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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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.
Critically, though, this smoothness is not isotropic, the same in all directions — at least not for those with the eyes to perceive it. For the nomad, smooth space is *marked*, strewn through with subtle “‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.” And these traits can be read & navigated by: *followed*, in the same way a mason pursuing the imperatives of minor science follows the lines of force already inherent in the matter they work.
Now, “trait” is a somewhat curious word.
Formally, we don’t know that it’s already appeared in “A Thousand Plateaus,” because the terms of our project here compel us to treat “Nomadology” as a standalone essay, just as it appears in the semiotext(e) edition I picked up on St Mark’s in late ‘86. But maybe it’s OK to cheat a little, and bring some of that treatment into the reading before us?
For D&G, a “trait” is something like a minimal inscription of difference. Traits signify, as part of a system that makes something what it is.
But traits also do something else: they *rhyme*. Each one is a line leading to something other, something with which it resonates.
So for the nomad, space is a lot like (in fact, *very much indeed* like) one of those maps of wind speed & direction you have in your weather app: not a cadastral grid, but a vector field. Here traits are lines of possibility and intensity, something to be discovered rather than imposed. And the method of discovery is nothing other than movement. You feel your way.
But movement, even alert, sensitive, attuned, “haptic” movement, carries its own hazards: remember, the traits critical to navigation of space “are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.”
(One thinks here of Tarkovsky’s eponymous Stalker, moving ahead only a single stone’s throw at a time, as the latent traits of the Zone reveal themselves to him, and — all too aware that the path of even a few steps before has gone fatally indistinct — never, ever backtracking.)
The traits we steer by, then, are in constant motion, much like ourselves more of the order of becoming than of being: “Even the lamella of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound.”
“Lamella”? What a gorgeous word; evidently, in geology it refers to the thin plates of crust that cover the surface of the sand. D&G seem to mean something a little more flexible — something like a thin, continuous, deformable membrane.
We should also consider the possibility that, consciously or otherwise, D&G mean to riff on Lacan, for whom a lamella is something like a mythical bodily organ, representing the pure life force itself — something indestructible, formless and self-replicating.
I’m the furthest thing on Earth from an expert on Lacan, and I *sure* as hell would not have had that reference to hand on my original reading of “Nomadology,” but the word appears in the text only a handful of times...
so I think we’re bound to treat each of these appearances as a trait in and of itself. Shall we hold there for the evening, and resume our inquiry tomorrow?
Notes!
- Somewhat insanely, Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” is available on YouTube, officially and in its entirety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3hBLv-HLEc
- An entire volume on Lacan’s “Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” incl. a contribution from the redoubtable S. Žižek & various reflections on the lamella, can be found here:
https://archive.org/details/readingseminarxi0000unse
Today we continue our investigation of the nomad and their relation with space, and we do so by immediately contending with a paradox D&G offer us: that we cannot think of the nomad in terms of movement.
Rather, they assert, “the nomad distributes himself [sic] in a smooth space, he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary...
