Nomadology: The War Machine [Paperback]

Be careful, this is an essay take out from "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia".

And, as almost everything in this book, is just great!!! It should, however to be read after geting all concepts they have developed...

I was hoping that this book would be much clearer than it is. Though some axioms, propositions, and problems are listed as headings in the text, there is no index, and nothing like a table of contents at the beginning of the book to locate important subjects. There are 109 numbered notes on pages 123 to 147, and note 5 identified sources for quotes of Nietzsche and Kafka in the text, so I was expecting to see more familiar names as I went along, but most notes referred to French experts in fields I had never encountered. "Western States" was used in the text to refer to countries in the part of Europe occupied by France, as compared to a great steppe region in which man-horse-weapon combinations provided the primary considerations in warfare.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have written other books in French, and this one was translated into English in 1986 by Brian Massumi. The theme is not as elusive as the details. For many people, warfare places the participants in a frame of mind which is not identical to the values of civilized societies. Those who believe in wars fought by nations might agree with Carl Schmitt that the state should have a monopoly on violence, imposing order for the benefit of those whose weakness makes them vulnerable to everyone else. NOMADOLOGY notes that this should not require war, if the state "uses policemen and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them" (p. 2) to prevent all combat. The idea that a war machine actually implies something else, "a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus" (p. 2) is associated with the ephemeral, the power of metamorphosis, and the furor that arises from the pack "like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity." (p. 2). The book does not have many modern examples, though references to atomic bombs near the end make clear that the authors tend to imply that nothing much has changed lately for people who are in a position which allows them to joke about these things.

Some of the notes are quite long and coherent, allowing comparison of this book with what its authors have learned from Paul Virilio, who is quoted from seven places in his book, VITESSE ET POLITIQUE, pp. 46-49, 132-133. The nomad is most like being underwater: "The strategic submarine has no need to go anywhere in particular; all it must do, in holding the sea, is to remain invisible. . . ." NOMADOLOGY, p. 137, n. 63). Speed has evolved from revolutionary tendencies to "speeds that are reinstated by a worldwide organization of total war, or planetary overarmament (from the fleets in being to nuclear strategy)." (n. 63). Fast and deadly options for the future, however well they might start, are in danger of worse endings:

"1) The war machine is that nomad invention which does not in fact have war as its primary object, but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the sense that it is determined in such way as to destroy the State-form and city-form with which it collides; 2) When the State appropriates the war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it; 3) It is precisely after the war machine has been appropriated by the State in this way that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its `analytic' object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object)." (p. 113). Current debate about whether American troops can leave Iraq before all the potential battles within its borders have destroyed the cities and towns which continue to attack American troops there makes that battle the American Gettysburg. "It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking." (p. 5).

Edmund Husserl is the philosopher most noted "On the issue of a vague yet rigorous science," (p. 129, n. 30). When "the Hegelians respond that the rational-reasonable cannot exist without a minimum of participation by everybody", "The question, rather, is whether the very form of the rational-reasonable is not extracted from the State, in a way that necessarily makes it right, gives it `reason' " (p. 131, n. 40). Music and drugs are seen as values much closer to the nomads than to the State, and an analysis of the modern war on drugs which includes crop eradication might have enough irony to appeal to rock 'n' rollers. Linguists might understand the difference in points of view as thought patterns that are "not at all in the same way, and the two communications are not symmetrical. Worringer, in the domain of aesthetics, said that the abstract line took on two quite different expressions, one in barbarian Gothic art, the other in the organic Classical art. Here, we would say that the phylum simultaneously has two different modes of liaison; it is always in connection with nomad space, whereas it conjugates with sedentary space. On the side of the nomadic assemblages and war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the sedentary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate together, plug up the lines of flight, subordinate the technological operation to the work model, impose upon the connections a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions." (p. 109).

Sick of hearing the C student wonks and politico idiots from inside the beltway talk about the latest war on fill in the blank? War is the only political metaphor left. This thin little tome contains more collective wisdom about the source of this rug rash than should be allowed out (come to think of it, you might want to order under an alias and have this sent to a PO box). (Marx was right: the state was bound to whither away, just turns out its replacement isn't as nice as in the Manifesto.)

Just today, reading the New York Times, there were a number of articles talking about the American tendency to try and make all solutions military. This book starts with the realization that the cooperation of the state and the war machine are an illusion, one that we still don't seem to understand today.

If you are sick of driving yourself crazy wondering how the War on Drugs could still be going on, sucking in billions each year as the government debates the end of PBS' puny subsidies, administer this book with impunity (while you still can).

(The Editor says this book was inspired by Nietzsche. In other words, file along with all other worthwhile works of the 20th C.)

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