Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 12

Summary of Chapter 12: Sacrifice

This chapter begins a new section, titled “The impossibility of realisation: power as sum of seductions,” which V summarizes:

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it people give up their real riches: for a cause that mutilates them {twelve}; for an imaginary unity that fragments them {thirteen}; for an appearance that reifies them {fourteen}; for roles that wrest them from authentic life (fifteen}; for a time whose passage defines and confines them {sixteen}. (105)

This chapter will thus be on “the cause that mutilates.” V’s summary (107):

There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really a sacrifice to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic self-destruction both leave us nothing – not even the option of death. All causes are equally inhuman. But the will to live raises its voice against this epidemic of masochism wherever there is the slightest pretext for revolt; for what appear to be merely partial demands actually conceal the process whereby a revolution is being prepared: the nameless revolution, the revolution of everyday life (1). The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered: human beings are not exchangeable. Henceforward the appeal to voluntary self -sacrifice is going to have to rely on three strategies only: the appeal to art, the appeal to human feelings and the appeal to the present (2).

“Where people are not broken – and broken in – by force and fraud, they are seduced.” The seduction of the current consumerist world (and its parallel in the State-socialist world, at the time V was writing), is familiar from earlier chapters. The way that myth and sacrifice operate in the current bourgeois world is a sort of debasement of their aristocratic predecessors (cf. Chapter 8).

the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic sacrifice of the master embodies within itself the real sacrifice of the slave: the master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real power to the general interest, while the slave makes a material sacrifice of his real life to a power which he shares in appearance only.

The decline and fall of sacrifice parallels the decline and fall of myth. Bourgeois thought exposes the materiality of myth, deconsecrating and fragmenting it. It does not abolish it, however, because if it did the bourgeoisie would cease to exploit – and hence to exist. The fragmentary spectacle is simply one phase in the decomposition of myth, a process today being accelerated by the dictates of consumption. Similarly, the old sacrifice-gift ordained by cosmic forces has shrivelled into a sacrifice-exchange minutely metered in terms of social security and social-democratic justice. (108)

Throughout this book V has been discussing “privative appropriation” (l’appropriation privative), and only now has it occured to me to wonder how this relates to the more common phrase “primitive accumulation.” V defines privative appropriation elsewhere (Vaneigem 2009) as “the seizing of control by a class, group, caste or individual of a general power over socioeconomic survival whose form remains complex — from ownership of land, territory, factories or capital, all the way to the ‘pure’ exercise of power over people (hierarchy).”

He mocks the pro-Soviet, statist left as also demanding “sacrifice.” Fanatics across the political spectrum sacrifice themselves to a Cause, which is really an aesthetics of death.

For aesthetics is carnival paralysed, as cut off from life as a Jibaro head, the carnival of death. The aesthetic element, the element of pose, corresponds to the element of death secreted by everyday life. (109)

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish. (110)

Ideology is the rebel's tombstone, its purpose being to prevent his coming back to life.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit. (111)

Thus for V, any of these specific causes or goals is a “thing,” a limitation to which individuals are called to sacrifice themselves; the real aim of revolution in his eyes is this reawakening of the “carnival spirit.”

The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution.

The ‘road to socialism’ consists in this: as people become more and more tightly shackled by the sordid relations of reification, the tendency of the humanitarians to mutilate people in an egalitarian fashion grows ever more insistent. And with the deepening crisis of the virtues of self-abnegation and of devotion generating a tendency towards radical refusal, the sociologists, those watchdogs of modern society, have been called in to peddle a subtler form of sacrifice: art. (112)

He traces how art changed from ancient, to bourgeois times, and its role in recuperating struggle into the service of the status quo.

The function of the spectacle in ideology, art and culture is to turn the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. (113)

New art movements are subject to planned obsolescence, such that the “dictatorship of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses before it can produce any masterpieces.” V is critical of attempts to resist this manufacturing a new aesthetic out of everyday life via “Sociodramas and happenings which supposedly provoke spontaneous participation on the part of the spectators,” as these do not truly challenge the spectacle. He considers the potentials, and failures, of surrealism, but notes that the “present state of affairs tends to favour situationist agitation” (115).

Wherever the will to live fails to spring spontaneously from individual poetry, there falls the shadow of the crucified Toad of Nazareth. The artist in every human being can never be brought out by regression to artistic forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have to go back to square one. (115)

The fact is that there will never be any friendship, or love, or hospitality, or solidarity, so long as self-abnegation exists. The call for self-denial always amounts to an attempt to make inhumanity attractive.

We never really give ourselves over completely to what we are doing, except perhaps in orgasm. Our present is grounded in what we are going to do later and in what we have just done, with the result that it always bears the stamp of unpleasure. In collective as well as in individual history, the cult of the past and the cult of the future are equally reactionary. Everything which has to be built has to be built in the present. (116)

I want to live intensely, for myself, grasping every pleasure firm in the knowledge that what is radically good for me will be good for everyone. And above all I would promote this one watchword: ‘Act as though there were no tomorrow.’

