The Architecture of Theories
At the beginning of his novel Gemini, Michel Tournier writes,
On the twenty-fifth of September 1937, a depression moving from Newfoundland to the Baltic sent masses of warm, moist oceanic air into the corridor of the English Channel. At 5:19 P.M. a gust of wind from the west-southest uncovered the petticoat of old Henriette Puysoux, who was picking up potatos in her field; slapped the sun blind of the Cafe des Amis in Plancoet; banged a shutter on the house belonging to Dr. Bottereau alongside the wood of La Hunaudaie; turned over eight pages of Aristotle’s Meteorologica, which Michel Tournier was reading on the beach at Saint-Jacut; raised a cloud of dust and bits of straw on the road to Plelan; blew wet spray in the face of Jean Chauve as he was putting his boat out in the Bay of Arguenon; set the Pallet family’s underclothes bellying and dancing on the line where they were drying; started the wind pump racing at the Ferme des Mottes; and snatched a handful of gilded leaves off the silver birches in the garden of La Cassine. (9)
What a beautiful way to begin a novel. The first thing to notice is the manner in which the events described here are dated. They occur at a particular time and in a particular place. Yet secondly, note the way in which this gust of wind pulls together a series of entities, linking them together despite their disparity.
Okay, so maybe not a master-science, but rather a master-metaphor or a guiding metaphor for thought. For some time I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated with the terms “structure” and “system” as key terms for thinking social-formations. For me, structure evokes connotations of architecture. I think of architectural structures. I can draw them on a piece of paper, capturing the blue-print of the edifice that I’m trying to think about. If I have some talent in the discipline of topology, I can then imagine these structures undergoing free variation. Yet the problem is that structure, even in topography, remains relatively static and rigid. When I describe the Sears Tower I don’t really need to talk about the outside world, but just the organization of the tower and how all of its parts fit together. Matters are not much different in the case of systems. For instance, the paradigm of a system might be a bureaucracy, where there are a set number of protocols for processing inputs for producing a particular output.
Both of these concepts strike me as too rigid, two subject to closure, for defining the historical present in which we exist. In his beautiful book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, the ethnographer Arjun Appadurai describes a set of social and cultural circumstances impacted by contemporary media technologies and mass migrations. How can we today speak of “architecture” or rigid structures in a contemporary setting where diverse codes are perpetually being brought into contact with one another through migration and communications technologies? Is it a mistake that the concepts of structure and system emerge right at that historical moment when migration brought on by the industrial revolution begins to erode these structures, calling them into question as a result of codes being scrambled everywhere? Does not structure appear at that precise moment when structure is disappearing? And might not the frantic search for structure and system everywhere be a symptom of the desire to make the Other exist, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
Assembly Required
Last night I had one of those thoughts that is probably best to never express out loud. “What,” I thought, “would the world look like if we imagined all entities that exist as variations of the weather?” This is really the sort of thought that can only occur to you when you’re in a sleepy, half drunken stupor, falling asleep on the couch while watching a show about the Galapagos Islands on National Geographic. I should say that meteorological metaphors have often appeared in my writing. In the past I’ve often made reference to phenomena such as hurricanes and tornadoes when trying to think about the nature of systems. On the one hand, hurricanes are of interest in that they have the status of quasi-things. Why is it that we’re inclined to think of a chair or rock as a thing or object, yet when it comes to a hurricane or a tornado we’re inclined to think of these things as events? It seems to me that what’s at issue here is a temporal prejudice or a prejudice pertaining to temporality. If a rock has the status of an object, then this is because it is a relatively slow moving and dense event. Rocks stick around for a long time. By contrast, even though a hurricane might stick around for days and weeks, they lack density and temporal longevity. Nonetheless, hurricanes do have qualities of organization and endurance, even if that organization or internal structure is relatively short-lived.
What interested me in particular about the documentary was their discussion of the ocean currents surrounding the Galapogos Islands. Every year the Islands receive cold currents of water that are particularly congenial for plankton and algae. A whole host of animals depend on these currents from marine iguanas to various sorts of fish to sea lions and a variety of sea birds that feed on these other creatures. Every few years the so-called El Nino effect will occur, preventing the cool waters from reaching the islands and bringing about unseasonable warmth and torrential downfalls. When this occurs the plankton do not arrive and the algae do not grow, and vast numbers of birds, marine iguanas, and sea lions die, leaving only a few to survive. These events then function as selective mechanisms, shifting the trajectory of subsequent development for the various species on the island. Just as vast numbers of sea iguanas die, the land iguanas flourish as a result of tender flowers and plant-life that pop up everywhere on the island as a result of the heavy rainfall. In short, these ocean currents assemble an entire organization among the plant and animal life that populate. What we have here are assemblage mechanisms that generate a particular organization (the ever shifting eco-systems), giving rise to a temporary pattern of relationships among the elements.
