There’s a certain kind of approach to theory that functions less like thought and more like a hall of mirrors.
Dense, seductive, and often completely detached from the material conditions they claim to critique.
They give fledgling thinkers just enough poetry to feel smart, but not enough clarity to act – an opium of the petit bourgeois.
Philosophy becomes a slogan.
Design becomes a posture.
Aesthetics replace politics.
Exhibitions of “work” priced at hundreds of thousands of rands, commenting on the post-colonial experience, while the person affected by these conditions cannot afford and doesn’t have access to experience these aforementioned works.
Theory, art and the humanities become a mood board of revolution, curated for exhibitions, gallery walls and lecture halls - that function more like instruments of conversation than sites of social transformation.
Meanwhile, the so-called “less intellectual” and “out of touch” students, those in business schools and policy departments, take control of the engines of power.
They learn the world as it is: legislation, jurisprudence, executive infrastructure, banks,
trade, logistics, media-capture, most importantly, power. They run it. The philosophers, activists, artists, and theorists, by contrast, write slogans and talk to each other in exclusive circles while the systems they critique remain untouched.
“They don’t want victory, they don’t want power, they want to endlessly critique power.”
In contemporary culture, materialism is treated as vulgar and Anglo-American.
Theory and activism must be metaphysical, tragic, and self-reflexive, but that refusal to engage the mechanisms of the world, markets, supply chains, and digital infrastructures is not sophistication. It’s evasion.
You’d learn more about how the world works watching a Marvel movie than attending a design graduate seminar on “post-human aesthetics.” Marvel is imperial realism. It tells you exactly what the West is, what it desires, and what it fears - The West as Saviour / Central Force of Order, Glorification of Surveillance, Tech, and Militarism, Mythologising “Good” Interventionism.
We begin here not out of contempt, but out of necessity.
Theory and Praxis in the material machines of production should not be divorced locations of practice, but two points we constantly relay between, each one a checkpoint the other must pass through to continue moving.
If we are to build something from the margin to achieve this magazine, this design practice, this cultural machine, it cannot begin strictly with inherited tools that refuse to touch the ground.
We don’t want to play with theory alone, we want to use it, bend it, drag it into contact with lived experience, economic constraint, and cultural invention.
The English language is violence; we will hotwire it.
We will master the master's tools to destroy what he has built.
Our work is not a critique. It is a declaration: that making, thinking, and designing without permission, “from the outside” and in between, not strictly within these circles of theory and praxis, is more vital than ever.
That theory, to matter, must be made in the act of creation.
We are not interested in commentary. We are interested in construction.
In the early days of the pandemic, when the global machine ground to a halt, there was a brief window for reflection. Without the hum of perpetual motion, the silence became a mirror, and in that mirror, we began to see ourselves.
I, too, looked. Hoping to revisit the past decade of my cultural life, to trace the imprint of my contributions, to recall what I had made and where I had been, but nothing was there. Nothing remained.
Where I expected archives, I found fragments. Where I sought memory, I met mirrors, territories not of record, but of translation. A cultural celebration I once lived and took part in is now only a highlight reel on a brand’s Instagram. A neighbourhood’s texture is preserved only in the blurred background of a fashion editorial photo. The raw has been absorbed, recoded, and rendered legible only to the dominant logics of the medium it lives on. What survives is not memory, but simulation.
For the first time in my lifetime, the world paused, and I was granted a moment to imagine my future. But to shape what lies ahead, I must first confront what came before. How can I grasp the truth of my past when it has been encrypted, veiled by those in power whom I trusted to inform me, yet who offered only echoes in return?
All this time, I looked upward, expecting guidance from those in power. But maybe I should have been looking horizontally to those beside me, not above me, to find the truth that was never echoed down, only lived in the material world and people’s experience around me.
When I tried to go deeper, toward the roots of place, of culture, of history, I encountered another layer of obstruction: institutionalised knowledge. Primary sources are locked behind university paywalls. Archives guarded not by secrecy but by selective access and epistemic gatekeeping. These institutions, following what Foucault teaches us, don’t merely collect knowledge; they produce it. And with that production comes curation, bias, erasure.
