




A similar structure is at work at the level of the social. In some inspiring pages early in his A People’s History of the United States, Zinn makes some observations that resonate nicely with Deleuze’s remarks about populations and geography. There Zinn writes,

‘History is the memory of states,’ wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everwhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation– a world not restored but disintigrated.


Zinn’s sorting here is a bit too neat and dualistic (victims and victimizers), but the interest of this passage is the way in which it undermines the legitimacy of molar unities such as “nation” and “state”, instead allowing us to see dynamic and divergent populations pulsing beneath. The problem with these molar categories is that they suggest homogeneity and unity where there are none. Quoting Deleuze once again,

There is a crucial experience of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed difference; a properly differential and original space and time; all of which persists alongside the simplification of limitation and identity. Oppositions are roughly cut from a delicate milieu of overlapping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogeneous potentials and intensities. Nor is it primarily a question of dissolving tensions in the identical, but rather of distributing the disparities in a multiplicity. Limitations correspond to a simple first-order power– in a space with a single dimension and a single direction, where, as in Leibniz’s example of boats borne on a current, there may be collisions, but these collisions necessarily serve to limit and to equalise, but not to neutralise or to oppose. As for opposition, it represents in turn the second-order power, where it is as though things were spread out upon a flat surface, polarised in a single plane, and the synthesis itself took place only in a false depth… In any case, what is missing is the original, intensive depth which is the matrix of the entire space and the first affirmation of difference: here, that which only afterwards appears as linear limitation and flat opposition lives and simmers in the form of free differences. Everywhere, couples and polariteis presuppose bundles and networks, organised oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions. (DR, 50-51).

What Zinn approaches without quite reaching it are these free and untamed differences, these networks, populated by antagonisms where identity is a principle become, and where the identities and institutions that we see all about us and which we experience as being eternal and unchanging– such that we can scarcely imagine a different world –are riddled with antagonisms and ripe with potentialities for both passing-away and becoming something other. Such a way of thinking suggests a very different mode of analysis, but also a different form of praxis aimed at touching upon these networks rather than playing upon the surface oppositions. Above all it is a form of praxis geared towards producing populations.