A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 13

Summary of Chapter 13: 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture

In this chapter they continue the series of propositions (but not of axioms?) from the previous chapter. The date refers to the flourishing of Çatalhöyük. The cover image is of a method for trapping partridges in a net using bait and an artificial cow, which the trapper manipulates “afin d’amuser les Perdrix” before capturing them in the net (Chomel 1767: 881-3). Kishik (2009) gives an interesting discussion of the source, though he refers to a different image of the same net without the cow and partridges.

Proposition X: The State and its poles.

D&G begin the chapter reiterating the Mitra-Varuna distinction from Dumézil, the two poles of the state being those of the “Binder-god,” or conqueror, and the “jurist-god,” or legislator. These can both conduct war according to their own principles, but this is only the captured war machine; the war machine is always represented by a third god or force [cf. Vaneigem’s “third force.”]. There is a “tempting three-part hypothesis” (426), whereby the war machine becomes a mediator between the two poles, in a 1 (binder god), 2 (war machine), 3 (jurist god) relationship. However, this does not in fact explain the origin of the State, as the first term of the conquering binder god remains presumed as somehow originary (and this remains eternal as the third jurist-god or republic aspect remains in “resonance” with the first (427)). Thus war can not be called on as an explanation for the existence of the state (because it presupposes the existence of the state), similarly to how “private property presupposes public property,” and “money presupposes taxation.” [They are here arguing against Engels’ theory of the State from his Origin of the Family; yet while the second and third points can be taken as well established (cf. Proudhon, Graeber), the first still seems a bit circuitous imho. Nevertheless they will make the case in the following proposition.]

Proposition XI: Which comes first?

On one level, the answer to this question is the aforementioned imperial pole of the state; yet at the same time they are framing the discussion to avoid a first-this, then-that series which could imply a social evolutionism. Smith (2019) gives a good overview of D&G’s sources and interlocutors in this section: they are arguing specifically against the evolutionism of Childe and Engels, as well as (behind them) Morgan and Spencer; key authors they draw on for support are Jane Jacobs, Fernand Braudel, and of course Clastres.

They begin with a discussion of the Urstaat, or originary State, which Smith argues “does not refer to a supposed first state, but rather functions as an Idea (in the Deleuzian sense) that is present, throughout the social field, as a virtuality or problem” (Smith 2019: 150). At the same time, they want to avoid the error made by Clastres, of imputing mechanisms in pre-State societies which counter the emergence of hierarchy to an “overmysterious presentiment of what they warded off and did not yet exist” (429). Thus, the Urstaat has to be in some sense always-already present, more literally in the sense of “tendencies that ‘seek’ the State” through incipient hierarchy (430; and I feel Clastres had made this argument as well); but also in terms of this “immemorial” “Idea of a completely captured and coded flow” (Smith, ibid., quoting from A-O); “it was already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive societies warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not reach without self-destructing” (431). Toscano notes that D&G “revive the Hegelian intuition that the state has always been there – not as an idea or a concept, but as a threshold endowed with a kind of virtual efficacy, even when the state as a complex of institutions and as a system of control is not yet actual” (Toscano 2010: 44).

Everything is not of the State precisely because there have been States always and everywhere. Not only does writing presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. (430; emphasis original)

This argument links back, one presumes, to their early discussion of language founded on the order-word (as opposed to “communication”); here they talk about translation as opposed to “communication:”

Speech communities and languages, independently of writing, do not define closed groups of people who understand one another but primarily determine relations between groups who do not understand one another: if there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communication.

They elaborate an important distinction between the roles of cities and states in the ancient world. Towns are always in a network of other towns, the individual town is a “circuit-point” in this network. This means the urban network has “egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic” (432) (in much the same way as the State remains at heart hierarchical, although taking differing, even democratic and “socialist” forms, which D&G assert are “not façades” (436)).

Expanding on Clastres’ thesis, then both cities and states become thresholds or potentials which primitive societies ward off, and which thus to some degree preëxist in these societies without overcoming them:

Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mechanisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through which to communicate. This is the sense in which primitive societies have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold. (433)

Neither city nor State preceded the other, as both are in “reciprocal presupposition” (434). Both are forms of, or form through, deterritoralization of the previous “primitive” societies. It would be an error to see them, as imagined in a certain 20^th century free-market mythology, as opposed poles of statist order on the one side and free-market capitalism on the other: “the towns did not invent capitalism,” which depends on the State in particular.

They come to a central argument, which is they they will define social formations in terms of machinic processes rather than by the modes of production favored by Marxists and social scientists in general (435). (Modes of production, they argue, are merely dependent on these machinic processes).

Social Formation	Machinic Process
primitive societies	prevention-anticipation
State societies	apparatus of capture
urban societies	instruments of polarization
nomadic societies	war machines
ecumenical organizations	“the encompassment of heterogeneous social formations”

Proposition XII: Capture

In this section they continue what is essentially their own critique of political economy, updating Marx with some insights from later economists and twentieth century anthropology. They begin with Jevons’ marginalist theory of value, applied to traditional society’s prevention-anticipation of the State. This leads them to a distinction between limit and threshold, such that “the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change” (438). “Exchange is only an appearance” (439) in the economic relations between pre-state groups; it is really about evaluation in relation to desire: “The issue is one of desirability as an assemblage component: every group desires according to the value of the last receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage.” And “it is the evaluation of the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage)."

The threshold comes “after” the limit, “after” the last receivable objects... (440)

The Archaic State, having passed the threshold, engages in stockpiling; the argument regarding stock is derived from V. Gordon Childe, though Smith (2018) traces it back further to Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, relating to primitive accumulation. The State absorbs the previously existing traditional societies which had coded the land, by overcoding them:

In solely descriptive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant, or territorial assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary, global, or Land assemblages (which operate by overcoding).

The land as the object of agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility of plots of equal surface area). (441)

They return to the previous chapter’s distinction between work and free action, with Massumi occasionally translates travail as “work,” and other times as “labor.” Smith (2018), (who consistently uses “labour”), notes that the distinction is derived from the work of Martial Gueroult.

In this section they lay out their “trinity formula,” an adaptation of Marx’s trinity of capital-profit, land rent, and labor-wages; their trinity is land, work, and money, with “money” replacing and subsuming(?) Marx’s “capital,” by bringing the state and its taxation into the concept.

They distinguish between four “regimes of violence”: struggle, war, crime, and policing. In particular the distinction between war (even when captured by the state) and legal violence (aka policing) underscores their difference from the “war is the health of the state” argument which would equate the two: “State overcoding is precisely this structural violence that defines the law, ‘police’ violence and not the violence of war” (448).

Proposition XII: The State and its forms.

The question now becomes: Once the State has appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve? What are its factors of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation between evolved States and the archaic imperial State?

Smith succinctly summarizes the issue, and how it relates to the above “trinity:”

the archaic state cannot overcode and capture without at the same time freeing up a large quantity of decoded flows that escape from it. It cannot create large-scale public works without a flow of independent labour escaping from its hierarchised bureaucracy of functionaries, notably in the mines and in metallurgy. It cannot create coinage without flows of money escaping, and nourishing or giving birth to other powers (notably in commerce and banking). It cannot create a system of public property without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, and then starting to slip through its fingers. Finally, it is with the rise of private property that classes appear, since the dominant classes are no longer part of the state apparatus, but become distinct determinations that make use of a now-transformed apparatus. (Smith 2018: 236)

"[T]he state is at once capture and the impossibility of complete capture, since the state can only overcode by decoding (abstraction)” (ad loc.) The archaic state overcodes, but this releases “decoded flows” which escape from it. D&G clarify that by “decoding” they do not mean “deciphering,” but de-coding, [“un-coding” could have been the more felicitous term]: “the state of a flow that is no longer contained in (compris dans) it own code, that escapes it own code” (448-9). The varieties of state have to do with how this relationship to both overcoding and decoding is organized.

The Greek city-states exist at the periphery of the Egyptian, then later the Persian world-economy and feed off of/benefit from the wealth it has generated. Flows are overcoded in the Orient, then decoded in Europe. “Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding) but becomes surplus value of flow” (451). Split into public vs. private sphere [in state space], slavery changes from communal workers to private property. “[T]he State apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in overcoding already coded flows than in organizing conjunctions of decoded flows as such.”

Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects, the operation of the imperial "signifier" has been superseded by processes of subjectification; machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime of social subjection.

