To Meet the Challenges of the World, Thought Must Change, Composing, 14/01/2014

As much as I like to bicker with some of Daniel Smith’s interpretations of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, I do find his compendium of essays to be an excellent read, and quite valuable to someone exploring his work. They also help remind me why Deleuze is so important to my own thinking, especially some of the foundational ideas of the Utopias project.

European philosophy over the last century or so has included a strong tradition of theorizing about the nature of ideology, conceived as a destructive form of political philosophy, especially those influenced by Marx. I’m not going to run through all the definitions and conceptions of ideology that were developed over this tradition. But here’s a Deleuze-inspired conception that I thought of while reading Smith’s discussions of what it means to create a concept. Ideology: A set of ideas that pitches itself as eternally true, and articulates itself politically with the aim of conforming the world to its premises.*

* A quick distraction. Here’s a point of convergence between my thinking on Deleuze and some of the ideas in Doctor Who. An old quote from The Doctor, in The Face of Evil: “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that need altering.” Essentially, this is the definition of ideology I’m using today.

For someone with a reputation for such
dense writing, Deleuze is an inherently
practical thinker.

Deleuze conceives the activity of thought in the world as if a kind of pragmatist. I face a problem, perhaps in political activity, society more generally, my own personal or psychological history, my mental health, my discipline or tradition of knowledge. This problem provokes thinking in me, sometimes self-consciously, but more often than we like to admit, autonomically. This thinking, if I’m doing it well, will formulate a concept. A concept, in this conception, is an assemblage of other ideas, perhaps with some new elements, that has particular capacities to shape one’s thinking, understanding, and action. This concept will go to work in the world through my action, and in so doing, deal with that initial problem. My work will transform the problem such that it goes away, and the order of the world changes. This new order produces new problems, which require new thinking and new concepts to work through. 

Because thinking transforms the world, the process is always a fluctuating one. The worldly conditions of thought, why we’re thinking, changes. The thoughts that the original problem sparked are now obsolete; the world has changed to render those old ideas unnecessary. We now need new thinking.

The inability to understand that new problems require new thinking produced the second-most annoying kind of article I read during the research for my Ecophilosophy project: looking for explicitly environmentalist principles in the works of established great Western philosophers, even of the pre-industrial era. You might be able to find some common features, but you can’t just get a simple answer to a question like, “What environmentalist thinking did Aristotle develop?” for instance. Aristotle didn’t develop any environmentalist thinking. The problem of environmentalism didn’t exist for him. It’s only through a great deal of creative mutation (which these articles never understood) that you can turn a pre-industrial philosopher into an environmentalist. Environmentalism only arises as a concept once humanity achieves greater destructive powers than nature. Only now that we have the capacity to pollute the drinking water of a city of hundreds of thousands or millions out of our own greed and stupidity can we (or at least some of us) develop the capacity to think our way through the problem.

Ideology, however, is a kind of thinking that ignores this change, that takes for granted several initial premises about the world (whether they are true or not does not even matter much to the function of an ideology, only that they can convince people of their truth), and follows them through in action, presuming that those premises are essential truths of existence that apply to all existence, and so their action would always be appropriate. 

That’s the kind of thinking, thought that ignores reality’s capacity to change, that constitutes the enemy of the Utopias project. This is why time is so important a concept for it: at best, ideology sees only one direction of time, the movement of the ideology’s realization, a forward propulsive motion that always embodies the ideology anyway. At worst, ideological thinking ignores the reality of time altogether, completely unable even to form the notion that the world can change and render ideas obsolete.

Here’s a very brief, admittedly amateurish sketch (so don’t take it 100% seriously or comprehensively) of how ideologies clashed in the 20th century, conditioning our current global economic messiness. This is just one picture, of course, and I’m not pretending it’s a complete one. Consider it an exercise in understanding social change through ideology.

If social democracy was truly a response to the problems of
Stalinism, then we'll need a new social democracy to face
the problems caused by the victory of social democracy.

