Learning the City, Introduction

McFarlane, Colin (2011) Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

Summary of Introduction

McFarlane states that he writes to address five questions:

How might learning be conceptualized? How does learning take place on an everyday basis? How does learning occur translocally? How do different environments facilitate or inhibit learning? And how might we develop a critical geography of learning? (1)

He casts this in terms of assemblage in order to “emphasize the labour through which knowledge, resources, materials, and histories become aligned and contested;” he posits different “urban learning assemblages” in different contexts, which will be explored in the book. Drawing on writers like Heidegger, Sennett, and Ingold, he plans to explore urban learning through the concepts of dwelling, struggle, and practice (2). From Lefebvre, he draws the importance of interpretation and participation to a democratic understanding of urban learning:

if we are interested in urban justice, then we cannot simply ask what specialist and expertise knowledge is and what it does, nor simply how learning takes place—we need alongside this to ask constantly who we learn from and with; that is, we need to attend to where critical urban knowledge comes from and how it is learnt.

M takes care to distinguish learning from knowledge. “Knowledge is the sense that people make of information, which is anchored in practices, beliefs, and discourses” (3). He does not by this want to make of it a [reified] “possession,” but rather to say that

knowledge is located in space and time and situated in particular contexts; it is mediated through language, technology, collaboration and control; and it is constructed, provisional, and constantly developing.... Most importantly, if knowledge is the sense that people make of information, that sense is a practice that is distributed through relations between people, objects, and environment, and is not simply the property of individuals or groups alone.

[This last point is likely key to M’s project of democratization.] He notes the traditional distinction between tacit and codified or explicit forms of knowledge, which distinction can be useful, but which runs the risk of obscuring how these are both distributed in assemblages.

Learning, for its part, is “the specific processes, practices, and interactions through which knowledge is created, contested, and transformed.... a dstributed assemblage of people, materials, and space that is often neither formal nor simply individual.”

M will explore the issue of urban learning in a wide variety of senses and contexts, with a focus on varying “urban learning assemblages.”

urban learning is not exhausted by the specificity of particular encounters with urban form or process, but is instead embedded in the current of people’s lifeworlds, and is shaped relationally. (7)

The city “demands” learning, which is not a set or fixed thing but an unending process over time. McFarlane will focus not only on individual or group bodies moving through and experiencing the city, but also on the city as learned by activists, urban planners, etc. His goal is not to privilege certain kinds of learning as more “real” or “authentic”, but to argue for “a democratization of urban learning” (13). He ends with Le Corbusier’s quote that “a house is a machine for living in,” concluding, essentially, that a city is an assemblage for learning in.

Seeing Like A State, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Cities, People, and Language

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The chapter starts off with the classic Borges quote on the one-to-one scale map, for which Scott cites (ahem) the fictional author rather than Borges himself (nevertheless he will mention Borges and this same story in a footnote to the next chapter). The focus is on how the state tries to redesign society to make it more governable, primarily through three means: urban design, imposition of permanent surnames, and standardization of language. For the first of these, Scott contrasts the medieval streets of Bruges with the modern grid of Chicago as two opposing ideal-types of urban form:

For those who grew up in its various quarters, Bruges would have been perfectly familiar, perfectly legible. Its very alleys and lanes would have closely approximated the most common daily movements. For a stranger or trader arriving for the first time, however, the town was almost certainly confusing, simply because it lacked a repetitive, abstract logic that would allow a newcomer to orient herself. The cityscape of Bruges in 1500 could be said to privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge, including that of external political authorities. It functioned spatially in much the same way a difficult or unintelligible dialect would function linguistically. As a semipermeable membrane, it facilitated communication within the city while remaining stubbornly unfamiliar to those who had not grown up speaking this special geographic dialect. (53-4)

Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. (54)

A key motivation for the mapping of cities was to enable control. City planners looked at cities the way foresters looked at forests; Scott cites the influence of the Roman castra. “Other things being equal, the city laid out according to a simple, repetitive logic will be easiest to administer and to police” (55), with straight, wide streets for the marching of armies. Nevertheless he notes that street grids do not ensure governability: “No amount of formal order can overcome massive countervailing factors such as poverty, crime, social disorganization, or hostility toward officials. As a sign of the illegibility of such areas, the Census Bureau acknowledges that the number of uncounted African-Americans was six times the number of uncounted whites. The undercount is politically volatile since census figures determine the number of congressional seats to which a state is entitled” (369n12).

