Title The logic of difference in Deleuze and Adorno

Author(s) Wu, Jing; 吴静

Citation

Issue Date 2009

URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/130908

Rights The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patentrights) and the right to use in future works.

Abstract of thesis entitled

The Logic of Difference in Deleuze and Adorno: Positive

Constructivism VS Negative Dialectics

Submitted by

Wu Jing

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

at The University of Hong Kong

in October 2009

Deleuze and Adorno are two of the most influential thinkers in the twentieth

century, especially in the post-war period. My thesis is a comparative study of

their philosophies. It focuses on the ways these two radically different thinkers

attempt to break away from the primacy of identity and pursue freedom and the

new. This attempt is the common logic of difference shared by them. On the other

hand, such a logic of difference is expressed in two opposite ways: Deleuze’s

positive constructivism and Adorno’s negative dialectics. The thesis argues that

this distinction is derived from their dissimilar understanding of the concept of

difference. For Deleuze, difference is an ontological being-in-itself that always

repeats like the Nietzschean eternal return; while for Adorno, it is a negative

nonidentity or contradiction that refuses to be reconciled. These two views of the

concept of difference stand in a strong contrast between the affirmative and the

negative. Such an irreconciled opposition is present in every respect of their

theories. My thesis aims to reveal the similarity (the common logic shared by

them) and the difference (their different strategies and conclusions) between

Deleuze and Adorno, and then examine the root that causes the similarity and the

distinction. Moreover, the last chapter provides a reflection on the limitations of

the struggle of Deleuze and Adorno for freedom at the practical level. It points out

a gap between the thinker’s theoretical intentions and their political applications.

(238 words)

The Logic of Difference in Deleuze and Adorno:

Positive Constructivism VS Negative Dialectics

by

Wu Jing

(吳 靜)

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

at The University of Hong Kong.

October 2009

i

Declaration

I declare that the thesis and the research work thereof represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation or report submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other qualifications. (Note: If part of the research work in your thesis has been carried out in collaboration with other parties, please indicate here the extent of collaboration, including jointly published work.)

Signed …………………………………………………………

ii

Acknowledgements

I owe profound debt of gratitude to Dr. Timothy O’Leary, my supervisor,

for his extraordinary patience and constant encouragement during the past four

years. At the very beginning of my study, he has given me many useful

suggestions to help me choose my topic for the thesis. At all the stages of writing,

Dr O’Leary has continuously offered me much illuminating advice and comments

to improve the form and content of my thesis. Moreover, he has also provided

some helpful resources for me. Without his help, this work would not have

reached its present form.

I would also like to express my deep gratitude to many people who have

contributed to or have helped with the development of this thesis in their special

ways during the years that it has been in preparation. Professor Zhang Yibin

(Nanjing University), his knowledge of critical theory helped me a lot in

understanding Adorno’s philosophy. Professor Ci Jiwei (HKU), with his unique

insight he made some critical suggestions about my proposal. In addition, I am

greatly indebted to my fellow graduate students whose disputable viewpoints in

seminar and reading group provided other insights in my working out the

problems.

Third, my thanks would go to my beloved family for their supporting all

through these years.

Finally, I wish to thank God for giving me the opportunity to study and

completing the thesis in such a nice atmosphere at HKU.

iii

Contents

Declaration ............................................................................................................i

Acknowledgements............................................................................................. ii

Contents ............................................................................................................... iii

Introduction

Why Deleuze VS Adorno? .........................................................................1

Deleuze and His Philosophy .....................................................................3 Adorno and His Philosophy......................................................................8 The Possibility of a Comparison between Deleuze and Adorno ............12 Research Methodology and Strategies....................................................18

Chapter 1

Anti-dialectic VS Dialectic: Against Ontology .............................23 1.1 Deleuze’s Anti-dialectics: The Univocity of Being..........................25 1.2 Adorno’s Negative Dialectic ............................................................37 1.3 Deleuzian Affirmative Forces and Adorno’s Negative Power .........46

Chapter 2

Transcendental Empiricism VS Historical Empiricism.................59 2.1 The Deleuzian Construction of the Transcendental Field ................66 2.2 Adorno’s Priority of the Object ........................................................76 2.3 Constituted Subject: Disappearance of Antagonism of Subject and Object......................................................................................................84

Chapter 3

Difference VS Nonidentity: Against Identity ................................92 3.1 Deleuze’s Difference-in-itself...........................................................96

iv

3.2 Adorno’s Nonidentity .....................................................................106 3.3 Internal Difference: Against Representation and the Identical.......116

Chapter 4

Rhizome and Constellation: New Modes of Production .............123 4.1 Rhizome: Construction of the Field of Signification......................124 4.2 Constellation: A Utopia of Nonidentity..........................................135 4.3 Concepts in Relation: The Power of Production ............................145

Chapter 5

Positive Constructivism VS Logic of Disintegration ..................156 5.1 Deleuze’s Philosophy as Positive Constructivism..........................157 5.2 Adorno’s Logic of Disintegration...................................................167 5.3 How Does One Achieve Internal Difference? ................................178

Chapter 6

Striving for Exit to Freedom ........................................................181 6.1 Deleuze: Enterprising Freedom ......................................................187 6.2 Adorno: Redemption as Aesthetic Freedom...................................195 6.3 Exit to Freedom: Where Does Freedom Arise from? .....................204

Chapter 7

The Limitation of Freedom: Constant Totalization .....................208

Conclusion

Meditation on Modernity .............................................................227

References .........................................................................................232

1

Introduction

Why Deleuze VS Adorno?

My dissertation is a comparative study of Gilles Deleuze and Theodor W.

Adorno. It focuses on the ways these two radically different thinkers attempt to

break away from the primacy of identity and pursue freedom and the new. This is

the common logic of difference shared by both of the thinkers. Through

comparative research, the dissertation aims to point out the superiority of

Deleuze’s positive constructivism over Adorno’s negative dialectics in the

practical sense. Deleuze and Adorno are two of the most important thinkers in the

20th century, especially in the postwar period. Both have wide interests in

philosophy, literature, fine art, etc., although of course philosophy is their main

concern. However, due to the differences in their methodology (Deleuze’s

constructivism as opposed to Adorno’s dialectics) and in their attitudes (Deleuze’s

optimism as opposed Adorno’s pessimism), their theories and philosophies

develop in very different directions. According to my understanding, both Deleuze

and Adorno converge at the point that they share the idea of “internal difference”

(Nesbitt, 2005, pp. 75–97) that assumes a critical attitude of the principle of

identity1, because both of them commit themselves to seeking ways to break

1 Nesbitt proposes this term in his essay “The Expulsion of the Negative: Deleuze, Adorno, and the Ethics of Internal Difference.” He argues that the ethics of “internal difference,” central to Deleuze’s early writings, can serve to underpin a critical and reflexive ethics of constituent subjectivity. I agree with his opinion. However, I do not think that internal difference is achieved negatively by Deleuze through an expulsion of negativity. Although Adorno never uses the term “internal difference” to Nesbitt’s knowledge, I refer to his opposition to the primacy of identity with this term.

2

through the restrictions and to transcend the limits of modern society. The

principle of identity, precisely the primacy of identity, for Deleuze and Adorno,

results in a hierarchical order in every respect by reducing difference to identity.

Both thinkers argue against the secondary position of difference and try to

emphasize its ontological privilege over identity. In doing so, they apply their own

theories to their critiques of capitalism and of history, devoting themselves to the

realization of freedom in modern society. Nevertheless, on account of the

differences in several primary aspects, they draw radically different conclusions,

regardless of the logic they share: internal difference. Considering the

heterogeneous nature of beings and relations, such a logic is in fact resistance of

identity that is conventionally seen as self-same persistence to make an entity

definable and recognizable. Thus, there emerges a seemingly odd result: the logic

of internal difference has developed into two opposite tendencies, Deleuze’s

positive constructivism and Adorno’s negative dialectics.

It is at this point that my interest arises. My dissertation is intended to

reveal the similarity (the logic they share) and the difference (their strategies and

conclusions) between Deleuze and Adorno, and then examine the root that causes

the similarity and the distinction. For the two thinkers, what interests me most is

to correlate the analysis of the conditions of the new with the critique of modern

society. With this critique, a way to freedom may be viable in a highly

administered society. To achieve this aim, I begin my thesis by analyzing the

major difference between the attitudes of the two philosophers toward dialectic

3

and methodology. Then I choose to compare two pairs of concepts: difference and

nonidentity, rhizome and constellation. These concepts are central to the

respective theories of Deleuze and Adorno. I juxtapose them because I believe

that they indicate the convergence point and the divergence point of the two

philosophies in how to produce the new. The first pair of concepts (difference and

nonidentity) illustrates the thinkers’ understanding of internal difference. The

second pair (rhizome and constellation) proposes the models to produce the new.

On this basis, I try to contrast Deleuze’s positivity to Adorno’s negativity on a

pragmatically political level by accounting for the possibility of freedom in

modern society.

However, before beginning, there is a question I have to confront: why

Deleuze and Adorno? What provokes me to pay attention to them? It is almost

impossible to start my research unless I answer these questions first. I begin with

an overview of each of these thinkers and their philosophy. I return to the above

question in the section “The Possibility of a Comparison between Deleuze and

Adorno.

Deleuze and His Philosophy

The thought of Gilles Deleuze has had an extraordinary impact around the

world. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential and revolutionary

philosophers of the 20th century. From the early 1950s until his death in 1995

4

(when he committed suicide), he (later with Félix Guattari) wrote a number of

prominent works that cover the fields of philosophy, psychology, film, literature

and painting. His complex theories have had implications in several disciplines. In

particular, his books Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense

(1969) have been considered systematic elaborations of his philosophy. In his

lifetime, there is a landmark year to be noted: in 1969, the encounter with the

psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. They coauthored a number of influential texts,

notably the two volumes of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972)

and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), which are

considered critiques of capitalist society. Among all of these critical writings, we

can see the shift of his main concern in different periods: from his early writing on

histories of philosophy to his later works in critical philosophy and

unconventional literary criticism. If those monographs on particular modern

philosophers2 can be seen as constructing a selective history of philosophy, then

his texts organized by distinct concepts (e.g., difference, repetition, sense) can

been seen as establishing the framework of his own theory. However, his disparate

interests and writings share a common concern that runs through his life as a

philosopher: how to create the new, because the new for him calls for the forces in

thought that are not the forces of representation and of recognition but the powers

of a drastically other model that can endow thinking with vitality by putting it into

2 These philosophers include Spinoza, Nietzsche, Leibniz, Hume, Bergson and Foucault. According to Deleuze’s reading, Spinoza and Nietzsche comprehend philosophy as a way of liberation that is important in relation to the pursuit of the new; Leibniz contributes to the affirmation of an infinite difference and variety in the world; Hume proposes the formation of the subject from an empiricist angle; Bergson’s greatest philosophical achievement is his concept of multiplicity; Foucault presents a challenging view of desire and power.

5

movement. In Difference and Repetition in which he elaborates his theory of

difference, he defines difference as the internal and primary factor in unity.

Apparent unities are composed of an endless series of differences that construct an

open plane with infinite potential to produce the new. The new indicates the

capacity for change; it is the outcome of encounter and creation. It is this inherent

capacity that presents being (becoming for Deleuze) as difference. Actually

according to Deleuze, the new is produced by the different relations of the

affirmative heterogeneous elements within the open plane. Contrarily, dialectic is

nothing but a closed spiral, stretching itself in only one direction.

Deleuze’s whole intellectual experience can be traced by his shifting

relationship to the history of philosophy. Starting from a few monographs on

philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Leibniz, he

engages himself in struggling with traditional metaphysical philosophy. The

reason is that, for him, the old metaphysical fashion has blocked the flows of

thought of human being. At the beginning of Difference and Repetition, he

expresses his interest in discovering a way to think of difference apart from the

Aristotelian framework. According to him, such a framework meets the demand

for coherence by constructing a conceptual hierarchy that is imposed by identical

generic concepts. As a result, people think of difference in the form of specific

difference that is in fact secondary to an assumed identity. In doing this, thought is

imprisoned for it has been dominated and directed by the pattern of representation.

To fight against such a philosophy of identity and of representation, Deleuze takes

6

an atypical way from his contemporaries who were more or less following the

Hegelian tradition. (In the postwar period, most French philosophers were

immersed in German theories derived from the “three Hs”: Hegel, Husserl and

Heidegger.) Deleuze, however, argues against not only Hegel but also the overall

history from Plato to Descartes. Deleuze follows the way that Spinoza and

Nietzsche initiated: against the history of Logos. According to Deleuze,

philosophy (of reason) relates to the State, for it starts from and serves a common

ground: the established order. In fact, either history of philosophy or State is the

production of reason. Notions such as universal, method, recognition, and

meaning are subject to reason. And the history of reason ignores and conceals all

the things outside. When we use concepts such as history or language, a kind of

awareness of the power to perform agency has emerged. Either the history or

language essentially demands coherence. In other words, to make sense of

“history” or “language,” it is necessary to conceive it in a consistent, ordered and

organized way. Otherwise, history would be no more than a crowd of occasional

phenomena and language would be a pile of meaningless utterances. Thus, the

demand for coherence and consistency implies a logic of identity that Deleuze

believes oppresses difference and accordingly snuffs out the possibility of the

new.

Deleuze has made a drastic attack upon Hegelian dialectic. In Nietzsche and

Philosophy, he states that dialectic is an awkward trick that veils the affirmative

element of difference by negation, so that the overall process of becoming is

7

placed under the principle of identity (1981, p. 196). The dichotomy of difference

and identity in dialectic seems to operate with extreme differences alone. But the

synthesis of two opposite terms, such as being and non-being, actually overcomes

the earlier opposition. In this sense, negation in fact is an oversimplified form of

difference. This fact is the secret and the power of dialectic. In other words,

negation forms a circle that assimilates difference-in-itself through the mediation

of the negation of negation (or, in Marxian terms, sublation). Deleuze proposes

that, in the relation with the other, the force that makes itself obeyed does not

deny the other or that which it is not, but it affirms its own difference and enjoys

this difference. It is a kind of emphasis on affirmative heterogeneous elements.

Moreover, Deleuze directs his attention to real life. He criticizes that

modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they

can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must

overturn established identities and so become all that we can become—though we

cannot know what that is in advance. The practical way to freedom is to create.

However, here freedom is not equated with the liberty to move about and pursue

one’s interests within a given social formation or State; rather, it concerns the

conditions of change for the social structure itself. Already in Difference and

Repetition, then, Deleuze gives the concept of freedom an altered set of

components, making it correspond to one of the fundamental problems of his

philosophy, namely, the conditions for the production of the new. Thus, freedom

is the freedom to escape from the fixed being and territories, the freedom of a

8

prison break from the fate designated by Reason, and the freedom of becoming.

The impulse to create goes throughout the life and work of Deleuze. He

describes philosophy as “an art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts”

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 2). His struggle against totalitarianism, against

dialectic and Hegel, his accent on difference, even his transcendental empiricism

all demonstrates such a theoretical intention: to break away from the bondage of

modern society and to ceaselessly approach the outside.

Adorno and His Philosophy

As one of the members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno puts emphasis on

the critique of modern industrial society. He has a wide interest in art, literature,

and music and works out numerous texts in these fields. Many of them are

relevant to his philosophical propositions and have been developed in many

strands of contemporary critical theory. In his last years, he published one of his

most important books in philosophy, Negative Dialectics. A key notion in the

work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment has been the idea

of thought as an instrument of domination that subsumed all objects under the

control of the subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e., of identifying

as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with concepts, and

regarding as unreal or nonexistent everything that did not. Adorno’s “negative

dialectics” is an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would

9

recognize its limitations and accept the nonidentity and reality of that which could

not be subsumed under the subject’s concepts.

The text Negative Dialectics goes beyond the classical Marxist framework.

In fact, Adorno is to a great extent influenced by Walter Benjamin’s application of

Karl Marx’s thought. He criticizes Karl Popper and Martin Heidegger for positing

the “primacy” of the object, because he believes that there is never an independent

object that is in fact subjectively defined and mediated. The topic of any

“primacy” indeed confirms a kind of identity, whatever it is. Believing in the

intermediation of the subject and the object, Adorno argues that the key of all

preceding philosophies—either idealism or materialism, either nominalism or

realism, whatever ignores the intermediation between the subject and the

object—is to presuppose a certain identity, which has shaped the foundation of

totality of a system (Adorno, 1973b, pp. 146–48). He also acknowledges the

importance of identity that functions as the nature of thinking. The declaration that

“to think is to identify” (p. 5) directly uncovers the essence of different

philosophies and theories, the presupposition of identity that derives from the

ability of reason of human beings. Generally speaking, because what thinking

seeks to comprehend is structured to accord with identity (which provides the

possibility for the totality of system), such an a priori presupposition to constitute

the metaphysical foundation of each philosophy is actually the output of thinking.

What has happened here is that philosophers generally regard the production of

their thinking as the transcendental supposition of philosophy, which is mistake.

10

This is an inversion in essence that Adorno argues against.

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno subverts the concept of positive dialectics in

its traditional form by debunking pseudo-negation in Kantianism and Hegelianism.

Kant develops his critique of dialectics on the basis of the critique of pure reason.

As Kant puts it, due to the restriction of the capacity of reason, dialectics presents

the logic of illusion. Adorno criticizes such dialectics as a medium of false

epistemology by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience are not

as pure as Kant claims. According to Adorno, Kantian dialectics, which insists in

separating thought from sensibility, cannot grasp genuine experience that implies

nonidentity between thinking and its object. In contrast, Hegel regards dialectics

as a medium of truth rather than as the logic of illusion. In light of his logic,

dialectics achieves a speculative identity between thought and its object in a

positive way: the negation of negation. This is the point that Adorno argues

against because he believes that a speculative identity is nonidentity in nature,

which only occurs in a negative way. That is why Adorno describe his dialectics

as “negative dialectics”. Trying to escape from the cage of a logical system, he

describes the purport of philosophy as a heterogeneous aesthetic experience.

According to Adorno, dialectic argues against every form of ontology that

includes Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein. Adorno begins this argument by

criticizing Heidegger’s criticism of traditional ontology. In his view, Heidegger’s

objection to traditional ontology is no more than an attempt to reestablish a new

form of “primary philosophy,” the imperialism of “being”. However, such a

11

philosophical effort of Heidegger is in fact to construct a profound philosophical

trick of expressing the inexpressible. Adorno expresses his distrust in Heidegger’s

ontology of Dasein. In the light of his account of dialectic, it is against “primary

philosophy” as well as the framework of dichotomy and the logic of identity. As a

result, the essence of dialectics is defined as the consciousness of nonidentity

(heterogeneity). Adorno’s key to evolve negative dialectics is the concept of

constellation 3 , a mode of relationship that eliminates the hierarchy and

enslavements between subjects, as well as between subject and object. With the

intermediation and the inter-action of the members within a constellation, Adorno

wants to realize a non-hierarchical mode of coexistence by giving prominence to

the non-identical elements among them.

Although Adorno denies the primacy of the object posited by Heidegger, he

insists on the priority of the object that is opposed to the constitutive priority of

the empirical subject implied by the identity between the subject and the object.

Given the identity between the subject and the object, knowledge about the object

depends on the subject’s experience. However, such a conclusion presumes that

the empirical subject can completely know the object. For Adorno, what takes

place between the subject and the object is nonidentity. The reason is the two

facts: first, the subject is objectively constituted by the social and historical

conditions; second, no object can be fully known according to the rules and

procedures of identity thinking. He argues that, under current conditions, the only 3 Constellation is a term Adorno takes from Walter Benjamin, who uses it in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. “The Trauerspiel therefore has no individual hero, only constellations of heroes…” (p. 132). Constellation here for Benjamin indicates a dialectical image of history that is distinct from the linear image of history.

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way for philosophy to give priority to the object is to think dialectically. He

describes dialectics as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought

and the object while carrying out the project of conceptual identification. In this

sense, his negative dialectics can be understood as an effort to formulate a

historical materialism that reflects modern society in a critical way.

The Possibility of a Comparison between Deleuze and Adorno

Drawing a comparison between Deleuze and other philosophers has

gradually attracted the attention of many contemporary scholars. According to the

objects of the contrast, this type of research can be divided into two groups. First,

where the contrast is between Deleuze himself and those he somehow relates to

(for example, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Spinoza). Second, where the

comparison is drawn between Deleuze and a modern non-related thinker. My

research is in the second group.

The first thing that interests me is their obvious distinct outcomes despite

their joint opposition to identity. Deleuze’s emphasis on the concept of

“difference” shares a common ground with Adorno’s proposition of “nonidentity”:

both of them argue against the principle of identity in thinking, although to

different extents. Just this nuance implies a momentous theoretical distinction: an

affirmative construction and a negative criticism. As I state at the beginning of the

Introduction, the radically different conclusions share a common logic, internal

13

difference. Accordingly, a series of questions naturally emerges: what causes such

a philosophical discrepancy when they have the same logic? What kind of role do

the two concepts (difference and nonidentity) play in their respective thought and

what is the distinction between them? What are the ways in which they pursue

their respective goals? How should we understand the difference between the two

philosophers? These questions form the departure point of my research.

At first glance, Deleuze and Adorno “appear to stand in irreconcilable

opposition” (Nesbitt, 2005, p. 75). In their philosophical careers, it is difficult to

rank Deleuze in any philosophical school or faction. In contrast, Adorno was a

co-founder of the Institute for Social Research (informally known as the Frankfurt

School) and the most remarkable and influential member of the Institute. Also,

Deleuze is a philosopher of immanence and the absoluteness of becoming, and he

insists on the univocity of being. Adorno, as the foremost thinker of irresolvable

contradictions and negative dialectics, argues that there is no ground for thought

and Being. He claims that both of the concepts are constructed; the knowledge

about them is related to the subject-object relation. Deleuze emphasizes the

“affirmative” and “active” aspect of power over and over again. In contrast,

Adorno regards dialectic (although not in the Hegelian sense, but his own sense of

“negative dialectic”) as a revolutionary way that can lead us to freedom from the

domain of identity. Nick Nesbitt claims that both thinkers represent difference in a

negative way, although in different forms. However, it is remarkable that the

Deleuzian character of “affirmative” is radically different from Adorno’s accent of

14

“negative”. So, in this regard, we could without exaggeration consider these two

philosophers as absolutely irreconcilable.

Another major distinction between them is their methodology. As a

principal member of the Institute for Social Research, Adorno follows the way of

historical dialectics and social critique. He does not like to invent new terms as

Deleuze does. The expressions he has used are the writings of familiar ones that

can be found in most philosophers. However, Deleuze shows his creativity in

methodology and terminology. Insisting on a philosophy of transcendental

empiricism, he conceives a plane of immanence as the foundation of his theory.

He condemns every dualist and dialectic way, constituting experience with the

overdetermined forces. Furthermore, he borrows a number of terms from other

disciplines to express his unique ideas. Deleuze and Adorno, may therefore seem

like creatures from different planets, following very different precursors and

making use of radically different philosophical terminology that allows for little

communication to occur.

However, Deleuze is similar to Adorno in that he has the same

philosophical question and the same social concern. Deleuze’s is the problem of

the negation of the negation (even though they take different opinions of dialectic);

whereas Adorno’s is “why did totalitarianism come into power?” Furthermore,

both Deleuze and Adorno are against the theory of “representation”; they insist

that the object must not be reduced to the subject, although they pursue this goal

very differently. Adorno insists that what the object is actually goes beyond all

15

appearances, beyond the grasp of any subject, beyond the summation of the

subject’s knowledge. He interprets this kind of subject-object relation as the

unattained goal in the history of human beings and defines critical theory as the

continuous struggle to criticize the act of knowing in social reality, which always

deviates from that ultimate goal. As O’Connor writes in the preface of his work

Adorno’s Negative Dialectic (2004),

“After all, if objects, for instance, can be nothing other than what

they are determined as being by subjectivity then there is no

philosophical basis to the effort of critical theory to correct the

misconceptions of the false consciousness of subjectivity” (p. X).

Against the Kantian antagonism between the noumenal world and the world

of experience (the world of phenomena), Deleuze conceives a transcendental field

between the two worlds. This transcendental field, that is, a quasi-ontological

foundation as the plane of immanence, is not a pre-given nature but a

pre-individual transcendental field. It is productive. The plane of immanence is

constitutive of singularities or forces, which is like the current of electricity rather

than fixed points. Upon this plane, there are always many infinite movements

caught within each other, each folded in the others. Deleuze describes such a

situation as “chaos.” When a singularity or a force encounters another singularity,

an event occurs. Because there are infinite singularities, their interplay can

produce infinite new events. Thus, he successfully eludes the conventional

relationship of subject-object and constructs an overdetermined plane of forces.

16

In addition, Deleuze shares with Adorno the idea of resisting the world of

identity, because they agree that the primacy of identity is one of the causes that

lead to totalitarianism. The demand for representation makes use of all powers in

a totalizing way. As a result, an empirical subject, from which identity is derived,

is constituted. Both Deleuze and Adorno distrust such identity, but they develop

different countermeasures: respectively, constituent subjectivity and the

non-identical subject-object relation. Nesbitt points out in his essay that the

concept of “internal difference” is the ontological ground of Deleuzian being.

Although such a difference contains some similar sense to Adorno’s nonidentity, it

is less than a negative understanding of otherness. On the contrary, it leads to an

affirmation of positivity. This position of Deleuze stands in strong contrast to

Adorno’s emphasis of the negative. The latter proposes a logic of relation that

begins with the fact of nonidentity and the intermediation between the subject and

the object.

Finally, there is another point that is worth noting. For both of them, art is

thought to be one of the ways to freedom. Deleuze focuses on the works of Kafka

(the so-called “minoritarian literature”) and Proust and the paintings of Francis

Bacon. Adorno pays attention to literature and music and champions the atonal

music that opposes the traditional twelve-scale musical system. These specific art

propositions imply their hope to fight against the established system and pattern,

being their distinctive way to freedom.

From the presentation above, we have now obtained a rough sketch of the

17

relationship between Deleuze and Adorno. Actually, their relationship is more

complicated than the incompatible oppositions or the resemblance on a specific

aspect or question; it is rather like two curves that cross each other—they deviate

from the other most of the time and in their direction but meet at some key points

that determine the composition of the framework of this picture. In other words,

these points of intersection are not insignificant details; instead, they are

determinate characteristics of the theories. This may be one reason that Nesbitt

thinks it possible “to compose a dissonant relationship between these two

seemingly antagonistic thinkers” (Nesbitt, 2005, p. 75).

After describing the two philosophers and their philosophies, a question

arises accordingly: how should we think of the relation between them? Deleuze or

Adorno? Or, Deleuze contra Adorno? Or even, Deleuze and Adorno? I do not

want to provide an exclusive answer. In other words, my dissertation does not

attempt to prove that one is truth and the other is untruth. The fact is that two

thinkers of radical immanence encounter each other here with each other and offer

a set of ways that tend to defy most critical paradigms today. Indeed, it is the

internal logic of difference that might reveal an interesting connection between

Deleuze and Adorno. However, I chose the third option, Deleuze and Adorno, as

the title of my dissertation, because it seems to be more neutral and to contain

more possibilities: neither absolute opposite nor totally alike but differences

intertwined with similarities. However, if Adorno does not stand as the untruth of

Deleuze, what does the distinction between them imply? This is the question I try

18

to answer in the final chapter.

Research Methodology and Strategies

Although this dissertation is a comparative study, it does not cover every

aspect of the theories of Deleuze and Adorno. One reason is that their research

fields are too numerous to be included in a dissertation. The second is due to my

own interest in their work. The contrast between Deleuze and Adorno may reach

more than one conclusion in the light of different points of departure. I have

already indicated that I am more interested in the stress on the ethics of internal

difference revealed by their philosophies and the spirit of pursuing freedom and

change. According to my understanding, the issue of difference is of central

importance in continental philosophy because it challenges and destabilizes the

traditional metaphysics that claims the primacy of identity. At this point, the spirit

of advocating difference corresponds to the criticism of modern society. Having

experienced the tragedy of the Second World War, most Western philosophers are

confronting the problem of the possibility of freedom. So do Deleuze and Adorno.

Being aware of the constraint of highly organized society and of the ideology

derived from it, they are seeking a way to escape the compulsion, namely, to

escape the principle of identity that is thoroughly implemented in modern society.

This explains why I relate the philosophers’ opinion of difference to their pursuit

of freedom. It is their philosophies of difference that provide the depth for the

19

reflection on freedom in a political and practical sense.

In this sense, their distinct theories are indeed different responses and

approaches to the same question. For Deleuze, difference is a productive

mechanism rather than a negation of identity as Adorno claims. The distinction

between the different understandings is the key to their conflicting positions:

positive constructivism and negative dialectics. Moreover, this distinction

embodies the various aspects of their theories. I select six aspects to elaborate it,

each one in a chapter. However, I do not expect to affirm a “better” one in the

conclusion. Instead, I am more inclined to explore the illumination of one for the

other, although they have different practical significance. It is the contrast that will

provide us with the means to reflect on the limitation of each. This is the intention

and the significance of my dissertation.

My dissertation consists of seven chapters, each of which focuses on one

specific aspect of the theories of Deleuze and Adorno.

Chapter 1 mainly discusses the different attitudes of both thinkers toward

dialectics. In this part, Deleuze’s anti-dialectical position stands in vivid contrast

to Adorno’s endorsement of dialectic. To elaborate this issue, I specify their

fundamental philosophical opinion: Deleuze’s concept of the univocity of being

and Adorno’s concept of dialectic. Their criticisms of Hegelian dialectics,

especially the criticism of negation are the key points in the chapter.

Chapter 2 focuses on the similarity and difference between their

employments of empiricism. Both can be seen as empiricists but in radically

20

different senses. From this position, both argue against the conventional

subject-object relationship. However, they deduce different solutions. I compare

Deleuze’s idea of constituent subjectivity with Adorno’s idea of priority of the

object, trying to reveal the significance it implies.

Chapter 3 discusses the concepts of “difference” and “nonidentity.” This

pair of concepts appears similar to some degree at the point of stressing

heterogeneity. Nonetheless, the concepts are proposed by Deleuze and Adorno to

refer to distinct levels. The distinction between them accounts for the contrast

between Deleuze’s active characteristics and Adorno’s passive characteristics. I

explore the implications of the distinction between the concepts by elaborating the

role of each in their theories.

