Review Out of This World Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation

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    7.08.03

    PETER HALLWARD

    Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation

    Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation , Verso, 2006,

    199pp., $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781844675555.

    Reviewed byJohn Protevi, Louisiana State University

    It's the sign of the maturation of philosophical work on Deleuze that Peter Hallward's fine newbook has appeared. For while the already quite lengthy series of introductions and reading guideshas served its purpose, it's not by approbation alone that one learns to appreciate a thinker; it'salso via those who, like Hallward, take the time to carefully point out what they think are theerrors, or perhaps better in this case, the limitations of a thinker.[1]I do not agree with Hallward

    on the details of his argument, but his attempt does what Deleuze claims all good philosophydoes: it forces you to think. In trying to understand how Hallward constructs his case I wasforced to go back to Deleuze with a fresh eye. This forcing to think is the mark of a fine work,and for that and for other virtues -- its wide range of topics, copious notes and clear writing chiefamong them -- Hallward's book deserves praise and careful reading.The first of the critical works on Deleuze was Alain Badiou's Deleuze: La clameur del'Etre (Hachette, 1997; English translation by Louise Burchill asDeleuze: The Clamor ofBeing[Minnesota, 2000]). Badiou made two decisive moves, each of which disrupted thedominant perception of Deleuze in the Anglophone world. First, he concentrated on the DeleuzeofDifference and Repetition andLogic of Sense (the books of the late 1960s in which Deleuzefirst "spoke in his own voice" after his series of historical works), completely ignoring the works

    by which Deleuze is best known, the collaborative works with Flix Guattari,Anti-Oedipus andA Thousand Plateaus. Badiou's move was no mere personal preference, but wasbased on his second remarkable point, his claim -- again contrary to the dominant perception --that Deleuze is not so much a philosopher of the multiple as of the One. Whence the book'ssubtitle, which refers to Deleuze's reading of the tradition of univocity in metaphysics: "A singleand same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all thedrops, a single clamour of Being for all beings" (Difference and Repetition, 389F / 304E; citedby Badiou at 20F / 11E).Badiou's lead in isolating a singular logic in Deleuze was taken up in, shall we say, exuberantfashion by Slavov iek inOrgans without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (Routledge,2003). Although a good bit of iek's book consists of his own speculations on film, politics,

    quantum mechanics, cognitive science, and several other topics, the parts that do concentrate onDeleuze conduct a polemic in favor of a Deleuzean logic of Being characterized as an"immaterial affect generated by interacting bodies as a sterile surface of pure Becoming" (asinLogic of Sense) and against a characterization of Deleuze as upholding the production ofbodies as actualization of virtuality (as inAnti-Oedipus) (iek, 21-22).Insofar as Hallward is the Anglophone world's leading interpreter of Badiou -- Hallward'sbook,Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minnesota, 2003), is the standard reference in the field, andwill remain so for the foreseeable future -- it should come as no surprise then that Hallward's

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    Deleuze book also follows the inspiration of Badiou in focusing on what is said to be the singularlogic of Being that resides beneath Deleuze's multiple interests and vocabularies. Hallward,however, clearly distinguishes himself from Badiou's reading of Deleuze in two ways.On a formal level, Hallward distinguishes himself from both Badiou and iek in accepting whatwe could call the "continuity thesis" regarding Deleuze's output (87). That is to say, he accepts

    the works written with Guattari as continuing the project Deleuze began inDifference andRepetition andLogic of Sense. We should note that although it's unclear what Badiou thinksabout the continuity thesis, it's clear where iek stands. While Badiou merely ignores the workswith Guattari, save for the briefest of mentions (Badiou, 13F / 5E), iek disdains thecollaborative works, callingAnti-Oedipus"arguably Deleuze's worst book" (iek, 21).