There are a variety of levels at which such systems can be investigated and no one level of analysis takes priority over the others. One might think that a discussion of the ocean currents is sufficient to explain the emergent system. That is, why might posit a hierarchical and unilateral form of causality. However, while the ocean currents serve as a condition for the possibility of the resulting assemblage, it must not be forgotten that the elements of the emergent assemblage themselves interact with one another and have dynamics of their own. The resulting assemblage has inter-assemblage relations with an outside (something entirely missing in structuralism and much of systems theory), but there are also intra-assemblage relations among the elements (the plankton, plant-life, sea lions, marine iguanas, land iguanas, turtles, fish, etc).
These intra-assemblage relations contain their own dynamics and tensions that preside over the development as a whole. For instance, there are a number of land iguanas that live in the calderas of old volcanoes. Every year, during mating season, the female iguanas make a journey of sometimes tens of miles to the top of the caldera so that they might lay their eggs. Here timing is everything (again a feature that tends to be ignored in structural approaches). If an iguana comes from deep inside the caldera she will have a longer journey. If she doesn’t make it to the top of the caldera in time, all of the good nesting sites will be taken and she’ll be forced to re-enter the caldera, laying her eggs in the precarious walls of the volcano’s side. These walls are composed of very loosely packed rock and soil where avalanches not only often occur, but are inevitable. In a year where the El Nino effect is operative, there will be a higher number of land iguanas due to the great amount of available vegetation, thereby leading to more intra-assemblage competition among the various iguanas and other creatures, thereby shifting subsequent courses of development. A more striking example of these intra-assemblage relations would be the effect that the Cane Toad has had on the eco-system in Australia. The Cane Toad was introduced into the Australian ecosystem to fight pests. However, having no natural predator of its own, it reproduced rapidly and began devouring much of the plant-life and other desirable animal life. Here we have an example of intra-assemblage relations where one element comes to predominate and shift the organization of the assemblage itself without being catalyzed to do so from elements of an outside. Consequently, it is not enough to simply analyze the inter-assemblage relations between ocean and weather patterns and the organisms that form a system in response to these patterns, but it is also necessary to explore the intra-assemblage relations and the various patterns that emerge as a result of interactions among the elements of these assemblages. Various species and ecosystems here come to resemble weather patterns themselves, like a relatively persistent eddy of water behind the support of a bridge that has its duration and fluctuations as it endures throughout time.
Contingency in the Garden of Forking Paths
The Galapagos Islands have a number of active volcanoes. Among the creatures that inhabit the Galapagos are the famous Galapagos tortoises. Some of these tortoises live exclusively in the calderas of various volcanoes, and have very simple or homogeneous genetic codes compared to tortoises elsewhere on the island. Occasionally you will find these tortoises with rocks actually embedded in their shells from small volcanic explosions that continue to occur in the base of the calderas, where they have lodged themselves in the shell of the tortoise. Biologists hypothesize that the simplicity of the genetic code among these tortoises is to be explained through a volcanic explosion that destroyed most of the tortoise population, leaving only a few to mate with one another.
A volcanic eruption or meteor hitting the earth or group of terrorists destroying the World Trade Center can be thought of as a contingent bifurcation point. Emerging from neither the relatively stable assemblages of weather patterns, nor from within the system itself, these events explode onto the scene, challenging the intra-systematic organization of the assemblage as a whole and bringing it before a point where forking paths of development as a whole are possible. In the days following 9-11, the United States wobbled between alternative paths in moving towards its future. Organization fluctuated back and forth without settling initially on any one particular social configuration. Within a few days the valence of the event was retroactively codified and a vector was chosen, generating a particular organization. Other vectors were possible.