Likewise, Chapter 4 discusses another pair of concepts, rhizome and

constellation, which indicate two types of modes of relation that Deleuze and

Adorno expect to substitute for established systems. Their significance lies in their

breaking away from the logic of identity that predominates in traditional

philosophy. The two types of modes have different accents: the line of flight of a

rhizome and the coexistence and intermediation among the members of a

constellation. My concern is their roles in the process of production of the new.

Chapter 5 mainly discusses the overall logic of these two philosophies.

From the philosophical standpoint, they stand in completely irreconcilable

opposition: positive constructivism versus logic of disintegration. In contrast with

Deleuze’s positive (although pessimistic) way of struggle, Adorno inevitably gets

21

into a political predicament due to his opposition against praxis. However, such

an opposition does not alter their concern for internal difference. On this common

ground, we can understand them as different attempts to realize difference.

Chapter 6 focuses on their dissimilar understanding of the concept of

freedom. Deleuze discusses a kind of freedom that concerns the conditions of

change. Such freedom is neither the liberty to behave nor the power to obtain; it is

rather an ability or potentiality to produce new relations. In contrast, Adorno’s

insistence on nonidentity between the subject and the object makes his theory

politically impotent to some extent: it cannot imagine a practical way to freedom

except through the redemption of aesthetics. However, I juxtapose them according

to a common fact: they both attempt to achieve a non-subjective freedom to create

the new. Moreover, I discuss the feasibility of the two forms of freedom in

political life.

Chapter 7 is the reflection on the limitations of the struggle of Deleuze and

Adorno for freedom at the practical level. The escape they provide from

identification does not avoid the function of integration in modern society.

However, although this inescapable totalization implies the principle of identity,

we can see it as an open-ended process of becoming. With its operation, society

continuously enforces itself by assimilating difference. I argue that, in this sense,

the ethics of internal difference should be considered as a movement of

totalization, which will lead to an accelerated capitalism rather than the collapse

of capitalism.

22

The Conclusion discusses the significance of the two philosophies in

question in a reflection on the limitations of modernity. The theories of Deleuze

and Adorno provide critical analysis of contemporary society. Such analysis is

significant to understand the relation between modernity and post-modernity in

the era of globalization.∗4

∗ Due to the fact that Deleuze and Adorno have both worked with other people, my general mention of Deleuze or Adorno sometimes means Deleuze (with Felix Guattari) or Adorno (with Max Horkheimer). When the text refers to works that are coauthored by the two, I show clearly Deleuze (with Felix Guattari) or Adorno (with Max Horkheimer). This point is not specified in the following text. 4 This dissertation does not touch upon their monographs on art and literature. Sometimes I quote from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theories because that these citations involve the issues in question.

23

Chapter 1

Anti-dialectic VS Dialectic: Against Ontology

Dionysus and Apollo are therefore not opposed as the terms of

a contradiction but rather as two antithetical ways of resolving

it; Apollo mediately, in the contemplation of the plastic image,

Dionysus immediately in the production, in the musical symbol

of the will.

——Deleuze

One of the notable differences between Deleuze and Adorno lies in their

positions on dialectics. This is not purely a question of choice of methodology but

a manifestation of their radical philosophical differences. The relation between

them is similar to that between Dionysus and Apollo, as Deleuze describes.

Deleuze’s work seems rather a construction on an open field. Acting as an

explorer, he tries his best to make the veins of topographic structure clear and

construct new architectures with the spontaneous and existing conditions. He is

not interested in seeking the historical origins of the phenomena; rather, he

commits himself to finding the conditions of experience. For him, there are no

established systems. His mission is to create the new with all kinds of conditions:

planes, forces, lines, etc. In contrast, Adorno is more like a historian (so is Marx in

the same sense): a linear history unfolds itself before him; what he is supposed to

24

do is to take a meta-critique of the history to see whether it is an evolving one or a

degenerative one. Unlike creation on an open field, a linear history always has an

end. In fact, this is a presupposition that determines the judgments of the historian.

However, history does not directly display what it is; rather, being an object,

history, and the historian mutually mediate. Thus, the historian reflects on history

in the process of knowledge-acquisition. The distinction between the thinkers

reveals the contrast between two antithetical ways: Deleuze’s immediate

production and Adorno’s mediated contemplation.

The different attitudes of Deleuze and Adorno towards dialectics

demonstrate their distinctive understanding of being. Because he is opposed to

Platonic dualism, Deleuze insists on the principle of the univocity of being.

Contrary to his contemporaries’ adherence to Hegelian philosophy, he refuses to

accept the negative way of defining being with the concept of contradiction, and

intends to define the affirmative univocity of being which is neither a material

substance nor a metaphysical abstraction. Concerning this topic, Adorno stands at

the opposite position of Deleuze. Influenced by Hegel and Marx, Adorno

describes his theory in an evidently dialectical way. His two works with dialectic

in the title (Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics) presuppose a

critical theory greatly indebted to Marx’s critique of capitalism. According to

Marx’s philosophy, contradiction is given central status because it is the motive of

the development of history. This chapter describes the radical difference between

Deleuze and Adorno through an analysis of their positions on dialectics.

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1.1 Deleuze’s Anti-dialectics: The Univocity of Being

Deleuze’s distaste for dialectics runs throughout most of his works, from the

early Nietzsche and Philosophy to his final book What Is Philosophy?. In his

books, dialectics and Hegel are often treated as an underlying adversary. In

Difference and Repetition, Deleuze characterizes the task of modern philosophy as

the ceaseless effort to “overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal,

historical/eternal and particular/universal” (1994, p. xxi). At first glance, this

statement appears to be an old-fashioned claim of unity. But actually, Deleuze

denies this estimation with an affirmation that philosophy is “always and only

untimely” (p. xxi). According to him, what overcomes the alternatives

temporal/non-temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal is not a

transcendental conception of unity but a condition that is foreign to time or history:

the untimely. This qualification requires Deleuze’s theory to be a philosophy that

can transcend time. It does not mean sliding over the questions related to time:

Deleuze rejects dualism in every form. He himself defines philosophy as “the art

of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.… it has to determine its moment,

its occasion and circumstances, its landscapes and personae, its conditions and

unknowns” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 2). This statement actually pulls

philosophy out of ontology and traditional epistemology: it qualifies as a

philosophy concerning the conditions of being. Precisely, for Deleuze, philosophy

26

is not simple reasoning but a creative activity that commits itself to determine the

conditions of concepts. Because concepts, which are overdetermined, are a

fundamental ontological category of being, to create concepts is closely related to

determining the conditions of being.

For this reason, we can understand why Deleuze began his career as a

philosopher with a selective study of the history of philosophy. In his view, the

history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even

in thought. It results in a situation of disability of thinking, because “an image of

thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops

people from thinking” (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002, p. 12). Deleuze ascribes such a

situation of thinking to metaphysical dualism, or more accurately speaking, to

dialectics. Therefore, he is concerned about Descartes (the dualisms of the Cogito)

and Hegel (the triad and the operation of the negation). He is attracted by those

writers who even though they are part of the history of philosophy, escaped from

it in one respect, or altogether: Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson. Actually,

each of them is never “minoritarian” or “marginal” in philosophical history. But

Deleuze reinterprets their propositions in his own perspective against Hegelian

dialectic. They, in Deleuze’s discourse, provide the exit from a history dominated

by negation and reactive forces, or rather, create a mode of existence. They are the

philosophers of positivity and multiplicity. Deleuze endows himself with the same

theoretical task as those of these thinkers. Similar to his relation to Nietzsche, in

his books they all become Deleuzian philosophers. Some of their concepts and

27

propositions are said by Deleuze to conceive of a non-dialectic philosophy of

becoming. Like a skilled architect, he constructs his anti-dialectical theory of

becoming with pre-given materials.

In Deleuze’s early reading of philosophers, he demonstrates a methodology

of empiricism which he uses to battle against the traditional philosophy of

consciousness. His deliberate selection provides him with several crucial elements

that are indispensable to his concept of univocal being.

Deleuze’s anti-dialectical posture directly relates to his idea of univocity of

being that claims that being is univocally difference. According to him, “beings

are multiple and different, they are always produced by a disjunctive synthesis,

and they themselves are disjointed and divergent” (1990, p. 179). From the

passage we could find, the ontological proposition of univocal being presupposes

the multiple difference to overcome a dialectical dualism. First, Deleuze

presupposes that dialectics has a theological premise of synthesized unity – unity

in contradictions, because (Hegelian) dialectic brings everything into the mode of

dualism and finally attains a false ontological unity with the power of the negation

of negation. Then his rejection of dialectics would be substantial only when he

disproves the fake unity of being. In this sense, his anti-dialectical method appears

as a rejection of dualist being in the first place. Spinoza’s concept of “Substance”

provides Deleuze with a special reference for this problem. He derives his plane

of immanence, a plane of consistency, from Spinoza’s single Substance – God or

Nature, in opposition to the supporters of order and law. The plane is neither

28

transcendent nor immanent to substance. It is substance itself. It signifies a virtual

design which, for Deleuze, offers the metaphysical or quasi-ontological ground

itself: a formless, univocal, self-organizing process. As Armstrong (1997) 5

explains:

“The main feature of this type of plan6 is that it directs the

development of forms and the formation of subjects but without

itself being given in that which it gives. It is a hidden structural

and/or genetic principle that organizes and defines bodies in

terms of their forms and their functions in terms of the ends

they are to serve.”

Such an organization, in Deleuze’s theory of becoming, takes the place of

transcendence in the traditional philosophy of ontology.

This univocity of being is a fundamental thesis in Deleuze’s philosophy. It

is actually an ontological proposition. This univocal being is not an entity. The

thesis of One-Substance in fact rejects all recourse to the role of mediation which

is the central operation in dialectics. He indicates the problem of dialectics in

Difference and Repetition by saying that the “objection to Hegel is that he does

not go beyond false movement – in other words, the abstract logical movement of

‘mediation’. They [Hegelian dialecticians] want to put metaphysics in motion, in

action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts” (Deleuze,

1994, p. 8). According to Deleuze, mediation is an abstract substitution of direct 5 Armstrong, Aurelia (1997). “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Composition and Agency”. From Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (London & New York: Routledge, 1997), Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, p. 47. 6 The French word plan means ‘plane’, and sometimes ‘map’.

29

signs for mediate representation. Dialectics is problematic, because mediation

transforms affirmative univocal being into negative relations.

However, Deleuze’s concept of univocal being does not signify a single

noumenon or a material body. It is affirmation of difference and multiplicity. “The

univocity of being does not mean that there is one and the same Being; on the

contrary, beings are multiple and different, they are always produced by a

disjunctive synthesis” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 179). In this way, Deleuze resolves the

problem of “One” and “Two (dual)” or “Many (multiplicity)”. Multiplicity is

immanent to being; it is being itself. With regard to his transcendental empiricism,

a plane of immanence is composed of infinite elements whose interplay can

infinitely produce the new. It not merely identifies the “oneness” that underlies the

multiplicity, but establishes a system of production. Deleuze abandons the dualism

of mind (thought) and nature, defining them as two facets of the plane of

immanence. The interplay of the two produces infinite movement. “This is why

there are always many infinite movements caught within each other, each folded

in the others, so that the return of one instantaneously relaunches another in such a

way that the plane of immanence is ceaselessly being woven, like a gigantic

shuttle” (Deleuze &Guattari, 1994, p. 38). In this regard, the plane is not an

established and completed nature but a productive locus upon which the events

are produced. In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze (1988c) interprets the

plane of immanence as a network woven by longitude (speed or state of motion)

and latitude (intensity), which is constantly combined and recomposed by

30

individuals and communities. The interaction and embedment of particles with

different speeds create modes of life. This system of production upon the plane of

immanence overcomes an appeal to dialectical contradiction and substitutes an

open productive field for Hegelian synthesis.

Bergson is another resource that influences Deleuze’s thinking to a great

degree: Deleuze borrows his idea of relating duration to mobility and interprets it

as a ceaseless becoming where the new is created. For Bergson, duration is

smooth, mobile time rather than spatialized time. He actually treats time as space,

immobile, discontinuous, discrete and homogenous, ignoring the mobility and

heterogeneity of real time, or qualified time. Duration is neither phenomenal

multiplicity nor transcendental unity. New experience is produced within the

duration by appropriating existing experiences rather than adding to it. To put it

exactly, existing experiences in duration are the raw materials of new experiences;

the process in which the former brings forth the later is a process of production, of

intuition and of imagination; it is not one of simple accumulation. Thus, new

experience comes as a result of accumulation of memory of experience. In

Bergson’s three images of duration, the last one is an elastic band contracted to a

point and then drawn out indefinitely to create a line that will progressively grow

longer and longer (1961, pp. 163–68). It implies a ceaseless process of creation

that continuously produces novelty and has no end. The theme of duration

becomes the theory and practice of becoming of all kinds, of difference and

coexistent multiplicities. It overthrows completely the dualism of dialectics and

31

proposes a producing plane in motion.

It is Nietzsche who helps Deleuze resolve the problem of the movement of

univocal being. Deleuze uses Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return (Nietzsche

also uses the term “eternal recurrence”) to describe his univocity of being as a

process of becoming. In fact, Nietzsche never expounds on what the “eternal

recurrence” is; he only talks of “the thought of eternal recurrence” (Heidegger,

1992, p. 110). Heidegger interprets this “eternal recurrence” as the constitution of

being (1992, p. 163). But its basis is that the world totality is in a state of

permanent becoming. Insisting that being is becoming, Deleuze defines his

univocal being as the eternal return. This definition refutes Hegel’s contradiction.

Hegel concludes the essence of being as the real contradiction, namely the

contradiction of that contradiction—the synthesis. Thus, dialectical movement is

merely to bring contradiction in ever wider cycles of real contradictions where

contradictions can be overcome by synthesis. In this process, we can find three

substitutions. Dialectics substitutes the negation of that which differs for the

affirmation of difference, substitutes the negation of the other for the affirmation

of self and substitutes the famous negation of the negation and for the affirmation

of affirmation. The spiral movement of return brings everything to infinity.

Dialectics engulfs everything into a strong assimilation and transforms it into

identity. It never negates or denies but absorbs and assimilates: that is, it is

characterized by synthesis, namely, sublation (Hegel’s Aufhebung). Sublation is

such a procedure that changing occurs with preserving. Hegel endows sublation

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with a tension between changing and preserving so that it seems a solution to the

question of evolution. Its changing function does not mean to positively affirm

difference but is subject to a preservation of fixed order. It makes no room for new

ones. To this extent, sublation is not an active concept. Here, Hegel gives primacy

to identity and makes difference secondary or derivative. A Hegelian difference is

merely a conceptual account of difference, one of the poles of the contradiction,

and finally achieves identity by the strong assimilation of negation. Negation

becomes the kernel of dialectics. Alluding to Nietzsche, Deleuze compares it to

“the yes of the ass” (1981, p. 185), a yes to everything that is no, a yes that does

not know how to say no. Its opposition is the Dionysian yes, which absolutely

knows there exist possibilities to say no, and how to say no. These two types of

yes definitely differ from each other. The former radically eliminates any

difference, so it finds no choice except to accept. But the latter voluntarily says

yes (pp. 185–86). In dialectics, the movement of negativity endlessly

subordinating difference to identity forms a spiral. Conversely, Bergson’s infinite

duration of time cannot provide a way of return. Deleuze has to turn to

Nietzsche’s eternal return. From this departure, Deleuze develops his theory of

repetition that is defined as a mode of movement. In repetition, there is no

similarity, no homogeneous elements. It is an exception or transgression, pure

difference behind which “will to power” is at work. Deleuze uses this concept to

explain the production of differential elements. In Deleuze’s reinterpretation, what

a will wants is to affirm its difference. “Returning is being, but only the being of

33

becoming. … Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary

power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or

turns around the different” (1994, p. 41).

For Deleuze, Nietzsche grounds his philosophy on the critique of Plato,

Kant and Hegel. He not only rejects Platonism and creates a philosophy of

becoming on the basis of forces but also criticizes the Kantian philosophy of

critique and directs it against traditional rationalism. Nietzsche is not simply

influenced by the themes of Kantian philosophy. The most significant contribution

of Nietzsche, according to Deleuze, is to introduce the concept of value to

philosophy. Nietzschean genealogy means both the value of origin and the origin

of values. In this philosophy of the origin of value, one of the important themes is

the criticism of Kant for his failure to propose a critique of value. In Kant, value is

never an object of critique. On the contrary, he presupposes values such as truth,

goodness and beauty as transcendent values to which his other critiques resign.

However, these values are the unverified ones that Nietzsche and Deleuze fight

against. “Genealogy is as opposed to absolute values as it is to relative or

utilitarian ones. Genealogy signifies the differential element of values from which

their value itself derives” (Deleuze, 1981, p. 2). Evaluation of value begins with

the different origins of values. And what determine values are the modes of life;

difference in modes results in difference in values. According to Deleuze,

differences can be produced either in an affirmative way or in a negative way. The

Hegelian relation of master to slave operates in a negative way to represent his

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idea of negation of negation. Hegel’s dialectical relation of master-slave endows

the slave with the opposite characteristics of those of the master, forming a

pseudo-contradiction. In such an opposite, the slave is the negation of the master.

The negation becomes the means to reach affirmation. Deleuze, following

Nietzsche, denies the dualism of the relation so that he successfully challenges

dialectics in which negation plays an important role. For Deleuze, Hegelian

dialectical relation between the master and the slave is false, because Hegel

mistakenly regards the heterogeneity of two different forces as the dualist

opposition. Therefore, Nietzsche’s affirmation of the heterogeneous systems of the

master and the slave, which are dominated by different forces, is actually the

affirmation of multiplicity. At this point, Deleuze agrees with Nietzsche’s idea that

contradiction is the false simplification of the heterogeneity: it masks the truth of

the multiplicity.

Deleuze criticizes Hegelian dialectic because he believes that dialectic is

indeed a passive and negative reflection on difference: it inverts the image of

inner difference. Deleuze reveals the secret of dialectic by saying that “not all

relations between ‘same’ and ‘other’ are sufficient to form a dialectic, even

essential ones: everything depends on the role of the negative in this relation”

(1981, p. 8). Actually, this statement confirms that negation in dualism is the

kernel of dialectics.

Deleuze argues against the Hegelian interpretation of the role of negation in

the relation between “identity” and “difference,” because what affirms

35

“difference” is not nonidentity but affirmative differentiated elements which

reveal several active forces. Here he does not consider negation to be the

oversimplified form of difference, or a passive difference, but to be a certain

reactive force. Indeed, in the relation with difference, the force that makes itself

obeyed does not deny the other or that which it is not, but it affirms its own

difference and enjoys this difference. It is a kind of emphasis on affirmative

heterogeneous elements. The movement of positive differentiated elements is not

a reactive feedback but an active will. Or, more accurately, will to power is the

motor of difference. Differentiated elements and their encounter and interplay not

only contain infinite potential to produce the new but also realize them. What they

have done and are doing is just affirmation of themselves. In contrast, in dialectics,

difference never exists in its own name; a dialectical synthesis (or identity) is

never a positive outcome of progress, merely a totality realized by sublation, a

function by negation.

To sum up, the first problem of dialectics lies in its unconditional negation.

Actually, negation is a radical ontological assumption. First, dialectics

presupposes the existence of negation. Second, it tolerates the false equation

“negation of negation = affirmation” with acquiescence. Therefore, when “Other”

is regarded as the negation of the self, affirmation immediately relates to the

negation of the “Other”, namely, negative differences. In rejecting all kinds of

philosophy of transcendence, Hegelian dialectics made the same mistake.

However, according to Deleuze (1981), it is a mistake to express affirmation with

36

negation. He intends to identify difference with affirmation.

“It [Difference] is pure affirmation; it has conquered nihilism and

divested negation of all autonomous power. But it has done this

because it has placed the negative at the service of the powers

of affirming. To affirm is to create, not to bear, put up with or

accept” (pp. 185–86).

Deleuze clarifies the reason why his great anti-Hegelian motif is that of absolute

positivity, his thorough rejection of negativity. In this regard, he relates his

discussion of the active and the reactive to the relationship of “master” and

“slave.” He points out the second mistake dialectics made when he criticizes it for

its mode of reactive thinking, which he interprets as a kind of slavish thinking.

Negation, in his definition, is “a quality of will to power, the one which qualifies it

as nihilism or will to nothingness, the one which constitutes the

becoming-reactive of forces” (Deleuze, 1981, p. 64). Because such reactive forces

are reactions to some repression, they are incapable of spontaneously acting

without the repression. From this perspective, it is repression that determines the

way reactive forces act. And as a result, active forces are separated from what they

can do. They no longer will behave as a master, positively affirming themselves.

They realize self-identity through some responses under repression, another name

of which, in Marxist philosophy, is alienation. The distinction between active

forces and reactive ones bears an analogy to “master” and “slave,” or “enjoyment”

and “labor.” The reason is that “only active force asserts itself, it affirms its

37

difference and makes its difference an object of enjoyment and affirmation”

(Deleuze, 1981, pp. 56–57).

1.2 Adorno’s Negative Dialectic

Adorno wrote two books with dialectic in the title: Dialectic of

Enlightenment (coauthored with Max Horkheimer, 1947) and Negative Dialectics

(1966). The former focuses on the relation of enlightenment to myth and carries

out a critique of the Western history of intellectual enlightenment. The latter, his

most significant work, proposes Adorno’s own mode of epistemology, negative

dialectics.

Negative Dialectics is described by Adorno as a meta-critique of idealist

philosophy. It is a work that responds to Kantian and Hegelian philosophy. From

its structure and content we can find the subjects that interest Adorno: the

Introduction introduces the concept of “philosophical experience” to argue against

Kant’s distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena” and reject Hegel’s

construction of “absolute spirit.” In this part, Adorno aims to bring the readers a

new philosophical impulse: the impulse produced by a critical and dialectical

thinking is due to some heterogeneous experience, not a logic of reason that

centers on a system of concepts. This affirmation signifies three dimensions. First,

in the dimension of philosophical premise, Adorno advocates thinking of

non-totality and game, against totality and absolute essence in conventional

38

construction of philosophy. Second, in the dimension of concepts, he refuses the

primacy of identity, approving of disintegration and unattainability of nonidentity.

Third, in the dimension of dialectics, he argues against contradictions for

pseudo-unity, applauding heterogeneous dialectics that tries to break away from

the reign of totality, namely, negative dialectics.

In the preface of Negative Dialectics, Adorno elaborates his intention: “…

this Negative Dialectics in which all esthetic topics are shunned might be called

an ‘anti-system’” (1973b, p. xx). The term system here does not mean a concrete

philosophical system but the systematic construction of the dominant philosophy

of reason. The most important character of system, for Adorno, is its fundamental

principle of identity. Accordingly, to specify and realize the goal of “anti-system,”

he puts up the concept of “nonidentity” to express its radical character. In this

sense, he criticizes Hegelian dialectic for its ending the motion of contradiction

with identity. Deleuze also argues against Hegel’s equation of “negation of

negation” to affirmation. In other words, although in different terminology and

expression, to reject the Hegelian circle of logic and to oppose the primacy of

identity are the common points shared by Deleuze and Adorno (specified

Deleuzian Affirmative Forces and Adorno’s Negative Forces in this chapter 1).

The base of Adorno’s theory is the critique of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger.

He aims his argumentation at three adversaries: Kant’s proposition of

transcendental subject, affirmation in Hegelian dialectics, and conceptuality in

Heidegger’s ontological “Dasein” (Being). From his view of point, they are

39

dominated by identity thinking that prevents thought from freedom of thinking

and conceiving objects. This identity thinking is described by Adorno as

theoretical despotism against which he proposes his solution: negative dialectics.

In the introduction, Adorno gives a clear description of dialectics. However,

this description is a kind of negative characterization rather than an affirmative

definition. It in fact repeats Adorno’s announcement of his philosophical intention

in the preface, where he assigns negative dialectics the task of flouting tradition.

The reason is that, in the history of philosophy, from Socrates to the young Lukács,

dialectics means “to achieve something positive by means of negation” (1973b, p.

xix). He seeks to “free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its

determinacy” (p. xix). In other words, Adorno wishes to overcome the limits of

rationality and reductive thinking in dualities, opposition, and essence and

phenomenon, because these concepts expose a hierarchical structure dominated by

identity thinking. His mission is to reveal the falseness of identity thinking with an

authentic dialectical method that conceives a new type of relation of subject to

object, enacting a critical consciousness that perceives that a concept cannot

identify its true object.

Adorno summarizes all preceding philosophies—whether idealism or

materialism, nominalism or realism—as “philosophy of identity,” because the

nature of thinking, according to him, is identity that has shaped the foundation of

totality of system. The declaration that “to think is to identify” (Adorno, 1973b, p.

5) uncovers the essence of different philosophies and theories: the presupposition

40

of identity that derives from the ability of reason of human being. Generally

speaking, because what thinking seeks to comprehend is structured to accord with

identity (which provides the possibility for the totality of system), such an a priori

presupposition to constitute the metaphysical foundation of each philosophy is

actually the output of thinking. What has happened here is that all the

philosophers mistakenly regard the production of their thinking as the

transcendental supposition of philosophy. This is an inversion in essence that

Adorno argues against.

To elaborate nonidentity’s characteristics of anti-system, Adorno relates the

principle of identity to the totality. Because identity must offer a ground upon

which totality forms, totality is immanent to every system of philosophy. Such a

system of philosophy is similar to the basic capitalist formula which quantifies the

valuation of a thing by a quantitative form of money. Everything is brought into

an all-inclusive system. This is what Adorno refers to as the inescapability of the

marketplace. And this is another deep identity. It turns creative human subjects

into atomic and identical objects, also measured by money. Adorno is opposed to

system, for he believes that it is a logic of identity that screens heterogeneity. He

argues that dialectics is the one and only way to break away from this logic of

identity.

Following Hegel’s stress on the role of negation, Adorno makes a positive

qualification: “Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. It does not begin

by taking a standpoint” (1973b, p. 5). Standpoint here means a certain solidified

41

view or fixed theoretical supposition that drives the theoretical logic into a

teleological movement. By refusing to obey such quasi-theological presupposition

in metaphysics, Adorno shows his intention to revise Hegel; in particular, to revise

Hegel’s claim that the “negation of negation is equal to affirmation” in dialectics.

Adorno does not deny the concept of nonidentity in Hegelian dialectic. He

argues that Hegel also acknowledges the validity of contradiction in nonidentity,

but Hegel annuls it with the principle that double negation is equal to affirmation.

As a result, contradiction disappears in identity; the three-stepped logic comes full

circle in the movement of “affirmation->negation->negation of negation.”

Borrowing the rule of “negative × negative = positive number,” Hegel develops

his famous formula, the “negation of negation is equal to affirmation” without any

effective demonstration. For Hegel, as the result of double negation, “something

becomes an other; this other is itself somewhat; therefore it likewise becomes an

other, and so on ad infinitum” (1959b, p. 93). However, according to Adorno,

Hegel’s concept of contradiction indicates the untruth of identity, for “the

dialectical primacy of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the

measure of heterogeneity” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 5). In a word, although

contradiction as nonidentity is certainly the motive of the movement of concepts

in Hegelian dialectics, every step of development is always realized by unity.

Even though Hegel creates a word, “sublation,” to describe what has happened to

contradiction, this does not change the fact that contradiction is no more than a

secondary and less important element when it is contrasted with identity.

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However, there is another point to clarify. What Adorno fights against is not

absolute identity but identity as a kind of theoretical despotism. He clearly

realizes that there would be no concepts, no cognition, no knowledge or theories if

there were no identity in the multiple, because the principle of identity plays a key

role in thinking. In other words, the capacity to conclude identity from numerous

phenomena is the ability of thinking, whereas it is the condition to think and

reason. Therefore, we can even say that identity is inherent in thought itself.

Adorno never wants to deny identity completely. His object is to invert what was

inverted, nonidentity, the truth of the world, which was considered to be

secondary to identity. From this perspective, precisely what Adorno is opposed to

is not identity but the primacy of identity. He believes that it is the primacy of

identity that causes the untruth of the world. This is really an embarrassing

situation: identity makes thinking possible whereas the primacy of identity

imprisons thinking. To resolve this problem, Adorno invents negative dialectics

that is able to achieve nonidentity. However, nonidentity and “negative dialectics”

are the way to his ideal of freedom rather than to a theoretical goal. For him, the

problem of traditional philosophy is that it thinks of itself as possessing an infinite

object. In this sense, both Kant and Hegel suppose a state of reconcilement, which

is actually a theological premise, between subject and object in the first place, and

then try to achieve it. Their affirmative dialectics create an illusion that the

concept of object can include the object entirely. Hence, Adorno insists on giving

dialectics a turn toward nonidentity, which he interprets as the hinge of negative

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dialectics. He does not think that dialectics is wrong but rather that the affirmative

power in it cannot achieve nonidentity, which is the truth of the world. In the

contemporary world, to think beyond contradiction, to think “positively” or

“affirmatively,” would be not to think at all. It is merely an action of reverting to

myth or ideology. In this sense, Adorno, as well as Marx, is still a Hegelian

philosopher. He also admits that dialectics is the right way to think. However, he

endows dialectics with the mission of realizing the internal

difference—nonidentity—through the negative power. It is this point that

distinguishes him from Hegel who pursues unity in dialectic.

After the above argument, Adorno emphasizes the primacy of difference by

claiming that non-conceptuality, singularity, and particularity are primary to

philosophy. All these heterogeneous elements (Deleuze gives them another name,

difference or differentiated elements) have been ignored as the temporal and the

insignificant by all classical philosophers since Plato. The reason Adorno relates

conceptuality to identity thinking is that this mode of thinking, he believes, is

inherent to the process of conceptualization, a process constituted by abstraction

and identification. Conceptualization conceals a mechanism of domination in

which identity between concept and the signified is presupposed.

Adorno is also opposed to the idea that the totality of system comes from

the concept of God or “absolute spirit.” This attitude of anti-system represents his

thorough rejection of all ontology or theological metaphysics. According to his

view, the secret of system does not lie in its structure of logic but in real life.