Vaneigem, Raoul (2009 [1963]) “Basic Banalities.” The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-basic-banalities

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

Summary of Part 3 Chapter 3: Technical and Philosophical Thought

In this chapter Simondon lays out his prognostications for how a presumably emerging or soon to emerge “philosophical thought” will characterize, or help bring about, the passage from our current split world toward a world which renews the unity or wholeness or whatever, which had characterized the original, magical world. He goes through the different kinds of thought which characterize our stage in world history – technical, religious, and aesthetic – showing how they fail to reach the desired outcome, and yet all include aspects which need to be included in the coming philosophical thought. Technics “grasps” us and our world below the level of unity, and social and political thought (which are the “functional analog of religions” (223) (and which he later specifies as national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet Communism (231)) grasp us from above the level of unity (224).

but these two representations are not enough, because the human world can be grasped in its unity only at the neutral point; technics pluralize it, and political thought integrates it into a higher unity, that of the totality of humanity in its coming-into-being, where it loses its real unity in the same way that the individual loses its unity within a group.

Aesthetic thought “grasps” reality at the “neutral point” between these, and philosophical thought will as well; but it will have to go beyond the merely representational level which aesthetic thought is stuck at, it will also require an “aesthetics of aesthetics,” putting the different stages of aesthetic thought into relation.

S goes through the limitations of current technical thought: it focuses on technical objects instead of seeing at the needed level, of the concrete technical individual (226). Instead of focusing on discipline-specific understanding, it will be necessary to understand the similarity (or identity?) of schemas at the intersection of multiple sciences and practical domains (227). Philosophical thought will need to grasp the “polytechnic — both natural and human — universe” (228); though the term “network” (réseau) goes a way towards this, it is too imprecise, S argues, in that it “does not account for the particular regimes of causality and conditioning that exist in these networks, and that functionally attach them to the human world and to the natural world, as a concrete mediation between these two worlds.” [But “réticulation” totally nails it? This might be related to his critique of cybernetics as too focused in homeostasis, and too readily positing what S considers false equivalences between different kinds of system.]

The introduction of adequate representations of technical objects into culture would result in the key-points of technical networks becoming real terms of reference for the ensemble of human groups, whereas they currently are only key terms for those who understand them, which is to say for the technicians of each specialty; for other men, they only have a practical value, and correspond to very confused concepts; technical ensembles introduce themselves into the world as if they had no natural or human right of belonging, while a mountain or promontory, which have less concrete regulatory power than some technical ensembles, are known by all men of a region and belong to the representation of the world.

[I have to admit I have not been tracking to what extent Simondon’s concepts of “key points” (points clés) and “high points” (hauts lieux) correspond; this passage makes me think they do.] Anyway this sentence sums up “what is wrong with people and society today” in S’s view, and this is the situation which the coming philosophical thought will correct. S notes the different experiences of the human individual toward tools and networks:

one changes tools and instruments, one can construct or repair a tool oneself, but one cannot change the network, one doesn’t construct a network of one’s own: one can only connect to a network, adapt to it, participate in it; the network dominates and frames [enserre] the action of the individual, it even dominates each technical ensemble. (229)

S goes into a very interesting discussion of the human experience of the technical and natural world in terms of respect and the sacred. To non-technically aware people, big things like a harbor, a freeway interchange, or the aforementioned mountain peak, command respect; but the technical networks of which they are not aware of, do not command such respect. He describes an occasion in which the clock of the Paris Observatory was thrown off to some fractional degree (less than could cause any practical disruption at large) by “the tumultuous visit of science students passing by it on their way to the catacombs,” and the scandal this caused among the scientists who were attuned to this clock’s importance, and thus hold it in respect. S points out that humanities students would not have even thought to profane the workings of the clock, since they would not understand it to be sacred; likewise, a classroom experiment in disrupting a similar clock would not be scandalous, because such a clock does not hold the same sacred, key-point position in a crucial network. So, a future, better society in which we all had better technical understanding, would also be one in which we were more respectful of such networks and their “key-points.”

Turning to social-political thought, S lists its three main forms in the mid-20^th century (national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet communism), and how these are each related to technology (e.g., Soviet communism “gains self-awareness through the use of tractors, the foundation of factories” (231):

the distribution and integration of key-points of social and political thought in the world at least partially coincides with the distribution and integration of the technical key-points, and ... this coinciding becomes all the more perfect as technics becomes increasingly integrated within the universe, in the form of fixed ensembles, attached to one another, constraining [enserrant] human individuals into the links they determine.

Part of what S is doing through this chapter is noting the deficiencies of each of the existing forms of thought, and also the promising aspects which philosophical thought can draw on, when it unifies or transcends them or whatever. Technical and religious (including social-political) thoughts separate the world, when what is needed is to grasp its continuity (233). Part of the solution is the development of what S has elsewhere in the book called “technical culture” (cf. Combes 2013: 57ff.):

it is culture, considered as a lived totality, that must incorporate the technical ensembles by knowing their nature, in order to be able to regulate human life according to these technical ensembles. Culture must remain above all technics, but it must incorporate into its content the knowledge and intuition of genuine technical schemas. Culture is that through which man regulates his relation with the world and with himself; and yet if culture were not to incorporate technology, it would contain an opaque zone and wouldn’t be able to contribute its regulative normativity to the coupling of man and the world. For in this coupling of man and the world, which is that of technical ensembles, there are schemas of activity and conditioning that can be clearly thought only by virtue of concepts defined by a reflexive but direct study. Culture must be contemporary with technics. Culture must reshape itself [se reformer] and must once again take up its content stage by stage. (234)

