Notes on “Nomadology,” Part I (25,000 words)

Good morning, beloved -

What follows is my attempt to come to grips as an adult with a foundational work of theory I’d bought and first tried to get my head around in late adolescence: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Nomadology: The War Machine.”

I first purchased “Nomadology,” in the slim, stylish semiotext(e) Foreign Agents edition, from the old St Mark’s Books in New York City in late 1986. Though I didn’t quite comprehend it at the time — it is only briefly acknowledged on the copyright page — the text of this edition originated as a chapter from the far longer work A Thousand Plateaus, itself part of Deleuze and Guattari’s larger project Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (It is a late chapter, at that.) Had I understood this, had I for that matter been reading the book as part of a class or some other organized and structured program of inquiry, I might well have ordered A Thousand Plateaus from the bookstore, or looked to see if the NYU library held a copy. But in that functionally pre-internet world of information scarcity, I did neither of these things, and for many years thereafter was therefore compelled by circumstance to treat “Nomadology” as a standalone work of thought.

And I “read” that work of thought, in the sense that I turned the pages and my eyes passed over the words printed on them. But I struggled to retrieve much in the way of sense from it. Dense, allusive, reliant on the kind of education I manifestly had not been exposed to, strewn with terms from the sciences that were obviously being used in something other than their textbook sense, and thoroughly salted with unfamiliar concepts, the book rapidly defeated my interpretive capacities, and swiftly thereafter, my attention. For years, it meant more to me as a totem (visibly tucked into a back pocket, on a bookshelf) than as a living argument.

Across the forty years that followed, I read enough about Deleuze and Guattari that I was eventually able to develop a fairly vivid sense of their thought. Certain key concepts of theirs, indeed, were so widely mobilized in the mid-1990s to explain the rise of networked hypertextual systems as to become inescapable, most obviously “the rhizome”; other terms of theirs, like “the fold,” enjoyed particularly wide currency among the architects, designers and other more or less organic intellectuals who were my friends in these years. As a result I was effectively able to become Deleuzian without having ever once wrestled decisively with the actual texts involved.

Until recently, when I decided that the time had come for me to undertake a slow, close reading of this very slimmest of their works — and, what’s more, to do this reading in public.

The discussion that follows originated as a single long thread on Mastodon. It extends, as of today, to some 267 posts, scattered across a third of a year of calendar time, and this 25,000-word effort has only gotten us a little less than halfway through the text: to page 52, of a work which runs to 122 pages in print. In the version of this material presented here, I’ve tried to preserve the sense of that thread, to the greatest extent consistent with a pleasant reading experience — in other words, what you’ll encounter here is a staccato succession of discursive, occasionally digressive, roughly paragraph-length modules of expression, corresponding with the original posts, with the newly-inserted section breaks reflecting discrete posting sessions, or “sequences.” (You’ll notice that, for the sake of retaining the feel of the original, I have left intact a measure that is frankly redundant in print: a lightweight “episode recap,” anytime there’s been a gap of a few days between such sessions.)

At the end of each day’s posting, as well, I generally included a brief section of inline notes on names, works and ideas that had cropped up in the course of the discussion, and these are presented here much as they were in the original thread, i.e. as links to online resources, which may or may not remain active at the time you encounter them. Finally, you may notice that in places I try to remember or imagine the set of associations I would have brought to the text on my first encounter with it. This interpretive conceit is especially present toward the beginning, and though it tails off to a considerable extent, it is occasionally present throughout.

I have otherwise applied only very light editing, mostly to correct typos or infelicities of formatting present in the original thread. I hope you enjoy this exploration of “Nomadology” as much as I’ve enjoyed putting it together. I’ll see you next week when regular dispatch service resumes.

§ Sequence One

1. I got this [paperback edition of “Nomadology”] down off the shelf because it’s relevant to one of the things I’m working on, and because – some 39 years after buying it and reading it for the first time – I feel like I’m finally in a position to understand and make use of it. Follow along with me, as I do a reasonably close reading of it here? It ought to be a fair amount of fun.

2. A couple of prefatory notes, by way of housekeeping: “Nomadology” is a chapter (or “plateau”) from A Thousand Plateaus, but I’ll be reading it as though it were a standalone offering; being equipped with only enough French to know when the subtitles on a film are terrible, I am necessarily reading translator [Brian] Massumi’s “Nomadology”; and I don’t know what depth I’ll get into in posts or what kind of schedule I’ll be able to keep. Assume a reader with a magpie mind & little scholarly inclination.

So let’s get into it!

3. There’s very little in the way of front matter, only a sideways acknowledgment that this is an extract from a longer work, and no introduction to speak of. The very first lines that greet the reader are these:

Axiom 1: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.

Proposition 1: This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama and games.

This is what’s known as “throwing the reader in at the deep end” (triply so if that reader is seventeen, self-taught but otherwise a product of American schooling, and struggling with what we’d now call “ADHD”). What could any of this possibly mean?

4. It’d be decades before anyone taught me to read for a text’s implicit ontology and epistemology, but we can already kinda see what the big chunky objects in play here are: the “State apparatus” – which I already had an instinctual anarchist’s antipathy for – and “the war machine,” which I was just about quick enough to realize they meant in something other than the literal, Black Sabbath “War Pigs” sense. And the latter occupied a relationship of exteriority to the former: it remained outside.

5. The word “apparatus” on its own wouldn’t have had any particular resonance for me in those days; I just took it to mean something like “machinery.” So we’re starting with the idea that there’s something called a war machine, more metaphorical than literal, and it’s being opposed to something you might naturally assume was its proper home: the State, something I already associated with hierarchy, structure and command. And we’re told that this relationship is first made manifest in “mythology, epic, drama and games.”

6. As for the stress placed on that “exteriority,” the only resonances that came to my mind on first reading naturally enough had to do with being “an outsider” – a loner, a weirdo, a nonconformist. In 1986: a punk. And that struck a chord: per the title, I already knew not merely that the book had something to do with nomads, but that this nomadology was linked to the figure of the war machine. A picture is already beginning to form, however kaleidoscopically.

7. How about “mythology, epic, drama and games,” though? My background here, like most Americans, was not strong, though I’d enjoyed the sort of middle-class privilege that involves kids being herded through the museum to consider paintings of Prometheus having his liver pecked out. And even that meager foundation dropped away like an elevator with a snapped cable when I hit the book’s very first full sentence. Here it is:

8. “Georges Dumézil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist-priest.”

Oof. You’ve got to imagine that there was no internet. The search engine wouldn’t be invented for another decade or so. I suppose I could have gone to the NYU library and looked up Dumézil in the card catalogue – that’s certainly what my more diligent friend Jamie would have done, probably before proceeding to the next sentence – but it’s just gone 1:30AM on 7th & B. You’re just going to have to get on with it.

9. We can, I think, safely assume that D&G do not primarily mean to invoke mid-period Foucault’s notions about “sovereignty” and “discipline” here, though surely that progression was hovering in the background for them in a way that it wasn’t for me in the fall of ’86. Let’s take them to mean sovereignty in its less specialized sense, just as they gloss it: a relationship of domination. Right here, in this first sentence, they’re invoking the comparative linguist and mythologist Dumézil to differentiate forms of domination.

10. But maybe “forms” isn’t quite it? Maybe it’s closer to modes. And Dumézil tells us that, from the infancy of what would become the West, myth, legend and (where these things are distinguishable from) history agree that there are two distinct and recognizable modes in which domination is enacted over people: “Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer.” Thank god for those last two opposed pairs!

11. Some notes before we proceed! It is, after all, very much in the D&G spirit to pursue tendrils sideways through the loam:

- Georges Dumézil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Dum%C3%A9zil

- Here’s a bit on the differing rationalities of power Foucault distinguishes as “sovereignty” and “discipline”: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2024/08/27/foucault-power/

- …and some thinking about some of the resonances that may crop up when D&G refer to a “State apparatus”: https://openreadings.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/apparatus-dispositif-material-discursive-practice/

§ Sequence Two

12. OK, we go on! I promise we’re not going to be quite as painstaking as we move on, but I think it’s important to lay out each element in the array of opposed pairs D&G offer to characterize Dumézil’s two modes of domination.

13. “Rex and flamen”: These are roles in the ceremonial culture of Rome, different channels by way of which divinely-sanctioned authority flowed through the Roman state. Wikipedia (sorry) tells us that the “rex sacrorum (‘king of the sacred things’)” was a “senatorial priesthood” (!) reserved for patricians, while the flamen were high-ranking members of society who officiated the cults of various gods.

14. Hmm, I kind of get it? But to someone whose education has not immersed them in the culture of ancient Rome, there isn’t really enough contrast here to quite grasp the distinction D&G are trying to make. Perhaps we’ll have better luck with…

15. Raj and Brahman! These terms from India clarify matters slightly. As the context in which Westerners most often encounter the term – the British Raj – implies, “raj” connotes a sovereign who rules by conquest, and inscribes their power of capture and command in the state form. “Brahman,” by contrast, is the ever-self-transforming ultimate ground of reality, something very much like the Tao. (We’ll assume D&G did not mean to invoke the “brahmin,” the highest, priestly caste of Hinduism.)

16. This opposition begins to do a better job of clarifying the distinction I think D&G are trying to uphold, certainly better than that of “Rex and flamen.” But let’s move onto the next dyad, Romulus and Numa. Here we’re back in Rome: Romulus, of course, was with his murdered twin brother Remus the legendary founder of the city. He is held to have laid out the city's boundaries and districts personally, and to have pursued social order by dividing the populace into three tribes.

17. The contrast being drawn with his immediate (and equally legendary) successor Numa is, again, less sharp than it might be, but evidently vests in the latter’s ability to instill civic peace not through the imposition of order but via the quality of inspiration. (The source here is Plutarch, who tells us that a kind of golden age of conciliation descended on Rome during Numa’s reign, until “on the iron-bound shield-handles lie the tawny spiders' webs.”)

18. What can we learn from “Varuna and Mitra”? These terms return us to the “Indo-” facet of Dumézil's expertise. Varuna is a Hindu god – perhaps significantly, the god of Order and Truth – but rather confusingly, Mitra has so little independent identity he generally appears in the hybrid form Mitra-Varuna, “which has essentially the same attributes as the god Varuna alone.” It’s not much to go on, by way of opposition between figures ostensibly symbolizing two principles, modes or rationalities of domination.

19. Because, remember, what these figures of myth are supposedly emblematizing is the “absolute exteriority” of the war machine to the State apparatus – given that emphasis, you might expect a more sharply inscribed, not to say polar, binary than that present between Romulus and Numa or Varuna and Mitra. Fortunately we now arrive at the final terms in this series, which give us something to sink our teeth into: “the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer.”

§ Sequence Three

20. We continue! We’re still on the first page of “Nomadology,” still working our way through the quote from philologist and comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil with which D&G choose to open up their exploration of the war machine and its exteriority to the State apparatus. Following Dumézil, they have offered up a series of opposed pairs, each term of which represents one of the two modes in which the State practices its art of domination: the “magician-king” and the “jurist-priest.”

21. And as we’ve seen, while it is possible to glimpse some distinction between the opposed terms of each pair, in each case they are hardly polar opposites. Each term seems to share something of its nature with the other. What becomes clear here is that maybe there’s a reason for this: “their opposition is only relative.” They are, in fact, different moments or aspects of a State apparatus that “distributes binary distinctions and forms a milieu of interiority.”

22. Rather like movement between the three points that define a plane, the State’s cyclical alternation between its modes of domination makes a stratum. And what D&G go on to argue is that war is always exterior to this space, this milieu or stratum. We might, indeed, think of the State as something that constitutes itself precisely in and through war. But for D&G, the bundle of energies we know as war is something that properly remains outside of the State, and furnishes an absolute contrast to it.

23. Here, already, the reader begins to get a sense of the specialized way in which D&G use common terms. We might think of contemporary policing, for example, as something practically indistinguishable from the State’s making of war on its own subjects, and so – as these terms are conventionally understood, anyway, by just about anyone from Schmittians to critical race theorists – it would seem nonsensical to insist that war occupies a position of absolute exteriority to the State apparatus.

24. What begins to take shape, though, is a conception not at all of war as we might think of it – as a logistical, indeed bureaucratic exercise, which has as much or more to do with organization and command as with the ability to inflict kinetic violence on a given target – and more of something wilder and purer. For D&G, war is a force, or skein of forces, that inherently runs counter to State logics and each of its modes of power: “Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less than to Mitra.”

25. And this is pivotal. In a sense, even, it’s the whole book. For, as I understand them, what D&G are arguing is that this thing they call the war machine produces an opening. With its sudden flashing violence, its “pure and immeasurable multiplicity,” the war machine constitutes “an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis” against sovereignty, the State apparatus and the milieu of interiority it churns out in its cycling between principles of rule.

26. Whether or not this appeals to you, all this talk of “incomprehensible cruelty” and so on, well, that’s a perfectly legitimate question. There is unquestionably a degree of romanticization here that feels – to put it mildly – incompatible with the experience of war’s reality, and I can’t really find fault with anyone who loses interest in the argument at this point. But there it is: if what you’re interested in is disrupting the State’s logic of control, what D&G propose is that you have to ride the lightning. Or so, anyway, they would have us understand the counsel of the Western mythos.

27. Notes:

- I see I invoked, in passing, the name of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, so here’s a link to the Wikipedia page on one of his most enduringly impactful ideas, the “state of exception”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_exception

- I also mentioned critical race theory. Here’s a painstakingly neutral overview of the topic, though you may well prefer one more rooted in advocacy. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-rights/archive/lesson-critical-race-theory/

28. Notes, continued:

- And finally for today, rrrreally close readers may want to pursue the ceremonial management of spiritual power in Rome as a submerged but discernible theme in John Brunner’s 1969 near-future SF novel The Jagged Orbit (which features a household-security firm called Lares & Penates Inc., and one of whose protagonists is indeed given the name “Matthew Flamen”).

§ Sequence Four

29. Before we get any further into the text, I want to briefly weigh the question of preparation and, conversely, authorial intention. Does it matter what you bring with you to reading a book like this? What will the author(s) have expected of a reader, by way of context?

