On October 4, 1957, Russia sent Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit as a symbol of their triumph over the US and their

continuance as the global hegemon. The ensuing space race marked the first concrete moment that human conceptions of outer space were founded on the heteronormative discourses of exploration, militarization, and eventually commercialization. Though the space race has ended, these constructions of space have not. Recognizing that outer space is formed and expressed by the social, we seek to explore outer space by problematizing the discourses that give its meaning. Griffin 9 (Penny, Senior Lecturer - Convenor, MA International Relations, The Spaces Between Us: The Gendered Politics of Outer Space, in Bormann, N. and Sheehan, M. (eds), Securing Outer Space. London and New York: Routledge, pp.59-75.)
'Outer space' as a human, political domain is organized around sex, but a 'sex' that is tacitly located, and rarely spoken, in official discourse. The poli tics of outer space exploration, militarization and commercialization as they are conceived of and practiced in the US, embody a distinction between public and private (and appropriate behaviours, meanings and identities therein) highly dependent upon heteronormative hierarchies of property and propriety.1 The central aim of this chapter is to show how US outer space discourse, an imperial discourse of technological, military and commercial superiority, configutes and prescribes success and successful behaviour in the politics of outer space in particularly gendered forms. US space discourse is, I argue, predicated on a heteronormative discourse of conquest that reproduces the dominance of heterosexual masculinity(ies), and which hierarchically orders the construction of other (subordinate) gender identities. Reading the politics of outer space as heteronormative suggests that the discourses through which space exists consist of institutions, structures of understanding, practical orientations and regulatory practices organized and privileged around heterosexuality. As a particularly
This chapter is about sex, but not the sex that people already have clarity about.
dominant discursive arrangement of outer space politics, US space discourse (re)produces meaning through gendered assumptions of exploration, colonization, economic endeavour and military conquest that are deeply gendered whilst presented as universal and neutral. US space discourse, which dominates the contemporary global politics of outer space, is thus formed from and upon institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that privilege and normalize heterosexuality as universal. As such, the hegemonic discursive rationalizations of space exploration and conquest (re)produce both heterosexuality as 'unmarked' (that is, thoroughly normal ized) and the heterosexual imperatives that constitute suitable spaceable people, practices and behaviours. As the introduction to this volume highlights, the exploration and utilization of outer space can thus far be held up as a mirror of, rather than a challenge to, existent, terrestrially-bound, political patterns, behaviours and impulses. The new possibilities for human progress that the application and development of space technologies dares us to make are grounded only in the strategy obsessed (be it commercially, militarily or otherwise) realities of contemporary global politics. Outer space is a conceptual, political and material space, a place for collisions and

Outer space, like international relations, is a global space always socially and locally embedded. There is nothing 'out there' about outer space. It exists because of us, not in spite of us, and it is this that means that it only makes sense in social terms, that is, in relation to our own constructions of identity and social location. In this chapter, outer space is the problematic to which I
collusions (literally and metaphorically) between objects, ideas, identities and discourses. apply a gender analysis; an arena wherein past, current and future policy-making is embedded in relation to certain performances of power and reconfigurations of identity that are always, and not incidentally, gendered. Effective and appropriate behaviour in the politics of ourer space is configured and prescribed in particularly gendered forms, with heteronormative gender regulations endowing outer space's hierarchies of technologically superior, conquesting performance with theif everyday power. It is through gender that US techno-strategic and astro-political discourse has been able to (re)produce outer space as a heterosexualized, masculinized realm.

We seek to use this discussion of space discourse as a springboard into a larger discussion of heteronormativity and the fascist within ourselves. The all-consuming desire to dominate space in the 50s and 60s was not a desire to lead but rather a desire to be lead by heteronormative discourses. Well isolate a few scenarios: The desire to be lead is what Deleuze and Guattari call fascism. This fascism, however, takes place not on the level of the interpersonal collective but on the level of the individual. Heteronormativity and other forms of repression cannot function without someone to desire it to be so. Through the space race, the masses called not only for domination of the Other but also subordination of the Queerness, both symbolic and physical, of themselves. This internal desire for repression steals joy from existence and guarantees mass slaughter.