Kaleidoscopes and Textiles
No doubt I will regret having written this post later on this evening. I have gone on about ocean currents, turtles, and iguanas in a rather indulgent fashion. However, it seems to me that social and political theory often suffers from being myopic and reductive, choosing one level of analysis and excluding all others. For instance, in psychoanalysis we are told the signifier reigns supreme and that everything is filtered through the signifier, thus allowing us to ignore contributions from neurology or even historical studies. Theory should instead be thought as a kaleidoscope, where various levels of analysis are thought like a turn of the scope revealing a different pattern. The difference here, of course, would be that these various patterns not be thought as independent, but should instead be thought as inter-dependent networks at various levels, producing effects at other levels, without these levels being hierarchical over overdetermining the others (as in the case of language with Lacan or economics for some classical variants of Marxist thought). Along these lines, Appadurai has proposed that we think in terms of independent streams such as mediascapes, ethnoscapes, financescapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes, where these various streams are woven together in various configurations, sometimes one dominating, sometimes others, where it is always a question of the relationship between the local and the global and of local configurations like a local weather pattern that is nonetheless dependent on global fluctuations. In this way we can investigate the manner in which certain forms of organization arise and maintain consistency for a time, while also discerning where their points of transformation might lie. To Appadurai’s five streams, I would also add ecoscapes or geoscapes, and perhaps bioscapes, to refer to the Other beyond the Other, the absolute outside of social systems, or those contingencies that shake the earth such as earthquakes, hurricanes, meteor strikes, etc., where ordinary social relations are momentarily suspended and the social system wobbles between possibilities.
In thinking these six or seven streams, we must learn how to think according to the ancient art of textiles in terms of weaving and fabrics, where we ask not which of these streams provides the interpretive key of all the others, but instead look at the patterned fabrics that emerge out of these various threads being woven together. Of course, the fabric here must not be thought as an extant thing like the fabrics we know in our day to day life, but as a specifically meteorological fabric that is an ongoing process of weaving on a shuttle and loom that never ceases to vary itself and which perpetually weaves new fabrics as new groupings or patterns emerge responding to contingencies both within the threads and from without. Weaving must be thought not in terms of its status as product, but process.
The advantage of treating meteorology as a key theoretical metaphor is that it underlines both internal organization and the dependency of every system on an outside, while also capturing the ephemeral nature of all emergent organization in the order of time. The hurricane can only emerge as a hurricane, as an organization, through the heat of the ocean water out of which it arises. Every social group formation, as it produces and reproduces itself in time, needs its heat as well. Some of this heat can be intra-systemic (for instance, the way in which communication technologies function as catalysts that heat up social relations and function as a condition of onto-genesis presiding over entirely new groupings independent of local conditions) or inter-systemic, pertaining to relations between social systems and environmental conditions in which the group exists (for instance, the role that a drought might play in defining struggles among various groups in Africa or placing group identities in onto-genesis as they redefine themselves in fights over resources). All these relations and their dynamics deserve investigation in their own right. These investigations will not unfold universal rules like Newtonian laws, but will be far closer to Levi-Strauss’s “science of the concrete”, investigating a set of emergent regularities that both came to be and that can pass away.
Larval Subjects . 
June 19, 2007 at 5:54 pm
This is a really interesting post, Sinthome, and it resonates with a lot of stuff I have been thinking about recently too. I really like the emphasis on inter- and intra-assemblage dynamics, as this is something I have been groping towards too, without being able to so nicely sum it up. I don’t have a lot to add to this post, but I was wondering how you might conceive (theoretically) the types of individuations you outline? It seems to me, on the one hand, that to follow Deleuze would require a search for the intensive factors that play themselves out in producing a stable formation. (And, since I’ve been reading some of your older posts lately, I’ve noticed you’ve also called for finding the intensive differences which preside over the emergence of social formations.) On the other hand, it seems like the types of individuations you outline here are more or less empirical/actual (maybe even descriptive…?) than the sort of individuations that Deleuze had in mind. Does this suggest that you are trying to detach the virtual/intensive from the account of individuation? Or do you think there is some sort of alternative theoretical account which provides the dynamic genesis of individuals? Or perhaps you would argue that the factors you have examined are intensive factors? (Which would be intriguing, since most (all?) examples of Deleuze’s intensive differences reside in the physical realm and not the social world.
June 19, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Gee Nick, why not ask some difficult questions! :-)
I’m not convinced that intensities fall under the category of the virtual for Deleuze. The framework Deleuze gives in Difference and Repetition suggests a tripartate schema between the virtual composed of differential relations and their singularities, the actual composed of species, parts, and qualities, and intensities. Deleuze there describes intensities by analogy to Kant’s schemata, as spatio-temporal dynamisms presiding over processes of actualization. The examples he gives are of critical points, such as boiling points, surface tensions, etc., etc., etc.
I am still struggling with Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, so my remarks here are provisional, but the sense that I get is that the virtual is a distribution of potentialities populating what I have called a “constellation” or a specific state-of-affairs:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/some-remarks-on-populations/
On my reading (which is provisional and subject to revision) the category of the virtual does the ontological work of explaining potentialities belonging to a situation and insuring that these potentialities are mapped as specific to that situation (as opposed to being abstract possibilities). Potentiality is a strange ontological category as it refers to something unactualized or not-yet (for instance, the match has the potential to burn, while simultaneously referring to something that is. Virtual thus names this dimension of beings. Under this reading, intensities would be those factors presiding over the activation of potentials within a given constellation. In short, something has to intervene in order for the potentials to come to life and new actualizations/individuations to take place. With these new actualizations, the field of potentials is transformed and we thus get new multiplicities (eternal return of the different).
In this post I was trying to get at phenomena of process and interdependence as it seems to me that much contemporary social theory ignores the dimension of process and has a tendency to treat social systems and structures as largely unchanging monoliths. As a result, it’s likely that much of it was empirical or descriptive in the sense you describe, but I was trying to draw attention to certain species of phenomena as a way of rendering other levels of analysis available at some future point. On the other hand, it’s important to remember, I think, that Deleuze’s thought is a transcendental empiricism. As such, the distributions of potentials we describe will be “empirical” in the sense that they can’t be known simply through thinking about them. We have to look at the real distributions of potentials inhabiting any constellation. The mapping of such distributions might be thought as a diagram of the constellation’s becoming (it’s tendencies of transformation), rather than a diagram of a constellation’s static structure at a given point in time. I vaguely tried to allude to this with my gestures towards the relationship between ocean currents (one intensive factor presiding over individualization among many) and the intra-assemblages among species (actualized structure). I really need to do a lot more work here. Deleuze and Guattari do a nice job capturing this idea of a diagram of becoming in A Thousand Plateaus. Each plateau/chapter has a date in the beginning, marking a particular point in history. The plateaus themselves can be understood as maps of a specific historical constellation or a diagram of becoming (a map of the singularities, differential relations, and intensive actualizing factors specific to that historical moment). Of course, it shouldn’t be understood that A Thousand Plateaus is a map of dead history. Rather, a diagram of becoming itself produces potentials that allow for further actualizations, i.e., the diagram deterritorializes the incorporeal event from its original site of material embeddedment, allowing it to be reterritorialized elsewhere. Deleuze and Guattari thus resemble Benjamin’s understanding of how history ought to be read against the grain in certain respects.
The stumbling block for me in understanding Deleuze’s concept of the virtual is the manner in which he attaches it to the pure past or memory vis a vis Bergson. I can understand treating virtuality in terms of relations and singularities as relations and potentials are literally “no-things”, but nonetheless central to any-thing in its being. But why the past? I suspect that part of the thought here is that the history of a things becoming or development is a part of that thing. Another aspect of this would be that certain types of systems continue to self-reflexively relate to their past: genetic systems, cultural systems, psychic systems (Freud’s mystic writing system, for instance), and so on, such that we cannot properly think these systems without an understanding of how the past continues to act in the present in feedback relations of various sorts. Still, a number of these issues are murky to me.
June 19, 2007 at 10:10 pm
This may be completely irrelevant (and apologies if it is – I’m not trying at all to interrupt, but just to think in parallel): Benjamin also often articulates things in terms of the past or history, when what he fairly clearly has in mind are potentials within some present situation.
My sense is that he does this in order to capture the notion that what he is talking about – although it hasn’t been realised – nevertheless has already been constituted or already exists. So he’s using the terminology of history or of the past to make clear that he’s talking about something existent – that his counterfactual is not a mere conceptual abstraction, but a material reality, even if a potential one.
Benjamin makes it clear in other places in his writing that he doesn’t conceptualise history in even the conventional sense as dead or “given” – this contingency of history, or the present constitution of a determinate relationship with specific moments of the past, then carries over to his use of the term history in trying to point to unrealised potentials in some particular present.
I don’t know if any of this overlaps at all with the sorts of issues you’re discussing above – apologies if the comment is entirely off point. Just trying to feel my way into what you’re describing.
