French settlement in what is now French Guiana dates back to 1503; its capital, Cayenne, was established by French colonists in 1643. The land was home to a number of groups of indigenous people such as the Kalina, Arawak, Emerillon, Galibi, Palikur, Wayampi, and Wayana, who faced displacement or enslavement throughout waves of French colonization. The colonists also brought enslaved Africans with them, forcing them to labor on plantations producing sugar and other crops. The colony was first declared a French overseas department (an administrative division under French government) in 1797. But over the following 150 years, French Guiana was developed as a penal colony, perhaps most infamously known for the Devil’s Island system, where the Second French Empire exiled incarcerated convicts and political prisoners (such as Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer targeted during the infamous antisemitic Dreyfus Affair) for intense and inhuman punishment. This system continued until the mid-20th century. In 1946, French Guiana’s department status was restored by the French government, along with that of Algeria, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. The colonized regions, now considered “departments,” were granted political status equivalent to Metropolitan departments in mainland France, while still not quite equal; for example, they were still excluded from certain statistical measurements such as unemployment. Algeria fought for and gained its independence in 1962, while French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique remain French overseas departments today. General Charles de Gaulle and “Free France” (a government-in-exile agenda led by French military forces during WWII), established the Guiana Space Center in 1965, in an effort to secure and control colonial projects guised as overseas departments. The Center is still operated by the French National Centre for Space Studies and the European Space Agency. The plantations of French Guiana—the roots of French coloniality—merely changed face, transforming to a Space Center when colonialism was formally denounced in the latter half of the 20th century. Colonialism lives on as an extractive virus in French Guiana, as France only extends its borders to South America insofar as it uses the land for projects such as space research or gold mining: projects which have little to no regard for the people living there. Colonial roots are at the heart of this issue of borders and citizenship.
Excursus 1
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the pair of French philosophers famous for their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project in the 1970s and 80s, begin the essay “Segmentarity and Micropolitics” (featured in their A Thousand Plateaus) with the simple yet ominous proclamation: “We are segmented all around and in every direction.” Deleuze and Guattari are notable for breaching theoretical horizons in political, social, and psychoanalytic theory with bizarre and jargoned nomenclature as a way of provoking an insurrection in epistemology. The essay in question goes on, at great length and equal—if obscure—detail, to propose the theoretical framework of “State Geometry”:
“State geometry, or rather the bond between State and geometry, manifests itself in the primacy of the theorem element, which substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple morphological formations, properties for affects, predetermined segmentations-in-progress … Private property implies a space that has been overcoded and gridded by surveying. Not only does each line have its segments, but the segments of one line correspond to those of another.”
State Geometry is anything but an imaginary political fabric—it is radical because it is rooted in empiricism, in the segmented reality of political life. How, then, are we to understand the bordered space of French Guiana? In a sense, it is a segmentary, a geographically broken yet primally determined extension of the French border–a geometrical imposition of the State–and this segmentarity is simultaneously the creation of private property: French Guiana is a “department” of France, extracted of its resources and surveyed for its materials, mediated by the border and manifested in citizenship.
Segment 1
According to the Columbus Gold Corporation, the mining company overseeing mining operations at Montagne d’Or in French Guiana, as of Q4 of 2018 the Environmental and Social Impact Assessments had been completed and the Mine Permit Applications were submitted to the French government for approval. In 2017 and 2018, after three phases of drill testing and during the Columbus’ Bankable Feasibility Study, there was public outcry over the decision of Emmanuel Macron’s government to develop the 800-hectare open-pit gold mine at Montagne d’Or, which sits only 100 meters from the boundary of one of the two natural reserves which enclose the site. In April of 2018, when covering the protests, The Guardian reported indigenous rights activist Alexis Tiouka of the Kalina people of French Guiana stating, “Paris is completely disconnected from us”. I would reiterate The Guardian’s report: Tiouka wasn’t exaggerating when he made that claim. French Guiana, officially an “overseas department and region of France,” is bordered by Brazil and Suriname on the Atlantic coast of South America. Cayenne, French Guiana’s capital, is over 4,000 miles from Paris, and yet Macron’s administration still governs the country through the French Guiana Territorial Collectivity and French Guiana Assembly, which is why, even with French Guiana’s own prefect, it remains Macron’s decision to approve of the mine at Montagne d’Or. French Guiana exists territorially and segmentarily, but as such it is a highly politicized entity. France’s regimentary State interpellates French Guiana geometrically; but this geometric relationship paradigmatically occupies multiple forms of coloniality, citizenship, territoriality, and property: the political nexus of which appears as a segmentary constellation of roots.
Excursus 2
Segmentarity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, appears in political forms: one “rigid” and one “supple,” binary and circular, primitive and State. Segmentarity occupies a multiplicity or aggregate of political relations. And, as Deleuze and Guattari detail:
“It is not enough, therefore, to oppose the centralized to the segmentary. Nor is it enough to oppose two kinds of segmentarity … There is indeed a distinction between the two, but they are inseparable, they overlap, they are entangled. Primitive societies have a nuclei of rigidity or arborification that as much anticipate the State as ward it off. Conversely, [State] societies are still suffused by a supple fabric which their rigid segments would not hold.”