Seem 83 (Mark, Intro to Anti-Oedipus, xvii)

To be anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo, willfully attacking all reductive psychoanalytic and political analyses that remain caught within the sphere of totality and unity, in order to free the multiplicity of desire from the deadly neurotic and Oedipal yoke. For Oedipus is not a mere psychoanalytic construct, Deleuze and Guattari explain. Oedipus is the figurehead of

imperialism, "colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home ... it is our intimate colonial education." This internalization of man by man, this "oedipalization," creates a new meaning for suffering, internal suffering, and a new tone for life: the depressive tone. Now
depression does not just come about one fine day, Anti-Oedipus goes on, nor does Oedipus appear one day in the Family and feel secure in remaining there. Depression and Oedipus are agencies of the State, agencies of paranoia, agencies of power, long before being delegated to the family. Oedipus is the figure of power as such, just as neurosis is the result of power on

individuals. Oedipus is everywhere.

For anti-oedipalists the ego, like Oedipus, is "part of those things we must dismantle through the united assault of analytical and political forces."4 Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is what gives us faith as it robs us of power, it is what teaches us to desire our own repression. Everybody has been oedipalized and neuroticized at home, at school, at work. Everybody wants to be a fascist. Deleuze and Guattari want to know how these beliefs succeed in taking hold of a body, thereby silencing the productive machines of the libido. They also want to know how the opposite situation is brought about, where a body successfully wards off the effects of power. Reversing the Freudian distinction between neurosis and psychosis that measures everything against the former, Anti-Oedipus concludes: the neurotic is the one on whom the Oedipal imprints take,

whereas the psychotic is the one incapable of being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis. The first task of the revolutionary, they add, is to learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs. Such a politics dissolves the mystifications of power through the kindling, on all levels, of anti-oedipal forces-the schizzes-flows-forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions : orphans (no daddymommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories).

A schizoanalysis schizophrenizes in order to break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick, of our selves! Therefore, my partner and I prefer the following plan: that the United States federal government fully fund and construct a queer colony on the Moon. While we will always defend the enaction of our plan, we believe that the journey which represents how we came to this conclusion is more important. We will argue there is no higher power to determine language for us, and instead we should question what that language DOES, not what it MEANS. We should question what these political affirmations DO, not whether can even discuss them. Our affirmation of the minority identity of the Queer is an echo of a larger struggle against the mechanisms of State Fascism. We are against divisions and articulations of place and order, constantly smoothing out striated spaces. We affirm instead a politics of continuation of constantly seeking new political outlets and investigating their potential. In this sense, our affirmation is one which cannot be tied down or controlled we move beyond the simple binary of beginning and ends and seek to explore the vast middle ground of infinite possibilities Conley in 2006 (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, Borderlines; Deleuze and the
Contemporary World, 95-100)
In their dialogues and collaborations, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari enquire of the nature of borders. They summon principles of inclusion and exclusion associated with borderlines. They eschew expressions built on the polarities of eitheror and in their own diction replace binary constructions with the conjunctive and. Furthermore, in Rhizome, the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, they argue for rhizomatic connections

fostered in language and by andandand to replace what they call the arborescent model of the ubiquitous Western tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In constant movement, the tissues and tendrils of rhizomes

call attention to the horizontal surfaces of the world in which they proliferate. They bring

to their observer a new sense of space that is seen not as a background but a shape that, with the rhizome, moves and forever changes. In the field of play Deleuze and Guattari often produce hybrid, even viral connections and downplay the presence of genealogies conveyed in the figure of the tree bearing a stock-like trunk. Rhizomatic connections form open territories that are not constricted by the enclosing frame of a rigid borderline . In the same breath the two
philosophers argue for smooth spaces of circulation. They take a critical view of striated spaces, replete with barriers and borders that are part of an arborescent mentality. Striated spaces cross-hatched by psychic or real borderlines drawn by the state (social class, race, ethnicities) or by institutions (family, school), prevent the emergence of new ways of thinking. Crucial, Deleuze and Guattari declare, is the mental and social construction of new territories and the undoing of inherited barriers. Institutional, familial and even psychoanalytical striations that

