7 Spacetime: nomadism and sedentarity

“Britain ruled from the sea, without land conquest, by blockade and fleet.”

“The enemy becomes invisible, elusive, no longer a clear and present danger.” Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, 1942

Concept of territoriality underpins the workings of modern state. Sovereignty of the state is articulated in spatial terms in its relation to the population and the other states. Internally, the state claims monopoly over use of violence over analytically demarcated space. Externally, at least in theory, state’s are forbidden from interfering with its each other’s domestic politics. This conception, however powerful its influence on state’s self-understanding and scholar’s characterization of political regimes, is problematic in several interrelated aspects.

On the one hand, it’s rooted in sedentary political regimes where agricultural production is the main determinant in state’s ability to extract economic sources from the population. It is an abstraction made from within a material context. Sedentarism of modern state operates on the basis of a framework marginalizing, if not fully excluding, nomadism from the center of political theory. Aside from the historical precedent of nomadism, it is also a land-based political theory with its predilection towards stasis and conquest which is inadequate for accounting dominant mode of operation of maritime political regimes, i.e., major colonialist forces such as the British empire. Priority of movement in nomadism and sea-based politics/warfare call for different set of conceptual instruments to account for dynamic realities.

“Nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads. Griaznov has shown in this connection that the most ancient nomadism can be accurately attributed only to populations that abandoned their semi urban sedentarity, or their primitive itineration, to set off nomadizing. It is under these conditions that the nomads invented the war machine, as that which occupies or fills nomad space and opposes towns and States, which its tendency is to abolish.” 7000 B.C. Apparatus of Capture (P. 470), Deleuze & Guattari

The dawn of modern political system from 15th century onwards was result of not only gradual consolidation power by absolutist states in Europe. Centuries-long push by Turkic and Mongolian nomadic empires (Chambers, 1979) and saturation of trade-routes leading to trade-deficit in the West paved the ground of colonization of Americas and Africa, campaigns that started first as attempts to find alternate trade routes to Asia by passing Ottoman hegemony in the Mediterranean.

At the beginning of 20th century, European powers entered into a colonialist arms race. Virilio describes the process whereby visual arts and logistic instruments start feeding it each other leading to symbiotic proliferation of cinema and war reaching to a climax in the assemblage of satellite vision, instant telecommunication, and ballistic missiles. Space as something that stands against the political will is almost completely absorbed into the political machinery which overcome its own inward looking development as in walled-cities by distributing itself in space in dynamic networks.

In this conjecture, differential of speed increasingly becomes the foremost political category determining the capacity over one another. The modern information system in its reliance on supercomputers in national security matters such as protecting the integrity of distant communication and opening up new fronts of counter-insurgency warfare; is based on this agonistic political/military context of World War 2 (1991, de Landa). Computerization and embryonic forms of digitalization first kicked off with the military purpose of decoding Japanese machines of encryption by US and UK in early 20th century.

Communication technologies did not develop in a political vacuum devoid of strategic pressure. They are not products of ‘civil society’. Modern algorithms are rooted in the World War 2 efforts to counter intractable movement of German submarines that dominated Atlantic Ocean rendering allied defense close to impossible. It is in this conjunction of material conditions and strategic situation, the speed of corporeal movement of submarines in sea coalesced with the speed of encryption and decryption —fusion of informatics and force— and led to the emergence of computer revolution.

Thus, not as memory of by-gone era of pastoral nomadism but as a core political model nomadic war-machine and its construction/navigation of political spacetime require students of political sociology to limit state/civil society-centric analysis and relate this dyad to exteriorities which are at time symbiotic and at times dissonant its operation. Recent generalization of algorithmic intelligence/power demands profound rethinking of spacetime in political theory. With decentering of interiority of nation-state, there is a tendency to conceptualize new sociality in retro-terms e.g. new feudalism, new fascism. In the following chapters we will explore affordance of networks over territoriality in its conceptual capacity to account for these new political realities. Deleuze and Guattari named their book A Thousand Plateaus in order to draw attention to simultaneous minuscule/explosive shrinking/expansion of space that Heidegger conceptualized as the appearance of the gigantic.

“A sign of this event is that everywhere and in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear-in the annihilation of great distances by the airplane, in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at ran­dom through radio by a flick of the hand. Yet we think too superficially if we suppose that the gigantic is only the endlessly extended emptiness of the purely quantitative. We think too little if we find that the gigantic, in the form of continual not­ ever-having-been-here-yet, originates only in a blind mania for exaggerating and excelling. We do not think at all if we believe we have explained this phenomenon of the gigantic with the catchword “Americanism”” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 135)

We are far removed from master narratives that relies of the binaries of country/city without these being reduced mere epistemological blurs. With datafication populations and their living standards are perhaps more than ever segmented and placed in dynamic hierarchies and identity-categories that ossify for short periods of time rigid hierarchies. The concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) are useful to describe this constant uprooting and transplantation as its side-effect. Yet perhaps they are also inadequate modes of attending to new political realities as they are stuck within the polarities of territory. New conceptualizations of speed that salvage the concept from reduction to mechanical motion in space and link it with movement in time arguably offer the most fertile grounds for political theorization (Işsevenler, 2022, p. 85).

