Introduction
The Context of the turn and the Debate
In
the last ten years, many texts have been released about the Philosophy of
Gilles Deleuze. Most of these texts explicate Deleuze’s work in multi-cultural
and interdisciplinary frameworks. The recent trend has been to elaborate how
these concrete concepts interact in the world. This has been a successful
endeavour in various fields belonging to the Humanities. The academic enterprise,
in theory, has given Deleuze studies a more prominent role in the world of
cultural and critical theory. It is now possible to attach Deleuze’s work to
theories of cinema, philosophy, post-colonialism, artwork, and literature and
gender studies. However, there has also been a backlash against Deleuze’s work.
For example, Alain Badiou released ‘Deleuze and the Clamour of Being’ in 1997,
which criticized Deleuze’s philosophy for being too tied to the abstract.
According to Badiou, Deleuze’s philosophy is centered on the ascetic thinker.
Badiou was extremely frustrated with the idea that Deleuze had replaced the
logic of truth with that of sense. In essence, the real job of sense and
non-sense was to give birth to multi-faceted events. Badiou makes three essential
claims about Deleuze’s philosophy I) it is organized around a metaphysics of
the one, II) it contains the dispossession of the subject; III) it requires a
creative ascetic exercise. These claims have been virtually ignored by the
academic community, even though Badiou was starting to make a name in French
post-modern thought. It wasn’t until Peter Hallward’s text ‘Out of this World’ in 2006 that things finally got stirred up.
Badiou’s text only surveys Deleuze’s solitary work; it excludes his co-authored
works with Felix Guattari whereas Hallward’s critique contains all of Deleuze’s
oeuvre.
Badiou’s
initial critique of Deleuze lies more on the grounds of interpreting Deleuzian
Metaphysics. Hallward’s maintains a radical thesis, that initially Deleuze
holds onto a mediaeval and theological project, which cuts off all relations
with the world and asks its material subjects to get rid of their human
essence. Overall, Hallward holds onto the notion that Deleuze’s philosophy is
dangerous and that it distracts all actual creatures from their world: It
culminates in a philosophy of indifference. Hallward states, “Those of us who
seek to change the world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look
elsewhere for it is not found in Deleuze” (Hallward
Out of this World 186). Although the
academic community did not respond well to Hallward’s critiques, there were few
critical responses to Hallward’s text. Initially, only a handful of critics
responded. However, the debate does not start here. The fundamental attack on
Deleuze was that Deleuzian politics was meaningless, singular and has no effect
on the world. The recent trend in Deleuze studies is to compare Deleuze’s
philosophy to theology. Therefore, the debate that starts with Hallward is perpetuated
by most people working in favour of Deleuze, who limit their studies of his
work to its theological dimension.
Deleuzians
have not adequately answered Hallward’s challenge. Instead, they have ignored
his claims and proceeded to use theological apparatuses to explain his
concepts. Works such as, ‘Deleuze and the
Secretion of Atheism’, ‘The Hermetic
Deleuze’, ‘Deleuze and Theology’
are now the most used secondary literature on the French philosopher. This
gesture not only accepts Hallward’s thesis indirectly, it cuts off creativity
in a field open to interdisciplinarity. The new literature has been fragmented;
it is no longer diverse, but is restricted to solve one function, the
theological. While there are still some works being written on Deleuzian
politics, it has been virtually abandoned. Our present mission is to explicate
Hallward’s position and subsequently defend Deleuze’s philosophy from
Hallward’s critique. In addition to defending Deleuzian politics, the target of
this critique is aimed at Hallward’s logic, which inaccurately interprets the
relationship between the virtual and the actual. Hallward misappropriates the
real context of what creation is to Deleuze and above all, makes a category
mistake between the definitions of immanence and eminence.
Chapter 1 - An Introduction to Hallward’s Deleuze
Evacuation, Subtraction
and the Singular Subject of Deleuze
The
singular subject, according to Hallward’s Deleuze, is defined by its own power
to eliminate its specific limits, both internal and external. Deleuze’s subject
must evacuate itself from all forms of identity and thus escape all formal
relations with the material world (Hallward, Gilles Deleuze and the World
without Others 535). This process is called ‘becoming-other’;
and it involves dissolving oneself. Beneath the fractured ‘I’ there is nothing
but a field of depth, an internal dynamic activity that escapes the material
self. Thus, by dissolving the self, one can achieve the exact point of pure
virtual creating and free this dynamic activity from isolation. This ‘becoming-other’ essentially means one
is no longer their self. In essence, one becomes a plurality of selves, or
singularities, called ‘larval selves’ (Hallward, World without Others 535). In
this sense, the subject is truly another. Therefore, the singular subject,
according to Hallward’s Deleuze, must become impersonal, anonymous, unconscious, and inorganic, in order for it to be suitable for the creating that
must flow through it.
According
to Hallward, there are three ways of ‘becoming-other’
and dismantling and evacuating the subject. The subject must be smoothed
out, as opposed to being a subject imposed by striation. This involves the
de-stratified subject, pealing the layers back off of what makes it a human. An
example of this stripping down, for Hallward is Deleuze and Guattari’s use of
the Body-Without-Organs: “The BWO is the virtual, unformed body-potential that
sustains any actual body. It is a body as an event, a body that can become
anybody. It is a body subtracted from any bodily shape or norm, and any organic
species” (Hallward, Out of this World 34). Hallward claims that “as a virtual
intensity, the BWO has nothing to do with space or place and everything to do with
pure potential or becoming (Hallward, Out of this World 98). What the quotation
identifies is this a-subjective entity that Deleuze privileges over the
specific self through the process of ‘becoming-other’ or
disappearing.
Becoming
anonymous entails the impersonal coherence of the singular subject. This
amounts to abandoning the material subject and according to Hallward, Deleuze
calls on a form of transcendence which removes the subject from its essential
syntactical link with the world (Hallward, World without Others 531). This
becoming involves an impersonal event or individual which passes through all
other individuals and extracts a unique event, like a wound or a death
(Robinson Crusoe and the de-populated island that passes through him or
Riderhood’s death that gives birth to a singular and impersonal pure event [near
death experience]) (Hallward, Out of this Word 25). In this sense, philosophy
merges with ontology, but ontology is already a part of the univocity of being.
Becoming-unconscious,
is due to the fact that Deleuze sees consciousness as a fundamental error.
Deleuze is striving for a kind of science of what can be known as the
unconscious. This task involves the singular subject forgetting its own self
and thus, over-come the bounds of its own nature. Hallward sees this move as
typical: - our consciousness gives us awareness of our material reality. Yet,
to become unconscious means we are no longer limited to all oppositions posed
to us by the propositions of consciousness. We must essentially produce
movements that become one and immediate and blur the distinct relations between
man and nature (Hallward, World without Others 533).
Becoming-inorganic blurs
all relations, and creates immediacy, between man and nature. This involves a
body that is vibrant and alive without organs. The organic self must dissolve
and purge itself of all materiality, into a pre-organic state called ‘larval
selves’, which are always underneath. This threefold movement, for Hallward,
celebrates the death and evacuation of the positioned person. Death, according
to Deleuze, frees the individual from both the form of an ‘I’ and a ‘self’ in
which both positions are imprisoned in the material world. Hallward argues that
Deleuze’s philosophy is a philosophy of difference only within the singular,
which only becomes active and dynamic through its own extinction. The singular
privileges processes of self-differing over forms of specific being that are
understood as co-differing (Hallward, World without Others 533).
Singular
difference applies only to I) what
differs, II) equates differing and
different, and III) makes difference
the very form of immediacy, a pure time in-itself that is immanent to itself. This
Radical immanence is conceived as only one entity. Radical singular difference
is self-constituting and is known as a sovereign force. Its coherence obtains a
level beyond the human, history, and the world, which to Deleuze is the
‘cosmos-brain’. The singular subject is therefore that which eliminates all
possible mediation between the specific, the particular and the universal. The
singular can only been seen in a God/substance who exists necessarily in
himself and produces himself and the whole cosmos in a single self-differentiating
flow. Deleuze calls this infinitely large singularity all of the following: will to power, expression, vital force, desire, pure thought, the unconscious
and the élan vital. Hallward’s
elusive point is that Deleuze is seeking creative ways by which we can escape
the world (Hallward, Out of this World 7).
