Spyros Vgenopoulos

Promiscuous Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Consistency and Metastability

MA Modern European Philosophy

2014/2015
 Abstract
This dissertation addresses the modality of political thinking as it is conceptualized by Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It focuses primarily on the resources offered by the two volumes of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia in order to provide a comprehensive account on how this thinking
can be used for collective action. The political body is chosen as the main ontological unit of
investigation and as the vessel for social mobilization. Out of the conceptual apparatus of our
authors we are using the concept of consistency as the main mechanism of regulation and
cohesion of the body’s several functions. The initial premise of this research follows Deleuze’s
and Guattari’s position that consistency is grounded on an immanent principle that holds the
heterogeneous elements of a unit together. For the purpose of dealing with the multiple
expressions of the body’s consistent action we are introducing the concept of metastability.
Metastability is used for the understanding of the processes that transform the body’s elemental
structures without destroying it. With this conceptual pair at hand we will argue that the body
can strategize and opt for revolutionary and emancipatory becomings effectively and without
sacrificing its heterogeneity. Lastly, we will try to show how this is possible by emphasizing the
tensions that arise on its strife to respond to urgent political events. The body has to be conceived
as a political educator which endows its participants with the task of investing on political
decision making and ethical vitality.
 Promiscuous Politics
Deleuze and Guattari on Consistency and Metastability

Table of Contents

Introduction............................................................................................. 1
A Politics for the Every-body.................................................................... 2
Bodily Functions ....................................................................................... 6
Assembling Bodies .................................................................................... 9
Theorising Consistency ........................................................................ 12
Organizing Refrains ................................................................................ 14
Smoothness and Striation; Seething and Soothing ................................. 17
Distribution .............................................................................................. 19
Problematizing Consistency ................................................................. 23
Machinic tactics ....................................................................................... 26
Ethopoetics and Political Pedagogy ........................................................ 34
Conclusion ............................................................................................ 40
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 42
 “But of course we do believe it. We have to. It doesn’t break any laws of logic or nature. It’s
unbelievable only in the shallowest sense. Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I
know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought
and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there’s no longer a moral or
spatial distinction between thinking and acting.”

Don DeLlillo, Mao II

 Introduction

The present investigation is guided by the hypothesis that Deleuze & Guattari offer several
useful tools for conceptualizing the problem of consistency and metastability of a political body.
By consistency [consistence] we understand the holding together of heterogeneous elements
through particular mechanisms and principles working immanently for the preservation of a
body. Although the term has a variety of usages in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, it is
especially this compatibility of heterogeneity between different registers that attracts our interest.
Metastability is a term originally extracted from its thermodynamic context by Gilbert Simondon
who used it in order to describe systems charged with non-actualized potentials. The metastable
hypothesis that we’re putting forward will help us articulate the body’s formative process
without subsuming it under a binarism that presupposes a dualism of form and content: we won’t
assume a social matrix that imposes form on a body treated as passive matter. The concept of
metastability is summoned to describe the state by which the social outside of the body is both
receptive and active similarly to the way that the body is always pre-charged with potentials and
holds an activity of its own. The advantage of using this model is that it enables us to highlight
the in-between, what happens processually between the body and its environment, the moulding
that gives birth and sustains them both. It is exactly this metastable equilibrium, positioned
between fixation and dispersion that we will engage with.

To begin with, we will argue that through a careful reading of the author’s texts, one can
successfully draw precious insights on methods of organizing political bodies, groups and
collectives, and thus argue against the crude image of D&G as prophets of unconditional
horizontality and non-strategic openness. Our second task is one of highlighting the pivotal
points of tension between horizontal and vertical ways of unification by arguing that D&G are
actually offering us the conceptual tools to conceive a metastable equilibrium where both
hierarchies and flat multiplicities appear in the body as existing in a mixed state of constant
redistribution. Our third and last task will be one of problematizing the modality of this body by
viewing it as a medium of political pedagogy.

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Concerning our intentions in dealing with these problems at hand, we feel the need to underline
that this paper does not aim at a prescriptive reappropriation or Deleuze and Guattari, nor is it
designed around a defensive argument seeking to salvage their philosophy from the hands of
critics or followers alike. The conceptual apparatus used throughout this enquiry, as well as the
names of the authors, are used with the intention to work as intensive loci of problems and as
conceptual personae which draw a line that vacillates between a befriending and an antagonism.
It is by way of such a vacillation that a most constructive critique can take place.

A Politics for the Every-body

Deleuze and Guattari are political thinkers. To think politically does not mean to separate in
thought a field proper to matters of the city or the state, to power relations between individuals
and institutions or to pre-designate a relatively autonomous sphere in society, affecting with
turbulence and variation societal changes and transformations. The problem of articulating the
political appears immediately in our present investigation, because as it will be noted, Deleuze
and Guattari offer us no clear distinction between the political and the social, and do not define
politics as a specific domain of thought.

The two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia though constantly discuss problems that could
not be deemed anything other than political. From political economy, fascism, socialism,
democracy and the state apparatus, to the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, Capitalist
axiomatics, eastern despotism, class conflict, power centers and declarations such as “Politics
precede being” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 203), political thinking is persistent. What is not
immediately obvious though is the modality of such a thought. The articulation of a political
sphere per se in the Deleuzoguattarian philosophy is impossible because any political claim
cannot be extracted from its genetic conditions that exceed this same domain. In this case, and as
a continuation of the tradition of Spinozist and Nietzschean materialism, Deleuze and Guattari
conceive a purely immanent ontology striving to think Being inside its own processes of
production, which as a result follows the non-delineated and incessantly rearranging construction
of bodies and play of forces. What follows then is an identification of philosophy itself with a

2
peculiar “politics of being” (Alliez 2004: 110), a path that complicates any expression of life
through its constituted neighborhoods with seemingly non-political subjects and practices.

There is then no normative politics found in Deleuze and Guattari and no normative political
philosophy that follows. The schizoanalytic theory does not offer or elaborate any political
program for a society of people to come (Patton 2000: 133). Politics is simultaneously
macropolitics and micropolitics. Micropolitics is a way of doing politics that concerns itself with
the microtextures of societies generating the regions of our everyday lives and dealings (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 225).It involves practices that do not have an immediate political
significations despite being constitutive of macropolitical changes: allegiances, sensibilities,
affective states, resistances, becomings. Micropolitics are designed to account for the local and
singular connections fabricated in such a microtexture, defined by being qualitatively different
from the rigidly ordered stratifications appearing on the macro-level of politics. Classes,
institutions, power centers, methods of mediating and representing aggregates are the
preoccupations of macro or majoritarian politics. This distinction between a molecular and a
molar level forms a conceptual pair that extends to the ontological analysis of any object. The
importance and priority Deleuze and Guattari give to micropolitics becomes the condition of
their most innovative analyses but also determines to a big extent the difficulty of strategically
following macropolitical fronts. Molar entities such as the state, the nation or the party tend to be
mistrusted.

Where can one find the source of this mistrust? Does it lead back to the distinction of the
political and the social? Our authors here follow Pierre Clastres, for whom “all societies, whether
archaic or not, are political, even if the political is expressed in many voices, even if their
meaning is not immediately decipherable, and even if one has to solve the riddle of a
“powerless” power” ( Clastres 1989: 22). There is an immersion of the political in the social
matrix, a forcefield of power and desire that is necessarily inherent in social life. The social is
inconceivable without the political, and every social actor is simultaneously a political actor.
Clastres’ relevance is on highlighting the universality of political power while separating it in
two primary modes: coercive and non-coercive (Clastres 1989: 22-23). Non-coercive power
points to a different organization of society where hierarchy and the state apparatus are absent.

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This becomes possible by collective mechanisms of distribution and “state inhibition” that lead
to a political organization rather than a political institutionalization.1

We are then opting for a political body which is somewhat conscious of its role as a political
actor as well as the possibility of a different organization. A body that acknowledges this
function and implements it in its own behavior and ethos as a reflexivity that needs a-posteriori
construction: a step-by-step political pedagogy.

In this version of spinozist ethology a whole universe of bodily physics and a corporeal
constellations in continuous recomposition and decomposition is laid out: composite bodies in
incessant redistribution, molecular bodies constructing larger ones extending to gargantuan and
cosmic creations. Out of this immense universal corporeality emerge formations of relative
stability and duration. Despite the fact that their ontological boundaries, due to their fluidity and
constant change, remain blurred, nothing prevents us from distinguishing compositional scales
for these bodies (Protevi 2009: 37). In fact, that would serve as our first analytical tool: to
separate a second–order political entity, formed by the gathering of individual bodies and thus
constituting a group-body formation. But also a group-body that exhibits a minimum of the
aforementioned form of political reflexivity: it may be the case that every possible social
formation – e.g a group of people enjoying a street music festival, both artists and spectators –
has a dormant political kernel, however, the modality of its expression is not obvious at all. It
may as well manifest with a variety of ways, from which, some of them could even deny their
political function.

All these remarks aim to demonstrate that we are dealing with group-formations that define
themselves or tend to equate their action as political in one way or another: local assemblies,
parties, short-term formations for precipitation of desired events, network-movements,
occupations, anarchist groups, workers unions, student collectives and so on. Here we are
approaching the heart of our problematic, and that is why, as any further analysis of these
formations would show, the question of both organization and scale proves paradigmatically
persistent. And as we already saw, the molar-molecular distinction tries to capture this tension by

1
The problem of locating the political and its modalities cannot be extensively discussed here. We will assume
following Clastres that the political manifests throughout the whole of society and so every body acquires a political
function that is nevertheless expressed differently.

