Nietzsche Blog

 

“The Truth is Out There”

 

“The judgment ‘good’ does not derive from those to whom ‘goodness’ is shown!  Rather the ‘good’ themselves—that is, the noble, the powerful, the superior, and the high-minded were the ones who felt themselves and their actions to be good—that is, as of first rank—and posited them as such in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and plebian”(12).

 

In this statement Nietzsche lays out his poststructuralist argument that there are no essential morals or “good” people and “evil” or bad people only interpretations of these terms as constructed by people.  There are no essences to these terms or these people instead they are given meaning through historical and cultural connotations—connotations derived from power.  In the above quotation it is obvious too that Nietzsche believes that those in power have the ability to construct these meanings in their favor so that they define themselves as “good” or “moral” people because of their positions of power.  Nietzsche also asserts on the next page (13) that the power to name those who are “bad” is held by those who have the power to define themselves as “good” and “moral” people. 

 

Nietzsche uses a genealogical method in order to trace how the connotations of “good” and “bad,” “moral,” and evil have changed depending on cultural and political circumstances.  In doing this Nietzsche details the fact that there is no inherent truth in the meaning of “good” and “bad” but that the truth is constructed depending on the circumstance.  Prior to reading this I had only skimmed over a bit of Nietzschean philosophy never understanding its purpose.  Now I see how Nietzsche is a pivotal text for French post-structuralism.  Post-structuralism’s basis lies at the idea that there is no inherent truth or essences within human beings, but that we are instead products of both discourse and bodily positionality (as I think Nietzsche alludes to in the idea of “slave mentality.)  Bodies are positioned within discourse and language and the ways in which these bodies are constructed determines whether they are imbued with power or are marginalized and lack power.  But there is no truth of these bodies; instead they are constructed as true, as good, or as evil and bad.   

 

This may be a trite example because it does not necessarily deal with marginalization of bodily positionalities--but instead marginalization of ideas—and the ways in which truth becomes constructed as Truth or allows for a multiplicity of truths. This example looks at how true is/are Truth/truths.   The television show the X-Files is a prime example of how truth is constructed and posits that there may be many versions of truths to be uncovered.  The show focuses on the characters of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as two FBI agents faced with a list of unsolved cases known as the X-Files-the secret files, or the files nobody else is interested in dealing with.  Mulder believes in the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, that new-aged monsters exist, and that some people possess super human powers-things that cannot be explained through any conventional means.  He is obsessed with uncovering the Truth of these matters, in fact a poster in his office reads, “I Want To Believe,” with a flying saucer in the background.  Mulder wants to believe that there is something out there to believe in other than what he or anyone else has been told. Scully is assigned to be Mulder’s partner because she is a medical doctor and she is supposed to disprove all of Mulder’s findings through positivist medical science.  Scully believes that science can prove the Truth in any situation that there are always, Always, ALWAYS scientific reasons for the things they encounter.  Until she begins to experience some inexplicable phenomena of her own, experiences, which cannot be explained through positivistic science. 

 

Along with Nietzsche, Mulder believes that the people in power, mainly in the government, have possessed the power to construct the truth, the reality that we believe in everyday.  He believes that the government is in secret possession of proof of alien life forms and other conspiracies that have harmed the American people.  In this sense those in power try to retain an image of “goodness” or “morality” while making Mulder look like a fraud or someone who is bad or at least doing “bad” and unnecessary work.  While Mulder does not believe in the precise method of truth that science can uncover he does believe that there is a Truth lying in the Department of Defense, Roswell, the sky.  Somewhere there is Truth among the lies.  There is Good or Light among the Evil or the Darkness.  To Nietzsche there is no Truth, only interpretations of experiences and bodies through discourse and language.  There is no Truth lying in a building (the Pentagon) or even in someone’s head (Cigarette Smoking Man) because those truths can only be understood through our interpretations of them.

 

I too agree with Nietzsche that there is not one Truth but many variations of truths, that truth is influenced by society, culture, and politics, and history.  There is no one Truth to search for and uncover but many truths, many experiences, many interpretations that are valid and important to know about.  Morality, goodness and evil like truth also have various interpretations depending on who is in the power to construct these terms.  If we associate morality with Truth than we assume that only those experiences deemed “good” or “moral” are True-leaving out a variety of other experiences.  For communication researchers it is important to recognize that Truth may not exist, that we may never “get to the bottom” of something completely-especially not with numbers or science.  Instead we have to listen to the diverse and varied stories of experiences, whether they are of UFOs or marginalized subject positions in order to uncover truths-truths that are subjective yet potentially shared among groups of people sharing similar experiences. 

