File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9810, message 319


From: Kalapsyche-AT-aol.com
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 18:59:21 EST
Subject: Re: boundaries in flow


Dan and Ambrd--

=09Thank you for your comments and clarifications surrounding Deleuze's notion
of events.  I agree with your reading drawn from the infinitive element of the
verb, although I think this was what I was trying to express-- though,
perhaps, not so clearly as yourself.  You were right to point out the
assumption of cardinality in Zeno's arguments, but I think they can still be
put to good use in defending Deleuze's introduction of the ordinality of time
and events.  We must remember, I think, that Deleuze is engaging in ancient
debates surrounding the opening discourses of Western Philosophy with respect
to being and becoming.  I'll expand on this in a moment.
=09In evoking our inability to locate the "crash" within the cardinal order of
causal series we are given de facto evidence for introducing events into our
ontology as incorporeal quasi-causes.  Insofar as Zeno's paradoxes proceed in
their defense of Parmenides' monism of undifferentiated Being by reducing the
order of argument to cardinal causal series (note here that ordinality
precedes cardinality in assigning a place to a cardinal number series.  This
will be one of the pivots of Deleuze's argument), he is able to demonstrate
that becoming leads to absurdities and is therefor an illusion.  In this way,
Zeno is able to establish the so-called "truth" of Parmenides' assertion that
all diversity is illusion.  In this connection, it is important to remember
that Deleuze takes Parmenides at his word in defining becoming.  In this
connection, reference to Plato's Parmenides at 141a-d reveals that Deleuze's
notion of becoming on page 1 of The Logic of Sense reveals that the two
definitions are identical.  "When I say =91Alice becomes larger,' I mean that
she becomes larger than she was.  By the same token, however, she becomes
smaller than she is now...  This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose
characteristic is to elude the present.  Insofar as it eludes the present,
becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and
after, or of past and future.  It pertains to the essence of becoming to move
and pull in both directions at once (my italics, this thesis is the ground for
inclusive disjunction): Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa.
Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or
direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions
at the same time" (1).  Immediately before this Deleuze states that Alice in
Wonderland deals with pure events.  Form this we can deduce that event and
becoming means the same thing for Deleuze.  Since, to overturn Platonism means
to affirm becoming, we can in turn assert that Deleuze's ontology is an
ontology of the event.  
=09Back to Zeno.  Since Zeno cannot locate the transitions between a point A and
a point B, he argues that any such transition between these points must be
illusory; ergo Parmenidianism.  In contrast to this, Deleuze, in a sort of
Kantian critical gesture, assumes events de facto, and then goes on to ask
what must belong to events de jure.  This de jure question will consist in the
assertion of the manner in which events evade the present, by "pulling in both
directions at once", and will also lead to the de jure postulation of a good
and common sense affirming the unidirectionality of time.  This good and
common sense will in turn function as the critical lynch pin for Deleuze's
deconstructions and reappropriation of various traditional metaphysical
doctrines.  This critical maneuver is precisely Deleuze's use of paradox as a
critical method reminiscent of Kant's transcendental dialectic in the first
critique.  It is also that which allows him to overturn certain key
assumptions belonging to Western Metaphysics in surprising and revolutionary
was.
=09For instance, Plato, in his Seventh Letter, makes the claim that the fifth
element of "true knowledge" cannot itself be taught or conveyed, but instead
"like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at
once becomes self-sustaining" 41d.  This fifth element that leaps up like a
blaze, is of course eidos or the forms, and functions strategically to
implement the structure of models and copies, which allows Plato to "tame the
dissident phantasmata".  The other four elements of Plato's knowledge or logos
consists in names, descriptions, images, and concepts.  Plato argues that
these four elements are necessary to attaining knowledge, but inadequate to
knowledge itself insofar as they are subject to the dissembling and
paradoxical behavior of becoming.  When Plato's fundamental articulation of
knowledge is viewed through the interval of Deleuze's de facto and de jure
questions, it becomes clear that Plato, along with most other thinkers of the
tradition, can make neither a de facto claim for the fifth element of
knowledge, nor can he consequently claim the de jure right of this fifth
element to govern the other four elements and protect them from the
paradoxical activity of becoming.  Such are the results of affirming becoming
over Being on the de facto grounds of experience.  When Plato's articulation
of knowledge in the Seventh Letter is situated in terms of the broader content
of the letter concerning his dealing with the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse and
the unfortunate events that occurred with respect to Plato's follower Dion, it
also becomes clear that Plato's assumption of the fifth element-- and it is an
unfounded assumption, cf., Phaedo 96a-100e for the hypothetical nature of the
model-copy structure in contrast to Greek nature philosophies --is a selective
mechanism based on a moral and political judgment.  In this sense, Plato's
philosophy becomes a sort of Nietzschean, Apollonian dream philosophy used to
organize flows of becoming and select among rival claimants.  This in turn
makes it open to the Nietzsche style critiques Deleuze charted in Nietzsche
and Philosophy.
=09Through this reversal or overturning of Parmenidian and Platonic assumptions,
Deleuze is thus able to formulate an ontological chaosmos, in which divergent
series or perspectives are organized around singularity sense-events.  Two of
the best examples of this chaosmos formed out of divergent series organized
around singular sense-events can be found in Borges' "Garden of the Forking
Paths" and Gombrowitz' Cosmos.  The latter, especially, manages to capture the
divergence of series around singular sense-events through the hanging animals
that function as intensive singular signs organizing the various
interpretations and actions of the characters.  This allows for a sort of
ontological pluralism that avoids the problem of the one and the many as a
false problem, since events are understood to be multiplicities that can be
carried off in a multitude of different directions.  Ok, I'm preaching to the
choir.  The problem I have lies in determining how the transition from
singular, multiplistic, sense-events to particular divergent series takes
place.  How do we give a genetic account of the transition from the ordinal
table of events (recall the two tables upon which the God's play games with
their dice here), to the cardinal order of causal sequences?  At this point I
think we need to be careful to recognize that no one can or does occupy the
plane of immanence or realm of impersonal, pre-individual, transcendental
event-singularities.  As Nietzsche describes this plane in aphorism 109 of The
Gay Science, "the total character of the world, however, is in all eternity
chaos-- in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order,
arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our
aesthetic anthropomorphisms" (168).  According to Nietzsche, we don't get
better at determining the "causes" of the universe, we just get better at
describing "appearances" that succeed one another.  This seems to be a view
that Deleuze shares, given his sympathy to both Nietzsche and Spinoza.  But if
this is the case, we must wonder how a transition is made from this chaotic
necessity of events, to a particular "causal point of view".  There are a
number of possibilities here: We could go with the process of
(indi)different/ciation of Difference and Repetition, or the static
ontological and logical geneses of The Logic of Sense, or the processes of
folding and unfolding in The Fold.  All of these represent variant solutions
of the "same" problem of individuation within Deleuze's thought.  My problem
has consisted in determining how this genetic process takes place from the
plane to the perspective.  Hopefully someone can help me out with this.
=09My apologies for both the length of this letter and the abundant references
to Plato.I have had a tendency to read Deleuze as a sort of dialogue with
Plato, which I do not think is completely unfounded.  I took this approach in
order to situate some elements of Deleuze's problematic, but more importantly
to point out that he does have strong arguments in favor of his position.
Here I'm in full agreement with the claim that a lot of sloppy work is going
on in the secondary sources.  I myself have noticed a tendency in some to
adopt Deleuze's jargony language and pluralism as mana descended from the
God's and summarily dismiss a number other positions as "metaphysical" or
"Oedipal".  Although this may be true of those positions, a failure to
demonstrate why it is the case, coupled with an unwillingness to take opposing
arguments seriously, represents a return to dogmatic philosophizing and a
betrayal of Deleuze's Neo-Kantian critical tendencies which I take to be
central to contemporary thought and the debate surrounding pluralistic
ontologies of difference.  After all, a return to dogmatic philosophizing, is
itself a denial of perspectivism and non-pluralistic in character.  It is a
return to arche, when the aim was an-arche.  More anon.


   

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