4
posing a qualitative organizational difference between entities that fall into one of these domains.
Molarity and molecularity are not defined by differences in size but rather complicate differences
in size by assigning them to a qualitatively different system of reference (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 217).They point to a compositional change that tends to appear simultaneously with
changes in scale, but does not exhibit any internal necessity. That is why a densely populated
organization is able to exhibit molecular movements, and in fact does so, because movements of
both kinds are not mutually exclusive but appear as tendential limits, always knotted together.
Despite this intricacy though, Deleuze and Guattari’s interest clearly tends towards the molecular
side of things, and it is from this aspect that one should understand their search for collective
entities more sensitive to these movements: packs, mobs, tribes, bands. Their shared concern
about these group formations derives from the assumption that their organizational nature is such
that it creates its own immanent defenses against hierarchical structures and emergent
centralization.

Our political bodies then are collective unifications different from the molar groups, whose
unifying structure proceeds by an institutionalization that progressively erases the singular
character of its members, or to put it better, works by structuring pre-allocated spaces of equality,
on which individuals are then assigned, ready for quantitative treatment. They are these second-
order political bodies whose members mutually presuppose each other as the condition of
possibility of the group, while also maintaining their individuality and unique characteristics as
resources determinative of the group’s cohesion.

We have then arrived at an adequate definition of the political bodies we wish to take as our
materials for investigation. They are the composite bodies that perform sociopolitical actions and
are situated “below” molar or institutionalized organizations by virtue of their nature. By shaping
and being shaped by the societal matrix, these bodies become emergent war machines that
engender more powerfully the quest of political change. They propose existent alternatives to the
question of how social and economical relations ought to be organized. Simultaneously they
reveal the intensive core that Deleuzoguattarian philosophy strives to think: the embrace of a
life-being that goes underneath representation and must not initially be totalized into coercive
power relations. Deleuze prioritizes desire over strategizing, escape over control. A non-stop
clashing of two poles: that of the aestheticization of one’s life as pure difference, a field of

5
immanence with its own consistency holding a singular grace, and that of representing, luring
into an original sin-resemblance two or more of these lives, sucking them in a whirlpool, a vortex
of another, coercive power that builds monuments in time and writes history on the face of
becoming.

Bodily Functions

Amongst the terminological noise of a discourse on politics we chose the body as our point of
reference, the unit of our study. We find in the body something curiously powerful and
challengingly complex so as to be thought-provoking. The body as “a great intelligence, a
multiplicity” (Nietzsche 1961: 61) as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra proclaims. This unfathomable
greatness and intricacy is a matter of ontological and political importance at least. The
unearthings of a greater, embodied intellect by philosophers and scientists alike during the 20th
century revealed the long forgotten residence of another kind of comportment, of an embedded
reason and a carnal intelligence that decentralizes the head as the anthropocentric locus and
installs all kinds of muscle memories, bodily functions and tactile dynamics into a “fully-
fleshed” corporeal self.

Be it a body of one’s life or the body of a state or a nation, this line of thinking in terms of
bodily-organized ensembles and establishing modeling analogies dates back to the Platonic
dialogues and steadily reemerges in the late antiquities, in medieval Political Theology and in
philosophers like Hobbes, Bodin and Rousseau among others. From the tripartite Platonic
divisions of the human and the social body, to the medical scrutiny of Louis’ XIV somatic
turbulences we witness a figurative analogy between the natural and the political body.2 The
governing head as the navigator of a social-body; the material corpus of the king and its
figurative civic extension as the kingdom itself; all in the name of a harmonizing order or better,
a balanced diet. A macrocosm connected to a microcosm by a single metaphor and a sovereign
head, which progressively disperses its authorities and localizes alternatively its command
centers through the passage to modernity. As Foucault has shown, biopolitics emerge through a

2
See Jeffrey Merick’s The Body Politic in French Absolutism in From the Royal to the Republican
Body;Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth and Eighteenth century France, p.12-14. Also Eugene Thacker
Nomos, Nosos and Bios in Culture Machine vol 7 2004

6
governmental shift during the 18th century Europe, constitutive of an alternative regulation of
power that links once again the natural and the political body under the new regime of “power
over life” (Foucault 1978: 135 - 145). In the story of the body’s revenge, its request of a lost
sovereignty resulted in a more nuanced and insidious governmental technique.

The bleak diagnosis of a biopolitical regime does not in any way herald a retreat. It’s a question
of finding a “new economy of bodies” (Foucault 1978: 159). The spinonist scream reverberates
anew: What can a body do? We yet don’t know, and it is by a way of constructive pragmatism
that Deleuze and Guattari aim to find out. It’s a matter of discovering what can all these
compositions do under the laborious testing of praxis. A use-value needs to be discovered, a new
economy of machines and flows where eco-nomy repeats its name as the nomos of the oikos, the
distribution of a household with no closed boundaries: oikos as the cosmos itself.3 Economy
becomes the distribution of entities in our earthly ecosystem. Immanence and multiplicity
become the principal concepts.

Deleuze and Guattari offer us an image of being that is interweaved with an all-encompassing
fabric whereupon the thread of the cosmic movement is unfolded. The worldly creation
encapsulates all that is and subsists in a single plane where every entity shares its existence with
the others. Immanence designates this consistent being-with that rejects any kind of beyond
escaping the plane’s magnetic attraction. There is an order but it’s rather chaosmic: cosmos and
chaos dance rhythmically and flow through each other composing the immanent score by
improvising their steps. Immanence, as that which remains within, is immanent only to itself,
thus laying a plane of immanence where everything is played out. There are times when a
beyond is posited that tries to institute itself as a new attractor, to provide an explanation for the
plane and place itself as outside of it (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 45). It is the moment when
transcendence erects out of the world, when the world by itself is not enough and needs to hang
on from an otherworldly being that would give it ground, meaning and consistency. It is not so
much that transcendence contradicts immanence but rather that it can actually subsist in it. Even
if it is figuratively opposed to it - because the plane of immanence rejects any opposition and is
able to withstand creations of paradoxical consistency - transcendence manages to impose itself

3
From the Greek οικονομία. Deleuze frequently plays with the etymological root of nomos that derives from the
verb νέμω which means distribute.

7
on the plane, but does it on the ground of concealing its own dependence on it. Hierarchies do in
fact exist, but only by virtue of the immanence that feeds them, and on behalf of intensities that
are distributed chaotically around the plane. Being is univocal, a single voice, but unequally
ordered (Deleuze 2004: 45-47).4 This unequal distribution is not a transcendent order, but a
nomos, an allocation of lots on the plane that is reenacted continuously but with different
rhythms and tensions each time. Transcendence is the way by which this distribution is erected to
a divine order that resists redistributions and fixates the unequal allocation by making the
selected –now transcendent- variable tend to eternity.

In Mille Plateaux we are given yet another definition: “the plane of consistency (grid) is the
outside of all multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9). Our plane is infused with yet more
abstraction to the point where it becomes increasingly difficult to think it as a plane, yet our
authors introduce us to a new concept, that of the multiplicity. Drawing from Riemannian
manifolds and Bergsonian metaphysics, Deleuze and Guattari praise the substantiation of the
multiple into a noun and aim to use multiplicities for the analysis of the states of things.
Renouncing the study of objects as unities or totalities, they conceive their ontological units as
plunged into a state of multiplicity that is irreducibly heterogeneous. (Deleuze and Parnet 2007:
vii-viii) A multiplicity is both inside and outside, within things and between them, a variety of
worlds irreducible to each other yet consistent and bonded. It is situated exactly at the junctions
of the outside, at the in-between where it forms its connections. It is a form of organization, a
concept that does not bother at unifying the multiple, but belongs to the multiple and sustains it
as such (Deleuze 2004: 230).

A body is itself multiple, with actual material relations and virtual dimensions that extend far
beyond its physical state and place. Bodies become territorial and are penetrated by intensive
processes. A student protesting in the streets with classmates is a crossroad pervaded by the
immediate conditions that surround it (the noise of the slogans, the pace of the demonstration,
the road’s morphology) and other innumerable flows that define it with varying intensities in one
way or another (the affectionate meeting of a close person, the worries of next month’s rent, the
creative desires). What is important for this student is not the inescapable character of this
overdetermination but the grasping of its multiple nature that despite its constant differing,

4
Note: all the references to Difference and Repetition are from the Bloomsbury 2004 edition

8
successfully lead her to her present action. A plane of consistency sustained all the directional
tensions into a resolved activity without erasing them but rather discharging and recharging,
channeling, strengthening and diverting them according to similarly different movements of her
neighboring bodies. The body is a multiplicity and as such it must recognize itself in its
corporeal configuration and its political existence.

Assembling Bodies

A political body is never created ex nihilo. The conditions of its assembling could be analysed on
many different levels and perspectives. It is not of our intentions to classify and hierarchically
systematize the degree of determination that history, economy, psychology or geography exert to
an imminent creation of a body politic with potential for social transformation. Deleuze and
Guattari affirm the determinative role these factors play on any possible theory of emancipation.
However, they are more concerned about finding a way of escaping structural overdetermination.
They do not abstain from the discourse concerning the revolutionary agent, but rather extend it in
an idiosyncratic way that partially distinguishes them from the Marxist tradition. Their focus is
targeted towards figures exemplifying a minor character by virtue of their fragile positioning in
the capitalist regime: schizos, nomads and packs, godless personas and keepers of the mysteries
of the multiplicities, holders of ambivalent powers of creation and destruction. The inauguration
of these figures as referential functions in a political body is the first step towards a different
conception of its organization.

As we’ve seen, the dissemination of the political into the relatively acentered vastness of social
life shifts the focus from a molar, unified revolutionary subject to micro-agencies that assemble
contingently by providing themselves open spaces for experimentation and composition. At the
same time this fact does not exclude the assembling of a big-scale emancipatory agent, a force
that could “strategically codify the points of resistance” (Foucault 1987: 98).5 A group has to

5
We would later argue that the concept of war machine can account for a similar strategic codification. The
difficulties of this task will be addressed accordingly. Deleuze disagrees with Foucault on question of what
determines the social. Whereas Foucault conceives society as strategizing Deleuze sees a primary leaking.

