[eDebate] removing judges : the last tendrils of state control

[Kevin Sanchez]

below are six paragraphs from deleuze and guattari's 'treatise on 
nomadology', which i utilized unsparringly in my last post. perhaps you'll 
find their thinking about science and politics more cogent. i hope they 
clarify that one needn't choose (not once and for all anyway) between 
axiomatics and problematics, since both procedures draw sustenance from one 
another. also take special note of two helpful distinctions : one between 
'following'/'intuition' and 'reproducing'/'intelligence', and the other a 
three-pronged distinction between mythos (as 'imperium of state truth'), 
logos (as 'republic of free spirits'), and pathos (as 'outside 
counter-thoughts'). if any of the verbiage gives you trouble, feel free to 
drop me a line here: kevin.sanchez at gmail.com. the feedback is appreciated.

_

Gilles Deleuze & F?lix Guattari. 1980. ('12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology - 
The War Machine'. A Thousand Plateaus. p372-8.)

_


A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific 
procedures: one consists in "reproducing," the other in "following." The 
first involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, involving 
itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences. Itineration is 
too readily reduced to a modality of technology, or of the application and 
verificiation of science. But this is not the case: following is not at all 
the same thing as reproducing, and one never follows in order reproduce. The 
ideal of reproduction, deduction, or induction is part of royal science, at 
all times and in all places, and treats differences of time and place as so 
many variables, the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the 
law: for the same phenomena to recur in a gravitational and striated space 
it is sufficient for the same conditions to obtain, or for the same constant 
relation to hold between the differing conditions and the variable 
phenomena. Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that 
is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But 
following is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, 
just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the 
"singularities" of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to 
discover a form; when one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of 
celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a 
determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow; when one 
engages in a continuous variation of variables, instead of extracting 
constants from them, etc. And the meaning of Earth completely changes: with 
the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of 
view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the 
ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends 
the territory itself. "Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the 
watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds 
far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the 
direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest 
point from your plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in 
between are yours. Later ... you can extend the size of your territory." 
[38] There are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow 
in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many 
"accidents" (problems). For example, why is primitive metallurgy necessarily 
an ambulant science that confers upon smiths a quasi-nomadic status? It 
could be objected that in these examples it is still a question of going 
from one point to another (even if they are singular points) through the 
intermediary of channels, and that it is still possible to cut the flow into 
layers. But this is only true to the extent that ambulant procedures and 
processes are necessarily tied to a striated space--always formalized by 
royal science--which deprives them of their model, submits them to its own 
model, and allows them to exist only in the capacity of "technologies" or 
"applied science." As a general rule, a smooth space, a vectorial fIeld, a 
nonmetric multiplicity are always translatable, and necessarily translated, 
into a "compars": a fundamental operation by which one repeatedly overlays 
upon each point of smooth space a tangent Euclidean space endowed with a 
sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism 
between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in 
this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction, instead of continuing 
to follow it in an "exploration by legwork." [39] This is the triumph of the 
logos or the law over the nomos. But the complexity of the operation 
testifies to the existence of resistances it must overcome. Whenever 
ambulant procedure and process are returned to their own model, the points 
regain their position as singularities that exclude all biunivocal 
relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and vortical motion that 
excludes any parallelism between vectors, and smooth space reconquers the 
properties of contact that prevent it from remaining homogeneous and 
straited. There is always a current preventing the ambulant or itinerant 
sciences from being completely internalized in the reproductive royal 
sciences. There is a type of ambulant scientist whom State scientists are 
forever fighting or integrating or allying with, even going so far as to 
propose a minor position for them within the legal system of science and 
technology.

