“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

- 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.