#thousandplateaus

Author: Magda Wisniowska – March, 2021.

Much of the appeal of Arjen Kleinherenbrink’s book lies in the single-mindedness of his argument. From the start we are told in no uncertain terms that many, if not most, of Deleuze’s ontological interpretations are incorrect, and that his machine ontology has been fundamentally misunderstood. Why? Because all these interpretations tend to posit a single continuous virtual realm. Depending on who you read, this realm consists of either those dynamic processes  underlying the discontinuity of concrete entities; a virtuality characterised as the one true real and causal agent of an only apparent existence; or a single intensive force accounting for all change (Kleinherenbrink 31-7). And in light of what Kleinherenbrink calls the ‘externality thesis’ it makes sense to posit such a continuous, active, virtual realm. For if all entities in our world of things are discontinuous and separate individuals, something else must account for these things to be able to change, to relate to each other, and to produce and create. Things would then be the manifestation of the one creative force, in actuality apparently discontinuous, but continuous in their virtuality; entities mere intersections in something much more vast and powerful than themselves. This is our proverbial tablecloth (see Sad Mondays 13). 

As Kleinherenbrink argues, the problem with ontological interpretations positing a continuous virtual realm is that they cannot be adequately reconciled with Deleuze’s machine thesis. ‘Everything is a machine’ Deleuze repeatedly states, but everything is not a machine, if there is something other than the machine, of which the machine is an expression. In these ontologies of the virtual, the being of mechanic entities is dissolved into something non-ontic, which nevertheless is presented as a realm in which things really and truly ‘are’ (Kleinherenbrink 32). We are very much reminded here of the Spinozian argument relating to God’s causality. We might recall how earlier, I argued that Spinoza’s is an immanent rather than transient God, meaning that his God neither acts on something other than himself nor does he create something other than himself (see Sad Mondays 6b i). If in Spinoza there is only the one God, the one Substance, then everything God creates must remains in God. Everything partakes in God. Here the analogy is of the world as God’s facial expression (Sad Mondays 6b i). 

For Kleinherenbrink however, Spinoza’s philosophy must also be rejected, as it too falls back on continuity. No matter our expression in modes — we are all part of God’s continuous being. So what does Kleinherenbrink propose? Instead of reality being divided into, on the one hand, a continuous virtual, and on the other, a discontinuous actual realm of entities, he proposes a second, mechanic ontology of a private virtual (36). Each machine, he claims, has this private virtual aspect, divided as it is, through an internal difference in kind, between the virtual and the actual. So with every machine there is an aspect that we can encounter, and an aspect that remains hidden to us, which is non-relational. Furthermore, Kleinherenbrink divides both the virtual and the actual aspect of the thing into the ‘one’ and the ‘multiple’ (38-9). On the virtual side of the machine, each entity has to be both one and multiple, or as Kleinherenbrink attributes to Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz, ‘one to be this, but multiple to distinguish this from that’ (39). Similarly on the actual side of the machine, each entity is also one and multiple. ‘One is this encounter’ that we relate to, but this same encounter is also ‘multiple in the sense of having qualities distinguishing this from that’ (39). I very much like the simple starkness of Kleinherenbrink’s first diagram, which he copies from Deleuze’s The Fold. I reproduce it below:

These few lines are meant to represent the fourfold of the machine, both virtual and actual, one and many, but ultimately, individual, isolated, non-relational. A more accurate diagram perhaps would be:

Which in turn brings us to Kleinherenbrink’s second diagram, following quick on the heels of the first.

In this much more complex elaboration of the fourfold, Kleinherenbrink draws on a number of Deleuze’s texts, each with its own idiosyncratic vocabulary. To explore the private virtual of the machine we encounter concepts of ‘sense,’ ‘body,’ ‘qualities’ and ‘idea’ as well as such familiar Deleuzian concepts as the ‘body without organs,’ the ‘problem,’ the ‘event,’ or ‘intensive matter’ — all of which I want to leave aside for now to concentrate only on one interpretation. For at this point of his argument Kleinherenbrink’s thinking of the fourfold owes the most to an early 1967 discussion at the French Society of Philosophy, a transcript of which has been republished in Desert Islands in 2002. Under debate here are the parameters of what Deleuze calls the idea, or rather, more accurately, of the thing of the idea. This for Deleuze does not consist of a ‘what’ but of a multitude of determinations: ‘how,’ ‘how much,’ ‘where and when’ and ‘what case.’ What is crucial is that already then, the fourfold is at play, as identified by the moderator of the discussion and president of the society, Jean Wahl.

