off. But if there is materiality then there is no sorcery (?). This is why the analogy reading comes in. Sometimes the materiality is palpable in TP.

I think the key to exploring this is in to tease out how the same connections exist in accretive theory as do in the materiality of assemblages, except in accretive theory the whole thing must be continually held in the space of vector-accretion, every machinic component must be of this nature.

Does it make sense to call the vector-accretion dyad an assemblage? There is indeed a question.