This
same solitary singularity, is considered to have an infinite variety of
attributes. Hallward finds Deleuze’s philosophy problematic at its core because
it is difficult to sustain a vital philosophy based on the extinction of all
human subjects. What can be grasped, perhaps is a subtractive vitalism
(Hallward, Out of this World 9). How
is it possible that Deleuze’s vitalist philosophy of life affirmation is
paradoxically centred on the destruction of the human subject? What Hallward sees
in Deleuze’s philosophy is a fundamental hostility towards our own given
particularity in a world. Deleuze dismantles the subject in order to generate
creative apparatuses to escape the fixed and mundane nature of our world. Hallward
sees this gesture as transcendence par
excellence and such a
gesture of transcendence is, in a sense, applied to creative ways to aid the
subject in getting out of its specific worldly condition. The escape out of the
world is Deleuze’s own formula of positing ‘the Real’; and annihilating the
subject, in order to replace it with an otherworldly, singular, impersonal and
inhuman condition. We can explicate this thesis in three parts. We must always
have I) a creator/God/substance, II) a virtual/creating/expression and
III) the creature/actual (Hallward,
Out of this World 13). Hallward
notes that this process occurs through our evacuation from our actual creatural
status back to a virtual/creating expression. In this example, we witness the
moment of evacuation to attain a higher relation with the one. In order for the
creature to have full reflexivity and freedom it must evacuate itself from all worldly
content to let the immanent creating move through it. This, in essence, is the
movement back from the actual/material/fixed subject towards an immaterial
virtual field of life. Hallward adds that this is what Deleuze means by becoming-imperceptible.
Becoming-Imperceptible entails that the
creature will become directly animated by the real. The real will always be
immediate but never a part of our world. Our humanly condition is given over to
us in a worldly context that is commanded by pluri-vocal relations that are
grasped in a dualist relationship between perceptions and perceived moments. What
replaces our complex notion of relations within the world is this united
singularity that is interwoven with the multiple: - a formula Deleuze calls the
‘one-all’. But kind of multiple can really exist in this oneness? According to
Hallward, it is only the ‘one’ that is seen as an uninterrupted expression of
this singular principle. And the ‘one’ has no room for variable degrees among
entities that are within its unity (Hallward, Out of this
World 29). This means that human
beings are only modifications or facets of the expressive nature of this
oneness. A feature of Deleuze’s philosophy that demands a continuous alignment
with the oneness (One-all) which always creatively asks to return back to
itself (The digression from actual creature to virtual
creating/counter-actualization). Hallward’s true fear is once one aligns with
the purity of the one they are in a sense already cut off from the material
world and enjoined in a world from above; that is always out-of-this-world (Hallward, World without Others 537).
This evacuation partakes in the cancelation of
difference and yields the singular notion of difference-in-itself.
This essentially presents us with a disinterested model of real difference,
which discloses the indifference of difference, a real (‘difference without-others’).
Hallward’s point, which I reiterated earlier, is if the ‘real’ is known as a
totalizing, self-sufficient, self-expressive and self-constituted force, then
our knowledge of this world and this creative force is subordinated by its own
self-expression. That is, we are ‘always-only’ a second feature or second
ordered function of this univocal totality. We are nothing but ‘the all’ in
this one (One-all) that entails absolutely everything.
Hallward states that this evacuation and
subtraction can be found throughout Deleuze’s work. Deleuze’s corpus paints the
same picture numerous times and the moral of each story is as follows: By
engaging in all things, and moving back to the moment of virtual-creating, one
can become part of the expression, part of this one univocal and creative
power. This movement separates the individual and evacuates the interests of
the creature. Now, the creature is no longer stuck in sad passions but allowed
to participate in a moment of joy that involves disinterested action. This move negates all
autonomy of the subject by aligning it with an ultimate sovereign, an ultimate
one.
The Theophany of Deleuze; and the Logic of Redemption
Peter Hallward states that Deleuze
writes a redemptive philosophy in conjunction with its artistic allies: Spinoza,
Saint Paul, and Suhrawardi. This redemptive logic is designed to ‘save’ its
readers from a situation contaminated by consciousness, representation,
analogy, repression, lack and above all else ‘the other’. Redemption from the
aforementioned provides immediate access to a different kind of situation, one
that can be defined as a form of radical self-sufficiency and its literal
inclusive immanence to itself. The meaning of immanence is as follows:
remaining within, indwelling and inherent. This means there is no effect
outside of any immanent form (http://dictionary.reference.com/).
Hallward notes that Deleuze’s oeuvre explicates our passage
from our given contaminated situation (material life) to purer and more
primordial situation. Deleuze’s corpus begins with an all-determining
ontological principle, or ‘God’ (Hallward, Gilles
Deleuze and the Redemption from Interest 6). Yet, this all-powerful force is somehow
repressed through its own power of creation. The logic of redemption that
Hallward puts forward is one aligned with both mediaeval and Islamic theology.
Spinoza, Saint Paul and Suhrawardi attack our human, specific and worldly forms
of difference, in favour of another-worldly redemptive force
(Hallward, Redemption from Interest 7). If redemption means an act of redeeming
or atoning for our mistakes and our sins, Deleuze’s philosophy seeks to ‘rescue’
us from the material world and deliver us to an immaterial and uncontaminated
state. According to Hallward, Deleuze’s radical philosophy of immanence must
entail a rigorous attack of transcendence and refuse all forms of negation.
However, Hallward points out that this very critique of
transcendence, posited by Deleuze, obtains its movement ‘only’ through a preliminary
transcendence. This transcendence is the move away from our contaminated
situation, which could be called ‘the given’ and this contains our worldly
specific and human significance. According to Hallward, Deleuze’s ‘God’ asks us
to leave behind our humanly material reality, for a singular, inhuman and
impersonal, a-subjective and a- significant position (Hallward,
World without Others 6). This transcendence is the propelling
gesture of Deleuze’s entire project; and one that Hallward feels is also its
ultimate incoherence (Hallward, Redemption from Interest 8). For
Deleuze, Spinoza and Suhrawardi, being is defined by its singularity or
univocity. Univocity means only having one expression.
For Deleuze, being is univocal and the one expresses
everything of the multiple (Humans, dogs, plants, stars) in a single same way.
What this amounts to is that ‘the real’
creates everything it perceives and conceives. There is only one kind of
production for Deleuze:-the production of the real. Humanity is produced and
must, in some way, determine the differences between the real and unreal.
However, as we have seen, the real is a part of the self-sufficient,
self-expressive and immediately determinate reality. The real must be immediate
and not a part of the given world.
For Deleuze, as Hallward notes, Spinoza, Saint Paul and
Suhrawardi conclude that our greatest task is to over-come all of these
obstacles. This contaminated status I had briefly stated earlier is an obstacle
to life. One must over-come all such obstacles, which consist of our worldly
and material existence and interest in this world. Our true goal in life is to
return to a different situation, one that has succumbed to the dangerous
escapism that is thrown into an immanent and immediate whole. For Hallward, it
is a dangerous escapism for someone to give him/herself up for such salvation.
This is something that we shall investigate further.
If the real is immediate and primordial, then by definition,
it must subsist in all creation. There is nothing in all creation that can
separate us from the intellectual love of God. Yet, interestingly enough, we
live separate from God. We live as interested and positioned subjects in a
world. How we relate to God, in this scenario, is imagined through a form of
transcendence that conceives God through the law; and this only brings us a
form of consciousness marked by ‘sin’. Deleuze’s solution like his redemptive
allies, is to escape the world; we must get past the specific, the (as-if) and
become immediate to God (Hallward, Redemption from
Interest 9). This amounts to us being ‘remade’, as if our minds and our
whole being were transformed to an adequate medium for God’s creations. Only
then will we be able to comprehend the will of God. Hallward sees Deleuze’s
philosophy in the same light. An analogy can also be drawn Suhrawardi’s philosophy
of illumination, which consists of thought being aided by magic. In this model,
light operates at a level of all reality and produces divine, metaphysical
sources of knowledge. The human is divided into two formal bodies: one tainted
by the material world and the other the soul, which is aided by the light. A light
that shelters these intellects in a collective oneness. Thus, it is thought through the light
that survives as the reviver and resuscitator of life. The same is produced in
Saint Paul, wherein the material world is in constant flux of sin, and one must
align oneself in the body of Christ in order to escape the material (Hallward,
Redemption from Interest 10).
