who's afraid of deleuze and guattari?
the above question has had variable resonances for me, depending on how i feel situated with D&G. colin once told me he was afraid of deleuze, or something to that effect. i discovered that the question was the title of a work on D&G. the two moments came together and made me consider what this fear is, what it means; or, better, what it does.
sometimes D&G are obscure, terrifying prophets to me (as deleuze understood nietzsche to appear to the unwary reader). like nietzsche, even to the careful reader they can be fearful because of what they demand - utterly new adventures of thought, experimentations in the fullest sense: without a pre-determined outcome. but they can also inspire fear for other reasons, a different form of fear to which, i imagine, they'd be much less sympathetic; a fear of the potential accusation of misunderstanding. "admit it! you don't understand them!" after all, theirs are difficult texts in a number of ways: stylistically, conceptually.
but sometimes they appear to me much more innocently. they signify a rush of ideas, a "schizoid flow" that is not for interpretation but experimentation, deployment in life for revolutionary purposes in a sense beyond the narrow arena of the "properly" political. this, of course, is the reading they explicitly request. deleuze himself found objections of the kind "you are wrong; this is what [hegel/lacan/deleuze/whoever] really meant!" to be without merit; he said he would try to get away from them, move on to something else. guattari expressed his fear of being published as a loss of the ability to turn his back and walk away - in becoming accountable for his acts of thought, his experimentalism became a liability, an errancy in need of justification.
yet that is not to say D&G advocated that most deplorable of (supposedly) postmodernist tropes: "free play"; "cultural relativism"; whatever term is currently being used to accuse pomo and any remotely associated discipline (literary criticism, continental philosophy, cultural theory) of advocating an anything-goes form of epistemological scepticism. whether or not pomo or any other prominent strain of contemporary thought actually advocates this isn't my concern. it's whether we should interpret the injunction to experiment not interpret, to use rather than to "understand" (in a certain sense - but here the problem emerges before we have had time to pave the way), as just another form of this. when D&G separately repudiate this juridical system of thought - an academy waiting to prove the supposed inaccuracy of a judgment - are they simply allowing free reign for an infinity of readings that are neither correct nor incorrect?
yes, but no.
two clues: deleuze's readings of other philosophers (he published books on hume, kant, nietzsche, leibniz, two on spinoza, bergson, maybe others i'm forgetting, and also frequently deployed the work of other philosophers in his own works - particularly difference and repetition), and his frequent criticisms of the concept of "truth" and "error" as commonly deployed.
1. his readings of other philosophers are creative but rigorous. creative in the following sense - deleuze does not present a synoptic account of a philosopher's work, but puts their concepts to work. his use of nietzsche i am best able to comment on - he crafts a complex but interrelated system of concepts drawn from nietzsche's work, productive and rigorous but not rigid. he essentially shows that nietszsche was a philosopher who detached the notions of rigour and clarity from a particular essentialist/rationalist heritage (perhaps ultimately an aristotelian heritage - "ousiology"). for example, the will to power is, in deleuze's hands, a "plastic principle": rather than a concept which represents a given reality to the greatest possible degree of accuracy, it is a evaluative activity with transformative potential - potential running both ways, as the principle can and must undergo a transformation based upon its specific deployment.
2. at this stage i don't feel able to go into deleuze's "problematic" epistemology too much (tired, would have to go dig out D+R), but manuel de landa's characterisation of it as "anexact yet rigorous" works well as a sort of encapsulation of what i'm getting at. deleuze does not offer "answers" that must be correctly interpreted by the reader - such a conception of philosophy he compares to a "radio quiz". what he offers is a set of concepts used to actively engage with "the world" - whether this engagement be ethical, political, metaphilosophical, physiological, whatever. these comments are not judged to be "truthful" in the sense of representing reality but rather efficacious in their engagements. for him to advocate immanence over transcendence is part of a broader ethico-ontological attempt to engage with life productively, not an attempt to posit an inarguably correct set of predicates about reality.
but these concepts can be judged; otherwise we would have reinstated absolute relativism at a theoretical level. there is an enemy of thought, it's just not falsehood. for deleuze, it's banality; or really anything that separates thought from what it can do. he repudiates objections of the form "you're wrong - this is in fact the case" because that hardly differs from the familiar "how can you like this kind of music? it's awful!" it supposes that the philosopher in question has made some childish error, that they told you 2+2=5; whereas what actually is taking place is two divergent assemblages of thought producing contradictions. the resolution is not to demonstrate the objective falsity of the other's propositions, nor to dialectically resolve the contradiction. guattari would rather walk away, because once accused there is no way to do what must be done when contradicitons occur - to proclaim "let us try it!"
