This week we read (or at least skim-read) the “Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine” chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus — a final peruse of that unwieldy book to try and help us tackle that other unwieldy book, which we’ll be turning back to properly from here on out: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.
We spoke about the concept of the war machine quite explicitly, then moved onto parkour and free running (again), rave culture, “the militarization of peace”, class struggle and etiquette.
Below is a short point made by Max in the Discord about the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the machine and Manuel DeLanda’s. I’ve included this here for context as we discussed these points off the bat.
Below that are my obligatory notes constituting something of an introduction to the chapter and the oddly promiscuous concept of the “war machine”.
Max writes:
An interesting point for me would be to understand more explicitly the machine. At the moment my reading of Deleuze is still influenced by DeLanda. DeLanda’s explanation of the machine is again via the modelling technique of state spaces. In a state space you look for dimensions with degrees of freedom (e.g. you can describe a pendulum as a two dimensional state space: one dimension for its place that can change and one dimension for its momentum). Another example is a simple model of growth (of a population). This can be modelled with the logistic function. This function has some interesting properties (you can play around with this function here).
You have r as grow rate and x0 as initial condition (the size of the population in regard to the annihilation factor — the size where the population dies out. Therefore x represents a fraction and has always a number between 0 and 1). The interesting point is, that depending on r the function has different properties. If r is smaller than 1 (r < 1), than the population dies out after some time; independent of the initial condition. Between 1 and 3 there is a point attractor. For example if r = 2, the point attractor is 0.5; independent of the initial conditions. Around r = 3 the equation reaches a critical value and a bifurcation occurs. The attractor is no longer a point attractor, but a period-2 one (try it with r = 3.2). The ratio in which these bifurcations occur can be measured by the so called Feigenbaum constant. The growth function is big abstraction, but there are other examples with the same ratio of bifurcations: convection rolls; the dripping of a faucet (r; the control parameter is the pressure of the pipe); and so on. This phenomenon is called universality. A mathematical structure shich occurs in many different mechanisms. The “classic” causality is the physical mechanism behind the concrete individual process.
But for DeLanda the distribution of attractors and bifurcations is also a causality or in his words a quasi-causality. According to DeLanda the term machine in Deleuze describes exactly this quasi-causality. (read the pages about abstract machines at the end of thousand plateaus and it makes a lot of sense with this context. Singularity is another word for attractor. In this sense it starts to make sense that machines are singular, but abstract; that they are more than the simple mechanism and so on). DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory goes so far that social entities can be described as state spaces. You have to find the parameters (or dimensions) with their degrees of freedom (he actually shows this with the war machine example in his Assemblage Theory book; the newer one with exactly this title not the A New Philosophy of Society one). But in the virtual (for DeLanda the structure of state spaces that determines the distribution of singularities/attractors) there are structures.
Sorry for the long text, but I think it helps to pose my questions. First: Is this the only way to think about machines? Is Deleuze using the word machine only in this mathematical / physical sense or are there more connotations of the word that can be applied to his texts and still make that much sense as the mathematical one? Second: Let’s stay within DeLanda’s explanation. If the virtual is the structure that is not actualized but has effects on the actualization of possibilities, what exactly is the virtual of a war machine? Are there different virtuals? Can they be thought as the same, that changes depending on a parameter and critical values?
Another interesting point is the application of war machines in Reza’s contribution to collapse 1. In this text he uses the concept of affordability (a concept i understand only faintly). It would be very helpful for me to get a grasp on affordability. Especially what this concept can explain that terms like tendencies and capacities can’t.
I hope that wasn’t too much text. I wanted to present a few thoughts, because I can only be part of the chat for a short time today.
First of all, apologies that I changed tack on this a little late in the day for anyone to realistically devour a 90-fucking-page chapter. But, as is common with Deleuze and Guattari, we’re not aiming for full comprehension here. However, at least an awareness of what Deleuze and Guattari call “the war machine” is probably necessary before we jump back into Cyclonopedia. On a cursory glance through the chapters ahead, it is a huge focal point for Reza. I think it might be worth us dwelling on for a session before we get back to the task at hand and, perhaps, finish it!
