And indeed that’s what we’ll be taking up in this section: an inquiry into thought itself.
The musing on thought which opens the section strikes me now as being pretty densely seeded with tacit references or allusions we have already characterized as having emerged from an elite French education of the twentieth century. I can detect echoes in the phrasing — I’m just not sure what they’re echoes *of*. So feel free to chime in if it’s obvious to you what they’re riffing on here.
In fact, this template is “an image of thought spanning all thought,” “which is like the State-form developed in thought.” And in a callback to the expansion on the “two-headed” nature of the State apparatus with which we began — remember all that material about Rex and flamen, Varuna and Mitra? — we’re assured further that “this image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty.”
The first they characterize as the “*imperium* of true thinking,” emphasis in original, which
constituting a legislative or juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground.”
And the truly salient point about this opposition — they do love their binary oppositions, don’t they, D&G? — is that the “imperium of true thought” and the “republic of free spirits” are necessary to one another. Just as, in the domain of application, royal & nomad science display a certain sort of asymmetrical-but-reciprocal relation, the imperium and the republic orbit one another with the jerky rhythm
of a binary star: “the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the first...antithetical and complementary, they are necessary to one another.”
This, understood in fullness, is one hell of a sobering insight. It’s the very model of all those ways in which some ostensibly wild vector of thought (and, I think we can read, cultural practice) not merely “feeds” or “is captured by” or even “stabliizes” conservative thought, *but is the very precondition of that thought’s
Both phases or moments of this cycle belong in their entirety to State thought! Well, this is beginning to feel claustrophobic, if not Negrian in its insistence that Empire can have no outside. Isn’t there *any* way to think the world that doesn’t ultimately inscribe template after template on the raw matter of being, world without end?
Well! “It is not out of the question, however” — and note the contingency, the tentativity — “that in order to pass from one to the other there must occur,
‘between’ them, an event of an entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place outside.”
Whew, what a relief! Come back tomorrow, and we’ll see if we can’t get D&G to tell us a little more about what that event consists of, and how we might induce its coming into being.
Notes! The heterodox Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) prefigured our moment in some fascinating ways. You can read more about his concept of the “noösphere” here: https://teilhard.com/2013/08/13/the-noosphere-part-i-teilhard-de-chardins-vision/
The ever-credulous Colin Wilson, whether despite or because of that very credulity, offered his late twentieth-century readers (and certainly me in 1988, lying alone up in my hacked-together loft bed in the flat above the Third Avenue pizza joint) true glimpses of thought from outside. A list of his major works is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson_bibliography
You know Jamie Reid’s work, even if you don’t recognize the name. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jamie-reid-12111
And here are two perspectives on the “Events” of May ‘68, the first from the mainstream:
https://frenchly.us/what-happened-may-1968-mai-68/
...and the second from the POV of a few political currents I have more sympathy for, including primary documents:
https://libcom.org/article/france-1968-reading-guide
Enjoy those, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
And we’re back! To recap, we’re into a section on noölogy, which D&G gloss for us as “the study of images of thought, and their historicity.”
At issue is whether thought can be extricated from the State model, or “image,” or, conversely, if we are bound to endlessly reproduce that image and its strictures in our own style of thought, as “a center that makes everything, including the State, appear to exist on its own efficacity [?] or on its own sanction.”
This latter possibility, if it turned out to be the case, would seem to be fatal for projects with ambitions to develop outside or beyond the State — cutting them off deep in their prehistory, severing them from their sources of energy, not even permitting their formulation. “Indeed, by developing thought in this way, the State-form gains something essential: an entire consensus.”
This passage goes on to elaborate what is at stake, should we permit that image or Image to govern our imaginings:
“Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of the universality of law.”
Well, we all recognize this, don’t we? D&G are naming the frustration of everyone who’s ever tried to have a conversation with Serious People — those who get to define the terms, the standards of comparison and the frames of reference. They’re describing the exhaustion of the anarchist explaining mutual aid to the New York Times reporter,
and getting only blank stares in response. In other words, they’re describing a condition of *hegemony*, just as Gramsci would have it, in which a regnant common sense imposes just-about airtight strictures over what can be thought or asserted if you wish to be taken seriously.
And there does seem to be one particular image of thought they hold responsible for enacting what we might call the conditions of possibility for this hegemony, though they don’t name it as such: German idealism itself.
Common sense, D&G tell us, is “the State consensus raised to the absolute.” And this “was most notably the great operation of the Kantian ‘critique,’ renewed and developed by Hegelianism.” For all those who descend from this line, the Idea itself has puissance in the world: force, the ability to transform material conditions. It is realer than real.
In the history of the West, there has been a precession of roles entrusted with the manipulation of the Idea, a series of symbolic operators that
begins with the poet and eventually includes philosophers and sociologists. They characterize these practitioners of the Idea as “image trainers” — a particularly brutal phrase, that. And the image they train us on leaves us unable to think the world in any way that doesn’t simply clone-stamp the implicate order of relations they take as a given, superimposing a ghostly State logic over everything we might encounter to the point that only the State is real for us.
Grim stuff. Again: airless.
But! Felicitously, “noölogy is confronted by counterthoughts” — note the plural — which are violent in their acts, discontinuous in their appearances, and the existence of which is mobile in history.” In other words, *there is an escape hatch from the Idea and the image of State thought it incontinently propagates across the entire field of the real*.
D&G tell us that these counterthoughts “are the acts of a ‘private thinker,’ as opposed to a public professor,” and they name three candidates:
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, “or even” Chestov (the Russian existentialist generally rendered in English as “Shestov,” born Yeguda Lev Shvartsman). And then this gorgeous encomium: “Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images.”