[perhaps this entire entry could be read as a way of engaging with conception of philosophy as seeking the truth through reason and debate - it's success at acting upon its own arguments would take another entry to analyse, but i think i've been moderately successful at not giving in to the temptation to engage in the form of accusatory repudiation i'm trying to complicate, or evade, or repudiate...]
ultimately, it's a question of caution and joy. "how do you make yourself a body without organs?" ask D&G. with a caution that is not borne from a fear of being incorrect, but from a desire to exploit fully the possibilities of thought when such possibilities have been so extensively and perpetually closed off. we must be cautious, not of thinking falsities, but of failing to think at all.
sometimes D&G are obscure, terrifying prophets to me (as deleuze understood nietzsche to appear to the unwary reader). like nietzsche, even to the careful reader they can be fearful because of what they demand - utterly new adventures of thought, experimentations in the fullest sense: without a pre-determined outcome. but they can also inspire fear for other reasons, a different form of fear to which, i imagine, they'd be much less sympathetic; a fear of the potential accusation of misunderstanding. "admit it! you don't understand them!" after all, theirs are difficult texts in a number of ways: stylistically, conceptually.
but sometimes they appear to me much more innocently. they signify a rush of ideas, a "schizoid flow" that is not for interpretation but experimentation, deployment in life for revolutionary purposes in a sense beyond the narrow arena of the "properly" political. this, of course, is the reading they explicitly request. deleuze himself found objections of the kind "you are wrong; this is what [hegel/lacan/deleuze/whoever] really meant!" to be without merit; he said he would try to get away from them, move on to something else. guattari expressed his fear of being published as a loss of the ability to turn his back and walk away - in becoming accountable for his acts of thought, his experimentalism became a liability, an errancy in need of justification.
yet that is not to say D&G advocated that most deplorable of (supposedly) postmodernist tropes: "free play"; "cultural relativism"; whatever term is currently being used to accuse pomo and any remotely associated discipline (literary criticism, continental philosophy, cultural theory) of advocating an anything-goes form of epistemological scepticism. whether or not pomo or any other prominent strain of contemporary thought actually advocates this isn't my concern. it's whether we should interpret the injunction to experiment not interpret, to use rather than to "understand" (in a certain sense - but here the problem emerges before we have had time to pave the way), as just another form of this. when D&G separately repudiate this juridical system of thought - an academy waiting to prove the supposed inaccuracy of a judgment - are they simply allowing free reign for an infinity of readings that are neither correct nor incorrect?
yes, but no.
two clues: deleuze's readings of other philosophers (he published books on hume, kant, nietzsche, leibniz, two on spinoza, bergson, maybe others i'm forgetting, and also frequently deployed the work of other philosophers in his own works - particularly difference and repetition), and his frequent criticisms of the concept of "truth" and "error" as commonly deployed.
1. his readings of other philosophers are creative but rigorous. creative in the following sense - deleuze does not present a synoptic account of a philosopher's work, but puts their concepts to work. his use of nietzsche i am best able to comment on - he crafts a complex but interrelated system of concepts drawn from nietzsche's work, productive and rigorous but not rigid. he essentially shows that nietszsche was a philosopher who detached the notions of rigour and clarity from a particular essentialist/rationalist heritage (perhaps ultimately an aristotelian heritage - "ousiology"). for example, the will to power is, in deleuze's hands, a "plastic principle": rather than a concept which represents a given reality to the greatest possible degree of accuracy, it is a evaluative activity with transformative potential - potential running both ways, as the principle can and must undergo a transformation based upon its specific deployment.
2. at this stage i don't feel able to go into deleuze's "problematic" epistemology too much (tired, would have to go dig out D+R), but manuel de landa's characterisation of it as "anexact yet rigorous" works well as a sort of encapsulation of what i'm getting at. deleuze does not offer "answers" that must be correctly interpreted by the reader - such a conception of philosophy he compares to a "radio quiz". what he offers is a set of concepts used to actively engage with "the world" - whether this engagement be ethical, political, metaphilosophical, physiological, whatever. these comments are not judged to be "truthful" in the sense of representing reality but rather efficacious in their engagements. for him to advocate immanence over transcendence is part of a broader ethico-ontological attempt to engage with life productively, not an attempt to posit an inarguably correct set of predicates about reality.
but these concepts can be judged; otherwise we would have reinstated absolute relativism at a theoretical level. there is an enemy of thought, it's just not falsehood. for deleuze, it's banality; or really anything that separates thought from what it can do. he repudiates objections of the form "you're wrong - this is in fact the case" because that hardly differs from the familiar "how can you like this kind of music? it's awful!" it supposes that the philosopher in question has made some childish error, that they told you 2+2=5; whereas what actually is taking place is two divergent assemblages of thought producing contradictions. the resolution is not to demonstrate the objective falsity of the other's propositions, nor to dialectically resolve the contradiction. guattari would rather walk away, because once accused there is no way to do what must be done when contradicitons occur - to proclaim "let us try it!"
[perhaps this entire entry could be read as a way of engaging with conception of philosophy as seeking the truth through reason and debate - it's success at acting upon its own arguments would take another entry to analyse, but i think i've been moderately successful at not giving in to the temptation to engage in the form of accusatory repudiation i'm trying to complicate, or evade, or repudiate...]
ultimately, it's a question of caution and joy. "how do you make yourself a body without organs?" ask D&G. with a caution that is not borne from a fear of being incorrect, but from a desire to exploit fully the possibilities of thought when such possibilities have been so extensively and perpetually closed off. we must be cautious, not of thinking falsities, but of failing to think at all.