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Deleuze for the
Desperate #10 War machine
Dave Harris
Discussion of this term is found
in the very long and rather rambling Plateau 12
of A Thousand Plateaus (ATP)
called Treatise on Nomadology – the
War Machine. As
we might predict, the first discussions of the
war machine in this Plateau refer to the
characteristics of the nomads who, among other
things, construct war machines.
The writing is typical of Deleuze and Guattari,
with all sorts of offhand references to things
like anthropological studies of the Bantu people
of southern Africa, an epic poem by
Kleist, and articles on the development of
technology by Serres, unfortunately still in
French. The discussion is punctuated with
various axioms, propositions and problems, but I
didn’t find them very helpful –perhaps you will.
Overall, it is an exhausting read and you will
need to take it easy and stay tightly focused.
For us, the topic here is the war machine rather
than nomads and their fascinating practices.
Forgive yourself if you can’t follow all the
dazzling detours yet – you come back to them in
time, as I did with Kleist. There is a more
extensive set of notes on the whole Plateau on
the website: http://www.arasite.org/TPch12.html
There is a much more readable
book by DeLanda (1991) which uses some of the
concepts in Deleuze and Guattari to explain war
machines, mostly in a military context. There
are some brief notes
on the website More generally, the term war
machine is also frequently used in Dialogues,
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987) (notes
here) in the context of resisting the
state and capitalism, largely through the
cultural politics of the 1960s. Incidentally,
those political themes are well described
overall in Chapter 4 of that book.
As usual, what we're going to do
is to try to manage the labyrinth by pursuing
some of the examples first and then get to the
underlying principles. You might find it useful
to have looked at the work on smooth space
first, since many of the characteristics of
smooth space can be transferred to the nomads
who produce war machines. They are flexible and
creative because their interests is in joining
up points not following conventional paths, they
challenge the forms of geographical and social
organization introduced by the state and so on.
So you might be led to think that nomads are
necessary for war machines to develop – only in
the last section are we told this is not always
so, that artists can also create war machines
although they have a more philosophical task to
do so, constructing smooth spaces by
investigating abstract possibilities in various
systematic ways, using deleuzian terminology
like the plane of consistency and the
machinic phylum (we stick with Latin with the
plural in this case -- phyla) (which is
discussed briefly below).
Let's start with some examples,
and these are pretty variable. The game of chess
is compared to the game of go for example (no
good if you don’t play both, but there is quite
a lot of detail). There is some anthropological
stuff about warriors and their historical
detachment from social order and the state. The
German tribes who once defeated the Roman
legions are admired, and so is Kleist's poem Pentheselia,
which portrays the great warrior Achilles as a
dangerously undisciplined, unpredictable and
volatile person, not at all happy to accept the
orders of the Greek Kings (just like Homer says
– and like Brad Pitt plays him in the film
Troy). In the poem, incidentally,
Penthesilea is Queen of the Amazons who meets
Achilles on the battlefields around Troy.
Instead of capturing a normal warrior and taking
him home to breed new little Amazons, which is
what was supposed to happen, she falls in
love with Achilles, and abandons the culture and
strict social and military rules of the Amazons
as a result.
Back to ATP. We get to
some general characteristics of war machines in
terms of 'secrecy, speed and affect' (392), and
these appear to guide the discussion
sporadically in what follows. Moving in smooth
space is explicitly suggested early on as a
characteristic as well.
Let's consider some other
examples first. There is the difference between
‘royal’ science, which is state sponsored and
institutionally established, and nomadic
science. Nomads here are those creative free
thinkers in mathematics, science and engineering
who were always a bit marginal to officially
recognized science and engineering. They were
outsiders, at first anyway. The obvious example
(not actually mentioned in the text) would be
the young Einstein working the Swiss Patent
Office before doing his famous work on
relativity. There have been creative military
thinkers too, like Napoleon Bonaparte, a classic
outsider, who developed the first people's army
and forms of popular involvement in military
campaigns, as well as thinking up some novel
tactics according to DeLanda.
There are also heroic
philosophers as private thinkers, not employed
in state institutions. The obvious example here
is Nietzsche, who famously argued that we should
take a hammer to the official icons of
philosophy. He wrote in a way that was quite
unlike official philosophical work. His
unorthodox forms included mythical characters,
metaphors, homely aphorisms. and folkish songs.
Nietzsche is also a good example to remind us
that even the most nomadic private thinker can
eventually be incorporated into a state
apparatus. He became a Nazi hero, or just
another philosopher on the syllabus of middling
English universities, a model for others to
follow.
