Plato's scheme is based on a set of abstract Ideas. Particular things in the real world are copies of those Ideas that resemble the model to one degree or another. The Ideas, being abstract, are self-identical; they are identity-in-itself. The copies are different from those model identities, but this difference is calculated along a chain of lost or modified identity. In other words, difference in this scheme is (partial) lack of identity. We can see how this sets up a tree image. The Idea is the trunk which then branches off into different numbers of copies at different distances from the ground. As we get further and further from the ground the branches get more numerous and the resemblance to the initial Idea declines. Eventually we reach the leaves at the tips of the branches, which are all things that claim to be derived from that single trunk. The goal of the scheme is to organize the leaves we find in the world in order of their distance from the trunk. That way we figure out which things are closest to the Idea, who is closest to the true Lover, Statesmen, Philosopher, etc ...
In Chapter I, we suggested that Plato's thought turned upon a particularly important distinction: that between the original and the image, the model and the copy. The model is supposed to enjoy an originary superior identity (the Idea alone is nothing other than what it is: only Courage is courageous, Piety pious), whereas the copy is judged in terms of a derived internal resemblance. Indeed, it is in this sense that difference comes only in third place, behind identity and resemblance, and can be understood only in terms of these prior notions. Difference is under- stood only in terms of the comparative play of two similitudes: the exemplary similitude of an identical original and the imitative similitude of a more or less accurate copy. This is the measure or test which decides between claimants
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Note that this tree is not the same as the Aristotelean or Linnaean tree constructed from genera and species. This is more like a family tree of descent from a common ancestor, a demonstration of how distantly we are all related to Genghis Khan. These two trees would only get related after the discovery of DNA coding. Which seems significant in some way I'm unable to put my finger on right now. Deleuze touched on this point in chapter 1
[The method of Platonic division's] point of departure can therefore be either a genus or a species, but this genus or this large species is understood as an undifferenciated logical matter, an indifferent material, a mixture, an indefinite representing multiplicity which must be eliminated in order to bring to light the Idea which constitutes a pure line of descent. The search for gold provides the model for this process of division.
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Deleuze asks us to back up one step and see the deeper problem this scheme is meant to address. We don't see the trunk or know exactly how the branches run. Those are abstractions. We just see the leaves. And our initial goal isn't really to try and organize all possible leaves into a single total tree. We're talking about Plato here, not Aristotle. Really we just start off wanting to separate the good leaves from the bad leaves. Who should we follow as a better Statesman to guide us? The merchant, the farmer, the shepherd? Who should we listen to as a Philosopher? The sage, the orator, the dialectician? The true goal here is to figure out how to live the good life, how to select the better option. Philosophy started as a question about how to live well, not about how to correctly represent the truth. It begins with the friend or the lover of wisdom, not its possessor. Which is to say that it ultimately poses a moral question. Today we might call it an ethical or ethological question, but it amounts to the same thing. We want to mark a difference between living well and not.
Plato's scheme answers to this problem. It uses the idea of a model and copy to try and organize these questions about the difference between the good and the bad life. The Ideas aren't fundamentally there to represent reality. They are a way to help us choose. The seemingly central distinction between model and copy is actually just a device to help us with this problematic moral distinction between good and bad.
More profoundly, however, the true Platonic distinction lies elsewhere: it is of another nature, not between the original and the image but between two kinds of images [idoles], of which copies [icones] are only the first kind, the other being simulacra [phantasmes]. The model- copy distinction is there only in order to found and apply the copy- simulacra distinction, since the copies are selected, justified and saved in the name of the identity of the model and owing to their internal resemblance to this ideal model. The function of the notion of the model is not to oppose the world of images in its entirety but to select the good images, the icons which resemble from within, and eliminate the bad images or simulacra.
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The translator's footnote is helpful here in connecting this back to our more typical understanding of Plato as talking about the distinction between (mere) appearance and reality.
The Greek term phantasma, for which Deleuze often uses the French equivalent phantasme, is frequently rendered in English translations of Plato as 'appearance'. I have preferred to use 'phantasm' in order to retain the connection with 'phantasy' in the preceding section of the text, where Deleuze uses the same French word as equivalent to the Freudian term Phantasie.
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What appears then, in its purest state, before the logic of representation could be deployed, is a moral vision of the world. It is in the first instance for these moral reasons that simulacra must be exorcized and difference thereby subordinated to the same and the similar.
