Jason Adams writes:
"The Re-embedding of the War Machine:
Resistance to Mediation in Societies of Primary Orality and Primary Literacy"
By Jason Adams
"The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize -- the State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging or conquering the State?" -- Deleuze and Guattari, 1987
Introduction
In the course of "Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine," Deleuze and Guattari construct a theory about the mediation of everyday life, based on Clastres' argument that nomadic (oral, gatherer-hunter) societies are marked by the presence of a "war machine" at the core of their social being, which serves to ward off the emergence of the state-form. Thus the function of war in oral societies is not to win hegemony but rather "to assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parceling, the atomization of groups" which, as Deleuze and Guattari state, valorizes the smooth space of difference over and against the striated space of identity. These assertions are well supported by contemporary political anthropology; as I will show in this essay, Sahlins, Goody and others have demonstrated that the Paleolithic era was marked primarily by multiplicity and abundance; thus hegemony and scarcity were not, as is often stated, the norm for the majority of the species' lifespan prior to "civilization."