Deleuze, Guattari, & the New Right, Part 3: 
Capitalism & Schizophrenia

5,738 words

“There are things which do not disturb thought and those which force us to think. The first are objects of recognition: thought and all its faculties may be fully employed therein, thought may busy itself thereby, but such employment and such activity have nothing to do with thinking. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” – Gilles Deleuze[1]

The Search for Smooth Space

Part Two of this examination of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari from a radical New Right perspective introduced the Deleuzian split between nomos and logos, and Deleuze’s insistence on difference as a radical counter to Plato’s Idea, to representational thought, as well as to the logic of the bourgeois Cogitatio natura universalis. While the paper presented Deleuze’s highly Nietzschean reading of post-Socratic Greece, its thinkers, and its forms of thought, as the triumph of decadence and degenerative social forces, it did so with the intention of promoting critical awareness of how the radical impetus of nomocentric thought can bolster forms of rebellion that are deeply entrenched in  logocentric thought.

As we move deeper into Deleuze’s philosophy – and connect it with that of Félix Guattari – the elaboration of nomos becomes more clearly a celebration of forms of thought that do not conform to the foundations of liberal modernity, which themselves become identified as “State-sponsored” thought. If he draws a line from Plato to the liberal nation-State, it is not only to highlight the relationship between forms of thought and political possibilities, but also to show that forms of thought and political structures directly represent instinctual forces and their appropriate valuation of values. For the New Right, this has critical ramifications, as the transvaluation of values must include the forms of thought that give rise to the State, as these also give rise to the bourgeois liberal values and evaluations against which we are aligned.

It is entirely probable that the primordial pre-Socratic form of Greek thought that some corners of the New Right seek to emulate stands in direct opposition to the logocentrism that spawned representative democracy, egalitarianism, and even race and nation. That there is something to Deleuze’s evaluation of nomos as a break with modern quantitative rationality is apparent to any good student of Homeric Greece, as the lack of orthodoxy regarding the composition and function of the Olympian deities has led scholars to claim that the Olympians, therefore, are not even religious entities. Of course, modern religion is a product of logos, so the confusion is perhaps one of instincts and not merely of evaluation.

In Capitalism and Schizophrenia (the collective title of the two-part series Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus), nomos and logos become the bases of two new binary oppositions: schizophrenia and paranoia, and smooth and striated space, both of which set the ontological and epistemological boundaries between modern man and his revolutionary counterpart. It is hoped that at the conclusion of this series, more political actors on the Right edges of modernity will understand themselves and their project as the search for schizophrenia and smooth space.

Without giving away the punch line, this would entail a complete transvaluation of modern values and forms of thought, the subsequent disconnection from modernity that that would entail, and finally a reengagement with modernity as a revolutionary adversary that creates spaces of exteriority in the heart of the liberal State.[2] In this too-brief summary, one clearly sees the potential for the New Right and other forms of Right revolution to be on the front lines of what Thomas Nail calls a “return to revolution.” For what the true Right has made essential – and that the Left has never understood – is precisely the transvaluation of modern values. And while the Left only fights for a more inclusive and compassionate modernity,[3] the true Right fights to destroy modernity itself.[4]

The State, Capitalism, and Desire: Secondo la Guerra Lampo[5]

This, more than “cultural Marxism,” explains the exclusion of New Right thought from the Academy; for the New Right is simply beyond the terms of inclusion, and rightly so, as nothing revolutionary can be included in the State. From the State’s perspective (and in Deleuze’s language), the New Right is different. It is minor – at odds with truth and morality. It is a derelict space.

And in turn, the liberal State is a taxation and conscription machine. It is repressive and destructive of logos, nomos, creativity, and all critical thought.[6] It seeks only one thing: human energy to labor for its economy. Not White, Black, Latino, or any other particular human energy – just plain ol’ universal bourgeois human energy. It makes of citizenship a right to labor. It discriminates or outlaws discrimination only in the name of commerce.[7] It psychologizes every man, woman, and child – making a teleology of development – so as to optimize the economic value of each and all.

It cares nothing of peoples, homelands, races, ethnicities, genders, or individuals, but only uses these to produce more economic production – as markets of labor and the production of consumption. It is the enemy of art, cultural particularity, and the will – unless these can be brought into the service of the economy by reducing them to multicultural fads.

