Episode #129 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is part five of our series on Gilles Deleuze. I hope you love the show today.

So we ended last episode with a passage from Nietzsche, and I kind of want to reread it for anybody that may not be listening to parts four and five back to back. Nietzsche asks us to consider how we might view our lives differently if this was the case:

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’”

Now, this passage was the first time Nietzsche ever talked about the eternal return or the eternal recurrence. This was in his book The Gay Science. It came out in 1882. And it was just one year later in 1883 that he expands on the concept some more when he releases one of the most revolutionary books in the history of the world, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But this time, when talking about the eternal return, he does so through the voice of a group of animals that are yelling at and taunting the main character of the book, Zarathustra. They say, “Behold, we know what you teach; that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us… I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent -- not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, self-same life.”

So already just a year later we can see Nietzsche developing this concept into something that isn’t merely a practical way of looking at your life, but in the second passage there starts to be a level of metaphysical baggage that’s being smuggled in, you know, that all things recur eternally, not just me. The significance of this change is Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche. He believes that Nietzsche’s ultimately making a pretty profound statement here about the long tradition in philosophy of being versus becoming. What he means is, tons of philosophers have divided up existence in terms of being and becoming. And traditionally the category of being has always referred to things within our perception of reality that are constant. Some philosophers say it’s things that are unchanging about the universe. Some say it’s things that are enduring. Generally speaking, being has always been the things about reality that act as a solid foundation, things that aren’t going to change. Depending on the philosopher, we’ve seen this expressed in a number of different ways on this show. God is being. Nature is being. Substance is being, etc.

Now, this concept of being is always contrasted with a concept that philosophers have called becoming which, as you might be able to guess, are all the things about existence that are constantly changing or in flux or, you could say, in reference to this picture of the world Deleuze is painting, the parts of the world traditional philosophy has always seen as in motion. The thinking’s always been that there’s something more real, more foundational about being than becoming. Becoming is just in motion. It’s always changing. It's contingent, surface level appearances. I mean, you want to get to the bottom of things as a philosopher, try to understand being. Understand the foundation that everything that is becoming relies upon.

But Deleuze is going to question this. And he finds inspiration in several passages of Nietzsche’s work on eternal recurrence. Nietzsche says, “If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached. If it were capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’” -- in other words -- “if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end.” What Deleuze takes from this reading of Nietzsche is that in the same way he thinks identity is a derivative of difference -- not the other way around like we talked about last time -- the appearance of being or what we’ve mistaken as constants of the universe are only possible to categorize as a result of us seeing what is truly fundamental, to Deleuze, the constant process of becoming.

See, to Deleuze, there is nothing foundational in the classic way philosophers have talked about it. The closest thing you could ever come to it would be the process of the world in motion, that process of becoming: from our episode on ontology, that unfolding of immanence; from our episode on politics, that desire production and machines constantly seeking connections. All of these things, this world in motion -- becoming is the foundation. Things like being, identity, or any static system of thought, these are just attempts by people to grow roots into the ground and reduce the rootless complexity of the rhizome to the rooted simplicity of a hierarchical tree. The fact is to Deleuze, identity is just not this simple of a concept. And thinking about identity this simply only leads to problems when we try to impose these old, Enlightenment-era ideas on building the world we live in.

For example, in professor Todd May’s analysis of Deleuze he gives an example of this by talking about the movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s of the urban renewal of cities in the United States. I mean, this is a perfect example of us imposing this naïve picture of identity onto entire cities of people. The idea was that during the decades following World War II there seemed to be an uptick in the amount of crime, poverty, and unemployment and generally anti-social behavior that was going on in big cities around the country. The thinking was that the reason for this was because cities and city life were just too chaotic and unpredictable to ever produce a functioning situation for people. There were either too many people or too many different walks of life in one concentrated place or too much of a variance in income levels. Regardless though, the solution, people thought at the time, would be to get everything organized in the city, reduce some of this chaos that existed.

