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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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.
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.
