2 - War Machines, Multiplicity and Rage against the Order: A Theory of the Hybrid Revolutionary

Summary

This chapter introduces a novel theoretical perspective to explore the discontents operating in the Westphalian epochal time frame in their becoming as complex processes and events. The intention is to lay the groundwork for tracing the becoming of revolutionary movements in the contemporary global order while eschewing the essentialisation of and reliance on the rigid categories of contemporary hegemonic discourse to describe phenomena that seem deviant or that have become completely banal (Lawson, 2019, pp. 1–3). To this end, the vehicle we propose – and outline in detail – is a theory of the modern revolutionary approached through a lens of hybridity that is mobilised to destabilise the neat boundaries that often define accounts of revolutionary agency and subjectivity.

This theory takes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophical project as a fundamental source of inspiration. In particular, it mobilises their notion of ‘war machine’ (machine de guerre) as a means to conceive of the revolutionary subjects’ hybridity in a profound manner that complements and advances previous approaches to hybridity in cultural studies and social theory (Acheraïou, 2011; Canclini and Rosaldo, 2005; Latour, 1993; Pieterse, 2001) and bypasses its theoretical flattening, which arguably goes hand in hand with the latter's proliferation in political discourse, notably ‘hybrid warfare’ (Fridman, 2018; Galeotti, 2019; Hoffman, 2007). The exposition of this theory is intertwined with practical, episodic examples from the cases studied in detail later in this volume.

However, a short introduction and analytical overview of the state of the art of current scholarship are first in order, to situate this theory against the established epistémé of (modern) revolution as has been developed for more than 200 years since the first shots were fired at the Bastille. It should be made clear from the beginning, nonetheless, that to theorise revolutionary movements and events as hybrid harbours no intention to ‘[cast] a net to catch what we call the world’ (Popper, 2002: 37). Even more so, it does not try to accomplish this in the service of either revolutionaries seeking to justify or interpret their actions or the state apparatuses engaging in more or less violent counterrevolution. Rather, it seeks to open a space for much-needed critical reflection on a global transformative political phenomenon and to probe its aspects, which remain obscured by a sensationalist flood from the global media.