All 5 entries tagged Plane Of Immanence

"I'm stupid because I'm dead, I'm dead because I'm stupid

Follow-up to A few vital anecdotes are sufficient to produce a portrait of a philosophy from Philosophy

As is well known, Plato in Book III of his "Republic" recounts a conversation that occurred between Socrates and Adeimantus, in which the flute and the pipe was deemed by Socrates to be of inferior musical stature to stringed instruments (the lyre and the harp).

Socrates: But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players? Would you admit them into our State when you reflect that in this composite use of harmony the flute is worse than all the stringed instruments put together; even the panharmonic music is only an imitation of the flute?

Adeimantus: Clearly not.

Socrates: There remain then only the lyre and the harp for use in the city, and the shepherds may have a pipe in the country.

Adeimantus: That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the argument.

Socrates: The preferring of Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and his instruments is not at all strange, I said.

For Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy the flute is unmistakably the most favorable instrument for its reference to Dionysiac rituals and ecstasy.

So, there is certainly a hyperbolic rejection of Schopenhauer's philosophy by Nietzsche on the grounds of the former philosopher's love of flute playing. However, hyperbol, especially in Nietzsche's case, just as in Kafka's is a style of writing which forces thought to "the limits of stupidity" as Deleuze explains in Difference and Repetition.

Moreover, after his collapse in Turin, Nietzsche is known to have mumbled now and then: "I'm stupid because I'm dead, I'm dead because I'm stupid.

Zafer Aracagok : 07 Feb 2006 12:04 |  Tags: Conceptual Personae Deleuze And Guattari Plane Of Immanence What Is A Concept |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A few vital anecdotes are sufficient to produce a portrait of a philosophy

Follow-up to What is Philosophy? Reading Group: Second Meeting: Notes from Philosophy

Following our discussion of ‘a few vital anecdotes are sufficient to produce a portrait of a philosophy’, one anecdote that didn't come up on Thursday was Nietzsche's claim that he decided to reject Schopenhauer's entire philosophy on learning that the great pessimist was fond of playing the flute. A good example of a biographical detail being used to refute a philosophy – Nietzsche's point being that those seriously advocating pessimism should not be engaged in such frivolous activities as music-making.

(Nietzsche famously said that "life without music would be a mistake". It doesn't follow from this, however, that life _with _music is not also a mistake…)

I'm not sure if I can think of any other examples in which the anecdote quite so clearly suffices to determine a critical response to the philosophy. (E.g. did any Kantians feel challenged on learning about his stocking suspenders?)

I've been trying to think of some anecdotes about other philosophers. About Wittgenstein one sometimes hears about how often he "gave up" philosophy to go and do other jobs (school teaching, becoming a hospital orderly, working in a monastery garden), and about how he advised a student to take a job in Woolworths instead of becoming an academic, but also about how he never succeeded in kicking the philosophy habit himself. None of this has the succinctness of the Kant anecdote that D&G are looking for, but it does suggest something about how seriously (or not) we should take Wittgenstein's views on philosophy.

Any suggestions for other anecdotes that `produce a portrait of a philosophy’ or reveal the conceptual persona?

Christopher Watts : 06 Feb 2006 19:16 |  Tags: Conceptual Personae Deleuze And Guattari Plane Of Immanence What Is A Concept |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

What is Philosophy? Reading Group: Second Meeting: Notes

What is Philosophy?; Chapter 3 – ‘Conceptual Personae’

This weeks’ discussion began with a consideration of the example which opens this chapter on ‘conceptual personae’ –the ‘idiot’. Deleuze & Guattari identify two manifestations of the conceptual persona of the ‘idiot’, which they term the ‘old’ and ‘new ‘idiot’. The old ‘idiot’ is the Cartesian one (associated with Descartes Meditations) – ‘it is the Idiot who says “I” and sets up the cogito…who wants to think, and who thinks for himself, by the ‘natural light’. The new ‘idiot’ emerges when ‘Descartes goes mad in Russia’, (Dostoyevsky’s Idiot).

‘The Old idiot wanted truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought – in other words, to create.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 62)

There was a brief discussion of how appropriate Dostoyevsky’s later work was to this understanding of the new ‘idiot’. The problem of Nietzsche and Nihilism was discussed.

