Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  THE BECOMING OF CONCEPTS

  One of the most obvious features of Deleuze's analytic of concepts lies in the fact that, from a Deleuzian perspective, concepts do not have an identity but only a becoming. In his preface to the Italian translation of Logic of Sense, for example, Deleuze himself briefly charts out the becoming of one of his own concepts: the concept of intensity (TRM 65–6). In Difference and Repetition (1968), he notes, the concept of intensity is primarily related to the dimension of depth. In Logic of Sense (1969), the concept of intensity is retained, but it is now related primarily to the dimension of surface—same concept, but different components. In Anti-Oedipus (1972), the concept enters a third becoming that is related to neither depth nor surface: rising and falling intensities are now events that take place on a body without organs.7 One might add a fourth becoming to Deleuze's list: in What is Philosophy? (1991), the concept of intensity is used to describe the status of the components of concepts, which are determined as intensive rather than extensive (which is one way in which Deleuze distinguishes himself from Frege, for whom concepts are extensional). In other words, the concept of intensity does not stay the same even within Deleuze's own corpus; it undergoes internal mutations.8

  To this, one must add the fact that many of the concepts Deleuze utilizes have a long “becoming” in the history of philosophy, which he relies on and appropriates, and into which Deleuze's own work on the concept is inserted. The distinction between extensive and intensive quantities, for instance, dates back to medieval philosophy and Plotinus. Deleuze's concept of multiplicity—to take another example—was first formulated mathematically by Bernard Riemann, in his non-Euclidean geometry, who in turn linked it to Kant's concept of the manifold. Both Husserl and Bergson adopted Riemann's concept for their own philosophical purposes, and Deleuze first wrote about the concept with regard to Bergson's distinction between two types of multiplicity (continuous and discrete), which Deleuze developed in his own manner, and considered it one of the fundamental problems of contemporary thought.9 On this score, one of the great texts in the history of philosophy is Kant's opening to the Transcendental Dialectic, where he explains why he is going to appropriate Plato's concept of Idea rather than coining his own term, since Plato was dealing with a problematic similar to the one Kant wants to deal with, although Plato, according to Kant, had “not sufficiently determined his concept.”10 Deleuze in turn undertakes another transformation when, in Difference and Repetition, he takes up Kant's theory of the Idea and modifies it in his own manner, claiming that Kant had not pushed to the limit the “immanent” ambitions of his own theory of Ideas.

  Similarly, Deleuze seems to have initially intended What is Philosophy?, at least in part, to be a book on the concept of the “category,” and thus a reworking of Kant's analytic of concepts.11 In the Transcendental Analytic of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had famously drawn up his own list of categories, derived from his typology of judgments, which he attempted to deduce as the conditions of possible experience. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze had explicitly distinguished his own fundamental concepts (problematic, virtuality, singularity, and so on) from Aristotelian or Kantian categories.12 Yet both Whitehead and Peirce had drawn up very different tables of categories than Kant, and in the process they had reinvented or recreated the concept of a category. Deleuze seems to have come to see his own work in the same light:

  The conclusion to A Thousand Plateaus is, in my mind, a table of categories (but incomplete, insufficient). Not in the manner of Kant but in the manner of Whitehead. Category thus takes in a new meaning, a very special one. I would like to work on this point.13

  For Deleuze, the problem that generated the concept of the category had changed. It was no longer a matter of determining the conditions of possible experience, but the conditions of real experience; and the conditions of the real were at the same time the conditions for the production of the new. Here again, the becoming of concepts within Deleuze's own work is a continuation of the becoming of concepts within the history of philosophy.

