1. STATE-EXTREME. The motor of the move toward empire was a collective drive for a synthesis of the disparate elements of the social and physical environments into a unified whole belonging to a single body. Since that goal is constitutionally impossible, it must be treated as Ideal--provided that ideality is not understood as a final cause inhabiting a realm apart from physicality. The only transcendence we saw (that of the emperor's divinized body) was the result and not the cause of the drive to empire. The emperor's transcendence, like the process it culminated, was irreducibly body-bound. The impossibility of the drive that it brought to its apogee was materially figured in a dialectic of manifestation and disappearance. It was less transcendence as traditionally understood than a manically accelerating alternation of bodily states striving to blur, like the spokes of a wheel, into an optical illusion of unity overcoming dismemberment. That optical illusion is the "State Idea," or, expressing its reality as a limit-state never attained, the "State-Extreme" (what Deleuze and Guattari call the "Urstaat" [1983:217-221]). The drive constituting it can be called many things. "Absolutism" would do fine, or "despotism," or "fascism." As long as these are understood not as empirical modes of production or political systems but as a desire common to many formations. Best for our purposes would be the term "State desire." That desire is material, but not empirical, since it can express itself only in the in-between of a multiplicity of things and states of things in motion. It is a Way: the way in which disparate elements hold together, and the road they travel together, their mutually determined direction. Consistency plus vector. Although State desire may tend toward transcendence, its functioning is always immanent to the parts it tries to overcome.
State desire can be resolved into two contradictory drives: for Unity and for Dominion. The contradiction resides in the fact that for there to be dominion there must be an other, in which case there is no unity. The State-Extreme is the logical outcome toward which that antagonism tends, but which it never reaches. It is the expression of a tendency in the Bergsonian sense: a self-propelling drive inscribed in matter.
The despotic drive whose vicissitudes we have charted played itself out on the level of an entire society, gathering up among other things conscripts, horses, weapons, and grains to produce a state formation. The State-Extreme may manifest itself on other levels, affecting different materials. For example, it may gather up wood and nails to produce a monotheistic religion (Christianity). Or phonemes and penises to produce a form of interiority (the Oedipal subject). Empire, heavenly kingdom, legislating subject: phases of the same fascist dynamic.
2. EXTREMIST STATE. Any state formation approaching the State-Extreme may be called an extremist state, regardless of its mode of production or political structure. The extremist state is the State-Extreme as incarnated in a concrete historical context, in other words as it exists within a realm of possibility. It is a pre-limit state moving to its impossible conclusion. Examples are state formations commonly classified as "despotic" [Wittfogel 1957], "absolutist" [Anderson 1979], "totalitarian," and "fascist." Proposing a common rubric for these widely divergent formations in no way implies that they are economically or politically identical. The aim is not to equate them, but to understand why their trajectories, in many ways so different, lead to the same end. If allowed to take their logic to its ultimate conclusion, they self-destruct. The extremist state is a suicide state. Nazi Germany stands with the Qin dynasty China as models of perfection of State desire. The Fuhrer's final bunker is a modern-day translation of the First Emperor's palace and tomb. Hitler's blow to his evil twin was more direct: his cross-bow shot a bullet through his brain.
3. NOMADIC-EXTREME. There exists a countervailing tendency to that expressed by the State-Extreme: the Way of nomadism. It too follows a path toward an impossible Ideal. That ideal is not dialectic but rather fluctual: Fluidity. Fluidity is Unity minus the dictate to form a single body, and separated from the unidirectional drive to Dominion. It is the unity in fluctuation of a collection of disparate elements whose disparateness is not denied (drops of water ...). It is unity liberated from the organic ideal of the State-extreme (... are not feet ...). A unity that does not preclude divergence (... and may stream to different seas). If the counter-ideal of the Nomadic-Extreme is impossible, it is not due to a contradiction in its logic but to resistances inherent in the materiality of its constituent elements (even the sea has a shore). Fascism marches duplicitously toward transcendence, nomadism undulates superficially toward immanence: channeling versus wave propagation.
Nomadism, like its statist counter-extreme, is not reducible to a particular economic or political system. It is a mode of being in geosocial space that may assume many forms, all of which nevertheless share a common dynamic. Nomadic formations are those which value motion over fixation, variation over order; which affirm the spaces between stops rather than bee-lining to a promised land; which reach a resting point only to use it as a relay to a future move; which have no finality, only process; which skim the surface rather than implanting a symbolic edifice or superimposing a code or statistical grid; which "occupy space without counting it" rather than "counting space in order to occupy it" [Deleuze and Guattari 1987:477]; which involve "arraying oneself in an open space" rather than arranging a closed space around oneself, fortress fashion [ibid. 353, 380]; which smooth without striating.