Power produces knowledge, not the other way around. And the knowledge that survives is the knowledge that serves.
This is not a bug in the system. It is the system.
We live in a structure where all information flows vertically, from the institution, from the platform, from the trend, from the algorithm. Our understanding of the world, of identity, culture, and resistance, is disseminated top-down. Even within the arts and humanities, the very disciplines meant to question structure and power, we now deal with issues like racism, ecology, or gender only once institutions make them legible and fundable. Change comes in themed exhibitions, editorial packages, and grant cycles.
This problem is not my problem of relating to my history, but a shared modern dilemma of how we relate to our socio-economic reality.
The eyes we are given are not ours.
They have been taught what to see.
They have been trained to recognise order and mistake it for truth.
All modern symbols don't reflect reality anymore and instead just reflect other symbols, creating an endless cycle of meaning detached from anything real.
We consume representations of representations.
Activism becomes a symbolic ritual rather than a material change.
Speculation is the simulation of economic behaviour, not its reflection.
We’re operating inside a semiotic loop, systems of meaning feeding on themselves, where the representation precedes the reality. This is hyperreality, and our participation is so normalised that we often don’t notice it.
We are at an impasse.
How do we progress from here? The Macro-scale of this problem seems too complex to take on at once. How do we turn toward the minor, the micro, the everyday sites of oppression and possibility? What does it mean to transgress against this dilemma not in theory, but in the textures of lived life?
This is where “horizontalism” becomes vital, not just as a political metaphor, but as a methodological and aesthetic tool. Against the tree of knowledge, the arborescent structure, we propose the rhizome: messy, nonlinear, connected in unpredictable ways. No centre, no hierarchy, no authorised version.
As bell hooks says, “No one can do the work for us. We must create our own representations.”
We must create our own tools. To record without permission. To build our own machines of memory and meaning. We do not need new theories. We need new weapons. We need to learn how to transgress.
One thing we can learn from the past in the practice of transgression against large machines is a tragedy that repeats itself in post-colonial regimes, again and again. It unfolds in three acts:
1. A colonial regime rises and violently suppresses a people.
2. A revolution emerges, dismantling the regime.
3. The new regime, born of the struggle, mirrors the old one in structure and spirit.
The cycle continues.
Post-colonialism, in theory, promises emancipation: the unravelling of colonial rule and the reclamation of identity, culture, and sovereignty. But in practice, it often fails to rupture the machinery of domination. Frantz Fanon diagnosed this failure as the rise of the national bourgeoisie, a local elite that replaces colonial administrators but continues to: Exploit the working class and rural poor, prioritise capitalist accumulation over justice, preserve extractive economic systems and align with Western powers and corporate interests.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that without a deep structural transformation, independence is merely symbolic, a change of flags, not a change of power.
Kwame Nkrumah named this condition neocolonialism: a situation where the colony is nominally free but remains economically and politically tethered to its former coloniser, or global institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and multinational capital. The new ruling class becomes an intermediary for global capital, not an agent of liberation.
So, what does true decolonisation demand?
Not simply replacing foreign rulers with local ones, but dismantling:
Economic systems that reproduce inequality.
Cultural hegemony including Eurocentric norms of education, language, and aesthetics.
Class stratification that silences the majority.
Otherwise, as we’ve seen, post-colonialism becomes a performance, an illusion of rupture rather than a real break. If the new leaders replicate the same bourgeois structures, then colonialism hasn’t ended, it has only changed form.
“There is always a danger that a revolutionary machine will be turned into a state apparatus, or that a counterattack will reinforce the very forces it sought to subvert.” -Deleuze & Guattari
Some of the most fascist regimes have emerged from failed revolutions.
With that in mind, what can we learn from this? What should our approach to transgression be?