    The content of Hallward's departure from Badiou is both more subtle and more important. InHallward's characterization, Badiou tries mightily to distinguish himself from Deleuze, paintinghim as a "poet of a living cosmos" (86) who nonetheless establishes a philosophy that is"indistinguishable from a philosophy of death"; in this, Badiou "goes perhaps a little too far"(177n37). For Hallward, by contrast, Deleuze and Badiou are similar in both upholding a"subtractive" ontology (81); the difference comes in that Deleuze's singular logic of Being can beseen as analogous to the tradition of theophantic thinkers, whereby the divine spark of creation isentombed in creatures; the task of the creature is to redeem that divine spark from its creaturalprison (4; 57; 85). But this redemption is not annihilation; Deleuze's philosophy is not that ofLacanian-iekian "renunciation-extinction" (94).

    In support of his thesis, Hallward's book has a two-fold structure that follows what he claims isthe way reality folds for Deleuze along the line of the virtual / actual distinction. In the first threechapters he follows the creative virtual spark into the actual, into creatural "confinement." Thebook then pivots, and the last three chapters follow the arc of Hallward's reading of Deleuze'sterm "counter-effectuation": the move away from actual creatural confinement back to thevirtual. Although counter-effectuation -- or the "extraction of the event" -- is not an annihilation

    of the creature, it is a "redemptive" move, Hallward claims, taking us "out of this world," as thebook's title would have it. Deleuze seeks always, Hallward writes, "to subtract the dynamics ofcreation from the mediation of the created"; in this way, Deleuze supposedly seeks to show that"purelycreative processes can only take place in a wholly virtual dimension" (3). Provocatively,Hallward adds, "Deleuze is most appropriately read as a spiritual, redemptive or subtractivethinker Deleuze's philosophy is oriented by lines of flight that lead out of the world; thoughnot other-worldly, it is extra-worldly" (3; emphasis in original).

    Once again, Hallward is careful not to paint Deleuze as desiring the annihilation of the creature(4; 84-87) but rather its "self-transcendence," so that it may become "an adequate vehicle for thecreating which sustains and transforms it" (6). This is done most purely in philosophical thought,

    where action and creation are one insofar as thought creates its own objects of thought. In such"abstract, immediate or dematerialized thought" (3-4), the creature is evacuated to let the creatingwork through it. In this way Deleuze "affirms the creative telos of thought in terms that invitecomparison with what Spinoza called the 'intellectual love of God.' The subject of such thoughtor love is nothing other than infinite creativity or God himself, insofar as he thinks and lovesthrough us" (2). (We will return to Hallward's use of the phrase "invite comparison with" andother similar rhetorical strategies, which closely associate while still distinguishing Deleuze from

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    the theophantic tradition -- e.g., p. 5: "you are only really an individual if God (or something likeGod) makes you so".)

    In Chapter 1, Hallward leads the reader on a tour of six important Deleuzean ontologicalconcepts: univocity; intuition; continuity; intensity; quantitative hierarchy; and virtuality. By andlarge the first chapter is unobjectionable in terms of content. However, there are instances whenhis method of explicating Deleuze by means of the concepts Deleuze adopts from Spinoza andBergson involve Hallward in the questionable rhetorical strategy of associating Deleuze with thetheophantic tradition, all the while maintaining plausible deniability in not coming right out andsaying it. The most obvious is his insistence on discussing Spinoza's substance in terms of God(9; see also 87). But as we all know Spinoza's most famous phrase was Deus sive Natura. Giventhat for Deleuze atheism is "the philosopher's serenity and philosophy's achievement" -- andnoting also his naming of the "atheist Spinoza" (What is Philosophy? 89F / 92E) -- we can askwhy Hallward did not discuss Deleuze's love of Spinoza as indicating the former's naturalism.

