Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics 9781350050068, 9781350050099, 9781350050075

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Resistance, Revolution and Fascism

Also available from Bloomsbury Spaces of Crisis and Critique, edited by David Hancock, Anthony Faramelli and Rob White Hegel and Resistance, edited by Rebecca Comay and Bart Zantvoort Tyranny and Resistance, Drew Dalton The Reasoning of Unreason, John Roberts Heidegger, History and the Holocaust, Mahon O’Brien On Resistance, Howard Caygill

Resistance, Revolution and Fascism Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics Anthony Faramelli

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Anthony Faramelli, 2018 Marilyn Dunn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez-Costa All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5006-8 PB: 978-1-3501-6170-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5007-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-5008-2 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For a world in which many worlds fit.

Contents Preface Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life Revolution and Fascism Resistance: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics Resistance to the Future: Constructing Space in Time Resistance to Life Conclusion

Notes References Index

viii xi 1 15 35 65 93 117 149 159 163 173

Preface: Coming to Theory In many ways this is a book twenty-­four years in the making. I was a teenager, just coming to my politics, living in the border state of Arizona when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up against the Mexican state and declared war on neo-­liberalism. Like everyone living in North America at the time, I had been following the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) debate closely. Always framed in a brutally racist context, on one hand the United States positioned itself as offering ‘salvation’ to the people of Mexico by ‘allowing’ them full participation in the global free market system. On the other hand, the American opposition to NAFTA wove a narrative of lazy Mexican rapists taking US jobs. The most vivid memory I have of this time is a short sketch on Saturday Night Live in 1993 satirizing the debate that cast the (white) comedian Rob Schneider wearing a fake Pancho Villa moustache and sombrero joking about how Mexican men would be stealing American jobs and American wives thanks to NAFTA. It is of particular significance that Donald Trump revived this same racist discourse satirized by Saturday Night Live in his successful 2016 presidential campaign. Coming from a family of farmers and living close to the Mexico border, I understood that NAFTA was going to be bad for workers on both sides of the border, though the disasters that NAFTA would unleash – especially in Mexico – dwarfed anything my teenage mind could imagine. This is why the idea of a left-­wing revolution happening a mere hour and a half drive away excited me in ways that I still cannot begin to describe. However, the Zapatistas surprised us all by refusing to take power. This began what is to date the most organized, creative and longest resistance assembled in modern history. I eagerly read all the Zapatista communiqués that were published online and in print and began to develop a working understanding of a philosophy that seeks to achieve revolutionary change through a practice of resistance. This philosophy is also what, in part, drove me to leave Arizona in the late 1990s and join the budding ‘alt-­globalization’ movement, a loosely organized collective of globetrotting activists who would assemble at various international

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gatherings of the global elite to protest neo-­liberal domination. We would meet in squats and punk houses in Seattle, Montreal, Genova, Calgary and Washington, DC. We would exchange books and form reading groups to discuss politics and philosophy. This is how I discovered the collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in a reading group in Calgary. A friend told me that ‘Chomsky is for children’ and threw his copy of AntiOedipus at me. If the Zapatista uprising in 1994 was my first political education, then my involvement in the alt-­globalization movement was my postgraduate studies in political resistance. At the time it honestly felt as though this was the birth of a revolution. For brief moments it seemed as though the anti-­capitalist convergence was a rising tide that couldn’t be contained. However the events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent crackdown on activism proved to be the rock on which the wave finally broke. Any critique of global capitalism and Western neocolonial exploitation was seen as support for ‘terrorism’. The movement lacked the capacity to resist this onslaught, and one by one friends and comrades retreated to untenable reactionary positions or else fell into a cynical nihilism. Following Obama’s 2008 election these positions often gave way to the relative safety of a watered down liberal iteration of Left politics that turned a blind eye to American and European neo-­liberalism and the corresponding violence these policies unleashed on the Global South. The anger and drive for revolution now was located primarily within the discourses of the reactionary Right. It was this revolutionary desire that both Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit campaign in Britain were able to tap into to propel their rise to power. The so-­called ‘resistance’ to Trump and Brexit is now framed within the reactionary drive to reinstate overt neo-­liberal governments, but with a liberal face. Of course, the perversity of both Trump’s America and Brexit Britain is that the policies they are pushing forward are in fact neo-­ liberalism masquerading as nativism. The so-­called resistance is, in effect, resisting nothing other than a simulacrum. All the while, the Zapatistas have been slowly growing and cultivating their resistance. While these political dramas played out, the Zapatistas have created a world outside of neo-­liberal domination. They continue to ask questions, to look for new approaches and to open up new networks of resistance around

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the world, building new assemblages to creatively resist domination. This is why I believe now is the time to look to their resistance – to examine how it functions, and to think through how it can be reassembled to work in different contexts. It is my hope that by learning from their resistance others can begin to go about the task of creating worlds outside of neo-­liberal domination.

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I need to thank my colleagues at Kingston University and The London Graduate School, especially Simon Morgan Wortham and Scott Wilson for their continuous support and insights. Without their guidance this research would not have been possible. I would like to thank Julian Reid, Benjamin Noys, Anthony Price, David Hancock and Mauro Senatore for their advice and encouragement over the past few years. I also need to thank David Hancock, Rob White, Edward Thornton, Sheena Culley, Gavin Grindon and Tom Medwell for proofreading early drafts. A special thanks is due to Andy Goffey and Howard Caygill for helping me to build on this research. I’d like to thank my students and colleagues in Media and Communication at Kingston University and Film and Screen Studies at University of Brighton, especially Aybige Yilmaz, Fan Carter, Eleni Ikoniadou, Hager Weslati, Fred Botting and Aris Mousoutzanis. This book would not have been possible without the support and guidance of the editors at Bloomsbury Philosophy, Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace. I couldn’t imagine working with better people. I am especially indebted to them for their flexibility and to Liza for suggesting that I turn this research into a monograph during an unrelated meeting. Finally, I would like to take a moment to thank a number of people in my life that made this present volume possible: my parents, John and JoAnn Faramelli; Bóas Kristjánsson, Krsistján Valur Ingólfsson and Margrét Bóasdóttir; and finally to Riin Faramelli-Kõiv for her constant support.

Introduction Political identities in the twenty-­first century are often constructed on the double moral and political position of being diametrically opposed to fascism. This is especially the case for identities that are predicated on the notion of revolution. This antifascism is evident in commentators and theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their reading of Leftist revolutionary movements such as Occupy in North America and Europe when they claim that the movement’s roots are firmly antifascist, placing Occupy in opposition to the implied fascism of the so-­called ‘1%’ (Hardt and Negri 2012). The assumed antifascism of revolutionaries is also evident in the liberal activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings who have constructed their identities in opposition to both the former regimes as well as to Islamic fundamentalists by reading the two latter groups as fascist (Berman 2013; Bradley 2012: 84; Prashad 2012: 31–32). Finally, the assumed antifascism of revolution is also located in revolutionary movements of the Right such as the Tea Party. The Tea Party is a grass-­roots conservative movement in the United States who largely consider themselves to be revolutionary in their opposition to the ‘fascism’ and ‘socialism’ of former US president Barack Obama and the Democratic Party (Skocpol and Williamson 2012: 43, 200). The ramifications of these discourses are twofold. In the first instance it entails a biopolitics. Revolution is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, biopolitical insofar as it actively produces subjectivities (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2009, 2012; Negri 2003). The subjectivities produced by revolution then are assumed to be inherently antifascist. This opens up a paradox insofar as to protect itself revolution must exercise biopower through dispositifs or apparatuses of security that exclude and eliminate those deemed to be a threat. As such this book will argue that the functioning of biopower is intrinsically fascistic. This opens up the second ramification present in the antifascist

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discourses of revolution: as it is deployed in these discourses, fascism is implicitly not limited to statist manifestations and totalitarian regimes, what can be considered ‘macro’ manifestations of fascism. Rather fascism represents any form of domination of one group over another. This is explicitly not limited to totalitarian states, but also located within the interaction between smaller social groups and individuals, what Deleuze and Guattari termed‘microfascisms’. As it is deployed, fascism is not easily conflated with ‘power’. As it is commonly understood within these discourses, power is value-­neutral, simply implying agency. Conversely ‘fascism’ is performativity utilized in order to achieve an affective response. Far from being value-­neutral, fascism implies the drives to exclude and dominate – in other words the drives to exercise power over others. Within this context we can infer that when, during a conversation with the Occupy Wall Street activists, Noam Chomsky stated that the United States would not become fascist because it had developed more sophisticated means of repressing and controlling its population, he was implicitly calling the United States fascist at a micro level of domination and coercion, while at the same time maintaining that it is not a (macro) fascist state (Chomsky 2012: 42–43). This is an important distinction since it entails acknowledging that there are multiple forms of fascism that exist at varying levels within social formations and are posited in the ideologies of both the Left and the Right. If then, as Aijaz Ahmad has claimed, ‘every country gets the fascism that it deserves’ (2000: 168) depending on its specific cultural, historic and economic situation then likewise every revolution gets the fascism it deserves. In other words, fascism in its multiple forms unescapably manifests in all political subjectivities in subtle and often imperceptible ways that are specific to a subjectivity’s social, political and historical situation. As such, dividing the world into Manichean binaries of ‘fascist’ and ‘antifascist’ cannot help but to reinforce the oppressive structures that revolution is intended to tear down through the antifascist disavowal of its own fascisms. This book will examine the fascisms that manifest within societies and how these fascisms infect projects of revolution. The use of the term ‘fascism’ is intended to have an affective response. By using this term in an analysis of projects of revolution, projects that are ostensibly intended to liberate people, this book intends to elicit a critical reading that would make an internal diagnostic mechanism, a mechanism for groups to analyse the ways in which

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power operates within the movement, integral to all revolutionary projects. The focus will be on revolutionary projects of the Left; however, the analysis is not limited to any one guiding ideology. Rather this book will argue that fascistic structures are profuse throughout all political subjectivities regardless of ideological orientation. Discourses of the Left tend to read fascism within the terms of totalitarianism, as an existential force that is dialectically opposed to lives outside of the ruling right-­wing elite. As such, the political Left considers itself to be immune from fascism (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 214–215; Guattari 2009, 163, 166–167; Evans and Reid 2013: 3; Foucault 2003: xi–xii, xiv; Foucault 2008: 190–192). This book will problematize these discourses and illustrate how fascistic drives remain posited within political subjectivities of the Left. As such this book will argue that revolutionary theory and praxis must contain internal diagnostic mechanisms to detect and minimize its own fascisms in order to avoid reproducing oppressive systems of governance. Revolutionary change then can only be achieved by way of never-­ending resistance to its own fascisms. *  *  *  * From a historical perspective, the post-­war period was marked by the commonly held belief that liberalism had defeated fascism (Evans and Reid 2013: 1, 4). The belief in the inherent antifascism of liberalism was furthered by the movements of decolonialization and reached its peak following liberalism’s victory in the Cold War with the collapse of the European communist states in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, prompting Francis Fukuyama (1993) to claim that we had arrived at the ‘end of history’, the integration of neo-­liberalism into the globalized economy that transcends any one sovereign nation, what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed ‘Empire’ (2000). This claim is based upon an axiomatic dualism that negatively constructs (neo)liberalism in opposition to fascism and, with the exception of a fringe minority, relegates fascism to the dustbin of history. Or, as Guattari wrote: ‘[We] have been lead to believe that fascism was just a bad moment we had to go through, a sort of historical error, but also a beautiful page in history for the good heroes. [. . .] We are further lead to believe that there were real antagonistic contradictions between the fascist Axis and the Allies’ (Guattari 2009: 166–167).

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However, history returned in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, prompting George W. Bush to famously proclaim that the United States and its allies were at war with ‘Islamic fascists’ (Evans and Reid 2013: 4–5). Once again the axiomatic narration was that liberalism has been pitted against its binary opposite, fascism. The United States and its allies used the discourse of war against fascism to justify their War Against Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. While the invasion of Afghanistan had full legal backing, insofar as the United Nations Security Council approved it, the war in Iraq did not. As such the Iraq invasion in 2003 unveiled the imperialistic drive behind the United States and its liberal allies (Harvey 2003: Ch. 5). The lack of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the pretext for the invasion, showed the full scale of liberal imperialism. It was a war, waged by Empire for control of oil resources and a strategic foothold in the region (Harvey 2003: Ch. 1). In this sense it was an extension of the first Gulf War in 1990 (Hardt and Negri 2000: 179–181). This is not to claim that the United States, nor neo-­liberal globalization (Empire) is illiberal, but that liberalism – as well as all other political subjectivities – is fascistic (Evans and Reid 2013: 3–5). This book’s contention is that there has never been just one type of fascism, the totalitarian state, but that, ‘there are all kinds of fascisms, all kinds of Stalinisms and all kinds of bourgeois democracies’ (Guattari 2009: 161). These macropolitical groupings (fascism, Stalinism, liberalism, socialism, Empire, etc.) break up as soon as they are scrutinized in detail, revealing the subtle and particular means of control and social organization that constitute each political formation. Such attention shows that every particular ideological form is contingent on its historical context and that each form carries within it fascistic forms of repression (ibid.: 161–162). The liberal axiomatic thinking that its ideological form has an inherently antifascist structure that allows certain fascist ‘machines’ – Deleuze and Guattari’s terms for social groupings – to persist at the ‘molecular’ or individual level. As such, ‘struggle against the modern forms of totalitarianism can be organized only if we are prepared to recognize the continuity of this machine’ (ibid.: 162). *  *  *  * This is not to say that the fascisms of liberalism, socialism, Stalinism and Empire have not been resisted or that revolutionary projects have not fought

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against these fascisms. Indeed, it was only by way of revolutions to forms of fascism that modernity came to replace older forms of empire (Hardt and Negri 2000: 74), opening up the path that would allow liberalism – and by extension, neo-­liberalism – to take hold of Europe (Foucault 2008: 39–40). Neo-­liberalism’s Empire has also continuously met with revolutionary resistance (Hardt and Negri 2000: Pt 3). This resistance became most visible and forceful during the final decade of the twentieth century with the birth of the alt-­globalization movement and its revolutionary push against Empire (Hardt and Negri 2009: 102; Nail 2012: Preface, 2013a). This tension reached its climax in 2011 when global calls for revolution inspired the birth of new revolutionary movements around the world in the form of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring (Hardt and Negri 2012; Nail 2012: Preface). The revolutionary movements unleashed in 2011 were short-­lived, prompting Franco Berardi (2013) to comment that they came, ‘out of nowhere and [are] going nowhere’. The manifestations of Occupy that continued after the first year became largely irrelevant (see Blackman 2014; Ostroy 2012; Roberts 2012; Salvo 2013; and Schneider 2013) and the Arab Spring largely fell into a chaos marked by brutal internal conflicts (see Bustani 2014; Bishara 2013; Hubbard and Gladstone 2013; Perry 2013; and Prashad 2012). Indeed the history of revolution is one that often results in the unleashing of fascistic violence (both real and symbolic) and ends with the establishment of an oppressive regime. The French Revolution’s ‘Terror’, the Russian Revolution’s ‘Red Terror’, the Soviet ‘Purges’ and the totalitarian and oppressive governments in postcolonial countries such as Algeria are all illustrative examples of fascistic energy released by revolution. With this in mind, the central concerns of this book are, as Foucault noted in a 1979 lecture, ‘What are the limits of revolution?’ and ‘When does a revolution cease to be helpful and become harmful?’ (Foucault 2008: 40–41). In addressing these concerns this book will turn to the work and legacies of Deleuze and Guattari in order to develop the concept of assemblage politics, a means of organizing resistance that places the emphasis on how heterogeneous elements come together to work in concert, but nevertheless retain their own particular traits. By their own admission, Deleuze and Guattari were not the first theorists to address the fundamental problem of political philosophy: ‘why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ Nor were they the first to claim that oppressed people are not merely

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fooled by the social system, and to introduce desire into the problem – claiming that people actually want to be repressed (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 29). However they opened up radically new avenues of inquire in addressing why people desire their own repression by shifting the focus to ‘micro’ politics and the formation of microfascism. *  *  *  * This book is an attempt to follow the injunction Michel Foucault put forward in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s first book of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, Anti-Oedipus: [The] major enemy, the strategic advisory is fascism. [. . .] And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism the causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. Foucault 2003: xiii

To follow this injunction the line of attack must, out of necessity, have a clear focus on the ‘micro’, unconscious desires that generate political subjectivities, rather than on macro political formations. What Deleuze and Guattari introduced into the thinking of political struggle was the concept of ‘microfascism’, the unconscious authoritarian and repressive drives that causes desire to desire its own repression. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. [. . .] Only microfascism provides an answer for the question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they ‘want’ to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by ideological lure. Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 215

In what they term the ‘micropolitics of desire’ Deleuze and Guattari attempt to put forward a politics that is not attempting to represent the masses nor interpret their struggles, but rather centres on a multiplicity of objectives, within the immediate reach of the most diverse social groups, looking at how a multiplicity of ‘molecular desire’, desire of a particular individual subject,

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could catalyse large-­scale changes. This focus explicitly rejects any notion of a homogenous unity, focusing instead a univocal multiplicity of desires (Guattari 2009: 158–159). In micropolitics desire constitutes the foundational analytic concept. As Brian Massumi notes, in Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic system: Desire is not desire for an object, except to the extent that whole attractors (represented by anything from an organ to a god) are imposed on the body by reactive forces. It is not a drive in the Freudian sense, and it is not a structure in the sense that language is a structure in the Saussurian model adopted by Lacanians. It can be made to be these things on one of its levels. That level is more the straitjacketing of desire (desire turned resentfully against itself). Massumi 1992: 82, original emphasis

Desire, then, is not predicated on any form of lack or absence within an individual. Rather, desire is always communal, abstract and generative of subjectivities. Chapter 1 of this book will elaborate on how desire functions in the formation of subjectivity within neo-­liberalism and how a subject comes to desire fascism. At this point it is important to flag up the relationship between desire and fascism. If subjectivity is created by communal desire, then a subject is always first and foremost a subject who desires. As such, fascism constitutes an unconscious space within the individual subject that is distinct from group identities and political/ideological systems (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 214). As Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising’ (ibid.). Fascism is diffuse and located in the middle of (au milieu) subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 214; De Vries 2013). In other words, fascism, as a micro-­formation of power, is located within the communally articulated desire that produces subjectivity. Through this analytic system Deleuze and Guattari broke the Manichean dualism that constructed fascism as all but dead and incapable of thriving within the liberal subject. This is a point elaborated on by Brad Evans and Julian Reid when they note that fascism is as diffuse a phenomenon as power itself, and as such it cannot be reduced to a simple set of power relations, an inept ideology or a historically situated regime (Evans and Reid 2013: 1). Evans and Reid go on to assert that all political relations, fundamentally

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understood, in all their endless variations, are fascistic insofar as they are predicated on a drive to dominate and that life itself is also inherently fascistic insofar as there is always the desire for power underwriting life (ibid.). This understanding of fascism, the injunction to read all relations and life itself as inherently fascistic, runs the risk of making fascism banal. If all life is predicated on a certain notion of fascism then the novelty of the term may lose its significance and as such become divested of any power. In other words, this opens up the question, ‘If everything and everybody is fascist then why speak of fascism?’ As such Evans and Reid’s injunction needs modification in this respect in order to demonstrate why it is necessary to speak about fascism. It is productive in this case to briefly turn to Hannah Arendt and her work on evil. Arendt’s quip about the ‘banality of evil’ of Eichmann and the Nazis, the way in which the evils of the Holocaust were carried out by ordinary people performing bureaucratic jobs rather than by inhuman monsters, in no way lessened the impact of the regime’s atrocities (Arendt 1994: Postscript). Rather it opened up a micropolitical reading of the Holocaust by locating a microfascistic drive within ‘ordinary people’ who were reduced to ‘tiny cogs’ going about their daily lives within larger machines. The omnipresence of fascism becomes the way in which macropolitical manifestations of fascism are linked to the microfascisms of the everyday. As such, in order to achieve the radical transformation of society, which this book takes to be the goal of revolution, revolutionaries must also oppose their own microfascisms. The first chapter of this book will explore how microfascisms metastasize into macrofascisms in greater detail. For now it is necessary to briefly note the genealogy of this line of inquiry into microfascism. Deleuze and Guattari note that this was first articulated in Reich’s 1933 work The Mass Psychology of Fascism when he argued that the family, with its social function to reproduce ideology, is the seed of mass fascism (Reich 1970: Chs 1 and 2). Reich, however, remains little more than a footnote in Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre. While they agree that the family is the site of social production, they argue that fascism cannot be reduced to mere ideology (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 68– 75, 308). To claim that fascism is only an ideological structure is to reproduce the liberal argument that tries to historicize and contain fascism in its macro forms, cutting off the inquiry into microfascisms (Guattari 2009: 162–163; Evans and Reid 2013: 1–6).

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When looking at the genealogy of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on microfascism it is more productive to turn to the early writings of Georges Bataille, specifically his essay from 1933 ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’. While Reich is little more than a footnote in Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, Bataille is no more than a footnote, with just passing mentions in a footnote about his theory of non-­productive expenditure and a brief mention of his work on potlatch in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 4, 190) and a passing reference to his more ethnographic work on nomadism in early Islam in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 383–384). In fact Jean-François Lyotard commented that Deleuze and Guattari hold utter contempt for all notions of transgression and as such are inherently anti-Bataille (Lyotard 2014: 168). Nevertheless it was Bataille who opened up a micropolitical understanding of fascism when he asserted that people want to be part of homogenous social grouping in service to a sovereign ‘head’ (Bataille 1985: 137–160). For Bataille this desire arises out of a certain tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity, constitutes what he termed heterology, the study of heterogeneous relationships. Bataille wrote that fascism cannot be reduced to mere state formation or ideology, but rather it lies in the drive to form a homogenous unity in service to a sovereign entity (Bataille 1985: 153–154, 157). The sovereign in this case can’t be human, or rather must be other than human. Indeed for Bataille sovereignty is posited within anything imbued for sacredness (ibid.: 144–148). This led Bataille to write about the sovereignty of kings or leaders, but also the sovereignty of the dead as well as in objects like a big toe or even scat (Bataille 2007a: 33–37). In other words, anything that is considered to be ‘other’, that is heterogeneous to normal relationships. Community, then, for Bataille is predicated on the relationship between the heterogeneous sovereign and the homogeneous mass insofar as it is the heterogeneous sovereignty that unifies the people (Bataille 1985: 144–148; Dragon 1996: 32–33; Nancy 2008: Ch. 1). As such, the homogeneous is always formed by and through the heterogeneous. Sovereignty is communicated through the people and binds them together in a shared sense of unity; as such the heterogeneous is always immanent to the individual subject. The relationship to fascism is determined by the position of the heterogeneous, if it is pure (king, leader, deity, etc.) or impure (poverty, the

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dead, scat, etc.) (Bataille 1985: 144–145). Fascism, at least in its state form, is engendered by sovereignty from above (ibid.: 154–156.) As Bataille writes: The simple fact of dominating one’s fellows implies the heterogeneity of the master, insofar as he is the master: to the extent that he refers to his nature, to his personal quality, as the justification of his authority, he designates his nature as something other, without being able to account for it rationally. Bataille 1985: 145, original emphasis

In human terms, it is the immanence then of the ‘master’ that is aligned in the middle of the individual’s subjectivity that reproduces this authoritarian fascism (ibid.: 146, 153; Nancy 2008: 2–4). Brian Massumi points out that this is notion of fascism as the drive to homogenous unity in service to a heterogeneous and sovereign head is evident in Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis (Massumi 1992: 119; Dean and Massumi 1992). This led Bataille to experiment with community formation predicated on the sovereignty from below, the impure heterogeneous objects, within the secret society, Acéphale. Although, after Acéphale disbanded, Bataille noted that there were still fascistic elements within the community (Stoekl 1985: xviii). The notion of sovereignty ‘from below’ will be elaborated on in Chapter 5 through an examination of the sovereignty of the ‘uncomfortable dead’. At this point it is sufficient to merely indicate that what Bataille’s work opened up was an analysis of how macrofascisms and microfascisms are immanent to each other, disrupting any notions of fascism being imposed upon a people by an ideological system as well as essentialist readings of fascism as being part of ‘human nature’. Bataille also opened up a critique of the fascism of the Left. Locating fascism within subjectivity rather than being imposed upon a people necessarily implies that fascistic tendencies are present regardless of political ideology. This is implicit in Bataille’s critique of liberal democracies being incapable of revolution because the heterogeneous sovereign – the fascist object – will always be immanent to its subjectivities, even in revolutionaries (Bataille 1985: 158–159, 200, 204). While Deleuze and Guattari do not reference Bataille in this regard, their work explicitly deepened this engagement when they directly implicated revolutionaries of the Left as being equally culpable in the reproduction of fascisms (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 214–215; 2003: 261, 277; Foucault

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2003: xiv). This scope of engagement is most critical in their explicit focus on the fascistic impulses released by revolution (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 257). Far from asserting a banality of fascism, this framework of analysis’s methodological approach to shift the focus to micropolitics and analyse fascism in its micro manifestations asserts a system of ethics. It is ethical insofar as it carries with it the question as to how to live a non-­fascist life. As Foucault noted, it is an attempt to address the question: ‘How does one keep from being a fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant’ (2003: xiii). It is that final point which is the principal concern of this book, how does the revolutionary not become a fascist? *  *  *  * This book is structured in two parts. The first part of the book, starting with the chapter ‘Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life’, will examine how microfascisms are produced in the very centre of neo-­liberal subjectivities. Utilizing the analytic pole of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, this chapter will analyse the development of contemporary capitalism and the manner in which this system affects a society’s political, social and psychic reality. This psychosocial, or micro, level of analysis will necessitate an emphasis on how subjectivity is formed within capitalism, arguing that the accelerating deregulated flows of capitalism result in alienated and fundamentally psychotic subjects. The response to this form of psychosis is a drive to securitize life that leads a static neurosis of identity politics that takes life as its referent. Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics will be brought in to argue that this form of accelerating biopolitics further breaks apart collective subjects, alienating people far beyond what traditional Marxist analysis has argued. In material terms, this form of accelerated biopolitics facilitates a condition of constant stasis where we are all accelerating towards a future, but paradoxically never progressing. This chapter will conclude by arguing that this form of extreme alienation, what Deleuze once briefly referred to as individuals reduced to dividuals, engenders a high degree of paranoia and fear of all others who may pose a threat to their form of life. This is what is at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s term ‘microfascism’. It is a form of everyday repression of any group whom a subject has deemed to be ‘Other’ and as such a threat to their form of life. These

12

Introduction

microfascisms block forms of communication and collective action that have the ability to destabilize productivity and as such it will be argued that they are part of the fundamental architecture of neo-­liberal capitalism. Chapter 2, ‘Revolution and Fascism’, will finish the first half of the book’s analysis of contemporary microfascisms. This chapter will argue that at their heart, all projects of revolution are based on the same accelerated and teleological temporality and biopolitics as neo-­liberal capitalism. In their work, Deleuze and Guattari argue that deregulated capitalism is the most powerful force the world had ever encountered in terms of its ability to ‘deterritorialize’ or break down established systems and reinvent new ones. Taking this analysis to its logical conclusion means arguing that neo-­liberal capitalism’s deterritorializing power, the power to constantly break itself apart and reorganize its structures, places societies in a state of constant revolution. As such, neo-­liberal capitalism is the ultimate form of revolution and other, oppositional, revolutions utilizing the same fundamental temporal and biopolitical structures can only reproduce the same authoritarian structures, allowing them to be subsumed by the capitalist revolution. This argument will be supported by a survey of twentieth and twenty-­first century theories of revolution. Theories developed by Lenin, Louis Althusser, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou will be touched upon. However, the principal focus will be Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s concept of the multitude, and the work done by the theorists who loosely make up the Accelerationist movement. The reason to focus on these particular theories of revolution is twofold: first, these thinkers represent the Left’s current return to grand theories of revolution and as such their work needs to be problematized. The second reason is due to the presumed radical stance that these thinkers occupy. While other contemporary theorists such as Badiou or Žižek are comfortable allowing a certain degree of fascistic thought and action into their politics, these thinkers are largely considered to occupy a non-­fascist position. This makes the need to problematize their work and locate their reproduction of microfascisms all the more urgent. After outlining our contemporary psychosocial landscape and locating the limits of revolution, the second half of this book, starting with Chapter  3 ‘Resistance: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics’, will begin to look for a way out of this political stasis. Having argued that the capitalist revolution has

Introduction

13

come to subsume all forms of revolutionary opposition, the chapter will turn to a practice of constant resistance as a means of achieving revolutionary change without revolution. The chapter will build on the seminal work done by Howard Caygill in his book On Resistance by proposing a practice of resistance termed ‘assemblage politics’. Assemblage politics grows out of the post-Deleuze and Guattarian work of Manuel DeLanda as a way of organizing resistance through a logic of assemblage. The chapter will also introduce a philosophic praxis which, it will be argued, is a manifestation of assemblage politics, zapatismo. The chapter will also give the readers an in-­depth introduction to zapatismo, including a brief history of the Zapatistas. Chapter 4, ‘Resistance to the Future’, will look at the analytic, or diagnostic, mechanism active in zapatismo’s assemblage politics, grounding its analysis in the Zapatista resistance to linear time. Arguing against revolution’s linear notions of time that see change following a singular trajectory, it will propose a ‘resistant time’ which is a spatial temporality, conceived as a topological plane folded over onto itself so that different events come into contact with each other. Within this understanding of time, movement becomes multidirectional and the different events and subjects that populate the space become immanent to one another. The theoretical basis for this understanding of time will draw heavily from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a ‘plane of immanence’ and from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza. This abstract notion of time will be grounded in the Zapatista writings. It will demonstrate how zapatismo constructs a temporality where they are put into direct communication with their ancestors, their ‘principles’ (narrated as ‘the first gods’) and the Zapatistas who are yet to be born. Zapatismo uses the communication enabled by this topological understanding of time as a diagnostic mechanism to locate and resist their repressive fascistic drives. Special attention will be paid to the immaterial and expressive elements of communication and communion between Zapatista resistants that are enabled by the substance of this temporality. Chapter 5, ‘Resistance to Life’, will fully flush out the notion of assemblage politics in its examination of the active material resistance to the reduction of life to biopolitics. Through a close reading of Deleuze and Guattari alongside zapatismo, we see that ‘life’ takes on a broader definition to encompass non-­living forms of life such as minerals, land and the spectral life of the dead

14

Introduction

and those not yet born. This form of resistance relies on the absolute heterogeneity of different subjects coming together to work for a common goal, but without any member losing their irreducible singularity. On the discursive level, this is articulated by Deleuze and Guattari’s work on multiplicity and in the Zapatista writings on the geology and history of Mexico and in their notion of the resistant dead. At the material level, zapatismo’s assemblage politics is put into practice through their international gatherings and their networks of support and solidarity with other resistants. Assemblage politics’ emphasis on heterogeneity means that it is irreducible to the reactionary politics of identity and the apparatuses of security that identity politics forms. The concluding chapter will begin by restating the book’s thesis and then briefly reiterate the guiding arguments presented in the book. The conclusion terminates by pointing to where this form of resistance can progress further and notes new avenues of inquiry that this body of research can take, specifically in the fields of network and media studies.

1

Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life Commenting on the transition from fascism to capitalism in post-­war Italy, the filmmaker, writer and political radical Pier Paolo Pasolini stated that: Various forms of fascism had transformed [individuals] into puppets, servants, and perhaps in part into true believers, but it didn’t really reach the depths of their souls, their way of being. Consumption touched their innermost selves; it gave them other feelings, other ways of thinking, living, other cultural models. Unlike Mussolini, there was no superficial, scenographic regimentation, but rather a real regimentation that altered and robbed them of their souls. Pasolini quoted in Lazzarato 2014: 132–133

Pasolini termed this a ‘new fascism’ and elaborated that this form of fascism is, ‘a pragmatism that acts as a cancer on all society – the national tumor of the majority’ (ibid.: 133). Pasolini was describing what Michel Foucault would later call the fascism of everyday life (Foucault 2003: xiii). While Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and those who continue to build on their critical understanding of fascism contend that fascism is ‘as diffuse as the phenomenon of power itself ’ (Evans and Reid 2013: 1), Pasolini was specifically thinking through the way in which capitalism produces a subjectivity with a specific form of fascism at its heart. Capitalism appropriated, ‘the demands – let us say the liberal and progressive demands – of liberty and, by making them its own, changed their nature and made them worthless’ (Pasolini in Lazzarato 2014: 134). The fascism of capitalism is based, according to Pasolini, on a form of racism that masks itself as a ‘false tolerance’, that is to say, liberalism is itself a guise for a form of fascism that imposes familialist forms of life and sexuality and acts through a culture of public relations and mass consumption (quoted in Lazzarato 2014: 133). This chapter will explore this ‘new fascism’ of everyday life. Utilizing the analytic pole of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, as well as, among others,

16

Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life

Foucault and Lacan, this chapter will analyse the development of contemporary neo-­liberal capitalism and the manner in which this system affects a society’s political, social and psychic reality. This psychosocial, or ‘micro’, level of analysis will necessitate an emphasis on how subjectivity is formed within capitalism, arguing that the accelerating deregulated flows of capitalism result in alienated and fundamentally psychotic subjects. The response to this form of psychosis is a drive to securitize a specific form of life to the exclusion of other lives. This form of accelerating biopolitics further breaks apart collective subjects, alienating people far beyond what traditional Marxist analysis has argued. In material terms, this form of accelerated biopolitics facilitates a condition of constant stasis where we are all accelerating towards a future, but paradoxically never progressing. This chapter will conclude by arguing that this form of extreme alienation engenders a high degree of fear of all others whom may pose a threat to their form of life. This in turn creates the drive to securitize life to the exclusion of all other forms of life. This is what is at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s term ‘microfascism’, an everyday repression of any group deemed to be ‘Other’. These microfascisms are part of the fundamental architecture of neo-­liberal capitalism. *  *  *  * Returning to Pasolini’s point that capitalism is fundamentally biopolitical, it creates subjectivities, it is important to think through capitalism’s creative process and how it has changed since Pasolini. To do this we need to examine two complementary processes of post-­war modernity: the development of liberal governance and the popularization of psychoanalysis. Liberalism and psychoanalysis worked in tandem to create a biopolitical subject predicated on the notion of lack and insecurity. Liberalism in particular understands the object of governance to be the biological life of the human and developed practices guided by its understanding of biology (Foucault 2008). In doing so, liberalism conceives the human as the ‘biohuman’, a subject reduced to its biological capacities (Reid 2016: 108; see also Dillon and Reid 2009; Reid 2009, 2010). This understanding has a particular significance in terms of security since life, biologically understood, can never be secured. Biological life is marked by vulnerability since by definition it must consistently struggle to

Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life

17

survive in competition for finite resources with other organisms for a finite time before its eventual death (Reid 2016: 52). ‘Conceiving the human this way has meant that liberalism has always been committed, unwittingly at least, of divesting the human of any belief in its abilities to transcend its mere biology and achieve security’ (ibid.). What is then irreducible to the liberal subject is the preference for security from whatever it deems to be a threat to its capacity to live in relative security (ibid.). The liberal subject then is a subject predicated on lack. It lacks the ability to securitize its life and as such it must inhabit the anxious space of vulnerability. It is here that psychoanalysis speaks to the creation of the lacking subject. While, by definition, psychoanalysis does not conceive of the human as ‘biohuman’, a human reduced to its mere biology, psychoanalysis nevertheless conceives the human psyche as centred on a fundamental lack of and need for security. For Freud, needs (specifically stemming from the sex and death drives) produce desires that exist within the unconscious mind. These desires are profoundly antisocial. For civilization to function and not to fall back into a Hobbesian state of nature, societies must produce social codes and legal prohibitions to control our behaviour and repress our desires. These prohibitions create feelings of guilt, discontent, unfulfilment and lack within people (Freud 1961). Freud stated that, ‘the price we pay for our advanced civilization is the loss of happiness through the heightening sense of guilt’ (ibid.: 81). In other words: Freud asserted that needs give way to desires and that our inability to fulfil these results in lack. People are constantly trying to fill the hole created by a primordial universal desire that they cannot satisfy. This form of psychic repression was perfectly married to capitalism so that desire was always radically producing lack and attempts to fill up this sense of lack with commodities. Psychic repression is such that social repression becomes desired; it induces a consequent desire, a faked image of its object, on which it bestows the appearance of independence. Strictly speaking, psychic repression is a means in the service of social repression. This implies a double operation: the repressive social formation delegates its power to an agent of psychic repression, and correlatively the repressed desire is masked by a faked displaced image to which the repression gives rise. Psychic repression is delegated by the social

18

Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life

formation, while the desiring-­formation is disfigured, displaced by psychic repression (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 119). The way that psychoanalysis has been married to liberalism means that repression is ultimately the result of the imposition of what Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘despotic signifier’, Oedipus. In their collaborative work, what Deleuze and Guattari are charting is a form of displacement: the law prohibits completely fictitious desires or instincts, so as to persuade its subjects that they have intentions that correspond to these fictions (ibid.: 114–115). Repression does not operate through Oedipus, nor is it directed at Oedipus. Rather Oedipus is a fictitious product of psychic repression. It is only repressed insofar as it is induced by repression. Repression cannot act without displacing desire, without giving rise to a consequent desire, and without putting desire in the place of the antecedent desire on which repression comes to bear in reality (ibid.: 115). Civilization then must be understood in terms of the social repression inherent to a given form of social production (ibid.: 118). History comes to be viewed through the Oedipal triangle, and within the Oedipal code of daddy–mummy–me, the libido as energy of selection is converted into the phallus as a detached object. This implicit reference to the penis gives full meaning to castration, and through it external experiences linked to deprivation, to frustration, to desire as lack takes on meaning after the fact. All previous history is then recast in the light of castration (ibid.: 77). Desire comes to be seen solely in the light of incest. We learn to be ashamed of our desires and to deny them for the good of civilization (ibid.: 120). This rereading of history within the Oedipal structure traps the flows of desire within the triangle and teaches us resignation to Oedipus, to castration, all with the stroke of a singular despotic signifier (ibid.: 59–61). The authority that Freud’s claim seems to rest upon is the law. If something is legally prohibited by a society it is because it is desired (such as the desires a man supposedly has to marry his mother and kill his father). Therefore there would be no need to prohibit something if it was not desired. He drew this conclusion in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo: Some Point of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics where his oedipal theory is fully articulated as being based on the observable link between taboos and the observations in regard to totem, which is alternatively an object of inviolability and of sacrificial origins. Freud passed from the conjugal families he had

Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life

19

observed to a hypothetical primitive family horde that was dominated by a singular biologically superior male who had a monopoly on all the young females. Freud then thought out the drama of the murder of this patriarchal figure by his sons, who then took his power over the women (Freud 1950; Lacan 2002: 40). Freud explicitly states the relationship to legal prohibition when he notes that, ‘almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying’ (Freud 1950: 4, original emphasis). The significance that Freud places on this primordial event is not only represented as the source of the taboo of the mother, but also of, ‘all moral and cultural traditions’ (Lacan 2002: 40). In his analysis of the Oedipus Complex in Freud, Lacan notes the reliance on legal prohibition when he stated that, ‘it attributes to a biological group the possibility of recognising a law, which is precisely what it is trying to prove’ (ibid.). Conversely, Deleuze and Guattari do not see desire as being inherently antisocial, but as having an enormous revolutionary possibility, so much so that for a repressive capitalist society to maintain its control it is necessary for it to re-­engineer individuals’ desires by interpellating people through the antisocial Oedipal triangle of mummy–daddy–me, so that they want to be repressed. In this way schizoanalysis works to, ‘show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression – whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere. All this happens, not in ideology, but well beneath it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 105). This happens beneath ideology insofar as desire and desiring-­production constitute an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not coincide, with the preconscious investments, or what preconscious investments ‘should be’ (e.g. ideology) (ibid.: 104). When Deleuze and Guattari talk about Oedipus they are not referencing the figure from Greek mythology. They are not necessarily speaking of the Oedipus Complex, as psychoanalysis understands it. In schizoanalysis ‘Oedipus’ becomes the shorthand term to designate these repressive mechanisms in the unconscious. Oedipus’s reliance on the law designates it as a construction of a group fantasy of repression that is centred on the Oedipal triangle (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 30). Social repression has an enormous effect on desiring-­production so,

20

Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life

since desire produces reality, the desire that is over-­coded – corrupted and distorted – by repressive elements produces a repressive reality. In other words, ‘desiring-­production is one and the same thing as social production. [. . .] fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy – as institutional analysis has successfully demonstrated’ (ibid.). It is this repressive element, the way in which desire is made to desire its own repression, that is generative of fascism in all its forms through a process of ‘superegoization’. To quote Deleuze and Guattari: The way that this group fantasy operates, in which the community is collectively imagined, has a decisive importance over the death instinct. This is true insofar as the immortality that is conferred onto the existing social order carries onto the ego all the investments of repression, the phenomena of identification, of ‘superegoization’ and castration, the resignation of desires (becoming boss; becoming a general; acquiring rank), including the resignation to dying in the service of the society, whereas the drive itself is projected onto the outside and turned against the imagined ‘Others’ (the outsider; the foreigner). ibid.: 62

Deleuze and Guattari position the family as the primary agent in reproducing Oedipal repression, generating exclusionary social forms insofar as the family ensures a mass reproduction of social systems (ibid.: 118). The family organizes desire along the lines of universal castration, but this quickly extends to global figures of power such as ‘the boss’, ‘the general’, ‘the cop’ and ‘the president’. Oedipus gives structure to false movement and the false idea that ‘humankind’ has been separated from nature and produces people abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for the culture (ibid.: 108). Once we have internalized Oedipus we see our choices in the terms of either rejecting him (and plunging into the darkness of neurosis) or else accepting his structure and internalizing him, so as to better rediscover him on the outside, in social authority, where he will proliferate and be passed on to children through regimes of socialization within capitalist societies (ibid.: 79). *  *  *  * Deleuze and Guattari noted how the transition into liberal modernity, with its political structure of the state and capitalist financial organization,1 ushered in two distinct mechanisms of ‘deterritorialization’ (the deregulation, or breaking

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21

away from codified norms) and ‘reterritorialization’(the regulation or codification of the deterritorialized break or movement) of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 303). On one hand capitalism unleashed desire as had never been done before in an absolutely revolutionary deterritorialized line of flight creating the new subjectivities of modernity in its wake (ibid.). This deterritorializing move is a form of ‘antiproduction’, its signifiers close off and forbid the emergence of every subjective group process. Such a repressive machine effects an imaginary territorialization of the group phenomena, such as racism, regionalism and nationalism (Bogue 1989: 87). In other words, it creates specific microfascisms within the group unconscious. Capitalism undermines traditional customs and social relations, but only to substitute for them other forms of repression, ‘the more capitalism “decodes”, “deterritorializes” according to its tendency, the more it tries to create or recreate artificial territorialities, residual codes, following a movement which contradicts its proper tendency’ (Guattari in Bogue 1989: 87). In this way capitalism also ushered in new regimes of social organization, whose marriage to the state functioned to support the state’s institution of repression and to leave untouched capitalism’s complementary processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In liberal modernity, psychoanalysis became ‘the best of all capitalist drugs’ (Guattari 2009: 141). In psychoanalysis revolution was always taboo and normality was identified by the acceptance heteronormative family life and through the reproduction of society (ibid.: 145–147). Within liberal modernity the analyst has become the ‘last priest’, a point that Deleuze and Guattari insist upon (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 81, 108, 332), and Oedipus becomes more powerful the less people ‘believe in him’ (ibid.: 81). This has empowered capitalism to engender a new system of repression, what Guattari often refers to as ‘semiotization’, a system of heterogeneous signifying and asignifying systems that cause subjectivation, the process through which subjects are assigned a sexed, gendered, classed, etc. social identity which in turn controls them by limiting their scope of movement (Lazzarato 2014). This process of political subjectivation broke apart forms of class consciousness by dividing, particularizing and molecularizing the workers, while at the same time tapping their potential for desire. They install themselves at the very heart of the workers’ subjectivity and vision of the world (Guattari 2006: 169).

