Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

NOTES TO PP. 386-390 □ 559

 

tance of this question in the East-West "dossier," see Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 

pp. 300-309, and Chaunu, L'expansion europeenne, pp. 145-147.

 

65.  Virilio gives a very good definition of the fleet in being and its historical conse-

quences: "The fleet in being... is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able 

to strike no matter where and no matter when ... it is a new idea of violence that no longer 

comes from direct confrontation... but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evalu-

ation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification 

of their dynamic efficiency... .Henceforth it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or 

an ocean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates ... the 

notion of displacement without destination in space and time.... The strategic submarine 

has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain 

invisible . .. the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves 

neither departure nor arrival... .If, as Lenin claimed,'strategy means choosing which points 

we apply force to,' we must admit that these 'points', today, are no longer geostrategic 

strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it might 

be... geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value, and, inversely, 

that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent 

movement"; Speed and Politics, pp. 38,40-41,134-135. Virilio's texts are of great importance 

and originality in every respect. The only point that presents a difficulty for us is his assimila-

tion of three groups of speed that seem very different to us: (1) speeds of nomadic, or revolu-

tionary, tendency (riot, guerrilla warfare); (2) speeds that are regulated, converted, appropri-

ated by the State apparatus (management of the public ways); (3) speeds that are reinstated by 

a worldwide organization of total war, or planetary overarmament (from the fleet in being to 

nuclear strategy). Virilio tends to equate these groups on account of their interactions and 

makes a general case for the "fascist" character of speed. It is, nevertheless, his own analyses 

that make these distinctions possible. 

66.  Jean-Pierre Vernant in particular has analyzed the connection between the Greek 

city-state and a homogeneous geometrical extension, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs (Paris: 

Maspero, 1971 -1974), vol. 1, part 3. The problem is necessarily more complicated in relation 

to the archaic empires, or in relation to formations subsequent to the classical city-state. That 

is because the space in question is very different. But it is still the case that the number is sub-

ordinated to space, as Vernant suggests with regard to Plato's ideal state. The Pythagorean or 

Neoplatonic conceptions of number envelop imperial astronomical spaces of a type other 

than homogeneous extension, but they maintain the subordination of the number; that is why 

Numbers become ideal, but not strictly speaking "numbering." 

67.  Dumezil stresses the role played by the arithmetic element in the earliest forms of 

political sovereignty. He even tends to make it a third pole of sovereignty. See Servius et la For-

tune and Le troisieme souverain (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1949). But the role of this arithmetic 

element is, rather, to organize a matter; in so doing it submits that matter to one or the other of 

the two principal poles. 

68.  Karl von Clausewitz stresses the secondary role of geometry, in tactics and in strat-

egy: On War, trans. Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie (Princeton, N. J.: 

Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 214-216 ("The Geometrical Factor"). 

69.  See one of the most profound ancient texts relating the number and direction to the 

war machine, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, The Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Burton Watson (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 155-193 ("The Account of the 

Hsiung-nu"). 

70.  Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (New York: Berkley Books, 1977), p. 212. One may 

refer to the characteristics proposed by Julia Kristeva to define the numbering number: 

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560 □ NOTES TO PP. 390-399

 

"arrangement," "plural and contingent distribution," "infini-point," "rigorous approxima-

tion," etc. Semeiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 293-297.

 

71.  Boris Iakovlevich Vladimirtsov, Le regime social des Mongols, trans. Michel Carsow 

(Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948). The term used by Vladimirtsov, "antrustions," is borrowed from 

the Saxon regime, in which the king's company, or "trust," was composed of Franks. 

72.  A particularly interesting case is that of a special body of smiths among the Tuareg, 

called the Enaden (the "Others"); the Enaden are thought to have been originally Sudanese 

slaves, Jewish settlers in the Sahara, or descendants of the knights of Saint Louis. See Rene 

Pottier, "Les artisans sahariens du metal chez les Touareg," in Techniques et civilisations, vol. 

1 (M'etaux et civilisations), no. 2 (1945), pp. 31-40. 

73.  Feudalism is no less a military system than so-called military democracy; but both 

systems assume an army integrated into some kind of State apparatus (for feudalism, it was 

the Carolingian land reform). It is Vladimirtsov who developed a feudal interpretation of the 

nomads of the steppe, whereas Mikhail Griaznov, The Ancient Civilization of Southern 

Siberia, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), leans toward military democracy. 

But one of Vladimirtsov's main arguments is that the organization of the nomads becomes 

feudal precisely to the extent that it is in disintegration, or is integrated into the empires it 

conquers. He himself remarks that in the beginning the Mongols did not organize the seden-

tary land they took over into fiefs, true or false. 

74.  J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945), 

p. 5. 

75.  Paul Virilio, "Metempsychose du passager," Traverses, no. 8 (May 1977), pp. 11-19. 

Virilio, however, asserts that there was an indirect transition from hunting to war: when 

women served as "portage or pack" animals, which already enabled the hunters to enter into a 

relation of "homosexual duel" transcending the hunt. But it seems that Virilio himself invites 

us to make a distinction between speed, as projector and projectile, and displacement, as 

transport and portage. The war machine is defined from the first point of view, while the sec-

ond relates to the public sphere. The horse, for example, is not a part of the war machine if it 

serves only to transport men who dismount to do battle. The war machine is defined by 

action, not transport, even if the transport reacts upon the action. 

76.  J. F. C. Fuller, Armaments and History, pp. 137ff., shows that the First World War 

was first conceived as an offensive war of movement based on artillery. But artillery was 

turned against artillery, forcing immobility. It was not possible to reinstate mobility in the war 

through "ever-increasing shell fire" (p. 138) since the craters made the terrain all the harder to 

negotiate. The solution, to which the English, and General Fuller in particular, made decisive 

contributions, came in the form of the tank: the tank, a "landship" (p. 139), reconstituted a 

kind of maritime or smooth space on land, and "superimposed naval tactics on land warfare" 

(p. 140). As a general rule, military response is never in kind: the tank was the response to artil-

lery, the helicopter to the tank, etc. This makes for an innovation factor in the war machine 

that is very different from innovation in the work machine. 

77.  On this general distinction between the two models, "work-free action," "consum-

ing force/conserving force," "real effect/formal effect," etc., see Martial Gueroult's expo-

sition, Dynamique et metaphysique leibniziennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), pp. 55, 

119 ff., 222-224. 

78.  Marcel Detienne, "La phalange, problemes et controverses," in Problemes de la 

guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The 

Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 119-143: "Technology is in a way internal to the social and the 

mental," (p. 134). 

79.  On the stirrup and the plow, see Lynn Townsend White, Jr., Medieval Technology and 

Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), chapters 1 and 2. Similarly, it has 

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