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).

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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” which 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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