February 26th: Spinoza and the Three "Ethics"

On the 26th of February 2007 the Volcanic Lines group discussed Deleuze's essay 'Spinoza and the Three "Ethics" from Essays Critical and Clinical, after hearing an introduction given by Matt Astill (Greenwich). What follows is a write-up of the introduction material along with some issues brought up in the seminar discussion.

In this essay, Deleuze focuses on the interrelationships between the three kinds of knowledge in Spinoza, and offers in tandem a reading of certain aspects of the Ethics. Concerning the first kind of knowledge, Deleuze links the affects with the Scholia; Concerning the second kind of knowledge, the common notions are linked with the geometrical style of the propositions, demonstrations, axioms and definitions; Concerning the third kind of knowledge, intuition is linked with the enthymemical style of the content of Book V.

The first kind of knowledge, which Spinoza calls 'knowledge from vagrant experience'(IIP40S), is an inadequate form of knowledge that can be characterised as 'affective': Deleuze notes Spinoza's use of Galileian physics of Book II to ground the first kind of knowledge in the affections or modifications engendered between colliding bodies. An affect is the resultant modification of one of these bodies, from its perspective alone (involving only the idea of that body). Affective knowledge concerns the nature of the modification of the subject body more than it concerns the nature of the object body, and cannot concern both (since the two bodies are separate, and the modifications made in the object body are not comprehended in the subject body).

For Spinoza, the human body is the object of the human mind, such that they are inseparably linked. The modifications of a human body parallels modifications in the mind that perceives that body (see IIP7). A crucial proposition for Spinoza (and for Deleuze's reading in 'Spinoza and the Three "Ethics"') is IIP24, which states, “The human mind does not know itself, except insofar as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the body”. The affects, or what we might call emotional phenomena, is the source of our knowledge about ourselves.

Deleuze introduces the concepts of joy and sadness as vectorial affects that are tied to the duration of the mode (since it is finite), and that indicate a growth or diminution of its power relative to the exercise of its nature. All scalar affects thus have dimentions of joy or sadness depending upon the state of power of the mode in question; Different senses of modifications of the body are scalar after their own idioms, but joy and sadness are two vectors or lines of force, showing expansion and contraction of power as immanent affects relational to the amount of power a finite thing has as it is acted on.

Deleuze says that signs refer to signs (in terms of affects), and that effects refer to effects (in terms of modifications engendered between bodies). In Spinoza's terms this is the principle of external causality that rules the world of finite modes: We cannot understand something that has been caused externally except by reference to an infinite chain of external causes, of which only the infinite series is sufficient – as finite things with finite knowledge we always have only insufficient knowledge of other things (IP28). It is evident enough for us to consider that whatever series we propose in explaining some effect, our series is merely the effect of a further cause that lies external to the series, on force of principle. Thus we only ever have a certain collection of effects to explain other effects, and never anything sufficient to be called a ‘cause’.

The example of optics is used to show what can be meant by 'effects' - shadows cast upon bodies. The first kind of knowledge is thus a "limit of light" (p.141, Verso 1998), to which light is antecedent. The move from shadows as knowledge to light as knowledge is to move from knowledge of the first kind to knowledge of the second kind. The common notions in Spinoza are those things that are true of all bodies, but known through the immanent structure of the subject body (i.e. it follows a line of constitution from God - e.g. 'insofar as God constitutes the essence of the human mind'). The optical analogy for Deleuze means an optical geometry, in which the structure of external bodies are revealed as they are penetrated with light (for Spinoza, constituted by God through the human mind).

Deleuze gives an account of structure stressing a Heraclitean variability (structures have motion and change, and their structure is revealed in relation to the motion and change that our bodies undergo), and a necessary notion of multiplicities (grounded for Spinoza in the need to have more than one body for an affection to occur between them). These structures are constructed within logical infinities, which, pointing in the direction of the most complex level of construction, indicates the idea of the infinite mode (where shadow, by the combination of modes seen in relation to each other, disappears into primary whiteness).

