<<TRANSMATHOME

A Row of Doors

‘Le plan de consistance (grille) est le dehors de toutes les multiplicités.

(The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities).’[219]

In the previous chapter Deleuze’s use of passive synthesis was discussed, together with the transformations in subjectivity when synthesis is not related to identity, nor understood as a spontaneous act of synthetic unity, nor confined within an image of thought. The passive “me” is not “other” to an acting I, but a mobile and variable affect, impersonal and intensive. In this chapter, changes effected in imagination by these shifts in the nature of the subject and  synthesis  will be looked at. This shift has implications for Kant’s association of the imagination with a soul, the latter being essential to the constitution of the category of the Person, defining a cultural body subject to law and capable of faith. Imagination is also involved in aesthetic judgements on the sublime, and the effects of the reconfiguration of synthesis as passive in relation to such judgements will also be explored.  Lastly, the nature of a machinic continuum is addressed, in terms of the continuous exportation of  the model of death, or zero, as the immanent condition of production.

I           Soul

‘C’est l’imagination qui traverse les domaines, les ordres et les niveaux, abattant les cloisons, coextensive au monde...conscience larvaire allant sans cesse de la science au rêve et inversement.

(It is imagination which crosses domains, orders and levels, knocking down the partitions coextensive with the world...a larval consciousness which moves endlessly from science to dream and back again).’[220]

In Mille Plateaux Deleuze and Guattari remark on the complementarity of impotence and power and their mutual reinforcement ‘dans une sorte de satisfaction fascinante (in a kind of fascinating satisfaction)’[221] particular to mediocrity and definitive of the glory of men of the State. In terms of its relations, this dynamic,  incorporating impotence and dominant authority as reciprocal correspondants, operates very much like the Kantian sublime, in which imagination and reason push each other to their limit, the inadequacy of the former resulting from the superior might of the latter. In the sublime, the relation of production to reproduction essential to recognizing unity is disturbed: imagination apprehends, or produces intensive quanta, but there is no general rule appropriate to the comprehension, or reproduction of their degree in a determinate objective form. As it was out on the lagoon, the subject becomes turned in on itself, disconnected from sensibility.

Whilst Kant emphasizes that there is neither an interest or liking of reason in the sublime, and that it is a purely aesthetic judgement, it is only in the context of a cultured mind that the fine line between enthusiasm and fanatacism and the sublime can be negotiated successfully. But as was remarked in a previous chapter, that the sublime requires culture, ‘in no way implies that it was initially produced by culture’[222]: its foundation belongs to the human predisposition for ‘(practical) ideas, i.e., to moral feeling’.[223] Thus, whilst imagination and reason are discordant and the play of faculties unregulated in the sublime, ‘imagination is...really part of moral common sense’[224] and only under the condition of a moral common sense, as a place of safety, are the violent agitation and ‘sacred thrill’[225] of the sublime commensurate with rational faith. The reconciliation of the sublime, of pain subsiding into negative pleasure, its fascinations becoming satisfying rather than threatening to reason, and its impotence giving way to authority is made possible by the movement out of nature, away from the sensible, and into the supersensible strata of Reason and Law.

It is indeed imagination that crosses domains and demolishes the orders and structures of the world; however, for Kant the movement from the world of objects, the world of science, to that of  dreams is achieved through a relation of  inadequacy and authority.  Imagination in its cognitive rôle, schematizing  relations of production to reproduction, or apprehension to comprehension, according to a rule of understanding, is inadequate in the face of the superior and incomparable supersensible dreams of reason; in the sublime, imagination apprehends or produces quanta which can neither be reduced to determinacy through analogy, nor reproduced or comprehended  according to the axiomatics of extension. But this disordered relation between production and reproduction is legitimate only in the context of  culture. As Kant says in the first Critique,  before venturing onto the ocean, one must first be secure in the possession of the land. The case is very similar in the sublime: before the natural disorder and indeterminacy of  faculties can be countenanced as within the ends of reason, and the fortitude of imagination, or the soul ‘raised above its usual middle range’,  culture must first have prepared the ground.[226]

Authority and impotence are hand in hand, but the latter is rationally legitimate only in the former is first made certain. This is because the sublime in its dynamic, rather than mathematical formulation, testifies to the physical impotence of man in the face of nature - not external nature, but the nature of the faculties; the chaotic and overwhelming forces of the sublime are expressed in the vastness of nature, but the feeling of the sublime itself testifies to the containment of this vastness; man has within him a disorder of immense magnitude, but reason in its cultured form is always adequate to this. Reason has ‘a different and nonsensible standard  that has this infinity itself under it as a unit’ and it is this that prevents the sublime from being a degradation of  humanity, and evidences instead its superiority over nature.[227] Reason contains chaos,  but chaos is no match, it seems, for reason.

