Rather, in a constant and sometimes contradictory mobility, the enfolding is also an unfolding, and inside and outside approach infinitely in their proximity. This odd doubleness is characteristic of language and body alike.
—Karmen MacKendrick, Word Made Skin
We are discovering new ways of folding, akin to new envelopments, but we all remain Leibnizian because what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding.
—Gilles Deleuze, The Fold
IT COMES DOWN TO FOLDS. Wave folding into particle, breath into body, hand into hand, melody into ear, seed into dirt, earth into human, violence into trauma, carbon into atmosphere, climate into climatology. Word into world, world into word. Outside in, inside out, the edge turns to layer, to tissue, complicating, pleating. The folding shapes, it limits, it may pleat sharply. We select, decide, make some cut between possibles, decisare; or else we dissolve into the manifold that we already are and “I” don’t happen. But the cut is never clean. It only exposes more folds. All the way down and out. And the vertical axis is itself twisting, bending into spirals diffracted by everything they transverse. The complication extends, explicates. Each one of its folds does the work of the world. In word or body.
The language in English that puts the fold literally into action has almost died: the verb to ply, as in apply, is now in common use only in a degraded sense—“to ply with alcohol”—yet it meant first of all “to work diligently” as “to ply a trade,” as “the artist plies her brush passionately” or, in a semantically archaic mobility, “the sailor plies the seven seas.” Folding signified the movement and agency of a practice. The noun has suffered an even sorrier abjection: we no longer think of a “ply” in its original sense as a fold or layer, as in the plies of a brain or of a project: “two-ply” now labels your toilet paper. Nonetheless, etymologically, not to mention in the chapters of this book, the fold still secretly labors within every multiplicity. Even simplicity provides complexity with no opposite, no mere One: it involves its single fold, its doubling.
If the fold repeats, layers, and supplies the actual world, it plies the open sea of its own potentiality. Then application no longer means the deployment of possibilities to predictable outcomes. But how does the fold escape the determinism of its doubling—one folds at least in two—its repetition? How might it work as the unit of an apophatic entanglement: the unit that is not one, in which the folding of the past world into a becoming present retains its edge of indeterminacy? Can the new unfold from its constituent relations? Does it not just happen—as the event? A coming rather than a becoming? The messianic, not the mess of tangles?
These questions expose again the dense web of issues, impossibly crowded in their politics and their materialities, and just as maddeningly abstract: for the implications precipitate dense explications. They demand new conceptualizations even before we have understood the old ones. And the tissue of folds between word and world, every last quantum of the cosmos, is precisely what demands and escapes every philosophical meditation on the relation of the knower to the thing known. It drives the noble attempts to sail past the Scylla of a cutting dualism and the Charybdis of a naive realism.
Thank goodness we ply theology here, and need not rehearse the whole onto-epistemological journey from Plato to Kant, from Hegel to . . . whomever floats our method. Our vessels in this century are less stately but no less dependent upon philosophy. This one is built for the waters of chaos. It is the concept of the fold, best articulated in the avowed chaosmos of Gilles Deleuze, that occupies the present chapter. And indeed it is the explicit enfoldment of Whiteheadian thought in the Deleuzean opus that will lend a current philosophical frame or “plane of immanence” to this theos logos of apophatically entangled becomings. I am hoping that this apparent doubling of abstraction will pry open, not further cement, the wall of the current worldview.
We have in the first part of this book contemplated an Infinite Complication. Following its ancient darkness glowing in language, we read in Cusa the simultaneity of its enfolding in its unfolding in and as the material multiplicity of the world. So the theological coincidentia of the maximum with the minimum invited comparison with the current science of minute quanta entangled with each other at an apparently maximum scale. But most of us do not, most of the time, feel ourselves swirling between infinities and infinitesimals. Whatever we enfold in physics or metaphysics, our lives unfold, refold, and fold down at the human scale. The human finds itself (coincidentally) in the exact middle—once geocentrically, now smack between the Planck scale and the galactic superstructures. Cusa already replaced the fixed center of ourselves, our planet, with a mobile relativity of perspective. We contract it to the shifting perspective that we are. But what are “we”? Are we cut out crisply from the universe like da Vinci’s drawing, Vitruvian Man, separate, geometrically immobilized, supremely self-knowing? Or more like a Klee abstraction (in the traumatized generation between Whitehead and Deleuze), an eye and a heart cut lyrically into a landscape of moon, stars, roofs, star of David, cross—no less human in scale and perspective? What colors, cultures, creatures, compositions ply the human? If we are to mind the folds of the human in and out of the other bodies of its world, our difference from them remains—entangled.
So I am not now asking: what generically distinguishes us as a species? (Language, intellect, spirit, politics, the ability to ask these questions or to sneer at them . . . the question is premature, and stale.) I am asking: how do we unfold ourselves? How do we compose ourselves out of the folds, human or not, that already enfold us? It has been suggested as the basis of the operative chiasm of this book that these folds, known and unknown, represent our constituent relations to the world and to ourselves. But then how do we mark our difference from other humans no less than from all the nonhumans? If the fold is the relation, it is also the difference. It makes or plies the difference between any two humans, any two creatures, which is to say inhabitants of the unfolding creation or indeed of each other. And if so, we are thinking—humanly—the nonseparability of the human difference from all that is maximally or minimally nonhuman. Not, then, as an exercise in the posthuman, but as a human exercise kin to the transhumanism gathered already from Barad in chapter 4’s intra-activity. This chapter is then literally “after the physics,” meta-ta-physika,1 not in the sense of a transcendence of the physical, but in following it (not unlike Derrida’s feline “following” of the animal, L’Animal que donc je suis, “‘I am’ or ‘I follow’”).2 The physics hosted by this cloud already folds decisively beyond classical materialism and puts in question such notions as “physical,” “matter”—along with the meaty or the mental “human.” We are observing these solid words for solid bodies all clouding into varieties of relational ontology. I am confessing to metaphysics? Perhaps in the sense of following/being the physical—but differently. In a difference that comes always, no matter how abstract, with body. Meta means both “after” and “with.” And, of course, in language and in bodies, every perspective is both after and with the folds that compose it, that are it. The folds, we will see, repeat and so follow the prior becomings. And so the new becoming is not one with what it enfolds—but with it. But to call the perspective that embraces that becoming “metaphysical” gets us stuck in a logos of the same or a debate about it that does not edify. Yet much that unsays the metaphysics of substance and its ontotheological God takes place in the name of metaphysics—as in Whitehead, as, indeed, in Deleuze.
