I got this down off the shelf because it’s relevant to one of the things I’m working on, and because – some 39 years after buying it and reading it for the first time – I feel like I’m finally in a position to understand and make use of it. Follow along with me, as I do a reasonably close reading of it here? It ought to be a fair amount of fun. #nomadology #deleuzeandguattari #deleuze #guattari
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has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist-priest.” Oof!
You’ve got to imagine that there was no internet. The search engine wouldn’t be invented for another decade or so. I suppose I could have gone to the NYU library and looked up Dumézil – that’s certainly what my more diligent friend Jamie would have done, probably before proceeding to the next sentence – but it’s 1:30AM on 7th & B. You’re just going to have to get on with it.
@adamgreenfield
> 1:30AM on 7th & B.
> 1:30AM on 7th & B.
I assume you mean in Alphabet City NYC?
And you mentioned 1986?
I lived on 7th and C around that time. Wonder if we crossed paths (without knowing who that was...)
@bhaugen Yeah, I lived at 193 E 7th, about a third of the way down the block toward C, beginning of 1986 through mid-‘87.
@adamgreenfield we lived on 7th street between C and D. I could not find any records of our street address.
Also, altho I have no records of when, I think it was before 1986. So we most likely did not cross paths.
Also, altho I have no records of when, I think it was before 1986. So we most likely did not cross paths.
@adamgreenfield "magician" doesn't go with "jurist-priest"?
@billseitz Not if you think of the jurist and the priest as magicians of a sort in their own right (rite? lol).
@adamgreenfield right, I see the latter 2 as sub-types of magician.
Of course, you could also see the King as a magician. Or, at least the *first* king in a society. Who builds the magical apparatus to bless his successors...
Of course, you could also see the King as a magician. Or, at least the *first* king in a society. Who builds the magical apparatus to bless his successors...
@billseitz This is a very Graeberian approach. : . ) Or at least Graeber sits at the tail of a lineage arguing things along this line.
I often wonder if our approach to knowledge wouldn’t be improved if we couldn’t see all the sites where an idea and its near others were articulated, in picking it up for the first time – I guess that’s what the memex was all about, what Ted Nelson wanted to achieve.
@adamgreenfield "Everyone's a magician, it's just that most of us fool only ourselves."
@billseitz Again: everyone brings their own resonances to the text. For me, some wild combination of speech-act theory and Crowleyan ritual magick is what arises in considering what it is a judge does in literally *pronouncing* judgement; similarly the priest.
@adamgreenfield yup
"Blue costumes are real. Guns are real. Cars with bubble-gum machines on top are real. Cops are a social fiction."
"Blue costumes are real. Guns are real. Cars with bubble-gum machines on top are real. Cops are a social fiction."
We can, I think, safely assume that D&G do not *primarily* mean to invoke Foucault’s notions about “sovereignty” and “discipline” here, though surely that progression was hovering in the background for them in a way that it wasn’t for me. Let’s take them to mean sovereignty in its less specialized sense, just as they gloss it: a relationship of domination. Right here, in this first sentence, they’re invoking the comparative linguist & mythologist Dumézil to *differentiate forms of domination*.
But maybe “forms” isn’t quite it? Maybe it’s closer to *modes*. And Dumézil tells us that from the infancy of what would become the West, myth, legend and (where these things are distinguishable from) history agree that there are two distinct and recognizable modes in which domination is enacted over people: “Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer.” Thank god for those last two opposed pairs!
[Dinner break! And a chance to let all that settle.]
Some links before we proceed! It is, after all, very much in the D&G spirit to pursue tendrils sideways through the loam:
Georges Dumézil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Dum%C3%A9zil
Here’s a bit on the differing rationalities of power Foucault distinguishes as “sovereignty” and “discipline”: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2024/08/27/foucault-power/
…and some thinking about some of the resonances that may crop up when D&G refer to a “State apparatus”: https://openreadings.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/apparatus-dispositif-material-discursive-practice/
(At suitable intervals, I’ll drop in links to topics that crop up in the text, neither assuming that you’re already comprehensively familiar with this material, nor that it’s utterly new to you.)
OK, we go on! And I promise we’re not going to be quite as painstaking as we move on, but I think it’s important to lay out each element in the array of opposed pairs D&G offer to characterize Dumézil’s two modes of domination.
