Deleuzian concepts as open multiplicities

Deleuze and Guattari conceive of concepts as complex acts which take the form of singularities in thought: ‘the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always a singularity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:7). As a complex singularity, every concept has components that may in turn be considered as concepts. There are no concepts with only one component. To take an example from the history of political philosophy, Hobbes’s concept of the social contract has a number of component concepts, each with its own history and internal complexity. These include the state of nature, the restless desire for power, the natural laws of human reason and the artificial person or Leviathan which results from the compact. A change in one or more of these elements changes the concept of the contract. For example, in contrast to Hobbes, Locke characterises the parties to the contract not as subjects of a relentless will to power without moral obligations towards one another, but as property owners subject to obligations towards themselves and others derived from divine natural law. Another variation occurs in the shift from philosophers such as Hobbes and Rousseau, for whom the contract involves relinquishing power and authority to a sovereign, to those such as Locke and Nozick, for whom power is simply lent to a sovereign authority on condition that certain important needs are met. In each case, the outcome is a singular concept of a social contract where the nature of this singularity is determined by the components and the complex relations between them.

As acts of thought, concepts are intensional rather than extensional objects as in the set theoretical model of concepts as classes. Similarly, the components of a concept are not like individual terms falling under a given concept. Rather, they are intensive elements, pure singularities such as the individual subject in a state of nature, the subject of natural law,

Page 13

and so on. The relations between these components involve a certain kind of ‘rendering consistent’ of their components. Deleuze and Guattari describe concepts as the intensive and variable unity of their components: a concept is ‘the point of coincidence, condensation or accumulation of its own components’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:20). In this sense, they suggest, concepts are both absolute (considered as wholes, or as they say ‘posited all at once’) and relative (to their components, to other concepts, and to the problems which they are supposed to resolve). The components and their consistency in a particular concept are two distinct dimensions of the concept, but related in that the consistency is established only by means of a certain ‘communication’ between the components. For example, in Hobbes, the relative weakness of human beings combined with their rationality ensures acceptance of those rational precepts of self-preservation in a state of nature which lead directly to the compact to establish a sovereign power.

Concepts have a history, which may include their history as components of other concepts and their relations to particular problems. Concepts are always created in relation to specific problems: ‘A concept lacks meaning to the extent that it is not connected to other concepts and is not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:79). The history of concepts therefore includes the variations they undergo in their migration from one problem to another. In any concept, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘there are usually bits or components that come from other concepts, which correspond to other problems and presuppose other planes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:18). The concept of contract has a long history in political thought prior to Hobbes, but this does not mean that there is a single concept or contractarian tradition which stretches all the way from the Greeks via Hobbes and Locke to Rawls. Rather, there are ‘a number of traditions in which the contract takes on a distinct character and serves a specific end’ (Boucher and Kelly 1994:1). The contract is transformed in part by virtue of the specific problem to which it relates in each case, whether this be the constitution and legitimation of civil authority, of morality, or the distinctive political relation between ruler and ruled. Hobbes’s problem is the constitution and legitimation of coercive political authority. Rawls’s contractarian theory of justice (Rawls 1971) is designed to solve a different problem, namely the problem of the principles of a just society. His concept of political liberalism is conceived as a response to yet another problem: ‘how is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?’ (Rawls 1993: xviii, xxv).

To some degree, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of philosophical concepts resembles the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘open concepts’ which was once used to support the thesis of the ‘essential contestability’ of political