22

Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life

Capitalism is a total reduction of desire, ‘[it] consumes desire where before, desiring machines consumed their own production’ (ibid.: 64), and in desire’s place it is obliged to construct and impose models of second-­order desire. Its survival depends on its success in bringing about the internalization of these models by the masses it exploits (Guattari 2009: 175). Deleuze and Guattari note that the deliberate repression of desire and the creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of the dominant class within capitalist society. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making desire fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent on the real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 28). Within capitalist social organization, desire had to be refigured as lack (ibid.: 342). This is the controlling or regulating element of capital, it recasts desire as lack, and it is the controlling figure of Oedipus who, with the privileged position psychoanalysis came to have in capitalist modernity, became pseudonymous with this repressive structure. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is this desire as lack that has allowed repressive systems to become the cornerstone of subjectivity within capitalist modernity. To quote Deleuze and Guattari at length: The fact is, from the moment that we are placed within the framework of Oedipus – from the moment that we are measured in terms of Oedipus – the cards are stacked against us, and the only real relationship, that of production, has been done away with. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself – in myth, tragedy, dreams – was substituted for the productive unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 24

*  *  *  * In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari affirm that there: ‘is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all

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kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them both – all for the worst’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 2). Geographically as well as historically, capitalism varies greatly; however, for Deleuze and Guattari a general definition of capitalism is as follows. First, it is a general function of semiotization of a certain mode of production, circulation and distribution that has a certain valorization of commodities. Second, it generates particular types of social relations through regulations, laws, uses and practices (Guattari and Alliez 1996: 233). Capitalism ‘confers on certain social sub-­aggregates a capacity for the selective control of society and production by means of a system of collective semiotization. What specifies it historically is that it only tries to control the different components which come together to maintain its processual character’ (ibid.: 235). It has the ability to articulate within one general system of inscription and equivalence the economic, social and scientific models of organization and work, all of which seem to be radically heterogeneous to one another, and extracting one and the same machinic surplus-­value or value of machinic exploitation without standardizing them (ibid.). This gives capitalism, ‘its hold, not only over material machines of the economic sphere (artisanal, manufacturing, industrial, etc.), but equally over the non-­material machines working at the heart of human activities (productive-­unproductive, public-­private, real-­imaginary, etc.)’ (ibid.: 235–236). Within this context the globalized component of neo-­liberal capitalism, what is referred to as Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), is a system that orders itself both at the global level as well as at the molecular level and radically increases the capacity for the machinic integration of all human activities. In doing so it makes entire societies productive, ‘the rhythm of production is the rhythm of life’ (Guattari and Alliez 1996: 244). Neo-­liberalism operates a reorganization of the state that is superimposed by the market. This is a movement from, ‘a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state’ (Foucault 2008: 116); generating a ‘state-­ phobia’ while reorganizing the state within its terms at the same time (ibid.: 76). Neo-­liberal IWC has become the high point of capital over society. It was established only on the conjunction between machinic integration and social reproduction – the latter resulting from a complex and conservative machinic reterritorialization that conforms to the essential axioms of social segregation (hierarchical, racist, sexist, etc.) (Guattari and Alliez 1996: 244).

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Capitalism and the Fascism of Everyday Life

We shall speak here of social-­machinic capital and it is this which will lead us to take the rise of neo-­liberal thought quite seriously, starting from the intrusion of information theory in the economic sphere. When information claims first place in the social machine, it would seem, in effect, that it ceases to be linked to the simple organization of the sphere of circulation to become, in its way, a factor of production. Information as a factor of production. ibid., original emphasis

Information production constitutes a knowledge economy or what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as ‘immaterial labour’, the production of immaterial products such as information, knowledge, affects, ideas, images, relationships, etc. (Hardt and Negri 2004: 66). Within neo-­liberal IWC immaterial labour has become the new hegemonic labour form. This is, of course, not to suggest that all labour is immaterial, but rather that all labour must now conform to the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labour (ibid.). Neo-­liberal IWC then can be analysed through three characteristics: its temporality, biopolitical organization and network structure. The first characteristic of neo-­liberal IWC is its temporality. Hardt and Negri note that within this system the distinction between ‘work time’ and ‘leisure time’ becomes blurred, with work over-­coding people’s leisure time, effectively ensuring that people are always ‘at work’ (ibid.). This is especially relevant in terms of the immaterial labour market that often requires its workers to be constantly checking their email or monitoring their work remotely. The second temporal of aspect of neo-­liberalism that Hardt and Negri note is its flexibility; the precarious nature of zero-­hour and other employment contracts often require an employee to be always ‘on call’ (ibid.). What is strikingly absent from Hardt and Negri’s analysis of immaterial labour’s temporality is a reflection on its reliance on the internet, new media technologies, mobile devices and the resulting acceleration of both economics and societies. In fact, acceleration is the key temporality driving the economic sphere of IWC. The explicit interface between capital and the internet has resulted in a digital economy – the fastest and most visible zone of production within capitalist societies – that manifests an acceleration of the capitalist logic of production. New products and new trends succeed each other at an anxious pace. ‘The speed of the digital economy, its accelerated rhythms of obsolescence

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and its reliance on (mostly) “immaterial” products seem to confirm the postmodern intuition about the changed status of the commodities’ (Terranova 2000: 47). This is best illustrated by the financialization of markets and the growth of high-­frequency trading, the new driving force shaping the spatio-­temporal matrixes of IWC through the institutional architecture of finance (Jessop 2009: 153; Scholtus, van Dijk and Frijns 2014: 89; Loveless, Stoikov and Waeber 2013: 50). In high-­frequency trading, algorithms replace human traders. Algorithms can act at an ever-­accelerating speed with the fastest algorithms acting within five milliseconds (ms), whereas other relatively fast traders can be identified at speed levels of 50 ms to 150 ms and ‘slow’ trading algorithms act at 200 ms or slower (Scholtus, van Dijk and Frijns 2014: 89). While theorists such as Luciana Parisi argue that algorithmic codes have (or at least have the potential of having) an aesthetic and affective nature all their own that does not have any interface with human subjects, rendering them totally non-­ human (Parisi 2013), the algorithms used in high-­frequency trading are explicitly part of a human economic system. This means that the financialization of markets – and by extension the economic sphere of neo-­liberal IWC more generally – constitutes an ever-­accelerating human–financial machinic assemblage. This is not to say that algorithmic codes in and of themselves are repressive, but rather that within this assemblage the deterritorializing potentials of code are immediately reterritorialized by their subordination to monetary exchange. In this way it mirrors Paul Virilio’s ‘dromology’, the interface between speed (acceleration) and politics. For Virilio ‘speed’ is as much spatial as it is temporal, although the spatiality of speed is not necessarily a literal space. The ‘street’ in Virilio’s analysis is as metaphorical as it is actual, the actual space of the street itself only has the meaning and political significance that it is assigned (Virilio 2006: 29–47). Virilio’s temporality is pushing towards non-­representation, pushing away from politics (ibid.: 99). Virilio shows us that ‘power will always be invested in acceleration itself ’ (ibid.: 59), constantly reterritorializing it in service to state repression be it in the form of military technology (ibid.), economics (ibid.: 200) or through the internet (ibid.: 201). The accelerated economic sphere of modern neo-­liberal IWC plays the central role in social acceleration (Rosa and Scheuerman 2009a: 21). Decreasing

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the turnover time necessary to earn a profit – reducing manufacturing time, accelerating technological innovation, speeding up production to maximize labour power, quickly transporting goods to distant markets and countless other features of neo-­liberal IWC – contribute directly to the acceleration of social life (ibid.; Rosa and Scheuerman 2009b: 291). Michel Foucault already noted this accelerated temporality as early as 1979 in his lectures on the birth of biopolitics when he referred to the post-­war introduction of liberal economics as ‘inflationary’, that is based on an ever-­accelerating speed of growth (Foucault 2008: 187). Deleuze and Guattari also noted how neo-­liberal IWC introduces an accelerated temporality. ‘The intensified despotism of capitalism represents the paranoiac, fascisizing tendency of desire to assemble entities in molar aggregates and to impose on them a centralized, unified organization, whereas capitalism’s accelerated deterritorialization of flows represents the schizophrenic, revolutionary tendency of desire to form molecular, nonsystematic associations of heterogeneous elements’ (Bogue 1989: 103). Anti-Oedipus shows us how in capitalism the paranoiac and schizophrenic poles of desire are the most extreme and the most transparent. The tension between these two psychotic poles is what defines modern neo-­liberalism. It is this tension between the accelerating liberation of energy, desire and economics, and the paranoid microfascistic drive to reterritorialize these energies, grounding them to strict boundaries based on static political identities and social codes, that allows Deleuze and Guattari to demonstrate how the governmentality of neo-­liberalism functions along the lines first dictated by Hobbes: ‘Wealth is power and power is wealth’ (Guattari and Alliez 1996: 241– 242). In other words, neo-­liberalism is more interested in governmentality than a generalized growth of production, but it establishes its form of governmentality through the acceleration of economics freed from restraint, a force that is, with ever-­increasing speed, destroying old markets to create new ones from the chaos. To properly understand neo-­liberalism and the subjectivities it creates, one must understand its temporality. Instead of thinking of neo-­liberal temporality as dialectical with natural or contained time (‘human time’ or time that is perceivable and understood by its ability to be compartmentalized into work time, non-­work time, etc.) occupying one position and digital algorithmic

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time (the time of machines, measured in milliseconds that is imperceptible to humans) occupying the other pole, time needs to be understood in terms of the machinic assemblages produced by the interface between humans and digital algorithmic codes (Terranova 2014: 379), or ‘machinic time’. Thinking in terms of machinic time allows us to better investigate the second characteristic of immaterial labour within neo-­liberal IWC: its biopolitical dimension. What is seen as desirable within neo-­liberal governmentality is a temporality that is constantly accelerating in its machinic-­time. Lines between work time and non-­work time increasingly dissolve and the rate at which people are expected to access information, communicate and produce (especially immaterial products and effects) needs to be ever increasing. Acceleration renders busyness an endemic feature of modern life. People are increasingly busy or preoccupied with fast rather than slow activities in both their work and their non-­work time (Scheuerman 2009: 291). With acceleration driving the temporality of both work and non-­work time the institutional mechanisms that form the main sites of power and privilege in society, ‘also possess a special status in the hierarchy of social temporalities: the enormous impact of capitalism over countless arenas of social life means that its high-­ speed temporality tends to become pervasive as well’ (ibid.). The biopolitical hierarchicalization of life is explicitly Oedipal since Oedipus produces hierarchical relations through its over-­coding of desire (the reduction of desire to lack) and is also produced by hierarchical relationships since subordination engenders an affectively felt sense of lack (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 278–279). As previously discussed, immaterial labour is biopolitical, it produces subjectivities through the, ‘strategisation of aggregated life for its own productive betterment. It links the “individual” to the “population” via a general economy of political rule’ (Evans 2013a: 47). Returning to Foucault’s lectures on the birth of biopolitics, he noted that the growth of neo-­liberalism was based upon a constantly accelerating speed, which extended to both social and administrative apparatuses (Foucault 2008: 187–188). This means that an accelerated temporality is at the heart of neo-­liberal subjectivities. ‘Apparatus’, or dispositifs, in Foucault refers to how heterogeneous sources of power function in relation to each other in order to create a special arrangement

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that enables life to be made to live (Evans 2013a: 45). It is, ‘no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad . . . in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out’ (Foucault in Evans 2013a: 45–46). Through demarcating the territory these apparatuses enact a ‘Law’, a dividing line on which ‘Life exists par excellence’ (Deleuze 2006b: 122). In other words, through the accelerated speeds subjectivity is created (ibid.: 122–123), and ‘life exists par excellence’ insofar as life (that is the subjectivity formed within the line) is established by the inside/outside binary. This life also becomes the object of security for the government. Those relegated to the inside then need to be protected, in what Foucault termed the dispositif of security (dispositif de la sécurité). By establishing an inside/outside distinction, these social and administrative apparatuses, dispositifs, operate to promote and protect what is seen as desirable in a population and to eliminate any uncertainties in any given situation (Evans 2013a: 46). In this way these apparatuses generate subjectivities that are both resilient and adaptable to the psychotic economic and social flows. At the psychic level, for a subject to be resilient and adaptable the mind has to form apparatuses to securitize it. This is what Lacan termed the sinthome, the apparatus that binds a psychotic unconscious together enabling a ‘normal’ functionality to the subject’s mind. Lacan first introduced this concept in his Seminar XXIII (1975–1976), Joyce and the Sinthome. For Lacan psychosis forms when the Name-­of-the-Father (the Oedipal law prohibiting incest which ties the subject to the Symbolic order of the unconscious) is foreclosed, or prevented from entering the Symbolic, the order of the unconscious structured by language that allows social functionality. This causes the levels of the unconscious mind to be disentangled causing psychosis, either paranoia or schizophrenia. The sinthome functions to bind the Symbolic order to the Imaginary and Real. The sinthome can take multiple forms. For Joyce, Lacan argues, it was the act of writing. In other, perhaps more common, examples it could be the formation of a phobia or obsessional compulsive fixations. What’s key here is the way that the psychotic mind perceives temporality. In his Seminar III Psychosis (1955–1956), Lacan discusses machine-­time in a way that speaks to contemporary social temporality. He notes that in order to work with and through computers a person has to, ‘respect the machine’s own

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rhythm – otherwise [what the user is trying to impute] won’t go in and can’t enter the circuit’ (Lacan 2008: 12–13). Lacan used this example to show how the Law (Name-­of-the-Father) is foreclosed in the unconscious if we are not working in the same temporality of social production. For the psychotic subject, all temporal reference points seem to disappear, resulting in an ‘abyss, [a] temporal submersion, a rupture in experience’ (ibid.: 45). This raises the question of how a human subject can enter into an ever-­accelerating temporal circuit that is measured in microseconds. The obvious answer is people cannot, meaning that the Law is foreclosed and the unconscious is unbound. The fourth term here, the sinthome or the apparatus of security, is introduced to ensure the subject is resilient and adaptive to their environment. In order to be productive in neo-­liberalism this apparatus of security manifests as obsession: obsession with acquiring and keeping rank, securing a position on the corporate ladder, securing a position on the housing ladder, etc. Once these positions are acquired, the act of securing them necessarily entails fascistically defending your position against any outside threat, either real or imaginary. *  *  *  * The third characteristic of neo-­liberal IWC is that its immaterial labour force, ‘tends to take the social form of networks based on communication, collaboration, and affective relationships. Immaterial labour can only be connected in common,2 and increasingly immaterial labour invents new, independent networks of cooperation through which it produces’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 66, original emphasis). The network organization of IWC over-­ codes and structures the global political system, what Hardt and Negri refer to as ‘Empire’, a network of power that is no longer limited to nation-­states, but also includes multinational corporations and supranational institutions(Hardt and Negri 2000). The modern political system [of Empire] is a global whole, unified and unifying, but is so because it implies a constellation of juxtaposed, imbricated, ordered subsystems; the analysis of decision making brings to light all kinds of compartmentalizations and partial processes that interconnect, but not without gaps and displacements. Technocracy operates by the segmentary division of labor (this applies to the international division of labor as well). Bureaucracy exists only in compartmentalized offices and functions only by

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‘goal displacements’ and the corresponding ‘dysfunctions.’ Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the boss’s office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower. In short, we would say that modern life has not done away with segmentarity but has on the contrary made it exceptionally rigid. Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 209–210

Within IWC, power is not strictly hierarchical, but diffuse micro-­hierarchies. Deleuze and Guattari noted that there was a linear succession of power within the Oedipal triangle; as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever. ‘School tells us, “You’re not at home anymore”; the army tells us, “You’re not in school anymore” ’ (ibid.: 209). Neo-­liberal IWC’s horizontal networks have radically disrupted this linear movement; however, it does not destroy Oedipus, but breaks it up and multiplies it into many micro-­oedipuses. There are two passing references to ‘micro-­oedipuses’ in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 205, 228); but Deleuze and Guattari do not go into detail about their formation or their diffusion across the social body. Through a reading of their use of milieu in relation to movement, and their work Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari 2008) alongside of Nick Land’s use of the mathematical concept of positive feedback from his essay ‘Machinic Desire’ (2011: 319–344), it is possible to chart how Oedipus is fractalized and micro-­oedipuses become multiplied across the social body. IWC accelerates deterritorialization, but lines of flight are not necessarily emancipatory, and one group’s line of flight may not work to benefit that of another group; it may, on the contrary, ‘block it, plug it, throw it even deeper into rigid segmentarity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 205). Both Deleuze and Guattari abandoned the concept of a line of flight in their later work, choosing instead to think in less loaded terms: ‘movement’ (Deleuze) and ‘cycles’ (Guattari). ‘It is an abstract line, a pure movement which is difficult to discover, he never begins, it takes things by the middle [par le milieu], it is always in the middle [au milieu] – in the middle of [au milieu des] two other lines? Only movements concern me’ (Deleuze 2006a: 95–96). Brian Massumi notes in his introduction to A Thousand Plateaus that, in French, milieu reflects the historical meanings of ‘surroundings’, ‘medium’ and ‘middle’ and all three of these meanings come into play in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Massumi 2002: xvii). Thinking in terms of movement and milieu means the movements of neo-­liberal IWC are au milieu, always in the middle,

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always immanent to the social field. The lines of flight for IWC posit Oedipus in the middle rendering it immanent to all relations. Within neo-­liberal IWC, power is continuously diffusing and multiplying, spreading throughout and bureaucratizing every level of society along neo-­ liberal principles (Foucault 2008: 148). In this way Oedipus is also becoming diffuse throughout the social fabric. It is no longer the despotic signifier ‘Oedipus’, rather it is fractalized micro-­oedipuses. As power within a neo-­ liberal organization becomes more diffuse, Oedipus moves and reproduces itself through the machinic process of ‘positive feedback’. In mathematics, a positive feedback is the basic diagram for self-­regenerating circuitry. Positive feedback tends to cause system instability. When the loop gain is positive there will be an accelerated growth, oscillations or divergences from equilibrium (Zeigler, Praehofer and Kim 2000: 55). ‘Positive feedback replicates reproduction as a component function of its departure from the same. [. . .] They do not merely repeat the same [. . .] the escape from reproduction is subordinated to a transcendent logic, conceived as simple reiteration, and thus returned to a sublimated meta-­reproduction that cages mutation within rigidly homogeneous form’ (Land 2011: 331). The creation of a positive feedback loop is an integral aspect of the neo-­ liberal form of governmentality. Luciana Parisi has argued that neo-­liberal IWC has: [I]ncorporated and reinvented the cybernetic notion of feedback, which now serves neither to stop nor to transform entropy into information; instead, the introduction of topology into digitality has entailed a neoliberal investment in the primary ontology of feedback, in terms of ‘reciprocal presupposition’: a process of structural coupling or mutual adaptation that subsumes relational terms under the power of time, evolution, dynamics, and change. Parisi 2013: 160

In this way Oedipus is replicated at an accelerated rate equal to the rate in which it encounters different neo-­liberal flows or lines of flight; Oedipus is thus immanent to the monetary plane (the driving accelerator of deterritorializations) and detached from any anthropomorphic limitations. It is, ‘adapted to the variable dimensions of fluidity [of the high-­frequency trading] agencies [and in this way] reformatted for cyberspace’ (Land 2011: 436). Although, it is not just

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copies of the same. In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari show how the Oedipal triangle in Kafka’s work breaks away to join with other Oedipal triangles (the family triangle breaks away to join with the bureaucratic triangle, or the legal triangle and so on) in a process that has the possibility to continue ad infinitum (Deleuze and Guattari 2008: 53–56). Each time the different oedipuses join together they create a new bureaucratic Oedipal machine. Each new Oedipal machine is a replicant of Oedipus, but a mutated one depending on which segmentary line of the social body it is on. The problem as Deleuze and Guattari have presented it is that everything happens on the same lines with no distinction between lines of control and lines of resistance (de Vries 2013: 133). They are always in the middle, au milieu, meaning that there is a mutual immanence of the lines, no one of them is transcendent and each is at work within the others (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 205). Lines of flight are immanent to the social field. Supple segmentarity continually dismantles the concretions of rigid segmentarity, but everything that it dismantles it reassembles on its own level: micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power, microfascisms. The line of flight blasts the two segmentary series apart; but it is capable of the worst, of bouncing off the wall, falling into a black hole, taking the path of greatest regression, and in its vagaries reconstructing the most rigid of segments. ibid.

This creates an organizational social structure that Deleuze termed ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze 1992). In his concise essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze noted how the disciplined societies of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Foucault studied gave way to control societies following the Second World War. Whereas discipline societies were hierarchically structured (the family, the school, the military, etc.) within spaces of enclosure (the factory being the basic model) and based upon economies of production, control societies are spatially decentred networks rather that hierarchically structured, dehumanized (‘Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks” ’ (ibid.: 5)), and based on markets rather than production (ibid.: 4–7). Social control is now based on the ‘operation of markets [. . .] and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-­term and of rapid rates of

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turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt’ (ibid.: 6). *  *  *  * So what are the characteristics of Pasolini’s new fascism, the ‘cancer’ of capitalist societies, and how is this form of fascism reproduced? This chapter has argued that post-Second World War modernity has been structured by the twin dynamics of Integrated World Capitalism and psychoanalysis, marrying desire to lack and in doing so limiting the horizon of possibility. Capitalism, especially in its neo-­liberal form, is both biopolitical and based on an ever-­accelerated temporal structure, and as a biopolitical force, it needs to be understood first and foremost as a theory and practice for creating subjectivities. Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter has argued that capitalism works through the double process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, a process of constantly breaking away from and destroying old systems and then reforming new ones. This is an inherently unstable system, creating subjectivities that understand life as vulnerable and precarious and, as such, are centred on a fundamental lack of security. The psychotic forces of neo-­liberalism and the financialization of the global economy have exponentially increased economic and social acceleration. The response to this form of economic and social psychosis is a drive to securitize an increasingly precarious life, creating a proliferation of microfascisms, a paranoia and fear of all others who could pose a threat to their form of life. These microfascisms cause an extreme form of alienation by blocking forms of communication and collective action. Psychoanalysis has been married to capitalism so that repression is ultimately the result of the imposition Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘despotic signifier’, Oedipus. This is not the Oedipus of Greek mythology, rather in this context Oedipus represents psychological mechanisms of repression that lead to the drive for social authority. In the accelerated flows of neo-­liberalism, Oedipus has been fractalized, broken apart into multiple micro-­oedipuses, which are continually spreading throughout the social body. Psychoanalysis reads prohibition and lack into the heart of human subjectivity, meaning that it centres its very understanding of the human on Oedipus. In this way it is the perfect intellectual and cultural justification for capitalism’s reliance on lack.

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These processes have created the fascism of everyday life, forms of microfascisms that spread across the social psyche. In order to be productive in an increasingly precarious world conditioned by neo-­liberalism, apparatuses of security manifest as obsession: obsession with acquiring and keeping rank and authority in order to securitize life, regardless of how precarious that life is. Once these positions are acquired, the act of securing them necessarily entails fascistically defending your position against any real or imagined outside threat.

2

Revolution and Fascism Understanding that the world – as structured by neo-­liberal capitalism – creates a specific form of microfascism based on a fundamental lack of security and drive towards consumption in the very hearts of its subjects leaves us with the question: how do we effect total societal change to rid ourselves of this toxic lack and arm our desire? The deceptively obvious answer is revolution. Revolution must be fought against capitalism and for egalitarian rights. While there may be disagreements as to the exact details and ideological motor, the radical Left largely agree that revolution and revolution alone can save humanity from capitalism’s crushing alienation and save the Earth from ecological collapse (social democracy and reformist policies of regulation are nothing more than ‘capitalism with a human face’ and do nothing to rid the cancer from the social body). It is only through revolution that fascism, in all its forms, can be rooted out and destroyed. Revolution certainly has a romantic history, dating back to 1789, conjuring images of brave militants fighting as a vanguard against tyranny. However, the recent history of the twenty-­first century has demonstrated that there is a very real appetite for a return to revolutionary politics. As such – both as theory and praxis – revolution needs to be seriously and critically reassessed. This chapter will analyse contemporary theories of revolution, paying particularly close attention to the threads of revolutionary thought that have grown out of a critical engagement with Marxist histories. Taking ‘revolution’ in its broadest terms, implicating both revolutionary projects of the Left as well as the Right, this chapter will analyse revolution’s temporality and its biopolitics in order to demonstrate that revolution’s temporality is based on the principle of acceleration and that its biopolitics produces subjectivities and exercises biopower through its dispositifs of security. This analysis will demonstrate how Oedipal repression and, by extension, microfascistic structures have the potential to be exacerbated by projects of revolution. It will then conclude with

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an examination of how the accelerated temporality within revolutionary projects creates a situation where diagnostic mechanisms for the detection of microfascism are not only unwanted, but also untenable. It is important first to separate the concept of ‘revolution’ from ‘revolutionary change’. While this book understands revolution in the limited terms as a biopolitical and Promethean project that is always based on an accelerated temporality, revolutionary change is understood to have a much broader definition. Revolutionary change is taken to mean totally turning things upside down, a radical change in a sign-­system. Or, as Negri phrases it, revolutionary change is the ontological transformation of the world (2003: 224). Revolution is always a violent act where change can only be operated by the force of a crisis. The ‘violence’ of revolutions is also, and in some cases could only be, psychic violence (Spivak 2006: 271). Looking at revolution and revolutionaries in these broad terms allows the analysis to be extended to all movements seeking radical change in signification and does not limit the scope to one guiding ideological programme (‘socialist’, ‘communist’, ‘anarchist’, etc.). As such, the analysis in this section will focus primarily on two thinkers on revolution, albeit from vastly different ideological perspectives, Antonio Negri and Nick Land, although other theorists such as Lenin, Lyotard, Althusser and Virilio will also be examined to a lesser extent. The explicit focus on Negri1 and Land is due to their respective critical stances on revolutionary movements of the past and their shared desire to not fall back onto a nostalgia of the past revolutionary movements. Despite the fact that both theorists come from a Deleuzo-Guattarian theoretical position and theorize the temporality of revolution, on the surface they seem as though they couldn’t be politically further apart. However, under scrutiny, both conceptualizations of revolution are shown to be remarkably similar. Focusing on the convergences of their respective theories allows the argument to be made that acceleration is not the motor for one form of revolution, but rather that the defining trait of revolution is acceleration. This allows for a more unified conceptualization of revolution as a general theory of change to be critiqued. *  *  *  * Land’s2 and Negri’s thinking of revolution in a post-Deleuze and Guattari framework is an ambiguous project since Deleuze and Guattari made no

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attempt to hide their scepticism of revolutionary groups. They argue that at the preconscious level, revolutionary groups remain subjugated groups – a group that receives its determinations externally, forming paranoid delusions to protect it from outside anxiety. This is true even if the group takes power, so long as ‘power’ refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and destroy desiring-­production. Revolutionary groups remain subordinated to a socius, ‘that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom; the effusion of anti-­production and death-­carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more immortal; the phenomena of group “superegoization,” narcissism, and hierarchy – the mechanisms for the repression of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 348). While Deleuze and Guattari also note that subject-­groups – groups that are able to generate their own internal laws and projects in relation to other groups – are derived from subjugated groups, they are still: continually closing up again, remodeling themselves in the image of subjugated groups: re-­establishing interior limits, reforming a great break that the flows will not pass through or overcome, subordinating the desiring-­ machines to the repressive aggregate that they constitute on a large scale. There is a speed of subjugation that is opposed to the coefficients of transversality. And what revolution is not tempted to turn against its subject-­ groups, stigmatized as anarchistic or irresponsible, and to liquidate them? ibid.: 349

Here, Deleuze and Guattari are uncharacteristically univocal in locating the reproduction of Oedipal repression and microfascisms in revolutionary groups as well as the impulse within revolutionary groups to either silence or expel any dissident or resistant voices.3 In terms of winning power and installing a new machinery of state, revolutionaries can only demand a different legality of state power. In this formation, law is defined as, ‘the forced or voluntary cessation of war, in contrast to illegality which it defines by way of exclusion’ (Deleuze 2006b: 29). However, in both Negri and Land’s projects, an explicit focus is laid on the first book in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, Anti-Oedipus, which is by far the most revolutionary – and by far the most provocative and polemic – of any of their other texts. To historicize their book, at the time of writing Anti-Oedipus, projects of revolution were still largely characterized by post-’68 French communism as theorized by thinkers

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such as Althusser and married to psychoanalysis through thinkers like Alain Badiou and Jacque-Alain Miller (the previous quote extends to implicate psychoanalysis as culpable in the reproduction of microfascism). These thinkers continued working throughout the 1970s to sustain the revolutionary struggles begun in May ’68 (Noys 2014: 6). These projects, which were largely abandoned to the postmodern theories of figures like Lyotard and Baudrillard in the 1980s (ibid.), were based on a temporality that will be shown to be classic ‘revolutionary time’. This temporality is characterized by what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘now-­time’ or Jetztzeit or what Althusser termed ‘full time’. *  *  *  * Leftist and communist projects of revolution have long been preoccupied with the notion of an accelerated temporality. As Georg Lukács notes in his writing on Lenin, revolution cannot be simply ‘made’, it had to be a produced within a revolutionary temporality (2009: 11–13, 30–32, 90). While capitalist time is largely theorized (at least by communist revolutionaries) as empty homogenous time, revolutionary time is full and orientated around conflict. It is, ‘dialectical time par excellence’ (Althusser 2005: 137). In his essay ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ from For Marx (ibid.: 129–151), Althusser examines the three temporal modes in the play: the long and extended ‘empty time’ of everyday life; the sudden fast ruptures of ‘tragic time’ or full time in moments of conflict; and melodramatic time, which is also fast and appears as tragic time, but in fact presents a ‘false consciousness’ through the intrusion of the father character. In Althusser’s reading of the play, the character of Nina (the daughter) only truly completes the dialectic of consciousness, and kills the false consciousness of melodramatic time, when she rejects her father (who has killed her lover – ‘destruction is the precondition for any real dialectic’ (ibid.: 138)) and embraces her own future (ibid.). The dialectic is completed through conflict. ‘Sheltered from the world, [the dialectic] unleashes all the fantastic form of a breathless conflict which can only ever find peace in the catastrophe of someone else’s fall: it takes this hullabaloo for destiny and its breathlessness for the dialectic’ (ibid.: 140). This full time for Althusser is the temporality of revolution. With it ‘the veils covering universal History’ are torn, myths and lies are destroyed and the ‘truth of man’ is uncovered and restored (2005: 43, original emphasis). ‘The fullness

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of time has come. Humanity is pregnant with the imminent revolution which will give it possession of its own being. Let men at last become conscious of this, and they will be in reality what they are in truth: free, equal and fraternal beings’ (ibid.). What is of particular significance is that full time only truly comes about through conflict (thus it is dialectical) and that it alone is able to open up a future beyond the ‘false ideology’ of capitalism. This now-­time of revolution marks an accelerated temporality since, as Paul Virilio notes, conflict is time’s accelerator (2006: 29). Moments of conflict rupture empty time, and accelerate the subjectivities involved through time. In this way, acceleration opens up the revolutionary to a future (Althusser’s reading of Nina opening herself up to the future through the conflict with her father and, now dead, lover). This notion of full time is analogous to Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, the model of his messianic time (Benjamin 1973: Thesis XVIII, in Negri 2003: 115). For Benjamin: A Historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the eternal image of the past; the historical materialist supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains master of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. Benjamin 1973: Thesis XVI, translation modified in Negri 2003: 114

It is this claiming of the full-­time, now-­time, or simply revolutionary temporality that separates revolutionaries from reformists; with the latter choosing to occupy the temporality of homogenous capitalist time (Lukács 2009: 54; Negri 2003: 224). Both Land and Negri reject this notion of temporality, Negri going so far as to claim that Jetztzeit is that creative flash in history that after it flares up is immediately retranslated into quantified and measured time, and becomes flattened back into the teleological progression and is co-­opted by capitalism because it was only a flash (Casarino and Negri 2008: 226). Far from being disruptive of capital, Negri argues that Jetztzeit provides capital with invaluable elements of innovation and indispensable creative energies. The problem with

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conceiving of innovative and creative time in Benjamin’s terms is that the Jetztzeit is always eminently capable of being co-­opted. ‘It is thanks to the endlessly repeated co-­optation of the Jetztzeit that capital can represent itself as it needs to, namely, as the progressive force of history’ (ibid.). Conversely, both Negri and Land theorize revolutionary time as being constantly accelerating and, as such, as immeasurable. In his reading of Marx’s Grundrisse and Kapital, Volume I, Negri theorizes that the real subsumption (Marx’s term for the process in which labour is internally reorganized to meet the dictates of capital) of all social relations by neo-­liberal capitalism leads to a non-­quantifiable and non-­measurable time. The temporality cannot be measured as quantity; however, capitalism endeavours to quantify and to measure all the time so as to control (or reterritorialize) it and employ it in the extraction of surplus value (Osborne 2008: 21). The temporality of capitalism in Negri’s work is characterized by subsumption. In other words, capitalist time subordinates people to its processes and rhythms. This is because, for Negri, capitalism totalizes, but capital’s mode of totalization detemporalizes, or ‘de-­potentializes’ time, rendering it empty. Conversely the creative temporalization of living labour detotalizes (ibid.: 16). Living labour in these terms is immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri 2004: xii); it exists at the interface of technology and the human users (Terranova 2014: 379). In Negri’s work, the creative temporalization of immaterial labour, ‘communist time’, takes the form of an almost literal line of flight, understood as an arrow with an irreversible trajectory shot from kairòs (the Greek figure of critical or opportune time) so that ‘time is traced by the tip of the arrow’ (Negri 2003: 162). In this way, immaterial labour constructs temporality as a vector, or a line of flight, that never falls and that will never be reterritorialized. He brings in Spinoza here to situate the temporality of the arrow as immanent (ibid.: 164), and in doing so creates a topological conception of temporality, a ‘continuous fabric’ of time stretched between the before and after (ibid.: 163). As a Spinozist, for Negri there can be only one historical substance, in which time increasingly appears as the real material from which communism is constructed. In this, the, ‘truth and the concept of communist time will appear to us as fireworks and flares rather than as a secure trajectory of physical time’ (ibid.: 46). This single substance means that the revolutionary line must come

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out of the same line of oppression, and the only way to move is by opening up a strata within neo-­liberal capitalism and accelerating through it (Negri 2010: 132–135). Adding this spatial element to time, along with the defining vector, brings us back to Virilio’s Accelerationism. Negri notes how this arrow shot from the only real source of power, kairòs, has only one trajectory, and is unable to ontologically reverse (2003: 163–164). This temporality is also productive, creating subjectivities (ibid.: 147–149, 155, 163, 174–176). If this is read alongside Virilio’s Speed and Politics (2006), then we see how Negri’s temporality is an accelerating one. As previously noted, in Virilio, acceleration is created by the marriage of speed (the vector of the arrow of time) in space (the Spinozist immanence creating a spatial understanding of time) and by subjectivities (the subjectivities created by the temporality). Negri’s temporality, his communist-­time, has to be understood as acceleration from the past through the present to the future. *  *  *  * In his writings, Nick Land is far less nuanced in his Accelerationism. Like Negri, Land also comes from a Deleuzo-Guattarian and Spinozist framework. However, Land is explicitly anti-Left and anti-­communist. In his work, he sublimates Deleuze, Guattari and Spinoza with Lyotard in order to construct a post-­human accelerated temporality. Land largely bases his work on acceleration on a brief provocative passage in Anti-Oedipus where Deleuze and Guattari state: But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet. 2003: 239–240

Drawing from the privileged position that lines of flight hold in AntiOedipus and reading this alongside Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (first

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published in 1974), Nick Land has constructed a fragmented theory of what Benjamin Noys termed (as a point of identification and critique, not celebration) ‘accelerationism’ (Noys 2014: xi). For Accelerationism, the path of ‘machinic revolution’ is within the deterritorialized flows of neo-­ liberalism. Land emphatically rejects the existence of ‘living labour’, insisting that there is only non-­human ‘cyborg-­labour’ (Land 2011: 434), and calls for the acceleration of capitalism in order to arrive at a post-­capitalist world (ibid.: 340–341). Like Negri, the temporality in Land’s revolutionary Accelerationism is spatially conceived (ibid.: 430, 452), where the forces of neo-­liberalism have accelerated the merger of time and space into an immanent, ‘global space and universal time’ (ibid.: 430). This space is constructed through a, ‘convergence of cybernetic, economic and libidinal discourses’ (ibid.: 329). Any deceleration, or even steady speeds introduces a temporalization – time that is no longer immeasurable – that in turn decompresses intensity, and ultimately restrains the revolutionary project (ibid.: 452). It is only through this path of accelerated deterritorialization that a revolutionary subject ‘discovers that the future as virtuality is accessible now’ (ibid.). Land’s politics is vehemently anti-Left and antihuman. However, there is a renewed interest in his work on acceleration within discourses of the Left, marked by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s new #Accelerationism movement and the 2013 online publication of #Accelerationism: Manifesto for an Accelerated Politics.4 The basic premise of the movement is that, ‘if the political Left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency’ (Williams and Srnicek 2014: 354). The course of action then is not to protest, disrupt, critique or simply wait for capitalism to die at the hands of its own contradictions, but, ‘to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies’ (Avanessian and Mackay 2014: 4). Through an affirmation of a ‘renewed Prometheanism and rationalism, an affirmation that the increasing immanence of the social and technical is irreversible and indeed desirable’ (ibid.: 7). The Accelerationists advocate a movement born within neo-­liberal IWC that, following Lyotard, celebrates the ‘capitalist jouissance’, the masochistic pleasure derived from the deterritorializing aspect of capitalism, and uses these forces to accelerate to a post-­capitalist world (Williams and Srnicek 2014: 355).