 

I include this clip just to give a sort of synopsis of the show.  There is also a very interesting quote in the middle where a sort of philosopher-scientist says, “Truth is as subjective as reality,” and I feel that this really helps to sum up at least a bit of what Nietzsche’s poststructuralist argument is.

 

Class Blog #5

Agamben

--

The Pleasure of Organizing Community

I am building on my own question posed in class, “What does organizing under the principles of non-identity look like?”  I have a personal investment in this because I do believe in the power of political organizing not around essentialized identities but still taking into account the difference of marked and marginalized bodies.

I believe Agamben offers us a useful tool for thinking about new and different ways of creating social movements.  As Agamben writes, “Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition.  In final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity—even that of a State identity within the State…What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging”(85).   

Agamben is challenging us to defy the State’s way of making people intelligible through identities. Agamben suggests to us that the State can only understand humans through their classifications so the only way to create social change is to disrupt the categorizations, the fixidity of identity categories. This is much in line with radical queer politics, which attempt to organize not under essentialized identity categories (woman, gay, black etc…) but instead organize around political issues like health care and poverty.  Unfortunately radical queer politics while preaching a non-identity based politics has unfortunately created a non-identity “identity” based politics, which continues to locate sexuality as a primary focus.  Queer politics as it was originally conceived tended to put queer at the forefront foregoing differences within its population.  I think Agamben offers us a solution to this problem through the concepts of singularity within community. 

Agamben discusses singularity as “neither universal nor an individual included in a series but rather ‘singularity insofar as it is whatever singularity.’ In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class”(1).  In this sense singularity is something that is a part of a larger group while still maintaining a sense of individuality.  This holds true for the possibilities of organizing social movements where groups made up of somewhat unique individuals gather together for political issues despite their identifications.  For example having people who do not identify as necessarily feminist or women organize for reproductive rights, despite the fact they may not possess the ability or desire to reproduce at all.  These groups also do not have to go about organizing in traditional means either but may instead use non-traditional methods of resistance-those methods not recognized by the State not organized protests where there are barriers and police officers lining the march/rally route.  Instead it may be more beneficial to hold group dinners at someone’s house raising consciousness for reproductive rights for all people (those of color, women and men dealing with forced sterilization, comprehensive sexual education complete with access to information on birth control, informed decisions, as well as information on those questioning their normative sexuality.)  Then maybe through a deliberative process the group could come to some decisions and then bring the issues to the State-all people individuals yet in a group come together to support the differences within their group all while advocating an issue.

I am open to this idea-I do think we need to be careful of identity based politics as Butler argues.  They lead to the potential alienation and exclusion of people not identified with that group.  As Ricki Wilchins  a gender and queer theorist notes "Movements and organizations become stronger when they welcome people as members instead of allies."  In this sense a movement becomes composed of people focusing on an issue together as opposed to a group which needs allies because the group is comprised of common identity excluding those who vary from it. 

However, I think it is naïve to think that people will not feel some sort of bond with those people who seem to have a similar experiences and positionalities.  Sometimes it is only in the groups we feel identified with that we feel "at home." Maybe this is a social and cultural construction but for people who face oppression because of their marked and marginalized bodies it doesn't seem to matter because these constructed identities connect them.  Maybe it is a connection of oppression as opposed to identity and I feel this is reasonable 

I think we need a balance of both kinds of activism noting the need for spaces for groups of similar conceptions of their identities yet also be open to a non-identity based politics where we come together over issues and not identities.  There is space for both of these types of organizing each with a different political agenda in mind. 

Class Blog #5

Butler

--

Troubling Gender

I deal with sex, gender, and desire everyday, every hour, every minute.  I have to assume that they matter because they matter to me.  But do gender, sex, and desire really matter?  Does identity matter?  How can we understand desire without understanding sex and/or gender?  Do my identities located at the intersections as a white, middle class, femme, lesbian, woman and the other multiplicity of categories and identifications matter?  Does my body matter?