According to Hallward, Deleuze uses the term ‘the
un-thought’ or ‘non-sense’ to describe the same otherworldly body. The multiple
is an expression of the one, yet to variable degrees that are determined by a
relative proximity to God. All creatures aim to return to the movement towards
the light. Like Suhrawardi, we must move towards the one-light/one-all, which
spring in all forms of life. This is the utter liberation of the creation. Hallward feels that Deleuze’s notion of freedom in its
purest state is a form of obedience. The greater the right, of the one or
sovereign, the more perfect unity there will be to establish one united body or
substance, directed by one mind or nature (one-all) (Hallward, Redemption
from Interest 13).
These
aforementioned points, Hallward states, direct us to the elements of Deleuze’s
real philosophy which is an exclusive ontology of univocity. Hallward claims
that Deleuze does not offer us a critique of representation. What he gives us,
at best, is a critique of misrepresentation. A focus on atonement and a process
of escaping the world (Hallward, Redemption from Interest 6). All of the following shows how Deleuze monotonously
breaks out of all given situations, locations and figures in order to jump into
a situation where everything is contained in an ultimate monism. This is what
Hallward states is the absolute ‘monarch’ or sovereignty (Hallward, Redemption
from Interest p.13). According to Hallward, Deleuze,
gives up our worldly existence for a theophany and salvation. We have no sense
of the real nature of things; they have been blocked and concealed from us by
our deep rooted human disposition. What Hallward sees continuously in Deleuze
is this redemptive move to save the creature.
The ‘real’ for
Deleuze is a form of repression, which makes ‘the real’ desire its own
repression. This repression is what the philosopher, the scientist and the artist
are struggling against. Each struggle with a task that reduces their being to a
clinical function, to cure their own worldly ‘sicknesses. The cure, from
repression and worldly sickness, is God. However, one cannot just begin with
the idea of God. Hallward stresses the fact that although the divine is
quite real for Deleuze, the only true way to excel in this form of nature, is to
become in thought (Hallward, Redemption from Interest 15). However, at this point, we must question why thinking is
so important. To clarify this viewpoint, Hallward posits three points:
1)
Thinking in no
way represents an innate feature or faculty because our own existence is cut
off from the power and understanding of the one. We are always already born in
a state of powerlessness and slavery, the point is to return to God or to the
virtual-creating that flows through the one.
2)
The notion of
creating is paramount to our singular endeavour. We must always be creating and
forming creative expressions in order to build creative encounters. In turn,
these can free us from our contaminated and isolated state through the idea of
God. This expressive state allows all of us to think, feel and simultaneously
experience an infinite variation of creating through the one.
3)
The most
important point is this process of merging the sequences of God and the self or
the given and the real. This synthesis is a part of the true creative process.
This so called creating is consequently reduced to a continuous cycle of
reproducing and expressing the entirety of nature as a whole. Our mission is to
evacuate our subjective identity in order to move back to the most purest and
expressive form of being. The dynamic immaterial virtual creating (a body
without Organs, or Larval selves, that all subsists in God). Creation and the
creating must always be an expression of its creator (Hallward, Redemption
from Interest p.16).
Actual Creatures, Virtual
Creating’s, Confinement, Escapism and the Logic of Creation
Hallward states
that Deleuze’s philosophy is centered on the idea that being is creation.
Creation embraces all features of reality and is the pivotal centre of all of
Deleuze’s works. We can now continue our investigation into the logic behind such
creation. If being is creation, being is also essentially differential. This
process of being differential is precisely what it means to be creative. Since
being is part of the absolute creativity in all there is, it must be able to
differentiate itself in an infinite amount of ways. This means that the most
basic element of being consists, in part, in the process of creating (Hallward,
Out of this World 24).
Creating, in
essence, serves as the sufficient reason behind all states of affairs,
individuals and events. This makes ‘being’ the ultimate form behind the
proliferation of unlimited events and creating that become one with creation
and nature; forming one ‘thought-nature’ that encompasses every possibility in
the universe (Hallward, Out of this World 27). Every distinct creation creates
a new organism, personality, object or experience. According to Hallward, we
can describe creation as one act but it proceeds as two movements, through
creations and creatures. Hallward states that “Creare is one, we might say it
involves both the active creans and the passive creaturum. The creating is
implied or implicated within its creator; the creature is an explication or
unfolding of the creating” (Hallward, Out of this World 27). As Hallward
explains, Deleuze’s logic of creation applies each case of creating and
creation. Deleuze attempts, through the production of creation, to construct
the real in and of itself (Hallward, Redemption from Interest 27). However, the modality of these apparent creatings in
their inherent being remains different and unique.
Differentiated
creatures are a part of actual extended forms of being. Yet, their existence is
contingent, based upon the material constraints of the world (Bodies, organs,
situations). These differentiated creations are virtual and intensive rather
than extended. Creation retains a primordial, self-differing essence and this
self-differing essence can only be conceived in terms of a virtuality which
actualizes itself. Hallward’s main point is that the real productive/creative
and differential force between these two facets is only virtual creating alone.
The creating does not occupy an external position to the creature, but relies
on the immanent relation internal to creation and creating. This immanent relation
between creature and creating arises internally through the creating to the creature.
Hallward insists on showing us the relation between creating and creation.
There is only one form of active
being that is truly active, and that stems from the virtual creating. It is
only the virtual creating that can differ and produce the new and the novel.
According to
Hallward, no matter how much effort is put into creating a work of art, a
scientific function or a philosophical concept, the only thing that matters is
the process of creating. This philosophy privileges verbs over nouns: to
create, to act, to build. Therefore, this creating is more pure than an actual
living person, place or thing. A creating is not just a novel concept; it is
entirely new in itself and eternal. What makes creating new is precisely this
immanent and internal power/spark that creates and manifests change,
transformation, disruption and difference. In reality creatural identity- the
actual creature- is only a simulation of its ‘real’ identity. The material self
is only an optical illusion or effect of what is produced. It is only the
virtual-creating that can produce the ‘new’ or novel. The real essence of a
creature is its de-actualized state or the moment of its virtual-creativity (Hallward,
Out of this World, 36).
Creation only
exists through the form of creatures, and only creatures can think the
necessary process in which they are actualized. However, the reality of the
situation is quite different. The actualization and individuation of the actual
person is always-only the essential product of a production that is itself
necessary and primary to the creature. According to Hallward the real destiny
of the actual creature is to create and invent new ways of dealing with its own
material reality. This inventive apparatus of dealing with its materiality is
precisely the moment where the creature empties everything that constitutes the
self, thus dissolving it into an adequate means of letting the creating flow
through it (the removal of the ‘I’ and the ‘I Think’ in place of a dynamic
activity to be de-actualized) (Hallward, Gilles Deleuze Out of this
World 38).
As stated
earlier, creation is a solitary action but proceeds through an inherent dualism-the
creating/creature and virtual/actual- and all transformation occurs internally,
in the expression which intensifies it in an immanent monism. Monism is defined
as an all-inclusive reality in only one form of substance. Deleuze ascribes to
this kind of formula what he calls pluralism=monism.
Essentially, all singular creations exist as multiple entities in one united
body (the One-all). The singular is self-sufficient. Creating retains a virtual
and ideal self-sufficiency that can only be deemed creative if, and only if, it
can be incarnated in an existent creature, which then expresses and inhibits
its own actualization. According to Hallward, “The existence (and resistance)
of the creature is itself an internal necessity of creation; and creatural
opacity is an immanent and unavoidable obstacle to the expression or
development of being itself” (Hallward, Out of This World 39). The obstacle to
which Hallward refers is the constraint of the material world (our bodies,
organization of organs, and our habits). Deleuze’s philosophy is constantly at
odds with the material and creatural world. According to Hallward, Deleuze’s
real work, is devoted to creating concepts and any other means to loosen the
grip of conditions on the creature.
It is important
to note that Deleuze dedicated two books to Spinoza; and Hallward thinks there
is a specific reason for this: Deleuze’s philosophy occupies the Spinozist
worldview, with some subtle modifications. For example, there is no distinction
of the virtual and actual in Spinoza, but Hallward points out key similarities
to both thinkers’ metaphysics. The term ‘naturans’ implies an active, creative
feature, while ‘naturata’ implies a passive, created substance. We have seen
that only the ‘virtual’ is active while the ‘actual’ creature is passive.
Spinoza, like Deleuze, seeks to construe nature as a self-creating reality.
Every individual creating is precisely an active modifying facet of this
univocal, expressive of substance. Each singular creating in this model
maintains the divine, eternal spark from the nature of God/substance.
To understand
this process of a singular creating contained in God/substance, is to
comprehend how all modifications are a part of the adequate means of expressing
this divine essence. Actual creatures are not ‘modes’ contained in God, but can
only refer to certain times and places, which relate to themselves based on
their own representation. These actual creatures are clearly not active
creations but passive selves. They cannot be a part of the adequate means for
creating, because they cannot express this one univocal power, they are stuck
and caught in their material and interested lives. What exactly does this mean?
