Migrants, Nomads, and Sedentary Peoples

1) Please explain Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between three political categories: the sedentary, the migrant, and the nomad. What are the characteristics of each?

            Deleuze and Guattarri greatly upset established ways of thinking about states, territory, and migrants in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ published in their book, A Thousand Plateaus.  Deleuze and Guittari delve deep into primitive history to posit a hypothesis that would reveal ancient tensions surrounding war and the state.  The centerpiece of this hypothesis centers on two archetypes for both individuals and societies that they imagine to have existed throughout human evolution; nomads and nomadic societies.  It is not clear whether the ‘nomad’ according to Deleuze and Guittari is a real and possible individual, or a model of an absolute that one can be in the process of becoming.  What ultimately matters most is the distinction the authors make between two other categories of people, migrants and sedentary peoples. 

            The first step in understanding this conceptualization is to understand the figure of the Nomad.  One of the first things Deleuze states about the nomad is that, “The Nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he not ignorant of points.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 380).  This is to say that the nomad lives in a territorial world, which he is not ignorant of the nomad remembers points within that territory.  But that territory is not defined by any geometrical striation of those points, instead the points serve merely as in-betweens on the nomads never ending path, one that can take a new direction at any point; “Point for him are relays along a trajectory.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 380)  Deleuze continues to summarize the nomad and his relationship the points by writing, “A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 380)  The nomad ends up at one point after another, but they perennially occupy the infinite space between.  The migrant does not even have to move, but is the only stationary absolute and the world moves around the nomad.  For this reason, Deleuze and Guittari proclaim, “It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement.  Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he who does not move… and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 381)  For the nomad to move from one place to another would be to striate the world, when instead the nomads seek to continuously confront time and space as they present themselves.

            The opposite of the nomad is the sedentary people, who are firmly identified with the construction of state power.  The heart of their difference seems to stem back to the Greek root words ‘nomos’ and ‘polis’.  Deleuze writes “The nomos is the consistency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law or the polis, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around a city.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 380)  The polis is the city where important gateways to the territory are controlled, striated, and ‘policed’.  Guards control the gate that defines the polis from the nomos, just as guards monitor the public streets that divide the polis internally into a striated space.  This ‘policing’ of the polis is one of the foundations of state power, it is also one which the nomads cannot understand.  As Empires expanded their power to control broad territory they built roads, and the interconnectedness of the roads served to bring more areas into communication and under control of the absolute state power.  Roads, symbols of Roman power more than anything else, embody the opposite purpose of nomadic travel.  This may seem counter-intuitive given the nature of roads to take a person from one point to another.  But those points do not exist in an empty plain, instead they occupy a striated territory defined by those very roads.  Deleuze and Guattari provide this crystallization of the difference succinctly, “Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 384)  Hence, the difference between travel on roads and nomadic travel aptly summarizes the difference between sedentary peoples and nomads.

The migrant is a figure wholly different from the Nomad, although they may have common characteristics embedded in their interactions.  Deleuze clearly states – unusual for him – that, “The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 380)  Essentially, the migrants’ world is not flat like the nomads because the migrant moves from one divided, striated space to another, but the nomad does so with intentionality.  The Nomad on the other hand travels with speed and intention in a line, but without intention, he simply reorients the world to his new direction at certain points.  The migrant still sees the world as striated between absolutes defined for them in the territory; Mexico is an absolute territory, the United States is another.  Nomads do not have to even move to be nomadic.  However, in practice it would seem that nomads and migrants have often found similar cause as mobile travelers.  Deleuze and Guattari write, “Nomads and migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their causes and conditions are no less distinct for that.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 380)  Certainly if one views the nomad as more of a conceptual figure then certainly many migrants are in the process of becoming nomad today.  Would not a migrant agricultural worker in California be an example of someone who occupies a territory but who moves from point to point without final destination?  Would that same person not be the most revolutionary example of an individual who lives and works nomadically and without status from within the territory of a state power structure?  Ultimately, Deleuze summarizes this difference between the migrant and the becoming nomad as a lack of reterritorialization; “If the nomad can be called the deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary.” (A Thousand Plateaus, 381)

2) Do Hardt and Negri agree with this distinction? What is the political importance of the migrant for Hardt and Negri? Do Papadopoulos and Tsianos agree with D&G’s distinction? What is the political importance of the migrant for Papadopoulos and Tsianos?

