At the Request of Noah-- Book Abstract and Table of Contents

The Transcendental Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze: Between Representation

Aesthetics

In this book I seek to unfold the significance and implications of Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism. Where many interpretations of Deleuze’s metaphysics treat his transcendental empiricism as a variant of sense-data empiricism based on the primacy of the given, I instead argue that Deleuze’s position is a hyper-rationalism that seeks to determine the conditions under which the given is produced or the conditions of real experience. Consequently, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism represents a substantial departure from classical empiricism in that it does not treat the given as epistemically primitive, but instead seeks to determine how it is produced. Thus, the empiricist dimension is to be situated in terms of how the given is produced and what conditions allow for the production of the given. It is for this reason that Deleuze philosophy remains a transcendental.

If Deleuze’s position is better conceived as a hyper-rationalism, then this is because he discovers intelligibility in the given itself. For Deleuze the sufficient reason of the given is to be found in the differentials of being that preside over the genesis of the given. Since these differentials are intelligible, rational structures governed by rule-like processes, Deleuze is able to collapse the oppositions between the sensible and the intelligible and passivity and activity that has governed the manner in which metaphysical problems have unfolded throughout the history of philosophy.

In this way Deleuze is also able to collapse the implicit distinction between finitude and infinitude, and show how the finite differs only in degree, not kind, from the infinite. If this distinction collapses, then this is because the ability to create objects (givens) through thinking them is no longer understood as belonging solely to divine, infinite beings such as God, but is a property shared in degree by finite creatures as well. As such, Deleuze’s thought marks a heroic attempt to depart from the reigning philosophical alternatives of phenomenology, logical analysis, pragmatism, post-modernism and post-structuralism, all of which evolved as responses to Kant, by undermining the central premises of finitude and the passive receptivity of intuition upon which they are based.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v

INTRODUCTION 6

1. EMPIRICISM AND THE SEARCH FOR THE CONDITIONS OF 23

REAL EXPERIENCE

1.1 Two Critical Problems of Transcendental Empiricism 23

1.2 Difference, Diversity and Empiricism 32

1.3 External Difference and Transcendental Philosophy 37

1.4 Between Conditioning and Genesis 41

1.5 Between Chaos and Individuation: The Forced Vel of 48

Representational Philosophy

1.6 Variations of Difference: The Topological Essences of Intuition 58

2. BERGSONIAN INTUITION AND INTERNAL DIFFERENCE 67

2.1 Internal Difference 67

2.2 Bergsonian Intuition 70

2.3 Internal Difference and the Intensive Multiplicity of Duration 73

2.4 Intensive and Extensive Multiplicities 78

2.5 Conditions of Real Experience 81

2.6 Topological Essences and Singular Styles of Being 85

3. TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM: THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT 97

AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ENCOUNTER

3.1 Deleuze Contra Bergson 97

3.2 The Image of Thought 105

4. FIRST MOMENT OF THE ENCOUNTER: THE SENTIENDUM 120

4.1 Imperceptible Encounters 120

4.2 The Sentiendum, or That Which Can Only Be Sensed 123

4.3 Deleuzian Faculties and the Joints of Being 126

4.4 Signs of the Transcendental 128

5. SECOND MOMENT OF THE ENCOUNTER: THE MEMORANDIUM 133

5.1 The Ontological Structure of Problems and the Encounter 133

5.2 Ontological Memory: The Being of the Past 135

5.3 Memory and the Passage of the Present 140

5.4 The Virtual Causality of Structure 145

5.5 The First Paradox of Memory: Contemporaneity 147

5.6 The Second Paradox of Memory: Coexistence 151

5.7 The Third Paradox of Memory: The Pre-Existence of the Past 156

5.8 The Fourth Paradox of Memory: The Co-Existence of the Past 157

with Itself

5.9 Freedom and Destiny 162

5.9.1 The Force of Memory 170

6. THIRD MOMEMENT OF THE ENCOUNTER: THE COGITANDUM 175

6.1 The Explication of Problems 175

6.2 The Moral Image of Thought 181

6.3 The Being of Thought: Essence 186

6.4 Difference: The Transcendental Condition of the Diverse Given 190

6.5 Essence and the Metaphysical Structure of Point of View 196

6.6 Problems and the Dialectical Illusions of Being 203

6.7 Kant and the Being of Problems 206

6.8 The Insistence of Problems 212

6.9 Structural Essences 218

7. OVERCOMING SPECULATIVE DOGMATISM: TIME AND THE 227

TRANSCENDENTAL FIELD

7.1 The Threat of Dogmatic Schwärmerei 227

7.2 The Kantian Split Subject 231

7.3 Towards a Third Copernican Revolution 235

7.4 Time Out of Joint 239

7.5 The Becoming-Identical of the Different: The Event of Time 245

and the Subject of Difference

7.6 Beyond the Subject: Deleuze’s Hyper-Critical Turn 251

7.7 The Limits of Recognition 254

7.8 The Genetic Conditions of Experience: The Three Moments of 256

Ideas

7.9 Chance and Necessity: The Eternal Return 262

7.9.1 Beyond Individuation and Chaos: The Singular 267

7.9.2. The Transcendental Field and Deleuze’s Speculative Turn 270

7.9.3 Individuation and the Being of Singularity 277

8. INDIVIDUATION: THE GENESIS OF EXTENSITIES AND THE 282

STRUCTURE-OTHER

8.1 Three Problems Pertaining to the Process of Actualization 286

8.2 Indi-Different/ciation and the Genesis of Extensities 286

8.3 The Principle of Sufficient Reason: Indi-Different/ciation 290

8.4 The Static Time of Actualization 298

8.5 The Time of Sufficient Reason 300

8.6 The Spatialization of Intensive Time 302

8.7 The Intensive Factors of Actualization 303

8.8 Implication and Explication 307

8.9 Depth and Extensity 312

8.9.1 Depth and the Image of Thought 314

8.9.2 The Genesis of Individuals and Persons 315

8.9.3 The Moral Ground of the Image of Thought 323

CONCLUSION 335

REFERENCE MATTER 340

Lautman on Problematic Ideas

For those interested in Deleuze's account of the virtual and the process of actualization, an article by Albert Lautman, one of his major inspirations, is now available online. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that Ideas or Multiplicities-- the virtual half at work in the process of individuation --are problems of which individual entities or beings are solutions. Lautman was among the central inspirations for Deleuze's conception of multiplicities and the virtual, so this article is well worth reading. To date there has been only a rudimentary understanding of Deleuze's account of individuation and why it is of central importance to his philosophical project. I would argue that the best articulation we have so far is to be found in Beistegui's Truth and Genesis. Much of this has to do with the fact that Deleuze relies on a number of untranslated and hard to find references, such as the work of Simondon, Lautman, and especially Solomon Maimon. Forays into this body of research reveal just how misguided the characterization of Deleuze as Humean empiricist are, and why Deleuze's ontology should be understood as a radicalization and transformation of post-Kantian German idealism.

UPDATE: Some have expressed difficulties getting the link to work. It's working fine from my end, so I'm not sure what the problem is... Perhaps that it's a PDF file? If the problem persists, you can find it in the "files" section here. Often the discussion is quite good on this list as well.

