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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@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.
At the age of 57, though, I find this material fascinating. It’s a secret history! And who doesn’t love a secret history?
It is, specifically, an attempt to trace a lineage of thought as it wanders across the past few centuries of Western science. And that lineage — that minor science, bending the tools and practices of science against itself — is coupled to the figure of the war machine, just as royal science is to the State.
Because of what it is & how it works, it’s perpetually throwing up
challenges to State knowledge, constantly generating new concepts and figures of thought that the State can only suppress or attempt to envelop and incorporate. “What State science retains of nomad science is only what it can appropriate; it turns what remains into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it.”
I bet you can think of a few pungent examples of just this sort of interrelation in recent history. You don’t have to be
any sort of a positivist to see that science occasionally — and perhaps more than occasionally — produces perspectives on the world that are intolerable to stratified thought. And here I mean all stratified thought, not merely conservative or right-wing thought, or capitalist reason. All human communities have and are bound by unquestionable articles of faith, and sometimes it happens that those cannot be sustained in the face of some new perspective arriving from outside.
Nevertheless, a sufficiently robust community can always attempt to enfold and appropriate such perspectives, and put them to work on its own terms. And this is what D&G tell us the State and its royal science have most often done with the fruits of minor science.
The passage that follows, sadly for me and maybe for you, is one of those that is largely given its sense by reference to a series of figures from the history of French thought: “Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, Carnot,
Poncelet, Perronet, etc.” And though, indeed, it would be helpful for D&G to have elaborated who these figures were, and how their experiences inform the idea of nomad science, they merely note that “in each case a monograph would be necessary to take into account the special sitiation of these savants whom State science used only after restraining or disciplining them, after repressing their social or political conceptions.” Some of these names are more familiar than others, the internet is
available and helpful in filling in the gaps in a way the library card catalogue would not have been in 1986, but even so this passage feels like it is bound to remain obscure to people not equipped with an elite French education.
This may or may not matter, because the thought comes to ground, and is succeeded by one of the most interesting passages in the book, about the sea and smooth space. This is “a specific problem for the war machine” — and remember the special sense in which D&G use
that word, as something open-ended and generative. They invoke Paul Virilio, to note that “it is at sea that the problem of the fleet in being is posed, in other words the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement that can rise up at any point” [emphasis in original].
I don’t know why D&G felt it necessary to namecheck Virilio here, because I don’t personally think his treatment of the “fleet in being” particularly adds anything to the discussion. It’s a concept from naval
strategy in the age of sail, and it both appears in a variety of guises down through centuries of military strategy and echoes “Nomadology”’s earlier discussion of the game of go. The fundamental idea (which we owe to the 17th century English admiral Lord Torrington) is that a naval force exerts influence simply by existing, even if it never leaves port. Like a stone placed on a go board, it radiates presence across the entire space of the sea. That fleet can potentially appear anywhere in
that space, compelling an adversary to allocate resources, plan their own movements and maintain forces in reserve even if it never sets sail. In fact, the fleet radiates *more* influence in port, since committing it to one or another heading both risks its destruction at the enemy’s hands and, just as decisively, rules out the possibility of it appearing elsewhere.
Torrington’s notion informed military thought for centuries, down to and including the development of nuclear deterrence strategy,
but D&G use it here to introduce a discussion of their distinction between the “smooth” space of the ocean and the “striated” space of land. And that discussion is central enough to their thought that we’ll pick it up tomorrow.
@adamgreenfield is this all just a long-winded way of saying “it’s complicated”?
@luis_in_brief I used to think things like that, but now I’m of the opinion that it’s ungenerous. There is specific sense here, buried in (and retrievable with some effort from) what is admittedly frequently enough turgid or infelicitous language.
@adamgreenfield Lawyers don’t generally get to throw stones about turgid language, but I have a high tolerance for academic prose and yet… I find a lot of D&G and similar so impenetrable that it feels like the authors didn’t want it read. So I usually end up respecting that wish.
I would read a history of how continental crit acquired such a reader-hostile style. I suppose some roots in Kant, and the Marx of Kapital? (Not the Marx of Manifesto.)
@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield although now I'm curious about how LLMs would do summarizing D&G. Maybe it's all just an extremely foresightful defense against being hoovered up by AI
@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield
I actively get mad when it seems like an author is being purposefully illegible, regardless of the topic or domain. I usually set it down immedtiately. Currently wading through a modestly illegible book purely so I can talk about it with a friend, looking forward to never reading something like this again.
@luis_in_brief Kant is my go-to, yeah, as the locus classicus of the preposterous idea that prose should be impenetrable & you as the reader should have to fight to extract meaning from it. It’s not uncommon for me to struggle with other German writers in English translation — Marx and the old Nazi, both, e.g. — but Kant is the only one I balked at entirely & turned completely to secondary sources in order to get my head around.