Individuated/differentiated/actual creatures suffer from ‘inadequate ideas’
which are precisely the aforementioned affects. They live material and
interested lives. This implies that they cannot take part in nature’s divine
essence. Materiality implies worldly bondage, limited to temporary existence.
For Deleuze, virtual creating is the only way that the production of the new can
occur. It is only through this type of production that this novel creation has
eternal existence; it is the active ‘naturans’ which expresses the entirety of
this infinite substance, and it is only the virtual-creating that is expressive
of the cosmos, or God. A problem arises: an actual person or creature is
governed by the material world, this consists of a series of interests and
needs that befit an organic being. Deleuze is trying to move away from this
image of representation that misrepresents the kind of beings that we are
capable of being the only way to free us from this imprisoned life is to
evacuate the mediation that make us a subjective self.
Henri Bergson,
according to Hallward, devoted his entire work to the nature of the virtual.
For Bergson and Deleuze, the actual represents the passive subject; its habits,
needs, and wants. Yet, at the core of this subject, the actual represents the present. The misrepresentation of
reality, here, is that although the actual may seem quite solid to us, in
reality, it is blurred by a materiality that falsely shapes the creature. The
virtual is reduced to memory, and it represents the past that fills in the
present. According to Peter Hallward, the actual/creature, is always guided by
an illusion of its real self, the virtual-creating. The virtual is both
immaterial and non-present, but it is seemingly the only real, lasting
dimension of reality. It is the only real creative apparatus, while the actual
is stuck to a limited perspective of the organism, preoccupied with its own
interest (Hallward, Out of this World 41).
If the actual
represents an organized body, the virtual represents an inorganic body that is disorganized
and stripped of its creatural coherence. The virtual is aligned with memory and
it has no action, sensation or extension. Memory only proceeds by an
uncontaminated, non-mediated and non-sensuous flow. Memory, represents a pure
form of immediacy and intuition. Thus, memory is disinterested in all present
action. It catapults us towards the middle of a pure past or pure recollection
of a virtual image. The pure past need not strive, to preserve itself; it
remains whole within itself. When we reflect on the past, we are not
actualizing or representing a memory to ourselves. What is occurring is a
moment where we are actually delving deep into the past (Hallward, Out of this
World p.43).
Hallward insists
on [this] repeatedly: Deleuze is strives for a privileged position that
produces its own de-actualization and de-materialization to empty the subject.
The empty subject evacuates the known creature in order to create and this
model can only be maintained correctly, in its momentum, as a theophany. Pure memory is powerless and
intensive. It shares no feelings or sensations and it contains no self-interest
for the creature. Although the actual/virtual cannot be considered separately,
the real task of every creature is to counter-actualize and reverse its own
creatural state confining it to a de-materialized form.
Actualization
belongs to the virtual and the actualization of a virtual singularity is
constituted by the plane of immanence. This plane is where the creature is
properly dissolved and annihilated. The virtual is the subject of actualization
and the plane of immanence is
nothing but a process which converts objects into distinct subjects. The
‘actual’ denotes an existing human being who can think, feel, have sensations,
qualities, and embody a life story. The virtual describes characteristics that
are not presentable or measurable: - virtual/creations are never present or
presentable. Hallward’s example of this is taken from Deleuze’s last work ‘Pure Immanence: An Essay on a Life’, in
which Deleuze invokes Charles Dickens’ character Riderhood, who has a near
death experience. Hallward states that…
“The virtual life that lives in
Riderhood, remember is not the actual subject who is incarnated in the midst of
things [and] who made things, good or bad; it is the anonymous spark of life
within him, with whom everyone emphasizes in a sort of immediate intuition or
sympathy. Such living is our only genuine subject to be equal with the events
that befall it; to the creatings that transforms it” (Hallward, Out of this World, p. 46).
Virtual differentiation creates what it actualizes and
this is because what it really actualizes never resembles the singularities
that they bring to life.
A creation is a
kind of pre-existence that ignores all activity and is the resemblance of real
life. As Hallward notes, the actual is always constituted, while the virtual is
wholly constituent. This is key to understanding Deleuze’s philosophy. The
virtual is always creative and the actual is always created or the virtual is
the act of composing, while the actual is that which is composed.
Virtual-creating is a pure form of creativity in and of itself. It can be seen
as a pure primordial energy, which is both the constituent force of its power
to create, along with its inexhaustible need for transformation and change. The
Virtual can only be thought of as a kind of unthinkable abstraction. The force
of transformation that is possessed within it is none other than a pure
intensity that aids both difference/being; and the virtual creating that
incarnates all things.
As stated
earlier, the actual is no more than an illusion or ephemeral result of our true
immaterial self. The virtual is ‘the real’ and exists more actually then our
material form, and this is predicated on the fact that virtual-creations are
fully intensive, while the actual is material and extended. In a manner of
speaking, the virtual-creating is intensive, immaterial, unlimited and is
always individuating pure forces. The actual is material, extensive, limited
and individuated, it is always in a fixed state.
Virtual
creations can be conceived as events linked to quasi-causes. Interestingly
enough, Hallward states, that an event to Deleuze, is free of all normative and
personal causality. This means that all events are virtual and as incorporeal
entities, they distance themselves from actual corporeal action. Creation and
events are the same. An event is actualized in a body or a state of affairs.
However, they also consist of a shadowy, secret form that is eventually
subtracted and then added to actualization. The virtual can be real without
being ‘actual’. An event exists as a kind of dead time, where what lies at the
heart of it, is a non-presentable immaterial, unmoving essence or spark. Such
events exist as empty floating entities or ‘mean-whiles’
where nothing ever takes place. This means that the virtual-event can only
be grasped by escaping any privileged perspective. This involves a kind of
suspension and dissolution of all actual activity. Hallward recalls Deleuze’s
example of a battle in which the real event hovers over the battlefield and can
only be realized in its pure imperceptible state. An event that occurs cannot
be part of our world; it must be out of this world. All identity
disappears from the self and the world in these virtual events. What replaces
‘real’ material life is a power to intuit this impersonal reality, which is
presented to us, as a new world, beyond the given. This given is material life
in flux. However, we must somehow block this flux in its movement and align
with the singular.
All creatures
that are able to create and to think, must find the necessary means to escape
the world; in order that they continue to be creative and thoughtful.
Philosophy is obliged to lead us from actual to virtual; or from our world it
must then lead us out of this world.
The goal of this philosophy is not just to leap out of the world into another realm. Since, as actualized
material beings, we are alienated and confined to a false identity of
ourselves, our escape entails us,
de-actualization or ‘deterritorialization which brings us back to the
point of virtual-creating previously discussed. This virtual-creating is an
impersonal, a-subjective, immaterial existence.
The ‘real’
layers of human form, including needs, wants, desire and habits, are part of
stratification. To stratify means, building layers of materiality that form our
representation of this world. Deleuze asks us to de-stratify ourselves, to remove
the layers of humanity, dismantle the actual creature and destroy the ‘organized
organism’. We must become a ‘body-without-organs’ and a body-without-others.
Our material body must attain a state where it can remove and de-populate
itself from the world. For Robinson Crusoe (deserted on the island), the
creative aspect of his existence is the moment where he no longer functions as
a human, but as the virtual spark of the island that connects all life to one
immanent form. Our creatural confinement has to do with our actual existence
and our material presence. These obstacles are imposed on the creature by our
worldly material constraints. Our task, as creators, is to loosen the grip of
the material world and let out the virtual-creating that has been imprisoned
inside of us. A creative body is never an actual entity, but is a wholly
virtual one. Like Robinson Crusoe, we must learn to annihilate ourselves in
order to let ‘the event-island’ live thorough us.
Singular Difference and the Active Subject.
For
Deleuze, a subject is never an isolated individual. A subject is the habits
that embody a human organism. Deleuze bases his idea of the subject on the
thought of Scottish empiricist David Hume. Hume did not believe that the human
organism could locate the idea of ‘the subject’ in themselves. According to
both Hume and Deleuze, a subject is nothing other than the passive flow of
sense impressions, which are synthesized together in a bundle of experiences
that are conditioned by resemblances. In essence, the human organism has no control
over its personal growth. Life is determined by the flux of powers and forces
emitted by individuals and structures. What we call a subject is nothing other
than a passive screen that contracts these sense-impressions and images. These
images form our sensory motor-schema. Unfortunately, society is built upon a
false representation. According to Deleuze, society is built upon a plastic
reality, formed by spaces of enclosure, blockages, segmentation, negation and
analogous formations. All of the following work together to cut off real
relations within the world. Deleuze insists on the creation of a new subject,
which no longer adapts to hierarchies and compartmental spaces. This new line
of flight freely acts and one is no longer limited to the frame-work of passive
experience but is actualized as a dynamic and active subject. In order to move
from passive to active, Deleuze grounds this formal subjectivity on pure difference.