30. I think it’s important to situate this chapter from A Thousand Plateaus not simply in the history of philosophy, but in the context of an elite French education. And I’m going to approach that, appropriately enough, from the outside. From my own position, actually – which is assuredly not that of someone with an elite education of any provenance, despite my recent and belated acquisition of an advanced degree.

31. Let me offer a concrete example, and hopefully it will shed some light on what I mean: I forget just where I first heard the term “conditions of possibility,” but I do remember that it made sense to me immediately. I was a fan of the cascading, pinball-machine model of cause and effect offered by James Burke in his TV show “Connections,” and was therefore delighted to have been offered an elegant phrase to describe what has to happen before something else can come into being.

32. But what I didn’t know (and in fact wouldn’t grasp for decades) was that the phrase belongs to Immanuel Kant, and therefore brings in its train a whole set of resonances and implied understandings. And these would be obvious to anyone who’d had a proper grounding in philosophy, in the same way it’s obvious to folks with a different grounding that the guitar sound on a Galaxie 500 record is an allusion to/invocation of the Velvet Underground, with everything that implies.

33. And just in the way a fish never becomes aware of the water through which it swims, I think it’s fair to say that D&G had remarkably little reflexivity about the field of knowledge they implicitly assume mastery of on the part of the reader. They were products of a particular curriculum, and it equipped them with the ability to fold up or encapsulate ideas in a single reference, without citation, and trust that a certain payload would be delivered to the mind of a reader in the moment of encountering it.

34. What follows from this is that a text like “Nomadology” is much denser than it appears to a casual reader — in fact fractally dense — and that readers with the proper equipment enjoy an incomparably richer experience in the text than those of us who are not so equipped. In fact most contemporary theory is like this: the author is implicitly situated in a lineage, (generally) implicitly arguing with someone/s specific, and enlisting entire bodies of thought in their argument by deploying the most glancing reference.

35. These are not books, in other words, that have been through the highly contemporary, market-driven process of breaking things down for legibility and comprehension. Their authors did not care if someone coming to their work wound up hurling it across the room the moment they first encountered a train of unfamiliar terms. You’re very much on your own – still moreso if, like me, you picked the book up not as part of any curriculum, or because it’s been assigned or chosen by a reading group, but just because it looked or seemed interesting.

36. What I would maintain – would insist – is that the act of reading a book like this from what we might call the naive position is still generative of value. You might not have the slightest idea who Georges Dumézil is, or have only the shallowest familiarity with the entire Western canon foundational to the authors (and being drawn on in ways they themselves are only liminally aware of).

37. But the text will strike its own resonances for you. You’ll bring your own experiences to it, your own canon. You’ll think of examples, and counterexamples, from the cultural texts that signify for you. You’ll bring your own sideways richness to the act of interpretation. And while I think this is always true, it’s super apposite in the specific case of D&G. We haven’t, yet, discussed “lines of flight,” or what a “milieu” or a “stratum” means for them, but when we get there I think you’ll see immediately why I think this is so. 

Notes: 

- The entire series of “Connections” appears to be available on YouTube, at least for the time being. Here’s Episode 1, “The Trigger Effect”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

§ Sequence Five

38. We proceed. We have weighed why D&G think the exteriority of the war machine to the State apparatus is borne out in Indo-European myth. How about games, though?

D&G begin their discussion by counterpoising chess (a “game of State”) with go, and while the comparison is entirely apposite – indeed profound – it does assume a certain familiarity with both games on the reader’s part. Now, as it happens, many American kids do grow up playing chess, by no means all of them middle class (as any stroll past the southwest corner of Washington Square Park can attest), so that’s less problematic. The game is present in the culture, in space and metaphor, at least in its general outlines.

39. But go? In 1986, I had never seen a go board outside martial-arts films, and a single vitrine way in the back of the good ol’ Compleat Strategist on E 32nd Street. So while the description of the mechanics of go here is accurate, and the contrast with chess both illuminating and supremely well chosen, it’s a little unfair to the reader. In order for the metaphor to land fully, you really have to have played the game. Once you have, though, the contrast splendidly clarifies the distinction D&G are making.

40. If it’ll give you a better sense of the point D&G are trying to make, though, you can try for yourself right now.

- This is a very slick site where you can learn the rules of chess, and test your understanding in actual play: https://www.chess.com/learn

- The basic rules of go are here, and once you’ve got your head around them, I believe the same site offers online play for free: https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go

41. Hopefully, you can grasp something of that contrast, even in the first moments of encounter with these two rulesets, and the spaces and relations they enfold and call into being. For D&G, chess pieces “have an internal nature and intrinsic properties, from which their movements, situations and confrontations derive.” Knight, bishop and pawn, in other words – and note the mapping of roles from the courtly history of Europe – move differently across the board, and exert differing pressures across space.

42. It is also the case that the board constrains their movement – most interestingly in the case of the knight, whose characteristic L-shaped movement pattern makes it a metaphor for the indirect application of influence. This, indeed, is why the chess knight is the symbol of military psychological operations, or PSYOP.

43. But go…ahh, go! In go the anonymous pieces are “elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage [cough] with no intrinsic properties, but only situational ones.” Played on the board, they establish the conditions of “life,” or disrupt the opponent’s ability to do so. A placed stone radiates influence across the entire space of play, an influence conditioned by the pattern already established. The player of go develops a sense for the properties of shape and the board as a field of potential.

44. D&G’s gloss: “In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point…the ‘smooth’ space of Go, as against the ‘striated’ space of chess…The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, while Go proceeds altogether differently territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…).”

These terms – deterritorialization, reterritorialization, smoothness, striation – are utterly foundational for an understanding of D&G, and lie at the heart of the shock and dismay the architect Eyal Weizman produced, when he famously revealed that “the IDF has been reading Deleuze”: https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp136_article1_walkingthroughwalls_weizman.pdf

45. Typically, though, their definition of these terms is subtle, idiosyncratic to their usage, and (most infuriatingly of all, for the reader of “Nomadology” as a standalone, $12-in-1986 text, who didn’t encounter it as a chapter of what was then the rather hard-to-find A Thousand Plateaus) not offered here. We’ll have to move on further to see if we can’t grasp what the relationship of “territory” to “milieu” might be, and how the establishment, abandonment or effacement of territory might function as tactics of a war machine that means to maintain its exteriority from an apparatus of State.

46. But what’s vital for me here is that, even this early in the going – and remember, we’re only on page 4! – D&G have furnished the reader with a template or, better yet, a grammar of action for all those who would want to counter logics of state, gleaned from their sustained consideration of multiple traditions and idioms. If “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways [but] the point…is to change it,” here is where that change begins. It may not always pay to take it too literally, but don’t be mistaken: as the baleful example of the IDF makes explicit, “Nomadology” is a manual for praxis.

§ Sequence Six

47. But why are we talking about games, then — games and priests and Hindu gods? “The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent, but remains difficult to conceptualize.” This is why D&G’s definition of something like “the war machine” proceeds inductively, by an accretion of examples, comparisons, parables or analogies.

After awhile, they trust that a sufficiently robust (if necessarily fuzzy-edged) space of overlap will appear in the implicit Venn diagram they’re drawing between concepts. As a writer I might prefer to (and my editor would insist that I) define my terms upfront, but that’s not their method here. And it works, too — provided only that you stick with it.

48. It does run the risk, however, that the reader will not quite grasp all the facets and connotations of what they’re laying down, which is why they occasionally wind up having to undertake what are essentially backfill operations. And this is the case here: “It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus,” as most of us who’ve been following their argument this far would no doubt be able to do without quibble. “It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.”

49. There’s two things we might want to pay attention to about this attempt to shore up the reader’s comprehension of these terms. The first is that, pretty clearly, “interiority” and “exteriority” carry some valence here beyond the everyday sense of the words. And the second is that the war machine is not simply being positioned as “being outside.” It is being positioned as outsideness itself.

50. So let’s consider what is meant by “the outside,” in the special sense in which D&G deploy the term. In the Western philosophical tradition, I’m sure you can find similar concepts running straight back to Plato. But so far as I have been able to determine, the outside as D&G put it into play — a sense later picked up by Nick Land, and folks like Xenogothic still further downstream — originates with Michel Foucault’s essay on Maurice Blanchot, “The Thought From Outside.”

51. And this is one of those things that nobody tells you! I mean, I dunno, maybe they do in school — like I say, I’ve never read D&G as part of a formal, structured curriculum, or in any pedagogical context to speak of. Maybe a solid seminar on Deleuzian thought (either at an academic institution, or as part of something wilder, like Philadelphia’s Incite Seminars) does, precisely, include an account of “the outside,” and points you at the Foucault piece. It sure would help! Because what Foucault helps us understand is that for Blanchot — and by extension, for D&G — le dehors, the outside, is a region of impersonal formlessness, where the subject itself dissolves into chaos.

52. We shouldn’t collapse this entirely into the notion of “exteriority” (even though D&G themselves are guilty of some slippage on this count), for as I understand it, “exteriority” is a relative term, simply denoting something that cannot be reduced to my conception of it. By contrast, the outside is absolute.

53. I’m sure those among you with a grounding in philosophy will pipe up at this point to correct/help me refine this understanding of exteriority and the outside, but let’s take what we have back to the context of “Nomadology,” where we’re told that we must “reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority.” That is to say: this roiling storm, the war machine, cannot be reduced to the State’s conception of it. It remains not merely external to control, but external to definition.

54. And D&G have already suggested why this is: because the State apparatus can only, helplessly, conceive of the world and its contents in terms of discrete states. It is static. The grandeur of its sovereign knowledge is of the order of statistics — quite literally state-istics. The war machine, however, is a continuous process of becoming.

55. The fundamental distinction between “being” and “becoming” — between understanding the world as a container for objects, versus perceiving it as woven of ongoing processes — is another that has a long pedigree in Western philosophy, going back to Parmenides and Heraclitus. Those of us coming at philosophical or theoretical writings from high above the plane of their ecliptic may need to encounter “becoming” a few dozen (or hundred) times before we quite twig to this — I’d only previously come across Parmenides in Phil Dick’s bonkers Exegesis, for example.

56. But just as a quick gloss, “becoming” (for me) connotes change, process, continuous flow — and, at times, a transition between states that cannot be broken down to the precession of discrete, Muybridgian intervals. Perhaps it’s meant to convey something more akin to the “changing lines” that mark transitions between discrete hexagrams of the I Ching? The becomings that are most relevant for “Nomadology” are those associated with the figure of the war machine, and (especially in conjunction) they say more about D&G than they may have understood or intended: becoming-animal and becoming-woman.

57. This is all a lot to absorb, so let’s leave it there for today. See you tomorrow!

Notes:

- I mentioned Incite Seminars; you can (and should) find them at https://inciteseminars.com

- PKD’s “Exegesis” can be found here, in its anguished entirety: https://archive.org/details/exegesisofphilip0000dick

- Here’s a splendid example of what I mean when I invoke Muybridge: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266429

- Here’s Foucault’s “The Thought From Outside”: https://monoskop.org/images/0/0a/Foucault_Michel_Blanchot_Maurice_Maurice_Blanchot_The_Thought_from_Outside_Michel_Foucault_as_I_Imagine_Him.pdf

- Xenogothic is one post-Landian thinker whose extensive use of “the outside” may shed further light on the concept: https://xenogothic.com/

§ Sequence Seven

58. Today, a brief intermezzo, in the form of a question: given the all-but-exclusive, rather airless parade of men across its pages, to what degree does women’s thought constitute an outside for D&G?

§ Sequence Eight

59. We continue. I want to leave the question of “becoming-animal” and “becoming-woman” here for the time being, and loop back to it later. What I want to take on right now is the propensity D&G can already see for the war machine — in all its exteriority or quality of absolute outsideness — to nevertheless “become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus.” In shifting light, or under conditions of (attempted or successful) capture by the State, we may mistake certain qualities or attributes proper to the war machine for those belonging to one or another of the State’s cyclically alternating modes of domination. D&G offer the example of “speed and secrecy,” qualities par excellence of the war machine that are nevertheless occasionally found to be numbered among the State’s own tactics, albeit in the form of “a certain speed, a certain secrecy.”

60. So “there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles, with the power of war.” (Here Massumi helpfully provides the gloss of puissance for “power”: wotta great word, in French or English.) And that danger consists precisely of forgetting that “the State has no war machine of its own: it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will always cause it problems.” (Emphasis in original.)

61. I trust you can furnish any number of historical examples attesting to the truth of this: for example, in the United States, the very extensive efforts gone to in order to produce a “professionalized” and nonpartisan military firmly yoked to civilian control and the notion of a supervening Constitution — efforts which are now being intentionally undone, with consequences that are readily foreseeable. I’m also put in mind, as I so often am, of biologist Lynn Margulis’s conception of the mitochondrion as something that once lived independently, and was subsumed as an engine by the eukaryotic cell lineage (though there, the process of subsumption appears to be total, irreversible and proceeding largely to the capturing agent’s advantage).

62. It’s still a useful metaphor, though: if the State wants to avail itself of the puissance and other productive properties of pure war, it has to envelop, encapsulate, absorb and appropriate the energies of a war machine. And almost without exception, this poses a continual challenge for the State that succeeds in this ambition.

63. D&G pivot here into a reasonably extended discussion of what this looks like in drama — specifically, in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 tragedy Penthesilea. (There’s that elite education rearing its head again.) 

64. Penthesilea is the story of the queen of the Amazons, “a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode,” and her encounter with Achilles at the battle of Troy. As D&G gloss that encounter, it is the titanic clash of being with becoming. And we can almost draw ourselves a little matrix here, lining up the qualities associated with State apparatus and war machine respectively: being and interiority v. becoming and exteriority, and so on. But if Achilles, a man of State, has feelings, what equivalent does Penthesilea experience? The answer that D&G furnish us with is yet another of those theory-terms that overspills its conventional definition: they tell us that what traverses her body are affects.