The point is to draw out the relationship between capitalism and the state, how they are dependent on each other, while also articulating their differences in relation to territory, coding, etc. They clarify the difference between axiomatic and coding/codes:

axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. (454)

Toscano expands on this:

Originating in the discourse of science and mathematical set theory in particular, axiomatic denotes a method that need not provide definitions of the terms it works with, but rather orders a given domain with the adjunction or subtraction of particular norms or commands (axioms). Axioms thus operate on elements and relations whose nature need not be specified. They are indifferent to the properties or qualities of their domain of application and treat their objects as purely functional, rather than as qualitatively differentiated by any intrinsic features. Axioms are in turn accompanied by theorems, or models of realisation, which apply them to certain empirical or material situations. (Toscano 2010: 21-2)

[Thus axiomatic refers to the non-specifying, discretizing and [extensive rather than intensive “disembedding” aspect of capitalism]. Per D&G the imminent axiomatic is effectuated in models of realization [thus the axiomatic of the Urstaat is realized in specific forms of the state? Though they state later that the archaic state is characterized by a transcendent formal unity, distinct from capitalism’s immanent axiomatic. It is more that the archaic State plays a role of primitive accumulation and creating uncontrolled decoded flows, clearing the way for the axiomatic of capitalism to emerge; one it does it becomes a “megamachine,” a world system within which existing states are models of realization of said axiomatic]. The relation of state and capital in terms of De/Re/Te:

It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations. (455)

So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows.

They assert that models of realization are “supposed to be isomorphic” with the axiomatics they effectuate; but how can this be so when so many differing models of the State effectuate the axiomatic? They discuss this with three points:

1. There is really just one (capitalist) world market, even the [so-called] socialist states are part of it, like it or not;

2. The real capitalist market tolerates polymorphy for two reasons: a) [articulation] of capitalism with non-capitalist modes of production, b) the bureaucratic socialist states are able to “conjugate with capitalism;” “there is only one world market, the capitalist one.”

3. The axiomatic encompasses the diversity of existing state forms, and while they are not all equivalent or interchangeable, they are interconnected, for instance the western democracies install and support dictatorships in the third world.

It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible variations, that the State becomes the model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic. (456)

A key difference in operation of the archaic state and modern states is the distinction between machinic enslavement and social subjection. Machinic enslavement means the individual becoming part of a vaster machine composing other people, animals, materials, and so on: a “constituent piece” (457) [this is presumably distinct from the mere fact of being part of an assemblage; likely having to do with the organization of the machine towards the Face of the Despot in the signifying regime of the Archaic State].

But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved by the machine.

This second form is also exploitative, it just treats the individual as a subject and not a mere object, along the way to extracting labor value. It seems that capitalism then introduces an even stronger version of social subjection which recreates some aspects of ancient enslavement, but this is in relation to technical machines:

One is not enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it. It would appear, then, that the modern State, through technological development, has substituted an increasingly powerful social subjection for machinic enslavement.

But the naked or “free” worker of capitalism takes subjection to its most radical expression, since the processes of subjectification no longer even enter into partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In effect, capital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the “capitalists,” are subjects of enunciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the “proletarians,” are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we certainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital …

[I was recently reading about the controversial Hart and Risley (1995) study of how parents of three groups (professional class, working class, and “welfare”) speak to their children, and how well the children go on to perform in school. Long story short, the higher the class the better the children are treated, and thus they go on to do better in school. Besides all sorts of methodological issues, the study clearly is of the “culture of poverty” sort of argument, ignoring all sorts of socioeconomic context to blame children’s adult social status on how they were raised by their parents. Nevertheless, in terms of D&G’s terminology, we can also see it as an illustration of how class identity is replicated. The professional class parents treated their students as subjects of enunciation, asking them questions, and expecting them to grasp a wider variety of words and concepts, which is precisely how the parents themselves are treated in their work and by capitalism, i.e., as subjects of enunciation. In turn, the working and “welfare” class parents, according to the study, asked fewer questions and issued more commands, treating the children like subjects of the statement, precisely as they in turn are treated in this economic system.]

Capitalism’s new machinic enslavement “in no way represents a return to the imperial machine since we are now in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a formal Unity” (458).

But it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible “humans-machines systems” replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action.

Automation reduces human workers to parts in the machine, and supplants variable capital (labor) with a larger proportion of constant capital (machinery).

But with automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us back to it.

The technical machine thus involves both enslavement and subjection, not as opposing forces but “two simultaneous parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other.” They provide the example of television:

For example, one is subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a subject of enunciation (“you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it is . . .”); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and “output,” feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical, others human.

[Needless to say, the case for the new machinic enslavement with our current communication and entertainment technology is far stronger than it was with television in D&G’s day! In a footnote (570n57) they reference Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451in which television has moved from being a mere device in the room, to “forming the walls of the house” [and metaphorically, the boundaries of the imagination. Has not VR made this dystopian fantasy a [virtual] reality?]

Social subjection proportions itself to the model of realization, just as machinic enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic that is effectuated in the model. (459)

They now delineate three historical forms of the state:

1) archaic States or Empires, machinic enslavement and overcoding of already-coded flows (that is, conquest of traditional “pre-State” societies);

2) diverse States existing in relation to the archaic State empires, “which proceed instead by subjectification and subjection, and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows”;

3) modern nation-States, “which take decoding even further and are models of realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation of flows” and rely on both social subjection and the new machinic enslavement.

Whereas for the second kind of state, the Empire or Urstaat was on the horizon, with the modern capitalist state system it has been brought back to the center of political economic reality. “Capitalism has reawakened the Urstaat, and given it new strength” (460).

Proposition XIV: Axiomatics and the presentday situation.

“Politics is by no means an apodeictic science” (461); it is experimental, fumbling, grasping, a posteriori. Naturally, this is praise from D&G’s point of view. Capitalism and the State are axiomatic and we want to get them out of our heads! Axiomatics is not the cutting edge of science, it is rather a capturing of flows:

The great axiomaticians are the men of State of science, who seal off the lines of flight that are so frequent in mathematics, who would impose a new nexum, if only a temporary one, and who lay down the official policies of science. They are the heirs of the theorematic conception of geometry.

To the axiomaticians, D&G contrast the intuitionist school of mathematics, more interested in problems than in theorems. The remainder of the chapter will be a “summary sketch” of seven “givens” which Adkins clarifies are “currently informing the creation of axioms in capitalism” (Adkins, 228)

1. Addition, subtraction.

Here they go into more detail on how axioms work in capitalism – there are competing tendencies within capitalism to add, and to subtract, the number of axioms in operation. [These seem to be related to the question of how capitalism survives crises? It does not seem to be clearly stated, but they have been making references to the composition of capital (variable vs. constant) throughout this chapter, and this is linked to the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.] These also have to do with capitalism’s relationship with the state; social democracies increase the number of axioms, while totalitarian ones reduce them [Exhibit A, the reduction of axioms in Trump’s current retooling of state power to more efficiently suit the interests of the wealthiest]. They reiterate their distinction between totalitarianism and fascism and discuss it in this regard.

2. Saturation.

“Saturation” sounds like a reference to Simondon, but he is not mentioned, and the concept itself is only invoked in passing:

Can we express the distribution of the two opposite tendencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point of inversion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. (463)

They invoke Marx on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (this is proof that capitalism is an axiomatic), [and hence the relation of axiomatics to crisis], and link the subtraction of axioms to totalitarianism, and the addition of axioms to social democracy; however, these are two opposed but linked parts of the modern state/capitalist axiomatic [and linked to the two poles of the State?] They go on to denounce the “disenchanted” concept of recuperation and talk about worker’s struggles.

3. Models, isomorphy.

“In principle, all States are isomorphic; in other words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of a sole external world market” (464). Nevertheless, there are actually three bipolarities organizing the variety of existing states:

1) the isomorphy of the social democratic and totalitarian states at the center of the [world system];

2) an East-West heteromorphy between the capitalist West and the bureaucratic socialist East; and

3) a North-South polymorphy, between center and periphery.

4. Power (puissance).

This section treats of the operation of war in the contemporary [i.e., late Twentieth Century] world system.

On the one hand, war clearly follows the same movement as capitalism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps growing, war becomes increasingly a “war of materiel” in which the human being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is instead a pure element of machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and this is the main point, the growing importance of constant capital in the axiomatic means that the depreciation of existing capital and the formation of new capital assume a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the route of a war machine now incarnated in the complexes: the complexes actively contribute to the redistributions of the world necessary for the exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. (466)

They derive five points from Virilio (separated here for clarity):

[1] that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of terror or deterrence;

[2] that it performs a technoscientific “capitalization”;

[3] that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed;

[4] that this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the “unspecified enemy,” domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world);

[5] that there arose from this a new conception of security as materialized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe.

 

5. The included middle.

This section discusses the intrication of center and periphery in the modern world-economy [hence the contrast with the “excluded middle”]. D&G identify unequal exchange as one of the most important axioms of capitalism, and briefly restate some of the language on overcoding and decoding which has run through this and the previous chapter:

The more the archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of resolving or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the periphery). (468)

The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of population, the flow of food, and the urban flow.

They discuss how the center becomes involved in the periphery and vice versa, giving the example of a Third World social democracy which establishes power through a “class rupture” [incorporating part of the working class as voting, represented subjects, and excluding others as an underclass who are left to fend for themselves in an informal economy]. “And the States of the center deal not only with the Third World, each of them has not only an external Third World, but there are internal Third Worlds that rise up within them and work them from the inside.” Here they draw on Negri and the operaists in a discussion that ties back to their previous invocations of the composition of capital.

