everything is real - gilles deleuze and creative univocity

7/27/2019 Everything is Real - Gilles Deleuze and Creative Univocity

1/14

EVERYTHINGIS REAL 61

EVERYTHINGIS REAL: GILLES DELEUZEANDCREATIVE UNIVOCITY

Peter Hallward

The central thesis of the conference in which a version of this article was

first presented - that contemporary understandings of art and science belong

to a single paradigm of thought, a single way of thinking - surely finds its

most emphatic philosophical justification in the work of Gilles Deleuze.

This most inventive of contemporary French thinkers seeks to understand

the individuation of all possible beings and experiences as part of one and

the same productive process, where everything thus individuated or

produced - planets, bodies, perceptions, dreams, paintings, delusions - isproduced in essentially the same way. Deleuzes work everywhere asserts

the strict univocity of being. All thatis can be said to be in exactly the same

sense, all that can be said of being must be said in one and the same voice.1

And if all that falls under the concept of being must be treated in the same

way and said in the same voice, then the essential compatibility of art and

science follows as a matter of course. (Artistic) interpretation and (scientific)

explanation become aspects of one and the same expressive project.2

All of Deleuzes notoriously complex work presumes this essential

reduction, this essential compatibility of art and science, for the simple

reason that it eliminates the epistemological basis of their broadly Romantic

distinction - namely, the difference between deduction and insight, between

what can be demonstrated objectively and what resonates subjectively,

between the natural sciences and the human sciences, and so on. Deleuzes

project begins with the evacuation of any rigorous difference between subject

and object or natural and human, so as literally to clear the mind for the

intuition of that single productive energy that saturates, in essentially the

same way, every dimension of existence and experience. His project thendevelops, along each of its many bifurcating paths, on the presumption

that the identity of the self is lost [] to the advantage of an intense

multiplicity and a power of metamorphosis.3

The creatures loss, we might say, is creations gain. For in the absence of

subject-centred distinctions, everything will be seen to cohere on the same

virtual plane of immanence or multiplicity, a plane upon which everything

is laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, a plane populated

by a single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate it. Every

being can be described as a creative movement across the One-All defined

by this plane, and these movements are distinguished from one another

only by speed and slowness (WIS, 41/38).4 As a matter of fundamental

principle, there is only one kind of production, the production of the real,

1. In the terms madefamiliar by centuriesof scholastic debate,that being isunivocalmeans that creaturesexist in essentiallythe same way astheir creator. On thispoint see DanielSmithsexceptionally clearpaper, The Doctrineof Univocity:Deleuzes Ontologyof Immanence,

Deleuze and Religion,Mary Bryden (ed),Routledge, London,2001.

2. The mostsystematic text to

deal with thisquestion is GillesDeleuze and FlixGuattaris What is

Philosophy? Minuit,Paris, 1991, HughTomlinson andGraham Burchell(trans), ColumbiaUP, 1994; it providesthis article with itsmain point ofreference. Further

references to thistitle will be given inthe text as WIP,followed by pagenumber. (Where areference containstwo page numbersseparated by aforward slash, thefirst number refersto the originaledition and thesecond to thetranslation; tmstands fortranslationmodified).

3. Deleuze The Logicof Sense, Minuit,Paris, 1969, MarkLester with CharlesStivale (trans),Columbia UP, New

York, 1990, p345/297.

4. Deleuze andGuattari,A Thousand

Plateaus, Minuit,Paris, 1980 BrianMassumi (trans),


2/14

62 NEW FORMATIONS

and our only goal is to draw close to the beating heart of reality, to an

intense point identical with the production of the real.5 Any effort to

complicate this schema by introducing anthropocentric alternatives like

imaginary or symbolic (let alone natural and human, or objective and

subjective) can amount solely to the introduction oferror pure and simple.

Strict ontological univocity has, as its immediate implication, that it is the

nature of consciousness to be false.6 Consciousness as such can only get in

the way of active participation in univocal expression. In this as in every

associated case, all our false problems derive from the fact that we do not

know how to go beyond experience toward the conditions of experience,

toward the articulations of the real [du rel].7

In what follows I will try to outline, in terms directed at mainly non-

specialist readers, what is involved in this production of the real and the

notions of art and science that ensue. I will argue, in spite of certain thematic

appearances to the contrary, that Deleuze encourages us to understand such

production as a peculiar, thoroughly contemporary version ofcreationism -the idea, which Deleuze adapts mainly from Spinoza and Leibniz, that all

actual beings exist as unfolding parts of the expression or explication of

an all-powerful, purely intensive, purely virtual creative force.8 An infinitely

creative force gives rise to an infinitely differentiated creation. The task of

any particular creature - any particular actuality - is simply to give

appropriate voice to that part of creative becoming that it is able to express.

