Signs and Learning

How do we learn to swim?  This example that pops up on several occasions throughout Deleuze's work, and here on page 23.  

The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as signs. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an innate or acquired practical familiarity with signs, which means that there is something amorous - but also something fatal - about all education. We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do'. Our only teachers are those who tell us to 'do with me', and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.

I think he chooses the example of swimming in particular to illustrate the general failure of the idea of imitation to account for learning.  Someone shows you the movements are involved in the crawl stroke.  You mime them on the beach.  It's actually a very simple pattern.  You imitate the instructor till everything looks exactly the same.  Then you get in the water and try to reproduce those movements and you sink like a stone.  You can't learn to swim by imitating the motions of someone who knows how to swim.  If you could, there wouldn't be any process of learning to swim at all; someone would tell you or show you how to do it, and you'd just do it.  

What you're actually doing when you learn to swim is learning to fit the pattern of your motions together with the patterns of how the water moves.  You're not copying an external model like the swim instructor.  That is just providing you with a set of signs that will hopefully enable you to grasp how you can interact successfully with the water.  A good teacher is not just someone who knows how to do something well, and so provides a good model, but someone who knows how to explain it in a way that triggers your ability to fit your motions together with the world.  If they are transmitting some sort of information to you, it is at best in the manner that a seed transmits information to the next generation of tree -- not like a copy, but like a recipe.

I think it's easy to acknowledge this distinction in the case of learning a new physical skill like swimming or playing tennis.  But what about areas where we seem to be able to just learn that as opposed to learning how?  Aren't there plenty of situations where we learn the right answer more or less instantaneously just by someone telling us what it is?  We do seem to learn information or facts this way, and certainly a lot of our schooling seems to revolve around force feeding people these facts.  I think these situations may actually be the exception that proves the rule though.  Inevitably the new information we acquire so quickly by copying it is actually just a small new modification within a very large framework that took us a long time to build up, just like acquiring physical skills.  

You might call this sort of thing "propositional learning".  Where you learn, say, the definition of something, or what formula to use to calculate the internal rate of return on an investment, or even what Plato said about the concept of repetition.  We tend to think of a lot of "higher" learning as propositional learning, perhaps because it's only this type of learning that can end with a right or a wrong answer.  You either correctly copy the instructor, or you don't.  

In fact, a lot of philosophy is taught as if it were a form of propositional learning.  Was Descartes "right" when he said that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul?  Was Kant "correct" when he said that we can never know a thing-in-itself?  Obviously, in philosophy the answer is up for debate in a way it usually is not in physics.  But the discipline is still mainly taught as if there were a right answer that we will somehow eventually come to.  So the other reason I think Deleuze invokes his swimming example early on in the book is to alert us to the fact that he does not see philosophy in this mold.  We are meant to "do it with him" and not just "do it as he does".  Perhaps this helps us appreciate his unique writing style a little more?  It's a lot easier to simply agree or disagree with Plain English than it is with French Philosophy, where you have to struggle over a sentence just to figure out what it might mean.  I don't think the goal is obscurity, so much as to try and unfold the complexity of the problem, instead of simply offering a ready made solution.

And we're back

Okay, enough about Stengers and the War Machine and the philosophy of science.  It's time to get back to Difference & Repetition.

Last episode on FPiPE we were using embryogenesis as our central metaphor to get a grip on what Deleuze has in mind when he talks about true repetition and its relationship to difference in the introduction.  I got a lot of mileage out of that analogy, and I generally find it useful to think of Deleuze modeling his philosophy after biology rather than after physics or mathematics.  But it's probably time to back up a step and and think a little more abstractly about the point we've arrived at and not get locked in to one metaphor.

The broad sweep of the Introduction seems to be:

1. How can true perfect repetition exist in an objective rule based world?  
2. If true repetition is an illusion, what's happening when we see something that looks like repetition?  It must be that we're seeing a general form or concept get repeated, with some of the particular details changed.  This general form would either be some objectively existing Platonic thing out there in the world, or some concept existing in our head.  Either way, the phenomenal world would be understood as never repeating.  Each moment of each thing is completely distinct and unique.  Our sense of true deja vu (as opposed to general) repetition would only arise when we see two things that are so close that they should share one concept, but somehow there are mysteriously two of them, like a left and a right hand.  These must be some sort of "degenerate" case (as the mathematicians like to say).
3. But wait, nature shows us all kinds of things like left and right hands that seem to be exact repetitions of the same concept.  This presents a major problem if we think that there should be a 1-to-1 correspondence between conceptual forms and things in the world.  The difference between left and right hands doesn't seem to map onto a conceptual difference.  And yet that difference also doesn't seem to fall into the form of a particular variation of a general form (like, say, longer or shorter fingers might).
4. So there seem to be some cases of true repetition that aren't general but that don't correspond to conceptual differences.  This is what real repetition is -- difference, but without a concept for it.
5. This kind of repetition can be explained by a repeated or ongoing process that has some difference within it that leads it to produce two forms as an end product. This is where embryogenesis came in.  The process, as an algorithm or recipe, can be repeated exactly, but the outcome can be slightly, or even radically, different every time.  The difference between the final forms isn't an external conceptual difference (as there is none in the case of symmetrical objects), but a difference internal to the process that creates the forms.  And the difference is also not a particular difference that falls within some general limits.  The difference between left and right can't be explained on the basis of how close they are to one another or to some general model.  The "level" at which the difference happens isn't the same level of the two distinct forms, it is somehow before or beneath them.