Rembrandt and Vermeer are used to stress the difference between light being primary, with shadows being emergent from its interplay with bodies (Vermeer), and light being a secondary contrast with relative darkness (Rembrandt). Here are two paintings for comparison:


Vermeer "A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window"


Rembrandt "The Nightwatch"

In my view, the Vermeer painting suggests a scene in which the second kind of knowledge is lived as the girl reads the words of her letter by turning to the light.

Back in the essay, Deleuze asks the question whether the first kind of knowledge can be thrown away. For Deleuze, however, the preexistence of concepts prior to our having knowledge of them (knowledge of concepts Deleuze equates with 'common notions') suggests that they must be immanently realised through the selection of the affects in the first kind of knowledge, and that the world of shadow, by its brightenings and darkenings, gives us the requisite injections of power to move into relation with structures and constitute true universals. Chiaroscuro, which is a relative brightening or darkening, reenters the system as the distinguishing characteristic or principle of the relational values 'joy' and 'sadness'.

To foster joy is to enter into a constitutive relationship with the second kind of knowledge through our ability to resonate with other objects (to use Nietzsche's words this is to 'conquer'), and Deleuze here suggests the oblique nature of the selection of joy through the fact of ressentiment, and the suggestion of the Nietzschean typologies of the Tyrant (or Despot) and the Priest.

After this section, Deleuze introduces his reading of the Ethics as a text, such that the axioms, demonstrations etc. all form the second kind of knowledge, but, crucially, that the scholia indicate the first. It is through the scholia, the "...book of Anger and Laughter" that the text is infused with its necessity and its scope. The text is a model of the reader, or the reader is a model of the text.

The third kind of knoweldge, or intuition, is taken up by Deleuze as constituting Book V in terms of the text, and as the idea of "Pure figures of light" in terms of the optical analogy. Two ideas work in tandem here - the reading of Book V as having an enthymemic quality that "...will proceed by intervals and leaps, hiatuses and contractions, somewhat like a dog searching rather than a reasonable man explaining", and the extrapolation of the light analogy as now an absolute speed covering specific intervals in a single flash (these intervals are dissociated through the light having a greater or lesser magnitude). This reading is somewhat grounded in Spinoza in IIP40S, where he uses an example from Euclid to demonstrate the difference between the three kinds of knowledge: “Suppose there are three numbers, and the problem is to find a fourth which is to the third as the second is to the first”, he asks. We rely either upon following a procedure, applying demonstrated principles or formulae, or we simply intuit the answer. The latter is the kind of ‘leap’ that Deleuze characterises Book V as performing, and which he illustrates with allusion to the mathematician Galois.

Issues and worries:

- A clarification is necessary with Deleuze’s use of ‘chance’ and ‘fortuitous encounter between bodies’ on p.141. These terms seem to go against Spinoza's argument that “Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced” (IP33), which is true on pain of denying that there is only one substance to account for this alteration. However, the chance that D is speaking of here is only temporarily true insofar as we find ourselves among affects and not common notions - randomness is only true if we stay inside the first kind of knowledge.

- Investment of power issue in forming common notions - Is it a problem that the 'selection of affects' will not be sufficient to account for common notions? Is Deleuze assuming an empiricism on Spinoza's behalf? Initially it seems this is a problem for Deleuze. However his point is not that the affects will be sufficient to the common notions but that they are necessary to them. This is in line with Spinoza's criticism of the 'proper order of philosophising' at IIP10S, and we can still see that God is the only sufficient cause of the differences in kind. Deleuze's account of the selection of the affects is placed in Spinoza's system by virtue of Spinoza's arguments in the Ethics, moving from the principle of a single substance. There was also a worry that Deleuze is using the idea of the dark precursor to smuggle in an empirical ground - however it was pointed out that this is inconsistent with the account of the dark precursor in Difference and Repetition, where it is that by which the given is given, and not itself a discrete given.