Post-structuralism, as expressed by the conceptual personae of the new ‘idiot’, where sense is constantly pushed to its limits, involves a constant search for the ‘outside’, and a move towards creation. The old Cartesian ‘idiot’ was driven and governed by certain epistemological imperatives and concerns, whereas the new post-Cartesian ‘idiot’ is an ‘ethical’ figure driven to uncertainty and the ‘outside’ of pre-existing sense.

What is the relation between the elaboration of conceptual personae in art (e.g. literature) and in philosophy. For Deleuze & Guattari the two can be intimately connected:

‘The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 66)

The emergence of the new ‘idiot’ in literature (specifically Russian literature) indicates a certain role for literature (evident from Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical) – namely as a symptamology of conceptual personae – what a writer takes a good thinker to be, what a thinker should be doing in a certain ‘space’.

There was a discussion of the possible differences and similarities between symptamology and genealogy. Is symptamology divorced from a more historical or quasi-historical cultural critique. For Deleuze & Guattari conceptual personae are irreducible to what they term ‘psychosocial types’. They write:

‘The features of conceptual personae have relationships with the epoch or historical milieu in which they appear that only psychosocial types enable us to assess. But, conversely, the hysterical and mental movements of psychosocial types, their pathological symptoms, their relational attitudes, their existential modes, and their legal status, become susceptible to a determination purely of thinking and of thought that wrests them from both the historical state of affairs of a society and the lived experience of individuals, in order to turn them into the features of conceptual personae, or thought-events on the plane laid out by thought or under the concepts it creates. Conceptual personae and psychosocial types refer to each other and combine without ever merging.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 70)

There was then a lengthy discussion of Leibniz and the role of concept creation in his philosophy, and their possible restriction by the type of conceptual personae he elaborates (later identified by Deleuze & Guattari as ‘the lawyer of a God’).

We discussed the crucial role of conceptual personae in disclosing what Deleuze & Guattari term ‘thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations.’ (i.e. its ‘diagrammatic’ function):

‘Conceptual personae are thinkers, solely thinkers, and their personalised features are closely linked to the diagrammatic features of thought and the intensive features of concepts.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 69)

We then worked fairly systematically through the five features of conceptual personae that Deleuze and Guattari identify.

Pathic Features (p. 70) – the aspect of the conceptual personae linked to the sensibility (pathological elements); a difference between the schizophrenic as psychosocial types and as conceptual personae responsible for laying out a plane of thought. (Links here to Nietzsche, Bergson and Foucault). The schizophrenic in the socius moves outside of ‘sense’ and is expelled, the schizophrenic as conceptual personae is analogous to the new ‘idiot’ – a ‘conceptual personae who lives intensely within the thinker and forces him to think’, pushing the ‘absurd into the highest power of thought’.

Relational Features (pp. 70–1) – akin to the Socratic notion of the ‘Friend’.

‘This is not two friends who engage in thought; rather, it is thought itself that requires the thinker to be a friend so that thought is divided up within itself and can be exercised. It is thought itself which requires this division of thought between friends.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 69)

Dynamic Features (p. 71) – the different forms of energetics involved with a conceptual personae, akin to a new athleticism in thought. It expresses the degree to which conceptual personae move into conjunction, into a becoming with external energetic forces.

Juridical Features (p. 72) – jurisprudence vs. universal principles of law. The juridical features of the conceptual personae elaborated by Leibniz, Kant and Spinoza.

‘Should not beings be judged from within – not at all in the name of the Law or of Values or even by virtue of their conscience but by the purely immanent criteria of their existence.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 72)

We discussed the juridical features of conceptual personae in relation to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

Existential Features (pp. 72–3) – These are to be understood as the emblematic anecdotes of conceptual personae (‘a few vital anecdotes are sufficient to produce a portrait of a philosophy’):

‘These anecdotes do not refer simply to social or even psychological types of philosopher but show rather the conceptual personae who inhabit them.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 73)

We discussed the differences between this particular understanding of the existential components of conceptual personae and the ‘intentional fallacy’.