The American and Italian philosopher duo consisting of Hardt and Negri published several books after Deleuze and Guattari posited their models for the nomad, migrant, and the sedentary.  They make use of this distinction in their analysis of bio-political power, but in order to make a more Marxian or Hegelian call for revolution or resistance against systems of domination.  It is not fair to say however, that they agree with Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between nomads and migrants.  Instead it would be more accurate to say they are arguing that migration is the source of a new nomadism, one that they see as the symbol and potential source of a modern resistance to the domination of state power by the sedentary peoples of status.  Hard and Negri describe some of the purposes of their writings as such, “Some such experiment or series of experiments advanced through the genius of collective practice will certainly be necessary today to take that next concrete step and create a new social body beyond Empire.”(Counter-Empire, 206)  This new social body must be global if it is ever to defeat the non-places of power and Empire because as Hardt and Negri propose, “Any proposition of a particular community in isolation, defined in racial, religious, or regional terms, ‘‘delinked’’ from Empire, shielded from its powers by fixed boundaries, is destined to end up as a kind of ghetto.” (Counter-Empire, 207)  For this reason they argue that we must accept that challenge and learn to think globally and act globally. Globalization must be met with a counter-globalization or as they say, “Empire with a counter-Empire.” (Counter-Empire, 207)

The difficulty Hardt and Negri see in confronting Empire is that the places of imperial power no longer have a definite place.  Instead the world market has become so powerful and expansive that imperial power currently exists outside of space.  This is why no ordinary nomadic horde has risen to sweep away the places of power like the Goths did to the Romans.  Adopting a very Hegelian tone, Hardt and Negri say that this is because, “The dialectic between productive forces and the system of domination no longer has a determinate place. The very qualities of labor power (difference, measure, and determination) can no longer be grasped, and similarly, “Exploitation can no longer be localized and quantified.” (“Counter-Empire”, 206)

            For this reason, Hardt and Negri argue that the battles against post-modern Empire cannot be won through direct confrontation, but rather ‘diagonal’ sidestepping and abandonment.  They clearly propose that, “Battles against the Empire might be won through subtraction and defection. This desertion does not have a place; it is the evacuation of the places of power. (“Counter-Empire”, 212)  There is one group emerging across the globe that Hardt and Negri see as being capable of taking up this task and that is the migrant.  It is because migrants will rise up to leave the places of power that they ultimately constitute the greatest threat to Empire.  Hardt and Negri prophesize that, “A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible. (“Counter-Empire”, 213)  With hundreds of millions of economic and political refugees unstoppably demonstrating the feebleness of borders today, it may be that this specter is already manifesting.

            It is because the migrants will be the ones to resist Global Empire that they will be the ones most accurately dubbed ‘nomads’ today.  This is why Hardt and Negri do not agree with Deleuze and Guittari’s distinction.  They see in the migrants the long fulfillment of Nietzche’s call for a ‘new barbarian’.  They write of Nietzche and migrants that, “We cannot say exactly what Nietzsche foresaw in his lucid delirium, but indeed what recent event could be a stronger example of the power of desertion and exodus, the power of the nomad horde.” (“Counter-Empire”, 214)  The migrants of today will become the nomad of tomorrow resisting state power because they are the most fundamental members of the modern proletariat that works dialectically against the powers that dominate them to drive global capitalist production.  Their way out of that trap will be too side-step it.  Hardt and Negri summarize all of this declaring, “Those who are against, while escaping from the local and particular constraints of their human condition, must also continually attempt to construct a new body and a new life. We affirm this in order to introduce a new, positive notion of barbarism...the concrete invention of a first new place in the non-place.” (“Counter-Empire”, 214)  The authors propose to solve the problem of the non-existence of un-striated space by creating a non-place for barbarism to exist positively.  However, most disappointingly, one of the most significant shortcomings of their work seems to be in actually discovering this non-place.

3) Which definitions of the migrant do you agree with the most? Which definitions or claims regarding the migrant do you agree with the least? What do you think is the

political importance of the migrant is for contemporary politics, if any, and why?

The pair of authors that I believe have proposed the most accurate model for migration in opposition to state power is the Greek thinkers Papadopoulos and Tisanos.  Their call for resistance is highly Deleuzian in its nature, but also includes critiques in order to provide a clearer path for resistance in the modern era. Papadopoulos and Tisanos explicitly mention their stance on the distinction made by Deleuze and Guittari about migrants versus nomads.  Their position is to ‘revise’ the distinction made by Deleuze and Guittari rather than to abandon it; they write, “Starting from a discussion of the notion of nomadism, we will argue that the practices of contemporary transnational migration force us to revise Deleuze and Guittari's split between nomadism and migration.” (The Autonomy of Migration, 1)

Their critique of Deleuze is similarly focused in comparison to Hardt and Negri’s, however they maintain a stronger Deleuzian framework.  They again focus on the process of becoming, and what path becoming is taking in the post-modern world to resist Empire.  They write of becoming that, “Becoming imperceptible is the immanent end of all becomings, it is a process of becoming everybody/everything by eliminating the use of names to describe what exceeds the moment.” (The Autonomy of Migration, 1)  Think of it in this way, an illegal migrant and a citizen of a country meet in a moment outside of time and space.  In striated space controlled by Empire, they could refer to each other by names such as illegal and immigrant or citizen and native.  However, in the moment they can only perceive the other as a bare individual will, everything else about them is imperceptible.

