What can we actually say about the concept of emptiness? Does the experience of the non-dual have any structure we can identify? Not that identifying something systematic here would resolve this experience, or be any sort of essential or fundamental description of it. The question is simply an experiment in what more can we say and what new possibilities these thoughts open for us.
This post is an experiment inspired by the sense that I keep reading about the same thing over and over again in different guises. Clearly then, there are many names for this thing and many approaches to it. My inclination is to describe this object in abstract form so as to better recognize it in various contexts, as well as to see more aspects of it in each of the contexts in which it appears. Let's provisionally call this object "emptiness". The simplest observation I can make about this 'object' is that it's more like a verb than a noun, more like a process than an object. And the simplest description I can give of the process of emptiness is that it is like a vortex. Things are empty when they arise in the manner of a vortex. A vortex seems like a good image of emptiness for two reasons. First, it is simultaneously real and capable of affecting other things, but is in itself also somehow essentially unreal, only an effect produced the relations of things that are not-vortex 1. A hurricane is 'just' moving air. Second, the vortex is a dynamic system that can't be thought of in the absence of time and movement. It is a process that essentially involves circulation. The vortex is the simplest image I can think of that describes what the ego in Lack and Transcendence, the gift in The Gift, the continuum in Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, and différance in Of Grammatology have in common.
Since I wanted to explore the line of thinking that has led me from each of these books to the next, and the connect this thought back to its (for me) Deleuzian roots, I reread Deleuze's essay "How Do Recognize Structuralism?". Back when I was reading Difference & Repetition, my attention was drawn to this particular essay by Levi R. Bryant's comments. It functions almost as a summary of Deleuze's ideas in DR and LOS. It also fits particularly well in the context of Tasic and Derrida. Since (contrary to perceptions here in Amerika) I find Deleuze a very systematic thinker, I thought that perhaps this essay could help me flesh out my rather simplistic metaphor. And indeed in the essay Deleuze does indeed describe something that acts very much like a vortex, which he calls "the empty square". But the way he approaches this idea -- by putting it at the end of his discussion of structuralism, despite the fact that he considers this element the very foundation of structural thinking -- encourages me to approach the question from a new angle. Let's see how that process unfolds.
Perhaps the place to begin is by examining the problem that Deleuze addresses in this essay. He says that we can only recognize structuralism by asking what it is that the structuralists themselves recognize in their various domains they study. In answer to this question, Deleuze points out that linguistics is always considered the foundation of structuralism for good reason; what structuralists recognize -- regardless of whether this is in a culture (Levi-Strauss), an economy (Althusser), an epistemology (Foucault), or the unconscious (Lacan) -- is always a language. Indeed, "language" and "structure" are almost synonymous. Consider our commonplace notion that there is a "genetic language". What we mean by this is that the genome is not simply a random collection of A, C, G, and T base pairs, but a structured one, where differences in this code are systematically tied to differences in phenotype. Because of this structure, we can see the genotype as a different way of describing the phenotype. Basically, a language is something that puts two different levels or orders into correspondence. This is also exactly how spoken language works -- by correlating some vocalized sounds with some ideas in our heads. And this correlation is the basis of our language's ability to mean anything at all. We might say that it is the "condition of possibility" of meaning in general. So, ultimately, the problem Deleuze addresses is how something any meaningful language is possible.
Traditionally, at least when it comes to spoken language, we have a simple answer to this question. Meaning is possible because there is a subject who understands what words represent. Today, it's obvious that this explanation is a cop-out because it packs all of the mechanism of meaning into the mysterious interior of the subject. So we can refine Deleuze's question a little further: how can a meaningful system be constructed in a world where the concept of meaning is not already given? One of the presuppositions of Deleuze's whole philosophy is that things like meaning, identity, and the subject must be constructed, that their behavior must be explained by the working of some mechanism that does not invoke them as a principle. In this context, "mechanism", "structure", and "language" are all synonyms. And all of these will have to operate below or prior to the level of meaning. They will seek to explain how we build the meaningful out of the meaningless. The analogous question in a Buddhist context would seem to be: how is form possible in a world of emptiness?
