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
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.
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
plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the planst that are growing in between are yours. Later...you can extend the size of your territory.’”
The quote is from that beloved old fraud Carlos Castaneda, who may or may not have invented the “Yaqui teachings” of his putative respondent Don Juan Matus from whole cloth. I don’t think it’s fully possible to convey now just how ubiquitous Castaneda’s book was, once upon a time and among a certain stratum of people, so it’s
possibly less startling to encounter these words deterritorialized from that context and reterritorialized here than it might be otherwise. But the quote does what D&G need it to, and does so in a few dimensions at once.
Firstly, of course, if we take it as face value, as a set of instructions for reckoning a claim to some portion of the surface of the Earth, it bears no resemblance to the cadastral procedures imposed by State geometers. It is an unwilled thing of rain, flows, seeds, runnels.
The claim fans out across the land, obedient to the accidents and singularities it encounters as it moves (or “follows”). It will not extend equally in all directions at once. It will follow the dictates of a logic that has no need of grids, theodolites, geodetic fiducials. It is still a claim: not better, but different.
But the method has also (ostensibly) been vouchsafed to the listener, Castaneda, by the wizened old Yaqui shaman don Juan Matus, and we are told that he in turn received his
understanding of the Earth from his encounters with the spirit of the peyote cactus.
I cannot imagine a better figure of contrast for D&G: compare a State geometer like Poincaré at the Bureau des Longitudes, projecting a grid upon the very Earth itself, to “don Juan,” baked out of his mind, crawling across the floor of the Sonoran desert trailing his fingers through the loam.(Whether or not he ever existed is, of course, immaterial.) Two completely different ways of apprehending a field of
relations. And again, I know which method of knowing I’d rather pursue: not better, but different.
Notes! Here’s a full version of “The Teachings of Don Juan,” in the colorful Ballantine edition you may remember from that era... https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/C/Castaneda%20-%20The%20Teachings%20of%20Don%20Juan.pdf
...and here’s a scholarly 1984 defense of Castaneda against his critics, should you be interested in such a thing:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43853017
Here’s a little potted history of the Bureau des Longitudes. It still exists!
https://www.imcce.fr/institut/histoire-patrimoine/buts-bdl
Before we leave this opposition of royal and nomad sciences behind, though, D&G want us to attend to the field of their *interaction* — though, in fairness, the examples they offer mostly seem to concern the capture and encapsulation of insights offered up by the latter on the part of the former.
Possibly referring back to their slipstream invocation of don Juan Matus, there is a lovely bit here here they explain that “[i]t is not that the ambulant sciences are more saurated with irrational...
procedures, mystery and magic. They only get that way when they fall into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also surround themselves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what comes out in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sciences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to have an autonomous development.”
What they appear to me to mean here is that there’s something self-contained or even self-completing about the
practice of nomad science — I’m tempted, even, to say solipsistic. One can get so bound up in the process of following, they seem to be saying, that the process expands to become the totality of life, in a way that challenges its operationalization for ends external to the pursuit in itself.
You want a cathedral? Then you better have someone on hand to abstract & reproduce what I’m doing, because I’m happy following the curve of force as it refracts through this particular chunk of stone.
This feels very close indeed to the point I’ve been trying to make, these past few years, when I argue against the notion of “scale” as an imperial logic, the logic of the enemy.
Every time I hear someone ask, “Yes, but how will this *scale*?”, in other words, what I’m hearing is a demand that some solution to a local problem, generated by the application of a nomad science, be lifted up out of that context and reproduced, precisely by the application of a royal science. It turns out that these
terms are *not* abstractions, but figures of thought that concretely shape our response to the various struggles we confront in life. And I imagine that just about every one of us will have some example of this dynamic playing out in our lives.
So the next time someone asks you about “scale,” it’s worth remembering that what they’re asking for is nothing less than a translation from one frame of value to another — and, what’s more, one which is certain to be lossy.
But, again: the fruits of the ambulant sciences are *not better, but different*. There may well be certain legitimate ends in the world that *require* the application of a royal science, with all the risks and all the habits of thought we know it entrains.
