This work does not exist as a standalone book by Gilles Deleuze. What you’re referring to is actually “Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine” (in French: “Traité de nomadologie—La machine de guerre”), which is the twelfth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), co-authored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This plateau is sometimes referenced independently because of its conceptual density and influence, but it was never published as a separate book under the title you’ve given.
The Core Argument: State vs. War Machine
The central thesis of this plateau concerns the relationship between two fundamentally different modes of organization and thought: the State apparatus and the war machine. Deleuze and Guattari argue that these represent irreducibly distinct social formations with different origins, operations, and orientations. The State apparatus is characterized by sedentary organization, hierarchical structure, striation of space, and the capture and coding of flows. The war machine, by contrast, is nomadic, operates through smooth space, and exists fundamentally exterior to the State apparatus—though it can be appropriated by it.
The argument begins with a striking claim: the war machine is not originally related to war at all. Rather, war becomes the war machine’s object only when the war machine is appropriated by the State apparatus. In its pure or nomadic form, the war machine has an entirely different object—the occupation and composition of smooth space, the affirmation of a nomadic existence. War, properly speaking, emerges when the State apparatus captures the war machine and turns it against other States or against nomadic peoples.
This reversal is crucial to understanding the entire plateau. Deleuze and Guattari are not primarily interested in military history or strategy, though they draw extensively on both. Instead, they use the war machine as a concept to think about forms of social organization, thought, and creativity that escape or resist State capture. The war machine becomes a figure for any force or movement that operates according to a logic exterior to the State.
Nomadism and Smooth Space
A substantial portion of the plateau develops the distinction between smooth and striated space, which becomes one of the most influential conceptual pairs in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Striated space is organized, measured, divided, and controlled—it is the space of the State, of agriculture, of the city, of the cadastral survey. Smooth space, by contrast, is the space of the nomad: the desert, the steppe, the sea, the ice. It is not that smooth space lacks organization, but rather that it is organized differently—through local operations, continuous variation, and heterogeneous distributions rather than through global constants and homogeneous measures.
The nomad does not move in the way the migrant does. The migrant goes from one point to another, from one striated space to another. The nomad, by contrast, moves within smooth space—the nomad distributes themselves in smooth space, occupies it, holds it, and this is their territorial principle. The nomad has a territory, but it is a territory without precise boundaries, a territory that is inseparable from the vectors of movement that cross it. Nomadic space is vectorial, directional, not dimensional or metric.
Deleuze and Guattari develop this through multiple examples and models. They discuss the maritime model, where the sea was initially smooth space that was progressively striated through navigation techniques, astronomical positioning, and cartography. They examine the mathematical model, contrasting the smooth space of minor or nomadic science with the striated space of royal or State science. They explore the musical model, distinguishing between striated musical space (with its fixed scales, measures, and forms) and smooth musical space (with its continuous variation and non-pulsed time). They consider the textile model, where weaving creates striated space while felt-making creates smooth space—felt being made through the entanglement of fibers without the geometric organization of warp and weft.
These are not mere metaphors or illustrations. Each model reveals something about the nature of smooth and striated space, and together they demonstrate that this distinction operates across multiple registers—spatial, scientific, aesthetic, technological. Moreover, smooth and striated space are never pure; they exist only in mixture, and what matters is the dominant tendency and the direction of movement between them.
Nomadic Science and Royal Science
One of the most developed sections concerns the distinction between two forms of science or knowledge. Royal science, associated with the State apparatus, operates through theorems, seeks constants and invariants, works with stable essences and fixed laws. It is a science of reproduction, of the identical, of the metric and the measurable. Nomadic or minor science, by contrast, operates through problems rather than theorems, follows flows of matter rather than imposing forms, works with singularities and affects rather than essences and properties.
Deleuze and Guattari trace this distinction through the history of mathematics, mechanics, and metallurgy. They discuss how certain mathematical developments—such as projective geometry, differential calculus, or catastrophe theory—have a nomadic character, following continuous variation and morphological processes rather than fixed forms. They examine how metallurgy, as an itinerant craft, developed a knowledge of matter that was irreducible to the hylomorphic model (the imposition of form on matter) that dominated State science. The metallurgist follows the singularities of matter, the veins of ore, the grain of metal, working with material flows rather than imposing predetermined forms.