Grasped in itself - grasped, we might say, as an attribute of the creator

per se, considered independently of creation - this force remains exclusively

virtual. Its expression or self-differentiation will individuate every actuality

with absolute determining power, but it itself qua virtuality, qua creativity,

will never become actual. It will never be limited by the stasis of material

actuality. Every particular creation, however, will have both a virtual and an

actual dimension. It will exist both as a purely virtual creative thought, i.e.

as a creating, as a thought in the creative Mind, and as the thoroughly

actual expression of that thought, i.e. as a creature, as a distinct element in

the field of creation. In Deleuzes work, virtual and creative (in this strong

creationist sense) are effectively interchangeable terms.Though it is always the virtual or creative dimension that determines

the course of creation, the expressive individuation of this force is

simultaneously spiritual and physical. From what we might call the creative

point of view, thinking and being are [] one and the same, since purely

creative thought must immediately give rise to whatever it thinks. Every

genuine thought is a creation. Though the plane of immanence is always

single, being itself pure variation, it has two facets, as Thought and as

Nature and the one is immediately expressive of the other. Creatings are

distinguished by their speed alone, i.e. by their proximity to infinite speed,

since creativity itself is a single speed on both sides: the atom will traverse

space with the speed of thought (Epicurus). The plane of immanence has

two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Physis (WIP, 41-42/38-

Minnesota UP,Minneapolis, 1986,pp311-312/254-255.Further references tothis title will begiven in the text as

ATP, followed bypage number.

5. Deleuze andGuattari,Anti-Oedipus, Minuit,Paris, 1972, RobertHurley, Mark Seemand Helen Lane(trans), MinnesotaUP, 1977, pp40/32,104/87.

6. Deleuze,Differenceand Repetition, PUF,

1968, Paul Patton(trans), ColumbiaUP, New York, 1994,pp268-269/208.Further references tothis title will begiven in the text as

D&R, followed bypage number.

7. Deleuze,Bergsonism, PUF,1966 Hugh

Tomlinson andBarbara Habberjam(trans), Zone Books,1988, p17/26.Further references tothis title will begiven in the text as

Bergsonism, followedby page number.

8. Regrettably, thereis no space here to

tackle the mostobvious (but alsomost difficult)question raised by adescription ofDeleuzes thought asessentiallycreationist, namelyits relation to abroadly evolutionaryperspective; thepertinence of such aperspective has beendemonstrated incompelling detail byKeith AnsellPearsons recentbook, Germinal Life:The Difference and

Repetition of Deleuze,


3/14


39).9 It is the essential singularity of the arrangement that necessarily boggles

every limited understanding of mind, since it coheres only from the point

of view of a mind that creates at every moment every object of its thought -

that is to say, from the point of view that in Leibniz and Spinoza corresponds

to the mind of God.10 The immediate methodological implication, however,

is perfectly straightforward: if everything that is is real, if all that exists

exists in the same way, then there can be only one mechanism of

understanding or perception, one faculty of expression-interpretation, and

this faculty will apply indifferently to the material, semantic, or spiritual

composition of things.

As a result, the differences between philosophy, art, and science do not

reflect differences in the substance of their concern any more than they

correspond to genuinely distinct faculties of the mind. Philosophy, art and

science are names given to the three forms of thought able to sustain

proximity to pure creativity as such, i.e. to pure creative chaos: they are the

three Chaoids, realities produced on the planes that cut through chaos indifferent ways (WIP, 196/208tm).11 They differ only in the intensity of their

approximation to thepurely creative point of view. The effort to conceptualise

configurations of creative thought as such, the effort to lend conceptual

consistency to its infinite turbulence, is the particular task and privilege of

philosophy. Art and science take up their distinct epistemological positions

with respect to the resulting hierarchy: whereas science abandons any direct

intuition of pure infinity (infinite chaos, infinite speed, infinite determination

) so as to isolate a plane of reference in which finite states of relative

speed or relative complexity can be observed and analysed, art attempts,

through its finite compositions, to serve as a conduit or vector for an infinite

compositional power. In short: if what trulyis is a pure creative energy that

proceeds with the infinite speed of thought, philosophy is the discipline of

thought that establishes zones of conceptual consistency within this infinite

difference, whereas science withdraws from the infinite to so as to measure

the finite, leaving art with the peculiar power of being able to pass through

the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite(WIP, 186/197, my

emphasis). These disciplinary differences are established solely with referenceto the underlying dynamic of creative thought as such, or the mechanics of

infinite speed - and not in terms of ineluctably anthropocentric distinctions

between explanation and interpretation, or perception and imagination,

or accuracy and insight.

II

Deleuzes point of departure is brutally straightforward. Being is univocal.

There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave

being a single voice [...]. From Parmenides to Heidegger it is the same

voice which is taken up, in an echo which itself forms the whole deployment

of the univocal (D&R, 52/35). All distinct beings are distributed across the

Routledge, London,1999. See also myforthcoming study,Creationism in

Philosophy: Deleuze.

9. The concept ofpure creativity (orinfinite speed)

satisfies the essentialcreationistobligation: the

whole ought tobelong to a singlemoment, inDeleuze,Nietzsche

and Philosophy, PUF,Paris, 1962 HughTomlinson (trans),Minnesota UP, 1983,p81/72. Furtherreferences to this

title will be given inthe text asN&P,followed by pagenumber.

