Abstract: Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘nomadic’ remains a concept that is frequently misunderstood. Their ‘nomadism’ is what some would call a ‘bastard concept’, one that sits astride standard categories and confuses seemingly distinct classifications. Deleuze and Guattari apparently take the ‘nomadic’ to be that which is peripatetic, set adrift, and, in this regard, their social model seems to be that of all individuals, groups, and societies in a relatively constant state of movement. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s object is not to systematize received anthropological taxonomies, but to articulate two abstract tendencies – the nomadic and the sedentary. Essential here is the differentiation of observations de facto and de jure, a distinction of long standing in scholastic philosophy and the philosophy of natural law. Bergson revives this at several points in his thought and Deleuze returns to it frequently. De jure distinctions for Bergson are ‘pure differences in kind’, and Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition of nomadic and sedentary is one such de jure distinction. Deleuze and Guattari are not troubled by the frequent observation that no mobile populations wander randomly, since every population manifests a mixture of sedentary and nomadic qualities. The de jure distinction between the nomadic and the sedentary is useful for Deleuze and Guattari in at least three ways: characteristics striking in one mobile population can be shown to be faintly present in another in an illuminatingly modified form; occasional nomadic practices and experiential qualities may be isolated and extracted from heterogeneous contexts and shown to have a certain cohesion across varying populations; and aesthetic objects and social practices may be assessed in terms of common tendencies within various social spheres without reducing any one of those spheres to the status of an epiphenomenal projection of another.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 24
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