Wow: #goals, right? I’m sure as shootin’ not here to tell you what to do, but I think we could all do a whole lot worse than to live in such a way that it is said of us that wherever we dwell, it is the steppe or the desert.
But in the end, the epithet “private thinker” is unsatisfactory, “because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of *outside thought*” [emphasis in original]. What’s more, “although this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already interlaced with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here.”
For me, anyway, this is among the most
“extremely populous solitudes” in no way a contradiction in terms for the people he worked and thought alongside for years.
Let’s let that marinate overnight, shall we? We’ll come back to it tomorrow. For now: notes.
Here’s a cogent overview of Gramsci’s concepts of ideology and hegemony from a Marxist perspective: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/tr-gramsci.htm
...and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Idealism — what you really want is the material from Kant forward: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/
From the same source, a comprehensive account of Kierkegaard’s work: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
My own personal Nietzsche remains, in many ways, the one I first encountered in Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to “The Portable Nietzsche,” complete PDF here: https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/the-portable-nietzsche-walter-kaufmann.pdf
I found this account of Shestov helpful in situating him, with apologies for the Tablet link: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/lonely-prophet-of-jewish-awakeness
That’s it for now. See you tomorrow!
So here we are: confronted with the prospect of being marooned with a single Image of thought that reproduces the State entire. What and all that is offered to us under the sign of this Image is a clammy airlessness that leaves us crowded in with the inane reinscription of the same, and no way to think the outside.
Until, that is, someone arrives on the scene whose thought *is* the outside. This “counterthought” smashes the Image, performs an all-but-literal iconoclasm.
At first, D&G suggest we can think of such iconoclasms as the acts of a “private thinker.” But then — perhaps realizing that another, perfectly lossless way of saying “private thinker” is “idiot” — they pronounce themselves dissatisfied with this framing.
What they propose instead is a kind of thought that’s “already a tribe, the opposite of a State.” And importantly, “this form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of interiority.”
its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just or the Right (Cartesian truth, the Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.).”
Wellllll now. I don’t know if, in life, either Félix Guattari or Gilles Deleuze ever had any personal experience of Zen meditation. But I’m not the first person to have picked up on the strong resonances between their notion of an Image-smashing counterthought and Zen practice. (I’ll share the reflections of others who’ve
picked up on this resonance in today’s notes.)
In fact, if you’re interested in a decent account of just what the practitioner is doing on their cushion, “smashing the Image of thought” — or more properly still, continuously renewing one’s awareness of its formal emptiness — “in the practice of counterthought” is not too shabby a start. This wouldn’t have occurred to me on my first encounter with “Nomadology”: as an undergrad in the New York of the mid-‘80s, even a first taste of Zen practice
still lay half a decade in my future and the whole breadth of a continent away. But the parallel is irresistible to me now, and helps me fairly readily make sense of a passage I would have found completely confounding then.
Zen, of course, was not the only unimage of counterthought available to D&G; if nothing else, Guattari’s clinical experience certainly furnished them with others. But they were themselves aware of the resonance: “Thought is like the Vampire, it has no image, either to
constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another, but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target.” A novel enough interpretation of Herrigel, perhaps — and Herrigel’s Zen was of course already *just* that, and no more — but for all that, not without its own puissance and applicability.
One frustrating thing, though, once you’ve glimpsed all the ways in which Deleuzian
Shall we leave things there, for now? This is already a fair amount to take in, and I want us to have done so before taking up the rather embarrassing construction of “race” as nomad thought that closes out the section.
Notes: here’s an article on resonances one reader perceives between Zen and Deleuze’s body of work:
https://cjc.utppublishing.com/doi/10.22230/cjc.2016v41n3a3188
...and what may be more accessible, a Reddit thread plying the same waters:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Deleuze/comments/150aa41/deleuzian_buddhists/
Finally! We return to our long slow consideration of #Nomadology! Welcome back.
Here we leave behind the question of noölogy — of royal or State thought, versus its nomad or minor others — and take up a somewhat different, more concrete set of concerns. Our arrival at this point is set off in the text thusly:
“Axiom 2: The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution)...
“As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatio-geographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.
Proposition 5: Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war machine in space.”
What follows immediately is a rather lyrical account of that “spatio-geographic” aspect of the nomad war machine, describing how the nomad body *is* in space, how it *makes* space, and how that relation to space makes a subject.
But before we get into that, I think it’s worth noting that D&G’s Axiom 2 is careful to make a distinction they’ve so far in this text tended to regard as not needing to be made: that between the nomad war machine and the State military functions, processes and formations which may appear to be its cognates.
I take this as their being just a little nervous about the reader retaining the sense of an argument that’s both clear to them, and central to what they’re trying to say. The Army is *not*
a war machine, remember; nor are any of its officers, NCOs or enlisted personnel; nor are any of its tools, weapons, logistical systems or algorithms. The war machine is something that comes from outside, because it *is* the outside.
And for the first time in the text, D&G describe that outside in some richness. The passage accounting for the nomad’s sojourn in space is, again, lyrical, even beautiful. Of course, D&G tell us, the nomad interacts with all the familiar elements of space, things
like territories and points and paths — they’re still embodied, still inside history and still occupying the space and time of the physical universe. But they *understand* these elements differently than the State does, and their relationship to them as well.
Here they make a distinction between the sedentary, for whom the point is all, and for whom the path is never anything more than a route between points; the migrant, for whom the path is but a necessary, temporary condition; and the nomad,
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.)
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
Based on the novel "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The Zone that arose on Earth for unknown reasons attracts attention with inexplicable ph...
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
Adam Greenfield
Matt Noyes