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!
Today, a brief intermezzo, in the form of a question: given the rather airless parade of men across its pages, *to what degree does women’s thought constitute an outside for D&G*?
Aaaand we’re back! We’re still unfolding the distinction D&G make between “royal science” (and, implicitly, the “striated” spaces it emerges from & reproduces) and the way/s of knowing they call “nomad science” (and the “smooth” spaces *that* emerges from or reproduces). The discussion that follows is rather obscure for me, as (again) it presumably is for those not graced with either an elite French education or the specifically architectural history the whole passage pivots on. Let’s go slowly.
D&G start by arguing there are times and places in history where the tension between a royal science and a nomad science becomes acute. They draw on the work of French sociologist Anne Querrien – “Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de l’état,” a book whose title I freely translate as “Becoming A Bureaucrat, or: The Work of The State,” and to which, most curiously, the footnote in this volume appears to be the only reference, though Querrien herself surely exists – to identify two such moments.
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 –
are specified to the builders by whatever secular or ecumenical authority is undertaking the project. The overall form is known in advance; the work involved is merely the execution of a model. The process is deductive, rather like the static, just-so “theorematic” approaches to a situation D&G have already associated with royal science. Bottom line, though: authority legislates a whole from above, then has it carried out; local initiative is minimal. This is the original Trust The Plan!
But compare the Gothic cathedral (which I grew up thinking of as massively Earthbound and all “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” and had to learn to see as the most delicate thing the twelfth century knew how to make). It’s a confection of pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses. And what I hadn’t realized – maybe you did? – is that these forms *emerged* from the local, experimental practices of masons, working iteratively. Rib vaults allowed builders to test & adjust forces on the fly.
The governing logic is inductive, “problematic,” adaptive, even generative: the form of Gothic cathedrals was adjusted in the very course of being built, in response to the specific pressures of gravitational load and material, not handed down a priori. What is being called upon here is a minor science: craft knowledge, empirical adjustments, improvisation, truth to the material rather than a static model imposed from above. These masons, dare I say it, stayed with the trouble.
I’d say that the Gothic cathedral is discovered rather than decreed, and this goes to the heart of the distinction I think D&G are trying to make. In any given historical moment, two tendencies coexist: a royal mode of knowledge, singular & imposed from above, and a minor or nomad mode, marked by multiple, distributed probes into the space of possibility. In one, matter is subordinate to form; in the other, form emerges from local experimentation and the interaction of matter and force.
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
If anyone has any further insight into the enigmatic «Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de l’état», please do let me know. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
Oh, and: I note that our slow, careful walk through this fairly short book is two weeks old today. I hope you’re enjoying the process as much as I am!
#deleuze #guattari #deleuzeandguattari #nomadologyI’m still thinking about the Fremen, actually, as a reading in the distinction between royal and nomad science, and vis à vis an insight that’s cropped up in my reading of Ingram’s “The Garden” (i.e. that soil is a technology, that Indigenous management of the ecosystem on millennial timescales is virtually never recognized as such, etc.). Recall that the Fremen are not in the slightest unsophisticated: that the stillsuits of their manufacture are far and away the best available, and so on.
The Imperium looks at the Fremen and can see only barbarians, because the sophistication of their techne is expressed in terms of their supreme adaptation to a given environment. They have everything they need to thrive in that environment, and not a single thing besides that does not serve that purpose. Can we read this as the pinnacle expression of an in this case entirely literal nomad science?
And if you think this reading is a stretch, consider what Frank Herbert himself had to say, in terms that both recapitulate Taoist wisdom and anticipate Deleuze and Guattari: “[T]he mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience…A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.” There it is. There it is, in just about so many words.
And the implication, once again, is that where nomad science is compelled to develop an account of royal science as a matter of survival, royal science cannot even recognize nomad science as an alternate but valid set of possibilities. Whether in the case of the Fremen, or our own inability to understand the Amazon rainforest for what it is, Empire literally cannot even see that which constitutes its outside.
