Driftwork

The fifteen tree species in my/our arboretum:

Beech
Sweet Chestnut
English Oak
Chilean Pine (Monkey Puzzle)
Hawthorn
Leylandia
Pine (2 varieties)
Evergreen (3 varieties)
Mountain Ash
Common Cherry
Californian Lilac
Holly

We might consider the conflict between the state and the nomad as being nearly timeless, an ahistorical given, perhaps more gently as being metahistorical. Deleuze and Guattari certainly do, before changing the meaning of the conflict by moving the concept from philosophy and theology - in which there is a clearly identifiable line of state thought which stretches from before the Ancient Greece, the Roman empire through Descartes and Hobbes to Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Mill and Heidegger and beyond to the present day, and nomadic thought – to science and scientific thought. Deleuze and Guattari propose state science as being hylemorphic, by which they mean that is works with form and content, privileging formed and fixed bodies. This places state science as being one of the two heads of political sovereignty the jurist-scientist rather than the magician-king (ATP 351), though equally in the present I might be tempted to substitute scientist for magician in the latter term. Nomadic Science they suggest works rather differently with movements, flows and singularities: events though which qualitative transformations take place. (ATP 372). The difference between these two forms of science is not necessarily permanent, because state science requires nomadic science. Needing the discoveries of nomadic science and conversely nomadic science requires state science. The flows and changes of nomadic science are reterritorialised onto the fixed coordinates, the juridical procedures, the stratifications and the categorizations of state science. Many things could be said about this understanding of science, for it obviously repeats a theme that is core to Anti-Oedipus (and Difference and Repetition for that matter) in which knowledge and information is considered as a deterritorialising force and it can also be seen to be generally equivalent to labour which is endlessly deterritorialised and then reterritorialised back onto property and capital. We can say then that the deterritorialisations of nomadic science are a subset of state science because they are endlessly reterritorialised back into state science, subordinated to the categories that are so alien to them.

Deleuze and Guattari want to establish a point which they could not make in relation to philosophy, though the logic is clear in the ATP, in part of course because as already said above, they correctly argue that religion and philosophy have been supplanted by state science as the primary ideology of our times. That state thought is dependent on nomadic thought, identity is after, dependent on difference, deterritorialisation is prior to reterritorialisation. What is being proposed is that knowledge and labour, thought and action, science and thought are all subject to the same apparatus of capture, processes of homogenisation that are intended to produce quantifiable and exchangeable units from what begins as difference, as differential relations of desire. In this state thought, state philosophy, state theology is no different than state science. At times Deleuze and Guattari discuss state thought as a relation of the identity between capitalist and worker, ruler and ruled, constructing a common rationality between subjects. ‘The state must realize the distinction between legislator and the subject under formal conditions permitting thought…’ (ATP 376). This is sometimes raised as collapsing the distinction between the state and capital but this is mistaken for as we’ve seen they are making an opposition within the present.

Of course my deliberate (mis)reading of Deleuze and Guattari assumes that a number of questions are considered as having been answered both within their work but also within related texts – sample questions might be for example - at what point in the history of western capitalism did state science supplant state philosophy and state theology as the central ideological apparatus ? The trajectory can be traced back to Galileo and Newton but which completes in the 19th Century during the 2nd industrial revolution. In this later period state philosophy and state science establish a social and political paradigm which is maintained up to the present. How did state philosophy respond to this replacement of philosophy and theology by science? The answer to this is simple, Heidegger … Sociology of Science (and its descendants), recent post-secularism and the delusion that science and monotheism are related.

This is a note and consequently I am not going to explain what is wrong with the unnecessary localism of relating state thought to the indo-european concept of political sovereignty, perhaps you noticed I didn’t mention Confucius and Lao Tsu in the opening paragraph ? Which is also why I didn’t reference Adam Smith an exemplary state thinker who referenced the east in the later books of the wealth of nations. But then state thought is not being considered as something western, but as something that extends beyond the locality of the indo-european. Perhaps this is where I should have taken this logic here but consider this a marker… rough notes anyway.

