AFF – Delooze

1ac
A weapon is not just an instrument of violence but rather active in the production of
social relations – weapons are agents that create affective encounters that shape
subjectivity. Desire is not a static human interest but rather preconscious social drives
that give form to individual interests. The question of arms sales in the resolution is
shaped by instrumentalism and ignores the role of micropolitical investment in
weapons.
-The Freikorps were a group of former soldiers who had fought in the First World War, but due to the military restrictions placed on Germany
by the Treaty of Versailles were unemployed.

Benjamin Meiches. 2017. [School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington-
Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA], Weapons, desire, and the making of war, Critical Studies on Security.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2017.1312149. EC
This section develops a theory of weapon agency based in the work of JFC Fuller, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and a number of other
contemporary theorists of violence. It suggests that weapons
are defined by distinctive affective potentials, which
exert formative influence on social life rather than passive instruments of violence. The section uses this theory
to demonstrate that weapons do not merely impact human calculations or facilitate political violence, but
actively contribute to the production of subjectivity and, as a consequence, security and warfare. Drawing
together Fuller’s understanding of war instruments with Deleuze and Guattari’s appreciation for the independence of objects provides an
important avenue for interpreting the affective implications of weaponry as a distinct form of object. Indeed, as JFC Fuller puts it nearly a
century ago: ‘From th e javelin and the arrow to the super-fortress and the rocket-bomb, the very power to
destroy… has intoxicated man’ (Fuller 1998, x). Fuller adds a post-human twist: ‘We are entranced by their cunning, their power and
precision, also by the things they give us and the profits we reap by means of them. Yet, how they influence us, as living
creatures, is left uncalculated’ (x–xi). Fuller’s description notes the various qualities of weapons such as sublimity, cunning, and
power, which draw humans to weapons. Set next to this complex account of the influences of weapons on ‘living creatures’, Fuller’s
definition of the weapon as ‘an instrument with striking power’ seems reductive (16). However, this definition of
weaponry offers a valuable starting point to theorise the capacity of weapons to incite desire. Deleuze and
Guattari make a similar observation that weapons have a privileged relationship to processes of propulsion in
contrast to a tool’s introjective model of force (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Weapons expend energy in relation to an exterior
milieu whereas tools conserve energy in the process of building a territory. The notion that a weapon has a ‘striking power’ captures how the
‘flight’ of ballistics expels force while the ‘blow’ of the hammer preserves it for another use. Deleuze and Guattari further differentiate weapons
and tools in terms of the vectors of speed and gravity, free action and work, and expression with jewellry rather than the order-words and signs
(396–401). These distinctions constitute the series of differential relations that characterise a particular assemblage, which acts as the formal
cause of the weapons and tools distinction. As they put it, ‘the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element
remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes … weapons and tools are
consequences, nothing but consequences’ (398–399). The philosophers further distinguish tools and weapons by examining different
‘compositions of desire’ as a defining aspect of both entities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 399). By compositions of desire, they refer to the
peculiar forms of passion, drive, and meaning that glue weapons and tools together. With respect to desire, they argue that
tools
presuppose a form of ‘introspective feeling’ while weapons operate as ‘projectile affects’. Affects
discharge emotions and, as such, resonate with the explosive properties of the weapon while the tool
remains apathetic to the work it performs. These differences are so stark that Deleuze and Guattari declare: ‘weapons are
affects and affects weapons’ (400). This observation is critical because the affective capacities of weapons and the weaponisation of
affects take many forms. For instance, as architect Léopold Lambert argues, the destructive expenditure unleashed by
weapons includes affective ‘operation- [s] in which physical bodies are being “broken down” into
smaller material assemblages’. As Lambert describes the process, an explosion is not defined by temporality or
speed, but by an exothermic reaction latent in a bomb’s chemical components. In a materialist sense, the
exothermic reaction ‘destroys’ by releasing forces that divide assemblages of 6 B. MEICHES one scale into assemblages of another (Lambert
2013). In this sense, the weapon’s affective power consists of ‘striking’ organic and inorganic compounds at a chemical level in order to deform
them. Other weapons work similarly. Swords cleave flesh, bullets pierce armour, and bombs produce rubble and debris (Gordillo 2014). These
affective ‘striking’ properties of the weapon operate on multiple levels. Prior to detonating or piercing,
the process of targeting or even possessing weapons also discharges affects that reconstitute somatic
postures, social narratives, and incites other emotive responses such as fear or terror. In order to account for
the affective power of weapons, I argue that contemporary understanding of ‘striking power’ needs to be expanded to include the capacity for
material agencies to divide and reconstitute habits and imaginaries. Many traditional theories of weapons, such as nuclear deterrence,
implicitly presuppose affective ‘striking power’ to describe the function of weapons. For instance, a gap exists between the destructive
potential of weapons and the more limited, actual use of weapons. This gap between actual and potential use produces a communicative
difference, which relies entirely on affective force. Typically understood as a form of threat, the gap between what weapons could do and what
they actually do sends signals between parties. These signals enable new mechanisms of force, such as coercion, by affectively shifting the
habits of a targeted or vulnerable party. However, thepossibility of these affective signals depends on the weapons
'striking power,' which impacts a person or stated affected by a weapon prior to an explosion or physical
impact. Threat is thus a byproduct of the latent potential of 'striking power.'. The entire concepts of threat gestures or postures thus
presuppose the affective capacity of the weapon, but they are not the only products of this gap. For example, the difference between the
potential and actual use of weapons also establishes the distinctions critical for laws and norms of war, but may also signal superiority in battle
or a different organisation of combat (DeLanda 2005). The ‘striking power’ of weapons consequently induces complex affects that befall both
human embodiment and relations of desire in ways that are difficult to predetermine. Hence, the destructive aspects of weapons constitute
only a set of the affective relations that link humans and weapons. Weapons similarly ‘strike’ humans in the form of
obsessions, profit, or art; weapons enchant, glimmer, and terrify. Arguably, these affects also comprise forms of
‘striking power’ in the broad sense of rearticulating the affective relations between bodies. By forming new kinds of desire,
weapons also produce their users. There are several ways to understand how weapons affectively mold subjectivity.
Each perspective or model explores a different mode of encounter between weapons and humans, which reflects slightly distinct theoretical
commitments regarding the role weapons (or things) play in social life. The first mode of encounter concerns weapons’ ability to augment and
transform human imagination. Put simply, weapons introduce the possibility for imagining otherwise by extending the capacities of human
beings. This interpretation adds a minimal degree of weapon agency into the dominant explanation of weapons as tools. In this model,
weapons only alter operations of thought by introducing new possibilities that change human designs,
strategies, and aspirations. For instance, Sven Lindqvist subscribes to this model in his illustration of how the development of
bombing prompted the emergence of fantasies of mass murder and genocide (2003, 31, 71, 126). Here, the
weapon contributes to the remaking of the world-image and, by doing so, both endow weapon possessors with a sense of omnipotence that
necessitates certain exercises in political violence (Chow 2006). This
model also provides an explanation of weapon
fetishes, which depends on an enamour with specific properties bound up in the fantasy of using or
possessing weapons. Another model focuses on the proximity of weapons and humans. In this case, living with weapons
stimulates processes of becoming with weapons that paradoxically take the form of a relationship of
embodied care. The soldier maintains and worries about her rifle and the nuclear scientist for their
Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). In this model, proximity produces relations between humans and
weapons that connect different affective properties of each entity, which become a habitual expression of a lifeworld.
The familiarity and everydayness of the weapon thus changes the relationship between the weapon and
the user. Indeed, this relationship has been the principal object of weapon socialisation processes such as training regiments, military
exercises, and martial arts, which rely on exposure and familiarity with weapons to instruct a person in their proper use (Waal 2010; Grossman
2009). Each of these processes of familiarisation includes a potential for weapons to redefine the self
through a set of somatic habits and empathic links that make living with weapons a key part of social
life. The proximity to weapons often fosters a productive relationship to actual conflict, even in the form of pure simulation, since proximity
changes and invents a new reality or field of conflict (Der Derian 2009). Similar processes inadvertently occur under duress or threat where
continuous exposure to the violence of weapons engenders a change in social structures of empathy
and care. In this model, weapons not only alter fantasies but also the corporeality and sociality of the bodies
that encounter them. The significant effort to decouple weapon users from their weapons, through institutions such as training and
legal distinctions under the laws of war, reflects the potency of this relationship since, as safeguards, they presuppose the capacity for the
familiarity with weapons to alter human conduct (Baker 2010; Lunasco et al. 2010). Put differently, weapons intervene on somatic
rhythms and relations of embodiment via their proximity and therefore require strict macro- and micropolitical regimes of
governance. A third model understands the encounter between humans and weapons in terms of a series of potentials introduced by weapons.
This ‘abstract’ reading
derives from weapons ability to synthesise a variety of discrete connections
between objects, humans, and larger assemblages including the construction, use, and care of weapons. These potentials,
which remain unactualised, produce contingent reactions to weapons, which cannot be predefined by the function or purpose of the weapon.
Put differently, a weapon operates as a pluripotential object that stimulates multiple forms of desire that cannot be derived from the apparent
utility of weapons for humans. The ‘fantasy’ and ‘familiarity’ models would thus be only a subset of the broader relations formed by the
potential opened by the ‘striking power’ affects of the weapons. In this respect, it is important recall the earlier point that as striking
instruments, weapons emerge in relation to an exterior milieu rather than an interior territory (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987). Unlike tools, which work towards a specific end in a process of construction and must be freed from this model to perform
otherwise, the
potentiality of the weapon hinges on a far wider and arguably more creative form of
expenditure, which involves the negative rearticulation of possibility. Put differently, the potentiality lingering on the
cutting edge of the weapon, the capacity to void other relations, strikes human subjects and alters desires irrespective of their conscious
acknowledgment of the process. This potentiality grows with the expansion of processes of weaponisation and, in effect, generates positive
feedback loops. Weapons’
potential stimulates greater investment (social, economic, military, and affective) in
weapons, which augments the potential of weapons in multiple forms. The striking power of the weapon
not only works as an instrument, unconscious fantasy, or because of the proximity of arms but works
also on the production of human subjectivity and desire at the broadest and most intimate levels. Two
examples show how this third model operates and directly challenge the presumption of human sovereignty over weapons by demonstrating
how weapons influence subjectivity. First, Klaus Theweleit’s work Male Fantasies unpacks the forms of desire and weaponry at work in the
freikorps and Nazi leadership (1989, 1987). Theweleit’s argument, which remains largely ignored in studies of war and conflict, is that the
freikorps conceptions of self, state, and society were entangled with processes of weaponisation. The
freikorps, according to Theweleit, were not exclusively intent on the destruction of the Weimar Republic, Jewish people, or the Soviet Union,
but with the articulation of self through the process of destruction itself. In this sense, the freikorps enemies were liquid, potential, fluidly
targeted on account of their ontological difference rather than static, eugenic categories. Their image of body, society, and state defined by a
rigid schema except, as Theweleit shows, during the act of killing, which provided a space of creativity. Destruction thus formed a crucial part of
the freikorps articulation of identity as their very purpose was to make war ‘more than a profession, [but] a state of being’ (Theweleit 1989,
396). As the means of destruction, weapons play a powerful role in the freikorps articulation of self such that they identify with their weapons
as vehicle of a perpetual seek and destroy mission. The freikorps thus envision their lives as means of destruction long before engagement with
enemies (Theweleit 1987, 218–225). In short, weapons
reconstruct the freikorps very capacity to desire, the forms
desire takes, and the ultimate form of life of the freikorps such that they discover a virtually unlimited series of enemies
and sources of danger to destroy. Another example is brilliantly outlined by Banu Bargu’s Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons.
Bargu’s text describes the formation of necropolitical resistances that challenge the coherence of a biopolitics of life. In doing so, she theorises
a process of ‘the
weaponization of life’ as ‘the tactic of resorting to corporeal and existential practices of
struggle, based on the technique of self-destruction, in order to make a political statement or advance
political goals’ (Bargu 2014, 14). The emergence of these ‘human weapons’ illustrates the potential for weapons to directly affect politics
by reorganising the relationship between life and death. Life forms have a long history at war (Cudworth and Hobden 2015), but many of these
examples are cases where militaries exploit the design features of an organism just like metallic weapons exploit the properties of metal. The
appearance of ‘human weapons’, in contrast, marks the point where weapons redefine the purpose, function, and possibilities of life and
death. However, this process is both a ‘weaponisation of life’ and a ‘vitalisation of the weapon’, since the possibility of human weaponisation
presupposes the capacity for weapons to augment human desire and self-understanding so that the nature, role, and function of life and
political conflict transform (Bargu 2014). In this regard, the weapon no longer works as simply a tool, but as a positive influence in human life if
not constituting a new form of life altogether. Put differently, the subjects of Bargu’s study develop because of the potential for weapons to
transform the conception of self. This possibility depends on a set of potentials opened up by weapons and
discloses how the reworking of desire relies on affective channels that go beyond imagination or
proximity. Furthermore, these examples imply a full reversal of the assumption of human sovereignty over
weapons by revealing the possibility that weapons alter the very definition of human life both
symbolically and technically. These limited cases create a number of problems for theories of the control and management of
weapons. First, they destabilise the assumption that humans direct weapons to predetermined ends and, by
doing so, challenge traditional accounts of the genesis of insecurity and armed conflict. Second, they suggest
that, on account of their potentiality, weapons have the capacity to modify desire by creating new constituencies
that will advocate for them, use them, ensure their reproduction as a form of non-life, and take them on
as integral to their mode of life. Weapons thus cannot be easily separated from their capacity to build
assemblages with human beings who bear them as vital objects of desire. Un fortunately, discussions of warfare
have largely excluded this dimension of weaponry from scrutiny. Section 3. On war (without weapons) Where do weapons appear in traditional
accounts of war? How might the absence of weapon agency impact explanations of conflict and violence? In his classic study, Carl von
Clausewitz notes that weapons participate in war, but argues that war
‘is an act of violence intended to compel our
opponent to fulfill our will’. In this statement, Clausewitz defines war as an expression of human will and the
activity of warfare as a confrontation of these wills. In this process, ‘violence, that is to say, physical force … is therefore the
means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object’ (Clausewitz 1908, 2). For Clausewitz, this distinction between
the objectives of war and the means of war is crucial since it grounds his analysis of the fog of war, friction, and his ultimate claim that war is
politics by other means, yet war remains a process directed by human interests. However, Clausewitz also employs this distinction to describe
the genesis of war. Conflict develops from a combination of ‘hostile intention’ and ‘instinctive hostility’ that determine the goals of war and
distinguish ‘the importance and duration of the interests involved’ (Clausewitz 1908, 4). As a matter of rational state policy, war derives from
the pursuit of objectives that are determined by and subordinate to these affective forms of hostility. Hence, Clausewitz both establishes and
problematises the rational governance of war by describing conflict as bound to a series of fluid feelings including terror, fidelity, or enjoyment,
which deviate from predictive analysis. For Clausewitz, these deviations generate internal limits to war because of the tension that emerges
from the interaction between volitional objectives, inclement dispositions, danger, and expenditures of force (5–10). War is thus an activity
where the interests at stake and underlying hostilities transform as a conflict unfolds. In this sense, the limits of war are not informational, but
affective insofar as they materialise within war as the objectives of war intersect with the other chimerical aspects of conflict. As beings usually
averse to danger, these affective responses help human communities avert the absolute tendencies of war to go to the extreme. Thus,
Clausewitz argues that war unintentionally 10 B. MEICHES produces encounters of will, which alter the form and outcome of conflict. Put
differently, the means of warfare transform the ends of war from within. If the means of war change the goals of war, then the means
principally affect the will or desire for war. Yet, Clausewitz remains silent on the role of weapons in this process. By reading weapons back into
Clausewitz’s account of war, seeing how they play a critical, but unexamined role in his theory, the constitutive influence of weapons in human
conduct comes into clearer light as a long-standing aspect of war and insecurity. In this sense, Clausewitz views war as the means to alter will or
desire, but weapons, as the means of the means, only appear a few times in his account. First, Clausewitz notes weapons in his description of
the terminal state of an ideal conflict, which he describes as the ‘disarmament’ of the enemy (Clausewitz 1908, 2). Here, weapons are notable
because their absence produces positive evidence that the ends of war have been achieved. Second, weapons appear briefly in his discussions
of tactics and strategy. As Clausewitz states: ‘the range and effect of different weapons is very important … their construction … is a matter of
indifference; for the conduct of War is not making powder and canon’ (113). Moreover, Clausewitz retains this distinction: weapons ‘are made
suitable to the nature of the fighting, consequently [they] are ruled by it; but plainly the activity engaged in these appliances is a different thing
from the fight itself … arming and equipping are not essential to the conception of fighting is plain, because mere wrestling is also fighting’ (84–
85). In this statement, Clausewitz reiterates the instrumental model of weaponry since weapons only matter insofar as they serve the ends of
war. However, if the terminal state of conflict occurs only after disarmament then the presence of weapons is a necessary if not sufficient
condition of war. Clausewitz’s paradigm consequently reflects the dominant reading of weapons as tools, but his theorisation simultaneously
depends on the capacities of weapons to introduce the possibility of conflict (Verbeek 2006). Indeed, while Clausewitz views the turbulent
nature of conflict as a product of conflicting wills, weapons appear
at key moments as forces that augment or
transform will. Weapons are thus not intermediaries in the Latourian sense, but mediators of war that exert formative
influence over soldiers on the line, populations subjected to terror, and state leadership (1994). Weapons
produce these affects because of the potentials they harbour, which afflict competing forces. Their ‘striking
power’ is thus present in the allure of fantasies that form the goals that lead to war, the dispositions and sensations of soldiers in conflict, and
contingent encounters that produce the chanciness of battle. Hence, Clausewitz describes the termination of conflict as a
possibility only when one side has been disarmed providing unilateral control over the affective
properties of war. By implication, Clausewitz’s account of the chaotic nature of conflict depends on the intensity of wills and affects,
which emerges from relations engendered by weapons. Much as military strategists speak of ‘force-multipliers’, weapons are the absent
‘willmultipliers’ of Clausewitz’s vision of war. Clausewitz’s explanation of war, however, also underestimates the importance of weapons in
producing conflict in the first place. Assuming Clausewitz’s definition of war is sound, the possibility of employing force to produce a
compulsory submission of will presupposes a capacity for force. This capacity depends on the properties of weapons. Clausewitz’s decision to
build his account of war on the model of the duel illustrates this point. The parity of force introduced by the duel assumes a set of social
CRITICAL STUDIES ON SECURITY 11 obligations, rituals, and beliefs, but the duel also presumes equity of access, training, and armament among
the participants (Holland 2008). This parity underlies the emergence of codes, rules, and affects, such as honour and courage, which historically
governed the duel. Clausewitz’s decision to model war on the duel not only reflects his aristocratic context but also how the presumption of
equity frames what things matter in the analysis of war as an ideal. The presumption of parity makes the ‘victory’ of the duel depend
exclusively on human ‘skill’ in combat by isolating other forms of inequity. By framing war as a duel, Clausewitz builds this assumption into his
theory. Weapons not only transform the activity of war as means but also enable the social formation of war as a consequence of their
potentialities. Each version of weapon desire outlined the previous section highlights this point. First, as conditions of possibility for the
realisation of armed desires, the fantasies of completely disarming an opponent make presumptions about the
importance of weapons in developing the will to fight. As the ideal end of conflict, weapon agency is present in the set of
imaginaries linked to practices of warfare. Second, the proximity of weapons renders them available as means of war.
In this sense, weapons exist in Clausewitz’s account as critical elements of training, which facilitate warfare and the set of human affects,
principally courage, which are key to battlefield success. The practice of training and familiarisation with the weapon enables the prolonged
exposure to war that provides an advantage to different sides in armed conflict. Hence, weapon familiarisation accounts for why armed forces,
which are similarly equipped produce different outcomes in war. Third, weapons augment the desire for war in a more
abstract sense because they produce the absolute tendencies of war to the extreme. Unlike the duel, which
uses the ideal of parity to restrain the influences of weapons, war unleashes the potential of weapons as an unlimited
space of their use. These potentials engender the self-augmenting tendencies of war towards the absolute, a process driven by the link
between weapons and the potentiality of destruction. In this way, Clausewitz identifies the development of force (weapons and weapon users)
to stimulate an opponent to do the same in a positive feedback loop. In short, weapons incite the demand for more
weapons and intensify the possibility of conflict. At the same time, weapons also create the series of affective responses to
conflict (fear for one’s life, disgust at violence, etc.), which restrict the tendencies of war to the extreme. The potentiality of weapons
as the means of war thus both incites human desires for war and produces the motivations to avoid war.
As desire-producing entities, weapons constitute not only a precondition for war in Clausewitz’s theory but also occupy an important place as
battlefield mechanisms or operators that avert these tendencies. This point is crucial in relationship to the larger literature in IR and security
studies. If the formative influence of weapons both spurs and undermines conflict, then both traditional explanations of the
causal origins of armed conflict and the potential remedies to war may be placing faith in the wrong
variables. While traditional literature has long emphasised the potential for weapons to both reduce and increase the intensity or likelihood
of conflict, the Clausewitzian assumption that these reactions are the natural responses of rational beings frames how they are understood in
relation to armed conflict. In contrast, this account shows that weapons play an essential if invisible role in Clausewitz’s rendering of war and
rearticulate the dispositions and tendencies that give rise to conflict. These tendencies can also be traced to forms of contemporary warfare. 12
B. MEICHES Section 4. Weapons of the hunt Criticisms of the emergence of drone warfare offer another example of how weapons contribute to
the possibility of war. In compelling critiques of the implicit principles of drone warfare (Shaw 2016; Holmqvist 2013; Shaw 2005) and critical
analyses of the unique phenomenology of the drone operation and targeting (Gusterson 2016; Wilcox 2015), scholars of critical security politics
often maintain that remote warfare constitutes a novel development in late modern war. Grégoire Chamayou’s provocative account of drone
warfare as a form of ‘cynegetic’ war illustrates this point (Chamayou 2012). By cynegetic war, Chamayou describes a predatory form of warfare
in which unequal access to arms and power enables one side to hunt the other in contrast to a biopolitical model of war where the care and
protection coincide with the elimination of specific threats to a population. Drones, the quintessential instruments of manhunting, are a prime
example of how modern warfare is cynegetic in character. Despite his intricate reading of the role of the drone, at certain points Chamayou’s
argument reproduces dimensions of Clausewitz’s classical account of war by reducing the ‘striking power’ of the weapon, an affective potential
that links arrows to drones. Chamayou interprets the history of cyngetic war ‘not only [as] the techniques of tracking and captures but also of
procedures of exclusion, of lines of demarcation drawn within the human community in order to define the humans who can be hunted’
(Chamayou 2012, 2, my emphasis). Tracing the historical transformations of the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, Chamayou
outlines specific forms of enjoyment peculiar to hunting war. These kinds of enjoyment derive from the paradoxical status of the
hunter/hunted relationship. To hunt other humans is both the greatest form of hunting because humans, as equals, pose the greatest challenge
and risk and, simultaneously, a practice predicated on reducing other humans to an inferior status. The hunt thus involves a uniquely exciting
form of danger, precarity, and sense of power. Cynegetic warfare consequently proliferates justifications that ontologically differentiate the
hunter and the hunted on the basis of the act of capture. In this way, cyngetic warfare is unlike other types of war because it relies principally
on expression of power. As Chamayou puts it cynegetic war ‘has no foundation other than force’ (13). Chamayou reads cynegetics in drone
warfare in the form of ‘pattern-of-life’ analysis, the pursuit of powerless combatants, and the dissolution of the classical spatial-temporal
boundaries of war, which foments a practice analogous to assassination (Chamayou 2015). Emerging drone doctrines such as combatant
immunity, precision warfare, and legal defences of remote killing mark the creation of a new doctrine of necro-ethics (killing well) that enables
cynegetic warfare without limits (186–190). At a crucial point in this argument, Chamayou characterises the logic of a kamikaze that destroys
themselves in attack, as ‘my body is a weapon’ (84). In contrast, the logic of the drone is ‘my weapon has no body’, which creates an impassable
distance between the operator and ‘the exposure to death’ (84). This form of distance reduces the negative repercussions of inflicting violence,
which explains why drones offer a perfect instrument for the expansion of democratic warfare since they involve none of the emotive
turbulence that Clausewitz identified as central to curbing the absolute tendencies of armed conflcit (184–7). The drone thus establishes a
paradigm of perpetual offensive military action. While Chamayou describes on the break in the phenomenological unity CRITICAL STUDIES ON
SECURITY 13 of the drone operator, his argument attends less to the phenomenological relationship between the operator and the drone or
the forms of proximity and intimacy that drone warfare enables. In this sense, his schematic reading of the weapons systems does not theorise
the productive relationship between the operator, the weapon, and broader affects. As several scholars have addressed, drones produce a
distinct blend of ‘remote intimacy’ that both removes and links the operator directly into the battlefield (Gusterson 2016, 59–83). However,
examining the phenomenology of the drone provides only one possible explanation of the recent investments in drone warfare. Another path
explores the affective potential produced by drones as distinctive types of weaponry. In this respect, Chamayou notes that cyngetic war creates
unique forms of enjoyment, which reflects the satisfaction of chase and capture. These forms of enjoyment correspond closely with the
fantasies of mastery, relations of training, and affective potentials analysed earlier in this article. Moreover, similar to other weapons, these
potentials produce desires for a specific form of war. The minimal threshold of influence necessary for war, the desire for war, hinges less on
politics as the ability to decide the legitimate case of conflict or hunting as a method of capture and more on the capacities for weapon
autonomy introduced by the drone. However, Chamayou describes these dynamics as unique properties of drone warfare. In doing so, he
overlooks a potential lineage between drones and older forms of weapons, which, as producers of desire, contribute to the creation of armed
conflict by inciting desire. Theories of drone warfare centred on the novelty of the drone or the legitimation for cygnetic warfare may thus
overstate the case that weapon agencies only now enable limitless conflict since, as this article argues, weapons capacity to foment the desire
for war is a key characteristic of their relationship to humans. In this regard, it is useful to compare Chamayou’s account to an entirely different
genealogy of political violence, namely, Zainab Bahrani’s glosses of sovereign power in ancient Mesopotamia. While Bahrani’s reading focuses
on figural inscriptions, these images graphically mark the distinction between the hunter and the hunted, sovereigns and slaves (Bahrani 2008).
The motif of cynegetic warfare is thus particularly prominent in these images, which depicts motifs of hunter-kings in many ways analogous to
the biblical figure of Nimrod analysed by Chamayou. Several of the inscriptions Bahrani describes offer pictographic narratives of ‘becoming-
sovereign’. These images are striking because they render visible the process of arming and forming a sovereign (189–195). Put simply, in these
inscriptions, the sovereign becomes sovereign by entering into a relationship with weapons. Specifically, Bahrani’s images narrate the trajectory
of a ruler’s origins, conquests, and ultimate seizure of sovereignty. Weapons play a key role in the narrative. Arrows, for instance, operate
simultaneously as cues for reading the pictographic narrative, marking sequences of time or movement, and serve as representations of
physical weapon. At the same time, the weapon figures in the narrative as key to the expansion of the sovereign’s power, the turn of the arrow
marking the sovereign as sovereign. The mythical presentation of rise of sovereign power thus relies both materially, symbolically, and
graphically on the force of weapons as fantasy objects in proximity to the king, which institutes new relationships between different political
bodies. In a sense, weapons engender a morphological transformation of the king (Bahrani 2008). By describing 14 B. MEICHES these processes,
these images both describe extant forms of desire in relationship to weapons, and also inscribe that desire in the narrative account of the
events. In doing so, the images disclose the potential for weapons to serve a foundational role as agents moulding the shape of political and
military relations in ancient Mesopotamia. The parallels between the arrow in ancient Mesoptamia and the drone in modern cynegetics
warfare are worth noting. In both contexts, the weapon’s agency is highly visible and generates the conditions for new expressions of human
force. In both settings, isolating the will of the sovereign or the expansion of drone warfare is challenging because the exertion of sovereignty
presupposes the affective potential of the weapon to both form and actualise human desire. While the drones depend on technical
innovations, their capacity to generate new political relations and forms of desire is a latent feature of weapons that affect human capacities
for being political just as the arrow introduces abstract potentials that serve as a condition of possibility for the expression of ancient
sovereignty. In this regard, the arrow and the drone share a legacy as desiring machines, which foster the capacity to do violence at a remove
that, in turn, enables images, symbols, narratives, and new practices of warfare. The presence of weapons in the field of warfare thus not only
changes the articulation of sovereignty but also invents new utilities for weapons in multiple political spaces (writing, history, empire building,
policing, war). The
weapon thus contributes to forms of desire that incite violence whether in the form of a
historical empire or contemporary technocratic dominance. Thus, while drone warfare is novel in the sense of a technical
creation capable of instituting new degrees of remoteness, the drone’s ability to create new investments in war is a reiteration of a long-term
feature of weapons as producers of human desire rather than a new feature of modern cyngetic war. Conclusion Reading
weapons as
tools subject to human intentions limits insights into the relationship between weapons and politics. By
diminishing the agentic capacities of weapons, an anthropocentric bias informs the way weapons, armed conflict,
and political power are understood. In contrast, conceptualising weapons as agents that foster human
desires makes several contributions to the study of the origins, continuity, and end of armed conflict. The
position outlined by this article poses three distinctive challenges to traditional and critical analyses of security. While it is beyond the scope of
this article to fully develop each insight, this conclusion briefly highlights each point in order to flesh out the larger implications of the
argument. First, reprising weapons as agents of desire offers another interpretive mechanism for explaining
the rise of discourses and processes of securitisation since weapons, to varying degrees, introduce humans to new affective
potentials. Security is thus a discursive construct, but one that weapons stimulate. Studies of targeting,
threat construction, and otherisation would thus benefit from a more concrete examination of the
development of weapon systems since these likely produce forms of desire that render violent social conditions possible. Second,
weapon desire plays a more significant role in the formation of war and violence than previous studies
have maintained. Weapons interact with humans through numerous modes of encounter such as somatic rhythms, powers of fantasy,
and political potential. As Latour’s initial quote indicates, the beauty of the weapon or the impulse to stab comes from
an encounter with a weapon that incites a desire for weapon use. Predicting the form this encounter takes, whether it
undermines or expands the likelihood violence, is, however, more difficult than quantifying the number of arms, comparing relative power,
detailing the social construction of a weapon, or even analysing targeting technics. Instead, the materialist analysis of the ‘striking power’ of the
weapon shows that weapons have a far more contingent, but nonetheless fundamental relationship to the
possibility of war. This contingency poses a serious challenge to accounts of the causes of war and conflict (or even ‘isolated’ cases of
violence such as friendly fire casualties or accidental shootings) that explain security politics in terms of fixed interests, stable power structures,
or static ideology. In each case, the relationship between weapons and desire introduces the possibility of both promoting and undermining
attachments to violence and, as such, requires a more careful form of analysis. Finally, while it is beyond the purview of this article, the
existence of weaponised desires complicates traditional explanations of arms control and
disarmament. In specific, this argument suggests that along with normative and legal commitments, arms control
and disarmament require a process of de-weaponising desire or, put differently, active efforts to
diminish the formative influence of weapons in social life. Since the ‘striking power’ of weapons affects fantasies,
embodiment, and potentiality, critical work cannot simply reject or ban weapons. Rather, the weapon–human
relationship requires micropolitical work on the investment in weapons, which goes beyond outlawing
weapons or relying on normative prohibition regimes. In this sense, tackling the question of war,
domination, and other forms of political violence requires wrestling with the way that weapons
generate forms of desire that link humans to the potentials introduced by weapons. In short, arms control presumes too
much about human sovereignty when, in many respects, arms produce and control their users through the medium of desire.

