christian jil r. benitez
from I Shall Be Missing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia attempted to counter the notion of fascism, especially in the form of identity, which means to say that not only did these theorists argue against a purist notion of identity (how a self is exclusively A or B only) or a fragmented one (how a self can be both A and B at the same time), but went as far as to debunk the concept of identity itself as something that is, to some extent, stable and certain, hence the proposition: To think of the ‘self ’ as amorphous and desiring, capable of ever shifting, establishing connections and flows, all for the sake of the desire for these alone and never for other motives, giving matter more on the paths, the bridges, and the roads; the process itself, on what is at hand, the now, until the paths, the bridges, and the roads cease connecting and flowing, the time to surgically remove the ‘self ’ from other ‘selves,’ to continue walking, to shift once more, as ever amorphous, as ever desiring. In Ferdinand de Saussure’s Nature of the Linguistic Signs, language, being representative in nature as signifiers for the signified objects, was theorized to be essentially arbitrary, which means to say that the sound coming from the vocal folds, rolled and bent by the tongue, moderated by the teeth and the lips in order to cut through the wind to eventually become a word with a meaning it is bound to carry over time was assigned out of random choice to the said meaning—a randomness, he wrote, that would not be found only in the languages that are onomatopoeic in nature, meaning those languages whose words whose very meaning are manifested viscerally upon their utterances, which then means to say that meaning is found not only in the word-meaning correspondence on the abstract level, but also in the concrete level through the materiality in the sensation of the utterance.
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