When I state the problem this way, I see more clearly how superior Deleuze's essay is to Derrida's contemporary reflections on structuralism. Derrida spends many pages deconstructing Saussure's linguistics and demonstrating how he relied on some idea of the interior "thought-sound" that spoken language was meant to represent. While I haven't read any Saussure, this seems to all be valid criticism. But it risks missing the forest for the trees. Saussure's major contribution -- the founding idea of structuralism -- was to point out that there is an actual mechanism to this representation. Spoken language consists of a series of arbitrary phonemes distinguished only by their differences from one another. So it doesn't represent thought by assigning each complete thought or each concept an external marker in some one-to-one correspondence. This would obviously require the understanding or thinking subject that we just discussed. Instead, language works by coding thought in a string of different sounds. It's true that Saussure seems to have sometimes taken for granted the simple unity, presence, and reality of the original internal thought. But just reading Derrida's account doesn't allow us to appreciate the huge step forward that Saussure has made by observing that the signifiers in language are not words but phonemes. These units don't directly represent or correspond to anything. Their only role is to differ from one another. Hence Saussure can famously say, "there are only differences without positive terms". Despite his criticism, Derrida's philosophy owes its whole existence to this idea.
What's more, all this deconstructing, all this obsession with crossing out the presumed origin of language in "pure" thought, leaves us almost completely unable to see how language could actually be, you know, constructed. And wasn't this the original question? Because, actually, language does carry meaning. It just doesn't do it the way we naively presume it does when we take the concept of meaning for granted. Deleuze tries to give us something like a new meaning for "meaning", whereas Derrida comes close to abandoning the concept altogether (while of course continuing to use it "sous rature", which is a fancy way of saying 'with scare quotes'). In fairness to Derrida, towards the end of his essay Linguistics and Grammatology, he does make some allusions to a positive theory. He suggests that what he calls "the trace" or "arche-writing" provides for the fact that language does actually distinguish an interior signified from an exterior signifier.
If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc..., belongs to the very movement of signification, then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed or not, in one form or another, in a "sensible" and "spatial" element that is called "exterior." Arche-writing, at first the possibility of the spoken word, then of the "graphie" in the narrow sense, the birthplace of "usurpation," denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, "spatial" and "objective" exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé, without difference as temporalisation, without the nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present. Metaphor would be forbidden. (pg.70 in this edition)
The takeaway from this monstrous prose is that "difference as temporalization" (différance) works as a sort of absence-within-presence or an unoriginality-within-origin that gives birth to both sides of these conjoined opposites in a single movement. Derrida, again with fairly vague allusions, relates this non-dual différance to Heidegger's concept of time and Freud's idea of repression. Time, it seems, is some sort of ongoing distinguishing process that literally produces a structured stream of differences and differences within differences, the most fundamental of which is the two sides necessary to constitute a language. I think Deleuze's concept of fractal time better describes this structure than Heidegger's analysis of the temporality of dasein, but these are clearly at least related ideas.
At its core, the structural mechanism that Deleuze uses to explain the possibility of meaning shares some similarities with Derrida's theory of différance. Both hypothesize that the two sides required for meaning are produced by the differentiation of a single, structural, element. Signifier and signified, subject and object, interior and exterior are the effects of the operation of the structure. Both also characterize this element as a sort of paradoxical object. Derrida's "nonpresense of the other inscribed within the sense of the present" corresponds to what Deleuze's essay calls the "empty square" that is always missing from its place. Throughout his writing Deleuze gives many names to his object. It's the aleatory point, the dark precursor, the BwO, and the plane of consistency. This variety of names is fitting for something that does not have a stable identity of its own. Ultimately this element is difference-in-itself, which keeps on differing from itself. The fact that difference is never what or where or when it is, so to speak, means that it is always displaced from itself, always circulating and moving. We can see the same structure in Hyde's gift or Loy's lack. Such circulation is the animating force of the structure, and this movement draws up an abstract space of spatial, temporal, and semantic possibilities. We might sum up by saying that difference corresponds to the one (or better the zero) that becomes two -- the thing which all the non-dual awareness philosophies seem to point at.
