<<TRANSMATHOME

II          Sense

In Différence et Répetition, Deleuze differentiates between the given (le donné) and ‘ce par quoi le donné est donné (that by which the given is given)’.[17] Difference is ‘ce par quoi le donné est donné comme divers (that by which the given is given as diverse)’ [18], the virtual and real condition of concrete appearance, substantial multiplicities. Sense is thus both  abstract and concrete simultaneously, perceptible and imperceptible; it neither explains nor hides itself by forced conduction along pre-given co-ordinates but is self-organizing, actualizing the differential relations of the problem as a distribution of multiplicities, or diversity; and whilst space is always to varying degrees segmented and partitioned, ordered and structured, there is at the same time something that always escapes.

Deleuze’s formulation of the relation of difference and diversity addresses the paralogism mentioned above; sense is not separated from what it can become by the form of possibility, nor channelled by a régime into providing the content for logical meanings and forms imposed from outside sense. Instead, it individuates a body, making solutions to problems perceptible whilst simultaneously adding the imperceptible alongside, not as a unifying or unified element, or as causally related to what is perceived, but as an additional component, which differentiates this assemblage from that; not extensively, according to properties or characters attaching to identical units, such as organisms or persons,  nor through comparisons of differences on the basis of a prior commonality, but as the immanent condition of  a body as a singularity, or haecceity., the term used in Mille Plateaux 

Deleuze distinguishes two senses of difference; differentiation, which belongs to a problem, and differenciation, as the concretization of the differential relations of the problem. Where these are confused,  and the process of actualization is taken to instantiate the relations of the problem, the problem discussed earlier, of confusing solutions with problems, and attempting to trace the nature of the problem from the instances of its solutions arises.

This early formulation in Différence et Répetition of two communicating orders of difference which cannot be referred to a  single unifying principle carries through, though in different terminology, into the later work. In Mille Plateaux, for example, the concrete individual is named an assemblage,  whilst differential problems become abstract machines: in both cases,   what is important is the relation between the two.  The variables negotiated by the assemblage effectuates the machine, and the latter does not exist independently of the former, whilst the former does not function independently of the latter. There are passages of communication between the two, variations in the variables selected which in turn change in nature of the variables.  It was said above that there is no time uniform for all space,  and no space distributed in advance of its occupation: each assemblage or body effectuates a singular machine, realizing a space and time without comparison. (The system, needless to say, does not wear democracy with ease!)

Kant is criticized, as has been seen, for isolating his abstract components from the empirical, his practice from his theory, disallowing their communication and the transformation of the problem, or abstract machine,  as it interacts with its solutions. The Kantian transcendental is folded back over the empirical, appearing as a miraculous condition of its order, independently originated and establishing a set of invariant constants. Deleuze, however, sets the constants in motion, so that a problem becomes a set of variables, the difference amongst things which have nothing in common, and itself varying in relation to the concrete.  He describes philosophy as the creation of concepts, but  concepts which remain contingent.

That by which the given is given is not time or space, but their genesis, a set of intensive syntheses immanent to the formation of a pure straight line and a rhizomatic distribution - a labyrinthine, ant-like line, the effect of time unhinged from cardinality, of passive syntheses.[19] These latter are the imperceptible and contingent cycles of the sufficient reason of sense, the molecular patternings of perception whose emergent effect is the concrete world, not as a theatre of representation, but as a shifting and mobile field of directions and tendencies. When Kant unhinges time from cardinality, turning it into something other than a logical problem, he is disconnecting it from generality, making it autonomous of understanding and of consciousness - of movement, succession, co-existence, etc., - which are modes, or consciousnesses of time. This demands ‘une nouvelle définition du temps (et de l’espace), (a new definition of time [and of space])’, which considers it within its own terms, as aesthetic and as singular.[20] This in turn necessitates a different theorization of imagination in relation to time, and sensibility, in which it is no longer rigidified by its common sense function of schematizing along channels of conceptual unity. This break up of common sense is one amongst other problems that Deleuze works out in Différence et Répetition, beginning to seed the apparatus of Anti-Oedipus, where the sense of a faculty has been melded onto that of real distributions, and becomes a function of the relations of a substantial multiplicity, or assemblage, which is not definable as a unity or as in relation to a unity. The assemblage is  the basic unit of machinic critique,  composed not of an aggregate of extensive units, a sort of clutter of randomly collected bits and pieces, but as a series of inter-related affects, continuously mobile and in variation; rather than existing in time, an assemblage is chronogenetic, generating a temporal and temporary metastability as an effect of the infinite firings of intensive difference which comprise its substance. 