    Hallward's reading method must also be mentioned, in which he piles up citations of otherauthors or of Deleuze's readings of other authors that again serve an associative function. I will

    concentrate on only one example, but others could be adduced. In the discussion of univocity inChapter 1, Hallward cites Deleuze's praise of Spinoza as one who "fully accepts the trulyphilosophical 'danger' of immanence and pantheism implicit in the notion of [univocal]expression. Indeed he throws in his lot with that danger" (9-10). So far, so good: an accuratequotation of Deleuze. But then Hallward adds "-- as does Deleuze after him" (10), implying thatDeleuze accepts the 'danger' of pantheism along with that of immanence. To support thisprovocation, Hallward writes that Deleuze "certainly annuls the difference between God and theworld but he does this in favor of God, not world" (10). This is an astonishing claim, whichHallward immediately qualifies: "More precisely, what he annuls is rather the world's owncapacity to negate God, to say no to God, to hold God at a critical or interpretative distance fromitself" (10). The term "negate" should raise our suspicion. It's certainly no secret that Deleuze

    consistently denies that negation is primary, but he never "annuls" the "capacity" to negate: hecriticizes the use of negation in the realm of ethics and he denies the primacy of negation in therealm of ontology. We then see what is perhaps the most egregious instance of Hallward's"theologizing" rhetoric, one I cannot help but think he does impishly, poking a bit of fun atDeleuze: "Here again he [Deleuze] follows Spinoza's lead, at least insofar as Spinoza can be readas a philosopher who refuses to 'distinguish God from the world' and who thus 'maintains thatthere is no such thing as what is known as the world,' that left to itself 'the world has no truereality'" (10). The quotations, of course, come from Hegel, for whom Deleuze rarely concealedhis disdain! It's the "at least insofar as" that indicates Hallward's maintenance of plausibledeniability, all the while associating Deleuze with a theological or at least theophantic positionthat is at least tendentious. But rather than waxing indignant here, I also can't help but think that

    Deleuze would have chuckled at Hallward's audacity, or rather, at the twinkle we can imagine inHallward's eye as he wrote those lines.

    In Chapter 2, Hallward discusses the relation of actual creatures and virtual creations. Here hecommits what is to me his crucial error, which colors all the subsequent analyses of his book: hecreates a dualism between virtual and actual, denying the intensive its own ontological register.In many passages, Hallward associates intensity with the virtual, in opposition to the actual:"Differentiatings or creatings are virtual, and are intensive rather than extensive" (27; emphasis

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    in original). As he continues on 28, "The crucial point is that all of the productive, differential orcreative force in this dual configuration stems from the virtual creating alone, and not from theactual creature" (my emphasis). Later he is blunt: "We know that the essential dualism in thisphilosophy of creation is that between actual and virtual" (82; my emphasis).The relations among actual, virtual and intensive form the most important issue in explicating

    Deleuze's ontology. I would argue that we should consider the intensive as an independentontological register, one that mediates the virtual and actual, which are its limits. Even if onedoesn't accept this and insists on a dualism of virtual and actual, one would have to say that theintensive belongs with the actual. Intensive morphogenetic processes exist here on earth, they arethings of this world; they are not "out of this world," as Hallward would have it by locating themexclusively in the virtual. In terms of Deleuze's writings on the existence of the intensive, it'svital to recall that the primary referent for intensity inDifference and Repetition is the "spatio-temporal dynamisms" of Chapter 5, the "Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible", not the virtualIdeas of Chapter 4, the "Ideal Synthesis of Difference."Hallward's positing of a dualism in Deleuze cannot be sustained, in my opinion. For instance,throughoutDifference and Repetition Deleuze uses the term "individual" to refer to the process of

    individuation, or perhaps to that which is undergoing individuation, rather than to the finishedproduct, which in the human realm would be the person. Thus the person is the set of fixedhabits, the actual; the intensive is the register of "impersonal individuations"; and beneath theseindividuations we find the virtual as the register of "pre-individual singularities" (as well asdifferential elements and relations) (Difference and Repetition 355F / 277E). I would argue herethat Deleuze is positing three ontological registers: the actual (person), the intensive (impersonalindividuation), and the virtual (pre-individual singularities); again, however, even if one does notaccept the intensive as its own ontological register, the important point is that it must somehowbe distinguished from the virtual, rather than identified with it, as Hallward would have it.