Whitehead plied a kind of constructive imagination he could call metaphysical in its exodus from any scientific or religious positivism, that is, in his rigorous attention to the mentality of what we call physical. He is effortlessly absorbed by Deleuze at key moments, to be considered in this chapter. This is a rarity in Continental discourse. For the relentlessly anthropocentric (not therefore humanist) Foucault, Lacan, and earlier Derrida, had so successfully mobilized attention to human structures of language and power that any cosmological experiment such as the Whiteheadian seemed archaic. I was utterly unprepared to discover the Whiteheadian intertext in Deleuze. But, with the rise of interest in Deleuze, dynamic syntheses of process cosmology with Continental thought, in its more constructivist rather than deconstructive vein, are appearing. In Europe it is the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers who has advanced this interchange.3 And working across the continents, Roland Faber has been advancing a great theo-philosophical entanglement of Whitehead and Deleuze.
Deleuze makes Whitehead audible to an interdisciplinary readership otherwise selectively deaf to cosmology, to ontology, to physics, to theology—in other words, to the entanglement of the human in the nonhuman. He not only adds an updated lexicon to Whitehead’s little known vocabulary: he fiercely intensifies the becoming multiplicities of the process universe—in which Many already precede One and increase it. But the multiplicities already billow in full eventiveness in Whitehead. The wild connections across difference—of scale, of species, of planetary history and its human civilizations—are already categorically unfolded in and from the actual occasion. Of course in Whitehead there is not just the dipolar creature, always at once mental and physical. There is also the dipolar deity. God is not dead but becoming. Within the ontology of the cloud, however, the generative atheism of Deleuze, close to pantheism, may not so much contradict as darken the panentheism of Whitehead. But it is their joint decomposing of the anthropocentric perspective—for both a work less of critique than of creation—that will, in what follows, help us to ply the human otherwise.
FOLDING PHILOSOPHY
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, written, yes, toward the end of his life, Deleuze returns to an early fascination. The book is not just a dazzling rendition of Leibniz. Leibniz lets him pick up the figure that lay concealed for two decades amidst the layers of multiplying concepts—deterritorialization, the assemblage, the rhizome, nomadology, bodies without organs, becoming-imperceptible, the movement-image. The figure of the fold had come into play doubly in the early sixties—in his major Difference and Repetition (1968) and, in that same year, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.
In the latter he pursues a great early work of resistance to the Cartesian dichotomos, the cut-in-two. But the concept of the fold works also in double, as a nondualist binary articulating the play of enfolding and unfolding. Its dynamic range surfaces in an extraordinary series of doubles: “implicatio and explicatio, enfolding and unfolding, implication and explication, implying and explaining, involving and evolving, enveloping and developing.”4 Riveted to the idea of “expression” as the modern equivalent of the explicatio, he had traced the explication/complication pair to its Neoplatonic and, indeed, however fleetingly, its Cusan underground, a tradition (he says admiringly) “always subject to the charge of pantheism.”5 Inasmuch as “one may speak of the Anticartesianism of Leibniz and In Spinoza,” it is “grounded in the idea of expression.”6 He paraphrases Cusa thus: “Immanence corresponds to the unity of complication and explication, of inherence and implication. . . . It is a complicative God who is explicated through all things.”7 And this logic of inherence and implication “will dominate Deleuze’s systematic expositions of immanence,” from Difference and Repetition to The Fold.8
In The Fold, Deleuze examines the alternative advanced by Descartes’s other seventeenth-century contemporary, Leibniz. “Descartes believed that the real distinction between parts entailed separability. . . . According to Leibniz, two parts of really distinct matter can be inseparable.”9 So here the distinction becomes explicit—argued from within the presupposition of substance—of the distinct from the separable. Separability “in fact applies only to a passive and abstract matter.”10 In other words the nonseparability that we observed blowing the minds of physicists extends its philosophical lineage. As Whitehead insists, the notion of separate bits of matter or mind, externally related, is a product of abstraction. It becomes a fallacy only when the abstract is mistaken for the concrete.
If Deleuze comes to the fold early and late in his thinking, he generates language all along the way for the differential connectivity of the world. It is a language as resistant to a unifying One, as to a mere collection of many ones. “Don’t be a one or multiple, be multiplicities!” It is the pli that makes the difference. A jaunty imperative for any relational pluralism, any polydoxy. For the many come folding in and out of each other. His collaboration with Guattari performs the multiplicity they write: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”11 (And we will find much more crowd than cloud in this chapter.) The politics of their books together with their nomadic war machine, would deterritorialize the empires of the One. It invites resistance to the vertical hierarchy at the root: become a rhizome! The orchid and the bee form a rhizome—an incarnation of the fold. Unlike the root, the rhizome spreads like grass, like a democratic multitude, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—just below the earth’s surface. Its geopolitical “lines of flight” would mobilize a manifold solidarity in place of the solidified powers.
The connective energy of their concepts of deterritorializing multiplicities has stimulated its own rhizome of political philosophies. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in a comparable double, have deployed Deleuze and Guattari to theorize a radical mobilization of multiplicity, as The Multitude, against the One—above all the new global Empire of corporate capitalism. Their work reverberated in the short-lived but explosive promise of the Occupy movement, in the potential of the planetary crowd of the 99 percent, enfolded in a theological future by Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan.12 William Connolly, with his pragmatic, Jamesian, and now Whiteheadian Deleuzeanism, plies a more ecologically and biologically materialized, more cosmopolitically democratic pluralism.13 These political unfoldings refract the nomadic exodoi of the desert cloud.
In the Deleuzean work concepts themselves are multiplied and mobilized. They do not reflect, mirror, or subserve the real; they participate in its becoming. They do not cut the world into abstractions. They ply the world; they apply themselves to its practices. Yet not in the sense of some scientific or ethical determinism, for concepts themselves are “centers of vibration, each one in itself and each in relation to all the others.”14 Linguistic centers are vibrating in sync—very differently from the poststructuralism of the time—with the rhythms of becoming bodies. In Thousand Plateaus he and Guattari ply a transformative language of symbiosis, of “life together,” where biosis implies not a biological entity but a process, a becoming: “It is already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy.”15
“Too far,” they mean, along a hierarchy. Instead this symbiosis spins open the meaning of bios, as the multiplying life that lives only in the plies of interlinked relations: not many creatures along a vertical or side by side but nonseparably linked. The symbiosis of mad particles with a galaxy by way of everything between, as we saw in the last chapter, is not just a Parisian poeticism. Deleuze evidently caught quantum entanglement on his radar already in the sixties, well before physics could cope with it. While contemplating the relation between successive present moments he refers quite precisely to “non-localizable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes.”16 This takes place in the context of the great chapter of Difference and Repetition where, paraphrasing the Victorian Samuel Butler, he asks, “What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates, thereby intertwining all the habits of which it is composed?” And then he quotes—relishing the irony of all this matter—Plotinus: “all is contemplation!”17 Deleuze knows of the Neoplatonic background of such contraction—as in Cusa’s contraction of the universe in and as each creature. In the each-in-each there is no space for inert, lifeless matter; the mad particles are folded into contemplation, which surely resonates with the observant quanta of Stapp, with the elemental. The present cloud contemplation circulates through the endlessly nonhuman constituency of contemplation itself.