            This becoming imperceptible is identifiable today with the model of nomadism.  They write of nomadism that, “Nomadism's dictum 'you never arrive somewhere' constitutes the matrix of today's emigrational movements. The following section attempts to delineate various modes of nomadic becoming which govern migrants' embodied experiences: becoming animal, becoming women, becoming amphibious, becoming imperceptible.” (The Autonomy of Migration, 2)  Again, Papadopoulos and Tisanos see the same issue that Hardt and Negri did on the subject of Deleuze and nomadism; this is namely that in the current era of global empire, one cannot expect a new horde of migrants to ride in from the outer space like they could when ‘outer’ space still meant somewhere on the Earth.  Instead, nomadism is the process of becoming nomad, which could theoretically happen to any person at any point in time.  Thus, a migrant could certainly be a nomad even if they move to a new destination.  Papadopoulos and Tisanos proclaim that, “Nomadic motion is not about movement but about the appropriation and remaking of space.  The nomad does not have a target, does not pass through a territory, leaves nothing behind, goes nowhere. The nomad embodies the desire to link two points together, and therefore she/he always occupies the space between these two points.” (The Autonomy of Migration, 2)  Migrants are always occupying space between points, as they have left their country of status for a new destination without status, from here they still desire to go somewhere or become something else.  This is what makes them nomadic. Papadupulos and Tisanos describe migration such as, “Even if migration starts sometimes as a form of dislocation (forced by poverty, patriarchal exploitation, war, famine), its target is not relocation but the active transformation of social space.” (The Autonomy of Migration, 3)  Hence, because nomadism and the migrations of today both embody a desire to transform a social space they can be used somewhat synonymously.

Migrants across the world today often do not want to be integrated, nationalized, and given status.  They would rather remain without status as a modern nomad.  This presents modern social problems such as multi-culturalism in a whole new light, and this is why migrants could become the new model for a transformation against Global Empire.  Multi-cultural advocates attempt to make every group and sub-group visible and demonstrate that they have power within Empire and thus must be included.  This only leads to their capture by global Empire however.  The way out then is to become invisible.  Papadopoulos and Tisanos write, “Instead of visibility, we say imperceptibility.  Instead of being perceptible, discernible, identifiable, current migration puts on the agenda a new form of politics and a new formation of active political subjects whose aim is not a different way to become and to be a political subject but to refuse to become a subject at all.” (The Autonomy of Migration, 7)  Take, for example, migrant communities in cities across the world where thousands of undocumented persons of similar ethnic or religious backgrounds have formed communities inside the territory of the polis, but outside of state power.  Within these communities, the undocumented are imperceptible amongst each other and must deal with one and another, ‘in the moment’.  As these communities and the number of imperceptible undocumented migrants grow state power will realize the contradiction of having these people living in their territory but not as a part of the state.  Furthermore, this is something that they will not be able to survive, as nothing will invalidate state power more than to reveal it as a house of cards where actual people live in the spaces in between.  When this house collapses, the barriers will be removed, and migrants will sweep in a new socio-political order based on the transformation of the social space into an open space from a striated one, much like the ancient nomads.

I grant Deleuze and Guattaris ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ my sophomoric approval, but I think it best serves as a starting point for discussion.  The distinction between nomads and migrants seems to hold less water in a post-modern world where great powers have placed boundaries over the entirety of geographic space, leaving only hordes of migrants of refugees to fill the symbolic spurs of the nomads.  However, Hardt and Negri’s transformational alignment of migrants with nomads leads to no other conclusion than that the resistance against Empire will consist of abandoning the places of power by the people.  But where would one go to vacate the places of power today?  Ultimately, Hardt or Negri provide no unambiguous answers to this question.  Papadopoulos and Tisanos on the other hand do describe how migrants will transform political life through their becoming imperceptible.  As more and more people are forced into migration they too will choose imperceptibility, and when all are imperceptible, the state will have no more divisions or striations from which to derive its power.  If something leads to the dissolution of state power structures, assuredly this is the most probable path of dissolution yet presented by any of the aforementioned authors.