<<TRANSMATHOME

Note 5. Science

Alongside art (and immanently connected) is the domain of craftsmanship, deployments of forces, and engineering, and alongside these (and again immanently connected) is the domain of science. Running in complex and very important ways through all of these is the area of engagement known as mathematics, but which can also be termed ‘numerics’. In the context of the idea of micropolitics, the issues here are again those of intensifications, and of assemblages.  The often very obscure engagements in effect in the appearance  of  capacities for creating devices and outcomes are  processes of intensification, and clearly the same is true of emergences  of heightened engagement with the zones officially engaged by scientists (expressing itself in part in the taking up of facts or knowledge-processes into domains of activity), and the associated development of the capacity to use scientific instruments.

In relation to the issue of science, the main question is: on whose behalf is the discovery of facts taking place? Are the knowledge-processes being put into effect in such a way that they will assist zones  of free becoming or deterritorialisation, or are they being straightforwardly given up to the assemblages (which will fold the discoveries back into processes of constriction)? At one level what this asks after is whether the groups and individuals making the discoveries are doing so as part of a fluid, multiple process of intensification and of escapes from stratification, or whether they are shrivelling away down lines of de-intensification in the process of making discoveries. Moving the focus outward, what the question asks after is whether the generated knowledge-processes are being set into effect in ways that intensify  free, generative, de-stratified flows on the part of groups and individuals (even if only within the immediate vicinity of scientific work).  It is possible, as has been seen, to be ‘lodged’ within a formation pertaining to the scientific assemblage, and yet to be off to one side of the field of stratification of the assemblage, speaking always in the name of a Spinozistic becoming-active that has  the zones engaged by science as one field of engagement amongst many.   A Thousand Plateaus makes this last point in relation to all assemblages (things are no different in relation to art, or engineering, or mathematics, or philosophy...):

 Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization [...] It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. [...] We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency [i.e. the overall field of its lines of flight] (TP p.161)

In relation to science (and this also applies to the other assemblages), a first crucial issue of ‘truth’ concerns the mode of production of the truths (or knowledge-processes). Are they yielded submissively as hostages to the grave  world of regimes of signs and assemblages of power (which can incorporate the processes in a way which has no effect on the de-intensications involved), or are they used to cause engagements to pass over thresholds?  A further major issue is that, as has been said, the truths or facts of  science only pertain to one set of  domains in relation to the field of zones of attributes of the world which are pre-eminently engaged by the human, such that pervading processes of becoming-active are definitionally not in effect if it is only the scientific lines of engagement which have been opened.

The crucial coordinates for thinking about science in this context therefore concern the nature of the processes and zones of engagement and institutional production. The approach of adherence  to the search for ‘truth’ or ‘scientific truth’ is an aspect of a dangerous trap, in that it can lead in practice to subsumption within the assemblages. Nietzsche’s aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil  is a good summary: ‘”Knowledge for its own sake” – this is the last snare set by morality: one therewith gets completely entangled in it once more’.[2] The morality is in fact the functioning of regimes of signs, and routines of assemblages, with the chief regime of signs in effect being that of the paranoiac state regime (truth relates to Being, and Being is the dominant centre which must be obeyed). As with the case of being lodged within an artistic assemblage, a ‘nomadological’ or micropolitical  path  can pass through scientific formations (there are advantages for instance in comparison with philosophy, which in many ways is more limited in scope of engagement, and which is more deeply burdened by layers of stratification), but it is a question of keeping up the  overall process of freeing up engagement or thought; that is, the always singular process of  intensifying engagement with attributes of the cosmos along all available lines.

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