Deleuze and the rejection of
conventional thinking
Dave Harris 2013
Another problem with 'applying'
Deleuze by isolating concepts is that
Deleuze himself says we should not ‘apply’ his
work like this. Deleuze deliberately breaks
with conventional thinking and writing (which
explains why we have use rephrasings such as
to ‘put him to work’, not ‘apply’ him in the
conventional sense). For Deleuze (2004) the
conventional image of thinking is seriously
limited. It prioritises similarity rather than
difference; operates through recognising
similarities using literary forms like analogy
or metaphor; and prioritises discussion and
consensus as a means of solving philosophical
disputes. A unifying essential consciousness –
grounded ultimately on God or Humanity – is
required to guarantee and resolve all
the subjective judgements about similarity.This
conventional image runs throughout
philosophical and everyday thought. [I have
some online notes on Deleuze 2004 here --it is VERY
dense and complex but the critique of
conventional thinking is done mostly in one
chapter -- 3. Good luck!]
Deleuze says we should pursue
instead a scholarly and individualized route
into non-conventional thinking: ‘In this
sense, it is indeed true that the thinker is
necessarily solitary and solipsistic’
(Deleuze, 2004: 352).A
wide knowledge of the arts and sciences is
used as raw material for his analyses. The
result is a series of intense scholarly works
quite unlike the familiar approaches.One
way of putting Deleuze to work, suggested in
Deleuze and Guattari (1994), is to encourage
analysts to develop Deleuzian concepts of
their own, but, presumably, this would require
first a similar level of engagement and
commitment.
Developing Deleuzian concepts of your own
seems to involve trying to first arrive at
singularities. This is not what social
scientists do -- they go for generalisations
or generalities. A singularity is something
that offers a particular combination of
specific empirical factors which are not
homogenous but, on the contrary, quite
heterogeneous. These emerge as particular
points or convergences of forces in the
virtual (I know this isn't easy and it sounds
like science fiction). Some are heterogeneous
enough to be unique -- haecceities. I
think you might get to this understanding by
looking at empirical objects or facts
philsosophically, trying to see how they might
be produced asa combination of forces and or
processes which happen to converge in a
particular fixed object or point. There is
some mind-boggling maths involving topology
which is cited here (best illustrated in a video by DeLanda)
. Let me take a really simple example, once
cited by Deleuze (1990) and about the only one
I understand. We can examine a circular
object, say a slice of a tree trunk as an
empirical object all on its own, but we can
also see it as a cut through a 3-dimensional
obect, a sphere or a cylinder. Let's get
philosophical and speculate that that sphere
or cylinder might also be a cut from some 4
dimensional figure, and that 4-dimensional
figure a cut from a 5-dimensional one -- and
so on. We have to see these multi-dimension
entities not as things ( which only exist in
3-d) but as forces, vectors, converging now
and then,maybe, to produce more fixed figures
which themselves can change their state to
produce the 3-d objects we know and love.
DeLanda has homely examples to illustrate
changes of state (much clearer than Deleuze's
own waffle and evasion) -- we are used to
seeing water as a liquid but we know that if
we changes its state ( its temperature, or
example) it exists as a gas and a solid as
well -- all the same thing. Writers and poets
do this sort of thing too,but with less
explicit methodology
We can pin down the term
'multiplicity', says DeLanda ( 2002), as those vectors of forces
producing convergences and state changes
(there is a fuller definition elsewhere)
. These eventually produce
singularities. In different terms again, we
have explained how individual objects, some
of which might look quite different,
and some of which might not even actually
exist on this earth except as ideas or
possibilities, are produced by some underlying
'diagram' or process, operating at the
virtual level Deleuze insists that the virtual
is also real even though we cannot perceive it
directly, let alone measure or quantify
it.. A proper concept grasps all these
aspects of reality. It is not just a
description of what can be seen and grasped
immediately and empirically -- it must have a
virtual dimension too to see that what exists
empirically is only one possibility.It should
also contain elements of the 'preconceptual',
which might mean those bits of knowledge which
have not properly been formalized, the
precursors of the concept, so to speak.
It is not at all clear, and Deleuze offers few
examples. It might be the case that his own
philosophy can be seen as another option in
some great philosophical diagram, which has
also produced the specific works by
philosophers he admires -- like Spinoza and
Nietzsche (who are not normally seen as very
similar at the specific level, I gather).
Deleuze (1995: 6) himself is famously vulgar
about his relation to the philosophers he
studied:
I
suppose the main way I coped with it at the
time was to see the history of philosophy as
a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same
thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself
as taking a philosopher from behind and
giving him a child; it would be his own
offspring, yet monstrous’.He
cites his book on Bergson as an example of
how he included ‘all sorts of shifting,
slipping, dislocations and hidden
emissions’.
