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

7. The Subject of Chaos

· 191 ·· CHAPTER 7 · The Subject of Chaos Gregory Flaxman The Daughters of Chaos The relationship between science and philosophy constitutes one of the most difficult and perplexing aspects of Gilles Deleuze’s work. Both with and without Félix Guattari, Deleuze develops a notion of philosophy that draws upon the domain of science (as well as that of art) at the same time that he seems to draw abiding distinction between them. In What Is Philosophy ? where the eponymous question demands their most explicit and enduring consideration of these three domains, Deleuze and Guattari insist that philosophy, science, and art achieve self-consistency by virtue of their respective problems and the modes of thought to which those problems give rise. Each discipline designates a separate sphere with separable concerns: science concerns variables that “enter into determinable relations in a function”; art concerns varieties that “no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation”; and, finally, philosophy concerns variations that “are not associations of distinct ideas, but reconnections through a zone of indistinction in a concept.”1 As a result, Deleuze and Guattari contend, each discipline claims its own creations: while science creates prospects and function, and art creates percepts and affects, philosophy creates concepts. These divisions are justifiably the source of debate and disagreement —as if Deleuze, who once declared that the “only true criticism is comparative,”2 had endeavored late in his life to define science, art, and philosophy as distinct and even disciplinary precincts. Is it really impossible to imagine science producing philosophical concepts, or philosophy producing aesthetic sensations (percepts or affects), or art forms producing scientific functions? No doubt these questions deserve careful reflection , but in this essay I want to forgo such specific concerns in order to 192 GREGORY FLAXMAN consider what we might well take to be their cause or condition. We can only grasp Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that science, art, and philosophy are discrete domains—or, as they will say, “planes”—insofar as we understand that these domains traverse the same topos. This paradox effectively structures What Is Philosophy? which treats science, art, and philosophy as autonomous domains only to affirm, in its final pages, that this autonomy is based on a common brain that the authors call “chaos.” Theirrespectiveautonomynotwithstanding,thesedomainsarebeliedbya shared heritage, a genetic lineage, without which we cannot hope to grasp their subsequent divergences and relations. “In short,” the authors write, “chaos has three daughters, depending on the plane that cuts through it: these are the Chaoids—art, science, and philosophy—as forms of thought or creation.”3 But what does it mean to say that these domains are born of chaos, and in what sense does this parentage reveal itself in and across these three siblings? Even as Deleuze and Guattari explain that the variables of science induce the development of functions, that the varieties of art induce percepts and affects, and that the variations of philosophy induce concepts, they also insist that these distinctions bear witness to a mutual chaos. No matter which domain, science, art, and philosophy only exist insofar as they take a “cross-section” of chaos, as if each one drew a secant traversing a common brain, an infinitely complex gray matter. The brain is “the junction (not the unity) of the three planes,”4 and it is with respect to this junction that we can begin to consider the liaison between philosophy and science. As we will see, philosophy and science unfurl completely distinct planes, or what we will call, respectively, “immanence” and “reference ,” but this distinction must always be grasped in relation to a common nondenominator—chaos. Each plane or domain consists in a relation to something that cannot be understood, grasped, or thought, but at the same time, Deleuze and Guattari insist, without this relation, or nonrelation, or “relation,” thought as such would not exist. Indeed, Deleuze maintains that philosophical thought acquires its character and its consistency in relation to that which is nonphilosophical, and the same would have to be affirmed of chaos’ other daughters. “Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience.”5 Therefore, the three daughters of chaos constitute distinct planes only on the condition that each one exists “in an essential relationship with THE SUBJECT OF CHAOS 193 the...