Creation?

Philosophy, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is ‘the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (1994: 4). More specifically, it is ‘the discipline that involves creating concepts’, because concepts are not ready-made, and even though they are incorporeal, what we usually refer to as intellectual or mental, there is no heaven of concepts; they must be created (1994: 5, 21). There are creators; creators are not persons but personae, a force of ideas that provide a signature, a name like Descartes or Kant that is a cluster or assemblage of concepts, and every concept is a multiplicity as there is no concept with only one component. Every concept has some sort of history as well as a becoming; it undergoes evolution, and so is both absolute with respect to the problem it addresses but also relative to its components, as well as infinite in its survol, its reach, but finite with respect to its Leibnizian indiscernibility (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 15–21). Although many things can be said about this designation, what I wish to draw attention to here is the problem of the creation of concepts. What does it mean to say that the creation of concepts is possible? How can we justify even the possibility of creation, not merely as a linguistic phenomenon but as a reality, even if an incorporeal one?

The reason creation rises to the level of a problem has to do both with Deleuze and Guattari’s own philosophy and with the mathematical and scientific framework, which their philosophy must confront in utilising the tools offered by the mathematics and cosmology upon which they are reliant. Beginning with a schematic history of philo-scientific accounts of the universe, and not simply of nature, western philosophy of science was formalised by Plato’s (fourth century BC) and Ptolemy’s (100 AD) models of the universe, both grounded in the idea of heavenly bodies moving in perfect circular motion guided by either Plato’s ‘pilot’ (in The Statesman) or Ptolemy’s Aristotelean god’s realm of heavenly perfection in which nothing that is true undergoes change. Much later (1687) there is Newton’s similarly eternal and cyclical universe (inherited by Albert Einstein) in which any event, no matter how improbable, must occur an infinite number of times (Smolin 1999: 143–4).

THE WRENCHING DUALITY OF AESTHETICS

From a certain point of view, it appears to be quite possible to characterize every aspect of Deleuze’s work as aesthetics or as in some manner grounded in aesthetics. This possibility arises as a function of the “wrenching duality” characterizing aesthetics, which Deleuze cites in The Logic of Sense (LS 260). This characterization arises in a discussion of the Platonic distinction between well-founded copies that resemble the Idea and copies called simulacra, which exist as a perversion of or deviation from the Platonic notion of the Idea (LS 256–58). What is significant in this account is the claim that Platonism founds the philosophical domain of representation realized through copies-icons that are understood to be the product of an intrinsic relation to the model that serves as their foundation (LS 257). We may venture to say, then, that Deleuze is interested in this intrinsic relation and in the distinction between representations or true copies and simulacra, which are distorted or false copies. As we will see, the distortion of figuration pushed by the simulacra will be central to Deleuze’s aesthetic thinking. It is, he says, the critical edge of modernity, destroying both models and their true copies (representations) in order to institute the creative chaos (LS 264, 266).

The development of this theme and of the structure supporting it appears to have continued throughout Deleuze’s work, thus its introduction sets the stage for Deleuze’s notion of philosophy in general. Referring to the wrenching duality, Deleuze states that aesthetics designates, first, a theory of sensibility, insofar as sensibility is assumed to be the form of any possible experience. As the form of any possible experience, aesthetics is clearly situated as an aspect of thought. As a form, it will be a calculus, a formal structure of well-defined rules that make the system governing experience consistent, so that it is not subject to interpretation.

THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE

For philosophers and film theorists today, there can be no innocent account of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and especially no innocent account of Bergson and film. The latter is due in large part to the two books on cinema written by Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (1983; 1986) and Cinema 2 (1985; 1989). Both books acknowledge Bergson's rich and inventive notion of the image, but simultaneously seek to circumvent Bergson's own so-called “overhasty critique” of cinema, a critique that apparently arises when he characterizes the medium as a model for the forces of rationality that immobilize and fragment time (Deleuze 1986: xiv).

