Empiricism and Apprenticeship: Structure and method in the works of Deleuze
Scott McBride
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
School of History and Philosophy
Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences
June 2017
iv EMPIRICISM AND APPRENTICESHIP: Structure and Method in the works of Deleuze
i THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Thesis/Di ssertation Sheet
Surname or Family name: McBride
First name: Scott , Other name/s: Wilkie
Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD
School: Humanities and Languages Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences
Title: Empiricism and apprenticeship: Structure and method in the works of Deleuze
Abstract:
This thesis analyses the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It examines his oeuwe to draw out the series ofvaf,iations and movements that constitute its deep structure. It argues that both ontological and methodological aspects exist within all ofDeleuze's work and that a rigorous articulation ofhis philosophy must express both the specifics ofhis arguments and distinctions as well as fidelity to his method ofphilosophizing. Any such account must also consider the habits ofthought that he condemns.
Deleuze's works are grouped into several successive periods in his phikrsophical development in order to sirow both the divergences and continuities between his eaxlier and later works. While the presentation is chronological, the analysis uses the metlods and strategies fiom all ofhis works. Deleuze's work is situated as both a response to a specific conceptual locale and set ofproblems, as well sets ofmore widely useful axguments and concepts.
The thesis argues that Diference and Repetition,rather,than being an original statement of a novel philosophical pcsition, instead collages and systematises the concepts that were aniculated in Deleuze's earlier historical studies. lt argues that rather than being his magnum opus it is instead a work of mixed value, containing both successful and flawed elements.
The thesis also presents and critiques existing accounts ofDeleuzian ethics and argues that Deleuze's ontology cannot directly support an ethics. [t develops a rival account ofthe ethical in Deleuze as an evaluatiye approach to other ethical systems, arguing that it should not be considered as a self-existent system in its own right.
The final sections ofthe thesis examine the analysis ofeconomic history in the two volumes ofCapitalism and Schizophrenia, focusing on the various functions that capitalism serves in those works in relation to social organisations and to Deleuze and Guattari's proposal for a universal history.
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'l hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or Cissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract lnterhational (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).
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Date pL:(: v(wtV Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been completed without the support and advice of a large number of people. In particular I wish to thank my supervisors Simon Lumsden and Paul Patton. Both were very encouraging, even of my decision to change my thesis topic from a comparative study of Hegel and Deleuze to one focusing solely on Deleuze at a late stage in the development of the thesis. In a traditional Sanskrit allegory about learning students are compared to four kinds of horses: the first kind runs before it sees the shadow of the whip, the second runs just before the whip reaches his skin, the third runs when it feels pain on his body, and the unfortunate fourth kind will only run after the pain of the whip penetrates into the marrow of his bone. Sadly for my supervisors the combination of my constant dissatisfaction with my writing, desire to read everything, and slowness in composition unhappily made me very much the fourth kind of horse. Simon especially deserves far more thanks than I can offer him for his long enduring patience.
I am thankful for the company of my fellow Hegelians Dave and Carlos. Though I am now a lapsed Hegelian I am still glad to have them as comrades. I am also grateful for my fellow travellers during the PhD (particularly those who shared wine and song), and for those who were part of a surprisingly long lived reading group: thank you Ash, Will, Rose, Eve, John, Anisha, Emilie, Lorraine, Jacq, Ozzie, Grace, and Naama.
Rosie: Much love, always and forever. In addition to her long standing care for me, her heroic work preparing the bibliography, and dealing with the final review of the footnotes and formatting can only be interpreted as an act of great love. Thank you also to Alan, Peggy and Brendan for being a second family to me.
Thanks are also due for the long distance support provided by a small kiwi contingent: Michael, Seth, and Claire, as well as my family: Carol, David, Julia and Logan. I wish to thank Vivienne Bull also for her material support at a crucial stage.
My colleagues (past and present) at the Arts Student Centre: Andy, Katie, Ashleigh, Liz, Milly, Juliana, Sam, Jan, Joel, Candy, Stephen and my manager Agnes were always tolerant of my PhD student eccentricities, including several conference related absences, and were always a refreshing break from the thesis headspace, particularly in the end stages.
Dylan Horrocks kindly gave his permission to use images from Hicksville for the cover.
At the end of the process of composition and revision I feel as I imagine many authors do: that the defects remaining in the work are all too visible. Nonetheless I will be pleased if any readers that this thesis may have in the end do not regret the time they spent in reading it.
v Table of Contents EMPIRICISM AND APPRENTICESHIP:...... i Thesis/Dissertation Sheet ...... ii Abstract: ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... v Chapter 1 ...... 1 What we talk about when we talk about Deleuze ...... 1 Chapter 2 ...... 10 Assembling the components: Studies in the history of philosophy ...... 10 Gueroult ...... 14 Maimon ...... 19 Hume ...... 27 Nietzsche ...... 34 Kant ...... 43 Proust ...... 49 Bergson ...... 54 Conclusion ...... 60 Chapter 3 ...... 63 On Difference and Repetition ...... 63 The Image of Thought ...... 69 Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference ...... 79 Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible ...... 81 Critical Evaluation ...... 86 Chapter 4 ...... 90 Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Part 1 ...... 90 Massumi’s A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia ...... 92 The Search for Weapons in Capitalism and Schizophrenia ...... 97 Difference and Repetition against Capitalism and Schizophrenia ...... 103 Tendencies and Types ...... 107 Chapter 5 ...... 119 Flowers fall and weeds spring up: Deleuzian ethics and analysis ...... 119 Braidotti’s Nomadic Ethics ...... 127 Lorraine’s Durational Subjectivity ...... 129 Comments on Lorraine and Braidotti ...... 132 Bryant’s Problematic Ethics ...... 137 Jun’s Immanent Normativity ...... 142 Summary ...... 144
vi Minor Ethics...... 145 Chapter 6 ...... 156 Capitalism and Schizophrenia, part 2 ...... 156 Preliminary Distinctions ...... 157 Economic History in Capitalism and Schizophrenia ...... 160 Chapter 7 ...... 176 Conclusion ...... 176 Bibliography ...... 178
vii “The dead whom we love are an inexhaustible task for us”1
“Come, sir, arise, away! I'll teach you differences”2
1 Deleuze, G. What Is Grounding? (&&& Press, 2015), p. 14 2King Lear, Act I, Scene 4 in Shakespeare, W. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Harper Collins, 1994), p. 1135. viii Chapter 1
What we talk about when we talk about Deleuze
Of course one writes about Deleuze from the middle of a number of things. Deleuze's singly and co-authored works comprise an oeuvre that stretches over forty years, an oeuvre whose works rove over a wide and varied range of philosophical and non- philosophical sources. Those works support an abundance of secondary literature containing diverse and contradictory interpretations. There are a thicket of articles, guides, and monographs devoted to single works, and to explorations of a theme or single concept. The monographs that address Deleuze's system more comprehensively constitute a discordant chorus that cannot conceivably form any kind of unity. A quick sampling of some of the major positions on Deleuze's works lead one to understand that he and his system should be best understood as:
“.. a spiritual, redemptive or subtractive thinker, a thinker preoccupied with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialisation ... [the system] is extra- worldly”3
… a realist ontology of the virtual structures of dynamical processes immanent to the world of matter and energy.4
… a series of works that, more than anything else, are “organised by the extinction of the word ‘being’ and therefore of ontology”.5
“… a toolbox of concepts that readers may pick and choose from as they see fit”.6
3 Hallward, P. Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (Verso, 2006), p. 3. 4 Summary of sentences in DeLanda, M. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum, 2002), p. 5. 5 Zourabichvili, F. Deleuze, a Philosophy of the Event, (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 37. 6 Massumi, M. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992), p.7.
1 … an attempt to “provide modern science with the metaphysics that it needs”, a metaphysics that is profoundly affected by Riemann’s notion of the multiplicity.7
… a philosophy whose fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to “submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One”, which turns out to be “profoundly aristocratic and a philosophy of death”8
… an anti-hierarchical philosophy in which “the ethical implications of affirmative nomadic ontology … constitutes the core of his philosophy”.9
Anyone wanting to read and think through and with Deleuze now works upon a dispersed set of texts so weighted with annotations and transpositions that it is tempting to speculate that the notion of the simulacrum featured so prominently in Difference and Repetition primarily for the sake of providing readers with the appropriate concept for understanding the profusion of Deleuzes that exist. This thesis will add yet another claimant’s voice to that clamour, but it differs from the others by setting out to give an account of Deleuze that draws on what he does as much as what he argues, assesses the plausibility and strength of his philosophy, and that focuses above all on his methods. The methods and strategies that are drawn out from across his many works are then reapplied to those same works to both demonstrate the adequacy of those distillations as well as to make what is most Deleuzian in those works appear all the more intensely.10
This thesis will neither lay out an invariant essence of Deleuze’s philosophy, nor treat his books as readily divisible without heed of or consequence to their systematicity. Instead it is a study of the series of variations and movements of that deep structure. The unit of analysis includes the corpus rather than just the paragraphs of each argument within a text. Deleuze’s works will be addressed in chronological order for the
7 Deleuze, G. ‘Responses to a Series of Questions’ in Mackay, R. and McWherter, D. eds., Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development: 2012: Volume 3: Unknown Deleuze / Speculative Realism (Urbanomic, 2007), p. 41-3. 8 Badiou, A. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 11-13. 9 Braidotti, R. in Smith, D & Henry Somers-Hall, H eds., The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 170. 10 At this point I reassure the reader that this interlinking of process and end point is oroubouric and certainly not Hegelian.
2 sake of exposition, and to be able to show where later works develop and rework the concepts of earlier books. Nonetheless the analysis of each one will not be constrained to use only the concepts or perspectives of that period being examined but will draw on later works for tools with which to evaluate the earlier. Two initial obstacles confront all those seeking to give an exposition of Deleuze’s philosophy: the problem of abstraction, and of the image of thought.
Deleuze repeatedly quoted Whitehead’s dictum that the abstract does not explain but must itself be explained. Accounts of Deleuze can often start from and return to Deleuze’s technical terms for example by describing his philosophy as the rehabilitation of a minor tradition in philosophy, or a system founded on difference, or one that seeks conditions of experience that are no wider than the conditioned. Not only can these explanations be opaquely circular, but the larger issues and purposes in creating such a system are then obscured. The question of what might be remarkable, desirable or superior about a minor tradition is unconsidered. With this abstraction the deeper tendencies that determine the system and the consequent consideration with evaluating how well it responds to those motivations is lost. Such accounts become intra- Deleuzian, and also present too shallow a conception of Deleuze. This problem is linked with and intensified by the second problem, that of the dogmatic image of thought. Deleuze introduces the concept of the image of thought in Difference and Repetition. It is a pre-conceptual and pre-critical distribution of concepts and values. It becomes dogmatic when those pre-understandings do not become explicit and then affirmed or discarded actively. Deleuze does not believe that pre-conceptions are inevitably mistaken, or that a state free of pre-conceptions can be attained; rather he gives an analysis of one particular set of assumptions about the nature of thinking that has in his view dominated most of the history of Western philosophy. The detriment of which was the invisible narrowing of the explicit doctrines of that tradition of philosophy to only those that can be compatibly thought within that ‘image’.
If Deleuze’s claims about an urdoxa of thought have any weight, then thinking through his system will require a backwards step on the part of that reader, in which they reflect as best they can on exactly how they are conceptualising Deleuze and what assumptions they bring. If the dogmatic image of thought is as pervasive as Deleuze makes out that it is then we will need to ensure that we do not end up secreting it back
3 within Deleuze’s philosophy in an act of unconscious conservatism. Deleuze’s philosophy often makes use of philosophical terms and doctrines that we believe we are already familiar with, and that belong to the same tradition of philosophy that he sets out an alternate path to. Reading the words empiricism, desire or materialism in his texts we think we know what is meant. And perhaps we do. But the possible existence of an image of thought contrary to that of Deleuze’s then redoubles the dangers of over- abstraction and too assenting an engagement with Deleuze’s philosophy. Unwarranted abstraction leaves the lines of the conflict between rival images of thought obscure, and makes it too easy to settle for explicatory accounts of Deleuze rather than evaluative ones.
To me it seems that there are examples of both ontological and methodological projects within all of Deleuze’s works. The secondary literature however often tends to focus on one aspect at the expense of the other. The works of Manuel Delanda and Francois Zourabichvili are some of the more extreme examples of each tendency: nowhere in Delanda’s works will one find an account of desire, conceptual persona, or the method of dramatization, while Zourabichvili holds that one only finds traditional ontological arguments within Deleuze when one misreads him. In contrast to both positions the approach to understanding Deleuze that this thesis will adopt is a middle path: a rigorous articulation of Deleuze must express both the specifics of his arguments and distinctions as well as resonate with the ways in which he does philosophy, and the errors and poor habits of thought that he condemns. One reads Deleuze well by rehearsing his way of evaluating just as much as considering the valuations he arrives at.
In the short story ‘The Library of Babel’ Borges presents an imaginary library constructed from the repetition of identical hexagonal rooms, which contain a vast collection of books.11 Taking the basic characters of the alphabet and a few punctuation symbols and setting a specific maximum limit of characters, there exists a very large, but finite set of possible texts based on the combinatorial permutations of those typographical atoms. Each single book in this fictional library corresponds to a single different combination of those elements. Every possible book (and a staggeringly vast
11 Borges, J. The Library of Babel, in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, (Penguin Books Australia, 1998).
4 amount of gibberish) is present in Borge’s library. If the Library of Babel is taken as a metaphor for thinking, the space within which its readers work is metaphorically flat and universal. The texts of this cornucopia are equally available to any reader (readers who are just as equivalent), and all of the texts are constructed from the same self- identical components. The task for readers is to sift through the errors and noise to locate the true texts that represent the actual world or have real value. Such a space is also emphatically non-Deleuzian. A metaphorical ‘Library of Deleuze’ in contrast would be more likely to consist of non-Euclidean wormhole spaces that would be well at home in an Escher illustration, and the texts themselves would change as the readers moved through the library (with the readers likewise changing). Such a space would not necessarily be unmappable but it would require a different kind of cartography. Interpreting Deleuze’s works only as a set of concepts and arguments, a set that neatly aligns with the pre-established categories of the history of philosophy, is to Babel-ise Deleuze’s work. And conversely, treating it as a set of spaces through which only the mode of travel is important, or to refuse to travel beyond the current niche, is to dispense with the hard task of mapping, and of explaining that mapping to visitors from the Library of Babel. The key to navigating Deleuze’s work then is, I claim, to read his writing as both acts of thought that respond to a specific conceptual locale and problems, as well sets of more widely useful arguments and concepts. In accordance with this logic then I will now give an account of what I see as the problems and context that Deleuze works within.
Deleuze’s early works, (Empiricism and Subjectivity, his review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, and the seminar series ‘What is Grounding?’) set out a cluster of issues and several of the main lines that Deleuze’s subsequent philosophy follows for their resolution.12
Firstly, Deleuze discusses a distinction between philosophy as system and philosophy as a kind of anthropology. Anthropological philosophies are those where the object is only ever the object as it is relative to the subject, and so philosophise
12 Deleuze, G. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, (Columbia University Press, 1991). Deleuze, G. ‘Review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence’ in Hyppolite, J. Logic and Existence (State University of New York Press, 1997). Deleuze, G. What Is Grounding? (&&& Press, 2015)
5 according to a method. That method, regardless of the particular form it takes, is a method attuned to and grounded on the way(s) in which humans experience reality. A systematic philosophy in contrast is “an enterprise of expressing what it is to be any being whatsoever, as well as what it is for one such being to relate to another. It then centers on things, rather than our experience of things”.13 Systematic philosophies are preferable because they dig deeper than anthropological philosophy into the nature of things. Secondly, Deleuze desires a systematic philosophy that will produce an account of being that does not need to posit something beyond this world, in the form of, for example, a second realm of essences or forms. Instead, it will articulate the ‘sense’ of this world. Deleuze writes, “Following Hyppolite, we recognise that philosophy, if it has a meaning, can only be an ontology and an ontology of sense”.14
These two problems then together lead to a third problem: Deleuze will need to provide an account of this ontological knowledge that is not simply another kind of empirical knowledge but at the same time is also not grounded solely upon the subject, nor upon transcendent principles or objects. Whatever principle or condition this is will be what produces this ‘sense’. Deleuze’s early discussion of this challenge takes place within the context of a discussion of the concept of founding (or grounds). He begins by arguing that what grounds experience is not what we know in experience; what renders cognition possible is not given in experience. Instead condition(s) are that which make experience and cognition possible. But those conditions are more than conditions of possibility; they are also the localisation of what is given within a milieu so that grounding also is the assignment of a domain or of a territory. Grounding will involve conditions of validity that limit that domain. Deleuze again insists that the grounding must not just be a reduplication of the empirical, since if it is to function as a ground, but nothing is altered in our thought or knowledge by the positing of the ground, then the proposed ground serves no real purpose.15 The ground is then to be understood as akin to a question, a question that changes things. The determination of a ground delivers something new and that gives us a rule to distinguish true problems from false problems by recourse to the specific nature of that ground.16 In the system Deleuze is
13 Deleuze, G. What Is Grounding? (&&& Press, 2015), p. 6. 14 Deleuze, G. ‘Review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence’ in Hyppolite, J. Logic and Existence, (State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 194. 15 Deleuze, G. What Is Grounding? (&&& Press, 2015), p. 41. 16 Ibid., p. 78, p. 47.
6 stipulating “knowing and ignorance, truth and error no longer relate to an order of reason, but to a mode of existence”.17 Philosophy is to be a system aimed at the analysis of these modes of existence and their basis in an ontology of sense. The ability to achieve all of these aims will rest upon whatever this principle of grounding turns out to actually be. Already in these early works there are suggestions of what this principle of grounding will be. In what is surely no surprise to any reader of Deleuze, it turns out that "This absolute identity of being and difference is called sense”.18
From the perspective of the history of philosophy these themes and problems are not unique: they are those that feature prominently in Kantian and post-Kantian steams of philosophy. Deleuze is explicit about these post-Kantian elements in his thought: “Kant proposes and leaves a problem to philosophy, finitude such that finitude is constitutive. … The problem is how to pose such a finitude”.19 But despite this Deleuze does not start with Kant, nor, as might have been expected based on his education and teachers, does he start from Hegel. He starts with Hume. What problem is it that Hume’s philosophy responds to that Kant’s or Hegel’s philosophies do not? I discuss Deleuze’s work on both Hume and Kant in detail in the next chapter, so rather than pre- empt that discussion here I will limit myself to making several observations along a slightly different line than the subsequent account.
One of Hume’s great virtues for Deleuze is his doctrine of the externality of relations. This means that the connections between things are only ever contingent rather than necessary. Such a principle is inherently anti-Hegelian. It will also turn out that it will only be a short conceptual movement from this conception of relations to the concept of multiplicity. This principle also motivates Hume’s reconfiguration of theory into a kind of investigative practice, (as opposed to Kant’s transformation of it into tribunal). Part of the problem with Kant’s philosophy as Deleuze sees it is that it presupposes facts about cognition and experience that are then used as the basis to ask
17 Ibid., p. 85. 18 Deleuze, G. ‘Review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence’ in Hyppolite, J. Logic and Existence, (State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 195. 19 Deleuze, G. What Is Grounding? (&&& Press, 2015), p. 150. These post-Kantian connections are further analysed in Voss, D "Maimon and Deleuze: The Viewpoint of Internal Genesis and the Concept of Differentials," Parrhesia 11 (2011)., Smith, D. Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)., Jones, G. and Roffe, J. eds., Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)., and Houle, K. and Vernon, J. Hegel and Deleuze: Together Again for the First Time (Northwestern University Press, 2013)., among others.
7 why the given is conditioned by cognition. He provides an analytic account of the conditions of possibility of the empirical situation he takes ready-made. But what Deleuze seeks is a philosophy that can give an account of the genesis of what is presupposed. Kant’s theory subordinates objects to the transcendental subject; Deleuze makes use of Hume to develop a rival account in which the given gives rise to the subject instead. Kant presents a philosophy in which there is a radical difference in kind between concepts and intuitions. Although they have distinctly different origins Kant holds that the two can harmonise. Hume then is the point of Deleuze’s entry into a systematic philosophy rather than an analytical one.
None of the subsequent post-Kantian philosophers find Kant’s solution to the problem of the relationship between concept and intuition convincing. Kant also operates with a structure for knowledge that does not itself change, leaving a gap between the conditions of knowledge and the knowledge of the conditioned (and between the transcendental self and the empirical self), and operates under the presumption, that becomes explicit in the third critique, that human knowledge forms a single, systematic totality. The transcendental subject, the static conditions of knowledge, and the uncovering of a single, complete tree of science through the correction of error, are all facets of a world without significant change or unprecedented novelty. The principle of the externality of relations is intended to have an effect on the way we think as much as on the theories we form about the world. Empiricism is a solution to the problem of a system, a self, and a world in motion.
Taken together, the sets of inter-connected problems that I have laid out above provide the criteria for several evaluations: • They form criteria for which to evaluate the success of Deleuze’s project – how well do the subsequent works resolve these problems? • They provide criteria for comparing the development of Deleuze’s works – how far to the later works revise these problems and/or replace them with new ones? • And they provide criteria for evaluating other interpretations of Deleuze’s philosophy in so far as intend to be rigorous readings of his system (as opposed to novel modifications of it) – how well do those interpretations align with these foundational problems?
8 In the chapters that follow I will work through several successive periods in Deleuze’s development. The first part of the thesis, consisting of chapters two and three, surveys Deleuze’s works on figures in the history of philosophy in conjunction with the way in which those earlier studies are then taken up anew in Difference and Repetition. Chapter two examines how those early monographs develop and refine a set of concepts that together lay out the outlines of a systematic philosophy that can address the problems raised in What Is Grounding?. Chapter three then moves from that basis to analyse the deeper structure of Difference and Repetition, and then assess the strength and plausibility of its arguments establishing difference as the ground of sense. It also critically examines Deleuze’s arguments for the existence of, and our degree of access to, the virtual. The second section, consisting of chapters four, five and six, covers Deleuze’s subsequent work, focusing on A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?. Chapter four lays out the principles by which I analyse Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and What is Philosophy?. In contrast to Massumi’s position, I view the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia as systematic work filled with interconnections. My account in this chapter draws out that structure, compares it to and distinguishes it from Difference and Repetition, and prepares a basis for assessing and developing the ethical implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s’ opposition to capitalism. Chapter five presents a survey of the secondary literature on Deleuze’s ethics, and argues that Deleuze’s ontology cannot directly lead to a specific ethical position. It develops a rival account of the ethical in Deleuze as an evaluative approach to other ethical systems, arguing that it should not be considered as a self-existent system in its own right. Chapter six presents a condensed exposition of the account of capitalism provided in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, focusing on the two senses of capital that are articulated in that work: capitalism as exterior limit of other social forms that Deleuze and Guattari present, and capitalist societies as a specific historical occurrence. I then relate both senses to the universal history that they propose, and explain what problem that history attempts to solve. The final chapter reviews the results of the preceding chapters, and compares them to the initial problems and the criteria laid out above.
9 Chapter 2
Assembling the components: Studies in the history of philosophy
In his writings, and in interviews, Deleuze made many comments expressing his views on how philosophy is to be done, and how philosophical texts are to be engaged with. In the reading of Deleuze’s works (including those he co-authored with Felix Guattari) that follows I attempt to follow Deleuze’s injunctions as much as possible. I seek to demonstrate as well as to explicate his philosophy. Before I begin my analysis I will articulate several over-arching strategies that I employ and the works that I will focus on.
Deleuze notes that there are three reasons for writing a book:
A worthy book is written only if (1) you think that the books on the same or a related subject fall into a sort of general error (polemical function of a book); (2) you think that something essential about the subject has been forgotten (inventive function); (3) you consider that you are capable of creating a new concept (creative function). Of course, that’s the quantitative minimum: an error, an oversight, a concept. … Henceforth, for each of my books, abandoning necessary modesty, I will ask myself (1) which error it claims to correct, (2) which oversight it wants to repair, and (3) what new concept it has created.1
As well as elucidating the intended functions of Deleuze’s books, the second reason in part guides my approach in this section of the thesis. The secondary literature on Deleuze contains an abundance of commentaries and articles on Difference and Repetition, of the relationship between Deleuze and particular figures from the history of philosophy, and on his studies in the history of philosophy. Careful scrutiny and scholarly detail will always be enriching, however the current state of affairs gives a distorted impression of the importance and depth of resources contained in his books. For example, while there are seven monographs alone devoted to Difference and
1 Deleuze, cited in Dosse, F. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, (Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 112
10 Repetition, it is only very recently that two (introductory) works on What is Philosophy? have appeared.2 There are few works that deal with Deleuze’s corpus independently, and as a whole, while there are many collections devoted to particular aspects of his work or to comparative studies. Even a cursory survey of much of the literature that claims the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia as inspiration gives good reason for wariness about Deleuze’s later works, and their co-authored status obviously provides an additional challenge to evaluating them and determining their connections with his other works. Part of the motivation for my approach then, beyond the reason that I believe it to be required for an adequate account of Deleuze’s philosophy, is to populate some of the deserts in the secondary literature. The spirit in which this is carried out is not intended as critical as such, but as a complementary and pluralistic effort.
In several discussions about his book on Foucault Deleuze expressed his dislike of picking and choosing a selection from a thinker’s writings,
The logic of someone’s thought is the whole set of crises through which it passes; it’s more like a volcanic chain than a stable system close to equilibrium. … You have to take the work as a whole, to try and follow rather than to judge it; see where it branches out in different directions, where it gets bogged down, moves forward, makes a breakthrough…3
By surveying the range of Deleuze’s writings I produce an analysis that, rather than identifying core concepts, investigates the points of variation and transformation of recurrent concepts, and of the lines that they collectively form. It is only through tracing transformations and bifurcations that the particular conditions of creation for those concepts can be determined, and only by seeing their range of articulations that they can be differentiated. In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes that works on the history of philosophy are the study of “the arrows or the tools of a great thinker, the trophies and the prey, the continents discovered”, while works of philosophy proper are where “we trim our own arrows, or gather those which
2 Butler’s ‘Reader’s Guide’ was published in December 2015 and Bell’s ‘Critical Introduction and Guide’ was published in February 2016. 3 Deleuze, G. Negotiations, 1972-1990, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 84-5.
11 seem to us the finest in order to try to send them in other directions”.4 To analyse what Deleuze’s arrows are, and what their targets might be it is necessary to first know the contents of his quiver. Setting Deleuze’s investigation of, for example, Bergson’s work on true and false problems in Bergsonism, with appropriate parts of Difference and Repetition will allow the identification of both the tool and its use.
Several times Deleuze describes philosophy, and on occasion more narrowly empiricism, as involving a method akin to science fiction:
A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems.5
Science fiction effects a kind of displacement in time and space, that, when followed is revealed to concern the actuality of the here and now rather than some speculative future. It is a method apt for a world that is no longer exactly as our parents’ world was, or their parents before them; a world where we reshape ourselves to fit technology and have powers far beyond the natural, with all the problems of power that result. A work of philosophy, then, is a means of establishing a relationship with things one knows badly, of things that one does not know, or with the borders of knowledge, and then through a series of dislocations, conjunctions, and transformations, concepts and problems mutually interact and by doing so bring about the further creation and determination of concepts and solutions particular to that conjunction. Evaluation of Deleuze’s philosophy requires the detective work of identifying all its particulars.
In several cases it is difficult to apply this methodology of analysis through investigation of variation because several of the sources of Deleuze’s ‘tools’ are not the subjects of any of his books or articles. In particular, there is an absence of any sustained piece of writing by Deleuze on Solomon Maimon or Martial Gueroult.6 In the
4 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. xiii. 5 Ibid., p. xix. 6 Similarly, and regretfully, although there are scattered references to Alfred North Whitehead in his works, Deleuze never devoted a book or essay to the work of Whitehead. Distinguishing the extent of Whitehead’s influence on Deleuze is far more of a vexed issue however because of the overlap of their
12 case of these thinkers I will provide a survey of the little that Deleuze did say or write or about them, and I will also draw from secondary sources that study the relation between Deleuze and those thinkers in detail as well as offering observations of my own.
In doing so, I do not attempt to present the account of ‘what Deleuze really meant to say’. Nor am I trying to provide a chronological account or an archaeology of the process of composition of his oeuvre. The resources required for those tasks are unavailable, and in any case the results would be of minimal interest from a purely philosophical point of view. Instead, I will argue for the coherency and usefulness of them for understanding a consistent line of thought that stretches throughout Deleuze's work from beginning to end; a line that, inevitably, undergoes changes and modifications as new works are written. When I quote Deleuze’s interviews, lectures, informal writings, and biographical information, I do so for two reasons. The first is that in an effort to show that the interpretation that I propose meets some minimum standard of hermeneutic viability, in that it does not, for example, violently contradict the expressed aims of his project and his comments on those matters. Secondly, and more importantly, Deleuze seeks to think in a way that is free from what he refers to as 'a dogmatic image of thought'; this results in great stylistic, structural, and conceptual novelty in his writing. Often one consequence of this for the reader is an additional challenge to comprehension. Deleuze's numerous interviews, forewords, public letters, and the like function as a set of annotations to his own work. These para-philosophical sources of information are a valuable source of additional instruction in his philosophical method, as well as aids to the understanding and evaluation of what is often only enacted in his writing. The final value of their inclusion will rightly rest on the extent to which Deleuze's work is illuminated by them.
In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze writes “If we do not discover its target the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy remains abstract and barely comprehensible”.7 Paul Patton, in his translator's preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition,
sources: both develop their process philosophies from re-readings of Hume, Leibinz, and Kant. The similarities between Bergson and Whitehead’s system are also notable, and Deleuze draws on Bergson as well. Barring the future discovery of some confessional document penned by Deleuze, the task of distinguishing what results from inheritance and what results from independent but convergent evolution is impossible. 7 Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy. (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), p. 8
13 characterises the book as a “retrospective analysis on the basis of an alternative”.8 In both cases making sense of what is at stake in the text requires knowledge of a philosophical 'unsaid' that accompanies and orientates the work. As I will show later, this is part of a larger method of 'dramatisation' that Deleuze uses. In the subsequent section I will present an account of Maimon’s and Gueroult’s influence on Deleuze. From there I will then work through Deleuze’s monographs on the history of philosophy in preparation for an analysis of Difference and Repetition. One of my theses is that Difference and Repetition really is, as Deleuze himself remarks in its introduction, largely a collage of his prior work. The earlier historical studies are the actual occasions where Deleuze begins formulating his own philosophical position; the magnum opus status attributed to Difference and Repetition isolates it, and serves to distort the understanding of the complete body of his work as single enterprise. A detailed study of his works on the history of philosophy is accordingly a necessary preliminary for understanding the function and the actual advances of Difference and Repetition. Following this chapter is an analysis of Difference and Repetition including a critical discussion of the secondary literature and rival positions on how Difference and Repetition is to be understood. Throughout all of this I will attempt to show what is really meant by Deleuze’s description of his philosophy as ‘transcendental empiricism’, and that this characterisation is rich enough to allow for a detailed elucidation of the method involved in that (as well as an account of why such a method would be desirable). I will also show that this method remains continuous from the beginning of his works to the end (although it does of course evolve along the way).
Gueroult I now begin with an account of Gueroult’s philosophical method and its influence on Deleuze. Martial Gueroult (1891-1976) was a historian of philosophy who taught at the Sorbonne and the College de France, among other institutions. He taught at the Sorbonne while Deleuze studied there from 1944-48. Deleuze wrote a review of the first volume of Gueroult's two volume study of Spinoza that acknowledged and praised both his work on Spinoza and the general method that he developed.9 Additionally, Dosse reports that Deleuze greatly admired Gueroult’s method of working and was
8 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition. (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. vii 9 Deleuze. 'Gueroult's General Method for Spinoza', in Deleuze, G Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953- 1974, (Semiotext(e), 2004).
14 influenced by it in his approach.10 Gueroult worked largely on the history of philosophy and published many studies of philosophers’ works, including books on Maimon and Spinoza. His work on Spinoza in part attempted “to show the inadequacy of Hegel’s understanding of Spinoza’s concept of determination”.11 As well as the obvious influence of these specific works on Deleuze, it is evident from Deleuze's approach to texts that he was equally strongly affected by Gueroult's method. Gueroult developed a systematic approach to the reading of philosophical works, using the immanent structures of the concepts within the text without any recourse to external or transcendent factors such as the biographical details of the philosopher, the socio- cultural context, their position in history, etc. He would “present philosophical thought as a movement of concepts, and to reveal moreover how the content and function of philosophical concepts are transformed as the concept moves from one domain to another”.12 Gueroult's method is resolutely anti-phenomenological as well as a- historical, and is a kind of structuralism before structuralism became prevalent as an intellectual movement. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari give an account of philosophy in which its primary function is the creation of concepts, and the analysis of their conceptual linkages and personae on a plane of immanence, all of which occur in an impersonal way. Although this book is published right at the end of their careers, the method it outlines can be retrospectively seen at work throughout Deleuze’s entire career, albeit in less evolved states. Gueroult’s method is a formative influence on Deleuze’s conception of philosophy, and the brief description of his techniques that I provide below will help make that method explicit in advance of the discussion of What is Philosophy?, as well as provide an initial outline of Deleuze’s approach, with which the final formulation can be contrasted.
Gueroult gives a summary of his approach and its virtues in the preface and first chapter of Descartes' Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons. In it Gueroult notes that there are two methods available to those seeking to understand a work of philosophy: textual criticism, and the analysis of structures, but “once the
10 Dosse, F. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. (Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 109, p. 326. 11 Kingston University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, “Martial Gueroult (1891–1976)”, http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/names/gueroult.html. (accessed 08/10/2013) 12 Kingston University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences “Synopsis of Martial Gueroult, ‘Nature Humaine Et État De Nature Chez Rousseau, Kant Et Fichte’” http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/synopses/syn6.1.html. (accessed 08/10/2013)
15 requirements of historical critique are satisfied, the better method is truly the analysis of the structures of the work”.13 The analysis of structure aims to discern the sequence and linkage required by the ideas themselves, which Gueroult refers to as ‘the order of reasons’, as opposed to the order or structure of their presentation.14 That analysis is not conducted from an external or extrinsic point of view but solely from the point of view of the text; even whatever intellectual aim the writer might have had in composing it is dispensed with.
One of the virtues of focusing on the chain of reasons is its preventative function: doing so wards off errors relating to selectivity, such as hair-splitting over minor details, the cherry picking of particular elements over others, reaching unsupportable conclusions through the use of disjointed sections, and so on. It also prevents the apparently legitimate but equally mistaken tactic of adopting thematic approaches (or 'the order of topics'). For Gueroult such an approach also does violence to the text and its ideas by severing them from the rest of the structure that they depend on and that in turn depends on them. If a topic is addressed several times in several places in a work, then there are reasons why the topic must occur several times, in several places; reasons that not only place but also determine the concepts. Combining disparate sections in a topical presentation effaces all of that, as well as the different views of that subject that occur from those varying positions. As they are obscured so too is the real meaning of the text.
Gueroult's approach assumes a self-contained and unified coherency to the text (or perhaps, more accurately, selects for works that meet that criteria). His understanding of structures is one in which structure serves not merely an expository function but combines both architectonic and logical purposes such that they demonstrate and articulate the philosophy.15 The conceptual components of the work mutually define and constrain each other, and lead in turn to yet other components. This structure is not implicit or hidden (and so requires no hermeneutic labour) although it may take close reading and great subtlety of thought to fully discern it.
13 Gueroult, M Descartes' Philosophy Interpreted, According to the Order of Reasons Vol. 1: The Soul and God. (University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xix. 14 Ibid., p. xx. 15 Ibid., p. xviii.
16 The order of the structure is such that some elements depend on prior elements, and the former can be known without the latter. There is a structured distribution of topics, arguments etc., as well as the immanent generation of nexūs where those chains of reasons connect and overlap. For Gueroult these specificities matter. Reasons are differentiated from each other depending on where and when they occur or recur in the text, their position relative to that which has been and so on. Understanding the work requires understanding the place of the parts within the whole and the purposes of the position they occupy, and the way that the text is self-differentiating and self- determining. The position of arguments also offers interpretive guidance for understanding, as well as creates requirements for a minimum adequacy. It is necessary to know and be able to explain why one section occurs before another, for example, why the second depends on the former, why it must occur here, not at another place. The structure then, generates its own immanent criterion for evaluating whether a specific understanding of that structure is sufficient due to its own internal generation of order and structure. Thus, in Gueroult's method “philosophy is developed as a pure geometry, which owes all its certainty to the internal linkage of its reasons, without any reference to external reality”.16 This is the approach that Deleuze adopts in his historical studies. There is no account of those thinkers as historical persons, nor is an intellectual context for their work provided (except their ‘post-Kantianism’, which is as much Deleuze’s characterisation of them as it is a statement of fact). While there are uncharacteristic political and historical elements in Empiricism and Subjectivity, these are only introduced in the context of the externality of relations, as a consequence of that doctrine, and are not continued in the later books.
Gueroult’s emphasis on sequence, and implication, also leads to a method of perspectives: from different points in the chain of reasons different arguments and proofs are available or not, different conceptual resources are at hand, the structure of the argumentative chain and the concepts in it change depending on the position in a chain and the chains it intersects with. The order of reasons entails an order of views. Gueroult also distinguishes two specific perspectives: the order of knowledge, and the order of real existence (or production).17 These orders are also referred to as analytic
16 Ibid., p. 7. 17 Ibid., p. 9.
17 and synthetic. The synthetic is aimed at presentation of a full set of results as a whole so as to aid comprehension, and tends to present the relationships of real things in the order that they actually exist, whereas the analytic lays out the actual steps taken in the process of reasoning through the structure. The analytic approach aids instruction by allowing the reader to follow step by step in the process of discovery, although the order of those discoveries may not match the real state of relations of what is discovered, for example, the status of God as primary being vs. the primacy of the cogito for establishing certainty in Descartes. The two offer different views for different purposes, and the confusion of them is an error that can distort a true understanding of structure. The analysis of perspective clearly dovetails very well with Deleuze’s interest in and work on Nietzsche, but it also can be seen independently of that in his way of engaging with other thinkers: throughout the texts Deleuze poses questions, inserts directions or offers instructions on how the part at hand is to be understood, for example “How can the mediations (or the relations that are established between the most remote objects) be justified?”18 “Can this translation-contraction be identical with the variable contraction of regions and levels of the past that we were discussing earlier?”19 “But, the dynamic of force in fact leads us to a distressing conclusion. … Are there no other ways of becoming?”20 Deleuze's presentations show that a great deal of attention has been devoted to contemplating the structure of the works studied and the presentation of that structure.
In Gueroult's method there is no investigation of the genesis of the structures that comprise philosophies, no attempt to situate them into any broader set of movements, nor is there any conceptualisation of a totalising ‘structure of structures’. There is some admission of the evolution of a structure (over the course of several books), but only insofar as that evolution can be concretely shown and located in a variation in the structures expressed in them. For Gueroult, the history of philosophy is a plane of discontinuous, self-contained structures with their own specific conditions of possibility. This informs his understanding of the history of philosophy:
18 Deleuze, G. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, (Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 102. 19 Deleuze, G. Bergsonism, (Zone Books, 1991), p. 64. 20 Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), p. 59.