The aboveground order of a grid city facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways—an order no less important to the administrators of a city. Delivering mail, collecting taxes, conducting a census, moving supplies and people in and out of the city, putting down a riot or insurrection, digging for pipes and sewer lines, finding a felon or conscript (providing he is at the address given), and planning public transportation, water supply, and trash removal are all made vastly simpler by the logic of the grid. (56-7)

Three aspects of geometric order bear emphasis:

1: “The first is that the order in question is most evident, not at street level, but rather from above and from outside.” (57) This is achieved through miniaturization, for instance models of buildings, or of cities. S notes the use of airplanes for the top-down view [cf. Certeau]; today drones, satellites, etc.

2. “A second point about an urban order easily legible from outside is that the grand plan of the ensemble has no necessary relationship to the order of life as it is experienced by its residents.” (58)

The formal order of a geometrically regular urban space is just that: formal order. Its visual regimentation has a ceremonial or ideological quality, much like the order of a parade or a barracks. The fact that such order works for municipal and state authorities in administering the city is no guarantee that it works for citizens. Provisionally, then, we must remain agnostic about the relation between formal spatial order and social experience. (58)

[The point here is not that it is unrelated but that there is no necessary or inherent relationship. Obviously, as Scott makes clear later, the formal order impacts and shapes social experience, and is intended to.]

3. “The third notable aspect of homogeneous, geometrical, uniform property is its convenience as a standardized commodity for the market.”

[This point is very relevant to SF history:]

Precisely because they are abstract units detached from any ecological or topographical reality, they resemble a kind of currency which is endlessly amenable to aggregation and fragmentation. … Bureaucratic and commercial logic, in this instance, go hand in hand.”

Plans to completely remake cities rarely come to pass, so most old cities are mixes of Bruges and Chicago (his two examples). He illustrates with the oft-told story of Haussmanization in Paris.

As happens in many authoritarian modernizing schemes, the political tastes of the ruler occasionally trumped purely military and functional concerns. Rectilinear streets may have admirably assisted the mobilization of troops against insurgents, but they were also to be flanked by elegant facades and to terminate in imposing buildings that would impress visitors. Uniform modern buildings along the new boulevards may have represented healthier dwellings, but they were often no more than facades. The zoning regulations were almost exclusively concerned with the visible surfaces of buildings, but behind the facades, builders could build crowded, airless tenements, and many of them did. (62)

The desired legibility is not just architectural [a la Lynch], but social [a la Jameson]:

Legibility, in this case, was achieved by a much more pronounced segregation of the population by class and function. Each fragment of Paris increasingly took on a distinctive character of dress, activity, and wealth—bourgeois shopping district, prosperous residential quarter, industrial suburb, artisan quarter, bohemian quarter. It was a more easily managed and administered city and a more ‘readable’ city because of Haussmann’s heroic simplifications. (62-3)

Poorer residents were displaced to outer suburbs such as Belleville, which become seats of resistance, involved in the Paris Commune as “partly an attempt to reconquer the city … by those exiled to the periphery by Haussmann” (63).

Moving on from urban design, Scott turns to the imposition by the State of permanent surnames (64ff). This was in contrast to local naming practices: “Like the network of alleys in Bruges, the assortment of local weights and measures, and the intricacies of customary land tenure, the complexity of naming has some direct and often quite practical relations to local purposes.” (64)

The adoption of permanent, inherited patronyms went far, but not the whole way. How is a state to associate a name, however unique and unambiguous, with an individual? Like identity cards, social security numbers, and pass systems, names require that the citizenry cooperate by carrying them and producing them on the demand of an official. Cooperation is secured in most modern state systems by making a clear identity a prerequisite for receiving entitlements; in more coercive systems, harsh penalties are exacted for failure to carry identification documents. If, however, there is widespread defiance, individuals will either fail to identify themselves or use false identities. The ultimate identity card, then, is an ineradicable mark on the body: a tattoo, a fingerprint, a DNA ‘signature.’ (371n38)

