Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World (1)
The distinction between the possible and the real assumes a set of predefined forms (or essences) which acquire physical reality as material forms that resemble them. From the morphogenetic point of view, realizing a possibility does not add anything to a predefined form, except reality. The distinction between the virtual and the actual, on the other hand, does not involve resemblance of any kind (e.g. our example above, in which a topological point becomes a geometrical sphere) and far from constituting the essential identity of a form, intensive processes subvert identity, since now forms as different as spheres and cubes emerge from the same topological point. As Deleuze writes,
Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. In this sense, actualization or differenciation is always a genuine creation.(1)
Deleuze criticism of nineteenth century thermodynamics should be understood in this context. By concentrating on the final, extensive form achieved once the intensive process is finished, thermodynamics failed to see that, before the differences in intensity are canceled, the final form (or more exactly, its topological counterpart) is already there, guiding (or acting as an attractor for) the morphogenetic process. In other words, seemingly abstract topological attractors have a perfectly real existence, as virtual entities, even before a given geometrical form becomes actual. And this simply emphasizes Deleuze ontological attitude towards the world: he is not only a realist regarding the actual, but also a realist towards the virtual.
With the final mathematization of classical physics in the nineteenth century, a certain picture of the world emerged dominant, one in which clockwork determinism reigned supreme and time played no creative role, so that the future was effectively closed, completely given in the past. Although the set of equations with which 19th-century Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton was able to unify all the different fields of classical physics (mechanics, optics, and the elementary theory of electromagnetism) did contain a variable for time, this variable played only an extrinsic role: once the equations were defined for a specific instant, both the past and the future were completely determined, and could be obtained mechanically by simply integrating the equations. To be sure, this static, timeless picture of reality did not go unchallenged within science, since thermodynamics had already introduced an arrow of time which conflicted with the symmetric conception of classical mechanics, where the past and the future were interchangeable. Nevertheless, as the history of statistical mechanics makes it clear, much scientific effort has been spent in our century to reconcile time asymmetry at the level of large aggregates with the still accepted time symmetry at the level of individual interactions.Thus, it would become the task of philosophers and social scientists to attempt to reconceptualize the world in order to give time and history a creative role, with the vision of an open future that this implies. Although there have been a variety of strategies to achieve this open future, here I would like to concentrate on two contrasting approaches. The first is perhaps best illustrated by the intellectual movement that is today known as "social constructivism", but which roots lie in linguistic and anthropological theories which go back to the turn of the century. At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that the core of this approach is a neo-Kantian theory of perception, in which individual experience is completely structured by the interplay of concepts and representations, but one in which Kant’s transcendental concepts (of space and time) have been replaced by the conventional concepts of a given culture. The guiding image of this strategy may be said to be "each culture lives in its own world", an image central to many theoretical approaches in this century, from the cultural relativism of Margaret Mead and Franz Boas, to the linguistic relativism of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, to the epistemological relativism of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigms. Again, oversimplifying somewhat, the key idea in all these theories is one of "incommensurability" across worlds, each conceptual scheme constructing its own reality so that bridges between worlds are hard, if not impossible, to build. Although these influential schools of thought deserve a more careful characterization, these few remarks will suffice for my purpose here. If indeed every culture and subculture inhabits its own conceptually constructed reality, then the world and the future become open again. Far from being completely given in the past, the future is now unbound, the world itself becoming a text open to innumerable interpretations. The problem is now, of course, that we have made the world open at the expense of giving up its objectivity, in other words, the world becomes open only through human intervention. For some this relativism may not seem like a problem, particularly when the only alternative is believed to be a realism based on a correspondence theory of truth, a realism deeply committed to essentialism and rationalism. Clearly, if the idea of material objects independent of human experience is based on a conception of their genesis in terms of preexisting essences, then we are back in a closed world where all possibilities have been defined in advance by those essences. Similarly, if the world is pictured as a fixed set of beings to which our theories correspond like a reflection or a snapshot, then that world would be hardly capable of an open becoming.
Yet, the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes it clear that a belief in the autonomous existence of the world does not have to based on essentialist or rationalist views. It will be the task of this essay to make a case for what we may call Deleuze’s "neo-realist" approach, an approach involving a theory of the genesis of form that does away with essences, as well as a theory of epistemology that does not rely on a view of truth as a faithful reflection of a static world of beings. I would like to begin with a quote from what is, in my view, Deleuze’s most important work, "Difference and Repetition". It is traditional since Kant to distinguish between the world as it appears to us humans, that is, the world of phenomena or appearances, and those aspects of the world existing by themselves and referred to as "noumena". Deleuze writes:
Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given…Difference is not phenomenon but the nuomenon closest to the phenomenon…Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned…Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity.(2)
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