Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  This is a good example of the “labor of the concept” one finds in Deleuze. It is a change in the concept of an “Idea” that allows Deleuze to “have done with judgment,” and to replace the notion of a conscious reflective judgment (which is guided analogically by a transcendent Idea, in the Kantian sense) with an unconscious but productive process of desire (which effects the passive synthesis of an immanent Idea, in the Deleuzian sense). Kant himself presents the Critique of Practical Reason as an analysis of a “higher” faculty of desire that is determined by the representation of a pure form: namely, the pure form of a universal legislation (the moral law) (KCP 28–9). If a reflective judgment of beauty can be presented as a “symbol” of morality in the Critique of Judgment, it is because its object can be taken as the analogue of an Idea of reason (a white lily is the analogue of the Idea of innocence), and therefore can be said to “predispose” us to morality. Even in Kant, then, the function of the doctrine of reflective judgment is to point us in the direction of the “higher” faculty of desire, which is our ultimate destination as moral beings. Like Kant, Deleuze will insist on the fundamental role of desire in “practical” philosophy, but he will effect an inversion of Kant by synthesizing desire, not with a transcendent Idea of universal legislation, but with an immanent and differential Idea that operates through a prolongation of singularities. One of the aims of Anti-Oedipus, from this viewpoint, is to formulate criteria to distinguish between legitimate (immanent) and illegitimate (transcendent) syntheses of desire (AO 75), and in this sense, Anti-Oedipus can be read as Deleuze and Guattari's own version of the Critique of Practical Reason. The immanent relation Deleuze establishes between a differential Idea of jurisprudence and the process of desire can thus be contrasted with the aporetic relation Derrida establishes between an infinite Idea of justice and an impossible decision or judgment. For Deleuze, the Idea constitutes the condition of real experience, and not merely possible experience; for Derrida, the Idea constitutes the condition of possibility of justice only by constituting its impossibility at the same time. The differences between the two are profound. Patton's reflections seem to suggest that a concept of judgment might none the less be able to be reformulated in Deleuzian terms, but it would certainly have to take into account this conceptual movement of Deleuze's thought.

  QUESTIONS OF THE IMAGINARY

  There is a final non-Deleuzian term that Patton imports into his analyses of Deleuze, a notion that does not stem from the liberal tradition, but which can perhaps serve as a final example to demonstrate the scope of Patton's own project. This is the concept of the social imaginary (see DP 72, 79, 80, 81, 89, 119, 126). The notion of social imaginary has been utilized by various contemporary thinkers to refer to those imaginary constructions—such as political fables, collective illusions, legal fictions, metaphors, myths, and images—which, while often unconscious and unthought, are none the less constitutive of the embodied identity of individuals and collectivities. Spinoza in particular emphasized the fundamental role of the imagination in social and political life. As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd have noted,

  Spinoza's account of the imagination is not a theory about a “faculty” but a theory about a permanent structure through which human beings are constituted as such … The strength of the social imaginary is that it constructs a logic of its own—a logic which cannot be shaken or undermined simply by demonstrating the falsity of its claims, its inherent contradictions or its aporias.24

  Given Deleuze's indebtedness to Spinoza, one might expect to find in Deleuze's work a strongly developed theory of the imagination or the social imaginary. But in fact this is not the case. Negotiations includes an interview entitled “Doubts About the Imaginary,” in which Deleuze asks the question: “Is ‘the imaginary’ a good concept?” and finds that it is “a rather indeterminate notion” (N 65–6).25 Elsewhere, the reason Deleuze gives for having doubts about the concept is that the processes he analyzes throughout his work—becomings, de- and reterritorializations, flows, affects, and so on—belong to the domain of the real and not the imaginary (AO 30, 83, 304–7).

  In several passages, however, Patton mounts a quiet challenge to Deleuze's doubts, intriguingly suggesting that these real processes none the less have an imaginary dimension. He (erroneously, in my view) equates Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the “socius” or the “body without organs” with a kind of social imaginary (DP 71–2; see 89: “the socius is the imaginary body of society as a whole”), and suggests that what Deleuze and Guattari define as “becomings,” such as becoming-woman, can take place in relation to the images found in the social imaginary (DP 81). Patton does not develop these points in detail. Yet given his own emphasis on the role of concepts and the need for their consistency, his claims invite a number of interesting questions. How does Patton himself overcome Deleuze's “doubts about the imaginary”? How, within Deleuze's own work, do these “doubts about the imaginary” relate to Deleuze's own interest in the analysis of images (images of thought, the images of cinema, etc.)? How might Deleuze's thought relate to works such as Gatens and Lloyd's, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, Michèle Le Dœuff's The Philosophical Imaginary, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, and Cornelius Castoriadis's The Imaginary Institution of Society—all of which make use of the concept of the social imaginary in varying (and not necessarily commensurate) manners?26 Most importantly, how could the concept of the social imaginary consistently connect with the revised liberal concepts Patton has introduced into his reading of Deleuze (normativity, critical freedom, judgment)?