impede a persons mobility in mental and physical spheres need to be erased or, at least, drawn with broken lines. When guilt is at the basis of the unconscious, productivity and creativity are diminished. Movement is also arrested
wherever the state erects barriers between social classes, races and sexes. To facilitate connections and erase mental or physical borders, Deleuze and Guattari want to do away with the state as well as its institutions. It is as anarchists of sorts and with an insistence on aesthetic paradigms that Deleuze and Guattari argue for making connections and for an ongoing smoothing of striated spaces. In the pages to follow, I will argue that today the problem of borders and barriers is as acute as ever. I will probe how Deleuze and Guattaris findings on rhizomes and smooth spaces elaborated in a post-1968, European, context might work today in a changed world-space. Is the struggle still between a paternal, bourgeois state and its subjects? Are the state and its institutions still targeted in the same way? Is the undoing of the subject often through aesthetics still valid, or is there a need for a more situated subject? We will first rehash the Deleuzian concepts of rhizome and smooth space before investigating whether and how these concepts are operative in the contemporary world. Since 1968, the world has undergone many changes. Over the last few decades, decolonisation, transportation, and electronic revolutions have transformed the world. They have led to financial and population flows. Financial flows seem to be part of a borderless world. Today, human migrations occur on all continents. They are producing multiple crossings of external borders that in many places have resulted in local resistance and, in reaction, to the erection of more internal borders that inflect new striated spaces in the form of racism and immigration policy. The ultimate goal for the utopian thinker espousing the cause of rhizomatic thinking is smooth space that would entail the erasure of all borders and the advent of a global citizenry living in ease and without the slightest conflict over religion or ideology. In the transitional moment in which we find ourselves arguing for smooth space can easily lead to a non-distinction between alternative spaces in which goods and currencies circulate to the detriment of the world at large. To account for the transformation specifically of the state and its subjects in a global world, I will argue by way of recent writings by Etienne Balibar for the continued importance of rhizomatic connectivity and also for a qualified notion of smooth space. Striated spaces will have to be continually smoothed so that national borders would not simply encircle a territory. Borders would have to be made more porous and nationality disconnected from citizenship so as to undo striated space inside the state by inventing new ways of being in common. Such a rethinking of borders would lead to further transformations by decoupling the nation from the state. It would open possibilities of rhizomatic connections and new spaces. It would produce new hybrids everywhere without simply a withering away of the state as advocated by Deleuze and Guattari. Currently, subjects (defined as humans who are asseuttis [subjected] to paternal state power) also want to be citizens (who can individually and collectively define the qualities of their habitus or environment). Yet, the latter are still part of the state. They are not yet entirely global, transnational citizens or cyber-citizens. While information networks seem to operate like rhizomes, it is of continued importance to retain the notion of state but to define it with more porous, connective borderlines so as ultimately to disconnect citizens from nationality. Deleuze and Guattari figure with other philosophers, anthropologists or sociologists who, following 1968, pay renewed attention to space. Their focus on space reappears at the very time Cartesian philosophies undergo radical changes due to the acceleration of new technologies and rapid globalisation. Many thinkers Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio condemn what they perceive as the increasing encroachment of technologies that quickly replace more traditional ways of being in the world. People who find themselves out of synch with their environment urge recourse to the body and new ways of using language. Deleuze and Guattari insert themselves into that line of thinking. Their criticism of the static order is twofold. They criticise an inherited spatial model defined by vertical orderings that has dominated the West. In that model, space was considered to be pre-existing. It became a simple dcor for human action. Deleuze and Guattari propose not only a criticism of the static model but also invent an entirely new way of thinking space. They propose a more horizontal and, paradoxically, if seemingly two-dimensional, even more spatial thinking of the world in terms of rhizomatic lines and networks. In accordance with Deleuze and Guattaris way of thinking through connections, the two regimes always coexist in an asymmetrical relation. They can never be entirely separated or opposed. In Rhizome, first published in French in 1976 and translated into English as On the Line, Deleuze and Guattari claim that for several hundred years it was believed that the world was developing vertically in the shape of a tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). The choice of a tree

limits possibilities. The mature tree is already contained in the seed. There is some leeway as to form and size, but the seed will become nothing more than the tree that it is destined to be. In lieu of the tree, Deleuze and Guattari propose an adventitious network, a mobile structure that can be likened to underground filaments of grass or the mycelia of fungi. A rhizome moves horizontally and produces offshoots from multiple bifurcations at its meristems. It changes its form by connecting and reconnecting. It does not have a finite or ultimate shape. Space does not pre-exist the rhizome; rather, it is created through and between the proliferating lines. Rhizomes connect and open spaces in-between which, in the rooted world of the tree, an inside (the earth) is separated from an outside (the atmosphere). Unlike the tree, the rhizome can never be fixed or reduced to a single point or radical core . Its movement is contrasted with the stasis of the arborescent model. In Rhizome the vertical, arborescent model contributes to the creation of striated spaces. In the ebullient imagination of the two authors it appears that the latter slow down and even prevent movement of the kind they associate with emancipation and creativity. Instead of imitating a tree, Deleuze and Guattari exhort their readers to make connections by following multiple itineraries of investigation, much as a rhizome moves about the surface it creates as it goes. Rhizomes form a territory that is neither fixed nor bears any clearly delimited borders. In addition to this novel way of thinking, rhizomatically, the philosophers make further distinctions between smooth and striated spaces. Smooth spaces allow optimal circulation and favour connections. Over time, however, smooth spaces tend to become