9
maintain a degree of freedom of action, a schizo-function in order to escape from the
subjugations that molar civic bodies tend to create for their own consistency. This freedom-limit
proves vital because it ensures the connection of the multiplicities with their immanent outside. It
is the guarantor of renewal and circulation of affective ingredients, ideas and existential
components of the bodies.

Guattari, while striving to articulate the complexity of a group’s components, decided to leave
the term behind and substituted it with the concept of assemblage or arrangement [agencement]
(Guattari 2009: 48). The shift occurred because the notion of the group proved incapable of
accentuating the inhuman, machinic elements that interpenetrate collective bodies. Assemblages
express arrangements of multiplicities, decoded fragments and released elements from several
ontological territories which subsequently mould into property-like features and create consistent
bodies of various elemental dimensions. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 503-505) An assemblage
could be a construct formed by the adjoining of material bodies, affective states, conceptual
features, abstract entities, desires and so on. There are 3 main types of assemblages: machinic
assemblages expressing concatenation of bodies, territorial assemblages connected to territorial
principles and collective assemblages of enunciation expressing semiotic chains that pass
through bodies by announcing their multiple origin and tearing apart the sovereignty of subjects.
Groups and bodies can work like assemblages by the way they are plugged into their
multiplicities and draw specific capabilities from them. One does not even need to be multiple in
extension to form an assemblage: the laptop-human-internet assemblage already forms a
powerful grouping capable of unimaginable and innumerable actions. An assemblage is an
intensive network. A group of people, a composite political body is an assemblage consisting of
multiple human elements alongside others. Its form of agency is not restricted to the conscious,
subjectively formed operations of its parts. It is rather a body beyond subject-object distinctions:
a machinic assemblage is a walking consolidation of the multiple intensities flowing through it.

Such groupings nevertheless, do not free-flow aimlessly into the oceanic expanse of their
potentials. Their movement is a territorial refrain hummed against the chaotic pulsation of the
world. Chaos is already vibratory, but also purely differential, withholding directional
components that are contingently becoming rhythmical. The periodic repetition of these
components forms blocks of space-time that creates environments, or milieus. Milieus form a

10
proto-codification by grasping a rhythmical difference, a productive repetition that gives rise to
the chaosmos that we already encountered. Still, milieus continually pass into another,
constituting a second rhythmical translation that this time becomes expressive and makes the
milieu components qualitative. In between milieus the rhythm is gathered and produces a
territory. It is when the components cease to be directional, freeze their movement (territorialized
function) and explode into an expressive outburst (territorializing expression): they become
dimensional and form qualities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 312-315). Expression is primary to
possession. Rhythms are continuously expressive movements, a non-stop creation on which
qualitative codifications are imposed.6 This last function is termed territorialization, a universal
movement that applies to any entity. The whole procedure from chaos to milieus and towards
territories is expressed by the concept of the ritornello or refrain (ritournelle): the act of crafting
cozy, home-like spaces out of the wilderness, the humming of refrains that return in a song as a
way to squeeze some meaning that we could work on, a dwelling and an existential marker.

Our assemblage-bodies do not work differently. We are constantly creating these spaces for
things that matter, for desires and necessities that keep us going on. A political body then has its
protest-refrains, its committee-refrains but also miniscule refrains of reading the news,
commenting on social-media and arguing on governmental actions while enjoying an evening
drink. These ritornellos gather us in many ways and as such they acquire a political function by
being attractors of habit or discord, releasing repercussions in the societal matrix.

Assemblages are similarly territorialized by being consolidated. There lies the key of their
consistency, the manner by which they are drawn together. “What make a material increasingly
rich is the same that holds the heterogeneities together without them ceasing to be
heterogeneous” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 329). The territorial assemblage, Deleuze and
Guattari argue, works with three consolidation functions: a milieu consolidation, a space time
consolidation and a consolidation of coexistence and succession. In each time what is
consolidated? At first a milieu is drawn together, making neighborhoods communicate and
interact, creating environment and ambiance. Secondly, a space-time block is synthesized,
producing relative spatialities and temporalities proper to the inhabiting heterogeneities. Finally a
third synthesis occurs by tying these elements in the aforementioned block so that they can

6
On the primacy of expression over possession see Deleuze’s book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p.50-51

11
spatially coexist and temporally withstand succession. The territory holds embedded triggers that
push the assemblage to organization. A political body has to explore the way it is consolidated in
this manner in order to find methods by which triggers can be multiplied and redistributed. This
can lead to inclusion of new members and consequently the deterritorialization of the triggers.

Theorising Consistency

No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into

Thomas Pynchon

There exist a problem which is at the same time a battle that traverses the thought of Deleuze and
Guattari, appearing with different tropes and under many disguises through their various book-
experiments. It is laid out as a vast field furnished with ideas in need of rearrangement, but it
steadily leaks out to form a watershed of solutions. How can one grasp consistency? How could
the multiple be packed into the one without ceasing to be multiple? How are these abstract
machines folded together without crumbling against each other? Every conceptual dyad is a
necessary enemy that needs to be undone: deterritorialization – territorialization, molecular-
molar, smooth-striated, virtual – actual, the list carries on. The dualisms are constructed for the
articulation of the in-between, the analysis of the mixed states in which things are plunged into.
One should then take seriously this mad insistence on the middle of things and apply it to the
dyads themselves. There is neither purity nor priority there except the persistence of change, a
wisdom that philosophically dates back to Heraclitus. Deterritorialization becomes important
because it is able to express territorial changes in any given register. It is a decontextualization
of an in-formation, a thieving gesture subtracting a code from a territory and reprogramming it
on a new one. Deterritorialization is the cosmic movement, the Earth itself (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 509). On this universal glide things go back and forth. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy
focuses on dissemination and dissolution only to the extent it stays faithful to this cosmic

12
movement, and only as far as it valorizes it as an ontological ground. How could one do
otherwise? How could one silence the poet inside, the one who feels and listens, the one
exposed? An aristocratic thought? A bourgeois perspective? Or the choice between different
kinds of dwelling: a poet or an assassin? (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 345).7

It is indeed true that Deleuze at least, chose to dwell as a poet, and this has to be a political
choice, which nevertheless is in itself politically unintelligible. One has to be a reformist when
flirting with the pores of life in its pure, absolutely immanent form: A life, as the old Deleuze
once wrote. (Deleuze 2006: 385) However, In the Guattari-and-Deleuze-assemblage things are
not entirely clear. The voice of the militant falls with weight on the general’s map, it makes the
pen draw some lines that do not pause after the praise of creation but keep on returning,
smudging away the beauty of cosmos, only to sketch it once more, under the weight of choice
and the urgency of battle, for the sake of a people to come.

So which is the aim and potential of their conceptual machines? It is never purely a matter of
disorganizing, of letting go and being free and provisional so as to sing the praise once again in
the name of immanence. Sobriety is the big lesson of Mille Plateaux, but it is not the demureness
of the adult or the reticence of a docile subject. Sobriety and consistency are the prerequisites of
the explorer who does not risk the sacrifice of his team. In arctic, hostile waters the breaking of
the ice proceeds with utmost care. In deterritorialized grounds the political bodies are threatened
as much from upsurging micro-dispersions as from the heavy organisms of the state or capital. It
is indeed the dependence on this molecular war, disorientation for the sake of it, that allows
institutions to return all-powerful and inconspicuously present: the 30 years after Capitalism and
Schizophrenia have shown that the machine is still working, exploiting, enslaving, smoothening
and molecularly-colonizing on behalf of – or even better, upon - any rhizomatic structure and
schizoid breakthrough. To harness that abstract machinic consistency, beyond the fetishized
journeying and towards brave efficacy - that is the aim of our bodies.

7
The question is taken from Virilio. Deleuze and Guattari contrast here two kinds of dwelling by which molecular
populations become either free and loose or closed-off. A similar pair is found in Difference and Repetition, where
the assassin is the politician: "We claim that there are two ways to appeal to 'necessary destructions': that of the
poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to
affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return; and that of the politician,
who is above all concerned to deny that which 'differs,' so as to conserve or prolong an established historical
order” .p. 64

13
 Organizing Refrains

We cannot let our political bodies disperse. We know that the organs are not the enemy of the
body: we keep on rearranging and plugging them with care. The enemy is the organism, a
particular organization of the organs that stratifies the body with great precision (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 158). The erection of the organism is always imminent as the erection of
transcendence was in the plane of immanence. The first step to a defeatist beginning is to
abandon the prospect of gathering a collective body at all.

A collective body should work as an attractor that gathers desires, affects and problematic fields
around its orbit. It becomes an “existential refrain” propelling solutions that were previously
unsought on individual level. It loops immediate or long-term concerns by delimiting existential
territories. The refrain function is a peculiar case of unification that does not clear away the
heterogeneity of the subjects it surrounds, but rather projects them on vectors that “maintain a
relative sense of unicity despite the diversity of components of subjectivation that pass through”
them (Guattari 1995: 15-17). It is a way of keeping up an abstract machinic consistency, as
Guattari puts it, granting a level of metastability in the collective body by not im-posing
structures on it but rather pro-posing pathways. Keeping up with the machinic ontology that
characterizes bodies, the refrain also works as an “autopoetic node” that feeds from the
disequlibrated states that it extends to (Guattari 1995: 37). Our collective body then has to run a
maintenance of consistency that ensures connections with its immanent outside: a renewal of
both subjective and non-subjective components is the first step towards a metastable equilibrium.
The sick body discards its organs until there’s no more of them to make it work, whereas an
active one performs successive readjustments so as to keep the engine going. The refrain then
becomes the rhythmical prism of the body. It filters these rhythms by making a consistent
harmonization without excluding dissonances - it is rather the dissonances themselves that place
a marker on the point where circulation enters an erratic route. The body needs to resurface and
include the diversions in the refrain, contracting their rhythm with build-ins, tempo-changes and

14
smooth transitions, or else it locks up, subjugates, or drives them away. Refrains “ward off
catastrophes and develop new metabolisms of escape from black holes” (Guattari 2011: 117).