The polymath Deleuze thinks in coordination with, and often in advance of, a wide range of scientific symbioses. For example, the biologist Lynne Margulis, first hereticized, now honored by her peers, later demonstrated the elemental relationalism of microorganisms. She exposed an interactive tissue of microbacteria covering the planet in a heretofore unknown layer of symbiosis. They may possibly explain the evolution of life as an original, cooperative act of mutually constitutive relation that she called “symbiogenesis.” It is a relation of feeding: but the imbibing of a single cell by another did not kill the first but enfolded it in a new creation—and so gave rise to com plex ity: the organism. Recall that symbiosis translates into Latin as convivium, “living together,” the first meaning of which is “feast.” The primal eucharist of life seems to find its genesis less in competition than in collaboration. This theory of life at the microscale of the organism also drove her coauthorship with Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis (also initially shunned), modeling the earth as a complex system on the macroscale. Neither the minimal microorganisms nor the maximum planetary organism map onto any traditional sense of the body; and so we may read the Deleuzean “bodies without organs” not as hostility toward organic life but toward its hierarchies of bounded organs. The phrase means to expose the nonseparability of concrete lives across “the whole galaxy.” (I am especially partial to Jea Sophia Oh’s postcolonial paraphrase: “becoming the Other: body without organ of Man.”)18
Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, the most developed pluralist alternative to any dichotomy of organic and inorganic, let alone of mental and physical existence, reverberates in the background. As in Deleuze, nearly four decades later, the alternative to the stasis of dualism or monism is the process of multiplicities: “Every actual occasion exhibits itself as a process: it is a becomingness. In so disclosing itself, it places itself as one among a multiplicity of other occasions, without which it could not be itself.”19
Whitehead’s actual occasion transmutes the substance—res cogitans or extensa—of separate individuals into the moments of becoming. Just as in Deleuze the becoming links together any scale and sort of creature, in Whitehead any ontological individual—particle, molecule, cell, each animal composed of them—is read as an actual occasion constituted of its relations to all its others. The actual occasion is a contraction of its universe from a unique perspective: it enfolds its universe and unfolds it differently. Whitehead does not use the language of folding; but it is his concept of the momentary occasion that Deleuze features in the climactic chapter of The Fold, “What Is an Event?” For both thinkers the event is as such a multiplicity, whose members come variously enfolded, pleated, engaged in each other already—and then get wrapped, cut together differently in the one now becoming. The many become that one, whose pleats of difference do not iron out but wrinkle all the way through. No chance to become a self-knowing or self-identical substance: that moment of becoming unfolds into the future “as potential for the becomings of future occasions.”
Whitehead and Deleuze are not one. But it is still too little noted that in The Fold the pli of multiplicity comes into its own as a rhizome of Deleuze/Whitehead/Leibniz. Indeed Deleuze draws upon Whitehead prominently in What Is Philosophy? (1991). And at the end of Difference and Repetition he proclaims Process and Reality to be one of “the greatest books of modern philosophy.”20 He praises Whitehead, for “notions which are really open and which betray an empirical and pluralist sense of Ideas.”21 Or perhaps there would have been too little resonance. Aside from Jean Wahl, whose attempt to introduce James and Whitehead into the Parisian scene in the mid thirties—as avatars of “the concrete”—seems to have been thwarted not only by the war but by the linguistic gulf, Whitehead was in general ignored on the Continent and also (aside from a mainly theological subculture) in the U.S. and England. The focus on sociolinguistic structure eclipsed interest in anything but the human world. And as deconstruction came to the fore the work of difference—“that differance is not, does not exist, is not a present being (on)” did also expose the dualisms and the monisms of substance metaphysics.22 However, Derrida did not move toward the embodiments of the multiple and its interlinked relations, let alone toward any relational theology (such as was being born as process theology during exactly the same period). At one level the impossibility that taunts the present project is just the possibility of an apophatic entanglement of difference in such a theology. And yet ironically it is Deleuze—the other great thinker of difference, one perhaps even more rigorously faithful to the Nietzschean death of God than Derrida—who may articulate such a link for us. Or rather Deleuze may serve as what he calls a “dark precursor” for an integration that may yet happen, but, if so, “in reverse,” like “thunderbolts exploding” due to the preceding pressure differential.
Clayton Crockett explains that the dark precursor is the “differenciator, and it is also what later becomes the plane of immanence or plane of consistency.”23 In grappling with Deleuzean difference as an operational differenciator—not a static distinction—Crockett lifts into relief a point of importance to our inquiry. Deleuze inserts an odd little summary of Heidegger early in the book. “1. The not expresses not the negative but the difference between Being and being. . . . 2. This difference is not ‘between’ in the ordinary sense of the word. It is the Fold, Zwiefalt.”24 Difference as the ontological difference between Being and beings,” comments Clayton, “is not simply a negative relation, a ‘Not,’ but rather the fold between Being and beings.”25 Perhaps here we have a dark precursor for the fold this book seeks, between negative theology and ontological relationality: when we say not God, are we saying—not a negative relation but the fold between what is called God and the relations of the world: the en of panenthism?
This Zwiefalt—the twofold—opens for Deleuze a passage from “difference in itself” to “repetition for itself.” By distinguishing the “not” from mere negation, the not-this of every difference comes into its own, not as a nothingness, a Sartrean néant or hole, but as an affirmative “fold.” Thus Crockett disagrees with the standard interpretation according to which “Deleuze lacks a theory of relations. This is wrong.”26 The fold signifies for Deleuze what we have been calling a nonseparable difference, a relation of difference: the differential relation is not a resemblance or a similarity, not a slide toward sameness. But relation does require a repetition—a doubling, or fold, of the one in the other. Deleuze uses the language of repetition, in other words, to keep relation temporal, rhythmic—differential. Indeed it is perhaps above all his attempt to redeem Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence from any onus of fatalism, of mere iteration of the same, that drives the book.
The thesis of Difference and Repetition may thus be summarized in the words of Deleuze: “difference inhabits repetition.” A repetition is not the same as what it repeats but is already another. So we see that repetition in Deleuze takes the place of the continuity of an essence, a substance, and yet performs such continuity as there is (of the one who reads this sentence, for example, enfolding in sight and mind a repetition of the words I write). By repetition the past is thus enfolded in a present. But for Deleuze there is a triple repetition: a second repetition contemplates that past as a becoming present (you make sense of these words), and then a third repetition yields the “future as such”: “it is itself the new, complete novelty.”27 (You will make your own meaning of the words.)
