Below is the paper I presented at the RMMLA this morning. We had large audiences for the two Deleuze panels, great discussions, and my paper was very well received. My only regret is that I couldn’t really get into the details of Deleuze’s understanding of simulacra as “signal-sign systems” as the paper would have been twice as long, so I had to focus on his critique of Platonism. It’s absolutely gorgeous here in the mountains of Utah, though I’ve had a wicked headache since arriving as a result of the altitude. Hopefully that will go away by tomorrow. I should also add that I wrote this paper at the airport and on the flight here, so a number of my allusions are unreferenced. Go easy on me! At any rate, without further ado…
Interpretation hits the real.
~J. Lacan
The simulacrum enjoys a short life in Deleuze’s thought. Appearing primarily in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, the concept then disappears in his later thought. This is not, of course, so unusual in Deleuze’s work. As has often been observed, each of Deleuze’s texts creates a new conceptual constellation. However, later, in interview, Deleuze will remark that the concept of the simulacrum was a poorly formed, while nonetheless giving no explanation or account of just how this concept was poorly formed. In my view, if Deleuze was led to abandon the concept of the simulacrum, this was not for reasons pertaining to the endo-consistency of the concept or its ability to attain a coherence and consistency allowing it to stand and support itself, but rather for rhetorical reasons pertaining to phenomena of resonance and echoes within the philosophical tradition of representation. This rhetorical situation or set of exo-relations within the tradition of representation only intensified with the appearance of Baudrillard’s work which made the simulacrum its key concept, but in a sense directly opposed to Deleuze’s own intentions in mobilizing the concept. Where Baudrillard mobilizes the concept of the simulacrum diagnostically as a symptom of our times in a war against representation and the real, Deleuze, while sharing Baudrillard’s war against representation, mobilizes the concept of the simulacrum in the name of the real. In short, Deleuze mobilizes the concept of the simulacrum in the name of a realist ontology. If, then, there is a problem with the concept of the simulacrum, this problem is to be found at the level of the plane of expression where the signifier “simulacrum” continues to resonate all too easily with both the logic of representation and anti-realist thought that has dominated philosophy since the late 17th century.
From the beginning of his work until the end, Deleuze dismisses the thesis that metaphysics is at an end or that it has exhausted itself. This affirmation of metaphysics should be taken seriously. Since Heidegger, there has been an unfortunate tendency within Continental thought to conflate metaphysics with onto-theology and philosophies of presence. Rather than following a path of thought that would metaphysically overturn onto-theology and the primacy of presence, the decision was instead made to either a) abandon metaphysics altogether in favor of humanist correlationism, or b) attempt to achieve, as in the case of Heidegger, a passage beyond metaphysics to something called thinking. By contrast, to affirm the possibility of metaphysics is to affirm realist ontology against the correlationisms that have come to dominate philosophy, suturing being and the world to the condition of the human. Within the constellation of French thought arising out of the late 60s, Deleuze is singular in this affirmation of metaphysics.
read on!
In his own work, Badiou distinguishes between Platonic and Aristotlean orientations of thought. Where the Platonic orientation of thought is characterized by the affirmation of number or the matheme as the real, thereby breaking, he believes, with intuition, sensibility, and the suture of ontology to language and the human; the Aristotelean orientation of thought is premised on the affirmation of things as the mark of the real. To adopt the Aristotlean orientation of thought is to side with the primacy of primary substances, where the primary substance is understood not so much as a substrate of predication, but rather as an individual entity or object. Numbers or things, we are told, are our two options. And of these two options, Deleuze’s realism is an Aristotlean realism, affirming the reality of the thing, object, or individual.
However, in declaring that it is individuals that are real, that being is a composition of individuals, Deleuze must walk a fine and treacherous line. Deleuze must simultaneously affirm the reality of individuals against the thesis that objects are merely correlates of human minds, intentions, language, or society, while also overcoming the logic of representation that led to the correlationist turn or suture of being to the human first inaugurated by Kant. It is, paradoxically, in the name of an affirmation of Aristotlean realism that Deleuze mobilizes the concept of the simulacrum. In short, the simulacrum promises to be the strategic fulcrum through which it is possible to conceptualize a non-representational realist theory of the object or individual.
