Day 24 Welcome to the War Machine

1. Day 24Welcome to the War Machine HUM 201 WI 2005

2. Itinerary • Reevaluate wandering after the loss of the subject (emergence, space, and knowledge) • Introduce you to Deleuze and Guattari • Nomadology 101 • Primer on thought as a weapon

3. Wandering recap • Wanderers moved through the world and processed information • Wanderers perceived time as changes in space • Wanderers couldn’t possess goods while wandering (knowledge moved from possession to exploration and communication)

4. Wandering and the loss of the subject • Wandering no longer an existential state • No longer about how individuals or groups act • Wandering now a process or moment in how we recognize the new--nomadism • Destablizes stable constructs • Has its own way of knowing • Produces its own type of space

5. Deleuze and Guattari • Both react against dominant trends in thought-Hegel, Marxism, Psychoanalysis • Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) - trained as a philosopher • How does novelty occur despite the loss of the active subject? • Felix Guattari (1930-1992)- trained as a psychoanalyst • What new types of subjectivity emerge after the loss of the psychoanalytic subject? Capitalism and Schizophrenia

6. "We don't claim to have written a madman's book, just a book in which one no longer knows-and there is no reason to know- who exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient, an untreated patient, a present, past of future patient. . . . Now, strangely, if we have tried to go beyond this traditional duality, it's precisely because we were writing together. Neither of us was the madman, neither of us was the psychiatrist; there had to be two of us in order to find a process that was not reduced either to the psychiatrist or his madman, or to a madman and his psychiatrist.The process is what we call a flux. Now, once again, the flux is a notion that we wanted to remain ordinary and undefined. This could be a flux of words, ideas, shit, money, it could be a financial mechanism or a schizophrenic machine: it goes beyond all dualities. We dreamed of this book as a flux-book."(from "In Flux" in Chaosophy. By Felix Guattari, Semiotext[e], NY, 1995.)

7. Nomadology 101 • The State • Not states against states but states against all else • Conserve • Makes distinction between governors and governed possible

8. The War Machine • War is not state against state, rather State against disorder (the nomad) • War is the limiting of exchanges • Prevents the state from conserving • All relations remain immanent • Felt at the margins of the State but really existing outside • Nomads don’t territorialize--not a migrant

9. The state in permanent war • State • Example: The Empire of all well ordered capital exchanges • The tendency in this system to order the world • War Machine • Example: terrorists and pirates, or, rather that part of terrorism and piracy that destabilizes the State • The tendency of things to escape order

10. Knowledge • Nomad Science: One of becoming • Looking for change • Traversing and engendering • No history, just a geography • Royal or Imperial Science: One of stasis • Looking for eternal laws • Representing

11. Space • Nomad space: Smooth • Open ended • Space leads to many different directions • Always has the tendency to become something other (De Certeau’s “space”) • Imperial Space: Striated • Gridded (De Certeau’s “place”) • Space leads to specific ends • Driven by an anxiety against change • Think of maps and the sea

12. http://www.christianhubert.com/hypertext/smooth_striated.htmlhttp://www.christianhubert.com/hypertext/smooth_striated.html

13. Implications for thought • Make thought a war machine • Use research to keep thinking the unthinkable • Thought operate from the inability to take form • We think precisely because categories are inadequate • Thought as a weapon • Use thinking to help change the world and not protect the status quo