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In some ways, the new Accelerationists are attempting to correct Land’s original work, specifically the way in which Land conflated speed with acceleration, noting that: We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-­dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as essential. ibid.: 352

Beyond this correction, the new Accelerationist work largely puts the human and living labour (albeit a living labour that works with and through technology) back into their vision of the future, although, as Noys points out, the writings gathered together within the rubric of the new Accelerationism are unsure as to specific conceptual aspects of capitalism, such as high-­frequency trading. They seem to celebrate the technology, yet they cannot bring themselves to endorse it, leaving their Accelerationism, unlike Land’s unequivocal endorsement of capitalist tyrannical processes, ungrounded (Noys 2014: 96). The Manifesto for Accelerated Politics (MAP) is where Negri and Land’s theories converge. Antonio Negri enthusiastically (although from a critical distance) supports MAP (2014: 365–373). Both strains of thought reject what they term old-­fashioned socialist ‘folk’ revolutionaries – revolutionaries who do not explicitly engage with new technologies; Keynesian/New Deal reformists; a return to Fordism; pluralism – insofar as it constitutes corporatism of the social; and systems of direct democracy as they currently exist (Negri 2003: 224–227; Williams and Srnicek 2014: 355–358). Like previous forms of revolutionary thought, their temporality is absolutely predicated on acceleration, albeit a constant acceleration rather than the accelerated bursts of classic Marxism.This common push for the sustained acceleration of deterritorialization is undoubtedly inherited from Anti-Oedipus, which ends with a revolutionary call to arms: We’ll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth (‘In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing’) is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides

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with the completion of the process of desiring-­production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed. Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 382

By privileging lines of flight in this manner, the hope is not only that revolution can accelerate beyond capitalism, but that it can move beyond the constrains of neo-­liberal governmentality. Both the Accelerationists and Negri maintain that this is not a utopian project (Negri 2003: 99, 2014: 377; Williams and Srnicek 2014: 356). Rather, it is an attempt to – once again, following Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2003: 302–303) – break away from the conditions where wage labour and Wal-Mart are the limits of utopian thinking (Fisher 2014b: 345; Negri 2003: 111). However, as Noys and Badiou (in his analysis of lines of flight) argue, the methodology that attempts to destroy capitalism by accelerating beyond it ironically end up reflecting the accumulative and accelerative logics of capital (Noys 2014: 68–69). This is most explicit in Tiziana Terranova’s contribution to the #Accelerate Reader, ‘Red Stack Attack!’, when she proposes that what is holding back the capitalist promise of less work and more leisure time is not the economic form per se, but rather the constraints placed on markets that impede or ‘decelerate’ its development. The solution to this is the accelerated implementation of algorithmic speed in immaterial labour production, which could, if unrestrained by neo-­liberal governmentality, allow the temporality of Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) to accelerate beyond the necessity of statist interventions (Terranova 2014: 387–400). This is basically the libertarian-­capitalist argument for laissez-­faire economics which privileges free markets over states, ultimately reproducing neo-­liberal market ideology5 with its machinic-­time married to a techno-­futurism. It is this form of neo-­liberal economic thinking that married social democracy to the neo-­liberal project and bred the ideological trope that has dominated the United States and the UK since the economic boom in the 1990s through to the current post–2008 crisis (Noys 2014: 56). *  *  *  * Revolution’s accelerated temporality situates its projects as fundamentally Promethean. While the need to be able to actively imagine the future has (once

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again) recently become a central argument of Left,6 Prometheanism nevertheless needs to be problematized. This book will argue that the ability to diagnose microfascistic mechanisms, and subvert the formation of overt fascism, is fundamentally undermined by revolution’s Prometheanism. Prometheanism is understood as, ‘simply the claim that there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and our world’ (Brassier 2014: 470). Prometheanism immediately implies a totality that seeks to radically transform the world by opening up a rational humanist future to-­come. It constituted the ‘intellectual project’ of the Enlightenment (ibid.: 391), making it the humanist motor accelerating revolutionary thinking found both in capitalism and communism (as demonstrated by Negri (1999: 292) in his reading of Leninism). However, as Ray Brassier laments, following the decline of the Soviet system, the intellectual Left largely scaled down and abandoned Prometheanism in favour of local politics and took up what he sees as the tendency within post-­structuralism to refuse metanarratives, focusing instead on discursive and/or micropolitical functions of power (Brassier 2014: 469). As such, a unifying aspect of all thinkers advocating a return to revolution – from Land on the political Right to the diversity of the political Left with thinkers like Negri and Badiou, as well as Peter Hallward and Jodi Dean – is a call for a return to Prometheanism and metanarratives. Prometheanism is most overtly engaged with Negri and the Accelerationists, who attempt to complicate the Promethean notion so as to open up the future to-­come on a global scale, but without falling into homogenizing metanarratives. As Negri often points out, the transcendental of neo-­liberal society is the transformation of ‘Prometheus to Narcissus’ (Negri 2003: 48, 50–51, 89, 112). In other words, the dispositifs that govern IWC circulation have created a regulatory ideal of automatic functioning that freezes time and makes every relationship become relative, dependent on the exchange value of the market. This is neo-­liberal’s reterritorializing effect. The material effect of how capitalism radically deterritorializes, while everything stays the same. Revolutionary thinking on both the political Right and Left want to reinvigorate Prometheanism. The key element of Accelerationist Promethean politics is the belief in the transformative potential of technology, ‘including the “transformative anthropology” it entails, an eagerness to further accelerate

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technological evolution’ (Avanessian and Mackay 2014: 26). They are seeking to transform the humanist Prometheanism in Marx into the antihuman machinic Prometheanism originally opened up by cyberculture (ibid.: 33). Whereas Land insists that this can only be opened by further accelerating capitalism (Land 2011: 432), in what is often termed ‘Right Accelerationism’, Williams and Srnicek’s Manifesto for Accelerated Politics looks to open a vanguard of Left Accelerationism: Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital. This mastery must be distinguished from that beloved of thinkers of the original Enlightenment. The clockwork universe of Laplace, so easily mastered given sufficient information, is long gone from the agenda of serious scientific understanding. But this is not to align ourselves with the tired residue of postmodernity, decrying mastery as proto-­fascistic or authority as innately illegitimate. Instead we propose that the problems besetting our planet and our species oblige us to refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we cannot predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically likely ranges of outcomes. What must be coupled to such complex systems analysis is a new form of action: improvisatory and capable of executing a design through a practice which works with the contingencies it discovers only in the course of its acting, in a politics of geosocial artistry and cunning rationality. A form of abductive experimentation that seeks the best means to act in a complex world. Williams and Srnicek 2014: 360–361

While Negri cautions the authors of MAP to be careful not to fall into ‘technological determinism’ (Negri 2014: 373–374), he nonetheless notes how MAP is complimentary and can even – with some modification perhaps – be folded into his concept of multitude (ibid.: 367–374). This can be done primarily because the Accelerationist Prometheanism requires the ‘reassertion of subjectivism, but a subjectivism without selfhood, which articulates an autonomy without voluntarism’ (Brassier 2014: 471). In other words, a network of singularities that does not constitute a unified identity. The claim is that by affirming the common as a ‘co-­operation between minds’ the totalities of metanarratives and identity politics can be avoided (Reed 2014: 534). Prometheanism nevertheless remains an incredibly problematic concept to ground any politics. Its fixation on the future to-­come can only serve to subvert

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meaningful diagnostic surveys of politics for repressive mechanisms that are posited in the present. It does this in two distinct, but related, ways. The first way is in the relationship that exists between Prometheus and Oedipus. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, for Nietzsche, Oedipus is related to Prometheus in an uncomfortable manner (Deleuze 1983: 20–21; Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 124–125). Both are linked to the concept of ‘original sin’, Prometheus in a masculine (Arian) way through sacrilege and Oedipus in a feminine (Semite) way to biblical original sin. Both instances resulted in a fundamental betrayal of the future in the lived present. In this way, they both travelled along the same line, and as such are immanent to each other, although Oedipus’ story did not end with his blinding. His fate was: [S]omething worse than death or exile, he wanders and survives on a strangely positive line of separation or deterritorialization. Holderlin and Heidegger see this as the birth of the double turning away, the change of face, and also the birth of modern tragedy, for which they bizarrely credit the Greeks: the outcome is no longer murder or sudden death but survival under reprieve, unlimited postponement. Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 125

The Promethean–Oedipal machine is the perfect model of neo-­liberalism. As previously noted, Oedipus (in his fractal multiple forms) is always in the middle (au milieu), is immanent to all subjectivity, so when Prometheanism assembles with Oedipal repression the result is a promised future to-­come that cannot actually come, a fixation on a future that is predicated on lack. Instead, the future will be always postponed. Or, to put it in Negri’s terms, it isn’t that Prometheus has been transformed into Narcissus, it’s that Prometheus and Narcissus exist on the same line, immanent to each other. For Deleuze and Guattari, this comes to represent the story of the authoritarian betrayal of the future with its effect in the present, a betrayal that has become humanist and marks modernity as well as postmodernity (2002: 125–127). The material effect of this betrayal is terror. Prometheanism is the preoccupation with the future to-­come, immanent to accelerated temporality. This comes at the expense of the present, and the actual effect is a complacency with terror. Brassier writes that whereas liberalism and even neo-­liberalism seeks equilibrium, Prometheanism radically produces disequilibrium (Brassier

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2014: 485), giving it the remarkable ability to destroy the reterritorializing dispositifs of neo-­liberalism that would assert identities as natural and given (ibid.: 474). This is why the Accelerationists are so eager to support a Promethean politics; it is a force that is both productive and destabilizing. However, the destabilizing factor carries the menace of microfascism. As previously noted, neo-­liberalism runs along the same destabilizing line of flight as Prometheanism, creating a subjectivity that is predicated on crisis. While the Accelerationists are right to say that this engenders singularization, the affective product is fear. This ultimately results in a lack of communication between the singularities and the creation of dispositifs of security that reterritorialize the line of flight and actively produce microfascisms. The second problematic aspect of Prometheanism is that it presupposes a separation from nature and a desire to control it (Avanessian and Mackay 2014: 34). This is problematic because it functions to over-­code and cut off desire. Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate that we are part of the social–ecological– technical assemblage and not its masters standing outside of it, and there is no such thing as independent spheres or circuits (2003: 2, 4). Enlightenment fantasies of mastering nature necessarily create an artificial binary opposition that has the very real effect of a fascistic drive of domination. There is no self-­ evident separation, everything within nature happens along the same lines, immanent to one another (Deleuze 2006a: 100). This is how desire is created and how it creates us at the same time and along the same line (ibid.: 66). Any drive for a mastery over nature only serves to create an axiomatic system predicated on a binary opposition (ibid.: 65). In doing so, it cuts off and over-­ codes desire (ibid.: 71). This over-­coding of desire (what Deleuze and Guattari often term superegoization) works in tandem with the singularization and affective fear produced by disequilibrium to cut off any microfascist diagnostic mechanism through the actual creation of microfascisms. *  *  *  * In much the same way that, as the previous chapter demonstrated, neo-­ liberalism is biopolitical, projects of revolution also create subjectivities. This is a point that both Negri and Land are explicit on: the accelerated temporality of revolution is both immanent and productive (Negri 2003: 185; Land 2011: 452), it produces revolutionary subjectivities while at the same time it is being

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produced by them. While stating that this does not necessarily have to be teleological, Negri nevertheless claims that all praxis must be occupied with the ‘to-­come’ or else it has failed. The ‘just-­now’ time of capitalism cuts this horizon, so politics must be orientated to the future to-­come. The present can only be dealt with by a future orientation and to have this orientation requires a proper name and a historical driving force, the tip of his arrow of time (ibid.). The never-­ending accelerated temporality of revolution, a never-­ending flow of desire, can continually and without interruption create subjectivities with a future to fight for, the only life that can be called life. What’s at stake for Negri is opening a future that will not be co-­opted by capitalism. This is an inherently political task, since time’s sublimation in capitalism is biopolitical. ‘Capitalism has invested the whole of life; its production is biopolitical; in production, Power is the “superstructure” of that which stretches out, and is reproduced throughout society’ (Negri 2003: 148). In Negri’s analysis, neo-­liberal IWC installs a political value to now-­time through its maxim of savings to sell labour tomorrow (Osborne 2008: 20), creating a biopolitical power over the workers’ subjectivities. His way out from this is through an accelerated temporality that opens up a future horizon beyond now-­time. The same exigency is found in Land and the legacies of his thought. Land’s temporality is conceived as being both productive – producing machinic subjectivities (2011: 452) – and produced, by the libidinal forces released by capitalism (ibid.: 321). Land’s temporality allows the creation of ‘cyber-­positive nomads’ who would be able to accelerate the deterritorializations of neo-­ liberalism and pass through to the other side (ibid.: 330), a movement that is only made possible by the vision of a post-­capitalist future. It is made unequivocal in the Manifesto for Accelerated Politics with the claim that the ‘future needs to be constructed’ (Williams and Srnicek 2014: 362) in order for the radical Left to exist (ibid.: 256). This seems to emanate from a close and productive reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus where the most concrete revolutionary programme advised is to take back desire from capitalism through accelerated deterritorialization and in doing so open up the possibility for a post-­capitalist future. This aspect of revolutionary biopolitics, the temporal zone, is not unique to post-Deleuzo-Guattarian bodies of thought. Alain Badiou, who makes little

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attempt to hide his disdain for Deleuze, also attributes a temporal zone to the biopolitics of revolution. In his essay ‘The Idea of Communism’ Badiou states that participating in revolutionary communism creates subjects, or in his terms, the event of communism creates a subjectivation (2010: 3). In the case that concerns us here, we will say that an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process (his or her entry into a body-­of-truth) is also, in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History. For about two centuries (from Babeuf ’s ‘community of equals’ to the 1980s), the word ‘communism’ was the most important name of an Idea located in the field of emancipatory, or revolutionary, politics. To be a communist was of course to be a militant of a Communist party in a given country. But to be a militant of a Communist Party was also to be one of millions of agents of a historical orientation of all of Humanity. In the context of the Idea of communism, subjectivation constituted the link between the local belonging to a political procedure and the huge symbolic domain of Humanity’s forward march towards its collective emancipation. To give out a flyer in a marketplace was also to mount the stage of History. ibid.: 3–4, original emphasis

Despite also being a fierce critic of Negri (see Noys 2014: 69–70), Badiou’s conceptualization of time is strikingly similar to Negri’s arrow of time. In this case the ‘arrow’ is shot from Babeuf, stretches throughout time in a single trajectory through the present and opens up a future at its tip. It is an irreversible and accelerated line of flight. While in an earlier work, Theory of the Subject (2013, originally published 1982), Badiou rejects any kind of immanent, single line of flight, suggesting ‘that we have to zigzag between the logic of trajectories and the logic of tendencies so they each correct the other’ (quoted in Noys 2014: 69), in 2010’s ‘The Idea of Communism’ Badiou seems to embrace Negri’s temporal trajectory, as translated from Anti-Oedipus, and ascribe to it a productive biopolitics. More than advocating a constant line of flight, Badiou is celebrating the biopolitics of revolution. By entering a subject into a History, a political identity is conferred onto them. ‘Communism’ for Badiou is not an ideology nor is it a politics, but it is a shared common identity that functions to bind individuals together, much tighter than any mere ideological bond. Revolution in this

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sense acts as a clinamen, binding different singularities together. ‘Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable, if not identical identities; rather it takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable’ (Nancy 2008: 6). This is why Negri’s concept of the multitude is still ultimately biopolitical. The multitude is Hardt and Negri’s schema for revolution that is located both within and against neo-­liberal IWC. Much like the Accelerationist movement, the multitude grows within neo-­liberalism and adapts to its hegemonic labour form of immaterial labour. It is constructed as a loose network of singularities that are bound together by ‘the common’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 66–67). The common is perhaps the most theoretically developed aspect of Negri’s system, which he applies to every project of revolution. In Multitude, Hardt and Negri define the common simply as a site of production: it is what is produced by the multitude and it is also what produces them, allowing communication and the formation of networks of revolution (2004: xv), implying that it is always immanent within revolution and has both a temporal and spatial character. But it is in Negri’s Time for Revolution where the notion of the common is elaborated on in its most succinct form, that he fully illustrates how it comes to compose a crucial pillar in both his analysis of and prescription for revolution. The first aspect of the common is its temporality. Negri is, ‘concerned ultimately with the question of production, that is, with the productivity of time, and hence articulates a concept of time as essentially productive, as constitutionally collective, and as potentially constitutive of new, antagonistic, and revolutionary subjectivities’ (Casarino and Negri 2008: 225). It is the accelerated temporality that gives the common its guiding productive characteristic. The production of a temporality that opens up a future of the world to-­come is at once inherently communal and teleological, so once singularities become concerned with the production of this temporality they assume the form of the common and the experience of the common is the mark of this teleological process (Negri 2003: 185). The common, then, is constituted on the line of flight, and acts as the motor that accelerates the line’s trajectory (ibid.: 162). Or, as Negri phrases it, ‘the teleology of the common, that is, in that teleology that at each instant is opened in a creative manner to the immeasurability of the to-­come’ (ibid.: 224–225).

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The second aspect of the common is that it is biopolitical. It produces the subjectivities that constitute it and unifies them with a common name. Negri describes the common name as the ‘teleological trace’ (a teleology of the instant, the telos of the event) that unites the events in the construction of a community: it is thus the ontological composition of the events that expresses itself as power and imagines itself as reality to-­come (2003: 161). The accelerated temporalization of living labour, which constitutes the common, de-­totalizes the temporality of capitalism; it blows it up by accelerating it as it runs along the same line. This in turn creates a multitude of revolutionary singularities within their temporization (Osborne 2008: 16), and then ascribes them an identity. In this way, the common acts as the clinamen of the multitude. The common name is the relation which is capable of binding the subjects together within the project, or, Negri would say, praxis, of revolution, a clinamen because, to paraphrase Deleuze, it is essential that the singular atoms be related to other singular atoms within their common movement (Deleuze 2001: 184). Singularity takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable (Nancy 2008: 6). Within the clinamen, each singularity retains an aspect of independence; however its freedom of movement is restricted, it is bound within the movement, accelerated beyond the speed of thought, to the other atoms (Deleuze 2001: 184). Nevertheless the clinamen appears as freedom because its movement is not codified by ‘nature’, by that which is heterogeneous to it; its movement is its own (Negri 2003: 45). In other words, because its movement is not controlled by the heterogeneous force of capitalism the multitude appears as freedom and it is able to accelerate its speed beyond that of capitalist thought. The singularities that compose the multitude surrender a portion of their autonomy and, to a degree, become a homogenous force unified under a common name leading it into ontology. ‘The common is ontology considered from the point of view of passion, of the force that agitates and constitutes both world and divinity’ (Negri 2003: 188). By reading the notion of clinamen through classic materialism, Negri positions it as freedom, and then by adding Spinoza’s ontology of materialism into his reading, he finally forms the clinamen as a passionate desire for freedom (ibid.). This passionate desire for freedom of the revolutionary produces a ‘unity’ and a ‘value’ (an ethics) that is affectively experienced as love (ibid.: 178).

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Love comes to occupy centre stage in Negri’s schema for revolution insofar as love, ‘which is the father of all passions and is in turn knowledge’, is ‘reason itself that produces through the common name, and reflection (that corresponds to the ontological conditions that permit the power of the common name) is always amorous’ (Negri 2003: 177). The accelerated temporality of the eternal is by definition beyond bounds, it cannot be measured, it cannot be perceived and as such it cannot be understood. Therefore, it is love that calls a subject into being (ibid.: 211). Negri goes on to note that this is not only true within his schema of revolution, but (in a similar vein as the famous quote from Che Guevara, ‘At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality’) love has been the truth of the genealogy of all revolutionary thought (ibid.: 210–211). The use of love as the prime mechanism of biopower within revolution is what exposes revolutionaries to an exaggerated risk of microfascisms, microfascisms that in turn can metastasize into overt macrofascism. At the level of affect, love does act as a counter to neo-­liberal individualization since love by definition is communal. Love is an identification with others par excellence, as well as a remaking of borders to include the feelings of those loved within our understanding of self. In other words, ‘I’ as a self-­contained identity implicitly becomes ‘we’, because in love we see a reflection of ourselves in unity with the loved object that allows otherness to dissolve (Kristeva 1987: 31–45, 111, 120; 1986: 243–250). In the essay ‘Shattered Love’, Jean-Luc Nancy notes that the self is supressed in love and that the correlative suppression of the self of love has its alternative truth as well as its ultimate affectivity. Love always resituates itself beyond the self. This beyond the self is necessarily the place of the other. It is the place of the same in the other, or, in Hegel’s terms, having in the other the moment of one’s substance (Nancy 2008: 86–87). This conception of love as ‘having in the other the moment of one’s substance’ – love as narcissism – is at the heart of love of the community. In love, the other no longer exists as ‘Other’, but merely as an external embodiment of the self. Love is born out of egoism and this egoistic love has the potential to create a bond based on the shared desire for the new (Secomb 2007: 30). In Negri’s work, love is unequivocally the love of this ‘new’ social form. It functions to bind networks of singularities – rather than a unified identity –

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together (Negri 2003: 211). He also notes that while the biopolitical production of revolution forms, as well as goes beyond, a common name, a ‘nominal dispositif’ (ibid.: 145), it is still reliant on, ‘at least two ontological dispositifs [. . .] the metamorphosis of bodies and [. . .] the revolution of the constitution of the common’ (ibid.: 249). Negri is referring to the new machinic assemblages of bodies formed by ‘constant deterritorialization’ and the way that the new biopolitical common causes the bodies and singularities within it to present themselves as subjects with a new biopolitical language of productivity and political ethics (ibid.: 250). Revolution creates these new and creative dispositifs that are linked to the accelerated temporality by love (ibid.). Negri understands the biopolitical field as a ‘constituent affirmation’ of creative difference (Chiesa and Toscano 2009: 4) and, as such, he views biopolitics as being both positive and creative and celebrates its dispositifs. This is what Lyotard termed the ‘libidinal dispositif’, the new and creative apparatus that enjoys the deterritorializing and transformative force of capitalism while subverting capitalism by securitizing a future to-­come (Lyotard 2014: 203). While Negri acknowledges the existence of ‘authoritarian’ dispositifs (2003: 95), he concludes that these authoritarian dispositifs have become inoperative in the late twentieth century (ibid.: 144). This new dispositif is: [Like] a virus thriving in the stomach of capital: in the restless yet undirected youth movements of the late 60s and early 70s ‘another figure is rising’ which will not be stifled by any pedantic theoretical critique. As Deleuze and Guattari assert, ‘nothing ever died of contradictions’, and the only thing that will kill capitalism is its own ‘excess’ and the ‘unserviceability’ loosed by it, an excess of wandering desire over the regulating mechanisms of antiproduction. Avanessian and Mackay 2014: 16

As such, ‘every limit is overcome by dispositifs that are all characterized by a single teleological necessity: to remove and annul Power and misery, and so to make poverty – as the expression of the desire for life – triumph’ (Negri 2003: 204). What Negri (and Left-Accelerationists more generally) are refusing to acknowledge is the affective nature of fear that dispositifs foster. Within neo-­ liberalism, fear works as a secondary motor in accelerating temporality. Paul Virilio (2012) and Brian Massumi (2010) have demonstrated how, within neo-­ liberalism, the affectively felt fear of a possible future to-­come becomes more

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real than reality because the actual reality of any possible threat can only be felt in the present (Massumi 2010: 54). This creates a situation where dispositifs must be created to securitize the future. This situation requires a very different understanding of dispositifs that focuses on the micro-­practices and governing security technologies of contemporary biopolitics, that explores how biopower is produced as a means of securitization. It is these dispositifs of security, analysed by Foucault, that need to be considered in order to problematize the biopolitical production of revolution. A central concern with any biopolitical production is the formation and regulation of an economically organized population that is situated in a given space and must be securitized from an aleatory future that is contingent on a certain element of random chance (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 278–279). ‘Chance is therefore always a political and moral concept which arises in the context of changing cosmologies of being. However chance is figured, it is always figured as an integral part of some political and moral economy’ (ibid.: 280). This immediately imposes a preoccupation with an accelerated future to-­come that needs to be securitized in such a way as to ensure it is ‘positive’, in other words, the production of a prosperous future (ibid.: 279). The ethical-­ political dimension of the new machinic subjectivities formed in the acceleration of revolution and bound together by love and the common must, by necessity, not only reject the reformism of liberals and social democrats and the technophobia of nostalgic Fordist revolutionaries, but actively expel them as a possible threat to their vision of the future to-­come, because the contingency on which the future relies is perceived as risk while promoting what is perceived as desirable (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 281; Evans 2013a: 46). In this way, revolution has no hope of escaping the classic paradigm of identity politics where a homogenous identity is formed through the affective fear of an omnipresent existential threat. This is to suggest, as Brian Evans and Julian Reid have, that political identity is fundamentally fascist (Evans and Reid 2013: 1). It is fascist insofar as it is based on a drive for power at the expense of a reterritorialized desire through the dispositif of security. Security is fundamentally correlated with a certain understanding of freedom (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 282), but security apparatuses’ understanding of freedom is not freedom as unrestricted and liberated flows of desire. Rather biopolitical apparatuses are concerned with

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the freedom to move only within a given territory (ibid.: 281–282). This prompted Foucault to claim that, biopolitically, ‘freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security’ (quoted in Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 282). Freedom within biopolitics can only be understood as the reterritorialization of flows into an axiomatic Manichean system. Revolutionary subjectivity is often based on the notion that freedom must come with a corresponding terror. That is to say that in order to achieve any measure of freedom, there must be a correlative but transitional period of terror. This is something that Badiou is explicit about when he writes that revolution, specifically communist revolution, situates subjects within a ‘History’, a shared history of militants fighting in a communal struggle for a future emancipation (as previously mentioned, the accelerated temporality moving from a mythic shared History to a future to-­come) and in doing so it endows them with a subjectivity (Badiou 2010: 13–14). Communism becomes an essentialized identity that is ascribed to people, and forms a community that is based around a project of revolution. This revolutionary identity demands to be securitized since, as Žižek (2005) points out, to love one group and, by extension, its guiding ideology means that you must at the same time hate all those whose identity poses (or at least could pose) a threat to that group. Slavoj Žižek defends this position by stating that revolutionaries are, ‘possessed by what Alain Badiou called the “passion of the Real”: if you say A – equality, human rights and freedoms – you should not shirk for its consequences but muster the courage to say B – the terror needed to really defend and assert the A’ (ibid.). Badiou shares this sentiment in his readings of Saint-Just when he states that those who do not want virtue and terror want corruption because, after all, ‘terror is nothing but the abstract upshot of a consideration required by every revolution’ (2009: 88). This is a position that, excluding Negri, the Accelerationists are at least tacitly in agreement with in their writing that it is time to, ‘move beyond good and evil’ to ‘leave behind the logics of failed [anti-­identitarian resistance] revolts and to think ahead again’ (Fisher 2014b: 345, 346). Microfascisms – as well as overt forms of fascism – are something to be embraced as a necessary means to a just end. This embracing of fascistic tendencies ascribes to the political a decisive importance over the death instinct (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 160). The productive biopolitical social ordering confers onto the ego all the investments

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of repression, the phenomena of identification, of ‘superegoization’ and castration, the resignation desires (becoming boss, becoming a general, acquiring rank), including the resignation to dying in the service of the society, whereas the drive itself is projected onto the outside and turned against the imagined ‘Others’ (the outsider; the foreigner) (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 348; Lacan 2002: 62). The ‘community [. . .] becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader . . .) [that] necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it’ (Nancy 2008: xxxix). The revolutionary community ‘masters’ its future by (re)discovering its pure origin, creating a, ‘teleology through its genealogy’ (Esposito 2010: 100, original emphasis). It becomes what Jean-Luc Nancy (2008) famously termed a ‘community of death’, an immanent community that operates at the intensity of death and of self-­destruction. What is notable about these ‘operative’ communities, especially if they are ostensibly tied together by a project of Left revolution, is that diagnostic mechanisms to detect the reproduction of microfascisms are both incapable of forming and unwelcome. The revolutionary community creates a sphere of immanence, meaning that for its members the community’s survival is paramount. Any attempt to question the community is untenable, as critique requires a certain degree of distance, and its members are bound within the community at a constant intensity. Even if analysis and critique were possible, they are unwelcome. The love for the community by its members, primary love as narcissism, means that any critique becomes threat and those with the distance to formulate such a critical position are, by their very nature, foreign and must be expelled. *  *  *  * Among the Accelerationists, Negri alone maintains an explicitly critical stance on the merger of freedom with terror in his condemnation of Jacobinism (2003: 120–121). In order to bypass the problem of biopolitics producing microfascisms, Negri’s conception of revolution seeks to shift the space of revolution from an enclosed territory to an expansive one. The space of biopolitical security dispositifs is a fundamental aspect of how the security parameters are organized (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 279), and as Negri and Hardt demonstrated in Empire and Multitude, the constitutive space of

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neo-­liberal Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) is no longer tied to the territorial borders of the nation-­state. Rather, the territory of security has been opened up to a global scale, connected through a series of networks. Conversely, their schema of revolution, the multitude, is also constituted on the same global network structure. This form of revolution must flow along the same lines or strata as the oppressive structures of neo-­liberal IWC. This means that revolution is not heterogeneous to systems of oppression, as Badiou or Žižek conceive it, but is born within them, undoing the systems from the inside out. This is a conception of revolution shared by the other Accelerationist thinkers. Whereas they acknowledge the terror that this system of change would engender, Negri theorizes that it can be avoided by accelerating past dispositifs of security. The multitude’s network organization is meant to bypass classic identity politics by placing the emphasis on singularity rather than on a unified communal identity. In this way, the multitude is not a movement towards the negation of difference, but towards a system where difference no longer matters. It is conceived as a set of absolute singularities, each different from the others, unified by the common without falling into a unity (Hardt and Negri 2004: 99–102). Multitude is fundamentally a class concept, where class is defined as the site of struggle (ibid.: 103–104). Following Foucault and Deleuze, neo-­liberal IWC has moved beyond discipline societies, creating disciplined individuals, to societies of control that molecularize subjects into dividuals (Deleuze 2001: 22–27). In his book on Foucault, Deleuze describes these dividuals as being created through the process of the ‘superfold’ (2006b: 131). Through an examination of ‘Postscript’ as well as Deleuze’s book Foucault, Alexander Galloway proposes that what Deleuze was beginning to articulate in his later work was a new image of society and the self through this new trope of the ‘superfold’ that involves the recognition of the computer as its central mitigating factor. ‘Just as the fold was Deleuze’s diagram for the modern subject of the baroque period, the superfold is the new “active mechanism” for life within computerised control society’ (Galloway 2012: 524). Galloway goes on to think of the superfold as: [Being] ‘proper to the chains of the genetic code’ and the progeny of an ‘unlimited diversity of combinations’, would follow a diagrammatic logic of dispersive and distributive relations within networks, of iterative regress via

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computational recursion. Instead of the human coming into a relationship with itself (the baroque), the human comes into a relation with ‘forces from the outside’ such as the silicon of the computer chip or exogenous factors from genetic engineering. The dividual therefore does not so much carry pleats in its soul, as Deleuze says of the baroque subject, but a tessellated, recombinant soul, if soul is still the proper word, forming and reforming across the metastable skein of the bioinformatic ecosystem. ibid.

For Negri the superfolded dividual is fundamentally an economic model of subjectivity. Neo-­liberalism has produced a ‘weak sovereignty’ where the molecularized dividual is biopolitically produced through a logic of circulation rather than dispositifs of security (Negri 2003: 226). Revolution can exploit this weak sovereignty in its organizational structure that focuses on individuals within networks and does not fall into the trap of identity politics (ibid.: 227). As such, Negri writes that we no longer need to speak of dispositifs or assemblages, but of constellations (ibid.: 228). A ‘productive constellation’ is formed where the power-­differences of the multitude co-­operate, creating new power. A constellation is more productive than the sum of the productive singularities (taken separately) that co-­ operate within them. It is thus for this reason that the singularities endeavour to co-­operate and the singular multitudes form constellations, because in that way they may produce more; or better still, they can continuously move beyond the singular measure of productivity and can open themselves increasingly to the immeasurable. ibid.

This is a form of cooperation imposed by the economic conditions of immaterial labour within neo-­liberalism. Negri writes that neo-­liberalism has annulled any concept of the outside, so cooperation can no longer be formed through heterogeneous relations, only spontaneously through the social organization of work, making it ‘power in reality’ (ibid.: 229, original emphasis). Negri is in full agreement with Foucault who also acknowledged that the globalization of markets within neo-­liberal IWC forced populations to be considered through the circulation of markets (Foucault 2008: 56), although Foucault maintained that the object of neo-­liberal governmentality was not to create a market society in which the regulatory principle is the exchange of

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commodities as the mechanisms of competition. Rather, neo-­liberalism created, ‘a society subject to the dynamic of competition. Not a supermarket society, but an enterprise society. The homo œconomicus sought after is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production’ (ibid.: 147). Where Foucault diverges from Negri is in his acknowledgement that neo-­ liberal governmentality is not anti-­state. The state still has a regulatory function in relation to mechanisms of competition (ibid.). In this way, neo-­liberal governmentality shows itself to be profoundly Kantian insofar as its focus is the achievement of Kant’s perpetual peace through the unlimited nature of ever-­expanding markets (ibid.: 56–57). This means that the dispositifs of regulation must be securitized. In no way was Foucault suggesting that competition was regulated to be fair or that the goal was a Keynesian equilibrium. Rather he was demonstrating that dispositifs of security are still pervasive throughout neo-­liberal governmentality and, as such, identity politics cannot simply be abandoned, a point that Brian Massumi also makes when he notes that singularization within neo-­liberalism does not replace communal or generic identities, but rather cuts off possibilities of radical change through the affective fear generated by dispositifs of security (Massumi 1993: 33). The effect of fear of the future to-­come means that life is what is perceived as being at stake. Ultimately, the function of all dispositifs of security is reducible to the protection of life. Since life needs to be securitized, life itself becomes the referent object of power and all struggles (both of Power and resistance to Power) become fundamentally a struggle for life (Deleuze in Evans 2013a: 47). ‘[When] life becomes the principle for political strategies, the violence so often associated with historical fascism appears less pathological and more reasoned’ (Evans 2013a: 47). In this way, we see that microfascism is intrinsically linked with all forms of biopower and biopolitics. In their move to reveal actual instances of the multitude, Hardt and Negri published Declaration (2012), a short piece commenting on what they viewed (at the time at least) as the revolutionary movements of the multitude as embodied in, among other movements, Tunisia and Egypt’s Arab Spring and the global Occupy movement. These movements are what Franco Berardi (2013) described as the multitude, ‘coming out of nowhere and going nowhere’.

