Claire Colebrook
Department of English Literature
University of Edinburgh
Claire.Colebrook@ed.ac.uk
The relation between mathematics and man may thus be conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or measuring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing human events, and, on the other, that of developing as various human events the conditions of a problem.
–Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense 55.
As early as 1969, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze was already taking the possibility of structuralism, as a distribution of singularities, beyond the death of man to the specifically human event. Whereas the mathematical had already been targeted by Heidegger in What is a Thing? as that which determined Being in advance as the measuring of beings, Deleuze suggests another realization of mathematical potential. Not only can the human be situated in a field of singularities; one can also extend a singularity as human. That is, one can think or develop a singular potential or event in life to the point where human thought extends itself beyond any already constituted image of “man.” In this paper I want to argue for the ways in which Deleuze’s project extends, and describes, two dimensions: on the one hand, Deleuze describes a space that unfolds from points effected through differentiation and is thus critical of any simple structuralism that would reduce a field to a single (or differentiated) space (Difference 206). On the other hand, Deleuze argues that once spaces have been actualized (say, in a closed system), this then allows for a thought–or extension of human potential–to spatiality in general. Indeed it is sense, a potential of language or the proposition, which opens a surface or plane that is fully neutral (Logic 31). Thus one may move from this or that constituted sense or term within a structure, to sense as such, a surface that is liberated from any denoted being. For Deleuze, then, the human or the potential of the brain is always more than a constituted image within sense; it is also that image that allows us to think the potential of imaging as such (Negotiations 42). I will argue that we need to add a deterritorialized humanity to Deleuze’s criticisms of man. Just as Foucault’s genealogy of man was accompanied by an affirmation of the self as that which can turn back upon itself, problematize itself, and thereby open new ways of thought, so Deleuze will affirm Foucault’s “superman” who no longer turns back upon himself but opens out to forces that will “free life” from “within himself” (Foucault 132).
The possibility that the “man,” whose being seems so self-evident and whose nature provides the object of modern knowledge and the human sciences, will one day be erased as a figure in thought is precisely what Foucault’s genealogy of the human sciences in The Order of Things sets out to entertain. Will we be able to imagine a power or thought that no longer emanates from a grounding life, that no longer signifies a receding sense whose order we can neither fully read nor definitively flee? For Foucault, such a possibility is tied to a re-imagining of space. Rather than a presumed surface across which the terms of our knowledge are inscribed, we might examine the ways in which various desires to know are produced by (and produce) a prior plane, table or “a priori” within which we think. Indeed, as Deleuze notes in his work on Foucault, to think requires moving beyond formations of knowledge and dispersed visibilities to the “non-place” from which “what we see” and “what we say” emerge (Foucault 38). This “outside” is not spatially separated from the world we inhabit; rather, the “outside” is nothing more than the relations of forces through which we live, see, and say (Foucault 84). There is space, the experience of space, only because of a non-spatial “outside” that is nothing more than a play of forces (Foucault 86).
In quite different ways from Foucault, Derrida also imagines an “end of man” but simultaneously recognizes that such an end or “outside” is internal to the space of Western knowledge: man is that being who, while existing spatially within this world, is also always the point from which spatiality is seen to emerge. For Derrida, the idea of the end of man, or the dream of overcoming or existing elsewhere than within the human, is thoroughly internal to a Western metaphysic that has folded itself in such a way as to incorporate any remainder. Western metaphysics is not an opinion or image of man so much as a striving to grasp the genesis of all imagery, and in this sense presupposes an ideal space in which a subject who is never merely human grasps the essence of a finite humanity. As Derrida notes in his early work on Husserl, the very idea of a truth above and beyond any specific culture or epoch–the idea of moving beyond “man” in his finite, located and concrete sense–posits a potential and “architectonic” humanity, a self-constituting and self-disclosing horizon within which and from which any specific world or space can be lived.1 The end of any “end of man” or the overcoming of any teleology, for Derrida, requires thinking the possibility of a differential movement that is neither spatial nor temporal, neither inside nor outside.
It would seem possible to add one more figure to these critical reflections on man: the Deleuze for whom inhuman durations are the future of thought, and who imagines (with Guattari) a thousand plateaus and multiple regimes of signs, the majority of which are beyond the range of human life. In this paper I want to look at the way Deleuze, with Guattari, criticizes the image of man and its concomitant subordination of space to extension; I will also, on the other hand, argue that Deleuze regards the human, but not man, as bearing a potential to imagine space intensively. Here, Deleuze draws on the non-dialectical intuitionism of Bergson. In Creative Evolution, Bergson argues that life bears two tendencies. In order to act or further itself, life spatializes itself. That is, in order to act on the world, we need to grasp it as remaining the same through time, as extended rather than in a continual state of creation and energetic exertion (or intensity). All life moves forward and acts in order to maximize itself but it must also, in a countermovement and in order to save energy, form habits or regularities that remain the same. For Bergson, a problem emerges when the human mind, so determined to master its opposing world, reduces itself to a spatial and extended thing within the world, rather than a creative and temporally dynamic force. So, the idea of “man” as an object of nature may have enabled all sorts of progressive benefits for science and function, but as long as man is a thing within space he will never fully realize his capacity to become. Only when humanity recognizes itself as creative of space will it overcome the image it has formed of itself as “man.” To put it schematically, we might say that while Foucault resists positing a life or unity from which spaces emerge, and while Derrida insists on a radical disparity that the thought of space and time can only reduce, Deleuze retains some of Bergson’s sense of the positive intuition of the inhuman. We can, and should, move beyond constituted space and systems to the thought of spatiality as such; this will not only yield duration–or the times through which various spaces are realized–but will also intensify space.2 Space will differ within itself according to the lives that occupy it. Whereas Bergson sees humanity as fulfilling itself in its capacity to intuit durations or pulsations of life other than its own (Creative Evolution 271), Deleuze and Guattari grant this role to philosophy. While A Thousand Plateaus insists that each plane of life–from linguistics and genetics to art and science–stratifies and gives form to difference (271), What is Philosophy? also insists that thinking about the potentials of art, science and philosophy will take us from constituted images of man and thought to the virtual plane, the abstract machine, or difference itself.