These phenomena confirm the difference between the new machinic enslavement and classical subjection. For subjection remained centered on labor and involved a bipolar organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat. In enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital, on the other hand, labor seems to have splintered in two directions: intensive surplus labor that no longer even takes the route of labor, and extensive labor that has become erratic and floating.

 

6. Minorities.

“Ours is becoming the age of minorities” (469). They reiterate that minorities, like majorities, are not constituted by number but “by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a redundant majority”. They invoke the concept of multiplicities from “One or Many Wolves”:

What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a nondenumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the connection, the “and” produced between elements, between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas the minorities constitute “fuzzy,” nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, “masses,” multiplicities of escape and flux. (470)

It does not help or further the cause of minorities to simply be incorporated into majorities, or even to flip the system and constitute new majorities of their own. “What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable …. Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.”

The remark on the inability of the axiomatic to accommodate even modest demands by majorities, as a sign of “the gap between two types of propositions, propositions of flow and propositions of axioms” (471).

The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of minorities.

 

7. Undecidable propositions.

Of course the axiomatic does marshall the war machine, which is also nondenumerable and all that, but this is limited by the way coöptation by the state has changed the objects of the war machine, as discussed in the previous chapter. They go into more about the particular politics of minorities, how integration does not really achieve anything, while the “final solution" extermination is impossible. “The minorities issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means” (472). They reiterate that at the same time as capitalism organizes denumerable sets into stable forms, it also creates nondenumerable sets which escape beyond it: “It does not effect the ‘conjugation’ of the deterritorialized and decoded flows without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them.”

The result is that “undecidable propositions” proliferate:

Every struggle is a function of all of these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic. (473)

Adkins, Brent (2015) Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press.

Chomel, Noël (1767) Dictionaire Oeconomique. Paris, 3^rd edition, Vol II: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205510n

Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Company.

Kishik, David (2009) “Apparatus of Capture.” Notes for the Coming Community. https://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2009/01/apparatus-of-capture.html

Smith, Daniel W. (2018) “7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture.” In Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey A. Bell, and James Williams, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Smith, Daniel W. (2019) “Against Social Evolution: Deleuze and Guattari's Social Topology.” In Michael James Bennett & Tano S. Posteraro, Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 141-158.

Toscano, Alberto (2010), “Axiomatic” and “Capture.” In Adrian Parr, ed. The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition. Edinburgh University Press.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 18

 

Summary of Chapter 18: The “Middle Layers” of Employment

Braverman turns now from the proletariat to the new “middle class,” which, however, differs from the old petty-bourgeois middle class of pre-monopoly capitalism, in that it lacks independence and access to the means of production (e.g. as oldtime artisans, farmers, etc. had), instead having some characteristics of a working class, in particular being dependent upon capital for employment:

This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and “professional” employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth. (279)

The stark contract between the old class structure and the modern one is that, before monopoly capital, a large portion of the working population were independent of capital per se, being neither owners nor employees of capitalist enterprises. Today, however, “almost all of the population has been transformed into employees of capital” (ibid., emphasis original).

However, for the middle class, it is about more than the mere structural fact that they are employees, for this technically holds true also of upper management:

These operating executives, by virtue of their high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act “professionally” for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personi­fies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute of being part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. (280)

Thus, the shared “form of hired employment” in fact represents two distinct realities: on the one side that of the working class, selling their labor power, and on the other a mechanism by which the ruling class selects representatives from within itself to carry out leadership roles in the corporation.

Then, “between these two extremes there is a range of intermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees,” primarily in terms of relative authority and expertise, as well as “working independence.” These intermediate positions are those held by the new middle class in the corporation.

Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders of the corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money—a commodity exchange—but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a “management stake,” even if a small one.

There is a vast hierarchy which blends into management at the top, and the workers at the bottom. This “new middle class” is distinct from the old middle class, again, because they are not outside the capital-labor relationship, but possess a status combining aspects of both sides, though increasingly of the latter, in that, like workers, they are subject to downward pressure on wages from an unemployed reserve army, and their workplaces are periodically subject to “rationalization” in the interests of capital (282). B notes that employment crises in the 20^th century exposed the myth that these middle class workers were independent “professionals:”

... rising rates of unemployment among “professionals” of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to “associate themselves” with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.

In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness of these employees. Feeling the insecu­rities of their role as sellers of labor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms of dissociation which are popularly called “alienation” and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.

Thus, the new “middle class” either is going or will go through the same shifts towards proletarianization as the clerical class discussed earlier in the book. Braverman draws from this the moral that class is not a static “thing” (as presumed by those who want to come up with inherent definitions for classes), but a relationship (283).

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 6

Summary of Chapter 6: Decompression and the third force

V’s summary:

Up till now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future coexistence. (When the leader of the game takes the power of a Leader, the revolution dies with the revolutionaries.) Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalises contradictions, and leads to their transcendence, in the name of individual freedom and against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate the third force without admitting its existence. (57)

V begins with a parable of people living in a windowless tower, with the poor responsible for providing light with oil lamps. A revolutionary movement calls for the socialization of light, and radicals call even for the demolition of the tower; a stray bullet cracks the walls, letting natural light pour in. Windows are constructed and the radicals who had advocated the destruction of the building quietly eliminated; however, dissatisfaction soon reappears, as people are now unhappy about living in a “greenhouse.”

V charges that “The consciousness ofour time oscillates between that of the walled-up man and that of the prisoner” (58). A man enclosed in darkness sees his condition clearly and is filled with desperate rage, battering his head against the walls to break them down by any means; a prisoner in a cell, on the other hand, is passive because of the barred window or door which keeps alive the hope of escape or reprieve. “The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner still has hope. Hope is the leash of submission” (58).

Thus, power has learned how to keep hope alive among the downtrodden and exploited, in order to render them passive, or rather, in order to be able to channel their resistance into controllable forms. In particular, V is referring to the cold war opposition of Capitalist and Communist states, each standing as an alternative to the exploited subjects of the other, while at the same time both retain their faithfulness to the principle of hierarchy:

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both sides: opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears the anti-capitalism of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the masters of the present, the masters of the future are already smiling back. (58-9)

The Russian Revolution, for example, had started as a real, anarchist, uprising and organization from below, but had been betrayed and coöpted by the Bolsheviks:

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolution­ary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it - Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader of the game and the Leader. (59)\

While the cold war powers go through the motions of opposition as part of the global spectacle, the people of the modern nation-states are kept entertained and confused by a multitude of momentary mini-conflicts, propagated in the media:

There is no one who is not accosted at every moment of the day by posters, news flashes, stereotypes, and summoned to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles that conscientiously stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the hands of Power, that glacial fetish, such particles of antagonism form a magnetic ring whose function it is to make everybody lose their bearings, to abstract individuals from themselves and scramble all lines of force. (61)

[And how better to describe the workings of social media today, than as the algorithmically moderated flow of “particles of antagonism?”]

“Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by Power” (61). Decompression, like the window in the jail cell, allows the pressure of despair and rage to relax into a controllable energy, which can be fed back into maintaining the spectacular oppositions which stand in for the possibility of real revolution. He cites old arcane church disputes as an example: a stark choice of god vs the devil would have overthrown the church; instead smaller, more arcane conflicts are promulgated, that don’t threaten the overall structure.

“In all conflicts between opposing sides an irrepressible upsurge of indi­vidual desire takes place and often reaches a threatening intensity.” (62) This is the third force, a true opposition to the spectacle and the workings of power, which can only have reality outside of the controlled binary of decompression.

From the individual's point of view the third force is what the force of decompression is from the point of view of Power. A spontaneous feature of every struggle, it radicalises insurrections, denounces false problems, threatens Power in its very struc­ture.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism ... the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of Power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances. (62)

The long revolution is this history of seemingly failed insurrections, revolutionary communes, momentary resistances, etc., which have each left cracks in the wall; each revolutionary individual or generation adds their own impetus to it, playing their part in “the great gamble whose stake is freedom” (63).

Swindell et al., Against Automated Education

 

Swindell, Andrew; Luke Greeley, Antony Farag, and Bailey Verdone (2024), “Against Artificial Education: Towards an Ethical Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use in Education” Online Learning 28(2), 7-27.

Summary:

This interesting article argues for an ethical framework drawing on the work of Gunther Anders, Michel Foucault, Paolo Freire, Benjamin Bloom (actually, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy), and Hannah Arendt. In the event, Anders, Foucault, and Freire are discussed briefly for broader ethical context, but the main focus of the article is the addition of an ethical dimension to Bloom’s Taxonomy using Arendt’s hierarchy of labor, work, and action.

