Machine de guerre
In Deleuze and Guattari, the *war machine* is not primarily an army: it is an assemblage of an entirely different nature from the state apparatus, external to it, prior to its law. It comes from elsewhere—from band societies, nomads, packs—and invents what the state cannot produce on its own: speed and secrecy. The state only acquires a *war machine* by appropriating it in the form of a military institution, an operation that never ceases to pose problems for it.
La machine de guerre est extérieure à l’appareil d’État.
The plateau opens with an axiom, presented as self-evident yet demanding justification at every turn: the war machine lies outside the state apparatus. Not secondary or marginal—fully external, of another kind, another nature, another origin. Deleuze and Guattari draw on Georges Dumézil: political sovereignty has two heads, the king-magician and the priest-jurist, the bond and the pact—but war is nowhere to be found in it. The state captures, binds, seizes; when it wages war, it does so through an army it secondarily appropriates, never through a power that belongs to it by right.
This externality is evident in the contrast between chess and go. Chess is a state game: its pieces are coded, qualified, each remains what it is and moves within a closed space, point by point. Go knows only anonymous stones, devoid of intrinsic properties, whose value lies solely in their position within an open space—“Smooth” space of go, versus the “striated” space of chess. The war machine thinks and moves in the former; the state apparatus organizes itself in the latter.
What the war machine invents, then, is not combat first and foremost: it is speed and secrecy, two powers the state cannot produce on its own and must always borrow—with suspicion—from what is foreign to it. Hence its permanent distrust of its own military institution, which inherits a force that does not belong to it. Packs, bands, nomadic societies, or commercial and religious margins: wherever something escapes the state-form, in polymorphous and diffuse ways, there lies the war machine.
To be distinguished from the military institution, with which it is too quickly conflated. “The state does not possess a war machine of its own; it only appropriates one in the form of a military institution.” The army is disciplined, coded, put to the service of constituted power; the war machine, by contrast, embodies a fundamental indiscipline, a perpetual challenge to hierarchy. And to be distinguished from the mere line of flight: the line of flight is the vector by which an assemblage deterritorializes, whereas the war machine is that assemblage itself—collective, occupying its own space, with its own rules, affects, and becomings—not merely the movement of flight that runs through it.