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incapable of conjuring events and summoning us to them.20 The
relationship of concepts to their plane is rather that of events to their horizon. The plane is an event horizon, but a horizon independent
of different observers rather than relative to them. It is what grants the concept its independence of the visible state of affairs through
which it manifests.21 Strictly speaking, neither can it be thought in
the way that a concept can, nor is it even a method that defines and
precedes proper thinking in terms of concepts.22
Rather, according to Deleuze, the plane of immanence is what
allows one “to find one’s bearings in thought.”23 Concepts are
intensive features of absolute dimension encountered in the context
of this non-conceptual field of understanding, which must always
already be scoped out for them.24 This cal s to mind the image of
someone with his hands outstretched as he makes his way through
a dark but familiar room, where the wal s and furniture are intuited
before making contact with them as if by an unfocused and invisible
searchlight. Indeed, Deleuze describes the “diagrammatic features”
of the plane of consistency as dimensions of fractal (not co-ordinate) directionality that can only be intuited.25 Deleuze goes so far as
to suggest that this occult background of philosophical thought,
which only intuition can access, is of the order of dreamlike esoteric experiences that may be classed as pathological and irrational (from
an academic or scholastic standpoint).26 Deleuze evokes the image
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 36.
22 Ibid., 37.
23 Ibid., 73.
24 Ibid., 40.
25 Ibid., 39-40.
26 Ibid., 41. “Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always 483
lovers of sophia
of a desert whose dunes are always in motion to help us understand
this space that concepts come to populate, for a time.27
That which lies beyond conceptual understanding is Chaos. For
Deleuze the Chaos into which thought plunges is not an absence of
determinations. Rather, it is characterized by the transformation of
immeasurable determinations at what he cal s “infinite speed” so that
they vanish almost as soon as they take shape “without consistency
or reference, without [discernable] consequence.”28 Deleuze cal s to
mind the Buddhist notion of Shunyata when he describes Chaos
as “a void that is not a nothingness.”29 In other words, Being is the
virtual. This is also Deleuze’s view of the irrational in Nature as
“infinite variabilities” that we need “just a little order” to protect ourselves from.30
Deleuze asks, “what would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?”31 The plane of immanence, which allows for the
creation of concepts, is a section of Chaos – i.e. a cross-section that slices through Chaos.32 Deleuze identifies what he cal s “conceptual
personae” as the points of view that stand between Chaos and the
diagrammatic features of the plane, as well as between the plane
and the concepts that it allows to take shape on the plane. 33 In other words, it is a conceptual persona that first and foremost “plunges
into the chaos” to extract from it both the diagrammatic features of
the plane and its intensional features – both the horizon for concept-
formation and the groups of concepts related by their mutual
possibility within this horizon.34 He compares this “constructivism”
to follow the witch’s flight.”
27 Ibid., 41.
28 Ibid., 42, 118.
29 Ibid., 188.
30 Deleuze,
What Is Philosophy? , 201.
31 Ibid., 208.
32 Ibid., 42.
33 Ibid., 75.
34 Ibid.
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to “a throw of dice” in “a very complex game.”35 This means that
although at times Deleuze lays out personalistic, diagrammatic, and
intensive elements involved in philosophy as if they were co-equal
functions, the personalistic features determine the diagrammatic
and intensive ones.36
A philosopher’s name is actual y a pseudonym for his conceptual
personae, and Deleuze suspects that: “The face and body of
philosophers shelter these personae who often give them a strange
appearance, especial y in the glance, as if someone else were
looking through their eyes.”37 For Deleuze, the “idiot” popularized
by Dostoevsky – the private man of the cogito – is Descartes’
conceptual persona.38 Deleuze also cites the examples of “the
Socrates of Plato”, “the Antichrist” and “the Dionysus of Nietzsche”
among others.39 Deleuze takes Nietzsche to have worked with more
conceptual personae, of both a sympathetic and antipathetic nature,
than any other thinker. Deleuze points out that it is almost a rule
that sympathetic personae can never ful y free themselves from their
antipathetic shadow (or “ape” in the case of Zarathustra) to emerge
into pure positivity.40 For two personae to even be able to encounter
each other in a hostile manner they have to be functioning on the
same plane.41 Nietzsche’s sympathetic personae include Dionysus,
Zarathustra, and the Superman whose arrival he heralds. His
antipathetic ones are Christ, the Priest, the Last Men, and even
Socrates (a conceptual persona appropriated from Plato).42
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 77.
