[73호] DELEUZIAN REALISM / 아연 클라인헤이런브링크 『질 들뢰즈의 사변적 실재론』 한국어판 출간 기념 강연 원고

강연
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2022-08-10 17:59
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DELEUZIAN REALISM


Arjen Kleinherenbrink


Introduction


Gilles Deleuze is widely acknowledged as one of the great metaphysicians of the twentieth century. His greatest achievement as a metaphysician is generally considered to be a specific theory found in Difference and Repetition, which was published in 1968.


I wrote my book Against Continuity because I disagree with this part of Deleuze’s reputation. I believe that his best metaphysical theory is not found in Difference and Repetition, but rather in later works such as The Logic of Sense and the books he co-authored with Félix Guattari.


One reason for this belief is that Deleuze explicitly distanced himself from Difference and Repetition. In a preface to The Logic of Sense, which was the next book that he wrote, Deleuze states that the metaphysics of Difference and Repetition was a theory of “classical height” and “archaic depth.” As will be explained during this lecture, when Deleuze says that a theory belongs to the “heights” or “depths”, he means that it ought to be dismissed. In that same preface, Deleuze also adds that even though he will keep using some of the same philosophical terminology that he introduced in Difference and Repetition, these terms with have different meanings from The Logic of Sense and onwards.


In other words: after Difference and Repetition, Deleuze moved on to a different philosophy. My claim is therefore that Deleuze is famous for the wrong metaphysics. He is famous for a theory that he rejected soon after writing it, and the alternative metaphysics that he subsequently designed has not received adequate attention. That is the general idea behind my book.


In today’s lecture, I want to do the following:


First, I will give a broad outline of Deleuze’s first metaphysics from Difference and Repetition.


Second, after explaining why that theory is promising at first sight, I will discuss why it nevertheless falls short on closer inspection. This second section is also where I will explain why my book is called “Against Continuity.”


Third, I will describe the most important features of the second metaphysics that Deleuze develops after realizing these shortcomings. This is the metaphysics that has largely been ignored thus far.


1. The metaphysics in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition


In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze presents a theory according to which all of reality consists of two realms, or two different dimensions. The names of these realms are famous.


First, there is the realm of the actual. The actual realm consists of every individual entity that reality contains according to ordinary experience and empirical science. It consists of animate as well as inanimate objects. Atoms and molecules; rocks and diamonds; eagles and tigers; rivers and mountains; humans and robots; countries and corporations: all these are actual entities.


Second, there is the realm of the virtual. What are the denizens of the virtual realm? Deleuze tells us that they are “singularities.” What is a singularity? A singularity is a point where qualitative change is produced.


For example: everybody knows that 100 degrees Celsius is the point where water is converted into steam, just like 0 degrees Celsius is the point where it is converted into ice. Such a point is a singularity. So a singularity is a moment of conversion. It is a transformation.


Now, please imagine for a moment that in the example of water, you could separate the water from the change that it undergoes at 0 or 100 degrees Celsius. Just like you can isolate the meaning from a written text, imagine that you can isolate the change from the water. So, imagine that you could put the water in one room and the two points of change in another room. The second room would then contain two very peculiar entities. They would not be wet like water or hot like a temperature. They would be abstract entities. Each of them would just be a change, nothing more and nothing less.


This is already hard to imagine. It is hard to imagine a change, apart from a thing that is changing. But now, imagine something even more complicated. Imagine a certain volume of ice that is slowly heated until we have boiling water. In this case, we do not just have the two points of change where the solid becomes a liquid and where the liquid becomes a gas. We also have many ‘ordinary’ points of change. We have the point where 50-degree water is becoming 51-degree water; we have the point where 84-degree water is becoming 85-degree water; and so on. In fact, we now have indefinitely many points of change.


Once again, imagine that we can separate the water from all these points of change. We put water in one room, and indefinitely many points of change in another room. Again, these points do not have the kinds of qualities that actual entities like water can have. Points of change are not frozen, wet, cold, or hot. They are just pure change. Or as Deleuze calls them: they are pure differences. They are pure processes. They are not an actual thing that changes. They are not the water itself. They are the change itself. They are all the singularities that, taken together, account for everything that happens to water.


