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.”

points one at a time.

Drawing lines is primary for a State: “It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism, but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire ‘exterior,’ over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon.”

I feel like “zone of rights” here refers to something more than the assertion of control over territorial waters, and tends more toward something like the Monroe Doctrine: the articulation of a sphere of influence.

But there does seem to be a nuance in D&G’s understanding of the *means* of that capture that would probably elude the common-or-garden IR instructor: what they have consistently referred to as the “striation” of space via lines of all sorts: roads, paths, property claims, sea routes, orbits. Only the one cleaving Kashmir in two is explicitly named this way, but really all such lines are lines of control.

“There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed,

regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects.”

Here I think of D&G’s characterization of nomad movement as “vortical,” and the initial phase of the settler-colonial conquest of the American west, almost as if a gas whose molecules consisted of Conestoga wagons had diffused across a membrane at the western shore of the Mississippi, until it filled the entire space. And then the coming of the State on the back of stagecoach routes

and telegraph lines, and eventually the Transcontinental Railroad. The space becomes cross-gridded with these lines, and only once that has happened is the assertion of State power tenable.

And the State uses that power to regulate flows further. It becomes responsible for what Paul Virilio characterizes as “management of the public ways,” with distinct consequences for the *ways* in which matter, energy, information and people flow: “the gates of the city...are barriers, filters against the

“recompose and transform movement, or to regulate speed.”

Here again we are confronted with a set of assertions that will quite probably drive the more literally-, physically-minded nuts. The point, firstly, depends on a teetering concatenation or cascade of Deleuzian definitions, which are not the same as those understood by the sciences. And in any event, it’s possible to think of quite a few — perhaps even too many — exceptions and counterexamples. Nevertheless, I think there’s still a good

deal of force to this conception of the State as regulator of all flows. The *real* question is whether anything that abstracts and captures flows, and breaks them to defined pathways, is becoming-State for D&G — because that could very well describe the entire domain of life.

Let’s let that question hang in the (smooth) air for a bit, and return to it tomorrow.

In the meantime, notes:

- The classic study of State use of smooth space is Mahan’s “Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783,” and you can find that here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13529/13529-h/13529-h.htm

- The meaning and implications of the Monroe Doctrine continue to be fodder for scholarly contestation. The proceedings of a recent, not particularly radical symposium on the topic will perhaps give you a flavor of some perspectives in the contemporary mainstream:
https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-138430

- Here’s Wikipedia’s account of the Kashmiri Line of Control, which doesn’t at a glance contain any howlingly obvious partisan assertions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Control

- And here’s a piece exploring one of the ways in which State striation of the American West undermined other, preexisting lifeways, and eventually rendered them untenable. https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/TRR

Catch you tomorrow, for the next tranche of “Nomadology.” 👊

Sometime, too, I’ll have to unpack what I’ve vaguely thought of as the “small multiples” theory of cultural production, which takes in the Foreign Agents series as well as a few other projects which have weighed disproportionately much in the course of my life – Metagaming’s Microgames, the Simple Machines 7” singles, etc.

https://www.blackgate.com/2014/11/28/the-roots-of-microgaming-the-classic-games-of-metagaming/

http://www.simplemachines.net/story.html

@adamgreenfield

I remember back around the 1980s attending a scifi con somewhere on the US east coast. I had done the cover art for (then) Metagamings micro game Ogre. So I had made a quick badge announcing the fact. Nobody noticed.

Except for an exceptionally intelligent young man named Adam Greenfield. In gratitude I made a quick drawing for him of the Ogre unit of his choice. IIRC it was a mobile howitzer.