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Title: Why Deleuze (still) matters
Author: Andrew Robinson
Date: 2010
Language: en
Topics: Deleuze, Guattari, Philosophy, anti-state
Source: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/

Andrew Robinson

Why Deleuze (still) matters

The usefulness of Deleuzian theory for social transformation will vary

with the selection of which conceptual contributions one chooses to

appropriate. Studying Deleuzian theory is complicated by characteristics

of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical method. In What is Philosophy?,

they define the function of theory in terms of proliferating concepts –

inventing new conceptual categories which construct new ways of seeing.

In common with many constructivists, they take the view that our

relationship to the world is filtered through our conceptual categories.

Distinctively, they also view agency in terms of differentiation – each

person or group creates itself, not by selecting among available

alternatives, but by splitting existing totalities through the creation

of new differences. This approach leads to a proliferation of different

concepts which, across Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative and

individual works, total in the hundreds.

Instead of seeking to trim their conceptual innovations and neologisms

(new words) for simplicity and necessity (an efficiency model of theory

– “just in time”, like modern production), they multiply concepts as

tools for use, which, although possibly redundant in some analyses, may

be useful for others (a resilience model of theory – “just in case”,

like indigenous and autonomous cultures). They encourage readers to pick

and choose from their concepts, selecting those which are useful and

simply passing by those which are not. This has contributed to the

spread of diverse Deleuzian approaches which draw on different aspects

of their work, but also makes it easy for people to make incomplete

readings of their theories, appropriating certain concepts for

incompatible theoretical projects while rejecting the revolutionary

dynamic of the theory itself. As a result, a large proportion of what

passes for Deleuzian theory has limited resonance with the general gist

of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, which is not at all about reconciling

oneself to the dominant system, but rather, is about constructing other

kinds of social relations impossible within the dominant frame. The

proliferation of concepts is intended to support such constructions of

other ways of being. Another effect of the proliferation of concepts is

to make Deleuzian theory difficult to explain or express in its

entirety.

In this article, I have chosen to concentrate on the conceptual pairing

of states and war-machines as a way of understanding the differences

between autonomous social networks and hierarchical, repressive

formations. Deleuze and Guattari view the ‘state’ as a particular kind

of institutional regime derived from a set of social relations which can

be traced to a way of seeing focused on the construction of fixities and

representation. There is thus a basic form of the state (a “state-form”)

in spite of the differences among specific states. Since Deleuze and

Guattari’s theory is primarily relational and processual, the state

exists primarily as a process rather than a thing. The state-form is

defined by the processes or practices of ‘overcoding’, ‘despotic

signification’ and ‘machinic enslavement’. These attributes can be

explained one at a time. The concept of despotic signification, derived

from Lacan’s idea of the master-signifier, suggests that, in statist

thought, a particular signifier is elevated to the status of standing

for the whole, and the other of this signifier (remembering that

signification is necessarily differential) is defined as radically

excluded. ‘Overcoding’ consists in the imposition of the regime of

meanings arising from this fixing of representations on the various

processes through which social life and desire operate. In contrast to

the deep penetration which occurs in capitalism, states often do this

fairly lightly, but with brutality around the edges. Hence for instance,

in historical despotic states, the inclusion of peripheral areas only

required their symbolic subordination, and not any real impact on

everyday life in these areas. Overcoding also, however, entails the

destruction of anything which cannot be represented or encoded.

‘Machinic enslavement’ occurs when assembled groups of social relations

and desires, known in Deleuzian theory as ‘machines’, are rendered

subordinate to the regulatory function of the despotic signifier and

hence incorporated in an overarching totality. This process identifies

Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the state-form with Mumford’s idea of the

megamachine, with the state operating as a kind of absorbing and

enclosing totality, a bit like the Borg in Star Trek, eating up and

assimilating the social networks with which it comes into contact.

Crucially, while these relations it absorbs often start out as

horizontal, or as hierarchical only at a local level, their absorption

rearranges them as vertical and hierarchical aggregates. It tends to

destroy or reduce the intensity of horizontal connections, instead

increasing the intensity of vertical subordination. Take, for instance,

the formation of the colonial state in Africa: loose social identities

were rigidly reclassified as exclusive ethnicities, and these

ethnicities were arranged in hierarchies (for instance, Tutsi as

superior to Hutu) in ways which created rigid boundaries and oppressive

relations culminating in today’s conflicts.

According to this theory of the state-form, states are at once

‘isomorphic’, sharing a basic structure and function, and heterogeneous,

differing in how they express this structure. In particular, states vary

in terms of the relative balance between ‘adding’ and ‘subtracting

axioms’ (capitalism is also seen as performing these two operations). An

axiom here refers to the inclusion of a particular group or social logic

or set of desires as something recognised by a state: examples of

addition of axioms would be the recognition of minority rights (e.g. gay

rights), the recognition and systematic inclusion of minority groups in

formal multiculturalism (e.g. Indian ‘scheduled castes’), the creation

of niche markets for particular groups (e.g. ‘ethnic food’ sections in

supermarkets), and the provision of inclusive services (e.g. support for

independent living for people with disabilities). It is most marked in

social-democratic kinds of states. The subtraction of axioms consists in

the encoding of differences as problems to be suppressed, for example in

the classification of differences as crimes, the institutionalisation of

unwanted minorities (e.g. ‘sectioning’ people who are psychologically

different), or the restriction of services to members of an in-group

(excluding ‘disruptive’ children, denying council housing to migrants).

This process reaches its culmination in totalitarian states. It is

important to realise that in both cases, the state is expressing the

logic of the state-form, finding ways to encode and represent

differences; but that the effects of the two strategies on the freedom

and social power of marginalised groups are very different.