After discussing the five identified features of conceptual personae we proceeded to briefly examine the notion of ‘taste’ introduced by Deleuze & Guattari:

‘The creation of concepts calls for a taste that modulates it. The free creation of determined concepts needs a taste for the undetermined concepts. Taste is this power, this being-potential of the concept: it is certainly not for ‘rational or reasonable’ reasons that a particular concept is created or a particular component chosen.’ (What is Philosophy?, p. 78)

The implicit allusions to Kant’s Third Critique were noted – e.g. the free accord of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding, and the singular nature of the aesthetic judgement for Kant. For Kant an indeterminate judgement of taste is not based on a concept, but a ‘feeling’.

We discussed the problem of doxa and urdoxa. The horror of philosophy as doxography, and the difference between philosophy and science, (particularly the relation between concepts, solutions and problems), indicated in the following passage at the conclusion of the third chapter:

‘The concept is indeed a solution, but the problem to which it corresponds lies in its intensional conditions of consistency and not, as in science, in the conditions of reference of extensional propositions. If the concept is a solution, the conditions of the philosophical problem are found on the plane of immanence presupposed by the concept, and the unknowns of the problem are found in the conceptual personae that it calls up. A concept like knowledge has meaning only in relation to an image of thought to which it refers and to a conceptual personae that it needs; a different image and a different persona that it needs; a different image and a different persona call for other concepts. A solution has no meaning independently of a problem to be determined in its conditions and unknowns; but these conditions and unknowns have no meaning independently of solutions determinable as concepts.’ (What is Philosophy?, pp. 80–1)

We concluded by identifying the ongoing post-structuralist problem of philosophy, an ethical problem identified at the end of the chapter:

‘Philosophy thus lives in a permanent crisis. The plane takes effect through shocks, concepts proceed in bursts, and personae by spasms. The relationship among the three instances is problematic by nature.’ (What is Philosphy?, p. 82)

Philosophy is always caught up in a becoming-doxographic, and concepts in a becoming-skeletal. Here nothing positive is done within philosophy. Philosophers and their history and their concepts are brandished like weapons to prevent ongoing philosophical invention and thought.

D Ambrose : 05 Feb 2006 14:07 |  Tags: Conceptual Personae Deleuze And Guattari Plane Of Immanence What Is A Concept |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Research Group Meeting: Aislinn O’ Donnell (UCD) – ‘Shame and the Possibilities of Life’

‘Human rights say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights. Nor is it only in extreme situations described by Primo Levi that we experience the shame of being human. We also experience it in insignificant conditions, before the propagation of these modes of existence and thought-for-the-market, and before the values, ideals and opinions of our time. The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered appears from within. We do not feel ourselves outside our time but continue to undergo shameful compromises with it. The feeling of shame is one of philosophy's most powerful motifs. We are not responsible for the victims but responsible before them.’ (D&G, What is Philosophy?, p. 108)

Aislinn O’ Donnell’s fascinating paper considered the question of “shame” in Deleuze & Guattari’s work, evident from the above quotation taken from the ‘Geophilosophy’ chapter of What is Philosophy?, specifically the ‘shame of being human’. Throughout the paper she was concerned with considering whether their particular conception of shame (as a visceral affect) can assist us in understanding their conception of otherness. Aislinn argued that such a specific consideration of ‘shame’ was undertaken within a much broader concern with Deleuze & Guattari’s resistance to capitalism and the question of why we should respond to the suffering human other.
Thus, the purpose of her paper was to try and think the shame of being human and to reflect on its relation (or non-relation) to Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the ‘other person’, to their rejection of cliché and their resistance to capitalism.

The paper began by providing a brief overview of some of the ways the notion of ‘shame’ has been thought within the history of philosophy, including Spinoza, Kant, Scheler, Arendt, Nussbaum & Tomkins. This was followed by an outline of Deleuze’s concept of the other person in The Logic of Sense and in Deleuze & Guattari’s What is Philosophy?. Aislinn managed to suggest some fascinating relations between the ideas contained within these texts and those found within Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. Her account of Levinas’ Ethics of alterity drew upon certain illuminating formulations of Levinas within the work of the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel. She then moved to addressing the specific question of the treatment of ‘shame’ in Deleuze & Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, and asking what a ‘shame of being human’ involves and why becoming-revolutionary is an appropriate response to such ‘shame’. She suggested that whilst the first chapters of What is Philosophy? contain a notion of the ‘other person’ as a type of example to elucidate their understanding of the ‘concept’, there is a wider instructive purpose. These chapters, she argued, have strong Bergsonian and Spinozist overtones, specifically in relation to their understanding of planes of immanence in terms of thought-being and in their initial descriptions of the plane of immanence which strongly resembles Bergson’s analytic description of experience as pure perception in Matter and Memory. For Bergson, pure perception is a field of survey of absolute pure consciousness prior to any subject-object. Rather than taking up Bergson’s pragmatic account of the way in which the indetermination of the brain creates a zone of possible action that filters perception, Deleuze & Guattari use the idea of the ‘Other person’ (an a priori ‘Other’) that restructures the perceptual field in order to give an account of the co-genesis of subject and object, self and other. This ‘Other’ is not an individuated or concrete other, but is solely understood as an expression of a ‘possible world’. The other person interrupts us and restructures our field of perception.

