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.”
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…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
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