The Soviet Union under Stalin crystallized and purified its ideological position: the world must be transformed into a classless proletariat through mechanisms of paranoia and fear, the purge and collectivization as social policy to remove distinctions among the masses. Confronting this ideology, democratic politicians and theorists developed a set of political concepts in response, social democracy. We have a market economy of individual freedoms and a democratically transparent welfare state acting in the ostensible shared interests of the public. Social democracy and Stalinism transformed the world: Stalinism collapsed under its ultimate instability (an inability to adapt to changing global economic contexts and the social fragmentation of a public under constant threat of purge); Social democracy creates a generation of increasingly affluent working class people. 

But now the challenge is that a welfare state and social conventions favouring the economic priority of the working classes (by this, I mean people who have to work for a living, who can’t rely on capital gains to survive) no longer have a Soviet menace against which to fight. The working classes don’t have to be mollified, because there’s no enemy for them to convert to. So we have a social movement toward oligarchical capitalism, where the wealth of elites rises phenomenally while that of working people stagnates. Social democracy as an ideology must change if it is to answer this new challenge from within the democratic state itself. I think perhaps it requires an infusion of anarchist principles into contemporary political thinking of the left, and a turn away from statist solutions to problems. I’m still not entirely sure, but this will be the practical political element of the Utopias project.

The Overpowering Reach of the Will to Judge, Research Time, 13/01/2014

Daniel Smith’s interpretations of Gilles Deleuze’s ideas are interesting, and gives me a lot to reflect upon. However, I also disagree with a significant portion of it, particularly how he relates Deleuze’s influence from Kant. The most interesting philosophical writers always have complicated relations with their influences. 

I’ve read claims that Deleuze is a Spinozist and a Bergsonian; none of them hold up. He mashes ideas together, relates intuitively unconnected domains of thought and science using detailed historical and conceptual arguments. Like Smith says, he doesn’t write about his favourite philosophers as much as he collaborates with them from beyond the grave. To say that he accepts anything he has read as a simple dogmatic principle is laughable at best and an insult at worst. In this, Deleuze should be a model for us all.

One's engagement with any philosopher,
Kant included, should never be set in
stone, but there are limits to productive
interpretation and thinking.

Yet there remains this recurring idea in many of Smith’s essays in this compendium: that Deleuze’s entirely immanent ontology was intended to complete the work of Immanuel Kant. I can’t understand why he’d make this claim. The argument appears in more and less detailed forms in essays first published from the mid-1990s to the current decade. It isn’t even always the major point of Smith’s discussion of how Deleuze and Kant relate (though it is too often for my liking). And I’m not entirely sure how his interpretations of Deleuze’s work benefit from this recurring image as a mutant Kantian.

Here’s how the argument goes. I’ve read it enough times in enough different forms by now that I have it down fairly solidly. A central motivation of Deleuze in developing his philosophy is to build an entirely immanent conception of existence in general and human life; a philosophy that is entirely opposed to explaining anything with reference to a level of being transcendent to our own, determining or otherwise having power over our existences without itself existing on our plane of reality. Kant had a similar project in The Critique of Pure Reason, developing a way to justify our claims to worldly knowledge that did not rely on any transcendent concepts such as God and the Soul. 

While Kant’s project in the justification of knowledge had this effect, however, that wasn’t the goal. The motive of The Critique of Pure Reason was to create a system of judging among knowledge claims by appeal to the grounds of their justifications. Another central goal of Deleuze’s thinking was to create an approach to philosophy that would be free of any act of judgment. Judgment was a moral activity that evaluates whether a subject can justify its actions, and Deleuze was most interested in creating an ethical philosophy by which bodies were evaluated only in terms of how they could achieve their potential, how they could articulate their fullest capacities.

In the context of knowledge claims, Kant’s focus on justification produced an immanent standard of judgment: a claim is justified by reference to a subject’s history and worldly powers to achieve what he claims. All the transcendent concepts that Kant junked in the context of knowledge claims return in the context of the moral law in The Critique of Practical Reason, as the completion of the Kantian critical edifice still reaches its pinnacle in moral judgment. The universal imperative to limit one’s powers, bow down before a transcendent standard by which your material existence is to be judged, is the crown of the Kantian system.* His other writings of the 1780s (The Metaphysics of Morals most definitely, but also Perpetual Peace) express in different contexts this inherently moral idea that in order for human society to hold itself together in peace, we must submit ourselves to the authority of transcendent concepts/imperatives whose existence we must postulate.

