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
Replies:
18
@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
paradigm shift, though I’d be tempted to argue that much of the activity of a period of normal science necessarily has a theorematic quality to it. What I think they’re trying to capture is this quality of being perpetually open to the outside, porous and capable of being *affected*, where the “royal science” that is its opposite is not and cannot be. We’ll explore what we might be able to do with this nomad or minor science tomorrow.
For now: notes! The Wikipedia page on “Alien” and the conceptualization of the xenomorph is worth consulting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenomorph
You can find the award-winning Peter Watts story “The Things” here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
There’s a fairly comprehensive, if dense, discussion of Thomas Kuhn, normal science and the paradigm shift here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
Finally, I used to have a fairly enlightening article on David Ogilvy and the history of problem-solution framing in advertising, in the big training bundle I was handed on my very first day at PSYOP school, but I’m afraid I can’t put my finger on it at the moment. If I can dig it up, I’ll post it here.
See you tomorrow, for further inquiries in minor science!
Until then, please do enjoy this most Deleuzian video of all time:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY
Ahh, OK, in response to things some folks have raised in comments, there’s a point I really want everyone following this looong thread to consider, which is that if I can understand the Deleuze and Guattari of “Nomadology,” then really just about anyone can. I am such a plodding, linear, utterly midwit, concrete-shoe’d thinker that if I can make this text yield up sense I really don’t believe it should be beyond anyone. The question as to whether it’s worth it for you, or pleasurable, I can’t
speak to, obviously, though one of the things I’m hoping to demonstrate is that there might be more utility and value in reading this than you might have suspected. But there is no idea in this text so utterly cyclopean, squamous and non-Euclidean that you can’t make it yield up something intelligible if you put in some work, I swear it.
And at that, let me not be cute with the invocations of Lovecraft, here above all places. What I mean to say is that yes: it’s French, it’s dense, it refers to bodies of knowledge that by no means all of us have been made familiar with. Like any deep woods, it’s easier to traverse with a friendly guide walking alongside. But it’s not impenetrable.
So! “Nomadology”’s Proposition 3 has offered us the notion of a “nomad” or “minor science,” running alongside the “royal science” of the State as it has unfolded across history. And D&G tell us this nomad science has some characteristic approaches to knowing: it sees things in terms of hydraulics and flows and becomings rather than solids and stable states of being; it attends to (and produces) “smooth” spaces rather than the “striated,” reticulated spaces of the Cartesian grid; and it poses the
situations it apprehends in terms of open-ended and generative “problems,” and not deductive, converging “theorems.”
I have to say that I remember being distinctly disappointed when I reached this passage, on my first reading at the age of 18. I’m certain that I’d picked the book up hoping that it was some kind of anarchoprimitivist manual — something that might teach me to be an urban Bedouin or Viet Cong or even Fremen, shrouded against the filth of the cindered, rodential Lower East Side.
Imagine, then, what it felt like to finally get to the “nomad science” touted in the title, only to find that it had something to do with geometrical proofs and “passages to the limit,” and that the “war machine” was something so obliquely metaphoric there didn’t seem to be much of either war or a machine in it. At this point in the book I was nonplussed: mostly it made me wish I’d paid more attention in calculus class. The references, allusions & invocations for the most part simply eluded me.