There are ‘des facultés non encore soupçonnées, à découvrir. Car on ne peut rien dire d’avance, on ne peut pas préjuger de la recherche’ (faculties yet to be discovered, whose existence is not yet suspected. For nothing can be said in advance, one cannot prejudge the outcome of research’), or of relations amongst senses with nothing in common.[21] In Différence et Répetition, Deleuze’s productive interest in Kant focuses on what forces sensibility to sense, on the relation of sense, as both sensation and intuition, to the thing-in-itself, which Deleuze re-names a dark precursor and disconnects from the unity which Kant allows himself to postulate in relation to it.  What is important for the dark precursor, or ‘l’en-soi, c’est que, petite ou grande, la différence soit interne (the in-itself, is that the difference, whether large or small, be internal)’.[22]  Difference is not a function of the relation of an identity to its external environment; indeed the determination and definition of  something as a boundary or limit becomes increasingly problematic. Without moving outside the terms of the problem, components whose sense is purely extensive cannot be introduced as mechanisms for its solution: there are thus only two elements to be considered - a continuum of intensities, a full space of varying degrees of density and compression, and the empty form of time. It is in this context that the dark precursor needs to be understood.

This is, in Kant’s own terms, not a problem for consciousness, for, from the position of consciousness, there are no relations other than those which appear, and those which appear are, for consciousness, axiomatically extensive. Nor is it a problem equivalent to that of the noumenon. The noumenon is ‘something in general’ distinguished from sensibility and leaving as residue ‘a mode of determining the object by thought alone - a merely logical form without content’ which firms the ground for the analogical conversion of natural law and maxims of moral law.[23] But the thing-in-itself as precursor is a differenciator, however, the ‘in-itself’ of difference, which Deleuze also calls demon, signal or leap. [24]

A majoritarian reading of Kant boxes the thing-in-itself into a single problem: this is how it becomes assimilated with the noumenon and conceived in causal terms, as both a principle of convertibility and exchange of subjective terms, moral maxims into general laws of science and back again, and in relation to the strange causality of freedom under the Law. The leap is thus  no longer a flash-flow but a labour. Not an autonomous interval but freedom and equality under Law.  Deleuze precision engineers critique, stripping it down whilst remaining rigorously transcendental (in the sense of immanence of criteria) by deploying sense against conversion and exchange, by not pre-supposing unity, and by illegitimating the resignation of thought to illusion, philosophical or physical.  The thing-in-itself ceases to be a sigle problem with a single solution, but becomes a singular matter immanent to and indistinguishable from its collective solution in a concrete assemblage, but imperceptible, and not explicable through reference to that assemblage.

Illusions are there to be dismembered, not resisted.  As the process of shifting the ground and uncovering elements inverted by negation and constrained by limitation continues, the nature of the transcendental and of the thing-in-itself become transformed, as each is divorced from the structures of unity, recognition and the image of thought. The transcendental - by which Deleuze means only the pure empty line of time unhinged from cardinality - becomes increasingly abstract, whilst the thing-in-itself becomes heterogeneous, intensive and synthesized as the variables of the transcendental are selected in the formation of a body, or assemblage; the thing-in-itself  becomes the imperceptible, produced through the given, as the difference of the given, rather than as its cause. It remains unknown, since it is by definition imperceptible. 

This does not mean in any sense that it is outside representation; indeed, the problem escapes the limited theatre of that doctrine.  The thing-in-itself or demon becomes immanent to perception as the imperceptible, though not for empirical reasons such as might be overcome by more sophisticated microscopic instruments, or more powerful telescopic devices. This reduces the problem back to extension. It has rather to do with movement, not as the motion of an object in extension,  but as a stationary process or principle of composition, which is at once both secret and transparent, continually escaping perception, but nonetheless effecting it.  It is in this sense always in advance of perception, a source of time rather than a movement in time. It has thus less to do with an economy of vision than one of affective or intensive differences,  with variations in heat, in pressure,  in density, in the tone of a voice, in  clandestine changes which  escape perception, which go unrecognized but whose effects are, of a sudden, there. 

The difference of diversity from that which gives diversity is intensity, the ‘raison du sensible (reason of the sensible)’ [25] which forces thought, which is not caused nor causal in any simple sense, nor outside the world, but immanent to its production: an abstract vector which distributes a surface, rather than an origin and source of knowledge. Rather than the faculties being independently defined, they are measured empirically, according to ‘ce qui revient à chacune sous la forme de leur collaboration (to that which pertains to each, given the form of their collaboration)’.[26]  This means that faculties emerge, flash and die, as inconstant variables, rather than as the constants in terms of which variations can be defined.  Faculties become the effects of  relations into which a body enters, and thought becomes a  game whose rules change in the playing, where the pieces come and go, where anything can move in any direction and the point is less to win than to maintain a line and  to keep a space open, play by play, rather than according to a single over-arching strategy.  The demon, or dark precursor operates in the intervals, a practice which leaps theoretical boundaries, confounding recognition,  relating disparate systems, determining ‘à l’avance le chemin renversé (a path in advance but in reverse)’. [27] It is a form given but not a priori: which is to say, it is a signal of material-forces given immanently to the formation of a path or line of flight, to the labyrinthine line of the pure form of time.

The form of the dark precursor is not, as was the noumenon, a logical form without content, a shadow compelled from without, nor, like the thing-in-itself is theorized, a causal problem, or something outside the system, but an immanence of field, a critical and material provocation, a demon,  incitement to alliances and distributions of difference. Deleuze is diagramming a keen critical unconscious of Kant: not The Unconscious, which is a theatre for the staging of conscious representation, but a principle of sufficient reason for sense, the genesis of thought.