Philosophy/Political

Occupy: A People Yet to Come

The term Occupy represents a belief in the transformation of the capitalist

system through a new heterogenic world of protest and activism that cannot
be conceived in terms of liberal democracy, parliamentary systems, class war
or vanguard politics. These conceptualisations do not articulate where power
is held, nor from where transformation may issue. This collection of essays by
world-leading scholars of Deleuze and Guattari examines how capitalism can
be understood as a global abstract machine whose effects pervade all of life and
how Occupy can be framed as a response to this as a heterogenic movement
based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of
organisation. Seeing the question as a political tactic aimed at delegitimizing
their protest, Occupiers refused to answer the question what do you want?
Occupy: A People Yet to Come goes a considerable way towards providing the
terms upon which this refusal can be understood within a changed landscape of
political activism and the rewriting of the conventions of political protest.
With essays by Claire Colebrook, Giuseppina Mecchia, John Protevi, Rodrigo
Nunes, Verena Andermatt Conley, Nicholas Thoburn, Ian Buchanan, David
Burrows, Eugene Holland and Andrew Conio.

Andrew Conio is an artist, writer and activist. He is Director of Programmes,

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, Kent
University and has published on a range of subjects including language, the
moving image, architecture, painting, institutional critique and creativity.

Series: Critical Climate Change

Conio

Cover Image: Declaration Flowchart

Rachel Schragis 2011 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA

Occupy
A People Yet to Come
Edited by Andrew Conio

Occupy

Critical Climate Change

Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook
The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and
has stood, until recently, outside representation or address.
Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change
concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and
energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological
and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual
production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes
of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new
formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and realignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical
languages and conceptual templates, political premises and
definitions of life. There is a particular need to publish in
timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the
boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the interface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change
is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemopolitical mutations that correspond to the temporalities of
terrestrial mutation.

Occupy
A People Yet to Come
Edited by Andrew Conio

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

London
2015

First edition published by Open Humanities Press

Copyright 2015 Andrew Conio. Chapters by respective authors except chapter 2: Protevi, John.
Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS. Theory & Event 14:4 Supplement (2011).
2011 John Protevi and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns
Hopkins University Press

Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/occupy.html

This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license.
Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy
their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under
the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair
use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-004-7
PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-014-6
Cover Art: Declaration Flowchart by Rachel Schragis, Copyright 2011 CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0

Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at
http://openhumanitiespress.org

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

Contents
Preface

Claire Colebrook

Introduction

23

Andrew Conio

1. On Anthropolitics: From Capitalism and Schizophrenia

to Occupy and Beyond

67

2. Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS

88

3. Pack of Leaders: Thinking Organization and Spontaneity

with Deleuze and Guattari

97

Giuseppina Mecchia
John Protevi

Rodrigo Nunes

4. Resistance to Occupy

125

5. Preoccupations

158

6. Minor Politics, Territory, and Occupy

172

7. September 17, 2011: Occupy without Counting

191

8. Negative Space War Machines

203

Claire Colebrook

Verena Andermatt Conley

Nicholas Thoburn
Ian Buchanan

David Burrows

9. Occupy America and the Slow-Motion General Strike

225

10. Savage Money

238

Bios

269

Eugene Holland
Andrew Conio

Acknowlegements

I would like to thank Claire Colebrook for her generous and steadfast support during the writing of this book; the contributors, Andrew Stapleton,
Sigi Jttkandt and my many friends at Occupy and the Economics
Working Group especially David, Tim, Clive, Mary, Ellena, Omar, Janos,
Peter, Mike, Obi, Schlack, Nick and Vica whose commitment to finding
ways to create a better world prompted the writing of this book.

Preface

End the Occupation,

Long Live Occupy!
Claire Colebrook

I
At the time of this book going to press, amidst all the diverging political theories and commentaries regarding how the twenty-first century
might cope with the intertwined complexities of climate change, collapsing global finance, wars on terror that are also wars on freedom, potential
viral pandemics and increasing disaster scenarios (with increased vulnerability to disaster for the less fortunate) one thing seems clear enough:
end the occupation. The attacks by Israel on Gaza have not received
unanimous condemnation; there are still those, especially in the United
States, who for all the disproportionate suffering inflicted on those
trapped in Gaza still see Israel as having some right to defend itself, and
still maintain that conflict was instigated by Hamas and therefore not
subject to any critique outside the right of Israel to respond. Regardless
of the competing histories, narratives, conflicting allegiances and complexities, it nevertheless seems clear that ending the occupation would be
the best and quickest way to end widespread and ongoing violence.
Why does ending occupation, amidst all this complexity, appear to
be such a clear and just thing to do? There are two identities the State
of Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza both of whom can lay claim to
having suffered displacement and both of whom can seem to ask quite
legitimately for a territory of their own. In the ongoing demands for a stable and peaceful future, perhaps one would support a two-state solution,

10

Claire Colebrook

or perhaps there are other alternatives, but ending occupation seems an

immediate imperative before anything else might be achieved, and occupation seems to be a simple and unqualified evil: a people were residing
in a territory, and that residence was taken over from without. Even if
one regards Hamass reaction to occupation as terrorism (rather than a
war between a funded military force and those who have to find other
means) the overwhelming fact is that Gaza is occupied. It was originally
Palestinian territory by virtue of the presence of those who are now
imprisoned in Gaza. Here we strike a small difficulty with the concept
of original occupation, which perhaps needs to be thought of as prior
occupation. The state of Israel is not occupying land that is terra nullius.
This might allow us to think of minor occupation whereby a people is
formed by occupying a space, with the space becoming the place that it is
by way of occupation. This would need to be contrasted with molar or
majoritarian occupation, whereby a world map is already laid out with
established nations and agents who then lay claim (or not) to the right
to occupy a space. Occupation is initially a form of territorialization,
a becoming who one is, or becoming a people by way of assembling in
a spatial zone. Taking away a territory is not only taking away a peoples
being their right to exist and their existence it is also the creation of a
different register. Rather than an earth that is occupied by peoples there
is a map of states, polities, geopolitics, markets, relations and nations that
overcode and negotiate the distribution of peoples across the earth.
To follow Deleuze and Guattari on this question: occupying space is
not something a people does. Something like a people emerges through
the occupation of a field, which in turn becomes a space. If this is so, then
one can see history, geopolitics, capitalism and the war on terror as a
problem of territorialization and deterritorialization. Most simply, capitalism deterritorializes in many different ways but one way is to generate a field of exchange, markets, finance, debts, and labor flows that preclude any territory from being simply what it is. The occupation of any
space becomes overcoded by another virtual space the world of capital,
and arms industries and nowhere is this more evident than in the US
response to Israel, where the simple moral demand to end occupation is
neither fully enforced nor fully articulated because of that other register
of security, which will ensure that global trade, militarization and force

Preface

11

become a smooth operating system with no other imperative outside the

systems own ongoing function or operation. This is capitalisms cynicism
that allows for any belief whatever, and then allows for the market and
exchange not only to operate regardless of belief but also to commodify
belief by generating green, feminist, queer and even activist commodities (such as Jay-Zs marketing of Occupy All Streets t-shirts).
Here is where despite first appearances Deleuze and Guattaris
philosophy allows for a nuanced political (or micro-political) account of
occupation. At first glance their thought would seem to offer nothing but
a violent relativism of force: there is no such thing as a people or a territory prior to occupation. Something becomes what it is by forming relations with what it is not, and those relations become relatively stable, but
always and necessarily subject to deterritorialization. When a territory
Gaza is represented by a single body Hamas one set of relations
(bodies in space) has been overtaken by another set of relations (political
identities and allegiances), and this other strata or register then becomes
reterritorialized on a single system (capital) that quite like Deleuze and
Guattaris own philosophy acknowledges no essential territories or relations. But the difference resides in capitals reference of all relations and
territories back to a global system of maintaining a global system. So, yes,
there is nothing in Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy that grants anyone
any right to anything; all identities and territories begin with appropriation and deterritorialization, becoming what and who one is in relations
that are not ones own. Any attempt to grant supreme importance to a
single territory the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, capitalism,
democracy is a form of violence that precludes the very dynamism that
brings anything into being.
But there are two modes of occupation: minor and molar. Minor occupation produces a territory through occupation so that a people or movement comes into being by way of assembling and taking up space. We
might say that all indigenous peoples, by definition, are forms of minor
occupation insofar as their being has no existence outside the taking up
of space. The sequences is not, this is who I am and what I stand for, and
therefore I have a right to occupy, but rather, this is occupied space, and
therefore this is who we have turned out to be. In the Occupy movement
that inspired this volume the logic of minor occupation was at work. Yes,

12

Claire Colebrook

Wall Street was the site for a people finance, banking and yes, this site
was overtaken and occupied by protestors. The logic was not, this is our
space and we have a right to this space because of who we are what we
represent and because we stand for humanity in general. On the contrary,
the occupation began and then certain motifs of proportion or statistics
were made quite explicit: to say we are the 99% is less a claim of identity,
property and right and more a claim of assembling. And if Wall Street
was based on a deterritorialized system of owning space because some
system other than occupation was at work (real estate, property, colonization of space), the Occupy movement was based on higher deterritorialization. Rather than right or ownership or taking back what was owed
to us, there was no us or we outside the event of occupation.
I would suggest that the same applies to Israel and Gaza: the Israeli
defense force is adopting majoritarian or molar occupation, appealing to
a narrative of nation, right, security, constituted peoples and property.
Tragically, those abandoned in Gaza, cannot appeal to any straightforward conception of nation but Gaza is where they are. All they have is
their occupation of space, a space that has then been occupied by a force
that does not simply counter-occupy but places the competing claims to
space as some grand narrative of security, nation, legitimacy and right. It
might seem quixotic, and violently so, to suggest that rather than respond
with a counter-narrative of right and nation one imagines a world of
occupation without right. Such a new earth would not set the occupation of a territory within a moral framework but would instead begin
with occupation the assembling across a space that generates a people,
and then enables certain narratives of rights to be formed ex post facto.
Such a call for a radically immanent politics might be navely wishful, but
here I would quote Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre who affirmed
the possibility that was articulated at the Seattle protests (prior to the
Occupy movements) that another world would be possible:
Becoming the child of an event: not being born again into
innocence, but daring to inhabit the possible as such, without the adult precautions that make threats of the type what
will people say?, who will they take us for? or and you think
that is enough? prevail. The event creates its own now to
which the question of a certain acting as if , which is proper

Preface

13

to children when they make things (up), responds. (Stengers

and Pignarre 2011: 4)
II
Deleuze and Guattari once declared that it was not easy being
Heideggerian. By this I take them to mean not that Heidegger was a
difficult thinker (for then they might have said the same about Kant or
Leibniz), nor that it was unfashionable to be a Heideggerian phenomenologist in the late twentieth century (for then they might have said the
same about any of their more obscure commitments to less canonical
figures, such as Raymond Ruyer or less politically tolerable writers such
as Henry Miller or Ezra Pound). Rather, there is something intrinsically
risk-laden about the possibility of Heideggers philosophy that takes us
to the heart of the relation between philosophy and politics, or the polity. Philosophy is possible by way of deterritorialization: the formation of
the polity occurs when lifes relation to the earth shifts in register and one
can create concepts that are not extensive (regarding what there is), but
intensive (or what one might be able to think). It is in What is Philosophy?
(1991) that Deleuze and Guattari theorize the geopolitical conditions of
philosophy, tying philosophy to an agonistics that can only occur among
friends who can be genuinely combative at a conceptual level because
they are occupying a terrain of luxury that liberates them from immediate
material production. (A similar notion of philosophical agonistics was
articulated by Jacques Derrida in Politics of Friendship (1994), where he
quoted William Blakes Do be My Enemy for Friendships Sake, (Derrida
2005: 72)). If one is bound to another for reasons of state or diplomacy
then relations are mediated by some external measure of justice or propriety, but if there is nothing at stake other than the struggle itself then the
genuine force (of concepts) can take hold. Deleuze and Guattari argue
that certain geopolitical forces need to have played themselves out and
constituted a specific territory for philosophical agonistics to emerge.
Their theorization of the philosophical plane of concept-creation has
got them into quite a bit of trouble, given that they tied their observation to a specific limitation of democracy with regard to the becoming
of subjected peoples. Here, they argue that Europeanization needs to be

14

Claire Colebrook

distinguished from becoming, just as in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) they

argue that there is no becoming-man:
Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First because man is majoritarian par excellence,
whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a
becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination
of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities,
as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: whiteman, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination,
not the reverse. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 291)
In this sense the 99% remains as a minority (as do those living in Gaza),
not because they are fewer in number but because their identity has no
basis outside the assembling in common. By contrast, the becoming
of man, has an internal end or telos towards which history is oriented.
Both the figure of European reason and man, go through time in order
to realize their proper potential, in order to arrive at their own freedom,
liberated from any specified form. Such a conception of democracy as
a becoming that is nothing other than its own unfolding as free selfdetermination needs to be differentiated from Deleuze and Guattaris
theorization of becoming as always becoming- (becoming-animal,
becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible), where becoming is not a
self-unfolding but always in a relation with what is not ones own. This
is why philosophy and art, they argue, allow for a creativity that can only
occur by way of a people that are lacking; one does not write because
one is a member of a polity, for it is writing and creation that occur only
in the absence of an autonomous or proper becoming:
The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a
new earth and people that do not yet exist. Europeanization
does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples.
Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution
of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of
creation. It is not populist writers but the most aristocratic
who lay claim to this future. This people and earth will not be

Preface

15

found in our democracies. Democracies are majorities, but a

becoming is by its nature that which always eludes the majority. The position of many writers with respect to democracy
is complex and ambiguous. The Heidegger affair has complicated matters: a great philosopher actually had to be reterritorialized on Nazism for the strangest commentaries to meet
up, sometimes calling his philosophy into question and sometimes absolving it through such complicated and convoluted
arguments that we are still in the dark. It is not always easy
to be Heideggerian. It would be easier to understand a great
painter or musician falling into shame in this way (but, precisely, they did not). It had to be a philosopher, as if shame had
to enter into philosophy itself. He wanted to rejoin the Greeks
through the Germans, at the worst moment in their history: is
there anything worse, said Nietzsche, than to find oneself facing a German when one was expecting a Greek? How could
Heideggers concepts not be intrinsically sullied by an abject
reterritorialization? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 10809)
How might we approach this argument regarding Heidegger, concepts,
philosophy, shame, and a future people and earth? For Heidegger, philosophy had at one and the same time covered over the essentially nonessentially nature of being, and the intrinsically inauthentic nature of
authenticity. Because philosophy emerges in a leisured and aristocratic
condition, freed from an economy of material production and occurs
amongst friends who have the space to be antagonistic, it is capable of creating concepts. If you are genuinely my friend and we have the luxury of
speaking in a manner of absolute war because the conversation is in a
different register from the day-to-day constituted demands of the body
then we can start to create concepts on a different plane: we might ask
what justice really is only if the answer is not bound by immediate material consequences and institutions. It is only in the absence of political
and material diplomacy that genuine friendship opens genuine agonistics. For Heidegger philosophers broke away from the everyday world
of projects, concerns, meanings, and the ready-at-hand; and they could
do so because that world of projects could be rendered inoperative by

16

Claire Colebrook

asking the question not of what this thing is for me, but what this thing or
being is as such.
It is in a moment of disorientation, or a certain loss of world, that
one might start to think not of a world that is always already human but
an earth (the forces from which the human world are composed). We
might say that what Deleuze and Guattari refer to elsewhere as the war
machine, or an agonistics that has not been captured by opposing sides
(such as political parties, nations, identified groups or communities), is
only possible when there is no actual war: in a state of war one holds on
to who one is, where one is, what one stands for and what one believes.
Doing so reduces the intensity of the war machine to stabilized terms and
oppositions; the war machine would be destructive of such a terrain. In
this respect Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy, like Heideggers, is not at
all easy because it abandons the negotiation of a field, abandons settlement among terms and instead aims for a higher deterritorialization: in
both cases one thinks the relation between world (constituted meaning) and earth (the plane that renders such constitution possible but
also fragile). Heidegger argued both that one can ask questions and begin
to think only because one has a world (a horizon of meaning, concern,
care, others, history and ownness) and that one becomes aware of the
having of a world when the world breaks down. Authenticity is therefore
not so much attachment to the projects and horizons that make us who
we are, but a sense that while all we do and think emerges from the lifeworld, what is truly worth thinking about is that there is a world, and that
it might not be. This does not mean that living authentically is liberation
from any identity, history, project or tradition, but that having a world or
tradition is something one takes on with a radical sense of decision. We
can only take up a free and decisive relation to a world that was not of our
own deciding, and nothing legitimates that world other than that world
itself. And here, of course, is where things start to become not at all easy
as a Heideggerian. One might not only say that there are certain material
and geopolitical conditions for adopting ones world freely and decisively,
and that for Heidegger these conditions were tied to a German National
Socialism that aimed to eradicate anything that appeared as too inert
or unthinking to embrace radical self-becoming. One might also point
out, as Jacques Derrida has done, that a certain notion of contemporary

Preface

17

politics, democracy and modernity as a lazy consensus and acquiescence

to passively received political forms was crucial to Nazi anti-Semitic
rhetoric that relied on refusing democracy as a contamination of the
truly decisive freedom of spirit. Democracy, parliamentary representation, communication and politics in its day-to-day combative forms were
(for the Nazis and twentieth-century fascism) the hallmarks of a world
dominated by money and an unquestioning acceptance of the constituted field. As Derrida pointed out in his reading of Benjamin, the dream
of a divine violence that would annihilate the ongoing order of received
law was perilously close to the National Socialist rhetoric of renewal and
redemption through a form of cultural rebirth (Derrida 1994).
One might then go on, as Deleuze and Guattari do, and tie the
Heidegger affair to a problem of philosophy and its aristocratic temper.
Philosophy is deterritorialization or the production of a register different
and distant from the constituted terms of a polity; it is the refusal of the
plane of functions, communication and certainly of the people. Is it any
wonder, then, that this notion of authentic and decisive thinking could so
easily align itself with another territory in Heideggers case the German
Volk who were not one populace among others but the privileged people
for thinking world-creation?
Bearing that in mind, we might say that today it is not easy being
Deleuzo-Guattarian, and not just because their thought is abstruse, out
of favor (in the new materialist turns) or irrelevant, but because their
celebrated rhetoric of nomadism and deterritorialization is a luxury that
displaced persons without a territory, or whose territory is occupied,
cannot afford. Worse, as their criticism of communication and democracy above seems to suggest, a certain privilege is attached to those who
are not mired in literal and material antagonism but can occupy another
plane, of pure conversation. One might suggest that their celebration of
deterritorialized philosophy offers a glib dismissal of a certain mode of
capitalist democracy the democracy of free markets and imposed conceptions of the consumer-oriented private individual but reinstalls a
hyper-democratic prejudice: some traditions, such as Western philosophy, have at their heart the potential to distance themselves from any
constituted tradition such that democracy would not be a worldview or
tradition so much as a critical mood or irony with regard to any tradition.

18

Claire Colebrook

International interventions that impose, maintain or secure democracy

are supposedly not undertaken for the sake of this or that constituted
people, but for some abstract or virtual ideal of humanity in general.
Against such a reading of Deleuze and Guattaris rhetoric of deterritorialization and nomadism as yet one more way in which the West uses a
concept of the universal to impose its own norms, presenting itself as the
ideology that is no ideology, and worse of using concepts of nomadism and deterritorialization in a world where real events of displacement are life and death matters, I want to suggest that we think seriously
about Deleuze and Guattaris claim for a new people and a new earth as a
genuinely futural endeavor. It is not easy being Deleuzo-Guattarian precisely because such talk of a people to come, deterritorialization, the war
machine and nomadism appears at best uselessly nave and at worst as
violently appropriative. How dare one celebrate at a metaphorical level
a placelessness that is traumatically painful for many who do not have
the luxury of the philosophical view from nowhere? Isnt such a strategy stupid, risky and far too abstract to be of any use in urgent political
struggles? What we need it might be said is not abstraction and deterritorialization, but history, facts, distinction, and more than anything
the affirmation of what is genuinely owed to a people who have had their
land, their personhood and their conditions for living stolen.
At the time of this volumes going into production the world was witness to such violent occupation and literal deterritorialization. Despite
pressure from the international community, and despite widespread
condemnation in much of the press and social media, the Israeli defense
forces continued to assault and wage war on the occupied territories.
Originally conceived in the wake of the radical and revolutionary Occupy
movements across the globe, this collection of essays could (it seemed
in 2012) quite easily contest capitalist and supposedly liberal ideologies
of property by celebrating radical potentials for becoming, dissolution,
non-identity and a notion of movement without place or clearly defined
ends. Indeed, one might say that the neoliberal rhetoric of ends, outcomes, success and even personhood had done much to precipitate the
increasing reterritorialization of all political possibilities on market efficiency and corporate personhood. To celebrate a certain destructiveness
without clearly defined ends, a certain non-productivity and even social

Preface

19

dissension, dispersal and vagueness at the time of Occupy was both

a timely response to those who accused Occupy of not being a clearly
defined social movement, and provided a clear foil against the discourse
of property and right that had allowed profoundly anti-democratic measures to be put in place lest the entire market and workforce be vanquished by an even more catastrophic crisis of the financial sector. But,
today, as a people who need to see themselves as a people with a territory
and a history are subject to warfare, displacement, carnage and dehumanization, what use would philosophical abstraction and anti-democratic
distance serve? One might say as Derridas critics did in his claim that
South African apartheid required a sense of the entire Western traditions implication in national identity and apartness that what is needed
now is not a critique of territory, nations, identity, peoples and place, but
an acute sense of facts, history, data, locatedness and immediate policy
(McClintock and Nixon 1986).
But here we can say, with Deleuze and Guattari, that the immediate
needs of molar politics claims such as those of the womens movement,
or today demands for a Palestinian state and the right of a people to exist
do not preclude micro-political analysis and imagination. And here is
where we go back to philosophy and risk: if we do not hold on to ideas of
a people being entitled to the territory that is the milieu of their history
and identity, do we not risk riding roughshod and violently over what
within the milieu of world politics and history is a legitimate and fundamental right of the Palestinian people to autonomy, life and liberty?
Yes, that is true: to question notions of territory, of peoples, of nations
and of democracy is to risk falling into a managerial bio-politics that
would undertake any means whatever to preserve life as such regardless
of historical and political complexities. But it is also a way of enabling a
post-territorial politics or a politics of higher deterritorialization. It is the
same rhetoric of territory, right, history, what it is to be a people and
the rhetoric of holding on to historical complexities, and specific conflict
histories that not only is appropriated by the state of Israel to defend
violent attacks that are anything but defensive, necessary or responsive;
it also allows for certain styles of reporting (where both sides are represented fairly, when the ultimate issue should be the violence of sides), and
encourages who started the conflict modes of reasoning. What stands

20

Claire Colebrook

for democracy or the debates and wars between and among identities
that are constituted in a capitalist milieu of geopolitical borders produced
by markets, trade agreements, and histories of appropriative nation states
tied to warring territories constituted by trade competition needs to be
displaced by a mode of thinking in which no-one has a prima facie right,
whatever the history, to occupy. What needs to be thought are less the
molar categories of the people, and the nation, and instead the micropolitical potentials that might open a new people and a new earth.
Rather than think of molar politics and minor politics as an opposition, it might be best to think of oppositional narratives versus narratives
devoid of scale. That is to say, one could start to approach the Israel
Gaza conflict through the history of anti-Semitism, the horrors of the
Holocaust and the desperate need for state security as a response to terror, or one could adopt a history of the Palestinian people and Hamas
and the insecurity of Muslim culture in a Middle Eastern zone increasingly tied towards alignment with the interests of the US, capital, energy
markets and other affiliations that have little to do with the survival of
the people who are supposedly represented by governments, parties and
brotherhoods. Molar politics focuses upon a history of nation and party
formation, and geopolitical border disputes; such competing narrations
enable debates over the proper nature of scale: should the IsraelGaza
conflict be framed by the specter of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, or
by the other history of displacement of the Palestinian people? Deleuze
and Guattaris micro-politics is not opposed to the molar, but pulverizes
any such identity: any nation, party, people or brotherhood has as its condition of emergence thousands of years of a taming of the earth (including oil and other lines of capital), and no dispute over borders has a natural or proper scale. Rather than the banal claim that beneath religious,
political, tribal or ethnic conflicts we are all human which of course is
the violent imposition of a humanity of recognition and would demand
that we all become liberal and distanced from the affiliations that mark
out our territories Deleuze and Guattari see difference as multiplying rather than weakening in micro-political analysis. Neither the Israeli
defense forces nor Hamas can contain the proliferation of differences
and identities that both sides violently seek to represent. So rather than
a democratic politics that would negotiate one people versus another,

Preface

21

or that would reconcile the rights of people over territories, one might
think beyond persons, beyond the demos, beyond the polity. One might
start to consider how the earth not the world might generate a people to come, a people without right, ownership or propriety. Such a call
for a world in common without propriety, without identity and without
nations and that would be beyond the world by thinking the forces of the
earth would not be easy. It would risk, as so many people have objected
with regard to Deleuze and Guattaris work, a celebration of statelessness
and impersonal life precisely when the worlds most fragile people are
seeking a territory and state of their own. But we need to ask, today, both
when climate change and environmental collapse have been ignored as
viable political concerns because states are concerned with their own survival, and when as the Occupy movement demonstrated, states represent corporations rather then people whether the ideals of personhood
and nation are not more risky. Do not concepts of right and nation risk
generating higher degrees of catastrophe than a possible future where
there are not territories and peoples, but a new people and a new earth,
no longer bound by the macro-narratives of the world and polities.
The heightened Israeli violence against Gaza occurs just as the earth
not the world but the earth (or the geological strata from which philosophy and various forms of humanity formed itself) is poised at a singular
point or threshold that would render all human life in its current mode
untenable. Rather than extending capitalist democracy a democracy
that represents persons as private consumers with the right to self-determination perhaps a better path would be to intensify the forces from
which diverse peoples emerge, beyond states, markets, territories and
right. The assaults on Gaza and the use of the figure of Hamas to destroy
the lives of civilians is perhaps one of the more violent and flagrant events
that have allowed the borders of states, markets, nations and molar identities to reduce the complex differences of people who do not have a state
or a territory.
If it is not that easy being Heideggerian or Deleuzo-Guattarian, then
one might insist that such difficulties are minor very minor when
compared with the struggle to live in the occupied territories. Rather
than see the means of violence the state as a right that should be
extended, a minor politics would intensify forces that are irreducible to

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Claire Colebrook

the state, disentangling Judaism in all its forms from Israel, and differentiating Islam from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and in turn
disentangling life and the earth from the striated space of East and West.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy?. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell. London: Verso.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Force de loi: Le Fondement mystique de lautorit (Paris:
Galile). English translation: Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of
Authority. Trans. Mary Quaintance. Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 9191045.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London:
Verso.
McClintock, Anne and Rob Nixon. 1986. No Names Apart: The Separation of Word
and History in Derridas Le Dernier Mot du Racisme. Critical Inquiry 13 (1):
140154.
Stengers, Isabelle and Philippe Pignarre. 2011. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell.
Trans Andrew Goffey. London: Palgrave.

Introduction
Andrew Conio

I. A Political Ontology of Flow

Life flows. Societies, economies, and political systems channel flows to
produce things, functional processes and systems. Processes congeal to
make autopoietic and highly relational social structures. The language
of painting or music can be used to describe social processes because
society is a mobile composition of points, lines and rhythms. Out of
flows, densities, contractions, planes and surfaces compositions emerge.
Deleuze and Guattari call them assemblages, milieus or plateaus. Every
society in history has operated on the basis of flows and distributions.
Capitalisms coding and decoding, de and reterritorialization, provide the
most fluid and mobile compositional template of them all. Capitalism
decodes and deterritorializes with all its might; it is a non-territorially based axiomatic of flows, but its distributions are dysfunctional as
they channel wealth and power into the hands of the few (Deleuze and
Guattari 2000: 369).
Deleuzes politics cannot be thought outside of his aesthetics because
he captures this struggle between flows that travel unimpeded to merge
with other flows, or that diverge to create new tributaries, and those that
are blocked or turned against themselves. Power is linked to the control
of flows, and Deleuzes anthropological1 intention is to capture the forces
or systems that seek to control flows.
For Deleuze subjugation is not imposed from the top down we
are not simply repressed as we are conduits for or contractions of
forces far in excess of the boundaries of the self. Each form of capture,

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Andrew Conio

be it phallogocentrism, colonialism, or sexism, controls the flow differently, hence there can be no crude economic determinism. As Conley2
observes, by:
advocating an ever-unfinished, non-dialectical, and nonhierarchical model of constructive dissent, [Deleuze and
Guattari] do away with the Marxian notion of class structure to consider social conflict in terms of mobile micro- and
macro-cosms, ever shifting lines, rhythms and harmonics.
Under neoliberalism, as it reaches ever further into the fabric of life,
capital determines far more than it ever did. The global economic and
political elite is commandeering the human genome and the building
blocks of life as well as the ontological and epistemological horizons of
thought. The central paradox is that while capitalism seeks to command
flows, capital itself is the strongest force of irrepressible desire to escape
all limits. As neoliberalism tightens its grip, Deleuze and Guattaris AntiOedipus (1972) takes on even greater prescience:
the prime function incumbent upon the socius has always
been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record
them, to see that no flow exists that is not properly dammed
up, channeled, regulated. (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 33)
Such insights support Colebrooks claim that Anti-Oedipus might be recognized as one of the twentieth centurys most important works.3
Release, capture, flow, systolic and diastolic rhythms, and the processes necessary to control these pulsations are to be found in all things,
in flows of women and children, flows of herds and seed, sperm flows,
flows of shit, menstrual flows (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 112). The
paths of flows are always machinic: mouthbreast, sunphotosynthesis,
cameraluxlumen, and the production of subjectivity itself is a machinic
process. Production is primarily desiring production, far in excess of the
economic system: social life is machinic [and] may be conceived as a
global system of desire and destiny that organizes the production of production, the productions of recording, and productions of consumption
(Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 142). There are, however, two valences to all
things block or flow, production or anti-production. Anti-production is
not necessarily the opposite of creative production. In anti-production

Introduction

25

things slow, gain traction or assume a different meaning. Retraction,

denial, and entropy are diverse dynamics to be found everywhere in all
things, so diverse as to make it impossible to theorize an overarching
code of lack or negation. Its pointless to imagine that anarchy as pure
free flow is good, and the state, strata or assemblages are bad. Instead,
block/flow, open/closed, anarchy/system have to be placed in a positive
correlation in the formation of static or regular inscriptions that in turn
facilitate the maximum degree of openness in all things while capitalism creates false antinomies and dysfunctional syntheses.
This collection of essays presents Deleuzes unique approach to politics, an approach that begins with a theory of life as flows, refrains and
forces: the notion of flow constitutes the heart of an ontology that
conceptualizes all processes in terms of exchanges of energy (Garo
2006: 58). This may sound abstract and tangential to the urgent problems
faced by the world today: the destruction of the ecosystem, worldwide
immiseration, the return of the despotic Urstaat or empire in the capitalist socius (Thoburn 2003: 91), and the multiple layers of control and
robbery. The Occupy movement, however, created a new environment in
which discussions that might once have seemed impertinent have been
gaining a new traction. Occupy is a synecdoche for belief in the revolutionary transformation of the capitalist system: a new heterogenic world
of protest and activism that cannot be thought in terms of the state, liberal democracy, parliamentary systems, or the hugely compromised nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector. Nor can Occupy be conceived
in terms of class war or vanguard politics. These conceptualizations do
not articulate fully where power is held, nor from where revolution may
issue. A philosophical vocabulary that would materially inhabit the conditions of our present global world order is needed because the different registers of ontology (the movements of the earth), the social (the
people yet to come), epistemology (concept formation), and aesthetics
are nevertheless activated on the one single plane that is at considerable
remove from the conventional terms of state or royal politics as they are
understood today. This book seeks to contribute to this process of thinking a single plane of matter, knowledge, politics and art through analysis
and illustration, but chiefly through the production of tools and methods

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Andrew Conio

that Occupy and the political ontology of Deleuze and Guattari demand
of each other.
The combination of precision and subtlety to be found in Deleuze and
Guattaris concepts accounts for the worldwide multi-discursive interest
in their formulations. Recent politically-engaged Deleuzian scholarship,4
the financial crisis, and the emergence of widespread social conflict following the collapse of the self-certainties of the BlairBush era have made
their work seemingly indispensible in the struggle to transform capitalism. Whilst Deleuze and Guattari have many mediators and interpreters in political theory, most notably Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
readers are increasingly attracted by the force of Deleuze and Guattaris
own conceptual apparatus and the ways in which it reveals the immanent dynamics of capitalism in the the pure flow of deterritorialization,
of money and labor brought together in a conjunction of flows which is
actualized in private property (Holland), and the axiomatics that hold
this system in place. Also fundamental to their analysis is an understanding of economic production as part of a much larger field of desiring production that produces the subjectivities and social relations upon which
the economic system ultimately depends. Deleuze and Guattaris political concepts have the capacity to resolve many of the contradictions left
unaddressed by other accounts of the machinery of capitalism. For example, their presentation of the immiserating, sadistic, world-destroying
tendencies of capitalism is no barrier to their appreciation for capitalisms
dynamic potential and boundless creativity. Their formulation of capitalist axiomatics provides a way to understand how capitalist systems, supported by a war machine of stupendous proportions, have the appearance
of inviolable natural laws, and yet are constantly modified by capitalisms
own inherent dynamism, the pressure of the multitude, and outright
resistance. Deleuze and Guattari share with Marx the view that capitalism is the handmaiden of its own eventual demise. The construction of
the contemporary subject is such that it is both the measure of capitalisms capacity for freedom and its primary mode of capture. In sum: the
brilliance of Deleuze and Guattaris thought lies precisely in their ability
to capture the multi-dimensional nature of social and life forces in such a
way that (through the construction of a matrix of extremely sophisticated
concepts) bifurcations, contradictions, and dialectics do not become

Introduction

27

impediments to thought but rather opportunities to delve deeper into

the underlying dynamics of existence and sociality.
The inconsistent reception of Deleuze and Guattaris works may be
due in part to the fact that their ideas stretch across so many discourses
from cinema to anthropology, philosophy to literature, and across the
sciences; it is easy to get lost amongst the plethora of innovations that
cannot be mapped easily onto the existing conceptual terrain. That their
works first entered the English-speaking academic world through literary studies, film, aesthetics and architecture partly contributed to the
sense that it would also be perfectly possible to engage with many of their
idioms without attention to their political implications, which can be
as evident as they are elusive. The scope of their works reflects the fact
that politics itself is as multilayered as it is aesthetic, as ontological as it
is linguistic, registering the fact that everything is political, or indeed, as
Deleuze and Guattari themselves insist, that politics precedes being.
This volume presents a series of experiments with such Deleuzian
concepts as the war machine, the pack, the event, the assemblage, becoming-imperceptible, capitalist axiomatics and the minor and molecular,
with three papers discussing a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to economics. Theories from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum
are subject to critique. Rodrigo Nunes, for instance, argues against the
Marxist concept of the vanguard as a predetermined social form, arguing
instead for a vanguard function and for multiple vanguards. In a typical
Deleuzian thought experiment, he takes the concept of the anomalous,
developed by Deleuze in relation to painting, out of its original context
and deploys it to capture more fully the kind of social practices associated
with the Marxist notion of the vanguard. The pack rather than the crowd,
and the anomalous rather than the vanguard, are dynamic transversal
expressions of social forces.
What makes Deleuze so perplexing and fascinating, and also of the
greatest value, is that many of his novel concepts mark a radical break
with established political ideas; they articulate something that cannot
be said even in an hybridization of existing words. They do not engage
with such notions as the rights of man, the social contract or constitutional democracy, and in diverse ways this volume will show how and
why such concepts cannot be afforded foundational status in the task of

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Andrew Conio

articulating the concrete dynamics of the contemporary world. Deleuze

and Guattaris concepts have a deliberate indeterminacy and abstraction,
which demands that the reader/writer/activist engage with them, putting
them to work. The failure to grasp this crucial point has, as we shall see,
led to a number of misplaced critical readings of Deleuze and Guattaris
political ontology.
II. Deleuze and his Critics
A series of critiques from Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancire and Peter
Hallward has given considerable ballast to the idea common in left-wing
circles that Deleuze and Guattaris ideas are shallow exercises in rhizomatic absent-mindedness joyous thinker[s] of the worlds confusion
(Badiou 2000; 10) lacking in substantive engagement with the urgent
need for genuine revolutionary change. Giuseppina Mecchia, proposing
the concept of anthropolitics as method and analytical category, tackles
each of these critiques in turn in, pursuing her argument that the anthropos, a dynamic, material figure of political subjectivity, has the potential
to bring about the revolutionary transformation of society. For Mecchia,
Badious reliance on set theory and Lacanian discontinuities means that
he has no account for the role of the kind of subjective encounters and
commitments that led to and sustained the Occupy movement.
In her critique of Badious notion of truth based on his conception
of the event as rare and knowable only retrospectively, Mecchia draws
our attention to the psychological, affective, and bodily commitments
of the Occupiers factors that were a fundamental aspect of their commitment to creating the event Occupy. She points out that the emergence of informed, affirmative activists sufficiently committed to staging worldwide the most important political protests of recent decades
cannot be understood according to Badious concept of the event as a
truth that does not happen to things or to persons, but rather happens
through them. For Badiou, events are politically and ethically of the highest significance. In response Ian Buchanan points out that whilst Badious
event may be universal and thus generalizable it still requires our fidelity,
we have to choose to believe in it and place it at the centre of our lives.
He explains that, for Badiou, the event gives rise to truth (it is truths

Introduction

29

condition), whereas for Deleuze it gives rise to sense (it is senses condition). Far from involving a multiplicitous dynamic interplay of cognitive,
semantic and affective forces of the type outlined by John Protevi in
this volume for Badiou the event moves on and produces the subject
who is also (again following Lacan) barred from her own subjective formation by the event itself.
Events are such an important feature of Deleuzes conceptual landscape because he is a philosopher of transformation. These transformations are changes in both matter and sense, both corporeal and incorporeal, so that when changes become infinitely extended and ongoing
processes they also become events. Buchanan clarifies that events are
not necessarily matters of scale:
the event for Deleuze and Guattari is not measured by a
change in the state of things a large crowd gathering in a
public square in Cairo or camping out in New York City is
not intrinsically an event in Deleuze and Guattaris thinking.
It only becomes recognizable as an event if it brings about a
transformation of thought itself, if it yields a new idea, a new
way of acting.
For example, when the genocide of the American first peoples is properly understood, then Americas whole sense of itself is undone. Most
importantly, for Deleuze, matter is evental; as Verena Conley puts it:
changes can occur autopoietically, unbeknownst to the subject, before
she or he even opens to the environing world. The inward rush of the
sea has a sense, a life-sense as Buchanan helpfully phrases it. We might
talk of crowds contracting, expectations growing, balance sheets expanding, blood levels rising, global digital signals pulsating across networks
around a Champions League football match. Organic or urban, in relation to the moon, the molluscs, the pier and the bather (Williams 2008:
8), sense is dispersed and flows in waves through and across bodies. The
sea and the moon provide a picturesque example, but the application of
the same concepts to the retreating, collapsing, rising, and dispersing of
flows in the stock market helps us to understand that markets are only
rational within the sublime irrationality of the capitalist economic system, that they are affairs of animal spirits which are most often wolverine

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Andrew Conio

as they hunt in packs. It is a Deleuzian commonplace that there is no difference in nature between the economic infrastructure and the libidinal
economy: desire belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology, desire
is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as
desiring-production (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 348).
Many of the features of Deleuzes embodied/engaged (schizoanalytic) subject are marshalled in Mecchias third defence of Deleuzes work
(after her considerations of Badiou and Rancire) against the criticisms
of Peter Hallward, whom she contends recasts and radicalizes Badious
critique of Deleuzian politics. Here Deleuze is again accused of aloofness,
his vitalism is considered a major flaw, and his commitment to a particular theorization of the virtual is taken to have left his theory devoid
of agency or of any sense of a determinant material force that might act
upon the world. Stephven Shukaitis summarizes Hallwards argument:
this results in a politics that can only lead out of this world, because the
potential of the actualized world is always compromised in comparison to the virtual (Shukaitis 2010). Ambrose phrases a pithy riposte to
this contention:
It is never merely a question of attempting to break out of
the world that exists, but of creating the right conditions
for the exposition of other possible worlds, the heterocosmic to break in in order to introduce new variables
into the world that exists, causing the quality of its reality/
actuality to undergo modification, change and becoming.
(Ambrose 2006)
There are significant problems, in particular, with Hallwards understanding of the virtual. In The Logic of Sense (1969) Deleuze shows that the
incorporeal is as real as the corporal. It is not the case that the virtual is
some kind of unreality outside of the real; rather, the virtual is real, just
not actualized. As Buchanan says in his contribution to this volume: the
virtual is fully real, as real as an idea, an image, and an innovation, is real.
It is real because its effects are real. Think of the infinite variety of forms
the wheel has taken, from prayer wheel to clock to waterwheel and propeller. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that there is an infinite multiplicity of
potential in everything, only a minuscule portion of which is actualized

Introduction

31

at any given time a virtual multiplicity is always in reserve, still to come.

Both Conley and Nunes detail the movement from pre-existing states of
affairs (the domain of the possible, where what is possible is essentially a
repetition of what already exists) to the domain of the actual where that
which emerges is unconcealed, new. At some point something boils to
the surface, a virtual something that neither Badiou nor Hallward can
account for: a threshold is crossed and without things being brought into
the realm of possibility should be this or should be that the event has
already happened, or as Conley puts it: occupation always begins with
an event, a rupture, a sudden surge of affect that rises spontaneously,
autopoietically. It begins with a preoccupation. Whilst for Nunes the
event is a rupture, it is not a magical flash in the pan; it neither comes out
of the blue nor is it a unique isolated new fact, but emerges out of a flux of
interweaved virtual potentialities. As well as providing a succinct guide to
the main points of disagreement between Badiou and Deleuze, Buchanan
highlights their different treatments of the event: for Deleuze the event is
an irruption of immanence (the opening up of a smooth space in other
words) [that] does not necessarily correlate with an idea of the truth.
Buchanan also offers a more nuanced reading of Badiou than do many
other commentators, noting that Spains indignados were possibly lacking
the type of affirmative idea that Badiou considers essential to political
struggle an idea like truth able to awaken the force of History itself.
Buchanan, quoting Badiou, appreciates Badious potential to contribute
to our understanding of how an event like Occupy Wall Street works:
It ignites what he calls a truth process it makes apparent to
all that human animals are capable of bringing into being justice, equality, and universality (the practical presence of what
the Idea can do). It is perfectly apparent that a high proportion of political oppression consists in the unremitting negation of this capacity. (Badiou 2012: 87)
III. A Politics of Collective Affect
John Protevi describes how the occupiers were forced by the ban on
bullhorns to invent the human microphone, which created a shared

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Andrew Conio

corporeal bond and affective identification between them. A profound

sense of shared identity emerged as language was reclaimed and turned
into both joyous affirmation and resistance to the command of order
words. For example, when leading members of the Corporation of
London braved the OccupyLSX General Assembly to explain that the
Corporation of London does many good things, [and] has a long history
of civic engagement, the assembly fell about like cartoon characters in
unrestrained laughter. This collective public ridicule of the guardians of
the Corporation chimes with how Protevi talks of affect:
affect is in the air, something like the mood of a party, which
is not the mere aggregate of the subjective states of the partygoers. In this sense, affect is not emergent from pre-existing
subjectivities; emotional subjectivities are crystallisations or
residues of a collective affect.
Many occupiers felt that they had tasted a kind of utopia in the sense of
release from the oppressive hegemony of BlairBush doctrine a noncoercive joyous experiment in creating the democracy yet to come. The
life-changing impact of Occupy on its participants was often understated, but what they did, as Holland notes, was to take truly democratic
social relations to the very heart of the beast. Things like the General
Assemblies, direct action (Occupy operating as a kind of phalanx in the
heart of the city from which further actions could be launched), workshops, mutual solidarity networks and the human microphone were
indeed exemplary, as Protevi says of direct democracy enacted but producing an intermodal resonance among the semantic, pragmatic and
affective dimensions of collective action. However, as Thoburn cautions,
this kind of communism in miniature must not be mistaken for the real
thing: From a minor political perspective, the risk with this formulation is that Occupy turn inwards, valorizing its own cultural forms at the
expense of self-problematization and an ever-outward engagement in
social relations.
Protevi also has a warning: corporeal affective collectivity is not necessarily a good in itself; affect, after all, also surged through the Nuremberg
rallies. Working through such valences is an essential feature of Deleuzian
scholarship. When does becoming a body without organs lead to

Introduction

33

impotence rather than genuine becoming? When is a rhizome a sign of

idiocy and when is it a line of flight to a new creation? When is organization facilitative and when suppressive? One question Nunes seeks
to answer is exactly the same as that which pre-occupied the Occupy
encampments worldwide: how do you create open and porous democratic structures that avoid the leaderless, formless quagmire experienced
at times by all occupiers? How might one enable structures that encourage a different type of democracy based on the principles of distributed
leadership? For Nunes, distributed leadership is not only an accurate
description of the actual processes in play at Occupy but also describes
the process of avoiding the false binaries between organization and formlessness, unity and diversity, spontaneity or planning, in a manner that
allows for the articulation of the greatest unity consiliant with the greatest diversity. Indeed, the distinction between pack and crowd that Nunes
draws upon is useful for thinking about how Occupy worked according
to both the logic of direct democracy and the logic of the pack, whereby
leaders emerged, led, provoked, instigated, and sometimes forced issues
through. The logic of the pack allowed for divisions and stratifications
and was arguably more democratic than modes of consensus. It was certainly a pre-requisite for getting anything done.
David Burrows also points to the pack-like movement and the effectiveness of distributed leadership in his study of negative space war
machines operating alongside Occupy in London in 2011 and 2012.
Nunes argues that far from solving the problem of representation the
Marxist vanguard often vests itself with the imprimatur of historical
necessity, and in setting itself the task of expressing and organizing the
revolutionary activity of the workers, can end up exasperating it.
The name Occupy has become a synecdoche for a proliferation of
new protest and political movements fighting a myriad of causes, from
closing down tax havens to defending the rights of indigenous peoples,
from resisting the decimation of the welfare state to critiques of big
pharma. At its inception Occupy spilt into diverse working groups, led
by experienced activists and charged with research, securing provisions,
media relations, planning, education, and so forth. This created a profusion of self-organized vanguards, each leading their own area. The distinction Nunes draws between the crowd and the pack is helpful here.

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Andrew Conio

In the former, equal status is afforded to all and the crowd is organized;
it moves as one, chants together, and there is a uniformity of function.
Packs are not secondary groupings emerging from the crowd; they are
the elemental ground of the mass and are formed out of alogical orders,
consistencies and compatibilities. As was seen first-hand at Occupy,
packs or multiplicities continually transform themselves into each other,
and cross over into each other, through processes of alliance or contagion. As Deleuze puts it: Schools, bands, herds, and populations are not
inferior social forms; they are affects and powers, involutions (Deleuze
and Guattari 2000: 241).
In their different ways Nunes, Protevi, Conley and Mecchia each find
solutions to the problems inherent to the tendency to objectification, or
the ways in which historically sedimented practices impede becoming.
Protevi captures the process as follows:
You dont combat [the shame of unemployment] by trying to
change individual peoples minds, one by one, with information about unemployment trends; you combat it by showing
your face, by embodying your lack of shame, by putting a face
on unemployment or homelessness. You thus counteract the
existing collective affect by creating a positive affect of, shall
we say, joyful solidarity. Shame isolates (you hide your face);
joyful solidarity comes from people coming together.
For Nunes, in the body of the collective one gains access to the complex
process of becoming-imperceptible, which, far from being an act of selfdenial is a becoming-more through allowing oneself to be exposed, to
take a risk, and to trust that one can be formed by and, can help form, collective assemblages. Nunes shares with Conley a concern to place becoming-collective at the heart of the process of undoing subjectivation. He
outlines how becoming-imperceptible should be understood as becoming more realistic about oneself and the real potentials and limitations to
a process. It requires the shedding of selfhood (the vanguard, the revolutionary), undermining pre-given divisions (self/other), finding differences that exist in potential, and the capacity to create new continuities.
The sense that the novel and spontaneous is diffused in a web of practices
and sensibilities that have been a long time in the making is shared by

Introduction

35

Thoburn, who also places the evental quality of life at the imperceptible
center of processes of social formation: the ungraspable and often highly
seductive character of a formation whose directions remain unmapped,
indeterminable, full, as Deleuze has it, of virtuality.
For Deleuze, only some of the virtual potentials existent in the world
are actualized as we are moulded by macro and microscopic affects and
sensations that pass through us and which can be cosmological in extension.5 We must think of contraction and dilation, release and flow, rupture and slice, entropy and clamor, as pure intensities: the world floods
through us in a cacophony of multiplicities and singularities fused in an
indeterminable concoction of affects and percepts across multiple landscapes of psychic, social and physiological geographies in the backwards
and forwards of time in multiple durations.
IV. Deconstruction and Occupy
In her contribution, Colebrook discusses the continued relevance of
deconstruction, addressing a body of work that has considerable traction
in contemporary political philosophy, and whose influence may be seen
in the refusal by contemporary political activists to adopt an unassailable
and inviolable stance of purported truth from which to declare the correctness of their position. Colebrook discusses the difficulties inherent in
claiming either a pre-existing place of purity, innocence or natural justice,
or a futural justice yet to come from which resistance to an invading or
occupying force might be mounted. Implicit in the language of Occupy,
explicit in its structure and modus operandi, and suffused throughout its
culture, was the question, how do you criticize capitalism without setting yourself up as the uniquely privileged defender of an imagined
purity or innocence against some evil external power? More specifically,
how do you defend a cause or mount a critique without repeating the
same binary oppositions that sustain capitalism and which substitute
underlying terms of exclusion and dominance for other equally determinant terms? How do you create change without being either fascist
or Leninist, or navely accepting capitalisms claim that its leading terms
such as freedom, equality, democracy and autonomy are somehow not
complicit in the violence inherent in their constitution? These are the

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Andrew Conio

reasons Occupy steadfastly refused to assert a claim to a single overarching truth, knowing that one claim to truth is a potential violence against
another. Diversity is a strategy, a methodology and an objective; any
attempt to impose a master narrative is seen as a type of violence done
to the myriad micro-struggles represented in the lived struggles of the
movements members. The question often put to the occupiers, What
exactly do you want?, is thus viewed as illegitimate, an attempt to delegitimize, belittle and close minds.
Colebrook explores the relevance of the works of Jacques Derrida and
Paul de Man to these debates, and in so doing outlines the weaknesses in
some interpretations of the deconstructive approach to politics (which
saw deconstruction contributing to a politics of nihilism, relativism and
cynicism), whilst highlighting some features that remain not just pertinent but necessary. First, in line with many of the arguments in this volume, and with its repeated theme of embodiment, Colebrook outlines
how deconstruction arose out of both developments in the history of
ideas and Derridas tortured response to the Nazi occupation of France,
where the occupation of language and citizenship led to a sense that the
material occupation of a territory and the immaterial occupation of language and subjectivity were violences of the same order.
For Colebrook, what began in material, historically specific circumstances provided the impetus for what became deconstructions quasitranscendental claim that neither the self-authoring presence of the
citizen/subject nor languages representational certainties, nor indeed
any binary opposition between inside or outside, innocent or contaminated, can be cited as non-compromised or non-complicit sites of resistance uncontaminated by the very logic of exclusion they were fighting
against. Paul de Man, whom Colebrook says captures deconstructions
conception of politics at its most rigorous, shows how there is no place
where language and the real can find a seamless relation. Each side of the
binary, the beautiful soul and totalizing power, resists a transcendental
structure of impossibility and undecidability. Both are party to an oppositional dialectic or binarism and are marked by the failure to accept the a
priori truth of the never assimilable, ungraspable outside, which places
all claims for truth under erasure. This is true of any type of Marxism
that might seek to ground resistance in some kind of system of techne

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37

or authentic relation between the purity of labor and lived conditions

that afford a practical and transformative relation between humans and
their world.
For deconstruction, to mount a position of resistance based upon
a Marxist logic of production, value and expropriation, or liberal ideas
of the sanctity of the individual or the rights of man, repeats a failure
to admit that we are constituted through resistance to the truth of the
impossibility and undecidability inherent to any attempt to claim truth.
The Nazi occupier and resistance fighter, the capitalist apologist and the
protester who seeks the pure ground for the perfect argument or the
ideal society, all deny the abiding force of the indeterminable and diffrance: one is already complicit, determined within the domain of difference that enables one to think. The insecurity that this creates is the
motivation behind all presentness. The idea that we might create coherent signs and narratives of this world, that we might resist the distance
between signs and the world, that we might create a pure presence, center
or ground, is ideology.
This stance, however, led in part to a widespread sense of deconstructions political irrelevance: if truth cannot be theorized, and if truth
claims are necessarily founded upon a denial of their own indeterminacy,
then the ground upon which a critique of capitalism might be staged
merely floats on a sea of differences; if difference leads to the impossibility of securing either a ground or a center, does this not amount to a form
of compliance with capitalisms own anti-foundationalism? Colebrook
however reminds us that in the 1980s and 1990s deconstruction did offer
an important and necessary critical response to the illusions of capitalism
when notions of autonomy, freedom, and liberal self-determinism acted
as ideological balustrades. For her, there was nothing at all valid in the
notion that post-structuralisms critique of representation plays a role in
nihilism, relativism and capitalist cynicism.
However, deconstructions role in undermining both the illusions of
self-consciousness, autonomy and integrity and the idea that these terms
might provide the basis for a critique of capitalism has only limited currency in our age. Nine-eleven effectively marked the end of capitalisms
own now insubstantial rhetoric, as individual freedom was progressively sacrificed to the demands of debt, surveillance and full spectrum

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Andrew Conio

dominance. Such concerns have been overtaken by an era in which market, choice, opportunity, autonomy and equality in the market place are
now caricatures unable to conceal a logic of market ruthlessness. We are
now in the grip of a flagrant neo-feudalism that no longer even pays lip
service to liberal ideology. We need to look elsewhere to explain how
certain axioms have come to dominate and overtake the previous configuration: how did capital manage to escape difference and allow one
axiom to overcode all others? (These questions are further attended to
by Holland and myself).
For Colebrook, instead of attempting to find a putative place of otherness we should think within system, techne and difference, critiquing
capitalism from within. There is no outside to capitalism; becoming
minor within a pre-existing language, economy and ontology is not only
theoretically valid but can create a series of heterogenic economies and
political systems, and a return to multiplicities of difference. In response
to the question what do you want? Occupy answers: ongoing reflection,
an authentic relation not to life but to becoming minor and a revitalized
commitment to difference.
V. Subjectivity and Aesthetics
Deleuze and Guattari oppose notions of an originating, proprietorial or
intentional subjectivity. It is not unreasonable to say that their entire oeuvre amounts to a profound and relentless anti-humanism, where humanism is the conception that humanity somehow stands above or straddles
life or nature. In fact, life precedes, envelopes and supersedes all that
human beings are the lived body is a paltry thing in comparison with
a more profound and almost unlivable power of life (Deleuze 2003: 44).
Deleuze and Guattari do not claim that their model of trans-monadic
becoming supersedes or supplants the present system, but rather that it
is already what we are. We are already packs; the body is impressed with
bodies of knowledge, medical bodies, juridical bodies and a myriad of
collective assemblages of enunciation. Perception is already cinematic
and memory photographic.
Nunes brings these themes neatly together by highlighting the correlation between event and subject taking place at Occupy. [The] subject

