Letters To Jack #3: The Treatise of Nomadology, and Two Kinds of Abstract Machines
This is a Letter to Jack F, author of the blog “Notes for Nomads” on Substack.
By Maty Candelaria (12.2.22)
This is a Letter to Jack F, author of the blog “Notes for Nomads” on Substack.
Hello Jack,
I want to talk to you about Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine" from A Thousand Plateaus.
In my previous letter, I wrote to you about Bergson’s two multiplicities. In the preceding letter, I would like you to consider Deleuze and Guattari's figures of ‘the nomad’ and ‘The State’ as two types of Socio-Political, as well as technological, machines. In light of Bergsonism, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of these technologies as having a different relationship with number and space (geography). In Bergson's terms, we could perhaps say one is open and moving, and the other is closed and forestalling.
For me, the Nomdadology plateau is a tricky one because Deleuze and Guattari pull from so many different disciplines to map out a genealogy of movement as well as a history of those who try to curb and capture that movement. Not only do they pull from anthropology and sociological theory from their own time, but also math theory, geography, metallurgy, literature, and a theory of games.
However, for now, I would like to start by talking about these figures as trans-historical machines.
In the plateau, Deleuze and Guattari set up a very interesting opposition, which can be read throughout history. Here, they set up the moving figure of the Nomadic War Machine against the sedentary and immanent figure of the State Apparatus. Although Deleuze and Guattari set these up as trans-historical concepts, it should be noted that the respective types of machines and technologies are not the same as the people who move through the machines. Additionally, these machines and technologies are always shifting, relative concepts. They are not a blueprint, and always show up differently. Instead, try to think of these technologies as tendencies, in the Bergsonian sense.
One machine captures and codifies movement into its internal code (Quantitative Multiplicity, The State Apparatus; Natured-Nature), and the other moves in continual movement and smooths out space (Qualitative Multiplicity; Nomadic War Machine; Nurturing-Nature).
In the "Treatise on Nomadology", Deleuze and Guattari oppose the figure of the nomad, to that of the sedentary. Nomadic peoples and sedentary peoples both enter into differing types of abstract machines which function as differing social technologies. The abstract machines (not the people) are seen as having distinctly different genealogies, which are different in kind, rather than degree.
In setting up the opposition between Nomadism and Statism, Deleuze and Guattari are necessarily erecting a kind of dualism. However, it's important to bear in mind that all of Deleuze and Guattari's dualisms are interpenetrating, and not always in a dialectical sense. However, despite this entanglement, there are still characteristics that are embodied within their movements which can qualify their differences from each other.
Before teaming off with Guattari, Deleuze found his roots in French Nietzcheanism. Deleuze wrote a wonderful book on Nietzche’s philosophy and was very critical of the kind of dialectical opposition which places these kinds of moral categorical claims. Deleuze saw Nietzsche as a philosopher who affirmed difference as opposed to denying it. Destruction, for Nietzsche, is not to be used for itself, but only insofar that it can be used to establish a new kind of thing. As Jonas Čeika explains in his book detailing the commonalities between Marx and Nietzche, this kind of movement that affirms life through destruction is called Aufhebung.
A genealogical study of historical machines, therefore, is not simply to choose one formation over the other as eternally good or evil. The point is to understand how these formations take shape, and how they can inform relationships with the earth's splendors wonders, and humans' relationship with these wonders.
From this method, it is important to point out that for Marx (as well as Nietzsche), abolition is itself a creative act:
“...communism for Marx is an Aufhebung: it cancels, meaning that it abolishes class society; it preserves, meaning that it nevertheless preserves the forces of production; and it lifts up, in that the initial historical stage of pre-class society -- primitive communism -- is in the final stage reproduced, but on a higher level, an advanced stage, lifted up: communism, but no longer primitive”1.
This much is true in the Nomadology plateau itself. The refrain repeated by Deleuze and Guatarri throughout is that the figure of Nomadism is “not better, just different” than the State Apparatus.
The figure of 'The War Machine’ is a trans-historical, but also shifting concept. The same goes for the State. Figures of nomadism can be followed in many different ways, but what unites them is a proclivity to movement, as opposed to staying in one place.
Nomad is here used as a general term that describes people who are constantly moving from place to place without making any single place their ‘home’. Nomadic people throughout history are not uniform. If you look at the examples that Deleuze and Guattari bring up, they are expansively different -- which is the point. Deleuze and Guatarri cite many examples of Nomadism such as historical ones like Genghis Khan but also biblical ones such as Moses. Furthermore, many of their examples are not what you would usually call nomadic, in the anthropological sense of the word. Archimedean geometry and metallurgy are said to have their own Nomadic elements. What unites them is not a code, a set of values, or anything which can reduce Nomadic people as archetypal figures.