10. The universe islike a whole whichGod grasps in asingle view, Leibniz,Letter to vonHessen-Rheinfels 12

April 1686, inLeibniz,PhilosophicalTexts, R.S.

Woolhouse andRichard Francks (edand trans), OUP,1998, p.99; cf.Spinoza,Ethics V,Proposition 25.

11. Alternatively -although it amountsto the same thing -they are the three

aspects under whichthe brain [or mind]becomes subject,Thought-brain,p198/210.


4/14

64 NEW FORMATIONS

space of univocal being, within a single plane of immanence or inclusion,

and they sing their being in one and the same voice. They sing a single

clamour of Being for all beings (D&R, 388-89/304).12 Being says all that it

has to say according to a single logic of sense, which applies indifferently

to God or man, animal or plant, dream or perception, word or thing.

Now if all beings express Being in the same way, does this mean that all

beings express the same intensity of being? Does ontological univocity imply

ontological equality? Far from it: its essential to understand that although

equal, univocal being is immediately present in everything, without

mediation or intermediary, nevertheless things reside unequally in this

equal being(D&R, 55/37). Univocity simply ensures an exclusively

quantitative understanding of expressive difference, where every difference,

ultimately, is a matter of being more or less expressive of the One-All,

more or less adequately expressive of being as that immanent whole in which

everything coexists with itself, except for the differences of level (Bergsonism,

103/100). All actual individuals actualise varying degrees of a single virtualforce (ATP, 62/46), and when we come to investigate the apparent diversity

of the natural world we see, between plant and animal, for example, between

animal and man, only differences in degree (Bergsonism , 105/101).

But why this inequality? Why is ontological hierarchy the originary fact,

[as] the identity of difference and origin? (N&P, 8-9/8). Because Deleuze

takes Nietzsches side in his quarrel with Schopenhauer: like any creationist,

Deleuze maintains that creation necessarily creates distinct creatures, that

production gives rise to distinct products. The illusions of subjective

autonomy must be dispelled, yes, but not in favour of a purely indeterminate

or undifferentiated abyss. The deluded pretension to a distinctive human

voice (i.e., to ontological equi-vocity) must certainly be disarmed and

replaced, but in and by individuation, in the direction of the individuating

factors which consume them and which constitute the fluid world of Dionysus.

What cannot be replaced is individuation itself (D&R, 332/258). And in

order to conceive of such individuation/differentiation as immediately active,

as purely creative, it must be abstracted from any process - of interaction,

communication, interpretation, negation - that might mediate, qualify,modulate or interrupt its operation. Creation does nothesitate. It does not

pass through anything external to itself. Fully creative difference must be

articulation and connection in itself;it must relate different to different without

any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the

opposed (D&R, 154/117).

Moreover, once actual individuation is explained in terms of the internal

differentiation of a single, purely intensive creative force then the quantitative

or hierarchical basis of the procedure follows as a matter of course. The

individuality of an individual can only correspond to its degree of expressive

power, its place on the single expressive scale. The philosopher whom

Deleuze reveres as philosophy incarnate, as the Christ of philosophers,

demonstrates the essential logic with unrivalled clarity: individuation is, in

12. Alain Badioutakes this phrase asthe subtitle for hisbrief but decisivecritique of Deleuzianunivocity in Badiou,

Deleuze, la clameur de

ltre, Hachette,Paris, 1997, LouiseBurchill (trans),Minnesota UP, 1999.For broadlycomparable readingsof Deleuzes singularorientation, see myDeleuze andRedemption fromInterest,Radical

Philosophy, 81 (Jan1997), pp6-21;

Deleuze and theWorld WithoutOthers,PhilosophyToday, 41:4 (Winter,1997), pp530-544;The Limits ofIndividuation, orHow to DistinguishDeleuze fromFoucault, in

Angelaki, 5:2 (Aug2000), pp93-112.Some of the material

discussed in thepresent essayoverlaps withmaterial analysed inthese earlier articles.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=/0300-211X^28199701^2981L.6[aid=5002132]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=/0969-725X^28200008^295:2L.93[aid=5002133]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=/0300-211X^28199701^2981L.6[aid=5002132]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=/0969-725X^28200008^295:2L.93[aid=5002133]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=/0300-211X^28199701^2981L.6[aid=5002132]


5/14


Spinoza, neither qualitative nor extrinsic, but quantitative and intrinsic,

intensive, purely quantitative, according to the degree of [a things] power.13

Any actual individual (any individual mode, to use Spinozas own term) is,

in its essence, always a certain degree, a certain quantity, of a [divine] quality,

and all modes are quantitatively distinguished by the quantity or capacity

of their respective essences which always participate directly in divine

substance (EINP

, 166/183). Ontological inequality is compounded,

furthermore, by the fact that in order to individuate fully distinct creatures,

creative force must temporarilyabandon them to their own distinction. As a

matter of course, once extended, purely intensive difference is explicated

in systems in which it tends to be cancelled (D&R, 293/228), just as, in

Bergsonian terms, life as movement alienates itself in the material form

that it creates; by actualising itself, by differentiation itself, it loses contact

with the rest of itself (Bergsonism , 108/104; cfEINP, 195-196/214-215).