UPDATE 2: Mystery solved. As N.Pepperell points out, you must be a member of the list to access the files. With Yahoo lists you can opt not to have messages sent to your account, thereby allowing you to access the files without having to clog your mailbox. There are a number of other interesting files in the file section as well.

Rough Theory-- The Surly Edition

N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has written a very sensitive post responding to my recent post on individuation. N.P. writes,

Sinthome’s thought on these questions is subtle and sophisticated, and I wish to be very clear that I am not trying to criticise any substantive points put forward in Sinthome’s posts. What I wish to ask, though, is whether the kind of reflection Sinthome carries out here might in its own practice remain bound to a subject-object divide: whether the practice of thinking through this issue, as carried out in these posts, is consistent with the express goal of the posts, which is to develop a system that transcends subject-object dualism.

And a little further on,

In drawing attention to these common means of explaining the rise of new concepts, I am obviously not seeking to criticise precise reasoning, or to argue against philosophical reflection on the natural world. I am, though, asking whether the form that philosophical argument takes, when it appeals to subjective error or objective empirical novelty, can be understood to be adequate when the content or purpose of philosophical reflection strives to overturn the subject-object dualism. Perhaps we need to be seeking a form of philosophical exposition that is more adequate to the content it seeks to express. I regard this as an epistemological task - where epistemology is understood as, to borrow a phrase from Sinthome, a “theory of learning”, rather than as itself a project grounded in the subject-object divide. And I think that Hegel - and, for that matter, Marx - by focussing their attention on self-reflexivity, have highlighted the need to find a philosophical path through this labyrinth.

Unfortunately I'm in the midsts of marking for the end of the semester so I'm unable to give a detailed response. First, I want to express gratitude to N.Pepperell for so thoughtfully and earnestly thinking with me in both a spirit of friendship and critical questioning, aimed, I think, at producing something or collaboratively developing something rather than simply opposing positions to one another. In a former post, N.Pepperell expressed worries that I took him/her to be criticizing or dismissing me (with regard to my claim that "the One is not") which I did not, nor do I take these remarks to be presented in this spirit. The worries I expressed about the thesis that the One is not are my own worries (here and here and here), namely that I sometimes recoil from this thesis and its implications, finding myself concerned that it is absurd or incoherent. Rather, I take N.Pepperell's comments as working notes revolving about a shared set of questions and concerns.

It seems to me that what N.Pepperell is groping for is the expression "performative contradiction". That is, in suggesting that there is a conflict between the content of my post and the form of my post, the suggestion seems to be that at the level of content, the ontological claims being advanced say one thing, while the form in which these claims are advanced say quite another. It would be here that all the issues of self-reflexivity emerge, for if my claims about individuation hit the mark, then 1) an onto-epistemological theory of individuation must account for how it itself came to be individuated. To put this point a bit differently, my meditations on these issues perhaps suffer the old joke of a man alone in a room asked by a passing traveller whether anyone is there and responding "no", thereby missing the obvious fact that he is there. I am "counting myself out" of the very thing I am talking about, and thus suggesting a transcendence that the content of my post forbids. 2) The nature of critique with regard to other epistemologies and ontologies is significantly transformed as one can no longer say that they are simply mistaken-- which would simply be another variant of the subject/object divide, i.e., the thesis that the world has been erroneously represented --but must instead tell some sort of story as to how these onto-epistemologies came to be individuated.

N.Pepperell remarks that,

I should note that I am being very sloppy with my language here - this is not how Sinthome would express this problematic - I’ll ask forebearance on this issue because my “target” in this analysis is not actually how we can best understand individuation, but instead something more abstract: I’m trying to illustrate something about the habits of thought into which most of us - including myself - tend to fall when we seek to resolve this kind of philosophical dichotomy.

If I am understanding N.P. correctly, then s/he is referring to the habit of thought that continues to evaluate things other than itself in terms of the subject/object divide, while nonetheless having purported to reject this representational conception of the world. Thus, for instance, Deleuze argues that we must shift from a theory of knowledge to a theory of learning throughout Difference and Repetition, and must examine things in terms of how they come to be individuated or produced rather than how they are to be truly represented, and then proceeds to denounce Hegel, Kant, Plato, and others as getting it wrong without applying these very principles to their thought.

It seems to me that there are a couple of thinkers that would be very fruitful in helping to address these sorts of questions. The German philosopher-sociologist, Niklas Luhmann, develops a good deal of his systems theoretical sociology around the theme of self-reflexivity and "observing the observer". These themes are developed very explicitly in texts such as Theories of Distinction and Essays on Self-Reference, but also in his magnificent and dense work Social Systems, where he argues, among other things, that a theory of society must also self-reflexively account for its own claims. Following the obscurantist mathematician Spencer-Brown, Luhmann argues that we can't observe anything prior to drawing a distinction. For instance, we might draw a circle on a piece of paper, thereby distinguishing an outside and an inside. Once a distinction has been drawn, it becomes possible to indicate things on the basis of the distinction (I can now say something is inside or outside). The key point is that the distinction is on the side of the observer, not the thing itself. From this Luhmann draws the conclusion that we can only have system-specific knowledge and can never know the world as such. I follow Luhmann part of the way, however, my criticism has been that the conclusion he draws from this line of reasoning repeats the representationalist tradition in epistemology, assuming that there's a world "out there" in itself that can never be known-- he often draws skeptical conclusions from his sociological work --and that Hegel's critique of the ding-an-sich or thing in itself shows why there is no thing in itself. Nonetheless, Luhmann provides a number of readily available tools for handling these issues of self-reference.

On the other side of the spectrum, it seems to me that this discussion can be profitably situated by taking a page from the Marxo-Hegelian playbook. Marx argues that each age develops a specific epistemology and ontology on the basis of its economics. I am not sure that I'm ready to follow Marx all the way with his economic determinism, but what makes Marx of interest here is that he doesn't simply argue that an epistemology or ontology is wrong or mistaken, but shows how these philosophies are individuated as solutions to a problem (here and here) within a particular socio-historical field. For instance, when an analyst approaches the fantasy of an analysand, he does not do so by showing how it is a distorted representation of reality or falsehood. After all, for Lacan reality is framed by fantasy and thus functions like a Luhmannian distinction or a window through which the subject selects between what is relevant and mere noise where desire is concerned. Rather, analysis proceeds as the analysand comes to discover the manner in which the fantasy (which very well might never be discussed as a fantasy) resolves a certain deadlock with regard to the desire of the Other or solves a particular problem of desire for the analysand. In short, fantasy is not treated as an error. Similarly, the philosophical and theoretical formations of history could productively be approached not in terms of the error/non-error distinction, but as a series of individuations responding to particular sets of problems. Hopefully I have heard some of what is in N.Pepperell's marvellous posts.

Deleuze and His Shadow

Over at Event Mechanics, Glen has recently written a post summing up [without realizing it] a great deal of what frustrates me about scholarship surrounding Deleuze. Hopefully he won’t mind if I quote most of his post. Glen writes:

There are abrupt moments where I will read Deleuze’s work and think, “Deleuze! What the fuck?” I read something that seems to contradict what I had previously thought. There have been at least two of these moments, and perhaps more that I have forgotten.

