The Genealogy of Politics
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The Genealogy of Politics
Rohit Lekhi and Mark Fisher
There is no ‘being’ behind the doing, working, becoming: the ‘doer’ is the mere appendage to the
action (Nietzsche 1989).
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals offers a devastating critique of agency, which it
identifies as the founding fiction behind western morality. A century later, politics has inherited all
the trappings of responsibility, duty and bad conscience which have formerly belonged to morality.
Deleuze and Guattari are amongst the few who have really attempted to register the impact of
Nietzsche’s critique. Anti-Oedipus takes The Genealogy of Morals seriously as an anthropology,
elaborating a Nietzchean theory of flows and impersonal becoming, its post-subjectivism invoking
not structure but system: what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘desiring production’ is a matter of feedback loops, networks and non-linear dynamics.
But what can ‘politics’ mean in the context of this, a cybernetic, model of the world? To what
extent can the term be extricated from its historical humanist attachments? These questions are
ever more pressing in the contemporary period as the search for a (or the) transformative agent
appears increasingly to be a forlorn one. Traditional manifestations of the ‘political’ - as purposeful activity directed towards some communally inspired end (justice, the good life, etc.) - appear to
have less and less purchase on the complexities of the social world. The crisis that has enveloped
so-called progressive social/political movements has made clear the need to recast ‘politics’ in a
radically different light.
Using the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper argues that the problem of ‘politics’ is
deeply embedded within western conceptions of the subject as the individuated agent occupying a
transcendent position from which to confront and/or intervene in the social world. It is argued that
this attachment to the pre-ordained subject - one to whom we must all owe an infinite debt because
we can never ‘be’ him - ensures that intrinsic to all traditional conceptions of political activity is
failure.
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Instead, it is argued that contemporary conceptions of politics must eschew the notion of agency
and its co-combatant, structure and instead acknowledge the systemic inter-connectedness of all
matter. Thus, politics becomes an activity concerned not with pre-defined linear beginnings and
endings but rather with unfolding potentials and mutations. The implications of this approach to
politics vis a vis social theory are, in turn, profound. The goal of social theory is then not to develop
a general idea or model that would stand out and above the bodies it subsumes; instead it is to
create a new body at ground level - it must engage in procedures that are entirely immanent….
They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too convincing, too sudden, too different even to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they
are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are - wherever they appear something new arises, a ruling structure
that lives, in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a place that has
not first been assigned a “meaning” in relation to the whole... It is not in them that the “bad conscience” developed, that
goes without saying - but it would not have developed if a tremendous quantity of freedom had not been expelled from
the world (Deleuze and Guattari 1992: 191-192).
Nietzsche is clear, in this passage from The Genealogy of Morals; the State is something violently imposed, arriving with the inhuman suddenness, the impersonal inevitability, of a shift in
the climate.
I employ the word “state”: it is obvious what is meant - some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race
which, organized for war and with the ability to organise, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps
tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad. That is after all how the “state” begins on earth: I
think that sentimentalism which would have it begin with a “contract” has been disposed of (Nietzsche 1989: 86).
As Deleuze and Guattari recognised when they invoked these passages in their Anti-Oedipus,
Nietzsche’s Genealogy is a pre-history of the modern subject. What Deleuze and Guattari call
Oedipus is Nietzsche’s neuroticized individual weighed down by bad conscience, guilt and
responsibility, emerging as the end product of millennia of socialisation. The socius is born in
violence, but the development of civilization is indexed to a gradual introjection of State
functions into the psychic structure of the individual itself. ‘When we stop obeying God, the
State, our parents, reason appears and persuades us to continue being docile because it says to
us: it is you giving the orders’ (Deleuze 1992: 93). The genealogy of politics follows the same
path as the genealogy of morals to the degree that politics inherits the gloomy interiority that
Nietzsche thought constitutive of Judaeo-Christian morality and its attendant mode of subjectivity. What politics has tended to call upon, at least in its modernist versions - and it remains an
open question as to whether there are any other - is a collective or individual subject whose
organic unity it seeks either to maintain or restore. Together with a neurotic belief in ‘responsibility,’ this politics has typically also been premised on the possibility of a transcendent intervention into social reality.
