<<TRANSMATHOME

II          System - A Gap

In exploring relations amongst the faculties in his book on Kant, Deleuze makes marks: that is to say, certain problems are flagged or differences made precise, spaces made clear, which are taken up, in radically different form, in his later work. For instance, he writes:           

‘chaque fois que nous nous plaçons ainsi du point de vue d’un rapport ou d’un accord déjà déterminé, déjà spécifié, il est fatal que le sens commun nous paraisse une sorte de fait a priori au-delà duquel nous ne pouvons pas remonter.

(each time we assume the perspective of a relationship or an accord which is already determined, it is inevitable that common sense should seem to us a kind of a priori fact beyond which we cannot go)’.[12]

In other words, common sense cannot answer the question of its own genesis, of an a priori subjective accord, a balance of difference not predicated on unity and not determined by experience. Deleuze’s criticism of Kant is, at its most naked, that whilst he provides an account of the production of representation, he fails to provide an account of the production of production, and in the book on Kant, the question of the genesis of the faculties and of their accord is opened, and a query also placed against what conditions the a priori? What produces the effect of formal laws extrinsic to experience, which determine its nature, shape, pattern and order? Kant has his solutions to this problem, in the free accord of imagination and understanding in judgements of taste in the beautiful, and in the accord which arises out of the discordant and unregulated relation of imagination and reason in the sublime. However, whilst reason is in both cases disinterested, the possibility of disinterest itself  testifies to the security of these judgements. Judgements of taste on the beautiful have a logical form commensurate with understanding and the idea of a norm or standard of beauty is achieved through an averaging process which, whilst not conscious, is nonetheless mechanically repeatable. And judgements on the sublime require culture. 

 The problems of the genesis of the faculties is one amongst others which will find, through labyrinthine routes, a solution in machinic production, and the relation of machinic assemblages to the body without organs, and is addressed in chapter two.[13] The beginnings of this solution follow on in chapter two, but it is not fully explored until a later one, when more of its elements have been provided.

Another mark made on the Kantian system in La philosophie critique de Kant pertains to Deleuze’s empiricism, and the potential for choice against Law. Theoretically, this is not possible: choice against natural law is outside the limits of understanding, since it is defined as giving the law to nature, and it is illegitimate for understanding to make a claim over the empty space of the noumenon on behalf of knowledge, a claim to know the object in general. It treads on the feet of practical reason and breaks the systematic unity of the ends of reason apart: ‘nous perdons seulement la condition sous laquelle [notre existence intelligible] fait partie d’une nature et compose avec les autres un tout systématique (we lose the condition under which [our intelligible existence] forms part of a nature and composes, with the others, a systematic whole)’.[14] Practically it is not possible either. Practical reason gives the law to freedom as absolute and categorical, and pure practical reason has no choice but to act legitimately. Practical reason is meant to realize its Law in action:  where the will operates against Law it is not a function of a choice, but the result of a will constrained by pathological inclinations, by pleasure, sensation, bodies, and passions.  Passions, according to Kant, signal the annihilation of freedom.

Whilst the previous mark was concerned with the production of harmony amongst the faculties, here it is a question of what conditions the good sense union of sensibility and intelligibility and the coherence of theory and practice. What ensures that good sense is good in itself, rather than merely a means to some other, not necessarily good, end? What ensures that restriction of one legislative domain by the affairs of another is limited to their territorial effects, whilst the domains themselves remain separate? Only insofar as a creature is both legislator and obedient subject of the Law, in its pure form, does there arise ‘a systematic union of rational beings under common objective laws - that is, a kingdom [ein Reich]’[15] and this end is possible only insofar as good sense is categorically defined as ‘necessary, in virtue of its principle, for a will which of itself accords with reason’.[16] What conditions the union of sensibility and intelligibility as good sense is Law, the positive side of Kantian theory.

Where good sense is absent, or there is a positive failure to recognize the ideal of the Reich, we ‘cessons d’être sujets, mais d’abord parce que nous cessons d’être législateurs (cease to be subjects, but primarily because we cease to be legislators)’, so transforming our relation with both sense and desire.[17] Making a point which is integral to a later theme in his work, regarding the impossibility of a completed system - he says often that something always escapes - Deleuze argues against the identification of practical reason, as pure form of Law, and freedom, as a problematic idea. In his reading of Kant and his movement of critique beyond the threshold of reason, these smallest differences generate global effects on the system,. because they are mobilized intensively, across the actual continuum and not extensively, through the lines scored on space by its theoretical demarcation. In this case as in others the issue concerns the real nature of problems, or the nature of real problems. Not: what conditions experience, or our knowledge of objects, but what are the immanent principles to the genesis of  a concrete world?

