Season's Greetings 2024

All Images: Centenary Square, Birmingham, November 2024

The City offered-up an unironic cascade of festive light and colour this year - or so I thought. Unfortunately, grim reality imposed itself between these shots being taken and their current moment of publication. One of these fairground rides, erected for the festive season, in Birmingham's Centenary Square, partially collapsed a few days ago - causing numerous injuries. Thankfully, there were no fatalities, and reports suggest none of the injuries were actually life-changing.

Immediately prior to these shots being taken, my friend Andrew Smith and I had been gazing at the scene over coffee and idly speculating whether we'd ever have summoned the courage to seek such thrills. Our joint conclusion was, not - preferring to participate in the spectacle as mere spectators. How little we really know...

Anyway, in the interests of pursuing innocent pleasures/lines of flight wherever they seem available, I'll offer condolences and wish a speedy recovery to anyone adversely affected in the process, and Season's Greetings to everyone else.

Merry Christmas

Deleuzeian Diversion 4.1/Liver_Pool 02 (Remix)

 

All Images: January 2022

[Translation]:

Every time a dividing line bursts into a flight line, the rhizome breaks, but the flight line is part of the rhizome. The lines are still connected. Humans, material properties - from Renaissance to Concrete Fascism to Concrete Fascism.

It's never about breaking down organisms or killing oneself, but opening up bodily connections, thinking about overall arrangements, circuits, combinations, levels and thresholds, routes and distribution of intensity, limits and measurable limits. Working as a surveyor.

In contrast, sharp lines do not start from the ground, but generate electricity, like drilling a hole in a pipe; no social system will liberate him from all sides, even if he gives up his pledge to prevent escape. The path of flight is unimaginative and has no symbolic meaning. Nothing is more active than flying wire, be it animals or humans.

Deleuzeian Diversion 4/Liver_Pool 02

Liverpool Docks, January 2022

"There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome.  These lines always tie back to one another.  That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and bad.  You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify evrything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject - anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions.  Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystalize." [1.]

 

"Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor." [2.]

Central Liverpool, January 2022

"Lines of flight, for their part, never consist in running away from the world but rather in creative runoffs, as when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight.  There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic about a line of flight.  There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals and humans." [3.]

Liverpool Docks, January 2022

[1.], [2.], [3.]:  Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 'A Thousand Plateaus' (Trans. Brian Massumi), London/NYC/Dublin, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021/1988