“Words are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions. Persuasions. Orders. No control machine so far devised can operate without words, because only words create the subtleties and ambiguities needed to manufacture the opposition and acquiescence, without which, there is no control.” William Burroughs, “The Limits of Control,” Schizo-Culture: The Book, 38.
“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 dictatorship of the herd ensures that you only experience knowledge, violence, and human potentialities for creation from the perspective of politicians, merchants, and priests; and rightly so: after all, imagine what might you know, will, or create without their shepherding!
“The pit bull with the studded choke chain still barks at the wolves and coyotes in the hills, just like Margery’s Labrador retriever. From the perspective of the wolf or coyote, the pit bull barking ferociously from the safety of his master’s fence or measure of chain is more pathetic than the Labrador that just runs and hides: at least the Lab knows that it is prey. But in demonstrating menace or retreating in shame, the Lab and the pit bull still have far more in common than either does with the wild canine. Science might say that they’re the all the same species but this ignores the violence of the forces used to separate the dog from what it could potentially become. Organs, so to speak, cannot function without first being organized. As a result of such organization, dogs only develop to the mental state of a 10 to 30 day old wolf puppy. This means that mentally dogs never become autonomous, which allows them to be held accountable for their obedience, or lack there of.” Dave Stimpson
“The Southerner has retained and fostered – in a certain way reinstated – the medieval estimate as to the value of life. In the opinion of those ages it was but lightly esteemed; it was not a supreme good for which almost all else was to be sacrificed, but something to be taken in hand and put in risk in the pursuit of manly ideals. Modernism has worked to intensify the passion for existence until those who are under its dominion cannot well conceive how a man – except for some supreme duty to which he is pledged by altruistic motives – can give up his own life or take that of his neighbor.” Nathaniel Shaler, North American Review, 1890.
Derelict Space 