44

Adorno relates identity to the capitalist economy of the market. In fact, following

the tradition of critical theory, Adorno’s critique of identity always keeps his eyes

on reality, more exactly on capitalism. He uncovers the external surface of free

market and free exchange, penetrating the internal kernel of capital. In capitalist

society, underneath the exterior of freedom and equality, people subject

themselves to inescapable enslavement. The maxim of capital increment degrades

people and makes them turn from creative subjects into one of the conditions in

the multiplication of capital. Such an opinion of Adorno continues Marx’s critique

of capitalist inversion. The marketplace is such a place where every unique

subject gains its identity through exchange. Nonidentity dies out in such a world

of identity from which Adorno wants to break away.

Adorno interprets philosophy as a special heterogeneous experience that

cannot be completely reduced to abstract spirits. Such experience is not a direct

sensible one but is an experience mediated by concepts, namely, experience in

concepts. This living experience abandons the rough superficiality of sensory

perception, preserving the heterogeneity immanent in it. The task with which

Adorno endows negative dialectics is to hold these heterogeneous elements firmly.

In this regard, he characterizes everyday life as presenting “alternatives to

choose from, to be marked True or False” (1973b, p. 32). Similar to the free

market in capitalist society mentioned above, such behavior looks like a kind of

freedom to choose, but in truth the alternatives are given. The reason is that either

yes or no responds to the given structure. They are both within anticipation and do

45

not go beyond a coercion of identity. This is why Adorno never says “yes” or “no”

to any given concepts and invents so many concepts with the prefix non-. Also for

this reason, his Negative Dialectics does not even adopt the common way of

writing. The German version of the book is a mass of discrete sections rather than

a chaptered book (the present titles were added to the sections by the English

translator). Being aware of the limit of system, Adorno tries to seek something

existing outside of system to achieve freedom, which he defines as the supreme

purpose of philosophy.

Related to his opposition to all systems and totalization, the concept of

totality, for Adorno, includes the absolute social structures in all forms, such as

Nazism. He points out that the tragedy of the concentration camps is truly the

inevitable result of identification. It is a reflection of the root of World War Two,

which was proposed in his Dialectic of Enlightenment coauthored with

Horkheimer: why is Auschwitz possible? Why does enlightenment lead to myth?

Nevertheless, Adorno fails to give a satisfactory affirmative definition of

negative dialectics. He merely employs the concept of constellation to figure a

kind of ideal relationship that is not hierarchical. But this borrowing of the

concept of constellation from Max Weber remains an abstract image. This

theoretical limitation results in the fragility of Adorno’s theory: lack of positivity

in his negative dialectics. I specify this point in a later chapter.

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1.3 Deleuzian Affirmative Forces and Adorno’s Negative Power

Deleuze and Adorno represent respectively two different traditions of

philosophy: the univocity of being (following Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza, etc.)

and the meta-critique of epistemology or historical materialism (following Marx

and the Frankfurt School). The two different philosophical positions are

demonstrated by their different opinions of dialectics.

Deleuze and Adorno are similar in that they have the same philosophical

problem, the negation of the negation. However, what is problematic for the

thinkers is radically different. Precisely what they argue against are the

contradictory attributes of the negation of the negation: Deleuze against its

negative and Adorno against its affirmative.

This notable difference between their attitudes towards dialectics derives

from their distinct opinions of contradiction, Hegelian contradiction, because the

concept of contradiction is in fact the means that otherness (difference) expresses

itself. From this perspective, the discrepancy in the logic of difference results in

the opposition between Deleuze’s anti-dialectic and Adorno’s dialectic. In other

words, each of their theories is a countermeasure against Hegelian dialectics but

on different planes and levels. So it is not accurate to say simply that one focuses

on the affirmative and the other on the negative. Simultaneously, their respective

propositions—difference and nonidentity—refer to heterogeneous elements.

Using the concepts, the primacy of difference is proposed by the thinkers

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against the primacy of identity. Nesbitt states that the concept of “internal

difference” —the ontological ground of Deleuzian being—shows some

resemblance with Adorno’s most central concept of “nonidentity” (2005, pp.

75—97).7 But essentially, the two concepts are entirely distinctive. To some

extent they emphasize the differentiated elements; however, they are based on are

two different planes.

In Hegelian dialectics, the impulse to negate is the immanent desire of a

being in every stage of its realization, because otherness is regarded as the limit of

the self. Accordingly, the spiral moment of dialectic is to overcome the limitation

and to realize a unity of the self. Such Hegelian language in fact implies a

dichotomy of the self and the other, which defines difference as otherness. It is

from this supposition that originates the dichotomy of the subject and the object.

Deleuze’s anti-dialectic lies in the rejection of this supposition. In the first place,

against the definition of difference as otherness, he claims difference-in-itself that

is the univocity of being. In the second place, from the perspective of

epistemology, he is opposed to the dichotomy of the subject and the object.

According to him, there is neither traditional subject (whatever it is) nor object,

nor action of knowing of subject; thought takes place as a pure “event” on a

pre-individual plane. This idea corresponds to the concept of the univocal being. It

is a subversion of the Kantian and Hegelian mode of knowledge-acquisition and

7 I elaborate on the idea of “internal difference” in Chapter 3.

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demonstrates Deleuze’s thorough rejection of the dualism of subject and object

and the theory of representation.

Like Deleuze, Adorno rejects such a representational model of thought that

only brings forward illusory images. However, he refuses to reduce thought to a

mere mode of being. For him, there is no a prime substance at all. The attempt to

seek a one-substance in every form is no more than retroversion to ancient Greek

philosophy. To interpret history with a one-substance, one must have ignored the

agency of the thinking subject. He argues, in classic Hegelian fashion, that pure

being, instead of being ontological or ultimate ground, itself is a mediated and

constructed concept. It is not a being-in-itself but a constructed subject that plays

a role of mediation in knowing an object. In contrast to Deleuze, Adorno does not

believe that Hegel’s problem of identity can be overcome by will or movement of

concept. Similarly, enlightenment cannot be overcome through critique.

Dialectical thinking is the only way to reach outside (nonidentity), but it must

avoid the Hegelian synthesis of contradiction; it must be negative dialectics.

Another way to explain Deleuze’s anti-dialectical position is his rejection of

pseudo-reconciliation. I mentioned that Deleuze resists all presuppositions in

theories. In doing this, he regards the synthesis of contradiction in dialectics as a

theological premise. First of all, it is a presupposed reconciliation and the tension

between the two opposites (contradictory) of being (being and nothing) is

resolved by means of a synthesis. Nevertheless, from Deleuze’s point of view, the

contradiction is suspect, not to mention the reconciliation in it. In his

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argumentation, forces are all-directional; no tension relates the two opposite ones.

Dialectics has ignored the complicated situations of the forces and presupposed an

oversimplified mode of interaction betweeen them. Thus, negation in dialectics is

no more than a mistaken image of intervention of other forces. Moreover, the

reconciliation of synthesis cannot find the ground on which it can rest. It is

something like the problem of reconciliation between God and human beings in

Christian dogma. In Deleuze’s eyes, Hegelian dialectics is still theological.

Secondly, dialectics employs negation as its operating means in the spiral

movement. Deleuze does not treat history (or, in Marx’s term, development) as a

process in which it ceaselessly negates itself; rather, history is “the succession of

forces which take possession of it [history] and the co-existence of the forces

which struggle for possession” (1981, p. 3). He advocates Nietzsche’s genealogy

because it explores the differential element of values from which their value itself

derives. In contrast, in dialectical thinking, the act of reducing complex

interactions of forces to negation must result in ignorance of differential elements.

According to Deleuze, Nietzsche argues that in interventions of forces

negation is not the aim. “In its relation with the other the force which makes itself

obeyed does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its own difference

and enjoys this difference” (Deleuze, 1981, pp. 8–9). Here, he reverses the role of

negation and succeeds in transforming it into an affirmation of difference. He

demonstrates an important difference between Deleuze and Adorno, or originally,

a difference between Nietzsche and Hegel. Following the spirit of Dionysus,

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Deleuze transforms the suffering of denying itself into the pleasure of affirmation

of difference, the pleasure of creating novelty. In this regard, we may understand

Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s contrast between Dionysus and Apollo:

“Dionysus and Apollo are therefore not opposed as the terms of a contradiction

but rather as two antithetical ways of resolving it; Apollo mediately, in the

contemplation of the plastic image, Dionysus immediately in the production, in

the musical symbol of the will” (1981, p. 12). For Deleuze, Apollo is not wrong,

but production or to produce is of more importance than contemplation.

What is production? It is in fact the creations of new attributes. Then, does

dialectic produce? It is at this question Deleuze and Adorno diverge again.

To elaborate the reason why dialectical thinking is insufficient to produce,

Deleuze compares it to the way of thinking of the slave: it is reactive. It does not

create or produce spontaneously but reacts to the master with ressentiment. In this

sense, the reaction cannot affirm positivity; it is merely revenge. This idea of

Deleuze lies in his opinion of limitations. For him, the Hegelian definition of

limitation as otherness not merely makes the overcoming of limitations a passive

and reactive action. In the passive mode of thinking, the existence of the slave is

secondary and is subordinate to the master. The master outlines the limitation of

the slave. Then, the slave treats the attributes of the master as the image he wants

to appropriate: what he wants to do is not to make the master a slave with him but

to make himself the master. What he thinks or does is no more than response to

these attributes. Putting the images aside, the slave, whose opposite is the

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Nietzschean Overman, could not imagine an entirely new image of the master in

his own name. This is the inability of reactive thinking itself. Deleuze (1981)

endows forces with the attribute of active or reactive.

“Only active force asserts itself, it affirms its difference and makes its

difference an object of enjoyment and affirmation. Reactive force,

even when it obeys, limits active force, imposes limitations and

partial restrictions on it and is already controlled by the spirit of the

negative.” (pp. 56–57)

Only active force can affirm difference, which instead of pure negation or

denial raises the positivity of differentiated elements, thereby producing the new.

For active forces, the demand for transcending limitations proceeds from its own

will, not from the pressure of otherness. Therefore, this kind of force is creative

and productive. This will to transcend is the will to produce, the will to power.

Conversely, historical dialectics operates in a reactive mode. It presupposes

a kind of suppression, alienation, as the pre-condition. Thus, it forms its practical

contradiction and its resolution: alienation and reappropriation. However, it is an

imaginary image, because dialectics deprives active forces of the ability to create

in this way. It separates them from what they can do and makes them reactive by

the concept of contradiction.

Deleuze believes that one of the errors of dialectics lies in its affirmation of

necessity. With regard to the encounter of forces, he proposes the concept of

“chance” against absolute necessity in dialectics. Because dialectical

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reconciliation is impossible, it cannot function as the intrinsic drive to push the

dialectical spiral movement. Accordingly, negation and negation of negation are

far from the inevitable direction. However, Deleuze does not waive the concept of

necessity completely. Rather, he acknowledges a certain necessity in reality and

introduces chance to necessity. He borrows the example of the game of dice to

explain “chance in necessity” in the sense that being is affirmed of becoming and

unity is affirmed of multiplicity (Deleuze, 1981, p. 26).

Adorno confronts an entirely different question. His nonidentity does not

signify the difference that is the opposite of the same; rather, it is much closer to

Hegel’s “contradiction.” The term nonidentity, which indicates the disparity

between subject and object, still implies the dichotomy of subject and object. This

kind of disparity appears as the differentiated elements that exist in the

relationship between subject and object. We can know that in the definition of

nonidentity, Adorno legitimizes the function of negation. Of course, this derives

from his approval of dialectic. In Hegelian dialectic, contradiction is regarded as

the central motor of the dialectical movement, because the limitation it indicates

imposes a demand for transcending on the subject. As a member of the Institute

for Social Research, Adorno is greatly influenced by Hegel and Lukács who sings

high praise for dialectic. However, he is still at a great distance from Lukács on

the issue of dialectic. Lukács argues in his History and Class Consciousness that

“the primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution

in science” (1971, p. 75). Such a sympathetic position toward totality showed by

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Lukács is sharply criticized by Adorno, because from Adorno’s point of view

totality is the demonstration of the primacy of identity in philosophy and history.

For this reason, he is against Lukács’ dialectic of totality, for he believes that the

inherent contradiction of dialectic implies nonidentity between thinking and its

object. In this regard, nonidentity is essentially a certain contradictory difference

that lies in the subject’s consciousness about the object. Deleuze shares one

common point with Adorno that difference does not appear as the opposite of the

same; his differences are singularities within his transcendental field. However,

Deleuze disagrees with Adorno because in Deleuze’s theory, differences do not

contain any negative factor; they are absolute differences without negation. As he

indicates in Nietzsche and Philosophy, they are essentially affirmative. Also, the

Deleuzian employment of difference does not involve epistemology; rather, it is

quasi-ontological. That is to say, Deleuzian differences are not descriptions of

phenomena in the world of experience. It has nothing to do with the discrepancy

between object A and object B.

To talk of Adorno’s concept of nonidentity, epistemology is an inevitable

topic for us. The reason is that crucial to “negative dialectic” is not only the

object’s nonidentity with itself (the concept of object) but its nonidentity with the

knowing subject. From this it is not difficult for us to find the influence of Kant.

In Kant’s philosophy of transcendental idealism, the active, rational subjects are

never able to transcend the bounds of their own mind, meaning that they cannot

access the ding an sich (thing-in-itself). For Kant, human understanding attempts

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to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Adorno’s

nonidentity actually derives directly from the inaccessibility of the cognitive

subject. Nonetheless, he does not intend to describe the limitation of the action of

knowing. The discrepancy between the subject and the object, for Adorno, does

not derive from Kantian “two-world” interpretation but from the conditions of

knowing. Hauke Brunkhorst has incisively observed this point. He argues that

“Kant’s version of dialectic is closer to Adorno than Hegel’s attempt to transform

the Kantian skepticism concerning the ‘thing in itself’ into an at least affirmative

philosophy of history” (1999, p. 5).

However, Adorno’s acknowledgement of identification does not signify that

it is the essence of the relationship between the subject and the object. For him, it

is indispensable for acquiring knowledge. Because what thinking seeks to

comprehend is structured to accord with identity (which provides the possibility

for the totality of system), such an a priori presupposition to constitute the

metaphysical foundation of each philosophy is actually the output of thinking.

What has happened here is that both Kant and Hegel misread the production of

their thinking as the transcendental supposition of philosophy. Nonidentity and

“negative dialectic” are the way to his ideal of freedom rather than a fixed

theoretical goal. According to Adorno, the essence of the subject-object

relationship is nonidentity, because the infinity of the object is beyond the grasp of

the knower. Reason emphasizes the infinity of historical conditions of the object.

In other words, it is always in a specific historical context and particular cognitive

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structure that the subject comes to know the object. As a result, the knowledge it

acquires must be historical and specific. This type of knowledge is finite and

makes sense only in the specific context.

Although there are many passages in Deleuze’s text that demonstrate his

attitude of anti-dialectic (confirmed by most researchers8), Slavoj Žižek raises a

contrary opinion in his book Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences

(2004). As Žižek argues, Deleuze, although in a literal sense, following

Nietzsche, expresses his objection to Hegelian dialectics (especially in Nietzsche

and Philosophy, Difference and Repetition), he does follow a dialectical way to

unfold his argument: to set a contradiction between difference and repetition, to

set a contradiction between minoritarian and majoritarian, to set a contradiction

between One and multitude. Žižek claims that these binary logics repeat the

instability of the traditional philosophical opposition between idealism and

materialism. Finally he comes to his conclusion “Deleuze equals Hegel” (2004, p.

94).

This statement, however, is criticized by Robert Sinnerbrink for its tendency

of Hegelio-Lacanianism (2006, pp. 62-87).9 Sinnerbrink points out that Žižek’s

fault lies in his misunderstanding of Deleuze’s concept of difference. In the first

place, Žižek cannot make a distinction between the concept of difference and

conceptual difference. He regards difference as a unity which is a resolution to 8 For example, Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, 2002; Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, 1996; Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political, 2000. 9 In Sinnerbrink’s essay, he commends Žižek’s accurate understanding Deleuzian philosophy as an effort that might open up the possibility of thinking the new. However, he argues that, in terms of the concept of difference, Žižek misunderstands Deleuze, who misunderstands Hegel. According to Sinnerbrink, Žižek’s such misreading is due to his attempt to domesticate by integrating Deleuze’s non-dialectical difference within the framework of Hegelio-Lacanianism.

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contradiction to which degree he looks upon Deleuzian difference as something

similar to Hegelian “radical universality” whose groundwork is the “identity of

difference and identity.” The striking point of this confusion is that he conceives

the relationship of Deleuzian difference and same within the confines of unity all

the time. In other words, for Žižek, difference is not independent multiplicity but

still a differential element subject to the identity of difference and identity. He

does not go beyond the restriction of dualism, not to mention represent the

essence of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” that takes the plane of

immanence and forces on it as its point of departure. Deleuze never intends to

seek an abstract totality or universality or something else as an ontological plane

in conventional philosophy. Deleuze’s radical methodology follows the

empiricism of Hume and Spinoza, but Žižek ignores this fundamental discrepancy.

He neglects Deleuze’s genetic principal “that organizes and defines bodies in

terms of their forms and their functions in terms of the ends they are to serve”

(Armstrong, 1997).

Žižek argues, “Deleuze’s great anti-Hegelian motif is that of absolute

positivity, his thorough rejection of negativity. For Deleuze, Hegelian negativity is

precisely the way to subordinate difference to Identity, to reduce it to a sublated

moment in identity’s self-mediation” (2004, p. 52). According to the rule of

“negation of negation,” he reduces Deleuzian absolute difference back into a

dialectical concept: “identity of difference and identity.” For Žižek, there must be

a solution between a pair of contradictory concepts so that they can be put into

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motion. However, this is not true for Deleuze. He never imagines an abstract

universality to mediate all opposite directions. The interaction of different forces

on the plane of immanence constitutes diverse flows, all-directional, not linear, or

spiral (in the sense of dialectic). In this way, the conflicting of the forces does not

posit contradiction but causes the blockage that produces the new.

In my view, Žižek misunderstands Deleuze thoroughly when he thinks that

Deleuze’s non-dialectical thinking of the new will turn out to be an idiosyncratic

dialectical repetition of identity. The key to such a misreading is that he

mistakenly takes production of Deleuze’s thought as contemplation.

It is evident that both Deleuze and Adorno attempt to overcome the primacy

of identity that lies in the traditional understanding of the relation between

difference and identity. From this perspective, each has made a critical analysis of

the role of negation in Hegelian dialectic. Nevertheless, they diverge at the point

of how philosophy can achieve real difference. Adorno’s insistence on negation

derives from his believing in a negative otherness, nonidentity. In contrast,

Deleuze interprets difference as the outcome of interactions of various forces.

They hold distinctive opinions of negation. Adorno believes that negation has not

been really achieved in Hegelian dialectics, whereas Deleuze argues that negation

is itself a mistaken role to define difference. Accordingly, Adorno intends to seek

a way in which the real function of negation can be exerted, negative dialectics.

However, Deleuze is more inclined to explore the conditions that can bring about

difference. It is in this sense that their distinctions demonstrate not merely their

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attitudes toward dialectic but also their methodology, the topic of Chapter 2.

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Chapter 2

Transcendental Empiricism VS Historical Empiricism

“If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept,

it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with

which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.”

——Adorno

Empiricism is a theory that insists that the origin of all knowledge is sense

experience. In the history of philosophy, it is contrasted with rationalism, which

holds that knowledge is independent of senses. However, Deleuze and Adorno are

not traditional empiricists: their empiricism is in different senses. In contrast with

traditional empiricists such as Locke and Hume, Deleuze characterizes his own

methodology as “transcendental empiricism.”10 The expression “transcendental

empiricism” marks two methodological dimensions: empiricism against

traditional ontology and metaphysics, and transcendental against conventional

empiricism. Such a methodology determines the object of Deleuze’s philosophy.

In Difference and Repetition, he provides a clear explanation of the two parts of

the expression: empiricism marks the difference of Deleuze’s theory from

rationalist philosophy, because the subject matter of the former is something

“which can be perceived only from the standpoint of a transcendental sensibility”

10 Deleuze discussed his methodology of transcendental empiricism on several different occasions. The expression “transcendental empiricism” can be found mainly in Difference and Repetition and Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life.

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(1994, p. 144). This quotation exposes the distinction between Deleuze and

classical empiricists who claims that knowledge is derived from sense experience.

What he is concerned with is not the purely empirical world but “a transcendental

sensibility.” This concern involves his critique of the role of experience in

classical empiricism. For him, experience is the events that appear on the surface

of the empirical world; it is constituted. What Deleuze seeks to find is the

univocal being behind experience. Or, we can summarize his question as “how

can empiricism be transcendental?”

First, we need to clarify the meaning of transcendental. Kant defines the

transcendental as prior thought forms that make the activities of thinking and

understanding possible. However, Deleuze does not follow this definition. He

reserves this concept to signify the non-empirical conditions of beings. In The

Logic of Sense, he states that the objective of his philosophy is “to determine an

impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field, which does not resemble the

corresponding empirical field” (1990, p. 102). This transcendental field is the

conditions of the beings in the empirical field; it is the locus where experience is

produced. It makes the empirical field possible. Here another distinction is made

between classical empiricism and Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. The main

concern of the former is with the origin of knowledge, whereas the later does not

focus on this. Its main concern is life itself.

Moreover, Deleuze refuses any transcendent philosophy whose ground is

based on ready-made and seemingly self-evident concepts. He classifies these

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concepts as “the old metaphysical Essences” (1990, p. 105), in other words, they

are abstracts that cannot explain anything; rather, they must be explained

themselves. Deleuze attempts to describe, in his philosophy, a state of “virtuality”

in immanence, which means a reality that has not been realized yet. It is not

something eternal or universal but something that leads our attention to the

conditions under which the new can be produced. In arguing against the stable

“subject” and the solidified “object,” Deleuze emphasizes a flowing subjectivity

and an accidental occurrence of an event. From this departure, he develops an

anti-metaphysics, transcendental empiricism. Following Whitehead’s definition of

empiricism, Deleuze defines the mission of empiricism as analyzing “the states of

things, in such a way that non-pre-existent concepts can be extracted from them”

(2002, p. vii). In analyzing “the states of things”, Deleuze seeks to find an

impersonal and pre-individual field out of which the individual is derived. This is

his transcendental plane, also his plane of immanence that is defined as an

a-subjective, impersonal and powerful state, which exists “in contrast to

everything that makes up the world of the subject and the object” (Deleuze, 2001,

p. 25). Deleuze affirms his own philosophy as a thorough empiricism. He takes

this position mainly because he believes that knowledge is not derived from ideas

but from sense. Sense is a transcendental concept. His interpretation of this

concept depends upon a kind of experience; however, this experience is neither an

“immanent thinking” as in traditional epistemology, nor everyday life experience

as in typical positivism. Rather, it closely relates to an open life, the

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transcendental. This is something unaffected that is actually the raw material of

philosophy. For Deleuze, refined metaphysical abstraction and intuitionistic

experience are not sufficient to explain the world: the former is problematic, and

the later is not able to provide the possibility of the new. Neither of them is the

conditions that constitute the world; they are only interpretations or inductions. He

does not need an established and closed system of interpretation; rather, what he

prefers is an open and productive field. Compared to the concept of the

transcendental subject, life is actually an impersonal singularity; it needs a wide

and wild empiricism. That is transcendental empiricism. In this sense, Deleuze’s

transcendental empiricism is a philosophy of conditions.

But, what is Deleuze’s transcendental field? It is actually the Spinozist

univocity of being that I mentioned in Chapter 1. This univocity is in fact an

ontological one-substance that is neither an empirical immediacy nor an abstract

idea. It is a field within which everything changes. Multiplicity that exists in these

changes is a virtual power. It is real but not actual. Or, in other words, the

univocity consists of multiplicity which is represented as infinite possibilities to

produce the new, not the numerical and concrete phenomena. Then, Deleuze

integrates the principles of univocity and multiplicity into one with the concepts

of the virtual and the actual.

The association between Adorno and empiricism is harder to detect. Adorno

develops in his works a critique of modern epistemology (including empiricism

and positivist philosophy) in general. The most distinctive character of his

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epistemology is what he calls “the object’s preponderance” (Adorno, 1973b, p.

183), namely, the priority of the object. The reason why he resists every idealist

philosophy lies in two facts: 1) the presupposed identity between subject and

object, and 2) the problematic priority of the constitutive subject. Against

empiricism, Adorno argues that, the priority of the epistemic subject is suspicious,

because it is itself constituted by the society which, not as a stable reality, is

continuously changed in the historical process. However, although insisting on the

priority of the object, he denies any independent and spontaneous object, for the

object can only exist in relation to the constituted subject; it is always in motion

with the historical conditions. In a letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno suggests that,

in the pursuit of understanding, “we should search for an experience of necessity

that imposes itself step by step, but which can make no claim to any transparent

universal law” (Adorno & Benjamin, 1999, p. 148). He stresses the historicity of

the constituted subject and object. However, the significance of the “given” object,

namely the fundamental question of empiricism, necessarily leads to the

questioning of the correlative subject. The answer to both of the questions can be

provided by historical philosophy, or in a more Marxian term, historical

materialism. The subject of the “given” object is never an ahistorically identified

and transcendent subject; it is ceaselessly transferred and transfigured by history

and must be grasped historically. In this sense, Adorno still confirms the dualist

relation of subject and object, but his methodology is a revised version of

traditional epistemology. This is also the methodological position in general of the

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Institute for Social Research.

Simultaneously, according to his theory of the “administered society,” what

takes place in modern society is really dominated by illusion. An empirical study

is necessary to confirm or disconfirm a stereotypical structure. Consequently,

what empiricism affirms is neither the historical object nor an actual reality. If

anything, it confirms the illusion produced by enlightenment reason. Actually,

empiricism verifies the rationality of the compulsory character of modern society,

that is, the validity of capitalist society and instrumental reason. This position is

strengthened in Adorno’s dispute with Popper. In the debate about positivism

which lasted from 1961 to 1969 in Germany, Adorno argues that the “critical

rationalism” proposed by Popper and Albert cannot contribute to the critique of

positivism. For Adorno, rationalism is absolutely not critical because it remains a

theory of science. He states that Popper mistakenly ignores the distinction

between natural science and social science because he has overlooked the

important function of the subject. According to Adorno, it is impossible to posit an

object independently of the subject, for the object is defined and mediated by the

subject. Once this precondition is neglected, social life would be understood as a

natural necessity. As a result, Popper’s theory is not a critique of the social but a

defense of the facts. At the very beginning of his essay “Sociology and Empirical

Study”, Adorno proposes a new perspective that social research should start with

social life itself. Real knowledge of society is determined by the elementary

condition of the social structure. The key condition, for Adorno, is the relation of

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exchange in the marketplace. It is the very ground of Adorno’s focus on social

life.

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno affirms philosophy as a heterogeneous

experience. The concept of experience here is borrowed from Benjamin’s

Erfahrung, which means the actual experience that the individual has experienced

in his own heterogeneous life. It refers to experience that is mediated by cognitive

judgment. The alternative of Erfahrung is Erlebnis, which suggests immediate

experience without cognition. The employment of Erfahrung demonstrates

Adorno’s empiricist attitude. This kind of experience is a departure against

conceptualization. It stresses historical dimension once again. Accordingly, I

intend to characterize Adorno’s theoretical methodology as historical empiricism.

From the above general introductions of Deleuze and Adorno in respect to

empiricism, we can clearly distinguish one from the other. One perceives a

univocity of being as a transcendental field where the virtual is the potential

differential elements, whereas the other finds contradiction to exist in the real

nonidentity of the subject and the object, of thinking and reality. However, this is

only one aspect of the problem. With regard to their respective purposes, Deleuze

intends to find how the given, usually regarded as some immediacy, is constituted,

namely, the conditions of the given. However, his goal is not to add a footnote to

reality. He does not define his philosophy as interpretation of reality. Rather, he

considers creation the mission of philosophy, because one cannot create the new

without knowledge of how it is constituted. Deleuze believes that transcendental

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empiricism is the way to bring him to this end. Adorno’s intention consists in

criticizing social reality by revealing the illusion that dominates the cognition of

the human being. Targeting the ostensible identity between the subject and the

object, Adorno seeks to reveal the nature of capitalist society, confirming the

principle of nonidentity with the intermediation between the subject and the

object.

2.1 The Deleuzian Construction of the Transcendental Field

In Deleuze’s view, each transcendental philosophy presupposes one or

several principal concepts to unfold the theoretical constructions. These concepts

or notions are self-evident because they are derived from common sense (such as

Descartes’ Cogito and ego) or abstraction (such as the Hegelian rule of “negation

of negation”). Deleuze does not want to follow either of these patterns. He is

telling us that this representational “given” is still transcendent, because the

empirically “given” is mediated by space and time as the form of the conceptually

possible. Deleuze rejects both metaphysics and commonsense (in the narrow

sense) at the same time. As a result, he takes empiricism as methodology. The

reason can be found in the preface to Difference and Repetition (1994):

“Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts,

but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an

encounter, as a here-and-now, or rather as an Erewhon from

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which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed

‘heres’ and ‘nows’.” (p. 20)

From this quotation we can find that one of the reasons why Deleuze demands a

completely new way of thinking is to oppose representation. Representation

reflects and interprets the established order, but it fails to create the new that is,

for Deleuze, the positive task of philosophy. His philosophy seeks to determine

how the given is produced. Thus, the empiricist dimension is to be situated

according to how the given is produced and what conditions allow for the

production of the given. It is for this reason that Deleuze’s philosophy remains

transcendental.

Against the Kantian antagonism between the noumenal world and the world

of experience (the world of phenomena), Deleuze conceives a transcendental field

(the plane of immanence or the plane of consistency). Both Deleuze and Kant

agree that knowledge derives from experience and that experience is constitued,

but they have different opinions about the source of experience. For Kant, the

noumenal world is the world of things as they truly are in themselves, whereas the

phenomenal world is the world of things as they appear, namely, experience.

Moreover, he believes that objective experience is constituted by the functioning

of the human mind. However, although Deleuze also believes that even

experience is itself constituted, its source is not a subjective one such as mind:

rather, experience is transcendental. This transcendental field, that is, a

quasi-ontological foundation as the plane of immanence, is not a pre-given nature

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but a pre-individual transcendental field. It is this productive plane that determines

the conditions of experience. The plane of immanence is constitutive of numerous

forces, which is like the current of electricity rather than fixed points. “These

impersonal and preindividual nomadic singularities constitute the real

transcendental field” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 109). Upon this field, there are always

many infinite movements caught within each other, each folded in the others.

