All I have really wished to say, I think, when evoking the term “object” or “thing”, is that beings are differance. This is the sense of the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation. As Jean-Luc Nancy so nicely puts it, “being is or entrances the existent” (The Sense of the World, 27). Or again,
…that which is neither property nor a substance– the act or as-act of being-as-act –cannot be produced. Nor does it produce itself, not having the resources of a subject (for it is an agent, identical with its action, not a subject). It “is produced” in the remarkable sense of “taking place,” “happening”… “[C]reation deconstructed yeilds the being-as-act of existence, along with its differance.” (27 – 8)
Differance is the simultaneous coming-to-presence of beings and their withdrawal. It is the deferral of presence and presencing. And this is precisely what the relation between virtual proper being and local manifestation is. Things are these processes of differance. Beings are like blooming flowers, yet are blooms that always hold themselves in reserve, such that there will never be any final presence, completion, or parousia. And this differance has no need of God or a subject to take place. Being blooms in and of its own accord. Nor is there any eschatology, teleology, or final point where being coincides with itself, exhausting withdrawal.
Larval Subjects . 
November 2, 2011 at 12:39 am
Neat! I respond.
November 2, 2011 at 3:54 pm
Nice. I find the links between your work in OOO and (for want of a better expression) a metaphysically inflected ‘Derrideanism’ intriguing.
November 2, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Hi Levi,
Thanks for this post. I’m curious about how you would navigate Laruelle / Meillassoux’s contribution around the critique of the notions you set forth above.
I can imagine them saying: “The Being you are talking about here is necessarily a mixture that still includes an image of the subject as differance. This is then pushed onto being itself. It reproduces deleuze and derrida’s errors. What does Being look like neither as withdrawal or presencing of an Absolute One but instead as the Unilateralization of a Radical One?”
How do you respond to L / M?
November 2, 2011 at 4:33 pm
Thomas,
I honestly just don’t understand Laruelle well enough to comment on his style of critique (I don’t personally see how he escapes it or avoids falling into a night where all cows are black). As for Meillassoux, I think he’s up to something different than Laruelle.
November 2, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Hi Levi,
I really appreciate this honesty and intellectual integrity. I myself am struggling with their respective contributions.
While they certainly are up to different things I see both of their work revolving around a key notion of indifference. This is radical to me. Instead of a synthesis of difference (no matter how asymmetric it may be), both of them posit an entity that retains a radical indifference to the synthesis of difference – for Laruelle this is the One, for Meillassoux this is Being (as indifferent from the copropriation of being and thought).
I think without needing to understand the details of this, that this still remains important to consider. For while philosophies of difference are preoccupied with re-mainders (that which remains after a synthesis of difference), so called post-continental thought seems to move in the direction of the pure mainder (that which is indifferent to the synthesis of difference itself).
I see both Meillassoux and Laruelle as going in this direction. I see this as important because what is at stake to OOO is similar to what Brassier claims of Deleuze: that his notion of repetition retains the form of psychic individuation. This is just a specific critique, but the more general critique is that Difference/Differance retains a subject-individuation at the heart of the image of Being. If this is true, then objects of OOO are actually traces of this subject-individuation. This accounts for the critique of OOO and the notion of withdrawal as subjective traces imposed on objects. This is why moving forward and dealing with this critique head on feels urgent and important to me.
Your thoughts?
-Tom
November 2, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Hi Thomas,
I’m not sure I understand the relationship to thought or a subject here. When Laruelle or Meillassoux talk about indifference they’re talking, as you know, about indifference to thought. I don’t think they’re talking about the absence of difference as such (though it’s hard to say with Laruelle’s real). When I say that the being of objects is differance, I am not making a claim about the relationship between a subject and an object, nor a synthesis. Differance is something that entities do regardless of whether or not anyone is there to witness it and regardless of whether any other objects exist. These are processes of auto-differentiation and auto-differentiation. Flowers bloom without the aid of anyone to witness them and have infrared patterns even if there are no other beings to witness these patterns. I personally feel that Brassier is a bit unfair to Deleuze in his discussion of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s account of concepts. Deleuze and Guattari do indeed talk about how concepts auto-posit an object, but that need not entail that objects are dependent on thought to exist. All it means is that concepts effect a selection within the buzzing, blooming confusion and that other selections are possible. By contrast, in the first chapter of Difference and Repetition, “Difference In Itself”, Deleuze develops a concept of difference that isn’t dependent on thought, a subject, or conceptuality where auto-differentiation takes place in being. As I recall, this goes unmentioned in Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. I try to disentangle all of this in the third and fourth chapter of The Democracy of Objects, where the third chapter deals with the being of objects independent of other objects and the fourth deals with the inner world of objects as they relate to other objects.
November 2, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Hi Levi,
I Agree – it doesn’t appear to me that they are talking about the absence of difference as such.
I would like to read what you have already written about this and then I will get back to you about this in more details. Though I think what you have written is enough to show why their thought still is pertinent to this idea.
You say two things I would like to comment on: “Differance is something that entities do regardless of whether or not anyone is there to witness it and regardless of whether any other objects exist. ”
and: “… the fourth deals with the inner world of objects as they relate to other objects.”
I think this is where the critique applies. L/M would say perhaps that “Objects don’t present themselves or withdraw – instead they simply differentiate. The two-level theory whereby there are actualized objects and virtual proper being is where the trace of the subject comes into being itself, or here, the image of objects. Even if this being is considered Flat or immanently, this flatness is really the One in disguise, since it relates proper beings to virtual beings. – This makes it a relative-absolute, rather than a radical notion of the One. This relative-absolute One IS the image of the subject imposed upon the thought of objects. The phrase – the inner world of objects – lends itself to the confusion of Difference (as subject position) and Difference (as what an Object is). [or differenTiation and DifferenCiation as Deleuze would say.]”
I appreciate your continued dialog with me around this. This point feels crucial since I see it as the fault line between OOO and many other thinkers.
Warmly
-Tom
November 2, 2011 at 6:02 pm
Thomas,
Virtual proper being isn’t a One, but is a discrete half of each entity, i.e., there isn’t, in my framework, a non-individuated one that then becomes differentiated. There are just individual entities. I don’t see how it contains the trace of the subject within it. All it means is that entities always harbor potentials that aren’t actualized in properties of the entity at that particular point in time. The potential energy of a taughtly drawn spring isn’t a potential that the subject doesn’t witness, but is a property of the spring itself and a potential for the spring to act regardless of whether anyone discerns it.
November 2, 2011 at 6:16 pm
I think there is a misunderstanding here, The way I understand the One is what relates virtual proper being to actual entities, not as a substratum.
Do you see what I mean here? The one is not ascribed to virtuality, but to the relation between the virtual and the actual. It is more what we would could univocity. This “bridge” for Laruelle and Meillassoux is correlationist.
I’m curious about the example of a spring is that here potential energy is extensive because it is an unactualized possibility rather than an intensive virtual proper being. There is an easy slippage here into possibility as an unactualized actuality.
The question comes back to a “un-actualized for whom?” What recognizes this potential? What must posit it in being itself? When a spring is drawn down energy is added to the system and then it is constrained to actualize the dissipation of this energy (it is “contained” through a blockage). This is also why objects don’t fall from high places even though there is a potential there through gravitational force. This potential energy idea to me is distinct from the idea of virtuality which posits intensive forces at play which are not the “blockages” so much as what “Adds” energy to the system in the first place.
I’m just cautioning against a conflation between potential energetics as an example of virtual proper being.