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Their quick celebration of the revolt in Egypt, which has since fallen into sectarian violence and military dictatorship, and of Occupy which simply dissolved without effecting any significant change, betrays the fundamental flaws within their concept of multitude, namely the premise that the weak sovereignty of neo-­liberalism has opened up a subjectivity beyond classic identity politics, allowing the birth of the revolutionary multitude that would be, by definition, anti-(micro)fascist. Subjectivity within neo-­liberalism is, ‘made real on account of its ability to live through the ongoing emergency of its own emergence’ (Evans 2013a: 57), making it the subject of crises (Evans 2013b). As previously noted, the dispositifs of security have not gone away or become obsolete in neo-­liberalism, but rather have continued to function by adjusting the individual to the crises of neo-­liberalism. In doing so, they lock the subject within a biopolitical identity, despite the corresponding singularization of the subject. Affective fear aids in accelerating neo-­liberal temporality, while working to produce the superegoization of the unconscious. This paranoiac subjectivity is central to contemporary fascisms (Evans 2013a: 57). The second conceptual flaw of multitude is the assumption that it is by default antifascist. The lines that the multitude flow across are the same lines in which Oedipus becomes fractalized into multiple oedipuses that join together in oedipal assemblages. Since social production is desiring production ‘under determinate conditions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 29) individuals cannot be empirically separated from society (Evans 2013a: 45). This means that the normative strata that have reterritorialized the social body would have also, to some degree, territorialized the individual, over-­coding them with normative social codes. And since, as previously noted, lines of resistance and lines of repression share a mutual immanence, oedipal mechanisms of repression are always in the middle (au milieu) of revolution’s lines of flight. Without a mechanism for diagnosing fascistic tendencies, each singularity carries with it its own micro-­oedipuses and microfascisms into the network. When they come into contact with each other they form new micro-­oedipal machines. *  *  *  * This chapter has worked to show that revolution, regardless of what ideological position it arises from, is characterized as having three predominate features:

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it is biopolitical, it is based on an accelerated temporality and has a Promethean orientation. What is striking in this analysis is the way that projects of revolution mirror capitalism in many ways. As the previous chapter demonstrated: first and foremost, capitalism needs to be conceptualized as a theory and practice of creating subjectivity. Capitalism has radically reconfigured the subject as based on an omnipresent lack of security. The subject then obsessively tries to fill this lack with consumption, while desperately attempting to securitize their precarious economic/social position against any perceived outside threat. At the heart of this process is an accelerated temporality. Capitalism, especially in its neo-­liberal form, needs to continuously destroy markets in order to create new ones and the faster it can accomplish this, the more profitable it is. This is best represented by the financialization of the economy and high-­frequency trading. This is a system where transactions are measured in milliseconds and pushed to move ever faster. High-­frequency trading has become so pervasive, that the multinational financial service company Credit Suisse titled their March 2017 Trading Strategy ‘We Are All High-Frequency Traders Now’ (Vlastelica 2017). The accelerated economic sphere has a direct relationship to both the social and mental spheres in a society, meaning that an accelerated temporality is also found within neo-­liberal subjects. Finally, capitalism also has a Promethean orientation. While this may seem counter-­intuitive given the very real fact that for many people the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism forecloses the possibility of any future (Fisher 2014a). Indeed, the only ‘stability’ capitalism offers is that people’s economic situations cannot change. Nevertheless, as the last chapter argued, capitalism remains an aspirational system. Failure to secure a future where you are free of debt and allowed some degree of economic and social mobility is always viewed as a personal and moral failure of the individual, not the system as a whole. Taking these defining characteristics as a whole, we are forced to agree with Deleuze and Guattari that capitalism is a revolutionary system insofar as it is the only social system based on decoded flows (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 153). Capitalism, ‘liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives

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it towards this limit’ (ibid.). In its neo-­liberal form, capitalism evades capture by the State, meaning that its revolutionary liberation of desire – within the strict limits of consumption – is both global and nomadic. The question then becomes: how can you achieve revolutionary change without the revolution recreating mechanisms of repression?

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Resistance Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics Seeing how revolution has not just the possibility, but also the probability of recreating microfascisms that metastasize throughout movements, the Left is left with the persistent question: how can we affect revolutionary change? Or, put another way, is it possible to have a revolution – an ontological transformation of the world – without revolution? This is far from a new question for the Left. Indeed, this was a guiding question for Deleuze and Guattari. As the previous chapter noted, Deleuze and Guattari were univocal in locating the reproduction of Oedipal repression and microfascisms in projects of revolution. However, they remained hopeful that revolutionary change could be achieved. In an essay from 1984 titled ‘May ’68 Did Not Take Place’, Deleuze and Guattari (2001) argue that the social and political uprisings in May ’68 constituted an event that cannot be reduced to social determinism or causal linkages, but rather constituted a deviation in relation to laws, opening onto a new field of possibilities (Stivale 2008: 106). The problem was that France was unable to assimilate the event, to create, ‘new agencies of collective enunciation to match the new subjectivity’ and instead showed ‘a radical incapacity to create a subjective redeployment on the collective level, as May ’68 required’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2001: 210). This was the reason it ‘did not take place’, France and Europe was too invested in pursuing an American-­style organization of economics and society. So the event did take place, but it did not have a space in which it could be situated and understood. In fact, the essay’s title, Mai 68 N’a Pas Eu Lieu, is better translated as ‘May ’68 Did Not Have A Place’. Deleuze and Guattari end their essay by arguing that ‘the field of the possible’, the possibility for revolutionary change within society, lies beyond the

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neo-­liberalism of America and Europe in international networks of alliance with resistance in the Global South. These networks can offer, ‘creative redeployments that can contribute to a resolution of the current [neo-­liberal] crisis and that can take over where a generalized May ’68, amplified bifurcation or fluctuation, left off ’ (ibid.: 211). This creative redeployment is a form of resistance at the level of subjectivity, since, for Deleuze, the modern is created, ‘like a focal point of resistance to the two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed once and for all’ (Deleuze 2006b: 105–106). For Deleuze, this is a creative struggle for the right to, ‘difference, variation and metamorphosis’ (ibid.: 106). May ’68 acted as a ‘rehearsal’ of the three key questions creative resistance must ask: What can I do? What do I know? What am I? (ibid.: 115). Interestingly, this is a position that the French philosopher and political militant Régis Debray also adopted in 2017 when looking back on his 1967 publication of Revolution in the Revolution. Looking towards the recently successful Cuban Revolution, Revolution in the Revolution sought to ‘free the present from the past’, to argue that revolution cannot be formulaic, so revolutionaries are better served by a strategic flexibility and adaptation rather than an academic understanding of previous revolutions (Debray 2017: 30–42). Nevertheless, Debray argued that there are certain unchangeable features that all revolutions contain; foremost among them is that it is an armed and violent insurrectionist guerrilla war against a state power. Debray perversely argues that the first war the revolution must fight is not against the state, but against pacifist reformers and future renegades (ibid.: 39). The confrontation must not be reactionary violence in the name of ‘self-­defence’, but offensive combat to the death. Debray goes as far as to say that: ‘The failure of armed self-­defence of the masses corresponds on the military level to the failure of reformism on the political level. In the new context of struggle to the death there is no place for spurious solutions, no place for the pursuit of an equilibrium between oligarchic and popular forces through tacit non-­ aggression pacts’ (ibid.: 41). Interestingly, Debray himself has since condemned this position. In his preface to the 2017 reprint he wrote that history has proven that revolutionary vanguards, armed struggle and the theory of the foco (guerrilla warfare) were

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not the correct method of uprooting dictators in Latin America (ibid.: 10–11). Rather, political and social rights won in Latin America and the dictatorships end came about through the resistance of trade unions, rural political movements and through the resistance posed by the revival of united civil societies. Ironically, while in 1967 Debray sought to revolutionize revolution through his theory of the foco, it was the addition to his 2017 preface that actually opened his work up to a new theory of revolutionary change through a practice of resistance. Debray argues that while armed vanguards did not achieve lasting egalitarian change, they nevertheless inspired active resistance to oppression (ibid.: 11). This is a form of resistance understood through a Clausewitzian military lens of confrontation, an opposition of forces. Key to this is that the resistants are not reacting to state violence, but actively resisting for egalitarian social and political rights. Resistance here is a dynamic process designed to enhance the capacity to resist that cannot be reduced to a mere fight or flight response. Rather it exists within a, ‘complex and dynamic spatio-­ temporal field that manifests itself in postures of domination and defiance’ (Caygill 2013: 4). Undoubtedly, the most philosophically rigorous examination of resistance to date is Howard Caygill’s 2013 book, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance. In a similar vein to Debray’s 1967 writings on revolution, Caygill argues that: A philosophy of resistance has itself to resist the pressure of concept-­ formation, of reducing the practices of resistance to a single concept amenable to legitimation and appropriation by the very state-­form that it began by defying. Yet, while remaining attentive to such risks, it cannot renounce the responsibility for seeking a certain consistency in the practices of resistance: while resistance has continually to be reinvented, its history of inventions demands philosophical reflection. 2013: 6

This approach leads Caygill to an examination of several resistance movements, ranging from the French Resistance and Fanon to Gandhi, from the Zapatistas and Jean Genet to the women of Greenham Common. The unifying feature in Caygill’s analysis is, similar to Debray, a fundamental strategic and military understanding of resistance as the clash of forces. Caygill looks to both Derrida and Foucault here, paying sharp attention to Foucault’s

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well-­known formulation that where there is power, there is resistance and that resistance always comes first (Foucault in Caygill 2013: 8). The thinker from whom Caygill draws the most is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Clausewitz and the argument he developed in On War that war is always war of resistance (Caygill 2013: 10, 15–21). The goal of war, ‘is dedicated not only to compromising or annihilating the enemy’s capacity to resist, but also to preserving and enhancing one’s own capacity in the face of the enemy’s application of force’ (ibid.: 10). The result is a conception of resistance as a philosophically informed praxis, defined by a structural fluidity and an ability to adapt to vastly different political, social and cultural contexts. Caygill also, importantly, thinks through the notion of resistance in terms of consciousness. That is to say, in much the same way that Marx theorized class consciousness, resistance creates a ‘resistant consciousness’. Through a reading of Marx with Nietzsche and their antithetical views on the Paris Commune, Caygill divides resistant consciousness into two disparate forms, based on a logic of vengeance. Resistance to injustice can be generative of ressentiment, a resentment and hostility towards the master class (2013: 36). This is a creative force, giving birth to a set of values, but it is also, in Nietzschean terms, a ‘slave morality’, a consciousness that needs external hostile forces in order to act (ibid.: 34). In other words, it is a fundamentally reactive consciousness; it is resistant by contrast only. Within ressentiment, ‘resistance is defined by negation, by the desire to preserve itself in the face of attack, and that sentimentality is dangerous in this context of enmity and revenge’ (ibid.: 35). Nietzsche saw this as a form of ‘passive nihilism’, a condition defined by a drive for vengeance. This creates a situation where the drive for vengeance subsumes all else. Resistance becomes a force of pure negation, even negating the drive to live. At the political level, insurrections flowing out of ressentiment tend to glorify the self-­sacrificing martyr through a discourse of final and eternal vengeance (Caygill 2013: 37). Nietzsche famously saw the resistance of the Paris Commune, and socialism1 more generally, as being fundamentally structured by ressentiment, and likened it to Christianity insofar as socialists and Christians believe that they can endure hardship so long as someone else is responsible for it. ‘The future is resentful, the pursuit of revenge in the name of justice and fraternity would eventually destroy itself in an accelerated version of the self-­destruction of Christianity’ (ibid.: 36).

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This is analogical to what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘subjugated group’, a group that is subordinated to a socius as a fixed support. The group attributes to itself the productive forces of the socius, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom, but also effuses itself with the death-­carrying elements within the system. The socius seems to be immortal insofar as it generates a field of immanence that subsumes the group (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 348–349). Desire within the group is trapped in a reactive circuit that forecloses the possibility of affirmative action (Deleuze 2006a: 71). Conversely, noble morality begins with an affirmation of difference, but it does not allow itself to be governed by external forces. It achieves this by defining itself affirmatively in creating a new world with no thought for resisting the old. This is what Marx saw in the Paris Commune, not a reactive resistance against Empire, but an affirmation of itself for its own good (Caygill 2013: 38). Marx saw the Commune as an ‘expansive political form’ that was able to combine resistance in the present with a future orientation (ibid.: 40). The seizure of initiative and the flexibility or elasticity of response to difficult circumstances exceed any logic of reaction or ressentiment, even if this reappears in the ‘capacity for sacrifice’ and Marx’s search for ‘who is to blame’ for its failure. For Marx it was the Communards themselves who were to blame for not being sufficiently affirmative in seizing the opportune moment, or kairos, by taking the initiative in the civil war. The right moment was missed because of moral and political scruples: ‘They did not want to start the civil war, as if that mischievous abortion Thiers had not already started the civil war with his attempt to disarm Paris’ (Marx and Lenin 2008, 86). By renouncing the initiative and lapsing into a reactive posture, the Commune compromised its own invention of an ‘expansive political form’. ibid., original emphasis

The noble morality is formed through spontaneity. It actively seeks out its Other in order to affirm itself, becoming what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘subject-­group’. This allows the group to generate its own internal laws and prohibitions, moving beyond the metaphysical concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to the secular concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (Caygill 2013: 34–35). It is this morality, grounded in a secular materialism, that allows this form of consciousness to ground itself in the present, but maintain a vision of a new future. In other

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words, it enacts a temporal structure where the past and the future are both operative in present actions. A subject-­group is a group whose libidinal investments are revolutionary. The group causes desire to penetrate into the social field and transform the socius by subordinating it to the group’s desiring-­ production (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 348). *  *  *  * The choice Caygill gives us is between a reactive resistance that can function only by reaffirming the superiority of the power it opposes, or an active and affirmative resistance that is able to generate its own laws and vision of the future, making the group revolutionary in its ability to affect change. The answer is obvious, only active resistance stemming from a subject-­group can achieve an ontological transformation of the world. One such group that is near and dear to Caygill’s analysis is the Zapatistas in south-­east Mexico. The Zapatistas have achieved a remarkable capacity to resist state repression and participation in the violent system of neo-­liberal Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), while radically transforming their world along egalitarian lines of their own creation. Early in the morning on 1 January 1994 – the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, came into effect, launching Mexico fully into the neo-­liberal system of IWC – the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN) declared war on the Mexican government and seized seven municipal zones in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, including the state’s capital, San Cristóbal de las Casas. The EZLN emerged as a clandestine military organization composed primarily (but not exclusively) of indigenous people. However, they quickly set themselves apart from the Marxist guerrilla focos that had become common in Latin America throughout the 1970s and 1980s by their refusal to take power, instead claiming that their aim was to create a space for democracy. Since their inception on 17 November 1983, the compañer@s2 of the EZLN have undergone constant transformations: first abandoning their initial Leninist vanguardism as a result of their contact with the indigenous populations in the Lacandón and then, following their 1994 uprising, gradually dissolving its clandestine military structure into something that is far more

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fluid, inclusive and stable in its resistance. This movement became most explicit in 2006 when they released their Sixth Declaration from the Lacandón Jungle and launched its corresponding ‘Other Campaign’ (La Otra), which began the process of creating lines of support between subaltern struggles throughout Mexico. La Otra consisted of sending out delegations throughout Mexico and into the United States’ Southwest charting an international ‘diagnostic of suffering’ caused by neo-­liberalism as well as resistance to capitalism. Following their ‘field research’, the Zapatistas hold multiple conferences, meetings and other gatherings with other resistants from around the world establishing a set of strategies to resist domination and a set of goals that move towards their vision of an egalitarian future. Undoubtedly, it is the Zapatista autonomy that most dramatically sets them apart from other resistance movements. The state of Chiapas is a mountainous area largely blanketed by the Lacandón Jungle. The population of Chiapas is largely indigenous and at the time of the 1994 uprising, Chiapas was the poorest region in North America. These factors made the area the perfect breeding ground for the Zapatistas, who, village by village, gained support for their cause from the local populations over the eleven years prior to their uprising. The Zapatistas first declared the existence of thirty-­ eight autonomous rebel municipalities in an EZLN communiqué dated 19 December 1994. While initially the municipalities formed part of a political and military strategy for establishing territorial control, by 1996, in the context of the peace talks of San Andrés, the labels autonomous and indigenous supplemented that of rebel. Immediately after the 16 February 1996 signing of the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture3 the support bases began to implement their right to autonomy, regardless of the possible future implementation of constitutional reforms. Mora 2015: 91

Despite Mexican state repression and harassment from local paramilitary groups, they control a vast area of Chiapas. Rather than seeking recognition and vying for greater redistribution of Mexican state resources, EZLN support bases enacted a politics of refusal by impeding the presence of functionaries and rejecting government development projects. The autonomous municipalities simultaneously exercise self-­government through diverse social

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programmes, such as education, conflict resolution, health and agriculture. In doing so, the Zapatistas, implement their right to autonomy at the fringes of the state. They explicitly claim a marginal sociopolitical location as part of their own political project in ways that parallel what James Scott has referred to as the ‘art of not being governed’ (Mora 2015: 88). These autonomous zones are governed by the Zapatista mandate to lead by obeying, a system of direct democratic voting, that has given rise to an environment where women’s rights, LGBT and queer rights, child rights, education and healthcare flourish. The Zapatista autonomy, often referred to as the decision to live as though capitalism has already ended, reveals the affirmative nature of their resistance. The Zapatistas resist in order to affirm their autonomy, their Otherness (Marcos 2001: 167). The autonomous municipalities are spaces of resistance, spaces resisting in order to create an Other world that is not subjected to neo-­liberal domination. The Zapatistas have also set themselves apart from other resistance movements by developing an entirely unique philosophy of resistance, zapatismo,4 developed through the poetic and philosophic writings published online as well as in the Mexican newspaper la Jornada. Many of these writings have been subsequently published in the collections Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings edited by Juanita Ponce de León, ¡Ya Basta! Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising edited by Žiga Vodovnik, Conversations with Durito: Stories of the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism edited by Acción Zapatista Editorial Collective and The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001–2007 edited by Canek Peña-Vargas and Greg Ruggiero. In addition to these edited volumes are countless smaller publications of select communiqués, declarations and interviews. Within these writings the Zapatistas have developed a complex philosophic praxis. When writing on the tenets of zapatismo, Subcomandante Marcos wrote that the pre-­existing theories and practices of the Left have not managed to provide a meaningful critique of accelerated oppression of neo-­liberalism (Peña-Vargas & Ruggiero 2007: 343). He proposes that a new dynamic theory of zapatismo, defined by fluidity and grounded in praxis, needs to be deployed in order to resist neo-­liberalism. In a 2006 communiqué entitled ‘Other Intellectuals’ Marcos lays out the job of zapatismo as a theoretical praxis in certain terms. To quote Marcos at length:

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From below and from the left, a movement is creating itself, la Otra [The Other Campaign] is also creating new realities. We neozapatistas think that these new realities, which are already emerging, and which will go on appearing further ahead, need another theoretical reflection, another debate of ideas. This places demands on the other intellectuals. First, the humility to recognize that they are facing something new. And, second, to join in, to embrace the other, to learn about themselves through it, and to come to know the indigenous, the worker, the campesino [Spanish for peasant or a person living in a rural area], the young person, the woman, the child, the old one, the teacher, the students, the employee, the homosexual, the lesbian, the transgendered person, the sex worker, the small shopkeeper, the Christian base, the street worker, the other. We think they should participate directly in the meetings of supporters in their states and, in addition, listen to what all the supporters throughout the country are saying. Thanks to the alternative media, the other media, it is possible to closely follow this beautiful lesson in contemporary national history. In their way and with their means, the other intellectuals will certainly produce analysis and theoretical debates that will astonish the world. ibid.: 343–344, original emphasis

Zapatismo offers a theory and practice of revolutionary change through constant resistance. In much the same way that Debray insisted that his theory of the foco has to maintain a high degree of fluidity in order to adapt to different environments, zapatismo is not a set of procedures to be followed, and cannot be an exact model for resistance or revolution (Marcos in Ramírez 2008: 307). Rather zapatismo presents a ‘tool box’ set of theories and practices to be adopted, modified and discarded depending on the specific context. This brings zapatismo close to the schizoanalytic concept of a metamodel.5 Models are the closed and formal systems of recognition – or cultural, aesthetic and political schemas of representation – that govern societies and are usually considered to function as a blueprint or a set of instructions that need to be concretely followed. Conversely, a metamodel is not a blueprint or a set of instructions. Rather it is a diagrammatic set of heterogeneous relations that radically disrupt the closed hierarchy established between models and truths as well as the corresponding politics of representation where identity is seen as linearly constructed

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throughout history and is the sole province of a political, religious and/or ideological body. *  *  *  * The philosophic nature of zapatismo has prompted several commentators to analyse them within ill-­fitting pre-­existing theoretical frameworks such as the anthropological approach in Mihalis Mentinis’ Zapatistas: Revolutionary Subjectivities and the Chiapas Revolt (2006) or the social-­constructivism in Alex Khasnabish’s Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (2008) and Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (2010) as well as Thomas Olesen’s International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization (2005). Attempts to read zapatismo as a philosophic praxis in and of itself have been attempted by the Latin American Subaltern Studies historian José Rabasa in his collection of writings on the Zapatistas, Without History: Subaltern Studies, The Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (2010) and in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s analysis of the Zapatistas in their collaborative works Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). Of the aforementioned thinkers, Hardt and Negri’s analysis is by far the most compelling. In Empire, the first of a trilogy they co-­authored analysing the formation of Empire and the resistant multitude, Hardt and Negri are initially critical of the Zapatista rebellion, stating that despite having a clear global critique that was evident by their staging the revolt the same day that NAFTA took effect, they nonetheless claimed that the Zapatistas remained concerned only with local issues and are incapable of communicating with other resistance movements (Hardt and Negri 2000: 54–55). By 2009’s third instalment in the trilogy, Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri’s view on zapatismo shifted to them celebrating the Zapatista movement as an example of the multitude creating an ‘altermodernity’. The Zapatista campaigns for indigenous rights in Mexico provide a clear political example of this altermodernity. The Zapatistas do not pursue either of the conventional strategies that link rights to identity: they neither demand the legal recognition of indigenous identities equal to other identities (in line with a positive law tradition) nor do they claim the sovereignty of traditional indigenous power structures and authorities with

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respect to the state (according to natural law). For most Zapatistas, in fact, the process of becoming politicized already involves both a conflict with the Mexican state and a refusal of the traditional authority structures of indigenous communities. Autonomy and self-­determination are thus the principles that guided the Zapatista strategy [. . .] Zapatistas began a series of projects to put its principles into action by instituting autonomous regional administrative seats (caracoles) and ‘good government councils’ (juntas de buen gobierno). Even though the members of Zapatista communities are predominantly indigenous, and even though they struggle consistently and powerfully against racism, their politics does not rest on a fixed identity. They demand the right not ‘to be who we are’ but rather ‘to become what we want’. Such principles of movement and self-­transformation allow the Zapatistas to avoid getting stuck in antimodernity and move on to the terrain of altermodernity. Hardt and Negri 2009: 106

While the book Empire examined the system of global oppression, Hardt and Negri’s books Multitude and Commonwealth have to be read as one long elaboration on the transformative effect of the multitude. The multitude grows within neo-­liberalism and adapts to its hegemonic labour form of immaterial labour. It is a biopolitical class concept that is constructed as a loose network of singularities that are bound together by ‘the common’. In Commonwealth they build on the concept of the multitude in two important ways: the multitude as constituting an alternative modernity, or ‘altermodernity’ and its relationship to communism. With the first distinction, altermodernity is the construction of an alternative modernity within neo-­liberal capitalist modernity. Altermodernity is set against antimodernity. Antimodernity is essentially the resistance to modernity’s domination. It exists within modernity insofar as it is created by modernity (Hardt and Negri 2009: 67–68). The examples they use in this case are anti-­colonial resistance and slave revolts. Both were movements against modernity’s oppression, but in their resistance absolutely upheld the humanist values of modernity (ibid.: 77). When viewed in this manner Hardt and Negri argue that modernity’s progression has been based on antimodernity’s resistance (ibid.). Conversely, altermodernity does not posit itself as an existential resistance to modernity, but rather it is within the same substance of modernity, in the middle, and subverting it from within. In this way it is what the revolution that Negri theorizes produces. Therefore altermodernity

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involves not only insertion in the long history of antimodern struggles, but also a rupture with any fixed dialectic between modern sovereignty and antimodern resistance (ibid.: 106). The second modification Hardt and Negri add to the concept of the multitude is that it is necessarily communist. Whereas anti-­colonial movements, anarchism and a certain communism constitutes antimodernity and socialism tries to straddle both modernity and antimodernity, communism is what opens altermodernity (ibid.: 101–106). In Commonwealth Hardt and Negri modify the definition of communism to include an explicit biopolitical dimension. For Hardt and Negri communism involves a ‘phenomenologicalization’, that is to say it becomes intrinsically linked to bodies and bioproduction (ibid.: 25). Drawing on Foucault, Hardt and Negri argue that this phenomenologicalization rests on three axioms: [Foucault’s] first axiom is that bodies are the constitutive components of the biopolitical fabric of being. On the biopolitical terrain – this is the second axiom – where powers are continually made and unmade, bodies resist. They have to resist in order to exist. History cannot therefore be understood merely as the horizon on which biopower configures reality through domination. On the contrary, history is determined by the biopolitical antagonisms and resistances to biopower. The third axiom of [Foucault’s] research agenda is that corporeal resistance produces subjectivity, not in an isolated or independent way but in the complex dynamic with the resistances of other bodies. Hardt and Negri 2009: 31

It is the third axiom that Negri and Hardt draw on most explicitly in their biopolitics of communism (and, by extension, multitude). The phenomenologicalization explicitly began with racialized and gendered bodies insofar as fundamentalist discourses of modernity excluded these bodies from hegemonic power, putting them in a position outside of hegemonic power (ibid.: 31–38). That is to say that racialized and gendered bodies were biopolitically produced as ‘Other’. The act of being relegated to this position left these bodies with little choice other than to resist this form of domination (antimodernity). Hardt and Negri then trace the bioproduction of racialized and gendered bodies to the biopolitics of class consciousness. The oppressed racialized and

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gendered bioproduced bodies were economically disadvantaged with restricted access to owning property: in other words, poor. Historically, ‘hatred of the poor expresses a thinly veiled or displaced racism. Poverty and race are so intimately linked throughout the Americas that this hatred is inevitably intermingled with disgust for black bodies and a revulsion toward darker-­ skinned people’ (ibid.: 49). The intrinsic links between subaltern racial and gender positions and poverty has continued to be a defining feature of Empire, thus the communist multitude becomes – by necessity – a class consciousness of poverty that is opposed to private property (ibid.: 39). Poverty and wealth are also biopolitical, producing subjectivities that are based on economics. The multitude is inherently poor, however poverty: [. . .] does not refer to its misery or deprivation or even its lack, but instead names a production of social subjectivity that results in a radically plural and open body politic, opposed to both the individualism and the exclusive, unified social body of property. The poor, in other words, refers not to those who have nothing but to the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted in the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order or property. And this conceptual conflict is also a political conflict. Its productivity is what makes the multitude of the poor a real and effective menace for the republic of property. ibid.: 39–40, my emphasis

Their understanding of zapatismo – as predicated on the concept of the multitude – is a class concept that is inherently communist, organized as loose networks of singularities, and works through neo-­liberalism, rather than against it. In adopting these characteristics Hardt and Negri also argue that altermodernity is characterized by a different temporality from modernity. The biopolitical productivity of the multitude always exceeds, ‘the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation. What we really confront here, then, are two temporalities, which both move beyond the old measures of time: the capitalist temporality of exception and the multitudinous temporality of exceeding’ (ibid.: 242). In other words, altermodernity is predicated on an accelerated temporality. While these concepts of altermodernity and communism have very definite points of intersection with zapatismo – its focus on individuals as well as groups; the interest in micropolitics, or the individual and subverted uses of power that

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(often unwittingly) reproduce repressive structures and their insistence on a non-­essentialized or fluid identity – it is nonetheless a problematic framework to use. Zapatismo is neither a class concept or biopolitical. When writing on the biopolitics of the multitude, Paolo Virno notes that: The paradoxical characteristics of labor-­power (something unreal which is, however, bought and sold as any other commodity) are the premises of bio-­ politics. In order to understand it, however, we must go through another step in the argument. In the Grundrisse Marx writes that ‘the use value which the worker has to offer to the capitalist, which he has to offer to others in general, is not materialized in a product, does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really, but only in potentiality, as his capacity’ (Grundrisse: 267; Virno’s italics). Here is the crucial point: where something which exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller. The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-­ power which, in itself, has no independent existence. ‘Life’, pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential. Virno 2004: 82

Capitalism is bioproductive insofar as it requires the workers to sell their life, the possibility of their production. The multitude then is a class concept since it grows within neo-­liberal capitalism and is predicated on the hegemony of immaterial labour. Zapatismo, however, is not a class concept. Given that the Zapatista base communities are largely founded on agricultural production and sustainable farming, money is not regularly used within them. Rather, it is conserved for the compañer@s who need to travel to cities; zapatismo does not recognize the hegemony of immaterial labour.Also, zapatismo’s universalization of subaltern struggles de-­essentializes class identities, placing them on an equal field (i.e. an IT technician with agricultural worker with bartender and so on). Zapatismo’s refusal to allow work (especially within capitalist production) to define a person, or to endow them with subjectivity, negates capitalism’s biopolitics, the same biopolitics that the multitude employs. Within zapatismo subjectivity is always plural, but zapatismo’s understanding of this plurality is not reducible to the plurality of members of a collective. Rather it is the schizo position established by the movement into and through zapatismo. Since

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subjectivity is formed in the wake of communal desire, the inherent plurality of subjectivity is in its collective enunciation. It is the multiplicity of a singular subject among other singular subjects who are also multiplicities, or n + 1 subjects. *  *  *  * Hardt and Negri’s work is compelling, but it ultimately fails to understand the fluidity and complexity of zapatismo as a theory of constant resistance. A far more appropriate framework to use in order to grasp how zapatismo understands and organizes resistance is ‘assemblage politics’. Assemblage politics is a form of non-­representational political action that emphasizes horizontalism and fluid network organization rather than hierarchical structures of power. As a conceptual framework, assemblage politics flows out of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In their co-­authored Capitalism and Schizophrenia book series (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari pieced together a new theoretical approach to political philosophy that they termed schizoanalysis. For schizoanalysis, ‘everything is a machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 2). As Ronald Bogue notes, this is not simply reviving the eighteenth-­century notion of l’homme machine, not a mechanistic model of reality (Bogue 1989: 91). ‘They speak of machines to suggest that the unconscious is less a theatre than a factory, and to convey a positive, dynamic sense of the cosmos without falling into religious or anthropomorphic vitalism’ (ibid.). For schizoanalysis a machine designates how heterogeneous components function together as new productive assemblage (Guattari 2009: 90–91). In its simplest terms, an assemblage is when two or more heterogeneous things join together to form something new where each component retains its own particular traits, but is able to work in concert with the other parts, much like the players in a jazz ensemble are able to work in concert, while still maintaining the distinct individuality of each instrument. Schizoanalysis argues that there is no such thing as a self-­contained unity; rather all psychic, social and political operations are conceptualized as machinic assemblages. This is a point that Deleuze and Guattari insist on throughout their work, nothing is given; everything is collectively produced

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through dynamic systems of networks. A machinic assemblage has ‘neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination, it is always in the middle [. . .] it is a rhizome’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 263). These networks are conceptualized as immanent to any one subject within the assemblage and constantly move in a seemingly directionless manner, so as to expand beyond any geographic, geopolitical and temporal boundary. This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic movement, a dynamic movement that travels in all directions and is recognizable by intensities, rather than by linear progression (ibid.: 262– 263). These networks are able to move in this way because they are not tied to geopolitical entities, but come into contact by a shared communal desire (such as the desire for democracy) (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 169, 2003: 22; Deleuze 2006a: 66). Desire is always productive and collective, producing and being produced at the same time by those subjects who experience it within the collective assemblage (Deleuze 2006a: 66–67). For Deleuze and Guattari desire is not analogous with lack (as it is in psychoanalysis). Desire is always the collective expression for equality and freedom, the full sense of Rancière’s understanding of democracy, and in this way it is always and can only be political and revolutionary. As Deleuze explained to Claire Parnet: If you tie your friend up and say to him ‘Express yourself, friend’, the most he will be able to say is that he doesn’t want to be tied up. The only spontaneity in desire is doubles of that kind: to not want to be oppressed, exploited, enslaved, subjugated. But no desire has ever been created with non-­wishes. [. . .] In retrospect every assemblage expresses and creates a desire by constructing the plane which makes it possible and, by making it possible, brings it about. [. . .] It is in itself an immanent revolutionary process. It is constructivist, not at all spontaneist. Deleuze 2006a: 71 original emphasis

Schizoanalysis dramatically rejects the possibility of essentialized positions that are the guaranteed by state representation, arguing instead the micropolitical position that there are only political subjectivities created through the process of machinic assemblage. Schizoanalysis’s focus on micropolitics allows it to analyse the power formations that underwrite politics and engender political identities and to think through practices of resistance to institutional representation and oligarchic power.

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This understanding of subjectivity enables schizoanalysis to have a more dynamic and nuanced approach to the analysis and construction of social and political movements. Moves to translate schizoanalysis into the social and political sciences have been recently undertaken by the theorist Manuel DeLanda in his 2006 book A New Philosophy for Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. In his work, DeLanda has drawn on schizoanalysis in order to derive an analytic framework termed ‘assemblage theory’. Following Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda conceptualizes an assemblage as relations of exteriority. ‘These relations imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different. In other words, the exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy of the term they relate’ (DeLanda 2006: 10–11). The relations between the different components are not necessarily logically structured,‘only contingently obligatory: a historical result of their close coevolution’ (ibid.: 11). In this way assemblage theory draws attention to the, at times, chaotic factors and non-­linear movement that has given rise to different social systems and in doing so it drastically disrupts any notion of an organic totality. In assemblage theory: [The] parts of an assemblage do not form a seamless whole [and] once historical processes are used to explain the synthesis of inorganic, organic and social assemblages there is no need for essentialism to account for their enduring identities. This allows assemblage theory to avoid one of the main shortcomings of other forms of social realism: an ontological commitment to the existence of essences. ibid.: 4

DeLanda goes on to argue that because assemblage theory does not reduce the object of study (a society, social justice movement, etc.) to an artificial totality, but rather approaches it as an assemblage of singularities that retain their difference while working together, it is a more appropriate form of social analysis (DeLanda 2006: 5–6). With a focus on the processes of stabilization and destabilization that move social objects, assemblage theory focuses on the exteriority of relations that produce linkages between its components to form the logically necessary relations that are contingently obligatory within the social assemblage (ibid.: 11–12).