In this paper I therefore wish to move beyond a possible perceived dualism in the work of Deleuze and Guattari by drawing attention to the specific mode of their dualism, a dualism that is on its way to a monism and that therefore overcomes the rigidity of man, not through dispersal, but through the affirmation of thinking. The way to move beyond “man” to thought is twofold: first, to see “man” not as an error or illusion but as a formation that has enabled the mastery and extension of space; second, to see this production of man positively, as one of the ways in which life stratifies itself. And once this is done one might move beyond the particular image of man to the power of imaging as such. That is, one moves beyond this or that affect, this or that event of force or relations, to the thought of relationality, the plane of immanence.
There is a perception we could have in reading Deleuze and Guattari that the molecular is good, while the molar is bad, that affect is liberating and mobilizing while meaning or conceptuality is rigidifying. Such a moralizing reading would be enabled by placing Deleuze and Guattari in the tradition of post-1968 difference thinkers who resist the lure of identity and who, supposedly, grant an essential radicalism to the non-semantic per se. On such an understanding, conceptuality, ideality, and form are ways of retarding and normalizing the flow and force of life, while the random, singular, or unthought release life into its open and infinite potentiality. The relation between time and space would, accordingly, also be historicized and politicized. Philosophy has privileged a uniform space of points, a space that may be measured or striated precisely because any point in space is equivalent to and interchangeable with any other. These points are achieved either by the division or uniform matter, or by the location of bodies across the plane of matter. Time is then regarded as the measure of movement or points within this uniform field. Western metaphysics has always privileged a fixed world of forms, a spatial unity and a pre-given order over the processes and events that produce that order. When we read Deleuze and Guattari’s seeming celebration of smooth over striated space (A Thousand Plateaus 353), of multiple plateaus rather than a line of history (393), of artisans rather than architects (402), and of nomadology rather than sedentary phenomenology (380), this would seem to suggest that we move from a dualism that privileges a founding term–spatial coordinates, measuring time, order–to an affirmation of the singularities from which all dualisms and orders emerge. Like Derridean deconstruction, we would recognize any moral or binary opposition as effected from a differential field not governed by any dominant term. In terms of space this would seem to suggest that space, far from being a field within which points are mapped, is better conceived as a plane of singular affects and events that is, in Western thought, reactively coded as one general territory.
What I want to stress here, however, is that the emphasis in post-Deleuzean theory on affect, singularities and nomadology misses the affirmative understanding of sense, mind and philosophy that sits alongside Deleuze’s critical project. Throughout his work Deleuze is at pains to point out that he is not advocating a “return” to primitivism, and this has been accepted well enough. However, the celebration of the minor term in Deleuze and Guattari’s non-dualist binaries does seem to suggest a preference for the affective, singular, haptic and embodied over sense, conceptuality and ideality. What I would suggest, though, is that there is another problem in the post-1968 affirmation of difference: the problem or positive possibility of the whole, the power of a singular thought to imagine space in general. Certainly, poststructuralism concerned itself with the disruptive question of genesis: how is any field, system of differences, or plane of knowable terms generated, and how does one term explain, and thereby occlude, the genesis of any structure? But there is also an affirmation of the structural possibility of this genesis: how does any field or set of relations produce a point or image of that which exceeds the set? According to Derrida, such a question–the question of the origin–has never been asked in a truly radical manner. For Foucault, history is just the various forms such a question takes: how do we understand or determine what counts as the field of knowledge and its relations? How is the a priori unfolded historically? For Deleuze and Guattari, it is time to approach the problem of genesis and structure differently (A Thousand Plateaus 242): a structure is a set of external relations, the way in which life is viewed or generated from some point. A structure is one side of a stratification; the other side is that which is structured, but this determinable content is not undifferentiated or formless. And so for Deleuze and Guattari we need to move beyond structures on one side and structured on the other to the abstract machine from which both are unfolded. This would mean taking account of the process of differentiation–the dynamic unfolding of difference–that subtends differentiation, or the actual and realized distinctions between terms (Difference and Repetition 206-07). It should be possible to think immanent tendencies, the way in which different expressions of life unfold different spaces, relations, fields, or trajectories, “the immanent power of corporeality in all matter” (A Thousand Plateaus 411).
Genesis and Structure
Structuralism presented itself as a break with the Western epoch of metaphysics that had grounded beings and identities upon some prior plane from which they emerge; differences were no longer differences within space. Rather than accepting that differences were grounded on a prior order and distributed across a field, structuralism described the emergence of any field from the differentiation of points or terms. The idea of difference without positive terms allows us to imagine a differentiating field that produces points only in relation to each other, denying them any intrinsic orientation. Space would, then, be the effect of a synthesis of points, not a container or ground. Space is the effect of relations. This would apply both to space in a metaphorical sense, such as the space or field of a grammar or social structure, and literal space. Geometry is not a pre-given and ideal order of a space that bears its own laws; rather, our space is constituted through the sense we make of it, the mapping of our field of orientation. Structure therefore privileges external relations or movements over points. There is nothing in any point or being itself (no intrinsic relation) that would determine how it behaves or constitutes itself in relation to other points. However, as long as structure is seen in terms of a differentiating system of pure relations it fails to account for the genesis or internal difference of those relations.
While Deleuze also insists on the externality of relations–that nothing fully determines how any potential will be actualized–he refuses to reduce relations to a single structure. Rather, life is a plane of potentialities or tendencies that may be actualized in certain relations but that could also produce other relations, other worlds. We can make this concrete by way of a very crude example. The power to be perceived as located in geometrical space–to be actualized in a system of relations between points–is certainly one way in which a body or matter might be actualized. So, a line that makes up a grid on a plan or diagram is a line by virtue of this realized set of relations. But such a line might also be drawn on a canvas, overlaid with other lines or set aside blocks of color, no longer being a line but becoming other than itself–a shading or border. This means that there is a potential for sense (within, say, linearity) that cannot be exhausted by any single relation. In contrast with the idea that space or the world is constructed from sense–socially or culturally constituted–spatiality opens sense, for any location bears the potential to open up new planes, new orientations. Rather than seeing space as effected from sense, as realized from a system of orientation or intending, Deleuze sees spatiality as an opening of sense, as the potential to create new problems.