Campaigns to assign permanent patronyrns have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns. (65)

In Han China, surnames were imposed on commoners for tax collection, at the same time stabilizing/creating the patrilineal family as a legal entity. In Europe the traditional system of naming was also overhauled:

An individual’s name was typically his given name, which might well suffice for local identification. If something more were required, a second designation could be added, indicating his occupation (in the English case, smith, baker), his geographical location (hill, edgewood), his father’s given name, or a personal characteristic (short, strong). These secondary designations were not permanent surnames; they did not survive their bearers, unless by chance, say, a baker’s son went into the same trade and was called by the same second designation. (65-6)

He illustrates with the failed Florentine census (catasto) of 1427:

The matter of age, like the matter of landholding, was a vastly different concept in the state’s hands than it was in popular practice. ... In local practice, exact ages were unimportant. Approximate ages and birth order (e.g., oldest son, youngest son) were more useful; in the catasto this is reflected by the tendency to declare ages in units of five or ten years (e.g., thirty-five, forty, forty- five, fifty, and sixty years). For the state, however, exact age was important for several reasons. The age of ‘fiscal adulthood’ as well as liability for conscription was eighteen, and, beyond age sixty, one was no longer responsible for capitation taxes. As one might expect, there was a demographically improbable clustering of declarations just below age eighteen and just above sixty. Like the surname, the designation of age, in the strict, linear, chronological sense, originates as a state project. (372n45)

When making his declaration, a typical Tuscan provided not only his own given name but those of his father and perhaps his grandfather as well, in quasi-biblical fashion (Luigi, son of Giovanni, son of Paolo). Given the limited number of baptismal names and the tendency of many families to repeat names in alternate generations, even this sequence might not suffice for unambiguous identification. The subject might then add his profession, his nickname, or a personal characteristic. (66)

In the final analysis, the Florentine state was inadequate to the administrative feat intended by the catasto. Popular resistance, the noncompliance of many local elites, and the arduousness and cost of the census exercise doomed the project, and officials returned to the earlier fiscal system.

The older method of naming can still be seen in many surnames:

A great many northern European surnames, though now permanent, still bear. like a fly caught in amber, particles that echo their antique purpose of designating who a man’s father was ( Fitz-, 0’-, -sen, -son, -s, Mac-, -vich. At the time of their establishment, last names often had a kind of local logic to them: John who owned a mill became John Miller; John who made cart wheels became John Wheelwright; John who was physically small became John Short. As their male descendants, whatever their occupations or stature, retained the patronyms, the names later assumed an arbitrary cast. (67)

Surnames were imposed with spread of written documents, allowing people to be identified even though the official identifying them or using the document did not know them personally. For individuals and communities, adopting surnames aligned with, and facilitated, interactions with state structures like taxation (record of previous payments) and property (inheritance).

One imagines that for a long time English subjects had in effect two names—their local name and an “official,” fixed patronym. As the frequency of interaction with impersonal administrative structures increased, the official name came to prevail in all but a man’s intimate circle. Those subjects living at a greater distance, both socially and geographically, from the organs of state power, as did the Tuscans, acquired permanent patronyms much later.

For instance, the Scots and Welsh getting surnames later than English. S goes into the interesting example of the Philippines, where Spanish officials created a list of “nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts” (69) which were used to assign surnames. Schools and other officials were ordered to require surname use, so people couldn’t just ignore them.

Surnames were imposed by various European states on Eastern European Jews. Other examples: US immigration, colonies, modernizing states.

Today, of course, there are now many other state-impelled standard designations that have vastly improved the capacity of the state to identify an individual. The creation of birth and death certificates, more specific addresses (that is, more specific than something like ‘John-on-the-hill’), identity cards, passports, social security numbers, photographs, fingerprints, and, most recently, DNA profiles have superseded the rather crude instrument of the permanent surname. But the surname was a first and crucial step toward making individual citizens officially legible, and along with the photograph, it is still the first fact on documents of identity. (71)

[Speaking of crude instruments, it is interesting that signatures are still used, often in very attenuated form (as in the digital scribble I used to sign for a UPS package, which was clearly not expected to be legible or match some “official” signature).]