18 Rather [than start with the assumption of a priori knowledge of the essence of philosophy], we must begin with the known; that is, with living philosophical experience in history, and to rise from there to the unknown: the essence of philosophy, forcing ourselves to discover methodically the a priori conditions which make such an experience possible.21
In Gueroult's view, the sense and justification of the history of philosophy involves a specific and central relation to truth. This conceptualisation of the relation between his method and the history of philosophy is something that Deleuze will break with, but this topic will be addressed in more detail in the chapter on Difference and Repetition, in the context of the discussion of What is Philosophy?. Despite the eventual differences in their view of the overall conception of the history of philosophy, Gueroult's method is the basis for Deleuze’s method of analysis. I will show below that his main techniques – a close reading of the text aimed at delineating the conceptual structure, determination of its internal linkages, constraints and differentiations, as well as the analysis of perspectives – are employed in all of Deleuze’s studies in the history of philosophy (most notably in his book on Kant), and then are reiterated again right at the end of Deleuze’s career in What is Philosophy?’s account of the constitution of and the relations between concepts. Before I do that though I will discuss Maimon’s influence on Deleuze.
Maimon What follows is a summary not of Maimon’s work, but only of what is important for Deleuze in Maimon. Maimon attracted remarkable praise from both Kant and Fichte for the acuity of his analyses of the critical system but his high reputation in Germany did not last long beyond his death in 1800. It did however remain much stronger in France, and Gueroult's book on Maimon in particular was a significant influence on Deleuze.22 The central thread of Maimon’s argument concerns the relation of a priori
21 Gueroult, M "The History of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem," The Monist 53, no. 4 (1969): p. 587. 22 Kant: “none of my opponents has understood me and the principle question so well as Mr Maimon ... only a few people possess such an acute mind.” (Maimon, S. Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), p. xii.). Fichte: “My respect for Maimon’s talent knows no bounds, I firmly believe, and I am ready to prove, that he has turned upside down the Kantian Philosophy” (ibid., p. xiii.). Gueroult’s book on Maimon is La philosophie transcendentale de Salomon Maimon (1930).
19 categories to experience. Given that the categories are derived by reason independent of sensibility there is no certainty that those categories connect necessarily to sensibility. The relation of the categories to experience therefore had to be transformed, and this leads to Maimon’s rejection of the ‘external’ conditioning of concepts and intuitions and proposal of an ‘internal’ genesis via differentials instead. What Deleuze takes from Maimon are several problems resulting from the criticisms of the critical system: the problem of finding conditions for specific experiences as opposed to any possible experience at all; the problem of accounting for knowledge in a Humean world; and the problem of determining a satisfactory relationship between sense and concept. He also draws on several of Maimon’s attempted solutions: the idea of an internal genesis of experience, the use of infinitesimals in that genesis, the role of difference and relative relations in the construction of experience, and the use of the structure of the differential equation as a means to understand that genesis.
Maimon’s commentary on Kant’s critical philosophy is significant because he presents it from a position within the critical system as someone sympathetic to it but troubled by its failure to meet the standards it sets for itself, especially the role played by the ‘thing in itself’ and the system's inability to provide specific conditions of possibility rather than the general conditions of all experience. Maimon is also one of the first to attempt to construct a system that will move with Kant beyond Kant, “Kant’s critique is not the only one possible, and is not even the best of its kind”.23 In the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy Maimon presents himself as a commentator on ‘the great Kant’ who hopes to “bring out the most important truths of this science”, while also offering a few comments on some aspects of his work.
Maimon was neo-Humean in the sense that he critiqued Kant by restating a form of Hume’s criticism in his scepticism about the ‘fact’ of experience. In Maimon’s view Kant merely assumes that the a priori can be applied to experience, and constructs his critical system to show the conditions under which synthetic a priori conditions would ground knowledge. It still remains to be conclusively proved that the kind of knowledge that Kant assumes actually exists, and that experience is not simply a flurry of sensations whose concordance with knowledge is only assumed. While the structure
23 Emphasis his. Di Giovanni, G. ed. Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (Hackett Publishing Co., 2000), p. 171.
20 grounding knowledge may be internally coherent and rigorous, there is nothing in Kant’s account to persuade the skeptic that the sort of experience that it supports actually exists.
Furthermore, not only does Kant assume that we actually have knowledge of causality, but his philosophy fails to provide any specific criterion by which synthetic a priori concepts are to be applied to specific a posteriori intuitions. Causality as a category is applicable to every possible experience, but what empirical investigation seeks to determine is which elements of a particular event or set of events are contingent and which are necessary or causally determined in respect to a single, specified causal power. If there are no rules to determine when the categories do and do not apply then there is no way to establish the validity of their use. Kant admits that there is nothing in perception by itself that marks out a necessary succession (or an objective one) from a contingent (or subjective) one. Instead the ground for our distinctions between different types of events lies in the application of the category of causation by the understanding. Kant does provide principles for grounding the identification of causality, however neither temporal sequence is sufficient as a guide for the actual application of the category of causality, nor is the irreversibility of events sufficient. Distinguishing causal succession from mere temporal succession requires either a posteriori experience to know if they actually apply in a particular case, or perplexingly vast amounts of a priori knowledge about the causal structures of the world. Likewise, without a posteriori knowledge it is unclear how we are to recognise genuine irreversibility from a merely contingent succession of events that appear irreversible but will soon be shown to be otherwise.
Both attempts at accounting for the application of the concept of causation involve further assumptions about their a priori use that Maimon holds are unsupportable. The conditions of experience that Kant has provided are so wide, that in being applicable to any possible experience at all, they lack any purchase for connecting particular experiences to the categories.24 As I will show later, the challenge of finding
24 Thielke argues that it is debatable whether this criticism is effective, and that Maimon’s view of Kant’s position is inaccurate, see Thielke, P. "Discursivity and Causality: Maimon’s Challenge to the Second Analogy," Kant-Studien 92, no. 2001 (2001). My purpose here is not to assess the strength of Maimon’s arguments but to show how they can be used to understand Deleuze’s philosophical project.
21 conditions that are both specific to a particular experience, as well as necessary to it, becomes a battle cry that echoes throughout Deleuze’s subsequent studies in the history of philosophy.
Maimon also strongly criticises Kant’s construction of his system upon a difference in kind between sensation and concept, and the faculties of the understanding and sensibility. Kant’s account of the harmony between the two relies on his arguments for a pure a priori intuition of time and space, along with the mediating role of the schemata, to bridge the two otherwise wildly divergent types of experience and faculties. After presenting a progressive set of arguments Maimon concludes that while space and time are necessary forms, they can only be empirical intuitions and not pure intuitions of space and time independent of determinate content (i.e. they are the ordering of things in time and space, rather than that which allows time and space to be ordered). If Maimon is correct then Kant's account of the application of a priori concepts to a posteriori intuitions through pure intuitions of time and space is insufficient to perform the role that is required to do. Maimon’s aim is not to eliminate the critical project, but to instead continue it in a corrected form. Having ruled out the possibility of pure intuition, he must provide another account of how sense and concept and related. In his critical discussion of the pure intuition of time and space Maimon established that sensibility rests on differences. He then moves to discuss the process of the formation of representations from them,
Sensibility thus provides the differentials to a determined consciousness; out of them, the imagination produces a finite (determined) object of intuition; out of the relations of these different differentials, which are its objects, the understanding produces the relation of the sensible objects arising from them.25
For Maimon these differentials are the noumena, with the objects arising from them constituting the phenomena. While we cannot determine the noumena themselves, we gain a differential (and determinate) knowledge of them only in their relations to other noumena. Thus any two noumena, here represented by x and y, together allow us to determine the difference of x with respect to y (dx/dy), but not determine any value, or
25 Maimon, S. Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), p. 21.
22 content, for x or y alone or directly. The thing in itself then refers not to some independent realm of being, but merely stands as a concept of the absolute limit of knowledge of that object, a knowledge in which the object is completely determined. Such knowledge is not within our power.
Maimon defines pure concepts (the categories) as “concepts that do not contain any, even a priori intuition”, that is, they can only be relational concepts that do not determine what is joined by them apart from the structure of that relationship.26 These are of two types – mutually or “reciprocally” dependent, and asymmetrically or “one- sidedly” dependent. For Maimon those pure concepts of experience are
in a reciprocal relation that is asymmetrical: one the one hand, experience does not first make these concepts possible, but only shows that they are in themselves possible; on the other hand these concepts not only show that experience in itself is possible, but they make it possible.27
Here Maimon presents a similar argument regarding the a priori of the understanding as he did for the a priori of sensibility: that they are concepts in general, and they provide the conditions that make experiential judgements possible in the first place because the judgements of experience cannot be thought without these concepts. They do not however contain any determinate content in themselves. Maimon has established earlier that spatio-temporal differences present real differences, differences that we are not aware of the source of. If our sensible experience is unknown, Maimon will need to explain how a priori concepts can be applied to it to produce our experience since “intuitions are still heterogeneous with concepts of the understanding”.28 Maimon’s options for resolving the dualism of the faculties are either to sensualise the intellect, or to intellectualise the senses. It is unclear how the first option could be carried out in such a way as to retain self-consciousness so the second option seems more promising, and it will also be able to draw upon the resources of Leibnizian philosophy. In connection with the proposal to intellectualise the sense Maimon also introduces the idea of an infinite understanding, for which “the forms are at the same time objects of
26 Ibid., p. 24. 27 Ibid., p. 27. 28 Ibid., p. 38.
23 thought, or that produces out of itself all possible kinds of connections and relations of things [the differential ideas]. Our understanding is just the same, only in a limited way”.29 If we assume (or if it is the case) that our limited understanding is just a restricted form of this, then that would give an analogous explanation of empirical knowledge. Because the infinite intellect would take forms as objects of thought instead of empty relations then the necessity of them would be immediately apparent to this infinite understanding. We come to know the connections between concepts through experience, but if our understanding were different then we would perceive the relations directly and in a way that would fully understand them. Maimon offers a fuller account of his distinctions between empty relations of thought and real relations.
He proposes a principle of determinability as a rival principle for determining objective thought. This would show a way in which a manifold given to thought could exhibit an a priori criterion by which some specific connection could be thought.30
Real thought (as opposed to both formal and arbitrary thought) demands a judgement in which the subject and predicate stand in a determinable relation – the subject must be something that can be determined by the predicate.31
The principle of determinability holds that no proposition can refer to real objects if its subject and object are not in a relationship of determinability. A determination on its own is merely a relation without content. In a synthesis, if one part can be thought independently of the other, but the other part cannot be thought independently of the first part, or if both parts require the other, then they are relations of determinability. In a relation of determinability one of its components is cognized as subject and the other as predicate, and not the other way around. The first is determinable, and can be an object of consciousness by itself, while the other is the determination of the first, and can be an object of consciousness only in conjunction with the first, not by itself. In the concept ‘right angled triangle’ ‘right angle’ cannot be thought without ‘triangle’, but ‘triangle’ can be thought independently of ‘right angle’. The principle of determinability
29 Ibid., p. 38 30 Ibid., p. 191. 31 Ibid., p. 145.
24 is then used as a criterion. Maimon distinguishes real thought, formal thought, and arbitrary thought:
Formal thought is a mere form without an object, and arbitrary thought is an object given to thought without determinate form, real thought (i.e. thought cognized in accordance with the principle of determinability) contains instead a given object as well as a form determined through this object.32
‘Colourless green ideas’ is arbitrary, as while the components may be real in themselves, their combination is not grounded in anything real, and is just a meaningless conjunction. In contrast, ‘cause and effect’ is not an arbitrary combination, as one necessarily involves the other. When they are expressed abstractly, without an object, then their combination is merely formal, rather than real, because it lacks any positive content and expresses a mere possible form of relation. Thoughts of mathematical forms are however real because we can cognise the relationship between those given objects as actual. Mathematical knowledge gives us an example of what this infinite understanding would be. According to Maimon, when we think of a right-angle triangle both the concept and the thing is given to us at the same time, and we can determine the necessary properties of a triangle through its construction in thought alone. The necessary properties of a triangle are part of what makes it what it is, and we cannot think it otherwise.
The principle of determinability that Maimon gives, in conjunction with our cognitive limits, can only ground our mathematical knowledge, and nothing else, and this is what leads to Maimon’s deep scepticism about our empirical knowledge. He does not deny that knowledge is possible, but neither does he admit it is a fact. For him the relationship of determinacy ought to be our standard, and we cognise things to be in that relationship, or at least we “suppose” them to be so even though we cannot show that to be the case.33 They can be “thought on the assumption of the relationship, but they cannot be cognised as such (since the relation is not seen)”.34 Maimon’s position shows the problem of the first fork of the dilemma posed to Kant by his critics in which we do
32 Ibid., p. 165. 33 Ibid., p. 174. 34 Ibid., p. 199.
25 not really know the thing at all since we are left with appearances leaving us with little faith in the conceptual determinations we draw from sensation. Maimon radicalises it and accepts the consequences. His systems of differentials of sensation leaves the understanding to apply the categories to the results of the synthesis of those differentials, and accepts that there is nothing in the sensations themselves that we are aware of that can give guidance to that. In Maimon’s system what prevents utter scepticism is his claim that our mind shares something with the mind of God, and as such we can have faith that our partial view of things is nonetheless a fragment of the true image of the world in all its infinitesimals. In that true image there are assuredly necessary connections between infinitesimals, sensations and concepts. Maimon’s sceptical conclusion, with or without the introduction of an infinite intellect, is an extremely unsatisfying end point.
Maimon’s identification of internal problems of Kant’s philosophy is more compelling than the solutions he proposes for them. His attempt to re-conceptualise Kant’s sense-concept dualism, to posit a series of internal relations as the origin of experience, and to provide a principle that could ground our identification of specific necessary connections in a posteriori experience were highly suggestive for subsequent post-Kantians and for Deleuze especially. As will become apparent in the discussion of Difference and Repetition in the following chapter Deleuze makes ready use of a number of the contributions that Maimon makes in the process of reforming the Kantian project. Maimon’s account of differentials, the focus on processes of genesis and on conditions of specific genesis rather than conditions of possibility all form enduring parts of Deleuze’s system. Maimon’s scepticism about knowledge of causality too, while less explicit, is continued in both the distinctions between causality or determinism in our experience of what is actualised, and with freedom or destiny in the virtual component of the actual. By itself though, Maimon’s system cannot provide all of the tools for resolving the problems the impel Deleuze’s search. It is only through the addition of elements from Hume’s philosophy, and the fundamental reorientation along empiricist lines that Kant’s transcendental self and architectonic view of knowledge will be overcome.
26 Hume I will begin my discussion of Deleuze’s historical monographs with his book on Hume’s philosophy Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Deleuze begins writing with Hume, and right at the end (the conclusion of What is Philosophy?) Deleuze is still referring to Hume. Similarly, Deleuze consistently identified himself throughout his career as an empiricist. Deleuze’s reading of Hume is singular, to say the least. Deleuze writes that “a choice is always defined in terms of what it excludes”; his own choices around the way he presents Hume is similarly revealing for what they exclude.35 There is no explicit discussion of any relation between Kant and Hume, and yet much of the presentation of Hume's philosophy occurs under a Kantian aegis. Deleuze uses a return to Hume as a means of find a path through Kant (not around Kant).36 Hume introduces “a new power, a theory and practice of relations”, so that the Critique of Reason and its theoretical tribunal is replaced by a Critique of Relations and experimental evaluation. Hume's empiricism is “a study of the conditions of legitimacy of practices in this empirical world that is in fact our own. The result is a great conversion of theory to practice”.37
My account of Empiricism and Subjectivity will focus on three main areas: 1) the association of ideas – initially presented as a theory of mind, but primarily understood as a practice of cultural and conventional formations; 2) a transformation of the understanding of knowledge, including a theory of probabilities and illusion; 3) a “great logic of relations”, their externality, their tendencies that lead to habits, and their connection to a pluralistic world of particular experience.
In Kant's system synthetic a priori principles are applicable to experience despite not being derived from it because they are related to the structures of a transcendental subject. The transcendental unity of apperception theorises that transcendental subject, but no account is (or could be) given of the genesis and entwining of that transcendental self with the concrete existence of the subject. Deleuze makes use of Hume’s
35 Deleuze’s decisions to write a book on Hume and empiricism in the intellectual climate of France in 1953, as well as dedicating it to a Hegelian teacher in “sincere and respectful homage” are also strikingly revealing. 36 This procedure also reveals something of how Deleuze’s philosophy of history works – here a predecessor provides an answer to a chronologically subsequent philosopher 37 Deleuze, G. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, (Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 36.
27 examination of the way the components of the mind are affected and affect each other to replace that Kantian analysis of an always-already constituted transcendental subject. Hume’s problem is to determine how a collection of tendencies and impressions comes to constitute a self, a self that apprehends that collection and also transcends it. To do this will require the location of an initial condition that would allow knowledge to become possible, without presupposing knowledge already. That condition is “the mind must be affected”, “Ideas are given, as given; they are experience”.38
Experience is succession, or the movement of separable ideas, insofar as they are different, and different, insofar as they are separable. We must begin with this experience because it is the experience. It does not presuppose anything else and nothing else precedes it. It is not the affection of an implicated subject, nor the modification or mode of a substance.39
The mind is the movement of ideas, and the totality of their actions and reactions. There is no constancy or uniformity in the ideas that the mind has, nor in the way in which ideas are connected through the imagination. Constancy and uniformity arise from association, which has three principles: contiguity, resemblance, and causality. Human nature consists of the consistency of the ways of passing from one idea to another. Association is a quality that unifies ideas, instead of being a quality of ideas themselves. At first it is only chance that connects two ideas to one another. Nonetheless the principles of association impose some constancy on the freely roaming mind, until the mind makes easy transitions from one idea to another and acquires a tendency.
These three relations are the means with which the mind goes beyond the given. The formation of the subject is linked to this creativity, “When does [the mind] become subject? When [the parts transmit to one another], and also, when all the parts taken together resonate in the act of producing something new”.40 In Deleuze's presentation of Hume's doctrines, instead of the mind being active and forming causal connections
38 Ibid., p. 22. 39 Ibid., p. 87-8. Deleuze describes this as the empiricist principle of difference. 40 Ibid., p. 132. There is no necessity here that subjectivity correlates with consciousness and/or rationality.
28 independently, it is activated by its impressions, becomes a subject, and goes beyond what is given: subjectivity is an effect. Human nature transcends the mind (rather than the mind transcending human nature) and is a product of prior principles or forces. The principle of human nature is the creative habit of contracting habits.
Belief and invention are the two modes of transcendence and we can see their relation to the original characteristics of the mind. These two modes present themselves as the modification of the mind caused by principles.41
The habit that is “the constitutive root of the subject” is the synthesis of the three dimensions of time, which Deleuze describes in a way that presages his book on Nietzsche, as “the synthesis of the present and the past in light of the future”.42 The subject presents the synthesis of time, and this synthesis is productive, and creative. Deleuze explicitly notes that understanding time as the structure of the mind is proto- Bergsonian.
The principles of association discipline the mind and allow it to form a consistent nature. That creates the possibility of forming compatible relationships with nature. But the imagination in turn uses those principles to make not just compatible connections but also fictions and illusions. Illusion is troubling because it arises from the very same mechanisms as our more correct beliefs and thoughts. The principles of association, and the relations they form, go beyond the given to what has not been given in experience or what could never be given in experience. This is a matter of inferring and believing (not knowing). In the situation that Hume presents, knowledge is based primarily on belief, and belief is produced based on probability and habit. The mind is not a mirror of nature.
Hume's scepticism is not a challenge to be overcome in an account of how to retrieve knowledge of true causality and surety out of the circumstances he presents; it is instead the impetus to shift to a new approach, in order to understand “the functioning of relations as the effects of those causes, and the practical conditions of this
41 Ibid., p. 132 42 Ibid., p. 92-3.
29 functioning”.43 Deleuze's Hume makes the ability to go beyond nature or the given central to human nature, which produces a rival system not of the principles and inter- relations of a subject's faculties, but of various connections to a great 'outside' of thought. “Empiricists are not theoreticians, they are experimenters: they never interpret, they have no principles”.44 The theory of association does not ground a complete account of human knowledge, but institutes a kind of casuistry: the formation of relationships provides fodder from which to expand or distil theoretical rules from those specific situations and experiment with applying them to new instances. The creation of relations serves as an identifying characteristic, “we will call ‘non-empiricist’ every theory according to which, in one way or another, relations are derived from the nature of things”.45
The real content of causality cannot be constituted in experience because, in a sense, it constitutes experience by its generation of effects in the mind. These dual powers of subjectivity (to believe and to invent) are insufficient to grasp the true nature of things. To believe and to invent is to infer or distinguish or constitute that which is not given in nature. Kant's attempt to provide an irrefutable ground for certain knowledge is a mistake:
Rationalism has lost this philosophy. Hume’s philosophy is a sharp critique of representation. It does not elaborate a critique of relations but rather a critique of representations, precisely because representations cannot present relations.46
When representation is a criterion, ideas are expected to stand for something which cannot be constituted within experience or given in an idea without contradiction, and mental determinations are then mistakenly transferred on to external objects. Because the mind does not experience causes, it can only work with effects. This requires a re- orientation of philosophy so that it is congruent with a world of effects, where cause cannot be known,
43 Ibid., p. 164. 44 Ibid., p. 41. 45 Ibid., p. 109. 46 Ibid., p. 30.
30 This is why difference is not between the sensible and the intelligible, experience and thought, sensations and ideas, but between two sorts of ideas, or two kinds of experience, that of terms and relations.47
In this re-orientation, the mind is not synonymous (or even primarily identified) with reason. Reason is instead an effect of the mind, one that is limited by the vast domain that escapes it, and its insufficiency to completely determine our actions by itself. Reason always requires concrete orientation and content from and is applied to a pre- existing world with an already established ethics and aims. Hence Hume’s statement that “Tis not contrary to Reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”.48
The critical revision of the way we understand relations, and our knowledge, for Deleuze, carries out a critique of representation by showing that it is not possible to coherently present our knowledge of relations as a representational model of real relations in nature. Instead, relations are the means by which to carry out various activities. This raises the question of what sort of accord there is between mind and nature, so that “The problem of this accord provides empiricism with a real metaphysics, that is, with the problem of purposiveness”.49 Kant’s attempt to explain that accord through the conditioning involved in transcendental syntheses was premised on the given being related to the subject in order to ground the agreement between representations and their subject. In Hume’s account there is no necessary theoretical accord between representations and nature, but despite this there is the possibility of an accord in practice, and it is that which defeats scepticism. Deleuze summarises his account of Hume’s philosophy in this passage:
We should not ask what principles are, but rather what they do. They are not entities, they are functions. They are defined by their effects. These effects amount to this: the principles constitute, within the given, a subject that invents
47 Ibid., p. 42. 48 Hume, D. A Treatise of Human Nature, (Dover Publications, 2003), p. 296. 49 Deleuze, G. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, (Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 109.
31 and believes. In this sense, the principles are principles of human nature. … For this purpose, there must already be relations between ideas … but also the action of principles … and that is not all; …. this implies habit. …. In short, as we believe and invent, we turn the given itself into a nature. Inside the given, we establish relations and form totalities. But the latter do not depend on the given, but rather on the principles we know; they are purely functional. And the functions agree with the hidden powers on which the given depends, although we do not know these powers. … This agreement [between intentional finality and nature] can only be thought … Philosophy must constitute itself as a theory of what we are doing, not a theory of what there is. What we do has its principles; and being can only be grasped as the object of a synthetic relation with the very principles of what we do.50
In Hume’s philosophy the subject lacks a fixed nature (other than the content independent principles of association, the habit of acquiring habits, and the existence of passions) and that lack of a fixed nature relates to its essentially practical character.
The summary of Empiricism and Subjectivity that I have presented above has focused mostly on the elements in the book that deal with Kantian themes and the construction of individual experience in the book due to their importance in the subsequent chapter, and their connection to the orientating problems that I identified in the first chapter. This has led me to neglect any account of the role of the passions, the “affective circumstances [that] direct the association of ideas”. As well as giving them a direction they also provide them with a sense, and lead to the formation of inclinations. Passions are further connected to the construction of social institutions and behaviours. Habits only occur by means of culture and institution, and by making history. The realm of the social is a realm of artifice directed towards the satisfaction of the passions, and the modification and transformation of sympathies and partiality. A large proportion of Empiricism and Subjectivity concerns the realm of the social and the historical. Indeed, in Deleuze's account any philosophy of mind or psychological doctrines in Hume are only ever sub-components within a broader sociological and moral project (and must always be seen from within that larger view point). The question of the formation of
50 Ibid., p. 133.
32 human nature is only ever asked within the broader trajectory of historical development and variation of social and political. Consideration of the passions, the principles of association, the understanding, and so on only take place with that end in mind.
The account above has also ended up discussing the more abstract and general elements of the book, whereas the social and historical sections of the work introduce much more specificity and explore numerous examples. One main thread of that is that the constitution of a subject by the given cannot be separated from its singular content, and the particularity of its circumstances. Deleuze states that this is the fundamental claim of empiricism, and it explains why “circumstance” appears throughout Hume’s philosophy, “[Circumstance] is at the center of history and it makes possible a science of the particular and a differential psychology. … only affectivity can justify the singular content, the profound and the particular”.51 The combination of circumstances and creativity necessitate empirical investigation, “If nature is the principle of resemblance and uniformity, history is the scene of differences. The drive is general; it does not explain the particular, even when it clearly finds in the particular the form of its satisfaction”.52 The empiricist must always ask ‘why this form, in this structure, in these circumstances?’ since history clearly displays a panoply of variations.
Deleuze’s account of Hume’s philosophy resonates with and extends aspects of Maimon’s position. Given that Deleuze accepts Maimon’s argument that Kant has not refuted Hume’s scepticism about the grounding of the categories, then an account of Hume’s philosophy obviously explicates what that scepticism means. Taking that scepticism seriously then entails re-conceptualising philosophy’s aim and focus, for example, from causes to effects. In connection with this, Maimon’s move away from the thing in itself, together with a model of the internal genesis of experience, marry up with the critique of representation and the account of the genesis of the subject within the given in Hume. Maimon’s criticism of overbroad conditions of possibility can be seen as adding reasons for the appeal of empiricism’s focus on articulating particular and individual conditions for the occurrences of social institutions and historical occurrences.
51 Ibid., p. 103. 52 Ibid., p. 7.
33 Empiricism and Subjectivity goes beyond Maimon however by finding a new source in action and creation for the analysis of particular conditions, and their evaluation. Maimon’s suggestive but untenable proposal of a criterion for knowledge of necessity is replaced with an alternative account of the relations between ideas (although Maimon’s criterion of the actual construction of relations obviously has some overlap with the creation of relations in Hume). In addition, the discussion of the social and historical aspects of subjectivity and relations, and the situation of the individual within those processes is without any precedent in Maimon, as is the discussion of actual concrete situations and examples. Deleuze’s presentation also includes hints of an account of values and the importance of “the profound and the particular”. These hints, and the way in which passions convey sense in particular will in turn be extended in Deleuze’s subsequent book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Philosophy.
Nietzsche Despite the gap of almost ten years between the two, Deleuze's book on Nietzsche extends the lines of investigation begun in his earlier book on Hume. The formation of selves and the role of contingency and novelty have an important place in Nietzsche and Philosophy and connect directly to the central topics of Empiricism and Subjectivity. The account of those topics offered in the Hume book was rather abstract, and in that work concrete examples served only to help explain mechanisms common to all selves, whereas the work on Nietzsche progresses beyond that to analysing specific types of formations of the self. Nietzsche and Philosophy further develops the earlier concerns with social and historical creativity, and enhances the account of the mutual determination and inter-relationships of the social and the individual with greater detail. As well as advancing those Humean topics Deleuze also introduces new themes: the revision of Kantianism becomes an explicit project, as does the positing and grounding of an evaluative framework. Nietzsche's philosophy, for Deleuze, is an attempt to complete Kant's prematurely foreclosed critical project, by making value and sense topics for critical philosophical inquiry. The evaluation of sense and value is carried out through an investigation of the specific and individual conditions of their creation. This plurality and specificity is what requires Nietzsche's “very special empiricism and pragmatism”.53 Not only are values created at specific times and places under a
53 Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), p. ix.
34 constellation of factors, that creation occurs within an open universe in which the central and most enduring force is one of disruption and plasticity. Kant's Critical system requires its own critique because “Kant's 'proper usage of the faculties' mysteriously coincides with these established values: true knowledge, true morality, true religion …”.54 This true critique must go beyond identifying Kant's misconceptions and false applications; it must carry out a 'creative destruction' so that it produces “not [just another] justification, but a different way of feeling: another sensibility”.55 In this the legislator is replaced by the genealogist. One major aspect of this extension of the critique is that the assumption of the ‘good will’ and ‘common sense’ of the thinker becomes questionable. The topics of the struggle of philosophy against the stupidity of thought, and the analysis of the type of thinker presupposed by a particular concept are first introduced in this work. Together these form a major line of thought that continues into Deleuze’s final writings, one that I will later argue is an indispensable supplement to the superior empiricism that Deleuze proposes.
According to Deleuze Nietzsche's critique is directed against three dominant approaches to analysing values: (1) those who simply provide an inventory of existing values, (2) those who apply existing values, and (3) those who seek to find an origin for value, with the aim of reducing that origin to a (single) set of ‘objective facts’. Such approaches strip those values of their originality and the marvellousness of their creation, while also eliminating any need for a differential evaluation and an inquiry into the particular conditions that led to those values. Nietzsche's counter method will present values as neither absolute nor relative or utilitarian but local and created, and so analysable via a critical genealogy. This method carries out a double movement that we will see again and again in Deleuze’s subsequent works such as Bergsonism, and Proust and Signs. The method’s first step is to trace experience traced back to conditions no broader than the phenomena conditioned by it, and then to move from those conditions back to the experience to evaluate the conditioned based on those differential elements and tendencies and their expression. Deleuze summaries this position in this way:
Nietzsche always attacks principle for being too general in relation to what they claim to condition, for always having too broad a mesh in
54 Ibid., p. 87. 55 Ibid., p. 88.
35 relation to what they claim to capture or regulate ... [the principle of the will to power] reconciles empiricism with principles ... it constitutes a superior empiricism, ... because it is an essentially plastic principle that is no wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditioned and determines itself in each case along with what it determines.56
Below I will discuss three main aspects of Nietzsche and Philosophy. The first is a metaphysical strand that will outline the conditions of the world that provide the environment that the genealogist works within. Following that will be an account of the evaluative and typological elements of that metaphysics, and the implications that follow from it. The third focuses on the critical aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, and Deleuze's positioning of it as a rival claimant to Hegel and the other post-Kantians. I will briefly discuss this third aspect now. Deleuze argues that Nietzsche's Kantianism is also accompanied by an equally strong anti-Hegelianism: “It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy, in its polemical sense, is the attack on these three [key elements of Hegel]”.57 And it attacks Hegel's system because,
it misinterprets sense because it does not know the nature of the forces which concretely appropriate phenomena; it misinterprets essence because it does not know the real element from which forces, their qualities and their relations derive; it misinterprets change and transformation because it is content to work with permutations of abstract and unreal terms.58
Hegel's philosophy mistakes the nature of difference, and substitutes concepts of negation, opposition, and contradiction in its place. It is only from a reactive perspective that such a misinterpretation could occur. Hegel goes the furthest in seeking to bend the forces of impermanence and creativity back into a rational and Christian philosophy. As such, for Deleuze, he is the mightiest representative of the forces of nihilism and ressentiment that occupies much of history, morality, and philosophy. That history is
56 Ibid., p. 46. 57 Ibid., p. 185. 58 Ibid., p. 149.
36 one that has been interpreted in terms of reactive forces, a history in which the church and state have instituted strict methods, and wrestled the free play of the forces involved in conditioning and the formation of bodies to their own ends.
Dispensing with Hegelianism will require a new image of thought. The goal of this new image of thought is a thought that affirms life
Does not critique express, … , express new forces, capable of giving thought another sense? A thought that would go to the limit of what it can do? A thought that would affirm life instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life? Life would be the active force of thought, but thought would be the affirmative power of life. Both would go in the same direction, carrying each other along, smashing restrictions, matching each other step for step, in a burst of unparalleled creativity. Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life.59
In this new thought life would go beyond the limits that knowledge fixes, while also thought would go beyond the limits that life sets for it. Deleuze’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy is part of his preparation to form a new image of thought. Against the static distributions of being, and the recognition of the familiar in good and common sense in the dogmatic image of thought Deleuze poses a counter conception of a mobile, novel world. By the time of Difference and Repetition this flux of forces will become explicitly conceptualised as the nomadic distribution of being.
For Nietzsche the world is also composed of forces. The things we experience are the signs and symptoms of those forces and the relations they form. As in Empiricism and Subjectivity the elements of analysis are processes in interaction. The role of the philosopher is that of a physician, reading the semiotics of the forces of the world, “we can ask, for any given thing, what state of exterior and interior forces it presupposes”.60 The metaphysical categories of cause and effect, following Hume, have been replaced. In Nietzsche and Philosophy sense and phenomena are the new primary categories. Sense is not a new form of atomism however as the sense of a phenomenon
59 Ibid., p. 94. 60 Ibid., p. ix.
37 changes as new forces appropriate it. Sense is therefore complex and plural, and phenomena can have multiple senses. In addition, not every sense has the same value. Deleuze singles out this multiplicity of forces, sense and value, writing
Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot be understood without taking his essential pluralism into account. And, in fact, pluralism (otherwise known as empiricism) is almost indistinguishable from philosophy itself.61
Compounding this situation is the fact that the thing that is possessed or taken by these forces is not simply an inert vehicle for force but is congruent with some, and has aversions to others. Forces take different things up in different ways. Not only does the philosopher-physician ask which forces are presupposed, but also what affinities they do or do not have with that thing, and which forces would have the most and least affinity with it. Forces are never encountered alone or in themselves, “Nietzsche’s concept of force is therefore that of a force which is related to another force”.62 These differential relationships of forces form the wide variety of bodies that constitute the world, both material and immaterial (such as political bodies). Nietzsche's empiricism outlines a world in which differences are the primary type of relationship between things, and this “empirical feeling of difference, in short hierarchy, is the essential motor of the concept, deeper and more effective than all thought about contradiction”.63 Difference is present all the way down, to the extent that it has a special role as the 'will to power', in which
… forces in relation reflect a simultaneous double genesis: the reciprocal genesis of their difference in quantity and the absolute genesis of their respective qualities. The will to power is thus added to force, but as the differential and genetic element, as the internal element of its production. ... more precisely, it is added to force as the internal principle of the determination of its quality in a relation (x + dx) and as the internal
61 Ibid., p. 4. 62 Ibid., p. 6. 63 Ibid., p. 7.
38 principle of the quantitative determination of this relation between itself (dy/dx).64
The will to power determines the forces it is added to as well as being determined by them. It determines the relation between the forces (the viewpoint of genesis), but in its manifestation as a (specific) capacity for being affected, it is in turn determined by the relating forces. The influence of Maimon in Deleuze's presentation of the will to power is clear: Nietzsche’s forces are Maimon’s differentials, and what in Maimon is an account of the genesis of experience in a subject has now become a process of genesis tout court. In Deleuze's reading, Nietzsche goes beyond Maimon in also making a distinction between two types of relations of forces: dominant forces are active, dominated forces are reactive. Reactive forces are forces of conservation, limitation adaptation and utility, and the idea of mechanism, as well as its binary opposition to final ends can only be formed within a reactive view. They are forces that separate active forces form what they can do, as well as denying or limiting itself. Active forces impose and create form, and are 'plastic forces' of metamorphosis. They are forces that go to the limit of what they can do, and make their difference something to be affirmed and enjoyed. Reactive and active also characterise a vector as well as a type or quality: affirmation is becoming active, and negation is becoming reactive. Nietzsche's metaphysics leads from an account of the nature of the world into problems of typology and evaluation.
The classification of active and reactive forces introduces several problems, as well as a new line of questioning. The plurality of senses, the plurality of forces, and the two vectors all compound the problem of evaluation. In Deleuze’s account Nietzsche’s empiricism is a method of winnowing the confusion produced by an abundance of rival interpretations. This is done by referring forces back to their specific capacity for action, and by doing so only from a perspective of pluralist affirmation, “we must find, for each thing in turn, the special means by which it is affirmed, by which it ceases to be negative”.65 What can happen instead, just as much to the philosopher as to anyone else, is that when an event, force, or a thing call for perspective that is far from our own, a tendency to accusation, denial, discounting or devaluating that which does not
64 Ibid., p. 47. 65 Ibid., p. 16.
39 correspond to our own inclinations and interpretations occurs. What is different is seen instead as a negative reflection or absence of our own values or existence, and understood only derivatively and relatively. This single focus of interpretation flattens out thought and our thinking of the world into an abstract universality. Representations of power and recognition, along with a single, simple calculus of them replace concrete feelings of positive affirmation. Reactive forces dominate and control us to the extent that existence becomes inherently problematic and requires justification. The innocence of plurality and diverse becoming is replaced by “our deplorable mania for accusing” and a search for responsible parties. The method of dramatisation through which the philosopher feels out and evaluates phenomena requires a sufficient mutability of thought in them so as to be able to affirm a range of existences. It is not that the philosopher must not have a response to what they evaluate, or cannot be critical of anything; rather, they must not have a reactive response, or substitute negation for real criticism. Assuming that the philosopher can do this, then their analysis will leverage the ways in which forces react to one another (including their own response).
Power designates the differential relationship of forces that encounter one another, leading to diverse forms of affirmation and negation. The actions and propositions that are produced reflect a way of being or a mode of existence of the speaker.66 The forces they oppose and the others they give impetus to, the relations they form, what they maintain and destroy, all provide clues to support a diagnosis. These allow for the creation of an expanding typology of reactive and active forces, and their multiple combinations. Nietzsche’s open set of types and their variations are substituted for a single universal standard of true and false, and good and evil,
the noble and the vile, the high and the low, become the immanent principles of interpretations and evaluations. Logic is replaced by a topology and typology: there are some interpretations that presuppose a base or vile way of thinking, feeling, and even existing, and there are others that exhibit nobility, generosity, creativity …67
66 Nietzsche’s analyses are anthropocentric, but Deleuze’s presentation does much to present those human focused accounts are examples that could just as easily have been of events in the non-human world. 67 ‘Nietzsche’ in Deleuze, G. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, (Zone Books, 2005), p. 119.
40 The ground of these evaluations is both broad, resulting from a plastic world of multiple and independent forces, as well as local, in that the particular characteristics and forces and their specific relations to each other must also be involved. That evaluation is also immanent. A type such as the priest is reactive because they limit their own forces and curtail their own potential and possible transformation. This, together with the danger of reactive forces triumphing in or even constituting a self, is why a critique of values is necessary. Principles are to be evaluated to see what viewpoint they enact, what problem their creation responds to, what particular circumstances and way of life that determines them. This “empirical and pluralist art” consist in asking “which one?” rather than “what is?”.68 Instead of seeking an essence, this method attempts to locate the particular perspective that the phenomena incarnates, and the particular set of forces that produce this 'thing', without which it could not even be thought or experienced, or acted. This art, which Deleuze calls “the method of dramatization,”69 is an art that
interprets phenomena, treating them as symptoms whose sense must be sought in the forces that produce them. … it interprets forces from the standpoint of their quality, be it active or reactive. … [and] it evaluates the origin of forces from the point of view of their nobility or baseness, since it discovers their ancestry in the will to power and the quality of this will.70
Using this method Nietzsche generates a panoply of types, creates new concepts with which to analyse reactive forces, such as ressentiment and bad conscience, and critiques a false metaphysics of representations.
There is a second, more cosmic sense of evaluation in Deleuze's account, one connected to the principle of the eternal return. Nietzsche replaces Kant's conditions for all possible objects with a genetic principle of difference, and this principle, through being internal to the forces involved, does not require the (question begging) postulation of a harmony between otherwise unrelated and incongruous terms. The will to power is a substitute principle of synthesis that can account for both synthesis and diversity. For
68 Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), p. 71. 69 Ibid., p. 73. 70 Ibid., p. 70.