Theory and philosophy assume for themselves a legislative or pseudo legislative role - decreeing, from above, what goals political action should pursue and what form political organisation
should take, acting on behalf of an incumbent State or a State yet to come, always imagining
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The Genealogy of Politics
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politics in strictly statist terms - even if only at the level of the ‘virtual state secreted in all oppositional
ideologies,’ the structure of the party itself.
The intelligentsia is responsible for its own bad conscience... It is the pseudoethical mask of the dependent intellectual.
Priests have been replaced by men of the state. A revolutionary of the Left or the Right is a state man, too - at least if
he wins (Konrad 1984: 219).
Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving the established powers its blessing, and
tracing its doctrine of faculties onto the organs of state power (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 376).
The history of institutional philosophy and the development of the modern state are bound
together.
The collision between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth
century at the University of Berlin... The end product would be a “fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society”
- each mind an analogously organised mini-state unified in the supermind of the State. Prussian mind-meld. More
insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government ... is its philosophical role in
the propagation of representational thinking itself, that “properly spiritual absolute State” endlessly reproduced at
every level of the social fabric (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: xii).
The mania for representing, for being represented, for getting oneself represented, for having representatives and
representeds: this is the mania of all slaves, the only relation between themselves they can conceive of, the relation that
they impose with their triumph. The notion of representation poisons philosophy: it is the direct product of the slave
and the relations between slaves, it constitutes the worst, most mediocre and most base interpretation of power (Deleuze
1992: 81).
The unitary organism is decipherable at every level. The State is but the unification of endless
mini-states, the general will is the aggregation of endlessly individuated particular wills, sovereignty is the collectivisation of innumerable principalities. It is all about an ordered interiority - the
truth - everything is identical to itself. A mechanistic relation between parts and wholes is one of
top-down structuration, of stasis and hierarchy.
In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbour, his or her hierarchical superior... The channels of
transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted
place (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 16).
Far from being opposed, however, the individual and the collective as conceived of by modernity
are one and the same, well-defined territories with carefully policed boundaries. If the State is an
organism, the organism is also a State, each organ assigned a single function.
‘[T]he word organisation was frequently and very aptly applied to the establishment of legal
authorities, etc., and even to the entire body politic,’ Kant wrote of the then recent formation of
America. ‘For each member in such a whole should indeed be not merely a means, but also a
purpose; and while each member contributes to making the whole possible, the idea of the whole
should in turn determine the member’s position and function’ (Kant 1987: 254). Kant at least
posits a reciprocal relationship between whole and parts, but conceives of it in resolutely organismic
terms - ‘members’ are held together under an overarching organisation.
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Rohit Lekhi and Mark Fisher
‘Organized man,’ man ‘centred outside himself,’ stands at the pinnacle of Kant’s meticulously
arranged, but tentatively asserted, teleological system.
Kant’s dream was not to abolish the distinction between two worlds (sensible and super-sensible) but to secure the
unity of the personal in the two worlds. The same person as legislator and subject, as noumenon and phenomenon, as
priest and believer (Deleuze 1992: 93).
The ‘new architecture’ of Kant’s critical machinery
has as its purpose to prepare the ground for the assembly of a new organism. There is a redrawing of borders, a
redrafted statute of rights of way, and, when all the limits have been established and are adequately policed ... they
produce a skeletal proto-interiority, a maquette of pure reason (EC 34).
In the face of this disciplinary geography, politics - always conceived of as a form of statecraft - can
only ever be strategic. Strategy, according to De Certeau, is:
The calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that become possible as soon as a subject with will and power
(a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own
and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets and threats (customers and competitors, enemies, the country, surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. As in
management, every “strategic” rationalisation seeks first of all to distinguish its “won place,” that is, the place of its
won power and will, from an “environment” (De Certeau 1984: 35-5).
Kant inaugurates the uneasy tension between optimistic overvaluation of its own capacity for
self-determination and depressive surrender to forces of external determinism that is characteristic of the modern subject As a parodic version of dialectics, deconstruction remains bound to
the identitary commitments of modernism, and to its Statist fetishisation of the signifier. In its
enfeebled deconstructive form, politics emerges at the moment of structural failure. But the poststructuralist dramas of endless displacement, lack and supplementarity are merely tools of
reconciliation, signalling an artificial distinction between the interior and exterior which, no
matter how much it is deconstructed, continues to dominate both theory and an always-deferred
practice.
Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis moves beyond structure not by endlessly ruminating on
its demise, but by taking a turn to the practical, into a systemic functionalism.