They apply this to the actually existing use of AI by imagining this, frankly, quite likely scenario:

Let’s consider an example of how AI might be used with current GPT technology in a classroom. A journalist, under pressure to produce more consumable content for its struggling publication, uses a GPT to write a story about the benefits and costs of electrical vehicle production and use. A teacher, excited by the labor-saving allure of an AI teaching assistant product called Brisk, uses the software extension to read the news story about electric vehicles and design a 60-minute lesson plan for their students, complete with learning goals, discussion prompts, a presentation activity, and summary quiz about the reading. The students, given carte blanche to use their school-provided Chromebooks, “read” the story using an AI platform like Perplexity, which provides summary analysis and key takeaways for them to use in their discussion and respond to the quiz. Simultaneously, they use Microsoft’s AI image generator to create a slide deck for the class to graphically represent their group’s ideas. The teacher completes the assessment cycle by having their AI assistant grade the quizzes, provide feedback to the students, and input their scores into a learning management system. (Swindell et al., 2024: 17).

[Brisk is a classic example of the stark cynicism of our current use of GAI, allowing “instructors” (the term loses meaning in this context) to automatically generate “feedback” on student essays, which you (the instructor) are then encouraged to “personalize” and present to the students as “from you.”]

The authors’ critique of such a situation:

In this scenario, the AI engages in activities of labor and consumption, while all of the parties involved advance nothing of lasting significance, and if debate or critical reflection arise amongst students it is an incidental, rather than planned, outcome of the AI-prescribed lesson. Indeed, the Brisk teaching assistant might be well programmed to incorporate into the lesson features of the RBT such as understanding, evaluating, and creating activities; but unless a human being in this process is attuned to helping learners act in the world and make it a place, using Arendt’s (1963/2006) words, “fit for human habitation,” ... the most common educational experience might become, ironically, ones in which humans are unnecessary. (ibid., 18)

They go on to propose a “Framework for Ethical AI Use in Education,” in the form of a graphic inputting insights from each of the five philosophies they are drawing on. They apply this framework in two examples, which are, unfortunately, not particularly satisfying. They begin with a list of “guiding questions” for lesson design using AI:

1. In what ways are our historical, technological, social contexts shaping how we think and act; what activity or experience can shock learners into appreciating their contingency?

2. Will the technologies we are going to use advance humanizing ends? In what ways can the technology enhance or harm the co-creation of knowledge?

3. How can we design learning activities that have benefits beyond their own sake; how are the learning activities helping students to act in the world?

4. In what ways can AI reduce the burdens of teaching and learning labor while increasing the capacity to act in the world? (ibid., 22)

[The first two questions show the influence of Foucault and the rest; the last two are primarily informed by Arendt.]

Their first proposed exercise involves a research project in which students seek to learn about their local “political landscape.” AI is used to conduct research on who the local elected officials are, what the local issues are, and what are the important fora for discussion and debate. Students then form their own positions using this knowledge: the idea is that AI performs the “labor” (Arendt’s lowest category), leaving humans free to focus on “action” (Arendt’s highest category.

However, having done exercises like this in the past without AI, this just seems like so many attempts to rationalize an “ethical” or “harmless” use of AI – namely, AI is inserted as an extra element where it is not actually needed. Local political entities, candidates, electoral bodies, and so on, have websites with all this information – it is not hard to find. Using a generative AI search tool only introduces the likelihood of errors, along with the dangerous habit of taking AI as a reliable source of information. At best, AI could be asked what websites contain this information, and then the information looked up on those websites (with the added hope that the list is correct, of course). What is more difficult is not the “labor” of looking up information, but the process of reading through debates, articles, and so on to try and evaluate and formulate issues and positions, and it is this that students are likely to use AI for – against the recommendations of Swindell et al, since after all this involves higher-level Bloom’s and corresponds with “action,” which is supposed to be left to humans.

In their second example,

students are tasked with researching a topic of their choosing both to learn about it and apply this knowledge to their own context. To facilitate this endeavor, AI acts as an agent of Socratic dialogue and questioning for the student, helping students generate research idea topics that will be specifically catered towards student interests. AI will be equipped to ask students questions regarding their level of interests and commitment, suggest other topics of potential interest based on specific student response in addition to refine students’ thinking regarding logical sequencing of topic selection and eventually argument. This personalized approach allows them to analyze how these topics manifest in their own lives and communities, gaining valuable insights. (ibid., 24)

Again, why is AI required to engage in Socratic dialogue? First of all, isn’t this the instructor’s job? (And one of Brisk’s more cynical applications is just such an automated “feedback” generator). But more deeply, isn’t this an opportunity for students to engage in Socratic interaction and mutual critique with each other? After all, the authors have been citing Freire on conscientization and the need to allow students to develop control over their learning process. The instructor could easily model Socratic questioning in class, and give students example questions and topics to guide them in developing their own practice. Delegating this to AI is an opporyunity lost.

Thus, we have yet another attempt at reasoning out an ethical use for AI in the classroom, which fails to provide any good reason for actually using AI in the first place. Seeing as the primary use of AI today is 1) to avoid having to do any actual work or difficult thinking, and 2) to avoid interacting with people, it is hard to see how a “humanist” or ethical use can gain much traction, until this situation – and the underlying causes, pre-existing the development of generative AI – are addressed.

Another limitation of the model could be the reliance on Arendt’s hierarchy of labor-work-action, which has been reasonably criticized as reproducing an arbitrary, classist distinction (cf. also Sennett 1990). It is not true that we don’t learn or gain from anything classed in this model as “labor,” or that there can in fact be a clear line drawn between the actual, complex, productive activities which Arendt has delineated into these three a priori types. More to the point, it is not the type of work, but the social context, aka the relations of production, which render some kinds of work more meaningless or alienating than others. Likewise, it is not the mere fact of automation that is problematic, but how that automation is deployed, to what ends, and in whose ultimate interests. The authors make some nods to this political-economic context (via their discussion of Freire, Foucault, etc.) but the proposed ethical framework does not much reflect this.

Beyond this, the insistence on a “humanist” framing could be a limitation (Arendt in fact called herself an “anti-humanist”). The result is yet another call to keep “humans in the loop,” as masters, rather than servants, of the technology—as if it were the relations between humans and machines, rather than those between humans and other humans, that was ultimately at stake.

What difference might a post-humanist view have on the issue? ANT, for example, could have been brought in to consider the human subject as a historically and contextually created “figure” in a larger more-than-human assemblage, and the dissolution of this figure, with the supplanting of the disciplinary society with the control society, occurring, in Foucault’s words, like the erasure of “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1970: 387).

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things. Vintage Books, New York.

Sennet, Richard (1990) The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 3, Chapter 1

Summary of Part 3, Chapter 1: The Genesis of Technicity

S begins by introducing the concept of phase:

By phase, we mean not a temporal moment replaced by another, but an aspect that results from a splitting in two of being and in opposition to another aspect; this sense of the word phase is inspired by the notion of a phase ratio in physics; one cannot conceive of a phase except in relation to another or to several other phases; in a system of phases there is a relation of equilibrium and of reciprocal tensions; it is the actual system of all phases taken together that is the complete reality, not each phase in itself; a phase is only a phase in relation to others, from which it distinguishes itself in a manner that is totally independent of the notions of genus and species. (173, emphasis added)

[The temporal meaning of “phase” is actually a derived sense, by way of the phases or appearances/aspects of the moon. Another related sense to how S uses the word is that of variant in biology, e.g., orange or red phase bearded dragons.]

The existence of a plurality of phases finally defines the reality of a neutral center of equilibrium in relation to which there is a phase shift.

[He goes on to explain how this is different from a dialectical schema, but I think it is also interesting to consider how this view of a system of plural phases with a “neutral center of equilibrium” replaces or surpasses the cybernetic emphasis in homeostasis.]

Each phase in such a system is “a symbol of the other,” i.e., they necessarily refer to each other in a system of differences, like letters or words, etc.

He thus describes the “phase shift” from the system of magical thinking to the split between technics and religion, each of which is a phase in a new system centered on aesthetic thought, which becomes the neutral point, or center of equilibrium, of this system, and an incomplete analog of the previous magical unity. Religion and technics then split further into theoretical and practical modes; scientific thought is the neutral point of the two theoretical modes, and ethical thought of the two practical modes. Philosophical research is an attempt within this system to find a new, superior analog to the magical unity, surpassing the first analog of aesthetic thought through the convergence and reunion of science and ethics.

S proceeds to discuss the phase shift from the “primitive magical unity,” drawing on the concepts of figure and ground from Gestalt theory, with the caveat that Gestalt’s emphasis on stability be replaced with metastability (177). The primitive magical universe defines “a universe that is at once subjective and objective prior to any distinction between the object and the subject, and consequently prior to any appearance of the separate object.” It is in the phase shift and fragmentation that comes after this that the technical object becomes objectified, and a religious mediator is subjectified.

The magical world is structured through a network of key points (points-clés) which are both spatial (privileged or special locations) and temporal (privileged or special moments or dates). It is these key points which have power, and human specialists access this power through them:

The magical universe is made of a network of access points to each domain of reality: thresholds, summits, limits, and crossing points, attached to one another through their singularity and their exceptional character. (180)

Individuals interact with these key-points through [ritual and] “friendship,” not as dominating, detached subjects:

To climb a slope in order to go toward the summit, is to make one’s way toward the privileged place that commands the entire mountain chain, not in order to dominate or possess it, but in order to exchange a relationship of friendship with it. (179)

It is wrong to suppose that the remnants of magical thinking in the present world are represented by superstitions, which are just degraded vestiges. Rather, it is in “high, noble, or sacred forms of thought” such as the will to exploration or ascent, that we see the survival of magical thinking and its relation to the world of key points. Even contemporary holidays and vacations are attempts to reconnect with key points.