The Brittlestar and Classical Dynamics

Physicist and philosopher Karen Barad has given us an account of an amazing sea creature, the Brittlestar, an invertebrate related to starfish, a creature that has no eyes, but is all eyes. The approximately ten thousand spherically domed calcite crystals covering the five limbs and central body of the Brittlestar function as microlenses that collect and focus light directly onto nerve bundles which are part of the Brittlestar's diffuse nervous system, giving it compound-eye capability (Barad in press). The Brittlestar's microlenses are optimised to maximise visual acuity enabling them to discern predators or discover hiding places. However, all of this activity takes place in a creative tension between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects and between geometrical and physical optics. Scientists, she notes, are studying the Brittlestar in the hope of mimicking its technique for producing vision. Of special interest is the information that the Brittlestar is a creature without a brain; it is simply a visualising apparatus, a metamorphosing optical system.

Darkness and light

Sitting before the computer screen, we gaze at the display of digital photographs, souvenirs of summer. A few of the images appear to have a sequential or serial character. I am trying to make you laugh, so I click, click, click, one image after the next. We throw them up on the screen, viewing them at first simultaneously, then one at a time, but quickly. Your shoulders jerk back and forth; the laughing mouth lights up the image then quickly evaporates as we move forward then backward, forward and backward again, symmetrically, through the series, replacing one image with the next as quickly as possible. It is so awkward, still, we exclaim, ‘Look! It's like a movie!’ Yet, it is not quite like a movie because the movement is too slow, too jerky. Its not true animation, not a continuous sequence of moving images. It remains a set of discrete images, images that influence one another, images that have their effect on us, but not quite like a film whose continuity is made possible by the minutely differentiated, sequential attitudes of the frames that make it up – twenty four immobile frames per second. Moreover, as we click through the photographs, one or another in the array stops us. ‘Ah,’ you exclaim, ‘that one is you.’ The slideshow stops abruptly; you survey the image, a pure contingency – one that does not interest me at all.

Universality and unity

Some people are standing in the back of a sparsely furnished room. Others, in front, are sitting restlessly; a few are moving around, but the room is generally quiet. A woman, surrounded by men, steps up to a microphone. She whispers more than sings, breathing her words, running the lines together:

What sensibility releases this woman to avow publicly and directly ‘God knows how I adore life?’ It is a private, personal admission trembling through the words of the poet. Merely repeating these words in public, lacking the cover of music or alcohol, of a dimly lit club or a private space evokes discomfort among those who listen. The listeners squirm; they feel embarrassed that the woman is so exposed. They have a language for this. They view her ruefully as pathetic, and some leave the room in search of less visceral stimulation; something that will help them to understand something, to know something, to do something.

Societies of control

The argument for apparent inevitability of the regulative principles of connection, disjunction, conjunction as an ontological structure is already well known and, somewhat disturbingly, it seems to have been accepted almost without question. It is not only the inexorable judgment of the transcendental idealist, whose ideas, expressions, murmurs, sighs and utterances are given voice throughout the preceding pages of this book, but also that of the skeptical but transcendental empiricist, whose beliefs have been till now barely stated but, nevertheless, quietly insinuated. What allows the empiricist to take up a transcendental, and not merely skeptical, stance is the fundamental concept that all simple ideas may be separated by imagination and united by that power again in whatever form pleases us. Such ideas stand in purely external relations with respect to one another; although empirical in origin, they are organized from ‘outside,’ embedded in a higher dimension. Is this not a truly transcendental structure? What are the implications of such external relations? What is gained by the swift and repeated association of impressions and ideas? What is lost as the infinite and infinitely accelerated intensities push forward their forces, ready to capture, to overtake and to determine and define whatever events – affects, percepts, concepts, prospects, functives – contingently rush onto each trajectory, giving themselves up to whatever associations ‘imagination’ has awaiting them. And finally, in the path of such intensities, what of our jagged hesitations, our wild intersecting seperatrices, our intervals of sensibility spilling from illuminated networks into the creation of perspectives, rays of light opening onto the crowds we are?

