đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș life-glug-deleuze-guattari-intro.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:03:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Deleuze and Guattari Author: Life Glug Date: August 27, 2015 Language: en Topics: Deleuze, Guattari, philosophy, post-structuralism, revolution, social change, anti-statism Source: https://lifeglug.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/deleuze-and-guattari-an-intro-for-anarchist-communists/
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were a pair of French philosophers who
came to prominence around the uprisings of May 1968. Their experiences
of those events led to their two-volume work âCapitalism and
Schizophreniaâ, in which they laid out a wealth of tools for analysing
the dynamics of capitalism and the state. They drew upon a massive array
of sources, blending the philosophical concepts of Marx, Freud and
Nietzche, with insights from chaos theory, evolutionary biology, geology
and anthropology (amongst many others). Whilst this variety of sources
means there are many different ways to engage with Deleuze and
Guattariâs ideas, anarchists will likely be most interested in their
emphasis on creating freedom from all forms of domination, both material
and psychological.
Like many of their academic peers of that era, D&Gâs use of language was
deliberately opaque, which has unfortunately meant their ideas have
mostly remained locked within academia. I hope this article goes some
way to bridging that gap, by presenting just a handful of their
bewildering array of concepts in more accessible language. Some who are
familiar with D&G may disagree with how Iâve interpreted these concepts,
but that was always their intention with the difficult language: they
detested the type of âState philosophyâ that tries to control what is to
be considered the truth, and subsequently used to the benefit of
dominant powers. Instead they saw the task of philosophers as the
creation of a conceptual toolbox that people could draw from, and
connect to their own lives and struggles in their own ways. The deciding
factor was not truthfulness, but usefulness. In a conversation with
Foucault, Deleuze said (paraphrasing Proust): âtreat my book as a pair
of glasses directed to the outside; if they donât suit you, find another
pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is
necessarily an investment for combat.â
Before we begin, one basic concept is worth explaining to help
understand D&G. They often talk in terms of âflowsâ: flows of money,
flows of people, flows of information, flows of thought, flows of
speech, flows of history â even âflows of shitâ. For them, nothing is
static: all of the universe is in constant flux, albeit at different
speeds. From the slow movements of the earthâs crust over millions of
years, to the rapid changes in an explosion. Likewise they apply this
idea of flows to social change, in both the gradual development of
social structures through history, to the rapid changes that come about
during a revolution.
With that in mind, letâs see if we can make Deleuze and Guattari useful
for anarchist communism.
In their Introduction to Anarchist Communism, the Anarchist Federation
(hereafter AFed) says:
âA state is a machine for controlling people and can never be anything
else.â
A key function of the state is what D&G call âstriationâ: taking the
commons (âsmooth spaceâ), where free movement is possible, and cutting
this up into plots with strict borders (âstriated spaceâ). When applied
to land, this process creates the possibility of rent by creating
discreet areas that can be owned and traded. Anarchists will be familiar
with examples such as the enclosure of the English commons, the
expropriations by colonial powers across Africa, as well as modern state
land grabs such as those currently underway in places like China and
Ethiopia.
But this âstriationâ is not restricted to land. The state is involved in
the striation of other common assets: the smooth space of the sea is
carved into territories, as is the smooth space of the air. The smooth
space of public squares become privatised and regulated, with certain
actions (even certain people) forbidden. There are more abstract
examples, such as intellectual property, where the smooth space of ideas
and concepts has been striated, and its ownership enforced. And ânet
neutralityâ, the smooth space of the internet, is also under sustained
attack by the state, attempting to divide it up to allow preferential
treatment to the highest bidders. Striation is one of the ways in which
the State clears the way for capitalist exploitation.
The only smooth space the state can tolerate is where itâs created as a
tool in the service of further striation, such as in maintaining the
integrity of state borders. So for example, how modern states use
anti-terror legislation to create a smooth space of communications
surveillance, where state agents can slip in and out of communication
networks without restriction. Or the smooth space of warfare, where
normally observed âstate sovereignityâ is dissolved, and all terrain
becomes subject to violent cleansing.