I begin with something near and dear to my heart-“drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch and femme identities”(187) or what Butler terms subversive bodily acts.  While I want to go into this subversive performance by offering a selection of a narrative piece I am working on-I want to contextualize the subversion of these bodily performance through Judith Butler’s work on sex/gender/desire. 

Butler aims to denaturalize the connection we associate with sex/gender/and desire saying that they produce one another that they are rooted in a place of discourse, culture, social construction, and history.  We often understand or are told that sex is biological, determined by one’s genitalia and their chromosomes.  It is “only natural” to classify a person as male or a female-to make people intelligible.  A common assumption is that this essentialized understanding of sex leads to the cultural inscriptions of masculine or feminine practices upon a sexed body.  Then based on the notions of male/female, masculine/feminine we can decipher normative sexuality.  The dichotomous bodies “belong” together-they “complete” each other.  Anything other than that is considered deviant, abnormal, or at the very least non-normative.  This is what Butler considers the “heterosexual matrix,” or the “respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire”(31). 

If we eradicate the naturalization and the stability of the categories of sex and gender then how can we understand desire?  We attempt to categorize sexual practice based on whether or not they are engaged in by “same” or “different” sexed people.  But what if our attempts to gender and sex people are a matter of making them fit into a pattern of heteronormativity?  Then the politics of the body of sex/gender/and desire cannot be said to create one another but are instead produced through one another. 

But these categories of sex/gender/desire have to be important-they have to matter because bodies live them everyday.  All bodies to some degree, but especially those bodies, which make a point of defying the heterosexual matrix, are implicated in structures of power, which, condemn them and attempt to re-discipline their bodies back into normative conceptions of gender/sex/and desire.  But what about those people who choose not to conform despite the pressures?  Are their subversions actually subversive- are they resistant? Again I have to believe they are because I experience the effects of people’s non-conformity everyday both positive and negative.

I am going to offer a short passage from a paper I will be presenting at NCA on a narrative performance panel.  My paper is something like “Femme Drag: Subversive Performances of Female Same-Sex Desire.” 

 *****

I wake up in the morning and I put on my gender and sexuality identity.  Everything I do in the morning while habitual is done with intent.[1]  The eyeliner I put on my top lid, lining it with careful precision, the grey ankle boots I place on my feet-they are intentional choices.  How am I going to put on my white, femme, lesbian, self today?  You see I need my eyeliner and boots in this crazy world we live in because for a femme lesbian they are both my resistance and my protection.  They are my subversion, my empowerment, and my survival.  You see they are my resistance-something that makes me feel my queer-ness, something that while everyday and mundane, set me apart from all of those people who “subconsciously” perform femininity and masculinity according to the way society has told them to.  But they are also my armor against being called a dyke and queer (and not in that good way.)   

And isn’t that just a little bit radical?  Maybe I am laughing at my own joke here but isn’t it a little bit queer to perform femininity and do it for the purpose— no not the purpose— the desire of other women-preferably those already lesbian (but that’s always negotiable.) And what about performing it for women who don’t look like women at all?  I like my girls to look like boys.  I say eff the patriarchy—the system that tells me my eyeliner and my boots can’t be my resistance— that these things normalize instead of queer me.

 Because my queerness…I want it to stand on it’s own.

 My femme drag performance should be— no it is enough to cast me in the role of lesbian, of queer, of gender norm defying queer lesbian.

 *****

So I include this here to sort of take Butler up on her notions of subversive bodily performances, but also to problematize her the notion that these resistive practices are taken up solely by those defying the “heterosexual matrix.”  

Butler writes, “If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance.  As much as drag creates a unified picture of a ‘woman’…it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which falsely naturalized as a unity through regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence”(187). 

