Deleuze and the Heideggerian Connect!

Well, for a little flashback to my chanced Deleuzean rendezvous!

When we met up with Dr. Kunhammad in Kannur months back, we all had such a delightful rendezvous over a cuppa in his (HoD’s) room.

There, we were discussing a whole lot of literary delights, from Spivak to Deleuze, giving little heed to Time’s wing’d chariot!

It was then, during this enlightening chit chat, that I chanced to know that Dr. Kunhammad is a Deleuzean! And howww!

This proved the much-needed impetus for me to revive my reading on Deleuze, and I was surprised to find some delightful, lovely streaks that links him with a host of philosophers, Heidegger in particular! This Heideggerian streak runs through Deleuze, on a host of concepts, much more so, with the concept of assemblage and that of the rhizome in particular!

But I’m still quite confused on a lot of his ideas. So me thought of reproducing some of them that I found a bit more easy on the eyes and mind! 

Thanks a million to Dr. Kunhammad for lighting the Deleuzean spark in us all!

This critique, given below, is from a book on Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus by Brent Adkins.

If I could give a tentative title for this passage that’s featured below, I would say…

Which do you prefer? Stability or Change?

Wanna have a stable schema for life, or changing vistas for life?

So here goes…

Between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari collaborated on a book that’s on Kafka.

Kafka continues many of the themes found in Anti-Oedipus, such as Oedipus and desire, and anticipates many of the themes that will be taken up in A Thousand Plateaus, such as immanence and assemblage.

I want to show that the concept of "assemblage" (agencement) provides the book with its thematic unity.

Deleuze himself is quite explicit about this.

When asked in an interview about the unity of A Thousand Plateaus, he replies, "I think it is the idea of an assemblage."

We can think of "assemblage" as an answer to the venerable philosophical question, What is a thing?

The trouble with "things," as philosophy soon discovered, is that they seem to combine two contradictory properties: stability and change.

Identifying a thing as a table entails both the recognition that the object possesses some kind of permanence but also that it is also subject to modification.

The desk in my office, for example, has numerous scars and stains on the top, and a couple of the drawers are missing their pulls. It's still recognizable as a desk, but it's also easy to imagine this sort of decay happening to the point where the desk is no longer recognizable as a desk.

Furthermore, long before that happens, it will be no longer usable as a desk. While Heraclitus and Parmenides sought to minimize either stability or change, Plato responded to the problem by strictly separating these two properties into the discontinuity of the sensible and the intelligible.

The establishment of the discontinuity between the sensible and intelligible, as we have seen, is the inaugural gesture of Western philosophy and has been the predominant way of dealing with the paradox of the "thing."

The stability of a thing is attributed to its intelligible nature, while the thing's ability to undergo change is attributed to its sensible nature.

For the most part, the properties related to the thing's intelligible nature are its essence, while the properties related to its sensible nature are its accidents.

Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblages addresses the paradox of the thing in a radically different way.

Deleuze and Guattari are thus faced with two interrelated problems.

First, they must (re)articulate things in terms of assemblages.

These assemblages, furthermore, are to be thought as concrete collections of heterogeneous materials that display tendencies toward both stability and change.

The second problem is that because Deleuze and Guattari are uncovering the tendency toward change as crucial to understanding assemblages, one might take them as arguing that the task of philosophy is to pursue the tendency toward change to the exclusion of the tendency toward stability.

The danger of an unrestricted tendency toward change is just as great as that of an unrestricted tendency toward stability. To adapt a line from late in A Thousand Plateaus, never believe that change alone will suffice to save us.

For Deleuze and Guattari any given thing thus exists on a continuum that lies between the fully intensive and the fully extensive.

Take a human body, for example. A fully grown adult has converted most of its intensive processes into stable extensities.

An adult won't grow anymore, change eye-color, or develop gills. Some processes, though, remain at the intensive level even in an adult. Chief among these are biological metabolism, which takes flows of nutrients themselves converted from food, which is extensive-and through the process of digestion absorbs the nutrients to maintain the stability of the adult human body.

In the same way, we might also think about thought itself as an intensive process. Thoughts seem to percolate in and out of conscious awareness for the most part. However, thoughts can also coalesce around a particular idea.

It's only when jealousy becomes fixed as an idea (extensive) that it begins to orient one's other thoughts and behaviors.

Thus, every plateau will have three components: 1) The moment of stability under consideration. 2) One pole on an intensive continuum that marks the plateau's limit in terms of stability. 3) Another pole that marks the limit of change.

Each chapter of this book will seek to make explicit these three aspects in every plateau in A Thousand Plateaus.

As a brief example of what l have in mind, let's look at language.

Language is a concrete assemblage that evinces tendencies toward stability.

This tendency toward stability in language Deleuze and Guattari call, the being major of a language. In order for a language to be major it must have the support of numerous other assemblages, particularly a government powerful enough to declare a language "official" and pass laws with regard to what language a government's business is to be conducted in.

Government-sponsored education bolsters the language's status by ensuring the teaching of the "proper" rules of grammar.

At the same time, however, other forces destabilize a language.

Everyday usage, borrowings from other languages, literature, and slang continually disturb the stability of a major language.

As a concrete assemblage, a language is the dated, singular zone of stability that is the result of intensive processes with tendencies toward both stasis and change.

A Thousand Plateaus is the exploration of assemblages or plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate how to create concepts in a way that does not presuppose a metaphysics of discontinuity!!!