Striation therefore relates to how movement through space-time is
constrained or otherwise, whether of human bodies, capital, information,
products, armies; all âflowsâ. Anarchism could be said to seek a world
of smooth space, that is, not just a world without borders, but without
coercion in our movements, thoughts and expressions. D&G apply smooth
space to work in a way similar to an anarchist perspective,
counterposing the striated, coercive âworkâ with the smooth, creative
âfree actionâ:
âWhere there is no State and no surplus labour there is no Work-model
either. Instead, there is the continuous variation of free action,
passing from speech to action, from a given action to another, from
action to song, from song to speech, from speech to enterprise, all in a
strange chromaticism with rare peak moments or moments of effort that
the outside observer can only âtranslateâ in terms of workâ
We must be careful however, as smooth spaces are not in and of
themselves liberatory. As mentioned, they can be used directly in the
service of the state, such as in warfare. They can also exist in the
cracks of striated spaces, creating an individual and temporary sense of
liberation that doesnât disturb the social order. The urban explorer
constructs a smooth space in their movement through a city, traversing
the locked, boarded up and hard to reach places. But this doesnât remove
the striations themselves, it merely allows an individual the thrill of
working around them.
Smooth spaces can have a powerful effect however, particularly when as
part of collective action. We might distinguish the smooth space of a
militant protest, that spontanously reclaims space from the hands of the
state and spreads out unpredictably, versus the striated space of the
police-sanctioned A-B march. The smooth space of a non-hierarchical
neighbourhood assembly, versus the striated space of union bureaucracy.
Or on a broader scale, the smooth space of a new society created through
direct democracy, versus the striation of the five year plan.
AFed says: âSchools, whilst providing an important service, also
indoctrinate children and prepare them for a life as workers rather than
as human beings. Prisons, immigration authorities, dole offices and on
and on and on, all intrude into our lives and control our actions. Some
of these things, like schools, hospitals and welfare benefits, we
sometimes depend on for our lives. It is often this very dependence that
these organisations use to control us.â
Social space is divided along different types of line: in dualisms
(child/adult, man/woman, this class/that class), expanding circles (the
individual, the couple, the family, the town, the city) and linear lines
(I pass from home, to school, to army, to work). Each of these ways of
division is operative in all forms of society. But where pre-state
societies tended towards segments which are supple, and interlink in
multiple ways around numerous centres, State societies make these rigid,
and organise them hierarchically around a single centre. What was a
dynamic web of different centres of attraction becomes a single
hierarchical âresonance chamberâ through which power can flow.
Through this hierarchical chamber, state organs are made to resonate
together with the same neoliberal ideology: schools and universities
acting as factories to produce workers; prisons used as sources of
labour, housing those who fail to adapt to the harshness of neoliberal
society; benefits being given only on condition of unpaid work;
politicians shaping policy to best help big business, all public
services being stripped, marketised and privatised; the continuity of
the interests of the financial, industrial and military sectors.
Ideology is able to resonate through all these social segments as one.
The more the state interferes with our lives, the more we as individuals
are also made to resonate with these state organs. We are hailed by the
state as individualised legal and political subjects, supposedly equal
under the law, ignoring the inequality of our social circumstances. We
are treated as customers, eroding the expectation of unconditional civic
rights and replacing them with payment-conditional consumer rights. We
are compelled to dress and act with increasing homogeneity, with
deviation from the ideals of âsmartnessâ and âspeaking properlyâ being a
danger to our ability to find work, even now extending to our conduct on
social media. Families reproduce and normalise hierarchy and the âwork
ethicâ in their children. Even relationships are judged in terms of
âmarriage marketsâ and âinvestmentsâ. This level of insidious social
control would be impossible without a system of rigid segments, arranged
to act as a single resonance chamber through which an ideology could
flow.
AFed says: â[T]he ruling class works hard to divide us against each
other. It does this in two ways, partly through trying to control ideas
and the way we think about ourselves, and partly through creating small
differences in power and wealth that set working class people against
each otherâ
D&G also aimed to analyse more precisely how capitalism and the state
affect the way we think about ourselves and others at a subconscious
level. For them, âideologyâ was too vague and deterministic a concept,
and needed more specific elaboration of how State processes like
striation and rigid segmentation affected thought. They refer instead to
three âsynthesesâ of the mind. This is how our minds connect together
the chaos of sensations around us, then divide them into discrete
objects, then put together all these seperate objects and understand
them in context, against a ground. These then are the syntheses of
connection, disjunction and conjunction.
