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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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
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
design a cathedral that does not collapse. “[C]ontrol calculations,” it turns out, “are difficult to effect for the constructions of ambulant science”: “the ambulant sciences confine themselves to *inventing problems* [emphasis in original] the solution of which is linked to an entire set of collective, nonscientific activities, but the *scientific solution* [ditto] to which depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has transformed the problem by introducing it into its
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...
