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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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Work was deskilled, all the intelligence necessary to the task of construction being withdrawn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.
Hylomorphism is the scenario of the old Heptones song “Book of Rules”:
Each is given a bag of tools
A shapeless mass
and the book of rules
And this implies many things at once. First, of course, it implies a profound ontological hierarchy, with all of the grandeur (agency, intelligence, creativity, will, value) living with the one doing the shaping. It also implies that matter is abject: that it lacks tendencies or propensities or agential capacities of its own, and can only accept. And it
opens onto a world in which education, training, employment, and the broader organization of the social order are all arranged to accomplish operations of this form. The limits imposed by a hylomorphic schema are well established in left critique — you may be familiar, for example, with Paulo Freire’s “banking model of education,” where knowledge is conceived of as something deposited by teachers in students. (Ew.)
But D&G mean to go further, to take a still deeper cut.
It is true, they tell us, that “this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed...intellectuals and manual laborers.” But then they take a step back: “What characterizes [the hylomorphic schema] is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression.” And “[i]t seems that nomad science is more immediately sensitive to the connection between content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms encompassing
both form and matter” [emphasis added].
This strikes me as having the most profound implications for anyone who works “creatively” in any medium whatsoever. What D&G are suggesting is that — at least for minor science — all such work has the character of a negotiation. The mason wants to roof a void; the stone tells them where it can be struck without fracturing. The guitarist wants to evoke regret, and the string held at this fret can only sound triumph. I want to convey a certain sense,
and the conventions of English expression and the structures that mediate language in the brain constrain me to a relatively narrow path in doing so. Nobody stands alone, above, Promethean and wreathed in lightning, and sheds form onto the world. All acts of creation are, and must be, conversations. These conversations may be asymmetrical, to be sure — but they are never simply in the way of stamping an imprint onto a blank and receptive sheet of paper. So “the division of labor fully exists,
but does not imply the form-matter duality (even in the case of one-to-one correspondences). Rather, it *follows* the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of those connections, whether they be natural or forced. This is another organization of work and of the social field through work.”
I mean: whew. Yes it is, isn’t it? And if we are *very lucky*, those of us immured in State cultures might get to feel what a social field organized in
that way might feel like a couple of times in our lives, possibly for as long as a few months at once. The collaborative workshop, the meaningful conversation, the jam, even pallid simulacra like Burning Man: all irruptions of this nomad logic and its organization of labor into lives otherwise characterized by an all-too-vertical ordering of form and matter, medium and expression.
From here we proceed into a discussion of Plato, and the Platonic notions of “compars” and “dispars,”