Already we can see the rhetorical problem that Deleuze must have faced in electing to treat the simulacrum as a strategic fulcrum for a non-representational realist ontology. As a philosopheme, the ancient concept of the simulacrum is deeply entrenched within the logic of representation. Insofar as the simulacrum is conceived as a degraded or illegitimate copy of a copy pretending to adequation with an object or an essence while nonetheless subverting this relation, the simulacrum is conceived not as a real being, but as a false and dangerous imposter of the real. One need only think of trompe l’oeil which we risk running into, confusing it with a real object or that deceive the eyes. However, conceptualized in this way, the affirmation of the rights of the simulacrum remains within the orbit of the logic of representation, merely affirming the primacy of representation over what it represents, holding that we never have access to the real but only to the precession of the simulacra or representations. In other words, such a move is merely an affirmation of the anti-realist option, thereby remaining within the framework of philosophies of presence, if only negatively. No. If Deleuze’s affirmation of the simulacra is undertaken in the name of a realist ontology, then he must undertake a delicate operation through which the concept of the simulacrum is de-sutured from the logic of representation, affirming simulacra themselves as the real and not as false representations of the real.
In his work during the 60s, Deleuze embraces the Nietzschean imperative wherein the task of modern philosophy is to reverse Platonism. It is within the context of this task that we must comprehend the strategic import of Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum. However, when we reflect on this Nietzschean imperative, it cannot but strike us as a strange task for philosophy. Why is this the task of modern philosophy? Should not philosophy aim at a knowledge of being qua being, the conditions under which knowledge is possible, the way to the good life, or the means by which it might be possible to change the world? Unless reversing Platonism is intimately related to these sorts of questions, this imperative cannot but seem arbitrary.
If Platonism proves to be a privileged site of modern philosophical engagement, if it is the site to which we are obligated to return if we are to formulate a non-representational realist ontology, then this is because here a fateful decision is made that will reverberate throughout the subsequent history of philosophy. This reverberation will be subterranean and a quiet whisper, becoming invisible almost as soon as it appears like words written in the sand of a beach; but nonetheless it will continue to act beneath the manifest discourse of philosophy in much the same way that a snippet of speech overheard during childhood can unconsciously function as the theme or destiny of a person’s entire life without that person being aware of this complex theme acting within all his actions. In this respect, we are obligated to go spelunking to render an alternative form of thought available and possible. As Whitehead observed, all philosophy is a footnote to Plato and is, in this respect, Platonic. To claim that philosophy is Platonic is not to claim that subsequent philosophy endorses the doctrine of the forms or Plato’s particular metaphysics, but rather that the destiny of subsequent philosophy is determined by the frame and imperative first inaugurated by Platonic philosophy.
The privilege of Plato is thus twofold: First, what we find in Plato is the moral motivation for the distinction between appearance and reality, essence and existence, and the intelligible and sensible that will function as the organizing philosophemes around which subsequent philosophy is framed and which delimits the field of possibilities open to subsequent metaphysics. To claim the ground of these distinctions is moral is to underline that it is not authorized by the requirements of ontology or the being of being as such. Rather, Platonic ontology is contaminated by an axiological suture premised on the refusal to think being qua being. The “is” becomes subordinated to the “ought”, such that certain beings are excluded from the orbit of being on moral rather than ontological grounds. After Plato, this decision will go underground, enjoying a shadowy, unconscious existence, but will nonetheless continue to determine Western thought across the centuries. The point, then, is that this moral decision generates an inadequate ontology. Second, according to Deleuze, not only do we find the origins of this ontological inadequacy in Plato, but we also find the means of reversing Plato within Plato’s own thought.
In “Plato and the Simulacrum”, Deleuze observes that reversing Platonism does not lie in abolishing the distinction between essence and appearance, reality and appearance, or the intelligible and the sensible. This task had already been undertaken by Kant and Hegel (and later by phenomenology), and therefore could certainly not have been what Nietzsche had in mind by a reversal of Platonism. Moreover, the abolition of the distinction between appearance and reality continues to tie being to the condition of the human as can be seen in all those facile anti-realisms that continue to declare that the distinction between idealism and realism is meaningless while still placing the human and human phenomena at the center of questions of being, thereby revealing all too clearly that they hold that being is only thinkable in relation to the human, that being is subordinated to the condition of the human, and that apart from the human nothing can be said of being.