    Spatio-temporal dynamisms, that is, morphogenetic processes exhibiting intensive properties, areprocesses of individuation, of emergence from pre-individual fields. The paradigm cases forDeleuze are embryos and weather systems. In the biological register, the "field" of individuation(the gradients of which are laden with pre-individual singularities) is the egg, while the processof individuation is embryonic morphogenesis; in the meteorological register, the field ofindividuation is the pre-conditions (the bands of different temperature and pressure in air andwater) to the formation of wind currents or storms, which are the spatio-temporal dynamisms.But Hallward's identification of the virtual and the intensive (e.g., p. 40, where he puts "virtual orintensive quantities" as synonyms) presents many problems. For when Hallward discussesweather systems as "intensive assemblages" (38) and then goes on to talk about the "virtualprocess of individuation" (47), he is asking us to consider weather systems as virtual. But thatcan't be: any resident of Louisiana will be able to locate hurricanes for you in terms of theirspatio-temporal co-ordinates. To be fair, we do have to distinguish between the location of a

    hurricane as embedded in a geographic co-ordinate system -- its extensive properties -- and thethresholds proper to its intensive properties. It's only at certain singular points in the differentialrelations among air and water temperature and wind currents that thunderstorms, tropicaldepressions, tropical storms, and hurricanes form. Nonetheless, the point is that the weathersystem itself is the intensive process by which those singularities are actualized, and that thisintensive process operates here, in this world.

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    In sum, whereas I argue that the intensive deserves to be treated as a distinct ontological register,Hallward moves the intensive into the virtual. He thus empties all creativity out of the actual andthereby claims that the virtual somehow does this creative work itself: a cosmic Life thatexperiments with itself in the virtual and then expresses itself in the actual. I would argue that itis better to say that actual organisms (things with fixed patterns) might be that which "life sets

    against itself in order to limit itself" (in the words ofA Thousand Plateaus 628F / 503E), butembryos are that by which life experiments, and that embryonic experimentation qua intensiveprocess is a thing of this world.Not only does Hallward posit a dualism of virtual and actual, he orients it exclusively in favor ofthe virtual, as when he writes of the "unqualified dependence of the actual upon the virtual" (47).A key problem for him thus arises when he writes that "everywhere he [Deleuze] looks he findsevidence to prove that virtual or differential 'individuation always governs actualization'" (47;citingDifference and Repetition 323F / 251E). We have claimed that identifying individuationsor spatio-temporal dynamisms as "virtual or differential" misses the point, as they are worldlyintensive processes; no one should think that embryos are virtual. But let us now discuss therelation of the virtual and the intensive (or, if one insists on a dualism, on the intensive portion of

    the actual, the actual qua intensive). I would claim that intensive processes of individuationmediate the virtual and the actual, a point Hallward denies. He writes, "virtual creatingsimmediately give rise to actual creatures" (35). Unfortunately, Hallward is then forced tocontradict himself in quoting Deleuze on this point: "the creative 'movement goes from thevirtual to its actualization -- through the intermediary of a determining individuation'" (48;citingDifference and Repetition 324F / 251E). Here it's clear that Deleuze holds that spatio-temporal dynamisms are exactly those "determining individuations," the intensive processes ofwhich mediate virtual and actual.The main discussion of the primacy of individuation over actualization and differenciationoccurs atDifference and Repetition 314-327F / 244-254E. We have to recall here the "order ofreasons" given at 323F / 251E: differentiation -- individuation -- dramatization -- differenciation.Spatio-temporal dynamisms are intensive processes of individuation and it is these processeswhich create lines of differenciation: the latter are by no means predetermined by Ideas[differentiation]. It's precisely the idiosyncratic differences of pre-individual fields (Differenceand Repetition 324F / 252E: "no two eggs or grains of wheat are identical") and the singularcharacter of the intensive spatio-temporal dynamisms which operate therein that determine thespecies and qualities of things.Let's call the move from intensity to dramatization and differenciation the "down-relation". Myquestion is about the "up-relation," that is, the relation between individuation and differentiation.Hallward denies there is such an "up-relation." The picture is more complicated in Deleuze, whosays that "individuation is the act by which intensity determines the differential relations tobecome actualized, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities itcreates" (317F / 246E: "L'individuation, c'est l'acte de l'intensit qui dtermine les rapportsdiffrentiels s'actualiser, d'apres des lignes de differenciation, dans les qualities et les tenduesqu'elle cre"). Writing a few pages later about the clear and confused nature of intensities,Deleuze tells us that the expression of Ideas in intensities "introduces a new type of distinctioninto these relations and between Ideas a new type of distinction" (i.e., from co-existing torelations of simultaneity or succession). He then writes that "all the intensities are implicated inone another, each in turn both enveloped and enveloping, such that each continues to express thechanging totality of Ideas, the variable ensemble of differential relations." He concludes that

