So, #nomadology fans, when we left off our inquiry in mid-November we were just getting into the question of the “nombre nombrant,” the “Numbering number,” and trying to get our heads around what Deleuze & Guattari meant us to understand by their use of the term.
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And we’ve been told that this mysterious thing “relates only to conditions of possibility constituted by nomadism, and to conditions of effectuation constituted by the war machine.”
But in every other way, the term seems to invoke processes that would appear to belong *entirely* to the State as D&G have asked us to conceive of it. It’s an apparatus of ordering, capture and legibility, that counts in order to govern, enumerates to classify, rank and fix identity. It’s *metricization as power*.
But these properties are anathema to the war machine as we’ve been given to understand it!
So if the Numbering Number indeed “relates to the conditions of possibility constituted by nomadism,” maybe we have to turn the proposition before us inside-out in order to grasp the point D&G are trying to make: yes, the Numbering Number relates to the conditions of possibility constituted by nomadism *for its Other*, i.e. for the State apparatus.
It’s a bit of a stretch, maybe, but frankly, this is the only way I can make sense of this passage. (Either that, or what is of course always the alternative possibility: that I haven’t understood them. Other sources suggest that the Numbering Number is linked to the production of differences and becomings, which I have a far easier time connecting to the figure of nomad thought, but a harder time finding justification for in the text.)
So let’s read on, and maybe this gets clearer?
We’re back in the context of smooth space, and how it may be occupied, where we are told that the Nombre nombrant appears “as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject.”
