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.