Smoothing machines and the constitution of society

I ask the reader to imagine society as a production of 'smoothing machines' Smoothing machines mark the surfaces of bodies, and in the social sense, t hey are markings of the body that indicate status, generally in terms of pu rity or perfection. The socius, Deleuze and Guattari write, is a coding mac hine, and codes smooth social relations of power. Elias Canetti, in his wor k on crowds, discovers an internal connection between smoothness, social po wer, and the body - for him the first aspect of power is the smoothness of the teeth, and he traces modern forms of social control and violence to eat ing and incorporation. In his darkest vision, 'everything is going smoothly ' comes to mean that everything is in our power, and power is equated with paranoia and the naked will to survive. Many contemporary disciplinary tech nologies take the form of smoothing the body, understood as 'fitting' the b ody to a model of subjectivity and a functional regime. Not all smoothing m achines facilitate social control, however. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest , many also generate lines of flight or escape. For every smoothing machine that forms a Subject and submits it to power, there are others that set it free.