Deleuze's 'war machine'

[Ravachol]

I recently started reading 'A thousand plateaus' by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and stumbled upon the concept of the 'war machine' (http://zinelibrary.info/files/nomadology_imposed.pdf) which is, in short:



The war machine constitutes an outside to the State. While the State is characterised by interiority, the war machine is characterised by absolute exteriority. While the State is, as we have seen, a coded conceptual plane confining thought within binary structures, the war machine is sheer nomadic movement, non-striated and uncoded. It is a space characterised by pluralities, multiplicities and difference, which escapes State-coding by eschewing binary structures (Deleuze 1987: 141). The war machine is the State's Outside - whatever escapes the State's capture: 'just as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the State and makes it impossible' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 359).
It is the conceptual absence of essence and central authority. Again I would argue that Deleuze, as was the case with Stirner, is not talking here about actual war, but rather a theoretical terrain characterised by conceptual openness to plurality and difference, which eschews the stable identities, essences and conceptual unities that form part of the assemblage of the State. The idea of war as a radical dislocation and constitutive emptiness may be developed in this way, as a tool of resistance against State power and authority.
As we have seen, resistance is a dangerous enterprise: it can always be colonised by the power it opposes. It can no longer be seen as the overthrowing of State power by an essential revolutionary subject. Resistance may now be seen in terms of war: a field of multiple struggles, strategies, localised tactics, temporary setbacks and betrayals - ongoing antagonism without the promise of a final victory. As Deleuze says: "...the world and its States are no more masters of their plane than revolutionaries are condemned to a deformation of theirs. Everything is played in uncertain games..." (Deleuze 1987: 147).


This bears, to me, striking resemblance to the 'communes', acting as material bases from where effective resistance to Capital and the state can be developed, proposed by The Coming Insurrection. The idea of a diffuse, horizontal network bound by material interests and mutual support that is ever-changing and adapting having survival and it's material needs (in direct opposition to capital and the state) as it's prime goal and 'war' (in whatever form) as it's secondary seems to be exactly what both concepts advocate.

Are there any (constructive :rolleyes:) thoughts on how such a network might develop and sustain itself in a fashion that is eventually capable of destroying Capital?

[Kotze]

How is this gobbledegook different from Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity? But maybe my eyes are not sophisticated enough to see the beautiful new clothes you are wearing.

[eclipse]

I think that is quite an interesting concept. As with the politics of "free spaces" or collective production and enterprises it has one problem though, it would depend on the economic status quo. I think it's very difficult to build a counter - economy" for example, because it needs to be based on capitalism and within capitalism has to deal on its marke. Solidarity comes at a price, a corporation which fires people at a whim is more effective concerning capitalism internal logic.

It would be possible if the network would be able to sustain itself and its members to a large extent, but you cannot instanly found such a network, it might have to grow.
A problem I see here, as in the politics of free space, communes, squats and so on, is that you are putting revolutionary culture inside a ghetto if you don`t hold up a permanent connection to the society outside the network. If it requires quite an amount of work, this might not be easy.

But perhaps i miunderstand the idea totally? Maybe due to your remark on communes?
Perhaps it might be just the form of a progressed, unified revolutionary movement.

[Ravachol]

How is this gobbledegook different from Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity? But maybe my eyes are not sophisticated enough to see the beautiful new clothes you are wearing.

I am fully aware of Sokal's hilarious mock-article and (at times, correct) criticism of post-modernism. You don't seem to have read what I posted however (never mind the actual piece by Deleuze and Guattari). It's actually quite simple: constructing libertarian communism as a 'living' movement outside and against Capital and it's hegemonic structures on the base of a diffuse network whose social relations are rooted in shared material interests (and thus class) and mutual aid. With a bit of creativity it could be seen as analogous to council communist ideas in the sense that the 'network of resistance' exists in a sphere completely outside the sphere of institutions dominated by Capital.


I think that is quite an interesting concept. As with the politics of "free spaces" or collective production and enterprises it has one problem though, it would depend on the economic status quo. I think it's very difficult to build a counter - economy" for example, because it needs to be based on capitalism and within capitalism has to deal on its marke.