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    "each intensity clearly expresses only certain relations or certain degrees of variation those onwhich it is focused when it has the enveloping role" (Difference and Repetition325 F / 252E).

    My question to Hallward: is there a way in which the selective "focus" by which intensitiesclearly express only certain relations will itself introduce changes into the realm of Ideas? Thatis, can one say that experimentation with intensive morphogenetic processes will link togethernew combinations of differential relations, thereby forming new Ideas? That's what I take"determines the differential relations to be actualized" (which I prefer as a translation of "s'actualiser") to mean in the extreme case of an Event or "emission of singularities": it rendersthem determinate in the sense of linking together previously unrelated relations. In pushing thisinterpretation, I want to avoid a Platonism in which the Ideas are already determined and soexpression is a mere copying of already made linkages of relations. And it is to just such aPlatonism that I fear Hallward's denial of the "up-relation" leads us.

    If an Idea is a set of differential relations, that is, linked rates of change, then the Idea of color isthe linkage of rates of change of electromagnetic vibrations, and colors are actualized by eyes /brains / bodies which express certain of those relations. It is arguable that the eye / brain / body

    of different animals express different relations; they enact a different visual world (to use theterminology first established in Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch's TheEmbodied Mind[MIT, 1991]; see also Evan Thompson, "Colour vision, evolution, andperceptual content," Synthese 104 (1995): 1-32). These different visual worlds were not waitingin the virtual realm to be actualized: the eye / brain / body of the animals have to do the creativework to produce different enacted visual worlds. And that creation has to take place in the long-term intensive processes of evolution as linked to those short-term intensive processes ofdevelopment, as detailed in several schools of contemporary biology, evolutionarydevelopmental biology ("evo-devo") and Developmental Systems Theory ("DST") among them.However, Hallward cannot appreciate the role of intensive processes as creative of biologicalnovelty because he assimilates a genetic reductionism to his exclusive privilege of the virtual and

    evacuation of all creativity from the actual. He writes that "there is no more an interactiverelation between this virtual or composing power and its actual or composed result than thereis between a given set of genes and the organism that incarnates them (52; emphasis in original).But precious few biologists today would accept the hard-core genetic reductionism by whichorganisms "incarnate" genes. While we cannot enter into the critiques of genetic reductionismoffered by the advocates of DST (inter alia, Richard Lewontin, Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths), wecan at least refer in admiration to the great riches of Mary Jane West-Eberhard'sDevelopmentalPlasticity and Evolution (Oxford, 2003), and in particular to her concept of environmentalinduction of novel traits as a source of evolutionary potential (145; 499ff). While Deleuze'sbiophilosophy has been the subject of several noteworthy works (Keith AnsellPearson, Germinal Life [Routledge, 1999]; Mark Hansen, "Becoming as Creative Involution?