41 Deleuze this is “a radical transformation ..., a reinvention of the critique ..., a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts”.71 This principle that guides synthesis is what produces the repetition of difference, and grounds the elevation of difference over identity. The ground of that is pure becoming, which is also the foundation of the eternal return, for “returning is the being of that which becomes”.72 In Kant’s critical system time has a central role in the constitution of experience. It conditions both inner and outer experience, and as such is the form through which the undetermined becomes determined. If Nietzsche’s substitute principle is to be used to revise a Kantian system then he will also need to explain the relationship that that principle has with time, and how that relationship is one that involves a deeper connection than one of external conditioning. In Deleuze's reading the function of the eternal return performs such a role by accounting for the passage of time, and by connecting the synthesis of difference with the synthetic relation of one moment of time to another, as well as of past present and future to one another. The ‘return’ of difference and the multiple grounds the synthesis of time and its dimensions, of diversity and its reproductions, of becoming and being. The outline I have sketched here is very brief because it forms part of Nietzsche’s metaphysics rather than directly factoring in to his genealogy. The connection to Deleuze’s more tangible problem of the connection of concrete modes of existence to analysis comes through the evaluation of affirmation and negation, and the superiority of one response over the other, resting on the overturning of identity in the eternal return. The eternal return produces a double selection: a selection of that which wholeheartedly wills the eternal return, as well as only that which also fully becomes. Only action and affirmation return (although not in the same form), because only becoming has being, and it is against that background that reactive and active, and affirmation and negation acquire their full meaning.
The eternal return introduces a personal aspect to this cosmic difference (which will become more fully developed out in Deleuze's subsequent book on Proust). Nietzsche outlines the concept of the dice throw in connection with the eternal return:
The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity.
71 Ibid., p. 48 72 Ibid., p. 44
42 Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the sense that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity.73
The dice throw is a way of willing and aligning oneself with the eternal return, through the affirmation of chance. In the open cosmos of becoming there is no purpose or specific end to the universe as a whole, since it is truly a multiplicity without unity. Acknowledging that that is the situation in which one exists leads to the affirmation of chance, since there is nothing to reserve in favour of something higher, better, or final. In contrast, the bad dice player seeks a particular combination which belongs to a realm behind or superior to chaos and chance. That player seeks a secret causality, some means to 'redeem' what exists, and he makes “use of causality and probability to produce a combination that he sees as desirable” but “all that will ever be obtained are more or less probable relative numbers”.74 The bad player adopts various tactics; they count on several throws, or great numbers to save them. What is common to all their endeavours is that they all seek to negate chance with, for example, insurance, a safe bet, or a system. The good dice thrower only needs to throw the dice once, since whatever result occurs will be affirmed. What the concept of the eternal return does is to provide a deeper value with which to sift the multiplicity of values that exist in Nietzsche world of forces. And this concept of the good player is the kernel of what becomes, in Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense, Deleuze’s (ethical) concept of counter-actualisation. Counter-actualisation will be discussed in detail in chapter five of this thesis.
Kant Deleuze writes that “Kant's genius ... was to conceive of an immanent critique”, one where illusions are generated by reason itself.75 Reason critiques itself, but no account of the origin of reason is given, and the conditions that the critique discovers remain external to what they condition. What is required is an account that sets out the genesis of reason and the faculties. For Deleuze Nietzsche's method is superior to Kant's because provides both an immanent and a genetic critique, and one that concretely
73 Ibid., p. 24 74 Ibid., p. 25 75 Ibid., p. 85
43 varies its analyses based on the specific conditions of the forces it examines. I will now discuss Deleuze’s treatment of Kant in Kant’s Critical Philosophy.
Deleuze's book on Kant is remarkably brief. It displays a deep familiarity with the three Critiques and manages to accurately survey the entirety of the critical system in a very small book.76 Despite the polemical comments in Nietzsche and Philosophy, and the positioning of both it and the Hume book as major divergences from Kant's philosophy, the presentation in Kant's Critical Philosophy is a demure and relatively 'straight' reading compared to some of Deleuze's other historical commentaries. While the other pre-Difference and Repetition books constitute an alternate history of philosophy, and assemble a set of concepts that are collaged in Difference and Repetition, the Kant book does not easily fit into that series, particularly since Deleuze described it as 'a book on an enemy'. While Kant is alluded to as a foe, there are few if any overt adversarial tones in the book, and a muted critical agenda is evident only in some of the choices about which aspects of the system are included in the content of the book. The function of the book on Kant is to provide the grounding necessary to create an alternative transcendental philosophy instead of abandoning that project after identifying its shortcomings. A fair and sober study of the complete workings of that system is necessary to disassemble it as well to as re-purpose it. I will have more to say about Deleuze's unduly heavy utilisation of Kant later in the thesis, but provisionally, the small book on Kant will help elucidate some of the more puzzling features of Difference and Repetition, such as the explicit commitment to the dated faculties model of the self and the detailed account of the genesis of extensive qualities. I will not give a full outline of Kant's Critical Philosophy, instead I will comment on aspects that will be relevant to the broader direction of this thesis. Deleuze's account examines Kant's philosophy as a complete system along with its architectonics, rather than focusing exclusively on any single text or theme. In Deleuze's presentation Kant's system is constructed from two main elements:
1) The networks formed by the different possible relationships of the faculties 2) The transcendental method as an immanent critique resting on the model of those
76 The book does however quite noticeably omit any extended discussion of sections that are inimical to Deleuze’s taste: there is no discussion of teleology in the second half of the Critique of Judgement and Kant’s moral philosophy receives very light coverage.
44 networks
The three critiques are then analysed primarily in terms of the relationships of the faculties that they present, and those three chapters are book ended by an introduction examining the transcendental method, and a conclusion concerned with the over-arching relationship of the three critiques, together with the ends of reason and their possible realisation in nature and history. The main purpose of this is to draw out both a set of positive methods and structures that Deleuze will adopt, as well as a set of assumptions that Kant's system relies upon but are never argued for, that Deleuze will later discard.
Deleuze begins by distinguishing Kant's project from both empiricism and rationalism. For empiricism, reason has the status of a means of accomplishing natural (a-rational) ends. Rationalism is similar to empiricism in that while its ends are rational, it has the same structure in which the will is determined by representations. Against both rationalism and empiricism Kant argues that there are ends that are nothing other than the exercise of reason itself, where reason both generates and judges its interests without any other authority or input. This self-determination provides the basis for Kant's critical philosophy “an immanent critique - reason as the judge of reason - is the essential principle of the so-called transcendental method”.77 Kant's critique is an account of the false problems and speculative illusions that reason generates when it goes beyond experience and beyond its limits. This method of immanent critique is then applied to the various faculties of the mind in order to counteract that by demarcating the areas of their legitimate use. These faculties correspond to types of existential relations: casual relationships, relationships of representation or agreement in knowledge, and relationships of intensifying or decreasing vital force (pleasure and pain).78 Kant makes a distinction between the form of the representation and the content of what is presented. The analysis of the manner in which representations are synthesised justifies the legislation of the faculties over certain kinds of representations, for example, the faculty of the understanding over knowledge. Each faculty as a mode of relation (knowledge, desire, pleasure and pain) corresponds with a faculty in the legislative sense (imagination, understanding, reason). This double aspect is what
77 Deleuze, G. Kant's Critical Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 3 78 This positioning of the faculties are capacities for existential relations prefigures the Spinozistic and ethological elements in Deleuze's later works such as A Thousand Plateaus.
45 allows Kant to search for the 'higher form' of these faculties. Determining the higher form of the faculty also determines a (non-representational) interest of reason, such as knowledge in itself, or the law as a pure form for the will. Those pure interests of reason differ in nature from each other. They are systematic, plural, and hierarchical, and together these generate principles for a system of ends, and rules for the various combinations of domination and subordination of faculties, and their illegitimate and legitimate uses. Deleuze writes, “In this way the doctrine of the faculties forms the real network which constitutes the transcendental method”.79 The excavation of this higher form is the discovery of the faculty's own immanent laws for its exercise. Deleuze's presentation draws out a much more mobile account of the faculties and the subject in Kant, and the stress on the faculties as forces, or powers directs the reader to seeing the points of compatibility between Kant and Nietzsche. It also emphasises the non- representational tendencies in Kant's account by stressing the pure forms of a faculty's exercise and the self determination of the faculty by itself. Questions of the accord between representations and the world, or the grounding of a priori knowledge fade out of Deleuze's portrayal of the faculties leaving only a structural analysis of the capacities of the subject. For example, the distinction between the empirically real and the transcendentally ideal is not discussed in any sustained way. The context and aim of Kant's Copernican revolution is eliminated so as to better reveal the heart of that reversal. Because the doctrine of the faculties is the essence of the transcendental method, Deleuze commits himself to adopting this same faculties model of the subject in Difference and Repetition (albeit not without mixed results, which I discuss in more detail in the next chapter). And this in turn explains why the majority of the book on Kant is devoted to analysing the inter-relations of the faculties.
In the Critique of Pure Reason the unity of the synthesis of the faculty of understanding is carried out by the categories that represent that unity a priori. That unity enables the understanding to legislate, but its scope is limited to the legislation of laws (principles for the construction of experience) to which all phenomena are subjected to due to their form, rather than particular laws concerned with specific phenomena. The genesis of representations involves the use of schemata as well, which allow the application of the understanding to multifarious sensible phenomena.
79 Ibid., p. 10
46 Schematization is an act in which the imagination becomes determined, and a schema is a spatio-temporal determination corresponding to a category. Because they are “spatio- temporal relations which embody or realise relations which are in fact conceptual” they help bridge the gap between the different faculties and their different contents.80 Ideas also feature in the generation of representation. Ideas embody the totality of conditions under which a category of relation may be attributed to objects of possible experience. By representing a totality, they represent the unconditioned, and also serve to confer a maximum of systematic unity and extension to the representation. Ideas are foci. Deleuze draws out the ways in which Kant's account of knowledge severs the form of knowledge from the matter of knowledge, and a similar observation can be made about the moral law. Implicit in this is Maimon's critique of the gap between the a priori and the a posteriori, and his re-conceptualisation of sensible experience. The ground for that criticism is prepared and noted, but it never becomes voiced in the text.
Deleuze also dwells on the role of harmony in Kant's system. The harmony between the form of a representation, which is subject to categories, and its content, which corresponds to ideas of reason is simply postulated.81 If such a harmony did not exist, then the diversity between the two could be so large as to preclude their co- ordination. A systematic unity of nature is presupposed by Kant, and the ideas of reason symbolise that unity as a limit. Represented objects tend towards systematic unity, giving the idea a status of objective, but indeterminate, problematic, and determinable by analogy only due to the difference between concept and sensibility. A harmony between the faculties is also presupposed. Common sense is just such an accord of faculties, and is a condition for the communication of the faculties in such a way as to be universal. Both empiricism and rationalism assert a difference in degree (whether in the liveliness in our sensibility or in the clarity in our understanding) but Kant instead institutes differences in kind between the faculties. Those differences generate problems in understanding how they can be related, and how their inter-relations can adequately ground truth, but Kant resolves those problems by postulating several kinds of harmonious accords. The nature of the accord differs depending on the existential relation and the priority of the faculties e.g. in the second Critique a moral common sense is invoked. Deleuze notes that common sense seems “a kind of a priori fact
80 Ibid., p. 18 81 Ibid., p. 20
47 beyond which we cannot go” in the Kantian system. Difference is constrained and its power utilised by Kant in proposing a new basis for the relation of the faculties, but any further role of difference is limited.
The issues of the harmonies between faculties and the interlinked idea of common sense is taken up and further explicated in the final Critique. In it the issue of the free and indeterminate accord of the faculties is tied to the question of the ground or genesis of that common sense. The Critique of Judgement analyses the a priori exercise of the faculty of feeling, which is a kind of schematisation without determinate concept, resulting in a free and indeterminate accord between faculties in judgements of beauty. Deleuze views this subjective accord as the basis or condition for the possibility of the other two accords in the first two critiques. Such an accord also requires a transcendental account of its genesis, and the account of the sublime supplies this. Judgements of the sublime occur when that faculty encounters its limit in situations where it is faced with the formless or something 'deformed' through the immensity or power inherent in its representation. At the limit of its ability to comprehended the idea of reason “present” “in” the thing, an indeterminate accord between the faculties is produced. Deleuze's account also investigates the implications of the beautiful, the sublime, and teleological judgements: that there exists a supersensible unity of the faculties, and an accord between the two realms of nature and reason. Kant's third Critique is meant to complete his critical system by showing that reflective judgements express a free and indeterminate accord of the faculties that also suggests an ultimate compatibility between moral freedom and a (mechanically) causally determined realm of nature, although this accord is presented in the form of an analogy rather than directly established.
Deleuze's presentation of Kant's critical system set out a series of strata within its architecture: the faculties are defined by both relationships of representations, such as knowing, desiring, and feeling, and as sources of representations, such as imagination, understanding, and reason. Each faculty rules over one type of representation, and by doing so provides the grounds for a transcendental or legislative account of that faculty’s employment. That in turn presupposes a common sense of that faculty, one regulating the hierarchical set of relationships between the faculties that exists when they are employed. The final accord or grounding of the relations between
48 the faculties rests on their free and indeterminate agreement, which in turn requires an account of the genesis of that agreement. The only account of such a genesis that Kant provides is in his account of judgements of the sublime. The sequential dependencies that Deleuze sets out also show the points at which Kant's system is most open to disruption and criticism. The accords of the common senses of the faculties are presupposed, and the question of the existence of other forms of accord is not investigated, nor is there any account of the genesis of faculties themselves. The pre- existent, 'transcendental' subject functions as a line beyond which Kant's investigation does not progress, and which must be presupposed. All of these topics will be addressed in Difference and Repetition. Before I analyse Difference and Repetition, in chapter three, I will examine two other works published before it. Deleuze’s study of Proust is remarkable for being surprisingly phenomenological compared to his other works. The focus and the underlying worldview remain consistent; Deleuze is however still working with a model of system instead of an anthropology. His attention is on the pedagogical role that systems play in the lives of individuals. That pedagogical theme is extended in Difference and Repetition, but in a more abstract way. I also further develop those pedagogical elements into an account of Deleuzian ethics in chapter five.
Proust In 1964 Deleuze published a study of Proust's series of novels In Search of Lost Time under the title of Proust and Signs.82 In Deleuze's analysis the novels primarily concern not an exposition of the retrospective faculty of memory, but an account of a series of apprenticeships to 'signs'. Proust's narrative concerns the formation of the subject of those apprenticeships, apprenticeships that lead to the discarding of particular illusions. The search is not retrospective, but directed towards the future, and is a localised and temporal apprenticeship as opposed to a search for abstract or universal knowledge. One becomes a particular person by becoming attuned to those signs, for example, one becomes a lover by cultivating and seeking a sensitivity to the signs emitted by the beloved. As I will show below, Deleuze's unpacking of involuntary memory, the role of various times in the process of searching, and the identification of difference as the essence of signs all complement the method of intuition subsequently
82 While I cite references from the 'complete text' edition, I only draw on the sections written prior to the publication of Difference and Repetition in order to support my argument about the relationship between Difference and Repetition and the works that preceded it.
49 introduced in Bergsonism. The account of the worlds and values that signs express performs a similar function with respect to the interconnections between pluralism and symptomatology and typology in Nietzsche and Philosophy.
These signs are plural and form networks united by the types of signs emitted, those that are appropriate or not, the specific way in which they interpret those signs and so on. Signs are not merely associations that the subjects form, nor are they immaterial effects existing only in the subject. The search is “an exploration of different worlds of signs that are organised in circles and intersect at certain points”.83 The task of the apprentice is to come to understand why signs function in the way that they do in a particular situation, why distinctions are made, and signs are read in a certain manner, all for the sake of explicating and developing “these unknown worlds that remain enveloped in the beloved”.84
The path of the apprentice is not simply linear. It inevitably involves regressions, discontinuities, transitions, lost travel along false lines, and so on. These perplexities require the creation of means to overcome those disappointments and to continue the search. The act of learning is similarly resistant to easy elaboration or identification without involvement, “The sign implies in itself a heterogeneity of relation. We never learn by doing like someone else, but by doing with someone, who bears no resemblance to what we are learning”.85
All signs are not equal, “such signs are already distinguished from the preceding ones by their immediate effect”.86 The force of the encounter with these signs provokes something that begins the apprenticeship. The significant part of this is that it removes a 'debased form' of probability from the subject's deportment. With the advent of such a sign the sense that things could have been different, or that the occasion is merely one occurrence out a set of other equivalent and substitutable occasions is removed. The abstract possibilities generated by an intelligence reflecting to itself have been wiped away via an encounter that shows the path to a truth that we could not reach by other
83 Deleuze, G. Proust and Signs: The Complete Text (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 4 84 Ibid., p. 7 85 Ibid., p. 22 86 Ibid., p. 12
50 means. This type of sign constrains the apprentice, and yet is also contingent, and occurs contingently.
The encounter reveals to the apprentice that the current topology of their existence obscures other potentials, other worlds, while also inserting a new, charged, value into that life. The value of the sign stimulated by the encounter is different in kind from the truths and values that arise from diligence and fidelity to pre-established plans.
The reflective intelligence that steadily plans and projects presumes that it already has the measure of things, and that it can simply total up values and consequences. This mind “only ever attains truths with a possible value”.87 Part of the reason for this is that “the intelligence tends towards objectivity, as perception towards the object”.88 Both perception and intelligence assume that the full extent of existence is already laid out, ready to be observed and spoken of. This intelligence “impels us to conversation, incites us to friendship, invites us to philosophy” all on the basis of a pre- existant and universal good will and natural truth of the mind. It is enough to merely designate and refer to objects, rest upon the 'proofs' of evidence, eliminate errors and mis-understanding so that communication is clear, and so on. Clearly this resonates with the critique of the possible and false problems in Bergsonism and the bad dice player's understanding of probability in Nietzsche and Philosophy that were discussed above. The problem with this 'objective' approach is that signs and significations cannot be simply localised in an object as its (sole) essence. Objects only bear or emit signs in conjunction with others, so signs can register differently to different people, but are not simply relativistic as signs are expressions of worlds distinct from those of the subject.
When evaluating a work of art, we are faced with a double problem: we may react to what is a bad or mistaken piece of art, but there is also the possibility that our reaction may arise from a particularity or infirmity within ourselves that means we are not simpatico with it. It is not the case that we are in error, rather that there are a plurality of standards. This plurality of signs and values is the problem of apprenticeship. Inexperience in distinguishing the new requires different ways of seeing, listening, saying and so on.
87 Ibid., p. 30 88 Ibid., p. 29
51 Through the encounter the apprentice is drawn to learn to arrive at this new milieu, a milieu that transcends “the states of subjectivity no less than the properties of the object”.90 From there they discover that an essence, an idea was “already incarnated, that they were already there in all these kinds of signs”.91 This idea gives a thing its real existence, more than the materialities that incarnate it. The use of essence here is somewhat misleading, for an essence is “a difference, the absolute and ultimate Difference”.92 This is not an empirical difference between two things, but an internal difference, a final quality at the heart of it, which is “the viewpoint to which it expresses the world”, “the viewpoint being the difference itself”.93 Again, these ideas are not to be confused with purely subjective thoughts, they are real and independent, “essence is a country, a region of being revealed to the subject, essence implicates itself in a subject”. In doing so it determines and individualises that which it is implicated in. Pre-empting Difference and Repetition, Deleuze states: “What can one do with essence, which is ultimate difference, except to repeat it, because it is irreplaceable; and because nothing can be substituted for it?” “Difference and repetition are only apparently in opposition”.94
This theme of problematic encounter is also evident in Deleuze's discussion of the functioning of involuntary memory in Proust's work. In it voluntary memory is distinguished from involuntary memory. Voluntary memory involves the directed and active recollection of knowledge without any transformation of that knowledge or of the subject. In contrast in an act of involuntary memory an internalised difference becomes immanent such that two memories become one in an internal relationship (as opposed to forming a relationship of resemblance). Involuntary memory involves the interaction of two 'powers' of time: difference in the past, and repetition in the present. In such a memory that which is recalled is remembered not as it was, but in its essence, an essence that involves an experience of time in its pure state, an essence that is “real without being present, ideal without being abstract”.96 Such a description matches
90 Ibid., p. 38 91 Ibid., p. 38 92 Ibid., p. 38 93 Ibid., p. 41, p. 42 94 Ibid., p. 49 96 Ibid., p. 61
52 exactly with the description of the virtual in Bergsonism. The effect of involuntary memory is to make the subject sensitive to certain signs at privileged moments.
Deleuze, echoing his account in Kant's Critical Philosophy, writes that this distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory is a distinction between two different forms of exercise of the same faculty, and that similar double modes of functioning also exists for all the other faculties.97 In each case, the voluntary exercise gives merely a possible truth whereas the involuntary form generates a profound truth. In the conclusion of the book Deleuze summarises all of this:
What forces us to think is the sign. The sign is the object of an encounter, but it is precisely the contingency of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what it leads us to think. The act of thinking does not proceed from a simple natural possibility; on the contrary, it is the only true creation. Creation is the genesis of the act of thinking within thought itself. This genesis implicates something that does violence to thought, which wrests it from its natural stupor and its merely abstract possibilities. To think is always to interpret - to explicate, to develop, to decipher, to translate a sign. Translating, deciphering, developing are the forms of pure creation.98
On Deleuze's reading, Proust provides an image of thought that is opposed to orthodox philosophy and its presuppositions. Indeed the concluding chapter that the quote comes from is simply titled 'The Image of Thought'. Deleuze's little book on Proust functions as a way point that collects and condenses the earlier studies in the history of philosophy so as to prepare for the leap of Difference and Repetition. In it, Deleuze marries the pluralism and critique of values, and its concomitant philosophy of typology and symptomatology, with the method of intuition and its analyses of problems and the intuition of differences and tendencies within durations. He provides a more concrete and embodied account of how those approaches are deployed, while establishing a new account of 'necessity', a contingent necessity that is contrasted with the (merely) possible. Deleuze then links this kind of contingent necessity to the functioning of the
97 Ibid., p. 98 98 Ibid., p. 97
53 faculties when they encounter their limit or transcendental genesis. All of these elements form an integrated whole in an account that, as did each of the preceding historical studies, establishes difference as both the genesis and determining element of experience. The role of difference in experience will be further refined into a method in Deleuze’s subsequent book on Bergson.
Bergson In Bergsonism Deleuze reads Bergson as a post-Kantian, responding to Maimon's critique of Kant and extending Kant's critical project, while also belonging to a tradition of empiricism.99 One Bergson passage in particular acts as a central focus,
An empiricism worthy of the name … would measure out for the object a concept appropriate to only that object, a concept of which one could barely say that it was still a concept because it could only apply to that thing.100
Deleuze adopts Bergson’s method of intuition as is the means of accomplishing that empiricism. The use of a concept of intuition here is at odds with most of its use in traditional philosophy, where it is part of an experience of knowledge rather than a deliberate sequence of acts. That method is also entwined with several more tactical or metaphysical issues: duration, difference, multiplicity, the virtual, true and false problems, and distorted 'images of thought'. Difference has a double and indissociable meaning; it has both a methodological and an ontological register. In the account that follows I will address mostly the methodological resonances of it in Bergsonism. In this, Kant's critical project is re-purposed as an immanent investigation of the legitimate use of difference, instead of the faculties, and an alternate set of tendencies to illusion and unwarranted deployments of reasoning are counteracted. That project is then extended beyond Kant's stopping point, of determining the conditions for any possible experience, to provide a positive method to analyse the conditions of specific, actual experiences. Deleuze describes this method as,
99 “The project we find in Bergson’s work, that of reconnecting things by breaking with the critical philosophies … in many of its aspects participated in English empiricism.” Deleuze, G. Bergsonism. (Zone Books, 1991), p. 31 100 Deleuze, G. Quoted in “Bergson, 1859-1941” in Deleuze, G. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953- 1974. (Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 25. The quote originally comes from Bergson's La Pensée et le mouvant [The Creative Mind]
54 ...something other than a spatial analysis, more than a description of experience, and less (so it seems) than a transcendental analysis. It reaches the conditions of the given, but these conditions are tendency-subjects, which are themselves given in a certain way: they are lived. … What is essential here is that this ground is experienced, and we know how much Bergson insisted on the empirical character of the elan vital. Thus it is not the conditions of all possible experience that must be reached, but the conditions of real experience. Schelling had already proposed this aim and defined philosophy as superior empiricism: this formulation also applies to Bergson. These conditions can and must be grasped in an intuition precisely because they are the conditions of real experience, because they are not broader than what is conditioned, because the concept they form is identical to its object.101
I will begin my account by first explicating the method of intuition, and then discussing the broader metaphysical issues surrounding it. Intuition is a method that presupposes duration (an account of which will come later). This method has three rules: 1) stating and creating problems, 2) discovering genuine differences in kind, 3) the apprehension of real time.
First rule: apply the test of true and false problems to themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems.102
In Proust and Signs the possibilities available to one's existence, and the meaning and value of the signs occurring in it were connected to the topology of that existence. Apprenticeship was the motivated process of transition from one form of life to another. In Bergsonism the same particularity of perspective is applied to the stating and creation of philosophical problems. Rather than there being a single realm of philosophical thought, or existence, instantiating problems that then stimulate rival solutions, variability exists at the level of the problem itself, requiring the differentiation of true and false problems as well as true and false solutions. The search for true problems requires not just their discovery, as if they were waiting only to be uncovered, but their creation or radical re-fashioning. True freedom lies in deciding on and
101 Ibid., p. 36, emphasis his. 102 Deleuze, G. Bergsonism. (Zone Books, 1991), p. 15
55 constituting problems for oneself; the Kantian imperative 'sapere aude!' has been reshaped into “dare to create!”. Finding and positing true problems is important for ensuring that their solutions are not merely true, but worthy. Focusing on the constitution of problems rather than their solutions alone brings problems of creation and evaluation to the forefront, and also strips away recourse to external standards. When the problem is accepted as a given, then the attention is on the solution, and that problem acts as an external criterion for the solution, and the creativity of the creation of a solution is subordinated to the givenness of the problem. In contrast, in Bergsonism, stating a problem is as much a matter of invention, and the solving is an uncovering or discovery that follows from that first act: the solution relates to what already exists (actually or virtually). The stating of the problem invents relations that might never have happened. This echoes and extends Deleuze's earlier account of Hume's philosophy above, by connecting critical analysis and the positing of the problem with the earlier analyses of fabrication, the grounding of expectation, and the creation of relations.103
It is clear that the problem sets a standard that can be used to determine true and false solutions to it, but the evaluation of the problem itself appears to lack a similarly obvious guide. This leads to a question that recurs throughout Deleuze's philosophy, “How can this constitutive power which resides in the problem be reconciled with a norm of the true?”.104 The answer involves a further elucidation of method:
Complementary rule: false problems are of two sorts, “non-existent problems”, defined as problems whose very terms contain a confusion of the “more” and the “less”; and “badly stated” questions, so defined because their terms represent badly analysed composites.105
Non-existent problems arise from a fundamental misconception. In some problems, particularly those involving dualisms, one or some of the terms of the problem appear autonomous but are in fact dependent on the other(s). Bergson provides several analyses
103 For example, this quote from Bergsonism, “... the history of man ... is that of the construction of problems” (p.16) could just as easily have preceded the discussion of e.g. the problem of extending sympathy in Empiricism and Subjectivity 104 Ibid., p. 16 105 Ibid., p. 17
56 of such problems, often linked to non-being, such as the possible, and disorder. In both these cases the possible and disorder consist of the original term plus a negation.106 The possible relies on the actual, and disorder presupposes order. The first concept is needed to generate the second, so that “the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind that throws its image back into the past once it has been enacted”.107 Bergson's argument for this in the case of the possible and disorder will not be covered in detail here. In any case, the tendency to error itself cannot be removed, and while they involve the same structure, each false problem must be critiqued anew with an analysis specific to it. Bergson does however identify a recurrent tendency that leads to false problems: the concepts of the negative and negation. This identification comes in part from Bergson’s ontological account of difference, in which there is no 'space' for the negative, but also from the structure of those concepts. The negative and negation inevitably involve a similar 'parasitic' determination, in this case negation is dependent on a positive and preceding prior term for it to be applied to. For Deleuze, Bergson's method of intuition is inherently anti-Hegelian.
In addition to non-existent problems there are also badly stated problems. These arbitrarily group things that are of different kinds. Because the terms of the problem do not map the actual articulations of the existants they generate a false formulation of the problem. Again Bergson identifies a particular tendency that powers that error, one that is both separate from and consonant with his metaphysical commitments. That tendency is that of thinking solely in terms of differences in degree, and so failing to notice differences in kind. Doing so flattens out crucial distinctions between things, and creates a problem with a distorted topology, that in turn misdirects the solutions that follow from it. Like Kant, Bergson holds that these tendencies to illusion cannot be eliminated. Bergson's method of intuition is means to activate and extend a countervailing critical tendency. This leads on to the second step in the method of intuition.
106 They also require the motivation to create such a negation – this will be discussed further below in relation to Deleuze's use of Nietzsche. 107 Ibid., p. 17
57 “Second rule: Struggle against illusion, rediscover the true differences in kind or articulations of the real”.108
Experience is always a mixture of tendencies, different types, elements and so on that have become combined to produce a continuous stream. In Kant's account of that process experience is the product of a set of syntheses of differences that is unified by the self. That unity promotes a bias in accounts of experience, so that only differences of degree are recognised within it. Intuition is a corrective method that seeks to divide composites so as to establish the elements in them that differ in kind. In this, the analysis must “push beyond experience in a direction drawn from experience itself”. The direction is immanent to the experience itself, but it seeks to determine what specifically conditions that experience yet is not represented within it. Intuition proceeds by seeking the terms that there cannot be a difference in kind between, only a difference in degree. By establishing a single ‘line’ of experience that runs along differences in degree, we can then identify a second line that consists of elements that differ in kind from the first. This gives us two (or more) directions that allow us to identify tendencies, and identify for us two pure presences that cannot be represented. This is a way of working with the mixtures that our experience consists of in a way that avoids false problems and instead locates articulations of the real by going beyond what is given towards the conditions of that experience. These conditions are specific to that experience, and are real instead of being merely abstract ideas. It uses the little segment of the curve that is perceived to determine the real “curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind”.109
There is a further step to tracing the tendencies of experience back to their pure sources: in addition to finding the conditions that this particular experience depends on, an account must be offered of why they have intersected. The point at which they give rise to the thing that we experience is known, but what must also be discovered is a “virtual point, [a] virtual image of the point of departure, which is itself located beyond the turn in experience; and which finally gives us the sufficient reason of the thing”.110
108 Ibid., p. 28 109 Ibid., p. 27 110 Ibid., p. 28
58 Hence a complementary rule to the second rule: the real is not only that which is cut out (se decoupe) according to natural articulations of differences in kind; it is also that which intersects again (se recoupe) along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point.111
This convergence in an ideal point is how a problem suggests and verifies its solution. Once a problem is correctly articulated, then the lines and their intersection define a zone of possible intersection. The point of intersection, once determined, then is verified by checking that that solution does indeed connect the condition back to the conditioned so that there is no gap between them.
“Third Rule: State problems and solve them in terms of time rather than space”.112
Deleuze says that intuition “presupposes duration, and it consists of thinking in terms of duration”.113 Instead of analysing the quantitative homogeneity of space and the differences in degree that it supports, intuition is a method for determining and then investigating differences in kind. Space is not unreal or illusory, merely secondary. Those differences in kind all reside in duration, and ultimately, in Bergson's account it is time that is the power of differing qualitatively from itself. The temporal being of things, their 'rhythm of duration', is a process of differing from themselves (and secondarily, from others), and this self-differing reveals the nature of those things. Identity is linked to change rather than permanence, and impermanence is the deeper, more revealing aspect of experience.
The intersection of the human duration with other durations is what allows the method of intuition to function. Human duration is used to reveal other durations through their differing. In doing so intuitions occur, relations are created, and a problem constructed and solved through an investigation of differences in kind. In the subsequent section of Bergsonism Deleuze extends his account of the virtual by distinguishing and contrasting two types of multiplicity, and substituting the two for the
111 Ibid., p. 29 112 Ibid., p. 31 113 Ibid., p. 31
59 concepts of the one and the many. Two types of multiplicity are revealed in the way Bergson carves up space and time into,
multiplicities of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation, of difference in degree; it is a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual. The other type of multiplicity appears in a pure duration: it is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers.114
The virtuality of the second type of multiplicity, qualitative multiplicity, always contains more than what is currently actual. It retains hidden powers and changes in nature as it continues to differentiate itself. In contrast the other type of multiplicity, numerical multiplicity, already has its differences fully actualised (even if they are not currently realised, their realisation will not change anything significantly). Qualitative multiplicity contains more than we can think of. Thinking in terms of numerical multiplicity alone covers over the other type and reduces differences to numerical difference upon a single continuum.
The remainder of Bergsonism covers Bergson’s account of memory and the past, the contemporaneity of the past with the present, and the virtual co-existence of differing degrees of contraction of the past. Subsequent to that is the re-analysis of memory and present, duration and space, to determine whether there is a single duration or a plurality of durations, along with a discussion of life and the biological focused on Bergson’s Creative Evolution. I will not provide an account of these here as my focus is on the methodological elements of the book rather than the more metaphysical components.
Conclusion Through his historical studies Deleuze has followed a path that constructs an alternate history of post-Kantian philosophy. That trajectory attempts to adopt and refine a kind of empiricism in order to solve problems with Kant’s transcendental
114 Ibid., p. 38
60 approach. It also attempts to prioritise difference, flux and creativity over the static and the identical. Deleuze will assemble all the elements from this first series of books and then attempt to repeat them in an original way, in his own voice, in Difference and Repetition. The next chapter will consist of an analysis of Difference and Repetition. Before that however I will briefly review what Deleuze has taken from these studies. Gueroult’s focus on system over anthropology has an obvious compatibility with Deleuze’s project. The analysis of the structure of concepts, and the stress on the order of reasons promote a focus on the ‘terrain’ of concepts and the possible movements over it; this will remain a lifelong influence on Deleuze’s thinking. From Maimon’s work Deleuze makes use of the focus on genesis rather than conditions of possibility, the role of difference in the constitution of experience, and the suggestion of using a ‘coalition system’ itself. Hume provides a number of elements for Deleuze’s subsequent philosophy: positing habit as the foundation of the self allows for the replacement of a fixed or transcendental identity, with the added benefit of being able to generalise habit, in the form of repetition, beyond just human experience. Hume’s scepticism and principle of the externality of relations allows for the injection of motion and novelty into thought and the world. It also provides a position from which to form a new basis for conceptualising the practice of philosophy: as experiment rather than tribunal. In Bergson’s work Deleuze finds a way to resolve the problem of grounding a kind of knowledge that is neither empirical nor of a transcendent realm, through the method of intuition and the doctrine of the virtual. The account of problems and solutions also helps flesh out that account of the grounding of experience. Nietzsche’s methods for the analysis and evaluation of values on the basis of forces allow Deleuze to relate differences in concrete modes of existence back to deeper differences. The associated perspectivism, and the multiplicity of forces, will feed into Difference and Repetition’s development of the concept of a multiplicity. And finally, in his work on Proust Deleuze draws out a concept of learning that will recur throughout Difference and Repetition. Despite Deleuze’s criticisms of phenomenology the account of apprenticeship in the work of Proust is the fullest account that he will ever present of the radicalised and mobile analysis of experience that his philosophy substitutes in its place. Proust and Signs humanises elements of Deleuze’s philosophy that in Difference and Repetition will be presented very abstractly.
61 Chapter 3
On Difference and Repetition
Difference and Repetition contains all the elements of a traditional metaphysics: an account of the self, an epistemology, a philosophy of time, and so on. It also contains a history of philosophy, a revision and reanimation of Kant’s critical project, a manifesto, a philosophy of calculus, and more. Although it is referenced and treated as the keystone of a system, it would be more accurate to describe it as a palimpsest across which competing purposes pile up and vie for prominence. Partly this is due to the circumstances and requirements of the work (it was Deleuze’s principal thesis for the Doctorat D’Etat), partly from Deleuze’s own admitted inability to produce the work he hoped to, and partly the end product of a deliberate attempt to produce a new style more fitting of the content. Interpretations of Difference and Repetition often read it in conjunction with a second narrative, or through a particular lens: Husserl for Hughes, Kant for Bryant, classical themes and arguments in metaphysics for Williams, chaos and systems theory for Protevi, and so on.1 The benefit of this as a hermeneutic strategy is that it helps cut through the ‘noise’ and phantom echoes that come from the heavy use of ‘collage’ and circumvents the minimal directives within the work about the purpose and structure of the broader whole. Such approaches also run the risk of covering over the elements of the book that are the most singular. What I hope to show is how one could read Difference and Repetition in tandem with the Deleuze of the earlier historical studies to amplify what is most Deleuzian about Difference and Repetition to reveal a ‘philosophically clean shaven’ Deleuze.2 This Deleuze is a transcendental empiricist. The secondary literature often references Deleuze’s claim to be working with a ‘transcendental empiricism’. Usually this claim is unpacked with a quotation about ‘a set of conditions no wider than that which they condition’ about which no more is said. I will argue that there is sufficient detail in the text so that, together with the trajectory
1 Hughes, J. Deleuze's "Difference and Repetition": A Reader's Guide (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009). Bryant, L. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern university press, 2008). Williams, J. Gilles Deleuze's "Difference and Repetition": A Critical Introduction and Guide, 2 ed. (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Bonta, M and Protevi, J. Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary (Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 2 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. xx.
63 of the earlier works, one can glean a fairly detailed method there waiting to be used, a method that is then enacted in the post-Difference and Repetition works, albeit not without some further modification. The Deleuze that emerges from this excavation is a pragmatic thinker proposing a new theory and practice of education and learning adequate to the flux of the world.
Difference and Repetition is organised into five chapters enclosed by an introduction and a chapter length conclusion. The first two chapters analyse difference and repetition and give an account of the actual world of our experience, but one that points out the ways in which our concepts and understanding fall short, and why they will not do. The third chapter analyses what it is at work in philosophy and our thought that encourages those misapprehensions and blocks the creation of true alternatives. The fourth and fifth chapters lay out what the deeper structure of reality, and how it interacts with and produces the actual. The book simultaneously has a second structure, one that resists easy summary and diagramming. The core elements of the book form a series of repetitions so that one encounters them multiple times, in different degrees of explication, and in connection with different themes and problems. For example, the problematic nature of ideas is discussed at length in chapter four but it appears in the book long before then, such as in the discussion of the anticipation of the future as need in chapter two. This structure is Deleuze’s attempt to use collage as a new, more suitable style for his philosophical aims. If Difference and Repetition is a work of science fiction, then the parallel world it shows us is the ‘volcanic’ realm of the intense and the virtual rumbling beneath our feet, a clamour that echoes through the whole of the book. Nonetheless the second half of the book remains the locus for the fleshing out the ‘superior empiricism’ of the concept, since it is the intense world of differences “in which we find the reason behind the qualities and the being of the sensible”.3
Difference and Repetition begins with a winding, reference-strewn survey of prior accounts of difference and repetition. It quickly blossoms into a wide-ranging analysis of the history of western philosophy, and the systematic ‘shackling’ of difference to a representational model and a ‘fourfold root’ of identity, opposition, analogy and resemblance.4 In Deleuze’s narrative the concept of difference has
3 Ibid., p. 69. 4 Ibid., p. 38.
64 undergone a process of domestication by being made to fit the requirements of representation. Instead of a free and wild difference we think instead, for example, a reduced and relative difference that delineates two closely related identities. The challenge of thinking difference, and repetition, in their own right and in their own terms turns out to involve reversing an (oddly Heideggerian) history of the forgetting of difference. I will not go through Deleuze’s staging of this history, his analyses and criticism of Aristotle, Leibniz, Hegel, et al. Nor will I rehearse his arguments about, say, the univocity of being or the philosophy of time he presents. Williams and Somers-Hall do that, and more, admirably (and to about as full an extent as it can be done).5 My focus is on foregrounding the subterranean account of the encounter and learning that Deleuze presents. This, together with an analysis of the account of the problematic and individuation given in chapters four and five of Difference and Repetition, allows for an evaluation of the practical consequences of the work. I take seriously Deleuze’s repeated claims to be an empiricist and wish to show what that empiricism might consist of. Within the broader narrative of this thesis I hope to try and demonstrate why Difference and Repetition is both a break with and a continuation of the earlier historical studies, and why, ultimately, it is also a failure.