According to Deleuze, the virtual realm contains such pure processes for every actual thing that exists. Not just for water, but also for fire and for humans, robots, diamonds, rocks, countries, corporations, and so on.


This metaphysical theory of two realms has often been called a peculiar variation on pre-Socratic theories. Remember that the pre-Socratics posited that everything ultimately is a primordial substance like fire or water. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze simply proposes a more abstract and more dynamic version of such theories. He proposes that there is an actual world full of individual things; that ‘below’ or ‘behind’ this world there is a pre-individual realm full of pure transformative points called ‘singularities’; and that relations between these singularities account for everything that is created, altered, or destroyed in the actual world.


Why would someone propose such a metaphysics? The reason is that the virtual realm seems to solve a problem regarding change and causality. In basic terms, the problem is that change and causality are nowhere to be found in the actual world.


We see things change everywhere around us, but we cannot isolate change. For example, let’s say that I stop going to the barber so that my hair will keep getting longer, and that my hair also starts becoming more grey as I get older. I can isolate the different lengths of my hair at different points in time. I can also isolate different colors of my hair at different points in time. I can compare these lengths and colors to see how I have changed, but I cannot access the change itself. Change eludes me. It happens everywhere around me, but whenever I try to isolate it, I only get some other quality like a length or a color. I always get something that is changing, but never change itself. So where does change come from? We do not find it in things, because in things we just find things that have changed. We never find change itself.


There is a similar problem with causality. In any given chain of events, I can only ever identify the actual thing that caused something. For example, I can identify the cat that knocked over my glass of water. But I can never isolate the cause itself apart from the actual thing. I cannot isolate ‘the knocking’ from the cat that knocks over the glass.


In other words, changes and causes are all around us, but at the same time they are not properties of actual things in the way that lengths and colors are properties of actual things. Changes and causes seem to come from between things. Yet no matter how hard we look between things, we never find a change or a cause.


Many philosophies have tried to solve this problem by making one kind of actual entity a privileged entity that is supposed to do all the causal work in reality. An atomist, for example, thinks that all causal work in reality plays out on a microscopic level, and that the macroscopic world of our experience is the series of effects of this molecular world. Likewise, what philosophers call an ‘occasionalist’ is someone who thinks that all causal work in reality is done by a supernatural God, such that the natural world around us is the effect of his actions.


The problem with such theories is that they merely relocate the problem rather than solving it. Logically speaking, their solution is premised on the rule that changes to things on some level of reality must be accounted for on some other level of reality. If that is the case, and if events in the actual world are accounted for by change in a microscopic world, then we must introduce a third layer of reality (a micro-microscopic world) to account for change in the microscopic world, ad infinitum. Alternatively, if change in the actual world is accounted for by the actions of God, then we must introduce Gods beyond God in order to account for change in God, ad infinitum.


As long as you want to account for changes in the actual world by positing some other layer of reality that also consists of things, the same problem will simply repeat itself with regards to that layer. Namely: “how do those things change?” This necessitates the introduction of another layer, thus triggering an infinite regress.


Hence the inventive character of Deleuze’s metaphysics in Difference and Repetition: what accounts for the actual realm is not another realm of things, but a realm consisting of changes themselves. The virtual realm is a realm of pure processes, a realm of pure causes. The actual realm is not the realm of causes and changes, but just the realm of effects. Every car, every tree, every sound, and every other existing thing is the product of pure processes in the virtual realm. The change that we constantly perceive in the actual realm is just the series of states that are produced by pure processes in the virtual realm. The reason why we cannot perceive change in the same way that we can perceive length or color is that change simply comes from ‘behind the scenes,’ so to speak.


