justice, convents, etc.). This involves an organization of space (from the manor
to the cathedral), a hierarchical social body (the King, his vassals, etc.), a body
of rituals and practices. I shall stop there, for the whole of feudal society is
in danger of being swallowed up by the concept. But its interest lies elsewhere:
precisely in the ontological mix, in the materiality of the processes that produce
discourses and their speakers. It is thus that, although Deleuze and Guattari
do not mention it (no doubt the French translation of the text was too recent),
their concept of collective assemblage of enunciation is proximate to Bakhtin’s
chronotope (the difference lies in their stress on the ‘-tope’ as opposed to
the ‘chrono-’).
Fifth shift: from party to group. Deleuze’s most explicitly Marxist (or para-
Marxist) text is his preface to Guattari’s Psychanalyse et transversalité, entitled
‘Trois problèmes de groupe’. The preceding shifts are already made in germ
in it. And it is explicitly a question of shifts, Reich and Guattari being at the
outset saluted as embodying the coincidence of political activist and
psychoanalyst. In this text we find a critique of the theoretical and political
positions of the Communist Parties (it dates from 1972). Thus, the theory of
state monopoly capitalism is analysed as a compromise formation between
the internationalism of capital and the defence of the national framework of
the state. The degeneration of the Soviet Union is described in prophetic
terms, which (vaguely) recall certain analyses of state bureaucratic capitalism.
The main thing is the distinction between subjected group(as the Bolshevik
Party became after 1917 and as were – and still are – communist organisations
and parties), which is obsessed by its self-perpetuation and only offers a
skeleton of reified organisation, and group subject, which is in a constant state
of flux, always hastening to announce its own dissolution. Here, we find the
political equivalent of the contrast between machine and structure, under the
rubrics of party and groupuscule(we have already mentioned Deleuze’s
attachment to ‘ordinary far leftism’). Even if the dissolution of the concept
of party is difficult for a paleo-Marxist like me to accept, this analysis poses
a real problem of crucial significance: how are we to prevent the vanguard
from substituting itself for the body of the army, or transforming itself into
a permanent high command, cut off from the infantry in the trenches and
despatching them to be butchered?
Sixth shift, which in fact covers the whole series: from the molar to the
molecular. These are two central and well-known concepts of Anti-Oedipus
Continuations • 127