striated. They lose their flexibility. Nodes and barriers appear that slow down circulation and reduce the number of possible connections. Writing Anti-Oedipus in a post-1968 climate, Deleuze and Guattari propose rhizomatic connections that continually rearticulate smooth space in order not only to criticise bourgeois capitalism with its institutions the family, school, church, the medical establishment (especially psychiatry) but also to avoid what they see as a deadened or zombified state of things.
They criticise the state for erecting mental and social barriers and for creating oppositions instead of furthering connections. Institutions and the state are seen as the villains that control and immobilize people from the top down. They argue that when the family, the church or the psy instill guilt in a child, mental barriers and borders are erected. The childs creativity, indeed its mental and physical mobility are diminished in the process. Such a condition cripples many adults who have trees growing in their heads. Deleuze and Guattari cite the example of Little Hans, a child analysed by Freud and whose creativity, they declare, was blocked by adults who wrongly interpreted his attempts to trace lines of flight within and through the structure of the family into which he had been born (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 14). The state, too, functions by ordering, organizing and arresting movement, by creating relations of inclusion and exclusion. The state facilitates the creation of rigid and often ossified institutions. It enacts laws of inclusion and exclusion that order the family and the social in general. It tries to immobilize and dominate the social world. Yet the social cannot be entirely dominated. The organising rgime of the order-word is never stable. It is constantly being transformed. Lines detach themselves from fuzzy borders and introduce variations in the constant of the dominant order. These variations can lead to a break and produce lines of flight that bring about entirely new configurations. Of importance in the late 1960s and 1970s is the doing away with institutions and the state that represses subjects. In Anti-Oedipus, the philosophers show how institutions like the family and psychiatry repress sexuality and desire in order to maximize their revenue. They argue for the creation of smooth spaces where desire can circulate freely. In A Thousand Plateaus, the bourgeois state ordered by the rules of capitalism is criticised. Deleuze and Guattari rarely contexualise the state in any specific historical or political terms. Constructing a universal history of sorts, the philosophers note that the state apparatus appears at different times and in different places. This apparatus is always one of capture. It appropriates what they call a nomadic war machine that never entirely disappears. The nomadic war machine eludes capture and traces its own lines of flight. It makes its own smooth spaces. Here Deleuze and Guattari have faith in subjects

who undermine control by creating new lines of flight. These subjects deviate from the dominant order that uses order-words to obtain control. Order-words produce repetitions and reduce differences. They produce molar structures and aggregates that make it more difficult for new lines to take flight. Yet something stirs, something affects a person enough to make her or him deviate from the prescriptive meanings of these words. Deleuze and Guattari would say that the subject molecularises the molar structures imposed by the state. People continually trace new maps and invent lines of flight that open smooth spaces. Deleuze and Guattari call it a becoming-revolutionary of the people. In 1980, the philosophers also claim that humans inaugurate an age of becoming-minoritarian. The majority, symbolized by the 35-year-old, white, working male, they declare, no longer prevails. A new world is opening, a world of becoming-minoritarian in which women, Afro-American, post-colonial and queer subjects of all kinds put the dominant order into variation. Changes of this nature occur at the limit of mental and social territories, from unstable borders without any clearly defined division between inside and outside. They occur in and through affects, desire and language. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-minoritarian
must be accompanied by a withering of the state and its institutions without which any generalized transformation would be impossible. Thought they make clear in Rhizome that the connections they advocate are different from those of computers that function according to binary oppositions, the philosophers keep open the possibilities of transformations of subjectivities by means of technologies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 475).Deleuze and Guattari are keenly aware both of the ways that technologies transform subjectivities and of writing in a postcolonial, geopolitical context. Nonetheless, they write about the state in a rather general and even monolithic way without specifically addressing a given nation-state. It is as if the real villain were a general European concept of state inherited from the romantic age. The institutional apparatus of the state dominates and orders its subjects, preventing them from being creative or pursuing their desires. It keeps them from making revolutionary connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473). To construct rhizomes and create smooth spaces for an optimal circulation of desire, the state, armed with its order-words, has to be fought until, finally, it withers away and, in accord with any and every utopian scenario, all identity is undone.

