by Greg Johnson
In other words (those of Deleuze and Guattari), capitalism deterritorializes the codes and meanings provided human life by savage and despotic/Statist forms of life—leaving the human in a position wherein the creation of new values is possible. But, this moment is ever so fleeting, as the axiomatic reterritorializes desire in the terms of the surplus values of capitalist production. This, then, is not the terrain of the Marxist opposition between labor and owners of capital, but between the social-production of surplus value and its private ownership and management, whereby sociality (desiring-production connected to a conformity-machine) and labor (desiring production connected to a profit-machine) are quantifiable in the terms of the production and consumption that valorize capitalism.163
However, this is a continual process, and as such, capitalism will soon enact a deterritorialization of the desire it previously reterritorialized in order to maintain production and the flow of capital. Over time, and from the perspective of the liberal State, this process establishes the purely economic basis of all social institutions. But, while all institutions are apparently social, the one major exception is the nuclear family, which becomes the site of a private submission to the authority and sensibility of the bourgeois regimentation of life.
Deleuze and Guattari return to Nietzsche’s suggestion that money is not only about exchange but also debt and guilt, making these central to how capitalism is lived by individuals. And this, as suggested above, is what makes capitalism truly insidious. Devoid of meaning but in need of subjects (laborers and consumers), capitalism hands responsibility for creating these subjects to the State.
But the State is beholden only to capitalism, so it leaves subject formation up to the family, and for the first time, makes reproduction a “private” affair. While this is the origin of the Oedipus complex, as primal sexuality is focused on members of the immediate family that are forbidden it (training desire to manifest itself as lack), it is also the perfect domain for making production, consumption, and submission a matter of free will, choice, opinion, taste, aesthetics, and many more bourgeois justifications. Thus, the State’s work is done for it by the family, and children are inculcated in the process by an unending succession of advertising, leisure activities, learning actions, and even food digestions that all point to the primacy of both the capitalist axiomatic and the bourgeois codes of the liberal State: produce to consume, movement is money, money is freedom.
THE NOMADIC WAR MACHINE AGAINST THE STATE
But all the while, desire is flowing, wanting only to produce, taking no joy in consumption. This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is what points to a beyond modernity, especially when combined with the destruction of codes and the deterritorialization of desire inherent in capitalism. While the system seems monolithic—especially and perhaps exclusively from America—it is inherently unstable; but that instability can only be exploited if desire goes to war with capitalism and liberal modernity.
Deleuze and Guattari posit schizophrenia as a revolutionary process. Whereas the first function of schizophrenia, mentioned above, is a form of normalcy in an axiomatic life devoid of meaning, the second is as a radical opposition to Statist paranoia. At the macropolitical level, this opposition explains the contrary needs of the State and capitalism, in that capitalism seeks the diminution of the State and the creation of a single global market and what Deleuze and Guattari call “universal history.” The liberal State obliges these goals particularly because its entire existence is predicated on the triumph of the capitalist axiomatic, and not the elevation or well-being of its subjects. In this light, multiculturalism, security, and the prohibition against certain forms of violence are laid bare as tools of axiomatization.
At the micropolitical level, schizophrenia and paranoia become poles in an opposition based upon the nomocentric and logocentric forms of thought. Nomos as schizophrenia is the tool of the nomadic war machine—individuals, groups, or processes that lie beyond the sovereignty (or interiority) of the State—that can take the form of anything from social relations and methods of production to nomadic tribes and squadristi. And, while the war machine is often schizophrenic, it is less often revolutionary, because it is not enough to escape the State, but to “make what one is escaping escape.”164
In other words, revolution is not merely ascetic but must actively engage in warfare against the State. “The state is sovereignty,” say Deleuze and Guattari, “but sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, or appropriating locally.”165 Sovereignty and appropriation bring us back to the idea of the State as a mechanism of capture, whereby communities (or local particularities) are brought into a general space of comparison—in which access is equal and free to all whom the State judges worthy (in effect justifying the capitalist axiomatic in one fell swoop by making money the adjudicating factor)—and sovereign power—through which the Good of the State trumps all other considerations of value.
Given this conception of sovereignty, logocentric thought becomes the lingua franca of the liberal State, with its paranoid insistence upon codifying and territorializing every aspect of life, as well as its normalization of universal conceptions of man.
But, while we are witnessing the omnipresent universalization of the bourgeois human, it is not the State that is driving his apotheosis but capitalism. For while there are many spaces of dereliction—smooth space that can neither be codified nor axiomatized—in relation to the State, there are less so in relation to the capitalist market. This explains why the post-WWII liberal State has allowed capitalism to dictate its foreign and domestic policy.