  These are large issues, and to my mind they remain genuinely open questions, prompted by Patton's admittedly passing appeal to the social imaginary. For my part, it seems there are at least three aspects of Deleuze's thought that might be relevant to an analysis of the social imaginary. Patton explicitly addresses the first aspect, which concerns the relation of images to embodiment (which admittedly constitutes a small part of the theory of the social imaginary). It has often been noted, for instance, that images of idealized bodies (in advertising and television, as well as less obvious imaginaries) can affect, even if unconsciously, my relation to my own body, to the point where I become willing to subject my body to the demands of the image (e.g., via dieting, bodybuilding, surgery, cosmetics, and so on). This can be seen as an instance of the more general problem of desire, which Deleuze and Guattari have identified as “the fundamental problem of political philosophy”: “Why do people fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” (AO 29). In this case: Why would I voluntarily subject my body to an idealized image to which I can never conform, and whose real effect, in the end, is to produce in me the “sad” affects of inadequacy and resentment? Although this phenomenon is common, the mechanism by which it takes place is less so. How exactly does the social and public production of images affect the private production of my personal desires? Stated in broader terms: What is the relation between political economy (social production) and libidinal economy (production of desires)—in short, between Marx and Freud?

  As Patton observes, this is a problem that is explicitly addressed in Anti-Oedipus (68–9). A common response is to say that I somehow “internalize” or “introject” the information and connotations contained in the images; and conversely, that the images themselves are nothing more than “projections” of the desires of those who consume them, to the point where the producers of the images can claim that they are simply “giving people what they want.” But the entirety of Anti-Oedipus is directed against this thesis: “The Marx–Freud parallelism remains completely sterile and indifferent as long as it is expressed in terms that make them introjections or projections of each other without them ceasing to be utterly alien to each other” (AO 28–9). Deleuze and Guattari's claim is that the social production of images (or imaginaries) and the production of desire are one and the same process, and thus that there is no need to posit any mediating psychic operations s
uch as introjection, projection, or sublimation to account for the power of images (or any aspect of social production). Patton analyzes this famous (and complex) thesis in his chapter on desire (esp. DP 68–70), which precludes any simple summary. But his analyses here link up with his earlier claims about the general orientation of Deleuze's philosophy: despite his doubts about the imaginary, Deleuze could no doubt acknowledge the existence of a social imaginary, but his primary concern would be with the underlying processes that account for both its production and its effects (in this case, image and embodiment). For Deleuze, as long as social production and desire are seen to be two different processes, the actual operation of social imaginaries would remain a mystery.

  The second aspect concerns the question: Why is the imagination none the less not a prominent concept in Deleuze's philosophy? I would suggest that, in a sense, the imagination does play an important role in Deleuze's thought, but that it appears in a form that perhaps owes as much to Kant as it does Spinoza. In the schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes a novel distinction between the reproductive imagination and what he calls the productive imagination.27 The activity of the reproductive imagination is to reproduce a concept in images: a plate, the sun, or a wheel are images of a circle, just as a taut string or a figure drawn on a blackboard may be considered images of a line. But the activity of the productive imagination is quite different: here the imagination produces a “schema” that will allow me to construct something round or straight in experience that conforms to the concept. The schema is necessary, says Kant, because neither the concept nor the image tells me how to produce a circle or a line in intuition. The concept may allow me to recognize a straight line, but only a schema can tell me how it is possible to construct a straight line in experience. Kant thus argues that “the shortest path” should not be understood as a predicate of the concept “straight line,” but rather as a schema for constructing a straight line (“follow the shortest path between two points … ”). As a rule of production, a schema must therefore be seen as an aspect of lived experience, something that must be lived dynamically, as a dynamic process, albeit in conformity with a concept.