Deleuze is critical of the subject of philosophy for whom space is a form imposed on the world, but he is also resistant to reducing space to actually constituted spatial planes. What needs to be thought is not this or that plane, nor this or that realized system of relations, but the potential to produce planes, the “planomenon” and our capacity to think or encounter that potential.
To a certain extent this problem is also captured in Derrida’s problem of thinking that which occurs “before” oppositions between genesis and structure, between active and passive, between time and space, or between the point and the line. Terry Eagleton recently “corrected” what he took to be a widespread misreading of Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text.” What this really means, Eagleton explained, is not that everything is language or discourse but that nothing can be conceived without relation to something else. But it is just this “without relation” that is the most crucial dimension of Derrida’s thought. A space or a sequence of time relates one point to another, carries over or traces in the absolutely singular an anticipation of that which will remain the same. What needs to be thought are not sets of relations but the tearing of the singular from itself, the way in which any point to be established as a point must already be transgressed, traced, marked or divided from itself by the anticipation of some continuing identity. “Before” there can be a hierarchical relation or difference between terms there must be the establishment of some point of stability, some marking or tracing of that from which relations might then be thought. Relations in their external or structural form–relations among terms, such as a spatial field–depend upon a non-relation. The point, the singular, the unique or the purely present which we imagine as the original substance before differences and relations, must already have departed from itself without relation, retrieval, or re-presentation (Derrida, EH 151). To establish a present, as present, as bearing an identity or mark that can then be thought or related to some other point or present, the present must already “announce” the infinite, go beyond itself, not be itself.
Derrida is at once critical of Western thought’s tendency to regard the singular as inevitably fulfilled or made fully present only in the thought of some representable whole. There is an “architectonic” impulse in metaphysics, regarding as properly present only that which can be re-thought, brought to consciousness and rendered universal and transparent to thought in general (EH 99). What cannot be thought is the non-relational, those tremors, potentials or movements that fail to be actualized. Accordingly, when Derrida affirms textuality, he is not arguing for the construction of a language or system that would “mediate” reality; nor is he arguing for the fact that everything is already bound up in some set of relations. On the contrary, Derrida attends to the singularity of space, the ways in which texts produce specific relations or points from which some plane or field is then effected, such that the ground is effected by the traversal or spacing of the gramme. Inscription is not the inscription of a surface, nor the synthesis of self-sufficient points; it is the production of surface and point from each other, from “différance which is neither punctual (unique, self-present and self-identical) nor continuous (a synthesised and unified whole awaiting division)” [Dissemination 206].
Like Deleuze and Foucault, then, Derrida is critical of a subjectivism that would ground structures or spaces in some outside producing term. Where Derrida differs markedly from Deleuze and Guattari’s “geology” is in his insistence on necessity. Metaphysics, or the inability to think difference itself is necessary; insofar as we think and speak we have always already located ourselves within a structure. One can only think the outside critically. In this regard Derrida shares with Foucault an ability to think of language freeing itself from its closed system alongside a refusal to consider life‘s power to deterritorialize itself (Deleuze, Foucault 131). In structuralism the removal of any ground liberates difference but fails to think or confront the emergence of difference and the distinct ways in which different epochs (Foucault, Order 326) or different texts (as in Derrida’s Dissemination) produce a plane or space upon which difference and structure are thought. In the case of both structuralism and its preceding epochs, what fails to be considered is epochality as such: how a field, plane, surface, or ground of thought is generated. Whereas pre-structuralist thought takes difference to be the mapping and relating of distinct terms–terms that dictate a certain order of relations–structuralism posits an external system from which relations are determined.
This is Foucault’s great argument in The Order of Things. Whereas order had always been seen as dependent on some prior ground, either the divine sense of the cosmos or the specific logic of natural organisms, languages or political economies, modern thought discovers one distinct ground–life–from which all structures and relations flow (Order 317). All genesis and becoming have been referred back to a space, plane, ground, or unity. An equivocity is thereby established such that the differences among beings may be accounted for on the basis of some other being (327). Life unfolds itself by producing various structures, all of which point back to an origin that bears an entirely other sense (278). Languages have a logic not present to speakers, labor is effected by laws and relations outside its intentions, and various organisms are determined by forces, such as evolution, which are radically distinct from the desires of this or that body. “Life” is just that generating ground from which all specific structures emerge. There is now a single metaphorical plane explaining all modes of difference, and this is mapped by a literal space of normalization. For Foucault, the modern study of life precludes the thought of distinct and incommensurable territories. There is one space, the space of life, unfolding itself though the same global logic (318). Working against this assumption of a life from which various structures emerge, and critical of the projects of structuralism and phenomenology, which wish to explain space as effected from the orientation of life and consciousness, Foucault turned to spatial events. If one could think space as an event, as unfolded from specific relations (relations that also produce the terms that relate), then one would look to how distributions of space (in the literal sense) produce a plane or table (in the non-literal sense). Prisons and hospitals allowed for the study of humanity–producing a point of knowledge and a soul to be studied–and thereby constitute a space of man (man as the animal that allows space to be measured, synthesized, mapped or constituted). All bodies as manifestations of this one life are subject to the same laws. One can thereby see all specific political territories and norms as reducible to transcendental and translatable criteria.
Derrida has also, but with quite different approaches and exits, challenged the unity of the transcendental field by insisting that every text, both literally and figuratively, not only generates a set of relations but also requires or generates a point (a supplementary, excessive or exorbitant term) from which such relations are understood to flow. For Derrida, deconstruction is not itself a method so much as an inhabitation and solicitation of all those texts that present their structures, differences, borders or relations, while repressing that which generates structure. There will always be, within any field or space, a closed set of terms and an unthinkable supplementary term that borders or closes the set. If we imagine how this might provoke the practice of spatial arts, such as architecture, then we can follow Mark Wigley by suggesting that any experienced or actual space must repress, forget or disavow that spatializing tracing which marks out the border between inside and outside, which generates the field but cannot be located within the field (191). More concretely one could strive, as Bernard Tschumi has done, to bring this thought of quasi-transcendental difference into practice. Le Parc de la Villette aims to decenter space by producing a distribution of points without hierarchy. According to Tschumi, the various points that create the grid system of the park preclude the thought of a center or realized intention. Without hierarchy or center the various points will then enter into a series of multiple relations, such that the character of the space produced is not determined or organized beforehand. Further, by overlaying other distributions such as a series of surfaces and then a series of lines, no system of distributions is elevated above any other; unity is avoided. The points therefore work against a dominating ratio that would present space as an expression of design–certainly not the expression of a subject. If the points were in some ways pure form or pure difference, this would be a set of relations without positive terms, without overarching form, allowing other systems of relations–including actions and the participation of other designers–to produce new relations. Most significantly, Tschumi insists that the “project aims to unsettle both memory and context,” and is therefore exemplary of a resistance to the idealization of space, the use or experience of space in terms of an ideal sense that would precede its punctual event:
Not a plenitude, but instead "empty" form; les cases sont vide La Villette, then aims at an architecture that means nothing, an architecture of the signifier rather than the signified--one that is pure trace or the play of language ... a dispersed and differentiated reality that marks an end to the utopia of unity (Tschumi viii).