Quantitative difference is inevitable once we leave the uninhabitable domain

of pure creativity (pure intensity) as such.

III

The expressive scale is defined, then, by two simple principles, which Deleuze

adapts more or less tel quel from Leibniz. These principles are: Everything

is always the same thing, there is only one and same Basis; and: Everything

is distinguished by degree, everything differs by manner [...] These are the

two principles of principles.14 Perceived in terms of these two principles,

every apparent difference in quality is nothing but difference in quantity

(N&P, 50/44; cfBergsonism , 73/74), and these quantitative differences

correspond directly to differences in proximity to pure creative thought,

that is to say to a form of expression which, very literally, says anything and

everything. Expressive power varies on a scale ranging from this infinite

articulation (the expression of all-in-one, the expression of unlimited

difference in a new monism) to merely unitary articulation (the expression

of only one affect or thought, the assertion of a simple, static existence).

At the highest end of the scale stands the utterly chaotic, purely virtuallimit of infinitely expressive thought - that inconceivable intensity of thought

which, at every moment, articulates all that can possibly be articulated. As

Deleuze understands it, this creative

chaos is characterised less by the absence of determinations than by the

infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. This is not a

movement from one determination to the other but, on the contrary,

the impossibility of a connection between them, since one does not appear

without the other having already disappeared [...] Chaos undoes every

consistency in the infinite (WIP, 44-45/42).

Chaos as such exceeds articulation, by itself it cannot consist. Chaos as such

13. WIP, 59/59-60;49/48-49. Deleuze,

Expressionism inPhilosophy: Spinoza,Minuit, 1968, Martin

Joughin (trans),Zone Books, New

York, 1990, pp180/197, 166/183.Further references tothis title will begiven in the text as

EINP, followed bypage number.

14. Deleuze, TheFold: Leibniz and theBaroque, Paris,Minuit, 1988, TomConley (trans),Minnesota UP, 1993,p78/58 (referring toLeibniz).


6/14

66 NEW FORMATIONS

exceeds our (creaturely) powers of thought. In chaos all beings become

something other than themselves, without interruption. Chaos is pure

creativity, abstracted from any sustainable creating; it undoes what it does

in the immediate instant of infinite transformation. Infinite creative

difference is conceivable only in a dimension traversed at infinite speed,

and Deleuze knows that from Epicurus to Spinoza (the incredible book five

[of theEthics

]) and from Spinoza to Michaux the problem of thought is

infinite speed. More, such speed requires a milieu that moves infinitely in

itself - the plane, the void, the horizon (WIP, 38-39/36).

Philosophy is the discipline of thought that dedicates itself to the creation

of concepts entirely within such milieu. Every philosophical concept is a

chaoid state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent,

become Thought. Or again: the problem of philosophy is to acquire a

consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges ... (WIP,

45/42). Philosophy is the closest thought can come to pure creative chaos,

without being undone.The lowest end of the scale, by contrast, is populated by relatively thought-

less forms of existence, by minimally expressive (or creative, or active )

forms of being. These are beings that can sing only a very limited part of

the general clamour of Being, in other words beings that cohere at a

maximum distance from chaos. Such beings exist in such a way as to avoid

becoming something other than themselves. It would be mere

anthropocentric hubris to identify this scale with something like the Great

Chain of Being, a chain in which the more complex forms of life occupy a

naturally elevated place. For all creatures capable of thought themselves

need to become thoughtful; a creature expresses creation only by being, in

the most active and inventive sense, creative. Thinking is part of an arduous

learning process. All thoughtful beings begin their existence in impotence

and slavery, in ignorance of their true creative nature, and remain ignorant

until they manage to remember or reinvent this creativity (EINP, 24/263;

268/289-90). Sadly, human beings, far from occupying a naturally privileged

place on the expressive scale, have a particular affinity for thoughtlessness.

We have a knack for transforming our active, open or creative dimensioninto reactive closure and inertia. Creative force is active, it creates the very

objects of its perception, but becoming-reactive is constitutive of man.

Ressentiment , bad conscience and nihilism are not psychological traits but

the foundation of the humanity in man. They are the principle of the human

being as such (N&P, 74-75/64).

