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.