<<TRANSMATHOME

V Demon I

In Differénce et Répetition, difference of intensity, infinitely doubled differences potentiating infinities is called disparity, dispars, the dark precursor or demon: this function was met with in an earlier chapter, where the importance of difference as internal was noted, together with its rôle as differenciator. The model of science as Dispars, as demonic rather than divine in nature, is thus never concretely completed: it does not present, like Compars, a finished world, but a cosmos in continual involution, perpetually variable, dividing into itself and with each division changing in nature. The demon is implicated with the causality specific to nomadic science, a reverse causality that testifies ‘d’une action du future sur le présent, ou du présent sur le passé (to an action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past)’[179]. Again, however, this is not a generalizable function, but is specific to each system; its connection with the concrete actualization of any distribution is always an effect, rather than a condition of its operation. The demon, or dark precursor ‘détermine à l’avance le chemin renversé, (determines their path in advance but in reverse’, functioning as a virtual attractor, the nature of which is only discernible in retrospect.[180] It is not something always already there, however, but generated in the process of its concretization, like the convergent wave or the anticipated potential.

It is important not to confuse reverse causality with teleology, however: as mentioned before, machinic production conjuncts mechanism and teleology through difference to take synthesis across the threshold of antinomic division, changing the assemblage and re-wiring the transcendental network, unhinging the faculties and differentiating the process of production from its source conditions. Reverse cauality is without finality: the future is not somehow there in advance, pre-determined and fated; rather it is virtual to the formations of the actual.

The demon is not a point or principle in advance of individuation, or a form governing beforehand the material constitution of a machine, body or system: it is instead a radically local function, an element in a science of intensities which invents orders of communication amongst differences for which no prior order exists, using of necessity the elements of a majoritarian form but speaking of necessity a foreign language. Whereas Kant reconciles differences in intensive magnitude by referring them to an extensive space which equalizes them out into a uniform field, Deleuze uses such differences as communicating principles amongst disparate series, which are themselves composed of intensive differences, and it is the complications of the relations generated in this manner which demand the invention of new concepts, new terms, new functions and new distributions and the creation of a foreign philosophical language.

The re-formulation of the thing-in-itself in terms of a plane of consistency, an intensive magnitude immanent to and simultaneous with the given does not cancel its status in Kant as an objective problematic; it continues to demand a solution. However, it transforms what counts as such. Jacobi said:

‘I need the assumption of things-in-themselves to enter the Kantian system; but with this assumption it is not possible for me to remain inside it’.[181]

Jacobi was responding to the thing-in-itself in the context of  representation, as something which, in some undefined manner, is the cause of the content of representations, but is itself  unrepresentable. Deleuze’s method of deduction, and critique of representation changes the nature of the problem, however, because it changes the field of its solution. Firstly, there is no problem of access in Deleuze: as has been said, any machine is already integrated on the strata, as well as facing away from it, on a plane of consistency, and thus potentiated by both actual elements comprising the State, and virtual elements which anticipate and repel it. No assumption of a content above and beyond that distributed on the strata, or composing lines of flight is necessary. Deleuze reminds continually that critique is immanent: a critique of the State cannot situate itself outside its object, and to do so would be to repeat identically old errors. Besides, Deleuze’s understanding of system is in terms of openness; there is no outside to open systems. ‘Elles ne répondent pas à la condition visuelle de pouvoir être observées d’un point de l’espace extérieur à elles (they do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them)’.[182]

Secondly, Deleuze can be said to read Jacobi’s claim that the assumption of the thing-in-itself ejects one from the Kantian system  as positive. From within Kant, Deleuze subjects representation to a rigorous critique and deducts the components of power, generality, recognition and unity of image which restrict its operation, undoing common sense and good sense. The thing-in-itself can no longer be defined, following that critique, in relation to representation, as the unrepresentable, however, but must be re-formulated in terms of the production of production. It is in the process of deducting the power structures from Kant that the movement of feedback is released, and it is this which allows for the re-formulation of the thing-in-itself in terms of difference and intensities. Instead of being a general problem, it becomes one of singular distributions of intensity on a smooth surface, of vortices and turbulences which have no definition outside their concrete swirlings and speeds, displacements and divergences. An infinity of demons, of molecular leaps, qualities, emerge from intensive magnitudes, and in differentiating themselves from that magnitude, also carry it with them, immanently. This is why Deleuze is a philosopher of both surface and depth, and why the thing-in-itself retains its paradoxical nature, but instead of paradox  being cancelled out in extension and representation, it becomes a prolific machine, an engine of the real without condition or presupposition. The positive feedback from the concrete to the virtual precludes there being “a problem of the thing-in-itself”; singularity is perhaps a more appropriate term for it, in the context of Deleuze.

***

The relation between Kant and Deleuze has become both closer and more distant in this chapter. Deleuze’s deduction of the power components in Kantian critique and his deployment of a method remote from the juridical model force a gulf between the two. His concentration on the explosive moment within the subject (amongst the topics addressed in the next chapter) and his distribution of the network of faculties as an interconnected surface rather than an organic or hierarchized edifice imply a distinctly unKantian approach. However, his subtractive deduction uncovers directions and problems in critique which are missed when the structures erected by Kant are taken to be constitutive of the transcendental, and when the movement of critique is confined within the science and economics of the Enlightenment. It is Deleuze’s attention to forces and flows, limits and thresholds, and synthesis (again, a topic for the next chapter) which re-connect him with Kant, and with the real problems of critique.

Deleuze’s relation with Kant is, however, more complex than the above suggests, including many elements for which this thesis does not have space. In his paper Sur quatre formule poétiques qui pourraient résumer la philosophie kantienne, Deleuze weaves Hamlet, Rimbaud and Kafka into the heart of Kantian problems. Hamlet and Kant together achieve ‘l’émancipation du temps (the emancipation of time); Rimbaud and Kant, in their different ways, proclaim ‘Je est un autre (I is another); Kafka and Kant alike describe the practice of law on the body. Kafka illustrates the immediacy of Kantian  law with the body; through this story, it’s vaulted magnificence subsides into the bureaucratic pettiness of the officer delighting the perfections of a machine which writes law directly onto the flesh. It is not known, but met with in its execution, its application through pain and violence.

In each case, when the strangeness of these alliances is pursued a problem of forces and of systematics is uncovered. Kantian philosophizing is remote from the spaces of force, however, a task rather than a movement, and whilst Deleuze describes him as the analogue of a great explorer, his exploration is limited to the surface, and does not travel the intricacies of its depth. He is concerned rather to prevent tunnellings and connections which do not follow the strict lines of extension or the strict rules of law.

 ‘The worker in the field of philosophy, especially pure philosophy (logic and metaphysics), must hold his object hanging in midair before him and must always describe and examine it, not merely part by part, but within the totality of a system as well.’[183]

This contrasts directly with the opening of this chapter, and Deleuze’s comment about the need to occupy space without measuring it: Kant’s method is to take each part and refer it, through a variety of means - analogy, resemblance, comparison, proportionality, directionality, numerical identity, and so on - to the ends of reason, to the totality of the system. All the seasickness in the world could not, it seems, persuade him that attraction at a distance across empty space is inadequate as a theory of force.

The next chapter looks at Kant’s theory of synthesis, as an act of the subject,  and  Deleuze’s deduction of unity from synthesis, leading to its formulation as passive, together with the changes effected within imagination as a result of these changes.