Understanding Deleuze

Claire Colebrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000248265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

'The best introduction to Deleuze, and to the collective writings of Deleuze and Guattari, available yet! Claire Colebrook has produced a truly accessible pathway into the labyrinthine enchantments offered for contemporary thought by Deleuzianism, making concepts clear, showing their political and theoretical complexity, elaborating their social and artistic relevance. A wonderful, lucid opening onto the new worlds of Deleuze.' Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University 'A wonderfully clear introduction to key Deleuzian concepts and to their effectiveness in fields ranging from ethics and politics to cinema, literary and cultural studies. Claire Colebrook provides a series of effortless transitions from Deleuze's philosophical concerns (eg: difference, representation, desire and affect) to concrete problems in a variety of fields. This book is an excellent guide to an important body of critical thought.' Paul Patton, Professor of Philosophy, University of NSWA genuine attempt to think differently, Gilles Deleuze's work challenges, provokes and frustrates. Surprisingly practical as well as innovative, it is now being seen as a 'must read' for students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Claire Colebrook's Understanding Deleuze offers a comprehensive and very accessible introduction to his work. hink differently. It is built on the notion of an immanent ethics: how can we have a political and ethical theory without some external foundation such as the subject or morality? He argues that the only way we can do this is with a theory of the virtual, and he sees all life (not just cyberculture) as virtual. Deleuze goes further than Foucault or Derrida in questioning the boundaries of the subject and knowledge. For Deleuze perception extends beyond the human, to animals, machines and microorganisms.Deleuze's writing is challenging and hard to read, and so far there is no introduction to his work. Claire Colebrook's primer offers an accessible introduction to the whole Deleuzian oeuvre, including the work he did with Guattari.

1
Beyond representation and structure

Stupidity and common sense

Deleuze, like many writers of the twentieth century, regarded western thought in general as being dominated by the dogmas of common sense and representation (Deleuze 1994). The very concept of thought as representation assumes that there is some objective, present, real and external world that is then re-presented by thought, as though thought were a passive picture or copy of the world. There would be an actual world (the real), and then its virtual and secondary copy. Deleuze wants to reverse and undermine this hierarchy. Both the actual and the virtual are real, and the virtual is not subordinate to the real. On the contrary, the virtual is the univocal plane of past, present and future; the totality of all that is, was and will be. It is therefore an open totality or whole, never fully given or completed. The virtual can then be actualised in specific forms.

The best model is perhaps evolution. Life is a constantly creative and transforming and thoroughly open plane, but only certain modes of life will be concretely actualised. DNA, for instance, holds a virtual becoming or information that may or may not be actualised depending on whether other becomings are actualised. Keith Ansell-Pearson (1999) has argued that Deleuze’s philosophy and politics of the virtual can be best understood from a position of radical evolutionary theory. Against a supposedly Darwinian evolution that would see life as striving to maintain and select for the sake of species and organisms, Deleuze’s uptake of evolution stresses the striving of creativity and difference itself. Evolution does not proceed in order to achieve the creation of species or beings; it is not governed by actual goals or already present organisms. Evolution is itself a virtual power: a capacity or potential for change and becoming which passes through organisms. (This would mean, for example, that sexual reproduction is not something ‘we’ do in order to continue our species; ‘we’ exist, and reproduce, for the sake of variation. Sexuality is something that passes through and beyond us, not an instinct ‘we’ have.) The aim of evolution is change and creation itself, not the creation of any actual being: ‘The species, therefore, a notion which caused Darwin so much anxiety since an accurate definition proves so elusive, is a transcendental illusion in relation to the virtual-actual movement of life, which is always evolving in the direction of the production of individuation’ (Ansell-Pearson 1999, p. 93). It is by confronting new developments in science that philosophy, thinking and the human can transform themselves. We will no longer take who we are (the actual) as the ground and measure of life; we will recognise life as a virtual power for becoming that can take us into an unforeseen future.

