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
ideal forms is, in fact, very similar to the processes Scott describes, in that *we have no problem seeing the negative aspect of it, but tend to miss what it affirmatively produces*. In D&G’s words, “Not only can it be said that there is no longer a need for skilled, or qualified, labor, but that there is a need for unskilled, or unqualified labor, for a dequalification of labor.”
In other words, the method of royal science does not merely undercut the autonomy of those with craft skills,
but also produces an affirmative demand for those who can uncomplainingly and undeviatingly execute an order issued to them from afar. These distinct methods and ways of knowing open onto different social orders — in fact, onto entirely different worlds.
Shall we leave things there for today?
Notes: Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Husserl:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/
...and, from the same source, one on Plato’s distinction between matter and form: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
Edmund Husserl (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
And here, in its entirety, is Scott’s magisterial “Seeing Like A State”: https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf
We’ll continue, and with any luck conclude, our discussion of royal and minor science tomorrow! See you then.
Ha! That “conclude” was a trifle optimistic: our discussion of royal science v nomad and minor science continues.
We have arrived at the question of why the State needs to suppress nomad science, and the answer D&G offer is, at first, startling in its straightforwardness: it isn’t for any other reason but the one we began to get into yesterday, i.e. that nomad science and royal science propose two differing divisions of labor, and the one upheld by the former is “opposed to the norms of the
State.” And then they go on to say something fascinating, though a whole lot less straightforward, as though it followed semi-obviously from the question of the division of labor: royal science is “hylomorphic.”
The word descends from Aristotelian thought, in which it signifies the juncture of “hyle” (matter) with “morphē” (form). A hylomorphic schema is one in which matter is conceived as something passive and inert, waiting to be given shape by an active form.
Hylomorphism is the scenario of the old Heptones song “Book of Rules”:
Each is given a bag of tools
A shapeless mass
and the book of rules
And this implies many things at once. First, of course, it implies a profound ontological hierarchy, with all of the grandeur (agency, intelligence, creativity, will, value) living with the one doing the shaping. It also implies that matter is *abject*: that it lacks tendencies or propensities or agential capacities of its own, and can only accept. And it
opens onto a world in which education, training, employment, and the broader organization of the social order are all arranged to accomplish operations of this form. The limits imposed by a hylomorphic schema are well established in left critique — you may be familiar, for example, with Paulo Freire’s “banking model of education,” where knowledge is conceived of as something deposited by teachers in students. (Ew.)
But D&G mean to go further, to take a still deeper cut.
It is true, they tell us, that “this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed...intellectuals and manual laborers.” But then they take a step back: “What characterizes [the hylomorphic schema] is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression.” And “[i]t seems that nomad science is more immediately sensitive to the connection between content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms encompassing
*both form and matter*” [emphasis added].
This strikes me as having the most profound implications for anyone who works “creatively” in any medium whatsoever. What D&G are suggesting is that — at least for minor science — all such work has the character of a negotiation. The mason wants to roof a void; the stone tells them where it can be struck without fracturing. The guitarist wants to evoke regret, and the string held at this fret can only sound triumph. I want to convey a certain sense,
and the conventions of English expression and the structures that mediate language in the brain constrain me to a relatively narrow path in doing so. Nobody stands alone, above, Promethean and wreathed in lightning, and sheds form onto the world. All acts of creation are, and must be, conversations. These conversations may be asymmetrical, to be sure — but they are never simply in the way of stamping an imprint onto a blank and receptive sheet of paper. So “the division of labor fully exists,
but does not imply the form-matter duality (even in the case of one-to-one correspondences). Rather, it *follows* the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of those connections, whether they be natural or forced. This is another organization of work and of the social field through work.”
I mean: whew. Yes it is, isn’t it? And if we are *very lucky*, those of us immured in State cultures might get to feel what a social field organized in
that way might feel like a couple of times in our lives, possibly for as long as a few months at once. The collaborative workshop, the meaningful conversation, the jam, even pallid simulacra like Burning Man: all irruptions of this nomad logic and its organization of labor into lives otherwise characterized by an all-too-vertical ordering of form and matter, medium and expression.
From here we proceed into a discussion of Plato, and the Platonic notions of “compars” and “dispars,”
but that’s sufficiently daunting that I think we should take it up from a fresh start tomorrow.
Notes! Here, again, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is their entry on form and matter: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
Paulo Freire’s “banking model of education” is discussed in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” in full here: https://files.libcom.org/files/Paulo%20Freire,%20Myra%20Bergman%20Ramos,%20Donaldo%20Macedo%20-%20Pedagogy%20of%20the%20Oppressed,%2030th%20Anniversary%20Edition%20(2000,%20Bloomsbury%20Academic).pdf
And here are Kingston’s own Heptones, with their big hit of 1973, “Book of Rules”: https://open.spotify.com/track/4PKri4OX2AB2RXj95Y9ZgB
See you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
Form vs. Matter (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
OK! We’re back into “#Nomadology,” w/further thoughts on the distinction between “royal” & “nomad” ways of knowing.