Per S, contemporary culture fails in this regard because it lags behind technology, understanding it through concepts and ethics which were suitable for earlier stages of history, but are now no longer sufficient. [Though of course, what S does not appear to consider is why this should be the case other than the extent to which “nobody has figured it out yet.” He does not consider what role such “opaque zones” [aka black-boxing] plays in contemporary political and social structures; how, for instance, the fact that users have only an opaque idea of the workings of social media, AI, and so on, is not a bug but a feature from the viewpoint of those who control platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.] Nevertheless, with such sociopolitical context added in, S’s vision has some resonance with thinkers like Bookchin or even Ruskin, who advocate a society whose technology is accessible to, and understood by, all members at large. Ruskin, however, would be susceptible to Simondon’s next argument, which is that

the confusion of technical realities with utensils is a cultural stereotype, founded on the normative notion of utility that is at once valorizing and devaluing. But this notion of utensil and of utility is inadequate to the effective and actual role of technical ensembles within the human world; it thus cannot be regulative in an effective way. (234-5)

S is here specifically arguing against Heidegger, but this also argues against Ruskin’s dream of a return to a day of independent artisans with their utensil-bound technical imagination, inadequate, per S, for the present and future of technical ensembles. The way for humans to learn how to understand technical ensembles is for them to experience, directly, certain situations:

In the same way one used to consider journeys as a means for acquiring culture, because they constituted a mode of placing man into a situation, one should also consider the technical experiences of being placed into a situation with respect to an ensemble, with effective responsibility, as having cultural value. To put it another way, every human being should to a certain extent take part in technical ensembles, that is, take on a responsibility, a definite task with respect to such an ensemble and be connected with a network of universal technics. Furthermore, individual man should not simply experience a single kind of technical ensemble, but rather a plurality of them, just as a traveler will have to encounter several peoples, and experience their mores.

Thus, a future philosophically-informed technical culture would encourage its members to experience a diversity of such situations. Interestingly, S then continues in a manner reminiscent of a famous passage from Marx:

However, this kind of experience must be conceived more as a way of experiencing the situating of each type of technics and ensemble of technics, than as an effort to participate in the condition of man in each of the technics: for in each technics there are technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers, and to the extent that conditions are strictly social, they can be rather analogous, at each level, in the different technics. It is the particular situating in the technical network that must be experienced, insofar as it places man in the presence of and within a series of actions and processes that he does not direct alone, but in which he participates. (235-6)

The resonant, oft-quoted passage from The German Ideology:

… in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (Marx 1978: 160)

Marx then continues, emphasizing why such a range of experience should resist the recreation of what he calls “partial identities:”

This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors of historical development up till now. (ad loc.)

The mere idealism of Simondon’s warning to avoid falling into the limited, socially determined perspectives of “technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers,” and so on (cf. his similar argument back in the Introduction) can perhaps here be supplemented with something like Marx’s materialist account of how this involves overcoming exploitation and alienation (cf. the discussion of alienation in the summary of Part 2, Chapter 2). It is also worth noting that Simondon’s earlier argument privileging a particular social-scientific position of the “mechanologist” now appears to have dissolved into a more general argument for a sort of society in which individuals learn such a perspective through their regular course of experience; and in what sort of society would this be more likely, than one in which agency, access to, and responsibility for technical (etc.) organization was evenly distributed? [Daniel Colson, most notably, has found numerous resonances with anarchism in Simondon’s otherwise “largely apolitical” work (Colson 2019: 13).]

The philosopher/mechanologist retains an important role, which is similar to that of the artist in contemporary society:

The philosopher, comparable in this role to the artist, can help in raising awareness of the situation within the technical ensemble, by reflecting it within himself and by expressing it; but, again just as the artist, all he can do is be the one who solicits an intuition in others, once a definite sensitivity has been awakened and allows the grasping of the sense of a real experience. (236)

Again, this has to be more than what is possible today with art, which is, essentially, [aestheticizing]:

All the prestigious color photographs of sparks, of fumes, all the recordings of noise, sounds, or images, generally remain a use [exploitation] of technical reality and not a revelation of this reality. Technical reality must be thought, and even be known through participation in its schemas of action; aesthetic feeling can emerge, but only after this intervention of real intuition and participation and not as a fruit of a mere spectacle: every technical spectacle remains puerile and incomplete if it is not preceded by the integration into the technical ensemble.

“Intuition” and “participation” are among Simondon’s consistent offerings for how to get past the divisions he charts, between the technical and religious, the practical and theoretical, the inductive and the deductive, the a priori and the a posteriori. Religion, “being the paradigm of deductive thought” (240), is responsible for a division between Being (as primary) and Knowledge (as secondary), which has detrimentally influenced non-religious ways of thinking as well. [This may not be what he is referring to, but what springs to mind is the interminable 20^th century epistemological debate, taking a form similar to: S can be said to “know” p if:

1: p is true.

2. S believes that p is true.

3. S has “valid reasons” for believing that p is true.

The subsequent debate then hinges over how precisely to word proposition 3 (and/or 4, etc.), without recognizing that propositions 1 and 2 have set up an insuperable Cartesian binary, namely that which Simondon is here criticizing.]