Transgression ≠ Total Overthrow
When we think of transgression, we often imagine it as a dramatic gesture: overthrowing the regime, burning the flag, seizing the institution. But true transformation is not always a molar event. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that those large-scale revolutions, what they call molar movements, often get absorbed by the very systems they seek to destroy. The State is adaptive; it has the capacity to digest rebellion and repackage it in forms that serve its continuity.
Instead, they propose something more subtle and sustained: molecular revolutions. These are slow, subversive, and experimental transformations embedded in the everyday. Rather than loud declarations, they manifest through new modes of desire, being, and action.
One form of molecular revolution is the act of desiring differently. This involves refusing to funnel desire into pre-approved channels like consumerism, state loyalty, or familial obligation. It is about reclaiming joy, libido, and time for oneself and one’s community, rather than allowing them to be extracted for the benefit of larger systems.
Living in multiplicity is another gesture of transgression. It is a refusal of fixed identity categories, a way of being many things at once, a student, artist, lover, worker, and revolutionary simultaneously. In doing so, one resists being captured by singular definitions and remains in motion.
Philosopher Erin Manning speaks of “the minor gesture”: small, disruptive acts that reorient power in subtle but meaningful ways. These gestures may be a whisper instead of a scream, a poem where a theoretical argument was expected, or a ritual invented from scratch. They are minor in scale but immense in their capacity to unsettle.
To queer a practice is not only to question norms around gender and sexuality, but to queer as a verb, to make norms unstable in any domain. This means dissolving binaries: between art and science, work and play, public and private, rational and intuitive. Queering is a way of inhabiting uncertainty, of remaining open to difference and transformation.
All these practices converge in what I want to focus on: the creation of micro-assemblages.
Micro-Assemblages: Building New Machines of Life
A micro-assemblage is a machine constituted of different minor moving parts, alone useless, but in unison have enough power to transgress, a small but potent machine composed of disparate parts: people, tools, affects, routines, gestures, and spaces. These elements come together to generate new ways of living, thinking, and relating.
Imagine a rooftop garden thriving in the middle of a concrete cityscape. Or a zine cobbled together from leftover paper and accumulated rage. Think of a pop-up kitchen that serves food not for profit, but for joy and community. Or a pirate radio station broadcasting in stolen frequencies to voices that never get heard.
These micro-assemblages are not global, but local. They are specific, not universal; unfinished rather than fixed. They are also more-than-human, entangling technologies, environments, and rituals in a choreography of resistance and renewal. They do not aim to seize power, but to reroute it, to construct different circuits for life.
These are the seeds of transgression, a different form of revolution, not movements that shout their name, but assemblages that quietly rewire life.
“Revolutionary groups are defined more by what they do in the micro-level of everyday life than by what they say they are.” - A Thousand Plateaus
Borrowing From the Old to Become New
It’s important to note that using old machinery isn’t inherently a failure. In fact, it may be necessary.
Deleuze, reading Nietzsche, writes that new forces must borrow from the forces they resist in order to survive. Radical transformation never begins from zero.
A new language must first speak in the grammar of the old.
A new desire flows through inherited channels, law, religion, education, and the body.
A new world reconfigures the debris of the last.
There is no pure break. Even the seed must push through soil layered with decay to reach the light.
Struggle, then, is not about purity; it’s about mutation.
New forces must emerge within the old, borrow its tools, and push them far enough into difference that they can’t be captured again.
“There is no other means of overcoming a force than to go through the force it opposes.” - Gilles Deleuze
So, the goal is not to destroy the old, but to recompose it, to build a new body from its ruins.
“I came to theory because I was hurting…” bell hooks writes, and in doing so, she names theory not as abstraction, but as response. Not escape, but a way to survive absence. To find language where silence once governed. Tabula Rasa begins from this wound; it does not aim to resolve the wound, but to inhabit it, to trace its contours, to map the lines of flight that spiral outward from it.
