We need a new political ideology for indigenous political strategy. (Pearson 1997b: 218)

There is no ideology and never has been. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4)

Directed transformative political practices, such as postcolonisation, require the collective deployment of a strategy. Strategy is self-consciously expressed from a position of subjectivity. The subject is thus the cause of transformative action, which is organised via the strategy it expresses. However, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a subject emerges only as an effect of its becoming. A subject – like all forms of being – is a virtual assemblage, made actual. But how can a subject then be a cause of its own becoming, when it is actually an effect of this process? What makes a body a ‘self’, an active agent of its own formation as subject? As a produced effect or object of social relations of power and desire, how can a subject come to have a position that is critical and capable of taking those social relations as the object of her intentional action? When she only exists as a position already given, already made actual, how can the subject strategically choose her position of action and cause the transformations she wills?

This chapter will consider what notion of the subject is possible for constructivist philosophy like Foucault's or Deleuze and Guattari's. The discussion begins by revisiting the nature of the body as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari, in light of their complementary concept of the body-without-organs (BwO).