Scott now turns to the imposition of a standard, official language, as a project of State control, with the particular example of France (drawing heavily on Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchman, among other sources):

The great cultural barrier imposed by a separate language is perhaps the most effective guarantee that a social world, easily accessible to insiders, will remain opaque to outsiders. (72)

Where the command of Latin had once defined participation in a wider culture for a small elite, the command of standard French now defined full participation in French culture. The implicit logic of the move was to define a hierarchy of cultures, relegating local languages and their regional cultures to, at best, a quaint provincialism. At the apex of this implicit pyramid was Paris and its institutions: ministries, schools, academies (including the guardian of the language, l’Académie Française). (73)

This was accompanied by the centralization of travel in France with Paris as a hub; (which became a liability in wartime):

It was aimed at achieving, for the military control of the nation, what Haussmann had achieved in the capital itself. It thus empowered Paris and the state at the expense of the provinces, greatly affected the economics of location, expedited central fiscal and military control, and severed or weakened lateral cultural and economic ties by favoring hierarchical links. At a stroke, it marginalized outlying areas in the way that official French had marginalized local dialects. (76)

Conclusion:

Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—and often several steps—removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture.

...complex reality must be reduced to schematic categories. The only way to accomplish this is to reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation. The invention, elaboration, and deployment of these abstractions represent, as Charles Tilly has shown, an enormous leap in state capacity—a move from tribute and indirect rule to taxation and direct rule. (77)

Direct rule sparked widespread resistance and necessitated negotiations that often limited the center’s power, but for the first time, it allowed state officials direct knowledge of and access to a previously opaque society.

For this biopolitical point S gives the example of the CDC, and the lifesaving capacities this creates.

The techniques devised to enhance the legibility of a society to its rulers have become vastly more sophisticated, but the political motives driving them have changed little. Appropriation, control, and manipulation (in the nonpejorative sense) remain the most prominent.

[By “nonpejorative” S means he is making basically the same point Foucault makes: this state logic is not “good or bad, but dangerous.”]

The interventions it does experience will typically be mediated by local trackers who know the society from inside and who are likely to interpose their own particular interests. Without this mediation—and often with it—state action is likely to be inept, greatly overshooting or undershooting its objective.

An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare. As long as the state’s interest is largely confined to grabbing a few tons of grain and rounding up a few conscripts, the state’s ignorance may not be fatal. When, however, the state’s objective requires changing the daily habits (hygiene or health practices) or work performance (quality labor or machine maintenance) of its citizens, such ignorance can well be disabling. A thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations, and measures. At the same time it is likely to create new positional advantages for those at the apex who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher the new state-created format. (78)

A telling illustration is the use of such knowledge by Nazis in the Holocaust. In the case of Amsterdam, the use was made of the legibility created by existing Dutch population and business registries, to which the Nazis “supplied the murderous purpose” [which phenomenon I have elsewhere called the “complicity” of the liberal state].

That legibility, I should emphasize, merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions—a capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.

Legibility implies a viewer whose place is central and whose vision is synoptic. State simplifications of the kind we have examined are designed to provide authorities with a schematic view of their society, a view not afforded to those without authority. Rather like U.S. highway patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities enjoy a quasi- monopolistic picture of selected aspects of the whole society. This privileged vantage point is typical of all institutional settings where command and control of complex human activities is paramount. The monastery, the barracks, the factory floor, and the administrative bureaucracy (private or public) exercise many statelike functions and often mimic its information structure as well. (79)

State simplifications can be considered part of an ongoing ‘project of legibility,’ a project that is never fully realized. The data from which such simplifications arise are, to varying degrees, riddled with inaccuracies, omissions, faulty aggregations, fraud, negligence, political distortion, and so on. A project of legibility is immanent in any statecraft that aims at manipulating society, but it is undermined by intra-state rivalries, technical obstacles, and, above all, the resistance of its subjects. (80)

Scott lists five characteristics of state simplifications:

1. They are interested, utilitarian;
2. They are documentary (written, recorded);
3. They are static (S defends this in a footnote: “Even when these facts appear dynamic, they are usually the result of multiple static observations through time that, through a ‘connect the dots’ process, give the appearance of continuous movement. In fact, what actually happened between, say, observation A and observation B remains a mystery, which is glossed over by the convention of merely drawing a straight line between the two data points” (375n79));
4. They are mostly aggregate facts (allowing for greater impersonality);
5. For most purposes, they are standardized for practical purposes.