  Even more tellingly, Deleuze says that even he and Guattari “never did understand the “body without organs’ in quite the same way” (TRM 238), a revelation that is perhaps faint consolation to readers striving to comprehend Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Yet this is not a question of authorial intention. If one considers Deleuze and Guattari's jointly authored books as belonging fully to the trajectory of Deleuze writings, and equally fully to the trajectory of Guattari's writings, then one could take Deleuze's comment to imply that, even within a work like Anti-Oedipus, the concept of the “body without organs” has a different sense, a different becoming, depending on whether one reads it in the context of Deleuze's trajectory or Guattari's trajectory. In other words, even within a single work or project, Deleuze and Guattari's concepts do not have an identity that would be reducible to a simple definition. Indeed, Deleuze insists on this point: “Working together [with Guattari] was never a homogenization, but a proliferation, an accumulation of bifurcations” (TRM 238). Moreover, if Deleuze entered into a “becoming-Guattari” in his jointly authored works, one could say that he did the same thing in even his monographs, where he entered into a becoming-Spinoza, or a becoming-Leibniz (and Spinoza and Leibniz in turn were forced into a becoming-Deleuze), such that, even in his solo works, Deleuze's concepts never lose this status of becoming. As Deleuze said, “I am nearly incapable of speaking in my own name [en mon nom]” (TRM 65). In this sense, Deleuze's critique of the identity of the self or ego has as its exact parallel a critique of the identity of concepts. If “experimentation on ourselves is our only identity” (D 11), then the same is true of concepts: their only identity lies in experimentation—that is, in their intrinsic variability and mutations. For this reason, finally, a “becoming-Deleuze” similarly affects Deleuze's readers as well as those who attempt to write on his work. In Nelson Goodman's terminology, Deleuze's writings exemplify what they express: his texts are themselves problems, fields of vectors, multiplicities, or rhizomes whose singularities can be connected in a variety of ways, so that writing on Deleuze's texts is itself a becoming, a production of the new (not merely an “interpretation,” as hermeneuticians might say).14 One rarely finds “positions” in Deleuze's works (“Deleuze thinks that …”); rather, to read or write on Deleuze is to trace out trajectories whose directions are not given in advance of one's reading or writing. Even Deleuze's occasional appeals to various “-isms” (“vitalism,” “transcendental empiricism”) are less pledges of allegiance than oxymoronic provocations. In short, there is a becoming of concepts not only within Deleuze's corpus, but also in each book and in each concept, which is extended to and draws from the history of philosophy, and is repeated in each act of reading.15

  PHILOSOPHY AS CREATION

  This, however, is what one would expect—both theoretically and practically—from a philosopher such as Deleuze. If Deleuze's philosophy is a philosophy of difference, then this differential status must be reflected in his own concepts, which cannot have an identity of their own without belying the entire nature of his project. But how, then, is one to understand this becoming of concepts? As an initial approach to this question, one could say that Deleuze's conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts has several interrelated consequences.

  First, it defines philosophy in terms of an activity that has traditionally been aligned with art: namely, the activity of creation. For Deleuze, philosophers are as creative as artists, the difference being that what they create happens to be concepts rather than paintings, sculptures, films, or novels. In Deleuze's language, philosophers create concepts, whereas artists create sensible aggregates of percepts or affects, and scientists create functions. Deleuze's approach to the question “What is philosophy?” has the advantage of characterizing philosophy in terms of a well-defined occupation or a precise activity, rather than simply an attitude—for instance, knowing yourself, or wondering why there is something rather
than nothing, or taking nothing to be self-evident. “To create concepts,” Deleuze writes, “is, at the very least, to do something” (WP 7). Moreover, just as works of art bear the signature of the artist, so conceptual creations bear the signature of the philosopher who created them. In painting, we speak of Van Gogh's sunflowers or Jasper John's flags, just as in philosophy we speak of Descartes's cogito, or Leibniz's monads, or Nietzsche's will to power. In medicine, similarly, we speak of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease; in mathematics, of the Pythagorean theorem or the Hamiltonian number; and in science, of the Doppler effect or the Kelvin effect (LS 70). In all these cases, the proper name refers less to the person than to the work of art or to the concept itself—the proper name is here used to indicate a non-personal mode of individuation. In this sense, it would be possible to do a history of philosophy along the lines of an art history: that is, in terms of its great products or masterworks. “We dream sometimes of a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher—his most essential and creative contribution” (ES ix). Indeed, Deleuze elsewhere muses that one could even quantify philosophy, attributing to each philosopher a kind of magic number corresponding to the number of concepts they created or transformed (a philosophical analogue, perhaps, to Erdo˝s numbers in mathematics) (ABC H). From this point of view, Descartes's cogito and Plato's Idea would the philosophical parallels to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's Last Judgment—the great philosophical masterpieces, signed by their creators.

  Second, Deleuze's definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts not only implies that philosophers are as creative as artists; more importantly, perhaps, it also implies that artists are as much thinkers as are philosophers—they simply think in terms of percepts and affects rather than concepts; painters think in terms of lines and colors, just as musicians think in sounds, writers think in words, filmmakers think in images, and so on. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, once said that, in filmmaking, the decision to use a tracking shot rather than a panoramic shot was a profound activity of thought, since each type of shot produces a different type of space; panoramic shots are encompassing, giving us a global vision, as in projective geometry, whereas tracking shots construct a line, and link up local spaces and neighborhoods that in themselves can remain fragmentary and disconnected, more like Riemannian geometry (N 58). The idea that thought is necessarily propositional, or representational, or linguistic, or even conceptual is completely foreign to Deleuze.16 “There are other ways of thinking and creating, other modes of ideation that, like scientific thought, do not have to pass through concepts” (WP 8). When sculptors mold a piece of clay, or painters apply colors or lines to a canvas, or filmmakers set up a shot, there is a process of thought involved; but that process of thought does not take place in a conceptual medium, nor even through the application of concepts to a sensible medium (Kant). Rather, it is a type of thinking that takes place directly in and through the sensible medium itself.