Deleuze begins the discussion by identifying the thing through its two distinguishing traits. The first concerns the qualities that specify it as a thing, the second, the extension that the thing occupies, an organisation of internal and external parts. So on the one hand, there is the synthesis of qualification and specification, on the other hand, the synthesis of partition and organisation. Crucially, the one depends on the other, there being no qualities without extension, no species without parts. In the mathematical language that Deleuze uses, this is differentiation, with its two correlative aspects, and it does remind one of a graph, the vertical marking the difference in y, the horizontal, the difference in x, together representing the rate of change. But Deleuze argues that underlying specification and organisation are spatio-temporal dynamisms, an intensive spatium pre-existing every quality and extension. This would be in Deleuze’s mathematical language, the differential, the rate of change at any one single point. And the determinations of the intensive field are what corresponds to the multiplicity of questions of how, when, where, who. 

Jean Wahl identifies Deleuze’s thing as a fourfold, because Deleuze shows that the dynamisms controlling differentiation — the specification and partition that actualise the thing of the idea — are derived from the two aspects of the differential — differential relations and their concomitant points. That the differential has two aspects might have eluded my description of the differential as the rate of change at any single point, but this is what, mathematically speaking, the differential consists of: differential relations existing only through reciprocal determinations, and singularities, points corresponding to these relations. Thus the thing of the idea is only ever actualised when differential relations are incarnated in species or qualities and concomitant points in the extension corresponding to these qualities. Or  as my diagram shows:

What we have here is a very abstract system, but which nevertheless corresponds to many, not so abstract systems, found in our everyday world. The differential is the phonemes distinguishing one sound from another in language, the physical particles making up matter, the biological genes carrying the instructions of how protein is made. 

Author: Magda Wisniowska – January, 2021.

Becomings-animal plunge into becomings-molecular. This raises all kinds of questions. (Thousand Plateaus, 272)

Like Deleuze and Guattari, we must begin at the end. ‘All becomings are already molecular’ they write  (ibid), including becoming-animal, and as we discussed last time, as well as  becoming-woman (see Sad Monday 12, part I and II). Becoming-woman is merely the first step towards becoming molecular that all becomings begin with and pass through. Becoming-woman is this first step because, in our world, man is ‘the molar entity par excellence’ (292), the standard on which the majority is based, and becoming-woman is the dismantling of this standard. But in the end, the woman we become is not a molar entity (that would only substitute one standard for another). Instead we become woman by entering a proximity and emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest (275). This is the zone of a ‘microfemininity’ which produces in us ‘a molecular woman’ (ibid.).

They are right to say that this raises all kinds of questions — but surely, the first must be, what are these molecules of which they speak?  What is a molecular woman, in contrast to a non-molecular one? A woman reduced to particles? And here even the least scientific of us think of bodies composed of, if not molecules exactly, then certainly atoms, held together by their different chemical bonds: atoms floating around in constant movement, electrons spinning, eventually bumping into other atoms, attracted or repelled, and at rest when a favourable bond is formed, electrons shared or transferred. This is how Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of consistency, their plane of nature, sounds like. As we know already, on this plane, 

There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. (266)

There is an image of Deleuze’s thought which fits well with my description of a realm of molecules. This is the commonplace idea of Deleuze as a philosopher who sees reality as ‘a swirling ocean of flows, events, intensities, and processes’ (Kleinherenbrink, 31). As Arjen Kleinherenbrink argues in his book ‘Against Continuity, Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism,’ in this particular interpretation of Deleuzian thought, while the outside world may present itself as consisting of individual and external entities, ontologically however, it consists of an intensive, virtual realm of flows and processes. In other words, ontologically speaking it is our world of unformed molecules in movement. The image Kleinherenbrink uses to explain this interpretation is of a tablecloth (32). The outside world’s apparent discreteness is no different than its twists and folds. There might seem to be things ‘here or there’ but straighten the cloth out a bit and pull it across, and you see that there is nothing other than cloth ‘all the way down’ (ibid.). Not a plan but a plane of consistency.

In these interpretations, becoming-woman would be the smoothing, ironing out of the kinks to see the ontological fabric of life better. Certainly, this cloth metaphor seems pertinent to my description of the zig-zaging of man’s becoming-woman and woman’s becoming-animal as the adoption of a disguise (see Sad Mondays 12, part I and II) . In this process of becoming-molecular, we —both as men and as women— lift the cloth and hide underneath, somewhat like ontological ghosts, intent on becoming one with the matter of our camouflage. 

