ABSTRACT
The underlying task of Deleuzian philosophy is the affirmation of difference. This goal is expressed in a theoretical method that consists of a proliferation of complex, diversity-affirming concepts to aid in thinking the world ‘otherwise’ and bringing a new world into being. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the main purpose of philosophy is the invention of concepts. ‘The philosopher is the concept’s friend. . . . [P]hilosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts’ (1996: 5). Creating concepts creates new lenses, new ways of seeing; ‘every concept is a combination that did not exist before’ (1996: 75). A concept is a ‘fragmentary whole’, totalising incompletely its components (1996: 16), giving consistency to the chaos of immanence, ‘making a section of chaos’ (1996: 42). Deleuze’s critique of representation stems from his affirmation of difference and rejection of the primacy of identity, sameness and/or negativity. ‘Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary’ (1994: 51). According to Deleuze, difference cannot be thought as long as it is subject to the requirements of representation (1994: 262). Representation is not identical with all communication or ‘repetition’, or with the creation of concepts. Rather, it is specified by its emphasis on fixity, the idea of a total system of classification without excess, viewing things as fixed ‘molar’ beings rather than ‘molecular’ becomings or singularities, ignoring the specificity of each entity or connection by assuming its reducibility to general categories. Representation presupposes identity, when difference is primary; ‘representation subordinates difference to identity’ (1994: 65). Various dogmatic postulates serve to ‘crush thought under an image . . . of the Same and the Similar’, hence suppressing the very ‘act of thinking’ (1994: 167). Saskia Sassen rightly suggests that Deleuze uses the term ‘representation’ to refer to something akin to ‘disciplinary knowledge’, echoing the concerns of authors such as Foucault and Saïd (2006: 379). Deleuze maintains that the idea of representation has at its root a moral imperative to suppress difference for the good of order (1994: 127). It is thus
complicit in statist and dominatory thought. It requires a monocentric (arborescent) world hostile to difference (1994: 263). That which communicates in ‘pure forces’ is contrasted to representation (1994: 10); it is an ‘original, intensive depth’ which is missed, and not at all enhanced, by the addition of representations governed by a master-signifier (1994: 50). Representation ‘mediates everything but mobilises and moves nothing’; it fails to capture affirmative difference (1994: 55-6). The uniqueness or ‘singularity’ of each person, being, relation, thing, etc., confounds the possibility of nonrepressive representation. A representative claims to speak for ‘everyone’ but always leaves out some unrepresented singularity which is other than ‘everyone’ (1994: 52; cf. 1994: 130). Guattari argues that the ‘infernal machine of “substitutionism” ’, organisations claiming to represent ordinary people, is increasingly unable to represent or negotiate for the oppressed (1984: 204). The categories of representation are ‘too general or too large for the real’, like a net so loose that even the largest fish pass through (1994: 68). This leads to a systematic attempt to recompose philosophy as the systematic analysis of immanence. A central premise of Deleuzian philosophy is the replacement of essences with multiplicities, which ‘specify the structure of spaces of possibilities, spaces which, in turn, explain the regularities exhibited by morphogenetic processes’ (de Landa 2002: 10). Multiplicities, the concepts which take the place of essences in depicting broad categories of phenomena, are defined by singularities, the uniqueness affirmative difference of each thing. These singularities may influence behaviour by acting as attractors for the trajectories of the flows which are constitutive of existence, underlying the apparently fixed forms of molar entities. According to Deleuzian philosopher Manuel de Landa,
Deleuze . . . must be given credit for working out in detail . . . the requirements for the elimination of an immutable world of transcendent archetypes. Given that essences are typically postulated to explain the existence of individuals or of natural kinds, eliminating them involves giving an alternative explanation, not just reducing these individuals and kinds to social conventions.