Besides the “participation” in situations which was discussed above, Simondon’s other important answer for how to get past these binaries is intuition, which he derives from Bergson. Intuition is distinct from both “idea” (inductive) and “concept” (deductive):

Now, it is not entirely correct to identify intuition with the idea; knowledge by way of intuition is a grasping of being that is neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous with the existence of the being it grasps, and which is at the same level as this being; it is not a knowledge by way of the idea, for intuition is not already contained within the structure of the known being; it does not belong to that being; it is not a concept, since it has an internal unity that grants its autonomy and its singularity, preventing a genesis through accumulation; lastly, knowledge by way of intuition is really mediate in the sense that it does not grasp being in its absolute totality, like the idea, or on the basis of elements and by combination, like the concept, but rather grasps being at the level of domains constituting a structured ensemble.

Note that this also gets us past the limited perspectives focusing solely on element or totality. The new, philosophical intuition will follow on from, but surpass, the earlier stages of magical and aesthetic intuition (244). It will not grasp technical objects (and their users, ensembles, collectivities, etc.) as stable objects but genetically, in becoming. The essence will be going beyond previous, limited and divided ways of thinking, to grasp technicity through an understanding of concretization (thus establishing the importance of the rest of the book to this goal):

this conditioning of the technical object’s genesis are indeed effectively translated by a particular type of the technical object’s coming-into-being, what we have called the concretization of the technical object. The process of this concretization can be directly apprehended by the examination of a certain number of examples of technical objects. But the sense of this concretization, which is an inherence in the object of a technicity that is not entirely contained in it, can be understood only by philosophical thought following the genesis of the technical and non-technical modes of the relation between ... man and the world. Whence the use in this study of a genetic method applied first to technical objects and then to the study of the situation and role of technical thought in the whole [l'ensemble] of thought. (245-6)

Colson, Daniel (2019) A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze. Tr. by Jesse Cohn. Autonomedia, New York.

Combes, Muriel (2013) Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Marx, Karl (1978) “The German Ideology: Part I” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: WW Norton.

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 14

Summary of Chapter 14: The Smooth and the Striated

This chapter treats of smooth and striated spaces; how they mix, or are transformed one into the other and back. The date has to do with the development of ocean navigation, and the image is of a quilt, both being instances of the interaction and transformation of the smooth and the striated. They propose to discuss “a certain number of models, which would be like various aspects of the two spaces and the relations between them” (475).

The Technological Model. They start by discussing fabric [poss link to “textile” as cognate with “techne?”] The loom means the fabric can be any length in one direction, but only of a fixed width. Plato used weaving as the exemplar of a “royal science,” “in other words, the art of governing people or operating the State apparatus”.

In contrast to the striated grid space of woven fabric, felt operates by entanglement, and stands here for smooth space. Then this opposition is complicated by examples which fit on neither side or combine both logics, like crochet and patchwork quilting. “The smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that ‘smooth’ does not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal space prefiguring op art” (477).

The Musical Model. They discuss the theories of Pierre Boulez, already touched on in earlier chapters, concluding with the definition:

the striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rhythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal. (478)

The Maritime Model. They return to the subject of nomadism and space, with their terminology of points, lines, vectors, intervals, and direction and dimension. “Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter, in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties” (479). The sea provides an important lesson, as it is not only the archetypal smooth space, but also the first space where the modern science of geographic striation arose. They reference “the Portuguese argument” that the year 1440 marked a turning point in this, but then point to the more complex history in which earlier, more nomadic navigational strategies involving directionality were built on into the stratified latitude-longitude system of dimensionality. They point to further complications with reference to Virilio’s Insecurity of Territory, regarding nautical and aerial weapon systems which turn the seas and skies back into smooth space (whereby attacks could be launched anywhere), but, ironically, “for the purpose of controlling striated space more completely. The smooth always possesses a greater power of deterritorialization than the striated” (480).

All of this serves as a reminder that the smooth itself can be drawn and occupied by diabolical powers of organization; value judgments aside, this demonstrates above all that there exist two nonsymmetrical movements, one of which striates the smooth, and one of which reimparts smooth space on the basis of the striated.

Three differences between the smooth and the striated: 1) “in the case of the striated, the line is between two points, while in the smooth, the point is between two lines;” 2) smooth space is directional, with open intervals, and striated space is dimensional, with closed intervals; and 3) “In striated space, one closes off a surface and ‘allocates’ it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one ‘distributes’ oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one's crossings (logos and nomos)” (481).

They discuss the city as the archetypal striated space:

In contrast to the sea, the city is the striated space par excellence; the sea is a smooth space fundamentally open to striation, and the city is the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it back into operation everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside but also inside itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of worldwide organization, but also of a counterattack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant.

[It could be interesting to discuss urban automobility in terms of the same smoothness-within-and-over striation, which they discussed earlier in regard to military technology.]

“In each instance, then, the simple opposition ‘smooth-striated’ gives rise to far more difficult complications, alternations, and superpositions.” [And this is hardly surprising, for this is what Deleuzo-Guattarian binary oppositions do.]

D&G state that “there are two kinds of voyage” (482) by which they apparently mean on the one hand a voyage of extension across striated space, the voyage of Being of the commuter or tourist; and on the other a voyage of intension within smooth space, the voyage of Becoming of the nomad, [and presumably, of the flaneur, based on this description]:

a stroll taken by Henry Miller in Clichy or Brooklyn is a nomadic transit in smooth space; he makes the city disgorge a patchwork, differentials of speed, delays and accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations...

[Flanerie/psychogeography/rhythmanalysis/megapolisomancy, etc. could thus be discussed in terms of these complex interactions of the smooth and striated in urban space.]

