“Make your loves into war-machines, and create your wars as love-machines.” Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 138 (translation modified).
“How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught behind. But ’tis enough.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick, pg. 167.
“What begins with the State or the apparatus of capture is a general semiology that overcodes the primitive semiotic systems. Instead of traits of expression that follow a machinic phylum and wed it in a distribution of singularities, the State constitutes a form of expression that subjugates the phylum: the phylum or matter is no longer anything more than an equalized, homogenized, compared content, while expression becomes a form of resonance or appropriation. Apparatus of capture—the semiological operation par excellence.” Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 444-445.
“The body conceived of as a machinic assemblage becomes a body that is multiple. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies.
But, bodies tend to desire their own order and organisation: they make their own movements toward stratification and limitation, and toward the reassuring constancy it provides. I know who I am. I am a female, student, non-smoker. Stratification is the way in which bodies actively and strategically put themselves together in order to have a political social voice and to say “I”. A body becomes a subject (selfsame) in order to interact successfully in the social world. Languages, institutions and systems of thought all demand it, and bodies rarely fail to accede.” Peta Malins, Machinic Assemblages
“The nomad is on the contrary he who does not move.” Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 381.
“There is a fundamental difference between State history and minoritarian becomings: whereas the State continually adds developments to its past – both in writing and through territorial conquest – a minoritarian becoming subtracts the codifications of its past in order to maximize the potential to take history in other directions. In other words, the narratives of State history and the actions informed by that history retrace and reinforce the causal chains that produce and/or consolidate State rule – this is the one sense in which history is always written by the victor. By contrast, minoritarian becomings strip away (decode) the actual determinations of the past, and restore to the present its virtual potential to become-otherwise in the future.” Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 136-137.
“Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of “probe-heads”; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. Probe-heads dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favor of veritable rhizomes, and steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or creative flight.” Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 190-1.
“Speech-acts don’t establish or share or communicate a truth-relation to the world, but establish or transform the sense of what must or can be said about the world.” Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 79.
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Translator’s Foreword, xii.
Derelict Space 