Deleuze describes such a situation as “chaos” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 42).

When one force encounters another, an event occurs as a singularity. Because

there are infinite forces and the chances to encounter, their interplay can produce

infinite new events. Differences are inherent in this field as infinite radical

differentiated constituting elements. They are sources of becoming. This type of

definition and description of the plane avoids the contradictions brought by

dualism. The infinity of movements and events is immanent to the plane of

immanence. The motor to push concepts into action is not the contradiction and

transformation of the opposite forces but the interplays of all the forces.

With this plane of immanence, Deleuze develops a methodology distinct

from empiricism, which is called transcendental empiricism. It is transcendental

because it overcomes the fact that orthodox empiricism derives the abstract from

the concrete in daily experience. Deleuze, however, believes that the phenomena

of experience exist as a certain outcome of the forces behind; they cannot explain

themselves. Nevertheless, he calls his own methodology empiricism, for it thinks

of an experience, life or becoming that has no ground outside itself, such as

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subject, just experience.

Deleuze makes the important point that “Empiricism is by no means . . . a

simple appeal to lived experience” (1994, p. 35). His position actually rejects an

empirical model that is based on sense. Deleuze’s empiricism takes a departure

regarding the transcendental in general. Both subject and object emerge as an

effect from the transcendental field. This proposition is a revision of his account

of Hume’s subjectivity. In Deleuze’s first publication, Empiricism and

Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, he defines “the

special ground of empiricism: . . . nothing is ever transcendental” (1991, p. 24). In

Deleuze’s interpretation, Hume’s main concern is to establish the basis upon

which the subject is formed. However, “in the case of Hume, nothing is

transcendental, because these principles are simply principles of our nature”

(Deleuze, 1991, pp. 111–112). From the two citations above, we can find the way

in which Deleuze has derived his transcendental empiricism from Hume.

Subjectivity cannot be explained or analyzed either by subjecting it to

transcendent substance or by assigning it a transcendent status. Such an

ontologically defined subject would lead to a dualism between the conscious

subject and the empirical world. As a result, the subject is placed at the opposite

of the object; it is outside the empirical world. Such a dualism is the one from

which Deleuze and Hume wish to break away. The emergence of the individual

subject within a pre-individual field is the central question. But what distinguishes

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one from the other is that Deleuze regards as the transcendental the a priori

ground.

Deleuze argues that he has never given up the principle of empiricism by

saying that “I have always felt that I am an empiricist” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p.

vii). If empiricism can be characterized by the rejection of external principles that

dominate experience, then Deleuzian philosophy is empiricism in its strictest

sense. And Deleuze, being an empiricist, welcomed Hume’s emphasis on

externality of relations. According to Deleuze, three concepts—association, belief

and externality of relations—are key concepts with which Hume explains the

subject. Association is the principle of nature which operates by establishing a

relation between two things. According to this principle, new relations and entities

can be produced. Relations form a network. When Deleuze states that in Hume

the relations are external to their terms, he means that there is no transcendent

principle that imposes itself over the relations, neither the terms of the relations

themselves nor a deeper and more comprehensive term to which the relation

would itself be internal (Deleuze, 2001, p. 37). Thus for Deleuze, Hume’s three

concepts emphasize the constructing process of the subject: “Empirical

subjectivity is constituted in the mind under the influence of the principles

affecting it; the mind therefore does not have the characteristics of a preexisting

subject” (1991, p. 29).

Although Deleuze is deeply influenced by Hume, there are distinctions

between them. In Hume’s argumentation, he divides knowledge into two

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categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact. The first category includes

mathematical and logical propositions; the second one contains those propositions

concerning some event. However, Deleuze refuses this kind of division. He

follows Hume’s emphasis of relations, not only relations of ideas but also

relations of everything—relations of forces, relations of singularities, and

relations of events. For him, the category of relations is central to his philosophy.

He does not treat the matter of fact as a category different from the relations. On

the contrary, according to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, a purely empirical

event is not an immediate and isolated fact; it is only an effect. The relation of

forces is the a priori cause underneath the event as an effect. In this sense,

Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism starts with the relations. The encounter with

the other and the relation with the other becomes a productive system. “On this

condition the other appears as the expression of the possible” (Deleuze & Guattari,

1994, p. 17). The relation with the other introduces a difference and produces

something new. The new here does not refer to an actual and concrete fact but a

virtual power. This virtual power is brought up by the relations of the forces: it

opens the possible world and infinite possibilities.

Indeed, Deleuze’s interpretation of force formation is influenced by Michael

Foucault. According to Deleuze’s understanding of Foucault (1988b),11 every

force represents a relationship, because a force can never function on its own; it is

always in the operation of relating to others. Essentially, such a relationship with 11 The reason I do not say “according to Foucault” but “according to Deleuze’s understanding of Foucault” is that Deleuze, in his research on other philosophers or writers, interprets them as Deleuzian philosopher. Of course, we also could say that he is influenced by these precedent philosophers, but sometimes it is not a direct inheritance; rather, it is based on a Deleuzian reinterpretation of them.

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others is the characteristic or existing mode of the force. In Deleuzian terms, the

function of forces comes from neither beginning nor end, neither from center nor

margin, but from the “middle.” In these relationships, there are not any subjects or

objects; everything is expressed by relationship, the outcome of the encounter of

the forces. This is a great achievement against classical dualism between subject

and object; it breaks the theory of representation and offers a wholly new

epistemology. Deleuze does not explain the source or the form or the content of

the forces, because all these are not the right questions. If he tries to answer them,

he would fall into the trap of traditional ontology. On the contrary, about the

forces in question, as Deleuze indicates, one is supposed to ask “how does it

operate?” (1988b, pp. 70–73). A force is defined by its ability to influence other

forces and to be influenced by other ones. According to Deleuze’s description, “a

singularity may be grasped in two ways: in its existence and distribution, but also

in its nature, in conformity with which it extends and spreads itself out in a

determined direction over a line of ordinary points” (1990, p. 109). Forces can

find their own significance only in relations to others. Relations are multiple. Thus,

the flows, the encounters and the direction-turnings of the forces on the

transcendental field—the plane of immanence—create the innumerable

differences and differential elements.

Then, what does transcendental mean? Or, to be precise, what does

transcendental mean for Deleuze? The answer to this question is in fact to explain

how experience becomes transcendental. Deleuze does not believe the classical

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empiricist opinion that experience is the immediate and univocal source of

knowledge. Rather, it is itself constituted. Accordingly, he needs a transcendental

foundation to explain experience. This foundation is the plane of immanence that

functions as a network of relations. Deleuze states in his last work What Is

Philosophy? “…the plane is the abstract machine…” (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 36).

Moreover, elsewhere, he explains the abstract machine as “the map of relations

between forces, a map of destiny, intensity” (1988b, p. 37). It is actually the

genesis system in Deleuze’s transcendental philosophy and independent of the

forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute. The reason that

we call Deleuze an empiricist is that the object of his philosophy is experience,

real experience, not transcendental experience. In fact, he keeps seeking to

determine the conditions of real experience. What is immanent to experience is

not something material but the transcendental; they are the conditions of

experience in general. Transcendental empiricism does not deal with the formal

conditions of the sensible experience, nor with their material conditions, but with

the genetic conditions of the real and empirical events. These genetic conditions

are not ontological, but the a priori reason of the experience. The question that

Deleuze wants to resolve is how the individual, the event, and the experience are

derived from the impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field. This question

is not the type of Pythagorean question about how one becomes the multiple. It is

not the result of causal reasoning but an a priori genesis. With the transcendental

field, namely, the plane of immanence, Deleuze unites the univocity of being and

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the multiplicity. The generic procedure is realized with the concept of the virtual.

The relations with others induct pure differentiations that are real but not actual.

Also in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze discusses the concept of the

transcendental from the perspective of the distinction between the virtual and the

actual (1994, pp. 186—190). The plane of immanence is the very ground of the

univocity of Being. It does not refer to a substance or a form; it is a locus that

contains infinite virtualities. Influenced by Nietzsche’s principle of eternal return,

Deleuze interprets repetition as the univocity of Being. With the univocity

(repetition), the virtuality (difference) can be brought into actualization.

According to my understanding, we can grasp Deleuze’s concept of

transcendental from three dimensions.

First of all, the transcendental field is not the outside the world but within

the world. It is itself a part of reality but not in the form of experiential

phenomena. In Deleuzian terms, it is virtual, not actual; in other words, it is

beyond the reach of perception but still subject to reality. Second, the

transcendental signifies a kind of virtuality concerned with the a priori or intuitive

basis of knowledge as independent of experience. Third, in the transcendental

field, everything experiential appears in disorder. And the faculties have to

promote themselves to their utmost—the utmost of sensation, experience, body

and thought—to approach the transcendental field as such. With the plane of

immanence and the univocity of Being, Deleuze strives to articulate the conditions

for real existence, which is capable of accounting for the individual without

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falling into conceptual or ontological abstraction. His theory affirms being as a

productive process or creative individuation based on real difference, and a

challenging critique of essentialist ontology of substance. His substitution of sense

for Essence demonstrates his philosophy of transcendental empiricism. For him,

the concept of Essence is usually regarded as transcendence. Once it appears, it is

probable for readers to think of ontological or metaphysical immediacy. But the

concept of sense can avoid this kind of trouble. Deleuze (1990) states his reason

by saying that:

“Sense was first discovered in the form of impassive neutrality

by an empirical logic of propositions, which had broken away

from Aristotelianism; and then, for a second time, sense was

discovered in the form of a genetic productivity by

transcendental philosophy which had broken away from

metaphysics.” (p. 105)

The transcendental plane provides Deleuzian philosophy with a radically

different field of sense. On this plane, thinking takes place. Nevertheless, this

plane is not a geometric one in space; rather, it is transcendental, the locus of

sense. Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism wishes to resolve the question of how

experience is determined. Only on this basis is it possible for Deleuze to focus on

his main concern: the new and freedom.

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2.2 Adorno’s Priority of the Object

Adorno’s philosophy shows a strong objection to idealist philosophy.

Although he does not affirm the principle that knowledge derives from experience,

he insists on the privilege of experience in philosophy. However, such experience

is not lived experience (Erlebnis) that immediately comes from life, but what he

calls philosophical experience (Erfahrung) that is mediated by the subject’s

cognition. In fact, Adorno’s critique of positivism lies in its trust of Erlebnis,

because he believes that such sensuous experience is insufficient to reveal the

critical aspect of the subject. On the contrary, the formation of Erfahrung is on the

basis of the rational judgement through which the world is mediated. At the same

time, Erfahrung is the judgement about the object. Hence, experience for Adorno

is indeed a dialectical movement of consciousness that revises itself according to

the conditions of the truth. Adorno’s philosophy seeks to disclose the objectivity

of the truth. His empiricism registers as what he calls the priority of the object.

This empiricist position is radically different from Deleuze’s: it presupposes a

transcendental subject. Adorno’s insistence on the priority of the object does not

mean that he has already abandoned subjectivity. On the contrary, he argues that

the objectivity of dialectical cognition needs more subjectivity (1973b, p. 40).

Accordingly, the priority of the object only refuses to take subjectivity as the

primary principle of experience.

This position is in fact a refutation of both idealism and positivism.

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Idealism grounds the act of knowing on the absolute subject so that it ignores the

objectivity of the world. Under this circumstance, the subject reduces the object to

itself, forgetting how much it is itself the object in the first place. In contrast,

positivism only focuses on the actuality of the empirical world. As a result, the

subjective element, by which the world of phenomena is mediated, is considered

secondary. Neither of the results is what Adorno wants, because the lines they

provided, either exclusively subjective or objective, suppose an identity between

the subject and his/her experience. The real experience of the subject is only

revealed through the subject’s reflection on the process that the consciousness

about the object is determined. With the priority of the object, Adorno (1973b)

aims to stress the mutual mediation between the subject and the object. In such a

process,

“Subjectivity changes its quality in a context which it is unable to

evolve on its own. Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of

mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently

from the way the object enters into the subject. An object can be

thought only by a subject but always remains something other

than the subject.” (p. 183)

In this way, the truth between the subject and the object is realized: it is

nonidentity. Such a truth lies in a peace achieved between human beings and their

Other.

Adorno’s epistemology is in fact influenced by Lukács’s dialectic of

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subject-object.12 In History and Class Consciousness (1971), Lukács defines

“the crucial determinants” of dialectics as “the interaction of subject and object,

the unity of theory with practice” (1971, p. 24). In fact, such a dichotomy of the

subject and the object is a misunderstanding that ignores the mediated subject. No

self-conscious subject exists in the materialist surroundings that are external to

human subjects; instead, every subject is conditioned and mediated by the socially

objective conditions. This is also the case of the object. The concept of object is

necessarily mediated by the subject. As soon as subject-object dialectics is not

historical, it becomes a vulgar materialism. This result, in Adorno’s mind, is the

situation that traditional empiricism cannot overcome. He is making a new form

of inquiry open to experience. For him, the process of conceptualizing experience

is problematic: “Sensation, the crux of epistemology, needs epistemology to

reinterpret it into a fact of consciousness, in contradiction to its own full

character—which after all, is to serve as authority for its cognition” (1973b, p.

172).

Insisting on nonidentity between the subject and the object, he never

denies the existence of identification in knowledge acquisition, because he

believes that if there is no identified abstraction from multiple objects, there is no

concept, or thought which operates according to concepts. For him, in the

ordinary action of knowing, what takes place is not that the subject grasps or 12 Lukács’s concept of reification is of central importance to Adorno’s critique of the administered world. According to Lukács, there are pervasive phenomena of reification in the capitalist society. Reification is not only the immanent nature of the structure of commodity but also the root of many contemprory problems. Adorno shares this point with Lukács, but he diverges from Lukács on the overcoming of reification. For Lukács, reification will be overcome by the proletariat. However, Adorno believes that the proletariat is unable to achieve such a mission because of their own limitations. I will explain this point in the later arguments.

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recognizes the object as it is. Rather, the subject identifies the object with his own

previously conceived conceptual system. That is, the subject “invents” a

conceptual system and assimilates the object to it. Metaphysical philosophy as

thinking of thinking had begun to construct a hierarchical system of concepts

since Plato, when it formed multiple secondary concepts that are reducible to a

primary one. It is a strictly hierarchical kingdom. In Hegel, the situation is a little

more complex, but it is still the process of identification that plays the key role in

knowledge acquisition. This process is described by Sherratt (2002) as a process

of overcoming alienation.

“For Hegel, (and Hegelian-Marxism) in the process of acquiring

knowledge, the subject confronts the ‘separation’ that exists

historically between the subject and the object. This ‘separation’ is,

of course, alienation. The process of acquiring knowledge is part of

the overall historical process of overcoming alienation. To overcome

alienation, the subject must ‘overcome’ the divide between the

subject and the object. This engagement consists in an act of

‘identification’ between the subject and the object.” (p. 115)

In fact, such identification mistakenly conceives the object according to

what the subject had supposed, so it takes nonidentity—the truth between the

subject-object relation—as the separation that is supposed to be overcome.

Accordingly, identity as the despotism of the Idea is what Adorno challenges. In

this regard, the history of ideas is obviously a history of self-enslavement by the

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principle of Identity. Then, under the rule of Identity, “conceptual order is content

to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 5), and

ultimately becomes an ideology of cognition. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno makes

a famous declaration that “oneness is an illusion” (1984, p. 309). In an abstraction,

“the appearance of thought” always intertwines with “the truth of thought” (the

actuality grasped by concepts). What takes place in reality is that whatever lies

outside the cognition is decreed away: the limited intention of the concept is

regarded as totality. To begin with, a concept is to represent a presence, and finally

it is believed as an actual presence. It is problematic, because each concept

historically and finitely reflects a particular object. Once it is believed as the

totality, what happens is the ideology of Identity in which falsity takes the place of

actuality. It is an illusion. Even in dialectical form, it is still ideological.

As I stated in Chapter 1, Adorno defines the real concern of philosophy as

“nonconceptuality, individuality and particularity” (1973b, p. 8). Generally

speaking, nonconceptuality means concretely heterogeneous objects, namely the

individual and particular presence. The idea of nonconceptuality is raised to argue

against this dominating mechanism. It refers to the concrete things that have not

been conceptualized. The very proposition somehow indicates an empiricist

position by rejecting the alienation of the concept. Adorno does not raise the

sensible experience to oppose rational essence; rather, he seeks to reemphasize the

concrete specificity of the thing. In this sense, to support nonconceptuality means

rejecting abstraction that is the key operating role in metaphysics. Abstraction

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extracts “oneness” or essence (both are identities) without paying attention to their

specificities, which, according to Deleuze, is the driving dynamics in their motion

of developing; it cancels the given historical conditions of the thing or experience.

Both sides result in a miserable situation in which the living experiences and

concrete things have become a game of concepts: that is, a game of identity. This

is also the standpoint from where Adorno makes critical comments on Heidegger.

What is actually in his mind is cognition: if a philosophy, no matter how profound

it is, would not disclose the truth of nonidentity, then it is merely a mirror image

of identity.

Adorno insists that what the object is actually goes beyond all appearances,

beyond the grasp of any subject, beyond the summation of any subject’s

knowledge. He interprets this kind of subject-object relation as the unattained goal

in the history of human beings and defines critical theory as the continuous

struggle to criticize the act of knowing in social reality. Generally speaking,

critical theory reveals that we can only know what is within our experience and

what the conditions of that experience are.

To achieve the historical task of correcting “the misconceptions of the false

consciousness of subjectivity” (1973b, p. 61), for Adorno, the only and effective

weapon is dialectic. This position looks like the persistent standpoint of the

Institute for Social Research. As the ideal aim that “negative dialectics” pursues,

nonidentity describes the historical limitation of the act of knowing. Non-directly

relates to the attribute of Adorno’s dialectic, negative. Negative never signifies

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negation. On the contrary, Hegelian-Marxian dialectic is summarized as

“affirmative dialectic” because of its commitment to “identification” in the

process of thinking. Such “affirmative dialectic” misreads the subject-object

relation as identity. In fact, the misunderstanding admits the transcendental

presupposition of preexistent cognitive structure. Nevertheless, nonidentity in the

subject-object relation is true experience. It is “the state of differentiation without

domination, with the differentiated participating in each other” (Adorno, 1988, p.

246). His method of “negative” is to emphasize the mediation of experience. For

Kant, the notion of experience always entails an immediate relation with an object.

Kant distinguishes in Critique of Pure Reason two sorts of experiences: inner

experience—experience of subject—and outer experience—experience of object.

He wants to explain all experience through subjectivity. That is why he interprets

outer experience as the condition of inner experience. But Adorno argues against

the idea of the reducibility of object to subject. He therefore holds nonidentity

high through priority of the object. In effect, it is to endorse the uncertainty of the

experience of subjectivity.

Adorno insists on the priority of the object in the subject-object relationship.

It does not mean that the object is more important than the subject, or the subject

is secondary to the object. Actually, the priority of the object emphasizes the

shaping of the category of the subject. According to Adorno, what we refer to

when we say subject, is a complicated process. At the same time that we are

subjects we are objects in the world. Grammatically speaking, if one were to say

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“I see a tree”, the I is the subject. Replacing the I with Me, the I becomes an

object. That is to say, in our mind, I is recognized as Me before I is understood as I.

However, the first procedure always takes place unconsciously. It is ignored in

common cognitive movement. In fact, to this extent, subject and object are

intertwined. Subjectivity is not a subject; it is an object as well and the subject is

then of and a part of the world at large.

O’Connor states that the term mediation for Adorno is intended “to capture

the meaning-producing qualities of reciprocatory and nonidentical dimensions of

the subject-object relationship” (2004. p. 48). In the relationship, the subject and

the object are not two independent moments bridged by the function of

“mediation”; they permeate each other. Mediation is constitutive of both. What

Adorno wants to show through the priority of the object, at the first level, is that

the object is independent of the subject in the sense that its properties are

independent of the individual subject although it must be mediated by the subject

to form knowledge of it. that is, experience about it. Such independence is

nonidentity, because the object has gained its unattached attribute. It is no longer

restricted in the presupposed structure of identity. This proposition has overthrown

the traditional epistemology and the subject-object relationship. At the second

level, the priority of the object stresses its priority in the process of formation of

experience. As O’Connor indicates, Adorno shares the Kantian and Hegelian idea

that experience is a matter of understanding. “This means that experience is the

activity of conceptualization of the objects which are given” (O’Connor, 2004. p.

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65). In other words, the given object is pre-experience, even pre-subject. It is not

the self-reflection of the “absolute spirit” or something else. Experience is

experience of the objects.

From this perspective, I term Adorno’s priority of object “historical

empiricism.” The new expression partially originates from me. I say partially

because Nesbitt calls Adorno empiricist in one of his essays, because he “proceeds

in the construction of concepts inductively in the manner of Enlightenment

thought” (2005, p. 82). According to my understanding, Adorno’s emphasis on the

object in the subject-object relationship is actually an emphasis on the objectivity

in the epistemological field; it is the theoretical preparation for his own statement

that negative dialectics is object dialectics. Moreover, this objectivity is realized in

history; it is not a fixed fact but a changing process in the intermediation of the

subject and the object. It is posited to oppose the mistakenly supposed

subjectivity.

2.3 Constituted Subject: Disappearance of Antagonism of Subject and Object

Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and Adorno’s historical empiricism are

undoubtedly revolutionary in contrast with traditional understandings of the

subject-object relationship. Although they are radically different from each other

in both form and content, they share a theoretical concern: the question of how the

subject is constituted. For both of them, the subject is never a transcendent

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concept that in traditional Western philosophy means a conscious mind and a free

agent. They agree that the subject is formed under some conditions. The subject

does not function as a thinking being that produces knowledge about all kinds of

objects; rather, the subject is ceaselessly constituted in its relation to society: the

process of becoming-subject is one and the same with the process of knowledge

acquisition. However, Deleuze’s and Adorno’s revolutionary positions are not

identical. Deleuze poses a transcendental plane different from lived experience.

For him, it is not important to be subject or object; the question is how

subjectivity is derived from the transcendental plane. Or, in other words,

according to Deleuze, a subject is not always a subject. It can be a special subject

at the same time as a special object. The question of how and when an individual

appears as a subject is what concerns him. In contrast, Adorno commits himself to

philosophy of history. Following Marx’s reflection of society and history,

Adorno’s constituted subject is a historically transformed conscious mind.

Their critiques of subject-centered mode are no less profound than

post-structuralists such as Lacan’s criticism of pseudo-subject. However, there is

an obvious difference between the former and the latter: the paired categories of

subject and object cannot be eliminated. For Deleuze and Adorno, the places of

subject-object relationship in their respective philosophies are radically different.

Deleuze thoroughly abandons the cognitive mode of the conscious subject,

transforming the principle of subjectivity into a pre-individual field, the plane of

immanence. In contrast, Adorno insists on the agency of the empirical subject,

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claiming that the deceptive subjectivity was fabricated in the illusory identity

between subject and object. Both explore the way to freedom in their respective

critique of subject-centered mode. For Deleuze, the transcendental plane of

immanence consists of virtuality for engendering the new. Here, the categories of

subject and object are subject to a certain structure: the transcendental field. The

dualist relationship is substituted for a new productive system. Adorno wants to

correct the mistaken image of the subject by overturning the mistaken process.

Therefore, he posits the priority of the object against the primacy of the subject.

This demonstrates a familial similarity to Marx. For Adorno, the subject is an

object in the first place. He wants to reveal the idealism behind subjectivity,

which means objects having a meaning apart from our subjectivity. With the

intertwined relationship of the subject-object, Adorno argues against a

one-dimensional dualist understanding of the relationship of the subject and the

object. Because subjectivity is closely tied to objectivity, the knowing and

thinking of the human subject is inseparable from society as it is transformed in

history.

For Deleuze, Hume contributes much to empiricism, giving it a new power,

leading it to a theory and practice of relations, because he pays more attention to

the conditions under which something new is produced. Such an evaluation

signifies Deleuze’s own main concern. As a transcendental empiricist philosopher,

Deleuze intends to examine the conditioning of human thought and

consciousness—traditional philosophy presupposed several transcendental

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concepts such as “conscious subject,” “meaning,” or “essence” to interpret

them—by exploring its composing moments and the way by which it is produced.

Traditional philosophy presupposes that we already live in a meaningful world

and that we can only begin to build knowledge within the context of a pre-given

meaning, whether this meaning is produced by history, subjectivity, or

fundamental ontology. However, Hume’s empiricism commits itself to the

exploration of the relationship between the concrete phenomena so that it is an

affirmation of multiplicity at a practical level. It is he that helps Deleuze escape

from the dominant continental philosophy of meaning and turn to his radical

methodology, “transcendental empiricism.” Adopting this methodology, Deleuze

renounces metaphysics. But Hume fails to examine the way in which the

meanings have already been shaped by the interests and intentions of the human

subject, namely, the pre-individual experience. Deleuze tries to explore the

conditions of experience. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that he put his stress

on the forms of consciousness and the processes in which it is formed and on

experience prior to individual consciousness.

Deleuze posits two aspects of his own transcendental empiricist philosophy.

One is negative: empiricism means the rejection of all transcendental. The other is

positive: empiricism is always about creating. For Deleuze, creating par

excellence is to create concepts, which, for him, is the mission of philosophy. It is

in this sense that Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is an alternative to the

traditional dualism of subject-object. Moreover, the emergence of the subject as

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an effect in the plane of immanence does not suppose a transcendental subject in

the process of knowing. As a result, the antagonism between subject and object

has been totally overcome: Deleuze does not cancel concepts such as subject and

object, but they are not the two opposite parts in knowledge-acquisition. A new

quasi-ontological and productive field, neither metaphysical nor lived experienced,

is developed to support an explaining model of subject and object. Both of them

are constituted.

Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism has opened a non-dualist way,

whereas Adorno’s historical empiricism has remained in the dualism of

subject-object to some extent. Although Adorno proposes the priority of the object

to oppose the transcendent subject, the model that the conscious subject comes to

know the object outside has been reserved. Adorno discusses the history of

illusory identity in subject-object relationship, arguing that the primacy of the

subject in traditional epistemology is the result of compulsory identity. The

subject is mediated by its place as an object in the first place. Then, the object is

mediated by its relevant subject. However, Adorno attempts to retain the

subjective principle, while criticizing its conventional form as the primacy of the

subject. As he says, “we must use the force of the subject to break through the

deception of constitutive subjectivity” (1973b, p. xx). That is to say, in the attempt

to understand who I am, it turns me back to the empirical world (society and

history) in which I am intertwined. Because no matter how deeply I treat myself

as “subject” in unconsciousness, there is an object; that is, I am produced as an

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object in the society and keep transforming in the society. In the Marxian view,

society is a product and a process of history: it is reproduced to such a degree that

the question “Who am I?” is subject to the question “What is the meaning of

historical experience?” It is in this sense that subjectivity is a problem of social

relations.

Adorno’s reconfiguration of the subject-object relationship demonstrates his

attempt to build a new relationship without domination among humans. He wants

to justify the objectivity of knowledge-acquisition with the function of the

mediation of object. According to his critique of illusory identity between the

subject and object, the more the subject forgets or denies the foundation upon

which it is constituted, the more the subject is reversed unconsciously into what it

forgets, the object. In his discourse, this object refers to the social reality and

history. In other words, in the prevailing act of thinking or knowing, a subject is

mistakenly considered as a transcendental subject who has no ground. On this

condition, philosophy forgets “the mediation in the mediating subject is no more

indicative of meritorious sublimity than any forgetting” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 176).

As a result, the subject is mistakenly seen as an immediate concept. Adorno calls

such a process “the reversal of the subjective reduction” (p. 176). Here, in fact, his

critique is directed towards a critique of the fetishism of the commodity, the most

profound critique of capitalism. Following Marx’s critique of alienation, Adorno

criticizes capitalism for its reversal of the human subject into the ossified object.

As a result of the reversal, the human subject is deprived of spontaneity and

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agency, being reduced to the defense of the administered reality. In this sense,

Adorno’s historical empiricism, the priority of object in particular aims to resume

freedom and spontaneity of human subject. The centrifugal power of nonidentity

is the very force that is able to withstand the assimilation of compulsory identity.

Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism overcomes the dichotomy of the

subject and the object with a transcendental field. This plane is neither

One-Substance nor lived experience. Epistemologically, transcendental

empiricism completely abandons conventional functions of the subject and the

object where the subject is believed to have the ability of reasoning. However,

Deleuze’s empiricism avoids the topic of history by setting the productive system

in a transcendental field. In contrast, Adorno’s historical empiricism follows the

Marxian critique of social reality. Similar to Marx’s critique of labor in Capital, he

points out a relationship mistakenly reversed, arguing to bring everything back to

historical reality. It is a meta-critique of the subject-object relationship.

Both of these epistemological positions emphasize the fact that the subject

is constituted, but they analyze different conditions of the subject. For Deleuze,

the a priori ground of the subject is the generically transcendental conditions; but

for Adorno the material conditions and the historical context are more radical.

Although they are completely distinctive both in content and form, they have

comparable significance. The two kinds of reformation of the subject-centered

philosophy challenge classical empiricism such as Hume’s, one that only explains

the world on the basis of experience. Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and

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Adorno’s historical empiricism begin with the subject-object relationship and step

further into the reflection of the given. However, the more important distinctions

between them cannot be understood without mention of the two concepts,

difference and nonidentity. This pair of concepts is central to their philosophies

that converge at the point of “internal difference” and diverge at one of their

forms.

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Chapter 3

Difference VS Nonidentity: Against Identity

“I do not know for sure, but it may be that our epoch has brought

with it an ‘upgrading’ of the utopian—only it is not called this

anymore.”

——Ernst Bloch

Difference and nonidentity are the central concepts in Deleuze’s and

Adorno’s philosophy. I have briefly introduced these concepts in describing the

foundation of the two different theories in Chapter 1. In this chapter, I discuss

them in detail: their significance, their positions in their philosophies, the

similarities and differences between them. Using this comparison, I aim to

elaborate the distinction between Deleuze and Adorno as philosophers of

difference.

