According to Deleuze and Guattari, geophilosophy addresses the following decisive question directly: how do we think philosophy in its historicity, without maintaining the illusion of a rationality that was born in Greece and assumed Europe as its eternal seat, and, at the same time, without reducing the concept through a geographic and sociological determinism?
This question first requires a political critique of the way philosophies represent their own history. The concept of geophilosophy – with its cutting edge and extreme position – serves this purpose. While still attributing the complete and endogenous consistency of the concept to philosophy (philosophy is the creation of the concept – ‘the concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy’ [WP 34]) – geophilosophy also links Western philosophy to the rise of Europe and its pretension to define man in general, as well as to the development of capitalism.
The concept of geophilosophy is thus strategic, destabilising historical constructions of philosophy that support the colonial ambition of Western thought, a thought that positions itself as the crown jewel of rationality and as the parental figure of Reason, while violently suppressing unfamiliar knowledges emanating from non-European continents. Just as the thinker is ostensibly gendered male, it is no surprise that philosophy, beginning in the Renaissance, lists English, German and French names, with the notable exceptions of a Jew of Portuguese origin who emigrated to Amsterdam and a Scandinavian. Today, even if philosophy is taught globally in most universities and flourishes in America and Asia, following the pathways of technics and science, it still embraces the fiction of its mythic origin, emerging fully-armed in the happy Greek moment, a miracle contemporaneous with the emergence of the city-state, mathematics and art, in short, with the emergence of civilisation according to its European definition.
It is through its insistence on the historicity of philosophy that geophilosophy produces a political critique of the concept of ‘history’, substituting for the universal history of Reason a transcendental critique of the geopolitical conditions of the emergence of the concept, comprehended as creation and construction. The contingency of the emergence of systems deemed philosophical is therefore understood geographically in terms of the contingency of their ethos, the ecology of a territory, which includes its multiple components and the diverse relations it forges with its outside: neighbouring territories or universes of prior or current values, in accordance with an empirical and fluctuating ethology. It is not a question of relinquishing the temporal density of history while returning philosophy to the static simultaneity of a geography of the present. Instead, it is a question of establishing a relation between philosophy and its planetary situation – between philosophy and the Earth – instead of territorialising philosophy exclusively upon the linear succession of a history of (Western) Reason. Defining philosophy as the construction of concepts, while also taking into account the historical circumstances of its emergence in Greece and its reemergence in Europe, entails a confrontation between philosophy and its own tradition, but with the caveat that the concept of history itself must be transformed. It is paradoxically in the name of the irreducible historicity of philosophy that geophilosophy proposes a new version of its own necessity. Geophilosophy doubles the concept of history with that of becoming, which permits philosophy to be thought not in terms of universality, but in terms of contingency, as the construction of concepts and as creation.
In this way, Deleuze and Guattari open the constructive moment of the system to its historicity, which is entwined with the empirical and political actuality of its social assemblage. Defining philosophy entails explaining what a concept is: a creation. But, reciprocally, defining the concept entails proposing a new conception of philosophy, which in turn requires a new version of its history, the history of the succession of its systems. But its history – the real succession of its systems – cannot be explained within the context of rationality, that of a sole, unitary and all-powerful Reason; nor can it be explained within the framework of habitual conceptions of history. In order to account for the existing and unpredictable conditions of philosophy’s diverse articulations, it is therefore necessary to transform our way of conceiving of history.
In other words, philosophy is founded upon this new, critical conception of history as becoming, and in no way upon a denial of its historicity. This is the diagnostic function of philosophy and constitutes its foothold upon actuality, a foothold that is resolutely political.
To ask what philosophy is entails the interrogation of the historicity of this type of discourse, as well as its resilient capacity to unify itself under the label of a history of philosophy, despite the disparate and enduring variety of its different figures. The conceptual consistency of philosophy poses the historical-political problem of the emergence of European rationality, with its all-powerful universality, as well as the problem of its persistence despite the heterogeneity of its systems. This persistence has authorised every philosophy, at least since Descartes, to position itself as a new point of departure without renouncing the principle of a specific rational tradition. It is precisely in order to bind philosophy to the problem of its history that Deleuze and Guattari followed their collective work, subtitled ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, by What is Philosophy? This work links philosophical consistency to a politics of the concept and to the concrete history of the emergence of capitalism as the condition – necessary, but not sufficient – of the emergence of a unified Reason. This Reason thinks itself as universal even while universality promotes the pragmatic imperative of political domination. Deleuze and Guattari thus rehearse the standard gesture enacted by every philosophy since Descartes by proposing a new departure that redistributes and transforms the history of prior systems. They do not make this gesture, however, in the name of a universal History or a pursuit of truth, but in the name of a geopolitics of the concept as construction and diagnosis.