Introduction

39

is not an autonomous, sovereign agent, but the way in which the event
expresses itself. It exists to the extent that it affirms the event, as much
as the event exists only because it expresses itself in this subject. [T]he
event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (Deleuze
and Guattari 2003: 216), but not as an external cause; it is in producing
such transformations that the event events. That the subject is crafted
by rather than master of events is also crucial to Conleys argument. As
Guattari asserts, changes can occur autopoietically, unbeknownst to the
subject, before she or he even opens onto the environing world.
For Conley, Occupy presents an opportunity to revisit the promise of
new forms of subjectivity outlined in A Thousand Plateaus, a work which,
for her, marks a significant turning point in Deleuzes political thought.
After the exuberance, almost delirium, of Anti-Oedipus, and after the
defeats of the left and capitalisms resurgence, a more sombre and pragmatic approach was needed. As Conley notes, A Thousand Plateaus is far
from being the vague and indeterminate series of loose assemblages of
ideas it is sometimes taken to be, but is rather a series of territories held
together by affective intensities made possible as a specific moment in
history from which, in the present (for the authors in the aftermath
of 1968) they think and write. There is something so consistent about
Deleuzes approach that it almost amounts to a methodology: from the
indeterminate ground, the flux and flow of change, consistencies emerge;
depending on the context these are fashioned as territories, assemblages,
milieus or plateaus. Conley attunes us to the subtlety of Deleuzes use of
plateaus to describe the creation of territories or planes of consistencies
out of the profusion of complex multilayered social dynamics, semiologies and intensities. She writes of shifts in subjectivity, changes in relations and expectations, the dynamics of voyaging smoothly with awareness, of crossing thresholds, of the making of rhizomatic connections
that happen way beyond the egotistic and outside of the world reduced
to systems of economic, juridical and scientific signs. She affirms that in
voyaging one can invite change by shifting to a new subjectivity, perspective or language, or taking a line of flight, and she finds plenty of evidence
of such soft subversions effected by artists, educators, and cultural creators. Considering the slippery nature of desire, Buchanan (2011) notes
that changing the composition of desire is itself revolutionary, and as

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recent events have shown the transformation of desire on both an individual and collective level is not something that necessarily requires
planning. Conley also asks, most positively of all, whether Occupy has
not also put the dominant discourses of state, democracy, space into
variation: is Occupy another plateau?
In keeping with the spirit of this volume, Thoburn explores Deleuzes
concepts not in order to illustrate or represent the themes and issues of
Occupy but to create a dialogue between the two with the aim of facilitating their further development: Its a recursive relation, for reflection
upon Occupys themes or problems should also help extend Deleuzian
concepts, lending them a contemporary vitality. For Thoburn, the
minoritization of politics has found expression in the shift away from
identitarian and representational politics as part of long-term changes
in the structure of capitalist development and the concomitant production of the multitude. The minor brings contestation, argument and
problematization to the fore. This is exemplified by Occupys single most
important statement: Let these Facts be Known the Declaration of the
Occupation of New York City.
Lets acknowledge the reality: the future of the human race
requires the cooperation of its members. Our increasingly
interconnected world obscures the underlying truth that all of
our grievances are connected.
Adding extra dimensions to this and echoing the autonomist Marxist tradition, Thoburn draws our attention to how willed poverty and a form
of boundary limitation are actively affirmed as a means of resistance
by the multitude. He shows how the range of economic structures and
plethora of social relationships thrown up by the push and pull between
these co-determining dynamics offers no fixed route, system or structure.
He also presents a warning that seeing the multitude in this way might
mean avoiding perhaps the most urgent task of all: creating a strategically
planned, coherently organized, well-prepared and organized body able to
win a fearsome class war.
Thoburn also pursues a thought experiment by thinking of democracy as a grid a series of lines, intersections and spaces, something
like a diagram, imposed upon the virtual multiplicities of the socius. He

Introduction

41

marshals Deleuze: Elections are not a particular locale, nor a particular day in the calendar. They are more like a grid that affects the way we
understand and perceive things. Everything is mapped back on this grid
and gets warped as a result (Deleuze 2007: 143). For Thoburn, democracy imposes a status quo that inherently excludes the problems of
inequality and exploitation. This state of affairs is normalized and treated
as a natural condition that liberal democratic systems are best suited to
resolve, rather than being imbricated in the very structures that bring
these iniquities about. The grid democracy is thus a matrix of principles,
ideals, and structures into which people are expected to fit even when
the inner logic of the system results in unelected technocrats taking control of the levers of power, as in Greece and Italy. Indeed, the idea that
an unproblematized majority might somehow stand for the will of the
people is itself a form of dictatorship. Its not that Deleuze and Guattari
are anti-democratic, far from it; rather, they seek a far more intensive
democracy, a becoming democratic in everything everywhere.
To this end, Thoburn suggests that the grid Occupy can be seen as
a means of multiplying points of antagonism. For example, the slogan we
are the 99% (asserting that the vast majority of humanity is suffering at
the expense of the few), may have captured world-wide attention, but
we should recall that Occupy London took down the talismanic banner
Capitalism is Crisis because it accentuated a single theme. The fact that
Occupy distinguishes itself relationally the 99% versus the 1% means,
writes Colebrook, that it does not present itself as somehow positioned in
a pure outside, occupying its own self-referential ground. It is a relation,
it labels a mass not an identity. The 1% has no identity other than that
of its situation within an already distributed terrain. In this way Occupy
both reclaims capitalisms claim of universality a system of the greater
good and names a number and not an identity such as the workers or a
class, a vanguard or a method of socialism.
For Deleuze a majority is like a dictatorship, or a weapon, a false
abstraction imposed upon myriad forces, identities and singularities;
indeed, counting, for Buchanan, even a headcount of a million protestors, is not the same as that which transforms history. A majority is false
because it adheres to number and not the dynamic multiplicities evolving in the will of the people. For Badiou, the majority is an empty set, a

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set that is determined by force, the terms of which majority might count
having already been decided. The question, Would you prefer a society
in which all people share of the common wealth equally? is positioned
as nonsense.
Contrariwise, historical transformation involves rather the irruption
of immanence and a change in consciousness irrespective of number.
Buchanan provides two examples to illustrate how such transformation
can be both conceptual and historical. An idea whose time has come is
a clear manifestation of the minor, it isnt concerned with results, with
counting in the here and now, what it awakens is the force of history itself.
A raggle taggle of disaffected anarcho-political activists who numbered
no more than a few hundred placed into world-wide public consciousness the idea that we might imagine the total transformation of society.
Buchanan also writes of the creation of smooth space and the mobility
it affords being the key resource in battles for territory, technology, minds
and ideas. However, elsewhere he is careful, in employing Deleuzes exact
phrasing, to caution against an uncritical valorization of the term:
it all depends on a careful systematic use were trying to say
you can never guarantee a good outcome (its not enough just
to have a smooth space, for example, to overcome striations
and coercion, or a body without organs to overcome organisations. (Deleuze 1995: 32)
Thoburn likewise observes that a kind of smooth space is necessary to
undo the illusions of democracy, but he fills this with layers of antagonism. Hence, the grid Occupy seeks is to encourage a problematics
of contestation and critique, and the development of divergent positions in an extension and intensification of the problematic in concrete
circumstances.
As well as emphasizing the contested and conflictual modality of
Occupy, Thoburn explores the aesthetic dimension of political struggle.
He references Deleuzes anthropological/ethological approach wherein
animal, natural and human traits are interlaced in a social form that is
indispensably aesthetic. We find in Occupy expressions of territoriality that are not just markers and signifiers of boundary lines but have
an expressive sensory quality. As in the numerous ethological examples

Introduction

43

employed by Deleuze the musicality of birds, the color of fish scales,

the zigzag of the stickleback such expressions are essential features of
the territorializing function. As Thoburn carefully details, the occupations of Zuccotti Park and the St Pauls Cathedral steps involved much
more than a mere physical encampment, including songs, found objects,
art brut, and countless slogans, banners and placards weaved together in
a tapestry as affirmative as it was functional.
An aspect of pathos is crucial to this. The problem with representational and identitarian politics is that the few speak for the many; hierarchical structures are created and power becomes concentrated in oligarchies or elites. There is, by contrast, a humility to Occupy; its members
are very circumspect about speaking for the movement or making claims
on its behalf. Consensus is not just an aspiration but also a way of life,
and the atmosphere is suffused with a sense of mutual aid and suffering.
As Thoburn puts it, this quality of life fragile, impersonal, damaged
is central [to] lifting suffering to a level of aesthetic expression
without losing any of its struggle. This fragility is an important part of
Occupys expression: the cardboard signs, the mocked-up soup kitchens OccupyLSX became a highly efficient kitchen feeding hundreds
from day one, prompting the highly unethical response of the police who
shepherded the homeless and the destitute to the park and the provision of care for people suffering from mental health problems. Fragility
became Occupys aesthetic, resulting in mutually sustaining encounters
between meaning and politics through sensory and expressive qualities,
all coordinated and self-managed by a leaderless, grassroots movement.
VI. The War Machine and the Multitude
Each of the contributors in this collection takes a different approach to
the conceptualization of those aspects of capitalism that they find most
egregious. But they also address how capitalisms creativity can be harnessed, and what is to be done in the face of an appropriated and preaccomplished global war machine (Marzec 2001), the object of whose
rule is social life in its entirety (Hardt and Negri 2000: xv). They ask
which of Deleuze and Guattaris concepts have the capacity not merely to

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illustrate but to be applied along with Occupys practical tools and methods, not least in various approaches to the question of space.
Buchanan for instance observes how smooth space amounts to a
commons. He argues that Occupy opened up a new way, a new space, for
thinking and acting, creating a radical break with the normal continuity of things, interrupting and causing a counter flow to the usual flow
of daily life. Articulating the increasing interest in the common, the
commons movement and commoning at Occupy, he suggests that the
common, conceived as social relations, can be understood as a smooth
space. We must bear in mind that neither Buchanan nor Thoburn equates
smooth space with a flattening or an absence of conflict. Buchanan borrows from David Harvey:
The common is not to be constructed, therefore, as a particular kind of thing, asset or even social process, but as an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular welldefined social group and those aspects of its actually existing
or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment
deemed crucial to its life and livelihood. There is, in effect, a
social practice of commoning. (Harvey 2012: 73)
For Hardt and Negri the common is the basis for the existence of the
multitude; the two are indivisible since the common is:
that which allows the multitude to communicate and act
together the common does not refer to traditional notions
of either the community or the public the common is
what configures the mobile and flexible substance of the multitude and social life depends on the common. (Hardt and
Negri 2006: 9, 10, 212)
The common is a space that allows for the greatest degree of singularity, it
is composed of a set of singularities and by singularity here we mean a
social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness. Beyond
all else, the common is the virtual space of pre-individual singularities,
where flows of affects and percepts, ideas and processes, and the ground
of all human life (Graeber 2012: 101) discussed by all the contributors
to this volume, are to be found.

Introduction

45

Thoburn foregrounds contested and antagonistic spaces in which

smooth space is by no means without conflict or fragmentation the
opposite in fact. Burrows chapter attends to Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the war machine specifically in relation to what he calls negative space, and he joins Conley in stressing the importance of creating
vacuoles of non-communication and of the more general artistic strategies
and tactics of the movement. Where Thoburn employs the notion of an
ethno-aesthetic territoriality, for Burrows, Occupy is to be situated at
the cutting edge of contemporary art practice. Like other contributors,
he does not simply offer a Deleuzian reading of Occupy, but rather the
production of a forced encounter between certain theoretical resources
and the various material practices and events that took place across 2010
and 2011. His essay also considers the networked dividual, the role of
art education, and the merit of various literary, philosophical and artistic
strategies of non-relation to capitalism in the construction of a singular
reading of the war machine.
The term war machine may be one of Deleuze and Guattaris most
misleading, as it has nothing to do with war and what it designates might
be better termed a metamorphosis machine (Patton 2002: 110) or a
mutation machine (Holland). Indeed the war machine and the multitude should be seen as synonymous terms; as Tampio explains:
Hardt and Negris major contribution to Deleuzian political theory is an attempt to name the social body capable of
actualizing Deleuzes vision. The concept of the multitude
rephrases Deleuzes intuition of a war machine combating the
state apparatus, the composition of a joyful political body,
and the full social body without organs (2009: 387).
With the concept of the war machine Deleuze and Guattari are describing a process of mutation and change. Now that a war is actually taking
place over our bodies, minds, and increasingly the planet and life itself, it
is the state that has war as its object, and not the nomadic war machine
(Marzec 2001). What Hardt and Negri once saw as an acephelous supranational order is increasingly becoming a system of outright control,
wherein power is vested in a specific identifiable group of financiers, politicians, institutions and corporations. There is then a tension emerging

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between what we already know from French intellectual writing after May
1968 which broadly accepted the idea that power is not simply a matter of coercion or repression the product or the expression of a powerful ruling elite exercising influence over a powerless majority (Buchanan
2008: 21) and contemporary conditions on the ground suggesting the
emergence of a transcendent neoliberal war machine of debt and perpetual war against people, communities and life.
We should also be wary of investing in the notion of the sovereignty
of an empire or despot as a terrifying behemoth, lest we both misunderstand it and create a monster that can only be challenged by matching
its scale and its weapons, in turn affording it even greater power. Instead,
we should think with Hardt and Negri:
Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the
modern regimes of power because it presents us, alongside
the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all
the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly
opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them. (Hardt
and Negri 2000: 393)
Capitalism is, in and of itself, decentered and deterritorialized; it is endlessly creative. It creates fluid networks, multiple hybrid identities, and
demands new subjectivities. Its axiomatics create borders and inhibit
flows, and yet it also cannot tolerate borders; indeed, we might argue that
capitalist production cannot tolerate the unproductiveness of racism,
sexism and homophobia, and certainly decoding and deterritorialization have immense emancipatory potential. According to Virno (2004)
the capitalist mode of production in the transition from Fordism to postFordism was driven by the multitudes demands for new socialities, new
working practices, and the development of new desires, relations, sexualities and attitudes to hierarchy that have subsequently been capitalized.
Given the inherent dynamism of capitalism, it is hardly surprising
that the multitude takes on equally amorphous forms of expression. But
the multitude is not simply a consequence of new forms of production;
it emerges from the autopoietic drive of the resourcefulness of life of
difference as the driving force behind new forms of capitalist production. Its force also emerges from disjunctive and conjunctive accidents

Introduction

47

and unexpected collisions, which foster new potentials and multiplicities

that are to be found simultaneously in-between and beyond.
The new phenomenology of the multitude reveals labor as the fundamental creative cooperative activity that goes beyond any obstacle
imposed on it and that constantly re-creates the world. Labor material or immaterial, intellectual or corporeal produces and reproduces
social life, and in the process is exploited by capital. This intermingling
of capital and labor becomes the new ground for resistance. Here Hardt
and Negri encapsulate their project: The creative forces of the multitude
that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a
counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and
exchanges (2000: 53).
The war machine is irrepressible, autopoietic and endlessly resourceful; a perpetual and continuous act, it is the driving creative force behind
capital that capital seeks to control through its axioms. It is essential not
to underestimate the extraordinary potential of the war machine; for
Deleuze and Guattari it is another species, another nature, another
justice, another origin (1987: 352, 353, 354).6 This aspect of Deleuzes
political ontology is entirely in step with Occupys modus operandi.
Everything is to be questioned using weapons and terms specific to the
particular circumstances, the kind of violence to be resisted, and the joy
to be released across the entire social field made in the moment for the
moment without coda or rules. This is an astonishingly flexible method,
requiring no authorization from a creed or hierarchy.
Whilst Conley speaks to the advancing multitude, those cultural
producers that create new nomadic, rhizomatic identities out of new
spaces, for Burrows the war machines specificity arises from its performance of resistance. He examines a range of political actions (swarms,
teach-ins, collective action), some of which he took part in, in terms of
how they occupy space, or how they created four-dimensional spaces.
Burrows draws out the complexities of three different expressions of
refusal united in their rejection of the exigencies of neoliberal capitalist
production. Each of them says no to alienation by, or participation in,
the already legitimized spaces of political discourse or civil society. This
saying no also involves refusing the affirmative search for solutions or
exploring grounds for compromise. It takes the form of developing other

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spatial dynamics beyond the enclosed, regimented and delimited spaces

of the public and private, of the media, commerce and political institutions breaking these divisions down and thinking transversally across
them. As Holland remarks, rather than making demands on a supposedly democratic system, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) tried to instantiate
and illustrate what true participatory democracy looks like. Burrows also
positions art as the privileged ground for engendering a spirit of the collective and for opening horizons. In doing so, he addresses the various
ways in which protests are able to challenge dominant subjective and
discursive formations by experimenting with the production of negative
space or vacuoles of non-communication. He notes that for Deleuze and
Guattari the negative space is non-incorporable, non-subsumable, as the
war machine operates to decompose rigid forms: The war machine is the
surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 357).
Burrows thinks through the various forms of saying no and shows
how in many circumstances refusal can be recuperated, accommodated,
commodified and marketized; as he puts it: the crumbling edge of capitalism is also the cutting edge of capitalism. He compares the quiet,
steadfast, ultimately suicidal refusal of Melvilles Bartleby with Nick
Lands theorization of both non-compliance and the problems inherent
to organization. The war machine Burrows describes is resistant, actively
negative, and creates conflict not by answering power but by opening up
a new space for experimenting with affirmation and negation. The creation of collectives as an art practice brings together the various complexities at work here, not least in the enactment of a new sense of space
and time through a new alignment of actual and cyberspace. This is in
step with those art practices that over the last 40 years have striven to be
non-subsumable by the market. Burrows contends that becoming minor
within the global art establishment parallels many would argue leads
the new politics of our age.
Along with Mecchia, Holland measures how the term war machine
was developed in response to May 1968, but can be adjusted to the
imperatives of Occupy. He highlights how the war machine creates role
specializations, is horizontal in its organization, and operate[s] via contagion, enthusiasm, esprit de corps, and solidarity (Deleuze and Guattari

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49

1987: 2419, 2679, 278, 3667, 384, 39093) rather than strict obligation or duty, although, he warns, there is nothing that can be considered
decisive about this modus operandi in itself, since the Tea Party movement, and indeed the stock exchange, share many of these features of
the war machine. Notwithstanding this caveat, when looking to understand Occupys potential for social transformation the concept of the war
machine provides an invaluable tool. Historical change does not come
only through violent revolution or sudden ruptures but also through slow
developments in thought, affects and perception, through the shifting
and sliding of subjectivities and communities. As we are seeing today, the
potential for a revolution in consciousness is observable in the exceedingly clear political bifurcation that is taking place between diametrically
opposed political ontologies, the furthest poles of which being exemplified by Occupy and the Tea Party.
Refusal is also central to Hollands analysis. He suggests that a slowmotion general strike (a strike against everything) may be taking place
in the widespread subtraction of our collective and individual experience
from the machinery of neoliberal capitalist production. It is clear that vast
numbers of people are either reduced to exhaustion and dismay by capitalisms rage against love, community, and social solidarity, or are enraged
by informed analyses of climate change, wealth distribution, people
trafficking, the prisonindustrial complex, modern-day slavery and so
forth, and emboldened by experience in resistance movements across
the globe. It takes time to create new networks and new subjectivities,
and taking back time is both the method and objective of many of these
disparate political groupings. Holland leaves open the question as to
whether this will prompt a sudden irruption of the political unconscious
or will continue in slow motion. Either way, the hoary old reformrevolution conundrum does not become an issue because neither is negated
in the open-ended political utopianism of Occupy.
VII. Money and Debt: Towards a Minor Marxism
Anti-Oedipus is a difficult read. It is Deleuze and Guattari at their most
infuriating and perplexing, and yet it may be their most prescient text.
For Holland it provides an indispensible anatomization of how the

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conversion of wealth into capital and work into dependent wage labor is
central to the development of capitalism, and charts a path through different conceptualizations of money, debt, control societies and capitalist
axiomatics to arrive at what appears to be capitalisms essence, the conjunction of three flows of decoding consisting of:
The decoding of land flows, under the form of the constitution of large private properties, the decoding of monetary
flows, under the form of the development of merchant fortunes, the decoding of a flow of workers under the form of
expropriation, of the deterritorialization of serfs and peasant
landholders. (Deleuze 1971)
The conjunction of the deterritorialized flows of abstract capital and
abstract labor and their reterritorialization in the form of private property forms the center of the many factitious reterritorializations of capitalism. In turn, private property functions to alienate the wage laborer
whose so-called free labor serves as their only property, removed from
their material and incorporeal reproduction of worlds, selves and the
socius. Only as a consequence of these conjunctions could capitalism stabilize and endure.
In Anti-Oedipus we find that whilst critiquing all forms of arborescent thought, particularly Freudianism and Marxism, Deleuze and
Guattari assert that capitalism has an archetypal structure. At first blush
this appears to be a contradiction, but we should consider the difference
between seeking to determine the essential nature of a thing and analyzing a historically contingent organization of forces. Indeed, there is
a mood of exhaustion in contemporary Deleuzian scholarship, and the
proliferation of Deleuzian aesthetics, the various alibis for rhizomatic
absentmindedness and the championing of the liberating potential of
desire and schizoid expressivity. This reading (clarified in some detail in
this volume by Mecchia) has led to attempts to articulate a more careful and coherent Deleuzian political philosophy, achieved not least by
the works of Ian Buchanan. A useful introduction to the basic principles
of Deleuze and Guattaris political, social and economic thought can be
found in Buchanans 2008 Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus (88116),
which concerns a particular section of Anti-Oedipus (pages 139262).

Introduction

51

These pages outline the relation of Deleuze and Guattaris political

ontology to psychoanalysis and Marxism, as well as their reliance on
Nietzsches anthropological account of the role of credit and debt in the
formation of human societies and the development of consciousness.
To briefly summarize: Anti-Oedipus offers a typology of three interrelated social formations in terms of the regulation of flows by coding.
In the primitive/territorial period, bodies, acts, symbols, territories and
subjectivities are enacted together in everyday life, initiations, rituals and
language. The despotic age is characterized by an overcoding by the state,
money and religion, whereby finite porous bonds are overcoded on the
body of the despot. Finally, in the civilized/capitalist age, overcoding is
replaced by capitals most characteristic and most important tendency
of decoding and deterritorialization. The capitalist social machine is
fundamentally different from the primitive and despotic abstract social
machines in that it functions not by codes but through decoding and
deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 34). It is the first society
in history where the aim of production is not to serve another end (social
bonds or overcoding), but serves its own purpose: production for productions sake. The essence of wealth is no longer a concrete objective
thing, but the activity of production in general (Deleuze and Guattari
2000: 270). As I highlight, the key objective of a mappable number of
super-corporations and political institutions is the takeover, domination
and then destruction, through monopolization, of the market. Thoburn
likewise notes that production in general does have a purpose the selfexpansion of capital, the maximization of surplus value from the expansive potential of life.7
This system is held in place by axioms. First amongst which is that
Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every
attempt at collectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 190). Deleuze and
Guattaris political ontology is a theory of the connectedness of all things
in the great germinal wash of life: the same wash of life that is the force
behind the multitude. Capitalisms first axiom is to replace this with the
assertion of capitals immanence. This harnessing of lifes plenitude, diversity and vital creative force serves not the good of all but the acceleration
of capitalist accumulation.

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Central to the transition from the primitive/territorial to the despotic epoch was the role played by the development of money. In the
primitive/territorial age, goods were exchanged according to a system
of barter.8 Credit and debt were measured using various fungible, finite
recording systems criss-crossing a palimpsest of social and familial registers which laid the foundation of the development of thought (where
thought is taken to include shared beliefs, alliances and filiations, inherited myths, social practices, recognitions and scales of values, affects,
soma, and so forth), and social obligations. Money was not introduced to
facilitate barter but imposed by the despot to secure his power and exact
tribute. This, along with the development of abstract labor and capital,
laid the foundations for the development of capitalism. The conjunction of these great forces of decoding were exacted through the figure
of money, which retained the imprint of its originative incarnation as a
power of command.
My own chapter shows how money, while its infinite variety of uses
may be impossible to fully theorize, should be understood in terms
of the originative division, forged in the transition from the primitive
to the despotic age, between its dual functions as credit and exchange.
The self-same coin acts according to two valences as credit, which allows
for accumulation, the extraction of tribute and the power of command,
and exchange, which facilities both invention, creativity and the multitudinous expression of desire. Exchange money is impotent and turns
us into slaves of the social machine of production and consumption
wherein all desires are decoded and recoded into the general equivalence
of money: under capitalism, all the flows of desire, and all of the intensities of life become grounded on one single flow: the quantifiable medium
of capital and exchange (Colebrook 2006: 50).
There is then a profound ambivalence at the heart of money. It facilitates the creative potentials of unlimited exchange and it also allows for
quantitative exchange as a substitute for the time-consuming, socially
complex and never quite concluded palimpsest of different mechanisms of trade.
Quantitative measurement as a substitute for rational value
judgment confers supreme moral security and intellectual
comfort: the Good becomes measurable and calculable;

Introduction

53

decisions and moral judgments can follow from the implementation of a procedure of impersonal, objective, quantifying calculation and individual subjects do not have to
shoulder the burden [of decision making] anxiously and
uncertainly. (Gorz 1989: 121)
However, these extraordinary freedoms are curtailed as money becomes
the supreme, indispensible criteria and single measure of value of all
things. These values and criteria are largely determined by the manner
in which is money is issued and the purposes to which it is put. These
ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of money are fundamental,
and Philip Goodchilds project is to show how thinking and reason are
grounded in the same processes. Looking across the epochs we can question whether the great advances in trade and social development would
have been possible without the cooperation and coordination introduced
by the single quantifying measuring scale provided by money. Likewise,
would the industrial revolution have been possible without credit?
These contradictions may explain why moneys other side, its power
of command and extraction through rent and tribute, remains unhindered and leads to chronic overproduction, breathtaking inequality and
wastefulness of human potential, and an inescapable, incessant schiz-flow
of creative invention and destruction rather than revolution. What is hidden is the simple fact that moneys ability to facilitate the expression of
lifes potential is severely curtailed by its issuance as credit money by the
banks. Indeed, the appearance of a primary equilibrium of prices leads to
a belief in an underlying principle of equality that conceals entirely functional and fundamental inequalities. As Goodchild, one of the foremost
interpreters of Deleuzian economic theory, notes:
Since money is created as debt, and debt must be repaid in
the form of money and more debt, and debt becomes the
supreme principle of theoretical knowledge, practical conduct, and mutual trust, then this perspective of evaluation is
not chosen but imposes itself. (2013: 53)
Taking up the challenge of making Deleuze relevant to policy formation and institution building, I ask whether the practical policy formulations of the political campaign group Positive Money (whose agenda

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Andrew Conio

is to strip banks of the right to create money) might be read as classical

political economic manifestations of Deleuze and Guattaris philosophical speculations.
Also assessing the fundamental importance of debt to the fabric of
neoliberalism, Holland argues that credit money creates three decisive
forms of dependency: the enforced selling of labor-power to capital;
enforced consumption in markets whose exchange values are bogus; and
the creation of psychological dependency, leading to a state of debt peonage. For Holland, a minor Marxism seeks to overturn these dependencies. Because money is imbricated in the very foundations of subjectivity,
thinking and power relations, this is not a single-issue campaign but one
that strikes at the heart of capitalist production and is a direct invocation
to the multitude to express its collective agency and challenge capitalist
axiomatics. Indeed, the importance of this cannot be understated in so
far as the creditor and debtor relation is the primary machine for the production of the difference which arrests and plunders the plenitude of all
other differences.
Debt servitude under neoliberalism has similar characteristics to servitude under the despot: it is a debt of existence, a debt of the existence
of the subjects themselves (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 197). As such, a
debt strike has the potential to release a collective identity from servitude
to infinite debt, sending lines of flight in unforeseen directions across
oceans of repressed fears, unlocking desire and thought and allowing for
layer upon layer of armor to fall. At stake in such a debt strike would be
not only billions of dollars of social and private debt, but (to paraphrase
Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guatarri 1983: 180)), all the stupidity and
arbitrariness of the laws, all the pain of the initiations, the whole perverse
apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons and the atrocious procedures that breed man, mark him in his flesh, render him capable of alliance and form him within the debtorcreditor relation.
Both Hollands and my own essays in this volume discuss primitive
accumulation in terms of an array of debts and obligations being traded
according to a palimpsest of fungible relations before the demands of
exchange facilitated by money. Colebrook reminds us of an essential but
under-studied component to this theory: that the fabric of the socius in

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55

the form of obligation and mutuality, dependence and merit, was realized
through the practices of theft and gift.
Deleuze and Guattari detail how in the primitive/territorial age the
destruction of surplus production in rituals or potlatch not only used
excess to create a filiative lineage of social adhesion but also allowed
obligations to remain, as the absence of wealth held in reserve necessitated continued social dependency. Mecchia reports on Pierre Clastres
view that many world populations were not frugal and stateless because
of scarcity and political primitivism, but as a consequence of an explicit
political decision, notably the unwillingness to engage in labor contracts
and political representations. Celebrations and expenditure to demonstrate excess, along with enactments of rituals and inscriptions, are all
forms of gift that are very different from just simply giving something
away, or from messy reciprocal gift-giving; they are commitments to the
social bond. Buchanan (2008) explains that the chief doesnt exchange
his wealth for allegiance; rather, through these practices he converts
wealth into allegiance. Gift is also a form of trade, and to give often
implies a power relation as the gift bestows power in the form of reputation, rank and sociability, which implies its mirror in the form of allegiance. By giving, credit is accrued, but also life force is expended, and by
expending is in turn increased; the gift is the spending of energy not for
the sake of return, indeed ones force is increased the more one spends
(Colebrook 2006: 126).
To a large extent to steal is to be, and very often the gift is indistinguishable from theft as elaborate feasts and gift-giving become a way
of converting goods into prestige and allegiance: to prevent this from
becoming an exchange the ritual of gift giving must make the gift seem
like a theft (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 203). Before there is an economy allowing for the exchange of property, and before there is anything
like scarcity, need or interest, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a milieu of
forces that is neither the rapacious world of capitalist acquisitiveness and
theft, nor a benign moral nature attuned to social harmony and benevolence. Once social systems are formed from a war machine that is a play
of forces before interests and property, then a milieu of rivalry, envy and
rank inevitably follows precisely because of establishing the single force
of the proper or of ownership.

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In the primitive/territorial age inscription on the body was often

the instrument for bonding the protocols of theft and gift: as Nietzsche
says, when impressed through pain, things are remembered. The rites of
inscription, tattooing, scarring, painting and piercing served many purposes; the tribe was bonded by attaching bodies to symbols, minds and
the socius (the body and gaze and the tribe are assembled at once, collectively), creating lateral alliances that countered the power of filiation and
lineage and extending filiations to the extensive allying relations of the
tribe. These rituals, dependencies and alliances warded off the uncontrollable power of unleashed exchange.
In sum, the requirements of the socius were enacted through systems
(machines) of inscribing and marking, rituals and the measuring of credit
and debt, to which the practices of theft and gift were essential: theft and
gift are a style of relation that preceded coding as mother, child, priest,
and despot. As Colebrook points out, theft and gift were fundamental to
the creation of stable points within the psychosocial fabric and for the
formation of territories, which in turn is a pre-requisite for the creation of
genuine difference and genuine exchange.
What is to be found in the primitive/territorial society is exactly what
the term implies: territories rather than exchange, stable points rather
than equivalences. In our age, territories are formed primarily through
the possession of capital, land and political power. Before the emergence
of the exchange of equivalences and accumulation of abstract capital
through money, territories were assemblages of natural disequilibriums
between alliances, filiations, and potentialities expressed through the
powers to differ actualized in productive encounters. Genuine difference
and genuine exchange, as Colebrook points out, leads away from insecurity, moralizing and the fear of living a full and active life towards vitality
and arousal; I steal therefore I become and I give therefore I accrue, are
not forms of power over but power to (Colebrook 2006: 134).
Desiring life is intensive difference. A body is made up of
powers to differ, and these powers are actualized in productive encounters. Theft and gift are precisely the processes that allow for these differences to be expressed.
(Colebrook 2006: 134).

Introduction

57

The requirement of the socius was therefore that potency, agency, leverage and force create relatively stable terms, and intensive difference is
a pre-requisite for a genuine calculation to be made regarding who has
taken what. Such calculation, as I show, is taken by Nietzsche to be the
foundation of thought.
In the primitive/territorial epoch we see an assemblage of adjunctive
and disjunctive relations and collective territorialization occurs when the
tribe is marked by processes [that] allow organs such as the eyes, penis,
breast or head to be experienced collectively (Colebrook 2006: 144).
This collectivism also leads to a proto-individualism, as only in a form of
territorialization can the body take itself as an individual; and individual
memory, or a sense of self existing in time, is dependent upon collective
memory. As Holland, Colebrook and I all make clear, fundamental to this
process is debt and the ability to live up to a promise. As I argue:
Certainly, without rational thought, anticipation and prediction, man would not survive; but memory is more than that.
It lays the foundation for the formation of will by the creation
of a link between I will and the actual manifestation of the
will in action. In this way an infallible psychological law leads
to predicable subjects who, in turn, provide the infrastructure
for the social bond.
Also emergent from this process is accumulation achieved not through
expropriation but as a result of harboring and storing and the process of
exchange, which together form the conditions for a nascent capitalism.
Economic and subjective differences, a this is mine and that is yours or
non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities between two discernable persons, are pre-requisites for trading. The emergence of capitalism was a consequence not of determining laws of history, nor of an
underlying human nature, nor of a law of struggle or economic production, but of a specific historically contingent assemblage of forces.
VIII. Deterritorialization, Reterritorialization, and Smooth Space
Deleuze and Guattari are often presented as being in thrall to the deterritorializing effects of capitalism. Fueling this perception, Anti-Oedipus

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Andrew Conio

presents the schizo as a figure of revolution, freed from the shackles of

the despot and capital as a signifier-scrambling agent traversing the strata
in a mode of permanent revolution. As early as 1991 Eugene Holland
attempted to dispel the resulting misconception of an absentminded,
sensation-fetishizing Deleuze and Guattari by demonstrating how in A
Thousand Plateaus this revolutionary schizoanalytic fever became more
tempered. What is usually overlooked is that de- and reterritorialization are tendencies not oppositions. They are aspects of the same process; as deterritorialization creates a space for reterritorialization, reterritorialization leaves a vacuole in its wake: the least deterritorialized
[element] reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 174).
Capitalisms great potential and allure is precisely that it is the first system whose modus operandi is immanent to a process that constitutes the
formula of all being. But capitalism does not merely deterritorialize with
all its might; its force is determined by axioms irrespective of the damage
caused to the oikos, the planet and life itself. Occupy and Deleuzes philosophy seek not to restrain capitalism (and lifes) fundamental tendency
towards deterritorialization but to bring about new kinds of reterritorialization organized around much more rejuvenating forms such as assemblages, social machines, plateaus and smooth spaces.
If a motif can be discerned in the many vectors of thought and diverse
positions that make up this volume, then it turns on the question of territorialization in relation to potentials of causality, agency and leadership
as well as the necessity of resistance and antagonism. It is a question of
how these might be realized in pragmatic formations in the creation of
territories, negative spaces, new subjectivities and sensibilities, and in
new ways of understanding economics, particularly in relation to debt.
We should not just occupy empty spaces but, as Conley puts it, rethink
and refashion space by means of new distributions, maintaining a commitment to change though rearranging inherited configurations of life.
To occupy does not necessarily imply taking over a psychical territory
or seizing the fort but can be pure movement in the form of cadences
and rhythms, drawing lines or tracing diagrams. And for such change to
happen something has to happen first: the preoccupation of a myriad of
micro spaces that have to be pried open to bring about new sensibilities

Introduction

59

in the formation of other intelligences. Preoccupation for Conley entails

new modes of thinking, experiencing and perception which, when held
together by affective intensities, create a new plateau: Occupy.
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari note that the territory
implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, or sensibilia that cease to
be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a
transformation of functions (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 183). Thoburn
saw this happening first-hand at OccupyLSX, where sensibilia took the
form of a struggle for ideas, gestures, placards and signs, information
systems, a collective will to self-education, the immersion of subjects in
shared ideas and in the deployment of new social technologies. These
expressive, sensory qualities were manifested most clearly by the tent,
where the experience of poverty, precarity, debt, and racism as well as
the spatial arrangements of the city, the gendered divisions of labor and
the partitions of public and private were all refashioned in a different
type of dwelling and form of possession. For Thoburn, the tent expressed
and created a territory at once:
The tent undid patterns of behaviour, laws, sensory structures,
and economic forms that determine that space as a road,
stage for commerce and governance, or municipal park. But
if the tent and tripod deterritorialize in this way, they simultaneously generate a new territory, they reterritorialize into an
Occupy camp or a street party.
Thoburns interest is in how two different modalities of composition, the
sensory or expressive quality of Occupy and its meaning or explicit politics, formed a mutually sustaining encounter. He likens this new form of
territorialization to the art object, which for Deleuze is always a composition of material form and expressive qualities. The art object as monument is a fabulation, rather than a representation or image, and this fabulation has to capture something of the struggle to live, to express the
struggle for existence. In this way, artistic and socially progressive forms
lift suffering to the level of aesthetic expression.
In a paper similarly concerned with aesthetics, Burrows writes of
swarms, teach-ins and collective actions spearheaded by art students,
made possible by the knotting together of the seemingly infinite,

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Andrew Conio

inhuman scale of cyberspace and communication technology with the

space and time of occupation and protest. This knot of cyber and physical space enabled individuals who may have previously felt atomized to
discover the joys of collective action. For Burrows reterritorialization
took the form of the creation of negative spaces in the various practices
of saying no; in this way he shows the versatility of the war machine,
specifically how new collective assemblages created new space-times and
the production of a negative space became the material of protest. The
breadth and scope of the war machine is also drawn out by Holland, who
reminds us of Deleuzes insistence that the war machine exists only in its
own metamorphoses (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 366) or in specific
assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgements or making music or instituting a science, a technology (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 366).
Attending to the question of space, Buchanan addresses how, in
rupturing the striated spaces of capitalism, Occupy instigated a change
in sense and perception through the creation of smooth spaces. This
amounts not so much to a change in the state of things, or redefining the
map, as to the creation of a new way of being in space. For Deleuze and
Guattari smooth space speaks not of a flattening, but of social relations
where regularities, points, measurements and predetermined modes of
being give way to openness, and where multiplicitous relations and differently accented rhythms create irregularities and constant itinerancy.
For Buchanan, following Harvey, it is in smooth space that the new commons is to be found not as a presumption of commonality but in terms
of a regard for contingency and variation, where instability and incoherence is to be worked through in the manner of Occupy rather than concealed beneath conviviality or the false ideal of the public. Buchanan
stresses, partly in response to Badiou, that the Idea in the form of an
affirmation of what might be possible, rather than a state of ressentiment
or anger, is essential to the creation of smooth space. Deleuzian analysis of social space concerns less how to create the conditions for universalizing concepts such as a public than how to construct a place where
genuine conflicts between ideas are given expression. We might say, as
Thoburn does, that dissolving the passivity of consensus, antagonism and
dissensus fosters a sense of alertness and empowers people and groups

Introduction

61

to embark on multifarious forms of resistance. In this sense, the smooth

space of Occupy is a territory wherein further, deeper and more extensive conflicts are to be assembled.
Smooth space for Mecchia is nomadically itinerant, vibrant and open,
but densities or refrains emerge within it to create points from which life
may be processed or machines assembled. Smooth space contracts and
opens, and conjunctions between forces emerge. Following such conjunctions, Mecchia addresses how de- and reterritorialization are played
out in the figure of the subject. First, deterritorialization means taking
apart existing egos as well as monolithic and totalizing philosophical
and psychoanalytical theories and, most importantly, their ties to capitalist de- and reterritorializations. Second (or better concomitantly), it is
necessary to reterritorialize in the figure of the anthropos, understood
as a dynamic, material figure of political subjectivity that criss-crosses
the striated spaces of social organization. For Mecchia the anthropos is
both a method and an analytical category, the meeting place of which
was given material expression at Occupy. It does this through a collective
conceived not in terms of party structure, nor as subject to the demands
of truth, but as an assemblage of empirical, machinic processes that are
transversal across striated spaces: neither man nor woman, rich or poor,
powerful or subjugated what constitutes this kind of collective organization is one of the most powerful practico-theoretical figures for our
understanding of the emergence of the Occupy groups.
For Nunes also, binary oppositions such as openness against closure, diversity over unity, spontaneity over purposive organization, rhizome over arborescence, deterritorialization over reterritorialization
are all equally unreliable. Nonetheless, as tendencies, the drift towards
either end of these poles is obvious. The crucial issue is how in any given
situation these tendencies are to be balanced and to what purpose. For
example, as Nunes notes, at one end of the scale, formlessness only serves
to lay political movements open to irrelevance and capture, but he is
also at pains to show how, at the other end of the scale, vanguard politics can no longer capture or mobilize new forms of political protest, or
the emergent sensibilities of political collectives. For Nunes the twilight
of the vanguard has seen the emergence of multiple vanguards, collective assemblages and packs, all of which are experiments with political

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Andrew Conio

transformation in ways that retain the maximum degree of openness and

mobility. Rather than universal forces of history or the endless struggle
between capital and labor, the nature of event and the complexity of our
times require new more mobile forms, thinking strategically about how
to take on the war machine at its most abstract, precisely in the manner of Occupy.
For Protevi, Occupy created an environment for people to show
their faces to each other, assume an identity, and challenge the crystallization of the collective affect of shame in the American air. By showing
their faces to each other in a new collective space the Occupiers sought
to counteract existing stratified and homogenized affects by creating a
positive affect of joyful solidarity. Placing body next to body and becoming immersed in the shared expression of the chant are forms of vibrating and being in phase: an indissoluble togetherness capable of creating a
positive intermodal feedback of percept, affect and sense.
IX. Conclusion
War machines, smooth spaces, packs, assemblages, plateaus, becomingminor, transformations in subjectivity, the creation of new collectivities
and forms of distributive leadership all these ideas and processes are
addressed in relation to Occupy in the chapters that follow. While there
are many other aspects of Deleuze and Guattaris political ontology that
could also be invoked and applied here, it is hoped that these are sufficient to demonstrate how their political concepts are relevant to this
new neo-feudal age and to the type of sociopolitical movements that
have emerged in response. Life flows, life is irrepressible, the question is
always what social forms might be created to make these flows more malleable, open, flexible and more able to express the creativity that lies at
the heart of human nature and life. This book articulates a shift away from
the fetishization of deterritorialization towards fluid and open forms
of territorialization as figures of potency, agency, leverage and force, in
search of genuine difference. As Deleuze and Guattari say, everywhere,
the depth of difference is primary (1994: 51). The aim of politics is to
release difference from its entrapment within the logics and axiomatics
of capitalism. Capitalism is a difference-producing machine that cannot

Introduction

63

tolerate its own plenitude. In response, rather than following the Deleuze
popularized in some circles of accelerated difference we need to find or
invent, with Occupy, difference-affirming machines. Occupys Let these
Facts be Known captures the myriad forms of minoritarianism that
allow for contradictory, antagonistic, connective, rhizomic differences.
Recognizing that our urgent times do not afford us the luxury of absolute
deterritorialization or fantasies about an outside to capitalism, Occupy
is intensely pragmatic all of its groups and assemblies are charged with
experimenting with questions of how to devise practical solutions to the
problems of the state, democracy, economy and social relations. In the
end, both Occupy and Deleuze are rooted in practical analysis, and both
reject the stifling alternative reform or revolution, because both understand that the question [of revolutions] has always been organisational
(2007: 143): the organization of flows into autopoietic and highly relational structures.
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of the Radical Imagination ( June 23).
Shukaitis, Stevphan. 2010. Deleuze and (Which) Politics. Review of Deleuze
and Politics. Eds. Nick Thoburn and Ian Buchanan. Culture Machine Reviews
(September).
Tampio, N. 2009. Assemblages and the Multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the
Postmodern Left. European Journal of Political Theory 8 (3): 383400.
Thoburn, Nicholas. 2003. Deleuze, Marx and Politics. London: Routledge.
Virno, Paolo. 2003. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms
of Life. Cambridge: Semiotext(e).
Williams, James. 2003. Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction
and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Andrew Conio

Notes
1.

The anthropological view of politics sees the institutions and structures

of political life as contingent. And the premises and principles that
underpin these are far from taken from given but the subject of enquiry and
comparison.

2.

All references unless cited otherwise are to papers in this volume.

3.

Claire Colebrook, endorsement for Ian Buchanans Deleuze and Guattaris

Anti-Oedipus (2008).

4.

Most obviously: Deleuze and Political Activism (2010) edited by Marcelo

Svirsky; Deleuze and Marx and Politics (2003) by Nicholas Thoburn; Deleuze
and Politics (2008) edited by Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (2008);
Deleuze and the Social (2006) edited by Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier
Srensen; Deleuze and Marx (2009) edited by Jain Dhruv; as well as numerous
titles by the Deleuzian entangled Phillip Goodchild.

5.

As illustrated in Deleuze (2008).

6.

See also Marzec (2001).

7.

As Anne Pettifor points out: real wealth should be seen not in terms of the
tangible stuff (homes, money land) but in terms of the intangible stuff the
economic power that wealthy people are able to exercise by virtue of the fact
they have got assets, those assets enable them to borrow and leverage their
wealth at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. For example the
Glazier brothers bought Manchester United using very little of their own
money, they used borrowed money. They had some collateral but the real
collateral was Manchester United football team itself, and its supporters
and its streams of revenue. They were about to purchase a football club and
make others pay for the debt, through buying tickets, televisions rights,
tee-shirts. Those revenue streams are paying down the debt incurred by the
Glazier families is an exact example of how the rich are further enriched
by the enforced indebtedness of others. See Boom Bust (June 5, 2014),
RT America. Accessed April 25, 2015 from: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=1Yqalvi5jUM

8.

The first coinage by the Lydian or Phrygian despots in the Greek colonies on
the Aegean around 680 BC, probably for fiscal, military and political purposes
rather than for trade; coinage only acquired a use in trading between cities
in the following century in the main Greek trading ports, such as Athens.
(Goodchild 2008: 28).

Chapter 1

On Anthropolitics: From Capitalism and

Schizophrenia to Occupy and Beyond
Giuseppina Mecchia

The events related to the Occupy movements caught many by surprise:

how often, especially but not only in the USA, have we seen people
occupying the streets and parks of major Western cities, in the very
strongholds of global capitalism, expressing a radical opposition to their
most profound economic and social determinations? As the persuasion
exerted by the capitalist way of life became more globally widespread,
one might have despaired that such a mobilization could still be possible. Even more striking was the pointed eloquence of the demonstrators,
who performed an impeccable analysis of the financial crisis that started
in 2008 and chose to bring it forth in deeply significant publicprivate
spaces. From Zuccotti Park in New York City, just a few blocks from Wall
Street, to St Pauls Cathedral in London, a few hundred yards from the
London Stock Exchange, students, long-time activists and newly minted
militants decided to take their message to the streets. Leaving the message aside for a moment, the mere appearance of these crowds was worth
pondering: how could the protesters have materialized, both physically
and psychologically? How could it be that in an age when our mental
abilities and physical resources seem to have been completely coopted by
economic imperatives, so many of us could suddenly break the spell? In
other words, how does the subject of politics emerge if only from time
to time from the dejection of every day drudgery and delusion?
Nothing less than a social psycho-philosophy of the subject could
start to account for such an event, and this is the direction that I will take

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in this chapter. In the following pages, I will argue that Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari left us with basic elements of an ethico-political stance that
can best let us understand the political discourses and practices that saw
in the Occupy movements their most recent instantiation. In particular,
their common work on schizoanalysis will help me propose the concept
of the anthropos as a dynamic, material figure of political subjectivity.
Defined as the psychosocial subject of the schizoanalytic unconscious,
such a figure can help us conceive not only capitals current grip on global
forms of life, but also and most importantly the limits of such a hold and
the spaces that can still be reclaimed for anthropolitical projects of liberation and affective redirection.
Before going any further, a few words about schizoanalysis are in
order. While the limits of this chapter dont allow me to go into the more
technical details of their presentation, let us remember that Deleuze and
Guattari introduced the concept in Anti-Oedipus as a political response
to some contemporary trends in psychoanalytic thought. We should
remember how, in the early 1970s, Lacans pessimism about the movements of May 1968 when he famously claimed that the students were
simply looking for another master was becoming increasingly influential in intellectual circles, and was later promptly adopted in the reactionary atmosphere of the 1980s. The Lacanian unconscious cares little about
history and political change: deeply rooted mechanisms of physical and
mental dependency internal to the human physiology and familial structures remain constant, and beside stoic acceptance and analytic lucidity,
little or no space is left for any serious questioning of ones determinations. Political revolt is largely presented as an ultimately insignificant
smoke-screen, behind which an immutable tale of suffering and neurosis
continues to unfold. To this pessimist narrative always liable to become
a socially conservative political stance Deleuze and Guattari opposed
a revised version of the Lacanian unconscious, at once less chronically
despondent and more politically satisfying. In the chapter entitled A
Materialist Psychiatry, we read that contrary to Lacanian orthodoxy, the
productions of desire are real, and are borne by the machinic investments
expressed by constantly created bodies and minds:
If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it
can be productive only in the real world and can produce only

On Anthropolitics

69

reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows and bodies, and that function as units of
production. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 26)
The task of schizoanalysis is then progressively made clear: intervening
in the passive syntheses that constitute the partial objects of desiring
production, responding to the suffering caused by deadly investments in
oppressive and stunting processes be it familial entrapments, capitalist cooptation or statist bureaucracies with an effort to follow decoded
schizzes, defined as the desiring chains working toward the continual
detachments (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 39) of disjunctive moves
against pre-determined, ready-made individualized significations.
Refusing the normative call to individualization and the injunction to
name oneself as attached to a specific desire, those who follow the schizzes resist filling the space of the I understood as the isolated subject of a
reified identity:
There are those who will maintain that the schizo is incapable
of uttering the word I, and that we must restore his ability to
pronounce this hallowed word. All of which the schizo sums
up by saying: theyre fucking me over again. (Deleuze and
Guattari 2009: 23)
Deleuze and Guattari are careful to contextualize their rethinking of the
psychoanalytic unconscious in relation to a critique of capitalism, through
the different social mutations of private property and accumulation, since
it is this form that produces the capitalist field of immanence, the capitalist, the worker [and that] produces a vast conversion of this world
by attributing to it the new form of an infinite subjective representation
(Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 303). Only by perceiving ones subjective
representation as the result of an oppressive, even deadly, assignation can
one try to redirect ones energies in a less nefarious manner.
The Occupy movements, in this respect, were profoundly schizoanalytic: supported by non-proprietary and anonymous cultural forces such
as Adbusters or Anonymous itself, and by individuals whose identities
of workers/unemployed/students/producers became the asignifying
numeric symbol of the 99%, the people involved in these actions were

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able to defy and physically contradict at least for a time the capitalist
subsumption of their mental and social energies.
On Capitalist Crises and Insurrectional Responses
Although I intend to formulate a critique of the present with a focus on
the Occupy movements, there is no better introduction to my main argument than a very old quotation taken from A Thousand Plateaus:
Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We
have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as
in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have
seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as
parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of
enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but
the unspecified enemy Yet the very conditions that make
the State or the World War Machine possible, in other words,
constant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually recreate unexpected possibilities for
counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machinesthe unassignable
material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most
diverse forms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 422).
The second installment of the diptych Capitalism and Schizophrenia was
originally published in 1980, eight years after the publication of AntiOedipus and as a result of about ten years of cooperation between the two
co-authors. It is, of course, very difficult to reconstruct with any accuracy
the historical context of what they then called the present situation.
Nonetheless, the policies adopted by a number of Western powers in the
late 1970s to counter internal and external threats were the source of the
discouragement felt by many activists at that time.
A few, certainly insufficient, reminders do in fact allow us to reconstruct some aspects of the books present, in a highly interdependent
international context: the escalation of the AmericanRussian conflict in
Iran and Afghanistan at the end of Jimmy Carters presidency in the US;

On Anthropolitics

71

the brutal repression of socialist regimes in Central and South America

throughout the 1970s, largely fomented by the US secret services; the
internal repressive tactics adopted by Western countries to quell internal
dissent, Italy being a particularly relevant case in point; the protection
of Western-backed autocratic rulers in the Muslim world, from Mubarak
in Egypt to Suharto in Indonesia; the cynical use of the AraboIsraeli
conflict to maintain a Western, capitalist bastion in the Middle East; the
continuing intervention of the former colonial powers in the national
politics of the African states. All of the above, of course, was occurring
at terrible human costs, easily accepted in the name of the peace that
reigned in the hegemonic political and economic centers no longer easily identifiable as states, since the democratic institutions were already
being deprived of their significance by global corporate interests that
could bring death through local wars to populations deemed unworthy
of preservation. Whether those populations were dissenting minorities
within specific states, or burgeoning democratic republics in certain key
areas for global capitalist investment, the result was the same: an unrelenting pounding from the capitalist war machine. The last years of the
Cold War, in this respect, were particularly ferocious, and would continue to be so throughout the 1980s. The progressive realization that the
so-called socialist republics only reproduced capitalist economic imperatives, transferring them on a bureaucratic state apparatus, contributed to
an intense feeling of impotence and pessimism.
I offer these blatantly inadequate historical pointers not so much
to reconstruct what would have been the unique context of Thousand
Plateaus, but rather to underscore how the present situation of capitalist hegemony is always discouraging and potentially soul-crushing for its
subjects. Indeed, equally dramatic lists could be offered when discussing
many other historical conjunctures, including our own, and none would
appear much rosier. Still, A Thousand Plateaus also registered the specific
fatigue felt by many activists after what was called the long 1968 in Italy,
Germany and France (Flix Guattari being himself a particularly poignant case in point). There is certainly a shift in tone from the expansive,
ebullient pages of Anti-Oedipus, which was written in the years between
1969 and 1972, when a more revolutionary tone and a certain kind of
Marxist critique were still commonly heard in many different variations

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Giuseppina Mecchia

not only in France but in several Western European countries. By the

time the first French edition of A Thousand Plateaus went to the presses,
the repressive side of the Western state apparatuses was back in full, selfcongratulatory swing. When the two volumes of the diptych reached
their Anglophone audiences Anti-Oedipus in 1983 and A Thousand
Plateaus in 1987 their audiences were fully into the grips of the reactionary capitalist politics of the ThatcherReagan era and the last military
flashes of the Cold War.
Not surprisingly, the present geopolitical situation was once again
quite bad. But even then, new forms of progressive political engagement
saw the light of day think about the environmentalist movements and
the LBGT1 mobilizations: clearly, there is no absolute, unique determination of subjectivity, but an infinitely modulated continuum of sociopsychological investments. While all of them are eventually captured by collective assemblages, the opportunity to orient ones libidinal investments
along axes diverging from capitals command is implicit in the deterritorialized forms of existence that capital itself creates. Since the production
of affect is intrinsic to any material assemblage, from molecular energy
to the emotions of human beings, any structure of power rests on and at
the same time is canceled by subjective investments that can move away
from it through autonomous social redirections of affective investments,
if only for a time. Such redirections were, as we have already seen, the
very task of schizoanalysis, since its job is to discern, at the level of groups
or individuals, the libidinal investments of the social field (Deleuze and
Guattari 2009: 350). The libidinal subject appearing at the crossing of
these investments is the schizoanalytic subject that later in this chapter I
call the anthropos.
It is essential to remember that neither Deleuze nor Guattari thought
that any present situation, however dire, was irrevocably and uniquely
bound to the deadly consequences of capitals grip on power. On the contrary, it is precisely after this assessment that they remind us that both
technology constant capital and people human variable capital
always retain the potential to create minoritarian mutant machines
able to sabotage and escape molar and molecular capitalist imperatives.
But how can the schizoanalytic process operate such as shift, and go, so
to speak, from discouragement to counterattack, from terrifying to

