The best part of rhizomatic thinking is that you never haver to admit you've digressed. Since everything is connected, you can never lose your train of thought, dude.
To wit, I recently read James Scott's new book on the deep history of the early states: Against the Grain. This was a great short read that I'd like to write a lot more about. But one of the most interesting topics turned out to be a theme which we just saw is dear to Deleuze's heart -- the last chapter is titled "The Golden Age of the Barbarians". Scott's basic point throughout the book is that the State is a mechanism organized for producing and capturing an agricultural surplus, and that it literally wrote the history books in order to flatter itself. In contrast, the 'barbarians' (a term Scott uses with tongue in cheek) didn't settle permanently, didn't write any history books, and yet just generally outlived the hell out of everybody. Turns out mono-cropping domesticates was a shitty idea from a public health perspective, required that most people subject themselves to slave-like labor in order to support a god-like elite, and on top of it left the poor suckers totally exposed to marauding bandits who were nobody's fool when it came to what the State represented; the Bedouin apparently had a saying: "raiding is our agriculture". For thousands of years, the early grain based states were like tiny cult islands precariously afloat in a sea of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers.
The story contrasts pretty strongly with our historical notion of the inevitable progress from the 'barbarism' of the nomads towards the 'civilization' of the sedentary State. Which reminded me of the twin chapters in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari discuss the relationship between the War Machine and the State Apparatus. I started glancing back at those, and I propose to spend a little bit of time translating them into Plain English. This is going to be a pretty summary effort, and I don't know how far I'll get, but I was encouraged when I discovered that their idea of "nomad science" was already directly related to the question that promoted the original detour into Stengers book: what should we make of the "replication crisis" in science? Is there a philosophical underpinning to why scientists are so focused on replication? So at least this new tangent leads back to the first tangent and ... I completely lost my train of thought.
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The first thing D&G point out is that the War Machine (WM) and the State Apparatus (SA) have completely different ideas of space. The SA divides up a fixed amount of closed space, while the WM populates an indefinite amount of open space. The first has a global plan or blueprint, while the second actually extends its space through ongoing embryologic differentiation.
[Incidentally, I think this distinction is why D&G refer to the State as an apparatus, rather than a machine. The rough difference: a mechanism (ie. an algorithmic process) that sees itself as having a clear teleological purpose is an apparatus, whereas one that operates 'blindly' is a machine. Hence, there is a sedentary State Apparatus that intelligently designs, and an evolving nomadic War Machine. Also incidentally, they provide a great discussion of the difference between Go and Chess; I feel sure one of them was a Go player.]
They turn this distinction between open and closed into a deep and philosophical one. But it's pretty obvious how it relates to the historical existence of states and nomads -- the State is constantly trying to draw a circle around itself that defines the limits of "civilization". It is constantly trying to capture and control a territory, often literally by building walls around it. The fact that these walls define an inside is just as important as what they do to protect it from an outside; Scott at one point approvingly quotes someone who observed that the Great Wall of China was built at least as much to keep tax paying subjects IN as it was to keep the Mongols OUT. So the State is an apparatus of capture. Capture of territory, capture of population, capture of grain, capture of tax.
Set against this, you have the nomads, who are basically those who refuse to be captured. Those who chafe at the strictures and malnutrition that living within the SA amounts to. Those who, rather than settle into the backbreaking grind that was early agriculture, choose raiding instead. This is the beginning of the nomad WM. You'll notice that this division starts the discussion of war from an unusual point of view. Often we think that war belongs to the State, and originated with it. After all, what better way to capture stuff, right? In which case the first wars would have been between rival Mesopotamian superpowers, kinda like you see in Intolerance. D&G are positing that this stage of State sponsored war was actually a later development that happened when the SA captured a piece of the WM. They're arguing that before this, war wasn't about capture, but was the means of resistance to being captured. In fact, this might almost be the definition of what they mean by the WM -- resistance to capture. "I will not be taken alive".
I don't know whether I'd say Against the Grain lends support to this argument about war or not. It definitely portrays the early States as essentially precarious grain cults that arose out of desperation when times got tough on the floodplain. That doesn't sound a lot like all-conquering imperial Babylon. They seem to have been pathetically weak, perpetually at risk of having a bad harvest of their one crop, beset by unknown new viruses due the the concentration of people and animals, and plagued by raiders and by their population getting fed up with plowing and wandering off into the hills. Maybe this all makes their contention about the original role of war a little more plausible.
