De-skilling

Read the following interesting passage in Deleuze and Guattari “Nomadology”, p. 406 in a Thousand Plateus:

“Not only can there be said that there is no a longer a need for skilled, or qualified, labor, for a dequalification of labor. The State does not give power to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined, yet is sufficient to divest those whose jobs it becomes simply to reproduce or implement of all of their power”

The number becomes a subject

427ff in A Thousand Plateus):

The number becomes a subject,. The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied without itself being counted”

The task of the State-apparatus

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior,” over all flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects. (A Thousand Plateus 425)

Striated space in modernity

Read this in Negri & Hardts “Empires” (pdf, p. 208)

“The striated space of modernity constructed places that were
continually engaged in and founded on a dialectical play with their
outsides. The space of imperial sovereignty, in contrast, is smooth.
It might appear to be free of the binary divisions or striation of
modern boundaries, but really it is crisscrossed by so many fault
lines that it only appears as a continuous, uniform space. In this
sense, the clearly defined crisis of modernity gives way to an omni-
crisis in the imperial world. In this smooth space of Empire, there
is no place of power —it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire
is an ou-topia, or really a non-place.”