Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World

Athina Karatzogianni, Andrew Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135261603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines issues of organisation in resistance movements, discussing topics including the integration of the world system, the intersection of networks with discourses of identity, and the possibility of social transformation.

Drawing on a number of theorists including Deleuze and Guattari, authors Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson seek to reinterpret World Systems Theory in order to engage with issues of power, resistance, and conflict in the contemporary world. Discussing contemporary scholarship in global politics, the authors consider new and developing concepts including: global cities, bifurcations, hegemonic transitions, the relationship between capitalism and the state, the position of East Asia, and active and reactive network movements. Their analysis includes a very rich pool of empirical examples covering more than fifty countries and thirty resistance groups.

Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World will be of interest to students and scholars looking for a comprehensive new theorization of the forces at work in global politics. The book provides a framework which crosses the boundaries between international relations, international political economy, comparative politics, conflict studies, social movement studies and critical theory, producing a study of a highly interdisciplinary scope.

1
Rhizomatic politics

A new theory of social logics and assemblages

Deleuzian philosophy: singularities, difference and the critique of representation

The underlying task of Deleuzian philosophy is the affirmation of difference. This goal is expressed in a theoretical method that consists of a proliferation of complex, diversity-affirming concepts to aid in thinking the world ‘otherwise’ and bringing a new world into being. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the main purpose of philosophy is the invention of concepts. ‘The philosopher is the concept’s friend…. [P]hilosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts’ (1996:5). Creating concepts creates new lenses, new ways of seeing; ‘every concept is a combination that did not exist before’ (1996:75). A concept is a ‘fragmentary whole’, totalising incompletely its components (1996:16), giving consistency to the chaos of immanence, ‘making a section of chaos’ (1996:42).

Deleuze’s critique of representation stems from his affirmation of difference and rejection of the primacy of identity, sameness and/or negativity. ‘Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary’ (1994:51). According to Deleuze, difference cannot be thought as long as it is subject to the requirements of representation (1994:262). Representation is not identical with all communication or ‘repetition’, or with the creation of concepts. Rather, it is specified by its emphasis on fixity, the idea of a total system of classification without excess, viewing things as fixed ‘molar’ beings rather than ‘molecular’ becomings or singularities, ignoring the specificity of each entity or connection by assuming its reducibility to general categories. Representation presupposes identity, when difference is primary; ‘representation subordinates difference to identity’ (1994:65). Various dogmatic postulates serve to ‘crush thought under an image … of the Same and the Similar’, hence suppressing the very ‘act of thinking’ (1994:167). Saskia Sassen rightly suggests that Deleuze uses the term ‘representation’ to refer to something akin to ‘disciplinary knowledge’, echoing the concerns of authors such as Foucault and Saïd (2006:379).

Deleuze maintains that the idea of representation has at its root a moral imperative to suppress difference for the good of order (1994:127). It is thus complicit in statist and dominatory thought. It requires a monocentric (arborescent) world hostile to difference (1994:263). That which communicates in ‘pure forces’ is contrasted to representation (1994:10); it is an ‘original, intensive depth’ which is missed, and not at all enhanced, by the addition of representations governed by a master-signifier (1994:50). Representation ‘mediates everything but mobilises and moves nothing’; it fails to capture affirmative difference (1994:55–6). The uniqueness or ‘singularity’ of each person, being, relation, thing, etc., confounds the possibility of non-repressive representation. A representative claims to speak for ‘everyone’ but always leaves out some unrepresented singularity which is other than ‘everyone’ (1994:52; cf. 1994:130). Guattari argues that the ‘infernal machine of “substitutionism”’, organisations claiming to represent ordinary people, is increasingly unable to represent or negotiate for the oppressed (1984:204). The categories of representation are ‘too general or too large for the real’, like a net so loose that even the largest fish pass through (1994:68).

This leads to a systematic attempt to recompose philosophy as the systematic analysis of immanence. A central premise of Deleuzian philosophy is the replacement of essences with multiplicities, which ‘specify the structure of spaces of possibilities, spaces which, in turn, explain the regularities exhibited by morphogenetic processes’ (de Landa 2002:10). Multiplicities, the concepts which take the place of essences in depicting broad categories of phenomena, are defined by singularities, the uniqueness affirmative difference of each thing. These singularities may influence behaviour by acting as attractors for the trajectories of the flows which are constitutive of existence, underlying the apparently fixed forms of molar entities. According to Deleuzian philosopher Manuel de Landa,

Deleuze … must be given credit for working out in detail … the requirements for the elimination of an immutable world of transcendent archetypes. Given that essences are typically postulated to explain the existence of individuals or of natural kinds, eliminating them involves giving an alternative explanation, not just reducing these individuals and kinds to social conventions.