Transcendent understanding of weapons is grounded in a representational

metaphysics that relies on the reification of categories and produces dualistic images
of thought. Instrumentalism relies on the flawed humanist conception of a unified
subject – the 1ac is an immanent ontological critique that portrays the body as a
surface of intensities and thinks of difference in of itself. Replacing being with
becoming is key to understanding desiring-machines as a series of connections rather
than a fundamental lack.
Ella Brians. 2011. [Ella Brians (B.A., Amherst College, French and Philosophy; M.A., New School for
Social Research, Philosophy) works on poetry and poetics from Romanticism to Modernism in English,
French and German], The ‘Virtual’ Body and the Strange Persistence of the Flesh: Deleuze, Cyberspace
and the Posthuman, Deleuze and the Body.
https://edinburgh.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638642.001.0001/
upso-9780748638642-chapter-6. EC

This brings us, finally, to Deleuze. Ann Weinstone has grouped Deleuze’s work with the ‘major
philosophical and techno-scientific sources for progressive posthumanism’ (Weinstone 2004: 10). I am
wary of embracing the term ‘posthuman’ in relation to Deleuze’s work. Its use to indicate mutually
exclusive theoretical stances means that it risks meaning everything and nothing, while muddying the
conceptual field. However, given its popular currency in cultural theory, this is probably a losing battle. If
we want to situate Deleuze in regard to this discourse and ask whether he is a posthumanist, then I
contend that the answer depends very much on which form of posthumanism we have in mind. It seems
evident to me that of the two views outlined here (admittedly, with a speed and superfi ciality that risks
caricature), Deleuze’s thought would align quite well with the ‘materialist’, and would be vigorously
opposed to the ‘dualist’. That is to say, if by ‘posthumanist’ we mean that he questions Enlightenment
rationality and the unity of the subject, while insisting on a form of critique that encompasses both
material conditions and cultural codings, then it would be fair to call Deleuze a posthumanist. If we
mean, instead, that Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-machine and machinic assemblages can be
equated to Moravec’s exhortations literally to ‘upload’ human consciousness into superior machines,
then the term is not only inaccurate, but it also risks a gross misunderstanding of Deleuze’s, and Deleuze
and Guattari’s, overall project. However, as the last sentence indicates, the first question we face in
deciding where to situate Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the posthumanist debates is what to make of
certain superficial resonances between some of Deleuze and Guattari’s more ecstatic statements and a
Moravecian image of merging with machines. How do we respond to those who see congruities
between Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic production, Body without Organs (BwO) and assemblages on
one hand, and Moravec’s merging of intelligence into machines on the other? Is Moravec’s vision of
mind merging with machine not just an example of the kind of impure minglings, assemblages, and
cross-pollinations that Deleuze and Guattari urge us towards? Is it, in fact, not the inevitable result of
Deleuze and Guattari’s own de-privileging of the human and their blurring of the boundary between the
organic and non-organic? In short, is Moravec’s ‘becoming machine’ not a prime example of what it
would mean to embrace a Deleuze and Guattarian ontology of becoming? A cursory reading of Anti-
Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, or a chance encounter with select excerpts, might indeed leave one
with the impression that Deleuze and Guattari are promoting a kind of ‘becoming’ that would ultimately
transcend the ‘merely’ human body. The language is undeniably there: the talk of ‘freedom’ and
‘liberation’, the image of becoming almost anything other than human, the machinic assemblages.
Taken out of context, phrases like ‘the real difference is not between the living and the machine’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 285) might seem to support a Moravecian view. The obvious fi rst response
is that what Deleuze and Guattari mean by machines, whether they speak of ‘desiring-machines’, ‘social
machines’, ‘organic machines’, ‘war machines’, or ‘machinic assemblages’, is simply not what Moravec
or Kurzweil means by machines. Deleuze and Guattari are not talking about computers, or steam
engines for that matter, when they discuss whether there is a difference between the living and the
machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 285). ‘Machines’ offer Deleuze and Guattari a way to talk about
the differential interactions of forces and processes of individuation that underlie, connect, and
structure all entities, whether mineral, animal, or machine. This leads us to the longer response, which is
that such a cursory, impressionistic reading misses the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s many ‘machines’
are part of a larger ontological critique – one, moreover, that is firmly situated in a materialist refusal of
transcendence that is incompatible with a Moravecian worldview. Deleuze laid out the basis of this
ontological critique in 1968 in the first fully developed statement of his own thought, Difference and
Repetition.8 Hayles has identified the shift from humanism to the posthuman with a ‘significant shift in
underlying assumptions about subjectivity’ towards a conception of the subject as ‘an amalgam, a
collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo
continuous construction and reconstruction’

(Hayles 1999: 3). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze lays the groundwork for just such an ambitious
and fundamental shift in the conception of subjectivity. Situating his critique squarely against Aristotle,
Plato, Hegel, and Kant, Deleuze argues against a representational metaphysics and epistemology that
relies on the reification of categories and produces a dualistic and transcendent ‘image of thought’. The
shift that Deleuze proposes is nothing less than a complete re-evaluation of the Western philosophical
canon. At the heart of this re-evaluation is a critique of ‘the subject’ and the logic of identity that makes
this subject possible. Drawing on Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, Deleuze calls into question the
negations and either/or structures that efface real differences and argues for a mode of thought that
does not subjugate difference to identity (Deleuze 1994: esp. 281–2). Instead, he offers a theory of
forces that are differentiated by varying degrees of intensity. These differences in intensity produce
more differentiations in an exponential process that finally produces entities that we recognize as
discrete objects, individuals, and eventually, subjects. Deleuze’s point here is that difference is prior to
and produces individuals. This has two consequences: the individual is the result of a series of
differentiations, not an essence; and as a contingent result of an ongoing process, the ‘individual’ (here
we can fi ll in ‘object’, ‘self’, or any entity) is merely shorthand for a relatively stable state of affairs that
is both partially determined by previous states and open to change. Another important point that will be
relevant in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and in relation to posthumanism, is that on this ontological
account there are no firm or absolute boundaries between one ‘thing’ and the next. Boundaries exist, as
zones of consistency, but they remain permeable and open to transformation, or becoming other. It is in
Difference and Repetition that Deleuze introduces and argues for ‘becoming’ as a more accurate
description of our ontological situation than Platonic ‘being’. In his work with Guattari, ‘becoming’ is
often taken as just a trendy catch phrase. Turning to Difference and Repetition, we see that ‘becoming’
is crucial to the fundamental shift in subjectivity for which Deleuze argues. Becoming refers both to the
endless process of differentiation and to our relation to our own subjectivity. Deleuze’s concept of
becoming is indebted to Nietzsche, who advocates ‘[b]ecoming as inventing, willing, self-negating, self-
overcoming: no subject but a doing, positing, creative’ (Nietzsche 2003: 138). In displacing identity and
being with difference and becoming, Deleuze argues for a new understanding of subjectivity as a
process, a ‘doing’ that is at once creative and critical. In contrast to the unifi ed Platonic or Kantian
subject, Deleuze paints a picture of identity as decentered, distributed, and emerging from a series of
highly complex interactions between pre-personal forces. The result is a subjectivity that is remarkably
similar to what Hayles describes as ‘posthuman’. Crucially, identity is revealed not as an essence, but as
‘an amalgam of heterogeneous elements’ that include biological and evolutionary processes, social and
cultural codings, and accidents of history. The forms that life takes and the particular individuals and
identities that arise are both determined to some extent and open to change or becoming other than
what they are at any given moment. The self must be made, but it is always constituted in a context.
This vision of subjectivity as emerging out of a process of becoming is resolutely materialist. If we have
any doubt of this, we need only recall the source of the opposition between being and becoming. In the
Republic, Plato rejects Heraclitean flux on the grounds that this material chaos, this becoming, obscures
the unchanging, non-material truth of the Forms (Plato 1991).9 In Platonic terms, becoming is ‘not real’
and ‘not true’. Its materiality, its participation in the physical world of things and stuff and dirt and
bodies, makes it incompatible with truth. At best, it is an imperfect representation of a ‘pure’ idea.
When Deleuze returns to becoming, he returns to the founding moment of Western metaphysics and
purposefully unleashes all the mess and chaos of material flux that Plato wanted to control by
consigning it to ‘mere representation’. This vision of subjectivity remains remarkably consistent through
Deleuze’s work with Guattari until his late essay ‘Immanence: A Life . . .’. In many ways, it anticipates
much of the critical project of what I have provisionally identifi ed as ‘materialist’ posthumanism. A
better term might be ‘immanent’ posthumanism. Deleuze’s philosophical commitments align him with
those like Haraway and Hayles, for whom the critique of subjectivity spans both the obviously ‘material’
(biological processes) and the ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ codings that make identity intelligible. Though they
are not ‘material’ in a physical sense, neither are they merely abstract nor transcendent, ahistorical
truths. These social and cultural codings are always immanent to a particular situation or environment.
Subtly, for each of these thinkers, these cultural and social codings have ‘real’ – that is, material –
effects. For Deleuze, as for Haraway and Hayles, an immanent worldview that takes into account a range
of heterogeneous forces is crucial to critiquing a form of subjectivity that, for various reasons, they fi nd
to be inaccurate, distorting, and even oppressive. With this in mind, I would like to return to the
question of the body in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The main target of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique
in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus is the same logic of identity that Deleuze fi rst targeted in
Difference and Repetition. This logic depends on a strict separation between self and other, inside and
outside, natural and unnatural, human and machine, and human and animal, to name just a few.
Deleuze and Guattari systematically set about undermining this series of oppositions. In doing so, they
repeatedly call into question the ‘fact’ of a unified, contained subject. Traditionally, the boundary of the
subject is identified with the boundary of the flesh; I end where my skin ends. This idea depends on a
naturalized idea of the body as ‘given’ and obvious. Deleuze and Guattari, however, illustrate how the
body must be constituted through ‘codings’, which are the result of the regulation, control, and
interactions of various ‘flows’, including the biological, technological, and cultural. In A Thousand
Plateaus, they use the example of the face or ‘faciality’ to discuss how a surface, itself the result of the
convergence of a thousand tiny flows, is signified as something, as someone (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
167–73). They ask us to be critical of the socially constructed, socially coded, but naturalized face and
the underlying logic of identity that supports it. In doing so, they suggest that ‘the body’ is always more
than its biological parts or fleshy boundaries. By opening the body beyond the limits of the fl esh, to
include its social and cultural codings, Deleuze and Guattari displace the body from what we
traditionally think of as the ‘material’ realm, that of biology, while precisely insisting on its materiality.
Braidotti clarifi es this seeming contradiction when she writes that:

