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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@adamgreenfield same feeling, I have that and red it way back when but only now do I think I have a hint of being able to take something useful and understood from it.
A couple of prefatory notes, by way of housekeeping: “Nomadology” is a chapter (or “plateau”) from “A Thousand Plateaus,” but I’ll be reading it as though it were a standalone offering; being equipped with only enough French to know when the subtitles on a film are terrible, I am necessarily reading translator Massumi’s “Nomadology”; and I don’t know what depth I’ll get into in posts or what kind of schedule I’ll be able to keep. Assume a reader with a magpie mind & little scholarly inclination.
So let’s get into it!
There’s very little in the way of front matter, only a sideways acknowledgment that this is an extract from a longer work, and no introduction to speak of. The very first lines that greet the reader are these:
“Axiom 1: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.
Proposition 1: This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama and games.”
This is what’s known as “throwing the reader in at the deep end” (triply so if that reader is 17, self-taught but otherwise a product of American schooling, and struggling with what we’d now call “ADHD”). What could any of this possibly mean?
@adamgreenfield I also tried to read D&G too early for my own good
It’d be decades before anyone taught me to read for the text’s implicit ontology and epistemology, but we can already kinda see what the big chunky objects in play here are: the “State apparatus” – which I already had an instinctual anarchist’s antipathy for – and “the war machine,” which I was just about quick enough to realize they meant in something other than the literal, Black Sabbath “War Pigs” sense. And the latter occupied a relationship of exteriority to the former: it remained outside.
The word “apparatus,” then, wouldn’t have had any particular resonance for me; I just took it to mean something like “machinery.” So we’re starting with the idea that there’s something called a war machine, more metaphorical than literal, and it’s being opposed to something you might naturally assume was its proper home: the State, something I already associated w/hierarchy, structure & command. And we’re told that this relationship is first made manifest in “mythology, epic, drama and games.”
As for the stress placed on that “exteriority,” the only resonances that came to my mind naturally enough had to do with being an outsider – a loner, a weirdo, a nonconformist. In 1986: a punk. And that struck a chord: per the title, I already knew not merely that the book had something to do with nomads, but that this nomadology was linked to the figure of the war machine. A picture is already beginning to form, however kaleidoscopically.
How about “mythology, epic, drama and games,” though? My background here, like most Americans, was not strong, though I’d enjoyed the sort of middle-class privilege that involves kids being herded through the museum to consider paintings of Prometheus having his liver pecked out. And even that meager foundation dropped away like an elevator with a snapped cable when I hit the book’s very first full sentence. Here it is:
“Georges Dumézil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology…
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.
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? 👊
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.