It is crucial to avoid three misinterpretations here, which in turn correspond to the different moments of this chapter. First, to ask what philosophy is, what it makes, does not amount to asking what its essence is. Neither does it amount to inscribing philosophy into a rational logic of the promotion of truth in accordance with an erroneous conception of the history of systems as a teleology of Reason. This is why Deleuze and Guattari link the endogenous formal consistency of the concept to its conceptual persona and to the unpredictable history of its construction (creation).
Second, thinking the historicity of philosophy does not in any way imply a linear causality between the socio-economic and the cognitive, which a certain kind of Marxist literature might promote as an explanatory scheme: there is no determination of the superstructure by the infrastructure. Instead, the consistency of the concept, adjacent to conditions of historical determinations, operates in a detached way and produces its own virtual temporality, one that is insistent but not eternal, and that is irreducible to the linear unfolding of historical succession. In the absence of this condition, the unpredictable creation of the concept would be replaced by a teleological development.
Third, the shift from a scientific paradigm, in solidarity with a history of the Western telos, to an aesthetic paradigm, which notably defines thought as creation, does not amount to an alignment of philosophy with art. This shift instead requires that we transform the concept of history, including the history of the concept, from one that is retroactive and pre-existing into a prospective geography, conscious of both its duration and of its pragmatic precariousness.
Let us examine the first difficulty. To ask what is philosophy is not to revive the old question of essence, ‘what is?’ Deleuze formulates the definitive critique of this in 1967, under the rubric of the ‘dramatisation of the Idea’, one of the initial moments of this debate.1 He rejects a list of categories centred on the ontological consistency of substance (‘what is it?’), and substitutes for it the Nietzschean ethology of the question ‘who?’, which refers to a clinic of thought, to a typology of thinkers. Such is the search for truth, which exemplifies most flagrantly the manner in which a philosophy, in defining itself, acts as the unifying principle of its prior history as tradition or as a succession of systems. This search for truth does not lead to a unanimous definition but rather diverges into distinct and concurrent dramaturgies, such as doubt (Descartes), inquiry (Hume) and tribunal (Kant). The procedures by which thought tracks down truth are differential and irreconcilable, and propose disparate configurations that are inscribed in distinct scenographies for which a typology can be traced out: the Inquirer (Hume), the Lawyer (Leibniz) or the Judge (Kant). Philosophising never consists in obtaining an already-constituted truth, nor in pursuing it to its limit by means of a procedure defined by a universal method, but rather in describing the gestural choreography of the encounter between thought and a problem, which produces an entire kinematics of thought for a thinker. It is precisely in this sense that a concept is signed, in accordance with the formula that Deleuze and Guattari maintain in What is Philosophy?
The question ‘who?’ is taken up in the figure of the conceptual persona, which should not be confused with a representation of the thinker. The concept is signed in terms of its individual historicity, but Deleuze and Guattari reverse the process by which the work is habitually assimilated to the author, while simultaneously distancing themselves from phenomenology and Marxism. It is the signature that individuates, not the ‘I think’ or historical conditions of a psycho-social type. Thus, any concept, in the elaboration of its multiple, formal components, liberates a certain image of thought (simultaneously thought and being) that determines a certain conceptual persona. This is an impersonal condition of thought, one which is not empirical but still singular, in that it responds to a new problem, which defines at the same time its task and the experience to which it refers. The conceptual persona that doubts is not Descartes’ psychological ego, but rather an unknown, which remains to be determined. We construct it from the components of the concept of the cogito, such as ‘to think’, ‘to doubt’ or ‘to exist’. These are distinct components – heterogeneous but not separable – that lay out the profile of a concept, the manner in which it attacks prior or adjacent problems by reconstructing them. The conceptual persona, presupposed by the relation between concepts (always characterised by a multiple consistency) and by the diagrammatic plane of the problem (the abstract machine) that they deploy and that contributes to their definition, is thus neither an emanation of René Descartes, nor a transcendent philosophical consciousness given for all eternity in the history of philosophy.
