Essays on Deleuze
Page 25
When the form of time is put into the concept, the falsifier [le faussaire]—that is, the artist, the creator—takes the place of the truthful person. The falsifier is not a liar, since the liar is localizable (the liar “owns” his lies), whereas the falsifier is nonlocalizable; the power of the false exists only under the form of a series of powers. To ask “What is a falsifier?” is a badly-posed question, since the falsifier does not exist apart from an irreducible plurality or multiplicity; behind every falsifier there is only another falsifier (a mask behind every mask). The question becomes: where is one placed within the chain of falsifiers? As Nietzsche showed, the truthful person is himself nothing other than the first power of the false; Plato distinguished between the true world and the apparent world, but to do so he first had to create the concept of the Idea. If the power of the false is what Nietzsche called the will to power, one can distinguish two extremes or two powers within this will—namely, the will to judge and the will to create—and it is the latter that constitutes the higher power. On this score, Deleuze suggests that there have been three great presentations of the theme of the falsifier: in philosophy, the final book of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the chain of the “higher” men, each of which corresponds to a power of the false); in literature, Hermann Melville's final masterpiece, The Confidence Man; and in cinema, Orson Welles's last film, F for Fake.52 The latter provides an instructive exploration of the difference between the painter Vermeer and Hans van Meegeren, the famous forger of Vermeer's works. How did van Meegeren pass off his forgeries as genuine Vermeers? Precisely because he made use of the criteria of experts, and the expert is someone who judges; the expert is able to recognize a true Vermeer by means of criteria he himself has established concerning Vermeer's style and periods. The forger then studies these criteria and uses them to produce the forgery, to the point where the expert will declare, “This is clearly a genuine Vermeer because it corresponds to all the criteria.” The expert always has a forger within him, since they are both nourished off the same substance: the system of judgment (TI 146). What, then, is the difference between Vermeer and his forger? Both the artist and the forger belong to the chain of falsifiers, but Vermeer has a power of metamorphosis, whereas the forger and the expert scarcely know how to change; theirs is already an exhausted life that can do little more than judge the creations of others. The expert and the forger are united in their exaggerated taste for form (the form of the true), but the artist is able to take the power of the false to a higher degree that is realized, not in form, but in transformation. It is this same vision that animates Deleuze's conception of philosophy: philosophy is the enterprise of the creation of truth (the creation of concepts): that is, the will to power at its highest degree, which has as its necessary correlate the will “to have done with judgment” (ECC 126).
THE UNIVERSAL THOUGHT FLOW
There is a final topic to consider, which What is Philosophy? hints at but does not discuss in detail. If philosophy is the creation of concepts, what is the process that lies at the real genesis of concepts or the real origin of thinking? The question of how to “begin” has always been a delicate question in philosophy, and although Deleuze raises this question in Difference and Repetition (DR 129), we will approach the problem here by considering the following (somewhat obscure) passage from one of Deleuze's seminars on Leibniz:
What is given, at the limit, could be called a flow [flux]. It is flows that are given, and creation consists in cutting, organizing, and connecting flows, in such a manner that a creation is sketched out or made around certain singularities extracted from the flows … Imagine the universal thought flow as a kind of internal monologue, the internal monologue of everyone who thinks … The concept is a system of singularities extracted [prélevé] from a thought flow … One can also conceive of a continuous acoustic flow that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence (perhaps that is only an Idea, but it matters little if this Idea is justified). A musician is someone who extracts something from this flow. (15 Apr 1980)
Somewhat abruptly, and in a vaguely Spinozistic manner, Deleuze here posits the existence of what he calls the “universal thought flow,” even if its status is simply that of a justifiable Idea: just as we may have an Idea of a continuous flow of matter in the universe, of which we ourselves are modifications, so we can conceive of a continuous flow of thought in the universe, of which we are likewise modifications. “I maintain,” Spinoza similarly wrote, “that there is in Nature an infinite power of thinking.”53 The thoughts that come and go in our heads, of which we are neither the origin nor the author, are the products of this thought flow. Or more precisely, they are themselves the very movement of this universal flow of thought—a flow that is anonymous, impersonal, and indeterminate, like a continuous internal monologue. Leibniz had already argued, against Descartes, that it is illegitimate to say “I think, therefore I am,” not because “I am” does not follow from “I think,” but rather because, from the activity of thought, I can never derive an “I.” At best, Descartes can claim that “there is thinking” or that “thought has taken place.”54 Both Spinoza and Leibniz argued that there is an automatism to thought just as there is a mechanism of the body: we are all “spiritual automatons”—it is not we who think, but rather thought that takes place within us.55 Nietzsche likewise observed that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, not when ‘I’ want,”56 and in one of his notebooks he added:
A thought … comes up in me—where from? How? I simply don't know. It comes, independently of my will, usually surrounded and obscured by a mass of feelings, desires, aversions, and also other thoughts … One pulls it [the thought] out of this mass, cleans it off, sets it on its feet, and then sees how it stands and how it walks—all of this in an astonishing presto and yet without any sense of hurry. Just who does all this—I have no idea, and I am surely more a spectator than originator of this process.57
What, then, does it mean to say that a concept is a “system of singularities extracted [prélevé] from a thought flow”? To answer this question, we need to consider what we might call the “usual” status of the universal thought flow, and Deleuze has formulated a concept to describe it: stupidity [bêtise]. “Stupidity is a structure of thought as such” (NP 105). More to the point, to a certain degree, stupidity is the basic structure of the universal thought flow. The thoughts that pass through our mind every day are not falsehoods, nor are they errors or even a tissue of errors; every thought may be true, but they are none the less stupidities, inanities. There is, no doubt, a certain provocation involved in Deleuze's use of this term (the French term bêtise is derived from bête, the word for a beast or an animal), since other philosophers have made a similar point by appealing to different concepts. Heidegger spoke of idle talk or idle chatter, and the fact that, most of the time, our thoughts are the thoughts of what “They” think (Das Man).58 Plato spoke of the reign of the doxa or the realm of opinion, and he saw the task of philosophy as the attempt to break with the doxa, to extract oneself from opinion. But the point remains the same: the thoughts that pass through our heads, carried along by the universal thought flow, are stupid thoughts—thoughts that are determined, often, by the inanity of the culture that surrounds us. Is this not the aim of marketing and advertising: to modify the thought flow, to populate it with anonymous thoughts about making one's laundry brighter or one's teeth whiter? For Deleuze, the misadventure that constantly threatens thinking is not error or falsehood, but stupidity (clichés, ready-made ideas, conventions, opinions …). William James said that what prevents the creation of truth are the truths we think we already possess.59 Moreover, at a deeper level, one might say that schizophrenia also reveals a possibility for thought, which is why Artaud plays such an important role in Deleuze's work.
Artaud said that the problem (for him) was not to orient his thought, or to perfect the expression of what he thought, or to acquire application and method, or to perfect his poems, but simply to manage
to think something. For him, this was the only conceivable “work.” (DR 147)
In different ways, both the flow of stupidity and psychosis reveal the internal problem that thought itself constantly confronts: as Heidegger put it, “what is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is the fact that we are not yet thinking.”60 On this score, Deleuze likes to cite a phrase of the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard: pas une image juste, juste une image (“not a just image, just an image”). Since we are constantly besieged by images that are nothing but clichés, the task of the filmmaker is not to create just or moral or uplifting images, but simply to create an image tout court—that is, to manage to create an image that is not a cliché. That in and of itself is enough: to create even a single image that is not a cliché. The same is true for the creation of concepts in the realm of thought: “to think is to create—there is no other creation—but to create is first of all to engender ‘thinking’ within thought” (DR 147).
Given the reign of stupidity in the realm of thought, and the reign of clichés in the realm of art (and even the reign of psychic clichés in our affective and perceptive life), what, then, is the process that constitutes a real act of creation? How is thinking engendered within the habitual clichés of the universal thought flow? We have already seen Deleuze's response: thinking is always engendered through the fortuitousness of an encounter with a problem (under the form of an intensity), which alone guarantees the necessity of what it forces us to think. Philosophy has long been content to assume a “dogmatic” image of thought which presupposes that thinking is a voluntary activity; that the thinker has a natural affinity for the truth; that we are led into error by what is foreign to thought (the body, the passions); and thus that what we need to think well is simply a method that will ward off error and bring us back to the truthful nature of thought (NP 103). But Deleuze is pointing to a generalized thought process that cannot be covered over with this reassuring dogmatic image. Thinking is never the result of a voluntary will, but rather the result of forces that act upon us from the outside: we search for “truth” and begin to think only when we are compelled to do so, when we undergo a violence that impels us to such a search and wrests us from our natural stupor. A lazy schoolboy who suddenly becomes “good at Latin” because he has fallen in love with a classmate is no less an instance of this than Leibniz's relentless pursuit of the problem of sufficient reason (PS 22), and there is no method that can determine in advance what compels us to think. The “conceptual persona” one finds in Deleuze is not the Platonic friend, voluntarily exercising a natural desire for the truth in dialogue with others about a “What is …?” question, but rather something akin to the jealous lover, involuntarily forced to confront a problem whose coordinates are derived precisely from the questions Plato rejected: What happened?, When?, Where?, Why?, With whom? Deleuze said that he himself frequently sought material in encounters outside of philosophy, although these occurred more often with films and paintings than with people (ABC C). But this is precisely why Deleuze, like Kant, distinguishes knowledge from thinking. Knowledge is only a result or an outcome—it is the establishment of a territory, a competence or specialization; but thinking is a process of learning or apprenticeship that is initiated by one's encounter with a problem, and necessarily stems from the depth of one's own ignorance (N 7).
How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? [Deleuze asks in his preface to Difference and Repetition]. It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow—or rather, to make it impossible.61
Yet the encounter with a problem would mean nothing if the universal thought flow were nothing but a flow of stupidity: that is, if it did not have its own singularities. Indeed, this is why the concept of “singularity” plays such an important role in Deleuze's philosophy. In mathematics, the singular is opposed to the regular; the singular is what escapes the regularity of the rule—it is the production of the new (the point where a curve changes direction). More importantly, some singularities are remarkable, while others are ordinary, and in this sense, one could say that there are two poles of Deleuze's philosophy: “Everything is remarkable!” and “Everything is ordinary!” (FLB 91; cf. TI 15). It is in terms of these two poles that we can understand the real genesis of concepts. In Deleuze's ontology, every moment, every event, every individual, every thought is singular. Being is difference: that is, it is the inexhaustible creation of difference, the constant production of new, the incessant genesis of the heterogeneous. Yet the ontological condition of difference is that, in being produced, singularities become regularized, made ordinary, “normalized” (in Foucault's sense). It is this reduction of the singular to the ordinary that Deleuze calls the apparatus of “capture” (TP 424): the inevitable processes of stratification, regularization, normalization—or perhaps what we might call “stupidization” in the realm of thought. The characterization of the “usual” status of the thought flow as having a structure of stupidity was thus a derivative characterization, for the thought flow is indeed constituted by remarkable singularities—but they are singularities that have been rendered ordinary and banal. As Nietzsche wrote, in a slightly different context, “fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be.” This is why Deleuze insists that the distinction between the regular (what belongs to the rule) and the singular (what escapes the rule)—and even more so, between the remarkable and the ordinary—is much more important in philosophy than the distinction between the true and the false.
If a concept is a “system of singularities extracted from a thought flow,” this process of extraction has two necessarily correlative aspects—destruction (the destruction of the cliché) and creation (the creation of the new). Nowhere has Deleuze examined this two-fold process of thought in more detail than in his analysis of the act of painting in Francis Bacon (FB 71–90). Painters never simply work on the white surface of a canvas, Deleuze suggests, since the canvas is already filled, actually or virtually, with the images (clichés, perceptual schemata) that painters bring with them, so that the first task of the painter is not to cover the canvas, but to empty it out: to destroy the cliché. Bacon's technique was to make random marks, to throw the paint from various angles and at various speeds, or to scrub, sweep, or wipe the canvas—precisely in order to clear out locales or zones that would destroy the nascent cliché and make possible the creation of an image. It is as if a “catastrophe” or “chaos” overcame the canvas, which loosened the clichés of visual organization but at the same time outlined “possibilities of fact” for the emerging image being created—though with the perpetual possibility that one could botch the painting or fall back into the cliché.62 And just as the painter must destroy the cliché in order to create an image, the philosopher can create only by first destroying the conventions of opinion. If there is a difference between painting and philosophy—as well as the other arts—it lies in the fact that in philosophy the battle against the cliché usually remains external to the work, even if it is internal to the author. Unlike the other arts, Deleuze suggests that painting tends to integrate the matrix of the catastrophe into itself; the work emerges from an optical catastrophe which remains present on the canvas. In rare cases of thinkers like Artaud, the collapse of ordinary linguistic coordinates can indeed belong fully to the work itself (TRM 184). But in all cases, whether in philosophy, science, or art, every creation—the engendering of thinking within thought—has as its inevitable condition the fight against clichés through the confrontation with a problem.
This, then, is the real process that lies at the genesis of every act of creat
ion, and which unites the various aspects of Deleuze's analytic of concepts: if the singular is produced under conditions that constantly reduce it to the regular or the ordinary, then the task of creation amounts to a constant and ever-renewed struggle against the reign of clichés in order to extract singularities from the thought flow and make them function consistently as variabilities on a new plane of creation: the variations of a philosophic concept (the plane of immanence), the variables of a scientific function (the plane of reference), and the varieties of a work of art (the plane of composition).