  In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze reformulated Kant's theory of schemata into a complex theory of “spatio-temporal dynamisms” (manners of occupying space and time), to which Deleuze gave a much broader sphere of application.28 In biology, for example, the concept of an animal can be determined by its genera and specific differences; but what cannot be derived from the concept is the way the animal inhabits space and time—its territory, the paths it follows, the times it takes these paths, the traces it leaves in its territory, the excitations to which it responds, the affects of which it is capable, and so on. This is why Deleuze exhibits such interest in the discipline of “ethology” (and frequently appeals to von Uexküll's ethological analysis of the tick), which attempts to classify animals in terms of their spatio-temporal dynamisms: that is, as blocs of space-time that are not only lived but also “embodied” (what can a body do?).29 Similarly, ethnologists can be said to describe the spatio-temporal dynamisms of humans to the degree that they describe their manners and affects—dynamisms that will necessarily vary the generic concept “human.”30 Native Americans, for example, often died under colonialism because they could not survive the diseases such as influenza that were introduced by Europeans; they were not capable of the same affects. At a more abstract level, one of the aims of Capitalism and Schizophrenia was to develop a complex typology of such dynamisms that are actualized in concrete social formations, and enter into varying combinations and interactions; primitive societies, states, nomads, and capitalism all occupy space-time in different manners—forming territories (primitive), striating space (states), occupying a smooth space (nomads), deterritorializing and reterritorializing space (capitalism), etc. Deleuze explains, for instance, that war machines “have nothing to do with war but with a particular way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times” (N 172; cf. 30). Moreover, the revolutionary potential he ascribes to war machines (or “metamorphosis machines,” as Patton prefers to call them) is derived from their capacity to construct new spatio-temporal dynamisms. “People don't take enough account,” Deleuze writes, pointing to one example among many, “of how the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] has had to invent a space-time in the Arab world” (N 172). If the imagination plays a role in Deleuze's political philosophy, in other words, it seems to appear primarily under this form of the productive imagination (production of spatio-temporal dynamisms), rather than that of the reproductive imagination (production of images), though the two roles of the imagination are obviously related. If this thesis is correct, then Deleuze's thought might open up a new way of thinking about the nature and functioning of social imaginaries as “spatio-temporal dynamisms.”

  The third aspect, finally, concerns the ways in which social imaginaries can be transformed. One (and only one) Deleuzian response to this question would address the political role of art (see DP 72–3). What we encounter in everyday life are images that have been reduced to the status of clichés—conventions and opinions that are in the service of forces other than themselves—and it is not difficult to produce works of art that merely reproduce such conventions (the “culture industry”). The political act of resistance against such ready-made images thus entails, in a sense, a struggle of image against image, and Deleuze repeatedly emphasizes the “battle against clichés” that artists must undergo just to produce an image—not a “just” image, as Godard says, but just an image, any image.

  To make an image from time to time: Can art, painting, and music have any other goal, even if the contents of the image are quite meager, quite mediocre? … It is extremely difficult to make a pure and unsullied image, one that is nothing but an image, by reaching the point where it emerges in all its singularity. (ECC 158)

  At various points in his work, Deleuze discusses the political effect of such image-making or “fabulating,” notably in his analyses of the status of third world political filmmaking in The Time-Image (TI 215–24), the role of the image in Samuel Beckett's work (ECC 152–74), and the battle against the cliché in Francis Bacon (FB 71–80). To be sure, the notion of the social imaginary encompasses far more than artistic or informational images, but the political function of art touches on the broad question of the enigmatic link between artistic creation and political change—both of which are instances of the Deleuzian problematic concerning the conditions for the production of the new.

  There is much else to be said of Patton's book. Its strongest elements are certainly its readings of Deleuze's concepts and its overview of Deleuze's philosophical project, which will benefit all readers, beginning or advanced. But the more creative aspect of the book, as I see it, is this somewhat clandestine “Pattonian” project that is being worked out alongside the interpretation of Deleuze, of which we will no doubt see more in the future.31 By forcing Deleuze's thought into a confrontation with the liberal tradition, Patton is able to show the way toward a transformation of such familiar concepts as normativity, freedom, and judgment. Moreover, Patton brings into his analyses other non-Deleuzian concepts—such as the “social imaginary”—which show that the scope of his own project goes beyond the Deleuze–liberalism confrontation. The next task, one might imagine, would be for Patton to show the consistency (endo- and exo-) of the conceptual apparatus he himself is in the process of developing. The outlines of such an apparatus, I have been suggesting, are already visible in Deleuze and the Political. Normativity is redefined in terms of the movement of processes of “deterritorialization”; these processes in turn constitute the condition for the exercise of “critical freedom”: that is, the exercise of a judgment, outside of pre-existing rules, which would be productive of the new (the creation of rights, the creation and transformation of social imaginaries, the production of new space-times, etc.). Deleuze and the Political, then, does not simply present a readin
g of Deleuze, or even Deleuze's political philosophy. It is at the same time an elaboration of Patton's own project, one of whose aims is to challenge traditional liberal conceptions of politics. Patton accomplishes this not simply by “applying” Deleuze's thought to liberal concepts, but rather by forcing them into a becoming that itself produces something new, something irreducible to either Deleuze or liberalism, but which constitutes Patton's own singular contribution to contemporary political thought.