65. I could probably spend two days posting about affect and the way it’s treated in contemporary philosophy and theory, and not exhaust the question. For now let’s conceive affect as the physiological component of emotion — the share that resists, exceeds or denies reason and language. For D&G, “[a]ffects transpierce the body, they are weapons of war.” These weapons have a specific function: they deterritorialize. When “feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a ‘subject,’ [they are] projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force.” Here the affected body is itself become the war machine! And even when that war machine is captured, the red haze (whether of rage or exultation or lust) subsides and the vectors of affect settle back into the containers made for them in language, they still point toward the outside.

66. “Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines which have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State?” That, anyway, is the wager D&G commit themselves to here. It’s a vision of the war machine folded inside the State like the dot of Yin inside the Yang, waiting for the stars to be right to surge forth in exultation once more.

67. And this brings us to the end of the first axiom and proposition! Tomorrow we’ll be back for the second, which picks up the vital question everyone from 1970s feminist scholar Joreen to anthropologist James C. Scott have all asked, in their own ways: “Is there a way of warding off the formation of a state apparatus (or its equivalents in a group)?”

68. Today’s notes:

- Penthesilea can be found in a Project Gutenberg edition here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6648

- Lynn Margulis’s original 1967 article on the theory of mitochondrial capture by the proto-eukaryotic cell: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11541392/

- An insider’s perspective on civilian control of the US military as a “useful fiction”: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/JF-23/Col-Todd-Schmidt/schmidt-civilian-control-of-the-military.pdf

- Wikipedia’s account of “affect” is actually pretty good (and, hey, makes a point about “vital force” I forgot to), so don’t sleep on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(philosophy)

69. Here’s an interesting piece on Scott and state formation, though I really do recommend his Against The Grain and The Art of Not Being Governed for his specific responses to the question D&G ask: https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-35d93f7e-797a-407a-8da2-ac319139de6b/section/6588f51f-162e-4a60-89f6-1754442747b5

- Joreen’s response is, of course, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (1969), and you can find that here. It’s an open question (for me personally and, I think, in anarchist studies more broadly) whether the structure she calls for ultimately reproduces the State: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

- Here’s one last crystalline account of affect traversing the body: https://open.spotify.com/track/2JrMcWigCymlBNbnQp6YcN

See you tomorrow!

§ Sequence Nine

70. OK, we continue! My partner, who’s not in the slightest bit geekly in inclination, contributes her reading of Dune by way of “Nomadology”: the Houses of Atreides and Harkonnen as the two faces of State — Duke Leto Atreides no less a man of State than the twisted Baron; the Fremen as we meet them nearly pure avatars of the war machine, literally rising out of the smooth space of the desert to disrupt and destroy the Sardaukar; and the tragedy of the books, Muad’dib’s eventual reinscription of State logics amongst the Fremen. That’s a pretty convincing reading, I tell you what! Makes me wanna read the three books (there are only three Dune books) again.

71. Meanwhile, back in this book, we have discussed the war machine’s absolute exteriority to the State apparatus, and therefore the unthinkability of its driving dynamics for State thought. We now arrive at a second set of concerns, set off in the text as:

Problem 1: Is there a way of warding off the formation of a state apparatus (or its equivalents in a group)?

Proposition 2: The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).

72. And here we get into one of the most interesting, and certainly one of the most vexed, questions in the field of anthropology: how and why does the State arise in the first place, developmentally and historically?

There is a classic, linear developmental story for human sociation that D&G will refer to as “evolutionist,” and which retrograde thinkers like Jared Diamond still uphold. It goes like this, historically:

band → tribe → chiefdom → state.

73. This model was proposed by Elman Service, in his 1962 “Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective,” and it was basically the model I was taught in school. You were very likely raised on some version of Service’s schema, too: in the ostensive “state of nature,” human society was organized in small, mobile hunter-gatherer “bands,” with a high degree of egalitarianism and little to no formal division of labor. Or so the story goes.

Past some size, in this telling, those bands that succeed become agricultural or pastoral societies. They settle in place, they develop hierarchy and fixed, stratified roles, and this allows them to begin generating the caloric surplus (and concomitant need for storage facilities, record-keeping technologies and specialists) that bring us to the threshold of the State. The rest, as they say, is History.

74. The trouble with this model isn’t merely that as the archeological record increasingly gets filled in, and our picture of the human past is rendered in higher and higher resolution, historical cases spring up that appear to confound this simplistic rubric. The real problem is that it bears no resemblance to the account existing hunter-gatherer societies offer of their own choices, as the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres was among the first to point out, in his 1974 Society Against The State.

75. And indeed, for half a century or more there’s been a current within institutional anthropology that has called the linear, reductive Service model of societal development into sharp question: here’s where you’ll find Marshall Sahlins, Morton Fried, more recently James C. Scott and David Graeber. And what these writers have in common with Clastres is the insight that the State is an option — a conscious strategy that some groups embrace for what they think it can get them, and others do not.

76. Having accepted this, the clear implication is that there must be specific techniques that groups can employ to forestall the appearance of the nascent State, to prevent the emergence of even its progenitor or prototype institutions and mindsets. That’s where D&G start this second division of “Nomadology,” asking with Clastres “if it is not a concern of primitive [sic] societies to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand?” And one answer they arrive at is clear: war.

77. This “surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State” works by “maintain[ing] the dispersal and segmentarity of groups,” preventing their agglomeration into entities that require the degree of specialization, stratification and institutionalization we associate with the onset of the State, but also preventing accumulations of personal power. We might expect this to be tempestuous — remember affect! — but the “collective mechanisms of inhibition” bound up in war “may be subtle.”

78. In fact, they may “function as micromechanisms,” operating at the level of small groups or even the individual subjectivity. The primary example D&G offer here is curious: drawn from the writing of Jacques Meunier — an obscure ethnographer whose work appears never to have been translated into English — it concerns mores among the street children of Bogotá. Meunier “cites three ways in which the leader” of a band or pack of such children “is prevented from acquiring stable power”: first, their association is strictly functional, rather than affective or sentimental — per Meunier, they gather to do crimes, then disperse, and don’t otherwise socialize or cohabit together. The pack itself is a temporary, functional lamination of smaller nodes of two or three members we might think of as familial or affinity groups, such that the ejection or departure of one of more deprives the pack of a significant portion of its strength. And finally, members are compelled to age out at fifteen or so.

79. Personally I think D&G wager a lot on overgeneralization from this one, perhaps atypical example, and it’s doubtlessly the case that they might have chosen a better one to make a point that seems somewhat foundational to their argument. I don’t think they really establish that these are conscious choices, rather than the product of other dynamics that may be operating in the background. But the point stands: human groups can and do avail themselves of mechanisms that prevent the concentration of power.

80. In a passage I would have preferred to see them develop further, as well, they indicate that (formally different, but functionally identical) mechanisms of diffusion operate also within “high society,” such that a “web of immanent relations” acts as a block to the concentration of prestige in any one individual. The important point is that high society, too, is a pack. And here D&G introduce for the first time in “Nomadology” the concept they are perhaps best known for outside theory circles proper, and which is pivotal for their thought: “Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type which centers around organs of power.”

81. And this is the hazard of breaking “Nomadology” out as its own standalone volume, because here the rhizome/root distinction appears without preamble or explanation. In this context, it clarifies nothing, obscuring more than it illuminates. But it’s so important that I’m going to reach back into the bit of A Thousand Plateaus that has been excised here to establish exactly what work they mean for this sentence to do...tomorrow.

For now: notes!

- Clastre’s Society Against The State can be found here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-clastres-society-against-the-state

82. You can get a sense for some of the problems that crop up when someone contemporary pursues Service’s linear, reductive model without reflexivity here: https://theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/anthropology-footnoted-jared-diamonds-the-world-until-yesterday

We’ll pick up the question of technologies societies consciously deploy against the emergence of the State tomorrow. See you then!

§ Sequence Ten

83. Picking up where we left off: in their account of the ways in which various human groups throughout history have taken measures to ward off the appearance of the State and its logics, D&G offer up the image of the pack, a type of formation they identify both with Meunier’s street children of Bogotá, and with high society. They go on to tell us that such formations instill mechanisms that prevent prestige or social capital from overaccumulating in any one given individual. And then they say something that is bound to strike readers who have encountered this passage outside its original context — i.e. as a discrete section or “plateau” of the far longer work A Thousand Plateaus — somewhat curiously: implicitly laying out a categorization or classification schema for groups, they tell us that packs are “groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type.”

84. This distinction is explored at some length, in the very introduction to ATP, in D&G’s signature allusive, looping, accretional style. I’m tempted to omit discussion of it from our reading here, as a matter that’s properly external to the text under consideration, but there’s no need to be that persnickety and rules-lawyerly, A, and B if people from outside the worlds of philosophy and theory come to a D&G text, it’s a fair bet they’re coming for discussion of this figure of “the rhizome.” It has, after all, been one of the most broadly generative concepts of the past half-century.

So what’s it all about?

85. They start from a consideration of the Book as bearer of writing and thought, in both its semantics and its physical manifestation. It’s a somewhat difficult passage — murky, at times discursive, slipping between registers — but for me the core of it lies in the announcement that the Book takes “the Tree or Root as an image,” and that “[b]inary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree.” The Tree cleaves the world into Above and Below, and continuously imposes a sorting operation that allocates things into one or the other realm.

86. Lest we despair at the harshly reductionist logic of such a Book, and the Law that it implies, D&G go on to tell us that there is another model for the Book, and therefore for thought: the “radicle-system, or fascicular root”: a bundle, a multiplicity where the unity of the tap-root shatters into a “supplementary dimension.” But they tend to deprecate this figure as something that “does not really break with dualism.” Fair enough.

87. But what then? What is the third figure for thought, the one that finally does offer a decisive break with binaries, with dualism, with hierarchy and the relentless above-or-below, ahead-or-behind sorting operations it gives rise to? This is the rhizome: a horizontal casting of the plant, capable of spreading beneath the Earth and sending up new shoots from each or any of its nodes. They rather famously go on to supply us with a series of things other than plants that they regard as strongly rhizomorphic: the wolf pack, the swarm, the burrows of ants or rodents “in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout.” In fact the rhizome “itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.” 

88. And the important quality of the rhizome — the very thing in which its prescience resided, the reason it became the figure par excellence for the internetworked age and the tag for a thousand lame club nights, tryhard zines, etc. — is the principle of “connection and heterogeneity” D&G ascribed to it: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”

89. There it is: the reason we’re still reading D&G, the thing that made this willfully obscure body of thought so supremely relevant to a world in which, before the decade was out, the collapse of Soviet-style communism would deprive the left of one of its primary models of organization, and in which a mass hypertextual medium would emerge just a few years later to furnish it with another.

90. A rhizome “may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again even after most of it has been destroyed.” And now maybe we can begin to see why this figure also suggests the pack, the street gang, the “barbarian” horde or the guerrilla force: in their multiplicity, their resistance to capture or suppression, their disconcerting ability to “route around failure,” as the engineers and early ideologues of the internet might have it — in the uncanny ability of each of these things to disappear from here and pop up again, after some interval, over there. If the State cannot help but organize things as aboves and belows, befores and afters, thises and not thats, the war machine is of the order of the rhizome.

91. We’ll see where this move takes us tomorrow. A final thought for today, though: is it ironic that this Introduction commits the very sort of ordering that D&G tell us belongs to State thought? Was it succumbing to the same error when, a few days back, I described sketching out “a matrix” to keep track of the various dichotomies they lay out before us – interiority v exteriority, mood v affect, unity v multiplicity, root v rhizome and so on? 

92. My answer is that this is a tension D&G struggle with at every turn, and which intimately informs the way they chose to structure ATP as well as the very way in which they define their terms and craft their arguments. They’re trying, in other words, to think the rhizome rhizomorphically, and as people of the Book they’re necessarily doing so with only partial and limited success. (If they were fully successful, ATP would have been a hypertext, not any kind of book, and in fact it’s somewhat poignant to think of D&G developing the work in a world where collaborative hypertext authoring tools were available to them.)

No notes today, other than pointing you at the full ATP itself: https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf

§ Sequence Eleven

93. So, fresh from that detour to fill in the backstory of “the rhizome,” we plunge ever onward.

Recall that we’d begun this second textual division of “Nomadology” with a question — how do groups ward off the logics of the incipient State, either historically or in real time? — and a proposition: that there’s plenty of evidence for the exteriority of the war machine to the State to be found in ethnology, the comparative study of human cultures. And we consider how some of those cultures — street children of Bogotá, French high society — indeed did call upon mechanisms that, whether consciously or otherwise, did serve to diffuse prestige and prevent power from accumulating in any one individual. There’s a brief and not terribly deep discussion of what these mechanisms look like in the specific case of Bogotá.

94. But then D&G throw us a curveball, which possibly explains why they don’t develop any particularly elaborate case to defend what they’ve laid out: far from developing over time, they argue that the State is something that appears in a single stroke. It cannot (they say) be accounted for as an evolutionary tendency. It either appears, or does not, and when it does, it is perfect and complete, all the institutions it will need to call upon already present at birth, like a mammalian stock of oocytes.

95. I think this account of State formation is, to put it mildly, historically debatable, but it’s the hinge they lean on for their next provocation: if the State either appears or does not, the question of the relation of the State to non-State societies may not be evolutionary or developmental so much as it is spatial. This is how they put it: presenting the thesis out of Clastres that, “on the one hand, the State arose in a single stroke, fully formed [and] on the other, the counter-State societies used very specific mechanisms to ward it off, to prevent it from arising,” they go on to assert “that these two propositions are valid, but that their interlinkage is flawed.”

96. And from this it follows that “the State itself has always been in a relation with an outside, and is inconceivable independent of that relationship...the law of the State is not that of All or Nothing...but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally.” And this opens onto a discussion of State topology that has only grown more pointed and more relevant in the years since 1980.

97. Because what’s being posited here is a kind of dynamic, metastable exchange of energies between State societies and their exteriors, a condition of “coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction” [emphasis in original] that is mutually constitutive. This accords with Scott’s account, in Against the Grain, The Art of Not Being Governed and elsewhere, of permeability between State societies and the “barbarian” communities on their peripheries, and it even chimes to a degree with the theme developed most fully by Graeber/Wengrow of a oscillation or seasonal alternation between forms of organization in a given society. You might even describe this idea of opposed but mutually co-constituting tendencies, deriving pulses of sustaining energy from their constant alternation between equilibrium and chaos, as Taoist — but D&G mean for us to understand that this alternation plays out in space, as a map of insides and the outsides they cannot overcode or even comprehend.