Out for lunch, more soon,
-Tom
November 2, 2011 at 8:41 pm
Hi Thomas,
I’m still not sure what you’re referring to as the One. Within the framework of my ontology there is no One of Being because there is no uni-verse or single substance that gathers everything up into a single totality. There are only worlds, with the emphasis on the plurality. Moreover, there’s no need of something to relate virtual proper being to actual entities because each entity already is this unity of virtual proper being and actuality. Thus, for example, there is my cat here that has this particular virtual dimension and this particular actuality. Over there is a rock that has this particular virtuality and this particular actuality. The virtuality of my cat and the rock is not the same virtuality. They are two entirely distinct entities and two entirely distinct virtualities. In other words, unlike Deleuze’s concept of the virtual (as interpreted by Badiou and DeLanda) there is not a single plane of the virtual that is then divided up into discrete actual entities. There is only discrete actual entities each of which has a virtual dimension and an actual dimension. The question “unactualized for whom?” is a thoroughly correlationist question. Actualization of a quality, property, or shape is not something that happens for someone or a spectator. Rather it is something that happens to an entity. Potential is a real feature of entities, something that really resides in entities, not something that is hidden from a spectator’s gaze. Nor do I distinguish between something like potential energy in the case of the spring and something else called “virtual proper being”. The virtual proper being of an entity just is these real features of an entity such as for example the potential energy stored in the spring. That potential energy is not dependent on a spectator in any way to be there, it is not something for us, but rather it is a real feature of the spring itself regardless of whether anyone exists to recognize it. It would be odd to suggest that someone must recognize something for something to be a real feature of a being.
November 2, 2011 at 8:54 pm
I see.
The comment about there not being a single plane of immanence clarifies things for me. I admit to conflating your position with Deleuze’s here. When DOO comes out as a book I will inform myself more directly with your position (I can’t bring myself to read such a long text on a screen).
I am curious then what relates different objects to different objects in your ontology. It is this problem that comes closest to the contemporary problem of the One. I have the sneaking suspicion you will say: objects themselves.
Also – “Actualization of a quality, property, or shape is not something that happens for someone or a spectator. Rather it is something that happens to an entity.” – I fail to see how qualities (especially the extensive ones you mention) don’t already imply a subject since to me the qualitative aspects of a being are already “sensual objects.” I can’t see how the actualization you speak of is not an “active synthesis” inside of some subject-like entity.
I am still uncomfortable with the idea of the virtual-actual combination in objects themselves.
I also can’t seem to see the example of a spring as anything other than something in a dynamic completely actualized tension for which there is no need for a notion like the virtual. When you say: “Nor do I distinguish between something like potential energy in the case of the spring and something else called “virtual proper being”.” – this actually worries me, since there is a clear difference to me between something like potential energy (and the examples you list), and what is proper to the notion of the virtual (which must, by definition, deal with something distinct from potential).
Nevertheless, I am intrigued to see where you go.
-Tom
November 2, 2011 at 11:05 pm
Hi Tom,
I’ll leave you to take a look at the book as these are all issues I’ve addressed at length elsewhere. As for what you say about quality, I’m not sure why anyone would suggest that the oxidation of rust in a metal, for example, has any dependence on a subject, spectator, or involves an active synthesis in some way. Rust is a quality or a local manifestation that belongs to the metal itself. No one need perceive for the rust to exist and take place. I’m not sure why we need some sort of One in order for objects to relate. Objects interact just fine with each other without some underlying substance or substratum as a One that contains or subtends them all. Some folks find the idea of the One or an interconnection of all things beautiful– I see it as a horrific carry over of theology, a variant of transcendental narcissism, and as a key source of fascistic/totalitarian desires, but that’s just me –but it explains too much. People and animals suffer precisely because it isn’t the case that everything is related. For example, hunger is the absence of a relation.
November 2, 2011 at 11:37 pm
Levy,
Fair enough. Thank you for engaging with me. There are a few loose ends raised in this last entry I want to tie up for closure.
The way I see it, the oxidation of Iron to iron oxide has nothing to do with qualities. It has to do with differentials regarding electron exchange and the intensive “qualities” of this system. The “qualities” you mention in your examples are extensive in my book, and therefore imply a subject. Rust doesn’t “belong to the metal itself” since rust is already a passage between two objects, namely electrons between oxygen and iron. This is clear because “rust” is only a fairly “loud” example of oxidation, itself a generalized form of this intensive process. Therefore, rust is not at all a quality that belongs to the metal, but a potential inherent in any electron-transferable object.
It should be clear that I am not saying that it is necessary for an observer to see this rust. Your defense is for someone else. I am saying that the notion of quality needs to be differentiated into extensive and intensive, and the examples you choose strike me as extensive, hence already imply a subject in their determination.
The last point illustrates may betray this slightly in bringing up hunger as a quality of some sort of manifestation of non-relation. – “hunger is the absence of a relation.” – I think it is far too simplistic a determination Hunger itself is entirely a subjective quality that is a signal of a certain state of an organism. Hunger’s a priori (the reason why we are hungry at all) itself implies relationality, both with regard to a telos of free energy capture, and to the evolutionary history of entrenchments that lead to nutritional requirements. Hunger can completely be stimulated by relation, seeing someone else eat food for instance.
November 3, 2011 at 12:57 am
Tom seems to getting at a problem I keep having with OOO’s positions against materialism. They often come down to an ethical judgment for a more lively and interesting world, implicating the displaced subject of the philosophical decision Tom invokes via Laruelle (I’m hazy on much that Francois says, but his argument here is pretty worthwhile). This is owned up to in Harman’s characterization of his project as “weird realism” in contrast with “dull realism” a few years ago and the continually restated dislike for philosophical stances that would seek to explain too much.
Along those lines, Object-Oriented ethics can be valuable (I find it certainly makes me grapple with the ethical implications of my own thinking), but I worry that it fails to routinely stage a working ethical position in the political situations with which you identify work.
For instance: If hunger is to be admonished or respected as the absence of a relation, irreducible to a manifestation of inadequate caloric intake and muscle loss as well as kept from becoming concrete abstractions in the indexes of urban and developing world food deserts and inadequate relief efforts, what does that thought compel beyond an art of starvation, the aesthetics of aching, gurgling, distended bellies and emaciated limbs?
I should note that I would by no means suggest that this ethical side encompasses everything OOO produces, just many of its attempts to justify its efforts to distinguish itself from materialism.
November 3, 2011 at 1:12 am
Joshua,
My position is a materialism, so I’m not sure what your claiming with regard to onticology’s stance against materialism. I don’t understand how you’re drawing the implications you are about hunger. The whole point of that example is not to glorify hunger, but to find ways to create a relation so that people don’t have to go hungry. What I’m pointing out is that the “everything is interconnected” crowd overlooks basic things like people starve and live in poverty precisely because they aren’t connected to the things they need.
November 3, 2011 at 1:18 am
Thomas,
This isn’t even an accurate reading of Deleuze. In Deleuze “intensive” doesn’t mean “ontological” and “extensive” mean “subjective”. The extensive is for Deleuze a product of the intensive. “Extensive” just means “spatial”. For example, the final form that a crystal takes after it has been generated. There’s an intensive or energetic difference that passes through a supersaturated solution (intensive difference) that generates extensive forms (the crystalline shape). That crystalline shape is a set of qualities.
November 3, 2011 at 1:29 am
And Joshua,
I gotta say, between your comments here and your remarks over at Bogost’s blog, you have completely mischaracterized both of our positions both on ontology and ethics. Perhaps you should sit down and read what people actually say before jumping into a discussion. For example, in our work on McLuhan, both Bogost and I are defending the materiality of media and the difference that materiality makes against attempts to reduce media to content. Yet over at Bogost’s blog you said that we were ignoring things like mediums. Both of us have written extensively on this very thing both on our blogs and in print. Here you claim that I reject materialism, when I have written extensively here and elsewhere defending materialism. You also attribute a thoroughly bizarre ethical philosophy to me (“we should champion hunger!”) when I’ve never suggested anything remotely like this. Finally you suggest that I defend my position based on the thesis that we “need a weird realism that multiplies entities”) when, you know, I’ve actually developed arguments for the existence of objects, why they cannot be reduced to our concepts of them, why they exist at many different scales, etc. It’s as if you’ve heard a few vague things about OOO and then proceed from there without bothering to read anything. Go to the side bar and do a search for either “materialism” or “McLuhan” and see what comes up. You’ll find quite a bit.
