- Introduction
Since Gilles Deleuze's death in 1995, there has been much discussion of the eclectic and wide-ranging nature of his thought. A great deal has been written about his engagement with politics and social theory, as well as his highly influential work on art and literature. In recent times, attention has also been focused on Deleuze's interest in science. Deleuze's œuvre engages with work in the fields of mathematics, chemistry and biology, and refers to a number of key scientific writers, such as Gilbert Simondon, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Jacques Monod and François Jacob. As far as the articulation of philosophy and science is concerned, Mark Bonta and John Protevi distinguish between Deleuze's project in his single-authored works, and those that are co-authored with Félix Guattari.1 They argue that in his own work, Deleuze attempts to provide an ontology that corresponds to contemporary physics and mathematics. Deleuze and Guattari's co-authored works propose something slightly different, although obviously closely related, in the shape of an exploration of the usefulness of the contemporary biological and physical sciences for conceptualizing and acting in the world.
In the context of a body of work that is complex and challenging even for readers with a good grasp of philosophical ideas, this scientific material can often be quite forbidding. Difference and Repetition, for example, draws extensively on the mathematical fields of differential and integral calculus.2 Similarly, A Thousand Plateaus draws on scientific concepts taken from physics, such as 'black holes', as well as mathematical ideas such 'fuzzy sets', 'neighbourhoods' and 'Riemannian spaces'. We might ask, then, just what draws Deleuze to these areas: what function do scientific theories and concepts fulfil in his work?We might also ask, as Sokal and Bricmont have done,3 whether it is legitimate to wrench scientific concepts from their natural environment and put them to work in a very different, philosophical context. Such an undertaking runs the risk, for example, of using these concepts in a metaphorical way that could rob them of their coherence and relevance. Unsurprisingly, Deleuze was aware of these potential criticisms and provided a rationale for his own engagement [End Page 1] with scientific ideas. When questioned about the use of scientific material in A Thousand Plateaus, he pointed out that the choices he and Félix Guattari made were influenced by a particular distinction that they made between two sorts of scientific notions:
There are notions that are exact in nature, quantitative, defined by equations, and whose very meaning lies in their exactness: a philosopher or writer can use these only metaphorically, and that's quite wrong, because they belong to exact science. But there are also essentially inexact yet completely rigorous notions that scientists can't do without, which belong equally to scientists, philosophers, and artists. They have to be made rigorous in a way that's not directly scientific, so that when a scientist manages to do this he becomes a philosopher, an artist, too.4
It may be a case of alighting upon an 'inexact' notion in science, which Deleuze also refers to more precisely as 'an exact yet rigorous', or it may be a case of finding a particular component or potential within a scientific notion that philosophers and artists can legitimately work with.
In addition, as can be seen from the quotation above, Deleuze also proposes a way in which he thinks the fields of science, art and philosophy can, as it were, work off each other, without any single discipline exerting its superiority. The three fields have very different ways of functioning, all of which have their own internal validity and coherence, and it is a question of respecting that internal coherence. The task of science is to produce 'functions', whilst art seeks to produce sensory aggregates in the shape of 'affects' and 'percepts', and philosophy sets itself the task of constructing 'concepts'. The fact that these fields have their own distinctive ways of proceeding does not preclude interactions between functions, aggregates and concepts: all three areas can participate in the activity of thinking, or, in more precisely Deleuzian terms, thinking difference...