Applying an analysis to philosophy that has been perfectly clarified with respect to art, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate that the proper name of a philosophy is its signature, in the sense in which it has been defined semiotically in the analysis of the ritornello in A Thousand Plateaus: as an individuating material of expression (and thus historically specified hic et nunc), but one that is impersonal because it does not presuppose any individual subject given in advance. On the contrary, it is the signature that individuates philosophical thought and gives consistency to its author, permitting this group of writings to be distinguished in the production of an epoch as a new philosophical dealing out (donne) ‘signed René Descartes’. Deterritorialising prior or adjacent (limitrophe) concepts that it replays in recomposing, the signature turns thought into an act of territorialisation, one which does not depend upon any transcendental subjectivity that would serve as its origin, but that rather falls back on the person of the author that it differentiates and actualises. Three distinct levels should thus not be confused: the conceptual persona of the Doubter or the Dancer; the psycho-social type of the French soldier marching in the Europe of the seventeenth century or that of the walker of Sils Maria; and finally the individuals René Descartes and Friedrich Nietzsche, determined by the thought that they inaugurate. The conceptual persona is not identical with the psychology – even the transcendental psychology – of the writer (scripteur) or with a psycho-social type determined in accordance with historical materialism. But it is nevertheless the conceptual persona that individuates Descartes as a philosopher, in alignment with the psycho-social traits of his time but without being determined by them (if this were the case, all French soldiers would have written Discourse on Method). The conceptual persona, distinct from the psycho-social type, is not independent of the latter and is not ahistorical. It is constructed in an imperceptible way as a condition for the determination of a concept but does not pre-exist it, any more than it is caused by it: it functions as its transcendental virtual condition, one which is not pre-existent, but rather constructed, as a diagnosis.
The conceptual persona thereby turns out to be the agent of enunciation, the one who says ‘I’ in philosophy (WP 64–5): this ‘I’ is not originary (phenomenological) or determined (sociological Marxism), but rather ‘invented’, constructed and presupposed at the same time that a concept is created and a pre-philosophical plane is laid out. The philosophical enunciation is thus not exclusively discursive, grammatical or propositional, but instead on the order of the construction of the concept: one does not think in saying (or in producing a linguistic enunciation) but in constructing a multiple concept, which requires the institution of a pre-philosophical plane (a plane of immanence) and the logical ordination (ordination logique) of the components of the concept. This is the formula of constructivism: creating concepts as the laying out of the pre-philosophical plane of the problem. The philosophical persona functions as a shifter between the phases of the created concept and the problem that has been laid out, creating a new formula for the individuation of thought.
This ‘I think’ – in conformity with Deleuze’s work since he took up Simondon (1964), as well as with Guattari’s writings on the assemblage of enunciation (1965) – is produced by impersonal and singular individuation, in conformity with the way that Deleuze and Guattari define individuation in A Thousand Plateaus: as becoming. The act of positing a concept in philosophy individuates its thinker (contrary to how we habitually think about it) and also explains the link between the concept and its pre-philosophical plane, the plane of immanence that should not be confused with an assemblage of enunciation or with a domain of eternal, virtual idealities. It is not the plane of immanence that produces the concept (any more than the assemblage, for that matter), even if they are in a relationship of reciprocal presupposition.
Are we now in a better position to define the conceptual persona more precisely? Neither an individual figure nor a conscious creation of the philosopher, it is the result of the new individuation of thought, positioned at the intersection of the concept and the problem. This transforms what it means for us to orient ourselves in thought. We can list its pathetic traits (the Idiot, the Doubter); its relational traits (the Friend, the Waiter in the café); its dynamic traits (marching, climbing, flying, gliding); or its juridical traits: thought claiming what belongs to it by right, from the Claimant or Plaintiff in a Greek tribunal to the Lawyer (Leibniz), the Empirical Investigator (Hume), or the Judge at the tribunal of revolutionary Reason (Kant). It also includes existential traits, which evoke vital anecdotes from The Logic of Sense: Empedocles and his volcano or Spinoza and his spider fights.
