Tag: Deleuze & Guattari

Rhizomes and Revolution: Deleuze & Guattari’s Impact on US Anarchism

I so badly want to write an article on Deleuze & Guattari’s influence on the US anarchist movement in the 1980s-90s. One path is obvious–Hakim Bey’s use of their idea of the Nomadic War Machine in his popular concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones. But there is more.

I’m equally interested in tracing a thread through Italian Autonomia & the German Autonome. A group of Italian autonomists including Bifo formed a study group on Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus that contributed directly to them forming the pirate station Radio Alice in 1976. They envisioned Radio Alice as a node in a decentralized, rhizomatic structure of a new kind of post-1968 revolutionary movement. Radio Alice, which operated out of Bologna, played an important role in the upswell of Autonomia in 1977.

Squatters and autonomists from West Germany traveled to Italy, where they were influenced by Autonomia and helped draft a set of Autonomous Theses in 1981 in Padua, Italy. They called for a “politics of the first person,” explaining that “we fight for a self-determined life in all aspects of our existence, knowing that we can only be free if all are free… We have no organization per se. Our forms of organization are all more or less spontaneous. There are squatters’ councils, telephone chains, autonomous assemblies, and many, many small groups.”

The rhizomatic organizational model had many sources, including traditional anarchism and council communism, but it was undoubtedly influenced to some degree by efforts to put Deleuze & Guattari into practice by Radio Alice within the context of Italian Autonomia.

The German Autonomen were young radicals who squatted hundreds of abandoned buildings and turned them into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural spaces. They constructed rich networks of autonomous spaces meant to provide both alternative forms of living and bases of attack. At their best, these networks of alternative spaces and infrastructure functioned as dual power and urban liberated territory in which the revolution was lived through a communism of everyday life. You can read more in my article Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack.

As Love & Rage put it in a history of anarchism in the 1980s, “The Autonomen were an important inspiration for the young activists in the U.S. and Canada who would be attracted to and who would reinvigorate the anarchist movement.”

A number of US anarchists traveled to Germany in the late 1980s, where they stayed in squats and were inspired by the militancy of the movement. They took what they learned back to the US, where they helped to popularize models from the German Autonomen: squatted social centers, infoshops, and black bloc tactics.

I don’t want to overstate it, but I think that the grassroots transnational spread of Deleuze & Guattari played a key role in the development of the new anarchist movement. All of this happened before their embrace in academia and before Hardt & Negri popularized them in radical spaces with the Empire trilogy.

Rhizomes and Anarchist Infoshops: Deleuze & Guattari in Practice?

I’m writing a piece on infoshops in the 1990s, which led me to revisit an earlier essay I wrote on our Antidote Infoshop and Food Not Bombs in Ithaca in 2018. I wrote it as I read Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which helped me think through the rhizomatic forms of anarchist organization. I don’t necessarily agree with much or all of the piece anymore, and it is notable that the Ithaca anarchist groups it highlights each fell apart within a year… But I still think it is interesting. Here is a brief excerpt from the middle of the piece:

Alternative infrastructure and anarchist organizations more broadly should be organized in fluid rhizomatic networks to resist state control. Here, anarchists can benefit from Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the possibilities of non-hierarchical rhizomatic networks of organization.[1] Counter to all efforts to develop hierarchies and centralize control, we should fight for decentralization and fractal organization; as the Curious George Brigade argues, “fractalized resistance cannot be adequately met by predesigned management and crowd control strategies.”[2]

Against a hierarchical, arborescent organization of thought and practice, Deleuze and Guattari pose another mode of organization: the rhizome. Anarchist infrastructure and organization are largely structured as rhizomes already, but this principle should continue to be embraced more consciously.

Rhizomes have six main characteristics. The first two are principles of connection and heterogeneity. That is to say, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”[3]

Third is the principle of multiplicity, which treats the multiple “as a substantive, ‘multiplicity’ […] Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities.”[4]

Fourth, the principle of asignifying rupture, holds that rhizomes can be broken at any spot but continually reform along new lines. “There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.”[5] In this principle, Deleuze and Guattari provide a strategy for how to practice rhizomatic expansion by following deterritorializing flows.[6]

Finally, the fifth and sixth principles are of cartography and decalcomania. Against the “tree logic” of “tracing and reproduction,” D&G argue that “the rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. […] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.”[7] This experimentation in concrete projects is core to the anarchist approach.

Networks of anarchist infrastructure should turn a potential weakness—the fluid and often ephemeral nature of autonomous spaces—into a strength by organizing rhizomatically. Each node within the network should make as many connections as possible to other spaces and draw lines to connect them. The network should embrace its ever-shifting quality and constantly reconfigure itself, moving fluidly around shifting nodes. And finally, anarchists should continually experiment with new organizations and institutions, never falling back on tracings of previous efforts.

This relates as well to the common anarchist organizational form of the affinity group. Affinity groups are small collectives of people (usually around five to ten) who naturally share certain affinities regarding political practice and ideology. They often begin as or become close friends. As the members share common affinities, the goal is to operate as a unit and thus be more effective politically. Deleuze and Guattari write of the multiplicity of the wolf pack in a manner reminiscent of an affinity group.

among the characteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles. […] The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it.[8]

Rather than attempt to organize more traditionally in formal structures, anarchists embrace the small, shifting multiplicities of affinity groups that come together for specific actions and projects before dispersing again to new areas and pursuits.

[1] Indeed, as I plan to argue in subsequent academic work, one can trace a genealogy relatively directly from Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the 1970s to contemporary anarchist practice in the United States, via Italian Autonomia and the West German Autonomen.

[2] The Curious George Brigade, Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs, 45.

[3] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8-9.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9.

[6] “Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. ‘Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later . . . you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way.’” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11.

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12.

[8] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 33.