The Study Group as War Machine -- Neither Royal nor Rogue: Reading Group Sessions 1.1

Guiding Question:

How to gather and study in opposition and/or apposition to the state-recognized institution of higher learning—i.e., the royal academy—and what are the perils and pitfalls of doing so?

Excerpt 1

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari from A Thousand Plateaus (1980), “Nomadology: The War Machine” 1,570 words · ~10 min

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish “nomad science,” which works through problems, flux, and smooth space, from “royal science,” which counts space in order to occupy it. State science continually captures what it can appropriate from nomad science while repressing the rest.

Excerpt 2

Achille Mbembe from “Necropolitics” (2003), “War Machines and Heteronomy” 2,447 words · ~15 min

Mbembe traces what happens when state infrastructure is strategically eroded: polymorphous war machines emerge, combining political, mercantile, and predatory functions through direct links to transnational capital. This is the pitfall: without the stable state, other forms of grift and violence rush in.

Excerpt 3

Fred Moten & Stefano Harney from All Incomplete (2021), “The Gift of Corruption” 2,023 words · ~12.5 min

Moten and Harney argue that institutions regulate “corruption,” the generative sharing and entanglement that constitutes life, in order to impose scarcity, including the scarcity of the means of study. Meritocracy and regulated corruption work together against us, especially when we try to work them on our own behalf.

Excerpt 4

la paperson from A Third University Is Possible (2017), “You, a Scyborg” 2,189 words · ~12.5 min

la paperson theorizes the “scyborg” as the machined person who can rewire institutional technologies toward decolonial ends. Colonial schools accidentally produced subjects who used their grafted equipment to build a “third world university” nested within and against the first.