by Daniel Smith
IDEAS IN THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON
In order to get a better grasp of what it means to speak of the “genetic” power of Ideas, let me turn, finally, to Kant's second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. One might easily—and correctly—surmise that Deleuze would have little sympathy for the second critique, with its appeals to transcendence (the moral law and the categorical imperative).21 Yet the structure of the first chapters of Anti-Oedipus is indebted to—and indeed derived from—the second critique. Both Anti-Oedipus and the Critique of Practical Reason present themselves as theories of desire, and one of the aims of Anti-Oedipus is to present an immanent theory of desire, one that is derived from the immanent theory of Ideas developed in Difference and Repetition.
Kant posited three fundamental powers or faculties of the mind: the faculty of knowledge (first critique), the faculty of desire (second critique), and the feeling of pleasure and displeasure (third critique).22 This distribution of the faculties was derived from the nature of our representations: every representation we have can be related to something other than itself—either to an object or to the subject. In the faculty of knowledge, a representation is related to an object from the viewpoint of its agreement or conformity with it (theory of reference or denotation). In the faculty of the feeling of pleasure and pain, the representation is related to the subject, in so far as the representation affects the subject by intensifying or weakening its vital force. In the faculty of desire, finally, the representation is likewise related to an object, but in this case it enters into a causal relationship with its object. Kant's definition of desire is extraordinary: desire is “a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations.”23 This definition breaks with a long tradition in philosophy that defined desire in terms of lack: desire, says Kant, is a faculty that, given a representation in my mind, is capable of producing the object that corresponds to it.
We know why Kant defines the faculty of desire in causal or productive terms. The problem of freedom concerns the operation by which a free being can be said to be the cause of something: that is, in acting freely, the agent produces something that is not reducible to the causal determinisms of mechanism. “Practical reason,” Kant writes, “is concerned not with objects in order to know them, but with its own capacity to make them real.”24 Of course, Kant is aware that real objects can be produced only by an external causality and external mechanisms; yet this knowledge does not prevent us from believing in the intrinsic power of desire to create its own object—if only in an unreal, hallucinatory, or delirious form. In what Kant calls the “pathological” productions of desire, what is produced by desire is merely a psychic reality. None the less, Kant brings about a Copernican Revolution in practical philosophy to which Deleuze is strongly indebted: desire is no longer defined in terms of lack (I desire something because I do not have it), but rather in terms of production (I produce the object because I desire it). The fundamental thesis of Anti-Oedipus is a stronger variant of Kant's claim: “If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality” (AO 26). How, then, does Deleuze work out this immanent conception of desire as productive of the real?
For Kant, the essential question of practical philosophy concerns the higher form of which each faculty is capable—a form that is no longer merely “pathological.” A faculty has a higher form when it finds within itself the law of its own exercise, and thus functions autonomously. The higher form of desire, for Kant, is what he calls the “will.”25 The will is the same thing as desire, but raised to its higher form—that is, desire becomes will when it is determined by the representation of a pure form: namely, the moral law, which is the pure form of a universal legislation (the categorical imperative). Practical reason has to do with “a will that is a causality inasmuch as reason contains its determining ground.”26 Under such conditions we are acting freely. In Kant, however, the moral law requires the intervention of the three great transcendent Ideas as its postulates. “Freedom,” as the fact of morality, implies the cosmological Idea of a supra-sensible world, independent of any sensible condition; in turn, the abyss that separates the noumenal Law and the phenomenal world requires the intermediary of an intelligible author of sensible Nature or a “moral cause of the world” (the theological Idea of a supreme being, or God)—an abyss that can only be bridged through the postulate of an infinite progress, which requires the psychological Idea of the immortality of the soul. This is the shortcoming of Kantian ethics: having denounced the transcendent Ideas of soul, world, and God in the first critique, Kant resurrects each of them, one by one, in the second critique, and gives them a practical determination.
