Now I’m going to go somewhere completely unrelated. I shouldn’t be surprised that in D&G’s essay about the war machine they somehow managed to succinctly describe culture war online discourse, but goddamn if this doesn’t sum things up.

Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a “subject,” to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects.

To me, this is talking about the way that, at this current point in our cultural conversations, people too easily project their own feelings about a particular piece of art – whether those are positive feelings the person wishes to defend, or negative feelings they wish to reify and attack in the form of other cultural commentators. Now, that projection wouldn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but the word here “velocity” ties in to a thread that D&G will pick up later where they’re talking about the difference between weapons and tools. They suggest that speed is the defining aspect of a weapon, and gravity is the aspect that defines a tool. They don’t really define what they mean by gravity here – or if they did, I missed it – but I think that ties in perfectly with this little cultural tangent that jumped out at me here.

Shooting off a tweet or a twitter thread is fast, and anyone who’s spent any amount of time on twitter knows it can be a weapon. On the other hand there’s gravity, which I take to be the serious and measured consideration of a piece of art or culture – allowing yourself to be caught up in the gravity of it, to consider it on its own terms, consider how its gravity interacts with your own, and not simply react with speed, basic love or hate.

There’s another section later on:

In a sense, it could be said that […] thought has never had anything but laughable gravity. But that is all it requires: for us not to take it seriously. Because that makes it all the easier for it to think for us […]. Because the less people take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing — to be a thinker?

This certainly seems to tie into the culture war discussions around art, and that seemingly innocuous phrase that has served to flatten the very idea of cultural criticism: Let people enjoy things.

People are allowed to enjoy whatever hollow pap they want, but the sentiment is also used to discourage criticism and conversation that might focus on a piece of media’s flaws – particularly ideological ones. You only need to look at the involvement of the US military in the production of Marvel films, and the way the ideology of the films is in support of US imperialism and hegemony to see how something as seemingly wholesome at first glance as “let people enjoy things” is actually the death knell for both challenging art and vital cultural criticism.

And it’s that final bit that really grabs me – “what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing – to be a thinker?” Just think of all the lib-brained takes being churned out by the commentariat week after week – all these people who consider themselves to be true thinkers but who unquestioningly regurgitate the ideology of the State. Maybe it’s always been this bad, but D&G certainly feel prophetic here.

Here’s one chunk of my notes on Buddies without Organs Episode #8: Nomadology. Episode and all the related goodness is at the BwO website here.

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There’s one last bit I wanted to quote from, because again it seems like a perfect summary of the world of the past few years, held in the thrall of US military hegemony.

The war machine reforms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itself is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the point at which Clausewitz’s formula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say that politics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invert the order of the words as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is necessary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the States, having appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates the States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions.

That line “a form of peace more terrifying still” is really evocative. I’ve spent my entire life living in peace-time while people in other parts of the world have experienced nothing but conflict. It’s another bastardisation of that classic William Gibson quote: peace is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

But the other thing that I find interesting about this section is that it implies that it’s actually the war machine that won the battle against the State, whereas throughout the rest of the essay I was reading it in terms of the State and its military institution. But when you look at US imperialism it’s easy to see how the war machine won – how it appropriated the State and not vice versa – again epitomised by 20 years in Afghanistan. So instead of the war machine, this section might make more sense if you consider the deep state – not the deep state of QAnon, but its original meaning: The military-industrial complex and its web of lobbyists, bought politicians, and media sycophants.

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Chess / 3rd Generation Warfare vs 4th GW

Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology.

This puts me in mind of 3^rd generation (or perhaps earlier) warfare versus 4^th. Rules-based warfare as envisioned by the State (if you don’t play by our rules that greatly favour us, we’ll claim that you’re cheating [read: a terrorist]), versus the true chaos of warfare as envisioned and lived by guerrilla fighters.

Here’s one chunk of my notes on Buddies without Organs Episode #8: Nomadology. Episode and all the related goodness is at the BwO website here.

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One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior,” over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon.

This seems especially relevant today, with the technocratic desire to quantify, label, and then be able to monetise everything. Technocrats continue to sell us the vision of smooth space – that their products, their data, their dark designs, will make our lives easier and better, but that hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen, because in practice they are actually more heavily striating our lives than ever before. They believe that they can fully understand nature, the world, humanity, and individuals if only they were able to gather enough data, but our world doesn’t work like that.

