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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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...
*he who does not move*” [emphasis in original]. What on Earth might this mean?
What now strikes me immediately — though, again, there’s no way in which this would have occurred to me on first reading, unequipped as I then was with any of the necessary reading or experience — is that this is a decent rendering of what the practitioner of Zen experiences. In other words, being-nomad is an *inner* orientation: a way of relating to one’s surroundings that starts in the mind, or no-mind.
To arrive without traveling is not a contradiction in terms for the Zen student, but rather a simple description of what happens as they sit still on the cushion. Nomadicity, here, is the ability to make smooth any space whatsoever that one happens to occupy, by seeing it as such.
One becomes a nomad by smoothening the space you’re in: “Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to...
the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.” Better to say, then, that *the world moves around the nomad*, who only ever occupies a single, implicitly deterritorialized position.
So while D&G mean to evoke the Bedouin style of equestrianism in the next sentence, I can’t help but hear a description of Zen practice: “Of course the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving.”
The very next passage introduces a concept that is pivotal for D&G, and it’s lovely besides, so I’m going to quote it at some length before circling back to unfold it:
“The nomad knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a ‘stationary process,’ station as process — these traits of Kleist’s are eminently those of the nomad. It is thus necessay to make a distinction between *speed* and *movement* [emphasis in original]: a movement may be very fast, but
“that does not give it speed; a movement may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive, speed is intensive.”
Well. Firstly, you either get this immediately, or you don’t, and if you do it hardly requires explication. (I’m put in mind of the ferociously effective instruction producer Martin Hannett apocryphally offered the members of Joy Division in the studio, before they had quite become the band we now recognize: that they play “faster, but slower.”)
But let’s dig in a little, for the benefit of those for whom this sounds like so much pretentious doublespeak.
Firstly, what’s this about Kleist? Heinrich von Kleist was a 19th-century German poet and essayist, and the reference is to his 1810 piece “On the Marionette Theatre,” in which he describes the perfect grace with which marionettes seem to move. Kleist ascribes this grace to the lack of self-awareness on the marionette’s part, which enables them to trace paths through space and time
with perfect economy of movement. (We have a still more graceful model available to us, that neither Kleist nor even D&G would have had access to: the eerie stillness with which anything algorithmically controlled moves, like a drone or a robot arm.) This stillness and grace is where the “stationary process” resides.
And D&G use this paradoxical quality to open up an opposition between speed and the very character of movement that would seem to inhere in it. They insist that speed and movement
belong to two entirely different, indeed opposed registers of being: the intensive and the extensive.
This is a foundational distinction for D&G, so it’s worth spending some time with it. It’s one of the places — so frustrating, I know, if not infuriating, to those who come from the “hard sciences” — where they rely on established concepts from physics to signify and do more than they do in that discipline.
The physical distinction can be made like this: *extensive* quantities are those that
