Gilles Deleuze, as Todd May puts it, is a philosopher of new possibilities, of ‘how we might think of things in ways that would open up new regions for living’.
Most simply, he’s a philosopher of difference, of how things change and become different over time.
For this reason, he is usually referred to as a postmodern or post-structural philosopher, lumped in with other French theorists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
There are both big similarities and big differences with these figures though. As with other ‘post-structuralists’, thinking in Deleuzian terms is to conceptualise a radical freedom. That as humans we are free to change the world in ways that don’t always seem possible. His work has been used in many disciplines, including education reform, politics, history, and the sciences.
This is the key difference between him and other ‘postmodernists’ – his work is filled with references to science, biology, geology, evolution. Whereas someone like Derrida emphasises how we understand the world primarily through language and text, Deleuze is a materialist and a monist. In other words, everything in the universe – both physical and thinking – is connected.
I will introduce Deleuze’s thought through his 1968 book, Difference and Repetition.
Deleuze’s thinking can be said to articulate the ontological foundations – that’s the question of what there is at the most basic level of phenomena – of other thinkers, referred to as poststructuralists or postmodernists.
By the way, while those two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, I use poststructuralist as referring to theory or theorists that emphasise language – and postmodernist as a more catch-all term that refers loosely to thinkers, a period, and a culture that critiques modernism. Anyway…
Michel Foucault, for example, points to how meaning and framings of social truth change over time, constituting new subjectivities conditioned through both power and knowledge.
The idea of discipline, for example, or how we think about mental illness has changed over time.
Jacques Derrida argues that language is unstable, and meaning is always deferred.
Both point to a world, or human subjectivity, in flux. Moving, changing.
Deleuze, it might be said, provides the ontological foundation for these sorts of views.
For thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and, originally, Nietzsche, there is no stable ontology of human nature.
As I talked about in a previous video, Nietzsche shows how concepts like good and evil also change over time.
As May has phrased it, ‘ontological matters are in reality historical matters parading in ontological garb’.
While much of Western philosophy has focused on an ontology of ‘what there is’, Deleuze wants to account for how things change. In other words, to account for difference over time.
He is largely responding to philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, who both conceptualise stable categories of thought. For Kant, for example, we have the natural ability to rationally judge things by quantity, quality, relation and modality. For Aristotle there is substance, doing, having.
This isn’t that important to start to understand Deleuze. What he’s doing is criticising thinkers – which turn out to be the vast majority of those in western philosophy – who emphasise that which is stable, or eternal, over that which is in movement, in flux.
Think about how we judge things – how we think about what things are.
We can quantify and qualify say, leaves: here are four, they all have a similar shape, colour, smell, and place where they grow – they are, then, of the same species.
Okay, that’s an oak leaf.
We could make a list of the qualities any thing has.
Literally, any thing. Television. Has a screen. Can pick up broadcasts. Has a power supply.
We can try and think of what is essential to a thing.
Here’s the problem. If we just do that then we cannot account for change, for how certain things develop into new things.
We need a way to understand how television evolved into say, Netflix or Youtube.
The evolution didn’t come from anything inside the category of television – it comes from the telegraph, the military development of the internet, the phone line, coding, microchips. All of these things converged into something new.
For Deleuze it’s the spaces between things – the differences between all of these things – that create the possibilities for newness.
In fact, all things are defined by the differences between them.
This is, as with most poststructuralism, influenced by Saussure’s belief that meaning is a product of the differences between words or signifiers. We understand what blue is because of its relationship to red, yellow, green, not because of any real tangible relationship between this and the word blue.
Deleuze’s philosophy builds upon Spinoza’s monism. The idea that everything is connected.
In fact, the world is so complicated, so connected, so mysterious, that there are, potentially, an infinite number of possibilities in the world. Not right now, but potentially.
Todd May cites the example of origami: an infinite number of shapes on an infinite number of pieces of paper; folding, moving, changing.
Deleuze writes that, ‘no two grains of dust are absolutely identical, no two hands have the same distinctive points, no two typewriters have the same strike, no two revolvers score their bullets in the same manner’.
Difference is everywhere.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s goal is to theorise a definition of difference in itself.
Opposed to repetition.
When we think, we repeat.
When I think of the leaf, I repeat something of the actual leaf in my mind. When I engage in that judgement between the four leaves, I have to repeat four times to come to that conclusion.
When we do this we are generalising, we are looking for resemblances. We know what greenness is even if the shades are different.
Generalising is the most basic action of thought and to generalise we must repeat.
Repetition contributes to generality, but in every repetition something distinct occurs.