The embodiedness of the subject is for Deleuze a form of bodily materiality, not of the natural, biological
kind. He rather takes the body as the complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces.
The body is not an essence, let alone a biological substance; it is a play of forces, a surface of intensities;
pure simulacra without originals. (Braidotti 1994: 112)

The ‘material’ is not merely the biological. There is a whole range of forces that interact to form ‘the
body’. For Deleuze, these forces have always been ‘material’. Unlike Moravec, Deleuze and Guattari’s
machines are not mobilized to do away with or escape materiality in a general ‘becoming-machine’.
Instead, as we have seen, ‘becoming’ has been, from the beginning, an indice for the recognition of
materiality and material fl ux. At the same time, drawing on Deleuze’s earlier ontological analysis,
Deleuze and Guattari insistently undermine the boundary between the organic and non-organic, the
human and the machine, the human and the animal. The blurring or elimination of these boundaries has
a strong relation to both forms of posthumanism that I have outlined above. It might also seem to
support a Moravecian merging with machines. If there is no real difference between human and
machine, then what is lost in merging them? The phrase ‘no real difference’ should be the fi rst indicator
that something is wrong here. For Deleuze and Guattari, the undermining of boundaries can never mean
that there is no difference. Their point is more complicated: it is precisely because there are too many
differences that these simple binary oppositions are insufficient. In undermining the boundary
between man and machine, Deleuze and Guattari do not aim to efface their differences, but to reveal
their interrelation and the fact that ‘calling into question the specific or personal unity of the organism’
and ‘calling in question the structural unity of the machine’ are part of the same ontological critique
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 284). Furthermore, in contrast to both a Moravecian posthumanism and
some of their own most ardent supporters, Deleuze and Guattari recognize that there are material
consequences of and limitations on our experimentations. Deleuze may repeatedly insist on the
Spinozistic question, ‘What can the body do?’, but this does not mean that he believes that the body can
do just anything. His theory of forces and intensities is firmly situated in what Hayles describes as ‘the
world of energy and matter and the constraints they imply’ (Hayles 1999: 236). There is a signifi cant
difference between asking what the body can do and suggesting the body can do anything, or, recalling
Moravec, doing away with the body altogether. With this in mind, let us return to the question of where
Deleuze’s work fi ts in the cyber theory and posthumanist debates. Deleuze’s project, from beginning to
end, attempts to create a ‘signifi cant shift in underlying assumptions about subjectivity’. Hayles,
following Haraway, identifi es a critique of the liberal humanist subject as a crucial feature of
posthumanism, and explicitly recognizes Deleuze and Guattari as being engaged in a similar project
(Hayles 1999: 4). Arguably, Deleuze takes this project even further, by returning to the philosophical
roots and habits of thought that make a Lockean subject possible. In contrast, Moravec’s ‘bubble of
Mind’ preserves key features of the dualist subjectivity identifi ed with Plato and Enlightenment
humanism, even as it promises to evolve past the human. As Chris Land observes with reference to
Moravec’s ‘uploaded’ brain, ‘this fi gure of the post-human is surprisingly like the ideal of the liberal-
humanist subject. Completely disembodied and obscenely rational, it is a pure will that has finally cut
itself free of its puppet strings to become a self-contained master’ (Land 2006: 122). Land has suggested
the term ‘transhumanism’ as an alternative to distinguish a posthumanism that both critiques the liberal
humanist model of subjectivity and affi rms materiality, from that of Moravec, Kurzweil, and other
futurists (Land 2006: 113). Weinstone uses the term ‘progressive posthumanism’. Regardless of which
term we prefer, what is clear is that Deleuze’s philosophical commitments align him with the strand of
cyber theory and posthumanism that not only insists on a critique of subjectivity and a thorough coming
to terms with embodiment and materiality, but that also sees these two tasks as intimately
interconnected.

The logic of identity reflected in oedipalisation channels desire towards capital and is
what allows for the reproduction of capitalist sovereignty. Oedipal representation
individuates desire and creates psychic repression through conflation of social
production with familial reproduction.
Earl Gammon. 2010. [Lecturer in Global Political Economy (International Relations, Centre for Global
Political Economy, International Development)], Oedipal authority and capitalist sovereignty: a
Deleuzoguattarian reading of IR theory, Journal of International Relations and Development.
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/41749. EC

In particular, it builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s oedipalisation thesis, which offers crucial insights into
the complex configuration of capitalist subjects’ desire, a configuration of desire that makes political
sovereignty a seemingly inviolable institution in contemporary world order. The oedipalisation thesis,
advanced in Anti-Oedipus, departs from Freud’s theorisation of the Oedipus complex, the social
operation that gives rise to human sexuality. In contrast to Freud’s view of the Oedipus complex as a
universal phenomenon, Deleuze and Guattari suggest it is a fictive configuration of human desire that
capitalist social relations have successfully inscribed in their subjects. It is an internalised configuration
of desire, which has allowed for the maintenance of social order as capitalism has ostensibly liberated
flows of desire in the social economy.12 Through the process of oedipalisation, of creating subjects
whose desire is channelled by an unconscious paranoia of violating the law of Oedipus, an acephalous
regime of capital has been able to preserve the conditions necessary for its reproduction. By extension,
this article suggests that oedipalisation is a process that helps to potentiate modern political
sovereignty, which, along the lines of the theorisation advanced by political Marxism, is indelibly linked
to the expansion of capitalist property relations.13 Schizoanalysis, as we shall see, interrogates the
notion of subjectivity, of the productive individual, through which capitalist sovereignty, defined by the
division of public and private spheres, manifests itself. Subjectivity for Deleuze and Guattari is not
premised on the Cartesian Cogito but rather on a Lacanian view of a radically decentred and fragmented
subject.14 Their schizoanalytic approach helps not only to understand the divisions and fragmented
nature of the modern political economic subject, but also to explore the specific configuration of
subjectivity which is mutually productive with capitalist sovereignty. This configuration, as we shall see,
is one which is formed out of the repressive structuring of the unconscious into a theatre playing out the
drama of Oedipus within capitalism’s subjects. Building on the contributions of political Marxism, this
analysis deploys schizoanalysis to reveal the unique libidinal configuration of subjectivity that gives
trenchant expression to capitalist sovereignty. It looks to reveal the unconscious and non-rational forces
that foment capitalist sovereignty’s day-to-day reproduction. Journal of International Relations and
Development Taking up the method of schizoanalysis, we come to better understand the psychical
economy which gives rise to the law of Oedipus, and in turn supports the reproduction of capitalist
sovereignty.15 This method highlights the unconscious aspect of the desire that coexists with and
overdetermines social production. Like Freud, rather than treating the unconscious as secondary to the
workings of the rational and functionalist dynamic of conscious social life, Deleuze and Guattari look to
the unconscious as the seat of all social production. The unconscious is not, as commonly characterised,
the realm of repressed thought.16 Nor is the unconscious some force external to a nuts-andbolts reality,
or simply an aleatory factor in social production that manifests itself in slips of the tongue. For
schizoanalysis, it is, as Holland points out, ‘the unconscious rather than conscious “intention” that
constitutes reality’ (Holland 1999: 23). This follows Freud’s own assertion that the unconscious is the
larger sphere of psychical life, which includes within it the smaller conscious sphere. The ‘unconscious is
the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the
external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world
by the communications of our sense organs’ (Freud 1964b: 612–3, emphasis original). Thus,
schizoanalysis views the conscious dimension of social life as the site for the negotiation of the
unconscious drives of desiring production, a ‘theatre’ of representation within a broader libidinal
economy. Anti-Oedipus The approach of schizoanalysis is largely revealed to us in Anti-Oedipus. Though
the approach is informed by psychoanalysis, particularly Freud’s theorisation of libidinal drives and
investments, as well as his understanding of the unconscious, it is nonetheless highly critical of his
generalisation of the Oedipus complex as a universal configuration for inscribing sexuality.
Schizoanalysis is also critical of the normalising role historically played by psychoanalysis with its focus
on Oedipal neuroses. Rather than beginning their radical programme with the neurotic, who Freud
generally conceived to be within the bounds of treatment (normalcy), Deleuze and Guattari take as their
inspiration the rebellion of the schizophrenic, a subject beyond the reach of psychoanalytic treatment,
and, who in their view, resists the language that binds together the libidinal configuration of capitalist
production. The Oedipus complex, as Freud outlines, is the decisive factor in forging the connection
between the ego of the subject and the social group. It brings into creation that psychical agency which
he referred to as the super-ego, which compels the subject to identify with others. The super-ego, for
Freud, is the preserve of the inter-psychical economy that makes civilisation possible. The Oedipus
complex is unique to humans among the animals. It marks a disruption in humans’ biological sexual
development, whereby they inscribe their sexuality in a socially determined pattern through the
identification with a parental figure during childhood. For Freud, the Oedipus complex was so
fundamental that the subject’s ability to resolve this complex in childhood was determinant of its
successful integration into the social group. For their part, Deleuze and Guattari did not accuse Freud of
fabricating the Oedipus complex, but were critical of his failure to properly historicise it. In his Totem
and Taboo, Freud hypothesises a primordial conflict in sexual relations at the dawn of humanity that
gave rise to the Oedipus complex, and which he also implicates in the rise of religion and ethics.17
Though Deleuze and Guattari would agree that ethics and religion are ultimately reflective of an
underlying libidinal configuration of subjectivity, the Oedipus complex was, in their view, a configuration
specific to the libidinal configuration of capitalism. While rejecting the universality of the Oedipus
complex, Deleuze and Guattari believed that Freud had struck upon something. Sophocles’ tale of
Oedipus Rex, the king who unknowingly killed his own father and appropriated his throne, who married
his mother and fathered her children, was a tragedy seen to resonate with the desires and anxieties of
capitalism’s subjects. Like Oedipus, who blinded himself upon discovering the crime he unwittingly
committed, the capitalist subject harbours an immense guilt that induces a form of self-castigation.18
The capitalist subject maintains a costly ascetic ideal in order to atone for its ‘illicit’ desires. But whereas
Oedipus becomes conscious of his crime, the capitalist subject remains unaware of its desires. The
unconscious recognition of this incestuous desire, though, and the need to prevent conscious awareness
of this desire, fuels the necessary psychic repression that allows the smooth flow of commodities and
money of capitalist social relations. The Oedipus complex is not actually repressing a real desire. For
Deleuze and Guattari the process of oedipalisation, of creating Oedipal subjects, is a ‘factitious
production of psychic repression’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 115). Desire within social production is
something which is engineered, something cultivated in the individual to enlist her or him in the
preservation of the prevailing mode of production. ‘The schizoanalytic argument is simple: desire is a
machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement — desiring machines’ (ibid.: 296).19 The
Oedipus complex, thus, is a specific machinic arrangement that cultivates an obstructed desire. This
artificial desire in turn reinforces a specific regime of familial identifications. It coaxes desire towards
differentiated parental figures — of mother and father, and at the same time prohibits the satisfaction
or realisation of this desire. Oedipal desires do not spring from the unconscious directly, to be
subsequently repressed; rather, they are created by the very act of the repression of undifferentiated
desire. ‘If desire is repressed, this is not because it is desire for the mother and for the death of the
father; on the contrary, desire becomes that only because it is repressed, it takes on that mask only
under the reign of the repression that models the mask for it and plasters it on its face’ (ibid.: 116). At
the same time that this desire is created through repression, it is obstructed by the threat of symbolic
castration, understood as the dissolution of identity, the disintegration of subjectivity. It is this threat
that compels acquiescence to paternal authority and fosters identification with the simulacrum of the
father, helping to ensure the reproduction of Oedipal authority through capitalism. This Oedipal
configuration of sexuality comes to permeate all aspects of social production. For Deleuze and Guattari,
as for Freud, sexuality is much broader than genital sexuality. What is called sexuality is ‘by no means
identical with the impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a pleasurable
sensation in the genitals’, Freud tells us, having ‘far more resemblance to the all-inclusive and all-
preserving Eros of Plato’s Symposium’ (Freud 1961: 218). Thus, our language, our institutions, all the
sundry objects that constitute our social existence, are libidinally invested. ‘The truth is that sexuality is
everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes
money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 293).
Oedipal sexuality, in particular, sees the simulacra of father and the mother conveyed in every aspect of
social life, every social role, the land, labour, private property, money, etc.20 It is ‘applied to everything,
in that the agents and relations of social production, and the libidinal investments corresponding to
them, are made to conform to the figures of familial reproduction’ (ibid.: 101). So too, Oedipal guilt acts
not only as a disciplinary force in individuals, but also helps to invigilate the behaviour of the social
group. As Schrift tells us, Oedipal guilt works in a fashion similar to the condition of bad conscience that
Nietzsche sees beleaguering ‘stable’ and ‘peaceful’ societies. Like bad conscience, the complex leads to
the self-repression of an illicit desire, and, at the same time, there is the paranoiac projection of this
guilt onto the social other (Schrift 1995: 78; Dudley 2002: 132). Thus, quite distinct from the reading of
Marx, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that what makes capitalism a unique form of social production is
not commodity exchange relations per se; rather, it is the unconscious machinic of Oedipus that upholds
these relations. In Capital, Marx proposes an answer to the question of equivalence posed by Aristotle in
Nicomachean Ethics, the question over the source of commensurability that allows us to formulate that
5 beds ¼ 1 house, or 5 beds ¼ a quantity of money. The general equivalent of any two exchangeable
goods, Marx (1990: 151) argues, is the quantity of abstract labour that goes into producing these
commodities. But in order for labour to be abstracted from the particular goods that it produces, and
then for it to be generalised or universalised through money, Marx (1993: 149–50) argues that it is force
that is necessary. Whereas Marx (1990: 873) locates this force in the wellspring of primitive
accumulation, which he claims is akin to political economy’s ‘original sin’, for Deleuze and Guattari it is
the crime of Oedipus that marks the beginnings of capitalism. The alienation of the worker from his
labour is not under compunction of physical force or deprivation alone, but the internalisation of the law
of the father that sanctifies this separation.

Oedipal representation binds the death-instinct to the despotic signifier of capitalism

through a negative desire that produces surplus value. Distinctions between
production and anti-production have disappeared – even the death enterprise absorbs
surplus value now. Zombie commodification has produced a capitalist dreamland that
ties us to an endless loop of desire for commodities and war. Only schizoanalysis can
undermine blockages that keep us captivated to the simulacrum of image
commodification and technologies of desire
S.C. Hickman. July 4, 2015. [I'm a poet, short story author, and philosophical speculator of the real
within which we all live and have our being. I take an interest in all things: travel, write, love, and most
of all ponder the mysteries of existence.], DEATH & CAPITALISM: THE SUBLIME WAR MACHINE,
Southern Nights. https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/death-capitalism-the-sublime-war-
machine/. EC

Deleuze and Guattari will question this deep wisdom of Freud’s anemic Ananke (Necessity) that binds
desire in a weltering world of voidic cholera: “Is this really the right way to bring on better days? And
aren’t all the destructions performed by schizoanalysis worth more than this psychoanalytical
conservatory, aren’t they more a part of the affirmative task?” (p. 334) In fact they will see in this
claustrophobic science of the mind, an Oedipal mind, a dark theatre of cruelty the habitation of ghosts
and interior palaces where desire is brought to bare for its crimes, a sadistic chamber where Freud can
observe the guilt of the past in all its terrible splendor. Instead of this dark cave Deleuze and Guattari
will say, open the doors, let in a little fresh air and give us a “bit of a relation to the outside, a little real
reality” (p. 334).

Freud was the first to link death and war as he studied the aftermath of WWI; a linkage between
psychoanalysis and capitalism in their twin engagement with death and war. (p. 335) “What we have
tried to show apropos of capitalism is how it inherited much from a transcendent death-carrying agency,
the despotic signifier, but also how it brought about this agency’s effusion in the full immanence of its
own system: the full body, having become that of capital-money, suppresses the distinction between
production and anti-production; everywhere it mixes anti-production with the productive forces in the
immanent reproduction of its own always widened limits. The death enterprise (war) is one of the
principle and specific forms of the absorption of surplus value in capitalism. (p. 335) What Freud
discovers is that the death-instinct being immanent to the capitalist despotic signifier, the empty locus
around which its system of absorption exists, that it must displace everything into this war-machine to
block the schizophrenic escapes and place restraints on its flights. (p. 335) Capitalism is a war machine
that binds desire within its own immanent logic as death: a negative desire that produces pure surplus-
value out of the hell of its despotic and ascetic cult.

It is at this point that they will introduce Zombie Capitalism: the “only modern myth is the myth of
zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason” by the psychoanalytical priest of a
new asceticism so that they can continue serving the war-machine like good subservient capitalists. (p.
335) It is the principle of death immanent to capitalism that produces the very limits that bind and
impose a gap between social-production and desiring-production that keeps the zombies tied to the
endless loop of a false desire for commodities and war. “Now this universe has as its function the
splitting of the subjective essence into two functions, that of abstract labor alienated in private property
that reproduces the ever wider limits, and that of abstract desire alienated in the privatized family that
displaces the ever narrower internalized limits” (p. 337).

