摘要：Itinerant boat dwellers in London (Boaters) utilise political strategies, emergent from
their mobility as afforded by the water on which they live, that are “flat” in a Deleuzian
sense. This makes them difficult to grasp from the perspective of the agencies of the state
that attempt to interpellate the Boaters. When outsiders attempt to identify representatives
empowered to speak on behalf of the community, they are presented with an ungraspable
flat organisational surface. Here, the life history of a Boaters’ political organisation,
London Boaters, is drawn, demonstrating its rhizomatic form. It is argued here that Boaters’
political organisations tend to emerge in response to specific external stimuli, refuse
to adopt hierarchical forms or otherwise resist them, and then disperse before they can
become captured by state-form hierarchies. Thus it is shown that Deleuzian ideas can be
useful tools for examining the interplay between material conditions and political organisational
forms.
