ELSEWHERE
DURING THE LAST few years, the concept and the conditions of nomadism have made a striking appearance in critical theory (and elsewhere) as both a model and a metaphor of human behavior and development. Certain characteristics of nomadic societies have been adduced (and assumed) in order that we (sedentary, urban, Western civilians—if that is what we are) might know something about what we are not, what we have never been, how we have never lived, and against what “outside” there has been a historical struggle in our social, technological, and political formations. Let us mark three moments on the horizon of this attention to nomadism, so that we can speak of the contentions of the new nomadology, and of its purposes; and, even as it offers a theory of limits, so that we can ask, What are its own limitations?
The three moments correspond to an assemblage of “poetic” (that is, “literary”), “scientific” (empirical, anthropological), and “theoretical” discourses. Bruce Chatwin’s self-designated “novel of ideas” The Songlines, 1987, might be situated under the auspices of the poetic.1 Constructed as a picaresque travelogue of the Australian outback interspersed with an accumulation of aphorisms, anecdotes, and asides gleaned from “world literature,” the “history of ideas,” and the author’s previous travel experiences, The Songlines is staged as the affectation of its own desires: “wandering” is summoned forth like the return of the repressed in the body of Western textuality. The book thus reads as a processional lamentation of the sedentary West for its leaden civility, a book-of-lists of movement. There is the Caribou Eskimo’s “Great Unrest”; Proust’s “‘walks’ of childhood”; Dante’s glorification of the human gait (according to Osip Mandelstam); Darwin on migratory instincts (along with freely interpolated poetic commentary of Chat-win’s own”—a salmon knows the taste of its ancestral river”); Burton on wandering (“as those Tartar’ and Zalmohenses that live in hordes”) as a curative for melancholy; nomadism as a social hygiene useful against epidemics and infectious disease (“a story of men brewing in their own filth”); Pascal contra quietism (“our nature lies in movement, complete calm is death”); new-historicist Judaica (“the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea were nomadic revivalists”); and, finally, the occasional much-delighted-in nomadic conundrum: “Raids are our agriculture” (“Bedouin proverb”). Furthermore, Chatwin’s text is enclosed within a triangular space whose coordinates are (stylistically) the renegade anticlassicism of Laurence Sterne, (passionally) the orientalist yearnings of the Romantic poetaster, and (Fideologically) the tectonic semantics of Modernist juxtaposition, crossed with confessional reportage. And the point of convergence in this textual space is the purportedly transhuman desideratum of wandering (the nomadic impulse), which is left paradoxically suspended between the writer’s desire and his knowledge, and between the nomadic condition and its (appropriated) place in the Western imagination. Poetic nomadism is machined, here, in the heart and lungs of the neo-Romantic wanderer, who, precisely, finds a voice by roaming equally amongst wanderers and between footnotes.
Academic anthropology, on the other hand, has specifically addressed the shortcomings of its own research material on nomadic groups in its fieldwork through the ’60s. There was, the discipline has reported, too much amateur ethnology, and too little Malinowskian rigor. Writing at the end of the decade, one academician described the double articulation of nomadic cultures managed by contemporary anthropology. One discourse produced an always generalizable “pure” nomadism wrought from the interpolations of often fragmentary data, and convened methodologically by “essentialist typologies”; the transcultural category of “nomadism” itself is the product of this reasoning. A second (and in this instance also the preferred) discourse was termed “behaviorist or realist,” and concerned itself with specific orderings inferred from a “continuous stream of happenings.” It was a kind of “situational analysis” (after Fredrik Barth), preoccupied with variability, contingency, and individuality rather than with invariance, regularity, and typicality.2