In this system caught between abstract labor and desire the zombie citizen lives under a mortuary
axiomatic: an axiomatic of simulacra, wherein the zombies cannibalize images instead of flesh: “death is
not desires, but what is desired is dead” (p. 337) In truth, capitalism has nothing to co-opt; or rather, its
powers of co-option coexist more often than not with what is to be co-opted, and even anticipate it. (p.
338) For those that remember Debord’s Society of the Spectacle all this will seem familiar. In Debord’s
theory, media have become the quintessential tool of contemporary capitalism, and consumerism is its
legitimating ideology. Or, to cite Debord’s famous quip, “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the
point where it becomes image.”2 What is crucial about Debord’s theory is that it connects the state’s
investment in social reproduction to its commitment to, “and control of, the field of images— the
alternative world conjured up by the new battery of ‘perpetual emotion machines’ of which TV was the
dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute.” Not only is the world of images a
structural necessity for capitalism, it affirms the primacy of the pedagogical as a crucial element of the
political. It enforces “the submission of more and more facets of human sociability— areas of everyday
life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity . . . to the deadly solicitation (the
lifeless bright sameness) of the market.” (Giroux KL 517-523)

Under contemporary capitalism, state-sanctioned violence makes its mark through the prisons, courts,
police surveillance, and other criminalizing forces; it also wages a form of symbolic warfare mediated by
a regime of consumer-based images and staged events that narrow individual and social agency to the
dictates of the marketplace, reducing the capacity for human aspirations and desires to needs embodied
in the appearance of the commodity. In Debord’s terms, “the spectacle is the bad dream of modern
society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep.” (Giroux KL 526) What Debord would
term the politics of consent is the acknowledgement that all aspects of social life are increasingly shaped
by the communication technologies under the control of corporate forces.

Of course this is even more so in our own time, when technologies of communication have become not
only ubiquitous and invisible due to normalization, they actually replace reality with a surfeit of image,
propaganda, and ideological constructs that seem to be more real than reality itself. As Giroux and
Evans will affirm:

Debord did not anticipate either the evolution of media along its current trajectories, with its multiple
producers, distributors, and access, or the degree to which the forces of militarization would dominate
all aspects of society, especially in the United States, where obsession with law enforcement,
surveillance, and repression of dissent has at least equaled cultural emphasis on commercialization from
9/ 11 forward. The economic, political, and social safeguards of a past era, however limited, along with
traditional spatial and temporal coordinates of experience, have been blown apart in the “second media
age,” as the spectacularization of anxiety and fear and the increasing militarization of everyday life have
become the principal cultural experiences shaping identities, values, and social relations. (Giroux KL 600-
606)

Following Deleuze and Guattari we should affirm both a destructive and constructive task incorporating
schizoanalytical technics in becoming mechanics rather than a theatre director: the political and social
unconscious is not an archaeology, there are no statues in this unconscious: there are “only stones to be
sucked … and other machinic elements belonging to deterritorialized constellations” (p. 338). As they
would tell us in “the unconscious it is not the lines of pressure that matter, but on the contrary the lines
of escape” (p. 338). To seek out those constellations of resistance and revolt, those “lines of escape” and
flight that will help us to open gaps and cracks in the current system of capitalism and its death machine,
this is the task today.

Against all representational theories that seek to interpret the socio-cultural, political, and economic
unconscious we must realize that the very images that interpretation entails are the very tools of
repression and death, the ascetic priests tools of choice that enslave and bind rather than uncover and
liberate or emancipate the break-flows of desire. Instead of a cinematic or video game existence flicking
by in synthetic-time frames, encapsulated in the violence of freeze-frame abstractions that present the
surface textures of a symbolic existence caught in the imaginary of capital, an a-life of artificial
extractions that confine flesh to a screen of repetition and loss rather than the break-flows of real time
existence. This half-life in which we are bound to an interface existence, caught up in the flows of death
machines that trap and bind us to a ghost-land of sound-scapes and images. “It is the very form of
interpretation that shows itself to be incapable of attaining the unconscious, since it gives rise to the
inevitable illusions … by means of which the conscious makes of the unconscious an image consonant
with its wishes: we are still pious, psychoanalysis remains in the pre-critical age” (p. 339). We must
break through this crystal palace dreamland of capital, discover lines of escape beyond its illusory fun
house of gadgets and technological toys, else be entrapped forever in a void of commoditized identities,
spinning in a self-voided paradise of Oedipal madness where we finally merge with our very machinic
lives – our flesh dissolving in the war-machines that have now become our only reality.

Ultimately the schizoanalytical technique unbinds the repressive Oedipal system of capital that has tied
it to the death machines of production and zombie commodification, the compulsion to repeat an
endless cycle of negative desire in a void of surplus-value profiting that sucks the life-blood out of the
human waste expended and multiplied by this vast charnel house system. Instead of falling back into the
trap of capitalist repression and re-Oedipalization, schizoanalysis “follows the lines of escape and the
machinic indices all the way to the desiring-machines” (p. 339). Or, as they tell us:

undoing the blockage or the coincidence on which the repression properly speaking relies; transforming
the apparent opposition of repulsion … into a condition of real functioning; ensuring this functioning in
the forms of attraction and attractive functioning, as well as enveloping the zero degree in the
intensities produced; and thereby causing the desiring-machines to start up again. Such is the delicate
and focal point that fills the function of transference in schizoanalysis – dispersing, schizophrenizing the
perverse transference of psychoanalysis.(p. 339)

For a social and political task one must take this and apply it to the repressive blockages within the
capitalist system that keep the zombies bound and captivated to the simulacrum of image
commodification and technologies of desire, providing an alternative to this death-machine zero sum
world of capital; one that allows a transference from this illusory image-world of capital to a world
where desiring-machines are no longer formed, mutilated, and bound to a negative desire situated in
capital and its war-machines. We need a critical praxis that is not a reversion to pre-critical forms, but is
worthy of the anti-representational critique developed by Deleuze & Guattari, one that seeks out in the
functional blockages in the political, economic, and socio-cultural unconscious the part-objects that
enforce its repressive stasis and violence of passivity and captures the desiring flows of surplus-
joissance, all the while seeking lines of escape and flight out of this zombie globalist system of capital.
Seeking cracks in the molecular fabric that encapsulates us in what that liberal-conservative Sloterdijk
calls the “World Interior of Capital”; that illusionary ideological construct that is so pervasive and
ubiquitous that it has become normalized to the point of invisibility, the Infosphere.
Thus we advocate for the nomadic war machine as a space of radical dislocation and
resistance against power.

The nomadic war machine frees thought from binary structures and opens up a space
characterized by multiplicity and difference. Embracing a philosophy of immanence is
a prerequisite for any alternative – humanist subjectivity ties desire to the State and
prevents resistance through self-complicity
Saul Newman. 8/17/2009. [Saul Newman is a British political theorist and central post-anarchist
thinker.], War on the State: Stirner and Deleuze’s Anarchism, The Anarchism Library.
http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/More_Books_and_Reports/The_Anarchist_Library/Saul_Newman__
War_on_the_State__Stirner_and_Deleuze_s_Anarchism_a4.pdf. EC

It is this undermining of Enlightenment humanist ontology that allows poststructuralists like Deleuze to
see politics in an entirely new way. Like Stirner, Deleuze sees the human subject to be an effect of
power rather than an essential and autonomous identity. Subjectivity is constructed in such a way that
its desire becomes the desire for the State. According to Deleuze, the State, where it once operated
through a massive repressive apparatus, now no longer needs this — it functions through the self-
domination of the subject. The subject becomes his own legislator: . . . the more you obey the
statements of dominant reality, the more you command as speaking subject within mental reality, for
finally you’ only obey yourself. . . A new form of slavery has been invented, that of being a slave to
oneself. . . (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:162) 10 For Deleuze desire is channelled to the State through our
willing submission to Oedipal representation. Oedipus is the State’s defence against untrammelled
desire (Deleuze 1987:88). In fact Deleuze sees psychoanalysis as the new church, the new altar upon
which we sacrifice ourselves, no longer to God but to Oedipus. Psychoanalysts are “the last priests”
(Deleuze 1987:81). So, while for Stirner the religion of the State is humanism and humanist Man, for
Deleuze the religion of the State is Oedipus. Oedipal representation does not repress desire as such, but
rather constructs it in such a way that it believes itself to be repressed, to be based on a negativity, guilt
and lack (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:116). Thus Oedipal repression is simply the mask for the real
domination of desire. Desire is ‘repressed’ in this way because unfettered it is a threat to the State — it
is essentially revolutionary: “. . . there is no desiring machine capable of being assembled without
demolishing entire social sectors” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:116). Deleuze argues that Oedipus
individualises this desire by cutting it off from its possible connections and imprisoning it within the
individual subject. This is much in the same way that for Stirner the essential human subject imprisons
the ego, trying to capture its pluralities and fluxes within a single concept. The question of desire plays a
crucial role in both Deleuze and Stirner’s political thinking, and I would argue that it is impossible to
understand their radical approach to politics without a consideration of this concept. For these thinkers
we can desire our own domination, just as we can desire freedom. Deleuze says: To the question ‘How
can desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its slavery?’ we reply that the powers which crush
desire, or which subjugate it, themselves already form part of the assemblages of desire:. . . (Deleuze
1987:133) For Stirner similarly, desire is not repressed or denied — rather it is channelled to the State:
“The State exerts itself to tame the desirous Man; in other words, it seeks to direct his desire to it alone,
and to content that desire with what it offers” (Stirner 1993:312). So for Stirner desire is constituted in
such a way that it becomes desire for the State. In this way State domination is made possible through
our complicity — through our desire for authority (Stirner 1993:312). Like Deleuze, Stirner is not so
much interested in power itself, but in the reasons why we allow ourselves to be dominated by power.
He wants to study the ways in which we participate in our own oppression, and to show that power is
not only concerned with economic or political questions — it is also rooted in psychological needs. It has
embedded itself, in the form of abstract ideas such as the State, human essence and morality, deep
within our conscience. The dominance of the State, Stirner argues, depends on our willingness to let it
dominate us: The State is not thinkable without lordship and servitude (subjection); for the State must
will to be lord of all that it embraces, and this will is called the ‘will of the State’. ‘He who, to hold his
own, must count on the absence of will in others is a thing made by these others, as a master is a thing
made by the servant. If submissiveness ceased, it would be all over with lordship. (Stirner 1993:195–6)
Stirner argues that the State itself is essentially an abstraction: it only exists because we allow it to exist
and because we abdicate to it our own authority, 11 in the same way that we create God by abdicating
our authority and placing it outside ourselves. What is more important than the institution of the State
is the “ruling principle” — it is the idea of the State that oppresses us (Stirner 1993:226). The State’s
power is really based on our power. Would the State be as dominant if one refused to obey it, if one
refused to surrender his authority to it? Is it not undeniable that any kind of rule depends on our
willingness to let it rule us? Political power cannot rest solely on coercion. It needs our help, our
willingness to obey. It is only because the individual has not recognised this power, because he humbles
himself before the sacred, before authority, that the State continues to exist (Stirner 1993:284). So for
both Stirner and Deleuze the State must be overcome as an idea before it can be overcome in reality.
This is the only way to ensure that a new State does not spring up in the place of the old. This was also
the central concern of anarchism. However, according to this argument, classical anarchism failed to
adequately account for the problem of power, subjectivity and desire. As Stirner and Deleuze have
shown, not only is State power linked to moral and rational discourses, it is also fundamentally linked
with the idea of the autonomous humanist subject — the cornerstone of anarchist thought. What the
classical anarchists did not foresee was the subtle complicity between the desiring subject and the
power that oppresses him/her. This is the spectre that haunts revolutionary theory. So Stirner and
Deleuze go beyond the problematic of classical anarchism by unmasking the links between human
essence and power, and by recognising the authoritarian possibilities of desire. It is clear then that
resistance against State power must work along different lines to those envisaged by classical anarchists.
4 Resistance So for both Stirner and Deleuze, State domination operates through, not only social
contract theories and moral and rational discourses, but more fundamentally through humanist desire
itself. The question must be how, if we are so intricately tied to the State, do we resist its domination?
For Stirner and Deleuze, resistance to the State must take place at the level of our thoughts, ideas and
most fundamentally our desires. We must learn to think beyond the paradigm of the State.
Revolutionary action in the past has failed because it has remained trapped within this paradigm. Even
revolutionary philosophies like anarchism, which have as their aim the destruction of State power, have
remain trapped within essentialist concepts and manichean structures which, as Stirner and Deleuze
have shown, often end up reaffirming authority. Perhaps the very idea of revolution should be
abandoned. Perhaps politics should be about escaping essentialist structures and identities. Stirner
argues, for instance, that resistance against the State should take the form, not of revolution, but
“insurrection”: Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former
consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and
is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a
transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves,
is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up without regard to the 12 arrangements that
spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let
ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’. It is not a
fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working
forth of me out of the established. (Stirner 1993:316) Insurrection, it may be argued, starts with the
individual refusing his enforced identity, the ‘I’ through which power operates: it starts ‘from men’s
discontent with themselves.’ Moreover Stirner says that insurrection does not aim at overthrowing
political institutions themselves. It is aimed at the individual overthrowing his own identity — the
outcome of which is, nevertheless, a change in political arrangements. Insurrection is therefore not
about becoming what one ‘is’ according to humanism — becoming human, becoming Man — but about
becoming what one is not. Stirner’s notion of rebellion involves a process of becoming — it is about
continually reinventing one’s own self. The self is not an essence, a defined set of characteristics, but
rather an emptiness, a “creative nothing”, and it is up to the individual to create something out of this
and not be limited by essences (Stirner 1993:150). Deleuze as we have seen also rejects the unity and
essentialism of subject, seeing it as a structure that constrains desire. He too sees becoming —
becoming other than Man, other than human — as a form of resistance. He proposes a notion of
subjectivity which privileges multiplicity, plurality and difference over unity, and flux over the stability
and essentialism of identity. The unity of the subject is broken down into a series of flows, connections,
and assemblages of heterogeneous parts (Bogue 1989:94). One cannot even think of the body as
unified: we are composed of different parts that may function quite independently. What is important is
not the subject or the various components themselves, but rather what happens between components:
connections, flows, etc (Bogue 1989:91). So for Deleuze and Stirner, resistance against the State must
involve a rejection of unified and essentialist identities — identities which tie desire, language and
thought to the State. Their breaking down of unity into plurality, difference and becoming may be seen
as an exercise in anti-authoritarian, anti-State thought. It may be seen as an attempt to go beyond
existing political categories and to invent new ones — to expand the field of politics beyond its present
limits by unmasking the connections that can be formed between resistance and the power being
resisted. As Deleuze says: “You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that
you will restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier,. . . ” (Deleuze and Guattari
1988:9). Perhaps one way to think outside this binary, essentialist logic is through the concept of war.
Stirner and Deleuze, in different ways, theorise non-essentialist forms of resistance against the State in
terms of war. Stirner calls for war to be declared on the very institution and principle of the State.
Moreover, he sees society in terms of a war of egos, a kind of Hobbesian war of “all against all” in which
there is no appeal to any notion of collectivity or unity (Clark 1976:93). For this he has often been
accused of advocating a selfish and extreme individualism in which “might is right” and the individual is
entitled to all that he has it within his power to attain. However I would argue that Stirner is not talking
here about actual war but rather a struggle at the level of representations which creates radical
theoretical openings and in which all essential unities and collectivities are ruptured. War for Stirner is
not a State of nature or an essential 13 characteristic. Rather it is a mode of thinking that undermines
essence. It is in the same vein that Deleuze talks about the ‘war machine’ as a figure of resistance
against the State. The war machine constitutes an outside to the State. While the State is characterised
by interiority, the war machine is characterised by absolute exteriority. While the State is, as we have
seen, a coded conceptual plane confining thought within binary structures, the war machine is sheer
nomadic movement, non-striated and uncoded. It is a space characterised by pluralities, multiplicities
and difference, which escapes Statecoding by eschewing binary structures (Deleuze 1987:141). The war
machine is the State’s Outside — whatever escapes the State’s capture: ‘just as Hobbes saw clearly that
the State was against war, so war is against the State and makes it impossible’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1988:359). It is the conceptual absence of essence and central authority. Again I would argue that
Deleuze, as was the case with Stirner, is not talking here about actual war, but rather a theoretical
terrain characterised by conceptual openness to plurality and difference, which eschews the stable
identities, essences and conceptual unities that form part of the assemblage of the State. The idea of
war as a radical dislocation and constitutive emptiness may be developed in this way, as a tool of
resistance against State power and authority. As we have seen, resistance is a dangerous enterprise: it
can always be colonised by the power it opposes. It can no longer be seen as the overthrowing of State
power by an essential revolutionary subject. Resistance may now be seen in terms of war: a field of
multiple struggles, strategies, localised tactics, temporary setbacks and betrayals — ongoing antagonism
without the promise of a final victory. As Deleuze says: “. . . the world and its States are no more
masters of their plane than revolutionaries are condemned to a deformation of theirs. Everything is
played in uncertain games. . . ” (Deleuze 1987:147). How does this notion of resistance as war, as an
uncertain game played between individuals, collectivities and authority differ from the anarchist idea of
revolution? For classical anarchists revolution was a grand, dialectical overturning of society, in which
structures of power and authority would be overthrown and the last obstacle to the full realisation of
the subject’s humanity would be removed. For Deleuze and Stirner, on the other hand, resistance does
not have a conclusion or telos in this sense. Resistance is seen as an ongoing confrontation ’ a perpetual
war of attrition in which the lines of confrontation are never marked out in advance but are rather
constantly renegotiated and fought over. Resistance against the State is an uncertain game precisely
because State power can longer be circumscribed in a single institution but rather is something that
pervades the social fabric, constituting, as we have seen, desires, essences and rational principles. The
very notion of the moral and rational human subject which is pitted against State power in anarchist
discourse, is constructed, or at least infiltrated, by this very power that it purportedly opposes. So
resistance is an uncertain game played by individuals and groups engaged in day to day struggles with
multiple forms of domination.

