Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty

The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception

Dorothea E. Olkowski

• Editorial: Indiana University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253054722
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Phänomenologie in der Philosophie

Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception offers the only full-length examination of the relationships between Deleuze, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty.

Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) succeeded one another as leading voices in French philosophy over a span of 136 years. Their relationship to one another's work involved far more than their overlapping lifetimes. Bergson became both the source of philosophical insight and a focus of criticism for Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Deleuze criticized Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as well as his interest in cognitive and natural science. Author Dorothea Olkowski points out that each of these philosophers situated their thought in relation to their understandings of crucial developments and theories taken up in the history and philosophy of science, and this has been difficult for Continental philosophy to grasp. She articulates the differences between these philosophers with respect to their disparate approaches to the physical sciences and with how their views of science function in relation to their larger philosophical projects.

In Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Olkowski examines the critical areas of the structure of time and memory, the structure of consciousness, and the question of humans' relation to nature. She reveals that these philosophers are working from inside one another's ideas and are making strong claims about time, consciousness, reality, and their effects on humanity that converge and diverge. The result is a clearer picture of the intertwined workings of Continental philosophy and its fundamental engagement with the sciences.

ONE

Naturalism, Formalism, Phenomenology, and Semiology in Postmodern Philosophy

FOREIGN BODIES, FOREIGN MINDS

Embassytown, a novel by science fiction writer China Miéville, describes a species of nonhuman but intelligent beings who inhabit an alien planet, Arieka, at the farthest edge of the known universe.¹ The Ariekei are described as almost grotesquely alien, and their planet, invaded and inhabited by a contingent of human administrators and diplomats, presents an extreme version of the culture/nature distinction. Briefly stated, it is a story about fundamentalism in language brought about by an extreme commitment to reference and true propositions. On the human side, there is Embassytown, a small, enclosed, artificial environment where even the air has to be manufactured. Featuring brick and ivy, bureaucratic and planetary politics, it is a place where language does not refer to an outside because it is emblematic of a formal, syntactical expression of order, and so is not concerned with reference—that is, the truth or falsity of its statements.

But on the Ariekei side, it’s all biological, consisting of polymers and “biorigged” flesh such that even their dwelling places and technology are purely biological. The Ariekei walk on four spiderlike legs ending in hooves; their bodies bear external spines, their heads, dark hair, and their faces, eye antlers. They have two mouths and two awkward coral-like wings, a giftwing for manipulation under the turn mouth and a fanwing, for hearing, behind the cut mouth. Wings and eye antlers all retract or furl and emerge like those of sea creatures or light-sensitive plants. The Ariekei are called “Hosts” by their human occupiers; mature Hosts are accompanied by battery creatures (Zelles), and the older ones grow edible sacs.

Communication between Ariekei and humans is difficult. The Ariekei consist of and are embedded in pure biology, pure nature. Ariekei language and thoughts are indistinguishable; they operate without the influence of artifice, including writing; thus their minds and language are profoundly naturalized. As a result, when a non-Ariekei speaks the Ariekei language, unless the speaker is somehow able to unite mind and language, Ariekei hear only noise. The meaning is not in the sound but only in the mind. Meaning is conveyed in thoughts so much so that words do not signify and are not symbolic—that is, words are their own referents.

The strange bodies of the Ariekei dictate that they speak simultaneously with their two harmonizing mouths, the “cut” above on the neck and the “turn” at the chest. Their language is the simultaneous enunciation of these sounds, which are representable as words written one over the other in the form of a fraction. Possibly because of their biological or material embeddedness and the indistinction between mind and word, the Ariekei language allows only affirmations, only true propositions. It gives them the capacity to speak of events that actually are taking place or have taken place in their biologically embedded world, and so the language allows them to tell no lies. Affirmation is the limiting limit of their semantics. This amounts to an extreme “naturalism” in language, whose philosophical formula stipulates that linguistic accounts must be built on empirical causal relations and natural law.² This is all the more the case for a species whose environment is “biorigged,” its nest-like homes and towns consisting of apparently living plantlike materials bearing no resemblance to the cultivated geometries of the human parts of the city. Little surprise, then, that humans and Ariekei cannot even breathe the same air.

Lacking all cultural artifice, Ariekei have no signifiers that allow them to use a word to describe an action or object in a nonliteral, nonaffirmative manner. They cannot, for example, express disappointment by declaring “I felt crushed.” Likewise, joy would not be articulated with phrases such as “I am flying high.” For this species, such statements are lies.

At first this fidelity to truth in the form of affirmation is admirable, yet it is not absolute. Due to the extreme limitations of what can be expressed in this manner, the Ariekei eventually develop a mechanism to produce and use similes (saying that one thing is like another) for which the referent is a real and embodied event or action. The protagonist Avice is one of the similes. As a girl, she was given something unpleasant to eat; she ate it out of obedience, not choice, and suffered for this. Later, one of the Hosts said of her, “When we talk about talking . . . most of us are like the girl who ate what was given to her. But we might choose what we say with her.”³ Referring to Avice’s act in this way, as a limitation, indicates that at least some Ariekei find even the similes too constraining, at best a kind of making do.⁴

The difficulty inherent in communicating with the Ariekei leads the human bureaucrats to breed a race of doubles, called Ambassadors, who can replicate the Ariekei process of speaking two words simultaneously. They originate as clones with massive amounts of empathy, approximating a unified mind, to produce “speech spoken by a thinker thinking thoughts.”⁵ Things go badly when some Ariekei begin to learn to turn the similes into contradictions at the same time that Bremen, the ruling planet, sends a special pair of Ambassadors whose “language” not only intoxicates the Ariekei but induces addiction to the sound of their voices, even as they say nothing more important than pleasantries and polite conversation. The addicted Ariekei begin to demand this “god-drug” and become incapable of taking care of themselves, their young, and their city.

Out of the chaos emerge two fundamentalist revolts, one against addiction and one against “lying.” The revolts are led by other Ariekei along with certain humans who become leaders by advocating for the purity of truthful, affirmative propositions with evident external natural and empirical referents. The novel thus pits signifying against naturalistic affirmative truth telling and expression against the purity of reference in a political and religious context. For the addictive Ambassadors and the human bureaucrats who breed the double that administers the god-drug, language is pure artifice in the form of statements with signification but no empirically true affirmation or external reference. Their language, nothing more than a postmodern signifying chain pushed to its limits so as to mislead, is posited as a necessity in the political and cultural realm to the point of becoming addictive in its own context. Affirmative statements about events that have actually occurred remain largely outside the bureaucratic system of language. It becomes the task of nonbureaucratic humans to teach the Ariekei to signify using metaphors in order to release them from their addiction but also to make good on some conception of reference within Embassytown to keep it from being overrun by the powerful forces of Bremen.

SIGNIFYING AND SIGNS

The case for chains of signifiers and the overdetermination of meaning is often thought to be one of the chief accomplishments of postmodern philosophy. British literary scholar Alan Kirby claims that a defining trait of postmodern philosophy is its concern with the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge.⁶ Postmodernism, he writes, treated contemporary culture as a spectacle before which individuals were powerless to act but nevertheless were able to problematize questions about the real. These observations align with those of the French postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard, who famously describes the postmodern condition as the debunking of grand philosophical, scientific, political, religious, and historical narratives. Nevertheless, while there are still university courses that teach the literature of this debunking—for example, “Postmodern Fictions”—they are rare.

Kirby comments that outside of academia, postmodernism is dead, dead and buried. He claims that celebrated authors like Nabokov, Gibson, and B. S. Johnson, along with philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard, are no longer relevant to a generation accustomed to interacting, inventing, or directing their texts and drinking in the illusion that they are somehow controlling or at least managing their place in quick bites of online and reality TV worlds, the more banal the better. Such so-called pseudomodernism is said to have reactivated the individual along with the once-abandoned grand narratives and have taken the place of postmodernism. Pseudomodernism, he argues, is greatly inferior, and instead of calling reality into question, it takes itself for the real even while engendering nothing but the desire to return to the infantile state of being consumed by one’s activities. This territorialization is problematic.

Perhaps the technological and social revolutions of the last ten or more years leave little doubt about the veracity of this claim, but if we have definitively left something called postmodernism behind, it seems we still do not know what it is and to what extent it may or may not have contributed to the current state of affairs. This is the complaint made as long ago as June 2011 by British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on his Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science website. Dawkins and others, like physicist Alan Sokal, are making claims about postmodernism strikingly similar to Kirby’s criticism of pseudomodernism. When Dawkins puts a question on his website asking what “critical theory” might be, the clearest answer he gets from any commenter is that critical theory includes structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism and that it is the provenance of “a few scruffy radicals.”⁷

The problem is that this is not a definition, much less an explanation. Dawkins is left like the poor Duck in Alice in Wonderland, who just wants to know what it means when the Mouse, who is telling a dry tale, says, “Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable.”⁸ For the Duck, it refers to something specific, like a frog or a worm. Like the Duck, Dawkins offers up crisp definitions of the biological concepts Lamarckian and mutationism—definitions that are clear and concise, as well as informative and, as far as possible, truth telling. Like the Ariekei language, these terms are supposed to refer to nature, to the world outside of language that is empirically verifiable in all its aspects. Given the impossibility of such clear and concise naturalistic definitions for postmodernism, Dawkins asks if it is possible that words like postmodern mean nothing at all.

Even Kirby, who defends postmodernism as ironic, knowing, and playfu...