to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant”; the model is “vortical,” not laminar, operating “in an open space throughout which thing-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things”; that model models not a “striated” space that “is counted in order to be occupied,” but a “smooth” space that “is occupied without being counted”; and the subtlest & hardest for me to grasp among all these distinctions, it is “problematic,” not “theorematic.”
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@adamgreenfield hi a, i actually think making a pamphlet is a great idea, main reason is im v interested in the material and am keen to hear your take on it, but i struggle to follow the thread version, it being embedded in a more or less distraction-based context.
OK! We’re onto the next subdivision of #Nomadology, which appears thusly in the text:
“Problem 2: Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?
Proposition 4: The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, finally, by noology.”
In the wake of our extended consideration of the entanglement of royal & nomad science, that first bit’s transparent enough. And at this point we’re sufficiently immersed in D&Gese that even “the exteriority of the war machine” reads straightforwardly.
But “noology”? What’s going on there?
When I first picked up this text in ’86, any concern for “noötropics” still lay a few years in the future, interred in a yet-to-be-unfolded stratum of “Mondo 2000”s and Psychic TV remixes. But I’m willing to bet I’d already come across Teilhard de Chardin and his notion of the “noösphere,” maybe in a Colin Wilson paperback left behind by some girlfriend’s older brother or something? So I would have had a vague intuition that we were in the realm of thought.
And indeed that’s what we’ll be taking up in this section: an inquiry into thought itself.
The musing on thought which opens the section strikes me now as being pretty densely seeded with tacit references or allusions we have already characterized as having emerged from an elite French education of the twentieth century. I can detect echoes in the phrasing — I’m just not sure what they’re echoes *of*. So feel free to chime in if it’s obvious to you what they’re riffing on here.
@adamgreenfield just chipping in with a titbit that may or may not be relevant, sparked by the mention of Teilhard de Chardin.
I first came across his work and the idea of the noosphere in Jean Gebser's book The Ever-Present Origin, which proposes a model of evolving structures of consciousness, whereby humanity is evolving to greater (specifically, more intense) consciousness, towards the realisation of the noosphere (a la Teilhard but less formally religious/Christian). Gebser's structures comprise (in order): archaic, magical, mythical, mental (rational-logical) and, ultimately, integral. Each one incorporates the previous ones. Not aware of any direct connections between Gebser and D&G, but reading your later posts they mention some connected terms.
@GuyBirkin I have always loved the *flavor* of Teilhard — and have a weak spot more generally for Jesuits who wander off-piste — but just cannot stomach the teleology. Ah well.
We’re told that “thought as such” is “already in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs.” It’s not clear to me whether they mean for this to be a universal statement about human subjects or thinking-agents, but being charitable, sure: we can see ways in which at least many of the European & North American thinkers whose names we’d recognize might be said to display thought templated in just this way.
In fact, this template is “an image of thought spanning all thought,” “which is like the State-form developed in thought.” And in a callback to the expansion on the “two-headed” nature of the State apparatus with which we began — remember all that material about Rex and flamen, Varuna and Mitra? — we’re assured further that “this image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty.”
The first they characterize as the “*imperium* of true thinking,” emphasis in original, which
is opposed to another tendency they characterize as “a republic of free spirits.” And on first reading it’s immediately tempting to identify these with, oh, say, Apollonian and Dionysian ways of being in the world. But there’s a curveball waiting for us here: D&G pair “the imperium of true thinking” with mythos, telling us that it “operat[es] by magical capture, seizing or binding,” while “the republic of free spirits” belongs to the order of logos! It “proceed[s] by pact or contract,
constituting a legislative or juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground.”
And the truly salient point about this opposition — they do love their binary oppositions, don’t they, D&G? — is that the “imperium of true thought” and the “republic of free spirits” are necessary to one another. Just as, in the domain of application, royal & nomad science display a certain sort of asymmetrical-but-reciprocal relation, the imperium and the republic orbit one another with the jerky rhythm
of a binary star: “the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the first...antithetical and complementary, they are necessary to one another.”
This, understood in fullness, is one hell of a sobering insight. It’s the very model of all those ways in which some ostensibly wild vector of thought (and, I think we can read, cultural practice) not merely “feeds” or “is captured by” or even “stabliizes” conservative thought, *but is the very precondition of that thought’s
development*. So it *isn’t*, as we once noted despairingly but with quiet self-congratulation, that the Situationism of May ‘68 expressed in the collages of Jamie Reid found its way first onto couture t-shirts via Malcolm McLaren, & thereupon, denatured, decontextualized, stepped on and commodified, onto the racks of every Hot Topic in existence. It’s that the Situationism was always already the dark twin of State thought, pulled headlong down the gravity ramp to drive the State’s own expansion.