Rather, according to Deleuze, reversing Platonism requires “…bring[ing] [its] motivation out into the light of day” and “…’track[ing] it down’… the way Plato tracks down the Sophist” (LS, 291). In bringing this motivation into the light of day, a fundamental instability, a symptom, a knot in the real, is revealed at the heart of Platonic ontology and the subsequent philosophy structured around this Platonic decision. And just as psychoanalytic interpretation brings about a shift in the structure of desire through the speaking of the symptom, through bringing this symptom to the light of day, a crack is opened within the constellation of philosophemes structuring philosophical thought allowing for an-other thought and another path.
The motivation of which Deleuze speaks is the motivation for the method of division deployed in Plato’s late dialogues such as the Phaedrus, the Statesman, and the Sophist. Initially our suspicion might be that the dialectical method of division “amounts to the division of a genus into contrary species in order to subsume the thing investigated under the appropriate species…” (291). Indeed, this is how Aristotle would later understand Plato’s method of division and would be that around which he advances his critique of Plato for failing to provide a middle term grounding transport between the genus and the individual. Yet Deleuze argues that this is only a superficial or ironic aspect of division as mobilized by Plato (292). Rather, the real purpose, according to Deleuze, is to select lineages, “…to distinguish pretenders, to distinguish the pure from the impure, the authentic from the inauthentic” (292). In support of this thesis, he appeals to the frequent metaphors comparing division to the testing of gold.
In and of itself, this aim is not objectionable. If the method of division is beset by a fundamental instability, a fundamental inconsistency, then this is because in executing its task it must resort to myth. As Deleuze puts it, “…when division gets down to the actual task of selection, it all happens as though division renounces its task, letting itself be carried along by a myth” (292). This is the case in both the Phaedrus and the Statesmen. If division must resort to myth in order to carry out its task, then this is because “[m]yth, with its always circular structure, is indeed the story of a foundation, [p]ermitting the construction of a model according to which… [rival claimants to the authentic and the pure] can be judged” (292). The model, then, will be the form of the Same serving as a foundation, serving as the Forms, essence, the intelligible, and so on. What the model enables is selection with respect to the Similar, or the distinction between true and false copies. Although myth will, for the most part, go underground following Plato, it will nonetheless continue to function in a furtive manner across the history of philosophy in much the same way that the fundamental fantasy functions with respect to the symptom in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Before proceeding to discuss where, precisely, Deleuze situates the reversal of Platonism within Platonism, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment and reflect on the significance of foundational myth as it operates as a selective mechanism allowing selection to take place between the good copy and the false claimant or simulacrum. Although Deleuze does not himself refer to him, it would not be inappropriate, at this juncture, to evoke the names of Claude Levi-Strauss and Lacan with respect to to the role of myth as a foundational selective mechanism. This detour does not do too much violence to his text for, during this period, Deleuze is thoroughly immersed within structuralist thought as can be seen from his essay written contemporaneously entitled “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?”, as well as the many structuralist themes that animate both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. During this period, Lacan and Levi-Strauss are constant points of reference for Deleuze.
If Levi-Strauss is of great relevance here, then this is because in texts such as “The Structural Study of Myth” and “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” he effectively shows that myth arises at that site, at that precise point, where a system is beset by an insoluble contradiction or formal paradox that cannot be surmounted through the resources of the system itself. Generally these paradoxes and contradictions are of a set theoretical nature, such that the membership of some entity within a set is impossible to decide, or where membership is both required and prohibited. In this connection, myth functions as a suture, a solution, that both marks or preserves the place of the paradox or contradiction within the structure while also allowing it to be surmounted and overcome. In his own work, Lacan will refer to these sites of formal impasse or impossibility as the Real, and will theorize this site as the place around which fantasy forms, serving a function similar to that of myth in Levi-Strauss, and where the symptom is produced as a remainder that must be marked within the system of the unconscious.
It is here, with reference to Levi-Strauss’ conception of myth and the Lacanian conception of the Real that we can get some mileage out of the thesis that the Deleuzian reversal of Platonism in the name of the rights of simulacra is undertaken in the name of a realist ontology. For as Deleuze proceeds in his analysis of Plato he notes something both peculiar and symptomatic in the three dialogues in which the method of division is most intensively deployed. Of these three dialogues, it is only in that dialogue that does not seek to select the good copy and exclude the bad copy, it is only in that dialogue that seeks to thematize the bad copy or simulacrum itself in the form of the Sophist, that myth does not appear. Within the Sophist, where the aim is to make the Sophist himself, the simulacrum of the philosopher, the target of Platonic definition, we find no foundational myth operating a selection between good-copies and simulacra. Moreover, by the end of this experiment, it turns out that the sophist and Socrates, the philosopher, cannot be distinguished from one another.
