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- Here’s a scene from “24 Hour Party People” in which Andy Serkis brilliantly inhabits Martin Hannett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90j6V8EjSuI
- And here’s what the results of that advice sound like, in Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” — as good a way of understanding the distinction between extensive movement and intensive speed as any I can imagine:
https://open.spotify.com/track/0rcLhYRihks3t4lFPtHhQV
Enjoy these links and I’ll see you for more “Nomadology” tomorrow!
Did this thread get broken? It looks like this post comes in in the middle of a thought?
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.)
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
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.)
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.
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