From the viewpoint of representation and common sense, the actual world provides a foundation or external model (transcendence), and thought ought to be a faithful copy or replication of the actual. If we were to accept this, then thought would be judged according to its accuracy or correctness or the degree to which it recognises some outside or external reality (transcendence). This would give us some notion of common sense (the correct way in which ‘we’ should think). For Deleuze, philosophy has been governed by just this dogmatic image of thought, the idea of a subject who passively and dutifully recognises and represents the world (Deleuze 1994). Philosophy, he argues, often begins from the most ‘puerile’ examples of recognition—such as ‘this is a table’—but real thinking in all its difference, violence and inventiveness is not disclosed in everyday common sense but in the bizarre cases of stupidity, creativity and even malevolence. If we begin with common sense, then we take the primary mode of experience to be the recognition of external objects or facts. We then see literature or art as a second-order representation. But by what right have we selected this form of representational thinking as foundational or exemplary? Representational thinking assumes that there is an ordered and differentiated world, which we then dutifully represent; it does not allow for thought itself to make a difference, and it does not see difference as a positive and creative power to differentiate. If thought were simply representation, then we could only imagine difference as the difference between the different beings that we recognise: ‘the world of representation is characterised by its inability to conceive of difference in itself’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 138).

Against representation, and its assumption that behind thought there is a standard thinker of good will and common sense, Deleuze suggests other instances of thinking which demonstrate quite different possibilities. Perhaps stupidity, rather than common sense, can show us that thought does not necessarily conform to models of correctness, and perhaps art is not another way of conveying information. Perhaps thinking is not the act of judgement, by a subject, of some world of facts. Thinking, Deleuze insists, is an event that happens to us. It is not something that is grounded on a decision; thinking is not the cataloguing of different external objects. Thinking invades us. Indeed, there is no ‘us’, no subject or individual, that precedes and controls the act of thought. There is thinking, and it is from events of thought that we assume that there was some subject, or common sense, that was their author. Thinking is differentiated by what is not its own:

Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself.

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter (Deleuze 1994, p. 139).

As an example of the dogmas that have pervaded western thought, Deleuze cites Plato’s dialogues, although he argues that all the philosophers he targets (including Descartes, Kant and Hegel) have also provided positive insights that take thought beyond recognition and common sense. Plato’s dialogues (like Descartes’ Meditations or Kant’s Critique) elevate a form of thought that is the simple recognition of already differentiated beings:

Therein lies a costly double danger for philosophy. On the one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition exist and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is an apple, this is a piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus. But who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognise, we are thinking? (Deleuze 1994, p. 135)

Plato’s dialogues set up an opposition between those who are correct and those who are mistaken. What philosophers do not consider, however, are those who are stupid, evil or malevolent (Deleuze 1994). If we all agree on the basic principles of logic or mathematics, it is easy to point out where we go wrong or are mistaken—and most philosophy is written in this way, as though we all share a basic logic that can be corrected and freed from error. But what if we don’t recognise or refuse to recognise the basic rules? Deleuze cites Dostoevsky’s underground man, in Notes from Underground, who is driven by the desire to contradict whatever it is that is recognised as human, shared or self-evident (Deleuze 1994). But we can also think of examples of non-representative thought taken from popular culture: the absurd delight we take in characters from situation comedies who employ the most bizarre forms of logic, or the infuriation we feel when we listen to talkback radio and hear all sorts of illegitimate connections. Such experiences of thinking show just how illegitimate it is to assume a basic human rationality shared by us all. But even logic and mathematics, today, preclude us from recognising some general norm of thought. There are competing logics and radical disputes about the nature of mathematical theory. Once you accept a system of logic, then we all agree. But the person who works from a different system isn’t incorrect or in error; she, like the illogical character in a comedy, is working within an entirely different way of making connections and conclusions. Real thinking, Deleuze insists, is not the manipulation of symbols within a system that we all recognise; it is asystemic, unrecognisable, perhaps ‘inhuman’. Stupidity or malevolence differ from error; stupidity has not just made a mistake within the norms for good thinking. It does not have the same norms. It adopts an entirely different or perverse logic (Deleuze 1994).