November 3, 2011 at 1:43 am
This dialog is a great deal of fun, and I thank both of you. Still, both of you seem closer to Badiou than what I thought was at issue in Deleuze. In The Clamor of Being — a line lifted from the end of D&R — B wishes to characterize D as a proponent of the One and himself of the extant multiple (related to the notion of things in ooo?). But when he cites Deleuze’s response (that he paraphrases without clear citation) he “quotes” D as saying “the virtual, in its chaotic form, is absolute pre-predicative givenness, the non-philosophic presupposition of all philosophic thought”(46). This postulate I think does not call upon the One — at least as that capitalized notation is usually used – but only the opening of becoming in whatever way it hic & nunc becomes out of its ever-differing mobility (the stasis of the term “difference” is I think a disability). To the degree that — as perhaps in Levi’s allusion to rust — we freeze that opening, that power, into a formal characterization, we are already in representation and ideality no less so because it alludes to a scientific “fact.” This strikes me not as a post-human or ecologically neutral modality but rather is founded in the ideology and history of science and its operational category of the objective in which subjects deny their subjectivity exactly as they act in the service of extant discourses of established power. The notion of the possibility of abstraction in judgment, of its purity, has always accompanied the exercise of control from those who have overcome the weakness of more “limited subjectivities.” Clearly, the general political tenor and intention here is liberal and democratic but it participates, I think, in the progressive enlightenment project and its sense of the trans-personal progressive. It may be however that it is the hubris of that notion more than anything else which destroys the planet by belaying the encounter with difference at hand through its expectations of a future system that can meet those demands better in some conjuncture not yet attained, the mythology of the presence to come. This is not I hope a return to Berkeley where we hope for divinity’s intervention in a world rendered otherwise inscrutable but rather the opposite: a call for action that prioritizes the claims of the coming into being at hand with an interventionist humility that sees the “self” as an epiphenomenon of its current embedding. In that mode, the locality in which the “self” appears as its relatednesses is the only ground of action.
———————
BTW, all this is said too fast and likely with too much provocation but not totally without excuse. This format allows little relative to the size of the problems that appear. If one has other axioms, there is no space to tease them out from the egg.Still, here as everywhere what forms the more or less tacit notions of what is the case is central to the discussion in its most elaborated and non-foundational discussion. In short, if this comment is more trouble than it is worth, I apologize in advance. For me, this blog is one of the best philosophical sites on the web, more alive to possibility and representative of growth than any other I know. While I hardly ever fully agree with the central lines given, I am thrilled by the flow and feel over and over my debt. Thanks.
November 3, 2011 at 1:54 am
Levi,
I should have been precise and said the distinctions are drawn between OOO/Onticology and other materialisms more of the Meillassoux or Brassier varieties. My questioning of the ethical premise of OOO/Onticology and its subjective implications, however, still stands (though you’ve said you’re not for commenting on Laruelle at the moment, so I just bring it up as an endorsement of Tom’s line of inquiry).
In reference to hunger, I meant to suggest that hunger is in a constant relationship to desperate organs, inadequate social infrastructure, and cultural models ranging from the ascetic to the gourmand, and so nothing seems to be explained or resolved by positing it as a remote a object.
November 3, 2011 at 1:55 am
Levy,
I’m frustrated because I don’t feel seen or understood in your characterization of my claims, and also I’m noticing that you didn’t respond to anything I wrote, but rather sidestepped it with your comment about my supposed misinterpretation of Deleuze.
If my memory serves me, in Deleuze, an extensive quality is NOT spatial, but space is one form of extensive quality. Extensive qualities being qualities that can be divided and still retain their nature. This applies to spatial qualities as well as other qualities that bear divisibility, divisibility being that which can be reduced without remainder.
It is true, and I am aware that the intensive/extensive distinction does can exist without subjectivity. I believe you are mistaking my distinction between the intensive / extensive with the virtual / actual. Intensive qualities DO produce extensive qualities, but the virtual does NOT produce the actual. They coexist and the movement can be oversimplified as a kind of “bidirectional” co-necessity. I am aware of this.
What IS deleuzian, and what I do not at all believe I am mistaken about, is that these extensive qualities are conceived through “concepts” instead of “ideas.” – This is why Deleuze complains about the aesthetic being founded upon what can be sensed, and points out that it is the transcendental use of the faculties that matter for a conception of being, not the qualities given to a subject. What constitutes the conceptual is representation, and what constitutes representation is good / common sense’s apprehension of extensive qualities. This is what I am saying. My imaginary critique still applies.
This DOES map onto the ontic / ontological distinction in which Being is either thought with regard to its representative extensities, sensible qualities, or intuitions on the one hand, and its intensive differentiations on the other.
Clarifying this, I do not believe I am mistaken in this understanding. And I do not see a response to my previous points that critique your characterization of certain qualities as extensive (or at the very least “trapped in subjective qualities.”).
-Tom
November 3, 2011 at 2:19 am
I should have waited to reply, it seems.
I want to assure you, I’ve read quite a lot of what OOO and associated parties in speculative realism have produced. I would resent the implication, but I am fresh to commenting on the philosophy so I am almost certainly playing too loose with terms that are still tender from being wrestled over – I am sincerely sorry if that is the case.
To again risk being too abrupt, since you brought it up, I think you and Ian are at risk of conflating materiality and materialism when it comes to media in a way that does not hold up under some of the demands of your respective philosophical projects or the auspices of media theory. It is the emphasis on materiality and mediums, not your ignoring them (your impression here, again, might be due to my wording on Ian’s blog), which I think destroys the possibility of thinking media as anything but the plurality of medium (which is probably contrary to your wishes). I sincerely look forward to being proven wrong on this account because I am myself split over those divisive concerns.
November 3, 2011 at 2:22 am
Deleuze (or maybe Guattari) once said that his philosophical corpus was more readily understood by those who took his images literally, rather than metaphorically. It occurs to me, after reading this thread, that while object-oriented theory doesn’t make the same ‘figurative’ gesture embodied in Deleuzean thought, the principle for interpretation is similar. When I say ‘hyperrelationality’, I mean the idea that everything is interconnected, intertwined with(in) the being of everything else to form a unified, undifferentiated whole. When Timothy Morton says ‘hyperobject’, he means an object that eludes the spatiotemporal grasp of any single object or locus. When you discuss ‘virtuality’ and ‘actuality’, you refer to the manifestation of an object’s qualities at a given locus, in the case of the former, and potential (powers) retained by an object across loci, in the case of the latter. I’m reducing a little, but that’s the gist, and it’s not hard to understand.
Threads like this pique my interest because they reveal how counterintuitive object-oriented thought is, even for those who claim otherwise. At the same time, it’s elegant in its simplicity, unless one tries to recuperate objectal ideas within the realm of human relation or cognition, thereby anthropocentrizing object-oriented claims–a metaphysical oxymoron, if ever there was one.
November 3, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Joshua,
I have not made the claim that hunger is an object. That’s a beast of your own making. Obviously hunger is a state some objects occasionally possess (living beings). A state is not an object but a property of an object. States cannot exist independemt of the objects in which they occur. I’m making the very obvious point that people go hungry because they lack access to other objects, namely food. In other words, they are not related to something they need to sustain themselves in a particular way. This example is an ethically and politically tinged way of demonstratjng both that not everything is related to everything else and that we need to examine both these lack of relations and relations that function in assemblages.