Their Socratic dialectic denies the constant flux of reality and transforms debaters into
bureaucratic subjects- “deliberative dialogue” only maintains a cycle of suffering and
commodifies debate as a space of manufactured dream worlds- only a Heraclitean
vision exposes the unreality of our existence without masking Dionysian forces
Marinus Ossewaarde. 2010. [Ringo Ossewaarde is an Associate Professor in Sociology of Governance
in the School of Management and Governance at the University of Twente. He took his undergraduate
and master degrees at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam and the LSE, and he took his PhD at the
LSE.], The Tragic Turn in the Re-Imagination of Publics, Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and
Humanities 14, pg. 43-66.
https://www.academia.edu/1928373/Ossewaarde_M._2010_The_Tragic_Turn_in_the_Re-
Imagination_of_Publics_Animus_The_Canadian_Journal_of_Philosophy_and_Humanities_14_43-66. EC

The distinctive feature of the Heraclitean dialectical vision is the perception of reality as having no rational (that
is, causal, functional, meaningful) foundation or given order, which could be discovered by reason or science. The Heraclitean
dialectical view in sociology implies that the social world, with its orders, identities and inequalities, is studied as a ‘fearful, evil,
enigmatic, destructive, disastrous’ flux of passing phenomena, which has neither order, law or form
(Nietzsche 2000: 7). The world moves in a dialectic between opposite things that transform reality in their
confrontation with each other. Opposites, which sociologists have grasped in ideas like self and other, bourgeois and citoyen, labor
and capital, culture and industry, local and cosmopolitan, antiquity and modernity, and myth and enlightenment, are related to each other in a
very ambiguous manner. They are namely
contraries that struggle against each other, and yet, at the same time,
they are driven towards each other, because they ultimately belong to each other (Bloch 1983: 284; Dienstag
2001: 936). This is the tragic story of hero who fights against his fate, knowing that the inevitable will happen, and who, therefore, actually
precipitates or realizes his lot. It is the union between opposite forces – the restoration of ‘the original Unity’, according to Nietzsche (2000: 30)
– which ensures the ephemeral periods of cultural flourishing (Seaford 2003: 156-159). Georg Simmel is one of the very few sociologists who,
inspired by Nietzsche, assume the Heraclitean dialectic of opposite forces in their reconstruction of social reality. The dialectical sociology of
men like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner, on the other hand, is not Heraclitean but Socratic. Their
sociology is based on the understanding of reality as being governed by an ordering principle that can be
discovered through reason. The Socratic dialectic, which involves contesting contemplative minds, assumes such a
rational order of reality and aims at grasping it through ideas (Gouldner 1965: 259-296; Bloch 1983: 289-90); Prus 2004:
13). Plato’s ideas of ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘beauty’, Thomas Aquinas’ ‘bonum commune’ are examples of such intellectual forms. In sociology, the
assumption of a rational order of reality is expressed in, for instance, C. Wright Mills’ ‘democratic society of publics’, Robert Bellah’s ‘good
society’, or Philip Selznick’s ‘moral commonwealth’.2 These
concepts presume that there are criteria to distinguish
between good and oppressive orders, and that it is humanly (politically and morally) possible and even
necessary to strive after such goods. 2 In his presidential address, Herbert Gans (1989: 5) argues that ‘we ought also to confront
once more an old, recently forgotten question: what is a good society and how can sociology help bring it about?’ OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC
TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 49 From a Heraclitean perspective, these
ideas of an order are illusions, since
reality is a flux that is not governed by any order, and in which no order can be discerned. Reality is a
stream (or perpetual cycle) of destruction (death) – ‘the violence of the dialectic’, says Walter Benjamin (1977: 166) – and
becoming (birth), kept in movement by the continuous strife between opposite forces. The Socratic view, on the
other hand, is that the flux is only appearance, and that the enlightened mind can see that there is a hidden, yet discoverable, order of things
behind and beyond this physical (phenomenological) veil (Ossewaarde 2010). Reason is the eye that discovers this sublime and eternal meta-
physical reality or ordering principle, while the body, with its senses and appetites, can only experience the flux. Reason discovers the good
order, which is immune to the forces of the flux or to fate, and which can be imposed on the flux. Chaotic or meaningless realities are,
therefore, reshaped in accordance with reason, to achieve, for instance, a more democratic or more just world. Ideas of democracy and justice
have always been and will always be, and since reason dwells in this permanence, it can unveil them. The Socratic intimate relation between
reason and the good implies that all evil in the world springs from ignorance, which is not in accordance with reason. Therefore, all evil in the
world (falsehood, injustice, oppression, pain) can, at least potentially, be overcome when the world is ordered according to the ideas revealed
by reason. The knowledge of the rational order of reality can only be acquired in and through the art of friendly dispute (Ossewaarde 2010).
Ignorance is not only the fruit of a suppressed Socratic dialectic, but it also promotes this repression (for instance, by condemning Socrates to
death). Hence, ignorance maintains a vicious circle (the flux), and in the end, it is the source of all evil,
boredom and woeful agony, while knowledge of the truth about the self and the beautiful ordering principle that
governs true reality is the highest that one can achieve in life. The one who knows also sees the unity of all goods (justice,
freedom, happiness, health and so forth) in the one Good. According to the Heraclitean perspective, there may be such a thing as
reason, but it is not exempt from the becoming and passing of things, and therefore, sways just as much
as passions. Reality, which is always in a state of becoming, does not have a given end, since it does not a
beginning (foundation). Neither reality nor the self are to be shaped according to ideas revealed by reason, since these are pure illusions.
Reality is at a certain time and in a given place, when opposite forces are temporarily united, but this union does not last long, and the process
of becoming carries on. The self is when the contest between inner forces comes to rest, but the flux ensures that this respite is never
permanent. Reason does not have much to say or see in this chaotic process, in which all kinds of
(irrational) forces play crucial roles. In other words, the truth about reality is absurd and horrific. The ancient tragedians like
Aeschylus and Sophocles express most vividly this Heraclitean vision of the flux, in which the self is carried and tossed back and forth (Steiner
1980: 169). Oedipus’ lot is such that he wishes he was never born. OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 50
The Heraclitean unity in the art of tragedy Nietzsche’s vision of reality in The Birth of Tragedy can be described as Heraclitean. He argues that
reality is a process of becoming or a ‘flood of suffering and troubles’ (Nietzsche 2000: 57), which is animated by a strife or ambiguous
relationship between two opposite forces or drives that inhere in a reality that has neither origin nor foundational principle. He names the two
opposites after two mythological deities, Dionysus and Apollo. In Greek mythology, Dionysus is the god of wine, fertility, vitality, ecstasy,
intoxication and the art of music, who was unjustly dismembered by his enemies in a spell of individuation and later restored by his brother
Apollo (Sweet 1999: 354; 357; Nietzsche 2000: 59-60). Apollo is the god of Delphi, of light and dream. He is ‘an ethical deity’ and the god of
individuation and of ‘just limits’ (Nietzsche 2000: 21-2; 31; 58). Nietzsche (2000: 17) holds that these two opposites are united in the art of
tragedy: The difficult relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy should really be symbolized through a fraternal bond
between both deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo and Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus, and so the highest goal of
tragedy and of art itself is achieved. Tragedy, Nietzsche emphasizes, is a Dionysian art. The distinctive feature of Attic tragedy, however, which
Nietzsche considers to be the most perfect art of tragedy, is that it has succeeded in coupling the Dionysian and the Apollonian opposites in a
fraternal bond, without one force annihilating the other (Nietzsche 2000: 46; Weinberg 1967: 256; 263). Tragic art does not only
presume a fundamentally pessimistic view of the world, but it also offers a way to live with this truth.
Nietzsche (2000: 60) notes how there is a ‘tragedy’s doctrine of the mysteries’. Nietzsche (2000: 60) points out that the knowledge of
the tragedian is the ‘the fundamental knowledge of the unity of all that exists’, which is the consideration of the
spell of Dionysus’ individuation as the original cause of evil and ‘the presentiment of a restored unity’ as the original cause of the good. The
narrated life of the hero depicts this suffering of individuation and at the same celebrates his heroic longing for an original unity, which is fate.
The tragic hero is always a noble character, who is driven by a powerful vitality and potency, and who has a strong will and energy to live life to
the fullest. Despite fear and evil, the tragic hero is able to surpass all human limits, to finally succumb to this same transgression or sacrilege
(Nietzsche 2000: 58).3 This fundamental imprudence, unreasonableness or disobedience is what triggers the Apollonian wrath on Dionysus.
Yet, it is precisely this heroic, Dionysian impulse that leads to the climax in the tragic story of the hero, since it is his ‘attempt to step outside the
spell of individuation and to become the single essence of the 3 Nietzsche (2000: 55) gives the example of the tragic hero’s incest as a
monstrous transgression of nature. Kurt Weinberg (1967: 265) points out that ‘tragedy is invented to ascribe dignity to crime.’ OSSEWAARDE:
THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 51 world’ (Nietzsche 2000: 57). Tragic art expresses the contradictions hidden in things
and the agonies that necessarily flow from them. The agony of Dionysus is the one of a humanity that is torn to pieces in a disorderly world
(Steiner 1980: 167). The ‘dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering,’ Nietzsche says in a Heraclitean style (2000: 59), ‘is similar to a
transformation into earth, wind, fire and water.’ The material world can only be a whole if these four elements are united as One. In other
words, the suffering of Dionysus reflects broken bonds, between man and man, and between nature and man (Nietzsche 2000: 22). In his poem
The Persians, Aeschylus, the first of the Attic tragedians, presents Xerxes, the greatest enemy of the Greeks, as the tragic hero. In his disastrous
defeat at Salamis, the Persian king falls into the Dionysian abyss by crossing the Straits of Helle, driven by his strong Dionysian impulses and
energy (his desire to conquer Europe). By imprudently transgressing the Apollonian border that separates Europe and Asia, Xerxes encounters
Apollo’s wrath. Xerxes’ fatal misjudgment, which he is destined to make given his blessing and curse, leads to the ruin of the Persians, the
climactic unity of opposites. And thereby, the hero transforms the unformulated field of tragic fate, the Dionysian abyss, into a sublime piece of
art, of which he forms part. A tragedy like The Persians tells a profound truth about the Heraclitean flux and the place of human beings in it,
presenting the hero’s encounters with the isolation, death and suffering, which are part of the human condition, as the hero experiences it
(Curtis 2007: 860; 870). In tragedies, heroes like Xerxes have
a Dionysian flaw or impulse that is inescapable, given
the forces of necessity.4 They refuse to accept the limits drawn by Apollo, transgress these limits, fight
against misfortune, succumb to their cruel fate, and mystically abandon their selves (Nietzsche 2000: 24; Alford 1992: 157;
Antonio 1995: 7; 16; 19). The hero’s self-abandonment, after being ruined, is typically an act of rage (Steiner 1980: 128). Such anti-climax or
Dionysian defeat is most evident in Sophocles’ Oedipus myth. After having seen his sacrileges, Oedipus becomes so disgusted with his self that
he pokes out his own eyes, so as not to see himself again. His heroic selfabandonment is definite: he will never be king again and will be a blind
beggar for the rest of his life (Farley 1996: 127). Gone are the heroic impulses that drove him to overcome the contradictions inherent in
human life. Apollonian and Dionysian publics The tragic art and the Socratic art of friendly dispute take place and result in different publics. The
Socratic dialogues presume and promote Apollonian publics, which are based on the assumption that knowledge can be acquired through
intellectual interactions. 4 Hans-Uwe Haus (2008: 321-322) points out that ‘what strikes and fascinates us in reading ancient Greek tragedy,
however, is precisely the belief that we cannot assert our will unconditionally and that we occupy a small place in an immense universe in
which all things, even the immortal gods, are subject to one force, the force of necessity. For it is the recognition of necessity, in one form or
another, that finally resolves the conflict in Greek tragedy.’ OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 52 Such
publics ensure, at the same time, that the contest of minds is not stifled by all sorts of social forces and sophistries (Voegelin 2000: 66; 123;
125). From an Apollonian viewpoint, the
essence of the European culture is the rule of reason and the protection
of the rational order, through prudence and moderation, that is, by recognizing Apollo’s just limits. Reason and the Apollonian
publics can, therefore, only flourish if the European life is lived through friendly disputes, whereby the
ordinary citizen is brought on stage and gets a chance to speak. The example of such a wise, reasonable and serene way of life is set by
Socrates, the Apollonian intellectual hero who sacrifices his own life for the sake of the eternal Reason and ideas. Socrates even succeeds in
turning his own death into a theme for his dialogue, which in turn makes his heroic death become the ‘art of dying’ (Bradatan 2007: 589; 602).
The Apollonian hero – the exemplary figure for scientists standing in Europe’s Socratic tradition – outwits even death (Nietzsche 2000: 76; 82).
Neither the horror of death, which is itself just appearance, nor the Dionysian abyss is experienced. The material reality veils what cannot be
killed. The Heraclitean perspective, on the other hand, does not perceive reason as such a praiseworthy human characteristic. Reason is,
just as everything that is human, subjected to the flux. Hence, for Nietzsche, the ‘art of living’ is not so much philosophizing
and learning how to die as to live life with all its horrors and absurdities and purposelessness to the fullest (Nietzsche 2000: 128; Dienstag 2001:
924-925). This powerful will to live is expressed in and reinforced through the Dionysian festival. It is the
powerful or heroic will that characterizes Nietzsche’s ‘good European’, who is cultivated in an ‘aesthetic public’. Tragedies used to be
performed during the Dionysian festival, in an Athenian sanctuary of Dionysus, in honor of the god of wine (Lea 1977: 36-7; Herington 1986: 19;
Scullion 2002: 107).5 Tragedies are performed against a background of enchanting myths, in particular those of Dionysus’ dismemberment and
of his madness inflicted by Hera. Dionysian or aesthetic publics enable the audience, to borrow Leszek Kolakowski’s words (1989: 45), ‘to
participate in myth,’ so that it can fully experience the tragedy and become part of it. In aesthetic publics, the
demigod and his
chorus of satyrs, rather than debating ordinary citizens, are at the centre of the stage, offering a
spectacle that, in Nietzsche’s view, is a ‘more truthful, more real, more complete image of existence’
than the Apollonian thinker ‘who commonly considers himself the sole reality’ (Nietzsche 2000: 47). During the Dionysian festival, the
audience becomes intoxicated with the Dionysian ecstasy and will to live (Nietzsche 2000: 52; Dienstag 2001: 932), which Nietzsche (2000: 113)
calls ‘an orgiastic feeling of freedom.’ Freedom is here associated with the free play of the virile passions and energies, which refuse to be
defeated by suffering and death. This feeling of freedom is an aesthetic experience that is at once ecstatic, musical and intoxicating (Sweet
1999: 354). The audience becomes part of the performance, is carried into life of the legendary hero, tastes the Dionysian euphoria, jubilates in
the hero’s triumphs and mourns his downfall and mysterious selfabandonment (Nietzsche 2000: 48; Weinberg 1967: 252-3; 266; Dienstag 2001:
927). 5 The Dionysian festival and the contest of the tragedies had originally been institutionalized in ancient Athens, in around 534 BCE, during
the reign of Pisistratus. OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 53 The Attic tragedians remind their audience
that the dramatic ruin of the hero can also be their own fate and constantly charge their tragedies with deeper tragic significance, against the
superstitions of the crowd (Lea 1977: 37-38; Steiner 1980: 315; Alford 1992: 159; Antonio 1995: 30; Dienstag 2001: 931).6 Nietzsche (2000:
111) argues that the art of tragedy is ‘a necessary healing craft’. He holds that only the performed tragedy, that is, the aesthetic experience of
the Dionysian festival, can reshape the disgust of life into the will to live, and hence, saves from collapsing into a condition of despair or apathy
(Nietzsche 2000: 46). The audience needs the literary art, ‘as a protection and remedy’ (Nietzsche 2000: 84), to be able to tolerate (rather than
ignore or escape from) reality. The redemptive power of the tragedy lies in its fusion of greatness with suffering – of the tragic hero in this case
– against a background of singing and dancing chorus and audience (Nietzsche 2000: 19; 23; Farley 1996: 125). The participants literally imbibe
the powerful passions that characterize a heroic life and end. If they are, in turn, able to live such a life, they become Nietzsche’s ‘good
Europeans’. The music of the chorus, in the performance, forms a crucial part of the aesthetic experience of tragic heroism. Nietzsche argues
that ‘real music’ or ‘serious music’ is ‘the imageless Dionysian art’ (Nietzsche 2000: 19) performed by the chorus in honor of Dionysus. Such a
music expresses the ‘essence of the world’, that is misfortune, which the public of ‘aesthetic listeners’ (Nietzsche 2000: 120) can hear (‘drink’).
The Heraclitean flux can, indeed, only be expressed in imageless sounds, while the ‘voice’ of reality is blocked by rationalizations (Friedlander
2006: 640). Music expresses that which words can hardly tell namely the experiences of perpetual destruction and re-creation, death and re-
birth, and the climactic moment when the hero meets his fate (Friedlander 2006: 634-5). Tragic music is therefore an ‘original echo of pain’
(Nietzsche 2000: 35), the pain of Dionysus and of everyone who longs for greatness, the infinite. The musical performance requires, or
presupposes, an audience that is sensitive enough to be able to hear the shattering of fluid realities or ‘the undistorted voice’ of the flux
(Nietzsche 2000: 90) – the pain of becoming – in the performance of the tragedian. In the Apollonian art, by contrast, suffering is vanquished or
erased by the beauty of beautiful images that depict a reality free from contradictions. Nietzsche points out the antagonistic relationship
between the Socratic dialogue and the Dionysian festival. Apollonian publics promote a life of intellectual contempt for 6 Jean Bodin stresses
that this so-called deeper tragic significance must be understood within the context of the Athenian city-state. Bodin (2008: 280) argues that
the legend of the tragic hero ‘functions as a warning addressed to the demos.’ The tragedian understands the city-state, as Anitra Laycock
(2009: 29) emphasizes, as the extension of the rule of Olympian gods into the human realm. Paul Epstein (1996: 30), therefore, calls the city-
state an ‘Olympian institution’ (Epstein 1996: 30). Nietzsche (2000: 28), however, claims that these
gods were ‘born of dream, as
a screen’ and created by the Greeks themselves, who invented them to be able to live with ‘the terrors
and horrors of existence’. OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 54 the primitive, unrestrained
instinct, feverish impulses and wildness of the Dionysian impulses, which are aroused during the performance of the tragedy. For Nietzsche,
Socrates is ‘a newly born daemon’ and a ‘despotic logician’ who ‘single-handedly dares negate the Greek character’, which is so closely related
to the Greek mysteries, and instead, creates an Apollonian or Socratic culture in which there is no place for the Dionysian will to live (Nietzsche
2000: 68; 79; 74). In this culture, the reckless hero who provokes fate and transgresses all reasonable limits is a bad example for citizens.7
Apollo or the wise philosopher, on the other hand, teaches how to live serenely, in the belief of eternal forms. In his dialogues, Socrates shows
an open distaste for the formlessness, fickleness and futility of music, myth and dance, and he reduces the intoxicating tension of the tragic
with comical remarks and laughter (Detienne 2001: 150-1). Nietzsche insists that the
death of tragedy begins with the
Socratic dialogue, which is a cowardly escape of the mind into a dream-world of ideas (Nietzsche 2000: 83).
‘Not reflection, no! - but true knowledge, insight into the horrific truth’ is what fundamental knowledge is about (Nietzsche 2000: 46). The
really wise man is Oedipus, not Socrates (Nietzsche 2000: 55); and yet, in the tragedians’ plays, the Dionysian hero is, despite his sharp reason,
ignorant. The wise Oedipus did not know who is father was. Nietzsche, however, notes how even the life of Socrates eventually expresses the
union between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces; or more exactly, how the Apollonian drive in Socrates can no longer resist the Dionysian
impulse. This climax, according to Nietzsche, is reached when the hero (Socrates) finally becomes musical, just when he is about to die
(Nietzsche 2000: 80). Then he comes to realize, against his earlier beliefs, that philosophizing may not be the highest (or most beautiful) art
after all, and that there may be wisdom in music, which had thus far been inaccessible to him as theoretical man. For Nietzsche, the last days of
Socrates reveal that Apollo
needs Dionysus, especially in times of existential crises like an imminent death and
wars, and that Dionysus can make himself be heard and felt even in the life of the most reasonable
(Apollonian) men. If Dionysus could make such a come-back in the life of Socrates (the personification of European rationality), then,
tragedy can also be revived in the Apollonian culture of European modernity. When the Enlightenment movement was destroying the old
rational order of Christian Europe, Richard Wagner arose as the new Aeschylus, to reaffirm the Greek character of the German nation. At least
that was Nietzsche’s hope when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy. 7 Nietzsche (2000: 73) presents Socrates and Euripides as hand in glove, holding
that ‘Socrates used to help Euripides with his writing.’ In his The Bacchae, Euripides narrates the story of a Dionysian festival in which things go
terribly out of hand. When King Pentheus of Thebes declares a ban on the worship of Dionysus, Pentheus’ cousin, the mask of Dionysus, invites
the King to attend the Dionysian public that had driven the Theben women into ecstatic frenzy. During the orgiastic worship of Dionysus, the
deity calls out to his worshippers and accuses Pentheus. This drives the women wild, including the king’s mother, who, in her frenzy, cuts off
the head of her son, and only realizes what she has done when she awakens from her Dionysian spell. In The Bacchae, Dionysus is not always
noble, and the chorus, including its singing, dancing, music and acting, plays a minor role. OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-
IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 55 Bureaucracy and publics For Nietzsche, the Heraclitean vision sees the truth about reality
while tragedy subsequently transforms this unbearable absurdity of life into an aesthetic public, without
masking the horror itself. The Socratic dialectic and its Apollonian publics intellectually involve people who are incited to search for
the good in the realm of ideas, in spite of the phenomenological flux and absurdity of things. Dionysian publics do not try to check
the becoming of reality, but instead, incite the participants to live it as art, by making them become part
of the story itself. In Socratic dialogues, disputing friends critically question all established orders in their search for the rational or good
order. Both the Dionysian and the Apollonian publics can disturb an established order and institutions. The urge to control drives
bureaucracies, which, in order to effectively fix one type of reality, have to destroy all forms of publics
that have the potential to upset order. In modern societies, bureaucracies impose an enlightenment model of
rational order devoid of mythical content and uncertain self-knowledge, upon a reality that is thereby made fully
intelligible, controllable and correctible. Nietzsche considers the European enlightenment as the modern successor to the Socratic myth-
annihilation, which characterizes the Apollonian publics.8 The enlightenment movement’s confidence in the capacity of reason and its belief in
the rational order of reality are Socratic in origin. However, Nietzsche suggests that the enlightenment goes steps further than Socrates in its
annihilation of myth. Although Socrates ridicules and destroys the legendary tales of the tragedians, his dialogues are premised upon the myth
of the Delphic oracle (which revealed that there was no one wiser than Socrates). And, although Socrates maintains that reason rather than
myth is the foundation of European culture, reason, the nous, is itself a mythical entity (Nietzsche 2000: 72): the ‘voice of reason’ is the ‘divine
voice’ of Socrates’ daimonion, which makes itself be heard in the dialogues (Nietzsche 2000: 75). In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, inspired by Nietzsche (c.f., Wellmer 1991: 3), maintain that the enlightenment movement postulates a vision
of reason that is devoid of mythical content. Enlightenment reason, in its origin, seeks to make people think for themselves and to
liberate them from their fears and superstitions, but, in the modernization process, it becomes an instrument that
serves bureaucratic objectives, such as enforcing laws effectively, fixing a machine, or making a business
run more efficiently.9 Horkheimer and Adorno (2007: 57) emphasize that Nietzsche, like 8 Antonio (1995: 8) points out that ‘according
to Nietzsche, the Protestant ‘north’ is the heartland of Socratic culture,’ the enlightenment movement being represented most explicitly in
Kant’s works and, as Benjamin (1977) affirms, in German drama or Baroque opera. 9 Horkheimer and Adorno (2007: 103-4) point out that the
enlightenment movement is primarily directed against the myth of the teleological order of natural law
(discoverable by the nous) and the charisma of the authorities that safeguard the pre-given order.
OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 56 Hegel before him, had grasped this pathology of enlightenment
reason that turns into a bureaucratic instrument. The reduction of the Socratic nous to an instrumental reason has far-reached political and
cultural implications. Enlightenment
reason provides the static concepts, mummified categories,
classifications and catalogues that are required to construct bureaucratic limits and boundaries, which in
turn rationally order reality (Honneth 2007: 70). Dialogical or democratic practices have no place in such a technical organization of
reality. Bureaucracies, whose function is to implement the enlightenment or any other theoretical model of reality, have no need for the
Socratic publics and consider dialogues and the need for intellectual justification rather troublesome and disorderly (Gouldner 1973: 76;
Gardiner 2004: 35). The (potential) participants of Socratic dialogues are turned into bureaucratic subjects, like
workers, consumers and clients, that is, into
‘spectators without influence’, whose lives are governed by the
enlightened power elites and civil servants (Honneth 2007: 33). The identity of bureaucratic subjects is
determined by typically large and powerful organizations, such as government agencies and enterprises (Mills 1956: 355).
The Enlightenment movement is, in Nietzsche’s words (2000: 85), ‘the most illustrious opponent of the tragic world-view.’ Horkheimer and
Adorno stress that the enlightenment movement, or perhaps more exactly, some kind of process deriving from it, eventually comes to
substitute the plebeian entertainment of mass culture industries for the tragic art of the aesthetic publics. According to Nietzsche,
bureaucratic subjects who live in a disenchanted world in which myths are annihilated by Apollonian
reason cannot bear the horrific and absurd truth about their own existence.10 The subjects of the culture
industries no longer have the opportunity to participate in enchanting tragic myths that cultivate powerful passions and the Dionysian will to
live, which characterize Nietzsche’s ‘good European’. The entertainment provided by manufactured images and commodity forms, like music
productions, films, television programmes and glossy magazines, ensures that the absurdity of life and the Dionysian abyss are forgotten
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2007: 159).11 Being thoroughly rationalized, such subjects cannot develop the mythical imagination or a certain
sensitivity that would have allowed them to ‘live the tragedy’ in and through the aesthetic publics. In a bureaucratic culture, subjects
cannot experience, feel or live the tragic fate of the Dionysian hero, because, as Nietzsche (2000: 10 Nietzsche (2000:
104-5) identifies the opera and the ‘theatre public’ (Nietzsche 2000: 43) as optimistic entities that do not ‘bear the slightest
trace of the elegiac pain of an eternal loss, but rather the serenity of eternal rediscovery, of comfortable
pleasure in an idyllic reality.’ Benjamin (1977) contrasts the seventeenth century German opera (the Trauerspiel or mourning play)
with Attic tragedy. Like Nietzsche, Benjamin stresses that the latter is mythic in its conception, while the former is organized within a rational
order (Friedlander 2006: 633). 11 Neil Curtis (2007: 861; 877) points out that, in the culture industry, the mass media plays the role of the
chorus and yet, it cannot function as the chorus because it separates the spectator or the listener from the play. OSSEWAARDE: THE TRAGIC
TURN IN THE RE-IMAGINATION OF PUBLICS 57 45) insists, shielded by bureaucracies, they are not ‘equipped for the most delicate and intense
suffering.’ Bureaucracies
expect and demand passive obedience from their subjects, which makes cultural
movement nearly impossible. Such passive spectators or so-called ‘consumers of art’ (Shrum 1991: 349; 371), are, Horkheimer and
Adorno (2007: 155; 166) point out, deluded en masse, governed to take refuge in comfortable, boring and mindless bureaucratic forms of
entertainment. Culture
industries provide ready-made experiences to a passive public that is willing to buy
them to fill the emptiness of a disenchanted world and appease the cowardly fear of living in the flux,
which they explicitly experience in temporary relationships and the continuous flow of new products and changed consumption patterns. The
experience of the flux can also be more implicit or unconscious, resulting in a sort of malaise, feeling of insecurity or restlessness. However,
the escape from life into a manufactured dream-world of cultural productions does not really quench
the thirst, as the Socratic dialogue and the Dionysian festival do, which, therefore, allows the culture industry to carry on with its provision
of manufactured dream-worlds, to fill an emptiness that never decreases.
 A2: Framework
c/i: the affirmative must defend a change in politics or the political
Borna Radnik. 2013. [Hon. B.A.], POLITICS AND ITS DOUBLE: DELEUZE AND POLITICAL ONTOLOGY,
McMaster University. https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/13292/1/fulltext.pdf. EC