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DeLanda characterizes assemblage theory as having two poles: the analytic pole that looks at the material and expressive aspects of an assemblage and the pole that analyses the process in which the assemblage’s identity is stabilized and destabilized (ibid.: 18–19). The analytic pole first breaks down an assemblage into its material aspects. In a social assemblage the most basic material element would be a face-­to-face conversation. This could be enlarged to include any gathering or assembly where physical bodies are put in proximity and communicate to each other (ibid.: 12). However, this should be expanded so as to incorporate bodies that are able to be in communication regardless of physical proximity, for instance via online communication. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari note that actual physical proximity is not at all necessary for an assemblage to form so long as the subjects are connected by the flow of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 22; Deleuze 2006a: 66–71; Guattari 2013: 97–98). In this way the material aspect of an assemblage would also, paradoxically, be able to include subjects who are no longer living. To illustrate how subjects who are no longer alive still constitute an assemblage it is useful turn to the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s seminal book Specters of Marx. In Specters of Marx (2006, first published in 1994) Derrida shows how Marx (or at least a ‘certain’ Marx) is still informing political action and in this way still very much a part of contemporary political and social movements. This is a point that is explicitly echoed by the Zapatistas in the Second Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle and further reiterated in most of their subsequent communications when they speak about their ancestors as well as all anti-­colonial resistants informing their political action (EZLN in Marcos 2001: 49–50; see also Caygill 2013: 124, and Chapter 5 in this volume). The second and third analytic aspects in assemblage theory deals with the assemblage’s expressive elements and the media used to facilitate communication. Expressive components are the linguistic, non-­linguistic and paralinguistic elements of communication (DeLanda 2006: 12–16, 19). In other words, it is verbal and non-­verbal communication (the language used, the words used, body language, tone, etc.) and the media refers to the medium in which the communication takes place (assembly, face-­to-face conversation, online, etc.). These directly affect how the identity of an assemblage is formed: for example, an online manifesto written in English that calls for a global revolution of the immaterial workers against capitalism, such as Michael Hardt

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and Antonio Negri’s 2012 Declaration. Declaration joins together the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the Occupy movement as a new form of global revolution. Negri and Hardt immediately identify this political assemblage as educated, computer literate, urban and Marxist (at least within the confines of how they use Marxism in their concept of the multitude), who are able to speak the language of global capitalism (English) and have clear political objectives. The second pole in assemblage theory is the process in which an identity is stabilized, destabilized and restabilized, what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as territorialized, deterritorialized and reterritorialized. This is the dynamic process in which assemblages change and adapt depending on specific historical and material contingencies. DeLanda notes that an assemblage ‘can have components working to stabilize its identity as well as components forcing it to change or even transforming it into a different assemblage. In fact, one and the same component may participate in both processes by exercising different sets of capacities’ (2006: 12). It is worth quoting DeLanda at length on the distinctions he set out between territorialization and deterritorialization within assemblage theory: The concept of territorialization must be first of all understood literally. Face-­to-face conversations always occur in a particular place (a street-­ corner, a pub, a church), and [. . .] conversation acquires well-­defined spatial boundaries. Similarly, many interpersonal networks define communities inhabiting spatial territories, whether ethnic neighbourhoods or small towns, with well-­defined borders. Organizations, in turn, usually operate in particular buildings, and the jurisdiction of their legitimate authority usually coincides with the physical boundaries of those buildings. The exceptions are governmental organizations, but in this case too their jurisdictional boundaries tend to be geographical: the borders of a town, a province or a whole country. So, in the first place, processes of territorialization are processes that define or sharpen the spatial boundaries of actual territories. Territorialization, on the other hand, also refers to non-­spatial processes which increase the internal homogeneity of an assemblage, such as the sorting processes which exclude a certain category of people from membership of an organization, or the segregation processes which increase the ethnic or racial homogeneity of a neighbourhood. Any process which either destabilizes spatial boundaries or increases internal heterogeneity is

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considered deterritorializing. A good example is communication technology, ranging from writing and a reliable postal service, to telegraphs, telephones and computers, all of which blur the spatial boundaries of social entities by eliminating the need for co-­presence: they enable conversations to take place at a distance, allow interpersonal networks to form via regular correspondence, phone calls or computer communications, and give organizations the means to operate in different countries at the same time. 2006: 13

The process of territorialization works at the intersection of language and structures to code assemblages into homogenous entities with strictly defined boundaries and a hierarchical order, whereas deterritorialization disrupts (decodes) these structures and challenges the established hierarchy (ibid.: 13–17). This process is further complicated by the act of reterritorialization that corresponds to and follows deterritorialization, meaning that every radical disruption is then coded in a manner that may foreclose the revolutionary potential of the decoding (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 474–500). Finally, the focus on the processes of territorialization and deterritorialization allows assemblage theory a more nuanced frame to analyse how assemblages move. Whereas analytic systems that look at structures as a unified totality emphasize an evolutionary process where development moves in a linear fashion (ibid.: 6), the process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization emphasizes how assemblages move in a multidirectional manner. While DeLanda avoids explicitly engaging with the notion of multidirectional movement, Deleuze and Guattari situate it at the heart of schizoanalysis. In schizoanalysis multidirectional movement is conceived as being ‘rhizomatic’, meaning that it moves in all directions without any centre locus (ibid.). In the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, Deleuze and Guattari write that assemblages ceaselessly establish connections between different material and expressive components that are heterogeneous to one another and each new connection causes the assemblage to change in its form and content and alter its trajectory (ibid.: 6–10). The principle aspect of rhizomatic movement is that it radically disrupts any attempt to over-­code the assemblage and reduce it to a homogenous unity and in doing so each component is able to retain its particular traits but still function in concert with the other parts of the assemblage (ibid.: 9).

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From an analytic perspective, the concept of a rhizome allows multiple points of entry when examining a given assemblage (ibid.: 12). While analytic systems that reduce social structures to homogenous totalities function as a means to map a given social or political entity, schizoanalysis is interested in constructing a cartography of social bodies that functions as a metamodel. In doing so the rhizomatic metamodel engenders a far more dynamic framework of analysis within the social and political sciences. *  *  *  * While assemblage theory has provided a strong tool to use with analysing social, political and corporate structures, it nevertheless remains only a means of analysis. Within the schizoanalytic system, Deleuze and Guattari were not only developing an analytic tool, but a political philosophy that was explicitly intended to engender praxis. Guattari theorized that theoretic assemblages, what they termed ‘abstract machines’, become ‘real’ or actualized through a double movement of the abstract and concrete (Guattari 2013: 73). Each supplementary degree of deterritorialization of an abstract machine ‘corresponds to an increase in its power of effect, which will no longer be expressed in terms of a quantity of energy but in terms of a reinforcing of the potentiality for singularization, or, in other words, a reduction of entropy’ (ibid.: 93). This effect materializes as machines become concrete. When this happens their sense of time no longer folds back on itself, but rather becomes stretched between two poles and the possibilities created have the potential to be actualized and tested (ibid.: 96–97). Following this actualization, new possibilities are formed based off the previous experiences, a process that Guattari referred to the cycle of Assemblage (ibid.: 97–98). In other words, schizoanalysis is stretched between three separate, but related, components: the analytic, the abstract and the concrete. The first pole, the analytic, is schizoanalysis as a metamodel where it is a dynamic tool used to examine social, corporate and political structures – what DeLanda termed assemblage theory. The second and third components constitute what will be termed assemblage politics. Assemblage politics incorporates the same material and expressive components and the same process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization that assemblage theory analyses, but actively deploys these

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as a form of political praxis. The first component of assemblage politics is the abstract, the virtual space of possibilities. Deleuze and Guattari theorized the existence of an abstract machine that can achieve an absolute deterritorialization, a possible social-­political assemblage that would have the revolutionary capacity to continuously destabilize static social systems and identities ad infinitum. An absolute deterritorialization proceeds by corresponding speeds of heterogeneous abstract machines in the virtual space of possibilities. For an absolute deterritorialization to occur, different abstract machines with complimentary speeds of movement must come into proximity with each other, allowing for new machinic assemblages to form (Deleuze and Guattari 2008: 53–56). When this happens the new machinic assemblages are able to ‘jump over’ segmented lines, and in doing so maintain the deterritorialization. This means that an absolute deterritorialization is no longer defined by a single line, but by rhizomatic movement. The formation of new assemblages of abstract machines changes the previous trajectories, so all that is left is a constant rhizomatic movement. Notably, when Deleuze and Guattari write about absolute deterritorialization they refrain from ever using language that would suggest that it could concretize in the real world. As such an absolute deterritorialization is only the opening up of new worlds of possibility. In practice they maintain that reterritorializations, social codes, are not only unavoidable, but also necessary in order to give the subject perspective (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 493–497). The final element is the actualization of the politics. While the abstract can open the politics up to what is possible, it is only when the project is actualized and tested that the individuals are able to gain perspective and fully visualize the project (ibid.: 493–499). It is only through the actualization and testing of the abstract possibilities that, ‘lack of direction and negation of volume [turns] into constructive forces’ (ibid.: original emphasis). In other words, assemblage politics is fundamentally phenomenological; it is grounded in real-­world practice. *  *  *  * An illustrative example of how zapatismo organizes resistance through assemblage politics can be seen in both the scope of their resistance and by how they create and organize space. As often noted, the internationalization of

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all resistance struggles is a defining feature of zapatismo. The Zapatistas’ First Declaration called on all Mexicans to revolt, and subsequent declarations and other communications have progressively broadened the scope of those called upon to resist. This has included the Zapatistas offering material support to other resistance struggles (in May 2006, as promised in the Sixth Declaration, it was reported that workers at the Martin Luther King Center in Havana, Cuba received 8 tons of corn and 400 litres of gasoline from Zapatista communities to be distributed directly to people suffering from the USimposed embargo6). The Zapatistas have also offered intellectual and diplomatic support to other resistance movements (such as the brief communication between Zapatistas and Basque resistants and the Zapatista offer to meet the Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón to debate the Basque situation (Ramírez 2008: 245–247)). Most significantly, the Zapatistas’ internationalism is seen in the way in which they have opened up spaces (both literal and discursive) where different resistance movements can encounter each other. By far the most significant initiative to open up a space for resistance was La Otra Campaña, The Other Campaign. The Other Campaign is the Sixth Declaration put into practice. The Sixth Declaration is by far the most encompassing of all the Zapatistas’ declarations. In it they reassert their belief that neo-­liberal globalization is a world war being waged by IWC and as such the only path of resistance is for all oppressed people around the world to resist capitalist exploitation and oppression at the hands of the rich and the ‘bad governments’ of the world together (EZLN in El Kilombo Intergaláctico 2007: 62–86). The Sixth’s goal is, in part, to initiate a global anti-­neoliberal movement of resistance (Navarro 2006: 15). At the national (Mexican) level the Sixth aims to, ‘rearrange the [sic] Mexico from below into a new political force – explicitly Leftist, anti-­neo-­liberal, and anti-­ capitalist – that is clearly distinct from the legally recognized political parties that now exist’ (ibid.: 21). The Other Campaign then consisted in sending delegates throughout North America in the construction of an ‘Other geography’, a geography of the subaltern. Notably, this was the first Zapatista action to explicitly extend beyond the borders of Mexico (Ramírez 2008: 317–320). For the Zapatistas just as there is a neo-­liberal globalization there is a ‘globalization of rebellion’ that grows within the hegemonic system of oppression. The Sixth Declaration, alongside the Other Campaign, set about

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the process of creating space where different resistant subjectivities would be able to communicate with and support each other in their resistance (ibid.: 322). What the Zapatistas are striving to create then – especially through The Sixth and Other Campaign – is space, a space that would erode the assumed hegemony of the clandestine political-­military terrain of the EZLN as well as other hierarchically structured resistance movements and allow new democratic assemblages to form (Peña-Vargas & Ruggiero 2007: 23). What the Zapatistas acknowledge in The Sixth was that the political sphere, both nationally and internationally, is constructed as a ‘void’ – a blank, but constructive space of possibilities – so The Sixth, ‘announces the rebels’ intention to occupy that abandoned territory. This space is not only ideological, but, above all, is political and social’ (Navarro 2006: 41). This space will not be occupied solely by zapatismo, but rather the goal is to bring in the entire spectrum of resistant ideologies and movements (ibid.: 27– 29). In other words, zapatismo avoids the conceptual unification of ‘a Resistance’ while allowing for the dispersion of several historically and geographically discrete resistances (Caygill 2013: 7). In this sense the Other Campaign sets out to concretely establish a space for resistant singularities to come into contact and form new, concrete, assemblages. For zapatismo, the future of resistance must be predicated on the constitutive power that is formed within networks and the resistant subjectivities that is created by the shared desire that binds the networks together. Global resistance to oppression can only function within a space where subaltern peoples are able to enter into communication with one another. It is not enough for one person to resist oppression, for a woman to resist sexism for example. This means that ‘woman’ as an identity category is still being negatively created by sexist patriarchy. The only way to break out of this negative construction is through the constitutive power to create a new micro or minoritarian subjectivity in relation to a shared desiring-­machine that remains heterogeneous to the subject (Navarro 2006: 38–42). What the Zapatistas have put into practice here is an anti-­representational politics of networks. They are explicitly refusing to be unified under a singular unified identity; rather zapatismo is creating a politics based on the absolute heterogeneity of the different singularities that compose it. This is a point

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Marcos made when interviewed by El Kilombo Intergaláctico. It is worth quoting him at length: We think the only real guarantee of individuality, of subjectivity, is the collective. The problem is how the collective relates to its parts: if it is imposing hegemony or respecting these differences. Just like this collective demands respect from other collectives in a larger movement, it must deal with the same issue among its parts. The fact that in the Other Campaign there are thousands of individuals does not mean that they don’t have a group. It means that no group has satisfied them, that in no group have they felt respected in their individuality . . . We think that it’s just a matter of time before they realize that it is in collective where our problems can be resolved. . . . And the individual-­individual, well no! This doesn’t exist! It is a myth of capitalism. Individualism in reality is the negation of the individuality of subjectivity. Peña-Vargas & Ruggiero 2007: 48

This network of singularities that The Other Campaign is working to establish across Mexico is part of a larger international initiative that began in 1994 with the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. For this first international encounter the Zapatistas called for: [A]ll individuals, groups, collectives, all the left that has been and will be, nongovernmental organizations, solidarity groups, bands, tribes, intellectuals, indigenous peoples, students, musicians, workers, artists, farmers, cultural groups, youth movements, alternative media, ecologists, popular urban movements, lesbians, homosexuals, pacifists, feminists . . . all human beings who are homeless, landless, out of a job, hungry, sick, without education, without independence, without democracy, without peace, without a homeland, without a tomorrow . . . to participate. EZLN in Ramírez 2008: 136

This was the first in a series of international encounters organized by the Zapatistas that include the Intergalactic Encounter in 1996, The Second International Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism held in Spain in 1997 (which led to the establishment of People’s Global Action and the World Social Forum, both of which operate under the principles of autonomy and horizontalism derived from zapatismo (see Nail 2013b: 27)), and the Little Zapatista School of Freedom in 2013. These encounters are

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non-­hierarchical and build around zapatismo’s concepts of autonomy, equality and freedom with a guiding concern with the common desire for a world not dominated by neo-­liberalism. These spaces are ostensibly designed as educational forums; however, they are not based on pedagogic teaching practices. Rather they are predicated on the notion that everyone is a teacher and a student, a point that the Zapatistas are explicit about in the preparation communiqué for the Little Zapatista School of Freedom.7 The idea is that through daily interactions with activists from around the world all those who participate can learn about others’ struggles, their successes and failures and then take these lessons back with them to share in their home countries, building new innovative forms of resistance as well as establishing international networks of solidarity. A more recent example of the international encounters hosted by the Zapatistas is the 2015 international symposium held in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico from 2–9 May: El Pensamiento Crítico Frente a la Hidra Capitalista8 (Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra). The symposium included contributions from various theorists, intellectuals, artists and militants from around the world as well as contributions from the Sixth Commission of the EZLN. The proceedings of the symposium have since been published as a three volume set.9 The central premise of this and other Zapatista gatherings is that neo-­liberal capitalism is a Hydra, attacking the world with multiple heads at the same time. In order to understand the nature of the enemy and organize resistance, resistants from across the world must converge in order to share their experiences and work together to form, ‘basic concepts to understand the capitalist system and the turbulent march of history’ (Galeano 2016: 6). It is only through this collective process that resistants can begin, ‘to explain, to understand, to know, and to transform reality’ (ibid.: 7). Subcomandante Galeano expands on the need for critical thought in resistance stating that: According to us Zapatistas, theoretical reflection and critical thought have the same task of the sentinel. Whoever works in analytic thinking takes a shift as guard at the post. I could go into detail explaining what the location of the post is within the larger whole, but for now it’s enough to say that it is a part of the whole, nothing more, but nothing less. ibid.: 15

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A key part of zapatismo’s analytic thinking is constantly asking others ‘from different calendars, different geographies’ to share their experience of capitalism and their means of resistance in order to maintain a dynamic concept of both capitalism and resistance (ibid.: 19). In doing so the Zapatistas can universalize the struggle against capitalism and for an Other world (ibid.: 22). Indeed, as Subcomandante Moisés notes, to be a Zapatista, ‘is about theory and practice’, it means to work at concept creation and then to test the concepts through active resistance (Moisés 2016: 26–27). For Subcomandante Moisés this means cultivating resistance, understood as the ability to ‘stand strong and firm’ when attacked, and rebellion, the active and creative response to capitalism (ibid.: 116). Resistance and rebellion are cultivated in every aspect of life, including their way of organizing economies (a central theme in the Zapatista seminars given at the 2015 symposium), educational systems, healthcare and cultural events. This ultimately creates a resistant subjectivity (ibid.: 24–27) with a built-­in reflective capacity that allows it to analyse its actions and desires in order to detect the formation of microfascisms.

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Resistance to the Future Constructing Space in Time Assemblage politics, as the previous chapter noted, maintains an operative analytic pole that detects the formations of microfascisms. For this pole to work, it needs a degree of both time and space in which subjects can come into contact. Indeed, as Caygill rightly argues, any notion of subjectivity, resistant or otherwise, must first start with situating itself in a temporal sphere (Caygill 2013: 43). This chapter will examine the temporality of resistance and how this understanding of time opens up space in which resistant subjectivities are created. This chapter will also expand on zapatismo’s spatial understanding of ‘history’ and ‘memory’, and on how these concepts form a key aspect to their resistance. The chapter will then look at how this spatial understanding of time explicitly rejects the acceleration of revolution, favouring instead the slowness of resistance. The slowness of what can be considered ‘resistant’ or ‘diagnostic’ time is what allows the diagnostic aspect of an assemblage to function. This means that assemblage politics’ ability to detect and extract microfascisms from the assemblage is based on a spatial understanding of time, which allows for degrees of slowness. This will be grounded in the Zapatistas’ material practice of organizing space and how this slow form of organization allows resistant subjectivities to be constructed. Finally, this chapter will conclude by examining how this spatial temporality helps the Zapatistas to resist their own destructive drives towards monomania and microfascisms. *  *  *  * History occupies a central concern for both zapatismo (and the academics who have written on it) and Latin American politics. In their own writings, the

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Zapatistas often note how those in power erase the history of those who are oppressed (Marcos 2001: 242, 268), rendering ‘History’ (written as a proper noun) as little more than a discursive teleological field cast by elites in the service of oppression. This problem of History has been elaborated on in the work of José Rabasa and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASSG). Rabasa writes that colonial domination has left the indigenous people of Latin America ‘without history’ (Rabasa 2010: 12). The ‘without’, however, does not equate to a lack or absence of history, but rather that the life histories of the indigenous people exist in a space outside elite historiography (ibid.: 13). The concept of history itself presupposes an absence and an outside in positing an origin or beginning that either assumes a nothing – that is, an outside that cannot be taken as a source and ground of history (out of nothing, its nonfoundation, ex nihilo); or posits an origin in mythical expressions that is, a prehistory that contains the seeds of history proper (in a progression, a lack to be supplemented, teleology). Rabasa 2010: 13

In Rabasa’s work the hegemony of elite History never fully subsumes the histories of subaltern people. The Mesoamerican histories of Latin American indigenous people are heterogeneous to elite History and take on a spectral presence that is immanent to the people and helps to open up a now-­time of revolution (ibid.: 9–12). In other words, the Mesoamerican traditions of direct democracy were never destroyed by the colonial move to degrade them and then to relegate the histories to the dustbin of ‘premodernity’. They exist and inform the present moment – the ‘without’ or outside of History – and help to open the accelerated temporality of revolutionary now-­time. While Rabasa does note that this conception of indigenous History lends itself to essentialization, he endorses the strategic element of essentialism writing that: But we should not be afraid of essentialism as long as we stay away from defining permanent unalterable traits.We may understand Indian essentialism as a strategic move that warns us against conceptualizations of indigenous societies that for the past five hundred years have argued (and planned) their inevitable demise. The millennial communalism of indigenous societies is not manifest in the fixity of museum pieces but in the ever-­recurrent innovation that has surprised multiple regimes of power over the centuries. ibid.: 8

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While there is a definite critical engagement of History within zapatismo, and while zapatismo does have a pronounced utilization of folkloric aspects from Mesoamerican histories, the universalization of the Zapatista struggle and zapatismo’s adoption of all other forms of subaltern resistance as their own renders the deployment of a contest of histories and strategic essentialism an inappropriate frame of analysis. A more appropriate framework focuses on memory rather than on History. Whereas History represents a homogenous collective past that both represents an identity (as the Subaltern Studies Group have demonstrated) and opens up a future to-­come to be accelerated towards, memory is a collection of single points of information that opens up the present moment by communicating past experience and the future through repetition and as such effects singularities rather than identities. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes that a theory of time must pass through three moments of synthesis: The first synthesis, that of habit, constituted time as a living present by means of a passive foundation on which past and future depended. The second synthesis, that of memory, constituted time as a pure past, from the point of view of a ground which causes the passing of one present and the arrival of another. In the third synthesis, however, the present is no more than an actor, an author, an agent destined to be effaced; while the past is no more than a condition operating by default. The synthesis of time here constitutes a future which affirms at once both the unconditioned character of the product in relation to the conditions of its production, and the independence of the work in relation to its author or actor. In all three syntheses, present, past and future are revealed as Repetition. Deleuze 2001: 93–94

Drawing on Nietzsche, for Deleuze the final synthesis works itself out through the eternal return. The eternal return is a form of selective memory creation based on negating the negating element in identity formation, so what is key then is not memory, but waste (ibid.: 55). In other words, it opens a circular understanding of time where the memory that is returned to has undergone a double negation, rendering it different and productive. It is productive insofar as is has been actively produced through affirmation and, maintaining an immanence to the subject, it actively produces the singularities that produce it in its difference (O’Sullivan 2012: 33–36). The eternal return

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opens up a space that opposes identity insofar as identity is the reproduction of the same (a homogenous past), whereas the eternal return produces singularities based on the affirmation of difference (Deleuze 1983: 46). The repetition of memories within the eternal return opens up a future and a past within the lived present (Deleuze 2001: 73) insofar as: [Repetition] is the thought of the future: it is opposed to both the ancient category of reminiscence and the modern category of habitus. It is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetting becomes a positive power while the unconscious becomes a positive and superior unconscious (for example, forgetting as a force is an integral part of the lived experience of eternal return). ibid.: 7–8, original emphasis

This is an active process of creating memories that present themselves as ‘artificial signs’, signs that, ‘refer to the past or the future as distinct dimensions of the present, dimensions on which the present might in turn depend’ (Deleuze 2001: 77). These artificial signs present a realm of virtual possibilities, rather than a representational identity based on a historicized homogenous past. Deleuze’s analysis of these active memories turns to artistic story telling where, ‘the critical and revolutionary power [. . .] may attain the highest degree and lead us from the sad repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and then to the ultimate repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out’ (ibid.: 293). In other words, these memories are, or can be, created in individual singularities through the process of storytelling, opening up a radical scope of potentialities to the singularities within the lived present. Philosophic issues surrounding the narration of History and memory and how these concepts function in the production of subjectivity would certainly have been well known to the Zapatistas. Before his active role in the EZLN began, Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente Fuente (his name before adopting the nom de guerre Marcos) completed his doctoral thesis entitled Filosofía y educación, prácticas discursivas y prácticas ideológicas. Sujeto y cambio históricos en libros de texto oficiales para la educación primaria en México (‘Philosophy and Education, Discursive and Ideological Practices: Subject and Historical Change in Official Textbooks for Primary Education in Mexico’ – my translation) in which he drew on Althusser and Foucault in an analysis of pedagogical educational practices in Mexico. Looking specifically at how the

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textbooks used in primary school curriculums narrated a History to the young students, the PhD thesis argued that these books’ formation of a homogenous History is part of an Ideological State Apparatus and used to create disciplined and docile subjects (Henck 2007: 35). The thesis argued that what is needed is a, ‘new philosophical praxis: philosophy as a revolutionary weapon’ (Fuente in Henck 2007: 35). This new philosophical praxis was in part actualized through the Zapatista practice of creating memory. The notion of ‘creating memory’ in relation to zapatismo was first put forward by Juanita Ponce de León when she edited a selection of Zapatista writings credited to Subcomandante Marcos for the book Our Word Is Our Weapon. ‘Creating Memory’ is the title of the section of the stories about ‘Don Durito’ and ‘Old Don Antonio’ (Marcos 2001: 289–416). Old Don Antonio was a local Mayan villager who helped facilitate the first contact between the EZLN and the local populations in the Lacandón Jungle; however, in the Zapatista narrations he takes on a mythic sage like character – not unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – who lives outside of time and space. His stories come to us as memories of a past, present and future that are outside of neo-­liberalism. ‘Don Durito de la Lacandón’ is a fictionalized beetle and knight-­errant who fights against neo-­liberalism. Don Durito’s character sees neo-­liberalism as a thin veil that can be torn down to show that the future world outside of neo-­liberal violence exists in the lived present. The stories told through these two characters present us with a story of resistance, a story that, ‘merges and confuses modern time and old times’ (ibid.: 414), and in doing so these stories explicitly privilege memory over History. Since zapatismo’s understanding of History is that it has been – and will always be – co-­opted by those in power, memory is what arms the subaltern person with agency by historicizing their present struggle while at the same time opening up a future in the lived present. This is made most explicit in Marcos’ retelling of the story ‘The History of the Measure of Memory’ when he wrote that, ‘ “Memory is good,” the greatest gods1 said and told, “because it is the mirror that helps us understand the present and promises the future.” ’ (Marcos 2001: 395). It is this vision of the future that helps to inspire resistance. In this way, memory helps to arm their struggle with dignity. This is a point that the Zapatistas are explicit about. After affirming that memory gives them the promise of a future the story explains that,‘memory is greatest and strongest

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in the small people. [. . .] And they also say that dignity is nothing more than memory that lives. That’s what they say’ (ibid.: 396). Dignity comes not just from the vision of an equitable future, but also by placing the resistants in proximity to their ancestors (‘Five Hundred Years of Indigenous Resistance’ (Marcos 2001: 40–42)), to national heroes and revolutionaries such as Zapata (‘The Tale of the Little Newsboy’ (ibid.: 346)), as well as to the indigenous gods who personify the characteristics of zapatismo. One of the more poetic narrations of zapatismo is given in the story ‘The Words That Walk Truths’. This story takes the form of a memory of when the seven first gods set about the task of giving light to the first people. To solve this problem they construct a star to bring back the light to the people. The star is made out of clay in the shape of a person, given its points through the process of giving it its own light, given a portion of the hearts of the gods so that the star can walk, given a destiny so that it would have a path to travel, and finally from their hearts the gods also gave it ‘the good word, the true one’, or dignity (ibid.: 364–369). After receiving the last of its components the star spoke and asked the people, ‘Where shall I go and what should I do?’ (ibid.: 368). In this story, components of the past and the future come into contact with each other in order to present us with the lived present concept of zapatismo. The symbol that has been adopted for zapatismo is the classic communist red star. However, nowhere is Marx or the history of worker struggles found in these stories. Zapatismo is created through a recontextualization of classic communist iconography and the history of struggle it signifies through the lens of indigenous tradition that rejects vanguardism (the star’s first words were to ask where it shall go and what it shall do). In this way, the Zapatista red star is what Deleuze termed an artificial sign. It signifies the scope of radical transformative potential that exists in the lived-­present through an understanding of time that is presented via story telling where the past and future are folded into the lived-­present. These memories form the second type of memory for Deleuze, what Simon O’Sullivan has termed ‘true memory’ (O’Sullivan 2012: 45). In Difference and Repetition Deleuze notes how the first type of memory, passive memories, manifest as habit (Deleuze 2001: 4). Habit is the repetition of the same, the reoccurrence of a homogenous and reactionary past that, at its worst, manifests as resentment, a violent reactionary politics (ibid.: 114–146). This constitutes

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the return of a History that carries with it fascistic elements. Conversely, ‘true memory’ is the actively produced memory that produces singularization with radical emancipatory potential. This is a memory that is more neutral, and ultimately, apersonal. We might even say inhuman in that it is not selective or connected to the needs of the organism as the letter exists on the plane of matter. It is less memory as such than a general ‘pastness’. Ultimately, it is also a species-­memory, or even a kind of cosmic memory of the universe in that it extends far beyond the individual [. . .] The individual is nothing more than a local stoppage within this pure past, which we might also call, following Deleuze-Bergson, the virtual. O’Sullivan 2012: 45–46

These actively produced or true memories always presuppose a collective, but not a collective that can be homogenized into an identity. Rather it is the space of possibilities and as such can only be understood as the space of becoming. This is not to suggest that the reactive first form of memory is neutralized by the active memory. Both exist together within a topological plane and are connected at the locus of actual bodies (ibid.: 46). In other words, they are connected by our sensual perception of the actual world in our lived-­ present. Privileging memory over history gives the Zapatista narration of time a topological character, a conception of time that is also present in Deleuze and Guattari. A topological field is a single surface that is populated by multiple heterogeneous points that are able to come into contact with each other through folds in the surface. As pointed out by Thomas Nail in Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly apply this topographical conception of time to political history in order to consider how different political events have several overlapping and contingent tendencies at once (Nail 2012: 45). They use this to illustrate how different political events are able to communicate without one driving dominant locus (ideology) because, ‘Topologically speaking, [. . .] there is only a relative mix of political tendencies folded on top of each other without fixed center or necessary relationship’ (ibid.: 45–46). This is something that Guattari carries much further in his later work Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics and Schizoanalytic Cartographies.

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Guattari was interested in constructing a cartography of the unconscious that can function as a ‘metamodel’. As previously noted, while models are closed, predetermined and formal systems of recognition that govern societies as blueprints or a sets of instructions that need to be concretely followed, a metamodel is not a blueprint or a set of instructions. Rather it is diagrammatic set of heterogeneous relations that radically disrupt the closed hierarchy established between models and truths as well as the corresponding politics of representation where identity is seen as linearly constructed throughout history and as such is the sole province of a political, religious and/or ideological body. Guattari suggests that the unconscious is structured as a limitless topographical plane that is populated by memories of experience (Guattari 2013: 80–82). Each of these memories exists as a point on this plane, heterogeneous to the other memories. As singularities encounter each other the ‘external’ memories of the other singularity come into proximity to one another, adding infinitely more points onto the plane. This means that memories exist in an unconscious that is collectively produced and exceed any one individual. In fact, Guattari theorizes that there are also memories of memories. That is to say that memories create their own memories in much the same manner as a human subject would, meaning that there are an infinite amount of memories, each heterogeneous to the other (ibid.: 121). Such heterogeneity opens itself up and charges itself with possibility (ibid.: 83), allowing new energies to emerge. ‘The category of energy then tends to be substituted for that of identity. Being loses its fidelity to itself: endo-­reference [homogeneous self-­reference, closed system] fades away in face of the principles of deterritorialization constancy and consistency’ (ibid.: 90). What this means is that Being – the concrete sense of self in the world – cannot be reduced to the reality of the real. Rather it is a ‘machinic function that converts fields of possibility into effects of necessity. In this way machines are instances of ontological production and Being is essentially a machinic product’ (ibid.: 91). In other words, there can be no essentialized positions, only subjectivities that are created through a process of machinic assemblage. The ordering of these memories is rhizomatic, there is no definite centre locus. The assemblages that they form are an ‘abstract machine’, a machine that exists in the virtual space of possibilities (Guattari 2013: 90–91). These abstract machines are:

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[M]ultipolar; they proliferate in every direction and in all dimensions, they overlap in Rhizomes, are transposed, bud in knots of effectiveness. Such a striation confers on them a hyper-­continuous character that will allow them to be established in the subsequent stasis, in a, let’s say, volumic manner, through the fitting together of incorporeal Universes of possibilities, themselves entertaining relations of compossibility. ibid.: 92

The space in and through which abstract machines form is constituted as a smooth space. However for Deleuze and Guattari this is not the same smooth space of substance that Negri and Land employ in their accelerated temporality. Rather this is a space that is smoothed out and then restratified in the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (ibid.: 117). The deterritorializing move smooths spaces, allowing the abstract machines of possibility, what Deleuze and Guattari also refer to as ‘war machines’, to form. Following this is the reterritorializing move: the imposition of codes that stratifies the space, limiting the field of possibilities. What differentiates Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of this space from the Accelerationists (and, it could be argued, from the Deleuze and Guattari of Anti-Oedipus) is the notion of a constant smoothing. The constant line of flight of revolution presupposes a constant smooth surface over which an accelerated temporality can be formed, although, as demonstrated in the previous chapters, stratification cannot be avoided, causing micro-­oedipuses to proliferate and metastasize into different fascisms. Conversely schizoanalysis acknowledges the stratifications, and instead proposes a resistance metamodel based on a folded surface. In ‘The Smooth and the Striated’ from A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that both forms of space – the smoothed space of deterritorialization and the striated space of reterritorialization – are needed. The smooth space is the virtual space of possibility that allows for nomadic movement and the formation of war machines; however, it is the striated space that gives perspective to resistant projects (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 493– 494). While smooth space requires a vantage point that is intensely focused on micro movements that may seem directionless, striated space, on the contrary, is defined by the, ‘requirements of long-­distance vision: consistency of orientation invariance of distance through the interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a

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central perspective’ (ibid.: 494). It is striated space that turns, ‘lack of direction and negation of volume into constructive forces’ (ibid.: original emphasis). More importantly, striated space concretizes the abstract lines produced in smooth space (ibid.: 496–499). When taken together, movement through these spaces is defined as different speeds and slownesses (ibid.: 499), rather than a constant acceleration of forces. It is this relation of speeds and slownesses that define the haecceity of movement, which in turn is key to understanding how subjectivity is formed within these spaces. A haecceity, an individualization that lacks a unified (essentialized) subject, has, ‘neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination, it is always in the middle [. . .] it is a rhizome’ (ibid.: 263). The subsection entitled ‘Memories of a Haecceity’ from the ‘Becomings’ chapter in A Thousand Plateaus explains that a non-­essentialized subjectivity can be formed through a folding of time, meaning that events are rhizomatic – moving through the different planes of intensity, not in linear progression; and immanent – that they are always here, always in the middle and always movement (see also Guattari 2013: 55). Subjectivity is formed by the historical events coming together by their proximity to one another and forming an assemblage, which is heterogeneous to the subject. As opposed to the teleological history of succession which sees history moving on a progressive vertical trajectory with each generation building on the previous towards a unified subject, the Zapatista memory of events (including those events yet to come) playfully casts moments of the past, present and future on a topological plane that is then folded over, so that points on the plane converge in a non-­successive manner. To quote Thomas Nail: Consider the way in which they have selected some moments from Mexican history (Emiliano Zapata’s peasant uprising 1910–1917), some components from Marxist history (red stars, the use of the word ‘comrade’ and so on), some components from their own indigenous history (consensus decision-­ making, autonomous village networks and so on) as well as some components of the future (the promise of a non-­neoliberal future) to compose the historical hodgepodge of their own political event. Nail 2012: 66–67

The metamodel of zapatismo is perhaps most explicit in the story of Marcos’s first conversation with Old Don Antonio. In this story Marcos tries to

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explain who Zapata, the historical revolutionary figure, was. Old Don Antonio corrects him and then tells the story of a god with two sides, Voltán and Ik’al, who had to learn to move through constant cooperation, ‘together but separately and in agreement’ (Marcos 2001: 414). It was through this constant and respectful negotiation that the gods learned to, ‘walk with questions, and they never stop. They never arrive and they never leave . . . They are never still’ (ibid.: 415). Finally, hinting that he knew Zapata, Old Don Antonio states that this is who Zapata was, is and will continue to be (ibid.: 416). In these narrativized memories, a clear model of zapatismo emerges. Any attempt to pull Zapata – and by extension the Zapatistas of the EZLN – back into a linear history is immediately rejected. This explicitly rejects any historiographical understanding of time because these abstract machines cease to be static in their positions and become ‘trans-­positional’. Moving across the topological field of time, they mutate and cannot be ordered by a system of representation into a hierarchy. In the words of Guattari, they are, ‘constituted by abstract machines without any fixed identity, which – although expressed through formulae and laws – nevertheless escape from any transcendent coding inscribed on a bedrock of scientificity’ (Guattari 2013: 93). Within the narration of memory in zapatismo, ‘the stories that give birth to [zapatismo] don’t walk through time or space. No, they’re just there, being’ (Marcos 2001: 364). The events are therefore always immanent to any moment in time. *  *  *  * Zapatismo uses the immanence of events in time as a diagnostic mechanism to detect the reproduction of repressive mechanisms: micro-­oedipuses and fascisms. Perhaps the most significant contribution to the literature on zapatismo in recent years has been Thomas Nail’s sustained critical reflection on zapatismo and political history. He notes how the folded historical assemblage of zapatismo has an operative diagnostic function in the detection and subversion of the principal axiomatic dangers revolutionary movements encounter: monomania and microfascism (Nail 2012: 37–108).2 Deleuze and Guattari warn that the first danger posed to rebellion is axiomatic. The belief that, ‘a little suppleness is enough to make things better’, creates the risk of monomania, an obsessive fixation. In this case the monomania

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is explicitly the notion of History and strategic essentialism. This is a danger that is often reproduced in analysis of the EZLN with its focus on indigenous rights. When commenting on the integration of Mayan traditions in zapatismo, Rabasa – among others – is quick to note the suppleness of this heritage, the Mayan tradition of direct democracy and its potential to disrupt easy binary divisions (Rabasa 2010: 17–36). Thomas Nail critiques this position writing that: Supple reforms based in the representation of an essential group identity only appear to be transformative when in fact they leave deeper structural problems intact. That is, if revolutionary movements produce their own coded (and thus restricted) values, essential meanings and segmented territories, they may appear to have made important reforms by legitimizing their own identities/values. But by representing their culture as a coded identity, they are only that much easier to incorporate into the larger processes of state overcoding or a profitable and tolerant multiculturalism. Nail 2012: 54

This is precisely the danger that would have been faced by the Zapatistas had they limited themselves to an indigenous rights movement within Mexico, as they were first perceived to be. Had they essentialized zapatismo as an indigenous rights movement then their scope of engagement would have been limited only to the reform of the government to include the protection of indigenous human rights. By extending and internationalizing their scope of critique and action to all oppressed people, they effectively avoided the trap of monomania. This move is evident in zapatismo in two distinct ways. The first is found in Marcos’s writings on indigenousness. The claim of a homogenous indigenous or Mayan culture is an absurdity given the vast array of different Mayan peoples in South Mexico, as well as the different non-Mayan indigenous people throughout the greater Mexican state. The scope of different peoples grouped together within the homogenizing category of indigenous is most explicitly illustrated in the opening remarks of the Inauguration of the Zapatista Exchange with the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico when they welcomed thirty distinctly different indigenous peoples (EZLN 2014). In an interview, Marcos noted that the EZLN were aware from the outset of the danger of them becoming a race movement and their struggle being minimized to that of

