Every time Deleuze wants to talk about an open space, he will reach for the image of the nomad. Thinking about nomads is great because it forces us to counteract our now deeply seated prejudice that settling down to a sedentary life on a fixed piece of property as subjects of some state is the natural, inevitable, best and really only way to live. Even at this early stage of his philosophy, he's clearly making a political and historical point. Nobody seems to refer to nomads as "subjects". Their movement is a way to be in the world that clearly locates them in space. But the space isn't conceived as a closed state totality from the start, and they occupy it in a way that does not make the ground "theirs", that is, does not convert it into "property". As James Scott confirmed, subject, property, sedentarism, and agriculture all go together, and the nomads are having none of it.
The main thrust of the nomad image in D&R is metaphysical though. Deleuze is just using the nomad's version of political anarchy to help us see the way we have carried the same state sponsored concepts into the very depths of our metaphysics. Just think about the loaded terms "subject" and "property". Is it coincidence that we think of the building blocks of the universe as substantial subjects, each with various properties, each farming its little metaphysical plot of wheat? So much for philosophy starting from some mythical land of self-evident a priori principles!
I wrote some before about how thinking about embryology can help us understand how an open space and a nomadic distribution works, and those comments are worth revisiting. Looking at this again now in the context of univocity though, I might shift the emphasis onto a sentence that I didn't quote last time:
It is an errant and even 'delirious' distribution, in which things are deployed across the entire extensity of a univocal and undistributed Being. It is not a matter of being which is distributed according to the requirements of representation, but of all things being divided up within being in the univocity of simple presence (the One - All).
One of the biggest, but also weirdest, aspects of Univocal Being is that it does not work the way you expect a totality to work. If you think of it simply as a restatement of the idea that "everything is one", you miss the point -- univocal is not the same thing as unitary. On the one hand, it's not a closed whole which would be divisible into parts. In fact, he says univocal being is actually undistributed. On the other hand, we can't think of it in terms of mystical union either, because this would imply that the distinctions we see are actually illusory, which is to say that they don't exist in the same way as the undistinguished whole. This is the point of the reference to Parmenides on pg. 36. There is not a "path of timeless truth" and a "path of changing appearance and opinion" -- the whole idea of univocity is that appearance exists in the same sense as reality so that there's only one way to exist. So you end up with a non-whole not-dividing itself into parts, and have to make sense of the idea that somehow the parts are the whole. The whole structure kinda reminds me of something out of one of Cantor's infinite sets. Or the description of the ground in the first section of this chapter.
This idea that the parts are the whole, or at least equal to the whole occurs again in the discussion of hierarchy.
There is a hierarchy which measures beings according to their limits, and according to their degree of proximity or distance from a principle. But there is also a hierarchy which considers things and beings from the point of view of power: it is not a question of considering absolute degrees of power, but only of knowing whether a being eventually 'leaps over' or transcends its limits in going to the limit of what it can do, whatever its degree.
The words 'everything is equal' may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal, univocal Being: equal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things reside unequally in this equal being. There, however, where they are borne by hubris, all things are in absolute proximity, and whether they are large or small, inferior or superior, none of them participates more or less in being, nor receives it by analogy. Univocity of being thus also signifies equality of being. Univocal Being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy
I'm still struggling to fully the understand the concept of power. We're obviously talking about some sort of "absolute power" here, not a relative comparison of the power of two distinct forms. It seems to me that the limit in question can really only be defined after the fact. You only know what the limit was once you cross it and transform into something else, similar to the way a phase transition works as ice turns into water. Univocal Being isn't a pre-given totality, and the forms that populate it can't be defined in advance either. In fact, since Being is univocal, the whole and the parts (wrong terms of course) that come to populate it exist in exactly the same way. Which I think means we have to conceive of both of them as continually expanding and transforming, though these transformations have to be conceived as themselves discontinuities that create "leaps" and "lines". Does this mean that we can also only define Being by looking in the rearview mirror? I'm tempted to link this to the concept of time, but it seems pretty tenuous. And in the other direction, when we say that something "deploys all its power" are we saying that it's effectively "becoming equal to Being"? This seems similar to the dissolving of identity one might might associate with buddhism, where the interconnection with the rest of the world has become so intense, that there's no definition of "you" left that doesn't include everything. But again, I feel like I'm veering into something very abstract and of dubious value here.
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