Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World (4)
Meshworks combine heterogeneous elements by meshing them using their functional complementarities. For example, an ecosystem brings together a large variety of distinct species interlocking them into food webs via alimentary complementarities: parasite-host, predator-prey, and others. But often these heterogeneities do not mesh well and special intercallary elements are needed to effect the link, such as symbiotic micro-organisms lining the gut of animals, allowing them to digest their food. Or to take a different example, pre-capitalist marketplaces were meshworks which interconnected buyers and sellers through complementary demands. Barter could indeed effect this meshing, but the chance encounter between two people with exactly matching demands was very rare. In this circumstances money (even primitive money such as cowry shells or salt blocks) could act as an intercallary element allowing complementary demands to find each other at a distance, so to speak. Thus, there are two questions that connect the theory of meshworks or machinic assemblages to the theme of an open-ended future: one is the existence of special combinatorial spaces that are more open than others (for example, the space defined by carbon, an element which thanks to its ability to bond in several ways with itself, has a much higher combinatorial productivity than any other element) and the existence of special intercallary entities that open up possibilities by allowing heterogeneities to mesh with each other (for example, metallic catalysts which insert themselves in between two poorly-meshing chemical substances, recognizing them via a lock-and-key mechanism, to facilitate their interaction.) Philosophically, these two questions boil down to one, the singular nature of either carbon or metallic catalysts (to stick to examples from chemistry). Deleuze tackles this issue in a way that parallels his approach to attractors. As I said above, he proposes to get rid of the distinction between the possible and the real, keeping only the latter but distinguishing in the real between the virtual and the actual. Similarly, he suggests we get rid of the dichotomy between the essential and the accidental, affirming that everything is accidental, but distinguishing in the latter between the ordinary and the singular (or the special, the remarkable, the important.) As he writes:
It will be said that the essence is by nature the most ‘important’ thing. This, however, is precisely what is at issue: whether notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself. The problem of thought is tied not to essences but to the evaluation of what is important and what is not, to the distribution of the singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points, which takes place entirely within the unessential or within the description of a multiplicity, in relation to the ideal events that constitute the conditions of a problem.(14)
It hardly needs to be added that, as a realist philosopher, Deleuze sees the distributions of the singular and the ordinary as perfectly objective, the world itself exhibiting traits that are more or less important or remarkable regardless of whether there is a human being to carry on these evaluations. Carbon and metallic catalysts are objectively unique in this sense. And so are the topological forms we discussed above, and which Deleuze refers to as "singularities". Attractors are indeed remarkable (states which minimize free energy, for instance, are rare and unique) as are the bifurcations that change one set of attractors into another, such as the special points in intensity (temperature) at which water changes from liquid to solid or from liquid to gas. Yet, as the quote above illustrates, there is a close relation between these objective distributions and the nature of human knowledge ("the problem of thought"). I would like to conclude this essay with a few remarks on Deleuze’s special approach to epistemology (an epistemology of problems), an approach that further distinguishes him from older forms of realism that are too closely linked to rationalism.Instead of rejecting the dichotomy between true and false, thus plunging into a form of relativism, Deleuze extends it so that it not only applies to the answers to questions, but to the questions themselves. That is, he makes "truth" a predicate that applies primarily to problems, and only derivatively to their solutions. Yet, problems for him are not a human creation (and problem-solving a human activity) but possess their own objective reality. As he puts it, the concept of the "problematic"
does not mean only a particularly important species of subjective acts, but a dimension of objectivity as such that is occupied by these acts.(15)
Problems exist in reality defined by singularities, hence problem-solving is an activity in which all kinds of material assemblages may engage. To illustrate with examples we have already used, a population of interacting physical entities, such as the molecules in a thin layer of soap, may be constrained energetically to adopt a form which minimizes free energy. Here the "problem" (for the population of molecules) is to find this minimal point of energy, a problem solved differently by the molecules in soap bubbles (which collectively minimize surface tension) and by the molecules in crystalline structures (which collectively minimize bonding energy). Given this objectivity of problems and their conditions, what may be peculiarly human is not problem-solving, but problem-posing, an activity that involves distinguishing in reality the distributions of the special and the ordinary, and grasping the objective problems that these distributions condition. Chapter Four of "Difference and Repetition" is a philosophical meditation on the differential and integral calculus (a mathematical tool at the heart of all modern physics) viewed precisely as a "technology" for the framing of true problems. But as the above remarks on metallurgy suggest, Deleuze does not think of representations (even mathematical ones) as the only, or even the most important, means to pose problems. Any kind of learning, even physical, sensual learning, involves an engagement with material assemblages which embody problems and their defining singularities. As he writes:
For learning evolves entirely in the comprehension of problems as such, in the apprehension and condensation of singularities, and in the composition of ideal events and bodies. Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems.(16)
Clearly, these few remarks cannot do justice to Deleuze complex theory of the problematic. I introduce them here simply to draw one connection between human knowledge and the open-ended evolution of the world. The latter depends, as I said, on divergent actualization, combinatorial productivity, and the synthesis of novel structures out of heterogeneous components. These define the essentially problematic structure of the world. It follows that truth cannot be a correspondence relation between representations and a static, fixed set of beings, but an open-ended relation of isomorphism between problems as actualized in reality and problems as actualized in our bodies and minds. To conclude, unlike social constructivism, which achieves openness by making the world depend on human interpretation, Deleuze achieves it by making the world into a creative, complexifying and problematizing cauldron of becoming. Because of their anthropocentrism, constructivist philosophies remain prisoners of what Foucault called "the episteme of man", while Deleuze plunges ahead into a post-humanist future, in which the world has been enriched by a multiplicity of non-human agencies, of which metallic catalysts, and their acts of recognition and intervention, are only one example. And, in contrast with other realist or materialist philosophies of the past (such as Engel’s dialectics of nature), the key non-human agency in Deleuzian philosophy has nothing to do with the negative, with oppositions or contradictions, but with pure, productive, positive difference. It is ultimately this positive difference, and its affirmation in thought, that insures the openness of the world.
References
(1) Gilles Deleuze: Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press 1994, 212. (back)
(2) Ibid., 222. (back)
(3) Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine: Exploring Complexity. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1989. (back))
(4) Deleuze, op. cit., 214. (back)
(5) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus.Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 336. (back)
(6) Ian Stewart: Does God Play Dice: The Mathematics of Chaos. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, chapter 6. (back)
(7) Deleuze/ Guattari, op. cit., 330.(back)
(8) Ibid., 336.(back)
(9) Ibid., 411.(back)
(10) Ibid., 329.(back)
(11) Stuart Kauffman: The Origins of Order. Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, ch. 3. (back)
(12) George Kampis: Self-Modifying Systems in Biology and Cognitive Science. A New Framework for Dynamics, Information and Complexity. Oxford, Engl., 1991, p. 235 (back)
(13) Deleuze, op. cit., 189. (back)
(14) Ibid., 169. (back)
(15) Ibid., 192. (back)
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