Hi, I understand that some of you will have found Deleuze's text a very difficult way to start the seminar, but I think it's worthwhile using it to raise some profound questions at the level of philosophy before we move to more 'Cultural -studies -type papers and look at artworks and artists etc. But we don't have to know or understand every text so much as use them as vehicles for our own discussion and questions and ideas.
Nevertheless, if anyone wants to read the text in tandem with my reading here you may find it more illuminating and useful. Anyway, here it is for those who may be interested. You may find it even more confusing but I hope it will help and may significantly change your thinking.
My reading of Gilles Deleuze’s short essay ‘A Philosophical Concept …’ (taken from Eduardo Cadaver’s ‘Who Comes After the Subject’)
Paragraph 1.
First Deleuze is saying that he is going to talk about a ‘concept’ and that concepts are subject to variables (change in the ‘states of things’, Historical changes), both internal and external changes affect the concepts we use to orient ourselves. It’s not up to us to just say a concept such as ‘Subject’ is dead (he is writing in answer to the question ’Who Comes After The Subject?’), no, we have to wait for the variables to change in such a way that the concept no longer exists or no longer applies (perhaps we experience this in a less profound way when a cool word or band or style becomes stale, we don’t make it that way but things change and suddenly its no longer cool).
Paragraph 2.
The concept ‘Subject’ has for a long time served two useful functions. First it worked as a useful universal way to address the self, even after we stopped grounding reality in objective universals like Truth and God, Essence etc. and began instead to believe reality is grounded only in Acts -acts of reason and acts of language. Here Deleuze illustrates by showing admiration for philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), the Scottish empiricist who changed and challenged the idea of a Subject by asking whether it is ever accurate for us to use the words ‘always’, or ‘necessary’ when really all we can ‘know’ is immediate, present experience. Hume was sceptical enough to dismiss the idea of ‘knowing’ and preferred to believe in things he experienced directly, as if for the first and only time. Deleuze suggests this changed our model of the Subject because, influenced by Hume’s model we are no longer grounded by reliable, objective universals but rather led by experience. The ‘Subject’ is just a series of experiences and acts –events we might say. Belief in these acts, experiences and events becomes our basis for reality, not reliable ‘knowledge’. The concept ‘Subject’ served the function of representing this kind of person or human. Second, in a modernising world in which we no longer thought of the self as a soul or a mere thing, the concept ‘Subject’ helps us to individuate the self even though. As someone who speaks and is spoken to, the self has several terms of address, including ‘I’, ‘You’ and ‘Me’. He raises the question of a difference between ‘I’ and ‘me’, asks if they refer to the same thing and suggests there is a conflict between them. When we use ‘I’ Deleuze says it is more universal, but when we use ‘me’ it is more individual. It is these questions which introduce the debate that became a philosophy of the subject and he says Hume, Kant, Husserl and Descartes all raised this question.
Paragraph 3.
Rather than simply say the Subject is dead, redundant etc. Deleuze asks if we can find new variables to change our idea of the concept ‘Subject’. As one example he mentions new 20th century notions of time (I think he means Einstein and Bergson and the ways that time may now be considered as variable according to Relativity, speed, or subjective experience). He states that this is an example of the way in which today singularities have become more important than universals. A singularity is not just the opposite of a universal but something we can use to make connections with other singularities (Here we could think of Hume again and of the modern Subject as someone who shares and compares singular experiences to ascertain and maintain reality rather than grounding it in an abstract universal of Knowledge or Truth). 20th century thinking doesn’t necessarily rest on ‘knowledge', or belief, but on more mathematical ‘arrangements’, ‘contrivances’, and assemblages. When we think of the world in this way the Subject doesn’t figure (as it does in ‘knowledge' or belief), the world runs with or without the Subject, beyond the human) and Deleuze calls this “ a transcendental field without Subject”. Philosophy may then be able to dismiss the Subject from its considerations and understand the world as arrangements of singularities, multiples that, once conveniently brought together become a new kind of singularity that he calls a Multiplicity. Now, there is no need to oppose singularity with universal, we have a new term -‘Multiplicity’- which is both singular and multiple - ‘a Multiplicity’ - and this might be the best way to consider the Subject, it is another arrangement, contrivance or assemblage. Things that recur and repeat, that are regular (in this more mathematical world of experiences and events) are more important than ‘knowledge’ or the old distinction between ‘true and false’. We forget about true and false and we forget universals, all we work with are these arrangements, these Multiplicities. Interestingly the Law works like this, appealing, not to essential truth but to repetitions, patterns and precedents brought together to prove a point. The truth, reality or identity of the ‘Subject’ doesn’t concern the Law because the law is only made up of a series of examples and precedents that can be configured in certain ways to make someone guilty or innocent.
Paragraph 4.
These are some of the variables that, through History have changed or are changing what we thought of as the self and have come to think of as the ‘Subject’. There are types of individuation that are not personal, ways of singling a self out that are not innate or within. If we see the word in terms of multiplicities we may wonder what individuates a multiplicity. We speak of a life, an event, a season, 5 o’clock, and there is a useful word to use here -‘Hecceities’ which means something like ‘a this’ or ‘thisness’, it is useful because we can use it to refer to a thing as an event. A this is only this, a this is an event that may repeat but will never be 'this' again. What we called the Subject is no longer a person or ego, we are only a ‘this’ a ‘thisness’ - a hecceity. Compared to calling myself a hecceity or a ‘this’ the Anglo-American word ‘me’ seems to Deleuze to be a “grammatical fiction” (think of the unconvincing explanation by Maria in The Sound Of Music - “Me, a name I call myself”). When we see ourselves as a ‘this’ we see ourselves as an ‘a’, as an event which, like other events is best understood in terms of relative speed and slowness, longitude and latitude, power and affect (exerted force and sensual response). Everything becomes “impersonal”, so that we are an ‘it' (as might be used to refer to other events). ‘It’ replaces ‘me’ in as Deleuze says that ‘it’ better describes our self and our exchanges with a community than ‘I’ and ‘You’ (perhaps the self as part of a Facebook group, seminar or other community is better described as an ‘it than as ‘me’). The reason we might today ask the question ‘Who Comes After The Subject?’ is that we are today aware of the important influence upon us of things less than the Subject (atoms, genes, acts) which nevertheless determine what and who we are, as well as impersonal arrangements greater than and external to the Subject (community, time, language) that form a modern understanding of the world without the Subject at its centre (with knowledge, truth, God or law to rely upon). But, as Deleuze said at the beginning, there is no point in just replacing one concept with another, or simply saying any particular concept is dead, we have to look at the problems and questions that a concept was previously used to answer or solve (which is what he has done in this short essay) and see how those problems and questions have changed to make the concept seem outmoded. Then we might see what the new problems and questions demand instead today (perhaps this is what the seminar is all about). In conclusion, Deleuze notes that nothing the great philosophers have written on this problem is dead either, the History of thought doesn’t work like that, it is the fact that past philosophers have asked questions so deeply and rigorously that allows us to continue asking such questions, and he compares philosophy to both science and art because, like them it only survives and thrives by having new questions to answer and it serves a changing world by creating new representations to accommodate and orient our experience.
END
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