As their 'free radio' experience showed,
Deleuze and Guattari never escaped from this
fundamental contradiction of revolutionary politics. The absence of the Leninist party did not
prevent the continuation of vanguard politics
. As in other social movements, Fr=E9quence Libre was dominated by a few
charismatic individuals: the holy prophets of the anarcho-communist revolution.<15>
In Deleuze and Guattari's writings, this
deep authoritarianism found its theoretical expression in their methodology: semiotic
structuralism.
Despite rejecting its 'wooden language',
the two philosophers never really abandoned Stalinism
in theory.
Above all, they retained its most fundamental premise:
the minds of the majority of the population were
controlled by bourgeois ideologies.<
16> During the sixties, this elitist theory was updated through the addition of Lacanian
structuralism by Louis Althusser, the chief philosopher of the French Communist party.<17> For Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser had explained
why only a revolutionary minority supported the New Left. Brainwashed by the semiotic 'machinic assemblages' of the family, media, language
and psychoanalysis, most people supposedly desired fascism rather than anarcho-communism. This authoritarian methodology clearly
contradicted the libertarian rhetoric within Deleuze and Guattari's writings. Yet, as the rappers who wanted to make a show for Frequence Libre
discovered, Deleuzoguattarian anarcho-communism even included the censorship of music. By adopting an Althusserian analysis, Deleuze and
Guattari were tacitly privileging their own role as intellectuals: the producers of semiotic systems.
Just like their Stalinist elders,
the two philosophers believed that only the vanguard of intellectuals had the right to lead the
masses - without any formal consent from them
- in the fight against capitalism.
8. Turn – their type of revolution is committed precisely to stop the becoming-other of the
disadvantaged – they can never understand the situation of the people they try to liberate –
their author
Deleuze 93
(Gilles, Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic and mother of three, “Toward Freedom,” The Deleuze Reader pg 255-56,
dml)
All this constitutes what can be called a right to desire. It is not surprising that
all kinds of minority questions
—linguistic,
ethnic, regional, about sex, or youth—
resurge
not only as archaisms, but
in up-to-date revolutionary form which
call once more into question in an entirely immanent manner
both the global economy of the machine and
the assemblages of national States. Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the
revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine
in general,
why not think that a new type of
revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating
, living
machines
conduct wars, are combined and
trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of
organization of the world and the States? For
, once again,
the world and its States are no more
masters of their plan than revolutionaries are condemned to the deformation of theirs. Everything
