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Thesis Order and the Virtual: Toward a Deleuzian Cosmology W.J. Ross

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Thesis Order and the Virtual: Toward a Deleuzian Cosmology W.J. Ross Thesis Order and the Virtual: Toward a Deleuzian Cosmology W.J. Ross 1 Order and the Virtual: Toward a Deleuzian Cosmology Contents Introduction 3 Chaos 12 Entropy and the Complete Concept in Leibniz and Deleuze 30 Order 69 Order as Complexity 100 Sufficient Reason as Dissymmetry and the Evolutionary Paradigm 118 Conclusion 152 Abbreviations: Titles by Gilles Deleuze B Bergsonism, tr.s H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (US: Zone Books, 1988) DR Difference and Repetition, tr. P. Patton (UK: Athlone, 1994) FLB The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, tr. T. Conley (US: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) LoS The Logic of Sense, tr. M. Lester (UK: Athlone, 1990) N&P Nietzsche and Philosophy (US; Columbia UP, 1983) Titles by Gilles Deleuze with Félix Guattari ATP A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. B. Massumi (UK: Athlone, 1988) WP What is Philosophy?, tr.s G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson (UK: Verso, 1994) Others CE Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, tr. A. Mitchell (UK: MacMillan, 1928) BP Serres, Michel, The Birth of Physics, tr. Jack Hawes (UK: Clinamen Press, 2000) PR Whitehead, A.N., Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed.s D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne (UK: The Free Press, 1985) 2 Order and the Virtual: Toward a Deleuzian Cosmology Bill Ross Introduction Order is a more or less explicit topic for any thinker who undertakes to write about nature. Even those who assert that randomness or chaos is the most fundamental trait of nature are obliged to account for the apparent permanence, organisation and structure we observe around us. No less is true for Gilles Deleuze, who champions the power of chaos through his work. On one reading, Deleuze’s chief impulse is to wrench loose the lynchpins of order; to ‘affirm chaos’ and disarticulate the law of excluded middle; to refuse jurisdiction to laws of nature and render provisional its every constant; to banish identity and negation alike. If we are to be left with no fixed point, we might ask, what remains of order? This study is nevertheless an examination of that notion in Deleuze’s natural philosophy. For me the counter-reading is much more productive and insightful. Deleuze is rather a firm believer in order, even there where he affirms chaos. If we could furnish a ‘Deleuzian Question’ par excellence, it would be; ‘Given that there are no fixed points, how is order expressed in the world?’ This question is implicitly reprised across the entirety of his work and inflected at each stage by fresh vocabulary coined to treat it anew, as though for each new Deleuzian territory a new phrasebook is required. I have opted to approach this question from a particular point of view, in its way a lesser thesis. Deleuze’s philosophy of nature is a Cosmology. This framing is for multiple reasons. In one sense it serves simply to foreground those elements in his text which operate on the cosmological level. The concept of ‘Chaosmos’ is one such, as is ‘The Plane of Immanence’. Perforce any discussion of Plato’s Timaeus or the Lucretian void or the Stoic universe such as we find in Deleuze’s work belongs in this vein, but so too does Deleuze’s own fabulous figure of the calculating God, whose calculations, if ever they worked out exactly, would spell the end of the world. Nietzsche’s Eternal Return and Deleuze’s own elaboration thereof are nothing if not cosmological. All the complexity and nuance of Deleuze’s thought can be unpacked through this approach. In another sense the frame serves pragmatically to put this philosophy into conversation with the contemporary field of scientific cosmology, which in itself, has a number of perspectival advantages. Modern cosmology is in truth not so much a field of its own as a particularly vibrant intersection of the Venn diagram representing multiple fields of physics. General Relativity is from the start a cosmological theory, predicated as it is on those scales at which gravity becomes significant. Yet the micro-scale which Quantum Physics treats has been no bar to cosmological speculation. The universe may have been generated, we learn, from the inflationary expansion of a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum. Supersymmetry posits a history of the universe in which the disparate laws, atomic and sub-atomic forces are simply remnants of a single force which fractured through symmetry-breaking as the formidably high-energy initial conditions underwent discharge. String Theory could be seen as a prodigious laboratory for a vast number of theoretically viable universes, each of which is a permutation of higher-dimensional conditions for sub-atomic-scale matter-energy. Its offspring Brane Theory envisages a higher-dimensional