Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 08:43:37 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crosby <Crosby_M-AT-rocketmail.com>
Subject: Re: utopia


--- Millay Hyatt <millayh-AT-web.de> wrote:
> can anyone point me to any literature on utopia in
> d&g or from a d&g perspective?

"A people isn't something already there. A people in a
way, is what's missing". This is what 'nationalism'
boils down to: fight or flight. Lines of flight and
identities "can be both at once because the two things
aren't lived out on the same plane... Utopia isn't the
right concept: it's more a question of a 'fabulation'
in which a people and art both share. We ought to take
up Bergson's notion of fabulation and give it a
political meaning... The key thing may be to create
vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we
can elude control" (Gilles Deleuze "Mediators"
interview in _Negotiations_ p173-4).

If you are interested in the politics of Deleuze, it's
really very simple: "The mistake would be to say:
there is a globalizing State, the master of its plan
and extending its traps; and then, force of
resistance..." (Deleuze "Many Politics" in _Dialogues
with Claire Parnet_ p145). 

Maybe you have not seen the multitudes of 'American'
(USayian?) and 'British' youth swarming to join this
new war machine fleeing toward "the heart of the
steppe or desert" powered by fabulations of 1001
Baghdad Nights as liberating heroes!? It's hard to
fathom, using notions of nationality or utopia, how 70
percent of the American public could support this
crazy crusade (although the percentage is supposedly
reversed among Black Americans..)

What is nationalism? "This machine in its turn is thus
not the state itself, it is ... the dominant languages
and knowledge, conformist actions and feeling, the
segments which prevail over the others" ("Many
Politics" 129). SO, what does it mean to be
revolutionary in a society of dispersed control? It
means, partially, to be "a third which always comes
from elsewhere and disturbs the binarity of the two,
not so much inserting itself in their opposition as in
their complementarity... tracing another line [which]
diverts the plane of organization" (131).

- Mark
"autocratic idealism in politics ... a late militant
philosophy ... was not the many-sided ideal radiation
of spontaneous life, but a particular type of society
or a particular method of change which they chose to
impose on mankind or to attribute mythically to the
universe..." (George Santayana, "On the Subjects and
Objects of Government" in _Dominations and Powers_).

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