Treatise on the Nomadology: Axioms, Propositions, and Problems

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.
Problem I: Is there a way of warding off the formation of a State apparatus (or its equivalents in a group).
Proposition II: The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).
Proposition III: The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a “nomad” or “minor science”.
Problem II: Is there a way to extricate thought from a State model?
Proposition IV: The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, finally, by noology.

Axiom II: The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the state apparatus and distinct from the military institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.
Proposition V: Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war    machine in space.
Proposition VI: Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of the war machine.
Proposition VII: Nomad existence has for “affects” the weapons of a war machine.
Problem III: How do nomads find or invent their weapons?
Proposition VIII: Metallurgy itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism.

Axiom III: The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.
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).

A Thousand Plateau Dates

1914: One or Several Wolves?

• Freud’s On Narcissism is published (?)

10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)

• Flexible dating for the beginning of the Holocene epoch, connected with the close of the last Ice Age, global geological and ecological transformations in the shifting of the climatic belt, and the beginning of both migratory and nomadic societies.
• Hinted at in footnote 26 of the plateau on the Refrain:

November 23rd, 1923: The Postulates of Linguistics

• Date of the pegging of the German mark to the Rentemark, effectively ending hyperinflation in what Deleuze and Guattari described as a “semiotic transformation that, although indexed to the body of the earth and material assets, was still a pure act or incorporeal transformation.” (pg. 82)
• Footnote 12 to this plateau further unpacks the significance of this date:

587 BC – 70 AD: On Several Regimes of Signs

• Dates marking the first and second Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, essential events in the path of the Jewish people through history:

November 28th, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?

• Antonin Artaud records “To Have Done with the Judgment of God”, a Theater of Cruelty-style radio play that was intended to wage war on the technopolitical order that consolidated on a global level in the wake of the Second World War. The Body without Organs is posed as the opposition to the organization this order – and the orders proceeding it – imposed upon the self:

No matter how one takes you you are mad, ready for the straitjacket.

– By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,

• god,

• and with god

• his organs.

For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

• The Judgment of God itself, as that which imposes organization upon the Body without Organs, is invoked in the Geology of Morals:

Year Zero: Faciality

• The birth of Christ and the retrocausal genesis-point of Western civilization

1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?”

• Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques is published, a work regarded by Deleuze and Guattari as indicating the way that the novella folds the “postures” of the mind and body together (in contrast to the tale which is marked by an unfolding). Through this a tripartite schema is derived:

1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

• Hitler becomes chancellor

1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible

• Vampire-mania sweeps Europe:

1837: Of the Refrain

• Hector Berlioz composes his Requiem (?)

1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine

• Ogedei Khan assumes power after Genghis dies and proceeds to expand Mongol empire.

7000 BC: The Apparatus of Capture

• Systematization of agriculture occurs in Mesopotamia.

1440: The Smooth and the Striated

• Development of Portuguese map-making in relation to the technological breakthroughs in oceanic navigation: