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Real or imagined nomads

Deleuze and Guattari establish the exteriority of state and war-machine by pointing to qualitative differences in two directions: externally, where it is a matter of the most general characteristics of the assemblages in relation to one another and to third-party phenomena such as war and space; and internally, by analyses of the different elements and modes of articulation which compose each type of assemblage. As an example of their internal analysis of the differences, consider their comparison of tools and weapons. They argue that the elements of a particular assemblage are only defined as such by the play of differential traits and affinities under which they belong to that assemblage. The difference between a tool and a weapon may be abstractly specified in terms of the use to which each is put. Beyond that, it is difficult to establish a list of intrinsic qualities that will differentiate one from the other: weapons and tools ‘have no intrinsic characteristics. They have internal (and not intrinsic) characteristics relating to the respective assemblages with which they are associated’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:398). The same physical object, such as an axe, may serve either as a tool or a weapon. In each case, the object will involve a particular relation to the application of force or to movement, but it is not the same force or the same movement. Weapons stand in an internal relation to speed, in contrast to the essential gravity of tools. Absolute speed is a characteristic of the war-machine, whereas the state has an affinity with

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gravitas. Both weapons and tools involve the application of force, but it is not the same mode of application in each case: weapons are protective, whereas tools are introceptive. Tools involve an expenditure of force as work, confronting resistance and being consumed in the process, whereas weapons involve the exercise of force according to a model of free action where this does not aim at overcoming a resistance so much as at impelling the weapon itself in such a manner that it creates and occupies a smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:397). Ultimately, the distinction between weapons and tools refers back to the difference between assemblages of the war-machine and state kinds. Weapons and tools must be understood in terms of the nature of the assemblages to which they belong. Assemblages are essentially functional apparatuses and they are primary in relation to their components. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari assert that: ‘weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:398).

We saw above that Deleuze and Guattari argue for the exteriority of the war-machine and its irreducibility to the form of the state. In addition, they claim that it is not enough to assert the exteriority of the war-machine and the state, but that ‘it is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the warmachine as itself a pure form of exteriority’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:354). In other words, war-machine assemblages are the expression of a peculiar kind of abstract machine, one that ‘exists only in its own metamorphoses’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:360). It follows that there can be no concept of the war-machine in the traditional sense of a series of features or marks that will determine necessary and sufficient conditions for something falling under the concept. War-machines are rhizomatic assemblages which can only be defined by their relations to the outside and their concept is delineated by tracing a line of continuous conceptual variation in relation to elements and phenomena ‘external’ to assemblages of the war-machine type. In this sense, the war-machine concept is a limit case of the potential variability inherent in all concepts. For these reasons, Deleuze and Guattari define the characteristics of the war-machine by reference to the conditions of nomadic existence. However, the question is: ‘what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:380).



In effect, the relation to smooth space is the principle of nomadic existence as they define it. This is the ‘territorial principle’ of the nomad: to be ‘distributed in a smooth space which he occupies, inhabits, holds’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:381, see also 410). It is on this basis that they distinguish nomads from migrants, itinerants and transhumants who also move about, some of them no less incessantly than nomads.3 For the migrant or transhumant, a journey is simply a trajectory between two points, whereas for the nomad, it is the journey that matters, the points along the way being ‘strictly subordinated to the paths they determine’

