{"id":152,"date":"2015-07-31T10:23:10","date_gmt":"2015-07-31T08:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meme.co.za\/?p=152"},"modified":"2015-07-31T10:25:18","modified_gmt":"2015-07-31T08:25:18","slug":"children-of-the-new-earth-deleuze-guattari-and-anarchism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meme.co.za\/?p=152","title":{"rendered":"Children of the new Earth – Deleuze, Guattari and anarchism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cNothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event.\u201d – Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u201cWhat is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.\u201d – Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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* This is a ta<\/em>lk I<\/em>\u00a0presented at the 2015 Deleuze and Guattari and Africa conference (www.deleuzeguattari.co.za<\/a>). It does not include citations.<\/em><\/p>\n

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1. Politics precedes being<\/h3>\n

I am going to argue that the political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is profoundly anarchist. I will assume some familiarity with terminology and basic arguments. I will also employ neologisms shamelessly \u2013 my intention is not just to elucidate but also to bring the series anarchy, Deleuze and Guattari together, in all their heterogeneity, in order to see what might happen. In short, I will claim that anarchism as a historical movement consists of various discrete actualisations of a virtual multiplicity we can call anarchy; I will draw this anarchy into conversation with the virtual multiplicity Deleuze and Guattari; I will claim that the full practice of anarchism as a series of non-exhaustive selections \u2013 various actualisations and counter-actualisations of anarchy \u2013 affirms what Deleuze refers to as the crowned anarchy and nomadic distributions of difference in repetition.<\/p>\n

What is Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy? Badiou observes that they do not even see politics as an autonomous form of thought in What Is Philosophy, which understands art, science and philosophy as the three planes that cut sections of chaos. Along with Zizek and Hallward, Badiou argues that where politics can be found in Deleuze and Guattari, it is not a politics that allows for coherent, grounded forms of political organisation and praxis, but one that leads to a banal flux of desiring-whatever \u2013 what Badiou terms the fascism of the potato.<\/p>\n

But how are we to understand this claim in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that politics precedes being<\/em>. In delineating the problem, let’s take Deleuze’s advice and, instead of picking and choosing from his and Guattari’s books as though they were a record, accept and welcome this work as a whole, following its complex trajectories in order to see what they outline. We should also remember, as Deleuze observes, that \u201cthe philosophical learning of an author is not assessed by numbers of quotations… but by the apologetic or polemical directions of his work itself. We will misunderstand… if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principle concepts are directed.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Deleuze and Guattari, politics names what is in its becoming: the entire actualised plane of force-relations, strata, assemblages and territories, across all scales of organisational complexity, from sub-individual to supra-national. Politics is the distributing of the actual. This is why they can claim that political practice does not only emerge once the world and its relations have been established but actively participates in this emergence. \u201cBefore Being, there is politics.\u201d A politics that is \u201cunaware of persons, aggregates, and laws, and of images, structures, and symbols… an orphan, just as it is an anarchist.\u201d Politics, then, is what circulates and communicates beneath things; the dynamism of pre-individual singularities and larval selves, without unity or totality, the actualisation of anarchic multiplicities of differing differences.<\/p>\n

2. Anarcho-desirants! Spontaneists!<\/h3>\n

But how does this profoundly novel conception allow for anything even close to what we understand as politics proper? Is Deleuze and Guattari’s political maxim really, as Badiou sarcastically claims: \u201cunforeseeable, desiring, irrational: follow your drift, my son, and you will make the Revolution.\u201d We can remind ourselves that for Deleuze \u201cthought has never been the affair of theory. It is about the problems of life,\u201d but this is not enough to rescue him from the dreaded appellations spontaneist! anarcho-desirant!<\/p>\n

