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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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
Here’s one last crystalline account of affect traversing the body: https://open.spotify.com/track/2JrMcWigCymlBNbnQp6YcN
See you tomorrow!
Ha! My partner, who’s not at all geekly in inclination, contributes her reading of “Dune” by way of “Nomadology”: the Houses of Atreides & Harkonnen as the two faces of State — Duke Leto Atreides no less a man of State than the twisted Baron; the Fremen as we meet them nearly pure avatars of the war machine, literally rising out of the smooth space of the desert to disrupt & destroy the Sardaukar; and the tragedy of the books, Muad’dib’s eventual reinscription of State logics amongst the Fremen.
@adamgreenfield whoa, my mind should have gone there immediately when you started talking about Myth.
It’s been too long but I assume there’s also something to be said here about the Big Vietnam Movies (and huh, is Dune a Vietnam movie?)
@luis_in_brief THE CASE CAN BE MADE
