The Aleatory Point

Towards the end of this section of affirmation and negation (pg. 55-57), Deleuze expands a bit on a metaphor he's already used a few times in critiquing Hegel's dialectic -- the damn thing just spins in place, a circle with a single center that never really moves.  He contrasts this with the "circle" of Eternal Return:

For if eternal return is a circle, then Difference is at the centre and the Same is only on the periphery: it is a constantly decentered, continually tortuous circle which revolves only around the unequal.

In the next paragraph he starts to talk about the center of a circle as a metaphor for the point of view of a subject who represents the world in some sort of perspective.

Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. 

If we revisit Deleuze's understanding of Aristotle's theory of "average forms" with this picture in mind, we can see that the POV that Aristotle chooses is precisely the harmonious, balanced, and essentially human one.  Remember that for Aristotle, difference was always classified between large generic differences and small specific differences, and that specific differences were further divided into contraries that constituted the opposite poles of a genus.  In other words, the whole picture is taken from some central point in the middle of things, which makes perfect sense with the overall Greek emphasis on man as the measure of all things.  There's also no movement in Aristotle's scheme, because it is a taxonomy constructed from one privileged, and hence permanent, point of view.  Pictorially, we have classic perspective.

Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centers, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation: paintings or sculptures are already such 'distorters', forcing us to create movement - that is, to combine a superficial and a penetrating view, or to ascend and descend within the space as we move through it. 

But wait, you ask, didn't Leibniz talk about every monad as a separate POV on the whole of the universe? And didn't Hegel introduce a movement where the POV changes over time as history progresses?

Is it enough to multiply representations in order to obtain such effects? Infinite representation includes precisely an infinity of representations - either by ensuring the convergence of all points of view on the same object or the same world, or by making all moments properties of the same Self. In either case it maintains a unique centre which gathers and represents all the others, like the unity of a series which governs or organises its terms and their relations once and for all. The fact is that infinite representation is indissociable from a law which renders it possible: the form of the concept as a form of identity which constitutes on the one hand the in-itself of the represented (A is A) and on the other the for-itself of the representant (Self = Self). The prefix RE- in the word representation signifies this conceptual form of the identical which subordinates differences.

The answer to Deleuze's question there is obviously "no".  You can multiply the perspectives infinitely, but if they all form a unified and convergent series that represents one object to one subject, you haven't created any genuine movement.  The center from which each picture is taken may be different, but there is a sort of meta-center to the whole image.  This meta-center is literally the concept of identity.  For Leibniz it's the identity of one best of all possible worlds guaranteed by one benevolent God.  For Hegel it's the self-identity of Absolute Spirit doing its dialectical merry-go-round thing.

So then, how can we get past the idea of there being a central point of view?  Basically, we have to embrace the idea that all these multiplying points of view diverge, and that the only convergence is this fact of divergence.

The immediate, defined as 'sub-representative', is therefore not attained by multiplying representations and points of view. On the contrary, each composing representation must be distorted, diverted and torn from its centre. Each point of view must itself be the object, or the object must belong to the point of view. The object must therefore be in no way identical, but torn asunder in a difference in which the identity of the object as seen by a seeing subject vanishes. Difference must become the element, the ultimate unity; it must therefore refer to other differences which never identify it but rather differenciate it. Each term of a series, being already a difference, must be put into a variable relation with other terms, thereby constituting other series devoid of centre and convergence. Divergence and decentring must be affirmed in the series itself. Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing.

Stated abstractly this can seem like an empty formalism and another dance step in the post-modern one-upmanship jig.  Which is why I think it helps to consider the actual image that he's setting up here.  The center of the circle of eternal return is constantly moving.  It isn't fixed like in Aristotle.  It doesn't converge to some equilibrium like in Leibniz, nor does it revolve in an orbit like in Hegel.  We should think of it as tracing out some path that connects one difference to another.  A very strange (even torturous) path though, as difference refers to itself endlessly and ad infinitum.  The image that comes to mind is the Peano Curve.  

The center moves through space in a way that eventually fills it entirely and literally lends it the power of a higher dimension.  Of course, while weird, the Peano Curve is pretty regular, so we might have to imagine the angle of each turn changing as it moves. 

