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

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

belong to two entirely different, indeed opposed registers of being: the intensive and the extensive.

This is a foundational distinction for D&G, so it’s worth spending some time with it. It’s one of the places — so frustrating, I know, if not infuriating, to those who come from the “hard sciences” — where they rely on established concepts from physics to signify and do more than they do in that discipline.

The physical distinction can be made like this: *extensive* quantities are those that

can be subdivided without changing their nature. Lots of familiar measurements are like this: length, area, volume, mass. The numbers add up linearly. *Intensive* quantities, on the other hand — like temperature or pressure — can’t be divided up so neatly. They’re gradients, right? And each position on the gradient is its own thing, its own situation: it’s nonsense to speak of today being half as cold as yesterday.

And importantly, these are differences in potential. *They drive processes*.

flows they produce between them. Finally we’re in a position to understand “movement” as a practice of extension in space, and “speed” as something else, an intensive quality that can even inhere in absolute stillness.

That’s a lot to get our heads around, so I think we’ll leave that to marinate overnight. For now, notes!

- Here is Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theater” (recall, too, that this same Kleist was the author of “Penthesilea,” invoked some weeks back): https://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm

- Here’s a scene from “24 Hour Party People” in which Andy Serkis brilliantly inhabits Martin Hannett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90j6V8EjSuI

- And here’s what the results of that advice sound like, in Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” — as good a way of understanding the distinction between extensive movement and intensive speed as any I can imagine:
https://open.spotify.com/track/0rcLhYRihks3t4lFPtHhQV

Enjoy these links and I’ll see you for more “Nomadology” tomorrow!

Good news for everyone who’s been following this unfolding of “Nomadology,” or trying to, who would prefer the convenience of a single long piece: I’ve now published Part I of Notes on “Nomadology” as a free post on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/notes-on-part-i-142961660

Feel free to share the link with friends, or anyone else you think might be interested!

#deleuze #guattari #deleuzeandguattari #nomadology #athousandplateaus #theory #philosophy

“He is a vector of deterritorialization. He adds desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations the orientation and direction of which endlessly vary.”

What crops up at this point for me is a question that’s been looming beneath the surface of our inquiry across its entire duration, which is that of *implicit identification*. There’s a strong, though never explicitly stated, sense that the reader of the book is supposed to admire these operations, and want to emulate them,

as much as they are assumed to abjure and reject royal science, theorematicity, arborescent order, the striation of space u.s.w. u.s.w. That is: we are supposed to understand deterritorialization not merely as a tactic available to us, but as something to which we might, and ought to, aspire.

This might seem obvious, but I think it’s worth making explicit. Despite the occasional reminder that minor or nomad modes are “not better, but different,” I think we are safe in assuming that a gradient

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

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:

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...”

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