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The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterimages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest number, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous. Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?

—Brian Massumi in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

[Image from here.]

In a society based on poverty, the poorest products are inevitably consumed by the greatest number.

—Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.

Generally, the first response generated by an avant-garde film is, “This isn’t a movie,” or the more combative, “You call this a movie!?” Even the rare, responsive viewer almost inevitably finds the film—whatever its actual length in minutes—”too long.” By the time we see our first avant-garde films, we think we know what movies are, we recognise what “everyone” agrees they should be; and we see the new cinematic failures-to-conform as presumptuous refusuals to use the cinematic space (the theater, the VCR viewing room) “correctly.” If we look carefully at this response, however … we recognise that the obvious anger and frustration are a function of the fact that these films confront us with the necessity of redefining an experience we were sure we understood. We may feel we know that these avant-garde films are not movies, but what are they? We see them in a theater; they’re projected by movie projectors, just as conventional movies are … we can see that they are movies, even if we “know” they’re not. The experience provides us with the opportunity (an opportunity much of our training has taught us to resist) to come to a clearer, more complete understanding of what the cinematic experience actually can be, and what—for all the pleasure and inspiration it may give us—the conventional movie experience is not.

These first avant-garde films, in other words, can catalyze what I would like to call our first fully critical response to a set of experiences our culture has trained us to enjoy, primarily as a process of unquestioning consumption.

—Scott McDonald, Introduction to Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (1993).

[Still from Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929).]

Bill Hicks:

Someone made a comment at the club going, “We don’t come to comedy to think.” Gee, where do you go to think? I’ll meet you there. We don’t have to do this here.

… What am I supposed to do? Change my own outlook and my beliefs…to be what to them? I try to talk to the audience the same way I talk to my friends. To take away the artifice of showbusiness and actually have a feeling of a conversation going on. If some of the audience get offended then they’re saying to me, “I don’t want to be your friend” and that’s fine.

… I honestly believe that we’re all the same. And I think to go, “well I’ll give’em what they want” is very condescending. … I don’t sit there and go, “You are all a bunch of idiots so I will do things I don’t believe in to amuse you”.

[The interviewer replies, "But they want to be entertained."]

When did thinking not become entertaining?

Art should never try to be popular.

The public should try to make itself artistic.

—Oscar Wilde.

Due to your vague interest in these matters which have been deemed antisocial by the new thought police, you have been exiled to Cyberia. You may believe your visit to be voluntary, but ask yourself: if you could live—in real time, in full color, without a ‘net’—the revolt and transformation you fantasize about, would you be here, contemplating and trading in mere representations of such things? The new isolation chambers and interrogation rooms largely need no judicial procedures or law enforcement to fill them—we confine ourselves to these office cubicles, internet cafes, and lonely bedrooms willingly, even believing ourselves to have found access to our dreams and desires here.

Not to criticize you, of course—since obviously I am in the same situation as you, similarly self-exiled. But let’s use this time in the wilderness as the political prisoners of old did: not to get accustomed to it, not to build new lives around this voluntary amputation, but to educate ourselves, increase our powers and connections, so when we can return to society we will be armed with new tools for dismantling and reconceiving it. Let us take the world itself back, rather than the “information superhighways” upon which we are being herded so quickly away from it, so one day there will be no need for anyone to return here besides misguided historians and other archaeologists of the cursed graveyards of the past.

See you on the other side of the screen, if you make it, earnest cyberspace cadet.

—CrimethInc. Workers’ Collective.

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

—David Simon, creator of The Wire.

It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role, at once essential yet limited, that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called ‘Conclusions’ but for the reader ‘Incitements’. We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires … That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

… As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of and then sample passively in perfect repose of mind and body.

—Marcel Proust, quoted in Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (Picador, 1997).

Be not too tame neither: but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of Nature: for any thing so overdone, is from the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature; to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one, must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.

—Hamlet, Act III, Scene III, Shakespeare.

[Still from Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000).].