Buddhism, Nomadism, and the Making of New Religio-Political Places: Deleuzian Thought About Borderlands, Movement and Itinerant a/Theology

Abstract

Resistance is in movement, mobility and nomadism (in the Deleuzian sense), an ‘errant’ journeying which takes various counter-statist forms, such as in what may be called a vagrant religiosity. This paper looks at the convergence of a hierarchical state apparatus and its territorialising civic Buddhism contraposed with a deterritorialising religious nomad space; a counter-theology and hetero-praxis located in the borderlands. Buddhism in Thailand, increasingly marginalised or privatised, has reached a point where encounters inside and outside have shaken the arboreal foundations and aspirations of civic religion and its over-coded theological conventions. Broadly speaking Thai society is in a continued state of reflection with its own shadow, its own imagining; similarly, with religion which is an integral element. It is to the social interstices, to the rhizome, that we must look for the transformations to come.

Keywords:

• Deleuze and Guattari
• Buddhism
• Nomad Space
• Religious Wandering

Notes

1 Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘code’ as a cultural logic, a machinic operation or a process that is unfolding, a becoming (see Pawlik 2005).

2 Linguists for Northern Thai /Tai Yai or Shan Buddhism/s may be able to advise on local variants.

3 As nomadism often involves the use of regularised pathways or movement, Bauman sees the notion of a ‘vagabond’ (for the postmodern world) a more applicable term since these itinerants are in a fixed state of being ‘out-of-place’ (see 1993, 240–241).

4 Deleuze and Guattari adopt the term nomos from the pastures of the ancient Scythians; a variable distribution of bodies within a given place in opposition to polis which defines space as a contained zone subject to external control.

5 Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘smooth’ is taken from composer Pierre Boulez in reference to two distinct kinds of musical space. Smooth is rhizomatic, ‘patchwork’, a ‘fluid space of continuous variations characterised by the plurality of local directions’ (see Patton 2000, 112). ‘Smooth space’ exists in contrast to ‘striated space’—a partitioned and prohibitive field of movement, referring to an environment, a landscape in which a subject operates.

6 Overcoding involves a series of ‘phenomena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 46). As such, these phenomena are processes that seek to stratify and normalise subjects, and the best way to resist these processes is to ‘decode’, or to put these processes in flux. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is achieved through a process of deterritorialisation that produces the anti-statist ‘nomad’ figure. In practice overcoding works through the built environment, which must be conceived as inseparable from its many language machines (billboards, speakers, televisions, computers, and so on). Overcoding consists in the imposition of the regime of meanings arising from the fixing of representations on the various processes through which social life and desire operate. Overcoding ultimately entails the destruction of anything that cannot be represented or encoded.

7 An axiom here refers to the inclusion of a particular group or social logic or set of desires as something recognised by a state (as plus or minus values).

8 I refer to the centre-polity elsewhere as the ‘city-nation’ in the context of state. By ‘city-nation’, reference is made (symbolically, territorially) to metropolitan/primate Bangkok as an imagining of nation-state that is socially, culturally and economically separated from the rest of the countryside, defined by specific urban/elite civic (‘tribal’) values, and historically marginalising the nation countryside. It is also the font of national imaginings and the sacred–ritual centre/summit of the Thai nation-state (Taylor 2012).

9 Deleuze and Guattari would ask: How can the masses be made to desire their own repression? Here we need to look at the functions of propaganda.

10 For an excellent overview of Deleuzian fascism in the context of historical and contemporary liberalism and modernity, see the collection edited by Evans and Reid (2015).

11 The proliferation of microfascisms refers to a field of destructive, authoritarian impulses that permeates capitalist society. In the case of Thailand, this refers to its totalitarian conservatism in attempting to seal all possible lines of flight. But it is dangerously close to a centralised state (capital ‘F’) fascism as a realised nihilism, using the forces of the war machine now constructed on an intense line of flight, which it can then transform into a ‘line of pure destruction and abolition’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 253–254). The profound polarity in Thai society has been carefully manufactured under the aegis of a royalist military regime for its own purposes. It has created a proliferation of molecular ‘micro-black holes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 236), so entrenched that individuals see only the illusion, which is nourished by military-royalist propaganda. In Thailand, microfascisms (as in the danger of molecular striation) permeated and took hold through the military because there was already in place the appropriate micro-organisations (right-leaning state and non-state actors). These allowed for its inimitable ability to penetrate into every social cell (as cultivated hysteria around an illusory summit).

12 Foucault, in the Preface to Anti-Oedipus (2009, xiii) emphasises the problematic in Deleuze and Guattari's work of confronting fascism in everyday life, ingrained in a way of thought and behaviour, contested by multiplicities, difference (rather than uniformity) and flows (rather than unities), mobile arrangements (rather than systems), and to believe in what is ‘productive’ is nomadic not sedentary.

13 Deleuze’s desire is an ‘active and positive reality, an affirmative vital force’, realisable through action or practice (see Gao 2013).

14 See also Thongchai (1994).