And so began a multi-decade effort to cordon off different areas of the city and designate them as the area where certain activities were going to take place. There was the shopping district, where people would go to buy things; the business district, where people would go to work during the day; the living district, where they’d make these new, efficient, high-rise apartment buildings that would be much more affordable for lower incomes than when living situations are more spread out. We identified all the different elements of city life, cordoned them off into their own little sections, and expected everything to run a lot more smoothly.

What really happened was the opposite. Things fell apart. What happened was, now nobody can get anywhere because the flow of traffic is all going to one section of town at one time of day. The whole city’s trying to go to work at the same time. The whole city’s trying to go to the entertainment district at the same time. The high-rise, low-income apartment buildings just ended up corralling lower-income people into one small area even more, which had the opposite of the intended effect. It concentrated and worsened the ghetto. More than that, when it came to the reduction of crime that was expected, it turned out that by funneling the vast majority of people into different sections of town at specific times of day, that just created a hotbed for crime. For example, when the entire section of town that people live in is empty because everyone’s in the work section of town, how much easier is it to break into a home with confidence? This dividing of the town had the same worsening effect on relations between people of different walks of life. People felt more isolated, more separated. And it’d be far less likely for somebody from two different walks of life to run into each other and have a conversation.

Professor Todd May cites the work of Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The problem with city planning of the type that went on during the ‘50s and ‘60s in the urban renewal phase, is that cities just don’t work in the same way that suburbs work. Put more in the language of Deleuze and Guattari, city life is a rhizome. Cities themselves are machines. And when you try to impose rigid identities and static, rooted structure onto them, you’re left with a lot of unintended consequences like there were in the ‘60s. Remember, machines don’t have a rigid identity that they’re beholden to. Their identity within a given moment is defined by the connections and relationships to difference around them within that moment. Well, isn’t this a much more accurate description of how a city works?

See, from the outside looking in, if you were to analyze a city and then try to identify all the different parts that make it up, that city might seem to be pretty chaotic. City planners may come along and think they know how a city works and try to impose order on what seems to them to be chaos. But the reality, to Deleuze, is that it’s not chaos. The city is an active thing in motion. It’s a machine seeking connections, the connections that it ends up making, a rhizome. The fact is, there is an order to cities and city life that unfolds. The problem for city planners or anyone trying to assign rigid identities to the way a city functions is that there’s no template for a city. There’s no cookie-cutter way that order emerges within a city. The order doesn’t come from the outside from some city planner or some philosopher. The order emerges or unfolds naturally from the diverse connections made within the city. It’s immanent.

Think of the similarities to ontology here. Substance doesn’t come from something transcendent from the outside. Substance is immanently unfolding from within. Think of the similarities to identity versus difference or being versus becoming. Notions of identity or order unfold out of difference or the world in motion. Deleuze would say, when things within a city are not cordoned off from each other, unable to make new connections, when workplaces and residential areas and restaurants and theaters and low-income, high-income -- when everything’s all mixed together, it turns out cities just function way better. There’s less isolation. Machines make connections that are more diverse, and thus have a less compartmentalized view of the world. There’s never areas of town that are completely empty where crime can flourish. There’s always eyes on the street. People feel more safe. People feel a sense of community as a member of the city as opposed to just a member of their neighborhood.

To Deleuze and Guattari, the mistake we’re making is we cannot think of the needs or identity of a city as something that can be preplanned and executed. The reality is, there’s no such thing as “the identity of a city” because the identity of a city is not a static thing. Its identity’s always going to be determined by the connections that make it up in a given moment, which no city planner could ever possibly plan for without the help of Miss Cleo. When you try to impose rigid identities onto a rhizome, you will always run into problems.

Another example Todd May gives when talking about this clear departure from traditional ways we’ve talked about identity -- picture a guy that several times a week goes into a music store. And in between looking for whatever it is he wants to buy at the music store, being a single man, he comes to realize that he’s extremely attracted to the woman working behind the counter. Now, he also notices that every time he’s in the music shop when she’s working, she’s always playing jazz music that features the trumpet. So this guy decides what he’s going to do is he’s going to start playing the trumpet so that she might like him more. He might have something to talk to her about that isn’t painfully forced and awkward. Regardless of the reason, the guy picks up the trumpet.