How can just thinking about our life make a difference in our life? How can it help us distinguish between the things that really matter and the fake shit in our world, our society, and our own minds. This question is so deep it knows no bottom. It is the absolutely universal core of philosophy and religion. Plato actually responds to this question. He feels its full weight the moment before philosophy gets converted into a mere search for truth and accuracy. The only problem is that he tried to answer the question, once and for all, rather than allow us to keep asking it. He decided that the best way to test the different options before us was to see how closely they resembled an ideal model.
For this reason it seems to us that, with Plato, a philosophical decision of the utmost importance was taken: that of subordinating difference to the supposedly initial powers of the Same and the Similar, that of declaring difference unthinkable in itself and sending it, along with the simulacra, back to the bottomless ocean. However, precisely because Plato did not yet have at his disposition the constituted categories of representation (these appeared with Aristotle), he had to base his decision on a theory of Ideas.
I find this a really intriguing interpretation of Plato. He does bring up the question of how to live and examine our life in such a way that it is not determined in advance by the received wisdom of state, religion, or tradition but instead depends on our own thinking to make a difference. This is what makes him the father of philosophy. But then he has no frame of reference here, he's like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know ... my point is he gets lost in the immanent universe of possibilities that thinking of difference creates. As a result, he betrays it, shackles it to the Same, and restores the transcendence he just deposed. The positive and creative difference we can make by thinking is dismissed as mere phantasy, and the only difference that survives his moral test becomes the difference between model and copy. In short, we get reduced to merely remembering the Ideas we forgot in our last life.
Once Plato works his magic, any difference that doesn't correspond to one or another model, that can't be located somewhere on the tree of copies branching from the trunk of an Idea, becomes a mere appearance. It's not even a degraded copy. It doesn't resemble anything real at all. It's just illusion, confusion, seductive simulacra.
Simulacra or phantasms are not simply copies of copies, degraded icones involving infinitely relaxed relations of resemblance. The catechism, so heavily influenced by the Platonic Fathers, has made us familiar with the idea of an image without likeness: man is in the image and likeness of God, but through sin we have lost the likeness while remaining in the image ... simulacra are precisely demonic images, stripped of resemblance.
The difference we can make ourselves is monstrous. Dangerous. Demonic. It only proves that we've fallen from the Ideas, that our thoughts no longer resemble anything pure, anything that exists truly and in-itself. Still, we might wonder where all these illusions come from and why there are so many of them. Also, why are we always so seduced by them? Why is it so hard to figure out what is a copy and what a simulacra? Why do the Ideas have to be hidden?
Actually, the simulacra too have a logic to them. It's the illegitimate logic of mixture. The simulacra are the impure and monstrous result of the Ideas inter-breeding. Instead of being the direct descendant of an Idea, the simulacra is the bastard stepchild of more than one idea. Plato was obviously not a goer. Or a golfer. These orgies are obviously immoral.
Or rather, in contrast to icones, they have externalised resemblance and live on difference instead. If they produce an external effect of resemblance, this takes the form of an illusion, not an internal principle; it is itself constructed on the basis of a disparity, having interiorised the dissimilitude of its constituent series and the divergence of its points of view to the point where it shows several things or tells several stories at once.
Deleuze is clearly referring here to the structure of the disparate that we've spent so much time unravelling. The simulacra is built from the resonance of two series of difference, the two chains of descent originating in two different Ideas. They don't resemble any one thing, don't live within one Idea as a degraded copy, but contain within themselves the intersection of two lines of descent. For Plato, this is the source of their power to confuse. It's so hard to distinguish the bastard step-child from the dunce prince who fell so far from the family tree. For Deleuze, the inter-breeding of Ideas is where all the action is at. The Simulacra aren't bad copies of the Idea-in-itself. They are always original 'copies' of difference-in-itself.