It is not, however, the enemy of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Biology, or Political Science, because these and other disciplines are in the service of the State, making the Academy merely the finishing ground of the State’s bourgeois purpose.

It forces us to send our children to school, it asks us to be pious and attend church, it provides us with entertainment and employment, and demands only that we obey laws put in place for our own benefit – and at each and every turn we not only become the rational homo economicus, but are also given a plethora of rewards for participating in the form of life at hand.[8] And it makes sense, but how? It does all of this without ideology or deception, but instead with our deepest consent. For how could it not?

Enter Deleuze and Guattari, who created a philosophical system designed to explain how the liberal State works to create a particular (bourgeois) form of life that is craved like the corporate death burgers and sugary chemical drinks with which it is most closely associated. The point of entry into Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy involves the State, capitalism, and desire.

The liberal State is an agent of capitalism, providing rational, economically sensible labor from the vast flow of human potential, and economically exploitable resources from the equally vast flow of natural potential.

Capitalism is a system of unceasing economic production that successfully utilizes these flows while demanding nothing in return beyond unceasing production.

And desire is the human will to produce, consume, and make connections with life.

The State, then, codifies desire in order to produce bourgeois humans. Capitalism uses these humans, but at the same time undermines (decodes, or deterritorializes) the State’s codes by reducing all of life – even the previously useful codes like myth, tradition, life, death, tribe, and peoples – to economic rationality.

But desire is always aloof. Like capitalism, it desires only production: to flow, to explore, and to connect.[9] Give it homo economicus and American Idol, and it will function as required, quickly falling in love with the opportunity to produce and consume in a bourgeois manner. Tell desire that it is defined by lack, as modern State-sponsored thought demands, and it will see lack everywhere and seek to fill it with the spoils of the labor, democratic politics, and popular culture that the State provides. But recode desire to connect with transvaluation and the destruction of liberal modernity and it will create new possibilities for life.

Why, then, do the masses shun revolution? The easy answer is because they desire homo economicus, the comfort and safety of the liberal State, and the productive and consumptive possibilities of capitalism. The more complicated answer is that homo economicus, the State, and capitalism are easy investments for our instincts and desire.

So, where is the potential for revolt? Well, the body, say Deleuze and Guattari, is a desiring-machine, and as said above, it will produce, flow, and connect by nature. The problem, ultimately, is with what modernity, the liberal State, and capitalism give the body to connect. This is why mere regime change is of little value, revolutionarily speaking.

The locus of revolution must be desire.[10] In order to create new decoded or deterritorialized flows of desire, we must first create spaces that cause breaks in the bourgeois order. These derelict spaces have to be zones of schizophrenic bodily decoding, wherein state-sponsored thought, capitalist production and consumption, and liberal humanism are no longer functional.[11]

Perhaps we are beginning to see why the New Right and other forms of Right revolution have a prominent role to play in the revolt against modernity prescribed by Deleuze and Guattari.

Félix Guattari: An Aside

We have yet to spend much time on either the life or philosophy of Félix Guattari. This is partly symptomatic of a general neglect of Guattari’s contributions to Deleuze’s philosophy found in the secondary literature on the duo,[12] but also a purposeful neglect based on Guattari’s political life and a favoring of Deleuze’s profound Nietzscheanism. Nonetheless, Guattari played an important role in turning Deleuze toward explicit political philosophy.

While Deleuze always remained a committed academic and professor – keeping a respectful distance from liberal and anti-liberal politics, Guattari remained a radical Trotskyite – becoming known in the French press as “Mr. Anti-” for his role in the politics of anti-colonialism, gay rights, prisoner rights, and environmentalism.[13] He befriended Antonio Negri when the radical Leftist sociologist fled to France in the wake of charges that his Autonomia Operaia movement was the brains behind Red Brigade terrorism. Guattari openly supported the Autonomia movement and celebrated Italy as the only site of true revolution in the West.

Theoretically, Guattari combined Lacanian psychoanalysis with radical Marxian anti-capitalism, seeking to find links between the productive energy of desire and the process of capitalist production. Anti-Oedipus is the apotheosis of this project, which came to fruition only after Deleuze imposed Nietzsche’s vitalist naturalism on the matter.

