Thursday, February 21, 2008

deleuze.

I thought it was interesting the way that Deleuze refered to Guattari's electronic card systems, that one would be able to leave one's apartment, etc etc., when I instead think of my electronic card (my Brown ID) as letting me in to places. I think maybe this has something to do with the way Deleuze is thinking, a lot about enclosure, being enclosed, and that the greatest horror of this system of the electronic card would be gettin trapped inside a place instead of being unable to get into it. Wouldn't you rather be some place than no place?

It got me thinking that I kinda wished Deleuze had gotten more into talking about exclusions in his essay. I found all of what he had to say extremely interesting, and I would just be curious to see what he would have to say about exclusion as opposed to enclosure.

Maybe we can say, this is one of the problems of modernity--exclusion. I don't know if I'm contradicting what Deleuze is saying or something, but it seems to me that exclusion is a new control, one of the new ways of enclosing people. We work all our lives for fears of exclusion, from like, you know, high school to making sure we're in the right economic class (I guess that's what Deleuze meant by "no longer man enclosed, but man in debt"?) Also people are getting more paranoid about security and personal safety, I feel like there's been a change in the way think about open public spaces. Even when we are in public spaces, we still tend to be held back by invisible forms of enclosing ourselves, by letting our fears, hold us back from openly interacting with other humans, even if they are strangers.

This kind of goes with a line in Deleuze that struck me the most, that the factory was a body that enclosed, but the corporation is a "spirit, a gas." I think that's really interesting, that we are being held back or enclosed or controlled nowadays less by physical constraints, the physical weights, the burdensome machinery of the factory, but rather by intangible, imaginary shackles. We work in offices now where the worst of our problems will probably have to do with a piece of paper, and yet it seems that there is something so much worse now about paperwork than the fatal dangers of heavy machinery.

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