symploke 2006 goh-1

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/symploke-2006-goh-1 1/17

The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I): Anti-Community

Goh, Irving.

symploke, Volume 14, Numbers 1-2, 2006, pp. 216-231 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/sym.2007.0022

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by University of Bath at 06/01/10 8:32AM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sym/summary/v014/14.1goh.html



8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symplok e 217

community will only fleetingly reappear at the end of that text with theannouncement of a “shadow of a people to come.” Like the silence of a

shadow then, the question of community is a silent problematic inDeleuze and Guattari, making it almost strange, if not estranging, tothink the possibility of a future thought of community, or the possibilityof a thought of the future of community, in relation to their philosophy.That, however, does not mean that we should henceforth commit toforgetfulness the concept of community in Deleuze and Guattari. Whatthis paper is committed to do therefore is to unfold that silentproblematic of community, singularly in Deleuze and Guattari, and alsoto unfold what that silent problematic reserves for the (future) thought of

community. (Friendship, which undoubtedly supplements as anotherproblematic for the thinking of community in Deleuze and Guattari,certainly calls for equal analysis. But I would like to reserve that task asa second paper to this study of community in Deleuze and Guattari.)

Here, I would like to take up the question of community, or perhapsthe question of the apparent absence of community, in Deleuze andGuattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, the second book that follows Anti-Oedipus . In A Thousand Plateaus, as in Anti-Oedipus, there is amovement of what I will call “anti-community.” The word“community” is hardly articulated in both texts. And when Deleuze

and Guattari do so, it hinges on the negative, as something that is anti-thought, something that thought should not regress to (hence my use ofthe term “anti-community”). For example, in A Thousand Plateaus,where what is argued for is unrestricted or non-striated movement,“community” is the form in which there is the danger of “run[ning] therisk of reproducing . . . the rigid” (228). Yet what remains as the criticalconcept in and to A Thousand Plateaus—the concept of nomadology—isundeniably already communitarian, for nomads, from whichnomadology takes its image, are irreducibly tribal or of the pack, andhence already manifesting itself as of a certain communitarian force.

And Deleuze and Guattari’s apparent reservation to give nomadology’scommunitarian expression its full force can never erase thatcommunitarian trace. How then does one approach the thought ofcommunity in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of nomadology? Inother words, how does one think the idea of community in Deleuze andGuattari when there is an apparent absence if not resistance of it in theirwriting?

But let me interrupt those questions and speak first of the phrase“anti-community,” situating it in a more general context beforeattaching it to the question of community in Deleuze and Guattari.Why anti-community? Why a phrase that suggests a violence againstsomething or some term that has at least put into place in this worldsome form of harmonious living between humans? Perhaps one couldbegin with less radicality by saying anti-“community” first, and from

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


218 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I)

which one is able to subsequently discern why there should be a call forthe obviation of community today. In anti-“community,” the quotation

marks around the word community would signal linguistic markers,indexing community as a mark of verbal speech. To be more precise,they would mark community as an excess of speech, fallen from any actof thought, rendering community and/or “community” as ameretricious speech act. This is not simply a pessimism on paper. It isvery much a contemporaneous actuality. As Zygmunt Bauman hasobserved, the word “community” as how we have been treating it hasbeen “so loud and vociferous” (11). We, Bauman continues, haveinvoked “community” only to uncritically sing its praises, “telling the

others to admire them or shut up,” so much so that “community is nomore (or not yet, as the case may be)” (12). To every existingcommunity, there is to be no disagreement to the practices, codes, andnorms that are already in place. Communities and their practiceswould be impervious to critique and to any suggestion of futurebetterment via altogether different strategies. One may witness such aphilosophical let-down of thinking about community by turning tocontemporary affairs of the world. There can be no doubt that there isso much talk about community today, particularly about an“international community,” in global political discourse. But one is