    Contextualizing Deleuze and Guattari's Biophilosophy,"Postmodern Culture 11.1), his relationto evo-devo and DST is relatively under-appreciated.[2]So while we cannot present a full-fledged argument here, we should recall that Deleuze himself includes a critique of geneticreductionism inDifference and Repetition, precisely by alluding to the spatio-temporaldynamism or intensive morphogenetic processes at the cellular level that mediate virtual [genes]and actual [organism]: "The nucleus and the genes designate only the differentiated matter -- inother words, the differential relations which constitute the pre-individual field to be actualized;

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    but their actualization is determined only by the cytoplasm, with its gradients and fields ofindividuation" (323F / 251E).These are among the most difficult and controversial points in thinking about Deleuze's ontologyand a book review is not the format for a full discussion of the issues. Let me leave the abovepoints as questions for Hallward then and move on to the rest of his book. Hallward's chapter 5

    concerns Deleuze's works on art and cinema, and chapter 6 focuses on Deleuze and Guattari'snotion of science and philosophy laid out inWhat is Philosophy? These are fine chapters,covering the main points of the works in question in clear and meaningful terms. Like all ofHallward's work, they deserve careful attention, but it would extend this review too long todiscuss them in detail here. So I would like to end by turning to the conclusion, where Hallwardtreats Deleuze's ethics and politics.

    Hallward's dualism and positing of uni-directional virtual dominance prepares him to say thatDeleuze's orientation "out of this world" vitiates his politics, leaving it "little more than utopiandistraction" (162), one that "inhibits any consequential engagement with the constraints of ouractual world" (161). Instead of a supposedly extra-worldly preference for the virtual, Hallwardwrites -- eloquently and certainly not without justification -- that "the politics of the future arelikely to depend less on virtual mobility than on more resilient forms of cohesion, on moreprincipled forms of commitment, on more integrated forms of coordination, on more resistantforms of defense" (162). But it's only Hallward's identification of the intensive and the virtualand consequent evacuation of all creativity from our world that leads him to think that, of hisdesiderata, "resilient cohesion" and "integrated coordination" are not Deleuzean concepts. Iwould submit that these are more aligned with what Deleuze and Guattari recommend --experimentation with intensive processes -- than with either "virtual mobility" or its allegedcounterpart, "actual fixity," to which Hallward seems attracted here.

    I have insisted enough, I think, on the fact that we live in an intensive rather than (or at least inaddition to) an "actual" world, so I will conclude only by saying that Hallward has missed the

    "toolbox" element of Deleuze's work. (I'm referring here to the well-known conversationbetween Foucault and Deleuze, "Intellectuals and Power," available in English in D. F.Bouchard, ed.,Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Cornell, 1977]; see 208 for the "toolbox"remark.) In his conclusion, Hallward verges on the polemical, warning us against the futility ofreading Deleuze politically. But his reading is theoretical, all-too-theoretical. To examineDeleuzean politics is not so much to read the singular logic of being that allegedly subtends themany analyses of the structures of territorial assemblages, the detailed theory of capitalism andthe state, the many pragmatic cautions about experimentation with social interaction foundthroughoutA Thousand Plateaus, but to see how these can be and have been used to find pointsof transformation and intervention in a system. When Deleuze and Guattari write, "we knownothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they

    can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body" (AThousand Plateaus 314F / 257E), we have to consider their philosophical writings in this respect.In other words, we have to see how they've been put to use (and there is certainly no"progressive" guarantee here, as Hallward himself notes [163]). So in this regard at least, it's tothe positive attempts at "applying" Deleuze and Deleuze & Guattari that we must turn in order toevaluate the potentials for compositional affects offered by these thinkers, rather than to thecritical work of Hallward, as noteworthy and thought-provoking as that might be in many otheraspects.

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    [1]This point is also made in Keith Ansell-Pearson's review in NDPR (2007.03.06) of JayLampert,Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History (Continuum, 2006).

    [2]Technically speaking, West-Eberhard prefers to call her approach "developmentalevolutionary biology" rather than "evolutionary developmental biology" (vii).

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