November 3, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Thomas,
I did not sidestep your questions. If they are based on confusions then those confusions need to be clarified. Deleuze is quite clear that the process of actualization in which extensities are engendered is a genesis of qualities and species. Tpyou’re conflating two distinction issues. One issue is the manner in which good and common sense are blind to the virtual altogether, instead engaging with the actual/extensive alone where difference is cancelled (cf. Chapter 5 of DR). This is an epistemic issue. Another issue issue is the process of actualization itself where a passage from the virtual to the actual takes place and extensities are engendered. The latter is an ontological issue. That genesis of qualities and species in the extensive takes place regardless of whether any subject witnesses it or is involved. I deal with all of this in great detail in my study of Deleuze’s ontology, Difference and Givenness.
November 3, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Levi & Dan,
Levi,
My understanding is that the genesis of extensity is due to a transcendental repetition (when repetition “founds” a new level / dimension and thus “covers” over the lower dimensions and seems to cancel their difference), and that this itself is due to actualization. This ontological issue you speak of around extensity and intensity is due to repetition, which of course takes place without observing “subjects.” But Deleuze does call these contractions “contemplations” and attributes them to larval subjects I know you are familiar with. To disregard these “little subjects” would strike me to have to be a conscious departure from Deleuze. Do you?
For my reading of Deleuze, it is not so clear that there is a clear distinction between what you are calling the epistemic issue (which I translate as when all of this becomes relevant to human active syntheses), and the ontological issue. The little joys, little perceptions, the 1000 orders of repetition to me make this so called “confusion” mandatory – a kind of panprotoexperientialism.
Enter in so called higher levels of subjectivity and the common/good sense apprehension of these extensities – and now we are in what you call the epistemic issue. My point is that these are not somehow “separate” from each other because a “passion for repetition” and the contraction of difference accounts for the covering of intensities.
I’m letting go, but am just advising caution around what seems to me a hasty description of qualities as properties of objects, which seems ontologically unnecessary to me.
Dan,
I am not at all invoking Badiou here, though I understand your confusion, because Badiou makes a similar critique (but one I don’t find as convincing as Laruelle’s).
I am invoking Laruelle, for whom any mixing of a transcendental (virtual) and an empirical (actual) and the so called relation between these (univocity) is an “impure mixture” which makes it impossible for a radical immanent One to exist.
I saw a similar “mixture” in Levi’s conception of objects regarding their virtual proper being and their local manifestation – which led me to be curious about if Levi has actively dealt with Laruelle’s critique of Difference/Differance. Since this entry started with a metaphysicalization of Derrida’s Differance, I thought this enquiry appropriate.
November 3, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Thomas,
When Deleuze speaks of “contemplations” and “larval subjects” in the second chapter of DR, I think that he’s speaking poetically, not literally. Deleuze, for example, speaks of the flower as composed of “contemplations” of earth, sunlight, water, etc. I don’t think he is literally suggesting that flowers have minds or contemplate things. I think he’s talking about the role all of these nutrients take in the actualization of the flower (just as grapes from one and the same vine will be very different from one year to the next as a result of these environmental differences). Matters are complicated because in the second half of chapter two Deleuze does give an account of psychic individuation and repetition that does involve minds. But mind is only a subspecies of being, not a form of being operative in all being. There is natural repetition, extensity, and actualization as well that generates species and qualities and that has no need of subjects or minds to take place.
November 3, 2011 at 3:20 pm
Hi Levi,
I’m glad we’ve reached this point because we’ve hit that fundamental difference in our readings that separates our understandings. This clarity is relieving for me.
For me, Deleuze is being entirely literal here. The whole interpretation of what Repetition is, is at stake here.
Let us look at the example of an Eye:
Deleuze: “An animal forms an eye for itself by causing scattered and luminous excitations to be reproduced on a privileged surface surface of its body. For there is indeed an activity of reproduction which takes as its object the different to be bound; but there is more profoundly a passion of repetition, from which emerges a new difference (the formed eye or the seeing subject). Excitation as a difference was already the contraction of an elementary repetition. To the extent that the excitation becomes in turn the element of a repetition, the contracting synthesis is raised to a second power…” (DR, 96)
Deleuze shows that there are several orders of repetition here:
1 .Excitation as a difference is already an elementary repetition of the excited molecule. That is, the photoreceptive molecule already “contracts” this difference.
2. When this excitation itself becomes the element of another repetition it is raised to a second power, the Eye.
When Deleuze says that the eye itself is a form of contracted light he is not being poetic, but entirely literal because it “doubles” the light into a higher order.
A flower is only different in HOW it constitutes the repetition of light, that is, in how in contracts light. This “higher ordering”, “this “doubling” Deleuze very explicitly refers to AS consciousness.
Deleuze: “It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something. It is the double of this something, and everything is conscious because it possesses a double, even if it is very far off or very foreign.” (DR 220)
This to me is not a naive panpsychism as Brassier claims, but the complete inverse of it – a showing that consciousness itself is nothing BUT this doubling, but this repetition. It doesn’t mean that plants “contemplate” but rather that the contraction of difference itself IS an elementary contemplation. That when we “really contemplate” we are doing nothing qualitatively different than contracting difference to a new order of repetition, just like a plant does with light, air, and soil.
To reduce these statements to poetry to me completely misses the radicality of Deleuzian repetition.
November 3, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Thomas,
You’re right, I don’t share this reading of Deleuze. If these remarks– which are pretty sparse and incidental in DR –were to be taken literally he would be worthless in my view and should be thrown out.
November 3, 2011 at 4:24 pm
As an additional point, however, even if we do take the panpsychist reading this doesn’t lead to the correlationist critique that you’re suggesting. Correlationism is the thesis that no subject can be thought apart from an object and no object can be thought apart from a subject. Deleuze’s “consciousness” in these sorts of passages is not a subject, but, as he repeatedly emphasizes, an a-subjective transcendental field without reflexivity or self-positing. Subjects can be precipitated from this field, but need not be precipitated at all. This is clear from his account of the genesis of subjects both at the end of chapter 5 in DR and in the static and dynamic genesis chapters of The Logic of Sense. In other words, the question “for whom” is this a quality conflates this pure a-subjective stream of consciousness with an individuated subject. But the two are entirely different things.
All that said, I prefer to sever Deleuze from any panpsychist reading of his thought, instead adopting the sort of materialist reading DeLanda adopts. I think there’s far more evidence for this reading of his thought across the entire corpus of his work than for the panpsychist reading.
November 3, 2011 at 4:38 pm
Levi,
Fascinating. I feel complete here. I’m certainly not willing to throw out these comments, they strike me as essential – I also don’t find them sparse at all but essential to Deleuze’s ideas… Moreso I see them as the only contemporary post-humanist refutation of epiphenomenalism that still deals with the “hard problem” of consciousness. It explains what we call emergent properties, and can even be used as a real definition of objects.
I Enjoyed this, thanks for your engagement and time.
Warmly
-Tom
November 3, 2011 at 4:49 pm
In Difference and Givenness I actually take the panpsychist route. I came to reject panpsychism however as I couldn’t see any good argument to support it or to establish that rocks, for example, have some minimal consciousness. Additionally, I came to believe that there were a number of things with human cognition that it just couldn’t explain.
