Bradley Evan and Laura Guillaume (ed.), Theory and Event,Volume 13, Issue 3, Special Symposium : Deleuze andWar, John Hopkins University Press, 2010

The War Machine, the Formula and the Hypothesis: Deleuze and Guattari as Readers of Clausewitz

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toulouse, France, and Researcher at theCentre International d'Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (E.N.S. Paris). He coordinates the "Groupede recherches matérialistes". His recent publications include: Philosophie politique XIXe-XXe siècles, PressesUniversitaires de France, 2008; "Politicising Deleuzian Thought, or, Minority's Position within Marxism", in D. Jain(ed.), Deleuze and Marx, Edinburgh University Press, 2009; Deleuze et l'Anti-Oedipe. La production du désir,Presses Universitaires de France, 2010. He may be reached at: sibergui@wanadoo.fr.

1. From the Instrumental Conception of War to the Hypothesis of the War Machine

We would like to attempt here the problematization that Deleuze and Guattari propose regardingthe relationship between war and the State in light of the concept of the war machine formulatedin 1980 in the twelfth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus: “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: TheWar Machine.” From a simply nominal point of view, this concept designates a relationship ofexteriority in relation to the State organisation of a given society in social formations that can bequite diverse in structure and objective (band, secret society, religious brotherhood, professionalassociation, commercial organisation, etc.) as in the components they arrange (technical,scientific, artistic, linguistic, ecological, economic, religious, etc.). A given group forms a warmachine not when it takes war as its goal, but when it becomes heterogeneous to the stateapparatuses, to their procedures of administration and of control over the social field, as well asto their particular modes of territorialization, in other words, to the reciprocal determination ofthe State’s power and of the specific spatiotemporal formations in which it actualises itself. It isthrough this bipolarity of the State apparatus and the power formations exterior to the State-formthat, from 1973 onwards, Deleuze had introduced the expression war machine in order to putinto words a “direct political problem”: the problem, for groups engaged in the revolutionarystruggle, of a mode of composition which does not model itself upon the form of a party or of aState, which does not model itself on the organisation of “bourgeois apparatuses of State,” inshort, which does not reproduce, within the militant groups, the type of power structure that theyclaim to wish to abolish.1

The interest of the twelfth “Plateau” resides in the fact that it passes through the watchword tothe philosophical concept through a theoretical elaboration that intends to revitalize the Marxistunderstanding of State power and its repressive apparatuses. More precisely, it involves theproduction of a theory of war that does not presuppose a “localisation” of the repressive Statepower in institutional bodies such as the police or the army, but that is capable of taking intoaccount the constitution of this power through the conflicting interactions between the State and

1

the social forces that escape it or which tend to turn against it. The concept of the war machine isthus inscribed within the framework of a complex bipolar theoretical program. There is theprogram of a genealogy of war that is at the same time a genesis of military power within therepressive apparatuses of the State—and more precisely, since it is a matter of the Stateincorporating a power that one presupposes as heterogeneous or exterior to its apparatuses, aheterogenesis of the State power. But on the other hand, we find the program of an analysis ofthe dynamics of struggles that, under variable organisational forms and historical circumstances,reconstruct war machines turned against the State, against its apparatuses, and against its veryform. It is suitable in this regard to emphasize that this concept is above all presented byDeleuze and Guattari as a hypothesis, a working hypothesis in view of a complex genealogicaland analytic program.2

In order to clarify the conceptual implications of this hypothesis and program, we would like toexamine the manner in which they relate to the writings of the great theoretician of war, Carl vonClausewitz. The textual location of this theoretical reference immediately suggests itsimportance: sketched in the first “Proposition” of the Treatise on Nomadology, it is picked upagain and developed in the ninth and last “Proposition,” where it organises another approach tothe body of problems implicated by the theory of the war machine in a systematic expositionwhich “recapitulates the hypothesis in its entirety.” Before examining these texts in themselves,we will note that this reference envelopes a paradox upon first reading, at least if one relies uponwhat appears to constitute the core of Clausewitz’s polemical thought (in any case, that to whichhis controversial posthumous reputation was attached, as much in the affirmative claim of hislegacy as in more critically detached analyses): the thesis of a political determination of wars.Expressed in the well-known formula, “War is not merely a political act, but also a real politicalinstrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means”3,this argument affirms an instrumental conception of war, and more profoundly, it bases war uponthe premise of a strictly state determination of the political itself. Yet Deleuze and Guattari’shypothesis of the war machine is based on anthropological and historical considerations thatprove to differ with such a simplified Clausewitzian thesis. Against the supposition which wouldhave war be “in essence” an affaire of the State, a mode of interaction between States, and thusan (albeit extreme) modality of the political, Deleuze and Guattari seek to depart rather from therecognition that all States in history have not had military apparatuses, and that the power of waritself can and could realize itself in material and institutional devices outside of the State (forexample in primitive societies or nomadic tribes). As an initial hypothesis, we must thenconceive a relation of exteriority between the State and a power of war, the latter consistingsolely in an ideal and transhistorical continuum of power (“machine” or phylum) that can realizeitself in infinitely varied socio-technical environments, but without necessarily taking war as itsobject, nor as goal the submission or destruction of an enemy.4

This same hypothesis, however, far from distancing us from the Prussian theoretician, seems tobring us closer to him, by inviting us to reexamine the context and presuppositions of theClausewitzian argument regarding the political determination of wars. As Deleuze and Guattarirecall, this thesis is not independent. It is found within a “theoretical and practical, historic andtranshistorical aggregate whose parts are interconnected,” and which is not unrelated to the idealdetermination of the war machine by a pure continuum or a power flux:

2

(1) There is a pure concept of war as absolute, unconditioned war, an Idea notgiven in experience (bring down or ‘upset’ the enemy, who is assumed to have noother determination, with no political, economic, or social considerations enteringin). (2) What is given are real wars as submitted to State aims; States are better orworse ‘conductors’ in relation to absolute war, and in any case condition itsrealization in experience. (3) Real wars swing between two poles, both subject toState politics: the war of annihilation, which can escalate to total war (dependingon the objectives of the annihilation) and tends to approach the unconditionedconcept via an ascent to extremes; and limited war, which is no ‘less’ a war, butone that effects a descent toward limiting conditions, and can de-escalate to mere‘armed observation.’5

In inscribing into such a theoretical mechanism his theory of the political determination of war,Clausewitz draws out its conditions of validity, and thus its limits, which are simultaneously of ahistorical, theoretical, and even speculative order. First, it is known that the Clausewitzianconcept of “absolute war” is constructed from the historical singularity of the Napoleonic Warsand from the twofold upheaval that followed, in the political equilibrium of the Europeanbalance of power, and even in the art of making war (radical offensive war, systematic utilizationof the maneuver, mobilization of the entire nation, or at least of an enlarged fraction of “thepeople” in the war effort). But if this historical singularity must orient the construction of thepure concept of war, of which it reveals, in asymptotically approaching it in a new way, theessential content, this is because it appears at the end of a historical series that passes from the“Tartar hordes,” through the Roman Republic and then Empire, through the vassal systems of thefeudal monarchy, through “the great merchant cities and small republics” of the Renaissance, tothe great State monarchies of the Classical European Age.6 It is not that wars took a more andmore absolute form: Clausewitz emphasizes on the contrary the strictly limited character, untilthe French Revolution, of the political goals of war, and thus of its objectives and its militarymeans. The essential part of this historical series is rather the transformative curve of thepolitical itself, and in particular, of the development of the “state cohesion,” throughconsolidation of territorial sovereignties, through the development of public fiscal concernspermitting the transformation of personal allegiances into material taxation and the insertion ofthe State’s military power into the institution of a permanent army, and finally through statemonopolization, not only of “legitimate physical violence,” but of the political relationshipsbetween groupings of power in European space:

Inside [this space], almost all the States had become absolute royalties, and therights of states [Stände] and their privileges had gradually disappeared; politicalpower was thereafter a unified institution, capable of representing the State forforeign powers. The evolution of things had created an efficient instrument andan independent power capable of impressing upon war a direction conforming toits nature.7

Thus if wars are always politically determined, or in other words are not “ever an independentreality but in all cases conceivable as a political instrument,” as the Clausewitzian formulaannounces, this proposition does not become historically and in practice true until the momentwhere the political determination is itself over-determined by the State-form. But far from

3

deducing that State politics is an intrinsic determination of war itself, that is to say an internalgiven to absolute war as adequate content to the pure concept of war, Clausewitz draws theinverse conclusion—which reinforces the historical limit of validity of the Formula with aproperly speculative limit dealing with the relation between the “essential” and the “real,”between the “pure concept” and historical effectiveness. In fact, if real wars are alwayspolitically determined, this is not because war is intrinsically or essentially political, but on thecontrary because it is not! If it belongs to political power to provide the reason for wars—in thedouble sense of the term, in that it is at the same time their final cause, and the principle thatproportions to this end their sequence of events, their objectives, and their tactical and strategicmeans8—it is precisely because war in its pure concept has no other object than its pureautonomous movement, and no other proportion than a disproportioned race toward the extremewhere, at the limit, the political would dissolve itself (the end of history?). In other words,effective war is the continuation of politics, and one of the forms of realization of politicalrelations, precisely because its effectiveness does not coincide with its concept or essence. It is“the state of society in its interior and exterior relations […] which engenders, conditions,circumscribes and tempers war: but all these aspects remain foreign to the essence of war, andare only extrinsic variables thereof”9—which condenses the striking expression: “War issometimes more, sometimes less than itself.”10 Closer to Kant than to Hegel, politics finds itsproper place in this irreducible distance between the concept and history, which is for Clausewitza distance between the absolute form of war and the various ways in which States determine, andsimultaneously condition and limit, the empirical realizations of this form.

