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"Машина войны" (отрывки).TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY--THE WAR MACHINE

Selections from:
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Translated by Brian Massumi

TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY--THE WAR MACHINE
This text for use of Students of Philosophy 6600. Possible errors.

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12 : 1227 (A.D.): Treatise on Nomadology-- The War Machine

[Wood Chariot]

Nomad Chariot. Entirely of Wood, Altai. Fifth to Fourth Centuries B.C.
картинка в копилке

AXIOM I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.

PROPOSITION I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic,
drama, and games.

Georges Dumйzil. 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. 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. "At once
antithetical and complementary. necessary to one another and
consequently without hostility, lacking a

351

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mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically
calls forth a homologous specification on another. The two together
exhaust the field of the function." They are the principal elements of a
State apparatus that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary
distinctions, and forms a milieu of inferiority. It is a double
articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum.

It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. Either
the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through
war-either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has
no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture.
seizes" and "binds," preventing all combat-or, the State acquires an
army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and
the organization of a military function.2 As for the war machine in
itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside
its sovereignty and prior to its law:

it comes from elsewhere. Indra, the Warrior god, is in opposition to
Varuna no less than Mitra. 3 He can no more he reduced to one or the
other than he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a
pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the
ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he
betrays the pact. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a
celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power
(puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He
bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible
cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he
unties bonds . . .).4 He bears witness, above all, to other relations
with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of
becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between
"states": a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman,
which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between
relations. In every respect, the war machine is of another species,
another nature, another origin than the State apparatus.

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State
apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and
Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the
pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the
court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded: they have
an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements,
situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities: a knight
remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a
subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these
relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess
player or the game's form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are
pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous,
collective, or third-person function:

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"It" makes a move. "It" could he a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant.
Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no
intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very
different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess
pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the
adversary's pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand,
a Go piece has a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with
nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of
insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All
by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation
synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only).
Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war,
with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without
battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles
even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is
not at all the same: in chess. it is a question of arranging a closed
space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying
the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go,
it is a question arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of
maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement
is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or
destination, without departure or arrival. The "smooth" space of Go, as
against the "striated" space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State
of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and
decodes space, whereas 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.
"They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext ..."
"In some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the
capital. At any rate, here they are: it seems that every morning there
are more of them."'
Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same schema:
Nkongolo. an indigenous emperor and administrator of public works, a man
of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to the
hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves. Mbidi's son, a man of
secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with
that inconceivable thing, an army. He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to
build a new State.6 "Between" the magical-despotic State and the
juridical State containing a military institution, we see the flash of
the war machine, arriving from without.

From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his

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eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity,
deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumйzil 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).7 The warrior is in the position of betraying everything,
including the function of the military, or of understanding nothing. It
happens that historians, both bourgeois and Soviet, will follow this
negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan understood nothing: he
"didn't understand" the phenomenon of the city. An easy thing to say.
The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to
the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to
conceptualize. 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
take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking.
What complicates everything is that this extrinsic power of the war
machine tends, under certain circumstances, to become confused with one
of the two heads of the State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with
the magic violence of the State, at other times with the State's
military institution. For instance, the war machine invents speed and
secrecy; but there is all the same a certain speed and a certain secrecy
that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily. So there is a great
danger of identifying the structural relation between the two poles of
political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these two poles,
with the power of war. Dumezil cites the lineage of the Roman kings:
there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series, with
variants and an alternation between these two types of equally
legitimate rulers; but there is also a relation with an "evil king."
Tullus Hostilius, Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a
disquieting and illegitimate character.8 Shakespeare's kings could also
be invoked: even violence, murders, and perversion do not prevent the
State lineage from producing "good" kings, but a disturbing character
like Richard III slips in, announcing from the outset his intention to
reinvent a war machine and impose its line (deformed, treacherous and
traitorous, he claims a "secret close intent"9 totally different from
the conquest of State power, and another

-an other--relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war
power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets
muddled: the war machine can then be understood only through the
categories of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside
the State. But, returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine
is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin.
One would have to

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say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the
two articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to
the other. But "between" the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if
only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war
machine of its own: it can only appropriate one in the form of a
military institution, one that will continually cause it problems. This
explains the mistrust States have their military institutions, in that
the military institution inherits an extrinsic war machine. Karl von
Clausewitz has a general sense of this situation when he treats the flow
of absolute war as an Idea that States partially appropriate according
to their political needs, and in relation to which they are more or less
good "conductors."

Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war
becomes outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury,
which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles,
then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from
Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes
to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the
modern

State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles' arms, only to convert
them to other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State--not Ajax,
who is condemned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned.10
No one has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric
and conjemned, better than Kleist. In Penthesilea, Achilles is already
separated from his power: the war machine has passed over to the
Amazons, a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are
organized uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the Scythians, the
Amazons spring forth like lightning, "between" the two States, the Greek
and the Trojan. They sweep away everything in their path. Achilles is
brought before his double, Penthesilea. And in his ambiguous struggle,
Achilles is unable to prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or
from loving Penthesilea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses
at the same time. Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek
State that Penthesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional
relation of war with him without herself betraying the collective law of
her people, the law of the pack that prohibits "choosing" the enemy and
entering into one-to-one relationships or binary distinctions.

Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it
against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start.
Doubtless Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the
imperial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to
the Roman State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and
stands condemned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law
of the State. As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything
more than

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banditry. 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? Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a
monster, and Kleist has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that the
most uncanny modernity lies with him? It is because the elements of his
work are secrecy, speed, and affect.11 And in Kleist the secret is no
longer a content held within a form of interiority: rather, it becomes a
form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to
itself. Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a
"subject," to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure
exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force:
love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects. And these affects
are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the becoming-animal of the
warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects transpierce the body like arrows,
they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization velocity of affect.
Even dreams (Homburg's, Pentheselea's) are externalized, by a system of
relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the war machine.
Broken rings. This element of exteriority--which dominates everything,
which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to
invent--will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic
episodes or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is: "This
affect is too strong for me," and a flash is: "The power of this affect
sweeps me away," so that the Self (Moi) is now nothing more than a
character whose actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to
the point of death. Such is Kleist's personal formula: a succession of
flights of madness and catatonic freezes in which no subjective
interiority remains. There is much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese
fighter, interminably still, who then makes a move too quick to see. The
Go player. Many things in modern art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel
are old men next to Kleist. Could it be that it is at the moment the war
machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the
utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving,
dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or
revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the
war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of thc
same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis,
affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of
pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental
thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?

{Next}

Selections from:

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

This text for use of Students of Philosophy 6600.
TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY--THE WAR MACHINE

{Axiom One} --- {Home}

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PROPOSITION IX. War does not necessarily have the battle as its object,
and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its
object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result (under
certain conditions).

We now come to three successive problems. First, is the battle the
"object" of war? But also, is war the "object" of the war machine? And
finally, to what extent is the war machine the "object" of the State
apparatus? The ambiguity of the first two problems is certainly due to
the term "object," but implies their dependency on the third. We must
nevertheless approach these problems gradually, even if we are reduced
to multiplying examples. The first question, that of the battle,
requires an immediate distinction to be made between two cases: when a
battle is sought, and when it is essentially avoided by the war machine.
These two cases in no way coincide with the offensive and the defensive.
But war in the strict sense (according to a conception of it that
culminated in Foch) does seem to have the battle as its object, whereas
guerrilla warfare explicitly aims for the nonbattle. However, the
development of war into the war of movement, and into total war, also
places the notion of the battle in question, as much from the offensive
as the defensive points of view: the concept of the nonbattle seems
capable of expressing the speed of a flash attack, and the counterspeed
of an immediate response.104 Conversely, the development of guerilla
warfare implies a moment when, and forms under which, a battle must be
effectively sought, in connection with exterior and interior "support
points." And it is true that guerrilla warfare and war proper are
constantly borrowing each other's methods and that the borrowings run
equally in both directions (for example, stress has often been laid on
the inspirations land-based guerrilla warfare received from maritime
war). All we can say is that the battle and the nonbattle are the double
object of war, according to a criterion that does not coincide with the
offensive and the defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla
warfare.

