Bodies as sites of protests: The case of two desiring machines that liberated controls

Abstract

Inquilab, a popular Tamil poet and activist, whose angry poems on human rights violations are popular among all strata of Tamil society, died on 1 December 2017. As desired by him, his body was donated to the Chengalpattu Government Medical College Hospital. A born Muslim, who practiced secular values, he wished to donate his body after his death to medical research. A couple of years ago, in a remote village of Tamil Nadu, Thirunalkondacheri (Thirunalkondacheri is a village in the Nagappattinam District of Tamil Nadu.), a young dalit lawyer went to Madras High Court seeking the state's permission to take the dead body of his grandfather in a procession through the main streets of the village to the graveyard, in deference to the wishes of his grandfather. The court granted permission as desired by the petitioner. In both the cases, the bodies have been kept as sites of protests to fight against the state policies, religious practices and deeply rooted caste discriminations. Deleuze and Guattari describe the body as a network of material forces in tensionwith one another and present the body as a ‘desiring machine', whose spiritual vitality is creative. Bodies, through their combinations and struggles, are the productive forces of reality. Bodies appear as purely relational entities continuously shaped, united and divided by power relations since bodies are both the agents and the vectors of power onto which power exerts and inscribes itself. Deleuze argues that one's self must be conceived as a constantly changing assemblage of forces, an epiphenomenon arising from chance confluences of languages, organisms, societies, expectations, laws, etc., (Stagoll in The Deleuze dictionary. Edinburgh University Press Ltd., Edinburgh, 2010). As Grosz (Volatile bodies—Toward a corporeal feminism. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1994) argues, ‘a refiguring of the body moves from the periphery to the centre of analysis, so that it can now be understood as the very ‘stuff' of subjectivity. The refiguring is important, as it radically transforms our understanding of experience as something cognitive to something corporeal. Deleuze and Guattari (A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Athlone Press, London, 1988) characterize a social field in terms of a ‘machinic assemblage' and a ‘collective assemblage of enunciation'.This chapter analyses the becomings of the two bodies (Inquilab's and the dalit's grandfather) in the light of Deleuzian and Guattarian principles of becoming and control.