Deleuzian Intersections. Science, Technology, Anthropology (review)

Relations between science and the humanities have not uniformly improved since C. P. Snow's famous 1959 diagnosis of their "two cultures." The Frankfurt School fostered a global suspicion of "technology and science as ideology," as Habermas's title had it. Simplistic versions of "social constructivism" (preached mostly in English departments), wherein any reference to science was dismissed out of hand as "essentialist," hardly helped. On the other side of the fence, Alan Sokal's 1996 parody of this went hand-in-hand with an equally global dismissal of any understanding of science by post-structuralists; in film studies, the "cognitive turn" has usually been accompanied by sweeping disavowals of so-called "grand theory." N. Katherine Hayles' work on the boundaries of science and humanities, Niklas Luhmann's borrowings from cybernetics, or Friedrich Kittler's histories of technology have remained exceptional; a great many humanities scholars still prefer a now very conventional culturalism. Since references to science and mathematics are frequent in Deleuze's work, and more substantial than mere passing metaphors, he makes a logical point of departure for exploring a philosophy of science that would neither reduce the latter to mere "construction," nor dismiss humanities methodologies as unprovable castles in the air.

For a new body of work to be broadly disseminated beyond the confines of a narrow circle of true believers, that work's concepts need to be critically tested, brought into contact with other discourses and concepts, and illustrated in more intuitive detail through pragmatic application to specific objects and problems. Thus Lacan was popularized through film studies and feminism, and Deleuze's notions of the movement-image and time-image have been made fruitful in analyses of particular films. This has not yet happened with other of his central ideas, however. The greatest obstacle to understanding Deleuze's concepts has been their central emphasis on virtuality and becoming, as opposed to actuality and being. The objection made to this position by even as sympathetic an observer as Alain Badiou is that it results in an "objectless knowledge" that cannot be pinned down or circumscribed in any specific way. If Deleuze's "event" defies any distinction between subject and object, if it is completely immanent within the world, then "everything is event," and how can one thus distinguish an event from the mere facts it is meant to oppose?1 Without such determination or specification, Deleuzian concepts may risk resembling only rhetorical appeals to a certain style of thinking, rather than the latter's practice and application.

Matters are not helped by some of Deleuze's exegetes, who reinforce this problem with appeals to "the new" or, worse still, "creation" and the "creative"—terms banally familiar from popular everyday usage, thus without much content. What important philosopher was not creative or "new," and who would not claim to be? When it is argued here that Deleuze "evaluates the greatness of Nietzsche not in terms of detailed empirical knowledge but rather with a view to the creative potential that can be extracted from his analysis" (16), one immediately objects: why does "creative potential" have to be opposed to "detailed empirical knowledge?" The opposition leaves the "creative" hanging in an objectless void, immune to refutation. (It also misses the point of Nietzsche, the force of whose speculative thought was inseparable from his quite "detailed" and "empirical" philological evidence. Nietzsche, like Heidegger and Derrida after him, was paradoxically a "creative philologist.") The same may be said of catch-words like "heterogeneous," "disparate," and so on, which betray an aesthetic stance toward philosophical writing. In the same way, straw-man arguments are a risk in Deleuze scholarship: the ritual denunciations of Hegel and Plato, or the dismissal out of hand of "Western metaphysics" and "anything grand, solid and major" (13). A good example is the rejection of "the a priori essentialism of the norm of reciprocity" [23]: in a manner typical of straw-man arguments, a Kantian epistemological term is conflated with ontological "essentialism" (hardly characteristic of...