No leaf is actually a repetition. They are all different; in colour, shape. Even in position and in time.
And the thought of the leaf is different – the next time I think of the leaf it is different.
Newness is inscribed in every moment.
Each repetition is something new in space and time; it has ‘no equal or equivalent’, while carrying something from the first.
Every act of nature repeats with novelty. And every repetition of every thought changes something in the mind which contemplates it.
But here is the main point: it is the difference in every repetition that accounts for change, for newness, for evolution, for creativity.
If we only conceptualise the repetition, the representation, we fail to understand how difference changes concepts and things.
Take the movement between television and Youtube.
Hypothetically, the person who invents Youtube looks at television, then his computer, then uses the internet.
In his mind, he repeats them. But he repeats them differently. He repeats the idea of television while reorganising it with the idea of what is different about television and the computer.
But it’s not just the television and the computer – differences that bear on the process are many – language, tools, education, code, the innate biological aptitude of the inventor.
All of these things repeat themselves in some way in every act towards the new.
Similarly, when a baby is born, it is both a repetition of genes, DNA, blood, and a response to differences like the size of the womb, the environment it’s born into.
A plant repeats itself through seeds but through differences like the intensity of the wind, rain and sun, interactions with animals.
When thinking, a person repeats things in some way. We rationalise and judge. We identify things, see analogies between things, see things opposed to each other and judge things that are the same. We organise and reorganise a plane of possibility.
We do something new, but we also repeat something old.
It is not enough, like Kant, to say that the rationality thinks. Instead, ‘something in the world forces us to think’.
We might organise questions in our mind, or create goals, or have plans – but they arise from somewhere real – they are presented to us by the world, and we reorganise the variables to try to create solutions.
There is a kind of map of things to repeat and things we could make different.
This map – the innate potentiality of newness – is what Deleuze calls the virtual.
Virtuality has similarities to potentiality. The universe moves, bodies move, concepts move, all in relation to each other. They repeat, but in every repetition different combinations of differences potentialise.
Deleuze writes that, ‘the more that living matter complexifies, the more it transforms this virtual into spontaneous action and unforeseen movements’.
The virtual is a product of the intensities between differences, the lines of flight between them.
The virtual is determined by the differential relations between what Deleuze terms Ideas, which are made up of multiplicities.
Again, you have television, microchips, the internet, hands, eyes, a keyboard – the differences and relations between them point towards new ‘lines of flight’.
There are many potentialities in any moment though – lots of possible configurations.
The result is also random – contingent. Youtube could have easily been a different new configuration of all these possibilities – a different person, a different name, a different setup.
Ideas are made up of multiplicities; combinations of representations and differences.
Assemblages like bone structure or geology are part of the multiplicity. But the multiplicity precedes the actual Idea, it defines its possibilities.
Lets shift from Youtube to World War Two.
Multiplicities are presented to us in pre-organised forms: a group of texts on the Second World War, the University of London, a conference on World War Two, the bodies of the dead, the photographs. All of the differences between them point to disparate lines of flight for new potentialities, upon which the historian might write a new history.
The virtual is like a coil; it is not possibility though, it precedes possibility.
It creates the conditions for possibility.
Each possibility in any given moment is conditioned by lines of immanence that give it its shape.
If we acknowledge that possibilities do spring from somewhere, somewhere real, then the virtual is that plane. The virtual is that surplus of the present moment, of any fixed identity, grounded in the spaces between things, their differences.
Deleuze writes, ‘Everywhere, couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organised oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions. Stereoscopic images form no more than an even and flat opposition, but they depend upon something quite different: an arrangement of coexistent, tiered, mobile planes, a ‘disparateness’ within an original depth. Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary’.
This perspective strips postmodernism of its reputation of claiming that ‘anything goes’ – of leading to radical relativism. The virtual is very real, very much conditioned; it only presents itself through a finite number of possibilities at any given time. But it does guarantee the opening of new possibilities, guarantees the possibility of continual change and freedom.
Deleuze is notoriously difficult, and has many sides. One thing he points towards is interdisciplinary work – between say history, sociology, geology, art – anything – that can open up new lines of flight and new potentials.
He suggests how repeating without thinking of new possibilities can be repressive, oppressive.
Here’s a quote I like: ‘the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return; and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to deny that which ‘differs’, so as to conserve or prolong an established historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation’.
I’m no expert. I’ve read a lot over the past few months – all of Difference and Repetition – and large parts of other books.
I hope this suffices as an introduction. I’m going to continue with Deleuze and introduce new concepts over the coming weeks that might help to clarify further – the rhizome, and haecceity.