I will give a summarised presentation of some of the elements from the first three chapters to provide a context for the later chapters, to frame my argument, and to account for the dynamics of the work that lead me to evaluate the later chapters as I do. If, as I argue, the later chapters fail in their aim, we will need to know what problems they are meant to solve if we are to judge their failure. The core claim and consequent aim of Difference and Repetition is usually presented as being that:
All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical ‘effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative.6
5 Williams, J. Gilles Deleuze's "Difference and Repetition": A Critical Introduction and Guide. 2nd ed. (Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Somers-Hall, H. Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 6 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. xvii.
65 Deleuze sets out to show the intersection of these two ideas: non-conceptual intrinsic difference, as well as a kind of repetition that is not simply a difference without concept of two instances of the same thing. The everyday world of our experience is the world of representation. We take this world to be one in which identity accounts for the distinctions and regularities that populate it. Digging down past generality and substitution and exchange reveals secret inner actions that take place in response to something singular, something that falls outside generality. Movement implies tangles, superimpositions, coexistence and plurality. So the task is to think through real movement, along with an account of how they become covered over by representation and the general, which will turn out to be the dramatization of ideas. Difference and repetition are the two necessary conditions for such movements, and the two are entwined; difference “forms the essence of that in which every repetition consists” while “repetition is the formless being of all difference”.7 Differences are mutually implicated and complicated differences, systems of differences, and repetitions are selections of differences. “Difference lies between two repetitions” but also, “repetition lies between two differences”.8 Repetition allows passage from one order of difference to another: repetition is the differenciator of difference. The form that these repetitions or contractions take in the actual are defined by Deleuze as passive syntheses. These syntheses are passive in that there is no co-ordinating or directing agency to them, nor any enduring substratum that they ‘belong’ to – the constituted synthesis is nothing beyond the moment of its constituting action. Each contraction then is a synthesis of time “Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants”.9 The complex combinations and rhythms of tiny durations, and their habit-like recurrence, result in the composition of more complex figures. Wheat, for example, is nothing but “a contraction of the earth and humidity”.10 Swarms of habits cluster and resonate, form levels and blocks, “The nods of the chicken’s head accompany its cardiac pulsations in an organic synthesis before they serve as pecks in the perceptual synthesis with grain”.11 These references of contractions and temporal syntheses to other such repetitions create signs so that the world is already saturated
7 Ibid., p. 28, p. 69. 8 Ibid., p. 97. 9 Ibid., p. 91. 10 Ibid., p.96 11 Ibid., p.97
66 with signals and meanings independently of human lives. Conscious action and experience are constituted by a particular kind of contraction of elements of repetition so that our active syntheses depend upon the multitude of tiny habits, the multitude of passive syntheses that we are.12 Those active syntheses that humans perform are just one sort of contraction that happens to be reflective of what is contracted and intended in a way that passive syntheses are not. Similarly, the ‘artificial’ signs of active syntheses (as opposed to natural signs of passive syntheses) depend on reflective representation. Consciousness then is a thin sparkling film floating atop the great depths of unconscious repetitions.13 Deleuze also qualifies the account he presents by noting that the passive syntheses themselves are sub-representative.14
Repetition-contractions have another characteristic in addition to their signification, that of having a question-answer structure. The selection of differences poses a question or prepares a problematic field, and the contraction that results answers or resolves that question-problem. Each contraction affirms its own small creativity by constituting itself as an answer to the problematic difference that stimulated it.
The account of repetition is extended into the basis of a philosophy of time. All three syntheses of time (past, present, future) “are revealed as Repetition, but in very different modes”.15 The living present with its anticipations of future and memories of the past, the passing of that present only on the condition of a perpetually past time that was never present, and finally the future proper all involve repetitions. Of these, the repetition of the future occupies a special position. The repetition of the future is the eternal return, and the eternal return “is the univocity of being, the effective realisation of that univocity”.16 The eternal “is at once both production of repetition on the basis of difference and selection of difference on the basis of repetition”.17 The selection that the eternal return carries out is the selection of only those things that “extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing into another” so that only difference
12 Ibid., p.93 13 Deleuze is explicit about the connection between contraction and a kind of self-experience, even for the inorganic, describing contractions as a kind of ‘contemplation’, and so committing himself to some kind of panpsychism. The similarity of Deleuze’s contemplations with Whitehead’s prehensions is one of a great number of affinities between Difference and Repetition and Process and Reality. 14 Ibid., p.106 15 Ibid., p.117 16 Ibid., p.51 17 Ibid., p.52
67 returns, and only in the form of intensities rather than identities. Metamorphosis is the only constant.18 The future is the force that drives the repetition of difference; novelty supplies the ‘secret coherence’ of the actual world as well as its continual perturbation and disruption.19
One of the most striking and repeated characteristics of the scenario that Deleuze presents is the degree to which the roots and true nature of the experienced world are hidden. There are two components to this: one is the tendency of difference to conceal or cover over itself so that “the vanishing of difference is precisely inseparable from an “effect” of which we are victims”.20 The other is the distortion produced by the system of representation:
Representation is a site of transcendental illusion. This illusion comes in several forms, four interrelated forms which correspond particularly to thought, sensibility, the idea and being. In effect, thought is covered over by an “image” made up of postulates which distort both its operation and its genesis. These postulates culminate in the position of an identical thinking subject, which functions as a principle of identity for concepts in general. 21
This hiddenness and distortion is the reason for Deleuze’s insistent criticisms of phenomenology and phenomenological approaches since they lack the power to resist those illusions:
The whole of Phenomenology is an epi-phenomenology.22 Those who bear the negative know not what they do: they take the shadow for reality, they encourage phantoms, they uncouple consequences from premises and they give epiphenomena the value of phenomena and essences.23
18 Ibid., p.52 19 Ibid., p.113 20 Ibid., p.287 21 Ibid., p.143, p.334 22 Ibid., p.63 23 Ibid., p.67
68 The phenomenological fails to dig deep enough. It still deals with the world of representation, which does not capture the swarming differences that are its transcendental condition. Phenomenological approaches also fail to ward thought against the false metaphysics of the negative that draws its concepts and its model of movement only from the play of effects within experience.
Difference remains perpendicular to the world we experience, and oblique even in respect to the emergence of the new within it: difference “can only ever coincide with a historical moment but never be confused with it”.24 This resistance or hiddenness of difference has the effect of raising the stakes for Deleuze’s system: each iteration of the resistance of difference to representation increases its potential scope and power, but at the cost of increasing the stress placed on Deleuze’s arguments. Deleuze’s arguments for his system lack the necessity that would make his position unassailable (this is discussed in greater detail below), they are presented not as an ironclad chain of deductions but rather as an experiment in constructing an alternative system of thought. One reason to foreground the role that learning plays in the work is to attempt to ‘lower the stakes’ by identifying additional, underappreciated grounds within the text supporting the same conclusions.
The Image of Thought The bridging chapter ‘The Image of Thought’ serves as a transition between the two earlier diagnostic and preparatory chapters, and the two subsequent chapters that present the deeper structure of difference and analyse the process of the actualisation of ideas. One of the divisions that Deleuze introduces in it is the platonic distinction between encountering objects of recognition that pose no challenge for thought and encountering things that disturb thought and force us to think. This second kind of experience is not one of structured, tactical doubt but one in which an involuntary act of thinking occurs, one which, despite its contingency, forces itself upon us with its own kind of necessity. I shall have more to say upon this in a moment, first however I wish to highlight several elements of the contrasting style of thinking.
24 Ibid., p.66
69 His claim is that this first mode of thought implicitly pre-supposes a particular relation between thought and the world. Both the conceptualisations of thought and the acts of thinking that issue from this mode of thought depend on an implied common sense and good sense. These preconceptions form an image of thought which, as the foundation for ‘properly’ philosophical thought, predetermines the course of that thinking. In this image, thought is at home in the world. There is an essential congruence between thinker and thought, thought and the true, the true and the world. A natural capacity for thought and an affinity for truth are accompanied by a naturally occurring desire for truth and an inherent good will of the thinker. The assumption of a natural fidelity and trajectory to thought encourage establishment of a method for thought, but a method that is indifferent to its particular content. That assumption also pre-conceives the nature of the types of disruption to thought as errors, mere temporary detours or disorientations on the way, as thought will, in the end, infallibly find and reach its goal. These assumptions are not necessarily pernicious, but still represent a particular conception of the state of things that needs to be argued for rather than uncritically adopted. Although specific counter examples may exist they do not counter the in-principle legitimacy and comprehensiveness of the image of thought.
Furthermore, this dogmatic image of thought also directs philosophy towards a specific transcendental distribution of the faculties of thought. The structure that it locks in is that of recognition, where all the powers of the mind coordinate without conflict on the same object. The common accord of the faculties produces a common sense; their object similarly bears an ideal of harmonious distribution. Good sense coordinates the empirical contributions of each power of the mind appropriately for the objects that are qualified. ‘Appropriately’ is of course a loaded term, and one that despite its alleged transcendental basis, can only be determined through recourse to the empirical. Through all of this “the model [of recognition] remains sovereign and defines the orientation of the philosophical analysis of what it means to think. Such an orientation is a hindrance to philosophy”.25
This image of thought does not necessarily have to lead to doctrines that accord with the doxa of the day or produce militant defences of ‘common sense’ to be
25 Ibid., p.170
70 pernicious. This image of thought warps the whole of what is constructed upon it. Deleuze’s contention is that this image is a moral one. This is because the alleged affinity of thought and the truth, self and world, can only be grounded by the good (by an essentially moral picture of the world).26 Furthermore Deleuze does not argue that acts of recognition do not occur, or that they do not form a sizeable part of everyday life.27 What he takes issue with is that this ‘image’ takes one particular empirical exercise of thought, and then elevates it as the fundamental template for the transcendental structure of thought. Both the bias of the selection of just one act of thought, and the mundanity of the example chosen, produce consequences. This mildness seeps through into its issue. Recognition, with its inbuilt comparison to the already known, is inherently conservative. It creates an ideal orthodoxy: it is much harder to break with doxa when the system is weighted towards accord and agreement. If instead we were to take cases at the limits, heightened cases of great risk, or examples of pathology, disjunction and disaster then quite different models would result. This is just what Deleuze’s preliminary analyses of repetition and difference attempted to show. The criteria used to sort and determine cases of repetition prejudged repetition by making sameness the basis for it, thus misrecognising and excluding its real nature. This is why for Deleuze the pressing danger that thinking risks is not error but mis-cognising the distribution and relation of the elements and sense of the matter at hand: mistaking the banal for the profound, the ordinary for the distinctive, the distinctions and relations of linguistic terms for the delineations of the real.28
Deleuze outlines a dissymmetry between passive and active syntheses, between difference and identity, and he likewise elevates problems over their solutions. There is a tendency to emphasise and value the search for solutions to philosophical and existential problems, for obvious reasons. Problems, in this view, are not difficult to find, as they thrust themselves upon us. Deleuze however, drawing on his earlier work in Bergsonism, reverses this tendency and give greater emphasis to the construction of problems. In the everyday view a problem’s solution may have no scope for variation, such as in cases of arithmetic, or it may be more open ended and permit a degree of creativity in finding its solution, as, for example, in designing a bridge. In either case it
26 Ibid., p.167 27 Ibid., p.171 28 There are other dangers to thought that Deleuze mentions: stupidity, malevolence, madness and so on.
71 is the answer that is significant. But Deleuze’s position is that the givenness of problems is an illusion that covers over the conditions particular to the occurrence of that specific situation, and that the consequent emphasis on solutions that comes from taking problems to be only readymade is misplaced. There are two aspects to this illusion: a natural illusion where the problem is traced from the divisions of common sense (axioms, theorems, opinions, etc.) followed by a philosophical illusion in which problems are evaluated according to their solvability and their form is modelled upon the relations and possibilities present in the propositions used to describe it. Deleuze’s criticism of this approach is that it is heedless of the risk of creating false or poorly constructed problems. Problems are not given ready-made, even if they seem to appear as such. The way in which a problem is construed determines the scope of its solutions; a false problem produces disastrous solutions. Problems exist apart from the propositions that express them; great care must be taken to ensure that the constructed problem conforms to the extra propositional situation from which it arises. A solution separated from the real conditions of the problem remains abstract and general in a negative sense.29 An answer may be consonant with its question, but if that question is trivial or banal its correctness counts for little.
This is where the polemic against sedentary distributions of being makes its force felt. Every metaphysics that dictates a closed set of categories, every philosophy that traces its transcendental structures from particular concrete scenarios, every political philosophy that legislates the status quo as the natural state of affairs (even if that natural is a constructed or artificial situation, such as that of contracts or markets) runs the risk of inscribing the empirical as the transcendental, foreclosing the possibilities for thought and life. Here the deepest aim of Difference and Repetition becomes apparent; rather than a philosophical exercise, revitalisation of selected concepts, or system building it aims at liberation for the sake of increasing our practical powers and our courage:
Furthermore, if the truth be told, none of this [analysis and subsequent counter- system] would amount to much were it not for the moral presuppositions and practical implications of such a distortion. We have seen all that this valorisation
29 Ibid., p.202
72 of the negative signified, including the conservative spirit of such an enterprise, the platitude of the affirmations supposed to be engendered thereby and the manner in which we are led away from the most important task, that of determining problems and realising in them our power of creation and decision.30
The chapter ‘The Image of Thought’ turns out to be not merely a transition but the fulcrum for the whole of the work. It opens up the site at which Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism will be situated. It does this by sketching out what thinking free from the yoke of the dogmatic image of thought might look like.31 Deleuze’s avowed ambition of ‘reversing Platonism’ ultimately seeks liberation. What if other forces than truth, other powers were to stimulate thought? What will this model look like if it cannot count on the good will and pre-destination of thought? What if the distribution of being was not ordered and sedentary but mobile and intransitive in its relations? Such a philosophy would escape the dogmatic image of thought and would form a system adequate to the encounters of thought with the resistant and the unrecognisable. It would require,
the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.32
This encounter cannot be with something capable of being represented. It is re-iterated throughout Difference and Repetition that difference constantly escapes our experience so difference itself cannot be the object either. Deleuze’s solution is to cast the encounter as an experience of the limit between the two, an encounter not of “a quality but a sign. It is not sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is therefore in a
30 Ibid., p.337 31 This is why Deleuze retrospectively describes that chapter as the one “that now seems the most necessary and the most concrete.” Ibid., p. xv 32 Ibid., p.176
73 certain sense the imperceptible”.33 This liminal experience engenders an apprenticeship. Now, Deleuze describes this process of learning from two distinct perspectives: one is of the transcendental exercise of the faculties as they encounter their limits, and their involuntary transmission of the force of the encounter from one to the other in a chain of discordant accord. The second is from the perspective of the exploration of Ideas. The two are equivalent to one another.34 Most of the secondary literature focuses on the faculties model of the encounter whereas I will focus on the perspective of the exploration of ideas. In this construal of the encounter, to learn is to come into contact with an Idea, where Ideas are objective, but not actual. They exist instead virtually (obviously Deleuze again draws on the work of Bergsonism here). The structure of these problematic-Ideas will be discussed in more detail below. To learn is to “enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the idea, and into their corresponding singularities”.35 When one learns to ride a bicycle one must first learn to connect one’s body with the bicycle and to the new relationships with gravity and movement that it opens up: one must learn different styles of comportment (seated, standing on the pedals) that avoid the new danger of toppling over. One learns to turn through the movement of the arms instead of the legs, read new signs of speed (the air rushing in one’s face), form new views of distance and timing and so on. All this is done not by theoretical analysis but by conjoining one’s body and actions and affects with the bicycle and attempting to enter into motion, perhaps with judicious pointers from another. This is a process whereby the actual relations (falling, wobbling, etc.) correct one’s perceptions until the problematic encounter has been resolved. The problematic field permits multiple resolutions: along with the obvious mastery of bicycling, there is the closing off of that problematic field through fear or permanent injury, the transition to further adjacent fields (from bicycles to gliders, intensifying an element of the movement) and so on.
This concentrated but still embryonic account of the lived experience of an encounter at the end of chapter three forms the kernel of Deleuze’s counter-system. It is this that necessitates the rigorous and resolutely non-phenomenological foundation that
33 Ibid., p.176 34 “The exploration of Ideas and the elevation of each faculty to its transcendent exercise amounts to the same thing.” Ibid., p. 204 35 Ibid., p.204
74 is outlined over the subsequent two chapters. Accordingly, the impact and value of Difference and Repetition rests on its final two chapters, where the systematic basis of this thought without image is presented. Without them (or something equivalent in their place), the book would merely be a punk-philosophical tract screaming a nihilistic no- escape scenario, or a tepid and mystical affirmation of a ‘difference’ that lies forever on the cusp of the phenomenological. The stakes are clear: if the final chapters cannot support the weight of the system sufficiently then the project fails.
In the course of the critical analysis and counter-history of philosophy in Difference and Repetition Deleuze has set himself several challenges that he must overcome in order to complete his metaphysical system. Some of these he sets out explicitly, others are implicit in the criticisms he makes of other philosophies. His central project requires him to give an account of difference that shows how identity can be merely the effect of difference while also still explaining the predominance of identity, recognition, the same and so on in the world we experience, along with the process by which this world is produced. Doing so will complete the reversal of an (ultimately moral) model that distinguishes between and hierarchises originals, copies, and simulacra. 36 This will allow difference to be thought in its own right rather than in relation to an external ground or standard and makes difference a unilateral or self- affirming distinction.37 His project is “no longer the Platonic project of opposing the cosmos to chaos, … . It is indeed the very opposite: the immanent identity of chaos and cosmos”.38 Deleuze needs to posit this ‘difference-in-itself’ in a way that makes it compatible with distinctions and structure instead of being some sort of indescribable hyper-chaos or formless mist. If there is just an indistinct fog of difference then our structured world would be a rather miraculous result (and the usefulness of his philosophy would be quite limited). There are two models of such an indeterminateness that he explicitly sets out to avoid. The first is that of the undifferenciated abyss or the black nothingness in which all distinctions are dissolved. The second is that of the white nothingness in which all determinations exist in their distinctness but are indifferent or unconnected to each other.
36 Ibid., p.80 37 Ibid., p.36 38 Ibid., p.156
75 Deleuze’s difference must take the form of a primary system that produces the secondary effects of opposition, analogy, resemblance, identity, it must be differentiated and connected with itself, and it must be able to relate to itself and differenciate itself without mediation. The trick will be showing how we can plausibly claim to think of a differentiated difference, and providing a compelling account of the process that leads to the genesis of our sensible experience without reinjecting the model-copy template back into his system. Doing so merely duplicates the empirical and presupposes what is meant to be explained, effectively separating the real conditions of a problem from its actual solutions. The account must at the same time avoid being overly general. Deleuze has been explicit about what his transcendental empiricism will require: it must provide the conditions of real experience rather than the more general conditions of any possible experience.39 This means that it will be an account of an intrinsic genesis instead of an indifferent relationship where the conditioned is merely impressed by its conditions. An example may make this clearer. In Kant’s system of critical philosophy one of the conditions for sensible experience is an a priori manifold of time and space. Time and space are a necessary condition for any sensible experience whatsoever. However knowing that does not tell us anything specific about the form that any particular sensible experience takes. Nothing about the a priori-ity of time and space makes any connection with my tactile experience of typing these words on a keyboard. They are not sufficient by themselves and so merely condition that experience. In contrast Deleuze has set himself the goal of having only the conditions required for that particular phenomena and no other, thus making them the conditions for the genesis of that thing.
At the same time Deleuze must also avoid problems that come with an over- determined system. The imprimatur of the original upon its duplicates is obviously one kind of over-determination. Furthermore, contra Leibniz and Hegel, the connections and series of differences must, overall, tend towards divergence and disjunction in order not to produce an over-arching order, thus reintroducing identity at a higher level within his system.
39 Ibid., p.192
76 It must also be sure to show how the account it gives connects up to the process of apprenticeship and the existence and functioning of signs, since these are the reasons we have for supposing that there are greater significance to movements of differences and repetitions. This means that it must show how the institution of the system of representation and the apparent cancelling out of ‘pure’ differences comes about.
Part of the work required to make such a system comprehensible has already been accomplished in the presentation of the doctrine of the univocity of being in the chapter ‘Difference in Itself’ (which I will not discuss here).40 The final two chapters of Difference and Repetition present an account of Ideas and Intensity; the two facets of the virtual that complete the system by detailing the structure of Ideas along with the process of their actualisation via the intermediation of intensities. Ideas are virtual multiplicities, made of relations between differential elements, while intensities are implicated multiplicities, made up of relations between asymmetrical elements. Intensities direct the course of the actualisation of ideas and determine the cases of solution for problems. In outline, the continual auto-differentiation of virtual relations among ideas feeds a process of individuation involving intensive differences, leading to the ‘dramatisation’ or production of spatio-temporal dynamisms that cascade into the differenciation of articulated, extended, discrete physical existence.
Ideas are ‘virtual’ structures, and are one of the conditions for the genesis of actual phenomena. They are real, but not actual. They are objective elements of reality, but are without spatio-temporal existence. Ideas are not known directly then, but are determined only insofar as they can be established to be at work in what is experienced.41 When it comes to characterising the relationship between Ideas and phenomena Deleuze will attempt to sidestep both the one-many, original-copy templates as well as the creation of a foundation upon an essence by introducing the concept of the multiplicity to define the Idea (collaging it from Riemann). Deleuze writes, “An Idea is an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity”.42 Dimensions refer to the number of variables or co-ordinates that it has. An Idea is continuous in that it is not constituted of atomistic sub-components but is made up of a system of inter-related and reciprocally
40 Ibid., p.45 41 Ibid., p.215 42 Ibid., p.230
77 determining differences that do not exist independent of the system they form part of. And finally, an Idea is defined because it is neither indistinct, nor indiscriminate, nor undifferentiated, nor all-inclusive; the range of the continuous changes of those variables defines the Idea. This definition is not in reference to external factors or scales; ideas are not placed or located. Because an Idea is a multiplicity there is no relationship of resemblance between it and its instantiations. One of the most striking features of the two chapters is the repeated use of mathematical elements to explain their structure together with the extreme abstraction of the account.43 Both chapters are heavily technical and resolutely inhuman. Why the use of these mathematical figures?
Extensity does not account for the individuations that occur within it, since such explanations already presuppose the individuated and distributed matter that they seek to explain.44 In Deleuze’s view when we are driven to go beyond what we think and experience,
We sense something which is contrary to the laws of nature; we think something which is contrary to the principles of thought. Moreover, even if the production of difference is by definition “inexplicable”, how can we avoid implicating the inexplicable at the heart of thought itself? How can the unthinkable not lie at the heart of thought? Or delirium at the heart of good sense?45
The delicate balance Deleuze must find is to provide the sufficient reason of sensibility while also not contorting difference too far into the shape of the recognisable. The challenge is a steep one, and at points one wonders whether the language grasps what it aims at (or if it is even possible to tell if it did not): “The elements of the multiplicity must have neither sensible form nor conceptual signification, nor, therefore, any assignable function”.46 Inexplicable indeed. I can only conclude that Deleuze aims not at proving the inescapable necessity of his speculative system alone, but at the less
43 Ibid., p.346: “The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.” 44 Ibid., p.288 45 Ibid., p.286 46 Ibid., p.231
78 strenuous goal of establishing the plausibility of it.47 The borrowed use of mathematically expressed relations and processes then is to push thought as far from the experienced as it can go, the better to avoid falling back into the tracing of epi- phenomenon. It is perhaps even fitting that an attempt to escape a metaphysics of substance and essence through the prioritisation of pure movement, pure becoming find an alliance in the abstract functions of mathematics.48 Deleuze’s defense of this use of mathematics is remarkably brief; it consists of stating that the relationships expressed in differential calculus or group theory express a series of relationships that are not essentially mathematical in themselves and so are not used metaphorically (which states the presumption rather than simply describing a fact).49 Deleuze’s claim is that this mathematics gives us “the revelation of a dialectic which points beyond mathematics”.50
Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference In ‘Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference’ Deleuze introduces mathematical concepts from differential calculus to show how such Ideas could be thought, and to flesh out what relationship our second-hand knowledge of them stands in relation to the Ideas in themselves.51 Differential calculus is a branch of mathematics used to establish rates of change. Differentiation is the process of finding the derivative for a function (determining the gradient of a tangent on a curve at a particular place), which also gives the applicable rate of change there. One of the remarkable characteristics of the differential relation is that when the values of x and y in the differential are zero the relation or ratio of x to y still exists, and is not equal to zero. The differential dy/dx expresses “the universal of a function independently of its particular numerical values” so that the relation is external to its terms.52 Virtual Ideas then are akin to ‘pure’ relations, existing apart from concrete determinations (as Deleuze often writes, they are differentiated but not differenciated).
47 Aspects of his style seem connected with this too: in the 386 pages of text that make up the body of the text ‘must’ appears 381 times, yet the heavy use of such an emphatic is an odd occurrence given the indirectness of his prose. 48 It is also ironic that a philosophy so resolutely anti-deterministic should have recourse to a science focused on exactly the opposite. 49 Ibid., p.229 50 Ibid., p.227 51 Ibid., p.217 52 Ibid., p.57
79 The second aspect of differential calculus that Deleuze draws on is a method of analysis. A function can be described as a series of distinctive and regular points. Distinctive points, or singularities are those that mark a change in the curve, such as reaching the minimum or maximum of that section of the curve before it changes direction. Regular points fill the space between distinctive points. Establishing the distinctive points and the regular points that lie between them allows for the generation of the entire function. Those singularities in a sense extend over and determine the neighbouring points, up until the region of another singularity. Those singularities may be convergent or divergent with the first; the function may be continuous or discontinuous at that point. An analysis of a function then establishes its singular points, which can be both quantitative (tangent, rate of change) and qualitative (points of inflection, maxima, and minima). An analysis of Ideas then will seek to find thresholds, remarkable points, points of transformation, limits, and zones of connection with other multiplicities. The singularities that define it are ‘pre-individual’.53 From this Deleuze extracts a model in which the differentials are “simultaneously undetermined, determinable and determination”.54 Differentials cannot be determined in themselves, but can through entering into reciprocal relations become determinable; for which there are actually determined values. This reciprocal synthesis is the source of the production of real objects.
The other notable feature of Ideas is that they have a problematic structure. The actual that results from the reciprocal synthesis is the solution to the virtual problem. The problem determines the solution, but it does not determine it totally or in a deterministic fashion. The determination it imparts comes from its singularities. In addition, each solution is only ever a partial solution- one out of a greater set of solutions. The same problem can be re-worked and re-solved in a variety of ways in diverse circumstances. Actual ‘things’ incarnate solutions to idea-problems; things are multiplicities in so far as they actualise ideas. The actualised solution covers over and conceals the extra-propositional character of the problem to which it was a response. Ideas become hidden, effaced in their solutions, solutions which they are still immanent in but transcendent to. Recovering them from their hiddenness requires the assessment
53 Ibid., p.223 54 Ibid., p.217
80 of what is important and what is not in the solution, the determination of the distinctive and singular points from the regular and ordinary.
Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible In the final chapter ‘Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible’ Deleuze’s thesis is that difference is expressed in relation to spatial extension and the qualities that fill it. In experience differences have become distributed and stabilised, but still remain able to be sensed as that which gives diversity to the sensed, and that which acts as a condition for and accompanies change. “The vanishing of difference is precisely inseparable from an “effect” of which we are victims. … not only are there sensory illusions but there is also a transcendental physical illusion”.55 Even if difference escapes us, it is implicated as the inexplicable at the heart of thought and sense. Difference must be thought as that which creates diversity.56 If the structure of ideas matches that of the reciprocal synthesis of dy/dx, then the following asymmetrical synthesis of the intensive is akin to a partial derivative of that differential.
The account Deleuze presents of the creation of that diversity equates difference with intensity. As intensity “is simultaneously the imperceptible and that which can only be sensed”, sensed not in itself, but only with “the qualities which cover it and the extensity in which it is distributed”.57 Deleuze’s account has two parts to it: one part is akin to a transcendental argument and a challenge, the other a speculative solution modelled, once again, on mathematical structures.
In the first, Deleuze argues that for qualities, extensity, depth perception, etc. to occur there must be conditions that are themselves not elements in experience. He also sets out a series of hurdles, in keeping with his program, that must also be cleared: the explanation cannot treat space as a fait accompli that anticipates perception, must be structured in such a way as to be non-representational and a-individual, it must avoid appeals to common and good sense, and it must avoid the ‘black nothingness’ of the undifferentiated abyss and the ‘white nothingness’ of unconnected determinations.58
55 Ibid., p. 287 56 Ibid., p. 285 57 Ibid., p. 290 58 Ibid., p. 28
81 The somewhat arbitrary choice of topic of the thermodynamics of Carnot that opens up the chapter gives an example of how this illusion works. Carnot’s analysis takes as its starting point a scenario in which differences in intensity are already constituted and distributed; ready to be set to work. The scenarios used are a particular set of empirical examples (steam engines; mechanistic and enclosed simple systems that are then rendered abstractly). The conclusions drawn are taken to be one instance of a universal process (ultimately leading to the heat death of the universe). Doing so simply assumes that the cosmos is a closed system constituted just as our local portion of it is assumed to be. The initial omission of the issue of genesis is finally supplemented by a rule assuming that no further creation occurs. Carnot’s account has fallen prey to the illusion presented by the movements that cancel the differences in intensity through their expression in extensity. Our sensory setup shunts us towards this conclusion since it can only grasp intensity as extrinsic (as mediated) rather than as it exists intrinsically. In doing so the empirical is mistaken for the transcendental,
In terms of the distinction between transcendental and empirical principles, an empirical principle is one which governs a particular domain. … The transcendental principle does not govern any domain but gives the domain to be governed to a given empirical principle; it accounts for the subjection of a domain to a principle. The domain is created by difference of intensity, and given by this difference to an empirical principle according to which and in which the difference itself is cancelled.59
Deleuze’s solution is similar to the account of the passive syntheses in the earlier chapters of Difference and Repetition. Just as in the account of temporality the present requires the addition of a pure past in order to function, similarly the sensible requires a ‘something else’ to make sense of out of it. The spatial syntheses Deleuze outlines repeat the temporal syntheses previously specified: the explication of extensity rests upon the first synthesis, that of habit or the present, the implication of depth rests upon the second synthesis, that of memory or the past. Finally, in depth, “the proximity and restlessness of the third synthesis make themselves felt, announcing the universal ‘ungrounding’ of intensity”.60 Intensity then, performs the role of the future in regards
59 Ibid., p. 301 60 Ibid., p. 230
82 to genesis and change. Intensity is “the theatre of all metamorphosis or differences” that in its original moment is neither qualified nor extended.61 The original depth of space as a whole consists of intensity, and the relative variations of extensity is a depth that makes possible width and breadth and the mundane measurements and spatiality of the world. The signs that Deleuze focuses on cannot be explained or constructed out of extension but itself. Measurement by itself does not convey significance, and the significance and the meaning of signs varies between individuals. As a transcendental principle intensity is the source of a quadruple genesis, not just a model of perception.62 The ground of relative directions and distinctions depends on a deeper groundlessness. From it emerges extension, the dimensionality of space that allows those extensive magnitudes, formed matter occupying extensity and endowed with directionality, and designations of that matter as objects.
The intensive spatium determines the actualisation of ideal connections (the differential relations contained in the Ideas) in extension through the vectors that intensity expresses. That difference, and its inherent incommensurability, is ‘cancelled’ in the extension that distributes it, although it continues to exist implicated within it. Intensities are not structured in the same way the extension is, and are not measured or ordered in the same way. Deleuze’s account of how the intensity that we sense in extension is to be understood draws, once again, on a series of mathematical models for its structure. If one takes the series of natural numbers, elements in the series can be divided by others in it. Some numbers will not divide evenly however, and so those numbers can be supplemented with fractions. Fractions express a relation between two quantities that cannot be reduced to whole numbers. Fractions in turn have their own limit. Irrational numbers in turn express a relation that cannot be reduced to a fractional number, and so on. Measurements involve a dimension that cannot be eliminated or equalised fully. Attempts to do so are regressive. Intensity then, stands in relation to extensity in the same way that this indivisible remainder exist in a series of numbers.
Deleuze then describes the nature of the field of intensity in itself through a discussion of the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers. Cardinal numbers invoke specific units or quantities (the gap between 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 3 and 4 is
61 Ibid., p. 307 62 Ibid., p. 291
83 identical), and the numbers themselves are ‘numbers’ or counts of lots of that unit. Relations between numbers can be expressed in terms of these units. But in an ordinal system numbers refer to the place in a series (first, second, third, etc.) and are expressions of relations between numbers that are not equal to the first series in the same way. For example, first and second and third – there is a series of relations here that are not decomposable and not expressible in a common measure: the relation between first and second is not comparable with the relation between first and third. So on this model we can see that the parallel between extension and cardinal numbers (as settled, measurable quantities) and another parallel between intensity and ordinal relations.
In the model Deleuze proposes intensity is composed of intensities, which are differences between two potentials. These differences express relations between differences – differences in potential, differences in speed, temperature, along with other vectors that are not reducible to concrete relations found in extension. These differences taken individually cannot be assigned a value, for example there is no way to determine if the third number in the series is twice as large as the fifth number in the series, whether it is even, and so on. As such, there is no single scale or relative magnitude for them- each has to be “affirmed” in themselves without reference to a scale or external system. This also has the consequence of ruling out any model of intensity that involves their absence, or cancellation to zero. Intensity affirms positive difference. The thermodynamic model in which differences in potential energy are eventually completely cancelled utilises an inverted model of difference, an illusion in which “the image of intensity is seen from below”.63 The requirements of representation and the subordination of difference to identity generate misconstrued problems and false conceptions of relations.
While intensities cannot be negated, Deleuze notes that they must be able to be thought as ‘divisible’ in some sense. Intensities enter into configurations with other intensities in order for change to occur, but those connections cannot be of an order of simple addition or production of a single scale that encompasses both. Instead, the connection, drawing on the work in Bergsonism, is akin to an act of division that in
63 Ibid., p. 294
84 relating the two terms produces a change in kind in both terms. The account of true multiplicities as those that when divided produce a difference in kind rather than of degree is reworked. Intensity then, is composed of ‘distances’ between differences, where they are indivisible asymmetrical relations, ordinal and intensive, between a heterogeneous series of terms, where relations of dependency can be established according to whether the nature of a given part presupposes a given change of nature or is presupposed by it. The result is that the intensity that lies implicated within extension must be conceived of as “a perfectly determined form of being” while also lacking measurable quantities and qualities.64 This is the cause of the asymmetry in the chapter title– the relations between intensities generate, but do not directly correspond with relations in extensity. Ideas are perplexed virtual multiplicities, made up of relations between differential elements. Intensities are implicated multiplicities, ‘implexes’ made of relations between asymmetrical elements that direct the course of actualisation of ideas and determine the cases of solutions for the problem in extension. The power of intensity is grounded in the potentiality of the idea producing a solution in which the problem disappears as intensive differences disappear in extensity. Actualisation is a double differentiation; both qualitative and extensive.
In Deleuze’s account of actualisation genesis then is not an event that occurs in the passage from one actual to another actual, but from virtual to actual, a “genesis without dynamism, evolving necessarily in the element of a supra-historicity a static genesis which may be understood as the correlate of the notion of passive synthesis”.65 The realm of the actual is accompanied by a virtual echo, doubling it without resembling it, acting as solution to the implicated problem-event. The connection is never one of determinism, instead there are “non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions. … The succession of presents is only the manifestation of something more profound”.66 What we live empirically as a succession of different presents (constructed via active syntheses, according to succession, simultaneity, causality, contiguity, resemblance, opposition) is also one constructed upon passive syntheses (which contract the whole but at different
64 Ibid., p. 297 65 Ibid., p. 232 66 Ibid., p.105. Also see p. 362
85 levels, and with different emphasis). The second problematic level persistently challenges one to search, to change, to create.
Critical Evaluation I will now critically examine some elements of the system Deleuze has presented. The text is a collage, and some parts of that collage have not aged well: the long engagements with psychoanalysis have lost much of the import that they may have had in the Paris of 1968. Similarly, some of Deleuze’s claims, such as the necessity, not merely the desirability, of repeating as many of Platonism’s features as possible in the act of reversing it, or that the philosophy of the future will inevitably be one involving a system of the faculties, seems simply outlandish. In general, Deleuze’s re-workings of both Kant’s and Plato’s systems seem to limit his ability in Difference and Repetition to move beyond their orbit by ensuring that a residual Platonism and Kantianism exists within the work. Despite this, I do not believe that their presence in the text impairs the central claims of the work to any noticeable degree. This is borne out by the rapid disappearance of the notion of the simulacra quickly disappears from his work after the publication of the Logic of Sense, while the increasing naturalism that culminates in the introduction of desiring machines in Anti-Oedipus finally does away with the last remnants of a subject centered system of philosophy, throughout which Deleuze’s project and resources remain more or less unchanged.
One of the main interpretive difficulties for at least this reader of Deleuze is the double challenge of the insistence that parts of the world are unknown and essentially unknowable, while also presenting a great deal of description of that unknown. A tension results from Deleuze’s opposition to the assumptions of the dogmatic image of thought when it is paired with the presentation of a systematic philosophy– if we cannot assume the good nature and suitability of reason and thought, then there is no strong reason to think that our systems of thought are universal or complete or even just largely accurate. Deleuze’s system is just as vulnerable to these concerns as the systems he critiques. Admittedly Deleuze’s system acknowledges this, and attempts to counteract that worry with its foregrounding of the encounter, the development of the idea of a contingent necessity, and so on. But the very system that underlies those encounters is itself much broader than each of those features. Hence a tension. That system is also monotonous. The account of the synthesis of difference and the synthesis of the sensible
86 is applicable to all processes of differentiation and differenciation, regardless of what it is that ends up being actualised.67 Deleuze has taken great pains to ensure that, in principle, both ideas and intensities are teeming with distinctions, but the fleshing out of those distinctions in any detail remains very light. Without that level of detail, it is unclear if Deleuze’s account can actually provide conditions of genesis that are ‘no wider than the conditioned’, that is, are specific to particular phenomena rather than being applicable to all possible phenomena. A short survey of Deleuze’s scattered comments on this topic follows (for the sake of simplicity I will focus only on the role of problematic-Ideas here and omit a discussion of intensive differences).
