Difference In Itself

From me, the most important point Deleuze is trying to make in the early part of Chapter 1 is that we usually think of difference between two forms and not difference in itself. That is, we usually start with identity instead of starting with difference. If we want to develop a concept of difference in itself then, we will have to back up to a world "before" forms and their relations. There would seem to be two approaches to a formless world – nothingness and everything; chaos and the void.

Indifference has two aspects: the undifferenciated abyss, the black nothing- ness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved - but also the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float un- connected determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows.

It's tempting to think that difference is somehow between these two poles of indifference.  But either pole still seems to be conceived in terms of forms – either absence of any forms or presence of all the forms -- so it's not clear that whatever is between these will help us.

Could we try to think of difference in itself by dispensing altogether with forms and considering the moment of differencing or distinguishing, when difference is created between a thing and a not-thing?  This is like the moment of the creation of a form, the moment where it distinguishes itself as such, that is, as a thing distinct from a non-thing?

However, instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself - and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it. It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground.

The lightning strike is the first of three images to appear in this short section at the beginning of Chapter 1 (pp 28-30) that repeat throughout all of Deleuze's work. The other two are very much related – the abstract line, and the body-without-organs (here only implicitly through the mention of Artaud). I think the first two are basically synonyms for one another and refer to the formation of a form (as opposed to a pre-existing form that then happens to appear). And the body-without-organs is another name for the ground, though in reading Deleuze we should hear "ground" as in "background" of a painting, the contrast to "figure", and not "foundation" or "root" or "first principle", which is often what it means for other philosophers.

The key idea behind the abstract line or the lightning strike is the one-sided distinction of something from an infinite and amorphous ground. The ground is not the lack of things or a collection of possible things; it would be better to call it a "not-thing". Somehow this not-thing rises to the surface and takes on a life of its own, without itself becoming a thing. I think this is why Deleuze ends up calling it "monstrous". Think of the "shadowy forms" we see in the movies that seem to consist of nothing but varying density of shadows. There is no bright contour line that demarcates the form as a thing unto itself, no place where we can clearly separate figure from ground or inside from outside. And yet the form is there nevertheless, even though the line which draws it is "abstract", even if it is constructed of nothing more than lighter and darker ground just like in a chiaroscuro.  The ground can rise up anywhere, it seems, and create something out of nothing.

We're going to see this metaphor again and again because Deleuze sees thought itself as a sort of lightning strike.  A thought is there at the moment some determinate form rises out of the background of non-thought.   Basically, thought is a difference or modification of non-thought:

Nor is it certain that it is only the sleep of reason which gives rise to monsters: it is also the vigil, the insomnia of thought, since thought is that moment in which determination makes itself one, by virtue of maintaining a unilateral and precise relation to the indeterminate. Thought 'makes' difference, but difference is monstrous.

But we're probably getting ahead of ourselves on that one and will have to come back to the question of "what is a thought". For the moment, let's try to understand why, if the ground becomes monstrous, the difference is cruel.  This is related to Artaud's idea of the cruelty of the "judgement of God".   "They're trying to cut my body up into organs".   Difference in itself is cruelty because it is carving a figure out of the ground.   It is introducing distinctions into something that has no interest in them, something that "wants" to be whole.  

When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.

So difference in itself, caught on the wing, so to speak, in the act of differing, is cruel and monstrous, wild and unpredictable. A lightning strike, an abstract line. I always feel like I've understood Deleuze when I've managed to read him completely literally.

This kind of difference is too wild for us though. We seem to feel the need to tame it, to domesticate it. We try to relate this unilateral determination to other determinations, or to a ground that we re-conceive as undetermined rather than indeterminate. Notice the change in prefix. We convert that infinite and amorphous ground into a whole set of possible things in waiting, from which determination will actually select just one. Later on, Deleuze will call this confusing the possible with the virtual. Here he talks about it as an "organic representation" of difference, giving it a fixed form that can be compared to other forms, making it a piece in a whole to which it belongs, the one reflecting the other.  This is what an organism is – some parts working together to form a whole, a whole keeping each of its parts in the proper place. The basic move is to construct the pre-determined, pre-formed possibility space of the whole, and then see difference as the specification of one or another of the forms contained within that space. This specification process determines the limits of difference, which now will have to fit between the Largest and Smallest possible allowed values.

At this point the expression 'make the difference' changes its meaning. It now refers to a selective test which must determine which differences may be inscribed within the concept in general, and how. Such a test, such a selection, seems to be effectively realized by the Large and the Small. For the Large and the Small are not naturally said of the One, but first and foremost of difference.

It bears repeating that this taming of difference depends crucially on converting the not-thing of the ground into a thing conceived as a whole. It morphs from something infinite and amorphous, to which the idea of identity doesn't even apply (is the ground even identical to itself?) into a thing or set of possible things that simply has yet to be determined.   This latter is a closed set with determinate boundaries, which should clearly be identical to itself.   This is what Deleuze is going to call, always pejoratively, the concept.