I cannot help but hear an echo, perhaps even a repetition, of the triple repetition in this passage: “that experience involves a becoming, that becoming means that something becomes, and that what becomes involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy.”28 Here Whitehead pits repetition against Cartesian substance and its “presupposition of individual independence.” Whitehead seems here to be the dark precursor. One can say that the actual occasion as an event of interdependence enfolds the differences of its predecessors as its past. So the “public” repetition that is “causal efficacy” is the actual occasion prehending or enfolding in feeling its past world. The “private” repetition, internal to the moment, is the concrescence of creative contrasts. In this becoming concrete, difference indeed inhabits repetition. For that repetition yields the novum—the immediacy of experience. But in the third fold the occasion “perishes”—just at the point of its “satisfaction” or actualization. It doubles as an “immortal” influence in the world, rippling through the prehensions of future occasions as a potential for their possible actualizations. Not endless return of the same event, but the entanglement of the new event in all subsequent relations. The novelty, the crisp bite of the first apple, will repeat itself endlessly.
And the human? It emerges like every other creature in this triple folding. In the creative contrasts by which we compose ourselves, consciousness emerges—as a contrast of contrasts, never a given. It does not distinguish us from other animals. The degree of complication may. It allows us to entertain propositions, “lures to feeling,” with a perilous freedom of selection—Whitehead derives consciousness specifically from an “affirmation-negation” contrast. The past and future, enfolded as potentiality, now invite the peculiar spatiotemporal range of the human, with its contrast of memory and futurity making possible—posse—the self-conscious novelty of the human perspective. Contrasts of contrasts, folds within folds: consciousness emerges, if it does, late in the nontemporal sequence of the concrescence. Not that I ever know myself directly, as a Cartesian mind could. In the concrescence I remember and forget what has been, even as I anticipate or ignore possibility for what may be. But “I” am always only now becoming and therefore never available for pure self-knowing. “I” am already a crowd—of past selves and future possibilities. “I” happen at the same time as the perspective enfolding them all. So the “I” seems to be a peculiarly human device: it renders my perspective, entangled in all those others, singularly repeatable—and therefore responsible. We are able to respond to the other before us, and so to decide, to cut between possibilities—mindfully. Or not. The other may be first of all human, mirroring me to myself, but only first of all, and only late in history did the human get abstracted and extracted as ego from all the nonhuman selves folding in and out of it. Still we humans know ourselves cloudily as complex compositions of our relations human and otherwise, called to create something new of them—of ourselves. Together, in any event.
“A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of the line.”29 Thus Deleuze traces the entangled difference of a multiplicity in the shape of the labyrinth. And his folds precipitate events, they ply the actual. “We must hold on to our awareness of this eventfulness, of the fold as an act, ‘to fold’ as a verb,” explains Karmen MacKendrick.30
Toward the end of Difference and Repetition comes an extraordinary passage, one that sprang out at me once when I was sniffing around for the lost chaos of Genesis. Here suddenly he calls upon Leibniz for a notion of multiple perspectives that “unfold simultaneously,” then he invokes the chaos of James Joyce’s stream of consciousness “as itself the most positive,” as “indistinguishable from the great work which contains all the complicated series, which affirms and complicates all the series at once.”31 If this figure of the complicatio sounds familiar, the following sentence, veiled in parenthesis, renders the genealogy explicit: “It is not surprising that Joyce should have been so interested in Bruno, the theoretician of complicatio.” Bruno, we have noted, drew his visionary vocabulary of cosmic folds directly from Cusa. “The trinity complication-explication-implication accounts for the totality of the system—in other words, the chaos which contains all, the divergent series which lead out and back in, and the differenciator which relates them one to another.”32
It is not the same triple repetition but an esoteric modulation at the scale of the universe. To translate the enfolding of all as the chaos is hardly Cusan, let alone divine; but it does open up from below the infinity of unformed—unbounded—possibility. The same trinity recurs again toward the end of the book, in the same passage where he invokes Whitehead. Again complication signifies “the state of chaos which retains and comprises all the actual intensive series which correspond to these ideal series, incarnating them and affirming their divergence.”33 This convergent divergence—certainly no mere disorder—describes the first fold or integration. Explication is the next, where a solution to the problems is traced out. Implication signifies the persistence of the problems and of the values that explicate them. If we intensify its resonance with the infinite complicatio, which may be called chaos only in the profound sense of tehom or the apophatic deep, and from which the “God” problem cannot be washed out, we diverge from Deleuze in the direction of his much older sources.
During the same period Deleuze wrote Expressionism in Philosophy, in which he traced with admiration the Neoplatonic lineage of the unfolding and the enfolding. As Joshua Ramey has invitingly demonstrated, the hermetic tradition as it is funneled through the Renaissance Neoplatonism of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Bruno provides Deleuze with the “dark precursors” of a spiritual legacy.34 When he returns late in his life to the figure of the fold, then, it is no casual assemblage of concepts that accompanies it.
OPEN MONADS
So then when he ensconces Whitehead as the subject of the pivotal chapter of The Fold, a book on Leibniz, it is because he finds with him the question—“What Is an Event?”—echoing for just the third time (the first time among the Stoics, the second with Leibniz) in the history of philosophy. As we have seen already, there is no easy coincidence of fold and event; one must provoke a co-incident. The relationality might otherwise lie neatly folded in a demobilizing drawer. There is no more mobile thinker, releasing less predictable lines of flight, than Deleuze. Nonetheless, the problem of the relation of the nonseparability to novelty, in other words of fold/repetition to unpredicted event, persists. The terms in which he returns to it seem at once overdetermined and surprising. I do not mean that there is some teleological necessity to this recurrence. Divergent lines of thinking persist, as in Cinema 2 and 2, with their politically charged vocabulary of movement-image and then time-image. Indeed his return to the fold expresses something of the force of novelty in repetition that the “eternal return” signifies for Deleuze.
He sets Leibniz in the architectonics of a “Baroque condition” surrounded by gilded drapes, whorls, and pleats. All these luminous folds might appear to the jaded eye as the effulgence of seventeenth-century power. But here they yield a code of infinite connectivity. Thus Deleuze paraphrases Leibniz: “a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing and might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds . . . each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.”35 The division of the continuous, in the words of Leibniz, “must not be taken as of sand dividing into grains, but as that of a sheet of paper or of a tunic in folds, in such a way that an infinite number of folds can be produced, some smaller than others, but without the body ever dissolving into points or minima” (6).
We recall that Heisenberg’s “smaller and smaller units “bring us not “to fundamental units, or indivisible units,” but to that “point where division has no meaning.” The simplest minimum that measurement can reach never proves to be the smallest (candidates have been the fermion, the Higgs boson, the superstring). They come folded with partners or superpositions (the wino and the bino—so physics names the nameless—are superpartners of certain bosons). The minimal one is Einfalt, one fold, simplicity. “The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of the line” (6). (Cusa had already tracked the fold of point into line, the line into the circle, the circle Hermetically losing its circumference.) Unlike the point-grid of Cartesian or Newtonian space, the universe as a whole, Leibniz wrote in 1696, resembles “a pond of matter in which there exist different flows and waves” (5). Leibniz already anticipates, a bit spookily, the quantum field.
