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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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
ideal forms is, in fact, very similar to the processes Scott describes, in that *we have no problem seeing the negative aspect of it, but tend to miss what it affirmatively produces*. In D&G’s words, “Not only can it be said that there is no longer a need for skilled, or qualified, labor, but that there is a need for unskilled, or unqualified labor, for a dequalification of labor.”
In other words, the method of royal science does not merely undercut the autonomy of those with craft skills,
but also produces an affirmative demand for those who can uncomplainingly and undeviatingly execute an order issued to them from afar. These distinct methods and ways of knowing open onto different social orders — in fact, onto entirely different worlds.
Shall we leave things there for today?
Notes: Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Husserl:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/
...and, from the same source, one on Plato’s distinction between matter and form: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
And here, in its entirety, is Scott’s magisterial “Seeing Like A State”: https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf
We’ll continue, and with any luck conclude, our discussion of royal and minor science tomorrow! See you then.
Ha! That “conclude” was a trifle optimistic: our discussion of royal science v nomad and minor science continues.
We have arrived at the question of why the State needs to suppress nomad science, and the answer D&G offer is, at first, startling in its straightforwardness: it isn’t for any other reason but the one we began to get into yesterday, i.e. that nomad science and royal science propose two differing divisions of labor, and the one upheld by the former is “opposed to the norms of the
State.” And then they go on to say something fascinating, though a whole lot less straightforward, as though it followed semi-obviously from the question of the division of labor: royal science is “hylomorphic.”
The word descends from Aristotelian thought, in which it signifies the juncture of “hyle” (matter) with “morphē” (form). A hylomorphic schema is one in which matter is conceived as something passive and inert, waiting to be given shape by an active form.