June 19, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Haha, just trying to keep you on your toes! : )
I completely agree that the intensive and the virtual should be separated. When I mentioned that it seemed like you might be discarding them, I meant it as two fields of being, not one. In that case, I did intend to suggest that your characterizations seemed to avoid both the virtual (the realm of potentialities) and the intensive (the productive differences responsible for change). More specifically, and this is a problem I’m struggling with myself, is that while you do speak of ‘interactions’ between the elements of an assemblage, this doesn’t really seem to get at how these differences produce a stable system. The problem for me, in a nutshell, is how to go beyond simply a metaphorical use of terms like ‘bifurcations’ and ‘tensions’ and ‘thresholds’. Undoubtedly, the intensive mechanisms are specific to each empirical situation, but is there any sort of guideline that can assist in discovering them in the social realm? (In your reply, you suggest the ocean currents as an explicit example, and I could see how these could be considered intensive factors, but this is again a physical example.) Is it the case that, perhaps, we have to designate social intensities in terms of things like the tension between workers and capitalists? The caveat here would be that ultimately, the workers and the capitalists cannot be considered apart from the intensive relation that (partly) constitutes them. As you mention though, there are multiple levels of analysis possible. So there may also be intensive relations between the workers and a managerial class, or there may be an intra-assemblage dynamic involving moderate and radical workers, which both contribute to producing the workers as a relatively homogeneous grouping. In the end, the assemblage of workers would be generated by the sum of its intensive relations (and the intensive relations between relations, and so on). To me at least, this seems like a way of making intensive difference consistent within the social world.
By the way, I like your description of the virtual as the potentialities specific to a situation, as opposed to abstract possibilities. It seems to both make it a useful category and one that avoids, like you mention, the pure past of Bergson. My own thinking on that subject is like yours, in that the past is in some sense responsible for the present situation. But I’m not sure how to reconcile this with some of the finer points Deleuze makes about the past.
June 20, 2007 at 3:03 am
You write:
I think this is the ten million dollar question and I’m struggling with it as well. At the outset, I’m a bit uncomfortable with talk of two fields of being when talking about the virtual and the actual. Rather, the virtual should, in my view, be understood as immanent to the actual such that there is nothing but actuality (that’s not quite putting it right). What I’m trying to get at is the thesis that the virtual is always a dimension of the actual. In this respect, the distinction between the virtual and the actual should not be understood as a numerical distinction but as a real distinction. Deleuze devotes a great deal of time to unfolding the distinction between these types of distinctions towards the beginning of Expressionism and Philosophy. Very very roughly, a numerical distinction refers to two things that are distinct and can exist independent of one another. Descartes conceives the distinction between mind and body as a numerical distinction, whereas Spinoza conceives it as a real distinction. A real distinction refers to two things that are distinct yet inseparable. Husserl gives the best examples: the relationship between color and extension. There’s no such thing as an uncolored extension, nor an unextended color. Yet nonetheless color and extension can be distinguished in thought. Real distinction is absolutely vital to maintain Deleuze’s thesis that monism = pluralism. If this argument can’t be sustained than one of Badiou’s major criticisms comes to bear on Deleuze’s ontology.
I’m reluctant to treat the example of antagonisms between workers and capitalists as an example of an intensive social difference presiding over social structuration, as it seems defined by the logic of opposition that Deleuze often criticized. What other factors might have been in play in constituting/individuating something like the figure of the “worker”. Marx outlines some of these individuating processes that are “micrological” in character, that I cited in my “Rough Theory” post the other day. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari seem to favor micro-analysis. As far back as Difference and Repetition, Deleuze praises Althusser’s conception of the social as an example of the “social Idea” (multiplicity). Crucial here would be Althusser’s concept of “overdetermination” that allows for non-linear and multi-faceted forms of causality pervading social phenomena. I suspect that we would have to survey the social intensities at work in any given social actualization to answer the question your posing. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari are highly attentive to the machinic and how this functions as an individuating agency for the subjectivities that populate the territorial socius, the despotic socius, and finally the capitalist socius. Thoburn analyzes these aspects of their thought to great effect in Deleuze, Marx, and Politics. Intensive factors, in my view, could come from both within the social itself (population densities, migrations, new technologies, etc) and from a variety of natural events as well. I think we’d have to examine the “throw of the dice” operative in each respective formation. I realize this isn’t a very satisfying response to your remarks.
June 20, 2007 at 4:45 am
I’ve been spectating at a lot of these Deleuze conversations, and the questions that are being raised are exceedingly pertinent to me, but I lack much of a grasp of Deleuze’s work.
I’ve tried *A Thousand Plateaus* on for size, but didn’t come away with much more than a few general impressions and scattered insights (which Brian Massumi’s introduction seems to suggest is a pretty typical response).
What would any of you acquainted with Deleuze suggest as a good entry point – either in form of primary or secondary literature – to the Deleuzian corpus?
June 20, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I don’t know that there’s any easy way into Deleuze’s works themselves. The works with Guattari are exceptionally challenging. Deleuze’s earlier studies of other philosophers– Empiricism and Subjectivity, Nietzsche and Philosophy, and Expressionism and Philosophy –tend to be fairly lucid, so these can be a way of gaining entry into some of the other texts. I’ve struggled with Difference and Repetition for years and have found that this illuminates much of the later work, but it is a rather difficult text in its own right.
Massumi is up to his own thing in A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, so I don’t know that it’s the best of introductions. Personally I’ve found those works that do not seek to imitate Deleuze and Guattari’s style to be the most illuminating. Hallward’s Out of This World is very good, though it has to be read cautiously as he makes a few unfounded claims about Deleuze’s thought. De Beistegui’s Truth and Genesis is excellent for both how it situates Deleuze in terms of the history of philosophy and his own reading of Deleuze’s ontology. I’ve found DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy to be very illuminating, though I’m bothered by his appeals to science (not because I’m anti-science, but because I’m suspicious of philosophical arguments that seem to base themselves on science as if it were a privileged discourse). If you’re looking for an entrance into Anti-Oedipus, Eugene Holland’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis is exceptionally lucid and helpful. Just about anything by Daniel W. Smith is good and sooner or later he’ll finally be releasing his book which should be excellent.
June 20, 2007 at 2:47 pm
This may be completely irrelevant (and apologies if it is – I’m not trying at all to interrupt, but just to think in parallel): Benjamin also often articulates things in terms of the past or history, when what he fairly clearly has in mind are potentials within some present situation.
Right, this is what I was trying to get at. This resonates nicely with Deleuze. In the second chapter of Difference and Repetition Deleuze develops a series of paradoxes pertaining to the structure of time as a way of developing an ontology of time. Among these paradoxes is the thesis that the entirety of the past is present with the present in a more or less contracted or dilated state. Under this reading, the past functions as a set of potentialities that are contracted in the process of actualization. Although Deleuze’s thesis is ontological and is intended to apply equally to physical and cultural systems, it converges nicely with Benjamin’s own understanding of potentials.
June 20, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Just one more suggestion for a couple of books on esienkowski’s reading list into the Deleuzian universe. I started out with Claire Colebrook’s “Gilles Deleuze” (in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series) and have also often used The Deleuze Dictionary edited by Adrian Parr (Edinburgh University Press).
“A Thousand Plateaus” should – as D&G say themselves (quite correctly) – be read and used rhizomatically.
June 21, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Excellent.
Great thanks for the help.
June 21, 2007 at 5:07 pm
“In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari seem to favor micro-analysis.”
I suppose this is one of my sticking points, and why I spoke in terms of classes; namely, how to conceive of a micro-analysis that also avoids individualism. In this regard, I think Gabriel Tarde is hugely important, but I haven’t been able to entirely make sense of him (I suppose I should read the online copy of Social Laws). In particular, I have been trying to make sense of this from ATP:
“The Durkheimians answered that what Tarde did was psychology or interpsychology, not sociology. But this is true only in appearance, as a first approximation: a microimitation does seem to occur between two individuals. But at the same time, and at a deeper level, it has to do not with an individual but with a flow or a wave. Imitation is the propagation of a flow; opposition is binarization, the making binary of flows; invention is a conjugation or connection of different flows. What, according to Tarde, is a flow? It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage [i.e. expression and content??]); a flow is always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every society, because they are flows and as such are “quantifiable”; they are veritable social Quantities, whereas sensations are qualitative and representations are simple resultants.” (ATP, 219)
The question I am trying to work through is how to connect this microsociology of preindividual flows with the focus on individuation in D&R’s chapter 5 and the work on haecceities within ATP itself. I’m not quite sure how to interpret ‘flow’ here either; are we supposed to take it to refer to an affective, pre-cognitive level of interaction amongst people (which is not quite right, considering individual ‘people’ are produced from it)? Anyways, it seems to me that working all this out would be a big step towards being able to provide a micro-social analysis of assemblages in processes of individuation. I look forward to any thoughts you might have on the subject!
June 21, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I suppose this is one of my sticking points, and why I spoke in terms of classes; namely, how to conceive of a micro-analysis that also avoids individualism.