It is thus we who are thoughtless, insofar as we consciously cut our particular

voice off from the general clamour of being, insofar as we tolerate (if not

cultivate) being trapped within the limits of consciousness, subjectivity, and

representation. As soon as we begin to represent the elements of our

experience and to formulate opinions about this experience, we cease to

present directly that part of creative thought to which we are able, in

principle, to give voice. What we express of active or creative being becomes


7/14


reactive - passive, dampened, indirect (N&P, 46/41). Opinion is thought

become weary. Where creative thought moves at absolute speed, and passes

through its every articulation in one and the same moment; ordinary opinion

moves at relative speeds, and is concerned only with the succession of

movements from one point to another.15 Likewise, investment in the means

of representation and the pseudo-philosophical supervision of appropriate

representation requires the consolidation of all that isolates and distinguishes

us as particular beings, as if suspended from the vital flow of creative energy

that we nevertheless continue to express - only with minimal intensity. We

thereby identify with our inherited organic limits, rather than seek out the

echoes of that anorganic life we share with the rest of the cosmos. We co-

ordinate our interactions with others in the consensual interests of a common

sense, rather than seek to become-other. We align ourselves with our

particular fragments of territory, rather than pursue those creative lines of

flight that cross every boundary and uproot every dwelling. Rather than

think at that creative level of coherence which is indistinguishable from abeing-thought, we thereby restrict thought to the abject supervision of mental

behaviour (recognition, classification, consumption ) that preserves our

bio-cultural distinction at the price of creative sterility. To surpass the human

condition, such is the meaning of philosophy.16

Hence the essentially redemptive role for those intermediary practices,

art and science, whose mobility along the expressive scale allows them to

draw near to the limit of infinite speed. Like philosophy itself, art and science

are procedures that think (that create) in proximity to chaos. Every such

procedure has a negative and a positive aspect. Negatively, art and science

must puncture the repressive walls people generally erect to protect

themselves from chaotic creativity. In the interests of security, normality,

familiarity and order, people normally take shelter from the chaos forever

raging over their heads under a conceptual umbrella, on the underside of

which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions .

But artists and scientists, like philosophers, make a slit in the umbrella,

they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos

and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent.Though this rent will quickly be patched over with commentaries, imitations

and further opinions, the glimpses of reality it affords serve as a constant

invitation to assume a higher expressive power:

Art, science and philosophy cast planes over chaos. These three

disciplines are not like religions that invoke dynasties of gods, or the

epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella.

Philosophy, science and art want us to tear open the firmament and

plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price.17

It remains a matter of defeating chaos because while our task is to think

chaos, to let chaotic thought course through us, in order for such thought

15. Our misfortunecomes fromopinion, WIP,pp194-206.

16.Foucault, op. cit.,pp139-140/124-125.

17. WIP, pp 191-192/202-203, referring toD.H. Lawrence.


8/14

68 NEW FORMATIONS

to continue we ourselves must remain at a mastereddistance from chaos. To

fall entirely into chaos is to be consumed in a kind of conceptual black hole.

Chaos as such consumes all form and undoes every doing: we must never

be directly precipitat[ed] into the chaos that we want to confront (WIP,

188/199).

So positively, then, philosophy, art and science will establish zones of

durable consistency from within or close to the element of chaos. Only the

philosopher can bring back from chaos variations that are still infinite,

purely virtual variations that pulse with the infinite speed of thought (WIP,

190/202). True philosophical concepts are articulated upon thesame virtual

plane as the chaotic movements of thought which they channel or configure

(WIP, 112/118).

The scientist, by contrast, is preoccupied with the actual processes by

which such speed becomes finite, that is to say with the actual, extended

forms in which pure intensive difference explicates itself. Whereas

philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency [] science,on the other hand, relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference, by

laying out, as if on top of the virtual plane of constant variation, an open

empirical plane through which actual movements and propositions can be

distinguished and assessed (WIP, 186/197). Science passes from chaotic

virtuality to the states of affairs and bodies that actualise it; the scientist

brings back from chaos variables that have become independent by slowing

down, that through their actualisation have been separated from the virtual

vitality that engendered them (WIP, 147/156; 190/202). Thus actualised,

these variables can be observed or modelled, measured or analysed. And if

science moves from the creatively virtual to the derivatively actual, art seeks

to reverse the process - to tap into virtually infinite creative power from

within the limits of actual materiality, to arrange patterns of sensation in

such a way as to point the way towards their creative source. Art is not itself

chaos but it opens a path back toward chaos, towards what Joyce called a

chaosmos (WIP, 192/204).

IV

The essential compatibility of art and science stems from ontological uni-

vocity, since the immediate casualty of its affirmation is the peculiarity of a

distinctlyhuman voice - a voice that something called the humanities would

seek to transcribe, for its own sake. Every artistic and scientific project

worth the name leaves anthropocentric illusions in ruins. Every discipline

of thought has as its object not the consolidation of merely human liberty

but rather liberation from the human - freedom become the capacity of

man to vanquish man.18 The challenge in each case is to dissolve the subject

so as to reveal the absolute sufficiency of the object, grasped as a dynamic

creating or event,19 rather than merely specified as a particular creature

defined by particular attributes. Ultimately, nothing other than the Event

18. Deleuze, Priclset Verdi: la philosophie

de Franois Chtelet,Minuit, Paris, 1988,p11.

19. Event orcreation - the twoterms are effectivelysynonymous, in What

is Philosophy, op. cit.,p198/211.


