Thinking beyond the State

Marc Abélès, Phillip Rousseau, Marie-Claude Haince, Phillip Rousseau, Marie-Claude Haince

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501712005
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

The French scholar Marc Abélès is one of the leading political and philosophical anthropologists of our time. He is perhaps the leading anthropologist writing on the state and globalization. Thinking beyond the State, a distillation of his work to date, is a superb introduction to his contributions to both anthropology and political philosophy.

Abélès observes that while interdependence and interconnection have become characteristic features of our globalized era, there is no indication that a concomitant evolution in thinking about political systems has occurred. The state remains the shield—for both the Right and the Left—against the turbulent effects of globalization. According to Abélès, we live in a geopolitical universe that, in many respects, reproduces alienating logics. His book, therefore, is a primer on how to see beyond the state. It is also a testament to anthropology's centrality and importance in any analysis of the global human predicament. Thinking beyond the State will find wide application in anthropology, political science and philosophy courses dealing with the state and globalization.

1

Society against the State

CLASTRES, DELEUZE, GUATTARI

In the sixties, the controversy surrounding Sartre and Lévi-Strauss on the question of structuralism polarized the relation between philosophy and anthropology. Structures, Sartre argued, are “those strange internal realities which are both organized and organizing, both synthetic products of a practical totalization and objects always susceptible of rigorous analytical study” (2004, 480). Borne out of both praxis and dialectical reason, the movement toward totalization mattered above all else within Sartrean thought. Privileging analytical reasoning, Lévi-Strauss favored the pursuit of universal laws through the exploration of combinatory logics (and their variants). Focusing on the system of relations in which the individual is caught meant removing the primacy of consciousness from its mantle that philosophy had afforded it until then. Indeed, the transcendental subject of history, essential to dialectical reason, was revealing itself to be an epistemological obstacle for its analytical counterpart. For the sake of coherence, structuralism had to dissociate itself from a philosophical anthropology that had taken the issue of Man too seriously by making it the engine of a becoming that somehow radically eluded it. In this sense, when Michel Foucault proclaimed the death of Man in The Order of Things (1970) he was simply repeating the well-rehearsed lesson of a structuralist counter-anthropology and following the Lévi-Straussian demystification of such intellectual endeavors: “This philosophy (like all the others) affords a first-class ethnographic document, the study of which is essential to an understanding of the mythology of our own time” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 249n). Theoretical antihumanism was therefore a constitutive feature of structural anthropology through which the issue of the subject fell well within the modern ideological realm. Beyond the elaborated individual representations of being-in-the-world and becoming, structuralism thought it possible to consider the conditions and constraints in which human action unfolds.

Adversaries were quick to condemn the radical claims of Lévi-Strauss and his disciples. Such a “one fell swoop” approach to history and contingency, they argued, missed out on the importance of the event. Furthermore, its mishandling of both human liberty and creativity could only preach despair, promoting a reductive technocratic view of a human object. The 1968 protests basically laid to rest structuralism’s subjectless theoretical framework, putting human initiative back at the forefront of history: “Everything is political,” as the slogan said. Summoned to revert to so-called cold societies, or without history, anthropology was discharged of any responsibility to tend to modern (or postmodern) societies, now the prerogative of sociologists and philosophers. As roles were redistributed, anthropology—often labeled “ethnology” at the time—was confined to a form of area studies, from which alterity could be subsequently stressed in relation to Western civilization. Not long ago, anthropology had championed itself as a comparative science of human societies. It was now paradoxically accepting to be relegated to caring for the singularity of each group. As compensation, it had great liberty in specific domains (kinship, symbolism) where difference could be explored in all its wondrous manifestations. While philosophers were never averse to the idea of resorting to ethnographic descriptions to illustrate their own arguments, the relation of philosophy to anthropology/ethnology was purely instrumental. For those who wanted to make a philosophical point ethnography now served as a great warehouse where one could find on-demand exotic concepts and “ethnicized” otherness: totemism, mana, Nuer, Nambikwara, and so on.

Something froze. For Lévi-Strauss, ethnography had been an effective operative mechanism in unequivocally dismissing philosophies of the subject—whether Sartrean or not—to reformulate the anthropological question. The Savage Mind (1966) was an incredibly efficient conceptual machine in destabilizing the tradition of Western philosophies of history and undertaking a critique of dominant conceptions of the relation between nature and society. Still, through the reinforcement of ethnographic research in the seventies, anthropology withdrew into itself. The effect was a widening gap between philosophy and anthropology, which ensured, in every sense of the word, a truly anecdotal relation between the two disciplines. Ethnographic accounts still intrigued and fascinated “real” producers of concepts. René Girard and Marcel Gauchet, for example, grounded their very different political philosophies on several borrowed elements from ethnographic literature. “Segmentation,” a key concept of political anthropology, was also invaluable to the highly original enterprise of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A whole chapter of their Anti-Oedipus (2000), somewhat ironically entitled “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized,” is even presented under the aegis of the founding fathers of anthropology harking back to the heydays of Lewis Henry Morgan and Friedrich Engels. The anachronistic character of the classification did not escape the authors. First, such latent evolutionism was a constant target of many critiques at the time. Second, given Deleuze’s critical relation to Marxism, it seems highly unlikely he would give his support for a conceptual framework arising from vulgar materialism.