In fact, we should probably even go ahead and imagine that the path it traces isn't continuous at all. The center jumps around everywhere, passes through every point before returning to where it "started". Which means we're actually trying to describe a completely random "curve".

Each difference passes through all the others; it must 'will' itself or find itself through all the others. That is why eternal return does not appear second or come after, but is already present in every metamorphosis, contemporaneous with that which it causes to return. Eternal return relates to a world of differences implicated one in the other, to a complicated, properly chaotic world without identity. Joyce presented the vicus of recirculation as causing a chaosmos to turn; and Nietzsche had already said that chaos and eternal return were not two distinct things but a single and same affirmation. 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 uni"ocal being which is said of difference. With eternal return, chao-errancy is opposed to the coherence of representation; it excludes both the coherence of a subject which represents itself and that of an object represented.

Eternal Return, the univocity of difference, difference in itself -- this concept is meant to be a sort of paradox or oxymoron that gives us a concrete image of chaos.  Ultimately I think chaos basically plays the traditional role of God in Deleuze's philosophy, the source of all possibility, the only thing that can tie everything together, the identity (univocity) of difference.

The final turn of the screw here is to understand what effect setting this chaos of difference free (as opposed to taming it) has on us.  Because with every POV removed or set into motion, we have in fact obliterated our selves.  In thinking the universal chaos of eternal return, we are forced to reconceive our thinking self as a difference propagating through all the others, trying to come back to "itself" after this infinite journey.  We are not the center of this chaos, but just a slice of it, a random sample of total randomness.  The thought of the eternal return is like Daniel Dennett's universal acid or Douglas Hofstader's perfect record player taken to a more abstract level; a thought that dissolves everything, including the thinker.

Nietzsche seems to have been the first to see that the death of God becomes effective only with the dissolution of the Self. What is then revealed is being, which is said of differences which are neither in substance nor in a subject: so many subterranean affirmations. If eternal return is the highest, the most intense thought, this is because its own extreme coherence, at the highest point, excludes the coherence of a thinking subject, of a world which is thought of as a guarantor God.

 For Deleuze, thought reaches its highest power when it dissolves itself into chaos.

... for a brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterises the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly on to difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept.

P.S. The title of this post comes from a concept Deleuze employs throughout The Logic of Sense. I'd have to look back at the book and my notes to be sure that it's the same concept as the chaotic trajectory of a mobile center that I'm discussing here, but I feel like he's setting up such a strong visual image here that the two are almost bound to be "the same". Did I mention that Deleuze seems to have genuinely lived, and written, the eternal return?

Eternal Life

Living forever is actually pretty simple.  You just have to continually redefine your "self" as something alive.  If you cling to your given identity, you are bound to perish.  If "you" are instead just a difference in the world that's capable of producing even more difference, you continue to circulate ad infinitum, albeit at the price of continually transforming into something else.  In business, we would call this "moving the goalpost".

I take this to be the general gist of the discussion of affirmation and negation in Nietzsche's Zarathustra that occurs on pg. 53-55.  It begins with:

No one passes less for a beautiful soul than Nietzsche. His soul is extremely beautiful, but not in the sense of the beautiful soul: no one is more endowed than he with a sense for cruelty or a taste for destruction. Moreover, throughout his work he never ceases to contrast two conceptions of the affirmation-negation relation.

and ends with:

Nietzsche announces only a light punishment for those who do not 'believe' in eternal return: they will have, and be aware of, only an ephemeral life! They will be aware of themselves and know themselves for what they are: epiphenomena. This will be their absolute Knowledge. In this manner, negation as a consequence, as the result of full affirmation, consumes all that is negative, and consumes itself at the mobile centre of eternal return.

In between, Deleuze explains how Zarathustra and his own personal Ass both use both affirmation and negation, though in opposite ways.  The role of the Ass at first appears completely affirmative, as it is willing to carry the weight of any burden.  This affirmation is only secondary though, because it stems from the Ass's constant acceptance that there must be limits that define the identity of every form only by distinguishing itself from everything which it is not.  Negation is the first principle of the Ass, and, like the Hegelian dialectic (amusingly depicted as an Ox chewing the cud and regurgitating the same stuff over and over again), it can only produce affirmation as the by product of a double negation.  The motor of dialectical change is supposed to be a form defined by what it is not, which is then negated and overcome.  The positive production of movement is just a double negative, a circle with one center that gets us nowhere.