Now, technically, if we wanted to assign an identity to this man after this moment as he’s practicing the trumpet, he would be a trumpet player. But where exactly did that piece of his identity come from? Was there some sort of latent, trumpet-player identity hidden inside of him since birth? If two weeks from now he’s walking down the street, both his arms get ripped off by a passing trolley, and he quits the trumpet, is there a trumpet-player identity lying dormant inside him that can just never be expressed for the rest of his life? Deleuze would say, no, this is not how identity works. The fact that man decided to be a trumpet player in a given succession of moments was entirely contingent upon his open-ended identity as a machine seeking connections and, then, the connections he sought to make as that machine.

Also, consider the fact that the only thing that’s going to determine whether in five years this guy’s still a trumpet player or not is also entirely contingent on the connections he makes. Will he watch a documentary on Wynton Marsalis that inspires him to be the greatest trumpet player ever? Will there be a welcoming jazz community in his neighborhood that invites him to come play with them every week? When he goes into the music store and casually brings up how he was playing his trumpet the other day, does the woman behind the counter seem to be more interested in him? The point is, there wasn’t some static, preplanned identity that determined that this guy was going to be a trumpet player, only the connections made when interacting with the world that is constantly becoming, unfolding, and in motion around him. And this same dynamic applies when it comes to all other aspects of identity as a machine, whether that’s a person in a music store, a city being organized and planned, or a movement of thought that ends up becoming the voice of a generation.

See, this is the mistake that so many people make when it comes to trying to understand their own personal identity. So often people run into the trap of just conforming to the identities handed down to them by their parents or doing their best impression of some character they like on a TV show. Or let’s say they were to do something like pick up the trumpet, to just completely copy the way trumpet players have always played the trumpet that came before them, just parroting the people that came before you, the same notes, the same scales, the same riffs and transitions. What happens when you live your life in the same safe, preplanned way so many people play music when they pick up an instrument? What happens is your life becomes a blocked rhizome. The possibility of a random root shooting off and making a new exciting connection with another network becomes impossible. The possibility of playing new music with your life becomes impossible. You turn yourself into a tree, rooted in one place, restricted to the same riffs and transitions for the rest of your life, unable to see new possibilities.

But this is what so many people do, to Deleuze. They want an identity given to them by some third party outside of them that tells them how to live, a city planner for their own identity, someone to answer the question for them “What does it mean to be me?” This is why it’s so common for people to want answers to these old questions from philosophy that we began the series with. People desperately want an answer to the question “How should one live?” “How should one act?” as though being a human being could ever be marginalized to questions that simple, as though there is some sort of human nature out there, some constant of the universe, some essence where if only the right philosopher comes along and identifies it for us, then I’ll have all the answers; then we can rest easy knowing that some transcendent body prescribed a way that I should be, the same way the entire history of philosophy has tried to explain ontology in relation to transcendence, the same way psychoanalysis has tried to explain away desire by relating it to something transcendent, the same way people watch the news, read a few books, hyper-focus on one little tree-sized section of the rhizome and then spend the rest of their life looking at things from their narrow, one-dimensional, hierarchical worldview, making declarations about the way that things are.

So what should be completely obvious by this point is that when it comes to the question of “How should a person live?” the kind of question that dominates the ethics of people like Plato and Aristotle, Deleuze would never even think to try to answer a question like that. This is why, knowing what we know now, the question that’s far more relevant to Deleuze is the question “How might a person live?” What possibilities exist? What connections can potentially be made? Remember, in the first episode of this series we talked about his answer to the question “What is philosophy?” The conclusion being that when you’re engaging in philosophy, you’re not looking for the truth. You’re not looking for some set of objectives or identities about the way that things are, but instead you engage in philosophy to hopefully arrive at the interesting, the remarkable, the useful.

