Deleuzian Intersections

Science, Technology, Anthropology

Casper Bruun Jensen, Casper Bruun Jensen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Science and technology studies, cultural anthropology and cultural studies deal with the complex relations between material, symbolic, technical and political practices. In a Deleuzian approach these relations are seen as produced in heterogeneous assemblages, moving across distinctions such as the human and non-human or the material and ideal. This volume outlines a Deleuzian approach to analyzing science, culture and politics.

Part I

Deleuzian Sciences?

Chapter 1

Experimenting with What is Philosophy?

Isabelle Stengers

Perplexities

‘It is in their full maturity, and not in the process of their constitution, that concepts and functions necessarily intersect, each being created by their own specific means’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 161). In other words, scientists do not need philosophers, and philosophers should not intervene when scientists are at work, or are facing new troubling questions, even if it may seem obvious that the elucidation of philosophical presuppositions could play a role, and even if it seems quite desirable that scientists experiment with new philosophical possibilities. Functions, as associated with scientific creation, and concepts, as associated with philosophical creation, indeed intersect but only after they have achieved their own specific process of self-fulfilment, that is, also after they have fully unfolded their requisites and consequences and, as such, do not entail that philosophers and scientists share a common concern about the questions arising from this unfolding. ‘Philosophy can speak of science only by allusion, and science can speak of philosophy only as of a cloud. If the two lines are inseparable it is in their respective sufficiency, and philosophical concepts act no more in the constitution of scientific functions than do functions in the constitutions of concepts’ (ibid.).

Taking a position that sounds like a biblical prohibition, ‘Thou shall not mix’ immature creations, Deleuze and Guattari seem to turn their backs against all those who had promoted them as the thinkers of productive connections, the creation of deterritorializing processes escaping fixed identities, transgressing boundaries and static classifications. The ‘sufficiency’ of the philosophical and scientific lines has also been a matter of disappointment for those who took for granted that Deleuze and Guattari would be allies in the debunking of the self-proclaimed autonomy of science and philosophy, underlining the open character of the process of the constitution of scientific enunciations, as well as its undetermined boundaries with politics, economics and cultural imperialism. They anticipated a joyful celebration of experimentations that subvert its very identity, that undermine the very persona of the philosopher. Instead, they got exemplifications from so-called ‘great philosophers’, Plato, Descartes, even Kant. As if, when the question ‘What is philosophy?’ was directly at stake, Deleuze had chosen to side with his great forerunners and forget his allies in deterritorialization. As if philosophy itself, as the work of Dead White Males, was suddenly innocent of any connection with power, gender, imperialism, and so on.

To those matters of perplexity and disappointment, I would add my own, which concerned the very ‘modern’ character of the tripartition between philosophy, art and science, whose complementary lines seem together to define the notion ‘creation’. Why this privileged connection between creation and modernity?

In producing such questions, What is Philosophy? confronts its reader with an alternative between two lines of thought. One may try to understand what felt like a betrayal in the terms of the book. Alternatively, one may experiment with ‘outside’ ingredients, which, if the experimentation is not a failure, should connect different aspects of the book that would otherwise appear to be mutually independent. In any case, what matters is to follow Deleuze’s own advice: we should be interested in tools for thinking, not in an exegesis of ideas. An idea is always engaged in what he called a matter; always a specific one. An idea needs to be engaged in this way in order to enable a process of articulation of how and why this idea indeed matters and what kind of difference it makes: the process that Deleuze calls ‘actualization’ or ‘effectuation’.

Before following this second line of thought, I shall describe what is entailed by thinking in terms of the first line. I start by recalling that for Deleuze and Guattari the question ‘What is Philosophy?’ is not a general one. It is a question they posed at ‘that twilight hour when one distrusts even the friend’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 2). And it is a question about a threatened practice, the beginning of which they associate with ‘contingent reason’ and the end of which may also be contingent: no ‘natural death’ but a destruction. In other words Deleuze and Guattari do not define philosophy as a transcultural, transepochal feature of humanity as such (a Chinese philosophy, an African philosophy . . . ). When they talk about the need for a ‘pedagogy of concept’, we must understand that ‘concepts’ are irreducible to ‘expressions’ of thought, that they are something you need to encounter and experience in order to understand that very particular adventure of thought that is called philosophy. And that nobody would ‘miss’ philosophy if ever the conditions for this encounter disappeared.

Obviously pedagogy is not, in this case, a matter of faithful transmission; rather, it is a matter of relays. Relay transmission is always contingent as it implies both a taking over and a handing over. The taking over is always a creation, but the act of handing over also requires a creation. As Deleuze recalled in his Abécédaire,¹ it was the event of encountering concepts that produced him as a philosopher. To create the concept of concept, as distinct from science’s functions and art’s blocs of sensation, is to create and hand over what makes up the particular necessity of philosophy.

