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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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.
Notes! Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the “subtle doctor,” Duns Scotus…
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/
…and the original, Xerox PARC version of Lucy Suchman’s “Plans and Situated Actions”:
https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/ISL-6_Plans_and_Situated_Actions.pdf
I’ll be back with more “Nomadology” tomorrow, if I can fit it into my flight to Amsterdam & the talk I’m giving there. See you then!
Oh, I can’t resist making this point, either: my method of approach to *this very text* strongly corresponds to nomad science as we are beginning to flesh it out.
I am feeling my way through the text slowly, with great care, asking of every singularity I encounter within its pages what it is in its full, autonomous particularity. I am – and I hope you are, as well – finding the way from one understanding to another by way of these toeholds or turning points, mapless but unafraid. Great fun.
…and I guess we’ll talk about night land nav and orienteering some other time.
It’s been a whole two weeks. I’ve been to Berlin and back, sat out a cold even, but now I’m back on my bullshit! Fully fueled and ready to go! How about you? Ready to get back into some #Nomadology?
We are still in the midst of an extending passage distinguishing two approaches to epistemology — two contrasting ways of knowing that D&G associate with their figures of the State apparatus and the war machine, ways they refer to as “royal” and “nomad” or “minor science” respectively.
And they’ve thrown a bunch of different metaphors at these concepts, in the attempt to clarify how each works in the world, and I’ve in turn recruited some material from arbitrarily far afield — Lucy Suchman, for
example, and her “Plans and Situated Actions” — to see how the distinction they’re making chimes with my own epistemic frames.
Briefly, as a refresher, royal science is the State’s mode of knowledge. It is consecrated to the reproduction of templates delivered from above, the use of those templates to reliably impose form on passive matter (“hylomorphism”), the equally passive execution of a plan devised at and by the center. It conceives of the world theorematically and deductively.
And the contrasting nomad science, well, that occupies the opposite position of all these antimonies. It’s inductive, conceives of situations as generative “problems,” is attentive to the local & the singular. It follows the grain of whatever material it sets itself to work with, cocreates form with what it encounters. And it results in a different division of labor — in creativity, autonomy, *power* residing with the mobile agents who take it up as practice — in a way that is deeply uncongenial
to the State.
Without leaving this subdivision of the text, D&G begin to argue that royal and minor sciences (strong version) produce or (more weakly) are associated with different kinds of space: respectively, “striated” and “smooth.” And striated and smooth spaces, in turn, require different kinds of conceptualization, and afford different kinds of movement through them.
The distinction they offer is between “reproducing” and “following”: “The first has to do with reproduction, iteration and
reiteration; the other, having to do with itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences.”
I can see that this is *precisely* the kind of passage that vexes certain readers of D&G, and of theory more broadly, to the point of rage. I can understand how this might seem like overclever wordplay, choking the page with language without producing meaning. But though I’ve certainly had to exercise some patience to get here, I’ve actually come to enjoy this kind of construction. There is a
meaningful difference being articulated here, and it has to do with *what it is we think knowledge is for*.
Are we seeking to throw a net over the phenomena our mind encounters, wrestle them down, superimpose over them a grid that helps us understand them in terms of the things we already know? Or are we inclined, rather, to move with them, to follow their rhythms, to *let ourselves be changed by the encounter* & emerge as something different? It seems to me that that’s what they’re getting at.
At least, that’s how I’m choosing to understand this opposition.
D&G have a good deal more to say about the difference between “reproducing” and “following,” but I’ll let things rest here for today — no need for us to do anything but ease back into this conversation, and we’ll pick it up again tomorrow.
But in the meantime, why not go ahead and let me know what thoughts following this reading has produced for you? I’m always interested to hear how others respond to these ideas.
The rest of this section of the text consists of an extended riff on the distinction between “reproducing” and “following,” the latest in the succession of terms D&G use to qualify their categories of royal and nomad science.
The passage once again approaches the quality of the lyrical, but it’s a lyricism of an odd sort: strewn with technical vocabulary, with terms and concepts deployed in ways that might or might not make sense to anyone used to seeing them in their originary contexts.
For the most part, those contexts are mathematical, physical, geometrical; we get musings on “tangent Euclidean space” and “parallelisms between two vectors,” and while I’m tempted to bust out my math texts and subject these passages to a really fine-toothed reading, I don’t actually think that would yield much in the way of light. The meaning accretes, surely and steadily, simply by “following” the text in precisely the way they characterize as a practice of the “ambulant sciences.”
The nub of this distinction goes, again, to how the researcher — the reader, thinker, “scientist” — constructs their relation to the field of study and practice. Are they outside it, and looking down on it from above? Or are they committed to it, and subject to the play of all the forces they encounter there?
I’m *sorely* tempted to read this as metacommentary on the role of the French intelligentsia post-1968, but I’ll leave that to those who are more knowledgeable about the relevant history.
@adamgreenfield "[T]erms and concepts deployed in ways that might or might not make sense to anyone used to seeing them in their originary contexts [...] The meaning accretes, surely and steadily, simply by 'following' the text in precisely the way they characterize as a practice of the 'ambulant sciences'."
You worded well why (and how) I fell so hard for D&G nearly twenty years ago now: by putting into (relatively) simple language how I've only lost myself in the years since down rabbit holes seeking what their wording 'actually means'—only to arrive back at the point of fact of its having been about the ambulance / ambulatory aid they provided the whole time.
But it yields this beautiful passage, or beautiful to me, anyway:
“Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of *view* [emphasis in original] that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the ‘singularities’ of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form...And the meaning of Earth completely
“changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. ‘Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the
plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the planst that are growing in between are yours. Later...you can extend the size of your territory.’”
The quote is from that beloved old fraud Carlos Castaneda, who may or may not have invented the “Yaqui teachings” of his putative respondent Don Juan Matus from whole cloth. I don’t think it’s fully possible to convey now just how ubiquitous Castaneda’s book was, once upon a time and among a certain stratum of people, so it’s
possibly less startling to encounter these words deterritorialized from that context and reterritorialized here than it might be otherwise. But the quote does what D&G need it to, and does so in a few dimensions at once.
Firstly, of course, if we take it as face value, as a set of instructions for reckoning a claim to some portion of the surface of the Earth, it bears no resemblance to the cadastral procedures imposed by State geometers. It is an unwilled thing of rain, flows, seeds, runnels.
The claim fans out across the land, obedient to the accidents and singularities it encounters as it moves (or “follows”). It will not extend equally in all directions at once. It will follow the dictates of a logic that has no need of grids, theodolites, geodetic fiducials. It is still a claim: not better, but different.
But the method has also (ostensibly) been vouchsafed to the listener, Castaneda, by the wizened old Yaqui shaman don Juan Matus, and we are told that he in turn received his
understanding of the Earth from his encounters with the spirit of the peyote cactus.
I cannot imagine a better figure of contrast for D&G: compare a State geometer like Poincaré at the Bureau des Longitudes, projecting a grid upon the very Earth itself, to “don Juan,” baked out of his mind, crawling across the floor of the Sonoran desert trailing his fingers through the loam.(Whether or not he ever existed is, of course, immaterial.) Two completely different ways of apprehending a field of