Ping Pong 66: It is Beyond Me Now
In a sense Deleuze (and Foucault) bring justice full circle. Plato had initially outlined a theory of justice based upon the idea that there existed something (for him Ideas) beyond any one individual mind, which dictated exactly what it was good to think and right to believe. The crux of Platonic justice was therefore that one’s mind was never (quite) one’s own. And is it this problem of an external element to thought that runs through the work of Deleuze and Foucault. What, they ask, do such externals look like in world where one has lost faith in both the individual as a prime unit for thinking, and also in God as the prime guarantor of truth. What is it then to do justice to the external elements to thought without God or the Soul? The point then is, that this external element will clearly need to be thought in terms of mechanics for thinking, for producing ideas, which cannot be tied to any one individual mind. They will rather exist as mobile thoughts, whose provenance is shared by many brains. Or to put it differently, one needs to think the nature of a thought whose essence lies between minds. Put in this way of course, the combined project of Deleuze and Foucault shares much with that of the thinkers of the gateway to the twentieth century (Durkheim, Freud, Weber and Bergson). These thinkers had similarly, in very different ways attempted to create patterns of thought that existed in between different individuals. However, for all these latter thinkers the domain so created had an absolute value of its own. It existed therefore instead of God and in spite of the soul. It was the replacement for those concepts. What makes Deleuze and Foucault different, is that they want no such replacement. On the contrary, they want to produce ruses for thought that work on different rhythms to those ones haunted by Gods and souls.
Deleuze’s starting point to understand such rhythms is the idea that thought must be seen to be akin to an abstract machine, and so not tied to personality. Such a machine is characterized by numerous different parts that all hook together to produce an effect. That is, each machine hooks across numerous minds and articulates certain of their thoughts one with other, to produce an effect beyond any one thought, or any one individual. The nature of this effect will only come forth across the interactions of these components. A ruse of thought is therefore always a means by which at some level something new tumbles into the world. This new thought might then itself hook into new machines (and so become itself a mere component, a productive agent in another’s reality). The great advantage of the machine driven approach is that it never ties any series of thoughts to either specific individuals (components) or even specific products. The same series of components might well, if tweaked a little differently produce different products, the same products might be produced by different components, or the same machine might in its history embrace different elements within it. Everything can change across all dimensions and yet the machines rumble on; that is, an effect will continue to be produced.
Machines will thereby produce texture within thought. That is, they form the crucible within which thoughts are manufactured, thoughts which are then spun off into reality. Each thought constructs reality at a certain level. The thoughts of one level will then have nothing to do with the thoughts of another (or will only be indirectly linked to them). The thoughts of the world described in times of String Theory or Quarks will therefore only be tangentially linked to that described by atoms and molecules. Each machine, each level, being genuinely creative, and therefore never simply reducible to the previous level. Genes might be caught up in the manufacture of the proteins which build lives, and yet lives are a thing apart (and enter into numerous machines, each of which use those proteins differently according to the rhythms of their respective machines). The joy of this model is that there is nothing preordained about such machines. They occur when elements start to communicate with each other, and so become productive. Machines are therefore in a sense genuinely semi-spontaneous production as they really produce things that were never thought before, and new and unique co-operations emerge. For example twenty four hour news operates as such a machine, and does so at numerous levels. At the most basic level it is clear that each individual company scours the world for news. Or perhaps better, they take as their inputs the micro news being produced by rumour or Twitter, or (occasionally) witness accounts. This news is then transformed and packaged across a single corporation and is made to produce reactions in individuals presenters, and tailored to fit arguments or fit in with specific cases. It is therefore used to produce or manufacture the ‘truth’ of a report. This product, this truth, is then taken up by other news organizations, which report upon the report, and use it to produce a product of their own, a product which the first corporation then itself uses. The entire system therefore produces a ‘meta news’, that is, a news whose provenance lies between all these corporations, all these networks, and has a chance to claim that it is the ‘entire’ truth’ as it is reported.