I've collected a few of the quotes that step 5 translates: 

We are right to speak of repetition when we find ourselves confronted by identical elements with exactly the same concept. However, we must distinguish between these discrete elements, these repeated objects, and a secret subject, the real subject of repetition, which repeats itself through them. Repetition must be understood in the pronominal; we must find the Self of repetition, the singularity within that which repeats.

It is true that we have strictly defined repetition as difference without concept. However, we would be wrong to reduce it to a difference which falls back into exteriority, because the concept embodies the form of the Same, without seeing that it can be internal to the Idea and possess in itself all the resources of signs, symbols and alterity which go beyond the concept as such.

The interior of repetition is always affected by an order of difference: it is only to the extent that something is linked to a repetition of an order other than its own that the repetition appears external and bare, and the thing itself subject to the categories of generality.

So, basically, there are two kinds of repetition -- repetition of process, and repetition of form.  These operate like subject and object.  

For the object, all the differences between instances lies outside the form, external to its completed individuality.  That's why when we think about two repeated objects, we find that the specifying their difference requires invoking some other level of explanation that doesn't have to do with the objects themselves.  We need ideas like "number", or "reflection" or "translation" or some other mathematical transformation that would apply equally to all objects.  The difference between objects isn't itself an object.  We have no concept or form for this repetition like we have for the objects, and when we reach for it, we immediately reach for descriptions that involves process and movement.  

The subject of repetition -- that is, the repeating process -- actually has an inside to it.  The difference that gives rise to the repeated forms is built into the process.  I think this is Deleuze's answer to the question, "what is a subject"?  The subject is a form of interiority.  It has a "what it is like from the inside" to it.  Only processes have an inside.  Finished forms do not.  Sure, we may take them apart and find other forms within them, but that's exactly when we start to say that the larger form is an illusion that "is really" reducible to smaller forms following laws which are also external to them.  

Now we find ourselves at a strange moment though.  It seems to me there's an ambiguity in the notion of a repeating process that I've already alluded to a couple of times.  Is it really right to say that the process repeats, in order to produce two forms?  In the case of embryogenesis it was more like the process bifurcated or differentiated based on some internal difference.  In other words, the different outputs were products of one ongoing process, albeit one that can spawn new subprocesses.  This is the paradox, as it were, of true repetition -- it's always yet again for the first time.   This brings us back to where we started with the introduction.  Repetition is an infinite series just like the repeated celebration of the 4th of July.  Because the event is historic we repeat it, and repeating it makes it historic.  Without the repetition, it is no longer a singular event, but just some stuff that happened a long time ago.  To understand the inner and subjective form of repetition, we have to understand the singular process that gives rise to the outward repetition of forms.  

Asymptotically Objective

So, I finished reading Stenger's book of essays about slowing science down.  I was thinking of writing some more about it when I looked back at the two earlier posts and realized that I would mostly be repeating myself.  There are some interesting details along the way, but taken together I've mostly covered her basic critique and suggestion.  Scientist should drop the philosophically dubious idea that they are producing objective, authoritative knowledge, and instead focus on the particularly interesting situation they really do create -- a human system that takes into account what matters for  other parts of the cosmos in reliably useful ways.  Science is a human system with human goals, but it cares deeply about what the rest of the world "thinks".  Which is to say that the world can prove scientists wrong, which is the only way one can learn from another entity.

It's a deceptively simple suggestion, and in the later essays you can really hear how it resonates with her thinking about Whitehead and James (who she thinks Whitehead was elaborating on).  To follow all of it would be a very long conversation about Whitehead's idea that everything (including, say, elementary particles) is actually a "society" defined by its own "values", by what "matters" for that society.  The main difference between societies for Whitehead is the way their values incorporate those of other societies by way of contrast.  Which is to say the way they incorporate the possible into the real.  Like I say though, without a much longer discussion, that's not going to sound convincing or even intelligible, so after putting several everyday words in scare quotes, I'm stopping here.

