EVERYTHING IS REAL: GILLES DELEUZE AND CREATIVE UNIVOCITY

Peter Hallward
The central thesis of the conference in which a version of this article was first presented - that contemporary understandings of art and science belong to a single paradigm of thought, a single way of thinking - surely finds its most emphatic philosophical justification in the work of Gilles Deleuze. This most inventive of contemporary French thinkers seeks to understand the individuation of all possible beings and experiences as part of one and the same productive process, where everything thus individua ted or produced - planets, bodies, perceptions, dreams, paintings, delusions - is produced in essentially the same way. Deleuzes work everywhere asserts the strict univocity of being. All that is can be said to be in exactly the same sense, all that can be said of being must be said in one and the same voice. 1 And if all that falls under the concept of being must be treated in the same way and said in the same voice, then the essential compatibility of art and science follows as a matter of course. (Artistic) interpretation and (scientific) explanation become aspects of one and the same expressive project.2 All of Deleuzes notoriously complex work presumes this essential reduction, this essential compatibility of art and science, for the simple reason that it eliminates the epistemological basis of their broadly Romantic distinction - namely, the difference between deduction and insight, between what can be demonstrated objectively and what resonates subjectively, between the natural sciences and the human sciences, and so on. Deleuzes project begins with the evacuation of any rigorous difference between subject and object or natural and human, so as literally to clear the mind for the intuition of that single productive energy that saturates, in essentially the same way, every dimension of existence and experience. His project then develops, along each of its many bifurcating paths, on the presumption that the identity of the self is lost [] to the advantage of an intense multiplicity and a power of metamorphosis.3 The creatures loss, we might say, is creation s gain. For in the absence of subject-centred distinctions, everything will be seen to cohere on the same virtual plane of immanence or multiplicity, a plane upon which everything is laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, a plane populated by a single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate it. Every being can be described as a creative movement across the One-All defined by this plane, and these movements are distinguished from one another only by speed and slowness (WIS, 41/38). 4 As a matter of fundamental principle, there is only one kind of production, the production of the real,
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1. In the terms made familiar by centuries of scholastic debate, that being is univocal means that creatures exist in essentially the same way as their creator. On this point see Daniel Smiths exceptionally clear paper, The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuzes Ontology of Immanence, Deleuze and Religion , Mary Bryden (ed), Routledge, London, 2001. 2. The most systematic text to deal with this question is Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris What is Philosophy? Minuit, Paris, 1991, Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (trans), Columbia UP, 1994; it provides this article with its main point of reference. Further references to this title will be given in the text as WIP, followed by page number. (Where a reference contains two page numbers separated by a forward slash, the first number refers to the original edition and the second to the translation; tm stands for translation modified). 3. Deleuze The Logic of Sense, Minuit, Paris, 1969, Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (trans), Columbia UP, New York, 1990, p345/ 297. 4. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , Minuit, Paris, 1980 Brian Massumi (trans),

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Minnesota UP, Minneapolis, 1986, pp311-312/254-255. Further references to this title will be given in the text as ATP, followed by page number. 5. Deleuze and Guattari, AntiOedipus, Minuit, Paris, 1972, Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane (trans), Minnesota UP, 1977, pp40/32, 104/87. 6. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition , PUF, 1968, Paul Patton (trans), Columbia UP, New York, 1994, pp268-269/208. Further references to this title will be given in the text as D&R , followed by page number. 7. Deleuze, Bergsonism, PUF, 1966 Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (trans), Zone Books, 1988, p17/26. Further references to this title will be given in the text as Bergsonism, followed by page number. 8. Regrettably, there is no space here to tackle the most obvious (but also most difficult) question raised by a description of Deleuzes thought as essentially creationist, namely its relation to a broadly evolutionary perspective; the pertinence of such a perspective has been demonstrated in compelling detail by Keith Ansell Pearsons recent book, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze ,

