It seems puzzling
that at an interdisciplinary conference I would be speaking about the creation
of disciplines and in a sense upholding borders between other academic fields.
I will spend a large portion of this paper looking at the relationship between
philosophy and science and the current state of contemporary thought. It is
interesting that Deleuze himself posed similar questions at a conference like
this. So are investigation together will lead us to ask and answer three
important questions?
1) What is the
creative act? 2) What is the creation of a Discipline? 3) Why would any
academic discipline want to uphold a knowledge barrier or border? At the same
time we could almost pose a fourth question 4) what does it mean to have an
idea in philosophy or in science. What does it mean when we say “Hey I have
Idea”? We all know that having an idea is a rare event; it is never just
something general. But an idea and the individual are always-already dedicated
to certain field or discipline. Ideas have to be treated like potentials
already engaged in a specific mode of expression and at the same time they are
also inseparable from that mode of expression.
Deleuze wanted
to initially separate these two disciplines by setting up borders between them.
Philosophy is the art of creating and fabricating concepts on a plane of
immanence, while science forms functives on a plane of reference. In
continental philosophy, we have seen mixtures such as phenomenology mixing with
cognitive science, and philosophy gravitating towards a more mathematical and
logical apparatus to balance the legitimating power of the discipline. The
crossing over between philosophy and science is what causes the ambiguities
between both fields and initially confuses their role in the world of
knowledge. This mutates both the philosophical concept and the scientific functive.
It takes away from the creative invention. It turns them into a ‘prospect,’ which is a proposition or a
variable. It makes both fields concentrate on propositions and reduces the
disciplines to mere opinion on variables and logic.
For Deleuze
philosophy is always a creative and revolutionary act. At the same time it also
is quite inventive. Philosophy’s role as
a discipline is to create concepts.
Concepts do not exist ready-made in some kind of platonic heaven waiting
for the philosopher to come and grab them. Concepts have to be produced. There
is a certain kind of necessity attached to the inventive act of creation in a
discipline. According to Deleuze, if there isn’t this need, this necessity,
this model of creation, then there is nothing.
The
definitions of such academic disciplines that we are all well accustomed with
today, are different to Deleuze, they deal with creation, invention and
experimentation. To Deleuze, Philosophy like Cinema tells stories, different
kinds of stories, stories that consist of the concept or of movement. Science
tells a story as well with its inventive functions, which are a multiplicity of
sets that interact with one another forming a kind of movement. Science also
works in a similar fashion; the scientist invents a function in response to a
problem or a concern. Yet, a Scientist has nothing to do with a concept, which
is why we have philosophy. A function occurs in science when we have regulated
responses that correspond between two sets, we can say that science deals with
a multiplicity of sets. But how does the interaction of the concept or function
occur in our world. It seems almost puzzling that disciplines are to be reduced
to that act of either producing a function or a concept but why do we need this
act of creation in all disciplines? Deleuze thought that the greatest problem
of our contemporary world is that it is saturated by mass opinion. Information
technologies, communications and the role of advertising, have taken over
conceptual space, diluting words like concept, and creative. Thought has been
replaced by a new framework, what he called the cogito of the marketplace, or a
Conceptual Capitalism. The liberation from such saturation takes place in
inventing, fabricating and forming new concepts or inventing and experimenting
with functions. This is the great danger that we all face today; the fact that
knowledge or information is everywhere. Deleuze states, that all around us is
an unfurling mass of chaos and doxa.
Think of today in your daily routines how much information has overloaded your
mind, points of views, topics, opinions, outlooks, and beliefs that all of us
have come across.
Opinion/Chaos
is best described, not as a disorder, but as a constant pressure in all
directions. Communication and Information act as a transmission and a
propagation of information. But what is information, we all know what
information is, for we see it, and hear it every day; it is a set of slogans,
directions, imperatives or an order-word. When we are informed we are told what
to believe, in other words, informing means circulating an order-word.
Information is communicated to us at every second, we are told what we are
supposed to believe; and sometimes it is not that simple sometimes, we are told
just to pretend that we believe. In a sense, the order-word or the saturation
of information is an attempt to create information of control, or a controlled
system of order-words used in a given society. These are what Foucault would
call, Societies of Control. But the
weapons against such a control are the creation of disciplines, or the creative
act in Philosophy and Science that work to counter-information. A concept in
philosophy or a function in science creates an act of resistance. Deleuze and Guattari’s book what is philosophy, was written from
this view, that both Philosophy and science struggle against opinion, and common belief, they are to be seen as
disciplines of creativity, in a sense, a philosophy of nature, or a science of
being.
The troubling
characteristic that we all face today is the question of certainty. We all want
the truth, or something like the truth. And as societies grow and our thirst
for the truth increases we start to see
disciplines based on their accountability for the truth. We create hierarchies
contingent upon what we think will give us the best results not realizing that
the thought of thinking, what we need the most, is an order-word, or an attempt
to situate all disciplines in a hegemonic order. In this case, we have all
witnessed the scientizing of the university; and of all its disciplines.
Deleuze in an
interview in 1988 stated we have to watch the university very closely for we
will quickly move into a time where academic funding will be dominated by the
sciences, and not inventive, creative science, but a scientizing of all
academic fields, where the race for knowledge will no longer be centred around
the necessity to solve problems, but the necessity to acquire funding only to
participate in a limited form of discourse policed by the sciences.