November 3, 2011 at 4:51 pm
Almost there – Regarding post 29:
I disagree with this characterization. Deleuze certainly does denote a transcendental field that is a-subjective, but to think this is all he determines fosters the misreading that turns him into an acosmisit in which consciousnesses aren’t “real.” They are real, as syntheses. In fact they are necessary to synthesize and contract difference. Without them we only have difference-with-concept. Repetition ensures difference happens without concept. When Deleuze invokes the metaphysical surface, or the a-subjective field, he is doing so in order to effectuate the passage beyond all blockages that “extensive determinations” create – a univocal effectuation where all dimensions flow beyond what their “little subjects” can endure. This is his notion of death drive as well. This a-subjective field is from the perspective of the plane of immanence. It is not at all merely what Deleuze determines as real.
Again, this is not panpsychism, but new form of panprotoexperientialism. They are different.
Again I am not saying these little consciousnesses are human consciousnesses. My “for whom” does not refer to an experiencing subject, but rather I was trying to emphasize my position that qualities don’t exist except for something else. This goes back to my critique of the notion you present of potentiality. I see it harboring traces of consciousness of subjectivity. You certainly don’t seem to share this view. That is ok.
When you bring things back to a supposed subject needing to observe, I don’t have the sense you are responding to what I am saying. Its not about an observer. I have stated this already above.
We are in several different threads here. My invoking of correlationism was to see your response to the critique I imagined M or L making of your system of objects, which has a virtual dimension and an actualized / local dimension. It is precisely this that, at least laruelle, sees as a trace of the transcendental synthesis and thus missing immanence.
November 3, 2011 at 6:33 pm
Thomas,
Before making a couple comments, I have to wonder why we’re having a discussion about Deleuze when this post is about my claims and ontology. That aside, you write:
You’re conflating terms here. I referred to subjects, not consciousness. For Deleuze there can be consciousness without a subject. In other words, all humans, animals, plants, and bacteria could be destroyed and there would still be, under the panpsychist reading, this pure a-subjective consciousness because this, under the panpsychist interpretation of Deleuze, just is what matter is. Additionally, it simply is not the case that a subject is required for synthesis. This is the whole point of passive synthesis. Passive synthesis is a form of synthesis that takes place automatically within being, not something locked in subjects or done by subjects. Third, under the panpsychist reading it does not follow that they require a “for whom” for qualities to occur to. This conflates pure consciousness with positing consciousness or a relationship between subject and object. Yet Deleuze, drawing on Bergson and Sartre’s account of transcendental and non-positing consciousness is talking about something prior to any positing or “being before or to”. The quality is just a pure luminosity without anyone or anything required to encounter or experience it. This is why there’s no real problem with Deleuze from within Meillassoux’s framework. For Meillassoux the question is whether it’s possible to think a world without humans or subjects. This is exactly what Deleuze does. At any rate, I don’t think I’m missing what you’re saying. I’m saying that the moment you talk about a “for whom” you’re necessarily talking about an observer. Once again, I just can’t speak to the Laruelle. I haven’t found anything I’ve read by him compelling or particularly decisive and don’t feel that he really leads to anything. Out of a principle of charity in reading I assume that this means I must be missing something, but I haven’t seen anyone make a compelling case as to what he gives us and why we should invest the time in him.
November 3, 2011 at 7:11 pm
“Before making a couple comments, I have to wonder why we’re having a discussion about Deleuze when this post is about my claims and ontology.”
I believe this don’t believe there is anything really at stake in Meillassoux and Laruelle. I have made reference to your distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation in almost every post and my sense is that you don’t quite see that this structure of virtual/actual is precisely what Laruelle is critiqueing, and is precisely what Meillassoux would call weak correlationism in which the in-itself exists but is unknowable. A realist reading of Deleuze doesn’t change this in any way. I can only continue to wait for a response to this. But since you don’t see Meillassoux’s weak correlationism as a threat (and keep reducing it to this idea that there needs to be a subject or a consciousness for there to be objects, which is NOT what weak correlationists do, but rather leave traces of subjectivity in objects by making them non-wholly determinable: aka, withdrawal or virtual proper being.
“Passive synthesis is a form of synthesis that takes place automatically within being, not something locked in subjects or done by subjects.”
This idea completely ignores the role repetition plays in contracting difference. Again, a common exclusion in Deleuze readers. When you say “automatically within being” you are forgetting that it is repetition which contracts difference, and this repetition, if it be genuine, must inaugurate a new “dimension” or level of difference. This is what makes intensive differentiation work, and why difference contracts difference… It can’t happen without repetition. For every repetition, Deleuze says repeatedly there are “little subjects” AND “little consciousnesses.” The idea that it happens “automatically” doesn’t give any generative account of why difference differentiates. It does happen “automatically” but not without a contracting synthesis.
“under the panpsychist reading it does not follow that they require a “for whom” for qualities to occur to. This conflates pure consciousness with positing consciousness or a relationship between subject and object”
Again, I don’t know why you are defending yourself against a thesis I am not claiming. You seem to be so triggered by the phrase: “for whom” that you can’t see in what context I am saying it. I’ll say it again, if it doesn’t sink in I’ll let go. I don’t believe any determination of qualities is subjectless, so when you speak of qualities I am led to ask, qualities FOR what. My claim has nothing to do with observers or subjects here. It is rather the claim that IF there are qualities, they are “sensual objects” and not properties of objects.
“The quality is just a pure luminosity without anyone or anything required to encounter or experience it.”
Unless luminosity is speaking of something happening, an event, I would have to understand luminosity as an intensive event of differentials in atoms (again regarding electron transfer in atomic orbitals which gives off light). If luminosity refers to anything else here, I can’t help but read this as a contradiction.
“I’m saying that the moment you talk about a “for whom” you’re necessarily talking about an observer.”
This explains alot of the confusion about what I am saying. The chapter title of DR is: “repetition for-itself.” What I am talking about is the “for-structure” of differentiation. This is completely classical Deleuze here. What deleuze claims is that there ARE for-structures which do not need or have observers. If I have been insisting on the for-structure it is because it is crucial to just about everything Deleuze does in DR, and don’t think it can be ignored unless one is consciously casting it off as detritus. I have not been insisting on the for-structure to justify some sort of believe that there needs to be observers. Rather to show that Deleuze inverts what consciousness and contemplation and subjectivity ARE by showing their elementary and proto processes in elementary repetitions.
“I haven’t seen anyone make a compelling case as to what he gives us and why we should invest the time in him.”
Fair enough. Though it basically comes down to his thesis, which you may not be interested in, that Immanence is made impure by any trace of “something which is accessible / knowable / local” – local manifestation, and on the other hand, “something which eludes this actualization” aka – withdrawal, virtual proper being, whatever. Laruelle claims this “mixture” not only botches immanence but is yet another trace of the subject in the determination of the Real.
Why this is crucial is because what he is essentially claiming is that if there is a virtual proper being and a local manifestation, that this thought can never bring us to the Real because it is in fact a trace of the transcendental synthesis. I think this is fairly powerful and has the capacity to undermine all of OOO that centers around the “dark,” “the withdrawn” or the “virtual” if it is not taken seriously.
November 3, 2011 at 10:41 pm
I think Dan (nr 18) makes an important point. Badiou (intentionally) misreading of Deleuze is quite evident for those who travel daily in his texts, with truncated quotations, etc, etc, etc
There is no “One” in Deleuze: all the beauty and subtlety of the thesis of the univocity of Being is that escapes the double bind (see LS) of a ground that eliminates all difference (Badiou reading) without falling in the reign of the chaos or the multiple (beautiful soul syndrome). The “one” is said only OF difference (I know you often underline the importance of the genitive in Deleuze Levi), which is the role of the eternal return as 3rd synthesis, abandoning a certain exteriority of Spizona substance and stopping the “décalque” of the transcendantal from the empirical still present at the 2nd synthesis (see the Freud example), making the organisation (cosmos) imanent to the desorder (chaos) in the famous chaosmos.
