Deleuzian Immanence: A Primer

I wrote this some time ago as a kind of primer to Deleuze's understanding of immanence. I'm still pretty happy with it, although I'd add two things. First, I'd suggest reading this together with the pieces on univocity and 'non-ontology', both of which I wrote some time after this. Together, I think they form a nice triptych of Deleuze's philosophy as trying, fundamentally, to get at the same thing in a few different ways. An 'overthrowing' of ontology in favor of a thinking of 'life', the stakes of which, beyond mere labels, have to do with a primacy of ethics. Univocity in particular is that which 'cashes out' the promise of immanence: to think Being under the demand of immanence transforms it into a thinking of Life. Second, I wish I qualified a little better the 'comologizing of thought' I mention in Part II, which risks a strong pan-psychic reading of Deleuze. I think this ought to be avoided, but a proper engagement with that topic would be a little too disruptive to the flow of the piece. So I simply signal my discomfort here for when you come across it later down there.

What Is Immanence (For Deleuze)?

Part I: Basics

"Immanence" follows from the effort to carry through the project of transcendental philosophy to the end. This needs some unpacking, but the idea is this - recall that for Kant, 'transcendental philosophy' asks after the "conditions of possible experience", i.e. what kind of conditions need to be in place so that experience is possible? For Kant, these conditions amount to the whole system of cognition, with the 'faculties' of imagination, understanding, and reason all interacting with one another in their very specific ways (as detailed by Kant) such that experience is 'possible'. Deleuze's critique of Kant is that it's not good enough to just ask after the conditions of 'possible' experience. Deleuze wants to go further. He wants to ask after the conditions of real experience: what conditions must be 'in place' such that 'real', and not just 'possible' experience, is engendered?

By why real experience? What's the problem? Well, for Deleuze, the problem with 'stopping' at 'possible experience' is that it just presumes that thought has a natural affinity with what is thought. As though the universe was formed 'just-so' in order for us to apprehend it in thought, and vice versa. Deleuze's case is that you can't just presume this. This is what he calls the paradigm of 'recognition'. 'Recognition' is the idea that thought always bears upon identical objects, ready and waiting, as it were, to be re-cognized by a self-same subject ('a flash of recognition'). But for Deleuze, you can't just presume this correlation - instead, real experience must affect a change (a difference) 'in' the subject, experience is something one 'undergoes' such that one's identity is at every point disrupted or dissolved. Here's how he puts it (and pay attention to the rhetoric of 'necessity' and 'force' - this will be important later): "Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. ... Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter" (D&R, 139).

So what does this mean? What do we 'encounter', if not identical objects? Deleuze's answer is: problems. We encounter 'problems' and 'experience' is the on-going effort to 'solve' problems ("the object of encounter, the sign, were the bearer of a problem - as though it were a problem", D&R, 140). By 'problem', Deleuze means something like an open-ended problem, one that can never be solved 'definitively', but only provisionally and in an on-going manner. This is why time is so important: thought is not re-cognition, it doesn't take place 'in a flash'. In non-Delezueian terms, experience is an on-going 'negotiation' (my term) that never comes to an end (not because it's 'lacking' anything, but because there is no end to which it can be subject - the future eternally returns). What is primary is difference, not identity! Identity then, is derivative, secondary to this primary, ongoing process of negotiation, a freeze-frame cut out of an otherwise dynamic, ever differentiating development. And recognition (and with it, judgement), bears only upon identities.

So how do we relate this back to the question of immanence? Well, this whole process described above is what Deleuze calls an account of 'intrinsic genesis', rather than 'extrinsic conditioning' (D&R, 154). 'Intrinsic' because it presupposes nothing about the object of thought, does not subject the objects of thought to judgements according to pre-defined categories and ready-made concepts: "In fact, concepts only ever designate possibilities. They lack the claws of absolute necessity" (D&R, 139) - this, here, is Deleuze's critique of transcendence: that transcendence is always too arbitrary with respect to genesis, insofar as thinking in terms of 'possibility' 'lacks the claws' of necessity which can only ever be engendered by 'encounters'. Immanence is (but is not only this) just the name of precisely this effort to think thought on its own terms, without resorting to (arbitrary) presuppositions.

Part II: Complications (enfoldings)

Two last comments need to be made in order to complete this sketch of immanence. So far, we've been talking about 'thought' as an straight-forward category that more or less coincides with human thought. However, for Deleuze, this is not the case. To be blunt about it, for Deleuze, everything 'thinks' Or better, everything is insofar as it is thought: "Organisms awake to the sublime words of the third Ennead: all is contemplation! Perhaps it is irony to say that everything is contemplation, even rocks and woods, animals and men..." (D&R, 75). While there is alot to be said about this understanding of 'contemplation' or thought, the essential point to extract from this is that the account of 'thought' given here is cosmological in its scope: it applies not only to human thought, but to all that exists. Deleuze's simple term that he uses to designate the scope of immanence is "life". Or more expansively, 'non-organic life', insofar as the 'life' that concerns Deleuze is more than just biological beings as we know them, but 'life' in the sense of 'the life of the universe' and everything within it.

To conclude, it is important to recognize that immanence doesn't just designate an 'ontological' or 'metaphysical' category (however one chooses to understand those terms), but also an ethical one. For Deleuze, immanence provides a basis for thinking an ethics which is opposed to 'moralism', where 'moralism' is what judges life from an 'extrinsic' POV, apart from the possibilities inherent in life. Life as viewed from 'within', as it were. As before, there is much to be said here, but a closing quote will have to do: 

"There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared, selected, and judged relative to one another. On the contrary, there are only immanent criteria. A possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements it lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence: what is not laid out or created is rejected. A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good and Evil or any transcendent value: there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life." (WIP, 74)

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Note: The reason I dragged this old piece up on the blog is that someone actually translated this little primer into Chinese! Which is just such a deeply wonderful honor. To think that this not only helped someone, but that it did to enough to motivate them to transmit it forward to others. In some ways the height of what I could ask for as a Deleuzian - to become a relay! ("You became aware of the necessity for confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay - it's possible, on the contrary, that your function was already that of a relay in relation to them" - Deleuze, Intellectuals and Power).

The translation, by Aho, is here:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/SZRRrBtQPIleHPhrmu6N-A 

 

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