That is why we push the question further back, asking if war itself is
the

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object of the war machine. It is not at all obvious. To the extent that
war (with or without the battle) aims for the annihilation or
capitulation of enemy forces, the war machine does not necessarily have
war as its object (for example, the raid can be seen as another object,
rather than as a particular form of war). But more generally, we have
seen that the war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it is
in its essence the constitutive element of smooth space, the occupation
of this space, displacement within this space, and the corresponding
composition of people: this is its so1e and veritable positive object
(nomos). Make the desert, the steppe, grow; do not depopulate it, quite
the contrary. If war necessarily results, it is because the war machine
collides with States and cities, as forces (of striation) opposing its
positive object: from then on, the war machine has as its enemy the
State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts as its
objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine
becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form.
The Attila, or Genghis Khan, adventure clearly illustrates this
progression from the positive object to the negative object. Speaking
like Aristotle, we would say that war is neither the condition nor the
object of the war machine, but necessarily accompanies or completes it,
speaking like Derrida, we would say that war is the "supplement" of the
war machine. It may even happen that this supplementarity is
comprehended through a progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation. Such, for
example, was the adventure of Moses: leaving the Egyptian State behind,
launching into the desert, he begins by forming a war machine, on the
inspiration of the old past of the nomadic Hebrews and on the advice of
his father-in-law, who came from the nomads. This is the machine of the
Just, already a war machine, but one that does not yet have war as its
object. Moses realizes, little by little, in stages, that war is the
necessary supplement of that machine, because it encounters or must
cross cities and States, because it must send ahead spies (armed
observation), then perhaps take things to extremes (war of
annihilation). Then the Jewish people experience doubt, and fear that
they are not strong enough: but Moses also doubts, he shrinks before the
revelation of this supplement. And it will be Joshua, not Moses, who is
charged with waging war. Finally, speaking like Kant, we would say that
the relation between war and the war machine is necessary but
"synthetic" (Yahweh is necessary for the synthesis).

The question of war, in turn, is pushed further back and is subordinated
to the relations between the war machine and the State apparatus. States
were not the first to make war: war, of course, is not a phenomenon one
finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence. But war is
not the object of States, quite the contrary. The most archaic States do
not even seem to have had a war machine, and their domination, as we
will see, was

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based on other agencies (comprising, rather the police and prisons). It
is safe to assume that the intervention of an extrinsic or nomad war
machine that counterattacked and destroyed the archaic but powerful
States was one of the mysterious reasons for their sudden annihilation.
But the State learns fast. One of the biggest questions from the point
of view of universal history is: How will the State appropriate the war
machine, that is, constitute one for itself, in conformity with its
size, its domination, and its aims? And with what risks? (What we call a
military institution, or army, is not at all the war machine in itself,
but the form under which it is appropriated by the State.) In order to
grasp the paradoxical character of such an undertaking, we must
recapitulate the hypothesis in its entirety. (1) The war machine is that
nomad invention that in fact has war not as its primary object but as
its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the sense
that it is determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and
city-form with which it collides. (2) When the State appropriates the
war machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since
it is afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or
else expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State
undertakes exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon
it. (3) It is precisely after the war machine has been appropriated by
the State in this way that it tends to take war for its direct and
primary object, for its "analytic" object (and that war tends to take
the battle for its object). In short, it is at one and the same time
that the State apparatus appropriates a war machine that the war machine
takes war as its object, and that war becomes subordinated to the aims
of the State.

This question of appropriation is so varied historically that it is
necessary to distinguish between several kinds of problems. The first
concerns the possibility of the operation: it is precisely because war
is only the supplementary or synthetic object of the nomad war machine
that it experiences the hesitation that proves fatal to it, and that the
State apparatus for its part is able to lay hold of war and thus turn
the war machine back against the nomads. The hesitation of the nomad is
legendary: What is to be done with the lands conquered and crossed?
Return them to the desert, to the steppe, to open pastureland'? Or let a
State apparatus survive that is capable of exploiting them directly, at
the risk of becoming, sooner or later, simply a new dynasty of that
apparatus: sooner or later because Genghis Khan and his followers were
able to holdout for a long time by partially integrating themselves into
the conquered empires while at the same time maintaining a smooth space
on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated. That was
their genius, the Pax Mongolica. It remains the case that the
integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one of the most
powerful factors of appropriation of the war machine by the

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State apparatus: the inevitable danger to which the nomads succumbed.
But there is another danger as well, the one threatening the State when
it appropriates the war machine (all States have felt the weight of this
danger, as well as the risks this appropriation represents for them).
Tamerlane is the extreme example. He was not Genghis Khan's successor
but his exact opposite: it was Tamerlane who constructed a fantastic war
machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was
obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive
since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that
machine.105 Turning the war machine back against the nomads may
constitute for the State a danger as great as that presented by nomads
directing the war machine against States.

