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.
Discussion
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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.”
Here, maybe, is a place where a command of French would be genuinely helpful, because it seems to me that what D&G mean for “Nombre nombrant” to convey is something contained in Massumi’s English translation *along with its diametric opposite*.
We’re in Necker-cube territory again! In English, “the Numbering Number” can be read *both* as “the number which numbers” *and* as “the number caught in the process of numbering itself,” “the number becoming number.”
The distinction feels closely cognate with the one Spinoza makes between “natura naturans,” active and autonomous nature considered in the continuous process of naturing, and “natura naturata,” nature-as-product.
And this really helps, because now it’s much easier to see how the Numbering Number *as the number in the process of numbering*, doin’ the numbering thing, is something one could think of as belonging to the order of the smooth, the nomadic and the war machine. Now it’s much easier to
grasp the point of this sequence. (It’s frustrating to run up against the limits of one’s own language that way, but then there’s something salutary and instructive about that, too.)
Let’s leave things there for today? And in the meantime, we can enjoy this exploration of the vortical qualities of number in its occupation of space:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTr_HS_O4Ek
See you for further adventures in #nomadology tomorrow!