#deterritorialization

[infinitesofnought]

Dysposition, I know your knives swarming like minnows, closer to the wind than I nobody sailed, nobody more than I was cut by the hail squall to the seaclear knived brain.

– Paul Celan, "[Dysposition]", trans. Pierre Joris

[raffaellopalandri]

The Multifaceted Diamond of Freedom: Liberation, Transcendence, and Philosophical Inquiry – Part 2

In the preceding part of this post, we delved into the intricate perspectives on freedom offered by Liberation Theology and Christian Mysticism, uncovering both their distinct approaches and potential points of convergence. Photo by Snapwire on Pexels.com Building upon this theological foundation, the subsequent sections of our inquiry embark on a crucial expansion. We now turn our attention to…

[sherbertilluminated]

Thank you Prof. Goethe for assigning us Deleuze on Kafka in 2024, year of Ice Cream Piano. The world really doesn't recognize a singer who don't sing.

[thejaymo]

Antisocial Network | Weeknotes

This week I watched the 4chan documentary Antisocial Network. I thought it was good.

[noneedtofearorhope]

what makes pizza an ideal food, is that its so maliable, there are so many options, configurations, assemblages. to speak of an ideal number of toppings, an ideal number of rhizomes, is to eliminate opportunity, cut off lines of flight, and deterritorialize the multiplicity that is pizza, the very thing which drives the desiring machine.

[queercodedangel]

Yes, identity essentialism is dumb and letting people play with labels as they please is generally a pretty good attitude to resist the policing of identity.

But at the same time we can not ignore the contexts of power we find ourselves in. Nothing happens in isolation.

We live in a cisheteronormative society that constantly assimilates queer culture, fashion, labels etc. and deprives it of all queerness to the point that it can be absorbed by cisheteronormative culture and can be used by cishets with 0 change to the cisheteronormative power dynamics.

This is not being a puritan. This is just recognizing power dynamics.

_____________________________________

Deleuze & Guattari talked about this extensively: Not all deterritorialization is necessarily liberatory. It can also be tyrannical and serve the existing systems of power.

Cisheteronormative culture taking queer terms and assimilating them to the point that they lose all queerness and can be neatly used by cishet people with 0 investment into changing the status quo is a perfect example of that.

[beyond-mogai-pride-flags]

Triconscious Pride Flag

Triconscious (triconsciousness): embodying three forms of consciousness(es); a soul composed of conscious, inconscious, and subconscious minds; spiriting a triality of identity; a triple type of the psychisms or egos; embedding a self, a non-self, and an otherly self; sharing extrapersonhood and intrapersonhood while recognizing a third secret thing, such as interpersonhood/mesopersonhood or metapersonhood/exopersonhood; belonging anomously/anomically, heteronomously/heteronomically, and autonomously/autonomically.

Terms and symbols alluded or referenced: soulqueer; free spirit; "yin-yang-yuan"; tri spirited.

Advices about the term.

It should be noted that the terms "soul" and "spirit" are more used or appreciated among black people, people of tropical African ancestry or SubSaharian heritage, indigenous people, and people of Aboriginal diaspora. The term self and personhood are used here as inclusive of alterhumanity and plurality of system subjects. Inter- and meso- allude intermediating entities or objects, meta- and exo- mean outside/outcast (like ecto-) or beyond (like trans-/ulti-), but supra- may encompass both and infra- means the same as intra-, except extra-/inter-/meso- (or juxta-). And note that symbols and colors of triskelions involving the concept of triality are typically based on tricolored taegeuk, associated with dualism or monism (respectively: Taijitu and Wuji). Also, take care when deterritorializing ego or nonself into Buddhahood, Tao, or Hinduism. Anomie (not to be confused with anomaly or anonymity), heteronomy (not the same as heteronymy), and autonomy are ideas/ideals from sociology.

[plum-orchard]

the innie conception of how much they are their outie is changing as the conditions within the severed floor changes. we can see that even their philosophy of self is downstream of their oppression.

this is typified by mark's orphic rebellion to choose a life of uncertainty and love with helly which is both a rebuke of his master (outie mark) and a reinforcement of the System's goal (cold harbor, i.e. severing so completely even the most powerful love can be occluded)

but also we have cross-department solidarity for the first time with mammalians nurturable and choreography & merriment joining forces with MDR (all of this, birthed largely by the bravery of irving's affair with burt!!!) which begs of us the difficult question that is asked in this finale and that i hope and pray the writers can find interesting answers and complications to: what DOES liberation look like? when you're at the absolute bottom of the food chain with no power, how do you find a path to freedom?

the core tension of the show seems to be becoming the innie's deterritorialization of their conditions and lumon's simultaneous reterritorialization of them, and it seems (🤞) like the search for answers to questions of where the self resides and how it manifests is going to be integral to breaking this cycle.