9/14


subsists, the Event alone,Eventum tantum for all contraries . - the event

of pure creation as such. The problem is therefore one of knowing how the

individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with

a world, in order to attain to the universal communication of events.20 To

think the event of creation is to be thought by that event, at a level of intensity

that consumes and dissolves the thinking subject as such. The highest

exercise of thought can only be undertaken by a form of what Deleuze,

after Spinoza, names the spiritual automaton. Dispossessed of his own

thought, the automaton is thought through by divine or creative thought as

such, in a process through which thought thinks itself and nothing more.21

The essential question is thus always a variant on the question posed in

Cinema 1: how to attain once more the world before man, before our own

dawn, the position where movement was [...] under the regime of universal

variation, where every action was a pure creation within the luminous plane

of immanence?22 And the answer is always a variant of the answer given in

A Thousand Plateaus: by reducing oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in orderto find ones zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter

the haecceity and impersonality of the creator (ATP, 343-44/280).23 We can

then access thenon-organic life of things [...] which burns us [... and] unleashes

in our soul anon-psychological life of the spirit, which no longer belongs either

to nature or to our organic individuality, which is the divine part in us, the

spiritual relationship in which we are alone with God as light.24

The distinctive roles of art and science are to be understood as

contributions to this general effort, this attempt to reverse the alienation of

virtual force in the actualities it creates. The virtual individuates itself in

actuality, intensive force cancels itself in extension; science and art play

privileged (if ultimately only preparatory) roles in the redemptive process

of counter-actualisation or counter-effectuation which leads actual

creatures back up to the virtual, event-ful creativity from which they spring

(WIP, 147-48/159-160).

Science is generally confined to the more limited role in this process. Its

concern is the study of actuality qua actuality. Science busies itself with actual

states of affairs. Whereas through the invention of its concepts, philosophycontinually extracts a consistent event from the state of affairs - a smile

without the cat, as it were - through its functions, science continually actualises

the event in a state of affairs, thing, or body that can be referred to. The

concern of philosophy is the event of creating, the concern of science is the

creature that results. Science relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in

order to gain a reference able to actualise the virtual (WIP, 112/118). For as

soon as the creatively virtual is perceived through a plane of reference, the

speed of creation slows down dramatically, as if caught in a freeze-frame.

Science operates in slow-motion. Even those values which limit the systems

of co-ordinates used to measure movement on the plane of reference - values

assigned to the speed of light, absolute zero, the quantum of action, the

Big Bang - impose radical limits upon thescientifically incoherent notion of

20.Logic of Sense, op.cit., pp 207-208/176-178. Individuality isnot a characteristicof the Self but, on

the contrary, formsand sustains thesystem of thedissolved Self , in

Difference andRepetition, op. cit.,p327/254.

21. Deleuze, Cinema2: The Time-Image,Minuit, 1985,Tomlinson andHabberjam (trans),

Minnesota UP, 1989,p343/263. Again, ifeternal return is thehighest, the mostintense thought, thisis because its ownextreme coherence,at the highest point,excludes thecoherence of athinking subject, in

Difference andRepetition, op. cit.,

p81/58.

22. Cinema 1, op.cit., p100/68.

23. Cf. Cinema1,pp117/81, 171/122.

24. Cinema 1, ibid.,p80/57.


10/14

70 NEW FORMATIONS

infinite speed or infinite action (WIP, 113/119). Moreover, whereas fully

creative or unconditioned philosophical concepts maintain the

inseparability of variations internal to their consistency, science analyses

its plane of reference in terms of functions that presume the independence

of variables, in relationships that can be conditioned (WIP, 119/126) and

ordered in terms of relatively stable equations or formulae. Insofar as science

limits itself to the physical, it necessarily stops short of an exploration of

the meta-physical, which can alone think the sufficient reason of the

physical.25

But we might say that science - unlike the merely thoughtless

representation of creatures - analyses actuality so as to prepare it for its

eventual counter-actualisation (itself undertaken through art and

philosophy). Deleuzes privileged scientific references - an eclectic collection

ranging from Mamon and Saint-Hilaire through Bergson and Whitehead

to Simondon and Prigogine - have at least one thing in common: they restore

a creative dynamism to the plane of reference as such. What qualifies astrue science for Deleuze always involves an emphasis on nonmetric

multiplicities, the multiplicities of smooth space or constant variation, as

opposed to the apparent stability and stasis of metric measurement and

predictable calculation within a homogeneously striated space. In keeping

with Spinozas emphasis on a creatively naturing nature [natura naturans]

over its passively natured effects, Deleuze affirms a numbering number

over merely numbered quantities - a nomadic or independent number,

number as a creative process in itself, whose subsequent function is to measure

magnitudes in striated space (ATP, 605/484-85).26 Each application of this

numbering number is an attempt to evoke, from within the limited co-

ordinates of the plane of reference, a purely indeterminate creativity, a

creativity variously at work in the mathematisation of quanta, fractals,

crystals, strings, strange attractors, resonance, turbulence, so many re-

workings of the ancient idea of the cliname n - that pure energy of

displacement which distributes atoms across the universe and sets them in

motion.27

There is certainly nothing anthropocentric about such creativenumbering. The composition of a plane of reference proceeds through a

radical perspectivism which is never relative to a subject, but rather

disseminated through a multitude of what Deleuze and Guattari call partial

observers: the role of the partial observer is to perceive and to experience,

although these perceptions and affections are not those of a man, in the

currently accepted sense, but belong to the things studied (WIP, 124/130).

