to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant”; the model is “vortical,” not laminar, operating “in an open space throughout which thing-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things”; that model models not a “striated” space that “is counted in order to be occupied,” but a “smooth” space that “is occupied without being counted”; and the subtlest & hardest for me to grasp among all these distinctions, it is “problematic,” not “theorematic.”
Post
@adamgreenfield
Did this thread get broken? It looks like this post comes in in the middle of a thought?
@cavyherd I can’t tell! It threads OK for me. Have you been following from the beginning?
@adamgreenfield
I can't see back to the beginning; the earliest post in the thread is the one I responded to. If there are earlier posts in that thread, they aren't showing up for me. (I haven't gone pawing through your TL to find them; that seems like that would take a lot of time.)
One probably has to have had a better mathematical education than I did for the sense of that last distinction to leap forth from the page, so let’s unfold it a little before wrapping up for today.
When D&G describe something as “theorematic,” they’re invoking the history of geometry and formal logic to point out that a situation framed in this way proceeds to truth via a process of deduction. You are given a set of unproved axioms & derive the theorem from their interaction, purely formally.
But there’s something akin to a lack of curiosity in this process, a begged question. If you accept (“grant”) the truth of the axioms on the table, the theorem pops into being more or less automatically: “It follows that...” The solution is implicit in the starting position, and the rules of this toy system.
For D&G, the opposite of this closed system is the “problem.” Now I do not love the word “problem”: you’ve likely often enough heard me rant here about the roots of problem/solution framing
in advertising, and in my systems theory-derived aversion to the notion that the challenges we face can even be constructed as problems which admit to solutions, even in principle. For me, “problem” is a concept with far too much freight of the wrong kind to be useful.
Sucks to be me, though, because “problem” is how D&G would prefer for us to construct situations. If a theorem is a narrowing cone of possibility that converges on a unitary truth, a problem is that cone turned around so that it
perpetually opens out, a generative field that gives life to any number of solutions. Describing something as “problematic” in the D&G sense, then, is highly complimentary: it means something that’s a site of emergence, something that’s open, something that’s productive of novelty and difference.
What they’re implying about a “nomad” or “minor” science with this laundry list of qualities should now be a little clearer. It isn’t simply the distinction between Kuhn’s “normal” science and the
@adamgreenfield is this all just a long-winded way of saying “it’s complicated”?
@luis_in_brief I used to think things like that, but now I’m of the opinion that it’s ungenerous. There is specific sense here, buried in (and retrievable with some effort from) what is admittedly frequently enough turgid or infelicitous language.
@adamgreenfield Lawyers don’t generally get to throw stones about turgid language, but I have a high tolerance for academic prose and yet… I find a lot of D&G and similar so impenetrable that it feels like the authors didn’t want it read. So I usually end up respecting that wish.
I would read a history of how continental crit acquired such a reader-hostile style. I suppose some roots in Kant, and the Marx of Kapital? (Not the Marx of Manifesto.)
@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield although now I'm curious about how LLMs would do summarizing D&G. Maybe it's all just an extremely foresightful defense against being hoovered up by AI
@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield
I actively get mad when it seems like an author is being purposefully illegible, regardless of the topic or domain. I usually set it down immedtiately. Currently wading through a modestly illegible book purely so I can talk about it with a friend, looking forward to never reading something like this again.
@luis_in_brief Kant is my go-to, yeah, as the locus classicus of the preposterous idea that prose should be impenetrable & you as the reader should have to fight to extract meaning from it. It’s not uncommon for me to struggle with other German writers in English translation — Marx and the old Nazi, both, e.g. — but Kant is the only one I balked at entirely & turned completely to secondary sources in order to get my head around.