Toward Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Deleuze and Guattari met in 1969. The student uprising of the previous spring enchanted both of them, and they sought a way to explain the unscripted and uncontained unrest as a revolution. While Guattari’s approach led him to discern exploitable ruptures in the State and capitalist market, Deleuze further developed difference and nomos into political concepts capable of debilitating the liberal human.

These are not concepts that seek to create more inclusion in the modern project, but to offer a way beyond that project. Nomos, as we have already seen, was developed as a counter to Platonic forms of thought. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia it functions as a political metaphor for spatial dynamics of thought and social organization, with nomos becoming nomadic thought and behavior, and logos, “State science,” and economic rationality. Politically, logos is the regime of modernity, while nomos leads one beyond the regime.

Likewise, difference (the great mass of individual specimens that resist all forms of representation and universalization) leads one beyond the regime of universalization and standardization promoted by statist logos. In the context of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, difference entails a relationship between majority – or, those who conform to the standard or ideal type of the collectivity in question – and minority – or, those who are defined by the gap between themselves and that standard.

Far from vulgar liberal politics of difference, which defends the right of the minority to be included in the majority by continually reconfiguring the standards of majority inclusion, Deleuze and Guattari propose the process of becoming-minor, wherein individuals and groups actively diverge from the majority. In other words, becoming-minor involves the same active transvaluation of the bourgeois form of life that has prompted the creation of the revolutionary Right. Becoming-minor, then, places the onus of revolutionary action squarely on our shoulders, as the potential for social transformation is not a determination of those seeking majority inclusion, but of those who are no longer subjugated by a majority.

Desire is crucial for Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of difference, because it is the location of power’s influence on the individual. In Marxist terms, desire is central to the infrastructure – investing it, organizing power, and even organizing systems of repression.[14] But against the Marxist orthodoxy that conceptualizes power as repressive, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy gives power a positive and creative quality. Life, as the continual interaction of various desiring-machines, strives to preserve and enhance itself by connecting desires with other desires. These connections produce social wholes and communities, from the level of human populations to the relationship between wasps and orchids.[15]

Power, then, is not the repression of desire, but its expansion. Social wholes do not use ideology to repress desire but are themselves productive and positive, using desire to produce interests – the coded, regular, collective, and organized forms of desire that make it quantifiable. Given this explanation of desire, power, and social forms, one concludes that interests like humanism, capitalism, and egalitarianism have their roots in desire.[16] Clearly, desire and the investments that it produces can turn against life, becoming reactive and producing values and evaluations based in ressentiment. For, what do our investments in the bourgeois form of life make of us? The body, individualism, willful ignorance, greed, and moralism are not merely personal features added onto character but impersonal forces from which bourgeois character itself is effected. Being bourgeois, then, is a symptomology of a collection of investments, but, as the derelict space of the “true Right” has demonstrated, it can be broken.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Welcome to the world of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the two-part opus that first seeks to explain how capitalism makes an economy of desire and then to demonstrate how to destroy that economy. It is a world of erudition for those who read it – a true marvel of philosophical exposition – but a cloth and paper Molotov for those who use it. In fact, in one of Deleuze and Guattari’s interviews about the bipartite philosophy (Anti-Oedipus [1983] and A Thousand Plateaus [1987]),[17] they suggested that the books have far more uses than merely being read, that they have no inherent purpose. One might even find them useful as gas soaked and burning projectiles to hurl at a police line.

Anti-Oedipus focuses primarily on the relationship between the individual and capitalism, while A Thousand Plateaus focuses on the individual and the State. Both volumes create a rich tapestry of concepts, theories, and examples – none of which, the authors insist, are to be read metaphorically – that change the function of almost every word in either book on multiple occasions. That being said, it is Anti-Oedipus that is more rewarding to the reader, but A Thousand Plateaus that best rewards the man in revolt.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia begins by explaining how unconscious desire gets invested in economic, social, and political fields.[18] Desiring-production (desire in machinic form, as it makes connections and investments) is repressed by social-production (the social manifestation of desiring-production) in order to create specific forms of life. Oedipus enters the fray as the form of repression specific to capitalist modernity. Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate this by comparing social-production in three social forms: savage, despotic/State, and capitalist.