I did have one final thought though, inspired by a comment from Dr. CC that has been rolling around in my head for a while now.  Is science "asymptotically objective"?

This idea seems like a natural and appealing fallback in the face of something like Kuhn's thinking about the possibility of a paradigm shift.  Sure "we once thought" that gravity "was really" the point-to-point attraction of massive bodies, "but now we know" that it's really about curved space-time.  What we thought was "objectively true" has proven to be a complete abstraction that merely worked well to help us do what we wanted.  And we're conscious that our new abstraction is also going to someday fall victim to this same pattern.  Still, though, we know that with each revolution we are somehow getting closer to the one true real explanation.  The objective world at the end of the asymptote.

This is a strange image though.  Because how is a progression of what we now freely admit are abstractions created for human purposes supposed to be magically transmuted into an "objective description" at the end of the asymptote?  And how exactly can a description be objective anyhow?  It's certainly not just in someone's head, because many of us share it.  And it's certainly not just a collective delusion because it allows us to effectively do all kinds of things.  But at the same time a description of the object is clearly not the object itself, but only one aspect of it; the one that matters for our purposes.  Whitehead calls the problem the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".  An electron is pretty clearly an idea, not a thing, so we must be pulling a fast one when we claim that the world is made up of electrons.  And no matter how much further or smaller we go in our abstractions, we're not going to ever magically hit the "objective" world with them because this same problem is going to apply.

What content would be left to the claim of asymptotic objectivity then? Isn't it really about creating ideas that allows us to do more and more with the world?  Explanations that allows us to do some new stuff on top of all the old stuff we used to be able to do?  Seems like a noble goal and a good candidate for the content behind what we'd like the claim to do.  If you believe A, you'll be able to do X and Y.  But believing B is better (slip the word "more objective" in here) because you can do X, Y, and Z.

Unfortunately, this claim doesn't seem to have anything to do with objectivity, though it does sound a lot like our idea of progress.  Once you drop the claim of objectivity though -- which seems at first may seem costless and merely semantic  -- you will also have to subtly modify your definition of progress.  Because now there's no such thing as "general progress".  There's only specific progress along a particular dimension you happen to value.  But not all of these dimensions point in the same direction and some may even be opposed (as in predictive accuracy and mathematical elegance in the standard model vs. string theory debates).  If you wanted to do Z, then believing B was definitely better.  But what if you wanted to do Q?  

This "progress" then begins to look a lot more like Brownian motion.  Or maybe an amoeba moving up a sucrose gradient at best.  It may have a direction, but there is no a priori reason to think that it's the right or unique one.  The metaphor of an asymptote only makes sense if there is some value to converge to.  If we start to see our direction as inevitably defined by our value space (so to speak), then it seems like we're wandering in a very, very large space indeed, and we're going to need to ask much more complex questions about how our values might overlap with other possible sets of values (say, alien or computer values).

A final thought occurs to me here.  One I don't completely understand  In some sense, Brownian motion does have a sort of asymptote that we call "equilibrium" -- the diffusion of something to occupy a volume at a uniform concentration.  Maybe I've inadvertently defined something exactly like general progress?  Perhaps, yes, science always has a particular direction at a particular time, but maybe somehow, on average over time, it expands in every direction to completely describe everything that could matter about the world?  This is a wildly ambitious hypothesis that makes the physicist's dreams of a final theory-of-everything look like a silly footnote.  Because were they to announce the current version of this theory tomorrow, it still wouldn't describe a fraction of the things that matter just to me -- like why Deleuze is so great or even whether it will rain April 3, 2056452.  But maybe, someday, there could be an ever bigger ToE that would explain those things?

Tough question.  I'm going to go with Stuart Kauffman on this one though, and posit that the universe is actually non-ergodic.

Consider next the number of proteins with 200 amino acids: 20 to the 200th power. Were the 10 to the 80th particles in the known universe doing nothing but making proteins length 200 on the Planck time scale, and the universe is some 10 to the 17th seconds old, it would require 10 to the 39th lifetimes of the universe to make all possible proteins length 200 just once. But this means that, above the level of atoms, the universe is on a unique trajectory. It is vastly non-ergodic. Then we will never make all complex molecules, organs, organisms, or social systems.

 And if life and matter is wandering through this non-ergodic universe, then so are our explanations of it.

Short video on the history of the nomad war machine

This Message is Brought to You by the War Machine

The best part of rhizomatic thinking is that you never haver to admit you've digressed.  Since everything is connected, you can never lose your train of thought, dude.

