A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 374-387
Thought
“PROBLEM II. Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?
PROPOSITION IV. The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, finally, by noology” (374)
“Thought as such is already in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire organon” (374)
“an image of thought … the special object of ‘noology,’” i.e., MIND (374).
Deleuze first writes of the image of thought in chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition (1968): “We may call this image of thought a dogmatic, orthodox or moral image. It certainly has variant forms: ‘rationalists’ and ‘empiricists’ do not presume its construction in the same fashion. Moreover, as we shall see, philosophers often have second thoughts and do not accept this implicit image without adding further traits drawn from explicit reflection on conceptual thought which react against it and tend to overturn it. In the realm of the implicit, it nevertheless holds fast, even if the philosopher specifies that truth is not, after all, ‘an easy thing to achieve and within reach of all’. For this reason, we do not speak of this or that image of thought, variable according to the philosophy in question, but of a single Image in general which constitutes the subjective presupposition of philosophy as a whole” (Difference and Repetition, 132).
“This image has two heads … the imperium of true thinking operating by magical capture, seize or binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (mythos); a republic of free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground (logos)” (375)
“These two heads are in constant interference” but “are necessary to one another” (375)
“in order to pass from one to the other there must occur, ‘between’ them, an event of an entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place outside” (375)
Commentator’s Note: I just read “Foundational Anxieties” by Massimo Mazzotti in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and this is precisely the two schools of mathematics in Naples that he discusses: the “synthetics” (mythos) and the “analysts” (logos). And indeed, it is his argument that revolution (war) makes possible a transition between them, but both are ultimately concerned with a foundation of the image of thought as reason.
“an imperium of truth and a republic of spirits … the necessary condition for the constitution of thought as principle, or as a form of interiority, as a stratum” (375)
“thought gains … a gravity it would never have on its own, a center that makes everything … appear to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction” (375)
“the State-form gains something essential: a whole consensus” (375)
“Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of de jure universality” (375)
“It is as if the sovereign were left alone in the world, spanned the entire ecumenon, and now dealt only with actual or potential subjects … the State becomes the sole principle separating rebel subjects, who are consigned to the state of nature, from consenting subjects, who rally to its form of their own accord” (375)
The State “extend[s] itself in thought, and [is] sanctioned by it as the unique, universal form” (375)
Commentator’s Note: the cop in your head.
“the only remaining particularity a community has is interior or moral (the spirit of a people), at the same time as the community is funneled by its organization toward the harmony of a universal (absolute spirit)” (375)
“The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that interiority a form of universality” (375)
“everything revolves around the legislator and the subject” (376)
“Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself” (376)
“Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving the established powers its blessing … This was most notably the great operation of the Kantian ‘critique,’ renewed and developed by Hegelianism” (376)
“It is not at all surprising that the philosopher has become a public professor or State functionary. It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of thought. With full reciprocity” (376)
“the image itself assumes different contours in accordance with the variations on this form: it has not always delineated or designated the philosopher, and will not always delineate him” (376)
“In modern States, the sociologist succeeded in replacing the philosopher … Even today, psychoanalysis lays claim to the role of Cogitatio universalis as the thought of the Law, in a magical return” (376)
“Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of images of thought, and their historicity” (376)
This is an important distinction, because a Marxist critique of ideology still depends upon universal reason.
“In a sense, it could be said that all this has no importance, that thought has never had anything but laughable gravity. But that is all it requires: for us not to take it seriously. Because that makes it all the easier for it to think for us, and to be forever engendering new functionaries. Because the less people take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing—to be a thinker?” (376)
Commentator’s Note: Serres remarked somewhere that all his philosopher peers, if they could not make it in the university, wished to become Ministers in the French government.
Counterthoughts
Counterthoughts “are violent in their acts and discontinuous in their appearances,” and their “existence is mobile in history” (376)
“These are the acts of a ‘private thinker,’ as opposed to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov” (376)
“Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images” (376)
But “private thinker” isn’t right, because it “exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought” (376)
“To place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be studied in Nietzsche” (377)
Counterthought “attests to an absolute solitude” but “it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here” (377)
“Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State” (377)
“this form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of interiority … symmetry exists only between different poles or focal points of interiority” (377)
“the form of exteriority of thought—the force that is always external to itself, or the final force, the nth power—is not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State apparatus. It is, rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.)” (377)
“the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences” (377)
This describes A Thousand Plateaus—no conceivable reproduction, only relays.
“Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy” (377)
“In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target” (377)
“The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the monument” (377)
“An ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model society” (377)
Commentator’s Note: Compare Baudrillard’s theorization of planetary deterrence, the orbital satellary of models.
Pathos
“pathos” is “an antilogos and an antimythos” (377)
The question of pathos is an original one for Deleuze, going all the way back to his study of sympathy in Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953).
