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.”
Post
Replies:
15
(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
like territories and points and paths — they’re still embodied, still inside history and still occupying the space and time of the physical universe. But they *understand* these elements differently than the State does, and their relationship to them as well.
Here they make a distinction between the sedentary, for whom the point is all, and for whom the path is never anything more than a route between points; the migrant, for whom the path is but a necessary, temporary condition; and the nomad,
for whom all points are merely adjuncts to further onward movement. The desert well “is reached only to be left behind”; “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay”; “the life of the nomad is the intermezzo.”
For me, reading this in mid-to-late middle age, this description is already soothing and a solace in a way it could not possibly have been at eighteen. And it has those qualities because it rather elegantly confers dignity on a life that, from other perspectives, may well seem to
elude consistency or the accumulation of worldly merit. What D&G explicitly authorize here is a permanently peripatetic condition — of the body, of thought, of becoming — that rejects or fails to recognize or simply bypasses “place” (in all its qualities of position, turf or territory) in favor of something else, something that they call “deterritorialization.”
I can’t tell you what a gift this is to come across, how welcoming and comforting this passage is for those of us who, willy-nilly,
have never made our homes in any one place, either literally, disciplinarily, intellectually or politically.
But there’s another aspect to the nomad’s relation with the path as well, which is that while they may well “follow trails or customary routes,” their use of these “does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is *to parcel out a closed space to people*” [emphasis in original]. Thinking of the path as being a conduit from A to B, in other words, reifies “A” & “B” as places.
And once reified, they become the buckets of a sorting operation (indeed, I’d go so far to say, the attractor poles of a schismogenetic process): if you are like *this*, you belong *here*, but if you’re like *that*, well then, you’d surely be happier (& will probably be safer) over *there*. The path becomes the means of duality, distinction and the inscription of identity.
And there’s a tangible difference between the kinds of spaces produced by sedentary thought and those generated by nomads:
here again resurfaces the distinction between “striated” and “smooth” space.
For the sedentary, space rapidly becomes reticulated by a grid of property relations, parceled up, striated by “walls, enclosures and roads between enclosures.” For the nomad, though, all of this disappears: space is “marked only by ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.” (Recall the Trukese navigator, plying routes between atolls a thousand miles apart, guided only by sign of wind and wave.)
No notes today! But we’ll take up what might be implied by this curious word “trait” tomorrow. See you then?
So we left off yesterday having just begun to consider the nomad’s relation with space: how they occupy it, how they move through it, how they produce it.
D&G tell us that, for the sedentary, space rapidly becomes crosshatched with grids of control and distinction of one form or another — chiefly, of course, the one that’s bound up in the distinction between *mine* and *yours*. But for the nomad, space is entirely different: smooth, like the ocean or the desert.