“Rex and flamen”: These are roles in the ceremonial culture of Rome, different channels by way of which divinely-sanctioned authority flowed through the Roman state.
Wikipedia (sorry) tells us that the “rex sacrorum (‘king of the sacred things’)” was a “senatorial priesthood” (!) reserved for patricians, while the flamen were high-ranking members of society who officiated the cults of various gods.
Hmm, I kind of get it? But to someone whose education has not immersed them in the culture of ancient Rome, there isn’t really enough contrast here to quite grasp the distinction D&G are trying to make. Perhaps we’ll have better luck with…
Raj and Brahman! These terms from India clarify matters slightly. As the context in which Westerners most often encounter the term – the British Raj – implies, “raj” connotes a sovereign who rules by conquest, and inscribes their power of capture and command in the state form. “Brahman,” by contrast, is the ever-self-transforming ultimate ground of reality, something very much like the Tao. (We’ll assume D&G did not mean to invoke the “brahmin,” the highest, priestly caste of Hinduism.)
This opposition begins to do a better job of clarifying the distinction I think D&G are trying to uphold, certainly better than that of “Rex and flamen.” But let’s move onto the next dyad, Romulus and Numa.
Here we’re back in Rome. Romulus, of course, was with his murdered twin brother Remus the legendary founder of the city. He is held to have laid out the city's boundaries and districts personally, and to have pursued social order by dividing the populace into three tribes.
The contrast being drawn with his immediate (and equally legendary) successor Numa is, again, less sharp than it might be, but evidently vests in the latter’s ability to instill civic peace not through the imposition of order but via the quality of inspiration. (The source here is Plutarch, who tells us that a kind of golden age of conciliation descended on Rome during Numa’s reign, until “on the iron-bound shield-handles lie the tawny spiders' webs.”)
What can we learn from Varuna and Mitra? They take us back to the “Indo-“ facet of Dumézil's expertise. Varuna is a Hindu god – perhaps significantly, the god of Order and Truth – but rather confusingly, Mitra has so little independent identity he generally appears in the hybrid form Mitra-Varuna, “which has essentially the same attributes as the god Varuna alone.” It’s not much to go on, by way of opposition between figures symbolizing two principles, modes or rationalities of domination.
Because, remember, what these figures of myth are supposedly emblematizing is the “absolute exteriority” of the war machine to the State apparatus – given that emphasis, you might expect a more sharply inscribed, not to say polar, binary than that present between Romulus and Numa or Varuna and Mitra. Fortunately we now arrive at the final terms in this series, which give us something to sink our teeth into: “the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer.”
We continue! We’re still on the first page of “Nomadology,” still working our way through the quote from philologist and comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil with which D&G choose to open up their exploration of the war machine and its exteriority to the State apparatus.
Following Dumézil, they have offered up a series of opposed pairs, each term of which represents one of the two modes in which the State practices its art of domination: the “magician-king” and the “jurist-priest.”
And as we’ve seen, while it is possible to glimpse some distinction between the opposed terms of each pair, in each case they are hardly polar opposites. Each term seems to share something of its nature with the other. What becomes clear here is that maybe there’s a reason for this: “their opposition is only relative”. They are, in fact, different moments or aspects of a State apparatus that “distributes binary distinctions and forms a milieu of interiority.”
Rather like three points define a plane, the State’s cyclical alternation between its modes of domination makes a stratum. And what D&G go on to argue is that war is always exterior to this space, this milieu or stratum. We might, indeed, think of the State as something that constitutes itself precisely in and through war, but for D&G the bundle of energies we know as war is something that properly remains outside of the State and furnishes an absolute contrast to it.
And here, already, the reader begins to get a sense of the specialized way in which D&G use common terms.
We might think of contemporary policing, for example, as something practically indistinguishable from the State’s making of war on its own subjects, and so – as these terms are conventionally understood, anyway, by just about anyone from Schmittians to critical race theorists – it would seem nonsensical to insist that war occupies a position of absolute exteriority to the State apparatus.
And what begins to take shape is a conception not of war as we might think of it – as a logistical, indeed bureaucratic exercise, which has as much or more to do with organization and command as with the ability to inflict kinetic violence on a given target – and more of something wilder and purer. For them, war is a force, or skein of forces, that inherently runs counter to State logics and each of its modes of power: “Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less than to Mitra.”