There are at least three steps to manufacturing facts which are standardized and aggregatable [which could be glossed as coding, counting, and calculation]:

1. “the creation of common units of measurement or coding”;
2. “each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment”;
3. “the creation of wholly new facts by aggregation, following the logic of the new units.”

Combining several metrics of aggregation, one arrives at quite subtle, complex, heretofore unknown truths, including, for example, the distribution of tubercular patients by income and urban location. (81)

Though S calls these “state simplifications,” he does not mean to say by this that they are simple or foolish per se. Rather, the term simplification has here two senses:

1. “First, the knowledge that an official needs must give him or her a synoptic view of the ensemble; it must be cast in terms that are replicable across many cases. In this respect, such facts must lose their particularity and reappear in schematic or simplified form as a member of a class of facts.”
2. “Second, in a meaning closely related to the first, the grouping of synoptic facts necessarily entails collapsing or ignoring distinctions that might otherwise be relevant.”

Taking the example of measuring employment, S devotes a substantial footnote (375n82) to three problems created in the use of statistics:

1. The “hegemony of the categories,” i.e. a complex and diverse world of unique and varying circumstances must be radically simplified to fit [Procrustean] categories;
2. The fact of observation and measurement shapes the response of those being measured, for instance unemployment statistics being exaggerated, because of people working “off the books” to avoid taxation;
3. Those creating the statistics are also interested in the outcomes, and could [“massage”] the data to create desired impressions.

S notes that “accuracy is meaningless if the identical procedure cannot reliably be performed elsewhere” (81). [Though this sort of begs the question of just what “accuracy” would be, if not a feature of some “better,” more precise and exhaustive system of measurement? It is like contrasting any given map to Borges’ perfect (but useless) 1:1 map].

But Scott’s ultimate argument is that the State not only tries to create the map to suit the territory, but also seeks to transform the territory, to better suit the map.

The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations. (82)

The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a ‘civilizing mission.’ The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.

If you wish to have any standing in law, you must have a document that officials accept as evidence of citizenship, be that document a birth certificate, passport, or identity card. The categories used by state agents are not merely means to make their environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance. (83)

 

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)

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

Artaud, Antonin (1976) Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Bourne, Randolph (1919) Untimely Papers. B.W. Huebsch, New York.

Clastres, Pierre (1989) Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Zone Books, New York.

Colebrook, Claire (2010) “Noology” in Adrian Parr, ed. The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition. Edinburgh University Press.

Detienne, Marcel (1999) The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Zone Books, New York.

Dillet, Benoit (2016) “Deleuze’s Transformation of the Project of Ideology Critique: Noology Critique.” in Meiborg and van Tuinen, eds,, Deleuze and the Passions. Punctum Books, New York, pp. 125-146.

Edlund, John R. (2020, January 9) “Sophistic Appeals: Mythos, Logos, Nomos,” Teaching Text Rhetorically. https://textrhet.com/2020/01/09/sophistic-appeals-mythos-logos-nomos/

Herm, Gerhard (1976). The Celts: The People Who Came Out of the Darkness. St. Martin’s Press, New York.

Kalyniuk, Gregory (2019). “Pierre Clastres and the Amazonian War Machine.” In Chantelle Gray Van Heerden and Aragorn Eloff, eds., Deleuze and Anarchism. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 218-23. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aragorn-eloff-chantelle-gray-van-heerden-deleuze-and-anarchism

von Kleist, Heinrich (1951) “On the gradual construction of thoughts during speech.” tr. Michael Hamburger. German Life and Letters 5(1): 42-46.

Plutarch (1940) The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Modern Library, New York.