In contrast to this pure distribution and relation of points–“differentiated reality”– Deleuze puts forward the idea of external relations that cannot be confused with the singular powers from which those relations are effected. Relations are not the effect of a process of differentiation or distribution. Rather, the power to differ expresses itself differently in each of its produced relations, with each effected point or term bearing a power to exceed itself, and to establish a new relation that would then create a new space. Put more concretely, we might imagine a certain power to differ–light–producing a spectrum of colors, such that these differences are effects of this intensity of difference; but we then might imagine colors entering into relation with the eye, thereby producing a visibility that can create new terms and new relations. Any space or plane, then, is the unfolding of matter, with relations being effected by specific expressions, which are events of specific powers to relate:
There is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of the ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather "haptic," a sonorous much more than a visual space. The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartography. (A Thousand Plateaus 382)
This is what Deleuze draws from Spinoza: if life is desire or striving, and has no static being outside this striving, then encounters or relations need to be referred back to desires or intrinsic powers to differ.3 There are not points or positive terms that are differentiated or distributed in a uniform space; nor is there spatiality or punctualization as such which can only be thought after the event. Rather, each relation is expressive of a power that bears a potential to enter into further relations. A field is not a distribution of points so much as the striving of powers to become, and each power becomes as this or that quality. Qualities depend upon, but do not exhaust, the potentials actualized in each encounter.
Even so, while this yields an affirmation of the affective or material over the formal, the production of space rather than its orienting sense, there is also an affirmation in Deleuze’s work of the thought, philosophy, and sense of affect. Indeed, Deleuze’s historical work with Guattari offers a genealogy of globalism: how certain affects such as the white face, viewing, subjective eyes, and laboring and subjected body constitute the “man” of modernity and single territory of capitalism. There is nothing radical per se about affect, but the thought of affect–the power of philosophy or true thinking to pass beyond affects and images to the thought of differential imaging, the thought of life in its power to differ–is desire, and is always and necessarily radical.4 The power of art not just to present this or that affect, but to bring us to an experience of any affect whatever or “affectuality”–or that there is affect–is ethical: not a judgment upon life so much as an affirmation of life.
Space in General
In this section I want to look back at Derrida’s and Foucault’s original encounters with the peculiarly modern understanding of space to which they both respond in order to make two points, the first critical, the second constructive. Both Derrida and Foucault are concerned with the emergence of a transcendental understanding of space as an historical event, but mobilizations of their work have tended to reinforce the very transcendentalism they problematize. Furthermore, while Deleuze’s work has often been read as amenable to the already undertaken mobilization of Derrida’s and Foucault’s criticisms of transcendental space, Deleuze’s expressionism actually demands and affirms an understanding of space that is entirely at odds with the dissolution of qualitative space that is seen to be postmodern. Deleuze’s concepts of the molecular, affect, haecceity, and multiplicity, far from striving to think a spatiality that lies outside the field it determines, allow the thought of a self-distributing plane, a space that unfolds itself, and that does not require and expel a supplementary absent and spatializing force. Deleuze’s difference is not radically anterior and unthinkable; it is the immanent pulsation of life that expresses itself infinitely and that can be affirmed in the thought of life.
The idea of space as the effect of a radically absent force of spatialization that lies outside the field it spaces–even while this outside can only be thought as outside once terms are spatialized–is itself a peculiar event, affect and multiplicity. Why is it that today we see ourselves as subjected to the signifier, as inhabiting a law or system of relations imposed by an Other who does not exist? There is, if you like, a space of white Oedipal man, a space that has expressed itself in a pure geometry, a geometry oriented by the sense of a space that would be the law for any body whatever, a space that is nothing more than a capacity for axiomatic repetition. In response to this space of man and pure geometry, Deleuze suggests that far from returning to a primitive geometry, and far from adding one more dimension to the plane that might allow us to think space in general, we ought to multiply the dimensions of space in order to maximize its power. From that critical endeavor we can then go on to ask, as Deleuze and Guattari will do, what a plane is such that it can think its own folds and dimensions. Philosophy creates the plane of thought which, in its Deleuzean form, strives to think the emergence of all planes, and this is why A Thousand Plateaus can describe life through planes of science, geometry, geology, literature, politics, metallurgy, history, and linguistics: all the ways in which life folds upon itself in order to imagine and give form to itself, all the different matters of form, all the ways in which matter manners or articulates itself.5
The Space of Man
Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry” was both a response to the reduction of truth and space to the human sciences and the occasion for two of the most profound meditations on space of the last century: Derrida’s Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction and Foucault’s The Order of Things. Both of these works were, ostensibly, critiques of the very project of a science of man. Both Derrida and Foucault pointed out that any explanation of spatiality and temporality from the finite point of view of the human animal would also be a repression of that dispersion or spatiality that allows man to be. Man can see himself only as the point of view from which space and time emerge if this space and time are, to use Foucault’s terms, a Same which divides itself in order to produce man in its fold (Order 330). In the modern complex of man as an empirical-transcendental being, man’s various fields of activity and knowledge are regarded as epiphenomena of a single life, a ground from which difference unfolds (Order 279). For Foucault, Husserl’s phenomenology, despite its critique of the human sciences, is an expression of this modern logic of man: transcendental consciousness is just that which both differentiates itself in various structures but can also turn back and comprehend itself by recognizing this space of life. For Derrida, Husserl’s phenomenology expresses the tendency of metaphysics per se, a metaphysics that has always privileged the telos of a single and architectonic logic of space (EH 99). Geometry in its pure form, particularly when it recognizes itself as the capacity to produce space as an ideal form, discloses a consciousness that can imagine itself as constituting a general horizon of humanity, a logic that is infinitely repeatable and forever capable of retrieving the sense of its origin.