And this is pivotal. In a sense, even, it’s the whole book. For as I understand them, what D&G are arguing is that this thing they call the war machine produces an opening. With its sudden flashing violence, its “pure and immeasurable multiplicity,” the war machine constitutes “an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis” against sovereignty, the State apparatus and the milieu of interiority it churns out in its cycling between principles of rule. Whether or not this appeals
to you, all this talk of “incomprehensible cruelty” and so on, well, that’s a perfectly legitimate question. There is unquestionably a degree of romanticization here that feels – to put it mildly – incompatible with the experience of war’s reality, and I can’t really find fault with anyone who loses interest in the argument at this point. But there it is: if what you’re interested in is disrupting the State’s logic of control, what D&G propose is that you have to ride the lightning.
Or so, anyway, they would have us understand the counsel of the Western mythos. Tomorrow, we’ll have a look at the ways in which the notion of the war machine’s pure exteriority to the logic of State is manifest in games…and maybe even get past the book’s first few pages. Do let me know if you’re enjoying this reading, are finding it useful, or think I’ve missed something? 👊
@adamgreenfield I've read the whole thread up to today, and am enjoying the hell out of it. I will try to continue to check in on it as it further develops, but am up against a writing deadline of my own.
@siderea It’ll be here whenever you’re able to come back to it! At this pace I think we’ll wrap up in Revember of the year 2631. Good luck with your piece.
@adamgreenfield truly enjoying this, as someone who has a long-standing interest in D&G, but never dared dig in out of fear of being in way over my head.
Reading along with 🍿
Reading along with 🍿
Oh, and: links. I see I invoked, in passing, the name of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, so here’s a link to the Wikipedia page on one of his most impactful ideas, the “state of exception”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_exception
I also mentioned critical race theory. Here’s a painstakingly neutral overview of the topic, though you may well prefer one more rooted in advocacy. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-rights/archive/lesson-critical-race-theory/
And finally for today, rrrreally close readers may want to pursue the ceremonial management of spiritual power in Rome as a submerged but discernible theme in John Brunner’s 1969 near-future SF novel “The Jagged Orbit” (which features a household-security firm called Lares & Penates Inc., and one of whose protagonists is indeed given the name “Matthew Flamen”). I’ll be back tomorrow with more “Nomadology”!
Before we get into today’s text, I want to briefly weigh the question of preparation and, conversely, authorial intention. Does it matter what you bring with you to reading a book like this? What will the author(s) have expected of a reader, by way of context?
I think it’s important to situate this chapter from “A Thousand Plateaus” not simply in the history of philosophy, but in the context of an elite French education. And I’m going to approach that, appropriately enough, from the outside.
From my own position, actually – which is assuredly not that of someone with an elite education of any provenance. I can offer a concrete example, and hopefully it will shed some light on what I mean.
I forget where I first heard the term “conditions of possibility,” but it made sense to me immediately. I was a fan of James Burke’s TV show “Connections,” & therefore delighted to have been offered an elegant phrase to describe what has to happen before something else can come into being.
But what I didn’t know, and in fact wouldn’t grasp for decades, was that the phrase belongs to Immanuel Kant, and therefore brings in its train a whole set of resonances & implied understandings. And these would be obvious to anyone who’d had a proper grounding in philosophy, in the same way it’s obvious to folks with a different grounding that the guitar sound on a Galaxie 500 record is an allusion to/invocation of the Velvet Underground, with everything that implies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condition_of_possibility
And just in the way a fish never becomes aware of the water through which it swims, I think it’s fair to say that D&G had remarkably little reflexivity about the field of knowledge they implicitly assume mastery of on the part of the reader. They were products of a particular curriculum, and it equipped them with the ability to encapsulate ideas in a single reference, without citation, and trust that a certain payload would be delivered to the mind of a reader in the moment of encountering it.
@adamgreenfield Your description reminds me of my experience reading Camus' essays. He would mention a Greek character or a French poet, with the assumption the reader would know the weight of these reference.
When you start reading these works, it feels like you are dropping into a deep conversation. As one reads on, even lacking the knowledge, one begins to pick up what a reference to Hades may mean for this author.