One was reading The Fold in the passage where Deleuze says something like the question of scale is a question of persepctive. WTF? Was Deleuze lapsing into some sort of postmodernist relativism? No. The answer to this WTF is provided in the text. Latour picks up on this too. It is not a question of the relativity of truth, but the truth of relativity.

The other moment came when reading The Logic of Sense where he says, “Structure is in fact a machine for the production of incorporeal sense (skindapsos).” Structure? WTF! Deleuze a structuralist? He wrote a brief essay on the subject, and Alliez addresses it in a paper published as an appendix to his Signature of the World:

That is how Deleuze could recognize himself in a certain structuralism (it is after all the principle behind his response to the question ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ [Deleuze’s essay]: by seeing structure as virtuality, as the multiplicity of virtual coexistences effectuating themselves at diverse rhythms in accordance with a multi-serial time of actualization …), before denouncing structuralism’s incapacity to account for a reality proper to becoming in a later text from A Thousand Plateaus: `Memories of a Bergsonian’.

For it was in the wake of his Bergsonian studies’ I that Deleuze could oppose to the sedentary character of numerical individuation the nomadic insistence of the virtual in the actual, the pure spatio-temporal dynamism designed to let us grasp the world in its ideal eventality and `real experience in all its particularities’ (heterogenesis). Whence a second proposition which sums up this experimental naturalism for which philosophy merges with ontology and ontology merges with the univocity of Being (according to the famous formulae of The Logic of Sense).

Structure as the machine for the production of incorporeal sense (ie events), this machine is the multiplicity of virtual coexistences effectuating themselves at diverse rhythms in accordance with a multi-serial time of actualization. How is structuralism proper possible then? The obvious answer is that it is a question of perspective (of the scale of events); for example, the truths of rationalities that Foucault extracted from the archive and which existed on epistemic scales.

First, I would like to humbly suggest that perhaps this sort of response to Deleuze results from a prejudice or set of expectations in how we read his works. That is, perhaps we confuse Deleuze himself with a popular shadow of his work and are therefore unable to read what is there in his work. I suppose that when it comes to work on a thinker I have rather stodgy attitudes towards what good scholarship is, and I think there's a lot of shoddy scholarship surrounding the work of Deleuze and Guattari. There, I said it, may my cred as a Deleuze scholar go down in flames.

It is my view that a sound reading of a thinker should do its best to both carefully follow the actual arguments made by that philosopher, while also being cognizant of the manner in which that thinker is engaging with the history of philosophy and also working within-- to adopt N. Pepperell's word --a particular "historical moment". This task is enormous with regard to Deleuze. Not only must one be familiar with the work of Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the Stoics but one must also have a respectful and working knowledge of Deleuze's enemies and how he creatively reworks their projects. That is, one must also have a sound working knowledge of Plato (especially The Republic, The Sophist, and The Statesman), Descartes, Hegel, and Kant... A working knowledge that is something more than a caricature. In addition to this one is required to have familiarity with obscure thinkers, such as the untranslated Solomon Maimon who's influence on Deleuze is vast and largely undiscussed by anyone save Daniel Smith and, coincidentally, myself, Simondon, mathematicians such as Lautmann and Riemann, and a host of others. I've seen very little work approaching this degree of careful attention to references and arguments, save that Beistegui, Toscano, and Daniel W. Smith.

When confronted with an anomaly in one's reading such as Deleuze's praise of structuralism during the late 60's or his numerous positive references to Lacan, one ought to ask oneself whether these anomalies are simply brief lapses or whether something is amiss in their expectations as to what Deleuze is arguing. Put otherwise, perhaps these are not anomalies at all, but one is instead distorting their apprehension of Deleuze's text by a shadow that inhabits the reading, causing us to cognitively filter what doesn't fit with that shadow. Just as we are often unable to hear what our lover is genuinely saying because of our idealized image of our lover, perhaps this occurs when we read privileged thinkers as well.

Why not entertain the possibility that perhaps Deleuze has been deeply misinterpreted on the basis of the early translation of Anti-Oedipus (translated 1983, whereas The Logic of Sense wasn't translated until 1990 and Difference and Repetition wasn't translated until 1994) and A Thousand Plateaus, and that perhaps his earlier works need to be approached with fresh [interpretative] eyes, bracketing all expectations as to what Deleuze is up to and what he is arguing? Deleuze's essay "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?" (1972), written around the time of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and providing a highly condensed summary of The Logic of Sense and his account of different/ciation, was largely unknown to the English speaking world until its publication in Charles Stivale's The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari in 1998 (I recall the great controversies and excitement surrounding the translation of this article when Stivale discussed it back in the heyday of the Spoon-Collective Deleuze and Guattari discussion list. It appears that many were constitutively unable to even entertain the thought that Deleuze had a very serious and enthusiastic engagement with the structuralists). More remarkably yet, this essay was published the same year as Anti-Oedipus, which itself calls for a rethinking of Deleuze's relationship to structuralism in the context of "schizoanalysis". Deleuze did not engage in idle scholarly exercises, but treated each article he wrote, whether on another thinker or an artist as an activity of philosophy itself. This article cannot be rejected as a mere "aberration". Why has no one spoken to this strange conjunction of timing between the initiation of his work with Guattari and Deleuze's structural period? Lacan, of course, teaches that the exception defines the rule; and here, above all, perhaps we should look for a structural truth in this exception-al article, so contrary to what our English speaking expectations as to what Deleuze and Guattari were up to. This article is a symptom, and as such calls for interpretation... An interpretation that would both diagnose a predominant trend in the secondary scholarship, and a structure at work in Deleuze's own thought.

So one thesis would be that claims made much later in the collaborative work with Guattari are retroactively being read back into Deleuze's own, independent, earlier works, preventing us from reading these works on their own terms. This would prevent reading Deleuze's earlier works with fresh eyes and would have the detrimental effect of preventing a careful analysis of the evolution of his thought and the specific philosophical motivations that led him to later transform the notion of structure in favor of something more closely approaching systems in the systems theoretical and cybernetic sense. However, of greater concern is the possibility that the early translation of these works written with Guattari led to distorted interpretation of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus themselves. Lacan's third seminar The Psychoses was not translated until 1993. Is it possible to responsibly read and understand Anti-Oedipus apart from a careful and thorough understanding of Lacan's account of psychosis aka schizophrenia? Does not the signifier "schizophrenia", divorced from the French omnipresent context of psychoanalytic practice, invite the English reader unacquainted with Lacan to encounter schizophrenia as a sort of mad chaos that evades all intelligibility, re-producing the worst prejudices and commonplaces about madness, and completely oblivious to the advances Lacan had made in the understanding of psychosis through structural approaches? This is not, of course, to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari endorse Lacan's structural account of psychosis-- Lacan himself would significantly modify his position in the 70's in ways very congenial to Deleuze and Guattari in seminars such as RSI and The Sinthome --but only to point out that it is necessary to at least understand Deleuze and Guattari's approach to schizophrenia on the horizon of these discussions.