Beneath the refrain stands our initial question: what holds the heterogeneous elements together?
It is the same question we applied to our political bodies, pursuing means of unification that
prevent subjective or machinic suffocation. The concept of transversality is a specifically
designed tool created by Guattari in order to keep away the Oedipalization of the collective and
insistently inject in its environment [umwelt] elements gathered from dimensions lying outside of
it (Genosko 2002: 96). We see how it is a matter of diversifying organization methods while
keeping an eye on bureaucratic petrification. It means sustaining both reality and phantasy on the
same plane, but also bringing the seemingly non-important factors into the trajectory of the
group. In this way what is ostensibly not a collective issue, a flow of ideas or worries, is drawn
from the disparate shelter of an individual’s subjectivity- that is nevertheless still intrinsically
linked to further multiplicities -towards the collective body’s machinic structure, filtered anew
by the connected machines that regulate it and reproject its problematic character after
successive interpretative distillations and desiring investments. The circulating object goes
through subsequent deterritorializing and reteritorializing movements, producing, reframing,
expanding and testing its content. These are all procedures of consolidation uniquely defined by
their asignifying character, a knowledge that is “first of all existential transference, non-
discursive transitivism” (Guattari 1995: 61) The transversal components then point not to a
contemplative consistency but to a pragmatic one. In this case there is only one distillery that
manifests all the content of the assemblages by expressing them in the domain of an existential
praxis that constitutes the problematic field itself. The matters at hand of the collective body are
constantly traversed through and by the everyday activity of its members, which itself is
simultaneously the problematic field and its solution. What appears as a non-political element in
the life of one member is swept by the transversal flow, finding political expression in the
collective body’s existence, whereas a political disagreement situated in one conjunction of the
machinic assemblage-collective body can dissolve itself in the midst of a non-political gesture
exchange outside of the group. This is not a dialectical procedure of sublated opposites, but the
genetic process of politicizing social problems. Transversality is the lubricant of the mechanics
of consistency. And the cogwheels are working in search of new fuel: “What holds all the

15
components together are transversals, and the transversal itself is only a component that has
taken upon itself the specialized vector of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 336).

We are still using our micropolitical lens, and we’re taught that as a civic body, a society is
defined by its leaking, its escaping from all directions (Deleuze 2006: 127). In the same vein a
second order collective-body is shooting off its vectors of deterritorialization that build its
consistency. These vectors are the body’s bridges to its outside, its adjusted spielraum in which it
is and is not yet there. Deleuze and Guattari describe the way a concept works in a similarly by
assigning it endoconsistency and exoconsistency. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 19-20, 90) We
could argue that a political body expresses both kinds of consistency by the functions already
described. Its endoconsistency exemplifies the consolidated multiple components and their
interrelations, whereas its exoconsistency the potential adaptability, the plug-ins that imply its
connections with sociopolitical movements and events. Both contribute to the metastable factor
that sustains the body’s existence, but as we’ve seen, it’s the deterritorialized vectors that
principally define it.

The third theorem of simple deterritorialization tells us that “the least deterritorialized
reterrritorializes on the most deterritorialized” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 174).The most
coded, stratified components appropriate the space opened by the most abstracted, unbounded
ones. What breaks free serves as the model for subsequent captures, so the elements of a
political body that serve as the “cutting edge of deterritorialization” are the ones which spearhead
the transformative processes so that the others will carry on the inhabitation: an immanent
vanguard function.8 This breakthrough action is carried out in a space that Deleuze and Guattari
call “smooth”. It is an open, unlimited space created by a line of flight that crosses
diagrammatically strata and systems, opening up new territories. Smooth space is contrasted to
striated space which in its part is ordered and divided, pre-establishing positions and a priori
fixed.

8
Nunez has argued for the vanguard function nodes can acquire in networks. See Organization of the
Organizationless; Collective Action after Networks, p. 38

16
 Smoothness and Striation; Seething and Soothing

Smooth and striated space, as with all the dyads we encountered, exist in a mixed state and
continuously intertwine and transform into one another. They provide us with materials for a
spatialization of the problematic of the political body. We already saw that the regulation of the
body is kept in its metastable state by primarily letting its deterritorialized components free to
alter the mechanisms of its maintenance. However, wild or extremely fast changes can quickly
lead to destruction, dispersion or complete transformation of the body. Striation here is the
spatial coordinate of territorialization. It describes the movement after the change, when
inhabitation and appropriation of the opened territory are steadily giving a shape and a
dimensionality proper to a settling organizational structure. Political striation would aim to
augment and solidify the body’s constituted spielraum by adequately channeling it to the
territorial landscape of the opened space. It does not carry a negative import on itself, because
with striation comes also the birth of a territorial dimensionality that accounts to a specialized yet
relatively limited function. The organs acquire a higher degree of complexity and movement but
only inside their allotted space. Striation carries a principle of organization which makes the
body adamant as it provides the condition of possibility for certain logistical and probabilistic
calculations. Striation has to be treated in its immanent form of unfolding, and especially as a
process vital to collective political bodies, as without it collectives are constantly left open to
dispersion.

For our account concerning the metastability of the body, the interest falls on the general
organization of multiplicities that each spatial term implies. As with the refrain function, smooth
and striated space become tools for conceptualizing the mutability of the body as it crosses
thresholds and responds to events. Politically speaking then, smooth and striated space aim at a
regulation of tendencies between an anarcho-desiring principle of demanding-the-impossible,
and a tactical principle of political realism. The constant back and forth between these tendencies
is probably a key factor of consistency. However, as in any case, the balance between these
elements can be nothing more than a descriptive account: on the face of real-time strategic
problems, urgencies and the irreducible specificity of situations, the body has to choose on its
own and without any compass which side of organization has to be reinforced.

17
Smooth and striated space then appear with equal tactical importance. They imply two tendential
limits of organizing the multiple that is entangled on the body and crisscrosses the assemblages.
The origin of this thought dates back to Deleuze’s book on Bergson and is connected to the two
kinds of multiplicity: the continuous-implicit multiplicities and the discreet-explicit
multiplicities.(Deleuze 2004: 298 and Deleuze 1987: 39-40) As is already evident, the
problematic field of the body is not a dead end but its constitutive space of action. Continuous
multiplicities are these intensively loaded agents that have not yet accentuated their “content”
and diagrammatically roam across the body and its problematic field - its outside -
simultaneously giving it shape. This is also the meaning of their nature as implied: not yet
explicit, embryonic, folded into a virtual quantum that conditions not possibilities but pure
potentials. At this level, multiplicities cannot be arrested or metricized according to a
probabilistic measurement without qualitatively changing. The problematic field though
immediately asks for possible solutions, as the body continues its motion. Implicit multiplicities
cross the threshold of their virtuality when one path is chosen, when a solution is preferred, and
thus the implied multiple transforms into explicit multiple: it is divided and separated into
extension, now ready for measurement and calculation. It is by these means that the body deals
with its existence in the social: implicitly determining problems and explicitly expressing
solutions to them. In the first instance the multiple elements coexist in a state of fusion and
continuous fluidity, creatively pro-jecting, deterritorializing and opening space. In the second
instance the multiplicity is disentangled from its fused state, even though its elements still
coexist, but now ordered, distinct and allocated into micro-regions that provide it with the
possibility of being metricized.

These operations, translated into the language of Mille Plateaux, create the concepts of smooth
and striated space. Their characteristics as derived from the two types of multiplicities are
retained, but their spatial form now further complicates their interaction.9 Smooth space is
principally defined by directional lines while striated space with dimensional lines. It is a space
that has folded within it the powers of becoming. Indiscernible from its medium, the quantum
that travels across smooth space occupies it horizontally and surrounds it wholly. By contrast
striated space is dimensional and extensive, an articulation of the amorphous smooth nature that

9
Deleuze and Guattari offer extensive analyses concerning the nature of these spaces. See A Thousand Plateaus
p.480-481 for definitions and also 482-488 for their relation with cardinal and ordinal numbers

18
has unfolded in a metric schema. Striation is like a process of translating the smooth space into
tangible schematizations. It inexorably changes its nature by overcoding and subjugating it but
also propels it and renews it, giving it a form of expression and a milieu of propagation. (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 486) Organization is the taking into account of both movements as
constitutive factors of consistency. It involves the smoothening of spaces that allow participants
to express their own problems and interests and it also involves striating them, giving them a
concrete form which consolidates and prepares them for militant usage.

Distribution

The smooth and the striated also imply different modes of distributing the singular elements that
they carry. Whenever one mode of organizing space is implied, a specific distribution of
singularities works its way in order to create the structural nexus that will support the body.
Distribution here means rearranging the skeletal form of the group. A certain distribution of
singularities creates junctions, highways and terminal points from where the in-formation
channeled by the body inevitably passes.10 Distributing singularities then actually means in-
forming the body, making it optimal and ready to receive certain flows to mould them
accordingly. Any kind of flow then becomes informative of the body’s organization and it is
filtered through this endoskeleton that continuously gets redistributed and conditions the
circulation.

