Derelict Space

Tag: State

December 20, 2017

Uniting the Left and the Right

by markdyal

“When you feel yourselves aroused at your best by your wonderful ideal, do you not instinctively dream of holding a gun in your hands? Doesn’t any one of you feel himself to be a soldier in a battle that is approaching? Can you really be sure that your offspring will not one day condemn you for having raised them by ignoring, by scorning, the greatest of all aesthetics, that of frenzied battalions armed to the teeth? I am telling you that war, any war at all, is made with guns, and that our enemies are at the gates, that every kind of zeal is needed, that all forms of heroism compel us in these hours of immense psychological upheaval, in our desperate wait for war. We are all unsettled and maybe even fearful cowards. We have to convert the great hatred we have accrued into a great love, into great heroism. If rivers of blood run healthily through this dumbfounded, anemic world, we shall be the first Archangels of Health.” F.T. Marinetti, “Our Common Enemies”

January 12, 2015

The State & its Semiotics; A History of Obscurity

by ds1881

“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.

January 6, 2015

Veins & Veils

by ds1881

“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.

November 22, 2014

Dancing with Marinetti

by markdyal

If what you do does not cripple the State – by which I mean it’s power to control you – then it does harm to your potential for freedom. For the State has only two functions at this point: to create as many hands as possible to pass currency from one subject to another, and to protect the various systems that allow those transactions.

Anything you do beyond actualizing and maximizing currency flows is transgression. A slave will suggest that the State also profits from our transgressions and thus rationalize its passive enslavement – less to the State than his own cowardice, in this case. And while this is true, it is also true that very few slaves ever get a taste of freedom; for unlike raptors and wolves, a slave will do anything to avoid bloodshed. The slave, it seems, values possession too highly, and this keeps his blood dancing happily to his master’s beat.

Meanwhile the raptors and wolves dance unchained around the flames of their burning fetters singing, “blood has no value unless it is spilled.”

November 13, 2014

Superfluous (adj): the Man of the State

by markdyal

“There, where the State ends, only there begins the human being who is not superfluous; there begins the song of necessity, the unique and irreplaceable melody. There, where the State ends – look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the übermensch?” Zarathustra, “On the New Idol.”

October 9, 2014

One Step in the Long Road to Becoming-Docility

by ds1977

“Understanding and reason have a long history: they are instances which still make us obey when we no longer want to obey anyone. When we stop obeying God, the State, or our parents, reason appears and persuades us to continue being docile because it says to us: it is you who is giving the orders. Reason represents our slavery, and our subjection to it creates a real enslavement: I am superior because I am a rational being!” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 92 (translation modified).

September 27, 2014

Betrayal as a Radical Creative Act

by ds1881

“We betray the fixed powers that try to hold us back, the established powers of the earth. Fixed and established powers do not form an outside; they traverse our bodies, our relations, our worlds. The traitor therefore betrays her own realm, her own gender, her class, and her majority. To betray one’s own majority means to drop out of one’s own dominant normality. For it is difficult to be a traitor; it is to create. At the beginning of betrayal is the movement of disappearance, of becoming-nobody as a break of loyalty to the logic and to the terror of identity, representation and visibility. Betrayal as a creative act has to be imagined and actualised as a tendency of disappearance, as a movement that constantly has to be instituted, which again and again starts anew and thwarts the institutions, the structures, and the state apparatuses of representation.” Deleuze & Parnet, Dialogues, 30-33.