Techniques for De-Centering Monadologies

Like Foucault, Deleuze and Giattari reject modernist models of subjectivity, which, with their emphasis upon temporality and the State, conceive of the subject as unified, rational, and static. This subject, Deleuze claims in "The Fold," has no place in the present age, which "is now made up of divergent series (the chaosmos) and no which longer tolerates "the differences of inside and outside, of public and private. Likewise, "the Leibnitzian monad is no longer able "to contain the whole world," and instead "opens on a trajectory or a spiral in expansion that moves further and further away from a center." In the postmodern era, Deleuze concludes, monadology is overtaken by "nomadology," the striation of the logos makes way for the smooth space of the nomos, and the sedentary subject-as-monad becomes a decentered, "schizophrenic," embodied, and active subject-as-nomad.

Peta Mitchell, "Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction"

The Greek term nomos is crucial to the "Treatise on Nomadology" where Deleuze and Guattari discuss nomadism most directly and extensively. But the Greek term itself can be internally differentiated, by considering it in relation to a series of distinct concepts from which it is most often distinguished in Greek philosophy: physis, logos, and polis. As distinguished from polis, nomos refers to space outside of city walls (originally pasture land), a space not subject to the laws and mode of organization of the state (or city-state). It is the distinction between polis and nomos that generates the sense of nomadism as a way of occupying space that is characteristic of nomadic people....Far more often in Greek philosophy, nomois is distinguished from physis. In this context, it refers to the domain of human culture as distinct from that of nature. If we were to formulate a speculative topography, we could situate nomos between the unruly realm of nature or wilderness (physis), on the one hand, and the enclosed and regulated space of the city or state (polis), on the other.

Buchanan and Swiboda, "Deleuze and Music"