“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

“a center which repels the obscure *nomos* [emphasis here, as above, in original]. The absolute of religion is essentially a horizon that encompasses, and, if the absolute itself appears at a particular place, it does so in order to establish a solid and stable center for the global.” (Here one thinks very much of the Kaaba, in fact.)

This cleaving of one absolute from another may strike you as the worst sort of pseudo-theological quibbling — but then, as any mathematician will tell you,

there are different kinds of infinity, and each variety has its own distinct properties, its haecceities. And so it is here: D&G note the well-known affinity of the Abrahamic monotheisms for smooth space, but conclude that “religion converts the absolute.”

The local irruption of the Godhead into history — whatever else it may be — is *not* what they mean by “the local absolute.” Religion remains, very much as we’d suspected, “a piece in the State apparatus (in both its forms[...]).”

I’m going to leave off here for today, because we’re still contending with a plumbing emergency, and I expect that will occupy the rest of my day.

Would one of you be so kind as to contribute a few notes — pointers to the theory of the Eucharist, the circumambulation of the Kaaba, and so on? Thanks, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!

So we pause, in this reflection on the relation between religion and the nomad, to establish what seems obvious, self-evident, almost unworthy of comment: that the monotheisms, at least, are “not, in effect, separable from a firm and constant orientation, from an imperial State of right, even, and especially, in the absence of a State in fact.”

We know that if there’s one thing D&G are always attentive to, though, it’s eddies, inclusions, trailing vortices, slight returns. And so it is here:

“[I]t is not an exhaustive approach to establish a simple opposition between two points of view, religion-nomadism,” they tell us. “For monotheistic religion, at the deepest level of its tendency to project a universal or spiritual State over the entire ecumenon, is not without ambivalence or fringe areas.” What might these consist of?

Well, I can think of a few, myself — various heresies or esoteric practices within the monotheisms, from Sufism to Kabbalah to the practice of kenosis.

But D&G are after something more specific: “religion as an element in a war machine, and the idea of holy war as the motor of that machine.”

They seem to anticipate — even then, in the days before various self-anointed mujahideen made “jihad” a familiar concept in the West — that the mind of the reader would leap straight to Islam at this point: “The *prophet* [emphasis in original], as opposed to the state personality of the king and the religious personality of the priest, traces the...

movement by which a religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of such a machine.” And they invoke Georges Bataille’s pungent, if questionable, summary of early Islam: “‘a society reduced to the military enterprise.’”

Here comes the corrective, though: “Yet the Crusades were a properly Christian adventure of this type.” And there follows an astonishing, if all too brief, regrounding in the history of medieval Europe, and the papacy’s concerted attempts, over two centuries, to

wrest the southern Levant from Islam by military force, and claim it for Christendom.

It’s a good moment to spend some time contemplating the energies summoned by the Crusades, because in so many ways they are still conditioning our lives. Poor self-hating Pete Hegseth rather fancies himself a Crusader, with his Deus Vult tattoo; various contemporary far-right formations overtly take this warrior Christianity as a model (when they aren’t simply harboring suppressed jealousy for the Taliban).

And what D&G argue is that the lessons are not quite so clearcut as these latterday stans have made themselves believe. The whole sequence in which they do this has a melancholy music that — in its own way, to be sure — just about rises to a prophetic cadence itself, so I’m going to quote it in full:

“The prophets may very well condemn nomad life; the [here implicitly Crusader] war machine may very well favor the movement of migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in general may very

“is in the process of becoming, and finally, its turns its dream of an absolute State back against the State-form. And this turning against is no less a part of the ‘essence’ of religion than that dream.”

*Whew*. We don’t even need to imagine the specifics to grasp something of the truth of this, but let’s try to evoke some anyway. The doughty Norseman meeting his end in the siege of some Balearic hilltown, the Catalan uprooted from the tending of his fields and driven halfway around the world

in a bedraggled column of filthy, half-literate warrior-mendicants: what heresies did they encounter along the way? What sights, sounds, foods, smells entered them? (For that matter, *who* entered them, and under what circumstances?) Can we be at all sure they remained the slicing instrument of Godly terror at all times, or is it possible that entirely other affects traversed these pilgrim bodies, and made *them* something entirely other?

It’s an example from another time and place and context,

but I think of the three US Army medics who came back from the war in Vietnam filled not with loathing for the Viet Cong, but with admiration for the way they tended to the wellbeing of the people, and on the basis of these “barefoot doctor” practices founded the Free Clinic that remains operational in Berkeley to this day.

The faith contains the seeds of its own undoing, always. Not in every body that carries it, not maybe in most — but the harder it tries to clamp down a lid upon the world,

the more cracks it opens through which something else might seep through. The application of force creates the conditions of its own negation, and however local that negation may be, when it appears it is absolute.

Let’s leave things here for today, shall we?