In itself, nomadism is morally neutral. A society embodying the Nomadic-Extreme may practice unspeakable cruelty. Its violence will nonetheless be of a different nature than that of the State. So much so that it will appear utterly senseless from the State perspective. It is. Not because it is disproportionate in quantity or intensity (it can come nowhere near rivalling the State on that front), but because strictly speaking it has no object. The nomadic war-machine does not fundamentally make war on an enemy. It fights stasis (running in place, the State spiral and its perpetual wheel-spinning). Violence for nomadism is not an end in itself, or even a means to an end. It is simply a means: a stop along the way, pause enough to hew an opening, like clearing a path. Nomadism is a war-machine because war is not its end [Deleuze and Guattari 1987:416-23].
The societies of the Inner Asian steppes were incarnations of nomadism. They were not, however, entirely free either of the drive to dominion (which is why their war machine was so easily converted to State ends, and why they founded a mirror-image empire answering to the Qin), or of the dictate to fuse into a single body (that of the khan). Examples of nomadism closer to the Extreme are provided by recent movements of basically anarchist orientation (situationists, Kabouters, yippies in the sixties; autonomists and political punks in the seventies and eighties). Nomadisms, like despotisms, are found on many levels. There are religious nomadisms both Eastern and Western (Daoism with its spiritual journeys, versus the Confucian obsession with ancestors and origins; alchemy and witchcraft with their multiple transformations, versus one-way Christianity), as well as modes of nomadic individuation (schizophrenia as defined by Deleuze and Guattari [1983]: a pragmatic deregulation that opens the body to the world in such a way as to intensify its sensations and multiply its potentials; not the pathological condition of disablement resulting from a blockage of that process). Nomadism, while morally neutral and often cruel, offers at least the glimmer of a possiblity excluded by the State Ideal: a collective existence that affirms difference as such and fosters creation, unbounded.
4. MIXED FORMATIONS. No social formation can ever effectively reach either extreme. Even the nomads of the steppes, even the superfascist Qin state, were mixed formations. They stand out as examples of societies that followed their desires to a point unusually close to their respective ideals, but were in no way pure of opposite attractions (in fact, the State-Extreme by definition includes its opposite, nomadic smoothness, translated as organic unity). Most social formations fall more toward the middle range on the continuum between the Nomadic and the State Extremes. The dynasties following the Qin backed away from the limit, and lived. The tributary-state dynasties preceding the Qin (see notes [20] and [29] below) were even farther from that extreme, and dissipated. Feudal states (the Warring States period, medieval Europe), city-states, socialisms, and capitalist 'democracies' can be seen as essentially different mixes combining the same two tendencies in various ways. What form a mix will take is determined by the social and physical materials at hand, and by the relative strength of the constitutive desires.
The flow-chart of State desire traced by Qin calls into question some common assertions about the nature of the State and its formation:
1. ¿THE STATE IS THE OUTCOME OF AN ORDERED EVOLUTION? It is true that the elements that combine to
form a state are the products of gradual evolution. However, the State itself is without lineage. It is
a consistency, a way in which elements hold together and move in concert. All the elements may be
present without taking on State consistency. Lattimore's assertion that the peoples who were
expelled to the steppes chose to resist induction into the state is seconded by the anthropological
studies of Pierre Clastres [1987], according to whom the social organization of 'primitive' societies
includes mechanisms that actively block the emergence of centralized power. The absence of a
state is not a simple lack. It is the presence of a counter-desire. The taking on of state consistency
is always an imposition on the elements inducted into the state. The State always arrives from
without, and imposes itself by force [Nietzsche 1967:86-87]. When a state happens, it happens
instantaneously: if the parts of the state form an organic unity no one part is logically prior to any
other. The elements either consist as State desire, or they do not. The State is an empirically
uncaused irruption of desire that does not preexist its object (both in the sense of the actual political
apparatus it institutes and the ideal of the State-Extreme toward which that apparatus tends). The
instantaneousness of the arrival of State desire is often marked by the assumption of a title (king,
fuhrer) or the issuing of a decree (an act of law-giving like that of Romulus). This does not mean
that the State has an identifiable origin. Its arrival can be placed in time, but its point of departure
cannot. For the outside from which the State arrives is an unlocalizable in-between, an interrelating,
an interval from which a will-to-power surges forth as if by magic. The spatial point of departure of
State desire is also unspecifiable. It may appear to sweep in from a separate sphere (the steppes),
but upon closer inspection the situation always proves far more complex, to the point that it
becomes impossible to distinguish which came first, the within of the borders or the without,
conquerers or conquered. That the outside is an in-between means that it is the border, or better
the act of bordering. If it can be placed, its place is on the margins--which may be interior to the
state in geographical terms (taking the form of a revolutionary movement). The bordering that is the
State is an unlocalizable interface between desires. State desire may appear to issue from a single
individual. In fact, it moves toward one. That State desire moves in the direction of a transcendental
concentration in the body of a more or less divinized leader does not belie the immanence of its
functioning, which is always collective.