For Deleuze and Guattari, this Clausewitzian mechanism provides a valid point of departure onthe condition of being adjusted according to the hypothesis of the heteronomy between the powerof the “war machine” and State power. This adjustment takes on the appearance of aradicalization of the distance enveloped in the Formula. In relation to this theoreticalmechanism, what exactly does this displacement have to do with? They find a hint in Clausewitzhimself:

Whenever the irruption of war power is confused with the line of Statedomination, everything gets muddled; the war machine can then be understoodonly through the categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remainsoutside the State. But, returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine isseen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin [than State].[…] The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in theform of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems. Thisexplains the mistrust States have toward their military institutions, in that themilitary institution inherits an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has ageneral sense [un pressentiment] of this situation when he treats the flow ofabsolute war as an Idea that States partially appropriate according to their politicalneeds, and in relation to which they are more or less good ‘conductors.’11

Already in Book I of On War, and then again in Book VIII, Clausewitz senses the tension that isintroduced into the theoretical conception of war by his distinction between real empirical warsand the pure concept of war as the “inherent tendency of the war machine,” the “natural tendencyfor which States are only more or less conductors or offer more or less resistance or friction.”12

4

Without ceasing to be a State affair, absolute war compels one to think, as adequate content tothe pure concept as limit-concept, an ideational flux of power that States only seem to be able topartially appropriate according to their political determinations, and that must be conceived asexterior in theory to this political sphere of the State and of relations between States. Whatserves as an indication for Deleuze and Guattari is their recognition that this ideationaldetermination is not sensed by Clausewitz any more than in a “presentiment,” that is to say that itis, for a theoretician of war as political instrument, inevitably maintained in the implicit, and thatit can only reveal the flaws or the “hésitations” of his text which makes of absolute war at timesthe political exacerbation of the process of war, and at other times the “inherent tendency” of awar machine which abstracts itself from every political relation.13 This indication, thesevacillations or these flaws of the Clausewitzian text, are symptoms, that is to say signs whichmark in the theory what this very theory cannot manage to think. What is it then that prevents itfrom bringing to the explicit thematization this exteriority of the war machine to the State, thisexteriority (which the Formula covers up and disguises rather than expresses) of the absoluteform of the power of war vis-à-vis the State-form? “The problem is that the exteriority of thewar machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult toconceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It isnecessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority,whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, oraccording to which we are in the habit of thinking.”14

What remains unsatisfying in Clausewitz for Deleuze and Guattari is not the distance that heplaces between a pure concept of the power of war (as an absolute or an unconditioned Idea) andreal conditioned wars through their insertion in historical and institutional, as well as social andmoral milieus where they find ipso facto a political signification (i.e., their insertion in theensemble of conditions that cause, in effective history, wars to have always already a politicalsignification). It is on the contrary that this distance is not envisaged in its full radicality,because it remains for Clausewitz a distance interior to the State-form. In Difference andRepetition, Deleuze defined his program of “transcendental empiricism” by reproaching Kant forhaving conserved too many empirical presuppositions in his criticism, and at the same time, forhaving just as much compromised the exploration of the “true structures of the transcendental”which distorted the critical thrust of the empiricism itself.15 In a similar sense, Clausewitz findshimself reproached in A Thousand Plateaus for having put too much of the political in the pureconcept, or inversely, for having not put enough heteronomy of the power of war in the State—heteronomy of which the recurrent conflicts, in the history of modern States, between civil andmilitary authorities and the constant mistrust of the former vis-à-vis the latter, are theinstitutional symptoms, just as Clausewitz’s hesitation had previously formed the theoreticalsymptom. In sum, Clausewitz presupposes already “too much State” in the pure concept of thepower of war itself. Thus, when he determines the fundamental objective of the military actionas the “destruction of the enemy” (i.e., in the “overcoming of his ability to resist”) and considersthis objective as the intrinsic property of the pure concept,16 and when, correlatively, he inserts inthe pure concept a dynamic of ascent to the extremes of antagonistic forces, it is clear that thesupposedly “intrinsic” goal presupposes already a political determination of the enemy, and thatthe ascent to extremes presupposes a qualitative homogeneity of the forces in presence of whichthe tactical paradigm remains the battle between State armies, and so presupposes a symmetry in

5

the forms of power in conflict (to the small qualitative difference) (as one sees it a contrario inthe short-circuiting of the ascent to extremes in asymmetrical guerrilla wars).

Such a difficulty to really think the formal heterogeneity of the war machine in relation to theState-form, or more precisely, to conceive “the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority,”exposes us to the risk of a theoretical double blockage: First, a disfiguration of the content of thepure concept—a power of war incarnated in a “machine” as an Idea unconditioned by Statepolitical coordinates— but also, on the other hand, an illusion in the theory of the State-formitself which compromises the historical analysis of its transformations. The speculative problemand the analytic-concrete problem are here intimately related (as usual in the work of Deleuze).In missing the pure concept or the war machine as unconditioned Idea,17 we risk first tomistakenly obscure the effective operations by which the States succeed in incorporating this warmachine (and to transform it while incorporating it); and, second, simultaneously, to misread thelimits of this incorporation, the mutations that it imposes on the State-form itself, thecontradictions and the antagonisms that the heteronomy of the war machine introduces into theapparatuses and structures of the State power. We risk, in sum, to miss the fundamental problemof a genealogy of military power in the material history of societies. We must then see at presenthow the critical recapture of the Clausewitzian mechanism by Deleuze and Guattari leads themto systematically develop “the entirety of the hypothesis,” in order to remove these twoblockages and to specify the groundwork of their genealogical program.

2. Systematic Exposition of the Hypothesis

If the critical resumption of the Clausewitzian mechanism allows a systematic exposition of thehypothesis of the war machine, this is true because it allows us to identify its problematic core.“The distinction between absolute war as Idea and real wars seems to us to be of greatimportance, but only if a different criterion than that of Clausewitz is applied. The pure Idea isnot that of the abstract elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine that does not havewar as its object.”18 Deleuze and Guattari’s move consists in uncoupling two things thatremained indistinct for Clausewitz: the absolute concept of the power of war, which is to saythis power in so far as an unconditioned Idea, and the concept of absolute war. Such adecoupling implies, more fundamentally, a reconsideration of the conceptual form in whichClausewitz envisages the war machine, and which governs his instrumental conception of war:the form of a practical syllogism: “the political intention is the desired end, war is the means,and the means cannot be conceived without the end.”19 The overall exposition of the hypothesisof the war machine follows from it, and is deployed in a twofold problematic series. The firstseries explains in what sense the war machine, as a Idea not given to experience (althoughemblematically realized, as we shall see, in the anthropological and historic conditions of thenomadism of the Steppes), does not satisfy a priori this syllogistic form of State wars. Themovement of this first series is to establish that the war machine cannot be determined as theState instrument of war, that it cannot then either be determined by the goal “to overthrow ordefeat the enemy,” that it does not enter “by its nature” in the practical syllogism of ends andmeans expressing the political signification of war at the core of the State-form. It is thus ananalytic and critical series: it aims at separating the war machine from war itself. Thus its mainproblem becomes: How to re-determine the positive object of the war machine, in other words,the intrinsic content of the Idea, if this object is paradoxically not war itself? But this first

6

problematic series leads to a second, this time synthetic and historic. This series confronts theproblem of knowing how the war machine becomes an instrument of State power, by whichmeans States appropriate it and integrate it into the political syllogism of means (i.e., military),of the object (of war), and of the ends (wills or political goals) accorded to the interstaterelations, and at the price of what tensions or what contradictions in the historical developmentsof the State-form.

Problematic Series IAnalytic-critical Series (conceptual distinction between war machine and State apparatus).

