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.
…and I guess we’ll talk about night land nav and orienteering some other time.
It’s been a whole two weeks. I’ve been to Berlin and back, sat out a cold even, but now I’m back on my bullshit! Fully fueled and ready to go! How about you? Ready to get back into some
#Nomadology?
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.
And the contrasting nomad science, well, that occupies the opposite position of all these antimonies. It’s inductive, conceives of situations as generative “problems,” is attentive to the local & the singular. It follows the grain of whatever material it sets itself to work with, cocreates form with what it encounters. And it results in a different division of labor — in creativity, autonomy, *power* residing with the mobile agents who take it up as practice — in a way that is deeply uncongenial
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
meaningful difference being articulated here, and it has to do with *what it is we think knowledge is for*.
Are we seeking to throw a net over the phenomena our mind encounters, wrestle them down, superimpose over them a grid that helps us understand them in terms of the things we already know? Or are we inclined, rather, to move with them, to follow their rhythms, to *let ourselves be changed by the encounter* & emerge as something different? It seems to me that that’s what they’re getting at.
At least, that’s how I’m choosing to understand this opposition.
D&G have a good deal more to say about the difference between “reproducing” and “following,” but I’ll let things rest here for today — no need for us to do anything but ease back into this conversation, and we’ll pick it up again tomorrow.
But in the meantime, why not go ahead and let me know what thoughts following this reading has produced for you? I’m always interested to hear how others respond to these ideas.
The rest of this section of the text consists of an extended riff on the distinction between “reproducing” and “following,” the latest in the succession of terms D&G use to qualify their categories of royal and nomad science.
The passage once again approaches the quality of the lyrical, but it’s a lyricism of an odd sort: strewn with technical vocabulary, with terms and concepts deployed in ways that might or might not make sense to anyone used to seeing them in their originary contexts.
For the most part, those contexts are mathematical, physical, geometrical; we get musings on “tangent Euclidean space” and “parallelisms between two vectors,” and while I’m tempted to bust out my math texts and subject these passages to a really fine-toothed reading, I don’t actually think that would yield much in the way of light. The meaning accretes, surely and steadily, simply by “following” the text in precisely the way they characterize as a practice of the “ambulant sciences.”
The nub of this distinction goes, again, to how the researcher — the reader, thinker, “scientist” — constructs their relation to the field of study and practice. Are they outside it, and looking down on it from above? Or are they committed to it, and subject to the play of all the forces they encounter there?
I’m *sorely* tempted to read this as metacommentary on the role of the French intelligentsia post-1968, but I’ll leave that to those who are more knowledgeable about the relevant history.
But it yields this beautiful passage, or beautiful to me, anyway:
“Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of *view* [emphasis in original] that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the ‘singularities’ of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form...And the meaning of Earth completely
“changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. ‘Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the
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