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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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:
for example, in the United States, the very extensive efforts gone to in order to produce a “professionalized” and nonpartisan military firmly yoked to civilian control and the notion of a supervening Constitution — efforts which are now being undone, with consequences that are readily foreseeable. I’m also put in mind, once again, of Lynn Margulis’s conception of the mitochondrion as something that once lived independently, and was subsumed as an engine by the eukaryotic cell lineage, though
there the process of subsumption appears to be total, irreversible and proceeding largely to the capturing agent’s advantage.
It’s still a useful metaphor, though: if the State wants to avail itself of the puissance and other productive properties of pure war, it has to envelop, encapsulate, absorb and appropriate the energies of a war machine. And almost without exception, this poses a continual challenge for the State that succeeds in this ambition.
D&G pivot here into a reasonably extended discussion of what this looks like in drama — specifically, in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 tragedy “Penthesilea.” (There’s that elite education rearing its head again.)
“Penthesilea” is the story of the queen of the Amazons, “a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized uniquely in a war mode,” and her encounter with Achilles at the battle of Troy. As D&G gloss that encounter, it is the titanic clash of being with becoming.
And we can almost draw ourselves a little matrix here, lining up the qualities associated with State apparatus and war machine respectively: being and interiority v. becoming and exteriority, and so on. But if Achilles, a man of State, has feelings, what equivalent does Penthesilea experience? The answer that D&G furnish us with is yet another of those theory-terms that overspills its conventional definition: they tell us that what traverses her body are affects.
I could probably spend two days posting about affect and the way it’s treated in contemporary philosophy and theory, and not exhaust the question. For now let’s conceive affect as the physical, indeed physiological component of emotion — the share that resists, exceeds or denies reason and language. For D&G, “[a]ffects transpierce the body, they are weapons of war.” These weapons have a specific function: they deterritorialize. When “feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a ‘subject,’
[they are] projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force.” Here the affected body is itself become the war machine! And even when that war machine is captured, the red haze (whether of rage or exultation or lust) subsides and the vectors of affect settle back into the containers made for them in language, they still point toward the outside.
“Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines which have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State?” That, anyway, is the wager D&G commit themselves to here.
It’s a vision of the war machine folded inside the State like the dot of Yin inside the Yang, waiting for the stars to be right to surge forth in exultation once more.
And this brings us to the end of the first axiom and proposition! Tomorrow we’ll be back for the second, which picks up the vital question everyone from Joreen to James C. Scott have all asked, in their own ways: “Is there a way of warding off the formation of a state apparatus (or its equivalents in a group)?”
Today’s notes! “Penthesilea” can be found in a Project Gutenberg edition here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6648
Lynn Margulis’s original 1967 article on the theory of mitochondrial capture by the proto-eukaryotic cell: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11541392/
An insider’s perspective on civilian control of the US military as a “useful fiction”:
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/JF-23/Col-Todd-Schmidt/schmidt-civilian-control-of-the-military.pdf
Wikipedia’s account of “affect” is actually pretty good (& makes a point about vital force I forgot to), so don’t sleep on that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(philosophy)
Here’s an interesting piece on Scott and state formation, though I really do recommend his “Against The Grain” & “The Art of Not Being Governed” for his specific responses to the question D&G ask: https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-35d93f7e-797a-407a-8da2-ac319139de6b/section/6588f51f-162e-4a60-89f6-1754442747b5
Joreen’s response is, of course, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” and you can find that here. It’s an open question (for me personally &, I think, in anarchist studies more broadly) whether the structure she calls for ultimately reproduces the State: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
