Escape Routes

 1

Deleuze wants us to be nomads. He wants us to traverse all the planes of existence, from the body all the way to the world-historical all the way back to the body. He wants us to not only traverse outside of our bodies, but within them as well. He wants us to reach our limit, stretch ourselves, bring ourselves to our limits, become fluid. Because that’s what Deleuze’s philosophy is all about; constant movement, constant traversal, constant, erratic, schizophrenic evolution of the self and how we view it so that we may go beyond it.

For Deleuze, we are ourselves machines, machines composed of other machines which themselves are composed of machines. Machines interrupt processes. But what does that mean? Do they interrupt production? It interrupts their flows, draws from them and directs them elsewhere, connecting them to a variety of other machines. 

You are a machine; you are a machine of machines, each machine channelling certain parts of your identity; race machines, gender machines, sexuality machines; in a word, identity machines. 

2

“Morals,” “Ethics.” I spit on such notions! There are no morals under capitalism, nor are there ethics. The moral exists to suppress the good, and the ethical exists to suppress what empowers us. Spinoza can eat my shit! There is nothing in this world that could ever be called moral. The good of the world today? Money! The bad? Whatever stops the money from flowing! The only good is the force that leads to the absolute destruction of all that presently exists. Anything else is pigshit!

3

Writing - what horseshit! I sit here, clacking away at my keyboard, spouting nonsense that has been said a million different ways by a million different people. I hate writing. I hate it! Yet here I am, writing, like I can’t do anything else, a slave to the written word, a slave to thought.

4

There’s nothing we need to do except keep going! Never stop! Bring everything to its limit, stretch it, cut it, sew it back together, spit on it, beat it, until it is a pulp of mental blood and bruised flesh! Take everything to its limit! Music, art, poetry, technology, drugs, love, food, it all must become what it really is, and even more than that! Food must become drugs, literature must become music, and it all must become everything! Never stop until we have broken through!

5

Irony culture exists to neutralize radicalism; radicality becomes a joke, a posturing method, a mask, something that is used to relate to the surrounding world, which goes against the nature of true radicalism, which is the negation of said world. In this way, irony culture is a method of recuperation, and seems to mostly impact the young. One can tell when any particular group or individual has been possessed by the spirit of irony; politics become identity, not a conviction. It enters into the realm of crude representation (the political compass) which, upon further inspection, is a completely meaningless model that represents not a particular thing, but the fact that nothing is there in the first place.

6

Capitalist surrealism is stumbling across an Onion article and not realizing it is satire.

7

Gender is a defensive field that is constructed in order to ward off the realization of the natural fluidity of identity. This must be warded off so that individuals can be confined to small zones of containment that are easily exploitable by capital.

8

Queerness crosses the limit of the body (sex) and enters into the mind (sexuality), and from there enters the social-political (relationships and reproduction) which loops back around to the body (sex). This occurs because these fields are inherently connected, and that is what allows this to occur.

9

You never are queer; you are always becoming queer. You are always within queerness, in between this and that, man and woman, sexual and asexual, “gay” and “straight.” You stretch it and mold it, you take from it and give back to it. Queerness is the realm of excess, the realm of production which is itself consumption, it is a surface upon which your non-existence is inscribed. The queer is what wages an active internal war against itself (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, 150).

10

Queerness is a subversive tendency that exists within and arises out of straightness, a tendency that begins with the material conditions of straightness, the hegemony that it constructs; it is its negation. Queerness is what disrupts identity.

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