The point then, about all of these stages, is that they are genuinely productive and creative. The final product, that of the news story which the entire system produces, has very little to do with the original ‘story’ and is a product of a machine, a product of a series of shared thoughts and productive moves. It is a thing in its own right. Deleuze, while arguing that there are an infinite variety of such machines, suggests that it useful to distinguish between two different types of shared thinking. On the one hand, there are concepts, and on the other, percept-affects. The former deal with the events outlined in essay 64 in this series. They therefore operate by focusing different events, one against the other, and producing thoughts that accord to this focus. The latter operate according to a totally different schemata. They have at their essence the idea that perception opens one onto a world that is genuinely differently to oneself. To perceive, to hold a colour in one’s head, is therefore to allow something utterly differently into one’s mind, and the percept-affect is the means by which one allows this difference its transforming power. Both these difference machines will then need to be considered n a little detail.
A concept exists at a point or junction in which many differing thoughts meet and hook up, and produce differing effects . Take as an example the concept of the ‘War on…’(drugs, freedom, terrorism). Each of these possible wars bring with them numerous different elements and different experiences. The war on…drugs therefore combines stories about people who die through drug abuse, with worries about social control, with strategies for social repression, with anxieties about capitalism (and the marketing of actual poisons designed for consumption), with anxieties about the rain forests, with… All these thoughts are then taken up in the war on drugs and made to communicate one to the other. They produce then an effect, a set of options, and a strategy, an angle or series of angles, a series of thoughts about how one deals with drugs. On a wider level, the concept of the ‘War on…’ operates always as a point which inserts a division within society. To fight a war is to call to arms. It forces individuals to rummage around within their own minds, and produce thoughts which accord to the war, thoughts and feelings that place them on one side or other of the conflict. The various wars on… therefore operate (ideally) to produce directions within the thoughts of differing individuals, directions that then see folk want the same basic thing and feel themselves to be of the same basic struggle. The wars on… define therefore, a way that things ought to matter, and requires that they do matter to the population.
However there is a problem at this point, in the nature of these wars. Each war in itself appears complete. It is a direction, a rallying call which operates by itself on the population. And yet the wider War on…concept actually describes and involves all wars, and does so in such a way that insists that all these apparently different fights are actually caught up in one another. The war on poverty, and the war on drugs, and terrorisms are therefore inter-related struggles. Poverty creates or is caught up with terror, and with drugs, while drugs fund terrorism, and create ways out of poverty, and terror uses drugs and feeds itself on frustrated hope. The War therefore hooks up all its elements, making them jangle one across the other. It therefore ensures that those who take a simplistic approach to the concept and the nature of these specific wars are caught up in spite of themselves within a far wider series of connections which they never envisaged. The war on terror therefore not only confirmed the right of the Taliban (apparently) to produce opium; but also creates a situation that sees the brother of the president of Afghanistan as one of the main opium drug barons…
It is the peculiar power of the concept that it ensures that nothing is simple. One thought that reality was within one’s grasp, (one thought the war on… made things simple), and yet the concept reached out, and included other things in the thought. It reaches therefore, across disparate elements and hooks them into the same dance, one to the other, a dance it is very easy for naïve humans to become unwilling partners within and parties to. One creates concepts therefore at one’s own peril. That is, one creates them without ever being able to control their eventual outcome.
Percepts and affects work to a rather different rhythm. For Deleuze, the percept exists as the point at which a perception tumbles into one’s mind and forces one to inhabit a landscape far greater than oneself. One is therefore contained within an entire picture, where what one thinks, and how one can use one’s perceptions could and perhaps should, always be different. To look at a landscape in a painting is therefore to be transformed, from a mere spectator upon a picture to a figure in a landscape, caught up in details and little journeys of eye and mind. What one is, and how one changes in accordance with these journeys, are peculiarly the power and domain of the percept. Or to give a totally different kind of example; In a sense the recent election results (UK local and European) were akin to a percept. Something seismic occurred when Labour’s vote failed to materialize. We all knew it was going to happen. We all knew that it would have consequences. The problem was that it was not clear at all what those consequences would be. The country was therefore caught up in a nexus of possibles (would the Labour Party sack its leader, or not, would a general election happen or not, etc.). It was only then resolved by the specific action of the cabinet (those who did not resign). This action then ensured that Brown could keep his job, but at the cost of being the plaything of certain elements within the cabinet. If they decide at a future time they are better off being without him, they are free to be so. Something therefore seismic did happen (the castration of a Prime Minster is always seismic) it was just not quite what we expected. This nature, this tumble into an elsewhere, is always the peculiar power of the percept.