Such an inventory – attempted as an experiment in What is Philosophy? – does not constitute an exhaustive list of traits that individuate a conceptual persona once and for all, forming a kind of timeless history of figures of Reason. The philosophical consistency of a conceptual persona is neither timeless nor unified; the list of categories is no more closed than the open typologies of signs of cinema, of the Baroque, or of literature. ‘Personae proliferate and branch off, jostle one another and replace each other’ (WP 71), because they are the object of critical and clinical diagnoses. They are not given but constructed – in a non-arbitrary way, of course, but which is not pre-existent either – and get revived by a philosophy that rolls the dice of the concept anew. This is why the persona is the unknown of a system formed by the relation between concepts and the problematic plane. Unconscious for the philosopher, the persona is only revealed in the critique or revival (la reprise) of another philosopher, at the point where the concept is at work and thus, in reality, at the place where the new figure of the conceptual persona disrupts the preceding construction.
POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY AND THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM
For his part, Guattari produces powerful analyses of the relation between politics and theory, indicating that the formal consistency of doctrines is never univocal, definitive or absolute, and that abstraction is never a first term but rather the result of concrete assemblages of enunciation. Each time we encounter a universal statement of the kind ‘cogito ergo sum’, it is necessary to determine the particular nature of its enunciating assemblage in order to analyse its formal consistency and the operation of power that enables it to pretend to universality (MU 12).
In sum, the abstract is neither the first term nor the sovereign, hierarchical pole of a proposition that can be extracted from its conditions of enunciation in order to be considered a given in the timeless universe of a sky of Ideas. The relation between theory and practice must be conceived of transversally: the concept is neither a Platonic Idea transcendent to the empirical real, nor a form adjacent to social matter. The concept is not attached to a unique, universal time but rather to a plane of consistency that is always inscribed historically, but which is imperceptible as long as it is not marked by a becoming. In this way, the appearance of the concept in the real does not occur all in one piece (d’un seul tenant): the coordinates of existence, the spatiotemporal coordinates, and the subjective coordinates become established in relation to assemblages in constant interaction (MU 11).
In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, the critique of the universal is accomplished theoretically and politically: the universal as an abstraction functions as an order word (mot d’ordre). This nominalist critique is always accompanied by two logical stakes. First, the universal is not explanatory; instead, it is the universal that must be explained, as Deleuze, as well as Guattari, insist repeatedly, and it must be explained from the point of view of the concrete instance that it explores, of the experience that it configures, as well as of the nexus of social and political forces that it redeploys, contests, or favours. Consequently, the use of the universal as an order word supports a political imperative of domination and is not a logical necessity. The universal as a concept thus gives way to a pragmatics of thought, which opens onto the theory of assemblages, systematically placing theory in a relation of co-constitution with its collective assemblage of enunciation, at the same time as with its endoconsistency. The collective assemblage, similar to the Foucauldian statement, encompasses discursive conditions in the orders of knowledge, but also engages non-discursive conditions: political and pragmatic assemblages and states of facts. Second, it is necessary to analyse the semiotic components (concrete assemblage and abstract machine) that singularise the relation between a given system and a given political assemblage of enunciation. If philosophy no longer concerns the universal, a new interpretation of necessity in thought becomes indispensable, one which concerns neither the universal nor the teleology of history: this is what geophilosophy defines as the constructivism of the concept, in its geopolitical inscription, as becoming. This becoming must be determined as a crisis, not as a linear expression of given material and historical conditions. Without this, thinking would serve no purpose.