Both phases or moments of this cycle belong in their entirety to State thought! Well, this is beginning to feel claustrophobic, if not Negrian in its insistence that Empire can have no outside. Isn’t there *any* way to think the world that doesn’t ultimately inscribe template after template on the raw matter of being, world without end?
Well! “It is not out of the question, however” — and note the contingency, the tentativity — “that in order to pass from one to the other there must occur,
‘between’ them, an event of an entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place outside.”
Whew, what a relief! Come back tomorrow, and we’ll see if we can’t get D&G to tell us a little more about what that event consists of, and how we might induce its coming into being.
Notes! The heterodox Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) prefigured our moment in some fascinating ways. You can read more about his concept of the “noösphere” here: https://teilhard.com/2013/08/13/the-noosphere-part-i-teilhard-de-chardins-vision/
The ever-credulous Colin Wilson, whether despite or because of that very credulity, offered his late twentieth-century readers (and certainly me in 1988, lying alone up in my hacked-together loft bed in the flat above the Third Avenue pizza joint) true glimpses of thought from outside. A list of his major works is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson_bibliography
You know Jamie Reid’s work, even if you don’t recognize the name. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jamie-reid-12111
@adamgreenfield
Aww I miss Colin Wilson! Now wondering what happened to Celia Green - I assume she can't still be with us?
@srtcd424 Wikipedia says “is,” not “was.”
And here are two perspectives on the “Events” of May ‘68, the first from the mainstream:
https://frenchly.us/what-happened-may-1968-mai-68/
...and the second from the POV of a few political currents I have more sympathy for, including primary documents:
https://libcom.org/article/france-1968-reading-guide
Enjoy those, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
And we’re back! To recap, we’re into a section on noölogy, which D&G gloss for us as “the study of images of thought, and their historicity.”
At issue is whether thought can be extricated from the State model, or “image,” or, conversely, if we are bound to endlessly reproduce that image and its strictures in our own style of thought, as “a center that makes everything, including the State, appear to exist on its own efficacity [?] or on its own sanction.”
This latter possibility, if it turned out to be the case, would seem to be fatal for projects with ambitions to develop outside or beyond the State — cutting them off deep in their prehistory, severing them from their sources of energy, not even permitting their formulation. “Indeed, by developing thought in this way, the State-form gains something essential: an entire consensus.”
This passage goes on to elaborate what is at stake, should we permit that image or Image to govern our imaginings:
“Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of the universality of law.”
Well, we all recognize this, don’t we? D&G are naming the frustration of everyone who’s ever tried to have a conversation with Serious People — those who get to define the terms, the standards of comparison and the frames of reference. They’re describing the exhaustion of the anarchist explaining mutual aid to the New York Times reporter,
and getting only blank stares in response. In other words, they’re describing a condition of *hegemony*, just as Gramsci would have it, in which a regnant common sense imposes just-about airtight strictures over what can be thought or asserted if you wish to be taken seriously.
And there does seem to be one particular image of thought they hold responsible for enacting what we might call the conditions of possibility for this hegemony, though they don’t name it as such: German idealism itself.
@adamgreenfield jumping on halfway through without having read the whole thread. But this resonates. Try explaining simple ecological concepts to someone whose job is to destroy nature - an engineer, bulldozer driver, council mower. They are nearly incapable of understanding. You may as well talk to the trees.
Common sense, D&G tell us, is “the State consensus raised to the absolute.” And this “was most notably the great operation of the Kantian ‘critique,’ renewed and developed by Hegelianism.” For all those who descend from this line, the Idea itself has puissance in the world: force, the ability to transform material conditions. It is realer than real.
In the history of the West, there has been a precession of roles entrusted with the manipulation of the Idea, a series of symbolic operators that
begins with the poet and eventually includes philosophers and sociologists. They characterize these practitioners of the Idea as “image trainers” — a particularly brutal phrase, that. And the image they train us on leaves us unable to think the world in any way that doesn’t simply clone-stamp the implicate order of relations they take as a given, superimposing a ghostly State logic over everything we might encounter to the point that only the State is real for us.
Grim stuff. Again: airless.