The ‘difference’ that can creatively represent all beings in a single substance
is called a singularity. There is a key difference between Peter Hallward’s
notion of singularity and Deleuze’s singular concept mainly: 1) the Singular is that which
encompasses all reality and life, 2)
it is contingent on ‘the differentiation’ of others 3) these different perspectives are equally spread throughout the
singular totality.
The Differentiation of
Difference.
Our current state of reality is built
on false forms of representation. Representative ideology shatters our sensory perception.
How exactly does this occur? In Deleuze’s texts on cinema, he devotes the
founding principle on the pursuit of building a new subject on difference. The
differential-subject is someone who can believe in the world again, a world
that is not cut off from life. Deleuze states “The question is no longer does
cinema give us the illusion of the world, but to direct us towards a new
question, how does cinema restore our belief in this world” (Deleuze, Cinema 2,
182). This is the real project of Deleuze and the concept of difference. It
posits: how can we make the passive
subject, who is caught up in the illusion of a world which no longer believes
in-itself, produce an active subject
who can begin to think outside of the degradation of representation. To
accomplish this, Deleuze needs to build a new form of difference that can
perceive all of reality. We now need to conceive the difference between the
ground of representation and Deleuze’s necessary form of difference in-itself.
For
Deleuze, real difference carries in itself all intermediary differences within
a single determination (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 90). This single
determination is one by which all species are accounted for. Our society has
been formed by the illusion of representation that blurs the distinct function
of difference. In stating that apples are different from oranges, the method of
differentiation cuts off the relation between both objects. Deleuze asserts
that our basic knowledge of difference is always inscribed by roles, which
constantly make us separate, and correlate between specific objects based on an
analogous-difference.
Deleuze
singles out a dangerous point, that we do this with people, and our analogous
thinking immediately describes ‘the other’ as an object. This gesture was
Aristotle’s mission to get at the fundamental cause of reality (Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, 33). However, Aristotle’s secret reality is
determined by a knowledge that categorized all living things into a series of
groups. These groups of ‘things’ are then arranged by what is predicated of a
particular object and then categorized by their powers of action. This may not
seem dangerous to us at all in examples like rational-animal, which refers to
mankind and it does not hurt anyone. Yet, Aristotle never referred to both the
sexes as ‘rational-man’. This is always a limitation to Aristotelian analogy. Analogy
is problematic in that it reduces all things to predicates, and explains life
in terms of superficial qualities. An apple is round and an orange is oval, the
apple is red and the orange is not red.
Analogical difference is grounded on a fundamental limitation, for it can only
give us determinate characteristics and traits that are crudely predicated of
an entity.
Negation and opposition also play a part in
how we understand ourselves and reality. However, oppositional thinking reduces
reality to representation. According to Deleuze, if representation and analogy
are seen as an Aristotelean gesture, then negation, lack and opposition are
founded on Hegelianism. Hegel identified a method of negation, the only way to
differentiate two objects or two individuals was through the process of
opposing traits by a ‘lack’ of their elements. All reality is based on a
fundamental negation. In order to get at an absolute understanding of the world
and its subjects, we must ground our representation of the world in the
negative. In ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’,
Hegel starts off with the concept of sense-certainty, which is proto-object,
searching to understand it-self. In order to do so, sense-certainty must see
itself as an object. An object that lacks its fundamental subjectivity and
relies heavily on negation to determine its understanding of the world.
Let us to return to the previous example of
the apple. An apple is known as an apple because it is not an orange. The same differential
process occurs in a subject. This is dangerous to Deleuze: the process of
blurring our understanding of the subject and object. As well as knowing that
our individuality is bound to the ground of the negative and only this infinite
lack can tell us who we are. Thus, the individual, according to Hegel, is
always in the process of fulfilling this lack because of its negative starting
point. Subject X can only affirm its existence only by realizing that it is not
Subject Y. It is this radical form of Hegelian opposition that actualizes the
necessary individuality to Hegelian self-consciousness. Deleuze is suspicious
of the process of subjectivity being actualized by the negative, because its
false repetition is stuck in the process of always trying to fill in this
infinite lack or debt.
If Hegel grounds the subject on the foundation
of the negative, then only the ground of this negation, and its internal lack,
can distinguish what we are and what separates us in the world. We know analogous-difference
reduces life to categories and predicates, and differential-negation and
opposition can only disclose the attributes of life according to a determinate
lack. The question, then, is how these theories explicate the passing flow of
life and its movement? This is a fundamental problem today: a world which no
longer believes in-itself because of Aristotelian categories/analogies and
Hegelian polar identities. All of the following gives us a theory and system of
objects, but the aforementioned theories do not pertain to ‘a life’. They
merely reduce difference to an object-like state. Only an adequate account of
pure-difference or difference-in-itself can free us from false forms of
representation. This system of objects or reality is known as ‘simulacra’.
The
‘simulacra’ is a model or copy of an entities real form. Only a form of
pure-difference can shatter the simulacra and aid us in to the universal
construction of becoming a subject. If we understand difference in terms of
representation, then we dilute difference. The methods of analogy, opposition
and negation, modify ‘real’ difference. These only produce a fraction of what
characterises difference/singularity and these isolating processes make the
differential-singularity a second ordered function. They are contingent upon
another entity forever limiting it to an epiphenomenon. Epiphenomenal existence
is applied to attributive analogies that can only solidify existence based on
another entity. The apple can only know of what it is by realizing what it is
not.
Univocity and Equality.
For
Deleuze, this idea of becoming-subject involves a rupture. We must
fundamentally break the ties that bind a subject to all formal representation.
A subject and an apple can only individuate themselves based on an internal
form of difference, an expressive, dynamic form. In order to ground difference
in an expressive and dynamic form of comprehension, Deleuze needs to disclose a
form of difference that is not created through the mediation of representation
but understood through an absolute immediacy, a pure contemplation. This form
of immediacy or pure contemplation is misrepresented by Hallward. The fallacy
of Hallward’s critique of Deleuze lies in the fact that we are presented with a
Deleuze who embraces all forms of representation, who grounds difference on the
negative and who takes advantage of the notion of life. Hallward’s critique
presents us with man as the center of all life and our mission is to become
anonymous, imperceptible and de-materialize. If man is to become the center of
all life then why would Deleuze demand the destruction of the subject? The
destruction of the subject would then signal the removal of man in the world.
These two claims do not coincide. Hallward’s far from the picture that Deleuze
paints of life. According to Deleuze, Difference can only be understood as
difference once it can ‘differentiate’ what pertains to it. What is needed for
this process is a singular individuating difference. This may sound peculiar,
but what Deleuze has in mind is an entirely differential ontology that invokes
the creation of a subject outside of our sensory-motor schema. He aims to
present us with subjects who can formally oppose this representational-schema
on a new ground, that of repetition. What does this mean? We still have no
answers regarding repetition, difference and the dynamic. In order to prevent
us from falling into Hallward’s trap of an ‘a-subjective’, ‘a-specific’ being,
we need to recognize how Deleuze uses Duns Scotus’ model of univocity. Since
difference cannot be understood through negation and opposition, this newly
created ‘difference-in-itself’ has no formal predicates standing behind it. The
shadow of difference will only be repetition, which is the production of the
new; the production of new difference. In essence, this means that difference
must be its own ‘differentiator of difference’ or what Deleuze calls ‘a dark
precursor’ that is always in-between the forces of life, pulling them together
and creating unities.
It
is easy to get caught up in a thinker’s jargon and most of the problems that
stem from accounts of Deleuze are due to misrepresenting these subtle
processes. Hallward for example, creates the notions of creator, creating and
creation in order to understand all the alterations of difference. Yet, by
doing this, he often misses steps and blurs the distinctions between
fundamental aspects of the philosophy. For now, what we need to do is
familiarize ourselves with univocity and Scotus’ model of being. The principle
of univocity holds that all being is singular and that all entities are unique
and resonate the same being within all of reality. Deleuze states “Being is
univocal and it only has one single voice” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
35).
