’I think there’s an image of thought that changes a lot, that’s changed a lot through history. By the image of thought I don’t mean its method but something deeper that’s always taken for granted, a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think, and to “orient oneself in thought.” (Negotiations p 147-148 ).
The problem of thought for Deleuze is what kind of activity, of process, thinking is. What is an act of thinking? This problem also relates to the how and who of thinking.
Deleuze argues that we have ‘images of thought’ – pre-philosophical notions (I guess by this he means without concepts) of what thinking is and that these are simply taken for granted. The current orthodox image of thought is grounded in the thinking subject. The famous beginning ‘I think therefore …’ is a good demonstration of this image. Necessary for thinking, is a thinking subject, the ‘I’. This image of thought is also defined by common sense and good sense. Common sense is that which is possessed by all thinking subjects, and draws all our other faculties together: perception, imagination and memory. Together with common sense, we also have good sense, that which determines that correct distribution of the other faculties. Hence, in this image of thought, thinking is guaranteed by a subject with common sense and good sense.
However, this image of thought limits sense to mere representation (the most general term to cover all recognition, resemblance, and reproduction). By limiting the act of thinking to the act of representing, thought becomes the measuring of the world (literally geometry) by the thinking subject. Objects are given to thought by being measured through recognition, comparison, or judgement. The model of thought is ‘harmony of the faculties grounded in the supposedly universal thinking subject and exercised upon the unspecified object’ (Difference and Repetition, p 134). These unspecified objects moreover, only come to us as metric objects, even in remembrance and imagination within this image of thought.
So what is the alternative to this image? Difference and Repetition begins to develop one (Though I am aware that perhaps The Logic of Sense is the more rigorous text on ‘what is thinking’). Thinking begins not with a subject but with an encounter.
‘Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple, a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition …’ (D&R p 130)
Concepts are never isolated, but always come together with percepts (‘packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them’) and affects (‘becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them’) (Negotiations p 137), I gather it is this triplet which is characteristic of an encounter. So what is it that we encounter? What is the object of the encounter that forces us to think? We cannot recognise that which has forced us to think, as recognition would assume the old image of thought and us as always and already thinking subjects. Nor can the object be the ‘I’ again falling back onto the old image.
‘The object of the encounter on the other hand, really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense. It is not an aistheton but an aistheteon. It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given. It is therefore a certain sense the imperceptible … that which can only be sensed (the sentinendum of the being of the sensible) moves the soul, ‘perplexes it’ – in other words, forces it to pose a problem: as though the object of encounter, the sign, were the bearer of a problem- as though it were a problem.’ (D&R p 139-40)
This is not to say that we do not engage with familiar objects – cars, money – but these do not exhaust what is given in an encounter. More strongly put, these are not that which is sensed in the encounter. What is sensed is the being of this sensible encounter. The encounter, its sign, its object, its sense are all the same thing (and this is not an essence). It is a problem.
What forces us to think, where thinking originates is a problem. It is the problem that determines the sense of the actual happenings, the given, of the encounter. We may also calls these encounters, these problems, Ideas or events. Foucault writes:
‘… it is also here that this analysis poses some probably awesome philosophical or theoretical problems, If discourses are to be treated first as ensembles of discursive events, what status are we to accord this notion of event, so rarely taken into consideration by philosophers? Of course, an event is neither substance, nor accident nor quality nor process; events are not corporeal. And yet, an event is certainly not immaterial; it takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of materiality. Events have their place; they consist in relation to, coexistence with, dispersion of, the cross-checking accumulation and the selection of material elements; it occurs as an effect of, and in, material dispersion. Let us say that the philosophy of event should advance in the direction, at first sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism.’
Encounters, events, are these contradictory – incorporeal material – things. They are not clear and distinct objects (metric objects with extensive qualities) but obscure and distinct series of differentials. The being of the sensible is difference. To relate this to a previous post, encounters or events are the trajectories on the manifold.
So in the new image of thought, thinking and concepts do not begin with a thinking subject and proceed through representations (in which there can be not true difference nor repetition) but are forced upon us in encounters. Thinking begins in these material yet incorporeal events. And this is the beginning of the new empiricism, but I will leave that to the next post and a quote:
‘A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to ‘ḏramas’ and by means of a certain ‘cruelty’. They must have a coherence among themselves but that coherence must not come from themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.’
This is the secret of empiricism. Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concepts as object of encounter, as a here-and-now, or rather as a Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘nows’. Only an empiricist could say; concepts are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond ‘anthropological predicates.’ I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from a aways displaced periphery which repeats and differenciates them.’ (D&R p xx)