With the phase shift away from the magical order, “figure and ground separate by detaching themselves from the universe to which they adhered” (181). The key-points as figure, “detached from the ground whose key they were, become technical objects, transportable and abstracted from the milieu.” Ground becomes “detached powers and forces,” subjectivized “by personifying themselves in the form of the divine and the sacred (God, heroes, priests).” Thus, the figure is fragmented into individual technical objects, while the ground is universalized into forces, the first thought through technics and the second through religion. After the phase shift and the loss of unity, technics is left with a status, and focus, lower than unity, and religion with a status higher than unity (185). Technics takes the element as its object, decomposing actions into elementary operations that can be solved technically; the technical object is always less than, and subordinate to, the reality it is a part of, acting only on some particular place and time. Religion, for its part, takes aim at intention and tries to solve questions of universal validity, such as ethical rules applicable in all times and places. Technics focuses on the how and on results; religion on the why and on intention (188).

But religious thought, inversely, which is the foundation of obligation, creates a search in ethical thinking for an unconditional justification that makes each act and every subject appear as inferior to real unity; related back to a totality that dilates infinitely, the moral act and subject derive their meaning only from their relation with this totality; the communication between the totality and the subject is precarious, because at every instant the subject is brought back to the dimension of its own unity, which is not that of the totality; the ethical subject is de-centred by the religious requirement. (190)

Writing and Identity, Chapter 4

Summary of Chapter 4: Issues of identity in academic writing

In this chapter Ivanič reviews the literature on student writers in an academic setting. She traces the development in this field from an original perspective focused on product, meaning, how to get students to produce particular written products; to an exploration of process, the process of learning and writing; to the contemporary interest in writing as social. Much of the discussion involves navigating the relationship between “social construction” and “social interaction,” i.e., the extent to which identity, meaning, values, etc. can be treated as entities, or as created by entities (e.g., culture, “society,”) preceding and above the level of individuals; or as the product of individual agents in interaction.

Along these lines, she reviews competing understandings of the concept of discourse community: as abstract (that is, along the lines of “culture,” or “interpretive community”) or as concrete (aka, as a speech community in the sociolinguistic usage). She notes that academic discourse communities share not only written but also spoken discourses, and adds that “it is necessary to recognize the interests, values, and practices which hold people together and see how discourse emerges from those, rather than starting by looking at discourse” (80). She argues against what she terms an “initiation” approach which sees academic discourse communities as possessing set characteristics and practices which students need to be “initiated” into to master; rather, we need to understand these discourse communities as situated in time and place, and as changing through time, in part through the re-interpretation and modification of practices by new entrants:

Academic discourse communities are constituted by a range of values, assumptions, and practices. Individuals have to negotiate an identity within the range of possibilities for self-hood which are supported or at least tolerated by a community and inscribed in that community’s communicative practices. Discourse community members, of varying affiliations in relation to the values, assumptions, and practices, are also locked in complex interpersonal relationships, characterized by differences in status and power …. (82)

From a discussion of “boundary” writers (those whose different writing style or values causes them troubles in trying to conform to a written discourse community), she applauds researchers and teachers who recognize that “disadvantage is constructed by the system, not a characteristic of people” (83). She quotes Patricia Bizzell to the effect that “We should accustom ourselves to dealing with contradictions, instead of seeking a theory that appears to abrogate them,” and concludes that “Discourse communities are the ‘social’ element in the expression, ‘the social construction of identity.’”

Ivanič reviews studies discussing how writer-learners should learn to imitate, not the “product or the process of writing,” but the writer (85), in a form of “identity modelling” (though she is critical of this term). However, learners should not, or do not, just mimic, but construct a “compromise” between existing conventions and their own idiosyncracies:

A writer’s identity is not individual and new, but constituted by the discourses s/he adopts. On the other hand, a writer’s identity is determined not completely by other discourses, but rather by the unique way she draws on and combines them. (86)

[A productive way to think the intersection between the “Unique”/haecceity, and discourse as structuring.] She references some interesting-sounding studies on plagiarism, notably by Ron Scollon, then discusses Roger D. Cherry’s distinction between two aspects of identity in writing: ethos (aka character, from Aristotle’s rhetorical triad of ethos/pathos/logos), and persona (aka social role). Among critical approaches to academic discourse, she notes the use by Geoffrey Chase of terminology adapted from Henry Giroux’s critical pedagogy, referring to three stances taken by learners: accommodation (learning to accept conventions), and opposition (involving a more broad critique of the dominant ideology) (92). Ivanič notes that she has used this approach in the past, but now considers it to assume “too monolothic a view of academic discourse.”

She discusses some reasons why her particular interest in the writer’s construction of identity has not been a focus of scholarship up to her time of writing (1998): one being an emphasis on the reader, which took the writer for granted. At the same time, the development of the social view of writing in opposition to the earlier process view (each diagrammed on pages 95 and 96) led to some blinders. The process theorists somewhat uncritically celebrated the idea of “voice,” as in, each writer needs to find their own “voice.” This was then criticized by the social theorists as too romantic and simplistic, fetishizing individual creativity at the expense of understanding the social and discursive context of creation. Ivanič agrees with this critique, but suggest that in “denying the existence of a writer’s ‘voice,’ I think that these theorists lost sight of other aspects of the writer which are extremely important to a social view of writing” (97). Ironically, the use of the term “voice” is back in fashion among critical social theorists of writing, from its use in translations of Bakhtin, but with a changed meaning:

‘Voice’ in this new way of thinking is multiply ambiguous, meaning a socially shaped discourse which a speaker can draw upon, and/or an actual voice in the speaker’s individual history, and/or the current speaker’s unique combination of these resources...

She concludes by folding insights from the current chapter back into her earlier elaboration of Goffman’s theory of self-presentation, adapted for writing (as opposed to face-to-face interaction, as in the original). Much of Goffman’s face-to-face terminology, such as the use of “clothing” and “furniture,” in interaction, remains useful as metaphor, because in writing, “The encounter between performer and audience may be removed in time and space, but it is still an encounter” (100). She notes some standard criticisms of Goffman, such as that he acts as if individuals are consciously strategizing at all times, and that they inhabit a community of shared values and understandings, “which might be relatively true in a small, close community like the Shetland Isles” (102). She includes an interesting discussion of Goffman’s “protective practices” whereby performers and audience cooperate in perception management (the former by trying to save face in interaction, the second by using tact, etc., to help the performer maintain face). Readers, in contrast, are not as likely to feel the situational compulsion to help the performer maintain face; even worse, graders of academic papers often think of themselves as on a mission to point out the writer’s inadequacies. [In this light, cf. Sedgwick on “reparative reading.”]

She concludes with a discussion of the three aspects of “identity” as the term is often used: 1) the product of processes shaping the individual; 2) the way they position and portray or enact themselves; and 3) the way they are understood by readers/interlocutors. Rather than teasing out one of these as the true “identity,” Ivanič prefers to consider how they are interrelated, and situationally more or less relevant, though her book will (as stated in earlier chapters) focus on the construction and interplay of the “autobiographical self” and the “discoursal self.”

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 12

Summary of Chapter 12: 1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine

This major chapter covers the distinction between the State and the nomadic War Machine. The illustration is of an ancient “nomad chariot,” and the date is the year Genghis Khan died, thus representing the encounter of the state and the nomadic war machine, or potentially their blending. The chapter is organized by a series of Axioms, Propositions, and Problems; here is the complete list:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Axiom II: The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.

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

Proposition VI: Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of a war machine.

Proposition VII: Nomad existence has for “affects” the weapons of a war machine.

Problem III: How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?

Proposition VIII: Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism.

Axiom III: The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.

Proposition IX: War does not necessarily have the battle as its object, and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result (under certain conditions).

---

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

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

D&G begin their argument opposing the “war machine” to the state, based on Dumézil’s opposition of Mitra to Varuna as the two poles of state authority in ancient Indo-European cultures: “the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer” (351). Indra/Mars is a third who cannot be reduced to or included in either the state’s “originary” characters of ruler or legislator. Mars is not a “war god” so much as a “jurist of war.” Mitra and Varuna form a double articulation of the stratum of the state, leaving the third god, Indra, to be explained as something additional.

They further explore the difference between the state and the war machine in the differences between chess and go. In chess the pieces are all characters, with their own specific and intrinsic moves (aka interiority); the pieces are subjects of the statement, and the subject of enunciation is the player/agent. In Go, on the other hand, the pieces are anonymous pellets [but it is not clear, is there not still a player/subject of enunciation who unites them in play?] whose entire capacity is dependent on their location in relation to other pieces (exteriority).