often left thinking what or where such a community is, if not itsveracity. The term “international community” after all has beeninvoked most oftentimes only as an alibi for the justification of theviolent decimation of a state-entity by another of global politico-economic-military leverage when the former insists on a path contraryto the political and economic interests of the latter. Otherwise, when the“international community” has been called for so that the cosmopolitancollectivity of sovereign states may be an effective force to endhumanitarian violence, poverty, tyranny, etc., in some place of theworld (one remembers, of late, the names Darfur and Sudan), the

response unfortunately has been less than desirable, which henceforthseriously weakens the idea of the existence of any such “internationalcommunity.” And in almost the same vein as Bauman, Nancy in TheInoperative Community has also suggested that community is like theword “love,” which we say too much without finally saying it, withouttouching the heart of the matter. Should we then not reserve a breathfor community and not articulate it for a moment, but take that momentto think what remains for us to think about community today?

But anti-“community” will not be about rejecting communitiesabsolutely. It will not be about dismantling or destroying absolutely theidea or notion we call “community,” though it will indeed put forth acertain necessary violence against that codified convention the worldpresently calls “community.” To think a future (of) community, averbal anti-“community” is not enough. It will also be necessary to

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symplok e 219

undo if not strike out at the myths and false idealisms of community.That is the necessary violence of anti-community—this time without

quotation marks around the word “community.” But it is a violencethat will only ultimately return “community” to an active process ofthought. This paper (despite its title) is therefore not anti-communityper se, in the sense that it is looking towards an absolutely nihilistichorizon for community. And neither is Deleuze and Guattari’sphilosophy of nomadology. The “anti” of negation in anti-communitythat this discussion is engaged with operates not so much on communityas idea or thought as on the linguistic articulation of that idea. To say itagain, it is really the verbal reiteration of “community”—articulated

endlessly without submitting it to critical thought, enunciated as if itcould ever if not already adequately give us that thing called“community”—that has so far contaminated any future possibility ofthinking about community. We will have to begin to refrain fromuttering “community.” We will be anti-community just so to create aclearing for a free space of thought for another thinking of community.We will have to be anti-community not so that we will stop thinkingabout community but to return community to a proper thinking, athinking that is always open to its futures, a thinking without horizon.That is my hypothesis for a future thought for community, for a future

of community, or for a future community. That is also my hypothesiswith regard to the question of (the absence of) community in Deleuzeand Guattari. Anti-community for a future (of) community is what Ibelieve the apparent absence of community in Deleuze and Guattarihelps us to do. What I am arguing therefore is that there is a force ofanti-community at work in Deleuze and Guattari, which only returnscommunity to a whole new movement of thought, even though thismovement is undeniably one that will be of a “chaoid” (to use theirterm from What is Philosophy?) trajectory. This is the reading that I willgive to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, with particular focus

on that “plateau”—the “nomadology” plateau—in A Thousand Plateausthat speaks precisely of a certain sense of community, which at the sametime is veiled by an ironic reservation of what we call “community.”

The State of Community / Bunkers / Violence

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology, or to be morecomprehensive, their concept of the nomadological war machine, readsirresistibly as very much individual or singular rather thancommunitarian. After all, according to Deleuze and Guattarithemselves, it “attests to an absolute solitude” (1987, 377). Thenomadological war machine seeks to hold space—only to increase the

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1



desert of that space and not to saturate it with accretions of properties orpossessions—but it has no similar insistence on holding on to its

nomadic tribe, its community. Within the nomadic tribe, the sense ofthe singular nomadic war machine betraying its community, bydisavowing it or by deviating from it, is always already imminent.2

But that betrayal function of the nomadological war machine goes intooperation only when it sees its tribe enclosing itself and all else that itreceives into and as a structural totality. “We betray the fixed powerswhich try to hold us back, the established powers of the earth” (Deleuzeand Parnet 1987, 40). In the face of a striating structuration,nomadology projects its combative force as a war machine in its fullest

intensity so as to dismantle or undo such an arrangement, not excludingclose-knit social arrangements such as communities. That is the task ifnot the raison d’être of the nomadological war machine, which gives it asense of an anti-community force, beside its “social clandestinity,”beside its rather glaring anti-social “anti-dialogue” and “non-communicating force,” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 405, 378, 380) contraHabermas.