The Mathematical Model. They start off discussing Riemann’s contribution to the understanding of multiplicity, and a distinction they derive loosely from Russell (and more directly from Bergson) between distance (qualitative multiplicity) and magnitude (quantitative multiplicity). Both are divisible, but the qualitative cannot be divided without changing its nature: “a temperature is not the sum of two smaller temperatures, a speed is not the sum of two smaller speeds” (483). In this context they make a reference to Zeno’s Paradox: “Achilles’ running is not divided into steps, his steps do not compose it in the manner of magnitudes;” from the context it sounds like the paradox can be interpreted as the clash of these two different systems of multiplicity; Zeno treats the arrow, the tortoise, the runner, etc., in terms of the quantitative, infinitely and homogeneously divisible multiplicity of the magnitude, which completely fails to capture the actual qualitative divisible multiplicity of distance.

D&G point out that their entire book so far has been characterized by the encounters between these two kinds of multiplicity:

We have on numerous occasions encountered all kinds of differences between two types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric; extensive and qualitative; centered and acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic; numerical and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses and of packs; of magnitude and of distance; of breaks and of frequency; striated and smooth. (484)

They reiterate the distinction between numbering number and numbered number, relating to minor and major science, and the smooth and the striated, respectively. Rhiemannian space can be taken as an exemplar of smooth space in that it is a heterogeneous patchwork. They isolate two aspects or characteristics of smooth space: 1) “when there are determinations that are part of one another and pertain to enveloped distances or ordered differences, independent of magnitude” and 2) “when, independent of metrics, determinations arise that cannot be part of one another but are connected by processes of frequency or accumulation” (485).

Again, they emphasize the continuous movement between smooth and striated and vice versa. Striated space is involved in “subjugating, overcoding, metricizing smooth space, ... neutralizing it,” but at the same time “giving it a milieu of propagation, extension, refraction, renewal, and impulse without which it would perhaps die of its own accord” (486).

Major science has a perpetual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if it did not confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements.

Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space.

They discuss the importance of fractals, and list six differences between smooth and striated space (separated here for clarity):

(1) we shall call striated or metric any aggregate with a whole number of dimensions, and for which it is possible to assign constant directions;

(2) nonmetric smooth space is constituted by the construction of a line with a fractional number of dimensions greater than one, or of a surface with a fractional number of dimensions greater than two;

(3) a fractional number of dimensions is the index of a properly directional space (with continuous variation in direction, and without tangent);

(4) what defines smooth space, then, is that it does not have a dimension higher than that which moves through it or is inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity, for example, a line that fills a plane without ceasing to be a line;

(5) space and that which occupies space tend to become identified, to have the same power, in the anexact yet rigorous form of the numbering or nonwhole number (occupy without counting);

(6) a smooth, amorphous space of this kind is constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumulation defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to “becoming” (more than a line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface) (488)

The meaning of this last is illustrated with a graphic of Von Koch’s curve and Sierpensky’s sponge (487).

The Physical Model. “The various models confirm a certain idea of striation: two series of parallels that intersect perpendicularly, some of which, the verticals, are more in the role of fixed elements or constants, whereas the others, the horizontals, are more in the role of variables. This is roughly the case for the warp and the woof, harmony and melody, longitude and latitude” (488). They address the question as to why “smooth space” is not considered “homogeneous:”

If the smooth and the homogeneous seem to communicate, it is only because when the striated attains its ideal of perfect homogeneity, it is apt to reimpart smooth space, by a movement that superposes itself upon that of the homogeneous but remains entirely different from it.

They list six steps of an “imaginary, elementary physics” to show the connection between homogeneity and striation (here separated for clarity):

(1) You begin by striating space with parallel gravitational verticals.

(2) The resultant of these parallels or forces is applied to a point inside the body occupying the space (center of gravity).

(3) The position of this point does not change when the direction of the parallel forces is changed, when they become perpendicular to their original direction.

(4) You discover that gravity is a particular case of a universal attraction following straight lines or biunivocal relations between two bodies.

(5) You define a general notion of work as a force-displacement relation in a certain direction.

(6) You then have the physical basis for an increasingly perfect striated space, running not only vertically and horizontally, but in every direction subordinated to points. (488-9)

[I can’t see any direct link between this and the list of six differences between smooth and striated space on the previous page.] Space escapes the limits of striation in two ways: at one pole, through declination, linked to the clinamen of Lucretius; and at the other through vortices and spirals.

The shift from vertical to horizontal striation, and thus to greater homogeneity, outlined in the list of six, above, is linked first to the shift from empires to city states, and then to the transformation of labor along with the development of capitalism. This relates to their earlier discussion of work and free action, [and Massumi’s translation continues the same inconsistency as before in the use of “work” and “labor” to translate D&G’s “travail,” in a footnote on Sahlins (573n25), in particular, reversing the more common English usage derived from Engels. Given that D&G are here arguing for a link between sociology and physics, Massumi is perhaps more concerned to bring out the link to the use of “work” in physics (“travail d’un force” in French, which less felicitously lacks the English word’s etymological connection to erg.)]

As opposed to free action, which takes place in a smooth space, “work” is marshaled for the re/production of striated space. The “physicosocial” Work-model is linked to the State in two ways:

First, because labor appears only with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labor that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labor (in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labor.