This distinction has profound implications. It suggests that there are forms of knowledge and practice that cannot be reduced to or derived from State science, that have their own consistency and rigor. The State apparatus does not create nomadic science; rather, it appropriates it, captures it, translates it into its own terms. Royal science is constantly drawing on nomadic science, extracting from it what can be formalized and reproduced, while nomadic science continues to operate at the edges, in the interstices, following lines of flight that escape capture.
The Appropriation of the War Machine
A crucial movement in the argument concerns how the State apparatus appropriates the war machine. The State does not invent the war machine; the war machine is exterior to the State and has a different origin. But the State captures it, makes it its own, gives it war as its direct object. When this happens, the war machine becomes the military institution, the army, subordinated to State aims and organized according to State principles.
This appropriation is never complete or stable. The war machine retains something of its exteriority even when captured. Military institutions can become autonomous, can turn against the State, can develop their own logic. Moreover, there are forms of warfare that resist State appropriation—guerrilla warfare, partisan warfare, revolutionary warfare—that retain something of the nomadic war machine’s original character.
Deleuze and Guattari develop this through historical examples. They discuss the relationship between nomadic peoples and sedentary States, how nomadic empires (like the Mongols) operated differently from sedentary empires, how the nomadic war machine could devastate State formations but could not itself become a State without transforming into something else. They examine how European States progressively appropriated the war machine, creating standing armies, developing military science, making war into an instrument of State policy.
But they also trace counter-movements. They discuss how revolutionary movements have sometimes operated as war machines against the State—not necessarily through armed struggle, but through the creation of new forms of organization, new modes of thought, new ways of occupying space. The war machine, in its broadest sense, is any formation that draws a line of flight, that creates something new, that operates according to a logic exterior to the State.
The Axiomatic of Capital
The plateau also addresses how capitalism relates to the State apparatus and the war machine. Capitalism, for Deleuze and Guattari, operates through an axiomatic rather than through codes. Where previous social formations coded flows (of people, goods, desire), capitalism decodes them, liberates them, but then captures them in an axiomatic—a system that can add or subtract axioms to regulate flows without recoding them.
The capitalist axiomatic is more flexible than State coding, more capable of accommodating variation and innovation. But it is also more totalizing, more capable of capturing and subordinating everything to its logic. The war machine, in the context of capitalism, takes on new forms. Capital itself operates as a kind of war machine, drawing lines of flight, deterritorializing, creating smooth spaces. But these smooth spaces are immediately reterritorialized by the axiomatic, captured and subordinated to the logic of accumulation.
This creates a complex situation. Capitalism needs the war machine, needs deterritorialization, needs innovation and transformation. But it also needs to control and limit these processes, to prevent them from escaping the axiomatic. The result is a constant tension, a constant movement between smooth and striated space, between deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that revolutionary movements today must operate as war machines against both the State apparatus and the capitalist axiomatic. This does not necessarily mean armed struggle; rather, it means creating new forms of organization, new modes of thought and practice, new ways of occupying and composing space that escape both State capture and capitalist axiomatization. The war machine, in this sense, is fundamentally creative—it is the force that creates new possibilities, new modes of existence.
Conceptual Innovations and Methodology
Throughout the plateau, Deleuze and Guattari develop a distinctive methodology. They work through what they call “assemblages”—concrete arrangements of bodies, technologies, practices, and concepts that have a certain consistency and produce certain effects. The State apparatus is an assemblage, as is the war machine. These assemblages are not structures or systems in the traditional sense; they are not defined by their elements or their organization, but by what they do, by the affects they are capable of, by the territories they create and the deterritorializations they undergo.
This approach allows them to move freely across different domains—military history, mathematics, metallurgy, music, textiles—finding resonances and connections, tracing how similar operations occur in different registers. It also allows them to avoid reducing one domain to another, treating each as having its own consistency while also participating in broader assemblages.
The plateau introduces or develops several concepts that have become influential beyond their original context. The distinction between smooth and striated space has been taken up in geography, urban studies, and cultural theory. The notion of nomadic science has influenced science studies and philosophy of science. The concept of the war machine itself has been applied to everything from artistic movements to political resistance to corporate innovation.
Historical and Anthropological Material
Deleuze and Guattari draw extensively on historical and anthropological material, though always in a way that serves their conceptual purposes rather than aiming at historical accuracy or completeness. They discuss nomadic peoples—the Mongols, the Turks, the Huns—and their relationship to sedentary States. They examine how these peoples organized space, how they waged war, how they related to technology and knowledge.
