Capacity or Plasticity: So just what is a Body?
In an interview, (p.137, Negotiations 1995) Deleuze remarks that The Fold was a very important book for him because it allowed him to distinguish the Concept from the Affect and Percept, which he suggests he had previously confused in the Refrain Plateau, of A Thousand Plateaus. This remark is very significant because elsewhere Deleuze explicitly links affect, percept and concept with Spinoza’s three types of knowledge (ibid 164-166); and yet this is all the more problematic in that one looks in vain for these terms within The Fold itself. Hence a relationship between Leibniz and Spinoza is both posited, and yet apparently occluded, and all the more so, as Deleuze in The Fold, unlike earlier works, is keen to stress the differences between the two thinkers (51,121). This last point reminds one that Deleuze, by the time of The Fold had developed many previous positions on both Leibniz and Spinoza, all of which are subtly re-worked within The Fold itself. The aim of this article is to go back to these earlier encounters with Leibniz and Spinoza, and by examining exactly how Deleuze habitually links these two philosophers, to elucidate exactly what The Fold might be clarifying, and what might follow on from this clarity. My argument here is that Leibniz holds the key to Deleuze’s understanding of Spinoza: It is Leibniz who invariably defines the problem, and Spinoza, the solutions. Moreover this is clearly no static relationship. On the contrary at three key points, progressively a richer interpretation of Leibniz triggers a new reading of Spinoza. The Fold, which is of course Deleuze’s richest encounter with Leibniz, is therefore critical to the advent of the Spinoza of What is Philosophy?. Moreover it will also be argued that it is this dynamic that configures ‘Spinoza’s’ peculiar journey within the Deleuzian mind. A journey that starts from a Spinoza of Expressionism who is understood as an important milestone on the road to a philosophy of difference, moves through a Spinoza of A Thousand Plateaus, who is now the supreme philosopher of nature itself, to ending, in What is Philosophy? with a Spinoza, who is transfigured into a Christ for philosophy itself. However, as it is clearly impossible to consider in the scope of a single article all the intricacies involved in this sequence, I will limit myself in two regards. Firstly, I will concentrate more on the role of Leibniz, as problem setter, than Spinoza as problem solver and secondly I will concentrate especially on the fate of the body within Deleuzian thought, and attempt to show how the evolving Leibniz-Spinoza dynamic, at each turn produced a new account of the Body.
Perhaps unlike later encounters between Leibniz and Spinoza, there is a real urgency in the account of Leibniz within Expressionism. Deleuze wishes to argue that Spinoza has a concept synonymous with differentiation, and yet Spinoza explicitly at least, develops no such idea. Deleuze can therefore only uncover ‘differentiation’ within Spinoza by arguing that Leibniz and Spinoza are developing the same basic argument and that consequently at the point which Leibniz clearly introduces a notion of the differential, one can infer that Spinoza will likewise require an equivalent (if obscure) concept. For the Leibniz of Expressionism, the differential derivative force is given by the ‘forces of acting and suffering’, which he describes as ‘an inherent force, or to put it another way a force for producing immanent action’ (AG 161). Deleuze suggests that the equivalent to this differential force is found in Spinoza’s fairly often repeated claim that the mind is capable (or apt) to do many things, as its body is likewise capable (II/97, II/103,II/239,II/305).
Deleuze’s argument for this equivalence is based on a supposed ‘Anti-Cartesian Reaction’. Descartes had instituted a nature that was purely understood in terms of a mathematical and mechanistic science. Nature was thereby stripped of powers which became rather the preserves of beings outside nature (Subject or God, 227). The ‘Reaction’ involved the attempt to re-establish force and power within nature. Deleuze suggests that this was achieved via a threefold schema, of mechanism, force and essence, which he suggests applies equally to Spinoza and Leibniz; even if it is only explicitly stated in the latter. If one starts with purely extrinsic movements, it is clear that they explain everything that happens within the body in terms of mechanical laws. And yet it is also the case that such movements can only be related to a body (as specific movements) if they already presuppose an inner nature that is capable of acting within a moment (as a force) to compose each successive motion. Such a derivative force, which operates upon an aggregate, constructs “the inner nature of things which is no different from the forces of acting and suffering” (Deleuze here is quoting Leibniz, 229). This inner nature however although it links moments, is itself momentary, and must be referred to a primitive force “or essence” which is capable of governing the series of moments (228-229, see also Loemecker 808-825). Deleuze argues that Spinoza’s argument can be understood to involve a ‘closely analogous’ schema, which moves from a mechanism which governs bodies, to a dynamism related to a capacity to be affected, and finally to an essence which express itself in the variation of this capacity (ibid).