In desiring machines everything functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures,
stalling and short circuits, distances and fragmentations, within a sum that never succeeds in bringing its various parts
together to form a whole (Deleuze and Guattari 1992: 42).
Or, at least, not a whole conceived of as totality: the task is to think of fragments as singularities,
without reference ‘either to [an] original totality (not even one that has been lost), or to a subsequent totality that may not yet have come about’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1992: 42).
It is only the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and going beyond both the One and the many, beyond the
predicative relation of the One and the many, that can account for desiring-production: desiring production is pure
multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 42).
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Whereas atomistic or arborescent thought is always reductive - reducing, or attempting to reduce,
complexity to representative and organic units (or unities) - molecular or rhizomatic thought is
irreductive. What it points to is the irreducibility of complexity at every level, the dynamics of
open systems; in other words, the functioning of multiplicities. There is no final explanation, no
ultimate cause promising the possibility of totalizing closure, only ecologies of circular causation
in constant movement.
But this is not the cue for a depressive resignation. What it rules out are the - at any rate always
futile and often dangerous - quests for a transcendent ‘Truth.’ And the abandonment of Truth
shouldn’t be conflated with an advocacy of an over-rehearsed post-structuralist ‘relativism.’
It is the nagging and unproductive anxieties of epistemology which are being dismissed, not
in favour of nihilism or scepticism, but a materialism that is transcendental in the sense that it can
only build what it uses and use what it builds. Criteria of functionality displace the representational
conundra so beloved of bourgeois individualist epistemo-logos. Make maps not tracings, Deleuze
and Guattari insist. The production of a map entails only functional criteria: in no way dependent
upon representation, a map is useful only to the degree that it enables operation in a territory.
Freed from the task of forming a representation of the world, theory immediately assumes a
more practical role, strictly in line with Marx’s formula, ‘philosophers have interpreted the world,
the point is to change it.’
A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not
for itself. If no-one uses it, beginning with the theorist himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory
itself is worthless or the moment is inappropriate (Deleuze and Foucault 1977: 208).
A theory will not be functional while it remains committed to describing social reality in terms
of personalized entities. No social process can be adequately understood using an ontology in
which personal responsibility is privileged. Even the most supposedly ‘private’ experiences have
to be understood as the operation of molecular populations - considered up close, each ‘act of
will’ devolves into an impossibly fine weave of neuronal connections. Zero in and you’ll never
find a unit, only a site of multiple interactions.
With only the mechanistic science of the Newtonian universe available to it, modernity
attributed all apparent ‘order’ to the operation of an underlying teleological principle or a
transcendent design. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari track the emergence of consistent or
composed wholes that have neither been designed nor organised - the ‘nonorganic life’ emanating from what they call ‘the machinic phylum.’ Desiring-production is their term for the autoproduction of the real. By folding desire and production together, it rescues both from their
modernist articulations, reprocessing them as positively reinforcing elements in a cybernetic
loop, and making the move beyond the clockwork determinism of the Newtonian universe into
the open systems of cybernetics.
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Rohit Lekhi and Mark Fisher
Is the material universe the universe of mechanism? No, for ... mechanism involves closed systems, actions of contact,
immobile instantaneous sections. Now, of course, closed systems, finite sets, are cut from this universe or on this plane
... But it is not one itself. It is a set, but an infinite set. ... This is not mechanism, it is machinism (Deleuze 1991: 59).
Anticipating chaos and complexity theory, schizoanalysis utilises a cybernetics deterritorialized
from its modernist project of control. ‘Cybernetic or communicationally oriented explanation,’
Anthony Wilden explains,
is concerned with wholes, (open) systems, feedback, and relationships, rather than with parts, aggregates, entities, and
forces; with circular, self-regulating or structure-elaborating systems rather than with lineal chains; with homeostasis
and morphogenesis rather than with equilibrium with constraints, noise, probabilities, teleonomy, and goals rather than
efficient causes; with the information in circuit (which triggers and controls) rather than with energy. All systems
involving or simulating life or mind are open systems because they are necessarily in communication with another
“system” or “environment” (Wilden 1972: 36).