True. This is slightly related to the issues raised in the 'Demise of the beehive collective' (http://www.anarchistischegroepnijmegen.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Love-and-Rage-Demise-of-the-Beehive-Collective-Infoshops-aint-the-revolution.pdf) text which deals with issues of 'counter-institutions' as well. Although I think any 'counter economy' would have to be partially rooted in Capitalism, I think this would go for just about any experiment. Capital is so all-encompassing that I don't think it actually has an 'outside'.

What I do think is possible is the development of networks of material aid and support ('communes', a 'war machine', call it whatever you want) that ease the burden of Capitalism and free up time to allow for more effectively organising against Capital with other means. A second upside is that these networks of material support have real relevance to the everyday lives of the working class and thus provide in a daily need as well as bind the working class to a 'natural' organ with which they can express their concerns. In turn, this can evolve into what Autonomists call the 'party of autonomy', a party that is no party but the organic organisation of the working class on a material basis actively fighting for it's interests as a class.



A problem I see here, as in the politics of free space, communes, squats and so on, is that you are putting revolutionary culture inside a ghetto if you don`t hold up a permanent connection to the society outside the network. If it requires quite an amount of work, this might not be easy.


As a Dutch activist I have experience with this problem and trust me, it's a pretty big one. Here is an article on the matter (http://schriftzine.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/issue-1-beweging-en-marginalisatie-subculturalisme-versus-consistente-politiek/) (in Dutch only, unfortunately) which basically states what you state. A 'counter-power' will have to prevent ghettoisation and develop meaningfull connections to the working class and their everyday needs. The reason current squats/free spaces/etc fail to do this is because they operate 'idealistically' and not from material needs. They organise all kinds of bike-workshops, 'art galleries' and what not but these are not class demands. Affordable housing (through squatting), collective kitchens, etc. those a relevent material needs that actually allow for a network operating against Capital to develop.

[RasTheDestroyer]

I emailed this thread to a friend of mine who has read A Thousand Plateaus. She is not a member of the forum, but she replied to me with her insights into the original post, which I'll repost here at her permission:

You know, I always think of Deleuze's concepts as being far more radical than any idea contained in a commune, though there are some similar elements. The war machine, the rhizome, to me, are more related to capitalism than any form of revolutionary politics. The rhizome/war machine is capital in its most extreme form and has nothing to do with the State in any current or past incarnation. Hence Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

This interpretation of the text seems to depart somewhat from the OP's. I invite people to discuss her interpretation, open it to criticism, and if possible combine what is best about the OP's with what is best about hers.

That being said, I emailed her my reply, which I'll post here as well and ask that it be opened up to criticism too:

I think the 'rhizome' concept describes the organizational structure of both capital and its state in the new contemporary capitalist paradigm, or the mechanisms by which information is transmitted (rhizomatically, i.e. horizontally) to the various fractions, circuits and departments of capital in order to equalize them. Marx argued that the general law of capitalist accumulation would lead to uneven development in those circuits and departments - as between the department that produces capital goods and that which produces consumer goods. As one grows, the other shrinks, creating widening differentials. Also, as the theory goes, in the new imperial order, anything related to capital is related to the state, because the barrier between the two has vanished, and capital is now identified with the state. That is to say it is the state.

Also, Deleuze's concepts of 'desiring machines' - of which the war machine is a part - and multiplicity and difference (which rhizomatic structures can apprehend due to their multiple overlapping entry and exit data points) form the theoretical foundation of Hardt and Negri's work. Their contribution was to show how Deleuze's analysis of capital in its most 'extreme state' using his radical new language of concepts creates new revolutionary potentialities and opens up the creativity and initiative of the 'multitude' - a heterogenous and differentiated exploited class subject produced by the new capitalist paradigm. The affective, diffuse, horizontal networks of power are created by the new capitalist order for the purpose of producing and reproducing society in all spheres of social life but, they argue, can be used to fight capital. For them, capital now longer has an 'outside' from which to resist it, thus it must be resisted from within. The enclosures that once defined the earlier stages of capitalism and its corresponding institutions of discipline (the factory, the school, the hospital) break down under this new order and extend across the entire global space of society. The organizational structures that the rhizome and machines describe, on the one hand, enable capital to de-center itself, neutralize local conflicts and contradictions, etc. and on the other hand, possess the capability and mobility to more flexibly striate society according to the needs of capital. Though, as I pointed out before, these new stratifications along the lines of labor and class produce a new exploited class subject - the multitude.

