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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But what’s vital for me here is that, even this early in the going – and remember, we’re on page 4! – D&G have furnished the reader with a template or, better yet, a grammar of action for all those who would want to counter logics of state, gleaned from their sustained consideration of multiple traditions and idioms. If “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways [but] the point…is to change it,” here is where that change begins.
It may not always pay to take it too literally, but don’t be mistaken: as the baleful example of the IDF makes explicit, “Nomadology” is a *manual for praxis*.
But why are we talking about games, then, games and priests and Hindu gods? “The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent, but remains difficult to conceptualize.” This is why D&G’s definition of something like “the war machine” proceeds inductively, by an accretion of examples, comparisons, parables or analogies.
After awhile, they trust that a sufficiently robust (if necessarily fuzzy-edged) space of overlap will appear in the implicit Venn diagram they’re drawing between concepts. As a writer I might prefer to (and my editor would insist that I) define my terms upfront, but that’s not their method here. And it works, too — provided only that you stick with it.
It does run the risk, however, that the reader will not quite grasp all the facets and connotations of what they’re laying down, which is why
they occasionally wind up having to undertake what are essentially backfill operations. And this is the case here: “It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus,” as most of us who’ve been following their argument this far would no doubt be able to do without quibble. “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.” There’s two things we might want to pay attention to about this attempt to shore up the reader’s comprehension of these terms. The first is that, pretty clearly, “interiority” and “exteriority” carry some valence here beyond the everyday sense of the words. And the second is that the war machine is not being positioned as “outside.” It is being positioned as outsideness.
Let’s first consider what is meant by the outside, in the special sense in which D&G deploy the term. In the Western philosophical tradition, I’m sure you can find similar concepts running straight back to Plato, but so far as I have been able to determine, “the outside” as D&G put it into play — a sense later picked up by Nick Land & folks like Xenogothic still further downstream — originates with Michel Foucault’s essay on Maurice Blanchot, “The Thought From Outside.” https://monoskop.org/images/0/0a/Foucault_Michel_Blanchot_Maurice_Maurice_Blanchot_The_Thought_from_Outside_Michel_Foucault_as_I_Imagine_Him.pdf
And this is one of those things that nobody tells you! I mean, I dunno, maybe they do in school — like I say, I’ve never read D&G as part of a formal, structured curriculum, or in any pedagogical context to speak of. Maybe a solid seminar on Deleuzian thought (either at an academic institution, or as part of something wilder, like Philadelphia’s Incite Seminars) does, precisely, include an account of “the outside,” and points you at the Foucault piece. It sure would help!
And what Foucault helps us understand is that for Blanchot — and by extension, for D&G — le dehors, the outside, is a region of impersonal formlessness, where the subject itself dissolves into chaos. We shouldn’t collapse this entirely into the notion of “exteriority” (even though D&G themselves are guilty of some slippage on this count), for as I understand it exteriority is a relative term, simply denoting something that cannot be reduced to my conception of it. The outside is absolute.
I’m sure those among you with a grounding in philosophy will pipe up at this point to correct/help me refine this understanding of exteriority & the outside, but let’s take what we have back to the context of “Nomadology,” where we’re told that we must “reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority.” That is to say: this roiling storm cannot be reduced to the State’s conception of it. It remains not merely external to control, but external to definition.
And D&G have already suggested why this is: because the State apparatus can only, helplessly, conceive of the world and its contents in terms of discrete states. It is static. The grandeur of its sovereign knowledge is of the order of statistics — quite literally state-istics. The war machine, however, is a continuous process of becoming.
The fundamental distinction between “being” & “becoming,” between object & process, is another that has a long pedigree in Western philosophy, going back to Parmenides and Heraclitus. Those of us coming at philosophical or theoretical writings from high above the plane of their ecliptic may need to encounter “becoming” a few dozen (or hundred) times before we quite twig to this — I’d only previously come across Parmenides in Phil Dick’s bonkers “Exegesis,” for example.
But just as a quick gloss, “becoming” (for me) connotes change, process, continuous flow — and, at times, a transition between states that cannot be broken down to the precession of discrete, Muybridgian intervals. The becomings that are most relevant for “Nomadology” are those associated with the figure of the war machine, and (especially in conjunction) they say more about D&G than they may have understood or intended: *becoming-animal* and *becoming-woman*.
This is all a lot to absorb, so let’s leave it there for today. See you tomorrow!
Notes: I mentioned Incite Seminars; you can (and should) find them at https://inciteseminars.com
PKD’s “Exegesis” can be found here, in its anguished entirety: https://archive.org/details/exegesisofphilip0000dick
Here’s a splendid example of what I mean when I invoke Muybridge:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266429
Xenogothic is one post-Landian thinker whose extensive use of “the outside” may shed further light on the concept:
https://xenogothic.com/
Oh, by the way: a bunch of you have asked if it’s OK to share the link to this reading with friends.
Of course it is! It’s why I made the whole thing public in the first place. The conversation begins here: https://social.coop/@adamgreenfield/115084166276097771
PLEASE NOTE that there are a few places where Mastodon’s handling of very long threads seems to break down. If it seems like the discussion has come to a dead end…it hasn’t, though you may need to click around some.