There is a mad, nomadic distribution and a sedentary distribution of common and good sense.
These distinctions correspond to the spatial ones and share the same relations of alteration,
complication and superposition. However, what proves interesting for our inquiry is the relation
these types of distribution seem to have with different models of hierarchies that grow out of our
political body. As we already saw, hierarchies and transcendences manage to stand out of the
immanent plane due to a “freezing” of redistributions, thus guiding flows persistently to the same
points. In a similar manner we aim to conceive the distribution of singularities in the body. The
point is to sustain a rhythmic redistribution that will support the metastable state of the group so

10
Information is used here in the sense Gilbert Simondon ascribes to it: “The notion of form must be replaced by
that of information which presupposes the existence of a system in a state of metastable equilibrium that can
individuate itself” from The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis, p. 12

19
as it can resist extensive hierarchization and centralizations of power. It is less important to aim
towards an absolute horizontality than to prevent extensive power-intensifications of points and
breed counter-forces that ward-off the rise of stable leaders.

In order to be more consistent then, it is important to note that allocation implies a sedentary
distribution. This becomes evident when we relate it to the striated space that it constitutes:
sedentary distribution divides up space by creating intervals and fixed positions in which then the
singularities fall. It performs a division of space itself, allocating seats and positions, regions that
establish rigid structural connections and arrest what travels through them, determining pre-
formed rooms for maneuver. In contrast, nomadic distribution is “without property, enclosure or
measure”. It performs “no longer a division of that which is distributed, but rather a division
among those who distribute themselves in an open space”. (Deleuze 2004: 46) Distributing
oneself here implies an internal factor proper to each singularity: each one is not distributed but
rather distributes herself, carries an import of activity and decision. The open space is the smooth
space which on its turn allows the free internal cause of its singularity to draw its trajectory. It is
also interesting that this operation does not presuppose a distributed space but a borderless one
that belongs to no-one. There is no property or divine law here, but a demonic principle, a play
of de- and re-territorializations. Deleuze’s critique of good sense and common sense become
intelligible if viewed from this perspective. (Deleuze 2004: 283-4) Good and common sense
cancel the productive differences by arranging them in space and time in such a way that they
negate themselves. They become formulas of identification, comfortable norms that register their
own attractors who arrest deviations and fertilize unconscious commandments. In a political
body the distributions can happen accordingly, so that participants find themselves cut off from
their creative capacities and potential powers. The allocation happens in a manner that is
ultimately restrictive and breeds conformity, but also hinders action. Forming a plane of doxa, of
common reproduced opinion, good sense creates a space where everydayness falls under the
habitual banality. It manifests as “the ideology of middle classes who recognize themselves in
equality as an abstract product” (Deleuze 2004: 283). What is more, sedentary distribution ends
up breeding counteractivity and conservatism. This is why “it dreams less of acting, than of
foreseeing”. Action becomes a prescient being working with the powers of prediction and
recognition: it needs to project a pre-established space and find its place on it rather than push

20
towards an unpredictability (Deleuze 2004: 285). Action gets arrested by a non-future,
replicating already givens.

In a similar note one can understand Deleuze’s famous critique of the metaphor (Deleuze and
Parnet 2007: 117).Why such an attack? The problem arises with the distribution of sense in the
noematic combination of words. It seems that metaphor carries a movement that is not in itself
productive but rather transactive. Diaphora (difference) is what is at stake. A metaphoric
(concentric) movement is a transportation of elements to a different plane. Metaphoric means of
transport however perform a transaction that presupposes a constituted difference which remains
concealed: every metaphor conceals a transformation, a differential passage by which a
qualitative change occurs. Metaphoric function creates a “figurative leap” that does not
accentuate the diaphoric leap that produces the difference on the (noematic) planes of reference.
Metaphor then works according to a numbered number, a pre-allocation that first constitutes the
planar structures and then distributes contents. What is transported always falls into a predestined
lot, a positioning that accounts to a bare repetition of minimal difference. Diaphoric movement
(eccentric) though makes the transported contents immediately expressive: they distribute
themselves as they create the plane at the same time. The movement also does not work as an
empty vessel but becomes this expression: already a mad distribution is under way. Diaphoric or
differential transportation then is a crosscutting of referential planes that sketches polycentric
movements according to the different mutation that happens in each leap.

Diaphoric movement proves useful to any kind of distributed leadership. One the one hand it
resists a pre-disposed power center, a leadership seat that endows with authority the people
taking it, while on the other hand creates a disarray of power centers which grow relative to the
spatio-temporal conditions of unfolding events. Organization of this type manages to maintain
metastable equilibriums in which actors are each time involved with different affective
intensities: desires, skills, duties, fears and other states are constantly brought into the play of
forces that pushes them to different and higher limits.

21
Figure 1

metaphoric movement diaphoric movement

concentric eccentric

There is no simple answer to prove the efficacy of this process rather than multiplying
redistributions and their madness as the real producers of the body, the laborers feeding the
machine. We are thrown back to the Netzschean game of univocity and eternal return: that
everything is equal is said of that which is unequal. Everything participates wholly in being but
unequally and differently so. It is this operation that does not breed an organism out of a body. A
play of forces is a prerequisite for productive tensions to arise inside a collective. Escaping the
urdoxa goes through the way of paradox as the metastable state of meaning: it goes to both
directions at the same time, neither stable nor unstable, but consistent in its ambivalence.
(Deleuze 1990: 76-77)11 Para-doxical states then appear as the true factories of encounters
where several powers are affirmed and conflate. This is when singularities take precedence over
another in order to produce the primary nomos, the productive inequality. There are thus two
kinds of hierarchy at work, one of qualification and one of substantialization (Deleuze 1983: 60-
61). The first is created by the genetic process of nomadic distribution we demonstrated, while
the second is imposed on the first and is fueled by the sedentary distribution. Qualification is an
immanent process of the body conceived as an ebb-and-flow that moulds the differences and

11
Ambivalence etymologically points to the in-between or the affirmation of multiple senses simultaneously. From
the Latin ambo (=both) and valeō (=to be strong, to have power)

22
erects local and evanescent “leaders”. Substantialization on the other hand is the conspirator of
fixed identities of power and authority, keeping these temporary leaders enthroned because it
fixates the qualification process and stops the body from redistributing – against metastability, it
fashions an ‘eternal stability” as a dead end.

Problematizing Consistency

To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,

To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat

Wallace Stevens

Metastability and consistency appeared in our enquiry as the two basic building blocks on which
we attempted to grasp a political body’s existence. Up to this point our analysis has delved in a
deliberate abstraction which made possible the exposition of the mechanisms that sustain the
body’s unification and regulate the vacillations between horizontal and vertical organizational
principles. This line of thinking about groups proves applicable to any collective body: from
NGO’s and interest groups to parties and anarchist committees. However, and right from the
start, we committed our research towards the question of emancipation and conceived our group
as one that aims at revolutionizing struggles. It is our belief that people’s power, an organization
from below, can achieve important blows against the social, political and economical paradigm
set up by capitalism and the consistent models of govermentality that arise in different epochs.
Revolutionary praxis then erupts as the main problematic and guiding principle that informs the
political body which strives to achieve a break in the constituted political scene. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia emerged as a monstrous synthesis of several critical areas of study that affirmed

23
unconscious processes of producing worlds. The question of revolution was uprooted from a
strictly Marxist socio-economical context and transformed into a molecular force of
deterritorialization that affirms a contingent history and aligns itself with powers of nature.

Molecular revolution then finds an ally in the face of an a-temporal becoming. There are
preconscious revolutionary investments as well as unconscious ones.”The preconscious
revolution refers to a new regime of social production that creates, distributes and satisfies new
aims and interests” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 347) Preconscious investments do not touch the
real of production but rather arrest it immediately in new codifications and territories. They
reinstitute a new kingdom of order. In doing so they are unable to follow the most
deterritorialized flows, which as we saw, are the ones that open spaces, producing several no-
man’s-lands that are subsequently manipulated and exploited for surplus-value of code. The
unconscious investments on the other hand constitute the real revolutionary breaks, characterized
by their persistent resistance towards antiproduction, perpetuating the greasing of abstract-real
machines which are the true producers of the social field, the agents of productive disequlibrium,
the ones who perpetuate differentiations and avert the heat-death of the social universe. Deleuze
and Guattari, borrowing some sartrean terms, speak of subjugated and subject groups and
connect them to these two kinds of libidinal investments.12 They point out that revolutionary
groups can act either as subject or subjugated depending on the nature of their investment. Thus,
“a revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing
power, as long as this power itself refers to a form or force that continues to crush desiring-
production”(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 348). Here lies the problematic kernel of a
revolutionary collective body. When, how and how much can one deterritorialize? Up to what
point does one follow the great schizo or nomad desiring-productive flows?

Our project until now tried to answer this question by conceiving a metastable state of
consistency that would allow the flows to smoothen up space without crushing the body itself.
However, not everyone recognizes a defeat in the uncontrollable, destructive powers of
deterritorialization. Nick Land, with his rather maddening support for deterritorializing forces,
ends up as an individualistic anti-hero, a cyber freedom fighter by claiming that the mechanisms

12
Subject and subjected/subjugated groups derive from Sartre’s analysis of groups-in-fusion and pledged-groups.
See The Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1 trans. Alan Sheridan Smith p. 345-382 and 405-428

24
created in mille plateaux for regulating the wild vicissitudes of destratification threaten to
“cripple and domesticate the entire massive achievement of Deleuze and Guattari” (Land 2011:
280). But with such a move Land also unearths the main unthought ground in their thought, or
rather the real open space for experimenting with different strategies of relentless destruction and
sober creation. The problem is indeed that none knows the intricacies of the how much, the when
and the up to what extent. Supporting the schizoid flows at any cost, Land risks consistency and
thus risks being a bad composer: he follows an intensive rhythmical trance, opens new regions
on his way, but sacrifices so much to the point where his song cannot be heard by anyone outside
the trance. We rather believe that there is a way of circulating this demonic power in collective
political bodies which can remodel themselves by regulating and even gambling with the
counterbalancing of “a speed of subjugation that is opposed to the coefficients of transversality”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 349). A group can test its action and organization only by
immersing itself into the sociopolitical realm by means of an alchemy that produces
amalgamated techniques: coiling around urgencies, needs and interests while remaining still
open to unconsciously invest desires and change the very same fields that constitute them.

