“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?
“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.
“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.
“A line of flight neither to a new political-cultural alterity nor to a new form of political organization but instead to a radically new plane of consistency – to a new singularity and disaggregation of life’s potentials for assemblage and creation. This line of flight would be a movement of internal desertion, of an irreducibility to the bourgeois man and his heaven, of a total absence from State-Capital: indifferent to its values, ignorant of its provocations, and unresponsive to its stimuli. Autonomy! Desertion! Deserting family; deserting school; deserting the office, the army, the duty, the responsibility, the debt; deserting men, women, and citizen; deserting everything that holds us entrapped, enslaved, and entranced.” From High Mountains, “Becoming-Autonomy,” markdyal.com
“To flee, but in fleeing to seek a weapon.” Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 102.
“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 