Deleuzian Refrain, and the Quotidian Intimacy in the Glocalized Context in Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

Abstract

In Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe refrain as a kind of ecology where “members of the same species enter into rhythmic characters at the same time as different species enter into melodic landscapes”. Bertelsen and Murphie further develop the idea of how the refrain constructs a space called ‘existential territories’; refrain also weaves these territories together on the ‘plane of composition’. Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is both a protest poem and a love poem addressed to everyone with lungs. The use of refrain and repetition form an existential territory that expands to engulf both the local and the global space, while simultaneously connects the personal with the political. The following article would try to shed light on how Spahr’s use of the Deleuzian refrain deterritorializes the inhabitants of a space by positing a connection between the subject of the poem, which is a collective, to everything that shares the same space on a global level. The article would further inquire into how global politics becomes a part of intimate spaces where the quotidian also serves as a space for ethical accountability, and in doing so, Spahr’s art reaches what Guattari has termed “dissensus”.

Keywords: Refrain, intimacy, glocal, politics, deleuze.