There are parallels when it comes to approaching life. We shouldn’t engage in living life with the expectation that there’s some way we should be living that we’re going to arrive at some day. See, because again, the world is fundamentally a world in motion, to Deleuze, constantly emerging or becoming or in flux. But this picture of the world that Deleuze is painting goes far beyond just metaphysics. This entire worldview is, in many ways, a call to action, a gauntlet being thrown down challenging anyone who hears it to rip off the shackles of a rigid identity that’s been given to you by somebody else and to engage in a process of becoming, to allow your identity to emerge immanently from inside of you rather than accepting it as a gift from someone else. But it goes beyond just you. His work is a call to embrace seeing the entire world in terms of difference rather than identity. Because if the world is fundamentally immanent and in motion and rhizomatic, then to embrace that immanence and motion and the enormous fractal complexity and inter-connectedness of the rhizome is to affirm existence, to Deleuze, rather than negate existence, which would be to hide behind identities and hierarchical systems of thought that just oversimplify things. To affirm existence is to embrace difference, to seek out different people, different cultures, different ideas, different answers to the question “How might a person live?” which could include different jobs, different relationships, different lifestyles, to spend your time engaging in different activities. Maybe this year it’s the trumpet; maybe next year it’s archery.

The point with all of these examples is that you are a single perspective when it comes to making sense of all this. And when I say “all this” I mean the universe. You are one perspective, nothing more, nothing less. And as tempting as it would be to cling to one of those hierarchical, tree-like systems of ideas like you’re a koala baby, to Deleuze, the only way to take a step back and see the interconnectedness and complexity of the world around you is to embrace difference and, like the world, stay constantly in motion yourself. Have new experiences; do things. There is always more to be done, to Deleuze. You’ve never seen it all. And Deleuze thinks, if you’re telling yourself you have seen it all, you should examine what it is you’re really saying about yourself there.

That is the call to action: let’s embrace the world that’s spontaneously unfolding and in motion by ourselves remaining in motion. And part of living our lives that way is going to be being okay with not knowing how things are going to play out. See, if you had some transcendent answer to how you should be living your life, you’d basically know exactly how your life was going to play out. If you had some static identity of exactly who you are, some dormant trumpet player that lives inside of you, then it wouldn’t be a surprise at all when you decide to start playing the trumpet one day. But this isn’t reality, to Deleuze. When you’re affirming existence, you can’t know how your life is going to play out until you’re actually doing it. And you can’t know exactly what kind of person you’re going to be until you’re actually living as a machine and see the connections around you.

To truly affirm existence is to seek difference while also understanding that there is no cookie-cutter template of identity to follow as a human being and ultimately to accept the fact that, when it comes down to it, the universe doesn’t owe you anything. There are no guarantees. To affirm life and to truly embrace immanence and a world in motion is to accept that the universe is going to play out the way it’s going to play out and to get attached to any single outcome, good or bad, is simply to deny the way that reality is unfolding. Now, Deleuze is not saying that you shouldn’t try because of that or you should resign yourself to total acceptance of whatever comes your way. Try your hardest. Have a plan. Stay in motion. But understand and find peace with the fact that you can’t ever really know ahead of time where that motion is going to take you.

For this reason, Deleuze is a really big fan of looking at life almost as a series of experiments because an experiment is always in some way seeking something new. But you can’t ever know the result of the experiment until you actually run the experiment. This is a worldview that can start to sound a lot like Nietzsche, and it’s no coincidence that both Nietzsche and Deleuze talk about this process of living by affirming life rather than negating life. But maybe if there’s one thing both Nietzsche and Deleuze are the most similar on, it’s the fact that they both absolutely despise conformity. And the idea that the person who stays in motion, embraces difference, creates their own values and identity, makes connections, experiments, the idea that this is the person that owes the world an explanation for their actions rather than the person conforming to the safety of the systems of thought around them -- you know, this person to them will often spend their entire lives never seeing enough of the rhizome to even know how small of a vine they’re conforming to.

But, regardless, in closing, when it comes to living life, maybe the best advice is from Deleuze and Guattari themselves. They say, “This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensity segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.”

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.