We are told that early
stonemasons (also classic itinerants) saw the
task of building cathedrals as a kind of craft,
using an informal kind of working geometry
rather than a fully mathematical one imposed on
the designs by later architects. I am reminded
that my favourite novel, Moby Dick, also
says whale hunters divided up whale corpses
using their own geometrical forms -- one is the
'quorn'. We also find praise for early metal
workers and metallurgists, who were often nomads
or at least itinerants, and to learned to work
metal as a form of art, noting the important
qualitative changes in the material as it is
worked, the properties proper to the metal as
well as human intentions imposed from outside.
In particular, nomadic metal
workers were alert to the possibilities in
things called 'machinic phyla'.
These are particularly well
explained in Delanda's book. We normally think
of machines as actual devices to do work, a
washing machine or a motorbike, but there is an
abstract definition – an abstract machine is a
form of productive organization of forces,
sometimes expressed as an equation or formula.
The term is sometimes applied to social or
linguistic structures too. A phylum generally is
a grouping of objects or in this case machines
that have a similar basic structure. The term
also implies some notion of a kind of
evolutionary development (phylogenetic
development) between machines with a similar
structure, perhaps in the direction of
developing more and more sophisticated
possibilities. DeLanda gives the example of
propulsive weapons that use the same basic
notions of propulsive force and ways to
constrain it in a cylinder to provide a linear
direction. Once you have the basic idea (in the
form of a diagram in deleuzian terms) you can
pick up on any new inventions and move from
blowpipes to cannons and eventually missiles.
Steam engines are another byproduct. It's an
important part of the development of human
capacity to realize the existence of machinic
phyla of all kinds and access them through
abstract diagrams of all their dimensions. Again
early metal workers were particularly adept at
realizing the possibilities as they pursued
various combinations of heat, chemical
composition, force, working techniques and so
on.
There is an implication for the
use of numbers in various nomadic organizations
which follows. There they do the useful task of
counting so as to estimate forces and sizes, of
warrior bands, say, but did not develop the
abstract capacity of numbers to subdivide,
classify, striate and therefore specialize, as
in modern armies or states. Nomads probably knew
how to do this, but possibly chose not to since
that would bring about stifling top-down
organizational forms. The original use of
numbers in this way was crucial to the later
developments however, so that nomads more or
less invented the social uses of numbers.
Political examples
At the end of the plateau we get
some political examples that I think have
probably been quite influential from the
beginning. The first mention of ‘war machine’ I
came across was in Guattari's’ Psychoanalysis
and Transversality, (Guattari 1972 -- notes
here) where he is discussing the sort of
organization socialist militants ought to
develop. The trick was to organize effectively
to take on capitalism, without getting too
stratified and rigid (Like the then Stalinist
French Communist Party) or too sectarian and
defensive, which was the tendency for Trotskyite
groups. Maoists were too keen on the uncritical
cult of personality of Chairman Mao. All these
options were around in France in the 1960s and
Guattari debated with most of them and formed or
joined all sorts of other groups too. He argued
we had to open channels of proper ‘transversal’
communication with other groups as well as
militants – students or normal workers. We had
to listen as well as speak. We needed an
effective but flexible and open war machine.
The other example was provided by
the modern guerrilla forces that were proving to
be militarily pretty successful in China, Cuba
and of course Vietnam. Guerilla or people’s war
had caused a great deal of ferment in
theoretical circles too, since they seemed to
offer a new way to smash capitalist states
outside of bolshevik revolution or election
campaigns. Guerrillas are obviously loosely
organized, flexible in their choice of weapons
and locations, and able to flow through
territories rather than having to occupy
particular specialized positions like ranks in
an army. We mentioned this a bit in the
video on the rhizome. The tactics and
theoretical implications for the French
Communist Party of the successful guerrilla war
in Cuba are well described in an influential
book by R Debray if you are interested. Deleuze
and Guattari warn us that guerrilla warfare is
often combined in practice with more orthodox
warfare, however, classically in the final
stages of the campaign
M Harris section
The most sustained discussion of
the political aspects of war machines is found
in Dialogues, though. This was written
before ATP and it rehearses some of the points
met already. It is probably more readable It
doesn't bang on about nomads so much. So we are
told that the war machine originates in a
different way from the State. It was
originally developed by nomadic people against
sedentary people. It features a focus on
problems not theorems. The State itself persists
through the exercise of binary machines and
overcodings of space and social life . But the
war machine is run through with various kinds of
becomings. These include ‘the
becomings–imperceptible of the warrior’
(141). The war machine follows lines of
flight and deterritorialization. This is
compatible with its strategy when it turns to
military action The example is the nomad army of
Genghis Khan. Incidentally the date which
appears in the title of Plateau 12 is 1227. This
is the date Genghis Khan died.