Second, labor performs a generalized operation of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise of the State, namely, its conquest of the war machine. (490-91)

So-called “primitive societies” refuse not only the state, but “work,” engaging rather in free action. Ancient empires first make the extraction of surplus labor obvious [in addition to the work you regularly do reproducing yourselves, you also do extra work to pay tribute, do corvée service, etc.]. Capitalism suffuses all work with surplus value extraction, so the distinction between “labor” and “surplus labor” becomes nebulous: “Marx shows precisely that surplus value ceases to be localizable in the capitalist regime” (491). With automation, acc D&G, machines themselves produce surplus value, flipping the composition of capital so that “it remains true that all labor involves surplus labor; but surplus labor no longer requires labor” (492). This displaces labor from the work of production to the “work” of consumption/[prosumption]:

Not only does the user as such tend to become an employee, but capitalism operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling—every semiotic system. It is as though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was able to carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital necessarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooth space in which the destiny of human beings is recast.

Along with this smooth space of [semiotic capital] contemporary [late capitalism] also produces a smooth global space of corporate movement:

The present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making the distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and circulating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is instead the distinction between striated capital and smooth capital, and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across territories and States, and even the different types of States.

The Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art

Nomad art and its successors (barbarian, Gothic, and modern art) 1) possess close-range vision, as opposed to long-range vision, and 2) are haptic rather than optical (D&G emphasize that this is not limited to “tactile” and is available as well to the eye and all senses). They thus involve smooth space rather than the striated Euclidean space of, e.g., the Renaissance, neo-Classical, Academic traditions, etc. They discuss the desert as smooth space with only the relative bearings of Riemannian monads (or nomads).

Striated space, on the contrary, is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, in variance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective. It is less easy to evaluate the creative potentialities of striated space, and how it can simultaneously emerge from the smooth and give everything a whole new impetus. (494)

Worringer and the others founded the haptic in Egyptian art, but per D&G this is incorrect, as this is where it has already been captured and put to work for striation (495). They subordinate the haptic/optic and near/far distinction to smooth/striated (496). They go into a lengthy discuss of abstract vs concrete line, and the “Gothic line” in conversation with Worringer; Adkins (2015: 241) gives a helpful illustration contrasting the art of Martini and Masolino [though part of his argument hinges on the Martini work not presenting one unified space/time; however, St. Peter also appears twice at two different “times,” standing with his back to himself in Masolino’s painting].

The abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation. (497)

What then should be termed abstract in modern art? A line of variable direction that describes no contour and delimits no form . .. (499)

“Do not multipy models.” There are countless other possible models and even kinds of space that could be discussed; their point on emphasizing these is practical and political:

What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us. (500)

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

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part III, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Part III, Chapter 2: Relations Between Technical Thought And Other Species Of Thought

This chapter is divided into two parts, “Technical thought and aesthetic thought,” and “Technical thought, theoretical thought, practical thought.” The first lays out a quite interesting theory of beauty, and the second sets the stage for the final chapter, on philosophical thought. The whole can be seen to be following through the relations established in the previous chapter, for which a diagram can be found in the previous summary.

in order for works of art to be possible, they must be made possible by a fundamental tendency in the human being, and by the ability to experience the aesthetic impression in certain real and vital circumstances. The artwork that is part of a civilization uses aesthetic feeling and satisfies, sometimes artificially and in an illusory manner, man’s tendency to seek a complement with respect to a totality, when he exerts a certain type of thought. (192)

S seems to be forging a path between a certain universalist or inherent “fundamental tendency in the human being” with a historical situatedness, in terms of a particular culture at a particular stage in the historical transition he has outlined, from magical to post-magical thought. Thus, in the post-magical world divided between science and religion, the role of aesthetic thought and the work of art is to recreate the sense of totality that had been lost with the end of unified magical thinking. However, S stresses again that this is not simply a survival or atavism of the older magical era, but something new and distinct; and also, as indicated in the above quote, that the sense of totality achieved may only be superficial and “illusory.”

He makes an interesting use of the term “metábasis eis állo” which is an abbreviation of the phrase “metábasis eis állo génos” from Aristotle, meaning a change from one genus (e.g., subject, line of reasoning, or discipline) to another. For Aristotle, and subsequent thinkers through Husserl, such metabasis has typically been considered a bad thing. Simondon, however, drops off the genos and transforms it into something more like “change into an other,” a positive thing in Simondon’s thought, and linked to his concept of transduction.

The aesthetic character of an act or a thing is its function of totality, its existence, both objective and subjective, as an outstanding point. Any act, any thing, any moment has in itself the ability to become an outstanding point of a new reticulation of the universe. Every culture selects the acts and situations that are apt to become outstanding points; but culture is not what creates the aptitude of a situation to become an outstanding point; it only forms a barrage against certain types of situations, leaving narrow straights for aesthetic expression with respect to the spontaneity of the aesthetic impression; culture intervenes as limit rather than as creator. (193)

The single reticulation of the magical world has been replaced with two separate reticulations of technics and religion in the modern world, but these cannot recreate the original unity, which can only be approached with aesthetics.

To this day, it does not appear possible for the two reticulations, that of technics within the geographical world and that of religions in the human world, to analogically encounter each other in a real, symbolic relation. And yet only in this way could the aesthetic impression state the rediscovery of the magical totality, by indicating that the forces of thought have once again found one another. Aesthetic feeling, common to both religious thought and technical thought, is the only bridge that could allow for the linking of these two halves of thought that result from the abandonment of magical thought. (194)

Aesthetic reality is “a new mediation between man and the world, an intermediate world between man and the world.”

