Process Imagining

In an essay entitled “Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze’ critiques the notion of the state by not its opposite, but rather exterior from it; he develops the concept of the nomad/war machine. I call it exterior from the State, because its opposite can still exist within it. He wants to break from the transcendental nature of the State by deriving a set of principles rather than a framework to lift up difference rather than unification by assimilation and classification. Thus the concept of the nomad/war machine (these terms will be interchanged throughout).

The War Machine is a concept that is against the state. Deleuze takes from Hobbes that “the State was against war, so war is against the State.” Deleuze is not however signaling a revolution in terms of fighting, although it can get to that moment, but rather a way of pushing back, dispersing, or differentiating something that does not come from the state. The State is a system that was not naturally developed, but was economically developed to conserve and control. It controls by amassing, taking in all things and categorizing them so that their is a form of control and a valuation of things outside of itself for consummation.

The war machine is different. It “maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups.” Why should this be the case? What makes the unification of all things from the perspective of the State negative? For Deleuze, there needs to be a difference from the self and the other. There needs to be a way of describing what is around you from ones own terms, and not from the perspective of a unified system. If the unified system believes that it is the sole system that is correct, then there is no chance of change; it itself is what it is. It categorizes us, what we should think, how we should think, and what and how we should feel. It creates striations, paths, grooves, that easily make things walk through it. It controls. It creates a framework and reifies it for the purpose of control, although it no longer looks or performs in that way.

The war machine thus seeks not control, but rather formations of power or use always at the present moment. It commonly functions as a rhizomatic system, with no center, and in times of crisis it assembles (assemblage) to perform the action or to show itself at that moment. The nomad/war machine takes into account the its surroundings and does what it can from it, not force its surroundings to conform to it. It does not create templates for itself, so that wherever it goes it creates the world around it, but rather is created by the world, the nomadic/war machine world around it. A perfect example is his writing on Romanesque vs Gothique buildings. Roman churh structures remained within a striated space, following that of prior Roman structures (pillars juxtaposing the vault), while gothic churches were able to create larger, higher vaults by creating a smooth space, by continually varying the stones(similar to the bringing together of stones and having a cornerstone to hold it all together, yet on a larger scale). Instead of having clear templates and blueprints of what was to be done, the stone cutters would square off stone, which is a form of eyeing off, of being present in the space and working from that moment, that problem, with all its issues. This immanence of squaring off is a move away from the more transcendent system of calculations and templating, which works for all things, regardless of situation.\n\nTo recap, the war machine is the evolutionary next step in the development of social structures, which rely on close relationality with the group to derive power, and then it is fleeting, because at one and the same moment it can be lost. But that sets in an immediate reality: that power is meant to ebb and flow as necessary. It is not meant to be held on to. The rhizomatic system which has no center, allows for an assemblage at any moment to deal with the situation at hand, and continues to survive if anything were to arise. The war machine thus affects and is affected by its surroundings. There is an affection, a give and take of feeling, of difference. Not so with the State, with its organs of power to control, conssumate and conserve, but assimilating and categorizing all that it can into its own system, and thus making it its own. If it does not fit, it goes into the lowest category or ostracized, forgotten. The State acts as a sedentary system, the nomad/war machine, always moving/has a speed.

The Nomad is a term to define the act of differentiation, a way of taking back difference, and moving away from capitalism’s power of amassing all things for itself to categorize humanity by amassing and creating everything for it, by conserving all things, thus holding all power. The nomad exists outside of it, allowing for what is left to affect it and be affected by it.