Day 24 Welcome to the War Machine

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Day 24Welcome to the War Machine

• HUM 201
• WI 2005

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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

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Wandering recap

• Wanderers moved through the world and processed
  information
• Wanderers perceived time as changes in space
• Wanderers couldnt possess goods while wandering
  (knowledge moved from possession to exploration
  and communication)

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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

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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
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• "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, Semiotexte, NY,
  1995.)

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Nomadology 101

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

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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 dont territorialize--not a migrant

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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

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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

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Space

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

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http//www.christianhubert.com/hypertext/smooth_st
riated.html
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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

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