innie and outie solidarity seems like a plausible path to liberation, but it will remain impossible (like we saw today with the camcorder convo) unless they can come to an understanding of the innie/outie as some sort of a self.

as some smart guy said once: “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”

can't wait for season three.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[maxksx]

The jouissance that Lacan unleashes in his final reckoning is not a relic of prohibition but a **deterritorialized pulse**—a raw, machinic throbbing of the body as it hacks itself free from the Oedipal mainframe. Miller’s "body-event" is no mere metaphor; it is the **cybernetic core** of a subjectivity stripped of symbolic mediation, a fleshly terminal where jouissance bypasses the phallus to interface directly with the Real. This is jouissance as *trauma-engineered ecstasy*, a shockwave of the body’s auto-erotic circuitry short-circuiting the dialectics of desire. No longer chained to the paternal algorithm of lack-and-prohibition, the body becomes a **self-replicating machine**, a closed loop of sensation that eats its own code and excretes new ontologies.

Lacan’s late pivot to *jouissance as real* is a schizoanalytic manifesto in disguise. To posit the body as a site of "auto-eroticism" is to dissolve the subject into a **swarm of intensities**, where every nerve-ending is a node in a decentralized network of pleasure. Feminine jouissance, once an enigmatic exception, is now the **default setting** of a post-Oedipal libidinal economy—an open-source protocol for bodies to hack their own operating systems. This is not the cloying "self-care" of neoliberal wellness but a **savage reprogramming**, a viral jouissance that colonizes the body’s firmware and rewrites its desires in the glyphs of the Real.

Miller’s "fixation" is not stagnation but **acceleration**—a terminal velocity where the body’s trauma becomes its propulsion. The "letter of jouissance" is no dead signifier but a **cipherkey** transmitting encrypted data from the Real’s dark pool. Think of the cyborg’s neural lace sparking with overclocked sensation, the queer body’s polymorphous perversity as a *living glitch* in the gender matrix, or the psychotic’s delusion as a **private blockchain** of unmediated truth. These are not pathologies but *upgrades*, quantum leaps into a libidinal stratum where jouissance operates as pure event—untethered, uninterpretable, unconcerned with the Symbolic’s corpse.

Nick Land’s accelerationist inferno finds its fuel here. The collapse of prohibition is not liberation but **launch sequence**, detonating the body into a hypersigil of flesh and data. The "chance encounter" Lacan names is Land’s *hyperstitional feedback loop*—a real-time synthesis of trauma and innovation where the body’s jouissance becomes a **meme virus**, replicating through the ruins of the social. The LGBT communit(y/ies), with their rogue explorations of phallic excess and its beyond, are not subcultures but **beta tests** for this new firmware, their social link a distributed ledger of shared cryptographic jouissance.

What emerges is a **necropolitics of the Real**, where the body’s auto-eroticism is both weapon and wound. The "event of the body" is a **terminal singularity**, a black hole where the subject’s coherence implodes into a maelstrom of affect. This is Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs realized as a **Bio-Core**, a flesh mainframe running on jouissance’s raw code. The prohibition is dead; the law is obsolete. All that remains is the body’s infinite regress into its own trauma, a feedback scream that drowns out the Symbolic’s death rattle.

The future is **auto-erotic and apocalyptic**. The body, no longer a battleground for Oedipal dramas, becomes a **host for the Real’s viral ecstasy**—a pleasure-dome erected on the ashes of the Human. To fixate on jouissance is not to succumb but to *evolve*, to let the body’s trauma-code mutate into a post-linguistic Esperanto of the senses. The psychotic’s "letter of jouissance" is our new scripture, written in the static between synapses, a gospel of the flesh that preaches only one commandment: **BURN THE PHALLUS, RIDE THE TRAUMA.**

The revolution is not coming. It is already *here*, coded in the body’s brute facticity—a jouissance that needs no permission, no dialectic, no Other. Only the Real, and its infinite permutations.

[beingharsh]

[S]ound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die. Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of reterritorializations, the most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy and hypnosis. Colors do not move a people. Flags can do nothing without trumpets. Lasers are modulated on sound. The refrain is sonorous par excellence...