Deleuze & Guattari’s problem is not the solipsistic one of the problem of other selves; selves are emergent, relational and interbound. Their problem concerns modes of existence, and Aislinn argued that this was the reason why ‘shame’ is so interesting as it offers a visceral ought, (a visceral affect) bound up with our beliefs, desires, and values, but also indicating an immanent vocation of humans – to strive to create possibilities for life and thought, in particular amongst those complex being with whom we identify. With Deleuze & Guattari’s work there is an awareness of how the singularity of the Other person is annihilated in different ways – through clichés, through capitalism, through the death camps, through consumerist society – that precipitates ‘shame’. The final part of her paper considered the question of shame in relation to resisting these features of contemporary life and thought.

‘Shame of being human’, Aislinn suggested, is not premised upon an identification with the other but a commitment to the singularisation of life. The ‘shame of being human’ operates within Deleuze & Guattari's work as a critical principle – it operates as an immanent evaluation and appraisal of a mode of existence, of complicity in suffering and of the diminishment of life’s immanent possibility for creation without appeal to a fixed ideal for humanity. Drawing at times from Arendt, Aislinn considered the question of ‘shame’ as a critical affect in Deleuze & Guattrai, and the troubling question of why we increasingly don’t feel shame:

‘Utopia does not split off from infinite movement: etymologically it stands for absolute deterritorialisation but always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu.’ (D&G, What is Philosophy?, p. 108)

Aislinn argues that perception is, as Bergson showed, far from innocent – we choose not to see, we choose to be blind. It is in this respect that shame can be the catalyst to precipitate change as it makes us sensible to dimensions of a situation and ourselves that previously were ignored or accepted, as it can disrupt the narcissistic, habitual and self-absorbed tendencies of selves. Shame is a critical and disruptive affect. Shame is not simply a subjective disposition or experience but registers the intolerable nature of a mode of existence and as such can become both critical and creative. Shame has the capacity to be positive and productive – it creates sensitivity to the richness of the present, to the forgotten histories, excluded others, silenced voices, unrealised worlds as well as to the real potentials of a situation. It ruptures the complacency of our own experience and draws to light the limits of our sensibility. Disparateness and rupture operate on both ontological and experiential registers as rendering a given situation or mode of existence meta-stable and generating real potentials that require the invention of other modes of existence that effect a qualitative transformation of existence. The pre-individual dimensions of the human reveal our singularity, but the possibility for cultivating processes of singularisation of life are foreclosed by cliché, banality, and intolerable modes of existence.

The visceral experience of shame is not one of sublime failure and a sense of our supersensible vocation, but a sense of the diminishment of life, a failure of our sensibility, a failure to respond and to cultivate different kinds of relations, to question ourselves and our complicity in the compromises of our time. Shame as ‘critical affect’. Singularisation is not atomisation but the capacity to weave and create different possibilities and expressions of life. This is, Aislinn concluded, the restoration of immanence.

There followed a lively and engaged discussion which pursued many of the provocations for thought initiated within this excellent paper.

A full audio podcast of Aislinn’s paper together with the subsequent group discussion will be posted on the Project website within the next few days.