25
 Machinic tactics

In the long chapter of Mille Plateaux called “Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine”
Deleuze and Guattari approach the problem of a unification of the nomad-schizo flows that as we
saw showcase real creative and productive capacities. Even before Mille Plateaux Deleuze,
commenting on Guattari’s texts, was boiling a solution that would follow the general standards
of his ontological prerequisites. “Clearly a revolutionary machine cannot remain satisfied with
local and occasional struggles; it has to be at the same time super-centralized and super-
desiring. The problem therefore concerns the nature of unification, which must function in a
transversal way, through multiplicity, and not in a vertical way, so apt to crush the multiplicity
proper to desire. In the first place this means that any unification must be the unification of a
war-machine and not a State Apparatus” (Deleuze 2004: 199). The war-machine appears as that
unification which, for the sake of salvaging its own productive impetus, manages to remain
exterior and relatively uninfluenced by state capture, recodings and subjugations.

The authors give us a series of axioms and propositions explaining the modality and function of
the war machine in its relation to the state apparatus. A similar schema is applied to the
description of its function: the war machine hunts down the molecular pathways by smoothening
spaces whereas the state apparatus striates and captures them, conjugating their flows and
distributing them sedentarily. The subterranean productive forces of the machine are supported
by a minor science, one congruent to the disruptive and deterritorialized flows on which it works
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 361-374). By assembling the libidinal investments or minorities
whose interests and desires contrast with statist distributions, and by creating its own functional
components (aim, object, space, form of sociality), the war machine effectuates a model of
resistance and becomes a latent revolutionary “subject”, a factory of revolutionary becomings.13
A transversal unification then, it is a scattered virtual body whose elements follow trajectories of
constructing the differential new – social, political, artistic, and scientific novelty. The war
machine so mobilizes several political bodies whose allegiances form potential revolutionary

13
For the components and the variants of the war machine see Holland’s Scizoanalysis, Nomadology, Fascism ,
p.80

26
poles: our metastable, consistent body becomes a first order war machine, aiming to tap into and
congregate with the wider resistant machinic network.

Strategic and tactical maneuvering go hand in hand with the problem of the body’s consistency.
As we saw, complete and total openness could prove catastrophic or even defenseless against
manipulation by existing power structures. The degrees of escape and control, smoothening and
striating determine both the metastability and the efficiency of our machinic body. When
nomadic smooth movement creates its own trajectory, it nevertheless starts from certain
commencements of striation and stratification. It begins from specific organizational principles
and then cuts through them. This diagrammatic operation, with all its productive force is backed
up by capitalist machinations, but is also vital to them as it expands the territorial limits on which
they can subsequently colonize and axiomatize. The opening of such a space constitutes the
indiscernible zone where the real guerilla battlefield for potential revolutionizing forces is
fought.14

Deleuze and Guattari tell us that the state apparatus aims at appropriating the war machine and
all its productive capacities. But even before the state’s capture, the war machine holds an
incipient molarity of a different status. The confrontational, guerilla-like strength of the war
machine lies in the manner by which it becomes a womb of several vectors of subjectivation. It
embodies a proto-moulding vessel, an art-studio necessary for providing archetypal
dimensionalities for political bodies that populate it. Segmented spaces, dimensional units,
centered formations, all function as pro-created places for maneuvering, lebenswelt building
blocks. What the war machine now does is to provide these dimensional structures as educational
material for destruction: a breeding pool effectuating the torque of existential territories and the
impetus of their deterritorializing vectors. There is a suspension of smoothness, a minimal
striation as schooling: the war machine does not completely inhibit or block its lines of flight but
rather creates a subtle economy of de- and re- territorialization for the sake of its own
proliferation: “never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 500). This construction is indeed an understated world-creation that requires excessive
sobriety and extended use of transdisciplinary agents. It’s the forming of relatively autonomous

14
For the detailed analysis of capitalist axiomatic and the absolute and relative limits see A Thousand Plateaus p.
454 -473 and Anti-Oedipus p. 246-252

27
and demandingly expansive spaces that procure the individuals participating with worlds of
experimentation on transitory phases from smoothness to striation and vice-versa. The excessive
freedom of the kind of nomadism created in urban environments of the post-analog, digitalized
era is more eager to get cancerous and circulate around black holes that neoliberal
govermentalities and capitalist machinisms so successfully tame. The relatively classless, intra-
cultural post-modern proteanism is the open yet terrorizing space of possibility and availability
that Heidegger scrutinized half a century ago with his pompous analyses (Heidegger 1971: 163).
Of course there is no space or time for a nostalgic return or a strategic naivety of withdrawal
from contemporary technologies. The recurring problem though is that this distancelessness of
the present is completely congruent with a nomadism of the mall, a war machine against abstract
freedoms of speech and the non-denumerable facebook-selves that we have in our disposal.

Nomadic breakthroughs then traverse referential spheres by sketching their own directions and
creating lines of flight on a smooth space that cannot totally resist commodification and co-
option. This movement operates on a dizzying constellation of myriads of conditions but blows
up identities of class, culture or nation by assembling a virtual becoming one with a flow in
which it is fused. The war machine becomes a tool for the connection of these productive flows
which carry quanta of in-formation (revolutionary ideas, cutting-edge programs, innovative
techniques). “Connection indicates the way in which decoded and deterritorialized flows boost
one another, accelerate their shared escape, and augment or stroke their quanta.” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 220). Moreover, the war machine has the even more difficult task of actualizing
these flows, and this inevitably involves some kind of subjugating or striating them. It assembles
the dormant schizoid flows and waits to unleash them unpredictably, in “exact and accustomed
times”. But does it risk making the nomadic horse of deterritorialization a bridled animal
subjected to a will not of its own?

War machines need not be restrained to a tactical war of resistance, as in De Certeau’s sense of
tactics (De Certeau 1984: 36-38). Its tactics must not be left to culminate as an “art of the weak”.
A strategic variant has to be introduced, accompanying the main objective of creating productive
lines of flight. Deleuze and Guattari find the revolutionary/minoritarian becoming of the people
more desirable than the revolutionary capture of the state (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 146-147).
The question here is not to measure the probable anti-revolutionary reformism by extinguishing

28
the belief of a revolution as an event and scattering it in molecular revolutionary becomings.
Political bodies must struggle on and anticipate these becomings. The real question is when,
where, by whom and most importantly on which territorialities must they start to precipitate
them?15 The war machine must be metamorphosed into an educator of revolutionary strategy and
that means it has to take its military variant seriously.

“The war machine does not necessarily has war as its object” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
417). A war machine is first and foremost a machine of creative production. Initially an
invention of the nomads, it is what summons distributions in open space, carrying a territoriality
which it inhabits, but every time on the most deterritorialized grounds: the ones that itself opens
for the sake of its free movement (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 381-382). However, it turns out
that its nature manifested more morbidly than it was imaginable. Following Virillio’s analyses,
Deleuze and Guattari claim the existence of a relatively unchained – from the state’s capture –
war machine which takes world-order peace as its object and becomes itself materialized war
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 467).16 The existence of an abstract, smoothly functional,
“apocalyptic” war machine immanentizes steadily a machinic enslavement that acts on pre-
individual and supra-individual level, activating a-signifying and non-representational semiotic
shackles. (Lazzarato 2014: 25, 31) Machinic enslavement is this new species of materialized,
peacefully clothed war that penetrates life practices: disseminated biopolitical warfare in the tip
of one’s tongue. Global capitalism becomes one variant of the war machine: the peace of cold
war deterrence signifies a transition to non-military ends, and the conquest is now not carried out
by arms but by the force of trade (Holland 2008: 81). There’s no wondering why the capitalist
machine manages to plug into the war machine for maximum effects of multiplication. They
seem to both thrive on the same deterritorialized flows, even if the war machine is the real
explorer, the abstractor that pushes the absolute boundaries on which capitalism comes to
axiomatize and utilize by posing its own relative ones (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 246-247).
Capitalism sets in motion flows and is also set in motion by them.”Its power of

15
This is the line of questioning that Deleuze also seems to endorse: “According to Nietzsche the question "which
one?" (qui) means this: what are the forces which take hold of a given thing, what is the will that possesses it?
Which one is expressed, manifested and even hidden in it? We are led to essence only by the question: which one?”,
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.77
16
States become increasingly subordinated to the requirements of the capitalist axiomatic. They become its models
of realization.

29
deterritorialization consists in taking as its object not the earth but materialized labour, the
commodity”(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 454).

In this scenario where both states and supranational machines are waging different wars, a
people’s war-machine as a people’s army is needed to create autonomous, localized axes. A
political body of this kind should focus on coordinated strikes of destruction-construction which
aim to paralyze the neoliberal constructivism of multiplicity and substitute it with a localized
constructivism brought about by the machine’s environment. If politics has become materialized
warfare then the war machine has already taken war as its object. To tame deterritorialization
means to conceive a war machine as an already political machine with the strategic dilemma of
selecting dosages. Phillippe Mengue is rightfully identifying the problem of “how to bring about
the creative connections between lines of flight”.”The destiny of the concepts of nomadism, war
machine, smooth space and so on should better be reserved for the aesthetic domain where
everything can be connected with everything without a loss, where fluidity and abstraction
represent eminent values of style and art, and where creation presupposes a certain spontaneity
that does not tolerate planification.” (Mengue 2009: 171). He however chooses a disdainfully
liberal-democratic reading where the war machine becomes a doxic plane of immanence, the
realm of opinion which is to be revolutionized at the prospect of covering the inescapable void
that founds democracy itself: “this inescapable void is the real that grounds political realism and
that phronesis must confront” (Mengue 2009: 176).