“Particles,” continues Deleuze, citing Leibniz, “are ‘turned into folds’ that a ‘contrary effort changes over and again.’ Leibniz “brings the fold or the variation to infinity. . . . The model for the science of matter is the ‘origami,’ as the Japanese philosopher might say, or the art of folding paper” (6). One could in this context consider the Asian philosophies of flow, in for instance the microprocesses of pratityasamutpadha, the Buddhist flux of events interdependently co-arising. Or in the flowing mutual enfoldment of the yin and the yang, whose chiasm does not diminish their difference. A human alter-knowing of nonseparable difference has been breaking through here and there for millennia.
Deleuze turbocharges relations comprising the Baroque origami. Its complex spirals follow a “fractal mode by which new turbulences are inserted between the initial ones” (18). He draws upon the mathematical breakthroughs of the 1960s, coincidentally Parisian, the hallucinogenic geometry of chaos of Benoit Mandelbrot, and the catastrophe theory of René Thom, with its elementary fold-events. Complexity theory and its notion of emergence “at the edge of chaos” provide another scene, largely biological, of the nonreductionist relationalism unfolding at the shorelines of science itself. In this holographic iteration at multiple scales, one can imagine Baroque design merging with postmodern geometry. “Growing from other turbulences, in the erasure of contour, turbulence ends only in watery froth or in a flowing mane.” Here lines do not draw boundaries between substances but fractal nonlinearities that “open onto fluctuation” (18). Fluctuation in chaos theory registers in a hallucinatory, computer-simulated iconography of novel repetitions, of iterative sensitivity across divergent scales and between dimensions. We may then not be surprised that Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel laureate and pioneer of chaos theory, writing with Stengers (who soon emerged in her own voice as the Deleuzean-Whiteheadian philosopher-physicist), uses Whitehead to interpret complexity in their Order Out of Chaos (1984).
Leibniz proposes the monad as the unit of enfoldment. The monad is a microcosm of the world, which it mirrors in itself. The monad is its perspective upon the world. The point morphs into the “point of view” (20). It is in fact Leibniz’s perspectivism that offers Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, the clue for the critique of “simple location.” Simple location names scientific materialism’s doctrine that “material can be said to be here in space and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time.”36 Whitehead had developed a modal geometry in which no point can be pinned down; here he discusses “the prehensive unity of volume.” This is the way the different points of view—not points—comprised by prehensions together form a volume. A volume, as the most concrete element of space—such as a room—can of course be reduced to “a mere multiplicity of points.” But such a room is then nothing but “a construction of the logical imagination.” The actual room is experienced as a prehensive unity, formed by the way each part is what it is only from the standpoint of every other part. Whitehead thereby performs an “erasure of contour” of the boundaries of discrete subjects and their separable objects.
Unaware of Whitehead’s discussion of Leibniz, Deleuze exclaims: “How remarkable that Whitehead’s analysis, based on mathematics and physics, appears to be completely independent of Leibniz’s work even though it coincides with it!”37 Whitehead had in fact written that “it is evident that I can use Leibniz’s language, and say that every volume mirrors in itself every other volume in space.”38 In Leibniz the mirroring of the universe in each monad is the reflection of the universe from—indeed as—a particular point of view, in space as in time. So Whitehead lends Leibniz a hint of Bergsonian durée: “Each duration of time mirrors in itself all temporal durations.”39 It is this mirroring that will then in Process and Reality find explication in the double repetitions of prehension and of concrescence. Whitehead attends with special care to the concrete materialization of the microcosm: “in being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life.”40 The animal body is the community of repetitions inhabited by human difference; and it receives for its period unusual emphasis. The “withness of the body” enfolds the whole speculative width of his cosmological speculation. “The body, however, is only a peculiarly intimate bit of the universe.”41
Leibniz perhaps wrote the first full-scale metaphysical holography, much more developed in its analysis of the particular event than that of Cusa or Bruno. But the monad comes with a cost. Leibniz argued that “as this world does not exist outside of the monads that express it,”42 the monads have no direct connection with each other. Leibniz may thereby rescue the insight of the all-in-each from the aggressive Cartesian separation of each from all. If Leibniz resisted the dualism of substances through the infinite multiplicity of folds, Spinoza resisted it concurrently through an enfolding single substance. And there was Anne Conway as well, also provoked to write—in a period particularly repressive of female intellect—her own alternative to Descartes. She was inspired by her in-depth engagement of Jewish Kabbalah with a mystical and simultaneously naturalist animism: no creature lacks life and movement. Again the boundary between the animate and inanimate dissolves; the microcosm is a contraction of universe. But in Conway the folds of multiplicity take the form of a direct and porous interdependence between creatures: “A creature, because it needs the assistance of its Fellow-Creatures, ought to be manifold, that it may receive this assistance.”43 Through her friend van Helmholz, Leibniz knew of and admired her book.44
In Leibniz, however, the waves or folds of connection do not flow between, only harmonically within, his indubitably animate monads. The “each-in-each” gets trapped as he encloses the universe in windowless monads. They must run, therefore, on an interior determinism (infamously coordinated by what Whitehead called “the audacious fudge” of the best of all possible worlds). The determinist relations between monads display again the risk—not the necessary implication—of holism. So there is irony in the derivation of the event, which in the twentieth century signifies novelty, from Leibniz. And it is in order to ply this event-fold in its chaotic indeterminacy that Deleuze opens “What Is an Event?” thus: “Whitehead is the successor, or diadoche, as the Platonic philosophers used to say, of the school’s leader. The school is somewhat like a secret society.”45 He is framed thereby as the third great thinker of the event.
Because in Leibniz “the world is submitted to a condition of closure,” Deleuze now deploys Whitehead to pry open the Leibnizian hologram without losing its fractal microkosmos. “Prehension is naturally open, open onto the world, without having to pass through a window.” Rather, writes Deleuze, “a condition of opening causes all prehension to be already the prehension of another prehension” (92). In this way he can affirm the fold not only of all in each but of each in each other. This is the immense difference from “Leibniz’s Baroque condition. For Whitehead it involves prehensions being directly connected to each other, either because they draw on others for data and form a world with them, or because they exclude others (negative prehensions), but always in the same universe in process” (91). Negative prehensions, which constitute the vast majority of relations, are nonetheless “perfectly definite” connections. Rethinking the fold between creatures as direct connection is an event in itself. For, without this chaotic entanglement in its universe, the event is—as we see in the pluralist event-ontology of Badiou—prone to balloon into one great revolutionary exception surrounded by a void.
