On Sunday, 4/21/13, we recorded our discussion on chapters 1-3 of What Is Philosophy?
The main task of What Is Philosophy?, the pair’s final work together (Guattari died not long after) seems to be setting up a new conceptual framework for understanding what philosophy is and how it differs from science and art. What is philosophy? It’s the creation of concepts, specifically complex and interesting ones, that enable us to see the world in a different way. No concept is simple: each contains as components other concepts, meaning that they tend to be created in batches. It’s a very anti-foundationalist view: concepts are active creations performed on a “plane of immanence,” which you can think of as a pre-philosophical field of intuitions and sensibilities.
I would describe such a plane as a vague “representation of the world,” but Deleuze’s epistemology is radical along the lines of late William James and many post-Kantians, meaning that he doesn’t make a real distinction between the representation and the world; they’re just different aspects of the world (he highly praises Spinoza’s idea of mental and physical aspects of all of creation). So the plane is a plane of immanence precisely because, from the point of view of that plane, there is no outside. The plane is not immanent to anything: it’s not the field of experience behind which transcendent things-in-themselves or God work, and Deleuze even objects to Husserl’s move of finding transcendent objects within experience (i.e. by perceiving one part of an object I posit that there are indefinitely many more unseen aspects, such that the object as a whole transcends my experience).
At the same time, different philosophies employ different planes of immanence, such that it’s sometimes hard when you’re reading different philosophers or even different periods of the same philosopher to figure out whether they’re talking on the same plane. The plane determines what’s going to be considered a legitimate and pressing philosophical problem, which the concepts are then created to articulate and address. This means that for any philosophy, much of the work is actually done pre-philosophically, undercover. The plane is actually part of the philosophy, and emerges more-or-less at the same time as the philosophical concepts themselves, as a necessarily unarticulated “image of thought,” i.e. an idea of what thinking is supposed to really be, what is “due to thought by right.” Is thought remembering, as Plato conceived it, or interpretation of received tradition, or the feigned ignorance and doubt of Descartes, etc. etc.?
The third element of a philosophy is its “conceptual personae,” which are like the characters we see within and “behind” the philosophy. I use the quotes because it’s not a matter of knowing the philosopher’s biography, but of the character the philosopher makes of himself, e.g. the “Idiot” in Descartes who doubts everything. Not all of these personae represent the author, e.g. Plato has Socrates stand in for himself but also created other characters like Callicles that serve as icons for other positions. The personae are what give life and coherence to the philosophical concepts. The concepts to us as “signed” by the author, so that talking about the Cogito without thinking of it as Descartes’s Cogito will only lead to confusion. So creating a philosophy (explicitly creating the concepts) also involves positing the corresponding plane of immanence and imagining and communicating the relevant conceptual personae.
This structure leads Deleuze to characterize apparent disputes in philosophy as typically people not on the same plane talking past each other. Truth itself is an element defined on a plane; there are no standards external to a plane by which to judge a philosophy. Instead of judging whether a philosophy is true, Deleuze thinks the big question is whether it is interesting and important, which is tantamount to figuring out, in part, whether the plane in question is where you’re at given your culture, intellectual climate, and other factors. At the same time, his prohibition of transcendence as somehow contrary to the structure of doing philosophy itself amounts to a strong advocation of a fairly narrow set of philosophical positions, so he’s not all hippy dippy “whatever you think is fine” in the way this might sound. Likewise, he stresses that these planes are not descriptions of an individual’s subjective world-view; like Fregean senses, these planes are intersubjective, which is the same, for these phenomenology-influenced folks, as objective; there’s simply no sense to be made of the term “objective” apart from the fact that different people at different times can go back and verify some alleged event or fact.
Deleuze stresses that these concepts are different than propositions, and you can’t just try to translate the elements of a philosophical concept into propositions without turning them into a bunch of half-baked, insufficiently scientific opinions. Science is not in the business of creating concepts, but of using already created, utilitarian concepts (e.g. a word like “momentum” is shorthand for a bunch of observed phenomena; the scientist needn’t ask what momentum REALLY is in the way that a philosopher would) to track regularities in states of affairs. Art likewise does not create concepts, but creates “percepts” and “affects” (note that these terms, unlike “perceptions” and “emotions” refer to public entities, not to private mental states of individuals).
For the discussion, we brought on longtime Deleuze fan and Ph.D. in rhetoric Daniel Coffeen. To get a sense of what he’s about, go listen to the course he taught in rhetoric at UC Berkeley in 2008. As a self-proclaimed sophist, he provided an interesting foil to our usual method of trying to carefully suss out the meaning of the text and fit its lessons into our analytic frameworks. Instead, he emphasized the life-changing power of being knocked out by a new and powerful philosophical point of view, which is not at all different from discovering a new and visionary artist.
looking forward to seeing what you folks make of it.
http://www.recalcitrance.com/deleuzelast.htm
http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/08/how-to-begin-reading-deleuze.html
Thanks for the reference–good stuff.
