Our concern here is not with the nature of these assemblages but the practice of philosophy which gives rise to a book of this kind. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, pp. 42–6.
In an interview published after his death, Deleuze described A Thousand Plateaus as the best thing he had ever written, alone or with Guattari (Deleuze 1995a:114).
The ‘secret link’ which unites these thinkers is their ‘critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power’ (Deleuze 1995b:6).
In What Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari suggest that both contemporary analytic and communicational or conversational images of thought remain bound to the recognition model (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:138–9, 145–6).
In the Critique of Judgement, Kant explicitly grounds this accord among the faculties by means of a ‘common sense’ (Kant 1987:89–90). However, in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Deleuze 1984), and in his article published in the same year, ‘L’ldée de genèse dans l’esthétique de Kant’ (1963), Deleuze argues that the notion of such an accord between faculties or common sense is implicit in the accounts given in the preceding Critiques. Common sense is defined as ‘an a priori accord of the faculties, an accord determined by one of them as the legislative faculty’ (Deleuze 1984:35). In the case of knowledge claims, it is the imagination, understanding and reason which collaborate under the authority of the understanding to form a logical common sense, while in the case of moral judgment, it is reason which legislates. Kant ‘multiplies common senses’, creating as many as there are ‘interests of reason’ (Deleuze 1994:136–7).
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze uses Heidegger’s example (Deleuze 1994:165) but the analogy holds for any individual body attempting to coordinate bodily movement with a greater force, such as the novice rider attempting to coordinate his or her bodily movement with that of the horse. In an interview, Deleuze points to the contemporary passion for surfing (Deleuze 1995b: 121). For the example from Plato, cf. The Republic, 523b-c, and Deleuze 1994:138–9.
In The Logic of Sense (1990) and later writings, Deleuze proposes that the Leibnizian domain of the event is the ultimate element of thought. In What Is Philosophy? (1994), transcendental or ‘pure’ events are singled out as the external conditions of philosophical thinking: concepts express pure events. Deleuze’s concept of events and the relation between philosophical concepts and events is discussed further below.
Deleuze and Guattari insist on the difference between concepts and the plane of immanence which is not a concept but the region or milieu of thought in which particular concepts may be formed: ‘Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:36). In order to highlight continuities between the concept of philosophy outlined in What Is Philosophy? and that in Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition, we focus on the identity asserted between the conceptual plane of immanence and the image of thought. However, it should be noted that the concept of the plane of immanence also has links to the important concept of the plane of consistency developed in A Thousand Plateaus: see for example Deleuze and Guattari 1987:70–3, 265–72.
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‘I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or manufactures something that does not as yet exist, that is, “fictions” it’ (Foucault 1980:193).
In similar fashion, Best and Kellner read Anti-Oedipus (1977) as ‘a materialist, historically grounded, Foucauldian-inspired critique of modernity with a focus on capitalism, the family and psychoanalysis’ (Best and Kellner 1991:85). At the other extreme, Philip Goodchild argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s theory ‘should never be judged according to its apparent “truth” or “falsehood’’… Deleuze and Guattari’s social theory does not tell us about society in general, nor about the society in which we live; it only tells us about the social unconscious which Deleuze and Guattari have created, out of the resources which lie to hand, and it provides a resource through which we may create our own social meanings and relations’ (Goodchild 1996:46).
The equivalence of transcendental problems and pure events is reaffirmed in Deleuze’s account of the logical genesis of propositions in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990:123).
The passage Deleuze cites from Péguy’s Clio reads as follows: ‘Suddenly, we felt that we were no longer the same convicts. Nothing had happened. Yet a problem in which a whole world collided, a problem without issue, in which no end could be seen, suddenly ceased to exist and we asked ourselves what we had been talking about. Instead of an ordinary solution, a found solution, this problem, this difficulty, this impossibility had just passed what seemed like a physical point of resolution. A crisis point. At the same time, the whole world had passed what seemed like a physical crisis point. There are critical points of the event just as there are critical points of temperature: points of fusion, freezing and boiling points, points of coagulation and crystallization. There are even in the case of events states of superfusion which are precipitated, crystallized or determined only by the introduction of a fragment of some future event’ (Deleuze 1994:189; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994:111–13; 156–7). Note that it is in this context that Deleuze first introduces the categories of importance and distinctiveness as criteria for the evaluation of thought, suggesting that the problem of thought ‘is not tied to essences but to the evaluation of what is important and what is not, to the distribution of singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points, which takes place entirely within the inessential or within the description of a multiplicity, in relation to the ideal events which constitute the conditions of a “problem”’ (Deleuze 1994:189).
Kant 1992:153–7; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994:100.
Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of the event as the contour of an event ‘to come’ is mirrored by Derrida’s concept of the ‘to come’ as ‘the space opened in order for there to be an event, the to-come, so that the coming be that of the other’ (Derrida 1993:216). A concept of the pure event appears in Derrida’s accounts of the undecidable objects of his quasi-concepts: for example, his discussion of signature explains the ‘enigmatic originality’ of every such mark of identity by reference to ‘the pure reproducibility of the pure event’ (Derrida 1988:20). In effect, all the objects of deconstructive a-conceptual concepts might be described as pure events, or as variations upon the one pure event of sense or meaning: writing, iteration, differance, incineration, justice, etc. The experience of the undecidable, which is associated with all of these objects, is also an experience of the event or an experience of that which is necessary in order for there to be an event. For Derrida as for Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of the pure event functions as an inaccessible incorporeal reserve of being which guarantees a freedom in things and states of affairs.
