Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  In other words, vital concepts like the “Baroque” create their corresponding object, since the object does not pre-exist the formation of the concept. In being created, a concept posits itself and posits its object at one and the same time; the concept, in other words, is self-referential (WP 22). This is not true of the concepts of ordinary language, which are used to denote already-constituted objects or classes of objects (Russell). This is why Deleuze considered concepts to be multiplicities or manifolds: metric spaces are determined by coordinates external to the space, such as Cartesian coordinates, whereas non-metric spaces have internal metrics, which mark out their internal transformations, mutations, and passages (in Whitehead's sense of a “passage of Nature”).21

  But this seems to imply that philosophy is not the only milieu of concept creation. The puzzle that Heinrich Wölfflin addressed in his Principles of Art History, for instance, is the fact that all the works of art produced during the Baroque period look like … Baroque works of art. But the Baroque, as a style, does not exist apart from its concept, and what Wölfflin attempted to do in his art history “without names” (contra Vasari) was to isolate the components of the concepts of Classic art and Baroque art in the service of a broader history of modes of vision: the linear versus the painterly, plane versus recession, closed versus open form, clarity versus chiaroscuro, and multiplicity versus unity.22 Though Deleuze breaks with aspects of Wölfflin's analyses—notably by insisting that the fold is a fundamental component of the concept of the Baroque—one can none the less see in Wölfflin's pioneering work a vast effort at concept creation.23 A similar creation of concepts takes place in medicine. If conditions such as Parkinson's disease or Asperger's syndrome are named after doctors rather than patients, it is because the physicians were able to “isolate” the disease by constructing an original clinical concept for it. The components of the concept are the symptoms, the signs of the illness, and the concept becomes the name of a syndrome, which marks the meeting place of these symptoms, their point of coincidence or convergence (M 15–16).

  I would never have permitted myself to write on psychoanalysis and psychiatry [Deleuze once admitted], were I not dealing with a problem of symptomatology. Symptomatology is situated almost outside of medicine, at a neutral point, a zero point, where artists and philosophers and doctors and patients can encounter each other. (DI 134)

  In this context, Arnold Davidson, in his work on the emergence of the concept of sexuality, has shown that, strictly speaking, there were no perverts or homosexuals prior to the nineteenth century—as opposed to, say, pederasts or sodomites—precisely because their concept had not yet been formulated.24 Similarly, Ian Hacking has shown how, particularly in the human sciences, the creation of concepts such as multiple personality can have the effect of “making up people,” creating phenomena, or making possible new modes of existence.25 Concept creation, in short, does not seem to be the exclusive purview of philosophy. Although Deleuze occasionally speaks in this manner, he none the less writes, “as long as there is a time and place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy, or will be indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is called something else” (WP 9).

  What is important about concept creation, in other words, is less its specific relation to philosophy than the fact that created concepts—“vital” concepts—in whatever domain they are created, must be understood as singularities (or rather, as sets of singularities, or multiplicities).

  There are two kinds of concepts [Deleuze notes], universals and singularities … The first principle of philosophy is that universals explain nothing, but must themselves be explained … Concepts are not universals, but sets of singularities that are extended into the neighborhood of other singularities. (N 156–7; WP 7)

  But what does it mean to consider a concept as a set of singularities? Deleuze frequently appeals to a distinction Lévi-Strauss made between two types of propositions: only similar things can differ from each other, and only differences can resemble each other.26 In the first, resemblance between things is primary; in the second, things themselves differ, and they differ first of all from themselves (internal difference). The first proposition posits resemblance as a condition of difference, and requires the postulation of an identical or universal concept (such as redness) for two things that differ from each other. According to the second proposition, resemblance or even identity is the effect of a primary difference or a system of differences. The concept of a straight line is a universal, because all straight lines resemble each other, and the concept can be defined axiomatically, as in Euclid. The concept of the fold, by contrast, is a singularity, because folds vary, and every fold is different; all folding proceeds by differentiation. No two things are folded in the same way—no two rocks, no two pieces of paper—nor is there a general rule saying that the same thing will always fold in the same way. In this sense, there are folds everywhere, but the fold is not a universal; rather, it is a “differentiator,” a “differential.” As Deleuze writes, “it is not at all a matter of bringing things together under one and the same concept [universals], but rather of relating each concept to the variables that determine its mutations [singularities]” (N 31). Or again, writing about his own conceptual creations: “What is interesting about concepts like desire, or machine, or assemblage is that they only have value in their variables and in the maximum of variables which they allow” (D 144). What is important about a vital or created concept is not its universality but its internal singularities—the singular points that it connects, the intensive components that it condenses, the becomings and mutations it enters into. This is why the concept of the fold is linked to Lévi-Strauss's second proposition: all folds differ, and this difference is primary; but they are, secondarily, made to resemble each other in the concept. The concept of the fold is a singularity—or more precisely, it is a multiplicity that marks the convergence of a set of singularities, which form the components of the concept—and the concept can only gain terrain by varying within itself, by bifurcating, by metamorphosing.