The language of diagrams and multiplicities is
also used specifically in Deleuze's (1999)
work on Foucualt, however. Briefly, the
argument goes that Foucault was not being at
all contradictory or inconsistent when he
wrote about knowledge on the one hand in one
book (Archaeology of Knowledge-- I have
some notes) , and
disciplinary institutions in a later book (Discipline
and Punish -- notes here). Specifically,
a lot of people have seen him as waffling
horribly about whether a discourse is just
language and, if so, what the relation is to
non-discursive 'reality', which includes the
power to force people to do things without
invoking any discourses. He was alluding to an
underlying multiplicity which produces
combinations of both knowledge and power-laden
institutions, says Deleuze. The multiplicity
offers all possible combinations and a process
that brings about specific and actual
combinations (in very complex ways which
you will have to read for yourselves). The
abstract possibilities can be seen as an
underlying 'diagram'. Foucault got to that
insight by identifying singularities in
knowledge -- statements, not normal linguistic
units like words or phrases,and his method for
getting to those is defined as archaeology.
The breakthrough in Disicpline is
seeing the importance of 'the visible', that
which informs actual arrangements like prison
buildings, and other possibilities as well.
Deleuze says great writers of ficition can
also expose these singularities and
multiplcities too --the best examples are in
Deleuze (1997).
I have just read Guattari and
Rolnik (2008) as well. Mostly the book is rather
tedious, rambling and a bit sad in its support
for revolutionary movements in Brazil ( and
Solidarity in Poland!), but a couple of
excellent clarifications on psychoanalysis from
Guattari, including a most esxtended critique
yet of Lacan. He also suggests that the Freudian
Unconscious can be best seen as an assemblage of
various subjectivation processes (or a
multiplicity amd that all the schools of
Freudianism are right while none of them is
sufficient on its own. Clever! To be fair he
also has a couple of throwaways about how
schools constrain the creativity of children --
but only the usual liberal stuff I think.
Deleuze’s mission also leads to reluctance to
engage in conversations with other
philosophers (except his chosen collaborators)
who might distract him: ‘philosophers have
very little time for discussion...when it
comes to creating, conversation is always
superfluous' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 28).
Those who advocate debate and communication
are often inspired by ressentiment,
and ‘speak only of themselves when they set
empty generalisations against one another'
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 29).
Deleuze admits
that to escape all social constraint would be
to risk personal chaos in the form of madness
or self-harm, and he admires the artists who
have pursued that route to that conclusion
(Scott Fitzgerald, for example). Deleuze’s own
style offers a series of experiments, first
appearing in the odd serial structure of Logic of
Sense (Deleuze 1990). Further
experimentation produced a free exposition of
associated ideas, especially in the better
known works of Deleuze and Guattari.They
wrote ‘this book [Thousand
Plateaus] as a rhizome’ (Deleuze and
Guattari, 2004: 24) and as illustrating délire:
‘exactly to go off the rails’ (Deleuze and
Parnet, 1987: 40). Given the rejection of
conventional thinking this is fully
explicable, but the result can appear as a
‘private language’.Sociologists
might also be able to detect some
unacknowledged social elements which persist,
as we shall see.
We cannot opt for Deleuze on the basis of any
agreed ground for his work: Deleuze tells us
that in conventional thinking ‘good sense’ or
‘common sense’ grounds philosophy, but this
will not do for really radical philosophising.
However, anyone following his arduous path
will encounter the deep and groundless
contingency of the ‘eternal return’:
connecting ‘the individual, [this] ground and
thought’ (Deleuze, 2004: 191) ends in madness
or melancholy.
Instead, we should choose Deleuze’s work
according to ‘philosophical taste’: ‘it is
certainly not for “rational or reasonable”
reasons that a particular concept is created’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 78).This
‘faculty of taste… is ... instinctive’ (1994:
79).Rather
than developing knowledge or truth, ‘it is
categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or
Important that determine success or failure...
Only [mere] teachers can write “false” in the
margins, perhaps’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994:82,
original capitalisation). Bourdieu’s critique
of taste clearly seems applicable here too.
The notion of the eternal return is a
difficult one, and Deleuze refers us to
Nietzsche, or to particular readings ofNietzsche.We
can understand it perhaps if we remember that
Deleuze wants to give no room to repetition in
its normal senses.So
some people have seen life as repeating
itself, may be going through various circles.Others
have seen life as proceeding in a straight
line from past to future, may be in the form
of evolution.Deleuze wants to insist that there is a
line that connect events in the past present
and future, but it is not a circle nor a
simple straight line.Instead
it is characterised by random shifts of
direction, arising from chance events.It
is contingent, unpredictable, or ’aleatory’.Nevertheless,
there is something that remains consistent in
the background, and that is the generation of
differences.It is the process of generating
difference that endlessly and eternally
returns, while the actual specific objects and
events that are produced on the line are
chronically likely to appear then disappear,
change and combine, but never return.