But to be more precise, or to give Deleuze and Guattari a moreproper reading, the word “community” is hardly articulated as theprimary target of nomadology. Instead, it is the State that the

nomadological war machine inclines towards with an angle of attack.And the nomadological war machine conducts war with the State onlybecause the State has delimited ways of movement and thought that thenomadological war machine has taken to be (its) freedom. The Stateimposes a homogeneity of thought. It discourages, represses, andsometimes suppresses deviations. The State captures thought as itsrationalizing interiority, and through which “thought is [thereby]capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, ofelevating the State to the level of de jure universality” (1987, 375). Itappropriates thought so that it can lay claim to be a force of an

enlightened institution, an institution that none can disagree with. Andto maintain that, along with its will to establish spatial integrity,sovereignty, or security, the State also limits the freedom of movementof people within its territory. This can be seen perhaps quite clearly in

2“We certainly would not say that discipline is what defines a war machine:discipline is the characteristic required of armies after the State has appropriatedthem. The war machine answers to other rules. We are not saying that they arebetter, of course, only that they animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, aquestioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a veryvolatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation of the State”

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 358; my italics). Deleuze will return to this question ofthe betrayal in Dialogues (1987). Deleuze, on speaking of nomads “who have neitherpast nor future” will also reaffirm that in the trajectory of nomadic movement, “thereis always betrayal in a line of flight” (38, 40). This betrayal is “not trickery like that ofan orderly man ordering his future, but betrayal like that of a simple man who nolonger has any past or future” (40).

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symplok e 221

State globalization, where the transnational or trans-border movement ofinformation, capital, and goods are almost without restriction, but the

similar free movement of people in and out of national or economiccommunities is still delimited by citizenship criteria. In all, the State isthe capture of space, movement, thought, and people into a striatedspace. And that is why nomadology projects its force of a war machineprimarily against it.

Now, if communities become swept up by the projection andprojectile of the nomadic war machine, it is because they have becomeState-like in their outlook. Communities have become overcodified bytheir linguistic idioms, customs, economic practices, political

inclinations, etc. Membership into the community is predicated only bythe knowledge, acceptance, observance, adherence, and communicationof these codes. Community has taken on a politics and an economy,and it has come to signify a circuitous flow. Everything has to circleback onto itself. Everything is rooted onto a closed arborescentstructure. And everything has to be organized. Every face of everybody within the community becomes reduced to a signifyingarticulation of the community, becomes subjected to a totalizingrepresentation only of the community. In other words, the face becomesan over-conscious investment of community. According to Deleuze and

Guattari, the body in such an economy of community becomes reducedto a mere denigrating faciality. And faciality is that process in whichthe face is reduced to be a site of signs pointing towards what it investsin or what invests in it, and whereby the body as the cartography ofsigns of singularity is no longer regarded at. And with this process offaciality, the operation of numbering begins. Everything counts in thisspace. Not just bodies count because of the number that their faces willadd to the progressive façade of the community, but even ethics beginsto be quantitatively measured. I cite the example Bauman uses inelucidating some of the myths of community. Within communities that

are mythologized by us, we take it as natural or given that once wehave helped someone in the community, “our right, purely andsimply, is to expect that the help we need will be forthcoming” (2).Even the friend will be counted. It will be a matter of my friend,someone I can count (on) to add quantitative measure to the community.It will not be that estranging friend, the friend that is the other , thefriend that brings to the structure of community a difference or evenrivalry, so that community is never a rigid or closed structure.3 At thispoint, we are reminded by Deleuze and Guattari that “the number hasalways served to gain mastery over matter, to control its variations and

3The friend as rival is derivative of Deleuze and Guattari’s take on friendship in

their introduction to What is Philosophy?, which I have referred to at the beginning ofthis paper.