Interestingly, sometimes when I have finally read the sources I find the common understanding for these short references may be wrong. It still doesn't matter. The references have meaning within the conversation.
I find this style educational, challenging, non condescending, and highly poetic and beautiful.
@hugoestr Those are unquestionably its upsides! It’s very French, it assumes a great deal of common intellectual-cultural ground between writer and reader, and it really makes you work if you yourself should not happen to share that ground. Such was the degree to which this appeared to me as simply the way Thought was that it took me much of my life to realize that there were other standards of discourse, other ways of presenting complex ideas.
@adamgreenfield It also has the side effect of one slowly gaining that cultural background. One begins to read the works that are referenced. This is how I ended up reading French poets :)
@adamgreenfield Something we discussed my first round through grad school is the absolute *Frenchness* of this technique. The French philosophical tradition has a completely different relationship to citation than the Anglo-Germanic one. There's even an argument to be made that the French approach to citation could constitute plagiarism in the Anglo-Germanic tradition. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S8755461506000363?via%3Dihub
@fishsauce Absolutely 100% this. And it’s something nobody ever *tells* you, except that I guess in your case somebody actually did. That’s good pedagogy.
@fishsauce (Personally, as you know, I incline more toward the most punctilious citational practice, as a source of joy for me and of breadcrumbs for my readers to follow.)
@adamgreenfield Artistically, I'm also into Barthes' idea of the "biographeme," which I think of almost like a form of citation, and how they can be used as a kind of hinge inside an artistic work to both cement the realism/verisimilitude and *simultaneously* call out the artificiality of the text.
@adamgreenfield I work similarly, to the point where the book of poetry I'm currently shopping around has an extensive notes section, but I find myself aesthetically aligning with the "remix" attitude presented in Hess' paper (the Dust Brothers/DJ Shadow/Prince Paul aesthetic is something I love, musically, and it dovetails w/ my interest in, say, the graphic design of Chris Ashworth).
What follows from this is that a text like “Nomadology” is much denser than it appears to a casual reader, in fact fractally dense, and that readers with the proper equipment enjoy an incomparably richer experience in the text than those of us who don’t. Most contemporary theory is like this: the author is implicitly situated in a lineage, (generally) implicitly arguing with someone/s specific, and enlisting entire bodies of thought in their argument by deploying the most glancing reference.
@adamgreenfield sounds like rabbinical literature
These are not books, in other words, that have been through the highly contemporary, market-oriented process of breaking things down for legibility & comprehension. Their authors did not care if someone coming to their work wound up hurling it across the room the moment they first encountered a train of unfamiliar terms. You’re very much on your own – still moreso if, like me, you picked the book up not as part of any curriculum, or because it’s been assigned or chosen by a reading group, but
@adamgreenfield I am a hurler of theory books across the room, and I am very grateful for this thread and its insights into such texts in general and this text in particular.
Thank you for reading it ‘aloud’ here.
Thank you for reading it ‘aloud’ here.
@CommonMugwort The pleasure is mine, quite literally. 👊
just because it looked or seemed interesting.
What I would maintain – would insist – is that the act of reading a book like this from what we might call the naive position is still generative of value. You might not have the slightest idea who Georges Dumézil is, have only the shallowest familiarity with the entire Western canon foundational to the authors & being drawn on in ways they themselves are only liminally aware of.
@adamgreenfield
rhizome was memed to death by media studies but that point is really why it's the first chapter of ATP
> A book itself is a little
machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a
war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract
machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting
literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other
machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in
order to work.
But the text will strike its own resonances for you. You’ll bring your own experiences to it, your own canon. You’ll think of examples, and counterexamples, from the cultural texts that signify for you. You’ll bring your own sideways richness to the act of interpretation. And while I think this is always true, it’s super apposite in the specific case of D&G. We haven’t, yet, discussed “lines of flight,” or what a “milieu” or a “stratum” means for them…
@adamgreenfield Thanks for articulating this. Marx's standard for critique, which is typical of serious thinkers in that intellectual tradition, was to critique from as high or higher an understanding of the subject. In the face of this challenge, it's easy to fall back on an anti-intellectual positivism. I think Jacotot's "panecastic" (Ignorant Schoolmaster) offers a good orientation for readers outside the tradition.