In fact, Deleuze and Guatarri very explicitly criticize how many scholars before them have treated Nomadism as something lesser, as if Nomads throughout history were ‘not developed enough to form States when it might be the case that they were actively avoiding doing so. The opposition between "Nomadic" and "Sedentary" is merely to show how both have different ways of interacting with the world.
With that being said, it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari find a radical potential in the act of Nomadism, insofar as Nomadism is understood as a kind of 'active movement'. Nomadic people throughout history seek to follow life where it leads, such as following weather patterns for warm land or following migration patterns of animals. This kind of relationship with the Earth requires space to be smooth, and relatively undivided by Man-Made blockades. This doesn't preclude the necessity for technology, paths, or tools. However, it does mean having a different relationship with the Earth.
These abstract machines are not human, though humans may constitute some of their parts. Rather, these are abstract machines that people enter into. Or at least, they are performed through human relationships to culture, geography, agriculture, animals, games, and social relations more broadly. Although they are abstract, they are composed of real sensuous relationships. They are not eternal. They are always morphable and shifting.
“Not only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is, to a set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the "multinational" type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power”2.
For sedentary peoples, The State Apparatus is a kind of abstract machine which constitutes laws and operates by a double (binary) movement. The State is said to have two heads, whose content is always the same, and can always be figured by binary arborescent mechanism. Some examples of these figures are "the magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer" (TON, 351). In modern States, these heads are abstracted into governmental agencies (judiciaries, congresses, and world leaders).
It is this double movement of binding and organizing which give a State its immanence. It's not that The State is itself immanent, it's that its function is to overcode all that is within its territory to bring it under a unified Law. Like the Monad, it allows only for intensive movements, but only insofar as this movement is subordinated within walls and laws.
An important distinction to be made within the lexicon of Deleuze and Guattari is that the War Machine is not the same as Nomadic people, just as the State Apparatus is not the same as people living under a State. The War Machine, on the other hand, is said to be a Nomadic concept only because The War Machine prefers movement in smooth heterogeneous space. To be clear, they are not saying that Nomadic peoples are necessarily warlike, just that war becomes a means to resist or ward off the state. War only becomes a function of the War Machine when it runs into external bodies which attempt to capture it or threaten its way of life:
“Clastres describes the situation of the chief, who has no instituted weapon other than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, and no other rule than his sense of the group's desires. The chief is more like a leader or a star than a man of power and is always in danger of being disavowed, abandoned by his people. But Clastres goes further, identifying war in primitive societies as the surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State: war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups, and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death. Clastres can thus invoke natural Law while reversing its principal proposition: just as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the State, and makes it impossible. It should not be concluded that war is a state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state that wards off and prevents the State”3.
Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis here is radical because it goes against the long history of Anthropology, and State philosophy which labels so-called “primitive” societies as being ‘less evolved’ than State societies. Instead, we see a theory that affirms Nomadic practices insofar as they intentionally prevent the process of State formation. Nor are Nomadic people fetishized in the form of the ‘noble savage’.
Deleuze and Guattari are largely responding to multiple fields of academic discourse which either create an idealized so-called ‘primitive peoples’ to put on a pedestal (such as with Anarcho-primitivism) or which poses them as being lesser than State form (such as a vulgar evolutionist perspective). Deleuze and Guattari are clear in their disagreements with both ways of formulating Nomadism. They are not looking to go back to a Hobbesian state of nature or affirm the State. Instead, they understand Nomadism as a practice of something actively hostile toward State formation, and State thought.
However, this doesn’t mean that either is better or worse, or it especially does not mean that War Machines are transcendentally good. When War Machines are captured by States, War itself becomes the primary export to feed back into the State's immanetizing mechanism.
For a modern example of the State Apparatus, look no further than the United States. Borders become an integral limit to the State Apparatus, as it clearly defines the lines of its power, and where its Law stretches to. The classic Lockean claim that The State protects the freedom of its constituents is America’s cry of immanence. Freedom within borders is only a relative degree of movement within America’s walls, which is only granted to those that have been overcoded (assimilated) into its mechanism. Since the State operates by binary, hierarchizing oppositions, it creates minorities for which to subordinate, categorize, border off, and push into ghettos. However, a movement that seeks to abolish the present state of things can carve out smooth spaces within the State. Deleuze’s call to action, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”4, is a recognition of his political and social condition, but also our own.
