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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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.
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.
We’re told that “thought as such” is “already in conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs.” It’s not clear to me whether they mean for this to be a universal statement about human subjects or thinking-agents, but being charitable, sure: we can see ways in which at least many of the European & North American thinkers whose names we’d recognize might be said to display thought templated in just this way.
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
is opposed to another tendency they characterize as “a republic of free spirits.” And on first reading it’s immediately tempting to identify these with, oh, say, Apollonian and Dionysian ways of being in the world. But there’s a curveball waiting for us here: D&G pair “the imperium of true thinking” with mythos, telling us that it “operat[es] by magical capture, seizing or binding,” while “the republic of free spirits” belongs to the order of logos! It “proceed[s] by pact or contract,
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
development*. So it *isn’t*, as we once noted despairingly but with quiet self-congratulation, that the Situationism of May ‘68 expressed in the collages of Jamie Reid found its way first onto couture t-shirts via Malcolm McLaren, & thereupon, denatured, decontextualized, stepped on and commodified, onto the racks of every Hot Topic in existence. It’s that the Situationism was always already the dark twin of State thought, pulled headlong down the gravity ramp to drive the State’s own expansion.