In this brief and extraordinary moment we encounter the Real, in the Lacanian sense, that animates Plato’s philosophy and which will govern the subsequent history of philosophy. It is here that the necessity of Plato’s recourse to myth becomes legible. If Plato must make recourse to myth, then this is because in covertly grounding his ontology on an axiological decision so as to select between the good copy and the false copy or the simulacrum, he finds himself in an ontological double bind where he must simultaneously hold both that the simulacrum is prohibited from the domain of being (on moral grounds) while also holding that the simulacrum is. Within this constellation, myth functions as the operator by which this selection and exclusion is accomplished, while simultaneously surmounting the ontological problem of the inclusion of the simulacrum within the order of being.
It is within this brief moment that Deleuze discerns the reversal of Platonism, for in the treatment of the sophist or the simulacrum in terms of the logic of division, in the absence of myth in this application, and in the indistinguishability of the philosopher or Socrates and the sophist that results, the structure of thought organized around the internal relation between models and good copies, essence and appearance, the intelligible and the sensible, is overturned. And if this structure is overturned, then this is because the being of the simulacrum is here articulated without recourse to a model regulating good lineages. In short, here it is disclosed that it is possible to speak the being of beings without recourse to a model functioning as a selective mechanism. Thus, on the one hand, Platonism fails in its recourse to myth, while on the other hand, it succeeds precisely at that moment where it seeks to articulate the being of that form of being, the simulacrum, that is opposed to all of its moral efforts. What is revealed in this moment is that the simulacrum is true being, or, alternatively, that true being consists of simulacra.
However, having reached this point where this thesis can now be articulated, it is necessary to proceed with caution. When thinking the simulacrum, our tendency is to think it as a copy of a copy that threatens to be mistaken with the real being of which it is a second order copy. Yet this thesis remains within the logic of representation precisely insofar as a copy of a copy is itself a re-presentation of a re-presentation. Under this model, the thesis that true being consists of simulacra would be the correlationist thesis that being consists of nothing but representations. In other words, it would be the thesis that we only ever relate to representations and have no access to being as such. However, reversing Platonism consists in undermining this entire representational logic. If, in the concept of the simulacrum, Deleuze finds the possibility of a non-representational realist ontology, then this is because the accent, where the simulacrum is concerned, is on the manner in which the simulacrum embodies a non-conceptual difference, not because the simulacrum is, falsely, portrayed as a copy of a copy. Plato had inscribed difference in the model in order to tame it by the logic of the Same and the Similar, thereby grounding the axiological selective mechanism he seeks. What is remarkable in the simulacrum is that it embodies a difference without a model. As Deleuze puts it, “[t]he simulacrum is built upon a disparity or upon a difference. It internalizes a dissimilarity. This is why we can no longer define it in relation to a model imposed on the copies, a model of the Same from which the copies’ resemblance derives. If the simulacrum has a model, it is another model, a model of the Other from which there flows an internalized dissemblance” (295). In freeing difference from subordination to identity, difference is now revealed as ground, being, the real. To be is to relate difference to difference through difference, whether we are speaking of a tree, mountains, persons, signs, or a revolution. In short, ontology becomes flat and the question of access to “true being” is abandoned insofar as being itself is always already difference.
Larval Subjects . 
October 12, 2009 at 3:57 am
block quote “To be is to relate difference to difference through difference, whether we are speaking of a tree, mountains, persons, signs, or a revolution. In short, ontology becomes flat and the question of access to “true being” is abandoned insofar as being itself is always already difference.” /blockquote
Ok, this is going to annoy some people. And I won’t mention Badiou, Lacan, Meillassoux, partly cos I haven’t read much (a tiny bit of Lacan).
Flat ontolog raises many important questions and for that reason alone it is interesting.
What I feel might need more attention is the ‘objects’ that will remain when human objects are not included – not correlated with human distinctions.
Apart from human distinctions it is not clear that mountains exist.
I know, it seems unreasonable at first sight to claim this but think about it.