By analogy, think of it in the following way. Every single thing, and every single property of every single thing, in actual reality is akin to a single frame of a movie. To us, the viewers of that movie, it looks like there is causality and change in the projection of the movie itself. We first see a robber pull out a gun in a bank, and next we see a bank employee raise their hands. We think that what we saw first was caused by what we saw second. This, however, is an illusion. The cinematic content of one frame is not the cause of the appearance of the next frame. Instead, the cause for the actualization of sequences of frames is the projector that diligently works behind the scenes. In Deleuze’s early metaphysics, the actual realm is like the projection on the screen. It is the realm about which we, who are deeply immersed in it, believe that it contains causes and changes that connect everything in certain sequences. Conversely, the virtual realm is like the entire machinery that secretly produces the entirety of the projection. It is the real location of causes and changes that combine the images of actual reality into sequences of events.


2. Why the metaphysics in Difference and Repetition fails


Recall that Deleuze abandoned this metaphysics because he thought it still fell prey to problems that he associated with “classical height” and “archaic depth.” Let us now try to understand what that means.


The key to this is the philosophical principle that “relations are external to terms.” A ‘term’ can be anything at all. It can be a tree, a car, a festival, a molecule, a brain, or a bird. So the principle can also be rephrased as “things are external to their relations.” This principle of exteriority animates Deleuze’s thought from his very first book on the Scottish philosopher David Hume, published in 1958, right until his last works from the early nineties.


What do things have relations with? First, things have relations with smaller things that are their parts. Second, they have relations with larger things of which they are parts. For example, a human being has relations with countless smaller things that include nerves, organs, and memories that are its parts. At the same time, a human being is itself a functioning part of many larger things, such as languages, cultures, nations, families, and traditions.


To say that a thing is external to its relations, is to say that it cannot be reduced to such smaller and larger things. It is to say that even if you had all the facts about a human’s biological and cognitive parts, plus all the facts about the things of which she is a part, you still would not have all the facts about that specific human being. That things are external to their relations means that there is more to each thing than just its parts and its environment.


Deleuze always insists that exteriority must be the case. To pretend otherwise is a mistake. To reduce a thing downwards is to reduce it into “archaic depth.” It is to pretend that a thing makes no contribution of its own to reality. It is to pretend that it is merely a passive representation of smaller parts that would do all the real causal work. To reduce a thing upwards is to reduce it into “classical height”. It is again to pretend that a thing does not make its own difference. It is to pretend that a thing is merely a passive result of ‘higher’ laws or structures that determine its every move.


According to Deleuze in The Logic of Sense, a classical way of reducing things ‘downward’ into the depths is pre-Socratic thought. According to the pre-Socratic, everything ultimately is a certain primordial substance or a combination of such primordial substances. And the classical way of reducing things ‘upwards’ into the heights is Platonism, in so far as Socrates posits the existence of an eternal heaven of Ideas that ultimately accounts for the being of every actually existing thing.


The question is: why? Why must things be external to their relations? Why must things be irreducible to their relations? Deleuze gives us various arguments throughout his works, but I will limit my discussion to just two of them.


First, if we dissolve things into their relations; if the being of entities would be purely relational, then each entity would be exhausted in its current state of affairs. If you would be nothing but how you currently relate to your parts and your environment; and if the same would be true for all those other things; then not a single thing would have the non-relational surplus required to ditch old relations and forge new ones. In other words, if things were internal to their relations, change would be impossible.


Second, if we dissolve things into their relations, the particular properties of things become unintelligible, especially in so far as properties can be emergent. An emergent property is a property that is not found among the parts the constitute a thing. For example, water explodes and freezes at different temperatures than the hydrogen and oxygen that are its parts.


Hence things must be external to their relations. Of course things have relations with their parts, and of course things have relations with even larger things, but ontologically speaking every single thing must always be more than its relations with its parts and its environment. Not a single thing is therefore just a passive representation of entities on a ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ level that account for all the differences that the thing makes in reality. Not a single human being is reducible to the biological parts that constitute her, nor is a single human being reducible to the workings of the ideologies that surround her.


Now, why does this principle of exteriority invalidate Deleuze’s early two-realm metaphysics?