multiverse in which lesser- dimensional universes are embedded and which may in theory come into collision with each other. Modern Cosmology it seems has a singular capacity to furnish an increasingly diverse range of speculative solutions to the question of natural order, and as such is fitting 3 ground to explore the equally singular creative capacities of Deleuze’s natural philosophy. Of particular interest will be ‘network’ and ‘holographic’ paradigms. It is my hope that this fresh territory for Deleuzian commentary will serve to expand the focus for Deleuzian studies beyond a justified but overly strong association of Deleuze’s work with the field of Chaos Theory. There are no few elements in Deleuze’s text which appear to place his philosophy almost irremediably at odds with fundamental tenets of physics, and a great deal of the detailed argument here is devoted to negotiating these points of contention. This is not an attempt to promote a ‘minor’ science over a ‘major’. It seems to me that the scientific community is quite diverse and supple enough to cross-pollinate descant ideas and outlying paradigms; it is both major and minor. Any attempts today on the part of a philosophy of science to diagnose a positivist, Newtonian paradigm with which the scientific community blithely labours on is nostalgic at best. Rather, the focus is on the productive potential of the concepts in play between the philosophy and the physics. More importantly, I hope to show that the philosophy is salient enough to promote certain strands in physics rather than others; that is what makes a natural philosophy worth its salt. The final motivation for the cosmological viewpoint is due to the importance of a twin philosophical spirit in the themes explored here. A.N. Whitehead categorised his philosophy of nature as a Cosmology. While it is possible he meant by this to associate his philosophical activity with the spirit of the pre-Socratic, Ionian branch of natural enquiry, he devotes no real time to establishing this connection. The acknowledged debt (in Process and Reality) goes rather to Plato’s Timaeus. He does nevertheless share with that ancient philosophy a concern to encapsulate the overall macroscopic character of nature through analysis of its microscopic event; in his terminology, the ‘philosophy of organism’ provides the basis for the cosmology. Nevertheless, this is avowedly rather in the service of establishing a metaphysics adequate to the revolution in physics which had firmly taken hold by the 1920s; …[I]t must be one of the motives of a complete cosmology to construct a scheme of ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science. (PR p.xii) Clearly he understands the cosmology to comprehend philosophy and metaphysics as a whole, with science at least on a par with the other elements. The ‘natural science’ he refers to, the landscape through which our own contemporary physics still makes its way, is first and foremost an account of energetic or intensive processes. In a Relativistic World, matter and energy are strictly exchangeable; in a Quantum world, the enquiry is focused on those processes by which matter is derived from energy. This was certainly not lost on Whitehead.1 This feature, the primacy of the intensive, is the most important connecting factor between Deleuze and Whitehead for this investigation. Both provide an account of nature partitioned (but in constant permeable exchange) into two regimes of energy. Deleuze speaks of the intensive and extensive regimes. Whitehead recognizes the same distinction, but coins for himself the terms ‘mental pole’ and ‘physical pole’ respectively. For both, the intensive underlies and is prior to the extensive. On this last criterion both meet the entry requirement for a metaphysics which can speak to our contemporary natural sciences. Beyond this, but certainly not unrelated, the potential for conversation with contemporary physics is furthered by a common understanding on the part of both philosophers of the character of space. There is nothing given for either about the structuration of space; it is the result of underlying intensive relations, which in themselves do not require any prior determination of dimension or location. On the contrary, it is the intensive process itself which produces both dimension and location. As such, there is 4 common ground between our philosophy and quantum physics, which has been obliged to admit the occurrence of causal relations unconstrained by contiguous spatial location. This recognition was first prompted with respect to the phenomenon of entanglement. The capacity of entangled particles to correlate with respect to measured aspects, such as spin or polarisation, is problematic for any account of causality which relies on spatial contiguity. This capacity for correlation is shown to persist even when the entangled particles in question have travelled sufficient distance from each other to rule out even the greatest possible speed of causal propagation, the speed of light.
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