For Derrida, Husserl’s rigorous thought of the origin of geometry was typical of, and a fulfillment of, Western philosophy as such. On the one hand, one cannot reduce formal truths, such as the truths of geometry, to this or that particular culture, epoch, or individual psyche. What Euclid perceives is not just this space here with its finite properties but a future potentiality of all space for any subject whatever. Formal truth perceives in the here and now what may be repeated, or what marks this present with a possibility that pertains to any point in time or space whatever. Geometry is therefore the movement of sense and history, perceiving in this space what may be actualized and repeated in the future (EH 135). This formalization therefore seems to presuppose or require the idea of humanity in general, a space of man that may always be represented. The truths of geometry are not handed down as meaningless or arbitrary systems; they have sense only if their purposive orientation or lived meaning can be lived again, renewed and repeated with further sense. On the other hand, while insisting that formal truth cannot just be reduced to a human event within history, and that truths of space transcend this or that particular psyche, Husserl also acknowledges that without some inscription or synthesis by some consciousness, such truths would never have been constituted or brought to presence (EH 78). Without the synthesizing process of consciousness that can mark in this here and now a possibility that may be reactivated through time, and that may be sustained by an imagined humanity to come, space and truth would remain as unactivated potential, never brought to life, never capable of truly being (EH 153).6
Derrida makes two critical points with regard to this Husserlian project. The first has to do with Husserl’s claim for consciousness in general. When the geometer perceives the truths of space he experiences the world no longer as this finite and concrete here and now. Although he must inhabit some actual present, he experiences this present as if it were already carried into the future, beyond his own life. This point, this here and now, is anticipated as operating under the same logic for all those others who will follow. The constitution of formal truth and space relies on an Idea of humanity, a community of sense, who will both retain the repetition of geometry in its formal language and be capable of reanimating those original formalizations (EH 80). One does not just repeat the truths of geometry as so much received text; it must always be possible to perceive the truth of their genesis, and to re-live from this present, the sense of the living present of Euclid or their original founder. On the one hand the origin in ancient Greece must be accidental and inessential, for Euclid transcribes a truth that pertains to any space and time whatever. On the other hand, one also has to acknowledge the absolute singularity of that founding space: that the ancient Greek moment was that point in time and space which gave birth to the idea of time and space in general, and therefore the history of the West.
Derrida’s second point moves from the problem of the constitution of truth in general from some particular moment to the essential imbrication of space and humanity with this moment of genesis. It is true that philosophy and Husserl’s argument depend avowedly on time, and a time that can always reanimate the true sense of the past (EH 90). That which cannot be repeated, recognized and represented, that which does not pertain to space or time in general, has less being and presence than the truth whose sense prescribes the dignity and power of consciousness. Truth is only truth with this ideal temporal dimension; to make a claim to formal truth is to produce what could be repeated by any consciousness whatever.
Derrida also draws attention, as Foucault will do, to the profound spatiality of Husserl’s argument. Before Husserl can explicitly establish this ideal temporality of tradition, this community of scientists or geometers who will be and must be capable of reactivating the original experience, he must presuppose a common space of humanity, a single plane of man that is capable of living its concrete and particular present from the point of view of any space whatever:
Geometry, in effect, is the science of what is absolutely objective--i.e., spatiality--in the objects that the Earth, our common place, can indefinitely furnish as our common ground with other men. . . . The transcendental Earth is not an object and can never become one. And the possibility of a geometry strictly complements the impossibility of what could be called a "geo-logy," the objective science of the Earth itself (EH 83).
All consciousness must in potential be transcendental consciousness, a consciousness with the power and will to perceive its world not as this or that particular here but as one ideal community of sense.
The very project of transcendental reactivation and comprehension, the project of returning to the opening of the Idea of the unity of the world in general, rests upon an idea of the western epoch. For it is only in the self-representation of Western science that there is an idea of truth freed from any particular region. Husserl takes all experience of specific beings “back” to the very sense of a “world” or unified horizon, which is there for me, for others, has been there for the past and will be there for the future. Infinity is “announced” in the experience, any experience, of space; but only the reflection on pure geometry and its history brings this passage to infinity to presence. The history of geometry discloses the condition for experience as such; in order to affirm that what I perceive now is true and present I already rely upon the idea of what could be repeated and affirmed by consciousness in general. Husserl’s phenomenology merely brings this implicit metaphysics and unified spirit of humanity to recognition. Even the non-comprehension or untranslatability of other cultures requires the recognition of them as cultures and therefore as within the same “life-world.” Husserl’s inclusion of time, being, and sense within the general horizon of concrete conscious life is, according to Derrida, the ethic of a necessarily transcendental tradition of philosophy. It is only with the notion of life in general, freed from any determined image of man, that there can be a) the ideality of mathematics and geometry and b) the transcendental phenomenology that accounts for how such ideal objects are constituted. For Derrida, though, this transcendental horizon of absolute consciousness as the history of all sense, or the transcendental history, which thinks of a truth in general, must always bear the traces of a determined, empirical, factual, or singular space. For Derrida, it is the assumption of an architectonic space, a space that can be formalized, a space whose sense is already oriented toward man as a logical and self-recognizing being that decides, in advance, the being of space.
Against the idea that Husserl completes the project of the West and that all philosophy takes the form of this ideal comprehension of space within humanity in general, Foucault historicizes and politicizes Husserl’s project (Order 325). For Foucault the profound spatiality of the Husserlian gesture can be delimited, for its experience of man is not only modern but also marks a radical break with a history of thought that could think of differences experienced by (but not reducible to) the human knower, that could think of the surface of knowledge that time traversed, without seeing difference and space as the unfolding of the Same (279). Further, Foucault sees the modern point at which space is explained transcendentally as tied to a peculiar mode of the political. What I want to bring out here are three provocative implications of Foucault’s history of transcendental space.