  A third consequence follows from this. Neither of these activities—art or philosophy—has any priority over the other. Creating a concept is neither more difficult nor more abstract than creating new percepts or affects in art; conversely, it is no easier to comprehend an image, painting, or novel than it is to comprehend a concept. Philosophy, for Deleuze, can never be undertaken independently of art (or science, or politics, or medicine, and so on), and is constantly forming relations of mutual resonance and exchange with these other areas of thought. Philosophers can create concepts about art, just as artists and authors can create in conjunction with philosophical concepts—as, for instance, in so-called conceptual art. This is why Deleuze could constantly insist that, when he wrote on the arts, or on science, or on medicine, or on psychiatry, he did so as a philosopher, and that his writings in all these domains must be read as works of “philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word.”17 In his studies of the arts, Deleuze's aim, as a philosopher, was to create the concepts that correspond to the sensible aggregates created by artists or authors. In his book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which, he says, relates to a particular aspect of Bacon's paintings, but which also find a place in “a general logic of sensation.”18 In a similar manner, Deleuze insisted that his two-volume Cinema book can be read as “a book of logic, a logic of the cinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographic concepts,” concepts which are specific to the cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically (MI ix; N 47).

  These three rubrics encapsulate, in summary form, Deleuze's characterization of the relationship between philosophy and art—or more generally, between philosophy and the act of creation: philosophers are as creative as artists (philosophers create concepts); artists and authors are as much thinkers as are philosophers (they simply think in a non-conceptual material or matter); and neither activity of creation has any priority whatsoever over the other. Some readers of What is Philosophy? have none the less expressed surprise at Deleuze's somewhat curt allocation of separate tasks to philosophy (creating concepts), art (creating affects and percepts), and science (creating functions). But Deleuze here is following the same semi-Bergsonian procedure he adopted in his earlier works. In Matter and Memory, Bergson attempted to analyze what he called pure perception and pure memory, even though experience always presents us with mixtures of the two; the concepts allow us to isolate tendencies that remain mixed in experience. Likewise, when Deleuze distinguishes between active and reactive modes of existence in Nietzsche and Philosophy, or different social formations (“primitive” societies, states, capitalism) in Anti-Oedipus, or different kinds of images in Cinema, he always presents them as isolatable types that can be used to disentangle the mixtures presented in experience.19

  To extract the concepts which correspond to a multiplicity is to trace the lines of which it is made up, to determine the nature of these lines, to see how they become entangled, connect, bifurcate … What we call a “map,” or sometimes a “diagram,” is a set of interacting lines. (D viii; N 33)

  Deleuze utilizes the same approach in What is Philosophy? The significance of the distinctions Deleuze establishes between philosophy, art, and science is primarily that they provide a point of reference from which to assess and explore the resonances and exchanges—the becomings—that take place between these three domains (as well as medicine, politics, psychiatry, and so on). Concepts, for instance, are necessarily inseparable from affects and percepts; they make us perceive things differently (percept) and they inspire new modes of feeling in us (affect), thereby modifying, as Spinoza would say, our power of existing (13 Dec 1983). A concept that would be purely intelligible, and did not produce new affects and percepts, would be an empty concept. Conversely, Deleuze was acutely aware of “the dangers of citing scientific propositions outside their own sphere,” which are the dangers of “applying” scientific concepts in other domains, or else utilizing them metaphorically and hence arbitrarily. “But perhaps these dangers can be averted,” Deleuze concluded, “if we restrict ourselves to taking from scientific operators a particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to non-scientific areas, and converges with science without applying it or making it a metaphor.”20 In both these instances, Deleuze is exploring the nature of the interrelations between separable domains; as always, Deleuze's analyses are primarily focused on difference—on the in-between, the middle, the relational, the interstitial.

  CONCEPT CREATION AND PHILOSOPHY: “VITAL” CONCEPTS AS SINGULARITIES

  Deleuze seems to have intended his theory of concepts to apply specifically to philosophical concepts—the concepts created by philosophers—rather than to everyday concepts of recognition, such as chairs or pearls. “As Michaux says, what suffices for ‘current ideas’ does not suffice for ‘vital ideas’—those that must be created” (WP 207). An example of a “vital” concept—a concept that had to be created—i
s the concept of the “Baroque,” the components of which Deleuze analyzes in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.

  It is strange to deny the existence of the Baroque in the way one denies unicorns or pink elephants [Deleuze writes], for in these cases the concept is given, whereas in the case of the Baroque it is a question of knowing if one can invent a concept capable (or not) of giving it an existence. Irregular pearls exist, but the Baroque has no reason to exist without a concept that forms this very reason. (FLB 33)