The example D&G offer, broadly, is safety. They nod at the recognition that the State generally requires a *kind* of safety (security, the “consistency” we are told “the markets like”), but what they mean specifically and concretely is how to
theorematic apparatus and its organization of work” Whew!
And they conclude by invoking the Bergsonian distinction between intuition and intelligence, where “only intelligence has the scientific means to solve formally the problems posed by intuition.” Kekulé dreams of the snake eating its own tail, in other words, but then wakes up and works out the structure of the benzene ring conventionally. The dream needs the equations to do meaningful work in the world...
...but the calculations can never be posed without the dream.
And here we bring the passage distinguishing royal or State science from nomad, minor or ambulant science to its end.
Notes: Here’s a piece on Bergson’s “intelligence” and “intuition” (here glossed slightly differently as “intellect” and “instinct”): https://grantmaxwellphilosophy.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/intellect-and-intuition-in-henri-bergson/
And here’s the conventional take on Kekulé’s dream of the snake:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9#Kekul%C3%A9's_dream
We’ll proceed to the next section of #Nomadology tomorrow!
I want to ask you-all a question, btw — both those of you who’ve been following our reading of “#Nomadology” from the beginning, as well as folks who have tuned out or otherwise dropped off along the way:
To what degree would it be useful to have this whole exploration worked up as a self-contained, stand-alone #zine or pamphlet? Is that something you’d dig?
Let me know, yeah? If there’s enough interest, I’ll gin this material up in a form you can slip in a rucksack or a back pocket. 👊
OK! We’re onto the next subdivision of #Nomadology, which appears thusly in the text:
“Problem 2: Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?
Proposition 4: The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, finally, by noology.”
In the wake of our extended consideration of the entanglement of royal & nomad science, that first bit’s transparent enough. And at this point we’re sufficiently immersed in D&Gese that even “the exteriority of the war machine” reads straightforwardly.
But “noology”? What’s going on there?
When I first picked up this text in ’86, any concern for “noötropics” still lay a few years in the future, interred in a yet-to-be-unfolded stratum of “Mondo 2000”s and Psychic TV remixes. But I’m willing to bet I’d already come across Teilhard de Chardin and his notion of the “noösphere,” maybe in a Colin Wilson paperback left behind by some girlfriend’s older brother or something? So I would have had a vague intuition that we were in the realm of thought.
And indeed that’s what we’ll be taking up in this section: an inquiry into thought itself.
The musing on thought which opens the section strikes me now as being pretty densely seeded with tacit references or allusions we have already characterized as having emerged from an elite French education of the twentieth century. I can detect echoes in the phrasing — I’m just not sure what they’re echoes *of*. So feel free to chime in if it’s obvious to you what they’re riffing on here.
In fact, this template is “an image of thought spanning all thought,” “which is like the State-form developed in thought.” And in a callback to the expansion on the “two-headed” nature of the State apparatus with which we began — remember all that material about Rex and flamen, Varuna and Mitra? — we’re assured further that “this image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty.”
The first they characterize as the “*imperium* of true thinking,” emphasis in original, which
constituting a legislative or juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground.”
And the truly salient point about this opposition — they do love their binary oppositions, don’t they, D&G? — is that the “imperium of true thought” and the “republic of free spirits” are necessary to one another. Just as, in the domain of application, royal & nomad science display a certain sort of asymmetrical-but-reciprocal relation, the imperium and the republic orbit one another with the jerky rhythm
of a binary star: “the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the first...antithetical and complementary, they are necessary to one another.”
This, understood in fullness, is one hell of a sobering insight. It’s the very model of all those ways in which some ostensibly wild vector of thought (and, I think we can read, cultural practice) not merely “feeds” or “is captured by” or even “stabliizes” conservative thought, *but is the very precondition of that thought’s
Both phases or moments of this cycle belong in their entirety to State thought! Well, this is beginning to feel claustrophobic, if not Negrian in its insistence that Empire can have no outside. Isn’t there *any* way to think the world that doesn’t ultimately inscribe template after template on the raw matter of being, world without end?
Well! “It is not out of the question, however” — and note the contingency, the tentativity — “that in order to pass from one to the other there must occur,
‘between’ them, an event of an entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place outside.”