They also draw on the work of historians and anthropologists—Pierre Clastres on societies against the State, Arnold Toynbee on nomadic empires, various military historians on the evolution of warfare. But they use this material selectively and creatively, extracting from it what serves their conceptual development, often pushing interpretations in directions the original authors might not recognize.
This has led to criticism that they misuse or oversimplify historical material. But their aim is not historical reconstruction; it is conceptual creation. They are interested in what these historical formations can teach us about different modes of organization and thought, about possibilities that have existed and might exist again in different forms.
The Question of Violence
One of the most difficult and controversial aspects of the plateau concerns violence. If the war machine in its pure form is not originally related to war, what is its relationship to violence? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the war machine does have a relationship to violence, but it is a different kind of violence from State violence.
State violence is organized, measured, directed toward specific ends—the maintenance of order, the enforcement of law, the conduct of policy. The violence of the war machine, by contrast, is more immediate, more affective, less instrumental. It is the violence of destruction, of abolition, of the line of flight pushed to its limit. When the war machine is appropriated by the State, this violence is channeled, organized, made instrumental. But it retains something excessive, something that exceeds State purposes.
This is one of the most obscure and troubling parts of the argument. Deleuze and Guattari seem to suggest that there is something affirmative about the war machine’s violence, that it is connected to its creative power. But they also acknowledge the dangers, the ways the war machine can become purely destructive, can turn into fascism or totalitarianism. The line between creative deterritorialization and destructive abolition is not always clear, and the war machine can tip from one to the other.
Relation to the Broader Project
This plateau is integral to the larger project of A Thousand Plateaus. The book as a whole develops a philosophy of multiplicity, of becoming, of assemblages and lines of flight. Each plateau explores a different aspect of this philosophy, developing different concepts and following different lines of inquiry. But they are all connected, all part of a single, complex argument about the nature of reality, thought, and politics.
The war machine plateau connects particularly closely to several others. The plateau on the smooth and the striated develops the spatial concepts introduced here. The plateau on the apparatus of capture examines how the State captures and codes flows. The plateau on becoming explores the nomadic character of becoming itself. The plateau on the refrain examines how territories are created and transformed, which relates directly to the nomadic occupation of smooth space.
The concepts developed here also connect to Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier work, particularly Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. That book developed the concepts of coding and decoding, of flows and their capture, of the relationship between desire and social production. A Thousand Plateaus continues and develops these themes, but with a different emphasis and different concepts. Where Anti-Oedipus focused on psychoanalysis and the family, A Thousand Plateaus ranges more widely, examining language, music, biology, geology, and many other domains.
Influence and Reception
The war machine plateau has been one of the most influential sections of A Thousand Plateaus. It has been taken up in political theory, particularly in discussions of resistance, revolution, and alternative forms of organization. It has influenced military theory and strategic studies, though often in ways Deleuze and Guattari might not have anticipated. It has been applied to artistic and cultural movements, to corporate innovation, to urban planning and architecture.
The concepts of smooth and striated space have been particularly influential in geography and spatial theory. Geographers have used them to analyze everything from the organization of cities to the nature of borders to the effects of digital technologies on space. The distinction between nomadic and royal science has influenced science studies and philosophy of science, contributing to discussions about alternative forms of knowledge and practice.
The plateau has also been controversial. Some critics argue that it romanticizes nomadism and violence, that it oversimplifies complex historical realities, that its political implications are unclear or dangerous. Others argue that the concepts are too abstract, too removed from concrete political practice to be useful. Still others embrace it as offering new ways to think about resistance and transformation in contemporary capitalism.
The work has been particularly influential in autonomist Marxism and post-anarchist political theory. Thinkers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have drawn on it in developing their concepts of Empire and multitude. It has influenced discussions of guerrilla warfare, insurgency, and asymmetric conflict. It has been used to analyze everything from the Zapatista movement to the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.
In philosophy, the plateau has contributed to discussions about the nature of the State, the relationship between thought and politics, and the possibilities for philosophical creativity. It exemplifies Deleuze and Guattari’s distinctive approach to philosophy—their willingness to draw on non-philosophical material, their creation of new concepts, their rejection of traditional philosophical problems and methods in favor of a philosophy that is itself nomadic, that follows lines of flight rather than building systems.
The plateau remains challenging and generative, continuing to inspire new interpretations and applications. Its concepts have proven remarkably flexible and productive, capable of being taken up in diverse contexts and disciplines. Whether one agrees with its arguments or not, it represents a significant contribution to political philosophy and social theory, offering new ways to think about power, organization, space, and resistance.