37 Ibid., 64, 73.
38 Ibid., 64. In the guise of the question “Descartes goes mad in Russia?”
Deleuze draws a connection between the conceptual personae of the old and new idiot, as exemplified by Descartes’ doubter in search of absolute mathematical certainty and Dostoevsky’s underground man who wil s a return of the absurdly incomprehensible. (Deleuze, 62-63)
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 76.
41 Ibid., 77.
42 Ibid., 65.
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Although, for this reason, many have seen Nietzsche as a poet
or mythmaker, his conceptual personae are neither historical figures
nor literary heroes (or vil ains). By means of them he populates the
plane of immanence that he lays out – life as will to power – with many new concepts, such as: “forces”, “value”, “becoming”, “life”,
“eternal return”, “ressentiment” and “bad conscience.”43 It is also with reference to Nietzsche, that Deleuze volunteers one of his most
il uminating definitions of what he means by evoking a conceptual
“horizon” as a metaphor for the plane of consistency – namely that
one plane or another is a bounded field that opens up are certain
determinate “modes of existence or possibilities of life.”44 Conceptual personae are, in turn, not “invented” in a facile manner so much as
&nb
sp; they are “brought to life.”45
Deleuze claims that the personal names affixed to diverse
scientific propositions – such as the Pythagorean theorem, Cartesian
coordinates, Hamiltonian number, etc. – are not conceptual
personae, but partial observers that extract prospects from sentences in relation to a particular axis of reference.46 These partial observers
– even in quantum mechanics – are not indicative of subjectivism,
they attest to a truth of the relative and not a relativity of truth.47 They are the postulation of a monadic perceptive and experiential capacity
to be affected to things studied, without which those things could
not be studied.48 Deleuze also wants to differentiate the conceptual
personae of philosophy from the psychosocial types studied by the sciences – especial y psychology and sociology.49 He cites the work
of Simmel and Goffman on identifying certain of these psychological
types that are functions of a structured social field, such as the
stranger, the exile, the migrant, the transient, the native, and the
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 72.
45 Ibid., 76.
46 Ibid., 24.
47 Ibid., 129-130.
48 Ibid., 130, 155.
49 Ibid., 67.
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homecomer.50 Deleuze takes these psychosocial types to be “only
physical and mental” in nature, whereas conceptual personae are
“spiritual.”51 Psychosocial types may help us assess the relationship
of conceptual personae to the epoch in which they manifest, but
the way in which the personae are in a realm of pure thought above
(or beneath), beyond, and determinative of a historical milieu qua a state of affairs observable by social science, is taken by Deleuze
to mean that conceptual personae and psychosocial types never
merge.52
Conceptual personae allegedly not only differentiate philosophy
from science, but also from the arts. Deleuze attempts to draw a clear distinction between the personae of philosophy and the figures of
art. Unlike conceptual personae, which are “the powers of concepts,”
aesthetic figures are supposed to be “the powers of affects and
percepts.” Deleuze draws an analogy between the way that the great
aesthetic figures of literature (Melville’s Captain Ahab), painting
(David’s Marat), sculpture (Michelangelo’s David), and music
(Strauss’ Zarathustra) produce affections and perceptions that go
beyond those ordinarily experienced, and the way that conceptual
personae allow us to think beyond ordinary opinions.53 This
analogy is based on a parallelism of distinction. Deleuze does not
at all belittle art by comparison to philosophy. He claims that while
such powerful contemplative artists as Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Kafka,
Artaud, and Melville are in one sense only “half” philosophers, they
are “also much more than philosophers.”54
So long as its materials – stone, canvas, chemical color – last, art
preserves by means of them and so artworks are also the subject of
a concern for preservation that is unique to them among all things.55
This unique concern for preservation of the work of art is on account
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 68.