That the ’60s are revealed as a watershed in the anthropological discourse on the nomadic Other is, of course, in major part a consequence of the simultaneous decolonization, neocolonization, and agricultural “revolution” that were performed across the decade.3 Colonialism would characteristically hold, defend, and organize the designated centers of its annexed territories; as far as possible, it would subjugate and patrol the peripheries, but it would not occupy them. This was not usually true of the nationalist states to which it succumbed. In this sense one of the great crises of nomadic cultures was experienced exactly during the period of so-called postcolonialist “self-determination” in the 1960s (and beyond), when the imperialist legacies of centrism, national identity, and a capitalistlike profit economy all mitigated against the tolerance and survival of nonsedentary minorities. Thus the Indian anthropologist Shri V. Raghaviah tells a cautionary tale (in another’s language) about the “correct approach to the nomad” in his own fast-rebureaucratizing country: “The prejudices, superstitions, pet beliefs of a tribal, particularly of a nomad, may have to be studied well in advance and a suitable approach planned and devised before any large scale attempt in reclaiming him is undertaken by the Government or any obliging public worker.”4 Though implicated in its machinery, Raghaviah is actually contesting the forced “rehabilitation,” “reclamation,” “detribalization,” and “domestication” of Indian nomads. (“The offer of a five hundred rupee worth brick house did not bring his heaven nearer. When we further tried to confine him within the narrow walls of a plastered, low roofed, inadequately ventilated, frame work of a dwelling, the all-weather open air dweller of the jungle, with sky above and mud below, felt himself trapped like a mouse . . . plucked and decoyed from his native moorings.5)
Some aspects of the mysteriousness and seriality of the Chatwin poetic have made their way into more occasional or “alternative” anthropoloqies, such as the production and interpretation of “local knowledge” taken on by Clifford Geertz. For example, Geertz discusses several distinct geographical places (and historical periods) in which the charisma of organized central power is “visited” onto a larger social confederacy for purposes of self-display and political control. Thus such peripatetic exercises of central power as the “vast, didactic pageantry” and pictorialist allegorical tableaux of an Elizabethan “progress,” the “lumbering caravans” of the Javanese potentate Hayam Waruk, and the “court-in-motion” of the Moroccan warrior monarchy are all assembled as a kind of allegorical pretext for another understanding of the operations of the rhetoric of U.S. democracy in the full tilt of its electoral nomadism.6
Yet there seems to be a kind of romantic nostalgia here for the loss of historical kingship, and for the lugging of power from p(a)lace to p(a)lace in the never-ceasing cause of its perpetual demonstration and exercise. Geertz’s conclusion offers an implicit glimpse of the simulation of charismatic spectacle through the operation of (the) technological “progress”—its substitution of an invisible membrane of transmission and a panoply of consumer-artifacts of reception for the (phenomenological) literalism of power-playing through courtly movement. (Theater is traduced by the diode.) In this respect, even though Geertz has reversed the flow of the nomadic as a metaphor by constructing it as an image of power channeled from the center to the margins, his methodology is similar to Chatwin’s. Both writers offer slices of empirical information and gobbets of theory whose coordination is left (almost) always unspecific. Geertz is actually offering a commentary on the operations of Western politics; but he resists an analysis of exactly how the dissemination of power in the present relates to its past conditions, leaving us with a kind of Orwellian vision of the ultimate canalization of movement, the ultimate infiltration of stasis (the electronic homestead), amidst all the comely regalia of a cacophonous media-democracy. With Geertz, as with all but the most redoubtably empiricist of anthropological (or travel-logical) practices, “the nomadic” accrues one of a number of different types of metaphoric status, in order, explicitly or implicitly, that it be worked into a commentary on the very constitution of a system of sedentary social values, political norms, or psychic economies—whether this is the theory of the Western state, the convulsions of poetic wanderlust, or some commentary on errancy and circulation in modern-day electronic culture. Nowhere is this more clearly evinced than in recent critical theory that has taken up the thematic of nomadism. Now it might have been possible to describe a kind of “weak theory” of the nomadic that would embrace one of the totalizing premises or poles of poststructuralist activity—the free-ranging (“free play”) of signs, the perpetual staging of differance, or the very notion of “semiotic” flux (proposed by Julia Kristeva as opposed to “symbolic” fixture). However, though certain formulations, such as the emphasis on “noology”—the form or manner of thought, rather than its content—return us in some measure to the theoretic-historical morphologies of the early 20th century, nomadism has in fact been theorized rather differently.