Problem 1: Is battle the necessary “object” (objective form) of war?

Thesis 1—the principle of non-battle, such as it is illustrated notably in irregular and guerrillawars, and such as it can also enter into State strategies, suggests otherwise. Clausewitzemphasizes, after all, how the modern exploitation of the war of movement, as well as newstrategic uses of the defensive in wars of resistance, had come to complicate the forms andstrategic issues of battle. However, he maintained its privileged position. “The center of gravityof the whole conflict or of the campaign,” the battle is the only means of war that one canimmediately deduce from its concept: “The primordial objective of military action [being] toovercome the enemy and thus to destroy his armed forces […], the battle is the only meansdisposed of by military activity to achieve it.”20 The first problem raised by Deleuze andGuattari’s hypothesis thus places the analysis on concrete, polemological ground, that of thetactic and of the strategy, and the major concern of the corresponding thesis is to call upon a re-evaluation of forms of confrontation that are not subordinated to this model of militaryengagement. Let us note in any case that this first thesis—“the battle and the non-battle are thedouble object of war,” without exclusivity of the one nor of the other21—does not resolve thecorresponding problem. It emphasizes rather that this problem remains irresolvable as long asnot only the political ends of war but the modes of investment of space-time by the war machine,that is to say its strategic modes of territorialization (existence or non-existence of one or manyfronts, variable relations of the fronts and turning movements, of the manoeuvre and of theconcentration of forces, of the strategic length of time and of the tactical quickness ofengagements, etc.), are not taken into account.

Problem 2: Is war the object (objective) of the war machine?

Thesis 2—the war machine does not have as its suitable or direct objective war itself, but thecomposition of a “smooth space,” as a mode of collective organization of life. The formalheterogeneity of the war machine in relation to the State-form has for intrinsic content, notmilitary confrontation, but the heterogeneity of modes of inscription or investment of space andtime by the two formations of power. For if there are States without armies, and evenconfrontations without the objective of forcing an opposing political will to submit (of the pillageor “razzia” type, for example), it is difficult to conceive, on the other hand, a State, however“transcendent” or inadequately socialized it may be, that does not implicate a minimum ofdevelopment of territory, in the form of investments as much material (infrastructures) assymbolic and imaginary. What is usually called the “territorial principle” of State domination isas much the result as it is the presupposition of this inscription (which is quite variable,

7

depending on the historical formations) by which the State compensates for the specificdeterritorialization of its apparatuses in relation to immanent social practices. “The State doesnot dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities orcommerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions,which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relativemovements of subjects and objects” (striated space).22 The “exteriority” of the war machine isnot then an exteriority “in” space (geographical distance), but an exteriority of space to itself (tobe “from the outside”, wherever one is), which prevents its complete interiorization into theState-form. This is why the conceptual difference between the State apparatus and the warmachine, that is to say the heterogeneity between the State-form and the machine-form of war,finds its immediate expression, for Deleuze and Guattari, in the modes of territorialization whichdominate respectively in state formations and in nomad formations.

This formal heterogeneity of social nomadic assemblages has often been remarked upon,especially regarding their lack of State and centralized administration, towns and territorialinfrastructures, writing machine and fiscal machine, as well as sedentary economy and stocks.(According to this point of view, it is improper to speak of “nomadic empires”.) More generally,historians note that nomadic barbarians, whether coming from the oriental Steppes or fromnorthern Europe, have been rather mediocre founders of empire.23 This is not however due to alack or incapacity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, but to the fact that they valorise a positiveterritorial principle that wards off these elements and actively renders them impossible. For thenomadic vectors of a social formation are not simply defined by movement in general, nor bytheir itinerancy in particular (sedentary peoples may be characterized by both), but by the type ofspace on which each formation territorializes itself, that is to say its manner of being towardspace or of “holding” its space. A nomadic space is a space that is “smoothened” by that whichhappens on it (modes of distribution of men and things, movements and events). “To smoothen”space does not mean to homogenize it, but to put into variation the stable landmarks that wouldpermit the imposition of modes of occupation of space upon invariables. In the socio-ecologicalconditions of the Steppes or the desert, for example, “the orientations have no consistency, butchange according to vegetations, occupations and temporary precipitations.” Thus the directionsvary with the spatial fixed points which themselves vary according to adopted trajectories, insuch a way that space tends to merge with movements that are deployed. Nomadicterritorialization by smoothening is a mobilisation of space rather than a movement in asupposedly immobile space. It is the rendering variable of a non-appropriated space, rather thanthe occupation of an objectified space as property.24 The State, on the contrary, needs suchinvariable fixed points (striations) in order to immobilize space, in order to identify and controlhuman beings and things according to their positions and their movements in this space, but alsoto delimit it, segment it, and render it appropriable either directly (when the State itselfdetermines the rules of residence) or indirectly (when it fixes the juridical rules of its privateappropriation). All of these operations are not only challenged by nomadic modes ofterritorialization, but indeed are incompatible with them. Let us recall however that theanthropological concepts which Deleuze and Guattari deploy to display this distinction betweenthe two territorial principles (striation/smoothening) have principally heuristic value. For theexposition of the hypothesis of the war machine, the essential point is above all to distinguishclearly the complex status of nomadism, as a socio-historical type and as a conceptual figure.

8

From the point of view of universal history, the nomads invent the war machine as such, as aform of exteriority from state formations. From the point of view of concrete analysis of socialformations, nomadic social assemblages effectuate the war machine, as a process of autonomouspower determined by the production and occupation of smooth spaces which escape Stateapparatuses and which turn against them. From the point of view of conceptual constructivism,the historical and ethnological concepts of nomadism permit the determination of content whichis adequate to the Idea of the war machine, that is to say the description of territorial assemblagesaccording to their social and economic, ecological and technical, semiological and aestheticcoordinates, which is what forms the positive content of the Treatise on Nomadology. Ourobject here is not to reassess this content for itself. We will simply note that anthropologicalstudies of nomadic peoples offer a body of concrete singularities from which the concept of thewar machine may be constructed. This concept itself permits us in turn to consider the nomadicvalues of very diverse phenomena which situate themselves far from historical or ethnologicalstudies. “In conformity with the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an ‘ideological’,scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which itdraws […] a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who defines this constellation ofcharacteristics; it is this constellation that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence ofthe war machine.”25

One question becomes all the more necessary. Why should we conserve the name “warmachine”? We conserve the name because if the constitution of smooth space is truly theintrinsic object of such a machine, if the occupation and reproduction of such a space truly formthe specific process in which this machine is actualized, it is no less true that (Thesis 2.2) itcannot be posed as such without meeting that which it escapes, without, outside of itself, runningup against that which it excludes inside of itself: “If war necessarily results, it is because the warmachine collides with States and cities, as forces (of striation) opposing its positive object: fromthen on, the war machine has as its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon,and adopts as its objective their annihilation.”26 Following the Kantian distinction taken up byDeleuze, war does not follow analytically from the war machine, whose only intrinsic property isthe social assemblages of smooth space, however diverse they may be. However, these veryassemblages ensure that war must necessarily follow from the nomadic machine, according to asynthetic connection. (The problem then becomes: what is it that controls and operates thissynthesis, and from then on imposes this necessity?) Again, we must recall this immediateconsequence for the genealogy of the power of war. According to this hypothesis, it is no longerenough to say that war is not at first a State instrument but the indirect consequence of the formalheterogeneity of a war machine exterior to the State-form. We must add that war itself does notat first have as its aim the subjugation of an opposing State, the bending of an opposing State’swill in order to impose another upon it, but the destruction of the State-form as such. We are notdealing with the ascent to extremes of armed State forces to absolute war, as in Clausewitz, butwith the absolute destruction of the State as such.

Problem 3: Is the war machine the object (means) of the State apparatus? (Or in what manner isit such?)