In the savage form, life and desire are determined by a superabundance of codes that connect the individual to the tribe and earth. Kinship relations are strictly social and are designed to make connections amongst families, not to prohibit incest. Social-production is entirely social as well, with individuals sharing the fruits of labor. While this leads to a repression of the desire to directly appropriate ones own production, it is a form of life with an open system of debt that does not work to castrate the flow of life.[19]

In the despotic/State form, life and desire are still determined by codes but where they were once horizontally organized, they are now vertical, as all value flows to and from the despot. It is the despot who imposes infinite and unilateral debt paid as tribute, which Deleuze and Guattari – following Nietzsche – explain as the origin of money. This is an important thread running through both books, as money is not only bound up with guilt and debt but also with the establishment of transcendent standards of equivalence and value – acting in both senses as a judgment against life.[20]

But the despot also makes existence a form of infinite debt, as he holds the power to make and extinguish life at will. Thus he has access to every woman beneath him, creating an overcoding of desire that in turn makes incest a symbolic form of sexual normalcy and makes desire a desire of what one lacks. This infinite debt also diminishes, if not demolishes, the alliances that once created the boundaries between life and death.[21]

Under the despot, desire becomes entirely reactive, lashing out in ressentiment at the State, even when it is democratic in form. From the perspective of desire, the State is a system of continual terror, as it holds the permanent possibility of death over every subject, either through transgression of law or simply the needs of the State. It is here that one may begin to enquire about the possibilities of personal enemy formation that is at odds with the enemies provided by the State.[22]

Whereas the savage form of life was constructed territorially – that is, with a specific and grounded association between individual, tribe, and earth – the State makes these affiliations abstract, turning the earth into land capable of producing rent and resources. This is striated space – “drawn and riddled with lines of divide and demarcation that name, measure, appropriate, and distribute space according to political designs, history, or economic conflict” – that is appropriated by the State in a form of capture.[23] Capture is the process whereby a form of thought or sociality is forcefully brought under the domain of the State, detaching it from its previous purposes in order to serve those of the State. Deleuze and Guattari use anthropological and historical sources to explain capturing processes, focusing upon the transformation of earth into land, and political reason into public opinion.

While striated space is opposed by smooth space, the latter is not embodied in savage territory, but instead – as we shall soon see – in striated space made smooth by war machines that stand opposed to the State.[24]

This abstraction is a boon for capitalism, which follows the same path laid out by the State in disconnecting peoples from territory. However, it goes even further, reducing all of life to the market. In capitalism, the codes and overcodes that once governed conception and behavior have no value, as all meaning is eliminated from life (hence the first function of schizophrenia, as a form of normalcy of a life devoid of meaning). Where savagery and the despotic State had need of codes in order to arrange/codify desire to local forms of social-production, these codes now impede the purely abstract, and global economic, flows of capital. This is because all desiring-production and social-production now flows through the market. “Alliances and filiations no longer pass through people but through money.”[25]

And because the market that determines the possibilities of life under capitalism is devoid of meaning – providing only the pure truth of economic rationality – Deleuze and Guattari describe its social field as an axiomatic, or a domain that need not provide definitions of its constituent parts in order to function. The capitalist axiomatic controls flows without the introduction of a transcendent agent – making it the most lethal form of domination ever invented.[26] As Eugene Holland says, “were it not for the inconvenience of having human workers, managers, and consumers, capitalism would do nicely without any meanings whatsoever.”[27]

For these, however, capitalism is dependent upon the State, which, while still producing codes and meanings – job training for workers, research for schools and corporations, image making for marketing – these never add up to a stable global code that could challenge the axiomatic life. To make their message more clear, Deleuze and Guattari actually switch from discussing codes to territories (making codification = territorialization, decoding = deterritorialization, and recoding = reterritorialization), because without meaning there can be no codes.