Much of A Thousand Plateaus consists of either making smooth space of one’s image of thought or of presenting a myriad of (mainly scientific and anthropological) examples of types of war machines and the lines of flight that they may use to escape the State. The important thing to remember is that escape is possible. In one of their most interesting chapters on nomadology and the war machine Deleuze and Guattari use Georges Dumézil—a fascist philologist who studied the creation of sovereignty in modern States—and Pierre Clastres—a radical anthropologist who studied how nomadic tribes in South America used agonic war as a tool to keep the State from capturing its people and territory—to explain the necessary gulf between the State and the war machine.166
Via Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari conclude that the liberal State ultimately uses labor to capture the war machine, by reducing warring to a job while keeping space striated so that men cannot war on their own behalf.167
While nomadic warriors vanished from Europe because of a process of capture involving sovereignty and the appropriation of the right to wage war, there are still aspects of European life that are irreducible—and exterior—to the State. These can be formalized in a line from Nietzsche’s thought to the examples of ultra-localism that have erupted since the establishment of the European Union. In other words, new forms of sovereignty, just like forms of representation, always leave a large swath of experience running free. While these experience used to be understood as civil society, they are now something much less central to State sovereignty due to the development of neo-liberal methods of controlling civil society through capitalism, communication, and perpetual connection to a global village.168 Instead, Deleuze and Guattari point to the always local and particular instances of exteriority that do not have to rival the sovereignty of the State but only call it into question. The challenge for these types of experiences, as mentioned above, is to do more than just escape, but to become-revolutionary.
The New Right, Right anarchism, and secessionism each point to a type of becoming-minor that can become-revolutionary. From the perspective of the war machine, the logic of the State is not all or nothing, but a relationship between interiority and exteriority: being at once engulfed by, and beyond, the State. While this is a dangerous existence, it is also one that affords maximum opportunities for revolutionary engagement.
The challenge to Deleuze and Guattari posed by the revol
utionary Right hinges upon its own reading of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Does becoming—and becoming-revolutionary in particular—that points to a line of flight beyond the bourgeois liberal human look like peace or agon? Does modernity impose peaceful coexistence with impersonal forces of mediocrity on human desire or something else? Deleuze and Guattari ignored these questions, even while proposing that desiring-production is made knowable through Nietzsche’s—rather than Freud’s and Marx’s—engagement with modernity. Knowing the answers to these questions makes our Right a nascent war machine.
AFFIRMATION
Affirmation as Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari understand it, is the basis of a noble form of life; that is, a form of life that does not condemn as its primary energy and intensity, that knows and needs nothing of an oppositional force to justify its existence, that is critical in valuation and evaluation on its own terms. In sum, it is the diametric transvaluation of ressentiment. This affirmation is what separates the us from the liberal Right, the liberal Left, and illiberal Left.
However, this is not always apparent, given our propensity for “outing” our adversaries. But, to be a successful war machine we need to make use of every single weapon at our disposal. We must also have a greater desire to create than to destroy. As said Deleuze:
What we most lack is a belief in the world, it has been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volumes. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people.169
CONCLUSION: BECOMING REVOLUTIONARY
“The question is not, ‘Is it true?’ but, ‘Does it work?’ What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?”
—Brian Massumi170
SMOOTH SPACE: THE LIBERAL STATE & THE REVOLUTIONARY RIGHT
Deleuze and Guattari’s attack on the liberal State has the potential to be the most far reaching of their forays into New Right territory. There are at least three reasons for saying so. One, Capitalism and Schizophrenia paints a convincing picture not only of the depth of capitalism’s undermining of anything primordial still operative in bourgeois men and women, but also of the real possibilities for revolt. Two, these revolutionary possibilities involve a declaration of war against capitalism and the liberal State. And three, this war must commence with a deep understanding of what vitalist impact capitalism, liberalism, and the State have on us—especially given the bourgeois origins of Statist and universalist notions of the human.
In other words, there is no revolt if we are not transformed in the process. While it seems, in fact, that the true revolt will occur two generations removed from our destruction of modernity, Deleuze and Guattari propose that desiring-production will change immediately upon its removal from the bourgeois form of life, pointing to the importance of derelict spaces and their role in our revolutionary potential and experience.
Derelict spaces, smooth space, and nomadic war machines are social transformation-machines. They not only disrupt the processes of capitalist decoding and Statist liberal overcoding, but also the systemic entanglement, or capture, that defines our relationship with modernity. As the majoritarian examples of the modern human—the ones who maximize not only the Faustian but also the Last Man impulses of modernity—no one has been more deeply and intimately bound up with bourgeois instincts, images of thought, and forms of life.171
It is no small thing to reject our birthright; but I always wonder how much our conceptual sense-making apparatus keeps us ensnared by what we aim to destroy. “There is enslavement,” Deleuze and Guattari remind us, “when human beings themselves are constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and with other things (animals, tools) under the control and direction of a higher unity.”172 The goal of nomadic thought is liberation from such a machine, and affirmation is its tool.