Thesis 3—the war machine is not in itself the object of the State apparatus, but it becomes suchwhen the State appropriates it as a subordinated instrument to its own ends, and this historical

9

process of appropriation is reflected in the two preceding problems: it is when the Stateappropriates the war machine as a means, that the war machine itself takes war as a directobjective, and that war in turn takes as its privileged objective form battle. It is thus theprivileged form of the polémos, and the nature of the “synthesis” which change. As long as thewar machine is not appropriated by the State, its relation to war is synthetically necessary, but thesynthesis itself returns to an exterior encounter between the State-form and a war machine. Wecan say, in the terms of Louis Althusser, that this meeting “over-determines” the synthesis,establishes the contingency of its necessity, and ensures that the war machine maintainsautonomy in its own process. It is precisely this autonomy that is expressed in the tactical andstrategic forms of asymmetrical conflict, at least as long as they escape the dialectic of politicalwills and the Clausewitzian law of ascent to extremes.27 As he relates Genghis Khan’s invasionsduring the first three decades of the thirteenth century, the sinologist René Grousset shows thatthe nomads did not aim at conquering the State, to seize a power they would not know what to dowith—which is, for that matter, the source of disconcerting situations: “The war of GenghisKhan against the Kin, beginning in 1211, after brief truces, went on until his death (1227), onlyto be ended by his successor (1234). The Mongols, with their mobile cavalry, excelled atravaging the countryside and open towns […], they made war in China as they did in theSteppes, by successive razzias, after which they would retire with their spoils, leaving behindthem the Kin to reoccupy the towns, reconstruct the ruins, repair the breaches, rebuild thefortifications, which meant that in the course of this war, the Mongol generals were obliged to re-conquer two or three times the same places.”28 In different and later conditions, T.E. Lawrencewould write similarly in an admirable passage: “The Semites’ idea of nationality was theindependence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combinedresistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were notso much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to winit.”29 This is then what changes, as soon as the war machine is appropriated by the State:subordinated to the politics of States and to their ends, it “changes in nature and function, since itis afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else expresses relationsbetween States, to the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State orimpose its aims upon it.”30 If it then enters into a relation that is synthetically necessary to war,this is not because of an exterior encounter, but because henceforth the State masters the powerof synthesis, transforms the objective form of war into a confrontation between State armies(battle), and even becomes capable of locally integrating irregular elements of guerrilla orasymmetrical wars.

The “power of synthesis” refers to the conditions and means of this appropriation of the warmachine by the State (conditions and means which are contained in the last instance by thenotion of “capture”). We discern here the major conceptual displacement in relation to theClausewitzian mechanism, and the genealogical program opened by the hypothesis of the warmachine. The problem is not primarily that of the “realization” of the pure concept of war, of therealization of absolute war in more or less limiting conditions of States according to theirpolitical, social, economic and technical, moral and juridical parameters. The problem is at firstthat of appropriation of the war machine by the State. It is the conditions, the forms and thehistorically variable means of this appropriation that can realize modes of realization of war,which depend on it. This leads to the second problematic series, which deals directly with thegenealogical process of appropriation. We would like to emphasize that the expression of this

10

process engages the core of the Guattaro-Deleuzian theory of the State-form: the redefinition of“State apparatuses” as “apparatuses of capture.”

Problematic Series IISynthetic-dynamic series (the process of appropriation of war machines by States).

Problem 4: What are the conditions of possibility of such an appropriation?

Thesis 4—the principle condition of this state appropriation is found in the ambiguity internal tothe war machine itself, as an objective “hesitation” of the Idea, according to Theses 2 and 2.2.“It is precisely because war is only the supplementary or synthetic object of the nomad warmachine that it experiences the hesitation that proves fatal to it, and that the State apparatus forits part is able to lay hold of war and thus turn the war machine back against the nomads. […]The integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one of the most powerful factorsof appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus: the inevitable danger to which thenomads succumbed.”31 If the State first meets war not in waging it, but in suffering it, we mustalso say that “the State learns fast!”32 Here we touch on one of the most important reasons forwhich, according to the plane of cultural anthropology, Deleuze considers nomads of the Steppesas the emblematic realisation of the war machine as such. The dating of the Treatise onNomadology by the death of Genghis Khan is in this regard significant. It not only refers to theexteriority of Genghis Khan’s war machine which will succeed within a few decades insubordinating the Chinese imperial centres. It also implies the ambiguity which traverses thewar machine (and which traverses it, emphasize our authors, “from the very beginning, from thefirst act of war against the State”), since the great nomad warriors which follow, such as Kublai,and especially Timur, will appear in their turn as new founders of Empire, turning the warmachine against the nomads of the Steppes themselves.33 The year 1227 resonates as the date ofthis historic turning point, which returns back to this “hesitation” in the Idea, this fluctuatioanimi of the Idea, which the State, without hesitating, will take advantage of.

Problem 5: What are the concrete forms of this appropriation?

Thesis 5—Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two principle forms of incorporation of the power ofwar as instrument of the State (“with all possible mixtures between them”). On the one hand,there can be an “encastment” of social groups which remain exogenous to the politicalsovereignty, and which thus conserve a heterogeneity and a relative autonomy—which producesthe perpetually ambiguous status of the social personage of the warrior whose ancient roots areattested to by Indo-European mythology, but which also concerns the different historical formsof mercenaries, militias, condottiere, special corps, etc.34 On the other hand, they describe an“appropriation proper” which constitutes the power of war as a public function incorporated intothe institutional structure of the State apparatus according to the rules of the sovereignty itself,which thus tends to withdraw from it as much autonomy as possible.

Problem 6: What are the effective means of this appropriation?

Thesis 6—these means cannot be primarily military because the military institution results fromthe appropriation. They consist in “the fundamental aspects of the State apparatus,” among

11

which we will note that Deleuze and Guattari do not count the military apparatus, or the juridicalapparatus. If the genealogy of the state power of war is not itself warlike, it does not either passdirectly through the transformations of law, but by the three aspects of the State-form determinedas “process of capture”: the management of territory and the control of norms of residency andof the circulation of men and of things; the organisation of work and the control of norms ofexploitation of surplus labor; the tax system and control of the issuing of money. History attestsfrom late Antiquity on to the co-functioning of this triple monopoly in the enterprise ofterritorialization of warriors and incorporation of their forces into the State-form. Institutionssuch as the hatru in Achaemenid Babylonia35, the Cleruchy in Lagid Egypte,36 and the kleros infifth-century Greece37 are aimed at binding down the mercenary warriors by ceding land incompensation for military benefits, but according to conditions such as that this territorializationprofits especially from the development of the public tax system and from the state capture of themonetary economy. On the one hand, the benefits system compensates the services of warriorsthrough the granting of lands, which was a common mode of retribution of functionaries throughconcession of tenures which exist for thousands of years in Mesopotamia and in the Near-East(“alimentary fields” of the Sumerians, the ilku of the Babylonian, etc.). But on the other hand,the residential establishment of the warrior is complemented by a financial dependence. Thus,the kleros remain juridically the property of the king (there being an absence of privateappropriation of land in “despotic” formations), of which soldier-colonist only receives theusufruct, and which obliges him to pay a tax to the monarch.

In a similar way, in the hatru system, a tax owed in money automatically implicates, in an epochwhere metallic money is principally reserved to the monarch for foreign exchanges, anindebtedness of the feudal warrior, who must then turn to the Murasû bankers, themselvessupplied by the imperial issuing of money.38 Thus, at the same time as it constitutes a powerfulmeans of absorbing the imperial surplus, the territorialization of warriors directly participates inthe rise of a public tax system and to the monetization of the economy, and precisely because thismonetization directly depends upon the tax itself as a state apparatus of capture.39 A comparativeapproach recognizes this system of “fifes without seigneury”, according to the formula of thehistorian Guillaume Cardascia, in certain Germanic societies of the Early Middle Ages, amongthe Arimani Lombards for example, where the establishment of liberi homines on royal landsimplicates military service duties and economic taxes. In other different historical conditions,when burgeoning nation-states confront each other over the dismembering of the feudal systemand the dynamism of free towns to establish a territorial unification of their dominion, thesolution invented by the French monarchy permits the territorialization of the ancient warrioraristocracy by directly utilising a series of economic and financial factors: the ruin of the feudalnobility crippled with debts at the end of the wars of Religion and deprived of their lands bycreditors, the state promotion of a bourgeoisie on the rise, the correlative development of themonetary economy and of public financing, which make possible a financial subjection of thearmed nobility by the sovereign, and the substitutive putting in place of a soon enlargedconscription of all the social strata of the population.40 The link between development of thepublic tax system and the constitution of military institutions attests to the iteration, in thecreative evolution of states, of the convergent action of capture of territories, of works and ofcapital.

12

When Deleuze and Guattari elaborate their theory of the apparatuses of State as “apparatuses ofcapture,” they mean to construct a non-juridical concept of the monopoly of State.41 Moreprecisely, it has to do with thematizing an original operation of monopolisation by which isrealized an auto-constitution of the power of State in the interior of social and economicstructures on which this power simultaneously exercises its domination. This reopens, in a post-Marxist perspective, a materialist elucidation of the transformations of State through the conflictsand adversarial forces which it incorporates within itself throughout its history. We will simplyrecall here that the establishment of this concept of State capture proceeds from a rereading ofthe Marxian analysis of “the primitive accumulation of capital,” and more precisely from agrounding of the transformations of the nature of repressive State violence, of its role and of itsrelationship to the mutations of the juridical apparatus, through the historical process ofdecomposition of pre-capitalist modes of production, and the progressive establishment of therelation of production of capital.42 In primitive accumulation, the “liberation” of the two basicfactors of an economic structure dominated by the law of value and accumulation (the formationof money-capital as power of independent investment, and the expropriation of a “naked” laborforce) does not realize itself without a massive intervention of the State power, in the variablemixtures of legal violence and of brute repression (expropriation of the petty-peasantry, anti-vagabond legislations and repressions, laws of reduction of salary, etc.). But the crystallisationof new relations of production where these two factors come together leads not to adisappearance of State violence, but to a double transformation of its economy.