D Ambrose : 28 Jan 2006 16:01 |  Tags: Deleuze And Guattari Plane Of Immanence What Is A Concept |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Deleuze: The Passage from Noise to Voice

My concern with What is Philosophy? is basically related to one of the certain ways by way of which Deleuze and Guattari formulate their concept of “plane of immanence” soon after they offer their concept of a concept. Therefore, right at the start, it will be necessary to mention that Deleuze and Guattari think of the concepts as events: the creation of concepts in Deleuze and Guattari does not take the form of rigid, fixed concepts. Rather, it is an act of transformations, or “becomings” so that a concept never remains as it is. Their text therefore demands a reading based on construction and destruction at the same time such that a concept as such never comes into being. However, this complexity, thought with respect to the question of mimesis in the philosophy of Deleuze (and Guattari) casts several problems as the philosophers deploy the relationship between concepts, the plane of immanence, the image of thought and a strange “sieve.” In order to explain my point clearly I shall introduce some quotations taken from successive pages in What is Philosophy?:

“Concepts are absolute surfaces or volumes, formless and fragmentary, whereas the plane is formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractal.”1

“The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what itmeans to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought.”2

“If philosophy begins with the creation of concepts, then the plane of immanence must be regarded as prephilosophical.”3

“The concept is the beginning of philosophy, but the plane is its instituting. The plane is clearly not a program, design, end or means: it is a plane of immanence that constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy, its earth, its deterritorialisation, the foundation on which it creates its concepts.”4

“The plane of immanence is like a section of chaos and acts like a sieve.”5

“In short, the first philosophers are those who institute a plane of immamnence like a sieve stretched over the chaos.”6

As we all know that Deleuze wrote an appendix about simulacra at the end of The Logic of Sense where he privileges simulacra over mimesis with the intention of reversing Platonism.
“So "to reverse Platonism" means to make the simulacra rise and affirm their rights among icons and copies. The problem no longer has to do with the distinction Essence-Appearance or Model-Copy. This distinction operates completely within the world of representation. (...) The simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction. At least two divergent series are internalised in the simulacrum – neither can be assigned as the original, neither as the copy. (...) There is no possible hierarchy, no second, no third (...) Simulation is the phantasm itself, that is, the effect of the functioning of the simulacrum as machinery – a Dionysian machine.”7

However, the unfoldment of the description of the plane of immanence in What is Philosophy? as a sieve which cuts across a certain section of chaos casts several conflicts with regard to this privileging for the figure of the sieve goes to showing that mimesis, or a model-copy relationship is still what determines the relationship between the plane of immanence and the chaos.

In order to concentrate on probable reasons for this conflict, or the upsurging question of mimesis, I offer that we should read carefully some certain sections in Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense where he writes about a certain “passage from noise to voice.”

I would like to state immediately that my concern for this sieve emanates from my interest in “noise” in philosophy, and, therefore, a concern for a certain type of reading Nietzsche together with Deleuze: Nietzsche as the philosopher who introduced noise into philosophy not only with his work but also with his life. As some of us might know, the whip cracks, it produces “noise,” and this is the most unbearable noise for Schopenhauer 8. On the other hand, when Nietzsche hears the cracking of the whip in Turin, he collapses and he never comes back “I am stupid because I’m dead, I’m dead because I’m stupid.”9 That’s what he says now and then in his moments of vocality. The reason why he produced this mumble, and the place, the locality, from which it emanated and assumed a vocal form will always remain a secret for us. The only thing we have about this passage, or, perhaps, about this passage from sanity to madness, but also from madness to vocality, is his work.

As Ecce Homo bears witness to, the question of locality most uncannily visited Nietzsche, informing various passages from one thing to another. Moreover, in one of the fragments in Will to Power, Nietzsche also wrote about locality and action at a distance.10

Yet, first and foremost, what is a passage? How and when and why does one pass from one thing to another? How does a passage become what it is? How does one become what one is? Is all the thought about passages nothing but a thought about a certain passage which cannot be theorised unless one reappropriates the mimetic? Do we talk about passages in order to undermine a certain aporia, to shield ourselves before an impossibility? Having mentioned locality, do all the passages point to the workings of a force, some action at a distance, which, in its inaccessibility, both problematizes the thought on passages, and also at the same time is the condition of all passages? Can it be the spirit of gravity, as Nietzsche put it in Zarathustra, that forces one to find the bottom in an abyss? The metaphysics of the abyss, according to which even an abyss is localizable.