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1



movements, in other words, to submit them to the spatiotemporalframework of the State” (1987, 389). One is approaching a s/State of

community when everything counts.There are “never strangers,” to quote Bauman (2) again, in a

community, when everything is counted or numbered, or when everybody is subjected to a faciality. No doubt, in a close-knit community, itis a nice sheltering architecture that community provides. But becauseit is not open to any relation with an exteriority, not open to aninvitation to a friend who brings with it a question of rivalry to thebeliefs of the community, not open to any deviation in other words, thearchitecture of community can become familiarly strange or estranging

too, becoming an estranged familiarity. Its architecture will be “like abesieged fortress” as Bauman (15) would say. Or to follow Paul Virilioand Deleuze and Guattari, it takes on a bunker architecture.Community becomes bunker community. The deathly architecture of abunker is what one enters at the limit of anything that seeks its ownabsoluteness, its totality, its enclosure that cuts itself off with the outside.In other words, with a fortress or bunker architecture of community, thethinking of community—the future thinking of community, thethinking of another future of community—no longer has a (horizonless)horizon. There is no longer a free space of thought, a space of freedom

of thought for community. Community as such, as State-like, as State-community, or community-State (Bauman reminds us that ahomogeneous community may be a parallel construction of the State inits project of nationalistic nation-building too; and Deleuze and Guattariwill also say that “the modern State defines itself in principle as ‘therational and reasonable organization of a community’” [1987, 375]), ismore anti-community than communitarian, more anti-community—inthe sense of the negation of a true thinking of community, than thenomadological war machine.

It is this state of community, this State-community or community-

State, that has put into place a totalitarian micropolitics of itself, that thenomadological war machine seeks to disarticulate. From within thestriated space of State-community, it seeks to reterritorialize a smoothspace, a space where tangential trajectories are possible, a space whereheterogeneous elements are free to come together by desire, and areequally free to break away without causing any spatial anxiety. Again,it is a comforting thought, no doubt, that being a member of acommunity grants one almost automatic hospitality within thecommunity. But within hospitality, within a practical ethics ofhospitality, there should not only be reserved the right of the host toreject hospitality, as Derrida (2000) has already observed, but thereshould be cases where the receiver of hospitality reserves also thefreedom to refuse hospitality, the freedom to break away from theenclosures of “hostpitality,” the freedom to deviate. And smooth space

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symplok e 223

“is precisely the space of the smallest deviation” because it “has nohomogeneity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 371). It is precisely in this

sense, the creation of a heterogeneous space of deviation or smoothspace that does not view an absence of organization as a lack, by thedisarticulation or smashing of the structures of homogenization like thecodes of communities, that the nomadological war machine render itselfanti-“community”/anti-community.

N-1 Community

Now, I have said, and Deleuze and Guattari themselves have alsosaid, that the nomadic war machine reads more as a solitary force than acommunitarian one. But that is not to say that it is not open to a spacein which the space is constituted by a situation of more-than-itself.Smooth space is after all a space of more-than-itself. Smooth spaces “arenot without people” (1987, 506). But these people, these other experimental people, are those who have left behind the striated spacesof State-communities. They do not bind or delimit themselves with adefined territorial organization. “They have a local constructionexcluding the prior determination of a base domain . . . . They have

extrinsic and situational properties, or relations irreducible to intrinsicproperties of a structure,” as Deleuze and Guattari write (209). Thesepeople are multiplicities as Deleuze and Guattari also call them, andthey affirm and exercise the freedom to come together or break away.Multiplicities enjoy “a certain leeway, between the two extreme poles offusion and scission” (209).

And there is always a relation between multiplicities and smoothspace. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “a heterogeneous smoothspace . . . is wedded to a very particular multiplicity: non-metric,acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities which occupy space without

‘counting’ it and can ‘only be explored by legwork’” (371). The bodiesof multiplicity may be “non-metric,” but as multiplicity, there isinevitably the notion of number, if not of the numerous, though there isnothing numerically definitive about it. (Here, one may even say, inthe conventional understanding of what makes a community, that thereis already a sense of community with multiplicities, since communityalways already involves some gathering of some numerous.) Exceptthe number here is no longer that which is of a quantitative measure:“The number is no longer a means of counting or measuring, but ofmoving” (387). It constitutes a geography, a mapping out of agathering, a gathering whose cartography is constantly changing as theexperiment goes along. This number, or this “numbering number” asDeleuze and Guattari call it, does not function as an index of formal or