First, there is a transformation by incorporation of the brute violence in the social relations ofproduction and in the relations of rights which guarantee them under the authority of a State—aviolence which becomes structural, materialised in the “normal” order of social relations, alsohardly conscious of a natural state of things, and which does not manifest itself any more in itsbrutal form than in an exceptional fashion (exactly when these social relations are threatened).Second, we find a transformation by displacement of this violence in the repressive apparatus ofthis new “State of law” (Rechtsstaat, rule of law) at the core of which it no longer manifestsitself as direct violence but as a force of law reacting to all direct violences, as a State police or a“lawful violence” exercised against the violence of outlaws. From one phase to the other, fromthe primitive accumulation of capital (under the pre-capitalist modes of production) toaccumulation proper (in the newly constituted economic structure), from the violent law of thepre-capitalist State to the “legitimate violence” of the capitalist State of law, what happensexactly? There is monopolisation of the force of physical repression by the rule of law, but notin the sense where this repressive force would be exercised on a pre-existing field of application.The monopolisation of repressive force in a system of legality is in a relation of reciprocalpresupposition with a system of social relations which a para-legal violence permitted toconstitute. The concept of capture designates precisely the functioning of the entirety, circular ororganic, of such a genealogical violence which permits the development of the conditions ofcapital’s domination of relations of production (this violence may contribute to the relations ofproduction precisely insofar as it is not restricted by a State of law), but which then enters theserelations at the same time as they form a system, permits the formation of a system of legalitythat are adequate to them, and finally ceases to itself appear as repressive: “As a general rule,there is primitive accumulation whenever an apparatus of capture is mounted, with that veryparticular kind of violence that creates or contributes to the creation of that which it is directedagainst, and thus presupposes itself.”43

13

This analysis is initially engaged in a critical dismantling of the classical anthropologicalproblem of the origin of the State, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to renew the concept ofthe State-form by confronting it with the “Asiatic mode of production” of the Marxists (ChapterIII in Anti-Oedipus had constructed the foundation of this attempt with its notion of the“Urstaat”).44 However it is clear that it also takes a singular effect in light of the hypothesis ofthe war machine. At first glance, this hypothesis is inserted into the interior of the process ofprimitive accumulation; or rather it doubles the primitive accumulation of capital with aprimitive accumulation of a repressive State power, in one sense that is perhaps more than asimple analogy with the Marxian analysis. It is however true that the two processes seem mustbe distinguished, and do not appear on the same plane or in the same economy of violence. Thetransformation of the relation between repressive power and juridical apparatus in theestablishment of the structure of capitalist production initially concerns the interior repression asState police or “violence of law,” while the process of appropriation of the war machine seemsessentially to concern an exterior violence, whether defensive or offensive, turned against otherStates. From this point of view, the two processes seem the inverse of one another: on the onehand, interiorization of a violence less and less apparent insofar as it materially incorporatesitself into the social structure, and on the other, reinforcement and monopolistic concentration inthe State of a material power of war destined to appear on the international scene in more andmore considerable proportions. But a remark mentioned above from Clausewitz opens upanother route for us: the development of a “state cohesion,” which will determine the tendencyof nineteenth-century wars to return to attain an absolute form, itself took place in an epochwhen wars did not at all display such a tendency; it is not in the age of the politics of total warthat a power of total war developed, but previously, when the policies affixed upon war (andproportionally the military means to war) strictly limited objectives.45 From a Guattaro-Deleuzian perspective, this acknowledgment must be explained by a new problematic engagedby the Hypothesis: the question of modes of realisation of wars between States is second inrelation to modes of appropriation of the war machine by the State. This process ofappropriation must then be conceived as that of a “primitive accumulation” of a political powerof total war, that is to say an accumulation which cannot be explained by the politicaldetermination of war, but by the transformations of the war machine in the Classical Ageaccording to new relations in which the State and the socioeconomic field are determined toenter. According to this last point of view, the determining historical sequence is that where thegenealogy of the military power of the State enters into a relation of reciprocal determinationwith the genealogy of the social power of capital. Two movements reveal themselves from thismoment as more and more indissociable: the integration of the war machine into the State-form,but also the integration of State apparatuses into the immanence of the social field. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari designated as a “tendency to concretisation” this historicalmovement of incorporation of the power and of the apparatuses of State into socioeconomicstructures (and in the corresponding social antagonisms); they deduce not an abstractlyconsidered loss of State power, but on the contrary its intensive socialisation conferringbestowing it with an unheard-of social power and more and more differentiated functions, in itsnew task of regulating decoded flows of capital, of merchandise and human labor force.46

In A Thousand Plateaus, and in light of their new hypothesis, they take as a consequence thiscorrelative tendency: the more the war machine is interiorized by the State, the more the

14

institutionalisation of war, its administration and its not only political but industrial, financial andpopulational organization become factors of intense creativity for this State which is itself moreand more immanent to the social field. In other terms, the appropriated war machine becomesitself a direct instrument not only of the policies of war, but of the growing implication of theState throughout the social relations of production, at once as a stimulant and economic regulatorand as an instrument of domination at the core of class conflicts. We will of course recall herethe recurrent utilisation of the war machine as an organ of repression in the multipleinsurrectional junctures which rocked nineteenth-century Europe and the world of the twentieth-century, but also the functions that it assumed beginning in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centurieswith the invention of new forms of socialisation of labor. Marx remarked in a letter to Engels onSeptember 25, 1857, that the military institution had constituted a formidable laboratory ofexperimentation of the relations of production that would then be “developed at the heart ofbourgeois society” (for example the systematisation of wages, the division of work to the interiorof a branch, the “machinism”). In this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari recall the determiningrole that military engineers, from the Middle Ages on, begin to assume in the state managementof territory, “not only in the case of fortresses and fortified cities, but also in strategiccommunication, the logistical structure, the industrial infrastructure, etc.”47 In a similar manner,from the point of view of the transformations in modes of division and connection of the processof labor in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, they complement the analyses of MichelFoucault of military models of the “dispositifs disciplinaires” mobilized to territorialize theproductive bodies onto the apparatuses of burgeoning industrial production. It is in the barracks,the arsenals and the weapons factories that take place experimentations and systemizations of thetechniques which permit the “settling, sedentarizing labor force, regulating the movement of theflow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits,” by means of a striation of a “closed space,detached, surveyed in all its points, where individuals are inserted into a fixed place, where thesmallest movements are controlled, where all events are recorded.”48

We understand now that the genealogical program opened up by “the entirety of the hypothesis”is not only to study the role of the public tax system, of the state management of territories and ofconnections of productive work, in the appropriation of the war machine. It is also, in return, toanalyse how this machine appropriated into the form of institutions and of military functionsbecomes an intense vector of creation of knowledge and techniques of power for the statestriation of the social field, without which the capitalist relation of production would not be ableto establish itself nor to extend its social domination. This program thus articulates the primitiveaccumulation of the military power to the accumulation of capital, as the two processes that theState-form incorporates, and in which the modern State transforms itself. The major effect ofthis incorporation pointed out by Deleuze and Guattari will be the inextricable link ofdetermination and of reciprocal stimulation, between the rise of industrial capitalism and thedevelopment of economies of war. It is at the core of the same complex tendency that themodern State is militarized, that it takes its new regulatory functions in a decoded capitalist field,and that the material organization of the power of war becomes an intrinsic condition of theaccumulation and of the enlarged reproduction of capital. To finish, we would like to re-envisage in light of this underlying unity the Clausewitzian Formula and the evaluation of itslimits in the Treatise on Nomadology. It is precisely at the level of these limits that thegenealogical program is engaged with a political diagnostic of the actual situation (that of A

15

Thousand Plateaus, which is not so far from our own), and thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, intopossible lines of practical intervention.