Works of art recreate the power of key-points by their integratedness with their surroundings, a quality which distinguishes them from technical instruments, which retain their technical essence no matter where they are: “a statue is not placed just anywhere, a tree is not planted just anywhere” (195). It is not the imitation of nature [as presumed by some philosophers] but this integration with nature and the surrounding world, which defines the aesthetic object.

S develops his interesting theory of beauty in contrasting between technical and aesthetic objects:

technical objects are not inherently beautiful in themselves, unless one is seeking a type of presentation that answers directly to aesthetic concerns; in this case, there is a true distance between the technical object and the aesthetic object; it is as if there were in fact two objects, the aesthetic object enveloping and masking the technical object... (196)

His example is a modern water tower disguised to match an adjacent ancient ruin—a contemporary example of the same sort would be a cell tower masked to look like a tree. However, such an obvious example is not necessary for his argument. Way back in chapter one, S had distinguished between intrinsic, technical constraints shaping development, and extrinsic constraints coming from such silly and superfluous realms as marketing. Thus, for S, any technical object really is two objects, the pure, essential technical object corresponding to the intrinsic technical traits, and the second object a sort of aesthetic coating of all that is non-essential, but used for instance in marketing, corresponding for example to the “psychic and social inferences” which pollute the automobile as technical object (cf. chapter 1). Upon reading S’s claim that “technical objects are not inherently beautiful in themselves,” I thought of two drills I have near my desk; one, an old metal-green drill I inherited from my grandfather, very solid and elegantly curved in a way they don’t make them anymore; and the other, a garish plastic-rubber yellow and black thing I unfortunately had to replace it with. Both are, of course, both technical and aesthetic objects, equivalent insofar as they function as drills, but very different aesthetically—neither, perhaps, intended to be beautiful, per se, but rather to evoke various impressions of functionality, masculinity, and modernity. The older drill, however, has taken on a sort of beauty through its age and its association with an older aesthetic now flavored with nostalgia. Thus, while these drills as technical objects are completely interchangeable, and thus dissociated from context, as an aesthetic object, the older drill is beautiful through its integration into a certain sense of history and family belonging.

And this is the essence of S’s theory of beauty when applied to technical objects, that it is an effect of their integration into the world in the manner of an aesthetic object (another example he gives is that of a sail that is beautiful when filled by the wind). “But it is not only the technical object that is beautiful: it is the singular point of the world that the technical object concretizes” (197) “The technical object is beautiful when it has encountered a ground that suits it, whose own figure it can be, in other words when it completes and expresses the world.”

However, to return to the ugly, new yellow-and-black drill, this is also designed to evoke connotations and thus bind it into a meaningful cultural context. Thus the aspect of integration which S uses to explain the experience of beauty, no doubt actually informs not just beauty but a wide range of aesthetic reactions to objects, including ugliness, boredom, inanity, who knows what else—basically whatever reaction to an aesthetic object is possible.

S goes on to argue that although technical objects, by definition, are not beautiful in and of themselves (for reasons given above), they can come to be understood as beautiful in their technicity through education, e.g., in the mind of a student of science who comes to sense the beauty of their operation (his example is a radio relay). And this again is because this is an understanding of their operation as integrated into a universe: “The telephone call center is beautiful not because of its characteristics as an object, but because it is a key-point in collective and individual life” (198). As he states it later on, “it is never the object strictly speaking that is beautiful: it is the encounter — which takes place about the object — between a real aspect of the world and a human gesture” (202).

One can thus say that the aesthetic object is not strictly speaking an object, but rather the extension of the natural or human world that remains integrated within the reality that bears it … (199)

In addition to differing from technical thought in the above ways, aesthetic thought also differs from religious thought in that “it can neither be universalized nor subjectivized.” It does not take on the meaning that religion does:

the work of art remains artificial and localized, produced at a certain moment; it is not anterior and superior to the world and to man. The set [ensemble] of all works of art perpetuates the magical universe and maintains its structure: it marks the neutral point between technics and religion.

As this neutral point between technics and religion, aesthetics is thus not just a holdover from the time of magic, but a working part of this post-magical reality. “A norm of beauty exists within these two opposite modes of thinking [i.e., technics and religion], a norm that makes them tend toward one another by applying them to the same universe.”

Aesthetic reality is thus a surplus to given reality, but according to lines that already exist in given reality; it is what reintroduces the figural functions and the functions of ground into given reality which, in the moment of the magical universe’s dissociation, had become technics and religion. (200)

While technical thought is made up of schemas, of figural elements without ground reality, and religious thought is made up of ground qualities and forces without figural structures, aesthetic thought combines figural structures and ground qualities.