98. The map they draw for us is worth quoting at some length: “Not only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot be reduced to ‘foreign policy,’ that is to a set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at any given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the ‘multinational’ type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam [...], etc.); but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power…What becomes clear is that bands, no less than worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State, and that this exteriority necessarily presents itself as that of a diffuse and polymorphous war machine. It is a nomos very different from the ‘law.’”

99. Well, there’s a lot here to chew on. I think even contemporary normie political science would concur with the idea that “international relations” subtends non-State entities (from the World Bank and the IMF, to Save the Children, Oxfam and Greenpeace to Apple, Google and Meta), religious currents like salafist Islam, and stateless peoples like the Palestinians or the Kurds. There’s no argument from any quarter that the outside of the State is anything but “diffuse and polymorphous.” But does it make sense to think of all that as observing a single nomos, an overarching or undergirding organizing principle? Do all of these entities and currents, accreting around very different logics of blood, market, belief or conviction, really function as war machines as D&G have described them? 

100. My own personal sense of things is that it’s not really possible to answer in the affirmative — not even in the most simplified, toy model of things. The move D&G make is to define all of that as “what escapes States or stands against States.” And if that topographical distinction is the bright-line standard to uphold, then yes — all of that can be said to constitute a war machine, in all its heterogeneity and difference: “The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable within the limits of its poles…But the war machine’s form of exteriority is such that it exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a religious creation, in all the flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State.” 

101. Here D&G encourage us to think all the forms of non-State activity as avatars of a single hugely dynamic and protean tendency: ever new, ever strange, often savage but occasionally generative of great beauty, whose only consistency is that it perpetually escapes the reason of State. Tomorrow we’ll take up the question of whether this remains so — whether, indeed, Empire can any longer be said to have an outside — and what that implies for epistemology, for the way we think the world. See you then!

102. Oh, sorry: this is me turning back, more like Columbo than Steve Jobs, to raise just one more thing. It has to do precisely with this question of the thinkability of the outside, and specifically with the function of science fiction as what D&G might call a “minor” literature.

I sure wouldn’t have put it in so many words at the time, but it’s obvious to me now that I grew up relying on SF to furnish me with lines of flight bursting through the containment of what could be thought. And this took any number of forms, from Hal Clement imagining what intelligent life might look like if it had evolved under brutally high gravity to the ontological instability of Chip Delany’s ever-self-consuming Bellona. All of these worlds were challenges to the frames around language and thought and possibility that consensus normality subjects us to. I know SF can still do that – for all its issues, you’ve no doubt heard me recommend Peter Watts’s Blindsight more than once – but I do worry that market pressures, groupthink and what we might call the involution of the genre as it begins to consume its own past make that less and less likely. I only rarely now come across a piece of science fictional literature that feels like it presents me with an outside to my thought. 

103. No doubt this has a lot to do with me. But I do think something has gone missing from this literature. All too often the books I pick up feel more like a comfort blanket than like the appearance of some quietly self-replicating logic that will go on to overcode and remake my sense of the world, and what is possible within it. All I want is more fiction like that. I still need it, now perhaps even more than I did when I was 10 or 16 or 21. If science fiction is not a literature of the outside, then it is nothing.

§ Sequence Twelve

104. While we’re on the topic of science fiction as a literature of the outside, it happens to be a fruitful source of metaphors to help explain this conception D&G have of the war machine as everything that “escapes States or stands against States”! As readers, we perhaps expect this concept of the war machine as it’s presented to us to have one definable form. But that’s just it: it doesn’t, and (as I read things, anyway) its doesn’tness is a big part of what D&G describe as its “multiplicity.”

105. And not just that, either, but its exteriority — its resistance to conceptualization by State thought. (An unpleasant corollary: perhaps our expectation of a definition is a marker of our own capture by that thought.) So: multiple, protean, slippery, seeming to lack a clear point of origin, refusing the categories we’ve prepared for it. What else do we know works like that?

106. Well, consider “the” titular Alien – “the” in quotes because, more through sloppiness and lack of attention to canon formation than intent, across the series the three iconic forms of facehugger, chestburster and full-grown xenomorph are eventually revealed to stand amid a bewildering profusion of morphologies. “The” alien, in each Alien film, seems to take cues from whatever species it’s hybridized with, reproducing in any number of ways — but maintains throughout its perfect, unreasoning hostility.

107. Or think of The Thing — or more to the point still, Peter Watts’s brilliant riff on it in his story “The Things”:

“I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable.”

108. That’s not such a bad metaphor for the war machine either, you know? A wavefront moving through form, occupying it, using it, discarding it when it’s outlived its purpose, moving on. If that sounds supremely exploitive and selfish, well, maybe it is. Maybe here is the “incomprehensible cruelty” of the war machine. Or maybe that’s the morality of State speaking, from its place of uncomprehending judgment? How else would we expect a “nonsubjectified machinic apparatus with no intrinsic properties...only situational ones” to appear?

It can’t all be go pieces. The war machine is outside, which is to say: it is alien.

109. And this question of knowledge and thinkability brings us to the text’s Proposition 3:

The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by epistemology, which intimates the existence of a “nomad” or “minor science.”

Two things to say about this, right off the bat: firstly, I believe that this is the first appearance of the word or concept “nomad” in the text, here on page 17, and once again it’s an idea we’ll be led to via an accretion of exemplary situations and parables. And secondly, right alongside it is the first appearance of “minor,” another one of those framings or concepts in D&G’s oeuvre whose definition exceeds the one you’ll find in the dictionary, the meaning of which for them is smeared out across multiple passages in multiple texts.

110. In this particular case — even more entertainingly! — the source doesn’t happen to be the book you have at hand. “The minor” is an idea D&G introduce in 1975’s Kafka: For a Minor Literature, and it stems from Kafka’s use of German — a major, dominant or imperial language — as a Czech Jew writing in and from Prague. Like “outside” or “affect,” “minor” is one of those ideas we could explore for days, but for our immediate purposes here, what makes something minor is its quality of resistance, transformation and invention. A minor science, therefore, isn’t simply one that flips the script on the knowledge of State, but one that uses that knowledge against itself to produce something completely new.

111. But let’s see what D&G themselves have to say about the matter. They start by adducing, from its occasional and fugitive appearances throughout the history of the West, a lineage of thought — a science — “that seems very difficult to classify…even difficult to follow.” And they describe the characteristics of this lineage: it conceives of the world in terms of fluid dynamics (“a hydraulic model”) rather than the interplay of solids; that model “is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant”; the model is “vortical,” not laminar, operating “in an open space throughout which thing-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things”; that model models not a “striated” space that “is counted in order to be occupied,” but a “smooth” space that “is occupied without being counted”; and — what was at my first encounter the subtlest and hardest for me to grasp among all these distinctions — it is “problematic,” not “theorematic.”

112. One probably has to have had a better mathematical education than I did for the sense of that last distinction to leap forth from the page, so let’s unfold it a little. When D&G describe something as “theorematic,” they’re invoking the history of geometry and formal logic to point out that a situation framed in this way proceeds to truth via a process of deduction. You are given a set of unproved axioms, and derive the theorem from their interaction, purely formally. But there’s something akin to a lack of curiosity in this process, a begged question. If you accept (“grant”) the truth of the axioms on the table, the theorem pops into being more or less automatically: “It follows that…” The solution is implicit in the starting position, and the rules of this toy system.

113. For D&G, the opposite of this closed system is the “problem.” Now I do not love the word “problem”: you’ve likely often enough heard me rant here about the roots of problem/solution framing in advertising, and in my systems theory-derived aversion to the notion that the challenges we face can even be constructed as problems which admit to solutions, even in principle. For me, “problem” is a concept with far too much freight of the wrong kind to be useful.

114. Sucks to be me, though, because “problem” is how D&G would prefer for us to construct situations. If a theorem is a narrowing cone of possibility that converges on a unitary truth, a problem is that cone turned around so that it perpetually opens out — a generative field that gives life to any number of solutions. Describing something as “problematic” in the D&G sense, then, is highly complimentary: it means something that’s a site of emergence, something that’s open, something that’s productive of novelty and difference. 

115. What they’re implying about a “nomad” or “minor” science with this laundry list of qualities should now be a little clearer. It isn’t simply the distinction between Kuhn’s “normal” science and the paradigm shift, though I’d be tempted to argue that much of the activity of a period of normal science necessarily has a theorematic quality to it. What I think they’re trying to capture is this quality of being perpetually open to the outside, porous and capable of being affected, where the “royal science” that is its opposite is not and cannot be. We’ll explore what we might be able to do with this nomad or minor science tomorrow.

116. For now: notes!

- The Wikipedia page on Alien and the conceptualization of the xenomorph is worth consulting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenomorph

- You can find the award-winning Peter Watts story “The Things” here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

- There’s a fairly comprehensive, if dense, discussion of Thomas Kuhn, “normal science” and the paradigm shift here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

§ Sequence Thirteen

117. So! “Nomadology”’s Proposition 3 has offered us the notion of a “nomad” or “minor science,” running alongside the “royal science” of the State as it has unfolded across history. And D&G tell us this nomad science has some characteristic approaches to knowing: it sees things in terms of hydraulics and flows and becomings rather than solids and stable states of being; it attends to (and produces) “smooth” spaces rather than the “striated,” reticulated spaces of the Cartesian grid; and it poses the situations it apprehends in terms of open-ended and generative “problems,” and not deductive, converging “theorems.”

118. I have to say that I remember being distinctly disappointed when I reached this passage, on my first reading at the age of 18. I’m certain that I’d picked the book up hoping that it was some kind of anarchoprimitivist manual — something that might teach me to be an urban Bedouin or Viet Cong or even Fremen, shrouded against the filth of the cindered, rodential Lower East Side. You can imagine my frustration, then, when I finally got to the “nomad science” touted in the title, only to find that it had something to do with geometrical proofs and “passages to the limit,” and that the “war machine” was something so obliquely metaphoric there didn’t seem to be much of either war or a machine in it. At this point in the book I was nonplussed: mostly it made me wish I’d paid more attention in calculus class; the references, allusions and invocations for the most part simply eluded me.

119. At the age of 57, though, I find this material fascinating. It’s a secret history! And who doesn’t love a secret history?

It is, specifically, an attempt to trace a lineage of thought as it wanders across the past few centuries of Western science. And that lineage — that minor science, bending the tools and practices of science against itself — is coupled to the figure of the war machine, just as royal science is to the State.

Because of what it is and how it works, it’s perpetually throwing up challenges to State knowledge, constantly generating new concepts and figures of thought that the State can only suppress or attempt to envelop and incorporate. “What State science retains of nomad science is only what it can appropriate; it turns what remains into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it.”

120. I bet you can think of a few pungent examples of just this sort of interrelation in recent history. You don’t have to be any sort of a positivist to see that science occasionally — and perhaps more than occasionally — produces perspectives on the world that are intolerable to stratified thought. And here I mean all stratified thought, not merely conservative or right-wing thought, or capitalist reason. All human communities have and are bound by unquestionable articles of faith, and sometimes it happens that those cannot be sustained in the face of some new perspective arriving from outside.

Nevertheless, a sufficiently robust community can always attempt to enfold and appropriate such perspectives, and put them to work on its own terms. And this is what D&G tell us the State and its royal science have most often done with the fruits of minor science. 

121. The passage that follows, sadly for me and maybe for you, is one of those that is largely given its sense by reference to a series of figures from the history of French thought: “Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, Carnot, Poncelet, Perronet, etc.” And though, indeed, it would be helpful for D&G to have elaborated who these figures were, and how their experiences inform the idea of nomad science, they merely note that “in each case a monograph would be necessary to take into account the special situation of these savants whom State science used only after restraining or disciplining them, after repressing their social or political conceptions.” Some of these names are more familiar than others, the internet is available and helpful in filling in the gaps in a way the library card catalogue would not have been in 1986, but even so this passage feels like it is bound to remain obscure to people not equipped with an elite French education.

122. This may or may not matter, because the thought comes to ground, and is succeeded by one of the most interesting passages in the book, about the sea and smooth space. This is “a specific problem for the war machine” — and remember the special sense in which D&G use that word, as something open-ended and generative. They invoke Paul Virilio, to note that “it is at sea that the problem of the fleet in being is posed, in other words the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement that can rise up at any point” [emphasis in original].

123. I don’t know why D&G felt it necessary to namecheck Virilio here, because I don’t personally think his treatment of the “fleet in being” particularly adds anything to the discussion. It’s a concept from naval strategy in the age of sail, and it both appears in a variety of guises down through centuries of military strategy and echoes “Nomadology”’s earlier discussion of the game of go. The fundamental idea (which we owe to the 17th century English admiral Lord Torrington) is that a naval force exerts influence simply by existing, even if it never leaves port. Like a stone placed on a go board, it radiates presence across the entire space of the sea. That fleet can potentially appear anywhere in that space, compelling an adversary to allocate resources, plan their own movements and maintain forces in reserve even if it never sets sail. In fact, the fleet radiates more influence in port, since committing it to one or another heading both risks its destruction at the enemy’s hands and, just as decisively, rules out the possibility of it appearing elsewhere.

124. Torrington’s notion informed military thought for centuries, down to and including the development of nuclear deterrence strategy, but D&G use it here to introduce a discussion of their distinction between the “smooth” space of the ocean and the “striated” space of land. And that discussion is central enough to their thought that we’ll pick it up tomorrow.

For now, today’s notes.

- Here’s an article on the fleet in being as it appears in naval history... https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1246&context=nwc-review

125. …and here’s Virilio’s treatment of the idea, in the 2006 edition of his 1977 “Speed and Politics,” from the same semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series that “Nomadology” itself appeared in, in 1986: https://monoskop.org/images/archive/c/c1/20170626060354%21Virilio_Paul_Speed_and_Politics_2006.pdf

Enjoy these, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more on D&G’s conception of smooth and striated spaces!

