A Pair of Deleuzian Terms: Different/ciation

Sometimes, it's fun to take an incredibly obscure point of Deleuze's vocabulary, and use it as a lever to crack open the wider edifice of Deleuze's philosophy (fun to me, OK?). One such obscure point is the distinction between 'differentiation' and 'differenciation' (one with a 't' and the other with a 'c'), which Deleuze sometimes leans on in his discussions around the time of Difference and Repetition. Here we're going to use the different/ciation distinction to clarify (partially) another pair of obscure terms: the virtual and the actual.

First, the basic architecture (don't worry about what anything means yet, just follow the correlations). Keeping in mind the famous pair 'virtual' and 'actual', we can say that the virtual is what is differenTiated (it is differenTiated 'in-itself' as it were, without any reference to the actual), while the process by which the virtual is actualized is called differenCiation. In the order of (logical) priority, differenTation 'preceeds' differenCiation. So, if this is the case, what even is the virtual and the actual? The simple answer is that the virtual is to the actual as a problem is to a solution (or at least a 'response'). The virtual specifies the field of problems (which may be physical, biological, social, linguistic, mathematical, or otherwise) to which the actual are responses. The actual is said to 'incarnate' the virtual.

If you can get this problem/response model, then you can start to understand how different/ciation maps onto it. The idea is that even in the absence of a solution, a problem itself has determinate structure (Deleuze will say: a problem, or the virtual, is a structure). That is, a problem has a fully positive ontological standing 'in itself', without any need for a corresponding solution which would make it 'complete'. Here is how Deleuze puts it in his Method of Dramatization paper: "a thing in its Ideal form (virtual form -Si) can be completely determined (differenTiated), and yet lack the determinations which constitute actual existence (it is undifferenciated)". This determinate structure of a problem is what Deleuze calls its differenTiation. A problem, or virtual, is fully differenTiated.

So, once you have a fully differenTiated virtual/problem in place, then you can have a process of differenCiation which actualizes said problem (in a solution or response to it). DifferenCiation is tributary to differenTiation, in the order of genesis. Now, Deleuze goes into some detail here. What defines differenTiation itself (the structure of a problem) is what Deleuze calls the 'distribution of relations and singularities' which constitute it. Put otherwise, problems are defined by their 'relations' and 'singularities'. Correspondingly, solutions are defined by their 'qualities and species' and 'number and parts'. The latter pair are said to 'incarnate' the former pair, respectively. This is confusing, so mapping it out onto a bit of a table is useful:

DifferenTiated :: DifferenCiated

Differential Relations :: Qualities and Species

Singularities :: Number and Parts

Virtual :: Actual

These correspondences are everywhere emphasized when Deleuze talks of the different/ciated distinction. The Method paper puts it most succinctly: " DifferenTiation ... comprises relations and singularities characterising the virtual multiplicities or Ideas. DifferenCiation expresses the actualisation of these relations and singularities in qualities and extensions, species and parts as objects of representation." And in Difference and Repetition: "Qualities and species incarnate the varieties of actual relation; organic parts incarnate the corresponding singularities" (D&R, 120).

This is all very well and good, but at this point, all we've been doing is collecting terminological correspondences. Any good scholastic philosopher would end it here. But how are these terms to be 'cashed out', as it were? Well, a Deleuzian example of something differenTiated which then, in turn, becomes differenCiated is the gene: the gene is a 'system of differential relations' which is incarnated both as a species (dog, horse, human), and as a set of organic parts (this particular paw, that particular bridge of the nose). Or in the other set of terms we've been using, the gene poses a problem to which a response is a species of living thing, and this or that particular living. And the gene itself can be defined - without any reference to what incarnates it - as a series of differential relations and singular points.

 

Although the gene is a privileged example, the Deleuzian point would be to generalize this model of problem and response, differenTiation and differenCiation, to everything that is. As he writes in the Method paper: "The notion of different/ciation does not only express a mathematico-biological complex, but the very condition of all cosmology, as the two halves of the object". There is in fact nothing - not 'in' the entire universe, but 'of' the entire universe - for Deleuze, which does not come about by means of this complex interplay of problem and solution.

