The nature and task of philosophy

In What Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari set out three distinct conditions of the production of concepts. The first of these is the image of thought redescribed as the ‘plane of immanence’⁸ upon which the production of concepts takes place: ‘The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:37). Distinct images of thought are defined by reference to the presuppositions which define the nature of thought in principle. Merely contingent or empirical features of thought in a given context are not relevant, since the image of thought implies ‘a strict division between fact and right’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:37). Deleuze and Guattari point to a number of such images in the history of philosophy, including the Greek, the classical, the eighteenth-century and the ‘modern’ image shared by Nietzsche, Heidegger and others (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:54–5). Deleuze’s own conception of thought shares several features of this ‘modern’ image. His earlier approaches to this problem occasionally invoke the language of Heidegger’s question concerning the nature of thinking. Thus, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), he interprets Heidegger’s declaration that we are not yet thinking as a variant of the Nietzschean claim that we have yet to make thought absolutely active and affirmative: in so far as our thinking is controlled by reactive forces, Deleuze argues, ‘we must admit that we are not yet thinking’ (Deleuze 1983:108). In Difference and Repetition (1994), he refers in passing to Heidegger’s ‘profound texts’ which argue that thinking remains only an abstract human possibility. Ultimately, however, Deleuze does not believe that Heidegger manages to break with the presuppositions of the dominant image of thought or to provide an adequate conception of the highest form of the human capacity for thought (Deleuze 1994:144 and fn. 11).

The second condition of philosophical concept-creation involves recourse to particular characters or conceptual personae who speak in and through the utterances of a given philosophy: ‘conceptual personae are…the true agents of enunciation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:65). Like Nietzsche, who employs a whole cast of personae in order to work through the consequences of the death of God, Deleuze invokes a variety of conceptual personae throughout his works. These include, in Difference and Repetition, the apprentice who learns how to deal with problems (Deleuze 1994:164–6), and in A Thousand Plateaus, the nomad thinker who is aligned with a singular race or tribe rather than a universal thinking subject. Nietzsche’s account of Kierkegaard as a ‘private thinker’ rather than a philosopher in the service of the State, as well as Nietzsche himself, provides the model for this persona (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:376–9). In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari appear in the role of friends of the concept, where ‘friend’ itself is a complex concept which draws upon Nietzsche and Blanchot as well as the Greek conception of friendship (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:1–12).

Third, thought understood as the creation of concepts requires as its means and raw materials a supply of existing concepts. The definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts is a stipulative definition in which the term ‘concept’ is used to distinguish the object and materials of philosophy from those of science and art: ‘only philosophy creates concepts in the strict sense’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:5). By contrast, science aims at the representation of states of affairs by means of mathematical or propositional functions. Art does not aim at representation at all but at the capture and expression in a given medium of the objective content of particular sensations. Philosophy’s exclusive right to concept-creation means that it has a distinct object and vocation, but no ‘pre-eminence or privilege’ with regard to these other activities (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:8). It shares certain characteristics with science and art, but also differs from each of these neighbouring forms of thought. Whereas scientific functions provide knowledge of states of affairs and processes which are external to them, philosophy creates concepts which are like artworks in that they do not refer to or represent independently existing objects or states of affairs. Concepts are defined not by their relations to things or states of affairs but by the relations between their elements as well as by their relations to other concepts. In this sense, they argue, the concept ‘has no reference: it

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is self-referential, it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:22).

Deleuze and Guattari argue for a twofold semantic difference between scientific functions and philosophical statements, encompassing not only the nature of their respective objects but also their relation to those objects: scientific functions refer to bodies and states of affairs while philosophical statements express pure events. This implies that philosophy does not provide discursive knowledge of the kind provided by the sciences. In particular, it does not provide proof of its claims in a manner that may be disputed from the standpoint of the facts or even from that of another concept. A philosophical concept cannot be disproved, it can only be displaced or discarded. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that philosophy does not provide empirical knowledge nor is it ‘inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable or Important that determine success or failure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:82). Philosophy, as they understand it, is a form of practical reason and, as such, not subject to the norm of truth.

