If anyone has any further insight into the enigmatic «Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de l’état», please do let me know. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow for more “Nomadology”!
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@adamgreenfield
Did this thread get broken? It looks like this post comes in in the middle of a thought?
@cavyherd I can’t tell! It threads OK for me. Have you been following from the beginning?
@adamgreenfield
I can't see back to the beginning; the earliest post in the thread is the one I responded to. If there are earlier posts in that thread, they aren't showing up for me. (I haven't gone pawing through your TL to find them; that seems like that would take a lot of time.)
@adamgreenfield
Oh! Thank you! (I somehow missed this yesterday.)
One probably has to have had a better mathematical education than I did for the sense of that last distinction to leap forth from the page, so let’s unfold it a little before wrapping up for today.
When D&G describe something as “theorematic,” they’re invoking the history of geometry and formal logic to point out that a situation framed in this way proceeds to truth via a process of deduction. You are given a set of unproved axioms & derive the theorem from their interaction, purely formally.
But there’s something akin to a lack of curiosity in this process, a begged question. If you accept (“grant”) the truth of the axioms on the table, the theorem pops into being more or less automatically: “It follows that...” The solution is implicit in the starting position, and the rules of this toy system.
For D&G, the opposite of this closed system is the “problem.” Now I do not love the word “problem”: you’ve likely often enough heard me rant here about the roots of problem/solution framing
in advertising, and in my systems theory-derived aversion to the notion that the challenges we face can even be constructed as problems which admit to solutions, even in principle. For me, “problem” is a concept with far too much freight of the wrong kind to be useful.
Sucks to be me, though, because “problem” is how D&G would prefer for us to construct situations. If a theorem is a narrowing cone of possibility that converges on a unitary truth, a problem is that cone turned around so that it
perpetually opens out, a generative field that gives life to any number of solutions. Describing something as “problematic” in the D&G sense, then, is highly complimentary: it means something that’s a site of emergence, something that’s open, something that’s productive of novelty and difference.
What they’re implying about a “nomad” or “minor” science with this laundry list of qualities should now be a little clearer. It isn’t simply the distinction between Kuhn’s “normal” science and the
paradigm shift, though I’d be tempted to argue that much of the activity of a period of normal science necessarily has a theorematic quality to it. What I think they’re trying to capture is this quality of being perpetually open to the outside, porous and capable of being *affected*, where the “royal science” that is its opposite is not and cannot be. We’ll explore what we might be able to do with this nomad or minor science tomorrow.
For now: notes! The Wikipedia page on “Alien” and the conceptualization of the xenomorph is worth consulting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenomorph
You can find the award-winning Peter Watts story “The Things” here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
There’s a fairly comprehensive, if dense, discussion of Thomas Kuhn, normal science and the paradigm shift here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
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@adamgreenfield is this all just a long-winded way of saying “it’s complicated”?
@luis_in_brief I used to think things like that, but now I’m of the opinion that it’s ungenerous. There is specific sense here, buried in (and retrievable with some effort from) what is admittedly frequently enough turgid or infelicitous language.
@adamgreenfield Lawyers don’t generally get to throw stones about turgid language, but I have a high tolerance for academic prose and yet… I find a lot of D&G and similar so impenetrable that it feels like the authors didn’t want it read. So I usually end up respecting that wish.
I would read a history of how continental crit acquired such a reader-hostile style. I suppose some roots in Kant, and the Marx of Kapital? (Not the Marx of Manifesto.)
@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield although now I'm curious about how LLMs would do summarizing D&G. Maybe it's all just an extremely foresightful defense against being hoovered up by AI
@shauna @luis_in_brief If only ‘twere that straightforward.
@shauna @luis_in_brief About D&G specifically, though, my contention is that if I can understand them, then anyone can.
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@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield
I actively get mad when it seems like an author is being purposefully illegible, regardless of the topic or domain. I usually set it down immedtiately. Currently wading through a modestly illegible book purely so I can talk about it with a friend, looking forward to never reading something like this again.
@shauna @luis_in_brief If it’s a text originally written in English, that I’m reading in English? Yeah, I despise that. I have beef with Harney & Moten particularly for this, though people just seem to love them.
@luis_in_brief Kant is my go-to, yeah, as the locus classicus of the preposterous idea that prose should be impenetrable & you as the reader should have to fight to extract meaning from it. It’s not uncommon for me to struggle with other German writers in English translation — Marx and the old Nazi, both, e.g. — but Kant is the only one I balked at entirely & turned completely to secondary sources in order to get my head around.
So far as the French are concerned...bof. There I often enough think the text is only the traces scratched in cuneiform clay of some psychic transmission between two ENS-trained minds most of the bandwidth of which is in the far UV, with what we get on the page something like one-fifteenth of the actual signal.
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