Well written Mark. Especially about the Plane of Immanence.
We had a What is Philosophy? Not School group that fell away partially because of me (maybe wholly my fault). Not only did I have a hard time with this text (somehow A Thousand Plateaus was much easier), but I got distracted by Heidegger’s “Basic Writings.” I did, however, notice many parallels and potential comparisons between a lot of Heideggers musings on the proper place (his word, “essence”) of philosophy, science, and art.
At times I feel Deleuze was obviously influenced by Heidegger, at other times I’m afraid he’s not really adding much to Heidegger, and at worst, I’d like to accuse him of stealing from Heidegger. Would anyone care to chime in on this? (and I know, Deleuze is MUCH more a Spinoza-ist than a Heideggerian).
Note: I did not feel this way while reading A Thousand Plateaus, an infinitely more original text than What is Philsophy? (and anything else I’ve ever read, for that matter).
other than their common roots in Nietzschean studies Deleuze strikes me as having been much closer to Whitehead than Heidegger, can you share some of the specific references that you are asking about?
Dominic–
Sorry for the late post. While Heidegger raises the ontic of Being and Dasein (Being is a concept common to philosophy) to the level of the ontological, Deleuze is after a much more radical ontology of everything which has its foundation on the “impossibility of thinking that is thought” (philosophical concepts not yet thought).
Deleuze is not contrary to many of the crucial aspects of Being which Heidegger identifies, and incorporates Heidegger as far as he goes, but Heidegger does not go far enough. What is Philosophy is just an introduction to some of Deleuzes’s thinking, and only in Difference and Repetition does he really get at his original metaphysics, which has similarities to existential and phenomenological thinking, but radical differences.
So, for the original, come join us at the Difference and Repetition NFS 🙂
On Deleuze and Guattari’s “What is Philosophy?”
http://danielcoffeen.podomatic.com/
and/or
http://danielcoffeen.podomatic.com/entry/2013-04-23T16_31_37-07_00
http://projectlamar.com/media/Pure_Immanence.pdf
http://projectlamar.com/media/Deleuze-Spinoza-Practical-Philosophy.pdf
Diet Soap podcast #130
Daniel Coffeen on Deleuze and Guattari’s book What is Philosophy and on his essay The Experience of an Idea
http://dietsoap.podomatic.com/profile?p=4
Coffeen’s early podcasts raise a dilemma in that they are largely sort of tangential riffs in the spirit of Deleuze rather than close readings of the texts (will be interesting to hear if this is different with the fellows), and it is hard to say which (if either) is the proper response to such works.
I don’t know if “dilemma” is the word I’d use, perhaps context.
In the Diet Soap podcast the guy he’s talking to, Doulas Lain, hadn’t read the book so a strict textual analysis is kind of out. Daniel Coffeen is trying “in the spirit of Deleuze” to get across a very different way of thinking about and conceptualizing these things and relate Deleuze to his essay that Douglas Lain had read.
The other podcast Daniel Coffeen mentions recently doing the Partially Examined Life podcast where they discuss “What is Philosophy”, so after talking about and thinking over these ideas he posted the podcast to his site some after thoughts “in the spirit of Deleuze”. Of course he’s not reading a bit of text and analyzing it as he’s does in his podcasts on Maurice Merleau Ponty and Henri Bergson.
http://danielcoffeen.podomatic.com/profile?p=2
I’ve listened to every Partially Examined Life podcast (some a few times) and every one of Daniel Coffeen’s podcasts (some a few times), so I look forward to listening to some peopIe I respect greatly and have learned much from get together and discuss one of my favorite philosophers.
And Daniel Coffeen has some awesome tangential rants on youtube
Everything Is In Motion
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and the Affirmation of this Life
Affect as Knowledge
and this was dome by Esther Geis using some of one of his talks
joyful complexity- treat life as an experiment
Much respect and thank you for the links to the pdfs. I’ve read What is Philosophy, A Thousand Plateaus, and his dissertations Difference and Repetition, but I haven’t yet read those.
Long term listener who finally just caught up with a nearly current episode:
Fabulous discussion, which I enjoyed and which made a lot of things much clearer to me.
1. A suggestion on locating Deleuze-Guattari on the question of discussion and conciliation in philosophy (i.e.: Is their approach “hippydippy” or not?):
This has interested and concerned me a lot in reading Deleuze. I read him as rejecting the idea of a theory community in the total sense of a big discussion where everyone’s working on the same problem and thus inclining toward consensus as Dylan seems to be implying. This notion of community translates (at least I think) inevitably into people invoking a transcendent authority (the usual argument is from the performative contradiction allegedly inherent to any postulation of a “sophistic” or “relativist” position, because such a position is seen is inevitably presupposing for itself the universality it wants to deny). Deleuze sees himself as fighting against something he calls the system of judgement, which he replaces with combat, as the only force that really creates anything, whereas judgement (which I equate on one level with appealing to authority) is non-creative. It is certainly not judgement, for example, that will bring about the next new work of art (see Pour en finir avec le judgement in “Deux regimes de fous”; presumably called something like Making an end of judgement in “2 Regimes of madness” or similar).