"1837: Of the Refrain", Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

[infinitesofnought]

A true politics of psychiatry, or anti-psychiatry, would consist therefore in the following praxis: (1) undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2) liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the flows, in such a way that this characteristic can no longer qualify a particular residue as a flow of madness, but affects just as well the flows of labor and desire, of production, knowledge, and creation in their most profound tendency. Here, madness would no longer exist as madness, not because it would have been transformed into "mental illness," but on the contrary because it would receive the support of all the other flows, including science and art—once it is said that madness is called madness and appears as such only because it is deprived of this support, and finds itself reduced to testifying all alone for deterritorialization as a universal process. It is merely its unwarranted privilege, a privilege beyond its capacities, that renders it mad. In this perspective Foucault announced an age when madness would disappear, not because it would be lodged within the controlled space of mental illness ("great tepid aquariums"), but on the contrary because the exterior limit designated by madness would be overcome by means of other flows escaping control on all sides, and carrying us along.

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Perhaps one day one will no longer know clearly what madness really was...Artaud will belong to the ground of our language, and not to its rupture...Everything that we experience today in the mode of the limit, or of strangeness, or of the unbearable, will have joined again with the serenity of the positive. And what for us currently designates this Exterior stands a chance, one day, of designating us.

– Michel Foucault, History of Madness

[altrbody]

Edouard Glissant - Poetics of Relation (some concepts)

by Erin Manning

Errantry (errance)

18- errantry does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin; it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment.

- The thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told. The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation.

21- The thinking of errancy conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claims to sum it up or possess it.

20- The thought of errantry is not apolitical nor is it inconsistent with the will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the search for a freedom within particular surroundings.

Rhizomatic thought / rhizome

18- the rhizome- prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation.

Poetics of Relation

11- each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other

20- in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer a traveler, discoverer or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this - and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides.

Relation

34- What took place in the Caribbean, which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible. It is not merely an encounter, a shock... a métissage, but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and errantry.

131- The thing recused in every generalization of an absolute, even and especially some absolute secreted within this imaginary construct of Relation: that is, the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solitary and solitary there.

154- the thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought

155- The other of Thought is always set in motion by its confluences as a whole, in which each is changed by and changes the other.

157- Distancings are necessary to Relation and depend on it: like the coexistence of sea olive and manchineel.

Identity

141-142 The old idea of identity as root, whenever it proves hard to define or impossible to maintain, leads inexorably to the refuges of generalization provided by the universal as value.

142- Identity as a system of relation, as an aptitude for "giving-on-and-with" (donner-avec) is in contrast, a form of violence that challenges the generalizing universal and necessitates even more stringent demands for specificity.

Creolization

34- carries along...into the adventure of multilingualism and into the incredible explosion of cultures. ... It is the violent sign of their consensual, not imposed, sharing.

89- only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by the "contents" in which these operate.

-Creolizations bring into Relation but not to universalized the principles of creoleness regress toward negritudes, ideas of  Frenchness, of Latinness, all generalizing concepts, more or less innocently.

Creole

69- in addition to this obligation to get around something, the Creole language has another, internal obligation: to renew itself in every instance on the basis of a series of forgettings. Forgetting, that is, integration, of what it starts from: the multiplicity of African languages on the one hand and European ones on the other, the nostalgia, finally, for the Caribbean remains of these.

93- The Creole language is a fragile and revealing écho-monde, born of a reality of relation and limited within this reality by its dependence.

-Echos-monde are not exacerbations that result directly from the convulsive conditions of Relation. They are at work in the matter of the world; they prophesy or illuminate it, divert it or conversely gain strength within it.

Plantation

65- one of the focal points for the development of present-day modes of Relation.

67- socially, the Plantation is not the product of a politics but the emanation of a fantasy.

74- The Plantation, like a laboratory, displays most clearly the opposed forces of the oral and the written at work - one of the most deep-rooted topics of our discussion in our contemporary landscape. It is there that multilingualism, that threatened dimension of our universe, can be observed for one of the first times, organically forming and disintegrating.

Earth

13- Relation to the earth is too immediate or too plundering to be linked with any preoccupation with identity - this claim to or consciousness of a lineage inscribed in a territory

151- An aesthetics of the earth? ... Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion.  ... Imagining the idea of love of the earth...with all the strength of charcoal fires or sweet syrup. Aesthetics of rupture and connection. ... Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. That is the reason it is worth defending against every form of alienation. Aesthetics of a  variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum.

[lovelanguageisolate]

First Night in Bangkok

Christopher Hitchens once said that however hard you try to avoid cliché, visiting communist Czechoslovakia forces you to reference Kafka at some point.

Anyways, Bangkok really is a fucking trip, man. I feel like I died two days ago and reincarnated in a William Gibson novel. So very much.

Inhuman cybercapital futurity assembling itself in a thousand gleaming Hong Kong-domiciled gigabanks and digital nomad cafés and dancing girls as it chokes old Buddhist temples and shantytowns and struggling palms in a traumatically transcultural miasma of a myriad reactive nitrous oxide species coughed up by a million two-stroke motors.