To say that organs are abstracted is not the same as saying that they are projected. Projection
assumes the prior existence of an autonomous individual functioning as a unified
organism--precisely what despotism takes (and gives) pains to prevent. Limbs and other physical
body parts of course preexist their imperial abstraction, but their organicity does not.[36] As we
have seen, the Ideal of organic unity is the product of an imperial abstraction process. An organ is
meaningless without an organism. Organs are to the organism as the state is to State desire: they
arise in strict simultaneity, and on the same collective level. Organs and despotism are not only
analogical, they go phallus in hand. This is what Artaud meant when he launched the battle cry for a
return to the "body without organs" and an end to "the organization of organs called the organism,"
which he damned as the "judgment of god." In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, organism is a despotic
"overcoding" of the physical body. With the Emperor are invented the organism, organs, and the
master organ, the phallus, all in one fell saber swoop. This invention is often expressed as a new
filiation. In ancient China there was superimposed upon the horizontal network of territorial clan
alliances and aristocratic families a direct vertical filiation between every body in the state and the
emperor, and through him, the gods: the emperor as miraculous procreative principle, Father of the
territory and all its people.
The individual as modern western civilization understands it is a miniaturization of the organicity of
despotic desire to fit the contours of a single human body. Actually, to fit the confines of the family.
Western organs may seem to coincide with the actual limbs and other physical body parts of an
individual body, but it is only apparently so. The Oedipal process that defines the modern western
individual requires a differential, and this entails the participation of more than one body
(conveniently grouped into a single household). The phallus as differential marker in the family
context denotes less the penis as body part than an interbody dialectic--the same dialectic of
presence and absence that finds its synthesis in the the optical illusion of the
unity-in-dismemberment that was Empire. The phallus is an after-image of the emperor's body (not
the reverse). It is a scaled-down State Idea plotted back onto the body part it anciently abstracted.
The latter-day phallus is the penis transformed into a personalized organ of the State by a
miniaturizing overlay onto the family of a society-wide function. Biology is a destination (for State
desire), not a destiny (for the sexed body, which may or may not assume the desiring position
assigned it according to which side of the penile divide it falls on).
Oedipus is a reincarnation of Empire, by way of God. The monotheistic god represents the
completion of the spiritualization tendency of despotism (the perfection of the trick of simultaneous
absence and omnipresence; pure transcendence). This spiritualization is a necessary condition for
the application of State desire to the individual body (in which the Law laid down by the
emperor-god takes the form of a conscience or superego: mind over body). The development of
the superego is a necessary condition for capitalism, whose fluctuation requirements necessitate a
complex scattering of ground-level command centers throughout the social field--local autonomy,
but within bounds (unconstrained by conscience, capitalist bodies would slip toward the
Nomadic-Extreme, and risk dissipating into anarchy). Thus begins the reign of self-dictatorship
known as 'democracy.' The transition to capitalist democracy is unwittingly effected by the
Christian absolute monarchy, the stated goals of which were to embody God's empire on earth and
to revive the glory of Rome's [on the application of State desire to the individual in the context of
the French monarchy, see Elias 1983 and Marin 1989; on the king of France as Christ figure and
presumptive successor to the Roman emperors, see Apostolidès 1981:66-92]. Although the
implantation of a collectively derived superego in the individual body was a condition of capitalism's
emergence, it is not a necessary element of its subsequent functioning. In fact, the superego as
understood by Freud is destined to dissolve under late capitalism, which requires ever-increasing
social fluidity. The following chapter examines the way in which that dissolution is played out in
relation to Reagan's body image.