But to think of Deleuze’s philosophy in this way, as espousing a world of atomic particles that underpins the perception of all matter, is according to Kleinherenbrink, a profound mistake. There is no tablecloth, no separation of realms into actual and virtual, no intensities, no flows and no processes. For a separation into two realms would violate one fundamental Deleuzian principle: no interiority. To posit such a realm behind the world of apparent concrete entities, is to present these entities as representations of that other, more elementary realm. How entities are, in their discreteness, individuality and externality, would be accounted for by something else that allows for their interaction, change and development (ibid. 34). Entities would be nothing in themselves, merely flawed and incomplete manifestations of this other force.

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, May, 2020.

Every mode which exists necessarily and is infinite has necessarily had to follow either from the absolute nature of some attribute of God, or from some attribute, modified by a modification which exists necessarily and is infinite. (Spinoza, Ethics, P23)

Questions pertaining to the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of the animal are theological in nature, in that they have to do with the concept of God. But the theology at stake is one that allows for transformation, of the kind that is neither imaginary nor from one form to another (see Thousand Plateaus, “Memories of a Theologian”). It might seem we are back to the discussion of sorcery, witchcraft or demonic possession, if it were not for the reference to Spinoza. For Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza’s is a diabolical theology.

The above quote is from the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics, “On God." At this point of his geometrical demonstration, Spinoza has already produced the definitions of substance and mode with which he dismantles both the classical Aristotelian way of thinking and modern Cartesian philosophy. Instead of substance being a thing with a certain recognisable amount of properties (or at least, in Cartesian terms, the one essential attribute), Spinoza proposes a new definition based on cause alone. Substance is that which causes itself. It is logically dependent on itself only. There might be many different modes of substance, but these depend on substance for their cause. There might also be different ways the intellect perceives substance, in terms of what constitutes its essence—let’s say as a physical body or non-physical thought—but these are the attributes of substance and not substance itself. Ontologically speaking, substance is pure independent Being and the myriad of things in this world that are, depend on this substantial Being for their own being. The one substance with its infinite number of attributes is Spinoza’s definition of God.

It is worth reiterating: substance cannot be understood as numerically multiple, physically existing in space, for that would mean that there is something other than substance that substance depends on for its existence, the space it is in. Rather, I find the definition offered by Beth Lord useful. Substance is “the power of actualising its own existence” (Spinoza’s Ethics, 35). God is the eternal activity of actualising itself. It actualises itself infinitely, in all types of beings, in every possible way.

Nevertheless, even knowing Spinoza’s definitions, the above quote remains obscure. As God’s power of actualisation is infinite, it stands to reason that the modes in which the power is necessarily actualised are infinite too, but then why do they follow from some attribute of God? And why make the distinction between modified and non-modified attributes?

By no means, am I alone in struggling with P23’s abstraction. Already Spinoza’s contemporary readers made him aware of the passage’s difficulty, Georg Hermann Schuller writing a letter on behalf of his reading group in order to request further examples. To this letter Spinoza replied:

The examples you ask for of the first kind are: in the case of thought, absolutely infinite intellect; in the case of extension, motion and rest. An example of the second kind is the face of the whole universe, which, although varying in infinite ways, yet remains always the same.(Letter 64, CW 919)

So instead of necessary and infinite modes following directly or indirectly from some attribute of God, we have, on the one hand, “infinite intellect” and “motion and rest,” and on the other hand, “the face of the whole universe.” These are the metaphors Spinoza chooses for the creation of the world — nothing to do with art, but just thought, activity and facial expressions.

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, May, 2020.

Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with a "people" of dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the interstices of his disrupted self, that the "soul of the animal bares its teeth at monstrous fate": not pity, but unnatural participation. Then a strange imperative wells up in him: either stop writing, or write like a rat . . . If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc. We will have to explain why. (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 240)

Lord Chandos is the principal character of the fictional letter written to the philosopher Francis Bacon, a short story by Hugo von Hofmannsthal published in 1902. In this letter, Lord Chandos describes to his friend how he has increasingly become disillusioned with writing, unable to perform the simplest of tasks. Instead, he writes of moments when ‘words desert me’ and ‘something entirely unnamed…reveals itself to me.’ This could be as seemingly insignificant as a harrow left in the field or a dog lying in the sun, but is most memorably described through the incident of the poisoned rats. Chandos describes how after ordering rat poison to be spread in the cellars of his dairy farms, he had a vision of the dying rats, convulsing, frantically seeking escape, screaming out their rage. The ‘most exalted Present’ of this vision was of a mother rat surrounded by her dying young, gazing ‘into the void of infinity’ and ‘gnashing her teeth’. (https://depts.washington.edu/vienna/documents/Hofmannsthal/Hofmannsthal_Chandos.htm).