It is said that there were thinkers who explained that movement was impossible, but that this did not prevent movement from occurring. With Hegel it is the other way round: he creates movement, even the movement of the infinite, but because he creates it with words and representations it is a false movement, and nothing follows.

Zarathustra though starts with affirmation.  Instead of the weight of necessity, he starts with the lightness of possibility, the genuine movement of dance, and the chance discharge of electricity (Deleuze's lightning bolt of thought).  There is also negation and destruction with Zarathustra, but it occurs only as a secondary principle.

Difference is light, aerial and affirmative. To affirm is not to bear but, on the contrary, to discharge and to lighten. It is no longer the negative which produces a phantom of affirmation like an ersatz, but rather a No which results from affirmation. This is also in turn a shadow, but rather in the sense of a consequence - one could say a Nachfolge. The negative is an epiphenomenon. Negation, like the ripples in a pond, is the effect of an affirmation which is too strong or too different. Perhaps two affirmations are necessary in order to produce the shadow of negation as a Nachfolge.

This is a bit tangential, but, as I read about this "double affirmative" I was reminded of Deleuze's discussion of Spinoza's letters on the problem of evil.  Instead of talking about masters and slaves, or affirmation and negation, Spinoza divided things into good encounters and bad encounters, composition and decomposition.  This passage is from Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

"Thou shalt not eat of the fruit ... ": the anxious, ignorant Adam understands these words as the expression of a prohibi­tion. And yet, what do they refer to? To a fruit that, as such, will poison Adam if he eats it. This is an instance of an encounter between two bodies whose characteristic relations are not com­patible: the fruit will act as a poison; that is, it will determine the parts ofAdam's body (and paralleling this, the idea of the fruit will determine the parts of his mind) to enter into new relations that no longer accord with his own essence. But because Adam is ignorant of causes, he thinks that God morally forbids him something, whereas God only reveals the natural consequence of ingesting the fruit. Spinoza is categorical on this point: all the phenomena that we group under the heading of Evil, illness, and death, are of this type: bad encounters, poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition. 

 

In any case, there are always relations that enter into composi­tion in their particular order, according to the eternal laws of nature. There is no Good or Evil, but there is good and bad. "Beyond Good and Evil, at least this does not mean: beyond good and bad." The good is when a body directly compounds its re­lation with ours, and, with all or part of its power, increases ours. A food, for example. For us, the bad is when a body decomposes our body's relation, although it still combines with our parts, but in ways that do not correspond to our essence, as when a poison breaks down the blood. Hence good and bad have a primary, ob­jective meaning, but one that is relative and partial: that which agrees with our nature or does not agree with it. 

 

And conse­quently, good and bad have a secondary meaning, which is sub­jective and modal, qualifying two types, two modes of man's existence. That individual will be called good (or free, or ration­al or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the composition of powers. That individ­ual will be called bad, or servile, or weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his en­counters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one keep from de­stroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment, spreading one's own powerlessness and enslavement every­ where, one's own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable even to encounter oneself.

Since good and bad are always relative to some agent, there is always a perspective from which anything that happens is "good", in the sense of constructively composing or causing a new state of the world.  That new world might not involve our existence, but that simply means that we've got the wrong perspective on it.   This means that there's nothing inherently bad in itself, that is, nothing is evil.

Thus Spinoza gives a special meaning to the classical thesis holding that evil is nothing. In his view, in any case, there are al­ways relations that agree with one another (for example, the agree­ment between a poison and the new relations into which the parts of the blood enter). But relations that agree, according to the natural order, do not necessarily coincide with the preserva­tion of a particular relation, which may be dissolved, that is cease to be realized. In this sense there is no evil (in itself), but there is that which is bad (for me): "Those things are good which bring about the preservation of the relation of motion and rest the human body's parts have to one another; on the other hand, those things are bad which bring it about that the parts of the human body have a different relation of motion and rest to one
another." Every object whose relation agrees with mine (con­venientia) will be called good; every object whose relation decom­poses mine, even though it agrees with other relations, will be called bad (disconvenientia).