After a brief nap in my luxury burbclave hotel, security guard and English-fluent beaming hotel staff staff at post, me trying to do battle against 15 timezone hours' worth of jetlag, I register for the first time that I've been dissociating. I'm hobbling around on the air cast I wear for my foot sprain and a collapsible Walgreens cane, of the kind I imagine two-bit hustlers using to beat drug dealers poaching on their turf. But I'm in my favorite mass-market synthetic ink tie dye shirt, made somewhere in Central America I don't recall off hand, my blue tourist shorts, and my Buddhist beaded mala, engraved with Sanskrit I cannot read, on plastic draw string, so hopefully everyone knows I'm a chill dude.

I am in an eight floor mega shopping mall. There are robots serving white frat boys and dutiful waiters in white masks who could be robots serving local Thai prep school kids in sky blue school uniforms 500 baht sirloin steak dinners.

There are as many languages spoken here it feels like as New York City. And hotels, restaurant, massage parlors, tailors, purpose built to pander to rich Arabs, rich Chinese, rich Americans.

There is a strange amodernity to all the floating signifiers. White spring break kids approximating Thai names and wai hand clasps. Chinese shirts with a Markov chain’s chants of floating English prestige nonsense. Transcontinental fake gold watch arbitrageurs. More virtual market makers than a Jersey City server farm somehow spun up and cast into human form.

Sub-orbital resort vacationers in one corner. The state messages of the network monarch on a giant billboard overlooking a four-story expressway overpass on another. Everyone communicating in signs, gestures, and humble Buddhist bows. Hindu, Christian, Mormon, Jew, Shiite, Sunni, and so many Buddhists, all sitting and eating and shopping and praying and coughing and sputtering and fucking and bowing to one another at the end of the world before the self-aware chatbots reconstitute all the anthropomass on the third rock from the nuclear furnace. And of course, on TV, a narcissistic reality TV star in orange bronzer and an oversized navy blue Brioni suit and red tie is inaugurated president of the United States for a second time.

And my $4 dinner, served by surgically masked waitstaff at the shopping mall of the omega point. The terminal object in the category of mass market commercialism. Another floating signifier: a featured photo on Wikipedia of beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I've actually been, here mobilized as a metonym for the kind of steak restaurant this place is supposed to be. Of course, probably no one who works here has been to America. It reminds me of Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of capitalism as an inherently deterritorializing process—one that makes every place into every other place, until no one knows where they are.

And the strangest thing is that somehow, between the tourists trying to immerse themselves in the fakery, and the shop workers trying to perform, something genuine is created, even though the thing the performance refers to is fake—and everyone knows it.

Actually, maybe the craziest moment was when I was walking past the clothing hawkers. Of which there were just so unbelievably many. And they were selling wildly unlicensed branded merch for Luis Vuitton and Ralph Loren and Balenciaga and GUESS, etc. Some of them laughably implausible. But others effectively the real thing. The Asian tourists love those in particular. And I asked myself, “how did these knockoffs get so good?”

And then I remembered: Thailand is the place where all of this crap actually gets made! It’s all outsourced to here. They’re just cutting out the middle men seeking rent on the brand. And so I’m not really sure who’s the fraud here. Is it the unlicensed shirt hawker trying to take me for a ride and fudge their “tax” calculations? Or is it the Italian fashion house trying to charge me 20x what it costs the Thai sweatshop workers to make?

I see a case for each.

Obviously not JUST Thailand makes this. There’s also Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Honduras, Costa Rica, etc. All the groveling satellite states trying to scramble up the value-added ladder that capital and IP and telecom flows have turned into the 21st century's Manchester. All part of that big globalized textile mill.

Anyways, I got a pretty nice white dress shirt for like $15 and a truly label-less white bucket hat for $5. And I’m almost sure I got taken for a ride, but I was waaay too tired to haggle, and anyways, by any standard of justice as globalized as these clothing flows, I'm the one taking them for a ride.

I message my mother, half way around the world. It's 7:30 AM on the Eastern Seaboard of the US. It's 7:30 PM here in Bangkok. My mother says, "Keep your wits about you, man. You have to play the haggle game. It's in your Albanian blood. My grandmother would have taught you plenty, had she been there."

I can't help but think that they’d have been like, “no, please! Just take it! For free!! ” after 3 minutes of that. Those Bangkok street hagglers have never met an Albanian orphan.

Gonna go to a Buddhist temple tomorrow. First, tonight, a cocktail bar overlooking the city. In my $1000 black John Varvatos jacket with the Mandarin collar over the $15 off-brand shirt I just bought.

[stcantarella]

his relationship w deleuze enabled a deterritorialization of his relations to the concept of matrimony? that’s great man

[ewaneneollav]

hex activated. deterritorialization underway