Anti-Oedipus remains an incomprehensible book as long as one does not see its overall structure as an attempt, on Deleuze's part, to rewrite the Critique of Practical Reason. But what would a purely immanent theory of desire look like in the domain of practical reason? It would mean that one could no longer appeal to the moral law—and the transcendent Ideas that serve as its necessary postulates—but would instead have to synthesize desire with a conception of purely immanent Ideas? This is precisely what Deleuze does in the opening two chapters of Anti-Oedipus: the three syntheses by which he and Guattari define “desiring-machines” are in fact the same three Ideas that Kant defines as the postulates of practical reason (soul, world, and God), but now stripped entirely of their transcendent status, to the point where neither God, world, nor self subsists:
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 posed 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 Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze gives a purely immanent characterization of the three syntheses—connection [world], disjunction [God], and conjunction [self]—and then shows how desire itself is constituted by tracing out series and trajectories following these syntheses within a given social assemblage. There are, of course, many other important themes in Anti-Oedipus—such as the problem of the relation between Marx and Freud (via Lacan), and the identity of political economy and libidinal economy; and behind Marx and Freud, ultimately, Deleuze's appeal to the immanent models of Nietzsche and Spinoza. But if Difference and Repetition can be read as Deleuze's Critique of Pure Reason, Anti-Oedipus can be read as his Critique of Practical Reason. What unites the two pairs of books, respectively, is the theory of Ideas—the thread that links together theoretical and practical philosophy. What separates them is the status of their respective theories of Ideas (dialectics), and the use to which the Ideas are put. Kant critiques the transcendent use of the Ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason, only to resurrect them in the Critique of Practical Reason, and to give them a practical determination. In Difference and Repetition, by contrast, Deleuze pushes the immanent ambitions of the Critique of Pure Reason to their conclusion, uniting (in an immanent principle of difference) the three aspects of the Idea sketched by Kant (the elements of the Ideas are at once undetermined, determinable, and reciprocally determined). In the practical philosophy developed in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze proposes a theory of desire that, rather than seeking out the “higher” form of desire in the will, which has as its condition the synthesis of desire with its transcendent postulates (soul, world, God), instead seeks to explore the movement of desire, in a manner that is no less formal than Kant's, by tracing out the purely immanent syntheses of desire (connection, disjunction, conjunction). The new dialectic (theory of Ideas), whose formal components Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition, could be said to receive its practical determination in Anti-Oedipus—with the difference that, in Deleuze, the determinations of the Ideas are practical from the start (hence the importance of such questions as How?, Where?,
When?, How many?, From what viewpoint? and so on).
IMMANENT IDEAS AND LIVED EXPERIENCE
The preceding sections have attempted to explore the link between Kant's theory of Ideas—the thread of which can be traced through each of the three critiques—and Deleuze's revised theory of the Ideas, which is both dependent upon and critical of Kant. In this final section, I would like to present several concrete examples of the implications Deleuze's theory of immanent Ideas might have in the analysis of lived experience. At the very least, such examples serve to demonstrate that Deleuze's immanent theory of Ideas is not merely an exercise in speculation.
1. First, consider an everyday scenario such as the following. You wake up one morning, go to work, talk with some friends while sipping your coffee, sit outside in the sun during lunch, have dinner and a few drinks later in the evening, go home, feel slightly ill, and fall into bed early. What would be the Deleuzian portrait of a daily trajectory like this? If every “thing” is a multiplicity, my multiplicity necessarily changes dimensions, and enters a becoming, every time it is affected by another multiplicity: the heat of the sun, a conversation with a friend, the caffeine in my coffee. Each of these encounters introduces a variation in what Spinoza calls my “force of existing” (vis existendi) or “power of acting” (potentia agendi). I run into my friend Peter in the hall, but we have had a falling out, so I feel uneasy and uncertain around him, and my force of existing decreases; then I run into my friend Paul, who compliments me and buys me a drink, and my force of existing increases. In the park, the sun warms me, and expands my power; later I realize I am sunburned, and my power decreases. Drinking initially appears to increase my power, but the hangover the next morning seems to reduce it to zero. This is why Leibniz and Spinoza characterized us as “spiritual automatons”: these events happen to us automatically, and are almost indifferent to our own subjectivity.27 I have encounters and am affected by other multiplicities; at each moment these affections increase or decrease the intensity of my power, like a melody, a line of continuous variation or continuous becoming. Deleuze says he liked to imagine Spinoza strolling about, living his own existence, as a multiplicity, following this melodic line of continuous variation.