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1



structural growth, or of historical progress as in State-communities orcommunity-states. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the numbering

number is no longer subordinated to metric determinations orgeometrical dimensions, but has only a dynamic relation withgeographical directions” (390). The number of multiplicity of smoothspace hence speaks of a mass that is always moving, always breakingaway, if not always disappearing, from striated social arrangements—“masses are constantly flowing or leaking from classes” (213), andneither countable strictly as a singular or combinative crowd. Thegeographic “numbering number” is more a question of n-1 as Deleuzeand Guattari would have it, the fragmenting -1 projectile acting to resist

any form of quantitative and formal totality. It is like thesupernumerary in Rancière’s (2004) terms: that which is not onlyuncounted (especially by State), but also more critically, that whichrefuses to enter into an economy of the counted of homogenizingstructures such as communities. (We will also note that for Deleuze andGuattari, the mass is not insistently or necessarily a numerousassemblage. It may be a “‘mass’ individual” (215). Whatever this flowof this mass, it is “neither attributable to individuals nor overcoded bycollective signifiers” (219). Individual or a multitude, the multiplicity ofsmooth space is already, in a word, communitarian.)

In the smooth space cleared by the nomadological war machine, it isnot what counts that matters. Rather, matter—the matter of bodies, thematter of thought—matters. In this smooth space, it is a question of thefreedom of trajectory of bodies and thoughts, a question of the variationof the matter of bodies and thoughts, a question of “materiality insteadof imposing a form upon a matter” (408). It is a question of theexpressive materiality of whatever gathering or deviation that is takingplace, rather than imposing upon it the enclosing form called“community.” In nomadology, “what one addresses is less a mattersubmitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos. One addresses

less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter than materialtraits of expression” (408). And as such, any striating grasp ofcommunity cannot contain the nomadological war machine. The latterappears anti-community in this sense because while the former tries tohold (on to) everything together compactly, the latter gives place to therisk of accident of things breaking down, since “an entire energeticmateriality in movement” also “combine[s] with processes ofdeformation” (408). That “deformation,” along with other“discontinuities” (406) the nomadological war machine brings about, isnecessary to nomadology so as to prevent the smooth space ofmultiplicity becoming like the circuitous flow of the striated community.

When numbers do not matter only because they are accumulativesupplements to previous quantified constructions, then there is also thepossibility of opening up to the outside. The “numbering number”

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symplok e 225

makes it necessary also “to take into account arithmetic relations that areexternal” (391). What the smooth space of the nomadological war

machine articulates is therefore difference or alterity, and exteriority. InDeleuze and Guattari’s words, the nomadological war machine“produces its effect of immensity by its fine articulation, in other wordsby its distribution of heterogeneity in free space” (391). The rhythmicsof the nomadological war machine is therefore also, to wit, “notharmonic” (390), contra the myth of harmonious relations withinconventional communities. With the nomadic war machine, there isalways the possibility or the freedom of a dissonant line irrupting thestability of a melodious line of conventional communities, or else to

break away with its own other trajectory. Attaching itself to at timesthreateningly and possibly fragmenting elements of heterogeneity oralterity, the architecture of smooth space of multiplicity created by thenomadic war machine is not a bunker architecture. Instead, it is more abridge architecture, an architecture of moving bridges, or “movablebridges” in Deleuze and Guattari’s words in What is Philosophy? It is aquestion of bridges that are always constructing towards a futurecommunity. If there is any architecture of community that thenomadological war machine projects, it will only be an undefinedarchitecture. It will not be a finished, enclosed architecture, but an

architecture-to-come, an architecture-in-progress, an architecture-on-the-way. As Deleuze and Guattari themselves say, “It is not a question ofthis or that place on earth . . . . It is a question of a model that isperpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that isperpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again” (20).With the nomadological war machine, the architecture of community isalways a question of “relaying” these architectures-on-the-way: “onlyrelays, intermezzos, resurgences” (377).