Artaud: “thought operates on the basis of central breakdown … it lives solely by its own incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a function of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossible to interiorize” (378)
Kleist: “denounces the central interiority of the concept as a means of control—the control of speech, of language, but also of affects, circumstances and even chance” (378)
“A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an essence thought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of taking itself for a government ministry” (378)
“Is it by chance that whenever a ‘thinker’ shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or ‘aim’?” (378)
“the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied—a model far more insidious than the others—for the artificial stammerings and innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal” (378)
Commentator’s Note: This sounds like much of continental philosophy following in the footsteps of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, etc., something I have been guilty of. How to think, to speak, by the Gemüt, by feeling, by heart?
“The classical image of thought … operates with two ‘universals,’ the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and the Subject as the principle that converts being into being-for-us. Imperium and republic” (379)
In an earlier plateau: “There is no wall without black holes, and no black hole without a wall … Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight … The white wall of the signifier, the black hole of subjectivity, and the facial machine are impasses, the measure of our submissions and subjections; but we are born into them, and it is there we must stand battle” (“Year Zero: Faciality,” 184, 188, 189)
“Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a ‘universal method’” (379)
“nomad thought … does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or sea … A tribe in the desert instead of a universal subject within the horizon of all-encompassing being” (379)
They cite Kenneth White, Intellectual Nomadism, who had a second unpublished volume titled Poetry and Tribe (556). White links the “race-tribe” of the Celts and the “milieu-space” of the ‘Orient’ or the desert, making a “strange composite” that “inspires a properly nomad thought that sweeps up English literature and constitutes American literature” (379)
There’s a lot to unpack here, and this is the first I’ve heard of Kenneth White. But Deleuze and Guattari are quick to address the concern I have bubbling up: “what can be done to prevemnt the theme of a race from turning into a racism, a dominant and all encompassing fascism, or into a sect and a folklore, microfascisms? And what can be done to prevent the oriental pole from becoming a phantasy that reactivates all the fascisms in a different way, and also all the folklores, yoga, Zen, and karate?” (379)
“The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination” (379)
“In the same way that race is not something to be rediscovered, the Orient is not something to be imitated: it only exists in the construction of a smooth space, just as race only exists in the constitution of a tribe that peoples and traverses a smooth space” (379-80)
“All of thought is a becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and the representation of a Whole” (380)
Nomadism
“AXIOM II. The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspects.
PROPOSITION V. Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war machine in space” (380)
“The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.)” (380)
“although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay” (380)
“The life of the nomad is the intermezzo” (380)
“The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized” (380)
“the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory” (380)
For the migrant, see Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015).
“even thought the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating” (380)
“The nomos is the consistency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law or the polis, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around a city” (380)
The nomos is the exterior of mythos-logos.
Commentator’s Note: compare Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s “surround” in The Undercommons (2013).
“sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory” (381)
“The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle” (381).
“it is therefore false to define the nomad by movement … the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge” (381)
“The nomad knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a ‘stationary process,’ station as process” (381)
“It is thus necessary to make a distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed” (381)
“Movement is extensive; speed is intensive” (381)
“Movement designates the relative character of a body considered as ‘one,’ and which goes from point to point” (381)
“speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point” (381)
“vortical or swirling movement is an essential feature of [the nomad] war machine” (381)
Deserts
“nomads have no points, paths, or land”—i.e., they do not possess them (381)
“If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary (the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus [i.e., imperial colonialism])” (381)
“With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or support” (381)
“Hubac is right to say that nomadism is explainable less by universal changes in climate (which relate instead to migrations) as by the ‘divagation [straying] of local climates’” (382)
“The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it” (382)
“They add desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose orientation and direction endlessly vary” (382)
In the desert “there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations” (382)
“It is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic,’ a sonorous much more than a visual space” (382)
Commentator’s Note: To help concentrate while making these notes, I put on John Luther Adams’ Houses of the Wind (2022). At this very moment, oh so serendipitously, I felt the sonorous space of the desert, relayed through track V, “Anabatic Wind.” Such a wind is “caused by local upward motion of warm air,” which is to say, by a vortex.
“The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartography” (382)
“striated space, the relative global” limits the “smooth space it ‘contains,’ whose growth it slows or prevents, and which it restricts or places outside” (382)
The nomad, however, “is in a local absolute, an absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local operations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice, sea” (382)
Religion
“Making the absolute appear in a particular place—is that not a very general characteristic of religion”? (382)
“the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center that repels the obscure nomos” (382)
“The absolute of religion is essentially a horizon that encompasses, and, if the absolute itself appears at a particular place, it does so in order to establish a solid and stable center for the global” (382)
“The encompassing role of smooth spaces (desert, steppe, or ocean) in monotheism has been frequently noted. In short, religion converts the absolute” (382)
Commentator’s Note: But compare my old essay, “Absolute Particularity” (https://www.steinea.ca/2015/12/03/absolute-particularity). Kierkegaard, that nomad counterthinker, shows that the claim made by the voice calling out in the wilderness, grace, is precisely the ‘local absolute,’ what I called the ‘absolutely particular.’ Indeed, religion converts the absolute—church becomes servant to the law—but grace cannot, and should not, be lumped into this conception of ‘religion.’