That is why I can´t agree with your reading of the virtual in DOO but to demonstrate it would take much more text – and effort.
As for “panpsichism” I would abdicate the term, it doesn´fit Deleuze mundividence. But we shall not forget that for him “chaque chose pense et est une pensée” (DR, chap. 4): by this we mustn´t think that every rock thinks but that every rock is the embodiement of an idea, better that the ROCK IS ACTUALLY THE IDEA which doesn´t mean that it thinks but that the distinctions between nature and spirit or matter and memory don´t simply hold anymore – and that is the reason why all the debate of panpsichism around Deleuze seems poorly formulated: why should we extend “cognition” to “inanimate” beings when the letter and the spirit of Deleuze texts simply doesn´t fit those dichotomies?
and why “materialism”, “correlationism”, “idealism”, etc, etc, etc, as ready-made boxes where we pack the singularities of those who never thought in those terms? personally of course, because I can easily imagine the argument of the other side of the trench.
November 3, 2011 at 10:44 pm
and sorry about the discussion of Deleuze in a post meant otherwise!
November 3, 2011 at 10:59 pm
Thomas,
You write:
It’s not a question of “not seeing”, but a question of rejecting the terms of what you’re saying. The dimension of the virtual as I deploy it is not about knowledge. The equation is not:
The equation is rather:
The virtual proper being of an object is a perfectly real property of objects and we can know all sorts of things about the virtual proper being of objects. Indeed, I argue that what we seek to know in objects is not their local manifestations but their powers or capacities, i.e., their virtual proper being. In this regard, the Meillassoux/Laruelle criticism based on knowledge just isn’t relevant here. Hence my reason for ignoring it.
You’re becoming rather rude here in your talk of “sinking in”:
All I can read is your words and when you evoke the term “for whom” you’re necessarily evoking a positing consciousness. Let’s return to how Deleuze develops the distinction between Bergson and Husserl. In Cinema 1 Deleuze criticizes Husserl and the phenomenologists for treating consciousness as being consciousness of something. This is what I have called “positing consciousness”. To positing conscious Deleuze evokes the Bergsonian route of arguing that consciousness is something. In other words, he abandons the idea of “consciousness of” and instead treats consciousness as a pure luminosity that posits nothing. In asking the question “for whom” you’re necessarily remaining within the Husserlian framework of intentionality, positing consciousness, or consciousness of. Within the Deleuzian framework asking the question “for whom” or “for what” doesn’t make any sense because Deleuze’s understanding of consciousness doesn’t have this sort of positing or intentional structure.
This has been my point. These processes for Deleuze do not have to have observers or subjects that posit them. In your use of the language of “for whom” I had understood you to be asking “who witnesses the quality” as if the quality cannot exist without a witness. Now it sounds like you’re not talking about a witness, but about the entity that comes to embody the quality. For example, taking Deleuze’s famous example from The Logic of Sense, if we say “the leaf greens”, green would be the quality whereas the answer “for whom” or “for what” would be “the leaf”. But if this is what you’re saying, I’m unclear why you’re evoking Laruelle’s or Meillassoux’s critique. Meillassoux is not criticizing the idea that something happens to an entity. Rather, Meillassoux is critiquing positing consciousness or our inability to get out of the subject/object relationship, i.e., no object (or quality) without a subject, no subject without an object. Unless Deleuze is making the claim that the leaf only greens for an observer, subject, or witness (and he’s not), then he’s outside the scope of Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism.
I understand Laruelle’s critique quite differently. For Laruelle it is not something like virtual proper being and local manifestation are not the problem. For Laruelle, the problem is that every philosophy is based on a decision that cannot itself be justified and that divides the world into a faktum and a datum. The faktum is a transcendental a priori and the datum the empirical reality to be explained. As a consequence, philosophy, according to Laruelle, only ever finds what it put into the world in the first place. That is, every philosophy, for Laruelle, is an elaborate circularity that only ever interprets the world in terms of itself, never directly encountering the real. In effect, what Laruelle does is generalize Kant’s transcendental deduction as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, showing how something like the circularity Kant unfolds is operative in every philosophy regardless of whether or not that philosophy claims to be idealist. In contrast to this, Laruelle calls for a thought that does not attempt to think the Real but that attempts to think “alongside” the real and where the Real is indifferent to thought and is auto-determining.
Now, there are two reasons that I just don’t find Laruelle very compelling:
First, I think Laruelle is caught up in a performative contradiction. His non-philosophy critiques philosophy for this three-fold structure of decision and for being engaged in circularity, yet Laruelle himself is caught in this very same circularity. In Laruelle’s framework, philosophy is the datum or the empirical element to be explained, the categories of non-philosophy is the faktum or the transcendental a priori, and again and again Laruelle finds the structure of his own thesis in every philosophy he investigates. Pot meet kettle.
Second, if we’re being generous and argue that either a) the first point isn’t a serious charge, or b) Laruelle can respond to this charge in some way, the more serious problem remains that Laruelle’s One, immanence, Real, determination-in-the-last instance, etc., are completely empty concepts. Laruelle’s victory of philosophy is, in my view, a pyrrhic victory and it is a pyrrhic victory because nothing can be said of his One, immanence, Real, or determination-in-the-last-instance because the moment something is said about the Real, One, or Immanence, we’re back in the philosophical logic of circular decision. This is why, in my very first post, I described Laruelle’s world as a night in which all cows are black. No determinations can be made pertaining to the real or one, nothing can be said of these things, we have rather only a scorched ground in which no distinction whatsoever is possible. This is why I say I don’t understand Laruelle. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t get us anywhere but a position of absolute muteness with respect to being and existence. That just doesn’t seem very productive or valuable to me and ergo I take his argument with a grain of salt.
November 3, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Nuno,
I agree with much of what you say here. To expand on your remarks about Ideas here, Deleuze’s “Ideas” are closer to Platonic Ideas than to Lockean Ideas. In Plato, of course, Ideas are not mental entities or things inside the head, but are entities that exist in their own right. In Plato, even if there were not any minds to think the Idea of Justice, even if the world were entirely unjust, even if all sentient beings dies, the Idea of Justice would still exist. In Locke, by contrast, ideas are something in the head. Now the major difference between Deleuze’s Ideas and Plato’s Ideas is that the latter are models and resemble the individuals that incarnate them. By contrast, Deleuze’s Ideas/multiplicities share no resemblance to the entities that incarnate them and are not models but rather generative mechanisms by which these individuals come to be.
You’d have to say a bit more as to where you disagree with my reading of the virtual in The Democracy of Objects. Are you referring to my critique of Deleuze’s account of the virtual? That would be fair. There I am largely responding to a common theme I find in Badiou, Hallward, Protevi, and DeLanda that I find problematic for a variety of reasons. I think alternative readings that avoid my critique of Deleuze’s virtual are possible. Or are you referring to my concept of the virtual. My understanding of the virtual and Deleuze’s aren’t the same, though they share similarities. That’s quite another matter and would be a discussion not of Deleuze, but of the adequacy of the concept that I deploy and whether it is coherent and does the explanatory work that I want it to do.
November 3, 2011 at 11:15 pm
Laruelle seems to stand in that famous night where all the cows are black. Isn´t the power of Deleuze to have penetrated in that realm and showing us that not only it is populated by difference but also that difference immanently organises itself in a system that cannot be confused with a primordial One?
November 3, 2011 at 11:24 pm
thank you for the answer
it´s not your concept of the virtual, but only your reading of Deleuze´s virtual – I would say more but it´s really subtle things disseminated through Deleuze different texts and I don´t want want to transform your wonderful blog in a scholastic space.
