Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Deleuze and the Social: Is there a D-function?
- I Order and Organisation
- II Subjectivity and Transformation
- III Art and the Outside
- IV Capitalism and Resistance
- 9 The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control
- 10 Nomad Citizenship and Global Democracy
- 11 Deleuze, Change, History
- V Social Constitution and Ontology
- Notes on contributors
- Index
10 - Nomad Citizenship and Global Democracy
from IV - Capitalism and Resistance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Deleuze and the Social: Is there a D-function?
- I Order and Organisation
- II Subjectivity and Transformation
- III Art and the Outside
- IV Capitalism and Resistance
- 9 The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control
- 10 Nomad Citizenship and Global Democracy
- 11 Deleuze, Change, History
- V Social Constitution and Ontology
- Notes on contributors
- Index
Summary
The concept of nomad citizenship developed here derives from the concepts of nomadism and nomadology expounded by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). As I have explained elsewhere, this concept of nomadism should not be understood primarily in reference to nomadic peoples, despite the familiar connotations of the term. Rather, nomadism as Deleuze and Guattari understand it can refer to a wide range of activities, including ‘building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology’ (ibid.: 366). In the same vein, I will in what follows discuss nomad science, nomad music, nomad games – and eventually nomad management and nomad citizenship. We begin with nomad science, since it is a concept Deleuze and Guattari develop at some length by contrasting it with what they call royal or state science.
Nomad Science
Much could be said about these two ‘versions’ of science; for our purposes, two points are essential. One is the difference between the principles of ‘following’ and ‘reproducing’ that characterise the two kinds of science; the other involves the social consequences that follow from this difference.
Royal science proceeds by extracting invariant (‘universal’) laws from the variations of matter, in line with the binary opposition of form and matter: matter is essentially variable, but ‘obeys’ formal laws that are universal. Reproducing the results of a successful experiment is crucial to establishing the veracity and universality of the hypothesised law that the experiment was designed to test.
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- Deleuze and the Social , pp. 191 - 206Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006