On Anthropolitics

73

potentially revolutionary situations? Is it possible to affirm, socially, psychologically and philosophically, that figures such as saboteurs, deserters,
strikers and occupiers are indeed possible, even when they appear historically doomed, without resorting to the abstract and factually inadequate
principles of liberal democracies, such as human equality and freedom of
speech? In the rest of this essay, it will be my contention that yes, there
is a way to think the immanent potentialities of the social subject, and
that it may be present, more than anywhere else, precisely in the kind of
thought that is present in Capital and Schizophrenia, and more specifically
in the conceptual configuration of the schizoanalytic subject. It is this
new anthropolitical figure that I will try to delineate in the remainder of
this paper, taking a little pre-emptive detour through the objections that
have been raised against it.
One More Effort, If You Want to be Materialist!
After decades of controversies, it is inevitable that before articulating the
outlines of what I consider to be the innovative conception of subjectivity that emerges from the combination of Deleuzes brand of materialist
thought and the analytic, practical anthropology that he elaborated with
Flix Guattari, I should address some of the objections that have been
raised against its politics, because they are extremely useful to the articulation of the affirmative moments of my argument. I focus on the issue
of materialism because the stakes of this appellation are still quite high
when one wants to position ones critique within the Marxist legacy of
the political critique of capital.
First of all, the highly interdisciplinary and somewhat unruly philosophical lexicon of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with its concomitant
revision and expansion of classically Marxist categories and fields of
inquiry, certainly contributed to its muted political reception in many
leftist academic circles, in France and abroad. Additionally, the unorthodox theoretical credentials of Flix Guattari, joined to what is considered
a more bourgeois, classical practice of philosophy on the part of Gilles
Deleuze prior to their collaboration, have determined several thinkers to
either completely ignore the books the two co-authored during the last
twenty years of their lives, or to simply focus on the indictment of the

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political implications of Gilles Deleuzes own philosophy. Some, in fact,

have done both; most notably Alain Badiou, more indirectly Jacques
Rancire and more recently Peter Hallward. Since all of these thinkers
are involved in revised continuations of the Marxist critical field, with its
attendant claim to an immanence-based, material understanding of politics and subjectivity, a brief recapitulation of their positions is an essential
first step in articulating the specificity of schizoanalysis, precisely because
it has been so blatantly misrepresented by other self-defined leftist and
post-Marxist philosophies.
I will not delve into the personal aspects of Badious ressentiment
against Deleuze, that Franois Dosse details in his excellent double biography of Deleuze and Guattari, and Badiou himself acknowledged in his
introduction to Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997). For the sake of this
essay, we should simply remember that Badious critique of Deleuzes philosophy rests on two main theoretical objections: Deleuzes ontological
grounding of the concept of difference in the Spinozian understanding of
the modal, singular but infinite unfolding of substance, and his adherence
to a stoic version of materialist metaphysics, which finds in matter itself
the principle of its own evental appearance.
Without going into great detail, we can say that Badious main argument is that Deleuze is too much of a vitalist to be really revolutionary,
since a Stoic understanding of matter does not allow for absolute discontinuities, such as, for instance, political revolutions. As he says in his
book, it remains impossible to subsume such change under the sign of
Life, whether it is renamed Power, lan or Immanence. It is necessary to
think discontinuity as such (Badiou 2009: 362). According to Badiou,
only a highly formalized understanding of multiplicity, rooted in mathematical representations such as set theory, accompanied by an equally
formal representation of a Lacanian subject of absolute discontinuities
historically embodied in a recurring cast of characters, such as Saint
Paul, Mallarm, the Maoist Red Guards or indeed Badiou himself as
faithful monument to May 1968 can prevent us from sliding into an
inherently conservative praise of Life as ahistorical, inherently conservative substance.
The most important and not-enough-discussed political consequence of this position is that for the Badiouan subject of truth, neither

On Anthropolitics

75

psychological nor bodily determinations are really necessary, since those

pertain to life and not to the discontinuous event: what somebody will
or will not be, will or will not do in a specific sociohistorical framework
doesnt really enter Badious original field of argumentation. While in a
recent essay he has acknowledged that any truth procedure is dependent
on subjective supports that are spatial, temporal and anthropological
(Badiou 2010: 2) he does not consider them essential enough to actually
talk about their psychosocial materiality. Even in Logics of Worlds (2006),
when he recognizes that the theories exposed in Being and Event (1988)
could not distinguish fascist processes of subjectivation from progressive
ones, Badiou does not get involved in any analytic, conceptual assessment
of specific subjects to truth.2 To be fair, Badiou does not really enter into
issues of materialism as he rejects any critique coming from empiricist
positions, and his activist past does not prevent him from saying that
communist is no longer an adjective qualifying a politics (Badiou 2010:
3). But how can we not acknowledge that the very essence of the Occupy
movements is in fact a communist politics, both in theory and in practice? Clearly, Badious reliance on mathematical and monumental representations prevents his political philosophy from accounting for these
historical occurrences, since such an account needs to broach issues of
political economics and social critique, which are ultimately excluded
from Badious thought, which in turn is entirely narrated through symbolic abstractions, such as Idea, Humanity, History, the State, and
monumental subjects, such as Mao Tse-tung, Robespierre or Saint Paul,
even as their lack of reality is constantly reaffirmed. The imaginary
nature of political subjectivation is affirmed in distinctly Lacanian terms,
as if this were still the only valid model for unconscious mechanisms of
subjectivation: this is precisely the crux of Deleuzian/Guattiarian schizoanalytic theory, and is one that Badiou never confronts.
While different in theoretical arguments and presuppositions, it
becomes increasingly clear that there exists, in fact, a kind of continuity
between Badious positions and those elaborated by Jacques Rancire,
who, like Badiou, needed to distance himself from an Althusserian past
that seemingly condemned the political subject to an eternal entrapment
in ideological determinations. Rancires first book, Althussers Lesson,
originally published in 1974, was an early indictment of Althussers

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Giuseppina Mecchia

version of scientific Marxism, which seemed to negate the possibility of

political awareness for a subjectivity unmediated by a knowledge administered by didactical powers, such as a party or an academic discipline, be
it economics or psychoanalysis.
In the following years, Rancire refreshingly demonstrated that, historically, things dont really happen that way, since the people always
although rarely find a way to break through the ideological chains forced
upon them. For Rancire, language does not inevitably push us in the
domain of ideology or of the unconscious shackling of the Lacanian field,
but is the privileged faculty allowing all antagonistic processes of political
subjectivation. While the linguistic contents showered on us by power
might seem overwhelming, the linguistic faculty per se remains a beacon
of equality for all political subjects, no matter how socially degraded.
Rancire builds a precious archive of examples illustrating this
basic principle, from the Roman plebs seceding on the Aventine Hill,
to the French students reacting against university policies in the 1990s.
Rancires affirmative, non-apocalyptic version of the peoples history is
indeed a welcome contrarian voice in the midst of postmodernist political defeatism one might think about Baudrillards apocalyptic prophesies, or even Derridas latest recourse to de- and then re-constructed
ethical principles. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely
the indiscriminate applicability of Rancires principles that also makes
them, so to speak, almost politically unusable in their tautological selfpresentation. Badious recourse to logic and mathematics can be likened
to Rancires almost exclusive reliance on the faculty of language both
largely considered as an ahistorical a priori for the founding of an egalitarian political project. The Aristotelian identification of language as the
defining faculty of the human being, along with Aristotles separate definition of man as political animal, are powerfully bridged by Rancire,
who establishes a poignant causal continuity between the two.
It is indeed surprising that two former students of Althusser, the powerful theorist of the conjointure as the historicist understanding of what
Deleuze might have called a state of affairs, should have spent the best
part of their philosophical careers trying to distill the pure principles
in the case of Rancire or logical presentations in the case of Badiou
of an eternal figure of political subjectivity. Neither of them, it should be

On Anthropolitics

77

noted, is the least concerned with issues of political economics, political

anthropology or social psychology. Even when Badiou talks of the exclusion of the Inuits from Quebecs electoral laws between 1918 and 1950,
nothing is said of them, or by them: only logical schemes of relations
between them and the state are drawn in a way irrespective of whether
they occurred or not (Badiou 2009: 30724). Understandably wary of
falling into the traps of determinism, both Badiou and Rancire stay away
from temporal considerations altogether, condemning the bodily incarnations of political subjectivities what Badiou calls incorporations
to an Idea to theoretical irrelevance, keeping them only as the names
attached to a monumental historical archive. It is not surprising, in this
context, to hear Rancire ask, in the context of a 2009 colloquium about
the rebirth of the communist hypothesis in light of the financial crisis,
with whom, with what subjective forces, can you imagine building this
communism? (Rancire 2010: 175). The reliance on the verb imagine
is very significant in this respect, since if Occupy showed us something
it is that communist subjectivities dont need to be imagined externally:
rather, they constitute themselves according to variable personal and
historical circumstances, retraceable through and by a schizoanalysis of
desire and realization.
The fact that Rancire still conceives of communism as a project situated outside of its specific actuation if only to negate it tells us that
there is a surprising lack of involvement, on his part, in the sociopsychological mechanisms that allow such actuations to occur. What is at stake
in political insurrections is not the presupposed equality of all minds, but
the workings of the bio-political unconscious, of the bodies struggling
for the access to their own potential energies, of the brains polluted by
cultural inanities and creating life spaces that eschew some of the most
destructive determinations brought upon us by the current stage of cognitive capitalism.
Language is not an empty faculty, free to create any locution at any
given time: our lexicon, and therefore our conceptual arsenal, both
depend on the conditions of our cognitive experiences. While I praise
and share Rancires invaluable openness to the future of politics and
his admirable refusal to assess historical postmodernity along apocalyptic lines, I consider his understanding of language dangerously detached

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from what Bateson once called the ecology of the mind, that is, the environmental milieu that supports our brain function. Similar objections
could be levied against the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, who, like
Rancire, seems to be too dependent on Aristotelian and formal linguistics to engage in a genuinely materialist critique of psychosocial structures and physical determinations.
Both Badiou and Rancire and more recently Paolo Virno have
found an eager audience in British and North American academia. As a
concrete and remarkable case of derivative theory, I will reference here
Peter Hallward, a much younger, Canadian political philosopher, who
is greatly indebted to both philosophers and shares several of their basic
theoretical moves. Hallward, however, maintains a strong Leninist background that leads him to the formulation of a political voluntarism even
more radical than the apostolic fidelity requested of the Badiouan subject of truth. And like Badiou, he is staunchly anti-Deleuzian. His 2006
book, tellingly entitled Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of
Creation, recasts and radicalizes Badious critique of Deleuzian politics, most notably in the methodological exclusion of the volumes
co-authored with Flix Guattari and the accusation of Stoic, even aristocratic, detachment linked, once again, to a naturalistic vitalism considered incapable of formulating a political critique of contingent forms of
power. Hallward proposes nothing less than a neo-Leninist vanguardist
practice for the engaged intellectual, predicated on a strict one might
say ascetic adherence to certain principles, or truths. This is almost
paradoxical, since Hallward had already reproached both Deleuze and
Guattari for formulating a non-specific theory of singularity in his earlier text, Absolutely Post-Colonial (2001), while at the same time he himself was rejecting the inscription of the political subject in his or her own
sociohistorical determinations. The political subject appears as process
of relational de-specification, always consciously embraced by a responsible agent (Hallward 2002: 50). It is true that in his work on Haiti,
Hallward devotes unrelenting attention to the economic, cultural and
social specificities of that particular community; however, his inflexible,
transcendental conception of political subjectivity puts him in a difficult
double bind when thinking about issues of political agency. This is a difficulty that he shares most clearly with Badiou, but also, I would contend,

On Anthropolitics

79

with the kind of linguistic understanding present in Rancires conception of equality and democracy.
My critique should not be interpreted as hostile: I do appreciate the
fact that all of these thinkers remain steadfast in their opposition to present and past forms of capitalist and bureaucratic domination. However, I
think that all of them, and maybe most notably Hallward, who explicitly
declares his own inscription in MarxismLeninism, need to operate an
exceedingly difficult intellectual torsion in order to maintain their theoretical presuppositions. They all engage with but ultimately reject materialist empiricism maybe the most concise definition of Deleuze and
Guattaris thought as viable foundation for political critique in general
and for the description of the political subject in particular. To a certain
extent, even the ultimate Marxist legacy, which remains the critique of
political economy, is tossed to the side. Their political unconscious, to
quote Jameson, is entangled in the formal positions attributed to it by
psychoanalytic and linguistic representation. Whether such representation is true or false is not, of course, what is at stake here. Rather,
what needs to be questioned is the impossibility, for them, of theoretically accounting for the here and now of political constitution. What
Deleuze and Guattari allow us to think is the materiality of such constitutions, in their transversal crossing of the striated spaces of social organization. It is in the empiricist or even Stoic articulation of materiality
and autonomy, of singularity and immanent collective connectivity that
the most precious contribution of Deleuze and Guattari to political
philosophy is to be found, as I will argue in the rest of this chapter. In the
articulation of the schizoanalytic subject as anthropolitical agent we can
find maybe the most faithful rendition of the occupier, a figure that is as
material as it is complex, embedded in the deepest recesses of contemporary forms of subjective formation.
From Anthropological Abjection to Anthropolitical Autonomy
It is not by chance that I evoked Hallwards 2001 book on post-coloniality: in fact, powerful objections to the political content of Deleuze and
Guattaris two volumes on capitalism and schizophrenia have also come
from scholars deeply engaged in post-colonial studies, although others

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have readily embraced their understanding of singularity as a powerful

antidote to theories of alterity. While Gayatri Spivak famously attacked
both Deleuze and Foucault for what she considered their adherence to a
non-examined model of Western authoritarian discourse male, white
and European Chris Miller furthered this critique to denounce Deleuze
and Guattaris very use of anthropological sources. For him, it was outrageous to see how these sources were often the work of researchers actively
involved in colonial administrations, or at least always structured according to the anthropologists own hegemonic cultural framework. In her
essay, Spivak embraces Derridas deconstructive project as a radical questioning of Western knowledge, and considers it the only political horizon
for the self-aware Western intellectual. Miller, on the other hand, rejects
the very possibility of combining archival research anthropological or
other with any theoretical content, lest we reproduce the discursive
domination of the Other in making him or her a simple case in point for
an abstracted, de-contextualized concept, such as nomadology or the
war machine. Neither Spivak nor Miller considers the theory and practice of schizoanalysis worthy of mention, while I would argue that the
white, male and European subject of thought is completely debunked by
the transformation it incurs during the schizoanalytic process.
In fact, what is rejected without theoretical examination by these
otherwise brilliant scholars is the very possibility that Deleuze and
Guattaris conception of machinic, desiring subjects fully articulated
in their material constitutions but not ideologically pre-programed by an
external, univocal power (be it the state or capital) might indeed be a
truthful one, to be affirmed not according to an empty, Badiouan fidelity, but as a powerful extension of Marxist political economy and Engels
attempts at a socialist anthropology. In this respect, only an examination
of the basic tenets of schizoanalytic theory and practice can truly account
for the desirability of Deleuzian-Guattarian political theory.
This is why the use of anthropological materials in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia is to be understood as an effort to detach the construction
of subjectivity from its current, hegemonic forms, all tied to capitalist
de- and reterritorializations of subjective productions. Far from indulging in sentimental primitivism, Deleuze and Guattari repeat a typically
Marxist gesture; that is, they construct a diversified, historical archive of

On Anthropolitics

81

economic and social subjects, organized around the two axes of space
and time. This is in fact the mode that organizes the project of Capital
as narration. Therefore, when Paul Patton says that Deleuze and Guattari
engage in a neo-Marxist universal history (Patton 2000: 88), it is important to introduce an essential modification: while Marx relegates the
primitive mode of production to a historical past that conceives the modern capitalist mode of production as the inevitable telos of modern forms
of progress, Deleuze and Guattari adopt a slightly different universal
perspective. For them, capital and the state apparatus are both present
and absent in all societies, either as accepted realizations or, more importantly, as rejected virtualities.
In their treatment of primitive and despotic societies in Anti-Oedipus,
and later in the separate but interconnected chapters of Thousand Plateaus
devoted to nomadology and the war machine, segmentarity, and apparatuses of capture, they give us a way to conceive different world populations in their respective social inscriptions. What emerges from these
pages, densely populated with more or less realistic characters, is a world
crisscrossed by innumerable political striations, where nothing is truly
impossible or, inversely, absolutely necessary. This is why not only history, but also anthropology, have been essential to the formulation of the
political theses of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Far from being primitivist, the recourse to anthropology is essential in trying to assess the psychosocial constitution of todays collective becomings, such as those that
prompted a people to occupy public spaces in the Occupy movements.
Of course, one has to be careful: we are not talking here of the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, which is still excessively dependent
on an unrepresentable center the incest taboo, for instance for the
subsequent representation of family and social segmentarity emanating from it, but rather an account mediated to Deleuze and Guattari
by Pierre Clastres, a friend and contemporary of Flix Guattari and an
assiduous participant in Deleuzes seminars at Vincennes in the mid1970s. Before his premature death in 1978, Clastres had furthered in his
fieldwork some of Marshall Sahlins earlier discoveries: most notably, in
Stone Age Economics (1972), the Marxist anthropologist had reported
that many world populations were not frugal and stateless because of
scarcity and political primitivism, but as a consequence of an explicit

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political decision, notably the unwillingness to engage in labor contracts and political representations. These were societies of abundance,
although they appeared destitute to bourgeois ethnocentrism (Sahlins
1974: 3). Sahlins arguments extended to politics: in these societies, the
political sphere is often unrecognizable to us simply because the political
function has not been reified by a bureaucratic apparatus, but has been
retained by the social body itself.
Clastres pushed Sahlins argument a step further: it is precisely
because the primitive society refuses the alienation of power that it also
prevents the accumulation of wealth on the part of one or several of its
members. Some primitive societies, therefore, invest their psychosocial
affects and productive energies in ways that are not pre- but anti-modern.
They are, in sum, fully communist, both economically and politically,
even if such a definition can appear Western-centered and anachronistic.
Furthermore, Clastres recognizes the very profound political motivation for the immense amount of technical and human effort that primitive societies devote to war. In many respects, war defines the community and, among other things, ensures one of the most common social
axiomatics, the one that defines specific gender roles. Additionally, war
allows the primitive subject to deal with death and other forms of natural
and cultural exteriorities.
Against all odds and maybe counter-intuitively, it is through war that
social subjects reaffirm themselves as free and autonomous within the
bounds of their collective organization and biological determinations.
Such an affirmation does not need to concern itself with the reality of
its claims: it just works, insofar as it ensures a certain kind of collective
organization. Even more importantly, Clastres shows how the primitive
socius was perfectly able to modulate its own apparently rigid dichotomies, such as male/female, warrior/mother, and so on. In certain cases,
he observed that some male subjects refused the ultra-masculine association with warrior societies, adopting a more domestic, village-bound
existence. Same-sex physical relations were also widely present, and were
accommodated in different manners, allowing for men to actually dress
as women and share in their occupations.
In other words, far from being rigid, blind, limited, anti-statist,
and anti-capitalist, communities were even able to decode their own

On Anthropolitics

83

segmentarity, and to allow some of the deterritorialized affective flows

traditionally associated with capitalist monetization. Their struggles
against capitalist imperialism within the different national incarnation
of the Western colonial project should not prevent us from recognizing that, as a self-declared Deleuzian Brazilian anthropologist recently
said, the molecular dissemination of subjective agency throughout the
universe, in testifying to the inexistence of a transcendent cosmological point of view, obviously correlates with the inexistence of a unifying
political point of view (Viveiros 2010: 48). In fact, already in the 1990s,
the French anthropologist Marc Aug thought that anthropology could
be reborn around the project of substituting multiplicity for otherness,
starting to see how different subjective singularities could aggregate in
different collective assemblages, producing an effective, lived contemporaneity (Aug 1999: 53). This is why I believe that the anthropological subjects that allowed Deleuze and Guattari to formulate their theory
of schizoanalysis were not simply a bad faith version of the Western,
capitalist matrix. The anthropos neither man nor woman, rich nor poor,
powerful nor subjugated that constitutes this kind of collective organization is at least as far as I can see one of the most powerful practico-theoretical figures for our understanding of the emergence of the
Occupy groups.
We should not romanticize what I call here anthropolitical thought:
there is no individual freedom or desire, since if anthropology and social
psychology tell us anything, it is that libidinal investments are always
attributed to and captured by a body without organs, the socius. The
utopia of desire is not present in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, nor anywhere else in schizoanalytic thought: such a utopia is capitals ruse, which
makes us believe that its own deterritorialized monetary flows are in fact
synonymous with subjective freedom. Deleuzes thoroughly Spinozist
attentiveness to issues of rationality, knowledge and power, as well as
his stoic sobriety, prevent him from ever landing into utopian territory.
Guattaris awareness of the micro-politics of psychological and political
collective investments also keeps him within an expanded Marxist framework of local and contingent struggles, to be fought in the affective redirections of otherwise deadly global imperatives.

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Occupy as Anthropolitical War Machine

The Italian autonomist activist and sociologist Franco Bifo Berardi powerfully commented on the success that Anti-Oedipus had in the political organizations flourishing in Italy and in other European countries,
one might add in the 1970s. This interest was reciprocal, and when
Bifo escaped to Paris in 1977, chased by an arrest mandate, Deleuze and
Guattari told him that they were very interested in the Autonomia movements, where Anti-Oedipus had made an impact (Berardi 2008: 145). It
is well-known that practices such as the unauthorized occupation of public spaces, and other minor legal infractions such as squatting and even
limited self-supportive theft then called proletarian expropriation or
the payment of a lower fee for a certain service then called self-price
reductions,3 were widely used in the Autonomia version of anti-capitalist politics.
Remarkably, the various movements tied to this kind of activism were
also heavily invested in the establishment of deterritorialized modes of
communication and affective networking: Bifo himself established the
now famous Radio Alice on the newly liberalized radio frequencies,
where one could hear both political discussions and childrens fairy tales.
Feminist groups, students, squatters and other subjects could use the
radio facilities. The temporary nature of these non-institutional arrangements did not prevent them from playing a fundamental role in the nurturing and perpetuation of anti-capitalist thought and practice during
otherwise very difficult years.
It is undeniable that Guattaris understanding of transversality, as a
practice able to cut through macro-political forms of social organization,
and the consequent politicization of the schizoanalytic understanding of
the unconscious, were possible within the context of an intense, international web of concrete political engagements. These groups are indeed reenactments of the anthropologically excavated war machine, as a subject
of political and social struggle for autonomy and self-definition. It would
be wrong, of course, to attribute to the war machine intrinsic terroristic,
military or fascist determinations. The collective assemblages autonomously organized by the anthropos as psychosocial subject can be directed
away from deadly forms of capture, and instead flourish as alternative life
forms, against and in spite of bureaucratic and capitalist command.

On Anthropolitics

85

Even during the dark years of global capitalist triumph mostly

the 1980s and the 1990s the dissident political subjectivities that had
started their political engagements within the framework of autonomist
redirections of Marxist anti-capitalist critique kept to their guns, theorizing, among other things, the advent of cognitive capital and immaterial
forms of command and the necessity of rethinking anthropological categories such as gender and even humanity. In other words, even as the
military-bureaucratic state apparatus commanded by globalized capitalist organization extended its grip on present forms of life, it also brought
with itself new morphologies of political engagement.
There is no doubt that we are the utterly embedded subjects of global
capital. However, there is always the possibility for an affective and
political redirection of our subjective investments. Todays anthropos,
understood as the body carrying the constantly mutating unconscious,
machinic investments theorized by schizoanalysis, can break through
the capitalist axiomatic, and challenge, at least for a while, its political
arrangements. Anthropological and sociopsychological considerations
the very stuff of schizoanalytic critique are necessary if we want indeed
to constitute collective environments that make such redirections possible. An understanding of political subjectivity fully engaged in the materiality of the minds and bodies actually living in a certain social milieu is
necessary if we want to extract ourselves from formalist and ultimately
extremely abstract definitions of the political subject.
Even more importantly, we have to understand that language, and
the equality that it presupposes, is not independent from the brains that
conceive it, each time anew. We are engaged in a struggle for concepts,
for bodies: will we promote the global space of capitals domination, or
will we occupy it, exposing its exploitation and living against it? What
the Occupy movements demonstrate, is that these occupational practices do indeed occur, and they do so because the affective investments
of the anthropos are never fully exhausted by the powers encroaching on
them. In fact, the anthropolitical thought of Deleuze and Guattari might,
indeed, help us to keep cultivating the falsely primitive reflex that refuses
the instauration of inequality and exploitation that is the main form of the
capitalist relation to the anthropos and to the earth. This is what Occupy

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Giuseppina Mecchia

was and is about, and in this respect, if Capitalism and Schizophrenia can
indeed teach us anything, I deem it to be a good lesson.
Works Cited
Aug, Marc. 1999. An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds. London: Continuum.
Badiou, Alain. 2010. The Idea of Communism. In The Idea of Communism. Ed.
Costas Douzinas and Slavoj iek. London: Verso: 114.
Berardi, Franco Bifo. 2008. Interview with Giuseppina Mecchia, July 11 2005. In
Flix Guattari: Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography. London: Palgrave
2008: 14168.
Clastres, Pierre. 1989. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology.
Brooklyn: Zone Books.
Clastres, Pierre. 2010. Archeology of Violence. New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze Gilles and Guattari, Flix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze Gilles and Guattari, Flix. 2009. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
London: Penguin Books.
Hallward, Peter. 2002. Absolutely Post-Colonial: Writing Between the Singular and the
Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hallward, Peter. 2006. Out this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London:
Verso.Miller, Christopher L. 1993. The Post-Identitarian Predicament in the
Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology and Authority.
Diacritics 23 (3): 635.
Patton, Paul. 2000. Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge.
Rancire, Jacques. 2010. Communists Without Communism?. In The Idea of
Communism. Ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj iek. London: Verso: 16777.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Altherton.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak?. In Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press: 271313.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2010. The Untimely, Again. Introduction to Archeology
of Violence. Pierre Clastres. New York: Semiotext(e).

On Anthropolitics

87

Virno, Paolo. 2002. Quando il verbo si fa carne: Linguaggio e natura umana. Torino:
Bollati Boringhieri.

Notes
1.

The acronym for Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgendered people did not
exist at the time. However, it is in the late 1970s and in the 1980s thanks in
part to another crisis, the AIDS health emergency that these groups entered
the sociopolitical scene on the footsteps of the receding feminist wave.

2.

Badiou seeks to follow a materialist dialectic understood as the deployment

of a critique of every critique (Badiou 2009: 8). Even in this restricted sense,
he says that the complexity of subjective operations was not even broached in
the purely ontological treatment of Being and Event (Badiou 2009: 8).

3.

Respectively, espropri proletari and autoriduzioni in the original Italian.

Chapter 2

Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective

Enactment at OWS
John Protevi

Housecleaning
The Occupy movement shows us how the semantic, pragmatic, and affective meaning, action, and feeling are intertwined in all collective practices. The intertwining of the semantic and the pragmatic what we say
and what we accomplish in that saying has been a topic of interest in the
humanities and the critical social sciences for almost 50 years, since its
thematization by Austin and its codification in speech act theory; widespread interest in affect has been more recent, but the interplay of its twin
roots in Tompkins and Deleuze producing a sort of evo-neuro-Spinozism has been usefully explored in The Affect Theory Reader (Gregg and
Seigworth 2010). Its now time to bring speech act theory and affect theory together in understanding the role of political affect (Protevi 2009)
in the Occupy movement.
To do that, well need some housecleaning. The first thing that needs
to go is the concept of ideology. Deleuze and Guattari say in A Thousand
Plateaus: Ideology is a most execrable concept concealing all of the
effectively operating social machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 68).
I take that to mean that we have to thematize political affect to understand effectively operating social machines. From this perspective, the
real German ideology is that ideas are where its at, rather than affect. Its
political affect that makes men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as
though it were their salvation.

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Why wont ideology cut it? It doesnt work because it conceives of

the problem in terms of false consciousness, where that means wrong
ideas, and where ideas are individual and personal mental states whose
semantic content has an existential posit as its core, with emotional content founded on that core, so that the same object could receive different
emotional content if you were in a different mood.1
Thus to take up the great OWS poster, Shit is fucked up and bullshit,
the core act posits the existence of shit, and then we express our emotional state by predicating fucked up and bullshit of it, whereas we could
have predicated great and wonderful if we were in a different mood.
But that is execrable for Deleuze and Guattari, because its far too
cognitivist and subjectivist.
Its too cognitivist because it founds emotion on a core existencepositing act, and too subjectivist by taking emotion to be an expression,
something individual that is pushed outward, something centrifugal.
For them, emotion is centripetal rather than centrifugal, or even better, emotion is for them the subjectivation, the crystallization, of affect.
Now Deleuze and Guattari do have a corporeal/Spinozist notion of affect
involved with the encounter of bodies, but they also have what we could
call a milieu, or environmental sense of affect. Here affect is in the air,
something like the mood of a party, which is not the mere aggregate of
the subjective states of the party-goers. In this sense, affect is not emergent from pre-existing subjectivities; emotional subjectivities are crystallizations or residues of a collective affect.2
Enacting the Political
Having done away with ideology as an analytical concept, we can turn
to a simple, powerful talk by Judith Butler at OWS (Butler 2011a), which
calls upon the classic very well then, we demand the impossible trope,
and ends with the wonderful line, were standing here together, making
democracy, enacting the phrase, We the People.
A longer talk by Butler in Venice (Butler 2011b) discusses constituting political space while acknowledging the material precarity of bodies,
developed alongside a critical analysis of Arendts notion of a political
space of appearance. The overall aim is set forth here, where Butler states,

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a different social ontology would have to start from the presumption that
there is a shared condition of precarity that situates our political lives.
A brief excerpt from the beginning of Butlers Venice talk sets out
some of the main lines of thought that would go toward this different
social ontology:
assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public
space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that
material environment. And when crowds move outside the
square, to the side street or the back alley, to the neighborhoods where streets are not yet paved, then something more
happens. At such a moment, politics is no longer defined as
the exclusive business of public sphere distinct from a private
one, but it crosses that line again and again, bringing attention
to the way that politics is already in the home, or on the street,
or in the neighborhood, or indeed in those virtual spaces
that are unbound by the architecture of the public square.
(Butler 2011b)
But in the case of public assemblies, we see quite clearly not only that
there is a struggle over what will be public space, but a struggle as well
over those basic ways in which we are, as bodies, supported in the world
a struggle against disenfranchisement, effacement, and abandonment.
The role of the body in social ontology need not be limited to shared
precarity, however, as important as that is to emphasize in order to break
down notions of individuals as disembodied bundles of rights. We can
also think the positive affective contribution of public assemblies. In this
case, the city government of New York unwittingly helped OWS tap into
the affective potential of collective bodies politic. Im talking here about
the human microphone, which works, quite literally, to amplify the constitution of political space by assembled bodies.
The human microphone thus offers an entry into examining political
affect in the enacting of the phrase We the People at OWS. It shows us
how direct democracy is enacted by producing an intermodal resonance
among the semantic, pragmatic, and affective dimensions of collective
action. It also shows how the production of contemporary neoliberal subjects (homo economicus as self-entrepreneur, as individual rational utility

Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS

91

maximizer) is so successful and so pervasive as to be invisible. The city

thought they were hurting OWS by banning bullhorns when in fact they
helped them immensely by allowing the affect produced by entrained
voices, a collective potential they could not grasp.3
Entrainment
For some time now Ive been fascinated by William McNeills Keeping
Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (1995). McNeill
studies the political affect dimension of entrainment (the falling into
the same rhythm) by collective bodily movement as in communal dance
and military drill. The neuroscientist Scott Kelso has studied all sorts of
small-scale examples of entrainment (toe-tapping and so on) by using
dynamic systems modelling (Kelso 1995). A famous macro example of
spontaneous entrainment is the Millennium Bridge episode in which the
unconscious synchronization of walkers produced a resonance effect on
the bridge that caused a dangerous lateral sway (Newland, no date). The
developmental psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen has studied mother
infant inter-corporeal rhythms in terms of primary intersubjectivity
(Trevarthen 1979).
The upshot of this research is that humans fall into collective rhythms
easily and that such collective rhythms produce an affective experience,
a feeling of being together, an eros or ecstasis if you want to use classical
terms, the characteristic joy of being together felt in collective action.4
So I wonder if the human microphone (Ristic 2011), an invention of
the OWS assembly when NYC banned electric bullhorns, doesnt contribute a little to the joyful collective affect of OWS. (Needless to say, the
prospect that the human microphone might aid in the production of such
collective joy frightens the right-wing commenters (Dyer 2011)). Its not
quite a choir, but its a chorus, and so the bodies of the chanters (their
chests, guts, throats, eardrums) would be vibrating at something close to
the same frequency, something close to being in phase.
Now Im not a reductionist; the semantic cannot be reduced to the
corporeal; the message isnt dissolved into the medium. What interests me is how in the human microphone the message (enacting the
phrase We the People) is resonant with and amplified by the medium

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(collective rhythm). In her Venice talk Butler analyzes the Tahrir Square
chant translated as peacefully, peacefully in these terms:
Secondly, when up against violent attack or extreme threats,
many people chanted the word silmiyya which comes from
the root verb (salima) which means to be safe and sound,
unharmed, unimpaired, intact, safe, and secure; but also, to
be unobjectionable, blameless, faultless; and yet also, to be
certain, established, clearly proven. The term comes from the
noun silm which means peace but also, interchangeably and
significantly, the religion of Islam. One variant of the term
is Hubb as-silm which is Arabic for pacifism. Most usually,
the chanting of Silmiyya comes across as a gentle exhortation: peaceful, peaceful. Although the revolution was for the
most part non-violent, it was not necessarily led by a principled opposition to violence. Rather, the collective chant was
a way of encouraging people to resist the mimetic pull of military aggression and the aggression of the gangs by keeping in mind the larger goal radical democratic change. To
be swept into a violent exchange of the moment was to lose
the patience needed to realize the revolution. What interests
me here is the chant, the way in which language worked not
to incite an action, but to restrain one. A restraint in the name
of an emerging community of equals whose primary way of
doing politics would not be violence. (Butler 2011b)
This is an insightful, eloquent analysis of the pragmatics and semantics
of the chant. So its not to undercut it that I call attention to the material
dimension of the resonating bodies that accompany the semantic content
and pragmatic implications of this chant. Its to point to the way in which
an analysis of material rhythms reveals the political affect of joyous collectivity, and the intermodal (semantic, pragmatic, affective) resonance
such chanting produces.

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Shame and Joy

Joy in entrained collective action is by no means a simple normative
standard. There is fascist jy; the affect surging through the Nuremberg
rallies, building upon and provoking even more feeling, was joyous. If
there is to be any normativity in political affect it will have to be active
joy rather than passive joy; active joy I understand as empowerment, the
ability to re-enact the joyous encounter in novel situations, or to put it in
semi-California-speak, the ability to turn other people on to their ability to turn still others on to their ability to enact active joyous collective
action, on and on in a horizontally radiating network, or, to use Deleuze
and Guattaris term, a rhizome.
Now political affect doesnt occur in a vacuum. Its not a matter of
implanting a new feeling in any empty body; its a matter of modulating an ongoing affective flow. So the joy of OWS has to convert a
mood of shame.
What counts in the effectively operating social machine demonizing
welfare in the USA is the shame attached to receiving public aid without
contributing to society with your tax dollars. Its shameful to have lost
your job or your home; youre stupid, a loser to have been in a position to
lose it, and youre a lazy, stupid loser if you havent found another one, or
if you never had one in the first place. You dont arrive at this American
shame by aggregating individualized, subjectivized, packets of shame;
you get shamed subjects as the crystallization of the collective affect of
shame in the American air.
And so you dont combat this shame by trying to change individual
peoples ideas, one by one, with information about unemployment
trends; you combat it by showing your face, by embodying your lack of
shame, by putting a face on unemployment or homelessness. You counteract the existing collective affect by creating a positive affect of joyful
solidarity. Shame isolates (you hide your face); joyful solidarity comes
from people coming together. Its joy is released from the bondage of
shame, to follow up on the Spinozist references.
Whats especially heartbreaking, then, about the wearethe99percent.tumblr site, is that so many people still have some shame, as they
only peek out from behind their messages. Hence the importance of the

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Occupy meetings; shared physical presence, showing your whole face:

these create the positive affect, the shamelessly joyful solidarity needed
to fully overcome shame.
Fighting the residual shame, the half-faces of private pictures sent to
a website: thats what makes the collective occupation of space so important: bodies together, faces revealed, joyously.5
So Im going to propose that a full enactment of direct democracy
means producing a body politic whose semantic (we are the people, we
are equal, free, and deserving of respect in our precarity and solidarity),
pragmatic (the act of respecting and supporting each other the assembly
performs), and affective (the joy felt in collective action) registers resonate in spiralling, intermodal feedback.6
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. 2011a.Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street.. YouTube video. Accessed
November 5, 2011 from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVpoOdz1AKQ
Butler, Judith. 2011b. Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street. European
Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Accessed November, 5 2011 from:
http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press,.
Dyer, Jennifer, E. 2011. The Human Microphone Tactic: Scary or Just
Moronic?. Theoptimisticconservatives Blog. Accessed April 26, 2015: http://
theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/%E2%80%9Chumanmicrophone%E2%80%9D-tactic-scary-or-just-moronic/
Gregg, Melissa and Gregory Seigworth (Eds.). 2010. The Affect Theory Reader.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Kelso, JA Scott. 1995. Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
McNeill, William. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Newland, David. No date. Vibration of the London Millennium Footbridge.
Accessed April 26, 2015 from: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~den/ICSV9_06.
htm

Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS

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Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Policies that Crowd out Reciprocity and Collective Action.
In Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in
Economic Life. Ed. Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr.
Cambridge: MIT Press: 25375.
Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Protevi, John. 2010. Adding Deleuze to the Mix. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences 9 (3): 41736.
Ristic, Igor. 2011. The Human Microphone #OccupiesWallStreet.
Communicationblog.net. Accessed November 5, 2011 from: http://igorristic.
wordpress.com/2011/10/11/the-human-microphone-occupieswallstreet/
Trevarthen, Colwyn. 1979. Communication and Cooperation in Infancy: A
Description of Primary Intersubjectivity. In Before Speech: The Beginning of
Interpersonal Communication. Ed. Margaret Bullows. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Notes
1.

There are many ways of relating cognition and emotion, without even
bringing in the relations of this analytic vocabulary with that of the
Husserlian noesis/noema scheme. Still, I hope this will suffice just to get some
traction on the problem.

2.

When I was unemployed, some 15 years ago, for six months, I was often
overcome with shame, no matter how often I reminded myself of the objective
factors, the nonsensical nature of the affect, etc. But where did I pick up this
shame? I cant see how it was transmitted to me by another actual instance
of shame. You could say I had been socialized so that I carried a latent
disposition to shame that became occurent in the right circumstances. But
thats hardly less metaphysical than an account of virtual or environmental
collective affective with shamed selves crystallized out of that. I dont think
well escape metaphysics that easily; theres a lot of potential versus actual
metaphysics to be worked out there in the latent versus occurent disposition
scheme, as I try to do in Protevi 2010.

3.

Another topic for analysis would be the bike generators being set up at OWS.
In another possible blunder, recalling that of the banning of bullhorns, the
city confiscated gasoline generators prior to the late October snowstorm. The
brilliant OWS response was to acquire bicycle generators. Will there be an
analogous affective supplement from taking turns on the bikes to generate
electricity?

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4.

We touch the question of emergence here, which is notoriously difficult, as

it intersects methodological individualism. But that is not just a method of
the social sciences. Its all too often the source of policy prescriptions, so that
methodological individualism tends to slide into ontological individualism; as
the quip goes, methodology becomes metaphysics (Ostrom 2005).

5.

Faces are an extremely important factor in political affect. In analyzing

OWS wed have to consider the use of the Guy Fawkes/V is for Vendetta
masks; faceless corporations; and the faciality machine in Deleuze and
Guattari 1987.

6.

Many thanks to The New APPS Blog, authors and commenters alike, for help
with this essay.

Chapter 3

Pack of Leaders: Thinking Organization and

Spontaneity with Deleuze and Guattari
Rodrigo Nunes

The issue of leadership is one of several overlaps that have been spotted
between the thought of Deleuze and Guattari and the movements that
arose in 2011 a heady year that began in late 2010 with the English student movement, saw the emergence of the Arab Spring, Spains 15M, the
English riots, Occupy Wall Street, and continued into 2012 with Mexicos
Yo Soy 132 movement, among others. Whether it is because of a debt
to anarchism (Graeber 2011), because networking and web 2.0 are like
second nature to most participants, or because their acute awareness of
the crisis of representative politics spills over into distrust of any form of
representation, these movements have tended to eschew leaders, spokespeople and fixed structures beyond open assemblies and working groups.
In doing so, they have been widely perceived as subscribing to a logic that
Deleuze and Guattari describe as rhizomatic (open, mutable, horizontal,
spontaneously organized) as opposed to arborescent (closed, fixed, vertical, structured).
In what follows, I argue that this is not the whole picture. As much
as a closer reading of Deleuze and Guattari makes any simple opposition between rhizomatic and arborescent more complex, a more attentive examination of these movements shows that they are not entirely
free from phenomena of leadership and representation. This does not
mean that they are at fault in any way, failing to meet some standard of
openness and horizontality, or are somehow disingenuous. On the contrary, it is the idea of such a standard, or the notion that organization and

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organizational form necessarily denote hierarchies and vertical structures, that Deleuze and Guattari can help us put into question. Rather
than disproving the overlap between their philosophy and these movements, then, we can actually discover a deeper, more complex connection that helps shed light on how these movements work and some ways
in which they could transform their practice.
This essays first two parts are dedicated to showing how phenomena of leadership, vanguard and representation manifest themselves in
contemporary movements, arguing that these are not just residues of a
representative politics to be overcome, but an unavoidable aspect of politics itself. In particular, I will draw on Deleuze and Guattaris distinction
between the crowd and the pack to argue that these movements, rather
than leaderless, display what could be called distributed leadership. In the
third, I will develop some consequences of this by showing how the relation between spontaneity and organization must be rendered complex,
and how distributed leadership calls for thinking organization in terms
of complementarity. In the last section, I argue that Deleuze and Guattaris
concept of becoming-imperceptible offers a key with which to think the
organizational and strategic tasks facing these movements today.
I. Synecdoche Wall Street
One of the reasons why movements like the Arab Spring, 15M and
Occupy are seen as bypassing representation and leadership lies in their
relation to mass organizations. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, mass organizations were a pillar of radical or progressive politics. Forming, maintaining and perfecting them were indispensable steps
towards social transformation; their development was both a condition
for, and the material substrate of, the historical movement of social transformation itself. Mass organizations were burgeoning class consciousness
in externalized, materialized form; what gave that consciousness a visible
face and a cadre that could spread it. Mass organizations were something
like a collective memory device, whose very body registered its development: the tactics that worked, the mistakes that cost dearly, the victorious lines, the individuals who had acquired greater experience and prestige. As such, they were indispensable to a collective learning process that

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proceeded towards ever greater unification: organization by trade leading to organizations uniting workers across trades, and then to a party
through which the class could represent itself politically, in parliament
and outside it.
By contrast, most important mass movements since the late 1990s
have gone without or even against mass organizations, or involved
them in minor roles. This is partly because of the historical crisis of leftwing parties and trade unions, and the broader crisis of representative
politics. While the emancipatory movements of really existing socialism
became exploitative and oppressive regimes, parties and trade unions in
countries where socialism did not win not only manifested the same
problems to variable degrees (authoritarianism, lack of accountability,
bureaucratization), they often effectively worked to stymie social mobilization and radical demands. This process, already visible in the post-war
welfare state and national liberation struggles, became more acute with
the neoliberal restructuring from the late 1970s onwards.
This is where the crisis of representation in the left opens onto the
crisis of representative politics in general, in response to which protesters
around the world have risen in recent years. Most mature democracies
have effectively become two-party systems where both parties represent
essentially the same interests, so that the key political antagonism today is
between the overrepresented (the 1% with disproportionate economic
and political clout) and the under- or unrepresented (everyone else, the
99%). Whereas from the 1940s to the 1970s the welfare state was, in the
global North at least, the gravitational center of politics, and the political system offered a more or less accurate representation of the two key
opposing forces capital and (stable, Fordist, industrial, unionized) labor
neoliberalism functions less as a point of equilibrium than as a naturalized, almost invisible background. As a result, the options on the table
tend to be only slight variations on the same formula, tailored to cater for
the small interest groups which, in a context of indifference generated by
the lack of real options, decide whether an election goes this or that way.
While no doubt far from the extremes of Egypt or Tunisia, even the best
Western democracies are mired in cronyism and elite rule. This is what
has been dramatically laid bare by the crisis begun in 2008. It is hardly
surprising that contemporary movements should bypass, even avoid

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mass organizations, when the parties and unions that historically represented the working class are equally implicated in the crisess causes and
results, helping usher the bailouts and austerity measures with which
governments have made populations pay the ransom exacted by finance.
This subjective rejection is, however, not a sufficient cause for how
they have developed. We must add to it an objective condition, the widespread access to means of production and diffusion of information, of
which the material substrate is above all the internet. It may be true that
drums, fires, incendiary tracts, running down the backstreets, word-ofmouth, ringing bells (Badiou 2011: 39) were for centuries what mobilized masses of people; but just hurriedly dismissing Facebook and other
such nonsense of alleged technical innovation (Badiou 2011: 39) we risk
missing the quantitative and qualitative differences that our technological conditions represent.
Quantitatively, they vastly increase both the potential reach of calls to
action and the information on which they are based, as well as the speed
of their spread across networks; not only do they generate more instant
connections among a greater number of people, they create connections among people and groups that are distant from each other, to some
extent transcending the requirement of physical proximity. Qualitatively,
they create a continuous background of exchange of information, participation and collaboration beyond the limits of physical proximity (neighborhoods, workplaces, countries) and belonging (to a political organization, a movement, an ethnicity). Under certain special conditions, this
can scale up in unpredictably big and fast ways, and move from the virtual
environment into the real world.1 For that same reason, social technologies also provide a sort of continuous schooling in networked organization, so that it appears as the natural organizing logic for most people
living in the landscape created by these technological transformations.
Consequently, less open and flexible, less collaborative and participatory
logics will tend to be seen with suspicion.
If we abstract too quickly from specifics in search of universal, transhistorical constants we end up treating material media as indifferent and
interchangeable, as if the internet and drums were just instruments to do
the same thing, and our materialism becomes impoverished. However,
we can find a first approach to questions of leadership in one of the eternal

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constants of uprisings identified by Badiou. As he puts it, however large

a manifestation or revolt, it is always hyper-minoritarian [archi-minoritaire], (Badiou 2011: 90) composed of an acting and thinking minority
(Badiou 2011: 134) whose irruption makes a previously hidden social
antagonism visible. In these conditions, the deep country2 disappears
and the spotlight is put on what could be called a mass minority (Badiou
2011: 134; italics in the original). Badiou calls this phenomenon contraction: the situation is contracted into a sort of representation of itself,
a metonymy of the overall situation (Badiou 2011: 104). It is, in fact, a
specific case of metonymy called synecdoche, the figure of speech in which
a part stands for the whole.
Is any politics thinkable without synecdoche? Even in the direct
democracy of a General Assembly is there not a split between those who
speak and those who stay silent? Does not even the most immediate form
of mass politics, the multitudinous expressiveness of street protest, create a cleavage between those who are there and those in whose name they
are there? While concepts like emancipation and revolution obviously
suggest ideas of people getting rid of representatives, taking charge etc.,
the only political process in which a part (the most active, the most
conscious, the most enraged, the most experienced) would not, at
least temporarily, stand in for the whole (the workers, the poor, the
oppressed) would be one in which all concerned became equally active,
conscious, enraged, experienced at the same time.3 This, whether we
like or it not, is at best improbable; despite the large numbers that have
become mobilized across the world in recent years, it is certainly not the
case with the movements we see now. As Jodi Dean (2011: 229; italics in
the original) pointedly remarked, Occupy Wall Street is not actually the
movement of the 99 percent of the population of the United States (or
the world) against the top 1 percent. It is a movement mobilizing itself
around an occupied Wall Street in the name of the 99 percent. Inevitably,
even non-representative politics involves a moment of representation.
The difference is rather between a representation that strives towards its
own overcoming (in non-representative) and towards its own stabilization (in representative politics).
There is, of course, nothing wrong with this: it is a necessary feature of
political processes, whether in the slow work by which some organizers

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catalyze a collectivitys dissatisfaction into political action, or in the

mass upheavals that divide and energize whole countries. Apparently,
the absence of mass organizations, rather than eliminate this, multiplies
it. Until not long ago, mass mobilization tended to be the preserve of
mass organizations; initiative came from them, their backing was crucial
for success. As the heyday of mass organizations receded, their numbers
dwindled and their mobilizing capacity shrunk, we have seen more and
more relatively small groups of people lone individuals at the limit
take initiatives which, amplified by technological interconnectedness,
may strike the right affective tone to connect with widely shared feelings,
and offer relatively clear and feasible action points that masses of people
can engage in, producing effects that far exceeded their original conditions. If it is possible to speak of a twilight of vanguardism (Graeber
2004), it seems to be an ironic consequence of the proliferation, rather
than the end, of vanguards the dawn of diffuse vanguards.
II. The Crowd, the Pack, the Vanguard-Function
Vanguard was, particularly in the Marxist tradition, the name given to
this synecdoche; a metaphor borrowed from military language, it indicated the most advanced detachment in the struggle of the proletariat.
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels (2000: 2556)
presented communists as the most advanced and resolute section of
the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes
forward all others, while also having over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. We
can see how this fits in the narrative about class-consciousness and mass
organizations laid out above. Even if it is the capitalistic development of
productive forces that creates a politically conscious proletariat (by creating consciousness of material conditions), the process does not take
place all at once and in uniform manner; it is driven by a fraction of the
proletariat that becomes increasingly purposive, active and experienced,
and whose job it is to share that purposiveness, activity and experience
with others. Vanguard thus refers to two synecdoches, one contained
in the other. Internally to a movement or political process, there is one

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part (communists) that shows others the way (other working-class parties); yet this movement or process, taken as a whole, expands by attracting those around it (the great mass of the proletariat and fractions of
other classes).
While retaining these two different moments, vanguard is used here
in a way that differs from the orthodox Marxist idea in a crucial aspect. So
as to get to this difference, let us first go through Deleuze and Guattaris
analysis of two different logics of group function identified, following
Elias Canetti, as the crowd and the pack.4
The crowd is characterized by large quantity, the divisibility and
equality of number, concentration unitary hierarchical direction, the
organisation of territoriality or territorialisation; the pack, in turn, by
small or restricted numbers, dispersion qualitative metamorphoses,
inequalities as remainders or thresholds, the impossibility of a fixed totalisation or hierarchisation, the Brownian variation of directions, the lines
of deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 46).5 The distinction
between the two is projected directly onto that between the arborescent
and the rhizomatic and, as with the latter,
[t]he point is not to oppose the two types of multiplicities
() according to a dualism that would not be worth more
than that of One and multiple. There are only multiplicities of
multiplicities that constitute a single assemblage, that operate
in the same assemblage: packs in crowds, and vice-versa. Trees
have rhizomatic lines, but the rhizome has points of arborescence. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 47; italics in the original).
In other words, these are oppositions in thought that in reality only ever
occur in a mixed state (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 593). They indicate
two tendencies present in every assemblage, and two frames of reference
according which to analyse them, depending on whether we look at them
from the point of view of already given differences (and identities) or
understand [them] in intensity (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 44). And
while Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 31) oppose the arborescent and the
rhizomatic not as two models, but as something acting as a model
even if it produces its own flights, and something acting as an immanent
process that upsets the model even if it produces its own hierarchies,

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it is better to stress the processual nature of both. The model is not

imposed from the outside without being immanently produced: the pack
can become a crowd the moment it starts holding up a model of itself and
defining itself according to a group identity, a bivalent logic of belonging/
not belonging, identification with a leader etc. Still, it remains affected by
what pulls it in different directions and partially upsets arborescence with
new rhizomatic processes. However fixed a territory, it is inseparable
from vectors of deterritorialisation that work it from the inside, (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 635) and so it is always possible that arborescence be
reverted and what is (mostly) crowd develop back into (mostly) pack.
The question of how leadership functions in the pack and the crowd
helps us clarify how the word vanguard can apply to phenomena like
Occupy and the Arab Spring. Confounding schematic oppositions
between hierarchy and non-hierarchy, vertical and horizontal structures,
Deleuze and Guattari speak of equality in relation to the crowd and
inequalities in relation to the pack, and of leaders in relation to both.
There is equality in the crowd in the sense that all places are assigned,
and everyone (apart from leaders) is the same before the group; there
is inequality in the pack to the extent that there are no fixed roles or
places, rather constant movement as the pack itself changes direction in
Brownian (that is, random) motion.
In this sense, even if the pack and the crowd at times oppose each
other and at times interpenetrate, (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 46) it can
also be said that the pack is the truth behind the crowd, or the ground
zero of group behavior. Not because it is an elementary anarchism
repressed by social organization, or a primordial formlessness behind
form, or an originary evolutionary state, but because social organization and institutionalization is what selects and stabilizes some ways of
organizing, some forms, which the pack instead is constantly producing
and destabilizing. At the limit, the whole of society, to the extent that it is
open to deterritorialization, is virtually a pack, however much it may be
actually segmentarized as a crowd.
This allows us to draw a distinction between the objective, teleological understanding of a vanguard whose sway over the Marxist tradition
helped engender the pathology of vanguardism, and what can be called
the vanguard-function. The latter is what Deleuze and Guattari (2004:

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298) call the cutting edge of deterritorialisation of a situation or grouping that part which, having started to function in a different way, opens
a new direction that, after it has communicated to others, can become
something to follow, divert, resist (or imitate, oppose and adapt, as per
Gabriel Tardes three social laws).6 The vanguard-function is objective in
the sense that, once the change it introduces has propagated, it can be
identified as the anomalous cause behind a growing number of effects.
Yet it is not objective in the traditional Marxist sense of a deterministic
or transitive relation between an objectively defined position (class, class
sector etc.) and the occurrence of a subjective political breakthrough
(event), itself underpinned by a conception of history as following necessary laws. Where a process starts, which direction it takes, who steers or
diverts it, what is its course these can be determined retrospectively,
but never in advance. While it is no doubt possible to hazard more or
less educated guesses (depending on how well one can read the symptoms announcing potential events), there are no laws behind this. It is
only in this objective but non-transitive sense that the Arab Spring, 15M,
Occupy etc. can be called vanguards.
We can now extend this concept beyond the synecdoche between
these movements and the rest of society to its second moment, the
vanguard (or vanguards) within the vanguard. What changes the packs
course is an animal pulling the group in one direction and the rest suddenly following it, changing the groups shape and structure as they do.
It is not the case that the pack is leaderless, then, but the opposite: every
member is a potential leader. And this, rather than an ideal of horizontality that would amount to no less than absolute equality, is what best
defines the way in which the movements of the last few years organize.
Distributed leadership, not assemblies or horizontality, is their defining
trait.7 If the pack is the degree zero of collectivity, and distributed leadership is the kind of organization proper to it, we can conclude that distributed leadership is the degree zero of organization. That would no doubt
be true; at the same time, it is important that we appreciate the extent
to which contemporary communication technology expands the potential for it.
When crowd and pack are contrasted according to large and small
numbers, as Deleuze and Guattari do, this should be understood less in

