fragments of an attempted writing.
through the human pipe dream …


Roger Ebert, the movie critic whose name I can barely even stand, in his typically bankrupt mocking tone lashes out at the remake of the movie Willard with a simple objection which efficiently debunks Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical implications of becoming-rat in the movie Willard. Ebert objects to something obvious and trivial which Deleuze and Guattari refuse to acknowledge: Rats can’t be marshaled around, they are unpredictable, they are characterized by indiscriminate promiscuity and unbound contingency of the pest. Becoming-rat only happens in the fantasies of this Doctor Dolittle of pest control. You never know what a rat is going to do next, objects Ebert, not to mention a pack of rats. Rats' ferocity in generating pestilential contingency is unsurpassable, it is as if nature has finally found a compact enforcer and representative who doesn’t mind being irreverent even to nature, betraying human’s desires and boring itself through the buttocks of God no matter how he positions himself. Rats are endowed with a militant verve for adaptability; they can adapt to any hierarchical order only to turn it to an apparatus of criminal complicity. If god evades all definitions and situates itself beyond all attributes of beings in the manner of the neo-Platonistic God, rats are still capable of sneaking behind him at night to penetrate him with painless efficiency. It is not the question of posture and sitting right, it is all a matter of surprise from behind. They can break into your air-conditioned bourgeoisie dreams by taking the pipes and romping around in the vents. If you build schizophrenic cities they adapt to the paranoid dimensions, if you secure a paranoid house they spread schizophrenically in every direction. They are only mobilized according to an absolute contingency which is marked by double betrayal; simultaneously working against the rectifying movement of social machines and betraying the fluid derangements of a formless nature by dwelling and adapting to hierarchical orders and dimensions when it is necessary. The question is how human desire can afford such treacherous contingency whose sole ambition whether in life or death is complicity or alliance through betrayal. The apex of this treachery to which human desire cannot latch unless within scenarios entailing the elimination of human – or in Willard’s case, ‘ripping human narcissism along with its economical desires and secret repressions into shreds’ – is the image of the sinking infested ship in the middle ages: After consuming the ship to its last morsel of food and the last sailor, rats leave the ship in a mass migration which always heralds the imminent sinking of the vessel. Sink your ship, burn your boats, eat your house, that’s the only way forward.

- read the rest here.

4 comments:

  1. http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/stratigraphies-of-infestation.html

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  2. On the same sort of Deleuzian non-anthropic rhizomes bit...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuF4s-0-0Gs

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  3. Here's something to bring tears of joy to your leftist, ochlophobic eyes, Owen... :-)

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  4. I know the physical resemblance between Christ and Che Guevara can sometimes be breath-taking, but I really think you should probably take some time to figure out just what exactly it is.

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