When the virtual content of an Idea is actualised, the varieties of relation are incarnated in distinct species while the singular points which correspond to the values of one variety are incarnated in the distinct parts characteristic of this or that species.68 However as we have no direct access to the structure of the virtual, we must simply accept Deleuze’s claim that this is so. Deleuze further specifies the structure of virtual ideas; ideas are varieties that include within themselves sub-varieties, and Ideas can be classed in three different ways:
In a ‘vertical’ dimension, ordinal varieties: “according to the nature of the elements and the differential relations: for example, mathematical, mathematico-physical, chemical, biological, physical, sociological and linguistic Ideas” but elements can cross orders in new relations “dissolved in the larger superior order or being reflected in the inferior order”.69
In a ‘horizontal’ dimension “we can distinguish characteristic varieties corresponding to the degrees of a differential relation within a given order and to the distribution of singular points for each degree (such as the equation for conic sections which gives according to the case an ellipse, a hyperbola, a parabola, or a straight line)”.70
67 “Each type of system undoubtedly has its own particular conditions, but these conform to the proceeding characteristics even while they give them a structure appropriate in each case: for example, words are genuine intensities within certain aesthetic systems, concepts are also intensities from the point of view of philosophical systems.” Ibid., p. 144 68 Ibid., p. 257-8 69 Ibid., p. 235 70 Ibid., p. 235-6
87 And in the dimension of ‘depth’: “distinguishing axiomatic varieties with determine a common axiom for differential relations of a different order, on condition that this axiom itself coincides with a third-order differential relation”.71
All of this is rather general. Deleuze is clearly willing to accept that our existing actual to actual accounts of causation and value are often apt accounts with good predictive power as, for example, he notes the legitimacy of and need for the scientific and artistic in the introduction, and he takes great pains to justify and carefully qualify his use of concepts that originate from another existing domain of knowledge. Given that, in which situations would knowledge of the virtual order add something to our knowledge of the actual (and how would we know those situations)? The account of the movement of actualisation from virtual to actual in the case of a single ‘thing’ is well detailed, but the account of how that takes place amongst groups of already actualised things interacting is less clear. That situation must involve both virtual to actual connections internal to the things as well as somehow feeding in the actual to actual relations. How this occurs is not accounted for. There are however a number of moments, or nodules where the abstraction and generality of the writing breaks into short passages of very specific and very concrete detail. For example, there is a short discussion of a possible drug stimulated pedagogy of the senses72, a suggestion about the connection between particular forms of perception, the syntheses specific to them and ontology73, a sketch of genetics as a differential system74, an open ended list of faculties additional to Kant’s together with their transcendental exercise75, the fetish and revolution in Marxism76, death77, resonances between island formation and island dreamers78, and stereotyped behaviours in dementia and schizophrenia79. All of these are richly suggestive, but remain underdeveloped.
71 Ibid., p. 236 72 Ibid., p. 297 73 Ibid., p. 289 74 Ibid., p. 239 75 Ibid., p. 180 and p. 242-3 76 Ibid., p. 259 77 Ibid., p. 322 78 Ibid., p. 317 79 Ibid., p. 362
88 One other illuminating passage is the section where Deleuze introduces the method of vice-diction. Vice-diction has two procedures.80 The first is the ‘the specification of adjunct fields’ where one searches progressively seek to establish the field of the problem, the varieties of the multiplicity involved and their inter connections. The second, which is to be carried out in conjunction with the first, is to “condense all the singularities, precipitate all the circumstances, points of fusion, congealment or condensation” so as to make a solution burst in to the actual.81 As a set of directions the procedure of vice-diction is rather sparse. This procedure can be supplemented with some rules of thumb that can easily be drawn from the text:
• avoid undue emphasis on solutions, and be wary of poorly constructed problems • map paths of transformation as much as the patterns of stable systems. • seek out dissymmetry, incommensurabilities, inequalities, heterogeneity • look for displacements, slowdowns, variants, quickenings • seek to learn - combine the distinctive points of oneself with that of the ‘X’ to bring about an encounter with its signs • supplement an analysis of the actual with an attempt to look for the virtual tendencies at work (can the problem be re-posed?) • avoid the negative • be wary of transcendent standards, conformity, and overweening identity • favour significance over the clear or the merely correct, prioritise value before being
All of these are, admittedly, closer to slogans than instructions, but then so is the ‘procedure’ of vice-diction. The purpose of the metaphysics of the virtual, the ‘more profound’ realm, is to provide the clues that will lead us to ‘real’ movements, and to compose true problems. Difference and Repetition aimed to prepare us to think through a nomadic distribution of being and to equip us with a ‘transcendental empiricism’ in which we discover concrete ideas amidst the conditions of their actualisation. But it falls somewhat short of that aim. It does establish an internally consistent rival system of metaphysics based on difference, thus avoiding the creation of an anthropology or a transcendent system. The account of the virtual does provide a way to ground that
80 Ibid., p. 239 81 Ibid., p. 239
89 system, but its structure and our knowledge of that structure are not unproblematic. Furthermore, the process of individuation and genesis that it sets out still remains at a level of generality that does not meet the required level of concreteness that was stipulated in his earlier works. And although the system is meant to be an account of all being, the basis for a number of its developments remains stubbornly human and subject centred. Difference and Repetition’s value as a solution to the problems Deleuze initially posed, and as a platform for future philosophical development is, despite its riches and advances, is mixed. Both its successes and its weaknesses shape the direction of Deleuze’s subsequent work.
90 Chapter 4
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Part 1
The centrepiece of Difference and Repetition was an account of a transcendental and deeply strange realm of virtual ideas and pure differences. In contrast, A Thousand Plateaus (hereafter Plateaus) takes place in our world, but a world that has been made no less strange and that sports an endless baroque profusion of connections. Bird song, the rise and fall of archaic empires, theories of geometry, instants, aeons, pack dynamics and more all churn together. Although the book presents all of these as a single flow, grouped into avowedly independent chapters there is a sequence to the chapters and they marshal several distinct but interpenetrating analyses of:
a new unit of analysis (assemblages) and their structure; the transformation of assemblages; tendencies common to all phenomena; two types of space; and the particular history and mutations of social structures and capital on the basis of all of the above.1
My analysis of Plateaus will be split across this chapter and chapter six (non- consecutive) chapters. This first chapter will analyse the interrelations of the components of the book. By examining the structure of the book, the different modes of analysis, the purpose of the rhizomatic approach that Deleuze and Guattari produced and its relation to major and minor sciences, it will become much clearer how the book continues and departs from Difference and Repetition.2 This chapter also contains a preliminary discussion that sets up the second chapter's evaluation of the more specific claims in the book about capital and suffering. In both chapters I treat the two books that form Capitalism and Schizophrenia as a single work, and also use insights from
1 It would be more accurate to say that Plateaus contains an analysis of socio-politico-techno-materio- economic structures. One of the great strengths and great difficulties posed by Plateaus is its conjunction of what is normally dissociated and the neologisms and concepts it constructs to do that. 2 Rhizomatics, schizoanalysis, pragmatics, stratoanalysis, et al. are all synonyms. See Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 22.
90 What is Philosophy?. Within the trajectory of Deleuze’s oeuvre I see the co-authored works with Guattari (Anti-Oedipus/Plateaus/What is Philosophy?) as forming a single conceptual plane, in which the same concerns and conceptual tools are redeveloped and redeployed to the same ends.
It is in What is Philosophy? that Deleuze and Guattari offer an explicit hermeneutic framework for all of their work. Those commentators who offer systematic readings of Anti-Oedipus and Plateaus do so using Difference and Repetition as its basis (for example, Buchanan, Holland).3 Difference and Repetition tends to act as a lodestone for systematic accounts of Deleuze in general, not just of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In contrast, I will instead read Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus 'back' from Philosophy, making efforts to draw out the disjunctions and departures from Difference and Repetition. Reading back from What is Philosophy? then will orientate the analysis along these lines:
• What are the problem(s) that Capitalism and Schizophrenia is created on the basis of? • What are the central concepts in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, what are their zones of connection and exo- and endo-consistency, and what plane(s) do they lay out? • And finally, what is the relation between Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus? While I treat them as a single plane, deploying the same semi-consistent set of concepts, there is much re-cutting, redeploying, altering and opening up of angles and faces that goes in between the works.
In line with this strategy, and based on the limitations of Anti-Oedipus (more on which below) the predominance of my analysis will be devoted to Plateaus.
My exegetical strategy is in deliberate opposition to the prevailing reading of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The earliest and still dominant view of the structure of
3 Holland, E. Deleuze and Guattari's "a Thousand Plateaus": A Reader's Guide (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2013). Holland, E. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Taylor & Francis, 1999). Buchanan, I Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus": A Reader's Guide (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008).
91 Capitalism and Schizophrenia was presented by Brian Massumi in both his introduction to the English translation of Plateaus, and in his A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (hereafter A User's Guide). Massumi advocates treating the work as record, from which the reader selects only those tracks that resonate with them.4 In a similar vein he further describes it as a toolbox, and an open set of concepts. In A User’s Guide he writes “Once again, we have a slew of concepts. They do not fit together in a neat system. This is not a package deal. They are offered as a repertory to pick and choose from, to recombine and refashion, in the hopes that they may be found useful in understanding processes of structuration...”.5 While Massumi is the most prominent advocate of this stance, there are certainly numerous passages within the works themselves, as well as the interviews and dialogues that explicitly encourage this. The spirit of free experimentation and promiscuous proliferation has been an extraordinarily popular one, and no doubt partially explains much of the enthusiasm and fertilisation of Deleuze and Guattari's work with disciplines such as architecture, fine arts, cultural studies, and so on. As my account is at odds with Massumi’s, I will now discuss what I see as the shortcomings of his position. The criticisms I offer here are meant to apply not just to Massumi but more broadly to all those who adopt a laissez-faire strategy for interpreting Deleuze.
Massumi’s A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia In A User’s Guide Massumi also presents his account of Capitalism and Schizophrenia as a systematic whole, and incorporates material freely from both the singly authored Difference and Repetition and Deleuze’s even earlier studies in the philosophy of history. His reading is built upon the identification of the virtual as the central concept of Capitalism and Schizophrenia; “Understanding how a potential differs from a possibility is the key to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the virtual, and a passport to the adroit use of Capitalism and Schizophrenia”.6 In doing so Massumi neglects to identify any differences or advantages of Capitalism and Schizophrenia over Difference and Repetition. His presentation projects a flat structure onto all of the works, giving no historical or chronological account of them, treating all the works as
4 Massumi, B. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992), p. 7. Discussed hereafter as A User’s Guide 5 Ibid., p. 54. 6 Ibid., p. 35. The irony of the use of the very judicial and non-Deleuzeian notion of border controls and passports, as well as the French echoes of right and law in (a)droit must be noted.
92 simply continuous. He favours Anti-Oedipus over Plateaus, and divides Capitalism and Schizophrenia into two groupings of concepts: “semiotic analysis of local encounters” and “far-reaching speculation”.8 Some of these hermeneutic choices are merely the interpretive preferences rightfully available to any commentator, and are aligned with the shape of his broader project, but others go beyond that and are simply asserted without defence or explanation. Treating all of Deleuze's works, regardless of whether they were singly or co-authored, regardless of their differences in format as original work or secondary monograph, and regardless of what period they were written in, as being of a single piece ought to be supported by a justification.
Contra Massumi it seems to me that an account of Plateaus is not well served by adopting an interpretive strategy that is without a systematic basis. Massumi presents the virtual as the key to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I will show below that the concepts of assemblage and territorialisation are far more crucial. The account I present will differ from both of his assumptions. The internal structures of Plateaus seem underemphasised, I hope to make them clearer and argue for their mutual necessity. The differences between Difference and Repetition and Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and then, within Capitalism and Schizophrenia, between Anti-Oedipus and Plateaus are often effaced; I will emphasise their distinctions. Massumi advocates the virtual as crucial element of Capitalism and Schizophrenia; while I will argue that the process of de/re/territorialisation is the conceptual core of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Massumi’s implicit simultaneous advocation of both total systematicity and thorough going discontinuity leads to self-contradiction. He asserts the provisionality and lack of systematicity of the works against the backdrop of his single, systematic account of all the books:
Neither set [of concepts: semiotic and speculative], taken together or alone, is meant to add up to a system or a universally applicable model. In fact, they are specifically designed to make that impossible.9
8 Ibid., p. 23. 9 Ibid., p. 24.
93 Deleuze and Guattari themselves cannot be accused of making a method of [their tailored concepts]. No two books muster the same array.10
Even if this self-contradiction can be overcome, or is somehow only apparent, no discussion of it is offered. This strategy also introduces errors of understanding. One example with serious consequences is this:
The syntheses and their products can be labelled “passive” or “active”. These are only approximate terms, because every process of synthesis involves a mixture of forces that could be characterised as active or passive, again in an approximate way. ... Passive and active are evaluations.11
Here Massumi conflates the account of active and passive syntheses in Difference and Repetition with the account of active and reactive forces in Nietzsche and Philosophy, leading him to treat the active and passive syntheses of Difference and Repetition under the perspectival viewpoint of Nietzsche and Philosophy. Large sections of Difference and Repetition are devoted to careful justification of the distinction between, and asymmetrical relation of, passive and active syntheses. The repeated polemical arguments for identity and individuality being derivative notions rely substantially upon that dependency (and also on the demonstration of how a rival foundation of difference could be plausible). The account of the self, syntheses, repetitions and the unconscious set out in Difference provides the basis for the mechanisms and transformations of Anti- Oedipus. A lack of clarity about such crucial distinctions in Difference and Repetition has far reaching consequences.
Another example: in Anti-Oedipus schizophrenic and paranoiac processes are linked with revolution and capitalism, and fascism respectively. In Plateaus this simple binary becomes convoluted: micro-fascisms, state totalitarianisms, suicidal death-drive war-machine fascism, and so on are introduced. Similarly stratification is now “not the worst thing that can happen” and these movements and structures are presented in
10 Ibid., p. 24 11 Ibid., p. 56.
94 historical case studies that highlight the mutations and novelties that occur.12 Despite all of that, Massumi's account in the ‘monstrosity’ chapter of A User’s Guide sets out an account of the contemporary entwining of capitalism and the socius that is simply a polemical and classificatory account of the oscillation between two poles. The insights of Plateaus are silently lost. While other problematic interpretations can be cited, my aim is not primarily to offer an extended critique of Massumi but to show why a different approach is necessary.13 An account of Plateaus is better served by adopting other interpretive strategies than Massumi’s. What grounds do I have for this claim? I hope that the novelty of the account will be interesting enough to justify this approach, but additionally there are good textual reasons for this.
To start with, there are a slew of inconclusive but supportive pointers within Plateaus. The first thing written by Deleuze and Guattari that a reader of Plateaus will encounter is the 'Author's Note' where Deleuze and Guattari write “to a certain extent, these plateaus may be read independently of each other…”. and as the reader continues through Plateaus the anarchic freedom to connect anything to anything, start anywhere, etc. is just as frequently leavened with admonitions to sobriety, care in experimentation and the like.14 Similarly for all the anti-arboreal polemics, the formation of a rhizome and the occurrence of a-parallel evolution necessarily requires some minimum degree of convergence and entangling of vectors to co-effect and maintain that movement. Likewise, plateaus must reach and support a suitable level of consistency, and the accounts of mechanisms of territoriality, double articulation and the like all detail series of successive and mutually dependent, interacting structures. Plateaus is filled with page after page of accounts of non-arbitrariness and systematic interrelations. Undoubtedly the kind of consistency cannot be that of traditional model of central unity and identity that Deleuze and Guattari critique at length. It is only in What is Philosophy? that an account is given of the consistency involved in planes of
12 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 161. 13 In many places Massumi also identifies congruences and proposes an interpretative strategy combining quantum theory, complexity theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s work, e.g. Massumi, B. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. (MIT Press, 1992), p. 52-3, p. 58-9, p. 65, p. 95, p. 108. 14 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p xx.
95 immanence, as well as an analysis of concepts and concept creation. I will summarise that discussion as it will further detail the principles I will apply.
In What is Philosophy? the practice of philosophy “is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts”.16 This is a complex art “because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries or products” despite being produced from intuitions or a field.17 Concepts have a hybrid status as both something created (at a particular time by particular persons) as well being self-positing and untimely, “The concept is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies … the concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing - pure Event, a haecceity, an entity”.18 What connects a concept to a situation is the problematic nature of that situation. It is this problem and the process of its resolution(s) that gives consistency and meaning and modulate the determination of the concept.19 What is Philosophy? echoes the account of problems given in Difference and Repetition, re-iterating the trouble that badly formed or badly understood problems produce. As well as the determination provided by the field and the thinker, the concept from its own side generates consistency and self- structuration,
... what is distinctive about the concept is that it renders components inseparable within itself. Components, or what defines the consistency of the concept, its endoconsistency, are distinct, heterogeneous, and yet not separable. ... each partially overlaps, has a zone of neighbourhood, or a threshold of indiscernibility, with another one.20
Concepts then have a wholeness to them by virtue of the organisation of their components, the “coincidence, condensation or accumulation of [their] own components”. This is a fragmentary and transitory wholeness produced through the motion and geography of those components. It also generates its exo-consistency by virtue of the relationships that are created with other concepts and the bridges from it
16 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. What Is Philosophy?, (Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 2. 17 Ibid., p. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 21. 19 Ibid., p. 16. 20 Ibid., p. 19.
96 that lead elsewhere on the same conceptual plane.21 In Deleuze’s account concepts are not static atoms, but a kind of mobile alliance of conceptual components, with topologies demarcated by intensive features, and encountered at the intersection of field, thinker, and plane of differences.
The brief account above shows the guidelines for the following analysis of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. An analysis must be able to demonstrate how the collection of conceptual components in the work function together; the ways in which the shared elements delineate the contour of the plane of immanence that they construct, their limits and the conceptual movements they permit. It must also set out the problem(s) it attempts to solve, and how the thinker, problem-field and concepts crystallise together. Additionally, when taken as criteria for evaluating a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work it can be seen how Massumi prioritises the side of pure events at the cost of the concrete problems and fields that they intersect with, and prioritises both invariance and isolation in his construal of the systematic elements of their writing. The price he pays for this is a disavowal of the movements, necessary consistencies, and the incompatibilities and distinctions between the works.
By contrast my reading of Capitalism and Schizophrenia will attempt to track the problem(s) that provoke the creation of Anti-Oedipus and Plateaus. It will explore not just the central concepts in Capitalism and Schizophrenia but also their zones of connection and exo- and endo-consistency, and map the plane(s) they lay out and the transitions between the works. I will outline the relation between the two books and the role of Anti-Oedipus in detail, but first I wish to pre-emptively introduce the problem that Capitalism and Schizophrenia is meant to address.
The Search for Weapons in Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze described the function of his earlier works as a search for and assaying of tools. By the time of Capitalism and Schizophrenia this search for tools has become a search for weapons.22 Ethical concern is what brings about this search for weapons, and in Capitalism and Schizophrenia it is clear that they are to be weapons for use against
21 Ibid., p. 20. 22 Tools: Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. xiii. Weapons: Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 277.
97 the ongoing and entwined morphogeneses of global capitalism and over-determining state power. The universal history that is outlined over the two works is a mapping of the mutations, reversals, and disjunctions of individuals and social forms as they buckle, evade and are empowered in their conjunctions with those two lures along a trajectory of historical contingencies. The plane that Anti-Oedipus, Plateaus and What is Philosophy? construct purifies and recasts elements from the earlier works with original materials in an attempt to establish a prototype of a new analysis and basis for action. Adequately understanding these works then requires recognition of the status of capitalism as the ethical case study par excellence in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. It also has wider ramifications than exegetical adequacy: correctly seeing that and how Deleuze and Guattari do their ethics there provides clues on how to conduct Deleuzian- Guattarian ethics more generally.
The trajectory of material analysis and conceptual criticism of capitalism in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is continued in What is Philosophy? and bolstered by the methodological reflections that the later work articulates. Just as What is Philosophy? provides a retrospective account of the philosophical creation of concepts, so too does it make explicit the ethical and pedagogical purposes of the previous works. Regarding pedagogy, Deleuze and Guattari write,
The post-Kantians concentrated on a universal encyclopedia of the concept that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity rather than taking on the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyse the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments. If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third – an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism.23
Accounts of Capitalism and Schizophrenia in the secondary literature often draw too close to presenting it as an encyclopedia at the expense of analysing the singularity of the concepts created in it. When a reader rifles through it for a ready-to-hand concept to
23 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. What Is Philosophy?, (Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 12. Emphasis theirs.
98 use to resolve an external problem, the chance for seeing a deeper structure in the work, or for understanding the purpose that the concept was fitted for is lost. In terms of the argument I make below, seeing it as an encyclopedia already predisposes one to see Plateaus as a neutral repository of ‘experimentation-for-experiment’s-sake’, and diminishes the recognition of the perspective from which it is actually written from. The discussion I present below and in the next chapter aim to counteract that tendency to see it as an encyclopedia. The problem that Capitalism and Schizophrenia schools the reader in is a new repetition in Deleuze’s series of explorations of why people seek and maintain conditions poisonous to their own real freedom. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia the particularities of that problem are constructed in intersection with a history of capitalism. The requirement for ethical intervention and the need for an analysis of history and capital as preparation for future action is explicit and repeated:
We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist. Europeanization does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples.24
It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have lost the world, worse than [the loss of] a fiancée or a god). The problem has indeed changed.25
The concept frees immanence from all the limits still imposed on it by capital (or that it imposed on itself in the form of capital appearing as something transcendent).26
Retro-jecting the explicit positions and methodological reflections of What is Philosophy? onto Capitalism and Schizophrenia makes elements of its structure clearer. The argument I will present in this chapter and the next is that the three co-authored
24 Ibid., p. 108 25 Ibid., p. 75 26 Ibid., p. 100
99 works form a liberatory project that develops concepts and histories for use against capital. I will now provide a condensed summary of Anti-Oedipus as the first step in analysing the content of those works.
Anti-Oedipus is constructed as a solution to the intersection of several problems, problems both extra- and intra-theoretical.27 The first is the authorial and theoretical impasse of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. Those two works set out a previously unconsidered metaphysics that prioritised novelty and divergence. Both works were stylistic experiments as well, but were not entirely successful in either aspect. Difference and Repetition consolidates the previous studies in the history of philosophy but as a complete system left few avenues for future progress, and despite the breadth of sources and discussions offered no concrete program for action. Deleuze subsequently commented on his own feelings at that time of being blocked.
The second is the effects of the civil unrest of the May 1968 events in France. Beyond the simple fact of the unrest itself, they were notable for the unexpectedness and the spread of the protests, the counter-reaction by the government and the supposedly pro-revolutionary communist party, as well as the relatively rapid evaporation of the unrest with a return to more or less the status-quo with the re-election of the Gaullists, a return to work by the strikers, and the clearing and re-opening of the universities. An event that no one anticipated, which the established authorities and structures were ill-equipped for, and that dissipated just as suddenly, made it evident that contemporary social and political theories were somewhere between incomplete and inadequate. In this context, a critical analysis of Marxism and psychoanalysis was then an appealing project for working through those issues for several reasons:
• Re-working those theories of production and therapy would help identify the sources of the failures of those two programs in 1968, and by extension attempt to answer the question of what had actually happened.
27 See Dosse, F. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. (Columbia University Press, 2010) and Deleuze, G. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995, (Semiotext(e), 2007).
100 • Revisiting psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious would allow the work in D&R on the formation of self through repetitions and syntheses, and on the unconscious, to be extended to an adjacent field.
• The targeted and delimited engagement with those two disciplines creates a space for establishing possible future philosophical paths
• Beginning work with Guattari would by itself introduce stylistic change, as well as spur conceptual variety and add significant political and activist experience.
In response to these issues, the task of Anti-Oedipus was to extend the theoretical basis established in Difference and Repetition to encompass Marxism and psycho- analysis, without simply reducing one to the other. Marxism offers an account of the processes of social production, psycho-analysis of the process of formations of individual selves. But the processes each system of thought elaborates have no neat point of interaction, while clearly there must in fact be several, and a mere intersection of the two theories (e.g. leaders, or revolutionists with pathological personality then shape society) is an insufficient explanation in the '68 context. Something more radical is required. This more radical approach will be Anti-Oedipus's 'materialist psychiatry', which “can be defined, .... , by the twofold task it sets itself: introducing desire into the mechanism, and introducing production into desire”.28 The entrance point for that analysis is the case of the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic's inability to function in the everyday world that the rest of us occupy comes from their “harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living center of matter”.30 As Deleuze and Guattari see it, these unfortunate individuals are cursed with a more veridical experience of reality. This schizophrenic ontology is then used to connect accounts of the reproduction and formation of selves with the formation and reproduction of society. The out of control cascades of dissolution and polymorphous conjunction that the schizophrenic endures over and again are the all too evident turbulence of the processes that drive every other phenomenon that exists, both human and non-human, individual and collective.31
28 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 22 30 Ibid., p. 19 31 Deleuze and Guattari are of course neither the only nor the first to seek ways to join Marxism and Freudianism – many thinkers belonging to the Frankfurt School worked on such connections.
101 The syntheses introduced in Difference and Repetition provide the conceptual basis for those schizo processes, but are re-cast now as machines, and linked with desire, to produce the concept of desiring-production. An ontology of repetitions is replaced with one of machines and the connections and flows that they generate and that become interrupted and cut. Networks, chains and hierarchies of machines and flows exist, and are created, modified and destroyed as they draw off from, maintain, fragment, block and augment other machines and flows. Passive desiring-synthesis brings about the auto-production of our discrete, delineated world and the unconscious and social structures with it, which we then modify through our active syntheses. Before and beneath our world of interests and decision lies desire and investment. A single ontological plane of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘machines’ replaces the split binaries of nature/culture, nature/history, psychological/social and so on. Deleuze writes:
Production as a process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle. That is why desiring-production is the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives and deals with the schizo as Homo natura.32
The problem of tying the social production societies to the psychic formation of individuals is answered by locating a process occurring at a level irreducible to either one, and that supplants both. Naturalising processes of genesis might suggest that many differences, particularly those that fall on the culture side of the nature-culture split, will subsequently be effaced. While primordial desiring-production produces individuals and society, the differences between selves and social groups arise from the different regimes of processes that produce them. The hallmarks of Difference and Repetition: the primarily subject-less model, the secondary status of representation, and the requirement for a purely positive metaphysics are all in evidence here. And, as a mess of processes that continually begin and end, there is no inherent trajectory or telos to desiring-production, nor a finite set of types. The mechano-sphere is inextricable from the particularities of the contingent histories of its processes, and while positing it
32 Ibid., p. 5
102 naturalises humans and the socius, a historicalisation of nature and a breaking open of the ideological endpoints of Marxism and psycho-analysis is also required. In Deleuze and Guattari's hands the corrected account of desire that results from this 'critique of impure delirium' is then extended to work through the malformed models of both theories, and then from there generate a corrective universal history of social formations. I will not discuss the detailed criticisms of psycho-analysis that are presented in Anti-Oedipus and I will delay discussion of its analysis of capitalism until the next chapter.
Difference and Repetition against Capitalism and Schizophrenia Anti-Oedipus is a great advance and a significant transition from Difference and Repetition but it is not without limitations. It suffers primarily from its status as a case study. As a targeted criticism of those two particular systems of thought its analyses and conceptual structures trace their form from their sources. In doing so it imports and amends their models, and in keeping with that it largely offers re-readings of psychoanalytic theory and case studies, and anthropological and Marxist texts. While it suggests the presence of its own counter-history, that history never becomes explicit. Almost every key concept in Plateaus appears first in Anti-Oedipus (molar, molecular, regimes, wasp and orchid, territorialisation, a new earth etc.), consequently all of those conceptual innovations and advances are embedded in and constrained by those borrowed structures. Anti-Oedipus is a critical work that is insufficiently positive; it even ends by highlighting its own limitations “… schizoanalysis as such has strictly no political program to propose. ... No political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis”.33 Anti-Oedipus remains a limited, tactical work, seeking to deploy some new concepts and the previously created ontology for very specific purposes. But as a whole it opens onto broader questions of liberation:
… the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”35.
33 Ibid., p. 380 35 Ibid., p. 29
103 Schizoanalysis shows how and how not to analyse libidinal investments of economic and political processes that individuals and groups make. If the sociological field is always prior to the personal then ultimately any schizoanalytic cure will also require the dissolution of ossified social formations, probing for adjacent singularities, counter- mobilisation of existing flows, and so on. The function of Anti-Oedipus is to transform Difference and Repetition’s rethinking of ontology into a rethinking of concrete practices, and the socius requiring remedy is already identified as the contemporary capitalist one, but it is less clear how Anti-Oedipus’s diagnostics are to be extended into specific prescriptions.
These needs will be addressed by Plateaus. It will turn out that a supplementary analysis of history and refinement of the novel concepts of Anti-Oedipus will enable schizoanalysis to be extended to a broader method for the analysis of forms and groups in the process of change. Elucidating the mechanisms and machines of populations and environments, and the demythologising and detranscendentalising of particular histories, will draw diagrams towards a new earth. On a compositional level the diversity and abundance of references that constituted Difference and Repetition’s collage have been subtly modulated in Plateaus. While there are just as many quotations and compressed and oblique critiques in Plateaus as in Difference and Repetition, in Plateaus those quotations and critiques gain from being grounded by their materiality and organisation into sweeps of a single process of transformation. The plateau/rhizome organisational structure is a great improvement on that of Difference and Repetition. Metaphysically, the substance and concern of both books have much in common. At its heart Plateaus is still an analysis of multiplicities, with a major division of the types of multiplicities into two groups; the book serving a corrective, critical function in its rehabilitation of one group against the ascendancy of the other in a dogmatic habit of thought. There are numerous direct continuities with Difference and Repetition, for example, the account of the plane of immanence is supported by a Spinozist account of the univocity of being.36 The account of striated space and smooth space repeats parts of the discussions in Difference and Repetition about sedentary and nomadic distributions of space and the account of a metric, extensive space from a deeper non-metric yet still structured realm of intensities. Similarly, the division
36 Deleuze, G and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 254.
104 between problematic and theorematic is of a piece with the problematic nature of the virtual in Difference and Repetition. The account of the recurrence of refrains and milieus is a rewriting of the account of habit and repetition in Difference and Repetition. Likewise, the compressed discussion of the imperceptible perception that must be perceived recalls at one the account of that which both cannot and must be sensed in Difference and Repetition.37
When Deleuze and Guattari write “There is thus an image of thought covering all of thought; it is the special object of “noology” and is like the State-form developed in thought” and “common sense is the state consensus raised to the absolute” the continuity is readily apparent.38 But it is continuity with a difference, for the inversion of Plato that Deleuze advocated in Difference and Repetition and the proposal of a system of simulacrum has become less compromising: “destroy the image and its copies, the model and its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right …”.39 Similarly what in Difference and Repetition was a long technical account of the failings with Aristotle's account of species and genus has by the time of Plateaus become more immediate and practical observations about inter-kingdoms and unnatural participations. Plateaus is a great advance over Difference and Repetition in terms of the account it provides of actual phenomena, and of the profusion of conceptual tools if offers for their analysis.
One epistemological thread running through Plateaus sets out two kinds of investigation or science. The first, royal or major science focuses on the homogeneity and constancy of the object of investigation and uses strategies of isolation and control of influences, while the second, nomad or minor science, bases itself on the variability of its object and instigates processes of systematic alteration. The two forms of science are possible because the same thing can be treated in two different ways, “the first would be defined precisely by the power (pouvoir) of constants, the second by the power (puissance) of variation”.41 Minor science is a pragmatic study of placings-in- variation that operates in a different manner than the royal or major science, and with a
37 Ibid., p. 281 38 Ibid., p. 374, p. 76 39 Ibid., p. 377 41 Ibid., p. 101
105 different expectation of the world: the world is not filled with the same, the consistent and the eternal but shot through with mutation, difference and transformation. Minor science sites itself within a smooth “vectorial, projective, topological space … [that is] occupied without being counted” and works with the distribution of 'thing-flows' through that open space while major space is a closed, “striated, metric” space that is counted in order to be occupied and is populated with linear, solid things.42 Deleuze and Guattari also note that it adopts a problem based model focused on the particular events that intersect with its object rather than a theoretical model laying out its classification and so on.43
These two types are a somewhat artificial distinction: reality contains far more mixtures and intermediate cases than ideal types. Furthermore, historically, 'nomad' sciences can become annexed and fixed within a royal science, or worse denigrated or prohibited due to the differences in the way they conceptualise and treat their subject matter,
Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form that organises matter and a matter prepared for form. All matter is assigned to content, while all form passes to expression. Nomad science has a different scheme however where content and expression encompass both form and matter, and follows the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression (whether those connections be natural or forced) 44
The hylomorphic model produces a general theory of self-identical matter and iterable models. In contrast, the minor sciences are guided by the sensible conditions of intuition and use methods of construction within a space of flux. They are “itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many “accidents” (problems).45 Those problems open out the science onto other non-scientific problems and fields. Nomad sciences do not extract constants, instead they operate by increasing the variability of the singularities that they
42 Ibid., p. 361-2 43 This is, obviously, directly continuous with much of Difference and Repetition, particularly the account of sedentary vs. nomadic distribution of being. 44 Ibid., p. 369 45 Ibid., p. 372
106 discover to bring about new individuations. A variable is stimulated such that it passes a threshold and undergoes a transition along a virtual line between two of its states.
Knowing this we can already set out a concise account of Plateaus: it focuses on tracking minor lines of transition and mutation and the movements along them. The whole of Plateaus is an attempt to present the results of various minor studies in a manner that co-ordinates them without changing their nature.
Tendencies and Types
There are two modes of study in Plateaus corresponding to the two kinds of spaces that we operate in and attune to. Two tendencies would be a more apt expression since the two spaces in fact exist only in varying kinds of mixtures. The specific configuration of any one mixture, and the directionality of the transitions matter immensely: Does one envelop the other, or does it recede leaving its opposite in its wake? Deleuze and Guattari propose two limit states of the two tendencies: a plane of consistency or immanence lacking subjects structure and genesis, having only “haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations”, and “in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds”.47 And a teleological plan(e) of transcendence concerned only with subjects and forms, a plane of maximal organisation and structure,
The plane of organisation is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, trying to plug lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialisation, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organisation, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages or microassemblages.48
In striated space, lines or trajectories travel from point to point, subordinating the movement to those points and utilising closed set intervals in allocated spaces with assigned breaks. In smooth space the trajectory assumes priority, as a vector with
47 Ibid., p. 267 48 Ibid., p. 270
107 direction but not a dimension or metric determination. The space that results is constructed by local operations involving changes in direction, and filled by intensities rather than extensive properties. Smooth and striated are just two of a set of (non- symmetrical) tendencies that Deleuze and Guattari re-work and re-use throughout Plateaus:
We have on numerous occasion encountered all kinds of differences between two types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric; extensive and qualitative; centered and acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic; numerical and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses and of packs; of magnitude and distance; or breaks and frequency; striated and smooth.49
A ceaseless folding of one type of multiplicity or movement out of and into the other constitutes one of the major layers of structure in Plateaus, and analysis of that in specific cases one of the key elements of schizoanalysis.
If the connections that Deleuze and Guattari wish to illuminate are cross categorical then so too are the types of change that they similarly seek to foreground. Hereditary evolution restricts change to occurring only within species specific lines and between individuals of the same breeding pool. Most models of change involve correspondence, imitation, and progression (or regression) through a series or hereditary descent. Deleuze and Guattari foreground accounts of mutation, hybridisation and unnatural union, “proliferation by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes” in order to correct restricted conceptions and present more fundamental modes of transformation.50 They describe these inter-kingdom combinations as blocks of becoming, where the components produce a joint vector and linked changes without producing a union or reproduction of a coincident descendent (there is no part-fly-pig- truffle offspring in the block of becoming involving tree, truffle, pig and fly).51 A block of becoming, or the relationship, forms a line superior to the 'points' or visible relata that trail along after it and are shaped by it. Such a becoming has no pre-set destination, and passes beyond a threshold that leads to it changing in kind.
49 Ibid., p. 484 50 Ibid., p. 241 51 Ibid., p. 242
108 Deterritorialisation is the central concept of Plateaus, and its prominence is linked to the role of contingency in history. Essentially, all that Deleuze said about recognition, can be applied to traditional historical narratives. The histories of contingency in Plateaus are the extension and modification of the Difference and Repetition critical project to practical purposes. Much of the secondary literature devoted to Deleuze and Guattari and the topic of history has focused on metaphysical aspects, such as their philosophy of time, or on specific events as a means of resolving general theoretical questions.52 Those scholarly questions about the nature of history should also bring forth a reshaping of how we think and do history. If all we take from Capitalism and Schizophrenia are theses on the metaphysical structure of history and the nature of time then we learn less than we could from it, since there are a series of pointers on how and how not to construct particular historical accounts woven into it.
Setting aside the discursive elements of history - national narratives, traditional literary forms, tropes and genres, etc. - the ‘structure’ of history arises from several things: from virtual structures acting as organising principles, the ever-presence of all past events adjacent to the present, in conjunction with the numerous retentions and series of repetitions that constitute the present.53 There is a contrast between the deep structures of history, resting ultimately on difference and the virtual, and those molar tendencies that representational and arboreal logic discern. A view of the molar alone distorts history by favouring identity and endurance over difference and impermanence, mis-apprehending contingency as necessity, and taking effects for causes.
Traditional historical accounts focus on the continuity of present and past: what in the past is most congruent with now, what is currently most recognisable in the past is what is understood best, and the 'breaks' and mutations in history, when included, are often set up as opposites (negations) in a single narrative e.g. first slavery then its reversal in emancipation. Hence the need for nomadic history instead of state history to break with habits of thought that put teleologies and inevitabilities foremost in our
52 For example, see Bell, J and Colebrook, C (eds) Deleuze and History (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and Lundy, C "Why Wasn't Capitalism Born in China?–Deleuze and the Philosophy of Non- Events," Theory & Event 16, no. 3 (2013). 53 See Lampert, J. Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History (Continuum, 2006) for a full account.
109 mind, to encourage us to see those minor tendencies awaiting the advent of their moment, histories of the lost things and what never was but still could be.
Accordingly, there is a repeated insistence on the paucity of history for explanation throughout Plateaus – where history is understood as producing a sequential and necessary evolution through a set series of stages. Just as biological development and evolution were set within a context of transversal dynamics and alterations so too are the various developmental and evolutionary models of social development to be shattered. The world that Plateaus presents is one in which certain state-potentials are ever-present: “All history does is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession”.54 Becomings are supra-historical, so that:
it is more a question of thresholds of perception, or thresholds of discernibility belonging to given assemblages. ... It had been present “for all of time”, but under different perceptual conditions. New conditions were necessary for what was buried or covered, inferred or concluded, presently to rise to the surface. ... In this sense, all history is really the history of perception, and what we make with history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject matter of a story. Becoming is like the machine: present in a different way in every assemblage, passing from one to the other, opening one onto the other, outside any fixed order or determined sequence.55
It is not enough to treat this simply as a catalogue of ever present potentials. Such an approach would veer too close to treating the virtual as some kind of Platonism. The challenge is to analyse the intersection of those becomings with the specific features of the contingencies of a particular situation. One of the challenges for schizoanalysis is to create technical tools capable of addressing combinations of phenomena that cut across the habitual groupings and divisions of things from/with other things such as organic cohesion, species lines, individual-environment dyads etc.
54 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 430. 55 Ibid., p. 347
110 Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or peoples that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. The becoming- evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials.56
Another challenge is to be able to adequately trace how those relations bring about transitions and transformations, how they produce consistency, register, and filter. The concepts of assemblage, becoming, strata and territorialisation are developed to perform those functions. A stratum is an agglomeration, thickening or coherence on the plane of consistency that through the imposition of further form and bonds, greater organisation and hierarchy draws off energy or labour through a double articulation where each articulation presupposes the other. The first articulation chooses or extracts relatively stable substances from the unstable particle-flows giving them a greater consistency. The second articulation establishes forms “functional, compact, stable structures” plus the “molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualised”.58 Form is created via folding, articulation, regulation, coding and overcoding. An assemblage is a
constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow – selected, organized, stratified – in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage in this sense, is a veritable invention. Assemblages may group themselves into extremely vast constellations constituting “cultures” or even “ages”.60
One side of an assemblage opens out on to stabilizing forces while the other is open to destabilising forces. They are defined as much by the lines of flight that the lie on as by their functioning.