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terms of an actual numerical limit (the pack is non-denumerable and

defined by intensive relations, and, as we know from recent experience,
can be very large indeed) than as referring to a problem of scalability: the
greater the number, the harder it is for the pack not to become a mass.
The consequence here is the same as that of stressing the interpenetration and processual nature of crowd and pack: notions like verticality
and horizontality cease to be substantialized, or treated as properties
that necessarily adhere to certain substances or organizational forms
(the party, the multitude), and are instead regarded as vectors, virtual
tendencies that it may be necessary to foster or check in a given situation. Now, the problem of scalability applies to direct democracy much
more stringently than it does to distributed leadership, especially in the
present conditions: there is a limit to how far an assembly can be scaled
up without either ceasing to be functional or ceasing to be an assembly.
From before they hit the streets until now, the movements of the last few
years have effectively moved like packs, with small groups (even individuals) starting initiatives that would snowball into much larger effects.
Therefore, not only can they be collectively described as parts functioning as vanguards in relation to the whole of society, their very development is characterized by different groups, occasionally even individuals, occupying vanguard-functions at different points, breaking through
inertia and impasses on how to move forward. This is why the twilight
of vanguardism is not the same as the end of vanguards but, on the contrary, a result of their proliferation: the more there are potential occupiers
of the vanguard-function, the harder it becomes for a single vanguard to
become stabilized.
The point about the pack being the ground zero of social organization
can be taken further still. If the way group formations move at the most
elementary level, even when under control from above,8 is through distributed leadership, it follows that absolute horizontality a completely
level playing field, a strictly leaderless situation is impossible: There is
no going back, there is no anarchism (Guattari 2006: 196). There is no
situation in which phenomena of distributed leadership do not occur,
essentially because there is no situation in which deterritorialization does
not occur, and pack leaders or vanguard-functions are no more than vectors of deterritorialization. Does this then mean that the demand for real

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democracy can never be realized? Certainly not in the sense of a fully

stable final state of perfection. Real democracy is ultimately no more
than the endless work of unmaking and bypassing the stratifications that
create imperfection, as much as allowing other, more useful stratifications to develop (while trying to keep some of their dangerous tendencies in check). There is only less or more democracy, not full democracy
(or equality, or horizontality), and embracing imperfection as necessary
which need not, but can no doubt also work as an excuse for defeatist
pragmatism is at the same time a pre-requisite for clarity regarding the
goals of struggle, and a realistic appraisal of existing practice.
At the same time, while distributed leadership is no definitive guarantee against arborescence, it is not undemocratic either (unless, that
is, democracy is understood in absolute terms). Its very principle is that
vanguards can in principle emerge from anywhere, and the more connected and mobilized a movement is, the more likely this is to happen. It
is true, of course, that the more connections or prestige a group or individual have, the more likely they are to be noticed. However, to speak of a
vanguard-function is to say that something leads to the extent that it is followed: it works when it works, and does not work when it does not, in
ways that may even damage its power to work in the future. As Deleuze
and Guattari (2004: 46) put it: The leader of the pack or the gang plays
move by move, must wager everything in every hand, whereas the group
or crowd leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. Therefore, while
it precludes the possibility of a perfectly level playing field, distributed
leadership leaves the field open to difference, making the rise and wane of
different vanguards possible.
III. Becoming, Spontaneous and Organized
What an examination of the pack suggests is a complication of the usual
opposition between leadership and spontaneity: the packs spontaneous
movement results from its following one or more individuals that come
temporarily to occupy a vanguard-function.9 Besides, this function both
occupies a singular point and progressively propagates across the whole,
so that vanguard can be said of an actions originator, but also of the first
to follow it, those who join in subsequently, and so on. At the same time,

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the occasional leader of the pack is said to be a vector of deterritorialization, itself following a movement that was already present at least in
potential, a creator or originator only in being the first to grasp it. In
order to better understand this, it is worth taking the time to unpack what
Deleuze and Guattari mean by events, the generic term that they ascribe
to such spontaneous changes in direction.
Events have a complicated structure. The same event happens on different levels and, in a way, more than once; it is at once a discontinuity
concentrated on a point and a continuous process, an eventing that happens over time. To begin with, for any event there will be several layers
of causality at play; these will be, for example, a series of long-held grievances, a history of collective frustrations and personal humiliations, etc.
At this point, however, those under the effect of these causes will still
be operating within a pre-defined space of possibilities that constrains
what reactions are imaginable: the situation itself cannot be overcome,
although there may be individual routes of negotiating it (small acts of
transgression, escapist compensation, episodes of acting out, opportunistic collaboration, etc.). Something boils under the surface, but there is
no way it could emerge; acting on it does not even appear as a possibility
yet. Then, however, a new cause may act as a catalyst, focusing the existing layers of causality on a point, and a virtual threshold is crossed new
dispositions and potentials emerge, accompanied by a transformation in
sensibility: the situation is now perceived as intolerable. In a sense, the
event has already happened; the field of possibilities expands, and even
rational calculations change just yesterday you were wondering how
long you could extend a cigarette break, now you are asking yourself how
to organize a walk out.
The event is a rupture, firstly, because it is an excess over its causes,
a break with linearity, a bifurcation, a deviation in regard to laws, an
unstable state (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 215). It is unpredictable in
advance and only appears as possible after the fact: as much as one can
and must assign in the causal series the objective factors that made such a
rupture possible only what belongs to the order of desire and its irruption can account for the reality that [this rupture of causality] acquires at
that moment, in that place (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 453). Secondly,
it creates new possibilities, which in a sense makes it a necessary given for

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what comes afterwards: an event can be countered, repressed, recuperated, betrayed, it nonetheless cannot be surpassed: it is an opening of
possibles (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 453).
This is the event as pure becoming, a virtual transformation
abstracted or subtracted from actual states; but the event is not just a
pure becoming, it is also a becoming something else. A virtual mutation
must be followed by an actualising mutation (Zourabichvli 2000: 344),
which is the means through which a shift in sensibility is given a form:
new words, acts, behaviors, the actual and perceptible inscription of a virtual and sensible change in bodies and assemblages. It is through them
that the event actually takes place, transforming the world around it, and
is communicated. It may be that only a few have crossed the threshold, but
once they change, that change can be shared.
This is how the event, which has already happened once in a virtual
mutation and twice in the creation of new individuations, can happen
many more times as it spreads. But this means that spontaneity is not,
as is often thought, the absence of any form; on the contrary, the events
actualizing side is precisely the passage from formlessness to (new) form.
Gilbert Simondon (2005: 549), whose philosophy of individuation profoundly influenced Deleuze, draws an explicit comparison between a
metastable state of supersaturation, in which an event is ready to take
place, or a structure ready to emerge, and a pre-revolutionary one: all
it takes is for a structural germ [germe structural] to appear. An actualizing mutation (a perceptible change in behavior, practices, relations) is
such a structural germ: a new form that spreads across a field that is ripe
for the event even if, while the event is still eventing, not exhausted
in its potential, this new form is far from fixed, and rather than being a
model to be consciously imitated or rejected, it is communicated and
propagates through changes in sensibility.10 Here we see the correlation
between event and subject: it is when history tips over into meaninglessness, literally breaks the norm and creates something new, that the
subject comes onto the scene, bringing everything into doubt and producing a new utterance, an operation of the signifier as expression of a
meaning, a possible split in a given order, a breach, a revolution, a cry
for radical reorientation (Guattari 1984: 175). Yet this subject is not an
autonomous, sovereign agent, but the way in which the event expresses

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itself. It exists to the extent that it affirms the event, as much as the event
exists only because it expresses itself in this subject. [T]he event creates
a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari
2003: 216), but not as a cause external to its effects; it is in producing such
transformations that the event events. The subject is therefore what constitutes itself around the feeling that a rupture has taken place (it cannot go on like before), and must respond to the event by forming new
collective assemblages that correspond to the new subjectivity (Deleuze
and Guattari 2003: 216).
Thus, if we still speak of spontaneity a discontinuity, an excess over
causes, a break with existing constraints and the previously mapped
space of possibilities it is neither as a free creation nor as an absence of
form. The event expresses an expansion of freedom and contingency, not
an elimination of all constraints, and is inseparable from the structural
germs that, in giving it viable forms, actualize it.11 We can therefore see
why there is no contradiction in speaking of spontaneity and distributed
leadership. In fact, we can easily track the emergence of recent movements by observing how a few spontaneously created forms, in propagating across networks, brought those very movements into existence: the
protests in Sidi Bouzid around Mohamed Bouazizis suicide mushrooming into protests across Tunisia, as the first cries of Step down, Ben Ali
were heard; the camps that spread from Tahrir Square to the Maghreb and
Mashreq, then to Spain, Israel, the US and around the world; the original
Adbusters Occupy Wall Street meme, taken seriously by activists who
started organizing around the idea, until its replication across the US.
What these examples also show is that, even if there is a sense in which
the event is a rupture out of the blue, in its becoming, it escapes history (Deleuze and Negri 2007: 231), there is nothing magical or ethereal about it. On the contrary, it demands work; to say that propagation
happens at a virtual or sensible level does not make its conditions any
less material. The examples above make it evident that the various vanguards (several of them for each movement) had to spend a fair amount
of time honing their messages, building alliances, creating the necessary
channels and platforms (face-to-face meetings, Facebook pages, websites,
Twitter and Youtube accounts etc.), organizing protests, producing and
circulating videos, images, texts, memes.12 There is a much more complex

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interplay between spontaneity and organization than a simple opposition between the two would allow. On the one hand, the tactics that succeeded in producing large-scale outbursts generally did so because they
were sufficiently open-ended, inclusive and adaptable to allow people to
become involved in their own terms and through progressive steps, rather
than having to conform to a predefined activist style and identity overnight. Some have described this as open code activism in comparison
to open code software.13 On the other hand, if it were not for a backbone
of committed activists working from the early days, many of which had
years of political experience behind them and belonged to pre-existing
groups and networks, these movements would not have turned out the
way they did. The fantasy of thousands of entirely unconnected individuals magically turning up at the same place at the same time is simply a
myth; the reality is closer to a continuous eventing in which small vanguards slowly built up (and others no doubt withered), until the event
irrupted in full force on the streets. A series of small, ever growing synecdoches, leading to that sudden, exponentially larger synecdoche that
Badiou calls contraction.
If we understand spontaneity as formlessness, it is easy to slip into
imagining organization as its total opposite the fixation of a rigid form,
the party. It is certainly common that unreconstructed Leninists pay lip
service to a certain right to spontaneity in a first moment (Deleuze 2004:
278), but only as a transitional manifestation that must be left behind for
a superior phase, marked by the setting-up of centralist organisations
(Guattari 1984c: 66). But the problem also works the other way round: a
paranoid fear of organization, too sharp a distinction between the good,
spontaneous moment (which belonged to everyone) and the bad,
transcendent one (in which some people tried to take control) can
block the way to necessary new creations. Understanding spontaneity as
the creation and propagation of new form, on the other hand, poses a different set of problems than any binary choice between either spontaneity or organization: what forms to propose, what forms to select, which
forms to connect to.
There are, of course, many steps between selecting some incipient forms that manifest themselves in actions, conducts, discourses
etc., and developing organizational consistency (more clearly defined

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responsibilities, structures and criteria of membership, more permanent

participation etc.). But the point is, first, that organization should be
understood as a continuum that stretches between those two things and,
second, that it will always be a matter of choosing how to manage tendencies towards openness or horizontality, closure or verticalization.14 The
formlessness or party option not only posits organization as synonymous with a radical discontinuity, it assumes organizational unification
as a self-evident value, or the telos towards which organization should
tend. Thinking in terms of distributed leadership, on the other hand,
suggests that a movement choosing a course of action (which is necessary) does not entail choosing a single course of action (which is not).
If different initiatives spring up that are not defined by mutually exclusive group identities, but coalesce around complementary strategic and
organizing wagers (fighting foreclosures, debt, austerity measures etc.),
divisions appear as the means to better pursue different but convergent
goals, rather than as splitting a presumed common goal several ways.15 A
political process is then more like an ecosystem than an army, even if ideally it should also be capable of functioning as an army when necessary.
It is possible to advance without advancing as a single column, as long
as the forms created adequately respond to real tendencies or potentials,
possess the organizational consistency required by the tasks they pose
themselves, and remain open and responsive to their, continuously recalibrating strategy and tactics, and avoiding bad forms of stratification.
IV. Becoming-Anonymous, Becoming-Imperceptible
As we have seen, an event events if it is actualized into something new;
without history, experimentation would remain indeterminate, unconditioned (Deleuze and Negri 2007: 229). If nothing is done to actualize existing potentials into new forms, they could simply be incorporated into the existing situation (opportunism, identitarianism), or be
displaced into much worse forms (what Deleuze and Guattari call black
holes: fascism, terrorism, suicide, etc.). To avoid decisions, and the divisions they bring, in the name of an indefinite potential or diversity to be
preserved at all costs, is therefore not an option. In fact, remaining steadfastly against any actuality often belies an implicit reliance on teleology

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something we should be all the warier of if we abandon the orthodox

Marxists explicit reliance on the notion of a historical development
governed by necessary laws. The notion that strategic initiatives or new
forms should be rejected because the process, left to its own devices,
will produce the right solutions is not only paradoxical the process
is treated as something separate from the individuals that constitute it,
and having the power to arrive at solutions without any of its participants
actually proposing any but also premised on some kind of teleological
necessity.16As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, it is necessary to create
collective assemblages that can give a body to the event, and we shirk
that challenge at our own peril. The wager that defines their political
thought, perfectly summarized by Guattari in 1973, is that we can hope
for nothing else than a continuous effort to keep in balance the two fundamental and fundamentally contradictory demands of revolutionary struggle.
These two struggles need not be mutually exclusive:
The class struggle, the revolutionary struggle for liberation, involves the existence of war machines capable of standing up to the forces of oppression, which means operating with
a degree of centralism, with at least a minimum of coordination.
The struggle in relation to desire requires collective agencies to produce a continually ongoing analysis, and the subversion of every form of power, at every level. (Guattari 1984:
62; my italics)
Against the usual misconception that sees them as unwavering partisans of openness against closure, diversity over unity, spontaneity over
purposive organization, rhizome over arborescence, deterritorialization
over reterritorialization, the point for Deleuze and Guattari is rather that,
even if the poles in each pair tend to be conceived as mutually exclusive,
this need not and should not be the case.17 Rather than simply invert the
choice historically made by MarxismLeninism (for closure, unity, purposive organization, arborescence, reterritorialization), the challenge
is to invent forms capable of maintaining the two poles in maximal tension: the most openness with the most closure, the greatest unity with the
greatest diversity, and so on.18 The good form, as Simondon (2005: 543;

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Rodrigo Nunes

italics in the original) describes it, approaches paradox without becoming

a paradox, contradiction without becoming a contradiction. It is not stable
(cancelling out potentials), but metastable (capable of retaining the most
tension). It is therefore not a matter of finding a stable golden mean
as a recipe that could be transposed to any set of conditions but of a
constant readjustment under every new situation so as to prevent either
pole from taking over. As long as we see ourselves as having to choose
between either the impotent spontaneism of the masses or the bureaucratic and hierarchical encoding of a party organization, says Guattari
(1984: 2301; italics in the original), all liberation movements of
desire will find themselves taken over, or encircled and marginalized.19
Or, as Deleuze (2004: 279) summarizes it: It is evident that a revolutionary machine cannot be satisfied with local and punctual struggles: hyperdesiring and hyper-centralised, it must be all of it at once.
Instead of fighting or ruing organization and its risks as something
that comes from outside, that others impose on us, the real test lies in
becoming those others, that is, in taking responsibility both for the creation of collective assemblages and for their risks for developing collective capacity to act and mechanisms to analyse and subvert every form of
power that endangers the continuity of a process, including ones own.20
To be truly anti-Oedipal is to be self-subversive.21 This is why Guattari
(1984: 41) says that the fundamental problem of institutional analysis
(the field in which he started out) is: [C]an the group face the problem
of its own death? Can a group with a historic mission envisage the end
of that mission ? Can revolutionary parties envisage the end of their
so-called mission to lead the masses?22 Starting with the Zapatista Army
of National Liberations (EZLN) Subcomandante Marcos, facelessness
and anonymity have been a recurring trait among movements of the
last decades. Both a weapon against the targeting of leaders and a way
of demonstrating the struggles openness to all comers, this has been a
key element in creating an open-code activism. Besides, when distrust
of representation is rife, calls for action that are not authored by established organizations have a better chance of catching on.23 It is fitting that
one of the most important groups to appear in recent years if it can
even be called that is called Anonymous, and that their visible face is

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the Guy Fawkes mask worn by Alan Moores V, a sort of fictional forerunner of Marcos.
At the same time, it is clear that one cannot be anonymous forever.
Even if we do not know Marcos face, he is still identifiable as an EZLN
leader, and while the individuals in Anonymous may remain anonymous,
the collectivity called Anonymous itself cannot. If the vanguard-function leads, it inevitably becomes recognizable, even if only as something
like a Twitter alias. Besides, there is an important difference between the
localized kind of intervention that acts as a catalyst for a protest and the
more continuous, long-term work of a campaign or group. In the latter
case, becoming identifiable is unavoidable, and it is more likely that, however informal an organizational format might be, internal structures and
leadership figures will emerge.
Another of Deleuze and Guattaris concepts may help us think beyond
the limits of invisibility and anonymity: becoming-imperceptible.24 At
first, the three may seem synonymous, or becoming-imperceptible can
sound like the opposite of acting or leading. I would like to suggest, however, that it offers ways of thinking how to act and lead better, rather than
not at all. The first thing to stress about the concept is that it refers to
a kind of action. Although initially defined as becoming like everyone/
the whole world [tout le monde] (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 342), it
is poorly understood if treated as mere inaction or going with the flow.
To begin with, one actively strives to become imperceptible, choosing
to suppress everything that prevented us from slipping between things
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 344); one takes a step back from a constituted position (my group, my beliefs, myself) facing other constituted
positions so as to become attuned to their common background: their
virtual or unconscious conditions and the potentials present in the situation. It is a striving to place oneself in the position of the anomalous element that is a packs vector of deterritorialization, of which Deleuze and
Guattari (2004: 299) say that it is neither an individual nor a species
and has neither familiar nor subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics, but only affects.
This means neither an elimination of the self nor the attainment of
an objective, Gods-eye perspective on the whole. It is true that Deleuze
and Guattari (2004: 348) speak of a plane of consistency or immanence

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that, in the process of becoming-imperceptible, is perceived in its own

right. But it is so in the course of its construction, that is, through experimentation, and hence partially, rather than as if through external contemplation. If the unconscious must be constructed, not rediscovered
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004:), it is because it is never given as such, as in
some sort of fusional mystical experience, but only ever through a conditioned, perspectival effort. Constructing means acting, selecting, connecting to some elements and not others, and in that process producing
a new set of orientations for actual behavior. To have only affects is to
enhance ones sensibility to the conditions of the environment and, as a
consequence, to be better prepared to detect the latency of events and to
intervene so as to bring them about.
This can be thought in relation to the distinction between actualizing
and realizing that Franois Zourabichvili (2000) correctly highlights as
central to Deleuze and Guattaris politics. To realize a project is to depart
from an already existing image or goal, and attempt to shape the actual
according to it; to actualize is to experiment with or construct actualizations for a situations potentials, creating something qualitatively different not only from what came before, but from what could previously be
imagined as possible. The conception of action that corresponds to the
first is that of a form that exists as a mental image being imposed on inert
matter. In the second, an image cannot exist in advance it is at best a
hunch because the matter acted upon is not inert: it has potentials of
its own, with an agency of their own, responding to action, resisting it,
diverting it or accelerating it, so that the final result is truly unpredictable.
To realise a project produces nothing new if all it does is add existence
to an idea that was already given as a possibility; those who intend to
transform the real according to their previously conceived idea do not
take transformation itself into account (Zourabichvili 2000: 337).
Furthermore, if the matter on which the agent intervenes is not
merely passive, it is because this matter is the very environment in which
the agent moves which therefore acts back on her, even to the point of
transforming what she might desire or imagine. Instead of expecting to
control that environment or wishing to fully determine its future states,
the goal of actualization is more modest: to propose or induce a change,
to introduce positive and negative feedbacks that indicate a direction

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without predetermining it (which would be impossible). To see oneself

as an element that is both passive and active in a milieu that is also both
things, instead of a separate agent seeking to mold inert matter according
to a preconceived image, weakens the egoic, heroic investment in oneself as the vanguard, the radicals, the revolutionaries is undermined.
Ones actions and identity cease to be the be-all and end-all condition
for change, and are placed in a broader picture in which agents can be
relativized to the point of facing their own death that is, the partiality
and limits of their intervention and even, as the case may be, the need
for its overcoming or disappearance if it becomes superfluous or counterproductive. It is not just that this conception is less prone to authoritarian drifts, or more open-ended; it also involves greater attention to the
conditions of action, and thus tends to be more flexible both in meeting
people where they are and in anticipating and negotiating changes in the
environment. Ethereal as it may sound, becoming-imperceptible should
therefore be understood as becoming more realistic about oneself and the
real potentials and limitations of a process.
This relativization of the agent in favour of the environment and a situations conditions might suggest that becoming-imperceptible involves
an unconditional commitment to seeking compromises or maintaining broad consensus at any cost; but one thing does not follow from the
other. First of all, becoming-imperceptible is precisely not about negotiating differences understood as given or striking balances among fixed
positions identifying each actor or part of a process. While constituted
difference is what stops agents from slipping between things, becoming
imperceptible means looking for the constituent differences that underlie
them, and acting on those. Differences as they exist are not absolute values in themselves, although they are part of the material that one must
act upon, and must be taken into account as such. From the point of view
of becoming imperceptible, it matters more that one is sensitive to differences that can exist that already exist in potential and to construct
the transversal connections that can provide them with a plane of consistency, without those necessary leading back to the agent herself. To
turn ones gaze away from discontinuities (constituted difference) and
towards continuity (the potentials that traverse a situation and can constitute new differences) does not entail that the goal should always be

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that of maintaining continuity, let alone assuming or producing homogeneity. Divisions exist between the 1% and the 99%, the over- and
the under-represented, white and non-white, majorities and minoritarian
becomings etc. , and overcoming them will more often than not require
asserting their existence and creating new ones.
To the extent that events are ruptures, and that one seeks potentials
in order to elicit and propagate events, becoming imperceptible is part
of intervening so as to create ruptures; it is a moment in the hard work of
eventing. The question is what ruptures to produce, and how where to
draw the lines, in which direction to move, how to retain enough openness, where to be divisive and where inclusive, when to go with the flow
and when to interrupt it. Sometimes, attempting to push things beyond
the vaguest agreement will result in a process implosion or ones own
isolation; if new ruptures are to be created, one will have to wait, to be
flexible, to read the mood. In other cases, a spontaneous action that initially garnered little consensus can produce a widely shared qualitative
change for example, the way in which the storming of Conservative
party headquarters in London galvanised the UK student movement of
2011 (cf. The Free Association 2011).
This shows that neither maintaining continuity or asserting division
can be turned into categorical imperatives for political action. Whether
continuity or division is preferable is a badly posed problem. Properly
political (that is, practical) problems are always a matter of what continuity, what division, when, how, how much. The experimental character
of becoming-imperceptible, its reference to a specific process or situation, highlights this. By the same token, it indicates that the point of an
intervention is not itself, but what it does: one intervenes not in order to
assert oneself or the correctness of ones position, but in order to produce
effects. There is no advantage to respecting differences if that only means
that existing differences will remain the same; nothing is gained from
asserting division if all it does is divide us from everyone else. It is key
to the idea of an open code activism that revolutions should be come
as you are affairs; but they will not have been revolutions if they do not
result in leaving as you were not. The whole point of political practice is
what happens in the middle, and how to make it happen.

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Canetti, Elias. 1981. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart. New York: Continuum.
Comit Invisible. Nos Amis. Paris: La Fabrique.
Dean, Jodi. 2012. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Trois problmes de groupe. In LIle dserte. Textes et entretiens
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Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 2003. Mai 68 na pas eu lieu. In Deux rgimes de
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Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 2004. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit.
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Guattari, Flix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. David
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Guattari, Flix. 2009b. The Unconscious is Turned Towards the Future. In Soft
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Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Principles of Philosophy, or the Monadology, In
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Selected Writings. Ed. David MacLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 24572.
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Notes
1.

Javier Toret (2013) notes that, while the nodes more connected to the
explosion of the movement became weaker, a remarkable flow of interaction
and daily work has remained, being occasionally reactivated by the
connection with circles that are less internal to the process through new
(even if smaller) events that make social malaises transversal with network
processes, and thus are re-actualisations of the 15M DNA. This leads him to
distinguish four moments of the 15M process: gestation, explosion and birth
of the network-system, globalisation (including Occupy and the October 15,
2011 day of action) and evolution, development and mutation.

2.

Pays profond, in the sense that one speaks, for example of the United States
deep south.

3.

This helps explain the appeal that activists of a radical libertarian and
egalitarian bent sometimes find in a certain millenarianism: thinking
a radical change that happens at once (brought about, for example, by
ecological collapse) allows us to bypass all the dangers (the formation
of leaders and hierarchies, compromise) and the daunting work of a
transformation taking place over time.

4.

I follow the standard English translation of the German Masse (masse, in

French) as crowd; cf. Canetti (1981). Brighenti (2010: 297) compares
Canetti, Gabriel Tarde and Deleuze and Guattari as proponents of a concept
of multiplicity eschewing classical dichotomies between individualism
and holism, agency and structure, micro- and macro-sociology by making
the individual into something that exists only within a range located
between two other regions, the infra- and the interindividual (which we
could, following Gilbert Simondon, name pre- and trans-individual). It is
curious, then, that he fails to note how Deleuze and Guattari misread Canetti,
opposing pack and crowd as intensive and extensive multiplicities, when
Canetti sees both in intensive terms. For him, the pack is defined primarily
by its coming together around a specific goal and possessing only two of the
characteristics (equality, direction) of the crowd (which also include density
and the tendency to grow). Because of the latter trait (lack of growth), the size
opposition between crowd (larger) and pack (small) has an importance for
him that, as I will argue, it does not to Deleuze and Guattari whose pack
and crowd are arguably closer to Canettis open and closed crowds.

5.

Throughout the following pages I will be working from the opposition as it

is set out by Deleuze and Guattari, rather than Canettis actual definitions.
If anything, Deleuze and Guattari develop in the crowd and the pack the
opposition (itself drawn from Jean Paul Sartre) developed by Guattari (1984)
between subjected and subject groups, which is taken up in Anti-Oedipus,
where it appears as opposing groups that are revolutionary at the level of preconscious investments to those that are revolutionary at the level of desire

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Rodrigo Nunes
(Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 470 et seq.). Later in his life, Guattari (2009a:
48) would claim: I no longer have much faith in the specificity of the group,
and I would even say that I believe less and less in the existence of the group
as an entity I would like to start from a much more inclusive, perhaps more
vague, notion of assemblage. Cf. also Guattari (2009b: 179): Ive changed
my mind: there are no subject-groups, but arrangements of enunciation,
of subjectivization, pragmatic arrangements that do not coincide with
circumscribed groups.

6.

Cf. Tarde (2002).

7.

This point is developed at greater length in Nunes (2014).

8.

Again, this does not mean that people are always really free under control,
but that the constraints put on their actions (which elicit and modulate as
much as repress and prohibit them) never fully determine their content. It is
to the extent that their actions are underdetermined that they are free, not
only to operate under those constraints but also, under certain conditions, to
change the constraints themselves.

9.

While I am staying close to the animal metaphor here, it should be clear that
this need not be an individual; the cutting edge of deterritorialization could
be a group, a new material relation, a human/non-human assemblage etc.

10. Cf. Simondon (2005: 544): There can be no taking of form [prise de
forme] without two conditions coming together: a tension of information,
contributed by a structural germ, and the energy imprisoned by the milieu
that begins to take form; the milieu must be in a metastable, tense state,
like a solution in supersaturation or superfusion, so as to pass into a stable
state by liberating the imprisoned energy through the structuring work of the
structural germ.
11. Guattari (1984: 1723) introduces the concept of coefficient of transversality
to speak of the degree of freedom and contingency, or openness and
indeterminacy and the capacity to become aware of and manage them in a
group or institutional situation.
12. This point is further developed in Nunes (forthcoming).
13. I have heard the expression on three separate occasions from friends involved
in the Spanish 15M movement.
14. On organization thought as a continuum, cf. Nunes (forthcoming).
15. That initiatives should be based on political wagers means that they
should arise from strategic appraisals of the situation rather than mere
personal preference. Cf. Dean (2012: 228): fearful of excluding potential
opportunities, Occupy tried early on to avoid confronting fundamental
divisions within the movement. () The effect, though, was to reduce

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division to forking (in other words, to sublimate it). People pursued their own
projects, perpetually splitting according to their prior interests and expertise.
16. Other forms of implicitly teleological discourses that exist in the orbit of
contemporary movements include a certain historical and technological
optimism that places contemporary movements in a struggle between
the old (representative democracy, rigid structures, hierarchy, monopoly,
proprietary code) and the new (real democracy, networks, decentralization,
participation, open code), in which the victory of the new over the old would
be assured by the arrow of time, rather than seen as the very object of the
struggle; and an appeal to a generic humanity seen not as the outcome of a
struggle to overcome social antagonisms, as in the Marxist account, but as
an underlying reality veiled by divisions, ideologies, antagonisms etc., and
therefore the object of a spontaneous self-reflexive awakening. Once the veils
are lifted, the idea goes, it is inevitable that we see ourselves as essentially
equal, and so inevitably bound to agree on the basics of how society is to be
run. I develop the critique of positing a transcendence of the process over
agents in Nunes (2013).
17. The problem of organization appears then as profoundly Leibnizian:
obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible
(Leibniz, 1989, 58).
18. Deleuze and Guattari never had any illusions, however, that this tension can
be indefinitely sustained stasis always wins in the end, as it is inevitable
events exhaust themselves in their eventing, eventually consuming their
potentials or being captured by strata. This does not mean that they return
us to the same place, which would make them mere blips in a constant
underlying order, but that there is no final, perfect state, and at one point
new potentials will have to be harnessed to go beyond the forms created by
previous events in that sense, movement always wins in the end. This is
what leads Deleuze (with Parnet 2004) to jest but who did ever believe
that revolution turn out well? All revolutions fail. Everyone knows it
That revolutions fail, that revolutions turn out bad, that has never stopped
people from becoming revolutionary What people have to do in a situation
of oppression or tyranny is effectively to become revolutionary, for there is
nothing else to do.
19. At around the same time, Guattari (1984: 65) comments on May 1968: it is
true that problems are now seen differently, but, equally, there has been no
real break. This is undoubtedly because there is no large-scale machine for
revolutionary war. We have to recognize that certain dominant images are
still perpetrating their destructive effects even within revolutionary groups
themselves.
20. An example of the incapacity (or fear) of abandoning the position in which
the vicissitudes of political experience can always be blamed on others would

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be the Invisible Committees (2014: 75) critique of the notions constituent
power, democracy and government which sounds woefully inadequate in
its suggestion that the defeat of uprisings such as the one in Egypt would have
resulted from failure to deprive power of its legitimacy, make it acknowledge
is arbitrariness, when they were actually interrupted by the arbitrariness of
sheer force.

21. I borrow this explanatory short-circuit from Viveiros de Castro (2009: 239).
22. Interestingly, Guattari (1984: 202) comments that one should still be a
Leninist, at least in the specific sense of believing that we cannot really
look to the spontaneity and creativity of the masses to establish analytical
groups in any lasting way though Leninist is perhaps an odd word to use
when one remembers that the object at this moment is to foster not a highly
centralized party, but some means whereby the masses can gain control of
their own lives.
23. Treating psalo (the pass it on tag tacked to the end of emails and text
messages calling for actions) as the unpredictable actor behind the
movement of the indignados in Spain, Marta Malo (2011) observes that, as
the son of decades of political disaffiliation, psalo is wary, especially of
organised groups; when the latter attempt to use the same mechanism of viral
spread, their initiatives fall flat.
24. Nicholas Thoburn (2010: 137) emphasizes Deleuze and Guattaris affirmation
of becoming imperceptible as a political figure, aptly characterizing it as
not a sublime end-point of spiritual inaction, but the immanent kernel of a
militant political composition, and departing from a clear disarticulation of
political practice from the construction of coherent collective subjectivities,
but in a fashion that bypasses the anti-group position with an orientation
toward the discontinuous and multilayered arrangements that traverse and
compose social or, indeed, planetary life.

Chapter 4

Resistance to Occupy
Claire Colebrook

I
The title of my chapter indicates two senses of the concept of resistance,
and two senses of the concept of occupation. The two contrary tendencies of the concept of resistance take us to the heart of Deleuze and
Guattaris political philosophy. There is no authentic proletariat to whom
one might appeal in political protests. Rather than think of a populaces
resistance to power or the state, in terms of opposition, one needs to
think of political resistance at the molecular level: how might some forces
forces that compose us and what we take to be our interests produce
new formations that are not those of the standard political identities that
make up political analysis? We might think of standard (molar) political
resistance as to use Foucaults terms too bound up with sovereign
conceptions of power, as a repressive power over, or as a top-down
power, against which life and liberty would be set. By contrast, Deleuze
and Guattari theorize a sense of multiple and genuinely political resistance: it is not a question of life resisting power, but of thinking within
each body of resisting forces. In his book on Leibniz Deleuze describes
the play of forces that would generate a relatively unified body. On such
an account, for a body to resist would not be to appeal to natural desire or
interests, but to have a feeling for the multiple tendencies that would then
yield an inflection:
I hesitate between staying home and working or going out
to a nightclub: these are not two separable objects, but two

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orientations, each of which carries a sum of possible or even

hallucinatory perceptions (not only of drinking, but the noise
and smoke of the bar; not only of working, but the hum of the
word processor and the surrounding silence ). And if we
return to motives in order to study them for a second time,
they have not stayed the same. Like the weight on a scale, they
have gone up or down. The scale has changed according to the
amplitude of the pendulum. The voluntary act is free because
the free act is what expressed the entire soul at a given moment
of its duration. That act is what expresses the self. Does Adam
sin freely? In other words, at that instant his soul has taken an
amplitude that is found to be easily filled by the aroma and
taste of the apple, and by Eves solicitations. Another amplitude one having retained Gods defense is possible. The
whole question turns on laziness. (Deleuze 1993: 70).
Adam chooses because he is taken over by the smell of the apple and the
sounds of Eves voice, even though at another instant he might have been
swayed by a contrary feeling for God. Put more concretely, we might say
that political resistance would not lie in opposing power, but in having
a sense or feeling for the inflections of power: why, if a body is tending
one way towards refusing work (because of hunger and the fatigue from
working multiple jobs) does another tendency take over, such as a feeling
of obligation or fear? Deleuze seems at once to suggest that the question
is less one of opposition than amplitude: if all I can feel, perceive and be
is the immediacy of hunger and cold then that will be what prompts me
to act (and so I may go to work, yet again, for just enough to survive).
If however I could feel and perceive just a little more if on the way to
work another hungry, fatigued body described some other possible way
of feeling then I might choose to sit down, not work, occupy a city
space and think of a different world: The whole questions turns on laziness (Deleuze 70). This laziness is that of amplitude, of how much we
are able to feel, perceive and think. In his book on Leibniz, Deleuze suggests that rather than follow Descartess notion of clear and distinct ideas
such that we know certain truths indubitably we should understand
that everything perceives the infinite, but with its own degree of confusion or clarity. Rather than base politics on the subjects own certainty

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each individual deciding for herself because only she can determine
her own good a collective politics might generate alternating relations
of clarity and distinction. While Occupy may have been characterized
by indistinction never clear just who or what the movement represented, coming into being prior to any formation of an end or aim its
force and presence were clear (clear but indistinct), and as the movement
grew in size it became capable of different and varying amplitudes. The
political nature of Occupy cannot be understood by way of the subject,
whose finite knowledge would determine a range of expertise, but does
make sense according to Deleuze and Guattaris sense of perception as a
form of occupation and resistance: one perceives and knows according
to where one is, and what impedes or enhances ones range. This is not
just to say that Occupy managed to generate a broad, indistinct but clear
perception of its own force by gradually gaining self-perception by way of
social media, but also that within each Occupy site there were moments
of relative distinction where divergent demands of racial, ethnic, sexual
and gendered justice came into relative conflict. It was occupation, or the
assembling together of bodies, that generated multiple lines of resistance
both resistance to Occupys outside the 1% and within Occupy.
The use of relative quantities to name relations of resistance is closer
to a Deleuzian politics of the monad rather than the subject: rather than
a self who perceives its outside, political resistance is achieved by shifting and constantly redistributed relations of force. There are not subjects
who occupy and then resist; rather, there is an assembling of force, the
formation of a territory, and then the self-perception of that force by way
of its relative range of clarity and confusion. From the stable monad, a
being defined by it locus and force of perception, Deleuze and Guattari
argue for the nomad: a range of perception and force that is constantly
shifting (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 5734).
Deleuze and Guattaris work therefore manages to weave together two
contrary senses of resistance. The political concept of resistance is oppositional as in the French resistance and is a resistance to an occupying power. Deleuze and Guattaris micro-politics intertwines oppositional resistance, especially in Anti-Oedipus, with the psychoanalytic
concept of resistance: what stops a body, force or desire from doing what
it wants to do? If one wants to resist politically, and oppose a power, then

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one needs to ask about the powers within every body and every perception that impede or enhance its amplitude. Let us say that the political
concept of resistance, captured in the historical moment of the French
resistance (but also more broadly in anti-colonization movements), was
that of opposing an occupying power, and that such a concept of oppositional resistance has been increasingly problematized by another notion
of resistance articulated by psychoanalysis: how is it that desire resists
itself? It was this sense of immanent (rather than oppositional resistance)
that Paul de Man deployed in the notion of resistance to theory: rather
than imagine theory as something that could be easily achieved, such
that we might step back from a field of forces and relations and grasp its
higher logic, de Man argued that theory or the gaze of wise distance was
not something that could ever be fully achieved. Resistance or a certain immanent impossibility of fulfillment is constitutive of any event
of reading, or any attempt to grasp the sense of what one encounters.
Blindness is constitutively coupled with insight, just as for Deleuze and
Guattari all perceptions are distinct and confused, clear and indistinct.
A body occupies a field and encounters its resistances with counter-resistance. The theoretical desire is at once necessary to break with relations
as already constituted, but always remains as a desire, never a final object
(de Man 1982).
When Deleuze and Guattari write about micro-facisms, they focus
the question of resistance and opposition at the level of desire (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 31). If there is fascism, or the social-political organization of all force towards a single transcendent end the state, the people,
the party this is not because there is something that simply opposes
desire; rather, desire itself has a tendency towards becoming resistant to
its own tendencies:
You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is
still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that
restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject anything you
like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups
and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize Good and bad are only the products of an active and

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temporary selection, which must be renewed. (Deleuze and

Guattari 1987: 910)
All those tendencies that might have once been so liberating when set
against earlier modes of corporate capital, such as a stress on individual
freedom, creativity, goals, and unity in opposition to a quantifying and
reductive capital, might now need to be abandoned. Notions of individual freedom, creativity, personal fulfillment and work-life balance now
service capital, while concepts of disorganization and lack of clear ends
might be genuinely resistant. Such a shift of focus, away from a simple
oppositional resistance towards internal resistance, is particularly relevant today, looking back upon the potentiality of the Occupy movement.
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari reverse the usual notion that
a politics of resistance would require strongly formed identities (in the
mode of resistance to power by the populace). On the contrary, resistance occurs through what has not yet taken on the form of interests
and certainly not of organization: In order to resist organ-machines, the
body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface
as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows,
it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 10). Like Foucault who also argued against the
notion that power represses desire, Deleuze and Guattari do not accept
that there is a good desire lying in wait for political liberation; politics, or
the polity, begins precisely with the formation of objects or interests and
does so by repelling a desire that is not yet organized. Disorganized desire
is revolutionary; or, desire is disorganized and therefore is resistance and
revolution, not because it opposes power, but because what we take to
be power the power of distinct terms emerges by way of repelling or
organizing desire. This is why Deleuze and Guattari specifically use the
term desire rather than power (and this is where they mark their difference from Foucault). While accepting, following Foucault, that power
is positive, they nevertheless seek to mobilize desire rather than power,
for while power constitutes relations and points of stability, it is desire
that exceeds any of the terms through which it flows, and is therefore not
bound by the relations or organizations that generate the socius desire
exceeds resistance as opposition:

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Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to
be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always
assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension
of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine
have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 531)
Placing their work in context one might say that the French resistance,
and then the political milieu prior to May 1968, relied on a dichotomous
notion of occupation and resistance: in the Nazi occupation of France,
an outside had invaded the inside or the territory, and this outside must
be resisted. But Deleuze and Guattaris political theory, well before the
Occupy movement, precluded any simple sense of an inside/outside of
political territories. It is not the case that there is something like a territory a marked out and defined space that is then occupied: this is the
myth of nations, or the notion that space and place have some intrinsic
proper being. Rather, it is by way of occupation, or by filling a zone or
moving across a field, that something like a space or territory is formed.
This primary nomadism always occurs in relation (and by way of contestation). In the beginning is the potential for occupying a space, and the
mapping out of a territory; but the territory is therefore the outcome of
deterritorialization: forces of desire enter into relation, producing a certain quality or space. Property is occupation, or the taking up of a space
and of marking or signing it as ones own. There is something like a quality that is desired; there is a desiring, and it is from this tendency to take
up a quality that a territory is formed:
The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being
No sooner do I like a color that I make it my standard or placard. One puts ones signature on something just as one plants
ones flag on a piece of land. A high school supervisor stamped
all the leaves strewn about the school yard and then put them

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back in their places. He had signed. Territorial marks are readymades. And what is called art brut is not at all pathological or
primitive; it is merely this constitution, this freeing, of matters
of expression, in the movement of territoriality: the base or
ground of art. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 316)
Here, Deleuze and Guattari articulate a politics of occupation and resistance that is improper; in the beginning is the chance taking up of what is
not ones own as ones own. It would follow from this theory of original
occupation that it is not the case that there is a proper space of ones own,
that might then be taken over or occupied, and that this occupation must
be resisted by some proper or innocent outside of power. Rather, desire
encounters resistance, and in so doing generates a space of ownness or
an occupation. Occupation is the outcome of resistance, which in turn
is dependent upon a desire that has no proper home or being. I would
argue that there is something necessarily appropriative about the mode
of Deleuze and Guattaris political theory: not only do they see the notion
of the proper and property as dependent upon the seizing of a quality,
their very style of thinking about politics transforms how we think about
political theory. Rather than politics following on from an idea, rationale
or decision a commitment to freedom, the market, the individual or
even justice they commence with aesthetics in the strictest sense: a
quality is seized. The notion that this quality is then a sign of ones own
identity or territory or property is a consequence of a certain reversal. In
this respect their own theory is not only an overturning of Platonism (by
placing ideas as effects of sensations) but also an overturning of a certain conception of resistance that would focus on a politics of good ideas:
rather than demystifying or informing the masses of what they ought to
desire, and rather than focusing on a politics of good thinking, they stress
the event of occupation. Take up a space; write a placard, and sign it as
your own. Philosophically, we might say that Deleuze and Guattari insist
on internal relations: there are not qualities that enter into relation, but
there are powers that have tendencies to establish certain styles of relation. This is to say that rather than a matter that is neutral and that is then
differentiated from outside, there are tendencies to establish relations by
way of matters inflections. Matter is not blank quantity without quality.
Along with the commitment to internal relations, Deleuze and Guattari

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also insist that relations are external to terms; to be weaker or stronger,

master or slave, owner or thief, is not something one simply is, but occurs
as the outcome of a field of contestation, resistance and occupation:
What does matter do as a matter of expression? It is first of
all a poster or placard, but that is not all it is. It merely takes
that route. The signature becomes style. In effect, expressive
qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with
one another that express the relation of the territory they
draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of
circumstances. To express is not to depend upon; there is an
autonomy of expression. On the one hand, expressive qualities entertain internal relations with one another that constitute territorial motifs; sometimes these motifs loom above
the internal impulses, sometimes they are superimposed
upon them, sometimes they ground one impulse in another,
sometimes they pass and cause a passage from one impulse
to another, sometimes they insert themselves between them
but they are not themselves pulsed. On the other hand,
expressive qualities also entertain other internal relations that
produce territorial counterpoints: this refers to the manner in
which they constitute points in the territory that place the circumstances of the external milieu in counterpoint. (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 317)
The upshot of this ontology of internal relations, even though relations
are external to terms is that resistance and occupation are originary.
Force or desire is not some bland undifferentiated generic void that
requires relations to produce difference; desire differs and has a tendency
to pulse in distinct ways (internal relations, or a potentiality to express
in a certain manner). By the same token desire does not determine in
advance the terms that will be effected from encounters; whatever tendencies or pulses, a desire might express there are also relations that are
irreducible to the relatively stable points generated:
we should say that there are two politics involved a macropolitics and a micropolitics that do not envision classes,
sexes, people, or feelings in at all the same way. Or again,

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there are two very different types of relations: intrinsic relations of couples involving well-determined aggregates or
elements (social classes, men and women, this or that particular person), and less localizable relations that are always
external to themselves and instead concern flows and particles eluding those classes, sexes and persons. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 196)
I would suggest that the first wave of French post-structuralism, or the
first uptake of French post-structuralism, stressed external relations: a
system of differences (such as langue) was the condition for some point
of stability or sameness. It would follow, then, that politics might depend
on solicitation or disturbance of a system from within, given that there
would be nothing (or no thing) outside the constitutive differences that
enable points of seeming identity. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari
combine internal relations (a forces desire or tendency) with external
relations, or the constituted differences that generate stable points.
We might think, then, of the genealogy of French post-structuralism as an initial phase focused on the resistance to occupation. Nazi
occupation of France was, ostensibly, the intrusion or installation of a
foreign and pernicious body into a democratic polity; the French resistance directed against occupation relied upon the rebellion and refusal
by a polity that could conceive itself as other than the invading forces.
Deconstructions ongoing response to this notion of occupation as intrusion or contamination by an external evil has increasingly been one of a
politics of auto-immunity: there is no innocent body politic that is accidentally or tragically overtaken by forces of violence, terror and totalizing power, for in order to constitute any we or body proper there
must have been some violent and homogenizing event of recognition
that established the purity of the border and the putative innocence of
the we. Put in an overly simple way we might say that in an age of selfsatisfied democracy and good feeling where violence and terror appear
to be located elsewhere it would be theoretically requisite to point out
that our supposedly democratic and inclusive body politic was always
already contaminated by violence, terror and exclusion. From Derridas
early work on Levinas (where he argues that some domestication of the
other is necessary to avoid a worse violence of absolute exclusion) to

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the vogue for Agambens notion of sovereignty as necessarily premised

on violent abandonment, I want to suggest that a politics of pointing
out laws non-purity or our complicity was appropriate for an epoch of
seeming democracy. Derrida frequently situated his work in opposition
to the seeming triumph of liberalism; Specters of Marx (1994) was at least
in part a criticism of Fukuyamas theory of the late twentieth-centurys
freedom from imposed ideologies (Derrida 1994a: 701). Lest we be too
smug about our freedoms and the sanctity of law and the polity, or lest
we feel that we can enjoy the good conscience of being open to the otherness of the other, deconstruction was always there to remind us that
the condition for hospitality and recognition was always, necessarily and
essentially, a lesser violence (Derrida 1978). I would suggest, though,
that the twenty-first century requires a shift in the modalities of political
critique: rather than insisting that the claims for liberal freedom are alibis
for market freedom, it is more appropriate to consider why late capitalism seems to have abandoned even the ideal of liberalism.
One of the figures of the Occupy movement designates a shift in proportions; the 99% motif is part of a broader and highly complex narration of changes of distribution (the way in which income differentials
have broadened, the increase of wealth in the hands of a few, the difference in wages rises for the top few as compared to the bottom few, and
the very figure of 1% indicating contraction rather than the quality or
structure of power per se). Let us say that deconstruction was concerned
with a post-Marxist politics of contamination and complicity; there is no
pure nature, no spirit, no woman, and no original use value outside the
logics of technology and exchange. Any claim to good conscience or to
being purely democratic, in a space outside the rationalization of modernity, would need to be demystified, such that deconstruction could not
posit any actual or grounding justice, but only a justice or democracy to
come (Derrida 1994a). But, as the Occupy narratives make clear, things
have changed, and it is perhaps not the ideological lie of capitalist freedom, democracy and individualism that needs to be an object of critique;
the problem is not liberal capitalism. In the heyday of critiques of bourgeois liberalism what had presented itself as capitalism (freedom of the
market, choice, opportunity, autonomy and equality) was actually an ideological lure to cover a logic of market ruthlessness; it would make sense,

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in an era of individualism, to demystify the supposedly free subject, and

point out that the free individual has always been determined as free to
buy, sell and choose once market conditions are accepted. And it would
then make sense to think deconstructively about the forces of exchange,
signification and relation that preclude any simple self of reflection or
deliberative reason.
But what if even that minimal alibi of capitalist liberal theory is
over and we are now in the grips of a flagrant neo-feudalism that does
not even pay lip service to liberal ideology? In such a case, theory that
deconstructed autonomy, self-presence and liberal self-determination
theory that pointed out contamination might be less pertinent than a
theory that aimed to think points of resistance within a general economy.
Perhaps we can put it this way: against notions of presence, deconstruction was always a strategy of complicating and de-purifying sites of supposed origin (such as nature, the individual, consciousness or reason),
and it would follow from this deconstructive force that liberalism would
always have to be held to account if it tried to appeal to the individual
as some sovereign point upon which a polity of fairness might be based.
Theoretically, such a mode of critique is all sound and pertinent, and it
would always serve as a lever against notions of political purity and integrity, and would also as Derridas critiques of occupation and the French
resistance proceeded to do be necessary to point out that the supposedly evil, external and occupying power against which one poses resistance is never quite as other as one might like to believe. Deconstruction
tirelessly resists any notion of a simply accidental and evil other against
which one might posit ones self as a beautiful soul.
But here we need to think about another or supplementary theoretical
logic focused less on pointing out the absence of purity or the impossibility of a locus outside systems of difference and exchange, and more on the
point at which subtle differences of degree reach singular points and then
create differences in kind. Rather than insist that there is nothing outside
the text, we might want to examine the ways in which text or forces
of difference that are better thought of as desire generate relations. We
might need to do this because today we are experiencing not the liberal
lie that a deliberating subject precedes and tempers capitalist exchange,
but a full-blown abandonment of any notion of force or resistance.