Does this not mean, however, that if simulacra themselves refer to a model, it is one which is not endowed with the ideal identity of the Same but, on the contrary, is a model of the Other, an other model, the model of difference in itself from which flows that interiorised dissimilitude? Among the most extraordinary pages in Plato, demonstrating the anti-Platonism at the heart of Platonism, are those which suggest that the different, the dissimilar, the unequal -- in short, becoming -- may well be not merely defects which affect copies like a ransom paid for their secondary character or a counterpart to their resemblance, but rather models themselves, terrifying models of the pseudos in which unfolds the power of the false
You can see how this sort of problem would keep Plato up at night. The whole point of the Ideas was to enable us to distinguish the component parts of mixtures and thereby dissolve them. A simulacra isn't a thing in itself, but just a confused mix of multiple things, a superposition of the copies of several Ideas that should be understood by breaking it down into its component Ideas. But if mixture itself has an Idea, if there is a concept of difference in-itself, that fucks up our plan. We would no longer just be worried about what true ideas are involved in a particular real mixture, but would have to worry about Ideas that are inherently false, confused, and contain a multiplicity of other Ideas within themselves. Imagine your horror when you climb all the way out to the end of a tree branch and find that the leaf growing there also belongs to another tree.
And now we've reached the point I've promised at the beginning. The rhizome is constructed as the crossing of multiple branching trees. Here is a clumsy diagram to illustrate the idea. Obviously, the focus is the complex overlap in the center.
And here's a more aesthetically interesting one from circa 2005. Apparently I've had this idea before in a different form.
Compare these to actual rhizomes
And the great rhizome within (courtesy of Ramón y Cajal)
Each of Plato's Ideas creates a tree of descent. At the limits of those trees, after following the most distant branch to the most degraded copy, the leaves of one tree flutter in the breeze and become confused with its neighbor. We hoped that if we worked hard enough, that confusing patch that appears at first glance to contain three or four leaves could be disentangled, and we could see how every leaf belongs to one and only one tree. But in fact, maybe some of these leaves are attached to more than one tree. The trees aren't completely separate and pure unities, but actually form an inherently tangled network with points of intersection. A rhizome. Briefly, this makes us wonder whether we shouldn't reverse our perspective and take those points of intersection as a new sort of trunk, so that we can retrace the whole structure in reverse. If we started with a given leaf, perhaps we could trace it back to the two trunks it shares. Could each shared leaf serve as a model, a model of the shared, the split, the Other, of which the original trunks would then be the most distant copies? Or perhaps instead of leaves, we should think of the trunks extending underground into a root system that connects one to the next?
But no, no matter how we phrase it, this will never work. The damage has been done once we start to find points of intersection. With the network, any leaf could be traced to any Idea, perhaps even to every Idea, depending on how the topology of the network is arranged. We can no longer interpret the whole as a set of intersecting lines of descent from anything. Nothing can be a copy of anything else. All we have is the network. It's all a confused tangle and our only approach is to walk along these paths and try to find out which leaf connects to which and in what order.
Does this not mean, thirdly, that simulacra provide the means of challenging both the notion of the copy and that of the model? The model collapses into difference, while the copies disperse into the dissimilitude of the series which they interiorise, such that one can never say that the one is a copy and the other a model. Such is the ending of the Sophist, where we glimpse the possibility of the triumph of the simulacra. For Socrates distinguishes himself from the Sophist, but the Sophist does not distinguish himself from Socrates, placing the legitimacy of such a distinction in question.
What becomes, then, of our original problem? How can our thinking make a difference that distinguishes between the good and the bad life? Deleuze here echoes his description of difference in-itself from the very first pages of chapter 1. The simulacra is difference in-itself, it contains difference within itself, but this difference just leads us to other differences, to another simulacra, as we circulate endlessly around the network. Difference is made in this movement, as we traverse the network and connect things up. At the limit, we have to map the entire burrow to distinguish the location of a point within it. From the point of view of this totality, there is nothing special about the location. There are no endpoints, and everything is on the way to everything else. But notice also that in some sense the entire network is within our starting point. It splits and splits within itself to produce all these other differences that might lead it back to itself. Any random starting point can become the entire rhizome. In this case the difference between good and bad is made immanently, in terms of blocked passages or the ability to pass. And the eternal return is the ability to walk the entire rhizome and return to your utterly random starting point. Traveling in place.
It is no longer the Platonic project of opposing the cosmos to chaos, as though the Circle were the imprint of a transcendent Idea capable of imposing its likeness upon a rebellious matter. It is indeed the very opposite: the immanent identity of chaos and cosmos, being in the eternal return, a thoroughly tortuous circle. Plato attempted to discipline the eternal return by making it an effect of the Ideas - in other words, making it copy a model. However, in the infinite movement of degraded likeness from copy to copy, we reach a point at which everything changes nature, at which copies themselves flip over into simulacra and at which, finally, resemblance or spiritual imitation gives way to repetition.
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