§ Sequence Fourteen

126. Aaaand we’re back! We’re still unfolding the distinction D&G make between “royal science” (and, implicitly, the “striated” spaces it emerges from & reproduces) and the way/s of knowing they call “nomad science” (and the “smooth” spaces that emerges from or reproduces). The discussion that follows is rather obscure for me, as (again) it presumably is for those not graced with either an elite French education or the specifically architectural history the whole passage pivots on. Let’s take things slowly.

127. D&G start by arguing there are times and places in history where the tension between a royal science and a nomad science becomes acute. And they draw on the work of French sociologist Anne Querrien – Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de l’état, a book whose title I freely translate as Becoming A Bureaucrat, or: The Work of The State, and to which, most curiously, the footnote in this volume appears to be the only reference, though Querrien herself surely exists – to identify two such moments. These are “the construction of Gothic cathedrals in the twelfth century [and] the construction of bridges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” And seeing as my erudition, such as it is, sadly encompasses neither of these moments, I’m forced to take the discussion of them that follows on faith.

128. It’s important, firstly, that we understand the contrast that emerges between Romanesque and Gothic techniques of cathedral construction not as a periodization or an evolutionary argument. In other words, the Romanesque and the Gothic were both possibilities that arose in a given envelope of technological or sociotechnical possibility. The difference between them is one of approach, not of temporality – but it’s profound.

129. The round arches, barrel vaults and thick walls that characterize Romanesque construction (and here I’m cribbing from sources I’ll share in the links) are laid out according to pre-established geometric models. These forms – the circle, the semicircle and so on – are specified to the builders by whatever secular or ecumenical authority is undertaking the project. The overall form is known in advance; the work involved is merely the execution of a model. The process is deductive, rather like the static, just-so “theorematic” approaches to a situation D&G have already associated with royal science. Bottom line, though: authority legislates a whole from above, then has it carried out; local initiative is minimal. This is the original TRVST THE PLAN!

130. But compare the Gothic cathedral (which I grew up thinking of as massively Earthbound and all “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” and had to learn to see as the most delicate thing the twelfth century knew how to make). It’s a confection of pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses. And what I hadn’t realized – maybe you did? – is that these forms emerged from the local, experimental practices of masons, working iteratively.

131. Rib vaults and the other appurtenances of Gothic construction allowed builders to test and adjust forces on the fly. The governing logic is inductive, “problematic,” adaptive, even generative: the form of Gothic cathedrals was adjusted in the very course of being built, in response to the specific pressures of gravitational load and material, not handed down a priori. What is being called upon here is a minor science: craft knowledge, empirical adjustments, improvisation, truth to the material rather than a static model imposed from above. These masons, dare I say it, stayed with the trouble.

132. I’d go so far as to say that the form of the Gothic cathedral is discovered rather than decreed, and this goes to the heart of the distinction I think D&G are trying to make. In any given historical moment, two tendencies coexist: a royal mode of knowledge, singular and imposed from above, and a minor or nomad mode, marked by multiple, distributed probes into the space of possibility. In one, matter is subordinate to form; in the other, form emerges from local experimentation and the interaction of matter and force.

133. This, anyway, is what I think they’re getting at by invoking Querrien, though I had to sit with articulations like “One does not represent, one engenders and traverses” for awhile before they yielded up sense as characterizations of nomad science at work. I don’t mind admitting I found this passage rather hard going, in other words, and had to do a fair amount of digging of my own for the point to really click.

134. I’m still thinking about the Fremen, actually, as a reading in the distinction between royal and nomad science, and vis à vis an insight that’s cropped up in my recent reading of Ingram’s book The Garden (i.e. that soil is a technology, that Indigenous management of the ecosystem on millennial timescales is virtually never recognized as such, etc.).

Recall that the Fremen are not in the slightest unsophisticated: that the stillsuits of their manufacture are far and away the best available, and so on. The Imperium looks at the Fremen and can see only barbarians, because the sophistication of their techne is expressed in terms of their supreme adaptation to a given environment. They have everything they need to thrive in that environment, and not a single thing besides that does not serve that purpose. Can we read this as the pinnacle expression of an in this case entirely literal nomad science?

135. And if you think this reading is a stretch, consider what Frank Herbert himself had to say, in terms that both recapitulate Taoist wisdom and anticipate Deleuze and Guattari: “[T]he mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience…A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.” There it is. There it is, in just about so many words.

136. And the implication, once again, is that where nomad science is compelled to develop an account of royal science as a matter of survival, royal science cannot even recognize nomad science as an alternate but valid set of possibilities. Whether in the case of the Fremen, or our own inability to understand the Amazon rainforest for what it is, Empire literally cannot even see that which constitutes its outside.

137. In a delicious irony, we can think of such exteriorities, for Empire, as what the SF writer Iain M. Banks called an “outside context problem” – “delicious” because the very first historical example of such a problem that folks often offer is the sails and horses and guns of the conquistadors, for a people who had never seen any of that and had no way to parse it. One can abscond from Empire’s vision by being so sophisticated it has no way of constructing the very thing it gazes upon. 

138. (What’s this about the Amazon? Ingram cites William Balée, author of Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes, to the effect that the “rainforest is a human artifact which occurred when, after the collapse of Amazonian civili[z]ation following the disastrous coloni[z]ation from 1500, flora and fauna took advantage of the staggering soil fertility left over from the now lost civili[z]ation.” I find this argument compelling. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/26080)

Notes: Here’s my main source on Gothic construction techniques: https://moodle.unifr.ch/pluginfile.php

§ Sequence Fifteen

139. We pick up the story where we’d left it: in the middle of a passage where D&G are trying to establish that the war machine’s absolute exteriority to the State is mirrored in two ways of knowing, lineages of thought they call “royal science” and “minor” or “nomad science.” And there’s an asymmetry between these: just as the State can only appropriate the war machine’s energies for itself by flattening and abstracting the very thing that generates those energies, royal science can only make use of the fruits of nomad science once they’ve been standardized, routinized, subjected to normalization operations. 

140. D&G invoke the work of the French sociologist Anne Querrien to consider two moments at which they feel nomad science and royal science are poised in clearest opposition: in the construction of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, starting in the European twelfth century, and then again in the engineering of bridges and roadways from the eighteenth century onward. 

141. This latter argument is somewhat curious, in that by that period, the construction of French bridges and roadways were both subject to State administration. (And with results that remain obvious even now. All roads may “lead to Rome,” but I suggest consulting a map of France to see just what a centralized imperial mobility network looks like.) “But the fact remains that in the government agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under a well-centralized administration while bridges were still the object of active, dynamic and collective experimentation.” And this sets up a tasty parallel: the top-down, a priori, theorematic architects of Romanesque cathedrals are to road engineers what the “journeyman” masons feeling their way through what the stone wanted in the crafting of a Gothic cathedral are to bridgebuilders.

142. The methods employed by the engineers of bridges were unorthodox. And, again, multiple, horizontal and collective, to the point that “[director of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees Daniel-Charles] Trudaine organized unusual, open ‘general assemblies’ in his home.” (A quibble here: D&G claim Trudaine for the nomad lineage of bridge builders, but they might have just as plausibly claimed the opposite, on the strength of the several thousand kilometers of royal routes he designed.)

143. What can we make of this “problematizing” spirit of curiosity, openness and collective experimentation, evidently surviving right at the pinnacle of the State’s own administration for the reticulation of the land? “What we wish to say...is that collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that reconstitute equivalents of the war machine — in sometimes quite unforeseen forms — in specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals, or rendering judgments, or making music, or instituting a science, a technology...”

144. Now, as true as this may be empirically, it frankly strikes me as a little bit of a fudge factor. Having spent a few thousand words stressing the absolute exteriority of the war machine to the State, the utter outsideness and unknowability of nomad science to royal thought…D&G now tell us that we can find bits of these processes strewn throughout Empire if we know how to look for them. And we can imagine this, right? We can, because we’ve seen it.

145. Sometimes they take the form of inclusions, survivals, encystments or encapsulations. Sometimes their otherness is consciously put to work internally, even nurtured and encouraged, as with “red teams,” “tiger teams” or OPFOR. Sometimes, indeed, the problematizing element resides in the echelon at the very top of the org chart: the renegade C-suite that has somehow set itself against the entire rest of the corporate body. I don’t want to make too much of this possibility, or, especially, romanticize it, but I do grant D&G’s premise.

146. How to square this seeming self-contradiction? Perhaps it is simply (as D&G would have it) that royal science can ultimately only leverage the products of nomad science, not its processes: “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round.” This gemlike little aphorism is as close to a koan as D&G ever get, which makes it an ideal place to break for tonight.

147. Tomorrow we’ll come back to the dense conversation leading up to that aphorism, which I’ve elided, and we’ll see if we can tease out what this all might mean.

- In the meantime, you may enjoy this brief overview of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees... https://www.inventionandtech.com/landmark_landing/80184

- …and this road map of France, in which the centralized design of the network is made most obvious. All it’s missing is a jaunty little M. Bibendum with a beret. https://about-france.com/photos/maps/france-motorway-map.jpg

§ Sequence Sixteen

148. I want to back up a step, in continuing our investigation into “Nomadology” today. Yesterday, we’d wrapped up by opening up the question of how “fringes or minorities” upholding the war machine’s nomad science could possibly survive inside institutions of State, given the stress D&G place on their absolute exteriority. In explication, they offer the enigmatic aphorism, “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round.” And they follow this by observing that “the specific characteristics of nomad science are what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it counters and the interaction ‘containing’ it.”

149. This passage seems, to me, to arc back toward the few pages immediately preceding it, rather than setting up the argument that follows, so my instinct is to dig back into those pages, and see if we can’t make them yield an accounting of what those “specific characteristics” are. There’s a problem here, though — definitely in the ordinary sense, though hopefully in the Deleuzian sense as well — which is that this material is fairly opaque to me, in just the way D&G’s detractors so often accuse them of being.

150. For one thing, it starts by invoking Husserl, a writer whose oeuvre and general stance I have precisely zero familiarity with. D&G tell us “he speaks of a protogeometry that addresses vague, in other words vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences...distinct from sensible things, but also from ideal, royal or imperial essences” [emphasis in original]. The move here appears to be using Husserl’s phenomenology to open up a way of thinking about the relationship between the virtual and the real that blows through the familiar Platonic doctrine of form. The “essence,” here, is neither the actual thing itself, firmly situated inside history, nor the exact, perfect, ideal, transcendent form of royal science, but a mysterious, third thing: “anexact, but rigorous” [emphasis in original].

151. I interpret this to mean that the royal essence is theorematic, received from above, and in this way infertile, where the “vague essence,” this vagabond artifact and instrument of a counterscience, is perpetually generative — something that remains close to lived, contingent, adaptive practices of reckoning with space, and moving through it. I confess to feeling a little lost here, though, a lostness which doesn’t simply turn on my manifest unfamiliarity with Husserl.

152. It has to do, rather, with the fact that I don’t know what this passage on “protogeometry” as a science of the “vague essence” gets them. This far in “Nomadology” — occasionally with some effort — I’ve been able to see how each successive chunk of ideation extends a line of flight, calls upon new metaphors and incarnations to elucidate the primary distinction the piece starts with. This is the first point at which I’ve felt myself completely at sea. Maybe I need to learn how to navigate smooth space myself?

That said, I sure would appreciate your thoughts on what work you think this passage is doing.

153. What follows, though, is far more readily graspable, because it compares the ways in which royal and minor science respectively organize work and “the social field through work.” This discussion will resonate for anyone who’s ever considered the Taylorist regime, read Foucault on disciplinary space or Scott on imperial land-use planning, or worked a job whose regulations came in a three-ring binder.

In order to draw the distinction they wish to convey most clearly, D&G return to the figures of the architect of Romanesque cathedrals and the journeyman crafting the Gothic equivalents.

154. The two most immediate axes of contrast they discuss here concern the division of labor (and its consequences for the autonomy and mobility of the laborer) and the conception of the task. And just as we need to remember that the Romanesque and Gothic styles are not periodizations or evolutionary developments, D&G also want us to understand that the division of labor in nomad science is no less sophisticated than that imposed by royal science, it’s just different.

155. Historically in France, and presumably elsewhere, the journeyman was mobile. (That the name in English seems to allude to this is an accident of etymology, the “journey” here deriving from the French journée or day, and referring to the fact that they had the right to be paid daily.) Masons traveled from project to project, site to site, learning skills and spreading knowledge as they went. This gave them an autonomy that was obnoxious to the State, which responded by “tak[ing] over management of the construction sites, merging all the divisions of labor together in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the manual, the theoretical and the practical, fashioned after the difference between ‘governors’ and ‘governed.’” 

156. Work was deskilled, all the intelligence necessary to the task of construction being withdrawn upstream, with the obvious consequence that it simultaneously became more of an exercise in abstraction — here again, the manipulation of exact, perfect, ideal, transcendent forms.

157. So where D&G tell us that both royal and minor science contain the concept of “the plane,” each handles that concept in markedly different ways: “The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman stands in contrast to the metric plane of the architect, which is on paper and offsite” [emphasis added]. I add the emphasis here because this is such a striking p/recapitulation of the many passages in Scott’s Seeing Like A State describing the (generally disastrous) results of abstract planning from afar. In fact, we might think of Scott’s “mētis,” which refers to the situated, local, embodied knowledge derived from lived experience, as the more practical, Earthbound cousin to nomad science.

158. The effect of moving the design of cathedrals to the plane of abstraction and the reproduction of ideal forms is, in fact, very similar to the processes Scott describes, in that we have no problem seeing the negative aspect of it, but tend to miss what it affirmatively produces. In D&G’s words, “Not only can it be said that there is no longer a need for skilled, or qualified, labor, but that there is a need for unskilled, or unqualified labor, for a dequalification of labor.” 

159. In other words, the method of royal science does not merely undercut the autonomy of those with craft skills, but also produces an affirmative demand for those who can uncomplainingly and undeviatingly execute an order issued to them from afar. These distinct methods and ways of knowing open onto different social orders — in fact, onto entirely different worlds.

Shall we leave things there for today?