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I would suggest that May 1968 is a date that marks a demystification

of the innocence and purity of labor as a simple outside of capitalism and
ideology: there is no authentic human materiality that one might appeal
to as a lever of resistance beyond capital. It would become the task of
post-68-theory as deconstruction evidenced to problematize the relations among political bodies. If 1968 marks a threshold beyond which
labor could no longer act as a foundation, there is a futher disturbance
once liberal capitalism becomes subject to new forms of restriction in the
name of security. I would suggest that 9/11 operates as a counter-date
that allowed for the suspension of liberal illusions and that various crises
from the war on terror to the global financial crisis enabled exceptional and executive interventions that abandoned all attempts at illusions of freedom and individualism. If corporations are now individuals
then it is perhaps not the figure of the individual that needs to be deconstructed, and instead one needs to generate some resistance from within
the system, techne, and difference that does not come from the purity of
an outside. That is, rather than democracy or justice to come (which
would rely on us being critical of any sense that we have achieved a position of legal good conscience), we need to think of occupation. What is
sought is not some outside or beyond of capital but a rendering radical
of capital from within. The problem with the 2008 global financial crisis
was not that it was a victory of liberal capitalism, or even neoliberalism,
but that it was the hijacking of the means of capital exchange while
allowing some points to be exempted from the general terrain of difference and relations. The banks that were too big to fail emerged from
what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as archaisms: feudal strongholds that
remain rigid despite shifting into the openness of money, credit, speculation and futures. Not everything was subjected to the axiomatic of
capital, and not everything was deemed to be no more significant than
the flows that passed through it. If banks were too big to fail this was not
because liberal ideology had triumphed, but because something that had
always been radical in liberalism was reterritorialized: the very capacity
for money to create flows and exchanges was impeded by the unit and
mechanisms of money itself (banking, finance, traders).
The enemy, in short, is no longer bourgeois ideology and the putative
benevolence of the market, but archaisms and rigidities that were never

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fully eliminated in the illusory heyday of post-war liberalism. What the

concept of occupation offers is not an outside, but a way of calculating
capitalisms rigidities and points of surplus. By occupying Wall Street the
protestors re-mapped the notion of an open, decentered and global crisis: the resistance to the 1% was not some Manichean appeal to the purity
of the people but a form of minor politics in which the point of resistance
had no identity other than that of its situation within an already distributed terrain. The 99% do not share a common ground, for the number
labels a mass not an identity. The objections to the 1% were not directed
to a who or some essential enemy, but to the terrain or territory that
by differences of degree created new thresholds and points of survival.
To take an analogy from gender politics: if we think of woman as some
redemptive outside to patriarchy, then we remain in a logic of good and
evil. To free oneself from this moralism it would be necessary to deconstruct sexual difference and abandon the figure of some great feminist
beyond. There is no woman, only something like woman to come. But
in a post-feminist (or supposedly post-racial) America where it is vulgar
to talk in essentialist terms about gender (or race or class), what happens
when one no longer has an outside or resistant counter-identity? When
Deleuze and Guattari theorized becoming-woman they did so in the
context of minor politics, and in a way that is pertinent for Occupy in the
twenty-first century: there is no man and we cannot try and save ourselves by way of the values of humanity or mankind, but we can think of
the formation by way of occupation of local movements that disturb
and decenter a system (such as Wall Street) that does not circulate widely
and freely but constantly exempts itself and saves itself. Just as becoming-woman created a line that was not that of self-constituting man, so
occupy generates a different line of becoming that is not that of capital
growth and renewal.
II
Chronologically deconstruction does not precede Deleuzism, just as
Jacques Derrida is hardly of an earlier generation than Gilles Deleuze.
Today, though, there does seem to be some sort of sequence whereby one
begins logically with the notion that it is difference or external relations

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that constitute relatively stable terms, and that one cannot step outside
difference (deconstruction); then one takes the next step and starts to
think about just what force, life or matter it is that generates difference
(Deleuzism). Even in terms of literary history there is the high postmodernism of quotation, linguistic and textual self-reflexivity, and then a shift
to local and multiple narratives focused on perception, feeling and the
body. One can think here of Don Delillos classically postmodern White
Noise (1985) with its reference to simulacra, media, spectacle and clich, and then the same writers later Body Artist (2001) or Point Omega
(2010) concerned far more with the visible and the sensible. Similarly,
feminism seemed to be dominated by constructivist or linguistic conceptions of gender, subsequently displaced by a turn to the body; more
often than not the same texts were involved but were read differently.
Historically or critically (at least for the English-speaking world) the high
era of deconstruction was in the 1980s and 1990s, and was then followed
by a series of turns away from a perceived textualism or overly literary
post-structuralism towards a more vital, material and engaged Deleuzism.
This sequence coincides, I would suggest, with different political
problems. For deconstruction one needed to problematize liberal antifoundationalism; it is not sufficient to say that in the absence of any
determined law one must decide for oneself, for one is always already
complicit, determined and within the domain of difference that enables
one to think and speak. There is no pure outside, and no site of good conscience. The liberal individual simply substitutes rather than displaces the
onto-theology of the West, and needs to be deconstructed by insisting
on ones inescapable location within difference. Deleuzism, from a similar genealogy, is less about demystifying origins and instead remystifying: how do some figures seem to rigidify or reterriorialize, despite our
cynicism? Or, why is it that despite capitalism and cynicism desire is still
enslaved to Oedipal, familial and personal rigidities? How did capital
manage to escape difference and allow one axiom to overcode all others?
More specifically, how in this era of late capitalism and the supposed
liberation of all exchange from moral conceptions of justice and fairness
were some entities (banks, money, and economic wisdom) deemed to
be too important to be exposed to the contingency of force and survival?
The problem is no longer the ideology of capitalist individualism and its

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dream of free exchange that needs to be tempered by an insistence on the

constitutive differences that open the field of the market and the polity.
Rather, one needs to ask, as Deleuze and Guattari do, about the ways in
which figures like the family, the self, the economy, and even ones own
desire impede desires own tendencies.
These different political problems deconstructions war on the tyranny of pure presence and Deleuzes attempt to think, within difference,
of a difference that makes a difference present two modes of occupation. For deconstruction, one is always already occupied from without;
when I speak I do so by way of anarchical and archival forces of inscription that will always open any text or anything I say to an unpredictable
future. For Deleuze and Guattari concepts of minor politics and becoming-woman are less about the futural force of an utterance and more
about the creation of minimal, barely discernible, not quite identifiable
forces that occupy a field, taking on the same voice and then stuttering
and reproducing different relations and combinations: resistance is not a
question of borders or futures but is immanent. Consider what Derrida,
in Specters of Marx, does with Marxist utopianism: there is no proper
spirit that has been alienated by capital, but one can think, from within
capital and technology, of that which haunts, repeats and solicits capital. Such a force is anarchic and cannot be held to account. It is radically
futural, promissory and quasi-Messianic. It follows, for deconstruction,
that literature is allied to justice because literature liberates a text from
any grounding voice or context, allowing it to say anything whatever.
By contrast, Deleuze and Guattaris politics is less that of a virtual future
and less aligned with a mode of writing that is sent like a missive into
an unimagined series of contexts. Rather, minor politics and minor literature occur as positive deflections and new forces that open in the here
and now. For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka generates minor literature, not
because he imagined a Law beyond actual laws, but because he wrote
of burrowing animals, corridors, castles, and endless machinations that
were so cramped that they offered no outside and certainly no conception
of man or the people. Deconstruction tirelessly opened texts to a transcendence or promissory power they could not contain: justice to come,
absolute forgiveness or infinite hospitality, and was no doubt a great
rejoinder to the smug postCold War ethics of the end of history. But

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by theorizing minor politics, nomadism and becoming-woman, Deleuze

and Guattari offer a counter-foil not so much to liberal dreams of the end
of history, but to todays neo-feudalisms that have reinstalled centralized
power by way of notions of either financial emergency or post-political
market freedom. That is, whereas capitalism was once moralized as a
natural outcome of individual freedom, and was therefore haunted as
Derrida argued by a necessary alienation that resided in any linguistic or economic system, twenty-first century capitalism has emptied the
concept of personhood and markets of all moral sense. Corporations are
people, and markets are not the means through which individuals exercise freedom; the market as such takes on its own godly being. Rather
than the grand ideas of justice, democracy, hospitality and forgiveness
that marked deconstruction, Deleuze and Guattari look at local, multiple and rogue incursions: rather than focus on the radical promise that
resides in philosophys never vanquished promise, their minor politics
emphasizes the ways in which the introduction of the smallest distances
and differences enables a new relation to the whole.
Dont rewrite Plato or Heidegger from within, re-read the metaphysics
of the West; reconfigure all the voices, desires and potentials that already
compose the assemblage of the world. Occupy a site; think locally, and
destroy the globalizing tendencies that generate notions of the market,
the people. As John Protevi has argued, the attention to politics at the
level of ideas is itself an ideology; rather than see the polity as effected
from our systems of language and thought, we might think more various
layers of forces that are material, virtual, linguistic, textual, local, geological and so on (Protevi 2013).
This distinction and sequence of deconstruction preceding Deleuzism
(as it plays out in the history of Anglo-American theory) is partly an effect
of the order of translation, and partly to do with intellectual and institutional history: phenomenology rather than Bergsonism was dominant in
US and UK continental philosophy departments. Perhaps, also, the fact
that theory took place in literature departments rather than philosophy departments meant that a tendency towards textualism would win
out over theories (such as Bergsons) that were based on intuition rather
than language. I want to make another suggestion about the way we think
of these two broad theoretical dominants, which are sometimes seen as

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opposites (the linguistic focus of deconstruction versus Deleuzes materialism and vitalism), and sometimes seen as a sequence, with Deleuze
taking the problem of difference further, beyond language and humans.
Sometimes this is how Deleuze and Guattari present themselves in relation to deconstruction, and how Deleuze thinks about his own relationship to writers like Foucault (Deleuze 2006: 62). One way to read Deleuze
today is to see him as having picked up on a Spinozist tradition of politics
and Marxism that has been overshadowed by French Hegelianism and
that is being rethought today. But to state the relation and sequence this
way is to think at the level of the history of ideas, and to think that ideas
have a semi-autonomous history (which is itself a MarxistHegelian
notion). But what if ideas are expressive, and what if the DeleuzianSpinozist-materialist turn were an unfolding of new potentialities and
forces of life? I want to suggest that this is indeed the case and that the
vogue for a Deleuzian mode of politics is enabled by a positive sense of
occupation and a mode of politics that is less attuned to resistance; by the
same token I want to suggest that deconstruction was broadly focused on
the positivity of resistance in opposition to occupation.
Thinking about the shifting sense of occupation is not merely an
observation in the use of a word or what it means to occupy so much
as a different mode and style of political force. If occupation once figured
the imposition of illegitimate power in an otherwise democratic polity,
then it would make sense to question as Derrida does the supposed
purity and integrity of the putatively innocent democratic state. If, as is
increasingly the case, it is no longer a question of a state presenting itself
as democratic by excluding and abandoning a few, then one needs to
reconsider how concepts such as democracy have increasingly less force.
This is what I mean by referring to a new feudalism: rather than promoting the free and open market that accidentally leaves a few at the bottom,
it is now widely accepted that the few at the top will do all they can to
maintain wider and wider difference; the very concept of banks that are
too big to fail reinstalls a power that exists by fiat rather than right. A
few the 1%, who now flagrantly name and mark themselves as exceptional by means of bonuses and stately architecture (such as Manhattans
Trump Tower) have abandoned any pretension of the good polity. How
does political critique proceed when bourgeois liberalism is no longer

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an ideology that sanctifies laissez faire capitalism, and when capitalism is

no longer a general egalitarianism but operates as an all-inclusive, global
and crisis-ridden system that requires autocratic intervention and various states of emergency in order to save the few who are too big to fail?
I would suggest that we need to shift from a deconstruction of presence,
consciousness, autonomy and integrity (which would be required in
order to resist the lures of liberal individualism, or to resist the figure of
the integrated and bound political body), and move towards a positive
sense of occupation. How might one take up some point of disturbance
within an already disturbed, distributed and decentered political field
that is now flagrantly open to appropriation by an opportunistic and contingently autocratic 1%?
III
Deconstruction can be seen as bound up with the type of politics required
by the French resistance: a politics in which something like occupation
occurs a hegemonic power installs itself and produces an internal outside such that ones state and language are no longer ones own. (And this
problematic resistance continues with post-68 theorizations of how one
might be politically mobilized without appealing to some innocent or
natural outside, such as the worker, or the other. It also continues in
post-colonial theories of mimicry, irony or parody: disturb the system of
differences from within.) The politics of resistance in this sense is at once
oriented against imposed power from without, while being critical of any
posited innocence or freedom that would naturally resist occupation.
The Nazi occupation of France had a particularly profound effect on
intellectual life, but Jacques Derridas experience of occupation was even
more tortured. The problem of ones own identity and displacement
within ones own country and language were intensified by the fact that
Derrida lost his French citizenship as a youth under the Vichy regime.
From his own account this meant that Derrida was alienated from the
simple resistance to occupation. Those who considered themselves to
be purely French could regard the intrusion of Nazism as an external
evil, robbing them of the proper. For Derrida, there was an occupation
without occupation: the supposed interiority of ones own language and

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identity was already an intrusion of an outside. There is never anything

natural about citizenship for Derrida, but the experience of ones identity
as precarious occurs not only in events of explicit political occupation
(where one is overtaken by an other), but in modes where no occupation is required, for the very regime in which one lives and is a citizen
may suspend belonging, producing one as a foreigner in the same place
where one was once at home. The passage in which Derrida describes
occupation without occupation is worth quoting at length for its marking of three points: the way in which a mass becomes stateless; the way
in which this displacement occurs without one knowing, and without
one being spatially displaced; and the curious relationship this bears to
occupation, for it is the valiant notion of the French resistance against
occupation (or that a certain evil was deemed to be external) that Derrida
challenges. Displacement, non-identity and foreignness are internal, and
become forces for a life-long mourning:
As we know, citizenship does not define a cultural, linguistic, or, in general, historical participation. It does not cover
all these modes of belonging. But it is not some superficial or
superstructural predicate floating on the surface of experience.
Especially not when this citizenship is, through and
through, precarious, recent, threatened, and more artificial than
ever. That is my case; the at once typical and uncommon
situation of which I would like to speak. Especially not when
one has obtained this citizenship in the course of ones life,
which has perhaps happened to several Americans present at
this colloqium, but also, and above all, not when one has lost
it in the course of ones life, which has certainly not happened to
almost any American. And if one day some individual or other
has seen their citizenship itself withdrawn (which is more
than a passport, a green card, an eligibility or right to vote),
has that ever happened to a group as such? I am of course not
referring to some ethnic group seceding, liberating itself one
day, from another nation-state, or giving up one citizenship
in order to give itself another one in a newly instituted state.
There are too many examples of this mutation.

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No, I am speaking of a community group (a mass

assembling together tens or hundreds of thousands of persons, a supposedly ethnic or religious group that finds
itself one day deprived, as a group, of its citizenship by a state
that, with the brutality of a unilateral decision, withdraws it
without asking for their opinion, and without the said group
gaining back any other citizenship. No other.
Now I have experienced that. Along with others, I lost and
then gained back French citizenship. I lost it for years without having another. You see, not a single one. I did not ask for
anything. I hardly knew, at the time, that it had been taken
away from me, not, at any rate, in the legal and objective form
of knowledge in which I am explaining it here (for, alas, I got
to know it in another way). And then, one fine day, without, once again, my asking for anything, and still too young
to know it in a properly political way, I found the aforementioned citizenship again. The state, to which I never spoke,
had given it back to me. (Derrida 1998: 1516)
Resistance, for Derrida, names a certain French nationalist myth of
noble opposition to occupation; what needs to be thought, against this
innocence, is an occupation without occupation, or the way in which
without any physical or actual intrusion of an other there might nevertheless
be an expropriation of citizenship, and one that occurs without the grandeur of an event. Deconstruction therefore refuses the sense of resistance
that defines itself against occupation, and instead poses another resistance,
one that is internal and complicit, without innocence or purity. Rather
than resistance being a force that a body exerts on an intruding outside,
deconstruction worked with a constitutive and positively negative resistance. That is, rather than see the self as occupied from without by repressive forces, it is from the experience of resistance or opposition that one
imagines that there must have been a pure and present subject; it is after
the intrusion of otherness that one imagines an original subject. It follows that we might think of deconstructive politics as a war against the
myth of occupation as an oppression that comes from without; we are
constituted through resistance, but this resistance is against the impossible truth that there is nothing outside the text. It is a resistance to theory.

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Derrida will insist on a politics that does not yearn for some space
outside the limits of law, but that uses the logic of law to think a justice
that will always remain to come. Resistance, thought in terms of psychoanalysis, names the subjects own stifling of the truth: their symptom is
not an affliction from without but something taken on such that they can
imagine themselves suffering from an outside. If we accept constitutive
resistance then justice will not be what the other destroys by way of occupying my proper terrain of citizenship, for there is no proper, no justice
and no terrain of ones own. Resistance is first and foremost a resistance
to the very forces of non-presence, negativity and non-identity; these
differential forces, though precluding pure presence are nevertheless
capable of generating justice, if there is such a thing. Writing on Foucaults
attempt to (as Derrida sees it) find a historical space outside the rationalization and incarcerating logic of modernity, Derrida responds with a
perpetual threat that will always destroy the logic of opposition:
For, in principle, all these determinations are, for the historian, either presences or absences; as such, they thus exclude
haunting; they allow themselves to be located by means of
signs, one would almost say on a table of absences and presences; they come out of the logic of opposition, in this case,
the logic of inclusion or exclusion, of the alternative between
the inside and the outside, and so on. The perpetual threat,
that is, the shadow of haunting (and haunting is, like the
phantom or fiction of an Evil Genius, neither present nor
absent, neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside) does not challenge only one thing and another, the very
logic of exclusion or foreclosure, as well as the history that is
founded upon this logic and its alternatives. What is excluded
is, of course, never simply excluded, not by the cogito nor by
anything else, without this eventually returning and this
is what a certain psychoanalysis will have also helped us to
understand. (Derrida 1994b: 242)
For Derrida, then, psychoanalysis is both about internal resistance, or a
self that cannot confront its internal occupation, its own non-presence to
itself. For Paul de Man, certainly not speaking in psychoanalytic terms,

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resistance to theory is not about refusing to believe this or that claim or

argument; it is not like resistance to climate change or resistance to other
inconvenient truths. It is resistance to the untruth of truth: one imagines
that ones beliefs, attitudes, memories and narratives are faithful doubles
of the real world. Theory, for de Man, is the cold and ruthless stare one
directs at the inscriptions that compose ones world and ones innocence the truth being elsewhere but never assimilable, certainly not in
some graspable outside (de Man 1982). Theory is at once necessary and
impossible: the task of reading and thinking lies not in finding the proper foundation or ground of politics, but in a blank ungrounding. Theory
strives to see the world without the joys of meaning and ownness, even if
theory necessarily falls back into yet one more narrative of the proper. I
would suggest that de Mans concept of resistance to theory that there
is not some simple lapse that precludes us from confronting the misprision between the inscriptions we take to be ours as opposed to the world
that we take to be natural and there for representation allows us to grasp
deconstructions conception of politics at its most rigorous. If there is no
seamless or natural relation to the real, then political theory has as its task
a form of anti-foundationalism that emphasizes the impossibility of finding a space outside the contested field of differences; this impossibility
and undecidability is what we resist, and what we resist most notably in
myths that would posit evil as some external occupying power.
That is, far from the emphasis on resistance (or our necessary captivation by inscriptive systems) generating a political laissez faire and acquiescence to late capitalist abandonment of truth, it is our necessary resistance to truth (or the untruth of truth the truth that there is no truth)
that provides one way of thinking politics outside the mode of occupation. We should reverse the anti-theory notion that French thought
destroyed truth and left us with a world of amoral nihilism and relativism. Quite the contrary: today there is no shortage of truth. Fox News,
tabloids, MSNBC, the Tea Party, whats left of the left: all declare quite
shrilly that a certain path must be followed. And as Bruno Latour (2014)
has pointed out, we seem to have abandoned scientific doubt when it
comes to economists who tell us that we must bail the banks out now, and
not wait for further evidence. At the same time we seem so committed
to the idea of truth and verification that we do not act on evidence for

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climate change, because we are waiting for all the acts to come in. We suffer today not from doubt and relativism, but from a literalist notion
that there is a truth and that there is one system that grants us access to
the world: the new positivism of finance. So when Deleuze insists in his
books on cinema that we have stopped believing in the world, and when
(with Guattari) he describes capitalism as a dominance of cynicism, this
needs to be understood alongside the theory of the despotism of the
signifier: it is as though there is at one and the same time an abandonment of the distance between sign and world, and a simple acceptance
of the single system of signs that compose the shrill certainty of the
world as it is, capitalism as we know it in its flagrant just so. The value
of de Mans insistence on theory and Deleuze and Guattaris insistence
on minor politics is that rather than aim to disturb language from within,
one accepts the non-coincidence of linguistic systems with other strata,
and refuses the privilege accorded to any single system that would present itself as the code of all codes, the narrative of all narratives. This is not
simply another form of liberalism whereby the absence of ultimate truth
places us in a position of deliberation and ongoing communicative reflection: for there will always be some sort of appropriation of one strata
by another, and a laziness that resists the complex multiplicities that go
beyond any single polity. Resistance is constitutive; there will always be
some refusal of the blank stare of theory that abandons hope of grasping some innocent outside (de Man), always a resistance to immanence
as such that is not immanent to any transcendence (Deleuze). But there
are two ways of thinking radical immanence or non-transcendence. What
the absence of any privileged outside meant for the time of deconstruction in the 1980s and 1990s was that capitalism should not be opposed in
any simple way. There has always been techne and alienation. It is not the
case that we might step outside ideology and find the truth for the very
notion of an original truth that some sign system might grasp is ideology.
Resistance to the necessary distance of signs and the banality of inscription is ideology; that resistance is neither avoidable nor capable of being
reformed. Instead, all we have is a tireless war on all the modes of transcendence that might present themselves as good or benevolent outsides.
In response to this we might want to ask: was not the 2008 global
financial crisis precipitated precisely by just this abandonment of

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reference? But things are not so simple, for while it is the case that
futures, derivatives, hedge funds and the selling on of toxic assets enabled
an ungrounded and uncontrolled system that went into free fall, the
problem was neither unbridled exchange nor the absence of real value,
but some ongoing notion that exchange was grounded in assets and that
there would ultimately be a way of translating numbers back into material wealth (if there is such a thing). There is nothing at all valid in the
notion that post-structuralisms critique of representation plays a role in
nihilism, relativism and capitalist cynicism. On the contrary, it is still the
case that incontrovertible truths are asserted without any sense of the
impossibility of determination; we are now referring to corporations as
individuals, assuming that these entities are real, bounded and agential.
Indeed, the 2008 crisis was possible precisely because some myth of
reference precluded examination of an essentially virtual network: supposedly, at the base of it all, there were commodities, homes attached
to mortgages, speculation about buyers and sellers all real and material things. The problem lay in the notion that financial circulation was
ultimately grounded on things, or that financial speculation wasnt the
entirely fictional enterprise that it was. The very idea that banks operated
as some necessary structure that was so significant as to be too big to fail
did not come from a postmodern notion that reality is untethered, quite
the contrary.
What is required, then, is not some nave reaction that turns us back
to reality, and that expels deconstruction as a sign of the times of late
capital. Rather, the next question or problem after we accept anti-foundationalism, is how deterritorialized, groundless, unnatural, and open
exchange gets reterritorialized into some manufactured or hallucinated
center? How is that in all this free-floating speculation some bodies came
to be foundational, and eventually too big to fail? How did certain bodies, faces and persons maintain the prestige that enabled them, after the
2008 US election, to suspend social policies for emergency bail-outs, as
though crisis rendered certain forms of expertise more powerful? The
problem is not nihilism, decentering and lack of foundations and values;
it is the failure to render nihilism active, for it was the experience of crisis
and ungrounding that allowed for a seizing of autocratic authority and an
ongoing practice of disaster ethics: in an age of volatility and precarious

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life we are told we cannot afford to be too relativist, and need to turn
back to management and expertise. Should we really be thinking that in
a time of crisis we need to buoy up some sites of concentrated capital
in order to keep the rest of the field in play? Or, would it not be a question without any illusion of stepping outside of capitalism of exposing points of theft? When Deleuze and Guattari insist that the social field
begins with theft not exchange, they do not so much oppose capitalism as
they create an idea of powerfully destructive excessive capital. If life were
simply free exchange then there would be no basic stability, but if force is
originally stored, taken, harbored and then squandered, one site in the
field appears as powerful and even structural. It is not from scarcity that
political assemblages are formed, but from excess and theft: a body seizes
and stores force, and from that pooling of force an organized or deterritorialized reference point is constituted. Political life occurs as the repression of exchange, not because exchange is foundational but because radically unimpeded flows of exchange would destroy the relatively stable
points achieved by marking out quantities or properties as ones own:
desire begins not from a stable point that one might then establish as a
site of exchange, but from a seizing of force that establishes a stability
(territorialization), and that enables a system of exchange that in turn
is never fully free but always referred to a locus (deterritorialization).
One steals therefore one becomes. It is only by impeding an absolutely
deterritorialized flow that anything like a territory is assembled:
It is theft that prevents the gift and the countergift from entering into an exchangist relation. Desire knows nothing of
exchange, it knows only of theft and gift
Will it be said that, if desire knows nothing of exchange,
it is because exchange is desires unconscious? Will this be
explained by the exigencies of generalized exchange? But
what entitles one to declare that shares of debt are secondary
compared with a totality that is more real ? Yet exchange is
known, well known in the primitive socius-but as that which
must be exorcised, encasted, severely restricted, so that no
corresponding value can develop as an exchange value that
would introduce the nightmare of a commodity economy.
The primitive market operates through bargaining rather

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than by fixing an equivalent that would lead to a decoding of

flows and a collapse of the mode of inscription on the socius.
We are brought back to our point of departure: the fact that
exchange is inhibited and exorcised by no means attests to
its primary reality, but demonstrates on the contrary that the
essential process is not exchanging, but inscribing or marking.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 186)
We can think of the way plants store energy by way of photosynthesis,
with the whole human strata being possible because of the appropriation
of that energy. In the beginning is metabolism or the enhancement of one
body by the appropriation of energy of another. Bodies are distributed
according to the extent to which they can appropriate (and then squander) to the point of elevating themselves above the threshold of need. If
we accept this account of politics, concerned less with beliefs, consciousness, identity and rights and more with pure quantities (or intensities
that create quantities, for it is storing and harboring that enables the calculation and exchange mechanisms of money), then we might think less
of finding some outside of capital and instead think of the way in which
theft produces authority.
Is this not what the Occupy movement succeeded in part in achieving? Rather than the identity of friend and enemy, good and evil, or
inside and outside, it was a question of distribution and hoarding to the
point where shifts in quantity produced kinds we are now dealing with
percentages, not individuals. We need to reverse the notion that late
capitalism is calculative without morality, and instead say that exchange
and genuine calculation who has taken what is impeded by morality,
by wars on welfare and various other supposed threats to life and family. Again it is sanctimonious truth the truth of capitalism in its current
form as the only way that needs to be destroyed by a sense of simulation, inscription and a mode of theory that refuses such smug certainty.
Power has always been achieved by impeding exchange and establishing
a moral center, but the new feudalism that marks the present is closer to a
primal horde of flagrant appropriation and imposition of necessity than it
is to a falsely universalizing bourgeois township of self-interested traders.
In this respect, we need to think beyond deconstructions sense of
necessary occupation and resistance, but not because what we need is a

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good old-fashioned dose of truth and reality. Think of how futures and
hedging worked, or the ways in which speculation enabled persons who
were nothing more than agents of exchange (day traders, brokers); this
system of exchange was made possible only by way of the lure that there
was some ultimate reality or substance to what was being exchanged.
Ostensibly, hedge funds bet on future outcomes, just as mortgages are
originally debts attached to property, but are subsequently circulated and
repackaged. Money markets also function on the lure of substitution, or
that money is the sign of value. There is, in the world of unbridled finance
no shortage of realist fictions. The crisis was enabled precisely by what
de Man referred to far more broadly as aesthetic ideology: the notion
that the figures that captivate our attention are signs of an underlying and
amenable reality. One needs to criticize speculation not because it takes
its gaze off reality and starts to bet wildly on what has no substance, but
because it deploys a language (or tropology) of substance and reality.
What is really occurring is the creation of power by way of the illusion of
substance in the hands of a few who are stealing the practice of exchange.
On the surface the numbers being circulated in the years leading up to
the crisis were signs of peoples savings, houses and futures; but as pyramid and Ponzi schemes disclosed, there was no pyramid, no base that
was big enough to support the heights of financial fantasy.
IV
What does this mean for thinking about theory and politics today? First,
I would suggest that what Deleuzian or Deleuzo-Guattarian modes of
politics offer is an intensification, rather than reversal, of the positive
sense of resistance and occupation. Their use of the term desire is the
very opposite of the desires of consumers for products; desire is revolutionary directly because it is without anchor in identities or investments (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 113). What is resisted and repressed
is desire, and desire is not a quality so much as a quantity without quality:
Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have
been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything

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returns or recurs: States, nations, families. That is what makes

the ideology of capitalism a motley painting of everything
that has ever been believed. The real is not impossible; it is
simply more and more artificial. Marx termed the twofold
movement of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, and the
increase in the absolute quantity of surplus value, the law of
the counteracted tendency. As a corollary of this law, there is
the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows
on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 34)
To take up a space to occupy and then to do so in the name of a differential 1% versus 99% is to begin to destroy the field of political identities, interests and realities, and to do so by way of thinking intensities: at
what point does a differential produce an intolerable relation? Second,
this shift in inflection opens up a different way of thinking about capitalism: deconstruction would, strictly, not be able to posit some historical
outside to the system of capital. The notion of a proper relation to work,
the earth, nature or production, that would then be overtaken by some
external evil needs to be countered by thinking of internal occupation: to
speak, write, think, work, dream, desire and demand justice is already to
speak in a language that comes from elsewhere, that is other. For deconstruction this means that rather than trying to think of some point before
or outside capital, and rather than resist capital, one needs to think justice, democracy, hope and the future as that which disturbs all the forces
of resistance and occupation that preclude any pure outside.
By contrast with this critical and negative mode of deconstruction, Deleuze and Guattari think quite positively about what it is to be
occupied by the voice of an other, what it is to be invaded, overtaken,
by a voice not ones own. It is in their book on Kafka that they take the
same starting point of deconstruction signs are not signs of the world
but are positive creations of territories but generate a different line of
departure. Rather than accept the mournful distance of the destruction
of the dream of reference, they theorize a minor politics. Kafka, a Jew,
wrote in German and in doing so was a foreigner in his own tongue; far
from seeing this in terms of being internally occupied (having an identity
disorder), language becomes a force liberated from expression, identity

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and reference. A minor literature frees signification from the ideology of

the aesthetic: this is not the great voice or art that is expressive of the
people. In Kafka, it is both as though language appears as already oddly
inhuman, not ones own, and as not aligned with any tradition expressive
of mankind. The people are missing and the words and signs proliferate
less as claims or promises of an imagined future than as disturbances of
meaning. If minor literature breaks from the coherence of the canon and
is written not as the expression of a people but more as the marking out
of inscriptions that stake out differences that do not yet have sense or reference, then minor politics we might say could be something like a
scream, noise, mark or disturbance that is not yet expressive of a people,
nor even of a hoped for reality:
A minor literature doesnt come from a minor language; it is
rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any
case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of
deterritorialization. In this sense, Kafka marks the impasse
that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns
their literature into something impossible the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German,
the impossibility of writing otherwise. The impossibility of
not writing because national consciousness, uncertain or
oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature (The literary struggle has its real justification at the highest possible
levels). The impossibility of writing other than in German
is for the Prague Jews the feeling of an irreducible distance
from their primitive Czech territoriality. And the impossibility of writing in German is the deterritoralization of the
German population itself, an oppressive minority that speaks
a language cut off from the masses, like a paper language
or an artificial language; this is all the more true for the Jews
who are simultaneously a part of this minority and excluded
from it, like gypsies who have stolen a German child from
its crib. In short, Prague German is a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be

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compared in another context to what blacks in America today

are able to do with the English language.)
The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. In major literatures, in contrast, the
individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with
other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background; this is so much
the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically
indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become as one
in a large space. Minor literature is completely different; its
cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect
immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes
all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a
whole other story is vibrating within it. (Deleuze and Guattari
1986: 1617)
Thinking of minor politics and minor literature in this way might help us
enhance a new sense of resistance and of occupation that was the hallmark of the Occupy movement. First, if we accept that deconstruction
has put paid to any notion of innocence or purity outside capital (precisely because to speak is already to be operating within some already
constituted system of exchange and differences), then we can take one
step further by beginning with minor literature. Rather than accept that
one is always already alienated from ones own language, one writes in
the manner of an alien and alienates language from itself. Think of the
slogan of the 99%: part of the effectiveness of this rhetorical gesture was
that on the one hand it had no real referent (for the accuracy of the number did not answer to any constituted group at all, but was something
like a bet, as though simply declaring we are the 99% might gesture to
a people to come); on the other hand the grouping also performed a
certain event of non-identity not workers, not women, and certainly
not those who claimed to possess a grander demystifying knowledge that
would be other than the calculus of Wall Street. The group who occupied Wall Street were in no way representative of any 99%, but they were
installing themselves precisely in the pseudo-actual or quasi-actual site
of the illusion of capitalist reference. One of the main criticisms of the
movement was lack of direction, lack of coherence and a certain youthful

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opportunism, as though there had been a joyful decision just to make

some noise and situate oneself somewhere, with rationale and politics
being an afterthought.
And it is here that we have to take quite seriously what the concept of
minor politics offers, and how it helps us think of a new mode of resistance that emerged in the Occupy movements. How does one resist
a power without positing oneself as some more enlightened or more
authentic body whose very exclusion from power grants one a right and
capacity to speak critically? A certain Marxist conception of the worker
(whose labor will always grant them a genuine sense of the struggle of
existence and resistance of the real) is easily more authentic than the
Wall Street banker whose life consists only of numbers. Similarly a certain conception of feminism, ranging from eco-feminisms insistence on
womens proximity or association with nature to corporeal feminisms
critique of an abstract and quantifying modernity would seem to offer
us levers against the ravages of capital; but such motifs do so by way of a
fantasy that resistance comes from outside.
Occupy was not a workers movement, nor a womens movement;
it was by contrast a movement that can be thought of by way of a
Deleuzian conception of sexual difference, which follows on from
the conception of minor politics. As Deleuze and Guattari note in A
Thousand Plateaus one might accept, now and again, the force of majoritarian claims such as those that conceive women as a group who have
been deprived of a voice and who now wish to speak. But a minor politics
is one that begins with becoming-woman: what if there is no space outside
that might enable one to form a new identity? What if the term woman
were composed from the terrain one wishes to destabilize? What if one
were always already occupied by the forces from the outside such that
it would be more forceful to focus less on identity than anonymity, not
being of ones own kind, such that becoming-woman would be minor in
refusing authenticity, identity and propriety? One does not mourn, but
intensifies, identity disorder: mark ones political movement by installing
oneself in a space, making noise, then giving oneself a number (99%).
This war of becoming is a war of differentials, not peace opposed to war,
but a war on the rigidification of the field.

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In the beginning of the Occupy movement there was no body, not

even a mass, but simply a disturbance and a sense of occupation that
was spatial and virtual. The movement was in part performative: occupying Wall Street did not occur because of the fulfillment of a task, but
instead generated a series of tasks. Install oneself somewhere and then
that will constitute who one is, we are the people who occupy, rather than
we occupy because we are the people. And it is this rhetoric of a nonidentity achieved by taking up a space and a number that I would argue is
one of sexual difference: for an encounter is sexual when forces enter into
relation and composition and then generate rogue and unpredictable
(and certainly not productive, but often creative) outcomes. The sense
of occupation may once have been marked by a notion that who I am is
always already other; I am always already occupied, and this foreignness
to oneself is precisely what one most resists. But today there is another
sense of what it means to occupy: one does not resist or overthrow external or imposed power from some inside. To occupy is to produce a territory: not a territory of bodies who share a common ground. By occupying
common ground the multiple bodies of the Occupy movement rendered
that ground open, virtual, viral and creative. The spread of Occupy was
less by way of identity, belief or program and more by way of replication,
such that others started to Occupy in cities as far afield as Melbourne and
London, and then produced resistance not to some alien and external evil
but rather to a distribution and calculus that might be thought otherwise,
though not in any moment of purity, nor from some innocent outside.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans.
Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 2004. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R Lane. London: Continuum.
de Man, Paul. 1982. The Resistance to Theory. Yale French Studies 63: 320.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994a. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994b. To Do Justice to Freud. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas. Critical Inquiry 20 (2): 22766.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans.
Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2014. Beyond Belief: On the Forms of Knowledge Proper to
Religious Beings. Religion and Plurality of Knowledge (May 12). Groningen.
Accessed May 4, 2015 from: http://sggroningen.nl/en/evenement/beyond-belief
Protevi, John. 2013. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 5

Preoccupations
Verena Andermatt Conley

In the introduction to his translation of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris

A Thousand Plateaus, a breathtaking study of capitalism and schizophrenia in the shape of a mosaic, Brian Massumi declares that the philosophers urge those who contest current modes of governance to occupy the
street rather than to hold the fort. Taking to the street, the history of civil
disobedience tells us over and again, is risky business. Yet of late people
have taken to the street in many of the worlds urban centers.
Much has been said and written since 2011 about what now is often
simply called Occupy, from its possible origin in the Arab Spring (2010)
and the Indignants Movement in Spain (2011) to its visibility today as
an adventitious worldwide movement. Not only in the media but also in
unlikely places such as the academy, discussions have focused on Occupy
in the context of social injustices and economic inequality for which banks
and financial centers have become symbolic icons. In the United States,
Wall Street, a place name (as it had been in the sub-title of Melvilles
Bartleby the Scrivener, a tale anticipating much of what Occupy happens to be), functions as a synecdoche of an implacable barrier, the great
white wall of capital. The occupation of Wall Street (or rather, of the contiguous Zuccotti Park) represented the 99% of the underprivileged and
the unemployed in their fight and resistance against the 1% holding the
fort, and its outcroppings in and around the stock exchange.
Can it be asked if Occupy was a social and a political movement, bearing comparison with not a full-fledged revolution such as that of 1789
or 1917, but at the very least with a rebellion or a revolt in the manner

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of 1968, where the Sorbonne was occupied for days and nights on end,
the revolt having for a first time united students and workers? If so, and
if it has political mettle, what is its future? Or is it simply a ritual celebration that as Roland Barthes stated long before the fact in Mythologies
(1957), a collection of studies of popular culture depoliticizes itself
in the pleasure of its performance? Slavoj iek, a sympathetic critic,
warned the participants of Occupy of the risks of turning their movement into a narcissistic festival in place of a manifestation of dissensus. He
asked participants not to become enamored with themselves:
The danger [is] that [the protesters] will fall in love with
themselves, with the nice time they are having in the occupied places. Carnivals come cheap the true test of their
worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life
will be changed. We spend a pleasant moment together here.
But remember, carnivals are cheap. Of importance is the day
after, when people go on with their everyday lives. Thats the
moment to ask whether anything has changed? (iek 2012)
Other philosophers and cultural theorists have been less critical. Judith
Butler argues that Occupy is a bodily outcry and a demand for a physical
and mental space in which to live:
When bodies gather as they do to express their indignation
and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are
also making broader demands. They are demanding to be recognized and to be valued; they are exercising a right to appear
and to exercise freedom; they are calling for a livable life.
These values are presupposed by particular demands, but they
also demand a more fundamental restructuring of our socioeconomic and political order. (Butler 2011)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in turn, in a pamphlet entitled
Declaration write that as a movement of revolt Occupy is symptomatic
of dominant forms of subjectivity produced in the context of the current
social and political crisis. [They] engage four primary subjective figures
the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented all of
which are impoverished and their powers for social action are masked or
mystified (Hardt and Negri 2012). When iek cautions against slogans

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and Butler calls for a life worth living; or when Hardt and Negri urge
humans who are immobilized and infantilized by the media to go beyond
a threshold of revolt, we can read in filigree many of the Gilles Deleuze
and Flix Guattaris reflections on resistance. Often in similar terms, on
the heels of 1968, denouncing the state of the world under capitalism in a
phase of rampant and destructive expansion, they urged students, readers
and listeners to pry open spaces within its sphere that might enable the
beginnings of a greater reinvention and recomposition.
What are the links between the philosophers preoccupations and
those both of Occupy Wall Street and of Occupy in general? It is well
known that the two philosophers consider concepts to be both intellectual and political instruments carried in a toolbox. What can be drawn
from their toolbox, Deleuzes metaphor for the arsenal that can be put
to the use of rearranging inherited configurations of life? In addition to
practical concepts, what is the dynamism and force of conviction that we
can lift from their writings to help Occupy thrive? While iek, Butler
and especially Hardt and Negri (the most Deleuzian of the chosen list)
try to address todays problems, I propose first to go back to the philosophers pronouncements and then to see if and how they can be articulated with Occupy today.
The call to occupying the street rather than holding the fort runs
through Deleuze and Guattari both literally and metaphorically. The philosophers emphasize change through movement and flow, be it of people,
desire, affects or thought. Advocating an ever-unfinished, non-dialectical,
and non-hierarchical model of constructive dissent, they do away with
the Marxian notion of class structure to consider social conflict in terms
of mobile micro- and macro-cosms, ever-shifting lines, rhythms and harmonics. Already in 1975, in the French version of their first co-authored
book, Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize
the need to put a dominant idiom into a condition of variation. Never
stable, a dominant language, a common and unquestioned lingua franca
that generally controls subjectivity, is modulated where popular use of
dialects, vernaculars, verbal aberrations and multilingualism alters its
unilateral (and clearly monolingual) character. When used tactically,
minor languages instill into dominant rhythms cadences of stunning
variety (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 100110). In 1976, in Rhizome:

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Introduction (translated as On the Line (1983)), the philosophers write

about how the line, la ligne rather than the point or period that tends to
stop a harmonic flow can be drawn to chart new mappings for the ends
of mental and physical de- and reterritorialization. When they are drawing lines, diagrams or making maps, individual subjects or groups seek
to invent other ways of moving about and through an otherwise highly
regimented world. On the Line serves as the introduction to A Thousand
Plateaus, as I suggested, a mosaic, motley, or variegated work that
addresses the question of how to occupy a space through what Deleuze
and Guattari call rhizomatic or adventitious and multilateral thinking. If Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
had focused on exposing and abolishing a system that blocks all roads
to change, the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, of ostensibly more
pragmatic virtue, shows how rhizomatic thinking makes transformations
both imaginable and possible.
In this very spirit Deleuze and Guattari look to another literary
example in an idiom other than their own. Henry Jamess In the Cage
(roughly dated 1884), an aptly titled novella in which the protagonist,
engaged to a dull and rigid clerk finds how a simple variation in the
order of things happens to change her life (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
95100).1 At the beginning of the story, living within the narrow confines
of a routine, she moves on a molar, rigid line of segmentarity (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 195). An event takes place when a couple enters the
shop at which the clerk works to send enigmatic telegrams that put the
young clerk, almost unbeknownst to herself, on a molecular, supple
line of segmentation (196). She becomes preoccupied with what she has
heard and witnessed. The heroine eventually reaches a kind of abstract
line that ultimately she refuses either to draw or to follow. When she goes
back to her fianc she is no longer on the same line. Her life has been
altered. She has traced a line of flight that within her milieu takes her elsewhere or, as it were, that deterritorializes. A seemingly banal, everyday
event affects her and makes her occupy space differently. By extension,
what and how she becomes can be linked to Occupy whose members,
by virtue of a seemingly unimportant event, have a suddenly different
purchase on their surroundings. In their reading of In the Cage Deleuze
and Guattari distinguish three intermingling sorts of lines: a line of rigid

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segmentarity, another of molecular segmentarity and an abstract line, a

line of flight. The first line, they write, is one of words and interminable
conversations and the second of silences and allusions. However, when
the line of flight flashes the heroine jumps upon and rides with it. She
(and for the sympathetic reader, the ideal personage she would become)
can finally speak literally of anything without respect to a given position
or place. Implied from the philosophers reading is that, in a creatively
intransitive sense, cage or no cage, she truly occupies.
Elsewhere in A Thousand Plateaus ways of detaching oneself from a
territory by drawing a line or tracing a diagram (which is tantamount to
occupying) are discussed in a series of chapters or what, varying on the
idiolect of Gregory Bateson, they call plateaus. The latter are territories
held together by affective intensities made possible at a specific moment
in history from which, in the present (for the authors the aftermath of
1968), they think and write. Next to chapters on variations in language
and the tracing of lines and diagrams, the philosophers introduce a set of
plateaus that deal specifically with space. A gridded or striated city or
state space, they claim, is always riddled by another movement that continually smoothes it, that introduces play, that creates openings through
which one can move and think otherwise. They advocate the privileging
of nomos or open spaces over the closure of logos and/or reasoned discourse. In short, they urge people to occupy the street mentally or physically rather than hold the fort against an overarching order from outside
or above. From an event that took place in 1227, when what they call
the war machine appeared on the Asian Steppes, Deleuze and Guattari
endeavor to inflect the heavily organizational spaces of their own time
with others that they see marked by creative compositions and uncommon rhythms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 363). One hundred pages
later, they return to the same place, to the steppes, where they note: to
write is to resist and to think is to voyage in place (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 482). To think and to write mean to leave the habitual, repetitious,
rigid line of segmentarity while staying in place:
To think is to voyage what distinguishes the two kinds of
voyages is neither a measurable quantity of movement, nor
something that would be only in the mind, but the mode of
spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space

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(emphasis added). Voyage smoothly or in striation, and think

the same way But there are always passages from one to
the other, transformations of one within the other, reversals Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult,
uncertain becoming at that. It is not a question of returning
to preastronomical navigation, nor to the ancient nomads.
The confrontation between the smooth and the striated, the
passages, alternations and superpositions, are under way
today, running in the most varied directions. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 482)
Elsewhere, they link such transformation and opening of passages to
what they call the continual intermingling of affect, percept and concept,
or as Deleuze put it in a letter to Rda Bensmaia, new ways of feeling,
new ways of seeing and new ways of conceiving.2 Again, the three modes
are simultaneously circulating through one another.
Writing at a time of social and political turmoil arising simultaneously all over the world, from Algeria to Vietnam, from Cuba, Central
and Latin America to the civil rights movement in the United States, the
philosophers briefly sense a generalized becoming-minoritarian that
they are adamant has much to do with ways of distributing and occupying space, with putting into variation, or with deterritorializing through
drawing lines and crafting diagrams. Now, years later, it can be asked if
and how their philosophical pronouncements, which are never celebratory but, based as they are on the irruption of a sudden preoccupation,
resonate with Occupy. Has Occupy also put a dominant discourse into
variation? Has it led to the creation of new diagrams, the deterritorializing our sensibilities, and conceiving different and varied modes of
occupying space?
A response to the question can be broached through the events that
meshed with the writing of A Thousand Plateaus. The very real though
brief euphoria that Deleuze and Guattari felt around May 1968 and that
later inspired its sequel did not last (Dosse 2007: 20821; 297308).
Soon, what Guattari called the Winter Years came with a keenly felt
influx of rampant corporatism and economic globalization (Guattarri
1986). In strong contrast Paul Virilio looked upon 1968 dismissively,
calling it a simple rehearsal, a piece of play-acting, a kind of pseudo-event.

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Sympathetic and possibly in accord with Virilio, notably after the fall of
the Iron Curtain, Deleuze and Guattari did not join the chorus of those
praising the event as the triumph of liberalism. Without nostalgia or
despair, each in turn Guattari in 1989 and Deleuze 1990 denounced
the new state of the world (Dosse 2007: 4589). Deleuzes outlook
became bleak. At the end of Negotiations (1990), first in an interview
with Negri titled Control and Becoming and then in a short addendum,
entitled Postscript on Control Societies, he notes without nostalgia
that we have lost the world (Deleuze 1995: 16782). It has been taken
from us. No real resistance is possible when money, not affect, neither
variation nor pulsation, is the currency of life. Because it wafts in the
flow of capital, he speculates, even art, that had once produced singularities and made possible invention and creativity, can no longer be countenanced. Perhaps the only thing left is the opening of small vacuoles
from and within which to think otherwise. At the time of his suicide in
1995 Deleuze was rumored to have said that mentally and physically he
was finished.
In The Three Ecologies (1989), Guattari for his part decried the loss
of the subject and of human relations in an age that is in the grip of
infantilizing media in collusion with omnipotent corporate control of
the state. In the post-Fordist era, consumerism, he argued, transforms
humans into market samples and collectivities into molar aggregates. He
called for a reconstruction of the subject on his terms: by emphasizing
singularities, in the making of rhizomatic connections, and by advocating a collective solidarity. Building on an existential vocabulary, Guattari
notes the fragility of the subject as a for-itself opposed to the in-itself,
immobilized by debt and lobotomized by the media and its capacity
to change. Crucial for our purposes is that Guattari asserts on the one
hand that changes can occur autopoietically, unbeknownst to the subject,
before she or he even opens onto the environing world. In either case,
something suddenly affects the subject that leads to a preoccupation of
sorts, an event which produces a change in the individual or in the social
body. Even among large aggregates of given populations spontaneous
change and types of recomposition are possible. Singularities or groups
move about and across striated spaces under the impetus of a different
affect, without colliding head-on with the group or territory they are

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leaving. Guattari speaks of a gradual slippage and of soft subversions

(Guattari 2009). On the other hand, in a world reduced to systems of
economic, juridical, scientific signs, those who are in a position to affect
subjectivities educators, architects, urban planners, artists, media people, but also those in music, fashion or food need to show a sense of
responsibility in order to induce change in others. They drive a wedge
into a given state of things that will cleave and then lead to other mental
and social preoccupations from where, eventually, transformations can
be addressed. Preoccupations occur spontaneously at the same time that
those in a position to affect subjectivities are aware of their responsibility
of initiating change.
For Deleuze and Guattari, revolutions fail wherever they are anchored
in history. What is needed is a becoming-revolutionary of the people,
that is, a constant turning away from history and toward the future in
anticipation of other events. They privilege art (provided that its relation
with the world is not in collusion with capital and marketing), singularity
(which is plural insofar as it does not belong to individuals) and invention
(which is related to the force of an event). Militantism is important, but
it can only be temporary and cannot be reduced to slogans. In Guattaris
words, one has to be analytically militant. In The Three Ecologies, he
argues that singularities come together temporarily to militate for certain
short- or long-term objectives, such as the rights of women, of gays and of
the flora and fauna composing the environment. Guattari does not provide an economic strategy but focuses rather on the reinvention of the
subjects or, on effects of subjectivation to foment a change in thinking
and social exchange that will yield a more just but also a more enjoyable
world where, just as Judith Butler has it, life is worth living.
The philosopher makes it clear that ecology, a way of addressing and
governing ones oikos or the earth as habitat, bears at once mental, social
and natural components. Nature is not something to go back to (if it
ever has been), but something that must be considered carefully in terms
of the way it is occupied. In consort with Claude Lvi-Strauss he recognizes the impossibility of separating nature from culture. With the help
of Gregory Batesons Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) (that had been
a bible for the generation of 1968), he notes the importance of the feedback loop that can (as well as it cannot) assure change, alteration, and

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a dynamically corrective operation of the environment. Yet, as with the

social and built environment, natural environments must be dealt with
from todays conditions, where new and other dynamisms are at stake. To
be dealt with properly, Guattari argues, the environment requires another
sensibility and intelligence.3 Life, he claims, has always been at war with
nature. Defending himself against the accusation made by Franois
Dosse of being utopian, he writes elsewhere, and presciently (in view of
the ineffectiveness of todays governing institutions), that the conservatives, that is, those who insist on a return to an older, simpler way of living are those whose politics are regressively utopian.
With a distant memory of the sixties, a decade that saw a generalized becoming-minoritarian in the midst of many uprisings all over the
world, today a belief persists that a dynamics can be lifted from that era.
However, with further demographic explosions, a continued intensification of capitalism, the changes wrought by the electronic revolution,
and the very real and rapid depredations of the environment, our world
seems light years away from what he knew or envisaged. Already in 1983,
Guattari wrote that what is terrifying is our lack of collective imagination
in a world that has reached such a boiling point, our myopia before all
the molecular revolutions which keep pulling the rug out from under
us at an accelerated pace (Guattari 2009: 307). And this pace has accelerated over the last few decades with molecular revolutions in myriad areas.
How then can we use the philosophers toolbox while updating its implements that had been made perhaps for a slower world that, both thermally and figuratively, is now at boiling point? What kind of collective
imagination can we muster to tackle social, political and environmental problems?
A sense of an answer may be in the here-and-now. Glimpses of such
an updating of Deleuze and Guattaris dynamism have come, and continue to come, with Occupy. With popular uprisings, from the Arab
Spring and the Indignants in Spain to the recent mass protests in Greece,
Turkey, Brazil and again in Egypt in June 2013, new diagrams have been
charted, novel occupations of space essayed and worldwide demographic
shifts undertaken. The liberal euphoria of 1989 seems to be giving way to
another sensibility and, hopefully, a new form of intelligence that does
not simply speculate on the equivalence of material, natural and cultural

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goods in terms of the augmenting flow of capital.4 New and spontaneous

preoccupations have arisen among groups at the grassroots levels. Others,
engaged in fields pertaining to the creation of subjectivities educators,
urban planners, artists (including many media artists) have developed
a sense of social responsibility that makes preoccupations perceptible.
As iek warned the participants of Occupy Wall Street, to be sustained,
the movement has to go beyond self-congratulation. The movement has
to continue to resound as a compelling imperative, and as an aphorism
of action and not only a slogan or a piece of shorthand. It is incumbent
upon militants to be analytical and, in turn, to tactically revise and correct their positionings, and to shift the loci of their occupations. The revolution cannot, in Deleuze and Guattaris terms, become the object of its
own history. Its success depends on the becoming-revolutionary of the
people in order to be part of a short- and long-term transformation. As
they remind us, beginnings are difficult and outcomes uncertain. Yet, as
Samuel Beckett, through the ambulation of his personages show us, one
needs to go on.
In the 1960s, a generalized becoming-minoritarian was unified in
its fight against capitalism, as well as a dying colonialism and rights for
blacks, women and gays, as well as a return to nature. Today, issues are
more complicated and their scales are different. While Occupy can be
seen as a global movement in its struggle against economic and social
injustice, its virtue and its success are found in its variety. Mediatized,
securized and represented subjectivities are more easily found in certain
areas of the globe than in others. Occupy is aiming to reach the theoretical
plateau on which the philosophers moved about by urging local groups
to reterritorialize subjectivity and to advocate an active prying open of
myriad microspaces that can bring about new sensibilities, indeed, other
forms of intelligence that, in the words of Jacques Rancire, do not associate economics with politics and that, as Guattari and Butler noted,
make the earth habitable and life worth living. It is perhaps in the opening of micro-spaces that the movement has its most resounding success.
More delicately, however, when thinking from todays conditions, proponents of the movement understand and contend with infinite modes
of expansion and subtle smoothing of spaces that capitalism otherwise
continually coopts. Occupy must deploy a strategy of civility to engage

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long-term transformation. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the becomings that it seeks are difficult to obtain and their results always uncertain.
Over the last few years, a preoccupation, however faint, that reintroduces
idealism has become perceptible. In addition to the occupation of microspaces, it is in fields such as education, urbanism, architecture and the
environment that a shift has become noticeable among a newer generation seeking to redirect its thoughts and energies for the sake of social
justice, the rights of fauna and flora or simply put, for a life worth living
and a habitable world. These issues are often local and require coordination of analysis and careful exercise of militancy by which preoccupation becomes occupation occupation such that new affects generate
percepts and concepts.5 In this light, Occupys aphorism of action has to
be carried out in the accompaniment of an ongoing question on how to
occupy a space, that is, how to open and distribute it, and how to develop
a different sensibility and intelligence that, although situated within capitalism, runs against its grain. A different sensibility calls for ways of existing that both embrace singularity and collectivity and recognize both
transversality and interdependence. It thinks change from todays conditions, from the standpoint of a global scale and from that of locales in
their many-faceted and ever-changing conditions. A different intelligence
does not measure the state of things in terms of profit alone. Its condition
of difference seems at times difficult to generate in the present climate,
notwithstanding Occupys success that is yielding hints of what it can be.
As Deleuze and Guattari had argued, a kind of preoccupation that rises
spontaneously, autopoietically, is the pre-condition of the creative intelligence of singular and collective occupation. In addition, those who are
in a position to affect subjectivities share the responsibility of introducing a wedge in peoples thinking and open spaces for charting new lines
of inquiry.6
The question Occupy asks today is how to reorient social, economic
and artistic production for collective benefit. And for the two philosophers artistic did not mean a vaguely creative act (that, in fact, they
dismissed as vitamin induced, or bien vitamin). They noted then what
needs to be noted now: in a state of occupation in the economy in which
it is born, art has to do with invention and experimentation and not just
with testing and bigger markets. In the wake of Deleuze and Guattari and

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the artists they championed, we can say that Occupy aims to produce a
different type of singular and collective existence. Retrospection tells us
that they ask to create an oikos or habitat in dynamic process. The type of
occupation for which Deleuze and Guattari had virtually argued would
change awareness. To be preoccupied is to be aware of occupation before
occupation takes place. Preoccupation is a situated place at the level of
affect, a sense of something that stirs, turns into a percept and eventually
becomes a concept. As the philosophers had underscored over and again,
a new sensibility is fostered under the influence of other forms of intelligence; added to the intuitive sort of the artist, are those of scientists and
philosophers who too create new plateaus and new dynamisms.
Occupy thrives on creativity in an era of new modes of communication, but also on creatively passive militancy. It is hopefully part of a longterm projection that can be measured in terms of duration. Occupy began
with a sudden and contagious preoccupation, that has inspired a desire to
occupy space otherwise. Like the philosophers of 1968 before them and
with their tools refashioned for use in the twenty-first century, occupiers of mettle are those who rethink and refashion space by means of new
distributions and redistributions: who value nomos against logos; who,
refusing refuge in the fort, circulate in both real and electronic streets.
Occupation always begins with an event, a rupture, a sudden surge of
affect. It begins with preoccupation.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Trans. and ed. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill
and Wang.
Butler, Judith. 2011. Precarity, Embodiment and the Politics of Public Space. Tidal
(December 12). Accessed January 1, 2013 from: http://occupytheory.org/
Tidal_7.html
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations 19721990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1983a. On the Line. Trans. John Johnston. New
York: Semiotext(e).

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Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1983b. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1986. Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature. Trans.
Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Doherty, Gareth and Moshen Mostafavi (Eds). 2010. Ecological Urbanism. Baden:
Editions Mller.
Dosse, Franois. 2007. Gilles Deleuze et Flix Guattari: Biographie croise. Paris:
ditions La Dcouverte.
Guattari, Flix. 1986. Les annes dhiver, 19801985. Paris: Barrault.
Guattari, Flix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London:
Athlone.
Guattari, Flix. 2009. Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 19771985. Ed. Sylvre
Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Flix. 2012. Un amour dUiq. Ouvrage dirig par Silvia Maglioni and
Graeme Tomson; avec la collaboration dIsabelle Mangou. Paris: ditions
Amsterdam.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2013. Declaration. Jacobin Magazine. Accessed
May 4, 2015 from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/05/take-up-the-baton/
Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Khatibi, Kate, Margaret Killjoy and Mike McGuire. 2012. We Are Many, Reflections on
Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. Oakland: AK Press.
iek, Slavoj. 2012. Occupy Wall Street: What is to be Done Next?. The Guardian.
Accessed May 5, 2015 from: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/
cifamerica/2012/apr/24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next

Notes
1.