The problem is always to be understood on two planes, the political and the conceptual. This is why Deleuze and Guattari immediately refer the question of the emergence of philosophy to that of capitalism. In effect, the question is posited in the same way, since in both cases, given features in given times and places do not necessarily automatically unleash the threshold of emergence of capitalism (Braudel) or of philosophy, between which it is important to avoid establishing a relation of causality. They posit the historical status of the contingent and exigent irruption of such processes for both, revealing the strong link between the history of philosophy and that of capitalism. First, the emergence of capitalism, like that of philosophy, retrospectively unifies all prior history and propels the future forward on a segment of unified history, determining a specific development in a constrained manner. This is why, in the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write that there is no universal history except that of capitalism. This does not mean that capitalism is inscribed in an all-encompassing, universal history, but, on the contrary, that it creates the conditions of possibility of such a history: there is no universal history without capitalism. There is no universal history of civilisations except that of capitalism, just as there is no universal history of Reason except that of philosophy. It is not that the two determinations are teleologically programmed in advance, but rather that from the moment when they occurred (as a contingency), their emergence retrospectively unifies all prior attempts, through the construction of the universal. From the moment when capitalism emerged, it unified prior histories because it configured itself as universal, acting pragmatically as an instance of domination. But this universal is contingent (it is not necessary that it crystallises at a particular moment).
Nevertheless, from the moment when capitalism crystallised, when it occurred, it unleashed a necessary and constraining process. This is why history must be theorised as a mixture of the aleatory and the necessary, proceeding by contingent leaps, determining a problem (abstract machine, diagram, or plane) that retroactively produces a prior history without emerging from it. What is at stake is a transductive crystallisation in the strict sense that Simondon uses it, even though he did not think of applying this concept to the history of capitalism: a contingent irruption (chance) unleashes its own logic, its virtual problem (or abstract machine), from which the supposed linearity of prior history is retrospectively configured. This is why ‘there is no good reason but contingent reason; there is no universal history except of contingency’ (WP 93). Reason in philosophy is synthetic and contingent, proceeding through encounters, unpredictable conjunctions, ‘not insufficient by itself but contingent in itself’ (WP 93).
How can we deal with this empirical irruption through encounters, viewing it neither as a teleological universal nor as a causal determination? Through the concept of the abstract machine, which is installed transversally at the material, cognitive, social and affective levels, as it is set to work in Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and developed by Guattari in The Machinic Unconscious and Chaosmosis. Consequently, there is nothing fortuitous about the link between modern philosophy and capitalism: it is as strong (and contingent) as that of ancient philosophy with Greece. In both instances, an aleatory connection produces necessary effects. The psycho-social conditions of the Greek city-state with ancient Reason, the psycho-social conditions of capitalist Europe with modern Reason, are due to the features of deterritorialisation of the Greek city-state, bound to the Asiatic empires that it deterritorialises. Europe assumes the features of Greek fractal geography, spreading out into mercantile cities, recoding them onto the State and onto the generalised convertibility of Capital, installing a new type of generalised deterritorialisation, which favours economic domination and conceptual universalism. These determinations make it possible for Europe to define a properly European transcendental subject, a privilege that Husserl does not put in question when he defines the crisis of Reason. This privilege is founded on the construction of a subject posited not as one psycho-social type among others, but as Man par excellence, in possession of all the ‘expansive force’ and ‘missionary zeal’ proper to European capitalism (WP 97).
‘Capitalism reactivates the Greek world on these economic, political, and social bases. It is the new Athens. The man of capitalism is not Robinson but Ulysses, the cunning plebeian, some average man or other living in the big towns …’ (WP 98).
We should not conclude from this that philosophy, now the obligatory ally of capitalism, should be condemned. The link between modern philosophy and capitalism, like that between ancient philosophy and the city-state, is founded on the movement of deterritorialisation of capital, brought to the conditions of immanence of a generalised decoding that distinguishes capitalist assemblages from preceding semiotics. This is why the connection between ancient philosophy and the city-state or that of modern philosophy and capitalism is not ideological (philosophy echoing the exigencies of the city-state or of capitalism). This should not lead to a sociology of modes of thought, a linking of philosophy to the infrastructure of the ancient city-state or to that of modern capitalism, according to the model of a causal determinism (historical materialism). Instead, it should lead to defining a materialism that creates a place for a veritable indetermination in history, for its historicity. It is indeed in the name of real history that it is necessary to reverse the philosophical version that philosophy gives of history: its teleological version. In order to do so, it is necessary to double the concept of history with that of becoming, and to create the concept of geophilosophy.