  One only has to comprehend mountains—and above all, to see and touch mountains—from the viewpoint of their foldings for them to lose their solidity, and for their millennia to once again become what they are: not permanences, but time in the pure state. (N 157)

  With this claim that concepts are set of singularities (or multiplicities), we have reached the reason for the incessant “becoming” of Deleuze's concepts: the aim of Deleuze's analytic of concepts is to introduce the pure form of time into concepts, in the form of what he calls “continuous variation” or “pure variability.” “The aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)” (D vii).

  FROM ORIGINARY TIME TO ORDINARY TIME

  But what does it mean to introduce time into concepts? To answer this, we must take a short detour through Deleuze's philosophy of time. More specifically, we need to understand what Deleuze means when he refers to the pure and empty form of time—a phrase that recurs frequently throughout his writings.27 According to Deleuze, the modern mutation in our conception of time occurred with Kant; in Kant's work, time assumed an independence and autonomy of its own for the first time. Before that, from antiquity through the seventeenth century, time had been subordinate to movement; time was the measure or “number” of movement. Since the plurality of movements implied a plurality of times, the ancients were led to ask the question: Is there something immobile, outside of movement—or at least a most perfect movement—around which all other movements could be measured, a great celestial schema, or what Leibniz would call a kind of “metaschematism”? Is there a movement of movements in relation to which all other movements can be coordinated? Since there were two major types of movement—the extensive movement of the cosmos, and the intensive movement of the soul—this question wound up being answered in two different ways. In the Timaeus, for instance
, Plato sought to incorporate the movements of the cosmos into a vision of a “planetarium” comprised of eight globes, with the immobile earth at the center, surrounded by a sphere of “the fixed” (the stars) turning on its axis, with seven globes in between (the planets) turning in a reverse direction. These revolving globes start from an initial position, and eventually return to the same position: a great year or circuit of the “eternal return” which, by some calculations, was thought to last ten thousand years. It was precisely this movement of movements that provided a reference point by which all other movements were to be measured: an invariant, a permanence. Time, in this manner, was subordinated to eternity, to the non-temporal, to the non-tensed; in Plato's apt formula, time was “the moving image of eternity.”28 Similarly, Plotinus incorporated the intensive movement of the soul into the movement of the One, with its emanative processes of procession and conversion.29 In both cases, the result was a hierarchization of movements depending on their proximity to or distance from the eternal: an originary time marked by privileged positions in the cosmos or privileged moments in the soul. The discovery of this invariant was the discovery of the true; the form of the true was that which was universal and necessary, in all times and in all places. This conception of time as the measure of movement remains ensconced in our common chronological “clock” time: days, months, and years measure terrestrial, lunar, and solar movements, while weeks and hours are primarily religious determinations of the soul (God rested on the seventh day); and our watches and clocks remain dependent on movement, whether that of a pendulum or a quartz crystal. Modernity no less than antiquity remains engaged in a vast effort to render both time and movement homogeneous and uniform (timetables, time zones, the global positioning system).

  None the less, the Kantian revolution was prepared for by the fact that both these domains—the cosmos and the soul—were haunted by fundamental aberrations of movement, where a derived time increasingly tended to free itself from the posited originary time. The closer one came to the earth (the “sublunar”), the more the movements of the cosmos tended to become increasingly anomalous: the unpredictability of meteorological movements, the movement of everything that comes to be and passes away. (As Michel Serres notes, “scientists can predict the time of an eclipse, but they cannot predict whether they will be able to see it.” It is not by chance that, in French and many Latin languages, the same word is used for time and weather—le temps—with its various cognates: temperature, tempest, temperate, temperament, intemperate, temper).30 Does the sublunary world obey the metaschematism, with its proportional rules, or does it enjoy an independence from it, with its own anomalous movements and disharmonies? The Pythagorean discovery of irrational numbers had already pointed to a fundamental incommensurability between the speed and position of the various cosmic spheres. In short, the invariant provided by the “movement of movements” was threatened by crises when movement became increasingly aberrant. Similarly, the intensive movement of the soul became marked by a fear that its restless movements in derived time would take on an independence of their own, and would cease to be submitted to the originary time of the One or God (the Fall). The search for “universals” in philosophy is, in a sense, a remnant of this fear; the very term is derived from the Latin word universus, meaning “turned toward the One” (uni- “one” + versus “‘turned,” the past participle of vertere).

