This week we read “The Smooth and the Striated” chapter from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.
Introductory notes below.
“The Smooth and the Striated” is a complex chapter, but it might be the ultimate example of that tendency we’ve discussed at length in recent weeks — describing at the same time as you enact what you wish to describe.
This chapter essentially dramatises the various relationships that Deleuze and Guattari are attempting to critique and give form to but also to articulate just how interrelated they are.
I think the key passage here is, arguably, the very last paragraph where they write the following:
Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory… But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries.
Smooth spaces, then, are chaotic but productive; striated spaces are organised but oppressive. The most difficult thing for us to come to terms with, especially in our present century, is that progress needs both. It is a double articulation. Neither side exists, as it were, without the contrast of its opposite. But, it must also be said that these things are not in themselves whole. To think of the smooth and the striated as a dichotomy is to keep them encased and tied to one another.
This summary, which opens up one of the supporting documents I put in the chat — I can’t find the original source of this quotation — makes the point very well I think:
Deleuze does not come up with a definition of the nomad, but puts the word into play in different contexts, and such that it never acquires a definite meaning, but rather is intended to serve as a conceptual nomad: an agent in unfinished philosophical, political, artistic and other business.
Deleuze’s concept of the nomad, then, is akin to Negarestani’s oil. It lubricates. To think of it in itself is to image a kind of black void of powerful nothingness that oozes and seaps through strata. It is corpse juice. It is the very end point of life. But when put to use by capitalism it becomes a lubricant for state-capitalist forces.
This is similarly an example of the smooth and the striated that we might draw upon. Striated space is occupied by state-capitalism. The enclosure of a bordered nation gives a space for a national economy to circulate. It is limited in scope and tied to a certain piece of land. Globalised capitalism, however, has a very different nature. It flows over borders and interacts and ebbs and flows. It is, quite literally, a kind of abstract sea that flows to and fro against the borders of other nations. And oil is perfectly placed to be that abstract sea. It is oil that flows around the world, powering local businesses and movements along the striated infrastructure of roads and urban environments. It is as if striated spaces borrow flows from the smooth. But we can similarly look at the world the other way. We can note how the earth is 70% water. It is, for the most part, smooth space, but the striated points that occupy that last 30% provide the smooth space with points of reference and intervals around which to define itself.
It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari must add that we should “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.” If the earth was even more of a smooth space, we’d be living in Ballard’s Drowned World. But the thing is, is that the striated forces of this world do everything that they can to keep the smooth at bay. It is certainly true that we need both but the striated attempts to keep the smooth on a leash. State-capitalism attempts to restricted world capitalism; it attacks nomads, migrants, travellers; it attempts to eradicate free action in favour of work; it attempts to enslave rather than let roam. Even though it speaks so highly of the smooth and bows down to it, it has to keep it at arms length.
What Deleuze and Guattari do here, then, is demonstrate how just about everything under the sun — even the sun itself — is implicated in this kind of relation. This isn’t just two Continentals going off on one. We can find this dynamic in art, mathematics, fashion, physics, etc. And this is why capitalism is so pernicious. It is everywhere and in everything.