The discussion here is one of those passages where *either* D&G’s understanding of the sciences is so much subtler & so far exceeds my own that some of the specific analogies they are making remain obscure to me, *or* they are waving their hands & talking complete bollocks. But either way, it is still possible for me to retrieve sense from the argument, and that sense is valuable.
Their starting move is, once again, to define two “models of science,” and bring them into contrast w/one another: compars & dispars (which, as the English word “disparity” implies, appear to be rough Latin equivalents for “equal” & “unequal”). In doing so, they make new entries on either side of a growing ledger of terminology: compars belongs with royal science, logos, striated space, theorematicity, and the State apparatus…
while dispars belongs to the order of minor science, nomos, smooth space, problematicity and the war machine. And D&G tell us that compars is the search for laws, for regularity, for an “invariable form for variables.” It is not merely a grid draped over the known, but a gridness extending itself into every dimension at once, in a fiercely boiling wavefront of reticulation: “an independent dimension capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other dimensions…
of striating space in all of its directions, *so as to render it homogeneous*” [emphasis added].
By contrast, dispars is the art of the “clinamen” – the minimal curvature, the just noticeable difference. “Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables, but of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation.”
And this next bit is, for me, beautiful: “If there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations…irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible intuition of variation.”
That “sensible” is critical: D&G mean for us to *feel our way* through smooth space, using all the faculties of sense at our disposal – and this, the better to reckon with the particularity and irreducibility of the things we encounter.
The senses “seize or determine singularities in the matter, instead of constituting a general form. They effect individuation by way of events or haecceities, not by way of the ‘object’ as a compound of matter or form.”
And that word “haecceity”? Whoooo. Coming down to us from the thirteenth-century theologian Duns Scotus, this may be the most Buddhist-flavored word in the Western philosophical canon, denoting the isness, the ineffable thusness of something.
So where the procedure D&G associate with striated space (and therefore the royal science that produces such spaces) is “reproducing,” the parallel procedure for smooth space and the detection of haecceities is “following” – “the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences.” And these sciences “consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many ‘accidents’ (problems).”
Here I’m strongly reminded of the quote with which Lucy Suchman kicks off her 1985 classic “Plans and Situated Actions”:
“Thomas Gladwin (1964) has written a brilliant article contrasting the method by which the Trukese navigate the open sea, with that by which Europeans navigate. He points out that the European navigator begins with a plan – a course – which he has charted according to certain universal principles, and he carries out his voyage by relating his every move to that plan…
“His effort throughout his voyage is directed to remaining 'on course.' If unexpected events occur, he must first alter the plan, then respond accordingly. The Trukese navigator [by contrast] begins with an objective rather than a plan. He sets off toward the objective and responds to conditions as they arise in an ad hoc fashion. He utilizes information provided by the wind, the waves, the tide and current, the fauna, the stars, the clouds, the sound of the water on the side of the boat…
and he steers accordingly. His effort is directed to doing whatever is necessary to reach the objective. If asked, he can point to his objective at any moment, but he cannot describe his course.” [Gerald Berreman, 1966]
The contrast Suchman draws from this account – that between transcendent, a priori, from-above-and-outside planning and immersed, immanent, experiential, real-time “situated actions” – seems to me to correspond closely with D&G’s contrast of compars and the striation of space
by royal science, vs. dispars as the experiential negotiation of the world’s particularity. With each example, with each analogy and metaphor, we get closer to understanding that compars is “the form of interiority of all science”: the will to enclose, reticulate, reduce and render tractable that which properly cannot be, which is to say…everything.
Here, again, it feels to me that D&G approach a Taoist or early Zen perspective on matters.
Things must be reckoned with as they are, in their isness, and that isness is accessible to the senses – but it is permanently resistant to conceptualization, reproduction, representation or communication. A nomad science, they seem to me to be saying, permits things to be as they are, grasps and apprehends them as such, and does not require them to be brought inside to come into productive relation with them. (I would say “to make use of them,” but that formulation strikes me as being
exactly what we *don’t* want to uphold.)
So while this whole compars/dispars passage is prolix in a way that indulges some of D&G’s worst tendencies, it is in the end also astonishingly generative for me. With the sideways leap to Suchman, particularly, it really helped me fill in the picture – to understand how a nomad science might grasp the phenomenal world, and by grasping it proceed to a different kind of knowledge.
Notes! Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the “subtle doctor,” Duns Scotus…
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/
…and the original, Xerox PARC version of Lucy Suchman’s “Plans and Situated Actions”:
https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/ISL-6_Plans_and_Situated_Actions.pdf
I’ll be back with more “Nomadology” tomorrow, if I can fit it into my flight to Amsterdam & the talk I’m giving there. See you then!
John Duns Scotus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Oh, I can’t resist making this point, either: my method of approach to *this very text* strongly corresponds to nomad science as we are beginning to flesh it out.
I am feeling my way through the text slowly, with great care, asking of every singularity I encounter within its pages what it is in its full, autonomous particularity. I am – and I hope you are, as well – finding the way from one understanding to another by way of these toeholds or turning points, mapless but unafraid. Great fun.
Adam Greenfield
smith