In Deleuze, the concept of difference is not merely proposed as a category

that indicates the philosopher’s ontological idea; it is discussed along with the

concept of repetition. In Difference and Repetition, he tries to challenge “the

majority of philosophers” who have subordinated difference to “identity or to the

Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed or to the Analogous” (1994, p. xv). What he

wants to achieve is to think difference in itself. This means that Deleuze tries to

reverse the relation of difference to the categories quoted above and define

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difference in an ontological sense. The pair of concepts, difference and repetition

are employed to express Deleuze’s view on being. For Deleuze, difference in itself

is the nature of being whereas repetition is the mode of being. Deleuze is not the

first philosopher who talks of difference and repetition. In the contemporary

period, many philosophers and artists have come to emphasize the status of

difference and the function of repetition. However, whether in Heidegger or in the

structuralists, or even in the works of contemporary novelists, the pair of concepts

is subjected to representation: they “have taken the place of the identical and the

negative, of identity and contradiction” (Deleuze, 1994, p. xix). According to

Deleuze, a relation that supposes the primacy of identity in fact confirms

oppression and dominance in the representative functions of concepts and

accordingly “defines the world of representation” (p. ix). The system of

representation operates by establishing a settled norm as the model. The unity of

difference and identity is one of the primary models. It functions as the medium of

representation.13 Representation, in this way, distorts difference by subjecting it

to identity. Deleuze attempts to argue against such a model that has subjugated the

creative force. In his eyes, representation diverts our attention from being in itself.

As a result, people usually focus on what is represented. This is the case of

difference. In the representative model, difference is represented through specific

differences that are secondary to identity. This kind of statically hierarchical

structure fails to conceive the change in relation to difference. For this reason,

13 Deleuze describes for aspects of such a medium: identity, analogy, opposition, resemblance. A concept cannot be represented unless it is in one of the four relations to the mode of expression.

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Deleuze argues that difference cannot be represented “within the coherent medium

of an organic representation” (1994, p. 29). The uniqueness of his concept of

difference is revealed by difference in itself, not conceptual difference or different

characteristics or details. This is the first character of Deleuze’s concept of

difference. The second characteristic is that Deleuze’s difference does not imply

the negative: it is pure difference, affirmative difference. This characteristic is in

fact associated with the first one. I have mentioned that, according to Deleuze, in

the representative mode of thinking, difference is commonly regarded as the

substitute of the negative; it is the negation of the identical. Such an idea of

difference ignores the fact of the independence of the concept, because it observes

difference in a dualist or dialectical manner: difference is taken to be subordinated

to the identical. It describes the non-identical attributes between two objects. But

Deleuze’s difference is not like this; it is a pure affirmation that is not reducible to

the other concepts. It is at this point that the two characteristics of Deleuze’s

difference are intertwined, because difference can be affirmative only when it is

difference in itself.

In contrast to Deleuze’s discussion of difference in an ontological sense,

Adorno’s concept of nonidentity is thought in an ethical context. This concept

emerges in Adorno’s critique of the notion of identity; he believes that this notion

is central to the philosophy of reason (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1973). In Negative

Dialectics, Adorno elaborates three dimensions of the term identity: first, the unity

of personal consciousness; second, the equality with itself of every object of

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thought; third, the coincidence of the subject and the object (Adorno &

Horkheimer, 1973, p. 142). The three dimensions provide the epistemological

foundations of rationalist philosophy. Without them, it is impossible to conceive

the empirical subject and the process of knowledge-acquisition. The word

nonidentity describes the contraries of the three dimensions. However, Adorno’s

employment of this term does not imply an irrational philosophy or agnosticism;

on the contrary, it serves Adorno’s critique of capitalist society. Adorno interprets

the actual world as an administered and dominated world where human beings are

not able to think freely, because their thinking is restricted to the principle of

identity which is “the primal form of ideology” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1973, p.

148). Nonidentity mainly expresses the nonidentical state between the subject and

the object. Adorno takes the principle of nonidentity to be the redemption of

unfreedom of thought, because this principle explores the gap between two things

that are presumed to be identical. It is this gap that brings utopian elements into

thinking. However, the principle of nonidentity is not only Adorno’s solution to

the epistemological problem of knowledge acquisition but also his political ideal.

From the perspective of being against identity, the concepts—difference and

nonidentity—can be seen as a challenge to representation. Such a common logic

of “internal difference” constructs the resonance between Deleuze and Adorno.

This is the ground on which we can consider the distinction between them: the

positive contra the negative.

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3.1 Deleuze’s Difference-in-itself

In this part I will discuss two issues that are important to understand

Deleuze’s concept of difference: the relation of difference to identity, and the

relation of difference to repetition. To elaborate the first issue, Deleuze challenges

the understanding of difference from Plato to Heidegger by criticizing the image

of thought in the history of philosophy. His aim is to reverse the canonical view of

the relation between difference and identity, affirming difference as the first

principle. The second issue is actually Deleuze’s understanding of the univocity of

being. He uses these two concepts, difference and repetition, to unfold his own

distinctive ontological composition. The unique quasi-ontological construction

attempts to emphasize the internal difference that is taken to be the element of the

new.

Deleuze criticizes the image of thought by beginning with the critique of

representation. At the very beginning of the first chapter of Difference and

Repetition, Deleuze poses a question about mediation: “Must difference have been

‘mediated’ in order to render it both livable and thinkable?” (1994, p. 30).

According to his understanding, in the history of philosophy, ordinary opinion of

difference is tied to otherness that suggests a hierarchical order among concepts.

With this opinion, man is used to thinking about difference according to concrete

phenomena. Difference in this sense is in fact seen as specific difference: it is

something represented. This kind of idea of difference fails to account for the

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conditions of the production of change, because it appears in the analogy of the

two other objects. The analogy supposes “a choice of characters carried out by

judgment in the abstract representation” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 34). To be precise,

such specific difference is incapable of indicating the nature of the objects,

because it has been extracted from the characteristics of the objects. In fact, as

long as we consider the concrete object with respect to its characters, specific

difference is merely extrinsic. Moreover, when we compare the two different

objects, we always suppose a unity: as “white” and “black” are from “man”, or as

“male” and “female” are from “animal” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 30). It is in this sense

that the analogy always agrees on something else. In this sense, specific difference

has little association with the internal difference that determines the greatest

genera of the two different objects. Therefore, in the light of this viewpoint,

difference is secondary; it is always subjected to something identical. In Deleuze’s

view, this kind of difference is not the greatest difference because it is restricted to

a fixed model of the unity of difference and identity, which denies the ontological

status of difference in the first place. Here the so-called “greatest difference”

refers to difference-in-itself that concerns the conditions of change. Thus this kind

of difference is primary; it is the first principle. It does not need to be mediated.

Unity or identity must be apprehended as a secondary operation under which

difference-in-itself is embodied into forms.

Deleuze defines difference-in-itself as univocal being which is not a fixed

substance or an abstract concept. Here he accepts Nietzsche’s idea that being is

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becoming: there is an internal self-differing within difference-in-itself, and

difference-in-itself differs from itself in each form. Everything that exists is all the

time in the course of becoming; it is never completed. But this internal difference

reflects on distinct forms: it is multiple. In Deleuze’s words, this univocal being

“is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic

modalities” (1994, p. 36). From this perspective, the concept of difference can be

read as Deleuze’s reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power”: the

production of differential elements or the conditions of the change. According to

Deleuze’s viewpoint, what a will wants is to affirm its difference, because

difference is exactly its being, its genera. Moreover, in its essential relation with

the “other,” a will makes its difference an object of affirmation. This means that

difference does not come from some analogy; instead, it is being itself. A being is

in its difference. For this reason, “difference is the object of a practical affirmation

inseparable from essence and constitutive of existence” (Deleuze, 1981, p. 9). In

contrast with the negative difference in dialectic, such affirmation of difference, or

affirmative difference is in-itself and exists all the time, whether inconspicuous or

evident. This kind of revaluation of difference-in-itself takes as its most important

form the refutation of the Hegelian contradiction and dialectical difference, which,

in Deleuze’s eyes, represents the most extreme development of the logic of

identity.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze continues his anti-dialectical position

that we have seen in Nietzsche and Philosophy. He criticizes Hegelian dialectics

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throughout this work. I have discussed this issue in detail in Chapter 1, so I will

not spend too much time on his comments on dialectics unless they concern

difference. According to Deleuze, it is true that Hegel is aware of the problem of

difference. “The criticism that Hegel addresses to his predecessors is that they

stopped at a purely relative maximum without reaching the absolute maximum of

difference” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 44). However, Hegel misunderstands this maximal

difference as contradiction. In the case of contradiction, it is that everything is

subsumed to infinity in a greater opposition. Thus each time we think we have

ended in a final or supreme identity, it re-opens a new contradiction. This

movement shapes a dead end: “each contrary must further expel its other,

therefore expel itself, and become the other it expels” (1994, p. 45). This is

actually the logic of the identical, because in this circle, identity or unity becomes

the sufficient condition to determine difference. 14 Moreover, contradiction

mistakenly simplifies difference as opposition.15 In other words, presupposing

difference within itself, opposition distorts difference. Deleuze rejects the

synthesis of contradictory oppositions. In his view, difference cannot be reduced

or traced to contradiction, because the mode of the former is much greater than

that of the latter. The further consequence of the Hegelian logic of contradiction

for him relates to the function of negation in the dialectical system. Dialectics

mistakenly takes specific difference to be difference-in-itself and negates its 14 Eugene Holland points out in his essay “Marx and Poststructuralist philosophies of Difference” that “the qualitative order of resemblances and the quantitative order of equivalences”, which is described by Deleuze as the identities that suppress difference, is in fact codes and axioms. For this reason, Holland argues that the aim of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference would be to salvage difference and to prevent its subordination to identity. 15 In terms of Hegelian contradiction, James Williams (2003) claims that the task of direction of philosophy, for Hegel, is “to lift contradiction in ever wider cycles of real contradictions and syntheses” (p. 71).

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individual being by way of false synthesis. In this sense, Deleuze’s difference is

something other than a discrepancy or otherness, because difference signifies

affirmation. It is difference-in-itself.

Having elaborated Deleuze’s concept of difference, we can move to the next

item, the concept of repetition. If the concept of difference-in-itself allows

Deleuze to move away from the conventional understanding, then the concept of

repetition allows him to develop his theory about the movement of the univocal

being.16 Repetition, in Nietzsche’s term, is eternal return. Although Nietzsche

uses this concept to argue against traditional philosophy of value, Deleuze

employs repetition in a metaphysical sense. He defines repetition itself as the pure

form of time (repetition-for-itself) and relates the concepts of difference and

repetition to each other. With the concept of repetition-for-itself, Deleuze (1994) is

able to explain how things are determined and what role difference plays in the

process of determination.

“The eternal return does not cause the same and the similar to

return, but is itself derived from a world of pure difference.

Each series returns, not only in the others which imply it, but

for itself, since it is not implied by the others without being in

turn fully restored as that which implies them. The eternal

return has no other sense but this: the absence of any

assignable origin—in other words, the assignation of difference

16 As James Williams puts it (2003), the concept of repetition allows Deleuze to develop the mechanistic and materialist aspects of the concept of difference: it explains what difference is and how it emerges (p. 84).

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as the origin, which then relates different to different in order to

make it (or them) return as such. In this sense, the eternal

return is indeed the consequence of a difference which is

originary, pure, synthetic and in-itself (which Nietzsche called

will to power). If difference is in-itself, then repetition in the

eternal return is the for-itself of difference.” (p. 125)

Repetition is not repetition of the identical but of difference. What is repeated in

time is difference. But here the difference is not a certain detail or some concrete

different phenomena or experiences; it is difference-in-itself.

The repetition of difference constitutes the multiple of the One. However,

this One is not a specific category of identity but the univocity of being:

difference. It is by means of repetition that difference returns and takes new forms.

Repetition does not allow the return of something that existed. On the contrary,

each time difference-in-itself is repeated, it gets a new form. This is what Deleuze

calls the “mask” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 18). Difference is covered by different masks

in performances. Therefore, the mask is not only the form of difference, but also

the mode of its existence and of its development. Just in this sense, Deleuze states

that “the mask is the true subject of repetition” (1994, p. 18). However, the mask

does not serve representation. Difference-in-itself cannot be represented, and it is

always covered. Under each new mask, difference is signified. Here, we need to

abandon the conventional way of representation to consider this process of

signifying, because we cannot reach difference-in-itself by way of representative

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understanding.

Considering the relation of repetition to difference, Deleuze defines

difference as the movement of becoming as well as repetition. Because what

repeats is difference—the univocal being—then actually this being is never

completed; it is always in the process of becoming. In other words, according to

Deleuze, in repetition, nothing is ever an identity or a unity. On the contrary,

there is only difference, not special difference, but difference-in-itself as the

ontological One-Substance: masks are something new, everything keeps changing,

and reality is a ceaseless process of becoming. This does not mean reality is not

completed as being; it signifies that reality, as a constant changing movement, will

never be fixed. Becoming is being itself; the being of difference is realized in each

becoming (by repetition). In the case of the relationship of difference to repetition,

repetition is selective: it does not concern any negativity; on the contrary, it is the

affirmation of difference. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1981), Deleuze uses a

metaphor of the dice throw to describe the relation of the One to the multiple, of

necessity to chance, of becoming to being:

“The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance,

the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of

necessity. Necessity is the affirmed chance in exactly the

sense that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed

of multiplicity” (p. 26)

Repetition is like the dice throw: it can affirm all of chance when the dice are

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thrown each time. Difference is produced by means of repetition. When we throw

the dice, difference is not determined elsewhere; it arises internally. However,

difference exists here as virtuality. Before each throw of the dice, difference is real

but not actual: it is present as a virtual power. Nietzsche calls this the “being of

becoming”; it is pure multiplicity. For Deleuze, true becoming has no end or goal

outside itself; becoming is the only mode of being.

Deleuze’s dice throw of difference is played on the table of the field of

immanence. This transcendental plane provides Deleuze’s philosophy with a field

where sense can be produced. On this plane, thinking takes place; difference

arises. Nevertheless, this plane is not a geometric one in space; rather, it is

transcendental, the locus of sense. Generally speaking, geometry is subject to

empirical science; therefore, most simple ideas or prescriptions about a geometric

plane cannot be applied to the immanent plane as such. Deleuze’s difference is not

associated with otherness or negativity; it intends to express differential moments,

something new, something outside. The term outside here signifies neither the

external aspect nor the geometric or experiential space beyond a boundary. In this

discourse, outside and inside are no more than different locations of the same

form in the abstract (still within the geometry) or concrete space, projecting and

resonating with each other according to a certain reference frame in common. It is

an absolute exterior, neither the opposition of any interior (in this sense it can

shatter all the latent reference frames), nor according with any existing form. In

other words, the outside as such is a thorough outside, outside without inside: it is

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outside all the systems, reference frames or rules of location, even outside all the

outsides, outside “I” and the thought of “I.”

These expressions seem ambiguous and unreadable. What does the “outside

without inside” mean? Actually, it has surpassed all the systems and structures

that are designed for evaluation, definition or location, and brought the logic of

the empirical world into chaos. Such an outside is the alternative to the limit – the

limit of thinking and of representation. According to my understanding, Deleuze’s

interpreting difference-in-itself as something ontological is trying to transcend the

limit of representation. This is the reason that I associate difference with the

outside. The outside is not a wasteland; instead, it lies beyond all the limits:

something indefinable, unrepresentative, and even unthinkable.17 However, it is

able to provide fresh elements that have not been assimilated by representation.

The theory of the “outside” as such is the most paradoxical part of

Deleuze’s philosophy. In effect, Deleuze aims to reveal how this unthinkable

“outside” functions as the kernel and dynamic of thinking and how it helps

thinking break away from representation, in order to become creative. In other

words, according to Deleuze, what starts up thinking is not logic, not the Idea, not

intellectuality, not perception but the unthinkable that is out of reach of all the

intellectual abilities. How does this happen? As discussed in Chapter 2, the

infinite movements of forces on the immanent plane create innumerable singular

points and events. Thinking takes place in an “encounter,” an encounter among 17 “Unthinkable” is one of the central concepts of Heidegger. It means something that philosophers intend to point out but is out of the reach of expression. Here Deleuzian employment is much closer to its literal meaning: something beyond the reach of thinking, namely beyond the rational thinking that acts in accord with daily experience.

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forces, an encounter between a force and a “body without organs” (BwO) etc.

Deleuze believes that sensation is the start of philosophy, because just in the

sensation (especially shock) inspired by the encounter with an Other, the outside,

one can break loose from the fetters of reality, experience, rationality, etc. and

approach their limit. Thinking is not thinking of events; it itself is an event. Thus

it has three characteristics.

First, thinking is not the action or option of the subject; it is compelled in

the first place. The emergence of thinking as an event is due to an encounter.

Second, an encounter happens by chance. It is like a dice game. Before dice fall

onto the table, no one can predict the result. Finally, thinking essentially implies

difference, because thinking is motivated by the unthinkable from outside. This is

why Deleuze uses the expression “finding, encountering, stealing” to describe the

occurrence of thinking in a conversation with Claire Parnet (Deleuze & Parnet,

2002, p. 8). According to him, “to encounter is to find, to capture, to steal … it is

that which creates not something mutual, but an asymmetrical block, an a-parallel

evolution, nuptials, always ‘outside’ and ‘between’” (p. 7).

The outside in itself implies difference; it is always beyond all the limits.

Deleuze’s philosophy can be seen as an ontology of difference that is proposed to

be against all theories that advocate the primacy of identity, whether they are

fascism or communism, majoritarian literature or Freudian psychoanalysis.

According to Deleuze, just for this reason, difference—not dialectical negation

—can achieve authentic multiplicities. He uses the term outside to stress a kind of

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absolute difference. However, the outside as such is not something like

substantiality (in whatever form) that functions as a source of every concrete

difference, in the way that God may be said to be the source of Good. On the

contrary, the outside is simultaneously abstract and concrete; it is simultaneously

beyond all the planes and within every single event. In every single event, the

outside creates something new by way of an encounter of forces. In the moment

of encounter of two objects or things, a certain attribute belonging to neither of

the two is brought forth: it does not change the essence of the two, and it rests

only on the surface of the encounter for that specific moment. This process is the

emergence of the new.

3.2 Adorno’s Nonidentity

This is not the first time that the concept of nonidentity appears in my text. In the

discussion of the previous two chapters on Adorno (in particular, negative

dialectics in Chapter 1 and the priority of object in Chapter 2), I have outlined the

sense and the function of this concept. In this part, I focus my exposition on the

role that the concept of nonidentity plays in Adorno’s criticism of capitalism.

Following Marx, Adorno focuses on two phenomena that are presided over by the

principle of identity: the exchange of commodity and the exchange of labor for

wage. The problem of these forms of exchange lies in their inequality in the name

of equality. What Adorno does is more than such a classical Marxian analysis. He

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claims that the unbalance between equality and inequality is caused by the

principle of identity that produces fetishism by assuming a prevalent identity. At

this point, nonidentity is proposed by him to resolve the problem.

Nonidentity is a concept that is used by Adorno to deny the immediate

identity between the subject and the object, and between thought and reality. From

the composition of the word, the affix non- obviously signifies a negation of

identity. In the previous chapter, I pointed out that Adorno rejects identity because

of its ignorance of difference. Adorno uncovers the extent to which the concept of

identity is formed by analyzing the idea of identity in the process of

knowledge-acquisition.18 He uses the term identity thinking to refer to the form of

thinking that has accepted the primacy of identity. 19 And he attempts to

demonstrate the relation of power and domination in modern society by revealing

the coercive mechanism under the shaping of the idea of identity. In doing so, he

tries to fight against this kind of coercion with the concept of nonidentity. He

believes that the concept of nonidentity can contribute to thorough freedom in

thought by introducing difference into it. However, Adorno acknowledges that

philosophy has no direct access to nonidentity. Under capitalist conditions,

thought is able to achieve nonidentity only through the conceptual criticisms of

false identifications. Just for this reason, we have to understand the idea of

nonidentity through criticism of capitalist society.

18 See Chapter 2, the section entitled “Adorno’s Priority of the Object”. 19 For Adorno, such identity of thought with its object presupposes some form of Fichtean or Hegelian idealism. As Espen Hammer (2006) puts it, it “can only be anticipated from the standpoint of redemption, and not from within history itself” (p. 32). This is why we can understand Adorno’s concept of nonidentity from the historical-social angle.

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Adorno defines capitalist society as an “administered world” (1973b, p. 19)

whose principal characteristic is domination—domination by human, within

human, over human.20 Strictly speaking, Adorno is a post-Marxian rather than a

classical Marxian, for he challenges some of Karl Marx’s propositions about

capitalism and inherits Lukács’s and Max Weber’s approaches to a great extent.

He employs a more precise term, late capitalism to take the place of the more

general expression of Marxism, capitalism. This term refers to the highly

developed stage of capitalism in which the mechanism of the market has been

perfected and domination has been enforced. Consequently, his critique of

capitalist society goes much further than that of Marx.21 His theoretical effort can

be seen as an attempt to find a way to realize freedom that can break away from

the administered world.

According to Adorno, from the dimension of philosophy and epistemology,

the principle of identity has become a kind of unconsciousness in knowing.

People apply it to thinking without considering it consciously. However, in the

field of social life, the real system of identity is not merely an ideal matter but a

conscious or unconscious reflection of real mechanism. In the capitalist reality, the

mechanism is the totality of identity produced by the exchange value in the

marketplace. Different from extrinsic identity in feudalism, identity in capitalism

is no longer an extrinsic coercion but an unconscious structure made of subject

and object. It is a spontaneous and unforced constitution. Identity at the service of 20 This part is commonly considered as a critique of Lukács’s theory of reification. 21 Martin Jay (1984) holds the opinion that it is due to the negative form of Adorno’s concept of nonidentity that he had abandoned the confidence in the possibility of human emancipation which underlay the Marxist tradition in all its forms. I think this is one of the notable distinctions between Adorno and Lukács.

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the market is homogeneous quantitative money, whereas “what defies

subsumption under identity” in reality is the use value (Adorno, 1973b, p. 11). In

other words, the market economy is the real foundation of the contemporary logic

of identity, because all “incomparable subjects” in the marketplace are identified

through barter trade. This does not mean that Adorno fails to grasp the difference

between commodity exchange and barter trade; rather, his point is that the subject

is converted to something exchangeable in the process of exchange. The value of

a subject is measured by the price of his labor, the wage. In the exchange for

commodities, different use value is abstracted into measurable price; by the same

token, the concrete labor of the subject is replaced by abstract labor. In doing so,

the subject has lost his dignity as a human being: he is no longer evaluated by his

talent or creativity, or whatever attribute he has, but by a standard that is external

to him, money. Consequently, the principle of identity has been realized in the

form of money (or capital). This tool, invented by human subjects, has given rise

to domination over the subject. As a result, the market economy succeeds in

enforcing the principle of identity through ostensible exchange. This is why

Adorno says that, “a world that is objectively set for totality will not release the

human consciousness” (1973b, p. 17). Although this criticism of exchange

remains Marxian to some degree, Adorno has gone a little further than Marx:

Marx only points out the fact that the incomparable subjects have been turned into

comparable currency, whereas Adorno uncovers its root, the principle of identity

that reigns in the marketplace.

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Adorno’s criticism of fetishism shows the enslavement by the principle of

identity. In fact, it should be noted that he explicitly introduces Hegelian logic

right here: the exchange in the market economy presupposed “a notion of totality,

as well as the false reconciliation or identity between the general (the system of

cultural exchange or capitalism as such) and the particular (the product and its

consumption) within this (false) totality” (Hammer, 2006, p. 76). Such a logic

operates in the fetishism of commodity that is criticized by Marx.

Adorno reads Marx as a Hegelian materialist whose critique of capitalism

includes a critique of the ideologies. For Adorno, the most important thesis is

what Marx called “the fetishism of the commodity.”22 According to Marx, it is

inverted power that dominates commodity producers. Its developed and highest

form is “the fetishism of money,” which transforms into “the fetishism of capital”

in capitalist society.

All these forms of fetishism imply a kind of misreading of matter (such as

the commodity, money or capital) that is deemed to possess a kind of mysterious

enchantment to proliferate. According to Adorno, it is in fact a misreading of the

social attributes of matter as its natural attributes. People treat it as if it were a

neutral object, with a life of its own, which directly relates to other commodities,

in independence from the human interactions that actually sustain all commodities.

Therefore, the fetishism of the commodity is domination over human being by

matter—it is a kind of alienation that should be sublated in the advanced social

22 Karl Marx first used this expression in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

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form.

To describe the identity of concepts, Adorno creates another term that is

also influenced by Marx, fetishism of concepts. Non-conceptuality is the opposite

of fetishism of concepts, not the opposite of concepts. The employment of

fetishism here implies a kind of improper displacement having taken place.

Concepts are not what Adorno fights against. He never ignores the rational fruits

produced by human beings. Moreover, he states that all concepts (including

philosophical ones) refer to non-conceptualities, which implies an empiricist

sense.23 In other words, concepts are not self-sufficient, for they come from

reality. No concept is in-itself and for-itself. In this sense, we even can make a

direct claim that nonidentity is inherent in concepts. That is why it is unreasonable

for concepts to be absolutized as the primary element. Fetishism of concepts is

regarded as a violence of identity because it swallows the whole living objective

world by reducing it to logical propositions or abstract concepts with the illusory

infinity it believes it possesses.

Marx aims his critique against bourgeois social scientists who simply

describe the capitalist economy. According to Marx, bourgeois economists

necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic in capitalist production. The exchange

value of the commodity conceals the difference of their use value. In the

marketplace, every commodity is exchangeable. The principle of equipollent

exchange creates a surface of fairness. However, Marx thinks that people fail to

23 See Chapter 2, the section entitled Adorno’s Priority of the Object.

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understand that capitalist production, for all its surface freedom and fairness, must

extract surplus value from the labor of the working class. Adorno’s acceptance of

the Marxian criticism of the commodity is mediated by Lukács. Influenced by

Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, Lukács argues that the influence of

capitalist economy is not restricted to the field of economics. Rather, its principle

has spread to the whole society. In a broad sense, commodity exchange has

become the central organizing principle for all parts of society. This allows the

fetishism of the commodity to permeate all social institutions and academic

disciplines, including philosophy. Reification refers to the fact that commodity has

invaded all of human life in capitalist society. The process of reification is in fact

that of objectification, whereby the product created by human beings has betrayed

humanity. Reification is the outcome of the double functions of capitalism. One is

impersonalization, which attaches human workers to machines; the other is

rationalization, which advocates effective control such as the Taylor system. Both

of these functions deprive human beings of their agency, transforming them into

an accessory of the whole mechanism. Taking the example of production, workers

are reified into the ability to provide labor, and products into abstract labor. It is

reification that makes capitalist production possible. In this sense, it can be seen

as the structural problem of capitalism. Moreover, it has become the key role

whose principle governs the mind of the human being. Accordingly, Lukács (1971)

interprets reification as one of the forms of alienation that he believes will be

overcome by the working class.

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Adorno partly shares Lukács’s concern with reification and alienation, but

he never agrees with Lukács on the point that the revolutionary working class

could overcome reification. For him, the greatest question is why do unfairness,

slavery and human suffering persist although it is probable that the conditions of

modern society seem to eliminate them? In other words, the development of

history seems to strengthen this situation. For example, advanced technology does

not bring forth the freedom of workers from labor but fetters them more firmly.

The root cause, Adorno says, lies in how capitalist relations of production have

come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible,

concentrations of wealth and power (1973b, pp. 189–92). Society has come to be

organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of producing

exchange values. Nobody can escape from the marketplace. The principle of

exchange has come to dominate the whole of society:

“The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the

abstract universal concept of average working hours, is

fundamentally akin to the principle of identification…It is through

barter that nonidentical individuals and performances become

commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle

imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to

become total.” (1973b p. 146)

Because Adorno describes capitalist society as absolute identity that has

produced pervasive domination within the whole society, it is not odd that he puts

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forward the concept of nonidentity as a basis for his resistance. On the

philosophical level, Adorno criticizes not only the dualism between alienated

subject and reified object but simultaneously the identity between subject and

object.

The concept of nonidentity does not signify an entity called nonidentity; on

the contrary, it intends to reconstruct a new type of dialectical relationship

between subject and object, which eliminates the dominant law in capitalist

society. The proposition of nonidentity marks the difference between Adorno’s

materialism and Hegel’s idealism. Adorno never denies Hegelian speculative

identity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between

reason and reality, but he doubts that this identity has been achieved in a positive

fashion.

According to Adorno, dialectics is the only way to rescue nonidentity from

the world of identity, “negative dialectics.” What is mistaken previously is not

dialectics, but its mode, its affirmative character. As mentioned, in capitalist

society, under the function of the exchange principle, human thought deviates

from its natural process, being reversed. Bankrupt in the ability of agency, human

thought has been imposed on a certain frame of system of general identity.

Consequently, in achieving identity and unity, thought projects this frame upon

objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity. This affirmative

process of identifying, in Adorno’s eyes, is alienated. Thus he hopes he can rectify

such a reversed process in emphasizing the negative character of dialectics. That

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is why Adorno calls for a “negative dialectics” and why he rejects the affirmative

character of Hegelian dialectics (1973b, pp. 143–61).

Although Adorno shares Marx’s view that the fetishism of the commodity is

the central principle of capitalism, his focus is not the economic exploitation of

workers but the intrinsic domination over human beings and their thought. His

critique of capitalist ideology hence has become “immanent critique” rather than

resentment toward an unfair economic phenomenon. “Negative Dialectics” and

“nonidentity” is the method to resist the universality of capitalism.

With regard to the idea of nonidentity, Adorno actually follows a Kantian

rather than a Hegelian view that the object eludes assimilation by identity. His

insistence on nonidentity signifies an attempt to break away from the identity and

totality produced by concepts. As a redemptive strategy, nonidentity brings

utopian elements into Adorno’s criticism of modern society. And it makes free

thinking possible.

Adorno never regards Marxism as a method of cognition that could lead to

a program of action. His debt to Marx is clearly restricted to the negative level of

critique of capitalist ideology. He believes that the opportunity to realize Marx’s

political ideal was missed. And there is no longer the possibility of revolution.

Lukács’s class consciousness, for Adorno, is not the subject of action; it merely

creates a negative way to freedom: to think differently. In the practical sense,

although he never gives up hope for social transformation, his struggle can merely

remain at the level of critique, or be limited to the field of art or aesthetics.