160. Notes:

- Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Husserl: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/

- …and, from the same source, one on Plato’s distinction between matter and form: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/

- And here, in its entirety, is Scott’s magisterial Seeing Like A State: https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf

§ Sequence Seventeen

161. We have arrived at the question of why the State needs to suppress nomad science, and the answer D&G offer is, at first, startling in its straightforwardness: it isn’t for any other reason but the one we began to get into yesterday, i.e. that nomad science and royal science propose two differing divisions of labor, and the one upheld by the former is “opposed to the norms of the State.” And then they go on to say something fascinating, though a whole lot less straightforward, as though it followed semi-obviously from the question of the division of labor: royal science is “hylomorphic.”

162. The word descends from Aristotelian thought, in which it signifies the juncture of hyle (“matter”) with morphē (“form”). A hylomorphic schema is one in which matter is conceived as something passive and inert, waiting to be given shape by an active form. This is the scenario of the old Heptones roots-reggae classic “Book of Rules”:

Each is given a bag of tools

A shapeless mass

and the book of rules

163. And this implies many things at once. First, of course, it implies a profound ontological hierarchy, with all of the grandeur (agency, intelligence, creativity, will, value) living with the one doing the shaping. It also implies that matter is abject: that it lacks tendencies or propensities or agential capacities of its own, and can only accept. And it opens onto a world in which education, training, employment, and the broader organization of the social order are all arranged to accomplish operations of this form. The limits imposed by a hylomorphic schema are well established in left critique — you may be familiar, for example, with Paulo Freire’s “banking model of education,” where knowledge is conceived of as something deposited by teachers in students. (Ew.)

164. But D&G mean to go further, to take a still deeper cut. It is true, they tell us, that “this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed...intellectuals and manual laborers.” But then they take a step back: “What characterizes [the hylomorphic schema] is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression.” And “[i]t seems that nomad science is more immediately sensitive to the connection between content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms encompassing both form and matter” [emphasis added]. 

165. This strikes me as having the most profound implications for anyone who works “creatively” in any medium whatsoever. What D&G are suggesting is that — at least for minor science — all such work has the character of a negotiation. The mason wants to roof a void; the stone tells them where it can be struck without fracturing. The guitarist wants to evoke regret, and the string held at this fret can only sound triumph. I want to convey a certain sense, and the conventions of English expression and the structures that mediate language in the brain constrain me to a relatively narrow path in doing so. Nobody stands alone, above, Promethean and wreathed in lightning, and sheds form onto the world. All acts of creation are, and must be, conversations. These conversations may be asymmetrical, to be sure — but they are never simply in the way of stamping an imprint onto a blank and receptive sheet of paper.

166. So “the division of labor fully exists, but does not imply the form-matter duality (even in the case of one-to-one correspondences). Rather, it follows the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of those connections, whether they be natural or forced. This is another organization of work and of the social field through work.”

167. I mean: whew. Yes it is, isn’t it? And if we are very lucky, those of us immured in State cultures might get to feel what a social field organized in that way might feel like a couple of times in our lives, possibly for as long as a few months at once. The collaborative workshop, the meaningful conversation, the jam, even pallid simulacra like Burning Man: all irruptions of this nomad logic and its organization of labor into lives otherwise characterized by an all-too-vertical ordering of form and matter, medium and expression.

168. From here we proceed into a discussion of Plato, and the Platonic notions of compars and dispars…but that’s sufficiently daunting that I think we should take it up from a fresh start tomorrow.

Notes! Here, again, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is their entry on form and matter: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/

- Paulo Freire’s “banking model of education” is discussed in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” in full here: https://files.libcom.org/files/Paulo%20Freire,%20Myra%20Bergman%20Ramos,%20Donaldo%20Macedo%20-%20Pedagogy%20of%20the%20Oppressed,%2030th%20Anniversary%20Edition%20(2000,%20Bloomsbury%20Academic).pdf

169. And here are Kingston’s own Heptones, with their big hit of 1973, “Book of Rules”: https://open.spotify.com/track/4PKri4OX2AB2RXj95Y9ZgB

See you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!

§ Sequence Eighteen

170. OK! We’re back into “#Nomadology,” w/further thoughts on the distinction between “royal” and “nomad” ways of knowing.

The discussion here is one of those passages where either D&G’s understanding of the sciences is so much subtler and so far exceeds my own that some of the specific analogies they are making remain obscure to me, or they are waving their hands and talking complete bollocks. But either way, it is still possible for me to retrieve sense from the argument, and that sense is valuable.

171. Their starting move is, once again, to define two “models of science,” and bring them into contrast w/one another: compars and dispars (which, as the English word “disparity” implies, appear to be rough Latin equivalents for “equal” and “unequal”). In doing so, they make new entries on either side of a growing ledger of terminology: compars belongs with royal science, logos, striated space, theorematicity, and the State apparatus, while dispars belongs to the order of minor science, nomos, smooth space, problematicity and the war machine. And D&G tell us that compars is the search for laws, for regularity, for an “invariable form for variables.” It is not merely a grid draped over the known, but a gridness extending itself into every dimension at once, in a fiercely boiling wavefront of reticulation: “an independent dimension capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other dimensions…of striating space in all of its directions, so as to render it homogeneous” [emphasis added].

172. By contrast, dispars is the art of the “clinamen” – the minimal curvature, the just noticeable difference. “Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables, but of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation.” And this next bit is, for me, beautiful: “If there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations…irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible intuition of variation.”

173. That “sensible” is critical: D&G mean for us to feel our way through smooth space, using all the faculties of sense at our disposal – and this, the better to reckon with the particularity and irreducibility of the things we encounter. The senses “seize or determine singularities in the matter, instead of constituting a general form. They effect individuation by way of events or haecceities, not by way of the ‘object’ as a compound of matter or form.” 

174. And that word “haecceity”? Whoooo. Coming down to us from the thirteenth-century theologian Duns Scotus, this may be the most Buddhist-flavored word in the Western philosophical canon, denoting the isness, the ineffable thusness of something.

So where the procedure D&G associate with striated space (and therefore the royal science that produces such spaces) is “reproducing,” the parallel procedure for smooth space and the detection of haecceities is “following” – “the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences.” And these sciences “consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many ‘accidents’ (problems).”

175. Here I’m strongly reminded of the quote with which the philosopher of science Lucy Suchman kicks off her 1985 classic Plans and Situated Actions:

“Thomas Gladwin (1964) has written a brilliant article contrasting the method by which the Trukese navigate the open sea, with that by which Europeans navigate. He points out that the European navigator begins with a plan – a course – which he has charted according to certain universal principles, and he carries out his voyage by relating his every move to that plan…

176. “His effort throughout his voyage is directed to remaining 'on course.' If unexpected events occur, he must first alter the plan, then respond accordingly. The Trukese navigator [by contrast] begins with an objective rather than a plan. He sets off toward the objective and responds to conditions as they arise in an ad hoc fashion. He utilizes information provided by the wind, the waves, the tide and current, the fauna, the stars, the clouds, the sound of the water on the side of the boat…and he steers accordingly. His effort is directed to doing whatever is necessary to reach the objective. If asked, he can point to his objective at any moment, but he cannot describe his course.” [Gerald Berreman, 1966]

177. The contrast Suchman draws from this account – that between transcendent, a priori, from-above-and-outside planning and immersed, immanent, experiential, real-time “situated actions” – seems to me to correspond closely with D&G’s contrast of compars and the striation of space by royal science, vs. dispars as the experiential negotiation of the world’s particularity. With each example, with each analogy and metaphor, we get closer to understanding that compars is “the form of interiority of all science”: the will to enclose, reticulate, reduce and render tractable that which properly cannot be, which is to say…everything.

178. Here, again, it feels to me that D&G approach a Taoist or early Zen perspective on matters: things must be reckoned with as they are, in their isness, and that isness is accessible to the senses – but it is permanently resistant to conceptualization, reproduction, representation or communication. A nomad science, they seem to me to be saying, permits things to be as they are, grasps and apprehends them as such, and does not require them to be brought inside to come into productive relation with them. (I would say “to make use of them,” but that formulation strikes me as being exactly what we don’t want to uphold.)

179. So while this whole compars/dispars passage is prolix in a way that indulges some of D&G’s worst tendencies, it is in the end also astonishingly generative for me. With the sideways leap to Suchman, particularly, it really helped me fill in the picture – to understand how a nomad science might grasp the phenomenal world, and by grasping it proceed to a different kind of knowledge.

180. Oh, I can’t resist making this point, either: my method of approach to this very text strongly corresponds to nomad science as we are beginning to flesh it out. I am feeling my way through the text slowly, with great care, asking of every singularity I encounter within its pages what it is in its full, autonomous particularity. I am – and I hope you are, as well – finding the way from one understanding to another by way of these toeholds or turning points, mapless but unafraid. Great fun.

181. Notes! Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the “subtle doctor,” Duns Scotus… https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/

- …and the original, Xerox PARC version of Lucy Suchman’s “Plans and Situated Actions”: https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/ISL-6_Plans_and_Situated_Actions.pdf

I’ll be back with more “Nomadology” tomorrow, if I can fit it into my flight to Amsterdam & the talk I’m giving there. See you then!

§ Sequence Nineteen

182. We are still in the midst of an extended passage distinguishing two approaches to epistemology — two contrasting ways of knowing that D&G associate with their figures of the State apparatus and the war machine, ways they refer to as “royal” and “nomad” or “minor science” respectively.

183. And they’ve thrown a bunch of different metaphors at these concepts, in the attempt to clarify how each works in the world, and I’ve in turn recruited some material from arbitrarily far afield — Lucy Suchman, for example, and her Plans and Situated Actions — to see how the distinction they’re making chimes with my own epistemic frames.

184. Briefly, as a refresher, royal science is the State’s mode of knowledge. It is consecrated to the reproduction of templates delivered from above, the use of those templates to reliably impose form on passive matter (“hylomorphism”), the equally passive execution of a plan devised at and by the center. It conceives of the world theorematically and deductively.

185. And the contrasting nomad science, well, that occupies the opposite position of all these antimonies. It’s inductive, conceives of situations as generative “problems,” is attentive to the local and the singular. It follows the grain of whatever material it sets itself to work with, cocreates form with what it encounters. And it results in a different division of labor — in creativity, autonomy, power residing with the mobile agents who take it up as practice — in a way that is deeply uncongenial to the State.

186. Without leaving this subdivision of the text, D&G begin to argue that royal and minor sciences (strong version) produce or (more weakly) are associated with different kinds of space: respectively, “striated” and “smooth.” And striated and smooth spaces, in turn, require different kinds of conceptualization, and afford different kinds of movement through them.

The distinction they offer is between “reproducing” and “following”: “The first has to do with reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, having to do with itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences.”

187. I can see that this is precisely the kind of passage that vexes certain readers of D&G, and of theory more broadly, to the point of rage. I can understand how this might seem like overclever wordplay, choking the page with language without producing meaning. But though I’ve certainly had to exercise some patience to get here, I’ve actually come to enjoy this kind of construction. There is a meaningful difference being articulated here, and it has to do with what it is we think knowledge is for.

188. Are we seeking to throw a net over the phenomena our mind encounters, wrestle them down, superimpose over them a grid that helps us understand them in terms of the things we already know? Or are we inclined, rather, to move with them, to follow their rhythms, to let ourselves be changed by the encounter and emerge as something different? It seems to me that that’s what they’re getting at, or at least, that’s how I’m choosing to understand this opposition.

189. D&G have a good deal more to say about the difference between “reproducing” and “following,” but I’ll let things rest here for today — no need for us to do anything but ease back into this conversation, and we’ll pick it up again tomorrow.  In the meantime, why not go ahead and let me know what thoughts following this reading has produced for you? I’m always interested to hear how others respond to these ideas.

§ Sequence Twenty

190. The rest of this section of the text consists of an extended riff on the distinction between “reproducing” and “following,” the latest in the succession of terms D&G use to qualify their categories of royal and nomad science.

191. The passage once again approaches the quality of the lyrical, but it’s a lyricism of an odd sort: strewn with technical vocabulary, with terms and concepts deployed in ways that might or might not make sense to anyone used to seeing them in their originary contexts. For the most part, those contexts are mathematical, physical, geometrical; we get musings on “tangent Euclidean space” and “parallelisms between two vectors,” and while I’m tempted to bust out my math texts and subject these passages to a really fine-toothed reading, I don’t actually think that would yield much in the way of light. The meaning accretes, surely and steadily, simply by “following” the text in precisely the way they characterize as a practice of the “ambulant sciences.”

192. The nub of this distinction goes, again, to how the researcher — the reader, thinker, “scientist” — constructs their relation to the field of study and practice. Are they outside it, and looking down on it from above? Or are they committed to it, and subject to the play of all the forces they encounter there? (I’m sorely tempted to read this as metacommentary on the role of the French intelligentsia post-1968, but I’ll leave that to those who are more knowledgeable about the relevant history.)

193. But it yields this beautiful passage, or beautiful to me, anyway:

“Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view [emphasis in original] that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the ‘singularities’ of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form...

194. “And the meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. ‘Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the plants that are growing in between are yours. Later...you can extend the size of your territory.’”

195. The quote is from that beloved old fraud Carlos Castaneda, who may or may not have invented the “Yaqui teachings” of his putative respondent Don Juan Matus from whole cloth. I don’t think it’s fully possible to convey now just how ubiquitous Castaneda’s book was, once upon a time and among a certain stratum of people, so it’s possibly less startling to encounter these words deterritorialized from that context and reterritorialized here than it might be otherwise. But the quote does what D&G need it to, and does so in a few dimensions at once.

196. Firstly, of course, if we take it as face value, as a set of instructions for reckoning a claim to some portion of the surface of the Earth, it bears no resemblance to the cadastral procedures imposed by State geometers. It is an unwilled thing of rain, flows, seeds, runnels. The claim fans out across the land, obedient to the accidents and singularities it encounters as it moves (or “follows”). It will not extend equally in all directions at once. It will follow the dictates of a logic that has no need of grids, theodolites, geodetic fiducials. It is still a claim: not better, but different.