In a delicious irony, we can think of such exteriorities, for Empire, as what Iain M. Banks called an “outside context problem” – delicious because the very first historical example of such a problem that folks often offer is the sails and horses and guns of the conquistadors, for a people who had never seen any of that and had no way to parse it. One can abscond from Empire’s vision by being so sophisticated it has no way of constructing the very thing it gazes upon.
(What’s this about the Amazon? Ingram cites William Balée, author of “Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes,” to the effect that the “rainforest is a human artifact which occurred when, after the collapse of Amazonian civili[z]ation following the disastrous coloni[z]ation from 1500, flora and fauna took advantage of the staggering soil fertility left over from the now lost civili[z]ation.” I find this argument compelling.
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/26080)
Project MUSE - Cultural Forests of the Amazon
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.)
“But the fact remains that in the government agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under a well-centralized administration while bridges were still the object of active, dynamic and collective experimentation.” And this sets up a tasty parallel: the top-down, a priori, theorematic architects of Romanesque cathedrals are to road engineers what the “journeyman” masons feeling their way through what the stone wanted in the crafting of a Gothic cathedral are to bridgebuilders.
The methods employed by the engineers of bridges were unorthodox. And, again, multiple, horizontal and collective, to the point that “[director of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees Daniel-Charles] Trudaine organized unusual, open ‘general assemblies’ in his home.” (A quibble here: D&G claim Trudaine for the nomad lineage of bridge builders, but they might have more plausibly claimed the opposite, on the strength of the *several thousand kilometers of royal routes* he designed. Dang.)
What can we make of this “problematizing” spirit of curiosity, openness and collective experimentation, evidently surviving right at the pinnacle of the State’s own administration for the reticulation of the land? “What we wish to say...is that collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that reconstitute equivalents of the war machine — in sometimes quite unforseen forms — in specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals, or rendering judgments, or making music, or
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.
Sometimes they take the form of inclusions, survivals, encapsulations. Sometimes their otherness is consciously put to work internally, even nurtured and encouraged, as red teams or OPFOR. Sometimes, indeed, the problematizing element resides in the echelon at the very top of the org chart: the renegade C-suite that has somehow set itself against the entire rest of the corporate body. I don’t want to make too much of this possibility, or, especially, romanticize it, but I do grant D&G’s premise.
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
Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees | Invention & Technology Magazine
Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees
I want to back up a step, in continuing our investigation into “Nomadology” today. Yesterday, we’d wrapped up by opening up the question of how “fringes or minorities” upholding the war machine’s nomad science could possibly survive inside institutions of State, given the stress D&G place on their absolute exteriority. In explication, they offer the enigmatic aphorism, “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round.”
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
things, but also from ideal, royal or imperial essences” [emphasis in original]. The move here appears to be using Husserl’s phenomenology to open up a way of thinking about the relationship between the virtual and the real that blows through the familiar Platonic doctrine of form. The “essence,” here, is neither the actual thing itself *nor* the exact, perfect, ideal, transcendent form of royal science, but a mysterious, third thing: “*anexact, but rigorous*” [emphasis in original].
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.
It has to do, rather, with the fact that I don’t know what this passage on “protogeometry” as a science of the “vague essence” gets them. This far in “Nomadology” — with some effort — I’ve been able to see how each successive chunk of ideation extends a line of flight, calls upon new metaphors and incarnations to elucidate the primary distinction the piece starts with. This is the first point at which I’ve felt myself completely at sea. Maybe I need to learn how to navigate smooth space myself?
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].
I add the emphasis here because this is such a striking p/recapitulation of the many passages in Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” describing the (generally disastrous) results of abstract planning from afar. In fact, we might think of Scott’s ”mētis," which refers to the situated, local, embodied knowledge derived from lived experience, as the more practical, Earthbound cousin to nomad science.
The effect of moving the design of cathedrals to the plane of abstraction and the reproduction of
Adam Greenfield
Kevin Carson