Where it becomes politically useful is that D&G add an ethical
dimension: each of these syntheses has a legitimate and an illegitimate
form. In short, the legitimate syntheses of the mind are partial,
inclusive and fluid. The illegitimate are global, exclusive and rigid.
This means that:
We connect legitimately in our awareness of how people, minds, events,
social systems and so on are complex and contradictory, and made up of
an array of unique parts. We connect illegitimately in our
simplification of human and social complexity, in treating everything
and everyone as an already determined whole object.
This process is constantly active in the media, such as in the
representation of Muslims or asylum seekers, who are presumed to be
explained by that label, rather than being complex people for whom that
is only one constituent part. It also happens to anarchists, where
instead of being approached as complex human beings for whom âanarchistâ
is only one element, we are instead taken as simple whole objects that
are entirely summed up by that word, and all the misinformation attached
to it.
But we can also be guilty of this ourselves. For example, seeing people
such as Daily Mail readers or UKIP voters as totally explainable by the
label, rather than a complex blending of parts in their own right. This
doesnât mean taking a woolly liberal perspective of âeveryoneâs opinion
is equalâ â itâs about trying to understand why these oppressive
positions come about. By looking at people as a complex array of parts
rather than simple objects explainable by a label, we leave open space
to try to understand the social processes that have produced them. That
way, we stand a better chance of learning how to counteract the social
and psychological forces that create racism, nationalism and fascism.
We disjoin legitimately in recognising difference and treating it
inclusively. We disjoin illegitimately in tying difference into strict
binaries, and excluding that which doesnât fit. For example, the
distinction between âman and womenâ is often used to exclude and oppress
queer, trans and intersex people. The illegitimate axioms go: âYou are
either a man or a woman, and you remain that way for life ⊠A man is
attracted to women and a woman to men ⊠Men dress and act like this, and
women like that âŠâ In contrast, a legitimate disjunction accepts that
woman and man are two perfectly legitimate categories, but do not form a
restrictive pair. There is space for a proliferation of further
identifiers to understand a personâs sex/gender: trans woman, queer man,
non-binary person, intersex person â who may be heterosexual,
homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, monogamous, polyamorous â who may dress
and act normatively or otherwise. So where the illegitimate disjunction
forms an exclusive pair âeither A or Bâ, the legitimate use forms an
inclusive series âA and B and C and D and âŠâ
We conjoin legitimately in being open to the shifting of our horizons,
to the finding of a new position. We conjoin illegitimately in always
referring back to a rigid and unchanging ground, which generates
segregation. Nationalism is a perfect example of such an unchanging
ideological ground. After arriving at the idea of âimmigrantâ, this is
placed into the rigid, pre-determined ground of âBritainâ. It sets up a
segregative âus vs. themâ distinction which is carried through all
judgments. It doesnât matter how open and respectful think they are, so
long as they rely on this rigid ground of the nation, their compassion
will ultimately be overruled by the desire to protect the state.
But again, we must be careful that anarchist ideas do not also suffer
this. We have to always be ready to hone our expectations and analytical
tools to adapt to a changing world, and remain open to creating
contingent links on this ground. We canât simply fall back on dogmatic
assertions based on the grounding of classical anarchist thought, and
segregate ourselves from other working class struggle. In other words,
we have to maintain our principles without isolating ourselves. A
successful example has been the London AFed group finding ways to act
within the housing movement. On the whole itâs operated on
non-hierarchical principles familiar to anarchists, but has sometimes
required working alongside people with divergent political views. By
maintaining our autonomy as anarchists but forming contingent, temporary
bonds with others, weâve been able to assist in actions like eviction
resistance, weâve added an extra voice in arguments for keeping action
at a grassroots level, and allowed us to create links with and have
influence in parts of the movement we otherwise wouldnât have.
To bring these three syntheses together, we can look at the idea of
âcommunityâ. It can be a difficult term for anarchists: community in the
one sense is where we act against the State, yet we canât be uncritical
of it, as much inter-working class oppression occurs within communities.