3. Final Problem of the Hypothesis: Inversion of the Formula and the Actual Situation

The limits of the Formula were often enunciated by the necessity, for historical analysis and/orfor the strategic calculation of new twentieth-century conflicts, of an “inversion.” Politicsbecame a continuation of war by other means, and the State, the instrument of a perpetual war(whether overt or concealed), in any case of which the political States would no longer be theultimate subjects. Nevertheless, from Erich von Ludendorff to Paul Virilio, from Carl Schmitt toFoucault, this move could have meanings so diverse that Deleuze and Guattari do not adopt itwithout the precaution of immediately reinscribing it into the system of their Hypothesis—to thepoint that the term itself of “inversion” seems to them to have a very limited relevancy: “to beentitled to say that politics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invertthe order of the words as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is necessary to follow thereal movement at the conclusion of which the States, having appropriated a war machine, andhaving adapted it to their aims, re-impart a war machine that takes charge of the aim,appropriates the States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions.”49 Our first point isthat the inversion must not limit itself to an abstract move upon the Clausewitzian declaration; itmust comprehend a historical process which implicates not only the parameters of State politicsin the oscillation of real wars between simple armed observations and tremendous surges ofmilitary hostility, but more profoundly, the evolution of the factor of appropriation uncovered bythe hypothesis of the war machine. It is in light of this criterion that our authors first evaluate theinterpretation of the inversion of the Formula posited by Ludendorff.50

In his analysis of the total character of the First World War, Ludendorff gives Clausewitz creditfor having recognized the utmost importance of the “popular” dimension of modern conflicts.He nonetheless reproaches him for having failed to draw out all the implications of thisrealization, due to a three-fold presupposition: Clausewitz abusively subordinated the militaryinstrument to diplomatic action, since he limited his notion of the political to exterior politicswhile at the same time continuing to think of armies as the only subjects and objects ofconfrontations. Ludendorff objects to this by pointing out that, after the passage from theNapoleonic Wars to contemporary total wars, the hostility henceforth opposes entire nations, theentirety of their civil population, economy, and their ideological forces (which he refers to as the“spiritual cohesion” of the people in question). The strategic objectives are no longer onlyarmies and their reserve bases; they are all of their industrial infrastructure, their financialresources, the human and moral “reserves,” all enlisted and involved in the war effort. In otherwords, the strategic “center of gravity” is no longer a center, but the totality of the opposingsociety and of its State. This leads Ludendorff to the theoretical necessity of extending thenotion of the political in order to take into account the increasingly determining role of domesticpolitics in the enterprise of war, and the strategic necessity of entrusting to a military HighCommand the decision-making power over the entirety of the military and political (diplomatic,economic, psychological, etc.) means in view of the sole final objective which is henceforthadequate: no longer to confer through armaments an advantageous relation to the political Statein order to negotiate the conditions of peace (following the privileged situation of Clausewitz),but to militarily impose upon the vanquished an unconditional capitulation. That such a

16

situation, for Deleuze and Guattari, results directly from the underlying unity previouslyidentified, is easily conceived: the entanglement of the militarization of the State and thetendency to its concretization in the immanence of the capitalist social relations means that thewar machine cannot be appropriated by the State-form without simultaneously beingmaterialised in the increasingly intense network of interconnections of socioeconomic, politicaland ideological relations (which also means that at no historical moment is the appropriated warmachine to be confused with the military institution alone). It is in this sense that Deleuze andGuattari write that “the factors that make State war total war are closely connected tocapitalism.”51 It is in the same movement that capital “totalizes” the social field (which Marxcalled the “real subsumption” of social relations and the process of production by capital) andthat the State military power is incarnated in the total war machine, in other words, in a warmachine of which the means and the objective tend to lose their limits: the means are no longerlimited to the military institutions but extend themselves to the totality of “the investment ofconstant capital in equipment, industry, and war economy, and the investment of variable capitalin the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of war)”;the objective is no longer limited to striking the enemy army in order to bring about thesubmission of the political authority upon which that army depends, but tends to annihilate theentirety of the forces of the opposing nation.

Nevertheless, as Raymond Aron as rightly demonstrated, the Ludendorffian inversion of theFormula is not without ambiguity. First, because Clausewitz does at times recognize theimportance of domestic politics in the war effort, and especially because the unconditionalcapitulation of the enemy remains extremely vague outside of a political will, even should weonly be dealing with a will capable of proportioning this ultimate objective to the conservation ofits own State.52 Now this ambiguity is not simply theoretical. It is an effective ambiguity of thepolitics of total war, which is revealed historically in the contradiction into which may enter thepolitical goal and the processes of a now unlimited war machine, and which, at the limit of thiscontradiction, does not lead so much to the inversion of the hierarchical relation war/politicsannounced by the Clausewitzian instrumental conception as to an abolition of the political assuch, i.e., the absorption of the political goal by a material process of war which has becomeautonomous. The historical effectiveness of this limit, which brings both the Clausewitzianthesis and its Ludendorffian critique to their common “impensé” (and which cannot be indicatedbut in “symptomal” flaws, such as “Clausewitz's vacillation when he asserts at one point thattotal war remains a war conditioned by the political aim of States, and at another that it tends toeffectuate the Idea of unconditioned war”), is identified by Deleuze and Guattari as well asVirilio in the global war machine of the Nazi State. In its process of total war, this machine tendsto free itself from every political goal, to become an unconditioned process of war, i.e., removedfrom any political conditioning whatsoever. It is not only that the political goal tends to mix withthe objective of war (in the conditions described by Ludendorff), but this objective itself tends tobecome a process without end, autonomous, and whose political goals are now only subordinatedmeans. The total war machine is no longer only simply appropriated to the State and to itspolitical ends; it becomes capable on the contrary of subordinating or even engendering “a Stateapparatus which is no longer useful for anything save destruction,” eventually reaching a state ofcontradiction with every limiting condition of a political end, even with the fundamentalrequirement of the political: the conservation of the State. Thus the difference between theNational-Socialist State and a totalitarian State:

17

Totalitarianism is a State affair: it essentially concerns the relation between theState as a localized assemblage and the abstract machine of overcoding iteffectuates. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not awar machine, that takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage.Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand,involves a war machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not inthe sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine taking over theState.53

The specificity of the National-Socialist total State cannot be fully determined withoutrecognizing the dynamics of virtually unlimited war in which it realizes its totalization—by themilitarization of civil society, by the total mobilization of the population in the war effort, by theconversion of the entire economy into a war economy, the movement of investments to means ofproduction and consumption toward the means of pure destruction, etc. But in the very interiorof such a dynamic, the State tends to become a simple means of acceleration of a process ofannihilation into which it plunges. It is in this sense that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the fullrealization of the National-Socialist total State is less totalitarian as such (the total dominationwould be rather its “synthetically” necessary object, according to the requirements of totalmobilization, which is, after all, the work of the Party rather than the State) that its realization ina “suicidal State.” Total war appears then less as the enterprise of a State as of a war machinethat appropriates the State and “channels into it a flow of absolute war whose only possibleoutcome is the suicide of the State itself.” Even though she did not distinguish between fascismand totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote in a similar vein that the National Socialist idea ofdomination “could be realized neither by a State nor by a simple apparatus of violence, but onlyby a movement which is constantly moving […]; as for the political objective which the end ofthis movement would constitute, it simply does not exist.”54 At this point, Deleuze and Guattariadd, the war, and even the risk of losing the war, and finally the inevitability of defeat, come intoplay as accelerators of this now unlimited movement. March 19, 1945—Hitler—telegram 71:“If the war is lost, may the nation perish.”

In what historical situation would the Clausewitzian Formula be “inverted,” properly speaking,and not simply brought to the limit where it loses all sense? We have reached the last conclusionof the Hypothesis, that is, the moment where the historical movement of the “appropriation”factor joins the actuality of the Guattaro-Deleuzian statement of the Hypothesis itself. We mustmore than ever reaffirm its fundamental theoretical sense: the over-determination of the relationpolitics/war by the relation war machine/State, without which the supposed “inversion” of theFormula remains a pointless verbal artifice. What the first phase of the inversion whichculminates in the Second World War has shown us is that a global war machine which tendstoward autonomy from States, at the outcome of a trend where the rise of industrial capitalismand the development of war economies progressively merged, and where the intensivemilitarization of European States made of the material organisation of the power of war anintrinsic condition of capitalist accumulation. But in this first phase, this inversion of the relationof appropriation of the war machine and State does not bring about an inversion of the relationof politics and war. This is because the war machine only appropriates the political State in andby enacted war, in the form of total war; it is in continuing to take war as its direct objective that

18

the war machine materialises in the ensemble of the socio-economic field (economy of war andtotal mobilisation). This is such a way that the relation of appropriation is inverted, but underconditions where the political goal (to subjugate or destroy the enemy) remains the determiningmotive, and where war remains that of the Clausewitzian Formula, “the continuation of politicsby other means,” even though these other means become incompatible with all political anddiplomatic solutions, and despite the fact that the political ends enter into contradiction with aprocess of war leading the political State inevitably toward self-destruction. If a new threshold iscrossed during the post-war decades, it is precisely insofar as the inversion of the relation ofappropriation between war machine and State is embodied in a global configuration where themilitarization of States, the rise of the war economy in the structures of capitalism, thesubsumption under the material power of unlimited war of the ensemble of the planetary socialenvironment, come to be realised without enacted total war.