- The discussion group found the notion of 'pure figures of light' intriguing, and much conjecture was levied at what this could possibly mean.

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'The Actual and The Virtual' Workshop Discussion

This is a report on the discussion that followed Nick Midgley's presentation on Deleuze's essay 'The Actual and The Virtual' from Dialogues II on 19th February 2007 at the Volcanic Lines Research Group's workshop. The discussion began with the notion of ‘dramatic identity’ – this seems to resonate with Deleuze’s version of the Kantian schemata as developed in ‘The Method of Dramatization.’ He traces dramatic structures like Kant did in his attempts to relate concept and intuition. It was argued that 'The Actual and The Virtual' does have a Kantian flavour since ‘brevity’ means that the manifold is immediately represented. Does the reference to a ‘spatium’, along with the brevity which makes indeterminate, resonate with the intensive spatium that in Difference and Repetition is the dramatisation of Ideas? Reference was made to Bergson for whom perception is characterised by a gap, the centre of indetermination which distinguishes the discontinuity of the actual from the continuity of the virtual. The virtual centre of indetermination draws together the actual discontinuity around it because it draws upon the resources of its continuity to produce a singular and attractive determination. This is described by Deleuze as ‘emission and absorption, creation and destruction’.


At this point Deleuze’s Logic of Sense was related to the discussion. Here states of affairs are distinguished from bodies and events. We have a three-fold synthesis of time as in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze finds in the Stoic conception of the body the non-actual self which corresponds to the contracted self and individual in Difference and Repetition. The action of the body is the body going to the limit of its power of individuation.

The role of memory was also discussed. The ‘Combray moment’ in chapter two of Difference and Repetition allows us to access pure memory. But is the crystal we find in ‘The Actual and The Virtual’ closer to the ‘Eternal Return moment’, the ordinal structure, being a before and after moment of crystallization. It was argued that rather than any leap into the pure past, invoking perhaps an existential subject, we need eros. Deleuze can be said to leave Bergson behind when it comes to accessing the pure past because of his leap into the pure past. The eros moment explains the encounter and we don’t need to jump or leap to the Eternal Return, as if collapsing levels of Deleuze’s system and suggesting that through thought or Ideas there is a privileged access to Being. The argument rests upon keeping open the ways of accessing the past rather than privileging thought and making the subject beholden to a moment of revelation after which nothing else seems to be left. If we leap to the Eternal Return we seem to give up all reference to the actual and yet in this essay we find that virtual encircle the actual like a cloud. If the eros moment explains the encounter this places the encounter in everyday life, it is the affect that allows perception to occur.

Developing this point, the case was made that saving the pure past for ourselves is related closely to notion of apprenticeship for Deleuze. Eros is forced onto you and this invokes ongoing encounters or an infinite learning. The virtual that encircles the actual seems to develop a crystalline individuation and suggest that we must think the past through individuation, the common limit of the past and future. The film ‘Citizen Kane’ was mentioned – at the beginning a crystal ball shatters. Does this take you to pure memory? The event that shatters the actual – a kind of interruption that makes it impossible to say what is real and what is imaginary or a dream. It was argued that rather than a leap into the past we have the crystal as an eruption into a meta-stable situation, bring us closer, it could be argued, to the virtual encircling the actual. The seed seems to always be needed – it is what gets the system going. Temperature changes the types of structure that will form. This resonates with the earlier account of intensities in Deleuze’s work and with Manuel DeLanda’s work on Deleuze.

