LA DELEUZIANA – ONLINE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY – ISSN 24213098 N. 8 / 2018 – LA PENSÉE DIX-HUIT 130 2k18 // RE-EVOLUTIONARY ABORT by LOUIS ARMAND Abstract The task of this essay is to re-examine the question of revolutionary possibility and the critical force of “experimental knowledge” in the wake of May 1968 and the post -WWII reversal of the relationship between science and politics, as encompassed in what Harvey Wheeler termed the “universal revolution” of cybernetics. Concentrating on Félix Guattari’s description of 1968 as “abortive” – in contrast to the emerging politics of total “World Order” – an argument is advanced for rethinking the logic of revolution, not as an historical antagonism orientated by a succession of “Ends” (culminating in the present discourse of the Anthropocene), but as a “technology” of re-evolution. In doing so, it draws together a constellation of ideas from Marx and Blanqui, via Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Guy Debord’s Situationist theses, to the recent work of Bernard Stiegler and McKenzie Wark. The purpose of this is to test certain notions of individual and collective agency against a general concept of technicity, in the formulation of what Deleuze and Guattari have posited as “desiring production.” Consequently, former appeals to an historical materialism are refigured: on the one hand by a re-thinking of historical subjectivity in terms of a “stochastic materialism,” and on the other via a critique of the “prestige commodity” of revolution itself (here manifested in the figure of “May 68”). “The present order is the disorder of the future.” Saint Just 1. The Criterion that Revolutionary Knowledge Must Become Power “When the revolution is still a long way off,” Guy Debord argues, in The Real Split in the International (1972), “the difficult task comes down increasingly to the practice of theory. When the revolution commences, its difficult task comes down increasingly to the theory of practice…” (Debord 2003: §47, 63). But if the capacity to transform knowledge into power rests upon the capacity to transform theory into praxis, according to standard dogma, what then is the foundation of revolutionary knowledge? The empowerment of this revolutionary knowledge remains premised on the individual and collective agency vested in its organisation: the socalled