What is the definition of a mountain:
blockquote
There is no universally-accepted definition of mountain. Elevation, volume, relief, steepness, spacing and continuity has been used as criteria for defining a mountain.[1] In the Oxford English Dictionary a mountain is defined as “a natural elevation of the earth surface rising more or less abruptly from the surrounding level and attaining an altitude which, relatively to the adjacent elevation, is impressive or notable./blockquote
‘Meteors’ do not crash into mountains.
Graham Harman, in his Zagreb talk, claims that there would be shoes if no-one was wearing them. Maybe, but would there be shoes if all shoe wearers died of influenza?
Maybe you’ve stopped reading by now but these kinds of questions occupied Maturana not so long ago and he thought he had the answer (and he wasn’t that naive).
blockquote In general, existence is always the result of an operation of distinction performed by an observer or his operational equivalent, and it is meaningless to speak of existence without specifying the operation which distinguishes that of which one asserts existence.
Example: If I distinguish a table as a simple unity putting things upon it in the manner in which one does with a tables, then the entity thus distinguished exists in a space in which one of the dimensions is defined by the property of supporting things, under the circumstances in which the property of supportiveness is fully defined operationally…/blockquote
blockquote A fly seen walking on a painting of Rembrandt does not interact with the painting of Rembrandt. The painting of Rembrandt exists only in the cultural space of human aesthetics [a v. specific cultaral space], and its properties, as they define this cultural space, cannot interplay with the properties of the walking fly./blockquote
Maturana, Autopoiesis: Reproduction, Heredity and Evolution (1980).
I quote Maturana, partly because much of his writing is not well known – and prob. never will be. He may be wrong but I’m still sometimes not sure.
Uexkull talks about the blade of grass being a ‘beetle path’ for the beetle (rather than a blade of grass). It is an empirical question whether beetles make this kind of observation. It is certainly a ‘beetle path’ for us.
Maybe I’m making a silly mistake. Quite possible. OOO includes all objects, but apart from the ones correlated with human activity, or other self consc. self movers – I’m not sure there are many ‘objects’. They may truly have been undermined. Harman may claim that this ‘privileges’ e.g. the fundamental forces/fields. Maybe it is not a question of privilege but simply a question of what exists as a unity apart from our distinctions.
October 12, 2009 at 6:07 am
Paul,
Think it through a little bit. If objects are similacra, then your criticism is no real criticism at all, as there’s no original that knowledge is supposed to reach. I think there are two problems here in your comment. First, it conflates epistemological questions with ontological questions, working on the premise that there’s some issue of the relation between what objects are for us with what objects are. Second, it implicitly assumes that realism is identical to the position of epistemological realism (your issues about mountains and blades of grass). OOO, however, rejects the position of representational realism. Within Graham’s formulation, all objects withdraw from one another. In other words, objects never directly encounter or relate to one another. In this respect, there’s nothing special of how minds or beetles encounter objects. This is true of all inter-object relations. In my own formulation, there’s no relation between objects that does not involve translation. Insofar as I begin from the premise that to be is to make a difference, then it follows that when one object relates to another object, it is not only the case that the object interacting with the second object contributes a difference, it is also the case that the object receiving the difference of the first object translates these differences, producing the sorts of things you’re talking about here. The move to be avoided is the idea that somehow the being of the object is exhausted by what it is for us. The problem I have with theorists like Maturana (or Luhmann) is that they have a tendency to reduce the object to what it is in and through our distinctions. As a result, they’re led to a concept of “being in itself” as a sort of chora or chaos that is then segmented by the distinctions of a system. Nonsense!
While I cannot speak for Harman, in my own formulation of OOO, cultural objects are every bit as real as any other object. It is not the correlate that makes them the object that they are. Rather, these objects are what they are by virtue of relations of dependency on other objects known as humans. In this respect, they are no different than mosses that can only live on a particular type of tree in the redwood forests of California or the Amazonian rain forests. These mosses are dependent on a particular ecosystem, but nonetheless are distinct objects within that ecosystem. Likewise, entities like money or contracts are dependent on a particular ecosystem but are distinct and independent objects within that ecosystem. It is not our “intending an entity as such” that makes the entity that entity.
October 12, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Surely there are any number of ways in which the cultural space/formation of a Rembrandt could influence the fly; for one, the painting might be in a museum where the fly will be most likely zapped.
Which I think is a simple enough way of seeing why fictional objects and material objects might be ‘equally’ real insofar as they are equally able to influence each other given the right circumstances or odds.
October 12, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Levi,
Certainly, Uexkull saw his work as confirming Kant.