Can the crystal be regarded as an assemblage? Both are half actual and half virtual. They both seem to be individuating systems. Reference was made to Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy where there are no objects, only combinations and forces. In Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole, it was argued, there appears to be a big tension between the depth of the individual and the enormity of the virtual. There seems to be a risk that one or the other takes over, leading Deleuze to seek a circuit of the expansive horizon the virtual with the contracting that sustains an individual. ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ seems to draws these themes together. This was related to a possible film scenario where a character looks in the mirror and cannot see who they are. Individuation as a process seems to be crystallization here, individuation as a circuit. The reference at one point to dissolution seems to relate this to the earlier conception of ‘a system of the dissolved self’ as seen in Difference and Repetition chapter 5. In the last paragraph of ‘The Actual and The Virtual’ we find the distinction, upon the plane of immanence, between the actual’s ‘own virtual’ in its circuit of crystallization and its relation to the whole of the virtual (referring ‘to virtuals as to other things in the vast circuits where the virtual is actualised.’) This draws on the notion of contraction already mentioned in the essay and stages an expansion-contraction. It was argued that here we see that the problem of individuation, as a process ‘between’ actual and virtual, recurs. However, this was the subject of some debate. The persistence of individuation as ‘the third thing’ or level (as it appears to have been in Difference and Repetition) was disputed. This developed from the debate over the leap into the past versus the encounter with the past: do we have the individuated subject of encounters ‘between’ actual and virtual or the actual leaping into the virtual? Is the actual embedded in its cloud, it crystalline circuit, as well as relating to the whole of the virtual or is it exposed to this whole in abstraction from its individuation? This fundamental debate will no doubt continue productively.

Is going into memory a counter-actualisation? We need, it was argued, an empirical moment and not merely a leap. We cannot simply posit transcendental conditions as abstract and non-empirical. We have no representative access to the past and need an encounter, something that is non-representative. Bergson’s intuition appears unexplanatory, a ‘cop out’. What is it? How do we show that one intuition is better than another? It needs to be made rigorous, Bergson writes, but how? We need the structure of the encounter and Deleuze gives us this. The specific encounters can be selected by intuition as being true to their encounter. Thus we ask: Has the novelist constituted the affect? At some point you encounter yourself having an intuition – a contraction of the past – bang! Event! Rigor demands a method to say if I am actually doing this or not.

What do you encounter? In Derrida we have the aporetic moment and in Lacan the objet petit a. For Zizek you encounter the moment and then you’ve got the virtual. With Derrida, it was suggested, we get monotonous repetition because anything can be deconstructed. Yet for Deleuze, the virtual problem is of this text and not just any text, it is its own problem (its own virtual thanks to the crystalline circuit of its individuation).

A final point was that images come to sound more like forces because they are always in the process of acting and reacting.

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Text for the Workshop on the Actual/Virtual - 19th February 2007

Just a quick note to say that the workshop on the 19th February will be on the 'Actual/Virtual' and the text under discussion is available here, along with translation notes. The presentation will be by Nick Midgley.

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On four poetic formulas which might summarise a Kantian philosophy

Reading Group Workshop on Gilles Deleuze's Essay 'On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Presentation

The presentation delivered at the start of the session can can be viewed by clicking here.

Workshop Discussion

Desire in Kant was clarified in terms of its lower and higher use. How do we explain moral acts that don’t happen for reasons of instinct, appetite, interest and other ‘natural’ causes? However, the good life is what must be accounted for and ‘the good is what the laws say’. The kind of person ia key rather than what happens in particular empirical cases. The moral order connects things, through moral Ideas, that otherwise have no connection and a series of actions that cannot be explained. What is the continuity behind the good life? It must be the law which neither imposes or offers any particular commandment or instruction because then it would not have the force of pure or higher desire which lacks nothing. Desire seeking what it lacks in empirical cases of action is transcended by this lack and we lose the immanent production through desire that Deleuze seeks.

The relation with Anti-Oedipus was brought up. It was pointed out that this is a critique of desire as lack. It was questioned whether morality is ‘causal’ – is it not ‘productive’, bringing about something new? The pure and empty form of the law is not particularised and therefore cannot be equated with a chain of particular causes. It was argued that this involves ‘catching yourself in a completely subjective productivity.’ The force at the heart of thought and desire in the Four Poetic Formulas expresses the practical reality of the virtual.

