deleuze and on writing

An interesting discussion of the task of philosophers in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? where he gives advice on how to write and what about . . .

[P]hilosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, "Let's discuss this." Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussable problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact, and when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All those debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment.

The money quote has to be the last two or three sentences. Reads like (an English translation of) a speech by Robespierre. But notice, too, the importance the two authors give to 'concepts.' This is not a casual aside: the first chapter of the book is 'What Is a Concept?' In the third chapter 'Conceptual Personae' are discussed.

Then this comment on science and concept:

It is pointless to say there are concepts in science. Even when science is concerned with the same "objects" it is not from the viewpoint of the concept; it is not by creating concepts. It might be said that this is just a matter of words, but it is rare for words not to involve intentions and ruses . . . . The power of the concept is attributed to science, the concept being defined by the creative methods of science and measured against science. The issue is then whether there remains a possibility of philosophy forming secondary concepts that make up for their own insufficiency by a vague appeal to the "lived." Thus Gilles-Gaston Granger [a French University professor widely published - jsr] begins by defining the concept as a scientific proposition or function and then concedes that there may, nonetheless, be philosophical concepts that replace reference to the object by correlation to a "totality of the lived" [totalité du vecú]. [See Gilles-Gaston Granger, Pour la connaisance philosophique, chap. 6 - jsr] But actually, either philosophy completely ignores the concept, or else it enjoys it by right and at first hand, so that there is nothing of it left for science -- which, moreover, has no need of the concept and concerns itself only with states of affairs and their conditions. Science needs only propositions or functions, whereas philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary, bloodless concepts. The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of compensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs. Every concept shapes and reshapes the event in its own way. The greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts. So the unique, exclusive bond between concepts and philosophy as a creative discipline must be tested in its finest details. The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. The French original was published in 1991.

Comments

[John Ransom]

Above Deleuze and Guattari write:

"philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary, bloodless concepts. The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of compensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs. Every concept shapes and reshapes the event in its own way."

In other words, we don't want your sloppy seconds, science boy. On the contrary, it is rather science that waits on philosophy. And that's what's wrong, it seems to me, with various attempts to popularize philosophic topics. I was amazed I went to Borders the other day and there's these "philosophy and the simpsons" and "philosophy and star trek" etc. Even if we grant that there might be some value to these efforts, they undermine themselves by treating philosophy as an adjunct, an accessory, an appurtenance. Deleuze and Guattari's claim is that philosophy is at the center of human concerns. It does not need to latch onto other vehicles in order to draw attention to itself. It follows that we ought to be able to write in a way that reveals the clearing in which philosophy itself is the central concern, rather than playing the role of court jester. And this in turn implies that we expand our notion of audience: more in the direction of Friedman's "The Earth is Flat" and less in the direction of overspecialized in-group commentary that assumes, rather than demonstrates, the concerns that activate it. Of course we can't grab an audience as big as Friedman, but we can *lean* in that direction more forcefully; question the assumption that only writing that is inaccessible to the citizen is properly academic. Or also for example we see on Booknotes or on the Daily Show people who have written books in their own field that do a good job of stating their starting problem and how the material in the book addresses or solves it. If philosophy is primary, then we ought to be able to explain to people why it is "in und für sich selbst" valuable. It ought to provide its own drama and the stakes of that drama should be broadly accessible. Push more in the direction of intellectual works that do not sacrifice intellectual rigor but which are accessible to the reader, reasonably conceived -- a good example would be "Gun, Germs, and Steel" by Diamond. It's a myth, and a harmful one, that philosophic topics are so distant from life that interest in them can only be sustained with this or that spoonful of sugar, or can only be articulated in a way that assumes a few years of graduate school work before being approached.

[Nate]

It's probly cuz my traveling reading was AJ Ayer so I've been stultified, but I don't get how philosophy comes first. You may like it better than other stuff - me too, generally - but I think the consensus in the tradition is that it comes second, temporally (hence the metaphor of nocturnal avians) because it needs something outside of or prior to itself to work on. It's more controversial as to whether it's primary qua more important (more central to life). I like the stuff, but claims to importance beyond expressions of gustatory delight tend to involve claims for extra airtime and mindshare, which always make me suspicious no matter who makes them about which type of people/profession.

What struck me when I read these passages (I never finished the second half of the book, so maybe D&G qualify or take back and I missed it) is the legislative tone, the occulted prescriptions as to what philosophers do such that those who don't do those things aren't philosophers. It evinces a homogenizing impulse, as do a lot of other things here: discussion fails because of the lack of sameness between discussants, philosophy surveys the whole of the lived, philosophy throws dice which have finite sides and thus a finite set of possible outcomes, and then the propertarian invocation of sole ownership.

Like I said, I may be missing something here, being made stupid by (and shocked and a bit disturbed at how much I enjoyed) reading 70 yr old logical positivism.

best,
Nate

[~craig]

Science concerns itself with observation, with description of states of affairs, and philosophy with concept formation, according to D & G.. Fine. Yet Mssr. Delueze (sort of PoMo's own Hume de La Rue) surely perceived that concept formation may also be viewed as a state of affairs described by scientists, at least eventually when the brain juice mechanics are worked out; and mere formation of concept is not really sufficient--it's what the concepts do, or map, or suggest, or entail. Some concepts are more equal than others.

[Toadmonster]

Niether science nor philosophy 'comes first.' I think modern philosophy generally recognizes this as part of the movement away from Hegel-style projects. One could say, each comes first - philosophy needs science etc. because it needs something to talk about, so there needs to be actual knowledge about the world, about what has happened in history,etc. But, philosophy (with art) comes first because you need reflective as well as prereflective ways of experiencing and thinking before you can go and do your science stuff. This is what Deleuze is talking about when he describes philosophy as the discipline that opens new questions and comes up with new concepts for trying to answer them. But I don't feel compelled to say one or the other is prior; I think it's a bad question, because disciplines are mutual and interactive.

[Discard]

It always seemed to me that the main concern in this text is to establish the nonidentity, or separability, of art, science, politics. In this case none would come first fundamentally. The aim seems to be to set up the immanent outside, the unthought, chaos, etc, as that into which thought (whether as art, science, or philosophy) must "dive", open onto, or whatever, in order to create. D&G say, after talking about these three separately, that the place where they become indistinguishable is in this common outside.

[Nate]

John,
I should have said this before but I had a massive headache which made me a bit cranky and sloppier than usual. When you write

"It's a myth, and a harmful one, that philosophic topics are so distant from life that interest in them can only be sustained with this or that spoonful of sugar, or can only be articulated in a way that assumes a few years of graduate school work before being approached."

I can't agree more. It took me several years to read v1 of Capital after I finished university. I kept getting 30 or 100 pages in, getting confused or tired, and giving up with the sense of being too stupid for that book. My own placing of Marx on pedestal (part of my training into the pernicious myth named above) made it easier to do that.

take care,
Nate

[Sam]

There are words.

There are statements, claims, interjections, etc. comprised of words based on observations (for instance, Capital is comprised of claims about economic history).

They point to objects, states of affairs, events, different patterns of light or matter.

Reading the statement/claim one (or many) can confirm whether it correlates or maps certain states of affairs accurately.

Statements or claims which do not point to perceivable states of affairs (events, situations, objects) are not confirmable: they could be "true" or not by virtue of an a priori defined axiom system, or they might be meaningless and/or aesthetic.

There exists no easy method, whether semantically or logically, to differentiate a statement from a concept...a "concept" generally a term for collection of statements based on observations.

Marx himself would unlikely have argued for some transcendent or metaphysical status of "concepts." One of the points of the Gr. Ideology was that concepts (consciousness, ideas) are formed from humans' interaction with economic and biological situations. Like many PoMo's, D &G bring back a sort of crypto-cartesianism ...........But any sort of semantic minimalism--bad for the academic philosophy bidness, whether links oder rechts

[Nate]

I see I'm not the only one whose been reading logical positivism.

[John Ransom]

Toadmonster writes:

Niether science nor philosophy 'comes first.' [end]

So Toadmonster disagrees with Deleuze and Guattari. They claim it does come first.

Toadmonster again:

But, philosophy (with art) comes first because you need reflective as well as prereflective ways of experiencing and thinking before you can go and do your science stuff. This is what Deleuze is talking about when he describes philosophy as the discipline that opens new questions and comes up with new concepts for trying to answer them. [end]

I find myself much more in agreement with the second excerpt, which is closer to Deleuze's. A popular example would be the kind of thinking Kuhn does [is it not possible to insert links into comments?] about paradigms. It's not the same thing, I'm just pointing to something broadly similar that might make Deleuze's idea (or my idea, wrong or right, of it) clearer. Isn't Deleuze saying that concepts are much more like the kinds of things that start or participate in 'paradigm shifts'? Science is not equal to philosophy in this sphere, because it focuses on the practical work of implementing conclusions and conditions already reached by the episteme.

[John Ransom]

Nate writes in part:

I can't agree more. It took me several years to read v1 of Capital after I finished university. I kept getting 30 or 100 pages in, getting confused or tired, and giving up with the sense of being too stupid for that book. [end]

Yeah, well, how about if Marx hadn't started the book with the godawful commodities chapter? And you know I think Marx really wanted to be understood and strove to be understood -- but then he starts Capital with the commodities chapter. And Derrida is no better he starts Grammatology with his most obscure section requiring a degree from not just any univeristy but from a French one, and a really elite one at that, and only after a highly theoretical first part does he employ examples and themes (masturbation always picks up the prose) that a reader lacking the requisite fifteen years of study at an all-nerd monastery can follow. Where did this desire for obscurity come from? I think Deleuze and Guattari in 'What is philosophy' are challenging this kind of relationship between philosophy and the world. Personal anecdote: when I took a course with Prof. Harvey Goldman in modern political thought -- this is a while ago! -- he didn't start with Marx's chapter on commodities but the later, historical section on primitive accumulation. Much better starting point.

[John Ransom]

Sam excerpt:

There exists no easy method, whether semantically or logically, to differentiate a statement from a concept...a "concept" generally a term for collection of statements based on observations. [end]

Well a concept might come out of observation but still transcend it. Like 'revolution.' Or 'relativity.' Or 'the cogito.' 'The categorical imperative.' Or 'leaf.'

[Sam]

There's no inherent transcendence, especially with "relativity" or "leaf"; and the imperative also dependent on perception. There's a language one learns by correlating words and statements with observation and perceptions: indeed the concept "Relativity" determined/brought about by observation and by positioning the events in a vector space (also perceptual). No hidden variables, and no recourse to transcendental mind needed. Yes, one might admit humans have a unique ability to reflect and conceptualize, and that is not merely conditioned or responding, but "concept" doesn't imply ghost, nor some immaterial Kantian freedom. The perception which led to the conceptualization obviously was mediated by physiology (blind people don't do physics in any sort of normal fashion): it's merely convenience to say "transcendence". What that really means is it's a complex mental event "unaccountable by present neurological and/or cognitive methods" (tho such conceptual powers of course neurologically modifiable whether by alcohol, psych. meds., eletrical stimulation etc.).

[Craig]

John, as I'm sure you know, Marx extensively struggled with himself on the order of presentation of Capital. There are many extent drafts of the organization of the book... Of course, he could have made the wrong decision. What would you have put first? Unfortunately, the more flashy chapters aren't easily understandable without the analysis of the commodity. The stuff on primitive accumulation and the working day are great and exciting, but a bit flat without the previous sections.

[John Ransom]

Sam writes:

There's a language one learns by correlating words and statements with observation and perceptions: indeed the concept "Relativity" determined/brought about by observation and by positioning the events in a vector space (also perceptual). No hidden variables, and no recourse to transcendental mind needed. [end]

Don't you think that concepts transcend their empirical origins in observation? Here's an excerpt from the introduction, or preface, of Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_

I have no fear, as regards this treatise, of the reproach that I wish to introduce a new language, since the sort of knowledge here in question has itself somewhat of an everyday character. Nor even in the case of the former critique could this reproach occur to anyone who had thought it through and not merely turned over the leaves. To invent new words where the language has no lack of expressions for given notions is a childish effort to distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts, yet by new patches on the old garment. If, therefore, the readers of that work know any more familiar expressions which are as suitable to the thought as those seem to me to be, or if they think they can show the futility of these thoughts themselves and hence that of the expression, they would, in the first case, very much oblige me, for I only desire to be understood: and, in the second case, they would deserve well of philosophy. But, as long as these thoughts stand, I very much doubt that suitable and yet more common expressions for them can be found. [end Kant]

Side note -- note that Kant protests that he only wants to be understood. But what I want to point to is Kant's use of 'leaves' above. Isn't Kant's use of this word (at the end of the second sentence) one that both employs and transcends the concept 'leaf'? Yes, he's using it metaphorically. But if we explore the content of the concept 'leaf' itself we'll never get to the pages of a book, right?