Our criticism begins with the way political formations occur in the status quo groups formulate themselves around broader ideological and political reference points which act as transcendent signifiers constantly coding and directing potential. Even the most revolutionary aims can be tainted by underlying desires which inform the unconscious. Our affirmation takes place at the level of the preconscious, at the level of desires and instincts. Absent our investigation, change is doomed to failure as desire is tainted by the flaws of past politics. Desires is strangled by the formations of the status quo, turning life against itself, preventing the existence of immaculate joy Deleuze and Guattari 1972 (Anti-Oedipus 345-349)
Libidinal investment does not bear upon the regime of the social syntheses, but upon the degree of development of
the forces or the energies on which these syntheses depend. It does not bear upon the selections, detachments, and remainders effected by these syntheses, but upon the nature of the codes and the flows that condition them. It does not bear upon the

social means and ends, but upon the full body as socius, the formation of sovereignty, or the form of power for itself, devoid of meaning and purpose, since the meanings and the purposes derive from it, and not the contrary . It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are not

identical with this investment. Moreover, the

unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie-since love drives us on. The manifest syntheses are merely the preconscious indicators of a degree
of development; the apparent interests and aims are merely the preconscious exponents of a social full body. As Klossowski says in his profound commentary on Nietzsche, a form of power is identical with the violence it exerts by its

very absurdity, but it can exert this violence only by assigning itself aims and meanings in which even the most enslaved elements participate: "The sovereign formations will have no other purpose than that of masking the
absence of a purpose or a meaning of their sovereignty by means of the organic purpose of their creation," and the purpose of thereby converting the absurdity into spirituality. That is why it is so futile to attempt to distinguish what is rational and what is irrational in a society. To be sure, the role, the place, and the part one has in a society, and from which one inherits in terms of the laws of social reproduction, impel the libido to invest a given socius as a full body-a given absurd power in which we participate, or have the chance to participate, under the cover of aims and interests. The fact remains that there exists a disinterested love of the social machine, of the form of power, and of the degree of development in and for themselves. Even in the person who has an interest-and loves them besides with a form of love other than that of his interest. This is also the case for the person who has no interest, and who substitutes the force of a strange love for this counterinvestment. Flows that run on the porous full body of a socius-these are the object of desire, higher than all the aims. It will never flow too much, it will never break or code enough-and in that very way! Oh how beautiful the machine is! The officer of "In the Penal Colony" demonstrates what an intense libidinal investment of a machine can be, a machine that is not only technical but social, and through which desire desires its own repression. We have seen how the capitalist machine constituted a system of immanence bordered by a great mutant flow, nonpossessive and nonpossessed, flowing over the full body of capital and forming an absurd power. Everyone in his class and his person receives something from this power, or is excluded from it, insofar as the great flow is converted into incomes, incomes of wages or of enterprises that define aims or spheres of interest, selections, detachments, and portions. But the investment of the flow itself and its axiomatic, which to be sure requires no

We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with passion the system that oppresses them, and where they always find an interest, since it is here that they
precise knowledge of political economy, is the business of the unconscious libido, inasmuch as it is presupposed by the aims.

search for and measure it. Interest always comes after. Antiproduction effuses in the system: antiproduction is loved for itself, as is the way in which desire represses itself in the great capitalist aggregate. Repressing desire, not only for others

but in oneself, being the cop for others and for oneself-that is what arouses, and it is not ideology, it is economy . Capitalism garners and possesses the force of the aim and the interest (power), but it feels a disinterested love
for the absurd and nonpossessed force of the machine. Oh, to be sure, it is not for himself or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system. A violence without purpose, a joy, a pure joy in feeling oneself

wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes. Placing oneself in a position where one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where,

according to the aims and the interests assigned to us, one feels something moving that has neither an interest nor a purpose. A sort of art for art's sake in the libido, a taste for a job well done, each one in his own place, the banker, the cop, the soldier, the technocrat,
Not only can the libidinal investment of the social field interfere with the investment of interest, and constrain the most disadvantaged, the most exploited, to seek their ends in an oppressive machine, but what is reactionary or revolutionary in the preconscious investment of interest does not necessarily coincide with what is reactionary or revolutionary in the unconscious libidinal investment. A revolutionary preconscious investment bears upon new aims, new social syntheses, a new power. But it could be that a part at least of the unconscious libido continues to invest the former body, the old form of power, its codes, and its flows. It is all the easier, and the contradiction is all the better masked, as a state of forces does not prevail over the former state without preserving or reviving the old full body as a residual and subordinated territoriality (witness how the capitalist machine revives the despotic Urstaat, or how the socialist machine preserves a State and market monopoly capitalism). But there is something more serious: even when the libido embraces the new body-the new force that corresponds to the effectively revolutionary goals and syntheses from the viewpoint of the preconscious -it is not certain that the unconscious libidinal investment is itself revolutionary. For the same breaks do not pass at the level of the unconscious desires and the preconscious interests. The preconscious revolutionary break is sufficiently well defined by the promotion of a socius as a full body
the bureaucrat, and why not the worker, the trade-unionist. Desire is agape.
carrying new aims, as a form of power or a formation of sovereignty that subordinates desiring-production under new conditions. But even though the unconscious libido is charged with investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In fact, the unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the socius that desiring-production subordinates in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, an overthrown subordination. The preconscious revolution refers to a new regime of social production that creates, distributes, and satisfies new aims and interests. But the unconscious revolution does not merely refer to the socius that conditions this change as a form of power: it refers within this socius to the regime of desiring-production as an overthrown power on the body without organs, It is not the same state of flows and schizzes: in one case the break is between two forms of socius, the second of which is measured according to its capacity to introduce the flows of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest; in the other case the break is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape, and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks, The most general principle of schizoanalysis is that desire is always constitutive of a social field. In any case desire belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production. But these forms can be understood in two ways, depending on whether desire is enslaved to a structured molar aggregate that it constitutes under a given form of power and