‘Politics’ refers to the conventional, mainstream understanding of the term, one that is generally
associated with empirical phenomena such governance, state affairs, institutional policies, elections,
human rights, and so on . These can be generally understood to be facts about society. ‘Politics’ in this sense, can be said
to reflect the empirical facts about human beings in society, their activities, practices, and so on. This approach to
‘politics’ is what concerns political science. The concept of ‘the political’ refers to something entirely different. If
political science has traditionally concerned itself with the empirical field of politics, political theory in general investigates the
essence of the political. To ask what the essence of something is, is to seek to define that necessary kernel or characteristic which
makes something what it is. So when we seek to define the essence of the political, we are seeking to determine its definitive element. For
example, as we shall see below in greater detail, Mouffe’s conception of the political refers to antagonisms between human beings which she
maintains are essential and constitutive to any society whatsoever.31 This antagonism is certainly empirically illustrated in society as facts
about society, but its root lies in intrinsic claims about what it means to be human. For example, it is a known empirical
fact that there are specific kinds of antagonisms present in our contemporary society: antagonisms of between classes, ethnicities, religions,
genders, and so on. Insofar as we consider these antagonisms only through empirical means (e.g., statistical data), all we ascertain about these
antagonisms are a confirmation of their occurrence, and a breakdown of its components (e.g., x many people turned out to vote during the
elections, there were y number of protestors at the rally, and so on). It is an empirically known fact that in 2011, when hundreds of thousands
gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest Hosni Mubarak’s government, but this fact does not tell us anything more about the event.
Empirical facts may reflect the essence of the political (e.g., antagonism), but in order to explain what
that essence is and justify it, we need to enter the domain of the political. The crucial point is that whether or not
human beings are innately antagonistic is a disputable claim. It is an ontological claim that human beings are
antagonistic, one which depends on the type of ontology one adopts and commits to. If the ontology I
subscribe to does not hold that antagonism is an inherent property of what it means to be human, then
my definition of the essence of the political will necessarily be different than Mouffe’s. It will no longer depend
on the idea of human antagonism. It is ontologically contestable that antagonism is an implicit trait of human beings, and so ontological
claims about being human, inevitably end up influencing one’s conception of the political. Furthermore, given
that the theorists within the ontological turn in political theory disagree over the exact meaning of ‘the political’, their disagreement in fact
revolves around what constitutes the essence of the political (e.g., antagonism, etc.). However, the
essence of the political
(whatever it may be) does not exist in some vacuum independent of human beings. On the contrary, politics
is of course a human phenomenon and it arises out of human activity within a social context. Thus, when
we seek to define the essence of the political, its definition inevitably ends up being influenced by
ontological claims about human beings. The discourse of human characteristics is the discourse of the ontology of being human.
It is this kind of ontology that concerns the ontological turn in political theory. So, while the term ‘politics’ refers to factual human practices and
activities in society, ‘the
political’ refers to the constitutive dimensions of human societies, which are
influenced by ontological claims of what it means to be human. To help better clarify the difference, let’s briefly
consider Mouffe’s account of the distinction: “by ‘the political’ I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human
societies, while by ‘politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the
context of conflictuality provided by the political.”32 So for Mouffe while human antagonism is an essential ingredient of any human society,
what ultimately gives shape to the social order are human activities and social institutions within the context of this antagonism. For example,
the institution of the prison system can be explained by Mouffe’s concept of the political, insofar as dividing up a society’s populace on the
basis of those who uphold the law and those who break it is seen as an antagonistic relation. Prisoners and non-prisoners are antagonistic
insofar as they are interpreted on the basis of a ‘we’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. The point is that identifying the prisoners as prisoners can only
be achieved relative to the identification of non-prisoners as non-prisoners. If you break the law and are accordingly punished for it, you are
judged in relation to the rest of the population that did not break this law and has maintained the peace. This is all to say that the concept of
the political, as antagonism for example, describes an integral, constitutive part of human society, which finds its origin in the human being. The
explanation of society’s formation will depend on how the ontology in question seeks to account for human existence and experience. Thus, at
the core of ‘the political’ are ontological claims about being human. 33 While ‘politics’ only refers to the empirical
practices of human beings in society, ‘the political’ encompasses a more fundamental and essential level of what
constitutes politics because it aims to explain the essential human characteristics that inform the
formation of societies. This does not mean that the formation of human societies can be reduced to essential ontological claims about
being human, but rather that what it means to be human certainly plays an important role in society’s foundation. To put it rather crudely using
Mouffe’s conception as an example: 33 Or to put it another way: ‘politics’ concerns the empirical activity of human beings within society, while
empirical facts tell us that there are antagonisms among human beings in society, while ontological claims about being human tells us why
those antagonisms exist.

Attempts to impose a priori rules on the activity is a manifestation of the will to truth
that ignores micropower relations and disciplinary power that punishes deviancy. Our
interpretation is an immanent worldview that allows for alternative ways of thinking
that challenge the primacy of identity
Nathan Widder. 2004. [Department of Politics, University of Exeter], The Relevance of Nietzsche to
Democratic Theory: Micropolitics and the Affirmation of Difference, Contemporary Political Theory.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.cpt.9300113.pdf. EC

A dynamic in which power constructs identities against resistance is often ascribed to Foucault.11 Yet in
his genealogical studies of criminality and sexuality, disciplinary and normalizing powers produce neither
normalized, disciplined selves nor identifiable, knowable deviants whose distance from the norm can be
measured and corrected. Certainly, the norm and the various deviant categories mapped out in
opposition to it are developed and used to coordinate the deployment of disciplinary power. But the
products of this power remain enigmatic, as Foucault’s case studies of Herculine Barbin and Pierre
Rivie`re demonstrate (see Foucault, 1975, 1980). Foucault thus maintains that the prison system aims
not to eliminate delinquency or even to genuinely comprehend it, but rather to manage deviance, and
the consistent failure of the prison to reform inmates must be understood in this light (see Foucault,
1979, esp. Part 4). Disciplinary society seeks an efficient use of resources for the management of life, but
while a will to identity is wrapped up in this project, the mechanisms of power do not produce identity
as a result. What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth
century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient,
nor that they are set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather that an increasingly better
invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after F more and more rational and economic F
between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations. (Foucault,
1982, 219) Crucially, this drive for efficiency is replete with inefficiencies, which only reinforces the
project’s strength. While modern society, compelled by a will to truth to name, locate, observe,
measure, and know, is driven to identify deviations from a norm that no one even fits in the first place
and to police and correct these deviations in the name of promoting conformity with this fictitious
standard, the effect is very much the reverse: differences are multiplied rather than gathered under an
umbrella of normality. Yet through the persistent failure of the powers of individution, classification,
and correction to manifest an efficient social system, these same disciplinary mechanisms are extended
into more areas of modern life. Declarations of prison failure are always followed by moves to
maintain them (Foucault, 1979, 272) and the entire system of disciplinary power ends up trapped in its
own logic, unable to do anything more than increase its policing. Ultimately prisons look like factories,
which look like hospitals, which look like schools. And when one examines the personal histories of the
various ‘deviants’ that modernity seeks to police, they all have already passed through a myriad of
institutions purportedly designed to normalize them (ibid., 301). If Foucault’s overall project can be seen
as a challenge to this pervasive will to identity or truth, then as with Nietzsche the will to truth must be
distinguished from the dynamic of power that constitutes it. Just as Nietzsche’s genealogy traces
oppositional logics to a slavish perspective that denies constitutive strife, Foucault’s genealogy shows
how these same logics justify the use of power in modern society while falsifying or masking a
substantial part of power’s operations.12 The difference between norm and deviancy is delineated
through binary categories, the inadequacy of which is demonstrated by the need to reinforce these
judgements by constantly invoking other, heterogeneous oppositions: ‘When a judgment cannot be
framed in terms of good and evil, it is stated in terms of normal and abnormal. And when it is necessary
to justify this last distinction, it is done in terms of what is good or bad for the individual’ (Foucault,
1977b, 230). Foucault contends that the will to truth seeks to tame the excessive power of discourse
and today it has eclipsed and absorbed other controls, such as prohibition or the dismissal of certain
discourses as irrational (Foucault, 1984, 113–114). This shift corresponds to an apparent
democratization that allows different discourses to contest one another, yet at a different level the
terms of contestation have already been enframed. Discourse appears increasingly liberated, but this
must be understood against a background demand that discourses demonstrate their truthfulness, with
truth linked to purity, goodness, utility, and universality. Our apparently liberated post-Victorian
sexuality, for example, rests upon a prior explosion of discourse that links sex and desire to the truth of
the individual (Foucault, 1990, Parts 1–2). The ideas that power and liberation are opposed and that
discourse can be power-free or can free oneself from power hide more subtle forms of power and
discourse that condition this liberation by constituting sexuality as repressed truth. The will to truth
operates still more subtlety by reducing events to chronological history. This history, Foucault says, need
not judge the present in terms of progress or decline and can accept the contingency of events.
Nonetheless, it is a form of history that lacks Nietzschean historical sense. History as practiced today
does not turn away from eventsyBut the important thing is that history does not consider an event
without defining the series of which it is part, without specifying the mode of analysis from which that
series derives, without seeking to find out the regularity of phenomena and the limits of probability of
their emergence, without inquiring into the variations, blends and angles of the graph, without wanting
to determine the conditions on which they depend. Of course, history has for a long time no longer
sought to understand events by the action of causes and effects in the formless unity of a great
becoming, vaguely homogeneous or ruthlessly hierarchized; but this change was not made in order to
discover prior structures, alien and hostile to the event. It was made in order to establish diverse series,
intertwined and often divergent but not autonomous, which enable us to circumscribe the ‘place’ of the
event, the margins of its chance variability, and the conditions of its appearance. (Foucault, 1984, 128)
For this reason, Foucault notes that although he has operated within the sphere of historical events, his
work is not one of history.14 Rather, it is a genealogical investigation into agonistic power relations
operating at a microscopic level and exceeding any movement of identity and opposition. Although this
genealogy makes historical claims regarding changing configurations of power, its underlying principle is
that the connections between power relations and meaning cannot be grasped according to any logic of
spatial or temporal continuity. Juridico-discursive and psychoanalytic models of power continue the will
to truth’s forgetting of microscopic discontinuities. The first focuses exclusively on the macroscopic level
where already constituted subjects wield power in a negative fashion and where power and freedom
can be opposed. The second treats power as constitutive, but conceives it in oppositional terms, with
repressive power constructing the desire to transgress power’s boundaries. Psychoanalysis thereby
takes the binary system of licit and illicit that is part of the juridico-discursive model and extends it to all
levels of power relations (see Foucault, 1990, 81–85). Social agents such as a judge, parent, police
officer, or psychiatric expert certainly possess powers that they may choose to exercise or not exercise,
but these agents and their possessed powers refer back to a context of meanings and truths. These
meanings and truths are not pregiven, but the power that produces them is not one possessed by
agents. Instead, it constructs the social positions they occupy. This network of constitutive power
relations, like Nietzsche’s, consists of relations of strife. Foucault thus presents his micropowers as a
‘moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of
power, but the latter are always local and unstable’ (ibid., 93). This inequality in flux constitutes the
repetitive mechanisms of repressive power as ‘the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities,
the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement’ (ibid.).
Through a composition of micro-forces that is in no way a mere aggregation or totalization,15 ‘far-
reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced’ (ibid., 102). Micro-power
relations are immanent in all things F power is everywhere though, importantly, it is not everything F
but inscribed within them is a plurality of sites of resistance. Power at this level is never simply opposed
to freedom,16 and resistance, in turn, is never reducible to some thermodynamic, ‘equal and opposing’
force to power. Instead, resistances appear in the discontinuity of power relations themselves. They are
‘the odd term in relations of poweryHence they too are distributed in irregular fashion’ (Foucault, 1990,
96). While the dynamics of constitutive relations occasionally produce binary oppositions of power and
resistance as when the treatment of prisoners produces resentment towards the system, leading not to
reform but recidivism (Foucault, 1979, 264–268) F resistance more often takes the form of
indeterminate dispersions of subject positions and internal incompatibilities arising within and among
disciplinary institutions and practices. For example, the exercise of power to observe and investigate
sexual deviance, by virtue of the voyeurism and erotic ‘hide and seek’ games it encourages, proliferates
rather than controls sexual desire (Foucault, 1990, 44–45). On an institutional level, the family and
psychiatric bodies cooperate to monitor sexuality in the home, but also come into conflict when
psychiatrists seek to institutionalize family members (ibid., 111–112). Further discontinuities and cross-
purposes follow from the lack of correspondence between objects and discourses of knowledge and the
sites of their production, whereby the hospital as an institution to deal with insanity has its origins not in
medicine but law enforcement, while the discourse on madness is located not in the hospital but the
courts; and the delinquent, as an object of penal law, is produced in prisons, while prisoners are created
by the judiciary (see Deleuze, 1988, esp. Part 2). What therefore emerges in Foucault’s work, just as in
Nietzsche’s, is a difference exceeding the orders of identity. A lack of homogeneity within the self
corresponds to an inability to securely place different selves in schemas of identity and opposition.
Foucault’s later turn to the care for the self must be understood in light of this. It is in no way a
theorization of resistance, if resistance means a liberation from power relations although it can involve
liberation from certain formations of power (Foucault, 1988b). The care for the self, or the relation of
the self to itself, is a terrain presupposed by the very power relations that produce disciplinary practices
and institutions. Social meanings and ‘games of truth’, constituted by relations of strife, include social
types that are classified and disciplined and moral rules that establish prohibitions. But moral rules also
presuppose a subject who relates to them and, consequently, a set of self-to-self practices through
which the subject is ethically positioned. The shifts in these practices F in terms of the ethical substance
modified, the mode or command motivating subjection to the moral law, the practices employed in
adjustment, and the telos of ethical formation17 F demonstrate their political and ethical import not by
articulating a more ideal past,18 but by problematizing contemporary meanings and binaries that
otherwise remain unquestioned. Specifically, they problematize the link between desire, sex, and the
truth of the individual, which is made at the expense of pleasure,19 and the consequent anxiety to
locate and normalize delinquency. Alternative ways of thinking and acting follow the articulation of the
contingency of contemporary truths and identities, supporting an experimentalism with living, which, by
calling into question the need to see oneself as an identity, promotes a political and ethical affirmation
of difference.20 Foucault calls this a matter not of escaping games of truth but of playing them
differently (Foucault, 1988b, 15). Playing them differently means approaching them with curiosity and
care for what remains opaque and different, and with a willingness to press thinking beyond its
traditional limits.21 This is Foucault’s means to endeavour beyond good and evil, or to struggle, as he
puts it, against the fascism not only around us but inside us (see Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari, 1983,
xi–xiv). Like Nietzschean noble morality, this Foucauldian ethics renounces those oppositional politics
that construct the opponent as an ‘evil enemy’ in order to secure the sanctity of one’s own identity.
Furthermore: might not this ‘struggle’ that one tries to wage against the ‘enemy’ only be a way of
making a petty dispute without much importance seem more serious than it really is? I mean, don’t
certain intellectuals hope to lend themselves greater political weight with their ‘ideological struggle’
than they really have?y And then I’ll tell you: I find this ‘model of war’ not only a bit ridiculous but also
rather dangerous. Because by virtue of saying or thinking ‘I’m fighting against the enemy’, if one day you
found yourself in a position of strength, and in a situation of real war, in front of this blasted ‘enemy’,
wouldn’t you actually treat him as one? Taking that route leads directly to oppression, no matter who
takes it: that’s the real danger. (Foucault, 1991, 180–181) Foucault, therefore, refuses to engage in
ideological forms of politics that, by virtue of being totalizing, ‘are always, in fact, very limited’ (Foucault,
1988d, 375). Instead, he raises problems ignored by established political outlooks committed to party
politics or identity-based politics. This task of thought, governed by an ethical sense, flows into politics:
‘Thinking and acting are connected in an ethical sense, but one which has results that have to be called
political’ (ibid., 377).22 Let’s take an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question
of Poland in strictly political terms, it’s clear that we quickly reach the point of saying there’s nothing we
can do. We can’t dispatch a team of paratroopers, and we can’t send armored cars to liberate Warsaw. I
think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we
have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is happening there, and a
nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is
also political; it does not consist in saying merely, ‘I protest’, but in making of that attitude a political
phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will
sooner or later be obliged to take into account. (ibid.) The problems ignored by the normal mechanisms
and institutions of politics include those of asylums, prisons, and clinics. These are specific fields, but
they highlight the most general issues of modern Western society: power relations and the disciplinary
strategies that organize them.23 In these ways, Foucault takes Nietzsche’s critique of identity and his
dynamic of agnostic relations onto terrains in need of politicization. As these areas are occluded by the
demand for identity that traverses modern democratic life, they require alternative modes of
theorization and engagement. Theory and practice become more subtle and layered than traditional
conceptualizations allow. The first can no longer be an abstract doctrine providing a priori rules and
justifications for the second. Political theory in particular cannot remain the explication of procedures to
conduct and police disputes, the elaboration of the conditions for a more inclusive social milieu to
resolve them, or the development of a utopian model to inspire political action. All of these options
paper over excess by giving primacy to the reconciliation F through either simple inclusion or simple
exclusion F of divergent elements. Submerged within any binarism is a multiplicity to be exposed.
Politics is the strategic attempt to do this.