Just a quick comment. When I referred to micro-analysis I wasn’t so much referring to relations between individuals, but something closer to what Foucault has in mind with respect to institutions and practices. For instance, the way in which various educational institutions, the factory, the internet, money, and so on function as a milieu of individuation. This list could, of course, be infinitely expanded. One of the passages I recently quoted from from Marx’s Manifesto somewhat captures what I’m trying to think about and is worth requoting despite its length:
What I find so interesting about this passage is its focus on the factory and how displacement from native soil, coupled with relating to oneself as an abstract quantity by virtue of selling ones labor on the market functioned as a process of individuation to create a new sort of subjectivity: the proletariat. It cannot be said that the proletariat is in any way similar to the feudal serf. Rather, the proletariat is an entirely new species, with new affects, a very different way of relating to oneself (for instance, they don’t think of themselves as a nationality or tied to a land), new forms of group relation, and very different ways of engaging with the world and perceiving the world and its objects. Yet it takes all sorts of micro-processes through which the subjectivity is produced.
We can engage in similar analyses, asking how, say, the net functions as a milieu of organization. How is the nature of writing transformed in this medium? What new forms of intersubjectivity emerge? Are there qualitative transformations in the nature of thought as a result of this individuating milieu (here the analyses of Kittler and Ong are highly relavant, as they’ve shown how the shift from narrative to textual cultures also produced very different forms of thought). We can example the architecture of different educational systems and what sorts of subjectivities they produce, or what different forms of labor organization or workplace settings produce, and so on.
An anthropologist friend of mine likes to tell an anecdote about his family moving to Africa for the U.S. State Department and planting green bell peppers in their garden. The first season the peppers were largely the same as what you’d grow here in the states. But the second season they got a crop of very small, and extremely hot red peppers. The genetics of the peppers hadn’t changed, but the milieu of individuation had. We need to be similarly attentive to these milieus where human individuations are concerned, exercising caution in even talking about the human by virtue of its natavist and essentialist connotations that lead one to ignore fields of individuation.
June 26, 2007 at 12:17 pm
So I’ve been thinking about what it would mean for us to really adopt Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual as our own. I mean actually adopt it and not just claim to be Deleuzean. One thing that seems to me to be missing in Deleuzean scholarship is a concrete description of the virtual conditions of actual events and individuations. If philosophy is to be a rigorous Deleuzeanism, then it must be able to move from an abstract definition or description of the virtual field to a detailed analysis of actual events in the real world in terms of their virtual components. DeLanda in his book, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, goes some of the way toward this end, but his scientific descriptions of various systems really only show how the extensiveness of the space and time we perceive is the working out or cancelation of the intensive differences that precede extended space and time. The virtual, if I am correct here, is the complex sets of potentialities whose interrelations create those intensive differences, and DeLanda does not go into those, I think, because they are not within the realm or domain of science. Those virtual potentialities are in the domain of philosophy alone. But my question is this: are those virtual differences that are the condition of the reality of actual intensive differences too abstract to be described in actual, singular processes of becoming or individuation? Can we ever know the makeup of a real virtual field, or can we only ever describe a virtual field in general, a virtual field = x? And if not, have we really made any kind of improvement over Kant’s transcendental philosophy?
June 26, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Sinthome,
I don’t disagree with any of your points there, but I’m wondering what you make of Deleuze’s insistence on the importance of Tarde and his form of microsociology? It seems to me to suggest a form of analysis that would supplement the focus on institutions and practices that you outline. Oversimplifying it a bit, we might say that whereas the institutions and practices you cite form the milieu of individuation, the individuated individual itself differently repeats these forces of the outside – and this is perhaps where Tarde might come in: in examining how social structures are differentially repeated by individuals that are nevertheless products of their social context. Quoting from Difference & Repetition:
“Tarde criticizes Durkheim for assuming what must be explained – namely, ‘the similarity of thousands of men’. For the alternative – impersonal givens or the Ideas of great men – he substitutes the little ideas of little men, the little inventions and interferences between imitative currents. What Tarde inaugurates is a microsociology, which is not necessarily concerned with what happens between individuals but with what happens within a single individual: for example, hesitation understood as ‘infinitesimal social opposition’, or invention as ‘infinitesimal social adaptation’.” (314)
In this regard, Tarde’s work seems to focus on (one of) the ways in which a social field can change, as the produced individuals invent, adapt and imitate their practices and reciprocally act back upon the milieu that formed them. To stick with the proletariat example, we might think of the various ways in which individual workers invented forms of contention (e.g. breaking machines, strikes, or even small acts like slowing production) and then had these practices diffused throughout their class, leading to a systematic social movement (in conjunction with the other (discursive and non-discursive) mechanisms which produced a group identity). Anyways, that’s some of my own thoughts on it, but I just wonder how you would explain Deleuze’s interest in Tarde’s microsociology?