and our only goal is to draw close to the beating heart of reality, to an intense point identical with the production of the real.5 Any effort to complicate this schema by introducing anthropocentric alternatives like imaginary or symbolic (let alone natural and human, or objective and subjective) can amount solely to the introduction of error pure and simple. Strict ontological univocity has, as its immediate implication, that it is the nature of consciousness to be false.6 Consciousness as such can only get in the way of active participation in univocal expression. In this as in every associated case, all our false problems derive from the fact that we do not know how to go beyond experience toward the conditions of experience, toward the articulations of the real [du rel].7 In what follows I will try to outline, in terms directed at mainly nonspecialist readers, what is involved in this production of the real and the notions of art and science that ensue. I will argue, in spite of certain thematic appearances to the contrary, that Deleuze encourages us to understand such production as a peculiar, thoroughly contemporary version of creationism the idea, which Deleuze adapts mainly from Spinoza and Leibniz, that all actual beings exist as unfolding parts of the expression or explication of an all-powerful, purely intensive, purely virtual creative force.8 An infinitely creative force gives rise to an infinitely differentiated creation. The task of any particular creature - any particular actuality - is simply to give appropriate voice to that part of creative becoming that it is able to express. Grasped in itself - grasped, we might say, as an attribute of the creator per se, considered independently of creation - this force remains exclusively virtual. Its expression or self-differentiation will individuate every actuality with absolute determining power, but it itself qua virtuality, qua creativity, will never become actual. It will never be limited by the stasis of material actuality. Every particular creation, however, will have both a virtual and an actual dimension. It will exist both as a purely virtual creative thought, i.e. as a creating, as a thought in the creative Mind, and as the thoroughly actual expression of that thought, i.e. as a creature, as a distinct element in the field of creation. In Deleuzes work, virtual and creative (in this strong creationist sense) are effectively interchangeable terms. Though it is always the virtual or creative dimension that determines the course of creation, the expressiv e individ uation of this force is simultaneously spiritual and physical. From what we might call the creative point of view, thinking and being are [] one and the same, since purely creative thought must immediately give rise to whatever it thinks. Every genuine thought is a creation. Though the plane of immanence is always single, being itself pure variation, it has two facets, as Thought and as Nature and the one is immediately expressive of the other. Creatings are distinguished by their speed alone, i.e. by their proximity to infinite speed, since creativity itself is a single speed on both sides: the atom will traverse space with the speed of thought (Epicurus). The plane of immanence has two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Physis (WIP, 41-42/3862
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39).9 It is the essential singularity of the arrangement that necessarily boggles every limited understanding of mind, since it coheres only from the point of view of a mind that creates at every moment every object of its thought that is to say, from the point of view that in Leibniz and Spinoza corresponds to the mind of God.10 The immediate methodological implication, however, is perfectly straightforward: if everything that is is real, if all that exists exists in the same way, then there can be only one mechanism of understanding or perception, one faculty of expression-interpretation, and this faculty will apply indifferently to the material, semantic, or spiritual composition of things. As a result, the differences between philosophy, art, and science do not reflect differences in the substance of their concern any more than they correspond to genuinely distinct faculties of the mind. Philosophy, art and science are names given to the three forms of thought able to sustain proximity to pure creativity as such, i.e. to pure creative chaos: they are the three Chaoids, realities produced on the planes that cut through chaos in different ways (WIP, 196/208tm).11 They differ only in the intensity of their approximation to the purely creative point of view. The effort to conceptualise configurations of creative thought as such, the effort to lend conceptual consistency to its infinite turbulence, is the particular task and privilege of philosophy. Art and science take up their distinct epistemological positions with respect to the resulting hierarchy: whereas science abandons any direct intuition of pure infinity (infinite chaos, infinite speed, infinite determination ) so as to isolate a plane of reference in which finite states of relative speed or relative complexity can be observed and analysed, art attempts, through its finite compositions, to serve as a conduit or vector for an infinite compositional power. In short: if what truly is is a pure creative energy that proceeds with the infinite speed of thought, philosophy is the discipline of thought that establishes zones of conceptual consistency within this infinite difference, whereas science withdraws from the infinite to so as to measure the finite, leaving art with the peculiar power of being able to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite(WIP, 186/197, my emphasis). These disciplinary differences are established solely with reference to the underlying dynamic of creative thought as such, or the mechanics of infinite speed - and not in terms of ineluctably anthropocentric distinctions between explanation and interpretation, or perception and imagination, or accuracy and insight. II Deleuzes point of departure is brutally straightforward. Being is univocal. There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice [...]. From Parmenides to Heidegger it is the same voice which is taken up, in an echo which itself forms the whole deployment of the univocal (D&R, 52/35). All distinct beings are distributed across the
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Routledge, London, 1999. See also my forthcoming study, Creationism in Philosophy: Deleuze . 9. The concept of pure creativity (or infinite speed) satisfies the essential creationist obligation: the whole ought to belong to a single moment, in Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy , PUF, Paris, 1962 Hugh Tomlinson (trans), Minnesota UP, 1983, p81/72. Further references to this title will be given in the text as N&P, followed by page number. 10. The universe is like a whole which God grasps in a single view, Leibniz, Letter to von Hessen-Rheinfels 12 April 1686, in Leibniz, Philosophical Texts , R.S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks (ed and trans), OUP, 1998, p.99; cf. Spinoza, Ethics V, Proposition 25. 11. Alternatively although it amounts to the same thing they are the three aspects under which the brain [or mind] becomes subject, Thought-brain, p198/210.