The aff is not a rejection of the rules but rather a transgression of the “magic circle” of
debate to create a smooth space for political emancipation
Tauel Harper. 2009. [Dr, BA PhD Murd. Lecturer, Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education, School
of Social Sciences], The Smooth Spaces of Play: Deleuze and the Emancipative Potential of Games,
Project Muse. Volume 17, Numbers 1-2, pp. 129-142. https://doi.org/10.1353/sym.2009.0004. EC

The distinction between play as a “distraction” from the real and play as a moment of emancipation
seems to, in some sense, depend on the boundaries drawn between the game and the world around it. The
existence of an altered reality that is conducive to playfulness has been a staple assumption of traditional ludology for many years. Bernard
Suits has described how the act of playing involves a willful disengagement with the real in order to maintain
the cut and thrust of challenge amongst people who have entered into a contract to begin playing. Suits is
essentially ascribing the existence of “the magic circle” which is a construction of a game playing space
where the normal rules of reality are suspended through mutual agreement in the interest of the enjoyment that
can be obtained by entering into such an agreement (Woods 2009, 205). However, in the examples listed above, it is precisely at the
points where the playing escapes the “magic circle” of the game when the act of play precipitates
emancipation. This point is made consistently by advocates of “real play” who insist that play is only worth doing if it does directly relate
to the “real” world which surrounds the game situation. The rise of real play can be seen to be directly associated with a postmodern take on
the construction of reality, where all
social contracts, interactions, and even hermeneutic situations can be
understood to be occurring within some form of “game.” News articles which highlight how important sporting success is
to a country’s economic and political fortunes provide a good expression of how permeable the magic circle has become (“England Qualifying”
2009). There is also a growing cultural realization that ceremony and the assumption of roles and characters are central elements of our
everyday lives—that we merely move between various magic circles as our day progresses. In the field of ludics, the rise of Alternative Reality
Games and locative play games has emphasized this blurring at the edges of the magic circle. Aside from the aforementioned McGonigal, one
writer who has emphasized the role of games in challenging the magic circle is Marguerite Charmante who tackles the limits of the magic circle
head on. In her “Real Player Manifesto,” Charmante advocates “common reality as the best game engine actually known” (2007, 1). She
goes on to advocate play as a meaningful way to engage with any aspect of reality, insisting that “ludics is a
model for imbuing the thinking machine with a sense of levity, providing the salvation that is embedded in the danger and joy of in-game
technologies” (3). Following Charmante and the Real Players, one might argue, then, that the
difference between games as
emancipation and games as capture relates to their ability to transcend the magic circle, to link the
levity created by play to an application or relationship in the real world. What I would like to argue, beyond this, is
that this act of “linking” can be best understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s analogy of “smooth”
assemblages—those proliferated through rhizomatic relationships. The problem with accepting Tauel Harper The Smooth
Spaces of Play symplokeˉ 135 the argument that the magic circle is bad and overcoming the magic circle is good
is that the magic circle is as enabling as much as it is distancing. It is the very fact of ostensible uselessness that enables
play to take place in the first place. Removing the instrumentality from the engagement is the very thing that
enables the transgressive transformations to take place. Using the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I’d like to make the
connected suggestion that play is one of the best available methods of developing such “smooth” spaces. The
Smooth versus the Striated In their two volumes on capitalism, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus, (1980) Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari develop an ontological framework for examining the function of various social apparatuses. Designed to surpass the binaries of the
Freudian construction of desire and action, this
ontology rested upon an idea that desire is never good or bad but is
directed towards good and bad purposes through its engagement with various “machines” or
“assemblages.” In examining the way in which machines harness and thrive upon flows of desire, Deleuze and Guattari offer a
more nuanced view of the emancipative potential of play, which avoids the binary of magic circle = bad,
real play = good. Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of the relationship between smooth and striated assemblages allows us a more
sophisticated understanding of the emancipative potential of playing. Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion that game play could
become a model for understanding the differences between smooth and striated machines. Although they do
not elaborate on this notion, they suggest that such a model “would compare games according to their type of space and compare game theory
on different principles (for example, the smooth spaces of Go versus the striated space of chess)” (2004, 551). While I’m hoping that this paper
goes some way towards clarifying what they may have meant, it’s my intention to use their more established definitions of smooth and striated
as a way of understanding the role of the magic circle in “smoothing over” striations. The
magic circle depends upon a striation
from the real world to exist and enforces a number of striations in the form of “rules” and yet, it encourages
the continual renegotiation and smoothing out of these striations. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s framework, it is possible to determine that it is
when play gives rise to smooth spaces, free action takes place, whereas striated spaces give rise to work.
Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the smooth and striated is quite counter-intuitive: the smooth is presented as heterogeneous and the
striated as homogenous. In order to ensure the differences between two types of assemblages are clear, I shall recount a number of
distinctions Deleuze and Guattari have made between the smooth and striated. Initially, they articulate three differences: 136 The smooth and
the striated are distinguished first of all by an inverse relation between the point and the line (in the case of the striated, the line is between
two points, while in the smooth, the point is between two lines); and second, by the nature of the line (smooth-directional, open intervals;
dimensional-striated, closed intervals). Finally, there is a third difference, concerning the surface or space. In striated space, one closes off a
surface and ‘allocates’ it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one ‘distributes’ oneself in an open space,
according to frequencies and in the course of one’s crossings (logos and nomos). (2004, 530) The consistent element in these distinctions is that
the smooth is actually composed of the diverse and unrelated, whereas the striated relates to a universal. Another way that Deleuze and
Guattari relate this distinction is through contrasting Euclidean and Reimannian space. In Euclidean space, all points in space are related and
subordinated to one particular point and perspective. Gravity is a good example of a force which arranges the universe in Euclidean space, as
when one “maps” the gravitational effect of, say, the earth all forces act universally toward one point (the earth’s center) and at a constant
rate. This allows us to map all space in relation to one position. Reimannian space, on the other hand is defined as devoid of any kind of
homogeneity…two neighbouring observers in a Riemann space can locate the points in their immediate vicinity but cannot locate their spaces
in relation to each other without a new convention. Each vicinity is therefore like a shred of Euclidean space, but the linkage between one
vicinity and the next is not defined and can be effected in an infinite number of ways. (2004, 539) Simplifying in the extreme, we
can
understand striated spaces as being defined by general, universalizable rules which act to capture and
direct energy towards an instrumental end. Whereas smooth spaces are constituted by rulelessness—allowing
difference to be related in novel and creative ways. Using these guidelines, it is possible to conceive the magic circle as
having elements of both the smooth and the striated. In the first instance, the magic circle exists as a closed off surface,
where the implicit or explicit rules allocate the use of the space at determinate intervals (for example, the turns order of a board game or the
reciprocity of foreplay). In reading the magic circle as striated, we see that the “game space” exists, and is constructed, in order to achieve the
successful completion of the game; there is an instrumental purpose behind the space—moving from the point of
encounter to the point of completion. Furthermore, there is universality to the magic circle—we must all agree to play by the
same rules, so that the game may run its course. On the other hand, the magic circle can also be seen as constituting a
“smooth space” where players are free to suspend their pursuit of their own interests, engage in ludicrous
behaviour and, as Deleuze and Guattari would describe it, experience a number of becomings (becoming a millionaire property
tycoon in Monopoly, becoming Don Juan in the bedroom). The magic Tauel Harper The Smooth Spaces of Play symplokeˉ 137 circle is the very
thing which allows players to distribute themselves in new, transgressive ways “in the course of one’s crossings.” When viewed from one
perspective, the magic circle appears as a series of striations, a device designed to ensure successful completion of the game; when viewed
from another, it appears as a smooth, multifaceted space which can develop and accommodate highly differentiated flows of desire in a
positive, productive way. Striated space has a resonance with homogeneity, whereas the smooth is constituted by difference and disjuncture. A
number of analogies are employed by Deleuze and Guattari to highlight this difference, such as molar and molecular, arborscent and
rhizomatic, centred and acentred, metric and non-metric (2004, 534). In all these instances, the former is associated with the striated, the latter
with the smooth. The striated is homogenizing because it acts upon all interactions in the same way—just as
the rules within the magic circle are designed to apply equally. The smooth is constituted by difference
because the negotiation of connection is itinerant and temporary “the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not
defined and can be effected in an infinite number of ways” (535). Play works to generate smooth spaces insofar as “play”
encourages diverse engagements, relationships, and transgressions. It could be said, then, that the type of
game machine is the thing that determines the emancipative potential of play. This is commensurate with Deleuze
and Guattari’s original suggestion that a game like Go presents a more open, versatile, and transgressive playing experience than chess. Being a
fan of chess, I prefer to think that Deleuze and Guattari are simply not familiar enough with the latter to properly enjoy the full experience. I
would argue that their point is that Go, while based on incredibly simple rules, produces an emergent gaming experience, where the strategies
and tactics which will win the game will only become clear once you start playing and will depend predominantly on the strategy and moves of
your opponent. Chess, on the other hand, represents an “imperial” form of game, where the rules are more detailed and determine what
strategies will and will not be successful. In chess, your knowledge of the rules and strategies will give you an advantage over an opponent and
in a sense determine your strategy before the game begins. To take two more extreme examples, foreplay presents an open system, replete
with smooth spaces (when done well), whereas a game such as Monopoly treats all game interactions and possibilities as largely
homogenous—reducing playing itself to an impoverished expression of self and ability. The issue of whether or not Deleuze and Guattari’s
experience of chess has been shaped by the people they have played against and, indeed, the issue of what constitutes foreplay done well
raises the next important point. While play itself can be seen to be conducive to developing smooth spaces, and some games are clearly better
at creating playful engagement than others, the relationship between players is also important. With chess, once you know the strategies and
tactics your opponent is likely to pursue, the game once 138 again becomes an emergent system where the unexpected and iterative move will
often generate extreme satisfaction. This helps to illustrate that beyond the initial construction of the assemblages, the
way we negotiate the space is important. In order to highlight this, I shall cite a personal story detailing my own experience with
a game The Merchants of Amsterdam. Playing socially with some colleagues, this innocuous game managed to drive a wedge between friends
on the basis of different understandings of the role of the magic circle, but through the negotiation of these understandings, it generated a
smooth and highly productive assemblage. The Merchants of Amsterdam is a bidding game which revolves around a central “dutch auction.”
During this auction, a mechanized, battery-powered pointer swings slowly down through guilder values. All players have the option to press the
pointer at any point, agreeing in the process to pay the guilder value indicated by the pointer for a collection of goods. As such there is much to
be gained by waiting for the pointer to drop to the lower values but also the danger that someone else will steal in, press the pointer, and get
the goods. The issues this raises in terms of player interaction and the physical mechanics of the process of pressing the pointer to stop it has
led to a flurry of issues and attempted solves on the website BoardGameGeek (“hate the clock,” “alternative to the clock,” “save your clock”).
Using my experience with the boardgame The Merchants of Amsterdam, I would like to argue that a
playful attitude entices
striated magic circles to become smooth, in a way that is illustrative of how play can be seen to foster
transformative transgressions and, in turn, lead to political emancipation. Some friends and I get together every
now and then to play games. One, a game aficionado, has a bountiful collection of games, so we regularly play new games. Some games we
play fairly regularly, some irregularly, and some once and never again. Merchants of Amsterdam is one we’ve played once and never again. The
reason for this, I’m told explicitly, is because of my behaviour whilst playing the game. It seems that something I consider tactical play, others
consider cheating. The point of contention, as it always seems to be with The Merchants of Amsterdam, is with the bidding mechanism. With
four of us waiting around the board, watching the bidding clock tick down towards lower and lower values, I would, at certain times, move my
hand as if to “stop the clock” and make a bid. The intended effect of this was to compel other players to make their bid earlier than they
otherwise would have and it often worked. My fellow game players were quite upset with my strategy and equated my actions to cheating.
Upon referring to the rule book, there was no information concerning a correct procedure for touching the bidding clock, so it was clear I was
not breaking any explicit rules. My opponents then turned their attack upon my behaviour in regard to the expected standards of behaviour
according to the expectations of engaging with the magic circle. I believe that what I was doing was performing a “feint”—a movement made in
order to deceive, which is a perfectly legitimate tactical move in Tauel Harper The Smooth Spaces of Play symplokeˉ 139 fencing, chess, Go,
football, and pretty much all tactical engagements. In doing so, I
was viewing our magic circle to be a smooth space which
was delineated from social space—which allowed for, and in essence encouraged, a diverse range of
strategies and tactics. My critics were viewing the magic circle as a striated space, where behaviour needed to be moderated and
ordered so that we may finish the game while retaining respect for one another. What has ensued from that game, played almost twelve
months ago, is a constant negotiation and re-negotiation between these two points. Some of the main turning points of this to-and-fro have
arisen from the arguments that I was not creating striations through my actions—I was not determining the actions of other players in a
definitive manner. One form of the protest I faced was that my acts physically excluded the possibility of other players from playing the game. If
I had the desire or ability to fend off other players from the clock, I would have been striating the space “closing off a space and allocating it
according to determinate intervals” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 530). I thoroughly agree that such action would have resulted in an
impoverished game experience and a reduction of play. However, I did not perform such an action and considering the physical effort required,
I simply could not. Another, similar argument was made that while I may not have been physically “controlling” the space around the timer, I
was psychologically controlling the space and, hence, being somewhat unsporting. It is at these points where the concepts of Euclidean and
Reimanian space are most relevant as the problem with these kinds of arguments is that they presuppose a uniformity over intent,
psychological disposition and normalcy. Such an anticipation of uniformity, I argue, is anathema to smooth spaces and good game playing.
Furthermore, when regarding political issues and game playing, the expectation of uniformity is precisely the thing which undermines the
emancipative potential of playing games. I would argue that the
magic circle exists as both smooth and striated space—it
is necessarily transgressive enough to allow and facilitate difference but not so transgressive as to
preclude meaningful connection. It is precisely the negotiation between these two understandings of the magic circle which gives
rise to the negotiation which can “smooth things over.” For instance, the “smoothing over” that has taken place due to playing Merchants of
Amsterdam has resulted in meaningful communication about personal boundaries, ethics, strategies, and tactics; it has promoted deep
reflection on the meaning of the magic circle and the reason why we play. As my fellow players are also games theorists, this transgression has
produced two conference papers, this article, and an emotionally charged academic debate. These results may not be as important as fostering
a relationship of understanding between two estranged nations, but the process of creating a smooth space continues to
be a productive process. Furthermore, the process of negotiating the meaning and limits of the magic circle
has enabled a construction of a new relationship and understanding between me and my game playing friends. 140
The reason that play has a political overtone is that it can reconfigure a striated space to be a smooth
one. This is in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the
passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other
forces and emits new smooth spaces. (2004, 551) In spaces of play such as foreplay, crossing the magic circle can quickly eliminate the sense of
trust and possibility that are largely responsible for the “play” situation; whereas in games such as Monopoly, it’s often the case that
transgressing the magic circle (stealing from the banker, forming alliances, and doing “under the table” deals) is the only activity which
generates any enjoyment. This is reflected in real life “breakthough” moments in which personal and professional expectations are sometimes
shattered but which require a renegotiation of relation—such situations are always pregnant with the possibility of developing new
understandings and producing productive results. Deleuze and Guattari are instructive in helping to understand what makes play progressive in
a political sense, and they add a level of sophistication to debates about the role of the magic circle. Whereas Stalin’s game players were bound
by a magic circle, this did not make their play emancipative because their magic circle was dominated by the striations of universality
(productivity as the only measure of success). While Iran and Australia did not believe they could relate to each other, the playing of a game in
1997 enabled connections to be uncovered and highlighted admirable aspects of the adversaries, resulting in smoother relations between
nations. Despite the fact that the Cloudmakers had developed their community in response to a well-defined magic circle, they had the
potential to transgress that striation and direct their capacity to new and unrelated events—until, that is, people once again started imposing
their universal striations (“This is not a game!”). Similarly, my
transgressions in Merchants of Amsterdam, while admittedly
not flattering to my nature as a player inside the magic circle, producedinsights, relationships, and freely formed
production outside of the magic circle. It is in the very nature of play to experiment with transgressions,
facilitate community, and to have fun. The magic circle can be seen as a wonderful device to create the conditions in which to
pursue these goals but, at the same time, we should realise that transgressing that circle “to smooth things over”can have
a lasting and positive impact upon the way in which politics takes place.1