Milieus and rhythms are born from chaos through periodic repetition. Those repetitions produce structure and code the chaos. There are interior, exterior and intermediary milieus, and they can repeat each other, interfere destructively with one
56 Ibid., p. 263 58 Ibid., p. 41 60 Ibid., p. 406
111 another, become absorbed into other milieus and so on. Milieus can become richer than simply being directional guides or cues for action, when they move beyond functionalism to expression a milieu becomes a territory through that act of territorialisation. The act that imbues a habit with qualities can also serve to modify that habit. Territories can be reduced, re-worked, assembled, converted, bud to produce other territories and so on. Deleuze and Guattari set out a classification of refrains:
1) territorial refrains that seek, mark, assemble a territory 2) territorialised function refrains that assume a special function in the assemblage (lullaby, lovers' refrain, professor's refrain, etc.) 3) territorialised function refrains that mark new assemblages, pass into new assemblages by means of deterritoralisation-reterritorialisation 4) refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the territory or in order to go outside of it (at the limit, the cosmos as immense deterritorialised refrain)
Territorialisation is an account of how consistency comes to be, and how that consistency develops through the arrangement of intervals and differences into independence, or means of passage and transfer. Territorialisation is an account of a synthesis. De-territorialisation and re-territorialisation extend the concept by specifying directions to and from strata and the plane of consistency, as de- and re-territorialisation can often introduce novelties rather than simply recuperate what was lost or changed. Patterns of mutual deterritorialisation are a particular feature of the accounts of change provided in Plateaus, for example part of the process of human evolution involves the deterritorialisation of the human hand by the stick-tool and vice versa: what in other species is a paw, over time becomes a hand. Similarly, the development of the capacity for language begins to territorialise the lips and face into something new.
When territorial assemblages are swept up in a deterritorialisation its functions come loose, freeing a potentiality for mutation and variation though being both formed and (relatively) unmoored. Deleuze and Guattari describe that state of affairs as the release of an abstract machine.61 These machines effect connections to and from
61 Ibid., p. 333
112 assemblage to assemblage as well as causing connections to cease. They can drive assemblages towards or away from stratification, and can blindly explore spaces of potential combination. The abstract machine draws lines of continuous variation and the concrete assemblage organises diverse relations into a function of those lines.
When presented in the abstract, the tendencies or types of multiplicities and the concepts that provide the units of analysis may seem one dimensional. They take on a richness though when applied to concrete situations; there is always a plethora of ways to become more stratified, what matters is which one(s) are taken, what they involve and what becoming they lead to in conjunction with all the other assemblages in that environment. For example, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of socio-political formations rapidly expands to include, among others: primitive arrangements arranged on lineage or territory, state formations, nomads, totalitarian, early city states, despotic empires, modern state systems connected to international networks of capital and so on. Rhizomatics analyses assemblage(s) that is undergoing a change in kind via de- re-territorialization. It also analyses an assemblage(s) that has undergone change to map out what forces led to it becoming as it is now, mapping what affects it opens up, and seeks its adjacent thresholds.
All these concepts can be grouped into interconnected sets. The set of concepts that all describe the components of assemblages are: Territory, de-territorialisation, re- territorialisation, the earth (and the possibility of a new earth) and the cosmos they open out onto. One set of concepts describes the lines that characterise assemblages: these are the concepts of molar, molecular, and flight. The various lines are used to map assemblages, and their becomings can also be described by their directionality: the two poles, or great tendencies, of smooth and striated space, rhizomatic and arborescent, and the different changes that take place on the planes of consistency and organisation. The set of concepts that includes the plane of consistency, diagrams, and abstract machines performs a piloting role and constitute points of creation or potentiality not outside history but ‘prior to’ history. These concepts trace out the virtual.
Now, we can imagine various scenarios in which some of these components were missing. An account of assemblages without diagrams and the abstract machine would be one in which there was no deeper source of structure than that already
113 phenomenologicly evident. In this there would only be a plane of organisation that accounted for the formation of substances and the development of form, and no plane of consistency that sparks a second type of transformation. Similarly, an account without territorialisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation would be a static world of stable types and relations. Mechanical combination and recombination could be possible, but it would be a non-evolutionary world where no truly creative transformations would occur. And as a set of concepts but without the broad tendencies of smooth and striated, molar and molecular, rhizome and tree schizoanalysis would lack any compass. The task of analysis would be interminable and arbitrary in an overwhelming bloom of flux.
The systematicity of Plateaus’ concepts can also be seen in the books structure. Setting aside the introduction and the conclusion the thirteen chapters of Plateaus have a linear, cumulative structure. Its second chapter introduces multiplicities as packs and as assemblages. The third elucidates the concept of the assemblage further introducing territory, signs, strata, lines. The fourth and fifth chapters follow up on that by developing an account of signs, signification and subjectification as several kinds of interrelated strata. As an interlude, the sixth chapter presents practical problems around forming connections with the plane of consistency or 'Body without Organs'. Chapter seven draws a line from the discussions of signification and subjectification to analyse processes of formation and investment with significance of the face. Chapter eight uses Fitzgerald's 'The Crackup' to classify three types of line and line segment, which leads naturally on to the subsequent chapter's analysis of how those segments are taken up in the great strata of the state, ending with a discussion of the deterritorialisation towards death and destruction of Nazi Germany. That discussion of the perils of lines of flight is broadened in the next chapter into critical analyses of a variety of theoretical positions that cease to conceptualise becoming adequately, as well as providing suitable positive accounts of different types of becoming. The final discussion of becoming-music is a segue to chapter eleven’s analysis of the refrain. This account of repetition and rhythm is the final component needed to prepare the way for the most important three chapters of the book: Treatise on Nomadology – the War Machine, Apparatus of Capture, and The Smooth and the Striated. The chapter on the war machine introduce the concepts of smooth and striated space (continued in its own right in chapter fourteen) and the idea of the capture of the war machine by the state (the topic of chapter thirteen). Together
114 they offer a sustained analysis of the formation of modern states and international world capitalism. The chapters from two to eleven could have been otherwise: they could have been sequenced differently, they could have addressed other topics or used other source materials, or any combination of some or all of those without affecting the book to any great degree. The final three however would, if written differently, would lead to something else entirely. Any complete interpretation of Plateaus then must turn upon the analysis it provides of those final chapters (a reading of Plateaus that presented only the general method of chapters two to eleven would, through its absence render a severe though unexplained judgement upon those final sections by their lack). My thesis is that those three chapters and the book itself, along with Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy? are designed to attempt to resolve the problem of capitalism. But why must capitalism be an (ethical) problem when the growth in productivity and living standards for a large part of the world is undeniable? For Deleuze and Guattari the answer lies in the two kinds of violence that are essential elements of capitalism. The first kind is “violence that necessarily operates through the state, that precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes ‘primitive accumulation’ and makes possible the capitalist mode of production itself”.63 The second kind is a subset of more general kinds of violence, such as, violence between individuals, war, and crime. They single out state policing or lawful violence as a unique class of violence because it “consists in capturing while simultaneously constituting a right to capture”. The right to violence, which the state appropriates and justifies, is transformed in capitalism. They write:
It is true that war kills, and hideously mutilates. But it is especially true after the state has appropriated the war machine. Above all, the State apparatus makes the mutilation, and even death, come first. It needs them pre-accomplished, for people to be born that way, crippled and zombie like. The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth and not a war myth. Mutilation is a consequence of war, but it is a necessary condition, a presupposition of the State apparatus and the organization of work...64
63 Ibid., p. 447 64 Ibid., p. 425
115 As Deleuze and Guattari see it, capitalist society damages us. This violence is impetus to leave the plan(e) of capital - and to never cease leaving it, by “constitute[ing] a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means”.65
The concrete examples strewn throughout the book are an example of how such rhizomatic analyses can be made as a means of achieving that aim. As far as the method of rhizomatic analysis is concerned any of the examples of it applied in the book could turn out to be incorrect, to over/under emphasise some elements or miss relevant others without necessarily condemning the method itself (although if all or most of the examples fell into those categories that could well be fatal for the method). Similarly, one could imagine an alternative Plateaus in which a completely different chain of examples were used to demonstrate the same concepts without a change in the concepts themselves. In one sense this is not a problem, because the purpose of the book, and the mode of analysis is the creation of novel concepts for use, rather than absolute veridicality. Nonetheless the reader may feel some discomfort at such a happy impregnability of system. Happily two components of Plateaus do involve more consequential stakes. The general account of tendencies, the metaphysical warp and weft of the world, are central to the account provided. If these are not as they are presented in Plateaus, for instance, if there is no interweaving and generation of striated from smooth and vice versa then a relentless diremption of the world results. And likewise, for the final account of those “two great alloplastic and anthropomorphic assemblages, the war machine and the State apparatus”, along with the transformations of capital, it matters a great deal that the account is correct.66 Furthermore it is desirable that schizoanalysis provides suggestions for solutions of the problems that it analyses.
One issue is that nomadism as a distinct historical force was, as well as prone to capture by the state since the beginning of recorded history, also beaten by the state and went into decline, as Plateaus documents, “this was the case with the model of the fortress as a regulator of movement, which was precisely the obstacle the nomads came up against, the stumbling block and parry by which absolute vortical movement was broken”.67 However, the nomadic war machine also has an ambiguous status: while
65 Ibid., p. 472 66 Ibid., p. 513 67 Ibid., p. 386
116 Deleuze and Guattari are careful to clarify that the war machine in its unencasted form does not have war as its object, setting aside the classical state image of thought immediately presents 'dangers' and 'profound ambiguities' in the form of various forms of fascism and racism. And the continuous variation of free action is one that comes with “a vigour and cruelty all of its own (get rid of whatever cannot be transported, the old, children ... )”.69 If the war machine has a 'pure' form then is there a possibility for the state to similarly have a positive vector if a separation can be made between it and capital? Do the parallels and congruences between the movement of capital and absolute deterritorialisation mean that even rhizomatically informed resistance is doomed? The subsequent chapter on Capitalism and Schizophrenia presents an analysis of the role that capital and the modern state play in the final sections of Plateaus in order to evaluate the usefulness of the theory that Deleuze and Guattari provide. Before that however, the thesis will examine the status and structure of ethics in both Deleuze’s singly and co-authored works in order to prepare a sound footing on which to conduct the (ethically impelled) analysis of capital.
69 Ibid., p. 491
117 Chapter 5
Flowers fall and weeds spring up: Deleuzian ethics and analysis
The previous chapter presented a preliminary account of A Thousand Plateaus along with the suggestion that an ethical impulse pervaded it. Before continuing on to develop an analysis of the role of capitalism in it I wish to first critically discuss first the nature and viability of ethical doctrines derived from Deleuze’s work and second show how his work supports a particular mode of ethical analysis. Although I suggested that an ethical intention orientates the strategies of Plateaus, my conclusion in this chapter will be more negative regarding the possibility of a full-fledged Deleuzian ethics. To aid clarity, at the expense of any potential surprise, I will summarise the sections and their sequence in the chapter:
1. I summarise the explicit ethical injunctions in Difference and Repetition and Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Though they are few in number they must be included in any adequate system of Deleuzian ethics. 2. After this is a short review of the ethical aspects of Difference and Repetition and a discussion of how that work relates to Deleuze’s concurrently published book on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy. 3. This then moves into an analysis of Expressionism in Philosophy. Many accounts of Deleuze’s ethics see it as an extension of Spinoza’s ethics; as such the analysis of Expressionism in Philosophy provides a basis for the following section. 4. The next section consists of a survey of the various presentations of Deleuzian ethics in the secondary literature along with a critical discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. 5. I then propose a rival account of how Deleuzian ethics could be done, which I characterise as ‘minor’ ethics. Rather than offering a systematic ethics in the way that other interpreters of Deleuze do, it instead repositions Deleuzian ethics as a particular form of ethical analysis rather than a set of positive proscriptions. 6. This template for a minor ethics is then applied to a specific nexus of ethical ideas and practices (those of Buddhism). This serves to both to make my account of how minor ethics is to be conducted more concrete as well as to provide a comparison for the evaluation of the depth of ethical resources available within Deleuze’s works.
119 Throughout this chapter I argue that Deleuze’s ontology does not, and will never ground a satisfying ethics. The purpose of the comparison with Buddhist ethics is to highlight what Deleuze’s ethics lacks through a comparison with another philosophy that is based on a similar ontology of impermanence. This leaves two possibilities for Deleuzian ethics: either it can provide a more modest set of tools for mapping ethical education, or, if a fuller ethical philosophy is desired that requires supplementation by and fusion with other bodies of thought. And, since that choice of supplementary material is made and shaped by the desire of the thinker then it is inevitable that there will be a plurality of possible Deleuze inflected ethics. This conclusion is at odds with almost all of the existing literature on Deleuzian ethics. The notable exceptions to my sceptical position are Claire Colebrook’s chapter ‘Norm Wars’ and Ian Buchanan’s paper 'Desire and Ethics'.1
Colebrook’s essay both dwells upon the anti-normative elements in Deleuze but also sketches some ways in which consideration of ‘a life’ may open up an ethical space. Buchanan’s paper is more pessimistic and makes two criticisms of the work on ethics in the field of Deleuze studies. The first is that in his view there is a tendency to derive an ethical position directly from Deleuze's ontology, fallaciously leaping from is to ought. The second is that determining specific ethical injunctions and norms from Deleuze's writings is a particularly challenging task because in addition to the lack of explicit practical injunctions, the productive role assigned to desire conflicts with the tendency of almost all Western philosophy to position desire as the opposite of the rationality, deliberation and freely made choice that provide a basis for ethics. His paper ends by calling for the construction of adequately Deleuzian discourses. Although many issues of evaluation and ethical decision making overlap with and are also developed in works on Deleuzian politics (see, for example, the works of Patton, Protevi, May, Connolly, and Widder) in what follows I will restrict the discussion to only those works that deal primarily with ethics, for the sake of clarity and concision.2 A large portion of
1 Colebrook, C. Norm Wars. p 81-97. In Braidotti, R. and Pisters, P. eds., Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (Continuum Publishing, 2012), p. 81-97. Buchanan, I. ‘Desire and Ethics’ Deleuze Studies, 2011, Vol 5 (Supplement), p. 7-20 2 Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). May, T. The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, (Pennsylvania State University Press,
120 the works that take up the topic of Deleuze and ethics do so either with primarily hermeneutic or clarificatory aims, or as a small scale engagement with a specific issue or theme such as suicide, or connections with particular artistic works. I will not discuss those works either, as while these may be useful or interesting, my focus here is on the (im)possibility of a systematic, generalised system of ethics.
Before I survey the existing formulations of Deleuzian ethics I will briefly recapitulate a number of elements in Deleuze’s books that will necessarily have to be accounted for in any such ethical theory. I do so because all of those who present such systems draw extensively on their interpretations of Deleuze’s ontology, and although the elements I will recapitulate were discussed in earlier chapters I will briefly list these here again and make explicit their connection with ethics in order to provide a context for the discussion of the secondary literature that follows.
In Difference and Repetition Deleuze argues for the univocity of being, this is reaffirmed in A Thousand Plateaus with ‘the magic formula’ “pluralism=monism”.3 This univocity means that whatever distinctions and differences there are between particular beings, they are not a result of differences in their being. The consequence of this for ethics is twofold: it will be impossible, or at the very least require much greater effort to ground ethical distinctions by recourse to ontological differences or categories of being since fundamentally there are none. And, as univocity is also tied together with Deleuze’s espousal of the nomadic distribution of being, those distributions and differentiations of being do not stay still but continue to alter and transform. These transformations are without any particular telos. The centrality of change and becoming to his ontology means that even a secondary appeal to contingently established categories of beings (e.g. speciation produced by evolution or cultural formations produced historically) is problematic. Deleuze’s ontology also features a recurrent distinction between the virtual and the possible, and an elucidation of ways in which humans often fail to cognise adequately that deeper and more enigmatic sense of potential. The challenge this presents for ethics is that we cannot be sure that we
1994). Connolly, W. Pluralism, (Duke University Press, 2005). Widder, N. Political Theory After Deleuze, (Continuum, 2012). 3 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 2.
121 understand the full parameters of human existence, or even that we can adequately map the transformations available to us.
Deleuze’s ontology is one of pluralism and multiplicity; any ethics based on it must grapple with how those two issues translate into an ethical realm. Compounding the difficulties in doing so is Deleuze’s commitment to immanence not just in ontology but in evaluation and perspective. Overtly, there are his declarations favouring systems of immanent ethics instead of transcendent morals, but more subtlety, existence is evaluative; beings express values. Those evaluations are rooted in their perspective, for example a tick’s evaluations perhaps revolve around heat, suitable sites from which to drop, and movement and they also express with their being the world as it is for ticks. This thread of evaluation is extended in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. The reader of those works is presented a vision of the world in which forces clash, combine and recombine. Broad categories are set out for those forces: sad passions, reactive forces, affirmation and negation, those that limit themselves and those that go to the limit of their power and so on. These categories can be used for classification and Deleuze’s preference for affirmative over reactive is clear. As those forces wax and wane and alter their combinations, their effects, and the evaluations of them will also shift. Evaluation then is only ever immanent to a specific perspective at a specific time. Evaluation is also a means of diagnosis ‘what must be required in order for this to be said, for this value to be held’.4
As well as these ontological features, Deleuze’s works also contain several more overtly ethical elements. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze makes two gnomic statements, the first outlining what ethics would be in his system, and the second explicating the related ethical concept of counter-actualisation:
“Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us”.5
4 See Smith, D. ‘Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics’ in Essays on Deleuze. (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) for a more detailed account of this. 5 Deleuze, G. The Logic of Sense, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. 149.
122 “The actor actualizes the event but in a way that is entirely different than the actualization of the event in the depth of things”. 6
How both statements are to be understood is less than clear, but in any case, for my purposes here it is enough to make a preliminary conclusion that if a Deleuzian ethics exists it must find way(s) to affirm what occurs or to rise to the challenges we face, and that this is done through or is at least connected to the idea of counter- actualisation. Through evaluating what happens, and then selectively conducting oneself to further actualise some of those virtual tendencies in a transformed way there is the possibility of affirming what is. What exactly that means, and how it is to be done, will need to be spelled out by any developed ethics. The other more explicitly ethical parts of Deleuze’s oeuvre are the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Foucault’s preface to Anti-Oedipus describes it as “a book of ethics”, an “art of living counter to all forms of fascism”.7 Both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus extend and re-develop the concepts of Difference and Repetition within broader historical timespans and wider socio-cultural contexts. Interwoven with the development of a new conceptual vocabulary are suggestions of a broader social criticism of the over-petrification of desire and forms of life. A satisfying account of Deleuzian ethics ought to be able to account for all of the above both in the negative sense of explaining how the obstacles those concepts place for ethical theory can be surmounted, as well as more positively by including those productive elements
Unsurprisingly for a work focused largely on ontology, the number of explicitly ethical elements in Difference and Repetition is few. Ethics and morality are referred to mostly as negative examples or mistaken approaches, or, more positively, in the context of Spinoza’s works.8 Nonetheless even if the details are undelineated the intention of the ontology is in part undoubtedly liberatory: the dogmatic image of thought that Deleuze seeks to overthrow is also a moral image of thought. Difference and Repetition was one of Deleuze’s two doctoral theses, and was published at the same time as his second thesis on Spinoza. A number of Deleuze’s readers flesh out that implication by
6 Ibid., p. 150. 7 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. xiii. 8 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. 3-7, p. 25, p. 30, p. 40, p. 53, p.127, p. 131-2, p. 137, p. 197-8 p. 234, p. 265-8, p. 282. p. 303, p. 311.
123 reading the positive references to Spinoza in Difference and Repetition and the aligning of Nietzsche with Spinoza in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy as a line to follow, and then simply take the Spinoza monographs to both have the same status as Deleuze’s unique philosophical works and to be seamlessly continuous with them. However there are both interpretive and structural obstacles to simply merging the systems of the books.
In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, published two years after Difference and Repetition, a melange of biographical notes, a glossary, and essays on various aspects of Spinoza are published together. Of those, the second and sixth chapters are useful for generalising an ethics. These two chapters distinguish ethics from morality, connect Spinoza’s ethics to Nietzsche’s and present that bridge as an ethological approach to evaluating the powers of bodies. Comprising only 21 pages, those chapters are suggestive but slight in terms of philosophical detail and comprehensiveness. They also serve as a bridge between Deleuze’s prior historical studies and the subsequent works of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In A Thousand Plateaus the references to ethology, “what a body can do”, degrees of power, and changing relations of rest and movement all imply that there are Spinozistic continuities but those are references are occasional and the ethical implications of them are undeveloped.
Expressionism in Philosophy however is a full-length study of Spinoza’s philosophy. Difference and Repetition takes up Spinoza’s ontology, re-working it as part of a metaphysical coalition system in which substance instead ‘revolves around the modes’, but it contains no equivalent adoption of Spinoza's ethics. Projecting the discussion of ethics in Expressionism in Philosophy as the natural continuation of Difference and Repetition requires an exegetical decision that Expressionism in Spinoza is intended, or required, or systematically involved as the silent pair of Difference and Repetition. Two separate works, one a historical study of another thinker and the other an original work of philosophy ‘in one’s own voice’, are treated as one continuous project. Nothing in either work substantiates such an assertion, and the dual publication as a result of the French doctoral requirements as well as the contrasts between the style, manner and aims of the two works make this assertion something that must be argued for and justified.
124 Assuming for the moment that Expressionism in Philosophy is then to be the missing ethics section of Difference and Repetition, what does it say? It is a study of the philosophical use of ‘expression’ in Spinoza’s metaphysics that seeks to rehabilitate its importance in understanding Spinoza’s system. The specifically ethical aspects of this relate to the ways in which attributes expresses essences, and the attributes collectively constitute and express the being of God. Deleuze also highlights the consequences of Spinoza’s parallelism for the construction of ethics. Understanding Spinoza’s metaphysics leads to a need to reconsider ethics in light of it. There are two main elements informing that reconsideration: that ethics must replace morality, and that the body must also take its place as the foundation of ethics. In Deleuze’s account, Spinoza’s system is both naturalistic (there are no transcendent values) but it also retains a central place for God. Humans however generally lack an adequate knowledge of both God and themselves hence the oft-cited war cry ‘we do not even know what a body can do”.9 Both the naturalism, as well as the foregrounding of ignorance, feed into the proposal of an ethics structured towards congruence with natural laws rather than those centered on natural rights. In this account Spinoza’s ethics are exploratory, since no one is born free or rational, whereas models of natural right require and are based on a starting point of an adequate knowledge of the final state of affairs.
They model perfection within a clear, ranked, order of ends, and so tend to propose models requiring conformity with a ‘good society’ governed by the wise decider of ends, whether that be in the form of a philosopher-king or a democratic body of officials. Instead Spinoza will replace models of authority with those structured by contract and consent, and distinctions between good and evil qualities with encounters that produce good and bad consequences based on the specific circumstances. Such a model can only ever be relative: good and bad only from the viewpoint of a particular mode. From this follows a general account of sad and joyful, and active and passive affections,and how combinations of bodies can increase or decrease the power of action of each body involved (or end them entirely). This kind of calculation of existants is made more complex by the requirement that three distinct elements be considered: “its essence as a degree of power; the relation in which it expresses itself; and the extensive parts subsumed in this relation”.11 This model of powers that Spinoza proposes relies on
9 Deleuze, G. Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy. p. 255 11 Ibid., p. 237
125 the metaphysical system of essences. Expression comes in to the ethical discussion through the accounts of how essences are actualised both in relation to modes and to contingent worldly circumstances, and through the discussion of common notions. Common notions are what permits the bootstrapping from inadequate to adequate ideas, from bondage to freedom, from ignorance to knowledge of God. One special consequence of the role of God and essences in the system is that “there is nowhere any privation, but there are nonetheless passages between greater and lesser perfections”.12 A tension results from the existence of two necessary but mutually exclusive perspectives: that arising at the level of this perpetual perfection, and that of the level of ignorance and inadequate ideas, contingency, and chance and negative encounters in the order of extrinsic determinations.
As may already be apparent from this short summary, there are several areas of tension between the metaphysics supporting this ethics, and that of Difference and Repetition. Any attempts to bolt a Spinozistic ethics onto an ontology of difference will need to address them, as well as distinguish which elements of Spinoza’s system have not been adopted. Chief among these are the role of God, the doctrine of parallelism and the metaphysics of the essences.
The role of god. Deleuze’s atheistic philosophy is in stark contrast to Spinoza’s pantheistic portrayal of the cosmos. An attempt to keep this mechanism while somehow de-sacralising it through a kind of appeal to immanence would run up against the explicit disavowal of a ‘plane of all planes’ in What is Philosophy. Not only is the functional role of God central to the system, but God’s presence pervades the ethics is both orientation and tone. While Spinoza’s system is perspectival in that evaluations of good and bad are only ever relative to a particular body, he still espouses a single ultimate criterion and aim: the knowledge and love of God.
The doctrine of parallelism. Deleuze notes that the adoption of an ethics in favour of a morality, and natural law over natural rights is a direct consequence of doctrine of parallelism. If this doctrine is not adopted then another basis will need to be supplied.
12 Ibid., p. 253
126 The essences. The functioning of the essences provides the grounding for the model of natural law, and also for the transition from ignorance through the successive kinds of knowledge. But the essences in Spinoza’s construction are both unchanging and unified.13 The virtual field of differences, endlessly divergent and mutable, cannot then simply take the place of Spinoza’s essences without a substantial re-working. And similarly, the very idea of counter-actualisation makes no sense in Spinoza’s ethics.
Furthermore, Spinoza’s account of the order of extrinsic determinations and common ideas is proposed in a pre-Darwinian world. A definition of good as that which is compatible or conducive to one’s nature is not un-problematic when joined to a metaphysics that is heavily oriented towards the kind of changes in kind that occur once certain thresholds are crossed. In short, Spinoza’s philosophy operates with a sedentary account of being.
None of these disjunctions are necessarily insurmountable, and it is evident from Deleuze’s own writings that there is some deep commonality between Spinoza’s ethics and the ethics incipient in Deleuze’s writings. Deleuze never fully articulated a bridge between the two systems. My thesis is that Deleuze’s ontology cannot directly support an ethics, and that the works on Spinoza cannot fully resolve that insufficiency, so I will now summarise and critically assess the existing Deleuzian ethical theories proposed by Braidotti, Lorraine, Bryant and Jun in order to show how their weaknesses result from the incompatibility between Deleuze’s ontology and any concrete ethics.
Braidotti’s Nomadic Ethics Braidotti develops an ethical theory across several books centered on Deleuze's writings, which she calls nomadic ethics.14 She describes her approach as based on a “non-unitary or nomadic” conception of the subject and aims at avoiding neo-liberal status quo, relativism, and nihilism by propounding a positive system of sustainable ethical transformation.15 She draws on Deleuze's work on Spinoza and Nietzsche in particular. Combining these works with her own thinking, Braidotti propounds an ethics
13 Ibid., p. 237 14 Braidotti, R. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006). Braidotti, R. ‘Nomadic Ethics’ in Smith, D. and Somers-Hall. H The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Braidotti, R., and Pisters, P. eds. Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze. (Continuum Publishing, 2012) 15 Braidotti, R. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006), p. 4.
127 driven by desires and affects rather than only rational deliberation, in which historical changes are not solely impelled by conscious subjects, and ethical considerations are expanded to adopt non-human viewpoints and concerns. She repeatedly emphasises our human and non-human interconnections, arguing that “'we' are all in this together” as a result of this enlarged perspective of our shared territory.16 For her this ethics is primarily “a mode of actualising sustainable forms of transformation” and the focus of ethical analysis is on “the effects of truth and power that [one’s] actions are likely to have upon others in the world. This is a kind of ethical pragmatism …”.18 Her characterisation of ‘life’ as a open-ended and mutually enacted process that traverses, connects and re-connects assemblages leads to her advocacy for a bio-centered egalitarianism.19 This ethics rests on a monistic ontology, in which subjects are individuated within a larger, common flow of life.20 She stresses the materiality of the subject, and its responsiveness to its unique location, both historically and geographically.
Her commitment to monism and the situated and process based nature of all entities leads her to argue that ontology is best conceived such that “hierarchical levels and hegemonic differences are rejected and replaced by the renewed emphasis on … a common plane of immanence”.21 This focus on specificity, combined with her stress on ontological novelty, gives her ethics an inherent anti-conservatism. Similarly, she also suggests scepticism of the ability to represent others, a rejection of moral universalism and a hesitation about, but not outright rejection of, claims for equality understood as a matching of the rights of established identities.22 Instead she calls for a multiplicity of ethical strategies and positions.23 Those claims to particularity and difference are however balanced by her endorsement of “locally situated universalist claims” that are “grounded, partial and accountable" and which rest on the immanence of the subject.24 The making and remaking of these intersecting claims produce the beginnings of a 'web' of ethics. Her stress on ethical multiplicity is moderated by commonalities underlying
16 Ibid., p. 119. 18 Ibid., p. 217 & p. 14 19 Ibid., p. 110 20 Ibid., p. 158 21 Braidotti, R. ‘Nomadic Ethics’ in Smith, D. and Somers-Hall. H The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 174 22 Braidotti, R. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006). p. 13, p. 15, & p. 134 23 Ibid., p. 134 24 Ibid., p. 18 & p. 36
128 those divergences. Because “all subjects share in this common nature [of existence as “radically immanent intensive bodies”], there is a common ground on which to negotiate the interests and the eventual conflicts”.25 Braidotti argues that the relational and transitive structure of the self is expressed ethically in openness to others and a commitment to engendering social situations that encourage positive transformations.26 This is further buttressed by humans’ inherent tendency towards joy and self- expression, such that “Positivity is built into this program through the very idea of the immanence of matter and its self-organizing vitality. Life sets its own boundaries…”.28 Braidotti articulates several principles and ethical criteria that are drawn from her ontology. What is good is “what increases our power of acting”, similarly unethical behaviour “denies, hinder and diminishes that impetus [to express one's freedom], or is unable to sustain it”.29 Braidotti goes so far as to state that “In terms of the ethics of conatus, in fact, the harm that you do to others is immediately reflected in the harm you do to yourself, in terms of loss potentia, positivity, self-awareness and inner freedom”.30 Sustainability is used as a criterion for assessing what is ethical; only ethical behaviour can be made to last. She defines sustainability in terms of self-knowledge of one's body's limits and capabilities, a knowledge that is at least as much enactive as it is cognitive. This is then extended from an individual perspective to a communal one, requiring individuals to hold commitments to social values that support group flourishing and social cohesion. Individual actions are always to be understood as part of the wider ethical agency of collective relations. She advocates a non-profit orientation “against individualism and exploitation, in favour of self-expression and communally held property rights”32 Before I critically discuss Braidotti’s ethics I will summarise the ethics presented by Tamsin Lorraine. I will discuss both Lorraine’s and Braidotti’s work together because of the similarities in their positions.
Lorraine’s Durational Subjectivity Lorraine’s Deleuzian vision of ethics is grounded on “appeals to immanent
25 Ibid., p. 157 26 Braidotti, R. ‘Nomadic Ethics’ in Smith, D. and Somers-Hall. H The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 174 28 Ibid., p. 180. 29 Braidotti, R. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006), p. 162 & p. 148 30 Ibid., p. 157. 32 Ibid., p. 110.
129 criteria of human flourishing”.34 She makes it explicit that she is influenced by and makes use of Braidotti’s Nomadic Ethics. Lorraine’s theory draws out Deleuze's work on Bergson in particular, construing ethics as the interplay of attentiveness to the events of the present and proposing creative solutions to our “immersion in a duration whole made up of heterogeneous durations that includes nonhuman as well as human processes that are always unfolding towards an unpredictable future.”36 She draws on Bergson's account of durational thinking versus spatialised thinking to show how ethical thinking developed upon spatialised conceptions of reality and time can produce occlusions and hindrances due to its ontological inadequacy. She also draws on Deleuze's work on Nietzsche and Spinoza, focusing on the concepts of active and reactive, forces that go their limit rather than being separated from what they can do, and the cultivation of an active joy that arises from experimentation with different modes of connection with the world and others.37 The notion of being worthy of an event is unpacked as composing adequate ethical responses that recognise and encourage the flourishing of the multiplicity of durations that assemblages take part in. This counter-actualisation is tilted towards novelty, “rather than uphold already actualised patterns of living sanctioned by established conventions, one releases new actualisations in keeping with the accumulation of intensities leading to new thresholds in meaning and action”.38 Naturally Lorraine advocates a plurality of ethical practices. Rather than aiming at the production of universal rules, her ethics attempts to guide individuals in how to skilfully respond to the singularities in the particular context and the events that they find themselves in such that their experimentation encourages collective flourishing, via affective as well as cognitive attunement.
Like Braidotti, Lorraine identifies the grounding of her ethics in Deleuze's ontology but with qualifications about the limits of what can be grounded by it.39 Ethical norms are “fleeting idealizations of particular flows of life”, but those norms do not rest on any abiding features of human nature, for, as Lorraine sees it “there is no ontological form of the human that we can or should instantiate”.41 One can affirm
34 Lorraine, T. Deleuze & Guattari's Immanent Ethics: Theory Subjectivity and Duration (SUNY Press, 2011), p. x. 36 Ibid., p. 2-3. 37 Ibid., p. 77-78 38 Ibid., p. 125 39 Ibid., p. 31 41 Ibid., p. 31
130 human existence in its ethical multiplicity, and in specific positive actualisations, but one cannot establish a final or universal ethos. Accordingly, this ethics, on those grounds, extols ways of living that align with dynamic self-determination rather than determined by static representations of self.42 Identity based understanding is unnecessarily restrictive when compared to a more intuitive, receptive understanding of the multiple potentials within durations. That ability to step back from representational thinking to a more durational thinking, and to step back from the present reality to also include the potential future richness of the virtual is a skill required for ethical action. Adequately ethical actions are those that are guided by the (virtual) nature of a thing rather than an abstracted understanding narrowly focused only on its present, actual form. This guidance is not only cognitive but affective and embodied. This is not simply a matter of adequacy to reality, as Lorraine points out in her discussion of Judith Butler. Butler's concepts and the intensities in them resonate with the potentials of the time so as to impel and revitalise existing potentials in novel ways as well as open up new forms. Theory then is a tool that primarily allows the intensification of selected tendencies and secondarily determines truth. This focus on fruitfulness for future experimentation rather than veridicality to a changing reality resistant to representation makes a virtue of multiple traditions of ethical theorisation, aimed at different (but also sometimes overlapping) localities and terrains, drawing on differing (but again sometimes shared) traditions and resources. Those divergences however are grounded and constrained by the same ontology that underlies them all, and by the necessity to propose ethics that are active, affirmative and joyful.
As Lorraine observes, communities can only sustain themselves by preventing or minimising the actualisation of tendencies inimical to the repetitions that constitute that community.43 She combines these two points, of sustaining communities and of positive connections and harmonisation, to conclude that
Thus, on Deleuze’s reading, not only is it the case that the more energy is invested in dominating others or keeping others from doing what is in them to do, the less power of action one (whether “one” refers to an individual subject or collective) has, but the more skilful (or ethical) action would be the action that
42 Ibid., p. 76 43 Ibid., p. 40
131 fostered not just one’s own power of action, but the power of action of the others with whom one shares various kinds of assemblages (from a family assemblage to the assemblage of a community or movement to an eco-system or a planet) as well. Being “worthy of the event” is thus premised on intuiting multiple durations and the lines of action emanating from plateaus where multiple relations can come together in ways that empower not only oneself, but the assemblages of which one forms a component part.44
Lorraine also draws on the cautions contained in A Thousand Plateaus about fascist tendencies, too rapid de-stratification, over-stratification, and other destructive tendencies.45 The creative harmonisations that she describes are, as in Braidotti, not limited to human connections; human existence takes place as one flow amongst the broader flow of life. Lorraine advocates working with rather than opposing those flows.46
Comments on Lorraine and Braidotti Due to the overlaps and structural similarities between the ethics of both Lorraine and Braidotti the same criticisms are mostly applicable to both. It must be noted that in contrast to Lorraine, Braidotti’s purpose is less exegetical fidelity than the presentation of bold visions and broad syntheses of congruent but separate research projects and discourses. In places she offers rebukes of the socio-historical application of philosophical doctrines as grounds for the dismissal of those arguments rather than direct criticism of those systems themselves. In other parts her explication of the Deleuzian corpus is simply incorrect.47 For example, Braidotti promotes a concept of the limit as a “marker of sustainability”, in which she states “Deleuze has an almost mathematical definition of the limit, as that which one never really reaches”.48 This would be true only with respect to the subject’s own intersection with their death, but in every other example of limits Deleuze’s point is in fact the reverse; only by actually crossing a limit does an assemblage undergo a singular transformation. In another instance, she writes that “The founding ethical desire of this [Deleuzian] subject is to be
44 Ibid., p. 128 45 Ibid., p. 140. 46 Ibid., p. 76. 47 No doubt with this comment I place myself within the ranks of those she dismisses as ‘the orthodox Deleuzian clones’ Braidotti, R. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006), p. 141 48 Ibid., p. 218.
132 worthy of a life force that intersects with all that moves and exists”.50 In an elucidation of an independent but Deleuze inspired ethics this claim would be uncontroversial, but as an account of Deleuze’s own writings it is not only unsupported, but veers into a kind of mystical vitalism antithetical to those works. Despite my concerns with the grounding of Braidotti’s readings I will from this point address her position solely on its own merits without any further discussion of its (wavering) congruence with the works it cites.
Both Lorraine and Braidotti make it explicit that they set out to use Deleuze’s ontology as the basis for a Deleuzean ethics. Lorraine’s and Braidotti’s arguments and conclusions can be separated into two layers or groups that correspond to two segments in the structure of that onto-ethics. These layers can be understood as constituting the resolution of two problems facing any Deleuzian ethics, two layers that I will refer to as the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ problems. Resolution of the soft problem is the first and most general step in producing such an ethics. It answers the question of what universal conclusions can be drawn from Deleuze’s writings, and what systematic constraints does it place on any potential ethics (i.e. what values and conclusions cannot ever be generated from that perspective). The hard problem builds on whatever solution is offered to the first problem. Answering it is an attempt to resolve the question of what concrete stipulations and suggestions are to be drawn from Deleuze’s work that can be applied to particular events and assemblages, or at the very least a set of guidelines for how one would determine that oneself. An adequate Deleuzian ethics must, as Buchanan notes, be able to be actually used or intervene in real situations. The two problems correspond to each half of the pluralism=monism formula that encapsulates Deleuze’s ontology. The soft problem involves accommodating the perspective of monism and the hard problem involves accommodating the perspective of pluralism subsequent to that monism. The hard and soft problems also pair with two levels of truth in ethics: a level of processual truth that is indeed universal (this is not simply to be restricted to or correlated with material existence), and a level of nomadic truth where truth is contingent for particular subjects at particular times with particular capabilities. Part of the hard problem will be satisfactorily addressing the clashes that ensue between the two perspectives of pluralism and that of monism. As I will attempt
50 Braidotti, R. ‘Nomadic Ethics’ in Smith, D. and Somers-Hall. H The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 176.
133 to show, Braidotti’s and Lorraine’s ethics fail to provide a compelling answer to the second problem.
Both Braidotti and Lorraine detail their mutable conceptions of identity and ethics, arguing for their superiority over traditional static and ordered conceptions that require restrictive conformity. In doing so, they critically apply Deleuze’s ontology to other theories to rule out incompatible ethical doctrines (soft problem). Asserting a preference for difference over identity introduces the consequent (hard) problem of articulating which mutable concepts one should adopt, and an account of at what particular times and in which particular ways those mutations occur, and which would be desirable to foster. The criterion of intersection and alignment with ‘the forces of life’ is so abstract and broad as to have limited explanatory potential, and it once again overlooks the problem of how that is to be done for the many different forms (conjunctions of forces) of human life. One reads “Ethics means faithfulness to this potentia, or the desire to become” but the specifics of what one is to become are never detailed.51 Similarly, in their development of the commentaries on Spinoza and Nietzsche they advocate increasing our joyful compositions, skilful creativity and so on, but the issue of what criteria one would use to actually bring that about is never pushed any further than the promissory note of ‘immanence’ ‘affect’ or ‘immanent criteria’. The rhetoric of plurality is not pushed into a plurality of actual evaluations, or from broad claims to practical advice. Whenever their Deleuzian ethics encompasses concrete situations or examples they are always those imported from the independent currents of feminist ethics; the insufficiencies of their Deleuzian ethics are supplemented by an imported canon, practices, decisions and examples. When Braidotti advocates dispensing with anthropocentrism, because the monistic ontological process does not endow humans with a privileged position, she does not and cannot offer any further (Deleuzian) reasons for specifying whether, for example humanely treated animals can still be eaten or if one should be vegetarian, or vegan, or even fruitarian. Not only do their two ethics not give any such details, their systems are incapable of offering grounds for preferring any one concrete position over another in the case that both positions can clear the hurdle of congruence with their universal aspects of their onto- ethics. All of their principles are universally applicable. Lorraine and Braidotti would
51 Ibid., p. 183.
134 no doubt respond to this charge by reference to their advocation of a plurality of ethics and theorising, citing this as an advantage. With this I concur: a plurality of perspectives and strategies enriches us all, but the reality of that plurality is inseparable from “a power of decision”.53 But this necessity is invisible within their two systems.