So, what is the war machine? Geopolitically, it is perhaps quite easy to understand. It is a military or para-military force that exists on the border of, or wholly outside of, state apparatus. With particular relevance to Cyclonopedia, we can perhaps consider the relation of America’s international military presence to the confines of America the state. What is the function of America’s presence in the Middle East if not to perpetuate what Deleuze and Guattari call this “war without battle lines”. And furthermore, can we really limit the movement of the American military-industrial complex to the preservation of American state interests? As Reza demonstrates throughout Cyclonopedia, America isn’t just serving itself; it is serving capital. It is, in a way, a kind of militia employed to service the real war machine — oil.
A war machine, in this sense, becomes more of an abstract concept for that kind of entity that traverses and is simultaneously entangled with smooth space and striated space, which we discussed last time. As such, it is not just an entity that moves through “space” as such. Striated space, for instance, is not only determined by infrastructure but also by ideology. I mentioned this in the last session but I think it remains a compelling analogy — think about the difference between “parkour” and “free running”. Although these two sports are increasingly entangled and inseparable, parkour is a name for a kind of militarised Situationist movement — getting from A to B quickly and efficient, through a kind of movement that wholly undermines a suggested or instructed usage.
Free running is less practical, in that regard, and we might also say less explicitly “political”. It is all about flamboyance and flair — it is more about the aesthetic qualities of the movements made rather than their efficiency, but the interrelation of these two sports is very telling I think and brings us to what I’d quite like to discuss today.
If this chapter is overlong and difficult, it is for much the same reason as the rest of the book and, indeed, Cyclonopedia itself — it is constantly doing what it is trying to describe. Wassim’s discussions around “epistemic trespass” remain super interesting here to me. Epistemic trespass, as far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, might be described as a kind of epistemic parkour or free running. Their logics are disciplined but inventive, rigorous but irreverent. This makes A Thousand Plateaus something of a war machine in itself.
But is that equivocation dangerous? What are the implications of this kind of trespass or parkour, in which the political slides into the aesthetic? Plenty will decry this manoeuvre as being a red flag for fascism. As Walter Benjamin famously noted, “fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics”, but can’t neoliberalism similarly be defined by the de-politicisation of the cultural? Of the regimenting of the aesthetic to the point that it becomes a archetype? Instead, we might ask, what is an aesthetics of the multitude or the commons? In this sense, the American military-industrial complex has learnt lessons from its opponents. At the time of writing, Deleuze and Guattari are arguably nodding to the guerrilla warfare epitomised by South Vietnamese militias rather than the hard-headed arrogance of American interventionism, or even to the nomadology of the counterculture that would later reach its peak in the form of rave culture and the free parties of the ’80s and ’90s when unrestricted public space was exploited to pursue desires.
In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s tendencies have almost suffered an inversion. And this was, arguably, always planned. For instance, in the UK, everyone is no doubt familiar with the concept of “anti-social behaviour” — meaning behaviour that is contrary to social norms or accepted social standards. It was a term coined specifically to counter rave culture, when the relaxing of laws that prohibited basic access to open land for working people faced the ultimate backlash. The Young Communist League’s trespassing on Kinder Scout in the 1930s paved the way for rave culture and the New Age Travellers that would become a moral panic fifty years later. The argument often made here, of course, is that rave and the hedonism of collective congregation and celebration are long-standing social behaviours. However, they have been gutted by the hatred of intimacy that is defined by class war.
This is something I learned the other day. Did you know that the concept of “etiquette”, as a code of good behaviour, actually predates human understanding of germs and the transmission of diseases? Today, because etiquette already comes pre-packaged with a squeamishness around bodily function, it persists as a good way to ward off germs. But, originally, it was nothing more than an over-regulated statue of good behaviour that’s sole purpose was to signal your immersion in the upper class and its tastes. Here we find an instance where class politics and aesthetics are fundamentally entwined, and it is entanglement that allows the suppression of alternative social behaviours and desires to continue. And yet, these practices persists, precisely because they exist on the outside of striated spaces. They cannot be contained and, therefore, they cannot be defeated. There are sleeper cells everywhere for the good life. But these governing and authoritarian structures have nonetheless appropriated the war machine from the nomads, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, and it is perhaps this that has led us to the moment of stasis from which we seem incapable of escaping.