<<TRANSMATHOME

Note 2. Groups

On its own, the notion of a body of micro-political guide-lines for group de-territorialization  is liable in every sense to be disastrous – it is liable to be a path that all along is travelling in the wrong direction. The danger is that of the emergence (or initial presence) of ‘micro-dominations’or ‘micro-fascisms’, and of a  proliferation of subjectificatory, damaging  judgements based on guide-lines. It is broadly this analysis which is found in Plateau 9  – ‘Micropolitics and Segmentarity’ – at the point where the danger of a certain kind of ‘clarity’ is outlined. This clarity is a detailed  engagement with the  constrictions of large-scale social organisation  which at the same time does not see that the same kinds of problems will reappear at a molecular level unless there is a prevailing avoidance both of subjectification and rigidity with guide-lines,  and of the functioning of a model or delimitation of the nature of  any overall de-stratification:

Everything has the clarity of the microscope. We think we have understood everything, and draw conclusions. We are the new knights; we even have a mission. A microphysics of the migrant has replaced the macrogeometry of the sedentary. But this suppleness and clarity do not only present dangers, they are themselves a danger. [...]  ...supple segmentarity runs the risk of reproducing in miniature the affections, the affectations of the rigid: the family is replaced by a community, conjugality by a regime of exchange and migration; worse, micro-Oedipuses crop up, microfascisms lay down the law... (TP p.228)

Clarity in this sense sees the constrictions of molar social fields on a certain level, and understands this in connection with an understanding of the intensities, tensions and constrictions of bodies, but it fails to see the stratificatory abstract machines which pertain as much to the molecular level as to the molar, and which generate new collapses or rigidifications through web-works of insecurities, and complacencies.

The emergence of a freely deterritorializing group would seem to be a question of a  confluence of strong or ‘independent’ individuals, where this confluence is not something that can be arranged. To start with, a group of people is not a promising place of departure  on the basis of  intense  expressions of willingness to escape from constrictions  (a desire to unreservedly follow a ‘grand plan’ is in fact one of the worst possible initial elements).  A field of explicit guide-lines cannot go into effect  unless there is already a very high degree of  freedom from stratification on the part of the people involved, involving both a calmness in the face of gravely condemning opposition, and a prickly suspicion in relation to all guide-lines. It is necessary  to be involved not just in the process of using the maps, but in the process of amending them where this is needed, and it is equally necessary to have  lost any addiction to justification along conventional lines (if a kind of statement takes years of work before it goes properly into effect, it is a fallacy to imagine that an effective account of what is at stake can always be generated, especially in the face of hostility).

At all points (whether the point is to the side of a group, or within a group, or between several groups centrally affected by stratification) the process of free, intensificatory  engagement with groups and individuals involves maximising lines of creativity or thought, and avoiding a delimitation in advance of what a particular process of de-stratification might be like.

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