One will rejoin that Deleuze and Guattari target Lacan as an enemy, but this is to again participate in poor reading, as their references to Lacan are almost always positive in Anti-Oedipus, and Guattari himself was both a trained and practicing Lacanian analyst (of an admittedly idiosyncratic sort, but then analysis has no rules) and remained a member of Lacan's Ecole freudienne de Paris (EFP) for his entire life (Genosko, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, 2). Why would Guattari remain a member of such an organization of he genuinely believed that Lacanian psychoanalysis was a sickness or fundamentally mistaken? This is not to suggest that Guattari was a Lacanian tout court, or that he didn't have important reservations about Lacanianism. Moreover, a careful reading of Guattari's recently published journals demonstrates just how highly he regarded Lacan, how Lacan was omnipresent in his thinking as a sort of subject supposed to know, and how much he struggled with these issues. Of particular interest, I think, is his use of methods of free association in developing his thought, obsessively revolving around themes pertaining to a certain aunt. Again, there are a whole host of unasked questions here, of unthought relations. Moreover, silence regarding these issues-- or what amounts to the same, reactive and defensive dismissals --also indicates a marked tendency within Deleuzian scholarship to think in terms of abstract oppositions, which belong to the logic of representation that Deleuze and Guattari denounce. Is there not something symptomatic in the way psychoanalysis tends to be reduced to straw men and the most vulgar abstractions in the hands of so many Deleuzians?

Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense were both written during the heyday of structuralism and Deleuze generally shows a very high regard for structuralist thought during this period. References to Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Levi-Strauss, and even Barthes abound in these works, and Deleuze generally is extremely positive towards the thought being unfolded by these thinkers, as he seems to see structuralist thought as a philosophy of the concrete capable of avoiding the sorts of abstractions that we find in essentialist thought and Kantian and Hegelian abstract categories. We can read this desire for a philosophy of the concrete and singular in the very first pages of Levi-Strauss's Savage Mind, and Lacan's first seminar. For instance, I cannot exchange one language for another language, but must look for the internal articulations (differential relations among signifiers) that are specific to each language. Of course we deny ourselves the pleasure of discovering these productive and illuminating influences when we assume, from the outset, that structuralism is an enemy only to be touched in the way one picks up waste from one's dog. The careful reader of Deleuze who has taken off her blinders and suspended her expectations will discover that there are positive references to structuralism all over the place in the early, independent work. A good deal of chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition is taken up with a careful, informed, and nuanced discussion of structuralist principles. Does Deleuze give a highly unique interpretation of structuralism here? Absolutely. I would say that one of his central questions during this period could be posed as "what is the ontology proper to structure?" or "what are the conditions under which structures are possible?" or "how can we reconcile event and structure?" (would you like quotations? I can give them). No one has ever seen a structure, nor can you touch or hold a structure. Structures are not in individual minds, nor are they objects. So what, precisely, is the ontological status of structure?

Likewise, The Logic of Sense devotes an entire chapter to structuralism, and the other series deal heavily with structuralist concepts such as dual serialization, sense, nonsense, schizophrenia, singularities, the empty square or dark precursor, language, and a host of others too numerous to name. Additionally, the pages crackle with references to Saussure, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss. Deleuze was anything but dismissive of structuralism. If Deleuze and Guattari would later give a scathing critique of structural linguistics a la the likes of Jacobsen and Saussure, this would only be after an arduous journey where they had both preserved all that was good and worthwhile in structural thought while also having discovered its limitations. I'm afraid that a similar spirit has not been embraced in the secondary scholarship, partially encouraged by their own fiery and often inflated rhetoric.

None of this is to suggest that Deleuze's position didn't evolve and develop with time... But this development occured by working within the structuralist paradigm and discovering new paths for thought, new questions, and inadequacies at the heart of the structuralist paradigm that eventually led to the explosion of that paradigm. It did not occur by approaching structuralism abstractly as an enemy (something that occurs all to often in "Deleuzian" treatments of psychoanalysis and structuralism) and by dismissing straw men. While I believe this development is of great scholarly interest, I also think that it is of philosophical importance as well. My fear is that if Deleuzian scholarship continues along the path that predominantly characterizes it today-- empty sloganeering that often wouldn't know an argument or careful textual analysis if it hit it in the face --the work of Deleuze and Guattari will become increasingly irrelevant in the major philosophical debates as it will fail to be philosophically informed in such a way as to be capable of persuasively and powerfully participating in these debates. Avoiding this fate, above all, requires readings of Deleuze that focus on arguments for his position where arguments are to be found, readings which are intelligently informed by the history of philosophy, and careful conceptual analysis holding itself to the standard a gem cutter aspires to in cutting especially precious diamonds.

A great deal is made of the passage in Deleuze's Negotiations where he speaks of his way of reading philosophers.

......I suppose the main way I coped with it [philosophy as history of philosophy] at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed. (6)

There can be little doubt that a conception of reading such as this was destined to appeal to continentalists in the English speaking world that are generally oppressed by a philosophic academic system that stymies independent intellectual work written in ones own name and instead demands commentary on French and German thinkers (thinkers in other languages having, a priori, nothing worthwhile to say, of course). This conception of reading-- like Derridean deconstruction --provides a compromise between the demand to write commentary and the eminently philosophical desire to engage in original thought and conceptual discovery of ones own by speaking through another thinker while making that thinker say something other than the thinker perhaps says. Consequently, enthusiasts of Deleuze busily set about trying to get behind Deleuze's own work, trying to create monsters of it. But perhaps Deleuze, being a bit of a monster himself (I say this with admiration), requires a different type of buggary or monstrousity. What would a truly monsterous reading of Deleuze be? Has anyone yet asked this question? I think it would be a reading of Deleuze that staunchly refuses all those shadows that haunt Deleuze's texts in popular appropriations of his thought, and that instead takes his work seriously philosophically and systematically, demonstrating that Deleuze's assertions are something more than simply the product of his idiosyncratic taste, but are, in fact, well argued and conceptually well formed. I believe that such a Deleuze would be far more powerful and productive than the reigning version we so often see today. Perhaps it is necessary to forget everything one thought they new about Deleuze, to vigorously refuse to read him selectively, and instead look for the system that inhabits his thought. Who knows, perhaps, just as Lacan announced a return to Freud so as to rescue Freud from Freudians and reawaken, once again, the subversive potential of the Freudian text, something like a return to Deleuze is today needed... A return that would read Deleuze for the very first time.

None of this, of course, is to chastise Glen. Glen does exactly what should be done when encountering those remarks that violate our expectations of what an author is claiming: rather than dismissing the claim, he steps back and revises his understanding of the thinker. Unfortunately this practice is all too often ignored.

Can you tell I'm cranky today?

Enlightenment and Opening Possibilities

For the last few days I've been reading The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, by Peter Gay. As I read the tale of these young upstarts, I find myself filled with enthusiasm, and fall to bed at night with names like Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Newton, Diderot, Jefferson, Franklin, and Spinoza on my lips. I think to myself that here are struggles that matter, struggles that transformed the face of the world. Although these thinkers certainly sought recognition and prestige, their intellectual work did not simply consist in getting another line on their CV, on making the most radical claim, on being aesthetic dandies like so many of our postmoderns, or in simply securing a position (we need only look at the lives of Diderot and Rousseau to see this). Rather, there was a profound desire to bring an entirely new form of social relations into being, an entirely new world. What is it that excites me so in the lives and thought of these thinkers? Is it their passion for freedom? Their desire to escape superstition once and for all (today we have a new category in addition to superstition: ideology). Is it their ill tempered militancy? Is it their celebration of reason? Or their joy in inquiry? It is not any particular set of claims that I agree with, but rather a sort of spirit or elan that animated these figures... A sense that intellectual work is not simply for the sake of promoting one's academic capital, but transforming the world itself.

