but a materialism of corporeal assemblages, of combinations, without
metaphors, of desiring machines. They can hardly be accused of naturalism:
in their work, human nature appears in none of its forms, but history is
ubiquitous. Finally, they explicitly opt for the standpoint of the agon(which
they characterise as ‘philosophical athleticism’ in What Is Philosophy?^22 ) against
that of eirene. In their work, the basic utterance is not the proposition/judge-
ment/assertion, but the order-word. The object of interlocution is, therefore,
not a co-operative exchange of information, but establishing a power relation.
Deleuze and Guattari thus clearly do have a relationship to Marxism. In
order to think through this mixture of distance and proximity, we shall avoid
the religious idiom of filiation and haunting; and to the term post-Marxism,
which implies succession and supersession, we shall prefer para-Marxism,
which implies displacement by translation.
Accordingly, I shall propose a series of six shifts (the number is once again
arbitrary).
First shift: a change in periodisation. As we have seen, Capitalism and
Schizophreniais a historical fresco marked by an almost obsessive desire to
periodise. However, we find no mention of modes of production, productive
forces, and relations of production, but a parallel series – and hence one
translated from the Marxist original: régimes of signs, flows of libidinal energy,
coding. A Marxism that is virtually unrecognisable, because it has been both
semiotised and corporealised. And we understand that Deleuze and Guattari’s
main objection to Marxism is its attachment to the vertical model, with its
separation of ontological planes, of base and superstructure.
Second shift: the transition from history to geography. It is as if Deleuze and
Guattari are interested in capitalism, which they are attempting to analyse,
but not in previous modes of production (the feudal assemblage is nevertheless
employed as a canonical example) – except in the most marginal of them, the
one situated outside of the historical sequence: the Asiatic mode of production.
This is also the only one whose name assigns it a geographical, not a historical,
basis. In fact, we are dealing with a re-interpretation of the Marxist periodisation
from the perspective of its most eccentric element, which produces a series
of new concepts that are ‘geographical’ and no longer simply historical (we
124 • Chapter Five
(^22) Deleuze and Guattari 1993, p. 8.