* The Critique of Judgment is a total anomaly in this context, which I’ve thought since I first discovered it. Smith identifies a source for this shift in Kant’s late-period thought: his encounter with the criticisms of Salomon Maimon, who apparently did make these very points about the continual reliance on the transcendent in his thought. This may have shown that Kant’s initial motive actually did involve making philosophical thinking totally immanent, but it doesn’t stop the most remarkable Kantian achievement, the only work truly worthy of being called THE Kantian System, from being the conceptual edifice with judgment and justification at its centre. The Critique of Judgment is a fascinating new development that Kant was too old to follow through in detail, a minor stream in his corpus that arrived too late to gather force. I find it telling, however, that his last major book after The Critique of Judgment was The Conflict of the Faculties, an exploration of how disciplinary knowledge worked. 

I don’t have a particularly profound argument beyond this. I don’t have the time or inclination to put enough effort into writing a formal academic article disputing Smith’s claim on this. I’d rather finish my Ecophilosophy manuscript edits and proposal over this winter, and release a more creative, significant, and practically remarkable work of philosophy than a pedantic argument against one of Smith’s interpretations of Deleuze. Pedantic, whining arguments are for blogs. Philosophy would get a lot more progressive work done if we left our petty disagreements in spaces like these and put our individual creative efforts into more far-reaching inquiries and arguments. 

Because focussing on Kant’s immanentism just to draw a line of resemblance to Deleuze doesn’t gain us anything. It creates confusion about the place of Kant in the history of philosophy, and even about the place of Kant in Deleuze’s own thought. Because this notion of judgment is central to Deleuze’s own explicit reading of Kant. You can make parallels and connections if you want because Deleuze’s writing is subtle and complicated enough that you can find those parallels. And you can emphasize them if you want to make Deleuze seem like a mutated Kantian. It can be an entertaining and interesting minor reading of both Deleuze and Kant, a productive philosophical exercise. But I don’t see how it’s more than an exercise. I’m not sure what we can gain from this kind of interpretation.

I Wish Pragmatists and Deleuzians Would Talk More: A Note on Creativity, A History Boy, 12/01/2014

A couple of years ago, I delivered a presentation on John Dewey’s value for environmental philosophy at a conference on pragmatism at University of Oregon, a paper which was later published in expanded form in Environmental Ethics. The organization was called The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and their conference was called the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, but damn near everyone was a scholar of pragmatism. There was a wonderful set of presentations on African-American philosophers Cornel West and W. E. B. DuBois, some other work on environmental thought, and presentations on Hispanic-American feminist thinkers. But the bulk of the conference attendees were pragmatist scholars.

Ranking my knowledge of the Big
Three Pragmatist philosophers,
Dewey comes first, then James, last
the above Peirce.

There were a slew of John Dewey scholars, a few specialists on William James, and everyone had their idiosyncratic background readings in Charles Sanders Peirce. But the general theme of most modern scholarship identifying itself as pragmatist was producing interpretive material on these three figures, the traditional triumvirate of American Pragmatism.* I made a remark to Dr. K, one of the conference organizers (and author of a nice little book on Foucault as well) that so many of the problems the pragmatists discuss are treated with much more clarity, and in some cases resolved and progressed, in the work of Gilles Deleuze. I’m still not sure how to characterize his reaction. Here’s an example of where pragmatism is a potential fellow-traveller with Deleuze’s thinking.

* And yet so few people in the discipline of philosophy give George Herbert Mead very much credit for his contributions to this movement at all. I’ve barely even read him myself.

A lot of Smith’s writing can become very mystical about Deleuze’s writing on the creative nature of thought. Henri Bergson could definitely wax poetic about how every moment of reality itself was the creation of a pure novelty, however small, pushing existence farther into unprecedented forms and expressions against the weight of its own resistance. Insert an allusion to Nietzsche’s spirit of gravity, and you have a classic cliché of Deleuzian studies. In a sub-discipline whose aim is to explain Deleuze, the recurrence of such kind of language may echo and salute the man’s influence in Bergson, but it doesn’t do much explaining.

Another admirable aspect of Deleuze is how
he could acknowledge his debts to his
influences without himself being so influenced
as to become a commentator alone.