Perhaps what interests me most is the manner in which these thinkers were able to escape their historical moment, transforming history itself. Peter Gay writes,

...though distinguished members of that club [of the cultivated], the philosophes, intelligent and ruthless, were also unreliable: their encounter with the classics, often casual or insignificant, was also decisive for them as it was for few other men. It gave shape to their rebelliousness; it justified their radicalism. While a program of study is not normally a reliable intellectual pedigree, the philosophes' classical education had special, lifelong meaning for them: it offered them an alternative to Christianity. There were critical moments in their lives, in adolescence and later, when they appealed to the ancients not merely for entertainment but for models, not merely for decoration but for substance, and not for bland substance-- such as the staples of Horatian satire: complaints about crowded city life, laments on the brevity of existence, or the menace of bores and bluestockings --but for a philosophical option. (44)

The issue of whether the Enlightenment thinkers read the ancients in a hermeneutically accurate way is irrelevant. Their engagement with the ancients was one that had the character of a "history of the present", a directedness towards the present, creating an opening within the field of possibilities populating the closure of the present. Phantasmatic or accurate, this encounter suggested that another way was possible, another world was possible, that other forms of social relations and ways of reasoning had existed and could exist again.

That is, their identification with the classics, with the Greek and Roman ancients, allowed them to gain a minimal distance from their own historical moment, and bring something else into being. This distance from the present was also accompanied by a collapse of self-identity, where the subject of Enlightenment discovered itself as a void or emptiness, no longer knowing who or what it was. Peter Gay describes the turmoil of this transformation well in relation to David Hume:

Even David Hume, whose good cheer was celebrated, had to brood and struggle his way into paganism. At eighteen, in the rebellion against the dour Scottish Presbyterianism of his childhood, and elated by his discovery that he had a vocation-- philosophy --he stuffed himself, feverishly, with 'Cicero, Seneca & Plutarch', and was soon crippled by hysterical symptoms, loss of appetite, hypochondria, and melancholy. He was unable to study with concentration or pleasure.

Practicing some wild analysis, one can almost hear the Presbyterian superego intervening in Hume's symptoms-- His inability to eat reflects a resistance to reading further, a command by the superego refusing the incorporation of anything else. The hypochondria seems to be a defense on the part of his older identifications, suggesting that his new thoughts have rendered him ill and he's in need of treatment, while his melancholy suggests that he's lost his status as a love object for his community. Gay continues,

His memory of past 'errors and perplexities' makes him diffident; the weakness and disorder of his faculties and the 'impossibility of amending or correcting' them reduces him to despair and induces wishes of self-destruction. 'This sudden view of my danger' on the boundless ocean of lonely search 'strikes me with melancholy; and as 'tis usual for that passion, above all others, to indulge itself; I cannot forbear feeding my despair, with all those desponding reflections, which the present subject furnishes me with in such abundence.

...'I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy.' To be sure, this isolation may be rationally explained, but the explanation has that strange and self-enclosed rationality characteristic of men in situations of extreme loneliness: 'I have expos'd myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? I have declar'd my dis-approbation of their systems; and can I be surpriz'd, if they shou'd express a hatred of mine and of my person?' Detachment from society is mirrored by private emptiness: 'When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I trun my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance.' The world is hostile and, significantly, conspiratorial: 'All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho' such is my weakness that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning.' In the end, Hume proclaims that he no longer knows who he is; his stable self-image has dissolved in a sea of doubt and despair: he fancies himself, much as Diderot did in a similar predicament, 'some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in 'society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate.' And he is driven to ask: 'Where am I, or what? From what cases do I derive my existence, and to what Condition shall I return? Whose favor shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? And on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me?' (64-6)

These are passages worthy of Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure, and I must confess that I find Hume's breed of monster far more appealing than the sort of self-indulgent, aestheticized monster that often parades in the name of Deleuze and Guattari. Insofar as identity is diacritical, the product of differential relations among symbolic and imaginary subject-positions, it follows that a revolutionary subject must necessarily undergo a collapse of identity as there is no longer a place for this subject in this diacritical system. Hume asks "whose favor shall I court, and whose anger must I dread", indicating a relation to the Other or the symbolic. If this can become a question, then this can only be because the favor we court relies on a pre-existent symbolic system. If that system has collapsed for oneself, then we can no longer be certain whose desire we wish to capture and whose gaze we wish to avoid. We have become unmarked for the system, something that the system cannot count or recognize, and have thus, essentially, become void. Yet in this void something new can come to be.

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes,

Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced. It is not the historian's reflection which demonstrates a resemblance between Luther and Paul, between the Revolution of 1789 and the Roman Republic, etc. Rather, it is in the first place for themselves that the revolutionaries are determined to lead their lives as 'resuscitated Romans', before becoming capable of the act which they have begun by repeating in the mode of a proper past, therefore under conditions such that they necessarily identify with a figure from the historical past. Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection. We produce something new only on condition that we repeat-- once in the mode which constitutes the past, and once more in the present of metamorphosis. Moreover, what is produced, the absolutely new itself, is in turn nothing but repetition: the third repetition, this time by excess, the repetition of the future as eternal return. (DR, 90)

In constituting my history I constitute my influences or determine that through which I am influenced. I produce, as it were, my ground. Yet in identifying with the past, I also transform myself as an agent, and produce something new through the repetition of this identification in the present. To repeat in this instance is not to imitate or resemble the past. We would be hard put to find more than superficial resemblances between the ancients and the Enlightenment thinkers. Not only were their aims different, but in many cases their concepts were wildly different as well. Yet nonetheless the Enlightenment repeats the classical age. What, then, today would it mean to repeat the Enlightenment, in an age following Freud and Marx?

Another Take on the Transcendental Field

David Lapoujade has another take on transcendental empiricism and the transcendental field, reading it in terms of William James' radical empiricism. I'm not a big fan of the pragmatist-Deleuze connections (apart from Peirce) as I'm just not sure why Deleuze's ontology needs to be translated into this field. Sometimes I wonder whether this mad dash to translate Deleuze into something other than Deleuze isn't just an attempt to escape the difficulty of his text.

Deleuze's Transcendental Field

More of my old Deleuziana for anyone who's interested.

The letter! The litter! And the soother, the bitther.
~James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Slime Molds... Again! They're Back and This Time in Color Computer Simulated Form

Some Thursday night silliness when I should be working: I came across a slime mold simulator here. It allows you to discern the emergence of different patterns based on the number of cells in the environment and the rate at which the pheromones released by the cells evaporate. Play around with it a bit and see how collective formations are correlated with rates of evaporation. For my previous discussion of the intriguing properties of slime molds, you can go here.