But there is no void here, except the noise of successive political displacements. The war
machinery that is capable of action needs to operate on the vacillating line between its creative
capacities and its defensive lines that ask for unity and durability. It cannot but further
complicate its processual rhythms of controlled inhibition and unchecked transformation. The
constant problematizing of these forces can be thought in combination with a second double
movement concerning strategy and tactics.17 The complexity and range of the concepts of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization, which are nevertheless not exclusive to political
analysis, allow us to account for the following table.

17
According to Clauzewitz “tactics is the theory of the use of military forces in combat. Strategy is the theory of the
use of combats for the object of war”. The war machine’s object is changing the organization of intensive
morphogenetic processes that penetrate both virtual and actual dimensions. Strategy becomes the theory that decides
the dosages of deterritorialization and reterritorialization for the altering of these processes. Tactics becomes the
theory of organizing dosages in the realm of extensive properties, representation and sedentary distributions.

30
Fig. 2.1

Deterritorialization
Territorialization
Strategy
(organizing intensive change)
Freedom, open space, political
transformation, revolution,
emancipation, providing
directions
Consolidating and giving
consistency, rooting for
further uprooting, providing
limitations - dimensions
Tactics
(organizing extensive change)
Uprooting for further capture,
becoming imperceptible,
defending minorities, guerrilla
resistance
Overcoding, striated space,
organizing, unifying,
militancy

Fig 2.2

Strategy Tactics
4
3

Deterritorialization
2

Territorialization
1

(Note: we will use that letters D for deterritorialization and T for territorialization )

To begin with, each of these movements represents a D-T couple in which one component
becomes more intensified over the other. D and T are coexistent functions that can never be
totally separated. Furthermore, it may seem paradoxical to assign a strategic value to D because
it is essentially a non-teleological movement of displacement and decontextualization. D can
have as its true aim only a further D. So, every couple eventually falls under a greater movement
of a cosmic D which signifies becoming and constant change. What is more, all the connections

31
drawn from the table can be contrasted to several types of D that Deleuze and Guattari mention
in Mille Plateaux: absolute D ( which can be negative –positive) and relative D (also negative -
positive) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 509-510)

The combinations of the table aim to articulate the possible techniques of the D-T movement that
can be incorporated for constructing a political body as a war machine.

1. Strategic T with tactical T. (intensively territorializing by extensively territorializing)

Movement that focuses on successive striations and segmentations for stabilizing the
practices of a territory. Austere organization that breeds and sustains the existent
distributions. Defensive stance directed at maximum consistency on both levels and thus
susceptible to transcendent, arborescent unifications. Tending towards equilibration,
immobility, security, control, discipline, excessive policing. Suffocation of the territory,
overfilling - suicidal bodies

2. Strategic D with tactical D (Intensively deterritorializing by extensively

deterritorializing)
Movement of continuous construction of destruction. Persistent displacement and
disassembling of the actual, sabotage and disruption for maximum releasement of flows.
Proliferated mad distributions, tendency of D to turn on itself, possibility of black hole
effect: D does not find a T to decontextualize from. Disorganization, chaos, death, war as
telos, insecurity, uncontrollability. Inexistence of Territory, total emptying out –
expressive destruction by unleashing latent forces, suicidal dissipation

3. Strategic T with Tactical D (Intensively territorializing by extensively deterritorializing)

Movement that creates a refrain and builds consistency, aiming for the territorial
assemblage, sober progression of the D-T relation, Dynamic organization that releases
several Ds but focuses on their strategic Ts: disorganization for more efficient
organization, tendency towards equilibration as reinforcement and strengthening, third
theorem of D “ the least deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 174): catching up with the “vanguard”, difference on the
actual, differential creation of identity

32
 4. Strategic D with tactical T (Intensively deterritorializing by extensively territorializing )
Movement that summons D by insisting on the territorial extensity and invests on the
extensive qualities of it, leaving the territorial assemblage, production of differential
dynamics in a given territory by investing on its dimensions, productive repetition,
grasping the different in the same, militancy as becoming, difference on the virtual,
differential dismantling of identity

The two diagrammatic movements serve as the balanced models for a constructive approach to
the war machine as a political body. They need to be thought in their mixed states as necessarily
knotted processes deserving equal planning. They appear both as prerequisites for political
change. The diagrammatic movements bring about the desired intensive change that can be
either: a) territorial, delimiting the existential refrain, or b) deterritorializing, following a
sustainable line of flight. (Intensive change stands for the alteration of the intensive
morphogenetic processes that belong to both virtual actual planes and constitute the productive
non-representable plane of immanence.) They are designed to represent the levels of investment
in particular cases and in the very end should never be taken prescriptively. The question of
whether a long term deterritorialization has to be attained through short term territorializations
cannot be answered outside of the concreteness of the situation. Prediction is possible, but as
shown, deterritorialization opens up an unexplored space out of which both enemies and friends
are constituted anew through their “groping in the dark”. “Politics is experimentation”. (Deleuze
and Guattari 1978: 46).

33
 Ethopoetics and Political Pedagogy

There is no Dionysian politics.

Jacques Ranciere

In times of a generalized state of emergency we argued that the war machine needs to
reformulate its deterritorializing weapons and draw new lines according to a battleground that
requires something more than creative insight and “virtual mobility”. Against coordinated molar
attacks and disseminated molecular invasions, the war machine redefines its maintenance by
complicating its strategic and tactical aims; against state policies and capitalist economy it must
invest on actions of solidarity and conflict; against dispersion it must culminate into collective
struggles. Conflict and solidarity are equally important factors of consistency. The asignifying
power that stretches beyond the body’s extension flourishes on the intensity by which it is
committed and related to the others around it. Experimental introversion and narcissistic roaming
are not privileges of a collective that manages to connect revolutionary flows: they are rather
privileges of drugged, stagnated bodies that deterritorialized too much. For every body we have
to ask:”What are its modes, what comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises,
what is unexpected and what expected”(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 152). Sometimes, the sense
of urgency of the actual, the buried cries of the multiple that a body bears are obfuscated by the
openness and circulation that Deleuzoguattarian pragmatics tend to be more attentive to. The
dangers of emptying out a body instead of filling it. Proliferation of experimentation stumbles
on several freedoms. A freedom of decision and a freedom of indecision, the latter summarized
brilliantly in Bartleby’s formula:”I would prefer not to” (Deleuze 1997: 68). This state of
suspension is frequently endorsed to sustain the grand Deleuzian perpetual becoming that is
compatible with the ethical task of dismantling the sensus communis and the doxa that follows
on the cost of an imperceptibility that heralds the deterritorializing force and reveals a not too
innocent, disruptive kernel of reluctance.

Ranciere claims that Deleuze “wants to substitute one ground for another, an empiricist English
ground for a German idealist ground. But these seemingly surprising returns of a crudely
Schopenhaueran metaphysics and of a frankly symbolist reading of texts show that something
comes to thwart this simple substitution; in place of the vegetable innocence of multiplicities it
34
imposes a new figure of struggle between two worlds, conducted by exemplary characters”.
(Ranciere 2004: 156) The empiricist ground that is instituted anew offers itself as the one
suitable for experimentation and voyaging, of connecting the pebbles found on the way in a
transcendentally empiricist manner. But this constituted space is the open space of the hero as an
eccentric: the one who is able to divert and connect the multiplicities. What follows politically is
then an attempt that aims for a transformation of the layman into a great saboteur or a silent
alchemist. A theory of becoming heroic, of becoming worthy of wounds and events, an amor fati
that valorizes the individual’s attempt of self-overcoming. The place for communal or collective
emancipation only comes after, and as an effect of the transversal multiplications of the schizoid
figures.

This is a common ground of several critiques levelled against the political aspects of Deleuze’s
philosophy and it is in no way an unjustified one. His uncompromising critique of representation
and mediation forced a complicated analysis on the art of dosages of deterritorialization. The
endorsement of intermittent and unrepresentable forms of struggle, as well as the hostility
towards molar political entities seems to culminate into the same anarcho-desiring persona that
emphatically seeks the force of an emancipated becoming: the art of creating oneself prevails
over the art of creating sustainable collective struggles.

On a discussion about Deleuze and politics, Badiou argued noted that Deleuze’s political
contributions can be traced back, or better, dissolved in three key ethical maxims: escape from
control, believe in the world, and precipitate events.18 Badiou distills rather successfully the
deontological import of Deleuze in these imperatives, and tries to show that deleuzian politics
are in fact disguised ethics. Following such a claim we can further add to this ethical formula the
three principal “sins” found on the sixth chapter of Mille Plateaux: a) the construction of an
organism out of a body b) significance and c) subjectification (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 159).
A whole arsenal of weapons against stratification: a sense of avoiding bureaucratic viruses, intra-
group orthodoxies, interpretative scholasticisms, passions of the self. More like a do-it-yourself
textbook with a rhetorical ending: what can a body do, amongst the surrounding frequencies,
when does one follow footsteps and when does one draw lines?