And yet, if one considers Spinoza without regard to Leibniz this interpretation is far from evident. Starting from the ‘capacity for affection’, Deleuze’s interpretation is based upon a synthesis of arguments that, although they are clearly linked in Ethics, are never formally united in a single agency. Ethics talks not only of an aptitude to do many things but also of a force for existing which perpetually fluctuates (II/204), of joys and sorrows that relate to one’s ability to think and do many things (II/242), of actions that lead one to strive to perceive more things (II/227), and of a relation with God which waxes as we can think and perceive many different things (II/295)… All of which clearly imply one another, and yet the nature of this implication is left implicit, and undeveloped. Hence the importance of Leibniz in making this argument, is that he offers the reader of Spinoza a clue by which the connections between linked concepts can be made, a connection which, Spinoza himself singularly seems to lack.
Moreover the importance of Leibniz in setting up the schema is all the more evident when one considers the other two aspects of it. Deleuze argues that essences constitute intensive quantities (196-197). And yet he also notes that Spinoza does not us the term ‘intensive’, which was current up to the time of Descartes, and which Leibniz did use. Deleuze suggests that that Spinoza caution might well be due to not wanting to appear to reintroduce Precartesian physics (417-418). Which is of course viable, and yet unprovable. What is however certain is that unless Deleuze can argue that the essence is an intensive quantity he cannot get the required analogy between Leibniz and Spinoza. Likewise in his exposition of material reality, Deleuze very deliberately presents an accord between Leibniz and Spinoza’s account of matter. Deleuze argues therefore that Spinoza simple bodies involve extrinsic relations of motion and rest, that always gathered together in greater and lesser actual infinities of parts within certain ‘whole’ which correspond to a modal essence (205). It makes no sense ask whether such bodies exist or not. These bodies lack any nature of their own, and are merely ‘extrinsically distinguished’ from one another: They have no existence of their own, even though all existence is composed of them (207). Again Spinoza, beyond making the claim that simple bodies are distinguished from one another by means of motion and rest (II/97), does not actually claim any one of these moves. Leibniz by contrast explicitly makes them all. Claiming not only matter involves perpetual flux, but also that it is actually infinitely composite, and involves parts which lack reality of their own, even though they form the body of some substantial (intensive) form (AG 78-80). Although, of course one does need the caveat at this point that these bodies are for Leibniz mere phenomena. Deleuze addresses this point by arguing that extrinsic realities posit a purely modal distinction which is “’ no longer only ‘ contained within the substance of attribute” (214, internal quote II/91). Deleuze argues the viability of this position (which again is not made explicit in Spinoza ) by likening it to Kant’s argument that space, while being the pure form of externality, remains internal to the mind perceiving it. Likewise, extrinsic quantity ”presents existing modes as external to the attribute, and external not one another”, while is “nonetheless contained…in the attribute it modifies” (ibid).
So again in both these moves while there is certainly nothing in Spinoza that prevents the move Deleuze makes, there is nothing either that explicitly makes them. Deleuze argument therefore needs to repeatedly draw of Leibniz, in order to eludicate what is apparently so obscure within Spinoza. Only once this move has been made, can the Spinoza of Expressinosism be developed. The fully complexities of this argument are beyond the scope of this article. Here only two things need be noted, both of which relate to the point that Deleuze wishes to break from Spinoza. Firstly in Difference and Repetition Deleuze represents Spinoza as the penultimate thinker of difference. He was the philosopher who had all the ingredients to think difference (essence had become power, individuation was tied to a differential, being was univocal). And yet, the one whom in the last instance still argued substance was ‘independent’ of its modes, which were made ‘dependent on substance, but as though on something other than themselves’, and so failed to grasp that ‘being must be said of becoming’, not the other way around. That is, that difference needs to turn not on substance infinite capacity to differ, but upon the modes perpetual differing, which thereby becomes the object of a ‘pure affirmation’ (Deleuze 2004 50, 377).
Secondly, and arising from this last point, modes can only express God’s infinite capacity to differ in a fixed and determinate manner ( Deleuze 1992 93-94, and II/84). This capacity is physically delimited within a body: A horse has a different capacity for affection than does a man or a fish (217-218). Each intrinsic essence therefore ‘corresponds’ to a certain extrinsic relation of notion and rest (in which its capacity for affect is fixed), and specific individuation only occurs when extrinsic relations have been (via the chain of external causes) determined to enter into the ‘precise given relation’ for a specific individual (209-210). Once this relationship has been fixed, the individual is free to discover within itself what it capable of: Hence the formula that the capacity is physically fixed, and yet ethically variable (225). The effect of this move is that the Spinoza of Expressionism cannot ultimately break with an degree of Aristotlianism, whereby capacity for affection (and so essence) is welded to an ‘individual form’, even as it remains distinct from it ( II/93 and (209) . In the course of one life, the same ‘body’ might involve difference essence (II/240) but there can never be more that one essence in one body at one time. Deleuze will of course directly counter this move in Difference and Repetion. Here he argues that extensive interpretation of individuation remain incapable of providing reasons…why a synthesis of extensivity begins and finishes here”, and therefore that ‘ extensive parts are relative to the individual rather than the reverse’ ( Deleuze 2004 308). Hence there need be no correlation between external form and the individual. Each individuation no more depends upon the body than it does upon the soul. Each ‘self’ is therefore necessarily ‘dissolved’ into a shifting kaliescope of individualities that ‘ ceaselessly interpenetrate one another through fields of individuation’ (317).