We must continue to create moments of hesitation and confusion in ourselves—wherein violence forces thought to think. Through such events, thought becomes thinking, but it also becomes active instead of reactive. Nietzsche implored thought to “dance” and to become “light,” to affirm difference, distance, and becoming. But the powers of creating affirmative thought are violent, and they are the foundation of Nietzsche’s understanding of culture. Negation and ressentiment do not create culture, but only lash out childishly at the world at hand.173 Only that which affirms creates. But remember that we are doubly ensnared because, not only is the contemporary world the embodiment of negation and ressentiment, but so is our image of thought.
Thus, to think in the terms of the modern logoi is to think via negation. It is the job of the State to ensure that thinking never encounters the “forces that do it violence.”174 The revolutionary Right has the potential to be a firestorm of just such forces, for amongst our ranks are men and women who already understand the physiological bases of conceptualization; they must now understand the physiological bases of rebellion as well. Smooth space is affirmative space—affirmative potentialities for thought to become thinking, and for New Right thinkers to become New Right revolutionaries.
But, smooth space alone does not guarantee the efficacy of a line of flight away from liberal enslavement. It must be utilized—the epistemology must become ontology!—to make problems of each instance of our continual becoming-liberal. In other words, smooth space is only smooth when it demands that we create a new form of life. Things, events, thoughts, and people can neither be taken for granted nor given free passes; but should be subjected to continual evaluation.
For instance, how does Hegel’s elevation of the State keep us seeking a modern solution to modernity? How much of Hegel’s thought on the State is merely a teleological justification of his contemporary reality? How much of the energy of organic populations and peoples was destroyed by the imposition of the liberal State? How were the pre-Christian/pre-Statist forms of life—kinship systems, social structures, economies, population flows, religious practices, warring traditions, manhoods, wonders, joys, fears, motivations, knowledges, wisdoms—that many of us seek to emulate, impacted upon by the creation of the despotic State and its concomitant representational unification of humanity?175
These are the types of questions that Deleuze forces us to ask ourselves. They are questions that resonate with revolutionary Rightists because we already inhabit smooth spaces—our possibilities are no longer conditioned by the liberal equality-machine. But the answers to the questions and problems that we create are critically important, for they will either lead us to become increasingly minor and revolutionary or straight back into the loving arms of liberal modernity.
The answers usually point to the need for a serious understanding of the relationship between the State and whatever utopian future we envision. For my part, the answers have led me to begin thinking seriously about anarchism—and especially its relevance for the Übermensch—for the first time in my life.
RACE, NATION, & WAR MACHINE
This brings us to the question of the revolutionary potential of race and nation. Epistemically, race was created as a bourgeois project and was destroyed as a bourgeois project. Ontologically, it has avoided its epistemological fate, largely because of its comforting value to liberal racial minorities.
All of the Academy’s efforts to shift racial discourse toward ethnicity and multiculturalism fail only on this account. But even if multiculturalism is rejected by those it ostensibly aims to help, this is an incorrect assessment of the dogma’s implementation, because, as the New Right correctly understands, the diminution of race discourse and racial knowledge and the commoditization of ethnicity was only ever intended to de-racialize one race.
And because of this, the North American New Right holds on to race like grim death. Ironically, and despite so many appeals
to primordial and genetic racial characteristics, this has left it defending the two linchpins of modernity: race and nation; as well as standing alone amongst the various New Rights as both the progenitors and descendants of white racial nationalism.
But really, all of the threads of the New Right are knotted to this issue. Race is the essence of logocentrism, seeking not only to bind the various humans into one universal family, but to quantify them as well. But, as it has become outlawed in State-sponsored thought, race has shifted to a form of nomos, grounding only those who stand beyond modern truth and morality.
Further muddling the issue is the suggestion, à la Nietzsche and Deleuze, that what we think of as primordial racial groups—those defined by genetic and cultural similitude in opposition to other groups—were, in Greece at least, the oppositional basis of the establishment of Platonic political citizenship.176 In other words, the Platonic republic was the basis of a citizen-type based on “good thought, good laws, good arms, and good people bounded together by the practices of law and citizenship” at the expense of an idea of community based in kinship, blood, and likeness.177
So not only might we have a conception of racial primordialism that is less than secure in its foundations, but we have the ethno-Statist champion—Plato—being presented on the side of what can certainly be called modern forms of citizenship at the expense of what can also certainly be called the antecedents of modern race. Gregory Flaxman notices a similar juncture in Plato’s Republic, wherein Socrates exposes the autochthony of the Athenian aristocracy as a “noble lie” so that a transcendent value and motivational cudgel may be provided to each of the classes of Athenian social and political life.178
That Deleuze and Nietzsche problematize race is certain, but I suggest that they make the concept more radical. Plato understood that the organic nature of peoplehood posed a problem for the Athenian State, because it proposes a hyper-exclusive form of altruistic co-identification. I have already placed this primordial racial group, or people, on the side of nomos, because peoplehood—while internally stratified and hierarchical—operates in a context, or plane of immanence, that is organized horizontally.