2. ¿THE STATE GROWS FROM THE CENTER OUTWARD? The State proceeds from the margins in toward the
center, marks the spot (as a capital, usually with sumptuous ritual, and often with a change in title
for the leader, for example from king to emperor). Only then does it expand centrifugally.
Imperialism is the second moment of State desire. It is always a rebirth, a second founding, a
doubling of the origin corresponding to a change in direction of the State vector as it begins its
movement toward the outside from which, this time, its death will come.
3. ¿THE HUMAN BODIES SUBSUMED BY THE STATE ARE BY NATURE AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS? The
'individual' in a despotic state is a working part in a megamachine--or rather, a megaorganism. The
people of the empire are organs of the emperor's body. The organicity of the system is
supra-individual. In other words, body parts have been abstracted from individual bodies and
recast as social functions. One of those functions, the dialectic of unity and dismemberment
(presence and absence, transcendence and becoming-immanent) so fundamental to the erection of
the Empire, is attached to the penis abstracted as phallus. In the despotic state, the phallus is the
emperor's whole body. Since that body is coextensive with the realm, which is coextensive with the
law, all three are struck by strange convulsions and multiple disappearances--not the least of which
is the disappearance of women from official existence in any other capacity than that of reproducers
of men.
4. ¿THE STATE IS NEUTER? The state apparatus in not a neutral instrument. It is gendered: masculine.
State desire is by nature patriarchal. This is not the same as saying that men by nature have State
desire. Men are had by State desire (and women are just plain had). State desire, all desire, is
always artificial, arriving as it does from without (destination versus destiny). The near-universal
affinity between men and despotism is more a symbiosis (between a morphology and a mode of
social functioning) than the expression of an essential male nature. That State desire is gendered
masculine does not mean that its counter-desire is gendered feminine. Gender is an organic concept
that has no meaning for the modes of individuation implied by the Nomadic-Extreme (the
opposition between the two Ideals is asymmetrical: they constitute a physical divergence, not a
metaphysical duality). Masculinity and femininity are State concepts foreign to the "nonhuman" sex
of nomadism.[37]
5. ¿THE STATE IS A CONSCIOUS AND LOGICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF A TRANSCENDENTAL PRICIPLE OF ORDER?
State order is the product of an unconscious transpersonal drive that can only be described as a
mania. Any transcendental principles used to justify it are second thoughts, not founding
inspirations. "Because it is just" comes years after "because I desire it." "I represent the state"
comes long after "I am the state." Churchill and Roosevelt are kid brothers to Louis XIV.
6. ¿THE END OF THE STATE IS PEACE, HAPPINESS, AND THE PRESERVATION OF LIFE? Count the wars.
7. ¿THE STATE IS BASES ON A CONCENSUS OR SOCIAL CONTRACT? Without exception, the law constitutes a
system of torture imposed by brute force [Nietzsche 1967:57-91], the goal of which is to separate
the human body from the greater portion of the potentials inherent in it and to highlight the remaining
ones: to reduce the body's desire (organ-ize it). Sometimes the mutilation is subtle. In the
'democratic' capitalist state, the mutilation often passes unnoticed since it occurs before birth, taking
the form of the "inalienable" "right" to vote (i.e., the dictate to refrain from direct participation in
decisionmaking) and to sell one's labor (the dictate to limit one's productive activities to those
monetarily profitable for others).
8. ¿ALL STATES NATURALLY DEVELOP TOWARD CAPITALISM UNLESS THEIR GROWTH IS STUNTED BY AN INSUFFICIENT ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE? Capitalism, like the State itself, is a mode of desire. Since capitalism
requires a complex pattern of independent flows (fluctuation), the desire it embodies militates
against the State-Extreme. For that reason, an extremist state (and all states are extreme in origin)
will take active mechanisms to prevent its emergence. All of the elements of capitalism may be
present, without capitalism arising.
9. ¿ALL STATES NATURALLY DEVELOP TOWARD DEMOCRACY UNLESS THEIR GROWTH IS STUNTED BY SUBVERSIVE ELEMENTS OR EVIL LEADERS? 'Democracy' is also an afterthought. It is a limitation of State desire
imposed by the rise of a capitalist counter-desire in spite of the measures taken against it.
Dictatorship is not an abuse of state power. It is the essence of the State Idea.
9 a) Corollary: ¿IN A DEMOCRACY THE INDIVIDUAL IS FREE? Individuals in a democracy are as free as the
dictatorship of their conscience, the dicatatorship of the other miniaturized despotisms their
conscience directs them to enter (family, school, army, office), and their premutilations allow them
to be.
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