If you want to understand what Deleuze means with this concept of thought’s creativity, you have to consider what phenomenon provokes thinking. Smith refers in “On the Becoming of Concepts” to an impersonal universal flow of thought, but he does this in reference to Spinoza, the philosopher of one single substance. Thought being an attribute of the universal substance, of course is unified under all those expressions in its modes. Spinoza emphasizes substance, and therefore unity; Deleuze emphasizes and prioritizes what for Spinoza are modes, multiplicities. That is, singular bodies themselves interacting. In attributing a universal thought flow to Deleuze, he’d be off the mark. Another instance of Smith reading Deleuze too much in terms of his influences and missing the pluralist point.

Deleuze’s central idea about the nature of thought is that most of the time, thought is banal and ordinary, a witless exchange of inanities. A philosophically creative moment comes in developing a new conceptual framework for thinking through a society’s problems. Plato sought to contain the fragile chaos of Athenian democracy by developing a means to sort rival claims to truth. Kant, at the height of the German Reformation, articulates a vision of human knowledge where a universal moral law is paramount. These philosophies don’t reduce to the social problems that brought them about, but are profound and powerful conceptual creations that these problems inspire. The same goes for an artistically creative moment in developing a new and interesting sensory experience, or a scientifically creative moment in uncovering a new and interesting relationship among phenomena.

A thinker’s encounter with a changing world produces new ideas. Deleuze writes that most of his encounters were with philosophy, literature, paintings, and cinema, rather than in real-world situations. Those, perhaps, were the fuel for Heidegger, Foucault, and Margaret Urban Walker.** Bertrand Russell, who Deleuze long admired as a philosopher, had his encounters in mathematical thinking. These encounters are very rare, and most people don’t even prime themselves to be prepared for them. They live passive lives taking most of what’s around them for granted, and by this Smith refers to people who believe everything they hear on television (or today, their favourite tumblrs and twitter feeds). 

** I do consider Walker who have articulated a novel take on moral empiricism, even though Moral Understandings was bogged down in later chapters in the tedious academic practice of replying to earlier articles objecting to her work on relatively minor grounds. 

Gilles Deleuze in an ordinary moment.

Yet the social problems of the time demand answers, and if those answers are adequate enough to the worldly challenge to change those problems somehow, then they end up being taken for granted. What were once revolutionary ideas in response to problems that a society had never faced before now become banal, trivial, obvious notions. They’ve lost their power to shock and induce thought. Indeed, sometimes these trivial, long-accepted, obvious ways of thinking about the world only get in the way of new problems that arise, for which the previous revolution laid the conditions. The solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow, we can say about Deleuze’s conception of philosophical progress in What Is Philosophy?.

Smith even identifies a pragmatist precursor to this idea, but it’s simply part of a checklist. He doesn’t devote much, at least in this essay, to showing in detail the commonalities of pragmatist philosophy and Deleuze’s. He paraphrases William James’ remark that what prevents us from discovering new truths about the world are the truths we already hold, take for granted, and which we all too often believe to be all we need. Let me elaborate on the idea. The old truths were already enough for a previous world. But the old truths going to work in the world have changed that world. In a changed world, those old truths are still true, but obsolete. The solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow, itself a central insight of John Dewey's conception of social and political progress in Experience and Nature. 

And that’s one way to think of how pragmatism and Deleuze are closer companions than the textbook set of philosophical divisions might have you think.

You Can’t Do What Deleuze Did Only by Studying Deleuze, Research Time, 10/01/2014

After one day of flu-nursing, one day of flying, and another day of flu-nursing, I’m able to get back to work. My thoughts on Daniel Smith’s compendium are growing a little disconnected from the essay-by-essay approach I had originally been thinking of. Part of the reason is that because these were all originally published independently, there’s a little conceptual overlap between some of them, using the same examples and arguments (and sometimes even the same phrases) to serve different goals. That’s all fine; academic writers are expected to reuse older data and ideas where applicable. But it makes it easier for me to see Smith’s ideas about Deleuze as a fully formed whole that hasn’t much changed in all his years of writing on them. 

This strikes me as a very un-Deleuzian way to write about Deleuze. I’m writing this while part-way through an essay called “On the Becoming of Concepts,” where Smith describes how Deleuze conceives of philosophical concepts. Philosophy isn’t entirely a meditative activity, but is ultimately a production. That product is a philosophical concept. But these concepts change over time. 

