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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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...
...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.
