The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, radical French theorist-activists, have articulated a world-view of forces and flows. Their tools were philosophy and psychoanalysis, and the fuel for this lateral thinking was the libidinal break with conventional politics focused on the uprising of 1968 in Paris. The supposedly separate Individual of the Bourgeois ideal is instead seen as an arrangement of multiple elements which are contiguous with the social field. We are all zones for the intersection of currents that run through society and are not separable from those flows, those sources of desire that link to produce our experience of the individual and the social.
Deleuze and Guattari were writing in opposition to Capitalism and on behalf of personal & social liberation. But, as Jeremy Weate writes, “there is unease these days at where the Deleuze and Guattari trajectory has taken us - through an over-focus on the machinic and impersonal in their thought there has grown up a technological reading of D&G where the inhuman dominates and the responsiveness of human subjects drops out completely”. Could the move back to human subjectivity can be aided by the embodiment of Deleuzian forces in more of the Tibetan manner - personified forces with which we as subjects can develop relationships?
In ‘Lipstick Traces - A Secret History of the Twentieth Century’ Greil Marcus traces a subliminal trajectory where nearly-invisible connections arc across punk, the Situationists of 1968, Dada in 1916, the Enrages of the French Revolution and heretical millenarianism in medieval times. He isn’t describing the direct causal link of past and present but suggesting a more opaque entanglement. “Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured - new institutions, new maps, new rulers - or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?....If the language they are speaking, the impulse they are voicing, has it’s own history, might it not tell a very different story from the one we’ve been hearing all our lives?”
Perhaps these spectral connections reflect the mythic aspect of the revolutionary, the re-emergent impulse of insurrection, the subversive Shiva that destroys stagnant categories. “Damning God and the State, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play...making it possible to experience all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs: things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with
altogether.” Once loosed through the fissure of 1968 the spirit of Dionysius has led a merry dance through Free Festivals and raves, a seductive pied piper leading people astray. And now in Reclaim The Streets events we see the reappearance of Loki, the Trickster and mischief maker, the upsetter of ordered applecarts. These mythic entities aren’t external gods to be summoned nor, I’d suggest, are they simply interior states of the over-excited brain. If the mythic is part of the sea in which we swim then energies of utopian overturning are embodied through historical moments of uprising. It’s time to link arms with
the burning eyed, the daemons of the non-dual.
Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century [1 book, Amazon US] ... In the 1989 ‘Lipstick Traces - A Secret History of the Twentieth Century’ Greil Marcus traces a subliminal trajectory where nearly-invisible connections arc across punk, the Situationists of 1968, Dada in 1916, the Enrages of the French Revolution and heretical millenarianism in medieval times. He isn’t describing the direct causal link of past and present but suggesting a more opaque entanglement. “Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured - new institutions, new maps, new rulers - or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?....If the language they are speaking, the impulse they are voicing, has it’s own history, might it not tell a very different story from the one we’ve been hearing all our lives?”