In a phone discussion with her I had following this email exchange, she explains that the 'war machine' replaces traditional conception of the [capitalist] State, with its reliance on binaries. I am more or less in agreement with this, but think it still needs deeper analysis. Weren't the capitalist forms of production and exchange, and capital itself, reliant on [racial, gender, etc.) binaries of sameness and difference during the modern industrial and European imperialist phases of capitalism from the 16th century to the mid-20th? Isn't the 'war machine,' in which the binaries which characterized earlier capitalist states vanish, the result of, as I noted in my email above, the result of capital identifying itself with and becoming the state, thereby eliminating the capital/state base/superstructure binaries which represent the fulcrum of the binary logic of the traditional state that the war machine is expected to replace? Deleuze doesn't say this has happened yet, but that we are in a transitional period on the road to it.

My main criticism of Deleuze is what seems to be the seductivism of his work. In it there is a two-fold tendency, masquerading as revolutionary, to attract people to the lure of a safe life in the ideological center. The first is his anti-humanism, which denies and suppresses the idea that human beings are the creators of their own history (Stalin in Russia and 'revisionists' and 'rightists' in the CCP congress in Communist China employed this anti-humanist rhetoric to justify the accelerated development of the productive forces and of heavy industry at the expense of light industry and the middle peasants, costing them victory). The concept of 'desiring machines' is an offspring of the earlier anti-humanism of Foucault and Althusser, and of Donna Harroway's Cyborg Manifesto, all of which urge us to deconstruct the hierarchy separating 'man' from 'machine.' Any action taken by exploited, from this standpoint, is necessarily reactive instead of progressive.
That's not to say that it suffices that something be 'anti-humanist' to dismiss it out of hand, and I don't intend to devalue Deleuze's contributions, nor Harraway's, Foucault's, and Althusser's (though Althusser was writing after the Czech coup and Polish uprisings experienced by older generations of revolutionaries where the working classes did in fact take history into their own hands - a practice which contradicts Althusser's theoretical 'anti-humanist' Marxism). Still, it raises questions and debates that have plagued and divided revolutionary theorists for more than a century. Some theorists present an anti-humanist account of Marx while others offer a humanist interpretation. These radically divergent interpretations likely have their roots in Marx's differences in attitude and conceptual emphases between Grundrisse and Capital.

[RasTheDestroyer]

Also this:

'the war machine is sheer nomadic movement, non-striated and uncoded. It is a space characterised by pluralities, multiplicities and difference, which escapes State-coding by eschewing binary structures.'

How is it that this space can be characterized by difference but still be unstriated and 'smooth.' Negri points out that the space is smooth, but proceeds to declare that 'it might appear to be free of the binary divisions or striations of modern boundaries, but really it is crisscrossed by so many fault lines that it only appears as a continuous, uniform space. In this sense, the clearly defined crisis of modernity gives way to an omni-crisis in the imperial world. In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power--it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-place.'

Again, keep in mind that Hardt and Negri's revolutionary manifesto is based on a careful reading of A Thousand Plateaus.

[RasTheDestroyer]

Just realized I didn't name the second tendency for which I would criticize Deleuze. This criticism is closely related to his anti-humanism. The 'war machine' for Deleuze is an outside to the state, and in contrast to the state is uncoded and open to differences and pluralities (he does prefigure the rise of the 'war machine' and its eventual substitution for the State, right?). But he does not address the ways in which the struggle between capital and labor, nor the wills and actions of the working class, were the dominant creative force in the articulation of an outside to the State (hence its being a 'machine') in the first place. It is not capitalism that gives rise to this machine. On the contrary, it is the cooperation and communicative labor of the multitude that pushes capitalism to its extreme and forces it to constantly (re)articulate itself to accomodate labor and (re)articulate labor to accomodate capital.

[RasTheDestroyer]

(10:52:23 am)RasTheDestroyer:yea, there's more of a humanistic element in Grundrisse, which i think the italian autonomists built their own system around years later

(10:52:33 am)RasTheDestroyer:whereas Capital appears more determinist and objective

(10:55:27 am)RasTheDestroyer:like the autonomists and hardt and negri's analysis of the 'multitude' proceeds from the later notion that working class struggle actually overdetermines capitalist command and organization

(10:56:03 am)Anarko-komünizt:what's that mean?