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12. Alain Badiou takes this phrase as the subtitle for his brief but decisive critique of Deleuzian univocity in Badiou, Deleuze, la clameur de ltre , Hachette, Paris, 1997, Louise Burchill (trans), Minnesota UP, 1999. For broadly comparable readings of Deleuzes singular orientation, see my Deleuze and Redemption from Interest, Radical Philosophy , 81 (Jan 1997), pp6-21; Deleuze and the World Without Others, Philosophy Today, 41:4 (Winter, 1997), pp530-544; The Limits of Individuation, or How to Distinguish Deleuze from Foucault, in Angelaki , 5:2 (Aug 2000), pp93-112. Some of the material discussed in the present essay overlaps with material analysed in these earlier articles.

space of univocal being, within a single plane of immanence or inclusion, and they sing their being in one and the same voice. They sing a single clamour of Being for all beings (D&R, 388-89/304).12 Being says all that it has to say according to a single logic of sense, which applies indifferently to God or man, animal or plant, dream or perception, word or thing. Now if all beings express Being in the same way, does this mean that all beings express the same intensity of being? Does ontological univocity imply ontological equality? Far from it: its essential to understand that although equal, univocal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, nevertheless things reside unequally in this equal being( D&R , 55/37). Univocity simply ensures an exclusiv ely quantitative understanding of expressive difference, where every difference, ultimately, is a matter of being more or less expressive of the One-All, more or less adequately expressive of being as that immanent whole in which everything coexists with itself, except for the differences of level (Bergsonism , 103/100). All actual individuals actualise varying degrees of a single virtual force ( ATP, 62/46), and when we come to investigate the apparent diversity of the natural world we see, between plant and animal, for example, between animal and man, only differences in degree (Bergsonism , 105/101). But why this inequality? Why is ontological hierarchy the originary fact, [as] the identity of difference and origin? ( N&P, 8-9/8). Because Deleuze takes Nietzsches side in his quarrel with Schopenhauer: like any creationist, Deleuze maintains that creation necessarily creates distinct creatures, that production gives rise to distinct products. The illusions of subjective autonomy must be dispelled, yes, but not in favour of a purely indeterminate or undifferentiated abyss. The deluded pretension to a distinctive human voice (i.e., to ontological equi-vocity) must certainly be disarmed and replaced, but in and by individuation, in the direction of the individuating factors which consume them and which constitute the fluid world of Dionysus. What cannot be replaced is individuation itself (D&R, 332/258). And in order to conceive of such individuation/differentiation as immediately active, as purely creative, it must be abstracted from any process - of interaction, communication, interpretation, negation - that might mediate, qualify, modulate or interrupt its operation. Creation does not hesitate. It does not pass through anything external to itself. Fully creative difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed (D&R, 154/117). Moreover, once actual individuation is explained in terms of the internal differentiation of a single, purely intensive creative force then the quantitative or hierarchical basis of the procedure follows as a matter of course. The individuality of an individual can only correspond to its degree of expressive power, its place on the single expressive scale. The philosopher whom Deleuze reveres as philosophy incarnate, as the Christ of philosophers, demonstrates the essential logic with unrivalled clarity: individuation is, in
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Spinoza, neither qualitative nor extrinsic, but quantitative and intrinsic, intensive, purely quantitative, according to the degree of [a things] power.13 Any actual individual (any individual mode, to use Spinozas own term) is, in its essence, always a certain degree, a certain quantity, of a [divine] quality, and all modes are quantitatively distinguished by the quantity or capacity of their respective essences which always participate directly in divine substance ( EINP , 166/183). Ontological inequality is compounded, furthermore, by the fact that in order to individuate fully distinct creatures, creative force must temporarily abandon them to their own distinction. As a matter of course, once extended, purely intensive difference is explicated in systems in which it tends to be cancelled (D&R, 293/228), just as, in Bergsonian terms, life as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualising itself, by differentiation itself, it loses contact with the rest of itself ( Bergsonism , 108/104; cf EINP, 195-196/214-215). Quantitative difference is inevitable once we leave the uninhabitable domain of pure creativity (pure intensity) as such. III The expressive scale is defined, then, by two simple principles, which Deleuze adapts more or less tel quel from Leibniz. These principles are: Everything is always the same thing, there is only one and same Basis; and: Everything is distinguished by degree, everything differs by manner [...] These are the two principles of principles.14 Perceived in terms of these two principles, every apparent difference in quality is nothing but difference in quantity ( N&P, 50/44; cf Bergsonism , 73/74), and these quantitative differences correspond directly to differences in proximity to pure creative thought, that is to say to a form of expression which, very literally, says anything and everything. Expressive power varies on a scale ranging from this infinite articulation (the expression of all-in-one, the expression of unlimited difference in a new monism) to merely unitary articulation (the expression of only one affect or thought, the assertion of a simple, static existence). At the highest end of the scale stands the utterly chaotic, purely virtual limit of infinitely expressive thought - that inconceivable intensity of thought which, at every moment, articulates all that can possibly be articulated. As Deleuze understands it, this creative chaos is characterised less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. This is not a movement from one determination to the other but, on the contrary, the impossibility of a connection between them, since one does not appear without the other having already disappeared [...] Chaos undoes every consistency in the infinite (WIP, 44-45/42). Chaos as such exceeds articulation, by itself it cannot consist. Chaos as such
EVERYTHING IS REAL