In Mille Plateaux the interiorization of  intensive natural forces  is discussed in relation to the war machine and its containment by the State. A war machine is ‘une pure forme d’extériorité (a pure form of exteriority)’ , associated with the science of Dispars and with nomos, as full intensive and tactile space distributed without reference to law.[228]  A war machine has no necessary relation with violence: it is characterized rather by its relation to speed and intensity, and by its irreducibility to the mechanisms of capture specific to the State. In this respect, it is situated similarly to the position in which women have been established - or rather, not established - by philosophy, as necessary to the State, but not reducible to its forms and orders. The war machine is a pack, a gang of street children, a diffuse and mobile composition which cannot be understood in terms of class relations, age groups, sexual proclivities, or skin colours. In Brazil, the children are murdered by the State,  in Borneo the women are prostituted by the State, in all States, the aim is to incorporate the war machine, by whatever means and in whatever form, whilst eliminating those elements which cannot be reduced to its monopoly. Mockery, murder, prostitution, criminality, the police, the army, the church, the academy, the school, the youth club, the hospital, the prison: all these ways of producing the war machine as a suicide line inside the State, rather than as a  pure exteriority. It is noology, the image of thought, which serves as the mechanism of interiorization.

The war machine is counter-statistical: it is of ‘une autre justice, un autre mouvement, un autre espace-temps (another justice, another movement, another space-time)’[229] which testifies to an exteriority which is not outside the State, in the sense that one might think of an outside to representation - such as the thing-in-itself. As has been explained, the thing-in-itself is immanent to sense, produced in relation to it as the imperceptible, that which escapes thought but is not beyond it. It is not the “unrepresentable”, but the imperceptible; not outside the limits of knowledge, but immanent to the threshold of sense. It is in this sense that the space-time of the war machine is outside the State, as a force which destroys the image, the rule, the law and order of the State, not through the exercise of violence, which is a State function, even when it appears to act against the State, even when it appears criminal, but by shattering and scattering the consistency of the image and forming alliances which run counter to the arranged systems. The form of exteriority testified to by the war machine is ‘le devenir-femme du penseur, le devenir-pensée de la femme...qui ne se laisse plus contrôler ((the becoming-woman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman...that refuses to be controlled)’.[230]

Of the aesthetic in the third Critique, Deleuze says ‘le sensible vaut pour lui-même et se déploie dans un pathos au-delà de toute logique (the sensible is valid in itself and unfolds in a pathos beyond all logic)’.[231]  With this remark, he is forging an association between the sublime and thought as war machine, where thought operates solely through unregulated relations, charged with intensities  foreign to the grammars of its language. Once more, Deleuze is drawing lines which ally the schizo with the explosive moment in Kant, and focusing on the primacy of sensibility and imagination, and on thought as potentiated on the basis of ‘un effondrement central, qu’elle ne peut vivre que de sa propre impossibilité de faire forme (a central breakdown,  that it lives solely by its own incapacity to take on form).’[232] D If, as said in the previous chapter,  this breakdown is given image - Artaud is the one which crops up most frequently in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing - and the image becomes a model, the sense of the war machine is lost. The point is treachery: the treachery of a man is never that of a woman, the treachery of a child never that of a mother, the treachery of a philosopher never that of a poet. This is what becoming foreign to one’s own language means: it is not a matter of rebellion, of  suicidal daring and  a struggle to introduce shock-value into an otherwise pedestrian thought. This is why Deleuze and Guattari are so effective, and why, for example, to dismiss Différence et Répetition as a work of  regular academic proportions is to miss the degree of its deviance.

When the war machine is interiorized by the State, as the sublime is interiorized by Reason, the relation becomes that of impotence and authority, the inadequacy of imagination and the superior magnitude of the supersensible. The central breakdown which potentiates thought is interiorized, made whole, contained and controlled within the image, and the pathos of the schizophrenic explosion becomes merely pathetic.

***

In practical reason, imagination receives the sentence of the law.  Kant’s identification of imagination with the soul has already been noted in the previous chapter, and schema are described as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul’[233]. In the first Critique the conditions for deducing the objective possibility of an immortal soul - and thus of an unbounded imagination - are absent, or at least, not immediately involved in speculation, and there is an admixture of sensible information in the construction of cognition. But practical freedom is antithetical to the functioning of imagination on behalf of understanding, at its middle range, where the relation of production and reproduction is stable and determinate. The soul as  immortal substance is an insoluble problem for finite entities, and speculations on its nature lead to paralogisms and claims of a rational psychology (which, despite its theoretical illegitimacy, Kant remarks, has a disciplinary use).[234] The relation of substance (permanence) to force (intensity) is axiomatically extensive, and irreducible to a radical unity, matter appears heterogeneous and force diverse. Nonetheless, the idea of a fundamental power [Grundkraft] ‘is the problem involved in a systematic representations of the multiplicity of powers’[235] and imagination is no exception to this.  