So how do we express what kind of community we want? Using the three
syntheses above, we might say we are for community based on a complex
interweaving of parts, such as real local links of emotional and
material solidarity between people (legitimate connection). This is in
contrast to the way the word community is often used, which can mean
little more than lots of individuals living close by who donât interact
â community merely presumed by the name. We are for inclusive community,
where all are welcomed in their myriad differences (legitimate
disjunction), rather than a community which excludes on normative
grounds of gender, race, disability, etc. And we are for stable but
flexible community (legitimate conjunction), where people have a sense
of collective identity but which never excludes on the basis of âus vs
themâ. A community which maintains unique character and tradition but
where people have an openness to gradual, consensual change, always
shaping itself to find better ways of living together.
AFed says: âBoth the destruction of what exists now and the construction
of something new are part of the revolution.â
Finally, something that may be useful for anarchists in thinking about
revolution is D&Gâs concept of âde-territorial-isationâ. Itâs a bit of a
cumbersome word, so itâs worth breaking down a bit. It refers to
âterritoryâ, but this isnât necessarily a physical territory: it can
also apply to conceptual or social territories. This might seem odd at
first, but we actually use this in everyday language already. When the
Tories came into power with a majority, people may have said something
like: âWeâve entered new territoryâ, implying a new dominant ideology, a
new combination of laws, ideas, statements, practices etc.
So if these are territories, then territorialisation is just any process
which produces these social and material territories.
De-territorialisation therefore refers to processes which disturb and
transform these systems. It gets useful when D&G set out the different
types of deterritorialisation, to describe different types of system
change. Where our usual contrast of âreform vs revolutionâ gives us only
one broad axis of change, deterritorialisation uses two different axes:
absolute vs relative, and positive vs negative.
Absolute and Relative refer to whether we totally break away from
dominant social ideas, or merely create a momentary rift which is then
easily re-absorbed by the State. A relative change brings to the surface
some existing possibilities in the social system, but an absolute change
creates entirely new possibilities.
Positive and negative doesnât mean âgood and badâ, but rather refer to
whether the change acts against the formation of a dominant power
(positive) or if itâs a change which ultimately supports domination
(negative).
Combining the two axes gives us four broad types. (Though it should be
stressed that these are fluid types, and whilst some situations will
demonstrate one dominant type, others can involve a mix)
A negative relative deterritorisalisation means that the system is
upset, a change occurs, but this doesnât go very far to challenge the
system, and if anything it actually strengthens dominant power.
Elections are an example â a period in which a certain amount of chaos
comes into play, but only so much as the state expects and is completely
capable of recovering from. The State in fact emerges stronger because
of its refreshed âdemocratic mandateâ, and with some weaker links of the
system having been cast off. At the same time, no processes were in
place to work against the reformation (âre-territorialisationâ) of State
power after the election.
A positive relative change on the other hand, does actually create
connections to ward off the creation of domination, but doesnât in
itself present enough of a challenge to the whole system to create a
revolutionary break. Isolationist lifestyle anarchism tends to fall
within this type. It may be positive by actually working against
internal domination through non-hierarchical relations, and by creating
a âsmooth spaceâ that the state canât appropriate for itself. But it is
only a relative deterritorialisation because ultimately the
State-capitalist system as a whole isnât really that bothered by it.
Itâs a minor irritation that the State will either attempt to crush, or
like Freetown Christiana in Copenhagen, will allow to continue existing
in isolation, causing no further disturbance to the capitalist system.
Only absolute change can be revolutionary. This involves a serious
rupture in the social system which the state cannot absorb. But like the
relative axis, there is a negative and positive type. An example of
negative absolute change might be the kind of militarised
insurrectionary revolution which itself turns tyrannical, failing to
stop itself from turning into a new tool of domination. Authoritarian
communist revolutions would also fall under the negative absolute type:
whilst they may well challenge one current dominant power, they
nonetheless produce an alternative system of domination through
hierarchy and the repression it necessitates.
This is exactly why anarchist communists argue the need for
prefiguration: the creation of institutions and organisations that can
begin to constitute a new society free of domination prior to a
revolution. These organisations would enable a positive absolute change,
by creating connections which continually act against the reformation of
the state or any other form of dominant power, before, during and after
a period of revolutionary rupture.
There are countless other concepts that could be of use to anarchists
that thereâs no space to go into here. These will either have to wait
for another time, or else youâll have to brave the source texts
themselves â so check the references below for some guides and
interpretations. Finally, Iâll leave it to Deleuze & Guattari themselves
to illustrate the merits of their philosophy for anarchists:
âA concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason.
Or it can be thrown through the window.â
13 and 14)
Schizoanalysis