To wit, I recently read James Scott's new book on the deep history of the early states: Against the Grain.  This was a great short read that I'd like to write a lot more about.  But one of the most interesting topics turned out to be a theme which we just saw is dear to Deleuze's heart -- the last chapter is titled "The Golden Age of the Barbarians".  Scott's basic point throughout the book is that the State is a mechanism organized for producing and capturing an agricultural surplus, and that it literally wrote the history books in order to flatter itself.  In contrast, the 'barbarians' (a term Scott uses with tongue in cheek) didn't settle permanently, didn't write any history books, and yet just generally outlived the hell out of everybody.  Turns out mono-cropping domesticates was a shitty idea from a public health perspective, required that most people subject themselves to slave-like labor in order to support a god-like elite, and on top of it left the poor suckers totally exposed to marauding bandits who were nobody's fool when it came to what the State represented; the Bedouin apparently had a saying: "raiding is our agriculture".  For thousands of years, the early grain based states were like tiny cult islands precariously afloat in a sea of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers.  

The story contrasts pretty strongly with our historical notion of the inevitable progress from the 'barbarism' of the nomads towards the 'civilization' of the sedentary State.  Which reminded me of the twin chapters in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari discuss the relationship between the War Machine and the State Apparatus.  I started glancing back at those, and I propose to spend a little bit of time translating them into Plain English.  This is going to be a pretty summary effort, and I don't know how far I'll get, but I was encouraged when I discovered that their idea of "nomad science" was already directly related to the question that promoted the original detour into Stengers book: what should we make of the "replication crisis" in science?  Is there a philosophical underpinning to why scientists are so focused on replication?  So at least this new tangent leads back to the first tangent and ... I completely lost my train of thought.

----

The first thing D&G point out is that the War Machine (WM) and the State Apparatus (SA) have completely different ideas of space.  The SA divides up a fixed amount of closed space, while the WM populates an indefinite amount of open space.  The first has a global plan or blueprint, while the second actually extends its space through ongoing embryologic differentiation.  

[Incidentally, I think this distinction is why D&G refer to the State as an apparatus, rather than a machine.  The rough difference: a mechanism (ie. an algorithmic process) that sees itself as having a clear teleological purpose is an apparatus, whereas one that operates 'blindly' is a machine.  Hence, there is a sedentary State Apparatus that intelligently designs, and an evolving nomadic War Machine.  Also incidentally, they provide a great discussion of the difference between Go and Chess; I feel sure one of them was a Go player.]   

They turn this distinction between open and closed into a deep and philosophical one.  But it's pretty obvious how it relates to the historical existence of states and nomads -- the State is constantly trying to draw a circle around itself that defines the limits of "civilization".  It is constantly trying to capture and control a territory, often literally by building walls around it.  The fact that these walls define an inside is just as important as what they do to protect it from an outside; Scott at one point approvingly quotes someone who observed that the Great Wall of China was built at least as much to keep tax paying subjects IN as it was to keep the Mongols OUT.  So the State is an apparatus of capture.  Capture of territory, capture of population, capture of grain, capture of tax.

Set against this, you have the nomads, who are basically those who refuse to be captured.  Those who chafe at the strictures and malnutrition that living within the SA amounts to.  Those who, rather than settle into the backbreaking grind that was early agriculture, choose raiding instead.  This is the beginning of the nomad WM.  You'll notice that this division starts the discussion of war from an unusual point of view.  Often we think that war belongs to the State, and originated with it.  After all, what better way to capture stuff, right?  In which case the first wars would have been between rival Mesopotamian superpowers, kinda like you see in Intolerance.  D&G are positing that this stage of State sponsored war was actually a later development that happened when the SA captured a piece of the WM.  They're arguing that before this, war wasn't about capture, but was the means of resistance to being captured.  In fact, this might almost be the definition of what they mean by the WM -- resistance to capture.  "I will not be taken alive".

I don't know whether I'd say Against the Grain lends support to this argument about war or not.  It definitely portrays the early States as essentially precarious grain cults that arose out of desperation when times got tough on the floodplain.  That doesn't sound a lot like all-conquering imperial Babylon.  They seem to have been pathetically weak, perpetually at risk of having a bad harvest of their one crop, beset by unknown new viruses due the the concentration of people and animals, and plagued by raiders and by their population getting fed up with plowing and wandering off into the hills.  Maybe this all makes their contention about the original role of war a little more plausible.