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3.3 Internal Difference: Against Representation and the Identical

The previous two sections have specified the concepts of difference and

nonidentity. I show in this part how the pair of concepts converges at the point of

being against representation, which is believed by Deleuze and Adorno to have

enslaved thinking.

Deleuze shares with Adorno the idea of resisting the world of identity. They

agree that the logic of absolute identity is the radical cause that leads to Fascism.

On methodology, they both turn to empiricism: Deleuze to “transcendental

empiricism” and Adorno to historical empiricism. However, Adorno contributes to

the meta-critique of epistemology by employing the concept of nonidentity. In his

critique of identity, Adorno always keeps his eyes on reality. And he describes

capitalist society as absolute identity that works out pervasive domination within

the whole society. The capitalist economy of market and the role of exchange is

the reification of identical logic.

Deleuze chooses another way. He does not restrict himself to the general

conception of experience and the conventional relationship between the subject

and the object. He deploys a series of concepts such as forces, singularities, and

the planes of immanence to constitute a metaphysical framework. Following

Kantian usage, then, Deleuze and Guattari call their critique of psychoanalytic

metaphysics a “transcendental” critique: it will proceed by distinguishing

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immanent from metaphysical operations in the unconscious. In Anti-Oedipus

(1983), Deleuze and Guattari make a historical analysis of the different social

systems. It is not Marxian historical critique but to demonstrate that Being is a

delusion that represses desire and thereby traps it in the snare of representation:

the goal of Deleuze and Guattari is to release desire from Being so it can enter

more freely into Becoming that is the source of the new. Freedom is freedom to

produce the new. Hence, for Deleuze and Guattari the relation of desire is in fact

an affirmation of difference: it manifests itself only in creation or production.

Accordingly, history can be understood as the chance that the development of

productive forces beyond capitalism and the expansion of will-to-power beyond

nihilism will lead to greater freedom rather than enduring servitude. Their

substitution of schizoanalysis for psychoanalysis is to outline a new economy of

the libidinal and the social that is capable of producing difference. This theoretical

goal conforms to Deleuze’s emphasis on the concept of “difference” in his early

years. Advancing difference to an ontological being, he intends to challenge the

traditional image of thought which is produced by means of representation.

There are several important similarities between Deleuze’s concept of

difference and Adorno’s concept of nonidentity. In the first instance, both of them

indicate a moment of freedom. However, they are to be read in different sense.24

Deleuze describes how difference is internal to every singularity of being and how

every singularity has multiple and differentiated elements. Adorno works another 24 As I elaborated in the first part of this chapter, Deleuze uses the term “internal difference” in Difference and Repetition to refer to difference in itself, which is opposed to specific difference. However, Adorno’s nonidentity does not imply an ontological sense; on the contrary, it is based on the criticism of the epistemological principle.

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way: his concept of nonidentity has no relation to the nature of being; rather, it is

to reveal the disparity of the relation between the subject and the object. The

reason I term the common ground of the two concepts “internal difference” is that

both of them can be characterized as highlighting heterogeneous elements that are

outside identity, for it is able to pierce into the hierarchy that results from identity

and accordingly to free thought from identity thinking. For this reason, I classify

both as philosophers of difference. Both Deleuze and Adorno resist the primacy of

identity that results in representation; however, they do not deny the medium of

identity. Deleuze insists on the priority of difference over identity, whereas

Adorno points out the positive function of the principle of identity in thinking.

For Deleuze, modern society still suppresses difference and alienates people

from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference,

we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can

become—though we cannot know what that is in advance. The practical way to

freedom is to create. However, here freedom is not equated with the liberty to

move about and pursue one’s interests within a given social formation; rather, it

concerns the conditions of change for the social structure itself. Already in

Difference and Repetition, Deleuze associates difference with the conditions for

the production of the new. Thus, to emphasize difference is in fact to free

thought from fixeds and territories; it is the freedom of a prison break from the

fate designated by reason.

Through the concepts of difference and nonidentity, both Deleuze and

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Adorno express their protestation against the world of “representation”. To put it

another way, it is the way in which both thinkers pursue a radical line of inquiry

into the work done by “representation” that might reveal an interesting

conjunction between Adorno and Deleuze. This is actually the rhythm or the

common ground behind their incompatible characters, the way they engage the

object.

Deleuze takes the world of representation to be the outcome of the primacy

of identity. Thus the mode of representation distorts difference and suppresses

it. Against such logic, he proposes “internal difference” which never falls into the

four representative forms of identity (identity, similarity, analogy, and opposition).

For him, the mode of representation cannot touch difference-in-itself; neither does

it touch the ground of life and thought, because it organizes thought according to a

series of fixed patterns and standards that are subject to some form of identity.

Difference-in-itself is thus the complete overthrow of hierarchic, organic thought

in philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and ethics, as well as in society at large. In

Deleuze’s own terms, the accentuation of difference-in-itself is

“a question of producing…a movement capable of affecting the

mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making

movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct

signs for mediate representation; of inventing vibrations, rotations,

whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the

mind” (1994, p. 8).

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The image of thought is produced by the means of representation. By the image of

thought, Deleuze means a pre-philosophical series of presuppositions which

structures both the understanding of thinking and the character of the conceptual

production which ensues on that basis. For this reason, the world of representation

is unable to understand difference-in-itself, because it only evaluates difference

through what is represented, namely, specific difference.

In contrast, repetition-for-itself indicates the essence and the interiority of

movement. Deleuze makes use of the theory of theater to describe the relation of

difference and repetition: in the empty space, there are costumes (signs) and

marks through which actors play a role. Here, what is repeated is the condition of

repetition (movement) with which something new is to be produced (Adorno,

1994, p. 10). The theory of theatre is proposed to be against Hegelian dialectics.

According to Deleuze’s interpretation of representation, the function of which is

to present, not to dramatize the Idea, Hegelian dialectics is still representative.

Hegel has made two mis-substitutions. He proposes an abstract movement of

concepts instead of a movement of the physics and psyche. And, he substitutes the

abstract mediation of the particular to the concept in general for the true relation

of the singular and the universal in the Idea. On the contrary, difference-in-itself

and repetition-for-itself resolve the problems. With the movement of repetition,

difference exists as becoming.

Adorno’s rejection of the primacy of identity can be found in his criticism

of positivism and instrumental reason. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and

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Horkheimer offer a radically different account of enlightenment from those of

humanistic philosophers. The book presents a critical analysis of the

instrumentalization of reason that plays an important role in the thought of

enlightenment. For Adorno and Horkheimer, instrumental reason and positivism

are the ways by which objects are reified and represented. It establishes an

equation whose equivalence is only related to the special function of the objects,

not to their immanent properties. This kind of unreasonable representative

equation is actually the blockage of the commutative mediation: it prevents the

subject from permeating the object. As a result, the world is conceived of as

identical with its representation by instrumental reason. Such a representation

produced by the principle of identity is so conservative that it can do nothing but

support and justify the status quo. And the conservative position, which is unable

to challenge anything old, thereby suppresses the new.

Adorno’s concept of nonidentity explores the extent to which we can reject

representation. “The less identity can be assumed between subject and object, the

more contradictory are the demands made upon the cognitive subject, upon its

unfettered strength and candid self reflection” (1973b, p. 31) The concept of

nonidentity emphasizes the priority of the object and the agency of the subject,

refusing to represent the object in a simple manner of instrumentalization. In this

sense, nonidentity is the source that is pivotal to oppose representation and to

produce the new. “The new wills nonidentity” (Adorno, 1984, p. 33).

It is in the sense of anti-representation that Deleuze’s concept of difference

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and Adorno’s concept of nonidentity present their pursuit of the new and the way

to free thought. It is from this standpoint we could consider their theories a debate

about a common issue. The distinction between the pair of concepts reveals their

opposite philosophical positions to a great degree. Then, a question arises: how to

realize difference and nonidentity? In the next chapter I discuss another pair of

concepts that are proposed by those philosophers as providing the means to realize

the logic of internal difference.

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Chapter 4

Rhizome and Constellation: New Modes of Production

“The determination that relations are external to their terms is the

condition of possibility for a solution to the empiricist problem:

how can a subject transcending the given be constituted in the

given?”

——Ian Buchanan

In Chapter 3 I discussed a pair of concepts – difference and nonidentity. The

logic of internal difference shared by them constructs the common ground of

Deleuze and Adorno that demonstrates their rejection of the primacy of identity

and of the hierarchical relation among concepts caused by the former. Then, a

question emerges: how to produce difference or nonidentity? To resolve this

problem, each philosopher proposes a logic of relation that is less a relational

arrangement than an open model that begins with the fact of heterogeneity,

rhizome and constellation, respectively. In other words, we need to consider the

concepts of rhizome and constellation in the light of the question. Using these

concepts, they intend to establish an open model of relationship within which no

single part has primacy over the others. Moreover, within the model, different

parts interact, mediate, and finally define a reticular field. This new type of

loosely defined field challenges the paradigm of a hierarchical and linear relation.

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Deleuze and Adorno, respectively, focus on the means by which difference or

nonidentity is produced in the modes of non-hierarchical relations. The modes of

rhizome and constellation in fact plot the possibility that the subject, which is

itself constituted in the given, can transcend the given. I bring Deleuze’s concept

of rhizome and Adorno’s concept of constellation together because I believe the

point where they converge signifies the conception of difference once more.

Moreover, these two concepts are used to describe the modes of production that

are capable of producing difference. However, apart from the common logic of

internal difference, there are great distinctions between the models indicated by

each concept: they have particular emphasis on different aspects of relation among

the parts within the mode. These distinctions reveal the philosophers’ different

opinions of utopia. In this chapter, I begin with several similarities between

Deleuze’s and Adorno’s philosophy on the basis of a comparative study of these

two concepts.

4.1 Rhizome: Construction of the Field of Signification

The concept of rhizome is developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their

co-authored book A Thousand Plateaus to figure a model of non-hierarchical

relationships. In the introduction to this book, the authors classify three types of

books among which rhizome is brought forth to oppose the mode of root-tree or of

radicle. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “A rhizome as subterranean stem is

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absolutely different from roots and radicles” (1987, p. 6). Contrary to the mode of

root-tree or of radicle’s “spiritual reality” (1987, p. 4) of binary logic, a rhizome

as an open-ended system emphasizes the nomadic character of knowledge and life.

A rhizome, biologically non-centered and all-directional, is a critical alternative of

root-tree. In its development, it does not follow any fixed mode or track. Nor is it

recognized as a particular organ (for example, a root, leaf, branch, or trunk of a

tree); it may be this or that bulb or tuber, but only bulb or tuber. Bulbs and tubers

are rhizomes. Although they are specific individuals, they are homogeneous: they

are all the same in the function and the way of generation. Their differences are

only due to their places. In this sense, a rhizome develops upon a plane: it

stretches, unfolds, and radiates all-directional lines, shaping a network. This is

how a seed of grass can develop into a meadow. But confronting a meadow, you

cannot tell its origin or margin. In contrast, a tree, no matter how tall it grows, is

always at a certain point, unless it is replanted, but the new locus is still a point. At

the same time, all the organs of a tree are recognizable in its growth. You will

never confuse a root of a tree with its leaves. The growth of a tree is a centered

and standard process that ends in shaping a hierarchical structure.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome is a figure that reveals the inclination

of rejecting totalization in its organization. The second volume of Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, like the first volume, Anti-Oedipus,

expatiates on the process of desiring-production which challenges the mode that is

advocated by Western traditional state philosophy. According to Deleuze and

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Guattari’s understanding, the metaphor of root-tree is deeply rooted in Western

thought and culture that insists that knowledge as a kind of mirror-image about

reality is organized on the principles of systematization and of hierarchy. It is at

this point that they find the theory of representation problematic. On the ground of

so-called reality (the root), all the reflections have formed an arborescent structure

that aims at self-identification. This structure strives hard to confirm the Oneness

(the root) behind the multiple appearances (the branches and the leaves).

“The tree and the root inspire a sad image of thought that is

forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or

segmented higher unity…Even if the links themselves proliferate,

as in the radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two,

and the fake multiplicities…Arborescent systems are hierarchical

systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central

automata like organized memories.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,

p. 16)

From the standpoint of generalization and essentialism, such a root-tree

framework of knowledge has shown its potential to eliminate the multiple that is

supposed to derive from the One and is subject to the One. An arborescent

structure such as essentialism grows in the light of the dual logic. This logic is

also the immanent law according to which objects are recognized and knowledge

is acquired. A root-tree indicates a representative pattern that molds thinking in a

dualist way. But this is not what Deleuze and Guattari want. In an interview on A

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Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze expresses his favor for Maurice Blanchot’s writing

style as an open system. He defines a rhizome as one of the open systems (1995, p.

31). In his understanding, an open system is a system of concepts in which

concepts are related to their conditions, not to their own natures. In such a system,

there is no inherent hierarchical order or fixed pattern among the concepts; instead,

the relation among them lies in their conditions. For Deleuze, concepts and their

conditions are the objects that philosophy is supposed to study. In such an open

system, all the elements interact. But among them, the linear law of causation

does not work. A rhizome has numerous lines and ways that lead in all directions.

However, these multiple lines and ways are not derived from the One. All of them

are becoming. Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a system of rhizome stresses

its multiple dimensions (1987, p. 21):

“It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather

directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always

a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It

constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither

subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of

consistency, and from which the one is always subtracted (n-1).”

These dimensions determine the nature of a multiplicity. As a result, the

multiplicity changes in nature with the change of the former. The dimensions of a

rhizome are constructed by lines, only lines, “lines of segmentarity and

stratification” and “the line of flight and deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari,

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1987, p. 21). Actually, the topic of lines interests Deleuze so much that he insists

lines are prior to two-dimensional plane or three-dimensional solid, because lines

have no priority among themselves (Deleuze, 1995, p. 32). Being against

hierarchical order, Deleuze speaks of a rhizome as an open system that

emphasizes its undifferentiated character. Lines are pure conditions. Because they

do not arrange the deployment according to a certain priority, only linkage and

connection create the new.

A rhizome works on the “principles of connection and heterogeneity”

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). These are the first two principles with which

Deleuze and Guattari define a rhizome. In fact, a rhizome is a map made of lines;

it is a set of different lines that function synchronously. Any point of a rhizome

connects other points. A line is the bridge that connects any two points. The

emphasis of lines is actually emphasis of a kind of productive relation.

“In a multiplicity [a rhizome] what counts are not the terms of

elements, but what there is ‘between’, the between, a set of

relations which are not separable from each other. Every

multiplicity grows from the middle, like the blade of grass or the

rhizome.” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. viii)

Connection constitutes the network of a rhizome. The nodes of a rhizome

send out roots and shoots that establish the new dimensions with

conjugation and rupture between them, like flows. The venations of a

rhizome are the deterritorialized flows. Unlike the bifurcate lines of a

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root-tree that always delimits the dimension of the new production as a

sub-field, the lines of a rhizome form new circles of convergence in which

new points are located “outside the limits and in other directions” (Deleuze

& Guattari, 1987, p. 11). In doing this, lines constitute new dimension (n+1).

This new dimension is not another plane that exists in juxtaposition with the

established plane (n-dimensional territory); it is rather a transcending of the

established one.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari make use of lines to

refer to constituents that constitute things and events. They classify lines

into three types: rigid lines, supple lines, and lines of flight. They differ

from each other because each type of line constructs a particular spatiality or

subject. To build a rhizome is to connect and to create lines in breaking

other points of convergence or connection. In this sense, the organization of

a rhizome is a movement of conjugation, rupture and blockage. Dimensions

are always in motion, because a line of flight is immanent in the dimensions

that a rhizome has established. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that

“the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map

that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has

multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (1987, p. 21). Lines

of flight are liberatory escapes from the forces of repression and

stratification. They are everywhere in a rhizome and are available to go

across the borderline at any time. Therefore, a line of flight can be

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understood as a means of approaching the outside. Because they are able to

lead in any direction, they create absolute heterogeneity beyond the limits of

the established. I call this kind of heterogeneity “absolute” because it can

neither be ranked nor be reduced to any superior. In a rhizome, all the lines

and nodes are undifferentiated. In the sense of priority, they are independent;

in the sense of reality, they are related. There are not any hierarchical laws

or orders among them. Nonetheless, it is this undifferentiation that results in

absolute heterogeneity.

A rhizome is a multiplicity. Opposing the pseudo-multiplicity of an

arborescent structure that is constructed by the binary logic, a rhizomatic

network affirms pure difference (heterogeneity) through the lines of flight.

Multiplicity “designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to

one another” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. vii). It is a loose system in which

no principles other than connection and multiplicity play a key role. A

multiplicity is made of pure becoming that keeps developing new

connections. In this sense, a multiplicity has no history. Moreover, it “has

neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions

that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature”

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 8). This means that multiplicity does not

mean an increase in number but the extension of magnitudes and

dimensions. It is actually a flat plane of consistency that occupies all the

dimensions. A multiplicity is a multiple machine rather than a collection of

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individuals. This multiple machine is altogether different from the binary

machine that produces the structure of a root-tree as a formalization of order.

It produces the multiple by way of deterritorialization. To put it another way,

the development of a rhizome as a multiplicity does not reproduce the

bifurcations or sub-systems; rather, it always tries to break the boundary of

the established and go beyond it again and again. In Deleuze and Guattari’s

terms, “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the

line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature

and connect with other multiplicities” (1987, p. 8). Moreover, this kind of

breach is available in any direction. It is not a passive revolt against a

repressive force or order but a positive pursuit of freedom and heterogeneity.

Hence, for a rhizome, the principles of heterogeneity and of multiplicity are

intertwined; they cannot be separated from each other. The principle of

heterogeneity is immanent in the principle of multiplicity, and the principle

of multiplicity is the ground of that of heterogeneity.

Deleuze and Guattari use the term “rhizome” to signify different

acentered lines that constitute a multiplicity.25 It is necessary for a rhizome

to produce or construct a map that has numerous entrances and exits and the

lines of flight. The function of deterritorialization is realized in a rhizome by

the way of lines of flight. The outside is not a specific field that exists 25 Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) theory of rhizome has attracted much attention. Some scholars criticize it for its ambiguity. For example, Dan Clinton claims that D&G’s essay on rhizome is rather an ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor than an argument (“Rhizome”, Theories of Media, winter 2003). According to Clinton, such a pure and static description presents a statement of identity that violates D&G’s original intention. In contrast, other thinkers commend rhizome theory. In particular, Patricia Pisters provides a real example of a rhizome: the brain (See her The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory).

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outside the established in distance. Rather, it is an absolute outside that is

able to penetrate and erode the established. The outside follows a logic of

difference. Difference here does not indicate conceptual difference or

comparative difference but the internal difference that distinguishes the

object from itself. It is this kind of difference-in-itself that constantly

refreshes the established. Therefore, a rhizome is a system that is open to

difference that is immanent in itself. The difference enters the established

field through the rupture and the conjugation of lines, or through the

verification of dimensions. However, once the difference has succeeded in

entering the system, or in other words, once a line of flight is caught, the

difference or the line of flight is absorbed into the previous system and

produces one that is different from the former. Then, new differences are

brought into being as a result, which is called an “excess” or a “supplement”

by C. V. Boundas (2007). Boundas indicates that this kind of excess can

nourish new deterritorialized movement and release new lines of flight. In

Deleuze’s terms, the outside or the absolute difference in itself is becoming

as the virtual. It is impossible to exhaust. It relates the individual, whether

the singularities in a rhizome or a rhizome itself, to external forces on a

larger scale.

A rhizome is a changing system in which the virtual keeps on

penetrating and invading the actual. In a rhizome, the virtual provided by a

line of flight continuously influences the actual. As a result, a rhizome is

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less a fixed being than a becoming that produces conditions for change.

Moreover, it is this action of penetration and invasion that endows a

rhizomatic structure with vigor and fluidity. A rhizome provides a locus for

desire to move freely. Or, a rhizome is a mechanism that liberates desire

from the given. According to the politics of desiring-machine that Deleuze

and Guattari propose in Anti-Oedipus, a rhizome is a full body without

organs: it is productive, but not petrified in its organization (1983, pp. 8–9).

To put it differently, a full body without organs engages intensities within a

rhizome in a pattern of endless production of self-same pattern. In an

acentered structure like a rhizome, desires are not restricted as they are in a

root-tree as a totality. Desires have obtained the power for desiring which

they are deprived of in a repressive system. However, “once a rhizome

becomes arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by the

rhizome that desire moves and produces” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 14).

The Internet is a real example of a rhizome. It works through

connection and it is open to expansion. In the Internet, a point can connect

to any other point so that the whole network forms an acentered framework:

it cannot be reduced to the One or the multiple. However, it is

non-hierarchical connection that makes the production of heterogeneity

possible. Since it is non-signifying, the Internet functions as a full body

without organs where desire can freely flow.

The human brain is another example. In contrast with the visual

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operation of the eye, which assumes the identity between the object and its

image, the brain operates as a screen: it allows flattering multiplicity to

freely flow and combine on it (Pisters, 2003).

A rhizome is actually an assemblage of desiring-machines that

constructs a logic of conjugation “and.” This kind of logic, pursuing a

nomad and non-hierarchical state, manages to challenge the essentialism of

Western traditional science. The latter intends to affirm the constant through

a determinate form. In contrast, nomad science aims to remain in an

endlessly changing state with the concepts of force and flow, intensity and

speed. From this perspective, a rhizome is a movement rather than an entity,

penetrating all of the dimensions and traversing every boundary.

Both knowledge and thinking are less representation of the empirical

world or the noumenon than the production of a rhizome. Thinking is

always on the way; it is becoming. Therefore, to study a rhizome is not to

ask a question such as “what will it produce?” but to find how becoming

takes place. Methodologically, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of

rhizome rejects traditional research methods such as hermeneutics or

phenomenology or even analytic philosophy that does nothing but seek the

ultimate being or presence behind the surface. Philosophy of rhizome is

pragmatic in the sense that it always focuses on the question of functions

and conditions on the basis of relations between singularities. We can make

sense of this point with the example of language. Language, being

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rhizomatic, works only through the connection of words and phrases:

“semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of

coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only

different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status”

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). In language, multiplicity and

heterogeneity are merely related to the conditions of the connection between

semiotic chains.

4.2 Constellation: A Utopia of Nonidentity

Constellation is a term Adorno borrows from Walter Benjamin. In

Benjamin’s text, constellation is an alternative model of history that is

distinguished from the linear model of “progress.” Similar to modernist

“montage,” constellation links past events among themselves, or it links past to

present. Constellation as an image of historical development indicates the

transition from “mythology” into a true idea of history. However, Adorno makes

use of this concept in a sense partly different from Benjamin’s. He does not

restrict it to the field of history, extending it to refer to the correlations between

phenomena or concepts. Adorno agrees with Benjamin that the relation between

elements rejects a totalizing force. He understands a constellation as a dialectical

model. In a constellation, elements do not indicate what they express; instead,

they frame a network or a space where changing elements are juxtaposed without

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reduction to a centre. Taking the example of a constellation of stars, stars co-exist

in harmony. No one is more important than others; they frame the figure jointly.

The concern for this concept is a key feature of Adorno’s philosophy, going

throughout his career.

Being a metaphorical term, constellation signifies “a juxtaposed rather than

integrated cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common

denominator, essential core, or generative first principle” (Jay, 1984, pp. 14–15).

As one of the models that incarnate “negative dialectics,” constellation emerges as

a weapon against the hierarchical order and totality of the philosophical systems

of concepts. It is constructed according to principles of differentiation, nonidentity,

and active transformation. Unlike Benjamin’s timeless, metaphysical

constellations, Adorno describes constellation as a colony that is composed out of

historically actual particulars (1973b, p. 164). In Adorno, the spatial character of

constellations can account for their anti-linear tensions between parts. The model

of constellation releases the thought from a fixedly given pattern; it inaugurates a

number of possibilities:

“Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the

process stored in the object. As a constellation theoretical thought

circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it will fly

open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response,

not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of

numbers.” (p. 163)

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In a constellation as a pattern of thought, a concept is not treated as an isolated

object; instead, it is placed in a force field that stresses mutual relationships to

other concepts. This series of communicative relationships in motion construct the

object of cognition as an open, unsealed process. It is no longer a single and

closed concept. It ceaselessly renews its own territory of sense. It is in this sense

that there are numerous keys to this box of the given concept. In other words, the

pattern of constellation endows the object of cognition with infinite possibilities.

With the concept of constellation, Adorno criticizes the Hegelian idea of

world history. According to his critical analysis of Hegelian philosophy, the

concept of universal history26 plays the same role that mathematical natural

sciences play in Kantian philosophy: it provides the ground on which the world

can be understood as a total process. Hegel, according to Adorno, “conceived

universal history as unified merely on account of its contradictions” (1973b, p.

319). On the basis of the concept of universal history, the world gets its totality.

This totality is an absolute totality that is considered the subject of philosophy by

Hegel. Although Hegelian philosophy introduces the concept of contradiction to

assimilate the elements of difference or diversity into its own system and to set the

system in motion, such a philosophy of absolute totality is nothing other than a

philosophy that tries to achieve infinity in an affirmative way. Such a philosophy,

for Adorno, inevitably loses its critical power. As indicated in the previous

chapters, the Hegelian dialectical system constructed by the concept of

26 Universal history means that history is conceived as a coherent whole: it is governed by some basic principles.

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contradiction cannot accommodate or tolerate anything outside itself. Finally and

unfortunately, it becomes a closed system, although it appears to be in a dynamic

state of “progress” or “development” (the two terms are favored by Marx).

However, critical theory distrusts all closed systems, because systems with a

totalizing closure occlude their possibilities of self-renewing, which Adorno

attempts to get back in the way of negative dialectics.

For Hegel, the totality of the movement of self-reflection of categories

means a totalizing system. In this regard, Adorno’s emphasis on constellation

demonstrates his position against a Hegelian system. The reason is that closed

systems are bound to be finished; in contrast, an anti-system is always open to the

unfinished. A constellation is such a structure that constructs its mobile domain on

the ground of the mobile correlations of the particular parts. It is in construction

and to be constructed, but it will never be completed. However, an anti-system is

not a simple negation of system; it is much more complex than that. An

anti-system is a critique of system. So to speak, it demands a kind of critical

thinking of system. In Adorno’s belief, systems are necessary for interpretation in

philosophy. Nevertheless, they make thought rigid and absolute. In this sense,

systematic thought signifies idealism, which “attesting the positive infinity of its

principle at every one of its stages, turns the character of thought, the historical

evolution of its independence, into metaphysics” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 26).

Therefore, systems as abstract and absolute thought eliminate all heterogeneous

beings. Furthermore, they keep objects of cognition from the Hegelian freedom of

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object that pursues a spiral development through the negation of the negation.

Constellations reject the self-identification of systems in the first place. A

constellation is actually a process of self-constituting and self-refreshing.

However, such a process is by no means an identity thinking or Hegelian

“development” mediated by the concept of contradiction. A thought constellation

thinks the non-identical via constituting a force field that calls for unfixed and

peaceful relationships between historical particulars. Although Adorno in fact

borrows this term directly from Benjamin, he takes Nietzsche to be the forerunner

who forms the original idea of constellation in such a passage:

“The later Nietzsche’s critical insight that truth is not identical

with a timeless universal, but rather that it is solely the

historical which yields the figure of the absolute, became,

perhaps without his knowing it, the canon of his practice…. His

desperate striving to break out of the prison of cultural

conformism was directed at constellations of historical entities

which do not remain simply interchangeable examples for

ideas but which in their uniqueness constitute the ideas

themselves as historical” (1983, p. 231).

Now we can know that constellations themselves are constituted by the

unique particular. These numerous, unique particulars contain irreconcilable

diversities and multiplicities. It is in these heterogeneous beings that

constellations manifest the idea of difference advocated by Adorno’s negative

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dialectics. In contrast, the timeless universal or truth is problematic and suspicious.

These categories are metaphysical in the sense that they imply concrete content

from the historicity of the particular. According to Adorno’s understanding of

Hegelian philosophy, the idea of universal history leads to an ideology of truth, for

it merely consolidates what is identified by the system and excludes what cannot

be assimilated by identity thinking.

Constellation is a device that can create a potential to defamiliarize the

immediacy of its elements. Such an estrangement is brought forth through the

mutual mediation among the elements. As I argue in Chapter 2, according to

Adorno, immediate Erlebnis is insufficient to engender a critical consciousness

about the subject or the object. Constellation’s function of estranging serves the

goal of provoking a critical and dialectical consciousness about its conditions. It

juxtaposes disjunctive elements and creates an assemblage. Such an assemblage

cannot be integrated into a unity; rather, contradictions and discontinuity are

inherent in it. Consequently, constellation itself connotes the negative.

Because Adorno defines constellation as one of the critical models of

negative dialectics, it is understandable that the principle of non-identity is its key

feature. Adorno employs the concept of constellation to smash the identity that is

identified as the totality of the system of a given concept by creating an

assemblage of conditions with juxtaposed elements. For him, the system is the

source of Hegel’s dialectics in which the subject is hidden. However, Adorno does

not intend to criticize the dichotomy of subject and object. He accepts the relative

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identity that is figured as the ground of thinking, advocating the absolute

nonidentity. This kind of absolute nonidentity is actually the outside of one

specific concept system, namely, the outside of thinking. Moreover, Adorno

argues against the confusion about identity that “turns the object’s indissolubility

into a taboo for the subject” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 161). For him, nonidentity

inherent in the concept of constellation is not to negate all kinds of identity; rather,

it calls for identity between the relative identity and the absolute nonidentity. To

put it another way, constellation is a cognitive measure or model that relates the

activity of thinking to the individual material contexts and empirical experiences,

not the supreme subject. In constellation, “by gathering around the object of

cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior” (p. 162). In this

way, the concepts recover the parts that have been excised from them in identity

thinking. In this sense, the cognitive model of constellation, different from system,

pays attention to the particulars that have been victimized in the unifying moment

of dialectics. It creates a force field where the object of cognition can activate

what is immanent to itself in the communication and complementarity of parts.

In constellation, all moments coexist in symbiosis. The object of cognition

enters this peaceful and accrete relationship and finds what it represents in it.

Adorno makes use of the example of language to elaborate the function of this

model (1973b):

“Where it [constellation] appears essentially as a language,

where it becomes a form of representation, it will not define its

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concepts. It lends its objectivity to them by the relation into which

it puts the concepts, centered about a thing. Language thus

serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it

means” (p. 162).