13. WIP, 59/59-60; 49/48-49. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Minuit, 1968, Martin Joughin (trans), Zone Books, New York, 1990, pp180/ 197, 166/183. Further references to this title will be given in the text as EINP, followed by page number.

14. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Paris, Minuit, 1988, Tom Conley (trans), Minnesota UP, 1993, p78/58 (referring to Leibniz).

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exceeds our (creaturely) powers of thought. In chaos all beings become something other than themselves, without interruption. Chaos is pure creativity, abstracted from any sustainable creat ing; it undoes what it does in the immediate instant of infinite transformation. Infinite creative difference is conceivable only in a dimension traversed at infinite speed, and Deleuze knows that from Epicurus to Spinoza (the incredible book five [of the Ethics]) and from Spinoza to Michaux the problem of thought is infinite speed. More, such speed requires a milieu that moves infinitely in itself - the plane, the void, the horizon ( WIP, 38-39/36). Philosophy is the discipline of thought that dedicates itself to the creation of concepts entirely within such milieu. Every philosophical concept is a chaoid state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent, become Thought. Or again: the problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges ... (WIP, 45/42). Philosophy is the closest thought can come to pure creative chaos, without being undone. The lowest end of the scale, by contrast, is populated by relatively thoughtless forms of existence, by minimally expressive (or creative, or active ) forms of being. These are beings that can sing only a very limited part of the general clamour of Being, in other words beings that cohere at a maximum distance from chaos. Such beings exist in such a way as to avoid becoming som ething other than themselves. It would be m ere anthropocentric hubris to identify this scale with something like the Great Chain of Being, a chain in which the more complex forms of life occupy a naturally elevated place. For all creatures capable of thought themselves need to become thoughtful; a creature expresses creation only by being, in the most active and inventive sense, creative. Thinking is part of an arduous learning process. All thoughtful beings begin their existence in impotence and slavery, in ignorance of their true creative nature, and remain ignorant until they manage to remember or reinvent this creativity (EINP, 24/263; 268/289-90). Sadly, human beings, far from occupying a naturally privileged place on the expressive scale, have a particular affinity for thoughtlessness. We have a knack for transforming our active, open or creative dimension into reactive closure and inertia. Creative force is active, it creates the very objects of its perception, but becoming-reactive is constitutive of man. Ressentiment , bad conscience and nihilism are not psychological traits but the foundation of the humanity in man. They are the principle of the human being as such (N&P, 74-75/64). It is thus we who are thoughtless, insofar as we consciously cut our particular voice off from the general clamour of being, insofar as we tolerate (if not cultivate) being trapped within the limits of consciousness, subjectivity, and representation. As soon as we begin to r epresent the elements of our experience and to formulate opinions about this experience, we cease to present directly that part of creative thought to which we are able, in principle, to give voice. What we express of active or creative being becomes
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reactive - passive, dampened, indirect ( N&P, 46/41). Opinion is thought become weary. Where creative thought moves at absolute speed, and passes through its every articulation in one and the same moment; ordinary opinion moves at relative speeds, and is concerned only with the succession of movements from one point to another.15 Likewise, investment in the means of representation and the pseudo -philosophical supervision of appropriate representation requires the consolidation of all that isolates and distinguishes us as particular beings, as if suspended from the vital flow of creative energy that we nevertheless continue to express - only with minimal intensity. We thereby identify with our inherited organic limits, rather than seek out the echoes of that anorganic life we share with the rest of the cosmos. We coordinate our interactions with others in the consensual interests of a common sense, rather than seek to become-other. We align ourselves with our particular fragments of territory, rather than pursue those creative lines of flight that cross every boundary and uproot every dwelling. Rather than think at that creative level of coherence which is indistinguishable from a being-thought, we thereby restrict thought to the abject supervision of mental behaviour (recognition, classification, consumption ) that preserves our bio-cultural distinction at the price of creative sterility. To surpass the human condition, such is the meaning of philosophy.16 Hence the essentially redemptive role for those intermediary practices, art and science, whose mobility along the expressive scale allows them to draw near to the limit of infinite speed. Like philosophy itself, art and science are procedures that think (that create) in proximity to chaos. Every such procedure has a negative and a positive aspect. Negatively, art and science must puncture the repressive walls people generally erect to protect themselves from chaotic creativity. In the interests of security, normality, familiarity and order, people normally take shelter from the chaos forever raging over their heads under a conceptual umbrella, on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But artists and scientists, like philosophers, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent. Though this rent will quickly be patched over with commentaries, imitations and further opinions, the glimpses of reality it affords serve as a constant invitation to assume a higher expressive power: Art, science and philosophy cast planes over chaos. These three disciplines are not like religions that invoke dynasties of gods, or the epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella. Philosophy, science and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price. 17 It remains a matter of defeating chaos because while our task is to think chaos, to let chaotic thought course through us, in order for such thought
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15. Our misfortune comes from opinion, WIP, pp194-206.