Emergent from such an entangled multiplicity of relations are the overlapping spheres of the micropolitical and macropolitical. “What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement,” Deleuze and Guattari write. The macropolitical is no antidote to the poison of microfascism, for “May 1968 in France [when large-scale protests and strikes erupted across the country] was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the viewpoint of macropolitics … The politicians, the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept repeating over and over again that ‘conditions’ were not ripe.” It may seem, in French Guiana, that the macropolitical sphere is not in revolt against the French government. The French State geometry territorializes and borders French Guiana and, as such, the “conditions are not ripe,” regardless of the actual injustices which constitute the territory. But, given the entanglement of French Guiana within the rhizomatic constellation of French territoriality, what may we say of the micropolitical?
Segment 2
The Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement is thriving in Paris. The Yellow Vests movement initially responded to a spike in diesel and petrol prices in November 2018, but quickly gained momentum and articulated more general causes of discontentment with Macron’s presidency and the French government. Some Gilet Jaune demands include tax reforms aiming to aid low-income people, and the establishment of a citizen’s initiative referendum–a direct-democratic constitutional amendment which would allow for French citizens to directly petition the government for referenda, without permissive steps taken by the parliament or presidency. Every seven days, from November 17th to March 16th, the Yellow Vests occupied the streets of Paris, while parallel movements emerged all across France. March 16th, 2019, marked the “ultimatum,” as some taking part in the grassroots movement term the 19th wave of protests. That weekend 200 protesters were taken into custody and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo deployed nearly 6,000 police officers, two drones, and an entourage of teargas and police weaponry. President Macron threatened to involve anti-terrorist military forces come another wave of protests. News outlets have reported that the Yellow Vest movement is beginning to falter; Macron is appealing to some of its demands while heightening the threat of anti-protest military force. Were the “conditions not ripe”? If leftist organizations take the yellow vests as an example of grassroots insurgency, what do they see? Bright yellow vests, 40,000 people in the streets, blocked roads, and nervous politicians: ultimately a failed movement.
Excursus 3
Deleuze and Guattari write:
“For in the end, the difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual or collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective signifiers.”
Political relations, mediated by the border, must not be understood in dichotomous, arborized, opposing ways. Indeed, the multiplicitous politicality of French Guiana must be reckoned with in order to potentialize the antifascist flow of its activism.
Segment 3
Tiouka voiced concerns over the environmental damage the Columbus gold mine would cause in his country: “The forest is endangered because of legal and illegal mining. Our environment is completely polluted. We find traces of mercury in the rivers we fish in. People are ill because the whole food chain is contaminated. This shouldn’t just be about economic development.” But in the history of French Guiana, activism has never been just about environmental concerns. A recent article in The Washington Post recounts for the protests that surged in French Guiana during the 2017 French presidential campaign accordingly: “French Guianans feel legitimately neglected by Paris: Poverty, inequality and lack of adequate public services such as schools, police and hospitals are compounded by a wave of immigration from nearby Brazil and Haiti.” The author, Manu Saadia, describes how grassroots activists organized against the sale of a nonprofit hospital in Kourou to a private administrator. Saadia notes that activists in French Guiana, critically preceding the Yellow Vests, set up highway roadblocks denying access to the Guiana Space Center. The protest aggrandized and transformed into a sustained, month-long movement with demands including better public education and infrastructure. Saadia declares French Guianan victory. The pressure on the French government to acknowledge the activism of French Guiana as they did in Paris, which involved major economic disruptions and a few violent protests, forced the French government to concede three billion euros to French Guiana’s infrastructural development. Still, French Guiana is marked by the traces of a segmented territorialization. Had the French Guianans worn yellow vests? How does this political relation—that of the territory, the border, the citizen—problematize the leftist analysis of something like the “grassroots” ideals of the Yellow Vest movement? What if roots are thought of in terms of their extractive and colonial means? Does the yellow vest movement only embolden–and border–its appearance by excluding and extracting from its territorial roots?
Lines of Flight: Destratification
Who can wear a gilet jaune? Can the French Guianans? A French Guianan may be a citizen of France, but does this citizenship grant them a stake in grassroots activism? Or does French activism, while claiming “roots,” remain segmentary and territorialized, insisting endlessly that “the conditions are not ripe” when in fact the intensities of its flows are cut short by its colonial and extractive roots, which close and rigidify the movements which give it all of its potential? The highly visible line segments plastered on the bodies of protesters in France only serve to border its participants in an inscrutably microfascist macropolitics. These visible borders enclose French Guianian leftism within its colonial sphere, but it is not within the certain vision of the Yellow Vests to extend the roots of fuller, “grassroots,” French citizenship to French Guiana. Until the logic and remnants of coloniality and the violence of its territoriality are addressed in full by the left, a leftist workers’ movement will not transcend its fatal segmentarity.
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