When Wilden writes that ‘a model of history as the product of goalseeking socioeconomic
organisation’ is ‘a version of the Marxian model,’ he is already going some way to
cyberneticizing Marx, or recognising the degree to which everything functional in Marx was
always cybernetic. (Wilden 1972: xviii). But if Wilden is right to distinguish immanent,
bottom-up or bottom-to-bottom processes of goalseeking (teleonomy) from transcendent teleology, it surely betrays humanist prejudice to describe the product of these processes as ‘historical.’ History is the pre-eminent story of man, exactly that which is being dismantled (even as it
is being narrated) by capital. To further capture this as a process of ‘socioeconomic organization’
is also problematic, since capitalism could equally persuasively be described as a process of
disorganisation. The chaos theory term self-organization’ begs even more questions, both about
the self and organisation.
At their most acute, Marx and Engels refused all anthropomorphic interpretations of the enormous, impersonal energies they saw mutating the earth. ‘[C]apitalism is not . . . personal, it is a
social power’ (Marx and Engels 1963: 28), a runaway process in which the bourgeois, ‘like the
sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by
his spells,’ as much as the proletarian, become machine parts (Marx and Engels 1963: 20). AntiOedipus thus remains strictly Marxist when it writes of the bourgeois:
more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of the
reproduction of capital, internalisation of infinite debt. “I too am a slave” - these are the new words spoken by the
master (Deleuze and Guattari 1992: 254).
But where Marx occasionally retreats from the cold Nietzschean impersonality of this position,
returning to the humanist hope that the proletariat as collective subject would regain control of
history, Deleuze and Guattari pursue a Marxism liberated from the unificatory pretensions of dialectics. ‘It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions,’
they write. Instead, they understand capitalism cybernetically, theorising it in terms of flows and
their regulation and apprehending it as a system simultaneously tending towards its limits whilst
pushing them ever further back. ‘Nothing ever died of contradictions.’
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Ruthlessly dehumanized, Marx’s famous dictum, ‘men make history, but not in conditions of
their own making’ becomes a formula for multilinear cybernetic complexity. In what Deleuze and
Guattari call the geology of morals - the processes of stratification, sedimentation and sorting by
which any ‘relatively invariant’ structure becomes formed - nothing is man-made, man is made and
unmade in conditions of impersonal production.
If there is a new reductionism it lies with a humanism which wants to collapse the immense complexity and fine detail
of the interwoven lines and circuitries into the singular will of individual or collective agency (Plant 1993: 10).
What logos can only identify as impossible paradoxes emerge as the soft machineries of systemic causality, which operate by reciprocal presupposition, bootstrapping recursivity, and
feedback. It is the indeterminism of chaotic systems that cuts through the static and superseded
opposition of free will versus determinism. Any complex system is no more about will or
agency than it is about rigid structuration; it is a dynamic ecology ‘in which communication
runs from any neighbour to any other, ‘ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 17) and in which causation
is a fine meshwork of shifting variables.
The real Marx-Freud synthesis happens only when the depersonalised elements of both are fed
into each other. Anti-Oedipus does this, invoking an unconscious not structured like a language,
because not structured at all , but operating as a nonhuman systemic multiplicity, already social,
immanent to all processes of production; and an economy that is not a totalised cause or underlying
‘base,’ but a teleonomic complexity, fluctuating between order and non-order, emerging from the
impersonal flows of all levels of trade. In the face of this irreducible complexity, the ontologically
discrete unity - man or for that matter any other organism- disintegrates. Rigorously immanentized,
man becomes reconfigured:
as a “vertebro-machinate mammal,” or as an aphidian parasite of machines . . . Once the structural unity of the
machine has been undone, once the personal and specific unity of the living has been laid to rest, a direct link is
perceived between the machine and desire, the machine passes to the heart of desire, the machine is desiring and
desire, machined (Deleuze and Guattari 1992: 287).
Pragmatically reprocessed, the grand designs of politics are superseded by engineering diagrams.
‘The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman is opposed to the metric plane of the architect,
which is on paper and off-site. The plane of consistency or composition is opposed to another
plane, that of organisation or formation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 368). Always exterior to the
State apparatus nomad thought feeds into the war machine not by legislating strategy but by formulating tactics.
[A] tactic ... does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and selfcollection... It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole
within a district, visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of
‘opportunities’ and depends on them being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own
position, and plan raids... It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctures open in the surveillance
of the proprietary powers. It poaches them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected (de Certeau
1984: 37).
The University of Warwick
Coventry, England
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