Breeding Demons Chapter Two: Losing Face, I Recognition

In its broadest sense and throughout, Deleuze’s writing constitutes a critique of images which have protected the assumption that everyone knows what thinking means. In the early book, Nietzsche et la Philosophie, he summarizes three theses essential to the dogmatic image of thought: truth is the formal possession of sincere thought; error is in opposition to truth, the effect of forces alien to thought; method is the means by which the formal possession of truth is protected from the distractions of error - ‘corps, passions, intérêts sensibles (body, passions, sensuous interests)’ .[2] Truth is abstract and universal, method is independent of context, and always remote from the errors of the senses.

Deleuze writes that it is disturbing that thought understood in this way ‘n’ont jamais fait de mal à personne. Le fait est que l’ordre établi et les valeurs en cours y trouvent constamment leur meilleur soutien (has never hurt anyone. In fact the established order and current values constantly find their best support in truth conceived in this way)’.[3] By not taking seriously the professed innocence of thought, by not exploring the prejudicial nature of an image which protects itself by negating the body, the senses, the passions, desire and the potential cruelties of thinking, philosophy embraces stupidity, and even this is misunderstood, as bestiality or laziness or error. Stupidity is not these, however but the condition under which misadventures in thought are categorized as either truth or error: leading to thought as quiz-show, Deleuze says. Stupidity is a structure of thought as such: hence Deleuze’s question: why has stupidity never been considered as ‘l’objet d’une question proprement transcendentale (the object of a properly transcendental question)’.[4] Whilst the legitimacy of thought as a juridical and image-bound process is deduced, the intelligence of this process, of this sort of deduction as a legitimation of the real nature of thought, is never made the object of critique.

Deleuze targets several prejudices: that thought has a natural rectitude; that amongst the undeniable elements of thought are included subjectivity, representation, and discourse; that a common sense proper to the nature of thought distributes a form of the Same, an identity continuous throughout the diversity of empirical fields: that good sense determines a principle of direction which forces choice and eliminates alternative routes and patterns of thought: that thought has a form of interiority modelled on the State which, once given, is universalized: and finally, that the value of thought is established - that it is, indeed, we who think, who know who we are and what we think. The first person plural indicates not modesty or reticence in the face of saying ‘I think’, but illustrates that thought has been consigned to regurgitating the particular in the light of what is generally thought, of what thought holds in common. Deleuze’s reading of Kant is twofold, however: the critique of the dogmatic image simultaneously engages elements of critique which are not under the regulation of good sense, nor constituted by common sense, and so not under the grammar of the “we”. This minor treatment of Kant strips out the power structures, culture, doctrine, dogma, the ends of reason, sense and thought, so efficiently and elegantly mapped out in the little Kant book, to expose critique’s potential becomings.[5]

The principle presupposed by the image of thought, Deleuze argues, is that of recognition. Recognition implies a transcendental model which orients thought according to rules of distribution which function specifically to limit and control its relation with sense by requiring thought to be thought of an object, of something, something in general, something = x. The element of generality, of both scope and direction, is essential to the dogmatic image of thought, since it allows for the substitution of particulars on a horizontal plane, each and every object being exchangeable for any other object, and the subsumption of particulars on a vertical plane, each relation being contained under emptier but more general laws. There is no need for caution, thinking on this plane, because it is a general space organized identically throughout. No danger, no surprise. Extrinsic to sense, the form of the object in general lays claim to the empirical in advance of experience, and prejudices the potential force, direction and distribution of synthesis by explicating it along generally familiar lines.

Recognition of the particular depends on the field of sense becoming an object in general for the understanding. As Kant says, ‘the combination (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses’ and produce recognition, since sensibility is passive, intuition is singular and the real is a posteriori.[6] The conjunction of heterogeneous sensible presentations into a field of generality must therefore be an act of understanding, the faculty of representation. However, by generalizing the manifold diversity of sense under the form of an object, the real elements of sensible relations are inverted and hidden, and the transcendental problematic is lost.

In the Aesthetic, Kant says that the parts of time and space, which are pure intuitions, presuppose the whole: time is not composed of times nor space of spaces. However, according to the axioms of intuition ‘All intuitions are extensive magnitudes’[7], which is to say ‘the representation of the parts makes possible, and therefore necessarily precedes, the representation of the whole’.[8] When predicated of the object in general, as empirically real, intuitions become fixed quantities, discrete quanta with particular values which are a function not of sensible, nor real relations, but of the formal concept of magnitude. According to the concept of magnitude, space and time are divided into metric intervals, or units, and an extensive magnitude can be subjected to cardinal measurability, and an additive (+1) principle. Matter, in this context, is condensed into a point, and motion judged independently of both the quality or quantity of sensible differences.[9] Since the judgement of which the concept of quantity is a function is universal, this segmented Euclidean spatio-temporality becomes the field of thought to which understanding is limited, the surface on which the image is organized and across which a single subject expresses itself in an object in general. In this way a nested and intensive system, which is ordinal without the order of the sequence being determined by anything extrinsic to the system, becomes subject to a principle of succession which dictates that any element can be added in any order, and each element counts as a unit of the same magnitude. Ordinal does not mean first, second, third...etc., but first, ninth, twenty-third, second, seventeenth: not as arbitrary leaps, but as expressions of relations structuring a problem.[10] Only by unhinging the Aesthetic, together with imagination, from understanding and its empty conceptual boxes can the empty form of time become a carrier of intensive distances and depths of a space without uniformity, which is produced as it is crossed, rather than being there before you arrive. This is what Deleuze means when he calls the pure line of time a labyrinth: it is spatially intensive, just as space is temporally differentiated, and there is no single and uniform time which comprehends all space.