It is with such an architecture that Deleuze and Guattari’snomadological war machine is always maintaining a thought of

community, maintaining the free space of thought of community,maintaining the freedom of another thought of community, the thoughtof another future community to come. At the end, it is more of community rather than anti-community in the nihilistic sense. After all,the nomadic war machine clears a smooth space only for a “movementof people in that space” and in which “it is a very special kind ofdistribution, one without division into shares, in a space without bordersor enclosure” (422, 380). In other words, it smashes presentcommunities from within only to seek another future communitarianarrangement such that within that space, thought is free, that there is afreedom of movement of coming and leaving, that there is no politics oreconomics of counting, and the possibilities of and to the outside arealways open. After all too, the nomadological war machine conductswar against striated spaces like the State and overcodified communities

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1



only “on the condition that [it] simultaneously create[s] something else,if only new nonorganic social relations” (423). This other social relation,

this new communitarian assemblage, may be “nonorganic” perhapsbecause it will be an inhuman community, inhuman because freed fromthe anxieties of subjectivity, representational drive, and consciousness ofthe metaphysical human Being—Being that thinks limitedly andinclusively only in the image of itself, and Being that only lookstowards a One of totality of community or a community of aquantitatively accumulative One. Once again, the nomadological warmachine reads fascinatingly as an “absolute solitude.” But Deleuze andGuattari will also always reaffirm that “it is an extremely populous

solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already interlaced with apeople to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing onlythrough it, though it is not yet here” (377). The nomadic war machineis always already singularly plural, to use Nancy’s term. And it istherefore always already a question of a community-to-come, acommunity-to-come that renders any signifying articulation of it asfinally a “community” a belatedness, a community-to-come that rendersany representation of it as a cutting-off of itself from the flow or passageof the community-to-come. It is “an ambulant people of relayers” thatthe nomadological war machine awaits and clears a path for, “rather

than a model society” (377), rather than a model (of) community.To recapitulate, the anti-community force of the nomadological war

machine projects both a “disarticulation” of “community” and a violentcombative projectile against it. The latter is a necessary combat,necessary only because communities have become target communitiesfor the formation and maintenance of the State, or else its own striatingtotalitarian micropolitics. But the nomadological war machine is anti-community only because it maintains the future of community,maintains the possibility of a future, radical, and other community tocome. It is never nihilistic with regard to community. Instead, what it

does, for community, is to allow the chance of the future event of acommunity-to-come to take place. With Deleuze and Guattari then, andat least in A Thousand Plateaus and particularly with the image ofnomadology of A Thousand Plateaus as I have tried to show, philosophyis always a question of community. For Deleuze and Guattari, we arealways arriving at or moving towards a community with philosophy,but a community that is as indefinite as its linguistic article not becauseit is not able to decide itself (as community), and not because it is notsure of itself, but because it is always open to something new, alwaysforms itself anew, which as such guarantees its future, and evenpromises a radical future unrestricted to its present form. It is acommunity that is decisively (an) undecidability, an indecision that isproperly in-decision, as Nancy would put it. It decides on its openness

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symplok e 227

to futures and not closures. It decides itself as always a work-in-progress, a project without end.

Conclusion: Deterritorializing (from) the Real / Becoming-Animal

At this point, one may ask what is this communitarian nomadic warmachine in real terms, and where and how could one locate it in the realworld today, if not, for tomorrow? What and where can there be anempirical trace of such a “mass” or “people” that is communitarian

precisely because of its anti-community force? One could be tempted tothink of the subterranean or rather hyperreal community of digitalhackers. This community after all has been described in no lessDeleuzian terms by McKenzie Wark in his A Hacker Manifesto as such:“Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors,artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers orprogrammers, each of these subjectivities [of the hacker community] isbut a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself assuch” (002). It is a community of a “collective hack that realizes a classinterest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive

unity” (006), a community that is always reinventing technics that willgo round, if not smash from within, legal limits of the State that try torestrain the sharing of digital information via peer-to-peer technology.One could indeed pursue such a thread and give a nomadologicalcontour to such a community. But I would like to resist doing so. Thatwould, perhaps, be too easy. And that would also somewhat amount toignoring some of the dangers in (thinking of) locating the nomadic warmachine in the real. “We lack resistance to the present” (Deleuze andGuattari 1994, 108).