Philosophy thus appeared in Greece, but through an encounter, ‘as a result of contingency rather than necessity, as a result of an ambiance or milieu rather than an origin, of a becoming rather than a history, of a geography rather than a historiography, of a grace rather than a nature’ (WP 96–7). The Greek city-state’s features of deterritorialisation, linking it to the Asiatic empires, establish the conditions favourable for the emergence of a deterritorialised thought: philosophy is constituted on the basis of contingent chance (or ‘grace’), which does not have anything to do with ‘nature’ but that rather operates rather through the encounter. If Europe assumes the features of the Greek deterritorialisation of the concept on new bases, in doing so it achieves the construction of its Greek moment at the moment it integrates it – this is true for philosophy, as well as for art or science – by claiming a European universality that fabricates a fiction of Greek origins.
This is why it is necessary to explain this conjunction not only as a synthesis, but as a synthesis that is heterogeneous, multifactorial and contingent, to abandon the dream of ethnic purity that specifically links philosophical rationality to the Greek ethos, and to see Greece, as well as Europe, as a non-unified melting pot of very different, heterogeneous influences. And this synthesis is not necessary, but rather contingent, linked to the serendipitous historicity of instances and occurrences, of encounters. Philosophy is thus not linked to its necessary emergence in a given humanity, but is factual and contingent. This takes nothing away from the strong determination of its rationality, but determines its emergence otherwise, on a geophilosophical plane. Philosophy thus remains historicist as long as it thinks itself in terms of the unity of its history and defines its emergence as necessary, linked to linear history and determined by a form of rationality that, in distinguishing itself from all other forms of rationality, designates itself as the master and conquering form of rationality: European philosophical rationality, manipulating its universality as an instrument of domination.
Quite the opposite: a philosophy that takes into account its real historicity is necessarily a philosophy of contingency. This is why it is impossible to respond to the question ‘what is philosophy?’ without transforming the conception that philosophy has of its own history, that is, without transforming the very concept of history and at the same moment proposing a new philosophy.
THE PARADIGM OF CREATION
What is Philosophy? thus does not contain a reevaluation of the question of essence, dispensed with once and for all, but rather an interrogation into the specificity of philosophy as the construction of concepts, which must be understood in a polemical mode as much as in an affirmative one.
Polemicising with discourses of essence that link philosophy to its history, What is Philosophy? expresses creation with a sense of humour: if philosophy has a claim to consistency, this has nothing to do with a timeless essence, is not animated by any internal necessity and does not possess any eternal validity. Contingent and variable, philosophy in no way renounces its entire consistency, and is defined instead as construction and diagnosis, in a new conception of historicity. Determining this consistency demands at the same time a critique of philosophy and of the conception that it has of its own history. On the one hand, philosophy thereby shifts from the paradigm of science to that of art, and conceives of itself as creation. On the other, this creation concerns the consistency of the concept as a multiplicity and as a surveying (survol) of its own components.
Defining philosophy as creation collapses the epistemological frontiers that guarantee the hermetic distinctions between the discursive formations of science, philosophy and art; indeed, Deleuze and Guattari reduce the objectivity of knowledge and the figure of truth to the creation of the new. Several difficulties follow from this. On the one hand, philosophy and science are indexed on what seems to be the activity of art, that of creation, as new contribution and as sensory production; on the other, creation, considered ‘continuous’ (WP 8), seems to be defined in a purely negative way, as a difference that subtracts itself from the old, which it rejects, if we understand newness as a rupture with tradition. ‘The object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new’ (WP 5).
Here, philosophy assumes two determinations – the creative novelty of concepts and radical singularity – habitually reserved for art. The history of the sciences and of philosophy is thought in terms of the model of a history of works of art that are radically singular, incomparable, and thus unquestionable, and philosophy breaks apart into non-totalisable doctrines, doctrines that are thereby also unquestionable and, in turn, equivalent. The accent put on singular creation seems to open the gate to an atomism and a generalised relativism. There is no element common to doctrines by which we could compare them. What then prevents us from confusing philosophy with science or art in the absence of a universal that is specifically philosophical? Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari refuse to allow us to confound them and maintain that art, science and philosophy are established on distinct, heterogeneous planes of thought.