By appropriating a style, if a style can be appropriated, I would like to allude to various interpretations of Nietzsche, by way of another fragment from Gay Science:

“Not to be dead and yet no longer alive? (…) It seems as if the noise here has led me into fantasies. All great noise leads us to move happiness into some quiet distant. When a man stands in the midst of his own noise, in the midst of his own surf of plans and projects then he is apt also to see quiet, magical beings gliding past him and to long for their happiness and seclusion: women. He almost thinks that his better self dwells there among the women, and that in these quiet regions even the loudest surf turns into deathly quiet, and life itself into a dream about life. Yet! Yet! Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat there is a lot of noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise. The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this requires first of all and above all – distance.”11

Why noise, why women and why action at a distance?

One can perhaps produce a response to these questions by reconsidering some passages in Deleuze, one of the most rigorous interpreters of Nietzsche. Therefore, let’s have a look at a certain passage, a moment of specularisation in The Logic of Sense, which assumes the form of a “passage from noise to voice” in “The Twenty-Seventh Series of Orality.”

Let’s contextualise first. Up to now in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze has told us the relationship between the series, the resonance between them, the constitution of events, actualisation and counter-actualisation of the events, the disjunctive synthesis, and its affirmation, etc., and now the question is how to theorise the person (if it is not going to be an “individual”) with respect to his theory of the event. “The Twenty-Fifth Series” is thus called “Univocity,” and univocity in Deleuze helps to give freedom to all the compossible worlds so that the “individual” would reorganise his/her relationship not only with this world, but with all the compossible ones. Therefore, it is purely a question of form, that is, how to transcend the question of the form, known as the “individual.”12 Such a transcendence, if it is possible, requires in the first place, as we know it from Difference and Repetition, radicalising the “image of thought” so that there will no more be a form on which the constitution of the individual as such is based. In other words, what is known as individual will now be constituted on the basis of simulacra – not on the basis of mimesis – and thus the individual will be freed from being shaped by any predetermined model. On the other hand, if such a project means to open up the individual to multiplicities it will also have to deal with the question of ontology because even if Deleuze explains it with positing pre-individual singularities, they will nevertheless require, an appearance, a moment of being, or, rather, a passage from absence to presence, (or from non-being to being, if you like). Therefore, Deleuze writes:

“Philosophy merges with ontology, but ontology merges with the univocity of Being. (…) The univocity of Being does not mean that there is one and the same Being; on the contrary, beings are multiple and different, they are always produced by a disjunctive synthesis, and they themselves are disjointed and divergent, membra disjuncta. The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice that it is said, and that it is said in one and the same “sense” of everything about which it is said. It occurs, therefore, as a unique event for everything that happens to the most diverse things, Eventum tantum for all events, the ultimate form of all the forms which remain disjointed in it, but which bring about the resonance and the ramification of their disjunction.”13

In The Logic of Sense we are somehow familiar with the concept of “resonance,” because whenever Deleuze writes about the relationship between the series, he always refers to it, and resonance is explained only in the “Thirty-Fourth Series,” as follows: “Let us call the resonance “intrinsic beginning.””14 Although, Deleuze gives resonance such a function, that is, a function which almost verges on ontology in an obscure fashion, it is still difficult to see why ontology should be explained by accounting for a Voice. However, it remains a difficulty only until when one thinks of resonance, its being an “intrinsic beginning” in relationship to Voice, and, basically, with respect to the question of “voice” in the univocity of Being. In other words, if univocity signifies an event, an event of all events, it also points to a concern for genesis, where resonance can be rethought as an “intrinsic beginning,” a generic force, which makes genesis itself possible by triggering a passage between “that which comes before voice” and voice. Yes, that’s true, if one explains Being by Voice – which is not something specular but audible – one can, to a certain extent, overcome the difficulties that will be posed by an attempt at answering the question of ontology in a specular scheme: sound, as almost all the nineteenth century theory of music bears witness to is that rare art which does not imitate. Even so, this does not prevent this discourse from being populated by questions such as: if the coming-into-being of resonance, and its necessity is explained by Deleuze as an “intrinsic beginning,” (though its genesis can never be traced), doesn’t such a beginning also require a passage from “that which comes before voice” to voice (no matter if one defines it also as “neutral,” or “extra-Being”15 )? Can one be saved from a specular scheme, and from ontology, even when one is dealing with the problem of Being or unity not in a specular but an “aural” scheme?