Roffe, Jonathan (2010) “Nomos.” In Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition. Edinburgh University Press.

Somers-Hall, Henry (2018) “The Smooth and the Striated.” in Somers-Hall, et al., eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 242-59.

Lyon, Rhythmanalysis, Introduction

 

Dawn Lyon, (2022) Introduction: Rhythm, Rhythmanalysis, and Urban Life. In Rhythmanalysis: Place, Mobility, Disruption, and Performance. Emerald Publishing, Bingsley, UK.

Summary

Dawn Lyon, author of What Is Rhythmanalysis (2018), introduces this edited volume on rhythmanalysis by situating its contributions in  relation to the development of the concept by Lefebvre and Régulier, as well as to other recent volumes and works. She discusses L’s focus on the interaction of linear and cyclical time, and the factors of repetition and difference in any rhythm, which introduce “cracks” which contain “the potential for social transformation” (3). In conversation with recent volumes by Edensor, Smith and Hetherington, and Crespi and Manghani, and others, she raises the relation of Lefebvre’s concept of dressage to Simmel’s blasé metropolitan inhabitants. She notes that, while drawing on Lefebvre and Régulier’s work, many contemporary invocations of rhythmanalysis go beyond what they had outlined; Lyon lists five “possibilities of rhythmanalysis” explored in this volume, among other recent works. These are rhythmanalysis 1) as analytical tool (separating out and interrelating various rhythms and types of rhythms), 2) as conceptual tool (as mid-range concept connecting sensed and unsensed, or immediate and distant rhythms; and as critique), 3) as a method, or research strategy orchestrating a range of methods, 4) as “embodied and sensory practice,” and 5) as “urban poetics” (7-11). She then introduces the rest of the chapters organized along themes of place, mobility, disruption, and performance.

Cunning Intelligence, Chapter 8

Review of Chapter 8: The Sea Crow

Continuing the investigation of Athena’s powers re metis, this chapter further contrasts the powers of Athena and Poseidon, this time in relation to the sea. They discuss the idea of an “Athena of the sea,” which may seem contradictory as this is Poseidon’s realm, yet Athena appears at important points in several myths being involved with the sea, and she also invents the first ship [in a similar relation of craftiness controlling the horse as in the previous chapter].

They discuss an Athena-linked sea bird, aithuia (215). The Tomb of Pandion, king of Athens, on promontory at Megara, has a link to Athena aithuia. There is a question of just what species was called the aithuia in ancient times, they settle on the sea-crow for convenience, it is both a land and sea animal, hence ambiguous.

“The sea-crow has a semantic value as an intermediary at the centre of a triangle of elements—the earth, the water, and the air. It is thus perculiarly well qualified to symblise various aspects of the world of navigation.” (217)

They discuss links between Athena and the sea-goddess Ino Leucothea from the odyssey; in the Odyssey Athena arranges the voyage of Telemachus; she did the same with Jason and the Argonauts, and further assisted them in getting past the Clashing Rocks with the help of a sea bird. They discuss the use of birds in navigation more generally.

They now feel ready to ask on context, “How did the Greeks view the art of navigation in the light of their religious experience of the sea?” (221) This is explored through two pairs of powers: Pontos and Poros, and Tuche and Kairos. Pontos, the Salty Deep, is the center of the ocean, with no land or other markers to tell the way, “the most mobile, changeable, and polymorphic space,” (222) described with metaphors of chaotic motion. Poros, in contrast, is a navigable ford, or a sea route; another name for pontos is thus aporia.

Tuche, sea goddess and sister of Metis, has both positive and negative sides. The negative: “Tuche stands for one entire aspect of the human condition in a series of representations of the individual buffeted by the waves, whirling with the winds, rolling helplessly hither and thither without respite” (223). But she also stands for success or a goal attained, she takes over the tiller for the pilot and guides the ship safely to port, or grants foresight (prometheia). According to D&V, these two aspects are inseparable, as the chaos and motion of the waves are the necessary context for steering with the tiller, etc.