But how is it possible to assign a determinate content to this creation that seems to group philosophy and science with art, and to allow truth to fall back on the criteria of novelty, rupture and anomaly? If the virtue of rupture is derived from what it contests in order to be able to distinguish itself as new, then this definition is as traditionalist as that which proposes that truth is a repetition of the same. It is even completely reactive, and in this sense reactionary, finding its support in the old that it contests. Even worse, it re-establishes a link with linear teleologies of history, being content with reversing them, because it places the old and the new in a relation of succession. It is understood that ‘interest’ replaces the criteria of truth as measure of adequacy and that this banishes timeless essence, but if interest itself, as that which measures the truth of a proposition, can only boast the criteria of rupture as its guaranty, and if interest may be summarised as saying something ‘otherwise’, we risk exchanging the eternity of truth as timeless essence and the long history of its development as an oriented evolution for the short, brutal oscillation of rupture, of contestation.
The constructivism of the concept exposes us to this significant difficulty: if a ‘concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation’ then ‘there is no point in wondering whether Descartes was right or wrong’ (WP 27). Even worse, ‘when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane’ (WP 28). Constructivism, the new name for transcendental empiricism, implies that the concept assumes sense, not in the antecedent conditions of tradition, but in transforming old concepts into new weapons and responding to problems that did not exist before. Deleuze and Guattari clearly formulate the difficulty: ‘In the end, does not every great philosopher lay out a new plane of immanence, introduce a new substance of being and draw up a new image of thought, so that there could not be two great philosophers on the same plane? … But how, then, can we proceed in philosophy…? … Is this not to reconstitute a sort of chaos?’ (WP 51). They provide the answer a few lines later: ‘the choice is between transcendence and chaos’ (WP 51). This in turn presents a difficult methodological circle, which is resolved by the relation between construction and diagnosis.
For this radical singularity aims first to establish for philosophy an endogenous necessity. Different philosophies cannot be measured according to an external standard, one that is artificial and transcendent; they must be evaluated according to the type of systematicity that they institute and according to the systematic consistency that they propose (endoconsistency of the concept as multiplicity), the map of affects that they promote (perspectivism), the multiplicity of pragmatics that they make possible (politics) and for which they are also the diagnosis. The evaluation of a philosophy – as of that of works of art or scientific theories – cannot be the object of a unified, transcendent, pre-existing, exterior measure, because each system, work, doctrine or theory opens a point of view that constitutes its object and because there is no pre-existing unity of discourses, no timeless unity of objects, that would allow them to be aligned according to an external standard. There thus cannot be in philosophy, any more than in the sciences, a logic of truth, deploying its successive figures in the history of Reason. Relying upon the epistemology of sciences of Bachelard, Lautman, Canguilhem, Simondon and Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari thereby define a plural, multiple and discordant philosophy, a philosophy of diagnosis as opposed to a history of truth.
Creation, then, does not simply signify rupture, and novelty does not only signify contestation. To create in a given system signifies constituting, but constituting implies that there is no external, pre-existing object for human thought. This allows Barbara Cassin, for example, to classify Deleuze as a sophist.2 Art, science and philosophy are not creative because they innovate and refuse the past: this would be a negative and reactionary determinism along the lines of the ‘avant-garde’, assuming a dialectical conception of the production of the new in contradiction with the old. The value of a concept is not oppositional. ‘However, a concept is never valued by reference to what it prevents: it is valued for its incomparable position and its own creation’ (WP 31).
But the incomparable opens the way to a radical heterogeneity. What then permits the arrangement of these thoughts into the unity of a philosophy? This is achieved through the determinate and problematic perspective, that is, the partial and reconfigurative perspective that presides over their evaluation, that diagnoses their construction of a concept. Novelty should be less understood as a reaction (negation) than as production, the construction of concepts formulating new problems, presupposing unexpected conceptual personae – the Doubter, the Investigator – none determined by what preceded them, each nevertheless reconfiguring prior doctrines or concepts that they redeploy, but on a new plane. It is thus singularity that explains novelty, just as it determines a ‘star friendship’, to use Nietzsche’s phrase,3 a monadism of works, a dispersion without communication. This dispersion is not resolved in an atomism but instead promotes, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a politics of thought, one by which the diagnostic impact reverberates by constructing the problematic axis according to which the concepts of prior philosophies can be subjected to examination. This is not relativism but rather a pragmatic perspectivism, the theoretical stakes of which consist in activating the critical re-elaboration of the concept of history, the philosopher having a grip on history as it is being made, this proceeding in tandem with a new, ethical definition of consistency in philosophy: a geophilosophy.
