Writing With Deleuze

David Haeselin [email protected] April 25, 2007. Mimicry Paper Writing with Deleuze “I’m born, I’m bored. I’m not at all. This body needs an overhaul.”1 Not this human body limited by so many corporeal chains or the demilitarized zones of consciousness, but more importantly the barriers of communication in a world ripe with institutional violence, this body of knowledge. The cancer that some call free thinking is being eradicated, imprisoned and quarantined into slender niches of guillotined readers, decapitated and recapitulated. “Information is free, but exists everywhere in chains”2, and now even our slightest of miniscule chances of producing new knowledge is choking on its own vomit. How can one communicate these days? Beyond the metaphoric logic of binary representations promulgated on digital viewscreens, (One brain/ One monitor) can unencumbered creativity still vibrate from mailbox to mailbox fully fleshed and embodied? The 365 days a year come rain/come snow U.S. Postal Service has chomped off these conduits. In other words, they’ve proposed to hike the postage on independently operated journals while lubricating the dissemination highways for the pulpy dirges of Time Warner Incorporated’s ad-riddled magazines.

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In days when ClearChannel polices

the radio frequencies and independently operated journals of opinion are suddenly expected to churn for the wheels of profit (The New Republic recently divested majority control to Canadian media juggernaut CanWest 1

Global Communications)4 where can new voices migrate? Where can they be born? The answer is not important; the process of becoming vocal is. Publish yourself, read your own revolutionary opinions, send mail to yourself, journalize your own journeys outside. “Chop down Saussure’s signification tree and scatter its seeds as roots that grow horizontally, never vertically towards pure images. Deleuze & Guattari call this root a rhizome, a weed that leeches the nutrients of others, an interminable virus that deracinates any lumbering structure that still aspires to the Sun.”5 It could behoove us all to evolve into hives of ourselves. This hive-self needs no value, no ideology, but collective utterances of self: pity, aggrandizement, destruction. The question is not of who reads but who speaks. When we cultivate voices we manufacture outlets. Repeat the same things until they don’t mean. Don’t mean all, don’t signify. Mutter! The fascistic ear-plugging institutions have won already, so carve out territories they can’t transverse, the smooth spaces of interiority that is your own personality. This is not a war of collectivity, but singularity. If we can no longer startle ourselves, we’ll never incite any (one/thing). When we have something worth thinking, we’ll have something that publishes autonomously, writes its self. Steal this thesis. What thesis? Yeah, you’re probably right, I don’t have one. But still, pilfer information: digital, ontological, sexual. Desire disruption. Crave corruption. Everything I’ve ever needed to know I learned in Kindergarten. I’ve forgotten it all.

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Go to Scribd.com. Have a feminine computer generated British accented voice read this paper back to you. Download it if you wish. This free-association, self-reflexive masturbatory exercise isn’t trying mean. But it does connect to something. It’s a paper production machine, a gimmick. I guess it’s a critique of my own acumen. I don’t know how to write myself out of my own work, but this is my attempt. This was supposed to be emulation, but maybe now it’s creation, starting, living and ending with a voice that’s not my own: “Well I’ve been to a minor place and I can say I like its face. If I am gone and with no trace, I will be in my minor place.”6

Notes

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Les Savy Fav. “Wake Up!” The Cat and the Cobra. French Kiss Records, 1999. Wark, MacKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. 3 Freepress.net. “Stop Postal Rate Hikes.” http://action.freepress.net//campaign/postal 4 Seelye, Katharine. “Overhaul” New York Times, 24 February, 2007. 5 Haeselin, David. “The Machine Desiring A Good Grade.” Unpublished, 2007. 6 Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. “A Minor Place.” I See A Darkness. Palace Records, 1999. 1 2