It was suggested that in Deleuze, Lacan and Kant desire is positive and pleasure is negative. Desire is a desire for its own productivity, one that does not exclude different desires through a sum of possibility. Is desire anthropomorphic? If so, maybe ‘force’ is better and ‘cleaner.’

The selective test of desire for the sake of desire, the pure force of our thought, brings us to Nietzsche’s concern with a will that wills itself again and again. It is purely autonomous desire.

The space which Hamlet’s inhabits was then discussed in order to engage with Deleuze’s pronouncement that he is the first hero to need to time to act. Chaos of strange, demonic, maybe Dionysian, events – the breakdown of a space of action that requires clearness and distinctness. Yet these bewildering events come together because the (absurd) logic behind them, that which relates them, is a ‘time out of joint’ which Hamlet discovers and through which he acts. He finds the force of desire not through judgement and calm thought but thought’s own delirious limit. The events are held together by the thread of this time so as to contract a decision or act. We cannot say that Hamlet’s soliloquies lead to or explain his act, they do not reason towards it but do productively and profoundly attain the madness of reason through which acts emerge spontaneously and without a causal trail.

This was related to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling where the time of modern subjectivity prevents him from getting to the faith Abraham had. He had no subjective time but Kierkegaard is stuck in it. With faith we are not paralysed by this time.

In this subjectivity of modernity, also the subjectivity of the world or time of the city (the modernist milieu), stasis comes from everything happening at once, coming from all directions simultaneously. (Perhaps marketing has this effect) However, the existentialist says that I don’t know who I am until I make the decision. It is then best not to think because no subject produces action, it comes from nothing. The subject doesn’t pre-exist the decision. The space is then constructed from a minute and almost forgettable act.

Perhaps, it was suggested, the knowledge-action split in Hamlet can only happen in time. The end of the play comes together through a time ‘out of joint’. Hamlet isn’t just tormented by a decision between options because this would just be a space of possibilities and not the exhausted ‘any-space-whatever’ we encountered in Deleuze’s ‘The Exhausted’ at a previous workshop this term. Also, such a torment has already happened to heroes in plays – Hamlet thinks on a wider plane than that of possibilities. He thinks about individuation and his own being or production. His torment about his fathers ghost shows him split between the familial love of his father and the horror of the undead. The ghost is described in terms that invoke Shakespeare’s’ philosophy of nature, its Dionysian and demonic aspects. Could it be the devil simulating the image and voice of his father? Torn by love of father and sense of evil, something found in the imagery of his experience of a father both terrifying and attracting him (as the groundless ground does for Deleuze). This is to involve for Deleuze how things are produced (split between Apollonian and Dionysian). The ghost could be seen as exteriorizing something that speaks the truth of his own unconscious to him, his own thought or desire as an other. The ghost forces upon him the terror and attraction (‘to be or not to be’) of his own production, his own groundless ground. Hamlet’s subjectivity is exteriorized and referred a dramatisation of Ideas that exceeds his sense of possibility and movement. He is taken beyond possibilities to the production of things.
The role of the ghost was linked to Descartes’ demon who gets rid of the certainty of the law through an argument from illusion.

The Copernican turn in Kant was brought up – does it introduce the thinking of time through concepts of possible movement? With Hamlet, on the contrary, we get to madness and subjectivity made external via the thread or labyrinth in the world, the time of the world or city.

Deleuze’s reference to ordinal and cardinal time in the first Poetic Formula was discussed. With the ordinal there is no measure for knowing how long things will last – this is not rational, things can be all at once and procrastination results. The cardinal is discreteness, deadlines and order. For Kierkegaard the internal movement of passion in the soul is the intensive and ordinal time.

We have ‘succession of determination’ after the act and yet this is not existentialism.

A final point was again on the Copernican turn where everything turns around the subject. Transcendental subjectivity nevertheless avoids talking about objects in order to become the whole world prior to subject and object. We do get to the limitations of possible experience in the end but find before this a line of flight according to Deleuze.

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