A. J. Ayer
sought to demolish metaphysics only to replace it with a new role for
philosophy to be the hand maiden of the sciences. To make all other disciplines
ancillary to science. To situate philosophy as a truth mechanism but not of
capital T truth, for only the sciences’ can determine the truth, this kind of
truth is based on the validity of a proposition, we can think of the many
examples, S knows P, or the cat is on the mat, What this does, is turn
everything into an axiomatic system. We reduce the creative act by accepting
the model of variables’ and propositions. This is the danger, reducing thought
to mere opinion.
What we need
to investigate now is why in academic circles we have replaced the role of the
creative with a reductive axiomatic model. Why we are allowing this
reductionism to occur? To understand
this model we need to look further into Deleuzian metaphysics, multiplicities,
events and concepts. This is a highly sophisticated system so I will break it
down so that we can identify the necessary steps and processes and where we
seem to be going wrong.
Deleuze has a
unique formation of thought that is linked to actual situations and states of
affairs. In this model there are three ontological registers are 1) The actual
2) Intensities and 3) Virtuality. The
actual represents the state of affairs or a situation, Deleuze would call this
axiomatic because they deal with extensive multiplicities or sets, in other
words individuals, objects etc. Now intensities are the movement from the state
of affairs or (the actual) into what Deleuze calls Problematics (The virtual).
The virtual or the plane of immanence represents a place where problematic are
solved in concepts. Problematics, we can say is like problem-solving and this
happens in the mind. We can say in a sense that both Philosophy and Science
need these ontological registers to create or invent and experiment. By getting
rid of the Virtual apparatus we reduce all thought to the actual or the axiomatic
method. We lose the creative, or the aspect of problem solving. This is where
the concept mutates into what Deleuze would call a prospect and since according
to Deleuze the axiomatic logical model is inherently induced by reduction we
need to create a new model to replace the virtual specificity of thought. The
proposition takes the place of the creative act making all academic fields in a
sense enslaved to a non-conceptual reference.
It makes the concept a concept-extension where the concepts objects are
no longer the becoming in thought or connections and solving problems, but are
elements of sets. This completely negates the existence of philosophy. It is
science through its own plane of reference (Virtuality) that creates functions
in order to battle the chaos or opinion; it is supposed to extract tiny bits of
the chaos in order to evaluate that chaos, thus creating an invention or
experimentation, that works for life, that helps create functions, yet with
philosophy being obsolete in this model, science takes on more roles, thus
vindicating its right to be the absolute body of knowledge. In this model,
Science become a major royal science. Leaving the humanities and social
sciences deemed as either part of the ‘soft sciences’ or given a new name ‘the
arts,’ or what Deleuze calls a minor science.
What has
happened metaphysically speaking is that an entire ontological register has
been negated; the virtual pole or problematics have been completely ignored.
You need both multiplicities in a Deleuzian model, both actual/axiomatic and
virtual\problematic with the intensive running between them for a connection, a
becoming; and answer to a problem, a creative act, what Deleuze calls, pure
difference or differential multiplicity. Axiomatics possess the will to
deliberately stop problematics. Deleuze points out that in problematics or the
virtual all becoming happen there. This makes Problematics equal with a level
of discovery; and axiomatics equal, a level of demonstration. when the creative
is negated from a field, it is left as an empty multiplicity; and science
demands a demonstrable axiomatic, from all academics fields, when they cannot
comply, because, essentially they are a method of discovery and their method of
expressivity has been annulled, they are seen as inferior. As I stated earlier
Science creates its function on a plane of reference, the function it creates,
is an answer to a problems that arises which it tries to rectify, yet it can no
longer be achieved for a step is missing, the problematic or the virtual. Thus
science looks for new ways of entangling itself in all disciplines, demanding
the proliferation of its entirety in all academic fields. It demands rigor,
axioms, theorems, co-ordinates, propositions and demonstrations
This negation
makes room for the creation of pop philosophy and pop science which are
generated by the proposition, as it gradually mutates back into a form of chaos
or opinion. It is science; and science
alone that operates within itself, and philosophy with little or no role, the people
demand knowledge and they demand an outside an exteriority, that they can
access. Thus they posit chaos and pose a false problem which situates opinion
against opinion, individual against individual, taking up conceptual space as
rhetoric and propaganda. Thus information and communication take on the role
that creation played by levelling down forms of knowledge and disseminating
vast amounts of opinion that cut across both fields, inventing such things as
‘pop philosophy’ or ‘pop science.’ This affects both the sciences and
philosophy and turns them into, as Deleuze states, a field of marketing that
absorbs their meanings and negates their active and creative function in the
world, and makes them a cliché. Since,
it is opinion and the axiom that has replaced philosophy, the public demand an
ordered set of opinions, generating a consensus. Thus, the role of journalism
is heightened to degree where the media can generate and regulate the mass
production of opinion. They like science, have a new axiom, what they call
facts or as I mentioned earlier the order-word.
When academic fields
are forced to mix together or when philosophy is told that it needs science to
validate it, when the proposition or prospects enter into the equation, this
mutation invokes transcendence. We arrest the movement and the creative
apparatus of the function in science and the concept in philosophy. When
philosophy is demanded to be stretched past it limits, and when science negates
its virtual problematic, it becomes an empty demonstration without a level of
discovery.
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