Similar questions flare up in the “Twenty-Sixth Series of Language,” for here all the questions which have been actually gravitating towards the possibility of such a passage find an origin which they have been pointing to. In other words, if the discussions on sense and nonsense, paradoxical entity, and the event, up to the discussion on univocity of being were concerned with the relationship between the word and the thing, or the duality of eating/speaking, and its displacement into the proposition, that is, into the duality of denotation and expression, it was because they have all been pointing to this passage that would make possible a rigorous discussion on “language,” which would also constitute an origin for “individual,” and “psyche” in the rest of The Logic of Sense. Therefore, Deleuze opens this series with a conviction that “events make language possible,”16 and he immediately adds:

“But making possible does not mean causing to begin. (…) To render language possible thus signifies assuring that sounds are not confused with the sonorous qualities of things, with the sound effects of bodies, or with their actions and passions. What renders language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing them for the expressive function. It is always a mouth which speaks, but the sound is no longer the noise of a body which eats – a pure orality – in order to become the manifestation of a subject expressing itself. (…)And in truth, without the event all of this would be only noise – and an indistinct noise.”17

And, in the next series, “Twenty-Seventh Series of Orality,” he also adds:

“We constantly relive in our dreams the passage from noise to voice.”18

So, obviously, for Deleuze, there is such a moment of absolute separation, a passage, between sounds and sonorous elements (noise), made possible by the events. And events, not only make possible the language, but also the subject. From now on, a decision which was there, and suspending – probably due to the impossibility of saying something and its sense at the same time, but conversely due to the possibility of saying it, given the impossibility of escaping from representation – since the beginning of The Logic of Sense is thus given an “appearance,” making possible also the history of the psyche, which Deleuze reconstructs by reading his own theory of the sense and the event into psychoanalysis, basically into the works of Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan.

Let’s stop here, and think about what might probably have led to such a passage in Deleuze. Not because it is thinkable, or localizable with an exact clarity of thought but at least, this can be shown without making appear what cannot appear, considering the “distance” we referred to in Nietzsche in the beginning.

This is the “Twenty-Fourth Series,” and the series is about the “communication of the events.” Here, we find Deleuze celebrating Leibniz as the “first theoretician of the event,” for it was him who saw for the first time that “ ‘compossible’ and ‘incompossible’ cannot be reduced to the identical and contradictory, which govern only the possible and the impossible.”19 If compossibility is defined, on a pre-individual level, by the convergence of the series, the incompossibility is defined by the divergence of the series. Yet Leibniz made use of these definitions only to the extent that the compossible worlds, being incompossible with the best possible of all the worlds (our world), should therefore diverge from it. Hence, “He made a negative use of divergence of disjunction – one of exclusion.”20 So, Deleuze’s critique of Leibniz is directed to the negative use of divergence by Leibniz, and therefore he is concerned with a Nietzschean affirmation of divergences where the God, being dead, does not chose anymore the best possible world. Deleuze asks: “But what does it mean to make divergence and disjunction the objects of affirmation?”21 Of course, it means the irreducibility of the difference to the same and identical:

“We are no longer faced with an identity of contraries, which would still be inseparable as such from a movement of the negative and of exclusion. We are rather faced with a positive distance of different elements: no longer to identify two contraries with the same, but to affirm their distance as that which relates one to the other insofar as they are “different.” The idea of a positive distance (and not as an annulled or overcome distance) appears to us essential, since it permits the measuring of contraries through their finite difference instead of equating difference with a measureless contrariety, and contrariety with an identity which is itself infinite. It is not difference which must “go as far as” contradiction, as Hegel thought in his desire to accommodate the negative; it is the contradiction which must reveal the nature of its difference as it follows the distance corresponding to it. The idea of positive distance belongs to topology and to the surface.”22

