Date: Wed, 21 Feb 1996 09:48:42 EST From: Karen Ocana <CXKO-AT-MUSICA.MCGILL.CA> Subject: subjects and singularity In tangential response to the question of the production of subjects and subjectivities and the more pressing question of singularity: (In other words...) What are these singularities, impersonal and pre-individual "which are more us than we ourselves are, more divine than the gods, as they animate concretely poem and aphorism, permanent revolution and partial action ?" (Logic of Ssense, 72) And where do they come from? Why does Deleuze claim that our strength and freedom reside with them? The very word singularity is daunting, haunting. Perhaps it is an esoteric word, a nonsense word: a single-hilarity? There are, in fact, according to _The Logic of Sense_ two types of nonsense words: esoteric words, of the snark, phlizz, type; and portmanteau words, of the frumious (furious and fuming) and frabjous (fabulous and ravishing) type. These nonsensical words, or better yet, nonsense itself, is what for Deleuze 'donates' sense, by acting as an aleatory point or paradoxical element emitting 'singularities' and distributing them into two resonating series. Esoteric words such as snark create the two series intrepid hunter and rare prize. If singularities remain rather opaque to this reader/writer, she is perhaps not to blame. She is one. But that is only a partial answer/solution. It would seem that a singularity in the pure sense, is something or other - some pure ideational material force - from differential calculus. Deleuze is an amateur of the history of mathematics and references to Lautman and Proclus abound, perhaps moreso in _Difference and Repetition_ than in any other work, but certainly also with unnerving (I should say gratifying) frequency in _The Logic of Sense_. This claim merits an example. For instance: ...in the theory of differential equations, the existence and distribution of singularities are relative to a problematic field defined by the equation as such. As for the solution, it appears only with the integral curves and the form they take in the vicinity of singularities inside the field of vectors. It seems, therefore, that a problem always finds the solution it merits, according to the conditions which determine it as a problem. In fact, the singularities preside over the genesis of the solutions of the equation. (LS 54) Perhaps one solution to the enigma of singularities would be to take a course on the subject. Having already done so, the chances of improved understanding are better. Another solution would be to scan both _Difference and Repetition_ and _The Logic of Sense_ for traces of singularity and analyze the 'plates' in great detail. Another would be to study calculus, especially the history of calculus. For the time being such drastic measures are unnecessary. The sounder alternative is to extract a sense of the term from a more familiar context; it is repeated with such frequency and in such a wild number of variations in Deleuze's work, that not to have an inkling of *its real meaning* would seem almost a crime. In this new context, as you shall hear, a singularity is in fact a concept which is meant to replace subjectivity (perhaps it is meant to replace both subjectivity and objectivity or to subsume them by taking up a stance which incorporates both: the affective stance.) In a short article entitled "A Philosophical Concept" which appeared in the 1991 anthology _Who Comes After the Subject?_, Deleuze proposes that we give up subjectivity and replace it by singularity. Subjectivity "fulfills several functions in fields of thought that are themselves defined by internal variables. There are also external variables (states of things, moments in history), in a complex relation with the internal variables and the functions." He proceeds to ask: Can we find new functions and variables able to bring about a change? Functions of singularization have invaded the field of knowledge, thanks to new variables in space-time. By singularity, we mean not only something that opposes the universal, but also some element that can be extended close to another, so as to obtain a connection: it is a singularity in the mathematical sense. Knowledge and even belief have then a tendency to be replaced by notions like "arrangement" or "contrivance" (in French, agencement and dispositif) that indicate an emission and a distribution of singularities. Such emissions, of the "cast of the dice" kind, constitute a transcendental field without subject. The multiple becomes a substantive - Multiplicity - and philosophy is a theory of multiplicities that refers to no subject as preliminary unity. What becomes important is not what is true or false, but the singular and regular, the remarkable and the ordinary. The function of singularity replaces that of universality (in a new field in which there is no use for the universal). ('A Philosophical Concept', _Who Comes After the Subject?_, 94-5) The key phrase here is clearly the second sentence in which functions of singularization are said to have invaded the field of knowledge thanks to new variables in space-time. The reference is presumably to quantum physics or quantum mechanics and astrophysics, quarks, fractals and the like. The implication is obvious. It was really that - high technology - not structuralism which was and still is, today (as they say), at the cutting edge of sense-production. If revolutions in sense are bound up with revolutions in technology and these are in turn bound up with revolutions in epistemology which are bound up with political revolutions, social revolutions, spiritual revolutions and artistic revolutions, it would seem we are addressing a permanent revolution. The pragmatics of sense For Gilles Deleuze sense is, more precisely, what insists and subsists in propositions, in an independent and transcendental, ideal or metaphysical dimension. "Sense is the fourth dimension of a proposition. The Stoics discovered it, the lekton, along with the event: sense, the expressed of the proposition, is an incorporeal, complex, irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition." (LS 19) The sense-event or meaning-encounter, for Deleuze as for Foucault, takes place at the limits of bodies and signs, in the interstices of what is seen and said (and heard), in the realm of extra-being. If thought has ceased to be theoretical, it is also because sense has ceased to be solely a linguistic or logical concern and has become a matter of pragmatics. On a pragmatic view, the matter/form dichotomy has been dissolved in favour of material forces. "The couple matter- form is replaced by the coupling material-forces. The synthesizer has taken the place of the old "a priori synthetic judgment," and all functions change accordingly." (ATP 95) "Linguistics should be a pragmatics that opens language to the vagaries of 'context,' indexing grammar to relations of power and patterns of social change.[...] The operative concept is 'continuous variation.'" (Massumi, User's Guide, 42) Thought acts, it machines, system and process are in a state of mutual presupposition and continuous variation; and this 'new' image of thought (a bastard or aberrant line of thought ) seems to do for philosophy what the illocutionary did for linguistics. The thought-act has parallel implications to Austin's speech-acts. If the theoretical has died it is because it has gone the way of the subject and been replaced by new functions: performative and pragmatic, impersonal and singular. >From an unpublished paper, "Rhapsody for a surfacing sense-event in continuous variation" (May 93) kiro ------------------
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