Philosophy participates in this combat of course not as a “power” but as a “guerrilla” (see the very short forward of “Pourparlers”). States, for example, are powers and don’t do combat. They don’t do war as such, they do police actions. It remains difficult to understand how this notion of combat coheres with other positions of Deleuze, which seem rigorously “objectivist” but I think this does cohere in the context of a radical immanence.
Daniel, I think, illustrated this with his invocation to his classes: you don’t have to agree, just don’t object, the problem with objections being that they are appeals to authority, i.e. to being right (which Seth characterised in the podcast so neatly), not part of the practice of making concepts.
(It’s really interesting listening to his seminars to see how good he is at working in a group, explicating very carefully his “argument” term for term and integrating interjections from auditors. I recommend looking at least at translations of transcripts from the seminars, e.g.: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html , particularly on Spinoza)
The difficult thing to extricate from all this is the notion of critique as something with a positive value for Deleuze. Different problem. Anyone?
2. As to 1000 Plateaus being less coherent, systematic, wilder etc than What is Philosophy:
I think there must be a way in which the collection of concepts and phenomena in 1000 plateaus is different to a set of strictly random conjunctions. The book is a different kind of system and on the other hand it shows how all books tend to have this kind of structure – that you can read them and indeed do read them in different directions. Perhaps 1000 Plateaus is readable like this:
The chapters are fronted with dates, which situate the conceptual work in each chapter in connection to definite points in history. If thinking takes place in a plane of immanence which it at the same time gives place to, i.e. generates, then the book shows us how particular philosophical problems occur within historical contexts and at the same time can be reapplied to other contexts. Somewhere or other, Deleuze makes reference to this in the case of someone in the 1990s saying that they are a Platonist. This would mean they have a way of making use of Platonic concepts that makes these concepts pertinent to current problems. So the book is providing on the one hand the contexts, which make specific concept work concretely and inviting us at the same time to find others ways of making concrete uses of the concepts relevant to our situations. This avoids to a certain degree the problem of having to decide whether bits of theory work are either subjective and particular or objective and universally applicable.
3. What does infinite speed of concepts mean?
Not sure, but I have an idea what one aspect of it could be, if you’ll bear with me:
A concept consists of separate components which have to be thought all at once. That would mean quite literally travelling between all of them at once at infinite speed, i.e. being at all of them at the same time although they are apart from one another and different from one another. In the above mentioned seminars on Spinoza he talks about (Spinoza 02/12/1980 unfortunately only in French or Spanish translation, but all Americans read Spanish don’t they?) a new development in book 5 of the Ethic, whereby certain ideas come precipitously, suddenly, without a gradual build up. The way Deleuze himself does a seminar is that he very gradually develops thoughts moving carefully from one term to the next, explicating everything bit for bit. If we at some point start to grasp the larger interconnection of all these terms and their local joints then maybe this could be spoken of as a movement at infinite speed. There is also the notion of intuition in Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics, (an excellent little book which would be good for a podcast – I’d love to hear you on it anyway), which is a simultaneous grasp of something in its individual nature as a unity made up of all the little bits of relative, perspectival knowledge und perception we have accumulated of it; not as the mere aggregation, but rather as a single synthesis, like a flash, as a single impression; THAT’S Hector, THAT’S Paris (the city), which would also imply infinite speed of travel between different parts.
4. Just one more thing, sorry for taking up so much space:
There is a way Spinoza can be read as having a theory of immanence like Deleuze, so that the pupil can be made to harmonise with his teacher after all.
God in Spinoza is Nature, is the unity of everything, not a principle outside of it making it possible or holding it together. As a didactic crutch for myself I thought of God as a ground from which individuals (modes) surge up, expressing God’s essence in their particular way while remaining precisely part of the single mass, the single body of all of nature, i.e. remaining joined to it. You can think of the mass as being some dark sticky substance if you like the image – treacle perhaps.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion. Dylan’s short comparison to quantum physics I found really exciting, amongst much else. Here in Germany Deleuze suffers the fate of being not taken seriously by philosophers and not read by them und being read by cultural studies people but not taken particularly seriously by them in the fact that it is philosophy, is striving for coherence, rigour, “importance” and so on, and not just pissing about at random (just as Pollock was doing anything but pissing about at random, as I’m sure Daniel will agree).
if you enjoy this kind of speculative metaphysics give Shaviro a whirl:
https://archive.org/details/ShaviroSpecCriteria230513