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(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:380). In contrast to the roads and highways that connect the regions of sedentary social space, the paths of nomadic existence serve to distribute individuals and groups across an open and indeterminate space. Whereas sedentary space is striated by enclosures and paths between enclosures, the territory of nomadic peoples is a pure surface for mobile existence, without enclosures or fixed patterns of distribution. Deleuze and Guattari draw upon accounts of the life of desert peoples to make the connection between nomadism and smooth space, but in the end this means that the desert in their text is little more than a rhetorical expression of smooth space. Ultimately, it is the active relation to smooth space which defines the fundamental nature of the war-machine and that of the nomad as well: ‘the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:382). To say that nomadic existence is essentially deterritorialised and deterritorialising is not to say that real nomads have no attachment to territory, but rather that their relationship to their territory is different to that of sedentary peoples. They do have territories, which they are reluctant to quit unless driven away by force as they often were under the pressure of colonial occupation, but these territories are not homelands which belong to them so much as the ground or support of their existence. The different relationship to territory is one of the reasons why European colonists were typically unable or unwilling to recognise indigenous inhabitants as proprietors of their lands. Deleuze and Guattari’s references to actual nomads are largely confined to peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and the Eurasian steppes. We shall consider in the next section how the colonial capture of indigenous territories led to the dispossession of nomadic peoples in other parts of the world.

Deleuze and Guattari’s axiom linking nomads and war-machines means that the phrase ‘nomadic war-machine’ is a pleonasm and the detailed account of the conditions of nomadic existence no more than a means to specify key characteristics of the war-machine. The connection between nomads and war-machine assemblages appears to be justified by their historical claim that processes of becoming-nomad tended to involve the constitution of a war-machine. In reality, they make it an axiom that the war-machine is a nomadic invention. This procedure draws attention to the fact that they are engaged in the invention of a concept rather than empirical social science. In an important and well-informed critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, Christopher Miller argues that their reliance upon anthropological sources, however limited, commits them to ‘anthropological referentiality’ and leads them to make anthropological statements (Miller 1993:11–13).4 However, while he points to passages in which Deleuze and Guattari deny that they are making empirical claims, Miller does not take sufficient account of the abstract nature of the assemblages which they seek to define, much less the sense in which

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they are attempting to define a novel type of abstract machine which exists only in its multiple variations. As an abstract machine, the war-machine is not to be confused with any concrete social or military apparatus. The axiom that the war-machine is invented by nomads means that the nomadism which they describe must be regarded as abstract to the same degree as the war-machine. It follows that Deleuzian nomads are virtual or conceptual objects whose features are settled not by observation, but by definition. The quasi-empirical claims made about nomadic existence only serve to specify the characteristics of the abstract machine which defines assemblages of the war-machine type. It is therefore no criticism to suggest that, through their reliance on dubious anthropology, they ‘risk superficiality and imprecision in their understanding of specific situations’ (Miller 1993:20). The appropriate response, from the point of view of their real aim in outlining a concept of nomadism, would be to abandon such material and look for other ways to specify the concept.

Further, in so far as the concept of nomadism is understood as the expression of an abstract machine of pure exteriority, it cannot be considered bound to any given form of expression. In their own terms, Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in philosophy understood as the construction of concepts. The manner in which they define nomadic existence in terms of its relation to smooth space follows directly the conceptual paths traced out by the nomad distribution of being which Deleuze describes in Difference and Repetition. There he discovers among the philosophers of univocity a

completely other distribution which must be called nomadic, a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure or measure. Here, there is no longer a division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an open space—a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits.

(Deleuze 1994:36)

The hostility to figures of unity, totality and closure which is expressed in the Deleuzian world of ‘free differences’ is a direct antecedent of the concept of nomadism. In turn, the figure of the state-form embodies all the conceptual as well as political forces of unity, totality and closure. Nomadic existence is defined not so much in opposition to those forces as in relation to a different kind of space such that there is no common measure between them.

