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The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.
Gilles Deleuze
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote emphasizes the tension between technological advancement and social progress, highlighting the revolutionary spirit that seeks to challenge established orders.

Gilles Deleuze's quote reflects on the complex relationship between technology and political power. He suggests that while technocrats may align with dictatorships through the use of technology, true revolutionaries find themselves in the space between technological progress and social change. This gap is where their dreams of revolution take shape and manifest as a real threat to the status quo, indicating that the desire for change can in itself drive action and challenge established norms.

Themes

TechnologyRevolutionDictatorshipSocial ProgressChange

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion on technological ethics, one might cite this quote to argue against the uncritical embrace of technology by authoritarian regimes.

More from Gilles Deleuze

Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement
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Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
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Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
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Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.
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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.
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Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.
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