16. Foucault, op. cit., pp139-140/124-125.

17. WIP, pp 191-192/ 202-203, referring to D.H. Lawrence.

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to continue we ourselves must remain at a mastered distance from chaos. To fall entirely into chaos is to be consumed in a kind of conceptual black hole. Chaos as such consumes all form and undoes every doing: we must never be directly precipitat[ed] into the chaos that we want to confront (WIP, 188/199). So positively, then, philosophy, art and science will establish zones of durable consistency from within or close to the element of chaos. Only the philosopher can bring back from chaos variations that are still infinite, purely virtual variations that pulse with the infinite speed of thought (WIP, 190/202). True philosophical concepts are articulated upon the same virtual plane as the chaotic movements of thought which they channel or configure (WIP, 112/118). The scientist, by contrast, is preoccupied with the actual processes by which such speed becomes finite, that is to say with the actual, extended forms in which pure intensive difference explicates itself. Whereas philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency [] science, on the other hand, relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference, by laying out, as if on top of the virtual plane of constant variation, an open empirical plane through which actual movements and propositions can be distinguished and assessed (WIP, 186/197). Science passes from chaotic virtuality to the states of affairs and bodies that actualise it; the scientist brings back from chaos variables that have become independent by slowing down, that through their actualisation have been separated from the virtual vitality that engendered them (WIP, 147/156; 190/202). Thus actualised, these variables can be observed or modelled, measured or analysed. And if science moves from the creatively virtual to the derivatively actual, art seeks to reverse the process - to tap into virtually infinite creative power from within the limits of actual materiality, to arrange patterns of sensation in such a way as to point the way towards their creative source. Art is not itself chaos but it opens a path back toward chaos, towards what Joyce called a chaosmos (WIP, 192/204). IV The essential compatibility of art and science stems from ontological univocity, since the immediate casualty of its affirmation is the peculiarity of a distinctly human voice - a voice that something called the humanities would seek to transcribe, for its own sake. Every artistic and scientific project worth the name leaves anthropocentric illusions in ruins. Every discipline of thought has as its object not the consolidation of merely human liberty but rather liberation from the human - freedom become the capacity of man to vanquish man.18 The challenge in each case is to dissolve the subject so as to reveal the absolute sufficiency of the object, grasped as a dynamic creating or event,19 rather than merely specified as a particular creature defined by particular attributes. Ultimately, nothing other than the Event
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18. Deleuze, Pricls et Verdi: la philosophie de Franois Chtelet , Minuit, Paris, 1988, p11. 19. Event or creation - the two terms are effectively synonymous, in What is Philosophy , op. cit., p198/211.