For Deleuze and Guattari “The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems”. In other words, although the State can wage war, it can only do so by appropriating a War Machine that is necessarily external to it. In a modern context, this can be seen clearly in how States leverage their Military as a means of deterritorializing and destabilizing that which is outside of itself. For the State, War is a method to capture and striated space, to bring it under its Law.
The Military becomes an organ of imperialism, as opposed to a War Machine that operates as a Body-Without-Organs that seeks to ward off the State.
The United States Military uses its military to destabilize outside countries to recode them and bring them under U.S. occupation. By contrast, The Black Panthers operated as a War Machine that sought a real movement to abolish the present state of things (racial capitalism), while affirming life as a difference.
Yes, the War Machine will eventually run into States, and this is where War as a concept begins. Either the War Machine acts on its own accord and undoes arborescent relations, or it becomes captured by the State for its ends.
Military and War Machines are therefore not of the same kind. Military take up War as its object, whereas War Machines (counterintuitively) only wage war when necessary. When co-opted by The State, the War Machine undergoes a qualitative change which makes it different than it was before. Likewise, the War Machine can itself deterritorialize and affect the State Apparatus.
Furthermore, what is at stake for Deleuze and Guattari is a theorization of struggle not just against class, but against power formation in general. This is why the Nomadology plateau is so popular amongst Marxists and Anarchists alike.
Through an analysis of the history of the movement, Nomadology becomes an experimental ground for practice. I like this example that Deleuze and Guattari give where street gangs ward off the formation of a hierarchy:
“…in the case of gangs of street children in Bogota, Jacques Meunier cites three ways in which the leader is prevented from acquiring stable power: the members of the band meet and undertake their theft activity in common, with collective sharing of the loot, but they disperse to eat or sleep separately; also, and especially, each member of the band is paired off with one, two, or three other members, so if he has a disagreement with the leader, he will not leave alone but will take along his allies, whose combined departure will threaten to break up the entire gang; finally, there is a diffuse age limit, and at about age fifteen a member is inevitably induced to quit the gang”5.
In terms of Anarchist or Marxist praxis, warding off the formation of States is understood as an active process that seeks different means of forming alliances than binding and organizing.
Although the text does not fall into the traditional Anarchist canon, it ultimately describes a kind of movement (a real movement: becoming) that is actively hostile to the formation of arborescent power structures:
The War Machine “… unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he unties bonds.. .) He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between "states": a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus”6.
There are a few things I want to bring attention to in this passage. First, Deleuze and Guattari view the War Machine as non-binary or at least anti-binary. If the State is understood as establishing binary relations (good/evil, proletariat/bourgeoise) then the War Machine is the force that comes from the outside to tear down those relations. Or in other words, the War Machine does not simply detach itself from the State (ex-state) but unfolds its very conditions (un-stating).
It is very similar to how Communism, for Karl Marx, isn’t to simply make the proletariat into Bourgeoise subjects but to dissolve these categories entirely. As Cody explains in her new essay:
“Un-proletariat suggests both intensifying a verb that already suggests opposition or removal, and the existence of something which has been predicted and has not yet been given a name.
This is true, the new figure who emerges as Un-proletariat, not an Ex-proletariat, who hasn't simply exited his prolétairat status and become bourgeois. But has liberated himself and the condition which created her, creating something entirely new in the process.
This is the unique difference between the Hegelian Aufheben, Aufhebung of later Marxist texts, and the Abschaffung, Befreiung of earlier Engelian-Marxist works. The difference between exemption and emancipation7.”
Second, when Deleuze and Guattari say that “the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus” it is very clear here that they are talking about the war machine and state apparatus as forms of technology. One is a technology of emancipation or at least deterritorialization, and the other is a technology of sedimentation, discipline, and control.
If the function of the State Apparatus is to capture everything within a given territory and to make all conform to its Law, the function of the War Machine is to cut through the State. War Machines don't set up War as its end but rather set up smooth space as its end. The State is something that hates smooth space, although the State will appropriate the War Machine, overcome its radical potential, and make the War Machine into a State Military, or an Army. Through this act of overcoming, a transformation of one kind is reconstituted in the other.
Solidarity,
Maty
References and Further Reading
Delezue and Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine", A Thousand Plateaus.
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control.
Cody Tatley, Un-proletariat/Ex-proletariat An Philosophical-Linguistic inquiry, Negative Maps Blog.
Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx in the 21st Century.
Helpful Podcasts
Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx in the 21st Century.
Delezue and Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine", A Thousand Plateaus.
Ibid.
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control.
Delezue and Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine", A Thousand Plateaus.
Ibid
Cody Tatley, Un-proletariat/Ex-proletariat An Philosophical-Linguistic inquiry, Negative Maps Blog.