Maybe the contention also gets a little more plausible when you consider D&G's discussion of the work of Pierre Clastres. There's no question that Clastres is hopping around in the background of Scott's thought in general -- there's only so many anarchist anthropologists out there (though, is it just me, or does the discipline seem to lend itself to anarchist leanings? I'm thinking of David Graeber, and even Ursula Le Guin, who was the daughter of anthropologists). Anyhow it's interesting to find Clastres appearing in A Thousand Plateaus as well. It's been quite a while since I read Society Against the State, but from what I remember of it, D&G aren't bending the thesis at all. Basically, Clastres looks at a bunch of modern day South American tribes and argues that they have created social mechanisms that specifically prevent the accumulation of permanent consolidated centers of power (ie. a State) in their politics. There's a variety of means employed. For example, the chief is expected to be the most generous person in the village, so always ends up dressed rags. In our context though, the important mechanism is that tribes like the Yanomamo and the Jivaro have a 'war chief' who has near absolute power leading them into battle, but who is explicitly denied any power once the tribe returns to civil life. In other words, they seem to use war to ward off the state, to resist it.
I think this is a very interesting thesis. It fits well with Scott's criticism of our received story of the inevitable march of civilization. Not everybody lined up to get into the State as soon as the doors opened and the new iCornX got planted. But, as D&G point out, the idea raises a few new questions. For example, if the Yanomamo live in an area of warring tribes and have never had any contact with a State or Empire, how is it that they designed a political system for resisting it? How did they even know what they were resisting? Also, if we are trying to use their example to project back in time to what was going on in ancient Mesopotamia, we face the obvious question of why these means of warding off the State ultimately failed. If the State has no 'natural gravitational force' that captures people, no power for wars of conquest at the outset, and is surrounded by people who not only aren't interested, but have whole systems for preventing the State from operating -- well, then, how did it get started in the first place? It's like we're in danger of moving our view too far in the opposite direction. If we see the State as so not inevitable that it starts to look accidental, then we'll need to explain how anybody planned to avoid an accident that they shouldn't have know was even possible, and why, despite this, the accident happened anyway, five times independently.
D&G's solution to this problem is to posit that the SA has always been there alongside the nomad WM. They think of this as partly a historical hypothesis. States and proto-States have such a long history that almost no nomadic band would have completely escaped contact with them. By the same token, States have always been surrounded by these bands, immersed in a world much larger than them that, despite their pretense to inevitable universality and self-sufficiency, they do not control. Unsurprisingly, since D&G are philosophers, not historians, Scott's book lends a lot more historic nuance to this story. He describes a world where there are all kinds of different interactions between the sedentaries and the nomads. Sure, as we've already seen, there's raiding as agriculture. But there's also a great deal of trade that happens over the millennia between the two, particularly in wood, metals, and most importantly, people. These are all things that the State can never seem to get enough of, and that must be brought from the outside, by going through the nomads. The floodplain is naturally geologically metal-poor. The early States use up all the surrounding wood as fuel quite quickly, and their need to import this heavy commodity is one of the main reasons they are all situated on rivers (the laws of economic geography haven't changed much). They're also chronically short of people because of the disease and the simple desertion. So in addition to domesticating the human female and converting her into a baby producing animal, they constantly import people the nomads have enslaved in the hinterland in exchange for surplus grain. In short, Scott's idea that there was a "golden age of the barbarian" that lasted from 3,000 BCE to 1,500 CE, emphatically supports D&G's contention that the SA and the WM have coexisted for millennia, defining themselves against one another as inside and outside, giving the lie to the State's dream to be a self-sufficient, perfectly contained, eternally-at-equilibrium structure. The SA merely engineers the facade of equilibrium. In reality, it has always been a far-from-equilibrium structure in uneasy but indispensable contact with the Outside.
Scott's history also sheds some light on the second question we asked -- why did the State form to begin with? He highlights an interesting gap of close to 4,000 years between the first signs of sedentary agricultural settlement in Mesopotamia, and the establishment of the first States. That is a long long time. It should give pause to anyone who thinks that there is a natural and inevitable progression from the invention of farming as a technology, to the formation of centralized political power. Maybe someone really was "warding off" a possibility for all those years. At any rate, while Scott says the explanation for why sedentary farming caught on despite being kinda bad for your health isn't completely clear, there does appear to be consensus about why 4,000 years of farming morphed into States: ecologic decline. Basically, the State is a last ditch organizational effort to preserve survival amidst the deterioration of a previously cushy ecologic niche. When humans finally run out of every other food web (due to changing climate or their own impacts) they turn to authoritarian mono-cropping with a vengeance. Which I think provides an interesting perspective on the question of "collapse" that seems to obsess us these days. For example, Jared Diamond claims that societies collapse because of their own impact on the environment, because of climate change, because trade with friendly neighbors declines, because of conflict with hostile neighbors, and because some societies don't have the political or social institutions to adapt in the face of problems 1-4 (this is his 5-point framework for the end of the world). Yet here we are arguing that basically these same forces are what gave birth to civilization. Something weird is obviously going on here that should make us back up and ask what we meant by "civilization" to begin with.