June 28, 2007 at 1:18 am
Does not Tarde present a way to understand the progress of social time, collective duration, in a manner closer to an ontology of difference as opposed to the vestiges of the Hegelian absolute that remain in Marxist concepts of revolution in which the proitariate is imagined as a collective for whom the particularities of each are insignificant to their position in teleology of the history? For Deleuze is it not the case that repetition is founded on difference rather than the contrary? That the idea of class functions as the field upon which variation inconcievable makes its appearance? Or have I screwed up again?
July 1, 2007 at 1:47 am
Justin, apologies for taking so long to respond. I am sympathetic to what you’re saying here and also find DeLanda’s work problematic for the reasons you outline (while also very much appreciating it). My gripe is that DeLanda seems to rely on various sciences to “prove” Deleuze, rather than working with the autonomy of the concept. Nonetheless, I think DeLanda has helped to clarify a number of obscurities in Deleuze’s thought and draw attention to important aspects of his work such as individuation that were largely ignored prior to his work.
I would suggest that there are examples of what Deleuze has in mind by a rigorous analysis of the virtual. It seems to me that Deleuze’s various studies of artists such as Proust, Bacon, Kafka, and Cinema, are all exploring what he has in mind by the virtual dimension of the actual, and can thus function as guides or models as to what such an analysis might look like.
July 1, 2007 at 1:51 am
Nick, I’ve never read a page of Tarde so I have more to learn from you on this matter than you from me. The point you make about the individual and the milieu of individuation reminds me of Whitehead. For Whitehead, each actual occasion relates to the entirety of the world (it’s milieu of individuation) in its own specific way, according to its own specific form. Consequently, while the actual occasion would not be what it is without its milieu of individuation, it cannot be said that the actual occasion contributes nothing or that it makes the actual occasion what it is tout court. Compare this with Foucault’s discussion of docile subjects. Under a highly simplified and perhaps unfair reading of Foucault, the milieu of individuation simply makes the subjectivized subject what it is without remainder. By contrast, for Deleuze-Whitehead, the individual certainly wouldn’t be what it is without its milieu of individuation or its problematic field, but it also contributes something new to the universe that can’t be reduced to the milieu of individuation. It sounds like you’re suggesting that Tarde is up to something similar.
July 2, 2007 at 2:19 am
Dan,
As I understand repetition in Tarde (and I’m only just beginning to learn about him), it’s the mechanism by which desires and beliefs are spread. He argues for a distinct form of repetition in natural science, biology, and social science, with the latter being a matter of imitation. Social repetition, i.e. imitation, is based on difference in the sense that it requires a relation between two individuals. As Tarde (and Deleuze) says, he’s trying to explain the similarity of collectivities, rather than assuming them as givens that explain social patterns. His basic argument here seems to be that nearly all social practices and conventions are imitations (e.g. you are taught to obey certain authorities, you are taught to speak in a certain way, etc.). In the beginning, imitation is initiated between two individuals, such as a parent and a child (but not limited to this particular relationship), and later on in life we begin to imitate “collective and impersonal models”. The only exceptions to this imitative flow are the rare moments of innovation.
I could see repetition here being a matter of social time in the sense that the interactions between flows of belief and desire (e.g. multiple imitations spreading throughout a society) are ultimately what produces history in Tarde’s mind, but is this what you had in mind?
Sinthome,
I think you would really enjoy reading some Tarde; I’m finding him very productive for thinking in different ways about social issues. On the topic of Foucault and docile subjects, I think, to some degree, that Tarde’s theory of innovation will provide a means to escape this (although I haven’t yet made it that far into his Social Laws). The subject produced without remainder though, would seem to correspond to Tarde’s idea that social life is largely produced through imitation, meaning individuals are almost entirely products of these pre-existing flows.
Pinocchio Theory has a very good post on Tarde, if you are interested, and Tarde’s Social Laws is available online here. It’s a password protected PDF file that you can’t print, but there are some free programs out there that can let you get around that (nudge nudge, wink wink).
July 2, 2007 at 2:23 am
Oops, I almost forgot to mention Bruno Latour’s interesting article on Tarde, which can be found here.
November 17, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Although my rather spartan philosophical education doesn’t allow me to contribute any commentary to your reflection, I can express my appreciation for it. As a student of mathematical non-linear dynamical systems, I appreciate your extension of such ideas into the realm of the social. I am trained in the details details of analyzing deterministic systems (such as bifurcation theory, perturbation analysis, and other non-linear methods), but I know very little about systems theory outside of the applied mathematics. Thanks.