What is Deleuze doing? Or trying to do?

A mysterious man

My fixation in life consists of trying to get to the point where I feel as if I have fully unwound and mapped out the notoriously dense and labyrinthine Deleuze & Guattari text Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I am not the only person I know who has been afflicted with the desire to spend years of his life in textual rabbit holes exploring these books and the texts they cite, the texts inspired by them, secondary texts, stuck in a vortex attempting to uncover what seem to be the whirlwind of insights stuck behind the often violently frustrating impenetrability of prose.

I am getting pretty close to a kind of competence here, I think (and maybe soon I can move onto trying to fully understand Heidegger or something). What helped me the most was realizing that the order of the authors should be reversed: Guattari is the primary author, and Deleuze is helping him. This is widely acknowledged to be true in the writing of Anti-Oedipus, and if you read the solo texts from each author around the time of A Thousand Plateaus, it becomes clear that Guattari is the main source of the concepts there as well.

My realization is that Guattari, even though he writes like a madman, is at least trying to make himself understood. Guattari is a man with a mission, a humanitarian one: to radically reform psychoanalysis and integrate it with revolutionary anti-capitalist politics. He is afflicted by the problem: that he writes in fits of mania, and not very well, and can only make himself coherent with a good editor. But this is an understandable problem, at least.

Deleuze, on the other hand, is mysterious. He becomes the more mysterious the longer you look at him. He is hard to make non-mysterious. Why does he write like he does? Urbanomic, for the third volume of their Collapse journal chose to make the theme “Unknown Deleuze”, beginning with the admission “we do not know Deleuze”. The first step is admitting that you have a problem! If this is the exasperation of people who have dedicated their lives and careers to Deleuze-adjacent studies, what hope do we have?

My sense, in trying to figure this out, is that part of the problem is that Deleuze is doing something you are not supposed to do as a philosopher, and that part of the problem with the Deleuze sense-making industry is a conspiracy of silence around admitting this. This is to say, that there are various activities and aims that are considered valuable, proper, and socially useful as an academic, writer, and philosopher, but Deleuze is engaged in something other than this. However, it is felt that Deleuze must be lauded, given respect. So we cannot admit this deviant quality of Deleuze, especially if one is inside the academic-industrial complex and wants funding for one’s work on contextualizing Deleuze. But I don’t have to answer to anyone because I am just a man with a blog, so I can call it how I see it.

Is Deleuze a philosopher?

What is philosophy? There is a book titled What Is Philosophy? by Deleuze & Guattari which gives an answer to this question, but I’ll leave their answer aside until we explore the question ourselves for a bit.

A philosopher, as we know him since Socrates invented him, is the lover of wisdom. He is a man who strives to make perfectly true statements which hold for eternity, such as “all we know of the world are appearances, we never know things in themselves” or “one cannot jump in the same river twice” or “all things in the world consist of atoms and the void”.

Typically, the philosopher will construct his statements in opposition to those of other aspirants to philosophy — “now Mr. so-and-so has told you that you are able to jump in the same river twice, but I can demonstrate that he is wrong because”. And then, typically, he will anticipate the counter-arguments future philosophers will advance in opposition to him: “now you may think you have spotted a hole in my argument, but you are wrong because…”

Deleuze’s works are certainly about philosophers like this — he discusses Hume, Kant, Spinoza. But anyone who has read Deleuze’s work will know that he never speaks like this himself. When he makes claims, they are often on the order of the surreal and delirious: “God is a lobster” or “the body without organs is an egg”. These claims arrive abruptly and then disappear just as suddenly into the background of the text. If we imagine that Deleuze is trying to make “true” statements when he says these things, on what sort of ontological register can we possibly hold these as “true”? Surely not the same as that of the “classical” philosopher we just described?

Deleuze also had a habit of never entering into debate or dialogue, as the philosopher is typically supposed to do. He is quoted as saying: “Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's go on to something else.' Objections have never contributed anything”. A far cry from the attitude of Socrates! Deleuze would try to avoid speaking in conferences, insisting that people approach his ideas only in writing, behind these walls of opacity he constructs. He is not interested in demonstrating to you. “take it or leave it” is his attitude. Is this the love of wisdom?

This surreal, defiant quality of Deleuze’s work often leads people approaching it for the first time to think of Deleuze as a kind of radical anti-philosopher, interested in “blowing the whole thing up” — the whole thing being Enlightenment, the Western tradition, authority, rhetorical soberness, etc., — out of a sort of loyalty to madness for its own sake, as if Deleuze is a “postmodern nihilist”, a demon haunting the university. On the other hand, Deleuze himself insists that he is, no, nothing but a philosopher, a “pure metaphysician”, and even one of a more conservative, classicist sort of sensibility than many of his peers — and most of his well-read commentators follow him in this judgment.