Spontaneist. Who has not had this aspersion cast on their politics? For Badiou and co., Deleuze and Guattari are spontaneist. For Deleuze and Guattari, anarchists are the spontaneists. For many anarchists, in turn, it is Deleuze and Guattari themselves who advocate a dangerous spontaneism and becoming-for-the-sake-of-it. For other anarchists, it is anarchism itself that tends towards spontaneism; it must be purged of dreaded lifestylist elements. Further back, is this not the exact same criticism Lenin made of left communism? In fact, is this not precisely what Marx and Engels said of Proudhon and Bakunin? \u201cThey are like alchemists of the revolution… They leap at inventions which are supposed to work revolutionary miracles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking more closely, however, it becomes clear that neither Deleuze and Guattari nor anarchism can truly be said to be spontaneist or advocating for the freeing of desire as inherently liberatory. Desire always exists as machined and is \u201cnever separable from complex assemblages.\u201d It is \u201cnever an undifferentiated instinctual energy\u201d and the Body without Organs is \u201copposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism.\u201d Guattari puts this more directly: \u201cI have nothing to do with any liberating mythology of desire for desire\u2019s sake.\u201d Every desire is the affair of the people as every assemblage is collective.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the figure of the anarcho-desiring spontaneist is what Max Stirner would call a spectre of the mind. An abstraction. Guattari alludes to this when he observes how \u201cthe Bolshevik phantasy system repressed all suggestions of ‘anarchism’: barricades, fraternity, generosity, individual liberation, rejection of all hierarchy and constraint, collective exaltation, permanent poetry, daydreaming. All this seemed dead and buried, just part of a kind of regression or collective infantilism.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Anarchism and anarchy in the work of Deleuze and Guattari<\/h3>\n

What do Deleuze and Guattari themselves have to say about anarchism? If we look to their biographies, both were involved in a range of left and communist projects from the 60s onwards. Both collaborated with Antonio Negri and other autonomist Marxists \u2013 a strain of communist thought close to anarchism. Several of Guattari’s friends saw him as, at least in temperament, an anarchist and at one point, in a letter to a friend, he notes that he is writing a manifesto for an \u2018autonomous-communist-anarchist\u2019 movement. But no clear picture emerges.<\/p>\n

There is also no sustained discussion of anarchism in their work, just a few passing mentions, mostly negative, often figurative, occasionally favourable; for instance when they discuss the opposition between the socialist and anarchist currents of the nineteenth century on the question of whether to seize or abolish the state and appear to preference the latter, seeing it as a form of ‘nomadization power’.<\/p>\n

All told, it does not appear that they are more than passingly familiar with the history or ideas of anarchism. When Deleuze mentions Proudhon in an early lecture, for instance, it is very clearly Proudhon via Marx. Perhaps, however, there’s also a shared anxiety around discussing any affinities with anarchism, a distancing from the false and simplistic image of them as elitist anarcho-desirers. Indeed, in some of Guattari’s work mentions of anarchism and anarchy function almost as a nervous tic. After critiquing vanguardism in favour of autonomous self-liberation or collective subjectivation, for example, Guattari is quick to add, \u201cthere is nothing anarchic about this,\u201d only to go on to describe a form of revolutionary struggle that almost any anarchist would find affinity with.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, anarchism is anachronistic. Describing viable political struggle in terms of \u201ca continuous conquest of (new) arenas of freedom, democracy, and of creativity,\u201d Guattari assures us that \u201cthere is nothing anachronistic or anarchist in this way of conceiving things\u201d as it understands social transformation on the basis of desire, real needs and productive activity. In some places, strikingly, Guattari even sees anarchism as \u201cthe myth of a return to the pre-technological age\u201d and as unable to deal with \u201creal society\u201d. Or, most bluntly, \u201cthere is no going back, there is no anarchism.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other places still, anarchism is one extreme point of a continuum, at the other end of which lies Leninism. This anarchism is a phantasm of defeat, voluntarism and disenchantment, a solitary rebellion and a simple, abstract assertion of singularity. Instead of this, Guattari argues, we need an ‘other’ movement that is founded on the self-valorisation and self-production of singularities. Guattari has seemingly not read Bakunin, for whom \u201cthe very freedom of each individual is no other than the resultant, continually reproduced, of the mass of material and intellectual influences exerted on him by all who surround him.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Deleuze and Guattari anarchism and anarchy are often mentioned at precisely those points at which they most clearly articulate their political philosophy; at the exact moments that this political philosophy most sounds like anarchism yet simultaneously dismisses the latter. For instance:<\/p>\n