One of Deleuze’s key concepts is his use of the distinction between extensive and intensive quantities, yet this idea dates back to Plotinus and the philosophical traditions of Medieval Europe. Smith describes how Deleuze’s concept of intensity changes from its first articulation in Difference and Repetition, changes in The Logic of Sense, appears again in relation to the body-without-organs in Anti-Oedipus, and eventually recurs one last time in What Is Philosophy? in his analytic of how philosophy itself works. 

This is a very unusual way for a professional academic philosopher to work. And we should remember that Deleuze was only ever employed as a philosophy teacher throughout his adult life, whether in university, or as in the early years of his career, in high schools. Most academic philosophers behave in a very disciplinary manner, developing a single set of related focal points and developing these to a remarkable precision. Those who do create concepts usually simply intensify their own ideas or develop them in more detail. As I’ve mentioned in recent entries, Graham Harman is a philosopher I’ve encountered recently who has created an interesting concept, and pursued the latter path.* Changing how you use an idea or bringing it to debates outside your previously established expertise is a rare move in professional philosophy today.

* Harman’s concept of the withdrawal of objects from relations is interesting, even if it does constitute a philosophical dead end. McMaster University’s Dr Nick Griffin once delivered a fascinating lecture on Bertrand Russell’s substitutional theory of logic, a completely different approach to quantificational logic than what eventually became mainstream, and why Russell abandoned it as a dead end unable to avoid his self-inclusion paradox. It was still a beautiful system from which we can learn a lot. As for Harman, I think a central reason why he refuses to abandon or radically modify his concept of withdrawal is rooted in his worshipful attitude toward Heidegger. 

When studying philosophy, we often forget that not
everything a philosopher says is intended in seriousness.

You see, Smith’s essays present a unified vision of Deleuze that remains constant in his writings from the mid-1990s to the current era (a vision that is strongly and disturbingly Kantian, but more on that in the future). It seems part of his goals as an academic philosopher was to stake a single, original position in the field of Deleuze studies. He has certainly done that, and done so with flair and skill. But such an act strikes profoundly against what Deleuze saw as the purpose of philosophy: creating concepts and adapting them to various new problems that arise in the course of social and intellectual inquiries. Smith has become one distinct voice among others arguing for the correctness of their interpretation of Deleuze at conferences of specialists in Deleuze Studies. That isn’t the kind of philosophical work that Deleuze thought was productive for the tradition of philosophy itself. 

It seems that Smith has devoted himself too much to Deleuze himself, rather than his practice. What’s more, he’s devoted himself to a particular vision of Deleuze, one single Deleuze among many possible ones, given emphasis and interpretive tendencies. This focus can be dangerous for a philosopher, as it falls too easily into over-fidelity, worship. The irony is that Smith himself describes Deleuze in “On the Becoming of Concepts” as a philosopher who has his central influences, but never worships any of them. He instead collaborates with them on new projects and new explorations. Writing about his key figures is an act of becoming-Spinoza, becoming-Bergson, or even in his living collaborations, becoming-Guattari.** Yet in these essays so far, Smith gives no sign that he is embarking on a project that would create any concepts himself.

** A wonderful note in this essay: Deleuze says that he and Guattari never understood the concept of the body-without-organs in quite the same way, despite collaborating in two massive books where this concept was central. This makes developing a textbook-simple, accurate interpretation of the concept immensely difficult, if not impossible. This would be precisely Deleuze’s goal: the concept is philosophically useful and productive not despite of this tension in its meaning, but because of it.

One sign of worship is that you take everything that your favourite philosopher said absolutely seriously, as fodder for philosophical interpretation. There is a key moment in “On the Becoming of Concepts” where Smith quotes from Abécedaire, an alphabet-based interview Deleuze recorded late in his life where he discusses various ideas from his work and the history of philosophy. Some of his answers are very profound and thoughtful, but some are delivered as if they were little more than jokes. When thinking about Deleuze, we must remember that he was a very sarcastic man. As a sarcastic man myself, I can say that we get the most amusement out of people who take our jokes as if they were serious.