Unlike the borders between incompossible worlds, dividing the wholly excluded from the wholly included, “bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discord belong to the same motley world.” That world “can only be made or undone according to prehensive units and variable configurations or changing captures. In a same chaotic world divergent series are endlessly tracing bifurcating paths” (92). In other words, it is through Whitehead’s philosophy of organism that Deleuze recuperates the microcosmic enfolding of the universe as an open system: “The monad is now unable to contain the entire world as if in a closed circle. . . . It now opens on a trajectory or a spiral in expansion that moves further and further away from a center” (157).46
Deleuze then entangles the radical multiplicity of the microcosmic monadology with the elemental nomadology of his chaosmos. With the Deleuzian nomadology do we receive an echo—inadvertent, irreverent—of the Exodus? Certainly one could develop all manner of disturbing correlations with the nomadic warriors of A Thousand Plateaus and the tribal violence celebrated at the battle of Jericho. At any rate The Fold thankfully leaves the “nomadic war-machine” in the garage. Of course the chaosmos has not and will not unfold without violence, never far removed from vibrancy. But the vital seeds of nonviolent resistance to the ordered hierarchies of violation lie also amidst the nonseparable difference, repeated with fierce mindfulness.
. . .
The figure of complicatio-explicatio-implicatio releases a theological cloud of connections: folds all the way down, out, and up. So we must ask if the relentless connectivity has, after Deleuze, anything more to do with the deity of which the complicatio is an apophatic nickname? We might then ask, not does God live, but what kind could? The Sovereign of Separation—or an Infinite Complication? Or does the question presume too much? Does the boundary of the most modern assert itself here after all? When “God” gets eliminated, the cut must be clean. The only fold remaining would then be the history leading to “His [sic] death.” His is not the Lutheran or Hegelian version of His Death, but the Nietzschean; God, repeated—eternally returned?—in the animated moments of God’s death, would then be purged of all those countertraditions complicating and challenging the Judeo-Christian trajectory. Is this how “pure immanence” is to be achieved after all—by acts of allergic simplification?
Yet one must ask: if the cosmos in its chaos always refuses the boundary of inside and out, then how exactly does “pure immanence” remain pure? Does such purity not erase the chaos? Or perhaps “purity” is the wrong word, a misleading hyperbole. Perhaps what is at stake is really a boundless or infinite immanence.
From Spinoza Deleuze took early the notion that “the substance contains within itself the infinity of its points of view upon itself.” The substance, Deus sive Natura (God or nature), has infinite attributes, which are all, pan, the creatures. But then this is no pantheism of identity, of God = world. Deleuze captures its ultimate thus: “in the absolute limit, these properties take on an infinite collective being.”47 Neither the difference of theos nor its unfolded multiplicity as cosmos is reduced to a One. An infinite collective being: here flashes again the obscure intuition emitted when Cusa rules out any opposition of the divine One to a many. It occurs in the democratizing heresies of Spinoza, Schelling, and, in a different way, of the Whiteheadian consequent nature. I do not want to replay the dreary theological pantheophobia—a fear of the very logic of the infinite: no outside. Neither do I want to erase the difference between panentheism and pantheism. That little en encodes the difference of pan and theos and so, by a certain theologic, difference itself. I want to smudge it apophatically. The world-all, as such, remains as unknown (consider dark energy) as any deity that could enfold it. In other words, the en is nothing other than the fold. In the en, theos is then not the same or similar to the all, but nonetheless its repetition. The pan repeats the theos that unfolds it. Theos is the repetition and thus the inhabitation of pan—the envagination of difference itself. This is to be sure a deterritorialized and deterritorializing deity—entangled in a spatiotemporality that, at any point, clouds into the infinite. This being would be of little use to those who do not occasionally need to wrap their minds around it All. In time.
Deleuze does not avoid the All.48 He requires “a symbol adequate to the totality of time.” This symbol is here the all-involving temporality of the “eternal return,” which he redeems (in the third repetition) as the very site of the new. It may be “expressed in many ways: to throw time out of joint, to make the sun explode, to throw oneself into the volcano, to kill God or the Father.”49 What philosopher has better cadenced his explosions? And feminist theologians might find here more solidarity than with any Father. But does Deleuze threaten to slash from the other side the fold that the Father would cut from Himself? The fold that might otherwise host the novel event? Is this not the danger of an oedipal repetition: of liberation from a prior violence by a violence that will father new exclusions?
In the womb of repetition and the laughter of its chaosmos, however, I am wondering: how could the Deleuzean immanence purify itself of that infinite collective being that for Spinoza was, after all, God—hardly less than was the (not) God of the apophatic tradition?
There remain, indeed there may increase, the becoming theologies, neither monotheist nor polytheist, worshipping neither the One nor the Many but perhaps finding already in scripture a plurisingularity (Elohim) or in Tertullian’s trinity of “different not divided” already a triple fold. Would one silence the faint echo of Sinaitic thunder in every liberation movement or in any mystical cloud? Or might its preceding lightning flash expose the dark precursor of what follows? Would we purge—in the interest of purity—the name God not only from its own complicatio—and then also from the “One-All” Deleuze invokes in another late work? I ask these questions on behalf of theologians who find treasure in the Deleuzian immanence, but do not rush to sell off theology itself in order to afford it. We will get no permission from true Deleuzeans for even the entangled apophasis of the present cloud. But theology would have had nothing to say if it waited for the blessing of even those philosophies it finds indispensable.50
The One-All, the complicatio, the infinite collective being, univocity, pantheistic affirmation—these are among the theologically charged names mobilized by Deleuze to banalize and supersede any transcendence. This not to say that he unsays the names of God. Rather he marks negative theology as a haven of transcendence, of the unsaying that unsays itself and yields analogy, likeness, resemblance. As indeed it does. His critique is part of an erudite appreciation of the complicatio/explicatio oscillation that, as he reads it, will finally work its way free, in Ockham but especially in Spinoza, of the false problem of affirming or negating the names of a transcendent Creator. Yet the complication in its infinite condition does not cease to repeat what its theistic lineage has meant by God.
If the purity of pure immanence is not a purge but an indeterminate infinity, then we must continue to ask: how would one put boundaries around it, excluding its own deep past and unknown future? Wouldn’t one want rather to let that infinity undo the separative transcendence from the inside? If I ply here an apophatically panentheist argument it is neither for the existence of God nor for the compossibility of Deleuze and any theism. Rather it is that the coinciding of his particular atheism with a process theism provides a particularly compelling impossibility for theology and so an all the more rigorous test of our apophatic opening.
GOD PROCESS
It happens that The Fold offers a rare moment at which Deleuze nods almost appreciatively at God: “Even God desists from being a being who compares worlds and chooses the richest compossible. He becomes Process, a process that at once affirms incompossibilities and passes through them.”51 The affirmation of the incompossible performs an infinite symbiosis. For the God in Whitehead does not operate by a dialectical negation of conflicting possibilities. If in Leibniz the incompossibles—possibilities impossible to actualize in the same time frame—required separate worlds, in Deleuze incompossible ensembles are a mark of “the Open.” “Nothing prevents us from affirming that incompossibles belong to the same world,” he has argued elsewhere.52 Their joint belonging is a sign of the Joycean chaosmos.