[John Ransom]

Hi Craig,

You know, I didn't know that Marx had struggled a lot with the presentation and organization. Someone has got to have written a great book on that and I'll take a look.

I would've started with the postface to the second edition, which is front-loaded in the Vintage press edition. Then I would've done, as you suggest but don't like, the working day and primitive accumulation. Then I would've done the commodities chapter. There's no way around the difficult material in this chapter but I think a reasonably conceived reader would be much better prepared for it. And that's the order in which I teach it as well.

[Nate]

John,

I'm in complete agreement re: the organization of Capital. Marx the historian and critic of political economy is much harder to fetishize and pedestalize than the philosophical Marx of those awful early chapters. (And Craig, I disagree about the importance of the early sections, I think that stuff is overrated and not very necessary at all - the early parts of v2 of Capital summarize most of v1 without all the metaphysical sounding stuff and as far as I'm concerned without a loss, it also leaves out the historical stuff which is a big loss). The way I finally read it was by the same method you suggest, John, on the advice of Harry Cleaver. He teaches the book the same way.

Incidentally, in the new Althusser collection Althusser identifies the historical sections as most exemplifying what he likes (aleatory materialism) in Marx. He also attributes this sensibility to Engles' book on the English working class, which struck me for some reason. I'd someday like to write an essay on the historical sections in Capital v1 and Benjamin's remarks on materialist history.

I read somewhere that Marx originally intended the first section, the abstract stuff, to be an introduction and for the book proper to start after that. I also remember from glancing over editions in other languages that the organization sometimes differs from that in the English. When I'm back home in September I'll look into this further and try to have more than vague speculations to offer.

All of this aside, though, John I have to say I don't find D&G clear at all. I find them obscure and hard and frustrating (irritating) just as I do the early parts of Capital. A Deleuzian friend recommends treating the stuff like Beat poetry ("try to groove with it" he says), I don't like that stuff either, maybe that's some of my difficulty. Different strokes, I guess.

cheers,
Nate

[Sam]

Regardless of the massiveness of Capital there are central assertions--say Surplus Labor Theory--which are quite empirical, and indeed one might say falsifiable if not provisional. One could call the SLT a "concept" but the concept is not some immutable truth or axiom: thus the orthodox marxist (if any such creatures still exist) is faced with the task of re-confirming his Master's assertions ( each year? or month? day?) with economic data from capitalist societies and markets the world over, and routinely establishing that laissez faire does not result in equilibrium...(so in some sense even Popper more a postmodernist and indeterminist than any french aesthete).

[Anthony Paul Smith]

"Toadmonster writes:

Niether science nor philosophy 'comes first.' [end]

So Toadmonster disagrees with Deleuze and Guattari. They claim it does come first."

No, they don't. Pretty explicitly they say that science doesn't need philosophy to do its job and neither does philosophy need science to do its. They are specific modes of production and neither of them comes first. You're assuming a Kantian epistemology in your reading of WIP. What they do say, roughly, is that philosophy rides chaos while science organizes it, but I don't think they give a value judgement about that.

[John Ransom]

Anthony Paul Smith,

I would not have said that Deleuze and Guatarri said philosophy came first if I hadn't checked. Here's the text that supports my reading. It is already above.

"But actually, either philosophy completely ignores the concept, or else it enjoys it by right and at first hand, so that there is nothing of it left for science -- which, moreover, has no need of the concept and concerns itself only with states of affairs and their conditions. Science needs only propositions or functions, whereas philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary, bloodless concepts. The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of compensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs."

"by right and at first hand" - do you see it? "so that there is nothing of it left for science." Your disagreement is with Deleuze and Guatarri, not with my unobjectionable and straightforward reading of it.