This
singular ontology doesn’t mean that all objects and entities are thrown into
the same melting pot. Deleuze sees this position as the only affirmative
account of being/difference. Once being is understood as singular, and this
univocal principle is actualized, it posits a radical thesis: all individuals,
objects and entities should be comprehended as pure intensities. Deleuze sees
pure difference as a formal intensity that lies behind difference. When we as
individuals are actualized in activities, this intensive stream of
individuality is turned into an extensive force. We can call this intensity ‘a
pre-personal’ form of difference. It takes the shape of a potential which is
then actualized and individuated. This form of individuation takes a pure
potential and turns it into an extensive reality. This means there are two
forms of pure difference: one is a virtual structure behind an entity and the
pre-personal. This is what Deleuze calls differentiation and it deals with
intensity and the intensive. The other form of pure difference is known as the
actual. It is the individuation of being. We shall return to this dynamic
dialectic later on when we discuss the virtual and the actual. What is important
to note, is that this notion of intensity, lies behind the relationship of both
difference and repetition, a difference that creates the new and the extensive.
Both of these forms of difference are based on a univocal model. Deleuze states
that “univocal being is at one and the same time a nomadic distribution of
crowned anarchy” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 36). It is easy to
misinterpret Deleuze’s conception of a crowned anarchy. Essentially, this
conception will be understood as a set of multiples being expressive of this
singular difference that makes up all of reality. Deleuze will posit the
theorem of monism=pluralism; what he has in mind is a theory of monism that
stresses more importance on a pluralism. Each and every individual is
essentially made up of this one totality. Each individual is expressive of this
whole. Deleuze sees this monism in a different light than the history of monism
in philosophy. What he ideally formulates is a monism with a unique variation
of the multiple, each multiple possesses its own fundamental perspective of the
whole. This is precisely why difference must produce the intensive. We must
first be acquainted with life in order to be able to express it. Intensity is
understood as a depth of the world, that opens a new space around us, that once
it is actualized it can be extensive or extended to be part of this whole. Hallward
does not see the model in this way. He presumes that this crowned anarchy must
be viewed like Thomas Hobbes’ political model of a Leviathan standing over all
beings. Since the state of nature is dangerous, it is the Leviathan, a giant
that keeps everyone in their place working towards society.
This model makes all individuals fall
prey to the rules and regulation of the one, but this one is a determinate
totality. Meaning, everything fixed in their place. Hallward’s-Deleuze and
‘his’ monism is a prison for actual creatures. Their mission is to de-actualize
and become part of this Leviathan. Notice here, it is the Leviathan that gives
us a reality. It is what centers our ‘representation’ of the world. Thus,
Hallward’s comparison of the Leviathan and its sovereign reign does not align
with the Deleuzian singular and its perspective based Monism. Hallward is still
presenting Deleuze’s philosophy in the realm of opposition, analogy and
negation.
These errors of representation form what
Deleuze calls the ‘black nothingness of difference’. Deleuze differentiates
between the colour black and white to express the difference between intensity
and representation. The colour black denotes the absence of all colours. All we
have to do is think of the concept of a black whole which swallows all forms of
light. If we cannot think of these colours outside of the black background that
they are individual intensities or individual differences, than all of them
would melt into this black nothingness. What representation, analogy, negation
and opposition present us with is a model of the same and the similar. Once we
have melted into the same blackness, we are no longer individuated, actualized
and grounded on our own unique perspective. All is lost in this ubiquitous
self-same law of how things are supposed to appear to us.
This is the negation of difference and
the individual. This is how Hallward’s argument depicts Deleuze: Deleuze, for
Hallward, wants to melt everything into the same substance. In this melting of
all things there is no room for difference, because difference is negated.
Hallward’s position misrepresents Deleuze, and depicts an internal form of representation.
This creates the space to move difference, the singular and the individual into
nothingness. This destroys the model of uniqueness, expression and
individuality. It reduces all particulars to the same. It also depicts our
current societal state. We have a society of unique differences that are molded
according to how the ‘one’ imposes its structure. Either all individuality is
reduced to the same in order to make each of these individuals a profitable
outlet who gives back to the system; or they are not conducive to the system as
a whole and their differences are not welcomed. The whole is fragmented on the
schism of how the multiple should relate to the one. This forced conception
blurs the distinction between who produces and who is seen as ‘wholly other’,
creating and fragmenting a system of others that are never visible in the
societal whole. Yet, Deleuze’s univocal model is better described as an
‘undifferentiated white abyss’. In this model, Deleuze makes room for every
differential equation. If we look at the colour white as the elemental that
exists in all colours, its dynamic spark or expressive intensity, is contained
in all visible reality. All colours possess a degree of whiteness in their
constitution. The fundamental element of difference is what links the multiple
with the whole. However, we are taught through the history of philosophy that
to differentiate between two things we must not base this knowledge on a
creative intensity that everyone possesses. Rather, we are taught to exclude
and see reality through the eyes of opposition and negation. The method of
equal intensity is how we are to understand univocity, the process of
differentiation is what preserves all individual being.
Crowned anarchy is therefore, not a sovereign,
medieval deity, which stands guard over us and makes us obey the rigid laws of
the one. This result fragments difference. Crowned anarchy is like a giant
white wall. Now, this white wall is entirely made up of several degrees of
intensity that form the concept of white. Yet there are unique variation and
degrees of white that make up the wall. It is this multiple variation of
intensity that differentiates between other degrees and forms a cohesive and
singular reality. Notice here that each variation of white that makes up the
one. Each variation has its own unique perspective of the whole. The Black
nothingness isolates and cuts all the degrees of intensity, and severs
difference and the subject. It melts them into the absorption of the one. These
multiple perspectives of the one make reality; they add to it, they are part of
the dynamic flow and flux of life. When life is cut off and severed from its
activity, it is no longer active, but a passive subject who is melted into the
framework of a false reality. We no longer believe in the world because we are
cut off from its relations. The world in which we do believe in again is this
world built upon a univocal framework. This ‘undifferentiated-difference’ is
the white abyss, where each subject is seen as an ‘equal quality’ of its
infinite expression. This white wall has an infinite amount of attributes and
an infinite amount of degrees; each individual reverberates and allows multiple
sensations that can grasp all of reality. What univocity can offer us is a
fundamental model of difference that is unaffected by representation. The real
method behind the univocity of being and the differentiation of difference is
to show how: singular difference can differentiate among differential entities
‘only’ when, all objects, subjects, animals and entities are seen as an equal
part of reality. This essential equality allows the space for all beings to
express of themselves in all of ‘life’. Deleuze’s differential ontology is
first and foremost a philosophy of life. This is the real method behind
Deleuze. Hallward is right that Deleuze devoted two texts to Spinoza. However,
Deleuze’s fundamental pursuit, in his Spinozist analysis, is the hidden element
of reality, the hidden element behind difference, ‘intensity’ and how this
intensive-difference could become dynamic and expressive. Deleuze’s texts on
Spinoza are not about a God who can redeem us from the poison of the world, nor
is there any logic of salvation built in this framework. It is the concept of expression that Deleuze devotes these
two books to. How can we become expressive again? How can we believe in a world
that we ourselves cannot express. And so the leading question of the text is
the following: “We still do not know what a body can do” (Deleuze,
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 210). The real question behind these
texts is how can a body become an adequate expression of itself and all reality
(Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 210). The real thinker that
Deleuze models his metaphysics after is Leibniz. He devoted an entire text to
Leibniz’s conception of how reality is built by layers, or folds. Each layer or
fold is like a line, a reality built upon a never ending series of lines. Each
one of these lines or layers forms the identity or perspective of each unique
differential being.
When
a line of intensity converges or is forced to converge on any kind of
representational assemblage, this singular line deteriorates and is blocked
from expressing its unique perspective on the whole. This process is what
Deleuze will call ‘reterritorialization’. If a line can diverge away from the
series, if it is allowed to fold and enfold, creating a new series amongst the
whole, this process is called ‘deterritorialization’. This is the real process
behind life; to create new assemblages and form new series of differential beings.
Life must create expressive outlets for these continued processes of
divergence. This divergence is called a ‘line of flight’, and once it frees
itself from the convergence of the series, a new difference is produced through
the repetition that embodies the series. This is the continued cycle we live
in. Difference is first thrown into the face of a converging series, wherein it
is blocked, cut off and reduced to representational ambiguities. Or, it can
produce differential-being by diverging away from the series, thus repeating
the expressive-dynamic flow of life. Difference and repetition are the basis of
reality.