Maybe the contention also gets a little more plausible when you consider D&G's discussion of the work of Pierre Clastres.  There's no question that Clastres is hopping around in the background of Scott's thought in general -- there's only so many anarchist anthropologists out there (though, is it just me, or does the discipline seem to lend itself to anarchist leanings?  I'm thinking of David Graeber, and even Ursula Le Guin, who was the daughter of anthropologists).  Anyhow it's interesting to find Clastres appearing in A Thousand Plateaus as well.  It's been quite a while since I read Society Against the State, but from what I remember of it, D&G aren't bending the thesis at all.  Basically, Clastres looks at a bunch of modern day South American tribes and argues that they have created social mechanisms that specifically prevent the accumulation of permanent consolidated centers of power (ie. a State) in their politics.  There's a variety of means employed.  For example, the chief is expected to be the most generous person in the village, so always ends up dressed rags.  In our context though, the important mechanism is that tribes like the Yanomamo and the Jivaro have a 'war chief' who has near absolute power leading them into battle, but who is explicitly denied any power once the tribe returns to civil life.  In other words, they seem to use war to ward off the state, to resist it.  

I think this is a very interesting thesis.  It fits well with Scott's criticism of our received story of the inevitable march of civilization.  Not everybody lined up to get into the State as soon as the doors opened and the new iCornX got planted.  But, as D&G point out, the idea raises a few new questions.  For example, if the Yanomamo live in an area of warring tribes and have never had any contact with a State or Empire, how is it that they designed a political system for resisting it?  How did they even know what they were resisting?  Also, if we are trying to use their example to project back in time to what was going on in ancient Mesopotamia, we face the obvious question of why these means of warding off the State ultimately failed.  If the State has no 'natural gravitational force' that captures people, no power for wars of conquest at the outset, and is surrounded by people who not only aren't interested, but have whole systems for preventing the State from operating -- well, then, how did it get started in the first place?  It's like we're in danger of moving our view too far in the opposite direction.  If we see the State as so not inevitable that it starts to look accidental, then we'll need to explain how anybody planned to avoid an accident that they shouldn't have know was even possible, and why, despite this, the accident happened anyway, five times independently.

D&G's solution to this problem is to posit that the SA has always been there alongside the nomad WM.  They think of this as partly a historical hypothesis.  States and proto-States have such a long history that almost no nomadic band would have completely escaped contact with them.  By the same token, States have always been surrounded by these bands, immersed in a world much larger than them that, despite their pretense to inevitable universality and self-sufficiency, they do not control.  Unsurprisingly, since D&G are philosophers, not historians, Scott's book lends a lot more historic nuance to this story.  He describes a world where there are all kinds of different interactions between the sedentaries and the nomads.  Sure, as we've already seen, there's raiding as agriculture.  But there's also a great deal of trade that happens over the millennia between the two, particularly in wood, metals, and most importantly, people.  These are all things that the State can never seem to get enough of, and that must be brought from the outside, by going through the nomads.  The floodplain is naturally geologically metal-poor.  The early States use up all the surrounding wood as fuel quite quickly, and their need to import this heavy commodity is one of the main reasons they are all situated on rivers (the laws of economic geography haven't changed much).  They're also chronically short of people because of the disease and the simple desertion.  So in addition to domesticating the human female and converting her into a baby producing animal, they constantly import people the nomads have enslaved in the hinterland in exchange for surplus grain.  In short, Scott's idea that there was a "golden age of the barbarian" that lasted from 3,000 BCE to 1,500 CE, emphatically supports D&G's contention that the SA and the WM have coexisted for millennia, defining themselves against one another as inside and outside, giving the lie to the State's dream to be a self-sufficient, perfectly contained, eternally-at-equilibrium structure.  The SA merely engineers the facade of equilibrium.  In reality, it has always been a far-from-equilibrium structure in uneasy but indispensable contact with the Outside.

Scott's history also sheds some light on the second question we asked -- why did the State form to begin with?  He highlights an interesting gap of close to 4,000 years between the first signs of sedentary agricultural settlement in Mesopotamia, and the establishment of the first States.  That is a long long time.  It should give pause to anyone who thinks that there is a natural and inevitable progression from the invention of farming as a technology, to the formation of centralized political power.  Maybe someone really was "warding off" a possibility for all those years.  At any rate, while Scott says the explanation for why sedentary farming caught on despite being kinda bad for your health isn't completely clear, there does appear to be consensus about why 4,000 years of farming morphed into States: ecologic decline.  Basically, the State is a last ditch organizational effort to preserve survival amidst the deterioration of a previously cushy ecologic niche.  When humans finally run out of every other food web (due to changing climate or their own impacts) they turn to authoritarian mono-cropping with a vengeance.  Which I think provides an interesting perspective on the question of "collapse"  that seems to obsess us these days.  For example, Jared Diamond claims that societies collapse because of their own impact on the environment, because of climate change, because trade with friendly neighbors declines, because of conflict with hostile neighbors, and because some societies don't have the political or social institutions to adapt in the face of problems 1-4 (this is his 5-point framework for the end of the world).  Yet here we are arguing that basically these same forces are what gave birth to civilization.  Something weird is obviously going on here that should make us back up and ask what we meant by "civilization" to begin with.  