Every Worthwhile Philosophical Creation Has a Purpose, Research Time, 07/01/2014

Plato was a serious man who dealt
with serious issues. Nonetheless, he
still put a lot of crude jokes in
Socrates' mouth.

Daniel Smith won me over with the first essay in his Deleuze compendium, called “The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism.” It was the most beautiful kind of attack on two concepts that I’ve found hideously mangled in discussions of post-modernist philosophy and Deleuze studies more particularly, the simulacrum and the reversal of Platonism. Its beauty lay in its complete avoidance of any negative critique whatsoever. He simply explained how the concept functioned in Deleuze’s reading of Plato (with Nietzsche’s help) and in Deleuze’s uptake of Nietzsche’s project of reversing Platonism.

All my discussions of Smith’s work come with the caveat that you should really just read his book your damn self for the best possible account of his writing. This essay in particular is clear, thoughtful, considerate, and, above all, creative. It’s also a wonderful introduction to Deleuze’s way of engaging with philosophical inquiry, which I’ve picked up for my own thinking about philosophical texts and projects. The usual way we’re taught to think about philosophy in our undergraduate courses is to evaluate arguments in terms of their validity and truth. These are important dimensions to any philosophical argument, but they aren’t all that matters. A more revealing question is what the philosophical project is for. In a way, you can say that this kind of interpretation politicizes philosophy, but it’s a very profound politicization. 

Deleuze understood Plato’s philosophy as motivated by a need to distinguish the validity of rival claims to truth, those who truly understand from those who are clueless from those who purposely aim to deceive. I’ve discussed this last summer in relation to Hegel’s account of the motives of Socrates and Plato in his Philosophy of History. The Platonic Idea (and its culmination in the form of the Good) is the impartial standard by which all claims to truth may be judged. A true notion expressed in the world is true insofar as it resembles some aspect of the transcendent Idea/Good. A simulacrum is an idea that does not resemble any feature of these forms. 

I think, like Foucault, I'll probably spend my entire
philosophical career explaining why an immanent concept
of morality accomplishes all that a transcendent can,
without any of the unfortunate problems of the latter.

When Deleuze develops an ontology of simulacra, (as well as what I consider his unfortunate phrase from The Logic of Sense, “the power of the false”), he is too easily interpreted as a token post-modernist for whom any question of truth is meaningless, and for whom existence has no intrinsic worth. This was an empty, if publicly effective, critique of the progressive French philosophy of the period: that a vision of the world without transcendent eternal truth, especially moral truths, is an empty nihilism that licenses all manner of horrifying activity. My colleague at Waterloo, B. S. Nelson, recently posted an old interview with Michael Foucault where he defended himself against those very charges. 

Having identified the central purpose of Plato’s philosophy, what it’s for, Smith describes how Deleuze reverses Platonism. His article lists a variety of mistaken ways to think about reversing Platonism that miss the central point. Deleuze’s goal was to build a framework to approach philosophy that didn’t focus on the question of settling rival claims to truth. Instead the focus shifts to the assembly of social and physical structures themselves. In Difference and Repetition, the book where Deleuze did most of his work developing his creative critique of Platonism, he described this assembly as the generation and play of differences, and as the repetition of creative moments. His work over the 1970s progressed this inquiry, but using the concepts of assemblage and notions from contemporary ecological science.

Deleuze wasn’t opposed to philosophies based on settling rival claims, he simply wanted to promote a different paradigm with different problems. He developed and promoted a vision of the world as a Chaosmos — systems and fluxes interacting in fields of mutual affectivity. 

This is the vision of the world I adapted to environmental moral philosophy debates in my Ecophilosophy manuscript. Moral questions are determined through the actual relations of people and the benefits and harms individual behaviour and political structures cause. The kinds of questions you ask and concepts that you use are completely different; philosophy is for the creation of entirely different ways of thinking. 

A Writer Beyond the Scope of the Classroom, A History Boy, 06/01/2014

Daniel Smith’s collection of essays about the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze arrived here at my mother’s house during my vacation, and I’ve been slowly working through it. I have a lot of things to do here in Newfoundland, most of which have involved too little light to read. So I haven’t gotten through that much. 

