Heavy stuff

This morning I read the opening chapter to “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I found it weighty, but playful – it’s certainly dense material. It’s a bit of a ‘philosophy of our time’ analysis. I’m not convinced that the authors took themselves too seriously in discussing how the world operates like a giant ‘rhizome’. In any case, this paragraph stood out with regards to writing/text:

Then there is Andrzejewski's book, Les portes du paradis (The gates of paradise), composed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of children; a flow of walking with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes; the semiotic flow of the confessions of all the children who go up to the old monk at the head of the procession to make their declarations; a flow of desire and sexuality, each child having left out of love and more or less directly led by the dark posthumous pederastic desire of the count of Vendôme; all this with circles of convergence. What is important is not whether the flows are "One or multiple"- we're past that point: there is a collective assemblage of enunciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more recent example is Armand Farrachi's book on the Fourth Crusade, La dis-location, in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse, or else jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the typography begin to dance as the crusade grows more delirious. These are models of nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war machine and lines of flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State apparatus.