The problem is that this metaphysics falls prey to what we just covered. Entities in the actual realm are reduced to the virtual realm. According to this theory, cars, trees, rocks, and hurricanes are not causes that make their own difference to reality. They are just effects of pure processes in the virtual realm. They are just passive representations of changes among singularities.


But what is a singularity? We saw that a virtual singularity does not have the kinds of properties that actual things have. A singularity is not hot, cold, short, or long. A singularity is a pure process, a pure difference, a pure change. So what defines a singularity? Deleuze’s answer is that a singularity is fully defined by ‘differential relations.’ What is a differential relation? It means that a singularity is defined by its relations to neighboring singularities. It is nothing but its differing relations to other singularities. But these other singularities are also nothing but their relations to their neighboring singularities.


In other words, the problem with the virtual realm is that singularities are internal to their relations. Each singularity, right here and right now, is nothing but its relations to some other singularities. It cannot instigate change by itself, because it is nothing but these relations to others. But the others also cannot instigate change, again because they are nothing but relations with others for whom the same is again true.


So even though Deleuze initially defined the virtual realm as a dimension of pure change, upon closer reflection we find that these singularities that are supposed to populate it cannot change at all. They cannot change because the virtual realm is defined by continuity. Not a single singularity has a private aspect that escapes its relations. Every singularity is fully continuous with its neighboring singularities, for whom the exact same thing is true.


For the reasons just covered, Deleuze started to develop a second metaphysics, starting in The Logic of Sense. Instead of a metaphysics of continuity between virtual singularities located in a separate ontological realm, this will be a metaphysics of discontinuity between entities with individual virtual essences that always remain completely separate from each other. Hence the title of my book Against Continuity.


3. Deleuze’s second metaphysics


According to Deleuze’s second metaphysics, reality does not consist of two realms. All of reality is just one realm, which Deleuze sometimes calls “the plane of immanence.” ‘Immanence’ here simply means that there is no further level of reality that grounds it like a foundation, or that controls it like a puppeteer. This immanent realm consists of entities that Deleuze calls “machines” or “assemblages”. He calls them “machines” because they operate. They add their own difference to reality, rather than just being passive representations of others that do all the work. Every existing entity is a machine. Hence, machines do not just include technical artifacts made by human beings, such as chainsaws and smartphones. They also include molecules, stars, festivals, religions, theories, zebras, rivers, and fantasies. Everything in reality is the result of productive relations among different constellations of such machines, whether we are talking about the processes that produce helium in stars, thoughts in human minds, or cars in factories.


What is the metaphysical status or structure of such ‘machines’? They can be deduced from the principle of exteriority. If things are external to their relations, then every existing thing must have a dimension or a private interior beyond its engagements with its parts and environment. Deleuze calls this the ‘body’ or the ‘body without organs’ of a machine. This body is not its physical, corporeal body. It is a body that withdraws itself from actual existence. It is a purely metaphysical entity.


This, however, is not enough. If in and of themselves, all things are bodies, then they must also be something else in order to prevent all bodies from being fully identical to each other. Each body must therefore also be defined by what Deleuze calls its desire or, with less counterintuitive terms, its powers or capacities. A power is something that a body has thanks to its relations with its parts and its environment, but at the same time a power cannot be reduced to these relations. Therefore, the principle of exteriority is not violated.


For example: I have the power to speak English. I have this power thanks to certain relations with text books and teachers, and to certain relations with parts of my brain, my memories, and so on. All these are entities that generate, regenerate, and alter my power to speak English, but they are not this power and they do not have this power. Instead, I have this power, even though I have it thanks to them.


The same is true for all things, which is to say for all machines. The metaphysically basic elements of reality are machines that are defined by a body of powers, which is to say by certain capacities that they have thanks to their relations with others, but that are not reducible to those relations.


Now, a power need not always manifest itself. Water does not always have to boil, and speakers of a certain language do not always need to speak it. When a power manifests itself to some other entity, however, it never does so directly. It never does so as that power itself. You are currently not directly experiencing my power to speak English. You are just experiencing some sentences in the English language. These testify to my capacity to speak English, but they are not this capacity itself. Likewise, when water boils, what manifests to us is a hot liquid that can burn our skin. What manifests to us is not the power to boil itself.


