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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846
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wandering which is vagrancy» . It seems, therefore, that there is a form of travel that is,
as Deleuze puts it, a «real» as opposed to a «fake» breakthrough. Travel can be understood,
and it seems to be what Deleuze calls nomadism, not as simple geographical movement
but as the constant dispossession of oneself in the interest of reconstruction through
encounter with the foreign.
This nomadic war-machine, therefore, is the externalization itself, the assemblage that
produces lines of flight (very pertinently to our airplane example/situation), which means
to create escape lines, possibilities of cracking up systems of control, to breaking up the
structures and reveal open spaces. While the State apparatus build striated space – that is
a regulated, marked space, where subjects and objects are stated and functions, names
and positions are defined (in short, a transcendent space) – war machines create what
Deleuze and Guattari call smooth space.
A smooth space seems to be what Deleuze wants to define as a plane of immanence.
Opposite to the striated space, where subjectivation, chronology and positions are marked
on a structure, the smooth space is a non-structured plan, in what things are not marked
by hierarchy, major-minor relations or representation. It seems like the smooth space is the
plane in which the world can be seen and thought not in an extensive way, but as a grid of
intensities. The way such machines undermine the State is by exercising diffuse power to
break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of striated space with
smooth space—or better said: through defying, denying or destroying some structure. By
doing that, the war-machine produces difference, like the airplane does on a flight (at least
on one’s first flight), because it produces vertigo. The war-machine, thus, is a difference
engine, it is a nomadic, vertiginous clash of the statement, a movement generator, a
machine of deterritorialisation.
Language, transcendence and immanence
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Deleuze and Guattari , based on their reading of Georges Dumézil’s analysis on Indo-
European mythologies and its structures, affirm that all State structures are based on two
archetypes:
157 Onfray, Μ., op.cit, p. 86.
158 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, op.cit.
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