  However, these aberrant or derived movements—marked by meteorological, terrestrial, and spiritual contingencies—remained a downward tendency that still depended on the adventures of movement. They too posed a problem, a choice: either one could try to “save” the primacy of movement (saving the appearances), or one could not only accept but also will the liberation of time with regard to movement. There were two ways in which movement could be saved. The extensive harmony of the world could be saved by an appeal to the rhythms of rural time, with the seasons and harvests as privileged points of reference in the originary time of Nature. The intensive harmony of the soul could be saved by an appeal to monastic time, with its privileged moments of prayers and vespers; or more generally, by an appeal to an originary spiritual life of interiority (Luther). By contrast, the liberation of time would take place in the city, an “enemy” that was none the less engendered by both the rural communities and monasteries themselves. The time of the city is neither a rural life nor a spiritual life, but the time of everyday life; there is no longer either an originary time or a derived time, but only an ordinary time. The sources of this liberation of time were multiple, having roots in the Reformation as well as the development of capitalism. Max Weber, for instance, showed that the Reformation became conscious of this liberation of time by joining together the two ideas of a “profession”—the profession of faith and one's professional activity—so that mundane professions like that of a cobbler were deemed to be as dignified as any sacred calling. Unlike the monk, whose duty was to be otherworldly, denying the self and the world, the fulfillment of one's duty in worldly affairs became the highest form that the moral activity of individuals could take. There was only one time—everyday time—and it is in this time that we would now find our salvation.31 Likewise, Marx showed that this vision of temporal activity (“What do you do with your time?”), which is no longer grounded in a cosmic rhythm or a spiritual harmony, would eventually find its new model in the “abstract” time of capitalism, which replaced the privileged moments of agricultural work with the any-instant-whatever [l'instant quelconque] of mechanized work. Time became money, the form under which money produces money (usury or credit), and money itself became “the course of time”: the abstract time of capitalism became the concrete time of the city (7 Feb 1984). It was Heidegger who would ultimately produce a prodigious philosophical concept of the everyday and its relation to time, though he still maintained the old distinction between an originary (authentic) and a derived (inauthentic) time.

  For Deleuze, the result of the liberation of time will be a fundamental change in the relationship of philosophy to the thought of everyday life (opinion). Through the seventeenth century, one could say that, philosophically, everyday life was suspended in order to accede to something that was not everyday: namely, a meditation on the eternal. The ordinary time of urban everydayness, by contrast, would no longer be related to the eternal, but to something very different: namely, the production of the new. Given the flow of average everydayness, I can either raise myself vertically toward the transcendent or the eternal, at least on Sundays (or Saturdays or Fridays), through understanding or faith; or I can remain at the horizontal flow of everydayness, in which temporality tends toward the new rather than the eternal. The production of the new will be the correlate of ordinary time in exactly the same way that the discovery of the true was the correlate of originary time with the ancients. The aim of philosophy will no longer be to discover pre-existent truths outside of time, but to create non-preexisting concepts within time.32

  THE PURE AND EMPTY FORM OF TIME

  If Kant was the first to give a philosophical expression to this new conception of time, it is because he freed time entirely from its subordination to movement, and rendered it independent and autonomous.33 Kant drew the necessary consequences from the cosmological and psychological anomalies of movement: he liberated time from cosmology and psychology, as well as the eternal. In Kant, the Self, the World, and God are all shown to be transcendent illusions of reason that are derived from our new position in time. Time ceases to be the number of movement, and no longer depends on anything but itself; time no longer measures movement, but movement itself (whether originary or derived, anomalous or aberrant) now takes places within time. The reversal can be seen in the opening pages of the Critique of Pure Reason. Before Kant, time had largely been defined by succession, space by coexistence, and eternity by permanence.34 In Kant, succession, simultaneity, and permanence are all shown to be modes or relations of time: succession is the rule of what is in different times; simultaneity is the
rule of what is at the same time; and permanence is the rule of what is for all times. Put differently, succession (series) is the synthetic relation between the parts of time, simultaneity (set) is the synthetic relation between the contents of time, and what is permanent (duration) is something that endures in time by passing through successive states and possessing simultaneous states. In Kant, the self becomes a temporal entity that endures in time (permanence), that has intensive states (simultaneity), and that passes from one extensive state to another (succession). This is what Deleuze means, then, when he says that Kant reconceived time as a pure and empty form: time is an empty form that is no longer dependent on either extensive or intensive movement; instead, time has become the pure and immutable form of everything that moves and changes—not an eternal form, but precisely the form of what is not eternal (ECC 29). Yet time itself is neither succession, nor simultaneity, nor permanence, since time cannot be reduced to any of its modes, or to what takes place within time (its content). We cannot even say that the immutable form of time is permanent, since what is permanent—no less than what is successive or simultaneous—appears and is perceived in time, whereas the immutable form of time itself cannot be perceived. As the pure form of change, time itself is defined by its infinite variability, and the definition of chaos that Deleuze gives in What is Philosophy? is itself a description of the pure form of time: “Chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish” (WP 42; cf. DR 28). In other words, within the manifold of time, chaos is defined by the lack of any synthesis or rhythm between these determinations, “which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence” (WP 118).