4 - Geohistory and Hydro-Bio-Politics

Summary

It seems that in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari prefer geography to history. Do they not come right out and say ‘nomads have no history; they only have a geography’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 393)? Geography has three registers for them, corresponding to their three ontological registers. There is (1) actual geography, the production of maps (or better, ‘tracings’) of extended space, most often in the service of the State and its traditionally primary mode of spatialisation, striated space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12); (2) intensive geography, the ‘cartography’ that follows lines of becoming, the mapping of ‘longitude’ and ‘latitude’ of bodies (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 260–1); and (3) virtual geography, the map of the abstract machines of coding, overcoding and decoding, as they are actualised in the machinic assemblages of tribes, empires and war machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 222).

Before we go any further, we should note that the production of smooth spaces by the armed forces and surveillance technologies of contemporary States and quasi-State corporations, as well as the demand for identity cards and fixed addresses by asylum seekers, economic migrants, and other displaced persons, prevents any naive ‘postmodernist’ privileging of the smooth as somehow progressive or always beneficial and the striated as always retrograde and repressive. After all, the main text of A Thousand Plateaus ends with the line: ‘Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 500).