For Uexkull the one great lesson of theoretical biology was ‘All biology is subjective appearance.’
Maturana followed him in this. M. even states quite explicitly that we can say nothing about the ground that we require for epistemological reasons.
And we can now say that they made a mistake.
Deely tries to rescue Uexkull from himself with a ‘semiotic’ reworking of Umwelten (the animal’s ‘self world’).
It is also interesting how Deely frees ontology from trad. ‘first philosophy’.
He argues that Aristotles’ first phil. was concerned with being as existing outside the mind. Deely will claim that the ‘being’ that semiotics studies antecedes, and is irreducible to any division of being into mind depend. or mind indep. This is how we can mix these orders of being together in experience…
Deely: “(‘The Problem of interpreting the term “First” in the expression “First Philosophy).
Deely also claims that it is Avicenna who first gives us this sense of being. One, it seems, that Deleuze and Duns Scotus will use.
So we might risk saying that the ontology of 000 uses an understandin of being that is found in the work of the Persian doctor Avicenna (Ibn Sina). And called ‘sense’ by Deleuze.
What might still concern me is the flattening effect of 000. The ironing out might miss something (as Deleuze might have missed somthing) – but for 000 this is misconceived.
It is also exhibits a great confidence in assuming that almost everyone else got it wrong – but now we know better…
I can’t do justice to this in this comment but basing an ontology on a standard ‘differance’ ignores cadacualtez:
http://knol.google.com/k/mario-crocco/cadacualtez-or-why-one-is-not-another/2ude40i84gh9i/2#
Maybe in 200yrs some bright young philosopher will say ‘how could they have been blind to that!’ And the answer is ‘easy’, after all 000, certainly in its Harmanian form, claims that the last 200yrs is a kind of phil detour. Maybe 000 will end up being seen as an interesting detour?
Being is difference (Deleuze),
But a logical difference (= one amenable to repetition?)
not the difference that makes you not your neighbor.
Adnan,
Good point. I guess Maturana was thinking of the fly’s interaction with the surface of the painting….
October 13, 2009 at 12:13 am
Hi Paul,
You write:
While I think this certainly moves in the right direction, in my view this position remains idealist or correlationist. There are a couple of problems with this position as I see it. First, in talking about a field of investigation that antecedes or precedes the division between being and mind, such a view implicitly supposes that minds are not beings or are outside of the order of being. From the standpoint of flat ontology, this view is, as Latour taught us, strictly speaking incoherent. Mind is not something other than being but is an object or being among beings. In this respect, flat ontology does not begin with the question of how it is possible for minds to touch being, but instead sees mind-object relations as yet another case of object-object relations that has its own special dynamics and structure just as the relation between hydrogen and oxygen has its own special dynamics and structure.
Second, the thesis that the distinction between being and mind, realism and idealism, is meaningless is not a resolution of the idealism/realism debate, but amounts to deciding that debate in favor of the idealist. Generally, idealism is not the thesis that mind creates being, but rather that it is impossible to speak of the being of beings independent of mind or a relation to the human. All Deely’s thesis does is affirm this thesis; which is fine insofar as there are very good arguments for this position, but it’s idealism nonetheless. However, it seems to me that ontology investigates being qua being, not being qua human. If philosophy is ontology, if it takes ontology seriously, then it cannot begin from the premise that being is necessarily sutured to the human. At best discussions of the relation between humans and other objects is a question for regional ontology, not general ontology. To properly practice ontology we must be capable of imagining a world without any humans or minds.
Throughout you seem to imply that Deleuze’s position and Deely’s are the same. However, it seems to me that Deleuze, like Whitehead, is one of the only genuinely realist philosophers of the last century. Does Deleuze have a number of interesting things to say about signs, organisms, systems, and so on? Absolutely. However, Deleuze’s thought (as does Whitehead’s) differs fundamentally from idealist or correlationist approaches to philosophy in that he does not make signs, organisms, minds, etc., conditions for all other beings. Rather, for Deleuze, as for Whitehead, these beings are beings among other beings that ought to be analyzed in their own terms. He is not making the claim that one is dependent on the other. Consequently, Deleuze is just as happy to talk about rocks, trees, ticks, clouds, crystals, and so on without rejecting them to the human. I think this comes out with particular clarity in the case of The Logic of Sense, where Deleuze’s account of language can be contrasted with other accounts of language during the same time period. Deleuze does not argue that language is the condition for everything else (a fairly common structuralist and post-structuralist thesis). Rather, Deleuze shows the conditions under which language is possible, how it differs in kind from bodies, how it arises from bodies, and how it has its own internal organization. Just as for Deleuze language cannot be reduced to bodies or sounds, bodies and sounds cannot, for Deleuze, be seen as products of language. This is a significant departure from standard correlationist theses. However, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Deleuze’s thesis is that Deleuze doesn’t treat language as something other than being, but rather treats it as one form being takes among other possible forms being takes. In short, for Deleuze language consists of real beings among many other real beings.