2. Second, now imagine yourself sitting in a classroom, listening to a lecture, though your mind is occasionally wandering off elsewhere. Leibniz had noted, famously, that we often perceive things that we are not consciously aware of, like a tap dripping at night. Leibniz therefore put forward the argument that our conscious perceptions are derived, not from the objects around us as such, but rather from the minute and unconscious perceptions of which they are composed, and which my conscious perception integrates. I can apprehend the noise of the sea or the murmur of a group of people, for instance, but not necessarily the sound of each wave or the voice of each person of which they are composed. A conscious perception is produced when at least two of these minute and virtual perceptions—two waves, or two voices—enter into a differential relation that determines a singularity, which “excels” over the others, and becomes conscious, on the basis of my needs, or interests, or the state of my body, Every conscious perception constitutes a constantly shifting threshold; the minute or virtual perceptions are like the obscure dust of the world, its background noise, what Maimon liked to call the “differentials of consciousness”; and the differential relation is the mechanism that extracts from these minute perceptions my own little zone of finite clarity on the world. This is what Deleuze means when he says there is an immanent and virtual Idea of sensibility that is not identical to my actual perceptions, and yet constitutes the real condition of sensibility itself.
3. Third, this is why Deleuze, following Spinoza, contests the Cartesian notion of the “clear and distinct.” My conscious perception of the noise of the sea at the beach, for example, may be clear, but it is by nature confused, because the minute perceptions of which it is composed—the perceptions of each wave, or each drop of water—are not themselves clear, but remain obscure, since they have not been “distinguished” or actualized in a conscious perception. They can be apprehended only by thought, in an Idea—or at best, in fleeting states close to those of vertigo, or drowsiness, or dizzy spells. Deleuze suggests that philosophers should start from the obscure; a clear perception emerges from the obscure (or the virtual) by means of a genetic process (the differential mechanism). Yet at the same time, my clear perceptions are constantly plunging back into the obscure, into the virtual Idea of minute perceptions; by its very nature, perception is clear and obscure (chiaroscuro). For one can easily imagine the opposite case: since you are drowsy as you leave the classroom, you become dizzy, lose your balance going down the stairs, and begin to black out. What is happening? Your consciousness becomes disorganized and loosened, and is invaded by a flotilla of minute perceptions. You are not conscious of these minute perceptions, they do not stop being unconscious; rather, it is you who cease to be conscious. But you none the less experience these minute perceptions; there is, as it were, an unconscious lived experience of them. You do not represent them, nor do you perceive them, but they are there, swarming within you, like the obscure dust of the world. We all experience something similar to this whenever we listen to a lecture, drifting in and out of attention. To say that perception is by nature clear-obscure is to say that it is made and unmade at every moment, in all directions, constantly extracting the clear while constantly plunging hack into the obscure.
4. Fourth, and finally, one could say that what we call “freedom,” the free act, makes use of the same mechanism. Suppose that I am at home hesitating between continuing to work and going out to have a drink with a friend. How do I decide? What constitutes my “free choice” in such a situation? There is no appeal to “decision theory” in Deleuze; a decision theory would strip me of any supposed freedom, since the theory itself would provide the answer. Rather, just as my perceptions are conditioned by minute perceptions, so my decisions are conditioned by minute inclinations and motivations that remain unconscious, until they reach the threshold that constitutes my decision. “Staying home” or “going out” are not objects in a balance, but rather orientations or tendencies that are in constant flux, each of which integrates a host of minute perceptions and motives. My initial inclination to go out not only integrates the sensation of drinking, but also the smell of the tavern, the camaraderie with friends, and so on. But at the same time, my soul also inclines toward staying at home, which integrates not only my writing and work, but my solitude, the silence of my environment. Then I incline again toward going out, but the inclination is not the same, because time has passed, and the affectivity is different. Even in a simple example such as this, making a decision is never a question of choosing between x (staying in) and y (going out), since both inclinations are multiplicities that include an unconscious multiplicity of auditory, gustative, olfactory, and visual perceptions—an entire “perceptio-inclinatory ensemble.” When I deliberate, I am really oscillating between two complex perceptive and inclinatory poles—my home and the tavern—which “fold” my soul, Deleuze would say, in constantly variable directions. Arriving at a decision is a matter of “integrating” the minute inclinations in a distinguished or remarkable inclination. On which side will I fold my soul? With which minute inclinations and perceptions will I make a “decisive” fold? To say that we are free means that, in Leibniz's phrase, we are “inclined without being necessitated.” During the day, in most of our actions—in all our habitual and machinal acts—we do not confront the question of freedom at all; such acts are done solely, one might say, to calm our disquietude. The question of freedom arises only when we posit the question of an act capable (or not) of “filling the amplitude of the soul at a given moment” (24 Feb 1987). A free act is an act that integrates the virtual perceptions and virtual inclinations into a remarkable inclination, which then becomes an inclination of the soul. Our decision is the result of the struggle between all these motives, conscious and unconsci
ous—“a battling to and fro, a rising and falling of the scales.”28 Our calculation of consequences merely enters into this battlefield as one factor, one impulse, one element among others.
The aim of presenting these examples from lived experience is to show that, despite the abstract nature of his language, Deleuze is attempting to get at something concrete with his theory of immanent Ideas, and to show in what manner they can be said to constitute the conditions of real experience, and not merely possible experience. “This is what it's like on the plane of immanence,” Deleuze writes, “multiplicities fill it, singularities connect with one another, processes or becomings unfold, intensities rise and fall” (N 146–7).
ESSAY 8
Analytics
On the Becoming of Concepts
W
hat is Deleuze's concept of a concept?1 In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari famously define philosophy as an activity that consists in “forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”2 Deleuze seems to have held to this conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts from the very start of his career.3 “The power of a philosophy,” he wrote in one of his early books, “is measured by the concepts it creates, or whose meaning it rejuvenates—concepts that impose a new set of divisions on things and actions.”4 Even in high school, he recounts, when he was first introduced to philosophy, concepts struck him with the same force as literary characters, having their own temperament and vitality, and populating their own landscapes (ABC E). It was not until late in his life, however, in What is Philosophy? (1991), that Deleuze, working with Guattari, finally proposed his own “analytic of concepts,” to borrow Kant's phrase, reaching the point where he could ask, “What have I been doing all my life?”5 Deleuze compared the book, in passing, to Kant's Critique of Judgment, and the comparison is an apt one: both are works of old age, written at a time when thinkers often have little new to say, their “systems” already being well established.6 Yet Kant's third critique is a book bristling with new concepts, pushing at the limits of Kant's carefully constructed architectonic, and setting the stage for Romanticism and what we now call, precisely, post-Kantian philosophy. In a similar manner, What is Philosophy?, far from being the self-reflective culmination of Deleuze's career, is much more his bequeathal to future philosophy, a handing-off of the baton; it too poses a plethora of new concepts and problems that are no doubt destined to be taken up by whatever a post-Deleuzian philosophy turns out to be. In what follows, I would to explore a constellation of problems that lies at the heart of What is Philosophy?: namely, the complex set of relations that Deleuze establishes between concepts, time, and truth.