For Deleuze stupidity and malevolence are important precisely because they disclose something about thought and difference. Philosophers have treated the world as though it were already meaningful, identifiable and logically ordered. They have regarded thinking as the passive repetition of the world’s inherent meaning and logic. Stupid or malevolent thought, however, shows that thought does not naturally copy the world or inevitably provide one more example of common sense. There is a ‘natural stupor’ in thinking precisely because thought is not something fully owned or decided; thinking resides in an unthought element: ‘Stupidity is neither the ground nor the individual, but rather this relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 152). How is it, Deleuze asks, that we have elevated a thought that is in agreement, correct, recognisable and obedient? He argues that this dogmatic image of thought is tied to a profound refusal of difference.

Indifferent difference

In the world of representation and common sense we imagine a world of presence and identities. A thing is simply what it is, and its difference from something else does not affect its being what it is. (I am female, and even if all males of the species were eliminated tomorrow I would still be female. I can only see myself as different from men after something or someone has been placed alongside my original identity.) Difference, on this model, is the relation between already identifiable things. At least until the eighteenth century this was the dominant conception of difference, and thought was understood to be the faithful representation of such differences. The world was a system of identifiable species that could be grouped into larger categories (or genera), and difference was merely the relations between these already distinct beings. Being was understood to be equivocal, distributed into various different types. Language and representation would then be a way of organising these different beings. Difference or language or relations would be secondary or subordinate to being and identity.

In the late eighteenth century the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) referred to this understanding of difference as ‘indifferent difference’ (Hegel 1977a, p. 102). He attacked the common-sense view of difference: difference, in the common-sense view, is indifferent; it has no effect on a being’s identity. The difference between a chair and a table is no different from the difference between an animal and a plant. And chairs, tables, animals and plants are what they are, regardless of any relations they may bear to other things. Difference is simply the external relation between self-present beings; difference itself is indifferent.

From the nineteenth century to the present the theory that Hegel referred to as ‘common-sense’ or ‘indifferent’ difference has come under constant attack. The first philosopher to really insist on the primacy of difference was Hegel himself, who argued that there could be no being or identity without difference. Difference, for Hegel, was necessary, absolute and negative. Most twentieth-century thought, including key works in feminism, race theory and political theory, is indebted to Hegel, for whom what something is is defined through its other, its negation, or what it is not. We can only have a sense of being through non-being, of man and life through what is inhuman and beyond life, and of identity through difference. Post-structuralism, including the work of Deleuze, has often been read as an attempt to extend and criticise Hegel’s insistence on the primacy of difference (Descombes 1980). Hegel argues that we can only think being, or ‘what is’ if we are other than being; if we negate or differentiate ourselves from being. If being were simply self-present and identical, then we would have no concept or idea of being. (Imagine matter or being that simply is. The minute that we call it ‘matter’ or ‘being’, or say that it is, we have already spoken about it, or related to it, and so it is not simply being or matter; we are in a relation to being, or different from being.) In order for being to be, it must be differentiated; there must also be a concept that says that being is. So there must be a difference between being in itself and the thought or concept of being. Being must be negated by difference. We need to have a language, thought or concept, which is not being, in order for being to be known. According to Hegel, there is no getting outside this negating power of difference. If we want to think or refer to what lies outside the difference of language or concepts, we can only do so from concepts. The pre-linguistic is only known as different from, or not, linguistic. This means that the identity of any thing is an effect of difference. It is not that there is a world of beings that we then perceive as being different from each other—a being is what it is only through its difference from another thing. The contemporary feminist Judith Butler has used this argument to challenge sexual identity—I can only think of my ‘real’ sexuality as different from performed stereotypes (Butler 1993). Slavoj Zizek has used Hegel to read cultural and national identity—I can only think of my ‘nation’ or ‘community’ in relation to an other who is threatening that community (Zizek 1991). Indeed, we only have a ‘world’ by thinking what is different from thought, what is not me. And we only have a sense of ‘I’ or self, in being other than, or different from, the world.

Hegel therefore set dialectical thinking against representational thinking (Hegel 1977b). Fredric Jameson has placed Deleuze in this dialectical tradition, a tradition that does not accept what a thing is but questions how any thing we experience comes into being (or becomes) through what it is not (Jameson 1997). Representational thinking simply accepts already differentiated terms. On a representational account, men are men, women are women, and from these identities we can then think about all the specific differences between them. On a dialectical account, by contrast, men are only conceptualised as men through their differentiation from women (and vice versa). It is not that there are two sexes that then relate; there is a relation, negation or opposition from which we can conceptualise male and female. Men are non-childbearing, without breasts, slimmer-hipped; they are men in not being women. And feminists have long argued, albeit critically, that women have been defined in relation to men as irrational, without penises, physically weaker.