So far, we've made some progress relating Deleuze to Derrida, Hyde, and the concept of emptiness. The vortex we started with is created by the continual circulation of an empty place. As soon as one instantiation of this element fills in the place, the element itself, as a sort of placeholder, moves elsewhere. There's a sort of permanent disequilibrium or asymmetry involved in emptiness which creates a sense of motion that isn't in time so much as constitutes time itself. In this way, a single element, albeit paradoxical and multiple within itself, breaks down into a whole series of places, an entire field of differences. As I mentioned earlier, Deleuze does not begin with this analysis of the empty place, but build up to it as a climax (in "The Sixth Criterion: The Empty Square", pg. 184). Now that we've seen how the story ends, we can see better that his real contribution here is the whole apparatus he creates to help us understand how emptiness can structure form. All of the first five criteria were about the structure of this field of difference and the ordering of places within a series. If emptiness itself can't be described, we can instead spend most of our time discussing the way that it informs form.
Since I don't know whether I'm going to describe Deleuze's structure in detail, I want to make sure I state the takeaway upfront. Though he doesn't mention it in this essay, the basic metaphor here is embryogenesis. The undifferentiated egg gradually becomes the adult organism through a cascade of increasingly fine differentiations. There is a fractal cascade of difference from the difference in-itself of the empty square, to the qualitative difference between relations and singularities in the structure, to the field of quantitative differential relations between the elements themselves, and all the way down to the differentiation this structure provides to the actual. The goal of this complex theory is to allow us to say some more about difference-in-itself, to help us see how this idea of emptiness has a structure of its own, a recursive, nested, hierarchical structure that allows it to 'take form'. Deleuze creates concepts that allow us to express the idea that emptiness cannot be only a single, smooth, undifferentiated thing. Difference in-itself must contain difference, in itself. This recursive and non-dual structure is a requirement of any theory of immanence.
The whole sequence is encapsulated in Deleuze's idea of a T versus C spectrum of difference that stretches from the virtual to the actual. On one end, emptiness is a pure differential flux, an instantaneous cut or missing piece that rejoins the two asymmetrical sides of time. It is highly differenTiated in the sense of a mathematical derivative or singularity. But in itself, it is a nothing that can become everything, a sort of degree zero or un-differenCiated egg. On the other end, forms fill the structure and become fully differenCiated and reified into static objects. Time is then reduced to the un-differenTiated laminar and linear flow of a subject. I've presented this as moving from the empty egg as cause to the full forms as effect. But of course we can also think of it the other way around. At each level, distinct forms are joined by the emptiness between them. It is the empty square that animates the structure, establishes a continuity between the differentiated parts, and allows us to ascend from the actual to the virtual. In this context we might speak of a Deleuzian 'deconstruction' that always shows us a third thing, a transcendental precondition of the distinct things posited at each of the levels. In fact, this is how he opens the essay, by considering the way structuralism adds the symbolic to the commonplace distinction between the real and the imaginary.
And I think I'll leave it at that. There's a lot of apparatus in "How do we recognize Structuralism?". It's all interesting, but to really do it justice, I would need to read each of the structuralist writers he discusses as well as reread parts of Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense. But this apparatus changes again and again in the development of Deleuze's philosophy. The only crucial thing that is conserved in every iteration is the idea that: 1) a paradoxical element structures a nested field of difference, and 2) the first 'level' of this field (beyond the degree zero of the field of fields itself) is a distinction between its differential relations and its singularities. These seem to function like alternate perspectives on the same field which "symbolize with" one another (pg. 177). Perhaps these two are the minimum requirements of a philosophy of immanence?
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1. This description is inspired by my vague memory of how Tucker Peck once described not-self or emptiness or lack of essential nature or something like that. Everything is made up of stuff that is not that thing. I imagine that this description was aimed directly at the problem of infinite regress entailed in our typically homuncular sense of self. It's another way of stating Nozick's idea that the only explanations that actually explain anything are invisible-hand explanations. Since a vortex is in some sense nothing but moving particles, this description applies well. However, on another level we might argue that the constituent particles themselves are vortices as well, made up of the interaction of even smaller particles, and so on ... This strategy makes a virtue of infinite regress by suggesting that it's turtles all the way down. This idea of a "good infinity", the infinity within the finite, is fascinating to me. A simple iterative process produces the astonishing complexity of a fractal or the continuum or the results of a meditating on "who am I?". What theoretically seems like a boring copy of a copy of ... turns out to be remarkably fecund in practice.