Deleuze and Guattari’s point would be that Chandos here writes of the rats, but he also writes like a rat, because he begins to think like a rat. At the moment when ‘everything festers, throbs and boils’ and he is ‘about to ferment’, a kind of ‘feverish thinking’ takes over in a medium that is more immediate than words, leading ever deeper into the self (ibid.). Chandos describes this language of writing and thinking as a language in which ‘inanimate objects speak to me’(ibid.).

What we are discussing is a relation to the animal, which is not a classificatory one of natural history, as it neither seeks similarities nor analogous structures (see Sad Mondays 5, part one). Indeed, we are not really discussing animals at all, in the sense of individual pet dogs barking or oedipal sounding rats, but ‘the pack’, Deleuze and Guattari’s term for evoking ‘multiplicity’ (Thousand Plateaus, 241, 243-5). Multiplicity is also not simply an aggregate of units—that would be the multiple — but a radical openness, whose logic is ‘unnatural’ because it is without the unity offered by hereditary production. Someone who treats the animal in pack mode and thus engages with multiplicity unnaturally, on its own terms, is the figure of the sorcerer. Chandos would definitely be one such sorcerer, and Deleuze lists many others. I personally like Lovecroft’s outsider (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx), but there is also Captain Ahab and his whale, Kafka and Josephine the mouse singer, Lawrence and his tortoise.

To take up the position of the sorcerer, is to change the nature of our own subjectivity. Remember the inner voice speaking out my thoughts in my head? (see Sad Mondays 5, appendix) The I that thinks and the self that listens, and the gap, crack, delay in between? These are ‘the interstices of the disrupted self’ that Deleuze describes, which would allow for the animal’s soul to become bare. I must first age (and it is true that the thinking I that thinks must always be older than the self that listens, having come before it), crack, and then open up to what must remain unnamed. Or rather as soon as I open up to multiplicity, I am no longer an I. According to Deleuze and Guattari, I am a ‘fascinated Self’ (Thousand Plateaus, 245). The world of the animal is a fascinating one. Fascination makes me lose myself in ‘the pact’, the alliance formed with the animal, which happens when I follow the whale, when the vision of dying rats wells up within me (243).

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, April, 2020.

What do I hear if not myself? I hear the other voices of animals. When I hear myself speak, I also inseparably hear the gnashing of the teeth of an animal in the agony of death. The voice of the animal is in me… (Leonard Lawson, ‘Following the Rats: Becoming Animal in Deleuze and Guattari’, 170)

When do I hear myself speak? All the time would be the simplest answer. As soon as a thought appears, I hear it said, by me, silently, in my head. Or perhaps not so silently as it drowns out all other sounds, not just the sounds of my body such as my breathing or my pulse, but other voices, those that Leonard Lawson identifies as belonging to animals.It is my voice that kills the animals within. The moment I hear myself speak is also the moment in which I hear the animal dying.

The presence of the voice in my head is how Leonard Lawson introduces the traditional philosophical problem of auto-affection. What makes us autonomous as human beings (and confers upon us a dignity and right to domination) is the ability to hear ourselves speak, immediately, at the very moment we make a sound. On the other hand, philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida show that what we consider to be auto-affection is in fact a hetero-affection, arguing that there is never such a thing as pure presence, a concept that Kant already had introduced as a ‘crack in the self.’ In his 2008 essay for SubStance, ‘Following the Rats’, Lawson argues that specifically in Plateau 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari undermine the concept of human auto-affection by enlarging it, so that it encompasses the animal in the process of becoming, the becoming-animal. His essay is effectively a close reading of this chapter.

How can I then hear the animal instead of me? First of all I need to rid myself of my own subjectivity. This does not happen in a dramatic fashion, with a great effort and loud bang, but slowly and almost imperceptibly. Listen to how F. Scott Fitzgerald describes it, in a 1936 article for Esquire,

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. (https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/)

Lawson describes it as a process of ageing. Just as wrinkles deepen around my forehead and eyes, cracks appear in the depth of my soul. The moment I realise I am old is also the moment I become aware that I have lost a part of myself. Two consequences follow, both producing change: either I am lost, not to be found, or become aware of choices that were previously unavailable to me, when I was my old self. To choose the second option, that of having more choices, is to become open to the world in its multiplicity. Again, hear Fitzgerald, or rather how his friend allegedly comforted him,

“Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen—”, she said. (She always says Listen," because she thinks while she talks—really thinks.) So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn't a crack in you—suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.” (https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/)