by Alan Sokal
This reversibility of causal order – the reversion of cause on effect, the precession and triumph of effect over cause – is fundamental. ...
This is what science catches a glimpse of when, not happy with calling into question the determinist principle of causality (the first revolution), it intuits – beyond even the uncertainty principle, which still functions like hyper-rationality – that chance is the floating of all laws. This is already quite extraordinary. But what science senses now, at the physical and biological limits of its exercise, is that there is not only this floating, this uncertainty, but a possible reversibility of physical laws. That would be the absolute enigma, not some ultra-formula or meta-equation of the universe (which the theory of relativity was), but the idea that any law can be reversed (not only particles into anti-particles, matter into anti-matter, but the laws themselves). The hypothesis of this reversibility has always been affirmed by the great metaphysical systems. It is the fundamental rule of the game of appearance, of the metamorphosis of appearances, against the irreversible order of time, of law and meaning. But it’s fascinating to see science arrive at the same hypotheses, contrary to its own logic and evolution.
(Baudrillard 1990, pp. 162–3, italics in the original)
It is difficult to know what Baudrillard means by ‘reversing’ a law of physics. In physics one can speak of the laws’ reversibility, as a shorthand for their ‘invariance with respect to time inversion’.191 But this property is already well known in Newtonian mechanics, which is as causal and deterministic as a theory can be; it has nothing to do with uncertainty and is in no way at the ‘physical and biological limits’ of science. (Quite the opposite: it is the non-reversibility of the laws of the ‘weak interactions’, discovered in 1964, that is new and at present imperfectly understood.) In any case, the reversibility of the laws has nothing to do with an alleged ‘reversibility of causal order’. Finally, Baudrillard’s scientific confusions (or fantasies) have led him to make unwarranted philosophical claims: he puts forward no argument whatsoever to support his idea that science arrives at hypotheses ‘contrary to its own logic’.
This train of thought is taken up once again in his essay entitled ‘Exponential instability, exponential stability’:
The whole problem of speaking about the end (particularly the end of history) is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. This paradox is produced by the fact that in a non-linear, non-Euclidean space of history the end cannot be located. The end is, in fact, only conceivable in a logical order of causality and continuity. Now, it is events themselves which, by their artificial production, their programmed occurrence or the anticipation of their effects – not to mention their transfiguration in the media – are suppressing the cause-effect relation and hence all historical continuity.
This distortion of causes and effects, this mysterious autonomy of effects, this cause–effect reversibility, engendering a disorder or chaotic order (precisely our current situation: a reversibility of reality [le réel] and information, which gives rise to disorder in the realm of events and an extravagance of media effects), puts one in mind, to some extent, of Chaos Theory and the disproportion between the beating of a butterfly’s wings and the hurricane this unleashes on the other side of the world. It also calls to mind Jacques Benveniste’s paradoxical hypothesis of the memory of water. ...
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.
(Baudrillard 1994, pp. 110–11)
First of all, chaos theory in no way reverses the relationship between cause and effect. (Even in human affairs, we seriously doubt that an action in the present could affect an event in the past!) Moreover, chaos theory has nothing to do with Benveniste’s hypothesis on the memory of water.192 And finally, the last sentence, though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view.
The text continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense:
We shall not reach the destination, even if that destination is the Last Judgment, since we are henceforth separated from it by a variable refraction hyperspace. The retroversion of history could very well be interpreted as a turbulence of this kind, due to the hastening of events which reverses and swallows up their course. This is one of the versions of Chaos Theory – that of exponential instability and its uncontrollable effects. It accounts very well for the ‘end’ of history, interrupted in its linear or dialectical movement by that catastrophic singularity ...
But the exponential instability version is not the only one. The other is that of exponential stability. This latter defines a state in which, no matter where you start out, you always end up at the same point. The initial conditions, the original singularities do not matter: everything tends towards the Zero point – itself also a strange attractor.193 ...
Though incompatible, the two hypotheses – exponential instability and stability – are in fact simultaneously valid. Moreover, our system, in its normal – normally catastrophic – course combines them very well. It combines in effect an inflation, a galloping acceleration, a dizzying whirl of mobility, an eccentricity of events and an excess of meaning and information with an exponential tendency towards total entropy. Our systems are thus doubly chaotic: they operate both by exponential stability and instability.
It would seem then that there will be no end because we are already in an excess of ends: the transfinite. ...