This is the model of being that Deleuze
imports from Leibniz. We don’t need to go to in-depth into Leibniz’s theory,
but it is important that we see the close connection between Leibniz’s monad
and Deleuze differential-Singular being. According to Leibniz, a monad is a
simple substance that is encased in ‘the one’ of reality or the universe
(Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque 26). If we return think to the example
of the white wall, each monad, like the degrees of intensity that constitute
it, form all of reality. Each of these simple substances differentiates
themselves in the whole by dynamically adding in their own perspective. When a
line diverges away from the series, the repetition of its movement and its
divergence creates ‘a new difference’, an ‘extensive difference’. Subsequently,
this extensive difference is what adds its perspective on the whole. A newly
created perspective ‘singular-differential extensive’ creates the dynamic
whole; a pluralism that makes up a monism.
Where
representation demands recognition, univocity implies an inherent equality that
is the base of all human reality. All living beings are ‘a part’ of this organic
one-all. Each monad, as a subject, animal and plant, is conceived of as a differend. Each monad must actively
animate itself from passive difference to active difference, from
representation to univocal singularity, from intensive to extensive, the move
from the convergent series to a divergent actuality. Hallward completely
misrepresents Deleuze. Instead of portraying an immediate ‘white
undifferentiated intensive’ that is affected and expressive of an ‘immanent’ reality,
he presents Deleuze bound to forms of representation, melted into the black
nothingness. The underlying message of this black nothingness to Hallward is
categorized by a God who demands that his subjects become non-living entities,
and to transcend every human assemblage. Once a univocal conception of
difference is actualized and divergent deterritorialization is affirmed,
“The body is no
longer the obstacle that separates us from thought itself. But it is the
movement that we overcome, a false sense of thinking that we shatter, once this
is realized, we are plunged into the depths of reaching the unthought that is
life, not that the body thinks but now it is free from the obstinate and
stubborn world of identity, it is difference which forces us to think what is
concealed from thought and reality” (Deleuze,
Cinema 2, p.189).
The following quote
shows what life is for Deleuze, a life without categories and a body-without
hierarchies. Hallward confuses this conception of the singular. He
misunderstands that all life is creation, for Deleuze, and the novel and the
new are a part of the dynamic between the convergent and divergent series.
The Active Subjective and
the Three Synthesis of the Singular.
We
know that Deleuze’s subject, and all intensive subjects, are equal. We also
know that each singularity is not a deity but a being that exists among
multiple beings in one reality. This model is best explicated and activated in
an immanent framework. Immanence, for Deleuze, is a system of life, a system of
reality that encompasses everything within the entire totality. Yet, this
immanent totality is also univocal, which means everything that exists within
it is equal with one another: - a series of multiple perspectives. These are
the changes that Deleuze feels is necessary. However, we still have not got to
the bottom of what exactly this subject is and how it is supposed to express
the whole.
We
know that Deleuze characterizes the subject by a singular difference and that at
the very base of the subject is a form of intensity. Nevertheless, this is
still a difficult concept to grasp. According to Deleuze, the subject is part
of a tripartite dialectic. Now, Deleuze never uses the word dialectic. We are
going to invoke this terminology because these three syntheses of the subject
are asymmetrical, meaning they are always occurring at each moment. Each
multi-dimensional layer involved in this synthesis is interacting with several
stimuli and being affected and re-producing a new effect. This dialectic is
staged between the past, the present and the future.
As
stated earlier, the Humean subject is an empty screen. Like a movie theatre, it
is empty until a projector passively shines images upon it. This passive screen
lets in these sense impressions, forming a bundle of experiences. This sensuous
bundle is what Deleuze defines as a habitual experience of sense data that
affect us in our daily lives, forming our day-to-day moments. These moments of
habit, or contracting a habit, is what Deleuze calls the process of ‘habitus’
and this denotes all present experience. Habit becomes the constitutive root of
the passive subject but in order for this present to pass or be filled in with
context, the past must be able to actively integrate and substitute a complete
consciousness.
Deleuze
invokes the Bergsonian ‘pure past’ as that which conditions the present, for
the present could be nothing without a past that has not passed (Deleuze,
Bergsonism, 61). The pure past is a transcendental feature for Deleuze and it
is this transcendental feature that gives content and depth to the passive
subject. Interestingly enough, this form of pure past, is what Hallward
describes as empty and what causes friction between the material and the
immaterial. However, what Hallward does not grasp is that this pure past is not
in some immaterial realm. Time grounds the subject. Time is also the feature
that aids repetition and meaning. Time is part of the virtual structure that
pushes the convergent series into a divergent series. Deleuze calls this
‘recollection-subjectivity and contraction-subjectivity (Deleuze, Bergsonism
53). The present will always be part of the actual subject, but an actual
subject without intensity and extensity is nothing other than an empty shell. Yet,
something is still required of the subject and there is a missing step. If
Deleuze is trying to map out the free flowing line of flight from passive to
active subject, then what is it that animates these polar identities? What is
it that connects the potential with the actual? This problem has caused many
rifts in Deleuzian thought. What we need to remember is that Deleuze is not emptying out the subject in order to
bring forward some dynamic immaterial force. What activates these two forces is
the most ambiguous and problematic feature in all of Deleuze’s philosophy. This
feature is the death of the subject. What we have to keep in mind is that, for
Deleuze, thought really maps onto the body and each decade of thought changes
the milieu of peoples. We have seen the Humean paradigm and the Bergsonian, but
to truly understand the death of the subject we have to jump backwards into the
Kantian paradigm. We should keep in mind that death for Deleuze is not how we perceive
of death today. It is not the end or the destruction of the subject. We need to
establish some background in the history of philosophy first before we can
begin to understand this idea of a death of the subject.
For
Descartes, time is held in place by the divine and the mechanistic world is
created by God. The world worked like clockwork and every part of the body had
its place and role. In answering the question of subjectivity, Kant starts off
with the same Cartesian problematic. Kant used the ‘Cogito’ as the sole condition
that solidified the subject. Kant explains that this new cogito was a
transcendental feature, meaning that it helps the human organism conform to its
awareness. This ‘I’ that helps condition the subject is the main synthesis of
all of our experience. It is best described by Kant as the faculties. What we
call ‘the self’ today was part of the transcendental illusion, the illusion
that we have a self. Kant agreed with Hume that we are just passive subjects.
These faculties that consist of the ‘I’ merely synthesized all of our
experience, although, its function was not really part of the subject. Kant had
two functions of subjectivity: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’. However, the ‘self’ was
aided by reason to uphold this illusion, this thing-in-itself. This moment in
Kant’s philosophy between these two identities is what creates the
schizophrenic subject for Deleuze.
This
rupture in all passive experience forms a fundamental dualism. Notice here that
both Bruce Baugh and Hallward attribute this dualism with Deleuze (Baugh,
Deleuze and Hegel, 84). Deleuze affirms that this sequence in thought creates a
global unrest in the universal subject. The schizophrenic ‘I’ is never
consolidated and Hegel’s solution to this problem between the world of
phenomena and noumena is to create dialectic of representation, which further
fragments the subject even more. According to Deleuze, both Kant and Hegel
uphold this ironic gesture of death. In order to free our judgments from being
passive and empty, Kant creates the notion of practical reason, which makes
this illusion of self have the power to create judgments. As well, Hegel’s
gesture is to formulate a negative ground to solve the problem of this inherent
lack.
Deleuze
is willing to accept this moment between the schizophrenic ‘I’ and the illusion
of the ‘self’, but only if another solution is able to fix the problem.
Practical reason as judgments cannot help condition the subject. Neither can
the negative ground, if habits fundamentally form the constituency of the
subject and the past is our access to filling in these experiences with depth.
Deleuze is in the same position as Kant and Hegel; something must be able to
ground the unconditioned conditions. In other words, Deleuze needs a
fundamental synthesis to conjoin this moment of schizophrenia. The Kantian
route is to make this empty subject believe in the illusion of the self and the
soul, by giving them judgments. However, judgments depend upon the false kind
of representation that forms convergent blockages. This form of representation
creates an indifferent-difference. The Hegelian path leads to controlling the
subject, by letting them be guided by the ground of the negative. Since this
ground does nothing but give the subject an objective lack, Hegel’s answer is
that transcendence must be posited in order to align self-consciousness with a
form of absolute knowing. The key to answering this solution, according to
Deleuze, is that all humans exist among these processes of Humean habits,
Bergsonian time and Kantian illusions. However, Deleuze’s solution is to
dissolve these representational habits, and illusory judgments of self,
difference must peel back the layers of its passivity. This becoming-intensive
is Deleuze’s solution.