The difference between chess and go is also discussed in terms of an opposition between logos and nomos originating in Deleuze’s earlier book, Difference and Repetition. Whereas the distinction between logos and nomos is more conventionally understood as that between logic/reason/law-as-order and custom or law-as-custom (cf. Edlund 2020), for Deleuze it refers to two ways of organizing or distributing: logos is organization or distribution according to a pre-existing model, top-down hierarchy or process; while nomos is “anarchic distribution,” or self-organization, like cattle let out into an open pasture in which they arrange themselves (Roffe 2010: 189ff). [And in contrast to the nomos of the freely distributing cattle, one could consider force-fed geese in a foie-gras factory, as the ultimate culmination of animal organization according to logos].

The State vs. War-Machine opposition is a particularly interesting example of D&G’s method of dividing things into opposing binaries, then mixing those binaries together and showing how they are not really so opposing. The interesting thing here is that they need to posit “the State” in very particular terms as a form of rigid organization and thinking, first and foremost; in relation to this the “war machine” and any kind of open or fluid process becomes something that must originate outside the state and be fundamentally opposed to it (in principle though not always in practice). To do this they have to ignore competing theories, such as the state being founded on conquest or as a protection racket by erstwhile marauders, “war is the health of the state,” etc. (Bourne 1919). In a way, setting this opposition in the form of an ancient encounter between “the State” and “nomadic war machines,” feels a bit like a Just-So-Story, since things were always more complicated than this; nevertheless there is a point in distilling out these opposing forces or forms, to understand them better, even if the end involves mixing them back together:

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. (354)

The State gets into our heads, or more accurately, we are habituated into taking the state and its organization, its hierarchy, for granted. Of course, Bourne’s “war is the health of the state” is also an attempt to jolt us out of thinking of the State as some kind of ensurer of peace in contrast to a “war of all against all” (cf. also Calgacus’s mocking critique of the Pax Romana). D&G’s response to this position is that

whenever the irruption of war power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets muddled; the war machine can then be understood only through the categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State.

So, something must be left that is not inherently or originarily an aspect of the State or State thinking; and instead of such alternative outsides as peace, commons, communitas, and so on, D&G are going to go with the War Machine (a concept originally from Kleist).

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

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

Here they turn to the work of Pierre Clastres (1989), particularly his argument that “primitive” societies are not just simply societies which have failed to evolve into state societies, but that they are quite aware of the possibility of the state, and are actively organized in such a way as to prevent the state from arising. D&G focus on war as a means of preventing state formation, which is once again a bit selective, as this is only one of several means which Clastres delineates (others include the gift economy, humor, prophecy, etc.). They note the anthropological distinction between chiefdoms and states:

To be sure, primitive societies have chiefs. But the State is not defined by the existence of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power. The concern of the State is to conserve. (357)

In Weberian terms, chiefs rule temporarily and provisionally, on account of their charisma, personal connections, and ability to cobble together followers. For a true State to exist, however, there need to be fixed institutions and roles which continue regardless of the lives and deaths of the individuals who fill them: “The king is dead, long live the king!” Clastres’ argument is that primitive societies do not simply lack these institutions: to the contrary, they possess “diffuse, collective mechanisms” which prevent them from forming. The primitive institution of war and warriorhood is one of these, involving

a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State. (358)

[Indiscipline in the above quote specifically contrasting the discipline of the army after its capture by the State. I’m curious how well this fits with the history of, for instance, ancient Greek warfare, with the transition from feuding chieftains in their chariots, to phalanxes of citizen-hoplites. D&G in fact reference this transition, but not in a way that clarifies my question.]

They voice a criticism of Clastres, namely that he posits primitive societies as static, self-sufficient entities, out of which the state emerges suddenly and mysteriously, through the unexplained breakdown of the state-preventing mechanisms. Clastres is thus, despite himself, recreating a story of evolution from a “state of nature” to the modern dominance of the state.

We will never leave the evolution hypothesis behind by creating a break between the two terms, that is, by endowing bands with self-sufficiency and the State with an emergence all the more miraculous and monstrous. (359)

“We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite perfect, quite complete” (360). To the extent that D&G are arguing that there have been actually existing states and empires going back to the beginning of human history (and they do quite specifically imply this), they are on very shaky ground. To the extent they are arguing that the “Urstaat” pre-exists the emergence of the historical State, but “only as an idea around which primitive societies were organised in an antagonistic manner” (Kalyniuk 2019), this seems a safer bet, while also allowing them to maintain the State and counter-State societies, not as pure opposites, or as steps in an evolution, but as always existing in a relation to each other, as interiority and exteriority. Adkins notes that

While Clastres’ fundamental insight, namely that primitive societies ward off the state, remains correct, the mechanism he proposes [specifically of war] has come under scrutiny. … For the purposes of Deleuze and Guattari’s argument here it is sufficient to note that non-hierarchical societies can only maintain themselves to the degree that they can dissipate hierarchical structures. As we’ll see, these societies that refuse the state-form are “war machines” whether they take war as their object or not. (216-7n6)

Presaging later discussions of capitalism and the state, D&G delineate two “directions” in which exteriority exists today in relation to the State. The first is “worldwide ecumenical machines:”

huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a 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, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.) (360)

The second is

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 form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine.

But these war machines exist today in relation to the State, presupposing it, countering but not displacing it:

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 flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State. It is in terms not of independence, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms, megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against States. (360-1)

 

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

This proposition leads into a discussion of nomad or minor sciences, starting with the examples, derived from Serres, of the ancient atomists Democritus and Lucretius, and the geometry of Archimedes. This “eccentric science” has four characteristics: 1) it uses a hydraulic model [emphasizing flows rather than stable forms]; 2) “The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant” (361) – the clinamen is discussed in this context; 3) instead of the straight lines and parallels of striated space, it follows the curves, spirals, and “vortices” of smooth space; and 4) It is problematic, rather than theorematic [and note here, the variation between theorems and problems posed in this chapter, shows their intentional interweaving of striated and smooth space, of major and minor scientific approaches].

They discuss two competing geometries, or ways of thinking geometry: Euclidean, as the major science, and the more pragmatic Archimedean approach, exemplifying minor science. [A passage from Plutarch illustrates the opposition between the pragmatic approach of Archimedes and other thinkers, from the more abstract, “royal” science favored by Plato and exemplified by Euclid:]

These machines [Archimedes] had designed and contrived, not as matters of any importance, but as mere amusements in geometry; in compliance with King Hiero’s desire and request, some little time before, that he should reduce to practice some part of his admirable speculation in science, and by accommodating the theoretic truth to sensation and ordinary use, bring it more within the appreciation of the people in general. Eudoxus and Archytas had been the first originators of this far-famed and highly-prized art of mechanics, which they employed as an elegant illustration of geometrical truths, and as means of sustaining experimentally, to the satisfaction of the senses, conclusions too intricate for proof by words and diagrams. As, for example, to solve the problem, so often required in constructing geometrical figures, given the two extremes, to find the two mean lines of a proportion, both these mathematicians had recourse to the aid of instruments, adapting to their purpose certain curves and sections of lines. But what with Plato’s indignation at it, and his invectives against it as the mere corruption and annihilation of the one good of geometry, which was thus shamefully turning its back upon the unembodied objects of pure intelligence to recur to sensation, and to ask help (not to be obtained without base supervisions and depravation) from matter; so it was that mechanics came to be separated from geometry, and, repudiated and neglected by philosophers, took its place as a military art. (Plutarch 1940: 376)

Though opposed, the major and minor geometries exist in relation to each other, and D&G note how the static, major science needs to capture and make use of the “hydraulic” (aka flowing, changing?) minor science, in a passage reminiscent of Foucault’s discussion of the conduct of conduct:

the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers. (363)

The war machine or hydraulic model, in constrast

consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another.

Derived from the work of Anne Querien, Gothic architecture and bridge building are explored as encounters between minor-science journeymen and the major science of the State which employs them. This is followed by a discussion of the link between the war machine and the nomadic esprit de corps in the writings of Ibn Khaldun, then the concept of “protogeometry” from Husserl.

There is a discussion of the role of labor in the creativity of Gothic art and architecture, which goes substantially beyond Ruskin’s individualism, to the role of collectives of itinerant journeymen. In addition, Ruskin’s opposition between the creativity of the bottom-up artisan and that of the top-down star architect is rendered more material:

The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman is opposed to the metric plane of the architect, which is on paper and off site. The plane of consistency or composition is opposed to another plane, that of organization or formation. (368)

The anexact method of stone-squaring used by the Gothic artisans is replaced by the precise method using templates, which stand in for the knowledge and skill of the worker, much like automation in Braverman’s account, and a similar set of class relations and struggles is engendered:

It can be said not only that there is no longer a need for skilled or qualified labor, but also that there is a need for unskilled or unqualified labor, for a dequalification of labor. The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators [cf. Braverman’s white-collar workers]; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or implement of all of their power (puissance).

