deleuze and guattari:
(via eatsleepdraw)
Deleuze and Guattari’s utopian concept of becoming a Body Without Organs—either as an individual (in relation to his or her myriad personas) or as a populace—is becoming more and more of a possibility as social media rises in prominence, making all of the world and its people just a click away from one another. The ability to connect without the intermediary of a government or a corporation is itself revolutionary—as it allows groups to form organically, as opposed to hierarchically. The many are talking to the many. The false divisions between being the head of an organism and being its feet are being eradicated, as each one of us realizes that we each have a role to play. The lowly colon and fingernails are just as important as the celebrated biceps, or poetical eyes. It isn’t only a matter of needing one another to survive—it’s that we wouldn’t even exist in the first place if not as a network.
“A {Twitter stream} may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines… Every {Twitter stream} contain lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified attributed, as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.”
—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Page 9, in which I’ve substituted the words “Twitter stream” for “rhizome”.
I don’t believe in books.
I started to stop believing in books back in college. I knew the great tomes of Modernism had seen their time…David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon hit the ball so far out of the park that they put the genre of the mega book to bed and ushered in the era of hypertext and hyper meaning. Not only were books getting shorter and smaller they were also appearing in new (and renewed) formats: zines and blogs and audio podcasts. So many new formats that the question arises: do we need books at all? The Beats and the Beatles and the hippies and hip-hop beat architects had unearthed, cut and pasted together a new culture—why should we insist on telling its story using the exact thing we spent so much time taking apart? A book is a closed system. A private Facebook profile. Password protected. A walled garden stacked 10 deep at Barnes and Noble where you can’t leave a comment. A book is done. Finished. A pretend totality floating in a pretend moment in time. I thought I’d blogged myself free from all of that. Yet still I’m caught by it’s siren song—steeped in nostalgia and powerful memories of my mind being opened up by the beauty of neatly typed words in the warm summer light. I thought I could write a book as a rhizome—a laterally growing root like that of the ginger plant that allowed for multiple connection points—like A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. I believed the hype—that a book could be an assemblage of pieces instead of a reproduction of the world. In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari claimed that the book that followed was an assemblage instead of an attempt at recreating an image of the world. The text formed a circle, like that of ancient texts, in which the story did not end as much as return onto itself. As such it could be read in any order. It turned out to be a fake circle, however, as in the end it was still a book—mass produced on pages bound together beneath a flashy cover—but I allowed myself to fall for it anyway. I told myself that I could do what D&G did—I’d create a book in the shape of a circle—assuming this was the best form possible for my work: a book in which the awareness of its own failings was already built in. It seemed the only way—but a part of me refused to believe it. There had to be a better medium to tell the stories that I wanted to tell the WAY I wanted to tell them—without compromise. A better form—a better conduit. A zone in between my brain and the internets where machine and skin became one—tied together by gummy circuits and veiny cabling…
Welcome…step inside to my innernets…where do u want to go today?
A Thousand Streams (each one in the middle)
Twitter is made up of steady streams of in-between moments—the “little” times like car trips and slow escalator rides and waiting in line that connect together the supposedly “big” life events. The connector times are the perfect time to dash off a tweet or two. This rushing river of brevities is always “in the middle”, which is to say, you can’t see the beginning or the end by looking at it-it’s like a play that you’re always logging in to media res. This is part of why it is so difficult to explain Twitter to someone who hasn’t used it. As the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri pointed out in their prophetic late 20th Century Masterpiece A Thousand Plateaus, “It’s not easy to see things in the middle.” They go on to explain:
The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. —TP 28
The uninterrupted FLOW(s) of Twitter form a “collective assemblage of enunciation” and an “assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside” (TP 26) D&G preferred the word assemblage to describe A Thousand Plateaus instead of “book” which implied a false unity of the book as an image of the world. To them bound books represented old-fashioned closed-off, linear thought. An assemblage was an enity that bridged the gap between nomadic writing and the writing of the state. D&G would have been excited about open platforms like Twitter and Tumblr—the way the individual tweets are created with the awareness of the openings between them—they are collected together on a single feed but not closed off to being joined, borrowed from or added to—they’re ready to be mashed up and to go viral, like the best blog posts. Their immediate NOWness fufills the criteria that D&G layed out for the “ideal book”:
The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject. —TP 10
The creation of “open rings” is what social media is all about. Had the technology been available, I wonder if D&G would have tweeted A Thousand Plateaus instead of published it as a book? Or maybe they would have started a Tumblr blog instead—perhaps in the same spirit that I started this one—treating it like a rock n’ roll rhizome—a place in which to fit everything that doesn’t fit.