It was strangest thing reading the WS2 text on Heidegger and reactionary modernism from 1991 is that I approved of Heideggers concept of inhandedness and was only more ambiguous of the overall understanding of technology. This approval of the concept of inhandedness was probably because of the desire for interfaces to systems to be more Object Orientated and seamless. It’s worth restating that the analysis of Heideggers fascism, the reactionary modernism and the inevitable consequences remain fundamentally unchanged. In this at least I remain rather traditional… What has changed is that I now recognize that Heideggers relationship to technology is completely wrong, that the concept of inhandedness is utterly mistaken. I think that this is because of the engineering experience. The additional 20 years of engineering experience (not to forget the occasionally eccentric body of philosophical knowledges), has taught me that interfaces and tools are less invisible to the engineer, the user of tools as skills and usage increase. That the unskilled user wants the interface to be seamless but this is precisely because they are unskilled. Inhandedness is the concept of a philosopher who couldn’t use a hammer, who imagined that the craftsman being observed was unconscious of the interface between body, hammer and striking. Experience and more recently philosophy demonstrates that as skills and use increase we become more aware of the hammer, of the tools rather than less. I should have known before, my father was a mechanical engineer (large scale factory automation) would have produced a physical argument based on knowledge, mechanical skills and human design. Resulting in an argument that interfaces can never be invisible, that inhandedness can only have meaning to the unskilled.

Perhaps the problem lay in the desire to produce interfaces that maximize usability for unskilled users (and most computer users are unskilled) and as a consequence I ignored the fundamental error that my earlier reading of Heidegger reproduced. Nobody noticed of course, but then they were phenomenologists and were incapable of making the transition to difference engineering.

To clarify the ground of Realism and Anti-Realism, because some clarity on the claims I’m making can be substantiated even within a typical belief in the superiority of realism over non-realist approaches.

Hilary Putnam proposes “…a realist (with respect to a given theory or discourse) holds that 1) the sentences of that theory are true or false; and 2) that what makes them true or false is something external – that is to say, it is not (in general) our sense data, actual or potential, or the structure of our minds, or our language etc…” (and still later) “ that the theories accepted in a mature science are typically approximately true, that the same term can refer to the same thing even when it occurs in different theories – these viewed by the realist … As part of any adequate scientific description of science and it’s relations to its objects…” This is quoted not to define realism but rather to show that truth must play a central role in the construction of a realist position. More than that it also it seems to me to highlight what it is to hold a realist understanding of theory and the real world. Which is to emphasize the external and evidence. Consequently a minimal proposition that describes a realism, that is to say a scientific realism is as follows: “…Science aims to give us, in it’s theories, a literally true story of what the worlds is like: and the acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true…”

This is as I said above is deliberately minimal - a basic statement would argue that science tells a true story, the more complex one states that it merely intends to do so, but either way the central point is ‘truth’. The philosopher who I borrowed the definition from makes great play of the importance of ‘literally’ which he states rules out positions that suggest that science is true if ‘properly understood’ but literally that the statements can appear to be false or meaningless. We are of course dealing with epistemology here in that for a realist – what guides the acceptance of a theory is a belief in its truth. But this is not to suggest that anyone must take such a position but rather that they could. Finally (sic) then – within a scientific realist position it is necessary to recognize that an acceptance that a theory is probably correct means that the theory is probably true. In other words belief can come in degrees along with the consequent understanding a degree of belief that a theory is true. Which is not to suggest that this is the same thing as saying that something is approximately true.

Consequently : If realism is the position that the construction of a scientific theory aims to give a literally true story of what the world is like and that the acceptance of such a theory must include the belief that it is true — why do I not like this…? Because anti-realism is a more rational and intelligent position - anti-realism is a perspective that proposes that the intention of science and theory can work well without giving a literally true story, and that accepting a theory can properly involve something completely other than belief that it is true. [This for example I can think of myself as both a Marxist, Deleuzian (and sometime ex-SI) without regarding the theoretical contradictions as a problem – if I thought that any of these were realisms this would be a problem…] An anti-realist does not believe that to propose a theory is to specify that it is true, rather what is done is to claim that it has specific values which make it useful. These values will probably mean that it cannot be said to be true – but they may well be empirical adequate. The reason why ‘literally true’ is important is that within a realism the argument that a given theory represents the truth is often made – for example ‘the second law of thermodynamics’ – and within realism the statements that support the second law of thermodynamics are also considered to be literally true and are ‘literally’ a true representation of reality, until the theoretical proposition is proved to be incorrect. An anti-realist however maintains that whilst a theoretical statement can and probably should be understood literally, a theory need not be true to be useful and adequate. [This is not to accept a positivist approach – in which theoretical propositions and concepts only have meaning in their connections with what is observable. Which is to imagine that two alternative theories can say the same thing though they contradict each other….enough]. So what I accept as an adequate constructivist position – which is a reasonable anti-realist position in that it does not require a belief that a theory should of necessity be attempting to represent the truth and/or the real.. [still using science…]: “…Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate, and the acceptance of a theory involves it’s acceptance only insofar as the theory is empirically adequate…”

Something being empirically adequate implies that the theoretical model being proposed must relate to the actual things being described, and that the things the theory implies must be observably true…. I could go on: but let me pause here….