The positive distance, therefore, is finite, but its finitude, instead of foregrounding a contradiction which can be overcome by means of a dialectical synthesis (for which measure gains importance insofar as the distance can be overcome so that the contradiction can be resolved) puts forward distance as distance where the difference between two things is preserved, and, made open to topological determination, so that it can appear and be measured. And, hence, Deleuze’s illustration of the matter with Nietzsche’s perspectivism, or his capacity to reverse the perspectives: health in sickness and sickness in health, where the two states are not seen as contraries in a dialectical scheme, but as a means of preserving distance as distance, as a measurable distance between two states, not only in order to observe their convergence but also their divergence, and thus affirm their difference. So, having a perspective and a capacity to reverse it is a matter of the irreducibility of the two different divergent elements as a result of which one gains a point of view, in Leibnizean fashion, not from the point of view of oneself, but from the point of views of things themselves. All this, of course, with one radical difference from Leibniz where one observes only the affirmation of those that converge whereas in Nietzsche “the point of view is opened onto a divergence which it affirms (…) Each term becomes the means of going all the way to the end of another, by following the entire distance. Nietzsche’s perspective – his perspectivism – is a much more profound art than Leibniz’s point of view, for divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, an disjunction no longer a means of separation. Incompossibility is now a means of communication.”23 And also, one should add, opening the point of view onto divergence erases the discontinuity between the possible and the incompossible, and therefore a maximum continuity is maintained not only between things in the most possible world but between all the worlds be it possible and/or incompossible.

When one considers this discussion on distance with respect to the actio in distans we quoted from Nietzsche in the beginning, all is fine, except one thing that we skipped when we were reading Deleuze’s comment on distance. In the same paragraph, after celebrating Nietzsche’s perspectivism on health and illness, Deleuze also comments on what happens to this perspectivism after Nietzsche goes mad:

“Conversely, Nietzsche does not lose his health when he is sick, but when he can no longer affirm the distance, when he is no longer able, by means of his health, to establish sickness as a point of view on health (then, as the Stoic say, the role is over, the play has ended).”24

Let us remember what Nietzsche was saying: "Not to be dead and yet no longer alive."

I would like to claim at this point that the question of distance in Nietzsche can invite two different approaches:
1)one should keep one’s distance from noise so that the scene becomes specular and therefore is opened to specularisation, and/or theorisation;
2) one should consider the distance from noise not because of a concern for the specular but because “to be standing in the midst of one’s own noise” brings along such a distancing for, one, being neither dead nor alive, is both in the midst of it and also, the impossibility of experiencing it as such, interrupts both any attempt of speculating about, and also an absolute identification with, it.

Not to be dead and yet no longer alive?
Can this be the legacy for us?

Can it be a matter of not knowing anymore whether one is sick or healthy rather than having a perspective? Can it be a matter of de-sonance where one can no longer measure sickness and health unless one has a sieve?

(But doesn’t one appropriate the actio in distans when one posits a passage from “noise to voice”?)

NOTES

1. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. London: Verso, 1994, p. 36

2. What is Philosophy?, p. 37.

3. What is Philosophy?, p. 40.

4. What is Philosophy?, p. 41.

5. What is Philosophy?, p. 42.

6. What is Philosophy?, p. 43.

7. Deleuze, G., The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. London: Continuum, 2003, pp. 262–3.

8. See, Schopenhauer, "On Din and Noise." Parerga and Parlipomena. 2 vols. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974; reprint 2000, Vol. II, 642–43; and, also my “Noise on Noise,” forthcoming in Sub-stance.

9. Nietzsche quoted by Avital Ronell, in “Hitting the Streets,” Finitude’s Score, Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London, 1994, p. 81.

10. “Time-Atom Theory,” F. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Early 1873: (tr. Carol Diethe (with modifications by Keith Ansell Pearson) from Kritische Studienausgabe, Band 7, Berlin and New York, 1988, Pli 9 (2000) 2. )

11. Nietzsche, F., The Gay Science, Vintage Books, New York: 1974, Fragment 60, pp. 123–4.

12. “The problem is therefore one of knowing how the individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with world …”, The Logic of Sense, p. 178.

13. The Logic of Sense, p. 179.

14. The Logic of Sense, p. 239.

15. The Logic of Sense, p. 180.

16. The Logic of Sense, p. 181.

17. The Logic of Sense, pp. 181–2.

18. The Logic of Sense, p. 194.

19. The Logic of Sense, p. 171.

20. The Logic of Sense, p. 172.

21. The Logic of Sense, p. 172.

22. The Logic of Sense, p. 172–3.

23. The Logic of Sense, p. 174.

24. The Logic of Sense, p. 173.

Zafer Aracagok : 27 Jan 2006 17:58 |  Tags: Actio In Distans Mimesis Noise Plane Of Immanence Sieve |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem