by Daniel Smith
2. Second, if the simulacrum is an image without resemblance, it is because the Idea itself no longer has the identity of a self-same model, but rather is now constituted by difference-in-itself. If the copy is submerged in dissimilitude, it is because the model is plunged into difference, so that it is no longer possible to say which is the model and which is the copy. If identity and resemblance persist, it is because they are now simply the external effects of the internal differential machinery of the simulacrum. Plato himself specifies how the simulacrum obtains this non-productive external effect of resemblance:
the simulacrum implies huge dimensions, depths, and distances that the observer cannot master. It is precisely because he cannot master them that he experiences an impression of resemblance … Resemblance is always on the exterior, and difference—small or large—occupies the center of the system. (LS 258, RP 171)
The simulacrum differs in nature from the copy because it has internalized the differential nature of the Idea, and is thus constructed on a fundamental disparity—a “‘disparateness’ within an original depth” (DR 51). The simulacrum, in other words, is constructed on an internal difference, an internal disparity, which is not derived from any prior identity; it has “the disparate” [le dispars] as a unit of measurement and communication. “Placing disparates in communication, resonance, forced movement, would thus be the characteristics of the simulacrum” (RP 170–1).
Deleuze here makes an oft-overlooked distinction between the concept of the Identical and the concept of the Same. In Platonism, “the model can be defined only by a positing of identity as the essence of the Same (auto kath’ hauto), as the essence of Ideas, and the copy by an affection of internal resemblance, the quality of the similar” (DR 265). In an inverted Platonism, however, this link between the Same and the identical is severed. When the Same passes to the side of things rather than Ideas, and indicates the indiscernibilty of things and their simulacra (Socrates is indiscernible from the Sophists, God from Satan), it is the identity of things that suffers a corresponding loss.
The distinction between the same and the identical bears fruit only if one subjects the Same [the Idea] to a conversion which relates it to the different, while at the same time the things and beings that are distinguished in the different [copies] suffer a corresponding radical destruction of their identity. Only on this condition is difference thought in itself, neither represented nor mediated.39
When Deleuze writes that “modernity is defined by the power of the simulacrum” (LS 265), he seems to be implying that each era must create its own anti-Platonism, and that his own “simulacral” version is informed, at least in part, by the structures and techniques of modernist literature. On this score, certain twentieth-century modernist writers, including James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond Roussel, Pierre Klossowski, and Witold Gombrowicz—whose work has nothing to do with Platonism or its reversal—have none the less made the “internal difference” constitutive of the work of art evident in their literary techniques, and Deleuze frequently appeals to their writings as examples. In Roussel's novels, for example, a single narrative is made to tell two different stories simultaneously. The procedure of La Doublure rests on the double meaning of a homonym (the title can mean either “The Understudy” or “The Lining”), which opens up a space in the heart of the work that allows objects to take on a double meaning, each participating in two stories at the same time; Impressions of Africa complicates this procedure, starting with a quasi-homonym (billard / pillard), but hiding the second story within the first.40 Similarly, Joyce's Finnegans Wake can be said to have pushed such techniques of internal disparity to their limit, invoking a letter that makes all the divergent series or stories of the “chaosmos” communicate at once in a transversal dimension. Yet Deleuze insists that all the arts, such as painting and sculpture—and even premodernist arts—have their own techniques of internal difference, even if modern literature comes to be a privileged example.41 Indeed, in an inverted Platonism, all things are simulacra; and as simulacra, they are defined by an internal disparity: “Things are simulacra themselves, simulacra are the superior forms, and the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum … The important thing, for the in-itself, is that the difference, whether small or large, be internal” (DR 67, 121).
3. The third characteristic of the simulacrum, finally, concerns the mode under which this disparity or difference is apprehended, which Deleuze defines as a problematic mode. In the famous passage of the Republic where he expels the artist from the City, Plato appeals to the user–producer–imitator triad in order to preserve an “iconic” sense of imitation (imitation as mimesis rather than apate or “deception”).42 The user is at the top of the Platonic hierarchy because he makes use of true knowledge, which is the knowledge of the model or Idea. Copies then produced by the craftsman (demiourgos) are iconic to the degree that they reproduce the model internally; though the craftsman cannot be said to operate by true knowledge of the Idea, he is none the less guided by a correct judgment or right opinion of the user's knowledge, and by the relations and proportions that constitute essence. Right opinion, in other words, apprehends the external resemblance between the copy and the Idea only to the degree that it is guaranteed by their internal (noetic) similarity.