I am indebted to these performances of a gender that doe not cohere with its sex -I am in a relationship based off of butch/femme performance.  I am indebted to the way these performances stand out and actually mark my own body as a lesbian or a queer.  These are the performances which, on a daily basis are marked as “different” performances, performances that categorize people as others.  These are the bodies that walk around constantly scrutinized and marginalized.  They are the gender-queer bodies the ones usually seen as fragmented, unfixed, “fluid.”  These are not the bodies in “happy limbo of non-identity” (Butler 143) as assumed by Foucault; they are the bodies on trial.  But I want to suggest that the performances need not be solely based on those who do not conform their gender to their sex but those who make choices to either conform or not in the little everyday practices.  I believe femme drag is a subversive performance because it also defies the heterosexual matrix, through the everyday practice of putting on eyeliner and strapping on boots.  The femme in drag is not a unified subject but a subject full of inconsistency, fragmentation, and multiplicity.  While maybe the gender and sex are coherent in the femme lesbian performance, the connection to desire is anything but.  And if we believe that sex/gender/desire operate under some naturalized connection instead of as an entangled process of production and performance than a woman performing femininity but desiring women blows that connection apart.  It proves Butler's theory correct there is no cohesive subject, no subject that just because she is female who performs femininity-and should for all intensive purposes be heterosexual-is not. There is no sex and gender which is beyond desire, nor desire beyond sex and gender, however, there are ways to resist the normative ideas of all three.  Femme drag is one way I see this subversive performance occurring through fragmenting the performance of femininity with same-sex female desire-same-sex butch desire.  While the femme in drag is fraught with constraints of identity categories, categories that inform her ability to perform her femininity, racial and class constraints, identities that do "indeed" matter, this performance is subversive because it is never fixed as one thing.  Always changing, sometimes in corsets, sometimes times in business suits, and other times simply a form of becoming, of consciousness, of desiring.  Of changing desires, of changing identities, all while maintaining the consciousness the constraint of femininity.  It is complicated, it is complex, it is performance, it is conscious choice, it is limited choice, it is an existence unlike any other.      

All bodies to some degree are on trial.  All of our bodies are implicated in a system, which is quite rigid in its categorization.

But we have ways to create subversive bodily performances, while limited to exist within the discourse as nothing can intelligible can exist in this abject space, we have ways to resist.  These performances may involve only a certain level of heightened consciousness, others, are put into practice.  These little moments of resistance, of defying a gender norm (not shaving legs or allowing oneself to cry), of practicing same-sex desire while being identified as a femme, these practices do carry weight.  While they may not be the large social movements of our time, they are the mini revolutions within the everyday.  And they matter, because I can work with preschoolers as a femme lesbian and be a good teacher, a role-model, and a leader, not a pedophile or molester as some would claim.  I see my girlfriend-a butch- in a Speedo swimsuit with a mohawk teaching swimming lessons at the pool where she works, simply giving children and adults the insight into non-normative gender performances-ones they may not see anywhere else during their day.  Raising new consciousness, changing people on a micro-level, forcing them to deal with the queers, the people they may reject.  I see these performances as subversive, see them working in covert ways, creating resistance and promoting social change and awareness simply to other non-normative ways of being.

These things have to matter. 

Identities have to matter

Queering Identity has to matter 

Theorizing desire has to matter 

I have to believe it matters.   

Class Blog #4

De Certeau

--

Writing the Body Into Being

“There is no law that is not inscribed on bodies.  Every law has a hold on the body.  Through all sorts of initiations…it transforms  them into tables of the law, into living tableaux of rules and customs, into actors in the drama organized by social order…It makes its book out of them.  These writings carry out two complementary operations: through them, living beings are ‘packed into a text’…and on the other, the reason…of a society ‘becomes flesh’(140). 

I quote de Certeau at length here because I feel that this passage illustrates a way to reconcile text and the body-of bringing the body into being-of writing the body into being (Conquergood, Madison, Pollock et al).   In this passage de Certeau lays out the problematics of simply writing the body as though the body were simply a text.  When we think of the body solely as a text to be analyzed we forget its human-ness and the politics associated with its everyday experience.  In textual analysis we tend to examine the body as something to read to interpret, while forgetting that it is a living being, constantly in motion, constantly fluxuating its position. 

Performance theory is one way to reconcile the textualism that the academy privileges while also writing about the body as living, breathing, moving being.  De Certeau has been taken up (in fact the aforementioned passage specifically) in performance studies as a way to account for texts but also for performances—both staged and as everyday practice.  As Dwight Conquergood notes, “The hegemony of textualism needs to be exposed and undermined.  Transcription is not a transparent or politically innocent for conceptualizing or engaging the world”(147).  The body is more than a text, it is a product of historical, political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances. 