In an interview with Foucault, Deleuze talks of  the relation of theory and practice; instead of there being a defined and immovable limit which demarcates the two,  he institutes a mobile connection. Under the conditions of representation, practice is at times the application of theory,  its technical consequence,  a theory applied to matter, whilst at others, theory is a consequence of practice, drawn out of the empirical or through the subjective maxims of the pure form of Law. However, Deleuze wants to fragment their relation, and to reformulate theory as local, relative only to the domain it describes and exhausted by its practice, rather than universal and legislating beyond the concrete exhaustion of its terms. It may have application to other domains, but the theory itself does not involve the necessity of this. In other words, it is contingent, encountering obstacles, problems which necessitate side-ways moves, the incorporation of new elements,  which do not function as buttresses to the theory, additional hypotheses in support of a major claim, but whose addition feeds back into the theory to transform its nature. It is in this sense that Deleuze’s work might be called theoretical: rather than providing a single set of rules which encompass all concrete machines, and in terms of which all empirical contingencies can be hypothesized, he provides radically abstract rules, whose functioning is not pre-inscribed in their articulation, but contingent and differentiated according to the domain of practice. Practice is described as assemblage of relays, which mobilize a theory, moving it across domains, through walls, whilst theory allows for the relay of practices.  The relation is one of mutual reciprocation and interaction, rather than of fixed rule and principle. There is an action of theory and a passion of practice, a series of transformations by which theory becomes practice and practice becomes theory.  ‘[U]n système de relais dans un ensemble, dans une multiplicité de pièces et de morceaux à la fois théoriques et pratiques (a system of relays in an assemblage,  a multiplicity of  parts and fragments  simultaneously both theoretical and practical)’.[18] As is often the case with Deleuze’s reformulation of philosophical orthodoxies, such as the separation of theory and practice, the distinction becomes untenable once it is reconfigured; instead of a distinction one is left with an assemblage, a machine which constructs both theory and practice, but which is definable in terms of neither.

This digression on theory/practice relations explain Deleuze’s attention to the gap which maintains their separation in Kant, and the utilization of the tiniest interval teased open between freedom and law as an interzone of autonomy, where desire is not constrained by law to produce objects, nor sense similarly constrained by understanding. The idea (here, of freedom) remains problematic, as it is in the theoretical philosophy, but practical Law provides no solution to it, because it is no longer an idea produced under compulsion, familiar and repeated, and governed by duty, obligation and pain, but one which mobilizes the potential for departure from this particular territory..

Kant writes of the occupation of the ‘vacant place’ of the noumenon by the moral law:

‘Speculative reason does not herewith grow in insight but only in respect to the certitude of its problematic concept of freedom, to which objective, though only practical, reality is now indubitably given.’ [19]

The ‘zone de libre-arbitre (zone of arbitrium liberum)’, however, is unknown, uncertain, and the nature of its reality is not indubitably given[20]: that is, it is contingent, its conditions are unknown and its effects are not played out on the territory where the laws of theory and practice operate mutually restrictive devices against each other. It is neither a negative theoretical device limiting sensibility nor a positive practical device. 

The logical test of practical reason is made by analogy with theoretical laws:

‘the maxim which I adopt in respect to freely disposing of my life is at once determined when I inquire what it would be in order that a system of nature could maintain itself in accordance with such a law.’[21]

A theoretical model of a form of law is a test for pure practical reason; the subject judges the truth or validity of the law he applies to himself by an analogy between the two domains of theory and practice: a correlation of the two confirms the unity of natural causality and freedom under the law, and the noumenon is the name for this correlation. As Kant says, ‘the concept of freedom is meant [der Freiheitsbegriff soll] to actualize in the sensible world the end proposed by its laws’.[22] This meaning would translate into theoretical nonsense, if the laws of the sensible world were incommensurate with those of the practical.  If the two domains of theory and practice did not resolve into - at least in principle - an unconditioned unity, the territory which they share would crack apart: this is what Kant recognizes when he calls for a critique of reason as a means of preventing a lapse into a state of nature as warfare, and what he is underlining in his references to nomads and barbarians who cross the terrain of thought without having first secured possession of a ground.

In the Prolegomena, Kant says that discovery of the a priori concepts of understanding demands no greater insight than detection of grammatical laws: in no case is it possible to say ‘why each language has just this and no other formal constitution’.[23] Theoretically, one must assume it is contingent. However, that it is not contingent but bears a necessity predicated on moral law is made clear by the statement above: the meaning of freedom, and the fact that it makes theoretical sense - that analogies between moral maxim and theoretical law are possible - is a function of the Law.

The autonomous interzone in freedom on which Deleuze picks up escapes this analogy and the meaning of law: it is intelligible (which means no more than it expresses sense) and sensible (which means that it is intensive and that it is not legislative - sensibility does not legislate, being immanently passive, where passivity is not understood in relation to activity, but as passional and generative of affects). It thus cuts a transverse line across Kant’s system which escapes the systematics of reason, its cultural, moral, political and theoretical ends, and describes a different diagram of critique, one of practice and pragmatics, and a contingent autonomy. It is sensible; relative in the sense that it is attached to the concrete, but not relative in a liberal sense whereby one is necessitated to respect alternative opinions, alternative approaches;  intelligible, but not rational, problematic but  not subjective, effective but not caused and patterned but not meaningful. Falling on the side of neither theory nor practice, having unhinged sensibility from its reliance on various forms of imposed activity and disassociated autonomy from the freedom to impose Law on oneself, something escapes reason but not critique, nor indeed the problem of the transcendental.