The Spinoza of Difference and Repetition is therefore the thinker who gives an accurate account of both univocal being, and mobile highly mobile Individating differences, with the latter constituting formally distinct ‘throws of the dice, and the former a single unique throw ( 377). And yet, a Spinoza does not realize what he has found. He therefore confuses the impersonal nature of pre-individual fields with a substance, and attributes to them a being of their own beyond difference. Once this move is made, he makes a further confusion, and associates essence with an extrinsic characteristic relation, by which the God infinite capacity to differ can be fixed in some manner. A move that that then in leads him to loose sight of the differential elements involved in constituting a power, which becomes confused with a force, and located firmly within a body (Deleuze 1983 206). However if Spinoza’ position in the history of the Philosophy of difference is thereby secured, the same cannot be said of Leibniz. Leibniz is vital in the construction of Deleuze’s Spinoza, as the philosopher who has a clear exposition of what was obscure in Spinoza. Leibniz is very much the loser in this exchange. Not only are some of his most characteristic ideas (such as differentiation) assigned to his rival, but also he is rendered incomprehensible in the process. Deleuze simply cannot afford to allow Leibniz problems of his own: Hence, there is no hint in Expressionism of a distinction between plastic or elastic force, nor of the fact that Leibniz system requires a totally different account of the body, than is found in Spinoza (both of which are found in the Fold). Where Leibniz does differ from Spinoza Deleuze constantly argues it is as a result of the formers desire to shield himself from the otherwise worrying tendency of expression towards panthesism, and so nothing substantive in itself (Deleuze 1992 333).
This is the characterization is present within Difference and Repetition, where Leibniz is presented as a paradoxical thinker. The thinker who perhaps best defined the nature of a differential unconscious, and yet who then could only understand its actualization in terms of a realized possibility, that accorded with Good sense (Deleuze 2004 265). What is lacking in Deleuze’s account at this point, is any idea that for Leibniz realization (as it is related to the body) involves a different (and parallel) relationship to that of the Monad actualization (Deleuze 2006, 119): Likewise there is little hint at this point, of the importance of the Monad lived experience, in God’s choice of which world to create (ibid 83). In effect Leibniz, understood solely in the light of Neitzshe-Spinoza axis, is found if not wanting, essentially anomalous. Nonetheless it is clear both in Expressionism, and again in Logic of Sense, Leibniz does have one advantage of Spinoza. Unlike the latter, who could only define individuating differences one at a time, Leibniz did at least allow for that possibility that many such difference pertain to a single individual (Deleuze 1992 329-330), This point is subsequently developed in Logic of Sense, where Deleuze allows that Leibniz, perfectly characterized the aggregates and mixture into which events are actualized within a body. But was then not able to affirm the disjunctive synthesis itself (in spite of assembling many of its key ingredients). Hence, it is not the monad which can inhabit a chaosmos, but rather a ‘universal ego’, who is common to many worlds ( Deleuze 1990 111-117)
However at this point another Leibniz emerges, from possibly a very surprising source: Guattari. Guattari on reading Expressionism remarks that Spinoza can only ‘desubstantialize substance…without too much difficult because he has somewhat reassuring modes to fit in it…For Spinoza, substance is empty, unique and indivisible because the modes he considers don’t play around cutting themselves up and deterritoralize themselves’, Guattari 2006 262-263). Guattari argues, the model for this relationship was the idea of mercantile money that did not ‘deterritorilise itself beyond the world of the bill’ (ibid). Guattari contrasts this position with Leibniz’s who if anything pushes the monad too far in the direction of deterritorization and needs to have recourse to a God, in order to save not only morality and also reality. That is ‘Creationist monads…risk butting against a-substantial God, a Nothing-God, and all the more so if they are deployed in a continuum. But this Continuum …is limited in all directions, separated off by God” (ibid 259). Guattari goes on to illustrate both points with long quote from Discources on Metaphysics in the course of which Leibniz argues monads necessarily freely ‘accommodate (themselves) to one another” and it is only God who ordains that the exact combinations they must form (260). Liebniz is therefore only more stuck than Spinoza because the units he is dealing with are more creative (262). Guattari goes on to suggests that one need to reconcile the univocity of Spinoza’s with the ability of the monad to deterritorilalize ‘.. Monads would thereby be stripped of their ‘artifical territoriality:, and free to “ break and re-break…one another’ ( ibid 266).