If we are allowed to vulgarize the concept
like this, there are clearly implications for
the social and human sciences—I’m going to
consider sociology in particular.So
far, we have seen how Deleuze denies the
relevance of empirical studies in sociology,
which search for empty generalisations.They
do this by normalising, treating exceptions as
mere deviations from some general law.As
far as I know, however, this is never been a
major trend in modern sociology, although it
still persists, and might even be gaining
ground as the government seems to like
empirical generalisations.Nevertheless,
social theory has always done more than just
generalise: at its best, it tries to discover
underlying social forces, currents or ‘social
facts’ that produce the empirical.To
revert to Deleuze’s example of singularities
discussed above, social theory has always
tried to show how the same underlying social
currents, variously described as
rationalisation, modernity, advanced
capitalism and so on have produced a variety
of individuals, all of them unique in one
sense.Now
I know that Deleuze denies the relevance of
this concept of individual, and prefers the
term singularity, probably so there he can
include much wider areas of reality than just
social reality, but I think that social theory
is not that far away.
The
same goes for the eternal return.The
only alternatives seem to be simple
duplication or unidirectional change, but
social theory has offered another
concept—social reproduction.This
involves not just copying the same
institutions from one generation to another,
but copying them in a form that permits
adaptation to new conditions, a kind of
dynamic reproduction.This
sort of reproduction of empirical events and
institutions is precisely what is ignored by
Deleuze, in favour of some philosophical
mechanism where actual singularities or
institutions emerge from virtual processes,
then fade and die until new singularities or
institutions emerge again.Once
they’ve been actualized, institutions seem to
have no life of their own at all, except in
that they help us grasp the virtual processes
that produce them.
I
suppose it is inevitable that a French
militant would also think of marxism as having
replaced sociology. Deleuze and Guattari tend
to see marxism as simply economic determinist,
so it can be dismissed as pretty unsubtle and
uncomplicated. Only rarely is real modern
marxism discussed. When Guattari tried to
explain how subjectivation occurs in social
formations (how individuals are manipulated
while thinking it is all their own choice), he
develops pretty standard cultural marxism,
though.
In Deleuze (2004) we get back briefly to
something like the notion of multiplicities
explaining singularities when discussing a
marxist popular at the time -- Louis
Althusser. Marx’s notion of abstract labour
approaches the status of the social Idea (or
concept) which can be used to describe
different societies as differential relations
between specific elements including production
and property relations.Individuals
appear as ‘bearers of labour power or
representatives of property’ (2004: 234).The
economic instance (or system) is a social
multiplicity comprising these different
relations which gets incarnated and
differenciated into determinate societies and
real relations. Deleuze spells
'differenciated' with a c to refer to an
empirical process ofdeveloping
difference,
as things evolve or develop for example.
‘Althusser and his collaborators are,
therefore, profoundly correct in showing the
presence of a genuine structure in Capital
and in rejecting historicist interpretations
of Marxism, since this structure never acts
transitively, following the order of
succession in time; rather, it acts by
incarnating its varieties in diverse
societies…That is why “the economic” is never
given properly speaking, but rather designates
a differential virtuality to be interpreted,
always covered over by its forms of
actualizations; a theme or “problematic”
always covered over by its cases of solution’
(2004: 234-5).The economic in this general sense,
needs to be grasped, despite its disguises
offered by specific forms of economic
organization -- types of capitalism for
example. The economic multiplicity is the
source of all the important problems given
society, even though solutions may take
political or ideological forms, which seem to
have nothing to do with the economic.
Solutions can involve cruelty and oppression
as well as political reform and welfare
states. Deleuze cites in support Marx’s
formulation (in Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy) that
“mankind always sets itself only such tasks as
it can solve”.
In
my view, sociology offers much more useful and
practical insight into the actual
empirical processes going on in, say, schools
than Deleuzian philosophy or Althusserian
marxism does. Deleuze's project does
help us to dereify existing forms, like a lot
of other radical theorising does.We
come to see the existing system as not natural
or inevitable, but as the result of specific
combinations of forces.We
can then withdraw our consent and think of
alternative specific combinations.I
don’t know if we have to buy the whole
Deleuzian package, though, and philosophically
dissolve what exists back into the
multiplicity, and struggled to realise another
actual possibility.This
might be fun and personally liberating, as we
attempt to ‘become’ other people, animals or
objects, but it is a crap form of politics in
my view which will never be done with
philosophising.