However, the point is not, or not only, the survival of philosophy. The point of What is Philosophy? is our ‘lack of resistance to the present’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108), a lack of resistance that science and probably art also share, entailing the very strong likelihood that they also may well be destroyed. Learning how to resist is a task that tolerates no economy. No great masterword (mot d’ordre) designating a common enemy may spare those who belong to a threatened practice from asking what kind of specific vulnerability this enemy is exploiting since he (or it) does not need to use violent, repressive means. In order to become the witness for their threatened practice, philosophers must speak concretely, that is, situate their practice among other threatened practices, each from the point of view of its own weakness and capacity to resist. When calling for the seemingly modest task of a ‘pedagogy of the concept’, but also when speaking about art and science, Deleuze and Guattari speak concretely. They speak about each practice’s own specific ‘bad will’, which forces the practitioner to think and create, as opposed to ‘good will’, which facilitates thinking through consensual evidence (even the consensual evidence according to which our time would demand a general subversion of identities: to ‘distrust even the friend’).

At the twilight hour when it was written, at a time when relays can no longer be taken for granted, What is Philosophy? asks us to consider what Deleuze’s favourite ‘conceptual persona’, the idiot, keeps saying while others hurry towards consensual goals: ‘there may be something more important’. ‘Something more important’ does not mean something that would transcend our disagreements and reconcile us around a sacred cause, for instance the survival of philosophy. The idiot is unable to mobilize or convince; but perhaps he can slow down the mobilization and make some mobilized certainties stutter.

The idiot will never acknowledge that somebody has correctly understood what was more important. It is the task for everyone to learn and feel where and how his or her own slowing down and stuttering actually happen. The experimental reading I shall now propose stems from the feeling that Deleuze and Guattari were addressing their epoch, that is, their friends, while distrusting them, thereby asking us to think with the epochal fact that bad will as such can no longer be taken for granted. Continuing Deleuze’s seemingly ‘acritical’ turn, his apparent forgetting that he had been thinking all his life ‘against’ the image of thought associated with the ‘great philosophers’ whom he portrays as creators in What is Philosophy?, my reading will take the reader towards a still more acritical position. It may well be that what we vitally need now is to honour what forces us to escape goodwill and consensual thought; to honour that which indeed causes us to think, each with diverging means. And it may well be that what we have to honour will designate us as survivors, having to disentangle ourselves from all the words that would ratify that survival as ‘normal’, and in particular from those ‘critical words’ forged in order to sever any relation between the survivors and those practices that ‘deserved’ to be destroyed.

Science with a Beard

I shall first address Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of science as a creation of functions as referring to matter of facts,² things and bodies. I shall not, however, dwell upon this distinction, even if it is an important one. Indeed, it offers a line of escape from the Great Sad Problem of scientific reductionism and its poisoning consequence for philosophy, with philosophers seeing it as their sacred task to defend human values, experience or responsibility against their reduction to scientific ‘objectivity’. When a scientist affirms that experience should be and will be naturalized, explained (away) in ‘scientific terms’, as derivable from the ‘state of the central nervous system’, we recognize the inexorable advance of scientific knowledge and usually forget to ask about the possibility to define the brain as a ‘state’, with well-defined variables. I shall rather consentrate on the striking contrast with A Thousand Plateaus and its opposition between Royal Science, that is, unquestionably, the science of functions, and nomad sciences. Why do nomad sciences appear nowhere in What is Philosophy?, why is scientific creation enclosed in a definition that limits its relevance to what can be framed in terms of functions? A reader of A Thousand Plateaus can only be astonished. I was such a reader, and it is this astonishment that led me to my present reading of What is Philosophy?

I need now to complicate the problem by recalling another aspect of the situation, namely Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that it is only in their full maturity that philosophy and science may intersect. Again the idea of ‘maturity’ is relevant for Royal Science only, but Deleuze and Guattari seem also to create a privilege for what is usually called ‘science made’ against the vivid, open, risky construction of ‘science in the making’, which most contemporary studies take as the relevant access to science. In order to dramatize this choice, I shall refer to the contrast between ‘science made’ and ‘science in the making’ as characterized by Bruno Latour in his well-known Science in Action (1987) by a double, Janus-like figure. One face is that of a beardless youth describing the risky production of scientific facts and their social constructive dimensions. This production requires the coming together of people whose interest must be gained and who participate in the very definition of the meaning and importance of the scientific facts. The other face is that of an old bearded man explaining the robustness of science by its truth, by its objectivity, by its respect of settled matters of fact, and so on.

