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
of value exists for D&G across all the ways in which they make the distinction, and that for them the grandeur will always reside in becoming-nomad.
And therefore, that learning to recognize the qualities of nomad space is something we might want to devote some effort to. Thus: “The sand desert does not only have oases, which are like fixed points, but also rhizomatic vegetation that is temporary and shifts location according to local rains, bringing changes in the direction of the crossings.”
What a gorgeous image this is: the near-monochrome expanse of the desert swept with sheets of rain, whose patterns are only haphazardly predictable, and which raise in their wake a thin scrim of green barely less sere than the sands themselves. And it’s these outcroppings we subsist on, these patches of green we navigate by. (And sometimes, indeed, the rains fail.)
Whether or not this is a condition of being we ought to aspire to, it feels a whole lot like the condition that *is*: this is what
it means to live an intellectual life.
The register here, though, remains resolutely physical: “The same terms are used to describe ice deserts as sand deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour, visibility is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that does not rely on points or objects, but on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking...
“of ice, the tactile qualities of both); it is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic,’ a sonorous much more than a visible space...” [ellipsis in original].
I take such pleasure in this passage, simply as description, because I recognize it immediately, as will anyone who’s ever walked alone across a moor in the gloaming. The satisfactions involved may be what we think of as “Type 2 fun” — i.e. those that only surface in retrospect, in the recounting — but they are nonetheless real. And they are
here redoubled because, D&G tell us, we ought to consider bringing this same kind of perceptual intelligence to *every* space in which we might find ourselves, thereby transforming it. What would that feel like? What kind of results might it produce for us, and who might we become in making the attempt?
How about that word “haptic,” though? Why do they emphasize it and what might that connote here? What’s particularly interesting to me is that the word, and the concepts it enfolds, has enjoyed
a massive surge in usage since “Nomadology” was written. It was driven first by an exhibition curated by the Japanese designer Kenya Hara c. 2004, in which “haptic design” was defined in the somewhat banal sense of “design that captures how we perceive things with our senses,” and then — with geometrically more impact — by a particular need that arose in the context of human-computer interaction, where our senses of touch and motion were leveraged
to simulate the experience of interacting with physical objects, as we navigated virtual environments or the flat space of the capacitive touchscreen. Wm. Gibson develops this further in his novel “The Peripheral,” where characters are described as having belonged to a specialized unit in the Marines, “Haptic Recon,” that equipped/saddled them with a surgically-implanted force-feedback mesh.
It’s this lattermost, science-fictional sense which seems to me to chime best with what D&G propose:
that we navigate space with a whole-body sensitivity, a tactility that extends beyond the fingertips to the entire surface of the skin, and which takes in location and proprioception as well as touch. This, they seem to be telling us, is the fine-grained perceptual equipment appropriate to the nomad, and the only means by which we might discern the haecceities and traits we’ll need to attend to carefully if we wish to make our way safely across the trackless desert before us.
Notes: Here’s a drawing of the root system of a desert plant, the wonderfully-named Acanthosicyos horridus: https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/850/rec/4
- Here’s a few pictures of Kenya Hara’s 2004 Haptic exhibition: https://www.takeo.co.jp/en/exhibition/tps/2004.html
- ...as well as images of its catalogue: https://designmanners.com/HAPTIC
- And here’s Kelly Cordes’s original piece on the taxonomy of fun, surely recognizable to anyone who’s ever trekked the steppe or desert: https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
See you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
If I’ve got enough energy for a run, well then I’ve got enough energy for D&G, so let’s go ahead and get back into it!
At last, halfway through this text about “Nomadology,” we’ve taken up the figure of the nomad themselves, and especially the relation between that figure and their experience (and production) of smooth space. At the tail end of a relatively protracted discussion, D&G offer us this rather paradoxical elaboration:
“The nomad, nomad space, is localized and not delimited...”
“What is both limited and limiting is striated space, the *relative global* [emphasis in original]: it is limited in its parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation to one another, divisible by boundaries, and can be fit together.” It’s not easy to tell, but to my ear there’s a suggestion here of the generic qualities of modularity, extensibility & interoperability we prize so much in technical architecture, and which I’ve tended to regard over the years as desirable.
And even though I’ve always thought of this kind of modularity and extensibility as a way to afford the maximum possible scope for diversity, it’s true that there is an imperial logic to the technical protocols which permit that to be: whatever diversity they allow to flourish is in some sense a diversity within limits of fundamental self-similarity (at least at the edges, where the interface to adjacent conditions appears). This logic — which is, it hardly bears pointing out, the logic of the
internet and of Web pages served over it — is familiar enough that it gives me a concrete referent for “the relative global.” This helps me understand what D&G might mean when they say of the relative global that “what is limiting (*limes* or wall, and no longer boundary), is this composite in relation to the smooth spaces it ‘contains,’ the growth of which it slows or prevents, and which it restricts or places outside.”
So what is the nomad other and outside of the relative global?
This is, naturally enough, the “*local absolute*, an absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local operations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice, sea.”
Here, for reasons that are perhaps obvious, D&G are obligated to contend with the question of faith, of religious belief: “Making the absolute appear in a particular place — is that not a very general characteristic of religion?” And of course the answer is “yes,” for that does seem to be the very point
of many of the religious operations we’re familiar with, whether the consumption of the Eucharist, the veneration of the Hajar al-Aswad or the non-pursuit of no-mind in Zen meditation. These are all ways of introducing (or really, inducing) a factor of infinity into historical, embodied space and time, so it’s perfectly sensible to reach for them as examples of the “local absolute.”
You know there’s a “but” coming, though, right? And there is! “But the sacred place of religion is fundamentally
