one of deleuze & guattari’s infamously obscurantist-seeming concepts is the “war machine”. It’s not clear at first what this means, but understanding it offers useful potential for revolutionary practice

To begin: the word “machine” has an important historical context in D&G’s work. It was first named in a Guattari essay titled “Machine and Structure,” as part of his solution to explain why May ‘68 failed.

First off: for every powerful force and action, there is a certain sign, or significance. These signs order thw relations of powerful forces, and do not describe their particular actions but rather the milieu in which a force is organized and regulated.

so, a force like a socialist revolution can be represented pretty cleanly and clearly, but this representation becomes less “accurate” as different components within the milieu of revolution interact with each other.

These components are both insulated from the outside and situated in proximity to each other by their environment. Fortuitously, some may encounter one another in ways which are not represented by, for example, the central committee of the revolutionary party or their ideology

D&G consider these almost- invisible interactions to be the *really, genuinely revolutionary* parts of a revolutionary movement because they are the forms of social organization which demonstrate an open niche for something (like communism) to come along and inhabit.

Having been provided an environment that facilitated this evolutionary encounter by the revolutionary movement as a whole, the new interactions of components within the movement produce new effects not found in the normal movement of contemporary society.

Society has a “plan,” the movement has a “plan,” the bits of the movement running into each other don’t have a plan. They are only able to interact like this because of their environmental situation, rather than anything teleological. Evolution rather than eschatology.

As such, the effects produced by these interactions are not represented by the larger movement and do not signify anything but themselves. This makes them uncooptable.

Instead, these are repressed by the organIzation of the environment or the movement so that this component may only interact with that component, which obeys the signifying regime of the existing state.

That’s machines, desiring- or otherwise. A -war- machine comes from the work of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres. What Clastres found in the Amazon was that stateless peoples there were violent and dangerous, but that as a form of war against state absorbtion & representation.