Reactive networks

Reactive networks are what Deleuze and Guattari, and later Day, call ‘radicle’ networks, forming the root-network of a ‘trunk’ or hierarchy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Day 2005: 216). Typically they have an internal hierarchy of some kind, and when they do not, they retain hierarchy at the conceptual level, in terms of epistemological privileging of an ingroup defined against an excluded other. Reactive networks have many of the characteristics of affinity-networks, often being indistinguishable in internal organisational terms alone. These kinds of movements have in common with active affinity networks the fact that they operate largely in everyday life, through actual social practices (more than through the spectacle). They involve action rather than passivity of their participants. They often involve the construction of dense social networks within the in-group, that they are often antagonistic to the dominant forces of alienation, and also they seem to exist on a spectrum – people, groups and ideas move between reactive and active networks more easily than to and from the passive space of the spectacle. Their power is also connected to similar social spaces and conditions. The type of social opening, which empowers affinity-networks may also release reactive forces (see e.g. Scott 1990: 223; Day 2005: 216). This means that reactive networks are frequently ‘suicidal’, in that they fight for the actualisation of social conditions of closure, hierarchy and striated space, which destroy their own conditions of existence. Where they differ is in their relation to others and to scarcity: they are based on reactive rather than active desires, involve a constitutive exclusion, and close off their social networks at a certain point (where the same becomes other). Whereas an affinity-network is open-ended and minoritarian, a reactive network is constructed around a strong attachment to a single core identity, constructed through a constitutive exclusion. Hence, they are representational, have a majoritarian logic (even as organisers of ‘minorities’ as defined groups), and internalise the logic of scarcity, in terms of a conflictual or predatory relation to an ‘Other’, which is deemed to be beyond the pale of the network’s form of meaning. The concept of ‘reactive’ versus

‘active’ in use here is derived from Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (2006). In more conventionally Deleuzian terms, reactive networks can be viewed as the construction of molar aggregates as products of paranoiac desire. They are engineered into existence by pitting the units of active network formation, ‘packs’ and ‘masses’, against one another (1983: 279). They can also be connected to the ideas of microfascism and fascist desire. They are typically opposed to open space and inclusion because of their hostility to a constitutive Other. Reactive networks claim exclusive ownership of a nation, physical space, entitlements, etc., on the basis of their purported essence and its libidinal, social and other investments. ‘Ownership’ is hence denied to others, and with it rights, liberties and ethical claims of all kinds. Day typifies ‘radicle’ networks as containing hierarchical and authoritarian aspects (Day 2005: 216). In world-systems analysis, Arrighi makes a similar argument regarding the relationship between social and national movements in the nineteenth century, with very different definitions of social problems (Arrighi et al. 1989: 30-1, 66). While affinity-networks exist in or construct a world of ‘absolute territorialisation’, a smooth world, reactive networks seek violent reterritorialisations around their organising ‘trunk’. They are thus in many ways an autogenerated limiting of the potential of networks to reconstruct the world (presumably for psychological or cultural reasons). While affinity-networks are ‘small’ in the sense of being non-denumerable and anti-majoritarian, reactive networks aspire to be large, but keep themselves ‘small’ in a different sense, by limiting the scope of their world and cutting off dialogism and heteroglossia. They could be presented metaphorically as boxes in which flows are trapped so that they remain active but only within a constrained space. Marc Sageman has theorised political Islam in terms of the idea of the ‘small-world network’ created partly by a limitation of the social world to a particular group and partly by strong positive relations operating within the group. Social affiliation within the small-world network consists of close ties of friendship, kinship, discipleship and so on; the network functions through cliques, flexible and virtual links and the ‘strength of weak bonds’ (2004: 107, 138). In a sense, whatever their scale, reactive networks are always small-world networks, limited to a self-contained insider unit; within this unit, however, they have many of the affirmative effects of affinity-networks, enabling strong affinity-relations among those who qualify to enter the ‘small world’. Affinity-networks and reactive networks exist on a continuum. Harrison, for example, claims that the same binding social traits based on lineage and the same social fluidity are characteristic equally of everyday life and of channels of accumulation and patronage (Harrison 2002: 17). Indigenous relations turn into exclusionary ethnic relations if the other is alienated or is outside existing networks. Entry into transversal networks tends to overcome this phenomenon. Some indigenous groups have strategies to reinforce the expansivity and openness of networks, such as the Amazonian concept of predation as absorption of otherness (de Souza 2002, 2003, 2004), not to be