197. But the method has also (ostensibly) been vouchsafed to the listener, Castaneda, by the wizened old Yaqui shaman don Juan, and we are told that he in turn received his understanding of the Earth from his encounters with the spirit of the peyote cactus.

I cannot imagine a better figure of contrast for D&G: compare a State geometer like Poincaré at the Bureau des Longitudes, projecting a grid upon the very Earth itself, to “don Juan,” baked out of his mind, crawling across the floor of the Sonoran desert trailing his fingers through the loam. (Whether or not he ever existed is, of course, immaterial.) Two completely different ways of apprehending a field of relations. And again, I know which method of knowing I’d rather pursue: not better, but different.

198. Notes! Here’s a full version of “The Teachings of Don Juan,” in the colorful Ballantine edition you may remember from that era... https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/C/Castaneda%20-%20The%20Teachings%20of%20Don%20Juan.pdf

- …and here’s a scholarly 1984 defense of Castaneda against his critics, should you be interested in such a thing: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43853017

- Here’s a little potted history of the Bureau des Longitudes. It still exists! https://www.imcce.fr/institut/histoire-pat

§ Sequence Twenty-One

199. Before we leave this opposition of royal and nomad sciences behind, though, D&G want us to attend to the field of their interaction — though, in fairness, the examples they offer mostly seem to concern the capture and encapsulation of insights offered up by the latter on the part of the former.

200. Possibly referring back to their slipstream invocation of don Juan Matus, there is a lovely bit here here they explain that “[i]t is not that the ambulant sciences are more saturated with irrational procedures, mystery and magic. They only get that way when they fall into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also surround themselves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what comes out in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sciences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to have an autonomous development.” 

201. What they appear to me to mean here is that there’s something self-contained or even self-completing about the practice of nomad science — I’m tempted, even, to say “solipsistic.” One can get so bound up in the process of following, they seem to be saying, that the process expands to become the totality of life, in a way that challenges its operationalization for ends external to the pursuit in itself. You want a cathedral? Then you better have someone on hand to abstract and reproduce what I’m doing, because I’m perfectly happy following the curve of force as it refracts through this particular chunk of stone.

202. This feels very close indeed to the point I’ve been trying to make, these past few years, when I argue against the notion of “scale” as an imperial logic, the logic of the enemy. Every time I hear someone ask, “Yes, but how will this scale?”, in other words, what I’m hearing is a demand that some solution to a local problem, generated by the application of a nomad science, be lifted up out of that context and reproduced, precisely by the application of a royal science. It turns out that these terms are not abstractions, but figures of thought that concretely shape our response to the various struggles we confront in life. And I imagine that just about every one of us will have some example of this dynamic playing out in our lives.

203. So the next time someone asks you about “scale,” it’s worth remembering that what they’re asking for is nothing less than a translation from one frame of value to another — and, what’s more, one which is certain to be lossy. But, again: the fruits of the ambulant sciences are not better, but different. There may well be certain legitimate ends in the world that require the application of a royal science, with all the risks and all the habits of thought we know it entrains.

204. The example D&G offer, broadly, is safety. They nod at the recognition that the State generally requires a kind of safety (security, the “consistency” we are told “the markets like”), but what they mean specifically and concretely is how to design a cathedral that does not collapse. “[C]ontrol calculations,” it turns out, “are difficult to effect for the constructions of ambulant science”: “the ambulant sciences confine themselves to inventing problems [emphasis in original] the solution of which is linked to an entire set of collective, nonscientific activities, but the scientific solution [ditto] to which depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus and its organization of work.” Whew!

205. And they conclude by invoking the Bergsonian distinction between intuition and intelligence, where “only intelligence has the scientific means to solve formally the problems posed by intuition.” Kekulé dreams of the snake eating its own tail, in other words, but then wakes up and works out the structure of the benzene ring conventionally. The dream needs the equations to do meaningful work in the world......but the calculations can never be posed without the dream.

206. And here we bring the passage distinguishing royal or State science from nomad, minor or ambulant science to its end.

Notes: Here’s a piece on Bergson’s “intelligence” and “intuition” (here glossed slightly differently as “intellect” and “instinct”): https://grantmaxwellphilosophy.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/intellect-and-intuition-in-henri-bergson/

- And here’s the conventional take on Kekulé’s dream of the snake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9's_dream

We’ll proceed to the next section of #Nomadology tomorrow!

§ Sequence Twenty-Two

207. OK! We’re onto the next subdivision of #Nomadology, which appears thusly in the text:

Problem 2: Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?

Proposition 4: The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, finally, by noology.

In the wake of our extended consideration of the entanglement of royal and nomad science, that first bit’s transparent enough. And at this point we’re sufficiently immersed in D&Gese that even “the exteriority of the war machine” reads straightforwardly. But “noology”? What’s going on there?

208. When I first picked up this text in ’86, any concern for “noötropics” still lay a few years in the future, interred in a yet-to-be-unfolded stratum of Mondo 2000s and Psychic TV remixes. But I’m willing to bet I’d already come across Teilhard de Chardin and his notion of the “noösphere.” Maybe in Greg Bear’s great novel Blood Music? Or a Colin Wilson paperback, left behind by some girlfriend’s older brother? Either way, I would have had a vague intuition that we were in the realm of thought.

209. And indeed that’s what we’ll be taking up in this section: an inquiry into thought itself. The musing on thought which opens the section strikes me now as being pretty densely seeded with tacit references or allusions we have already characterized as having emerged from an elite French education of the twentieth century. That is to say that I can detect echoes in the phrasing — I’m just not sure what they’re echoes of. So feel free to chime in if it’s obvious to you what they’re riffing on here.

210. We’re told that “thought as such” is “already in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs.” It’s not clear to me whether they mean for this to be a universal statement about human subjects or thinking-agents, but being charitable, sure: we can see ways in which at least many of the canonical European and North American thinkers whose names we’d recognize might be said to display thought templated in just this way.

211. In fact, this template is “an image of thought spanning all thought,” “which is like the State-form developed in thought.” And in a callback to the expansion on the “two-headed” nature of the State apparatus with which we began — remember all that material about Rex and flamen, Varuna and Mitra? — we’re assured further that “this image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty.”

212. The first they characterize as the “imperium of true thinking,” emphasis in original, which is opposed to another tendency they characterize as “a republic of free spirits.” And on first reading it’s immediately tempting to identify these with, oh, say, Apollonian and Dionysian ways of being in the world. But there’s a curveball waiting for us here: D&G pair “the imperium of true thinking” with mythos, telling us that it “operat[es] by magical capture, seizing or binding,” while “the republic of free spirits” belongs to the order of logos! It “proceed[s] by pact or contract, constituting a legislative or juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground.”

213. And the truly salient point about this opposition — they do love their binary oppositions, don’t they, D&G? — is that the “imperium of true thought” and the “republic of free spirits” are necessary to one another. Just as, in the domain of application, royal and nomad science display a certain sort of asymmetrical-but-reciprocal relation, the imperium and the republic orbit one another with the jerky rhythm of a binary star: “the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the first...antithetical and complementary, they are necessary to one another.”

214. This, understood in fullness, is one hell of a sobering insight. It’s the very model of all those ways in which some ostensibly wild vector of thought (and, I think we can read, cultural practice) not merely “feeds” or “is captured by” or even “stabilizes” conservative thought, but is the very precondition of that thought’s development. So it isn’t — as we once noted despairingly, but with quiet self-congratulation — that the Situationism of May ‘68 expressed in the collages of Jamie Reid found its way first onto couture t-shirts via Malcolm McLaren, and thereupon, denatured, decontextualized, stepped on and commodified, onto the racks of every Hot Topic in existence. It’s that the Situationism was always already the dark twin of State thought, pulled headlong down the gravity ramp to drive the State’s own expansion. Both phases or moments of this cycle belong in their entirety to State thought!

215. Well, this is beginning to feel claustrophobic — if not Negrian, in its insistence that Empire can have no outside. Isn’t there any way to think the world that doesn’t ultimately inscribe template after template on the raw matter of being, world without end? Well! “It is not out of the question, however” — and note the contingency, the unaccustomed tentativity — “that in order to pass from one to the other there must occur, ‘between’ them, an event of an entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place outside.”

Whew, what a relief! Come back tomorrow, and we’ll see if we can’t get D&G to tell us a little more about what that event consists of, and how we might induce its coming into being.

216. Notes! The heterodox Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) prefigured our moment in some fascinating ways. You can read more about his concept of the “noösphere” here: https://teilhard.com/2013/08/13/the-noosphere-part-i-teilhard-de-chardins-vision/

- The ever-credulous Colin Wilson, whether despite or because of that very credulity, offered his late twentieth-century readers (and certainly me in 1988, lying alone up in my hacked-together loft bed in the flat above the Third Avenue pizza joint) true glimpses of thought from outside. A list of his major works is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson_bibliography

- You know Jamie Reid’s work, even if you don’t recognize the name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_BollocksHere%27sthe_Sex_Pistols#/media/File:Never_Mind_the_BollocksHere'sthe_Sex_Pistols.png

217. And here are two perspectives on the “Events” of May ‘68, the first from the mainstream: https://frenchly.us/what-happened-may-1968-mai-68/

- …and the second from the POV of a few political currents I have more sympathy for, including primary documents: https://libcom.org/article/france-1968-reading-guide

Enjoy those, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!

§ Sequence Twenty-Three

218. We’re back! To recap, we’re into a section on noölogy, which D&G gloss for us as “the study of images of thought, and their historicity.” 

At issue is whether thought can be extricated from the State model, or “image,” or, conversely, if we are bound to endlessly reproduce that image and its strictures in our own style of thought, as “a center that makes everything, including the State, appear to exist on its own efficacity [?] or on its own sanction.” This latter possibility, if it turned out to be the case, would seem to be fatal for projects with ambitions to develop outside or beyond the State — cutting them off deep in their prehistory, severing them from their sources of energy, not even permitting their formulation. “Indeed, by developing thought in this way, the State-form gains something essential: an entire consensus.” 

219. This passage goes on to elaborate what is at stake, should we permit that image or Image to govern our imaginings:

“Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of the universality of law.”

Well, we all recognize this, don’t we? D&G are naming the frustration of everyone who’s ever tried to have a conversation with Serious People — those who get to define the terms, the standards of comparison and the frames of reference. They’re describing the exhaustion of the anarchist explaining mutual aid to the New York Times reporter, and getting only blank stares in response. In other words, they’re describing a condition of hegemony, just as Gramsci would have it, in which a regnant common sense imposes just-about airtight strictures over what can be thought or asserted if you wish to be taken seriously. 

220. And there does seem to be one particular image of thought they hold responsible for enacting what we might call the conditions of possibility for this hegemony, though they don’t here name it as such: German idealism itself. Common sense, D&G tell us, is “the State consensus raised to the absolute.” And this “was most notably the great operation of the Kantian ‘critique,’ renewed and developed by Hegelianism.” For all those who descend from this line, the Idea itself has puissance in the world: force, the ability to transform material conditions. It is realer than real.

221. In the history of the West, there has been a precession of roles entrusted with the manipulation of the Idea, a series of symbolic operators that begins with the poet and eventually includes philosophers and sociologists. They characterize these practitioners of the Idea as “image trainers” — a particularly brutal phrase, that. And the image they train us on leaves us unable to think the world in any way that doesn’t simply clone-stamp the implicate order of relations they take as a given, superimposing a ghostly State logic over everything we might encounter to the point that only the State is real for us.

Grim stuff. Again: airless.

222. But! Felicitously, “noölogy is confronted by counterthoughts” — note the plural — which are violent in their acts, discontinuous in their appearances, and the existence of which is mobile in history.” In other words, there is an escape hatch from the Idea and the image of State thought it incontinently propagates across the entire field of the real.

D&G tell us that these counterthoughts “are the acts of a ‘private thinker,’ as opposed to a public professor,” and they name three candidates: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, “or even” Chestov (the Russian existentialist generally rendered in English as “Shestov,” born Yeguda Lev Shvartsman). And then this gorgeous encomium: “Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images.”

223. Wow: #goals, right? I’m sure as shootin’ not here to tell you what to do, but I think we could all do a whole lot worse than to live in such a way that it is said of us that wherever we dwell, it is the steppe or the desert.

But in the end, the epithet “private thinker” is unsatisfactory, “because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought” [emphasis in original]. What’s more, “although this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already interlaced with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here.”

224. For me, anyway, this is among the most lyrical passages in the entire project — the most romantic, even. And it may be worth remembering that, while we generally describe this body of thoughtwork as “Deleuzian,” the whole enclosing project is after all called Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and calls significantly upon Félix Guattari’s work as a clinician and practitioner of counterpsychiatry. “Outside thought” is something he would have had concrete, intimate, durational and quite possibly poignant experience of, “extremely populous solitudes” in no way a contradiction in terms for the people he worked and thought alongside for years.

225. Let’s let that marinate overnight, shall we? We’ll come back to it tomorrow. For now: notes.

- Here’s a cogent overview of Gramsci’s concepts of ideology and hegemony from a Marxist perspective: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/tr-gramsci.htm

- …and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Idealism — what you really want is the material from Kant forward: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ide

- From the same source, a comprehensive account of Kierkegaard’s work: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/

226. My own personal Nietzsche remains, in a great many ways, the one I first encountered in Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to The Portable Nietzsche, complete PDF here: https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/the-portable-nietzsche-walter-kaufmann.pdf

- I found this account of Shestov helpful in situating him, with apologies for the Tablet link: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/lonely-prophet-of-jewish-awakeness

That’s it for now. See you tomorrow!

§ Sequence Twenty-Four

227. So here we are: confronted with the prospect of being marooned with a single Image of thought that reproduces the State entire. What and all that is offered to us under the sign of this Image is a clammy airlessness that leaves us crowded in with the inane reinscription of the same, and no way to think the outside.

228. Until, that is, someone arrives on the scene whose thought is the outside. This “counterthought” smashes the Image, performs an all-but-literal iconoclasm. At first, D&G suggest we can think of such iconoclasms as the acts of a “private thinker.” But then — perhaps realizing that another, perfectly lossless way of saying “private thinker” is “idiot” — they pronounce themselves dissatisfied with this framing.