[Discard]

John, D & G seem to be saying that philosophy comes first with regard to the concept. Science comes first with regard to the function. Thus, science doesn't need philosophy to do its job (the function) and philosophy doesn't need science to do its job (the concept). Anthony is correct, then. You seem to be saying that the criterion is the concept, but this is the intraphilosophical criterion. With regard to the common job, bringing forth a people to come, a new earth, creating out of chaos, neither philosphy nor science comes first.

[John Ransom]

Hi Discard, okay, I can see that reading, but I don't think it's right. The concept is prior to the function, isn't it? What is 'concept' to D&G is 'paradigm shift' for Kuhn. They are asserting a priority. In the very same way that Galileo does in his letter to Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, found here:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/galileo-tuscany.html

[can't shorten links in comments I suppose]

[Sam]

Deleuze reads like a naturalist and anti-essentialist of some type: sort of Hume meets Spinoza sans ghost. Like Spinoza, D.'s writing seems to avoid defining determinism in any sort of useful fashion (but then most philosophers skirt that issue, including analytic philsophers).

It's difficult to see where the overlap would be with D. and a positivist and philosopher of science such as Kuhn, though one might argue there is a Kuhnian naturalism as well, but that is more from a sort of Quinean and verificationist perspective. And K's paradigm shifts are not any sort of metaphysical concepts or entities peculiar to an individual: more akin to adjustments in scientific theories due to conflicting data, improved "methodologies," modeling techniques. etc..

[Nate]

Sam,
I'm not sure I follow you re: surplus value. I think it is an empirical matter, in the sense of being an abbreviation for a number of phenomena which are abstracted into an account of a general social pattern. At that level of generality one can of course always quibble over problem cases, but the basic point holds. It's also not at all a unique insight on Marx's part. As for continually proving the correctness etc, that was always a foolish task and one which is happily dying off. Who, after all, would the Marxist economist convince, to what result, and why by that rather clumsy method?
cheers,
Nate

ps- as for states of affairs and statements which do not point to states of affairs being nonconfirmable, could one actually confirm the existence of states of affairs? I think most people would agree that we have sense data, some of which includes statements received, but I think "states of affairs" is not often held to be a synonym for "statements and sense data" but rather something - an external world - which is the source for sense data and the object of sentences.

In my experience people who utter "states of affairs" tend to believe in them in the way some people believe in souls, something which is not confirmed nor testable, and which there is little interesting in testing or confirming. (Personally I find the former a more sensible belief than the latter, but I'm not at all sure how to test this either, as any testing criterion I can think of are slanted by my own values.)

[Sam]

"As for continually proving the correctness etc, that was always a foolish task and one which is happily dying off. Who, after all, would the Marxist economist convince, to what result, and why by that rather clumsy method?"

However primitive Marx's specific claims seem, they are a fairly important contrarian view to Adam Smith or Keynes or others who hold that a capitalist economy leads to equilibrium, or even to the type of somewhat egalitarian, mercantile economy envisioned by Smith. I doubt "surplus labor theory delight' will make it into rock or hip hop charts, but some people still do value what might be known as induction, and the SLT or something like it generally forms part of any progressive or even green critique of market economics (the flaw was in asserting that SLT was a type of necessary law, when it is only a model--tho a model which is still capable of confirmation, as are KM's ideas on the division of labor, commodity (thought about the booming jewel or gold market lately?), "rentiers", speculation, etc. If you reduce marx's economic claims to a type of Hegelian idealism (and with your denial of induction and "states of affairs" you seem to be heading in an idealist if not Cartesian direction), you have sort of "aestheticized" the entire program and in effect neutered any sort of pragmatic, empirical critique. But most "marxists" themselves are guilty of this. Ralph Nader closer to M-ist orthodoxy than are ivy league sorts of belle-lettrists.

[Sam]

Which is to say, you may be a pedazo de ________ if you hold that Literature Incorporated assists progressive politics in any sort of meaningful fashion (and included in Lit. Inc. would be any manner of leftist heideggerians, most "continental philosophers," aesthetes, psychoanalytics, etc.). Marx would drink Pils with Thomas Kuhn before he sipped Pinot Noir with D & G, I believe.