confused with Appadurai’s concept of predation (see below, pp. 214-21). Hence, as Wallerstein has argued, the demand for recognition can lead in two opposite directions – towards the (affinity-based) unity of a ‘family of oppressed groups’ in an open space, or towards (reactively) ‘creating a fortress’ of each group (Wallerstein 2006: 38). One might speculate that indigenous dynamics take on sinister forms when mapped onto fixed categories, outside the situated relationality of indigenous cosmologies. For instance, the dynamic of raiding and revenge, a partially stabilising force between band societies, which is arguably necessary to ward off states and state-formation, takes on insidious characteristics when transmuted into meta-assemblages. It is possible that phenomena of ‘terrorism’ (suicide bombings in Israel and Pakistan, events such as 9/11) and genocide (such as in Rwanda) are a raiding and retaliatory logic mapped onto a macro-scale, in the same way that the raiding logic was used to make Native American and African societies into appendages of the slave trade. The structural distortion introduced in such cases is the replacement of the rival band, as a specifiable living assemblage, with the enemy society as reified imaginary entity. Hence the guerrilla raids the enemy society as if it were an integrated totality, like a rival band – instead of concentrating on the actual assemblages at work in waging war on the outside. The articulation of indigenous peoples into state or world-systemic webs often relies heavily on reactive networks. It is only possible when indigenous groups map the imposed system as simply one more in the series of immanent groups, and instead of uniting against the logics of alienation and domination, fighting each other for similar resources or positions within the frame of the system. Such inscriptions channel flows in ways that render them destructive and reactive rather than expansive for networks. Reactive networks take a variety of forms, varying with the specific ‘content’, which is mobilised through them, and the particular identity, which forms their ‘trunk’. They range from networks which are almost entirely insidious, to networks which are extremely ambiguous, torn between rhizomatic and arborescent logics. Examples of reactive networks include patronage networks through which localities are inserted into the global economy or the state; ethno-religious, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘communalist’ political movements such as political Islam, autochthony in Côte d’Ivoire, and Hindutva in India; fascist, racist and Nazi movements when they are not in power, in their ‘movement’ as opposed to ‘state’ incarnations; and gangs, ‘shadow state’ forms, ‘warlord’ militias, and other entities exercising concentrated sanctions in the shadowy world of informal and illicit economics and politics. Most of the armed opposition groups commonly labelled ‘terrorist’ are reactive networks. Aijaz Ahmad associates what we are terming ‘reactive networks’ with the ‘idea of the pre-modern as the postmodern solution for problems of modernity’. Usually these movements are especially widespread and vicious in the periphery, but under Bush ‘[t]he United States itself is gripped today by a

peculiar, cabal-like combination of Christian fundamentalists, Zionists, farright neo-conservatives and militarists’ (A. Ahmad 2004: 47). It would be a mistake, however, to view such movements as truly ‘pre-modern’. This is often how they conceive themselves, but their structure, strategy and conditions of emergence are thoroughly contemporary. Christian Karner’s analysis of the thought-world of Hindutva, for example, contrasts the ‘emic primordialism’ through which its adherents experience the world with its modern and ethno-symbolic roles (Karner 2006). As Minoo Moallem has argued, ‘fundamentalisms’ are a by-product of modernity ‘discontinuous with related premodern discourses’ (1999: 323). It is not uncommon for Marxist scholars from peripheral countries beset with reactive movements, such as Patnaik (1993), Ungpakorn (2008) and RAWA (1998), to depict all reactive networks as directly and literally fascist. We feel the term ‘reactive networks’ (or ‘microfascisms’) to be more fair: they are certainly similar in type to fascist movements, and the label is also fair in some cases (particularly the Hindutva pogroms), but classical fascism also has a certain geopolitical content that peripheral movements do not always replicate, and it is common for peripheral reactive movements to also map themselves onto legitimate grievances arising from oppressed groups to a degree that core fascist movements do not. Fascism in its historical sense was viciously statist, and has certain continuities with ‘neototalitarian’ social forms today (Robinson 1996). Reactive movements more broadly tend to reproduce ‘fascist’ desire and ‘microfascist’ politics, and the ‘mass psychology of fascism’ as viewed by Reich (1972), but also to involve mappings of strata of the excluded and strong aspects of network politics pitted against the power of states. It would be unimaginable for classical fascism to mobilise the Pashtun, Baloch, Chechens or Somalis for example, and not only because of its racism. The desire of such peoples to be left alone by a dominating state alien to local networks and practices, the resentment of excluded groups against Kikuyu settlers aligned with the Kibaki elite faction, the fear of Islam as ‘impurity’ by Hindu Indians rendered powerless in a world-system and mobilised through affective/bodily practices by caste elites, and the simple skin-colour dichotomies of neo-Nazis attached to disembodied ideas of racial essence – these are quite different phenomena. They represent in some regards a continuum in terms of the degree of affinity/ horizontalism that persists in identity/verticalism – the Wazir discourse is almost entirely of affinity and actuality (albeit plugged into wider identitarian networks), the Nazi discourse entirely a matter of spooks. The various contexts inflect the movements very differently: some express a distorted version of an affinity project such as self-determination and local autonomy, given a reactive edge by a context of war or scarcity (Pashtun mobilisation in the Taleban, for example); others operate as extensions of fully hierarchical machines, mobilising network resources to preserve dominant hierarchical privileges (as in the case of white racists, or American conservative Christians). Deleuze and Guattari analyse fascism as something more

complex than simply a reproduction of the state form. It is a molecular movement that penetrates every cell of society (1987: 214-15), and a war-machine that takes over the state, ‘a war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object’ (1987: 231). A war-machine with war as its object suggests that antagonism has become constitutive instead of contingent, and that ‘predation’ in Appadurai’s sense has become its dominant affect. In contrast, ethnic movements and gangs are taken as having ambivalent qualities capable of active or reactive inscription (see above, pp. 149-50). We would question, however, the assumed necessity of reactive networks, which sometimes appears in poststructuralist works. Partha Chatterjee, for instance, operates with a model of community, based on quasi-authoritarian ascriptive characteristics and appeals against exteriority and secession, as the necessary form of politics (1993: 231-2). We would argue that this, like much scholarship on social movements, ignores the possibility of the affinity-network form.