Flow and code are not complete. When thinking about language, it’s easy to see code as just being a way to understand flow and to make it understood. However, this construction is missing one element: the interpreter or, in another sense, the destination. In the case of language, the presence of the interpreter is assumed. This is what has allowed the destination of flow to remain unexplored for so long. That said, this is an essential element of flow and one that I want to model using the notion of car traffic.
The notion of flow and code as presented by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus is about a substance being made into something recognizable by its object, endpoint, and/or destination. The act or process of “flowing” is less useful for them than the existence of “a flow”, which can be seen in the way that they abandon the need to give a fairly concrete sketch of desiring-machines and the like. Due to this, and to explicit arguments they make, it’s easy to go from Anti-Oedipus to believing that flow-as-flowing is like water and code is like a pipe taking it straight from A to B. Without guessing whether or not D&G would agree with that extrapolation, I will say this: it is wrong. If flow is water, code is the rocky mountainside with its grooves and crannies and flat sweeps.
But I said that I wanted to use cars and traffic. The most immediate reason is, of course, that I live in a time and place where I drive very frequently, so I’m observing (and being in) traffic quite a lot. For my argument, though, the main benefit of traffic as a model is that it’s easy to understand how each vehicle is independent and makes its own decisions in a system of freedom and restriction. Choice has basically been boiled out of D&G’s work but it is a necessary component of flow. If we feel that “choice” is too human-centric, too sentience-centric, we can call it “inclination” instead. The point is that each “flowcule” — for traffic, this is the vehicle — has its own inclination which directs it along its route. We may be able to identify “choice/inclination” with “destination/object” but they might not be the same; regardless, they are at least related, and that’s enough to move forward with for now.
In general, I am going to stay away from D&G terms in favor of my own (with the exception of “flow”). The reason is that, being honest, I can’t assume that I’ve fully grasped their argument, so I don’t want to declare my X is the same as their X. For a reader of D&G, I hope it will be fairly obvious where I think there are related concepts.
To begin with we have the land, which I am going to call “terrain” as often as I can remember. Let’s imagine this terrain as having no human-made features of any kind on it: no buildings, no roads, not even footpaths. We’re going to put everything back but we need to build in stages. We begin with the terrain and the flowcule. For D&G and in network theory, flows have to start from a source, but we won’t need that now. The flowcule is an object that exists on the terrain and has the ability to decide where it wants to go and the ability to move itself by flowing, which is to say gradual movement across the terrain. In this world, there is nowhere to go: the terrain is still blank. To help this flowcule occupy itself, let’s place a number of sites of interest on the terrain. We can call these “facilities”. These are the possible destinations and sources of flowcules. Now that we have these, we can have motion.
Motion, yes, but not necessarily untroubled motion. While the terrain is blank (having no human-made features) it is not flat, which is to say that it does have natural features. If our flowcule Dodger wants to go to Facility F, a river might be in the way, or hills might make the direct route to Facility F undesirable. Let’s say Dodger comes upon the hills and doesn’t know how best to proceed, then it sees another flowcule called Tracker taking a different route which seems easier. Dodger follows Tracker, finds the route is better, and decides to use that route in the future. This is the beginning of a “system” that does at least one thing: conveys flowcules to Facility F. This isn’t the only system which could take one to Facility F, we could think up millions of others, and this fact should also be kept in mind. At base, though, a system is a means of conveying flows.
Now, rather than slowly building out this model, let’s just bring in modern civilization with its American-pioneered car culture. This is, I hope it isn’t too difficult to see, an incredibly complex version of the Facility F system. Rather than going to just one facility, this system goes to thousands of different facilities and it carries many more flowcules through it. To return to D&G’s notion of code for a moment, we can see that “conveyance” doesn’t only mean motion, it also includes concepts we can understand as encoding and decoding. Consider a hospital with an emergency entrance for ambulances only: for a flowcule to make a valid entry, it must be encoded as an ambulance, generally through being built to ambulance specifications, being painted in appropriate colors, carrying medical staff, and so on.
We should then ask the next question: what is this system made up of? Obviously, the traffic system includes paved roads themselves, as well as bridges, tunnels, country roads, etc. It also includes the road markings and signs, not only general signs such as for speed limits but also specific signs such as those pointing out potential destinations. Another obvious part of the system is the existence & actions of traffic police. We can see all of these things as we drive to the store or wherever our destination may be.