De Certeau is a good jumping point for thinking about the politics or “the laws” that become inscribed on bodies.  We embody the practices of the law, “Sit-down, be quiet, pay attention!”  These are not laws, which are written by lawmakers and voted on by those in charge, but are instead hegemonic practices ordering people to conform.  In this same respect institutions also attempt to conform to hegemonic white, male, heterosexual, middle-class ways of being—ways that ignore other potentialities of being. However texts in their more traditional form do inscribe laws onto bodies, when sodomy laws were in place restricting the practice of same-sex desire, creating a barrier of access to reproductive rights by creating parental consent laws, and as Conquer good notes, the bureaucratic paperwork presented to immigrants (also discussed by Richard in class).  These laws, which are written, try to control and restrain bodies, especially the bodies of whom we conceive of as oppressed.

Foucault expresses the concept of “subjugated knowledges”  or the ‘knowledges at the bottom of the hierarchy.”(Conquergood, 147) as the ways that those marginalized people’s experiences and voices are often invalidated.  Often times it is these knowledges that are resistive to dominant discourses and dominant performances of power.  These “subjugated knowledges make the body central to resistance.  This is what Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga describe as, “theories of the flesh” or theories of the body as key and central to writing about human subjects—especially in regards to the modes of power created by the racializing, classing, queering, and gendering, of bodies.  In this way we can never separate the body from the politics, which, govern it, but we do have agency and the power to resist.  When a person at the bottom of the hierarchy chooses to not sit when told, or protest against a war incited for pitiful fallacies and is physically arrested, those other ways of knowing and being gain some power.  They break the inscription of law on the body.

I think de Certeau would agree with Conquergood—who has also influenced my understanding--that we should not rid the world of texts, but that we must think also of the bodies and performances alongside them.  We must look at and critique textuality as the assumed norm for scholarship, which, often simply looks at the body as text, as a book (even when used metaphorically) and think of and depict the ways that bodies in their humanity, in their very existence can never be truly captured and represented in a text.  Through the intervention of performance however, and the re-centering of the body, we may be able to do a better job describing the practices of everyday lives of ordinary people where their knowledges become pertinent to furthering new knowledges.  In this process marginalized people not only are able to tell their experiences but in the telling and accepting may be able to heal.

Class Blog #3

Deleuze and Guattari

--

“Every State Line”

So this week to me so far has definitely been the most challenging because Deleuze and Guattari

offer very obscure examples, which our colleague Brian assures me is the point.  He told me that

if I think that Deleuze and Guattari are trying to create a concrete way of being or even 

understanding then it will never make sense because they are actually talking about a process of

“doing.”  I think this gets at the concept of “Being” versus “becoming.”  If we are something (are

as a conjugate of the word to be) then that is all that we are, if we are in process of becoming 

something then we have the potential to change who and what it is we are based on what we are

doing.   Confusingdefinitely, but in this abstract way sort of makes sense.  If Nomadology and 

the War Machine are constantly in flux then we escape the ideas that we are in fact something, 

that we have essences.  Instead we are always a process of movement, I don’t really like the 

word fluid, but maybe as Christina said, it is an idea of water, ocean, of liquid.  Maybe we ebb 

and flow back and forth sometimes between the War Machine and resistance and the State.  In 

contrast to Nomadology is the idea of the State, which tries to discipline people and bodies into 

certain accepted norms.  In the State bodies are policed in ways that they are forced into 

understandings of “Being,” making it easier for the State to deal with a discipline.

While Deleuze and Guattari would probably not approve of the next part of my blog for me it is 

relevant.  I am going to offer a contemporary albeit imperfect example of the ways that 

Nomadology and the State work together.   This was inspired while driving home on Monday 

and feeling emotionally exhausted and having NO clue what I was going to write about.  

Luckily my IPod was on shuffle and this song came on

and finally some of this theory of Nomadology made some sense to me.  A caveat as I stated 

before is that this is not a perfect example, but for me helped me to grapple with the text and 

make it applicable to me.I heard the song “Every State Line” by Ani DiFranco.  I am going to 

post the lyrics and a clip from the song and then talk about how I see it making sense and how I 

see it as flawed also.