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indigenous versus mestizos and then different indigenous peoples versus each other. This was avoided through their refusal to group all indigenous people together as a homogenous whole and through the constant interaction with other people (El Kilombo Intergaláctico 2007: 36–37). The second and related way that zapatismo has avoided the monomania of strategic essentialism is in zapatismo’s understanding of territorial boundaries of ‘Mexico’. Since the First Declaration the Zapatistas have constantly maintained that they are, above and beyond any other identity, Mexicans. However, Mexico as narrated in zapatismo’s storytelling, has nothing to do with the territorial borders that compose the political state. Rather, Mexico, including the narrations of its past, comes to be home to all people who stand in solidarity with minoritarian groups in revolt and who struggle for dignity, justice, freedom and democracy (the basic elements of zapatismo) and as such, regardless of where a person is located, they are Mexican (Marcos 2001: 244–245). The second risk is allowing microfascisms to form and infect zapatismo. As Nail also points out, two concrete examples of microfascism in relation to zapatismo are patriarchy and militarism (Nail 2012: 67–69). The poor conditions of indigenous women prior to the establishment of the EZLN have been widely commentated on (see Mentinis 2006: 40–42, 62, 178; Nail 2012: 67–68; and Ramírez 2008: 311–313). In response to this, the EZLN’s initial move towards gender equality was to ensure women have commanding roles within their political-­military structure. Of course, this is a structure that by definition is not and cannot be totally egalitarian and that, as Nail rightly points out, increases the risk of militarization and vanguardism (ibid.: 68). As Ramírez points out, while sexism does persist, the guaranteed rights of women within the Women’s Revolutionary Law3 has had remarkable transformative power within the autonomous communities opening up women’s collectives and decision-­making bodies (Ramírez 2008: 311–313). One of the most public demonstration of zapatismo’s politics of gender equality happened on 8 March 2000, International Women’s Day, when several thousand Zapatista women occupied the XERA radio station in San Cristóbal and broadcast their demands for equality (Marcos 2005: 28). At the same time, since 1995 the military structure of the EZLN has been dissolving and articulations of zapatismo have maintained a blunt rejection of

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all historical vanguards (Marcos 2005: 87–94), a position accelerated in The Sixth Declaration and made most explicit in Subcomandante Marcos’ 2003 response to the Basque separatist movement the Euskadita Askatasuna (ETA), ‘I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet’ (ibid.: 35). Zapatismo is not attempting to inaugurate and/or lead any kind of resistance to neo-­ liberalism, but rather facilitate the meeting of resistance, and allow it to organically form worlds outside of exploitation. Zapatismo is explicit on this point: So we think the path of [resistance to neo-­liberalism] isn’t constructed, well everyone will go about constructing their own ways of manifesting it, but we will continue to lack the place of encounter. That is why we say, this isn’t about constructing a world rebellion. That already exists. It’s about constructing the space where rebellion encounters itself, shows itself, begins to know itself. To those that say there isn’t discontent in the American Union, the thing is there, but we can’t see it. Or we can’t see it because it doesn’t show itself. And it doesn’t show itself because it has no place to do so. El Kilombo Intergaláctico 2007: 40

Zapatismo then becomes an extension of the space created by its temporality where different points of resistance can meet to form new machines. As previously mentioned, this has been put into practice through the various international and ‘intergalactic’ gatherings organized by the Zapatistas as well as the Zapatistas’ international ‘Little Zapatista School of Freedom’. These gatherings allow resistants to learn about each other’s struggles, their successes and failures. In other words, the resistants’ memories of particular resistances of the past and general resistances of the future are able to come into contact. These memories are put into conversation with each other allowing productive critiques to emerge and form new abstract machines of resistance through these absolute heterogeneous assemblages of memories. They would then take these lessons back with them to share in their home countries and in doing so form new concrete machines of resistance. In his concluding remarks about the diagnostic capability of the zapatismo’s topological sense of time, Thomas Nail states that: [W]ithout the predictive power of Marxist science, or a determinate universal history, the Zapatistas’ revolution has become contingent, non-­ representational and flexible like a folded topological shape. Zapata’s peasant

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rebellion can emerge from the past, direct democracy can emerge from the future, and both can bear directly on the transformation of the present. Zapatismo, in this sense, is a creation of the past and a nostalgia for the future at the same time. Nail 2012: 75

Since the different historical events are ostensibly put into conversation with each other, with no one position given priority, they are able to critique one another in order to detect moments of microfascistic desire being reproduced. At the same time this folded sense of time decentres any notion of a fixed and essentialized identity, the key component in monomania (ibid.: 69) as well as in the psychology of fascism (Bataille 1985: 122–126). This is all operative while simultaneously running a constant ‘diagnostics’ of their actions and motivations – the Other Campaign was referred to by the Zapatistas as constructing a ‘diagnostic of suffering’ (Nail 2012: 66). Taken together, zapatismo’s notion of topological time opens up an amazing capacity of resistance to its own destructive drives. This has the potential to neutralize the appearance of micro-­oedipal machines in the virtual space of possibilities, curtailing the formation of fascisms in the striated space of the concrete world of action. *  *  *  * Explicit in the temporality of zapatismo is a critique of acceleration. A well-­ known axiom of zapatismo is, ‘we walk slowly because we are going far’. In other words, the rate of change is defined by constant speeds and (especially by) slownesses, not by acceleration. Charting the rate of change anticipated by zapatismo alongside of Deleuze and Guattari teases out a strikingly similar movement from an initial call for accelerated politics to the deployment of slowness. As previously noted, the Accelerationists explicitly read the Deleuze and Guattari of Anti-Oedipus, often claiming that Deleuze and Guattari, ‘diluted the stance of Anti-Oedipus in A Thousand Plateaus with calls for caution in deterritorialization and a more circumspect analysis of capitalism’ (Avanessian and Mackay 2014: 43). This perceived dilution is most pronounced in the temporality of change as being based on different speeds and slownesses rather than on the possibility of constant acceleration that Deleuze and Guattari

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introduced in A Thousand Plateaus. In fact Deleuze and Guattari are explicit in their critique of acceleration: [One] does not go from the relative to the absolute [deterritorialization] simply by acceleration, even though increases in speed tend to have this comparative and global result. Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant accelerator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possible to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay. Retarded development is an example. What qualifies a deterritorialization is not its speed (some are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes epistrata and parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the contrary, jumps from one singularity to another following a nondecomposable, nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane of consistency. Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 56

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari did not abandon the notion of an absolute deterritorialization. Rather they complicated it by cautioning resistants to not move too far too fast. An absolute deterritorialization proceeds by corresponding speeds of heterogeneous abstract machines in smooth virtual space. Most deterritorializations are defined by the trajectory they move in, the lines they travel along, and for every deterritorialization there is always a corresponding reterritorialization. This is how smooth space becomes segmented. For an absolute deterritorialization to occur different abstract machines with complementary speeds of movement must come into proximity. This facilitates the formation of new machines to form in the same manner as micro-­oedipuses join together to form new assemblages, as was previously outlined. When this happens, the new machinic assemblages are able to ‘jump over’ segmented lines, and in doing so maintain the deterritorialization. This means that an absolute deterritorialization is no longer defined by a single line, but by rhizomatic movement. The formation of new assemblages of abstract machines changes the previous trajectories, so all that is left is a constant movement rather than a line of flight. This means that for Deleuze and Guattari an absolute deterritorialization is diametrically opposed to Negri’s arrow of time, since for Negri the progression of deterritorialization is defined by a constant singular trajectory. The same opposition holds true in comparison to Nick Land and the Accelerationists – and indeed for all thinkers

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of revolution – since their movement of revolution is always teleological, a constant line of flight that smooths the singular substance that facilitates acceleration. While Deleuze and Guattari also deploy the Spinozist concept of substance in their univocal claim that there is no outside, beyond or past for the absolute deterritorialization to achieve, just one substance; this is not an inherently smooth space nor can it be infinitely smoothed. There are always ‘bumps in the road’, segments and codes that prevent constant acceleration and a single trajectory in deterritorialization. In fact they correct the notion of ‘lines of flight’ when they note that it is more appropriate to only talk about reterritorialization when talking about ‘lines’. What is also evident in Deleuze and Guattari is that an absolute deterritorialization only exists in virtual, not actual, space. When they write about absolute deterritorialization, they notably refrain from ever using language that would suggest that it is concreteizable. Rather they only speak about abstract machines having the potential to maintain an absolute deterritorialization. An absolute deterritorialization is only the opening up of new worlds of possibility. In practice they maintain that reterritorializations, molar segments, social codes, are not only necessary but also unavoidable. In the actual world, deterritorialization always runs the risk of falling into a ‘black hole’, of becoming self-­destructive or else generating fascisms. Revolutionary projects run the risk of: inventing neonomadisms in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States, which reconstitute it at the limit of their striations. The sea, then the air and the stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but, in the strangest of reversals, it is for the purpose of controlling striated space more completely [. . .] All this serves as a reminder that the smooth itself can be drawn and occupied by diabolical powers of organization; value judgments aside, this demonstrates above all that there exist two nonsymmetrical movements, one of which striates the smooth, and one of which reimports smooth space on the basis of the striated. Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 480, original emphasis

In other words, we arrive back to the basic premise that microfascisms are unavoidable. A rate of movement that is based on constant acceleration can only fall back into the reproduction of these repressive mechanisms.

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Ultimately what Deleuze and Guattari’s post-Anti-Oedipus work constructs is not a theory of revolution, but a theory of how revolutionary change can be achieved through constant resistance. If revolution is defined by its constant and accelerating line of flight then the constant speeds and rhizomatic movements of absolute deterritorialization theorized by Deleuze and Guattari constitute resistance. This is because the abstract machines formed are always heterogeneous to each other and when they form new assemblages the change in trajectory that occurs happens as an effect of the resistance to one another’s microfascisms and micro-­oedipuses. In other words, the diagnostic element of this temporality generates a constant resistance and it is this resistance that engenders the rhizomatic movement. Marcos is explicit that this movement by way of resistance is characteristic of zapatismo when he noted that the only thing that prevented the Zapatistas from falling into the traps of monomania and microfascisms and endowed them with their longevity has been the constant interaction – and subsequent new machinic assemblages formed – with heterogeneous resistants (El Kilombo Intergaláctico 2007: 35–42). This is especially evident in the constant Zapatista refrain that the genealogy of their struggle is marked by two important defeats: first the defeat of the theory of the foco and historical vanguard by the indigenous peoples, then the defeat of the Zapatista men when they tried to recreate patriarchal structures in order to dominate Zapatista women. The rate of change engendered by this ‘resistance movement’ is necessarily slow, or, to paraphrase Ana Dinerstein, it is change at the speed of the snail. In her 2013 paper, The Speed of the Snail: The Zapatistas’ Autonomy De Facto and the Mexican State, Dinerstein concisely analyses the material advancements in human rights, health and education services and the autonomous building of democratic institutions and decision making in the Zapatista communities (see also Mora 2007; and Stahler-Sholk 2007). However, puzzlingly, she does not engage with the speed at which zapatismo moves. Zapatismo explicitly privileges a rate of movement based on a constant slowness. While The First Declaration called on a nationwide revolt – a revolt that did not materialize when civil society instead staged protest and demos to stop the fighting, causing the EZLN to change tactics and enter into conversation with civil society (Major Infantry Insurgent Moisés in Ramírez 2008: 78) – the notion of an accelerated revolutionary speed was not present. Change, wrote Marcos in

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April 1994, would take a very long time to come. This means that patience and constant movement, even if that movement is very slow, had to be predominate features of zapatismo (Marcos 2001: 292). Zapatismo also deploys a topological understanding of time as being constituted by smooth and segmented spaces, each engendering potential and actual movement. In Marcos’s ‘The Story of One and All’ (ibid.: 397–398) and ‘The Dawn Is Heralding Heat and Flashes’ (ibid.: 399–404) time is understood as being composed of one singular substance. As such, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s Spinozist understanding of topological time, there is no before, beyond or outside. There is only a singular immanent substance. Marcos first describes time as being a smooth space where movement is rhizomatic and nomadic (ibid.: 397–400). Within this smooth space the ‘old gods’, the foundational traits of zapatismo, are chaotic beings charged with infinite potential. In both stories this smooth space needs to become segmented in order for the first peoples to concretize the possibilities created in the smooth space of time. The gods are able to join with the different people (through the introduction of other characters such as ‘Mama Ixmucane’ in ‘The Dawn Is Heralding Heat and Flashes’) in order to ‘read the lines’ created in space (ibid.: 400–401). In this way the gods (zapatismo) constitute an absolute deterritorialization, jumping over the molar segments created in smooth space and forming new abstract machinic assemblages. Within the chaotic smooth space of time a vast array of potentials are formed, but only concretized for the people when time becomes striated. In these stories (memories), zapatismo is constructed as an absolute deterritorialization that is characterized by its constant movement, a movement that is explicitly always slow (ibid.: 400, 405, 415). This notion of constant slowness is articulated in praxis as well. As Gloria Muñoz Ramírez writes: In the Calendar of Resistance, the EZLN explain that those who come from below and from far back in time have, it’s true, many bonds and wounds. But these were inflected on them by those who made wealth their god and their alibi. And also, those who walk with a slow and measured pace can see very far ahead and at that faraway point that their hearts can only guess at is another world – a new world, a better world, a necessary world, a word in which many worlds fit. Ramírez 2008: 257

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Zapatismo as an absolute deterritorialization was again reiterated in explicit terms in 2003’s ‘Thirteenth Estela’. The Thirteenth Estela elaborates on Zapatista subjectivity. However, it also includes a key critique of their contact with civil society from 1994 until 2003 and indicted NGOs as patronizing and facilitating a ‘Cinderella syndrome’ of paternalism. This disappointing relationship ultimately gave rise to their decision to spatially reorganize the Zapatista Autonomous Municipality in Rebellion (commonly referred to by the Spanish acronym MAREZ). Following the publication of the Calendar of Resistance, the Zapatistas announced the death of the ‘Aguascalientes’ (the autonomous communities in rebellion) and the birth of the Caracoles and the Good Government Juntas (ibid.: 264). Caracoles, which translate literally as ‘snails’, were set up as cultural and political centres that act as the public face of zapatismo. The Caracoles are self-­ organized and self-­governed political spaces that, as at 2017, cover approximately 50 per cent of Chiapas, involving over 1,100 communities of between 300 to 400 inhabitants each.4 The Caracoles are territorial spaces for the operation of the Good Government Juntas (GGJ), the Vigilant Commission of the GGJ, schools, hospitals and the administration of the Zapatista cooperatives (Dinerstein 2013: 4–5). It is worth noting that the birth of the Caracoles and the Good Government Juntas also marked the withering of the EZLN from community decision-­ making. The Good Government Juntas work within the Caracoles to administrate justice and mediate conflicts as well as to promote and supervise other educational, administrative, healthcare and work needs in the communities (ibid.: 5). In the Zapatistas Caracoles, decision-­making occurs at three distinguishable levels. At the local level, each of the many communities of every town elects its own authorities, i.e., the communal agent (Agente Communal) as well as representatives to the Autonomous Juntas (Consejos Autónomos), the decision-­making body. All posts are voluntary. At the municipal level, delegates of each village meet in assemblies, which can last for 3 days, to reach consensus about decision involving design and execution of community projects. Representatives to the Good Government Juntas and the permanent representatives to the five Snails are elected. Finally, the state (estadual) level comprises five Snails: Oventic, Roberto Barrios, Morelia, La

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Realidad and La Garrucha. The Snails are also cultural spaces, gathering schools, assembly rooms, sport and rest zones, health centres, and cooperatives. ibid.

The withering away of the EZLN from decision-­making within Zapatista communities was explicitly due to the Zapatistas recognition that as a political-­ military organization the EZLN is fundamentally hierarchical and anti-­ democratic (EZLN in Navarro 2006: 79). As such it was necessary to allow the EZLN to wither away in order to implement the zapatismo principle to ‘command by obeying’. Naming the autonomous Zapatista communities ‘snails’ is a direct reference to the temporal pace of zapatismo. Throughout the Zapatista oeuvre are explicit references that their principle to command by obeying can only be achieved through direct contact and engagement with others. Much like the movement of a snail, this Zapatista practice facilitates a perpetual slowness of movement that the Zapatistas refer to as ‘walking with questions’. Zapatistas, ‘walk with questions, and they never stop’ (Marcos 2001: 415). Just like a snail’s shell spirals out and in at the same time, zapatismo is always in the middle (au milieu) of all this constant movement. When taken together, the topological temporality of zapatismo with its continuous diagnostic mechanism and rate of movement characterized by perpetual speeds of slowness has helped facilitate revolutionary change – the withering away of the military structure of the EZLN from the Zapatista communities, and the growth of autonomous practices of direct democracy – through a practice of resistance, not revolution. *  *  *  * What is particularly important about zapatismo’s temporality is the way that it creates space in order to facilitate assemblage politics’ diagnostic function. The folded topological character of time facilitates a much more expansive ensemble of subjects to come into contact, allowing the Zapatista’s ‘haunted subjectivity’ discussed in the next chapter to directly engage with and learn from the memories of resistance which each compañer@ carries with them. This allows for a great learning resource as to how best to organize resistance. The folded topology of time also means that the past and future are folded into the present reality, allowing the Zapatistas to focus on how to create a world

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now. At a material level, this practice is seen in the numerous international and ‘intergalactic’ encounters the Zapatistas host. Bringing together resistants from around the world to share their experiences of organizing resistance and creating movements, including sharing stories of failure, in order to better understand the nature of what must be resisted requires both time and space. It is common for people to remark that the Zapatistas are ‘lucky’ insofar as their material conditions – the inhospitableness of the Lacandón Jungle – provides natural protection for their communities from the Mexican military as well as from paramilitaries and drug cartels. To a large degree, this is correct (see Henck 2007: Ch. 6). Even Subcomandante Marcos/Galeano has mentioned several times his own difficult experience adapting to the harsh conditions of the jungle (See Henck 2007: 72–75; Marcos 2001: 213–217; Wild 1998). This claim neglects to acknowledge that the Zapatistas of the EZLN were not the first guerrilla foco to move into Chiapas with the hope of fermenting revolution. Chiapas’ geography coupled with their long history of political disenfranchisement and violent repression at the hands of the Mexican state as well as the ‘White Brigade’5 seemed to be the ideal revolutionary situation (Henck 2007: Ch. 6). Several groups, including the Maoist Línea Proletaria (Proletarian Line), Trotskyists and the FLN (the foco that had strong connections to the EZLN) all tried to establish themselves in Chiapas (see Dinerstein 2014: 79–111; Foweraker 2002: 88; Henck 2007: Ch. 6) and they were ‘defeated’ by the local populations (Krøvel 2011). Before the 1994 uprising the Zapatistas spent more than ten years meeting with local indigenous people and slowly building a network of support villages (Henck 2007: Chs 9, 10, 15). These encounters gradually built up to the first large Zapatista gathering, the three-­day First Worker–Peasant Meeting in 1986. The meeting was, ‘designed to forge links between local Chiapan peasants and workers from cities in the north of the country. The topic for discussion was how the two could unite to overthrow their common oppressor, the bourgeois government’ (Henck 2007: 88). The meetings began a process of cultural exchanges, where the groups discussed, among other things, ideology, politics, economics and organization. Marcos describes this process as the, ‘transformation for the EZLN, from an army of the revolutionary vanguard to an army of indigenous communities, an army that is part of the indigenous

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resistance movement’ (Marcos in Henck 2007: 134). Marcos further elaborated on this process, stating that: Once the EZLN has come closer to the communities, it can’t make decisions without first giving these communities notice of what’s to be done, and through a slow process we ended up asking them permission. That’s when this collision happened and the political-­military organization stopped making decisions vertically and started making collective decisions horizontally. This was the first defeat (derrota) of the EZLN [. . .] this was around 1990–91. ibid.

The slow pace of the Zapatistas’ transformation from a traditional revolutionary foco to a resistance movement organized through a logic of assemblage (approximately eight years) stands in direct opposition to revolution’s accelerating temporality. A key factor here is managing the psychosocial sphere as well. Experiences of trauma (such as the first-­hand experience of repression or the secondary experience of trauma from engagement with victims of oppression) have the ability to unleash a quick and physical manifestation of violence, which revolution seeks to capture.6 In fact, Marcos also commented on how before the uprising the ‘young cadets’ were eager to channel their anger into a desire for an offensive attack on the Mexican state (Henck 2007: 133). Conversely, zapatismo’s dialogical process focused on building a capacity to resist by giving, ‘military action a second place to organization of the population: as a result it is very difficult to draw a line between the combat force and the support population. We say here that even the hens are Zapatista’ (Marcos in Henck 2007: 135). This resulted in zapatismo achieving a longevity that revolutionary groups failed to have. The slowness of zapatismo allows for dialogue and reflection, which, in turn, allows for more subjects to connect with the assemblage. When taken together, this temporality resists the monomania of strategic essentialism by bringing in multiple subjects into the assemblage on an equal line. Each of these subjects brings with them their own multiplicity of memories. This means that no singular History is able to dominate and over-­ code the assemblage with a unified identity. This temporality also resists the risk of microfascisms metastasizing and corrupting the movement. The way that different singularities are brought in cultivates a capacity for resistance

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that is able to also resist itself. It does this through a slow dialogical reflective process. When one position tries to dominate (the original foco vanguard), it is resisted by the group (the indigenous populations’ rejection of vanguardism and the theory of the foco). The process of resolving these conflicts mutates the whole structure, moving it in a rhizomatic form that adapts to changing circumstances. Ultimately, this temporality is best understood as diagnostic time. Viewing this through the lens of assemblage politics, the analytic pole – that is, the pole that is concerned with material and expressive components – functions here to create the material conditions that allow for resistants to come into contact and reflect on the nature of their resistance. This temporality creates space for the Zapatistas to diagnose both the nature of neo-­liberal capitalism, as well as their own microfascisms. As Chapter  3 demonstrated, the expressive components of an assemblage directly affect how that assemblage’s identity is formed. So the Zapatistas, understood as a form of assemblage politics, have an identity based on a process of constant reflection intended to locate and kill the group’s unconscious drives to power at the expense of others. This diagnostic time opens a space where truly egalitarian and revolutionary change is possible.

5

Resistance to Life In 2003 the Zapatistas published their Calendar of Resistance: twelve documents, one for each month, in which the Zapatistas presented a study of different struggles and acts of resistance from around Mexico. The purpose of the Calendar of Resistance was to have a better understanding of the situation of Mexican subaltern peoples in order to start a process of connecting different strands of resistance throughout the country. The Calendar ended with a thirteenth month, the ‘Thirteenth Estela’, that reaffirms the resistant ‘essence’ of the Zapatistas. They just don’t obey. When you want them to talk, they keep quiet. When you expect silence, they talk. When you expect them to lead, they step back. When you expect them to follow behind, they take off in another direction. When you expect them to talk just about themselves, they start talking about other things. When you expect them to conform to their geography, they walk throughout the world and its struggles. EZLN in Ramírez 2008: 263

What the Thirteenth Estela is alluding to is a Zapatista subjectivity, a resistant subjectivity, based on a logic of assemblage. A resistant subjectivity is, as Howard Caygill notes, key to preserving and enhancing of the capacity to resist (Caygill 2013: 11). Clausewitz, Caygill reminds us, wrote that resistance is always diffuse and ‘vaporous’ (ibid.: 25). This is in stark opposition to the solid mass of the military or the liquid fluidity of revolution. Caygill takes this point and expands it by arguing that resistant subjectivity is, ‘vaporous as opposed to the movement of solid and liquid masses’ (ibid.: 61). For Caygill, having a resistant consciousness is not enough to mount a creative resistance to domination (ibid.: Ch. 1); it needs a corresponding affirmative subjectivity (ibid.: 56) that, like resistance itself, is diffuse and vaporous. That is to say that a resistant subjectivity must be, to a large extent, formless. It must be able to act

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along the logic of assemblage in order to adapt to changing contexts, to grow in intensity or else slide to the background. The previous chapters outlined assemblage politics and introduced the notion of a resistant subjectivity that forms within spatial conception of time as key to the assemblage. What joins the assemblage is the ability to connect to a specific desire, in this case the desiring-­machine of zapatismo. Subjectivity is formed in the wake of that communal desire. This chapter will expand on that notion, examining the way that the Zapatistas articulate their subjectivity, a haunted subjectivity that is neither alive nor dead, but exists as different levels of intensity. Through a reading of Bataille and Derrida and their notions of dignity and sovereignty, this chapter will demonstrate that the Zapatista subject position is not a Heideggerian ‘being towards death’, nor is it an affirmation of life (as you find in Levinas). Rather, it is one that is already dead and in its death in life it is able to connect with all those resisting neo-­liberal domination. *  *  *  * While there is no definitive model of resistant subjectivity, Caygill writes that: A surprising feature of resistant subjectivity is its mobilization of the theory of the traditional cardinal virtues of justice, courage/fortitude and prudence in the understanding of resistance. Resistance is motivated above all by a desire for justice, its acts are performed by subjectivities possessed of extreme courage and fortitude and its practice guided by prudence, all three contributing to the deliberate preservation and enhancement of the capacity to resist. Caygill 2013: 12

For the Zapatistas, resistance’s demand for justice, courage and prudence is first and foremost based on dignity. As John Holloway, the academic who is perhaps the most engaged with the Zapatistas (at least in the English language), points out, zapatismo has always placed the concept of dignity foremost within its call to resistance (Holloway 1998: 159–160). Whereas revolution problematically rests on the affect of love in its biopolitics, zapatismo explicitly rejects love as the guiding force in its politics with its acknowledgement that love engenders paternalism and fascistic exclusion (Marcos in El Kilomobo Intergaláctico 2007: 57–58). Rather, zapatismo’s call to

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resistance sublimates love into dignity. Dignity in this context is predicated on mutual respect and communication with the Other. Marcos is explicit on this point when he wrote that: Whatever political relationship that is not based in respect is a manipulation. Well-­intentioned or bad-­intentioned, it doesn’t matter, because it is a manipulation. If you don’t respect the thinking of the other, of their word, if you don’t speak to them clearly, then you don’t respect them and you are manipulating them. ibid.

Marcos goes on to acknowledge that the notion of dignity is minimized by capitalist relationships, as dignity based on mutual respect and communication, and not love, needs to be the revolutionary terrain (ibid.: 59). This is a clear reversal of revolution’s biopolitics that has love as the driving force in the production of subjectivities. Dignity, in zapatismo, has no biopolitical power. Rather it functions in the production of smooth spaces where different subjectivities may encounter one another, engendering a terrain of possibilities. Zapatismo’s inclusion of dignity, autonomy and sovereignty implicitly means that their project is one of liberation of and for all ‘human existence in an oppressive society’ (Holloway 1998: 160), and as such dignity, autonomy and sovereignty engenders the outpouring of Zapatista solidarity with other subaltern resistances. This is an important distinction since it means a shift in focus to the subaltern peoples regardless of the ideological framework deployed, a reversing the traditional Marxist-Leninist approach that is led by a vanguard and maintains that only the party can have an analysis of capitalism endow class consciousness to the masses (ibid.: 164). Conversely, the Zapatista approach with its emphasis on ‘listening’, rather than ‘talking’, shifts the active role to the subaltern class in revolt. Since the First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle dignity has been a prominent feature of the Zapatista discourses. But this deployment of dignity is one that problematizes both the conventional liberal and Marxist understandings of it. As pointed out by John Holloway, liberal theory takes ‘dignity’ as its point of departure for both the existence of the market – the functioning of which is based on the opposite of dignity, that is to say the active and daily exploitation, dehumanization and humiliation of the people and of state, since states are integrated into the world market – and into the global network of capitalist social relations. Holloway states that, ‘to

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speak of dignity in the framework of liberal theory, that is to say in the framework of the acceptance of the market, is a nonsense’ (Holloway 1997: 39). Holloway goes on to note how the Zapatista notion of dignity also disrupts orthodox Marxism. Dignity in Marxist terms is understood as ‘disalienation’. There are primarily two ways that this can be unpacked. Within orthodox Marxism (and here Holloway is explicit in stating that is a tradition that follows Engels and his conception of the ‘scientific’ rather than Marx himself) is one that reads it as closed: people are alienated now, and what is needed is a vanguard who have broken away from the fetishized social relations to lead the people to a future where, after the revolution, they will not be alienated any longer. The obvious repercussion of this conception of alienation is the hierarchical relationship it establishes (ibid.: 39–40). Conversely, Holloway notes that zapatismo converts dignity and rebellion into freedom and dignity, suggesting that zapatismo’s concept of alienation is closer to thinkers such as Bloch and Marx insofar as it implies that the starting point is the present existence of dignity and the struggle is one against dignity’s negation (ibid.: 40). To quote Holloway at length: Dignity exists as the negation of the negation of dignity, not in the future, but as present struggle. Or, in more traditional language, disalienation exists not only in the future, but also as present struggle against alienation. Dignity, as the struggle against humiliation, is integral to humiliation itself. This concept of dignity has enormous implications for how we think of revolution and the forms of political organisation. If the starting point is the dignity of those in struggle (and we are all in struggle, since we are all humiliated), then the struggle of dignity must be a struggle that is defined by the people in struggle. Hence the practices associated with the zapatista slogans of ‘command by obeying’ (mandar obedeciendo) and ‘asking we walk’ (preguntando caminamos). Revolution is not a talking but a listening or, perhaps better, a listening-­talking, a dialoguing, a setting out rather than an arriving. ibid.

Dignity within the Zapatista context has to be: [Understood] as a category of struggle, is a tension which points beyond itself. The assertion of dignity implies the present negation of dignity. Dignity, then, is the struggle against the denial of dignity, the struggle for the realisation of dignity. Dignity is and is not: it is the struggle against its own

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negation. If dignity were simply the assertion of something that already is, then it would be an absolutely flabby concept, an empty complacency. To simply assert human dignity as a principle (as in ‘all humans have dignity’, or ‘all humans have a right to dignity’) would be either so general as to be meaningless or, worse, so general as to obscure the fact that existing society is based on the negation of dignity. Similarly, if dignity were simply the assertion of something that is not, then it would be an empty daydream or a religious wish. The concept of dignity only gains force if it is understood in its double dimension, as the struggle against its own denial. Holloway 1998: 160

Dignity becomes a project of resistance to dignity’s negation that by definition cannot ever hope to be completed. It means the absolute fluidity of positions, and the negation of fixed identities (the state, in contrast, comes to represent to binary opposition to this by presenting a unified and fixed – essentialized – identity) (ibid.: 169). Holloway correctly points out that the implication of this is that there cannot be any transitional programme. ‘The concept of dignity, as revolutionary principle, necessarily implies that the revolution is made in the course of its making’ (Holloway 1997: 40). In other words, it becomes a resistant strategy that can never have an end point, but rather is defined by its perpetual movement. *  *  *  * Alongside of dignity, the other concept (demand) that is found throughout the Zapatista writings is sovereignty. Since the First Declaration and, most explicitly, in their negotiations of the San Andrés Accords, autonomy – specifically indigenous autonomy – has been an important aim of the Zapatistas. However, when looking at the Zapatista use of the term ‘autonomy’ we have to understand it as signifying more than just the state-­centric liberal theory of political independence and the recognition of self-­determination. Its proximity to their notion of dignity means autonomy comes to signify everything that is external to oppressive domination. Zapatismo’s concept of autonomy flows from the absolute refusal to seize power – what Holloway calls ‘anti-­power’; Zapatista autonomy radically decentres the state, negating its power as well as all fixed identities that the state guarantees (Holloway 2002: 33–35). In doing so, autonomy, like dignity,

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becomes a negative concept insofar as it negates power structures and rigidity. In this way it is autonomy from capitalist exploitation and alienation as well as autonomy from oppression, be it oppression predicated on gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, etc. In other words, it is a conception of autonomy that is predicated on dignity. This is a point that the Zapatistas are clear on. In an interview, Subcomandante Marcos explicitly states that the Zapatista understanding of autonomy is radically different from how it is commonly understood. While not offering a definition of the Zapatista understanding of autonomy, Marcos claims that in the conventional understanding autonomy includes a nostalgic link between blood and soil and as such other projects of autonomy become limited within ridged geographic borders, and to venture outside of those borders is to do so as an invading enemy, the existential Other par excellence (Anon. n.d.: 306). This understanding of autonomy is something that is not only heterogonous to the subject, but also actively deconstructs fixed identities. Autonomy becomes both a project as well as the space of struggle. Autonomy has a definite strategic use in zapatismo, but it is also, to quote Holloway, ‘a definition that overflows, both thematically and politically’ (Holloway 1998: 173). When taken together with zapatismo’s understanding of dignity, autonomy appears to be closer to Bataille’s concept of sovereignty than to any liberal state-­centric definition. The Zapatistas take their conception of autonomy from the notion that national sovereignty resides in the people (EZLN 1995 in Vodovnik 2004: 646). The ‘nation’ in question here, as deployed in the Zapatista communiqués, is better understood as the space where people happen to live. This means that ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘national liberation’ constitute a space that needs defending from any imperialist force, including the state (Holloway 1998: 166). ‘ “Nation” in this sense refers to the idea of struggling wherever one happens to live, fighting against oppression, fighting for dignity’ (ibid.). This is a sovereign position that in claiming autonomy refuses statist systems. Sovereignty then has to be understood as a communal effort that works at undoing both individual subjectivity as well as the essentialized identities that the state guarantees. *  *  *  * A subjectivity that relies on the capitalist state as its guarantor is, in Bataillian terms, a limited subjectivity. Limited insofar as they exist only in individuals

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who are isolated – alienated – by capitalism, by the demands of capitalist ideology that freedom can only be found in separateness (Hegarty 2000: 82). Conversely, Bataille maintained that sovereignty would provide a ‘deep subjectivity’ (Bataille in Hegarty 2000: 76). This is a deep subjectivity that can only be understood in its relation to dignity. Dignity within the capitalist system is a dignity that is dependent on things that convey a semiotic power relation (Bataille 2007b: 344–345). So to obtain a deep subjectivity, dignity must be predicated on NOTHING, the inverse of a thing that is used in capitalist accumulation (ibid.: 345), in other words, the excess. The truly sovereign person is the person who claims the dignity of NOTHING, a conception of dignity that, like the Zapatistas’ use of the concept, had a negative meaning – the negation of the negation of dignity. In attaining this dignity the sovereign person, ‘deliberately deprives himself of the enjoyment of those things he administers’ (ibid.: 357). When commenting on Bataille’s concept of deep subjectivity Paul Hegarty wrote that: The ‘deep subjectivity’ cited above is basically an empty one [. . .] it has nothing to do with knowledge, even the knowledge of death. It is not the overcoming of death, but the living in death that threatens knowledge and the subject. Sovereignty ‘is essentially the refusal to accept the limits that fear and death would have us respect’ and ‘the sovereign is he who is as if death were not.’ Hegarty 2000: 76

This is a subjectivity of a spectre, an apparition that is the intermediary between, ‘life and death, between being and non-­being, between matter and spirit, whose separation it dissolves’ (Macherey 2008: 19). Considering this form of subjectivity in terms of spectres places the examination within the context of Derrida’s hauntology. Hauntology also relies on a topological understanding of time in its summoning of spectres that are no longer or not yet present. In Derrida’s Specters of Marx the communism that is haunting Europe signals the inevitability of communism that is to come. Its first coming is already a return, already a repetition, but from the future not the past. It is a spectral repeatability that is a condition or effect of a future possibility, rather than a recurrence of what can be confidently recorded as a ‘history’ insofar as it has already happened in some sense (Montag 2008: 70). This summons a temporality where the future event comes to the present as a future

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repetition. In other words, a topological temporal plane that has been folded over, bringing Derrida’s hauntology, and by extension deconstruction, close to schizoanalysis. The returning repetition then comes back as difference. As Warren Montag points out, in the lexicon of deconstruction difference is understood as différance, the way that production of meaning is not the ‘re-­presentation of what was already fully present, but is itself a movement of difference and deferral in which every origin is constituted retroactively, nachträglich, an origin never present except belatedly’ (2008: 68). It is around the concept of difference where the points of contention arise around this haunted subjectivity. In his reading of Specters of Marx, Antonio Negri claims that Derrida’s hauntological intervention advances the practice of deconstruction forward through its revitalization of Marxist communism, or at least a certain form of Marxist communism, but then pulls it back into static inaction against capitalist exploitation. Negri recognizes that in Specters of Marx deconstruction acknowledges that the spectres haunting Marx, and that continue to haunt the world under neo-­liberalism, are the spectres of capitalism (Negri 2008: 6). Given that there is only a singular substance with no outside or beyond, capitalism presents itself as a pervasive simulacrum, a spectral overlay, in which time is ‘out of joint’ (ibid.: 7–9) and with, ‘no outside, neither a nostalgic one, nor a mythic one, nor any urgency for reason to disengage us from the spectrality of the real. There’s neither place nor time – and this is the real’ (ibid.: 9). For Negri, this critique implies a move into phenomenology and opens up the possibility for deconstruction to move into ‘post-­deconstruction’ with an affirmative line of flight that looks at the production of a social reality that would combat capitalist exploitation, an exploitation that is ‘real and intolerable’, through the construction of a new revolutionary subjectivity (ibid.: 13–14). However, Negri also notes that deconstruction’s approach, its refutation of every logocentrism and deferral of essence causes deconstruction to, ‘[remain] prisoner of an ineffectual and exhausted definition of ontology. The reality principle in deconstruction is out of its element’ (ibid.: 12–13). Thus Negri contends that hauntology is unable to untie the knots of neo-­liberalism, specifically in the ‘undeconstructability’ of justice. He concludes that Derrida’s hauntology:

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[Turns] back and loses itself in that which is ‘inaccessible to man’, in the ‘infinitely other’. The game is played out in mysticism, in the recognition of an irresolvable foundation of the law, in the definition of responsibility as committing to an ungraspable ontological ‘other’. ibid.: 14

Conversely, it is Derrida’s hauntology that members of Subaltern Studies, specifically José Rabasa and Latin American Subaltern Studies, see in the intervention engendering revolutionary possibilities in zapatismo. Rabasa’s hauntology resides in his guiding proposition that history always haunts the present moment. The ‘spectres of history’ manifest in two distinct ways: through repetition and immanence (Rabasa 2010: 9). History’s repetition is its homogenizing power. It is the reproduction of all history in terms of capitalist modernity that reads all past narratives within contemporary understandings of Empire – implicitly understood within Hardt and Negri’s framework as global neo-­liberalism. While Rabasa does note the possibility of a joyous repetition of Nietzsche that can be found in Marx’s call for the repetition of the communist moment that has yet to come (ibid.: 264–265), for Rabasa the eternal summoned by History’s repetition is the reterritorializing drive to homogenize all histories under the domination of neo-­liberalism (ibid.: 9–10). The revolutionary possibilities of the spectres of history lay in History’s spectral immanence. Employing terminology within the vein of Deleuze and Guattari (although without ever citing their collaborative works), Rabasa notes that History has a geological structure and that the, ‘antidote to history’s warning against repetition is the eternal recurrence of the immanent possibility of liberation that lies deeply sedimented in the life histories of individuals and communities. Repetition manifests the now of insurrection’ (Rabasa 2010: 9, original emphasis). Rabasa maintains that this is not the impatient ‘now’ of insurrection, the spontaneous bursts of rebellion, but rather ‘the flight that severs all ties with both historical contingency and necessity’ (ibid.: 10). This immanence is the return of indigenous life that was never colonized and as such constitutes the radical heterogeneity of neo-­liberal modernity, what Rabasa terms ‘non-­modern’ (ibid.). Rabasa builds on this line of thought to argue that zapatismo is a synthesis of the modern (a Western inheritance of Marx and Leninist communism) and the non-­modern (indigenous culture’s direct democracy) that is haunted by a call for justice that emanates from