Moreover Guattari argues it is not good enough to simply accept a division between production and representation (power and capacity for affection), but one must rather include the former within the latter and thereby ‘discover a certain complementarity to Spinoza powers’. It is this move that will allow the development of ‘a machanic composition of powers and non-equilibration of forces in a single body-structure’ (ibid 255). So that, rather than tying an actualized body to a fixed capacity for affection (and therefore a power), one needs to create body-structures which are capable of enfolding many distinct powers. Thence Guattari remarks that ‘God as pure power of being affected is essentially the power of nothingness, the power to negativize a determination’; while the corresponding fixed ability of a mode to be affected, amounts to its separation from its own actual powers (ibid 266-267); and will (although Guattari is not explicit here) only be possible through an appeal to perfection (each essence is always as perfect as it can be ), a move Guattari condemns ( “code does not call for or require perfection, ibid 266). The differential element in the body, is not some (arbitrarily) pre-fixed capacity, but is rather related to codes, which necessarily are ‘conjugated, and act and exist through conjugation’. Individual powers (that is affects) then erupt from individual surplus values of such codes (modal surplus is therefore the same as code surplus, ibid). Power is both always related to the particular circumstances which configured it, and is always actual (and so not subject to perfection): Hence ‘The degree of power…is thus “identical to the power to act itself”’ (ibid 267, internal quote Deleuze 1992, ibid 231). From which it follows that specific powers are not to be related to a singular essence but rather involve events: “If existence is only the factualness of the event, then the only things that counts is the actualizaton of power” (ibid 266). Each power is therefore both always a response to events elsewhere (and given to it as an ‘over-coding), and itself an event, which necessarily involves others in over-coding (as they are caught up within it).
Hence Guattari curiously inverts Deleuze own a viewpoint on Leibniz and Spinoza . Monads do not themselves lack the ability to the deterritorialize, And it is only God who stops this happening (ibid 264). What Leibniz actually lacks is a theory of univocal materiality, by which can be articulated the ‘aggregates’ and ‘mixture’ of individuals which are in themselves disjunctive. This is theory that Spinoza, will provide, if he is allowed to advocate on the one hand, powers which are both the products of events elsewhere, but also able to be an events (for others) in themselves. And on the other hand a type of individuation which is capable of articulating these power as events.
Guattari thereby challenges Deleuze to allow his Spinoza the same degree of freedom that Leibniz’s monad appears to enjoy: The freedom, in the absence of God, to wander across events, and through shifting powers. Once again therefore it is Liebniz who as defined the nature of the problem that Deleuze’s Spinoza must respond to. The contours of Deleuze and Guattari’s response are far beyond the scope of this current essay, all that needs to be noted here are two facts. Firstly that this move represents a significant augmentation in Spinoza position in the Deleuzian pantheon. It is now Spinoza who provides a way to understand nature as a ‘Plane of composition’, populated by intensive affects, and extensive motions ( Deleuze 1988 122-130); and who thereby, if only on a global level, provides all tools by which one thinks individuality as a machanic ‘assemblage of powers’ ( Guattari 226).
Secondly and more critically, is the position of the ritornello as a key element in the development of this new position. It is the refrain role to orchestrate the transcoding, which occurs ‘ when a code is not content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and instead take or receives fragments of a different code as such ‘. A refrain involves nature ‘ as melodies in counterpoint, each of which serves as a motif for another’. So that, ‘ whenever there is transcoding, we can be sure there is not simple addition, but the constitution of a new plane of surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, surplus value of passage or bridging’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 314). It is therefore the refrain which opens up mileus, allowing them to exist as events ‘for one another’, and therefore communicates a difference, which is not subsumed within specific relations, and instead could be said to inhabit a space ‘in-between’ individual actualizations. Hence refrain is the way in which Guattari contention that power needs to be always in terms of surplus values, which both create it, and which it creates, is being articulated. And yet it as this concept which Deleuze suggests in the interview cited in the introduction, which confused affect, percept and concept. Deleuze actually says
‘ an anaysis is sketched out in A thousand Plateaus: The ritornello involves all three forces (that is affect, percept and concept). We tried to make the Ritornello one of our main concepts, relating it to territory and Earth, the little and great ritornello. Ultimately all these periods lead into one another, and get mixed up, as I now see with this book on Leibniz or the Fold.’ ( Deleuze 1995, 137).
This remark, given the centrality of the Refrain, developing Guattari’s conjecture, implies a criticism which is both pungent, and forceful. What exactly is being confused here? What is the effect of this mixing up of concept and affect and percept? And how does that effect the Guattari project? And exactly how did then allow Deleuze to distinguish the concept from the Affect-Percept? And how does this separation itself link to Spinoza with whom, writing after the Fold Deleuze clearly identifies these terms?