The future, and creativity, for Lorraine and Braidotti is always referred to as implicitly monistic. Even the slightest consideration of the future and creativity from the perspective of plurality would show that they (and the much vaunted counter- actualisation) require acts of decision and selection of which of many possibilities are to be (creatively) actualised and which past and present tendencies are to be discarded or countered. Not only do Braidotti and Lorraine assume universality where they should see the problematic multiplicity of the future, their monist interpretation extends into their implicit view of the future as simply benevolent and harmonious. Future changes are for the better, thus conservatism can simply be dismissed, and forces are not divergent or conflicting so harmonising with them is unproblematic. Lorraine’s elucidation of the zones and limit points of concepts is similarly under-developed. The idea of concepts having zones and limit points that define them is an accurate representation of Deleuze’s account. But what she does not address is the consequences that follow when this is taken out of the realm of theory and into the real life transitions and movements of ethical concepts and their associated actualisations. To follow the variation of a concept beyond a limit may be to think otherwise, but it also may be to lose what made that concept valuable, for example, to move from a concept of honour to one of authenticity may be to lose the possibilities and meaningfulness of being honourable and dignified. Some new ideas are simply bad ideas, and some changes are for the worse, but no account of this exists in Lorraine and Braidotti’s works.
While both authors in places make some strategic acknowledgements of the existence of conflict and suffering, that acknowledgement is not supported within the structure of their ethics itself by e.g. offering sturdy criteria for resolving competing claims. Deleuze’s characterisation of his ontology as purely positive seems to have strongly coloured their positions. Braidotti goes so far as to claim that desire “can never be excessive”.54 Their systems do not sufficiently distinguish between (a) the positivity
53 Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. 197. 54 Braidotti, R. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006), p. 162
135 of that ontology, contrasted to a metaphysics of lack, which is applicable to all phenomena, and (b) positivity as an aspirational ideal for all human existence, as distinct from (c) the actualities we live among where wicked problems, factions with incompatible desires, and resentment are plentiful. Both (a) and (b) are soft problems, while (c) is a hard problem. Braidotti and Lorraine advocate a panglossian vision of the best of all future worlds where all assemblages always mutually increase their powers. Certainly as a vision this resonates with the utopic elements within Deleuze’s later works, and it is a laudable ideal that we might aim for.55 But it gives no grounds for evaluating scenarios where that kind of ‘everybody wins’ outcome is not possible, which, realistically, is many of them.
In a similar vein Braidotti’s rejection of hierarchy is true as an observation from a universal or God’s eye view, but simply false from the perspective of any actual existant: a large part of Nietzsche and Philosophy is devoted to this question of ranking and evaluation made from specific perspectives. It seems that Lorraine’s and Braidotti’s implicit solution to this issue, (implicit since it is never raised), is to insist that far reaching ethical decisions and values are formulated and anchored within collective determination. This interpretation is supported by scattered suggestions thoughout their texts that the correct scale of ethical analysis is not just the individual agent but larger assemblages. Braidotti advances an argument that the need for selection “has nothing to do, however, with the argument for choice and individual free will. Quite on the contrary, it establishes collective and transversal relations as the core ethical agency”.56 These suggestions are under-developed, and not without problems of their own. Firstly, it merely displaces the issue of the clash of individual ethical differences onto a broader scale of a clash of group ethical differences. Secondly, an “ethical commitment to social values conducive to a collectively well-functioning system” implies that ethical values are ultimately to rest on their functional fit with an individual’s (changing) nature and (changing) culture, but this provides no guidance on which of the plurality of future changes are more or less desirable or even undesirable.57 Thirdly, it is unclear what well-functioning is defined as, and what time scale is to be used for establishing that,
55 Such as those expressed in What is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus 56 Braidotti, R. ‘Nomadic Ethics’ in Smith, D. and Somers-Hall. H. The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p.176 57 Ibid., p. 175
136 particularly since impermanence is universal within Deleuze’s ontology. The concept of sustainability and limits take up these topics but introduce more shade than light. Sustainability as a concept seems inherently problematic within a Deleuzian context. In an ontology premised on difference, and on the institution of changes in kind, sustainability seems inherently conservative and can only ever be provisional. It is also unclear how to distinguish between the moments when the current situation should be sustained and when its support should be withdrawn and placed elsewhere, and which of the ever-present swarm of incompossible incipient changes should be nurtured and sustained. The examples given in their works are those that oppose self-destructive tendencies of individuals. True enough, and just as true for reckless destruction of the natural environment, but when applied to any less straightforward example (anything without a clear physical boundary), it is less clear how it is to be used. Once again, the recourse to immanence in the forms of ‘immanent limits’ here seems to do a great deal of (unarticulated) work.
Overall, in both Braidotti’s and Lorraine’s treatises immanence, affect and ontology are posited as a ground on which to move from the first problem of determining universal prescriptions to the second problem of how to establish specific enactments and modifications of them that would apply to particular situations. But the ground they develop to resolve these problems is simply assumed rather than argued for in any sustained manner. Moreover both suggest some kind of ethical naturalism that would function as an intuitive and mutable species of consequentialism. But as this naturalism is couched only in terms of the soft problem rather than the hard problem, the contents of this ethical naturalism never become fleshed out. In the end, all we can conclude is that “It would be a matter of what would work, rather than what was correct”.58
Bryant’s Problematic Ethics In ‘The Ethics of the Event’ Bryant asserts that “the dominant traditions of ethical thought are almost entirely useless with respect to genuine ethical problems” as their rule based models fit poorly with situations that produce ethical controversy.59
58 Lorraine, T. Deleuze & Guattari's Immanent Ethics: Theory Subjectivity and Duration. (SUNY Press, 2011), p. 29 59 Bryant, L. ‘The Ethics of the Event’ in Smith, D., and Nathan J, eds. Deleuze and Ethics. (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 22
137 This is because those controversial situations generally involve only partial knowledge and much opacity and so fit poorly with the model of application of principles to cases. Instead Bryant proposes to draw upon The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition to offer a more appropriate model of ethical thought. Bryant argues that traditional theories begin their ethical thinking too late, and by doing so produce malformed schemas. Not merely that the results are wrong, but that there is a deeper problem: they mistake the very situation of ethical problem itself and so set off on the wrong part from the beginning. What they miss is the moment of uncertainty and crisis where everyday existence of adequate familiarity has become unsettled, provoking questions of how to return to stability or whether to introduce new arrangements. For Bryant, traditional approaches are “egregious ... because [they] restrict the ethical to the moment of reduction and normalisation, to subsumption under a category or rule, [and fail] to recognise the inventiveness and creativity that ethics embodies”.60 Bryant’s thesis is that “the question of the ethical is that of how situations must be re-composed in response to this moment of crisis”.
Bryant draws upon the work of Latour to argue that the terrain in which we make our ethical decision is one populated and shaped by non-human ‘actors’ as much as other rationally deliberating humans. Those non-human actors are part of what brings about the change in circumstances that makes the collective enter into crisis and require re-thinking of the relations of them all and their integration with one another. Thus the work of ethics is of determining how a new collective relation is to be composed or formed: ethics as construction rather than a judgment. As Bryant puts it, “Given this event, how is our collective to be built?”.61 He then presents an account of Deleuze’s concept of the event, and the counter-actualisation of the event. These concepts are what grounds Bryant’s claims for the essentiality of creativity to ethics, “Something new is created both in response to the event and through the event”.62 He connects this to Deleuze’s discussion of the ontological status of problems, and the relation of the problematic status of virtual distributions of differential elements and relations. He then gives an account of actualisation as resolution of problems drawn from Difference and Repetition. Becoming worthy of the event is then cashed out as responding to a
60 Ibid., p. 26 61 Ibid., p. 29 62 Ibid., p. 36
138 problematic field, through enacted problem solving: “affirming this labor or work of actualization, this inventiveness proper to the ethical, and undertaking this genesis that the event calls for”.63 Slightly more concretely, Bryant argues that this means to work at determining true problems, and eschewing false problems. This means
a pedagogy of problems, in an exploration of milieus to discover their singularities, their significant points, their ecological factors so as to progressively trace solutions or actualisation in the formation of new forms of thought, ways of life, and new collectives. Rather than judging acts, the question will be on of exploring the generative field in which acts are produced.64
Although it may seem a trivial point at which to begin an analysis, Bryant’s scene setting sketch in which he introduces this idea of ethical controversy, and his ethical phenomenology that follows misstates the actual structures and sequences of crises in question. I ask the reader’s patience in this first part of the discussion that follows – while it may seem tangential at first, I hope that by the end its relevance will have become clear. While Bryant introduces ethical controversy and ethical crises merely descriptively, this approach determines his construal of things. What is not explored is whether ethical controversy is merely a conflict of opinions between rival ethical decision-making systems and values, or an actual case of widespread ethical uncertainty. In the former situation once a choice of system or values has been made a perfectly clear position results, thus the conflict in that scenario is in fact a political one over which system should be adopted rather than an ethical controversy per se. And this is what we can see in Bryant’s initial example: it is not that there is a lack of ethical evaluations, rather the controversy arises because of the overabundance of conflicting positions. Bryant suggests that ethical systems fail here because their applicability is obstructed by the patchy quality of our worldly knowledge. While perhaps some of the disputing parties in his example might change their views if further information were to be available, many hold their positions because of values or principles that would never be upset by facts alone. Clearly Bryant wants to separate out a set of ethical problems from more mundane ethical experiences, and this is what his phenomenology of ethical crisis is meant to point to. But again here too his phenomenological description is over-
63 Ibid., p. 39 64 Ibid., p. 41
139 broad. Ethical crisis can occur not only because of the breakdown of a system of ethics in the face of present circumstances. In the process of growing from child to adult one often faces ethical crises, but the structure and content of these (often concerning friendships and intimate relationships) are familiar from time immemorial, and the correct resolution of them is already well articulated in ethical norms and instruction even if the individual does not in the end adhere to them. Although Bryant wants to single out a specific category of events, the phenomenology of the ethical crisis itself is necessary but not sufficient for this. His neglect of these ‘lesser’ ethical crises also leads to the undervaluation of ‘everyday’ ethical decisions. On Bryant’s account crisis-less ethical acts are either not truly ethical situations, or are ethical but unworthy of acknowledgement or accounting for in the assessment of the dominant ethical traditions. Ethical decision making becomes regulated and standardised for both good and bad reasons. That much of daily life can be appropriately encompassed by such decision making seems, when the decision making is sound, something worthy of celebration rather than neglect or disdain. Bryant’s evaluation of existing ethical traditions does not make any attempt to determine what proportion of our experiences fall under his category of ethical crisis. If the failure of these ethical models is only occasional or slight, then their ‘uselessness’ is vastly overstated. Defining the heart of the ethical as just such situations that cannot be governed by existing principles seems to be argumentative theft rather than honest toil. While Bryant’s account of the failings of traditional ethical thinking may be overstated, it might still be the case that his alternate system has much to recommend it. I shall examine that next.
Bryant presents ethics as being connected to a ‘problematic’ ontology. If all actualisation is on the basis of the resolution of ‘problems’, and ethics is tied to those problems then is everything that exists then in some sense ethical? While it may be stimulating to consider ethics in the broadest frame as all possible ways of existing, such a situation of total ethics seems so vast and so vague as to be of no use by itself in choosing any specific action over another or for resolving an ethical crisis. On the other hand, if not everything is ethical then the connection of ethics to problems must be either analogical, or only applicable to some sub-set of events. Clearly for Bryant the connection cannot be merely metaphoric or analogical but he does not make it clear what makes a problem ethical instead of only ontological, nor exactly how a universal ontology with a problematic structure is to be connected to a selective ethics of
140 problems. Part of the problem is that Bryant has conflated two distinct senses of problem in Deleuze’s work. As well as the account of (ontological) problems in Difference and Repetition Deleuze also discusses problems in Bergsonism. The discussion in Bergsonism is of conceptual problems as they relate to a method of intuition, and of means of distinguishing true and false problems. False problems involve either the mistaken grouping together of things that differ in kind, or the confusion of the order of priority of a term and its dependent concept. Simply put, false problems do not cleave nature at its joints. Bryant’s account of ethics as both the dissolution of false problems as well as creative problem solving does align with that account: once that idea is applied to the ethical domain, false (ethical) problems are those that badly construe an ethical event. But the gap between the ontological problem and the ethical problem remains. For Deleuze the always provisional construction of true problems involves the ‘palpation’ of the actual (rather than representational) tendencies or the virtual distributions that underlie the phenomenal, but Bryant does not give any account of what those ethical realities might be: are they some set of virtues? Are they outcomes that increase one’s freedom? Are they events that create space within which certain behaviors become increasingly common? If so, which events and which behaviours? Bryant’s approach offers no indication of what concretely characterises the ethical. By applying Bryant’s approach to Deleuze’s ethics to his initial example we can see what light his refreshed understanding of ethics sheds. While his focus on generative fields does give a widened view of his example of ethical crisis, it provides no assistance at all in resolving that crisis or suggesting one course of action to be superior to another. It is entirely unclear then what practical benefits his Deleuzian influenced ethics provides over traditional ethical thinking.
This is not to say that his discussion does not contain elements that could not be fruitfully developed further. Connecting his discussion to the account of smooth spaces and striated spaces in A Thousand Plateaus would be one starting point for fleshing out what the ethical consists of. This approach would provide an account of how ethical traditions are developed and enacted in societies precisely with the hope of making a striated (crisis free) space for certain sets of ethical decisions that adhere to a specific set of values. Functional societies attempt, as best as they can, to use what training, norms, cultural expectations and understandings and technologies are on hand to ensure that certain ethical decisions are easy, and that some actions are discouraged. For
141 example, stipulations around marriage in a culture at a certain time and place embody an ethics and are aided by law, supported by expectations, behavior, education and even the stories that culture uses to represent itself. Those traditions were themselves once creative solutions to ethical crises that became codified and condensed over time. Setting his criticisms of ethical tradition and crisis within this broader historical-social framework would begin to provide an answer of what exactly shapes the ‘real’ contours of ethical problems. These ‘real contours’ would not be established from theoretical deduction but by beginning from the investigation of sets of concrete situations.
Jun’s Immanent Normativity In ‘Deleuze, Values, and Normativity’ Jun investigates two issues: whether Deleuze’s philosophy contains an account of moral norms (normativity), and whether it has an account of moral values (the good).65 Although it is not stated as such, Jun’s premise is that Deleuze’s political commitments in life and his statements expressing positive and negative views on political and ethical matters can and must be grounded in his philosophy. Jun provides no arguments to support the necessity he assumes. The alternative, that Deleuze merely held political views on independent grounds, and that those views did not contradict his philosophy, is simply never considered. Instead Jun claims that Deleuze formulates a new conception of normativity, one “which is categorical without being transcendental – in other words, an immanent conception of normativity”.66
Jun outlines his views on why the traditional understanding of universal norms are problematic for Deleuze: Deleuze’s philosophy is deeply resistant to any grounding or conception of transcendence. It is constructed specifically to avoid positing a transcendental subject and transcendent values or forces, rationality and representation are at bottom incompatible with the fundamental basis of reality resting on difference, and there can be no ontologically grounded order of being. Furthermore, Jun argues that what separates normativity from practical reasoning is its production of universalisable or categorical demands. This, together with its abstract nature when formulated as a set of principle(s) or imperative(s), makes it transcendental. As a contrast he introduces the
65 Jun, N. ‘Deleuze, Values and Normativity’ in Smith, D., and Nathan J, eds. Deleuze and Ethics. (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 89 66 Ibid., p. 90
142 case of universal norms (he cites Anarchists’ ‘prefigurative principle’ as an example) whose justification arises instead from pragmatic grounds, or as Jun argues, their immanence to the desired end.67 While transcendental norms are not open to revision these immanent norms vary as the pragmatic aims shift and are replaced. From this Jun jumps to this conclusion: “the concept of normativity as deterritorialisation” requires that “what ‘must’ always remain normative is the ability to critique and transform existing norms, that is, to create something new”.68
Because norms cannot be transcendent, norms are open to ‘deterritorialisation’, therefore, Jun argues, we should pragmatically adopt a meta-norm of only adopting norms that are capable of revision and that do not exclude other norms from being altered and replaced. As Jun himself notes this is very general and no use in deciding between competing practical claims. A value system is also required. This is where his theory of norms is to be connected to a theory of ethics or values. Surveying Deleuze’s works he concludes that for Deleuze “life is loveable, valuable and good; that it is worthy of being protected and promoted; that whatever is contrary to it is worthy of disapprobation and opposition”.69 For Jun, this
Deleuzian value theory, then, aspires to be an eternal revolution against representation which is itself an eternal process of creation and transformation, an eternal practice of freedom. The good or ethical life is both a goal as well as the infinite network of possibilities we travel in its pursuit. … Concrete moral and political goals sought as an end are constituted by our seeking them. Thus the process of seeking freedom or justice is a process of eternal movement, change, becoming, possibility, and novelty which simultaneously demands eternal vigilance, and endurance. … Consequently only individuals are in a position to discover, through processes of experimentation, what is valuable in their lives, what they ought to pursue and avoid, etc. in a particular set of circumstances. Only through the process of pursuing alternative practices can one begin to discover the manifold possibilities of life.70
67 Ibid., p. 101 68 Ibid., p. 101 69 Ibid., p. 104 70 Ibid., p. 104-5
143 This approach is evocative but it is lacking in any kind of practical detail. In fact, that account is merely descriptive of the process of forming values and contains no values other than the very general notion of the worth of life and experimentation. As such Jun’s account lacks normative force – there is nothing to distinguish Jun’s norms from any similar account of revisable conventions and expectations, or even from an account of laws and their amendment, except that jurisprudence has the virtue of featuring concrete theories of justice. Without a theory of values Jun’s sole norm of ‘deterritoralisation’ as ‘immanent normativity’ remains indistinct. Furthermore, his derivation of that norm is dubious. Jun has taken what is a fact from the perspective of Deleuze’s philosophy and then asserted that it ought to be not just a value in itself, but a transcendent value. Jun’s argumentative structure is essentially an isomorphism of Kant’s deduction of the synthetic a priori, but with the difference of attempting to begin from fact and somehow finish up with a value. If one applies Jun’s standard for norms to that norm itself incoherence ensues. Can his ‘immanent norm’ itself be ‘deterritorialised’? If it can, then it cannot function as a meta-norm in the way that Jun desires it to be. However if it cannot be deterritorialised then there clearly exist universal, abstract, eternal norms, which both contradicts Jun’s account of Deleuze’s philosophy and opens the door to the ‘deduction’ of other such norms. Consequently Jun’s attempt to derive a normative Deleuzian ethics therefore cannot be seen as successful.
Summary The presentations of Deleuze’s ethics discussed above share many common features. Setting aside criticisms of textual adequacy, those ethical systems suffer from the same flaws. The problem is that in Deleuze's world there is no fundamental constancy and there is a great diversity of forms. This is a challenging ground on which to construct an ethics. One solution is to sidestep this by focusing on ethics as procedural, while the other is to try and push down to a level of universality in flux itself. Regardless of which tactic they adopt, these attempts to develop a Deleuzian ethics are all surprisingly Kantian. They tell us that reality is problematical, and so are ethical questions best approached by analysis and composition of the genesis of problems, or that the multiplicity of active interweaving processes that constitute Deleuze's ontology also constitute his ethics, but they never reach the level of specific
144 examples or values. Just as Kant's transcendental conditions grounded all possible experiences, so to do these ethical stipulations universally apply to an immense panoply of mutually incompatible situations. Whilst these theorists acknowledge the existence and centrality of multiplicity dependent on individual specificity their ethical systems do not. And while they talk of ethical mutability, none of these theorists offer any account of what brings about ethical transformation, especially those that might occur in the future. Not one of them engages with the existing literature on, or offers, for example, a developmental ethical theory, or a theory of ethical changes stimulated by changes in material technologies and or physiological capacities. The implication one might draw is that Deleuze’s ethics are to be conducted in life similarly to Kant’s aesthetics: Deleuze’s ethical judgements, like Kant’s judgements of beauty, are made in accordance with rules that can never be explicitly given. And, just as Kantian ethics miraculously rediscovers all the mundane features of common sense in his ethics, so too do these Deleuzian theorists, when they offer specific advice, they offer surprisingly conformist positions. Braidotti even goes so far as to say that “The Kantian imperative of doing to others what you would not want done to you is not rejected as much as enlarged”.72 All of Deleuze’s pointed observations about common sense are forgotten in the resurgence of ethical good sense.
Minor Ethics
What these theorists never ask is the question of what problem Deleuzian ethics as an enterprise is intended to solve and what form would be best suited for that. Instead they assume it to be both a total system as well as self-existent, and so construct it on the wrong lines from the start. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze introduces a distinction between major and minor sciences. Major sciences are orientated by a single perspective, governed by theorems, and aim at extracting constants whereas minor sciences series of “pragmatic placings-in-variation”.73 An ethics constructed as a minor science would not begin by trying to make univocal being into its systematic footing. I will expand on this minor conception of ethics by sketching it out below and I will also then apply it to briefly analyse Buddhist ethics. The purpose of the comparison with Buddhism is to concretely show how a similar ontology that does support an ethics has
72 Braidotti, R. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006). p.), p. 157 73 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 109
145 a number of additional features that Deleuze’s (major) ethics does not, and those additional features are what legitimates that (major) ethics. Lacking equivalent features, Deleuze’s philosophy must instead be a minor ethics.
The minor Deleuzian ethics that I propose here repurposes Deleuze’s work on Hume, Nietzsche, and Proust. Deleuze’s makes use of Hume because of his proposal of a new basis for a theory and practice of relations, involving case studies and experimental evaluation, and aiming at determining the conditions that ground and legitimate our habits. Just as Hume's scepticism about our knowledge of causality is not meant to be a challenge through the determination of a new foundation so too must our knowledge of ethical matters be situated on a new basis as well. The formation of relationships provides cases from which to expand or distil theoretical ethical rules from those specific situations and experiment with applying them to new instances. Deleuze's Hume makes the ability to go beyond nature or the given a positive and central feature of human nature. It is this very mutability, resulting from our incomplete and ever varying set of connections to a great 'outside' of thought that requires a minor ethics instead of a total system. The consequence of adopting this position is that belief and probability replace knowledge with certainty. Hume’s account of the various ways in which extend our sympathies and form new passions is the affective correlate to his perspective on knowledge.
Nietzsche's philosophy, as Deleuze reads it, remedies the failings of Kant's Critical project (where Kant ‘rediscovers’ all of his pre-existing moral commitments) though inserting sense and value into the critical system by extending and modifying the analysis of conditions of possibility. This is done by making a method of the evaluation of values that investigates the specific and individual conditions at the point of creation of those values. For Nietzsche values are always created at particular times and places from the impetus of a conjunction of forces. As those conjunctions shift and encounter new forces so too do values shift and mutate. The ethical world throbs and swells according to the values that infuse it, leaving the philosopher to act as diagnostician. The philosopher reads the symptoms that ethical values and acts express so as to construct the system of forces and the perspective that inheres in them. Cause and effect are replaced by Hume’s practices, and Kant’s moral universals are replaced by Nietzsche’s pluralism of values. Nietzsche’s diagnostician seeks not the truth or
146 rightness of particular values, but to establish what perspective produces them, which conceptions and acts are in affinity with them and which cannot be contemplated from within that way of life. These conjunctions are differential – their value can only by determined in combination with other forces and acts, and cannot be theoretically deduced in advance with certainty. These differential relationships of forces form the wide variety of bodies that constitute the world, both material and immaterial (such as political bodies). The forces they oppose and the others they give impetus to, the relations they form, what they maintain and destroy, all provide clues to support a diagnosis. The philosopher investigates to see what viewpoints are enacted, what problem their creation responds to, and what particular circumstances, ways of life, and passions determine them. The results of those investigations produce the data for construction a mobile typology of reactive and active forces, and their multiple combinations. The plurality of perspectives and the values embedded in them require a method for navigating them. Connecting Proust’s account of signs to Nietzsche’s symptomatology gives it on a more concrete basis.
Deleuze’s analysis of Proust focuses on the way his characters undergo a series of apprenticeships to 'signs'. That apprenticeship shapes and forms the subject and their experience of the world. One becomes, for example, a compassionate person by becoming attuned to the signs of those in need and sensitivity to the nature of their experience, and by cultivating a sense of generosity. Signs are not isolated, but exist as systems and relays of signs united by the affinity and compatibility with one another. These signs are like Nietzsche forces – they are not to be understood as merely subjective interpretations nor are they only linguistic or immaterial. Apprenticeships begin when a sign catches or strikes an individual and is not fully understood or recognised. Its elusiveness or resistance provokes something, impelling the apprentice to seek to know and experience it more fully. The search of the apprentice is “an exploration of different worlds of signs that are organised in circles and intersect at certain points”.75 Their task is to, like the symptomatologist philosopher, to come to understand why signs function in the way that they do in particular situations, why distinctions are made, and signs are read in a certain manner. Transposing this into an ethical account does not require modification of this account, but only the delimitation
75 Deleuze, G. Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 4
147 of the signs to those with ethical content, for example, expressions of the virtues, acts of nobility or grace, marks of purity and so on. Ethical apprenticeships travel just as crooked and discontinuous path as other kinds of apprenticeship, and the difficulties of interpreting and evaluating those signs are the same as for others (see chapter two above). The codifications of ethics in both formal (ethical treatises) and informal (children’s stories and fables) forms are attempts to guide the ethically inexperienced and unsure apprentice into a particular ethical way of life, and to speed up the process of acquiring a different way of seeing, listening, saying, and so on.
Deleuze's transcendental empiricism is the method for analysing such apprenticeships, but it is expressed in the terms of a philosophical system, rather than how it might be used and experienced by an individual. And his account is also concerned with wider metaphysical issues that can obscure how his philosophical project can be extended into an immanent investigation of our ethical practices focused on genuine or consequential differences in kind and opposed to a tendency towards illusions of transcendence. It analyses not the conditions of a complete, and/or universal ethical system, but the conditions of specific, actual ethical experiences for the sake of evaluating the mode(s) of existence they imply. From this we can draw a preliminary account of how Deleuzian ethical analysis would work: it would analyse various case studies of ethical action, habit and transformation as creative (and rote) responses to ethical problems, the process of learning and recognition of ethical. It would investigate signs, how practices, self, community interact to form ethical ‘landscapes’, how individuals attune themselves to a landscape through an apprenticeship, how particular types inhabit such landscapes and what they imply about the way of life of those who occupy them, and the pluralities of such ethical topoi along with their bridges, affinities and ruptures. The case studies would be chosen on the basis of their remarkableness or distinctiveness rather than e.g. their historical prevalence in prior ethical debate, and would necessarily include examination of the forces and material factors that constituted that specific constellation. Such analyses would be made not in reference to a single transcendent standard, for the sake of distilling universal rules, or in order to hierarchise and rank them but each made from the perspective and principles immanent to that form of life. None of this would foreclose the possibility of comparative or evaluative accounts. Just as an individual can travel across several ethical landscapes in their life,
148 allowing them to make an evaluation from a position that has been inside of them all, so too can Deleuzian analysts critically address the plurality of ethical practices.
While the approach that I have outlined is drawn from the historical monographs and Difference and Repetition for the sake of concision, it is compatible with the subsequent co-authored works with Guattari. The changes and advances of those works would extend that approach by redressing the subject-centered focus of Difference and Repetition by making the collective, extra-individual aspects and longer historical time also part of the horizon of analysis. The focus on machinic process and diagrams would draw out the constructive and future-orientated aspects of ethical analysis, and the novel concepts developed in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia would provide analysts with a ready to hand conceptual tool kit. For the sake of simplicity I have limited my account to using only the style and concepts of the earlier works.
I will now use the ‘minor ethical analysis’ that I sketched out above to analyse an existing (non-Deleuzian) ethics. The purpose of doing so is twofold: it will demonstrate how my proposed minor ethical analysis is to be used, and it will also help to show by comparison the extent to which Deleuze’s philosophy lacks concrete ethical content. The kind of ethical analysis I have detailed is heavily weighted towards flux and temporality. Every philosophical study that Deleuze writes in the lead up to Difference and Repetition features a strongly temporal element, culminating in the philosophy of time that is at the heart of Difference in Repetition. Impermanence, in the form of creativity and the new, is a constant feature in his work. Impermanence is also at the heart of Buddhism. Buddhism has over two thousand years of history and has spread across many countries. For the purposes of this discussion I will treat Buddhism solely as a practical philosophy developed and codified by a particular historical human, extended, modified and systematised by practitioners and thinkers over the centuries and verifiable by oneself in the present day, much as stoicism is treated in the present day in the Western world. The account I present below is not an exposition of a particular school of Buddhist philosophy; it is compatible with Sravakayana, Madhyamaka, Hua Yan or another other philosophical tradition.76 Nor will I take a
76 That said, Deleuze’s ontology and the non-deterministic account of causality has some interesting resonances with Nagarjuna’s analysis of causality in his Mulamadhyamakakakarika in particular. See
149 stance on arguments in the (Western) secondary literature on for example whether Buddhist ethics is best understood as a form of utilitarianism or virtue ethics.77 My focus here is on the shape of the experience at the core of Buddhist ethics that produces its moral phenomenology.
At the heart of Buddhism’s practical philosophy is a diagnosis of everyday human existence as precarious and our response to it as dysfunctional. The diagnosis results from a direct investigation of lived experience, in something akin to a phenomenological analysis, rather than a primarily metaphysical analysis. The accounts of that prolonged analysis were originally presented in oral discourses, and dialogues. The teachings were often codified in named and numbered lists to aid memorisation. The most fundamental of these are the four ‘noble truths’, which summarise the Buddha’s diagnosis: Firstly, suffering exists. Secondly, there is an origin to suffering. Thirdly, suffering arises or originates from causes and conditions. Fourthly, there is a course of action that leads to the cessation of suffering (through elimination of its causes and conditions).
There are several senses to suffering; the single word in Pali used here does not translate neatly into just one equivalent in English. There is an everyday sense of suffering, as when I find out I have cancer, I lose my job, my mother dies, It refers to the mundane experience of frustrations, unhappy surprises, grief and hardship. There is another sense which refers to the insubstantiality and changeability of even our positive experiences: good feelings do not last and then are missed when they are gone, happy circumstances change, nothing is certain and unchanging, and so on. All phenomena share this insubstantiality and fleetingness (even though some of them may be very long lived). A third sense of suffering is the way in which all phenomena are conditioned, that is are dependent on other factors for their existence rather than existing in their own self-supported right. The diagnosis here is not that everything is terrible constantly and no one is ever really happy, rather, that as well as the overt forms of suffering, the
Nagarjuna. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (J. L. Garfield, Trans.). (Oxford University Press, 1995). 77 Goodman, C. Consequentialism, agent-neutrality, and mahayana ethics. Philosophy East and West, 58(1), 17-35., Keown, D. Buddhist Ethics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005)
150 transitoriness of happiness and pleasure and the way that we hunger after them is a subtler form of suffering in itself.
Fundamentally all these forms of suffering originate from a kind of ignorance about the nature of our self and reality. Suffering then is our existential horizon. This ignorance is a misapprehension of the three characteristics of all phenomena: impermanence, no-self, and pervasive unsatisfactoriness (dukkha). Impermanence mean that all phenomena occur, linger for a time, then dissipate. No self means that phenomena do not have an invariant, independent essence. Pervasive unsatisfactoriness refers to the insubstantiality and imperfection of things. Ignorant of the impermanence of all phenomena, humans strive to stabilise and maintain things that will inevitably change and eventually cease, worry and fret about what the future holds, hunger for more satisfying and pleasurable experiences, only to find them not as satisfying as expected when they do occur and all too quickly over. Conceiving of one's self as all important and possessed of its own sovereign independence partiality towards oneself at the expense of others is cultivated, and so on. This ignorance leads to (deluded) desires and cravings, and negative emotions such as greed, envy, anger and so on. These reinforce a (mistaken) sense of self, fuel further suffering, and so on in a viciously circular fashion. All these actions, in addition to whatever immediate effect, also have residual consequences. This is referred to as karma. Buddhism distinguishes three kinds of action: bodily, verbal and mental, and all produce karmic 'fruits'. Importantly, the intention or impulse which may or may not lead to an overt action is sufficient to generate karma. Three main types of impulses are identified that bring about karmic consequences: desire, aversion, and indifference. Desire and aversion here are meant in the sense of highly charged actions towards or against something while under the sway of ignorance (that is, desire and aversion are not inherently negative). Indifference is not neutrality but a kind of active disengagement and distance from phenomena. The functioning of karma is not a matter of mechanistic causality, in the form of some sort of cosmic balance sheet, or an inescapable fate but an attempt to show how the cumulative effect of relatively small thoughts and impulses leads to the formation of habits that develop their own kind of gravity, pulling one's mind and actions towards cyclic and often worsening outcomes. It is a model of causation based on conditioning and co-dependent determination. Ethical experience, and the processes of ethical transformation are all situated within this causal web of interdependence.
151 If ignorance produces confused actions with negative consequences, then the source of freedom from this kind of negative cyclic existence is insight. Liberation, for Buddhists, comes from a deep, direct experiential realization of the nature and functioning of the three characteristics in one's own life. Such a realisation runs counter to one’s habituated responses and so its occurrence requires preparation. A variety of sustained practices, including ethical training and meditation all work towards this end. The set of injunctions and techniques that Buddhists follow is called the ‘eight-fold path’, and it comprises: Right Views, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Recollection, and Right Meditation. Right is meant in the sense of being accurate or correct i.e. in accord with the reality of the impermanence and interdependence of all phenomena. So the purpose of them is to align the practitioner with reality and begin to undo the layers of conditioning and delusion. Generally, they are categorised into three types of trainings: training in morality (sila), wisdom or insight (prajna), and concentration (samadhi). Increased concentration gives meditators the ability to sustain the depth and length of attention required to observe and uproot delusions and remain attentive to without being swallowed up by afflictive emotions. Insight is being able to see clearly the three characteristics in one’s own experience directly. And training in morality is the practice of ethical behaviours.
The results of these practices and the sustained and attentive investigation of the stream of consciousness is eventually the realisation of the true nature of self and reality. This enlightenment does away with the mistaken conception of self, and with it the attachment to one's own welfare at the expense of others. One’s own well-being and existence is interdependent with that of others, and that the (deluded) boundary between oneself and another, along with the disparity in concern accompanying them is mistaken. There is no inherent conceptual necessity that the former produces the latter; Schopenhauer's conception of the blind aimless amoral cosmic Will is one example of a contrary conclusion coming after establishing that there is something illusory about our experience of the self. What is stimulated but not caused by insight then is an ethical epiphany. That this occurs is, for Buddhists, an empirical observation. That ethical epiphany is also not the end point of ethical training. Concentration and insight have delineated stages and a complete mastery of them is attainable. Effective and
152 appropriate ethical behaviours must still be practiced and developed in ordinary ways, and ethical insight confers no magical expertise or infallibility at this. The same set of ethical behaviours are both techniques for cultivating a particular kind of insight, as well as a way of expressing that insight.
Buddhism and Deleuze’s philosophy both characterise the fundamental nature of reality as impermanent. Both identify a tendency for humans to generate and then live by illusionary conceptions of reality. They also both identify how particular sets of negative emotions reduce the individual’s sense of agency and joy, and how those emotions can become congealed into wider patterns of action and social structures.78 Both also hold that there are paths of transformation that can be followed to bring about freer modes of existence. They both agree that the subject should not be conceptualised as an independent, self-existent self, but rather comes into existence dependent on specific conditions and shaped by those conditions. They differ however in a number of ways. Epiphany in Buddhism can generate compassion; whereas the schizo epiphany in Anti-Oedipus leads only to an insight into machinic nature of ontological processes beneath phenomenological experience. Buddhism holds that there is some strong sense in which that sense of self, regardless of whether it is de-centered, contexualised and conditioned or self-determining and transcendental, is illusory and one’s exclusive attachment to it binding. The Buddhist account of this liberation can be conceptualised in a Deleuzian fashion as a specific kind of apprenticeship. An encounter with suffering or the harsher facets of reality strikes an individual as something more fundamental to existence, or more pervasive than they had previously realised. What follows those signs are a series of stages of education aimed at rectifying the subject’s mis-cognitions and purifying them of afflictive emotions.79 This apprenticeship is inherently ethical.
At first these ethics must be taken on faith, until they have engendered the specific insight and subsequent ethical event that those actions accord with. This ethics is a practical consequence not a conceptually necessary one. Furthermore, Buddhist
78 I have not here addressed the account of afflictive emotions in Deleuze. Such an account would draw on his critique of the negative, his presentation of Nietzsche’s analysis of reactive forces and ressentiment, and Deleuze’s work on Spinoza and the ‘sad passions’. 79 For a canonical example of a handbook of the processes and signs of such an education see Buddhaghosa, B. The Path of Purification (B. Nanamoli, Trans.) (Buddhist Publication Society, 2010)
153 ethics involve not just a philosophical doctrine, but a rich set of concrete practices, as well maps of stages of various types of development, guides to signs for identifying both their attainment and for identifying obstacles and arrested and pathological development. In addition, there are numerous sets of techniques. Obviously, there are a variety of meditational techniques, but also vows, regular acts of remembrance, motivation and re-orientation (evening and morning chants, gatha, formal contemplations of the shortness of life, and so on), monastic discipline (not owning property, begging, renunciation of fashion and adornment etc.), and lists of virtues as well as ways in which to practice and cultivate them. It also translates those ethical ideals into specific types or characters: Buddha, arhat, bodhisattva, kalyana-mittata (the spiritual friend) and so on. This short account could be extended into a full blown Deleuzian ‘minor’ ethical analysis by further analysing and detailing the decisive points of transformation and the signs that mark them, the lines of variation that those transformations trace, what concrete values can be expressed from within those ethical perspectives, and what affects and potentials those ethical concerns develop.
Now that we have a Deleuzian account of a potentially similar but distinctly separate ethics it is also possible to discern some fundamental differences between that ethics and a purely Deleuzian (major) ethics by turning this Deleuzian mode of analysis back onto Deleuze’s texts themselves. The most striking, and most immediate conclusion is that his texts cannot provide any of the material that would form the basis of such an account. While Deleuze presents an account of the processes of the self and of the wider world there is no accompanying description of ethical insights that are compatible with it nor any exploration of moral psychology. There is no catalogue of ethical signs or problems, no practices, no analyses of action, nor set of character types. At best there exists some minimal set of abstract criteria for distinguishing empowering from diminishing conjunctions of forces, but it lacks the grounds for resolving problems involving mutually incompatible actions or explaining why we might find particular forms of life unworthy of praise and adulation.
The comparison with Buddhism also reveals a kind of blind spot in Deleuze’s philosophy too: a silence towards the often negative consequences of the existential situation that humans find themselves in. Mutable, prone to illusion, often unconscious of the nature of things, adrift in an ungrounded cosmos of change and impermanence –
154 while Deleuze was famously focused on only the affirmative there is much about his depiction that is genuinely unsettling and debilitating. Any Deleuzian ethics worthy of the name should address this aspect in one way or another.
