Deleuze and SUVs

By Chris Chrappa

What do we notice about road rage, at least specific kinds of it,

that ties in with contemporary times? Who knows, but if you think about it

in terms of SUV's, or the "luxury" or "leisure" vehicles, and what sort of

space they occupy, we might be heading in the right direction. In the old

days, when trains were popping up everywhere like huge metal mobile

mushrooms, they set people "moving" within a certain space, like a prison

barge or a slave ship. If at first one was mobile in the open space of the

earth, able to deterritorialize at the step of a foot, within the trains one

is liable to feel confined as it's not any particular "desiring-machines"

moving at some so-called nomadic speed, but rather some strange enclosed

immobile movement. You sit still, you play cards, you eat food, but youre

moving. You also have a spot from which you leave, a distance that you

travel, a destination where you arrive. Measured space, "striated space" as

D&G say. And the train, being a State apparatus important at first for

imperialist agendas, for instance in India, and in America for manifest

destiny and the conquering and measuring of the great frontiers, is a

fitting mark of what movement is in Capitalist regimes. In any event, once

the world has been absorbed into measurable chunks of territory, and the

train, for example, becomes the instrument, the territory, moving from one

territory to another, one is liable to get antsy, irritable, restless---as,

of course, one becomes absolutely territorialized. Territory at home,

territory on train, territory at destination. It's all there for you, the

world in the palm of your hand, the subject being everywhere at once.

So what did the people on the trains do? Oftentimes, they leaned out

the window and shot buffalo. Buffalo who walk the earth, in open space,

being a sort of nomadic animal, embodying a space lost to the world of

trains. The agression is similar to prisoners who hate nothing more than to

see the new fish, or warden, or guards, walking freely about outside the

dense space of the cell. It's a movement, or an expression, harsh perhaps,

of desire at its barest. The desire to deterritorialize, to move

again--with "speed"--in open space, in ever new frontiers.

Shooting buffalo like road rage. In Fitzgerald's books, the car was a

place where one was free, in control, with all the power of movement

read-to-hand. They were noisy, expensive, machines that were more of a

status symbol than a neccesity. You'd drive on country roads, down city

streets, all for the sport of it, the leisure it embodied. Yet, as the car

became more of a consumer item on a mass scale, a necessity for most, we got

traffic laws, we got freeways and bigger, longer roads--analogous to the

space of the train track. One uses cars to pick the kids up from school, to

go to the market for food, to go to work in the morning, to come home at

night. The car is no longer a symbol for mobility, for the freedom of

movement, but a cage that is always dominated and led from one damn place to

another. A closed space, within a closed space. There is nowhere to go, no

"lines of flight." The SUV and the leisure mobile is an attempt to

counteract this feeling of submission, to put dirvers back in "the driver's

seat," to give them a slicker, better space. But the attempt backfires, for

the same reason that trains became sites for the slaughtering of buffalo.

The nicer it gets, the more fixed, the more it desires to unfix, to make

less nice. Aggression results, like a person being suffocated kicking and

punching and scratching with every ounce of energy in her body. Hence, we

have the teenagers dirving along the strip in downtown, with no intention of

getting out of the car, but with definite intentions to yell and scream and

hurl insults at the pedestrians out on the sidewalk. Perhaps the

pedestrians are not nomads any more than the drivers, but they become so as

the dynamic between the closed space of the automobile and the open space of

the "buffalo" is juxtaposed. The drive by shooting is exemplary in this

regard. An act of aggression, charged with desire for mobility, for

de-territory--paradoxical of course, because drive-bys are generally seen as

acts of "defending" territory. And perhaps they are, consciously, attached

to territory. Yet, the desire for mobility, for open, un-measured and

un-conquered space, manifests itself in the suffocating kicks and punches of

the desiring-machines, the drive-by shooters, not in the express statements

they make about their "rationale". It's like shooting buffalo.

And what do we expect? When some frontier is fixed and rigid, and left

alone for a long enough time, it decays and seeks to make itself a frontier

once again. Baudrillard had an idea that once the world becomes a

closed-bubble, and one can reach any point just from an armchair, then the

vast expanse of the earth and the tiny sphere of personal interaction with

it combine. The world in the palm of your hand. The territory, becoming

more concentrated, more concentrated, more concentrated, until finally----it

implodes, bursting open a new space, a new "frontier, a "deterritory." This

does give some substance to D&G's claim that the nomad actually is the one

who doesn't want to move, who doesn't move. The nomad, rather, creates

lines of flight. And, apart from being assholes, people with road rage are

conduits or modes of expression for the desire for a new and unbounded

frontier where the lines are not plotted and determined beforehand. Routine

and habit are the ultimate monkey's, as they say. What is a territory if

not a space enclosed by the routine and habitual traversing of its

coordinates. The coordinates are one thing, but the routine gives them a

history and a solidity that wouldn't occur if one instead routinely created

new routes, new coordinates, new lines...of flight. That, my friend, would

be a routine of difference, being in the "habit" of difference---that would

be, in short, Repetition; the clarion call of Deleuze's philosophy.

When the world, the frontier, becomes a closed space, an edifice, as I

call it---then active forces will always come to the fore asserting their

desires and affirming themselves. Reactive forces, of course, are still

part of the State apparatus, just like "invalid statement" are as much a

part of any theory of language as "valid statements." What is the real

"enemy"??? War machines, or ABSURDITY. Homo sacer, right? What cannot be

admitted to the polis, what is banished and ostracized. Meaningless

statements (the green is or...) and meaningless gestures (road

rage)--conventionally frowned upon but perhaps filled with a certain charge

that we generally miss. After all, the building of the territory wasn't

pretty, why should we expect different when it comes to destroying it? It

doesn't seem to be a case for ethical prescription, but something rather

that just will happen whether we like it or not. There are probably more

constructive or creative ways to deterritorialize, but when those ways are

blurred or hidden from sight--like homeless people, homo sacer, who are not

allowed to sleep or be out on the streets after 12:30---then the desire

itself will blindly apply itself to whatever node it sees fit to destabilize

or destroy. Visibility is key, and if one sees no way out, no line or wave

to catch that springs out to the open sea, then one will blindly crush and

sever any perceived edifice in attempts to make a certain plane of

destabilization ready-to-see. We spoke of homeless people. In Sarasoate it

is a law that they cannot be seen on the streets after 12:30 at night, lest

they be arrested and brought to jail. After three times, they are locked up

for a good while and most likely put to work for big companies who want

their labor but not their names. So, it's not that there can't be homeless

people, it's that we have to remove them from our line of sight, to have the

impression that there are no homeless people, for the very simple reason

that they are dangerous to the State apparatus. They, in many ways, are a

testament to war machinic activity, utterly outside the great despositif,

caving in the foundation of the edifice, or Empire. In essence, they fuck

up our space, crack it open like an egg and fry that sucker until we get the

point. And not just homeless people, but everyone who is insistent on

creating new territories-- artists, professors, writers, directors, small

business owners, political dissidents...whatever. The point is not to be

just some wild and lawless blob. On the contrary, the point is to create

new rules and new conditions, and to persistently be creating them, revising

them, destroying them when necessary. Anarchists are the least

"anarchistic" people!!!! If you know what I mean.

Anyway, I just had some idea about that while reading today, and having

a nice chat with a friend of mine, and I had to get it out and test the

waters. I hope its not utterly moronic, and if it is, as I generally say,

at least it might be entertaining. What a world!!!

Later comrade,

War Machine Chris.