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
lineage injects its immanent diagram of organization into the State structure emerging among the people of the Law.
Now Jethro is *not* Hyksos, true. But he is a Cinite, or Kenite: a non-Israelite, of a people whose name etymologically connotes their origin as a band of itinerant metalsmiths (!). As an embodied carrier of pragmatic nomad mētis, Jethro is a line of flight by way of which this practice of distributed delegation makes of the Israelites for the first time a war machine.
That’s a ton to get our heads around, so let’s hold there for now, and return to this set of questions tomorrow.
For now, as always, notes:
- Here’s the whole Exodus 18, if you want to get a sense of the context in which this conversation is supposed to have happened:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2018&version=KJV
- Here’s Britannica on the Hyksos:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hyksos-Egyptian-dynasty
When Jethro, the priest of Midian, Moses' father in law, heard of all that God had done for Moses, and for Israel his people, and that the LORD had brought Israel out of Egypt; Then Jethro, Moses' father in law, took Zipporah, Moses' wife, after he had sent her back, And her two sons; of which the name of the one was Gershom; for he said, I have been an alien in a strange land: And the name of the other was Eliezer; for the God of my father, said he, was mine help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh: And Jethro, Moses' father in law, came with his sons and his wife unto Moses into the wilderness, where he encamped at the mount of God:
- Here’s “Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States,” better known as the “Blue Book” of Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin Steuben of Prussia, Baron von Steuben. https://ig.army.mil/Portals/101/Documents/IG%20History/Von-Steuben-Blue-Book.pdf
- And here’s an April 1989 CIA overview of the contrasting Soviet doctrinal approach to military organization, so you can get a sense of what *non*-delegation looks like in practice:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000499601.pdf
See you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
counterpart “Greek geometrism”?)
But what follows feels like it’s on somewhat firmer ground, not merely logically but anthropologically. They set out their argument by noting that historically there have been “three major types of human organization: *lineal*, *territorial*, and *numerical*” (emphasis in original). The lineal is a more or less straightforward matter of descent, cosanguinity and matrimonial alliance; such “lineages are essentially segments in action,” which “meld and divide, and
“vary according [sic] the ancestor considered, the tasks and the circumstances.” Neither number nor territoriality, of course, are absent from the question of lineage — “The earth is before all else the matter upon which the dynamic of lineages is inscribed, and the number, a means of inscription” — but this type of organization seems to suffice for pre-State societies.
“Everything changes” with the coming of the State, though (and remember, we mustn’t fall into the trap of understanding this
as a developmental or evolutionary matter). With the State, “the territorial principle becomes dominant.” By the same token, though, “[o]ne could also speak of deterritorialization, since the earth becomes an object, instead of being an active material element in combination with lineage.”
I’m frankly not sure about this latter assertion — i.e. that the earth constitutes an agential determining factor in all lineal relations — though I can certainly see it operating in some, or even many. There
will be a specific relation with the land at the root of many decisions to settle in a given place and initiate a lineage there: sure. But invariably? That’s a more complicated matter. Let’s accept this for the sake of argument, though, because the contrast with what the State makes of the land is vivid and illustrative.
The State, after all, is concerned with lineation, with the striation of territory, with the assertion of (both collective and private) property rights. And what is property
all a shallow Deleuzianism might ascribe a positive value to deterritorialization, the only thing we can validly say about it when compared to territorialization is that it opens onto an alternate set of affordances, operations and possibilities, “not better, but different.”
Ready for another whiplash reversal? The State may deterritorialize the land by subjecting it to the inscription of abstract property relations, but what “moves to the forefront” w/its coming is nevertheless *territorial*,
“in the sense that all the segments, whether of lineage, land or number, are taken up by *an astronomical space or a geometrical extension* that overcodes them” (emphasis in orginal), though “not in the same way in the archaic imperial State and in modern States.”
I’m somewhat sympathetic to those who might want to hurl the book against the nearest wall at this point. Is the State territorial in its effects, or deterritorial? And now that you’ve opened up the question of historical variation
grouping, and in any event it doesn’t work quite so well as a technique for the generation of insight when you only permit yourself local consistency. Or so it seems to me.
But sure, let’s accept that, while *property* may be a deterritorializing operation — and that the State has an intimate and indeed definitional relation with property — the State itself is a fundamentally territorializing order, as D&G have heretofore defined that term. We’ll see what that implies...tomorrow.
And if this was true of empire from classical antiquity through the age of steam, it is triply so for the modern State, “which in developing utilized all the calculation techniques that were springing up at the border between mathematical science and social technology.”
There’s a vaguely Foucauldian flavor here, of calculational and statistical techniques being applied to the management of whole populations — one thinks of Gompertz and Quetelet and Guillard, and then the roughly simultaneous
appearance of the Hollerith machine and modern demographics.
And thus, D&G tell us, “the number has always served to gain mastery over matter, to control its variations and movements, in other words to submit” these things — very much including “the ultimate matter constituted by the human population” — “to the spatio-temporal framework of the State.” Again, we should be thinking of state-istics.
It feels like a special case of Idealism, this notion of flows of matter, energy, information and
people pushed hither and yon around the ecumenon by manipulations of nothing more concrete than number. And it’s true: you don’t have the Atlantic slave trade or the Holocaust without continuous, task-driven innovation in tabulation, double-entry accounting, risk assessment and modeling. Number here seems agential — and quite malevolently so, at that.
But here they make a curious assertion: “We do not believe that the conditions of independence or autonomy of the Number are to be found
“in the State, even though all the factors of its development are present.” What I take them to be arguing here is that there is something about the structurating properties of Number that precedes or exceeds the order of State. And so far in this book, things which are exterior to the State apparatus in this way are generally figured to belong to the war machine. Let’s see if that turns out to be the case here.
“The *Numbering Number* [emphasis in original, and Massumi furnishes the gloss
‘Nombre nombrant’], in other words autonomous arithmetic organization, implies neither a superior degree of abstraction nor very large quantities. It relates only to conditions of possibility constituted by nomadism, and to conditions of effectuation constituted by the war machine.”
Got that? It may well be with the State that the problems imposed by very large quantities or particularly high degrees of abstraction appear...but the autocatalytic, self-organizing capacity of Number, the number
that numbers, indeed arises in and from the outside.
This, at first blush, might seem to be another one of those definitional games of bait & switch D&G so often play, where they define something as “royal” or “minor” at will, as it benefits them locally, and then say much the opposite somewhere else in the text. But here it feels like they’re onto something: Number as a strange attractor, lying only partially across human conceptual grids, and uncannily pulling the systems we devise toward it.
That, it seems to me, is a true, icy glimpse of the thought from outside. Perhaps the State itself is epiphenomenal, this thought seems to say: a mere dance of iron filings tugged into shape by the occult movements of something unseen, something with too many or too few dimensions to intersect our world in any way we’re capable of recognizing.
This gives me a better sense of what they mean by Numbering Number, OK, but once granted that the question becomes what they intend for us to do with it.
That’s a question we’ll leave for tomorrow. For now: notes!
- The “Gompertz curve” is a mathematical function devised by London actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825. Here’s a 1995 paper about its use in predictive domography. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8867525
- We have the 19th century Belgian statistician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet to thank for the notion of a “body mass index.” Here’s Quetelet on the question of obesity and the notion of “the average man”: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17890752/
The Gompertz demographic model describes rates of aging and age-independent mortality with the parameters alpha and A, respectively. Estimates of these parameters have traditionally been based on the assumption that mortality rates are constant over short to moderate time periods. This assumption is …
Adam Greenfield
Ruud Steltenpool