A second type of problem concerns the concrete forms the appropriation
of the war machine takes: Mercenary or territorial? A professional army
or a conscripted army? A special body or national recruiting? Not only
are these formulas not equivalent, but there are all the possible mixes
between them. Perhaps the most relevant distinction to make, or the most
general one, would be: Is there merely "encastment" of the war machine,
or "appropriation" proper? The capture of the war machine by the State
apparatus took place following two paths, by encasting a society of
warriors (who arrived from without or arose from within), or on the
contrary by constituting it in accordance with rules corresponding to
civil society is a whole. Once again, there is passage and transition
from one formula to another. Last, the third type of problem concerns
the means of appropriation. We must consider from this standpoint the
various data pertaining to the fundamental aspects of the State
apparatus: territoriality, work or public works, taxation. The
constitution of a military institution or an army necessarily implies a
territorialization of the war machine, in other words, the granting of
land ("colonial" or domestic), which can take very diverse forms. But at
the same time, fiscal regimes determine both the nature of the services
and taxes owed by the beneficiary warriors, and especially the kind of
civil tax to which all or part of society is subject for the maintenance
of the army. And the State enterprise of public works must be
reorganized along the lines of a "laying out of the territory" in which
the army plays a determining role, not only in the case of fortresses
and fortified cities, but also in strategic communication, the
logistical structure, the industrial infrastructure, etc, (the role and
function of the Engineer in this form of appropriation).106

Let us compare this hypothesis as a whole with Clausewitz's formula:

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." As we know, this
formula is itself extracted from a theoretical and practical, historic
and transhistoric, aggregate whose parts are interconnected. (1) There
is a pure

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concept of war as absolute, unconditioned war, an Idea not given in
experience (bring down or "upset" the enemy, who is assumed to have no
other determination, with no political, economic, or social
considerations entering in). (2) What is given are real wars as
submitted to State aims; States are better or worse "conductors" in
relation to absolute war, and in any case condition its realization in
experience, (3) Real wars swing between two poles, both subject to State
politics: the war of annihilation, which can escalate to total war
(depending on the objectives of the annihilation) and tends to approach
the unconditioned concept via an ascent to extremes: and limited war,
which is no "less" a war, but one that effects a descent toward limiting
conditions, and can de-escalate to mere "armed observation." 107

In the first place, the distinction between absolute war as Idea and
real wars seems to us to be of great importance, but only if a different
criterion than that of Clausewitz is applied. The pure Idea is not that
of the abstract elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine
that does not have war as its object and that only entertains a
potential or supplementary synthetic relation with war. Thus the nomad
war machine does not appear to us to be one case of real war among
others, as in Clausewitz, but on the contrary the content adequate to
the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and
composition of the nomos. Nevertheless it is still an Idea, and it is
necessary to retain the concept of the pure Idea, even though this war
machine was realized by the nomads. It is the nomads, rather, who remain
an abstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual, and for several
reasons: first, because the elements of nomadism, as we have seen, enter
into de facto mixes with elements of migration, itinerancy, and
transhumance: this does not affect the purity of the concept, but
introduces always mixed objects, or combinations of space and
composition, which react back upon the war machine from the beginning.
Second, even in the purity of its concept, the nomad war machine
necessarily effectuates its synthetic relation with war as supplement,
uncovered and developed in opposition to the State-form, the destruction
of which is at issue. But that is exactly it: it does not effectuate
this supplementary object or this synthetic relation without the State,
for its part, finding the opportunity to appropriate the war machine,
and the means of making war the direct object of this turned-around
machine (thus the integration of the nomad into the State is a vector
traversing nomadism from the very beginning, from the first act of war
against the State).

