(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
Axiom 1: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.
Proposition 1: This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama and games.
1
Georges Dumézil in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the magician-king and the jurist priest, Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposition term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the “bond” and the pact,” etc. [n1] But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted in themselves a sovereign unity.
2
…the State… either…uses policemen and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates through immediate, magical capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat – or …army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of military function. [n2] …irreducible to the State apparatus…
Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less then to Mitra. [n3]… He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact.
3
Chess is a game of State…internal nature and intrinsic properties, from which their movements, situations and confrontations derive.
Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, but only situational ones.
4
The nomos of Go against the state of chess, nomos against polis. …chess codes and decodes space… Go proceeds altogether differently territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere . . . . Another justice, another movement, another space-time.
5
Dumézil analyzes the three “sins” of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual transgression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State).
It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually tae as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.
7
The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will always cause it problems.
…the first man of the modern State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles’ arms…
8
Achilles is unable to prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or from loving Penthesileia, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time.
…Germanic war machine that breaks with the imperial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman State.
Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disciplined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself, to become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman?
10
The prime interest in Pierre Clastres’ theories is his break with this evolutionist postulate. Not only does he doubt that the State is the product of an ascribable economic development, but he asks if it is not a potential concern of primitive societies to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand.
11
Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms, are a part of chieftainship…
It should not be concluded that war is a state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state that wards off and prevents the State.
[n30 p. 129] … we may refer to the formula of Michel Serres, in his commentary on the geometrical figure called the salinon: “It is rigorous, anexact. And not precise, exact or inexact. Only a metrics is exact: (Naissance de la physique, p. 29). Gaston Bachelard’s book, Essai sur la connaissance approchée (Paris: Vrin, 1927), remains the best study of the steps and procedures constituting a rigor of the anexact, and of their creative role in science.]
28
What we have, rather, are two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal science is perpetually appropriating the contents of vague or nomad science, and nomad science is perpetually releasing the contents of royal science.
29
Settling, sedentarizing labor-power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the spot (corvée) or among indigents (charity workshops)—this has always been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer both a band vagabondage and a body nomadism.
30
…if the State is always finding it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so not because the content of theses sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of the State. The difference is not extrinsic…
31
Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form that organizes matter, and a matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. …all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression.
33-34
The nomos, or the dispars, is entirely different. Not that the other forces refute gravity or contradict attraction. Though it is true that they do not go against them, they do not result from them either, they do not depend on them, but bear witness to events that are always supplementary or of “variable affects.” Each time a new field opened up in science—under conditions making this a far more important notion than that of form or object—it proved not be irreducible to the field of attraction and the model of the gravitational forces, although not contradicting them. It affirmed a “more” or an excess, and lodged itself in that excess, that deviation. When chemistry took a decisive step forward, it was always by adding to the force of weight liaisons of another type (for example electric) that transformed the nature of chemical equations. [n34]
36
…Michel Serres… “Physics is reducible to two sciences, a general theory of routes and paths, and a global theory of waves.” [n35]
… following is not at all the same thing as reproducing, and one never follows in order to reproduce. The ideal of reproduction, deduction or induction is part of royal science… the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the law…
37
…with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself.
38
…a smooth space, a vectorial field, a non-metric multiplicity are always translatable, and necessarily translated, into a “compars”; a fundamental operation by which one repeatedly overlays upon each point of smooth space a tangent Euclidean space endowed with a sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction instead of continuing to follow it in an “exploration by legwork.” [n37] This is the triumph of the logos or the law over the nomos.
…ambulant or nomad sciences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to have an autonomous development.
[n41 p. 131] On the role of the ancient poet as a “functionary of sovereignty,” See Dumézil, Servius et la Fortune (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 64 ff., and Detienne, Les maîtres de vérité, pp. 17 ff.