Tagging the spectral mobility of the stateless body: Deleuze, stasis, and graffiti

Abstract

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility. Working through Difference and Repetition, I argue that Deleuze’s understanding of space emerges from a concern with both immobility and the singular concept of temporality articulated in his concept of the “third synthesis of time.” The essay then turns to two contemporary instances of stateless people immobilized by very different forms of nation state sovereignty in Tunisia and the West Bank. I examine graffiti in both locations and develop a concept of tagging, which considers both the graffiti tag and the digital tag as intersecting technologies of distributed social networks that serve to freeze and make visible the stasis of the stateless person.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• mobility
• migration
• refugees
• critical theory
• Tunisia
• Palestine
• graffiti
• social media
• Twitter
• street art
• space
• time
• West Bank
• Israel

Notes

1. Chapter Nine of The Origins of Totalitarianism orients its discussion of human rights and stateless peoples within the genealogy of the French Revolution. See especially pp. 286–301.

2. See “Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern,” Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey (2010) for a defense of Deleuze against Spivak’s assessment that his thought is not, in a fundamental way, properly postcolonial. (They address this particular point on pages 30–32.)

3. It is worth citing a final example of this “false movement” in Deleuze: the false movement of Hegelian dialectical thinking, which Deleuze contrasts to the kinds of movement found in Nietszche and Kierkagard:

“In all their work, movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement – in other words, the abstract logical movement of ‘mediation’. They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting signs for mediate representations; of inventions, vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.” (1994, p. 8).

Deleuze thus opposes the third synthesis of time to these false or aberrant movements, which can be observed equally in early narrative cinema and in Hegel.

4. In Chapter 7, Kaufman formulates this as a distinctly Deleuzean ethics, or in her term, an anethics, which takes a similar form to Lacan’s famous formula in his Seminar 7. She writes: “I would propose that Deleuze of the late 1960s – and arguably the Deleuzian oeuvre in its entirety – twists such a dictum to the following formulation without ever stating it as such: to not give ground relative to that place where desire is stopped in its tracks” (109–10; italics in the original). The point here is that once again the perspective of stasis, of immobility, functions as a kind of spur to the larger project elaborated by Deleuze, where mobility and space appear as prominent themes.

5. See Miller (1998), especially chapter six, “Beyond Identity: The Post-identitarian Predicament in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.”

6. Hallward’s Out of this World: Deleuze and the Politics of Creation (2006) ends with the following indictment: “Those of us who still seek to change our world and empower its inhabitants will have to look elsewhere” [than Deleuze] (164).

7. Hareetz, April 4, 2009, accessible online at http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/separation-fence-planner-wants-to-reroute-for-jewish-neighborhood-1.287360?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.225%2C2.226%2C [accessed on December 15, 2015].

8. See Yiftachel (2006) Ethnocracy: Land, and the Politics of Identity Israel/Palestine.

(PennPress - the University of Pennsylvania Press, 306 pp. 26 figures, 4 tables).

9. A photograph of this particular piece appears on pp. 132–3 in Parry (2010).

10. Massumi sums up this position in his forward to A Thousand Plateaus thus: “The question is not: is it true? But: does it work?” (Massumi, 1987, p. xv).

11. All translations from Fanon are mine.

12. These two modes of revolutionary organization prompt an important question, which is beyond the scope of the present study: are we to see the tragic situation in Egypt today (in which the country has returned to a form of military dictatorship worse than what the protestors sought to overthrow) as a proof of the failure of these immanent modes of co-ordination, lacking, as they were, in kinds of centralized message center (the FLN) that radio’s “transcendent” network requires?

13. See Twitter’s blog post at https://blog.twitter.com/2012/right-to-left-languages-on-twitter

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