One probably has to have had a better mathematical education than I did for the sense of that last distinction to leap forth from the page, so let’s unfold it a little before wrapping up for today.

When D&G describe something as “theorematic,” they’re invoking the history of geometry and formal logic to point out that a situation framed in this way proceeds to truth via a process of deduction. You are given a set of unproved axioms & derive the theorem from their interaction, purely formally.

But there’s something akin to a lack of curiosity in this process, a begged question. If you accept (“grant”) the truth of the axioms on the table, the theorem pops into being more or less automatically: “It follows that...” The solution is implicit in the starting position, and the rules of this toy system.

For D&G, the opposite of this closed system is the “problem.” Now I do not love the word “problem”: you’ve likely often enough heard me rant here about the roots of problem/solution framing

in advertising, and in my systems theory-derived aversion to the notion that the challenges we face can even be constructed as problems which admit to solutions, even in principle. For me, “problem” is a concept with far too much freight of the wrong kind to be useful.

Sucks to be me, though, because “problem” is how D&G would prefer for us to construct situations. If a theorem is a narrowing cone of possibility that converges on a unitary truth, a problem is that cone turned around so that it

perpetually opens out, a generative field that gives life to any number of solutions. Describing something as “problematic” in the D&G sense, then, is *highly* complimentary: it means something that’s a site of emergence, something that’s open, something that’s productive of novelty and difference.

What they’re implying about a “nomad” or “minor” science with this laundry list of qualities should now be a little clearer. It isn’t simply the distinction between Kuhn’s “normal” science and the

For now: notes! The Wikipedia page on “Alien” and the conceptualization of the xenomorph is worth consulting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenomorph

You can find the award-winning Peter Watts story “The Things” here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

There’s a fairly comprehensive, if dense, discussion of Thomas Kuhn, normal science and the paradigm shift here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

Finally, I used to have a fairly enlightening article on David Ogilvy and the history of problem-solution framing in advertising, in the big training bundle I was handed on my very first day at PSYOP school, but I’m afraid I can’t put my finger on it at the moment. If I can dig it up, I’ll post it here.

See you tomorrow, for further inquiries in minor science!

situations it apprehends in terms of open-ended and generative “problems,” and not deductive, converging “theorems.”

I have to say that I remember being distinctly disappointed when I reached this passage, on my first reading at the age of 18. I’m certain that I’d picked the book up hoping that it was some kind of anarchoprimitivist manual — something that might teach me to be an urban Bedouin or Viet Cong or even Fremen, shrouded against the filth of the cindered, rodential Lower East Side.

At the age of 57, though, I find this material fascinating. It’s a secret history! And who doesn’t love a secret history?

It is, specifically, an attempt to trace a lineage of thought as it wanders across the past few centuries of Western science. And that lineage — that minor science, bending the tools and practices of science against itself — is coupled to the figure of the war machine, just as royal science is to the State.

Because of what it is & how it works, it’s perpetually throwing up

challenges to State knowledge, constantly generating new concepts and figures of thought that the State can only suppress or attempt to envelop and incorporate. “What State science retains of nomad science is only what it can appropriate; it turns what remains into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it.”

I bet you can think of a few pungent examples of just this sort of interrelation in recent history. You don’t have to be

Nevertheless, a sufficiently robust community can always attempt to enfold and appropriate such perspectives, and put them to work on its own terms. And this is what D&G tell us the State and its royal science have most often done with the fruits of minor science.

The passage that follows, sadly for me and maybe for you, is one of those that is largely given its sense by reference to a series of figures from the history of French thought: “Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, Carnot,

available and helpful in filling in the gaps in a way the library card catalogue would not have been in 1986, but even so this passage feels like it is bound to remain obscure to people not equipped with an elite French education.

This may or may not matter, because the thought comes to ground, and is succeeded by one of the most interesting passages in the book, about the sea and smooth space. This is “a specific problem for the war machine” — and remember the special sense in which D&G use

that word, as something open-ended and generative. They invoke Paul Virilio, to note that “it is at sea that the problem of the *fleet in being* is posed, in other words the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement that can rise up at any point” [emphasis in original].

I don’t know why D&G felt it necessary to namecheck Virilio here, because I don’t personally think his treatment of the “fleet in being” particularly adds anything to the discussion. It’s a concept from naval