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!
surreal bovine choreography.No cows were harmed during the making of this video, though their future prospects probably aren't as optimistic.music is availab...
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
that space, compelling an adversary to allocate resources, plan their own movements and maintain forces in reserve even if it never sets sail. In fact, the fleet radiates *more* influence in port, since committing it to one or another heading both risks its destruction at the enemy’s hands and, just as decisively, rules out the possibility of it appearing elsewhere.
Torrington’s notion informed military thought for centuries, down to and including the development of nuclear deterrence strategy,
For now, today’s notes.
Here’s an article on the fleet in being as it appears in naval history...
https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1246&context=nwc-review
...and here’s Virilio’s treatment of the idea, in the 2006 edition of his 1977 “Speed and Politics,” from the same semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series that “Nomadology” itself appeared in, in 1986:
https://monoskop.org/images/archive/c/c1/20170626060354%21Virilio_Paul_Speed_and_Politics_2006.pdf
Enjoy these, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more on D&G’s conception of smooth and striated spaces!
These are “the construction of Gothic cathedrals in the twelfth century [and] the construction of bridges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” And seeing as my erudition, such as it is, sadly encompasses neither of these moments, I’m forced to take the discussion of them that follows on faith.
It’s important, firstly, that we understand the contrast that emerges between Romanesque and Gothic techniques of cathedral construction not as a periodization or an evolutionary argument.
In other words, the Romanesque and the Gothic were both possibilities that arose in a given envelope of technological possibility. The difference between them is one of approach, not of temporality – but it’s profound.
The round arches, barrel vaults & thick walls that characterize Romanesque construction (and here I’m cribbing from sources I’ll share in the links) are laid out according to pre-established geometric models. These forms – the circle, the semicircle and so on –
This, anyway, is what I think they’re getting at by invoking Querrien, though I had to sit with articulations like “One does not represent, one engenders and traverses” for awhile before they yielded up sense as characterizations of nomad science at work.
I don’t mind admitting I found this passage rather hard going, in other words, & had to do a fair amount of digging of my own for the point to really click. Here’s my main source on Gothic construction techniques: https://moodle.unifr.ch/pluginfile.php/991378/mod_resource/content/0/FRANKL%2C%20CROSSLEY%2C%202000%2C%20Gothic%20architecture%20I.pdf
We continue into our third week of reading “Nomadology: The War Machine,” slowly and carefully. Thanks so much to everyone who’s come along for the ride so far!
Today we pick up the story where we’d left it, in the middle of a passage where D&G are trying to establish that the war machine’s absolute exteriority to the State is mirrored in two ways of knowing, lineages of thought they call “royal science” and “minor” or “nomad science.” And there’s an asymmetry between these: just as the State
can only appropriate the war machine’s energies for itself by flattening and abstracting the very thing that generates those energies, royal science can only make use of the fruits of nomad science once they’ve been standardized, routinized, subjected to normalization operations.
D&G invoke the work of the French sociologist Anne Querrien to consider two moments at which they feel nomad science and royal science are poised in clearest opposition: in the construction of Romanesque and
Gothic cathedrals, starting in the European twelfth century, and then again in the engineering of bridges and roadways from the eighteenth century onward.
This latter case is curious, in that by that period, the construction of French bridges and roadways were both subject to State administration. (And with results that remain obvious even now. All roads may “lead to Rome,” but I suggest consulting a map of France to see just what a centralized imperial mobility network looks like.)
instituting a science, a technology...”
Now, as true as this may be empirically, it frankly strikes me as a little bit of a fudge factor. Having spent a few thousand words stressing the *absolute* exteriority of the war machine to the State, the *utter* outsideness and unknowability of nomad science to royal thought, D&G now tell us that we can find bits of these processes strewn throughout Empire if we know how to look for them. And we can imagine this, right? We can, because we’ve seen it.
How to square this seeming self-contradiction? Perhaps it is simply (as D&G would have it) that royal science can ultimately only leverage the products of nomad science, not its processes: “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round.”
