Rejecting the traditional Marxist idea that the working classes were the seedbed of change, [Deleuze and Guattari] wanted a broader umbrella under which to unite all marginalised groups. They claimed that those oppressed by patriarchy (women), racism (people of colour) and heteronormativity (what we’d now call the LGBT community) were all suffering thanks to the same machinery of despotic and imperial capitalism. It’s only by bringing together these ‘minoritarians’ that an anti-capitalist revolution could succeed. Because the philosophical image of the individual is based on the apparently autonomous figure of the white male subject, it is through a process of ‘becoming-woman’, and of ‘becoming-minoritarian’, that the spectre of individuality can finally be banished.

[…]

Instead of treating different fields of enquiry as cut off from one another, Deleuze and Guattari tried to show where one discipline seeps into another, challenging the centrality of any one of them. Ultimately, they aimed to open thought onto its outside, pushing against the tendency for theoretical work to close in on itself.

Short-ish essay at Aeon. For all the word-salad spilled in the name of “interdisciplinarity”, the academy — or rather, more fairly, the bodies which govern the academy through the distribution of funding — are still pretty determined to prevent that seepage between silos; D&G’s work makes it easy to understand why that might be the case.

(Well, OK, not easy, because reading D&G isn’t easy… but nothing worth doing ever is.)