For Hegel, one could not have the being or identity of a thing without its concept, but the concept is always other than the simple immediacy of a thing. It differentiates the thing from other things; being is mediated through the concepts we have of it. We can only think what a thing is through difference, or what it is not. Even the word ‘being’ is a concept, and we could not think what ‘is’ without such a concept. Concepts allow the very thought of being, and concepts operate through differentiation. So, far from difference being secondary, indifferent or the mere external relation between beings, difference is what enables being. Difference, Hegel insisted, was absolute; any time we try to think of what lies outside the differentiating power of concepts, we can only do so through concepts, in relation to concepts (or as something being different from our concepts). We only know a being from what it is not. It is because thought is not being, or is other than being, that we can know being or have a relation to it. Nothing can be thought without difference. The thought of the pre-conceptual absolute is still only thinkable as pre-conceptual. And thus for Hegel it is not that there is a world that is present that is then re-presented in concepts—it is only through the difference of concepts that we have the thought of the present world at all. Experience is mediated, differentiated and ordered through concepts. Deleuze referred to Hegel’s philosophy as one of ‘infinite representation’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 42), for it placed the representation of the world as the very being of the world. The world or being, for Hegel, does not exist outside the differentiating process of representation, and ‘man’ is just the vehicle for the representation of the world.

Structural difference

In Deleuze’s own time structuralism was the dominant theory of difference. Structuralism began early in the twentieth century as a way of studying meaning in general. In addition to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), there was also structuralist anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908–), structuralist studies of popular culture (Roland Barthes, 1915–80), structuralist Marxism (Louis Althusser, 1918–90) and many structuralist analysts of literature. Deleuze is often included in the general movement of post-structuralism and his theory of difference is both indebted to and highly critical of structuralism.

Structuralism in general regarded itself as a scientific study of human meaning; it was able to do so because it defined itself against the vagueness of historical analysis. Rather than beginning from some being that goes through history, structuralists argued that any being could only be known through a system of difference. You cannot have a history of something until you have some system or structure that differentiates and marks out that something: so, before the study of any language, culture or text we would have to think of how that language or culture is differentiated. Instead of understanding an artwork, say, as having evolved from previous forms and genres, you would have to study the culture or system of meaning which allowed that object to be differentiated as art. System or structure must precede history or ‘genesis’. Hegel had argued that difference was primary, but he thought that difference was historical: that being was differentiated or conceptualised through time (and that human life could understand and comprehend the construction of its identity by reflecting on its own history). Hegel argued that human life first has to think of some world as other than itself (negation). We then realise that such a world is known only through the ideas we have of it (so the negation is produced through ideas, or idealism). But if this is so, and all we have are ideas, and ideas give us the difference between ourselves and the world, then we arrive at the differentiating power of the absolute idea (absolute idealism or absolute difference). At the end of history, Hegel argued, we would recognise difference itself; difference would no longer be outside thinking. We do not use difference to think; and difference is not something that thought comes across. Thinking is difference, and what is other than thought—the real—is an effect of difference.

The structuralists contested this notion that we could recognise difference, doing so through an anti-historical (and anti-humanist) approach to meaning and language. In order to think of any thing at all, it must have been differentiated by the system of language. For the structuralists it is not thought that differentiates the world, it is a system of language. Before we can think or conceptualise there must be a system of differentiated marks—such as the letters of a language—which allow difference to be organised. Thought is not autonomous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series editors’ foreword
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The impact of Deleuze
• A guide to key Deleuzean terms
• Introduction
• 1 Beyond representation and structure
• 2 The politics of life and positive difference
• 3 Style and immanence
• 4 ‘Doing philosophy’: Interdisciplinarity
• 5 History of desire
• 6 Perception, time, cinema
• Conclusion: Virtual freedom
• Bibliography
• Index