In the Cage is included in MD Zabel (Ed.), Henry James: Eight Tales from
the Major Phase (New York: Norton, 1969). Deleuze and Guattari make little
mention of the cage as a prison, composed of crisscrossed wires, in which
the female is traditionally (and iconically) confined. One set of lines is thus
opposed to that of another, the heroines that crosses the barrier.

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171

2.

Footnote letter to Rda Bensmaia.

3.

Massive technological interventions alone, Guattari speculated, will alter

the environment for the better, including worldwide installations of oxygenproducing space stations. He traced a line of reflection between science and
fiction, and he even wrote a film script, Un amour dUiq (Guatarri 2012). In
their introduction to his posthumous publication, Uiq, Un cinma de linfra
quark, the editors, Sylvia Maglioni and Graeme Tomson, write that Guattari
cherished Ridley Scotts film Bladerunner, especially the scene in which
two replicants, Roy and Pris, hide in the apartment of a genetic engineer,
JF Sebastian. Guattari is said to have seen in this scene a kind of Spinozist
drifting of their intelligence and a desire to transform their life into a field of
experimentation.

4.

In Spaces of Hope, David Harvey (2000) could be in fact the geographer of

vacuoles that in their later writings Deleuze and Guattari were advocating.

5.

If after what was perceived as the Arab Spring and the protests in Spain
and Greece, the widespread and sudden success of Occupy suggested the
beginning of another worldwide wave of protest as in the nineteen-sixties, the
movement has, for the time being, often been more immediately successful at
the local levels. For example, in Occupy Utica, Occupying a Small Rustbelt
City, the authors show how for reason of its precise, concrete and attainable
demands that include local school programs, extension of social services (of
which a psychiatric clinic would be a part) and even the organization of a May
parade in honor of labor, Occupy was successful and produced change. The
members involved realized the importance of moving past the celebratory
moment of occupation and toward an active occupying of a space (Khatib,
Killjoy and McGuire 2012, cited in Le Monde diplomatique, January 2013).

6.

In The Third Ecology, in Ecological Urbanism, (Doherty and Mostafavi

2010), Sam Kwinter argues that the sixties were not all that bad even if it is
now fashionable to say so. Deleuze and Guattari did recognize the decade
as important when people were briefly animated by a desire to militate for
social justice, the lowering of production and a more just distribution of
the renewable wealth the world can provide. They had a sensibility that
acknowledged beauty in the nature of things.

Chapter 6

Minor Politics, Territory, and Occupy

Nicholas Thoburn

This chapter is the amended text of a talk given at Occupy Londons

School of Ideas as part of a workshop called Deleuze and Guattari and
Occupy, February 25, 2012.1 A little context may be instructive. Having
moved from the Bank of Ideas in an occupied UBS office, the School of
Ideas was situated in a spacious and attractive school building that had
been left vacant for three years prior to its occupation. Two days after this
workshop the School of Ideas was evicted in a coordinated move with the
eviction of the main Occupy London camp at St Pauls Cathedral (at over
four months, the worlds longest running of the 750 camps that sprung
up in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish indignados, and the
Arab Spring).2 Upon eviction, the School of Ideas was immediately bulldozed a fitting emblem of the wanton destruction that characterizes the
current round of neoliberal restructuring and public service cuts.
Westminster local authority, just down the road from the School of
Ideas, encapsulated the boorish swagger of the new culture in its promotion of the cuts to Housing Benefit: To live in Westminster is a privilege,
not a right (Westminster Council press officer quoted in Gentleman
2012). Inner London is indeed to be the class-cleansed home of the privileged, a middle class enclave serviced by a newly suburbanized and ever
more precarious working class Westminsters own figures project that
17% of primary school pupils could be forced by the cuts to move out of
the borough. Meanwhile, at the other pole, the 2012 millionaires budget
cut taxation for the rich those on incomes of 1m will benefit annually
to the tune of 42,500.3 No wonder recent years have seen the police and

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173

law courts shift up a gear in the discipline, punishment, and brutalization of student demonstrators, anti-cuts activists, and the young people
involved in the 2011 riots a move undoubtedly driven by concern that
the normalization of this grotesque inequality cant hold indefinitely.
In repurposing the vacant UBS office and abandoned school, Occupy
London spun such critical threads as these through neoliberalism, cuts,
housing, and the city, and did so in ways both analytical and practical.
But the Bank then School of Ideas also had a distinct pedagogical dimension. In Chile, California, Britain, and elsewhere, direct action against
neoliberal education policy has been a leading edge of the current cycle
of struggles. These education struggles have been largely defensive, fighting for the last remnants of a model of liberal education that is far from
perfect, albeit that it is vastly superior to the emerging neoliberal model
of debt-financed vocationalism. But the composition of this struggle
has also been characterized by new critical knowledges and solidarities,
as funding cuts in tertiary and higher education, creeping privatization
of educational institutions, student debt, the casualization of academic
labor, and graduate unemployment have drawn together a diverse range
of actors that have interrogated the forms, functions, and possibilities
of education at a new level of intensity. The School of Ideas, like other
autonomous educational endeavours, was interlaced with these developments, as participants in various struggles cycled through the building
and shaped it in their own ways. But it was also something that stood
up on its own, to make use of an expression I discuss below. Equal
parts co-learning school, workshop, community center, organizational
base, public interface, and home, one might say that the School of Ideas
amplified (not isolated) the critical intellectual function and culture of
Occupy London, and it was in that context that a sizeable group gathered
on a bright winters morning to discuss Deleuze, Guattari and the politics of Occupy.
Minor Politics
With the UK government itching to criminalize squatting, its a real pleasure to be speaking in a building that is undergoing public repossession,
so Id like to thank Andrew Conio for organizing this workshop and the

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School of Ideas for hosting us.4 What I want to do in this talk is work
through three of Deleuze and Guattaris concepts that are helpful in
thinking about Occupy. What do I mean by helpful? My aim is deliberately not to try and explain Occupy, to sew it up in a theory that for
Deleuze would be to negate what is inventive in a movement, but also to
lose the inventive quality of theory, making it merely a representation of a
state of affairs. Instead my approach will be to use theory to reflect upon
certain themes or problems in Occupy, looking at how these problems
can be approached with Deleuzian concepts in a way that may help shed
light upon them and aid their further development. Its a recursive relation, for reflection upon Occupys themes or problems should also help
extend Deleuzian concepts, lending them a contemporary vitality.
Given that this workshop is concerned in equal measure to bring
Deleuze and Guattaris concepts into relation with Occupy and to offer
an introduction to Deleuze and Guattari as political thinkers, Im going
to try and strike a balance between concept and Occupy, leaving space for
us to expand upon the points I make about Occupy in the discussion. The
concepts and problems that I address in turn are: minor politics and the
99%; territory, expression, and occupation; and fabulation and agency.
I will start with minor politics and fold in some comments about
the 99% though bear with me, the relation may not at first be apparent.
Running throughout Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy is a notion that
politics arises not in the fullness of an identity a nation, a people, a collective subject but, rather, in cramped spaces, choked passages, and
impossible positions; on the condition, that is, that the people are missing (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 1516; Deleuze 1989: 216; Deleuze
1999: 133). To understand how this anti-identitarian formulation works,
we need to consider their concepts of the majoritarian and minoritarian.
As Deleuze and Guattari have it, majority describes a system of identities that are constituted and nurtured by social relations to the extent
that the social milieu serv[es] as a mere environment or a background
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17). The minoritarian condition, on the
other hand, is one where social relations no longer facilitate coherent identity, for they are experienced as riven with competing imperatives and constraints. As such, the social ceases to be mere background
and floods individual experience, as life becomes a tangle of limits or

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impossibilities lets say, the experience of poverty, precarity, debt, racism, but also the spatial arrangements of the city, the gendered divisions
of labor, the partitions of public and private, dominant linguistic forms,
in their myriad combinations in each particularity. It is a condition that
forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics, for
without an autonomous identity, even the most personal, individual situation is always already comprised of social relations. And vice versa: this
immanent relation to the social is not a flattening of particularity, quite
the contrary. For the mesh of complex and contradictory social relations
in every particularity is such that [t]he individual concern thus becomes
all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other
story is vibrating within it (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17). Particularity,
then, is constituted by and interlaced with social relations, and it is on
this condition, not some kind of minority identity, that minor politics is
founded. So, what Deleuze and Guattari call major or molar politics
expresses and constitutes identities that are nurtured and facilitated by a
social environment, whereas minor politics is a breach with such identities, when the social environment is experienced as constraint, as perception is opened to what is intolerable in social relations (Thoburn 2003).
Deleuze uses an appealing image to convey a sense of this minor condition. He says that to be on the Right is to perceive the world starting
with identity, with self and family, and to move outward in concentric circles, to friends, city, nation, continent, world, with diminishing affective
investment in each circle, and with an abiding sense that the center needs
defending against the periphery. On the contrary, to be on the Left is to
start ones perception on the periphery and to move inwards. It requires
not the bolstering of the center, but an appreciation that the center is
interlaced with the periphery, a process that undoes the distance between
the two (Deleuze and Parnet 2012).
It is clear thus far that the minoritarian is a structural condition. And it
is one that is very much entwined with developments in global capitalism.
For the imperative of capital to set and overcome limits (an appreciation
of which is the basis of Deleuze and Guattaris Marxism)5 has produced
an ever more fragmented, variegated, and mutable patchwork of unequal
exchange, exploitation, and poverty, where the identity structures of
Fordism no longer hold and peripheral zones of underdevelopment

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become constitutive features of the center. Ours, as they say in 1980, is

becoming the age of minorities (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 469).
But, if structural, the minoritarian is also something that is actively
affirmed, constituted as a politics through a certain willed poverty a
persistent deferral of subjective plenitude that forces ever-new critical
engagement with social relations such that, as Deleuze and Guattari
quote Kafka, one strives to see [the boundary] before it is there, and
often sees this limiting boundary everywhere (Deleuze and Guattari
1986: 19, 17). And here we encounter a second aspect of Deleuze and
Guattaris relation to Marx. For the minoritarian is framed as the contemporary condition of the proletariat, provided that we understand the proletariat, with Marx, not as a substantial subject but as the immanent critique of capital, and, hence, of itself, insofar as the working class is itself a
functional product of capital, the subjectivity of labor:
The power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its
universal consciousness in the proletariat. But as long as the
working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by a
theoretically conquered State, it appears only as capital, a part
of capital (variable capital), and does not leave the plan(e) of
capital. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 472)
What does all this mean in practice? Politics can no longer be a question
of self-expression, of the unfurling of a subjectivity or the self-assertion
of a people, because in this formulation there is no identity to unfurl.
Instead, minor politics is the critical engagement with the social relations
that traverse each particularity, the relations through which life is experienced as cramped and intolerable. By social relations I mean the whole
gamut of economic structures, urban architectures, gendered divisions of
labor, personal and sovereign debt, national borders, housing, policing,
workfare whatever combination it might be in any particular situation.
And there is an important propulsive or motive aspect to this formulation. For, rather than allow the solidification of particular political and
cultural routes, forms or habits, the active deferral of identity works as
a mechanism to induce continuous experimentation, drawing thought
and practice back into a field of problematization, where contestation,
argument, and engagement with social relations ever arises from the

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experience of cramped space. The constitutive sociality of this incessant

bustle dictates that there can be no easy demarcation between conceptual production, personal style, concrete intervention, tactical development, or geopolitical events, and there is plenty of space for polemic
(Kafka 1999: 148) it is a vital environment well expressed in Kafkas
seductive description of minor literature:
What in great [or major] literature goes on down below,
constituting a not indispensable cellar of the structure, here
takes place in the full light of day, what is there a matter of
passing interest for a few, here absorbs everyone no less than
as a matter of life and death. (Kafka, quoted in Deleuze and
Guattari 1986: 17)
The Grid of the 99%
What has this account of minor politics got to do with Occupy? I want
to consider that question through the theme or problem expressed in the
Occupy slogan: We are the 99%. It is a complex problem with competing formulations, some of which articulate a troubling tendency toward
identity.6 But it also contains progressive political content, which is my
point of focus here. First, We are the 99% is an assertion that the vast
majority of the worlds population are exploited by and for the wealth
of a small minority. It names, in other words, a relationship of exploitation and inequality. The intervention of minor politics here would be to
follow those in Occupy who push for an understanding of this formulation of inequality and exploitation as an intrinsic feature of capitalism.
Framed in this way, inequality and exploitation signify not so much the
control of one group, the 99%, by another, the 1%, nor even the distribution
of wealth, but the very form that life takes in such a system, where the we
(as well, indeed, as the 1%) is wholly a product of the social relations of
that system, its political potential lying not in asserting its collective identity, but in perceiving and challenging its intolerable conditions. Second,
in naming this inequality and exploitation, We are the 99% simultaneously designates a breach with such social relations, or pushes for such a
breach. Let me stress again that in neither aspect does the slogan name a

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substantial identity; rather, it at once names and cuts the social relations of
exploitation, among those who feel cramped by these relations, feel their
intolerable pressure.
This naming and breach in capital is of course very general, without
immediate purchase on concrete particularities. And here lies the risk
of a tendency toward identity, as the generality is mistaken as naming
a coherent group of people, a political subject. But We are the 99% is,
rather, something like a formula or, to use a term with more spatial connotations, a grid. It lays out the abstract principle that can be taken up
and extended by any person or collective that would embody or express
it in their concrete experience; indeed, it is an abstract principle that only
has any meaning or purchase insofar as it is expressed in particular circumstances. In order to see how this grid functions, I want to compare
it to one that Occupy is more or less directly opposed to, the grid of parliamentary democracy. Parliamentary democracy is, for Deleuze, a grid
laid out across social space that seduces and channels political activity
through its specific forms and structures:
Elections are not a particular locale, nor a particular day in
the calendar. They are more like a grid that affects the way we
understand and perceive things. Everything is mapped back
on this grid and gets warped as a result. (Deleuze 2007: 143)
Politics in this way gets warped, as he puts it, because everything is
reduced to and formatted by the status quo, to the perpetuation of that
which gave rise to politics in the first place. A fundamental aspect of this
warping is the exclusion of problems of inequality and exploitation from
the realms of political interrogation. This was of course Marxs insight,7
but the condition is currently so acute that it has widespread, even popular recognition, as Greece and Italy have unelected technocrats imposed
on the populace to force through hitherto unknown assaults on living
standards, as the ConDems slice up the National Health Service while
claiming that it matters not one jot whether it is run by the state or private capital.8 This is why Occupys much remarked upon refusal to make
demands is so important and so much a product of our times. A demand
is a mechanism of seduction into the grid of democratic politics, a means

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179

of channelling the political breach with capital right back into the institutions that perpetuate it.
In contrast, the grid that is constituted by the slogan We are the
99% is very different. Rather than a mechanism of seduction into the
status quo, it is a means of multiplying points of antagonism, or, in more
Deleuzian terms, it extends the process of perceiving the intolerable and
politicizing social relations. As I said, this does not occur in general, but
from peoples concrete and situated experience it is a variegated field,
where the points of problematization are housing repossession, the laying waste of public services, privatization of common resources, debt,
police violence, workfare, and so on, and the tactics range from occupying social space, through the Oakland general strike, to direct actions
against eviction from foreclosed housing, non-payment of debt, the
hacking activities of Anonymous, or public repossessions as we have in
this building. Put another way, the grid is a catalyst across the social, not
an aggregating body extending ever-outwards from Zuccotti Park but a
zigzag, a discontinuous and emergent process. Again, its not a catalyst
because people come to recognize themselves in it as an identity even
a collective identity but because they come to embody and express its
abstract problematic in concrete circumstances.
Before moving on I want to directly address two points that are
implicit in what Ive said so far. First, it is not infrequently said by those
involved in Occupy that it in some sense is creating the new world in the
shell of old; that practices of collective decision, direct action, cooperation and care, global association, and so on, are a kind of communism in
miniature. Certainly, all of these collective practices are crucial to understanding the unfurling of Occupy, to its effectivity and affective consistency, to the complex pleasures and pains of being a part of it. But from a
minor political perspective, the risk with this formulation is that Occupy
turn inwards, valorizing its own cultural forms at the expense of selfproblematization and an ever-outward engagement in social relations.
Occupys vitality lies in its extension and intensification of the problematic of the 99% through an open set of sociopolitical sites and events,
in what is of course a highly segmented and stratified terrain (where, to
return to my earlier point, the fact of segmentation negates any notion
that the we of the 99% could designate a coherent subjectivity). For it is

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in and through these sites and events that the worlds population exists,
and from which an unknown set of possible futures will emerge. To identify those futures with the cultural forms discovered in Occupy camps
would be nave at the least, and risks a conservative reduction of the
movements minor political potential, a reduction to identity.
Second, refusing to make demands is not a refusal to speak to formulate and express our anger, hopes, and desires, to name the particular problems of which we are concerned and to seek practical effects.
On the contrary, to work through the problems of Occupy requires an
incessant production of critical knowledge and practice, knowledge and
practice that needs to be circulated in the extension and development of
these problems. The point is that this critical production is immanent to
Occupy, or to the social relations that Occupy politicizes, not a pleading
for recognition from an external power or a transposition of its problems
into the grid of parliamentary democracy. We have seen Occupy developing slogans and concrete decisions that move toward defining what the
movement wants, as part of reflection on how it may get it and this of
course is encouraging. But such formulations need to have a minor political efficiency, as Guattari has it, they must be adequate to the specific
and mutating problems of Occupy and its world, not reproduce themselves at the level of clich: either a minor language connects to minor
issues [which should not be taken to mean small or exclusively local
issues], producing particular results, or it remains isolated, vegetates,
turns back on itself and produces nothing (Guattari 1995: 37). All this
knowledge production will involve critique, contestation, and the development of divergent positions. Deleuze and Guattari are certainly interested in the way group consistencies emerge from distributed decision
lets say, the process of consensus in Occupys General Assemblies
but a good problem is not best extended in thought and practice by
pretending that we all agree: The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 6).

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Territory and Expression

I will move now to my second main concept and problem on this and
my third point I will be more concise. I want to look at an aspect of the
tactic of occupation, specifically the tent, and explore their relation to
Deleuze and Guattaris concepts of territory and expression.
The tent in an Occupy camp is first of all a practical object. It enables
space to be taken and occupied for a certain duration. In this respect it
has a family resemblance to the tripod as was used by Reclaim the Streets
in the 1990s, an object that worked at once to cut the flow of traffic and
act as a catalyst in the occupation of a road and the emergence of a street
party. In Deleuzian terms, both tent and tripod play a part in deterritorializing the space in which they operate that is, in undoing the patterns
of behavior, laws, sensory structures, and economic forms that determine
that space as a road, stage for commerce and governance, or municipal
park. But if the tent and tripod deterritorialize in this way, they simultaneously generate a new territory, they reterritorialize into an Occupy
camp or a street party.
To construct such a territory is of course difficult. It requires considerable knowledge of the territory that is to be undone: the governing legal situation, movements of traffic, an intuition about likely police
tactics, potential solidarities and enmities of the locale, and so on. The
constructed territory is thus a finely balanced constellation and can be
easily botched. Things in London might have been different, for example,
if Paternoster Square hadnt been barred and Occupy had not instead
ended up on land owned by the Church.
But lets turn to consider the characteristics of Occupys territory.
Deleuze and Guattari make a rather intriguing argument that the construction of territory goes hand in hand with art, that art is a question
of home or habitat: Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the
animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house. Such territory
is functional, of course, but it is simultaneously sensory and expressive,
that is, artful: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 183). These tangled aspects of habitat and expression

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are apparent, for example, in the art of the Bowerbird, whose courtship
rituals involve the production of elaborate decorated structures.
What are the components of this constructed territory? Well, they
are drawn from the environment, from existent materials in the case of
the Bowerbird, twigs, berries, bottle-tops but they are also qualities and
forms that emerge in the process of construction:
This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already art, not
only in the treatment of external materials but in the bodys
postures and colours, in the songs and cries that mark out
the territory. It is an outpouring of features, colours, and
sounds that are inseparable insofar as they become expressive.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 184)
The St Pauls occupation is very much this kind of constructed territory.
It comprises practical materials, the tent of course, items of furniture,
cooking equipment but also placards and signs, books, newspapers,
drums, assemblies, hand signals, the peoples mic, photographic images,
livestreams, YouTube clips, the OccupyLSX website and Twitter feed,
and so on. My point is not to proclaim that Occupy is art exactly, but to
suggest that alongside the practical tactics of occupation, the construction of territory through these functional components also includes an
expressive, sensory quality that becomes an inseparable aspect of the occupation.9 This is one explanation, for instance, of the production of newspapers at the Occupy camps, when online production and distribution is
clearly more practicable. As well as being an object of news, discussion,
and practical politics, the newspaper in this regard is also a bloc of sensation, an aesthetic expression of Occupy.
Tent as Monument
You might ask, Whats the relation between this sensory or expressive
quality of Occupy and its meaning or explicit politics? For Deleuze and
Guattari the two are different modalities of composition that come into a
mutually sustaining encounter. They sometimes use a surprising word for
these works of art or works of territory they call them monuments:

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the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is

a bloc of present sensations that owe their preservation only
to themselves and that provide the event with the compound that
celebrates it. The monuments action is not memory but fabulation [It] confides to the ear of the future the persistent
sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed
suffering of men and women, their recreated protestations,
their constantly resumed struggle. (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 1678, 1767; emphasis added)
So, the monument, the bloc of sensation, celebrates the event of which it
is a part. In our case, it celebrates the suffering and struggle that is named
and enacted by the slogan or grid of the 99%.
I have mentioned the range of artefacts that constitute the work of
territory, the monument, but the tent is a special case. It is of course a
habitation, thats what distinguishes it from the tripod I mentioned earlier. As habitation it has great tactical value in the endurance of Occupy
camps, even through the winter. But it also comes with particular sensory associations or expressive qualities. A tent pitched in the inner city
conveys something of the fragility of life, the precariousness of existence
bare life, if you will, an impersonal quality of all life. And this impersonal, precarious life is filtered in our time through the specific condition
of homelessness, as soaring rents, mortgage foreclosures, evictions, benefit and wage cuts, debt, and unemployment tip the home into a state of
crisis. Indeed, as were seeing with the rise of tent cities in the US and
elsewhere, the tent has become a very real habitation for a considerable
volume of displaced people, a feature of Occupy camps themselves: a
part of the homeless has become Occupy London, and a part of Occupy
London has become the homeless.10
This quality of life fragile, impersonal, damaged is central to the
tent as monument, lifting suffering to the level of aesthetic expression without losing any of its struggle. Even in its expression of suffering, then, the tent is no abject object. And it also conveys a rather joyous
quality of mobility. At risk of playing to a clich, it is the dwelling of the
nomad so dear to Deleuze and Guattari, where dwelling is part of an itinerant process, tied not to land but subordinated to the journey the production of a movable and moving ground through pitching ones tent

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(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 105).11 With the tent, then, we see something of the tactical or practical aspect of Occupy interlaced with its sensory or expressive quality: a tactic, and a sensory bloc both, for Deleuze
and Guattari, are constitutive of its territorial form.
The nomadic tent this production of a movable and moving ground
orients our attention to a final aspect of the territorial form of Occupy.
In constituting its territory, Occupy needs to remain open to a strong
degree of deterritorialization of its own. Indeed, the relation should be
reversed Occupys reterritorializations need to play only a secondary
role to the onward and open process of deterritorialization if it is not to
become blocked, bogged down, identified in its new territory (Deleuze
and Guattari 1988: 508). Deterritorialization in this way lends an evental
quality to a social formation, the ungraspable and often highly seductive
character of a formation whose directions remain unmapped, indeterminable, full, as Deleuze has it, of virtuality. But what does deterritorialization mean in more practical terms? You can think of deterritorialization here as the spatial dimension of that minor political opening to the
social that I began with, the process of warding off identity and problematizing social relations. It is a central problem of Occupy, as well expressed
in one editorial of The Occupied Times:
[The eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park] triggered a period of self-examination about how the Occupy
movement might best move forward beyond its signature
tents and into communities, enacting the movements core
message through practical action rather than symbolism.
It is a journey that has seen American occupiers leave tents
behind in favour of defending the homes of those about
to be foreclosed Thanks to equal measures of adroitness
and serendipity, Occupy Londons initial encampment at St
Pauls Churchyard has now far outlived Zuccotti Park in duration It would be a bitter irony and a failure of enormous
proportions if we allowed our comparative security to stop
us seeing some of our more distinctive tactics for what they
are: a tool to be employed only for as long as they remain
useful. Useful tactics generate change. They inspire others

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to act. To do that we must look outwards. (The Occupied

Times 2012: 2)
This process of deterritorialization concerns not only the dynamics of the
one territory, but also the relation or reverberation with other territories
or social formations. The obvious example is the relation with St Pauls
itself. Theres a clear sense in which Occupy subjected St Pauls to a force
of deterritorialization, Occupys minor monument undoing at the borders Wrens rather more major monument and the Churchs structures
of authority. Hence we witnessed the resignation of the canon chancellor, Giles Fraser, and Occupys forcing of the Church to reflect upon the
politics of Christianity and its relation to the citys banks. In turn, this
strange reverberation between Occupy and St Pauls had some effect on
the territory of the popular imagination, if we can call it that, even on its
dominant media representation. The obvious hypocrisy of the Church in
its initial dealings with Occupy seemed to lift and project the image of
Occupy in the popular imagination, lending it a degree of popular support that it may not have had if it had been in a straight face off with bankers and police (for despite all that we have witnessed since 2008, when
the lines are drawn between police and resistance in this way, common
sense, ever re-charged by news media, unfortunately still tends to prostrate itself to the truths of authority).
There are of course other points and possibilities of reverberation:
other Occupy camps, the hacker activities of Anonymous, precarious
workers, rootless graduates, assailants of workfare, those involved in education campaigns and struggles against public service cuts, and so on.
The aim of political theory informed by Deleuze and Guattari would be
to consider the specific qualities or features of these interlaced points, all
of them groping toward some sort of patchwork of politicized relations.
Fabulation and Agency
Thus far I have worked through two sets of concepts and problems:
minor politics and the 99%; and territory and occupation. I want to end
now with a brief sketch of a third concept and problem. This is Deleuze
and Guattaris concept of myth or fabulation and the problem of the collective agency of Occupy. In theory circles at the moment and in some

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commentary on Occupy there are indications of a return to voluntarism,

with talk of the peoples will as driver of change. From a Deleuzian perspective, such voluntarism abstracts an integrated subjectivity from what
are in fact multiple and disjunctive levels of subjective determination (in
dimensions that are economic, libidinal, semiotic, organizational, etc.),
and so fails to ascertain from where politics comes, or to address the
realities of conflict and reaction amidst and between social formations.
Deleuze and Guattari would counter this voluntarism with the minor
political emphasis on practical problematization that was the focus of
the first part of this talk political composition not formed of a generic
quality of human will to overcome all contradictions, but arisen amidst
the specific and multiform material conditions of the present state of
things, as Marx has it (Thoburn 2013). But there is an additional aspect
of Deleuzian philosophy that is helpful for getting at the issues of collective agency or force that those who appeal to the peoples will are, rightly,
interested in.
Concepts, problems, territories, and so on are constructed by their
human and non-human participants in the kinds of ways that I have been
discussing. But they also have a self-positing character they are created
by participants, and they simultaneously create themselves, they have a
life of their own: Creation and self-positing mutually imply each other
because what is truly created, from the living being to the work of art,
thereby enjoys a self-positing of itself, or an autopoietic characteristic by
which it is recognized (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 11).
This isnt easy; most created entities collapse without becoming selfpositing. But if an entity does achieve this, if it can stand up on its own, as
Deleuze and Guattari put it, then you have something interesting, something with an agency all of its own (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164).
You have a revolution, an art work, a concept, or in our case, you have
the Occupy movement. What does it mean to say that Occupy is selfpositing? It means that as well as being generated by the people, tactics,
objects, slogans, sounds and so on that are a part of its territory, it also
takes on a life of its own, a life that pulls its constituent parts along, creating them as parts of its event.
Now, when Deleuze and Guattari discuss this self-positing process
in the context of politics, they sometimes describe it as a process of

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fabulation. Its a word you might have noticed earlier in the quotation
about the monument. Fabulation or myth-making occurs when the shock
of an event be it an earthquake, a work of art, a social upheaval produces visions or hallucinatory images that substitute for routine patterns
of perception and action and come to guide the event. In Deleuze and
Guattaris reading, fabulation is a weapon of the weak, a means of fabricating giants, as they put it germinal agents with real world effects in
the service of political change (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 171). What
is perhaps most appealing in the context of Occupy is that these fabulations or myths are not so much located in individual people the cults of
personality, for instance, of Lenin, Mao, Churchill, what have you but
have a desubjectified or anonymous quality, generated and held in the fragmented bits of events, stories, medias, affects, material resources, and are
associated as much with mediocrity as with the grandiose (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 171). In this way Deleuze describes myth as a monster, it
has a life of its own: an image that is always stitched together, patched up,
continually growing along the way (Deleuze 1989: 150; Deleuze 1997:
118; Thoburn 2011).
Occupy has had something of this mythical quality, an agential power
of its own that exists among and between us, and that pulls its particularities along. Ill end by pointing to one small (and by no means unproblematic) artefact in this myth: the Guy Fawkes mask. Think how different
these two images of political myth are. Mao, a concentrated myth centered, in demagogic fashion, on an individual and the truth of his infallible thought. And the Guy Fawkes mask, an anonymous, distributed
power a part of the myth of Occupy, open to anyone, signifying a resistance to closure in a leader, vaguely menacing, a little bit silly, mediocre
even, and pop-cultural to boot. The masks impersonal mythical power is
well expressed in a cartoon in The Occupied Times, a cartoon that takes its
words from Subcomandante Marcos (and Thomas Mntzer in turn) and
so forms a red thread across to another political myth of our time: its not
who we are thats important, but what we want: everything for everyone (The Occupied Times 2011: 2).

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Works Cited
Gilles Deleuze. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta. London: Athlone.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical: 19681990. Trans. Daniel W Smith
and Michael A Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gilles Deleuze. 1999. Negotiations 19721990. Trans. Martin Joughin, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Gilles Deleuze. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 19751995.
Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e).
Deleuze and Flix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana
Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze and Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchill. London: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles with Claire Parne. 2012. Gilles Deleuze: From A to Z. Dir. Pierre-Andr
Boutang. Trans. Charles Stivale. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Gentleman, Amelia. 2012. Housing Benefit Cap Forces Families to Leave
Central London or be Homeless. The Guardian (February 16). Accessed
May 4, 2015 from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/16/
housing-benefit-cap-families-central-london
Guattari, Flix. 1995. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvre Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e).
Kafka, Franz. 1999. The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 19101923. Ed. Max Brod. Trans.
Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg. London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. 1975. Early Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
The Occupied Times. 2011. The Occupied Times 6. Accessed May 4, 2015 from:
http://issuu.com/theoccupiedtimes/docs/ot_issue_6_issuu/1?e=0
The Occupied Times. 2012. The Occupied Times 8. Accessed May 4, 2015 from:
http://issuu.com/theoccupiedtimes/docs/ot_8_issuu/5?e=0
OSullivan, Simon. 2006. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond
Representation. London: Palgrave.

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Thoburn, Nicholas. 2003. Deleuze, Marx and Politics. London: Routledge.

Thoburn, Nicholas. 2011. To Conquer the Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in
the Wu Ming Foundation. Cultural Critique 78: 11950.
Thoburn, Nicholas. 2013. Do Not Be Afraid, Join Us, Come Back? On the Idea of
Communism in Our Time. Cultural Critique 84: 134.
Zepke, Stephen. 2005. Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and
Guattari. London: Routledge.

Notes
1.

A different version of this article was published previously in Mute. Many

thanks to Mute for allowing its republication here. See http://www.metamute.
org/editorial/articles/minor-politics-territory-and-occupy

2.

See Simon Rogers, Occupy protests around the world: full list visualised,
The Guardian (November 14, 2011), available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
news/datablog/2011/oct/17/occupy-protests-world-list-map#data

3.

See Patrick Collinson, Budget 2012: Earning 1m? Your Tax Cut Will Pay for
a Porsche, The Guardian (March 21, 2012), available at: http://www.guardian.
co.uk/uk/2012/mar/21/budget-2012-earning-1m-tax-cut-pay-for-porsche

4.

Since this talk took place, the ConDem administration has enacted what Tory
regimes have long threatened, making squatting in residential properties
a criminal offence. The government and media bogeyman, as ever, was the
squatter who moves into an occupied family home; a clear ruse to deflect
from the disgraceful situation where people sleep on the streets when 610,000
homes lie empty in England alone. See Empty Homes Agency, Statistics
(October 2014), available at: http://www.emptyhomes.com/statistics/
Attacking working class housing on another front, central government has
set rents for local authority and housing association tenants to rise to 80% of
those in the private rental sector, a move that in many parts of the country
effectively brings to completion the destruction of council housing that began
with Margaret Thatchers policy of right to buy.

5.

Flix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways,
perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn
on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find
most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system
thats constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against
them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is capital
itself (Deleuze 1999: 171).

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6.

The critique of the formulation of the 99% is well made in Clinical Wasteman,
No Interest but the Interest of Breathing, Mute, Available at: http://www.
metamute.org/editorial/articles/no-interest-interest-breathing

7.

It is worth sketching Marxs thesis here, and keeping in mind Deleuze and
Guattaris distinction between major and minor politics while doing so, for
the correspondence is striking indeed. Rather than engage with the human
as social animal as species being in all the socioeconomic complexities
and antagonisms of its production bourgeois politics abstracts an isolated
individual a partial being, the individual withdrawn into himself,
his private interest and his private desires and devotes all its energies
to securing this subjectivity. Here, the whole of society is there only to
guarantee each of its members the conservation of his person, his rights and
his property, and, as such, the political sphere in which man behaves as a
communal being [Gemeinwesen] is degraded to a level below the sphere in
which he behaves as a partial being. This is not a mere ideological ruse, but
a structural feature of the inverted subjectivity of capital, where the worker,
who is wholly a product of capitalist social relations, experiences life as an
individual free to sell her labor-power on the open market. It is upon these
conditions that Marx can proclaim with every reason and some irony that
capital, for all that it comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with
blood and dirt, is indeed a very Eden of the innate rights of man (Marx 1975:
2301; Marx 1976: 926, 280).

8.

See To be honest I dont think it should matter one jot whether a patient is
looked after by a hospital or a medical professional from the public, private or
charitable sector, Tory health minister Lord Howe, quoted in Nick Triggle,
Private Sector Have Huge NHS Opportunity, BBC News (September 7,
2011), available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14821946

9.

The bowerbird is certainly not the last word on art in Deleuze and Guattari.
I should point out that despite possible indications to the contrary here,
their writing on art is not best viewed through the avant-garde lens of the
subsumption of art and everyday life, for they invest considerable import in
the exacting forms and techniques of modernist practice, in painting and
cinema especially (see OSullivan 2005; Zepke 2005).

10. See the Occupy London Homelessness Statement, available at: http://
occupylondon.org.uk/homelessness-statement/
11. Many thanks to John Bywater for pointing out this passage on the English
taste for camping, which helps counter any Orientalism in Deleuze and
Guattaris concept of nomadic dwelling.

Chapter 7

September 17, 2011:

Occupy without Counting
Ian Buchanan

The events of September 2011 will probably go down in history in much

the same way as the events of May 1968, with no-one being able to decide
what, if anything, actually happened.1 Zuccotti Park in New York City
briefly flickered in the global consciousness as the spark that threatened
to ignite a global revolution, just as the Latin Quarter of Paris had four
decades earlier (Buchanan 2008: 712). Within a month over 150
Occupy events were taking place all over the world and as one expects
these days the movement was even more prominently and diversely
represented on the internet. The message the occupiers wanted to relay
was both simple and complex. We are the 99%, they said: the part that
in Rancires terms effectively has no part because the other 1% control a
profoundly disproportionate share of national global wealth (the top
1% in the US have a greater net worth than the bottom 90%), (Rancire
1999: 9). They demanded nothing except to be noticed. Although they
received support from a number of labor unions, including teachers
and health workers who marched in solidarity with them on October
5 and November 17, 2011, they were on the whole chary of being too
closely identified with established political groups. Partly this was out of
a fear of being coopted, but largely it had to do with the collective desire
to create a new kind of political organization that was leaderless and
directionless (Greenberg 2011: 12). The occupiers confounded virtually
every attempt the mainstream media made to understand what was going
on. Their silence about what they wanted made the point that there is no

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democratic agency in the US that their concerns could be addressed to

because all of them are in some way or another beholden to the corporate
world. And it was this basic fact of American global life that they
wanted to draw attention to and initiate a change in what environmental
activist Bill McKibben usefully refers to as the political consciousness
(Greenberg 2012b: 47).
Occupy Wall Street and the corresponding Occupy movement
that sprang up in its wake was premised on the idea that change is not
achieved by violence or extortion, but rather by presence and permanence. The occupiers put their bodies on the line in order to make their
point. Situated in Lower Manhattan, literally on the doorstep of Ground
Zero, Zuccotti Park is anything but a park, if by that we mean lush green
spaces like New Yorks own Central Park or Hyde Park in London. It is
rather just over 3,000 square meters of concrete interspersed by a few sapling trees that in time may give it at least the appearance of a park. There
are no toilet facilities or any other basic amenities needed to sustain life
in a reasonable degree of comfort. So the occupation called for hard living and ingenuity. They were fortunate that the weather remained mild
for the first couple of weeks but by late October the first snows had fallen,
making life very uncomfortable indeed. Because generators werent permitted, electricity had to be produced using pedal power. It was the drive
in the legs of determined occupiers that heated frozen bodies and kept
the media center going and recharged all the cell phones and laptops.
Amplifiers werent permitted either, so public meetings were facilitated
via a call and response process in which the speakers words were relayed,
person to person, from the front of the audience to the rear. The occupiers were aided by the fact that Zuccotti Park is a private park controlled
by Brookfield Properties, who were far from supportive. This meant it
was exempt from curfew laws that would have applied in a public park.
Occupying Zuccotti Park was never easy and the City of New York did
everything it could to make it as difficult as possible. It directed homeless
people towards the park and dropped off released prisoners there and
infiltrated the occupiers and spied on them, with the result that several
were put on charges. Then on November 15, 2011, the police cleared the
park and brought the occupation to an end.2 The occupiers produced a
manifesto of sorts, The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,

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as well as a kind of newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, which

published ideas put to and ratified by the General Assembly, an ad hoc
group of occupiers who listened to and voted on proposals presented to
them by anyone with the interest to do so. Some of the proposals were
practical such as Adbuster editor Micah Whites call for the reinstatement of the GlassSteagall Act, which from 1933 until 1999 separated
commercial and investment banking, thus protecting America from
precisely the kind of speculative lending that led to the global financial
meltdown of 2007 but many were not, at least not in a straightforward
sense. Calls that corporate influence on government should be ended
cannot easily be enacted.3 But the manifesto was never really that important as far as the wider public was concerned. It functioned simply as a
chronicle of what the people were thinking in those heady weeks of the
occupation, rather than a carefully thought out and precisely articulated
position statement, much less a utopian vision of the future. The true
legacy of Occupy Wall Street will not be found in its pages. It was rather
the process of putting the manifesto together that was important not the
end result. Its production was an example of participatory democracy in
action the set of principles the occupiers wanted to live by was created
and embraced by the occupiers themselves. All proposals required the
support of at least 90% of the General Assembly in order to be ratified,
which is far more onerous than parliamentary democracies anywhere
else requires. And of course that was precisely the point: it demonstrated
that democracy as we know it, that is, democracy as it is practiced in the
United States and elsewhere is a pale shadow of true democracy, which
is open to all and premised on the notion that only near-consensus can be
regarded as representative of the will of the people. As impractical as this
model of democracy might be, its symbolic value should not be underestimated. It bespoke a powerful hunger for social justice, for a political and
economic system that represents the needs of the many not the greed of
the few that not even President Obama could fail to perceive.4
One may put it even more strongly than that. It could be said that the
occupiers staging of real democracy revived the idea that, as Rancire
argues, political society is at its core, in its very foundation, consensus
driven: [B]efore becoming the reasonable virtue of individuals and
groups who agree to discuss their problems and build up their interests,

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[consensus] is a determined regime of the perceptible, a particular mode

of visibility of right as arkh of the community (Rancire 1999: 107).
Consensus is not the goal of politics, but its starting point, its possibility,
because it stipulates that everyone has the right to be counted, to count,
in the formation of political ideas and decision. But as Rancire also
argues, consensus is in some ways the end of politics precisely because
it demands/assumes that everyone is, has been, counted and therefore
leaves no place for the part who have no part. It obscures, then, the place
of dissent (Rancire 1999: 116). The staging of a regime of consensus
within a political environment such as twenty-first century USA that
does not even pretend to be motivated by or interested in consensus as
a political ideal escapes this double bind because it simultaneously performs consensus as an idea but does so in a context in which the performers continue to be viewed as belonging to the part who have no part.
Occupy Wall Street was in this sense a highly complex piece of political
theatre, but it was also more than that because the effects of its performance were not purely symbolic, but completely real.
There are of course obvious political reasons why certain commentators would want to deny that anything takes place in these kinds of events
in which a populace suddenly and without warning or obvious provocation decides to express its dissent, and does so in a way that isnt aimed at
either bringing down a particular regime or taking power. It is hardly surprising that pundits who generally identify with the hegemonic regime
would tend to claim that events like Occupy Wall Street are ultimately
inconsequential, that is more or less their reason for being. It is a breadand-butter move for someone like Niall Ferguson to claim that Occupy
Wall Street is a giant, misguided waste of time because the real issue of the
day isnt the fact that the top 1% control the bulk of the nations wealth,
it is fact that there are so many baby boomers around getting ready to
hoover up all that free money from social security and government health
insurance (Mills 2011). What is surprising, though, is that the number
of basically sympathetic observers, including Michael Greenberg (who
otherwise does such a marvellous job of reporting on Occupy Wall Street
for The New York Review of Books) should find the movement wanting.
In an article that documents the way the New York police infiltrated and
harassed the occupiers, Greenberg describes the occupiers as corrupted

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by their own inviolable purity of principle (We dont talk to people with
power, because to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of their
power). I do not want to suggest that the occupiers should somehow
be seen as immune to criticism. But I do want to suggest that the political frameworks in place today are in many ways conceptually inadequate
to deal with events like Occupy Wall Street, which falls outside most
peoples standard paradigms for understanding political interactions
between the manifestly powerful and the apparently powerless. Usually
power is equated with violence and more especially the control of the
right to violence. The fact that non-violent movements like Occupy Wall
Street challenge that very idea, indeed that basic assumption, that politics
ultimately boils down to who has the best weapons and the most troops
is in many ways the most overlooked (in the media, I mean) aspect of
political activism today.
Conceptual advances are, in this sense, political acts in themselves,
because they open a space, or more precisely, create the form of the
expression for new political ideas (as the content of the expression) and
thereby enable political voices to be heard that would otherwise be presumed silent or adjudged irrelevant.
This is one of the key reasons that the concept of the event has
been so central a preoccupation for critical theory for the past decade
or more; it is starting point for any inquiry about what happened? Of
the several philosophers who have given thought to the concept of the
event, the most influential in critical theory, at least are undoubtedly
Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. The event is a crucial concern for
both, but they each approach it quite differently. At the risk of grossly
oversimplifying their respective arguments, I will try to generalize the
difference between them as follows. For Badiou the event gives rise to
truth (it is truths condition), whereas for Deleuze it gives rise to sense
(it is senses condition). Badious event, as a truth-event, demands our
commitment it therefore hovers on the border between conscious and
unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, that which we choose to do and
that which we feel compelled to do. Our commitment to a particular
truth is not so much a rational decision based upon the weighing up of
evidence as a lightning strike, an epiphany that hits us and in an instant
reshapes our view of the world. Badiou tends to give mathematical

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examples to explain what he means by truth because for him the real
quality of a truth is its inarguable nature: a triangle has three sides, a
square has four, and so on. Similarly, one could look to physics, and the
various laws formulated there: gravity means everything must fall. It is
an open question, it seems to me, whether any political idea can attain a
comparable status, but for Badiou this is what conviction would mean in
a political context: the unshakeable belief in the rectitude of a particular
idea and the concomitant clarity of perception this conviction affords
(Badiou 2012: 6061).
For Deleuze, too, the event is a kind of lightning strike, but it demands
only that we adapt to it. It does not demand our conviction, or even our
belief. The event for Deleuze is an eruption of immanence, if you will,
a bursting forth of a kind of immanent time-space continuum in which
something transcendent (sense) appears. In a late essay, published after
his death, Deleuze even called this type of eruption of immanence life
(Buchanan 2006). In his work with Guattari, space was usually referred
to as smooth space (but it had other names as well the body without
organs, the plane of immanence, the plane of composition, the plateau
and so on). This life-sense as we may perhaps call it (to distinguish it
from ordinary or semantic sense) has a structuring effect inasmuch as it
gives shape to the world as we live and experience it. F. Scott Fitzgeralds
notion of the crack is, for Deleuze and Guattari, something of a
touchstone example of what they mean by the event. It is a kind of mental
clean break, a brain snap as some people say, after which nothing is the
same. Examples of cracks might include the realization that ones job
is worthless and not deserving of the effort you put into it, or that you
arent as talented as you once thought (which was Fitzgeralds feeling),
and so on (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 198200). This is by no means at
odds with anything Badiou says about the event, except that for Deleuze
this eruption of immanence (the opening up of a smooth space in other
words) does not necessarily correlate with an idea of truth. It is also
worth noting that the event for Deleuze and Guattari is not measured
by a change in the state of things a large crowd gathering in a public
square in Cairo or camping out in New York City is not intrinsically an
event in Deleuze and Guattaris thinking. It only becomes recognizable as
an event if it brings about a transformation of thought itself, if it yields a

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new idea, a new way of acting.5 And I would argue that is precisely what
Occupy did: it opened up a new space of thought.
In contrast to Badious truth-event, Deleuze and Guattaris smooth
space of thought, or life-sense, is not universal or universalizable. The
crack Fitzgerald experiences is a truth for him, but not for anyone else,
not even Zelda Fitzgerald, who experienced her own crack. It is his sense
of his world, not anyone elses. Thats why we call it his life. And even if we
empathize with his outlook on things and feel that it somehow describes
our own world too, that it has something to say about our own life, it is
a not a truth we can be faithful to in Badious sense (as he applies it to
ideological worldviews like communism, for instance). I can believe in
the existence or occurrence of the crack (clean break, brain snap, etc.)
in someones life, but only in a formal sense. The specific content of
someone elses crack will always elude me because as Tolstoy more or less
said were all unhappy, that is to say, broken or cracked, in our own way.
What pushes me over the edge does not have to be the same as whatever
pushes another person over the edge for us to both say weve experienced
a crack. Yet for that very reason our respective experiences of cracking
are only comparable in an abstract way. This is not to say that for Deleuze
and Guattari there are no such thing as collective events, or events that
affect more than one person, but it does mean that universality cannot be
one of its defining criteria, as it is for Badiou. The other difference is that
for Deleuze and Guattari the life-sense event is involuntary Fitzgerald
doesnt choose to accept or adhere to the crack, it comes up upon him
without him knowing about it in advance and leaves him a changed man
in its wake. For Badiou, in contrast, the event requires our fidelity, we
have to choose to believe in it and place it at the center of our lives.
The event for Deleuze and Guattari is a radical break with the normal
continuity of things that at once interrupts the usual flow of daily life
and initiates its own counter-flow.6 This was precisely what Occupy Wall
Street did: it brought about a radical break with the normal continuity of
daily life, not just in lower Manhattan, but globally, as the whole world
stopped to see what was happening there. That it could do so without
violence or even the threat of violence is remarkable, particularly in an
era that is in many ways defined by the so-called War on Terror, which
had its beginnings Ground Zero a short distance from Zuccotti Park.

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Having said that, it is important to see that Occupy Wall Streets nonviolent approach, the so-called passive resistance it exercised, is anything
but passive. It is a misnomer that robs the non-violent approach to
protest of its core, namely the galvanizing effect of a desire for change. As
Perry Anderson writes, Ghandi himself translated satyagraha as truthforce rather than passive resistance. Inspired by Tolstoy, Ghandi coined
this neologism himself to conceive a vision of non-violent resistance
infused with a religious idea of transcendence (Anderson 2012: 6).7 For
Badiou, this is precisely how an event like Occupy Wall Street works.
It ignites what he calls a truth process it makes apparent to all that
human animals are capable of bringing into being justice, equality,
and universality (the practical presence of what the Idea can do). It is
perfectly apparent that a high proportion of political oppression consists
in the unremitting negation of this capacity (Badiou 2012: 87).
The fact that people take the trouble to interrupt their own lives
to commence and participate in an occupy movement and do so in
substantial numbers is living proof that in the words of the anti-WTO
protesters from the decade before Occupy Wall Street, another world is
possible. What counts is the act, the willingness to disrupt ones own life
and beyond that the lives of others, and beyond that the life of the social
machine itself. As Badiou puts it, speaking of the occupation of Cairos
Tahrir Square in January 2011, which sparked the Arab Spring: even if
the occupiers are a million strong, that still does not represent many of
the 80 million Egyptians. In terms of electoral numbers it is a guaranteed
fiasco! But this million, present in this site, is enormous if we stop
measuring the political impact (as in voting) by inert, separated number
(Badiou 2012: 58). Deleuze and Guattari call this space one occupies
without counting smooth space, which they contrast to striated space.
In what follows I will argue that Occupy Wall Street can usefully be
thought of as having created a new kind of smooth space. Ironically, it
is perhaps Badiou who, while severely critical of Deleuzes attachment to
the concept of the virtual, gives us the most useful illustration of precisely
what is meant here by smooth space. Speaking of Spains indignados, the
loose social movement which arose in response to the austerity measures
the Spanish government was forced to impose by the European Central
Bank as a condition of its debt relief (following the global financial crisis

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of 2007 and the resulting meltdown of the euro), Badiou argues that as
noble as their cause is, because it is fuelled only by negative emotions a
desire for real democracy to replace the bad democracy they have to
live with their movement isnt as powerful or as sustainable as it would
be if it were underpinned by an affirmative Idea (Badiou 2012: 97). The
Idea, Badiou says, is blind to the self-evidence of what is before it the
local defeats, as in the case of Occupy Wall Street, which was rousted out
of Zuccotti Park after only two months and far-sighted concerning the
future that no-one else has eyes to see it isnt concerned with results,
with counting in the here and now, what it awakens is the force of History
itself, the certainty that nothing not even capitalism is forever (Badiou
2012: 989).
Now, I would not want to say that smooth space is identical with
Badious conception of the Idea, but I do want to make the point that it
is both conceptual and historical in nature. Take for example Deleuze
and Guattaris key exhibit, Paul Virilios concept of the fleet in being.
At a certain point in history, naval commanders arrived at the idea that
the ocean could be dominated by the superior mobility of forces and the
power to interdict the mobility of others rather than through the control
of fixed positions. This idea, which was fully an event in both Badious
and Deleuzes terms, was communicated from sea to land to air to space.
Now war in all its modalities is informed by this idea. There have been
moments when this idea has seemed out of step with history. Germanys
Schlieffen Plan to sweep across Western Europe came horribly unstuck
in 1914 when their planned war of mobility was unseated by the twin
powers of the machine gun and barbed wire and turned into a standstill
war of attrition claiming the lives of millions. But almost as soon as the
first trenches were dug the opposing forces began scheming to regain
the power of mobility and within the space of a few years solutions were
found: tanks and airplanes rendered the gridlocked space of the battlefield smooth all over again. In this way a new pattern of action was set in
motion: striated space was to be defeated by technological advancement.
But within a few decades, by the time of the Vietnam War, if not sooner,
this model was also brought unstuck. Today, the incredible mobility
of high-tech weapons is countered by the fluidity of the identity of the
enemy. The unseen and unknown enemy compels the one who seeks

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them to give up at least some of their mobility for the apparent security
of checkpoints and surveillance procedures. In each instance, the Idea
of space dominated by mobility remains very much alive (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 480).
It is this power the power of an Idea as a force that shatters or cracks
the status quo and lets in a new kind of light, one that hasnt shone there
before that is the key to understanding Deleuze and Guattaris concept
of smooth space. Let me offer a different example that will hopefully
bring it into even sharper relief. I would claim that smooth space is comparable to David Harveys conception of the urban commons. He argues
that the 2011 occupations of Syntagma Square in Athens, Tahrir Square
in Cairo, and the Plaa de Catalunya in Barcelona transformed these public places into latter day variations of the medieval idea of the commons.
Importantly, although these spaces are all physical places that one can go
and visit, the urban commons itself is not, it is a social relation, and that
is precisely how smooth space should be understood I believe. Harvey
writes: The common is not to be constructed, therefore, as a particular
kind of thing, asset or even social process, but as an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular well-defined social group and
those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or
physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood. There is,
in effect, a social practice of commoning (Harvey 2012: 73). The key to
commoning, as Harvey sees it, is that it removes the relation between a
group and a space from commodity exchange: the commons is off-limits
to the market. This amounts to saying the commons is a virtual space as
Deleuze and Guattari would put it and that the virtual space of the commons is produced by the occupiers of that space, which is an important
clarification of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by smooth space.
Virtual does not mean unreal, as Deleuze and Guattari often remind
us. The virtual is fully real, as real as an idea, an image, and an innovation, is real. It is real because its effects are real. Here one might think of
Jamesons frequently made point about the need to keep alive what he
calls the utopian imagination: without bold ideas for the future, that is,
ideas which envisage a break a disruption, as Jameson calls it with the
present state of affairs we are condemned to simply let things continue as
they are. And this, as Walter Benjamin rightly said, is the real emergency.

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The smooth space may not suffice to save us, as Deleuze and Guattari
caution, but it does at least apply the handbrake to history and that may
just be enough.
Works Cited
Anderson, Perry. 2012. Ghandi Centre Stage. London Review of Books ( July 5): 311.
Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Trans.
Gregory Elliott. London: Verso.
Buchanan, Ian. 2008. Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum.
Buchanan, Ian. 2006 Deleuzes Life Sentences. Polygraph 18: 12947.
Greenberg, Michael 2011. In Zuccotti Park. The New York Review of Books
(November 10). Accessed May 4, 2015 from: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/
archives/2011/nov/10/zuccotti-park/?pagination=false
Greenberg, Michael. 2012a. New York: The Police and the Protesters.
The New York Review of Books (October 11). Accessed May 4, 2015
from: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/11/
new-york-police-and-protesters/?pagination=false
Greenberg, Michael. 2012b. What Future for Occupy Wall Street?. The New York
Review of Books (February 922): 468.
Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
London: Verso.
Mills, Nicholaus. 2011. Occupy Wall Street: A Primer. The Guardian (November
7). Accessed May 4, 2015 from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/
cifamerica/2011/nov/07/occupy-wall-street-primer
Rancire, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Notes
1.

In November 2011, Nicholaus Mills from The Guardian in the UK helpfully

published a cross-section of opinions from prominent cultural and political
pundits, spanning the spectrum from Naomi Klein to Niall Ferguson. See
also the April 2, 2012, issue of The Nation, which similarly carries a round-up
of opinion on the occupy movement, albeit all from a left perspective.

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2.

Details of living conditions are drawn from Greenberg (2011).

3.

Examples drawn from Greenberg (2011).

4.