To locate the nomadic war machine in the real is firstly topresuppose that it already presently exists. And if it is already visible insome way or other, it surely would already be subject to the State’smonitoring of its deviation from a State-managed and State-controlledcommunity. The State would not allow any minimal deviation of itspeople to extend beyond a certain duration. In no time, the policingforces of striation would have swarmed in on this deviation. And inany case, even before the declension of the striating forces falls on thedeviating elements, the latter collective would have lost its constitutionas a nomadological war machine, for to be perceptible as part of the

existing community implies that it is in some ways part of the existingstatus quo of life. But the nomadological war machine is always thatwhich departs from the normalized conditions of living. It does not wantany part of it. It does not want to be part of it. And because it departs,

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1



it would belong not to the order of the perceptible but the order of thedisappeared or disappearing. And in that sense, there can be no way of

locating this nomadological war machine in the real such that one couldhypostasize it as a subject of analysis. There is no doubt that thenomadic war machine is real and exists within the horizons of the real,but it dislocates itself in the perceptible way of things. It has departedonly by its disappearance, its rendering itself in-visible. It occupies spacebut only by making a desert of that space, a space of a desert so empty andso minimal in contrast to the excess of the global metropolis thatsurrounds contemporary communities, such that no one else sees it. It isdis-location par excellence. And it is the nomadic war machine as dis-

location that renders it difficult to be located in the real.Deleuze and Guattari themselves are also careful not to identify anyempirical social group, contemporaneous to the context of the writing of A Thousand Plateaus, as possible communitarian nomadological warmachines. They understand the limits and dangers of the visible real.And so in A Thousand Plateaus, they do not look to the present or ratherto what is present to seek out the potential nomadic war machine. Theonly reserve that is left in A Thousand Plateaus for thinking the nomadicwar machine in the real is that problematic real of which they will callbecoming-animal. Becoming-animal, which is not the anthropomorphic

mimesis of animals, is about the adjacent space between the human andthe animal. It is a “phenomenon of bordering” (Deleuze and Guattari1987, 345) between the human and the animal, in which a molecularanti-anthropomorphism at the edges of the human departs andcommunicates with the molecular particles of the animal that havelikewise left the frays of its form. This is the communitarian“transversal communications between heterogeneous populations” ofbecoming-animal by “unnatural participation” (345). On thecommunitarian horizon of becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari willalso say, “A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a

population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity” (239). Like the “peopleto come” that the nomadic war machine looks forward to, the pack, theband, or the multiplicity involved with a becoming-animal is nothingstructured. There is no conscious investment to build up such acommunity. Its future is not determined by any methodical calculationor rationality. And like the unquantifiable n-1 future community of thenomadic war machine, the elements within this multiplicity areuncounted, uncountable. “A multiplicity is defined not by its elements,nor by a center of unification or comprehension” (249).

And again like the nomadic war machine, the communitarian eventof becoming-animal proceeds with anti-community gestures. It beginswith what Deleuze and Guattari call the “anomic.” This “anomic” is an“exceptional individual” (243), but it is not exceptional in the sense thatit is absolutely outside the law of the group or existing community.