I somewhat get the sense that you’re worried that by adopting a realist ontology somehow we’ll be prevented from talking about humans or the autopoietic systems that interest you so much. But why should that be the case? Nothing prevents these things from being treated as real beings, nor are we in any way prevented from analyzing the manner in which systems use distinctions (Maturana) to structure perception, relations to the world, etc. All that is rejected is that these systems are the condition for everything else. Just as in chemistry or biology we recognize a difference between organic chemistry and non-organic chemistry without reducing one to the other, the simple point is that one sort of being is the condition of all other sorts of being.
You write:
Every philosophy is doomed to miss many things. You seem to suggest that philosophy shouldn’t even proceed because it might miss something. It’s inevitable that it will. More fundamentally, however, I find this line of argument very depressing. OOO doesn’t denounce the entire philosophical tradition as “wrong” but does what philosophies do: take a position, attempt to argue for that position, and refine that position. In doing so it draws heavily on the philosophical tradition, both correlationist and realist. It takes up what it believes is possible to preserve and rejects the other parts. But how is this different than what any other philosophy does?
October 13, 2009 at 7:37 am
Levi, this is good statement of the stakes of ontology!
I will try and respond more thoughtfully later, altho I shouldn’t make such promises.
A couple of things:
Deely is not the ‘same’ as Deleuze, but they do both emphasize univocal being – for Deely/Poinsot it is the being of relation…as you know.
Also I’m not convinced that Deely represents correlationism. As he argues, to interpret with any relevance the bee’s dance (von Frisch) is to go beyond the Kantian paradigm…but you may be right.
“To properly practice ontology we must be capable of imagining a world without any humans or minds.”
Yes, this is a fundamental challenge for ontology. And I will try to show (one day) that it is a v. depopulated world of objects without humans or minds (whether human or non-human).
block quote
Rari nantes in gurgite vasto. This “sea,” or the separation of minds by unmindful segments of nature, or hylozoistic discontinuity found among the natural sites, is properly called the hylozoic hiatus. And we find ourselves to be rari nantes in gurgite vasto (rare swimmers shipwrecked in a vast abyss), as Virgil considered the human condition in Æneid I, 118.
/block quote (Mario Crocco, Palindrome).
This ‘sea’ doesn’t have any ‘primary true forms’ like persons/semovient psyches. Deleuze/Guattari invoke Ruyer’s ‘primary true forms’ in the concl to WIP. He was on the right track. Absolute surfaces or volumes that are wholes – not partes extra partes.
block quote:Unmindful foreign entities are not integral: the wholeness of such and such a kilogram of sugar or – to use Heidegger’s example – the wholeness of the Earth’s Moon, eventuate only in their observers’ mental representations, or in a integrative level of nature (the fields) where the Moon and the sugar no longer keep a particularity.
Exception are the discrete increments in field excitation modes (“elementary particles”) that, independently of the physicists’ multiple mental representations purported to allude to them, occur as wholes with extramental intactness./blockquote (Crocco, Palindrome).
‘take a position, attempt to argue for that position, and refine that position.’
This seems right to me.
Persons/empsyched beings are not an optical ‘effect’ a la a certain Deleuze.
later. p.
October 14, 2009 at 2:41 pm
If everything is — and I think I believe this — ontic, immanent, and differencing, must not epistemology be so too a thing of the world? Therefore, the distinction is made here between ontology and epistemology, but given the model, does not the epistemic appear as “subset” of becoming? I would think that a flat ontology can discard nothing that makes a difference and epistemology does. This does not mean we “take it at its word.” However, what is to be taken at its word here? I assume that while signs are things, no thing is reducible to its “proper” significance alone. Indeed, it seems that ontology is not its representation alone and can never hope to capture its own character. Or not?