I know, I know. I said no Heidegger. But in re-reading that section (pg. 64-66) after all this discussion of Plato, I realized that it actually prompted a number of thoughts. I now feel like commenting on this section can advance my understanding without having to go back and read Being and Time again.
Hiking up to Mailbox Peak yesterday I started reflecting on the overall purpose of this chapter -- to put difference first, before identity, and think about difference in itself, rather than difference as something between two identities. If this sounds paradoxical, well ... we've just spent a long time discovering that it is, in fact. Why else were so many pixels sacrificed in an effort to understand something as goofy sounding as the Being of Not-Being? Which brought me to the thought that even difference is different. Not all difference is the same. It's not a homogenous field. There are certain distinctive points or distinctive differences. That is to say, there are singularities of difference.
Deleuze has already mentioned singularities a number of times in the book, mostly in the context in their distinction from the specific (in the Aristotelian sense). Now though, we have a clearer image of the singularity, even though it hasn't really been announced as such. Because Plato's Ideas are singularities. A singularity is a special point that structures a whole space of different possible points. Or is structured and defined by them. At this point it seems to me that the causality could run either way. For Plato, we usually think it runs from Idea as model to Instantiation as copy. But we've seen in the Sophist that maybe the question was somewhat ambiguous even for him, and in any case, we've learned that Plato's Ideas always seem to be tied up with some mythical circle, so the question of precedence might not make any sense to begin with. At any rate, let's just say that singularities and the possibility space they structure are co-defined.
Take a very simple singularity like a black hole. That singularity is a point (okay, 4-D volume, technically) in a gravitation field. The singularity and the field of differences it summarizes are really two sides of the same coin. Take this structure as an analogy for the difference within difference. The singular point is like a special difference, one that structures a whole space of possible differences, and hence turns them into a unity. It's a funny type of unity, yes, where it's hard to say whether the definition should go top-down or bottom-up. But this confusion happens every time we see a structure of circular causality; a hurricane is no less unified for being 'just' a pattern of moving molecules. Pushing this phase space analogy further, you see how we might describe a singularity as both a point and not-a-point, something more than a point. Because it adds a sort of dimension to the field that enables us to think of it as one thing. In addition, in the case of the black hole, the singularity quite literally turns what happens at every point and every resulting trajectory in the space into different solutions to the same problem. In other words, the singularity is a real and not real thing that, in conjunction with its associated field, has the unity of a problem. This is exactly the scheme that Deleuze is attributing to Plato. Of course, as we'll see next time, he wants to 'overturn' Platonism by starting with the 'opposite' of the Idea, the 'fake' copies at the end of the chain, rather than the 'real' Idea at the beginning of it. But if the chain is actually a circle, then 'inverting' it can only mean going around the circle in the opposite direction. The points will actually all be the same, though the sense we have as we pass them will be different.
Heidegger is portrayed here as applying this scheme of singularity as the difference of difference to the most general question, "what is Being"? Ontological difference is the difference between beings and Being. It's the difference within Being, that makes it also a non-Being that is not its negation but is its differencing. Ontological difference is basically the difference between the singularity and the field, which we've seen are the same and not-the-same, the one as many and the many as one. Difference implies unity implies difference implies ... The image of the fold makes better sense now because it's clear we're not talking about singularity and field as opposites, but as two sides of the same coin.
Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, undoubtedly followed a more thoroughly Heideggerian inspiration in speaking of 'folds' and 'pleating' (by contrast with Sartrean 'holes' and 'lakes of non-being')
In fact, with the idea that difference is different within itself, the whole commentary on Heidegger comes together for me. Difference in itself, at its most abstract level, is also singularity. It encompasses unity as well. Now we can follow the theses on Heidegger:
1. The not expresses not the negative but the difference between Being and being.
2. This difference is not 'between' in the ordinary sense of the word. It is the Fold, Zwiefalt. Being is truly the differenciator of difference - whence the ex-pression 'ontological difference'.
3. Ontological Difference corresponds to questioning. It is the being of questions, which become problems, marking out the determinant fields of existence.
4. Understood in this manner, difference is not an object of representation. As the element of metaphysics, representation subordinates difference to identity, if only in relating it to a third term as the centre of a compari- son between two supposedly different terms (Being and being). Heidegger recognises that this point of view of metaphysical representation is still present in The Essence ofReasons (see the French translation, p. 59, where the third term is found in the 'transcendence of being-there'). But metaphysics is unable to think difference in itself, or the importance of that which separates as much as of that which unites (the differenciator). There is no synthesis, mediation or reconciliation in difference, but rather a stubborn differenciation. This is the 'turning' beyond metaphysics: 'Being itself can open out in its truth the difference of Being and beings preserved in itself only when the difference explicitly takes place'.
This fourth point is particularly interesting, because it alerts us to the fact that it's easy to slide back into seeing this notion of difference in itself as the distinction between the identities we have in mind with "the many" and "the one". This leads us right back where we started though, with a boring Hegelian circle that always produces the self-identical. We have to see this most abstract difference within difference as an ongoing process by which difference differentiates itself. Novelty and movement and more difference are built right into the scheme. The Univocity (not unity) of Being is Deleuze's description of this process of circulation of ontological difference, the way possibility converts into actuality converts into possibility ...
5. Difference cannot, therefore, be subordinated to the Identical or the Equal but must be thought as the Same, in the Same. The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical. The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same, by contrast, is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say 'the same' if we think difference.... The same banishes all zeal always to level what is different into the equal or identical. The same gathers what is distinct into an original being-at-one. The equal, on the contrary, disperses them into the dull unity of mere uniformity.
Difference isn't homogenous. It's differs.
No comments:
Post a Comment