Our complex, metastatic, viral systems, condemned to the exponential dimension alone (be it that of exponential stability or instability), to eccentricity and indefinite fractal scissiparity, can no longer come to an end. Condemned to an intense metabolism, to an intense internal metastasis, they become exhausted within themselves and no longer have any destination, any end, any otherness, any fatality. They are condemned, precisely, to the epidemic, to the endless excrescences of the fractal and not to the reversibility and perfect resolution of the fateful [fatal]. We know only the signs of catastrophe now; we no longer know the signs of destiny. (And besides, has any concern been shown in Chaos Theory for the equally extraordinary, contrary phenomenon of hyposensitivity to initial conditions, of the inverse exponentiality of effects in relation to causes – the potential hurricanes which end in the beating of a butterfly’s wings?)
(Baudrillard 1994, pp. 111–14, italics in the original)
The last paragraph is Baudrillardian par excellence. One would be hard pressed not to notice the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology194 – inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning.
These texts are, however, atypical of Baudrillard’s œuvre, because they allude (albeit in a confused fashion) to more-or-less well-defined scientific ideas. More often one comes across sentences like these:
There is no better model of the way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our brain are interwoven than Moebius’s topology, with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral. It is in accordance with this same model that information and communication are constantly turning round upon themselves in an incestuous circumvolution, a superficial conflation of subject and object, within and without, question and answer, event and image, and so on. The form is inevitably that of a twisted ring reminiscent of the mathematical symbol for infinity.
(Baudrillard 1993, p. 56)
As Gross and Levitt remark, ‘this is as pompous as it is meaningless.’195
In summary, one finds in Baudrillard’s works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant.196 Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance
of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard’s thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.197
9
GILLES DELEUZE AND
FÉLIX GUATTARI
I must speak here about two books that seem to me to be among the greatest of the great: Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense. Undoubtedly so great, in fact, that it is difficult to speak about them and few have done so. For a long time, I believe, this work will soar over our heads, in enigmatic resonance with that of Klossovski, another major and excessive sign. But some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian.
(Michel Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, 1970, p. 885)
Gilles Deleuze, who died recently, is reputed to be one of the most important contemporary French thinkers. He has written twenty-odd books of philosophy, either alone or in collaboration with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. In this chapter we shall analyse that part of Deleuze and Guattari’s œuvre where they invoke terms and concepts from physics or mathematics.
The main characteristic of the texts quoted in this chapter is their lack of clarity. Of course, defenders of Deleuze and Guattari could retort that these texts are profound and that we have failed to understand them properly. However, on closer examination, one sees that there is a great concentration of scientific terms, employed out of context and without any apparent logic, at least if one attributes to these terms their usual scientific meanings. To be sure, Deleuze and Guattari are free to use these terms in other senses: science has no monopoly on the use of words like ‘chaos’, ‘limit’ or ‘energy’. But, as we shall show, their writings are crammed also with highly technical terms that are not used outside of specialized scientific discourses, and for which they provide no alternative definition.
These texts touch on a great variety of subjects: Gödel’s theorem, the theory of transfinite cardinals, Riemannian geometry, quantum mechanics ...198 But the allusions are so brief and superficial that a reader who is not already an expert in these subjects will be unable to learn anything concrete. And a specialist reader will find their statements most often meaningless, or sometimes acceptable but banal and confused.
We are well aware that Deleuze and Guattari’s subject is philosophy, not the popularization of science. But what philosophical function can be fulfilled by this avalanche of ill-digested scientific (and pseudo-scientific) jargon? In our opinion, the most plausible explanation is that these authors possess a vast but very superficial erudition, which they put on display in their writings.