The question is therefore less the realization of war than the
appropriation of the war machine. It is at the same time that the State
apparatus appropriates the war machine, subordinates it to its
"political" aims, and gives it war as its direct object. And it is one
and the same historical tendency

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that causes State to evolve from a triple point of view: going from
figures of encastment to forms of appropriation proper, going from
limited war to so-called total war, and transforming the relation
between aim and object. The factors that make State war total war are
closely connected to capitalism: it has to do with the investment of
constant capital in equipment, industry, and the war economy, and the
investment of variable capital in the population in its physical and
mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of war).108 Total war is
not only a war of annihilation but arises when annihilation takes as its
"center" not only the enemy army, or the enemy State, but the entire
population and its economy. The fact that this double investment can he
made only under prior conditions of limited war illustrates the
irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to develop total war.
It is therefore true that total war remains subordinated to State
political aims and merely realizes the maximal conditions of the
appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus. But it is also
true that when total war becomes the object of the appropriated war
machine, then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the
object and the aim enter into new relations that can reach the point of
contradiction. This explains Clausewitz's vacillation when he asserts at
one point that total war remains a war conditioned by the political aim
of States, and at another that it tends to effectuate the Idea of
unconditioned war. In effect, the aim remains essentially political and
determined as such by the State, but the object itself has become
unlimited. We could say that the appropriation has changed direction, or
rather, that States tend to unleash, reconstitute, an immense war
machine of which they are no longer anything more than the opposable or
apposed parts. This worldwide war machine, which in a way "reissues"
from the States, displays two successive figures: first that of fascism,
which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself; but
fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is
that of a war machine that takes peace as its object directly, as the
peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that
now claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itself is
surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine
has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no
more than objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the point at
which Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to
say that politics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not
enough to invert the order of the words as if they could bespoken in
either direction; it is necessary to follow the real movement at the
conclusion of which the States, having appropriated a war machine, and
having adapted it to their aims, reimpart a war machine that takes
charge of the aim, appropriates the States, and assumes increasingly
wider political functions.110

422 [] 1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY--THE WAR MACHINE

Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched
the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction
story: we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more
terrifying than fascist death;' we have seen it maintain or instigate
the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set
its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even
another regime, but the "unspecified enemy"; we have seen it put its
counterguerrilla elements into place, so that it can be caught by
surprise once, but not twice. Yet the very conditions that make the
State or World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital
(resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually
recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen
initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant
machines. The definition of the Unspecified Enemy testifies to this:
"multiform, maneuvering and omnipresent . . . of the moral, political,
subversive or economic order, etc.," the unassignable material Saboteur
or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms.111 The first
theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war machine has
many varied meanings, and this is precisely because the war machine has
an extremely variable relation to war itself. The war machine is not
uniformly defined, and comprises something other than increasing
quantities of force. We have tried to define two poles of the war
machine: at one pole, it takes war for its object and forms a line of
destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the
shapes it assumes here--limited war, total war, worldwide
organization--war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war
machine but only, whatever the machine's power, either the set of
conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so
far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order
of which the States themselves are now only parts. The other pole seemed
to be the essence; it is when the war machine with infinitely lower
"quantities," has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative
line of flight, the composition of a smooth space, and of the movement
of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed
encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now
directed against the State and against the worldwide axiomatic expressed
by States.

We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the
nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating
that the war machine as such was invented, even if it displayed from the
beginning all of the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition
with the other pole, and swing toward it from the start. However, in
conformity with the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an
"ideological," scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war
machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to a
phylum, a plane of consistency, a creative

1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY--THE WAR MACHINE : 423

line of flight, a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who
defines this constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation
that defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war
machine. If guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and
popular war are in conformity with the essence, it is because they take
war as an object all the more necessary for being merely
"supplementary": they can make war only on the condition that they
simultaneously create something else, if only new nonorganic social
relations. The difference between the two poles is great, even, and
especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that
creates, or turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency
that constitutes itself, even piece by piece, or turns into a plan(e) of
organization and domination. We are constantly reminded that there is
communication between these two lines or planes, that each takes
nourishment from the other, borrows from the other: the worst of the
world war machines reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose
the earth. But the earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization,
its lines of flight, its smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for
a new earth. The question is not one of quantities but of the
incommensurable character of the quantities that confront one another in
the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles. War machines
take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make
war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear
against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or
domination.

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