First is an idea we can borrow from Deleuze and which will allow us to move from Foucault to Deleuze; this is the opposition between univocity and equivocity.
Second is the idea of a specifically political reorientation with the folding of space into time.
Third is the relation between the affective genesis of space, or what Deleuze follows Husserl in calling “vague essences” (A Thousand Plateaus 367), and space’s formal neutralization and temporalization.
Univocity and Equivocity
Both Foucault’s The Order of Things and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus historicize the emergence of man, pointing out that man is not just one being in the world among others, even if the human knower has always been somehow privileged. Man is defined through what Deleuze will refer to as an equivocal ontology, or what Foucault will describe as an “ontology without metaphysics” (Order 340). That is, there is no longer a world of inherent or intrinsic differences which human knowledge may either come to know and map (as in the classical era) or which can be recognized and reflected in the self’s relation to a cosmos. For Foucault, prior to modernity, space is the surface upon which knowledge and difference are placed, and time allows those dispersed spaces–not to be constituted and synthesized–but to be recognized. In modernity, however, this world of dispersed differences is now torn apart by a point of opacity and radical difference. Being does not bear its own truth or metaphysics; there is a point outside being–life–that is other than the world but which gives the world its truth, order, or differentiation (Order 265). Difference and unfolding are located within man. To go back to Husserl’s argument for transcendental consciousness: we can no longer naively use the truths of geometry as though they simply represented the truth of space. We have to recognize the temporal constitution of these truths by consciousness. Consciousness is just a capacity for spatialization through time that can be recognized as having no proper space, and that must at once be located in a specific culture and epoch, but also differentiated in its potential from any concrete locale. Here, the difference, space, and surface of the world are unfolded from one point within the world–life–a point that can never have its space within the horizon it unfolds:
It is always against a background of the already begun that man is able to reflect on what may serve for him as origin. For man, then, origin is by no means the beginning--a sort of dawn of history from which his ulterior acquisitions would have accumulated. Origin, for man, is much more the way in which man in general, any man, articulates himself upon the already-begun of labour, life and language; it must be sought for in that fold where man in all simplicity applies his labour to a world that has been worked for thousands of years, lives in the freshness of his unique, recent and precarious existence a life that has its roots in the first organic formations, and composes into sentences which have never before been spoken (even though generation after generation has repeated them) words that are older than all memory. ... Far from leading back, or even merely pointing, towards a peak--whether real or virtual--of identity, far from indicating the moment of the Same at which the dispersion of the Other has not yet come into play, the original in man is that which articulates him from the outset upon something other than himself (Order 330-31).
It is in equivocal ontologies, according to Deleuze, that man as a signifying animal is the point from which system, difference, and structure are given. Man everywhere is subjected to the same formal structure of differences, law, exchange, and signification–with the world and real being nothing more than the plane upon which system takes hold. In modernity, one moves from expression to signification: from a world where differences are real and distinct and give birth to signs, to a world where each event has its ground and origin in one organizing system. From real and distinct differences one moves to formal difference, and to an idea of humanity that is nothing more than a formal function. Man is not a being within the world so much as a capacity to signify, exchange, and communicate.
It is not surprising that Deleuze, like Foucault, makes much of the pre-Kantian experience of multiple folds and spaces. In his book on Leibniz and the fold Deleuze draws attention to the ways in which the baroque played upon the intrinsic differences of possible perceptions. Each point in the world is a monad, a perception that unfolds the world from itself without the requirement of a shared and anticipated space that is synthesized into the future. To say that “monads have no windows” is to say that a world is perceived and unfolded without the assumption or presupposition of perception in general. One has not yet troubled oneself or given man the responsibility for the genesis of space from his own time; one has not yet seen each perceiver as the effect or sign of a perception in general. Perception is not the condition, genesis, or origin of the spatial and temporal world; there are spatialities and temporalities of each monad. At one end, God is the full and clear perception of all space; at the other, are the singular perceptions of infinity, each monad’s perceptual grasp of the infinite that transcends it. By contrast, modern “man” stands, not for one perceiver among others, but for a purely formal power to perceive that also bears the imperative to perceive as any subject whatever. The deterritorialization that frees the perception of space from its own locale is reterritorialized onto consciousness in general, the subject for whom space is everywhere subject to the same formal and geometric logic. Man speaks as one who is already subjected to a system that gives him being, and who must in essence already be tied to any other possible speaker:
The classical image of thought, and the striating of mental space it effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two "universals," the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and the Subject as the principle that converts being into being-for-us (A Thousand Plateaus 379).
From univocity, where space and perception are spread across a time and surface that transcends the human knower, equivocity establishes a single and formalizable condition of spatiality–the logic of the subject–which is both inescapable and unmasterable. Both Foucault and Deleuze note that this historical shift does not just have political implications but needs to be seen as the very negation of the political. Although they both have a common target–the equivocal ontology whereby consciousness is the substance from which the world’s spaces are constituted–Foucault and Deleuze differ as to the possibility of the re-politicization of space. We will deal with their arguments in turn.
In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that there have always been two ethical modes. The first takes the form of Stoicism or Epicureanism, which is civic and urban and decides how one ought to live according to who and where one is (Order 327-28). This yields a decided and specific morality of political identity, where the civic self is other than the bare or biological life from which he and the polis are distanced. In modernity, which is the second ethical mode, morality is no longer possible and man, far from being defined through a polity that sets itself off from mere life, now turns only to himself. Politics takes as its object life in general, or that which can and must be recognized in any body whatever. What had once been a spatial and explicitly political decision–the division between the civic body of law and the mere life of nature–is now a division within each self, with bare life or our biological and hidden being providing the ground or substance for the operation of power: “any imperative is lodged within thought and its movement toward the apprehension of the unthought” (Order 328). Political decisions, whether they be the liberal concerns for human life and rights, or the horrifying control of the human species at the level of race and ethnicity, now operate upon that which has no specific space or locale. Humanity as such, at the level of life, is the primary political object, which is to say that the political is no longer the polis or the space of decision but that supposed ground that precedes all decision and particularity: “modern thought is advancing towards that region where man’s Other must become the same as himself” (Order 328).
