=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

There are very few people who understand what Gilles Deleuze was writing about in his books. Sad to say, I'm not one of those few. But he said that was okay. You could just use what he said to make up your own stuff. Interpret it any way you want. He encouraged misreadings!

At least that’s how I interpret what he said.

Such misreadings might be examples of what Deleuze called a “line of flight” or a “rhizome” or something. Frankly, I hardly understand more than a sentence or two at a time of his writings. And even then, only when I take them out of context.

But they sure are inspiring!

For instance, he said his massive book “A Thousand Plateaus” could be read at random, a page here or there, in any order. You could read it like a jazz musician might improvise.

I should mention Felix Guattari here. He was Deleuze’s co-author on “A Thousand Plateaus” and “Anti-Oedipus,” also “Capitalism and Schizophrenia.”

I should mention that Deleuze, like just about all the most interesting and coolest of philosophers, was French. He was born and died in Paris.

Deleuze considered schizophrenia a natural byproduct of the dominant capitalist culture. He also considered it a coping mechanism or form of attack for those attempting to escape the hegemonic control of consensus reality.

Take the word “I,” for instance. The schizophrenic refuses to inhabit it. He is multiple. He cannot be reduced to a single name, a single number, a single personality, a single identity. He fractures himself to escape control. For a schizophrenic to restrict him or herself to one identity would be a lie, a betrayal. I is a convention. A convention used to exercise power over us. The schizophrenic refuses—or cannot—play along. The rest of us do. Well, the rest of you do.

Deleuze developed the idea of the “body without organs” which he derived from the writings of Antonin Artaud. I have only the vaguest idea of what a body without organs is. Actually, I have several vague ideas of what it is, but they are all too vague to describe and likely to have very little to do with how Deleuze would have defined it.

Deleuze, like many French intellectuals of his time, was politically radical. He put forward the idea of nomadism as a strategy for undermining the crushing repressiveness of the status quo. It's a dangerous idea, especially today, because it offers a theoretical justification for terrorism. Fortunately, for those in power, especially here in the United States, very few people read Deleuze—or anything else of consequence for that matter—so they have very little to worry about.

Nomadism is a “war machine” or rather a strategy against the war machine in the battle against the capitalist State. It’s become impossible, Deleuze thought, to confront and defeat the capitalist State directly. It’s grown too all-powerful, like a big absorbing blob that digests and self-servingly regurgitates all challenges to its hegemony. Direct confrontation is just what the State (any State) desires. The capitalist State is particularly powerful. It can withstand, absorb, neutralize and commodify any attack or challenge. Think Snoop Dogg selling minivans for Toyota. Think Che Guevera t-shirts.

The State, like any smart enemy, wants you to fight on the field of its choosing. Deleuze says: Don’t do it!

He suggests a wiser strategy. He suggests a cultural nomadism—a revolutionary network of multiplying subcultures which connect rhizomatically with each other, operating independently in cooperation outside of the mainstream, destabilizing the ground beneath the dominant culture with so many tunnels, wormholes, and secret passages that the oppressor eventually collapses from its own weight and unwieldiness, its very obsolescence.

Deleuze called this revolutionary activity “deterritorialization.” (Well, one form of “deterritorialization," anyway). It’s a soft terrorism. Terrorism as passive aggression. (Am I making this up out of whole cloth?!) Without a bomb, without a bullet, you bring down the Empire—by ignoring it, by not participating in it (don't vote, don't join the armed forces, don't support nationalism, don't support consumerism, don't watch mainstream media, etc). By circumventing the State wherever and whenever possible, you live outside it and beneath its reach. As a nomad, you remain mobile, fluid, protean, without fixed identity. (Remember the schizophrenic). You replace the State's "official" definition of reality with one of your (and you subculture's) own choosing.

Huh?

Deleuze suffered respiratory problems throughout his life. He had tuberculosis. He even had a lung removed. As he got older, breathing became more and more difficult. Eventually, everything exhausted him.

He threw himself out a window on November 4, 1995. That would have been a Saturday. He was seventy. Symbolic? Perhaps. He wanted more air and this world could no longer provide him with it. I admire his act of defiance.