Their book What is Philosophy? was a best-seller in France in 1991. One of its principal themes is the distinction between philosophy and science. According to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy deals with ‘concepts’, while science deals with ‘functions’. Here is how they describe this contrast:
[T]he first difference between science and philosophy is their respective attitudes toward chaos. Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, pp. 117–18, italics in the original)
Let us note in passing that the word ‘chaos’ is not being used here in its usual scientific sense (see Chapter 7 above),199 although, later in the book, it is employed without comment also in this latter sense.200 They continue as follows:
Now philosophy wants to know how to retain infinite speeds while gaining consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency specific to it. The philosophical sieve, as plane of immanence that cuts through the chaos, selects infinite movements of thought and is filled with concepts formed like consistent particles going as fast as thought. Science approaches chaos in a completely different, almost opposite way: it relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual. By retaining the infinite, philosophy gives consistency to the virtual through concepts; by relinquishing the infinite, science gives a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it through functions. Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science with a plane of reference. In the case of science it is like a freeze-frame. It is a fantastic slowing down, and it is by slowing down that matter, as well as the scientific thought able to penetrate it with propositions, is actualized. A function is a Slow-motion. Of course, science constantly advances accelerations, not only in catalysis but in particle accelerators and expansions that move galaxies apart. However, the primordial slowing down is not for these phenomena a zero-instant with which they break but rather a condition coextensive with their whole development. To slow down is to set a limit in chaos to which all speeds are subject, so that they form a variable determined as abscissa, at the same time as the limit forms a universal constant that cannot be gone beyond (for example, a maximum degree of contraction). The first functives are therefore the limit and the variable, and reference is a relationship between values of the variable or, more profoundly, the relationship of the variable, as abscissa of speeds, with the limit.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, pp. 118–19, italics in the original)
This passage contains at least a dozen scientific terms201 used without rhyme or reason, and the discourse oscillates between nonsense (‘a function is a Slow-motion’) and truisms (‘science constantly advances accelerations’). But what comes next is even more impressive:
Sometimes the constant-limit itself appears as a relationship in the whole of the universe to which all the parts are subject under a finite condition (quantity of movement, force, energy). Again, there must be systems of coordinates to which the terms of the relationship refer: this, then, is a second sense of limit, an external framing or exoreference. For these protolimits, outside all coordinates, initially generate speed abscissas on which axes will be set up that can be coordinated. A particle will have a position, an energy, a mass, and a spin value but on condition that it receives a physical existence or actuality, or that it ‘touches down’ in trajectories that can be grasped by systems of coordinates. It is these first limits that constitute slowing down in the chaos or the threshold of suspension of the infinite, which serve as endoreference and carry out a counting: they are not relations but numbers, and the entire theory of functions depends on numbers. We refer to the speed of light, absolute zero, the quantum of action, the Big Bang: the absolute zero of temperature is minus 273.15 degrees Centigrade, the speed of light, 299,796 kilometres per second, where lengths contract to zero and clocks stop. Such limits do not apply through the empirical value that they take on solely within systems of coordinates, they act primarily as the condition of primordial slowing down that, in relation to infinity, extends over the whole scale of corresponding speeds, over their conditioned accelerations or slowing-downs. It is not only the diversity of these limits that entitles us to doubt the unitary vocation of science. In fact, each limit on its own account generates irreducible, heterogeneous systems of coordinates and imposes thresholds of discontinuity depending on the proximity or distance of the variable (for example, the distance of the galaxies). Science is haunted not by its own unity but by the plane of reference constituted by all the limits or borders through which it confronts chaos. It is these borders that give the plane its references. As for the systems of coordinates, they populate or fill out the plane of reference itself.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, pp. 119–20)
With a bit of work, one can detect in this paragraph a few meaningful phrases,202 but the discourse in which they are immersed is utterly meaningless.
The next pages are in the same genre, and we shall refrain from borin
g the reader with them. Let us remark, however, that not all the invocations of scientific terminology in this book are quite so absurd. Some passages seem to address serious problems in the philosophy of science, for example:
As a general rule, the observer is neither inadequate nor subjective: even in quantum physics, Heisenberg’s demon does not express the impossibility of measuring both the speed and the position of a particle on the grounds of a subjective interference of the measure with the measured, but it measures exactly an objective state of affairs that leaves the respective position of two of its particles outside of the field of its actualization, the number of independent variables being reduced and the values of the coordinates having the same probability.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 129)
The beginning of this text has the aura of a deep remark on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but the end (starting with ‘leaves the respective position’) is totally devoid of meaning. And they continue:
Subjectivist interpretations of thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum physics manifest the same inadequacies. Perspectivism, or scientific relativism, is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative, that is to say, of variables whose cases it orders according to the values it extracts from them in its system of coordinates (here the order of conic sections is ordered according to sections of the cone whose summit is occupied by the eye).
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, pp. 129–30)
Again, the end of the passage is meaningless, even if the beginning alludes vaguely to the philosophy of science.203
Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari appear to discuss issues in the philosophy of mathematics:
The respective independence of variables appears in mathematics when one of them is at a higher power than the first. That is why Hegel shows that variability in the function is not confined to values that can be changed (⅔ and ) or are left undetermined (a = 2b) but requires one of the variables to be at a higher power (y2/x = P).204 For it is then that a relation can be directly determined as differential relation dy/dx, in which the only determination of the value of the variables is that of disappearing or being born, even though it is wrested from infinite speeds. A state of affairs or ‘derivative’ function depends on such a relation: an operation of depotentialization has been carried out that makes possible the comparison of distinct powers starting from which a thing or a body may well develop (integration). In general, a state of affairs does not actualize a chaotic virtual without taking from it a potential that is distributed in the system of coordinates. From the virtual that it actualizes it draws a potential that it appropriates.