“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).
“Nothing is more difficult than the struggles of minorities who want to remain minorities, who want to be recognized as such. Societies transform them into new powers, into His Majesty’s opposition(s) or into the gas house. It interprets them, that is, inscribes them. And so, it robs them of their own particular power … Nevertheless, what is at stake is not a matter of liberation as opposed to submission – it is a matter of line of flight, escape … an exit, outlet. The desire to evade interpretation is not a desire to be against interpretation, to negate it. To do so, after all, would be to continue to exist in its terms. The desire is rather to affirm an alternative which is simultaneously uninterpretable.” Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari & Robert Brinkley, What Is a Minor Literature?
“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.
“With its throttling, its stasis, its lesions, its neuroses, the capitalist state imposes its norms, establishes its models, imprints its features, assigns its roles, propagates its programs. Using every available access route into our organisms, it insinuates into the depths of our insides its roots of death. It usurps our organs, disrupts our vital functions, mutilates our pleasures, subjugates all lived experience to the control of its condemning judgments. It makes of each individual a cripple, cut off from his or her body, a stranger to his or her own desires.” Félix Guattari, Chaosophy; To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body, 207.
“Desire is revolutionary in its essence – desire, not left-wing holidays! Sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired.” Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 116.
“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
“What we’re interested in is how something works, functions – finding the machine. But the signifier’s still stuck in the question “What does it mean?” Indeed it’s this very question in a blocked form. But for us, the unconscious doesn’t mean anything, nor does language. Functionalism does rule, however, in the world of micro-multiplicities, micro-machines, desiring machines, molecular formations. On this level there isn’t this or that kind of machine, a linguistic machine, say, but linguistic elements along with other elements in all the machines. The unconscious is a micro-unconscious, it’s molecular, and schizo analysis is micro-analysis. The only question is how anything works, with its intensities, flows, processes, partial objects – none of which mean anything.” Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 21-22.
“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.
Derelict Space 