I have a complex relationship with Deleuze.* My plans for blogging about Smith’s essays include writing a post reacting to each essay, day by day (semi-regularly while I’m subject to the incompetence of Newfoundland Hydro and Nalcor, back to daily when I return to the relative sanity of southern Ontario). But today I just have some general reflections about Deleuze and his style of philosophy.

* This is something I say about pretty much every philosopher I discuss on this blog. If I have a simple relationship with their work, then it’s because I haven’t read much of them or I don’t find they have anything to say to me.

Deleuze is a philosopher that you can
relax with by the fireplace. Especially
if you're in Newfoundland and you've
lost your electricity on a -35ºC night.

Deleuze has a terrible reputation among wider philosophical circles; my own doctoral supervisor, until shortly before we began working together, considered him a hopeless obscurantist. I arrived at McMaster just in time for him to have started taking Deleuze seriously. See, I don’t think Deleuze is overcomplicated, as much as he’s a ridiculously dense writer. He includes so many ideas in his work, and his explanations are filled with allusions and references to so many different historical and scientific figures at once, that it’s hard to follow everything that’s going on. 

Reading through Smith’s essays, for instance, I’m struck by how the early chapters at least contain no references to the scientific ideas Deleuze discussed, but only the history of philosophy. Deleuze’s knowledge of mathematics, psychoanalysis, and ecology (as well as the further contributions of Félix Guattari to their collaborative works) similarly fills his writing. But Smith doesn’t seem to write about any of these notions and influences. A caveat: I haven’t finished his book yet. 

I think this makes Deleuze very rewarding, if sometimes difficult, to read. Reading a work of Deleuze, especially one of his original philosophical projects like Difference and Repetition, is a constant barrage of concepts and interpretations. More than almost any other philosopher, his works stimulate my brain with an incredible intensity. It’s almost boring reading anyone else after a long time spent with the works of Deleuze. A philosopher writing about only one or two ideas at a time? I’d be in danger of falling asleep reading something like that after an afternoon reading Expressionism in Philosophy or Bergsonism. 

As a philosophy teacher, this makes it very difficult to run a seminar on Deleuze. There’s simply so much going on in a single book that any lecture inevitably falls short of a comprehensive account. And because Deleuze wrote so many books and essays over his career at such a high rate, there is so much to say. One of Smith’s points in his essay on Deleuze’s concept of the univocity of being discussed how that concept never recurred in his later works after first introducing and exploring it in his 1968 works. He worked through the concept, and then transmuted it into a different form entirely as he moved on to new problems. Most philosophers, having developed such a radical and intriguing concept as this new take on the univocity of being, would ride it for their entire careers, and let it define all their works. I’m reminded of the works of Graham Harman, constantly riding one idea, even when it became clear that this one idea wasn’t working anymore. 

I’ve been working on a joint review project at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective for a book that criticizes the modern university system of knowledge production. Basically, the point of this book by Robert Frodeman is that the narrowing of knowledge production through disciplinary fragmentation damages the humanities by separating their research from the public and ethical relevance that gives these fields their foundational power. Philosophy in particular suffers from this problem in writing only for other university philosophers. 

Even though Deleuze is a very dense and difficult philosopher to read, I think his very density prevents his work from being forced into a disciplinary conversation. His works are so complicated that no lecture can contain all that they deal with. There are so many angles and perspectives in his corpus that a seminar conversation can’t comprehend all of it. More than many other philosophers, there is always more to discover in his work. The best way to understand Deleuze is not to read about or to listen to a lecture or podcast of his work, but to sit down and read it. That’s something that any reasonably intelligent person can do.

The Small and the Slightly Less Small, A History Boy, 03/01/2014

I’ll probably still update sporadically until late next week, because I’m still in Newfoundland and will be until January 9. As with any vacation, my days will be busier than when I’m at home working. There are meetings with family and old friends, and some shopping trips for gifts for friends back home in Ontario. I’m listening to VOCM’s Open Line show, a decades-old call-in radio show in St. John’s, where people are voicing their anger and frustration over a series of rolling blackouts throughout Newfoundland.