Notes: Wikipedia’s not terrible on the Crusades, at least as a place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

- You shouldn’t doubt how potent or how appealing Crusader iconography has become over the past several years: https://blog.library.villanova.edu/2019/09/30/deus-vult/

- Annemarie Schimmel’s “Mystical Dimensions of Islam” was my first source on Sufism (outside the hugely problematic works of adult-child sex advocate “Hakim Bey,” aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), and while it’s somewhat dated, it’s still a useful overview. You can find that here: https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/137665622MysticalDimensionsOfIslamAnnemarieSchimmel/137665622-Mystical-Dimensions-of-Islam-Annemarie-Schimmel.pdf

- My own exposure to Kabbalah (& related ideas e.g. gematria) was via Thelema, but the *source* is Gershom Scholem’s “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.” Find that here: https://www.bard.edu/library/pdfs/archives/Scholem-Major_Trends_in_Jewish_Mysticism.pdf

And for the Abrahamic trifecta, here’s what is possibly the preëminent work of Christian mysticism, the fourteenth-century “Cloud of Unknowing.” https://ia902909.us.archive.org/32/items/cloudofunknowing0000unse_h8l5/cloudofunknowing0000unse_h8l5.pdf

See you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!

Today’s passage is mostly a transitional one, the pivot between the discussion of religion and its use of the war machine we’ve been dwelling with, and one about the State and State spaces that will follow.

The approach to that latter topic, though, leads through a consideration of the composition of the State, which turns on a historico-geographical distinction we no longer make: that between “the West” and “the Orient.” What’s particularly interesting to me about this material is that 1980

is just about the last historical moment at which the distinction would have been intellectually and socially tenable, though frankly it feels like French thought was comfortable clinging to it after it had already begun to drift out of fashion elsewhere.

For contemporary readers, both in “the West” and elsewhere, it feels necessary to reconstruct the distinction the text here treats as obvious and primary. What was that distinction?

For all their radicalism elsewhere, D&G accept a conceptual

architecture they inherit from the age of empire: that between an Occident more or less coextensive with Christendom, and an Orient that sprawled away to the east and south. (The boundaries of the Orient were by no means fixed in the Western imagination; the early 19th-century Austrian diplomat Metternich is supposed to have said that “Asia begins at the Landstraße,” i.e. just east of the center of Vienna itself.)

And things were supposedly Different Out There, ethically or even ontologically

as much as economically, politically or organizationally. There were any number of articulations of this theme, but the one that feels closest to the sense in which D&G mobilize the distinction was that of the German sociologist Karl Wittfogel.

In the early part of his career, Wittfogel was associated with the Frankfurt School, but I think it’s fair to say that his work described a curious ideological trajectory following his escape from Nazi Germany in 1933. The concept for which he remains

best-known is that of “Oriental despotism.”

Oriental despotism was a mode of rule that involved the crystallization of a central State apparatus, in turn ostensibly driven by the emergent need to manage the complex irrigation infrastructure on which Chinese agriculture relied. (This was the “hydraulic hypothesis.”) D&G rely, overtly, on other sources for their account of the Orient — they cite only Braudel, Max Gluckman and the arch-rightist Chaunu — but Wittfogel is all over their description

of “the victory of the West over the Orient,” for those with the eyes to see it.

This wince-inducing idyll, of course, comes to a crashing end with the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” followed swiftly by Gayatri Spivak’s writings of the mid-80s. From that moment forward, the West/Orient distinction can no longer be upheld by anyone wishing to be understood as making serious contributions to thought: we see all the ways in which it’s lazy epistemologically, befilthed by its use

as a legitimating apparatus for empire, and basically an impediment to seeing and understanding cultures as they actually were and are.

So what might otherwise be an interesting, rather sharply Scott-flavored set of observations (about, say, the consequences of deforestation in China, rather than large-scale clearance for planting and the imposition of agricultural grids) becomes hard for the contemporary reader to engage. Where, elsewhere in the text, my own scholarship is inadequate to the

task of determining whether the binary oppositions D&G are so prone to assert are actually founded in any valid historical finding, here I know full well the argument is built on a weak, weaker, weakest foundation.

It’s certainly possible to hold that this doesn’t matter — that finding a literal, historical correlate for each of their figures of thought is hardly the point. And I’m actually not at all unsympathetic to this: for me, the point remains what you can *do* with these concepts, not

what in history (or anatomy, physics, etc.) they are supposed to have been based on. Nevertheless, I have a really hard time taking seriously any passage that asks me to entertain the idea that the Occident/Orient distinction is salient.

Notes: The conventional Metternich scholarship, i.e. that to which I was exposed in school, presents him as a titan of conservatism, but there is at least one recent revisionist perspective that appears to have impressed critics: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n19/christopher-clark/a-rock-of-order

(Note the weirdly Taoist point Henry Kissinger, of all people, makes about conservatism in the penultimate paragraph there.)

- Here’s Wittfogel (1955) on “Developmental Aspects of Hydraulic Societies,” with apologies for the shitey scan: https://www.columbia.edu/itc/anthropology/v3922/pdfs/wittfogel.pdf

- And here’s Said’s “Orientalism,” in all its glory:
https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said_Edward_Orientalism_1979.pdf

See you tomorrow!

Having put to one side the problematic-in-the-bad-way material comparing the West to the “hydraulic” “Orient,” we are now free to resume the much more interesting conversation that takes us through the remainder of this division of the text.

This involves, again, the question of “striated” State space: “One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space.”