I'll mostly skip over the preface to the English edition, other than to observe that Deleuze is not, as some have suggested, attempting to disavow his early "academic" work as insufficiently radical. I've read his early works on Nietzsche and Spinoza. They are indeed pretty dry and academic, probably interesting only to folks who have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the originals said. I've also read The Logic of Sense. I would certainly describe it as "abstract", and "academic philosophy", and clearly very tough sledding. However, the issues that interest him in all of these books are exactly the issues that continue to interest him throughout his entire philosophical life, and I find that the "abstract" texts can often explain things lurking in the background of the books written with Guattari. It's not like he suddenly decided that he was on the wrong course somehow.
A new image of thought - or rather, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it: this is what I had already sought to discover in Proust. Here, however, in Difference and Repetition, this search is autonomous and it becomes the condition for the discovery of these two concepts. It is therefore the third chapter which now seems to me the most necessary and the most concrete, and which serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with Guattari where we invoked a vegetal model of thought: the rhizome in opposition to the tree, a rhizome-thought instead of an arborescent thought.
I guess you can also see another interesting thing in this quote, which is Deleuze's use of the term "concrete". An "image of thought" is clearly not going to be something most folks would consider "concrete". We'll see how this chapter qualifies as more concrete than the rest when we get there, but I can actually offer a preview of what I suspect will happen after following the directions in the second preface (to the original French edition):
It is often said that prefaces should be read only at the end. Conversely, conclusions should be read at the outset. This is true of the present book, the conclusion of which could make reading the rest unnecessary.
I tried following these instructions and read the conclusion first. What I found was almost like an index to almost every concept I've come across in Deleuze's later works, including the collaborations. For example, it's only been a few years since I read his books on Cinema, and so many of the images that I remember appearing in those -- the Large and the Small, the 'irrational' cuts, the overall beef with representation -- are right here in the conclusion to D&R. Of course, the damn thing is so condensed that it definitely doesn't make reading the book unnecessary.
But I think it does suggest to me something of what Deleuze means when he talks about ideas being more "concrete". The conclusion here suggests some sort of metaphysical schematic that he laid out at the beginning of his career and then continued to apply to new areas throughout it. Except that this gives exactly the wrong image of the direction his thinking moves. I don't think it's a question of application, so much as reinvention. A kind of reinventing the philosophical wheel where you end up deriving the same concepts by considering a new problem each time from the ground up. You end up "back" at a place that didn't really pre-exist the return. Which (spoiler alert) turns out to be the basic idea of the first chapter of D&R -- repetition doesn't work like a model and its copies, or a general law and its particular applications. In other words, it doesn't work like a tree and its branches. Which makes me suspect that this is exactly why Deleuze changed his style over the years. He's just practicing what he preaches.
Thanks for putting your thoughts into bytes. Eager to see where this goes.
ReplyDeleteUnless I tackle D&R alongside you, I doubt I can offer any kind of coherent comment, but I did note a connection to an ancient Chinese parable on the two-way flows between humans and our tools (see below). It occurs to me that (1) the rhizome is a very ancient metaphor for interconnection, (2) concrete is something much newer, and I wonder if it is always and everywhere a stand-in for 'specific', and (3) the image of thought is at least as ancient as the rhizome, but suffers for being too close to the camera lens to be in focus.
> As Tzu-Gung was traveling through the regions north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into a well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager.
Tzu-Gung said, “There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort. Would you not like to hear of it?”
Then the gardener stood up, looked at him and said, “And what would that be?”
Tzu-Gung replied, “You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well.”
Then anger rose up in the old man’s face, and he said “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a ma- chine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them.”
Wow, that's about the most straight-forward ancient Chinese parable I can ever remember hearing. I'd hate to know what Tzu-Gung thinks of the iPhone.
ReplyDeleteI'd never thought about it before, but obviously you're right -- rhizomes have been around a long time and concrete is pretty new. The history of those two metaphors would actually make an interesting study.
Certainly also true that the question of the image of thought -- which at this point I take to mean what a thinker thinks they're doing when they're thinking, but we'll see when we come to Chapter 3 I guess -- has been around for a long time. Though I think the triumph of representationalism has meant that there's been little explicit investigation of this in Western philosophy until pretty recently. Maybe it's more explicit in Eastern thought, what with all the paradoxes and the influence of buddhism, I'm not really versed enough to know .