This is the most intensely political morning I’ve had in a long time. Newfoundland has a low population, and the rolling blackouts are apparently to save strain on the electricity grid. Although more snow has fallen on the island than the average winter, there seems to be no reason why demand for electricity is suddenly exceeding supply. In all the 25 years that I lived in this city, there was never any such situation. There were catastrophic blackouts caused by damage to infrastructure from bad winter weather. But in a province with such a low population, there has never been a situation where Newfoundland itself generated more demand for electricity than there was supply. The province is a power exporter. There seems to be no problem with the power that is sent to other provinces; only that for Newfoundland and Labrador itself. And this in the coldest winter the province has experienced in some time.

Kathy Dunderdale's Bill 29 effectively destroyed press
freedom to critique the provincial government. No non-
NLers outside NL know anything about it.

On Open Line and in personal conversation, I have heard frustration and thoughts of conspiracy. The Dunderdale government has been desperately trying to convince the province’s population that the new hydroelectric development at Muskrat Falls, Labrador is necessary to meet the province’s future power needs. But the provincial government has avoided all transparency about the project. Facing public concerns about massive cost overruns on the Muskrat Falls construction, the Dunderdale government passed a secrecy act, Bill 29, that gave her cabinet discretion to define which documents are exempt from Freedom of Information requests. If a journalist or a citizen asks to see the actual costs of the project’s construction, the government can simply refuse. 

This affront to democracy and the concept that a government should be accountable to its citizens is only part of an issue that has consumed the politics of my home province. There is no issue in Newfoundland and Labrador more important than Muskrat Falls and the corruption of a government who would prevent its people learning of that project’s true nature. It is a sign of the size of this project, but also the small size of Newfoundland.

This is one hydroelectric development project, one dam. Its goal is to transmit power down the eastern seaboard. Compared to the massive power grids of the United States and mainland Canada, the contribution of Muskrat Falls would be minimal. That a government would put its people through rolling blackouts in the height of the coldest winter in years, that it would pass a bill that literally castrates the press’ ability to criticize the government’s energy policy, is a sign that they take Muskrat Falls to be the defining project of Newfoundland. It is a sign of how petty Newfoundland politics always are and will be.

I’ve long heard that Toronto believes itself to be the centre of the universe in Canada. My girlfriend, who grew up in Scarborough, jokes sometimes that this is true. But when you compare Toronto to the rest of the world, it isn’t all that much compared with the global power and influence of cities like New York, Berlin, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Mumbai. I’ve lived in Hamilton, Ontario since 2008, a city that never believed it was the centre of anything except perhaps a plume of smoke from the steel plants. As tough as the last year has been for me, I’ve never been happier anywhere else. 

But when I see the shenanigans and anti-democratic manipulation of a population’s misery and suffering to justify a shady hydroelectric development, I think another place thinks of itself the centre of the universe. Newfoundland, St. John’s, and the leaders of the province’s Progressive Conservative party. My Utopias project involves how personal ideological visions can oppress and destroy people, that the material needs of people can be sacrificed to an idea. Even though I write philosophy for a living (or at least hope to), I understand how petty that is.

Joey Smallwood once made a legendary
documentary about his waiting days for a
meeting with Fidel Castro, which he conceived
as a summit between leaders of two island
nations. Smallwood was too small-time.

The pettiness of politics in this province is just one aspect of why I am sick of this place, and why I have been for a long time. There is nothing that depresses me more than the sight of other Newfoundlanders who go other places to pursue ambitious careers, but spend their time pining for the streets of St. John’s or their smaller outport hometowns. They think St. John’s is so beautiful, but like its politicians, the place is small, petty, self-absorbed, and with a disastrously inflated opinion of itself. It has a government that believes a single power plant in Labrador is worth stomping all over democratic values and plunging its people into a frigid, suffering, cold. Newfoundland is a place of outsized ego and self-obsession. 

When I get back to Hamilton late next week, my days will return to the routine I had established shortly before leaving. I’ll work at my editing job for a few hours each morning, then after lunch work on my research before making dinner, and relax with my love before some before-bed reading. Under the Trees, Eaten will be released late this Winter, and I aim to have a multimedia promotional circuit for it: touring around southern Ontario, managing a companion blog, among whatever else I can think of over the next couple of months. I’ll finish the next revision of my Ecophilosophy project over the same period and prepare to shop it to publishers. I’ll keep doing what I can. I’m one person, and that’s all I can do. There are some places where I can accomplish more than in others. I’ll be back in one of those more fruitful places next week.