It is not that the ambulant sciences are more saturated with irrational 
procedures, with mystery and magic. They only get that way when they fall 
into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also surround 
themselves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what becomes appearent 
in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sciences 
do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to have an 
autonomous development. They do not have the means for that because they 
subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of intuition and 
construction--following the flow of matter, drawing and linking up smooth 
space. Everything is situated in an objective zone of flucuation that is 
coextensive with reality itself. However refined or rigorous, "approximate 
knowledge" is still dependent upon sensitive and sensible evaluations that 
pose more problems than they solve: prolematics is still its only mode. In 
contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its theorematic or axiomatic 
power, is to isolate all operations from the conditions of intuition, making 
them true intrinsic conepts, or "categories." That is precisely why 
deterritorialization, in this kind of science, implies a 
reterritorialization in the conceptual apparatus. Without this categorical, 
apodictic apparatus, the differential operations would be constrained to 
follow the evolution of a phenomenon; what is more, since the 
experimentation would be open-air, and the construction at ground level, the 
coordinates permitting them to be erected as stable models would never 
become available. Certain of these requirements are translated in terms of 
"safety": the two cathedrals at Orleans and Beauvais collapsed at the end of 
the twelfth century, and control calculations are difficult to effect for 
the constructions of ambulant science. Although safety is a fundamental 
element in the theoretical norms of the State, and of the political ideal, 
there is also something else at issue as well. Due to all their procedures, 
the ambulant sciences quickly overstep the possibility of calculation: they 
inhabit that "more" that exceeds the space of reproduction and soon run into 
problems that are insurmountable from that point of view; they eventually 
resolve those problems by means of a real-life operation. The solutions are 
supposed to come from a set of activities that constitute them as 
nonautonomous. Only royal science, in contrast, has at its disposal a metric 
power that can define a conceptual apparatus or an autonomy of science 
(including the autonomy of experimental science). That is why it is 
necessary to couple ambulant spaces with a space of homogeneity, without 
which the laws of physics would depend on particular points in space. But 
this is less a translation than a constitution: precisely that constitution 
the ambulant sciences did not undertake, and do not have the means to 
undertake. In the field of interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant 
sciences confine themselves to inventing problems whose solution is tied to 
a whole set of collective, nonscientific activities but whose scientific 
solution depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has 
transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus and 
its organization of work. This is somewhat like intuition and intelligence 
in Bergson, where only intelligence has the scientific means to solve 
formally the problems posed by intuition, problems that intuition would be 
content to entrust to the qualitative activities of a humanity engaged in 
following matter. [40]

PROBLEM II. Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?

Thought contents are sometimes criticized for being too conformist. But the 
primary question is that of form itself. Thought as such is already in 
conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and which 
defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire 
organon. There is thus an image of thought covering all of thought; it is 
the special object of "noology" and is like the State-form developed in 
thought. This image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of 
sovereignty: the imperium of true thinking operating by magical capture, 
seizure or binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (mythos); a 
republic of free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a 
legislative and juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground 
(logos). These two heads are in constant interference in the classical image 
of thought: a "republic of free spirits whose prince would be the idea of 
the Supreme Being." And if these two heads are in interference, it is not 
only because there are many intermediaries and transitions between them, and 
because the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and 
retains the first, but also because, antithetical and complementary, they 
are necessary to one another. It is not out of the question, however, that 
in order to pass from one to the other there must occur, "between" them, an 
event of an entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, 
takes place outside. [41] But confining ourselves to the image, it appears 
that it is not simply a metaphor when we are told of an imperium of truth 
and a republic of spirits. It is the necessary condition for the 
constitution of thought as principle, or as a form of interiority, as a 
stratum.

