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@adamgreenfield@social.coop · last month

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/

mark simpkins

@geocontrol@mastodon.social replied · 2 months ago

@adamgreenfield same feeling, I have that and red it way back when but only now do I think I have a hint of being able to take something useful and understood from it.

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

A couple of prefatory notes, by way of housekeeping: “Nomadology” is a chapter (or “plateau”) from “A Thousand Plateaus,” but I’ll be reading it as though it were a standalone offering; being equipped with only enough French to know when the subtitles on a film are terrible, I am necessarily reading translator Massumi’s “Nomadology”; and I don’t know what depth I’ll get into in posts or what kind of schedule I’ll be able to keep. Assume a reader with a magpie mind & little scholarly inclination.

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

So let’s get into it!

There’s very little in the way of front matter, only a sideways acknowledgment that this is an extract from a longer work, and no introduction to speak of. The very first lines that greet the reader are these:

“Axiom 1: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.
Proposition 1: This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama and games.”

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

This is what’s known as “throwing the reader in at the deep end” (triply so if that reader is 17, self-taught but otherwise a product of American schooling, and struggling with what we’d now call “ADHD”). What could any of this possibly mean?

lenazun

@lzg@mastodon.social replied · 2 months ago

@adamgreenfield I also tried to read D&G too early for my own good

lenazun

@lzg@mastodon.social replied · 2 months ago

@adamgreenfield Dolce & Gabbana

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

It’d be decades before anyone taught me to read for the text’s implicit ontology and epistemology, but we can already kinda see what the big chunky objects in play here are: the “State apparatus” – which I already had an instinctual anarchist’s antipathy for – and “the war machine,” which I was just about quick enough to realize they meant in something other than the literal, Black Sabbath “War Pigs” sense. And the latter occupied a relationship of exteriority to the former: it remained outside.

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

The word “apparatus,” then, wouldn’t have had any particular resonance for me; I just took it to mean something like “machinery.” So we’re starting with the idea that there’s something called a war machine, more metaphorical than literal, and it’s being opposed to something you might naturally assume was its proper home: the State, something I already associated w/hierarchy, structure & command. And we’re told that this relationship is first made manifest in “mythology, epic, drama and games.”

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

As for the stress placed on that “exteriority,” the only resonances that came to my mind naturally enough had to do with being an outsider – a loner, a weirdo, a nonconformist. In 1986: a punk. And that struck a chord: per the title, I already knew not merely that the book had something to do with nomads, but that this nomadology was linked to the figure of the war machine. A picture is already beginning to form, however kaleidoscopically.

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I ❤️ Placemaking

@aljavieera@zirk.us replied · 2 months ago

@adamgreenfield I might read along!

Adam Greenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@aljavieera doooo ittttt

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