gregariousness, or whether it subjugates the large aggregate to the functional multiplicities that it itself forms on the molecular scale (it is no more a case of persons or individuals in this instance than in the other). If the preconscious revolutionary break appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics of a new aggregate, the unconscious or libidinal break belongs to the second level and is defined by the driving role of desiring-production and the position of its multiplicities. It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so-and even remain fascist and police-like-from the standpoint of its libidinal investments, Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an

A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiringproduction. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious
apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire.

characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom; the effusion of antiproduction and death-carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more immortal; the phenomena of group "superegoization ," narcissism, and hierarchy-the mechanisms for the repression of desire, A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose

libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary ; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego. What complicates everything , it is true, is that the same individuals can participate in both kinds of groups in diverse ways (Saint-Juste, Lenin). Or the same group can present both characteristics at the same time, in diverse situations that are nevertheless coexistent. A revolutionary group can already have reassumed the form of a subjugated group, yet be determined under certain conditions to continue to play the role of a subject-group. One is continually passing from one type of group to the other. Subject-groups are continually deriving from subjugated groups through a rupture of the latter: they mobilize desire, and always cut its flows again further on, overcoming the limit, bringing the social machines back to the elementary forces of desire that form them.

Desire manifests itself at the local level the unconscious and resonates into a group order, powering politics. Failure to investigate motivations at the level of desire abandons any possibility of understanding how political formations come to be and ensures serial policy failure Ballantyne 2007 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and
Guattari for Architects" 27-28)
So these

habits of thought, once they are planted in us, take over and refract our view of the world and all our dealings with it. It is probably becoming clear by now how the capitalism and schizophrenia project, across
the two volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, was caught up in every aspect of life. It is set up not as a set of dogmas or even of questions, but as a set of values. It is a work of ethics, and the link with Spinozas Ethics is strong. It too is a project based around immanence rather than transcendence. The desiring-machines that figure so prominently

at the opening of Anti-Oedipus, are the machines that operate without our noticing them to produce the desires that we do notice, and that we would like to act upon. But as mechanisms that operate to produce consciousness, the machines can be pulling in different directions and producing incompatible desires, which might be resolved at a preconscious level, or might surface as conflicted conscious desires. There are thousands upon thousands of these mechanisms, of which we become aware only as they produce effects that approach the level of consciousness, and what goes on amongst them is a micropolitics thousands upon thousands of rhizomatic connections, without any clear limit on where the connections would stop, and without any necessity to pass through a centralized arborescent hub. The scale of operations builds up from a preconscious sub-individual, who is already a swarm of desiring-machines, to a social group, or a crowd, where certain aspects of the people involved connect together to produce a crowd-identity that is unlike that of any of the individuals in the crowd. Crowds will do things that individual people would not (Canetti, 1973). The individuals are to the crowd what desiringmachines are to the individual. Except that one could alternatively say that it is certain of the mass of individuals
desiring-machines that, upon being brought together in the crowd, they are found to be able to act together to produce the group identity. The crowd is a body. Some of the mechanisms that would come into play in the individual

acting alone are somehow switched out of the circuit, and become irrelevant to the crowd, and having been switched off cannot inhibit the crowds actions . So the sense of the individual is even further

problematized, and we see it to be highly divisible. But nevertheless the idea of the individual is deeply ingrained in our language, and if were trying to explain ourselves, we might find that its the most direct word to be using. If were trying to connect with others then we need to be able to allow ourselves, from time to time, to speak like everyone else. As we follow Deleuze and Guattari further into their world, it becomes increasingly difficult to do that, as each straightforward utterance seems, from an alternate view, to have an inaccurate aspect.