These questions would, in considered in due detail take one very far from what can be achieved within this essay. I will therefore concentrate only on three aspects to this problem. Firstly I will provision define exactly what has changed in the Status of the Refrain between A Thousand ,Plateaus, and What is Philosophy; Secondly I will attempt to develop one theme (that of the Body) within the Fold, which is clearly has a role to play within this shift; and finally I will indicate how this third stage in Deleuze’s understanding of Leibniz, inspired a third stage in his understanding of Spinoza.
In What is Philosophy a very clear distinction is drawn between two types of becoming:
‘ Sensory becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other (while continuing to be what they are)…whereas conceptual becoming is the action by which the common event eludes what it is: Conceptual becoming is heterogeneity grasped in an absolute from; sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter of expression.’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994 177)
It is further claimed that the universes created by sensory becoming (which are linked to art and nature), are ‘neither virtual or actual; they are possible, the possible as an aesthetic category (“possible or I shall suffocate)’ (ibid). Each such sensation ‘exists in its possible universe without the concept necessarily existing in its absolute form’ (ibid 178).
The move augured in the Fold is therefore no mean one, as it forces Deleuze to confront the ‘non-philosophical’ nature of the natural world. And yet this by itself begs a further question. How should this possibility be understood? In Difference and Repetion, Deleuze makes a very careful distinction between possibilities based on resemblance and those based on expression. The former he argues a theorectically moribund, as they add nothing to ones understanding. A ‘Possible’. seen from this perspective is merely a non-existent actual, and can tell one nothing of reality beyond actualization ( Deleuze 2004, 263). However the same is not true for the latter, which Deleuze very carefully distinguishes from resemblance. The expressed does not ‘ressemble’ the expressor, but rather ‘ it ‘does not exist apart from the expressor, even though the expressor relates to it as though to something completely different’. Hence ‘ A terrified face does not ressemble what terrifies it, it envelops a state of the terrifying world, ’ which remains nonetheless distinct from the face itself. Moreover this world is expressed not as something real, but is enveloped within a constellation of possiblities. (perhaps the terror is real, perhaps not, or not yet, or not now, perhaps, perhaps…). Some of which (or non of which) might then be realized (in which case the face would cease to being conveying a possibility), and all of which are expressed in their very diversity by the look of terror expressed upon the face. Hence Deleuze argues that one grasps the other as such only at ‘ the moment at which the expressed has (for us) no existence apart from that which expresses it : The Other as the expression of a possible world’ (Ibid 323-324).
Thus far, a possible world could be either related to concepts or affects and percepts. Indeed the example of a terrified face is the example used in What is Philosophy to illustrate the sense that a concept has a possibility in What is Philosophy ( Deleuze and Guattari1994 17). How then do these possibles differ? Again this is not the place to fully assess this clearly complex problem. All that matters however in the current argument was given in the above quote. Conceptual becoming surveys the very heterogeneity of possible worlds. A concept of a terrified face, or China, endlessly transports the thinker into a land of possibilities all of which are enwrapped within the single concept. In a sensory becoming by contrast it is the sensation itself which necessarily enfolds other sensations which enclose yet others, and therefore expresses, a world as possibility, through its very matter.
Moreover, although Deleuze does not invoke Leibniz here, it is nonetheless the case that Leibniz is peculiarly useful in understanding this difference. Leibniz is after all the Philosopher who can make the apparently contrasting claims that God chose a certain world, as it was expressed with a certain set of Monads: And yet also claimed that in every world each Monad is free to choose other worlds, even if God knows they will not: Whence ‘What is Philosophy’ argues that Leibniz fails to think the possibility of the event, and yet still is vital in thinking the passive synthesis of the possible (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 17 and 212), Each individual is therefore free as they involve matters of expression: Adam really could have found other desires within himself, and so acted otherwise (Deleuze 2006 80); while each body contains a point of view which opens on a variety of possible connections, and therefore worlds (ibid 26). And yet at the same time, a monad as it involves a concept, will always only include within itself one of these options (27), and which is included in the monad only as it participates within a narrative of a story written by God (146). Contra Guattari therefore a monad is not free in regard to concepts, and yet still remains free with regard to matters of expression. It is therefore surely the role of the Monad to supply a ‘sufficent reason’, which enables the potential chaos of affects to be resolved one way or other. That is, the world itself is folded into a concave copula, at whose apex (that is point of view) there are included an infinity of folds: It is on this world of diversity, the event falls, as it implicates one particular point of view (142-143). One says it was a Caesar that crossed a Rubricon, and not merely an old, bald, bi-sexual man getting wet, because it is the Monad called Caesar, that is included in the event of ‘ ‘Crossing the Rubricon’, and therefore peculiarly expresses it (113). What is more, God clearly mirrors this process within the unique event of creation. He judges each world of events according to the rules of desire, and creates that world which taken together strives most to be (Ag 150). If events allow one talk of a Caesar; it is this single event of creation, that necessitates it be this Caesar, and this world.
