[mf2012] networked insurgents and communications guerilla

[Josephine Berry Slater]

Sorry to be always quoting things on this list, and not getting down to 
the nitty-gritty of arguing points through myself... but I am finding it 
hard to find the space and time to write anything concerted, although I 
would dearly like to reply to Anthony.

Crudely put, Anthony's mail is a criticism of guerilla as a 
elitist/Leninist form that operates in the absence of a general movement 
- the smile that is missing the rest of the cat's face, and by 
extension, a possible criticism of art/theatre that wants to take aim at 
the oppressive cage of capitalist social relations/ consensus reality / 
cybernetic lockdown etc. but cannot speak in a way that can render 
common experience or inspire its alteration - then the following 
provides, in my opinion, a really useful way of thinking beyond this 
stultifying double-bind. Either mass or elitist. Either integrated and 
molar, or (suicidally) individualistic, obscure and/or terroristic. The 
following is a section from a talk given by Nick Thoburn at Occupy and 
soon to be published in Mute, in which he reads off Deleuze and 
Guattari's Minor Politics against the conditions of the Occupy camps and 
their strengths/limits. This seemed too appropriate not to send on, but 
please don't circulate this any further, since it is soon to be 
officially published. The critical point is that the 'cramped space' of 
acting in the absence of a movement, is a general condition. Not 
something that should prevent us from acting and revolting, with all the 
contradictions this implies (cf. Trenton), but an alienation that is 
shared by all, and as such, again, a generality.

xj

Minor Politics

I will start with minor politics and fold in some comments about the 99% 
–  though bear with me, the relation may not at first be apparent. 
Running throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is the notion that 
politics arises not in the fullness of an identity – a nation, a people, 
a collective subject – but, rather, in ‘cramped spaces’, ‘choked 
passages’, and ‘impossible’ positions, that is, among those who feel 
constrained by social relations.i This is at once a very immediate 
experience – let’s say, the experience of poverty debt, or racism – and 
also something that is actively willed, a continual deferral of 
subjective plenitude that occurs when people shrug off and deny the 
seductions of identity and open their perception to what is 
‘intolerable’ in social relations; for example, when they ward off the 
identity of the democratic citizen, the model majority, the 
entrepreneurial self.ii So, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘major’ or 
‘molar’ politics expresses and constitutes identities that are nurtured 
and facilitated by a social environment, whereas minor politics is a 
breach with such identities, when the social environment is experienced 
as constraint, as intolerable.

If this is the case, what is the substance of politics? Well, it can no 
longer be about self-expression, about the unfurling of a subjectivity 
or a people, because in this formulation there is no identity to unfurl, 
the ‘people’ as Deleuze puts it, ‘are missing’.iii Instead, minor 
politics is about engagement with the social relations that traverse us, 
the relations through which we experience life as ‘cramped’ and 
‘impossible’. By social relations I mean the whole gamut of economic 
structures, urban architectures, gendered divisions of labour, personal 
or sovereign debt, housing, policing, workfare – whatever combination it 
might be in any particular situation. In this formulation, the 
‘individual intrigue’, as Deleuze and Guattari have it, is ‘immediately’ 
political, for without an autonomous identity, even the most personal, 
individual situation is always already comprised of social relations, 
and vice versa. The deferral of identity is in no way a reduction of 
singularity, quite the reverse: ‘The individual concern thus becomes all 
the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other 
story is vibrating within it’.iv

Deleuze uses an appealing image to express this. He says that to be on 
the right is to perceive the world starting with identity, with self and 
family, and to move outward in concentric circles, to friends, city, 
nation, continent, world, with diminishing affective investment in each 
circle, and with an abiding sense that the centre needs defending 
against the periphery. On the contrary, to be on the left, as he puts 
it, is to start one’s perception on the periphery and to move inwards. 
It requires not the bolstering of the centre, but an appreciation that 
the centre is interlaced with the periphery, a process that undoes the 
distance between the two.v

Now, there is an important propulsive or motive aspect to this minor 
politics. For rather than allow the solidification of particular 
political and cultural routes, forms or habits, the practice of warding 
off identity works as a mechanism to induce continuous experimentation, 
drawing thought and practice back into a field of problematisation, 
where contestation, argument and engagement with social relations ever 
arises from the experience of cramped space. The constitutive sociality 
of this ‘incessant bustle’ dictates that there can be no easy 
demarcation between conceptual production, personal style, concrete 
intervention, tactical development or geopolitical events, and there is 
plenty of space for polemic.vi It is a vital environment apparent in 
Kafka’s seductive description of minor literature:

What in great literature goes on down below, constituting a not 
indispensable cellar of the structure, here takes place in the full 
light of day, what is there a matter of passing interest for a few, here 
absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life and death.vii

I want to make one more brief point before turning to Occupy. I gestured 
toward a (potentially infinite) range of social relations that minor 
politics might arise from and engage with, but for Deleuze and Guattari 
there is a dynamic internal to all of them, the dynamic of capital. 
Deleuze states:

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

As is abundantly clear in the quotation, Deleuze’s assertion of 
‘Marxism’ is not the introduction of a transcendent explanation, but an 
insistence that we won’t understand the social field or develop 
effective politics without coming to grips in some shape or form with 
the contemporary modalities and dynamic structures of the capitalist 
mode of production.