And, the 1AC solves its the best way to reform the current political system and qualify ourselves to take action. Plus, this IS the right forum we must problematize, or at least avoid singular engagement with, the good/bad dichotomies that dominate academic policy debate today. Only our constant auto-critique, a new enlightenment which questions moral clarity and achieves progress by striving for the impossible, sufficcently challenges the normative structures preventing the activity from reaching full potential and ourselves form making best informed decisions Zalloua, 2008 (Zahi, Assistant Professor of French at Whitman College , "The Future of an Ethics of
Difference After Hardt and Negris Empire" MUSE)
With his concept of altermondialisation (or alterglobalization, the French word for globalization being derived from world [monde], a term that evokes the globes inhabitants more so than its geography), Derrida similarly foregrounds the continued need to think globalization in terms of alterity and its preservationthe need to think globalization otherwise (altermondialisation) than its current manifestation as a homogenizing capitalism that domesticates difference. In a brief essay entitled Une Europe de lespoir [A Europe of Hope], Derrida challenges

the terms of the debate imposed by a hegemonic and arrogant American power, who frames global struggle as a battle of good and evil. To this model Derrida opposes an engaged Europe, a Europe that
is more social and less mercantile (2004, 3) and that realizes the promises of the Enlightenment.20 Here, the term Europe does not refer toor rather, is not limited toa geographical space with fixed [End Page 141] boundaries, but rather a critical ethos based on the ideals of democracy, human rights, and freedom of thought21: It is once again a question of the Enlightenment, that is, of access to Reason in a certain public space , though this

time in conditions that technoscience and economic or telemedia globalization have thoroughly transformed: in time and as space, in rhythms and proportions. If intellectuals, writers, scholars, professors, artists, and
journalists do not, before all else, stand up together against [the violence of intolerance], their abdication will be at once irresponsible and suicidal. (2003, 125) Like Glissants archipelagoes, which serve as a productive model for rhizomatic thought, Derridas Europe becomes a trope for a deconstructive mode of reading, an example of what

a politics, a reflection, and an ethics might be, the inheritors of a past Enlightenment that bear an Enlightenment to come, a Europe capable of non-binary forms of discernment (2004, 3). To read like a European (a subject position open to allto Americans, for example, who draw their hope from the civil rights movement) is to contest what passes for moral clarity today. Against post-9/11 doxa and its resurrected rhetoric of good and evil, Derrida calls for a productive skepticisma skepticism that does not entail paralysis and nihilism in the face of our powerlessness to comprehend, recognize, cognize, identify, name, describe, foresee (2003, 94), but vigilance and self-critique, a more rigorous mode of analysis, one that resists the lure of moral absolutes and bears witness to the specificity and complexity of sociopolitical reality. Just as Foucault had before him defiantly refused the blackmail of the Enlightenment (the notion
that one is either for it or against it [1984, 42]), Derridas valorization of a European Enlightenment, on one hand, may have surprised if not shocked some of his readers, especially those for whom the father of deconstruction is a nihilist, obscurantist, textual idealist, or more generally, an enemy of Reason. On the other hand, this turn to the Enlightenment does not really represent a deviation in Derridas philosophical path. It is quite consistent with his demystifying critique of the yearning for purity, absolute (that is, ahistorical) meanings or transcendental signifieds (ousia, eidos, consciousness, etc.). For Derrida, this critique takes place first and foremost at the level of language. As Iain Chambers puts it, If what [End Page 142] passes for knowledge emerges within language, then, critical knowledge involves an exploration of language itself (32).22 As such, Derrida recognizes that his genealogical investigationshis denaturalization of key normative concepts (nature, culture, democracy, etc.)never constitute a transgression in the pure sense of the term, as a stepping outside of metaphysics: There is not a transgression, if one understands by that a pure

and simple landing into a beyond metaphysics, at a point which would be, let us not forget, first of all a point of language or writing. Now, even in aggressions or transgressions, we are consorting with a code to which metaphysics is tied irreducibly, such that every transgressive gesture reencloses usprecisely by giving us a hold on the closure of metaphysicswithin this closure. (1981, 12) Nevertheless, despite (or because of) the impossibility of transcending the closure of metaphysics , Derrida tirelessly works to forestall what post-Marxists Laclau and Mouffe call the desire for an ultimate fixity of meaning (112), rethinking creatively and critically (under erasure) the inherited

concepts of metaphysics within that very tradition: a mutation will have to take place in our entire way of thinking about justice, democracy, sovereignty, globalization, military power, the relations of nation-states, the politics of friendship and enmity in order to address terrorism with any hope of an effective cure (Derrida 2003, 106; emphasis added). While calling for an effective curethat is, for a critique that will have a positive impact on the worldDerrida is careful to frame his observation in tentative terms as a hope, cognizant that he is not proposing a blueprint for rational political action . Along these lines,