However, the last point clearly opens onto a whole series of question as to how affective- desires (or accords) are related to the point of view, which is contained within a body (understood as a viniculum). Not only does Deleuze make this link explicit in the very last pages of the fold where argues that private-accords and public crowds, fuse together is a strange diagonal line (157). But also this link is clearly at least implicit within Leibniz himself. If Adam is free to choose otherwise, then he must be both able to find in his own soul other desires. Thence there must exist either within the body, or at least open for that body other movements, which it could enfolded within different plastic forces. So that both desire and body must open out on more reality than the monad can ever actualizes. Each affect and each body is therefore not merely an actual (and real), but also envelopes of other possible worlds
And yet, the scope of the article precludes any full consideration of the intracies involved here. This is all the more the case, as Deleuze himself cannot get the final part of this equation from Leibniz (as Leibniz does not formally break the accord-body combination off from the monad-concept combination). What will be attempted here is therefore far more modest task of attempting to uncover what it is about Leibniz account of the body, as it is presented in The Fold, which will allow the subsequent moves which are developed within What is Philosophy. Before I briefly indicate how this move leads Deleuze back to Spinoza.
My question is therefore what exactly in the Fold allows the body and wider nature to be configured as a matter of Expression (and therefore in terms of possibility), The starting point for this argument clearly needs to be the re-confirguration of notion of resemblance found in the Fold. As discussed above Deleuze vehemently rejects the value of a possibility understood in terms of resemblance and the ‘real’ (and picks out Leibniz for special criticism in this respect). However in the Fold Deleuze clearly turns this resemblance argument on its head. It is not perception that ressembles something real in matter, but rather matter itself that ressembles perceptions as they are engaged in actualizations. And yet this matter is not identical to the actual-virtual combination, as the differential has no ‘real’ status in matter (Deleuze 2006 110). A move that itself leads to two further questions. One the one hand, what is it in matter that is like, and yet not identical to, the virtual? And secondly how does one understand the unity of body and perception by the body if that unity cannot be founded on simple parallelism? The answer to the first of these questions, clearly lie in what is so peculiar about matter. Matter essentially is not related to the virtual, but the possible. Matter (quite unlike the monad) encompasses all possible worlds: In the world of matter therefore an actual unsinning Adam remained still a possibility, even after the ‘virtual world‘ of sin in was created (119). The role of the body is to realize, in matter, what would otherwise remain possibility. Moreover it must do so, in a way which ’ressembles’ the actualization process of the mind (120), The latter Deleuze argues takes the form of a series of differential filters, through which the mind actualizes elements within its virtual unconscious (103, see also 86-87). The body likewise involves a filtering process (128), but which clearly bares not on the virtual (which can procede from whole to part) but the possible (as the body ‘successively submits to the impression of all the others’, 121). The problem is then becomes how this filtering is to be arranged.
This problem leads one back to the second question mentioned above, what is the status of the unity of body and mind, when that unity is not (as it is in Spinoza) linked to parallelism? The soul is present in the body as a presence (136). Soul never identical to a body, but rather is said to ‘own it’ (121). This ownership involves a double process of belonging inauguated by a viniculum, or primal link. One the one hand, a body belongs to each soul; on the other hand multitudes of animal souls taken enmasse as said to the belong to a body (124). Additionally, a monad does not simply own its own body but is rather yoked to it by a complex a double process. On the one hand, each Monad is linked to a viniculm, which ties it to other monads, and requires they, taken enmasse constitute a body for it. Thus far, the body created does not have individuality of its own : It is merely a man, or a flea. On other hand, individuality occurs when the viniclum is sent back from the body to the Monad, which then envelopes this body as its own (128-129).
The twin aspects of belonging, clearly allows one to develop a domain in which one can only talks of ‘A’ body, which remains indefinate, as long as it pertains only to the first stage of this process. Moreover, it needs to be remembered that this unspecififed body, composed merely of an act of realization, is itself substantial, for all of the fact that it realizes something within an illusion (126). The body might not be real, but that does not stop there being reality in its constantly realizing of phenomena within the body (138). What is more, a body, which belongs to a soul (as a presence), is animated (137). This peculiar status pitches the force for life within the body at its inception, in-between all specific individualizations or realities, On the one hand, as the phenomena realized, are themselves extremely volatile, so that which realizes it must do so in a way that could always be enfolding other possibilities. On the other hand the realization effected in the body will clearly not stop just because a phenomena has been ‘realized’, by it: each ‘real, must therefore as it is the body, also be ‘realizing’. Hence each body does not merely realize phenomena, but also does so in such a way that that realization even it is given contains other possibilities, and they others to infinity. Each body only ‘realize’ phenomena by becoming a filter for possibility. And yet this last point leads to two further questions. On the one hand, exactly how is this filtering process operating? And how is rendering the body ‘substantial’, as it realizes something else? On the other hand, how does this process itself force one to rethink the nature of the matter, which now must be understood as providing the raw material for this filtering?