In opposition/linkage to Tuche is Kairos, the propitious opportunity, which has been discussed in earlier chapters. They quote (250-1n45) from Plato’s Laws, in which the Athenian Stranger says that “Tuche and Kairos govern all human affairs, and that these two collaborators with God must be followed by a third which is our own, Techne...”

“The excellence of a navigator cannot be measured by the scope of his knowledge but rather by his ability to foresee and uncover in advance the traps the sea sets for him which are at the same time the opportunities it offers to his intelligence as a pilot.” (224) (this is paraphrase of Aristotle, they cite the Eudemian ethics, and Nicomachean ethics]

The relationship between Tuche and Kairos, and between the pilot, and the sea, is referred to as complicity:

"But whether they do indeed form a pair or not, Tuche and Kairos both emphasise one essential feature of the art of navigation: the necessary complicity between the pilot and the element of the sea.” (224-5)

Metis is one of the primary characteristics of the pilot (225). Athena is also associated with race runners; in the Iliad, she helps polymetic Odysseus win a race against fleet-footed Ajax, by getting Ajax to slip on some dung; although this is not a matter of Odysseus showing foresight, D&V argue it is basically the same, because Ajax, relying on speed instead of wit, has failed to foresee the dung:

“These circumstances are an expression, in the context of the epic, of the unpredictable nature of any competitive situation and of the advantages that metis cannot fail to derive from such unpredictability” (228).

They reiterate the three danger points of a race: the start, the turning point, and the finish line; however, through metis, Athena in fact dominates the entire track. “The victor is always the one who has more tricks up his sleeves than his rivals imagine” (231).

They develop the concept of “Agonistic area:”

“Although the athletic contest appears to take place within a closed area whose boundaries are fixed by arbiters and where the race is subject to certain specific rules, the fact is that any agonistic activity—whether it be running or the chariot race—takes place within an area that is, in a sense, similar to the area of the sea. The agonistic area, with its dangerous points and critical moments, is a place in which any kind of reversal is possible and where the path prescribed by the rules of the games is paralleled by any way that is open to and negotiable by metis. It is a shifting and polymorphic area in which the intervention of Athena necessarily takes the same form as in navigation where metis is at grips with the fluctuations of the sea and the blowing of the winds.”

Poseidon is Athena’s most formidable rival as a power over navigation, because he also saves ships; but does this differently. Athena appears and opens a path; Poseidon does not appear, but acts to control or tame the waves. They link this back to their differing control over horse driving, from the previous chapter.

Athena does not just cover the driving and navigation of chariots and ships, but their design and  manufacture: woodcutters, shipbuilders, and carpenters are all traditionally favored and protected by Athena (235), as is woodworking in general. Odysseus, as Athena’s protege, is good at all these things: he builds his own ship as carpenter, ship-builder, then pilots it.

“Among the expressions in the Greek language used to convey the idea of plotting, planning, or meditating, there is a group which employs imagery taken either from hunting or from fishing” (237). Weaving, like making a net, or constructing a ploy; the example of the Trojan Horse. They reiterate that Athena in these contexts is doubly active (instigator of movement, and resolver of difficulties), whereas Poseidon is passive as a sovereign (does not appear, but simply embodies control over the waters).

Finally, they bring up three myths which could challenge this interpretation, because Poseidon is portrayed more actively as a protector or patron of pilots: that of the Phaeacians, from the Odyssey; of Phrontis the pilot of Menelaus, and of cape Sounion, with temples to both Poseidon and Athena. They determine that “no pilot can exercise a craft which princiopally comes from Athena unless he simultaneously recognizes the role of the sovereignty of Poseidon” (243) (which essentially reiterates the concept of “complicity,” from earlier in the chapter).

The different roles of Poseidon and Athena vis-a-vis navigation are finally illustrated by the contrast between, the two helmsmen of the Argos: first there was Tiphys, favored by Athena; then after his death Ankaios, son of Poseidon (244). They are very different: Tiphys is masterly, Athena stands at his side. Ankaios, in contrast, never foresees anything, never decides anything; he always needs help and eventually quits in tears.

“... Athena manifests herself by exercising her intelligence as a navigator who is able to plot a straight course over the sea by taking cunning account of the unpredictability and instability of the waves...” (248)