Derridas appeal to the Enlightenment, then, is not to be understood as a wholesale acceptance of its Reason, but as a tactical use of its tools in an effort to reframe the terms of current debates (about globalization, democracy, cosmopolitanism, hospitality, hybridity, difference, etc.), to prepare if not provide an urgent opening, to see the present as holding some ability to become-other (Nealon 2006, 79). [End Page 143] We should experiment with politics, challenging various norms and realities with potential variations that upset institutionalized political framing. Our act of political defiance is effective because it is not predictable it challenges normalized prescriptive politics which ignore the question of desire Ballantyne 2007 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at Newcastle University , "Deleuze and
Guattari for Architects" 98-99) At certain moments, small changes in the initial conditions or in the balance between the forces that act can produce results that are very different. The ecology of ideas and the flow of capital that produces our dwellings and our cities, that produces a glittering citadel of mirrored towers here, and a flowering of neocolonial suburbs there, can be accepted uncritically or can be opposed, but it helps to understand that the surface appearances are produced by little mechanisms driving greater ones without immediate reference to a wider picture. This is the level at which Deleuze and Guatttari give us an apparatus with which to make an analysis of what is going on, and to see how everything is connected without every part being conscious of having wider connections . In a way these processes are already finding expression in everything around us, including the things we think and do. However another
challenge for the architect as an artist would be to find ways to make us feel the reality of these processes, as Czanne made the landscape speak of its formation: Look at the mountain, once it was fire (Czanne, quoted by Deleuze, 1985, 328, n. 59). Buildings are inescapably expressions of the great forces that shape them, whatever one might try to do about it, and someone looking back at them would be able to see immediately when they were built and maybe understand why, and they would be able to infer these things whatever the intention of the buildings designer. The processes involved in globalization, for example, would escape an individuals control, but could be importantly at work in producing the building and shaping it. But other aspects of the programme might be expressible given the right guidance. One could aim to give voice to the song of the Earth, to show by way of some glimpse of chaos how there were other possibilities, and how the building that emerged was actualized from the chaos of virtualities. A great monument would restructure the world, based on a little order taking a hold in its chaos, and working its way through into the form of the building and into the kinds of lives that can be led by the people who come into contact with it, making a framework for those lives, or part of a framework. A building is formed in a

milieu, but it also has a milieu within and around it, where new concepts and new ways of living can be shaped. The formative territorializations here, though, are things that Deleuze and Guattari themselves would be trying to go beyond , to mobilize and deterritorialize, so that, having developed to a certain extent, one opens up to chaos , makes oneself receptive to what one finds there, steps outside the structured world of habits and common sense, and sees what happens . Just as the subject, oneself, is more clearly and comfortably a self when it is unselfconscious playing backgammon so the object can reach its best form when the designer is dispersed into a multiplicity, that has its minds on other things.

Finally, this affirmation is a record. And like the Led Zeppelin best of, there are some tracks we hate and some we can never forget. Philosophy, like The Zep, is always changing its outlook, content, and sound. Certainly a core is retained, but the excesses to that core have a way of evolving. Brian Massumi, 1983 (Political philosopher and social theorist, with a PhD in French literature from Yale; A Thousand
Plateaus, Introduction)

"State philosophy" is another word for the representational thinking that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory generally. As described by Deleuze,16 it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy . The subject, its concepts, and also the objects in
the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity.

Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and
the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" (truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"17each mind an analogously organized miniState morally unified in the supermind of the State. Prussian mind-meld.18 More insidious than the wellknown practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that

"properly spiritual absolute State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name
"phallogocentrism" (what the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe it as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class). "Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect

the eternal form of a legislating subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secondary . They do not reflect
upon the world but are immersed in a changing state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the circumstances."19 Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x = noty (I = I = not you) with an open equation:.. . + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick + window + . . .). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The modus operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls. The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of

Nomad space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold
that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points.

the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called it the "gay science." Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside thought."20 In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms

"pragmatics" and "schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of philosophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philosophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.21 On a strictly formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the smooth spaces.22 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy. Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip

them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.