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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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
constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another, but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target.” A novel enough interpretation of Herrigel, perhaps — and Herrigel’s Zen was of course already *just* that, and no more — but for all that, not without its own puissance and applicability.
One frustrating thing, though, once you’ve glimpsed all the ways in which Deleuzian
(counter)thought closes the gap with the nondual un- or nonideation of Zen, is why they didn’t simply point their readers at whatever local sangha they had access to, and enjoin them to put in some time on the cushion. But there are many paths that lead to the desert, and any number of fingers pointing at the moon.
Shall we leave things there, for now? This is already a fair amount to take in, and I want us to have done so before taking up the rather embarrassing construction of “race” as nomad thought that closes out the section.
Notes: here’s an article on resonances one reader perceives between Zen and Deleuze’s body of work:
https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.2016v41n3a3188
...and what may be more accessible, a Reddit thread plying the same waters:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Deleuze/comments/150aa41/deleuzian_buddhists/
And here’s Herrigel’s “Zen in the Art of Archery” in full, on archive.org. It’s worth us noting what so often gets glossed blithely over, especially in early, sentimental Western Buddhist discussions of Herrigel: he was a Nazi, and not merely a “sympathizer” but an active member of the NSDAP and its cultural organizations. His interpretation of Zen cannot possibly have gone uninflected by his own affinity for the romantic elements in National Socialist thought.
https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.506186/page/7/mode/2up
Finally! We return to our long slow consideration of #Nomadology! Welcome back.
Here we leave behind the question of noölogy — of royal or State thought, versus its nomad or minor others — and take up a somewhat different, more concrete set of concerns. Our arrival at this point is set off in the text thusly:
“Axiom 2: The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution)...
“As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatio-geographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.
Proposition 5: Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war machine in space.”
What follows immediately is a rather lyrical account of that “spatio-geographic” aspect of the nomad war machine, describing how the nomad body *is* in space, how it *makes* space, and how that relation to space makes a subject.
But before we get into that, I think it’s worth noting that D&G’s Axiom 2 is careful to make a distinction they’ve so far in this text tended to regard as not needing to be made: that between the nomad war machine and the State military functions, processes and formations which may appear to be its cognates.
I take this as their being just a little nervous about the reader retaining the sense of an argument that’s both clear to them, and central to what they’re trying to say. The Army is *not*
a war machine, remember; nor are any of its officers, NCOs or enlisted personnel; nor are any of its tools, weapons, logistical systems or algorithms. The war machine is something that comes from outside, because it *is* the outside.
And for the first time in the text, D&G describe that outside in some richness. The passage accounting for the nomad’s sojourn in space is, again, lyrical, even beautiful. Of course, D&G tell us, the nomad interacts with all the familiar elements of space, things
