The Art of Tetman Callis

“Jewelry has undergone so many secondary adaptations that we no longer have a clear understanding of what it is.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the basis of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). But although this extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a technical object, it does not preclude a general convertibility between the two groups, to the extent that it seems very difficult to propose […]

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“One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize the smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to […]

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“Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: […]

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“History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it).” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“Some people can talk, hide nothing, not lie: they are secret by transparency, as impenetrable as water, in truth incomprehensible. Whereas the others have a secret that is always breached, even though they surround it with a thick wall or elevate it to an infinite form.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus […]

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“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.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“It should not be said that the genius is an extraordinary person, nor that everybody has genius. The genius is someone who knows how to make everybody/the whole world a becoming.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi) (emphasis in original)

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“The ‘subject’ of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign soliture of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: The Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world. Within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found.” […]

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“It is because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be apprehended. To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. […]

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“It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the ‘novella’ as a literary genre: Everything is organized around the question, ‘What happened? Whatever could have happened?’ The tale is the opposite of the novella, because it is an altogether different question that the reader asks with bated breath: What is going to happen? […]

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“Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at […]

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“What is called a style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“The world rarely leaves room for uncommon intensity, being in large measure an entropic trashbin of outworn modes that refuse to die.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi)

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“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought the brain and body […]

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“Unlike natural persons, corporations have limited liability for their owners and managers, perpetual life, separation of ownership and control, and favorable treatment of the accumulation and distribution of assets that enhance their ability to attract capital and to deploy their resources in ways that maximize the return on their shareholders’ investments. Unlike voters in U.S. […]

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“A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.” – Justice John Paul Stevens, United States Supreme Court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

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“The discourse of art, like any other professional discourse, imposes limitations on the possibilities of the gaze, speech or actions conducted by the spectator. The discourse of art directs us to continue to see the work of art as the source and goal of discourse, and enables the specialist spectator to exercise professional knowledge and […]

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“Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people.” — Justice Anthony Kennedy, United States Supreme Court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

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“The photograph is never a sealed product that expresses the intentions of a single player. The photograph does not make a truth claim nor does it refute other truth claims. Truth is not to be found in the photograph. The photograph merely divulges the traces of truth or of its refutation.” – Ariella Azoulay, Civil […]

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“Over the course of the last 250 years at least, human beings in different locations have thought of themselves as citizens and have debated the essence of citizenship as well as its limitations. Now that so much time has passed, thought concerning citizenship need no longer be bound to the invention of a zero point, […]

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“Whenever human beings exist together with one another, whether in private or in public space, whether in open or closed spaces amenable to, or hidden from, the surveillance of others, their being together constitutes political existence. This political existence takes different forms characterized by varying degrees of freedom and repression.” – Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: […]

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“Sometimes faith needs a sign. There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.” – Don DeLillo, Underworld

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“To historicize visual culture adequately is also to undermine the narrative that presents the history of art as the pertinent field of knowledge for the generation of visual culture in relation to which visual culture stands as a kind of appendix or late variant, possessed nevertheless of loyalty to shared principles. The hegemonic narrative, which […]

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“Whoever appears in a photograph or whoever is glimpsed in its frame always stands in a certain set of relations with others. Neither the photographer who is invested with ownership rights over the photograph as object, nor the work of art constructed as the center of gravity of the discourse of art, are capable of […]

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“The coming together of the photographer with the persons photographed always extends beyond the concrete encounter between them. The photograph serves to increase the chances that the encounter will, in fact, endure, migrating to other spaces and circumstances which, at the very least, evade the photographer’s ability, or that of the persons photographed, to know […]

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