subsists, the Event alone, Eventum tantum for all contraries . - the event of pure creation as such. The problem is therefore one of knowing how the individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world, in order to attain to the universal communication of events.20 To think the event of creation is to be thought by that event, at a level of intensity that consumes and dissolves the thinking subject as such. The highest exercise of thought can only be undertaken by a form of what Deleuze, after Spinoza, names the spiritual automaton. Dispossessed of his own thought, the automaton is thought through by divine or creative thought as such, in a process through which thought thinks itself and nothing more.21 The essential question is thus always a variant on the question posed in Cinema 1: how to attain once more the world before man, before our own dawn, the position where movement was [...] under the regime of universal variation, where every action was a pure creation within the luminous plane of immanence?22 And the answer is always a variant of the answer given in A Thousand Plateaus: by reducing oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find ones zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator (ATP, 343-44/280). 23 We can then access the non-organic life of things [...] which burns us [... and] unleashes in our soul a non-psychological life of the spirit, which no longer belongs either to nature or to our organic individuality, which is the divine part in us, the spiritual relationship in which we are alone with God as light. 24 The distinctive roles of art and science are to be underst ood as contributions to this general effort, this attempt to reverse the alienation of virtual force in the actualities it creates. The virtual individuates itself in actuality, intensive force cancels itself in extension; science and art play privileged (if ultimately only preparatory) roles in the redemptive process of counter-a ctualisation or counter-effectuation which leads actual creatures back up to the virtual, event-ful creativity from which they spring (WIP, 147-48/159-160). Science is generally confined to the more limited role in this process. Its concern is the study of actuality qua actuality. Science busies itself with actual states of affairs. Whereas through the invention of its concepts, philosophy continually extracts a consistent event from the state of affairs - a smile without the cat, as it were - through its functions, science continually actualises the event in a state of affairs, thing, or body that can be referred to. The concern of philosophy is the event of creating, the concern of science is the creature that results. Science relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualise the virtual (WIP, 112/118). For as soon as the creatively virtual is perceived through a plane of reference, the speed of creation slows down dramatically, as if caught in a freeze-frame. Science operates in slow-motion. Even those values which limit the systems of co-ordinates used to measure movement on the plane of reference - values assigned to the speed of light, absolute zero, the quantum of action, the Big Bang - impose radical limits upon the scientifically incoherent notion of
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20. Logic of Sense, op. cit., pp 207-208/176178. Individuality is not a characteristic of the Self but, on the contrary, forms and sustains the system of the dissolved Self , in Difference and Repetition , op. cit., p327/254. 21. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minuit, 1985, Tomlinson and Habberjam (trans), Minnesota UP, 1989, p343/263. Again, if eternal return is the highest, the most intense thought, this is because its own extreme coherence, at the highest point, excludes the coherence of a thinking subject, in Difference and Repetition , op. cit., p81/58. 22. Cinema 1, op. cit., p100/68. 23. Cf. Cinema 1, pp117/81, 171/122. 24. Cinema 1, ibid., p80/57.

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25. Deleuze recalls Bergsons belief that modern science hasnt found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me, Deleuze, Interview with Arnaud Villani, in Villani, La Gupe et lorchide: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze , Belin, Paris, 1999, p130. 26. As Pierre Zaoui reminds us, from a Spinozist perspective to love God as naturing nature [naturans] is not to love nature or the real as it is - natured nature [naturata ], in Zaoui, La grande identit NietzscheSpinoza, quelle identit?, Philosophie 47 (Sept 1995), pp71-72. 27. This aspect of Deleuzes work is explored to great effect in the endnotes of Brian Massumis Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass., 1992. See also Pearson, Germinal Life , 91 and passim.