18
Badiou Alain, “Existe-t-il quelque chose comme une politique deleuzienne ?” at Cités 4/2009 (n° 40), p. 15-20

35
We can find in Deleuze and Guattari variants of actualization and counter-actualization, tips for
setting up and sustaining several becomings. They fall under a general ethics of becoming,
conditioning the figures that populate their oeuvre and shaping their image as political actors.
This becoming is however always a becoming-political: pedagogy of the citizen. As early as in
his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze stretched the importance of figures such as the player, the artist
and the actor as the ones worthy of the event, the ones who by insisting on affirmation eventually
persist through it (Deleuze 1983: 24-25). These actors-players are the ones who “know how to
play” and manage to escape the necessity-freedom labyrinths by affirming the divine dicethrow.
These images along with the multiple personae of the schizo and the nomad have an ethopoetic
function. This is what the authors endorse as a remedy for moralization, the transcendent order of
imperatives. In the same vein, Deleuze’s reluctance on representative and rigidifying political
formations is derived from the same ethopoetic concern: it is only by knowing the modalities of
casting away probability and causality that one escapes the shackles of a morality. So how must
one act without knowing the capabilities of her body? Through transformation. The actor
becomes ethopoios (ηθοποιός), the creator of ethos. Ethopoiia is the greek word for forming
character through acting. It literally means the “art of forming manners and characters”. Ethos
(ήθος) stands for the adobe, an accustomed place or animal dwelling. Ethos is the refrain, which
when transcribed to human customs becomes a disposition. Ethopoia then is the craft of ethos-
making.19 Similarly, in Anti-Oedipus the unconscious is presented as a factory rather than a
theater (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 24). The actor does not act by representing but by actually
producing. But what? Among its many machinic functions, the actor also becomes an ethopoetic
machine. Deleuze then offers a dramatization of the political as he conceives the actor as the one
worthy of the event, able to counter-actualize her happenings, and thus grasp their point-zero
(Deleuze 1990: 150). The actor becomes the one who steps out of the worldy scene as it became,
in its being, in order to inspect its production and observe how it is becoming, in its be-ing. But
this counter-actualization is not a movement out of the actual, but a movement towards the
virtual, a step into the productive theater of societal and political processes. It is a movement
“from the creatural towards the creating” (Hallward 2006: 57). However, we must be careful to
note that the dualism introduced here is not a substantial one and the heideggerian language must
not point to a separation of ontological registers. Becoming and being are not two different

19
See the entry in Liddell and Scott. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1889

36
worlds but a consistent process. There is no mechanism that awaits for an energetism to activate
it.

The ethics of becoming are for Deleuze and Guattari necessarily ethics of becoming
revolutionary. They precipitate molecular revolutions by transcending the molar and actual
political oppositions. They invade the imperceptible space of transformation and that’s why they
appear as ambivalent. But it is this process indeed that is constitutive of an education by which
an actor comes to conceive the fluidity of the political scene, the trickery and cunning of reason
where enemy and friend, from a politically realist perspective, exchange positions constantly.
The molecular becomings asking for propagation lead indeed to a zone of indeterminacy that
could prove subversive for any side. But isn’t this also the place where the political dissolves and
becomes nonsensical? Where there is no place for justice other than the Dionysian delirium, the
mad distribution?

There is no Dionysian politics indeed. But a political education must incarnate this scission. A
metastable body is a fertile body, one that can be cultivated anew: lay farming and crop rotation
included. There is just the positive path of going from a political sense towards a nonsense and
nonsense’s donation of political sense. Nonsense here is not absence of sense but the incessant
production of an infinity of senses. (Badiou 2000: 38) There is a non-politicizable nonsense at
the heart of politics similar to the non-philosophical that is “perhaps closer to the heart of
philosophy than philosophy itself” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41). Does this mean that there is
also a politically neutral, virtual being that creates a political field as an aftereffect of its
actualization? Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless tell us that “politics precede being”. What kind
of precession is this?

Politics precede being because being is given through becoming as a phasing-out. The precession
does not introduce a real distinction where becoming and being, the virtual and the actual are
separated. Deleuze and Guattari are following Simondon for whom “becoming is not a
framework in which being exists, it is a dimension of being, a mode of resolution of an initial
incompatibility that is rich in potentials”. (Simondon 2009: 6) Politics appear as one
manifestation of this problematic character of being, as a response to the incompatibility of
human society. Both dimensions are traversed by intensive morphogenetic processes that support
them and “give rise to actual or stratified entities whose extensive properties and fixed qualities

37
are the object of representational thought and occlude the intensities which gave rise to them”
(Bonta and Protevi 2004: 101). It is also the contingent character of philosophy - as the thought
that contemplates and hugs being- which must affirm its political nature, born out of the curious
conjunction between a form of thinking and an environment. That there is “no universal history
except contingency” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 93) means that philosophy must excavate the
subterranean, unthought elements that made it as such, and that in this movement it must also
grasp the fact that things could have been otherwise without these elements – the tectonic plates
of an earthly and a socio-political milieu - crushing onto each other.

Ethopoetics thus does not contrast with political action nor does it paralyze the political actor
into an indeterminate zone of becoming. It is what brings out these morphogenetic processes and
precipitates them into the political. It becomes what communicates with the molecular and
through successive segmentations feeds the political logic that constitutes molar formations. The
accounts of the war machine and the political body that we tried to formulate throughout the
chapters become the factories where such processes could find fertile ground for blooming. The
political actor finds her ethopoetic function in the arduous task of building consistency.
Organization becomes the operation where collective thinking and acting means touching
directly on the multiple, redistributing it and creating sustainable paths for the collective to
furnish its activity. It becomes an action that is reflexive to the fact that it falls upon the group
and every time shapes it anew. It incarnates the strife of activating this unfolding on every
individual that comprises it. Political bodies and war machines are the vehicles for a political
pedagogy that evinces the tension between the fervor and opulence of becoming and the
convulsive necessity of strategic decision.

What is more, it is not only the drawn implications that lead to these subtle mathemes on
breeding subjects as citizens. Deleuze introduces us to a highly politicized reading of the history
of philosophy. The hermeneutical violence of “buttfucking” philosophers remains controversial
only to the scholarly miserablism that grapples with the extraction of untimely truths from
canonical texts. His monographs, with all their stretching, diverting, bending and mixing are
proper exercises on political and strategic reading: a quest for seeking comrades and companions
for the upcoming assaults. This is probably a better truth to extract: that philosophy is always
politically embedded and exists on many intersecting planes. The question is then not to draw out

38
a political program from the Deleuzoguattarian corpus, because it does not exist as such, and it
could not. It is rather a question about finding the kernel which makes their philosophy a
political philosophy, and spurs thought either as a diagnostic of capitalism or as a manual for
constructing revolutionary bodies. Its uttermost power comes from a kinship relation with the
Marxian assumption that philosophical thinking cannot but be a political thinking if it wants to
grasp its relation to the world and the materiality of its movement. From there it can find the
positive role of positing the utopian as revolutionary: “As concept and as event, revolution is
self-referential, or enjoys a self positing that enables it to be apprehended in an immanent
enthusiasm without anything in states of affairs or lived experience being able to tone it down,
not even disappointments of reason.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 101).

39
 Conclusion

For these are moments only, moments of insight

And there are reaches to be attained
A last level of anxiety that melts
In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim’s feet

John Ashbery

Collective action is situated between spontaneity and organization. A body harnessing the full
potential of its nature as multiplicity subsists on a ground where fragmentation and coherence do
not part ways but remain bonded as phases of a process by which it becomes consistent. Ethical
vitality and political efficacy are at stake. Beyond the existential epiphanies of groups in fusion
and the shrines of indignation we witness that revolution can be a banal formality and
insurrection a sporadic thunderstorm that little alters the habits and the psyches of the
insurrected. We are of course generalizing violently. Swallowed by abhorrent radicalism,
revolutionary discourse locks itself by demanding destitution before action. But metastable and
consistent bodies have a different task: not to eradicate the internal confrontations of a fledgling
movement but rather to separate the ones that strengthen it from the ones that hinder its
resonating voice.

We tried to highlight a similar process by focusing on a political body as our unit of

investigation. The concepts of metastability and consistency were used to articulate exactly this
processual unconcealment: the distributions of mechanisms of regulation (inhibition, destruction,
smoothening, consolidation, transformation,etc) proved to be the intensive backbone of
organization. We also witnessed how these processes manifest an ethical import in their
molecular expressions: a body is grasped in its becoming and as such it remains in an adolescent
phase where it can still become. One can argue that no-body stops differing and that all groups
never lose the potential to recharge themselves. But one also has to bear in mind that there are
times when praxis overcomes the oscillation and registers a body into a trajectory of no return.

40
The political actor must inevitably turn to the plane where politics is exercised. Affirm the
assassin or the politician, for the sake of a people to come.

We’ve been increasingly careful to blur the distinction – still a formal one – between politics as
life and thus as education and politics as power and thus as teaching. Deleuze and Guattari are
principally aiming at the proliferation of the first pole, and thus they stay forever children: they
never learn, only because there’s always more to learn.

Any affirmationist ontology stumbles on the same plane that it simultaneously desires and
abhors. If it grasps the intensity of this paradox then a productive outburst emits revolutionary
molecules that do make a change. If it fails to live the paradox intensively then it floats on a gay
shallowness and does not even pass from the existentialist ordeal. But the becoming-
revolutionary is more than a crash-test of transformations. Deleuze’s tactical anti-egalitarianism
could as well affirm any of the existing or different inequalities in this world. This is the focal
problem that haunts his affirmationist ontology when it tries to think revolutionary politics: it is
doomed to avert its macropolitical reactionary face, or else it finds itself next to the “heroes” it
wished to exorcise: demonically clever corporate think tanks, weathered and wise military
generals, true detectives, genius liberals and honored politicians. All figures of the state or
masterminds of capitalist production.

But Deleuze and Guattari choose the path of an ongoing guerilla warfare, forever turning their
face away from these powers, except for stealing their tactics. A battle of heroes between two
sides, on the same battlefield, that of deterritorialization, of uncertainty and gambling. And
Deleuze does not want to change the world once and for all. He prefers to fight forever on the
minor side, using the powers of destruction and creation with the same mastery. Here is a dark
Deleuze, one that accepts his fallen status as a man of a luciferian pride. He is the revolted, the
one that seeks salvation not in the human form - cause he knows he must then resurrect a new
God – but in all the inhuman becomings. The lord of the flies, the master of disguise? The
overman maybe? Definitely a creature that finds some joy in these alleys, cause it must know
how to laugh! As did Zarathustra.

41
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