Outrage and the Question of Minor Marxism

Writing the politics of Deleuze and Guattari into a pragmatic politics that will abolish capitalism is an ambitious project indeed. At first glance, it would seem that the Deleuzo-Guattarian project should lend itself with some ease to proposals for the production and sustenance of a new world and a people to come, and theoretically it does. In fact, it is not that Deleuze and Guattari do not give us adequate theoretical tools for the venture. No, it is when we attempt to become the handymen who build the little machines that will undo capitalism that the blueprints suddenly become opaque, confusing, and troublesome (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1).

Eugene Holland has undertaken just such an endeavor in Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike. He offers a reading of Deleuze and Guattari via Marx that produces what he terms a minor Marxism. From this engagement he derives several key concepts, on the basis of which he offers a series of social experiments premised on existing projects of social reconfiguration. It is a dense and ambitious piece of work that attempts to cover a great deal of complex theory and implicated practice in a short space.

Before we engage what Holland actually accomplishes here, it should be noted that the project is marred somewhat by a puzzling omission. Throughout the text there is an incomplete or, to use the Spinozist term, inadequate accounting of the contributions of Antonio Negri. To be fair, Holland makes an effort in his endnotes to distinguish his work here from Negri’s, or, to be specific, Hardt and Negri’s, but that effort is both problematical and unsatisfying. The terrain covered here is common ground for Hardt, Negri, and Holland. The problems and issues of revolutionary politics under the current regime of capitalism dovetail at many points throughout Holland’s work. Of course, because of the time Deleuze, Guattari, Negri, and Hardt spent together in France while Negri was in exile, it is at times difficult to tease apart their projects. The points of convergence and overlap would have been helpful to note, as well as what Holland considers the differences.

Holland begins with his own sense of outrage at the ongoing war on terror and the economic, environmental, and fundamentalist agendas that defined the Bush years and the contemporary U.S. political landscape. However, he then notes that he was just as outraged by the Clinton presidency, with its neoliberal agenda and “callous disregard for the damage to progressive causes” (ix). He suggests that it is important that we think of this apparent contradiction philosophically.

To do this, he tells us that it is necessary to move beyond binary conceptions of the state as one thing or another, despotic or civilized. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari, we might conceive of the state as oscillating between the two forms (among many) as “basins of attraction in an open process that has no predictable direction or final outcome” (x). By opening this way of conceiving the state, Holland argues that we move away from the linear, dialectical version of history in which one state form progresses into the next in a teleological fashion, as well as from any sense that we must choose between one form or the other. Instead, if we think about the form of the state philosophically, we engage the possibility of thinking creatively about new concepts and forms outside the binary or dialectical conceptions of the political.

Following Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy?, Holland sees the task of philosophy as creating concepts. Such philosophical concepts are historically, geographically, and socioculturally tied to the struggles and traumas of a given moment and location. He argues that first we produce concepts, but then it is essential that we ground them in careful experimentation within the realm of the social and political life of our own age.

To this end, he proposes two concepts: nomad citizenship and free-market communism. He premises...