For D&G though, the confusing hypothesis of the perpetual interaction of the SA and WM is not merely historic, but also, and really primarily, philosophic.  They are really talking about two types of forces, or algorithms, or tendencies (or as they prefer in ATP, "abstract machines") which are always there, but get instantiated in particular ways under particular circumstances (concrete "assemblages").  In fact, in some sense the WM and the SA are the twin ur-forces of their theory that go round and round as two side of the same coin.  Opening and Closing.  Extension and Consolidation.  Capture and Flight.  Outside and Inside, and Inside as Outside, like an immanent metaphysical Klein bottle.  

Being abstract, these machines can show up anywhere, instantiated in any medium.  Which accounts for the strange twist that D&G might add to the idea of a "golden age of the barbarian".  They might ask: did it really end?  Of course, there are just a few humans who still literally live as nomads.  But what if we look at the nomad as akin to a "state of mind"?  It would be characterized by its openness and adaptability, by the way it situates itself outside of State control, by the way it creates a space as it occupies it, piecemeal and locally, instead of marking off a circumscribed area from the outset.  Maybe this nomadic system hasn't disappeared at all.  Maybe its strength (and weakness) is its ability to change form, to avoid all capture.

Not only is there no universal State but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is to a set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the "multinational" type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc...) but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power. The modern world can provide us today with particularly well developed images of these two directions: worldwide ecumenical machines, but also a neo-primitivism, a new tribal society as described by Marshall McLuhan. These directions are equally present in all social fields, in all periods. It even happens that they partially merge. For example, a commercial organization is also a band of pillage, or piracy for part of its course and in many of its activities; or it is in bands that a religious formation begins to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less than worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine.

Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorphosis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?

Now, I know, we're in danger of slipping back into French here.  What's Plain about this English, you might ask.  TL;DR you said (innumerable paragraphs ago, undoubtedly).  So let me bring this triumphantly full circle and prove to you that the tangent line is really just the arc of a circle with infinite radius.  That's right, let's talk nomad science.

D&G have this idea that you can also see the contrast between the WM and the SA expressed in the difference between "nomad science" and "royal science" ("State science").  But beyond, you know, being invented by nomads, what would make something a "nomad science"?   It starts by modeling the world as a fluid, whose non-laminar flow can swirl into vortices to create the things we regard as solid, rather than treating a fluid as a particular case of a bunch of solids in motion.  It doesn't assume every system is at equilibrium or every cow is a sphere in a vacuum.  It studies non-elephant animals.  Nomad science focuses on solving concrete problems in the context in which they arise, rather than trying to prove theorems from first principles.  D&G basically have in mind the type of practical science we usually call engineering.  And so it gets dismissed as "mere engineering" (ie. not "real, fundamental, elegant, civilized ... State" science ).  It gets dismissed as "weather":

I once had a conversation with the late David Schramm, the famous cosmologist at the Univer­sity of Chicago, about galactic jets. These are thin pencils of plasma that beam out of some galactic cores to fabulous distances, some­ times several galactic radii, powered somehow by mechanical rota­tion in the core. How they can remain thin over such stupendous distances is not understood, and something I find tremendously in­teresting. But David dismissed the whole effect as "weather." He was interested only in the early universe and astrophysical observations that could shed light on it, even if only marginally. He categorized the jets as annoying distractions on the grounds that they had noth­ing in particular to tell him about what was fundamental. I, in con­trast, am fascinated by weather and believe that people claiming not to be are fibbing.

Ultimately D&G are contending that nomad science is a whole different way of looking at the innate creativity of matter itself, a creativity that goes way beyond the forms we try to mold a supposedly pliant matter into.   This means that it operates outside Aristotle's hylomorphic model that distinguishes dumb content from intelligent form.   I think many scientists deep down still subscribe to this basic model, a sort of un-reflexive and impoverished materialism that crumbles under a few lines of Socratic questioning:

  Socrates:  So, you think the world is made of atoms or quarks or material stuff of some sort?

Scientist:  Yep.  The universe is just a bunch of stuff following natural laws. 

  Socrates:  Very interesting.  So then, what kind of stuff are the laws made out of, if everything is made out of stuff?

Scientist:  What!?  No, look, the laws govern the stuff.  The laws themselves aren't made of stuff.  They're just natural mathematical laws.  The stuff is governed by the laws.

  Socrates: I see, so you think there's a material world and an ideal world that interact exactly the way a governor and the governed interact?  So you're a dualist; you didn't literally mean that it's "just" stuff.

Scientist:  What!?  No, you're missing the point again.  I'm a materialist!  Everything is just stuff.  

  Socrates:  Except for the laws.  

Scientist: Right, except for the laws.