The gemlike little aphorism is as close to a koan as D&G ever get, which makes it an ideal place to break for tonight.
Tomorrow we’ll come back to the dense conversation leading up to that aphorism, which I’ve elided, and we’ll see if we can tease out what this all might mean.
In the meantime, you may enjoy this brief overview of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees...
https://www.inventionandtech.com/landmark_landing/80184
...and this road map of France, in which the centralized design of the network is made most obvious. All it’s missing is a little M. Bibendum with a beret. https://about-france.com/photos/maps/france-motorway-map.jpg
And they follow this by observing that “the specific characteristics of nomad science are what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it counters and the interaction ‘containing’ it.”
This passage seems, to me, to arc back toward the few pages immediately preceding it, rather than setting up the argument that follows, so my instinct is to dig back into those pages, and see if we can’t make them yield an accounting of what those “specific characteristics” are.
There’s a problem here, though — definitely in the ordinary sense, though hopefully in the Deleuzian sense as well — which is that this material is fairly opaque to me, in just the way D&G’s detractors so often accuse them of being.
For one thing, it starts by invoking Husserl, a writer whose oeuvre and general stance I have zero familiarity with. D&G tell us “he speaks of a protogeometry that addresses *vague*, in other words vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences...distinct from sensible
I interpret this to mean that the royal essence is theorematic, received from above, and in this way infertile, where the “vague essence,” this vagabond artifact and instrument of a counterscience, is perpetually generative — something that remains close to lived, contingent, adaptive practices of reckoning with space, and moving through it.
I confess to feeling a little lost here, though, a lostness which doesn’t simply turn on my manifest unfamiliarity with Husserl.
That said, I sure would appreciate your thoughts on what work you think this passage is doing.
What follows, though, is far more readily graspable, because it compares the ways in which royal and minor science respectively organize work and “the social field through work.” This discussion will resonate for anyone who’s ever considered the Taylorist regime, read Foucault on disciplinary space or Scott on imperial land-use planning, or worked a job whose regulations came in a three-ring binder.
In order to draw the distinction they wish to convey most clearly, D&G return to the figures of the architect of Romanesque cathedrals and the journeyman crafting the Gothic equivalents.
The two most immediate axes of contrast they discuss here concern the division of labor (and its consequences for the autonomy and mobility of the laborer) and the conception of the task. And just as we need to remember that the Romanesque and Gothic styles are not periodizations or evolutionary developments,
D&G also want us to understand that the division of labor in nomad science is no less sophisticated than that imposed by royal science, it’s just different.
Historically in France, and presumably elsewhere, the journeyman was mobile. (That the name in English seems to allude to this is an accident of etymology, the “journey” here deriving from the French “journée” or day, and referring to the fact that they had the right to be paid daily.) Masons traveled from project to project, site to site,
learning skills and spreading knowledge as they went. This gave them an autonomy that was obnoxious to the State, which responded by “tak[ing] over management of the construction sites, merging all the divisions of labor together in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the manual, the theoretical and the practical, fashioned after the difference between ‘governors’ and ‘governed.’”
Work was deskilled, all the intelligence necessary to the task of construction being withdrawn
upstream, with the obvious consequence that it simultaneously became more of an exercise in abstraction — here again, the manipulation of exact, perfect, ideal, transcendent forms.
So where D&G tell us that both royal and minor science contain the concept of “the plane,” each handles that concept in markedly different ways: “The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman stands in contrast to the metric plane of the architect, *which is on paper and offsite*” [emphasis added].
@adamgreenfield From your description it sounds like they're trying to redefine Kuhn in their own terms. The "nomads" are "anomalists", creating that outside the scope of "normal (ie "royal") science, continually circulating until it grows large enough that it must be "dealt with", and thus war is invoked (and a paradigm shift may occur, or be resolved).
But like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, that's the impression that I get.
Adam Greenfield
Dr.Implausible
Kevin Carson