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Work was deskilled, all the intelligence necessary to the task of construction being withdrawn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/

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.

*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,

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”!

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.

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.

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…

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.

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!

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.

We are still in the midst of an extending passage distinguishing two approaches to epistemology — two contrasting ways of knowing that D&G associate with their figures of the State apparatus and the war machine, ways they refer to as “royal” and “nomad” or “minor science” respectively.

And they’ve thrown a bunch of different metaphors at these concepts, in the attempt to clarify how each works in the world, and I’ve in turn recruited some material from arbitrarily far afield — Lucy Suchman, for

example, and her “Plans and Situated Actions” — to see how the distinction they’re making chimes with my own epistemic frames.

Briefly, as a refresher, royal science is the State’s mode of knowledge. It is consecrated to the reproduction of templates delivered from above, the use of those templates to reliably impose form on passive matter (“hylomorphism”), the equally passive execution of a plan devised at and by the center. It conceives of the world theorematically and deductively.

to the State.

Without leaving this subdivision of the text, D&G begin to argue that royal and minor sciences (strong version) produce or (more weakly) are associated with different kinds of space: respectively, “striated” and “smooth.” And striated and smooth spaces, in turn, require different kinds of conceptualization, and afford different kinds of movement through them.

The distinction they offer is between “reproducing” and “following”: “The first has to do with reproduction, iteration and

reiteration; the other, having to do with itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences.”

I can see that this is *precisely* the kind of passage that vexes certain readers of D&G, and of theory more broadly, to the point of rage. I can understand how this might seem like overclever wordplay, choking the page with language without producing meaning. But though I’ve certainly had to exercise some patience to get here, I’ve actually come to enjoy this kind of construction. There is a