Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics by Tamsin Lorraine

Author:Tamsin Lorraine [Lorraine, Tamsin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Philosophy, Movements, Phenomenology, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781438436647
Google: 1_ZxHH6dLssC
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2011-08-01T02:39:42+00:00

Philosophy, Art, and Intuition

According to Deleuze's Bergsonian perspective, technological or representational thinking is not something we can or should do away with. We are practical creatures invested in our own survival who develop forms of perception and cognition designed to assure our success. It is the Bergsonian notion of intuition, however, that speaks to the ability we have to go beyond sheer survival and participate in the creative evolution of life by inserting a gap or interval between the perceptions and cognitions servicing the specific forms our individuation currently takes and the actions resulting from them in order to act in keeping with a future that would release new tendencies and capacities (see chapter 1). Representational thought reduces life to what it has already become and thus excludes the tendencies always implicit in it that could unfold to become other than what it is. Thinking allows us to consider some of the implicit potential insisting in the present and to intensify tendencies in order to foster creative evolution in directions that we would like to go. Although Deleuze cannot give a static measuring stick against which to measure such possibilities, he gives us the Nietzschean/Spinozist standard of proliferating joyful passions that allow us to unfold the creative potential within us and extend ourselves in terms of the tendencies inherent to the specific forms we actually take. His “transcendental empiricism” starts from where we are, but takes where we are to be not simply what has been overtly actualized, but also what exists only as implicit tendencies. These tendencies can only be thought in terms of the genetic processes through which they can intensify and unfold. This means we cannot abstract a finalized form of humanity from its surroundings, but must understand ourselves as always in dynamic interaction with a world from which we cannot extract ourselves.

Words, to take but one example of semiotic activity (and Deleuze and Guattari criticize privileging linguistic activity at the expense of semiotic activities of other kinds) generalize over things. I can name a singular happening, a specific configuration of forces that unfold into an actualized state of affairs, but that state of affairs never exhausts the name I give it. I can go in two directions with words: in the direction of the states of affairs to which I attribute the meaning of my words, and in the direction of the variations of meaning in the words I use that move me away from a specific state of affairs to the relations those meanings have with other words and other states of affairs. Insofar as I move toward the latter, I am operating in the space of the event or the meanwhile opened up by thought. It is due to the complexity of our nervous systems that includes the capacity to speak language as well as engage in other forms of semiotic activity, that we are able to open the interval between perception and action that allows us to respond to our present creatively rather than adhering to the restricted repertoire of reactions of solely instinctual organisms.

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