With practical reason, the possibility of the soul becomes a legitimate postulate of reason, on the basis of the determination of freedom by the Law. Only on this basis can immortality be framed without reference to modes of time, imagination removed from the framework of permanence and substance, and intensity reconfigured in relation to the will, as a drive [Trieb], rather than as a force [Kraft]. This takes the problem out of physics and into practical reason. Much as the understanding was compelled by practical reason to assume the noumenon in the interests of reason’s systematic growth[236], practical reason commands the assumption of an immortal soul, on the basis of the fact of a free will, in the interests of reason’s moral growth.

The practical postulate of an immortal soul is ‘an inseparable corollary of an a priori unconditionally valid practical law’[237]. Under practical law, the focus imaginarius is no longer imaginarius, as it was in the case of speculative reason, a subjective idea regulating formal systematic unity,[238] implicated with the negative noumenon, but real. The unity of law must be enacted, objectively, not merely posited, subjectively. Deleuze emphasizes that ‘un seul contresens est dangereux, concernant l’ensemble de la Raison pratique (a single dangerous misunderstanding regarding the whole of practical Reason’ is failure to realize that ‘l’abîme entre le monde sensible et le monde suprasensible n’existe que pour être comble (the abyss between the sensible world and the suprasensible world exists only in order to be filled)’.[239] This was seen in an earlier chapter one, in Kant’s insistence that practical reason was meant to influence the sensible configuration of phenomena. The negative noumena is the medium for the conversion of permanence from its sensible and conceptual relation with time and causality to its practical configuration as immortality through which the concept of substance becomes complete, and physical force discovers its impotence in relation to the drives of the will. As remarked above, however, this impotence is permissible and indeed predicated upon the a priori magnificence of reason, and the containment of immanence, as pure exteriority, within reason. Disassociated from time, through the ‘marks of permanence’[240] which reveal its real nature, the imagination fades into the immortality of the soul.

Elevated above sense, man discovers the root of his duty to the Law in personality, and (according to the principle of exclusive disjunction and the necessity for practical law to be realized) at the same time its empirical counterpart is formed, The Person. The subject understanding objects in the first Critique was for the most part a merely logical function; The Scientist. But under practical law, the growth of the architectonic is no longer a methodical theorization of a subjective idea but the real practice of its objective construction. Kant’s three Critiques build a law house for an organism with soul. With art on its walls too, for the characteristics of intensive permanence and substantive imagination are attached to exemplary works of art and their production by genius.

Speculative reason concerned itself with the plan for the court house - with the erection of a structure ‘just sufficiently commodious for our business on the level of experience, and just sufficiently high to allow of our overlooking it’.[241] This vantage sight has no objective substance independently of the fact of freedom, however, remaining merely hypothetical. But postulates of practical reason ‘give objective reality to the Ideas of speculative reason in general’[242]; all the aggregate unities, the random data, the technical methods, the particular schemes, all the loose change of knowledge contributes to the supply of the creature which occupies that theoretical house, which is the Person. Persons are the objective ends of reason, of absolute value, and do not serve ‘simply as means’.[243] Reason is its own end, and everything contributes towards it: which legitimates the use of bodies as means, on the grounds that reason is not a body, and it legitimates the use of imagination as an end, on the grounds that imagination is not a soul, merely its empirical relative. Imagination is objectively legitimated in the form of a Person, relinquishing its role as medium between sensibility and understanding to take its proper place in the holy trinity of God, Freedom and Immortality. The (human) organism becomes a Person, imagination becomes soul and their empirical and relative forms become legitimately describable as means. 

Independently of the objective value of an immortal substantial soul, and not confined by personhood,  imagination does not lose its infinity; instead,  it loses its reason and good sense. But it is not for that evil. The devil, Kant says, ‘has reason, but not infinity.’[244]  The simplistic divisions of moral Law require that goodness have its devils just as white men need their women and their blacks to retain the vantage point of their situation over the business of experience, and Kant’s devil without infinity is unimaginative and powerless, but nonetheless necessary. The  State, as Deleuze and Guattari say, needs its impotence, and Persons need to be sinners too,  to forget their immortality, in order that they might be reminded of it, under the Law.

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