Well, we've reached the end of Chapter 1: Difference in Itself. Certainly, much more could be written. But I'm a little behind deadline here since I was hoping to get through the first chapter in under a year, and my first entry was July 4, 2018. So I think I'll end with one last thought inspired by the final paragraph, and then take a bit of a break.
Deleuze often refers to himself as a transcendental empiricist, a term I've always found less than illuminating. I think I know what empiricism means -- building a hypothesis on the back of data -- but how would that type of thinking change if it were 'transcendental', and what does that term even mean? Gradually though, I've realized that transcendental means nothing more than thinking beyond or before the subject-object duality. Which is to say thinking beyond representation of an object by a subject.
The fault of representation lies in not going beyond the form of identity, in relation to both the object seen and the seeing subject. Identity is no less conserved in each component representation than in the whole of infinite representation as such. Infinite representation may well multiply points of view and organise these in series; these series are no less subject to the condition of converging upon the same object, upon the same world. Infinite representation may well multiply figures and moments and organise these into circles endowed with self-movement; these circles no less turn around a single centre which is that of the great circle of consciousness.
Regular empiricism, as in the case of Hume, takes the subject and object for granted. We have distinct sense perceptions. From these solid starting points we will empirically investigate what we do or do not know and how we know it. But us the knowing subject, and the objective sensory experience presented to us are assumed at the outset.
Of course, there's quite a lot of twentieth century philosophy (as well as a lot of Eastern philosophy) that proposes to go beyond the dualisms of mind and body or subject and object. Deleuze's criticism of those categories though, and his idea of what's beyond them, is unique. Because he's not claiming that either subjects or objects are illusions. And he's not claiming that they are manifestations of some deeper principle, like Heideggerian Being, for example, that philosophy might be able to say something general about. Instead, the problem is that both subject and object presume the pre-existent identity of themselves. They conserve the idea of the form of identity without questioning how this identity came to be produced. And if we ask what's beneath those forms of identity, the answer is: difference, in the sense of the univocity of Being or Eternal Return, which are really just names for the chaos of difference differentiating itself. All of which is to say that if we want to dig into how the unity of subject and object were created, we will simply have to investigate empirically. There's nothing general to be said. Except for perhaps that there's always more that can be said?
So instead of assuming that all experience takes the form of a unified subject encountering a given object, and asking what general categories apply to all possible experience (eg. it is in space and in time) we have to go looking for real experience, which of course changes its meaning once its not confined to happening between fully formed subjects and objects.
Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned. The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself, such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy. It is in this direction that we must look for the conditions, not of possible experience, but of real experience (selection, repetition, etc.). It is here that we find the lived reality of a sub-representative domain.
Understood this way, the idea of transcendental empiricism becomes very interesting. We're going to go out there and look for all kinds of experiences, that might go well beyond our human constraints. We have to figure out when an experience happens, what we now mean by this term. Investigating animal experiences is an obvious first stop. But we can continue asking whether there are geological experiences, or computational experiences. Transcendental empiricism becomes the best version of sci-fi.
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