Under the capitalist axiomatic, the limited access to consumption that defined the status of the individual vis-à-vis the savage tribe gives way to a hyper-consumption that is not designed to sate the lack-full desire of the individual but instead to sate the capitalist demand to produce at any cost. But, in fact, the desire of the individual is sated, making desire immanent to the system of production. Thus while the infinite despotic debt remains, it is paid to capital itself, allowing surplus-value to flourish as a road to redemption, and making the individual a happy component of the ceaseless creation of capitalist over-production.

In other words (those of Deleuze and Guattari), capitalism deterritorializes the codes and meanings provided human life by savage and despotic/Statist forms of life – leaving the human in a position wherein the possibility of creating new values is possible. But, this moment is ever-so fleeting, as the axiomatic reterritorializes desire in the terms of the surplus-values of capitalist production. This, then, is not the terrain of the Marxist opposition between labor and owners of capital, but between the social-production of surplus-value and its private ownership and management, whereby sociality (desiring-production connected to a conformity-machine) and labor (desiring production connected to a profit-machine) are quantifiable in the terms of the production and consumption that valorize capitalism.[28]

However, this is a continual process, and as such, capitalism will soon enact a deterritorialization of the desire it previously reterritorialized in order to maintain production and the flow of capital. Over time, and from the perspective of the liberal State, this process establishes the purely economic basis of all social institutions. But, while all institutions are apparently social, the one major exception is the nuclear family, which becomes the site of a private submission to the authority and sensibility of the bourgeois regimentation of life.

Deleuze and Guattari return to Nietzsche’s suggestion that money is not only about exchange but also debt and guilt, making these central to how capitalism is lived by individuals. And this, as suggested above, is what makes capitalism truly insidious. Devoid of meaning but in need of subjects (laborers and consumers), capitalism hands responsibility for creating these subjects to the State.

But the State is beholden only to capitalism, so it leaves subject formation up to the family, and for the first time, makes reproduction a “private” affair. While this is the origin of the Oedipus complex, as primal sexuality is focused on members of the immediate family that are forbidden it (training desire to manifest itself as lack), it is also the perfect domain for making production, consumption, and submission a matter of free will, choice, opinion, taste, aesthetics, and many more bourgeois justifications. Thus, the State’s work is done for it by the family, and children are inculcated in the process by an unending succession of advertising, leisure activities, learning actions, and even food digestions that all point to the primacy of both the capitalist axiomatic and the bourgeois codes of the liberal State: produce to consume, movement is money, money is freedom.

The Nomadic War Machine against the State

But all the while, desire is flowing, wanting only to produce, taking no joy in consumption. This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is what points to a beyond modernity, especially when combined with the destruction of codes and the deterritorialization of desire inherent in capitalism. While the system seems monolithic – especially and perhaps exclusively from America – it is inherently unstable; but that instability can only be exploited if desire goes to war with capitalism and liberal modernity.

Deleuze and Guattari posit schizophrenia as a revolutionary process. Whereas the first function of schizophrenia, mentioned above, is a form of normalcy in an axiomatic life devoid of meaning, the second is as a radical opposition to Statist paranoia. At the macropolitical level, this opposition explains the contrary needs of the State and capitalism, in that capitalism seeks the diminution of the State and the creation of a single global market and what Deleuze and Guattari call “universal history.” The liberal State obliges these goals particularly because its entire existence is predicated on the triumph of the capitalist axiomatic, and not the elevation or well-being of its subjects. In this light, multiculturalism, security, and the prohibition against certain forms of violence are laid bare as tools of axiomatization.

At the micropolitical level, schizophrenia and paranoia become poles in an opposition based upon the nomocentric and logocentric forms of thought. Nomos as schizophrenia is the tool of the nomadic war machine – individuals, groups, or processes that lie beyond the sovereignty (or interiority) of the State – that can take the form of anything from social relations and methods of production to nomadic tribes and squadristi. And, while the war machine is often schizophrenic, it is less often revolutionary, because it is not enough to escape the State, but to “make what one is escaping escape.”[29]

In other words, revolution is not merely ascetic but must actively engage in warfare against the State. “The state is sovereignty,” say Deleuze and Guattari, “but sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, or appropriating locally.”[30] Sovereignty and appropriation bring us back to the idea of the State as a mechanism of capture, whereby communities (or local particularities) are brought into a general space of comparison – in which access is equal and free to all whom the State judges worthy (in effect justifying the capitalist axiomatic in one fell swoop by making money the adjudicating factor) – and sovereign power – through which the Good of the State trumps all other considerations of value.