From the Origin of the State to the State as Origin

Should we view these efforts as regressions, a return to an “archaic illusion” as Lévi-Strauss caustically suggested? Such an argument would ignore the genealogical perspective privileged by the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The reappraised triad of savage-barbarian-civilized is not set up to retrace society’s itinerary through the stages of humanity’s progress from darkness to enlightenment. Quite the contrary, since it is the historicity of all societies that is here advantageously projected. Shone through the light of the ethnographic work of its time, the proposed genealogical plot brings together two classic threads of political and social anthropology: kinship and territory. Through these traditional domains of anthropological query, two specific conceptual frameworks also cross paths: the first avenue has to do with the Freudian perspective on descent (family) and the Oedipal complex; the second tackles the issue of territoriality, power and the State, concluding with an analysis of capitalism, which is characterized by the decoding and deterritorialization of flows. The deliberate reference to an anachronistic classification thus functions as a distancing device, like an ironic winking: “This may remind you of something, but it is not what you think it is!” As in other examples of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, the deceptive mode is also recurrent throughout Anti-Oedipus. As Foucault wrote, “It could even be said that Deleuze and Guattari care so little for power that they have tried to neutralize the effects of power linked to their own discourse. Hence the games and snares scattered throughout the book, rendering its translation a feat of real prowess” (Foucault 2000, xiii). Here, the two partners in crime use alliance and descent—both classical anthropological tropes—as their preferred playground, finding in these sufficient provisions to implement a theory of the interplay between flows and coding. On one side, the stock of descent; on the other, processes of alliances. As samplings of flows are constantly collected in alliances and retained as descent, differentiated statuses and relational imbalances are also produced. For our authors, such processes and relations contrast with the idea of a society without history, as the segmentary territorial machine triggers the give-and-take logic of alliances and filiations. Again, Deleuze and Guattari borrow a concept very familiar to ethnologists, brought to the fore by E.E. Evans-Pritchard. In his famous analysis of the functioning of Nuer society, the anthropologist characterized as segmentation the double movement of permanent fusion and fission, which he considered its basic organization principle.

In the following pages of Anti-Oedipus, the segmentary territorial machine becomes the “primitive machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 2000, 152). It is granted foresight as the dialectic between fusion and fission functions in a way to conjure “the concentration of power by maintaining the organs of chieftaincy in a relationship of impotence with the group” (152). It is easy to recognize the principle introduced by Pierre Clastres whereby primitive society neutralizes any leaning or desire toward domination by devising a precarious situation for its leader and drastically limiting his initiative capacity.1 It is as if the savages foresaw the dangers of the imperial barbarian and the despotic machine, which would eventually impose itself on the ruins of a bygone system of alliances and filiations.

Underlying these ideas is a reference to the Marxist conception of an “Asiatic mode of production,” which should not go unnoticed. It was hotly debated at the time of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing in the sixties, but was also an important concept in Marxist anthropology. Contrary to the officially sanctioned Marxist theory of the five stages, Marx’s Grundrisse (1973)2 introduced a mode of production dominated by the figure of the despotic State superimposed on the primitive communities: collecting tolls, constituting stocks, prescribing major infrastructure work, and playing a redistributive function in cases of natural catastrophes.3 A bit of a heretical figure in the Marxist framework, its originality came from the suggestion that the State could not be mechanically inscribed in a preceding class dynamic, since the community’s fabric was kept alive. Contrary to the dogma of superstructure as simply reflecting the contradictions of the mode of production, here was also a concrete example of “the passage to autonomy vis-à-vis society” that Engels had evoked in Anti-Dühring (1963, 211), and which did not presuppose the preliminary existence of a society of classes.

What is truly at stake as a subtext in Anti-Oedipus then is the question of the State: its origin, the way it functions, and its induced effects. The analysis of despotism as an apparatus that replaces the territorial machine and integrates prior territorialities reveals the recuperative capacities of the State. Once the dynamics of the incorporation of the primitive machine’s coded flows were made visible, Deleuze and Guattari could generalize the idea: “Overcoding is the operation that constitutes the essence of the State” (2000, 199). Here, something decisive happens: the case of the “Asiatic mode of production” showed that despotism could in no way be conceivable in evolutionist terms. Private property and social classes had countered despotism only to find feudalism in its wake. Later, the rule of commodities, forms of State capitalism and socialism, had also done away with such a strange configuration, relegating it to the museum of the barbaric. Marxism did not know what to do with it either, as it was utterly unfit for its five-stages theory. Amid their renewed attention to the genealogy of the State, Deleuze and Guattari could not be clearer: “The primordial despotic state is not a historical break like any other” (218); and then added: “It is not one formation among others, nor is it the transition from one formation to another” (219).