Some people nowadays are too eager to criticize this numerical organization, denouncing it as a military or even concentration-camp society where people are no longer anything more than deterritorialized “numbers.” But that is false. Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people is certainly no cruder than the lineal or State organizations. Treating people like numbers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geometrical figures to shape and model.

But then if that’s the way Deleuze and Guattari’s State is manifested in the current moment, then it’s worth considering what they have to say about the nomad, and see what lessons we might be able to learn from nomadology. Bear with me with this next quote, but I think it captures dichotomy of the sedentary and the nomad really well.

sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. […] The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. […] Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is […] he who does not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.

To me, this distinction between the migrant and the nomad really speaks of adaptability. Our ability to embrace true nomadism is being stifled by the State and Capital’s efforts to enclose everything, but the nomad’s strength is in clinging to the smooth spaces – perhaps the spaces the state has abandoned.

I’m a sci-fi writer, so I can’t help but think of this thread in terms of climate change, and the huge numbers of climate refugees we’re likely to see in our lifetimes. But as the State retreats to its fortresses, what opportunities might remain outside those walls for the nomad? I don’t have answers, but I think the climate nomad is a compelling figure – someone who shuns the striated spaces of the State and instead seeks to reterritorialize the spaces left behind.

Here’s one chunk of my notes on Buddies without Organs Episode #8: Nomadology. Episode and all the related goodness is at the BwO website here.

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It’s probably not surprising that in so much of this discussion of the war machine and the state, I’m put in mind of US imperialsm, particularly the past 20 years of the so-called War on Terror in the Middle East. With the recent situation in Afghanistan, a lot of people have been referencing Vietnam, so let me do the same. With Vietnam it was truly the US going to war – the draft meant many young men were sent to fight regardless of their own feelings about that war or war in general, it was a highly televised event broadcast into American homes every night, and it weighed heavily on political discussions and elections all throughout the years of the war.

Compare that to 20 years in Afghanistan. There’s no draft, so the people going over to fight have volunteered to do so – though economic realities being what they are for many people, can it really be called volunteering? – and even then, more and more of the war was entirely privatised. It wasn’t a war fought by the American people – by the State – but rather by the State’s military apparatus.

A fact that many people likely aren’t familiar with is that even when the US does deign to sign on to various climate change agreements, they will always demand that the US military is exempt from any restrictions related to decreased pollution. In so many ways it is simply not held accountable to the State or the people it is ostensibly protecting.

The war machine is pure exteriority, taking funding from the polity, but otherwise having little or nothing to do with it.

It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.

Now, the US military isn’t a true war machine in the D&G sense. “(What we call a military institution, or army, is not at all the war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by the State.)” As they say: “The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems.” That seems a really interesting point to me – the state and the military are always at odds with one another – but still the State is convinced it needs the military, even as the military takes ever-larger pieces of the state’s budget, and even when that military might choose to one day become the state, as with many coups across the last hundred years.

The military institution is a highly regimented and striated hierarchical organisation, but it seems to me that in formal militaries, the true nomadic war machine comes to light in the ways units are able to conduct their duties under their own supervision. There is still a military chain of command, but if the large number of atrocities and war crimes committed by our forces is any indication, that command must seem very distant indeed. And that ties in to some of the other parts of this essay that seemed to me to be speaking of the experience of the war veteran.

If being a part of the nomadic war machine means moving over smooth space – literally, in many desert settings, but also mentally or spiritually, a space where the moral and ethical constraints that underpin society have been smoothed over by a set of increasingly-lax Rules of Engagement –then it’s no wonder both that the rigid hierarchy is required to keep these would-be nomads under control, and also that they so often struggle upon return to the striated space of real life.

Deleuze and Guattari write: “Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury, which he turns against himself.” They go on to cite some examples out of ancient myth, but we don’t have to look any further than the many, many veterans who commit suicide upon return to the world. It’s not that their description matches every veteran, but it sadly covers many. Some survive by returning to the war machine – either the formal military institutions, or the private sector – some survive by an act of reterritorialization, becoming something other than a man of war.