Whew, what a relief! Come back tomorrow, and we’ll see if we can’t get D&G to tell us a little more about what that event consists of, and how we might induce its coming into being.
Notes! The heterodox Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) prefigured our moment in some fascinating ways. You can read more about his concept of the “noösphere” here: https://teilhard.com/2013/08/13/the-noosphere-part-i-teilhard-de-chardins-vision/
The ever-credulous Colin Wilson, whether despite or because of that very credulity, offered his late twentieth-century readers (and certainly me in 1988, lying alone up in my hacked-together loft bed in the flat above the Third Avenue pizza joint) true glimpses of thought from outside. A list of his major works is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson_bibliography
You know Jamie Reid’s work, even if you don’t recognize the name. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jamie-reid-12111
And here are two perspectives on the “Events” of May ‘68, the first from the mainstream:
https://frenchly.us/what-happened-may-1968-mai-68/
...and the second from the POV of a few political currents I have more sympathy for, including primary documents:
https://libcom.org/article/france-1968-reading-guide
Enjoy those, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
And we’re back! To recap, we’re into a section on noölogy, which D&G gloss for us as “the study of images of thought, and their historicity.”
At issue is whether thought can be extricated from the State model, or “image,” or, conversely, if we are bound to endlessly reproduce that image and its strictures in our own style of thought, as “a center that makes everything, including the State, appear to exist on its own efficacity [?] or on its own sanction.”
This latter possibility, if it turned out to be the case, would seem to be fatal for projects with ambitions to develop outside or beyond the State — cutting them off deep in their prehistory, severing them from their sources of energy, not even permitting their formulation. “Indeed, by developing thought in this way, the State-form gains something essential: an entire consensus.”
This passage goes on to elaborate what is at stake, should we permit that image or Image to govern our imaginings:
“Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of the universality of law.”
Well, we all recognize this, don’t we? D&G are naming the frustration of everyone who’s ever tried to have a conversation with Serious People — those who get to define the terms, the standards of comparison and the frames of reference. They’re describing the exhaustion of the anarchist explaining mutual aid to the New York Times reporter,
and getting only blank stares in response. In other words, they’re describing a condition of *hegemony*, just as Gramsci would have it, in which a regnant common sense imposes just-about airtight strictures over what can be thought or asserted if you wish to be taken seriously.
And there does seem to be one particular image of thought they hold responsible for enacting what we might call the conditions of possibility for this hegemony, though they don’t name it as such: German idealism itself.
Common sense, D&G tell us, is “the State consensus raised to the absolute.” And this “was most notably the great operation of the Kantian ‘critique,’ renewed and developed by Hegelianism.” For all those who descend from this line, the Idea itself has puissance in the world: force, the ability to transform material conditions. It is realer than real.
In the history of the West, there has been a precession of roles entrusted with the manipulation of the Idea, a series of symbolic operators that
begins with the poet and eventually includes philosophers and sociologists. They characterize these practitioners of the Idea as “image trainers” — a particularly brutal phrase, that. And the image they train us on leaves us unable to think the world in any way that doesn’t simply clone-stamp the implicate order of relations they take as a given, superimposing a ghostly State logic over everything we might encounter to the point that only the State is real for us.
Grim stuff. Again: airless.
But! Felicitously, “noölogy is confronted by counterthoughts” — note the plural — which are violent in their acts, discontinuous in their appearances, and the existence of which is mobile in history.” In other words, *there is an escape hatch from the Idea and the image of State thought it incontinently propagates across the entire field of the real*.
D&G tell us that these counterthoughts “are the acts of a ‘private thinker,’ as opposed to a public professor,” and they name three candidates:
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, “or even” Chestov (the Russian existentialist generally rendered in English as “Shestov,” born Yeguda Lev Shvartsman). And then this gorgeous encomium: “Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images.”
Wow: #goals, right? I’m sure as shootin’ not here to tell you what to do, but I think we could all do a whole lot worse than to live in such a way that it is said of us that wherever we dwell, it is the steppe or the desert.
Adam Greenfield
Steven Reed
Guido Stevens
Bill Seitz