But! Felicitously, “noölogy is confronted by counterthoughts” — note the plural — which are violent in their acts, discontinuous in their appearances, and the existence of which is mobile in history.” In other words, *there is an escape hatch from the Idea and the image of State thought it incontinently propagates across the entire field of the real*.
D&G tell us that these counterthoughts “are the acts of a ‘private thinker,’ as opposed to a public professor,” and they name three candidates:
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, “or even” Chestov (the Russian existentialist generally rendered in English as “Shestov,” born Yeguda Lev Shvartsman). And then this gorgeous encomium: “Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images.”
Wow: #goals, right? I’m sure as shootin’ not here to tell you what to do, but I think we could all do a whole lot worse than to live in such a way that it is said of us that wherever we dwell, it is the steppe or the desert.
But in the end, the epithet “private thinker” is unsatisfactory, “because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of *outside thought*” [emphasis in original]. What’s more, “although this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already interlaced with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here.”
For me, anyway, this is among the most
lyrical passages in the entire project — the most romantic, even. And it may be worth remembering that, while we generally describe this body of thoughtwork as “Deleuzian,” the whole enclosing project is after all called “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” and calls significantly upon Félix Guattari’s work as a clinician and practitioner of counterpsychiatry. “Outside thought” is something he would have had concrete, intimate and durational experience of,
“extremely populous solitudes” in no way a contradiction in terms for the people he worked and thought alongside for years.
Let’s let that marinate overnight, shall we? We’ll come back to it tomorrow. For now: notes.
Here’s a cogent overview of Gramsci’s concepts of ideology and hegemony from a Marxist perspective: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/tr-gramsci.htm
...and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Idealism — what you really want is the material from Kant forward: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/
From the same source, a comprehensive account of Kierkegaard’s work: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
My own personal Nietzsche remains, in many ways, the one I first encountered in Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to “The Portable Nietzsche,” complete PDF here: https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/the-portable-nietzsche-walter-kaufmann.pdf
I found this account of Shestov helpful in situating him, with apologies for the Tablet link: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/lonely-prophet-of-jewish-awakeness
That’s it for now. See you tomorrow!
Eep! No “Nomadology” today after all, sorry — I’ll check back in tomorrow to close out the subsection we’ve been working through, before we take a break while I hit the road for a few weeks. See you then.
So here we are: confronted with the prospect of being marooned with a single Image of thought that reproduces the State entire. What and all that is offered to us under the sign of this Image is a clammy airlessness that leaves us crowded in with the inane reinscription of the same, and no way to think the outside.
Until, that is, someone arrives on the scene whose thought *is* the outside. This “counterthought” smashes the Image, performs an all-but-literal iconoclasm.
At first, D&G suggest we can think of such iconoclasms as the acts of a “private thinker.” But then — perhaps realizing that another, perfectly lossless way of saying “private thinker” is “idiot” — they pronounce themselves dissatisfied with this framing.
What they propose instead is a kind of thought that’s “already a tribe, the opposite of a State.” And importantly, “this form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of interiority.”
If what you truly want to do is undermine hegemony, in other words, it isn’t enough to simply substitute a new and improved Image for the old one — or, for that matter, a revised and updated conception of the intellectual for the State thinker. The specific form of exteriority of thought “is not at all *another image* in opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus” [emphasis in original]: “It is, rather, a force that destroys both the image *and* its copies, the model *and*
its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just or the Right (Cartesian truth, the Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.).”
Wellllll now. I don’t know if, in life, either Félix Guattari or Gilles Deleuze ever had any personal experience of Zen meditation. But I’m not the first person to have picked up on the strong resonances between their notion of an Image-smashing counterthought and Zen practice. (I’ll share the reflections of others who’ve
picked up on this resonance in today’s notes.)
In fact, if you’re interested in a decent account of just what the practitioner is doing on their cushion, “smashing the Image of thought” — or more properly still, continuously renewing one’s awareness of its formal emptiness — “in the practice of counterthought” is not too shabby a start. This wouldn’t have occurred to me on my first encounter with “Nomadology”: as an undergrad in the New York of the mid-‘80s, even a first taste of Zen practice
still lay half a decade in my future and the whole breadth of a continent away. But the parallel is irresistible to me now, and helps me fairly readily make sense of a passage I would have found completely confounding then.
Zen, of course, was not the only unimage of counterthought available to D&G; if nothing else, Guattari’s clinical experience certainly furnished them with others. But they were themselves aware of the resonance: “Thought is like the Vampire, it has no image, either to