Which is it? I will argue that neither of these is really getting at the truth of the matter. Rather, Deleuze is doing his specific own thing, which can’t be reduced to either of these character tropes. Deleuze is Deleuzing — and we have to discover what that means.

Let’s take a step back. By presenting our image of a philosopher as one who advances well-intentioned truth-claims in discourse, we are perhaps restricting ourselves to a conservative definition of what philosophy can be. The idea that philosophers should limit themselves to clear, propositional truth-claims that can be assessed according to a formal logic is associated with the analytic branch of philosophy. The continental branch of philosophy, on the other hand, turns more often to literary commentary, spiritual and existential reflection, speculations on complex social constructs. It considers the analytic tradition to be overly left-brained and impoverished. On the other hand, the analytic school considers many of the continentals, like Deleuze, to be making torturously vague and meaningless statements. “It might mean something as poetry, but it is certainly not philosophy”, they say.

Okay, fair, so Deleuze is not the only continental philosopher to depart from a clear, propositional format. But let’s take a moment to examine other “dense, obscure” continental philosophers that the analytic mind would write off as merely bad poetry, such as Hegel and Heidegger. Both these thinkers present their own odd style and method, and laborious labyrinths to work through. But crucially, unlike Deleuze, they tell you what they are doing. They tell you what their method is, as well as its aim. Hegel establishes the dialectical method, and Heidegger engages in phenomenology. There is no such moment in Deleuze; there is no name for what it means to be Deleuzing, there is no grand statement of purpose.

As such, the question of what Deleuze’s unique method is tends to simply not be asked. Everywhere in Deleuze discourse, Deleuze gets reduced to the kind of philosopher he is not, because this is the kind of philosopher that philosophers know how to talk about. The strangeness and particularities of his surrealism are not addressed, they are written off as a mere “literary style”. Deleuze is turned into someone who is capable of entering discourse and debate — we become interested in Deleuze vs Kant, Deleuze vs Hume, Deleuze vs Plato, as well as someone who advances doctrines: Deleuze is the philosopher of “transcendental empiricism”, or “the univocity of being” or “radical immanence” — conceptual handles that situate Deleuze in the field of other philosophers, but do nothing to clarify his actual purpose in his particularly.

So, again, we must ask, what is Deleuze actually doing?

Shapes

Let us look at one of Deleuze’s major works: The Logic of Sense, a very curious text written in thirty-six disconnected chapters. The ostensible subject of the text shifts from one register to another: metaphysics, to linguistics, to psychology, to childhood sexuality. But all the topics under investigation are joined by the fact that Deleuze seems to weave them together into a collective shape, or at least, some invisible object with a topology and dimensionality, that the text describes.

I can’t find the quote right now (I should really try to find the exact quote and edit it into this post when I do), but there is an interview where Deleuze is asked what his motive is in writing The Logic of Sense. He says something like “In Difference and Repetition, I explored the depths and the heights, the depths being intensity and the heights being extension. This time around, I thought it would be interesting to see what happens on the surface.” It is very revealing that Deleuze describes his motives here in topological terms, rather than as if he is aiming to argue to prove explicit statements.

It is this shape or structure, with its three components of heights, depth, and surface, which ties together The Logic of Sense. We are told throughout the text — through surreal literary injections and an inventive cast of philosophical personae — that in the “depths” is where the pre-Socratics live, on the “surface” is where it is possible to be a “Stoic” and a “little girl”, and finally, the “heights” is the realm of Platonism. Nietzsche, on the other hand, apparently supreme, is able to navigate defly between all three.

What is this shape, this spatially articulated object? What actually is it? Suppose we say that it exists: what kind of a truth-claim is that? Is this philosophy? We cannot say that it is a mere metaphor — because the supreme purpose of the text is to construct this shape, this spatial arrangement for the reader to contemplate, and not to argue some specific thesis, truth-claim, or proposition.

What is the name of this object, which becomes a recurring theme throughout all of Deleuze’s major work?

The opening of section 3 of A Thousand Plateaus perhaps gives this object its full royal title: “The Earth — the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule — is a body without organs”.

What is described here is seemingly nothing other than the supreme Gaia-object of cosmogenesis. All blooms forth from this. Its depths are the inner inky void from which all existence unravels, and the heights are its ecstasies of full living development. Speaking now as we are of this object, our ability to use the dry concepts of philosophy unravels: we must become poets. So is that what Deleuze is? Someone who gives us rich imaginative language to describe the inaccessible metaphysical structures we conceive of bringing forth this world? Is he not so much a Socrates as he is a Hesiod?