This worldwide war machine, which in a way ‘reissues’ from the States, displaystwo successive figures: first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimitedmovement with no other aim than itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, andthe second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as itsobject directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms asmooth space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total waritself is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machinehas taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no morethan objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the point at whichClausewitz's formula is effectively reversed.55

We are in the presence of a configuration where the political effectively becomes thecontinuation of war by other means, but precisely because the global war machine ceases tohave war as object, while war ceases to be subordinated to political ends. The first importantfactor of the reconstitution of such an autonomous war machine is of course geopolitical andstrategic, according to new axes of international politics, the displacement of imperialist rivalriesof European States toward the axes of the Cold War: West-East and North-South. Such is firstthe meaning of the remark according to which “it is peace that technologically frees theunlimited material process of total war”56. Let us be clear that it is the ominous peace in the newstrategy of nuclear deterrent (the “peace of Terror or Survival”) which makes of the global warmachine the object and means of a technological, scientific and economic capitalisation withoutprecedent, which no longer even needs the triggering of total war itself in order to develop. Butthere is a second, more profound factor, which explains that the reformation of a worldwide warmachine in the post-second world war decades, which Deleuze and Guattari mention, is notsimply a broadening to new technological and geopolitical dimensions, or a continuation ofimperialist strategies of the Nation-States of the first half of the twentieth century, but a newsituation. Geopolitics itself in fact depends on a meta-economy which determines the relationsbetween the system of the world-economy and the political States which effectuate itsconditions, a meta-economy which, in the last instance, establishes the degree of autonomy ofthis system in relation to these States.57 In a general way, one could affirm that the autonomy ofthe global war machine in relation to State structures remains determined, as much in the firstphase as in the second phase of the inversion, by the degree of autonomy of the process ofaccumulation and reproduction of capital in relation to these same structures. In both cases, we

19

are dealing of course with a relative autonomy, which could not be identified with a pure andsimple independence.

Deleuze and Guattari enter explicitly here into the posterity of theoreticians of the “Statemonopoly capitalism,” from the analyses of Lenin on imperialism to those of Paul Baran andPaul Sweezy on the role of unproductive State expenditures, by civil government and militarism,in the absorption of surplus.58 Certainly, the process of accumulation of capital passesincreasingly through an international division of labor, a transnational circulation of capital and aworldwide market, but it is still obviously up to States to manage the corresponding relations ofproduction, to overcome the systematic disequilibria and the crises of under-investment andoverproduction, and to regulate for better or for worse their social repercussions inside nationalstructures. The novelty of the post-war decades is that the new worldwide war machine whichthe States “unleash” appears henceforth endowed with a degree of autonomy far superior toanything heard of before the Second World War. This provides evidence that the extremeintegration of this machine in the capitalist structure which itself crossed a new threshold ofautonomization vis-à-vis State institutions. At the same time that a trans-State monopolisticcapitalism is developing, which grafts itself onto State monopoly capitalism, which complicatesit rather than supplanting it, and which is embodied in multinational firms and a worldwidefinancial oligarchy, the global war machine itself is embodied “in financial, industrial, andmilitary technological complexes that are in continuity with one another,” traversing theadministrative, juridical and economic frontiers of national States.59

We are now able to clarify what we were earlier suggesting: when States tend to reconstitute aglobal autonomous war machine “of which they are no longer anything more than the opposableor apposed parts,” it has less to do with a binary “inversion” of the Clausewitzian Formula (is itwar that is the continuation of politics, or politics that continues war … ) than with a profoundredistribution and a systematic transformation of all the terms of its syllogism goal—objective—means, and, consequently, of a mutation of the meaning of objective form of “the political” and“war” themselves:

(a) First, if the war machine now ceases to be subordinated to a political end, it is first of allbecause the end itself ceases to be political and becomes immediately economic. Theaccumulation of capital and its enlarged reproduction to the global stage: this is the end or theaim, under conditions which remain those which Marx uncovered in his theory of crises. InBook III of Das Kapital, he emphasized the radical originality of capitalism with respect to allother known modes of production: having no other goal but the production of surplus value, tomake of growth of social productivity an “end in itself,” having thus no exterior limit to its ownprocess of accumulation, but only interior or “immanent” limits, such as the delimited conditionsof the valorization of existent capital: limits of productive forces in the creation of surplus valueaccording to the relations between population and rate of exploitation of labor, but also limits inthe absorption or “realisation” of surplus value according to “the proportionality of the differentbranches of production and of the power of consumption of the society.” As embodied in excesscapital, unemployment and crises of overproduction, such bounds generated by the process ofaccumulation in itself may only be surmounted by the periodic depreciation of existing capital,by the augmentation of investment in constant capital and the “continual upheaval of themethods of production,” by the creation of new markets and the expansion of the scale of

20

production, which does not destroy the immanent limits but displaces them only to find themagain farther away, or which only destroys them in reproducing them on an increasingly largescale.60 Inside of this dynamic of the process of capitalist accumulation on a worldwide scale,the new aim of the war machine must then be doubly determined. First, this aim becomeseffectively unlimited. Total war still needed a political end fixing an extrinsic limit to the warmachine (annihilate the enemy); but as soon as it crosses its new threshold of integration into thestructures of global capitalism, the war machine becomes effectively unlimited, i.e., rejoins thebase determination of the process of accumulation: not to meet any exterior limit to this processitself as an end in itself. Second, this end is only limited because it is intrinsically critical; theprocess breaks any exterior limit only insomuch as it generates its own immanent bounds(crises): “The growing importance of constant capital in the [capitalist] axiomatic means that thedepreciation of existing capital and the formation of new capital assume a rhythm and scale thatnecessarily take the route of a war machine now incarnated in the [militaro-industrial andfinancial] complexes: the complexes actively contribute to the redistributions of the worldnecessary for the exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. There is a continuous‘threshold’ of power that accompanies in every instance the shifting of the axiomatic's limits.”61

(b) Thus incorporated into the process of accumulation on the global stage, the war machineno longer has as its objective war as such, nor even war carried to the absolute. The objective israther, Deleuze and Guattari write, the worldwide order as “absolute peace of survival.” This isobviously not to say that wars diminish in frequency—indeed, this is far from the case! Rather, atthe same time as the war machine is regaining an autonomy from the State form, war becomesonce again its only synthetically object. Its analytic object, on the other hand, is to assure thedisplacement of bounds of the valorization of existing capital, through the extension of the scaleof production within the integrated worldwide market, through the correlative intensification ofexploitation of energy and planetary resources, through the consequential reconfiguring of theinternational division of labor and of the relations of unequal dependence between the regions ofthe world-economy. Without a doubt, none of these operations take place without tensionsbetween States, or without confrontations between political wills. But these are integratedhenceforth as wheels of a planetary security order which is planned throughout all civil disorderswhich the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production does not cease to generate. It is inthis sense that “war ceases to be the materialization of the war machine; the war machine itselfbecomes materialized war;”62 i.e., war incorporated into “the order” and to the “security” of theglobal capitalist axiomatic, which no longer even needs to pass through military operations, andwhich passes more systematically through the decoding of alimentary flows which generatefamine, the recoding of population flows through destructions of settlement, forced migrationsand remote urbanisations, the decodings of flows of energy-matter which generate political andmonetary instabilities, etc.—in short, war which has become perfectly immanent to thesystematically destabilized and “insecured” social and existential territories, of which even themilitary outburst of enacted total war was only a premonition.

