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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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,”
but that’s sufficiently daunting that I think we should take it up from a fresh start tomorrow.
Notes! Here, again, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is their entry on form and matter: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
Paulo Freire’s “banking model of education” is discussed in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” in full here: https://files.libcom.org/files/Paulo%20Freire,%20Myra%20Bergman%20Ramos,%20Donaldo%20Macedo%20-%20Pedagogy%20of%20the%20Oppressed,%2030th%20Anniversary%20Edition%20(2000,%20Bloomsbury%20Academic).pdf
And here are Kingston’s own Heptones, with their big hit of 1973, “Book of Rules”: https://open.spotify.com/track/4PKri4OX2AB2RXj95Y9ZgB
See you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
OK! We’re back into “#Nomadology,” w/further thoughts on the distinction between “royal” & “nomad” ways of knowing.
The discussion here is one of those passages where either D&G’s understanding of the sciences is so much subtler & so far exceeds my own that some of the specific analogies they are making remain obscure to me, or they are waving their hands & talking complete bollocks. But either way, it is still possible for me to retrieve sense from the argument, and that sense is valuable.
Their starting move is, once again, to define two “models of science,” and bring them into contrast w/one another: compars & dispars (which, as the English word “disparity” implies, appear to be rough Latin equivalents for “equal” & “unequal”). In doing so, they make new entries on either side of a growing ledger of terminology: compars belongs with royal science, logos, striated space, theorematicity, and the State apparatus…
while dispars belongs to the order of minor science, nomos, smooth space, problematicity and the war machine. And D&G tell us that compars is the search for laws, for regularity, for an “invariable form for variables.” It is not merely a grid draped over the known, but a gridness extending itself into every dimension at once, in a fiercely boiling wavefront of reticulation: “an independent dimension capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other dimensions…
of striating space in all of its directions, so as to render it homogeneous” [emphasis added].
By contrast, dispars is the art of the “clinamen” – the minimal curvature, the just noticeable difference. “Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables, but of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation.”
And this next bit is, for me, beautiful: “If there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations…irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible intuition of variation.”
That “sensible” is critical: D&G mean for us to feel our way through smooth space, using all the faculties of sense at our disposal – and this, the better to reckon with the particularity and irreducibility of the things we encounter.
The senses “seize or determine singularities in the matter, instead of constituting a general form. They effect individuation by way of events or haecceities, not by way of the ‘object’ as a compound of matter or form.”
And that word “haecceity”? Whoooo. Coming down to us from the thirteenth-century theologian Duns Scotus, this may be the most Buddhist-flavored word in the Western philosophical canon, denoting the isness, the ineffable thusness of something.
So where the procedure D&G associate with striated space (and therefore the royal science that produces such spaces) is “reproducing,” the parallel procedure for smooth space and the detection of haecceities is “following” – “the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences.” And these sciences “consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many ‘accidents’ (problems).”
Here I’m strongly reminded of the quote with which Lucy Suchman kicks off her 1985 classic “Plans and Situated Actions”:
“Thomas Gladwin (1964) has written a brilliant article contrasting the method by which the Trukese navigate the open sea, with that by which Europeans navigate. He points out that the European navigator begins with a plan – a course – which he has charted according to certain universal principles, and he carries out his voyage by relating his every move to that plan…
“His effort throughout his voyage is directed to remaining 'on course.' If unexpected events occur, he must first alter the plan, then respond accordingly. The Trukese navigator [by contrast] begins with an objective rather than a plan. He sets off toward the objective and responds to conditions as they arise in an ad hoc fashion. He utilizes information provided by the wind, the waves, the tide and current, the fauna, the stars, the clouds, the sound of the water on the side of the boat…
and he steers accordingly. His effort is directed to doing whatever is necessary to reach the objective. If asked, he can point to his objective at any moment, but he cannot describe his course.” [Gerald Berreman, 1966]
The contrast Suchman draws from this account – that between transcendent, a priori, from-above-and-outside planning and immersed, immanent, experiential, real-time “situated actions” – seems to me to correspond closely with D&G’s contrast of compars and the striation of space
by royal science, vs. dispars as the experiential negotiation of the world’s particularity. With each example, with each analogy and metaphor, we get closer to understanding that compars is “the form of interiority of all science”: the will to enclose, reticulate, reduce and render tractable that which properly cannot be, which is to say…everything.
Here, again, it feels to me that D&G approach a Taoist or early Zen perspective on matters.
Things must be reckoned with as they are, in their isness, and that isness is accessible to the senses – but it is permanently resistant to conceptualization, reproduction, representation or communication. A nomad science, they seem to me to be saying, permits things to be as they are, grasps and apprehends them as such, and does not require them to be brought inside to come into productive relation with them. (I would say “to make use of them,” but that formulation strikes me as being
exactly what we don’t want to uphold.)
So while this whole compars/dispars passage is prolix in a way that indulges some of D&G’s worst tendencies, it is in the end also astonishingly generative for me. With the sideways leap to Suchman, particularly, it really helped me fill in the picture – to understand how a nomad science might grasp the phenomenal world, and by grasping it proceed to a different kind of knowledge.