What, then, is left for the false resemblance and internal dissemblance of the simulacrum? Imitation takes on a pejorative sense in Plato only when it is applied to the simulacrum, which does not reproduce the eidos but merely produces the effect of resemblance in an external and unproductive way, obtained neither through true knowledge (the user) nor through right opinion (the craftsman), but by trick, ruse, or subversion, an art of encounter that lies outside of knowledge and opinion (the artist or poet).43 The simulacrum can only appear under the mode of a problem, as a question, as that which forces one to think, what Plato calls a “provocative” (“Is it true or false, good or evil?”).44 The Republic does not attack art or poetry as such; it attempts to eliminate art that is simulacral or phantastic, and not iconic or mimetic. Perhaps the genius of the Pop Art of the twentieth century lay precisely in its ability to push the multiplication of images to the point where the mimetic copy changes its nature and is reversed into the simulacrum (which is the originary model for Warhol's series of Campbell soup cans?).45
The “problematic” nature of simulacra points to the fact that there is something that contests both the notion of copy and that of model, and undermines the very distinction between the two. “By simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned” (DR 69). With the simulacrum, the order of participation is rendered impossible, since there is no longer any possible hierarchy, no second, no third. There is no privileged point of view, nor is there an object common to all points of view. Sameness and resemblance persist, but only as effects of the differential machinery of the simulacrum (will to power); the simulacrum simulates the father, the fiancée, and the claimant all at once in a superimposition of masks, for behind every mask there is not a true face, but another mask, and another mask behind that. As Nietzsche mused, in response to Plato's allegory of the cave: “Behind every cave, is there not, must there not be, another deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abysmally deep ground behind every ground, under every attempt to furnish ‘grounds’?”46 “The only illusion,” Deleuze comments, “is that of unmasking something or someone”—the illusion of presuming a face behind the mask, an originary model behind the copy, a true world beyond the apparent world (DR 106). As a simulacrum, the false claimant can no longer be said to be false in relation to a supposedly true model. Rather, the “power of the false” (pseudos) now takes on a positivity of its own; it assumes its own concept, and is raised to a higher power (NP 96). The false must be distinguished from the power of the false; the false takes on a “power” of its own when it is freed from th
e form of truth—that is, when the false is no longer presented as being true (that is, as an “error”).47 The true world is no longer opposed to the false world of simulacra; rather, “truth” now becomes an affirmation of the simulacrum itself, falsity (art) affirmed and raised to a higher power.48
PURE DIFFERENCE AS AN IMMANENT IDEA
These characterizations of the simulacrum lead us to a new consideration of the status of an inverted Platonism. Deleuze's project of overturning Platonism must not be taken as a rejection of Platonism—on the contrary. “That the overturning [of Platonism] should conserve many Platonic characteristics,” writes Deleuze, “is not only inevitable but desirable” (DR 59). The simulacrum may be the focus of Deleuze's analysis of Platonism, but it is not the final word. The simulacrum scrambles the criteria of selection established by Plato and gives both difference and falsity a concept of their own. Far from refusing Platonism in its entirety, however, Deleuze's inverted Platonism retrieves almost every aspect of the Platonic project, but now reconceived from the viewpoint of the simulacrum itself. The simulacrum thus plays a double role in Deleuze's reading of Platonism: it shows how Plato failed in his attempt to “make the difference,” but at the same time it opens up a path toward a retrieval of the Platonic project on a new basis. In this sense, Deleuze's inverted Platonism can at the same time be seen as a rejuvenated Platonism and even a completed Platonism.
What is the nature of this rejuvenated Platonism? Plato's error was to have remained “attached to that old Wisdom, ready to unfold its transcendence again” (WP 148). Deleuze refuses Platonism's appeal to transcendence: “Every reaction against Platonism is a restoration of immanence in its full extension and in its purity, which forbids the return of any transcendence” (ECC 137). A purely immanent theory of Ideas must thus begin with the simulacrum: there is a being of simulacra, which Plato attempted to deny. If the resemblance of the iconic copy is built upon the model of the identity of an ideal sameness, the disparity of the simulacrum is based upon another model, a model of difference, from which the dissimilitude or “internalized difference” of the simulacrum derives its power. “Simulacra are those systems in which the different relates to the different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance: it is all a matter of difference” (DR 299). Indeed, was it not the differential nature of simulacra that motivated Plato to exorcise them in the first place? “On the basis of a first impression (difference is evil), [Plato] proposed to ‘save’ difference by representing it” (DR 29). An inverted Platonism, in return, implies the affirmation of difference itself as a “sub-representative” principle that accounts for the constitutive disparity of the simulacrum itself. “The cruelty [of the simulacrum], which at the outset seemed to us monstrous, demanding expiation, and could be alleviated only by representative mediation, now seems to us to constitute the pure concept or Idea of difference” (DR 67). In other words, simulacra require a new conception of Ideas: Ideas that are immanent to simulacra (rather than transcendent) and based on a concept of pure difference (rather than identity). Immanence and internal difference are thus the two touchstones of Deleuze's rejuvenated Platonism in Difference and Repetition.
