"Names can name no lasting name" (1)

These days the names of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are often
found intersecting across the World Wide Web, or else popping up in
academic journals, or even on the lips of bright, young digital things
living in a wired world. Tributes to these two French philosophers are
scattered throughout academia. Sherry Turkle of the MIT, in her book on
identity in the age of the Net, writes:

"Thus, more than twenty years after meeting the ideas of Lacan,
Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, I am meeting them again in my new life
on the screen. But this time, the Gallic abstractions are more concrete.
In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid, and
constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is made and
transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers;
and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than
analysis" (2)

While on the other side of the Atlantic, back in that stretch of land
known as Europe, the excitement, the quasi-mystical feel that transpires
from Turkle's description of a New World(s), is escalated further still
by academics such as Franco Berardi "Bifo", and abstracted into a
densely poetical and referential language. His book "Mutation and
cyberpunk" opens thus:

"Navigating by association through a vast desert/ocean thick in signs
that are mobile and evasive: wandering and nostalgia, rastafari and
baroque, Hermes Trismegisto and Guatama Siddharta, cyber and punk. I
admit to having checked a few maps. The authors of Rhizome for having
furnished me with a philosophical method. William Burroughs for
focusing on the shifting processes of neurochemical mutation. Philip
Dyck (sic) for placing trust in the power of hallucinatory discoveries.
William Gibson for having suggested the contamination between
neuromancing and digital technology. Pierre Levy for having indicated
the possibility of creating interfaces between artistic creation and IT
technologies". (3)

Others still, like Stefan Ray, actually bemoan "a curious lack of
Deleuze and Guattari" (4) in recent analyses of communication and
cyberspace theory. One academic voice, however, has spoken out against
D&G, following in the old punk ethos of bringing down idols and
unearthing the shit behind the shine. In his forthcoming book, The Holy
Fools, Richard Barbrook of the HRC carries an all-out attack against the
current use made by "theory-jockeys" (5) of the ideas of the
avant-garde, and of Deleuze and Guattari in particular, who behind the
nomadic insurgence veneer are defined as authoritarian and supporters of
the Pol Pot regime.

+ + +

This paper intends to continue along the path set by Barbrook in
demystifying Deleuze and Guattari, but for totally different reasons.
First of all, however, lets take a brief look at the concepts underlying
Deleuze and Guattari's work to see why they have been adopted as
metaphors for the Internet. The two main buzz-words evolve around the
concepts of the "rhizome" and of the "war-machine". For rhizome, and by
extension for rhizomatic thought, Deleuze and Guattari intend a
non-linear way of thinking, which is anti-hierarchical, nomadic and
anarchic in nature. This they oppose to the arbolic system, which is
unbending and vertical. The nomadic essence of the rhizome leads in
turn to a grandiose apology of the "war machine", intended as the
nomadic warrior acting outside of the state apparatus, capable of
gliding through smooth, deterritorialized landscapes in hit and run
operations, using rhizomes to detour obstacles. It becomes apparent even
from this brief description how the rhizome, by branching out in all
directions, can be also used as a metaphor to describe what is commonly
known as the World Wide Web. Furthermore, for those involved in
developing the Internet as a tool of political and cultural resistance,
capable of breaking down national borders and allowing information to
flow freely across the globe, the imagery induced by Deleuze and
Guattari through their hermetic prose can become very romantic. Talk of
imagery and prose may seem somewhat out of place in discussing the
philosophical musings of two cultural theorists, but worthy of
consideration nevertheless. A strange doubt insinuates itself in our
thought processes, more of an intuition nearly, which leads us to ask:
could it be that this fascination for Deleuze and Guattari is also due
to the hermetically poetical nature of their written work? A random
quote from "Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine" (Chapter XII of "A
Thousand Plateaux") reveals what we are hinting at:

"The itinerant is first and foremost an artisan. But the artisan is not
a hunter, a farmer, a breeder. Neither is he a sifter, nor a potter,
dedicated to an artisan practice only in a secondary manner. He is the
one that follows matter-flux as pure productivity: therefore under
mineral and not vegetable or animal form. He is not the man of the earth
or of the ground, but the man of the underground. Metal is the pure
productivity of matter, therefore he who follows metal is the producer
of objects par excellence". (6)

All very cool, but what is really being said? Could this all be about
alchemy perhaps? Were Deleuze and Guattari looking under the rhizome for
the philosopher's stone? Or were they simply on the rebound from the
events that followed May 1968 in Paris? Masquerading feelings of anger
and loss behind a discourse heavily spiked with neo-mythological
terminology and awash with poetic/hermetic symbolism?

And what, we also ask ourselves, would a nineteenth century artisan have
made of the above statement? (a grainy black and white picture downloads
in the brain to reveal the picture of D&G looking baffled outside a
London pub, their noses bleeding).

