The other image I always have in mind when reading Deleuze is the fractal. I think he very often creates concepts that are specifically meant to be fractals, where the definition of difference is in terms of other differences, or the definition of "a" life turns out to be a whole series of lives.
Naturally any fractal concept is going to have an inherent relationship to the infinite. But it's an interesting variation on our more common conception of infinity. You might call it the infinitely small, or maybe better, the "interior infinite". It isn't created by just adding another one indefinitely, ad infinitum ... That would be the infinitely large, or the "exterior infinite". Mathematics is completely familiar with this large concept of infinity because it starts with a well defined atomic unit and just keeps adding more. Deleuze's fractal concepts approach the infinite from the opposite direction. We don't begin with a well defined unit, but one defined in terms of itself, creating a sort of feedback loop where we plunge into the concept, through the floor into the infinitely small, as it were. There's no base root of the tree which then branches off as many times as you like, but instead a rhizome whose roots get deeper and more convoluted the further you look.
You don't keep zooming out to see the full figure; it can't be created by adding together individual units. Rather, you zoom in, and in, and in ... with each smaller level revealing a variation on the larger theme. I don't know what the word is in French, but if the translations I've read are consistent, "plunge" is one of Deleuze's favorite verbs.
I see even one more twist to this idea, but the thread is tenuous. I think one of the big unstated problems behind Deleuze's philosophy is the question: "what is a thought?" How can we create metaphysical concepts that treat thoughts as real things, and make them part of the same world as everything else? Notice the way this immediately creates another fractal structure, because obviously whatever metaphysical concepts you create are themselves going to be thoughts, which are things you're theorizing about, which, etc ... One "image of thought", if you will, that seems like it would satisfy the requirements is to conceive of thought as a sort of simulation of the possibilities of the world. Some piece of the world that simulates what happens to another piece of the world. And packed inside the first simulation can be a simulation of that simulation, etc ... Thought is a model of the world, an abstraction and extrapolation of it, that is nevertheless running on the "hardware" of the world. Note that his is not the same thing as a representational reflection of the world. A simulation is a slice of the world taken for a specific purpose; it's not right or wrong, it's useful or not useful, stable or unstable, picking up signal or just modeling noise. I'm influenced here by Andy Clark's suggestion that this is how the brain works.
What sort of image would illustrate this idea? Maybe something like this?
Naturally any fractal concept is going to have an inherent relationship to the infinite. But it's an interesting variation on our more common conception of infinity. You might call it the infinitely small, or maybe better, the "interior infinite". It isn't created by just adding another one indefinitely, ad infinitum ... That would be the infinitely large, or the "exterior infinite". Mathematics is completely familiar with this large concept of infinity because it starts with a well defined atomic unit and just keeps adding more. Deleuze's fractal concepts approach the infinite from the opposite direction. We don't begin with a well defined unit, but one defined in terms of itself, creating a sort of feedback loop where we plunge into the concept, through the floor into the infinitely small, as it were. There's no base root of the tree which then branches off as many times as you like, but instead a rhizome whose roots get deeper and more convoluted the further you look.
The world is neither finite nor infinite as representation would have it: it is completed and unlimited. Eternal return is the unlimited of the finished itself, the univocal being which is said of difference.The fractal is the perfect image for this type of infinite. What could be a better example of "completed but unlimited" than the Mandelbrot Set?
You don't keep zooming out to see the full figure; it can't be created by adding together individual units. Rather, you zoom in, and in, and in ... with each smaller level revealing a variation on the larger theme. I don't know what the word is in French, but if the translations I've read are consistent, "plunge" is one of Deleuze's favorite verbs.
I see even one more twist to this idea, but the thread is tenuous. I think one of the big unstated problems behind Deleuze's philosophy is the question: "what is a thought?" How can we create metaphysical concepts that treat thoughts as real things, and make them part of the same world as everything else? Notice the way this immediately creates another fractal structure, because obviously whatever metaphysical concepts you create are themselves going to be thoughts, which are things you're theorizing about, which, etc ... One "image of thought", if you will, that seems like it would satisfy the requirements is to conceive of thought as a sort of simulation of the possibilities of the world. Some piece of the world that simulates what happens to another piece of the world. And packed inside the first simulation can be a simulation of that simulation, etc ... Thought is a model of the world, an abstraction and extrapolation of it, that is nevertheless running on the "hardware" of the world. Note that his is not the same thing as a representational reflection of the world. A simulation is a slice of the world taken for a specific purpose; it's not right or wrong, it's useful or not useful, stable or unstable, picking up signal or just modeling noise. I'm influenced here by Andy Clark's suggestion that this is how the brain works.
What sort of image would illustrate this idea? Maybe something like this?
No comments:
Post a Comment