In the same way, a constellation does not offer a system of signs that defines the

concepts for the object of cognition; it merely creates a platform or a kind of

atmosphere on which the object can be represented in its own right. Within a

constellation there is no hierarchical order, nor any fixed relation. The role of a

certain moment lies on its communication with others. And the whole

constellation exhibits a fluid character. This does not mean that a constellation is

an indeterminate aggregate; rather, the moments of a constellation are in a

dynamic relationship of mathematical function. Each moment varies with the

change of others. However, they keep a dynamic balance as a whole. This

situation of fluid balance makes it possible that the object can be understood in a

free and speculative way. The relationship of coexistence and the fluid balance

within a constellation is essentially dialectical. They break away from the coercive

identity and exclusive selectivity of the system in thinking.

Now we have seen the role of constellations in the function of cognition.

For Adorno, the model of constellation provides a possible approach to disengage

the closed concepts. In constellations, the coexistence of stars takes the place of

hierarchical order (no matter what is supreme primacy); the peaceful relationships

take the place of Hegelian dialectical contradiction. Of course, Adorno here never

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aims at negating dialectics or depreciating contradiction. On the contrary, he

hopes to use constellations as one critical model to resume the vigor of dialectics,

namely, its power of negation. Only with this kind of power, dialectics, in

Adorno’s belief, cannot serve the coercive identity or totality any longer. The

object of cognition in the constellation of concepts can open infinite space in its

own right, because it has transcended all the factitious circumscriptions imposed

by system.

Moreover, a constellation as a cognitive model is not fixed or established.

As I have indicated, within a constellation the relationships between moments are

mobile. These moments vary with the historical and social conditions. In this

sense, a constellation of concepts actually tries to catch the historical and social

character of an individual object. In fact, the model of constellation is analysis of

conditions that substitutes dynamic balance for the one-fold essence. A

constellation stresses less one or several elements than the space framed by all

elements. In other words, what a constellation represents is not its elements but

the relation constituted by elements. Such relation is not a fixed one; it varies with

the change of the conditions. Hence, a constellation can be seen as a combination

of the relations within it. Relations are external to their terms, so they cannot

account for the nature of elements. Against the immediacy of elements, relations

imply contradictions inherent through estrangement. With this model, Adorno

intends to speak the unspeakable (the contradiction exposed by estrangement),

which in his mind is what philosophy should commit itself to.

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Something unspeakable, or the power of outside, for Adorno is actually the

non-identical, or nonidentity. Therefore, Adorno’s concept of constellation also

signifies the dialectical and non-identical relationship between the subject and the

object. We have seen in the previous chapters that Adorno advocates the priority

of the object in the subject-object relationship. This principle reflects an attempt to

ask under what conditions it would be possible to have knowledge of the object.

Truth, as Adorno argues, lies in the constellations in which the subject and the

object penetrate each other (1973b, p. 129). Therefore, a constellation is not a

third moment beyond the subject and the object; rather, we can catch the

constellations between the subject and the object from the perspective of

criticizing supreme subjectivity or univocal existence. Philosophy that insists on

supreme subjectivity or univocal existence tries to stress a kind of direct identity.

However, the model of constellation applies itself to constructing a

communicative and interactional relationship between the subject and the object.

A constellation emphasizes the function of mediation. Within it, a mediation is

mediated by what has mediated it. In other words, the subject and the object are

mediated by the constellation of concepts that has been mediated by the subject

and the object in the course of knowing and thinking. Consequently, the subject

and the object are themselves constructed and inter-constructed. They are neither

pure subject nor pure object. Rather, a constellation between the subject and the

object reflects three dimensions of relationship: the relationship between the

objects, the relationship between the subject and the object, and the relationship

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between the subjects. With this model, Adorno attempts to realize a peaceful

relation of communication that frees thinking from identity.

4.3 Concepts in Relation: The Power of Production

The reason I bring Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) rhizome and Adorno’s

constellation together is that both of these concepts propose a non-centric mode of

relations. They happen to coincide in using figurative images to describe new

styles of concepts, substituting them for the linear or hierarchical cognition and

thinking. In both new modes, every element is put into a network, and the changes

of conditions are deciphered by the verification of its relationship with others.

Furthermore, the two modes are not static, representative ones that merely

indicate a fixed structure; they represent rather a mechanism of production that

produces the new through the changing conditions determined by the relations

among elements. We can understand the relation between the two concepts from

three dimensions.

First of all, both of them exhibit a forceful objection to totality and

hierarchical orders of systems by accentuating heterogeneous multiplicities. A

rhizome or a constellation unfolds a flat map made up of different dimensions of

forces. In their respective contexts, a rhizome is proposed as the opposite of the

arborescent structure, whereas a constellation is proposed to oppose a linear

model of reflection. In both the arborescent structure and the linear model of

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reflection, binary logic plays an important role in constructing the whole structure,

which, for both Deleuze and Adorno, leads to hierarchy. For Deleuze and Guattari,

a root-tree derived from dualist choice produces pseudo-multiplicities which are

subject to a centered totality. This kind of pseudo-multiplicity is secondary to the

“One.” The way an arborescent structure develops is different from cell division,

which breaks away from the previous whole body by dividing it into two.27

Therefore, starting from the One, cell division produces real multiplicities.

Branches are never separated from the body of a tree. They share a common

ground: the sole root and trunk. For Adorno, hierarchy signifies another problem.

For him, the idea that the subject can completely catch the knowledge about the

object (the self-consciousness of the object, in Hegel’s terms28)—namely, the

subject-object unity—makes objectivity secondary to subjectivity. Such an

understanding of cognition leaves the independence of the object out of

consideration and restricts an objective world in the experiences of a historical

and social subject.

The rhizome and the constellation, however, avoid both of these problems.

Both Deleuze (with Guattari) and Adorno try to construct a non-centric network

from the perspective of pluralist empiricism, which is not a system ruled by one

certain identity. Here, a rhizome or a constellation is not abstract or transcendental

but one of the models made up of the empirical elements. These two conceptions

of relations accentuate the mutual communications and interactions among the

27 This way is analogous to the means of the development of the “way” described in the Chinese ancient book I Ching: Book of Changes. 28 See his Phenomenology of Spirit.

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different moments, which have no beginning or ending. By constituting a being in

regards to relations, both philosophers have deviated from the pursuit of

something metaphysical or ontological like noumenon, descending to the

conditions of a being. For them, a being cannot be devoid of relations. Within

itself, there are different dimensions of forces interwoven, it is determined by its

relations to others. An idea like this is undoubtedly influenced by Marx, although

Deleuze’s concept of rhizome means more than relations. It seems a modified

version of Marx’s famous argument in his “Theses on Feuerbach”: as far as the

reality is concerned it is the summation of all the social relation of a human being

(Marx & Engels, 1969, p. 14). In this sense, both of the new modes of relations

can be seen as following a Marxian critique, advocating the role of relations in the

becoming of a being. Although Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) rhizome and Adorno’s

constellation are different from each other to some extent, they take notice of the

fact that multiplicity is inherent in relations.

Secondly, the modes of relations open a possible space towards the outside.

A possible space is a new dimension where real difference can exist. It is at this

point that both of the modes can be seen as mechanisms of production. They

create conditions and passages to produce difference as the outside. Just as the

moments in relations determine the interior, they actually prescribe the limits and

the borderlines. Simultaneously, they outline the absolute outside. In other words,

when the moments determine the limits of the interior, the outside is outlined. The

moments within the map of relations, which are dominated by all-directional

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forces, provide the virtual power to transcend these limits. However, as the

relations keep on becoming and acting, in transcending the original limits and

borderlines, the new ones have appeared. Thinking, in this sense, is actually an

attempt to reach for the outside. Nevertheless, the outside has no image or

signification. In contrast to the relativity of the interior, the outside is absolute. It

is defined by the disability of the interior, namely, its limits. The outside exists as

a marginal world where difference (other ideas or other objects) may come forth.

This marginal world is in fact “an entire field of virtualities and potentialities

which… were capable of being actualized” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 305). In this regard,

the attempt to reach for the outside is an effort to exploit what thinking is able to

do. Although the outside as an absolute exterior cannot be reached, thinking as an

endless becoming is always transcending the established; it is forever young.29

Deleuze and Guattari relate the outside to multiplicities through the line of

flight, which they regard as a movement of deterritorialization (1987, p. 8).

However, the outside cannot be understood as an exoteric field from the

perspective of space; it is not even the negation of the established. Rather, it just

signifies the wholly new determined by chance. “This is the outside: the line that

continually re-concatenates fortuitous selections in mixtures of chance and

dependency” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 118). Deleuze uses the example of a dice throw

more than once to describe how chance brings forth thinking and how thinking is 29 Louis Althusser quoted a sentence from Hegel, “Content is forever young” in the very beginning of his early paper “On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel.” He used this figuration to describe the endless self-renewal and self-transcending of content, which in my opinion indicates philosophy truth. However, different from the mode of a rhizome or a constellation here, Althusser made use of the Hegelian syllogism and unified entirely opposite categories like “inevitability (slavery)” and “freedom,” “form” and “content,” and “externality” and “internality,” constructing a dialectical process. In essence, it is a kind of paraphrase of Hegelian dialectics.

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endowed with forces of deterritorialization, namely, the forces from outside. The

outside represents “the simplest power- or force-relation, the one established

between singularities arrived at by chance” (p. 117). In this sense, thinking always

comes from the outside.

Alain Badiou interprets Deleuze’s conception of thought as a typological

outside from the perspective of Adorno’s objection to all philosophies of the

subject (Badiou, 2000, p. 78–91).30 Deleuze’s position shapes a strong contrast

with Adorno’s dichotomy of subject-object. For Adorno, constellations are merely

one of the cognitive modes in the process of knowing. For Adorno, concepts as

forms of thinking are the power of thinking. Constellations still concern the

subject and the object of Cartesian cogito. A constellation breaks the unity of

subject-object. When the object of cognition is placed in the constellation of

concepts, these concepts actually enrich the new experiences and significations

historically. In this way, the constellations of concepts cut off the immediacy

30 Badiou proposes several reasons to explain Deleuze’s opposition to a philosophy of the subject: 1. One

must begin with the univocity of being and then position the equivocal, as expressions or simulacrum, within

this — and not vice versa. 2. Identifying the being of thought with a subject endows this being with a

constitutive interiority, which refers both to itself (reflexivity) and to its objects, which are given as being

heterogeneous to interiority (negativity). 3. What philosophers of the subject, and in particular

phenomenologists, pose as an independent region of Being, or transcendental figure, is on a certain type of

simulacrum for Deleuze, which he names "lived experience" (the other type of simulacrum being named

"states of affairs"). 4. For Deleuze, this compulsory correlation between the subject and the (scientific) plane

of reference disqualifies equally those who uphold structural objectivism and those who uphold subjectivism

(pp. 79-82). However, Badiou does not think that Deleuze’s conception of thought as a typological outside

really resists the identity between thought and being. He argues that, “the intuitive identification of thinking

and Being is realized, for Deleuze, as the topological densification of the outside, which, as such, is carried up

to the point that the outside proves to envelop an inside. It is at this moment that thought, in first following

this enveloping (from the outside to the inside) and then developing it (from the inside to the outside), is an

ontological coparticipant in the power of the One” (p. 87).

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between the subject and the object, producing an insight mediated by the force

field. In a certain constellation, one concept summons another and the

communications between them extend the meanings. Therefore, for Adorno, there

is not a single concept that is sufficient to express the totality of experience. Only

while they are brought together into a constellation do they succeed in offering a

material (historical and social) mediation through the tensions between them. The

outside is in fact outside the identity of subject and object, namely, nonidentity as

his central concept, which is produced by the coherence of the concepts.

In spite of different positions on knowledge-acquisition between Deleuze

and Adorno, their concepts of rhizome and constellation make it possible to

introduce elements from outside into the becoming of new knowledge. In the

sense of emphasis on connections, both of the modes are rather similar to

Habermas’s so-called communication paradigm. 31 However, I use the term

communication in a sense different from Habermas’s communications among

subjects that serve the critique of capitalism. For Deleuze and Adorno, the

communicative action between the elements within a rhizome or a constellation

means the blockage and the interference of the forces behind the elements.

Substituting becoming for being, these two modes actually become the modes of

production. A rhizome implies the production and expansion of space and power

relations on an ontological level. Therefore, we can even claim that being is

31 See Urgen Habermas’s “The Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm.” In this essay, he set the communication paradigm as the opposite of the production paradigm, which is built upon the Enlightenment subject-centered reason. The communication paradigm rejects subject-centered mode, being grounded upon the communicative actions.

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production. However, production for Adorno means the production of historically

conditioned knowledge, or truth. In contrast to Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s)

ontological production, Adorno pays more attention to the movement of cognition.

The important difference that distinguishes constellations from rhizomes is that

constellations as a critical mode express a kind of ideal critique of the

subject-object relationship. They serve both a critical and a utopian purpose.

Hence, the concept of constellation exposes the dynamic character of reality,

which preserves subjectivity in all the objective experiences. It is a redemption

that liberates the historical conditioned truth from absolute subjectivity. Thinking

in constellations is a way of finding the tensions and inconsistencies generated by

the attempt to speak the unspeakable. This kind of thinking is an effective way of

indicating and transcending the limits of representational thinking. In Adorno’s

words, “Constellations, alone, represent from without what the concept has

excised within, the ‘more’ which the concept strives to be, and fails to be in equal

measure” (1973b, p. 164).

To speak the unspeakable is itself a utopia. Unlike Deleuze’s typological

outside sketched by the line of flight, Adorno defines the absolute outside as the

unspeakable. This definition implies a utopian hue from the very beginning. He

sets up an unattainable goal for thinking. In other words, in his belief, philosophy

must think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable. He assumes that this

paradoxical proposition can be achieved through the ideal model of constellations.

However, in his criticism of identity, utopia or redemption is impossible. To

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conceive an image of utopia is in fact far from its nature in a utopian sense,

because to think in essence is to identify. Hence, man is unable to conceive in an

identifying way a utopia as an absolute outside that cannot be reduced to any

identity. In this regard, it resembles the Jewish taboo of forbidding the depiction

of heaven. Any description of heaven makes the reality its own chief source,

whether it copies reality or negates it. The significance of this taboo lies in the

acknowledgement of the limits of human beings as mortal. Heaven or anything

relating to God is forever beyond these limits. Any effort to describe it is a

behavior of desecration. This is the case of Adorno’s redemption which only rests

on the criticism of reality (1973b).

“The materialist longing to conceive the thing, wants the

opposite: the complete object is to be thought only in the

absence of images. Such an absence converges with the

theological ban on graven images. Materialism secularizes it, by

not permitting utopia to be pictured positively; that is the content

of its negativity.” (p. 207)

Because the process of thinking is one of identification, once the unthinkable can

be thought, it enters a new circle of identification. With the communications and

the fluctuations between the moments in constellations, Adorno abandons the

immediate identity between the subject and the object, extending the conditions of

concept formation. But, by doing this, he constructs an imprecise identity between

the constellations, which is a kind of non-conceptual mediation. Through the way

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of mediating, not subsuming, constellations attend to their object and produce the

“utopia of knowledge” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 21), namely, the so-called historically

conditioned truth.

Therefore, although Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) concept of rhizome and

Adorno’s concept of constellation share several similarities; ultimately they refer

to different means of production. As indicated in the section entitled Rhizome:

Construction of the Field of Signification and the section entitled Constellation: A

Utopia of Nonidentity, a rhizome unfolds a typological map that has numerous

exits and entrances whereas a constellation rests on its relations to what is other

than it. According to its nature, a rhizome is itself a non-systematic system of

production: a horizontal stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes.

The most important characteristics that differentiates it from the root of the tree is

that it can develop its stems into new roots as another source of production. Being

a plane made up of different-directional forces and flows, they have numerous

lines of flight that outline the limits of a rhizome. These lines mark the possible

field of production, or in other words, the possibility of the production of the new.

The lines of flight are towards the outside and they rise in the middle of a rhizome.

Therefore, production can take place everywhere in a rhizome. In this sense, a

rhizome is a machine that serves multiplicity-production through the disjunctive

synthesis.

A Thousand Plateaus continues the critique of capitalist society that was

begun in the first volume Anti-Oedipus. As the counterpart of the concept of

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schizophrenia, the concept of rhizome that appears in A Thousand Plateaus

designates, in the words of one commentator, “capitalism’s positive potential:

freedom, ingenuity, permanent revolution” (Holland, 1999, p. 2). For Deleuze and

Guattari, capitalism makes universal history possible by freeing desire from what

prohibited it. This attitude toward capitalist society is radically different from

Adorno’s immanent critique. To put it briefly, flows of decoding and

deterritorialization make capitalism possible; however, when these flows become

the ones of recoding and reterritorialization, they hinder the realization of

capitalism.

Now we can move to the last, but not the least important distinction

between a rhizome and a constellation. Both thinkers aim to conceive a

mechanism that can transcend the limit. Such an act of transcending is an

estrangement of what has been identified and totalized by ideology. However, the

two modes have different pragmatic significance. The former, for Deleuze and

Guattari, signifies a practical mode that may be realized by stress on the marginal

ground as the outside. In such an active mode, the limits outlined by the interior

can be transcended. Accordingly, the given can become other than it is. In contrast,

Adorno’s constellation is rather a utopian image that merely expresses an ideal

mode. This is closely associated with the utopian feature of nonidentity. The

estrangement of immediacy implies a contradiction that refuses to reconcile.

Adorno cannot even provide an actual example for this mode. I intend to consider

it the inevitable result of negative dialectics that carries out a meta-critique as its

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mission. Such a distinction between the thinkers, indicated by the pair of concepts

of rhizome and constellation, is a foundational one that accounts for their different

attitudes towards political. This point is detailed in Chapter 5 and 6.

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Chapter 5

Positive Constructivism VS Logic of Disintegration

“Deleuzian and Adornian ethics appear to be in absolute

contradiction. While Deleuze follows Nietzsche in calling for an

‘eternal return’, Adorno formulates the apparently contradictory

ethical absolute that Auschwitz never again be allowed to recur.”

——Nick Nesbitt

In the previous chapters, I have discussed the common logic of internal

difference shared by Deleuze and Adorno and the distinction between them from a

series of perspectives. The common logic, as I have elaborated, reflects a rejection

of the primacy of identity. And the distinction presents a contrast between two

different philosophical positions. This difference is what I characterize as the

distinction between “positive constructivism” and “logic of disintegration,” which

distinguishes them from each other as a whole. In fact, neither of the terms

originates with me; rather, they are found in their respective authors.32 The

distinction between the two expressions allows us to understand many important

differences between the theories of Deleuze and Adorno, explaining many of their

philosophical propositions and attitudes. The reason is that the distinction

32 Deleuze (sometimes with Guattari) makes use of the term constructivism in his works more than once. In particular, this word appears several times in What Is Philosophy? and becomes the central theme of the book. The term logic of disintegration can be found in Adorno’s own Negative Dialectics, which is one of the main resources that my dissertation quotes. More than that, he describes negative dialectics as logic of disintegration (1973b, p. 144).

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indicates a common ground that all these different propositions and attitudes share,

for both Deleuze’s positive constructivism and Adorno’s negative dialectics are to

be understood as rejecting all transcendentals. In other words, the theories are

grounded in the criticism of all ontological and transcendental philosophies33,

including those that merely appear to criticize ontology.

5.1 Deleuze’s Philosophy as Positive Constructivism

In the title of this chapter, I characterize Deleuze’s philosophy as “positive

constructivism.” This adjective (positive) does not suggest a new school of

philosophy, but merely emphasizes a prominent character of Deleuze’s theory.

Such a positive spirit is not a passive acceptance of the status quo, criticized by

Hegel and philosophers of the Frankfurt School such as Adorno. The positive

rejects passive negation (see Chapter 1), but it does not neglect the huge power

inherent in the negation. Deleuze has always stressed difference and multiplicity.

It is actually a positive spirit that implies negative power. Such a positive

constructivism is critical because it can endlessly open up a territory and go

beyond the limit.

The term constructivism is widely used in art and learning theory.

33 The term “transcendental philosophy” here is distinct in signification from Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism”. The common adjective “transcendental” shared by the two terms is used by Kant to signify prior thought forms: the innate principles which give the mind the ability to formulate its perceptions and make experience intelligible. Kant applies “transcendental philosophy” to the study of pure mind; it is also called “transcendental idealism”. However, Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” concentrates on the conditions of the empirical given. For him, the empirical given, the raw data of sense experience, is not the ground of explanation but that which must be explained. In this sense, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism can be read as the contrary to both transcendental idealism and classical empiricism.

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Constructivism, in the sense of art, created in Russia in the 1910s as a kind of

futurism, refers to a trend within the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture

that has an optimistic, non-representational belief in construction. Constructivism

in the sense of learning theory generally applies to an epistemology attributed to

Jean Piaget, in which individuals construct knowledge or meaning by

incorporating their experience into a current framework. However, Deleuze’s

employment of this term is far from both of these uses; he makes use of it to resist

the principle of representation and subject-centered cognition in a constructivist

way. Here I refer to constructivism in an anti-foundational sense: it rejects the

notion that truth is at hand or ready-made, seeking to find how knowledge is

produced within experiences. Without placing subject-centered cognition at the

center of the production of knowledge, Deleuze conceives a transcendental plane

to explain the conditions of experiences by the interaction of forces. For him,

human cognition, which implies a subject-object relation, is also constituted; it is

insufficient to explain experience. Rather, it must be itself explained. In contrast, a

process that produces knowledge is necessarily one of cognition. This is the

departure from which his transcendental empiricism and constructivism derives.

Deleuze claims that experiences are constructed on a transcendental plane. Indeed,

it is this opinion that makes him radically different from most of his

contemporaries in epistemology. The term constructivism here maintains two

dimensions of sense: on the one hand, it involves a way of criticism, exposing the

assumptions and the invalidities of the precedent knowledge. They are dependent

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on its conditions and unknowns. On the other hand, it indicates the creation of

concepts upon the transcendental plane where knowledge is produced.

Let us begin with one of the arguments in Difference & Repetition in which

Deleuze suggests that a philosophical book is expected to be simultaneously a

detective novel and science fiction (1994, p. 3). In what sense does such a claim

make sense? It does not mean that a philosophical work can be confused with or

secondary to these genres of literature. Actually, what Deleuze intends to show

here, is his particular understanding of philosophy, according to which thinking is

not originally driven by will, rather, it commences in the question of “what

happened?” This is an encounter. In other words, the activity of thinking takes

place in the sensation of consternation led by the advent of a particular event, and

concepts are the problematic framework unfolded in the given circumstances

rather than a response to the questions raised by the event. Events, questions, and

concepts intertwine in the process of the emergence of philosophical thinking, and

unfold their own inferential fields where they function as the distinctive roles.

However, behind all these fields something resonates among them: it is

contingency, chance, accident, or unconscious collision that runs through them.

The plot, namely, the movement of thinking, is advanced by intension and infinite

speed.

In the last book coauthored by Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?,

the authors give an answer to this central question, defining philosophy as “the art

of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. …it [philosophy] had to

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determine its moment, its occasion and circumstances, its landscapes and personae,

its conditions and unknowns” (1994, p. 2). This description relates philosophy to

the task of determining the conditions of the philosophical problems, rejecting

assertions that claim to have discovered absolute “truths” or facts about the world.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the kernel of philosophical thinking is the creation of

concepts, which are never the ones like Plato’s “idea” or Pythagoras’s “One” that

need to be embodied in secondary categories. Deleuze argues that the real power

of philosophical thinking does not lie in its reflection of objects but in the exterior

possible world that transcends the current thinking of limitations. To put it

differently, in all the thinking of limitations, there would be “deterritorialization”

—neither something beyond the limitations nor the transgression of

limitations—that haunts within the existing limitations, simultaneously making

them paradoxical. The edifice of Deleuzian philosophy is built upon this

foundation, seeking to find the power of such a “deterritorialization,” namely, the

power of the minoritarian, the source of creativities and multiplicities.

In fact, the book What Is Philosophy? can be read as an attempt to define

philosophy as constructivism by Deleuze and Guattari. They themselves make use

of this term on several occasions in the text. As they indicate, philosophical

problems, the solutions to the problems, and the conditions or the unknowns of

the problems have no meaning independently of each other. In philosophical

thinking, the three activities—finding the problems, seeking the solutions, and

determining the conditions—“making up constructivism continually pass from

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one to the other, support one another, sometimes precede and sometimes follow

each other” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 81). Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy

as constructivism contains three elements that interact with and determine each

other. In this sense, philosophy commits itself to expose the way in which various

sorts of system manipulate their possibilities and complexities in the interplay

with other conditions. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari employ the term to

characterize the movement of thought in philosophy. For them, not merely

philosophy or any philosophical system but also thinking itself is a process of

construction. The reason is that the concepts, which are necessary for thinking, are

to be created by philosophy in the first place. Concepts and their personae are

intrinsic to thought; they are conditions of possibility of thought itself. However,

they are not a gift of transcendent being; they are produced in the movement of

thought. Although the creation of the concepts logically precedes philosophical

thinking,34 it does not mean that the former is prior to the latter in time. Actually,

the creation of concepts is itself the movement of thought. It is in this sense that

both concepts and thought itself are constructed. Such a constructivist position

reflects their empiricist position.

Deleuze acknowledges this theoretical standpoint. He calls his philosophy

“transcendental empiricism” (discussed in Chapter 2). Such a materialist posture

manifests itself mainly in three of Deleuze’s works coauthored with Guattari: two

volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand

34 Philosophical thinking begins with concepts. Hence logically the creation of concepts can been seen as pre-philosophical.

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Plateaus) and What Is Philosophy? Especially in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and

Guattari have made an analysis of the organizations of production, inscription and

consumption in different social institutions (including “primitive,” “despotic,” and

“capitalist regimes”). They describe capitalism as a form that can achieve

desiring-production. For them, desire as a kind of productive force operates

through the desiring-machine. The desiring-machine is the locus of desiring

production. This complex, neither abstract nor material, is invented by Deleuze

and Guattari, who combine desire and mechanism and create an association.

Machines are constructed. Every machine is connected to another one: it functions

as a breaker in the flows in relation to other machines that it is connected to. But

at the same time, the desiring-machine produces a flow. According to Deleuze and

Guattari, the universe is constructed by or made up of such desiring-machines

connected to each other. Their movements—their block, flow and

aggrandizement—in the circuits produce new flows of desire. Every flow is made

by cutting off another flow, by restricting or drawing off a flow. Such a

multi-flowed universe made up of desiring-machines provides an account of the

emergence of subjectivity from the perspective of constructivism: it comes from

the investments of the desiring-machines.

In contrast, the book What Is Philosophy? attempts to answer the question

of the title by stating that, contrary to the traditional definitions of contemplation,

reflection or communication, philosophy is a discipline that creates concepts.

Knowledge is acquired through concepts. But its sine qua non is to construct them

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in a field that can provide necessary soil for them, because “constructivism

requires every creation to be a construction on a plane that gives it an autonomous

existence” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 7). This field or plane, for Deleuze and

Guattari, is the plane of immanence. To put it in another way, to construct such a

plane in the first place is one of the steps in doing philosophy as constructivism.

The constitution of the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical. The next step is

to create concepts upon this plane. Philosophy as constructivism consists of the

two complementary aspects: the laying out of a plane of immanence and the

creation of concepts.35

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the traditional understanding of modes

of philosophy—relating philosophy to contemplation, reflection, or

communication—are merely variants of idealism. These concepts—contemplation,

reflection or communication—cannot be definitive of philosophical activity; they

must be first of all created. Moreover, contemplation, reflection and

communication are machines for constituting universals in every discipline: they

are not special to philosophy. In contrast, “the concept as a specifically

philosophical creation is always a singularity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 7).

Being machines, they cannot explain but must be explained. In other words,

contemplation, reflection and communication are themselves not philosophy or

philosophical activity; rather, they are the activities that occur in philosophy or in

other disciplines. Defining philosophy with these concepts, philosophy would

35 The topic of the plane of immanence has already been explored in Chapter 2.

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become idealism (p. 7).36

Therefore treating philosophy as constructivism expresses a kind of spirit

that attempts to explore the conditions for producing multiplicities. Both the plane

of immanence and a concept have to be constructed. Philosophy is the logic of

multiplicities. And the plane becomes the site where the process of production

takes place.

“Creating concepts is constructing some area in the plane, adding

a new area to existing ones, exploring a new area, filling in what is

missing. … If new concepts have to be brought all the time, it’s just

because the plane of immanence has to be constructed area by

area, constructed logically, going from one point to the next.”

(Deleuze, 1995, p. 147)

To create is to make something. Construction is actually the production of clarity

in chaos. Concept-creating carves up numerous areas in the plane of immanence.

But it is not an activity of segmentation; rather, it is the deployment of forces and

dimensions. The increasing joints among concepts secure conceptual linkages, and

these concepts in linkage secure the populating of the plane. Thought is

constructed in this way.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the activity of construction or creation is the

special and definitive character of philosophy. Undoubtedly, this definition of

philosophy as constructivism intends to describe a picture of production of

36 According to Deleuze and Guattari, the Universals of contemplation and reflection would result in objective idealism and subjective idealism. The Universal of communication would result in inter-subjective idealism.

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immanence: it is not a particular subject that produces something; on the contrary,

it is linkage that produces. Moreover, production brings forth new production.

This mode of production rejects a centered subject and thus excludes history in

the process, emphasizing a kind of ahistorical time and becoming. Construction is

both the movement of territorialization and deterritorialization. Increasing

linkages make possible the ceaseless process of deterritorialization or becoming.

Hanjo Berressem describes Deleuze’s philosophy as a “radical

constructivism,” which argues against “social constructivism.” 37 Social

constructivism is concerned with the social construction of reality. It argues that

an individual understand knowledge within social text. And it aims at finding how

human subjects acquire knowledge through the mediation of social conditions. It

is a psychological construct rather than an empiricist construct. In this sense,

social constructivism has narrowed its sight on how humans or language construct

the world. Therefore, it is inevitable that the result of social constructivism is

anthropocentric. In contrast, radical constructivism claims that knowledge is a

self-organized cognitive process in the mind of human beings. Although the

human subject plays an important role in such a process, the process of

constructing knowledge regulates itself. Deleuze is opposed to the theoretical

position of social constructivism. His opposition to anthropocentrism and dualism

runs throughout his career as a philosopher. He is always trying to explore the

way that thought takes place in order to concentrate on how the world is

37 See his paper submitted to the First International Deleuze Studies Conference, “Eigenphilosphy: A Radical Deleuze.”

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constructed. It is also the commitment of radical constructivism. According to the

theory of Ernst von Glaserfeld, one of the most important proponents of radical

constructivism, knowledge, is constructed and the process of constructing

knowledge regulates itself (von Glaserfeld, 1991, pp. 45–67).38 Therefore to this

degree, Deleuze’s idea of philosophy markedly reflects a radical constructivist

perspective.