Deleuze’s criticisms of the dogmatic image had already condemned as an illusion the idea that the genetic element of thought is truth and falsity. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), as we saw above, he took as the basis for a genetic and differential analysis of thought Nietzsche’s account of the different qualities of the will to power and the types of forces which correspond to them. This account breaks the connection between thought and truth assumed by the dogmatic image. It points to the forces that determine thought to take a particular form and to pursue particular objects. Having argued that for Nietzsche the sense and value of things are determined by the qualities of the will to power expressed within them, Deleuze writes: ‘We always have the truths we deserve as a function of the sense of what we conceive, of the value of what we believe’ (Deleuze 1983:104). The point is not to deny the possibility of truth, but rather to suggest that truth is no more than an ‘abstract universal’, the precise character of which remains ‘entirely undetermined’ (Deleuze 1983:103). There are base truths which are of no interest to a critical thought, while conversely there may be falsehoods which serve the ‘higher’ purpose of the critique of established values and the creation of new values. Deleuze always aligned his conception of philosophy with that of Nietzsche on two points: opposition to those whose ultimate aim is the recognition of what exists, and preference for an untimely thought which seeks to invent new possibilities for life. Foucault invokes a similar conception when he suggests that philosophy consists in ‘the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself, and asks rhetorically: ‘In what does it consist, if not the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?’ (Foucault 1985:9). In effect, in describing philosophical concepts as non-referential

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and not subject to the norm of truth and falsity, Deleuze and Guattari say no more and no less than Foucault does in claiming that political philosophy (his own included) produces fictions.⁹ Their account of philosophical concepts as autopoetic, self-positing entities gives a precise sense in which such concepts are fictions. Moreover, it spells out a sense in which philosophical fictions can nevertheless produce real effects and, as Foucault says, help to ‘fiction’ or bring into being something that does not exist.

At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari’s own collaborative work is a sustained exercise in concept-creation, culminating in their concept of philosophy as the creation of concepts. In their own terms, the concepts they create cannot be supposed to represent external processes or states of affairs. Yet much of this work appears descriptive and intended to fulfil a cognitive function. As we shall see in Chapter 5, they offer an account of capitalism and trace the evolution of its forms of economic, social and political regulation as an immanent axiomatic system. Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on control societies’ (1995b: 177–82) seeks to supplement Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power by defining new mechanisms of control which, it is suggested, have largely displaced the techniques of power described by Foucault. Commentators such as Negri see in such overtly empirical claims ‘a perfectly operational phenomenology of the present’ (Negri 1995:108).¹⁰ However, on Deleuze and Guattari’s account, their work is philosophy rather than neo-Marxist social science. How then does philosophy, as they understand it, fulfil a cognitive function?

In What Is Philosophy? (1994), the task of philosophy is to create concepts that provide knowledge of pure events: the concept is knowledge, they argue, but ‘what it knows is the pure event’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:33). One way to approach the question of what is meant here by ‘pure event’, and what is the nature of this knowledge, is via Deleuze’s earlier account of the task of philosophy in Difference and Repetition (1994). Here Deleuze outlines an alternative to the dogmatic image in terms of which it is transcendental Ideas or problems which are the genetic elements of thought. The task of philosophy then is to specify the elements and relations which make up these Ideas or problems. Pure events share several features of these transcendental problems. Deleuze defines problems as the differential and virtual multiplicities which are the transcendental conditions of both thought and reality. At one point he suggests that ‘problems are of the order of events’ (Deleuze 1994:188).¹¹ Just as problems are not reducible to the particular solutions in which they become incarnated, so pure events subsist independently of their actualisations in bodies and states of affairs. An example which Deleuze frequently uses to illustrate this difference is Blanchot’s distinction between death as a realisable event towards which ‘I’ may have a personal relation, and death as an impersonal and inaccessible event towards which ‘I’ can have no relation (Deleuze 1990:151–2; 1994:112).