The first of these questions, clearly comes down to how a point of view is contained within a body (11). This is because such point of view serves as the ‘condition’ by which the subject ‘apprehends variation’. Each such view point envelopes not only changes within a world (21), but looks out onto other possible worlds (26). It serves as mathematical point (or focus) which envelopes a ‘variation’, as that variation enfolds an objectile as the ‘invariant’ of a transformation (22). Thence in terms of the living body, a point of view serves to focus the infinitely enfolded plastic forces (both those realized and unrealized in this world), and resolves them into a certain ‘degree of unity’ as ‘a worm or a plant’ (11-12). What is significant here is that each point of view involves a ‘power of arranging cases’ (23) and will therefore naturally arrange within this infinite possibility shifting orders of realizations. Hence the argument made above: At any one time, a certain number of plastic forces will be real (and therefore no longer pertain to the body); And yet at the same time the body will also be ‘realizing’ how these forces contain other possibility for other forces, which likewise further possibility ad infintum. That is, in the terms of Difference and Repetion, it is the peculiar function of the body, to ensure that actual-real forces, are also matters, of expression, within which other worlds are enveloped. The infinite chaos of pure possibility becomes arranged, and expressed (that is filtered), within infinite set of series of enveloped plastic forces. However the point of view can only provide such unity as there is projected onto it a soul (25), through which it is existing in the body as a presence. This last point immediately raises the problem of how a point of view can have any status of its own within the body, which remains independent from both the plastic forces it focuses, and the soul that ‘occupies’ it?
To answer this question one must carefully assess the relative positions of the derivative forces and the Viniculm. As discussed above, each dominant Monad provides the principle of unity for a viniculm, which is quite unthinkable without it. And yet each monad can only takes this body as its own, because it has created in matter ‘a body’. Thence the non-individualised body clearly corresponds to the point to view, which then monad then posses, by resolving in someway (27). Moreover, while the‘ organic parts of the body’ are composed of molar elements, these aggregates will only be bound in a body, as they are included with the viniculm of some dominant monad, whose presence is therefore necessary to ‘corporeal substance itself ‘(130). Hence, plastic forces might bend matter into a molar organism (ibid), but they only do so in the name of a corporeal substance, which itself necessarily remains distinct from them. Each body can only serve as a filter, as it possess a dominant monad which has yet to avail itself of its bodies individual unity, and therefore as that body is animated, and yet non-individual. What is more it is surely this paradoxical status that allows it to function as a filter for possibility.in the first place. It is after all only such a life that defines the conditions by which plastic forces are real and yet also realizing, unfolded in themselves, and yet is always enfolding other possibilities, to infinity: Each body is therefore formed as an ‘expressive matter’ within which an infinity of possible worlds are constantly being generated.
However this last point merely intensifies the problem of exactly how the plastic forces that have been bent within the vinculum relate to the ‘unbent’ elastic forces. A full consideration of this Deleuze’s highly complex argument cannot be followed here. All that matters in the current argument are however three points. Firstly Deleuze reasons, that elastic forces within the body fabricate the texture of its organic parts, and cloth the abstract structures that plastic forces build (131). This point leads Deleuze to claim that as textures (felt) and properties are found in matter at large, it must be possible to apply the same reasoning to the constitution of matter as a whole. He suggests that entelechies provide the inner principle for this outer movement and as therefore always belong to the ‘aggregate as such’ (132-133). Secondly the body itself remains really distinct from these derivative forces, which exist to it merely as a presence, and as its requistes, to be taken up as a ‘unit of (it is) synthesis under the flash of an instant’ (135-137): That is, forces belong to matter, as it is eternally ‘in-another’ through owning them. Thirdly, the monads as they are belong to a body, ‘accede to a public status’, in which they always exists within a crowd or heap. At each instant a monad constitute a tendency, which ‘dies ceaseless’ in the instant it is given, and yet is then eternally reconstituted across other instants (134). Monads thereby become ‘collective without being statistical (131), and their very ‘crowd’ status, the sense they are always necessarily multiple, always in the middle of others, without ever being a whole, becomes in itself a creative force.
Two profound consequences follow from this argument. On the one hand each fold of elastic matter will always capture other individuals who elsewhere have there own individual plastic natures. Hence each viniculm only opens itself to the world of matter, as it itself is spliced to a series of capture and being caught (123). Likewise any set of shifting bodies is available form a viniculm (or its replacement). On the other hand the process by which elastic forces are constituted within a body, have become the paradigm case for matter as itself whole. Each body will therefore is necessarily connected to all other bodies (154-155). And yet this link will always its creative, both because these forces can only be taken up by a particular body through plastic forces that fold it otherwise, but also because the very multiplicity of involving many bodies is in itself creative.