The state is also viewed as a force of ‘antiproduction’. This term is

defined against the ‘productive’ or creative power Deleuze and Guattari

believe resides in processes of desiring-production (the process through

which desires are formed and connected to objects or others) and social

production (the process of constructing social ‘assemblages’ or

networks). Desiring-production tends to proliferate differences, because

desire operates through fluxes and breaks, overflowing particular

boundaries. The state as machine of antiproduction operates to restrict,

prevent or channel these flows of creative energy so as to preserve

fixed social forms and restrict the extent of difference which is able

to exist, or the connections it is able to form. Hence, states try to

restrict and break down the coming-together of social networks by

prohibiting or making difficult the formation of hierarchical

assemblages; it operates to block ‘subject-formation’ in terms of social

groups, or the emergence of subjectivities which are not already encoded

in dominant terms. Take for instance the laws on ‘dispersal’, in which

the British state allows police to break up groups (often of young

people) congregating in public spaces. Absurdly, the state defines the

social act of coming-together as anti-social, because it creates a space

in which different kinds of social relations can be formed. The state

wishes to have a monopoly on how people interrelate, and so acts to

prevent people from associating horizontally. Another example of

antiproduction is the way that participation in imposed activities such

as the requirement to work and the unpaid reproductive labour involved

in families, leaves little time for other kinds of relationships –

people don’t have time to form other assemblages either with other

people or with other objects of desire. Hakim Bey has argued that this

pressure to restrict connections is so strong that simply finding time

and space for other forms of belonging – regardless of the goal of these

other connections – is already a victory against the system.

So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze

and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of

relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the

proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and

used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and

the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used

because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’

theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among

indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would

be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term

‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of

overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the

war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in

Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or

elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless

mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all

‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of

brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses

such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity

(c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’).

For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also

war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process

through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social

movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made

them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early

states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously

vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless

societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind

of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous

war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state

instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose

their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless

destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see

below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are

regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited

war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This

drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent

state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli

strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities

between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a

selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war

denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli

army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the

destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate

destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the

Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in

the full sense.

The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured

war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state,

and against the coalescence of sovereignty. The way such machines

undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down

concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’

(regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine

is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of

smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian

societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done

by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any

potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly

think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or

how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political

power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’

movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are

the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines

in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to

Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian

intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also

in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state

control.

One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of

everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups,

termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines

because the state-form is inappropriate for them.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, war is not the aim of the war-machine

(except when it is captured by the state); rather, war-machines tend to

end up in a situation of war with states because of the

incommensurability of the war-machine with the state and with striated

space. War-machines end up in conflict with states because their goal is

the ‘deterritorialisation’ of the rigid fixities of state space, often

to create space for difference or for particular ways of life. Think for

instance of squatters’ movements: in themselves they do not aim for

conflict, but rather, seek different kinds of arrangements of space by

forming new combinations of unused geographical spaces with otherwise

‘spaceless’ social groups. Yet such movements are often forced into

conflict with the machinery of state repression because the state

ignores, or refuses to recognise these new articulations. As I write

this, the JB Spray squat in Nottingham is continuing a campaign of

resistance to reoccupation by state forces acting on behalf of

capitalist owners who have no intent of putting the space to use. This

is a struggle I would very much encourage readers to support (see this

article and related links for details; contact 07817493824 or email

jbspray[at]hotmail.co.uk). It is also a clear, local example of how

autonomous social movements are forced into conflict by the state’s

drive to repress difference.

War-machines are also associated with the formation of special types of

groups which are variously termed ‘bands’, ‘packs’ and ‘multiplicities’.

These groups are seen as operating as dense local clusters of

emotionally-intense connections, strongly differentiated from the

‘mass’, which is a type of group based on large scale, lack of intensity

and vertical integration. ‘Packs’ or ‘bands’ instead form as unstable

groups, avoiding fixed hierarchies (any leaders emerging are subject to

rapid succession), usually with small numbers, and dispersed through

space rather than concentrated in particular sites. Their diffusion is

enabled by a multiplicity of objectives which resonate through

horizontal, molecular connections rather than being represented in

overarching structures. They tend to detach materials from the

connections in which they are inserted in the dominant system, instead

reconstructing different ‘universes’ or perspectives around other ways

of seeing and relating. One can think for instance of the way groups of

children reconstruct urban spaces as spaces of play, finding new,

dissident uses for objects such as shopping trollies. For Deleuze and

Guattari, the process of forming ‘bands’ or ‘packs’ is necessarily

dangerous, risking the self-destructive implosion of small groups, but

also offering hopeful possibilities of forming ways of relating which

are more open to difference than those prevalent in the dominant system.

Deleuze and Guattari’s usefulness for radical activism is by no means

limited to this particular pair of concepts, but this way of thinking

about social transformation raises useful questions and provides

insights into how autonomous groups differ from dominant hierarchical

forms of social collectivity. For instance, this theory points towards

the need to avoid duplicating statist ways of relating within autonomous

spaces, and to avoid coalescing in formal organisations which ultimately

lead back into the state-form (albeit usually through the addition of

axioms). It also suggests the inevitability of antagonism between

radical movements and the state, even when the goal of a radical

movement is simply to defend or express its own difference.

Strategically, therefore, autonomous activists need to be prepared to

‘ward off’ the state, both within movements (by challenging statist ways

of thinking and acting) and in relation to the wider context (by

resisting state repression). According to Deleuze and Guattari, there is

a basic incompatibility between state ‘antiproduction’ and the

flourishing of difference, and this requires overcoming the former. This

requires attention to the creation and defence of autonomous spaces, in

full awareness of their underlying transformative potential.