The idea of the individual, i.e. the notion that rational subjects proceed through existence as isolated entities in some way separated from the external circumstances, is a cornerstone in the logic governing our perception of reality. Even though few persons would argue that the individual is completely above or beyond the natural and social world, we still need to believe in the rational free choice, the individual life-project, and the duty to take responsibility for our actions if we are to fit in smoothly in the systems of production and consumption which make contemporary society work. These systems, however, does not work according to any basic assumption of individual freedom. On the contrary. Even the most idealistic of neo-liberals could not deny that the State, for example, or the big corporations, are functioning according to the combined efforts of many human and non-human actions, which means that one individual’s wishes and desires become unimportant in the perspective of the assemblage. Even the Market, the capitalist god, is something-beyond, something-bigger, than the lone subject (even though the market-worshippers often like to speak of it as the sum of many individual desires and nothing more, an idea that only illuminates the contradictory doctrines of liberal thought). Thus, individual freedom is always subordinated to a structure, to the functioning logic of an assemblage. And this assemblage is non-personal. It is more than a metasubject, since it easily subjects many diverse and conflicting metasubjects to its hegemony. In fact, these inner dynamics, the conflicting interests within the assemblage, is what makes it grow and expand. As we have stated before (and many before us): Capital is defined by its immanent antagonisms. But these antagonisms also provide the possibility to destroy Capital itself. This contradiction, full of more complexity than it superficially proposes, we will discuss in a moment. First, permit us to regard the logic of assemblage more closely.
The machine-parts
There are, from our horizon, not One machine. Even when we speak of the megamachine, this does not mean that there exists a single logic governing life globally. It is a convenient simplification to regard Capital as such a logic, but one must also keep in mind that Capital itself is not One. Rather, it is a constant striving to bring together conflicting unities in ways suitable to its own interests. It is a gathering-in of disparate productions: a wannabe-logic, if there ever was one. But it is still not hegemonic in any essentialist manner. It does not have any essence outside of the diverse productive functions, combining to make the whole work, both producing and subjecting to the network they are creating.
An assemblage is, consequently, the production of logic. It is not a question of which comes first: the production or the logic. Rather, they are both parts of the creative process; none precedes the other (this might be hard to grasp if one is locked in chronological thought, but on the other hand chronological thought has always been part of a conservative outlook and needs to be dismantled). This production of logic will never be completed, will never reach its ultimate destination. It will continue to create itself, to discard that which has become useless and to find new ways of providing itself with energy and spatial manifestation.
The manifold and diverse machine-parts contribute to the production in many different and sometimes contradictory ways. The factories produce commodities, consumer goods and other machine-parts, culture produces values, ideals, dreams and life-stories (as does “counter-culture”, by the way), science produces truth, technology, and frontiers, the State produces spatial limitations, judicial barriers, and apparatuses of physical control and supervision, human beings produce surplus value, dreams, and innovation (operating under the logic it also is creating), the food industry produces energy, surplus consumption and pathological eating-disorders, the branding industry produces meaning, prestige and lack of meaning, etc.
These different forms of production always overlap and feed off each other, forging bonds, splitting up, competing or co-operating. The fundamental point about the assemblage is that it is a closed system. The canals and sub-systems of circulation that it creates are always constructions, things that need to be made and kept operational. The streams of energy, the truths and meanings travelling through the assemblage and keeping it intact and growing, does not work outside of the assemblage itself. They only keep their productive capacity as long as they are kept inside the assemblage. They are dependent on each other and on their respective positions in the system to work as reliable parts of the whole. Soon, it is their only wish and their exclusive desire to keep producing the way they are supposed to. And that is why Capital uses brute violence and naked oppression only when no other opportunities of control present themselves. After all, the production of logic works much better if it is supervised only by its own production.
So far the assemblage of Capital as it is-becomes. What of the potential for destruction of the wannabe-logic inherent in the system itself, what of the conflict-lines and their supposed rôles?
Immanence/transcendence
In contemporary revolutionary theory, discussions often touch upon the fundamental question whether the system’s immanent antagonisms in themselves, as they are, are enough to provide the moving-beyond Capital’s logic. The most obvious answer, in our opinion, is of course no. The antagonisms as they are are nothing more than the motor of Capital’s operation and expansion; to stress these conflicts’ self-directing path to revolution in any deterministic or fatalist way would then be contra-revolutionary.
But still, the conflicts, the impossibilities contained in the assemblage’s logic, are the only possible points if departure of a striving without. Anything else would be idealism: to suppose the construction of Without from anywhere else than Within is indeed a transcendental outlook. We have discussed this topic briefly before (Utopia); the Maybe, the outside, is a constant thing Other. It is a distant thing, but still it is conceived here and now, it is a desire within the Now striving to move without. The striving, the battles fought within, are always subordinated to the logic of Now, since they always are operating due to the conflict-lines serving this logic. Thus, they are limited battles, wars erupting along the lines inside the assemblage. They can never be “won” as long as they follow these lines, as long as they do not contain a serious element of crossing-over, of refusal against the logic provided by the assemblage.
The important thing is therefore not just to engage in war, but to try to move the battle away from the most obvious battlefield, i.e. to make the act of war something that does not serve the production of logic within. For example, activism is a kind of warfare typical of the logic of Now: a group of people assuming the rôle of antagonists, shouldering the responsibility to change things, using radical jargon inherent in the system, acting according to the assumed logic of revolutionaries. In many ways, this serves the production process of the assemblage. Therefore, activism should try to move beyond this process, to refuse to be activism, to be something working against the pacifying channels and compromises of Capital. If it truly wishes to be a revolutionary activity, it should simply move away from the assemblage instead of closer to it.
This is of course a very difficult matter. We do not have the answer to how it should be done in any “pure” way. As we said, the refusal and the moving-without must start in the struggle, anything else would be impossible (the flight lines must begin in the conflict lines). Activists still serve a different purpose than for example cops do in the antagonism, and activism sometimes (but far from always!) focuses on the most dire and fragile conflicts, the ones of the greatest destructive potential. But this goes for non-activists, too. After all, most people are not activists. What is essential is that also these conflicts, the struggles outside of the activist field, are being reinforced, provided with fuel and articulated (and understood) in a way not serving the logic of Capital. Anti-production, we would call it; flight-lines will only start to sprout if they are produced; otherwise they will only remain assemblage-producing conflict-lines.
Action to us is an unmediated, immediate process of movement, distribution, and change. Action is the connection between human beings and the concrete world of things, flows, borders, walls, channels, networks, assemblages and machine-parts. We do not consider the pre-programmed, ready-made theatre of everyday reproduction (working, consuming, pursuing reified ideals or fulfilling the social rôles given to us by the machine) to be action, since it is only a process of repetition, feeding the Now with the maintenance of the assemblage without actually changing any part of it. Action to us is a production process, a creation of interactions not pre-designed by the wannabe hegemonic logic of capital and State.