Caught up within the percept’s domain of possibilities are affects. The power of the affects, or feelings is to create a reaction to the percept or better a locus of possible actions. They create feelings therefore, that might later resolve in numerous ways, and be a part of and gathered within, many different possible subsequent feelings (all of which would trace their origins back to this one feeling). The affect creates therefore a feeling that straddles both many different worlds and the different ‘me’s of those worlds. That is, an affect is always greater than the individual who thinks it. The affect embraces many possible universes, and could be a part of other ‘me’s in a way in which I as a creature of a single life cannot. For example there is clearly an affect in the modern psyche about limitation and poverty. Not to consume has a certain trendy power. This power allows minds to orchestrate an individual who is a capable of living within a world of lacks; caused either by global warming or by global recession. It is the affect therefore, in straddling both worlds of lack, that creates or experiments with the creation of individuals who take a pride in making do and managing without. The affect is therefore the place in which new individuals or new types of individuality are being formed. And yet this individuation is happening at a place that could always be recanted. The very term used above - ‘trendy’ - indicates as much. Hence the affect straddles three differing worlds. The one of global recession, the one of global warming, and the one of mere trend setting. It creates a feeling which gives a home and is appropriate for all these worlds, and then waits upon events to resolve exactly which feeling it is.
Percepts create nexuses of possible worlds. That is they open up on many different landscapes, many different takes on the same sets of perceptions; while affects create feelings which could spin around in many different ways and revolve or resolve themselves into numerous apparently conflicting or at least distinct decisions. Deleuze suggests that these two hook up in our minds and with one another to create for us, both an individual finite space, a body or time and place, where I need to make a decision from, and a world and cosmos beyond that point. So that each individual at any one time exists as the body or place or frame into which percepts and affects tumble. My very ability to live in many possible worlds therefore configures on my certain finitude. I must choose to be caught up with a choice, a world which follows a time, when the forces that impels that choice or at least inform it, might take me to many other places, other worlds. I am therefore the nub, the point, that forces resolve, and become part of differing universes and differing possibles. This nub, this framing element, will then always in itself be open to the universe. That is, it will be open to the forces that tumble into it, and the conflicting possibles which they open up upon. The infinitude beyond, the series of possibles, becomes therefore only given, only conceived, within finite agencies.
This last point is of profound importance. The entire argument about global warming and the wider argument about the powers and patterns of nature is framed by it. What nature is, as immense force, is always defined by the finite individuals that live within it. Infinite nature therefore requires to be given something ‘other’, some individual capable of perceiving and feeling that nature in order to be. Nature is therefore the product of the minds of individuals, but only in so far as it is what breaks into those individuals’ minds and forces them to be different. It is the point beyond, that only has a beyond because we are there. Hence to respect ‘nature’, is to respect this world of possibles and possibilities. Thence to want to defend it, is to want to defend the diversity of possibility which it opens up to our minds (a diversity that global warming threatens). The ‘war’ for the environment is therefore at each point the war to ensure diversity and possibly keep its power and provenance and so avoid the entropic sump of excessive planetary warming. Hence in a very deep way, the battle for cultural and ecological diversity, and are party to the same ‘war on…’
Abstract machines therefore exist always beyond myself; through they it is that I can be hooked into justice, into the world and what I am within that world. I never act simply on my own, but rather as part of an assemblage that hooks me up to numerous other individuals, affects, and actions. However this still leaves open the problem of exactly how as a me, I might choose between these differing machines, and so choose the ones I feel to be just. This problem has of course been made, by Deleuze a highly complex one, as it is now clear, that this circle of mind is never independent from the machines which it chooses between. I am already a machine and part of many other machines. How then can I choose between them? How can I finally be just? This problem will be examined in the next Rant, which will look at how Foucault configures individuals in just such circumstances and will, by looking again at Plato, bring these studies full circle.