Partial observers are located in sites devoid of all subjectivity, in sense

data distinct from all sensation, and operate like photographic instruments

which capture what no one is there to see, which make these unsensed

sensibilia blaze. Scientific observers pick up on the singularities of a curve,

of a physical system, of a living organism, and in doing so - though they

remain within the referential calibration of horizons and empirical

25. Deleuze recallsBergsons belief thatmodern sciencehasnt found itsmetaphysics, themetaphysics it wouldneed. It is thismetaphysics thatinterests me,Deleuze, Interview

with Arnaud Villani,

in Villani,La Gupeet lorchide: Essai surGilles Deleuze, Belin,Paris, 1999, p130.

26. As Pierre Zaouireminds us, from aSpinozist perspectiveto love God as

naturing nature[naturans] is not tolove nature or the

real as it is -naturednature [naturata], inZaoui, La grandeidentit Nietzsche-Spinoza, quelleidentit?,Philosophie47 (Sept 1995),pp71-72.

27. This aspect ofDeleuzes work isexplored to greateffect in the

endnotes of BrianMassumis UsersGuide to Capitalism

and Schizophrenia,MIT Press,Cambridge Mass.,1992. See alsoPearson, Germinal

Life, 91 and passim.


11/14


deceleration of creative speed - they glimpse that virtual or potential

force without which every state of affairs is deprived of activity and

development. Science indicates that even in the field of actuality, nothing

is passive but everything is interaction, even gravity [pesanteur] (WIP, 146/

154). In the end, science itself demonstrates that a state of affairs cannot be

separated from the potential through which it takes effect.28 In short, science

observes actuality at a distance from the creative chaos that gives rise to it,

but it is inspired less by the concern for unification in an ordered actual

system than by a desire not to distance itself too much from chaos, to seek

out potentials in order to seize and carry off a part of that which haunts it,

the secret of the chaos behind it, the pressure of the virtual (WIP, 147/156).

V

Now if art is ultimately more creative (and thus closer to philosophy) than

science, this is clearly not because it is somehow more intimate or humane,more subjective or personal - less abstract - than science. On the contrary:

arts privilege stems precisely from its higher impersonality, its more radical

power of abstraction, its ability to transcend, without abandoning the logic

of sensation, the scientific plane of reference and actuality.

Art thus occupies an inter-mediate place between the pure virtuality of

philosophical concepts and the pure actuality of scientific states of affairs.

Art composes actively creative works of sensation, whose ontological status

is neither virtual nor actual but possible (WIP, 168/177). Insofar as what is

composed is sensation - insofar as the work of art is a being of sensation

and nothing else - it leans toward the realm of actuality. But insofar as the

creation of such beings is itself active and inventive - insofar as the compound

of created sensations stands up on its own (WIP, 155/164) - art participates,

immediately and without reserve, in the univocal expression that is creation

in general. Sensation is pure contemplation, but contemplation is creating:

embodied thought, sensation is nothing other than the mystery of passive

creation (WIP, 200/212). If philosophys conceptual becoming is [creative]

heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form, arts sensory becoming isotherness caught in a matter of expression which unlike science does not

actualise the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it: it gives it a body,

a life, a universe (WIP, 168/177).

Art, we might say, creates an echo chamber in which pure sensation can

vibrate in itself, in its undiluted intensity, independently of both the object

and the subject of sensation. Independently of the object, because art is

defined by its ability to make sensation (a smile, a grimace, an emotion )

endure for its own sake, without regard for the corruption of its material

support. Through artistic composition, it is no longer sensation that is

realised in the material but the material that passes [] ascends, into

sensation (WIP, 183/193). And independently of its subject, because every

movement back toward the virtual or creative must proceed, by definition,

28. Deleuze andGuattari give an

example fromparticle physics, adiscipline populatedby countlessinfinitely subtleobservers: in theactuality of theatomic nucleus, thenucleon is still closeto chaos and findsitself surrounded bya cloud of constantlyemitted and

reabsorbed particles;but a further level ofactualisation, theelectron is inrelation with apotential photonthat interacts withthe nucleon to give anew state of thenuclear material, inWIP, op. cit., p145/153; p124/131.


12/14

72 NEW FORMATIONS

in the absence of an independent subject. Artists are conduits for the

anonymous creatings that proceed through them, channels for the

nonhuman becomings of man. Or again: art is the answer to the question,

how can a moment of the world be made to exist by itself?, where this

answer always involves the extraction of that moment from its apparent

object and subject, its fusion with the surging energy of a cosmic becoming,

through a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it (WIP

, 162-

63/172-73; 154/163-64).

The purpose of art is not to represent the world, still less to cultivate or

enrich our appreciation of the world, but to create new and self-sufficient

compositions of sensation, compositions that will draw those who experience

them directly into the material vitality of the cosmos itself. The artist is not

the more refined cousin of those craftsmen who impose beautiful form upon

inert matter, but rather the liberator of creative anarchy in matter itself.