In a speech given on December 6, 2011, at Osawatomie, Kansas, President

Obama said that the issues identified by the Occupy Wall Street movement
were the defining issues of our time (Greenberg 2012b: 46).

5.

As they observe, following Gabriel Tarde, the French revolution began when
peasants stopped doffing their caps to the aristocracy, not when the heads
began to roll (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 216).

6.

In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari describe this counter-flow as a

witches flight.

7.

In an interesting twist of history, the Phillip Glass opera based on the life of
Ghandi, Satyagraha, was playing at the Lincoln Center in New York for much
of the period of Occupy Wall Streets tenancy at Zuccotti Park. See Greenberg
(2012b: 46).

Chapter 8

Negative Space War Machines

David Burrows

Suck My Kutzs1
With the first cuts, the first voids appear. The first negative spaces appear.
A window in Londons Milbank is kicked repeatedly, cracks radiate from
a hole filmed and photographed by much of Britains news media. The
following day, footage of a fire extinguisher dropped by a student from
the roof of the Conservative Partys HQ is uploaded to YouTube. The fire
extinguisher scatters ranks of police who survive unscathed except for
minor injuries. Nervous systems are stimulated by the first day of mass
protest against plans to charge full fees for undergraduate education in
England and Wales. The mass media twitch and pulse anticipating the
conflict to come.
Day X. The stepson of a millionaire rock star out of his mind on
LSD, whiskey and valium swings on a flag poll at the Cenotaph in
Whitehall, London. Kettles are sprung like traps on unsuspecting protestors. Some though are prepared. The Book Bloc batter police lines
with scaled-up cardboard replicas of Our Word is Our Weapon (2002) by
Marcos, End Game (1957) by Beckett, One Dimensional Man (1964) by
Marcuse and Just William (1921) by Compton. Others improvising with
metal barriers join them and punch holes in the cordon at Parliament
Square. As evening descends, the government votes to increase university
fees for home and European students and confrontation between protestors and police escalate. Television news leads with stories of violence in
the streets of Westminster, an attempted storming of the Treasury and a

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group of students sitting in the National Gallery, refusing to leave, surrounded by millions of pounds worth of paintings. Later, a chaufferdriven Rolls-Royce limousine in Londons West End is splattered with
paint. One of the vehicles windows is breached and an aristocrat sitting in
the back seat of the car is poked with a stick.
On an overcast day in March, swarms of protestors peel off the Trade
Union Congress (TUC) march to Hyde Park in London to occupy
Oxford Street. A giant, ramshackle horse representing the TUC lumbers
towards the center of Oxford Circus and is sacrificed. The pantomime
horse is set on fire. Dense, black plumes of smoke are visible for miles
around and the smell of melting tar fills the air. As does the sound of
whirring electric motors closing shutters, signalling the area is closed for
business. Rather than join the zombie-shuffle from point A to point B
(the prearranged rallying point from which a message to the powerful is
to be sent), a few thousand protestors transform the West End into a carnival of refusal. UK Uncut occupy the luxury goods shop Fortnum and
Mason and police form a ring around the store, serving as a membrane
for a vacuole of discontent.
At first, the UKs news media equated protests against austerity measures with violent confrontation the sought-after photograph was a
smashed window. Soon another tale emerged, told by journalists close
to the action: the birth of a new kind of protestor, the networked individual connected through social media. This declaration was followed
by another: a new kind of protest movement was identified by commentators, presented as an alliance forged through weak links, rapid collective decision-making and organization without hierarchies. But there is
another story to be told about this period of unrest and protest. As with
other manifestations of refusal around the world in 2010 and 2011, protesting against the coalition governments austerity measures involved
producing the space for protest. This took the form of occupations, protest swarms, teach-ins and gatherings; collective actions that rejected representational politics and embraced pragmatism and protocols and tactics
developed by anti-globalization activists. All of which contributed to the
production of protest as an occupation of space and time different to that
sanctioned by orthodox political organizations and traditions. Protestors
experimented with producing negative spaces that traversed and bored

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holes into the representations of organized politics and the mass media.
By 2011, for many the issue of education fees was succeeded by a focus
on the 1% whose spiritual home is the square mile governed by the City
of London Corporation, targeted by Occupy London. By then, opposing
austerity was no longer equated with violence in the UK, rather it was
equated with a group of people who met daily on the steps of St Pauls
Cathedral, experimenting with ways of living in tents in a small patch of
ground in the heart of the capital.
This essay is concerned with this recent period of unrest and opposition to student fee increases in London, in particular the occupations,
teach-ins and gatherings that not only manifested protest but the space
of protest. It is an account that draws upon my involvement with Arts
Against Cuts during this period, and thus will be a partial account and
include an assessment of the role art played in producing the negative space of protest, experiments named here as negative space war
machines. In this, the essay is specifically concerned with three interrelated problems.
1. Saying no. Protestors said no or expressed refusal in different
ways, something mirrored in the discussions concerning negativity, refusal and affirmation that took place during this period
of protest in various scenes or circles, many of which overlapped. Often views were polarized; actions and discussions
included a militant rejection of affirmation as well as an exploration of the relationship of dissent and affirmation. A constellation of names, that include Marx, Deleuze, Negri, Marcos and
Badiou, plotted different, competing political and philosophical ideas circulating during this period of unrest. However, to
frame this period of protest with a political or philosophical
concept or name would be unwise. Better to view recent protests as a testing ground for competing orientations, better to
focus on the modes of operation employed than present the
concepts and ideas of philosophers as providing meaning for
events. To that end, this essay charts various instances of refusal
and reflects upon the relevance of philosophical concepts and
orientations. Two orientations in particular are addressed: (a)
total refusal to produce anything that might hinder collapse or

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facilitate business as usual; and (b) dissent as the space from

which something new might be produced.
2. Space. Protestors were concerned with occupying places of
commerce, institutions and (so-called) public space, and with
the sphere of media communication and social network technology. A corollary of opposing the government was a questioning of hierarchical organizations and forms of decisionmaking. Movements formed which knotted together two
modes of address: the physical (face-to-face address) and the
mediated (face-less or Facebook address). It is the latter mode
of address that has received most media attention producing
the much-heralded networked individual already mentioned
but this is to misunderstand the role and importance of mass
communication technology for many protestors, which as an
important aspect of protest culture might best be considered
as a tool rather than a point de capiton for protestors. A more
accurate account of the role of communication technology in
this period of protest would focus on the knotting of the seemingly infinite, inhuman scale of cyberspace and communication
technology with the space and time of occupation and protest.
This knot of cyber and physical space enabled individuals who
may have previously felt atomized to discover the joys of collective action. While the majority of protestors were far from class
conscious, many shared a class identity of a kind: the educated
without a future apart from the promise of debt slavery and
precarious work if they could get it. One of the contentions of
this essay is that it was physical space that served as the medium
through which protestors produced a collective expression of
refusal and commonism.
3. Art. While many artists and art students were involved in the
protests, very little was produced by protestors that could be
described as conventional art, or what style magazines and
newspapers would term contemporary art. For the most part,
banners and slogans were produced that articulated statements
of opposition to the powerful. In addition to this, there were

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performances, writing and art produced for the like-minded

art for others involved in the movement. Both these approaches
addressed what the role of art could be in this period of protest.
Within gatherings of protestors, conventional art was not welcome or did not surface, not least because the hierarchies (and
ideologies) of the business of art were at odds with the nonhierarchical ideals of the movement. It is significant that anyone
wanting to make art, perform or write can do so by protesting
and find an audience at protest events. In fact, in the context of
protest, it might be true to say anyone and everyone can be an
artist if they wish to claim this mantle. In addressing the role
of art during protest, alternatives to market and institutional
conventions became tangible for many artists and students.
Reflecting on this, this essay argues that it is art that turns its
back on the powerful and public opinion to address or engender a collective that is most worthy of attention, for such impermanent and contingent productions function to open up new
horizons or perspectives beyond opposition in the spaces produced by protest.
Saying no, occupying space and the production of art: three problems relating to this recent period of protest. It is no easy task to address
them all and arrive at a coherent conclusion or overview. Instead this
essay addresses the various ways protest challenged existing and dominant subjective and discursive formations by experimenting with the
production of negative spaces.
Just Say No!
In the novel Chevengur (1978), a story by the Russian writer Andrei
Platonov, about a troubled utopia (a collectivized village), a man frightens himself with a dream in which he thinks his heart has stopped and
on awakening sits on the floor and asks, Where then is socialism? He
peers into a murky room but cannot find it. It seems to him that he had
this thing already but wasted it in sleep amongst strangers. Fearing punishment he runs off into his own distance. The reader senses that this

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precious thing had already been lost before the man was visited by this
disturbing dream or perhaps the precious thing was only ever an elusive
idea of a thing yet to be produced.
Many involved in the protests have voiced similar feelings of disquiet.
It is not that a precious thing has been lost exactly; rather, it is the feeling that the act of saying no, an act that should be simple and straightforward, is more complex than it once was. No doubt, this is due in
part to many lacking a faith in any politics of representation. No doubt
too, globalization has made opposing or reforming capitalism, the goal
of many protestors in UK, a much harder task. During the print union
and miners strikes in the UK in the 1980s, the unions identified a clear
goal and course of action: stop the transportation of newspapers or coal
by drawing a line, a picket line, across a gate or road. Action was envisaged as taking place on a local scale and having a national impact. In the
1990s and 2000s different spatial configurations were produced. Anticapitalist movements traveled the world and converged on the gathering
points and summits of global powers within various cities. In response,
governments created secure lines or corridors between protected cordons or sealed vacuoles, so as to allow business to be conducted without interruption. The protestors actions, though often spectacular and
confrontational, had little effect or influence. In recent times, occupation
rather than confrontation has become prevalent, leading some to declare
Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville to be the model for
a new kind of protestor, and the first occupier of Wall Street.2
Bartleby, the Scrivener is a strange tale of a man staying put and
refusing to do anything. Whenever his employer makes a request, including asking the scrivener to vacate the attorneys office in Wall Street,
Bartleby replies, I prefer not to. When asked about a change of employment or environment he indicates he would prefer not to as he is not
particular; that is, he has no specific desire to do anything in particular.
What is confusing for the attorney, who means the scrivener well, is that
Bartlebys statement I prefer not to, as Gilles Deleuze (1998: 68) argues,
is asymmetrical grammar or agrammatical; it is the affirmation of a negative that withdraws from dialogue.
Paul Mason, in Why its Kicking Off Everywhere (2011), continually
remarks upon how, in his encounters with European protestors, he rarely

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encountered anyone willing or concerned with identifying with a political ideology or set of demands. It might be the case that he didnt try
hard enough (the recent protests brought many class warriors out of the
shadows and the websites of various protest collectives carry numerous
statements and lists of demands); but Masons observation was echoed
in oft-heard criticism of the movements refusal to identify as one mass or
group promoting an agreed political doctrine, program or set of demands.
When asked to articulate the political doctrines of various protest movements many replied I prefer not to. Mason understood something that
others critical of the protestors lack of identification with a named or
historic political position did not. The refusal to identify is a refusal of
representation, a refusal of the modes and organizations of mainstream
media and politics mentioned earlier. Speak with us, not for us, as the
popular refrain goes.3 And this approach is effective to a point; without
a head to speak to or a name to cite or negotiate with, the conventions of
representational politics fails.
Comparing Bartlebys acts of refusal with recent protest might not
be inappropriate though. The scrivener ends his days in a prison or asylum refusing to eat and rejecting all assistance and kindness. Eventually
he dies: a sad end but, as suggested by the narrator, perhaps one ensuring Bartlebys freedom or sovereignty until his last breath. Perhaps this
is where the analogy of Bartleby as contemporary protestor seems limited, the scriveners silence and inactivity towards death would have been
out of place in the camps occupying the steps of St Pauls Cathedral in
London and Zuccotti Park in New York. Bartlebys asymmetrical grammar and occupation of space is, however, a compelling example of a
refusal that forecloses exchange and dialogue. Such refusal is relevant
when analyzing recent dissent and also when differentiating between
protests that demand the powerful accommodate or afford specific interests from the refusal that does not afford representation or dialogue, and
declines accommodation by the powerful. In this latter mode of protest,
the refrain we prefer not to plays out in many different ways.
The voices that articulated the most militant forms of refusal argued
that creative solutions and actions addressing the crisis of capitalism do
nothing more than breathe life into the failing organizations and economies of capitalism. To explore this idea I turn to perhaps a surprising

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source, the thoughts of Nick Land, the neo-reactionary philosopher

whose early interpretations of Deleuze and Guattaris writing were delivered with a negative charge. In the essay Machinic Desire he states:
Capital is not an essence but a tendency, the formula of which
is decoding, or market driven immanentization, progressively
subordinating social reproduction to techno-commercial replication. (Land 2011: 480)
Lands statement suggests that creative acts and social productions, even
those deemed alternative or oppositional, feed capitalist and technological development: the crumbling edge of capitalism is also the cutting edge of capitalism. Many would agree with Lands assessment even
if they reject his politics. Some protestors argued that only action (or
inaction) that contributed to a catastrophic collapse of capitalist economies (for which no creative solution is produced) could arrest or resist
this tendency of market-driven immanentization.4 The protestors refusal
to develop hierarchical organizations and identifications and a fixed program of actions echoed another aspect of Lands (1997) early thinking,
expressed in a short interview published online by Wire, in which he is
asked about why the internet reproduces dull organizations and relations
of power. He replies:
You have to understand that organisation involves subordinating low level units to some higher level functional program.
In the most extreme cases, like in biological organisms, every
cell is defunctionalised, turned off, except for that one specialised function that it is allocated by the organic totality. And
hence the preponderant part of its potential is deactivated
in the interests of some higher-level unity. Thats why the
more organised things get, the less interesting their behavior
becomes interesting simply meaning here how freely they
explore a range of possible behaviors, or how nomadic they
are Organisation is suppression. Its more accurate to say
that systems which avoid self-organisation whilst maintaining trajectories of productive innovation end up parasitically
inhabited by organisms of all kinds, whether those organisms are biological organisms, corporations or state systems.

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The history of life on this planet right through to Microsoft

is of the successive suppression of distributed, innovated systems. (Land 1997)
This concern was not limited to a small community of protestors and philosophers. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has expressed similar reservations about the internet and social media technology, driven
by narcissism and the ideologies of selfhood and selfishness. In talks and
interviews he suggested that to advocate for self-organizing societies
empowered by new forms of connectivity and communication was foolish. His example of a game of Pong being controlled by a hive mind is
chilling (Curtis 2011). In 1991 in California, scientist Loren Carpenter
invited a group of people to take part in an experiment. The group quickly
perceived that by waving paddles with red and green faces they could
control the virtual bats projected on a large screen in front of them. They
do so as two groups, spontaneously playing the game without communication or instruction from a leader. Curtis hints that this so-called hive
mentality or organization may just be articulating a pre-designed system;
participants delight in their collective cleverness but ultimately they may
be nothing more than an expression of that system. Curtis feels the same
way about the internet, which he feels will be seen in years to come as
an expression of powerful systems of control, Facebook being seen as
similar to the social realist paintings produced in the era of Stalinism
(Curtis 2011).
But rejecting collective action and communication, renouncing desire
and doing nothing, as we learn from Bartleby, is perilous; it is after all an
unaffordable path, and does not necessarily challenge existing relations.
To avoid nihilistic paths or noble suicide, refusal must produce new
horizons. In the interview Land suggests that while organization produces hierarchies and curtails potential, self-organization may counter
parasitic inhabitation by various agencies, allowing bodies and minds to
freely explore a range of possible behaviors, or how nomadic they are.
Perhaps Land articulates here something that many UK protestors valued: self-organization or autonomy as opposed to majority rule or hierarchical organization of bodies and minds.
While it would not be true to say that protest groups eschewed organization or preparation, as stated earlier, many protestors did refuse to

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create organizations with fixed and hierarchical roles in favor of gatherings convened by facilitators. These gatherings proceeded through spontaneous organization producing weak links between groups and individuals and consensus voting (allowing people to opt out of actions).
The role of facilitator was often taken up or adopted by individuals
in relation to the demands of a situation or event on the understanding
that the role lasted for the duration of that event. Not only this, events
and gatherings were arranged without a set program or agenda. At such
events, the order of activities and items for discussion were decided on
the day or through open space technology.5 The use of facilitators and
open space modes of programming expressed an ambition to avoid fixing
symbolic mandates and to produce a political movement that was multiple, flexible and peripatetic in action and word.
To further develop this discussion of movements that are not only
nomadic in thought and deed but that foreclose dialogue with the powerful, the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze are helpful. Deleuze, in conversation
with Toni Negri, argued that it was better to produce a vacuole of noncommunication, to produce circuit breakers, to prefer not to communicate rather than connect (Deleuze 1990: 175). For Deleuze, creating
was something different from communication. He argued that resistance
and communism has nothing to do with minorities or masses speaking
out, not least because speech and communication, which has become
corrupted by money and unable to evade control, has to be hijacked
(Deleuze 1990: 175).
What is a vacuole of non-communication? Perhaps it is merely a noisy
arrangement, or a piece of nonsense? In the same conversation, Deleuze
allows us to understand the potential genesis of this vacuole when he discuses the term war machine, a term that has nothing to do with waging war as such (Deleuze 1990: 172). Rather, it is a term that refers to a
particular occupation of space, an experiment within space and time, an
invention of space and time. Deleuze makes this term concrete by suggesting that the way the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had
to invent space-time in the Arab context has been underestimated. To
do so, the PLO became a war machine, marking out a territory where
previously none existed, opening up gaps and negative spaces in the

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discourses and organizations of local and international government and

the mass media (Deleuze and Guattari 2003).
Franco Berardi aka Bifo (2009a) has proposed a similar idea when
proposing that communism today is found in the production of singularities (experiments with time) born from the necessity of collective action
as means of survival and as the refusal of control and exploitation. Berardi
argues that such singularities manifest as the creation of an economy of
shared use of common goods and services and the liberation of time for
culture, pleasure and affection. Without dismissing Berardis arguments,
the war machine can be defined as similar but different, in that it is not a
singular experimentation with time and relations, or merely that, but an
illegal or dissenting occupation and use of space and time too; a movement that rejects existing hierarchies or representations and produces
its own space and time where none existed before, as a direct challenge
to the policing the management and ordering of existing space,
resources and relations.
A Place Called Space
Before addressing detailed examples of how refusal is linked to the occupation of space and time, and before examining the ways protestors knotted cyberspace and occupied (physical) space, a clarification of the different modes of protest so far considered is necessary. There are at least four
modes of protest worth attending to.
1. Refusal through identification. Refusal as an act that
demands the reform of existing laws or relations. This statement produces identification with a specific narrative or representation (an identification made with a cause or group that
engages with representational politics, such as UK Uncut.)
2. Refusal through connection and detachment: the didvidual. Refusal that leaves individual choice open by maintaining
weak identifications with groups and causes or deferring identification. This gesture engenders a post-continuity subjectivity,
contemporary with a post-continuity consumer culture. The
networked individual,6 or what Deleuze (1990: 180) terms the

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dividual, is a connection between other connections; dividuals can articulate and be articulated by an organization, such as
electronic media.7
3. Refusal through producing nothing. Refusal as an act that is
not affordable (for an individual or others) and that welcomes
the collapse or suspension of existing organizations without
proposing anything but the destruction of existing relations: a
refusal of affirmation, solutions or production of any kind.
4. Refusal through producing something different. Refusal as
an act of dissent and as an experiment with producing a different space and time from that produced by existing organizations of relations: a refusal that is unconcerned with communicating or negotiating with existing hierarchies.
Of course, the four modes of refusal are not four different kinds of
people; they are four statements that can be articulated by the same person or group. The statements can be found in the testimonies of different
occupations, three of which, issued in 2010, are cited below.8
Slade School of Fine Art Occupation Statement: We vehemently oppose the transformation of the university system into market based model; education should be a public
debate, not a private economy. Therefore we the students of
the Slade are offering a space for the assembly of all art colleges in England in order to organise non-violent direct action
against what we view as an attack by the government on the
arts. This is not a virtual exchange, this is a physical assembly.
We are demonstrating the value of physical space for art education through the continuation of our day-to-day activity, as
well as by inviting other colleges to participate in open events,
lectures and workshops. Our occupation is not designed to be
disruptive, nor will it engender any damage to the building.
Rather, we want to highlight the value of intellectual and cultural exchange within art courses. This is not a boycott, it is an
act of support (Slade Occupation 2010).

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At Goldsmiths College a less affirmative, more militant statement was

posted and staff were not allowed to work in the universitys occupied library.
Goldsmiths Occupation Statement I: We have taken over
Goldsmiths Library, the most publicly visible and accessible
physical space in the college. We are opening it as a center
for organization, available 24 hours a day to students and all
those on the receiving end of the governments assault in the
Lewisham community. We support library staff at Goldsmiths
and public libraries across Lewisham. The proposed changes
in Higher Education represent a historically unprecedented
attack on society. In response, we have taken the exceptional
step of deciding that no staff shall work in the library building,
although students are welcome to come and join us. Until our
demands are met, there will be no business as usual at the college. (Goldsmiths Occupation 2010a)
Finally, a statement representing a group of people who occupied the
library for a second time and shut it down.
Goldsmiths Occupation Statement II: I was among those
supporting a real occupation of Goldsmiths this week. A
large group of students, staff and supporters agreed before
the library was occupied that only a significant disruption of
the normal functioning of the university would contribute to
blocking the govts plans and forcing action from the university management. For me the idea that symbolic protests with
banners, or more innovative tokens of opposition, are the only
positive forms of protest is regressive aesthetically and politically In a society in which just doing our jobs and carrying
out our tasks whether writing essays, teaching, or stacking
(book)shelves is the main way in which social relations are
reproduced, it may be that NOT doing anything is our real
weapon So sitting in a library doing paid teaching or studying work (like those attending radical teach ins with their radical paid teachers yesterday and today) is a purely symbolic
gesture which refutes and undoes itself They want to shut

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down our society? Fine, well shut it down. And not just for a
few moments, or for a day, but for as long as it takes to reverse
their decision to axe our services, our jobs, and our futures.
(Goldsmiths Occupation 2010b)
Three statements, three negative spaces, three different expressions of
refusal. The first and most affirmative statement proposes an occupation
in which the university remains open but is run by the students as a platform for national resistance and as a space to experiment with what the
university could become. The last statement is damning of most of the
actions carried out by the majority of protestors at this time and proposes
that all universities, and society itself, should be shut down as a means
of striking at the government. We can discuss who is right and wrong,
which statement is the more idealistic, and whose actions are more symbolic or pragmatic but this would require a second piece of writing. In citing these statements, the intention here is to draw attention to the ways in
which space became the material of protest, and how the production of
negative space became a means of resistance.
By examining the statements produced by the occupations we can
see how refusal relates not just to the political and ethical orientations
but the production of space. This should not be a surprise. First, the protests addressed the problem of who can afford to attend the institutions
of education and culture, and which people and logics administer and
organize these spaces. Secondly, protestors, by marching and occupying,
discovered or confirmed that much so-called public space was constantly
surveyed and policed in London, if not run by or owned by private companies. Kettling, the restraint of groups of people as a means of containing protest or as a means of intimidation by the police, turned out to be a
defining and politicizing experience for many. Finally, protest (in producing the space and time of protest) necessitated the occupation of space
through swarms, teach-ins, disruption of business and the staging of
spectacles. All of which required preparation time and space that for
groups such as Arts Against Cuts and their fellow travelers took the form
of direct action planning weekends at various student unions. For many,
these were the encounters that mattered. Contrary to commentators
who have focussed critically on the use of social network technology by
protestors, face-to-face meetings in physical space were the medium that

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forged collective action and occupations. The majority of protestors at

these meetings, if employed, were mostly precarious workers or students
whose withdrawal of labor would make little difference. In this context,
where union muscle is not what it once was and marching toward violent
confrontation a dead-end, the occupation of space as a means of forming
collectives and resistance makes sense. Beyond refusing debt slavery, the
occupation and use of space could be considered a key political problem
or project of anti-austerity protestors.
Space is the Place
There is one more aspect of the production of negative space (as war
machine) that needs examining, one already touched upon in comments proposing that cyberspace and actual space were knotted together
through protest swarms and occupations. The different scale and intensity of relations (the different kinds of feedback) engendered by occupation meant that experimentation, collective action, and the formation of
community were understood as more than a symbolic gesture. Protestors
formed new subjective attachments through producing a space with an
operational scale that facilitated affective and transformative action.
To explore this question of scale it is helpful to examine how commentary on modes of attention and cyberspace has changed over recent
years. Before the internet had become a common form of communication, Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991), argued that human perception was unable to deal
with the invasion of mass media and communication technology in
everyday life and environments, an event he announced as the dawning of a postmodern hysterical sublime. Jameson refers to the character Jerome Newton, played by David Bowie in the film The Man Who
Fell to Earth (1976), an alien who can watch 57 televisions all at once;
something that Jameson suggests the human is unable to do (1991: 31).
Franco Berardi (2009b: 89) has alluded to this discrepancy between the
limited time and capacity that humans have to process information, messages and potential connections and the attention demanded by a seemingly limitless cyberspace that can dominate our attention at work and
play. For Berardi, fatigue and atomization rather than a hysterical sublime

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is the most likely result. Clearly, though, Berardi points to how we have
evolved from the postmodern primitives described by Jameson, but to
do so we have evolved into networked individuals dividuals continually making connections. The use of social network media by the occupations, while never fully cutting out the middle man of mass media broadcasters and communications corporations as some claimed, allowed
networked individuals to plug into collective culture and space, and to
broadcast from and about the actual spaces that they affected, controlled
and transformed through action. This radicalization of the dividual went
far beyond the act of creating Facebook pages. Two key examples of the
knotting together of cyberspace and physical space to produce the negative space of protest are the creation of the smartphone application Sukey,
developed by University College London students, to track the movement of the police through gathering Twitter information and the use
of text messages and other social media to amass and disperse swarms
and occupations at rapid speed. Whilst remaining dividuals (connecting,
circulating information and responding to messages) the protestors used
cyberspace to physically manifest negative spaces within the city.
Mise en abyme
To address the role of art as negative space war machines during this
period of protest it is important to clarify further what the term negative space refers to in the context of art. The term is borrowed from an
art school exercise that encourages abstract thinking and drawing. This is
not a process of opposition or of producing opposites; drawing the space
of the negative is different from developing a piece of film as a negative
for a positive photographic print. Rather a negative space drawing counters figuration, habits of seeing and thinking, and our perceptions of what
exists. Negative space is produced through a process of experimenting
with composition, a process that begins with observation (of things and
the unoccupied space around things), but produces new and abstract
arrangements (though a drawing might still bear the trace of the observed
or recognizable world that has all but disappeared in the final image). By
drawing empty space, by drawing nothing rather than things, the transcription of outlines and spaces onto a two-dimensional surface creates

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a composition that is ambiguous, one that could be viewed in multiple

ways: shapes can be viewed as forms or spaces, as having depth or as
being flat, as something or nothing. In this way, negative space drawings
are experiments that lead to new combinations and relations of forms.
The association of negative space drawings with occupation and protest came to mind not just because the occupations countered the status quo but also because the process of occupation and swarming relied
on spontaneity and a new counting or use of objects, environments
and space. In this way, the art of protest, as the production of a negative
space war machine, is understood as a performance or action that marks
or inscribes a negative space. It is for this reason that negative space war
machines are four-dimensional, operating beyond the one-dimensional
ideologies of capitalist realism, the two dimensions of opposition and
speaking to power and the three dimensions of pragmatic or direct action.
To expand upon the four-dimensionality of art as (negative space) war
machines, five examples of art from this period of protest are presented
below (though there are many other examples to choose from). All are
unlikely to make their way into any archives or galleries of museums.
1. Society. Two artists produce a simple banner, red in color,
baring the word Society. The banner is unfurled and carried
around London during the protests against austerity. The banner is carried by different people and taken to different locations where photographs are taken amongst protestors, next
to a soldier standing guard in Whitehall and next to a fountain.
Everywhere the banner is displayed a question is raised, What
constitutes society?
2. Funeral March for the Liberal Party. On the day following
the passing of the bill to increase students fees, a small group
walk from High Holborn to Trafalgar Square in crow masks,
howling and carrying wreaths. The event is best captured by
Paul Mason in his book, Why Its All Kicking Off Everywhere:
Whitehall and Parliament Square are still strewn with rubble and missiles Suddenly out of the dark comes the
sound of drumming and wailing. Seven or eight figures
emerge, dressed in black and wearing elaborate crows head

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masks. They do a dance across three lanes of traffic into

the middle of Parliament Square and approach the statue
of David Lloyd George. And they lay a black wreath
Were here to mourn the death of the Liberal Party, croaks
the guy holding the drum, as he beats out a tocsin surrounded by the masked, mainly female, wailers. This goes
on for about five minutes. At no point do they attempt to
photograph, film or otherwise record the performance. It is
purely gestural, vanishing into obscurity the moment it is
over. (Mason 2012: 53)
Throughout the march the mourners are spat at, sworn at
and abused. The performance gauges that levels of anger and
fear are high, and upsets the process of things quietly getting
back to normal.
3. The Hive Manifesto (Arts Against Cuts 2010). A text produced spontaneously and collectively, by all who occupied
the National Gallery on the night of Day X. As stated by Paul
Mason, who also comments on the manifesto, no great work
of literature perhaps, but a working through of protocols for
refusal and modes of protest different to those sanctioned by
representational politics (Mason 2012: 54). Protestors refused
to leave the gallery until the manifesto was complete.
4. Long and Direct Weekends9 (and the Notice Boards, Maps
of Spaces and Timetables They Produced). On several weekends, Arts Against Cuts and their allies held talks, discussions
and workshops at various universities, each weekend producing intense collaborations and encounters. The protocols of
open space technology were employed, so that all could stage
a workshop, discussion or presentation or produce props, banners and posters. Maps, notice boards and timetables indexed
rapid transformations of space and discussion; the timetables
and notice boards bore the residue of intense encounters in the
form scribbling, drawings, arrows, crosses, strikethroughs, felttip and ink smudges, erasures, notes and tape.

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5. Merz Summer School.10 Perhaps inspired by the free schools

of London and feeling they needed time to process all they
had seen and done, perhaps needing time to work through
the problems of collaboration and collective and individual action, and perhaps dissatisfied with universities as they
existed and discussions dominated by lecturers and experts, a
group of students involved in the occupations and protests left
London for the Lake District to run their own summer school,
open to all who wanted to attend, at the invitation of Kurt
Schwitters Merz Barn.

Negative Space War Machines

In conclusion, it is important to acknowledge the protests and occupations discussed above failed to halt austerity measures (whether due to
lacking critical mass or effective tactics) but the protests have a legacy of
a kind. While it is true that the five examples above and the occupations
in general posed no serious threat to the order of things, these negative
space war machines experimented with specific problems concerning
affirmation and negation, autonomy and collective action and the relation of cyberspace and physical space; all are problems relevant to politics and protest concerned with refusing existing relations and exploring alternatives. Through actions and productions that were more than
a communication of opposition, the occupations and the examples cited
above share four attributes that define negative space war machines:
Negative space war machines are not representational machines but address a problem.
Negative space war machines are made
in the moment for the moment.
Negative space war machines contest space and its relations.
Negative space war machines are produced collectively for a collective (not as a political communication to a public or power).

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Works Cited
Arts Against Cuts. 2010. The Nomadic Hive Manifesto (December 9). Accessed
8 May, 2015 from: https://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/
after-the-national-gallery-teach-in/
Berardi, Franco. 2009a. Communism is Back But We Should Call the Therapy of
Singularization. Generation Online (February) Accessed May 4 2015, from: http://
www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo6.htm
Berardi, Franco. 2009b. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the
Post-alpha Generation. Ed. Erik Empson and Stevphen Shukaitis. Trans. Arianna
Bove, Michael Goddard, Giuseppina Mecchia, Antonella Schintu and Steve
Wright. London: Minor Compositions.
Curtis, Adam. 2011a. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Episode one.
BBC2 (May 23).
Curtis Adam. 2011b. Untitled paper. The Story Conference at Conway Hall (February
20). London: Storythings. Podcast available on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.
com/gb/podcast/storythings/id439627244?mt=2#
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Negotiations 19721990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York:
Columbia.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. Bartleby; or, The Formula. In Essays Critical and Clinical:
19681990. Trans. Daniel W Smith. London and New York: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 2003. Treatise on Nomadology War Machines.
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi.
London: Continuum: 387467.
Foucault, Michel. 1974. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. AM Sheriden Smith.
London: Tavistock.
Goldsmiths Occupation. 2010a. Goldsmiths Occupation Statement. Mute
(December 7). Accessed May 9, 2015 from: http://www.metamute.org/
community/your-posts/goldsmiths-occupation-statement
Goldsmiths Occupation. 2010b. Statement on the Goldsmiths Occupation.
Mute (December 8). Accessed May 9, 2015 from: http://www.metamute.org/
community/your-posts/statement-goldsmiths-occupation
Jameson, Fredic. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
London and New York: Verso.
Land, Nick. 1997. Organisation is Suppression: Interview by James Flint. In Wire
(February). Accessed April 1, 2013 from: http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/
park/di21/art_tech_ec_files/land.htm

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Land, Nick. 2011. Machinic Desire. In Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987
2000. Cornwall: Urbanomic: 34041.
Mason, Paul. 2012. Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere. London and New York: Verso.
Platonov, Andrei. 1978. Chevengar. Trans. Anthony Olcott. Michigan: Ardis.
Slade Occuption. 2010. Our Statement. Accessed 8 May, 2015 from: https://
sladeoccupation.wordpress.com/our-statement/

Notes
1.

Slogan printed on an Arts Against Cuts sticker.

2.

Journalist Hannah Gersen, commenting on Bartleby and Occupy Wall Street

suggests, If Occupy Wall Street has any goal, it should be to have the same
effect that great literature has to unsettle, see Bartlebys Occupation of Wall
Street, The Millons (October 11, 2011), available at: http://www.themillions.
com/2011/10/bartlebys-occupation-of-wall-street.html Other websites
linking Bartleby to the occupations include Nina Martyris, A Patron Saint for
Occupy Wall Street, The New Republic (October 15, 2011), availabe at: http://
www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/96276/nina-martyris-ows-andbartleby-the-scrivener and Jonathan Greenberg, Occupy Wall Streets Debt
to Melville, The Atlantic (April 30, 2012), available at: http://www.theatlantic.
com/politics/archive/2012/04/occupy-wall-streets-debt-to-melville/256482

3.

See Occupy London, Statement on Autonomy (December 14, 2011), availabe

at: http://occupylondon.org.uk/about/statements/statement-of-autonomy/

4.

In relation to the problems of art and creativity, Reza Negarestani articulated

a similar position in a discussion at the event The Medium of Contingency
at Thomas Dane Gallery, London on February 23, 2011, the day that protests
against workfare and EMA (education maintenance allowance) cuts took
place in the capital. In his talk Negarestani argued for artists to be complicit
rather than creative with their materials and await contingencies or collapse.
He urged artists to do nothing creative.

5.

Open Space Technology (OST) is a mode of staging meetings that begin

with no formal agenda other than an agreed theme, aim or problem. Such
gatherings develop through bulletin boards and flexible timetables stipulating
spaces or slots that are filled as the event progresses. Participants attend
workshops or discussions depending on whether they feel they can contribute
or the sessions are productive. OST was developed by individuals involved in
business studies.

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6.

Paul Mason describes such a protestor, @littlemisswild who joins an

occupation by accident (she didnt want to be alone and she is told she can
twitter all she likes). She doesnt know the history of the term solidarity
though she ends every tweet with the greeting, and she does not read books
on politics if she can help it but reads twitter flows, blogs and websites to know
what is going on, and she does know what is going on (Mason 2012: 412).

7.

Mason (2012: 79) describes another (mythical) figure in the same book,
sitting in Starbucks, face colored blue from the reflected light of a laptop.
She may be facebooking, designing, gaming, tweeting or planning protest
and revolution, or all of these things at once. Mason suggests that this marks
a shift in culture from a generation steeped in collectivism to a generation
concerned with the expansion of the individual.

8.

The term statement is used here to refer to performed or performative roles, as

outlined by Michel Foucault who argued that a statement is not a unit, but a
function that cuts across a domain of structures and possibilities and unities,
and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space (Foucault
1974: 79118).

9.

See Arts Against Cuts, Arts Against Cuts: The Long Weekend (December
2, 2010), available at: http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/
arts-against-cuts-the-long-weekend/

10. See Kurt Schwitters Summer School, available at: http://

kurtschwitterssummerschool.wordpress.com/

Chapter 9

Occupy America and the SlowMotion General Strike

Eugene Holland

I see three areas of significant overlap between the Occupy movement

and Deleuze and Guattaris political philosophy, and I will examine them
under the rubrics of the war machine, ahistorical becomings, and the
minor. Given that their first collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus, emerged
at least partly as a reflection on the unanticipated political events of May
1968, it would be very surprising if Deleuze and Guattaris perspective
turned out not to be relevant to the equally unforeseen resonance of the
Occupy Wall Street movement throughout the United States (and indeed
around the world) some forty years later. And it is the unforeseen quality
of both these political movements that leads into the first two of the three
topics under consideration in what follows.
War Machines
Although the term itself is in many ways misleading, the concept of the
war machine is central to Deleuze and Guattaris understanding of politics and society, and especially to their conception of micro-politics,
which is one of their most important contributions to political theory.
While it is true that war machines do in certain specific circumstances
make war, their essential characteristics are that they operate by means of
a very particular kind of social cohesion, and that they produce change:
in this respect, they would be better known as mutation machines
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 229) or, as Paul Patton (2000) has

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suggested, metamorphosis machines. In order to evoke the kind of social

relations characteristic of mutation machines, we can draw on Deleuze
and Guattaris distinction between pack and herd animals. Herd animals
form an undifferentiated mass, and they all follow a single leader; this
for Deleuze and Guattari is the epitome of the State form of social relations. Pack animals such as wolves interact very differently: for wolves on
the hunt, there is a significant degree of role specialization, and the pack
operates via the collective coordination of members activities rather
than via obedience to a single leader. (While it is true that the dominant
alpha-male and alpha-female of a wolf pack unilaterally determine the
distribution of food after the hunt as well as the distribution of mating
opportunities, for that matter they do not serve as leaders of the hunt
itself, which operates instead via spontaneous or horizontal coordination.) The kinds of change produced by mutation machines, meanwhile,
vary widely. Deleuze and Guattari even go so far as to say that the war
machine exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial
innovation as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a religious creation or in specific assemblages such as
building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgments or making music
or instituting a science, a technology (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 366).
Finally, and perhaps most important, mutation machines operate via contagion, enthusiasm, esprit de corps, and solidarity (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 2419, 2679, 278, 3667, 384, 39093) rather than strict obligation or duty.
Certainly much of what happened during the events of May 1968 in
France can be accounted for only in terms of enthusiasm and contagion
rather than duty: a small student protest against corporate sponsorship
of war gradually spread to become a general strike against the dissatisfactions of French society as a whole. The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 (OWS), in a similar way, spread rapidly to cities and campuses around the country, and eventually to groups and places around
the world. It operated by contagion rather than by obedience to a single
leader or even a single platform or program. OWS also quickly developed both a remarkable degree of role specialization and very effective
horizontal modes of cooperation and coordination. And although it was
initially conceived and organized by an identifiable group of activists (as

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was the initial French student protest), it very quickly grew beyond the
bounds of anything they had imagined, and certainly grew far beyond
anything they could control. Yet the fact that OWS can be said to have
taken the form of a mutation machine does not make it a panacea: the
contemporaneous right-wing Tea Party movement operated according
to quite similar dynamics although it did benefit from funding by the
likes of the Koch brothers and from media hype provided by the likes of
Fox cable news. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the Nazis operated
as an autonomous war machine before they took power and integrated
that machine into the apparatus of state rule. Ultimately, then, the form
of organization or of the social dynamics of a given group says relatively
little about the content of their positions or activities. The value of the
concept of the war machine is rather that it directs our attention to the
manner in which these social groups or movements actually operate. And
in OWS and the Tea Party movements, we have chosen rather extreme
examples: it may be that elections in so-called liberal or representative
democracies are always won or lost on the basis of which party can mobilize more numerous and more energetic war machines operating on its
behalf from student volunteers going door-to-door, to volunteer housewives stuffing envelopes, to donors and campaign operatives themselves.
Much like the stock market, electoral politics depends far more than is
usually recognized on the kind of enthusiasm and contagion that are key
elements of the war machine.
Since war machines operate on the Right as well as the Left, and everywhere in between, the fact that OWS took that form, or started out that
way, cannot be considered decisive in evaluating its impact. But the same
was true of the events of May 1968 for Deleuze and Guattari: within the
span of a few months, the French movement had been re-absorbed into
macro-politics as usual, with President de Gaulle receiving broad-based
and strong support in the ensuing elections. But that doesnt mean nothing changed on the level of micro-politics. Deleuze and Guattari describe
deep-seated effects on countless individuals, for one thing in a portrait
that might just as well suit a generation of young Americans who would
soon participate in OWS:
The children of May 68, you can run into them all over
the place, even if they are not aware who they are, and each

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country produces them in its own way. Their situation is not

great. These are not young executives. They are strangely
indifferent, and for that very reason they are in the right frame
of mind. They have stopped being demanding or narcissistic,
but they know perfectly well that there is nothing today that
corresponds to their subjectivity, to their potential of energy.
(Deleuze 2006: 235)
And for another thing, the kind of movement that May 1968 was gets
registered in the concepts (such as the war machine, micro-politics, etc.)
that Deleuze and Guattari (and others) created in order to better understand it and hopefully relay its potential to future generations. Finally,
even when a social movement produces no apparent immediate results
as was the case with May 1968, and appears to be the case with OWS as
well it may have produced what Deleuze and Guattari call incorporeal
transformations whose real or corporeal effects only become apparent at
some later time. Thus a judges sentence doesnt in and of itself physically
kill a condemned person on the spot: it produces an incorporeal transformation, changing that persons social and legal status from accused
to condemned, which only later, barring unforeseen mitigating circumstances or disruptions, leads to corporeal death. But history is rarely (if
ever) as clear-cut as a judicial proceeding: incorporeal transformations
may occur without our even being aware of them at the time, such that it
is only later that we ask What happened? what must have happened x
months or y years ago, to lead up to the unforeseen changes we are witnessing today? In a famous 1984 magazine article (later re-published as
an essay in Two Regimes of Madness (2006)), Deleuze and Guattari even
went so far as to claim that May 68 did not take place (Mai 68 na pas
eu lieu); they characterize it instead as a visionary phenomenon and
a pure event whose realization depends on societys ability to develop
collective agencies of enunciation to institutionalize the changes foreseen by the event: French society has shown a radical incapacity to create a subjective redeployment on the collective level, which is what 68
demands (Deleuze 2006: 234). But the fact that no such agencies were
found in the two decades following May 1968 doesnt mean that they
couldnt develop in the future. And in the same way, incorporeal transformations put into motion by OWS may yet bear fruit; there can be no

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question that the movement has at least already completely transformed

the social meaning of an otherwise anodyne figure, the 99%.
Ahistorical Becomings
In order to better understand the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari
can say that May 1968 did not take place and yet call it a pure event, we
must learn, along with them, to distinguish between history and becoming, that is to say, between linear history and the potential alternatives
to historical development they call becomings. History for Deleuze and
Guattari is always a mixture combining linear development that is causally determined with bifurcation points that are unpredictable both as to
when they occur and where they will lead. May 1968 in France, as we
have seen, was a potential bifurcation point that could have led French
society in a very different direction, but it didnt (or hasnt yet) because
the requisite collective agencies of enunciation werent available. One of
the important roles for political philosophy is to diagnose the becomings
inherent in historical events, to extract what is untimely (as they say,
borrowing the term from Nietzsche), from linear historical determinacy.
If Deleuze and Guattari were able to extract a concept of micro-politics
from May 1968, is it possible today to extract concepts from OWS? We
will return to this question below. But first we need to further examine
the relation of becomings to history.
Conceiving of history as non-linear poses at least three kinds of problem. One is that historical achievements are never permanent. Deleuze
and Guattari contrast May 1968 in France with the mid-twentieth century American New Deal, inasmuch as the New Deal was able to institutionalize the solutions it envisioned to address the Great Depression.
Yet those institutions have not survived decades of Republican attacks,
so that now, even when confronting the worst economic crisis since the
Great Depression, a new New Deal has not been possible. A second problem arising from non-linear history is the impossibility of identifying
bifurcation points, or even assessing their potential when they are recognizable. May 1968 may have set in motion deep-seated transformations
in French society that will take decades to become visible and the same
may be true of OWS: perhaps it will have been a bifurcation point, and

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we just dont know it yet. Finally, in the context of non-linear causality,

effects may be wildly disproportionate to causes as in the famous (if
fanciful) illustration of a butterfly flapping its wings and thereby contributing to a hurricane on the other side of the globe. Such disproportionality adds to the difficulty of identifying bifurcation points in the first
place, and to the impossibility of assessing their future potential with
much confidence. What all this suggests for political strategy is a new
way around the hoary reformrevolution conundrum. Given the nonlinear view of history, there is no point in waiting around for the right
moment to make the revolution: we might miss any number of opportunities because we didnt recognize them as tipping points. At the same
time, there is no reason to shy away from reforms, even those that at the
moment seem unlikely to produce widespread change, because with
effects being disproportionate to causes, any one or combination of them
might be or become a tipping point before or without our realizing it in
the short-term. Political action must be worthwhile in its own right, in
the short-term, as well as hold out reasonable prospects for contributing
to significant and wide-ranging social change in the medium-to-longterm. This was one of the most striking features of the Occupy movement
in practically all of its incarnations: rather than simply calling for a more
democratic society, as many political demonstrations tend to do, it actually enacted one. Food was collectively prepared and distributed; lending
libraries and small discussion groups were established; most important,
a whole set of informal discussion and decision-making procedures were
developed for the General Assemblies (particularly in the face of police
injunctions against the use of megaphones and PA systems). OWS tried
to instantiate and illustrate what true participatory democracy looks
like, rather than merely make demands of a supposedly democratic system that it knew to be hopelessly corrupt. Yet at the same time, its propensity was emphatically not to turn on, tune in, drop out (as it was for
a portion of the 1960s counter-culture movement), but rather to take the
example of more truly democratic social relations to the very heart of
the beast Wall Street. So OWS had both a long-term or systemic largescale target (Wall Street) and an immediate small-scale goal (instantiating democracy), and satisfying this double requirement is one aspect of
what I have called (Holland 2011) the slow-motion general strike, which

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we will discuss below. But it poses some problems for the politics of the
war machine, as discussed above. How do you make political action that
is not obviously revolutionary into something contagious? How does the
felt need for social change become urgent? In the 1960s United States, it
was anti-war protest, and the prospect of dying in a war we didnt believe
in, that lent the counter-culture movement its sense of urgency; in 1960s
France, however, there was no such focal point, and yet the French student movement proved far more contagious than its American counterpart, and ended up mobilizing a far greater proportion of the French
people than were mobilized by the American counter-culture and antiwar movements combined. The Occupy movement certainly became
contagious, but despite the name Occupy, it never had concrete longterm ambitions: what will become of Occupy 2.0 is a pressing question
that so far remains unanswered. One of the unfortunate difficulties of the
war machine and non-linear history is that they are so unpredictable
practically by definition. It is just as impossible to produce enthusiasm
or solidarity at will as it is to predict the timing or extent of a bifurcation
point in advance. But it was certainly no accident that ground zero for
the Occupy movement was none other than Wall Street.
The Minor
And it may be just as revealing that the single most enduring, significant
and vigorous off-shoot of the Occupy movement has been the (inaptly
named) Occupy Student Debt movement. To help explain why this
might be so, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattaris adaptation of Marxs
analysis of capital, which I call their minor marxism (Holland 2011).
The key difference between most major or dialectical Marxism and this
minor or structural marxism is that while the former focuses on the results
of the dialectical process of capital accumulation, the latter focuses on the
structural preconditions for capital accumulation also known as primitive accumulation. The watchword of major Marxism follows from the
dialectical precept of the negation of the negation: expropriate the expropriators; confront the power of accumulated capital head-on, and wrest
it from its illegitimate private owners by force. The approach of a minor
marxism is different: address the structural preconditions for capital

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accumulation rather than the power of accumulated capital itself; disrupt

and reverse the process of primitive accumulation. This is the basis of the
strategy I call the slow-motion general strike. It is a general strike in that it
is not directed against a single industry, but against capitalist industry as
a whole; and indeed, following the example set in France in May 1968, it
could be considered to be a strike against many or all facets of social life,
not just industry and in particular a strike against a nominally democratic political system that, then as now, has clearly not served the interests of the majority (the 99%). But the slow-motion general strike is also
distinctive because, unlike the traditional or major general strike, it is not
punctual and not confrontational: it unfolds gradually over the long haul
rather than provoking (or hoping for) immediate wholesale changes in
social life; and rather than confronting the power of accumulated capital, it seeks to undermine that power by subtracting greater and greater
areas of social and economic activity from capitalist markets through
the development of alternative economies and social networks that provide alternative means of life outside the circuits of capital. As the work
of Gibson-Graham has amply demonstrated, economic activity already
actually takes many different forms, even under or within capitalism,
and many of them are in fact non-capitalist, if not explicitly anti-capitalist. The political strategy of a minor marxism thus centers around people
gradually extricating themselves from dependence on capitalist markets,
goods, and means of life, by instead relying on and further developing
alternative means of life community-supported agriculture, opensource software, DIY (do-it-yourself), fair trade, the list goes on and on
until a tipping point or bifurcation point is reached where capitalist
markets begin to starve and then eventually wither away. This is what it
would mean to reverse the process of primitive accumulation from which
capitalism first emerges and on which it continues to depend.
As Marx points out although he waits until the concluding part of
Capital, Volume One to do so the process of so-called primitive accumulation (called so by Adam Smith) is better understood as a combined process of accumulation and destitution. For capital investment to
emerge, there must be a prior accumulation of wealth in liquid form (not
land), available to be invested. But equally important, there must be a
population stripped of their traditional livelihood, who thus have no way

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of surviving other than by selling their labor-power for a wage. So-called

primitive accumulation, Marx insists, is nothing else than the historical
process of divorcing the producer from the means of production (1887:
Ch. 26, Para. 3). Capitalism emerges on the basis of this fortuitous
encounter between liquid wealth and destitute labor, which Deleuze and
Guattari call the primary axiom of capital accumulation. Innumerable
other axioms can be added and subtracted consumer tastes, production
technologies, state forms, and so on but the axiom that converts wealth
into investment capital and work into dependent wage labor remains at
the heart of the capitalist mode of production. Major Marxism focuses
on accumulation; minor marxism focuses on dependency. In the course
of capitalisms historical development, dependency has taken three basic
forms. The first form of dependence to predominate was work: destitute workers were forced to sell their labor-power to survive. But this
form was from the start inextricably linked to a second form, involving
consumption: workers were obliged to buy means of subsistence from
capitalists (rather than producing them independently). Availability of
non-capitalist ways of procuring the means of life would aggravate capitals realization problem: capitalists cant make a profit if the goods they
produce are not bought back in sufficient quantities. As brute starvation
(in some parts of the global economy) declines in importance as a way
of enforcing dependency, marketing and advertizing intervene to make
people psychologically dependent on the purchase of capitalist commodities. Even leisure time gets commodified, as people become increasingly
unable or unwilling to entertain themselves and purchase mass-produced
entertainment instead. Even worse than the subsumption of production,
consumption and leisure time by capital, however, is the third form of
dependency, which is debt. As Deleuze puts it in his prescient essay on
control society, modern man is no longer a man confined, but a man
in debt (Deleuze 1995: 181). This context renews and heightens the
significance of the fact that the first known word for freedom is an economic rather than a political term: it meant freedom from debt peonage.
Trading the unfreedoms of disciplinary confinement for the unfreedom
to go into debt in neoliberal society of control is hardly a bargain: while
capitalist production and consumption certainly subsumed huge portions of social life, the debt to capital weighs like a nightmare on every

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decision in every minute of every day, 24/7/365: for those in debt, each
and every moment of their entire life must enter a calculus of whether it
reduces, merely defers, or actually increases their debt burden.
But modern debt itself takes several different forms. Modern debtfinanced capital investment, of course, dates back to the early days of
mercantile capitalism, and continues unabated under industrial capitalism. The public debt [was] one of the most powerful levers of primitive
accumulation from early on, according to Marx (1887: Chap. 31 Para.
15). But as capitalist production develops and massifies, the realization problem emerges, as we have seen, and debt-financed consumption
arises alongside debt-financed production. Indeed as long as profit gets
extracted from the entire sum of exchanges between wages and commodity prices, capitalism requires debt-financed consumption in order
to survive. But debt-financed consumption itself takes two very different
forms. The first was the great Keynesian-New-Deal-Fordist-welfare-state
gambit, whereby states would go into debt in hard times to bail out capital
through deficit spending, with the expectation, supposedly, that the debt
would be repaid in good times. Except that, as we know, the debt never
does get repaid; instead, it continues to grow and grow and eventually
goes through the ceiling until or unless the ceiling itself is conveniently
moved, as it has been repeatedly by bipartisan acts of Congress. But the
debt ceiling cant be moved forever, at least not without exposing the
whole capitalist accounting system as a massive hoax or Ponzi scheme.
The inevitable conclusion is that capitalism has been living on borrowed
time for at least the last 83 years or on borrowed money, which as we
know is more or less the same thing. Nation states around the world, and
not just the United States, face this long-term sovereign debt crisis, as it
is called Argentina, notoriously, a decade ago; Greece, Italy, Spain, and
Ireland more recently with no final solution in sight. As the Occupy
movement spread around the world, it often focused on this form of debt.
But in the United States, the original OWS focused on the other form of
debt, which we can call neoliberal debt or indentured debt peonage the
kind that Deleuze associates with what he calls control society (Deleuze
1995: 177822). In this form, some of the debt required to keep capitalism afloat gets displaced from sovereign states onto private individuals
(home mortgages, car loans, student loans, credit card retail debt, and so

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on). While private consumer debt is hardly new, the scale of predatory
abuse of consumers perpetrated by finance capital, including most notably in home mortgages and student loans, went through the roof, and
were a key motivation for OWS, and for the choice of Wall Street as the
place to occupy in the first place.
Minor marxism offers another kind of explanation for OWS choosing Wall Street as its prime target, which has to do with the nature of
debt to begin with. Marx likens the role of so-called primitive accumulation in bourgeois political economy to that of original sin in theology:
it is crucial to everything that follows, but it itself remains unexamined
and/or unexplained. Deleuze and Guattari offer a very different account
of primitive accumulation: on their account, pre-capitalist accumulation is responsible for the appropriation of surplus-labor long before
the rise of capitalism, and the consolidation of capitalism as a mode of
production entails the transfer of what had been an infinite debt from
gods or despots to capital itself. What had been owed to them in various forms of tribute or taxation is henceforth owed to capital in the form
of interest. This means that finance capital has not just a historical precedent (as most Marxists will admit, from the period of mercantile capitalism), but a theoretical precedence as well. For major Marxism, credit
becomes possible because of, and out of, the surplus generated by capitalist production; the dialectical account occupying the first few hundred
pages of Capital, Volume One shows how through a process of increasing
abstraction money emerges from in-kind exchange, and then how the
commodification of labor-power enables money to become capital, and
finally how interest on money represents a share of the surplus-value generated through the production process owed to finance capital. Deleuze
and Guattari, by contrast, insist that finance capital is prior to industrial
capital not just at the historical emergence of capitalism, but in principle
and throughout the history of capitalism. This is so in principle because
Deleuze and Guattari follow Nietzsche in understanding money to be
primarily a vehicle for debt and the establishment and enforcement of
unequal power relations rather than a vehicle for the exchange of equivalents among equal parties. For minor marxism, then, ownership of capital
is first and foremost the power to create value ex nihilo, if only for the
purpose of subsequently introducing it into the production process in

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order to appropriate even more surplus-value. Modern state regulations,

it is true, require whats called a cash reserve ratio which means that
banks must hold some modicum of assets against which to make loans;
recently, these ratios have been found to be scandalously low, and have in
some cases led to bankruptcy: but the point is that the cash reserve ratio
for banks is never anywhere near 100% so even if technically speaking
capital is not being created completely ex nihilo, it is nonetheless the case
that most of it is, and that a major function of the finance sector is, in the
strongest sense, to invent or create fictitious capital for investment in productive enterprises, with the expectation that surplus-value will be generated and some of it paid back in interest. With Wall Streets development of complex derivatives and markets for insuring them, the disparity
between actual industrial value and fictitious financial value became
too great and too obvious yet another reason for choosing Wall Street
as the prime target for the Occupy movement.
Minor marxism focuses on the dependence or precarity generated
by so-called primitive accumulation, and particularly by the degree of
dependence accompanying the wholesale fabrication of ubiquitous
debt relations by contemporary finance capital, among which the home
mortgage and student debt crises became the most visible, and therefore
became precipitating factors in the Occupy movement. A student debtstrike is one of the most important ideas to emerge from the aftermath
of OWS but there is no reason to limit such a strike to students, when
practically everyone suffers from the imposition of debt in one form or
another. But eliminating or reducing debt is by no means the only laudable goal of the Occupy movement: its sights were set on far more than
that. By modeling post-capitalist and post-representative social relations,
OWS points to a more far-reaching and thoroughgoing transformation of
contemporary society, which perhaps only a slow-motion general strike,
based on principles similar to those instantiated in OWS, will be able to
bring about.