The question that might crop up here is why? Why all these moving parts? What motivates the positing of all these conceptual fly-wheels and moving parts as an account of things? For want of space, we can only give a partial answer here. But it has to do with Deleuze's effort to think about ontogenesis (how things, in the widest sense of the term, come to be) without any reference to the negative, or to 'lack'. Recall earlier that we said that problems, as differenTiated, have full ontological standing, 'in themselves'. This is the very desideratum of Deleuzian philosophy: the attempt to think Being in terms that does not admit of any negation: "Problems-Ideas are positive multiplicities, full and differentiated positivities" (D&R, 267). And it's in this model of problem-solution, differenTiation-differenCiation, that Deleuze finds a way to articulate just that. As to why, in turn, Deleuze wants to be done with the negative, well, that's another story.

-

(Potentially un)Clarifying note: A really important point to emphasize, because so many people get this wrong, is that what does the actualizing, the 'agent' in the process of actualization, is the actual, not the virtual. The virtual, qua problem, doesn't do anything. It elicits, or imminently conditions the responses which it presides over, but the active power of actualization is wholly on the side of the actual. Deleuze emphasizes that it is what he calls 'intensity' which is "the determinant in the process of actualization", and, as Dale Clisby¹ has so forcefully pointed out, intensity is on the side of the actual. The well known critiques from Badiou to Hallward on the 'priority of the virtual' are simply wrong. The virtual is actualized, but it is actualized by processes that take place at the level of the actual; by means of the actual. To really dive into this would require a whole post of its own. But we've said so much already...

-

¹ Clisby, "Deleuze's Secret Dualism: Competing Accounts of the Relationship Between the Virtual and the Actual", Parrhesia 24, 2015.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze's Three Syntheses of Time: A Primer

Image
Merry Christmas! My present is this utterly unmotivated post on Deleuze's three syntheses of time, meant to give the general gist of what's going on, without being too technical about it. This is anything but exhaustive. If I pull this off right, this might be the shortest exposition of the syntheses that have otherwise filled entire monographs! So here we go:  The cover illustration on one of the editions of Borges' Labyrinths. The 2nd Synthesis   The 3 syntheses (elaborated in chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition ) are easily among the toughest although most important bits of Deleuze's writing. But they can be rendered digestible by starting with a simple example: the example of déjà vu. It's not an original example, and in fact, it was Bergson himself who furnished it in his own essay on the "Memory of the Present and False Recognition". We're more or less going to crib from it to make Deleuze a little clearer (hopefully). Speaking very roughly,
Read more

Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History: A Synopsis and Critique

Image
Here's a small synopsis and critique of De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History . A quick word, though, about what De Landa means to me. It's actually been something of a great pleasure to read him again, because I think I can say, without exaggeration, that my chance stumbling upon his other book, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , among a random library shelf at uni one day, changed my life. I was looking for a different book, and I couldn't tell you for the life of me what it was now. I checked out Intensive Science because it looked interesting and gosh, it was nothing less than an Event for me, something after which almost everything I read now is, in some distant way or another, related to Deleuze. To return to De Landa is to return to the primal scene! Him and Levi Bryant's work on Deleuze, I should mention. With the distance of time - it's been years - I'm heartened by the fact that I can take an equal distance now, to De Landa&
Read more

Small Review of Guillaume Collett's The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School (2018)

Image
I finished reading Guillaume Collett's The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School not too long ago, and since there is almost nothing I can find that's been written about it, here's a small review. Published in 1969, Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense has by now garnered a small handful of dedicated studies, each of which continues to plumb the depths of that strange yet magnificent book (cf. the work of James Williams, Sean Bowden, Piotrek Świątkowski, and Mehdi Parsa). Guillaume Collett’s contribution, The Psychoanalysis of Sense , is distinguished by its focus on Deleuze’s engagement with psychoanalysis (as advertised!), as well as doing the one thing which has been desperately needed for a while now: reading the book back to front. For, as any reader of the Logic of Sense knows, its already brutal level of difficulty is compounded by the book’s organizational schema, composed as a series of loosely overlapping chapters (or ‘series’), who
Read more