jumping off deleuze

This post speculates on a few Deleuzian concepts and how they might relate to an exploration of narrative-being (meant in the sense that Heidegger talked about "work-being" with regard to the essence of the work of art).

In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel Delanda describes Gilles Deleuze's "flat topography," in which the individual is not a copy of an ideal (Platonic) essence but a unique actualization of a virtual multiplicity or process.

While...[essence] implies a unified and timeless identity...[multiplicity] implies an identity which is not given all at once, but is defined progressively; and while essences ear to their instantiations the same relation which a model has to its copies, that is, a relation of greater or lesser resemblance, multiplicities imply divergent realizations which bear no similarity to them. (28)

In this view, "the reality of the virtual is structure" which underlies the actualization. The virtual structures or multiplicities are recognized in both their actualizations and their potential, that is, a spectrum of possible actualizations that may never be realized.

In terms of narrative theory, the conceptual scheme is potentially useful in finding a connection between the "fictitious" and the "real," the possible worlds inherent in the fictional, and in the exploration of the narrative mode in general.

Back to Delanda on Deleuze:

Just as the extrinsic (actualized, measurable) biological phenomenon of the body grows out of the intrinsic (virtual) process of cell division, which rather than by a mathematically reducible formula occurs on the basis of cell properties and attractions in the organic, the individual emerges or is territorialized from the virtual into a unique being. The being is more than the sum of its accidents.

...mere resemblances and identities must be treated as mere results of deeper physical processes and not as fundamental categories on which to base an ontology. (42)

According the Deleuze, the generalization that arises from a comparison or analysis of attributes of similar objects/beings, is not an essence (agreeing here with Husserl that accidents cannot lead to essence) but a different individual.

...while an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique singular individuals different in spatiotemporal scale but not in ontological status. (47)

From this perspective, the generalization, human being, for example, is a new, unique individual, as distinguishable from the individuals from which it has been conceptually derived. Further, it is a result of its own multiplicities or virtual component, thus allowing the individual actualizations to which it conceptually relates their own identities. This non-hierarchical topography is a basis for plotting the individual consciousness on a larger plane where consciousness as such is examined; it is the topography that allows a single fundamental religious belief to exist as unique from the individual, "religious beliefs," thereby allowing the discovery of the dynamic processes underlying religious belief as such without having to contort the various specific actualizations (Christian belief or Islamic belief or Hindu belief, etc.) to a set of extrinsic qualities that may be used to characterize religious belief as such.

I believe that this topography is useful in exploring the narrative mode as a fundamental structure within what Merleau-Ponty describes as the lived-body consciousness and that this mode is one that recognizes the possibility of Deleuze's plane of immanence. This narrative-being is at home with the dynamic of identity and meaning that arises from being born of this plane. From this standpoint, the narrative product (whether written or merely imagined) is a trace of being, a unique actualization, which in the reading is re-actualized into a new trace, each time it is read.

The single reading or the writing gives rise to a picture of the world or, if we include the concept of identification, of ourselves in the world as a single actualization of a virtual process. This picture is synchronic in the sense of Saussure's snapshot of a language system that shows a coherent spectrum of meaning in the world and the elements that make up that system in coherent relation to each other...at that moment. Complementing the concept of Saussure's diachronic view of language, a single narrative trace is territorialized and deterritorialized over time, (e.g., by interpretations or critical analyses) as are the multiple readings of a text by a single reader. The stability of the text, as the stability of our identity, is in the virtual, the underlying dynamic, in the connection to the plane of immanence and to undiscovered potential actualizations.

This kind of view does not determine the human psyche as something that, as psychologist Ernst Becker describes it in Denial of Death, desperately reaches for stable symbolic meaning in order to escape the suicide that would result from the recognition of its own mortality. It is not one that despairs at the continual territorialization or deterritorialization of meaning in language, as seems to be the attitude within poststructuralism. The attitude of consciousness expressed by narrative potentiality is one at home with the dynamic of meaning and the multiple actualizations or visions of truth.