Now in the spirit of such silliness, compare the ridiculous with the sublime, by comparing this to what Badiou has to say about intensity in his most recent work. Hallward expresses the drift of Badiou's work very nicely in Badiou: A Subject to Truth. I quote at length:

...Badiou insists, that 'a being qua being is, itself, absolutely unrelated. It is a fundamental characteristic of the purely multiple, as thought in the framework of a theory of sets. There are only multiplicities, nothing else. None of these are, by themselves, linked to any other. In a theory of sets, even functions should be thought as pure multiplicities, which is why we identify them with their graph... Which excludes that there be, strictly speaking, a being of relation. Being, thought as such, in purely generic fasion, is subtracted from all relation" (Court traite, 192). What Badiou calls "the world of appearances" or phemomena, by contrast, "is always given as solid, related, consistent. It is a world of relation and cohesion, in which we have our points of reference and our habits, a world in which being is, in sum, captive of being there." (Through Badiou's current work, "appearing" seems to obey quasi-Kantian rules of intelligibility, compatibility, and coherence.) The goal now is to understand "how it is possible that any situation of being is both pure multiplicity on the border of inconsistency, and instrinsic, solid relation of its appearing" (CT, 200). Whereas the pure being of being is inconsistent-- and thus wildly anarchic, disordered, free...-- the appearing of being is itself a certain ordering of being (Logiques des mondes, chapt. 1, pg. 2). We might say that the shifting of Badiou's attention from the being of being to the appearing of being already implies a shift in priorities that bring him closer to Deleuze than ever before: from now on, the ultimate reference to ontological inconsistency or "chaos" will always be mediated by the exploration of precise ontic strata or "complexity," in roughly the sense made current by complexity theory.

What does Badiou mean by "appearing," exactly? He proposes to "call the appearing of a being that which, of a being, is linked to the constraint of a local or situated exposition of its multiple being, that is, it's "being there." Appearing appears here neither in Heidegger's phenomenological sense nor as a function of time, space, or the constituent subject. It appears as an "intrinsic determination of being" (CT, 191-92), a direct consequence of the impossibility of any totalization (or all-inclusive set) of being. In the absence of any Whole, "appearing is that which ties or reties a being to its site. The essence of appearing is relation."

Thought it is an intrinsic determination of being that it be there (that it appear), nevertheless it is not exactly pure being qua being as such that appears: what appears of pure being is a particular quality of being, namely existence [hence Badiou draws a distinction between being and existence, as I alluded to in a previous post on whether Badiou's ontology is genuinely consistent with materialism]. Thanks to the equation of ontology and set theory [this is not accurate, Badiou equates ontology with mathematics, not set theory alone], pure being qua being is essentially a matter of quantity and univocal determination: something either is or is not (with no intermediary degree). Existence, by contrast, is precisely a "quality" of being, a matter of intensity and degree. Something is if it belongs to a situation, but it exists (in that situation) always more or less, depending on how clearly or brightly it appears in that situation (L'etre-la: mathematique du transcendental, 3-5). We might say, for instance, and very crudely, that while a great many things belong to the American situation, that situation is arranged such that certain characteristic things (free speech, pioneers, private property, baseball, freeways, fast food, mobile homes, self-made men, and so on) appear or exist more intensely than other, dubiously "un-American," things (unassimilated immigrants, socialists, opponents of the National Rifle Association, etc.). (296-7, my italics)

I have quoted this passage at length as it provides a nice summary of Badiou's most recent work for those who are not familiar with his project with regard to appearing. As I have said, I have reservations about his account of being-qua-being as pure multiplicity without relation as I don't see how it is possible to make a transition from such pure multiplicities to being-there or related being. As Deleuze puts it,

It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from representation and to determine it as that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensation. Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline [!], only when we apprehends directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. (DR, 56-7)

So long as we conceive the transcendental field as pure chaos-- as Badiou apparently does with his inconsistent multiplicities --we are unable to account for how anything could emerge at all. Deleuze makes a similar point about chaos in The Logic of Sense that I need to track down, taking great care to caution against equating the transcendental field or immanence with chaos. As Hegel might have put it, that which reason draws asunder, it is powerless to put back together. There must be something at work within being or the transcendental field that renders emergence possible... Something that is not yet a being, but something also that is not pure disorder. Nonetheless, Badiou's thought of being as pure inconsistent multiplicity without relation is a provactive conceptual beginning point or axiom of thought (like Parmenides' beginning), inviting us to surrender the residual assumptions of substance metaphysics that might inhabit our thought. Here I'm in agreement with Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, that philosophy only genuinely begins when we start from the notion, freeing ourselves from common sense empirical requirements. This is very different from saying that philosophy should be rationalist or non-empiricist in a more rigorous sense. Rather, the point is that the world of "everydayness" is already a world of recognition, resemblance, representation and that the (un)ground must be sought prior to this field. Moreover, I have also expressed reservations about the descriptive nature of Badiou's enterprise regarding the processes presiding over appearing or being-there, or the manner in which he fails to give us an causal mechanism by which these complex related organisms emerge. Deleuze does a far better job with regard to these issues. All the same, I think there's a lot to be gained by thinking the two systems together.

What interests me in the passage above is Badiou's conceptualization of existence in a situation, appearing, or being-there in terms of degrees of intensity. Clearly intensity here is being conceived very differently here by Badiou than by Deleuze, as for Deleuze intensity is an energetic factor presiding over actualization, whereas for Badiou it pertains to presence in a situation. Indeed, Deleuze's account of intensity works nicely with the slime mold, as there's an inverse ratio between the rate at which the pheromones evaporate (i.e., the temperature of the environment) and the emergence of slime mold colonies. Thus we have both uses of intensity at work in the example of slime molds: On the one hand, the emergence of slime mold colonies relates to Badiou's use of the term "intensity", where slime molds become more apparent, are more there, in a situation. On the other hand, shifts in temperature or Deleuzian intensive factors preside over this production of individuated slime mold colonies.

The questions I have been raising recently with regard to the formation of collectives and the materiality of communications pertain precisely to these issues. Here Hallward's examples from the American situation at the end of the cited passage are entirely apropos. What, for instance, would it take to make socialists more apparent in the American situation? What are the intensive factors in Deleuze's sense that contribute to a production of such collectives? Why do group formations suddenly pop in and out of existence? I am not suggesting that there is one answer to this question-- we would have to look at the group formations in question, or at their specific material and semiotic conditions for emergence and continued existence. Nonetheless, the slime mold provides a nice analogy to the formation of collectives. Okay, so I know that I'm working with very facile analogies here, but I find that privileged examples are fruitful in rhizomatically generating connections between disparate phenomena. Here, again, Hegel is useful, as he demonstrates the manner in which the universal must always be thought through the particular.

Perhaps the ultimate absurdity of these posts about slime molds is that I've been getting all sorts of web traffic from people researching slime molds.

Deleuzian Tendencies

Anthony Paul Smith, of The Weblog, has written a very nice blog on different directions contemporary Deleuzian scholarship is moving in.

