Van Dyke's Abstract Machine

The goal of the colonial project is to distribute the strata of State along a plane of consistency that assigns landscapes a function, a use, a purpose; however, by territorializing the spaces of the desert southwest to function as a border and as a resource bank, the colonial project creates the empty spaces of sublimity, the ruptures where aesthetic abstract machines, which function to deterritorialize, can emerge. The process of writing I describe in this essay is, like the painting process articulated by Stephen Zepke in Art as Abstract Machine, “first of all, an articulation of its finite and infinite dimensions, an art of creation that in its finite processes of construction absolutely deterritorializes the world (destratifies it Deleuze and Guttari will say) and expresses its destratified and infinite ‘plane of consistency’” (Zepke 118). The aesthetic is an abstract machine that is what Deleuze and Guttari call a “line of flight,” a process of deterritorialization, an emergent property that moves from one stratification to an infinite plane of consistency where one can, like Van Dyke says of an antelope on the plain, see in all directions. The State apparatus sees this movement as a flight to another stratified plane of consistency; the desert becomes “tamed” in its emptiness, a framed picture of empty sandstone mesas, with ancient ruins of a long-forgotten people. Such is the picture John Van Dyke surely had in mind when he wrote The Desert.
John Van Dyke may have proposed to fossilize the desert landscape into a gallery of beauty, but his nomadic project, the act of walking across the sands, belies this goal. The meshwork Van Dyke generated in his aesthetic, or to put it more exactly, the meshwork into which he was inserted was, in the early years of the twentieth century, a stratified landscape on the brink of deterritorialization, a process he sparked with the abstract machine of his writing aesthetic. Like the wasp and the orchid, Van Dyke and the desert are engaged in simultaneous processes of de-and re-territorialization, making up a network constituted by flows of energy and materials, ideas and language, that grow and flow towards possibility, adding elements and materials, periodically expanding and contracting over a landscape that always, already contains the traces of its stratifications and destratifications. As we shall see, with the dawn of the 21st century new materials, global in scope and human in their nomadism, will fly into the system, walking across the dehydrated sands to tell their own stories of savage beauty.

John Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances
Pictures: Borderhack, Defenders of Wildlife, Univ. of Arizona, Desert Survivors