This is not a project of mastery or monument. It is not interested in building temples of thought. It builds temporary campsites, places to gather, to think, to feel otherwise. Places from which to depart again. Alternatives for culture to record itself on.
When Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome, they are proposing a new structure for both thought and life, one that is horizontal, proliferating, and resistant to capture. Unlike the tree (the arborescent model), which begins from a central trunk and extends in a hierarchy of branches, the rhizome spreads outwards in all directions. Any point can connect to any other. There is no centre. No origin. No final form.
Where nomadism is a mode of movement, a way of traversing terrain without being claimed by it, rhizomatic horizontalism is the structure through which that movement leaves a trace. A web of micro-revolutions, each rooted in its own local intensity but capable of resonating across time and space. These nodes are not solitary utopias, but communal experiments, fragile and fleeting, yet deeply real.
This is the work of Tabula Rasa: to document, to provoke, to relay, to send signals across the field, drawing lines between the unconnected, revealing affinities that were invisible under arborescent regimes. In this sense, theory becomes cartography. Not a tracing of what already is, but a map of possible becomings, a speculative practice that gives form to desires not yet realised.
In this rhizomatic terrain, resistance is not located in opposition, but in multiplicity. There is no single front line, there are countless minor fronts, each embedded in a different assemblage of language, image, ritual, and pedagogy. These are not grand revolutions; they are small breaches in the everyday. A redesigned chair, a hacked syllabus, a photograph with no caption, a whisper in the wrong place.
The nomad moves through these breaches, not to lead them, not to claim them, but to connect them. To carry their charge forward. To invent detours and transmit pulses. Nomadism, then, becomes a method for weaving relays between intensities, creating a field of potential that undermines the arborescent logic of mastery, hierarchy, and totality.
This field is fragile. It must be maintained, remapped, and repaired. The rhizome does not promise utopia, but connection. Tabula Rasa offers itself as one such node, a wound turned into a question, a map without legend, a pulse in the network.
To engage with it is not simply to read; it is to respond. To follow a line. To add your own.
This is not a project of mastery or monument. It is not interested in building temples of thought. It builds temporary campsites, places to gather, to think, to feel otherwise. Places from which to depart again. Alternatives for culture to record itself on.
When Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome, they are proposing a new structure for both thought and life, one that is horizontal, proliferating, and resistant to capture. Unlike the tree (the arborescent model), which begins from a central trunk and extends in a hierarchy of branches, the rhizome spreads outwards in all directions. Any point can connect to any other. There is no centre. No origin. No final form.
Where nomadism is a mode of movement, a way of traversing terrain without being claimed by it, rhizomatic horizontalism is the structure through which that movement leaves a trace. A web of micro-revolutions, each rooted in its own local intensity but capable of resonating across time and space. These nodes are not solitary utopias, but communal experiments, fragile and fleeting, yet deeply real.
This is the work of Tabula Rasa: to document, to provoke, to relay, to send signals across the field, drawing lines between the unconnected, revealing affinities that were invisible under arborescent regimes. In this sense, theory becomes cartography. Not a tracing of what already is, but a map of possible becomings, a speculative practice that gives form to desires not yet realised.
In this rhizomatic terrain, resistance is not located in opposition, but in multiplicity. There is no single front line, there are countless minor fronts, each embedded in a different assemblage of language, image, ritual, and pedagogy. These are not grand revolutions; they are small breaches in the everyday. A redesigned chair, a hacked syllabus, a photograph with no caption, a whisper in the wrong place.
The nomad moves through these breaches, not to lead them, not to claim them, but to connect them. To carry their charge forward. To invent detours and transmit pulses. Nomadism, then, becomes a method for weaving relays between intensities, creating a field of potential that undermines the arborescent logic of mastery, hierarchy, and totality.
This field is fragile. It must be maintained, remapped, and repaired. The rhizome does not promise utopia, but connection. Tabula Rasa offers itself as one such node, a wound turned into a question, a map without legend, a pulse in the network.
To engage with it is not simply to read; it is to respond. To follow a line. To add your own.