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
Sometimes they take the form of inclusions, survivals, encapsulations. Sometimes their otherness is consciously put to work internally, even nurtured and encouraged, as red teams or OPFOR. Sometimes, indeed, the problematizing element resides in the echelon at the very top of the org chart: the renegade C-suite that has somehow set itself against the entire rest of the corporate body. I don’t want to make too much of this possibility, or, especially, romanticize it, but I do grant D&G’s premise.
How to square this seeming self-contradiction? Perhaps it is simply (as D&G would have it) that royal science can ultimately only leverage the products of nomad science, not its processes: “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round.”
The gemlike little aphorism is as close to a koan as D&G ever get, which makes it an ideal place to break for tonight.
Tomorrow we’ll come back to the dense conversation leading up to that aphorism, which I’ve elided, and we’ll see if we can tease out what this all might mean.
In the meantime, you may enjoy this brief overview of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Cheussees...
https://www.inventionandtech.com/landmark_landing/80184
...and this road map of France, in which the centralized design of the network is made most obvious. All it’s missing is a little M. Bibendum with a beret. https://about-france.com/photos/maps/france-motorway-map.jpg
I want to back up a step, in continuing our investigation into “Nomadology” today. Yesterday, we’d wrapped up by opening up the question of how “fringes or minorities” upholding the war machine’s nomad science could possibly survive inside institutions of State, given the stress D&G place on their absolute exteriority. In explication, they offer the enigmatic aphorism, “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make something round.”
And they follow this by observing that “the specific characteristics of nomad science are what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it counters and the interaction ‘containing’ it.”
This passage seems, to me, to arc back toward the few pages immediately preceding it, rather than setting up the argument that follows, so my instinct is to dig back into those pages, and see if we can’t make them yield an accounting of what those “specific characteristics” are.
There’s a problem here, though — definitely in the ordinary sense, though hopefully in the Deleuzian sense as well — which is that this material is fairly opaque to me, in just the way D&G’s detractors so often accuse them of being.
For one thing, it starts by invoking Husserl, a writer whose oeuvre and general stance I have zero familiarity with. D&G tell us “he speaks of a protogeometry that addresses vague, in other words vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences...distinct from sensible
things, but also from ideal, royal or imperial essences” [emphasis in original]. The move here appears to be using Husserl’s phenomenology to open up a way of thinking about the relationship between the virtual and the real that blows through the familiar Platonic doctrine of form. The “essence,” here, is neither the actual thing itself nor the exact, perfect, ideal, transcendent form of royal science, but a mysterious, third thing: “anexact, but rigorous” [emphasis in original].
I interpret this to mean that the royal essence is theorematic, received from above, and in this way infertile, where the “vague essence,” this vagabond artifact and instrument of a counterscience, is perpetually generative — something that remains close to lived, contingent, adaptive practices of reckoning with space, and moving through it.
I confess to feeling a little lost here, though, a lostness which doesn’t simply turn on my manifest unfamiliarity with Husserl.
It has to do, rather, with the fact that I don’t know what this passage on “protogeometry” as a science of the “vague essence” gets them. This far in “Nomadology” — with some effort — I’ve been able to see how each successive chunk of ideation extends a line of flight, calls upon new metaphors and incarnations to elucidate the primary distinction the piece starts with. This is the first point at which I’ve felt myself completely at sea. Maybe I need to learn how to navigate smooth space myself?
That said, I sure would appreciate your thoughts on what work you think this passage is doing.
What follows, though, is far more readily graspable, because it compares the ways in which royal and minor science respectively organize work and “the social field through work.” This discussion will resonate for anyone who’s ever considered the Taylorist regime, read Foucault on disciplinary space or Scott on imperial land-use planning, or worked a job whose regulations came in a three-ring binder.
In order to draw the distinction they wish to convey most clearly, D&G return to the figures of the architect of Romanesque cathedrals and the journeyman crafting the Gothic equivalents.
The two most immediate axes of contrast they discuss here concern the division of labor (and its consequences for the autonomy and mobility of the laborer) and the conception of the task. And just as we need to remember that the Romanesque and Gothic styles are not periodizations or evolutionary developments,
D&G also want us to understand that the division of labor in nomad science is no less sophisticated than that imposed by royal science, it’s just different.
Historically in France, and presumably elsewhere, the journeyman was mobile. (That the name in English seems to allude to this is an accident of etymology, the “journey” here deriving from the French “journée” or day, and referring to the fact that they had the right to be paid daily.) Masons traveled from project to project, site to site,
learning skills and spreading knowledge as they went. This gave them an autonomy that was obnoxious to the State, which responded by “tak[ing] over management of the construction sites, merging all the divisions of labor together in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the manual, the theoretical and the practical, fashioned after the difference between ‘governors’ and ‘governed.’”
Work was deskilled, all the intelligence necessary to the task of construction being withdrawn
upstream, with the obvious consequence that it simultaneously became more of an exercise in abstraction — here again, the manipulation of exact, perfect, ideal, transcendent forms.
So where D&G tell us that both royal and minor science contain the concept of “the plane,” each handles that concept in markedly different ways: “The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman stands in contrast to the metric plane of the architect, which is on paper and offsite” [emphasis added].
I add the emphasis here because this is such a striking p/recapitulation of the many passages in Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” describing the (generally disastrous) results of abstract planning from afar. In fact, we might think of Scott’s ”mētis," which refers to the situated, local, embodied knowledge derived from lived experience, as the more practical, Earthbound cousin to nomad science.
The effect of moving the design of cathedrals to the plane of abstraction and the reproduction of