These kinds of spatial, or topological, constructions pervade Deleuze’s work. What are we to make of the idea that all philosophy supposedly takes place on a plane of immanence? Obviously, this flat shape that philosophy can be said to happen “on” does not actually exist anywhere other than the spatial imagination. Nor is there somewhere out there a body without organs we can touch, which is described a writing surface on which the unconscious is able to “inscribe” things. This is a metaphysics of a particularly visionary, imaginative variety — to posit a body without organs is like positing an akashic record the gods write on — an imaginary object located somewhere else — only we describe this without believing, like the faithful Hindu, that this record is akin to a real object in some other parallel realm which may be accessed after death.

Shapes found in other places: in section 9 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari posit that we as humans are composed of nothing but “lines” (and then go on to describe the different types of lines we are made of). Or in his text on Leibniz, Deleuze describes Leibniz’s philosophy as one of “folding”, and then goes onto describe Leibniz’s thought as a “mansion with a top and bottom floor” on which different things in the world occur.

And there is the famous “portrait” of Kant from What Is Philosophy?, in which the man’s conceptual system is transformed into an imaginative object with a topology:

Let it hopefully be sufficiently demonstrated that Deleuze is not as interested in generating propositional truth-statements as he is in these pictorial, topological, spatial references for thinking. In Deleuze & Guattari’s corpus, this action is often called “diagrammatization” or “cartography” — maps of thought, not new discursive statements. But why? What purpose does making these maps serve?

The image of thought

Deleuze’s corpus cannot be characterized by a single theme, but if there is one which predominates over the others, it is Deleuze’s opposition to the conventional image of thought, as discussed in section 3 of Difference and Repetition. Deleuze argues that philosophy presents thought as done by “upright” men who are endowed by reason by God, and are naturally “good-natured”, they naturally seek the truth methodically out of good will and a love of the true. (We, of course, presented a variation on this classical image earlier in the blog post).

By contrast, Deleuze posits that creative thought happens more usually by stumbling accidents. Thought does not naturally seek its object out of love or the truth, it is often propelled against its will only by a crisis. Thought often begins in blind stupidity, bouncing against walls before it finds its way. Philosophical thought has its origins in states more like drunkenness and madness (Socrates’ experience at the oracle, the ergot in the Athenian wine) than it does in the formalist, procedural, triumphant stance it assumes upon its completion. Thought “wanders around in a desert for years” — Deleuze calls this the nomadic image of thought.

We can describe these two images of thought: the classical image of thought, against the nomadic image of thought of Deleuze, by saying the first is the conscious image of thought, and the latter describes its unconsciousness.

What is conscious is what is spoken aloud. (We know that other men have conscious thoughts that are not spoken, but we have no right to discuss these because we have no means to have knowledge of them). What is unconscious, on the other hand, is what is expressed between and around the lines. It is a ghost that is revealed only by tracing out some kind of implicit thing behind the words.

It is remarked that, despite being sometimes characterized as part of the trend of “deconstruction”, Deleuze is actually the farthest thing from this — if anything, he is a bold constructionist. What this means is that, whereas a deconstructionist like Derrida will take a system presumed to be coherent and poke cracks into it to show that it contains the seed of its own contradiction, Deleuze does the reverse — he feels confident to treat anything which initially seems unstructured as if it is actually structured — Deleuze pulls out a hidden structure that only he can see. For example, Nietzsche is usually described as an anti-systematic philosopher, but Deleuze extracts from his corpus a coherent, consistent system. Deleuze is not afraid to do this to the most unlikely of people — he interprets Kafka’s scattered work as forming a coherent whole in which each part is crucial, even the letters he wrote to family and friends. And he also even treats schizophrenics like Artaud or Schreber as implicit metaphysicians. Art, film, get the same treatment. People who would never call themselves philosophers get interpreted as such.

At last we can announce a working definition of what it means to be philosophize as Deleuze: to reveal the unconscious of thought. These shapes, these cartographies Deleuze described are like the paths thought travels while it wanders in the desert. These are structures only seen after the fact; they are not known to the conscious philosopher.

It must first be said that this is radically different than doing a psychoanalysis of philosophers. This would be a means of revealing the unconscious behind thought which reduces philosophical aspirations to personal or sexual motives. Deleuze is not doing this at all — he is simply saying that before thought is able to make statements which are fully conscious, it necessarily discovers itself through loops and whirls in a great murky miasma of mental terrain.

If we read Deleuze this way, and interpret this as his aim, we can see why the attempt to talk about him in the language of conscious philosophy always breaks down. These descriptions of the unconscious are not truth-claims which can be debated or discussed. They yield to no process of examination or interrogation. They are maps, which are either followed or not.

What no one in academic circles can bear to announce is that Deleuze, in accordance with his rejection of the “well-intentioned” classical image of thought, is a badly intentioned philosopher. His works of conceptual cartography are of great worth to humanity, but in the vein of Dante describing the cartography through the celestial realms, or Joyce on Leopold Bloom’s journey through Dublin. What he is not doing is submitting truth claims, defended to the best of his ability, for the evaluation of his peers. He is describing the contours of the shadows of thought; the inarticulable and the unknown. He has revealed the world, or not. He cannot be held accountable.