Dialogues is not advocating
immediate military action, though. It is more
optimistic about resisting states with war
machines in cultural politics . States actually
have a problem of integrating the war machine
and institutionalizing it. So there is
always a residual tension between the two. Even
‘the most centralized state is not at all the
master of its plans, it is also an experimenter’
(145-6 ). It must adapt to change. So there is
room for local and opportunistic forms of
resistance. The question for resisters doing
oppositional politics is organizational, not
ideological. That is, we should not wait until
we develop a full political programme.
Instead,can we think of an organization which
does not mirror state apparatuses? Can we assess
assemblages in terms of how close they are to
the state apparatus? Can we develop a
suitably modern war machine which will avoid
becoming fascist. And divert its own powers of
destruction? Perhaps we could try out these
thoughts on universities? In the
radical 60s it all seemed more likely. I quote,
‘In a certain way it is very simple, this
happens on its own and every day’ (145). There
was no need to organize a revolutionary
apparatus on the scale of the state. Those were
happy optimistic days!
End of M Harris section
Back to ATP
We find more caution in the later
work. As usual. actual examples in each case are
likely to be mixed. There is a constant struggle
between war machines and states for example.
Royal science is always looking to build on the
achievements of nomadic science, craftsmen are
always likely to be incorporated into more
regular structured occupations, nomad
mathematics is always likely to be systematized,
warriors and their fighting groups are always
likely to be incorporated into state armies.
As usual then we need to think of
some pure definitions, because after all we are
philosophers. Maybe in the glorious 60s it
was less important to philosophize. We flirted
with this a bit earlier with the notions of
secrecy speed and affect, for example. These are
not developed very systematically, especially
the notion of secrecy, which implies being able
to operate outside the state’s organizations and
systems of surveillance, to be private.
Affect is a bit more interesting,
taking the term to mean human reactions,
emotions in the most general sense. It is
obvious that actual wars release all sorts of
powerful affects as state organizations break
down, and people lose their normal sense of
being a responsible citizen and normal
human—they become 'desubjectified'. These
affects can be so powerful as to produce
creative and unusual effects, including various
kinds of becoming. Becoming-animal is quite
straightforward—warriors become not only brutal
but cunning, resourceful and adaptable.
Becoming-woman seems to be rather unlikely, but
there are cases cited (I think in the Plateau on becoming,
and in Dialogues too) where warriors
disguised themselves as women, not only to hide
but to adapt, and learn from the activity.
Speed refers to that rather
strange special usage that crops up quite a lot
in ATP and elsewhere. High or infinite
speed really refers to a capacity to make
connections instantly, and that happens best in
smooth space. It is that capacity that explains
qualitative differences and deviations from the
normal. The state is constantly attempting to
regulate these high speed connections, to slow
things down, and this is one reason why the
state always attempts to striate space and to
impose other forms of regularity and
generalization. High speed connections are
associated with singularity, flow and
deterritorialization. Of course, active
organizations, including war machines, find
variable speeds useful: perhaps the most common
example here is the counterattack, where patient
slow defence suddenly turns into rapid attack.
So we have seen general
characteristics here which help us distinguish
the pure war machine. It's the same sort of
exercise that we saw trying to develop the pure
smooth space. We end with an abstract or ideal
war machine. You will note that we've not
focused exclusively on military activity or even
militant politics in some of the examples we
cited like science and metalworking. The ideal
war machine can also describe innovative
practice in the arts, in painting, in politics
and philosophy. It will be a set of activities
that closely parallel those found in the
invention of smooth space -- taking a plane cut
through a multiplicity to explore it is how we
described it there.
As usual, the plateau ends with a
warning that like smooth space, war machines are
very attractive to capitalist states because
they are so innovative and flexible. In the
video on smooth space we saw that the smooth
unregulated dimensions of the sea proved to be
ideal for the modern free- roaming nuclear
submarine. Current notions of total war also
show how a state can harness the flexibility and
dangerous affects of war machines to develop a
total war, a war without limits.
References
Debray, R (1967) Revolution in the
Revolution?. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
DeLanda, M (1991) War in the Age of Intelligent
Machines, New York: Swerve Editions
Guattari,
F. (1972) Psychoanalysis and Transversality.
Texts and interviews 1955-1971.
Introduction by Deleuze. Translated by
Ames Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)
back to
Deleuze page
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