infinite speed or infinite action (WIP, 113/119). Moreover, whereas fully crea tive or un conditioned philosophical concepts maintain the inseparability of variations internal to their consistency, science analyses its plane of reference in terms of functions that presume the independence of variables, in relationships that can be conditioned ( WIP, 119/126) and ordered in terms of relatively stable equations or formulae. Insofar as science limits itself to the physical, it necessarily stops short of an exploration of the meta-physical, which can alone think the sufficient reason of the physical. 25 But we might say that scienc e - unlike the merely thoug htless representation of creatures - analyses actuality so as to prepare it for its eventual count er-actualisa tion (itself un dertaken through art and philosophy). Deleuzes privileged scientific references - an eclectic collection ranging from Mamon and Saint-Hilaire through Bergson and Whitehead to Simondon and Prigogine - have at least one thing in common: they restore a creative dynamism to the plane of reference as such. What qualifies as true science for Deleuze always involves an emphasis on nonmetric multiplicities, the multiplicities of smooth space or constant variation, as opposed to the apparent stability and stasis of metric measurement and predictable calculation within a homogeneously striated space. In keeping with Spinozas emphasis on a creatively naturing nature [natura naturans ] over its passively natured effects, Deleuze affirms a numbering number over merely numbered quantities - a nomadic or independent number, number as a creative process in itself, whose subsequent function is to measure magnitudes in striated space (ATP, 605/484-85). 26 Each application of this numbering number is an attempt to evoke, from within the limited coordinates of the plane of reference, a purely indeterminate creativity, a creativity variously at work in the mathematisation of quanta, fractals, crystals, strings, strange attractors, resonance, turbulence, so many reworkings of the ancient idea of the clinamen - that pure energy of displacement which distributes atoms across the universe and sets them in motion.27 There is certainly nothing anthropocentric about such creative numbering. The composition of a plane of reference proceeds through a radical perspectivism which is never relative to a subject, but rather disseminated through a multitude of what Deleuze and Guattari call partial observers: the role of the partial observer is to perceive and to experience, although these perceptions and affections are not those of a man, in the currently accepted sense, but belong to the things studied ( WIP, 124/130). Partial observers are located in sites devoid of all subjectivity, in sense data distinct from all sensation, and operate like photographic instruments which capture what no one is there to see, which make these unsensed sensibilia blaze. Scientific observers pick up on the singularities of a curve, of a physical system, of a living organism, and in doing so - though they remain within the referential calibration of horizons and empirical
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deceleration of creative speed - they glimpse that virtual or potential force without which every state of affairs is deprived of activity and development. Science indicates that even in the field of actuality, nothing is passive but everything is interaction, even gravity [pesanteur ] (WIP, 146/ 154). In the end, science itself demonstrates that a state of affairs cannot be separated from the potential through which it takes effect.28 In short, science observes actuality at a distance from the creative chaos that gives rise to it, but it is inspired less by the concern for unification in an ordered actual system than by a desire not to distance itself too much from chaos, to seek out potentials in order to seize and carry off a part of that which haunts it, the secret of the chaos behind it, the pressure of the virtual (WIP, 147/156). V Now if art is ultimately more creative (and thus closer to philosophy) than science, this is clearly not because it is somehow more intimate or humane, more subjective or personal - less abstract - than science. On the contrary: arts privilege stems precisely from its higher impersonality, its more radical power of abstraction, its ability to transcend, without abandoning the logic of sensation, the scientific plane of reference and actuality. Art thus occupies an inter-mediate place between the pure virtuality of philosophical concepts and the pure actuality of scientific states of affairs. Art composes actively creative works of sensation, whose ontological status is neither virtual nor actual but possible (WIP, 168/177). Insofar as what is composed is sensation - insofar as the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else - it leans toward the realm of actuality. But insofar as the creation of such beings is itself active and inventive - insofar as the compound of created sensations stands up on its own (WIP, 155/164) - art participates, immediately and without reserve, in the univocal expression that is creation in general. Sensation is pure contemplation, but contemplation is creating: embodied thought, sensation is nothing other than the mystery of passive creation (WIP, 200/212). If philosophys conceptual becoming is [creative] heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form, arts sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter of expression which unlike science does not actualise the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it: it gives it a body, a life, a universe (WIP, 168/177). Art, we might say, creates an echo chamber in which pure sensation can vibrate in itself, in its undiluted intensity, independently of both the object and the subject of sensation. Independently of the object, because art is defined by its ability to make sensation (a smile, a grimace, an emotion ) endure for its own sake, without regard for the corruption of its material support. Through artistic composition, it is no longer sensation that is realised in the material but the material that passes [] ascends, into sensation (WIP, 183/193). And independently of its subject, because every movement back toward the virtual or creative must proceed, by definition,
EVERYTHING IS REAL

28. Deleuze and Guattari give an example from particle physics, a discipline populated by countless infinitely subtle observers: in the actuality of the atomic nucleus, the nucleon is still close to chaos and finds itself surrounded by a cloud of constantly emitted and reabsorbed particles; but a further level of actualisation, the electron is in relation with a potential photon that interacts with the nucleon to give a new state of the nuclear material, in WIP, op. cit., p145/ 153; p124/131.

