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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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.
So what are your thoughts, so far? Has this reading of “Nomadology” struck any sparks for you? Have you been able to put any of these concepts to work? I’d love to hear what you’re making of it, those of you who are following along.
OK, so: we continue. I want to leave the question of “becoming-animal” and “becoming-woman” here for the time being, and loop back to it later. What I want to take on right now is the propensity D&G can already see for the war machine — in all its exteriority or quality of absolute outsideness — to nevertheless “become confused with one of the two heads of the State apparatus.” In shifting light, or under conditions of (attempted or successful) capture by the State, we may mistake
certain qualities or attributes proper to the war machine for those belonging to one or another of the State’s cyclically alternating modes of domination. D&G offer the example of “speed and secrecy,” qualities par excellence of the war machine that are nevertheless occasionally found to be numbered among the State’s own tactics, albeit in the form of “a certain speed, a certain secrecy.” So “there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of political
sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles, with the power of war.” (Here Massumi helpfully provides the gloss of “puissance” for “power”: wotta great word.) And that danger consists precisely of forgetting that “the State has no war machine of its own: it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will always cause it problems.” (Emphasis in original.)
I trust you can furnish any number of historical examples attesting to the truth of this:
