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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Past some size, those bands that succeed become agricultural or pastoral societies. They settle in place, they develop hierarchy and fixed, stratified roles, and this allows them to begin generating the caloric surplus (and concomitant need for storage facilities, record-keeping technologies and specialists) that bring us to the threshold of the State. The rest, as they say, is history.
The trouble with this model isn’t merely that as the archeological record increasingly gets filled in, and our picture of the human past is rendered in higher and higher resolution, historical cases spring up that appear to confound this simplistic rubric. The problem is that it bears no resemblance to the account existing hunter-gatherer societies offer of their own choices, as the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres was among the first to point out, in his 1974 “Society Against The State.”
And indeed, for half a century or more there’s been a current within institutional anthropology that has called the linear, reductive Service model of societal development into sharp question: here’s where you’ll find Marshall Sahlins, Morton Fried, more recently James C. Scott and David Graeber. And what these writers have in common with Clastres is the insight that the State *is an option* — a conscious strategy that some groups embrace for what they think it can get them, and others do not.
Having accepted this, the clear implication is that there must be specific techniques that groups can employ to forestall the appearance of the nascent State, to prevent the emergence of even its progenitor or prototype institutions and mindsets. That’s where D&G start this second division of “Nomadology,” asking with Clastres “if it is not a concern of primitive [sic] societies to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand?”
And one answer they arrive at is clear: war.
This “surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State” works by “maintain[ing] the dispersal and segmentarity of groups,” preventing their agglomeration into entities that require the degree of specialization, stratification and institutionalization we associate with the onset of the State, but also preventing accumulations of personal power. We might expect this to be tempestuous — remember affect! — but the “collective mechanisms of inhibition” bound up in war “may be subtle.”
In fact, they may “function as micromechanisms,” operating at the level of small groups or even the individual subjectivity. The primary example D&G offer here is curious: drawn from the writing of Jacques Meunier, an obscure ethnographer whose work appears never to have been translated into English, it concerns mores among the street children of Bogotá. Meunier “cites three ways in which the leader” of a band or pack of such children “is prevented from acquiring stable power”: first, their
association is strictly functional, rather than affective or sentimental — per Meunier, they gather to do crimes, then disperse, and don’t otherwise socialize or cohabit together. The pack itself is a temporary, functional lamination of smaller nodes of two or three members we might think of as familial or affinity groups, such that the ejection or departure of one of more deprives the pack of a significant portion of its strength. And finally, members are compelled to age out at fifteen or so.
Personally I think D&G wager a lot on overgeneralization from this one, perhaps atypical example, and it’s doubtlessly the case that they might have chosen a better one to make a point that seems foundational to their argument. I don’t think they really establish that these are conscious choices, rather than the product of other dynamics that may be operating in the background. But the point stands: human groups can and do avail themselves of mechanisms that prevent the concentration of power.
In a passage I would have preferred to see them develop further, as well, they indicate that (formally different, but functionally identical) mechanisms of diffusion operate also within “high society,” such that a “web of immanent relations” acts as a block to the concentration of prestige in any one individual. The important point is that high society, too, is a pack. And here D&G introduce for the first time in “Nomadology” the concept they are perhaps best known for,
and which is pivotal for their thought: “Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type which centers around organs of power.”
And this is the hazard of breaking “Nomadology” out as its own standalone volume, because here the rhizome/root distinction appears without preamble or explanation. In *this* context, it clarifies nothing, obscuring more than it illuminates. But it’s so important that I’m going to reach back into the bit of “A Thousand Plateaus” that
has been excised here to establish exactly what work they mean for this sentence to do...tomorrow.
For now: notes! Clastre’s “Society Against The State” is here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-clastres-society-against-the-state
You can get a sense for some of the problems that crop up when someone contemporary pursues Service’s linear, reductive model unreflexively here: https://theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/anthropology-footnoted-jared-diamonds-the-world-until-yesterday
We’ll pick up the question of technologies societies consciously deploy against the emergence of the State tomorrow. See you then!
Picking up where we left off: in their account of the ways in which various human groups throughout history have taken measures to ward off the appearance of the State and its logics, D&G offer up the image of *the pack*, a type of formation they identify both with Meunier’s street children of Bogotá, and with high society. They go on to tell us that such formations instill mechanisms that prevent prestige or social capital from overaccumulating in any one given individual.
And then they say something that is bound to strike readers who have not encountered this passage in its original context — i.e. as a discrete section or “plateau” of the far longer work “A Thousand Plateaus” — somewhat curiously: implicitly laying out a categorization or classification schema for groups, they tell us that packs are “groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the arborescent type.”
This distinction is explored at some length, in the very introduction to “ATP,” and in D&G’s
signature allusive, looping, accretional style. I’m tempted to omit discussion of it from our reading here, as a matter that’s properly external to the text under consideration, but there’s no need to be that persnickety and rules-lawyery, A, and B if people from outside the worlds of philosophy and theory come to a D&G text, it’s a fair bet they’re coming for discussion of this figure of “the rhizome.” It has, after all, been one of the most broadly generative concepts of the past half-century.
So what’s it all about?
They start from a consideration of the Book as bearer of writing & thought, in both its semantics and its physical manifestation. It’s a somewhat difficult passage — murky, at times discursive, slipping between registers — but for me the core of it lies in the announcement that the Book takes “the Tree or Root as an image,” and that “[b]inary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree.” The Tree cleaves the world into Above and Below and continuously imposes a
