Gill e s Del e uz e a n d Fl ix G uatt ar i

City /Stat e

In so-called primitive societies there exist collective mechanisms which

simultaneously ward off and anticipate the formation of a central power. The
appearance of a central power is thus a function of a threshold or degree beyond
which what is conjured away ceases to be so and arrives. This threshold of
consistency or of constraint is not evolutionary, but coexists with what has not
crossed it. What is more, a distinction must be made between different thresholds of
consistency: the town and the State, however complementary, are not the same
thing. The 'urban revolution' and the 'state revolution' may coincide, but are not one.
In both cases there is a central power, but it does not assume the same figure.
Certain authors have made a distinction between the palatial or imperial system
(palace temple) and the urban town system. In both cases there is a town, but in one
case the town is an outgrowth of the palace or temple and in the other the palace or
the temple is a concretion of the town. In one case the town par excellence is the
capital, and in the other the metropolis. Sumer already attests to a town-solution, as
opposed to the imperial solution of Egypt. But to an even greater extent, it was the
Mediterranean world, with the Pelasgians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians, that
created an urban tissue distinct from the imperial organisms of the Orient.1 Once
again, the question is not one of evolution, but of two thresholds of consistency that
are themselves coexistent. They differ in several respects.
The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of
circulation and of circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and
which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits: something must enter it and exit
from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polarization of matter, inert, living or
human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass through specific places, along
horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is
fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold of
deterritorialization because whatever the material involved, it must be

1On Chinese towns and their subordination to the imperial principle. see Etienne Balazs.

Chinese Civilisation and Bureaucracy, trans. H.M. Wright, New Haven, Yale University Press,

1964, p. 410: 'The social structures in both India and China automatically rejected the town

and offered. as it were, refractory, substandard material to it. It was because society was well

and truly frozen in a sort of irreducible system, a previous cystallization.'

deterritorialized enough to enter the network, to submit to the polarization, to follow
the circuit of urban and road recoding. The maximum deterritorialization appears in
the tendency of maritime and commercial towns to separate from the backcountry,
from the countryside (Athens, Carthage, Venice). The commercial character of the
town has often been emphasized. but the commerce in question is also spiritual, as in
a network of monasteries or temple-cities. Towns are points-circuits of every kind,
which enter into counterpoint along horizontal lines; they operate a complete but
local town-by-town integration. Each one constitutes a central power, but is a power
of polarization or of the middle [milieu], of forced coordination. That is why this kind
of power has egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical,
democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic. Town power invents the idea of the magistrature,
which is very different from the State civil-service sector [fonctionnariat].1 Who can
say where the greatest civil violence resides?
The State proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of intraconsistency. It
makes points resonate together, points that are not necessarily already town-poles,
but even diverse points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic,
technological particularities. The State makes the town resonate with the
countryside. It operates by stratification: in other words, it forms a vertical,
hierarchized aggregate that spans the horizontal lines in a dimension of depth. In
retaining given elements. it necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements,
which become exterior; it inhibits, slows down or controls those relations. If the State
has a circuit of its own, it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon resonance; it
is a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder of the network, even if
in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls over its relations with that

1From all of these standpoints, Franois Chatelet questions the classical notion of the city-

state and doubts that the Athenian city can be equated with any variety of State ('La Grce

classique. Ia Raison, L'Etat.) in En marge, I'Occident et ses autres, Alberto Asor Rosa, et al.

Paris. Aubier Montaigne, 1978. Islam was to confront analogous problems, as would Italy,

Germany and Flanders beginning in the eleventh century: in these cases, political power does

not imply the State-form. An example is the community of Hanseatic towns, which lacked

functionaries, an army and even legal status. The town is always inside a network of towns.

but the 'network of towns' does not coincide with the 'mosaic of States': on all of these

points, see the analyses of Franois Fourquet and Lion Murard, Gnalogie des quipments

collectifs, Paris, 10/18, pp. 79106.