BECOMING AND DIAGNOSIS
The necessity of philosophy is thus endogenous and extrinsic at the same time. It cannot be reduced to an examination of its own history as a totalising university discipline, or to commentary on current scientific and artistic activity, which would be the equivalent of an epistemological retreat. In defining philosophy as the creation of concepts, Deleuze and Guattari seek a constituting exteriority for philosophy that guarantees its singularity as well as giving it a hold on its contingency. Their objection to the history of philosophy is that it remains endogenous without taking into account the necessity, for the concept, of producing a new problem. To metadiscursive or epistemological commentary, they reply that philosophy must maintain its conceptual content or else risk losing everything. The two positions are for them equivalent because both hold philosophy to be a second discourse, and in the end a secondary one, content to reflect upon an exogenous given. But the concept is constructed, it establishes itself as the solution to a problem that it defines: ‘A solution has no meaning independently of a problem to be determined in its conditions and unknowns; but these conditions and unknowns have no meaning independently of solutions determinable as concepts’ (WP 81).
Geophilosophy thus implies this irruptive, nonlinear history of problems. We can now more precisely define constructivism: the creation of concepts as instances of a solution configuring problems, laying out a plane and a movement on the plane as the condition of a problem, inventing a conceptual persona for the unknown of this problem, as a formula for the individuation of thought. This triadic construction – the concept thought, the virtual philosophical problem and the implied philosophical persona – serves as the maxim for the new ‘history of philosophy’ proposed by geophilosophy. This triad articulates the real history of philosophy in relation to the series of conceptual necessities produced by a sequence of unpredictable encounters.
In effect, we cannot define the constructivism of a past philosophy without at the same time producing a new construction of the concept, the reason why construction always refers to diagnosis. As opposed to doctrines of truth that position thought in a timeless element, we no longer think in terms of the eternal, but in the present moment that we are already in the process of leaving behind, and which is configured in such a way so as to favour the strategic – that is, the political – becoming of our conceptual practices. In addition, it is not a question of a thought of the present, because the present does not conceal what we are, but rather what we no longer are. We think in the indicative of becoming, in the timely as Foucault said, or the untimely as Nietzsche put it, we who are not concerned with what we are, but instead with the becoming in which we are caught up.
The problem of a philosophy, as a diagram or an abstract machine, is thus indissociable from its actualisation, which can always be assigned a date, even if in itself, as a problem, it does not belong to the retrospective history of the thinker, but to his becoming. The philosophical problem explains the virtue of crisis, the power of rupture, which means that a thought is not given once and for all, but instead knows periods, hours and coefficients of luck and danger. The mutation of thought demands a double analysis on the plane of history and on the plane of becoming: the reason for the succession of periods is not due to history understood as causal succession, but to creation, as rupture, as becoming. Crisis indicates the becoming of a system, and thus its historicity, just as it reveals its uneven, nonlinear, continuity. It is crisis that produces these links in which crisis, as cut or limit, constitutes the ideal cause of continuity. In this sense, cuts are not lacunae or ruptures of continuity because their fractures oblige us to distribute continuity in a new dimension that produces continuity beginning with the contingent irruption of a fracture. The cut thus explains the transversal character of the course of thought and the kinematics of systems of thought. Each philosophy irremediably changes the image of thought, and the construction that each philosophy proposes is no more contained in the preceding dimensions of its work than in the succession of prior doctrines. This is why Deleuze and Guattari specify that philosophy does not stop changing without any of its dimensions being contained in its preceding dimensions. The same is true for the becoming of thought, as for the capacity of thought to transform the world, a world that we are able to act upon precisely because thought has configured it.
NOTES
1. This concept is analysed in Sauvagnargues in Deleuze: L’empirisme transcendental, Chapter 9: ‘La dramatization de l’Idée’, 209–38.
2. Cassin, L’effet sophistique, 19–20.
3. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 225–6 (§279).