Where does Deleuze find resources for developing his immanent dialectic? Deleuze notes that difference and the dissimilar (becoming) occasionally appear, in several important texts of Plato himself, not only as an inevitable characteristic of created copies, as a defect that affects images, a counterpart to their resemblance (they must differ in order to resemble), but as a possible model that rivals the good model of the Same, a Platonic equivalent to Descartes's evil demon.49 An echo of this tension resonates in the dialogues when Socrates asks, ironically: Is there an Idea of everything, even of mud, hair, filth and excrement—or is there rather something that always and stubbornly escapes the Idea?50 Plato raises these possibilities only to conjure them away, but they bear witness to the persistent though subterranean activity of a Dionysian world in the heart of Platonism itself, and to the possibility of its own domain.51 But it was primarily Kant who inaugurated a purely immanent interpretation of Ideas, and exposed the illusion of assigning to Ideas a transcendent object. In the “Transcendental Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant identified three primary transcendent Ideas, which he identified as the terminal points of traditional metaphysics: the Self, the World, and God. Such Ideas can have a positive use, Kant argued, when they are merely employed in a regulative manner, as horizons or focal points outside of experience that guide the systematization of our knowledge (the legitimate immanent employment of Ideas). But when we grant Ideas a constitutive employment, and claim that they refer to corresponding objects, we fall into an illusion of reason (the illegitimate transcendent employment of Ideas).
Yet even Kant was unable to push the immanent conception of Ideas to its limit. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant was willing to resurrect the transcendent Ideas and give them a practical determination as the postulates of the moral law. Deleuze's own project follows an initiative inaugurated by Salomon Maimon, who was the first post-Kantian to insist that Kant's own philosophy of immanence could only be completed through a return to the work of Hume, Spinoza, and Leibniz. For Deleuze, Ideas are immanent within experience because their real objects are problematic structures: that is, multiplicities constituted by converging and diverging series of singularities-events. In Kant, it is only the transcendent form of the Self that guarantees the connection of a series (the categorical “and … and”); the transcendent form of the World that guarantees the convergence of continuous causal series that can be extended (the hypothetical “if … then”); and the transcendent form of God that guarantees disjunction in its exclusive or limitative use (the disjunctive “either … or”). Freed from these appeals to transcendence, Deleuze argues, Ideas finally take on a purely immanent status, and the Self, the World, and God share a common death.
The divergence of the affirmed series forms a “chaosmos” and no longer a World; the aleatory point which traverses them forms a counter-self, and no longer a self; disjunction posited as a synthesis exchanges its theological principle of diabolic principle … The Grand Canyon of the world, the ‘crack’ of the self, and the dismembering of God. (LS 176)
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze will develop a set of formal criteria for Ideas in this purely immanent sense: difference, repetition, singularity, problematic, multiplicity, event, virtuality, series, convergence and divergence, zones of indiscernibility, and so on. Difference and Repetition, in this sense, presents a new conception of the dialectic. Platonism is dominated by the idea of establishing a criterion of selection between the thing itself and its simulacra: “Plato gave the establishment of difference as the supreme goal of the dialectic” (DR 67). But difference here remains an external difference between the authentic and the inauthentic; Platonism is able to “make the difference” only by erecting a model of the Same that assesses differences by their degree of resemblance to a transcendent Idea. In Deleuze's inverted Platonism, however, the distribution of these concepts is changed. If the difference between the thing and its simulacra is rendered indiscernible, then difference becomes internal to the thing itself (at the same time that its resemblance is externalized). Difference no longer lies between things and simulacra, since they are the Same; rather, difference is internal to things (things are themselves simulacra). What is required is thus a pure Idea of difference, an Idea that is immanent in things themselves. The immanent Idea is no longer a pure quality, as in Plato, but rather “the reason behind qualities” (DR 57). Deleuze describes his project in explicitly differential terms:
Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing … The object must therefore be in no way identical, but torn asunder in a difference in which the identity of the object as seen by a seeing sub
ject vanishes. Difference must become the element, the ultimate unity; it must therefore refer to other differences which never identify it but rather differentiate it. (DR 56)
It is this immanent theory of Ideas that constitutes what Deleuze will call a “transcendental empiricism.” Identity and resemblance still persist, but they are now merely effects produced by the differential Idea. Difference
produces an image of identity as though this were the end of the different. It produces an image of resemblance as the external effect of “the disparate” … However, these are precisely a simulated identity and resemblance … It is always differences that resemble one another, which are analogous, opposed or identical: difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing. (DR 301, 57)
FIGURES OF AN INVERTED PLATONISM
Once the theory of Ideas is reconceived as both immanent and differential, the Platonic dialectic can be taken up anew: “each moment of difference must then find its true figure: selection, repetition, ungrounding, the question–problem complex” (DR 68). Our final task is to analyze the function these four figures play in Deleuze's inverted Platonism, and the link they have to Deleuze's theory of immanent Ideas.