  Socrates: Which I guess must not be real things then.  Are they figments of human imagination, delirious inventions, dreams, visions, or what?

Scientist: Huh!?  No, look, the laws are just ... there.  Everything is subject to them.  Humans don't invent the laws, they just discover them.  The laws are the most real and objective thing in the universe.

  Socrates:  So the laws just come down from some other realm you deny exists, are kinda 'revealed' to you scientists, and then everything has to follow those laws.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a political rather than a metaphysical debate.  Of course, D&G don't really think there's a difference.  The model of inert matter governed by timeless physical law handed down from on high is not coincidentally the same as that between governing State and governed Subject.  The point of both of them is to circumscribe a realm of possibility and to prohibit anything not expressly permitted.  A more vital materialism would look at matter as if it were itself alive, even thinking ... because of course it is.  What else is life and thought but a witness to the innate creativity of matter?  "Thoughts" are particular things that the grey squishy matter between the ears of hairless chimps can do.  A deeper materialism would have to deal with the way that matter makes up the laws as it goes (this is basically the point of Bob Laughlin's book cited above). 

What would a nomad science look like then?  I think the idea is that it would begin from a practical question that's part of a larger social, political, and economic context, and proceed to empirically investigate how a not completely pliant matter can be sort of coaxed into a useful form aimed at solving this problem.  The most important example D&G give of this type of science is nomad metallurgy.  As we saw earlier, the State has to go through the nomads to get to metals.  Only the nomads are able to ferret out where the right ores are and what processes can turn those into what types of metal.  To do this they have to practice a sort of science that learns from experience how to follow certain features of geology and how to manipulate certain phase transitions that happen as you heat metals.  Of course, you could always reduce this "in principle" to chemistry.  Just like "in principle" the weather is nothing but a bunch of air molecules moving around.  But the point is that the nomads are not interested in principles.  Their science is practical and contextual, and it deals directly with situations where there are not yet any principles to fall back on -- like when you want to see if this type of mine will furnish rocks that you can turn into that type of steel.  But just because there are no principles to "reduce" things to doesn't make what their doing "un-scientific".

D&G end up describing the difference in procedure as a contrast between following a matter and reproducing a law:

A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific-procedures: one consists in "reproducing," the other in "following " The first involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, involving itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences. Itineration is too readily reduced to a modality of technology, or of the application and verification of science. But this is not the case: following is not at all the same thing as reproducing, and one never follows in order to reproduce The ideal of reproduction, deduction, or induction is part of royal science at all times and in all places, and treats differences of time and place as so many variables, the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the law

What caught my attention in this passage was the way it seemed to so naturally fit with Stengers discussion of the relationship between "science" and "matters of concern".  Essentially, in nomad science everything is at the stage of a matter of concern.  You could call it "pre-scientific" if you like, but only as much as you would use the term to describe engineering.  It's really just empirical science before all the departmental lines get drawn and all the labs get set up and all the grad students get manufactured.  Since the object of this science is practical it doesn't even bother to set itself up as a pure independent discipline.  It's more like a science of general problem solving.  And it follows a problem, say the problem of global warming, as it moves from physics and chemistry though biology and ecology to economics, politics, law, etc ... In other words, nomad science operates in a complex world where there's no lab experiment that can be repeated.  There's no way to control the variables and to isolate the experiment from "outside influence".  In other words, this type of science operates on the outside without being able to construct an interior, just like a little WM.  The best it can hope for is to produce the same thing again, by taking into account what's changed in the context, and changing its methods accordingly.  State science, by contrast wants to capture everything, to hold everything constant.  To replicate its results again and again.  What it's really replicating turns out to be first and foremost the stable experimental setup, an isolated inside.  

For me, that connection really illuminates more of what Stengers is saying, especially in some of the later essays where she begins to ask what it is that scientist's want when they keep asking us to "save research".  We can ask  a similar question to her about "saving replication" from its crisis.  In both cases, you might say, "save it from what"?  Do we really want to make sure that Science is limited only to addressing topics that fit neatly inside a lab, within the bounds of a controlled environment that can be scientifically replicated to everyone's highest standard of p-value?  Are we just "saving" science from confronting the danger of confronting questions that it can't answer authoritatively?  Aren't those precisely the important questions?  

Something I wrote a long time ago, for the curious/masochistic.

Mammalian Mathematicians

Found this old email exchange while searching for another quote

Infinity as God 6 messages

---

XXXX <XXXX@YYY.com>	Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 8:08 AM
To: XXX <XXXXX@gmail.com>
Can you remind me how you reason infinity being God?