Page 14

concepts (Connolly 1983:225–31). In this view, concepts such as democracy are essentially contestable because they are complex and involve a number of component features, the relative importance of which may be weighted differently. As a result, the conditions of applicability of the concept leave room for dispute in particular cases. For Deleuze and Guattari, too, concepts are open or indeterminate in this sense. However, their primary concern is not with the difficulty of determining the limits of particular concepts but rather with the manner in which concepts are defined by the ‘bridges’ or pathways along which they may be transformed into other concepts. Because concepts are always created in relation to particular problems, and because different problems themselves may be interconnected, any given concept will be located in a series of virtual relations to other concepts. These virtual relations with other concepts constitute the ‘becoming’ of the concept in question. Concepts enter into such virtual relations when the elements of one become indiscernible from those of another. These relations in turn form particular paths along which the concept might be transformed into something else. Consider the concept of power which informs Hobbes’s account of the social contract: his argument that individuals in the state of nature become caught up in a competitive drive for ever more power appears to anticipate Nietzsche’s will to power. In fact, it is not the same concept of power in each case. From the Nietzschean perspective of power as an active force, Hobbes’s conception of power is reactive and his social contract amounts to the constitution of a community of slaves, whose only remedy for the inability to keep promises is to establish a power sufficient to compel observance by fear of punishment. Nevertheless, Hobbes does canvass—only to put aside as implausible—another basis upon which people might be held to their contracts, namely the moral strength of those individuals whose pride does not permit them to break their word. By contrast, Nietzsche invokes precisely this noble character type in envisaging the possibility of a sovereign individual ‘who has the right to make a promise’ (Nietzsche 1994: essay 2, para. 2). Nietzsche is commonly criticised for his individualism and his lack of any concept of political community. Yet by retracing this path from a reactive towards an active power, which must be regarded as a potential inherent in Nietzsche’s concept of will to power, we can envisage a transformation in the concept of political community which is the outcome of the social contract (Patton 1993:158–9).

Deleuze’s reconstructions of the work of philosophers such as Bergson, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche or Foucault were always attentive to the problems addressed in their work. However, What Is Philosophy? (1994) goes further in making the inherent susceptibility to variation or transformation a defining characteristic of philosophical concepts. Here, the essential indeterminacy of philosophical concepts is contrasted with the determinacy of the mathematical or propositional functions which are the objects of science

Page 15

and logic. Whereas philosophy forms ‘concepts’ on a ‘plane of immanence’, science establishes ‘functions’ on a ‘plane of reference’. The history of science involves the construction of such planes of reference and the specification of relevant coordinates in terms of which functions may be determined. In the case of logic, the Fregean definition of a concept as a function from individuals to a truth value defines a thoroughly determinate extensional multiplicity. In both science and logic, the determinate character of functions is ensured by the independence of the variables which define the relevant system of reference. By contrast, in philosophy the components of concepts are neither constants nor variables but ‘pure and simple variations ordered according to their neighbourhood’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:20). Within a given concept, these components are like so many intensive ordinates arranged in zones of neighbourhood or indiscernibility which define the consistency of the concept: ‘components remain distinct, but something passes from one to the other, something that is undecidable between them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:19–20).

At this point, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of philosophical concepts enters into a strange proximity with that of Derrida. In their terms, we might say that it is precisely such a zone of undecidability between spoken and written signification or communication that defines the deconstructive concept of writing in general. More generally, there are surprising similarities between the Deleuzian and deconstructive concepts of specifically philosophical concepts. Just as Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the specificity of concepts as they define them to ‘philosophy’, so Derrida distinguishes his distinctively deconstructive ‘concepts’ from ordinary philosophical concepts by calling them ‘quasi-concepts’ or ‘aconceptual concepts’. Derrida accepts the ordinary logic of concept-formation according to which a concept only exists when there is distinction: ‘it is impossible or illegitimate to form a philosophical concept outside this logic of all or nothing’ (Derrida 1988:117). At the same time, his practice of philosophy as a kind of ‘double writing’ produces its own distinctive series of philosophical ‘quasi-concepts’: writing, mark, trace, supplement, différance, iterability and so on. In effect, the procedure is one by which deconstruction moves from ordinary concepts (of writing, or of cinders) to another kind of concept ‘heterogeneous to the philosophical concept of the concept’ (Derrida 1988:118). By ‘philosophical concept of the concept’, Derrida means the traditional view according to which concepts are determinate ideal entities serving to identify regular kinds. Such concepts are not indeterminate or fuzzy but conform to the logic of exclusive disjunction: things either do or do not fall under them.

Iterability implies repetition or recurrence of the same and to the extent that a concept identifies something common to a range of particulars, conceptualisation implies iterability in this sense. Frege’s formal definition of concepts as functions from singular terms to truth values captures precisely

Page 16

this feature of concepts. By contrast, Derrida argues that iterability in this pure sense is never attained in natural language and it is precisely in order to account for this fact that deconstructive philosophy proposes to think the concept of concept otherwise. Iterability in the straightforward sense is never attained because in reality things are never simply instantiations of a uniform concept. In his discussion of concept-formation in ‘On truth and lies in an extra-moral sense’ (1979), Nietzsche comments that

a word becomes a concept in so far as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases…One leaf is always different from another one, so the concept ‘leaf is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.

(Nietzsche 1979: section 1)

Derrida points out that this implies that a rigorous concept of the ‘iterability’ which characterises concept formation would not only signify repeatability of the same but would also signify ‘alterability of this idealised same in the singularity of the event’ (Derrida 1988:119 trans. modified). In other words, concepts must be supposed to involve at once repetition of the same and realisation or instantiation of that same in different particulars: ‘leaf’ is both this leaf and that leaf as well as leafhood in general. Since leafhood is determined by the totality of particulars to which the concept applies, past and future, and since there is no possibility of measuring any particular against that ideal totality in the present, a necessary openness or indeterminacy affects the concept. To the extent that the concept of iterability takes this feature of concepts into account, it becomes a complex concept which combines (horizontal) sameness and (vertical) difference: ‘it entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event, concept and singularity’ (Derrida 1988:119).

Considered as ideal objects defined in terms of the deconstructive logic of iterability, Derridean aconceptual concepts are open multiplicities. They lack the determinacy associated with the traditional concept of concepts. In What Is Philosophy? (1994) Deleuze and Guattari also define concepts as open-ended and potentially variable multiplicities: Every concept ‘is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity is conceptual’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:25). The ‘zones of undecidability’ which render concepts consistent also render them iterable in Derrida’s sense of the term. Moreover, in their earlier collaborative works they invent concepts which exhibit these formal characteristics. Like Derrida’s ‘aconceptual concepts’, the concepts put forward in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) are not restricted by the logic of exclusive disjunction which is supposed to govern concept formation in the sciences and all ‘rigorous’ thought. They undergo continuous variation in their migration from one plateau to another. Against the

Page 17

arborescent image which has been prevalent in the history of philosophy, they propose a rhizomatic image of thought in which concepts are never stable but in a state of constant flux as they are modified or transformed in the passage from one problem to the next. The novelty of this conception of thought does not lie in its refusal of any systematic character but rather in the nature of the system which it develops. That is why when Deleuze describes himself as a philosopher in a very classical sense who believes in philosophy as a system, he immediately qualifies this comment by pointing out that he envisages a ‘system in perpetual heterogeneity’ (Deleuze 1993b:7).

It is in Deleuze’s earlier writings that the requirements of such a conceptual heterogenesis are worked out in explicit engagement with the philosophical tradition. From his essay on Proust (Deleuze 1972) through to What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994), Deleuze has pursued the question of the nature of thought. What is at stake in this question is the effort to describe an exercise of thought which is ‘opposed to the traditional image which philosophy has projected or erected in thought in order to subjugate it and prevent it from functioning’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:16). Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994) provides the most developed analysis of the dominant image of thought and his own alternative conception. In his retrospective comments on this book, Deleuze repeatedly singles out this chapter as the most important with respect to his subsequent practice of philosophy, describing it as ‘the most necessary and the most concrete’, and as the one which ‘serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with Guattari where we invoked a vegetal model of thought: the rhizome in opposition to the tree’ (Deleuze 1994: xvii; cf. 1995b:204; 1993b:8).

In the Introduction to Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), Deleuze explains the theatrical forms of thought common to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard by reference to their shared interest in movement, not in the sense that they wrote about motion but in the sense that ‘they want to put metaphysics in motion’ (Deleuze 1994:8). His own adoption of a method of dramatisation is evidence that he too shared this interest in a thought which moves. However, as he comments in an interview, it is not enough simply to say that concepts possess movement, ‘you also have to construct intellectually mobile concepts’ (Deleuze 1995b:122). A Thousand Plateaus (1987) is the realisation of this goal. It does more than simply record the movement to which concepts are subject in the course of the history of philosophy. It creates concepts that are defined by their relations to the outside and hence their capacities for movement and transformation. Only in this way is it possible to map rather than trace the variability inherent in all rhizomatic assemblages. The ‘anexactitude’ of mobile concepts is unavoidable, Deleuze and Guattari suggest: ‘anexactitude is in no way an

Page 18

approximation; on the contrary, it is the precise movement of that which is under way’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:20, trans. modified).

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 865