It is easy to see what thought gains from this: a gravity it would never 
have on its own, a center that makes everything, including the State, appear 
to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction. But the State gains 
just as much. Indeed, by developing in thought in this way the State-form 
gains something essential: a whole consensus. Only thought is cpaable of 
inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating 
the State to the level of de jure universality. It is as if the sovereign 
were left alone in the world, spanned the entire ecumenon, and now dealt 
only with actual or potential subjects. It is no longer a question of 
powerful, extrinsic organizations, or of strange bands: the State becomes 
the sole principle separating rebel subjects, who are consigned to the state 
of nature, from consenting subjects, who rally to its form of their own 
accord. If it is advantageous for thought to prop itself up with the State, 
it is no less advantageous for the State to extend itself in thought, and to 
be sanctioned by it as the unique, universal form. The particularity of 
States becomes merely an accident of fact, as is their possible perversity, 
or their imperfection. For the modern State defines itself in principle as 
"the rational and reasonable organization of a community": the only 
remaining particularity a community has is interior or moral (the spirit of 
a people), at the same time as the community is funneled by its organization 
toward the harmony of a universal (absolute spirit). The State gives thought 
a form of interiority, and thought gives that interiority a form of 
universality: "The goal of worldwide organization is the satisfaction of 
reasonable individuals within particular free States." The exchange that 
takes place between the State and reason is a curious one; but that exchange 
is also an analytic proposition, because realized reason is identified with 
the de jure State, just as the State is the becoming of reason. [42] In 
so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or rational State, 
everything revolves around the legislator and the subject. The State must 
realize the distinction between the legislator and the subject under formal 
conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptualize their 
identity. Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be master, for 
you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself ... Ever since 
philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving the 
established powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto 
the organs of State power. Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at 
the center constituted by the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the 
absolute. This was most notably the great operation of the Kantian 
"critique," renewed and developed by Hegelianism. Kant was constantly 
criticizing bad usages, the better to consecrate the function. It is not at 
all suprising that the philosopher has become a public professor or State 
functionary. It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of 
thought. With full reciprocity. Doubtless, the image itself assumes 
dIfferent contours in accordance with the variations on this form: it has 
not always delineated or designated the philosopher, and will not always 
delineate him. It is possible to pass from a magical function to a rational 
function. The poet in the archaic imperial State was able to play the role 
of image trainer. [43] In modern States, the sociologist succeeded in 
replacing the philosopher (as, for example, when Durkheim and his disciples 
set out to give the republic a secular model of thought). Even today, 
psychoanalysis lays claim to the role of Cogitatio universalis as the 
thought of the Law, in a magical return. And there are quite a few other 
competitors and pretenders. Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is 
precisely the study of images of thought, and their historicity. In a sense, 
it could be said that all this has no importance, 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, and to be forever engendering new functionaries. 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?

But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their 
acts and discontinuous in their apperances, and whose existence is mobile in 
history. These are the acts of a "private thinker," as opposed to the public 
professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell, it 
is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche's Schopenhauer 
as Educator is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the image 
of thought and its relation to the State. "Prviate thinker," however is not 
a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a 
question of outside thought. [44] To place thought in an immediate relation 
with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a 
war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be 
studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the 
maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic State act 
or sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from a 
new external force, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize 
it). There is another reason why "private thinker" is not a good expression. 
Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute 
solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a 
solittude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and 
awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here. "We 
are lacking that final force, in the absence of a people to bear us. We are 
looking for that popular support." Every thought is already a tribe, the 
opposite of State. And this form of exteriority of thought is not at all 
symmetrical to the form of interiority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists 
only between different poles or focal points of interiority. But the form of 
exteriority of thought--the force that is always external to itself, or the 
final force, the nth power--is not at all another image in opposition to the 
image inspired by the State apparatus. It is, rather, a force that destroys 
both the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every 
possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, or 
the Right (Cartesian truth, Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc). A "method" 
is the striated space of the cogitatio universalis and draws a path that 
must be followed from one point to another. But the form of exteriority 
situates thought in a smooth space that it must occupy without counting, and 
for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction, but only 
relays, intermezzos, resurgences. Thought is like the Vampire; it has no 
image, either to constitute a model of or to copy. In the smooth space of 
Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any 
point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer 
and the target. The problem of the war machine is that of relaying, even 
with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the monument. An 
ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model society. "Nature propels 
the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the 
arrow will stick somewhere. But countless times it misses and is depressed 
at the fact. ... The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the 
purposiveness of nature as regards the means it employs, though they are 
also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom of its purpose. They strike home 
at only a few, while they ought to strike home at everybody--and even these 
few are not struck with the force with which the philosopher and artist 
launch their shot." [45]