The artist does not observe the world or inhabit the world, so much as

demonstrate how we become with the world [] Everything is vision,becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular,

becoming zero (WIP, 160/169).

Freed from an object, stripped of a subject, deprived of reference, these

becomings or sensations cannot be contained within the confines of lived

experience [le vcu]. In its virtual intensity, life creates zones where living

beings whirl around, and only art can reach and penetrate them in its

enterprise or co-creation. Co-creators with life, every artist is a seer, a

becomer, someone who lives at an intensity that ordinary life cannot sustain.

The artist is someone who has seen something in life that is too great, too

unbearable for ordinary communication. Literary characters, for example,

can only exist because they do not perceive but have passed into the

landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensations. Ahab

really does have perceptions of the sea, but only because he has entered

into a relationship with Moby Dick that makes him a becoming-whale and

forms a compound of sensations that no longer needs anyone: ocean (WIP,

154-162/164-173).

Consider Deleuzes most highly developed example: cinema. Whatcinema demonstrates above all, says Deleuze, is the machinery of time as

such. As it evolves from its early confinement in Hollywoods entertainment

industry through to the more purely experimental terrain of Europes

nouvelle vague, cinema progresses from an essentially indirect treatment of

time - time filtered throughactual movement, through the co-ordination of

actions and reactions in a well-defined field of reference - to an ultimately

direct orimmediate treatment, one that blends with the pure creative virtuality

of time in its pure state. In the process, cinema sacrifices the co-ordinating

subject of ordinary action (the subject exemplified by the great Western

heroes) so as to clear the way for an exposure to pure sound and optical

situations, situations in which it is impossible to live, situations impossible

to endure, but which open directly onto that beating heart of reality that is


13/14


Deleuzes invariable concern. Paralysed, dismembered, actors become pure

seers, exposed without reserve to an intensity that explodes all actuality.29

Such seers, though actually helpless, are co-creators with time in its pure

(or exclusively creative) state. There is no more an in-between art and life,

for it is the whole of the real, life in its entirety, which has become spectacle

- this is life as spectacle, and yet in its spontaneity.30 They are absorbed

with the ultimate identity of virtuality and pure thought, in a creative

movement that unites negative and positive, place and obverse, full and

empty, past and future, brain and cosmos, inside and outside.31

An essential part of this process, accomplished in any genuinely artistic

sequence, is the conversion of an actualised space into a quasi-virtual or

creative space, what Deleuze calls an espace quelconque [any-space-whatever].

Such a space is

a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that

is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts,so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a

space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What

in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of

such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it

were, prior conditions of all actualisation, all determination []. The

any-space-whatever retains one and the same nature: it no longer has

co-ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and

Qualities, independently of the states of things or milieux which actualise

them (have actualised them or will actualise them, or neither the one

nor the other - it hardly matters).32

Access to such a space is nothing less than access to a place of pure creation,

abstracted from the limits of actuality. The outcome is anticipated in the

visionary films of Yasujiro Ozu, in which co-ordinated movements and action-

images have been replaced by pure optical and sound images. Along the

way, whether through disconnection or evacuation, Ozus spaces are raised

to the state of any-space-whatevers. They thereby reach the absolute, asinstances of pure contemplation, and immediately bring about the identity

of the mental and the physical, the real and the imaginary, the subject and

the object, the world and the I.33

Access to the plane of this identity, the plane of pure creation in which

everything is real and every reality is in the same way, is the exclusive

concern of Deleuzes philosophy. The way we structure our ordinary

experience amounts to an attempt to cut ourselves off from this plane. We

remain trapped in delusions of equivocity, caught up in the merely apparent

distinctions that divide mental and physical, real from imaginary, and subject

from object. Asactual beings we tend to forget the virtuality we express. Art

and science make complementary contributions to its philosophical recovery

insofar as they prepare for and enable the redemptive movement of counter-

29. Cinema 2, op.cit., p59/41.

30. Ibid., p112/84;118/89.

31. Ibid., p281/215;Cinema1, op. cit.,p290/215.

32. Cinema1, ibid.,p155/109; 169/120.

33. Cinma 2, op.cit., pp27-32/16-20;cf. 281/215.


14/14

74 N F

actualisation, the movement whereby a particular creature can reverse the

course of its genesis (and the cause of its forgetfulness) and thus access the

active, impersonal creating that it most essentially is. Science orients static

actuality in line with dynamic virtuality, whereas art evacuates actual sensation

so as to expose, in an espace quelconque, the creative intensity it contemplates

or contains. Only philosophy, however, will be able to claim a fully virtual

consistency, a creative power unlimited by its medium or element. Only

philosophy can claim to be fully autonomous in its creation, in the creation

of concepts that owe nothing to actuality. Only philosophy, in short, can

claim immediacy to the infinite speed of creative thought as such.

everything is real - gilles deleuze and creative univocity

Documents