In other words, powers are virtual, but in a sense different from the virtual realm in Difference and Repetition. And when a power manifests, it does not present itself as such (i.e. directly as a power). Instead, it presents what Deleuze calls a “partial object.” A partial object is like a translation of a power. The world of actual entities that we experience is, in its entirety, an ever-changing landscape of manifestations of such powers. And as with the example of water, we never experience these powers directly. All that we experience are the manifestations which testify to the existence of these capacities.


Now, recall that one reason for Deleuze’s earlier metaphysics of a virtual realm was that change and causation needed to be accounted for. We now have a second metaphysics in which there no longer is a virtual realm. We now have an ontology of machines, according to which each machine has its own private virtual interior consisting of powers, fully surrounded by partial objects or manifestations that prevent direct contact between the powers of two different entities.


Does this offer a better solution to the problem of causality and change? In a way, it does. Let us see how it works.


Whenever a machine registers another machine, it registers this other entity in terms of a partial object. But which aspect of the machine registers the impact of this other entity? Where does this other leave a trace? Where does it make its mark? It leaves its mark on the powers of a machine. A person spends time with an English person and as a result, their power to speak English increases. A mobile phone is equipped with a GPS tracker and it gains the power to make its location known. A steel tip is added to a wooden staff and thereby gives the weapon the power to pierce armor. A young animal watches and imitates its parents and thereby develops the power to hunt prey.


These examples testify to how the being-in-itself of machines is closed to being experienced by others. Others only ever register partial objects. But the being-in-itself of machines is open to experiencing others in terms of partial objects. These experiences directly impact and alter the powers that a machine is, which in turn means that a machine can start to manifest in different ways, ways that were perhaps completely impossible before a certain encounter with another machine.


This gives us causation and change. Powers are causes. Every entity only ever registers the world in terms of the powers that it has. Or as Deleuze quips in Anti-Oedipus: the eye interprets everything in terms of seeing. My powers are the cause of how I register other entities. But as soon as I do register them, my powers can change as a result. This, in turn, can change what I register in the world and how I can maneuver through it, which can lead to me having new experiences with new partial objects, which can again change my powers, and so on.


This is another reason why Deleuze calls entities “machines.” Based on its powers, every entity moves through the world in ways that can change its powers, which can instigate new moves, which can instigate new changes to powers, and so on. Every entity operates.


Finally, Deleuze’s second metaphysics also accounts for why change and causation are not directly visible. The reason is that they are only partially or indirectly visible. Every causal connection in reality has two poles. One of those poles is a partial object, meaning that it is a manifestation of a certain power by a certain entity. Right now, the sentences that you are hearing me speak are such manifestations. This first pole is completely available to experience. The second pole is not. It consists of the powers of a receiving machine that is open to that specific kind of partial object. In this example, those powers are your powers to understand and speak the English language, which will increase or decrease depending on your exposure to this language. But how much they increase or decrease is something that is not directly available to us. We can only come to know this indirectly, by actualizing those powers into new English words and phrases.


This is why we can never isolate change and causation from among series of actual events. The reason is that change and causation constantly ‘dip’ into the virtual aspect of individual entities, by generating, regenerating, or altering their powers that are then, in turn, actualized into new manifestations. This ‘machinism’, if you will, is a more concrete and ultimately more consistent account of reality than Deleuze’s earlier metaphysics, which banished all change and causality to a wholly separate virtual realm, a realm that was supposed to warrant all of reality’s dynamism, but that instead turned out to be a place where change could only freeze up permanently in the iron cage of internal relations.


In conclusion, it is Deleuze’s second metaphysics that ought to merit our attention. The Logic of Sense and his later works are not a continuation of an early metaphysics that would remain unchanged for the rest of his career. His early metaphysics was rejected and replaced with a more promising alternative. It is this ontology of machines or assemblages that, in my view, ought to be the central element of Deleuze’s legacy.

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