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In these terms, the concept of the social contract may be considered to express the pure event of incorporation of a legal and political system. As such, the contract is a pure event irreducible to its particular incarnations as the putative origin of morality or civil society. It is as though actual events were doubled by a series of ideal or virtual events which are both immanent and transcendent in relation to them. Deleuze cites Péguy’s ‘wonderful description’ of events in which he deploys ‘two lines, one horizontal and another vertical which repeated in depth the distinctive points corresponding to the first, and even anticipated and eternally engendered these distinctive points and their incarnation in the first’.¹² Deleuze and Guattari suggest that all historical events are similarly doubled or divided between two planes: ‘what History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing concept, escapes History’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:110). Pure events are therefore incorporeal abstractions, irreducible to their actualisations in different societies at different times but also immanent in those real events. In this sense, they represent a ‘pure reserve’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:156) of being and the guarantee of an open future. Kant makes a similar point when he distinguishes between the concept of a revolution in favour of universal rights of man as this was expressed in the ‘enthusiasm’ of Europeans for those ideals and the manner in which that concept and those ideals were actualised in the bloody events of 1789.¹³ In Chapter 6 we shall consider the event of colonisation and the different constitutional forms this can assume.

When they suggest that the pure events expressed in concepts are identical with the ‘pure sense’ that runs through their components (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:144), Deleuze and Guattari hint at the continuity between this account of the task of philosophy and Deleuze’s theory of sense or meaning in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990). In the course of outlining a theory of sense as that which is expressed in propositions, Deleuze drew upon the Stoic concept of the ‘sayable’ in order to distinguish the sense or event expressed in a proposition from the mixtures of bodies to which this sense or event is attributed. The Stoics, he argues, were the first to create a philosophical concept of the event, discovering this along with sense or the expressed of the proposition: ‘an incorporeal, complex and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition’ (Deleuze 1990:19). Deleuze and Guattari re-utilise this Stoic concept of events in their ‘Postulates of linguistics’ when they characterise the pragmatic function of language in terms of the effectuation of events or ‘incorporeal transformations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:80–8). Following the Stoics, they argue that all events are incorporeal transformations which are expressed in language but attributed to bodies and states of affairs. In so far as language serves to express such

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incorporeal transformations, it does not simply represent the world but intervenes in it. It follows from the account of incorporeals as the ‘expressed’ of statements, that the individuation of what occurs as an event of a particular kind is dependent upon language. Event attributions do not simply describe or report pre-existing events, they help to actualise particular events in the social field. The manner in which a given occurrence is described determines it as a particular kind of event. That is why politics frequently takes the form of struggle over the appropriate description of events.

The Deleuzian conception of events points to the role of language and other forms of representation in the actualisation or effectuation of everyday events. It also points to a critical role for philosophy in relation to the common-sense understanding of events. Deleuze and Guattari see the invention of concepts as a means of breaking with self-evidence. They contrast the effectuation or actualisation of a given pure event in particular circumstances with the ‘counter-effectuation’ which occurs when a concept is extracted from things: ‘the event is actualised or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from states of affairs so as to isolate its concept’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:159). In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze calls this doubling of the actualised event with a counter-effectuation a process of ‘miming’ what effectively occurs: ‘to the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualisation, counter-actualisation liberates it, always for other times’ (Deleuze 1990:161). In What Is Philosophy?, philosophy appears in the persona of the mime who isolates the event by constructing concepts: ‘Philosophy’s sole aim is to become worthy of the event, and it is precisely the conceptual persona who counter-effectuates the event’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:160). In these terms, the concept of a social contract can be regarded as an expression of the pure and indeterminate event of a political system based upon equality before the law. To counter-effectuate everyday events is to consider these events as processes whose outcome is not yet determined. It is to relate them back to the pure event or problem of which they appear only as one particular determination or solution. In counter-effectuating the event, we attain and express the sense of what happens, thereby dissociating the pure event from the particular determinate form in which it has been actualised and pointing to the possibility of other determinate actualisations. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘the concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:32–3).¹⁴

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