day 24 welcome to the war machine

Day 24Welcome to the War

MachineHUM 201WI 2005

Itinerary

• Reevaluate wandering after the loss of the subject (emergence, space, and knowledge)

• Introduce you to Deleuze and Guattari

• Nomadology 101• Primer on thought as a weapon

Wandering recap

• Wanderers moved through the world and processed information

• Wanderers perceived time as changes in space

• Wanderers couldn’t possess goods while wandering (knowledge moved from possession to exploration and communication)

Wandering and the loss of the subject

• Wandering no longer an existential state– No longer about how individuals or groups

act

• Wandering now a process or moment in how we recognize the new--nomadism– Destablizes stable constructs– Has its own way of knowing– Produces its own type of space

Deleuze and Guattari• Both react against dominant

trends in thought-Hegel, Marxism, Psychoanalysis

• Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) - trained as a philosopher– How does novelty occur despite

the loss of the active subject?

• Felix Guattari (1930-1992)- trained as a psychoanalyst– What new types of subjectivity

emerge after the loss of the psychoanalytic subject?

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

• "We don't claim to have written a madman's book, just a book in which one no longer knows-and there is no reason to know- who exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient, an untreated patient, a present, past of future patient. . . . Now, strangely, if we have tried to go beyond this traditional duality, it's precisely because we were writing together. Neither of us was the madman, neither of us was the psychiatrist; there had to be two of us in order to find a process that was not reduced either to the psychiatrist or his madman, or to a madman and his psychiatrist.The process is what we call a flux. Now, once again, the flux is a notion that we wanted to remain ordinary and undefined. This could be a flux of words, ideas, shit, money, it could be a financial mechanism or a schizophrenic machine: it goes beyond all dualities. We dreamed of this book as a flux-book."(from "In Flux" in Chaosophy. By Felix Guattari, Semiotext[e], NY, 1995.)

Nomadology 101

• The State– Not states against states but states

against all else– Conserve– Makes distinction between governors

and governed possible

The War Machine

• War is not state against state, rather State against disorder (the nomad)– War is the limiting of exchanges– Prevents the state from conserving

• All relations remain immanent

– Felt at the margins of the State but really existing outside

– Nomads don’t territorialize--not a migrant

The state in permanent war

– State– Example: The Empire of all well ordered

capital exchanges• The tendency in this system to order the world

– War Machine– Example: terrorists and pirates, or, rather

that part of terrorism and piracy that destabilizes the State• The tendency of things to escape order

Knowledge

• Nomad Science: One of becoming– Looking for change– Traversing and engendering– No history, just a geography

• Royal or Imperial Science: One of stasis– Looking for eternal laws– Representing

Space

• Nomad space: Smooth– Open ended– Space leads to many different directions– Always has the tendency to become something

other (De Certeau’s “space”)

• Imperial Space: Striated– Gridded (De Certeau’s “place”)– Space leads to specific ends– Driven by an anxiety against change

• Think of maps and the sea

http://www.christianhubert.com/hypertext/smooth_striated.html

Implications for thought

• Make thought a war machine– Use research to keep thinking the unthinkable

• Thought operate from the inability to take form– We think precisely because categories are

inadequate

• Thought as a weapon– Use thinking to help change the world and not

protect the status quo