The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy

2. Superposing Images: Deleuze and the Virtual after Bergson’s Critique of Science

· 87 ·· CHAPTER 2 · Superposing Images: Deleuze and the Virtual after Bergson’s Critique of Science Peter Gaffney On this new ground philosophy ought then to follow science, in order to superpose on scientific truth a knowledge of another kind, which may be called metaphysical. Thus combined, all our knowledge, both scientific and metaphysical, is heightened. —Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution In the exact sciences, “repeatability” and “reproducibility” refer to the validity of experimental findings with regard to successive attempts to create the same results under identical (or at least similar) circumstances .1 This gives scientists a standard for the production of knowledge based on patterns that are conventionally believed to inhere to the object itself andthatarebroadlyconceivedasnaturallawsoruniversalconstants.Italso shows how efforts on the part of scientists to understand the world result in a virtual image or representation that develops over time, approximating the actual world with increasing detail and accuracy. (We will see later how Erwin Schrödinger appeals to this common sense view of science in his riposte to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.) There are two problems that immediately confront this notion of reproducibility . First, the historical development of scientific knowledge appears to be susceptible to sudden schisms and ruptures; it does not progress toward a more and more complete image of the world so much as fragment and subdivide into infinitely new configurations of its own virtual image. This is what leads Kuhn, for example, to describe the production of scientific knowledge as paradigmatic (and, more problematically, gestaltic),2 a position that also accounts for more recent claims of a “disunity” of science.3 Second, modern physics introduces a new figure into the image itself: that 88 PETER GAFFNEY of the observer, whose position in time and space, and whose methods, instruments, and objectives all have some bearing on the outcome of the experiment. The state of a physical system is thus inextricably linked to the status of this figure. What are the observer’s aims and intentions? In connection to what matrix of relations is the observer measuring results? Indeed, with Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle(whichlaysthegroundworkforcontemporaryquantummechanics ), we see that experimental data is as much a portrait of the observer as it is of the world, not in the sense of an object that remains inseparable from a subjective point of view (as in Locke’s “secondary qualities”), but in that of an observer whose virtual image remains part of the objective field of vision. In this case, the scientist cannot consider natural laws alone to account for the reproducibility of an experiment. Indeed, repeatability and reproducibility acquire a subtler meaning here, suggesting a point of view from which the world, including the observer, can be made to reproduce its own behavior. It is this subtler meaning that underlies Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between two different attitudes in science, corresponding to two distinct roles for the scientific observer. On the one hand, “reproducing ” organizes thought and matter around laws or constants (the “legal” model); on the other, “following” implies a continuous realignment of the observer’s point of view around changes internal to both the observer and the visual field, or “field of individuation.” This difference is elaborated in this passage on royal science and “nomadology” in A Thousand Plateaus: Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is something different from the ideal of reproduction . Not better, just different. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the “singularities” of a matter, or rather of a material , and not out to discover a form; when one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous variation of variables instead of extracting constants from them, etc. And the meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations; but with the SUPERPOSING IMAGES 89 ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself.4 It is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari do not suggest anywhere that the truth claims of positive science are illusory. Indeed...