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its dual inheritance (ibid.: 37–61). It is this dual inheritance that endows zapatismo with the constituent strength that Negri outlines in Insurgencies (ibid.: 96, 100). In his work Rabasa attempts to propose an answer to Negri’s problem with hauntology and deconstruction by reading zapatismo – which he claims is haunted by the spectres of the non-­modern – through Negri’s concept of the multitude with its revolutionary temporality and its emphasis on the necessarily illegal strength of constituent strength – the power of the multitude that ‘rises up from nowhere’ – in order to demand the right of democratic self-­ governance. In doing so he argues that zapatismo, and revolution more generally, constitutes an ‘otherness’. This ‘otherness’ – which should not be read as ‘the Other’, but posited as an otherness’, as in revolution, the impossible [a concept he takes from Derrida. In this case the perceived impossibility of an Indian-­led revolution, full autonomy from the state, direct democracy, etc.], and the unnameable – demands that we not only account for Indians speaking in the terms and languages of the West but speaking about ‘the West, its revolutions, and its discourses’ in indigenous languages and discursive traditions. Rabasa 2010: 98, original emphasis

Rabasa’s argument is that it is the spectres of the non-­modern that haunt zapatismo that allows it, as a theoretically informed praxis, to remain a revolutionary multitude that can speak to and about the West without reterritorializing into a reformist movement that relies on constituted power – the power of the state that organizes the hierarchies of law (ibid.: 41, 59, 96–123). This would allow zapatismo to strategically essentialize its position, but defer the fixity of a static identity. Its claims to autonomy and sovereignty then seek to organize it within the structures of modernity’s system of laws (ibid.: 96), but zapatismo’s non-­modern spectres and messianic internationalism that seek change beyond the borders of Mexico defers this position and allows it to open up the revolutionary temporality of Benjamin’s Jetztzeit through its counter-­hegemony (ibid.: 57–59). As a reading strategy, Rabasa articulates a compelling argument that zapatismo demonstrates the revolutionary potential of hauntology by the way it maintains the multitude’s line of flight. However, his ordering of the non-­ modern and modern seeks to read zapatismo as a dialectical synthesis of the

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two. This reading reduces the two categories into homogenous binaries that implicitly privilege the non-­modern, as evident in his claim that the non-­ modern manifests as the democratic and egalitarian aspects of indigenous culture that were not colonized (ibid.: 8). When translating this reading strategy into revolutionary praxis the privilege position of the non-­modern ultimately serves to reproduce the monomania of essentialism that, in the accelerated temporality that Rabasa also affirms, would metastasize into forms of overt fascism. Howard Caygill opened up a move towards a more nuanced understanding of the spectres that haunt zapatismo, and the inheritance that they give to the Zapatista resistance, when he noted that zapatismo’s form of resistance includes a profound depersonalization. ‘The resistants were speaking and acting for and from the realm of the dead and those yet to be born, as the ghosts of Mayan gods and Mexican heroes such as Zapata and Villa’ (Caygill 2013: 191). This serves to create what Caygill briefly refers to as a ‘haunted subjectivity’, a resistant subjectivity that is constructed on the basis of a retroactive war of indigenous resistance to colonialism and oppression. This is a resistance that is haunted by and responds to the ‘voices of the dead’ and acts as their conduit for resistance to modern-­day oppression (ibid.: 124). This is a position that is made clear in the Zapatista communiqués as early as the Second Declaration from the Lacandón Jungle: Facing the mountains we speak to our dead so that their words will guide us along the path that we must walk . . . ‘Everything for everyone,’ say our dead. ‘As long as this is not true there will be nothing for us. ‘Find in your hearts the voices of those for whom we fight. Invite them to walk the dignified path of those who have no faces. Call them to resist. Let no one receive anything from those who rule. Ask them to reject the handouts from the powerful. Let all the good people in this land organize with dignity. Let them resist and not sell out. ‘Don’t surrender! Resist! Resist with dignity in the lands of the true men and women! Let the mountains shelter the pain of the people of this land. Don’t surrender! Resist! Don’t sell-­out! Resist!’ Our dead spoke these words from their hearts. We have seen that the words of our dead are good, that there is truth in what they say and dignity in their counsel. EZLN in Marcos 2001: 49–50

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Beyond their communiqués, this theme is also the guiding literary device in the 2007 semi-­fictional detective novel The Uncomfortable Dead that was co-­ authored by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos. The ‘uncomfortable dead’ in this novel is an explicit reference to Villa and Zapata, as well as all the dead oppressed people in Mexico, particularly the indigenous and the victims of Mexico’s ‘Dirty War’,1 who cannot find peace until the imperative ‘everything for everyone’ is fulfilled. Throughout the novel the detectives’ investigation into the ‘Bad and the Evil’ and their search for the infamous (and multiple) ‘Morales’ is directed from a series of messages transmitted through time by the dead. It is the dead who guide the investigation and who will not rest until justice has been delivered to all the people in Mexico. In fact the novel opens with the main character, an ‘Investigation Commission’ or detective named Elias Contreras, stating that he is already dead (Marcos and Taibo 2006: 14). The real life Elias Contreras was a support-­base Zapatista insurgent who died a short while before the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle was written. Leading up to the Sixth being drafted, the Zapatistas sent a group of compañer@s to every state in the Mexican Republic to conduct ‘field research’ on the state of Mexico and to report back what the situation (political, economic, cultural, etc.) was. This group was given the collective name ‘Elias Contreras’ (El Kilombo Intergaláctico 2007: 22). In this way the dead are still playing an active role in resistance. In death, Elias Contreras is not only still fulfilling his support role for the EZLN, but also guiding the Zapatistas in their struggle by locating the mechanisms of oppression within Mexico. In fact, Elias Contreras only became an Investigation Commission after he died (Marcos and Taibo 2006: 14–15), meaning that his importance to the community and his active role in their struggle exponentially increased after his death. Elias Contreras now speaks with a univocal voice, but a voice that is implicitly a communal utterance. He speaks through and guides the investigation into the ‘Bad and Evil’ (corruption, oppression, exploitation, etc.) carried out by all Zapatistas and as such is still an active member of their resistance. It is evident in their writings that the dead are narrated as being in constant communication with the Zapatistas, offering both advice and perspective in their struggle; this is perhaps most explicit in the writings about Subcomandante

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Insurgente Pedro (Marcos in Ramírez 2008: 42–43, 55–59). When speaking of Subcomandante Pedro, Captain Noé stated that, ‘Although physically he isn’t with us anymore as a member of this regiment, we still respect him [. . .] for me he isn’t dead’ (Noé 2008 in Ramírez 2008: 65). In the interviews Gloria Muñoz Ramírez conducted with Captain Noé and other Zapatistas, they use the past tense when relating specific stories about Subcomandante Pedro, but notably shift to the present tense when speaking of him in terms of what he continues to do for the Zapatistas, ‘For us he’s like a father, because there are things that we can’t do well and he helps us’ (Noé in Ramírez 2008: 66). The spectres haunting zapatismo, then, cannot be understood as an absolute depersonalization then since they are named, and in their naming specific figures are explicitly summoned. In the 2006 book Zapatistas: Revolutionary Subjectivities and the Chiapas Revolt, Mihalis Mentinis casually asserts that the deployment of the dead in service to resistance is little more than the Zapatistas’ own cultural relativity in keeping fidelity to indigenous and Latin American metaphysical belief systems: As in the case of mountain guardians, the dead too are believed to have supported the Zapatista struggle. When the first guerrilla group started coming down from the mountains of the jungle, where, according to local belief, the dead ancestors of the indigenous people live, and establish contact with civilians, they were able to win the trust of the latter due to the fact, at least partly, that they had survived for long time in the place of the dead and therefore should have had their grace. The rituals of the popular Mexican festival of the ‘day of the dead’, after the Zapatista uprising in 1994, have the extra component of thanking the dead for having supported the rebellion. Mentinis 2006: 176

This is a point echoed in Rabasa’s argument that zapatismo summons the non-­modern indigenous culture. However Mentinis’s analysis, and to a lesser extent Rabasa’s work, has reduced the Zapatista discourse of the uncomfortable dead to nothing more than strategic pandering to indigenous metaphysical belief systems and, in keeping with the Mexican government’s line of thinking (see Holloway 1998: 161), he casually implies that the insurgents gained the support of the indigenous people (at least in part) by exploiting their superstitions. In doing so, Mentinis’s work comes close to the Mexican government’s infantilization of zapatismo in their claim of the impossibility of

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an Indian-­led political movement;2 an argument that, as previously noted, constitutes a profound misreading of zapatismo (Rabasa 2010: 49). The first possibility opened up by Howard Caygill in approaching a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities of zapatismo’s haunted subjectivity is in relation to their demand for dignity and sovereignty. This is not the sovereignty as understood by Rabasa in his application of Negri’s concept of constituent power in his reading of zapatismo. For Negri, sovereignty is explicitly a state form of power that organizes hierarchies of power and draws the revolutionary multitude into a homogenous totality of ‘the people’. As such it stands in direct opposition to the revolutionary constituent power of the multitude (ibid.: 96). Following this understanding of sovereignty, the Zapatista demands for indigenous autonomy and sovereignty as outlined in the San Andrés Accords that they negotiated with the Mexican government (but have yet to be honoured by the Mexican state) constitutes the closure of revolution. Rabasa’s analysis of zapatismo is happy to accept this statist understanding of sovereignty when he notes that the San Andrés Accords are recognition of the indigenous non-­modern status of the Zapatistas (Rabasa 2010: 96–101). The demand for indigenous sovereignty is the demand for, ‘the democratic absolute, the impossible’, placing zapatismo within, but in opposition to Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire (ibid.: 100). However, the hauntological aspect of zapatismo opens up a form of sovereignty that is not reliant of the state as guarantor of identity, but rather posits itself as heterogeneous to the state. This is the sovereignty of the dead whose death constituted a sacrifice in the resistance to oppression. This is not to suggest that there are two different and mutually exclusive forms of sovereignty, but rather it constitutes a relationship between the sovereignty of the dead and state sovereignty. If, as Derrida suggests, ‘a radicalization is always indebted to the very thing it radicalizes’ (Derrida 2006: 116), then the spectres of the sovereign dead that haunt zapatismo and inform their demands for sovereignty have a direct relationship to the spectres of Marx with their conclusions about the withering away of the nation-­state. The naming of the dead opens up a critical space where sovereignty can be interrogated in service to the withering away of the assumed sovereignty of neo-­liberalism.

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Despite the fact that Subcomandante Pedro, Elias Contreras and Maestro Galeano were ‘actual’ Zapatista insurgents, the discourse surrounding them does not differ from that of any other uncomfortable dead. When looked at in conjunction with the other narrations of the dead that order the Zapatistas to resist as well as guide their resistance, we see that the discourse of the uncomfortable dead locates their resistance as stretching back through time, creating for them a history of resistance. More importantly, this is tantamount to narrating the death of all oppressed people as having been willingly sacrificed to the resistance (as was the case with Elias Contreras and, especially, Subcomandante Pedro who died in combat). The dead here have given the living the gift of their death and in doing so have enacted a freedom, the freedom to choose death and the responsibility that brings with it, the responsibility of the triumph over death, the triumph of life (Derrida 1996: 15–16). It is in the work and legacies of Bataille that the most rigorous work has been done in the thinking through of the haunted sovereignty of the dead’s sacrifice that zapatismo has deployed. For Bataille, a sacrifice (which etymologically means ‘to make sacred’) must be something valued and irreplaceable which abject, utilitarian use has degraded and made a thing of. Through the sacrificial act a thing is taken out of the profane world and placed in the realm of the sacred – the world that is immanent – by its destruction. As Paul Hegarty points out, in Bataille (specifically in his Eroticism (1987) at 82, 84, 86–89) both death and continuity, ‘emerge in sacrifice, where the victim is merged with the continuity beyond us, and in this, we are dragged out of ourselves as well’ (Hegarty 2000: 100). Those still alive identify themselves with the victim in a moment that restores immanence and through this process a communication takes place between the participants and the sacred being (Bataille 2006: 43–51; 2007b: 55–59). Community then is only present in moments of a shared sacred experience, what Bataille called communication. What is paradoxically shared or communicated here is continuity. In Eroticism, Bataille uses the term ‘continuity’ to signify a state of shared existence that is beyond the individual (Bataille 1987: 11–25). Death, ‘opens the way to the denial of our individual selves’ (ibid.: 24) by linking them to the flow of the general economy (Hegarty 2000: 56). Death in this sense is not limited to physical biological death, but

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comes to include everything that undoes the individual (ibid.: 57, 59). Since the process of being undone by sacrifice is always and can only be a shared experience, all communal existence is centred around death, and death is what is always sacred and sovereign. If, as Negri maintains, Empire manifests its sovereignty as the homogenization of singularities into a ‘people’, then the sovereignty of the dead undoes the sovereignty of Empire through its singularization. As Derrida notes, no person can die in the place of another person. People may die for others in an action of self-­sacrifice, what Derrida terms the gift of death, but each person’s death is always their own (Derrida 1996: 41). The irreducible singularity of death then undoes the capturing of forces into a homogenous whole by releasing the individual from the communal totality of the people (ibid.: 11, 36). This is especially true for the individual who gives her or his life through self-­sacrifice. Prefiguring Negri’s work on the sovereignty of Empire, Bataille wrote that within the bourgeois world of capitalism people are essentially reduced to tools in the production of the sovereignty of objects rather than subjects (Bataille 2007b: 344–345). In other words, capitalist societies endow eternal objects with a form of sovereignty, and dignity for people can only be attained through the possession of objects. The people then are reduced to a homogenous mass of consumers and as such are denied sovereignty. Because a dead person cannot again be used as a thing, it is in death that the contradiction of people’s thingness comes into play. Death actualizes that person as the absolute sovereign individual who is linked to the flow of energy (the general economy) and can never again be reduced to servile work within the homogenous totality of the people. What this means is that the only truly sovereign person is the dead person since sovereignty in Bataille describes how the general economy, the flow of excess forces that is heterogeneous and sacred, penetrates that subject of the restrictive economy – the world of utility and things – so that the subject falls away, losing itself in the shared communication of the immanent sacred. Sovereignty, and, by extension, community exists at the same intensity as death (Blanchot 1988: 11). When a person dies (and this is especially true in cases of sacrifice) those left alive make an error. They refuse to believe that s/he no longer is, but rather continues to exist in another form – a spirit, or an essence – which accompanies the consciousness of death that binds them together (Bataille 2007b: 216).

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Within this process of being bound together the individual subject becomes undone by being infiltrated by the heterogeneous sovereignty produced. To quote Paul Hegarty on Bataille’s understanding of the sovereignty of the dead: Like all other aspects of the general economy, [sovereignty] operates retroactively such that it will also have always been at the supposed origin of the subject (the subject is based on the possibility of her/his non-­existence or non-­being). This is what undoes the sense of project that will emerge when looking at ‘how sovereignty works’ [. . .] The referral to sovereignty as always already there means more than saying ‘in the beginning there was the sovereign subject’ – it is to say that, looking back, we deem it now to have always been there. On the one hand, in taking away the possibility of a sovereign subject as realization or achievement, sovereignty becomes the outside of the subject that infiltrates and always undoes the self-­present subject that says ‘I’. Hegarty 2000: 72

Zapatismo’s understanding of the uncomfortable dead, the five hundred years of resistance, retroactively endows the dead with sovereignty and with this sovereignty comes the zapatismo’s understanding of dignity. This is the dignity of negation, what Bataille refers to as ‘sovereign dignity’ (Bataille 2007b: 340–341). This negative dignity is the marriage of transgression and prohibition (ibid.: 341). However, transgression and prohibition in this context cannot be understood as having any relation to justice. The injunction of the uncomfortable dead is a call for justice, but, as Derrida notes, a justice, ‘where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights’ (Derrida 1996: xviii). The dignity of negation, the sovereign dignity, flows out of a call for a justice where there is none and necessarily involves the prohibition and transgression of unjust laws. The first manner in which hauntology, specifically in zapatismo’s deployment of it, rejects oedipal control is in the way in which it is selective as to which spectres haunt it. This seems at first counter-­intuitive given that hauntology, specifically in Derrida’s Specters of Marx (first published 1994), is marked by the return of the dead father. Derrida’s reading of Marx’s spectre haunting Europe alongside a reading of the paternal ghost who returns to haunt Hamlet implies a profoundly oedipal reading. However Derrida insists that he is

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interested only in the inheritance of, ‘a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them’ (Derrida 1996: 14, original emphasis). The spectral presence of Marx then cannot be the return of an oedipal figure, the reduction to, ‘the consciousness present to itself whose intention guarantees the unity and homogeneity of Marxist theory and practice’ (Montag 2008: 71). Rather, the spectre of Marx must be understood as a multiplicity of heterogeneous interpretations of Marx and the affective and effective power these maintain (ibid.). It is the immanence of the different Marxisms that continue to haunt the present. Or, to phrase it in schizoanalytic terms, each spectre of Marx is posited on the plane of immanence as a memory of Marx. As the plane of immanence is folded over the different memories are posited in the middle and remain immanent to the subjectivities formed in the wake of the movement of desire. It is the diagnostic element of topological temporality that allows for the selection of a ‘certain Marx’ to remain as the different memories, or spectres, of Marx come into contact and form new machinic assemblages. In this way it is not the oedipal ancestors of the indigenous Zapatistas that haunt zapatismo, but a certain immanent power of their dead. This return of a certain spectre within zapatismo is most articulate in the death of Subcomandante Marcos and the rebirth of Subcomandante Galeano. On 2 May 2014 in the Zapatista community of La Realidad a compañero teacher known by the nom de guerre ‘Galeano’ was ambushed and murdered by a paramilitary force supported by the two Mexican right-­wing political parties, the Green Ecologist Party and the National Action Party, as well as the Independent Center for Agricultural Workers and Historic Peasants (Molina 2014). Following the murder, on 25 May 2014 Subcomandante Marcos, in his first public appearance since 2009 (Oikonomakis 2014), gave a speech entitled ‘Between Light and Shadow’ (Marcos 2014)3 where he stated that ‘Marcos’ would also die. Not Marcos the man, Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, but Marcos the spectre. Vicente adopted the nom de guerre of Marcos after one of the original members of the EZLN known at the time as Marcos was killed at an army checkpoint in Puebla on 26 May 1983, around the same time that Vicente

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joined the EZLN (Henck 2007: 69). At that time ‘Marcos’ the military strategist was needed for the EZLN resistance, but this was never a unified figure. In his May 2014 speech Marcos was explicit that the spectre of Marcos who haunted zapatismo for the previous twenty years was never a unified subject with a single voice, but a multiplicity of spirits inhabiting the spectral form of Marcos (Marcos 2014). Following the move to wither away the military apparatus of the EZLN initiated in the Sixth, the need for Marcos the military strategist also began to wither away. Now that the Zapatistas have entered into a stage of relative peace and development, the spectre that is needed in the new post-­military phase of zapatismo is Galeano, the teacher. In order to bring this spectre back the Zapatistas: [H]ave come, as the General Command of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, to exhume Galeano. We think that it is necessary for one of us to die so that Galeano lives. To satisfy the impertinence that is death, in place of Galeano we put another name, so that Galeano lives and death takes not a life but just a name – a few letters empty of any meaning, without their own history or life. [. . .] That is why we have decided that Marcos today ceases to exist. ibid.

Rather than death releasing people from life,‘death commits [the Zapatistas] to the life it contains’ (ibid.) so that nobody truly dies, their spectres continue to serve the resistance. Thus a certain Marcos ‘died’ that day so that another spectre could be resurrected. The speech ended on a dramatic note when Marcos lit his pipe and exited stage left. Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés announced that, ‘another compañero is going to say a few words’ and a voice was heard offstage, ‘Good early morning compañeras and compañeros. My name is Galeano, Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. Anyone else here named Galeano?’ To which the crowd answered, ‘We are all Galeano!’ ‘Ah, that’s why they told me that when I was reborn, it would be as a collective. And so it should be’. Beyond hauntology, the second manner in which zapatismo’s hauntology rejects oedipal control is through its inclusion of actual living Zapatistas among the dead. In his analysis of zapatismo, Howard Caygill implies that the seemingly dead Zapatista subjectivity is an ethical position since, ‘the

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understanding that a resistant is already dead and cannot presume to enjoy the fruits of their resistance’ (Caygill 2013: 125). Therefore they must resist for everyone else still alive. ‘This is joined with the further thought that while the resistant dead live and speak [. . .] the living resistants should live as if already dead. The resistant subject is not free to choose a life of resistance, but is already dead and so must resist’ (ibid., original emphasis). Caygill is making an explicit linkage between the Zapatistas and Huey P. Newton’s concept of ‘revolutionary suicide’. In the words of Newton: The concept of revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic. On the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope – reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determinism to bring about change. Above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death and his life as one piece. Newton 1973: 7

Caygill correctly notes that revolutionary suicide is a resistant strategy where, despite not being able to enjoy the fruits of her or his resistance, they are able to no longer be held hostage to, ‘death in life or “reactionary suicide” of the vanquished Hegelian slave’ (Caygill 2013: 126). ‘Reactionary suicide’ is another term coined by Huey P. Newton where a person takes their own life as a reaction to external and overwhelming social conditions (Newton 1973: 4). Newton then goes on to adapt that to the condition of oppressed people who do not resist and suffer a spiritual death, a death in life, which manifests itself as apathy and resignation (ibid.). This is precisely the point made by the Zapatistas when they say that, ‘in order to live, we die’, and was made most explicit by Comandante Ramona when she declared that, ‘For all intents and purposes we were already dead. We meant absolutely nothing’ (quoted in Caygill 2013: 126). Marcos gave the most vivid account of this in an interview when he related the story of a girl, Paticha, around three or four years old who died in his arms from a fever: ‘And that happened many times, it was so everyday, so everyday that those births are not even taken into account. For example, Paticha never had a birth certificate. Which means that for the country she never existed, for the statistical office [INEGI], therefore her death never existed either’ (quoted in Holloway 1998: 163).

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For the Zapatistas the only choice left is to either die the slow and undignified death of misery or dying with dignity and in death achieving a spectral life imbued with sovereign dignity. To quote the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle: ‘By being born and living we die. We will always live. Only those who give up their history are consigned to oblivion’ (EZLN in Marcos 2001: 89). Finally, this haunted subjectivity carries with it an inheritance gifted from the spectres. If in order to live subaltern resistants have to die, then the ultimate function that the dead serve is through the inheritance that they pass on. In choosing revolutionary suicide the Zapatista resistants are giving the gift of their death, a gift that materializes as an inheritance. As Derrida notes in The Gift of Death, only a mortal can give and what a mortal can give is anything except immortality (Derrida 1996: 43). Conversely that which is dead and will not come back is unable to gift anything (Macherey 2008: 19). However, spectres by definition occupy the immanent space between what is alive and what is dead and, ‘an inheritance is also that which the dead return to the living, and that which re-­establishes a kind of unity between life and death’ (ibid.). For Derrida, the spectral return of a certain Marx means that the Marxist inheritance is not limited to the twentieth-­century forms of European state socialism and communism. Rather Derrida writes that: one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most ‘living’ part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-­death beyond the opposition between life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. Such a reaffirmation would be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx’s appeal – let us say once again in the spirit of his injunction – and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general. Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. Derrida 2006: 67, original emphasis

In Specters of Marx, Derrida acknowledges his opposition to everything that could be associated with the actual histories of the communist parties as well as the attempts by the French academics centred around Althusser who tried to pull Marxism into a ridged teleology (Ahmad 2008: 92–93). Indeed, Derrida also notes the oedipal nature of the actual occurrences of European

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communism when he points out that the spectre haunting Europe in the Manifesto for the Communist Party was a singular homogenous spectre, the return of, or rather the anticipation of the return of the Father (Derrida 2006: 2–3). The Marxist inheritance has to be a praxis that produces something new and plural, a reappropriation rather than a mechanical reproduction of a model or formula (Macherey 2008: 19). In this way the inheritance opens up onto the folded temporality of schizoanalysis by positing the memory on the topological plane so that it can form new machinic assemblages that are defined by constant rhizomatic movement, rather than stasis. One inherits from a past that remains yet to come in a present that is working to produce the past and future that share a mutual immanence (ibid.). The haunting must always engender ‘work’, the work to produce possibilities (Derrida 2006: 9). As John Holloway noted, when examining the inheritance of the haunted subjectivity of zapatismo, what is explicitly being gifted is the sovereign dignity of resistance. As a metamodel, zapatismo explicitly rejects attempts to reproduce its practices in any kind of formulaic manner. Zapatismo rather constitutes a space where different machinic assemblages can form into new war machines. To follow the injunction of zapatismo is to not blindly recreate its understanding of sovereign dignity, but to find new ways in which this inheritance can be translated and applied in different situations. *  *  *  * This chapter will conclude with an examination of the final aspect of the resistant Zapatista subjectivity, their depersonalization, through an analysis of their iconic pasamontaña (ski mask). Depersonalization, or the erasure of the individual in favour of a depersonalized multiplicity resists the pull towards any one authoritative figure and, as such, is key assemblage politics. This final section of this chapter will examine how the Zapatistas achieve their profound depersonalization in favour of a fluid, anti-­representational resistant subjectivity. In Specters of Marx Derrida is quick to draw an important distinction between a ‘spirit’ and a ‘spectre’ (2006: 4–5), although throughout the book he comes close to conflating the two closely related terms. As Warren Montag points out, this creates a tension that haunts Specters of Marx, as well as

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Derrida’s oeuvre in general, a tension between a materialist philosophy and a religious or metaphysical philosophy (Montag 2008: 72–78). It is this tension that brings Derrida close to the concerns of Deleuze and Guattari – how to make a memory actualize – and allows a schizoanalytic reading of hauntology. For Derrida, a spirit is that which necessarily comes before its first apparition, even if in the form of a promise or a hope (ibid.: 77). Spirit here explicitly has no material manifestations, but is a certain power to effect transformations (ibid.: 9). In other words, spirit inhabits the ‘virtual’ (ibid.: 10) in the form of possibilities. Deploying a linguistic framework that is remarkably close to Deleuze, Derrida writes that the spirit’s ability to effect, its virtual potential, lies in its repetition (ibid.: 10, 21). The singularity of each one of its returns creates multiple singular points, each with an equivocal voice but joined together to speak as a collective enunciation. It is through the time that is ‘out of joint’, the folded topological space of time, that a temporality that brings together time, history and the world. This constitutes the ability to cause effects of the spirit (virtual) on the material world by endowing the ‘law’ to the original spirit (ibid.: 21), or in other words, we have what schizoanalysis terms an abstract machine. This abstract machine, or spirit, materializes as a spectre. Derrida writes that a spectre is: [The] material manifestation of a spirit. It is a, paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-­body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter. There is something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapparition of the departed. Derrida 2006: 5

It is paradoxical because a spirit can be seen only by inhabiting something visible, a body or, in the case of King Hamlet, armour and a helmet, meaning that it is something virtual that has a very real materiality, something that is neither alive or dead (Montag 2008: 77). A spectre then is the link that allows the virtual possibilities to materially manifest by being mediated through phenomenological thing. A spectre may materialize around a unified persona

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such as the spectre of Marx or Hamlet’s father; however, its existence as a multiplicity means that it must be depersonalized. It is a body without flesh, the manifestation of, ‘someone, as someone other. And of someone other that we will not hasten to determine as self, subject, person consciousness, spirit and so forth’ (ibid.: 6, original emphasis). This is a point Derrida insists on when writing about the manifestation of Hamlet’s father and the visor effect. The power of a spectre resides in its ability to see without being seen, a tangibility of the intangible (ibid.). In other words the, ‘spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond [. . .] and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion’ (ibid.: 6–7, original emphasis). The amour, and especially the helmet, which the spectre of Hamlet’s father appeared in is at once a depersonalization and the guarantee of a persona. The spectre of the father inside the armour cannot be seen, but if the visor were to be raised then the spectral persona inside the amour would be visible (ibid.: 7–8). This, however, creates a problematic situation insofar as the spectre can speak, can pass the given injunction, without being verified. Even if the visor were raised it still has the same material, structural, effect of depersonalization (ibid.: 8). This depersonalization remains critical because sovereignty relies on a certain degree of depersonalization and multiplicity. As Derrida writes, the king must necessarily have ‘more than one body’; the king must be a thing (ibid.: 8, original emphasis). In other words, both sovereignty and law must originate from a collective enunciation. This depersonalization opens up a radical potential for the democratization of both law and sovereignty. If, as previously argued, fascism relies on homogenization, then sovereignty and law must be embodied in a transcendental third object, the oedipal object of a leader. Conversely, the spectrally of law and sovereignty opens itself up to a radical heterogeneity in the summoning of a certain ghost and through the difference produced in the summoning. In Specters of Marx Derrida is explicit that each return of Marxism is marked by a difference that is heterogeneous to both the original and to the other repetitions. Even Hamlet’s spectral father must be different from the original, marking his return as opening up multiplicity of ‘fathers’. This is not to suggest that the previous repetitions cannot be retroactively homogenized

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into a fascistic unity, but that the possibility for a collective enunciation that guarantees the singularity of each voice, but nevertheless speaks with a equivocal voice, is present. It is the possibility that is harnessed in zapatismo’s use of the pasamontaña. Derrida also writes that a helmet must be differentiated from a mask, although both share the same power to see without being seen (Derrida 2006: 8). The difference is in the visor; that is to say the ability for the visor to be raised while the mask ensures an omnipresent depersonalization. This differentiation seems to mark the tension between metaphysics and a materialist philosophy. The omnipresence of depersonalization of the mask could entail law and sovereignty as being trapped within a religious discourse where deity is the sole sovereign. This differentiation means that for Derrida the mask is, or rather has the potential to be, a totem that is itself endowed with a degree of sacredness. Rather than relying on a sweeping statement on the function of all masks, this needs to be complexified by looking at what kind of mask is used. As Thomas Nail notes, the use of masks as a political technology against representation has a global history that is unique to the radical Left. This history predates the Zapatistas, beginning with the use of masks in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s by the German and Italian Autonomists. However it was launched into global popularity by the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and has since been widely deployed by the alt-­globalization movement with the ‘black block’ tactic used during mass protests (Nail 2013b). The Zapatistas’ pasamontaña, with its eye and mouth holes, is able to avoid becoming a totem and remain a materialist connection in its mediation of a resistant subjectivity in two distinct ways: by offering a void in place of an object and impermanence in place of metaphysical continuity. The primacy of depersonalization within zapatismo is continually highlighted in their own writings. To draw upon a few quotes from Marcos that highlight this depersonalization: ‘because they were born without faces, without names, without individual pasts, the Zapatistas have been students of the story taught by the land. One dawn in 1994, the Zapatistas became teachers; consulting the old note of memory, they could teach how the world was born and show where it is to be found’ (Marcos 2001: 276). And, ‘[the] men and women who cover their faces to present themselves to others or who uncover

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their faces to hide’ (ibid.: 216). And, ‘I have seen our own cover their faces to show themselves to the world, and take off their ski masks to hide from the enemy’ (ibid.: 264). In his analysis of the Zapatistas, Mihalis Mentinis devotes considerable time to an examination of the Zapatista pasamontaña. He notes that the mask functions as a bridge between indigenous metaphysical belief systems where a certain amount of secrecy (in particular nagualism is concerned with secrecy from naguals or spirit totems who guide people and as such may be either a person’s friend or enemy) is a way of life and revolutionary ideology. Through an examination of Marcos’ parables of Old Antonio, he claims that for the indigenous the mask hides them from the harmful lion nagual of the Mexican state while at the same time facilitates the communication of an academic and urban revolutionary subjectivity. The mask, Mentinis argues, is a doorway bridging the ‘political language of the mestizo militants and the shamanistic indigenous discourse’ (Mentinis 2006: 173, 175–176). With his claim that the pasamontaña bridges the metaphysical world to the material world in its totemic power, Mentinis argues that the mask functions within the same tension between metaphysics and materialism in which Specters of Marx was written. While his analysis is compelling when thinking about what role indigenous culture played in the origins of the Zapatista practice of wearing the pasamontaña, ascribing the pasamontaña a totemic religious power does little good when considering the post–1994 practice of wearing pasamontañas as well as the significance of the mask outside of Chiapas. Thomas Nail suggests a more suitable scope of analysis when he notes that radical political struggle in the twenty-­first century wears a mask (Nail 2013b). What he is suggesting is that an anti-­representational politics has (or at least should) come to the forefront of radical struggle and in doing so move it from a classic politics that is bound up within the identity and difference schema. In other words, he is arguing for the potential of depersonalization. Masks actually do very little good concealing a person’s identity, a fact clearly illustrated by the relative ease in which the Mexican government was able to identify Subcomandante Marcos’s ‘real’ identity as Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente4 coupled with the simple fact that in their normal day-­to-day lives Zapatistas do not wear masks, so identifying them is not a difficult task for the military or news media. It is obvious that the practice of wearing masks

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is not an effective way of protecting your identity, nor is it intended to do so. It remains, however, important to continue the practice, to maintain the visor effect of the pasamontaña in order to avoid the homogenization of the Zapatista movement around an oedipal figure of a leader. Since political action based on an articulated fixed identity can only be limited in scope, if the Zapatistas had solely presented themselves, unmasked as it were, as an indigenous movement, then by definition their scope of action would have been limited to the promotion of indigenous rights. While the Zapatistas are predominately composed of indigenous peoples and indigenous rights have always been a key feature in their demands, they are also explicitly not a movement of indigenous people, but rather a movement of all oppressed people within as well as outside Mexico. In practice, the Zapatistas have given several different reasons for the use of these masks over the years, from poetic claims that the pasamontaña portrays Mexico’s covering up of the real Mexico5 to claiming that it guarantees that no one tries to become the leader. Marcos has stated that Zapatistas wear masks for two reasons: The primary one is that we have to watch out for protagonism – in other words, that people do not promote themselves too much. It is about being anonymous, not because we fear ourselves, but rather so they cannot corrupt us. [. . .] We know that our leadership is collective and that we have to submit to them. Even though you happen to be listening to me now because I am here, in other places others, masked in the same way, are talking. The masked person today is called Marcos here and tomorrow will be called Pedro in Margaritas or José in Ocosingo or Alfredo in Altamirano or whatever he is called. Finally, the one who speaks is a more collective heart, not a caudillo [a charismatic leader]. That is what I want you to understand. Not a caudillo in the old style, in that image. The only image that you will have is that those who make this happen are masked. And the time will come when people will realize that it is enough to have dignity and put on a mask and say well then, I can do this too. Marcos quoted in Khasnabish 2010: 12

The pasamontaña’s depersonalizing effect opens up a radical heterogeneity in zapatismo. This is why the Mexican government’s unmaking of Marcos proved to be so ineffective. Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente has a definable

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face that speaks with a singular voice, however Subcomandante Marcos’s face is depersonalized and his voice is always collective. This is why when the Zedillo government identified Marcos as Guillén, calling him a middle-­class ‘maverick philosopher and university professor’, in an attempt to discredit him, Marcos’s unmasking was met by over one hundred thousand protesters chanting, ‘we are all Marcos’ (Henck 2007: 284–285). This was equally illustrated in the ‘rebirth’ of Galeano, when the crowd cheered, ‘we are all Galeano’, prompting him to respond to the crowd, ‘Ah, that’s why they told me that when I was reborn, it would be as a collective’ (Marcos 2014). Rather than one oedipal spectre or a multiplicity of one spirit, zapatismo is haunted by a multiplicity of spectres (both living and dead), each one a multiplicity in itself, n + 1. This is why the simple division between helmet and mask in their depersonalizations is inappropriate when analysing the pasamontaña. The depersonalization of the pasamontaña has the power to see without being seen, but it also has the power to reflect back the image of all subaltern people. In a process reminiscent of the Black Panther concept of ‘I Am We’, the Zapatista pasamontaña works to mediate collective subjectivity by forming a relationship between their name and the multiplicity that composes it, subverting what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the despotic agency of The Signifier’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 29). They are able to evoke the status of all subaltern peoples and offer a means of direct political action, rather than hopeless reliance on technologies of representation. This also means that anyone is able to be a Zapatista so long as they share the common desire of zapatismo. Zapatista is an intensity – a univocal name, but one that is uttered through a multiplicity of singularities creating the singular-­universal position – and the pasamontaña mediates the singular-­universal position to the world. By putting on the pasamontaña, an act that can be and is done by resistants across the world in solidarity with the Zapatistas, the wearer slips into the centre zapatismo, a subjectivity that they universalize as all oppressed people in rebellion against all forms of oppression the world over. The pasamontaña helps to locate a multiplicity of action that is centred around the zapatismo desiring-­machine within the immediate reach of the most diverse social groupings. This engenders communication without a transcendental language system of representation (see Guattari 2009: 158; Querrien 2011: 89–90). In

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other words, to paraphrase Marcos, it becomes a mirror that reflects and connects all resistant subjectivities (Marcos 2001: 244). In this way the pasamontaña should be conceived as a void that mediates Zapatista subjectivity rather than a representational object. In this context, a void does not signify any form of lack or absence. Rather, following Deleuze, a void is the constructive space of possibilities (Deleuze 2006a: 66–67). A void is fully, ‘part of the constitution of the field of desire criss-­ crossed by particles and fluxes’ (ibid.: 67). Space is not constituted by what fills it, but rather by the consciousness of it. So whereas lack signifies absence, void signifies the consciousness of a space of possibilities, or in other words the plane of immanence or the Body Without Organs. Deleuze and Guattari makes this spatial understanding of the void evident in A Thousand Plateaus when they write that it is space that mediates an absolute deterritorialization is the void (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 200). This is why the Zapatista understanding of the pasamontaña as a mirror works to mediate without representing. A mirror is essentially a void, it is negative space, or at least the consciousness of space, that has the potential to be filled with any assortment of different resistant and subaltern subjectivities. These different subjectivities, each with its own infinite number of memories, have the potential to form into new machinic assemblages. The pasamontaña does not represent any identity, but provides the mediated space for new assemblages to form in constant becomings. Here we have an uncanny similarity to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-­everybody / everything’. To become-­everybody is, quoting Deleuze and Guattari, ‘to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is only by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency’ (2002: 280). For Deleuze and Guattari, to become-­everybody is to become this abstract, decentred, line of flight and to then be imperceptible, indiscernible and impersonal, what they refer to as the ‘three virtues’ (ibid.). However there is a contradiction here. To be imperceptible is to be perceived. This is because there is a relation established to a, ‘given threshold of perception, which is by nature relative and thus plays the role of mediation . . . and makes forms perceivable to perceiving subjects’ (ibid.: 281).