In discussing how aesthetic works relate to each other, he goes into an interesting discussion of analogy, then discusses the relation between perception and participation. The translators provide a lengthy footnote (202n5) discussing his Simondon’s term “appeal aspect” (Caractère d’appel) in terms of the Gestalt concept of valence. S surveys changes through the ancient Tragic, the Romantic, and the Classical periods of art. He intends an important distinction between superficial art which fails to achieve anything lasting or meaningful, and the more important art which does:

premature aestheticizing tends toward a static satisfaction, toward a false completion prior to a complete specification; true technicity and true religion should not tend toward aestheticism, which maintains a rather facile magical unity through compensation, and thereby preserves magic and religion at a rather poorly developed level. The real development of thought requires the different attitudes of thought to be capable of detaching from each other and to even become antagonistic, for they cannot be simultaneously thought and developed by a single subject; they require, in fact, that a subject realize them and assume them in a profound, essential way, turning one of them into the principle of the subject’s existence and life. (208)

This presence of multiple attitudes existing at once in the work of art [cf. Bakhtin] requires that such art be social and collective, part of a tradition; “a second function of aesthetic judgment thus becomes that of preparing for the communication between social groups representing the specialization of different types of thought.” After all, “the subject is a collective being.” He refers to the “aesthetic quest,” bringing to mind his language in earlier chapters, that magic is not about superstition but about the will to explore and to supersede the given; thus, this aesthetic thinking also motivates scientific and technical progress and invention.

Aesthetic intention in itself is already the exigency of totality, the quest for a whole reality. Without aesthetic intention, there would be an indefinite quest for the same realities within ever more narrow specializations; this is why aesthetic intention appears like a perpetual deviation on the basis of the central directions of a quest; in reality this deviation is a quest for the real continuity beneath the arbitrary fragmentation of domains. (210)

One could even ask oneself whether art, to the extent that it observes, is not also what somehow sums up [résume] and renders an ensemble of realities transposable to another temporal unit, to another moment in history. Art, in the celebration and final investiture that it brings about, transforms the fulfilled and localized reality hic et nunc into a reality that will be able to traverse time and space: it renders human fulfillment non-finite; it is commonly said that art eternalizes different realities; art, in fact, does not eternalize but renders transductive, giving a localized and fulfilled reality the power to pass to other places and other moments. (210-11)

The second part of the chapter focuses on relations between theoretical and practical thought as further splits within the technical-religious divide, setting the stage for philosophical thought’s “role of convergence” in a future, “post-aesthetic” order (211). In the current order, it is the breakdown of existing models in practice that generates the need for innovation, or in Simondon’s way of putting it, regarding technics:

But the failure of the technical gesture phase shifts the technical act into two opposing realities: one figural, made of schemas of action, habits, and structured gestures learned by man as a means, and the other a ground reality, the qualities, dimensions, and powers of the world to which the technical gesture applies itself. This ground reality that undergirds the technical gesture is the dynamism of things, that through which they are productive, and that which gives them their fecundity, efficacy, and useable energy. (213)

This proceeds through inductive thought:

inductive thought comes from the failure of direct, parceled, localized technical action; this failure provokes the disjunction of the figural reality and the ground reality that was associated with it; inductive thought organizes the ground realities. (215)

As an example he gives a problem which emerged in hydraulics, whereby the water in a pump could not rise above a certain height, which fact was inexplicable according to existing models.

It is in order to recover the broken compatibility that technical thought splits into praxis and theory: theoretical thought which arises from technics is the thought at the heart of which it is possible to think the totality of the conditions of operation in a way that is once again homogeneous and coherent; through hydrostatics the system of conditions of the rising of water within the body of the pump can once again be homogeneous... (216)

Like technical thought, religious thought also splits when encountering limits, in this case to its imposition of totality. In contrast to the inductive approach of theoretical technicity, theoretical thought in religious thought is deductive, presuming a totality, a given, and then reasoning to particulars:

For contemplative deductive knowledge, the effort of knowledge is only that of becoming aware of an already existing order, not that of an effective ordering; knowledge does not change being, and always remains partially insufficient for grasping being, which is prior to it and at the heart of which knowledge deploys itself like a reflection. (218)

S makes the interesting claim that “the use of number within the sciences appears to be of religious origin rather than of technical origin; indeed, number is basically structure that allows deduction and allows the grasping of a particular reality in its reference to the whole [l’ensemble], so as to integrate itself within it...” He contrasts Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on number, with Plato’s side correlating with the religious and also the dominant scientific use today. Religious ethical thinking also proceeds from totality to particulars, for instance Kant’s categorical imperative:

the categorical religious imperative is categorical prior to being rational; it is everything at once, because the totality of being pre-exists all particular action and infinitely surpasses it, just as reality envelops the particular being who is the subject of moral action. (219)

A “complete” knowledge and a “complete” ethics would unite the opposed inductive/[pragmatic] and deductive/totalizing approaches of technics and religion, and their instantiations in theory and practice (220). This synthesis is a path to grasping reality: “the real is the synthesis of the virtual and the necessary [i.e., between the theoretical/desired/possible, and the limits set to this by nature, existing knowledge, etc.], or rather the foundation of their compatibility; between inductive pluralism and deductive pluralism, it is the stability of the figure-ground relation taken as a complete reality.”

In order for the divergence within the coming-into-being of thought to be fully compensated, the distance between the theoretical order and the practical order would have to be overcome by a type of thinking that has a definitive capacity of synthesis, and is able to present itself as a functional analog of magic, and then of aesthetic activity; in other words, the work that aesthetic thought accomplishes at the level of the primitive opposition between technics and religion would have to be carried out anew at the level of the relation between theoretical and practical thought. This work is what philosophical reflection must fulfill [accomplir]. (221)

Philosophical thought has to return to an originary grasping of the coming-into-being at the end of which it (philosophical thought) intervenes as a force of convergence.

The ensuing chapter on philosophical thought will also be about culture: “this intermediate mode can be called culture; philosophy would thus be constructive and regulative of culture, translating the sense [sens] of religions and of technics into cultural content." (222)

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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