All mere rants and raves of course. A little fun before embarking on the
more serious issue of placing Deleuze and Guattari in the historical
context in which they formulated their theoretical models. Writing in
the aftermath of May 1968, when the revolutionary moment had come and
gone, their attention turns to other forms of resistance. The
introduction of the concept of guerrilla warfare implicit in the
war-machine of Deleuze and Guattari, so funky on the Net, would soon
find its translation across Europe in the emergence of terrorist groups,
working in small, concealed cells. The action, following the disastrous
end to the tactical dreams and the creative resistance of the sixties,
moved underground - where Deleuze and Guattari's metal also resides –
and became harsher, increasingly violent, more desperate. In Italy in
the seventies, the notion of "Lotta Armata" (Armed Struggle) came of
age, with a whole constellation of extremist groups, mostly famously the
Red Brigades, coming out into the open on the streets of Rome, Milan,
Turin on the back of vespas (7) with the passenger usually extending a
P-38, and the violence extending across Italy, until those years became
known as the Years of Lead, for all the bullets that flew. The
shootings, the bombs, came from what called itself the Left and from
what called itself the Right. Often, both sides were heavily infiltrated
and directed by intelligence agencies, both Italian and by the CIA. In
some cases, extreme-right groups were the brainchild of the secret
services themselves (8). Across the seventies networks of armed cells
developed like rhizomes, everywhere and yet unseen, just like Deleuze
and Guattari had called for. The urban guerrillas, so nomadic in their
style of waging warfare, where shooting at the state and at each other,
until things got so murky and yet so rigid – not counting the dead –
that the whole experience was declared a failure by its main
protagonists. In 1983, the magazine "Frigidaire" (9) publishes a dossier
which carries a series of statements and articles compiled, mainly in
top-security prisons, by many of the leading figures of the armed
struggle, starting from Tony Negri. The dossier, entitled "A
self-criticism of guerrilla warfare", marks the end of an era (10). In
the introduction to the dossier, the editor of "Frigidaire" Vincenzo
Sparagna wrote:

"It was a certain ' reading' of reality, a certain way of intending the
function of the 'revolutionary vanguards" in their clash with the social
condition, which led a section, be it a minority, of the
social-political-cultural opposition to the dominant system to embrace
guns and shoot. The discourse – because it is 'ideological' – became a
thing, a practical behaviour". (11)

Not that we are intending that Deleuze and Guattari are responsible for
the years of terror and counter-terror which not only Italy, but many
countries world-wide, lived through in that period. Far from it. They
were even more of a minority than those Sparagna refers to above. What
we are saying is simply that things do not happen in isolation, and that
the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, in a historical sense, also
provide a theoretical framework for a better understanding of practical
events that shook recent European history. What we are doing is simply
pointing out that the War Machine and the Armed Struggle are close
cousins. And that the latter made many, many mistakes.

Nor was everything bleak during those years. Keeping our focus on Italy
we find that community radio also flourished during this period, thus
anticipating many of the issues and concerns that would later resurface
on the Net in the building of a virtual community. The Free Radio
movement was financed by the voluntary subscriptions of its listeners
and spread to all the main cities in Italy. Of these, the most
(in)famous was Radio Alice in Bologna. Interestingly, Gilles Deleuze
himself, in an interview, said he was interested in what Radio Alice
were doing because he saw "their inspiration was at once Situationist
and 'Deleuzoguattarian,' if one can say that" (12). For its part, Radio
"Alice hisses, yells, contemplates, interrupts herself, pulls" (13),
with a clear knowledge of its parentage, that pays tribute to the
situationists, but also to surrealism and dada and an entire tradition
of anti-work ethics, re-launching old perspectives with new strength,
as when the collective behind the radio station say:

"The body, sexuality, the desire to sleep in the morning, the liberation
from work, the chance to be overwhelmed, to make oneself unproductive
and open to tactile, de-codified communication: all this has been
hidden, submerged, denied for centuries. The blackmail of poverty, the
discipline of work, hierarchical order, sacrifice, fatherland, family,
general interests, socialist blackmail, participation: all stifling the
voice of the body. All our time, forever and ever, devoted to work.
Eight hours of work, two hours of travel, and, afterwards, rest,
television, and dinner with the family". (14)

But more of that later. For the time being, we return to the end of the
armed struggle in Italy, and the comments of a group of political
prisoners in the women's prison of Rebibbia, in Rome, commenting on
their experience as soldiers of the war machine, back in November 1982:

"The armed struggle was not able to grasp the complexity of the forms of
antagonistic expression due to its monolithic and necessarily selective
character. It was not able to construct social projects capable of
moving into the present the quality of the transformations in living
conditions and relations. It did not deflate power, it strengthened it.
In this sense it concluded in politics, acting no differently in the end
from institutional parties: small societies calling themselves states,
which are now suffering from the political crisis. This is the point,
the crux, the question that needs to be overcome. But, to the critical
conscience of the past we need to add the knowledge that the social
dramas of a decade ago have worsened. Today, the gap between having and
not having, between social exclusion and personalities, between the
controllers and the controlled is becoming radically wider". (15)

To overcome the armed struggle, they suggested a cultural revolution and
the following guidelines:

"Respect differences, acknowledge multiplicity, highlight the expression
of each experience, experiment, meet, especially meet, seeking
reciprocity: this is an ethic of transformation". (16)

Nearly twenty years on, these reflections form very much the backbone of
the antagonistic experience in Italy, with its CSOAs, autonomous social
centres in reclaimed buildings and industrial installations (17), and
its activities against the increasing rise of racism in the country and
in support of immigrant rights. And it is here that most of Italy's
political theory comes from, in the form of tactical media web sites
(18) and from the political hip-hop crews. Groups such as Assalti
Frontali (19) and 99Posse (20) express their dissent by mixing samples
from 70s TV and cartoon songs with hardcore beats and lyrics of cultural
resistance. The personal mixing with the political, the local with the
indigenous or the global, counterculture heritage with cyberpunk
visions. In "Devo avere una casa per andare in giro per il mondo" (I
need a home to go off around the world), Assalti Frontali sing of
nomadic times:

"I see the border far away
I run
My legs that weigh heavy like in
A dream
But if I slow down
I feel breathing down my neck
I don't give up
All around the world
Is hidden the sense
Of ways of life apparently
Without (meaning)
It's the conflict for survival
This is the explanation
The cage is the nation
First they throw us the leftovers
Then they watch us tear each other apart