Deleuze Lite:
Delanda is very good at explaining Deleuze's philosophy when it comes to science, as in his first three chapters, except for Chapter 2 where he says "These would be in a nutshell, the three ontological dimensions which constitute the Deluzian world: the virtual, the intensive and the actual." (p. 55) As no Deleuzian would ever make such a claim, we can clearly see here Delanda's imposed metaphysics. And when it comes to philosophy, Delanda rejects Deleuze's philosophical project, as becomes evident in his last chapter:
Chapter 4, Virtuality and the Laws of Physics
Delanda reconstructs Deleuze for a scientific audience, but then bifurcates virtual science from virtual philosophy according to his proclaimed “flat ontology of individuals” (well defined as non-hierachical by Delanda), but which ontologically flattens a fully Deleuzian intensive philosophy of multiplicity which includes socio-linguistic aspects of reality. After taking us through three masterful chapters of Deleuzian philosophy applied to science, Delanda declares at the beginning of Chapter Four: “There is no room for reified totalities . . . no room for entities like ‘society’ or ‘culture.’ " (Delanda 2002: 147) In so doing he decapitates Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) sociological critique of the historically reified totalities of both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxian economics. He also denies the alloplastic richness of Anti-Oedipus (AO) and A Thousand Plateaus (ATP).
How does Delanda’s cogent expositon of Deleuze’s multiplicity in the scientific world so completely reject the multiplicity of Deluze’s philosophical project? We have a clue where Delanda states: (1) “Unlike spatio-temporal dynamisms, the terms “passive self” and “larval subject” received very little elaboration in my reconstruction, mostly because I wanted to keep the description of Deleuze’s ontology free from anthropocentrism as possible.“ (p. 202) Delanda here is reacting to the potentially anthropocentic philosophy in Difference and Repetition (D&R) and completely rejects the more comprehensive philosophy of multiplicity of ATP.
Delanda is understandably concerned about the anthropological emphasis in Deleuze’s three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, which also has a parallel in the three syntheses of space. The Deleuzian cogito requires that the “I that thinks” be placed in time as the passive “I.” Deleuze rejects the Kantian cogito which grounds determinability not only in time but in thinking, which is secondary and illusory. “Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self; and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental or the element of the [true] Copernican revolution. “ (Deleuze 1980: 86) Deleluze exposes the ‘I’ that is fractured based on the passive receptivity of the self, rather than covering it up as does Kant with the synthetic apriori activity of the transcendental unity of apperception (TUA).
Deleuze now searches for the condition of this wider existence—what makes the undetermined ground (the fractured I, the passive self) of a well-determined given (time) determinable. There is a dialectic (interplay) between the condition (of a passive self with sensations and concepts) and the given (objects in time) which Kant tries to cut off by appeal to the pure apriori given, which are thereby separated from concepts and sensations. Deleuze includes sensations and concepts in his cogito for which he must find the necessary conditions for particular sensations or concepts which is the basis for his third synthesis of time where the ‘I’ dissolves in the virtual (failure of the third synthesis).
Delanda identifies his fundamental divide with Deleuze: “The term ‘intensive’ which in my presentation was used in relation to individuation processes, not the virtual continuum,” (p. 199) This philosophical divide for Delanda requires a reconstruction in order to eliminate the confusion between the intensive virtual and his falsely individuated actual which thereby ‘flattens’ his ontology in comparison to Deleuze. Therefore all references to the individual are flattened by this exclusion of the virtual, of intensities, and lacks a robust philosophy of multiplicity.
As we have seen above Delanda does well to identify the problematic of the anthropocentric concept of time. However, he goes on to say, “Unlike my reconstruction where the term ‘individual’ refers to the final product (organisms, species, etc.), in Deleuze’s work it refers to the larval subject themselves. It often has the meaning of a Leibnizian ‘monad.’ (Delanda 2002: 202) Delanda refers to Deleuze’s robust larval selves as a Leibnizian monad which Delanda calls an ‘intensive individual’ in contrast to the Delanda cogito of the ’individual.’ Delanda defines the ‘individual’ as “without qualification to refer to the extended and qualified actual entities which form my flat ontology of individuals.” (Delanda 2002: 203)
Then, under a section entitled “Extensities and qualities,” Delanda says “These are the two characteristics which define the realm of the actual, the fully constituted world of extended and qualified individuals.” Contradicting this focus on the actual he says, “In ATP these two characteristics are referred to as ‘substances’ and ‘forms’ respectively . . . Given that no actual substance is every purely extensional, these two characteristics are ‘not really distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.’ ” (Delanda 2002: 203; Deleuze 1980: 502)
Consequently, Delanda opens the final chapter as stated above with his strong claim of a “flat ontology of individuals” where he has “no room for reified totalities” but only for “concrete social individuals” with the same ontological status as human individuals, simply operating at larger spatio-temporal scales, “products of concrete historical processes” and operating as “parts to a whole (sic).” Where there are cases of homogeneity to suggest the existence of a single ‘culture’ or ‘society,’ one must not “postulate such totalities,” but must be “given a concrete historical explanation.” (Delanda 2002: 147)
Delanda thus becomes reductionistic of not only individuals, and society, but also of science by cutting off the second articulation of expression, of the virtual and of philosophy itself. In his attempt to avoid false totalization, he states that science is a ‘scientific field,’ “like any other individual” which “will depend on contingent historical facts such as its degree of internal homogeneity and its degree of isolation from other fields.” (Delanda 2002: 148). Delanda thus additionally reifies history while conflating under the category of ‘individual,’ the alloplastic of human individuals, social individuals, and culture. It was precisely Deleuze’s project to provide a more comprehensive integration of the physical, organic and social in ATP and to bridge this gap of Delanda’s flatened ontology.