(c) It is to wars themselves that we must return, in order to conclude. The “peace” of theworldwide security order does not imply any political pacification, or any quantitative reductionof wars, which may even contain certain of their functions from the imperialist age, according tonew geopolitical polarities and new relations of unequal exchange between North and South.Nevertheless these partial continuities are capable of masking the crux of the matter. Once

21

again, the realization of war depends upon variable relations of appropriation between State andwar machine. Now, as soon as the war machine ceases to be a means of State wars and becomesitself materialised war or organised insecurity, a power of destruction of concrete socialterritories in the “normal” order of a world-economy which, as Paul Virilio has written, tends todisqualify “the ensemble of the planetary settlement while stripping peoples of their quality ofinhabitants,”63 wars tend to take new objective forms. In the first place, Deleuze and Guattariobserve, they enter into alliances with police interventions, police operations interior to the“society” of the global market, which (relatively) subordinates the political and diplomaticleverage of States. An indication can be found in the growing transfer of public functions ofStates to the war machine itself—or to say this inversely, in the fact that military technologies aremore and more frequently transferred to the domain of civil government, of repression andpopulation control. Take the example, analysed by Virilio, of “the famous McNamara Linewhich was constructed, through an electronic system, to prevent infiltration of Vietconginfiltration, and which was reinstalled, in the course of the summer of 1973, in the south of theUnited States, on the frontier of Mexico, in order this time to prevent clandestine migration ofworkers. In France also, after the arson of certain factories and fuel depots, the same electronicprocesses of detection were put in place as those of American forces in the Far East, but this timearound industrial zones. Spy-cameras no longer only watched a declared enemy, but also themisbehaving spectator of a stadium, the bad driver, etc.”64

The new objective forms of wars, as internal parts of the security global order, thus combine a“policification” of international space and a militarization of civil interior spaces. In the secondplace, such a correlation causes the wavering of the double partition war/peace andinterior/exterior, upon which is based the coding of military conflicts in the State-form (political,juridical and diplomatic coding). Here again, Virilio made the following case: “At the momentwhere, throughout the “operational defence of territory,” the military institution attendsincreasingly to interior security, while the police tends to identify itself to public welfare. For thearmy, there is no longer even a clear distinction between the “interior” enemy and the “exterior”enemy, there is only a general threat to all domains (demography, economy, delinquency, etc.),and thus only one enemy without location, since it can be discovered here or there, at the whim ofpropaganda.”65 At the same time as the diplomatic and strategic distinction between peacetimeand wartime tends to fade away, the qualification of the enemy tends to be decreasingly politicaland becomes juridical, economic, moral, religious, etc. Thus the interest of Deleuze for thestrategic concept of the “unspecified enemy” formed by French theoreticians of the NationalDefence beginning in the 1970’s, a perfectly adequate concept to the security continuum insmooth space constituted by a new global war machine.66 When General Guy Brossollet presentshimself as the fervent partisan of an integration of anti-insurrectional techniques in strategies ofDefence, he explains that this is to deal not only with potential exterior aggressions, butespecially with all sorts of much less localizable threats, “of moral, political, subversive oreconomic order, etc.”: “The adversary is multiform, manoeuvring and omnipresent. The threatswhich France must deal with are found everywhere and affect very diverse sectors of nationalpotential. This is an alarming realization and implies a defence conceived according to thediversity and ubiquity of the threats.”67 In short, at the same time that war takes a police-juridicalobjective form, the enemy becomes abstract, virtually omnipresent, similar to a non-individualised and unqualified threat capable of springing up at any locus of social space and in

22

unpredictable forms (smooth space), independently of political criteria of association with a Stateor relations between States.

We could call this state of affairs a paranoiac reign of “insecuritizing security”: “The globalentente between States, the organisation of a global police and jurisdiction such as those inpreparation, necessarily clear the way for an extension where more and more people will beconsidered “virtual” terrorists.”68 We are obviously not denying that “there are” objective factorsof insecurity, terrorist practices, etc. We are rather attempting to understand how newcombinations of the military and the police implicate new procedures of discursive constructionof the figure of the enemy (construction which of course always has a firm grip on symbolic andimaginary structures), according to new relations between States and war machine, andaccording to requirements and contradictions of the capitalist axiomatic which over-determinesthese relations. We have seen in what sense the new global war machine was closely linked tothe process of accumulation of capital on the worldwide scale, which only traverses its internalcrises in precipitating cycles of depreciation of existing capital and of the formation of newcapital, with an unheard-of scope and speed of rotation. Precisely, such an expansion of thecapitalist axiomatic necessarily passes through a generalised virtualisation of the enemybecoming unspecified or unqualified, and correlatively, through an acceleration of procedures ofqualification of the enemy, and of continuous requalification of the enemy, at the price of anenlarged criminalisation of social practices. Such is the last correlate of the transformation ofobjective forms of war diagnosed by Deleuze and Guattari: the rise of assemblages ofenunciation capable of constantly revising the figure of the “threat,” assuring this discursivereproduction of an “enemy” which may be recorded, at the limit, in any fragment of discursivecode whatsoever (according to variable of age, confession, profession, residence, politicalideology, social or economic conduct, etc.).

We began by emphasizing that the Guattaro-Deleuzian theory of the war machine was first aworking hypothesis, the basis of a genealogical program articulating the long-term history of theconcept as well as its contemporary relevance. A categorical analysis of technologies of controlin smooth space (and notably transfers of technologies from the military to the civil domain), asemiological analysis of constructions of the figure of the unspecified enemy (and notablymechanisms of transformation or of rapid rotation of these figures in the media’s assemblages ofcollective utterances): such seem to us to be the two aspects of the working program finallyaccessed using the hypothesis of the war machine. It is clear that such a theoretical programwould seem hardly dissociable from the experimentation of new practices of collectiveresistance capable of reconstructing inhabitable territories, and thus recreating a new sense of the“political” irreducible as much to its military coding as to its juridical-moral, security and policedevelopments.

Translated by Daniel Richter

Notes

23

1 G. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (Los Angeles, Semiotext(e): 2004) 280.2 See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis/London, University of Minnesota Press: 1987)230, 360, 418-419, 426, 434.3 C. von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press: 1976) Book I, ch. I, §24. 4 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 418.5 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 419-420.6 Clausewitz “On War” B. VIII ch. 3B.7 Clausewitz “On War” B. VIII ch. 3B.8 Clausewitz “On War” B. I ch. 2, and B. VIII ch. 6A-B.9 Clausewitz “On War” B. I ch. 1 §3.10 Clausewitz “On War” B. VIII ch. 2.11 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 354-355.12 Clausewitz “On War” B. I ch. 1; B. VIII ch. 2 and ch. 6B.13 See Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 421.14 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 354.15 See G. Deleuze, Difference and repetition (New York, Columbia University Press: 1994) 135, 154.16 See Clausewitz “On War” B. I ch. 4 §3.17 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 420.18 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 420.19 Clausewitz “On War” B. I ch. 1 §24.20 Clausewitz “On War” B. IV ch. 11; B. VIII ch. 1.21 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 416.22 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 385-386.23 See P. Contamine, La Guerre au Moyen Age (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France: 1999) 88.24 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 380-382, 493-494.25 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 422-423.26 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 417.27 See Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 423.28 R. Grousset, L’Empire des steppes (Paris, Payot: 1965) 288-291.29 T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions: 1997) 86.30 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 418.31 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 418-419.32 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 418.33 Grousset “L’Empire des steppes” 495-496.34 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 351-352, 424-427.35 G. Cardascia, Armée et fiscalité dans la Babylonie achéménide, in Armées et fiscalité dans le monde antique (Paris,Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: 1977) 1-11.36 See E. Van’t Dack, Sur l’évolution des institutions militaires lagides, in “Armées et fiscalité dans le monde antique”77-105.37 See M. Détienne, La phalange: problèmes et controverses, in J.-P. Vernant [ed.] Problèmes de la guerre en Grèceancienne (Paris, Seuil/Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales: 1968/1999) 167-16838 Cardascia “Armée et fiscalité dans la Babylonie achéménide” 7.39 See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Œdipus (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1983) 196-197; andDeleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 442-443.40 See N. Elias, The Court Society (Oxford, Blackwell: 1983) ch. 5.41 See Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 437-448.42 See K. Marx, Das Kapital. Book I (1867) Section VIII.43 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 447.44 G. Sibertin-Blanc, Deleuze et l'Anti-Oedipe. La Production du désir (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France: 2010)ch. 3.45 See Clausewitz “On War” B. VIII ch. 3B.46 See Deleuze and Guattari “Anti-Œdipus” 221-222, 251-259.47 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 419.

48 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 368; See M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris, Gallimard:1975/1993) 166-175, 190-199, 230.49 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 421.50 E. von Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg (München, Ludendorffs Verlag: 1935).51 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 421.52 See R. Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz. II: L’âge planétaire (Paris, Gallimard: 1976) 58-61, 128.53 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 230.54 See H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, III: Totalitarianism (New-York, Harcourt, 1951/1958) ch.1 §1.55 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 421.56 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 467.57 See Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 461-466.58 See P. Baran and P. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York,Monthly Rewiew Press: 1966) ch. 7 and 8.59 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 466.60 See K. Marx, Das Kapital. Book III (1894) Section III, Conclusions ; Deleuze and Guattari “Anti-Œdipus” 230-231;and Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 463.61 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 466.62 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 467.63 P. Virilio, L’Insécurité du territoire (Paris, Galilée: 1993) 99.64 Virilio “L’Insécurité du territoire” 238-239.65 Virilio “L’Insécurité du territoire” 231-232.66 Deleuze and Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus” 471; and Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (London/New York,Verso: 1998) 45-46.67 G. Brossollet, Essai sur la non-bataille (Paris, Belin: 1975) 15.68 See G. Deleuze, “Les gêneurs”, in Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens 1975-1995 (Paris, Editions de Minuit:2003) 148.