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symplok e 229

Instead, it traverses the border between being with the law and beingoutside the law. It is like a shadow at this border, and one can never be

sure if this shadow is going to incline towards the outside or back withinacceptable boundaries. And yet this is enough to render it a figure ofuncertainty or potential chaos in the eyes of power. It does not violatethe law but its being at the border just disturbs the stability orequilibrium of the law (and is therefore something of an anti-communitypotentiality). And it is through an intuitive affinity with this (anti-community) “anomic” that a becoming-animal is put into effect. AsDeleuze and Guattari say, “you will . . . find an exceptional individual,and it is with that individual that an alliance must be made in order to

become-animal” (243). It is with the “anomic” that an event ofbecoming-animal “arrives and passes at the edge” (245) of the human.And from then on, like the anti-community/communitarian nomadicwar machine, becoming-animal is a potential violence against any forcethat structures for all within its grasp a rigidity of belonging, forexample, conventionally codified communities. Becoming-animal “isaccompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with thecentral institutions that have established themselves or seek to becomeestablished” (247), and “we should not confuse these dark assemblages. . . with organizations such as the institutions of the family and the

State apparatus” (242).The affinity between becoming-animal and the nomadic war

machine is undeniable. Deleuze and Guattari will even say that thereare “becomings-animal in the war machine” (247). One then is notsurprised to find the echo of the betrayal function of the nomadic warmachine in becoming-animal too. The advance of a becoming-animalwill also see to the undoing of the alliance with the “anomic.” This is itsother anti-community gesture. Becoming-animal will betray the“anomic”: “I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to reachthe pack as a whole and pass beyond it” (245). In a becoming-animal,

one will strike at the “exceptional individual” who is not only critical forthe constituting of a friendship that will lead one to become-animal, butwho will also lead one to the pack, the band, a peopling, thecommunitarian multiplicity. And one will certainly not rest with thecommunitarian outcome (“to reach the pack”) of the betrayal. In fact,one will trace a further anti-community trajectory and “pass beyond”the pack, the band, the multiplicity, but surely for other “newnonorganic social relations.”

Now, why becoming-animal is a problematic real, or why it isdifficult if not impossible to locate in the real, is because it is a “zone ofindiscernibility” (280). It proceeds by being “something more secret,more subterranean” (237) than what the real would like to spectacularlydemonstrate to visibility. Becoming-animal puts forth “an objectivezone of indetermination or uncertainty” (237), and presents at best a

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1



haziness before all technics of rational perception. A line ofdisappearance, and not visibility, is what a becoming-animal follows

after all: “A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a humanor an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to theimperceptible” (249). Becoming-animal is in-visible, dislocating theperception of the real, disrupting the real. But its being in-visible doesnot render it any less real than anything else that exists in the real. Itremains very real, only real without being definable or identifiable.“There is a reality of becoming-animal, even though one does not inreality become animal” (273). Its dislocation from or of the perception ofthe real constitutes its existence as a problematic real. And this is why it

will always escape or resist any teleologic analytic striation, andtherefore also always remaining a desirable space of reserve for(thinking) the anti-community/communitarian nomadic war machinefor Deleuze and Guattari.

Finally, to suggest that the nomadological war machine is alreadyexisting in some nascent formation at present would also,philosophically, reduce the concept to a delimited historical or temporalcondition. It would entail limiting its existence to only a certain time-frame. But this takes away the avant-garde edge of the concept. Theconcept of the nomadological war machine, derivative of all the minor

war-machines of history, remains a future-oriented project or projectile.It serves to be the front-guard that smashes the conditions andperformatives that have constituted the thought of community, andthereby clears a path for the future thought of a future community. AsDeleuze and Guattari write, it is always about casting a “shadow of apeople to come.” The nomadic war machine is always arriving, beyondour present knowledge, and exceeding the conditions of thought thathas come before. It is only as such that it maintains the thought of itselfnot only towards the future, opening itself up to all possibilities ofalterity to arrive to it, but also towards a future (of) community. The

present real only conditions the thought of the nomadological warmachine to think within the actualizable limits of the present. But theconcept of itself is always virtual, just as any philosophical conceptshould be, according to the pedagogy of Deleuze and Guattari in What isPhilosophy? It is always -1 from the real, and only the disappearing lineof becoming-animal can always already be that n-1 real of the anti-community/communitarian nomadic war machine.

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

8/9/2019 symploke 2006 Goh-1


symploke 2006 goh-1

Documents