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Thus their deployment of the mask helps to establish a proximity to others on a similar line of flight (a deterritorialization). Geographical distance no longer matters (and this is also immensely aided by their prolific and effective use of the internet). By universalizing their struggle, and adding to it the struggles of every oppressed person, through the use of the iconic image of the pasamontaña – something that since the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 has become part and parcel with the anti-­globalization movement, something that was often an explicit reference to the Zapatistas – they have created an identity of zapatismo that has nothing to do with a unified subject teleologically stemming from a mythic common ancestor. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari wrote, ‘propagation by epidemic, by contagion [. . .] nothing to do with filiation by heredity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 241). Deleuze and Guattari go on to write that: The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous [. . .] These combinations are neither genetic or structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations [. . .] [that have] nothing to do with families or states; they continually work them from within and trouble them from without [. . .] there is an entire politics [. . .] which is elaborated in assemblages [. . .] they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt. ibid.: 242, 247

It is within this proximity of desire that the Zapatistas enact a new assemblage politics. All of these singular subjectivities within Zapatista are bound together in solidarity, not by any formal relations but through proximity to one another, to those who are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which, for Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is a process of desire (ibid.: 272), in this case, a democratic and non-­ oppressive, non-­fascist desire. And it is a desire that ‘infects’ others, rather than spreading along lines of filiation. Deleuze and Guattari note that in all becomings a ‘molar extension’ is required (ibid.: 34). In other words, projects of becomings, deterritorializations, are necessarily communal and centred on a communal identity, in this case, ‘Zapatista’. However, Zapatista does not represent a unified subject, but rather it is the multiplicities that are formed in the wake of the event of desire. This is a point that the Zapatistas are explicit about. Throughout the collective Zapatista writings as well as the writings only attributed to Marcos, they refer to themselves

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as ‘neo-­zapatistas’. This is not a teleological name with the ‘neo’ prefix designating that the rebels who fought with Zapata were the ‘old’ Zapatistas and they are the new ones. Rather it refers to their continual rebirths. Each event within the Zapatista timeline (the original insurgents establishing a camp in the jungle, the ‘defeat’ at the hands of the indigenous populations, the 1994 uprising, the ceasefire, their encounters with Mexican civil society, their encounters with different resistants within the alt-­globalization movement, etc.) signifies a death and a rebirth of the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas return, but in each repetition they are different. What binds the ever-­expanding multiplicity of spectres together is that they are centred on the communal desire articulated in zapatismo. The name ‘Zapatista’ as a ‘proper name’ (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is, on the contrary, when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her ‘true proper name’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 37). The true proper name is the collective name or the name given to the spectral multiplicities that are present in the voice. In other words, ‘Marx’ may be a true proper name, but it is a name given to the multiplicity of the spectres of Marx. Or Zapatista is a true proper name, but only insofar as it is the name of the multiplicities that constitute it. The collective enunciation of zapatismo produces a very specific kind of resistant subjectivity immanent not to a consciousness which represents an ‘I’ to itself, but to the political event of zapatismo. The political event of zapatismo, as previously argued, then constitutes an absolute deterritorialization. However, since an absolute deterritorialization can only be maintained in the virtual world, then a resistant’s presence within the deterritorialization must be predicated on a temporality. This is the second function of the pasamontaña; it establishes an impermanence that enables people to move from the centre to the periphery and back again through the simple act of putting it on and taking it off, so to a degree a Zapatista is always alone with others, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘pack’. In the chapter entitled ‘One or Several Wolves’ from A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari look at movements involving multiplicities and distinguish two separate forms they may take: a mass or a pack (2002: 33). A mass or a crowd is characterized by, ‘large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members, concentration, sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-­way

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hierarchy, organization of territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs’ (ibid.). On the other hand, a pack shares many of these characteristics, but tends to be smaller in size and non-­hierarchical, or rather has a fluidity of hierarchicalization (ibid.). That is to say that there is no fixed leader within a pack. When hunting, a pack of wolves may appear to move in one direction following one apparent leader, but suddenly shift directions, with a different apparent member leading the pack. The pack then is not a hierarchical formation, but rather is composed of different singularities that are able to move as a collective. The pack is an assemblage. The wolves may move into the centre during a hunt or drop back towards the periphery at any moment, depending on the needs of the pack. This means that no one wolf is expected to maintain the intensity of the hunt at all times, but works always within the collective, moving into and out of the centre as needed (ibid.: 33–34). This is a form of rhizomatic movement that Deleuze and Guattari term ‘schizo position’, a constant movement from centre to periphery that allows the pack to move in any direction. We recognize this as the schizo position, being on the periphery, holding on by a hand or a foot [. . .] As opposed to the paranoid position of the mass subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group; be securely embedded in the mass, get close to the center, never be at the edge except in the line of duty. ibid.: 34

With the pasamontaña allowing Zapatistas to ‘show their face to the world’, the mask becomes the heterogeneous link between the depersonalized and spectral molar identity of Zapatista, and the molecular or particular subjectivity of the specific woman or man. In this way no one particular singularity is expected to accomplish the impossible – to maintain an absolute deterritorialization. By allowing the different singularities to always move into and through zapatismo, zapatismo itself (as embodied in the spectral form of the pasamontaña) is able to maintain a constant rhizomatic movement. In other words, zapatismo is able to maintain an absolute deterritorialization precisely because of the impermanence and the difference in repetition of the multiple spectres that haunt it.

Conclusion Theories of revolution have risen to a prominent position within political philosophy following the 2008 financial crash and the uprisings of 2011, but, as Slavoj Žižek (2011), Antonio Negri (2014) and Simon O’Sullivan (2014) have all noted, these theoretical returns to revolution largely lack a theory of subjectivity. This book argues that central to the project of revolution is the subjectivity that it produces. These singularities are not formed in a void and as such are not totally free from capitalist forces. It is these subjectivities that ultimately determine the direction and form in which revolutionary changes occur. Capitalism, especially in its neo-­liberal form, engenders a specific form of microfascism, something that Pasolini called a ‘new fascism’ and Michel Foucault referred to as the ‘fascism of everyday life’. Building on the work of Julian Reid, David Chandler and, especially, Michel Foucault, this book has argued that neo-­liberalism needs to be viewed primarily as a theory and practice for the formation of subjectivity. Capitalism has always created a subject centred on a fundamental lack who tried to securitize their life from biological and social threats. This explicit drive to securitize life necessitates a degree of fascism insofar as any thing or person which may pose an existential threat must be eliminated. In this matrix, desire to fill this fundamental lack is displaced to a form of consumerism, which in turn generates a greater sense of unfulfilment. The subject is subordinated within capitalist systems, but is conditioned to desire this form of repression. Capitalism functions through two distinct mechanisms of ‘deterritorialization’ (the deregulation, or breaking away from codified norms) and ‘reterritorialization’ (the regulation or codification of the deterritorialized break or movement) of desire. On one hand capitalism unleashed desire as had never been done before in an absolutely revolutionary deterritorialized

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line of flight. On the other hand it then captures these energies, disciplining them to market logic. This is a logic of creative destruction, constantly destabilizing social ecologies by destroying old markets in order to create new ones. In this way capitalism is a revolutionary system. This has been exponentially advanced at an ever-­accelerating rate since the global deregulation of capital, what has come to be known as neo-­liberalism. The accelerated economic sphere of neo-­liberal Integrated World Capitalism plays the central role in social acceleration. Decreasing the turnover time necessary to earn a profit, reducing manufacturing time, accelerating technological innovation, speeding up production to maximize labour power, quickly transporting goods to distant markets and countless other features of neo-­liberalism contribute directly to the acceleration of social life. The disequilibrium of neo-­liberalism’s financial flows are deeply interconnected with psychic flows within society, meaning that neo-­liberal biopolitics, the social and political power that creates subjectivities or ‘types’ of people, is based on the same disequilibrium. Within this system an accelerated drive towards a possible future destruction is always present in the form of the future-­anterior – and as such ecstatic destruction is immanent to subjectivity, it is located in the centre of a person’s sense of self. This creates a generalized anxiety within society. In other words, neo-­liberalism creates a fundamentally psychotic subject. *  *  *  * Revolution is taken to mean a radical change in the sign-­system, or, as Negri phrases it, the ontological transformation of the world. In other words, revolution is an act that would turn the world on its head, ridding it of capitalism and capitalist forms of fascism. What is at stake, then, the spectre haunting projects of revolution, is implicitly life. Not necessarily human life – Nick Land and other Accelerationist theorists are specifically interested in machinic life, or ahuman life – but nevertheless revolution is always a question of life in some form. This book argues that revolution as a specific desire to reorder life is productive insofar as it produces subjectivities, the communal identities then are formed through the discourse of revolution insofar as it is discourse that orders life (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 76). As revolution produces new abstract assemblages, what Deleuze and Guattari term war

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machines, within the virtual it remains a deterritorializing force. However, as Simon O’Sullivan reminds us, subjectivity needs to be produced through practice, in other words in the concrete world. This means that subjectivity is a ‘lived experience’, or we might say a ‘lived problem’ (O’Sullivan 2012: 1–2). To maintain life requires a certain apparatus of security, what Foucault termed the dispositifs of security. These dispositifs create a, ‘ “specific arrangement” so that life can be made to live’ (Evans 2013a: 45). For Foucault it is this arrangement that allows life to circulate (Foucault in Evans 2013a: 46). But, far from occupying neutral positions, these apparatuses are always inscribed into a play of power (ibid.). As such, revolution’s production of subjectivity, its biopolitical force, grounds revolutionary projects within a politics of security. This politics is inherently fascistic insofar as, ‘when life becomes the principal object for political strategies, violence so often associated with historical fascism appears less pathological and more reasoned’ (Evans 2013a: 47). Theorists of revolution have largely taken a strategic approach to its biopolitical sphere. For Badiou, Hardt and Negri revolution’s biopolitics is indispensable. These thinkers situate the biopolitics of revolution as the common that binds the singularities together by giving them a necessary History. In doing so, the biopolitical common opens up a future to-­come and connects the subjectivities to the accelerated temporality of revolution, what Negri refers to as revolution’s ‘arrow of time’. The production of a temporality that opens up a future of the world to-­come is at once inherently communal and teleological, so once singularities become concerned with the production of this temporality they assume the form of the common and the experience of the common is the mark of this teleological process. The biopolitical common then is constituted as what Deleuze and Guattari termed a line of flight and acts as the motor that accelerates the line’s trajectory. The biopolitical common of revolution, what Negri and Badiou insist is unified under the name ‘communism’, is the relation which is capable of binding the subjects together within the project of revolution, the clinamen. Singularity takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable (Nancy 2008: 6). Within the clinamen each singularity retains an aspect of independence, but its freedom of movement is restricted, it is bound within the movement, accelerated beyond the speed of thought, to the other atoms (Deleuze 2001: 184). Nevertheless clinamen appears as freedom because its movement is not

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codified by ‘nature’, by that which is heterogeneous to it – its movement is its own (Negri 2003: 45). In other words, because its movement is not controlled by the heterogeneous force of capitalism, the multitude appears as freedom and it is able to accelerate its speed beyond that of capitalist thought. The singularities that compose the multitude surrender a portion of their autonomy and, to a degree, become a homogenous force unified under a common name leading it into ontology. This book has argued because life is always the object of biopolitics, fascism is inherently located within all biopolitical production. The only possible manner in which a revolutionary project might avoid the pitfalls of fascism is to include an internal diagnostic mechanism, a mechanism that would work at the micro level, the sites of psychic production. This would allow the projects to confront their own reproductions of drives towards domination and oppression. As this book has argued, revolution is always based on a Promethean future orientation and an accelerated temporality. This temporal structure refuses the slowing down that a diagnostic mechanism would need to work. More than that, revolution’s Prometheanism functions to ensure that the ends justify any fascistic means used to arrive at the promised future. Ultimately, this means that, even if it is successful, a revolution will always defeat itself by reproducing the same fascistic structures it intended to dismantle. *  *  *  * This analysis leaves the anti-­capitalist Left with one enduring question: how to achieve revolutionary change without revolution? The answer, this book has argued, is through a practice of resistance. Building on the seminal work done by Howard Caygill in On Resistance, this book has looked at how a theory and practice of resistance can be generated that would be both active and created, rather than reactive and destructive. Since, as this book has argued following an schizoanalytic framework, desire is always assembled, the key strategy must be to assemble desire in order to resist the reproduction of oedipal mechanisms that engender fascisms (see also Evans 2013a: 45). This means that resistance must be organized through a logic of assemblage. This logic has been concretized as a philosophically informed practice termed ‘assemblage politics’. In its simplest terms, an assemblage is when two or more heterogeneous things join together to form something new where

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each component retains its own particular traits, but is able to work in concert with the other parts, much like the players in a jazz ensemble are able to work in concert, while still maintaining the distinct individuality of each instrument. Assemblage then organizes itself in much the same way. It is a form of non-­ representational political action that emphasizes horizontalism and fluid network organization rather than hierarchical structures of power. As a conceptual framework, assemblage politics is grounded in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. However, it most directly flows out of the conceptual framework developed by Manuel DeLanda in A New Philosophy for Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006). In his work DeLanda has drawn on schizoanalysis in order to derive an analytic framework termed ‘assemblage theory’. Following Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda conceptualizes an assemblage as relations of exteriority. Each component of the assemblage has the capacity to break away from the whole and re-­form either in a new way or else onto a different assemblage. The relations between the different components are not necessarily logically structured, only contingently obligatory. Assemblage theory functions at two poles: the analytic pole which looks at the material and expressive aspects of an assemblage and the pole that analyses the process in which the assemblage’s identity is stabilized and destabilized, or how the assemblage moves in a non-­linear rhizomatic way. While assemblage theory has provided a strong tool to use with analysing social, political and corporate structures, it nevertheless remains only a means of analysis. Assemblage politics incorporates the same material and expressive components and the same process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization that assemblage theory analyses, but actively deploys these as a form of political praxis. While the abstract can open the politics up to what is possible, it is only when the project is actualized and tested that the individuals are able to gain perspective and fully visualize the project. *  *  *  * This book argues that zapatismo, the resistant philosophy developed by the Zapatistas, functions as a metamodel, detailing assemblage politics in action. More so than other resistance movements, the Zapatistas have proven themselves to have an amazing capacity of resistance. Beyond their capacity to resist military attacks and political and economic pressure from the Mexican

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government, the Zapatistas have also opened up a present world not dominated by neo-­liberal exploitation rather than revolution’s Promethean promise of a future to-­come. The present opened up by zapatismo is a world predicated on dignity, sovereignty, equality and direct democracy. Through philosophic reflections on space, temporality, hauntology and depersonalization, zapatismo constitutes a theoretical praxis based on constant rhizomatic movement in resistance to microfascisms and micro-­oedipuses. Zapatismo is explicitly not a set of procedures to be followed, and as such it is not intended to be a model for resistance or revolution. Rather zapatismo presents a ‘tool box’ set of theories and practices to be adopted, modified or discarded depending on the specific context. This brings zapatismo close to the schizoanalytic concept of a metamodel. In terms of the analytic aspect of assemblage politics, zapatismo uses a folded topological temporality as a diagnostic mechanism to detect the reproduction of micro-­oedipuses and fascisms. Following from this folded temporality is a form of ‘diagnostic time’ that explicitly rejects Accelerationism with their understanding of the rate of change progressing through a constant speed of slowness. This way of organizing resistance in time and space is materially practised in the numerous international Zapatista gatherings or encounters. These bring together resistants from all over the world in order to better analyse both neo-­liberalism as well as their own forms of resistance. The Zapatistas also resist life itself by enacting a profound depersonalization while communing with resistants no longer living. Through its resistance, zapatismo demands dignity and sovereignty through a hauntology of the ‘uncomfortable dead’. This is further strengthened by their pasamontaña, their iconic ski mask. The mask constitutes a figurative space, what the Zapatistas often refer to as a mirror or a void, where different resistant subjectivities can meet and form new assemblages. The mask also facilitates in the formation of a schizo subjectivity, a subjectivity predicated on the rhizomatic movement from the centre to the periphery of zapatismo. This schizo movement subverts any attempt to essentialize Zapatista identity due to its impermanence, creating what Deleuze and Guattari would term a nomadic subjectivity. It is this schizo or nomadic subjectivity that is able to constantly adapt to new circumstances while maintaining its constant resistance to the microfascistic drives brought into it by the concrete subjects.

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Despite Mexican repression and harassment from local paramilitary groups, the Zapatistas now control a vast area of Chiapas through networks of autonomous municipalities. These municipalities exercise self-­government through diverse social programmes, such as education, conflict resolution, healthcare and agriculture. These autonomous zones are governed by the Zapatista mandate to lead by obeying, a system of direct democratic voting, that has given rise to an environment where women’s rights, LGBT and queer rights, child rights, education and healthcare flourish. However, while the tactics outlined here are considered to be the most universalizable, they are not exact procedures to follow. The strength of assemblage politics is its flexibility and adaptability. Each tactic must be experimented with and used, altered or discarded depending on what the specific context and situation requires. *  *  *  * This book’s examination of resistance and assemblage theory opens up the possibility for further research into the role that media technologies play within resistant and revolutionary projects. The first chapter of this book noted the relationship between technology and neo-­liberalism in its elaboration on the biopolitical production of human-­machine subjectivities within neoliberal Integrated World Capitalism (IWC). The explicit interface between capital and the internet has resulted in a digital economy – the fastest and most visible zone of production within capitalist societies – that manifests an acceleration of the capitalist logic of production. The human–financial machinic assemblage is the machinic subjectivity produced by the immaterial labour force. These subjectivities take the social form of networks based on communication, collaboration and affective relationships. Immaterial labour can only be connected in common, and increasingly immaterial labour invents new, independent networks of cooperation through which it produces. The network organization of IWC over-­codes and structures the global political system, so within IWC’s power it is not strictly hierarchical, but diffuses micro-­hierarchies. As such, a future research project could examine how resistant projects in the twenty-­first century must integrate media technologies in order to effect change within this global system of networked machinic assemblages. One of the strengths of the Accelerationists is the explicit focus on media technologies.

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A key inclusion in the #Accelerate Reader is the essay by Shulamith Firestone from 1970. In the essay Firestone grounds change to a certain form of rationalism through technological advancement (Firestone 2014: 114–115). The revolutionary project for the Accelerationists is assumed to flow out from the same rationalism given their explicit embracing of technology (see O’Sullivan 2014 for more on the assumed rationalism of Accelerationism). This is a point that Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek are explicit about in their ‘Manifesto for Accelerated Politics’ (MAP). They call for an end to ‘folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism’ to be replaced by an ‘accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology’ (Williams and Srnicek 2014: 354). In the MAP Williams and Srnicek state that the revolutionary strategy needed for the twenty-­first century is to: [Accelerate] the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is not techno-­utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without sociopolitical action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-­utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts. ibid.: 356

What is strikingly absent is a sustained analysis and theory of the exact role that technology, and more specifically media technology can play in revolutionary or resistant projects. While Nick Land explicitly call for a new ‘machinic’ subjectivity consisting of an incorporation of cybernetics and media technologies, he never grounds this subjectivity in praxis, nor does he comment on the exact function of media technologies. On the Left, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s analysis of the Arab Spring and Occupy uprisings notes that, ‘media and communications technologies are increasingly central to all types of productive practices and are key to the kinds of cooperation necessary for today’s biopolitical production’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 19) and that the ‘constituent power of the common is thus closely interwoven with the themes of constituent power – adopting new media (cellular technologies, Twitter, Facebook, and more generally the Internet) as vehicles

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of experimentation with democratic and multitudinary governance’ (ibid.: 55). In their analysis media technologies only work to facilitate the lines of communication within their concept of the revolutionary multitude. In this way they are reproducing the purely instrumental analysis of networks proposed by Manuel Castells in 1996 in Rise of the Network Society. This reading looks at media technologies purely in terms of facilitating communication, neglecting to analyse how they work to produce subjectivities. The importance of media technologies in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements has been well documented (Bruns, Highfield and Burgess 2013; Gleason 2013; Halverson, Ruston and Trethewey 2013; Wolfsfeld, Segev and Sheafer 2013); however, there has yet to be any sustained analysis of the role these technologies can play beyond facilitating communication. This lack is especially noticeable given, as Howard Caygill notes in his brief remarks on digital resistance, while its effects are not intrinsically liberating, the web itself is a site of resistance that is characterized by a decentralized fluid network (Caygill 2013: 204–208). This is especially pertinent in an examination of zapatismo. The Zapatistas were arguably the first rebellion to fully understand and utilize digital media technologies to their advantage in the creation of their specific subjectivities, prompting some commentators to label them the first postmodern revolutionaries (Carrigan 2001). The most notable example was the 2001 ‘Digital Zapatismo’ campaign carried out by a group of Zapatista hacktivists, the Electronic Disturbance Theater. This campaign targeted the Mexican military’s digital infrastructure by staging an ‘electronic sit-­in’. The campaign was subsequently expanded on through a suggestion that ‘digital Zapatistas’ exist in a discursive form on the web (Lane 2003). There have been some limited attempts to read the Zapatistas’ use of digital technologies alongside schizoanalysis to examine the spatiality of the web (see Cleaver 1998; Froehling 1997; Lane 2003; Martinez-Torres 2001) as well as work on the formation of digital subjectivity (see Fuller and Goffey 2012; Goffey and Pettinger 2014; Gallagher 2017; Wark 2004), but to date there has not been any sustained analysis on how resistance can be assembled in digital space and the creation of digital resistant subjectivities. This book’s examination of how zapatismo’s spatiality facilitates the production of subjectivities open up the possibility for further research into its utilization

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of media technologies. Following from this, a future research project in this area would be an investigation of assemblage politics and how media technologies open up a digital space that facilitates the creation of resistant subjectivities. Zapatismo presents a particularly fruitful frame of analysis in this regard due to its explicit internationalism and its use of media technologies in the production of an international zapatismo that actively produces new resistant subjectivities. In approaching these objectives this research project would also significantly add to the literature on schizoanalysis. A certain tension exists between Guattari and Deleuze’s individual writings. They were both distrustful of the liberating capacity offered by the digital age and both argued that resistance to capitalist oppression would have to find ‘new tools’ to utilize. However in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013), Guattari’s concept of a ‘post-­media’ resistance shows an optimism that is not present in Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (1992). A research project that seeks to reconcile this tension would be able to fully elaborate on the digital space’s potential to deterritorialize as well as its reterritorializing possibilities. In doing so it could elaborate on how digital space helps facilitate the creation of a subjectivity that comes before and extends beyond physical bodies and manifests in the phenomenological ‘real’ world without polemically reading the digital as either inherently liberating or repressive.

Notes Chapter 1:  Capitalism and the fascism of everyday life 1 This analysis runs through a vast portion of both of their work, as well as in their collaborative thought. They refuse to pinpoint any exact moment of this move, rather describing it as the slow process. Implicit in this movement was also the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis. In this sense their work largely corresponds with the Foucauldian genealogy. 2 The ‘common’ is Hardt and Negri’s term for the shared networks, social relationships, communication and desires that both produce subjectivities and is produced by them.

Chapter 2:  Revolution and fascism 1 Negri himself never uses the term ‘acceleration’ when outlining his project. In fact in his response to the Accelerationist Manifesto he is univocal in his dislike for the name ‘Accelerationism’. ‘The name “accelerationism” is certainly unfortunate, as it ascribes a sense of “futurism” to something that is not at all futuristic’ (2014: 372). However, it will be demonstrated that his understanding of ‘communist temporality’ incorporates an accelerating vector. 2 In his writings Land is ambiguous as to whether or not he is actively thinking through a project of revolution; however, a project of revolution is implicit in the accelerated process he is theorizing and explicit in the post-Land scholars of Accelerationism such as Mark Fisher, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. 3 While they were sceptical of projects of revolution, it is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari remained hopefully that subject-­groups could achieve revolutionary change through a creative practice of resistance. This book will be expanded on how this is possible in its subsequent chapters on resistance. 4 Originally published online at: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/ accelerate-­manifesto-for-­an-accelerationist-­politics. In 2014 their manifesto along with other Accelerationist writings were published in the #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Any references to the work of #Acceleration writers will cite the Reader rather than the online source whenever possible.

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5 See pp. 27–28 for Foucault’s analysis of neo-­liberal free markets in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). 6 See Mark Fisher’s celebrated Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014a).

Chapter 3:  Resistance: Zapatismo and assemblage politics 1 It is important to note that the socialism Nietzsche critiqued was the atavistic anti-Semitic Christian Socialism of Dühring, a precursor of German National Socialism (Caygill 2013: 39). 2 Compañera/compañero translate as ‘companion’ in English. In an effort to make their resistance more inclusive the Zapatistas avoid gendering nouns when writing in Spanish, so compañera and compañero are typically written as ‘compañer@’. 3 The signing of the San Andrés Accords was a landmark moment in both the Zapatistas’ history as well as in the history of indigenous de-­colonial struggle more generally, granting semi-­autonomy to the indigenous populations in Mexico. However, to date the Mexican government has yet to enact the Accords. 4 Zapatismo is, at times, also referred to as ‘neozapatismo’ so as to not confuse it with the original thought of Emiliano Zapata. In a similar vein, the Zapatistas are also often referred to as ‘Neozapatistas’. However, for the sake of clarity, this book will use the more common terms, zapatismo and Zapatista. 5 A schizoanalytic framework will be used to elaborate specific points of zapatismo. This is not to suggest that the Zapatistas read Deleuze and Guattari. While we do know that before the formation of the EZLN at least one of the insurgents – who is commonly known by his nom de guerre as Subcomandante Galeano (formerly Subcomandante Marcos) – was a lecturer in philosophy at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City and wrote his PhD on Althusser and Foucault, there is no information that suggests any active engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This is also not intended as an attempt to use the Zapatistas to legitimize philosophic theory, nor is it an attempt to use this theory to interpret zapatismo for academics from the global North. Rather, reading the theory alongside of zapatismo illuminates multiple points of convergence that can be read together in highly productive ways. 6 Confirmation of the delivery being received was reported on the Latin American political blog, Upside Down World (2006). 7 For an English-­language version of this communiqué see: http://www.elkilombo.org/ votan-­ii-the-­guardians-communique-­in-preparation-­for-the-­zapatista-little-­school/.

Notes

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8 It is important to note that multiple such gatherings happen every year. This particular one is being used due to the availability of the published proceedings. 9 At the time of writing, only Volume I, which contains the contributions from the Sixth Commission of the EZLN, has been translated into English and published under the title Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra I by PaperBoat Press in 2016. Full audio recordings of all the presentations can be found on the Zapatista website: http://radiozapatista.org/?page_id=13233.

Chapter 4:  Resistance to the future: Constructing space in time 1 A common trope in the stories credited to Old Don Antonio is the seven first gods, the gods who created the world and are the greatest gods. However, in the Zapatista retelling of these stories these ‘gods’ are not necessarily deities. Rather they are the seven characteristics of zapatismo. The exact definitions change throughout the Zapatistas’ writings of Old Don Antonio, and are often said to be infinitely multiplied by seven, however a basic list would be: dignity, hope, love or respect, compassion, knowledge or understanding, shared solidarity with others, and desire. 2 In his analysis Nail also notes the dangers of over-­coded state and capitalist representation. Avoiding these two pitfalls has been an important achievement of the Zapatistas. However, they are also the two most widely discussed and analysed aspects zapatismo and as such are beyond the scope of this project. 3 Implemented before their uprising in 1993, the Women’s Revolutionary Law (EZLN 1993) protects the rights of women within the EZLN and Zapatista communities and guarantees equality through ten basic statutes: One: Women, regardless of their race, creed, colour or political affiliation, have the right to participate in the revolutionary struggle in any way that their desire and capacity determine. Two: Women have the right to work and receive a just salary. Three: Women have the right to decide the number of children they have and care for. Four: Women have the right to participate in the matters of the community and have charge if they are free and democratically elected. Five: Women and their children have the right to Primary Attention in their health and nutrition. Six: Women have the right to education. Seven: Women have the right to choose their partner and are not obliged to enter into marriage. Eight: Women have the right to be free of violence from both relatives and strangers. Rape and attempted rape will be severely punished. Nine: Women will be able to occupy

162

Notes positions of leadership in the organization and hold military ranks in the revolutionary armed forces. Ten: Women will have all the rights and obligations which the revolutionary laws and regulations give.

An English version of the law can be found online here: http://struggle.ws/ mexico/ezln/womlaw.html. 4 This figure is provided by the Zapatistas, however it is largely collaborated by outsiders who have travelled to the Caracoles. See also Dinerstein 2013: 4. 5 The White Brigade (Brigada Blanca) are a paramilitary group with a loose affiliation to the Mexican government whom are hired by rich landowners to expel indigenous farmers from their land and then subsequently ‘protect’ the land from attempts to take the land back. 6 See Fanon’s chapter ‘On Violence’ in The Wretched of the Earth (2001) for an elaboration of how this plays out in the psychoaffective zone. The victims of systemic abuse exhibit signs of extreme anger and a strong destructive drive. This, Fanon argues, can be channelled into violent revolutionary energy.

Chapter 5:  Resistance to life 1 The ‘Dirty War’ refers to Mexico’s internal conflict fought between the Mexican government and left-­wing student and guerrilla groups in the 1960s and 1970s. 2 A mestizo is a mixed-­race person in Mexico with European ancestry. Generally speaking, racial politics in postcolonial Mexico are constructed along the binary division between mestizos and Indians. 3 At the time of this writing the transcript of Marcos’ speech is only available online. The original audio recording in Spanish can be found at http://komanilel.org/ AUDIO/EZLN/entreLaLuzyLaSombra.mp3. 4 This was done first and foremost through information given by Subcomandante Daniel, who left the Zapatistas in 1993 and gave information to Mexican Army Intelligence (Henck 2007: 281–286). However to confirm his identity the Mexican government was able to simply compare an old photo of Vicente with the exposed areas that Marcos’ mask does not cover (Mentinis 2006: 168). 5 ‘I will take off my ski mask when Mexican society takes off its own mask, the one it uses to cover up the real Mexico’ (Marcos in Katzenberger 1995: 70).

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Index acceleration 24–27, 33, 35–36, 39, 55, 108–109, 150 Accelerationism 41–43, 46, 154 Accelerationist(s) 12, 42–48, 54, 56–58, 101, 108, 150, 155–156 Althusser, Louis 12, 48, 50, 51, 108, 149, 172 Arab Spring 1, 5, 60, 83, 156, 157 assemblage 25, 27, 48, 54, 61, 79–85, 88, 93, 100, 102–103, 106, 108, 110, 113, 115–116, 145, 155 assemblage politics 5, 13–14, 79–86, 93, 113, 116, 138, 146, 152–158 assemblage theory 81–85; see DeLanda, Manuel Badiou, Alain 12, 38, 44–45, 49–50, 56–58, 151 Bataille, Georges 9–10, 107, 118, 122–123, 131–133 Benjamin, Walter 38, 40, 126 biological (life) 16 –19, 149 biopolitical 1, 12, 16, 24, 27, 33, 48–59, 61–62, 75–78, 151–152, 156 biopolitics 1, 11–16, 35, 49–50, 54–60, 76, 78, 119, 150–152; see Foucault, Michel Body Without Organs 145 capitalism 11–12, 15–17, 21–27, 33, 35, 39– 46, 49, 52, 54, 58, 62–63, 70–78, 83, 89–91, 109, 123–124, 132, 149–152; see Intergrated World Capitalism, neo-Liberalism Caygill, Howard 13, 67–80, 93, 117–118, 127, 130, 135–136, 152, 157 Chomsky, Noam 2 clinamen 51–52, 151–152 common 29, 46, 50–54, 55, 58, 75, 156, 159 compañer@ 70, 78, 113, 128, 134, 135, 160 death 57, 66, 96, 123, 128, 130–135, 147 death instinct (death drive) 19–20, 56

Debray, Régis 66–67, 73 DeLanda, Manuel 13, 81–85, 153 Deleuze and Guattari 2, 4–14, 15, 18–22, 26, 30, 32–44, 47–49, 54, 62, 65, 69, 79–86, 99, 101, 107–111, 125, 144–148, 150–151, 153–154, 158 Deleuze, Gilles 11, 30, 32, 52, 59, 66, 95–98, 145, 158 Derrida, Jacques 67, 82, 118, 123–126, 130–141 desire 6–9, 17–27, 33, 35–37, 48–57, 62, 63, 68–70, 79–91, 107, 118, 134, 144–152 deterrialization 12, 20–21, 26, 30–31, 33, 41–44, 45, 49, 54, 83–86, 101, 107–108, 109–112, 145–148, 150–151 diagnostic mechanism 2–3, 36, 48, 57, 93, 103–107, 113, 152 dignity 97–98, 105, 118–123, 127, 130, 132–133, 137, 138, 143, 154, 161 discipline 33, 58; see Foucault, Michel dispositif 1, 27–28, 35, 45, 48, 54–61, 151 Esposito, Roberto 57 Evans, Brad 7–8, 55 Evans, Brad and Reid, Julian 7, 8, 55 EZLN 70–71, 88, 90, 96–97, 103, 104–105, 110–115, 128, 134–135 facsism 1–11, 15, 20, 33–34, 35, 45, 56, 60–61, 103, 107, 109, 127, 140, 150–152; see microfascim Firestone, Shulamith 156 foco 66–67, 70, 73, 110, 114, 115, 116 Foucault, Michel 6, 11, 15–16, 26–28, 32, 55–56, 59–60, 67–68, 76, 98, 149, 151 Freud, Sigmund 7, 17–19 Galeano, Subcomandante 90, 114, 131, 134–135, 144 Galloway, Alexander 58

174

Index

Guattari, Felix 85, 99–100, 102, 103, 144, 158–159; see Deleuze and Guattari Hardt, Michel 1 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 3–5, 12, 24, 29, 51, 57–59, 74–79, 82–83, 125, 130, 151, 156 hauntology 123–126, 133, 135, 139, 154, 160 Hegarty, Paul 123, 131, 133 immanence 10, 13, 32, 41–42, 57, 61, 69, 95, 103, 125, 131, 134, 138 immaterial labour 24–40, 44, 51, 59, 75, 78, 155 Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) 23–31, 42, 44–45, 49, 51, 58–59, 70, 87, 155; see neo-­liberalism Khasnabish, Alex 74 Kisteva, Julie 53 Lacan, Jacques 19, 28–29 Land, Nick 30–31, 36–46, 48, 49, 108, 150, 156 love 52–119 Marcos, Subcomandante 72, 89, 96–97, 102–103, 104–106, 110–111, 114–119, 122, 128, 134–136, 141, 142, 143–147; see Galeano, Subcomandante mask 138, 141–148, 154; see pasamoñtana metamodel 73, 85, 100, 101, 102, 138, 153, 154 microfascism 2, 6, 8–12, 16, 21, 32–34, 35–38, 48, 53, 56–57, 60–61, 65, 91, 93, 103, 105, 109–110, 115–116, 149, 154 micropolitical/micropolitics 6–11, 45, 77, 80 micro-­oedipuses 30–33, 61, 101, 103, 107–110, 154 milieu 7, 30, 32, 47, 61, 113 multitude 12, 46, 51–52, 58–61, 74–78, 126, 130, 152, 157 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 70, 74 Nail, Thomas 89, 99, 102–107, 141, 142 Nancy, Jean-Luc 53–57, 151

Negri, Antonio 1, 12, 36–37, 39–54, 56–60, 101, 108, 124–125, 126, 130, 132, 149, 150, 151–152; see Hardt and Negri neo-­liberalism 3–7, 11–12, 16, 23–34, 35, 40–53, 61–62, 66, 71–72, 75–77, 90, 97, 124–125, 130, 149–150, 154–155 Noys, Benjamin 42–44, 50 Occupy (movement) 1, 2 5, 60, 61, 83, 156, 157 Olesen, Thomas, 74 Parisi, Luciana 25, 31 plane of immanence 13, 134, 138, 145 pasamontaña 138, 141–148, 154 Promethenaniam 36, 42, 44–48, 62, 152, 154 Rabasa, José, 74, 94, 104, 125–130 Reid, Julian see Evans and Reid resistance 3, 5, 13, 14, 66–80, 86–91, 93, 97, 101, 106–107, 110, 113, 115–116, 117, 118–119, 121, 127–131, 133, 138, 152, 153–158 digital 157 revolution 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 35–39, 42, 44–45, 48–59, 62, 63, 65, 66–67, 70, 75, 82, 83, 93, 94, 101, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114–116, 117, 118, 120–121, 126, 151–154 revolutionary change 3, 13, 36, 63, 65, 73, 110, 113, 116, 149–150, 152–153 schizoanalysis 7, 10, 19, 44, 79–81, 84–85, 101, 124, 138–139, 153–154, 157–158 Spivak, Gayatry 36 subjectivity 2, 7, 10 –11, 15, 16, 21, 22, 28, 33, 47–48, 56, 59, 61–62, 65, 66, 76–91, 93, 96, 102, 113, 117–122, 123–130, 137–148, 149–150, 151, 154, 155, 156–157, 158 temporality 12–13, 24–44, 47, 48–62, 77, 93, 94, 101, 106, 107–110, 115–116, 123, 126–127, 134, 138–139, 147, 151–152, 154 Terranova, Tiziana 44

Index topological plane 13, 40, 99–107, 111–113, 124, 134, 138–139, 154 utopian 44, 156 Virilio, Paul 25, 36, 39, 41 Virno, Paolo 78 virtual (the) 99 possibility/possibilities 96, 139 space 86, 100, 101, 107–109, 139, 147, 151

175

zapatismo 13, 14, 72–74, 77–79, 86–87, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97–98, 102–107, 110–115, 118–122, 125–127, 129–133, 134–135, 141, 143–144, 146–148, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161 Zapatista(s) 13–14, 67, 70–72, 74–75, 78, 82, 87–91, 93, 94, 95–99, 102–107, 110, 112–123, 127–131, 134–138, 141–148, 153–155, 157, 160 Žižek, Slavoj 12, 56, 58, 149