And yes, his texts can be such a mess that different readings are always possible – and yours is as usually wonderfully argued.
November 4, 2011 at 12:36 am
Levi, I find it odd that your characterization of Laruelle’s “world as a night in which all cows are black. No determinations can be made pertaining to the real or one, nothing can be said of these things, we have rather only a scorched ground in which no distinction whatsoever is possible.” This places you as a Hegel reading or — relative to OOO — misreading Schelling. Further, I am not sure that the characterization of Laruelle is correct or correctly analogous. While I dislike both his terminology and his syntax (which makes reading him painful and my understanding subject to doubt), I do not think Hegel’s image works well in analogy. The pre-philosophical for L is active and hetrogenious and productive not, as “night,” dark, homogenious, and ungiving. This heterogenious productivity is, however, not captured for him by philosophies of difference as they have thereby already engaged in characterizations that are after this — neither ontic nor ontological — a priori of what I would call differencing. This is not a nothing but a challenge to the assertions of a something with greater specificityt as “givens” that are taken for granted in ignorance or denial of their pre-philosophical antecedents. This position is not beside your original point “All I have really wished to say, I think, when evoking the term “object” or “thing”, is that beings are differance.” If difference is a la L, a posture constructed as a convenience to sublate the relation betwen objects and their generalization then your self-assignment as Hegel is not without an appropriate character but one which is open to other questions. However, I do not think Deleuze is fairly understood by L under his blanket attack and I take it this is part of what Thomas has been saying.
November 4, 2011 at 1:03 am
Dan,
I haven’t been anything lime what you say about the real in Laruelle. All I’ve been able to find is an axiomatic that stipulates that nothing can be said of it (hence his affinity for mysticism). I’m not trying to evoke Hegel here in using his expression, I just think such a conclusion is thoroughly useless and worthless. I am, however, willing to be disabused of this. This impression is based on my limited reading both of Laruelle’s own works and works on Laruelle. No one has yet been able to explain the payoff of the beyond of his non-philosophical critique to me. I loom to philosophies to explain and I just don’t find explanation in Laruelle.
November 4, 2011 at 2:09 pm
Hi Levi,
You Say:
“virtual proper being = power/capacity/potential
local manifestation = property, quality, state
The virtual proper being of an object is a perfectly real property of objects and we can know all sorts of things about the virtual proper being of objects. Indeed, I argue that what we seek to know in objects is not their local manifestations but their powers or capacities, i.e., their virtual proper being”
I see that what you mean by virtual has nothing to do with some expressive ontology, and as such is less susceptible to the Laruellian critique I had enquired about earlier – however a new problem emerges…. Isn’t this distinction arbitrary and merely perspectival? Aren’t an objects’ properties, states, and qualities already its power/potential/capacity? If metal has rusted already (what you are calling quality or state) it has less of a capacity to rust (regarding its chemical equilibrium). Unless what you are calling power has to do with its capacity to relate with other objects, in which case not only is this uknowable until actualized, but cannot be said to be a property “of” the object, but instead a property of the relation between two objects.
Levi: “You’re becoming rather rude here in your talk of “sinking in”:”
Admittedly, I was frustrated with not seeing a response, and then asking why we were talking about Deleuze and not what I had mentionted about virtual proper being. I regret my words seeing that my comments offended you, I could have been more careful. Note taken.
Levi: “In Cinema 1 Deleuze criticizes Husserl and the phenomenologists for treating consciousness as being consciousness of something.”
Without you quoting the passage it is difficult what to make of the notion. Deleuze’s critiques have been so misinterpreted that it is far too easy to make a straw man out of his critiques.
I quote the following passage below to show an incredibly favorable reading by Deleuze on Husserl that deals with what we are talking about.
Read for instance, this passage in LOS (pg 20-21):
“Husserl calls [the dimension in which sense appears for itself] “expression” this ultimate dimension, and he distinguishes it from denoation manifestation, and demonstration. Husserl… rediscovered the living sources of the Stoic inspiration… when Husserl reflects on the ‘perceptual noema’ or the ‘sense of perception,’ he at once distinguishes it from the physical object, from the psychological or ;’lived’ from mental representations and from logical concepts. He presents it as an impssive incorporeal entity, without physical or mental existence… The real tree (denotatum) can burn, be the subject and object of actions, and enter into mixtures. This is not the case, however, for the noema ‘tree.’ There are many noemata or senses for that same denotatum: evening star and morning star are two noemata, that is, two ways in which the same denoatum may be presented in expressions…
When therefore Husserl says that the noema is the perceived such as it appears in presentation, ‘the percieved as such’ or the appearance, we ought not understand that the noema involves a sensible given or quality; it rather involves an ideational objective unity as the intentional correlate of the act of perception. [CRUCIAL]
The noema is not given in a perception… it as an entirely different status which consists in not existing outside the proposition which expresses it… Is that which he calls ‘appearance’ anything more than a surface effect? Could phenomenology be this rigorous science of surface effects?”
It is extremely clear to me here that any “critique” of Husserl does not mean abolishing perceptual noema (as distinct from qualia), nor of bypassing the intentional nature of this consciousness, but by supplementing it with an “ideational objective unity” which is what Deleuze wants to explicitly explore.
Levi: “Within the Deleuzian framework asking the question “for whom” or “for what” doesn’t make any sense because Deleuze’s understanding of consciousness doesn’t have this sort of positing or intentional structure.”
I have quoted passages that show that the repetitive for-structure is crucial in Deleuze’s system. I also am not saying that it is merely positing, as obviously it IS something too. As I’ve shown in the quote above, Deleuze supplements OF with IS, he doesn’t deny the existence of OF, but rather treats it as a repetitive for-structure which.
I want to honor the time you’ve spent engaging with me and those seem to me to be the most important points that I am most curious about your response to.
Thanks,
-Tom
November 4, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Hi Thomas,
I treat your concerns with respect to the issue of virtual proper being and local manifestation in the first chapter of TDO. You are, of course, free to run with that argument or not.
You’ll find the relevant passage in chapter 4 of Cinema 1:
Deleuze takes the second route. This second route is confirmed by everything he writes up until his final published essay, “Immanence: A Life”. The transcendental field is something that precedes any subject and therefore any phenomenon of intentionality. Here it is above all important to read Deleuze’s concept of the transcendental field in terms of Sartre’s Transcendence of Ego and the critique of intentionality he develops there. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze will show how an intentional subject is precipitated out of the transcendental field, not a ground of the transcendental field in his accounts of static logical and ontological genesis and his account of dynamic genesis. He will also give a critique there of that form of philosophy that sees individuation as dependent on either God or a subject (recall from chapter 1 of DR he also makes much of how Kant effectuates the true death of God with his critique of the subject in the paralogisms). In chapter five of DR he provides a similar account of the precipitation of psychic systems and subjects at the very end of the chapter. As Deleuze will write in his final article, “Immanence: A Life…”
Deleuze further remarks,
This is a very condensed version of his critique of Husserl, Kant, and Descartes that he develops in chapter 3 of DR. Yes, Deleuze retains the noema of Husserl in LS, but as impersonal, prepersonal, and independent of any subject or intentionality. Cf., for example, Deleuze’s remarks about “a battle” and how it precedes the subjects caught in it, his account of the fourth person singular, and his emphasis on the it as in expressions like “it rains”. Incidentally, if it’s a period that defines the meaning of a sentence, then this final article, “Immanence: A Life”, thoroughly undermines the panpsychist reading of Deleuze. I’d say more but I have to run off to teach.