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Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations 19721990. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 19751995. Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham, JK. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We New It): A Feminist Critique
of Political Economy. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
Holland, Eugene W. 2011. Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the SlowMotion General Strike. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Marx, Karl. 1887. Capital, Volume One. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling.
Accessed May 8, 2015 from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1867-c1/index.htm
Patton, Paul. 2000. Deleuze and the Political. London and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 10

Savage Money1
Andrew Conio
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the
mind is repelled.
JK Galbraith (1975: 29)

Banks create money. That is what they are there for Each
time a Bank makes a loan new Bank credit is created
brand new money.
Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada 1935 to 1955

The analyses of the banking system and prescriptions for repairing it by

the monetary campaign group Positive Money have received a remarkable degree of attention.2 The group has been party to policy discussions
with governments, think tanks and research groups, has a reputable
board of advisors,3 and has established a significant political presence, as
well as attracting large public audiences, widespread media coverage and
book sales unprecedented in the history of monetary reform campaigns.
Expressed with undue brevity their argument runs something like
this: Our current economic problems stem largely from the fact that the
banks have the ability to create endogenous money money that they
can then charge for. Almost the entire money supply is on loan from the
banks: only 3% of the money in the system is notes or coins or reserves of
the central bank, with the remaining 97% being created by the banks as
debt. By paying interest on virtually every dollar or pound in circulation,
we are, in effect, renting a privatized currency from the banks.

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This single feature impacts upon every aspect of economic and political life. First, it is difficult to overstate the role that bank money played
in the creation of the housing bubble. The rise in house prices was not a
supply and demand issue: over the last 20 years US housing stock grew
by 16%, meaning that the number of houses grew faster than did the
number of people, whilst mortgage lending grew by almost 600% over
the same period. Subprime mortgage lending increased from $30 billion
a year to $600 billion a year in 10 years, leading to an effective doubling
of house prices.
This endogenous form of money creation has distorted the UK
national economy and cannot be disassociated from the gigantic Ponzi
scheme that brought the world economy to its knees. It was the transformation of debt into tradable securities that made possible the invention
of securitization and the armory of financial weapons of mass destruction, as Warren Buffet dubbed them.
Bank-created money provided the base fuel for unrestrained money
creation taking into account the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives market, it
is safe to say that in effect money creation became infinite. This is a system whereby so-called fiat money, money that is not backed by reserves
of another commodity, became virtual.
In a speech to the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform,
Michael Rowbotham (2013) dissects most clearly how a debt-based
economy squeezes disposable income; it also squeezes the profit margins
of businesses creating the need for cheaper and cheaper products and
higher levels of mass production, which in turn creates increased impoverishment of the labor force, thousands of tons of cheap and disposable
goods, and the unpayable social and environmental costs of production
and distribution. Money creation is the main driver behind the imperative for growth that is in essence the driver of ecological destruction.
As Ross Jackson notes, the most important single factor that is driving our civilization toward ecological collapse is the promotion of great
per capita consumption as the primary goal of every nation state at a time
when we are already over-consuming (2012: 73). The stark reality is that
if we continue to pursue the economic growth required to pay off the
debts then runaway climate change is all but guaranteed.

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When banks create money they realize the stuff of wizards and legends. The magical power to create your own money in the form of an
asset out of thin air is expressed by Paul Fisher (2013) thus:
When you start printing money, you create some value for
yourself. If you can issue a thousand pounds worth of IOUs to
everybody, youve got a thousand pounds for nothing.
From 2003 to 2013 the banks created 1trillion, netting
interest of between 108bn to 217bn every single year. The
financial system has effectively held the political system hostage. As banks create money they have the power to shape the
economy and decide the economic priorities of the nation.
With little bearing on any sensible measure of what counts as economic
development and wealth creation, between 1980 and 2007 the assets of
the banking sector grew from $2.5 trillion to $40 trillion. In 1980 banking assets were worth 20 times the then global economy; by 2006 they
were worth 75 times (according to the UN). Due to this wizardry banks
have an undue influence on the development of the economy. Assetstripping, off-shoring and speculative trading are now favored over the
steady growth that emerges out of a commitment to manufacturing and
long-term business-development. As a result, new money is often more
likely to be channelled into property and financial speculation than into
small businesses and manufacturing, with profound economic consequences for society.4 Given that five banks control 85% of the money in
the UK economy, a total of 87 board members (or 30 to 40 key decision
makers) have effective control over the nations money supply.
Government has to gear its policies to keeping the money (debt) supply working, and because the banks are essentially responsible for that
supply, when they get into trouble, government that is, taxpayers
have to bail them out. We have no choice. We find ourselves in a position where the banks lending is higher than all government spending.
Further, each and everyone of us now has to shoulder the burden of this
debt; the natural human propensity to take responsibility for oneself, to
shoulder ones burden, is exploited and masochistically internalized as
we take upon ourselves the costs and risks of the economic and financial disaster.

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Financial markets became integral to the administration of public debts, accompanied by an expansion of their logic, their rules, their
imperatives and interests. This implies, finally, the shifting of the reserves
of sovereignty. The financialization of government structures, the mediation between public and private debts have mechanized political decisions as market-driven decisions; the markets themselves have become a
sort of creditor-god, whose final authority decides the fate of currencies,
social systems, public infrastructures, private savings, etc. (Vogl 2012: 5)
The overall effect of this cycle was a colossal transfer of wealth from
the poor to the rich. Far from creating jobs, and prompting the miraculous trickle down effect, this wealth concentration created a restriction
of real demand. The owners of assets (property, stocks and shares, private equity, complex financial products, works of art, race horses, etc.)
were able to use easy credit to inflate the value of those assets. By these
means were they obscenely enriched. Those without assets and therefore
without access to easy credit were correspondingly impoverished. Thus
did the rich get richer, and the poor poorer. The repugnant effects spread
across household, regional and global scales as debt repayment was used
to justify outcomes that would be intolerable in other circumstances: an
avalanche of people losing their homes, who also can no longer afford
healthcare; countries losing their economic sovereignty and devastating
their social provision; cancellation of healthcare programs leading to the
deaths of tens of thousands and, on a global scale, the hunger, even starvation, of vast numbers and the immiseration of millions.
The link between the housing bubble and money creation is clear, as
is the relationship between the creation of the shadow banking system,
the huge swathes of predatory products, and the vulture, voodoo or
downright quasi-criminal speculative trading schemes that brought the
world economic system to the brink of collapse. Bank credit provided the
fuel, deregulation the environment, and algorithms the velocity required
to create colossal sums and to some extent shield the players from their
responsibilities.
For the Positive Money campaign group, the effect endogenous
money has had on the banking sector betrays the structural flaw at the
heart of the financial system in the form of ceding control of the nations
finances to private interests. What has become clearer is the central role

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money creation has played in this, along with the staging of a financial
coup dtat by the financial services industry. A rogue, predatory industry, bereft of moral values, has been bolstered by an idiotic idiom that
models only objective illusions (Goodchild 2013: 55) perpetuated by
an economics profession that has captured the debate to the exclusion of
any consideration of the values of life, ethics, species, planet, community,
compassion, or the future of life itself.
However, whilst from the perspective of mainstream (neoliberal)
economic theory, Positive Moneys thesis may be considered unorthodox, from a philosophical or anthropological perspective they rely on a
set of conventional and unexamined predicates, particularly around the
nature of money, which they take to be relatively colorless or frictionless
instead of originativily and structurally riven with power relations. With
regard to the history, nature and function of money this paper questions
whether there exists an unbridgeable methodological, ethical or ontological divide between speculative philosophy and political economy.
To answer this question, I propose a journey from the empirical policy-driven world of Positive Money to the experimental empiricism of
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, in order to test one against the other.
I will examine the theory of money presented in Anti-Oedipus, which is
coming to be regarded as a prescient and prophetic reading of contemporary capitalism.
In conclusion, I suggest that the philosophical speculations of Deleuze
and Guattari and Positive Moneys empirical approach to debt-based
money can, despite emerging from wholly different epistemologies and
methodologies, be overlaid, one atop the other like tracing paper, each
ultimately saying the same thing. The political, economic, and philosophical consequences of this are far reaching. Not least in the identification
of a potential meeting place for the most intensive critiques of capitalism
as a totalizing abstract machine and the political demands of policy formation and reform.
Credit and Debt
The following discussion is framed by four works that have the strongest
purchase on the issues at hand: Friedrich Nietzsches On the Genealogy

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of Morality (1887), David Graebers Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011),
Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus, and Maurizio Lazzaratos The
Making of Indebted Man (2011). The first three books each delineate
differently the same formative period in the development of humanity
before the emergence of societies that were structured chiefly through
the interaction of church, money and state. The period is outlined with
different emphases but with substantive details in common as the The
Axial Age5 (Graeber), Primitive Society (Nietzsche), or Primitive/
Territorial Society6 (Deleuze and Guattari). Lazzaratos work offers a
reading of a new stage of capitalist development (contemporary finance
capital) and the concomitant emergence of a new subject, the indebted
man, by way of the Nietzsche-inspired thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari.
Graeber accumulates extensive anthropological and historical evidence going back millennia to take issue with the conventional view
that money emerged in order to expedite barter and to demonstrate that
coins were used in the Agrarian Age7 which preceded the Axial Age but
were made to suit the needs of small city states, and acted as a currency
of last resort when informal credit systems became too unwieldy. They
had few of the features which we would today associate with money.
This concurs with Deleuze and Guattaris description of primitive
territorial societies where debt was plural, finite and based on systems of
alliance. Indeed, in a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) paper
Benes and Kumhof (2012: 12) pull together an even wider range of
accounts which in their different ways show that money did not develop
out of the need to trade or as a way of measuring equivalences.
Nietzsches thesis in the Genealogy of Morals can be expressed in short
order: man is innately aggressive, he expresses enmity, cruelty, joy in pursuit, in attack, in destruction, and to think otherwise is navely to divorce
man from his animal nature. In primeval times, within the original tribal
cooperatives, relations were principally relations of judgment and measure rather than cooperation and mutuality. Nietzsche (1998) outlines in
his book On the Genealogy of Morality that man is an inherently calculating animal, and selling and buying, together with their psychological
attributes, are the oldest forms of social organization.
The character of the system for the measurement and collection
of debts determined the logic of social exchange and relations. With

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regard to non-payment of debts, punishment was not sought as a kind

of revenge; instead, payment, even in another kind, was calculated for
non-payment. The debtor was not cast as somehow in breach of a moral
code or as having fallen short of some moral value. What was owed was
not guilt, gratitude or supplication but the debt itself. Thus, as objective compensation for a crime, an eye could be taken for an eye. Debt
was measured according to custom, payment due and taken; a pound of
flesh or a child taken away could amount to a debt executed and payment
measured precisely. Whilst savage means for exacting payment were
used amputation for example they were measured without rancor or
enmity as they allowed for a natural discharge of anger, executed with a
disinterested, enjoyable and affirmative malice. This was for Nietzsche a
nave and innocent type of cruelty unencumbered by sentimentality and
piousness. Crucially, because they were dischargeable, debts in this sense
were finite.
According to both Norman Brown in Loves Body (1966) and Graeber,
such debts owed to the gods were discharged periodically. Instead of an
overarching concept of indebtedness or guilt there existed a palimpsest
of debts and credits as well as a multiplicity of systems for the collection
of payment. Following Deleuze and Guattaris account in Anti-Oedipus,
Eugene Holland (1999: 65) writes that debt was sporadic and reciprocal,
remain[ed] immanent to the kinship system of blood-lineages and marriage-alliances comprising savage social organisation, and function[ed]
to prevent power from accruing to any one family or clan.
In social relations, natural sadism and aggression could be aligned
with and expressed through the collection of debts. A creditors balance
could be taken in the form of his pleasure in the infliction of pain and his
enjoyment of violation of the debtor. In this way, anger was not associated
with unkindness but was an appropriate manifestation of an instinctual
expression of power upon gaining the entitlement to mistreat another.
Clearly, today, human aggression is no longer expressed in this way
and, in Nietzsches terms, with good conscience. Instead, it is veiled
behind malevolent sympathy or expressed in other dissimulated forms.
What are a 25-year mortgage, homelessness, or the circus-like spectacle
of The Jerry Springer Show if not forms of institutionalized cruelty? Mostly,
though, the failure to exhibit natural aggression results in self-hating and

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supplicant men bent over in prostration or, in Nietzsches contemptuous

dismissal, enjoyable self-flagellation.
The ancient systems of debt, credit, calculation, measurement and
collection were fundamental processes in the development of the process
of thinking: the very oldest form of astuteness was bred here (Nietzsche
1998). Indeed, the debtor/creditor relation is the fundamental and primal psychological tendency, and the measurement of debts, obligations
and payment was the driving force behind the development of thinking and consciousness. According to Nietzsche (1998): To set prices,
measure values, think up equivalences, to exchange things that preoccupied mans very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense
its what thinking is. Central to this was the understanding and administration of pain, and the psychological impact of the imprint of suffering. For Nietzsche, whatever is impressed through pain is remembered.
Hence the highly ritualized individual and tribal enactments of tributes,
sacrifices and punishments that were formulated to sear into the mind
the morality of custom:
there is perhaps nothing more fearful and more terrible in
the entire pre-history of human beings than the technique
for developing his memory. We burn something in so that it
remains in the memory. Only something which never ceases
to cause pain stays in the memory. (Nietzsche 1998)
Interestingly, only five or six of these seared memories have to be made
ineradicable, as the subject will create the ties and connections sufficient
to bind such wounds together into a whole conscious landscape.
For Nietzsche then, the individuals capacity to participate in society
was not born out of mutuality, sympathy or the modern psychology of
identification, but from the violence used to secure the creditordebtor
relation. Out of this originating process emerges a man able to honor
debts: Man (manas), as Nietzsche points out, denotes a being that values, measures and weighs, capable of reason and the capacity to live by
their word with the advantages of society.
Clearly this is an account fundamentally at odds with the Levinasian
model of a social bond borne out of a mutual recognition between individuals whereby both are dependent upon the Other for their own sense

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of identity a mutuality that ipso facto creates an ethical bond, as both

are constitutive of each others sense of self. Such a model has the whiff
of an infinite obligation about it. As captured by Couze Venns pithy paraphrase of Levinas:
Such an ontological debt, arising from ones inherent condition as a social being, entangled in a world of other beings,
and as an essentially vulnerable and fragile being, necessarily leaves us bereft because of the burden of responsibility for
the other which it places upon us, a responsibility which can
never be completely discharged since it calls for a generosity
that entails the abnegation if not sacrifice of the self. (Venn
forthcoming)
Nietzsche would denounce as idiotic the argument that the development
of society, guilt, conscience and honor arose out of an innate human tendency to share, commune and cooperate. For him, this is but the symptom of a wilful ignorance of history and human nature. Indeed, it may be
possible to ascribe the concern for mutuality and just relations between
co-dependent equals merely to a superannuated calculation whereby
those who measure a grievance calculate a moral revenge that takes the
form of malicious sympathy: Everything has its price, everything can be
paid off the oldest and most nave moral principle of justice, the beginning of all good nature, all fairness, all good will, all objectivity on
earth arises when man measures himself against another.
Certainly, without rational thought, anticipation and prediction, man
would not survive; but memory is more than that. It lays the foundation
for the formation of will by the creation of a link between I will and the
actual manifestation of the will in action. In this way an infallible psychological law leads to predicable subjects who, in turn, provide the infrastructure for the social bond: not the other way round.
Money
Primitive/territorial society was characterized by multiple trading
arrangements and various systems of record-keeping; sticks, shells
and other simple devices were used to record debts. They were aids to

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memory and accounting tools, but did not have the functions normally
associated with money as exchange value, stores of wealth, or commodity. Money in the form we know it today emerged out of conquest. It was
the form in which the conqueror could extract tribute and/or facilitate
expansion. A single currency replaced a myriad of logical currencies
some of which were metal-based coinage. Here is Graeber:
Coinage, certainly, was not invented to facilitate trade. It
appears to have been first invented to pay soldiers, probably
first of all by rulers of Lydia in Asia Minor to pay their Greek
mercenaries. Carthage, another great trading nation, only
started minting coins very late, and then explicitly to pay its
foreign soldiers. (2009)
After the violence of conquest, populations were enslaved and tribute
extracted, not least to pay for the campaign and to create a market in
which the conquerors were sole controllers of a currency invented precisely for purpose of control and domination.
The credit systems of the Near East did not crumble under commercial competition; they were destroyed by Alexanders armies armies that
required half a ton of silver bullion per day in wages. The mines where
the bullion was produced were generally worked by slaves. Military campaigns in turn ensured an endless flow of new slaves. Imperial tax systems,
as noted, were largely designed to force their subjects to create markets,
so that soldiers (and also, of course, government officials) would be able
to use that bullion to buy anything they wanted (Graeber 2009).
The despot would impose his currency on the society, while local currencies were downgraded in relation to a single representative of value,
which served as the measure of power relations, hierarchy, social control
and obligations.
Graeber puts this into sharp relief when he asks why the ruler created
coins when he owned all the gold and silver mines anyway. The answer
is that coins became not only the most efficient way of paying the troops
and buying supplies, but also the main way of supplicating the population in bondage who were required to pay their taxes in coins, which
were exchanged for the produce they made. A relationship of disequilibrium thus becomes exquisitely efficient, and a hierarchical form of social

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organization is sewn into the fabric of every exchange and relation. As

Deleuze and Guattari note: Money is fundamentally inseparable, not
from commerce, but from taxes as the maintenance of the apparatus of
the State (2000: 197).
Graebers agrarian and Deleuzes primitive territorial worlds of finite
dischargeable debts were thus gradually replaced or in Deleuzian terms
overcoded by monetized debts as tributes. In the subsequent despotic
societies the subject became ipso facto dependent upon the state/despot
for his life and existence the subject lived at the behest of the state, and
was subject to the state. As monetized debt was also a debt of a life, the
infinite creditor and the infinite credit replaced the blocks of mobile and
finite debts the debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 197). The
original palimpsest of multiple indebtedness within a horizontal mosaic
of alliances that formed the community and weaved the social fabric was
superseded by a system of vertical filiation to hierarchical powers: to
God, the despot, money and the state.
The question as to which had precedence despotic societies, world
religions, states or money may be impossible to answer; but that money
and world religions emerged at the same time appears indisputable. Here
it is worth quoting Graeber in full:
The most remarkable pattern is the emergence, in almost the
exact times and places where one also sees the early spread
of coinage, of what were to become modern world religions: prophetic Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism,
Confucianism, Taoism, and eventually, Islam. While the precise links are yet to be fully explored, in certain ways, these
religions appear to have arisen in direct reaction to the logic
of the market. To put the matter somewhat crudely: if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition
of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone
else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach
that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things
are unimportant, and selfishness or even the self illusory.
(2012: 1314)

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We find support for this approximation in the On the Genealogy of

Morality, where Nietzsche finds that there is no evidence of the reactive
creditor nor the guilt-ridden, culpable, self-flagellating subject before the
arrival of money, but plenty to show that money heralds the most fundamentally constitutive creation of them all, an eternal indebtedness to
an omnipresent God to whom everything is owed: a God who sacrifices
himself for the guilt of human beings (can you believe that?). And when
debts were finite guilt was not a property of human emotion. Only, with
the creation of God and money do we find guilt emerging as a manifestation of suffering, a suffering that is an absolutely interminable consequence of a debt that can never be repaid.
The effects of relinquishing the world of finite, payable debts were
many and deep. Humans lost touch with their nature, their beginnings
and their ancestors: they turned against the womb from which they arose
and into whom from now on the principle of evil is inserted (Nietzsche
1998: 62), and turned away from existence itself, which is thus felt to
have little value. This turning away is in the first instance nihilism, and
in the second, prompts the search for other states of being particularly
religious piety.
These shifts in the relations of credit and debt are first-order events in
the development of a certain consciousness. The crucial point here is that
with Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, and Graeber, we have a materialist account of the development of thinking as such; and when we come
to consider whether economic predicates are a priori or transcendental,
we find, if sufficiently lengthy timescales are used, that historically, politically imposed precepts and narratives which suit the needs of the rulers
over the ruled can be challenged. This includes what appears to be the
most naturalized precept of them all: the neutral status of money.
There are, however, two problems with this view. Money is indeed
all of the things described above. Money may have been forged out of
calculation, it may have emerged with war and despotism, and it may, as
Deleuze and Guattari contend, be first and foremost a power of command. But money is also whatever we want it to be, because how something emerges is not the same as what it is. Money is a superlative tool for
the calculation of obligations and debts; it makes the creation of markets
possible and creates anonymity. It enables deterritorialization, freedom

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from bonds, class and the exhilarating freedom of all things to shed limiting meanings, purposes, uses or values. This is a tremendously productive
development in human relations. To be able to borrow without sticky
social or kinship obligations is an attribute of individual autonomy and
existential capacity.
Moneys emergence does mean that there is a tendency for personal,
finite (that is, dischargeable) compassionate indebtedness, the binding
among people borne out of mutual reliance, to give way to alienated and
commodified relations, but the opposite is also the case; money can also
be used to express love and compassion, to appease and facilitate human
relations and forge the social bond.
Unquestionably, money creates hierarchies, changes the nature of
obligation, monetizes relations and changes the value of everything, particularly subjective, social and ecological relations. But this type of thinking must not shelter ressentiment towards the innovations, entrepreneurial
risks and expansion that capitalism affords. Money also creates new alliances, new soma, affects, desires and thoughts; polyplurient life is facilitated through money as pure flow. Capitalism forces us to be free, and
this is an axiom, but, without question, millions of people find contentment through the opportunities, freedom and security that capitalism
and the inherent ease of money affords. However, as Goodchild (2010:
33) points out, a specific historical process has taken place, from money
as universal equivalent and exchange value to money as speculative capital, until finally money replaces itself as a differential, reflexive flow.
Money has so many dimensions it is little wonder that no definitive
theory of it exists. Such rhetorical statements as in capitalism the debt
becomes infinite because one is submitted to a law and a system, but this
law does not demand a particular body so much as empty and formal
submission (Colebrook 2006: 130) need to be balanced by the fact that
the deterritorialization facilitated by exchange enables the transcendence
of all bodies including God, the despot, the nation state, Oedipus, and
class. Money is both capture and release: the deepest diastolic and systolic movements of the psyche and the bowels are manifested in the flows
of the financial markets. The desolate capitalist system is also creative,
innovative and facilitative of human needs and multiple layers of expression and joy. It is nothing short of arrogant to dismiss the hard creative

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work and self-determination of millions of economic actors that sustains

the system as we know it, not least because deterritorialization is not a
facet of capitalism, but a life force that finds its expression in the exchange
of equivalences, open systems and flexible forms of social organization
facilitated by the market. This is at some remove from Nietzschean and
Graeber-inspired accounts of money as despotic imposition and alienating abstraction.
For Nietzsche, to become a dependable man is a form of self-slavery,
but we must concede that without dependable men who honor their
debts society breaks down and chaos ensues. It is exactly this type of
ethical demand to take responsibility for ones own debt that has been
exploited by the financial sector. Debt to the homeowner means selfrespect, personal responsibility and security. For the financier, it is merely
an asset to be packaged, collateralized, securitized: an asymmetry of obligation that works only in the banks favor. Venn captures the unequal
relationship between debtor and creditor turned predatory and punitive:
[A] historical shift [in] a chain of signifiers has gradually
come to link debt to fallenness through the idea of sin and
its metonymies, such as wilful inadequacy, laziness, dysfunctional behaviour, underdevelopment, inferiority, and so on.
It is a worldview (and an imaginary) which in the minds of
policymakers authorises the criminalisation of indebtedness.
(Venn, forthcoming)
Can this to-ing and fro-ing between what has the appearance of liberation/emancipation and repression/iniquity be resolved by returning to
Deleuzes Marxist account of the development of capital and labor?
First we should review how Deleuze and Guattari set out the relationship between the emergence of labor-power and money in the development of capitalist production in Anti-Oedipus (2002: 226/228). Most
importantly, abstract labor was not premised upon the production of
capital, and an asymmetry of the relations between debtor and creditor
precedes historically that of production and wage labor. Indeed, abstract
labor existed independently of money and commodities and effected a
decoding of flows in and of itself. However, it required the appearance
of a double-sided monetary system of general equivalence and capital

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accumulation for the force of abstract labor to be fully unleashed. Money,

having emerged semi-independently, imposed upon abstract labor the
characteristic of exchange, and money became a value in its own right.
Once detached from the body and the socius, money enters into relations with itself and becomes the supreme value of society, assuming the
capacity to concretize once again that which it abstracted into the plane
of equivalence. This is a circular motion: as monetary equivalences liberate values from needs, money becomes its own force and money begets
money. Money then determines the concrete processes, taking on the
appearance of prime cause. Here Deleuze and Guattari (2000: 227)
follow Marx:
Value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital
value suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, in which money
and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts
off in turn. Nay more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into relations
with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as
surplus value. (Marx 1887: 106)
This force, as capital, is then used to enforce a system for the maintenance of profit, but over time it effects this less through the extraction of
surplus value than by rent or tribute and through command of the flows
of life and production. Deleuze and Guattari expand Marxs thoughts
in many ways: for them, control of the flow is power in and of itself, a
type of omnipotence that can far exceed the satiations of acquisition
and excess.8 Through controlling investment, capital determines both
what is done (investment in environmentally destructive industries,
the endless production of rubbish) and what is not done (ethical care,
stewardship of resources, genuine democracy, equal distribution of the
common wealth).
We can see this model most clearly in the endemic criminality and
amorality of the financial sector which demonstrates how capitalism
under neoliberalism after asset striping, off-shoring and wage reduction
ran out of assets to exploit and came to feed off itself. An avaricious
and rapacious tendency unleashed the capitalist war machine against life.

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It is much more than a coincidence that the New York Stock Exchange
topped 15,000 for the first time ever just as it was announced that the
atmosphere had absorbed 400 ppm CO2. Such is the ruin that the only
recourse open to it appears to be a return to much more savage social
formations as increasingly modern capitalist and socialist states take on
the characteristic features of the primordial despotic state (Deleuze and
Guattari 2000: 220). Think of drone strikes, the prisonindustrial complex and direct tribute in the form of quantitative easing. It is more than
a note in passing to comment that for Deleuze and Guattari history is not
teleological, as primitive, despotic and civilized capitalist machines coexist in contemporary society.
The world as represented by capitalism is therefore seen through the
wrong lens. Instead of a world of production, wealth, values, and social
relations, the world as represented increasingly manifests the exclusive
requirements of the monetary system, the first requirement of which is
the production of more money. Labor processes and general production
that were once the heartbeat of society are now used to produce only capital. The deployment of this quotation from Marx in Anti-Oedipus illustrates why Deleuze and Guattari refer to themselves as Marxists: Capital
is dead labour that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and
lives the more, the more labour it sucks (Marx 1887: 160).
However, and this is the real matter at hand, such is the nature of
money that any discussion of its historical development and the amorphousness of its form bears yet further contradistinction in a seemingly
endless movement between adversative conjunctions such as also,
but and however that is logically unavoidable. This is not a problem
because the defining feature of any Deleuzian analysis is its capacity to
take into account the contradictions inherent in any issue. Deleuze,
across his entire corpus, whether on painting or cinema, philosophy or
science, develops systems that create dynamic relations between what
other systems would treat as irreconcilable contradictions, paradoxes
or dialectics. Hence, we live under the axiomatics of capitalism, yet life
retains its vitalism; the society of control regulates social relations, yet
across A Thousand Plateaus unexpected speeds and slowness traverse the
machinic, human and organic, in expressions of social life composed of
melodic refrains.

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Thus, the free market is a powerful liberatory, schizoanalytic, force.

Despite Nietzsches protestations, money does create an equality of relations where none previously existed. And here we might add another
corrective to Nietzsche. Certain thought processes may indeed have
been instantiated by exchange, and unquestionably psychic structures
and social realities are imprinted by violence, but thinking is an infinitely
more varied and dynamic process that involves the senses, memory,
imagination, recognition and misrecognition, as well as the sensible and
insensible flows and limits of this world. There is certainly no norm or
model that reifies experience into a stable and unchanging form.
Money also allows for temporal equivalence. What incalculable freedom is this to be released from the shackles of time, as money enables
unprecedented investment that creates new temporal dynamics?
Consider the Channel Tunnel.
Money is at once a deterritorialization, which allows relations to
extend beyond immediate exchange or barter, thereby extending a tendency of life to create or produce for what is not present; but it is also a
reterritorialization, which introduces equivalence, sameness and a quantity of value through time, an attempt to contain and master the disequilibrium of time (Colebrook 2006: 86).
The system of equivalences and the power to make the dissimilar
comparable is freedom. As across time so also in space, a process captured by Philip Goodchild with his usual perspicacity:
money is a quantum flow, facilitating an exchange of goods
and services between heterogeneous cities, where interests,
values, and codes lack a common measure. Money retains
value and facilitates communication where the coding breaks
down, where one encounters indeterminacies and intervals. It
bridges the chaos. (2010: 2930)
As well as being flow, money is also a thing. You can use it, it has direct
objectivity. However, this very objectivity accounts for the perpetuation
of an irrational system because it places an objective value on things,
which invokes a sense of trust and a semblance of objectivity (a loaf of
bread is worth more than a slice). Money extends the illusion that we all
participate in the system as equals: the money earned by the wage earner

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is the same as that amassed by the billionaires. But the stability provided
by the idea that money is a determinate quantity entered on bank statements and balance sheets is based only on faith, as are the distortions,
specious premises, bogus methodologies and mathematical tautologies
of the dismal science known as economics. Economic rationality only
makes sense within a system that is irrational and is divorced from other
measures that would include rudimentary values for life.
Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself.
The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the
capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious; its mad
(Deleuze and Guattari 2001: 215).
The other objective part to this system is the sense that money is the
fabric of life that we all have equal access to. It is approachable: it exists
right there in front of you, not actually outside of you but as part of your
very constitution; your processes are exactly the processes you have
inherited. Hence:
this principle of convertibility which is enough to ensure
that the desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest
with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole. Flows,
who doesnt desire flows, and relationships between flows,
and breaks in flows? (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 229)
Accordingly, an appearance is given of a medium of exchange that is fair,
and able to provide a quantitative determination of all things as a price;
yet in and of itself, it is neutral. Moreover, we can position ourselves
wherever we wish in relation to it, and should take responsibility for
our autonomous choices. Yet the effects of the price mechanism are also
pernicious, it creates an illusion of a primary equivalence at the heart of
society, and inurs us to a fundamental disequilibrium, as Shaviro (2011:
8) observes: The price system continually forces us into debt. And
thereby it confines, restricts, and channels our behavior far more rigidly,
and effectively, than any compulsion based upon mere brute force would
be able to do.

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Neoliberalism as Infinite Debt

Possibly second only to Graebers best-selling work in terms of impact
in political activist circles is Lazzaratos The Making of the Indebted Man
which is essentially an application of the prophetic (Kerslake 2009)
Anti-Oedipus to contemporary neoliberal society. However, there are
distinct problems with this account, the resolving of which will allow
sharper distinctions be drawn regarding the relationship between control
societies and debt. Lazzarato presents a litany of effects of the concretization of the paradigm of debt in neoliberalism, including increased immiseration, the takeover of the common wealth, and the commandeering of
public, social and psychic space. Lazzarato takes the Deleuzeo-Guattarian
conceptual apparatus further by arguing that our expectations of what
might be socially possible and the extent to which we can imagine the
future have been effectively colonized by debt. For him, the archetype
of social relations, and its violent substrata, is being concretized in real
historical conditions. He attempts neither a critique nor an analysis, but
aims to show, in an ardent call to arms, how the warnings of Anti-Oedipus
have been realized.
Debt-based subjection takes all the forms discussed hitherto, it is as
material as it is existential, as it suffuses our minds, sensibilities, languages
and psyches. Infinite debt is the primary social bond and is now the material and subjective condition of our lives. To paraphrase Lazzarato: the
subject of debt is in an existential condition, at once responsible for his
own fate, and for the debt of the banks, society, the sovereign state and by
extension the whole world.
For Lazzarato, this is at once a return to the logic of capitalisms
originative form, the extraction of rent or tribute, and a new stage in its
development whereby debt acts as a capture, predation, and extraction
machine on the whole of society, as an instrument for macro-economic
prescription and management, and as a mechanism for income redistribution and a return to its originative form as tribute. For example, Mattera
et al (2012) have tracked how 19 states have passed laws that allow 2,700
large corporations (every brand name company you know Goldman
Sachs, General Electric, Proctor and Gamble) to keep the state income
taxes paid by the workers at their factories in those states. Put another

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way, 2,700 companies get to pocket the money paid by their employees
in tax. Five-and-a-half billion dollars has been diverted from workers
paychecks in this way. US pipeline companies are exempt from corporate income tax but they are allowed to include the tax on the rates they
charge customers. Energy customers are thus paying a tax that does not
exist and this increases the ultimate return to the owners of these pipelines by as much as 75%. Recent research shows that in the UK welfare
support functions as a failure to pay a living wage subsidy to the employers of 5.5 million workers, and private sector housing benefit serves as a
direct transfer of public funds to property owners and banks. This shift
from profit to rent is also noted by Lofgren (2012), who writes that the
super rich aim to create a tollbooth economy, whereby more and more
of our highways, bridges, libraries, parks, and beaches are possessed by
private oligarchs who will extract a toll from the rest of us.
All of the accounts discussed above confront us with the same question: are we dealing with an anthropological invariant or a historically
specific assemblage of forces? The answer is that the disequilibrium
inherent to relations of exchange, which came to be expressed in money,
is the originative paradigm of the social, and that the debt paradigm has
displaced or superseded other forms of capitalist development (cognitive
capital, financial capital, and so on). The neoliberal form is a specific form
of debt relation in which this paradigm of capture, predation and extraction forms the very basis of social life. The creditordebtor relationship
constitutes specific relations of power that entail specific forms of production and control of subjectivity a particular form of homo economicus the indebted man (Lazzarato 2012: 778). Thus, in neoliberalism,
the creditordebtor relationship encompasses all other relations: capital/
labor, business/customer, workers/consumers. Everyone is a debtor,
accountable and guilty before capital. Capital has become the Great
Creditor, the Universal Creditor.
The question arises as to the relationship between an abstraction,
a seemingly amorphous ubiquitous indebtedness, and specific material acts such as the invention of new financial products, new computer
algorithms, and the pre-crash wave of deregulation. The question often
directed to Deleuzes articulation of the society of control (and to his
wider politics) similarly concerns the relationship between the indefinite

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and the specific. In answer we should note that a significant feature of the
Deleuzean and Guattarian political landscape is their tendency to avoid
giving specific examples of (and indexes to) even their most productive
and worthwhile political concepts capitalist axiomatics, schizoanalysis,
the war machine requiring the reader to experiment with them each
time they are used. To prevent ossification concepts must remain mobile,
work in multiple circumstances and be brought into relations with other
concepts in the manner of creating new understandings and potentials
for political thought, and have an inherent resistance to subsumption and
clich. Most importantly, though, is that a level of abstraction must operate as a necessary counter-force and weapon: we must rise to this level of
abstraction and deterritorialisation if we want to avoid being swept away
or crushed by the Great Creditor (Lazzarato 2011: 161).
Exchange Money, Credit Money
Accepting, indeed welcoming, all the paradoxes inherent to this statement: Deleuze and Guattaris identification of a profound dualism at the
heart of money is the rock bottom of all of the matters at hand. For them
we cannot underestimate:
the extreme importance in the capitalist system of the dualism
between the formation of means of payment and the structure of financing, between the management of money and
the financing of capitalist accumulation, between exchange
money and credit money (2000: 229).
Credit money and exchange money are tendencies; the multiple interactions between the two use the same coin, and banks facilitate both financing and payment transactions with one continually flowing into the other.
Even so, the fundamental difference between the two is of inestimable
importance. There is a profound dissimulation of the dualism of these
two forms of money, payment and financing the two aspects of banking
practice (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 229). In this sense, it is decidedly
not the same coin that is counted as credit on the balance sheet and in the
pocket of the wage earner. Credit money is where the flow of exchange is

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arrested, where values are assigned, and divinations of purpose, rent and
ownership are made according to the axiomatics of capitalism.
On the one hand, exchange money has no value in and of itself: it is
an impotent sign of exchange value, it could be a theatre token, a shell
or a notch. On the other hand, credit money traverses a particular circuit
where it assumes, then loses, its value as an instrument of exchange and
where the conditions of flux imply conditions of reflex, giving the infinite
debt its capitalist form. It is here that Deleuze and Guattari predict the
impact of credit money: bank credit effects a demonetisation or dematerialization of money, and is based on the circulation of drafts instead
of the circulation of money (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 229). Drafts
here correspond only in part to the 97% bank-issued money identified by
Positive Money; in reality they include the trillions of dollars conjured
up by the shadow banking system. In short: the capitalist field of immanence is sustained by the circulation of credit money (Kerslake 2009),
and through credit the archetype of violence and savagery is forcibly
built into the nature of money, and money is a precondition for existence
in any part of the globe (Shaviro 2011). This credit-and-exchange-money
binary solves a residual problem with the Marxist theory of money.
It is unfortunate that Marxist economists too often dwell on the mode
of production, and on the theory of money as the general equivalent as
found in the first section of Capital, without attaching enough importance to banking practice, to financial operations, and the specific circulation of credit money (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 230).
At this stage of the argument, it should be clear that trying to establish the essence or truth of money, trying to pinpoint its role and function, should give way to the problem of forces. What counts is less the
essential nature of money than what it does. Capitalism is sustained by
the great paradoxes between its dynamism and destructiveness; invention and despotism, freedom and servitude, the implacability of its axioms and demand to constantly revolutionize them, these can be understood in terms of this essential dualism and how the irrepressible creative
charge and rhizomic flow of capital is essentially underpinned by credit
money, or more importantly, how exchange money comes into existence
as credit money:

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[Deleuze] underscores the impossibility of considering a

market economy in itself, since the latter derives from and is
always subordinate to the money economy and to the debt
economy, which distribute power, subjection, and domination. The asymmetry of power, the differentials of power
expressed in debt-money, hold for every society primitive society, ancient society, feudal society, and capitalism.
(Lazzarato 2012: 378)
At this point we can return to the earlier semi-orthodox economic theories of Positive Money, their fellow travellers, Steven Keen, Margrit
Kennedy and the longer tail represented by the likes of Frederick Soddy,
Irving Fisher et al. We can see more clearly now what Deleuze and
Guattari mean when they say that the circulation of money is the means
of rendering the debt infinite. Money is not issued, as it should be, like oil
to smooth the system of trade, investment and exchange. Instead it is
deployed as an opportunity to charge rent and to sustain the entire system of the production and circulation of commodities. Financial institutions and banks create a debt spontaneously to themselves that releases
a flow possessing a power of mutation determining the planning of
investment in technology and labor (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 237).
It is essential to retain all the subtleties and nuances outlined above;
capitalism is sustained by a virtuous circle of customer demand, freedom of choice, and an astonishingly productive power underpinned by
the invisible hand of the inescapable market. Exchange is liberatory but
only within the conditions set by the market that have to be accepted.
Capitalisms first principle is the encouragement and release of flows that
lead in unexpected directions and the constant revolutionizing of the
instruments and relations of production, yet it must also limit and block
these lines of flight.
The value of trading and the market and cannot be denied it is the
circularly system of libidinal and social production but here we are
discussing a very distorted market. Its lines of flight, rhizomic potential and accumulative charge are blocked by its own axioms and credit
money. As Graeber has recently pointed out, the policies of the G20, G8,
International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and the World
Bank have singularly failed to foster wellbeing for the worlds population;

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where success is to be found where their policies have been ignored, yet
all the while they have magnificently convinced the world that capitalism and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semi-feudal
capitalism we happen to have right now is the only viable economic
system (Graeber 2013). Thus banks not only have the capacity to control
investment and interest, most importantly they control the relationship
between credit and exchange money that becomes the principal feature
of the capitalist mode of production itself.
This is Deleuzes first axiomatic of capitalism that it must be presented as common sense, irrefragable and transcendental in its immanence; that it insists there is no other way of controlling the schiz/flow,
credit money/exchange money, credit/debt whilst concealing its chronic
wastefulness and iniquity and the inherent power relations: therein; and
that it inhibits human creativity largely through the issuance of money.
Through the system of debts, money imposes an immense
and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by
economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money
system. (Kerslake 2009)
In this way, neoliberalism is the control society we are controlled by and
submit to its values as it insists that alternatives to its immanence are
crushed. Kerslake is right, Anti-Oedipus was prophetic:
There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism:
the debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence
of the subjects themselves. A time will comewhen the creditor has not yet lent while the debtor never quits repaying.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 197)
Here we can recognize the phenomenological struggle of the mind to
take in the colossal sums of bank credit, the quadrillions produced by
the financial services industry as assets, securities and virtual credit, that
exist alongside the flows and intimacies of everyday life facilitated by
exchange money. Whilst they may be expressed in the same coin their
functions are so dissimilar as to make it impossible to conceive of them as
the same thing. Today, consumption, production and the production of
subjectivity are geared to provide the surplus value needed to give these

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Andrew Conio

inestimable virtual sums some objective attachment to the real world:

an attachment that was stretched beyond breaking point in the crash of
2008. Indeed, far from a purely cash driven nexus we find that primitive, industrial, Fordist and post-Fordist forms of capital are required to
produce leverageable assets in order that finance capital can continue to
reproduce itself. Indeed, exchange (as the swapping of debts and promises creating a form of sociality and mutuality) far from being an antidote
to credit is now, as a new form of feudal capitalism emerges, a kind of capture as all flows are permitted as long as they are quantified and circulated
through the system of exchange.
How this dynamic process provides the historical material origins for
systems that are in equal measure cognitive and social (the philosophical
holy grail) is outlined perceptively by Goodchild in his paper Philosophy
as a Way of Life: Deleuze on Thinking and Money, where he argues that
the exchange/credit money differential, the flow of the one into the
other, is absolutely fundamental to the structure of human thought:
Exchange money and credit money, segmented line and
quantum flow: this unique self differentiation and re-conjugation is the schiz-flow that structures the capitalist social field,
generating all the dualisms of Capitalism and Schizophrenia
representation or production, molar or molecular, striated or
smooth, State or war-machine, neurosis or psychosis, extensive or intensive multiplicities, being or becoming, organization or consistency, transcendence or immanence in each
case, we are informed that it is not an exclusive disjunction
or a value judgment, but that one term is continually passing
into the other. Capitalism, a purely machinic process of segmentation, can only function alongside such intensifications
of experience. (Goodchild 2010: 30 and 35)
To conclude, we have at hand a way of thinking that captures the intense
contradictions that are inherent to the nature of money and how these
contradictions subtend the oppositions and disjunctions inherent to the
development of thought and social relations.
Although he does not use such combinative terms, Matthew Tiessens
statement could possible be laid atop of a Positive Money working paper:

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263

Todays money has become the primary agent of capital accumulation and an aggressive catalyst of dispossession that, in
order to feed itself, uses enormous leverage to parasitically
prey on life and energy in general, insatiably consuming emergent, biological and processual forms of life and matter in
order to feed that which both keeps it alive and expanding:
debt. (Tiessen 2012)
In the meeting of Positive Money, and Deleuze and Guattari there is no
need to posit contradictions between philosophical and anthropological
speculations and the objective political policies and programs of political
economy. Controlling the banks issuance of money is a specific weapon,
perhaps the most urgently needed of our age. A range of currencies serving different purposes is also needed. Such a range already exists.9 The
coexistence of a range of currencies with a state-issued currency may
be the first of a series of experiments wherein the philosophical work of
Deleuze and Guattari might find practical concrete application. As would
a combination of reforms that piece-by-piece may gain the consistency
of a counter-aggregate sufficient to cause the capitalist abstract machine
to lose its potency. Like much of the Occupy movement worldwide, the
OccupyLSX Economics Working Group (EWG), of which the author is
a member, is discussing a range of specific policy initiatives and reforms
to the monetary system. The three main foci of these discussions for the
EWG in London are thus: reform of the issuance of money; reform of
the structure of land ownership and rent; and reform of wage structures
along the lines of guaranteeing a minimum income to all citizens regardless of status or employment. It is striking how much of this chimes with
Deleuzes description of the three main decodings that came together to
create the capitalist system:
These decodings of all kinds consisted in the decoding of land
flows, under the form of the constitution of large private properties, the decoding of monetary flows, under the form of the
development of merchant fortunes, the decoding of a flow of
workers under the form of expropriation, of the deterritorialisation of serfs and peasant landholders. (Deleuze 1971)

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Andrew Conio

Finally, what must be borne in mind, as the Occupy Economics Working

Group and Positive Money do, is that credit is not an evil in and of itself,
credit is a fact of life, and we measure people and ourselves by our capacity to repay debts. Credit is a requisite of non-simultaneous exchange,
provided the charge behind the industrial revolution, and is the way in
which production can be released from the shackles of time and space.
The problem then is not credit or debt per se but who issues it and who
controls it to what end. In this respect we have at hand a potential consilience between the highest level of philosophy which is philosophy at
its most concrete and concrete proposals that in aggregate can create a
revolution against what is now being commonly called despotic or feudal
capitalism without tearing down society and creating chaos.
The modern banking system manufactures money out of
nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of
sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived
in inequity and born in sin . Bankers own the earth. Take
it away from them but leave them the power to create money,
and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy
it back again. Take this great power away from them and all
great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a
better and happier world to live in. But, if you want to continue
to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery,
then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.
Sir Josiah Stam, Director of the Bank of England 1927

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Notes
1.

I am grateful to the Occupy London Economics Working Group for

the opportunity to discuss this paper on more than one occasion. I am
particularly grateful to Clive Menzies, Dave Dewhirst and Tim Flitcroft for
their comments.

2.

Over 600,000 YouTube views of their video 97% Owned (as of March 4,
2014); 30,000 visits per month to http://www.positivemoney.org

3.

Including Prof. Herman Edward Daly; Dr Martin Harrison Martin Harrison

(formerly Chief Investment Strategist with Deutsche Asset Management);
Prof. Joseph Huber; Paul Moore (one of the UKs leading specialists in risk
management, regulatory affairs and corporate governance in the financial
sector with twenty-seven years experience of UK and other regulatory
regimes); James Robertson (British-born political and economic thinker and
activist, publisher of 14 books); Gordon Styles;and Prof. Richard Werner;
in addition to advisors (who wish to remain anonymous) at the Bank of
England, RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, the International Monetary Fund,
and the BBC.

4.

Mortgage, company, government, student and credit card debt is a massive

dead weight on economy activity.

5.

For Irving Fisher this refers to 200BC500AD, for Graeber 800BC600AD.

6.

Deleuze and Guattari identify three different social machines: The primitive
territorial machine of savage society; the imperial despotic machine of
barbarian society; and the capitalist immanent machine of civilized society.

7.

For Graeber, 2000BC800AD.

8.

A recent study of financial power by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute

of Technology shows how this structurally embedded form of power works
in practice. Analysing the degree of connectivity amongst networks of
transnational companies, the findings reveal a web of ownership linking the
largest transnational corporations (TNCs), whereby a super-entity formed
through interlocking ownerships involving just 147 of them controls 40%
of the entire network of 43,060 TNCs. Most of this tightly knit entity were
financial institutions, and the connections include shared ownership in

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Andrew Conio
each other. The map of power also uncovers a wider set consisting of a core
group of 1,318 companies which controlled 60% of global revenues (Coghlan
and Mackenzie 2011). This concentration is the result of both preferential
connectiveness motivated by existing power relations (players gravitate
towards the most powerful groups, networks or individuals) and naturally
occurring structures relating to systems characterized by complexity.
So, the architecture of the network of power showing the characteristics
associated with small-world networks together with the kind of business
companies do, and the shared assumptions about the economy that unite
decision-makers into a coherent hub, combine to establish the super-entity
determining the fate of the global economy. It means a small elite the
1%? wields enormous power which can by-pass democratic control and
regulations.

9.

In the form of: time banks; air miles (United Airlines in the USA used to
pay their entire worldwide PR account in frequent flyer points); electronic
barter currencies (Trade Dollars Northwest) and international currency
(universal); herocards in Minneapolis, Local Economic Trading Schemes;
and, loyalty cards (Boots loyalty card has space on it for various different
loyalty currencies).

Bios
Ian Buchanan is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of
Wollongong. He is the author of the Dictionary of Critical Theory (OUP)
and the editor of Deleuze Studies (EUP).
David Burrows is an artist, writer and lecturer based in London and
working at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. He exhibits and presents performances in the UK and abroad, working independently and in collaboration to produce the performance fiction Plastique Fantastique.
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn
State University. She has written books and articles on Literary Theory,
Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Contemporary European Philosophy
and the visual culture. Her most recent books are the two-volume Essays
on Extinction (Open Humanities Press, 2013). She is currently completing Fragility: Species, Planet, Earth for Duke University Press.
Andrew Conio is an artist, writer and activist. He organised public
debates and gatherings at Occupy St Pauls in London, worked on the
information tent and served as a member of the Occupy Economic
Working Group until 2014. Andrew teaches at the School of Music
and Fine Art, Kent University, and has published on a range of subjects
including language, the moving image, architecture, painting, institutional critique and creativity.
Verena Andermatt Conley teaches in Comparative Literature and
Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. She writes on
issues of ecology and technology. Her recent publications include Spatial
Ecologies (Liverpool, 2012) and Nancy Now (Polity, 2013), co-edited
with Irving Goh.

270

Bios

Eugene W. Holland is the author of Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand

Plateaus: A Readers Guide (Bloomsbury 2013), Nomad Citizenship:
Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (University
of Minnesota Press 2011), Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus:
Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge 1999), and Baudelaire and
Schizoanalysis: The Socio-Poetics of Modernism (Cambridge 1993). He
has published widely on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, on Western
Marxism, and on French poststructuralism in anthologies and in journals
such as Angelaki, South Atlantic Quarterly, and SubStance. Dr. Holland is
Professor of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.
Giuseppina Mecchia is Associate Professor of French and Italian and
Director of French Graduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She
has co-edited a special issue of the journal SubStance on Italian Postworkerist Thought (SubStance, 112, v. 36, n.1, 2007). She is the co-editor
of The Futures of Empire, a special issue of Theory and Event about the legacy of Hardt and Negri Empire trilogy (forthcoming 2015). She has cotranslated, edited and introduced the book by Franco Berardi Bifo Flix
Guattari: Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave, 2008).
For Semiotext(e), she has translated, edited and introduced one other
monograph by Franco Berardi Bifo (The Soul at Work, 2009), one monograph by the Swiss-Italian political economist Christian Marazzi (Capital
and Affects, 2011) and one book of philosophy of language by Paolo
Virno (When the Verb becomes Flesh, forthcoming 2015). She has published numerous essays covering matters such as the political thought of
Jacques Rancire, the esthetics and politics of Marcel Proust, the terrorist
esthetics of Jean Baudrillard, the biopolitical concept in Antonin Artaud,
the political thought of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, the philosophical grounding of Elsa Morantes esthetics, Paolo Virnos politics of language and the political implications of the Italian Post-Modern novel.
Rodrigo Nunes is a lecturer in modern and contemporary philosophy
at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He is the
author of Organisation of the Organisationless. Collective Action After
Networks (Mute/PML Books, 2014) and has recently edited a dossier
on the Brazilian protests of 2013 for Les Temps Modernes.

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271

John Protevi is Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and

Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. He is the author
of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minnesota, 2013), Political
Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minnesota, 2009), Political
Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (Athlone, 2001), Time and
Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida (Bucknell, 1994), and co-author,
with Mark Bonta, of Deleuze and Geophilosophy (Edinburgh, 2004). He is
also the editor of A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Yale, 2006). His
research and teaching materials can be found at www.protevi.com/john
and he blogs at http://proteviblog.typepad.com/protevi/.
Nicholas Thoburn is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of
Manchester. He has published on media aesthetics, political theory, and
social movements. He is author of Deleuze, Marx and Politics (Routledge,
2003) and co-editor of Deleuze and Politics (Edinburgh UP, 2008) and
Objects and Materials (Routledge, 2013). His monograph, Anti-Book:
Material Text and the Art of Political Publishing is forthcoming with
University of Minnesota Press.

Philosophy/Political

Occupy: A People Yet to Come

The term Occupy represents a belief in the transformation of the capitalist

system through a new heterogenic world of protest and activism that cannot
be conceived in terms of liberal democracy, parliamentary systems, class war
or vanguard politics. These conceptualisations do not articulate where power
is held, nor from where transformation may issue. This collection of essays by
world-leading scholars of Deleuze and Guattari examines how capitalism can
be understood as a global abstract machine whose effects pervade all of life and
how Occupy can be framed as a response to this as a heterogenic movement
based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of
organisation. Seeing the question as a political tactic aimed at delegitimizing
their protest, Occupiers refused to answer the question what do you want?
Occupy: A People Yet to Come goes a considerable way towards providing the
terms upon which this refusal can be understood within a changed landscape of
political activism and the rewriting of the conventions of political protest.
With essays by Claire Colebrook, Giuseppina Mecchia, John Protevi, Rodrigo
Nunes, Verena Andermatt Conley, Nicholas Thoburn, Ian Buchanan, David
Burrows, Eugene Holland and Andrew Conio.

Andrew Conio is an artist, writer and activist. He is Director of Programmes,

Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, Kent
University and has published on a range of subjects including language, the
moving image, architecture, painting, institutional critique and creativity.

Series: Critical Climate Change

Conio

Cover Image: Declaration Flowchart

Rachel Schragis 2011 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA

Occupy
A People Yet to Come
Edited by Andrew Conio