Nomadic Flows: Globalism and the Local Absolute

In ”Anti-Oedipus” (1972), Deleuze and Guattari make extensive use of the concept of flows to develop a global history of social, cultural and material relations, with the modern capitalist era being characterized by a ubiquitous decoding and recoding of flows. In ”A Thousand Plateaus” (1980), Deleuze and Guattari introduce a complementary conceptual opposition of nomadism and sedentarism, thereby suggesting that modern capitalist relations may be framed in terms of nomadic and sedentary flows. The opposition of nomadism and sedentarism is one of tendencies rather than discrete entities, and hence an opposition that manifests itself empirically only in mixtures of the two categories. Nonetheless, nomadic flows and sedentary flows differ qualitatively from one another, and on the basis of that qualitative distinction one may delineate two different conceptions of global relations: an acentered, metamorphic, open ”globalism” based on nomadic flows; and a centralized, static, closed regime of universal ”globalization,” based on sedentary flows.