November 4, 2011 at 6:51 pm
Levi, to add more grist to your mill I would like to retranslate an extract from “Difference and Repetition” at the bottom of page 75:
“given that contemplation never manifests in action, given that it is always withdrawn … it is easy to forget it”
(NB Paul Patton’s translation is perfectly correct, but made without knowledge of your theoretical terms, as published in 1994)
So Deleuze’s talk about contemplative souls is his way of coming to terms with the withdrawn aspect of objects. I think his contortions, trying to distinguish the self who acts and the little selves who are subjacent to both the subject and the action and which are the contemplations, go in this sense. I don’t know what you think but where Patton makes Deleuze talk about “a contemplative soul adjacent to the subject of the compound action” (p75) Deleuze clearly says “sous-jacente”, subjacent, and I think the resonance of this word is close to the sense of withdrawn (“en retrait”) that he uses a little later, where “adjacent” just suggests juxtaposed. On that interpretation the meaning of the cry “All is contemplation” is synonymous with your cry at the beginning “beings are differance”, and the panpsychist reading is sidelined as figurative placeholder, gesturing towards a more adequate conceptual vocabulary, that you provide.
November 4, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Levi, As always I am grateful for your lucidity and here for the mobilization of specific quotations in support. I remain unsure if I understand Laruelle or if I like him or if he is “right.” Further, I think he is not fully true to Deleuze in his reading. So everything I say here is under a set of contingencies. Still, what I think L is trying to do or say may be important for the project you are realizing and, for me, for other possible takes.
For L, the Deleuzian plane of immanence is made possible I think by a presumed relation with what L calls the One and NTT (Non-Thetic Transcence). One way I understand this is as a kind of tautology: that every system of difference must have an a priori possibility in advance of its articulation. This recognition might be totally uninteresting but it has an affirmative quality about the nature of becoming without limit, margin, or location. What I see here is the necessity of a pre-axiomatic roiling — the swerve everytime/where — and also the possibility of its entering into any version as difference.
As you suggest at the end of #44, Deleuze does capture this with the “it” and also with the indefinite article, “A life,” which hovers, as it were, at its own genesis, its living. For me, this mechanism helps constitute the on-going occasion of its action not as a fixed characterization of difference that falls thereby into the trap of its own inconsistent consistency but as an activity at odds with its own desire for stability. This is very important for me in regards to my understanding and partial hesitancy in regard to your reading — or Nancy’s above — of “thing-ing.”
November 5, 2011 at 7:40 am
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November 5, 2011 at 8:07 am
Great. I posted it in my blog if you don’t mind :
November 5, 2011 at 6:57 pm
To both Levi and Thomas,
I’m enjoying the exchange and am learning much from it – thanks!
Billy
November 5, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Thomas,
I have not come across Laruelle before, trying to place him in context of what I am familiar with when you state…
“Laruelle claims this “mixture” not only botches immanence but is yet another trace of the subject in the determination of the Real.
Why this is crucial is because what he is essentially claiming is that if there is a virtual proper being and a local manifestation, that this thought can never bring us to the Real because it is in fact a trace of the transcendental synthesis.”
This to my mind seems an apt summarization of quasi-trancedental notion of differAnce at play in Derrida’s work, would this be fair?
Billy
November 7, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Dear levi,
regarding your earlier comments regarding the one, would it be fair to deduce that you confine the imaginary to a kind of anthropmorphism whilst holding open the symbolic as going beyound the human- if this q makes sense (im new to lacan).
November 8, 2011 at 11:22 pm
Levi — I’ve done a rough draft translation of Nancy’s book “L’Adoration” into English. It’s a fantastic book. I hope to get to some school so I can go over it with some help and get it out there. Here are some passages on differance I thought you might like. (Excuse the rough edges of the translation)
“The world of existence or of existences is precisely the ensemble of rapports that never make “one” world, and even less a world of objects facing subjects, but – if one stays with this terminology – a world that itself is “subject”: subject, precisely, of the rapports for which it is the general connection. Subject of rapports, that is to say, definitively, the subject that, itself – like any subject –, is rapport and is only this: a being to-, to self/to the other/to the same/to nothing, a being whose whole being partakes of to. In the final analysis, the Destruktion of ontology wanted by Heidegger can be transcribed in this manner: not being any “being,” being designates an act or rather an indefinite complex of acts that constitute the rapports in which even the terms (or subjects) of these rapports would not exist. A rapport: an address, a call, an invitation, a refusal, a rejection, a signal, a desire, an indifference, even, or an avoidance traversing the abundance [foisonnement] of existences. Which exist by exposing themselves like this according to the rapport.
Thus, not the difference between “Being” and the “being,” but this differance that Derrida knew to name – or unname –, which signals that the existent exposes itself, does only that: moving away from itself not from a distance that would differ its final advent, but on the contrary from a proximity whose slender opening puts it in contact with the totality of beings and, in this way, with the infinity of the opening which shares them all and reunites them all. Not reuniting them to anything other than this opening itself: to the opening of the world, to the opening that is the world and about which all we can say is that it tends to adore. That is to say, simply addresses to itself the testimony of existence itself. To finish, what I name here “to adore” means: to decide on existing, to be decided for existence, to turn away from inexistence, from the closure of the world over itself. (A world closed over itself, it’s an acquired Sense, a final End, a world reduced to something, to even less than a pebble.)
(p 103)
At bottom, in order to think this without getting embarrassed by an odd weaving of reason and naïveté, or else without putting faith in the thrall of belief, we must try to think how the “I” is not – that I am not – the sole rapport to myself, punctuated and separated (absolute, in the strict sense), but that I am the totality of rapports, that it’s according to this alone that I can report myself to myself, beginning with language to be sure (beginning with it, or else without establishing an order in seizing the ensemble of language, look, gesture, touch, and all the sensing(s) of other beings, of other “I’s” and others that aren’t “I’s” or that don’t bear witness to this). This would be nothing other than the most serious penetration, I would say almost more serious than normal, into all the thoughts of the distance to self in the rapport to self: the most pregnant being Jacques’, because differance responds to nothing but this, which under this heading one could associate with Deleuze and his “becoming-x” (animal, feminine, imperceptible). The origin of these thoughts are culled from the Hegel of the consciousness of self and its “alienation,” next from the Nietzsche of the illusion of the “subject,” for which Spinoza undoubtedly gave another model, anterior to subjectivity, where the rapport to “God,” that is to say, to the totality of being, consists precisely in “conceiving things under the aspect of eternity” (to take the translation of Pautrat): there, the rapport to self is not an index of identity, but of the pleasure or the joy of this knowledge that accords with the “eternal aspect,” knowledge which is thus also that of our proper eternity and that is indissociable from our community with other humans and with the rest of the world.
If Spinoza can say that “we sense and know of experience because we are eternal,” it’s because this experience is that of our rapport which is only “to self” insofar as it’s to the rest of being and thus to the incommensurable (which Spinoza names “God”), for which we can have joy but not knowledge. By this, we understand that “joy” here is not very different from “faith” as I think we ought to hear it. Or what Spinoza names “intellectual love.”
“Intellectual love,” without a doubt, speaks quite well to the heart [le vif] (if I can say this!) of the problem: how, in what way, do we conjoin “love” and “intellect”? In contemporary terms, I would say: how, in what way, can we understand that the differance of identity is just as well the drive and the desire of the other (of another, of all alterity)? If we know to respond, then we know also how to reduce – a little… – the fracture between the possible thought of our eternity – or immortality – and its impossible sensation or affect. We also know, therefore, how to surmount the opposition between faith and knowledge, that is to say, between faith and belief also.
(p 135)
November 13, 2011 at 2:32 pm
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November 13, 2011 at 3:52 pm
[…] has a post up outlining his thoughts on Derrida. Referring to a post I wrote recently on differance, he writes, the door, in his view, to the “transcendental […]
January 27, 2012 at 3:32 am
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February 10, 2012 at 4:16 pm
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