richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

... and Now 171another mood, Deleuze and Guattari issue somber warnings aboutthe kind of ecstasy into which they themselves are prone to fall. Theywrite: ‘If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have theirown, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good:for there is no ... ontological dualism .... between good and bad, noblend or American synthesis’ (20).Reason fails in Deleuze and Guattari’s texts, though it does notfail miserably. It fails joyfully and playfully, in the same way that thePink Panther paints the world his own colour. Both ecstasy (passion,Bey, nomad, SI) and caution (reason, May, citizen, Habermas) are setloose, neither subordinated to the other. But this does not mean that‘anything goes’: Deleuze and Guattari never exhort their readers to‘Become a man of the State’, ‘Do Royal Science’ or ‘Get Oedipal!’ Acrucial aspect of Deleuze’s philosophical method is his commitmentto a style of criticism that proceeds by the creation of alternatives:alternative readings, concepts, planes of immanence. Deleuzeand Guattari’s social criticism, as MacKenzie has argued, similarly‘involves the creation of new concepts of society’, or at least ‘thecreation of new concepts pertaining to social relations’ (1997: 13;17 n. 41). Thus, although they are careful to point out that thereare no general recipes or globalizing concepts to which one canturn with certainty in every case, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysesof contemporary western societies tend to identify certain excessesand provide suggestions as to how these excesses might be fought,repaired, or partially escaped.But what is to be fought, and why? While Deleuze and Guattariare careful to avoid ontological dualisms that would precede andmotivate ethico-political choice and social analysis, they utilize anetwork of contingent dualisms that enable their critique of particularsystems of power relations. I will focus here on only one linked subsetof concepts that resonates with, and adds further complexity to,Foucault’s work on the analytics of power. Foucault, as I have noted,marks a distinction at the level of system—that is, at the level offlux, flow, process—between relatively open and relatively blockedrelations of power. Deleuze and Guattari provide further help inseeing our way past the hegemony of hegemony with their insightsinto relations between the state form and the war machine. Statestend to perpetuate already instantiated (arborescent) forms, while warmachines tend to destroy old forms and instantiate new ones throughrhizomatic connections. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘revolutionaryorganization must be that of the war machine’ (Guattari 1995: 66);