So far, recasting affirmation and negation as composition and decomposition just restates the basic goal of this section, which is to look for the underlying affirmative and productive element that gives rise to (and breaks down) forms of identity.  But then it immediately presents us with the question of whether we could find the "good" point of view on the breakdown of our own form.  In other words, is there a way to affirm the affirmation that negates us?  Is there a way to cheat death?

What happens then in the case of poisoning? Or in the case of allergy (since the individual factors of each relation must be taken into account)?  In these cases, it appears that one of the constitutive relations of the body is destroyed, decom­posed. And death occurs when the body's characteristic or dominant relation is determined to be destroyed: "I under­ stand the body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different relation of motion and rest." Spinoza thus makes clear what is meant by a relation being destroyed or de­ composed. This occurs when the relation, which is itself an eternal truth, is no longer realized by actual parts. What has
been done away with is not the relation, which is eternally true, but rather the parts between which it was established and which have now assumed another relation.

If we are able to identify ourselves with the relations that characterize "us", with some sort of process or pattern that constitutes us, could we become this part of ourselves that is eternal?  I don't completely understand how to think of this.  I mean, how is this different from our "immortal soul"?  And what even constitutes "a" process?  I bring it up here because reading the double affirmative in the context of Spinoza is the only way I know to make sense of some of these passages, especially this one:

Negation is difference, but difference seen from its underside, seen from below. Seen the right way up, from top to bottom, difference is affirmation. This proposition, however, means many things: that difference is an object of affirmation; that affirmation itself is multiple; that it is creation but also that it must be created, as affirming difference, as being difference in itself.

For us to be more than epiphenomena, to know ourselves as more than ephemeral, we're going to need to change our definition.

The Beautiful Soul of Identity Politics

There's one more interesting political passage in this section on the relationship of difference to affirmation.

At this point, does the philosophy of difference not risk appearing as a new version of the beautiful soul? The beautiful soul is in effect the one who sees differences everywhere and appeals to them only as respectable, reconcilable or federative differences, while history continues to be made through bloody contradictions. The beautiful soul behaves like a justice of the peace thrown on to a field of battle, one who sees in the inexpiable struggles only simple 'differends' or perhaps misunderstandings. Conversely, however, it is not enough to harden oneself and invoke the well-known complementarities between affirmation and negation, life and death, creation and destruction (as if these were sufficient to ground a dialectic of negativity) in order to throw the taste for pure differences back at the beautiful soul, and to weld the fate of real differences to that of the negative and contradiction. For such complementarities as yet tell us nothing about the relation between one term and the other (does the determined affirmation result from an already negative and negating difference, or does the negative result from an already differential affirmation?).

Deleuze has actually already mentioned the "beautiful soul" in the preface.  It represents the danger that confronts a philosophy of difference.

There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed ...

I think of the beautiful soul as akin to a certain strain of left wing politics that has grown over the past 30 years into our present idea of identity politics and political correctness.  I don't think it's a parody to say that this type of thinking is focused on creating a "safe space" where we can each express our story and affirm everyone's stories as equally valid and deserving.  Naturally, this space wouldn't have any conflict or opposition or hierarchy and all of our differences would be able to peacefully coexist in a LGBTQIA rainbow love-in.  

To be clear, I think there's a lot that's truly beautiful about the "beautiful soul", and it is presented here explicitly as a danger we might fall into when we've already had some success in the main task of liberating ourselves from the limiting and repressive negativity of identity.   So let's not come down too hard on the beautiful soul and mistakenly give the impression that the cure is worse than the disease.  At the same time, let's try to think all the way through the problems that come up when we try to completely replace a world of identities with one of pure difference.  