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in the absence of an independent subject. Artists are conduits for the anonymous creatings that proceed through them, channels for the nonhuman becomings of man. Or again: art is the answer to the question, how can a moment of the world be made to exist by itself?, where this answer always involves the extraction of that moment from its apparent object and subject, its fusion with the surging energy of a cosmic becoming, through a gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it (WIP, 16263/172-73; 154/163-64). The purpose of art is not to represent the world, still less to cultivate or enrich our appreciation of the world, but to create new and self-sufficient compositions of sensation, compositions that will draw those who experience them directly into the material vitality of the cosmos itself. The artist is not the more refined cousin of those craftsmen who impose beautiful form upon inert matter, but rather the liberator of creative anarchy in matter itself. The artist does not observe the world or inhabit the world, so much as demonstrate how we become with the world [] Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero (WIP, 160/169). Freed from an object, stripped of a subject, deprived of reference, these becomings or sensations cannot be contained within the confines of lived experience [le vcu]. In its virtual intensity, life creates zones where living beings whirl around, and only art can reach and penetrate them in its enterprise or co-creation. Co-creators with life, every artist is a seer, a becomer, someone who lives at an intensity that ordinary life cannot sustain. The artist is someone who has seen something in life that is too great, too unbearable for ordinary communication. Literary characters, for example, can only exist because they do not perceive but have passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensations. Ahab really does have perceptions of the sea, but only because he has entered into a relationship with Moby Dick that makes him a becoming-whale and forms a compound of sensations that no longer needs anyone: ocean (WIP, 154-162/164-173). Consider Deleuzes most highly developed example: cinema. What cinema demonstrates above all, says Deleuze, is the machinery of time as such. As it evolves from its early confinement in Hollywoods entertainment industry through to the more purely experimental terrain of Europes nouvelle vague, cinema progresses from an essentially indirect treatment of time - time filtered through actual movement, through the co-ordination of actions and reactions in a well-defined field of reference - to an ultimately direct or immediate treatment, one that blends with the pure creative virtuality of time in its pure state. In the process, cinema sacrifices the co-ordinating subject of ordinary action (the subject exemplified by the great Western heroes) so as to clear the way for an exposure to pure sound and optical situations, situations in which it is impossible to live, situations impossible to endure, but which open directly onto that beating heart of reality that is
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Deleuzes invariable concern. Paralysed, dismembered, actors become pure seers, exposed without reserve to an intensity that explodes all actuality.29 Such seers, though actually helpless, are co-creators with time in its pure (or exclusively creative) state. There is no more an in-between art and life, for it is the whole of the real, life in its entirety, which has become spectacle - this is life as spectacle, and yet in its spontaneity.30 They are absorbed with the ultimate identity of virtuality and pure thought, in a creative movement that unites negative and positive, place and obverse, full and empty, past and future, brain and cosmos, inside and outside.31 An essential part of this process, accomplished in any genuinely artistic sequence, is the conversion of an actualised space into a quasi-virtual or creative space, what Deleuze calls an espace quelconque [any-space-whatever]. Such a space is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualisation, all determination []. The any-space-whatever retains one and the same nature: it no longer has co-ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of things or milieux which actualise them (have actualised them or will actualise them, or neither the one nor the other - it hardly matters).32 Access to such a space is nothing less than access to a place of pure creation, abstracted from the limits of actuality. The outcome is anticipated in the visionary films of Yasujiro Ozu, in which co-ordinated movements and actionimages have been replaced by pure optical and sound images. Along the way, whether through disconnection or evacuation, Ozus spaces are raised to the state of any-space-whatevers . They thereby reach the absolute, as instances of pure contemplation, and immediately bring about the identity of the mental and the physical, the real and the imaginary, the subject and the object, the world and the I.33 Access to the plane of this identity, the plane of pure creation in which everything is real and every reality is in the same way, is the exclusive concern of Deleuzes philosophy. The way we structure our ordinary experience amounts to an attempt to cut ourselves off from this plane. We remain trapped in delusions of equivocity, caught up in the merely apparent distinctions that divide mental and physical, real from imaginary, and subject from object. As actual beings we tend to forget the virtuality we express. Art and science make complementary contributions to its philosophical recovery insofar as they prepare for and enable the redemptive movement of counterEVERYTHING IS REAL

29. Cinema 2, op. cit., p59/41.

30. Ibid., p112/84; 118/89. 31. Ibid., p281/215; Cinema 1, op. cit., p290/215.

32. Cinema 1, ibid., p155/109; 169/120.

33. Cinma 2, op. cit., pp27-32/16-20; cf. 281/215.

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actualisation, the movement whereby a particular creature can reverse the course of its genesis (and the cause of its forgetfulness) and thus access the active, impersonal creating that it most essentially is. Science orients static actuality in line with dynamic virtuality, whereas art evacuates actual sensation so as to expose, in an espace quelconque , the creative intensity it contemplates or contains. Only philosophy, however, will be able to claim a fully virtual consistency, a creative power unlimited by its medium or element. Only philosophy can claim to be fully autonomous in its creation, in the creation of concepts that owe nothing to actuality. Only philosophy, in short, can claim immediacy to the infinite speed of creative thought as such.

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