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

10. The Image of Thought and the Sciences of the Brain after What Is Philosophy?

· 255 ·· CHAPTER 10 · The Image of Thought and the Sciences of the Brain after What Is Philosophy? Arkady Plotnitsky The parts of the walls that were covered by paintings of his, all homogenous with one another, were like the luminous images of a magic lantern which in this instance was the brain of the artist. —Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past “Casting Planes over Chaos”: Philosophy, Science, Art, and the Nature of Thought In their What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari define thought as a confrontation with chaos. It is their concept and part of their image of thought— “the image of thought that thought gives itself of what it means to think.”1 The architecture of this concept and the lineaments of this image are multifaceted and complex. My aim here is to explore those facets of this concept and image that relate to the sciences of the brain—neurology, physiology, psychology, and others. I shall focus primarily on neuroscience, following Deleuze and Guattari’s argument in their conclusion to What Is Philosophy? (“From Chaos to the Brain”), which extends their concept of thought to a correlative philosophical concept of the brain, in their sense of “philosophical concept.”Aphilosophicalconceptinthissenseisnotanentityestablishedby a generalization from particulars or “any general or abstract idea” (11–12, 24) but instead a complex phenomenal configuration: “there are no simple concepts . Every concept has components and is defined by them. It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity. . . . There is no concept with only one component” (16). Each concept is a multicomponent conglomerate of concepts (in their conventional senses), figures, metaphors, particular elements, and so forth, which form a unity or have a more heterogeneous, 256 ARKADY PLOTNITSKY if interactive, architecture that is not unifiable. Philosophy, as a particular form of thought’s confrontation with chaos, is defined by the invention of new concepts, which is in turn a complex process involving such components as the plane of immanence or consistency, conceptual personae, and so forth. Each such concept is also seen in terms of naming and posing a problem, one of the hallmarks of Deleuze’s philosophy, which, from Difference and Repetition to What Is Philosophy? defines philosophical thinking as thinking by posing problems. While this aspect of thinking equally pertains to science (including mathematics), the confrontation between the scientific, rather than philosophical, thought and chaos, is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, defined by the invention of functions and frames of reference, rather than the invention of concepts (117–18). How we pursue science, however, often depends on concepts and images (philosophical, artistic, or other) related to scientific ones that we possess or form—in the case of neuroscience, those of thought itself. The reverse is, of course, equally true because scientific ideas enter and shape the architecture of our philosophical concepts. This essay takes advantage of this reciprocity in the case of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical thinking and neuroscience. Their concept and image of thought and the corresponding concept of the brain are shaped by neuroscience or biology in general (and other fields of mathematics and science); on the other hand, this concept and image of thought, or the brain, suggest new trajectories, “lines of flight,” for scientific thinking about the brain. The concept of thought as a confrontation with chaos also requires a concept of chaos, even if only as that of the impossibility of forming such an image or concept, as found, for example, in Martin Heidegger or Jacques Derrida. Although potentially relevant to Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, this is not their primary understanding of chaos, which they approach by means of a particular and, especially in philosophy, unusual concept and image.2 According to them, “Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence” (118). This concept of chaos, chaos as the virtual, indeed appears to be essential to our understanding of thought and, hence, philosophy, art, and science. I would argue, however, that thought also confronts other forms of chaos, which require corresponding concepts THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT AND THE SCIENCES OF THE BRAIN 257 of chaos, two such concepts in particular. Both are at...