“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.
“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.
1. The State is an ecosystem designed to promote and sustain a very specific form of life.
2. One kills much more than a bureaucratic apparatus when one destroys the State.
“Art is the only thing that resists death. There is a fundamental affinity between the work of art & the act of resistance. A creator is not a being that works for pleasure, a creator does nothing but that which he has to do; ‘the necessity’.” Gilles Deleuze, What is the Creative Act?
“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
Because expression gives form to content.
Roots are certain/
So say the bourgeois profiteers as they ask you to buy into The Revolt.
They sell you roots to keep you from revolting.
After all, your money has no value amongst men who can’t be bought,
Or those who know that you can’t buy nobility.
/Sky is empty.
So becomes the body,
Cut loose on the frontline, the battles raging within: sloughing off the roots that connect it to nothing but the status quo.
The roots that demand submission to certainties that are only true to men who are beneath you,
To men who would sicken at the thought of your battles.
Derelict Space 