Hence a Vinculum fabricates corporeal substance as a filter over possibility, which is necessary opens upon a universe of constant collective creation. It is then this model of nature which is carried into What is Philosophy, and was moreover no doubt what served to ‘clarify’ Deleuze’s own mind in relation to the refrain (which had thought this connection in terms of concepts). This move, however clearly cannot be finally accomplish within Leibniz, for whom the body remained bound up with the pre-established harmony; nor is there scope here to enter into a full discussion of it All I will attempt here is to mention five key pointers clearly present in the Fold, even if, due to the rigours of a monogram they could not their be further developed, before proceding to a conclusion.
.Firstly, Deleuze clearly establishes an equivalence between the domains of mind and matter. Each Mind has a clear zone, and an obscure molecular unconscious, which is inseparable (if really distinct) from similar division of body and matter. Thence nature itself expresses (within the domain of matter) the ‘melodic’ unconscious of the monad itself. That is, it contains within it an infinite kaleidoscope of shifting movements (or motifs) that a viniculm can take up into its own peculiar expression (155).
Secondly, although ‘opened’ by the world of matter, each viniculm can only bend elastic movement into itself, as if it were uncovering these movement as a possibility it already had.. It follows that the domain of aggregate matter opens out strange communication between disperate individuals: Deleuze notes Leibniz teaches the valuble insight that communication itself is never the problem, as it is in itself a constant (154). What is more problematic is how one resolves a ‘communicative element’, which is both only be enfolded in a body by plastic forces, but also even as it communicates is creative. What is shared takes the form of a counter point, which but which difference is both communicated and affirmed (153,155).
Thirdly, as soon as one moves beyond Leibniz it is very clear that there is as real dynamic instability within the body. Each body must open out links to other natures, which will always be able to move ‘otherwise’ (125). Likewise each nature is always only a fold away from the infinity of nature itself. Once that nature cease to be a singular world, but becomes a choasmos, each individual is caught up in that chaos, and straddles many possible worlds, and with them bodies (157).
Fourthly, the position of nature has changed. Nature is no longer the archetype of a machanic composition of powers, because the conditions that allow it to be posited necessarily involve an ‘irreducible variety’ of distinct individuals (Deleuze and Guattari 1992 213), from whom it must always be distinct (it is the finite that restores the infinite, ibid 197).
Finally, it is it is not absolutely clear (once the monad looses is supremacy), at what exact point the soul is present in the body. It is the soul that actually constitutes this unity? Or is it the fold itself that is real? And if it is not the soul, how does this fold link with other prehensions, which it captures, and is caught by (158)?
However, it is clear that as Deleuze cannot answer these questions in terms of Leibniz, he once again turns to Spinoza. He now understands Spinoza’s three forms of knowledge in terms of affect, concept and percept (Deleuze 1995 165), and it is the first and the last of these elements that now offer to philosophy the ‘non-philosophic tools, by which , the ‘possible universes’ of sensation can be explored.
This last point clearly takes the relation between Leibniz and Spinoza circle. The dynamic of a Leibniz who defined the problem, as well as an imperfect set of solutions, and a Spinoza how answered the problem correctly, is a perpetual presence within the thought of Deleuze. Initially the formation was relatively simple. Leibniz’s problem merely concerned how one understood how a differential exists within an individual. Spinoza’s solution was likewise limited, while Spinoza himself was merely the last stepping stone on the path to difference. All this suddenly is suddenly rendered topsy-turvy by Guattari’s suggestion that Leibniz was better able that Spinoza to allow for difference. A move that then prefigured the Spinoza of a Thousand Plateau, now revealed as the supreme philosopher of nature. In the Fold yet another Leibniz is encountered. This Leibniz in a sense vindicates both Deleuze’s initial argument, that God created the world, and not the monad, whose task was not to have concepts, but rather to the actualize the aggregate mixtures in one world. And yet at the same time Guattari (as non-philosopher ) was also right, once it was realized that this ‘aggregate’ world has its own productive, if non-philosophic dynamic. It is then this Leibniz which triggered the final encounter with Spinoza, who is now understood not only as the supreme philosopher of nature, but also the Christ of Philosophy, who obliges the philosopher (Deleuze) to engage with other non-philosophic worlds. That is, it is this threefold synthesis of Leibniz with Spinoza, which sees Spinoza move from being the closest ‘near miss’ in the history of philosophy to Neitzsche (and the eternal return) , through being the supreme philosopher of nature itself , to his transfiguration in What is Philosophy,as the Christ of Philosopers, whose John the bapist no doubt revealed to be Leibniz.