We might say then that the prodigal possibilities of the world here pass through the impasse of the impossible: another sign and mobilization of the coincidentia oppositorum in which the oppositions do not cease to diverge even as they converge. Process is infinite. But is Process—God? In fact Whitehead does not identify Process with God but with Creativity, his “Category of the Ultimate.” He is at pains to distinguish his ultimate from his God, who mediates creativity to every becoming creature. The process God is not process itself, which, if named God, might again take command of all the becomings in process. God is in process with them. Negating divine ultimacy, Whitehead is resisting the imaginary of a changeless Lord omnipotently presiding. To collapse God into the sheer impersonality of Process might undo the anthropomorphism, but it is not Whitehead’s solution. God is rather a metaphor of the relation to the infinite process. And God thus provides a primordial locus of all possibilities, which begin to lose their sheer abstraction already by being housed, tabernacled. The nonlocal possibilities thus become available for local actualization. They become its lures.
The actual occasions materialize, however, through the agency of their own response. And God in consequence feels, internalizes, em-pathos, each becoming as though in Her own body. The one who entangles us in new possibilities is thus entangled in their spontaneous actualizations.
God does not make the differences; but makes possible—posse ipsum—the difference actualized by every finite creature. The possibility of the lure or “initial aim,” repeated differently in the creature’s “subjective aim,” provokes the creaturely creativity from within.53 Which might be just to pulse electronically or to take a breath. To jump into the volcano. Or to kill an idol. In this sense God has become Process—has unfolded in it, as it. And the process, as such, is certainly related to the Deleuzean immanence: “the philosophy of organism is closely allied to Spinoza’s scheme of thought,” Whitehead clarifies. “But it differs by the abandonment of the subject-predicate forms of thought.”54 Like Spinoza, and more kin, as Whitehead signals, to “some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European thought,”55 it does make process—rather than fact, entity, a being—ultimate.
God is process, but not the only one. The process God, then, is neither transcendent Creator nor indifferent Creativity but a consequence of creativity, its “first creature.” An infinite creature to be sure, preceding and exceeding the creation collective, which it collects in and as its own becoming. Admittedly this solution yields its own problems, as I have stressed earlier. The language of God as “actual entity” at this point seems to cry out for an apophatic negation: not a being, not an entity, not a one. And surely not a creature. When Cusa considered the “creatable” God, we noted, he did then also unsay both creator and created—yet not without subversively privileging the latter. In cloud perspective we need not underwrite the process God’s tendencies toward a straightforward ontological identity—especially after decades of pedagogical repetition in U.S. process theology, beneficial in its ecclesial contexts. The benefits of the Deleuzean tonic in its philosophical ones thus work apophatically in the interface with theology.
The cloud of the impossible has promised no merely negative theology—only an exposure of the constructedness, never hidden by Whitehead, of metaphysical affirmations. God the mediation of groundless creativity and manifold creatures is not only rendered composite, collective—but infinitely so. In a heritage in which the authorities were always hunting down any insult to the Creator’s transcendence, any identification of God with creation as a whole (pantheism) or a particular creature (the Arian heresy of Christ as created), it is transcendence that has been bounded and reified. God the creature: that phrase is an answering iconoclasm. It suggests in passing the exorbitantly embodied relationality of this process: incarnation multiplied beyond all knowing. In other words, it names the most apophatic of entanglements. But only if we also say—an actual entity is not God, a creature is not God, as God remains apophatically tucked among Whitehead’s “metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”56 Then we gladly tarry with this experiment in which Deleuze, incompossible with theology, helps us darken the en of panentheism.
Process, not God, is the solvent that democratizes all processes as its instances. And therefore Whitehead’s deity does not dissolve into the univocity of being but resolves into the solidarity of becoming: as the “prime exemplification” rather than “the exception” of creative flux. (Political theology of the sovereign exception will get no comfort from this God.) What Deleuze wants from ontological univocity Whitehead gets from his “ontological principle,” defined thus: “all real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality.”57 Actualities are the “only reasons”—God is not the first cause or the hidden reason behind what happens. But “God’s immanence in the world . . . is an urge towards the future based upon an appetite in the present.” God as this appetite, this eros, makes possible and urges the actualizations of possibilities but does not actually perform them. “The whole world’s a stage” from its omnivoyant perspective. The individual occasions are improvisational events in a collective becoming—which may or may not constitute any kind of progress. Each actual occasion reconstitutes willy-nilly “the obvious solidarity of the world.”58
God as consequent nature, however, signifies no detached observer: s/he/it absorbs and integrates the whole collection in a process that can be called an infinite collective being. Such a being resembles no essential substance so much as one distributed infinitely among all as possibility—and actualized selectively, according to the limitations and deformations of each. For the present perspective the collectivity of the divine being is the complicatio itself—and so can only be distinguished from the creativity this way: as our relation to it. To it All. For the All of the world also oscillates between the collectivity of the particular creatures and the field, ocean or cloud from which and in which they unfold. God signifies the particular relation of particular creatures to the infinity of the world. All, pan, can be said to be “in God” because all is enfolded, complicated, in and as God, in the consequent nature—and unfolded, as God is in all, in and as the creaturely decisions. But the creativity as such is a bottomless flux, an infinite abyss, a grounding Ungrunt. The ultimacy itself, as perpetual genesis, may be called tehom. But then that deep is also the deep of God. “Your waves and your billows pass over me.” This chaos that surfaces in Whitehead’s “motley world” of “prehensive units and variable configurations” marks precisely the point where Deleuze salutes God as Process.59 The en of panentheism remains a relation, a fold: it marks the difference precisely as the nonseparability of pan and theos. The en is, of course, the prefix of im manence. And it remains smudged, obnubilated, internal to the relata it relates.
Thus Whitehead: “it is as true to say that the world is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the world.”60 The chiasmus signifies a chaosmos: for immanence operationalizes nonseparability as relation. The relation is a motion, not a place. And so it is “as true to say that God transcends the world as that the world transcends God” (348). This transcendence is no entity, no Being, but movement beyond: not beyond, to another ontology, but beyond the given, to the new. Transcendence then will not serve as the foil of immanence: it is rather the dynamism of the folding, inasmuch as we have no longer to do with closed wholes but disenclosed becomings. Nancy’s transimmanence hints at such a crossover. Immanence without the movement beyond, the self-exceeding, is mere containment. In what is repeated “in” another—even as that other emerges—the boundary of the in and the out, the immanent and the transcendent, cracks right along with the wall between world and God. And then the creativity cascades through, washing out every substantial individual. In a world of separations it will feel like the primal flood. The difference that is relation rather than separation, however, is not threatened but intensified, multiplied, by the luminously darkened panentheism.