We can read this shift in the relation between space and the political in Foucault’s emblematic epochal vignettes. In Discipline and Punish, he describes the construction of political space through sovereign terror. The public torture of Damiens the regicide establishes the law as a body with the power to act upon life, and it is this potential to intervene in life which establishes the border between the lawful space of the polis and its constituted outside. Such a moment is an historical threshold announcing the possibility and space of modern power. The political body is deterritorialized: the relation among bodies of the polity is governed by a body (or the sovereign) whose intervention in life and death opens the potential for life as such to be the locus of power, or the medium through which relations are distributed. The sovereign body is excepted or placed outside the political territory through this act, which also establishes the polis as other than bodily life by the very violence of acting upon this singular body which has transgressed the polis. In the modern panopticon, by contrast, the body of law no longer divides mere life from the political space of order; each body is exemplary and bears the law within itself. Space is now organized in order to monitor, know, or manage life; where each life exposes something of any life whatever. The criminal is not a transgressing body, so much as a being whose will must be referred back to the domain of life in general–intention, psychology, sociology. Power is reterritorialized on the interiority of human life, that which causes and determines our relations to space and others. In the panopticon (and the human sciences that also locate man within a general life from which relations unfold), it is not only intentionality or the hidden which becomes the basis for the operation of power, but an intentionality that has its law outside any particular body and can provide the receding ground for us all. The prisoner’s body is no longer exceptional, punished as a sign of the possible terror of the law, but exemplary, bearing the same intentional life in which we can all read ourselves. Now, in response to this new relation between space and power, Foucault makes no claim as to the radical or reactionary organizations of space per se. His metaphorical use of space–that different epochs produce different historical a priori, or fields of relations within which we think, act, and speak–does not yield the demand for an organization of literal space that would free us from our commitment to subjectivism, or the notion of one life as the ground for history, language, and politics. One can see spatial events as expressive of the relations of power, and one can write about other political relations–the bodily relations that produce the ancient polity, and that do not presuppose some already constituted humanity. But Foucault explicitly refuses to step outside the historical spaces he describes in order to describe a politics of space as such (“Space” 354).
Deleuze offers a similar account of the genesis of the subject and humanity, but differs from Foucault in two crucial respects. First, Deleuze remains committed to the notion of life: the disciplines of evolutionary science, linguistics, and even a form of psychoanalysis which explain the relations or strata that produce terms or points or relative stability. Thinking life radically, however, involves freeing the movements that produce any single series of relations, or any plateau, from any single term. Thus, neither biology, nor geology, nor linguistics, nor sociology, can account for life as such. Indeed, life is just that which unfolds in all these distinct series. Second, one can see each of these series or plateaus as a problem, as one of many ways in which the striving of life creates, produces, expands, and expresses itself. The problem with modern power in its capitalist form is just the reduction of all these series to the single plane of capital, all these forms of stratification to the space of man. Here, Deleuze is in accord with Foucault’s genealogy but allows for the thought of life, the problem of life, to open up a new space, a virtual space or a space of sense.
Husserl had already argued that the formalizing or idealizing power of geometry allows one to repeat the truths of space to infinity. One establishes a science through an orientation or problem that goes beyond the given to its future and repeatable potential. Sense, for both Husserl and Deleuze, is this radical incorporeal power to release what is essential in an event from its material locale. The constitution of formal geometrical space therefore emerges from a certain sense, striving, or project. For Husserl, this is the sense of one humanity, occupying a single territory and history of truth and knowledge. Whereas Foucault and Derrida are critical of this one conscious life, this presupposed “we” or ground of consciousness, Deleuze affirms the power of thought and philosophy to intuit life as the source of difference, folds, relations, and spaces. Sense, philosophy, intuition, thinking and concepts all name the power to unleash other territories by imagining the given as an expression of a life that exceeds any of its fixed terms, and imagining the potential that can be unfolded from that expressive power.
“Man,” or the modern subject of psychoanalysis or linguistics, closes down thinking if he is seen as the point from which differences and relations unfold. Accordingly, space, seen as the field occupied, measured, and constituted by this man of consciousness, is a field of interiority–a space within which we think, a space reducible to perceptions of this specific organism. Such a space operates from a combination of sense and affect. First, there are the affects of western man, the images that organize a plateau or constitute the social unit: the white face of the viewing subject, the black holes of eyes expressing an interior, a body dominated by speech and identified through their familial position as either mother or father (Anti-Oedipus 96-97). That is, the investing perception of a certain body part–the apprehension of the power of the face as organizing center–unfolds a sense of space, a way of orienting a field crucial to the territory of man.
The faciality function showed us the form under which man constitutes the majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based: white, male, adult, "rational," etc., in short, the average European, the subject of enunciation (A Thousand Plateaus 292).
From the specific affect of speaking man as subject and center, Deleuze and Guattari then describe the expansion or extrapolation of this affect to form a sense of space and time in general. The central point enables equivocity, where one privileged term is the organizing ground of the other; man becomes the substance upon which other terms depend and he also enables a single temporal plane:
Following the law of arborescence, it is this central Point that moves across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition, depending on which faciality trait is retained: male-(female), adult-(child), white-(black, yellow, or red); rational-(animal). The central point, or third eye, thus has the property of organizing binary distributions within the dualism machines, and of reproducing itself in the principal term of the opposition; the entire opposition at the same time resonates in the central point. The constitution of a "majority" as redundancy. Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory, through the position of the central point. (A Thousand Plateaus 292-93)
And all this is achieved at the expense of the line, for movement, desires, and trajectories are subordinated to the terms or points they produce. The effects of relations and desires–points–are taken as original, and in the constitution of an origin, Memory supplants memories:
What constitutes arborescence is the submission of the line to the point. Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating them as "childhood memories," as conjugal, or colonial memories (A Thousand Plateaus 293).
Deleuze’s project is the expansion of sense beyond its localization in man, the expansion of the potential of geometry beyond its purposive or architectonic sense. The transcendental project, the striving to think the sense of space, has yet to be carried out beyond its dependence on man. The space of humanity has been constituted from the perception of an upright man of reason who regards all others as potentially or ideally just like himself. A radical striving toward sense must be transcendental and empirical: transcendental in its refusal of any image of thought or consciouness, and empirical in its observation of the different perceptions opened from different affective encounters. Sense is the potential to imagine other perceptions of the infinite, and the striving to think space positively: not the link between two points, but the power of life in its striving to create trajectories that open series or plateaus.