For D&G though, the confusing hypothesis of the perpetual interaction of the SA and WM is not merely historic, but also, and really primarily, philosophic. They are really talking about two types of forces, or algorithms, or tendencies (or as they prefer in ATP, "abstract machines") which are always there, but get instantiated in particular ways under particular circumstances (concrete "assemblages"). In fact, in some sense the WM and the SA are the twin ur-forces of their theory that go round and round as two side of the same coin. Opening and Closing. Extension and Consolidation. Capture and Flight. Outside and Inside, and Inside as Outside, like an immanent metaphysical Klein bottle.
Being abstract, these machines can show up anywhere, instantiated in any medium. Which accounts for the strange twist that D&G might add to the idea of a "golden age of the barbarian". They might ask: did it really end? Of course, there are just a few humans who still literally live as nomads. But what if we look at the nomad as akin to a "state of mind"? It would be characterized by its openness and adaptability, by the way it situates itself outside of State control, by the way it creates a space as it occupies it, piecemeal and locally, instead of marking off a circumscribed area from the outset. Maybe this nomadic system hasn't disappeared at all. Maybe its strength (and weakness) is its ability to change form, to avoid all capture.
Not only is there no universal State but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is to a set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the "multinational" type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc...) but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power. The modern world can provide us today with particularly well developed images of these two directions: worldwide ecumenical machines, but also a neo-primitivism, a new tribal society as described by Marshall McLuhan. These directions are equally present in all social fields, in all periods. It even happens that they partially merge. For example, a commercial organization is also a band of pillage, or piracy for part of its course and in many of its activities; or it is in bands that a religious formation begins to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less than worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine.
Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?
Now, I know, we're in danger of slipping back into French here. What's Plain about this English, you might ask. TL;DR you said (innumerable paragraphs ago, undoubtedly). So let me bring this triumphantly full circle and prove to you that the tangent line is really just the arc of a circle with infinite radius. That's right, let's talk nomad science.
D&G have this idea that you can also see the contrast between the WM and the SA expressed in the difference between "nomad science" and "royal science" ("State science"). But beyond, you know, being invented by nomads, what would make something a "nomad science"? It starts by modeling the world as a fluid, whose non-laminar flow can swirl into vortices to create the things we regard as solid, rather than treating a fluid as a particular case of a bunch of solids in motion. It doesn't assume every system is at equilibrium or every cow is a sphere in a vacuum. It studies non-elephant animals. Nomad science focuses on solving concrete problems in the context in which they arise, rather than trying to prove theorems from first principles. D&G basically have in mind the type of practical science we usually call engineering. And so it gets dismissed as "mere engineering" (ie. not "real, fundamental, elegant, civilized ... State" science ). It gets dismissed as "weather":
I once had a conversation with the late David Schramm, the famous cosmologist at the University of Chicago, about galactic jets. These are thin pencils of plasma that beam out of some galactic cores to fabulous distances, some times several galactic radii, powered somehow by mechanical rotation in the core. How they can remain thin over such stupendous distances is not understood, and something I find tremendously interesting. But David dismissed the whole effect as "weather." He was interested only in the early universe and astrophysical observations that could shed light on it, even if only marginally. He categorized the jets as annoying distractions on the grounds that they had nothing in particular to tell him about what was fundamental. I, in contrast, am fascinated by weather and believe that people claiming not to be are fibbing.
Ultimately D&G are contending that nomad science is a whole different way of looking at the innate creativity of matter itself, a creativity that goes way beyond the forms we try to mold a supposedly pliant matter into. This means that it operates outside Aristotle's hylomorphic model that distinguishes dumb content from intelligent form. I think many scientists deep down still subscribe to this basic model, a sort of un-reflexive and impoverished materialism that crumbles under a few lines of Socratic questioning:
Socrates: So, you think the world is made of atoms or quarks or material stuff of some sort?