---

XXX <XXXXX@gmail.com>	Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:25 AM
To: XXXX <XXXX@YYY.com>
1) Marginally sentient apes wander earth bumping into material stuff.  This stuff seems pretty real because it's there whether the apes want it to be or not, and because it follows some definite patterns (which of course apes have evolved to extract). 2) Apes start using tools to dissect the real stuff.  Turns out real stuff is made of smaller real stuff that likewise seems to be both a) pretty objectively out there and b) follows a lot of definite patterns now called physical law.  The more patterns the ape finds, the more it uses those patterns to manipulate the stuff to find even more new patterns. 3) The ape now has a proper metaphysical problem, because it seems there are two kinds of real things, if by "real" we mean everything out there effecting the ape's world.  There's definitely real material stuff, but then also these patterns seem to be pretty real as well, as they have a big effect on the stuff, even though they themselves don't seem to be made of the stuff.  The patterns are weird because they seem both objectively out there like the stuff, but they are also subjectively in the head of the ape (for example, the ape can produce more of these patterns in a way that he cannot magic up more stuff).  Very confusing.  How are the patterns and the stuff related?  The patterns seem to come from some special realm not of this earth that only the ape has access to (far as the ape knows).  Call this realm the divine. Someone tells the ape about these patterns; that super-ape must be God.   4) Ape drops acid, begins to gaze at navel.  Realizes that the patterns describe possibilities for the stuff that aren't actualized right now, but could be made actual.  In addition, the ape discovers that the particular grey squishy stuff between its ears seems to be stuff that realizes (in the sense of makes actual) the possibilities that are out there in the other stuff.  This despite the fact that the grey squishy stuff seems to be basically just like all the other stuff.  It's like the stuff that seemed so hard-edged and definite and kinda static actually can create a fuzzy cloud of dynamic possibilities around itself.  So there's actuality in the here and now, and possibility in the somewhen else at some other time (not here and now), and not only do actual/possibility both seem to have equal claim to be called reality, but they seem to be the same thing, or at least two side of the same coin.  Trippy. 5) Hilarity ensues. 6) The computer now understands that possibility is just as real as actuality (or ideas are just as real as things, to use the old terms).  In tracing back how the particular grey squishy ape head stuff came to be able to make these possibilities have an effect on actuality though, the computer realizes that it can hardly have started with the ape brain.  In fact, all actual stuff seems to create some kind of cloud of possibilities around itself.  The question is basically just how big the cloud seems to be and how wide an effect this particular bit of stuff has on the rest of the stuff.  There's a bootstrapping process or feedback loop between actual stuff and possibility.  A little stuff gives rise to a few possibilities which gives rise to new configurations of stuff which gives rise to a whole new set of possibilities and so on ... till one day squishy ape brain has built a computer riding a light beam to Jupiter and beyond the infinite. 7) The übermensch finally grasps that we're dealing with a chicken and egg problem here.  Was it actuality or possibility that started off this feedback loop?  In any case, both the actual stuff and the possible stuff seem to be able to go on alternating to infinity.  Infinite actual stuff we think we sorta grasp -- just more space and time, right?  But infinite possibilities is much more difficult because, by the very nature of possibility, it doesn't go on in the same direction, it changes qualitatively at each step. The "..." gets pretty weird somewhere around the second dot.  When you try to think about the set of all possibilities extending infinitely, you start to run into some weird and paradoxical shit.  Like Infinity^2.  Or Infinity^Infinity.  Except these mathematical versions are just pathetic domesticated animals compared with Possibility^Infinity. "God" seems like a good name for the infinitely nested set of infinite possibilities because: a) this set would seem to be infinitely maxed out on not just space and time but every other dimension you can think of, and a bunch that even your squishy übermensch brain can't generate yet, b) this kind of inconceivability is always retreating before you as you advance, but actually creates the world as it goes and c) contemplating this set has an expansive emotional effect similar to the one that contemplating the patterns traced by stuff produced in our ape ancestors.  So call this set "God" mostly for reasons of historical continuity.    But remember, actuality and possibility are just two sides of the same coin, or two moments in the same oscillation.  The actual world then is a vehicle for the expansion of God, or a continually repeated part or phase of this expansion.  You cannot expand possibility without expanding actuality as the two together make up reality.  So this version of God actually changes and develops, even though God is outside of space and time (or maybe half inside half outside?).  And it also means that all of the actual world is part of God.  Though I suppose that if we decide God is infinite possibility then whatever stage that is at right now is fully actualized (there is some actual thing happening in my squishy stuff as I contemplate infinite possibility, and now it's happening to you too!) so that God, right then, is defined by the full actual state of the world.  As you can see, shit gets weird here and we may need to increase the dosage.  Probably the simplest way to say it would be to define God as the process of expansion, rather than as a fixed set of actual conditions right now, or of a static set of possibilities.  The theory is inherently dynamic and process oriented.