Given this conception of sovereignty, logocentric thought becomes the lingua franca of the liberal State, with its paranoid insistence upon codifying and territorializing every aspect of life, as well as its normalization of universal conceptions of man.

But, while we are witnessing the omnipresent universalization of the bourgeois human, it is not the State that is driving his apotheosis but capitalism. For while there are many spaces of dereliction – smooth space that can neither be codified nor axiomatized – in relation to the State, there are less so in relation to the capitalist market. This explains why the post-WWII liberal State has allowed capitalism to dictate its foreign and domestic policy.

Much of A Thousand Plateaus consists of either making smooth space of one’s image of thought or of presenting a myriad of (mainly scientific and anthropological) examples of types of war machines and the lines of flight that they may use to escape the State. The important thing to remember is that escape is possible. In one of their most interesting chapters on nomadology and the war machine Deleuze and Guattari use Georges Dumézil – a fascist philologist who studied the creation of sovereignty in modern States – and Pierre Clastres – a radical anthropologist who studied how nomadic tribes in South America used agonic war as a tool to keep the State from capturing its people and territory – to explain the necessary gulf between the State and the war machine.[31]

Via Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari conclude that the liberal State ultimately uses labor to capture the war machine, by reducing warring to a job while keeping space striated so that men cannot war on their own behalf.[32]

While nomadic warriors vanished from Europe because of a process of capture involving sovereignty and the appropriation of the right to wage war, there are still aspects of European life that are irreducible – and exterior – to the State. These can be formalized in a line from Nietzsche’s thought to the examples of ultra-localism that have erupted since the establishment of the European Union. In other words, new forms of sovereignty, just like forms of representation, always leave a large swath of experience running free. While these experience used to be understood as civil society, they are now something much less central to State sovereignty due to the development of neo-liberal methods of controlling civil society through capitalism, communication, and perpetual connection to a global village.[33] Instead, Deleuze and Guattari point to the always local and particular instances of exteriority (like CasaPound Italia) that do not have to rival the sovereignty of the State but only call it into question. The challenge for these types of experiences, as mentioned above, is to do more than just escape, but to become-revolutionary.

The New Right, Right anarchism, and secessionism each point to a type of becoming-minor that can become-revolutionary. From the perspective of the war machine, the logic of the State is not all or nothing, but a relationship between interiority and exteriority: being at once engulfed by, and beyond, the State. While this is a dangerous existence, it is also one that affords maximum opportunities for revolutionary engagement.

The challenge to Deleuze and Guattari posed by the revolutionary Right hinges upon its own reading of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Does becoming – and becoming-revolutionary in particular – that points to a line of flight beyond the bourgeois liberal human look like peace or agon? Does modernity impose peaceful coexistence with impersonal forces of mediocrity on human desire or something else? Deleuze and Guattari ignored these questions, even while proposing that desiring-production is made knowable through Nietzsche’s – rather than Freud’s and Marx’s – engagement with modernity. Knowing the answers to these questions makes the true Right a nascent war machine.

Conclusion

As this concludes the critical exposition of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, it should be noted that several works by both authors – and many by each of them – have been ignored. The most important of these is What Is Philosophy? (1994), the last book Deleuze and Guattari wrote together. But while the book was ignored, its focus on philosophy as an exercise in the creation of concepts was not. In fact, the idea of creation – along with affirmation – has been central to this series of papers.

Affirmation as Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari understand it, is the basis of a noble form of life; that is, a form of life that does not condemn as its primary energy and intensity, that knows and needs nothing of an oppositional force to justify its existence, that is critical in valuation and evaluation on its own terms. In sum, it is the diametric transvaluation of ressentiment. This affirmation is what separates the “true Right” from the liberal Right, the liberal Left, and illiberal Left.

However, this is not always apparent, given our propensity for “outing” our adversaries. But, as the conclusory paper to this series will make clear, to be a successful war machine we need to make use of every single weapon at our disposal. We must also have a greater desire to create than to destroy. As said Deleuze:

What we most lack is a belief in the world, it has been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volumes. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people.[34]

Notes