Deleuze’s philosophy, lacking any specific account of concrete ethical experiences and transformations, and advocating no concrete practices, will never be able to ground any kind of (major) ethics by itself. I am not arguing that consequently Deleuzians must become Buddhists (or ascribe to some other faith) to acquire an ethics. Deleuze’s ontology, for all its similarities, does not share the same richly developed account of ethical insights and practices that any fully fledged system of ethics must have in order to be put into practice. This is not however a sign that Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is a failure, or is fundamentally flawed in some way. Deleuze’s philosophy is primarily a superb evaluative and diagnostic tool; to expect an ethics from it as well is to mistake its function. If one is a Deleuzian then certainly there a variety of ethical stances that are simply not viable for one to genuinely hold, however advocating a single way of life runs counter to all of Deleuze’s pluralism and multiplicity, and the central role that novelty occupies in his system. The point at which Deleuze and ethics intersect then is in a future project of Deleuzian analyses of ethical stances towards the world, stances existing independently of Deleuze’s philosophy. This means cataloguing those practices, analysing the ethical problems they construct, the concepts formed, the decisive points in the becomings they initiate, and evaluating the modes of existence their solutions imply. And then, carefully, experimenting with combining some of them, seeing if a new plane of immanence can be made, and some new future people birthed.
155 Chapter 6
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, part 2
The global financial crisis of 2008 was an event akin to the protests of 1968: vast, rolling disruption, accompanied by uncertainty and confusion over its causes and how to resolve it. Then, in the aftermath, governments made some changes to laws and regulations for banks and finance companies in particular, but made no radical changes to the structure of any of the affected economies.1 In most cases public money bailed out private corporations, and then everything went back to business as usual against a backdrop of government austerity. The crisis pushed into popular attention the abstraction of financial and economic arrangements as well as the opacity and failures of their modelling. The tendency towards the division of labour and the interdependence of production has only intensified since Adam Smith’s early observations about pin factories. The complex processes and webs of contemporary economies function less and less in ways that map onto the phenomenological inputs and outputs that represent work in our daily experiences of it. In short, the actuality of contemporary capitalist economies has become something far more complex and far more turbulent than its Nineteenth and early Twentieth century theorists would ever have anticipated, something that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is well suited to analyse.
This chapter analyses the interpretation of capitalism presented in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, drawing out the implicit criticisms in it of standard accounts of capitalism and its development. In addition it assesses the adequacy of its analysis, and ends by marking out areas where that theory might be profitably extended. This account differs from existing interpretations of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus in that it focuses on the connections between capitalism and suffering, and the contingent history of capitalism as opposed to, for example, connecting the processes of the reproduction of society to processes of the production of subjects, or seeing Capitalism and Schizophrenia’s process ontology as an application of chaos and systems theory to the social sphere.
1 Greece might be an exception, although arguably the changes imposed on that nation were drastic but not radical since their aim was to bring the economy in line with the existing doxa instead of developing alternatives
156 Preliminary Distinctions Before I begin the discussion of Capitalism and Schizophrenia I will give several definitions and make distinctions between closely related concepts. What follows will pre-emptively draw on some of the conclusions about capitalism that are stated below. Firstly, economic growth should be distinguished from capitalism. Economic growth is an increase in the average income or level of production (apart from or on the top of that produced merely by population growth; as such economic growth existed long before capitalism. Money can function as both medium of exchange (in which it facilitates trade and payments through established systems) and as capital (where it finances future developments and forms a separate circuit of movement and often restructures other systems in its process). Markets and capitalism are also not to be conflated. Capitalism defines a social structure which is organised around markets, and driven by a goal of increasing capital as opposed to achieving political or religious aims or for subsistence. Markets determine and regulate a slew of activities: goods and services are produced for profit, workers offer their labour for sale, and non-economic appropriation (for example, by force or fiat) is exceptional and so on. All economic actors depend on the market and economic imperatives are, as much as possible, stripped of religious, political, cultural, and social, constraints. Co-ordination of economic activity occurs via market signals to all participants (consumers, regulators, producers). The market provides incentives to participants and opens spaces for them to match their behaviour to those incentives.
As time passes more and more processes that lie outside the market become commodified and put into a market organisation, and relations are increasingly established for the purpose of further accumulating capital. Rather than markets existing within a broader structure of social life, social life is instead embedded within market structures and competition assumes a prominent role. Capitalist societies are usually characterised by having private property rights, contracts enforceable by third parties, markets with responsive prices, and governments that provide the conditions for markets and competition to flourish.2 Societies matching that description are, within a historical time frame, relatively recent developments. The advent of such societies is
2 Neal, L. and Williamson, J. eds. The Cambridge History of Capitalism: Volume I, the Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848. (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
157 often presented as simply the culmination of a linear trajectory of either technological improvement in the forms of production and the reach of markets, or the impetus of humans to buy and sell so as to increase profit, or both. Both tendencies are taken to be ever-present, making capitalist societies both inevitable and unremarkable other than in their depth of development of both factors. Such histories of capitalism focus on detailing the successive removal of barriers to that end state, and testify to just how embedded the thought of capital has become in us that we have trouble thinking outside of it, and of recognising its non-inevitability. What is remarkable and unique to capitalist societies is then obscured and a difference in degree is presented rather than a difference in kind. Prior to the advent of capitalist society production was driven by other factors such as prestige, status, subsistence, and the distribution and exchange of goods followed other logics such as kinship, reciprocity, feudal obligation, charity and so on.
Nonetheless capitalism is not simply equivalent to the market exchange of commodities and services. Braudel distinguishes between two types of market; his distinction is illuminating as well as forming part of the historical research that Deleuze and Guattari draw on in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.3 In the first type, markets are largely local affairs where the agents are familiar with one another and with the systems and regulations governing exchanges. The participants are mostly producers rather than agents or speculators. Market manipulation though dishonesty, cornering, and the like, occurs only on a small scale. Modest profits are made and can be reliably forecast unless dramatic events such as famines strike from outside and cause the prices to vary wildly.
The second type of market is one in which different circuits of exchange are drawn. Here rather than the market occurring within a sphere of relations between receiver and producer a series of individual transactions take place mediated only by whatever financial arrangement is agreed upon. Superior price, quality, speed or ability to supply determine what exchanges are made, and the qualities of the buyer that matter are their readiness to exchange cash. While exchange may take place in competition with others, no containing factor acts to include or exclude any particular participant -
3 Braudel, F. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). See also Braudel, F. Civilization and Capitalism, 3 Volumes. (Phoenix Press, 2002).
158 unlike markets in the first category there is no set form to the collective, nor any reason to continue or cease exchanging other than profitability. Actors in these markets are “sophisticated and domineering”.5 The more these circuits link into chains with other unrestricted chains the stronger the capitalistic process becomes, and the more it can escape regulation. Long distance trade, political power, and this type of market all synergise. Long distance trade by its nature finds it easier to elude regulation, and through the capital and logistical requirements reduces competitors. Actors with state power can finesse both of those elements through favourable or selective application, as well as buttress their political position through the capital amassed from that trade. Braudel observes that this kind of long distance trader as a group is differentiated from smaller or national merchants by both their abilities (they can utilise credit and movement of capital and credit in ways that small or national merchants cannot) and by their tendency not to become exclusive specialists in order to maximise their utilisation of capital by following profits over multiple branches of endeavour.
What comes to dominate in capitalist societies then is the preponderance of the second type of market over the first, along with the increasing spread of its logic to other areas of life such that social relations are adjusted to fit with capitalism. For this to happen, society as a collective must accept the values of capitalism. Not all societies do, and other state formations extract surplus labour in other ways (through slavery, feudalism, or strong social or religious obligation). And of course even explicitly capitalist states are ambivalent in their relationship to capitalism, seeking to both encourage some aspects while curtailing its influence elsewhere and often acting to limit raw market self-regulation. A series of changes in institutions, political and legal frameworks, theorising must take place for the transition to embedded capitalism to occur. This is a transition that required, and continues to require, a degree of force and coercion in order to exist. The construal of markets as primarily functioning via opportunity and choice conceals the fact that compulsion is a central part of the market. This manifests itself in a number of ways: the requirement of individuals having to enter the market in order to survive and gain the requisites for life; the inescapability of the market structure as social relations are embedded within it; as well as the disparities amongst agents in markets. These societies foster and feed off breaks between labour
5 Braudel, F. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 62
159 and production - useful labour is divided and distributed, both in the division of the piece work in the chain of production that generates commodities, but also in the allocation of the fruits of that labour. Labour has become abstract; phenomenological, 'natural' accounts of value and action no longer capture accurately how these societies function. Marxist analysis attempts to resolve the problem of the abstraction of labour and its resistance to representation: to explain why we mis-recognise labour and relations, to present an accurate account of how it actually functions, and to work out what can be done with those mechanisms. Following this lineage Deleuze and Guattari set up capitalism as another type of transcendental illusion. The history of capitalism and its function require demythologising and de-transcendentalising by elucidating its mechanisms and machines. The core element of Marx's theory is the differences in class that create the dynamics that power a capitalist economy, along with the social structures that enfold it. In his account exploitation of differentials of power among agents is not an accidental, fringe or avoidable outcome but an inescapable part of the mechanism that produces capitalist circuits of production. This thread will form a central part of the account of capitalism in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Economic History in Capitalism and Schizophrenia My claim that Capitalism and Schizophrenia contains a sustained history of capitalism may seem somewhat overstated. While Deleuze and Guattari do posit capitalism as the basis for a universal history, there is much in their account that is missing compared to standard accounts, and elements that are even actively anti- historical. Not only is there the explicit devaluation of historical accounts in favour of analysis of becomings - which can never be reduced to historical factors - but the classifications of societies that are presented are ever-present potentials, and the passages between those possible states in history is one of mixtures, reversals and fluctuations rather than progressive or even merely linear development. Unlike conventional economic histories, and despite Deleuze and Guattari’s focus on (ontological) machines and the mechanosphere, there is little discussion of the advent of modern technologies and the changes they produced: there are no accounts of steam, electricity, factory production of organic chemicals, improved hygiene, or the internal combustion engine. There is no discussion of a series of questions about of the relationship between capitalism and industrialisation: was industrialisation necessary or sufficient for capitalism? Can the two be disentangled? Are large firms and
160 sophisticated financial markets necessary for industrialisation? Deleuze and Guattari’s posing of the question of why capitalism did not develop in China is borrowed from Braudel’s work, and is largely rhetorical rather than well developed.6 Despite all of that, there is an account of what Arrighi calls ‘the long Twentieth century’ during which the great divergence between capitalist and non-capitalist nations developed.7 For most of human history gains in productivity, wealth, and standards of living have all been transient. Any increases were followed at some point by losses except for moments when combinations of intensive growth in productivity and extensive growth in population and availability of resources produced ‘Malthusian singularities’ that (temporarily) escaped the Malthusian trap whereby per capita growth is subsequently swallowed up by demographic growth. In Goldstone’s account of these singularities:
the normal tendency is for an efflorescence to create a number of interlocking practices that are initially fruitful, but then tend to stabilise and become actively defended. Only a major social or political upheaval is then likely to create new opportunities for major episodes of growth.8
The industrial revolution (and associated upheavals such as the French revolution) and the great divergence that followed is a significant mutation in history; one that is all the more remarkable for not yet having ended. Not only is the origin of that set of interconnected efflorescences worthy of interest, but an investigation into their modulation into a self-sustaining and accelerating process rather than a decline to earlier levels of wealth and population is warranted. Deleuze and Guattari’s account differs from traditional accounts in a number of ways. Firstly, their account is Marxist, albeit a modified form of Marxism. Secondly, it presents a deeper analysis of the changes that
6 Braudel’s answer to this question also makes less of it than do rival accounts, for example Clark proposes that "If England grew but China, with similarly extensive markets and well-defined property rights, did not, then the problem must, he reasons, lie in some external constraint, such as geography. … it was the product not of the Smithian perfection of the market, but of a differential response of people to market incentives that had long been present." Clark, G. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 262. Clark also identifies several other mechanisms at work in both nations but producing different results due to their different conditions and the makeup of the assemblages that they form. Such a differential model is far more congruent with Deleuze and Guattari then Braudel’s identification of features particular to the arrangement of Chinese markets. 7 Arrighi, G. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (Verso Books, 2010). 8 Goldstone, J. ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the "Rise of the West" and the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): p. 384.
161 produced the contemporary form of world-capitalism by focusing on the changes of conditions of possibility that occurred in the lead up to and during those changes. For example, rather than taking elements of European civilisation, for example, the number and proximity of city states in the Mediterranean, as simple facts conducive to the eventual outbreak of capitalist societies, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to describe the processes that brought about those circumstances. Thirdly, those changes both shape and take place upon a terrain not of the given world as it empirically appears, but on a terrain that adds virtual possibilities to the empirical. They categorise the empirical terrain insofar as it expresses various tendencies and types of movements: towards stratification, towards re-territorialisation, and so on. Fourthly, their explanations of these factors are by recourse to the unique vocabulary of concepts and classificatory schemas that they develop in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Capitalism plays two roles in the history that Deleuze and Guattari give. The first is as an ever-present potential of limit that other social formations attempt to pre- emptively prevent. The second is as a long event that occurred in a particular time and place.
Capital as ever-present limit There are parallels between capitalism and de-territorialisation, and that is what gives capitalism its special status as the basis for a universal history. The other social regimes that Deleuze and Guattari identify function by coding the social field in a particular way. For example, primitive societies are characterised by mechanisms of prevention-anticipation and state societies are characterised by apparatuses of capture. Those specific machinic processes define them as a particular type of society. Those processes function so as to prevent or exclude rival and incompatible processes as much as possible. Uncoded flows and unstratified assemblages are a potential source of dissolution or mutation for a society.
Capitalism, in contrast to the other social forms functions not by coding but by the institution of money as a means of organisation and signalling. Deleuze and Guattari describe this as an axiomatic. Coding, overcoding and so on are domain specific and express relations between qualified elements, whereas an axiomatic relates functional elements without needing to take account of their qualities. Money allows for the
162 classification and characterising of people by using an abstract quantity (price). This is both a strength and weakness of capitalism; a weakness in that it is incapable of unifying and coding the social field in the way that earlier forms of society could, thus it promotes instability and difference. But this is also its strength in that these increasingly deterritorialized flows of desire and matter feed its own dynamics. The dynamics of capitalism then give it an internal drive towards a (destructive) limit of deterritorialisation and decoding that would undo the social field completely. That destructive endpoint would cause the flows that sustain capitalism to cease to move, so capitalist societies at the same time as they promulgate and increase deterritorialisation are also driven to prevent that disastrous end state through a variety of means, such as finding new markets, reactivating past symbolic identifications, exploiting disparities in values and exchange, and often use political or military force to do so (for example, in the forcible opening of China for international trade in the Nineteenth century).9 But these solutions only displace or delay that limit rather than finally resolve the problems inherent in making deterritorialisation central. This internal lurching towards and then diverting from disaster due to the intensification of unregulated flows, with the turbulence and counter-effects that follow them, is what makes crisis such a recurrent feature of capitalist societies.10
For Deleuze and Guattari it is also the source of those societies characteristic violence:
Capitalism does not confront this situation from the outside, since it experiences it as the very fabric of its existence, as both its primary determinant and its fundamental raw material, its form and its function, and deliberately perpetuates it, in all its violence, with all the powers at its command. Its sovereign production and repression can be achieved in no other way.11
9 See Harvey, D. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). for a set of fundamental contradictions within capitalism 10 See Kindleberger, C. and Aliber, R. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Jon Wiley and Sons Inc, 2000) and Reinhart, C. and Rogoff, K. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2009). 11 Deleuze, G and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 33
163 Several consequences follow from the identification of deterritorialisation as the mechanic that is central to the functioning of capitalism. One is that it positions capitalism as the exterior limit of the other social forms: when those societies cease to be able to exert control over the social field the resulting breakdown tends towards situations resembling the deterritorialized flows of capitalism. And the other, is that capitalism itself does not have an exterior limit in the way that other social forms do since it does not function by coding. Its limit is internal to itself, and is the point at which the social field itself breaks down into pandemonium. It is these two factors that cause Deleuze and Guattari to claim that “it is correct to retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly”.12
A key point here is the stress on the retrospectivity of this history. It is only after the development of capitalism that the prior history can be conceptualised as such, and the path of that development is itself contingent and discontinuous. There is neither a teleological drive towards capitalism, nor towards some form of post-capitalist society. The appearance of capitalist societies might never have happened since it relied upon the conjunction of two unrelated deterritorialisations: labourers with nothing to support themselves but the sale of their own work-power, and the free flow of readily transferrable wealth of investors (decoded flows of production). The genesis of those two processes relies in turn on other processes of decoding and deterritorialisation:
For the free worker: the deterritorialization of the soil through privatization; the decoding of the instruments of production through appropriation; the loss of the means of consumption through the dissolution of the family and the corporation; and finally, the decoding of the worker in favor of the work itself or of the machine. And for capital: the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; the decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital; the decoding of States through financial capital and public debts; the decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial capital; and so on.13
12 Ibid., p. 140 13 Ibid., p. 225
164 Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history sets out an account of how capitalism went from that which was guarded against by earlier societies to becoming a dominant, world-spanning system. The retrospective universal history presented in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the history of all these extra-economic contingencies, encounters and ruptures that led to the fashioning of a new machine that produces capitalist societies. These two distinct forms of deterritorialization (of wealth and workers) both result from the segmentation of the despotic state in feudalism and from the decomposition of that state and the feudal system more generally. That is, the universal history of capitalism is a history of particular conditions at a particular time and place.
Capitalism as historical event Capitalism and Schizophrenia begins to identify factors in the eventual appearance of capitalism as far back as imperial archaic states. I will not discuss those precursor events but will instead focus on the narrower band of time where the transition to capitalism occurs. The institution of capitalist societies occurs in Europe rather than elsewhere because it is only there that the components necessary for such a transformation are brought into connection and varied (albeit over a long duration). In Europe the connection of those components produces centers of immanence free from the overcoding that they underwent elsewhere in the world. Deleuze and Guattari, whilst emphatic that ancient Greek economies are not commensurable with later capitalist markets, nonetheless single out the unusual freedom that Greek city-states had in terms of being able to draw on the stocks of imperial states near to that region (for example, Egypt) without having to themselves adhere to a level of overcoding that would be necessary to produce those stocks. The conditions for capitalism’s immanent social structures are based on deep precursors. That immanence is again cultivated, adjusted, and extended during the breakdown of feudalism. At that time the institution of private property breaks down the bonds of personal dependence, such as was the case, for example between lord and vassal, and instead constitutes an independent subject. The law begins to relate to and evolve around personal rights instead of relating to lands, a people, etc. Eventually the law changes so much so that is no longer the overcoding of customs but has become an axiomatic in the form of a civil code
There are two particular series of transformations that took place within that breakdown that Deleuze and Guattari single out. One concerns agrarian structures and
165 the other money lenders and merchants. In the first, indentured workers, serfs, and slaves become mobile labour. In the second wealth becomes transformed from riches vested in land, merchant’s stocks and goods, or money for exchange and lending to facilitate trade or war, into freely moving and nonspecific capital. The feudal structures commanding country labour, and the guilds and corporations that controlled the labour of the towns both inhibited the transformation of personnel into rootless workers. The money of merchants and financiers was frozen in alliances with the existing power structures that governed production, rather than taking the form of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as filiative capital. Filiative capital seeks to use money not to ally with power but to produce more capital by generating surplus value directly itself. The slow decay of feudal society produces a greenhouse environment in which those blockages to the deterritorialisation of workers and wealth were loosened, and in which those changes could accumulate and stabilise in new forms. Capital is no longer tied to the land but relocated to the means of production.
It is only when merchants become early industrialists through using their capital to appropriate the means of productions (whether by offering commercial functions, or by e.g. making artisans into employees) that the capitalist machine begins to be assembled, since it is at that point that capital becomes abstract. It is at that point that the divisions of banker and merchant are no longer separate natural types but merely the particular forms that capital takes at one time or another in order to efficiently institute the division of labour that the capitalist machine has changed the mode of production. Similarly, in this process of breakdown feudal obligations became deterritorialised into wages. It is only with wages that labour becomes surplus labour available for varied and mutable work. Labour breaks formerly free action into the striated division of work and free time. Once freed of those ties and overcoding a process of repeated transformations and disruptions of the modes of production can occur. It is from this freedom that capitalism then eventually creates the machines of the industrial revolution (and not vice versa). In this process classes and class relations appear in a new form, since the dominant (capitalist) classes are no longer synonymous with the hierarchy of roles that constitute the state, and private property inculcates relations of debt and credit amongst classes.
166 All of these result from the breakdown of codes. The role of the state changes with the increase in deterritorialised and abstracted codes. Instead of overcoding heavily territorial codes, state power is now put to work reconciling tensions between the new classes, between labour and capital, and so on; through the invention of new codes for these deterritorialised flows. In Deleuze and Guattari’s account the modern state “substituted increasingly powerful social subjection in place of enslavement” in the form of the nation.14 The nation is “the very operation of a collective subjectification, to which the modern state corresponds as a process of subjectification. It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible variations, that the state becomes the model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic”.15 The role of the state is to temper capital’s power of deterritorialisation; no longer are they transcendent sources of overcoding but are now yet another means of realisation for an axiomatic of decoded flows.
Due to these changes, and the geographic uniqueness of the hotbed of rivalry and free communication of ideas produced by the closeness and accumulation of nations and cities in Europe, the role of states becomes less and less that of overcoding and more and more that of attempting to organise and direct the decoded flows produced by that competition and de-centralisation. Cities and money act as incubators for change and reciprocally feed one another, leading to successive phases whereby blocs of government and business agencies in turn development of the world capital system to their own advantage and in doing so progress its development (for example the sequential waxing and waning of the trading powers of Venice, Amsterdam, London).16 The twin processes of nation formation and market formation buttress and spur each other. It is important to note that it is not just a matter of a single transition from feudalism to capitalism, also a second concomitant shift from scattered capitalism to inter-connected capitalism whose power is fused with that of the state. Deleuze and Guattari further develop their account from the initial stages of capitalism in Europe up to an account of contemporary world-capitalism. Their account includes analyses of center-periphery relations between the first world and developing world, the status of women and minorities, and the connections between capitalism and war. In summary,
14 Deleuze, G and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 457 15 Ibid., p. 456 16 See Arrighi, G. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. (Verso Books, 2010).
167 they characterise the present-day form of the process of capitalist production as tripartite:
(1) the one that extracts human surplus value on the basis of the differential relation between decoded flows of labor and production, and that moves from the center to the periphery while nevertheless maintaining vast residual zones at the center; (2) the one that extracts machinic surplus value, on the basis of an axiomatic of the flows of scientific and technical code, in the “core” areas of the center; (3) and the one that absorbs or realizes these two forms of surplus value of flux by guaranteeing the emission of both, and by constantly injecting anti- production into the producing apparatus.17
Over the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari reproduce or replace all the categories that Marx uses to analyse economic structures. They modify Marx’s analysis by situating economic structures within deeper circuits of power, debt and subjectivity. Those circuits are based on inequalities and differences rather than the equality of exchange. Social formulations are defined, contra Marx, not by their mode of production but instead by the more fundamental machinic processes that instead produce those modes of production. They also introduce the concept of anti-production to classify effects aimed at preventing the emergence of formations antithetical to capitalism. All of these are used to produce a universal history analysing the advent of, and weaknesses within, capitalism.
What problem does this universal history answer? Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history performs at least two functions. One is to account for the origin of the cruelty inherent to capitalism itself. Through their investigation it is clear that the violence that capitalism inflicts results from the creation and reliance on groups of people who are forced to sell their labour in the market place and who lack any other alternative means of subsistence. It is not markets in themselves that are damaging but rather the unequal relations of force that participants in the market have that predisposes them to myriad forms of suffering. The other cause of violence within capitalism originates in its process of continually seeking new or more effective
17 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 237.
168 ways in which to displace or pass beyond its current limits. Because of the immanence of its mechanism and the lack of overcoding, its system is far more prone to enter into crises, which often require brutal solutions. Additionally, capitalism’s use of an axiomatic also predisposes it as a system towards much greater levels of mutation and disruption than other social forms. This continuing upheaval by itself is a source of violence, one that falls more heavily on those who have fewer resources to resist it.
The second function of the account in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is to critique the illusion of capitalism as a final state of affairs or as a falsely transcendental process.18 By showing in detail its origin and functioning, its status as an inevitable or an inescapable fate is shown to be false. Detailing its mechanisms also helps to suggest ways in which its dominance can be fought. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari expand on this aim:
Philosophy takes the relative deterritorialisation of capital to the absolute; it makes it pass over the plane of immanence as movement of the infinite and suppresses it as an internal limit, turns it back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people. ... philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point. ... it is to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed.19
The grounds for this dethroning of capitalism then ultimately rest on redeeming the notion of immanence from the impoverished conception of it that capitalism enacts. This is the basis for Deleuze and Guattari’s call for the creation of new ‘war machines’ against capitalism.
Although they suggest that this task in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a response to an ethical crisis, and link it to political philosophy in What is Philosophy? there is no concrete discussion of what that political philosophy would look like,
18 This aim is present in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus however it becomes explicit only in What is Philosophy? 19 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. What Is Philosophy?, (Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 99-100.
169 beyond the suggestions that its aim is utopic, and that it would involve the creation of a people yet to come. The focus of Capitalism and Schizophrenia on events and processes that exist at scales and timespans both above and below the representational realm of lived experience also make it challenging to connect those investigations to traditional models of politics that take freely determining, self-consistent rational subjects as the basis for expressing democratic choice and the correct scale for political analysis. Similarly, the critique of traditional forms of history creates obstacles for simply adopting existing accounts of projects of liberation that trace their origin back to the Enlightenment. I do not argue that a Deleuzian-Guattarian political philosophy cannot be formed, nor that their project does not aim at freedom. My claim is that Deleuze and Guattari’s three works are instead a preparation for a more explicit and practically focused solution to the problem of capitalism. That project remained unfinished due to the death of Guattari soon after the publication of What Is Philosophy? and the increasing ill health of Deleuze. Deleuze’s suicide, together with his wish for there to be no posthumous publications, meant that his work on a final book on Marx (tentatively titled ‘the grandeur of Marx’) was never completed and will never be available to us.
Despite that Capitalism and Schizophrenia does suggest several possible points of resistance. The immanent flow of capital is contrasted to coding and overcoding. Although the tone and details of their account imply such a solution would be an uphill battle it is at least in theory possible to counter capitalism by increasing or returning to more heavily overcoded societies. However, any cursory review of this as a real-world project reveals that in practice this kind of re-coding tends to attract, or devolve into the most barbaric forms from history (fundamentalisms, dictatorships, paranoia, etc.). Hoping for or encouraging a dictatorship to save us is neither compatible with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, nor a plausible political project for the majority of the western world.20
Another possible tactic would be to connect Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the fundamental machinic process of capitalism with other far more detailed studies of
20 My conclusion about the unpalatability of dictatorship is contrary to the Deleuze inspired neo- reactionary or ‘dark enlightenment’ political philosophies of Nick Land.
170 the types, mechanisms, and causes of crises and crashes in capitalist economies.21 Analysis of the conditions and mechanisms of profit squeezes, falling rates of profit, under consumption, capital scarcities, labour problems, disproportionalities between sectors, natural limits, unbalanced technological and organisational changes and so on would suggest concrete ways in which to counteract and prevent the suffering that results. It would also have the benefit of instituting cross-fertilisation between standard economic analysis and Deleuzian scholarship, producing an expanded scope for economics, while also supplying Deleuzians with greater detail and a wealth of empirical data. Nonetheless a Deleuzian approach to this would have to hold to Deleuze and Guattari’s realistic cynicism about the ability of our powers of representation and reason to ‘pin down once and for all the bedrock reality’ of those processes. Rather than seeking to produce an exhaustive summary of the real tendencies at work, with which we could finally make the ‘right’ economic decisions, it would instead adopt a methodology of cautious experimentation and analysis that seeks to follow those tendencies as they develop and to map where they go. The eventual result would hope to succeed in the more modest aims of being less wrong, less dogmatic, and more creative in our choices.
Eugene Holland draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a ‘new earth’ and, taking it quite literally, suggests that the end point for capitalism might be a final crash at the culmination of its ongoing process of despoiling the environment, particularly in the form of global warming.22 A despoiled earth is likely to be a limit that capitalism cannot mutate around or displace, and is also likely to bring about a broad, sustained and strong enough demand from the population for the replacement of capitalism. However, reaching the point where capitalism finally (and destructively) encounters its limits would be disastrous on a vast and unprecedented scale, and, in the form of the loss of the environment alone, to say nothing of the immense human cost, seems an incredibly high price to pay. Holland does not, of course, suggest that such an end point to capitalism is to be desired. While this scenario may eventuate, it cannot be
21 See Kindleberger, C and Aliber, R Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Jon Wiley and Sons Inc, 2000) and Reinhart, C and Rogoff, K This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2009) 22 Holland, E. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. (Taylor & Francis, 1999). The idea of a ‘new earth’ is introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?
171 adopted as an endpoint to be deliberately accelerated if one’s aim is to reduce human suffering.23
Another strategy might be to act to cultivate markets (as defined at the start of this chapter) and oppose them to capitalism. By this I mean political and legal actions that aim to make the assumptions and descriptions of traditional accounts of markets actually existent instead of the capitalist reality of many market exchanges – so that, for example, truly fair competition can occur, coercion would be absent, and systematic bias or over-sized influence over the market would be prevented. This pro-market stance would curtail the reach of capitalism. Tempering the prospects of this strategy is the observation that historically, the de-centralisation and powers of deterritorialisation that gives capitalism its strength also makes it a difficult foe to defeat, since it has historically managed to adjust itself around or over constraints on its powers. Enacting this approach would require the overcoming of a long history of very real power differentials. Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion of the need for a cultivation of a future people is a suggestion on how to create the conditions that would bring about a populous forceful enough to demand and compel such changes. This would in turn require a reactivation of the Humean elements within Deleuze (see Empiricism and subjectivity) for the sake of extending and connecting affection and sympathy within pluralistic and dispersed contemporary cultures beyond their current limits. There is however a fundamental difference between solutions that aim at amelioration of the various instantiations of capitalism versus those that aim at making deep changes to the capitalist system. The increasing prevalence of (ethical) concepts for modifying capitalism, for example fair trade coffee, so-called cruelty free eggs and meat, measurements of ‘gross national happiness’ and the like, all, from a Deleuzian perspective, address only the most immediate and overt forms of violence in the capitalist system.
23 I distinguish here between the acceleration of environmental collapse from the Deleuze influenced position that has come to be known as accelerationism, which advocates intensifying the contradictions and deterritorialisations of capitalism as a means of hastening our exit from it by speeding up economic and social disruption. See Mackay, R and Avanessian, A. eds., #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic, 2014), or Noys, B Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014) for further discussion.
172 At present there are a number of significant transformations in capitalist economies taking place. Digitisation, the replacement of large parts of production and market processes by software, the development of maker machines and increasing use of robots for production, and the often-heralded always-about-to-arrive artificial intelligence, as well as its more plausible current existence in the form of machine learning, and their flow on effects on taxation and employment and the middle class, have all increased the amount of discussion around the need for solutions and ideas about what form a post-capitalist economy might take.24 Many of the discussions however, such as proposals for a universal basic income, seem to focus on amelioration rather than radical change or direction of those emerging forces, and treat the technologies that spur such discussion as if they were value neutral forces of nature, that happen to have certain social repercussions, rather than expressions of particular social and political values (and in the case of those founded on venture capital investment, strongly driven by motivations for hefty profits). Just as no reader of Capitalism and Schizophrenia would accept that a claim that markets are not created and shaped by extra-market social and political forces, so too should they refuse to accede to any view in which technologies and digital systems are presented as neutral functions instead of as thoroughly conditioned and shaped by forces of power, history and contingencies.
In the remaining part of this chapter I wish to map out some possibilities for extending the analysis of capitalism that Deleuze and Guattari offer. The two directions that I will outline will move this discussion in a slightly different direction from the possible future avenues for development within Capitalism and Schizophrenia that I identified above. The first path is to connect the approach adopted in Difference and Repetition to the content and concerns of A Thousand Plateaus. The economic history of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is not, of course, a fully-fledged economic theory in itself. A Deleuzian critique of economic theory itself could be constructed by evaluating that body of theory against the list of tendencies that Deleuze condemns. In the standard models of economics a certain set of assumptions are made about the nature of (human) economic actors. They are presumed to make choices about their actions with the purpose of optimising (or more technically satisficing in accordance with the constraints of their situation and abilities) their outcomes, and they deliberate and choose without
24 See for example, Mason, P. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (Macmillan, 2016).
173 falling prey to any biases and with rational expectations. The preferences of these actors are presumed to be clearly known (for example, they can rank them) and stable, and they are also assumed to wish to seek out equilibrium. These assumptions are also assumed to hold, where appropriate, in more systematic economic theories that deal with aggregate effects of human interactions, such as relationships between pricing and demand. The mathematical focus in much of contemporary economics also introduces a tendency towards favouring the quantitative over the qualitative. Some of these tendencies arise from economics’ adoption of the style and approach of physics as a model for the field in its formative stages, and its aspirations to be a scientific discipline. And a number of these assumptions about human nature, and the positing of an idealised model of decision making and calculation, are critiqued from within economics itself, since the actual behaviour of people in a large number of situations fails to accord with what the theories predict.25
A Deleuzian analysis would investigate how the assumptions about permanency of identity (in the form of stable preferences), assumptions of common and good sense (in the freedom from biases, rational actors, equal powers and systems of decision making), assumptions of identity over difference (through positing equilibrium as frequent or natural and desirable) end up producing a disproportionate or partial set of theories.26 The focus on the quantitative at the expense of the qualitative, and over- emphasis on deterministic models, may also introduce blind spots in identifying differences in kind instead of differences of degree, and the ideal of a free market forecloses accurate analysis of situations which are more accurately characterised as being shaped by the force inherent in capitalist relations of production (as opposed to true market transactions). Similarly, capitalist markets are never simply given facts from which economic theory can be traced but are always in the process of being created, recreated, adjusted by non-economic factors. A critical Deleuzian analysis would aim to produce a more dynamic body of economic theory, with a broader range of theoretical
25 See for example Thaler and Kahneman’s behavioural economics based critiques in Thaler, R. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (WW Norton & Company, 2015) and Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2012). 26 A related, and Deleuze influenced account of the process of pricing in markets can be seen in Roffe, J. Abstract Market Theory (Springer, 2015). Roffe’s method differs markedly from the account I have outlined here, in that he treats the market from a position of immanence in which, on his principles, it its illegitimate to situate the market as conditioned by non-market forces; instead his approach is to analyse the market from a perspective that is solely internal to its own functioning.
174 underpinnings and that also considers what possibilities those economic analyses and formula allow us to do, and what problems they respond to.
The second possible form in which the analysis of capitalism could be extended is to produce a work akin to ‘A Thousand Plateaus of Twentieth Century Economic History’. The examples and critical (economic) events in Capitalism and Schizophrenia are almost entirely from-contemporary periods. The main exception to that is Deleuze’s late essay ‘Postscript on societies of control’. The account of capitalism Deleuze and Guattari present focuses on identifying the central process or abstract machine that produces capitalism, and the specific sequence of events that brought it into being. What it does not explain in detail (as it did not set out to), is the wide range of forms that capitalism can and has taken: monopolistic-, crony-, disaster-, turbo-, state-, welfare-, multinational- and so on. ‘A Thousand Plateaus of 20th Century Economic History’ would remedy that lack and would be a specific socio-political project modelled upon A Thousand Plateaus. It would research and set out a Deleuzian style materialist a history of economic machines and the potentialities they have made available. This minor history would provide an account of Twentieth century economic history as a flux of factors and efflorescences, their mutual reinforcement and the forces that led to their declines and transformations, their elements and their differential responses and rates. It would produce a mapping of points of intensities, necessary conditions, remarkable points, and so on. Some possible plateaus would include the Keynesian post war accord, the adoption of and movement away from the gold standard, the development of the Black-Scholes formula for pricing derivatives, developments in the formation of a world capital market along with the increasing complexity and spread of financial markets aided by digital technology, concept of regulatory capture, and more generally, the way in which banking functions as a central technology or machine for capitalism.
175 Chapter 7
Conclusion
It is now more than twenty years after Deleuze’s death and his work is still giving up treasures for those who are willing to sift through them. In this thesis I have tried to show how one might read Deleuze in such a way as to be attentive to both his system and his methods, and to use insights from one style of analysis to aid the other. While his system is explicit, his methods are often implicit, or must be unpacked as the implications for our thinking that are drawn out from his criticisms of other thinkers. I have also presented an interpretation which suggests that his works can be usefully divided into three periods: the gathering of tools, speaking in his own right, and finally, seeking weapons. Part of what pushes the movement of his thought from period to period is an attempt to resolve the insufficiencies of his earlier positions, and to further develop his system so as to include more concreteness, more movement, and more multiplicity into it. As part of that, his conceptualisation of the virtual, the conditions of experience, and the relations between the two undergo subtle changes over the long length of his career.
The collection of concepts that are prepared in the early historical studies are honed and given direction by their amalgamation into the coalition-collage of Difference and Repetition. The attempt to produce a complete system in that book required the development of additional components and the transmutation of even those concepts that are simply taken up whole from the historical monographs; the philosophy of time presented in Difference and Repetition is far richer than the simple addition of the Bergsonian account of the past to Hume’s habits and Nietzsche’s futurally orientated eternal recurrence. In turn, the opaqueness of the virtual and the over- emphasis on the subject in Difference and Repetition is corrected by the introduction of machinic processes, an ethological and broader temporal scope and the identification of a slew of tendencies (stratifying, molecular, striated, and so on) in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The heavily materialist and ontological focus of those works is then subsequently counterbalanced by the conceptual self-reflections of What Is Philosophy?.
176 Accordingly, Deleuze’s initial project of producing a systematic philosophy, utilising immanence rather than naïve empiricism or transcendent methods, that produces analyses particular to specific concrete modes of existence is, in my view, only fully realised in the late works such as A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy. While those works present the most developed and robust form of his thought, those works alone will not suffice to give an intent reader an adequate understanding of the depth and fullness of Deleuze’s system. I have tried to show in this thesis how some of the differences in the interpretations and uses made of Deleuze in the secondary literature are shaped not only by the purposes for which they are read but also, less desirably, as a consequence of the selection of only particular periods of his work, or conversely, from drawing on the entirety of his writing but without regard for any of the changes that occur amongst those works.
Deleuze’s works pose a formidable obstacle to any interpreter (one that I make no claim to having overcome in any degree other than slightly); aside from the sheer number and variety of the books, there is also the number of novel concepts, the variations in terminology, the stylistic experiments, and the breadth of knowledge they assume of the reader (calculus, birdsong, the history of philosophy from the stoics to the present day, and of course much more). Together the challenge produced by these factors is daunting. It is no wonder then that the number of secondary works devoted to studies of a single work, organised by a theme, or aimed at providing an introduction to Deleuze have outnumbered the works that offer a more sustained engagement with his corpus. Nonetheless those deeper and more detailed works will be what forms the bridge between Deleuze studies and other areas of philosophy. In this thesis I have attempted to show why I believe that some aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy remain either unfinished or still hold untapped potential (for example, his work on Marx and capitalism), or are deficient and ill-suited for the tasks to which they have been applied (for example, work on developing his ethical theory). No doubt others will disagree with my conclusions, but it is this critical debate about what is most fruitful in Deleuze’s works in this present age, and what their deeper structure consists of, that will produce long-lasting results. It is my hope that this thesis will be a small contribution to the movement towards that larger goal that already exists, and towards connecting Deleuzian thought with the great outside.
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