Ultimately, the state must continually appropriate and make use of the creative powers of the minor sciences, but at the same time continually repress them, because “they imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State,” because the hydraulic model challenges the hylomorphic, which is also the hierarchic. Citing Plato’s Timaeus, D&G reiterate the distinction between major and minor science as the Compars and Dispars, terms which apparently refer on the one hand to partnering or matching, like form to substance in a striated space, and on the other to dispersal, in a smooth space. In contrast to the Compars model, which extracts constants, the Dispars model effects “individuations through events or haecceities, not through the “object” as a compound of matter and form; vague essences are nothing other than haecceities” (369). This is, again, the contrast between logos and nomos. They articulate an important distinction between smooth space and homogeneous space, which is a form of striated space; a smooth space is a heterogeneous “field.”

They delineate Celeritas and Gravitas, or rapid and slow, as “not quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified movement” (371):

Laminar movement that striates space, that goes from one point to another, is weighty; but rapidity, celerity, applies only to movement that deviates to the minimum extent and thereafter assumes a vortical motion, occupying a smooth space, actually drawing smooth space itself.

The first corresponds to a physics of routes and paths, the latter to waves. They delineate a distinction between two kinds of science: one that reproduces, and one that follows – in the sense that the architect working from a template reproduces, while the artisan creating anew through the learned process follows but does not reproduce (because reproduction would be the reoccurrence of constants, while following creates similar but unique works, haccaeities). [This is linkable also to the contrast between structure and series in their discussion of becoming- in the previous chapter. To be sure, the verb “follow” could easily be aligned on the opposite side, as one “follows” a template or a leader; however, they emphasize the movement aspect of the verb, linking it to the itinerant artisan who follows a trade as they follow available work.]

There are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many “accidents” (problems). (372)

The two kinds of sciences nevertheless depend on each other, akin to the link between intuition and intelligence in Bergson’s thinking:

In the field of interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant sciences confine themselves to inventing problems whose solution is tied to a whole set of collective, nonscientific activities but whose scientific solution 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. (374)

 

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

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

As a means of trying to extricate thought from the State model, they discuss their concept of noology, a replacement for ideology as a focus of critique. “Ideology” has already been dismissed as an “execrable” concept (68); Claire Colebrook argues that “noology” is also opposed to phenomenology:

Ideology, for example, is the image of a mind that can think only through an imposed or external structure; phenomenology is the image of a mind that forms its world and whose ideas and experiences are structured by a subject oriented towards truth. (Colebrook 2010, 194)

Noology, in contrast, deals with “images of thought” and their historicity, taking them seriously as things or “thinkables” (ibid.), in order to “re-materialize ideology critique (as noology critique)” (Dillet 2016: 132). Significantly, D&G do not appear to be suggesting “noology” as a new field, but as an object of critique, in place of the dead end of the critique of ideology:

it appears that noology is not used by Deleuze and Guattari to designate a field of study in a conventional sense, but rather a general approach endemic in the history of philosophy. As such, noology refers to an approach Deleuze and Guattari wish to avoid. (Somers-Hall 2018: 244).

The critique of noology is a first step in the search for a way to “extricate thought from the State model.”

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, an entire organon.

The State-linked image of thought which is “covering all thought” has two heads, imperium/mythos and republic/logos, corresponding to Dumézil’s two forms of sovereignty, and also to the contest between kingly and democratic forms of truth, articulated by Detienne (1999). Detienne described how the concept of reason as a path to aletheia emerged in the democratization of ancient Greece, displacing the truth of the king or absolute sovereign; this democratically accessible concept of truth remains defined in contrast to the absolute, top-down model and thus

[t]hese two heads are in constant interference in the classical image of thought: a “republic of free spirits whose prince would be the idea of the Supreme Being.” And if these two heads are in interference, it is not only because there are many intermediaries and transitions between them, and because the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the first, but also because, antithetical and complementary, they are necessary to one another. It is not out of the question, however, 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. (375)

That third, “between” entity which allows for change is of course the war machine. Imperium and logos are caught in a static exchange: “The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that interiority a form of universality.” D&G discuss the history of thinkers in the service of the State, from ancient philosophers, through Kant, to modern sociologists, who “succeeded in replacing the philosopher” in the task of developing for it “a secular model of thought” (376). [And have not the sociologists since been largely displaced by the economists?]

“Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of images of thought, and their historicity.” “Thought,” or the “image of thought,” thinks for us, in conformity with the desires of the State. Yet, “noology is confronted by counterthoughts.... the acts of a ‘private thinker,’ as opposed to the public professor: Keirkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov.” D&G link these counterthoughts naturally to the war machine, and the desert, the thought of the outside; they note several reasons for which the term “private thinker” is insufficient.

D&G propose pathos (affect) as an alternative or opposition to mythos and logos, and give a reading of two “pathetic texts:” one a letter from Artaud to Jacques Riviére, the other Kleist’s “On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech” (Kleist 1951). [Artaud’s letter is presumably one of the ones in Artaud 1976, pg. 31ff. Kleist’s essay is a short, quick read and easily found online; Adkins (2015: 201-2) discusses it at some length.]

The Statist image of thought opposes two universals, the Whole (“the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon”) and the Subject (“the principle that converts being into being-for-us”), corresponding to mythos and logos (379). “Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a ‘universal method.’” Nomad, pathetic thought, in contrast, “does not ally itself with a universal thinking subject but, on the contrary, with a singular race.”

For “race” we could substitute “people,” “community,” “perspective,” “culture”... the point is there is a situated, contextualized positioning [in a particular milieu] rather than an alignment in terms of universals]. D&G are nevertheless quite intentional in choosing the word “race,” or “race-tribe,” as they want to recognize also the dangers of this thought, its peril of falling into racism or fascism. They respond by limiting the race-tribe to the minor/ity term:

The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race.

[i.e., “race” is always oppressed, by the system of race, in which even the dominant race or “majority” term is contaminated or compromised by the others it is defined in opposition to.]

Axiom II: The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.

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

As advertised, they now discuss three aspects of the war machine: the spatiogeographic, arithmetic/algebraic, and the affective. Adkins points out that these three aspects align with the next three propositions. Thus, they begin with the spatiogeographic, the nomads’ relationship to territory and mobility, which is distinct from the way the sedentary state relates to these; the nomad “has” a territory and a home in a different way than these are conceived in State societies. In terms of mobility

even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. (380)

They make a distinction between movement, which is extensive, and speed, which is intensive; movement takes you from point to point, whereas speed “constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point” (381). This is tied to their distinction between the nomad (speed/intensive) and the migrant (movement/extensive): the migrant moves from point to point within a space framed by the State and its economy [cf. also a commuter moving from home to work and back]. (Though D&G also call speed “absolute movement”).

It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land, even though they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary (the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself.

They describe the qualities of deserts of ice and sand as smooth spaces:

there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather “haptic,” a sonorous much more than a visual space. (382)

In a discussion on the composition of the State, and the question of Eastern vs Western States, they discuss anarchism in a footnote:

The idea of a “transformation” of the State indeed seems to be a Western one. And that other idea, the “destruction” of the State, belongs much more to the East and to the conditions of a nomad war machine. Attempts have been made to present the two ideas as successive phases of revolution, but there are too many differences between them and they are difficult to reconcile; they reflect the opposition between the socialist and anarchist currents of the nineteenth century. The Western proletariat itself is perceived from two points of view: as having to seize power and transform the State apparatus (the point of view of labor power), and as willing or wishing for the destruction of the State (this time, the point of view of nomadization power). Even Marx defines the proletariat not only as alienated (labor) but as deterritorialized. The proletariat, in this second perspective, appears as the heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did many anarchists invoke nomadic themes originating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above all were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a city haunted by nomads …. (558n61)

The State striates space, and subordinates smooth space, placing it in the service of communication, circulation, etc. in an extensive system of striated space. Gravitas is “the essence of the State:”

It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a “moved body” going from one point to another in a striated space. In this sense, the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed. (386)

[Returning to the chess-go distinction, we can see “movement” in the above as being the move of a chess piece, the “relative characteristic of a moved body,” that changes its emplacement, a re-emplacing in striated, demarcated, governed space; in contrast to the speed of pieces in go.] Controlling space means capturing or subordinating celeritas/speed to the project of striation, but this is never a completed task:

And each time there is an operation against the State—insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act—it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth (Virilio discusses the importance of the riot or revolutionary theme of “holding the street”). It is in this sense that the response of the State against all that threatens to move beyond it is to striate space.

They discuss the invention of the fortress as a “regulator of movement” which breaks the power of the nomads; noting that “The situation is much more complicated than we have let on,” they discuss the sea as a smooth space enabling state power via the “fleet in being” (387).