Every State Line: Ani DiFranco

I got pulled over in west Texas


so they could look inside my car


he said are you an american citizen


I said
yes sir
so far


they made sure I wasn't smuggling


someone in from Mexico


someone willing to settle for america


cause there's nowhere else to go


(chorus)

and every state line


there's a new set of laws


and every police man


comes equipped with extended claws


there's a thousand shades of white


and a thousand shades of black


but the same rule always applies


smile pretty, and watch your back


I broke down in Louisiana


and I had to thumb a ride

got in the first car that pulled over


you can't be picky in the middle of the night


he said


baby, do you like to fool around


baby, do you like to be touched


I said


maybe some other time


fuck you very much


(chorus)

I'm in the middle of alabama


they stare at me where ever I go


I don't think they like my haircut


I don't think they like my clothes


I can't wait to get back to New York City


where at least when I walk down the street


nobody ever hesitates


to tell me exactly what they think of me


(chorus)


a little town in pennsylvania


there was snow on the ground


a parked in an empty lot


where there was no one else around


but I guess I was taking up too much space


as I was trying to get some sleep


'cause an officer came by anyway


and told me I had to leave


(chorus)

--

Every State Line Video Clip

--I see this song as a way that someone may negotiate the constraints of the War Machine, and the

State.  In this song DiFranco is a trope for “nomad” she is constantly moving from place to place

and in every new state that she enters (as in United state of America) she is faced with different

mechanisms of policing by the State.  Deleuze and Guattari use the examples of chess and Go to 

explain the ways that the State and the War Machine operate (3-

4).  

As in the game of Chess there are only certain moves that certain pieces can make, DiFranco is 

not free to be in “perpetual movement”(4) as is characteristic of the game Go.  Every time 

DiFranco gets “going” in her nonnormative directions she is stopped by the State or the police 

and the rules set in place for that specific state do not allow or her freedom of movement.  As 

Deleuze and Guattari articulate the state is “quite perfect, quite complete”(14). There are only 

certain ways to move in these states or the State, not with immigrants, not hitchhiking, not 

appearing different. In these State apparatuses there is already a completed structure in place to 

discipline behavior.  She is not supposed to park in an empty lot, not supposed to speed, she 

doesn’t fit in with her haircut and clothes-

the parts of her that may be more in line with the war machine.  However, as they also clarify 

Nomadology is not solely defined by movement but the ability to hold ground, is territorial over 

their space.  In some instances I think she does this quite well, as in her response to the man who

wants to pick her up from hitchhiking.

Deleuze and Guattari also use the metaphor of the root and the rhizome, which, I think Richard 

articulated very well in class: that the root is something that is grounded in one place.  Rhizomes

on the other hand, are plants that have shoots sprouting from them in different directions. The 

State is something —

something that only allows for movement in one a specific direction.  For DiFranco the State are

the states that she enters and is prevented from engaging her nonnormative somewhat nomadic 

behaviors. New York City on the other hand is the rhizome a place that may have some sort of 

permanence but also has random shoots where she feels a sense of the ability to move (walk 

down the street).  Her nomadic performance can permeate the State through the rhizome .  She 

may have roots in a State or the State, but a rhizome like a potato is able to spread in all different

directions and not into one specific location.  Thus DiFranco is able to be different in a place, 

which, may still be a State in the sense of maintaining a norm and where she maintains roots but

where she feels she is more accepted and able to move about somewhat freely.  Although in 

New York City she may still be disciplined, it is a different sort of discipline not hegemonic 

implied norms, but norms spoken allowed, named and thus, able to be grappled with.

And this is not a perfect example because as Deleuze and Guattari suggest nomads do indeed 

occupy space outside of the State, although I think that the State and War Machine constantly 

influence one another.  They suggest that nomads occupy smooth spaces and change the spaces 

that they occupy but that “smooth space is controlled by these two flanks [the forest and 

agriculture] thus, showing the constraints of nomadic smooth space.  So the song isn’t perfect 

but I think it can be useful.

So what—

you may be asking me?  What does it mean to understand this theory in terms of the song or on 

its own?In terms of the song I think it is an interesting example of how to conceptualize the 

somewhat nomadic identity of a person negotiating the State.  And I think it is important because

in this sense it refers to identities and how States attempt to discipline identities into certain 

norms and patterns of behavior.  The War Machine (while constrained) offers a way to be 

resistive to the State regime.  While we may not have infinite possibilities for resistance the War

Machine allows us some ability to find liminal spaces outside the State, where resistive 

identifications or “disidentifications” may be performed.  The War Machine limits DiFranco, 

she does not have total freedom, because even in the game Go there is a purpose whether it is 

strategy or not.  So this theory may not give us a prescriptive way to be and act but offers a 

process of negotiation or strategy to deal with the constraints of the State and constraints of theWar Machine so that we may ebb and flow between them in a way that allows us to be engaged in a constant process of doing of becoming