Disjunctive justice

Once again, perhaps surprisingly, in the last chapter we found ourselves again influenced by the poet; the poet who absorbs and intuits, who is an ever-changing point of view, an effect of combinatorial networks, light emanating from stars and planets, clouds and mountains, forests and seas, plants, animals, humans, vast cities, desolate plains, objects, images, sounds, tastes, odors, touch. She too emits shimmering light. Let us begin by reminding ourselves that the words she uses, the language she speaks, the gestures she performs are the words and language, the gestures and performances of a crowd, a host of states combining, contributing, influencing one another and influencing her at every moment, at each arrival, when she speaks and gestures, emitting her own spatializing-temporalizing nexus. Thought on another scale, from a certain distance, she could still be conceived as little more than the effect of dispersed and dispersing intensities, partial, fragmented and fragmenting. First, the connective syntheses in which what is most her own, her partial and discrete delusions would be connected to other partial and discrete elements that interrupt and carry her away from herself into new connections, unanticipated but apparently necessary. Necessary in order to articulate a desire that is not her desire, but desire itself, the immanent binary-linear sphere of possible differentiations. Her little delusion-producing machine would then follow the connective law of desiring-machines, which is, if she ‘feels’ something, she must ‘produce’ something, something that, nevertheless, will be torn apart; that is the law of the dark precursor.

Love and masochism

The previous chapter began by posing a question. What sensibility releases the poet to speak, publicly and directly, to admit her vulnerability, to say, ‘God knows how I adore life’? What connects her to the realm of the sensible, to what she calls ‘mysteries of love’? Is her departure from the spheres of good sense and common sense an affirmation of the nonsense that is their foundation? Or, does she resolve her separateness, does she slow her cognitive or active response to perception by opening herself to her own pleasure and pain, her discrete diffusion and distress, her multiple networks of influences, thereby departing from the only scale on which autonomy is possible? Is she spinning into another structure of relations, a structure that is finite yet lingers, that is almost transparent to its past and the past of the world; a structure that precipitates a distinct point of view, an absolutely new spatio-temporalization, not merely a continuous, smooth transition? Philosophers may have some difficulties accepting this. Hume has shown us that impressions and ideas of relations (resemblance, contiguity, causality) organize the mind, but that they constitute an autonomous logic; they are the manner in which the mind passes from one term to another. In this they provide the mind with constancy or universality; the association of ideas allows the mind to go beyond any contingently given experience and to connect it to an other contingently given experience, whether or not this is warranted.

What the ears hear

A story-teller tells a tale. We hear it, fascinated or irritated, completely in agreement or completely in disagreement. Either way, it is a question of what the ears hear.

French philosophy evinces a conflict of methodology that may be traced at least as far back as Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and René Descartes (1596–1650). Montaigne is noted for rejecting scholasticism in favor of a philosophy conceived of as the practice of free judgment. He believed that insofar as human conduct does not obey universal rules, but a great diversity of rules, it follows that universal ‘reason’, ‘truth’, or ‘justice’ must be subject to doubt. Thus Montaigne pursues knowledge through experience; the meaning of concepts must be related to common language or to historical examples. This leads him to moderate his use of philosophical language and to prefer phrases such as ‘perhaps’, ‘to some extent’, ‘they say’, ‘I think’ when making philosophical claims. Descartes, widely thought to have been influenced by Montaigne's skepticism, nevertheless moves in the opposite direction emphasizing judgment based on universal rules such as logic rather than experience. Descartes' interest in mathematics is evident, leading him to originate what are now called Cartesian coordinates (a system for representing the relative positions of points in a plane or in space). Most importantly, ‘Descartes believed that a system of knowledge should start from first principles and proceed mathematically to a series of deductions, reducing physics to mathematics.’ Thus we have one skepticism, but two radically different solutions.

Imagine yourself in the midst of some milieu, some process of continuous differenciation, characterised by rapidly changing events and personages, a sense of expectation – what if there is a glimpse, a shudder, a leap, something else? What if there emerges some evanescent darkness, some momentary shift invested with the misery of an onslaught of disturbing reverberations? Responding to this in confusion, perhaps you construct an Idea, a structure, a multiplicity, a system of multiple, nonlocalisable ideal connections which is then incarnated. It is incarnated in real (not ideal) relations and actual (physical) terms, each of which exists only in relation to each other, reciprocally determining each other. What is essential is the movement from ideal or virtual structure to actual incarnation, from the conditions of a problem to the terms of its solution, from differential elements and ideal connections to actual terms and diverse real relations constituting, at each moment, the actuality of time, the time of processes, of differenciation, of connections. So you slip into the construction of an Idea whose intensities produce appearances redolent of harsh wind, dark days, gloomy landscapes.

What solution does this Idea offer? It might allow you to encounter a physical Idea as the distribution of the shuddering disturbances and to go on with your life. After all, you are a busy person with a lot of responsibilities and important work to accomplish; people are listening to you, counting on you.