(2002:88)

This means in practice that a theoretical division emerges between the types of forces or flows operating in a social field, and the actual assemblages that they form (roughly correlating with the distinction between the ‘virtual’ as the field of flows and the ‘actual’ as the field of assemblages). Disparate, incommensurable entities are often joined together into assemblages that have a machinic coherence but are not united by similarity or sameness. As de Landa puts it:

a large number of different trajectories, starting their evolution at very different places in the manifold, may end up in exactly the same final state (the attractor), as long as all of them begin somewhere within the ‘sphere of influence’ of the attractor.

(2002:14)

Nevertheless, the structure of attraction or coherence of an assemblage creates ‘inherent or intrinsic long-term tendencies of a system … states which the system will spontaneously tend to adopt in the long run as long as it is not constrained by other forces’ (2002:14). Therefore, it is possible to analyse assemblages and systems of assemblages in terms of their long-term tendencies, which in this text we refer to as social logics. In Harvey’s terms, we can say that abstract machines operate on a relational level, whereas assemblages appear in absolute or relative space (2006:142).

This also implies that there is an inside–outside relationship between different kinds of assemblages: there is not necessarily a single social totality, but rather, a field in which different social logics put into motion different (or sometimes the same) assemblages, in relations and conflicts which involve antagonisms between incommensurable forces. Abstract machines (including arborescent abstract machines with a master-signifier) do not directly realise themselves but only become actualised via concrete machines and ‘concrete micro-political “negotiations”’ (Guattari 1984:159); hence, molar forces as historical or genealogical phenomena can only be studied through molecular forces. Because of distinction of virtual social logics and actual assemblages, a statement can be true at one level but false at the other – for instance, a regime may overall be far short of fascist, yet its government or police may behave in a manner expressing a fascist logic or tending it in a fascist direction. There is greater sophistication of perception in awareness of the structural logic than in simply descriptive appreciation of the surface level of social machines. Hence, for instance, protesters might appropriately perceive that they are up against police or government fascism, even if political scientists, seeing only the actual, would be amazed at the view that the state in question is anything but liberal-democratic – even if, indeed, the state in question is among the most liberal. The ‘microfascist’ virtual machine operating through the liberal-democratic assemblage can only be discerned through a different kind of analysis.

In theorising the distinctiveness, clarity and machinic predictability of the virtual machines or social logics, one must not lose sight of the complexity of their inscriptions in the actual, which are not simply reducible to the virtual machines but involve a proliferation of difference. As de Landa explains, the difference between essences and multiplicities is that, while essences are traditionally regarded as possessing a clear and distinct nature, multiplicities are, by design, obscure and distinct; their differentiated structures emerge cumulatively as an entity develops, or undergoes a process of ‘becoming’. While the structure and often the core of an assemblage inflects its becoming, it does not provide ‘a clear and distinct blueprint’ of what it is to become (de Landa 2002:17). ‘Each of the singularities defining a multiplicity must be thought as possessing the capacity to be extended or prolonged as an infinite series of ideal events. Deleuze refers to this virtual process as a “condensation of singularities”’ (de Landa 2002:81). In addition to affirming immanence, de Landa argues that Deleuze must, and does, provide ‘mechanisms of immanence (however speculative) to explain the existence, relative autonomy and genetic power of the virtual’ (2002:123).

In short, the first task in creating immanent forms of relations is what Deleuze calls a condensation of singularities, a process involving the continuous creation of communications between the series emanating from every singularity, linking them together through non-physical resonances, while simultaneously ramifying or differentiating the series, ensuring they are linked together only by their differences (2002:124). De Landa argues that we need to conceive a continuum that yields, through progressive differentiation, all the discontinuous individuals that populate the actual world. This plane of immanence or consistency ‘cannot be conceived as a single homogenous topological space, but rather as a heterogeneous space made up of population of multiplicities, each of which is a topological space on its own’. It becomes a ‘space of spaces’ of entities capable of differentiation, providing ‘consistency’ as the synthesis of heterogeneity (2002:78). The plane of consistency, or ‘machinic phylum’, is not a logical totality, but it is a machinic totality or continuum (Guattari 1984:120).

In world-systems theory, drawing from complexity and chaos theory, ‘bifurcation’ is mentioned as the point in which the system reaches a critical point, where hegemony can break down (see below, pp. 80–2). Bifurcation similarly arises in Deleuzian systems, being theorised as occurring when a singularity undergoes a symmetry-breaking transition and becomes-other. The effects of such becomings vary with the ‘control knobs’ or parameters existing in the particular state of being in which the changes occur (de Landa 2002:18). If we understand the contemporary world-system as experiencing a bifurcation, of being away from equilibrium, then this is the moment where it exhibits its full complexity as a non-linear system, and this ‘non-equlibrium reveals the potentialities hidden in the nonlinearities, potentialities that remain dormant near or at equilibrium’ (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989; quoted in de Landa 2002:72). In other words, in the vicinity of the bifurcation, the capacity to transmit information is maximised (de Landa 2002:87). If we agree with the proponents of world-systems theory that the contemporary world-system is in such a bifurcation point, then it would be possible to utilise some of the maximised capacity for information, which this current chaotic moment presents us with. An opening is provided, not only for systemic recompositions around a new hegemon, but also for becomings-other which lead beyond the state-space and into the field of molecular becomings.