(10:56:28 am)Anarko-komünizt:that worker's wages won't fall to their reproduction level because they will resist and make unions and stuff?

(10:56:59 am)RasTheDestroyer:well, the more 'orthodox' interpretation of marx is that the character of the struggles themselves are determined by social forces and the existing social structure basically, i.e. materialism

(10:57:08 am)RasTheDestroyer:i don't think they deny that, at least they shouldn't

(10:57:38 am)RasTheDestroyer:but their contribution is showing how the struggles themselves change the organization of capitalist production

(10:59:05 am)RasTheDestroyer:like, i have not read much of Hardt or Negri except Empire and some articles, but they seem to argue that the transition from modern industrial capitalism to the postmodern 'service' economy in the advanced countries

(10:59:16 am)RasTheDestroyer:was determined by the struggles of the 60s

(10:59:47 am)RasTheDestroyer:actually yes i think what you said is one sort of example they give

(11:00:28 am)RasTheDestroyer:though i think their argument is mroe along the lines of 'the proletarian movement of the 60s rejected the factory and modern work life, which led to a paradigm shift'

(11:01:31 am)Anarko-komünizt:mmmm, interesting.

(11:01:47 am)RasTheDestroyer:but the argument seems to flow from an interpretation of and preference for Grundrisse over Capital

(11:01:57 am)RasTheDestroyer:and Negri did write a book about reading Grundrisse in 91

(11:02:09 am)RasTheDestroyer:which i might buy now, when i have the money, it's fuckin expensive

(11:02:37 am)Anarko-komünizt:My spontaneous reaction is that I think the shift to a service economy probably had more to do with market forces than concious class choice.

(11:03:12 am)RasTheDestroyer:yea, that is mine as well actually

(11:03:18 am)RasTheDestroyer:i mean it's a surprising argument for them to make

(11:05:01 am)RasTheDestroyer:though, if there was any defense to their claim, it might be that market forces and the class choices aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, in that the class choices - demanding higher wages, strikes, and demanding that service jobs have a higher social value - all made domestic industrial production more expensive

(11:05:49 am)RasTheDestroyer:the contemporary export of capital and demand might have been shaped by that in the first place

(11:07:01 am)RasTheDestroyer:like capital prefers to go where labor and resources are cheap and the rate of profit is still very high, and that can lead to a 'chase to the bottom' in wages

(11:07:27 am)RasTheDestroyer:but going where labor is cheap usually also means going where it is less organized

(11:14:28 am)RasTheDestroyer:oh crap gotta run, write me back if you want, and good luck with the girl :)

(11:35:30 am)Anarko-komünizt:I agree with your assessment. Better organization of industrial workers creates the market conditions for a move towards a service economy. Both worker choice and market forces work together. Now is the time to organize the service industry! And really if we want to be serious, we need the old IWW "one big union" because whatever is NOT unionized will become the new direction for capital.

(11:36:12 am)RasTheDestroyer:oh, that's interesting that you mention the IWW, Hardt and Negri commit a whole chapter to discussing that organizational model of 'one big union'

(11:36:23 am)RasTheDestroyer:it seems to be what they base their whole strategy for organization on

(11:37:12 am)RasTheDestroyer:Empire can be a little pretentious, and sometimes the theoretical language makes it hard to read but still probably worth the investment of time if you have it

(11:37:12 am)Anarko-komünizt:makes sense to me. Like, in order to stop outsourcing, what we need are 3rd world unions!

[berlitz23]

Even though this doesn't bear complete pertinence on your discussion of The War Machine-but rather an extension and illumination-I feel the Wikileaks explosive release and leak of covert operations orchestrated by the State Machine embodies an element of Deleuze and Guattari's Nomadic 'War Machine'. Wikileaks incarnates and employs a rhizomatic, deterritorialized, iternitant war machine that Deleuze and Guattari espouse in length in 'The War Machine and Capitalism: II The War Machine and The State.' I will expound later on the parallels between the Deleuze's & Guattari's concept and the recent release when I have more time.