This Janus-like figure may be sufficient to explain why Deleuze and Guattari claimed that philosophers should refrain from intervening in the collective construction of ‘science in the making’, even if the young beardless scientist is quite ready to welcome them, to quote them and to gain their interest. They should resist the temptation, resist being seduced by the openness of ‘science in the making’, and also resist believing in the promises of so-called ‘new sciences’ contradicting the closed, dogmatic character of ‘science made’. Indeed the two faces offer no contradiction but a contrast, a contrasted unity. The kind of science that the youth has learned is the bearded one. He is speaking about a problem in construction but he knows that, if he is to succeed, if the story of the construction is to be told as the story of a scientific achievement, it will be told in the terms of the bearded old man. In other words, the dreams of the youth, his ambitions, are bearded ones. If he succeeds and gets the beard of his dreams, philosophers will be left outside because the successful, stable, ‘mature’ definition of matters of fact will be related to science’s own specific means.

Deleuze and Guattari thus ask philosophers to resist understanding a description such as Bruno Latour’s as a denunciation, understanding the claim of the bearded old man as lies, which hide the truth that ‘matters of fact’ are really just socially stabilized states of affairs. They ask us to resist the temptation to state that philosophers are left outside ‘mature science’ because the ‘mature’ scientists have acquired the social power to claim that their results are ‘purely scientific’. When Deleuze and Guattari defined the ‘creation of scientific function by science’s own specific means’ they certainly did not agree with the old bearded explanation, since this explanation denies creation. However, they nevertheless asked us to relate science as creation to the ‘specific means’, associated with the possibility for a scientist to get a beard.

Of course, the temptation to denounce the bearded old face is strong. I would even add that I cannot resist it when the contrast between the two faces is not alive – some so-called sciences do indeed seem to be born with a beard. This is why I shall concentrate on experimental sciences; in their case we may certainly imagine, wish for and struggle for a less dissociated or amnesic personality than the Janus figure, for a bearded old man who would remember and celebrate the adventurous, intricate constructive processes that any scientific achievement entails, instead of describing the achieved result as the direct consequence of a normal, rational method. This may indeed appear as the most important challenge, in political terms, because the price paid for the reduction of experimental achievement to a normal, rational operation is the general authority attributed to such an operation. This is the definition of science and scientific expertise as what I would call the thinking head of mankind. It is because of its resistance to this figure that social constructivism may so easily be identified with political emancipation against the authority of science.

Bearded dreams may well entail important problems of political power, but following my reading of the original ‘idiotic’ political stance of What is Philosophy? there is something that is still more important. Indeed, the result of the denial that science would have ‘specific means’ is that, whatever the scientific proposition, we know how to resist. This is why many readers will have identified Bruno Latour’s problematic contrast between the two faces of the scientist as ‘social constructivism’: they ‘recognized’ the possibility of deriding the old bearded face, of claiming that behind any scientific (matter of) fact there is a state of affairs dressed with the social power to parade as authorizing scientific claims. Yet this is precisely the path Deleuze and Guattari refused to take when they chose to celebrate the mature scientific functions (and matters of fact) as a creation (science is a creation of functions).

A socially stabilized state of affairs, having acquired consensual authority, allowing scientists to feel that they know what they are saying or that they can define what they are observing, is the very characterization of what Deleuze and Guattari proposed to name ‘functions of the lived’ (fonctions du vécu): functions whose arguments are consensual perceptions and affections. For those functions, there is no creation, only recognition. Deleuze and Guattari were unsure whether all the human sciences should be included in this category: however sophisticatedly presented or statistically verified, they would merely constitute scientific opinion. But they did not hesitate with regard to logic as it came to dominate the philosophy that followed the route marked out by Frege and Russell (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 135): logicism heralds the very triumph of goodwill functions depending on states of affairs, functions whose argument depends on consensual recognition. For Deleuze and Guattari, identifying science or whatever other practice as a question of ‘states of affairs only’ is not a ‘lucid statement’ but is the denial of their relation with ‘creation’. There is certainly a strong appeal in debunking science by relating it to ‘states of affairs’. But it is a consensual appeal³ that offers no possibility of resisting the possibility that ‘functions of the lived’ may eventually come to define everything. Such a ‘lucid’ identification has a powerful taste of truth, but this is the poisoning taste of resentment: it means telling scientists: ‘Wake up, you are just like everybody else’. And, as is always the case with resentment, it participates in the destruction of what is more important: namely the capacity to resist.

I shall certainly not take as a confirmation of my thesis the dreadful historical irony that social constructivism may be described as unwittingly collaborating in the destruction of those very aspects of science that it derided. As we know, scientists ...