Intriguingly, Whitehead also moves to a third repetition in God. It is reflective of the trinity of complicatio, explicatio, implicatio, which is the Deleuzean Bruno’s supplementation of the Cusan binary. The complicatio/explicatio coincidentia can be correlated with the dynamism of the consequent and primordial in Process and Reality. As the consequent nature enfolds all that becomes as its own becoming, so the primordial nature unfolds its possibilities in and as the multiple actualizations of the world. But why then a third? Without indulging in a speculation on the Christian trinity, it does seem that the double gesture of the fold generates its own third, as mediation, as though to keep itself in chaosmic motion. So as a cosmology the complication of all in God can be fruitfully distinguished from the implication of God as possibility—posse ipsum—in the world, in the creatures, each in each and all in all. This bears then upon the move that Faber notes has been underassimilated because of its arrival so late in Whitehead’s Process and Reality.61 Now—“for the kingdom of heaven is with us today”—what has been incorporated into God passes back into the world. “By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world” (352).
So this third repetition is an implicated love. We can read it as the consequence of the consequent nature, linking its receptivity back again, which is to say forward, to the primordial filter upon creativity; the complicatio back to the explicatio—but only by the implicatio of the God-process in the active possibilities and multiplying incompossibilities of the world. In this sense, then, we repeat the game-changing figure: “God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands” (352).
The amorous flooding comes darkened on its face, tinged with unknowing. For all that is folded together remains abysmally infinite. That does not signify indifference. Superposed with every difference, self-implicated, this love can only surpass human understanding. Even in moments of delight or trust, the God unfolding and enfolding us mirrors back not only our own personality but at the same time the whole elemental impersonality of the universe. Yet even there, with our quantum relationalists, we traced a hint of pervasive responsiveness, if not prior consciousness.
Repeated this often, the God in process turns incompossible with the Deleuzean project. And surely the mutual embrace of earth and heaven, of theos and pan, rings too compassionate, with its “tender care that nothing be lost” (346). (Of course my theological occupation of Deleuzean space may trigger his warmachine in reaction. Oy vey.) It is nonetheless with the help of Whitehead, indeed for the sake of a new introduction of Whitehead, that the Leibnizian/Spinozist Deleuze returns to ply the convergent divergences, the iterative origami, of the chaosmos. At a certain point in that return Deleuze links Whitehead’s God-process to a modern mathematical version of the opened microcosm, “a fibered conception according to which ‘monads’ test the paths in the universe and enter in syntheses associated with each path.”62 Those very fibers had crossed A Thousand Plateaus as the links, threads, or folds that connect everything but do not enclose anything: “A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber.”63 With apophatic warrant in hand, we might leap to name the imperceptible, minimum or maximum, God. Not.
What matters is the creaturely thread. The fabric of the earth is perceptibly fraying: we humans now ignore the imperceptible at our peril. For the possibilities that may conspire with us amidst our incompossibles are encoded, enfolded, in those fibers. We always enfold the universe: but we can only unfold some sharply limited patch of it. The perspective will be human, but the content vastly other than human. If we still ply the human in the cloud-covered image of God, it has already reciprocated: in its dark mirror the sharp focus of the humanist hope, the One, Man, the discrete being of the human has dissipated. Instead a whole ensemble of creatures, elemental, vegetable, animal, and uncomfortably human, crowds the frame. It is not that the human perspective loses its focus, its I: rather, I lose my focus on myself. Self opens into the imperceptible. And so it perceives itself, aesthesis, differently: as in Frida Kahlo’s painting, The Love Embrace of the Universe, the fibrous, layered visages painted in an erotic multiple of cacti, species, colors of skin and atmosphere, herself, in Pieta-like embrace of her three-eyed lover, enfolded in the arms of an Earth embraced by an almost imperceptible goddess of cloud.
With or without God-talk, “and so on to the imperceptible,” designates the precise implicatio we can neither comprehend nor sanely ignore. Along its fibers we unfold a collective future of unspeakable destruction or unpredictable creativity. An apophatic cosmology suggests itself right at the intersection of process and French constructivism that Stengers plies in her Cosmopolitiques: “the cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable, as opposed to the temptation of a peace intended to be final.”64 We have to do here with “peace-making propositions,” not the proposal of an end of struggle. Elsewhere cosmopolitics defines—co-incidentally in an essay on Leibniz—“peace as an ecological production of actual togetherness, where ‘ecological’ means that the aim is not toward a unity beyond differences.”65
Then it must be said that the divergence affirmed is that of an apophatic entanglement. And so it only intensifies the fibrous togetherness of active possibility: of what might flash or rumble from the cloud. So, in answer to the earlier question, the ontology of interlinked becomings in this reading does not forfeit the radical surprise of the to-come (whether in Moltmann’s eschatology or Derrida’s messianicity—the impossible);66 it does not guarantee the justice or sustainability of what will come. The repetition of becoming intensifies the difference it unfolds. Perhaps, though, it shakes, it complicates, it enfolds some impossible it insists on resisting. For what is impossibility but the impatient contraction of incompossibles? Sometimes it is possible to shift incompossibility into contrast. To crack im/possibility becomingly open. Some unexpected contraction of the infinity of possibility becomes this momentary body—and not without the sense of beauty, as in “that color becomes you.”
The lure to actualize new contrasts implicates us in the cosmopolitics of an ecology where language breaks in horror or in awe. Or in contemplation. “If the desire proper to the fold is, as Deleuze claims, the desire to go on unfolding, small wonder the desire to articulate should be so intense at the edge of silence, where utter frustration is at the same time an infinite space of possibility.”67 Thus MacKendrick, an apophatic philosopher of deep folds, reminds us then also—not meaning to paraphrase Whitehead’s lure—that “God does not say but calls.” And we see that the problematic of that name has not neatly disentangled itself from philosophy, at least among the relational infinities: “The name is called out, and in it every possibility is called out too, affirmed by its naming. And the name calls to all that is possible.” Possible here and now as we ply our worlds of speech and body? Holding close to Deleuze, she has written of the “odd doubleness” that is the fold of word and body. It is the human mindfully emerging in that fold, that contrast of contrasts, but differently. In the next chapter (speaking of the body), Walt Whitman makes his appearance, articulating a transgressive body of words or word of the body.
It is with the help of Deleuze that we have drawn Whitehead into a language of apophatic entanglement that diverges from both. The incompossible elements in each do not excise the livelier complicities of their difference. And so we read this fold of process thinking, as it unfolds with new intensity in the twenty-first century, as an exuberant explicatio of the Infinite Complication. Its voices may or may not conjecture with theology any folds of theos. By whatever name, however, they will contemplate an Imperceptible in which we might together—we the ensemble of the earth—improvise more becomingly across our incompossible simultaneities. They will repeat, differently, the possibility with which Deleuze, citing the friend who set Pli Selon Pli to music, concludes The Fold: “from harmonic closure to an opening onto a polytonality or, as Boulez will say, a ‘polyphony of polyphonies.’”68