Concept art

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze & Guattari provide the answer to the titular question as “the creation of concepts”. Finally, we have an explicit answer to what Deleuze believes he is doing.

It should be noted: this is not what philosophers in the past believed themselves to be doing! Descartes, for instance, believed himself to be unveiling a new structure to firmly ground truth under which everything might lie. Deleuze, on the other hand, thinks Descartes‘ achievements should be summarized as the creation of a concept: the concept of the cogito (“I think therefore I am”). This is a bold shift in perspective, from the conscious and explicit to the cartographic and implicit.

For Deleuze, concepts “exist on a plane of immanence” and are “composed out of affects”. Again, we have to think spatially. Concepts are sort of like whirlpools in the mind — they are forces arranged in certain ways. They guide thought as it travels around, in its journey to some kind of resolution. These concepts are not mere words — they are mental topologies to explore.

Again, this is a bold redefinition. The philosopher, according to Deleuze, does not aspire to make truth claims. He makes labyrinths in which other thinkers might travel. He does not reveal to you the secrets of Minerva, he molds the passages of your slumbering half-thinking mind.

Is this philosophy? Is this the love of wisdom?

If what Deleuze is doing is the art of creating concepts, why even call it philosophy? Why not just call it, say — concept art?

We are of course familiar with the term concept art from an entirely different sphere. This term was invented by Henry Flynt, who intended it as a new artistic practice in which the outcome of the artistic process was a concept (specifically, Flynt was interested in generating concepts that were critiques of logic or mathematics). Over time, this term slipped to mean a different thing which we now know well: basically, works of plastic art that aspire not to classical notions of beauty but to be thought-provoking. This is all well and good, but is there not an artistry in the pure invention of the concept? Is Deleuze not right to advance this art?

Given that concepts are not truth-claims, but psychospiritual experiences to get lost within, one might say: do we not just say that this is a form of poetry? Personally, I would rather say: poetry and philosophy at their peaks might aspire to be concept art — the forging of new inner realities — but at their troughs they are vacuous descriptions of pleasant scenes from life, on the one hand, and tedious debates about semantics on the other.

Personally, this notion of concept art is a practice that I want to endorse, embrace, and make more explicit. I don’t like saying that I am into “philosophy” or aspire to be a “philosopher”, I like saying I am into conceptual thought.

The art of concepts is an exciting one which offers a variety of options because concepts can be brought into the world many ways: through writing, through art, through software design, or simply socially. And the world is built out of concepts. Though our ability to influence things might seem limited, drowned out by the cacaphony of social media and placed in the position of David against the Goliath of the powers that be, the right concept can be nurtured from nothing to rupture everything.

The long planetary voyage of thought

If one can describe the unconscious of thought, then one can lay bare the secrets of the earth. For everything we see around us is thought, the product of thought — buildings, sidewalks, iPhones, WiFi, money, policing, hip hop, people’s chatter on the street, art, religion, medicine. But we do not understand why thought is the way it is, or where it is going — or who is even thinking these things. It is of all of us, yet it is of none of us.

The only way we can come to answers or judgments about this is by continuing to think. The fact that we are thinking about thinking has not vaulted us to a higher register beyond thinking. To imagine this would be grossly hubristic. Thought has been about thinking ever since Eve bit into the apple. As Deleuze says, the plane on which philosophy operates is flat.

Thought is a planetary process which is doing things, and will continue to do things, and from which there is no escape, other than crude repression, which can never fully hold.

We also do not know where thought is going, or what its limits are, because thought has no exterior rules which it is bound by — as the rules are invented by thought itself, and then in turn interrogated by thought as insufficient. The act of defining limits to philosophy — eg disallowing ad hominem arguments, logical contradictions, etc — is itself a part of philosophy — which means that philosophy is necessarily Calvinball.

Moreso: thought is a PvP zone. To designate the concepts through which men following you will think is to establish sovereignty; it is to shape their unconscious, to define their limits. Deleuze identifies his rivals in the act of concept creation as capitalists and advertising men; so eager to shape the desires of the public. To structure the unconscious of another man is to rule him, to excavate and articulate the unconscious of another man is to embarrass and subordinate him.

Concepts have force, concepts have velocity, concepts travel. Does this make the creation of concepts an act of force as well — a badly-intentioned brutality? “How to philosophize with a hammer.” Deleuze often speaks in terms of emulating the warrior; discovering weaponry. This question of badness is perhaps up to debate; there is a kind of misanthropy to Deleuze, and his attempt, in discovering the vast unconscious fertility of thought, to go beyond the merely human, to ascend to unspeakable cosmic realms and leave the rest of us behind.