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (D & G) actually offer a “treatise on Nomadology” in chapter 12 of their recently translated A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.7 By recourse to a textual structure of “Axioms,” “Propositions,” and “Problems,” D & G develop an elaborate construction of nomadism as the Other to all theories and practices of statehood. For D & G, the determining aspect of the nomadic is its articulation through the “war machine.” And to the formation, space, and operation of the war machine there accrues in this account a set of interactive attributes that are figured against the characteristics of the State. Thus the nomadic war machine has (historically) been defined through secrecy, furor, celerity, anonymity, strategy, and packs. Its operational space is the deterritorialized “smooth space” of steppes, deserts, or oceans; its organizational space is the rhizome (associated with the “principles” of “heterogeneity,” “multiplicity,” and “rapture”); its “epistemology” is “minor science,” the “eccentric” science of hydraulics, heterogeneity, and problematization; its philosophy is conceived in the smooth, “private” space of “relays, intermezzos, resurgences”; and its symbolic technology is metallurgy. The state, on the other hand, is identified with publicity, codification, and interiority; its space is the “striated space” of the polls; its mode of organization is arborescent (based on the logic of the tree diagram); its knowledge system is the “royal science” of theory and deduction; its classical image of thought is predicated on the universal thinking subject; and its preferred “art” is the defensive architecture of the state, the gate, and the garrison.
To concertina these polar attributes in this way is of course to misrepresent the complexity of their interaction, and in particular of the unending capacity of the state to absorb and recuperate the knowledge, the science, even the violence, of nomadic action—”collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that reconstitute equivalents of the war machine.”8 Yet it must be made clear that the very structure (the laminate) of D & G’s constitution of a nomadology is formed around a schizophrenic binarism that constantly slips into a helical chain of interwoven historical formations and theoretical abstractions. Indeed, though somewhat repressed in the D & G text, it is the irruption of the nomadic in our present—in guerrilla warfare, riot, minority action, even “an ’ideological’, scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine”9—that clinches the high metaphoric purpose of this inclusive discourse of nomadology. (We are, however, enjoined by the last sentence of A Thousand Plateaus “never [to] believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.”10) Equally remote from the strictures of empiricist anthropology and the antisystematic reveries of poetic nomadism (though, we might say, more articulate in opposition to them), D & G have developed an always-in-process oppositional theory that contests every activity of centrist quietism, spread, and formulation. So, if the anthropologists themselves have admitted that “instead of typologies we need a series of relevant elements . . . combined and recombined into various . . . constellations,”11 could it be that in Mille Plateaux we are confronted by a discourse that might most appropriately be described as the other thousand points of light?12
John Welchman, an art historian and critic, teaches at the University of California, San Diego. His column appears regularly in Artforum.
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NOTES
1. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
2. Neville Dyson-Hudson, “The Study of Nomads,” in William Irons and Neville Dyson-Hudson, eds., Perspectives on Nomadism, Leiden, the Netherlands: E. M. Brill, 1972, p. 8.
3. See Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in Sohnya Sayers et al., eds., The 60s without Apology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 178–209.
4. Shri V. Raghaviah, Nomads, Secunderabad: Swaarajya, 1968, p. 373.
5. Ibid.
6. Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, 1983, pp. 51–146.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 351–423. Originally published as Mille Plateaux, vol. 2 of Capitalism et Schizophrenia, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. A modified excerpt on “Nomad Art,” from the concluding chapter, was translated in Art & Text no. 19, October–December 1985; the same journal (Art & Text no. 14, Winter 1984) also published Stephen Muecke’s “The Discourse of Nomadology: Phylums in Flux,” which annotated passages of the “Treatise” with a discussion of Native Australians, and of the secret tracks—”the song-lines”—foregrounded by Chatwin.
8. Ibid., p. 366.
9. Ibid., p. 422.
10. Ibid, p. 500.
11. D. Schneider, quoted in Dyson-Hudson, p. 23.
12. Nomad linearity has a “multiple orientation” and is grounded in a resonance of points” (pp. 496, 498).