remainder. The question is not to find out whether what is retained is natural or
artificial (borders) because in any event there is deterritorialization. But in this case
deterritorialization is a result of the territory itself being taken as an object, as a
material to stratify, to make resonate. Thus the central power of the State is
hierarchical and constitutes a civil-service sector; the centre is not in the middle [au
milieu] but on top because the only way it can recombine what it isolates is through
subordination. Of course, there is a multiplicity of States no less than of towns, but it
is not the same type of multiplicity: there are as many States as there are vertical
cross sections in dimension of depth, each separated off from the others, whereas
the town is inseparable from the horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global
(not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an operation
of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the milieu).
It is possible to reconstruct how primitive societies warded off both
thresholds, while at the same time anticipating them. Lvi-Strauss has shown that
the same villages are susceptible to two presentations, one segmentary and
egalitarian, the other encompassing and hierarchized. These are like two potentials,
one anticipating a central point common to two horizontal segments, the other
anticipating a central point external to a straight line.1 Primitive societies do no lack
formations of power; they even have many of them. But what prevents the potential
central points from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those
mechanisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a
higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles are not
concentric, and the two segments have need of a third segment through which to
communicate.2 This is the sense in which primitive societies have not crossed either
the town-threshold or the State-threshold.
If we now turn our attention to the two thresholds of consistency, it is clear
that they imply a deterritorialization in relation to the primitive territorial code. It is
futile to ask which came first, the city or the State, the urban or state revolution,
because the two are in reciprocal presupposition. Both the melodic line of the towns
and the harmonic cross sections of the States are necessary to effect the striation
of space. The only question that arises is the possibility that there may be an inverse

1Claude Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest

Schrepf, New York, Basic Books, 1963, pp. 15051.

2Louis Berthe analyses a specific example of the need for a 'third village' to prevent the

directional circuit from closing: 'Aines et cadets, I'alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj:'

L'Homme, vol . 5, no. 3 /4 (July - December 1965), pp.21415.

relation at the heart of this reciprocity. For although the archaic imperial State
necessarily included towns of considerable size, they remained all the more strictly
subordinated to the State the more it extended its monopoly over foreign trade. On
the other hand, the town tended to break free when the State's overcoding itself
provoked decoded flows. A decoding was coupled with the deterritorialization and
amplified it: the necessary recoding w as then achieved through a certain autonomy
of the towns or else directly through corporative and commercial towns freed from
the State-form. Thus towns arose that no longer had a connection to their own land
because they assured the trade between empires or, better, because they
themselves constituted a free commercial network with other towns. There is
therefore an adventure proper to towns in the zones where the most intense
decoding occurs: for example, the ancient Aegean world or the Western world of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Could it not be said that capitalism is the fruit of
the towns and arises when an urban recoding tends to replace State overcoding?
This, however, was not the case. The towns did not create capitalism. The banking
and commercial towns, being unproductive and indifferent to the backcountry, did
not perform a recoding without also inhibiting the general conjunction of decoded
flows. If it is true that they anticipated capitalism, they in turn did not anticipate it
without also warding it off. They do not cross this new threshold. Thus it is
necessary to expand the hypothesis of mechanisms both anticipatory and inhibiting:
these mechanisms are at play not only in primitive societies, but also in the conflict
of towns against the State and against capitalism. Finally, it was through the
State-form and not the town-form that capitalism triumphed: this occurred when the
Western States became models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows. and
in that way resubjugated the towns. As Braudel says, there were 'always two
runners, the state and the town' - two forms and two speeds of deterritorialization -
and 'the state usually won ... everywhere in Europe, it disciplined the towns with
instinctive relentlessness, whether or not it used violence... the states caught up
with the forward gallop of the towns.'1 But the relation is a reciprocal one: if it is the

1Femand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, New York, Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 398, 405,

411; italics added. (On town-State relations in the West, see pp. 396406). As Braudel

notes. one of the reasons for the victory of the States over the towns starting in the

beginning of the fifteenth century was that the State alone had the ability fully to appropriate

the war machine: by means of the territorial recruitment of men, material investment, the

industrialization of war (it was more in the arms factories than in the pin factories that mass
modern State that gives capitalism its models of realization. What is thus realized is
an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single City, megalopolis or
'megamachine' of which the States are parts or neighbourhoods.

production and mechanical division appeared). The commercial towns, on the other hand,

required wars of short duration, resorted to mercenaries and were only able to encast the war

machine.