It is obvious then that discourse is not considered separate from the world being described – discourse in this sense would also be understood as a matheme, if it makes a claim to be theoretically adequate it must relate to the actual objects being described. If empirical examples are raised from physics, the human social and so on – there is no performative contradiction for on an everyday basis ‘reality’ is merely a convention adopted because of our specific circumstances. The theoretical model that is adopted calls this ‘reality’ into question at the same time as does our everyday lived practice. Anti-realism – does not reduce the world to thoughts and discourse, any-more than a realism does in its claims for mathematics being a realism - what it does is question whether a realist model which claims that a theoretical proposition represents the truth/real of the world is either necessary or an accurate way to understand the world. An anti-realist, a constructivist position precisely recognizes that an act of torturing a human or non-human – takes place and must be understood as such – but that the discursive act of ‘talking about torture’ needs to addressed and understood as well. Freud’s insight into phantasy always needs to be born in mind here – for example – [A young girl who cut her own tendons in objection to being forced to marry someone last week – was being offered support whether or not the justification was true or false.]. The underlying point being that no examples work to support a realism rather than an anti-realism constructivist position, because of the important misassumption that an anti-realism is not addressing the observable and everyday world.

One might argue that realism is probabilistic rather than truth based, certainly but not yet…

Not accepting the default assumption that all social constructions are ‘real’ but are constructions does not mean that I am being quasi-religious, internal to their discourse religions are realisms.  The default understanding of an anti-realist is to assume that the object  is invented, constructed. Why would religion be considered as any different from racism, sexism, sheep,  domesticity, the quark or popular genetics ? The list of comparable objects and events is long but not limitless.

A comment then “My concern with both of you is that you seem to refuse the insights of evolutionary psychology and neurology to understand religious phenomena because you seem to want to foreclose prematurely on understanding it by simply labelling it instead as a kind reactionary ideology based on superstition. ” A scientific proposition which addresses an ideological/social construction  and  consequently reproduces religion as a unique set of real phenomena is not a scientific phenomena that I can consider as valid. It is difficult and perhaps impossible to separate the religious phenomena from the ideological concept that is being supported by the misidentification of ‘religious phenomena’.  It has the equivalent status as the assumption that since homosexuality exists as a social phenomena no society can exist without the concept of ‘homosexuality’, whereas in fact ‘homosexuality’ has nothing to do with male/male and female/female desire, it is an ideological concept that exists because of very particular societal requirements. Science which declares the existence of a ‘gay gene’ is carrying out a purely ideological operation that is founded on a society that requires the social concept of homosexuality be proven to have a cause. It is this same ideological operation which the science that declares that ‘religion’ is understandable as a phenomena having a genetic, neurological and physical cause which is encoded in some peoples genes is engaged in. What is present as science is much better understood as an ideological operation and only afterwards as a phenomena worthy of scientific investigation. (they are of course the  wrong sciences, but this scarcely matters). The problem is that science frequently presents ideological facts as ‘real’ as if evolutionary psychology and neurology are producing scientific laws equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics and clearly they are not. There can be no matheme that describes religion and religious phenomena, because they are simply social constructs. We can perhaps leave the question of whether the matheme itself is a wrong turn for another time.

A second comment was this “…A cynic might argue that you both hold such a position because your ‘everything is politics’ stance tends to mask a quasi-religious position itself and you are afraid that rational scrutiny in this area might hit too close to home…” Politics is immanent, where there are human beings there will always be the political. That we believe it is necessary to extend the concept beyond the human realm, for reasons to do with the radical extension of equality and equivalence out from the current reactionary and truncated form, to pre-establish an alliance with the non-human is not in any sense quasi-religious, it is however a deliberate political and philosophical decision, axiomatic to a fault. How to distinguish “…political and religious movements…” ? Everything is political, not everything is religious, where now we exist in societies where science and scientists function as jurists supporting the state, from physics, biologists, economists and beyond, ((Even the quasi-religious Bush regime depended on its coterie of western Economists arguing for the free-market and increased globalization, the support for capital coming ever closer to destroying the world)). Whereas religion is increasingly restricted to the social personal areas on the margins of our societies. Margins to be understood in the sense of marginalized from power, authority and juridical issues. The other aspect of this is that all aspects of human existence are always political;  science (physics,  biology,  economics,  the psychological sciences),  religion (who can forget the  extraordinary struggle of homosexuality in the Anglican churches?, the Islamist fatwas on writers !) -  no all human ground is political and it always has been. Before the neolithic invention of farming, perhaps even as far back as the first hominids inventing tools - the political. And that in brief is how I would distinguish the political from quarks and religion,  in brief one could be called eternal  whilst the others are temporal…