One might think here, positively, of sacred land. Claims for the sacredness of land by indigenous peoples are not just examples or instances of the various ways in which “we” (humanity) grant space significance. For the key difference is that space here is not “significant”–not seen as a marker, symbol, or image of cultural memory. Whereas western understandings of monument use space to mark an event, and do so in order to call future humanity to recognize and retain its past, sacred land is both infinite–demanding recognition from others–and inherently affective. The infinite it opens is deemed to be real, and not simply a relative cultural construction; but at the same time this infinite cannot be known or appropriated by just any other. Indigenous Australian claims to the sacredness of land locate memory or spirit in the land itself, which is not a signifier of the past, so much as the affirmation of the ways in which bodies and land are created through their affective connections. A people is a people because of this land, and this land bears its affect, resonance, and spirit because of the dreaming of this people. At the same time, in accord with the positive reality of sense, the dreaming, spirit, or genius of space transcends present individuals and opens up into the future, requiring further creation and demonstration. There is not a time or a space, which is perceived here in one sense, there in another. There are distinct modes of sense, different ways in which perceptions imagine, intuit, and constitute an infinite.
Conclusion
Deleuze’s project is both critical and affirmative. Like Foucault and Derrida he is critical of the assumed center of a constituting consciousness or single body from which relations emerge. But Deleuze also wants to argue that the transcendental project–the striving to think space or life in general–needs to be carried beyond its human territory.
The subject as universal humanity who operates on the single spatial and temporal plane of capitalism represents a distinct passage from affect to formal function. The white man of reason has no race, no body, no beliefs; he is nothing more than a power to relate to and recognize others. Capitalism is cynical and axiomatic; no body, image, or desire governs its domain. Man is the communicating, rationalizing, and laboring potential in us all. There is an abstraction from all tribalism and affective relations: territories are no longer constituted through investment in certain bodies or images. But this is possible only because one affective body–the image of oedipal man who is nothing more than a power to abstract from his body and speak–now allows the axiom of one global humanity. The gender neutral subject of modernity is produced as other than his bodily desire and is the white, western man of reason.
The body of signifying, capitalist man is the body of reason, speech, communication, and submission to a law that one recognizes as one’s own, and therefore also of all others. One’s true being is that of “any subject whatever,” an affective investment in a body whose desires are now pure functions, who can recognize in all others the same human life, the same potential to liberate oneself from mere life and become fully human. Man is that body or point of life liberated from life, a desire not for this or that image or affect, but a desire to be other than affect. On the one hand, then, this subject of formal geometry and the space of humanity is reactive: a desire that wills itself not to will and in so doing submits itself to the negation of desire. One constitutes oneself as a point in humanity across one universal space and time. In so doing, however, desire is deprived of its own power, reterritorialized, or subordinated to one of its affects. The power to intuit or sense perceptions beyond one’s own purview is halted by the inclusion of all other perceivers as already within one’s own space and time. Deleuze’s own project is neither the inhabitation of a specific text or event of space–determining the points from which a space is drawn or delimited–nor the assertion of an absolute deterritorialization. Rather, from the thought of the constitution of this or that space from this or that desire, or from the thought of the potential of sense, one can think space as such in its infinite divergence: a thousand plateaus.
We need to be wary of simply situating Deleuze, as a philosopher of singularity and affect, against universalizing or deterritorializing potentials. Indeed, at least half the power of his thought lies in his emphasis on intuition, on the capacity of perception to open the singular to its infinite force. We need to acknowledge Deleuze’s opposition to the globalizing subjectivism of capitalism, while at the same time recognizing his affirmation of the potential that has been domesticated by capitalism. Doing so will allow us to approach the politics of space through the dimension of both sense and affect.
Notes
1. See Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry 153; hereafter, this text will be referred to parenthetically as EH.
2. On the distinction between intensive and extensive spaces, see DeLanda. An intensive space is not made up of points that are all accorded the same value; rather, as one traverses an intensive space the space itself differs by, for example, speeding up in terms of its curvature, or (as in a weather map) altering in its pressures or potentials to change.
3. Accordingly, there is a quantitative distinction among beings that allows for intrinsic difference. All these numerically different instances of white are still of whiteness, a power to differ that is essential and can be seen as really distinct only because it expresses itself over and over again. Space as extension allows for “extrinsic individuation” or the difference of this from that; but space as intensive is just the power of essential differences to express themselves, to repeat themselves in all their difference and thereby establish one expressive plane:
Only a quantitative distinction of beings is consistent with the qualitative identity of the absolute. And this quantitative distinction is no mere appearance, but an internal difference, a difference of intensity. So that each finite being must be said to express the absolute, ... according, that is, to the degree of its power. Individuation is, in Spinoza, neither qualitative nor extrinsic, but quantitative and intrinsic, intensive. (Deleuze, Expressionism 197).
4. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is always revolutionary. Desire is not the desire for this or that lost object, or this or that supposedly natural need. Desire is the power for life to act, where action, movement and striving are not determined in advance by any proper end or intrinsic relation (377).
5. This is why it is a mistake, I believe, to correct Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy on the grounds that they have mis-read biology. According to Mark Hansen, Deleuze and Guattari privilege flows of becoming and creation and ignore the significant self-organization of organisms and the order of organisms as a power of nature. But Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is not based on biology and does not then use biology to explain other strata, such as art, language, or history. Rather, biological organization is one of the ways in which the differing and expressing power of life is manifested, and it is in other strata–such as philosophy–that the power to extend beyond organization can perhaps tell us something about powers actualized to a lesser degree in biological orders. I would therefore argue that no discipline or strata can explain or provide the model for any other. In What is Philosophy?, however, Deleuze and Guattari stress that certain strata–the human brain and its power to undertake philosophy, art, and science–not only actualize virtual powers in life, but allow life’s virtual power to be thought.
6. It is precisely this space–one freed from an architectonic of full actualization and universality–that Derrida affirms in a number of contemporary projects. In Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Derrida contrasts Husserl’s univocity with James Joyce’s equivocity. Joyce’s writing does not assume a ground of translatable sense that precedes or legitimates different languages, although the project of Finnegans Wake seems to comprehend this equivocity, bringing it within the space of the book (103).
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