Delanda goes on to state, “The ontology I have developed in this book is fully historical. Each of the individuals which populates this other world is a product of a definite historical process of individuation and, to the extent that an individual’s identity is defined by its emergent properties and that these properties depend on the continuing causal interactions among an individual’s parts, each individual is itself a historical causal process.” (Delanda 2002: 183-4) Delanda gets very Cartesian in his use of the historical, bifurcating the actual from the virtual.
Moreover, in the introduction (Delanda 2002: xv) Delanda tells us that in Chapter Four he is actually trying to “eliminate the erroneous assumption of a closed world . . . [and] devalue the very idea of truth.” But then he again confabulates his ‘problematic epistemology’ by capturing “an objective distribution of the important and the unimportant, or more mathematically, of the singular and the ordinary . . . an objectivity of physical knowledge, an objectivity now captured by distributions of the singular and the ordinary.” (Delanda 2002: xv) Delanda grants that “there is much more to Deleuze’s books than just an ontology of processes and an epistemology of problem,” and that “there is a certain violence which Deleuze’s texts must endure in order to be reconstructed for an audience they were not intended for.” “A different kind of violence is involved in wrenching his ideas from his collaboration with Felix Guattari,” stating that he intentionally goes back to Deleuze’s early texts such as D&R for his ontology.
Delanda also completely eliminates Deleuze’s use of content and expression, which combined with form and substance to define the full ontology of double articulation in ATP, rather than Delanda’s articulation which he also flatly carries into “A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.” Deleuzes’s ontology in ATP is that each movement of a strata of reality consists of the first articulation (movement), of both physical conjunction and symbolization (coding), of both substance and form, both parts (segmentarity) and multiplicity, the first more quantal intensity and merely ordered, the second more rigid, atomic and organised. Unfortunately Delanda comes nowhere near this capacity for the philosophy, although he does for science as multiplicity what he refused to do for philosophy
Delanda says “Every stratum needs a double articulation, a double play of substances and forms, of extensities and qualities, one at the level of molecular populations and another at the level of molar aggregates:” (Delanda 2002: 206)
D&G say: “The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which structures are simultaneously actualised (substances).” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 40-1)
Content is formed matter consisting of 1) substance as chosen matter and 2) form as matter chosen in a certain order: a) substance itself and b) form of content of matter. Expression is about how structures function as 1) organization of their own specific form and 2) substances as they form compounds: 1) form as organization and 2) content of expression of compounds. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 43)
There is an alloplastic grouping of strata (rather than autoplastic that only makes changes within) which make modifications in the external world through a new distribution of content and expression. Alloplastic layers work with linguistic rather than genetic forms of expression, including symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable and modifiable from outside. This is the layer of a new distribution of properties, the human: technology and language, tool and symbol, ‘gesture and speech.’(Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 60)
The organization of content and expression consists of both technological content and semiotic (symbolic) expression. Content and expression both contain existing aspects of hand/tools and face/language as well as preexistant formations. Content is not simply hand and tools, but a technical social process preexisting them as “states of force or formations of power.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 63) Language Expression is not merely a face or a language, but a “semiotic collective process that preexsts them and constitutes regimes of signs.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 63). Therefore a formation of power is much greater than a tool, and a regime of signs is much more than a language—they are determining and selective agents—as much in the constitution of languages and tools as in their usages or diffusions.
Unfortunately Delanda could not stay philosophically consistent with his own observation: “The Deluzian ontology . . . [is] a universe of becoming without being . . . where individual beings do exist but only as the outcome of becomings. “ (Delanda 2002: 99) Double articulation is therefore not merely an integration/individuation of the virtual and the actual, but also of substance and form, expression and content.
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