What is the War Machine? | Deleuze and Guattari Concept In Focus

In this lecture, we'll be delving into what exactly the War Machine is as used by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their seminal work "A Thousand Plateaus". Key elements of this concept are the primacy of change and the State's response to that change by coopting and absorbing the War Machine to establish stability, formalized concepts and practices, and exercise control. We will also discuss this concept's relation to the nomad (aka nomadology or becoming-nomad) and the relationship between process, form, and content. Enjoy!
Music is John Adams Scheherezade. 2: IV • Scheherazade 2: IV. Es...

[@defenestration-channel4836]

This is not very related to the video itself but i rly just want to shout in Deleuze and Guatarri's face the classic Zizekian question, what happens the day after the revolution? Ok, being desiring machine fighting against capitalism. That's all good. And then what? How do you keep a functioning modern society? How is any modern institution to be maintained without hierarchy, without territoralization? People may want to point to May 68 but it ended in utter failure in about a month. Even if you can suddenly mobilize millions of workers and then what? It ends in nothing. Global capitalism was not threatened to the least extent. It couldn't even topple de Gaulle in 1968, not to say America in 2024. The communists may have failed but they were real enemies that actually threatened American imperialism. There is not a single country on the planet that is about to be destroyed and replaced suddenly by some anarchist communes. I used to like Deleuze and Guatarri. Now, I only see unproductive anarchism in their philosophy.

[@gavinyoung-philosophy]

Maybe. Deleuze and Guattari never tell us to get rid of territory or hierarchy. This is a big misreading of their philosophy. They never tell us to get rid of organs as such and just reduce ourselves to pure flows. I’m not sure if you’ve read A Thousand Plateaus, but they make this *abundantly* clear, yet the myth abounds and I’m still not sure why. In the “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” chapter they address that rather directly. Deleuze and Guattari are really advocating for Nietzsche’s eternal return: they make us insist that what is is not all that can be and to think creatively about new solutions. This idea that they just want us to “go schizzo” and remove all our organs is probably the fault of the accelerationists who co-opted Deleuze for their needs without seeming to have read him nearly as closely as they should. Deleuze and Guattari are in favor of territory (how can you deterritorialize without some territory to *be* deterritorialized?), but merely choose to make it the object, not of a bare repetition (repetition of the same, pure reproduction of a model), but rather the object of a refrain (repetition of the difference inherent in a process or idea that has yet to be totalized and therefore changing and developing it like a musical theme, leading to creative changes). I understand your criticisms, and we do need “real world” solutions to real world problems, but we also need to realize that creativity is requisite for fighting global capitalism. Just make sure the D&G you’re opposing isn’t a watered down misrepresentation of their thought based on lazy readings that proliferate in the academic community.

[@LaurenRaaijmakers]

When I see the zapatista’s in Chiapas Mexico I see a way. They understand the warmachine

[@treadheads]

This was a very interesting introduction to Deleuze's political philosophy. I've only read a bit of his aesthetics, but I've been wanting to explore more of his philosophy. Do you have any recommendations for work to checkout?

[@gavinyoung-philosophy]

Anti-Oedipus is a good place to start. It appears dense at first, but you’ll get in a rhythm quickly. In my opinion, Deleuze’s personal works, like Difference and Repetition or Logic of Sense are very metaphysically dense, but in D&G’s combined work they introduce some of the concepts Deleuze first uses in those works (such as extensive vs intensive properties in A Thousand Plateaus). I’ve heard Pure Immanence is good as well, although I’ve yet to read it.