I actually think that this next section (pg. 50-58, post Hegel and Leibniz up to where he starts talking about Plato) might be the key to the whole first chapter. It is all about the affective tone, if you will, of difference and identity, and as a result goes some distance towards explaining a question we have really taken somewhat for granted so far: why would you want to start a metaphysics from the concept of Difference rather than Identity? Why is that any better? The basic answer is that difference, properly conceived, is positive and productive, whereas identity is always negative and limiting. Difference is a door-opener and Identity is a door-closer.
Let me quote the the beginning at length just because I really like this passage:
There is a crucial experience of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences; a properly differential and original space and time; all of which persist alongside the simplifications of limitation and opposition. A more profound real element must be defined in order for oppositions of forces or limitations of forms to be drawn, one which is determined as an abstract and potential multiplicity. Oppositions are roughly cut from a delicate milieu of overlapping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogeneous potentials and intensities. Nor is it primarily a question of dissolving tensions in the identical, but rather of distributing the disparities in a multiplicity. Limitations correspond to a simple first-order power - in a space with a single dimension and a single direction, where, as in Leibniz's example of boats borne on a current, there may be collisions, but these collisions necessarily serve to limit and to equalise, but not to neutralise or to oppose. As for opposition, it represents in turn the second- order power, where it is as though things were spread out upon a flat surface, polarised in a single plane, and the synthesis itself took place only in a false depth - that is, in a fictitious third dimension added to the others which does no more than double the plane. In any case, what is missing is the original, intensive depth which is the matrix of the entire space and the first affirmation of difference: here, that which only afterwards appears as linear limitation and flat opposition lives and simmers in the form of free differences. Everywhere, couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organised oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions.
This is the first mention we hear of the concept of a multiplicity, which is destined to be perhaps the signature concept of Deleuze's philosophy and will appear in all his writings. Difference is explicitly linked to multiplicity. In fact, you might say that there's not really "a" difference or "the" difference, but there are always differenceS. Swarms of tiny, even infinitesimal, differences. If you don't start with a principle of identity, you also don't start with a principle of unity. You start with the many, and have to manufacture the one. All the identities and unities have to be constructed or produced by difference. And difference itself only hides more difference -- you can think of this tiny swarm of differences as the atoms composing everything only on the condition that you understand the atoms themselves to also be composed of differences, and so on ad infinitum ... As always with Deleuze, the infinite regress isn't a bug but a feature, the sign of a productive feedback loop that means there's always more out there.
Okay, you might think, fine, let's say we replace unity and identity with multiplicity and difference. Why is that somehow better? Aren't we just playing an abstract shell game with these concepts? Does it make any practical difference which way we start our philosophy? While that can at first sound like the objection of a churlish simpleton, I actually think we should take questions like this completely seriously. In fact, I'd consider Deleuze a Pragmatist of sorts, entirely interested in the practical value or the effects of his philosophy, broadly construed. The answer is that the two starting points have very different outcomes and methods.
If you start with unitary identity you make a two-fold choice right off the bat. First, you choose to see whatever identity you start with as having fallen from the sky, and to stop investigating how it's built and what might be underneath it. You choose to take the identity in the sense of a root or ground or axiom. Obviously, someone else might look under the hood of what you took for granted, but then they will accept something else as their root identity, and etc ... This is our normal arborescent structure of thought that is horrified by the idea of an infinite regress and clamors for us to stop somewhere, to have some limits, some fixed endpoints. Second, since you assume the identity has no internal structure, you can only recognize it by a principle of negation. It is not anything else, not any other identity. Its difference or distinction from everything else is purely negative. We've seen this perhaps counter intuitive feature of identity creep into the descriptions of both Aristotle's and Hegel's theory of difference. Difference is contrariness, opposition, contradiction. Identity is contradiction overcome, the monster subdued, the differences integrated into a whole. The point is that both these choices are based on negativity, dude. They urge you to stop, to accept the limits, to draw a line in the sand and say, across this line ... Fundamentally, they're about stasis and opposed to change.
Starting with multiplicity and difference reverses this scheme and focuses entirely on affirmation. In fact, you're never "starting" at all. You're always picking up in the middle, acknowledging that there are differences below you and unexpected novelty to come, content that you will never reach the ultimate ground or the end of history, affirming an endless and un-limited journey in both directions. At the same time, if you start with differences you can immediately and naturally begin to investigate how identities are produced. You never need to assume that they just fall out of the sky ready made. It's the vortices in that swarm of differences that actually provide the presuppositions for all the identities we see. These differences are entirely affirmative in the sense that they positively produce things, telling you what is actually happening and what might also happen, rather than trying to limit your notion of what can happen.
I've strayed pretty far from the quote now, and actually covered the main point of the whole section. So I'll wait till next time to go back over the more concrete reading of that passage that connects the swarm of differences to the idea of a differential or transcendental field via a brief detour into Leibniz.
Meanwhile, there's one more slightly out there connection that comes to mind here. Deleuze always loves all things "between". He is constantly encouraging us to look at the lines of connection instead of the points that we usually take to define those secondarily. Points are mere moments on a line, a wave of being on an ocean of becoming (to add a dimension). The Plane of Consistency or the Body without Organs are best thought of as a means of connection amongst disparate entities. Even the Abstract Machines and the Virtual don't exist in some Plantonic heaven, but as he constantly points out, are always enmeshed in a milieu, literally a "mid-place". I submit that this between is actually Deleuze's gloss on what Spinoza and Whitehead call God. God is not at the beginning of things like a creator or principle, or at the end like a judge or goal. God is the fabric that holds everything together, the stuff between any two things, a lure for feeling.
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