That there is now a Deleuze industry is both troubling and exhilarating to me. That I ever read Deleuze at all is strange, since my education began as a theologian under a man very entrenched in the transcendental theology of Barth. Philosophically, in those early days, I was more attracted to Derrida and others who would teach me to read cleverly and whose philosophy was all about 'openness'. I won't pretend that I didn't read naively at this point. I have to credit a review of Daniel Bell's The Refusal to End Suffering with the first mention of Deleuze, in a provocative statement about there being only slaves with no masters in the current situation. Being attracted to Nietzsche through fear of losing my faith (and hope!) but still being highly liberal (not quite left at this stage) this thesis was attractive. And so when I went to Barnes and Noble and, strangely enough, saw Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy I bought it and struggled to get through it. It was different from anything I'd read before, from any of the other philosophers who I had been attracted to (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Derrida) and I didn't know how to read it. Then I ordered Anti-Oedipus and looked at it, often while taking a shit (Sinthome should like that), in complete confusion. I was 20 and my education before college was not what I would call good. The most philosophically inclined training I received was from a Christian apologist who did not fit with my punk rock ways. All philosophy was confusing at this point, but this was a different confusion. This made no sense to me at all when I attempted to read it 'academically', which at this point meant little. I finally made it through the book when I was in Paris and had the time to struggle through it. I was 21 and the day I finished it I wrote a letter to my friend Sarah with huge chunks of quotations scribbled in my infantile handwriting. Something about it made sense in the context of our friendship. That I read both Anti-Oedipus, Goodchild's Capitalism and Religion, and five books of Nietzsche's at this time says something about the speed in which I move through thought. I still tarry with these three more than anything else, to the point that I feel like I've internalized Nietzsche even when he doesn't accord with my essence. I've read Deleuze's Nietzsche book five times, each time slowly, and it remains, perhaps naively, at the centre of my understanding. Everything in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is just a building upon that book, a going further with Nietzsche's thought (further than poor Nietzsche could have gone). And the only undergraduate paper I think had any originality dealt with this book and his advancement in the book on Foucault.

Read the rest here.

Transcendental Empiricism

One of my early papers on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism can be found here for anyone who's interested (yes, I'm a shameful self-promoter and little narcissist. And yes, I vainly googled my name to reassure myself I exist, after an automated hand dryer refused to register my presence). Like anything else, my position has mutated and developed with time, but it's also startling to both come across oneself online when I didn't know I was still out there and to see how monotonous (or consistent) thought can sometimes be. I often have the experience of thinking that I'm thinking something entirely new (for myself) at the time I think it, only to reread something I wrote years ago and find a nearly identical formulation. Why is it so impossible to be before oneself? Or why does thought seem so forgetful of itself?

Substance, Process, and Networks-- Dynamic Group Formation

Recently I mentioned that I have been reading Rabinow and Dreyfus' excellent Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, and that it had been filling me with a tremendous depression and despondancy. I think that there are forms of theory that can make one ill by divesting one of their power to act, and for me Foucault's thought-- especially during his middle archaeological period --is an example of such toxic theory (Althusser's account of ideology would be another example of toxic theory for me). My paralysis emerges in response to claims such as the following:

Far from accepting a descriptive theory [of epistemes or historical forms of knowledge], he [Foucault] seems to want a prescriptive one: "The analysis of statements and discursive formations... wishes to determine the principle according to which only the 'signifying' groups that were enunciated could appear. It sets out to establish a law of rarity" (Archaeology of Knowledge, 118). At times he seems to go so far as to demand not merely conditions of possibility but total determination: "One must show why [a specific statement] could not have been other than it was" ("Reponse au cercle d'epistemologie", 17). The archeologist should discover "the play of rules which determine the appearance and disappearance of statements in a culture" (CE, 19). Again and again, Foucault seems compelled to abandon the phenomenological, neutral post hoc description for some sort of explanatory a priori. (84)

What is crushing in Foucault during this period is the manner in which every statement that can be made seems to always already be determined by the anonymous historical a priori in which it occurs. While I am perhaps able to make statements that don't obey the "established laws of rarity", these established laws nonetheless determine what is and is not taken as a serious statement. In the worst case scenerio, I'm not even capable of making non-serious statements, but instead can only articulate what follows these laws of rarity as my very subjectivity is a product of this historical a priori.

Although Foucault marks a substantial advance in seeing these constellations as historical, there are certain respects in which he nonetheless seems to remain tied to a substance metaphysics. As Kant articulates it in the first analogy of The Critique of Pure Reason or "The Principle of Persistence of Substance", "All appearances contain that which persists (substance) as the object itself, and that which can change as its mere determination, i.e., a way in which the object exists" (A182, B224). What Kant is getting at can be illuminated by reference to Descartes' discussion of the wax in the Meditations. There raising the question of how it is possible for us to know the persistence of an object in time (an epistemological variation of the problem of individuation), Descartes writes:

Let us now consider the commonest things, which are commonly believed to be the most distinctly known and the easiest of all to know, namely, the bodies which we touch and see. I do not intend to speak of bodies in general, for general notions are usually somewhat more confused; let us rather consider one body in particular. Let us take, for example, this bit of wax which has just been taken from the hive. It has not yet completely lost the sweetness of the honey it contained; it still retains something of the odor of the flowers from which it was collected; its color, shape, and size are apparent; it is hard and cold; it can easily be touched; and, if you knock on it, it will give out some sound. Thus everything which can make a body distinctly known are found in this example. (Lafleur translation, 30)

This might be referred to as the "bundle theory" of individuation, where I arrive at a knowledge of what individuates an object through the qualities of which it is composed (the epistemological problem of individuation should not be confused with the ontological problem of individuation). However, as we quickly see, this account of how we know the individuality of an object quickly fails:

But now while I'm talking I bring it close to the fire. What remains of the taste evaporates; the odor vanishes; its color changes; its shape is lost; its size increases; it becomes liquid; it gorws hot; one can hardly touch it; and although it is knocked upon, it will give out no sound. Does the same wax remain after the change? We must admit that it does; no one denies it, no one judges otherwise. What is it then in this bit of wax that we recognize with so much distinctness? Certainly it cannot be anything that I observed by means of the senses, since everything in the field of taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing are changed, and since the same wax nevertheless remains. (30, my italics)

Descartes concludes that we cannot know the individuality of an object through the five senses because the qualities of which the object is composed are perpetually changing, while the object nonetheless remains that object there. Something about the object remains the same. Descartes therefore concludes that,

A person who attempts to improve his understanding beyond the ordinary ought to be ashamed to go out of his way to criticize the forms of speech used by ordinary men. I prefer to pass over this matter and to consider whether I understand what wax was more evidently and more perfectly when I first noticed it and when I thought I knew it by means of the external sense, or at the very least by common sense, as it is called, or the imaginative faculty; or whether I conceive it better at present, after having more carefully examined what it is and how it can be known. Certainly it would be ridiculous to doubt the superiority of the latter method of knowing. For what was there in that first perception which was distinct and evident? What was there which might not occur similarly to the senses of the lowest of the animals? But when I distinguished the real wax from its superficial appearances, and when, just as though I had removed its garments, I consider it all naked, it is certain that although there might still be some error in my judgment, I could not conceive it in this fashion without a human mind. (32)

When Kant references "determinations", he is referring to what Descartes calls "superficial appearances" or sense-qualities composing our perception of an object. An object, at any given point in time, comprises a number of different determinations. For instance, I have short brown hair and brown eyes, a goatee, am about 175 pounds and six feet tall, have skin that is a particular shade of olive, wear glasses, etc. These determinations comprise my qualitative appearance, yet could easily change. I could gain or lose weight. I could become pale or darker. My hair is slowly turning gray and I will get shorter as I age, and so on. Yet I am somehow the same. In order for me to be thinkable as enduring in time, I must be thought as a substance (hypokeimenon, a support the lies beneath) that remains the same throughout change.