Disavowal of the potential for activism within the debate space reifies Cartesian
dualisms – knowledge is not disembodied but partisan and oriented. Saying debate is
a game misses the point – the liberatory potential of the university entails a militant
research that produces new perceptions of the world. Exclusion of the 1ac’s
scholarship reproduces capitalism and ignores the affective potential for change.
Bertie Russell. 24 March 2014. [School of Earth and Environment, University of Liverpool, Liverpool],
Beyond activism/academia: militant research and the radical climate and climate justice movement(s),
Royal Geographical Society. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12086. EC

Although the outcomes of the research are not of direct concern to this paper, it
is inevitably impossible (and perhaps both
undesirable and inconsistent with the militant ethnographic approach) to wholly disentangle the
content from the process of the research. Fundamentally, this is because the process of research (and me as
researcher) cannot be alienated from the ‘object’ of the research concern (Colectivo Situaciones 2003 2005). Beginning
from within, I understood militant ethnography – as a form of militant research – as the process of gradually

identifying and becoming fixated on a contradiction, inconsistency or paradox within an overtly politicised milieu,
and then striving to understand and contribute to the collective surpassing of this paradox – a
combination of thought and action orientated towards understanding and changing collective praxis,
identifying and surpassing the limits of our existing selves. Throughout my ‘militant research’ orientation (immanent research, perhaps?), many of the concerns
associated with the activist/academic problematic were incomprehensible – somehow offset, negated or confused by the militant approach. From the outset, there
existed no ‘critical distance’ between me – as some hypothetically pre‐existing ‘researcher’ – and the ‘object’ of my research. I could not make sense of ‘going
native’ (Fuller 1999), for I was never ‘outside’ of this milieu in the first place – I was researching in the middle of where I was. I was not concerned with finding
processes to ‘link my intellectual and political concerns’ (Juris 2008a, 20), as they had never been separate (and in any case, what value is the ‘intellect’ when
separated from the ‘political'?). There existed no ‘third space’ that I felt compelled to navigate between an ‘activist’ field and ‘elsewhere’ (although I shared
Routledge's concern with ‘research and theory [that] remain[s] analytical and disembodied’; 1996, 401). Militant
research – as an orientation –
is thus in many ways a rejection of the entire problematic of the activist/academic, or more accurately, it is a
subjective orientation towards research in which the ‘academic’ component is irrelevant precisely
because militant research does not take the university as a referent. In the first instance, militant research is
irrespective of the university and the attendant subject of the academic. Instead, all forms of militant
research are concerned with ‘the capacity for struggles to read themselves and, consequently, to
recapture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices ’ (Colectivo Situaciones 2003) –
militant research is thus the conscious and deliberate attempt to make movements move through a reflexive (dialectical, even?) critique of their own praxis. In a
subtle distinction between this paper and other thoughtful contributions to the activist/academic debate, my starting point was not therefore to negotiate the
relationship between being both an ‘activist’ and an ‘academic’. Rather, I approached and experienced the institution – as I'm sure many others have – as someone
attempting to contribute to the critical transformation of a movement in which I was already a constitutive actor. Through expanding on my research experience, I
shall suggest that militant
research is both an orientation and process that allows us to reappraise the
problematic of activism/academia. Speaking personally, it has become most obviously a question of how does one survive within the university,
both when in the process of militant research, and when one is not in the process of militant research. The paper thus concludes with an initial consideration of how
the orientation and process of militant research is concomitant with developing a normative position
regarding the very function of the university, demanding we ask not what the university is but what we
want it to do. Militant research as orientation People in therapeutic systems, or in the universities, who consider
themselves to be mere depositories or channels for the transmission of scientific knowledge, have already
made a reactionary choice. Despite their innocence or goodwill, they really occupy a position that reinforces the systems of

production of the dominant subjectivity. It does not have to be this way. (Guattari and Rolnik 2008, 41) It may seem frustrating (at best) when
the response to the question of what a militant researcher actually does is ‘It depends, and besides, what I did might be completely inappropriate in another
context’, or even more confusingly, ‘You do what needs to be done’. On first impression these responses appear as somewhat slippery apologies, yet they are both
wholly appropriate and accurate – the problem lies with the presuppositions of the question. Militant
research is not an ‘off‐the‐shelf’ set
of techniques for measuring, recording and assessing the world according to academic standards, but
rather an orientation and a process. What occurs during the militant research is wholly contingent,
demanding attention to the changing necessities of the milieu within which one is situated. The militant research ‘orientation’ has a long if somewhat irregular
history that finds its roots in Marx's (1880) Workers' inquiry – an extended survey directed at the French working class – which was later developed by those
involved with the Italian Operaismo of the 1960s and 1970s (see Malo 2004; The Commune 2011). More recently, groups such as Precarias a la Deriva (2004),
Colectivo Situaciones (2003 2005) and Team Colors (2010) have also experimented with militant research. While the forms of research are very different, what they
arguably share is a specific orientation that is grounded in a commitment to the augmentation and transformation of the movements of which they are part. In
many ways, the question of orientation is at the heart of the debate regarding whether there is something that can be properly considered a ‘feminist method’ (see
Harding 1987a 1987b; Reinharz and Davidman 1992; Sharp 2005; Naples 2007). For Harding, it was essential to make a distinction between epistemology (‘a theory
of knowledge’), methodology (‘a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed’) and method (‘a technique for … gathering evidence’). In Harding's
schema, the fundamental question of what constitutes ‘feminist’ research must take place at the level of epistemology, as it is these decisions that influence how
we define our roles as researchers, what we consider ethical research practices, and we interpret and implement informed consent or ensure the confidentiality of
our research subjects. (Naples 2007, 547) In other words, questions regarding ‘method’ are secondary to the question of the orientation of the research. The

importance of considering orientation stems from the disavowal of the positivist position that it is
possible to produce knowledge that is somehow neutral, and by extension, supporting the assertion that whether one
acknowledges it or not, all knowledge is inherently partisan knowledge. Without extensively rehearsing this argument, the critique of
positivist epistemology – and thus the inherent need to consider orientation – can be summarised through contrasting interpretations of research as either ‘truth
relaying’ or ‘knowledge production’. John Berger's (1972) essay Ways of seeing usefully rehearses this distinction through perspectives on the photographic process.
A positivist perspective holds that the photograph provides an unquestionably objective account of the
world, while the act of taking a photograph is a (scientific) process of ‘truth relaying’. ‘Good’ research will strive to minimise noise,
variables and unintended acts of distortion so as to ensure the photograph provides as ‘truthful’ account
of the world as is possible – in other words, they will ensure some form of methodological rigour (see Baxter and Eyles 1997). To the contrary, Berger argues
that: photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph,

we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is
true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. (1972, 8,

10) Rather than interpreting the photograph as the presentation of truth, we must understand the act of taking a photograph as the

production of a very specific and orientated knowledge. The act of decision between what is ‘relevant’
to the image and what is not, and what is rendered as ‘noise’ or ‘distortion’ rather than relevant
information, is an unavoidable act. To claim that the photograph is a mere ‘transmission of truth’ is to either
hide or apologise for the photographer, an audacious attempt to remove the photographer from the existence of the photograph. This is nothing but an

illusion. To believe the photographer does not exist is to reproduce the dominant (yet flawed)
understanding of knowledge as disembodied, impartial and universal, reinforcing precisely the ‘systems of
production of the dominant subjectivity’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2008, 41) that are the wrath of any progressive cosmology. To accept
that the photograph is essentially inseparable from the photographer is to accept the photograph as
both a situated statement on and intervention in the world, an attempt to portray and affect the world
in certain ways – whether one claims (or realises) to be doing so or not. As Orwell suggests, ‘consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan’
(2003, 195). We can thus understand Roseneil's claim that we should have ‘no qualms about rejecting “value‐neutrality” and taking sides’ (1993, 179); it is a given
that all knowledge is orientated, such that even those who claim to be producing scientific, disembodied knowledge ‘about’ the world are themselves reproducing
the dominant subjectivity. The question must thus be rethought as which side do you choose to take; do you choose to reproduce the dominant way of
seeing/knowing? Or do you choose to align with an antagonistic perspective that knows the world differently? What, then, can we understand of militant research
as orientation? The process of militant research necessarily ‘starts from the understandings, experiences, and relations generated through organising as both a
method of political action and as a form of knowledge’ (Shukaitis and Graeber 2007, 9). To this extent, the
militant researcher is orientated as
a constitutive participant within a given politicised milieu – they are immanent to a field of political
desires and the heterogeneous yet resonant bodies within this. It is impossible to think of this as ‘going native’ (see Fuller 1999),
which suggests a researcher is somehow ‘coming’ from a foreign or alien outside. The researcher begins orientated within and as part

of the milieu of the research, the ‘inquirer her/himself [is] placed in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter’ (Harding 1987a, 9) – the
self/other, researcher/researched binaries collapse in on themselves. Given this orientation, what therefore is the
‘photographic act'? Or to put it another way, how does one go about knowledge production when orientated through militant research? Or again, what do we now
mean by research? As Nate Holdren has suggested, this is wholly contingent on the research milieu: One experience of research militancy can find the techniques
and experiences of another to be either a resource to draw upon and redeploy, something relatively inert and not useful, or something incompatible to and actively
destructive for its own project, an object lesson to avoid. (2006, no page) Although beyond the scope of this paper – and thus an invitation for discussion elsewhere
– this opens a Pandora's box for those who fetishise participatory methods as some form of Golden Ticket to progressive, respectful or sensitive forms of research. If
we accept that the question of ‘method’ is subordinate to the question of orientation, we also have the basis for critiquing ‘participation’ as a fetishised object. It is
beyond question that ‘militant research’ may utilise participatory methods, but that is not to imply that participatory methods are inherently ‘radical’ or
‘progressive’ (Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010, 249). Indeed, the value of ‘participation’ resides more at the level of orientation and process than it does at
the level of method. We
should therefore approach the partisan construction of knowledge ‘exactly like a
toolbox’, in the sense that the production of knowledge is literally the production of tools that modify,
enhance or create new ways of seeing and enable new ways of affecting the world. Paraphrasing Proust,
knowledge(s) should be approached and used ‘like a pair of glasses to view the outside, and if it isn't to your liking, find another pair, or invent your own, and your
device will necessarily be a device you can fight with’ (Deleuze and Foucault 2004, 208). Given these reflections, an appropriate response to the question of what a
militant researcher actually does would be ‘you're missing the point’. Nonetheless, the question still stands – what does a militant researcher actually do? While
impossible to give an absolute answer to this (just as it is impossible to give a conclusive answer as to what a feminist researcher actually does), I can speak
personally of my experience of conducting militant ethnography within elements of the radical climate and climate justice movements. Militant ethnography as
process For multiple reasons, the second‐half of 2008 can be retrospectively understood as the impetus behind the militant research undertaken within the radical
climate and climate justice movements. I had been charged under the UK's Malicious Damages Act for my participation in a high‐profile environmental direct action
concerning emissions from coal‐burning, resulting in a long court case that demanded extensive reflection and justification of our collective action. The Camp for
Climate Action (CfCA) – one of the most visible elements of the UK's radical climate movement – had recently held a protest camp at Kingsnorth power station, and
was at the beginning of considering its direction for the following year while reflecting on the ‘politics’ of its process. Following the first international meeting of the
network, which later became known as Climate Justice Action (CJA), an international ‘call to action’ had been circulated in mid‐September calling for mass
mobilisations surrounding the COP15 summit at the end of 2009 – a call supported by the CfCA at its September national gathering. The intersection of these
nameable events – alongside a multitude of other less visible discussions, perspectives and inspirations – began to ignite a concern with the praxis of the
movement. It was no longer self‐evident to all movement actors that the ways ‘we’ in the radical climate movement(s) knew/acted upon climate change
represented a significantly ‘radical’ praxis, or that this was substantively different to the tendency of the mainstream environmental movement. While there had
been some discussions and publications that spoke back to the movement regarding this ‘liberal’ tendency (Archer 2007; Abbott 2009; Cambridge Anarchists 2009;
Resonance 2009), these critiques remained undeveloped despite their fundamental importance to how ‘we’ attempted to situate ourselves as ‘radical’ political
actors. It would be facetious to claim there was some light‐bulb moment at which this paradox suddenly emerged fully formed, or that there was a neat linearity
between the generation of the ‘question’ followed by a ‘research process’ intent on finding the answer. Rather, Deleuze's suggestion that ‘the art of constructing a
problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem‐position, before finding a solution’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 1),
provides a far more accurate account of the labour of this militant research process. This process was thus directed towards understanding and constructing this
problem‐position – of interrogating and constructing an understanding of the shortcomings of ‘our’ praxis – with the intention of surpassing and overcoming them.
In other words, the
intention of the research was to contribute to the interpretation and transformation of
the praxis of movement, to contribute to making the movement move. The extent to which militant research can be
deemed successful is thus measured solely by the extent to which it had some effect on the movement milieu. In practice, it is highly problematic to measure the
degree to which this research was successful, not least because an attempt to contribute to transforming the praxis of a movement necessarily means challenging
some elements of our praxis. To those movement actors intent on more of the same, such a research contribution may be an annoying or potentially destructive
distraction from the task at hand, and thus perhaps dismissible as intellectual waffle or a waste of time. On the other hand, there will be movement actors who will
be receptive to such reflexive contributions, those who will take up the problem‐position and collectively look for new praxes that respond and surpass it.
Militant research is thus a process of being critically committed to a given political milieu – at once
committed to the milieu through critical attempts to transform it. The intention is not to take detached, static and explanatory
snap‐shots – like much of ‘social movement theory’ (for example, Tarrow 1998) – nor is it to uncritically reaffirm the goals and processes of a given political
tendency (see Chatterton et al. 2007). Rather the
point of militant research is to contribute to processes of critical
reflection and transformation of our movements. In practice, militant ethnography – as a form of militant
research – meant adopting multiple forms throughout the research. Similar to research conducted by Routledge (2008 2009)
and Juris (2007 2008a 2008b), this resulted in attendance and participation in national organisational gatherings, coordinating workshops, facilitating information
sessions, writing funding applications, discussions on e‐lists, coordinating publicity, arranging mass coach transportation to mobilisations, helping refurbish squatted
convergence spaces, distributing literature, participating and speaking on protests, and so on. In other words, my participation was wholly contingent on the nature
of the specific political milieu within which I was a constitutive participant. Through these actions was an ongoing reflexive process of discourse analysis, participant
observation and affective awareness that – recalling that the research/researched binary has collapsed through the militant research orientation – could be
considered a sort of ‘collective autoethnography’. When de‐jargoned, this meant that while listening, conspiring, reading,
planning, writing, laughing and celebrating along with friends and comrades within the movement, I was
concomitantly developing both my own and others' understanding of this ‘problem‐position’. This was manifest both in terms of how I

therefore acted or spoke, what I would do (or not do) and why I would try and effect decisions or
processes in certain ways. On an observable level, this meant ‘formal’ reflections on the movement, including publications in movement journals
such as Shift (Russell 2010), open‐source anarchist journals widely syndicated across ‘movement’ websites (Russell and Pusey 2010) and a collectively authored and
edited book(let) (Building Bridges Collective 2010). Although fetishised within academia, these
formal reflections may be less significant
to making movements move than the ephemeral outburst in a meeting, a shared reflection over a beer or indeed the
choice to abstain from a given meeting or action. Militant research in/against/beyond the university As stated earlier, militant research in the first instance is
irrespective of the university and the attendant subject of the academic. To that extent, I have explored how I experienced militant research as both an orientation
and a process, and outlined how I
utilised a mixed ethnographic approach to knowledge production immanent to a
political milieu. From a militant research orientation, the problematic is thus not so much navigating the duality of
activism/academia, but to what extent one can conduct militant research within the university. In his
influential discussion on the experience of conducting activist research, Paul Routledge considered himself as ‘consciously acting as an activist and a researcher at
the same time’, necessitating a ‘difficult and unstable’ negotiation between his ‘roles as “activist” and “geographer” ’ (1996, 405) – yet this is to conflate ‘research’
and the ‘academy’. Throughout my experience of militant research, and despite my best attempts, I have struggled to empathise with this position. The assertion
that ‘the voices of those involved in struggles are distinct from the social science literature that seeks to study and explain such struggles’ (1996, 406) is undoubtedly
correct, yet the problem lies not in maintaining and negotiating this distinction, but in ensuring one is conducting research as a subject orientated through struggle,
rather than as an ‘academic’ producing disembodied – ‘dead’ – information about movements. Militant
research dissolves the perspective
that ‘activism’ and ‘research’ are somehow opposed, a refutation of the idea that activism is some form of uncritical mindless

‘campaigning’ whereas research is armchair ‘intellectual’ work (something perpetuated by many self‐defining ‘activists’ and
‘academics’ alike). This distinction is itself a hangover of the positivist perspective that intellectual work is the act of revealing disembodied truth, and that it takes a
the academic as positivist‐
specialist or expert (the academic) to produce this disembodied knowledge. What is in opposition is therefore

researcher – ‘those who see themselves as channels for the transmission of scientific information’ (Guattari
and Rolnik 2008, 41) – and the task of being critically committed to producing partisan knowledge that is

situated within political milieus. There is no possible negotiation between undertaking orientated
‘knowledge production’ on the one hand, and being an official ‘transmitter of truth’ on the other – a
commitment to the first necessarily discredits the second. As suggested by the Autonomous Geographies Collective, ‘the most important principle for academics
committed to social change is to make strategic interventions collectively with the social movements we belong to’ (2010, 247). If this is the positive image of what
we want the academic to do, then by extension it means reimagining the university not as an institution of elites ‘trained’ in some ‘science’ of truth‐relaying, but
rather as an institution fundamentally geared towards establishing and surpassing the problem‐positions of everyday life. The
university should
become an amplification chamber where quotidian experience is enabled to read itself, where non‐experts are
supported in intervening in the conditions of their own lives.1 One is left with a simple perspective on the contemporary university; to the extent that it is possible,
we should exploit the few remaining ‘cracks’ (Holloway 2010) that allow us to live while contributing to
antagonistic social change – both through teaching and research. Yet it is clear that the university, at least in the UK, is fast
approaching a state of disrepair following a sustained assault through the ‘neoliberal lens’. An ever‐expanding exploited and precarious workforce (Grove 2013),
the devaluation of research that does not demonstrate an ‘impact’ within the present framework of the
possible (see Harvie and De Angelis 2009; Rogers et al. 2014) and the transformation of ‘education’ into a process of
producing indentured entrepreneurial subjects (see Lazzarato 2012) are significantly reducing the number of
‘cracks’ left within the academic institution. To the extent that it is possible, we should seek to counteract those
forces and reimagine the university as a politicised machine that works to produce and amplify
different perceptions of the world, to find ways to interrupt and change the rules of everyday life. We must
challenge (and fight) over the very function of the university. ‘Demand the Impossible!’ should become the rationale of the academy, where ‘impact’ is

understood as the capacity for teaching and research to disrupt, discredit and dismantle the post‐
political malaise that dominates the ‘West’ (see Swyngedouw 2005), and instead open up new possibilities for
hope in what the future(s) could look like.