229. What they propose instead is a kind of thought that’s “already a tribe, the opposite of a State.” And importantly, “this form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of interiority.”

If what you truly want to do is undermine hegemony, in other words, it isn’t enough to simply substitute a new and improved Image for the old one — or, for that matter, a revised and updated conception of the intellectual for the State thinker. The specific form of exteriority of thought “is not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus” [emphasis in original]: “It is, rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just or the Right (Cartesian truth, the Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.).”

230. Wellllll now. I don’t know if, in life, either Félix Guattari or Gilles Deleuze ever had any personal experience of Zen meditation. But I’m not the first person to have picked up on the strong resonances between their notion of an Image-smashing counterthought and Zen practice. (I’ll share the reflections of others who’ve picked up on this resonance in today’s notes.) 

231. In fact, if you’re interested in a decent account of just what the practitioner is doing on their cushion, “smashing the Image of thought” — or more properly still, continuously renewing one’s awareness of its formal emptiness — “in the practice of counterthought” is not too shabby a start. This wouldn’t have occurred to me on my first encounter with “Nomadology”: as an undergrad in the New York of the mid-‘80s, even a first taste of Zen practice still lay half a decade in my future and the whole breadth of a continent away. But the parallel is irresistible to me now, and helps me fairly readily make sense of a passage I would have found completely confounding then.

232. Zen, of course, was not the only unimage of counterthought available to D&G; if nothing else, Guattari’s clinical experience certainly furnished them with others. But they were themselves aware of the resonance: “Thought is like the Vampire, it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another, but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target.” A novel enough interpretation of Herrigel, perhaps — and Herrigel’s “Zen” was of course already just that, and no more — but for all that, not without its own puissance and applicability.

233. One frustrating thing, though, once you’ve glimpsed all the ways in which Deleuzian (counter)thought closes the gap with the nondual un- or nonideation of Zen, is why they didn’t simply point their readers at whatever local sangha they had access to, and enjoin them to put in some time on the cushion. But there are many paths that lead to the desert, and any number of fingers pointing at the moon.

234. Shall we leave things there, for now? This is already a fair amount to take in, and I want us to have done so before taking up the rather embarrassing construction of “race” as nomad thought that closes out the section.

Notes: Here’s an article on resonances one reader perceives between Zen and Deleuze’s body of work: https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.2016v41n3a3188

- …and what may be more accessible, a Reddit thread plying the same waters: https://www.reddit.com/r/Deleuze/comments/

235. And here’s Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery in full, on archive.org. It’s worth us noting what so often gets glossed blithely over, especially in early, sentimental Western Buddhist discussions of Herrigel: he was a Nazi, and not merely a “sympathizer” but an active member of the NSDAP and its cultural organizations. His interpretation of Zen cannot possibly have gone uninflected by his own affinity for the romantic elements in National Socialist thought. https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.506186/page/7/mode/2up

§ Sequence Twenty-Five

236. Finally! We return to our long slow consideration of #Nomadology! Welcome back.

Here we leave behind the question of noölogy — of royal or State thought, versus its nomad or minor others — and take up a somewhat different, more concrete set of concerns. Our arrival at this point is set off in the text thusly:

Axiom 2: The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution)...

237. As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatio-geographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.

Proposition 5: Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war machine in space.

What follows immediately is a rather lyrical account of that “spatio-geographic” aspect of the nomad war machine, describing how the nomad body is in space, how it makes space, and how that relation to space makes a subject.

238. But before we get into that, I think it’s worth noting that D&G’s Axiom 2 is careful to make a distinction they’ve so far in this text tended to regard as not needing to be made: that between the nomad war machine and the State military functions, processes and formations which may appear to be its cognates.

I take this as their being just a little nervous about the reader retaining the sense of an argument that’s both clear to them, and central to what they’re trying to say. The Army is not…

239. …a war machine, remember; nor are any of its officers, NCOs or enlisted personnel; nor are any of its tools, weapons, logistical systems or algorithms. The war machine is something that comes from outside, because it is the outside.

And for the first time in the text, D&G describe that outside in some richness. The passage accounting for the nomad’s sojourn in space is, again, lyrical, even beautiful. Of course, D&G tell us, the nomad interacts with all the familiar elements of space, things

240. like territories and points and paths — they’re still embodied, still inside history and still occupying the space and time of the physical universe. But they understand these elements differently than the State does, and their relationship to them as well.

Here they make a distinction between the sedentary, for whom the point is all, and for whom the path is never anything more than a route between points; the migrant, for whom the path is but a necessary, temporary condition; and the nomad…

241. …for whom all points are merely adjuncts to further onward movement. The desert well “is reached only to be left behind”; “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay”; “the life of the nomad is the intermezzo.”

For me, reading this in mid-to-late middle age, this description is already soothing and a solace in a way it could not possibly have been at eighteen. And it has those qualities because it rather elegantly confers dignity on a life that, from other perspectives, may well seem to…

242. …elude consistency or the accumulation of worldly merit. What D&G explicitly authorize here is a permanently peripatetic condition — of the body, of thought, of becoming — that rejects or fails to recognize or simply bypasses “place” (in all its qualities of position, turf or territory) in favor of something else, something that they call “deterritorialization.”

I can’t tell you what a gift this is to come across, how welcoming and comforting this passage is for those of us who, willy-nilly,

243. have never made our homes in any one place, either literally, disciplinarily, intellectually or politically.

But there’s another aspect to the nomad’s relation with the path as well, which is that while they may well “follow trails or customary routes,” their use of these “does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people” [emphasis in original]. Thinking of the path as being a conduit from A to B, in other words, reifies “A” & “B” as places.

244. And once so reified, they become the buckets of a sorting operation (indeed, I’d go so far to say, the attractor poles of a schismogenetic process): if you are like this, you belong here, but if you’re like that, well then, you’d surely be happier (and will probably be safer) over there. The path becomes the means of duality, distinction and the inscription of identity.

And there’s a tangible difference between the kinds of spaces produced by sedentary thought and those generated by nomads:

245. …here again resurfaces the distinction between “striated” and “smooth” space.

For the sedentary, space rapidly becomes reticulated by a grid of property relations, parceled up, striated by “walls, enclosures and roads between enclosures.” For the nomad, though, all of this disappears: space is “marked only by ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.” (Recall the Trukese navigator, plying routes between atolls a thousand miles apart, guided only by sign of wind and wave.)

246. No notes today! But we’ll take up what might be implied by this curious word “trait” tomorrow. See you then?

§ Sequence Twenty-Six

247. So we left off yesterday having just begun to consider the nomad’s relation with space: how they occupy it, how they move through it, how they produce it. 

D&G tell us that, for the sedentary, space rapidly becomes crosshatched with grids of control and distinction of one form or another — chiefly, of course, the one that’s bound up in the distinction between mine and yours. But for the nomad, space is entirely different: smooth, like the ocean or the desert.

248. Critically, though, this smoothness is not isotropic, the same in all directions — at least not for those with the eyes to perceive it. For the nomad, smooth space is marked, strewn through with subtle “‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.” And these traits can be read & navigated by: followed, in the same way a mason pursuing the imperatives of minor science follows the lines of force already inherent in the matter they work.

Now, “trait” is a somewhat curious word.

249. Formally, we don’t know that it’s already appeared in A Thousand Plateaus, because the terms of our project here compel us to treat “Nomadology” as a standalone essay, just as it appears in the semiotext(e) edition I picked up on St Mark’s in late ‘86. But maybe it’s OK to cheat on this conceit a little, and bring some of that treatment into the reading before us?

For D&G, a “trait” is something like a minimal inscription of difference. Traits signify, as part of a system that makes something what it is.

250. But traits also do something else: they rhyme. Each one is a line leading to something other, something with which it resonates and to which it is therefore linked.

So for the nomad, space is a lot like (in fact, very much indeed like) one of those maps of wind speed & direction you have in your weather app: not a cadastral grid, but a vector field. Here traits are lines of possibility and intensity, something to be discovered rather than imposed. And the method of discovery is nothing other than movement. Remember: you feel your way.

251. But movement, even alert, sensitive, attuned, “haptic” movement, carries its own hazards: remember, the traits critical to navigation of space “are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.”

(One thinks here of Tarkovsky’s eponymous Stalker, moving ahead only a single stone’s throw at a time, as the latent traits of the Zone reveal themselves to him, and — all too aware that the path of even a few steps before has gone fatally indistinct — never, ever backtracking.)

252. The traits we steer by, then, are in constant motion, much like ourselves more of the order of becoming than of being: “Even the lamella of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound.”

“Lamella”? What a gorgeous word; evidently, in geology it refers to the thin plates of crust that cover the surface of the sand. D&G seem to mean something a little more flexible — something like a thin, continuous, deformable membrane.

253. We should also consider the possibility that, consciously or otherwise, D&G mean to riff on Lacan, for whom a lamella is something like a mythical bodily organ, representing the pure life force itself — something indestructible, formless and self-replicating.

I’m the furthest thing on Earth from an expert on Lacan, and I sure as hell would not have had that reference to hand on my original reading of “Nomadology,” but the word appears in the text only a handful of times...

254. so I think we’re bound to treat each of these appearances as a trait in and of itself. Shall we hold there for the evening, and resume our inquiry tomorrow?

Notes! Somewhat insanely, Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” is available on YouTube, officially and in its entirety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3hBLv-HLEc

- An entire volume on Lacan’s “Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” incl. a contribution from the redoubtable S. Žižek & various reflections on the lamella, can be found here: https://archive.org/details/readingseminarxi0000unse

§ Sequence Twenty-Seven

255. Today we continue our investigation of the nomad and their relation with space, and we do so by immediately contending with a paradox D&G offer us: that we cannot think of the nomad in terms of movement.

Rather, they assert, “the nomad distributes himself [sic] in a smooth space, he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary...

256. …he who does not move” [emphasis in original]. What on Earth might this mean?

What now strikes me immediately — though, again, there’s no way in which this would have occurred to me on first reading, unequipped as I then was with any of the necessary reading or experience — is that this is a decent rendering of what the practitioner of Zen experiences. In other words, being-nomad is an inner orientation: a way of relating to one’s surroundings that starts in the mind, or no-mind.

257. To arrive without traveling is not a contradiction in terms for the Zen student, but rather a simple description of what happens as they sit still on the cushion. Nomadicity, here, is the ability to make smooth any space whatsoever that one happens to occupy, by seeing it as such.

One becomes a nomad by smoothening the space you’re in: “Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to...

258. “the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.” Better to say, then, that the world moves around the nomad, who only ever occupies a single, implicitly deterritorialized position.

So while D&G mean to evoke the Bedouin style of equestrianism in the next sentence, I  can’t help but hear a description of Zen practice: “Of course the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving.”

259. The very next passage introduces a concept that is pivotal for D&G, and it’s lovely besides, so I’m going to quote it at some length before circling back to unfold it:

“The nomad knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a ‘stationary process,’ station as process — these traits of Kleist’s are eminently those of the nomad. It is thus necessary to make a distinction between speed and movement [emphasis in original]: a movement may be very fast, but…

260. “that does not give it speed; a movement may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive, speed is intensive.”

Well. Firstly, you either get this immediately, or you don’t, and if you do it hardly requires explication. (I’m put in mind of the ferociously effective instruction producer Martin Hannett apocryphally offered the members of Joy Division in the studio, before they had quite become the band we now recognize: that they play “faster, but slower.”)

261. But let’s dig in a little, for the benefit of those for whom this sounds like so much pretentious doublespeak. 

Firstly, what’s this about Kleist? Heinrich von Kleist — who we’ve already met, you’ll recall, as author of the Penthesilea — was a 19th-century German poet and essayist. The reference here is to his 1810 piece “On the Marionette Theatre,” in which he describes the perfect grace with which marionettes seem to move; Kleist ascribes this grace to the lack of self-awareness on the marionette’s part, which enables them to trace paths through space and time…

262. …with perfect economy of movement. (We have a still more graceful model available to us, that neither Kleist nor even D&G would have had access to: the eerie stillness with which anything algorithmically controlled moves, like a drone or a robot arm.) This stillness and grace is where the “stationary process” resides.

And D&G use this paradoxical quality to open up an opposition between speed and the very character of movement that would seem to inhere in it. They insist that speed and movement…

263. …belong to two entirely different, indeed diametrically opposed registers of being: the intensive and the extensive.

This is a foundational distinction for D&G, so it’s worth spending some time with it. It’s one of those places — so frustrating, I know, if not infuriating, to those who come from the “hard sciences” — where they rely on established concepts from physics to signify and do more than they do in that discipline. 

The physical distinction can be made like this: extensive quantities are those that…

264. …can be subdivided without changing their nature. Lots of familiar measurements are like this: length, area, volume, mass. The numbers add up linearly.

Intensive quantities, on the other hand — like temperature or pressure — can’t be divided up so neatly. They’re gradients, right? And each position on the gradient is its own thing, its own situation: it’s nonsense to speak of today being half as cold as yesterday. And importantly, these are differences in potential. They drive processes, like diffusion across a membrane.

265. So far, this is what any physics textbook would tell you. But D&G (and really, this is more or less straight Deleuze) want us to retrieve something more from the distinction, something primary: extensive space is the space through which the sedentary is compelled to move, and which submits to the operations of reticulation and distinction the sedentary imposes on it. But, as we’ve already seen, for the nomad, space is a field of differential intensities — gradients, tensions, tendencies and the…

266. …flows they produce between them. Finally we’re in a position to understand “movement” as a practice of extension in space, and “speed” as something else, an intensive quality that can even inhere in absolute stillness.

That’s a lot to get our heads around, so I think we’ll leave that to soak overnight. For now, notes! Here is Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theater”: https://southerncrossreview.org/9/klei

267. Here’s a scene from “24 Hour Party People” in which Andy Serkis brilliantly inhabits Martin Hannett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90j6V8EjSuI

- And here’s what the results of that advice sound like, in Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” — as good a way of understanding the distinction between extensive movement and intensive speed as any I can imagine: https://open.spotify.com/track/0rcLhYRihks3t4lFPtHhQV

End of Part I.

This is Dispatch from London No. 150 of Thursday, 6 November 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