Landscapes
The valley watered by the Mississippi seems created for it alone; it dispenses good and evil like a local god.… The surface of the earth is covered with granitic sand and irregularly shaped stones through which a few plants just manage to force their way; it looks like a fertile field covered by the ruins of some vast structure.… [I]t is the most magnificent habitation prepared by God for man, and yet one may say that it is till only a vast wilderness.…
A stormy, foggy ocean washed its shores; it was girt round by granite rocks and wide tracts of sand; woods of somber and melancholy trees covered its shores; there was hardly anything but pine, larch, ilex, wild olive and laurel.… In the dark and gloomy depths of the forests the air was always damp from the thousands of streams flowing through them, as yet uncontrolled by man. There was nothing but some flowers, berries, or birds.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
These Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
— H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
The primitive machine is not ignorant of exchange, commerce, and industry; it exorcises them, localizes them, cordons them off, encastes them, and maintains the merchant and blacksmith in a subordinate position, so that the flows of exchange and the flows of production do mot manage to break the codes in favor of their abstract or fictional qualities. And isn’t that also what Oedipus, the fear of incest, is about: the fear of a decoded flow? If capitalism is the universal truth, it is so in the sense that makes capitalism the negative of all social formations. It is the thing, the unnamable, the generalized decoding of flows that reveals a contrario the secret of all these formations, coding the flows, and even overcoding them, rather than letting anything escape coding. Primitive societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at the end of history, it is capitalism that results from a long history of contingencies and accidents, and that brings on this end. It cannot be said that the previous formations did not see this Thing that only came from without by rising from within, and that at all costs had to be prevented from rising.
— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
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Incredible. The first time I’ve ever seen Lovecraft sandwiched between deToqueville and Deleuze….awesome.
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Comment by hans @ 6/12/2006 11:51 pm