We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in them 
thought is truly a pathos (an antilogos and an antimythos). One is a text by 
Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Rivi?re, explaining that thought operates 
on the basis of a central breakdown, that it lives solely by its own 
incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression 
in material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a 
function of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances 
impossible to interiorize. The other is a text by Kleist, "On the Gradual 
Formation of Ideas in Speech" ("?ber die allm?chliche Verfertigung der 
Gedanken beim Reden"), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority of 
the concept as a means of control--the control of speech, of language, but 
also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this from 
thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dialogue, an 
antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before knowing 
while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says, is the 
thought of the Gem?t, which proceeds like a general in a war machine should, 
or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. "I mix 
inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using 
appositions when they are unnecessary." Gain some time, and then perhaps 
renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language, of 
being a foreigner in one's own tongue in order to draw speech to oneself and 
"bring something incomprehensible into the world." Such is the form of 
exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the becoming-woman of 
the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the Gem?t that refuses to be 
controlled, that forms a war machine. A thought grappling with exterior 
forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form, operating by relays 
instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a haecceity, instead of a 
subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem; 
a thought that appeals to a people instead of taking itself for a government 
ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a "thinker" shoots an arrow, there 
is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that 
counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or "aim"? 
Jacques Rivi?re does not hesitate to respond to Artaud: work at it, keep on 
working, things will come out all right, you will succeed in finding a 
method and in learning to express clearly what you think in essence 
(cogitatio universalis). Rivi?re is not a head of State, but he would not be 
the last in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to mistake himself for the secret 
prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a State of right. 
Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of all men of 
letters a veritable man of the State. But that is not the worst of it: the 
worst is the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended up 
becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied--a model far more 
insidious than the others--for the artificial stammerings and innumerable 
tracings that claim to be their equal.

_


38. Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1971), p. 88.

39. Albert Lautman has shown quite clearly how Riemann spaces, for example, 
admit a Euclidean conjunction making it possible at all times to define the 
parallelism of two neighboring vectors; this being the case, instead of 
exploring a multiplicity by legwork, the multiplicity is treated as though 
"immersed in a Euclidean space with a sufficient number of dimensions." See 
Les sch?mas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23-24, 43-47.

40. In Bergson, the relations between intuition and intelligence are very 
complex, and they are in perpetual interaction. Bouligand's theme is also 
relevant here: the dualism of the two mathematical elements, the "problem" 
and the "global synthesis," is developed only when they enter a field of 
interaction in which the global synthesis defines the "categories" without 
which the problem would have no general solution. See Le d?clin des absolus 
math?matico-logiques.

41. Marcel Detienne, in Les maltres de v?rit? dans la Gr?ce archd?que 
(Paris: Maspero, 1973), clearly articulates these two poles of thought, 
which correspond to the two aspects of sovereignty according to Dum?zil: the 
magico-religious speech of the despot or of the "old man of the sea," and 
the dialogue-speech of the city. Not only are the principal character types 
of Greek thought (the Poet, the Physicist, the Philosopher, the Sophist, 
etc.) situated in relation to these poles, but Detienne interposes between 
the two poles a distinct group, the Warriors, which brings about transition 
or evolution.

42. There exists a Hegelianism of the right that lives on in official 
political philosophy and weds the destiny of thought to the State. Alexandre 
Koj?ve ("Tyranny and Wisdom," in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny [New York: Free 
Press of Glencoe, 1963]) and Eric Weil (Hegel et l'Etat. Philosophie 
politique [Paris: Vrin, 1974]) are its recent representatives. From Hegel to 
Max Weber there developed a whole line of reflection on the relation of the 
modern State to Reason, both as rational-technical and as reasonable-human. 
If it is objected that this rationality, already present in the archaic 
imperial State, is the optimum of the governors themselves, the Hegelians 
respond that the rational-reasonable cannot exist without a minimum of 
participation by everybody. The question, rather, is whether the very form 
of the rational-reasonable is not extracted from the State, in a way that 
necessarily makes it right, gives it "reason" (lui donner n?cessairement 
"raison').

43. On the role of the ancient poet as a "functionary of sovereignty," see 
Dum?zil, Servius et la Fortune (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 64ff., and 
Detienne, Les ma?tres de v?rit?, pp. 17ff.

44. See Michel Foucault's analysis of Maurice Blanchot and the form of 
exteriority of thought: "La pens?e du dehors," Critique, no. 229 (June 
1966), pp. 523-548.

45. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. 
J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 177-178.

_