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/
*relative movement*, i.e. that calibrated against the State’s striations, and *absolute speed*, which (as frustrating as it sounds) they define as a property of someone or -thing that has become deterritorialized, and which may even be expressed in complete stillness.
And we’re prepared to accept this is yet another in the series of binary oppositions they’ve offered since the beginning of the text, contrasting the conditions congenial to and produced by the State apparatus to those which
“directions, relative movements, a whole counterhydraulic of channels and conduits.”
Well. Lots to say about this, including the notion that those very “fixed routes [and] constant directions” largely emerge from properties of the Earth system — haecceities! — of a sort that D&G have previously commended “following.” (Is a sea current other than a seam in a piece of stone?) But let’s accept that even the paradigmatically smooth spaces are indeed subject to attempts at striation. What of it?
the moment at which the smoothness of space pivots from being a property of nomadic deterritorialization to something the State can leverage to further its own ends.
The only example that comes to mind for me immediately is the one we’ve already discussed: of the IDF’s appropriation of Deleuzian thought. In the words of IDF commander Aviv Kochavi: “This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it...The question is how do you interpret the alley?
“We interpreted the alley as a place we were forbidden to walk through and the door as a place we were forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place we were forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the door. This is why we opted for the methodology of moving through walls...[l]ike a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing.”
This conscious use of smooth space to accomplish the ends of the State
in its most brutally oppressive form should certainly be enough to convince us that there’s no necessary connection between deterritorialization and liberation. And if this is the case, then perhaps we may yet imagine some circumstance in which striation *does* conduce to a fuller and more broadly enjoyed freedom. I leave the identification of such a circumstance as an exercise for the reader, though I surely hope you’ll let me know what you may come up with.
Tomorrow we’ll resume our inquiry
by taking up the text’s Proposition 6:
“Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of a war machine.”
Until then, I’ll leave you with the sole note for today, Eyal Weizman’s article “Walking Through Walls,” from which the commentary of IDF commander Kochavi was drawn:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56e1e3e24d088e6834d4fbf4/t/5b7ff4cf70a6adbc6a7736ad/1535112400261/191111322-Weizman-Walking-Through-Walls-Frontier-Architecture-Eyal-Weizman.pdf
So. “Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of a war machine.” What might this mean?
I find the entire long discussion that follows among the most obscure in all of “Nomadology” — and I suspect many readers feel broadly the same, as the concepts deployed here don’t seem to have enjoyed nearly the same popular amplification as other Deleuzian terms, like smooth space or the rhizome. So let’s take it particularly slowly and see if we can’t nevertheless get it to render up
something approaching meaning.
The section kicks off with an observation: “Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe to assume the presence of a military organization.” And we’re already in trouble, for two reasons: that word “decimal,” first — the Army I was in, at least, organized itself in teams, squads, platoons, companies, battalions and so on, none of which typically converged on a decimal
quantity — and also the assertion of an inherent militarity to this organizing logic, when it’s at least as plausible that large-scale labor formations organized this way preceded military ones historically. But let’s take them at their word, for a moment, and see what it is they want to do with this assertion.
“Is this not the way an army deterritorializes its soldiers? An army is composed of units, companies and divisions. [NB: “companies” and “divisions” are *types* of unit.] The Numbers can
“vary in function, in combination, they can enter into entirely different strategies, but there is always a connection between the Number and the war machine.”
I kind of get what they’re after here: in basic training, kids are stripped immediately of their affiliation with Pine Bluff, Arkansas or the Bronx or Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and remade as soldiers of the Third Platoon (“DOGS OF WAR!”), Company D, 2nd Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment. It’s as literal a deterritorialization operation as you
are ever likely to find, and each of those nested units does owe something to the “decimal” scheme D&G perceive, if only roughly.
The trouble is, though, that D&G are asserting a connection *not* between Number and the army, but *between Number and a war machine they have spent a few thousand words emphasizing is precisely other than a State army*. Maybe if we dig in further we can grasp the point they’re getting at?
The connection they wish us to see is “not a question of quantity, but of
nonplused by this passage as I am.)
Well. So far as I understand it, “this principle of numeric organization” — this fractal, nested way of assembling people, whether in militaries or labor formations, and divvying them up into functional groups — has to do with enabling a hierarchical practice of command and control. You don’t, and can’t, command a single formation of 10,000 — but you *can* issue orders to five divisional COs, who direct their battalion commanders, and so on down the chain.
And in this way, the whole unwieldy mass begins to move, with relative swiftness and cohesion. The whole thing depends on “the chain of command.”
What D&G want us to accept, though, is that this whole organizational logic was captured by the State from *nomads* who dispose of their available number “vortically,” in smooth space. How do they intend to convince us of this seemingly rather stark reversal?
With an appeal to history, evidently! “It was the Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to Egypt; and when Moses applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the advice of his nomad father-in-law, Jethro the Cinite, and was done is [sic] such a way as to constitute a war machine, the elements of which are described in the _Book of Numbers_.”
The Britannica tells us that the Hyksos were “a dynasty of Palestinian origin that ruled northern Egypt as the 15th dynasty” (the word “Hyksos” itself
was “in fact probably an Egyptian term for ‘rulers of foreign lands’ [heqa-khase].”) And, per the same source, they did indeed bring with them to their project of rule in Egypt military-organizational technologies founded on the horse, chariot and compound bow. So far, D&G’s account bears out.
As for Jethro’s advice to Moses, the Biblical account is in Exodus 18, verses 13-26. Here’s the King James version, which I obviously prefer:
“17 And Moses' father in law said unto him,
“The thing that thou doest is not good.
18 Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone.
19 Hearken now unto my voice, I will give thee counsel, and God shall be with thee: Be thou for the people to God-ward, that thou mayest bring the causes unto God:
20 And thou shalt teach them ordinances & laws, and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, & the work that they must do.”
“21 Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens:
22 And let them judge the people at all seasons: and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, & they shall bear the burden with thee.
23 If thou shalt do this thing,
“and God command thee so, then thou shalt be able to endure, and all this people shall also go to their place in peace.
24 So Moses hearkened to the voice of his father in law, and did all that he had said.
25 And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.
26 And they judged the people at all seasons: the hard causes they brought unto Moses,
“but *every small matter they judged themselves*” [emphasis added].
What is this other than a perfectly concrete account of the delegation of authority? Indeed, of the *distribution* of decision power to the lowest possible echelon? There’s a suppleness and agility to this way of doing things that — per Jethro’s word-for-word advice — doesn’t merely make a formation organized in this way “able to endure,” but gives it a massively improved ability to sweep the horizon for emergent situations,
and devise countertactics intended to help it maintain initiative and advantage. (Indeed, doctrinally, this reliance on pushing decision authority down to the corps of noncommissioned officers, i.e. corporals and sergeants, is ultimately derived from the Prussian von Steuben’s “Blue Book,” and it’s what distinguishes the US Army from its nominally stodgier and more micromanaged Soviet and post-Soviet competitors.)
So Jethro’s advice to Moses represents the moment at which a nomadic or minor
Adam Greenfield
LillyLyle/Count Melancholia