Deleuze is critical of Kant’s use of recognition in the Analytic of the first Critique, not only for its specific employment in that context, but for its wider function, which is to provide thought with a model of the ‘concordance des facultés fondée dans le sujet pensant comme universel, et s’exerçant sur l’objet quelconque (harmony of the faculties grounded in the supposedly universal thinking subject and exercised upon the unspecified object)’.[11] Common sense, the collaboration and convergence of faculties on the shared task of recognizing an object as the Same, limits thought by requiring that, to be legitimate, it adhere to this model. Recognition of the object thus becomes the means by which the real relations of sense are differentiated from the formal relations of judgement and understanding. That is, recognition is the mechanism by which the truth of image and the errors of the body are distinguished.

But: ‘Il y a dans le monde quelque chose qui force à penser’ (Something in the world forces [us] to think’ [12]. The limitations imposed on thought by the principle of recognition and on sense by its generalization under the form of an object imply a paralogism at the heart of Kantian epistemology: sense is separated from what it can become by a régime of relations which reduce the real to a condition of general possibility, and negate its genetic rôle in thought. In the first Critique, sense’s only logic is conceptually conditioned. What forces thinking is discounted by this condition, which separates a content of thought from a form, and then determines the former on the basis of the latter, endorsing hylomorphism.

But the above gives a negative aspect of Deleuze’s Kant, and as such is derivative of the positive aspect of critique. “[D]evant un tel génie, il ne peut être question de dire qu’on n’est pas d’accord. Il faut d’abord savoir admirer; il faut retrouver les problèmes qu’il pose, sa “machinerie à lui” (in front of such genius, perhaps it is not only a question of saying that one does not agree. First of all, you have to know how to admire; you have to rediscover the problems he poses, the “machinery in itself”)’.[13] It is this positive and generous consideration of the machinery, of the network of faculties, which gives Deleuze’s critique of Kant its force: he operates with courtesy towards his enemy, camouflaging the movements which effect the turn of the result against its origin, forging a strange alliance and producing a monstrous offspring. Of his practices in the history of philosophy at the time of writing the Kant book he writes that he looked on it as a process of screwing (enculage).[14]

His reading of Kant is, once more, double, a Kant of recognition and the image of thought, bureaucratic and moralizing counterposed with a Kant of synthesis, insistence on real conditions and sense as the problem and discovery of the transcendental. Mapping the latter Kant involves both an abstract problem, that ‘does not explain, but must itself be explained’, and an empirical problem, of ‘analyzing the states of things, in such a way that non-pre-existent concepts can be extracted from them’.[15] Abstract and empirical together and at once, a singularity, and not a particular. Explanation in Deleuze’s sense is not, however, discursive clarification or interpretation. Analysis of a substantial multiplicity, of the state of a “thing” made up of ‘a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another’ is neither exhaustive nor definitive, because the lines tangled in a multiplicity are becomings, material solutions or explanations to real problems of matter and energy flows.[16] There is, for an empirical logic of multiplicities, no “thing”, only sets of inseparable and continuously varying relations, and analysis is at once synthesis, since plugging into a multiplicity effects its reconfiguration, and any change in relation is, for an intensive, nested and real system, also a change in nature. There is always an escape: indeed, if critique were not immanently creative, Kant would be a dull enemy and a feeble ally.

[5].cf. Un Manifeste de Moins, in Superpositions. Here, Deleuze explores Carmelo Bene’s ‘Richard III’ as an illustration of the minor treatment of theatre. This is not anti-theatre, just as his reading of Kant is not anti-philosophy. It is rather a more precise operation, of substraction and deduction. However: ‘Vous ne pouvez même pas dire que c’est une opération négative, tant elle engage et enclanche déjà des processus positifs (you can’t even say that it is a negative operation, since it already engages and meshes with positive processes.’ (D,1979:103) Stable elements, constants, and the indicators of power are stripped out, to expose ‘le rôle des opérateurs, répondant à l’idée d’intervalle «plus petit». (the role of operators, responding to the idea of the smallest interval).’ (D, 1979:106) Negation is thus a consequence of affirmation. Cf. Différance et Répetition, esp. Chapter 1 for discussion of this Nietzsche-informed sense of affirmation and negation.

[9] The elimination of sensible differences in favour of distinctions which can be mapped in extensive space connects with the problem of enantiomorphic bodies, and with Irigaray’s critique of Kant, and is addressed in chapter six. In ‘Kant on the Impossibility of the “Soft Sciences”, Nayak and Sotnak argue for the measurability of intensive magnitudes, and for some other way of differentiating between intensive and extensive magnitudes than through a difference between ordinal and cardinal measurability. They argue that ‘the filling of space by matter is ultimately grounded in quality (force) [so] forces are not constructible in terms of quantity, for quantity would then be more basic than quality’. This latter is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari argue for: quantify writing, they say, in Mille Plateaux. See also ‘Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition’ (Alfredo Ferrarin), where a difference is made between numbers and numbering; this is also a working difference in Mille Plateaux, in relation to the distinction between science as war machine, or Dispars and science as royal state thought, or Compars. See Chapter Three for discussion of this.

[10].i.e., problem as a differential Idea, as discussed in the text.