Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion

Mutant' workers in 'veritable wars of subjectivity'; for Flix Guattari, this is what constitutes the history of the workers' movement. 1 He has in mind the events of revolutionary upheaval, the Paris Commune, October 1917, May 1968.But the problematic of revolutionary subjectivity -in its affective, semiotic, organisational, and imaginary registers -is one that pervades modern socialist, communist and anarchist politics.This problematic is that of the 'militant', of 'militancy', a persistent marker -indeed, often the self-declared guarantor -of radical subjectivity across the spectrum of extra-parliamentary politics.One can think of militancy as a technology of the self, an expression of the working on the self in the service of revolutionary change.However, unlike the subjective correlates of the great revolutionary events, for Guattari this more prosaic aspect of radical practice is not altogether joyful.This paper is a critique of the militant. 2 In particular it seeks to understand the ways militancy effectuates political passions and a certain unworking or deterritorialisation of the self in relation to political organisations and the wider social environment within which militants would enact change.To this end the paper traces a 'diagram' or 'abstract machine' of militancy, and considers a particular animation of this diagram in the Weatherman organisation in the United States at the turn of the 1970s.Returning to Marx's concept of the party, the paper then sketches the principle outlines of a counter figure -an 'a-militant diagram', or dispersive ecology of political composition -that suggests a rather different process of subjective unworking. MILITANT PASSIONGuattari locates the emergence of the modern militant formation in what he calls the 'Leninist breakthrough' during the 1903 Second Congress of the All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, from where -following certain procedural and organisational disputes -emerged a set of affective, semiotic, tactical, and organisational traits that constitute a kind of Leninist diagram or abstract machine. 3 For Deleuze and Guattari, the diagram or abstract machine is that which governs the articulation and distribution of matter and function in concrete assemblages (where a concrete assemblage may be a carcereal institution, an aesthetic practice, a military technology, an architectural school, and so on).The diagram is not an ideal type, infrastructure or transcendent idea, but a non-unifying immanent cause that is coextensive 1

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Militant · Passion · Passions · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci · Psychology · Social Psychology

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