Nullifying the Boundary: The Art of Vertical Escape
Continuing from yesterday, I attempt to gouge even more sharply into the Nomadology proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, dragging out from it a new concept for existence that modern people must confront. I believe that contemplating what constitutes a “True Nomad” is a theme that runs deep, connecting to the question of what constitutes a “True World Citizen” living in a True World. However, the perennial, vexing problem at this juncture is that the vast majority of people currently leading a “nomad life” possess absolutely no understanding of this. In short, I view them not as the future, but merely as one extension of a “formerly” existing state, reliant on archaic modalities. And what they themselves fail to realize is the fact that while they appear to have escaped or exited a specific system, they are actually standing in the exact same position.
First, we moderns harbor a fundamental defect in cognition. It is the fact that we are still strongly held captive by the curse of dualism, and we possess no prescription to counter it. In the concept of Nomadology, many posit a system known as the State Apparatus, which functions to turn inward; in opposition to this, they establish the Nomad as a “War Machine” that escapes the order—that prescribed cage—and continues to flee outward. However, no matter how one moves from city to city in that state, because the separated structure of “inside” and “outside” itself is not being questioned, it remains nothing more than a binary trap. And those standing on this erroneous cognitive premise, whether nomad or not, unknowingly become a force that manifests and reinforces the boundary line as a tangible entity. At this moment, we completely misread the essence of Nomadology.
To cite a typical fallacy, it is the frequent occurrence in our society of a situation resembling a Möbius strip, where one intends to walk on the obverse only to find oneself on the reverse, or vice versa. Rather, I am inclined to think that neither a dualistic world nor a linear world actually exists.
Why do we fail by grasping this obverse and reverse, this inside and outside, dualistically? It is because there is always a latency occurring in the linear time that modern people falsely believe in. Modern people cannot perceive this latency because, in the linear world premised on modern spacetime, this delay requires a considerable amount of years. And now that people’s lives are implemented by the second, no one can detect a delay that requires these few years, decades, or centuries; it is discarded as something that “never happened.” In other words, humans no longer possess fundamental life instincts. However, that act of discarding—whether you do it intentionally or not—becomes the driving force that heightens anxiety and fear toward the Real that is not reality. Consequently, people avoid facing the Real all the more, desiring throughout their lives never to see the Real, not even for a single moment. By scooping up these feelings of modern people, converting them conveniently as “mercy,” and systematizing them, a relationship of mutual dependency is established. The password is: “If you do not wish to face the Real, serve this world system.”
To go further, the time, thought, and world possessing linear codes that we believe in are, in truth, merely afterimages or echoes generated by this latency. Therefore, if one attempts to execute an escape easily without understanding this premise, it becomes inevitable that one falls into the phenomenon where one intends to go outside but returns inside—that is, the trap of reterritorialization warned of by Deleuze and others. This is the true identity of the sense of entrapment in the modern age. If you ask why one feels deadlocked the more one appears to have moved forward, it is because one has not moved forward at all.
Originally, the action of trying to escape to an absolute outside should have been the potency of the Nomad as a War Machine countering the system. Upon that, it was assumed that the Nomad would act as the very function of redefining the city through the accelerative influx and efflux of the Nomadological inside and outside; however, the individual subjectivized since modernity cannot perceive this delay—where one intends to exit to the outside but is retrieved by the inside—unless they discern it with extreme caution. And the greatest problem is that people born and raised in countries that structure the subject within language cannot perceive this latency. The profound interest of language lies entirely here.
As a result, the current state of affairs is a farce where the Nomad, who should have been a War Machine, has been reduced to a system administrator of the State Apparatus, or a supplement to it. Why does such an inversion occur? It is because, prior to that, they continue to avoid changing the very ground of their thinking. In other words, they are practicing escape from the system as an “outside,” but simultaneously, they are also escaping from facing themselves; consequently, they have neither the resolve nor the determination to face the Real itself.
No matter how physically the subjectivized individual tries to escape outward and outward, the spread of this inescapable deadlock is already moving toward a movement that packages the ignorant way of thinking—”If I escape outside, there is an answer,” “If I keep escaping, I can acquire freedom”—adorned with flowery rhetoric and disseminates it to people, simply for the Nomad to recover the various costs incurred in living. Because they are nothing more than programs already written inside the system. That is to say, there is no future for those who merely lead a nomad life opening their PCs in cafes in various cities. For that is not Nomadology.
Modern people are not moving forward within this closed circuit; rather, they are retreating. However, even that retreat is constantly disguised as progress in the recognition of the linear world. In a linear world, retreat is impossible. Therefore, if we look inside the giant centrifugal separator that is the system, we can understand that the majority of humanity is not actually moving; they are “something” merely pinned to the wall by centrifugal force, spinning at high speed in that spot. In short, they are making no substantive progress or movement. The status quo is simply that while only retreat is occurring, the RPM—that is, the numerical values of information volume and travel distance—has increased massively.
In this management system, the human body transforms into a blurred silhouette, dancing while being gradually crushed by the system. Here, even the “face”—that last bastion of humanity evoking ethical responsibility toward the other—is stripped away, leaving only a body without vitality, allowed only to convulse in the errors of the system. And as a result of being thoroughly tamed, the final nervous reflex of an existence that has actively self-domesticated is beginning to be converted into the meaning of “living” in the present. I am beginning to think that the driving force behind the anti-intellectualist movement—the distrust toward global intellectuals—lies in the irritation that the people who speak pompously of the world have failed to articulate these very things.
This redefinition of the meaning of living is an extremely dangerous sign. The reason humanity is enveloped in nameless anxiety, fear, and despair is solely because they instinctively sense the possibility that this will be the coup de grâce for humanity. However, there is an important key here. The truth is that “humanity” is, in fact, something alienated just like reality. And everyone will one day face the day when all the values we currently believe in vanish in an instant, and we confront the Real. At that time, in the reality we had alienated from the Real, we will confront the raw, unalienated human, not the decorated, ornate humanity. It may be war, natural disaster, social upheaval, terror, plague, or famine, but it has become essential for us to live with those risks. Then, what should be done?