52 Ibid., 70.
53 Ibid., 65.
54 Ibid., 67.
55 Ibid., 163.
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of an at least tacit acknowledgement that what is enfolded within
it is a compound of percepts and affects, concentrated sensations that have their own manner of being, their own existential capacity
to affect – even in the absence of human observers – by means of
perceptions encoded within them.56 This understanding of art in
terms of percept and affect blurs the boundary between works of art
and natural becomings: “The artist is a seer, a becomer…”57 Deleuze
claims that through his relationship with Moby Dick, Captain
Ahab enters into a becoming-whale that allows him to real y have perceptions of the sea – a nonhuman landscape of nature – and the
whale for his part has a compound of sensations that involve him in
a non-human becoming “ocean.”58 Deleuze wants to differentiate the zone of indiscernibility here from that at work within philosophical
concepts, a non-distinction and reversion of human and animal
wherein “something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other.”59
This does not allow aesthetic figures to grasp heterogeneity in an
absolute form the way that conceptual personae do.60 Sensory
becoming only expresses otherness in a striking way.61
The work of art confronts opinion by strategical y marshalling the
destructive force of chaos. The artist does not face a blank canvas or an uncarved block; she is always already confronted by a coagulation
of clichés that must be painted out or chiseled away.62 These clichés
are the attempts of opinion to resist chaos, but they are too feeble
and faltering to secure us from a col apse into the abyss. So the artist draws on chaos to produce a composition of sensations that defies
every opinion, every past attempt at art that has been assimilated
and uprooted.63 Deleuze uses the term “chaosmos” – borrowed
56 Ibid., 164.
57 Ibid., 171.
58 Ibid., 169.
59 Ibid., 173, 177.
60 Ibid., 177.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 204.
63 Ibid.
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from James Joyce – to refer to this composed chaos wherein chaotic
variability has been transformed into a chaoid variety that allows for a sensory encounter with chaos.64
By contrast, whether it transforms the chaotic variability into a
determinist calculus – where a future state is supposed to be able
to be determined from a present one – or whether enough of chaos
is allowed in to only admit of a calculus of statistical probabilities, Science does not aim at the retrieval of chaos. Rather, the scientist
at least tacitly filters chaos out of a framework of constants, limits, and coordinate axes of mathematical spatio-temporality.65 This
referenced chaos becomes ‘Nature’ qua object of empirical research
– by contrast with the natural non-human becomings at work in
art.66 The sciences slow down the infinite into a “freeze-frame” that
allows for propositional thought to penetrate matter, turning the
virtual into a finite quantity of movement, force, or energy bounded
by the parameters of a universal constant (e.g. the speed of light) so that it congeals into the formulaic mold of a frame of reference.67
Yet there are numerous instances throughout What is Philosophy?
where Deleuze undermines his sharp disciplinary distinction
between philosophy, science, and art. Some of his remarks readily
lend themselves to deconstructing this distinction altogether.
Deleuze sees Art, Science, and Philosophy as the three daughters of
Chaos, like the three muses. He dubs them “Chaoids.” They produce
realities out of Virtuality.68 Yet, interestingly, the parallelism and tripartite distinction between them is undermined by the ontological
priority that Deleuze assigns to the chaoid of philosophy. Concepts are not principles governing the reasonable association of ideas
or things; they are “mental objects determinable as real beings.”69
Concepts cut a plane of immanence through chaos, like a cross-
64 Ibid., 204-205.
65 Ibid., 205.
66 Ibid., 206.
67 Ibid., 118-119.
68 Ibid., 208.
69 Ibid., 207.
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section that gives chaos an intellectual y conceivable consistency – a
“mental chaosmos” which is “a chaoid state par excellence.”70 This
plainly asserts that the chaoid of philosophy sets the standard for
those of art and science.71 It contradicts Deleuze’s claim elsewhere72
that philosophy is not superior to science and art.
Bearing this in mind, let us look at Deleuze’s admission that the
relationship between philosophy, science, and art is not merely an
extrinsic interdisciplinary one.73 There is also an intrinsic relationship between the three on the basis of which we not only see how they
would need each other74, but why his claim that they are distinct at
all must real y be called into question. One example of this “intrinsic type of interference” is “when concepts and conceptual personae
seem to leave a plane of immanence that would correspond to them,
so as to slip in among the functions and partial observers, or among
the sensations and aesthetic figures, on another plane; and similarly
in the other cases.” While on the one hand Deleuze claims that
“these slidings are so subtle, like those of Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s philosophy” or when “partial observers introduce into science
sensibilia that are sometimes close to aesthetic figures,” he admits
that it can bring us to “find ourselves on complex planes that are
difficult to qualify…mixed planes…” constituted by “interferences
that cannot be localized.”75 Most significantly, Deleuze sees that
it is here where “concepts, sensations, and functions become
undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become
indiscernible,” that they extend a common shadow out of chaos and
into the future – the specter of the “people to come.”76
Deleuze also equates the artist and the philosopher, or views
them as interchangeable, at two crucial points when he is talking
70 Ibid., 208.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., 8.
73 Ibid., 192, 196, 217-218.
74 Ibid., 218.
75 Ibid., 217.
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