“locality is not delimited; the absolute, then, does not appear at a particular place but becomes a nonlimited locality; the coupling of the place and the absolute is achieved not in a centered, oriented globalization or universalization but in an infinite succession of local operations” (383)
“The nomads have a vague, literally vagabond ‘monotheism,’ and content themselves with that, and with their ambulant fires” (383)
“The nomads have a sense of the absolute, but a singularly atheistic one” (383)
“The universalist religions that have had dealings with nomads … have always encountered problems in this regard … These religions are not, in effect, separable from a firm and constant orientation … they have promoted an ideal of sedentarization and addressed themselves more to the migrant components than the nomadic ones” (383)
Commentator’s Note: Certainly, while majoritarian religions have a demonstrable history along these lines, I feel there is nevertheless a minoritarian strain that requires analysis, and is being elided here.
“monotheistic religion … is not without ambivalence or fringe areas … We are referring to religion as an element in a war machine and the idea of holy war as the motor of that machine” (383)
“The prophet, as opposed to the state personality of the king and the religious personality of the priest, directs the movement by which a religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of such a machine” (383)
“This is what the West invokes in order to justify its antipathy toward Islam. Yet the Crusades were a properly Christian adventure of this type” (383)
“The prophets may very well condemn nomad life; the war machine may very well favor the movement of migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in general may very well compensate for its specific deterritorialization with a spiritual and even physical reterritorialization, which in the case of the holy war assumes the well-directed character of a conquest of the holy lands as the center of the world” (384)
Commentator’s Note: Yes, see Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood (Penguin, 2015).
“The idea of the crusade in itself implies this variability of directions, broken and changing, and intrinsically possesses all these factors or all these variables from the moment it turns religion into a war machine and simultaneously utilizes and gives rise to the corresponding nomadism” (384)
Land
“Smooth or nomad space lies between two striated spaces: that of the forest, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with its grids and generalized parallels, its now independent arborescence, its art of extracting the tree and wood from the forest” (384)
“smooth space is controlled by these two flanks, which limit it, oppose its development, and assign it as much as possible a communicational role” (384)
But smooth space “turns against them, gnawing away at the forest on one side, on the other side gaining ground on the cultivated lands, affirming a noncommunicating force or a force of divergence like a ‘wedge’ digging in” (384)
“The nomads turn first against the forest and the mountain dwellers, then descend upon the farmers” (384)
“the State-form … implies a certain number of components: forest-clearing of fields; agriculture-grid laying; animal raising subordinated to agricultural work and sedentary food production; commerce based on a constellation of town-country (polis-nomos) communications” (384)
“States are made up not only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals, and commodities” (385)
“There is a unity of composition of all States, but States have neither the same development nor the same organization” (385)
“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” (385)
“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” (385)
“the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. 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” (386)
Citing Virilio: “the political power of the State is polis, police, that is, management of the public ways” (386)
“the State … requires that movement … become the relative characteristic of a ‘moved body’ going from one point to another in a striated space” (386)
“If the nomads formed the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being ‘synonymous’ with speed. And each time there is an operation against the State—insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act—it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth” (386)
Virilio again: “holding the street” (386)
The State “appropriate[s] the war machine” by giving it the “model of the fortress as a regulator of movement … by which absolute vortical movement was broken” (386)
“The sea is perhaps principal among smooth spaces, the hydraulic model par excellence. But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one attempts were made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed routes, constant directions, relative movements, a whole counterhydraulic of channels and conduits” (387)
“the hegemony of the West”—its “power … to striate the sea by combining the technologies of the North and the Mediterranean and by annexing the Atlantic” (387)
The Atlantic, that appalling space known as the Middle Passage.
But an “unexpected result”: “the sea became the place of the fleet in being, where one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space beginning from any point” (387)
“This modern strategy was communicated from the sea to the air, as the new smooth space, but also to the entire Earth considered as desert or sea” (387)
The planetary, and we might add, the cosmic beyond.
The State ends up “reimpart[ing] absolute movement” in a “new nomadism [that] accompanies a worldwide war machine … passes into energy, military-industrial, and multinational complexes” (387)
“smooth space and the form of exteriority do not have an irresistible revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exercise or establishment” (387)