The “primal State,” as Deleuze and Guattari labeled it (2000, 220), puts an end to the primitive machine’s primacy. Yet, no absolute break separates the two moments: “In the end one no longer really knows what comes first, and whether the territorial machine does not in fact presuppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that it segments in its turn” (219). The writing sways: while a “new destiny” is evoked with the instauration of the despotic machine and the barbaric socius, “the savage primitive formation that it supplants by imposing its own rule of law … continues to haunt it” (194). While Deleuze and Guattari resort without hesitation to expressions like “birth of an empire” and “decadence” (193) the presence of the paranoiac figure (the conqueror, the despot) can still be found within the primitive machine—such as the Guayaki hunter, “the great paranoiac of the bush or the forest” (148). What makes for a strange read in Anti-Oedipus is not so much the introduction of new concepts (codes, flows, deterritorialization, overcoding), as the reinvestment of small anachronistic and evolutionist pebbles. The genealogical approach seems to run counterwise. Not only does stage theory collapse, but we find, in its wake, a complete reversal of one of the major anthropological themes of classical political anthropology: the origin of the State.

Out of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis then comes the assertion that the primal State cannot be assigned to a specific stage of history, since it is always already there: “It supersects what comes before, but resects the formations that follow” (2000, 220). We cannot underestimate the significance of this statement,4 as it voids all attempts at locating the origin of the State and identifying its underlying causes—the consequences of which we will deal with later, when taking up the authors’ reflection on nomadism in A Thousand Plateaus (2005). Fundamentally, Deleuze and Guattari argue that something persists throughout history’s succeeding social forms: not despotism as a concrete apparatus but an enduring “abstraction” (2000, 220) that irrigates society or even a common horizon that invades the minds of individuals. The genealogy of despotism, then, projects us toward the issue of State desire: the State as both desiring subject and object of desire. Fascism, in other words, haunts the whole enterprise. As Foucault aptly noted, “And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (2000, xii). Building on their reflection on desire and the State, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis directs its gaze on the opposition between the molar and molecular: on one side, what tends to suppress and oppress singularities; on the other, the possibility of desiring machines willing to deploy them.5

The last pages of Anti-Oedipus allow us to measure more effectively the function of such reflections on despotism and primitive society in Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical framework. Under the guise of a tale, a displacement is being carried out with constant recourse to ethnographic experiences. The rather traditional question of the servitude of the masses takes on a new dimension not only with reference to the critique of psychoanalysis (not dealt with here) but, more importantly, with the introduction of a historical longue durée (from the primitive to the civilized) and a dose of alterity (the Dogon people, the Guayaki, the emperor of China).6 However, the essential point is that capitalism—its axiomatic or the molar ensemble it produces—is not in rupture with the original State. While Deleuze and Guattari do emphasize deterritorialization and decoding as characteristic of this peculiar formation, these also tend to provoke, in an inverted movement, reterritorialization and calls for the resurrection of new despotic figures. A paranoiac, they argue, is always standing by.

Man: A Segmentary Animal?

To a certain extent, Anti-Oedipus could be considered a full-fledged political anthropology. Deleuze and Guattari’s reconfiguration of the opposition between the State and segmented societies, furthered by their focus on the Asiatic mode of production, disqualifies a contrario any attempt at a purely positivist explanation of politics. The thought process and production of concepts are also woven through fiction and ethnography illustrated by emblematic figures such as Kafka and Clastres. We constantly maneuver between micronarratives—describing situations completely out of joint with the contemporary reality that the work aims to decipher and transform—and a high level of abstraction that has little to do with usual political analysis. In the first pages of A Thousand Plateaus, the authors mobilize the “literary machine” to foster the production of multiplicity and generate intensities. “A book exists only through the outside and on the outside,” write Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 4). An assumed assemblage, literature thus creates constant displacements making for unexpected situations. The closeness of such strategy with the specificity of ethnographic approaches is striking. While considerations about anthropological methods and writing are certainly not in Deleuze and Guattari’s purview, their own war machine implies them. Absorbed by the human spectacle and its avatars in the field, the permanent back-and-forth movement from one plateau to the next designs fickle passages from one regime ...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Society against the State: Clastres, Deleuze, Guattari
• 2 The Stalemate of Sovereignty
• 3 Biopolitics and the Great Return of Anthropos
• 4 Infrapolitics and the Ambivalence of Compassion
• 5 Scenes from Global Politics
• 6 The Anthropology of Globalization
• Notes
• References
• Index