Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy ( Rivew) (1)
Manuel DeLanda’s new book is an important event in Deleuze scholarship, as it explicates the main lines of the relation between Deleuze’s philosophy and the cutting edge of contemporary scientific work, so-called complexity theory (also known as non-linear dynamical systems theory). DeLanda has considerable expertise in this field, using complexity theory as background for his two previous works, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Zone Books, 1991) and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone Books, 1999). What makes Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy one of the best works on Deleuze I’ve read -- even beyond DeLanda’s exceptional clarity in explicating mathematics, physics, and biology -- is the three-fold way he maps form and content, so that his book performs Deleuzean functions even as it explains them.
1) DeLanda provides a differentiation of Deleuze. While DeLanda certainly provides a straightforward explanation of the process Deleuze calls counter-actualization (moving from the actual to the virtual), he does so not by an interpretation of Deleuze’s full philosophical output, but by a reconstruction of the ontology and epistemology of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense: ‘This line of argumentation ... is, in fact, not Deleuze’s own, although it follows directly from his ontological analysis’ (39). As DeLanda puts it: Deleuze’s world rather than his words. But this folds Deleuze back on himself, giving us a virtualization of Deleuze, moving from the actual productions of Deleuze (his books) to the structures of his production process (his concepts) in order to produce a new, divergent, product (DeLanda’s book). By virtue of being a book on Deleuze, of course, this product has itself the all-important fold of explaining the structures of all processes (or more precisely, explaining that all processes are structured, and that the structure of the realm of those structures, the virtual, can itself by explicated).
2) DeLanda provides a problematization of Deleuze. Here again we have several folds. First of all, DeLanda explains that for Deleuze, posing a problem requires indicating what is relevant or important (‘singular’), and that such problematization (as opposed to axiomatization, the proposing of laws which can be judged by the adequacy of the solutions they provide) is the very method of philosophy itself. But in the course of the book, DeLanda shows what is important in Deleuze, the attack on essentialism: ‘[Deleuze] must at least be given credit for working out in detail (however speculatively) the requirements for the elimination of an immutable world of transcendent archetypes’ (80), while proceeding problematically: ‘While the specific solution which Deleuze proposes may turn out to be inadequate, he should get credit for having adequately posed the problem’ (102; emphases in original).
3) One last fold. DeLanda not only explains the Deleuzean notion of affect as the ability to form heterogenous assemblages, he also attempts to bring out a new affect in the Deleuze community (working groups, collaborative book projects, and so forth) with analytic philosophers of science, philosophically minded scientists, and Deleuzean philosophers. It remains to be seen of course if this potential will be taken up by these groups, but this book provides one of the best current potentials for concrete connection among analytic and continental philosophers and working scientists (along with, I believe, the potential connection with cognitive science in Brian Massumi’s latest work, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation [Duke University Press, 2002]).
It will be a test of the Deleuze community to see how we respond to the challenge of this book. We must, to be sure, examine DeLanda’s work carefully, testing the extent of this violence, the adequacy of his reconstruction. DeLanda himself readily admits the ‘violence’ (6) to which his reconstruction submits the texts of Deleuze: there is much more to Deleuze than just ontology; the effects of the collaboration with Guattari are overlooked; Deleuze’s style is violated by fixing his terminology. But if we slide into a scholasticism and do nothing but badger DeLanda on textual details, then we will have, I think, betrayed the pragmatism of Deleuze. To use the terminology of Anti-Oedipus, DeLanda is constructing a machine, he’s trying to get something to pass among analytic and continental philosophers and scientists, and part of our response should be to connect with the process of the book, to tinker with its flows and channels, rather than simply judging the properties of the book as a product. We have to follow DeLanda along the lines of his counter-actualization and work in the virtual Deleuze he lays out for us, a virtual Deleuze that occupies a certain zone in the plane of immanence that philosophy constructs and that, as DeLanda shows, forms a zone of indiscernability with analytic philosophy of science.
The structure of the book is straightforward. Chapter 1 details the mathematical-formal ideas about the virtual structures of intensive dynamical processes. Chapter 2 deals with the spatial aspects of differential morphogenesis (the process of producing individuated products) while Chapter 3 deals with the temporal aspects of differential morphogenesis. Chapter 4 outlines
Deleuze’s problematic epistemology, the requirement to devalue axioms and truth in favor of problems and importance or relevance. An Appendix deals with ‘Deleuze’s Words’, laying out equivalences or at least resonances among the terms DeLanda uses in reconstructing Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense and the terms of A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and What is Philosophy?.
The content of the book is equally straightforward. Deleuzean ontology as DeLanda reconstructs it demarcates three ‘levels’: (1) actual products or beings, with extensive properties and qualities; (2) intensive processes, or more precisely, morphogenetic processes with intensive properties (systems exhibiting intensive properties are those that (a) cannot be changed beyond critical
thresholds in control parameters without a change of kind, and that (b) show the capacity for meshing into ‘heterogenous assemblages’); (3) the virtual structures of such processes (‘multiplicities’ defined by ‘singularities’), which collectively form a realm (‘the plane of consistency’), the structure of which can be explicated as a meshed continuum of heterogeneous multiplicities defined by zones of indiscernability or ‘lines of flight’. These levels explain the significance of the title: complexity theory explores intensive processes (‘intensive science’), while Deleuzean philosophy explicates the virtual realm (‘virtual philosophy’).
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