Nomadology

01 / Thesis

Not two armies. Two ontologies of space.

When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari sat down to write the twelfth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus (1980), they weren't writing military history. They were proposing that every social formation — an army, a marketplace, a piece of software, a trading desk — organizes itself according to one of two spatial logics: the striated, metric space of the State, or the smooth, vectorial space of the nomad. "Smooth space and striated space," they wrote, "are not of the same nature" — yet neither exists in a pure state; each is constantly "translated, transversed" into the other. A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 14

The war machine is their name for the nomadic invention built to occupy and hold that smooth space — and it is, crucially, defined as exterior to the State, not a stunted or primitive version of a State army. What follows is a field guide through both concepts, and a look at how much later systems theory — networks, feedback, self-organization — rhymes with a philosophy of space written half a century earlier.

02 / Two Spaces

Smooth space, striated space

Drag the divider. On the left, the State's striated space: metric, walled, organized around fixed points a body moves between. On the right, the nomad's smooth space: haptic, vectorial, organized around a trajectory that subordinates the points it passes through. Christian Hubert, "Smooth / Striated"

STRIATED

Walls, enclosures, roads between enclosures. Points fixed by the grid; movement goes from one point to another.

SMOOTH

Desert, steppe, sea. No fixed distances — only traits, drift, and intensity. The trajectory subordinates the points.

The war machine's four components

01

Spatio-geographic

Smooth space, as against the striated space of the State.

02

Arithmetic

Number organizes the pack itself, not fixed units it counts.

03

Affective & kinetic

Speed and affect — an "absolute" movement, not a measured rate.

04

Semiotic

A nomad, "minor" science of trajectories rather than fixed essences.

After Daniel W. Smith's reading of the "Treatise on Nomadology" — "Place, Expression, and Nomadic Philosophy," PhilArchive

STATE

interiority — command flows down

exterior to

WAR MACHINE

exteriority — no center to obey

03 / Axiom I

"The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus."

This is the opening axiom of the "Treatise on Nomadology," and it means something precise: the war machine isn't a weaker or earlier version of a State army — it's a different form entirely. The State constitutes what we usually take as the very model of order — an interiority that centralizes and commands. The war machine is a pure form of exteriority: it has no center to obey, because it is not organized around obedience at all. Deleuze & Guattari, "Nomadology"

Deleuze illustrated the difference with two board games. Chess is a game of State: its pieces are coded, each with an "internal nature and intrinsic properties" that fix how it may move — it codes and decodes a striated battlefield. Go has no such interiority: its stones are anonymous, collective, "form-taking" — they territorialize and deterritorialize an open field with every move, a war without front lines, "without aim or destination."

“The nomas of Go against the State of chess, nomas against polis.”

— Deleuze & Guattari, Nomadology (source)

04 / Two Diagrams of Thought

The tree and the rhizome

A Thousand Plateaus opens by attacking "arborescent" thought: the tree, with its single root and hierarchical branching, as the West's default image for knowledge, organization, and power. Against it, Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome — grass, ginger, fungus — a system with no center that connects any point to any other point. Rhizome (philosophy), Wikipedia

1–2

Connection & heterogeneity

Any point can — and must — connect to any other, regardless of kind.

3

Multiplicity

The rhizome has no unity to derive from; it is a multiplicity, not a One splitting into many.

4

Asignifying rupture

Cut a rhizome anywhere — it starts up again on an old line, or a new one.

5–6

Cartography & decalcomania

It is a map that gets produced, oriented toward experimentation — not a structure that gets traced.

After the six rhizome principles in A Thousand Plateaus, ch. 1 — full excerpt (Lane Community College)

05 / A Real Bridge

Where nomad thought meets systems theory

The connection isn't just an analogy imposed from outside. A Thousand Plateaus is structured as a series of numbered "plateaus" rather than chapters — a term Deleuze and Guattari took directly from anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson, who coined it to describe a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensity that never builds toward a climax. Conference paper, Academia.edu

Around the same postwar moment, biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy was formulating General System Theory: living and social systems are open — exchanging matter, energy, and information with their environment — organized by feedback, capable of emergent properties no single part possesses, and often reaching the same state through different paths (equifinality). "In the last resort," Bertalanffy wrote, "we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction." Bertalanffy, General System Theory (1968)

Later theorists of decentralized networks have made the link explicit: the rhizome's refusal of a single root or control center reads, to them, like a philosophical preview of open, self-organizing systems — the network winning out over the hierarchy not because it is more orderly, but because it routes around any single point of failure. "Rhizomatic Trust," Noosphere

06 / Escape

Deterritorialization & lines of flight

Every assemblage is pulled two ways at once: territorialization, which settles a flow into a fixed order, and deterritorialization, "a movement of deterritorialisation, a line of flight along which the assemblage breaks down or becomes transformed into something else." Paul Patton, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1994)

particles born inside the grid, following a line of flight until they escape it — or get pulled back

07 / Appropriation

How the State captures the war machine

The State doesn't invent the war machine — nomads do. But the State is very good at appropriating it: subordinating an exterior force to an interior purpose through what Deleuze and Guattari call an "apparatus of capture" — taxation, overcoding, standing armies. Once captured, the war machine "takes war as object" and aims at "global destruction." Uncaptured, its object was never war at all, but "the drawing of creative lines of flight" and the composing of smooth space. Rhuthmos, "The Rhuthmoi of War"

Historian Manuel De Landa pushed the point further: in practice, it's State armies that adopt nomadic operations — decentralized, adaptive, fast — that tend to win in the long run. Capture is never finished; it has to be constantly re-elaborated. The Funambulist, on De Landa

08 / Field Terms

Glossary

Click any term for its working definition and source.

09 / Further Reading