Resonating with these two modalities (nomadism and maritime power which shares a commonality with aerial power in terms of operating in dynamic space ) that are simultaneous with and complementary to sedentary statehood without being irreducible to its logics, the development/arrival of new technological topologies are expressing profound transformation of fields of political thinking towards the analytics of movement and speed, thereby relativization of territorial basis of political power and territorial focus of sociopolitical theory.

This relativity should be developed from multiple vantage points without presupposing translatability —without information loss/gain across of each these perspectives. From the perspective of land-based state, a resistance to settlement can become on the axis of capture/escape. Yet this state-centric reading does not exhaust intelligibility of the dynamic relation from the perspective of nomadism. Schematically, the hold of territorial sovereignty over nomadism is linked to strategies of surplus accumulation. State wants to fix the movement of nomads and be able to find them when it needs to in order to be able to tax their economic activity and recruit their human resources towards its war-making efforts (Lindner, 1983). In this interest in boundless accumulation of surplus, sedentarism tends towards conservation of resources over the discharge of energy, stability of organization over its rhythmic movement.

This fundamental bureaucratic attitude of the state manifests in relation to the population across the board not just in its archaic relationship to nomadic tribes. The first move of the state is to ask for identification, if this is not possible, strive to create the conditions of possibility of controllable identity by registers, charts, and archives. This is in contrast to essential mobility of nomadic life-style which is not tied to the land in the same way without disqualifying nomads from strategies of calculation and inscription. Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on Nomadic War-machine in A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987) is seminal in the comparative analysis of nomadism:

“Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe to assume the presence of a military organization. Is this not the way an army deterritorializes its soldiers? … For so peculiar an idea-the numerical organization of people-came from the nomads. It was Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to Egypt; and when Moses applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the advice of his nomad father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite, and was done in such a way as to constitute a war-machine, the elements of which are described in the biblical book of Numbers. The nomos is fundamentally numerical, arithmetic. When Greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab arithmetism,, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable to the logos: not that the nomads “do” arithmetic or algebra, but because arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad influenced world.” (P. 388)

Here, the distinction in the political operationalization of quantification lies in the dominant interest out of which it emerges. While in sedentarism, measure is geared towards anticipation, capture and stabilization of movement as in calculation of the exact time when the river Niles flooded in Egyptian water-based civilization; in nomadism and nomadic war-machine, numbering is an emergent quality of forces in movement. As Deleuze and Guattari put it” “It is a directional number, not a dimensional or metric one.” (P. 390)

“History has always dismissed nomads. Attempts have been made to apply a properly military category to the war machine (that of “military democracy”) and a properly sedentary category to nomadism (that of “feudalism”). But these two hypotheses presuppose a territorial principle: either that an imperial State appropriates the war machine, distributing land to warriors as a benefit of their position (cleric and false fiefs) or that property, once it has become private, it itself posits relations of dependence among the property owners constituting the army (true fiefs and vassalage). It both cases, the number is subordinated to an “immobile” fiscal organization, in order to establish which land can be or has been ceded, as well as to set the taxes owed by the beneficiaries themselves.” (p. 394) 

Sedentarist mode of living has an embedded interest in turning relation of land to a machinery of wealth-accumulation. While it would be unjustified to see nomadic societies as without excess and surplus, in the agrarian society there is an interest towards reservation and conservation. Put figuratively, nomadic society wants to be “light” and sedentary society “heavy”. Former support movement and speed, the latter gravity and centralization. This propensity towards mobility renders nomadic tribes open to religious and ethnic heterogeneity compared to increasingly purist conceptions of community and tribal-lineage in land-based aristocracies.

“We learn that the young Osman liked to hunt in remote areas. A certain Köse Mihal, the Christian lord of Harman Kaya, always accompanied him. Our sources calls Köse Mihal a ghazi and states that “Most of these ghazis’ attendants were Christians from Harman Kaya.” It is important to note that Köse Mihal did become a Muslim, but much later. Here we must conclude that if Mihal had really been a ghazi, the term must have been a label in no sense describing the character and behavior of a Muslim Holy Warrior. While Mihal is perhaps the most famous ” Christian ghazi” his story is only the most dramatic example of Ottoman-Byzantine cooperation in the early days: dramatic because it is ultimately a story of military cooperation.” (Lindner, 1983, p. 5)

Works Cited

Chambers, J. (1979). The Devil’s Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe. Phoenix Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1954)

Khazanov, A. M. (1994). Nomads and the outside world (2nd ed., J. Crookenden, Trans.). University of Wisconsin Press. (Original work published 1983)

Lindner, R. P. (1983). Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia. Sinor research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.

Schmitt, C. (2015). Land and sea: A world-historical meditation (S. G. Zeitlin, Trans.; R. A. Berman & S. G. Zeitlin, Eds.). Telos Press Publishing. (Original work published 1942)