Nevertheless, to say that the accounts of nomadism and the war-machine serve the philosophical purpose of constructing concepts of a certain kind does not mean that the conditions of nomadic social life offer the most effective means to present key features of the concept in question, or that

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the result is a good concept which counteractualises certain kinds of transformative agency. I suggested above that the war-machine concept is betrayed by its name and that it might be better to think of the abstract machine in question as a metamorphosis machine. Another aspect of Miller’s criticism of the concept of nomadism gives reason to think that ‘nomadism’ might not be the most helpful path to understanding the nature and workings of such machines: this is his suggestion that, behind all the questions that can be raised with regard to the reliability of the anthropological sources on which Deleuze and Guattari draw for their accounts of nomadic existence, there lies the more profound and unsettling issue of the historical condition of anthropological discourse in general: ‘colonialism and its project of controlling by knowing’ (Miller 1993:20). The choice of the term ‘war-machine’ to represent assemblages of mutation and transformation is understandable in the context of the language of struggle and class war which was characteristic of the post-1968 French left. Might not the choice of nomads to specify the characteristics of warmachines and smooth space betray a Eurocentric primitivism and a fascination for the Other, the limits of which were already apparent to the authors?5

While there may be some truth in this diagnosis, it would be a mistake to suppose that this was all that lay behind the appeal to a concept of nomadism in order to counteractualise the modern forms of resistance to state and capture. For, as in Deleuze’s revalorisation of simulacra or processes of becoming, the association of nomadism with qualitative multiplicity, smooth space and the conditions of transformation is intended to controvert a deep stratum of the European social imaginary. In particular, it is a concept designed to overturn the priority attached to sedentary forms of agriculture and social life at the expense of more fluid and mobile relations to the earth. If, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘history is always written from the sedentary point of view’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:23), their nomadology is an attempt to provide another perspective. The relationship of sedentary peoples to the earth is mediated by a regime of property or a state apparatus whereas in the case of nomads, they argue, ‘it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:381). Throughout the history of European colonisation, a recurrent form of justification for the expropriation of inhabited land has been the claim that the indigenous inhabitants were not sufficiently settled or had not tilled the land in a manner that made them rightful owners. J.G.A.Pocock argues that the crucial premise in this justification is that of vagrancy: ‘the premise that a wandering condition dehumanizes or must precede humanization’ (Pocock 1992:36). In practice, the absence of sedentary institutions and agricultural practices was considered sufficient to relegate the native peoples of North America and Oceania to a condition of primitive savagery and to a cultural time

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before the advent of civilisation. Pocock points out that the presumptions associated with the ‘Enlightened’ preference for sedentary over nomadic forms of social existence still served to legitimate the expropriation of Maori land in Aotearoa/New Zealand well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘when the tangata whenua [people of the land] were theorised as ‘‘savages”, and denied any relation with the whenua on the grounds that they had not appropriated it through the arable techniques of agriculture’ (Pocock 1992:40).

In the remainder of this chapter, we shall consider the legal history of colonisation from a nomadological perspective. We noted above that assemblages of the war-machine type are revolutionary machines of mutation and change. Their natural tendency is to emit quanta of deterritorialisation and draw lines of flight or deterritorialisation along which they, as well as the apparatuses of capture, may be transformed. We saw too that it is a consequence of the concept of abstract machines that they are susceptible to actualisation in more than one material domain. That is why Deleuze and Guattari can demonstrate their axiom that war-machine assemblages are external to the state by reference to distinct modes of thought in science and philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:361–80). It follows that, just as capture is not confined to the forms of political capture associated with sovereign states, so the key characteristics of metamorphosis machines (such as a productive relation to smooth space) are not confined to political forms of resistance to capture. Deleuze points to the possibility of metamorphosis machines in the law when he suggests in an interview that, within constitutional states, the parallel to nomadic processes of liberation lies not in ‘established and codified constitutional rights’ but in ‘everything that is legally problematic and constantly threatens to bring what’s been established back into question’ (Deleuze 1995b:153). In constitutional states, political creativity often takes the form of the problematisation of existing rights or the creation of new ones.6 Moreover, if as Deleuze suggests, ‘it is jurisprudence which is truly creative of rights’ (Deleuze 1995b:169, trans. modified), then jurisprudence must also be considered a potential site of metamorphosis machines capable of deterritorialising legal regimes of capture.


Date: 2015-01-11; view: 766


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