[To go on a bit of a tangent here, I was recently reading about Vercingetorix’s guerrilla war against Caesar. Gaulish society was increasingly sedentary but maintained a seminomadic emphasis on mobility, and Vercingetorix was “king” (rix) in the Celtic sense, that is, as head of a shifting, segmentary alliance of tribes. He was able to resist Rome as long as he kept up a scorched earth policy; his difficulty came when he was forced to defend the fortified city of Alesia (Herm 1976). Caesar not only invested the walled city but surrounded it with two additional walls, the inner protecting his army from the defenders of Alesia, and the outer from Gaulish allies gathering nearby; this involved immense difficulty and manpower (the inner wall was ten miles long, the outer one fifteen). The construction manifested the ability of the Roman state to marshall and maintain so much labor and skill in the service of conquest, and, pace D&G’s terminology, it seems hard to think of any better way to describe this than as a war machine against which the relatively mobile, segmentary organization of the Gauls was smashed (Vercingetorix surrendered, and his alliance dissolved). (Perhaps one could counter that it should be called a peace machine (cf. ATP pg. 422), but Calgacus would call out that particular bit of Roman Orwellianism in the following century). The Roman military war machine, with its logistic extension, seems so much more than a captured nomadic “war machine.” To the extent that there is a confrontation between smooth and striated spatial logics going on, it is within the Gaulish camp; in the fool’s errand of trying to match and fight the Roman State on its own terms, they grow increasingly State-like, losing much of their own flexibility.]

Proposition VI: Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of a war machine.

D&G propose three types of human organization: lineal, territorial, and numerical, corresponding to traditional societies, the State, and the nomads/war machine. The State is of course characterized by a relationship between the subject and the Earth mediated by the State, for instance via “property:”

Property is precisely the deterritorialized relation between the human being and the earth; this is so whether property constitutes a good belonging to the State, superposed upon continuing possession by a lineal community, or whether it itself becomes a good belonging to private individuals constituting a new community. (388)

The State overcodes or controls space in two ways, spatium and extensio, corresponding to the previously delineated “heads” of the State “image of thought” (imperio and republic). The State uses number (or more specifically, the numbered number) as a tool for controlling, striating, space (e.g., X,Y coordinates).

The numerical form of organization, in contrast, is characterized by numbering number (which they also call a cipher), meaning number that is agentive rather than controlled/overcoded; it refers to the “autonomous arithmetic organization” of the nomad (389), the “distribution of heterogeneity in a free space” (391). [Adkins (206-7) illustrates by expanding on D&G’s opposition between chess as striated, numbered, state space, and go as smooth, numbering, nomad space].

Proposition VII: Nomad existence has for “affects” the weapons of a war machine.

Turning to the third, affective aspect of the war machine, D&G delineate a distinction between weapons and tools which corresponds to the speed/intensive vs. extensive distinction threading through this chapter. Adkins (2015: 208) provides a helpful chart listing the five aspects of this distinction: direction (projection vs. introjection), vector (speed vs. gravity), model (free action vs. work), tonality (affect vs. feeling), and expression (jewelry vs. signs) (D&G don’t clarify this until page 402). In the course of dismissing presumed objections to the tool/weapon distinction, they differentiate between work and free action in relation to the motor:

The two ideal models of the motor are those of work and free action. Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next. Whatever its measure or degree, speed is relative in the first case, absolute in the second (the idea of a perpetuum mobile). (397)

“Weapons and weapon handling seem to be linked to a free-action model, and tools to a work model.” Using terminology from Simondon, they emphasize that this difference also has to do with the place of technology as an element within a collective, social assemblage:

But the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc. (397-8)

[One of the aspects I have found confusing in this section is the use of the word phylum, as in “It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the phylum selects, qualifies, and even invents the technical elements” (398). Though normally used as a name for a high-level category in linguistics or biology, D&G refer instead to the “machinic phylum” as an inventive flow; the word comes from the Greek for tribe or race, and can perhaps be thought of here as more cognate with affiliation (cf. also Freud on “phylogeny,” which they might be thinking of).]

So anyway, the difference between weapons and tools is not extrinsic (the uses to which they are put, per se), nor intrinsic (relating to their inherent qualities as objects), but internal, (relating to the assemblages with which they are associated). Thus,

What effectuates a free-action model is not the weapons in themselves and in their physical aspect but the “war machine” assemblage as formal cause of the weapons. And what effectuates the work model is not the tools but the “work machine” assemblage as formal cause of the tools.

They illustrate with the change in weaponry of warfare (from Detienne and Vernant), from the man-horse assemblage of the bronze age [actually man-chariot-horse], to the hoplite phalanx. This leads on to their argument that “Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire.” Thus, the shift mentioned above, from the elite chariot warriors of the Iliad, to the hoplites of the Classical era, reflects a new passional organization of the assemblage, from the “zoosexual Eros” of the warrior and horse, to the “group homosexual Eros” of the phalanx. The passional organization of assemblages is either through affect or feeling, with affect corresponding to weapons, nomads, and the war machine, and feelings to tools, the State, and the work machine.

Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools. (400)

It’s worth considering how the way D&G use the French terms travail as opposed to l’action libre intersects with the way work and labor are often distinguished in English, e.g., by Engels; thus travail (translated by Massumi as “work”) corresponds more closely to labor within the Marxist tradition:

For there to be work, there must be a capture of activity by the State apparatus, and a semiotization of activity by writing. Hence the affinity between the assemblages signs-tools, and signs of writing-organization of work.

[cf. also Vaneigem’s observations on the etymology of travail.] They explore metallurgy as a minor science that challenges state control, and that undermines the hylomorphic distinction with its attention to flow and change in the shape of metal, as well as in its itinerant, artisanal workforce.

Problem III: How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?

Proposition VIII: Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism.

Here they explore deeper into the question of metallurgy and how nomads acquire weapons, e.g., the saber (how could they have supposedly stolen or copied technology from the State, unless they already had the technical skill to produce it?). Per Adkins, this question blurs the distinction between imperial “state” and nomadic “war machine:”

Deleuze and Guattari complicate the story ... by arguing that the simple opposition between the state and the war machine is a false dichotomy. That is, it is impossible to say definitively that technological advances such as carbon steel are the property of either the state or the war machine. The better way to think about metallurgy is as a deterritorializing edge. (Adkins 2015: 210)

As D&G state it, a bit later on:

In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. (411)

They provide an extended definition of the assemblage in relation to flows, clarifying also their use of phylum:

We may speak of a machinic phylum, or technological lineage, wherever we find a constellation of singularities, prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression. (406)

We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense, is a veritable invention. Assemblages may group themselves into extremely vast constellations constituting “cultures,” or even “ages”; within these constellations, the assemblages still differentiate the phyla or the flow, dividing it into so many different phylas [sic], of a given order, on a given level, and introducing selective discontinuities in the ideal continuity of matter-movement. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct, differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts across them all, taking leave of one to pick up again in another, or making them coexist.

They invoke Simondon’s critique of the hylomorphic model, expounding on materiality:

On the one hand, to the formed or formable matter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying singularities or haecceities that are already like implicit forms that are topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of deformation: for example, the variable undulations and torsions of the fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. On the other hand, to the essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must add variable intensive affects, now resulting from the operation, now on the contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous, more or less elastic and resistant. (408)

We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed. (409)

Cf. the discussion of “following” above (371-2); this returns them to the subject of the artisan:

But artisans are complete only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to make “workers” of them. We will therefore define the artisan as one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, a machinic phylum. The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant.

This leads them further into a discussion of the various kinds of mobility, and their relations and differences: nomadism (smooth space), itinerancy (matter-flow), and transhumance (rotation) (410) [not to mention migration (striated space)]. In a footnote (562n95) they discuss Worringer’s theory of the “Gothic line” then go on to discuss miners, smiths, etc. as kinds of itinerant artisans.

Axiom III: The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.

Proposition IX: War does not necessarily have the battle as its object, and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result (under certain conditions).

Part of their purpose here is to clarify the difference between, and relations between, the “war machine” and actual war, per se. They list the three problems involved (416): “First, is the battle the ‘object’ of war? But also, is war the ‘object’ of the war machine? And finally, to what extent is the war machine the ‘object’ of the State apparatus?” To these three questions correspond three hypotheses (418, here separated for clarity):

(1) The war machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its primary object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the sense that it is determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and city-form with which it collides.

(2) When the State appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it.

(3) It is precisely after the war machine has been appropriated by the State in this way that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its “analytic” object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object). In short, it is at one and the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war machine, that the war machine takes war as its object, and that war becomes subordinated to the aims of the State.

This in turn leads to a discussion of three “problems” in the history of war, relating to the above hypotheses. Their conclusions impact the outcomes to their earlier questions, as to whether there is a way to “extricate thought from the State model,” and ward off the formation of the State. The war machine has two “poles;” on the more discouraging side, there is the appropriation of the war machine by the State, and the transformation of the State in turn by the appropriated war machine (total war, per Virilio), linked directly to capitalism (as will be discussed further in the next chapter):

at one pole, [the State war machine] takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here—limited war, total war, worldwide organization—war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war machine but only, whatever the machine’s power, either the set of conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of which the States themselves are now only parts. (422)

And yet, the other pole

is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.

And in the end, they admit that their derivation of the “war machine” from the nomads was just a way of talking about it, making connections, a Just-So-Story (and cf. their earlier critique of Clastres: they are trying to tell a historical origin story while avoiding a claim for some pristine, pre-State purity). The point is not really just about nomads, but about opposition to the State:

However, in conformity with the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an “ideological,” scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to a phylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who defines this constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine. (422-3)

War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination. (433)

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