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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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
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.
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.