Deleuzian theory thus provides, on a high theoretical level, a systematic alternative to the various arborescent systems of what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘royal science’. It is an alternative both to the drive to systematise and reduce to totality which persists in much Marxist social theory, and to the dominant ‘postmodernist’ or poststructuralist theories in which lack and alienation are taken as primary and/or the social field is deemed too complex for systematic analysis. It is, hence, a recomposition of theoretical thought beyond the break associated with the critique of metanarratives. Postcolonial theorists Robert Young (1990:19) and Murphy (1991:124) view postmodernism as European culture’s awareness that it’s no longer the centre of the universe (Slater 2004). Similarly, for Rosi Braidotti, authors such as Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault

challenged both the negativity and the static nature of the Lacanian master code on which all forms of mediation are supposed to hinge…. Power as a positive or potentia is crucial in forming the subject as an entity enmeshed in a network of inter-related social and discursive effects, providing a material, not merely linguistic, account of systems of mediation.

(Braidotti 2006:89)

The depth of the Deleuzian critique of representation and essences has theoretical and political consequences. The Deleuzian approach echoes certain aspects of Marxist (especially autonomist, Situationist and open Marxist) theorising. For instance, Deleuze insists on the importance of relational as opposed to reified theorising (1994:152). Hence, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of capitalism and the state resonate closely with those of authors such as Negri, Holloway and Vaneigem, as well as with those of other radical poststructuralists such as Virilio and Baudrillard. They also map easily onto the categories of world-systems analysis. Where a Deleuzian approach differs from, for instance, the work of Hardt and Negri or of the open Marxists is in its rejection of assumptions of totality or totalisation, whether in the analysis of the present (of capitalism or Empire), in ideas of human essence or species-being, or in the agents and processes of transformation. Hence, Deleuzian politics diverges quite sharply from Marxist projects of counter-hegemony, resonating instead with currents of anarchism such as post-left anarchy, Wardian ‘evolutionary anarchism’ and authors such as Richard Day, while also echoing strongly the radical antagonisms of 1970s European autonomism.

Assemblages, layers of analysis and the problem of the ‘outside’

Deleuzian theory thus yields a multi-layered approach to empirical analysis. Theorists make a mistake if, when seeking to apply Deleuze, they short-circuit too readily between high-level concepts such as the abstract and virtual, and specific phenomena of the present situation. In particular, a crucial distinction must be maintained between forces or logics on the one hand, and assemblages on the other. We would suggest that Deleuzian theory yields at least four different levels of analysis: high-level theory about ontology and concept-formation, such as the analysis of abstract and concrete machines, and the critique of alienation or representation; theories of the functioning of abstract social logics, such as capital, the state and the affinity-network form; discussions of specific assemblages which bring social logics into specific groupings, such as neo-liberal globalisation, the developmentalist state, indigenous politics, or social movements; and discussions of specific instances of assemblages arising at a particular place and time – political Islam in Afghanistan, Aymara social movements in Bolivia, anti-terror paranoia in Britain, autonomous social movements in Europe. To fully appreciate the theoretical significance of specific phenomena at the fourth, empirical, level, it is necessary to trace them through the different theoretical layers, and hence locate them in relation to the struggle between difference, active forces, autonomy and liberation on the one hand, and control, reactive forces and repression on the other.

The analysis of social formations should proceed on the level of assemblages, but while paying attention to the social logics beneath. According to Surin, cultural and social formations are constituted on the basis of ‘concerts’ or ‘accords’, organising principles that make possible the grouping into particular configurations of whole ranges of events, personages, processes, institutions, movements and so forth, such as that the resulting configurations become integrated formations. Surin sees capitalism as a set of accords, which regulate the operations of the various components of an immensely powerful and comprehensive system of accumulation, and as such situated at the crossing-point of all kinds of formations, having the capacity to integrate and recompose capitalist and non-capitalist sectors or modes of production. In this sense, capital, the ‘accord of accords’ par excellence can bring together heterogeneous phenomena, and make them express the same world, that of capitalist accumulation (Surin 2006:65; quoted in Deleuze 1993:130–7). A distinction can thus be made between the logic of capital as a virtual machine of axiomatisation (see below, pp. 42–9), and capitalism or the world-system as a specific assemblage or ‘accord’. When we refer to the world-system or the dominant system, we are referring to a specific assemblage in which hierarchical logics are primary. When we refer to capital or the state, we are referring to a social logic. Capital and the state (articulated together) drive the dominant system, but it is not identical to them.

Assemblages...

Table of contents

• Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World
• Routledge advances in international relations and global politics
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Rhizomatic politics
• 2 World-system theory
• 3 Affinity networks
• 4 Reactive networks
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index