What
Deleuze calls the ‘death drive’ is the moment of freeing these forced
representational sedimentations on the body. Judgments, opposites and habits
create hierarchies on the subject. Since we go through this continual process
between the ‘I’ and the self, Deleuze states that Nietzsche’s eternal return
will be our saving grace. Every time we reach this point of tension between the
schizophrenic I and the self, repetition creates the production of the new, a
new difference, the dissolving of the self. This brings us closer to what
really makes the subject, its real actions and real potential, a real new
difference.
This
stripped down subject is the virtual-body: it is a body-without-organs, a
non-hierarchized, non-sexualized subject. What is left of the subject is
nothing but a series of active larval selves beneath our habits and
representations. These larval selves represent the pre-individual singularities
and activities that we possess. It is a dynamic self, a real configuration of
difference, because we go through this process constantly when the cycle is
repeated we go back to this state of pre-individual activities. Our goal is to
affirm our absolute intensive actuality, we are more than just our habits and
this is why Deleuze calls on Nietzsche’s idea of becoming and the eternal
return.
These
Larval selves are pure affirmation. They create the multitude that makes us an
active being. What makes ‘you’ you is not your habits, or the way the world is
represented to you, but how you actualize your dynamic power, your creative
spark, and this is the solution to the dualism, between the I and the self;
beneath the crude materiality of everything, there is another self an
‘other-self’, a multiple of selves that make up the unity of all of our
activity. Deleuze claims that “Underneath the self which acts are little selves
which contemplate and which render possible both action and the active subject”
(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.75). Action is greater than judgments.
Life outweighs illusion and simulacra. This statement by Deleuze means that the
‘self’ is not based on its level of passivity or a crisis of illusion. Rather,
it is the essential and dynamic, the intensive and the active self. When we
act, and affirm all of the potential living beneath us, this chance, this ‘role
of the dice’ hands us back over to our lives (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
25).
Immanence, Emanation,
Constructivism and the Actual and the Virtual
Partly
what makes Peter Hallward critique so strong is the logic of theophany that he
invokes on Deleuze. Hallward states that Deleuze partakes in a one-all logic.
One couldn’t really deny this framework but there are two points we must
address: I) the one-all does not
refer to a unifying totality but too the plane of all thought and life, because
Deleuze invokes a philosophy of constructivism and it is centered on ‘a logic
of creation’. II) In order to pass
off this logic, Hallward makes a category mistake between immanence as the
plane of all thought and emanation a medieval theological concept. For Deleuze,
concepts represent fundamental events and literally all events, and concepts,
are part of this pre-philosophical plane. Even concepts go through the process
of differentiation. Differentiation represents a virtual structure for Deleuze;
we must not understand the virtual in terms of virtual reality, but as a moment
of a structure or pre-individual singularity awaiting actualization. These
presupposed moments are called problems/structures. The problematic is an intensive
field of differentiation: meaning it consists of several pre-individual
singularities. Like our larval state the pre-individual activities have not
been actualized and individuated. The real process is to actualize these
problematic structures and turn them into life solutions.
These
potentialities have the necessary means to germinate into life cycles.
Deleuze’s philosophy maps out these onto-genetic and morphogenetic processes. We
must return to the world, return to life, and thus, Deleuze’s philosophy is an ontology
of life. Hallward is correct that Deleuze is a vitalist, but his one-all does
not refer to a God and his creatures, but to multiple processes that involve
these pre-individual potentials in their virtual structure; their convergent
state and the movement to their actualization into real a solution, a real
life. The actual signals the divergent series and the production of the new.
These Virtual/actual multiples make up all of our reality and can be defined as
simple problems and solutions. They cannot be reduced to a deity, for a deity
is a representation of how the world works. If we look at simple vegetal life:
plants form a virtual structure with the earth, there are pre-individual
singularities that make up their constitution, what photosynthesis produces in plant-life
is the process of intensity, which takes sunlight and turns it into simple
sugars feeding the plant. The plant then takes the nutrients and actualizes it
all over its body and then returns what is left to the soil. This active
genesis or ‘differenciation’ in the plant, is what Deleuze calls
becoming-intense ( Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus p. 197).
This
differential ontology starts off with ‘differentiation’ (Virtual structure) and then moves to ‘differenciation’ (The genesis of actuality).
This to Deleuze is life solving problems and creation and novelty working at
every second. So the structure of the virtual-actual is not the fundamental
dualism posited by Hallward, but is an asymmetrical synthesis of life. Concepts
are formed in the same manner, a problem is posed in a pre-individual state and
the concept is created out of thought and actualized as a solution. Descartes
created the Cogito as a solution to radical subjectivity, and in doing this he
solved the problem of medieval subjectivity.
Any
time this dynamic logic of creation is used virtual/actual,
convergent/divergent, differentiation/differenciation, the outcome is always an
event. An event is the individuation
and actualization of differenciation (the incarnation of the actual) Deleuze’s point
is that we are always-already in a problem. Life is about these fundamental
encounters and solving each moment. It is not just the human organism that
encounters problem solving, the forces of life works in this exact way. This is
something that Hallward is not able to accept. A thunderstorm states Deleuze,
is a virtual structure, the tension in the ground and the surge of electrical
energy in the clouds, creates the process of differentiation, this is the
moment of pre-individual singularities
that create the potential that causes this influx of intensity. The
actualization or genesis of the storm is the bolt of lightning; this is the
process diffrenciation or the actual
individuation of the storm. Life works through the logic of creation, and our means
of problem-solving are created through concepts elaborated through philosophy,
art, science, and politics. Hallward is not able to accept this kind of
creation of the new because he sees Deleuze’s philosophy based on a false
ground of immanence.
Immanation
is marked by the immediate relationship between a cause and effect. While the
effect is certainly something distinguishable from the cause, it remains in and
of itself. The effect can always be seen as the cause’s own production, it is
here where we can relate the real immanent relationship between cause and
effect with that of Difference and Repetition and virtual and actual (Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition 115). Both the modal power of the effect and the
cause are within the same immanent force (intensity). Once
differential-singularity is seen through immanent causation, it is aided by the
univocity of being that equalizes all being (Deleuze, Expressionism in
Philosophy 53). Thus, this process is immanent, univocal and asymmetrical. The
effect is always contained in the cause, as difference is always conceived of
through its immediate intensity and then produced as the new through repetition
and extension. It is always expressed and then re-expressed as a new expression
that still contains the pre-potential of the previous expressivity. This is
Deleuze’s system: a system that encompasses all life, life feeding on life,
producing life, and causing and effecting life (Deleuze, Expressionism in
Philosophy 170).
Emanation
refers to a nature that gives and establishes an eminence of a giver to
recipient. The effect is still born out of the cause but it is separated from
it (Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy 170). This is the medieval explanation
of emanation, which Hallward uses to explain Deleuze’s concept of immanent
life. Notice, here, that the effect is still born out of the cause but it is
essentially separated from it. Just as Hallward depicts the singular, as that
which is alive and must dematerialize itself and subtract itself from life to
move back into the one. The creator is always separated from its creatings and
the creature must counter-actualize itself to move back into God. None of this
reflects Deleuze’s philosophy; Hallward produces a fundamental error; and
creates a category mistake between immanence and emanation and transcendence
and Univocity
Conclusion: ‘A
Part’ of this world
In
conclusion, Peter Hallward’s critique of Deleuze exploits, the concept of life.
Deleuze’s philosophy is one that is based on ‘a logic of creation’. A vital and
dynamic expression of how we as subjects can believe in the world again. The
world, for Deleuze, is comparable to an egg. It is an egg that always puts us
into a problem and an ‘encounter’ with life. If the world is embryonic it is
because among its endless possibilities there contains these pre-individual
potentialities awaiting our indefinite actualization. If we are always-already
in a problem, it is because we are always ‘in the world’, a world that is bound
to logic of creation, where intensity and difference are united in all
activities of life. The production of the new, creation and novelty are
occurring at every second, from thunderstorms to photosynthesis, to
procreation. Deleuze’s philosophy is a system that maps our becoming-germinal, and
this process is not in some other-worldly realm or held together by a God. It
is ‘we’ that determines the flux and flow of all of our actions. Deleuze thinks
that by changing the configuration of our understanding, by getting rid of
false hierarchies and representations, we can have another chance at becoming a
subject and becoming ‘the other’.
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