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

*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