Foucault, of course, is neither a Kantian or a Cartesian, yet when he describes the episteme governing what is seriously sayable in a particular historical moment, he seems to be referring to a sort of substance that supports variations in speech and discourse and persists throughout these variations. As I discussed yesterday with regard to Badiou's ontology of multiplicity and the count-as-one, however, it becomes possible, after Badiou and Deleuze, to think the identity of something as the result of a series of operations, rather than as a substance lying beneath consistent multiplicities. That is, we must think the individuation of consistent multiplicities as an ongoing process without an underlying substance that remains the same. Perhaps these social organizations are far less rigid, deterministic, and unified than Foucault supposes. As John Law puts it in a nice little article on Actor-Network-Theory or ANT (with which I'm now just playing, and have not yet committed to),

Just occasionally we find ourselves watching on the sidelines as an order comes crashing down. Organisations or systems which we had always taken for granted -- the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Continental Illinois -- are swallowed up. Commissars, moguls and captains of industry disappear from view. These dangerous moments offer more than political promise. For when the hidden trapdoors of the social spring open we suddenly learn that the masters of the universe may also have feet of clay.

How is it that it ever seemed otherwise? How is that, at least for a time, they made themselves different from us? By what organisational means did they keep themselves in place and overcome the resistances that would have brought them tumbling down much sooner? How was it we colluded in this? These are some of the key questions of social science. And they are the questions that lie at the heart of "actor-network theory"-- the approach to sociology that is the topic of this note. This theory -- also known as the sociology of translation -- is concerned with the mechanics of power. It suggests, in effect, that we should analyse the great in exactly the same way that we would anyone else. Of course, this is not to deny that the nabobs of this world are powerful. They certainly are. But it is to suggest that they are no different in kind sociologically to the wretched of the earth.

The ANT theorist begins from the premise that social organizations are improbable in that they come into being and pass away, and that we must look for the sufficient reason for the existence of an enduring organization in the micro-processes and activities through which an organization perpetually reproduces itself in maintaining its networks of existence. Or, put differently, how does a group come to "count itself as one"? That is, rather than looking at a mysterious entity called "statements" that determines social organizations at a particular point in history, why not look at networks of relationships among actors, such as a group of professors that form together at a particular university, determining who gets hired, selected for graduate school, what gets published, what conferences are organized, and so on. Moreover, we might look at the effect of material conditions and technology that impact the ability of various social organizations to maintain themselves. Organizations are possible today that were not possible fifteen years ago due to the internet. Certain formations would become impossible were the internet to somehow collapse due to some natural event like a shift in the planet's gravitational fields. It is these activities that maintain the existence of a particular social configuration (for instance the primacy of analytic philosophy in the United States), and which are themselves liable to change. That is, the formation of a social system and organization-- and here I am questioning Luhmann's thesis that systems constitute their own elements, and instead hypothesizing a reciprocal determination where elements constitute systems and systems constitute element --is maintained and produced through the interactions of the elements of that system. This is something that can readily be discerned here in the blogosphere, where very diverse persons are brought together in an aleatory fashion and where networks and organizations emerge through the interactions of those participants.

For instance, I would have never thought to take the work of Philip Goodchild seriously-- my copy of Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire is heavily marked up with angry comments pointing out various places where he severely distorts Deleuze and Guattari --and wouldn't have even paid attention to his subsequent developments, had I not encountered Anthony Paul Smith for whom I have both a certain fondness and who irritates the hell out of me. Yet as a result of that encounter, I begin to take Goodchild seriously (while nonetheless disagreeing with him) as this is a precondition for for discussing Deleuze with Anthony (who is always going on about "liking how ecological Deleuze's thought is). Indeed, Adam Kotsko and Anthony Paul Smith appear to be engaged in a sort of missionary work, spreading the signifiers Goodchild and "ecology" wherever they go, trying to push the reading of Deleuze in a certain direction. What results from the formation of these sorts of networks and interactions, is the production of a particular "standard reading" of Deleuze for a community of individuals that discuss Deleuze. This doesn't entail that this reading is agreed with by all. What it does entail is that others have to take that reading seriously in order to engage in discussion. Yet the production of such communities-- communities that share a sort of das Man or "everyone knows" or doxa or set of background assumptions and protocols --is the result of aleatory encounters between individuals that take on a life of their own and which, through relations of feedback, come to become self-reinforcing. The crucial point is that other networks can be formed. This, for instance, is readily discernible in the history of the psychoanalytic movement, where new organizations and "laws of rarity" emerge around certain figures such as Freud, Jung, Adler, Klein, Lacan, and so on.

A speciation takes place, that transforms the entire field. The logic here is not the logic of deterministic epistemes, but rather a logic of the slime mold, where indeterminate elements that existed independently of one another can come to form bonds and self-organize into collectives, that then constitute the valence of their own elements. As Latour points out early in Reassembling the Social, identity is far more conflict ridden and indeterminate than social theorists often suppose.

Relating to one group or another is an on-going process made up of uncertain, fragile, controversial, and ever-shifting ties. Is this not odd? If we simply follow the newspapers' cues, the central intuition of sociology should be that at any given moment actors are made to fit in a group-- often in more than one. And yet, when you read social theorists, it seems that the main, the crucial, the most urgent question should be which group is preferable to start a social enquiry. Should we take social aggregates to be made of 'individuals', 'of organizations', of 'classes', of 'roles', of 'life trajectories', of 'discursive fields', of 'selfish genes', of 'forms of life', of 'social networks'? They never seem to tire in designating one entity as real, solid, proven, or entrenched while others are criticized as being artificial, imaginary, transitional, illusory, abstract, impersonal, or meaningless...

While the most common experience we have of the social world is of being simultaneously seized by several possible and contradictory calls for regroupings, it seems the most important decision to make before becoming a social scientist is to decide first which ingredients are already there in society. While it is fairly obvious that we are enrolled in a group by a series of interventions that renders visible those who argue for the relevance of one grouping and the irrelevance of others, everything happens as if social scientists had to claim that there exists 'out there' one type that is real, whereas the other sets are really inauthentic, obsolete, irrelevant, or artificial. While we are well aware that the first feature of the social world is this constant tracing of boundaries by people over some other people, sociologists of the social consider that the main feature of the world is to recognize, independently of who is tracing them and with what sorts of tools, the unquestionable existence of boundaries. (28, my bold)

Groupings are always performatively enacted or the result of processes, whereby actors strive to form networks. They can be done and undone. They are the result of interactions among participants, and it is always possible for excluded participants to become missionaries after the fashion of Paul, seeking to produce a new furrow, that itself reorganizes the social. Yet none of these networks are ever formed without the activity of participants and acts of seduction.