“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