I think the main danger Deleuze has in mind here is that in emphasizing difference as primary and making identity secondary we may be tempted to conclude that identity is just illusory.  In our desire to affirm everything as possible we may see negation and contradiction as somehow not being real.  This is like the beautiful soul taken to its mystical extreme.  The world would be a pure flow of difference without border or boundary.  And without distinct entities, how could anything be opposed to anything else?  While Deleuze is clearly leading us in the direction of this vision, the beautiful soul jumps the shark by when it turns all opposition into mere illusion.  The point is not that there is no such thing as negation or opposition or identity.  The point is simply that these things are constructed.  They have a mechanism behind them.  In fact, the whole idea is to reach a higher level of empiricism where we investigate exactly what these mechanisms are, rather than taking forms of identity and opposition for granted.  This is why neither the pacifistic beautiful soul nor the hard-headed chickenhawk is the political figure Deleuze is looking for in that first quote.  One insists of the inevitable reality of limits and contradictions and war, and the other denies them any substance.  One sees only zero-sum games where the other thinks only "collective insanity" traps us in anything less than non-zero-sum cooperation.  But neither really investigates how things get built, when cooperation materializes and when it does not, where forms congeal and where flow continues uninterrupted.  

Phrased in the language of affirmation and negation, the problem is that the beautiful soul denies the existence of negation, and hence denies the reality of power altogether (in the conventional political sense of control and limit, though perhaps also in Nietzsche or Spinoza's sense of increasing ability to do stuff).  This is better than the "slave of power" we saw at the end of the previous post, who is only concerned with affirming the inevitability of the limitations embodied by some current or future power.  But the real goal is to understand how power is actually constructed, not as inevitable, but precisely as contingent, changing, and historical.  Our goal may ultimately be to defuse these power structures, but we don't accomplish that simply by imagining a safe space supposedly without power relations, or by simply multiplying the letters at the end of our birding acronyms.  These aren't bad ideas.  In fact, they're mostly great ideas.  They're just not complete, and it seems to me that they lead to another danger for the beautiful soul.

Ignoring power altogether also means ignoring your own power.  But since power and identity don't thereby disappear like a mist burning off under the sun, it becomes very easy to slide back into taking some construction of power for granted.  In fact, you may end up taking for granted the very same power of identity that you were critiquing in the first place.  I think this is exactly what sometimes happens to the beautiful soul of identity politics.  I think we've seen now how the construction of a "safe space" can sometimes be a simple demonstration of power, an imposition of new limits rather than a dissolving of old ones.  I'm sure this isn't the deepest intention of those constructing the space.  I'm imagining that the deepest intention is precisely the same as Deleuze's goal for thought: making a world where difference flourishes and allows for even more difference.  But these incidents highlight the danger that arises if we ignore the actual construction of power in a given circumstance.  We become liable to want to take revenge for the limits someone has placed on us and give vent to our, completely understandable, anger by demonstrating our power where we finally can.  This is certainly a "fair" and "just" response in the sense of being reciprocal to (though often not equal in magnitude to) the original treatment.  And it is clearly a way to assert the power of our identity against the way that exact identity was previously used to strip of us power.  You can see though, how we've now fallen into the old dialectical logic where difference turns into a clash of opposite identities.  We've slid from being motivated by a definition of power that is positive and affirmative, to pursuing one that is negative and limiting.  Ultimately, we started out to critique the way a repressive dominant identity unthinkingly conveyed power, and yet ended up asserting that our power comes precisely from our suppressed minority identity.  We still haven't changed the unquestioned underlying logic that identity = power, and that therefore difference ≠ power.  

As I said at the beginning, I don't think this means we have accomplished nothing, much less deepened our dilemma.  I think it means we've found a danger.  I think knowing about the existence of this danger gives us a method to move forward though.  We have to ask whether our actions stem from affirmation or negation, whether they open possibilities or close them.  We have to do this not "in general" as some sort of categorical imperative, but again in every circumstance and according to the different conditions.  This is exactly what Deleuze asks, and is the "selective" aspect of the Eternal Return:

... does the determined affirmation result from an already negative and negating difference, or does the negative result from an already differential affirmation?

P.S.  A lot of that penultimate paragraph is written in the second person plural.  I'm aware that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but both of my readers are probably aware that I am rich white heterosexual male; I am the oppressor.  So I apologize if phrases like "our minority identity" seem disingenuous.  I wrote it that way because I am trying to follow the text in understanding affirmation and negation as primarily philosophical questions, albeit, so I'm claiming, with political consequences.  "Dominant" and "minority", "master" and "slave" are not primarily historical terms in this context, but are evocative descriptions of ways of thinking.  In other words, any of us can end up on either side of these patterns at different points in our thinking.