MPCAD - Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine

[Michael Bailey]

a) presumably there is a running play here on Leibniz's Monadology...
wouldn't you say?

b) Is this where the Guess Who got "war machines" from?
("I don't need your war machines/ I don't need your ghetto scenes")

c) Gee, they sure seem to hate the State.
Why? --  "The State is what makes
the division between governors and governed possible"
maybe that's why

d) Yet they seem to admire the war machine, they see it
as not at all an instrument of the State but antithetical to it...

e) they link the war machine with nomadism
but also with the development of science

f) They even distinguish "royal science" - the science of the state,
"all operations [isolated] from the conditions of intuition"
from "ambulant science" "situated in an objective zone of fluctuation
that is coextensive with reality itself."
(can't help thinking of Merle as engineer versus the theorists of Candlebrow -
he found a way to work with those guys, though...)

g) "The nomads turn first against the forest and the mountain dwellers,
then descend upon the farmers.  What we have here is something llike
the flipside
or the outside of the State-form..."

h) metallurgy - the metallurgist is neither nomad nor citizen
The parts on metallurgy, and on hydraulics and geometry
(including our friend Desargues) are very nice indeed.

i) When I was in school in the early 70s, a guest lecturer in history
was booed just for being a military historian.
D&G certainly don't go that route.
In fact, they seem to admire "war machines"

j) So, I am probably not going to agree with them completely.
I didn't boo the military historian, but I don't admire the ethos.
In fact, I chose my discursive line through the book - er, rhizome - to traverse
this plateau early on, to get it over with.

k) although my concord with their admiration for nomadic
marauders and war machines is less than total,
their presentation is thought-provoking.  Specifically,
it got me to thinking about the State.  The last philosophers I tried
to read with enthusiasm were Mises and Rothbard, and had been
carrying around their (especially Rothbard's) notion of the State
as only destructive.  Yet D&G, especially D, lived in a fairly beneficent
State and benefitted from its educational system.  (whereas Rothbard and Mises
both were severely underemployed by the official system, and Mises
had to flee the 3rd Reich)

l) Unlike M&R, D&G don't seem to dwell much on the State
 per se ("we were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop") -
there is no litany of State-caused ills, no summation to the jury
in fact, perhaps it represents something to set their new ideas against,
just as the tree represents something to contrast their "rhizome" meme with
(they do expend some pains to clarify that they aren't anti-Tree)

m) Also they were writing to a world where Marxism held much prestige,
and post-1968 wanted to be part of the assemblage disowning the Marxist State?

n) charming passage: "All of a sudden, it is as if the collective body
of the notary publics were advancing like Arabs or Indians..."


-- 
"He ain't crazy, he's a-makin' pottery" - Finley Peter Dunne