Scientist: Yep. The universe is just a bunch of stuff following natural laws.
Socrates: Very interesting. So then, what kind of stuff are the laws made out of, if everything is made out of stuff?
Scientist: What!? No, look, the laws govern the stuff. The laws themselves aren't made of stuff. They're just natural mathematical laws. The stuff is governed by the laws.Socrates: I see, so you think there's a material world and an ideal world that interact exactly the way a governor and the governed interact? So you're a dualist; you didn't literally mean that it's "just" stuff.Scientist: What!? No, you're missing the point again. I'm a materialist! Everything is just stuff.Socrates: Except for the laws.Scientist: Right, except for the laws.
Socrates: Which I guess must not be real things then. Are they figments of human imagination, delirious inventions, dreams, visions, or what?
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a political rather than a metaphysical debate. Of course, D&G don't really think there's a difference. The model of inert matter governed by timeless physical law handed down from on high is not coincidentally the same as that between governing State and governed Subject. The point of both of them is to circumscribe a realm of possibility and to prohibit anything not expressly permitted. A more vital materialism would look at matter as if it were itself alive, even thinking ... because of course it is. What else is life and thought but a witness to the innate creativity of matter? "Thoughts" are particular things that the grey squishy matter between the ears of hairless chimps can do. A deeper materialism would have to deal with the way that matter makes up the laws as it goes (this is basically the point of Bob Laughlin's book cited above).Scientist: Huh!? No, look, the laws are just ... there. Everything is subject to them. Humans don't invent the laws, they just discover them. The laws are the most real and objective thing in the universe.Socrates: So the laws just come down from some other realm you deny exists, are kinda 'revealed' to you scientists, and then everything has to follow those laws.
What would a nomad science look like then? I think the idea is that it would begin from a practical question that's part of a larger social, political, and economic context, and proceed to empirically investigate how a not completely pliant matter can be sort of coaxed into a useful form aimed at solving this problem. The most important example D&G give of this type of science is nomad metallurgy. As we saw earlier, the State has to go through the nomads to get to metals. Only the nomads are able to ferret out where the right ores are and what processes can turn those into what types of metal. To do this they have to practice a sort of science that learns from experience how to follow certain features of geology and how to manipulate certain phase transitions that happen as you heat metals. Of course, you could always reduce this "in principle" to chemistry. Just like "in principle" the weather is nothing but a bunch of air molecules moving around. But the point is that the nomads are not interested in principles. Their science is practical and contextual, and it deals directly with situations where there are not yet any principles to fall back on -- like when you want to see if this type of mine will furnish rocks that you can turn into that type of steel. But just because there are no principles to "reduce" things to doesn't make what their doing "un-scientific".
D&G end up describing the difference in procedure as a contrast between following a matter and reproducing a law:
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 verification of science. But this is not the case: following is not at all the same thing as reproducing, and one never follows in order to 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
What caught my attention in this passage was the way it seemed to so naturally fit with Stengers discussion of the relationship between "science" and "matters of concern". Essentially, in nomad science everything is at the stage of a matter of concern. You could call it "pre-scientific" if you like, but only as much as you would use the term to describe engineering. It's really just empirical science before all the departmental lines get drawn and all the labs get set up and all the grad students get manufactured. Since the object of this science is practical it doesn't even bother to set itself up as a pure independent discipline. It's more like a science of general problem solving. And it follows a problem, say the problem of global warming, as it moves from physics and chemistry though biology and ecology to economics, politics, law, etc ... In other words, nomad science operates in a complex world where there's no lab experiment that can be repeated. There's no way to control the variables and to isolate the experiment from "outside influence". In other words, this type of science operates on the outside without being able to construct an interior, just like a little WM. The best it can hope for is to produce the same thing again, by taking into account what's changed in the context, and changing its methods accordingly. State science, by contrast wants to capture everything, to hold everything constant. To replicate its results again and again. What it's really replicating turns out to be first and foremost the stable experimental setup, an isolated inside.
For me, that connection really illuminates more of what Stengers is saying, especially in some of the later essays where she begins to ask what it is that scientist's want when they keep asking us to "save research". We can ask a similar question to her about "saving replication" from its crisis. In both cases, you might say, "save it from what"? Do we really want to make sure that Science is limited only to addressing topics that fit neatly inside a lab, within the bounds of a controlled environment that can be scientifically replicated to everyone's highest standard of p-value? Are we just "saving" science from confronting the danger of confronting questions that it can't answer authoritatively? Aren't those precisely the important questions?
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