There are also unseen aspects of the system. The law is probably the most obvious as we know that it provides the framework for the signs and the markings and the actions of the police. There are also customs, such as the problematic American custom of going five miles over the posted speed limit. Another aspect is the very manufacture of cars: laws dictate what a car is required in order to be legal (or valid) in the system, and at the same time, the properties of cars dictate how the system will be set up. For example, one of the reasons that asphalt roads are almost everywhere is that they are well-suited for the vehicles that we currently use.
It’s possible to come up with more actual elements of the traffic system than what we have, but I think that this gives us a reasonably complete view of the system. From here, we can break down generic elements that make up any system, and there are three: currents, bounding forces, and passages. Currents can be thought of as sub-flows or tendencies within flows, dictated primarily by the inclinations (or choices) of the flowcules. In vehicle traffic, we might see this when a major sporting match is happening in a city. Vehicles using the main road but not going to the match will have a difficult time getting away from the mass of vehicles which are going to the match — in other words, the non-sport vehicle is caught in a current. Maybe, at a critical moment, it will be impossible for the non-sport vehicle to escape the current, forcing them to alter their original route. Driving customs can also be thought of as currents because pressure to conform comes largely through the behavior of other flowcules rather than bounding forces, as we will talk about next.
Bounding forces are probably the simplest element type to understand: they push the flowcules to avoid certain areas or acts. Signs, roadways, and barriers are all bounding forces. The barrier makes sense immediately because most vehicles can’t go through them. Roadways may seem like their main purpose is to tell flowcules where to go, but in the context of a terrain and system, it serves primarily to divide the terrain into places valid for travel and places invalid for travel; you’re not supposed to drive on the median, for example. Signs don’t alter the terrain in the way that roads do but they perform a similar task: they tell the vehicle what it is valid to do and what it is invalid to do, and other things besides. We’ll return to the action of bounding forces shortly.
The final element type is the passage, or the bridge. Passages provide a conditional way to travel through, over, or past an otherwise invalid area. A bridge over a river is the simple example — a vehicle built for travel in the road system will likely not work right if it goes into the river — but bridges can go over other roads as well, allowing for travel in new directions. What’s important about the passage is that it permits what would otherwise be forbidden. Bridges, tunnels, flyovers, those little U-turn lanes that only cops are supposed to use, all of these can be considered passages.
In the thought of D&G, flow is unconscious and it unconsciously takes on its encoding. In terms of the traffic system, each flowcule has its own inclination and chooses (more-or-less) how it will traverse the system. The fact of inclination isn’t incidental to the system, though, it is central. Why is this? Well, think about driving down a road and on either side, left and right, there is unmarked terrain. As far as the system is concerned, that area is invalid. But what prevents the vehicle, the car, from going off the road? In the immediate, there is nothing stopping a vehicle from traveling into an invalid area: the road, while being a bounding force, doesn’t physically stop a vehicle from leaving it. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases, the vehicles (flowcules) do travel the system as intended, staying in the valid areas.
Two phenomena can help us understand why flowcules use the system rather than ignoring it: certitude and enforcement. Certitude is the quote-unquote “confidence” that a flowcule has in a system’s ability to get it where it is inclined to go. Enforcement is action by the system to force flowcules to stay within the system. Both are needed for a valid, active system: a system which inspires no certitude will be unused, while a system with no enforcement is trivial.
Here’s a dumb example from my own life. Years ago, my friend and I were traveling by car at night. We came to a fork in the road. I was driving and I took the fork one way, then my friend told me that we should have taken the other way. My reaction was to swing the car around, drive briefly over the grassy median, and get on the right road. I think we can adequately analyze this with certitude and enforcement. In the case of certitude, this is simple. After first taking the fork, the flowcule has low or no certitude that the system would take it to its preferred destination, so it decided to travel over an invalid area. However, this choice or outcome may have been impossible if more enforcement had been present. If a wall had surrounded that invalid area, the flowcule couldn’t have entered. If a police officer had been present, the threat of immediate punishment may have better enforced system rules. The fact that many cars are made to run on paved roads such that some easily break down off-road can also be considered a kind of enforcement. Moreover, I hope it’s clear from this that breaking out of the system does not invalidate the system, nor does it act as a permanent rejection of the system. Systems are used for a purpose. When they are not useful, they are set down until they are useful again.
My major goal with this piece is to put inclination (choice) at the center of the understanding of flows and codes, the latter of which I’m putting within the category of systems. Rather than seeing flows as entirely unconscious, my hope is to construct a model which can explain conscious, unconscious, and mixed-consciousness flows. The next step in this project is, I believe, to link these ideas of traffic flow more directly to D&G’s concepts of flow and code, especially in relation to the body-without-organs, and I hope to write on this subject in the near future.
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