However, I do not follow this expression, because there are several

distinctions between Deleuze’s constructivism and von Glasersfeld’s. The latter

does not avoid a subject-centered type. In his essay “Abstraction, Representation

and Reflection,” he considers knowledge as information actively received either

through the senses or by way of communication (1991, pp. 45–67). Therefore, for

von Glaserfeld, knowledge is constructed but actively constructed by a cognizing

subject. In contrast, Deleuze no doubt goes further than von Glaserfeld and lays

out the plane of immanence. For Deleuze and Guattari, not merely knowledge but

also subjectivity, even the site itself—where subjectivity and knowledge are

constructed, namely, the plane of immanence—is constructed. By this means,

Deleuze and Guattari presuppose a transcendental plane instead of a cognitive

subject. It is in this sense that Deleuze is more “radical” than von Glasersfeld’s

radical constructivism.

38 Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Abstraction, Representation and Reflection”. Steffe, Leslie P. (ed.). Epistemological Foundations of Mathematical Experience (New York: Springer, 1991), pp. 45-67.

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5.2 Adorno’s Logic of Disintegration

Adorno in Negative Dialectics defines dialectics as “the logic of

disintegration” (1973b, p. 144). This definition implies that dialectics is critical in

a negative sense. According to him, the only responsible philosophy is one that no

longer imagines it had the Absolute at its command (Adorno, 1998, p. 7). Such a

claim demonstrates a tendency of anti-ontology, because it no longer commits

itself to seek an emphatic concept of truth. On the contrary, it should be

understood “as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy” (p. 10), which,

in Adorno’s eyes, can provide a refuge for freedom.

Adorno (with Horkheimer) deploys his thinking following the way of

critical theory that is defined by Horkheimer as a theory “to liberate human beings

from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer, 1982, p. 244). In other

words, a theory is critical to the extent that it is committed to a specific practical

purpose: to seek the overall emancipation of human beings. However, this does

not mean that dialectics is a pure method: for Adorno, dialectics as a kind of

critical theory means to think in contradictions. But contradiction here is no

longer a Hegelian contradiction that reconciles the opposites in identity through

synthesis. They do not need to be reconciled. Contradiction is itself the element of

philosophy. It is in this sense that philosophy is defined as negative. In fact, the

point that distinguishes Adorno from Hegel lies in his description of dialectic as

the logic of disintegration. According to such logic of disintegration, all forms of

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identity are suspicious (Adorno, 1973b, p. 144), especially the identity between

the object and the cognitive subject. This issue has been studied in the previous

chapters, and I do not say more about it here.

Hence I discuss here the other dimension of dialectics as the logic of

disintegration: namely, Adorno uses dialectics as a weapon against all ontologies,

including Heidegger’s philosophy. However, to proceed to this theme, we need to

consider Adorno’s attitude toward all closed systems (Fascism in particular). In

fact, this is a position shared by his contemporary philosophers. Having

experienced the distress and terror of war, many thinkers began to reflect on its

cause. They come to be aware that the inclination for absolute identity has caused

Fascism and the concentration camps. However, such an inclination for absolute

identity also results in a communist totalitarianism like Stalinism. Hence, it is no

wonder that numerous contemporary philosophers demonstrate a disgust at closed

systems that carry out the principle of identity. According to Adorno, any closed

system that claims totality—philosophical, musical, or political—is suspicious. It

is doomed to be transcended because it is no longer opening or unaccomplished.

From this standpoint he claims that what Auschwitz entails is the complete failure

of culture, including its capacity to produce meaning and transcendence. The

dignity of the human being was totally smashed by industrialized mass murder.

Any philosophical term such as liberation, emancipation and freedom made no

sense, when confronting Fascism. As a result, any theory after Auschwitz is

absurd (Adorno, 1973b).

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“The feeling which after Auschwitz resists every assertion of

positivity of existence as sanctimonious prattle, as injustice to

the victims; which is reluctant to squeeze any meaning, be it

ever so washed-out, out of their fate, has its objective moment

after events which condemn the construction of a meaning of

immanence, which radiates from an affirmatively posited

transcendence, to a mockery.” (p. 354)

After Auschwitz, people no longer seek to affirm the significance of culture and

civilization. Instead, they come to consider the limitations of the principles,

although these principles have played important roles in the development of

history. Enlightenment, as well as the principle of identity, promotes civilization,

but at the same time it produces the limits that cannot be transcended by itself. In

doing this, Adorno offers a radical critique of the effects of capitalism on culture

and on the psychology of the working class, to explain why Stalinism and German

Fascism had taken root in the heads of the workers and so why efforts to develop

socialist societies had failed. He gives particular attention to the critique of

instrumental reason (in Dialectic of Enlightenment, coauthored with Max

Horkheimer) and identity thinking (in Negative Dialectics). These two principles

contributed to human reason and enlightenment, because the process of thinking

and reasoning is a process of identifying the subject with the object, of

indentifying knowledge with the world. However, either of these principles,

instrumental reason or identity thinking, as Adorno argues, can lead to

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unprecedented calamity. In other words, it is enlightenment that results in the

failure of enlightenment. To some degree, this failure is the inevitable

consequence of the history of enlightenment. This is Adorno’s famous theme of

civilization’s tendency to self-destruction.

Adorno’s political concern is to explore the possibility of avoiding such a

tragic failure. His question is: why did Enlightenment fail? In order to answer this,

he goes further in the direction away from Marx’s own thought than Lukács had

done. He not only ties all totalitarian political systems together with Fascism but

also extends the critique to the field of culture. According to him, the production

of mass culture is the embodiment of identity thinking. It is simultaneously a part

of the means of production so that it cannot be overcome by the development of

the productive forces. He tries to find a way to overcome the limitation immanent

to human reason through the critique of identity. His philosophical effort is, in

essence, an attempt to develop a critical alternative to the principle of

identification.

In doing this, he goes so far as to abandon some of Marx’s pivotal

concerns.Adorno partly shares Lukács’s concern that capitalist economic law has

dominated all aspects of society, but he never agrees on the point that the

revolutionary working class could overcome reification. He thinks that the

question that a critical social theory really needs to pay attention to is why

unfairness, slavery, and human suffering persist despite the purpose of civilization

that seems to be to emancipate human beings from bondage. In reality, the

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development of history seems to strengthen this situation. For example, advanced

technology does not bring forth the freedom of workers from labor, but fetters

them more firmly. He offers an explanation of history’s failure based upon the

idea that problems in the sphere of human reason prevented the development of

historical forces. Instrumental reason has no capacity to address moral questions

or indeed any questions pertaining to human purposes and meaning. It is only

used as a means to be more efficient and regards all the pertinent objects as means

to serve particular given ends without considering their significances in others

aspects. Reason consequently results in the absence of significance: the humanity

and agency of the human beings has been ignored; an individual is merely seen as

an atom in the market. Moreover, Adorno states that capitalist relations of

production have come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit

often invisible, concentrations of wealth and power (1973b, pp. 189–92). Society

has come to be organized around the production of exchange values for the sake

of producing exchange values. Nothing can escape from the marketplace, not even

philosophy. As a whole, society operates under identity thinking. Subjects are

turned into materials or instruments by identification. Heterogeneity, multiplicity

or nonidentity is totally ignored. Under the circumstances, the occurrence of

Fascism or other forms of totalitarianism is inevitable. They could be political,

economical, psychological, or even cultural.

Such an all-sided oppression is the necessary result of human reason and

culture, so it cannot be overcome by the practice of the human subjects. This

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theoretical position can explain Adorno’s opposition to the student movement in

May 1968 in Paris. Lukács’s class consciousness, for Adorno, is not the subject of

action; it merely creates a negative way to freedom: to think differently.

Accordingly, although he never gives up hope for social transformation, his

struggle can merely remain at the level of critique or be limited to the field of art

and aesthetics.

As I indicated at the beginning of this part of the chapter, Adorno’s

depiction of dialectics as “the logic of disintegration” demonstrates his opposition

to all ontology. In other words, his philosophy is a kind of meta-critique. In

Adorno’s own text, he focuses his criticism on Heidegger. At the very beginning

of Part Two of Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that, “in criticizing ontology

we do not aim at another ontology, not even at one of being nonontological”

(1973b, p. 136). It is actually a criticism of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology

which reintroduces idealistic and identity-based concepts under the guise of

having overcome the philosophical tradition.

Adorno refuses every form of idealism. In particular, he criticizes

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of being that is seen as a critique of traditional

ontology by Heidegger himself. Adorno expresses in his text a trenchant rejection

of Heidegger’s Dasein (Being), for he believes such a concept is merely an

abstraction that separates the state of being from what is being (1988).

“The ontologists are afraid of getting their hands dirty with the

merely factually existent, which lies in the positivists’ hands

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alone…Being, in whose name Heidegger’s philosophy

increasingly concentrates itself, is for him—as a pure

self-presentation to passive consciousness—just as immediate,

just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts

and the sensory data are for the positivists.” (p. 8)

Adorno indicates his own opinion by saying that “there is no Being

without entities” (1973b, p. 135). According to Adorno, Heidegger’s absolute

Being is actually an illusion in pursuit of the absolute form of a concept that has

broken away from the concrete content of thinking. Hence Dasein can be

understood as a profound self-deception. Engaged with this concept, Heidegger

has made a concrete phenomenological analysis. Although he refuses to see the

entity as something substantial, he commits himself to finding a category to take

the place of the entity. As a result, the copula be, which originally conveyed a

combination of meaning—it refers to the existence and the state of existing—has

become an ontological state behind phenomena. In fact, the copula be is not a

substantial category: it indicates a relation with the world rather than a

substantiality like an entity. Hence, Heidegger’s absolutization of Being (his

concept of Dasein) is mistaken. As Adorno argues, Heidegger does not even

realize that, “wherever a doctrine of some absolute ‘first’ is taught there will be

talk of something inferior to it, of something absolutely heterogeneous to it, as its

logical correlate” (1973b, p. 138). This means that Heidegger’s ontology of Being

can be still seen as one of the forms of primary philosophy. To put it in another

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way, Heidegger’s Dasein in fact assumes an object independent of the subject to

argue against the primacy of the free individual. For him, such an individual is

still a Kantian transcendental subject who figures himself “the lord of the earth”

(1982, p. 27). However, Heidegger’s refutation of Kant is also refuted by Adorno.

The latter points out, when Heidegger purports to show his distrust in the primacy

of a transcendental subject, he is positing another primacy – the primacy of an

independent object – with the concept of Dasein. For Adorno, on the one hand, a

doctrine that advocates some absolute “primary” or “first” must have an absolute

hierarchical structure; the primal dominating concept reins the determined

concepts. On the other hand, this Heideggerian independent object ignores the

way that the object is: it is subjectively defined. It is the greatest distinction

between Heidegger’s primacy of the object (showed by Dasein) and Adorno’s

priority of the object: the former leads thought to a totalitarian form by

absolutizing the being of the object while the latter concentrates on the existing

sphere of the object and the way it is. In terms of resisting the Kantian

transcendental subject, actually, as Brunkhorst (1999) puts it, “Adorno’s attempt

goes in the same direction as that of Heidegger, yet it is a more radical critique of

metaphysical a prioris than Heidegger’s question for being” (p. 1).

According to Adorno, the spirit of dialectics is to refuse any form of

primacy, because the philosophy of identity, which is opposed to dialectics, starts

with a primal ontology. On the one hand, the philosophical concept of “first” is

itself an ideological consciousness; therefore, “the category of the root, the origin

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is a category of domination” and is “itself an ideological principle” (1973b, p.

155). Hence, the starting point of fundamental ontology entails an implicit

totalitarian inclination. Consequently, Adorno specifies rejection of primal

philosophy and identity thinking as the premise of his negative dialectics. These

are the two dimensions of dialectics as the logic of disintegration.

This kind of theoretical orientation is an echo of Adorno’s attitude toward

real practice: theory against practice. This pessimistic position is mainly derived

from his believing in the universality of capitalism. Adorno affirms that

Enlightenment reason tends towards its complete triumph in the process of

industrialization. However, this process towards triumph is imbued with distress

and falsities. Adorno does not agree with Marx on the point that such distress and

falsities are solely the problems of capitalist relations of production. He goes

further. He argues against the Marxist ontology of praxis by critiquing of

productive forces.

In Part three of Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes clear his position

against practical reason when he discusses the theme of “freedom”. He states

(1973b):

“Marx received the thesis of the primacy of practical reason from

Kant and the German idealists, and sharpened it into a challenge

to change the world instead of merely interpreting it. He thus

underwrote something as arch-bourgeois as the program of an

absolute control of nature.” (p. 244)

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In Adorno’s view, the primacy of practical reason is the offspring of industrial

civilization; it is primacy of production. He denies Marx’s proposition that the

emancipated productive forces could liberate human beings from the slavery

of coercive praxis, because he believes that it is not feasible to ground

freedom of human being upon the praxis. At the same time, Marx’s belief in a

historically necessary primacy of the productive forces is too optimistic. Since

Marx’s time, productive forces have become highly developed, but this has

not solved the problem of starvation or changed the relations of production or

set people free. On the contrary, the highly developed technology was put into

use to industrially carry out mass murder, whereas the relations of production

have not shown any sign of collapsing. This is the reality of late capitalism.

This social phenomenon demonstrates that the traditional Marxian analysis of

relations between forces and relations of production has not been applicable to

modern society—the society of late capitalism. Accordingly, Adorno rejects

the Marxian stress on the primacy of productive forces, because it actually ties

productive forces tightly to production rather than emancipate them. He is

more concerned with the possibility of emancipation of human beings from

production.

Therefore, Adorno insists on the necessity of a reconfiguration of the

relation between the productive forces and the relations of production. All

forces of production are under the given relations of production, so there is no

primacy of the productive forces. In fact, they are mediated through social

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relations.

To this extent Adorno is opposed to action. He strongly resists the

traditional interpretation of Marxian dogma of a unity between theory and

praxis as entailing the demand for immediate political action. In this view,

praxis must be mediated through theory. However, this does not mean that

practice is under the direction of theory. Rather, for Adorno, it suggests that

thinking is doing; theory itself is a form of praxis (1998, p. 261). The

dichotomy of thinking and practice is subject to the ideology of the purity of

thinking. This ideology mistakenly separates thinking from practice in the first

place and then combines them through a fictive association.

However, any immediate political action inspired by some given slogan

or dogma is bound to fail, for it is blind and reactive. This originates from the

fact that irrational practice—practice that does not include thinking—arose

from labor, which means that practice was always a reaction to deprivation.

Accordingly, “it carries the baggage of an element of unfreedom: the fact that

once it was necessary to struggle against the pleasure principle for the sake of

one’s own self-preservation, although labor that has been reduced to a

minimum no longer needs to be tied to self-denial” (Adorno, 1998, p. 262).

Practice, being a reactive action, does not mean the application of theory, and

it cannot achieve the transformation of the social order. On the contrary, it

must end in identification with the given order. Moreover, believing in the

self-destructive logic of civilization, Adorno rejects the utopia of

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reconciliation as potential totalitarianism. For him, system is suspicious for its

own sake. And it is not possible to find a “secured” system through

enlightened political praxis, which could avoid the failure of enlightenment

reason.

Another reason why Adorno resists immediate political revolution is

that he cannot identify “a subject” of history. In the previous chapters, I

discuss his believing in the priority of the object. According to this principle,

it is the priority of the object that can give prominence to nonidentity, whereas

the priority of the subject does nothing more than subjecting to identity.

Consequently, a reconciled society could not be achieved by a particular class,

not even the proletariat. It is only possible for resistance to take a critique of

art or culture, which serves as the media of the relations of production.

Adorno’s position against practice is due to his dialectical methodology

of critique. It is the dynamical source of his critical view as well as the cause

of his political weakness.

5.3 How Does One Achieve Internal Difference?

As I have argued, the common logic of internal difference shared by

Deleuze and Adorno reveals their rejection of the primacy of identity.

Adorno’s negative dialectics as the logic of disintegration shows, through the

criticism of identity thinking and primary philosophy, the fact that the

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conditions to produce difference have been oppressed in traditional

philosophy. However, due to the negativity of his critical theory, his ethics of

difference betrays a utopian tendency: his posture against practice has been

proved powerless in the political sense. Hence, there is a gap between

Adorno’s criticism of identity and the creation of difference: he knows why

and where difference is repressed, but he is unable to point to where it can

emerge. Nonidentity is rather a critical view than a substantial condition.

However, Deleuze fills up this gap with his positive constructivism. He does

not attempt to resolve the problem of the production of difference by creating

a category and substituting it for its antonym, namely, identity, like Adorno

has done. Instead, he tries to avoid traditional modes of cognition and

determine the conditions of difference in a constructivist way.

In fact, Adorno’s proposition of negative dialectics can be understood as

an attempt to keep the critical thrust of Hegelian dialectics while refusing the

synthesis of an immanent totality. In order to achieve this goal, he is opposed

to the Hegelian overcoming of contradiction, for it realizes a synthetic

sublation by assimilating opposition into identity. At this point, he agrees with

Deleuze that nonidentity cannot be achieved through the negation of negation.

However, where he differs from Deleuze is how to produce the nonidentical,

namely, difference. For Adorno, “the nonidentical is not to be obtained

directly, as something positive on its part” (1973b, p. 158). This assertion in

fact characterizes nonidentity as something negative and mediated that can be

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realized only in negative dialectics. Such a description essentially determines

nonidentity as a utopian blueprint, because it denies any possibility of

achieving the nonidentical in an affirmative way. Adorno interprets negative

dialectics as a way to think with contradiction: thus, to think positively or

affirmatively is not to think at all. This rejection of the affirmative is in fact an

action of undoing, whatever is its object. This is the point that distinguishes

Adorno from Deleuze. The latter rejects such an action of undoing; in the

same way, he refuses to define difference with all that it is not, which is the

way Adorno defines nonidentity. As I have argued in the previous chapters,

Deleuze totally abandons the dualist mode; he needs to find a new mode that

is able to overcome all dualist categories such as contradiction, opposition, etc.

This new mode is constructivism. To construct is to create. It is a completely

affirmative action. This perspective can drive us to go further in

understanding Deleuze’s description of philosophy as creation of concepts.

The distinction indicated by the title causes the divergence of the two

philosophers, not merely in the sense of theoretical postures but also in the

sense of political positions. This is the topic I explore in Chapter 6.

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Chapter 6

Striving for Exit to Freedom

“Freedom must be sought in a particular nuance or quality of the

action itself and not in a relation of this act with what it is not or what it

could have been.”

——Bergson

In the previous chapters, I have discussed the embodiment of the logic of

internal difference as well as the concrete distinctions about the conception of

difference between the theories of Deleuze and Adorno. In this chapter I am going

to turn to a political issue that incarnates their common logic and distinct positions,

that is, the issue of freedom. The association of the philosophical concept of

difference with the ethical one of freedom may not be direct, but we could make

sense of this relation by understanding the philosophies of the thinkers as the

concerns about the conditions of producing difference. On the one hand, being

empiricists, both Deleuze and Adorno focus on the way to determine the

conditions that can freely produce the heterogeneous (both Deleuze’s difference

and Adorno’s nonidentity) within experience. Freedom here is related to

difference: it also seeks liberation from the domination of identity. Rather than a

political revolution, what freedom signifies, according to Deleuze and Adorno, is

a possibility of thinking otherwise, of living otherwise, of creating difference that

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cannot be reduced to identity. It is at this point that the demand for difference can

be seen as the demand for freedom.

On the other hand, such a demand for freedom is pervasive among

contemporary thinkers who have experienced World War Two. Indeed, freedom is

not a new question in the history of philosophy. Freedom is a complex and

context-dependent issue all the time which deals with the political, ethical, social

and philosophical discourses. In World War Two, all the values advocated by

Enlightenment – such as humanity, freedom etc. – were totally put down to the

largest degree. The dignity of the human being was completely smashed by the

fact of industrialized mass murder. After the war, philosophers came to reflect on

the profound cause of this unprecedented tragedy in human history. So to did

Deleuze and Adorno. On the one hand, in their respective philosophy, they give

expression to a similar understanding of this unfreedom – although in diverse

forms. Unfreedom is not restricted to Nazism and the war itself; it extends into the

social life. Accordingly, from the perspective of being against all forms of

totalitarianism and compulsion, Deleuze and Adorno (including their respective

co-workers) agree with each other. On the other hand, having analyzed the root of

unfreedom, it is inevitable to direct the way to freedom. On this issue, Deleuze

and Adorno demonstrate distinct ideas and approaches.

According to his methodology of transcendental empiricism, Deleuze does

not pay any attention to the concept of freedom that is involved with individual

subjects; on the contrary, he discusses a kind of freedom that concerns the

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conditions of change, which slides over the field of law or morality. Deleuzian

freedom is not freedom from some oppression. It is neither the liberty to behave

nor the power to obtain; it is rather an ability or potentiality to produce one or

several new relations. According to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, the

blockage of flows, the encounter of elements and the change or the combination

of directions of forces can be all brought into the production of new relations.

These new relations become themselves active forces producing heterogeneity. As

a result, the new is created. Consequently, the freedom to produce or to join the

relations is equated with the freedom to create the new. That is the point of

Deleuze’s philosophy, because he always focuses his sight on the conditions for

the production of the new. Paul Patton thinks this conception of freedom is close

to Nietzsche’s ideal of “self-overcoming” (2000, p. 2).39 I partially agree with this

view. Self-overcoming, for Nietzsche, is an intrinsic attribute and ability of will to

power, which satisfies will to power’s demand to enhance itself. Self-overcoming

is a constant process of becoming. At this point it is similar to Deleuzian freedom.

However, according to my understanding, Nietzsche’s self-overcoming is a kind

of power of negating existing conditions. This act of self-negating signifies

self-enhancement or self-mastery. The so-called self-enhancement or self-mastery

is the latent goal, that is, the end inherent to the self-overcoming. Deleuze’s

conception of freedom is not subject to this character. It is not based on restraint

or insufficiency. From this perspective, the emergence of new relations is merely

39 See Paul Patton’s Deleuze and the Political, in the part of Introduction, p. 2. According to him, in contrast with the relation to the normative distinction of negative or positive freedom, Deleuze’s conception freedom is much closer to Nietzsche’s ideal of self-overcoming.

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the changes of conditions: neither enhancement, nor degradation, just change –

pure change. Although change is itself the negation or even destruction of a

previous state, it does not presuppose the direction of its progress. So change,

brought about by new relations, is neutral. This difference between Nietzsche’s

self-overcoming and Deleuzian freedom makes it clear that the latter is not the

freedom impelled by the constraining pressure of internal or external reality, but

the freedom of the productive system – it is freedom of flow, of selectivity and of

synthesis. Deleuze expresses in many of his works his preference for Nietzsche,

but I doubt whether his conception of freedom directly refers to the ideal of

self-overcoming. However, it is doubtless that Deleuzian freedom of creating the

new is the application of Nietzsche’s active forces.

Adorno is quite another thing. If we see Deleuze’s understanding of

freedom as freedom of creation, then Adorno’s is freedom in the social life,

namely, to think and live differently. Adorno develops his understanding of

freedom on the basis of a meta-critique of Kant’s theory of freedom.40 So he does

not steer clear of Kant as Deleuze does. For Adorno, the antinomy between

necessity of nature and free will is the crucial problem of Kant’s moral philosophy.

He argues that Kant’s free will is devoid of any true content and is subject to

necessity. According to Adorno, on the one hand, since Kant’s moral philosophy is

closely related to the cognition of nature, moral laws are then subject to causality

of nature in the aspect of its origin. Under this circumstance, free will is also 40 See Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (the first section of Part Three) and Problems of Moral Philosophy. Freedom, as a concept, is an important component of Kant’s three books of critical philosophy: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment. He distinguishes three dimensions of freedom: transcendental freedom, empirical freedom and free will.

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secondary to the laws of nature. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, “the more

you obey, the more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason”

(1987, p. 376).41 On the other hand, as Hegel criticizes Kant, his account of the

moral law reduces freedom to subjective knowledge. Any individual or collective

cognition is restricted to its historical existence. Consequently, concrete freedom

can be seen as the derivate from concrete historical reality. In view of the two

reasons above, Kant’s freedom is really determined by necessity of nature and the

experience of individual or collective subject. Adorno reads Kant as a philosopher

who grounds realized freedom on the basis of the necessity of history. However,

he himself wants to overcome the problem and he intends to find a freedom that is

critical of all conditions. This does not mean that Adorno completely rejects Kant;

on the contrary, he affirms the logical element of reason in Kant’s account of

freedom.

“Freedom needs what Kant calls the heteronomous. Without

what according to the criteria of reason itself is called the

accidental or the contingent, freedom could as little exist as

could reason’s own logical judgements. The absolute separation

between freedom and chance is as arbitrary as the equally

absolute one between freedom and rationality. For an

undialectical standard of legality something about freedom will

always seem contingent: the case demands reflection, which

41 With this sentence, they criticize the subjective character of modern philosophy.

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then lifts itself above the categories of both law and chance

alike.” (1973b, p. 236-37)

To seek a critical freedom, Adorno begins his work with describing

unfreedom in human history. In his writings, he tends to attribute unfreedom in

social life to the social mechanism which engages people in identity thinking. By

way of example, in capitalist society, underneath the surface of the freedom of

wage labor is the unfreedom of salary earners. According to Marx’s criticism of

capitalist production, this ostensible freedom covers up the exploitation intrinsic

to wage labor. Capitalist production, or more specially, the exchange of wage to

labor, for all its surface “freedom” and “fairness”, is to extract surplus value from

the proletarian workers. Adorno holds that this lack of freedom in social life

results in the huge disaster in culture. Nazi’s concentration camp and the massacre

of Jews indicate the pursuit of absolute identity in society. Having disclosed this

profound root of Fascism, Adorno calls for a new consciousness of freedom –

namely, non-identity thinking. This new thinking of freedom corresponds to the

free society, because “in a state of unfreedom, no one has a liberated

consciousness” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 416). According to Adorno, non-identity is not

only the principle of thinking, but also the principle of society. However, he

nowhere attempts to give a specific description of what a society of freedom

would have to be like. With regard to non-identity, his utopianism of freedom

shares the negativity of his philosophy as a whole.

Although Deleuze and Adorno demonstrate highly distinct understandings

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of freedom and unfold their respective arguments in highly different ways, their

accounts of this concept can be united into one issue: to preserve heterogeneous

elements that are alien to identity, to find a way to live otherwise. I touched upon

this issue in Chapter 3 when I talked about Deleuze’s concept of difference and

Adorno’s concept of non-identity. In this chapter, I will focus on their efforts to

pursue freedom and will indicate the means by which freedom can be realized in

their own theories.

6.1 Deleuze: Enterprising Freedom

Deleuze’s philosophy displays a non-subjective character, so does his

conception of freedom. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze (with Guattari) criticizes

the preference of modern philosophy for the subject. According to him, the

philosophy of Kant or of Hegel, or even of Habermas, is subject to the thinking

with the image of the subject as a legislator, although they create radically

different ideas of that image. In doing so, their opinions of freedom get into a

vicious circle – “the more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will

only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself” (1987, p. 376). In Deleuze’s

view, even leaving aside the logical problem of these distinct forms of subjective

philosophy, their accounts of freedom only emphasize one dimension: they merely

stress the power of legislating. He is trying to find an alternative that destroys

these images and retrieves philosophical thinking from the subjective inclination.

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However, such a position is not to abandon the concept of the subject or to negate

the role of the subject; on the contrary, his philosophical construction can be

regarded as a call for freeing human beings from any social, historical or political

constraints. In fact, the term “freedom” rarely appears in the writings of Deleuze

(including the works co-authored with Guattari). It is said that, according to

Guattari’s remark, Deleuze himself dislikes those French words that end with an

accent, e.g. liberté (freedom) (Smith, 2003, p. 309). I’m not sure to what degree

this taste of language determines Deleuze’s employment of concepts, but it is

incapable of explaining the overall choice of Deleuze. From my point of view,

Deleuze keeps distinguishing his own philosophy from the philosophical tradition

from Descartes to Hegel. In doing so, he tries his best not to use those concepts

that recall readers to a sense of traditional philosophy. Freedom is one of them. In

the Introduction to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze illustrates the concepts of

freedom as one of the three cases in which conceptual identity is invoked to

account for repetition (1994, pp. 15–16). However, I still use this term to

characterize Deleuze’s philosophy because the pursuit of freedom is never foreign

to his idea. The whole construction of his transcendental empiricism and the usage

of the concepts achieve freedom, freedom of flows and forces, freedom of man

and thought, freedom of conditions of the new.

Deleuze tries to restore the active characteristics of freedom that were

repressed by Kantian morality. This has two dimensions of meaning. Above all,

enterprising freedom signifies the triumph of active forces. In the preface to the

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English translation of his early work Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze indicates

his position against “the triumph of reactive forces in man” (p. x). Accordingly, in

terms of Nietzsche’s relation of master and slave, Deleuzian freedom is freedom

of master. Indeed, the so-called “freedom of master” does not refer to the

autonomy of the individual subject. As I have argued at the beginning of this

section, Deleuze does not relate his concept of freedom to an empirical subject.

Therefore, following the Nietzschean usage, the notion of master does not stand

for the individual or class who is dominating, but characterizes the regime of

domination that comes under the sway of active forces. In the next place, with the

expression of “enterprising freedom”, I stress the ability and potentiality of such

freedom that can ceaselessly influence the existing realities. Deleuzian freedom is

not a state of release or disengagement. It is not the freedom from something

(constraint or regulation), but the freedom to do something. This freedom as

becoming is a process rather than a consequence: it cannot be reified or petrified:

it leads to more or greater freedom.

These two dimensions can be united into one point: enterprising freedom is

thus achieved to the extent that active forces not merely dominate reactive ones

but also transmute them. This process of transmutation is a matter of “creating

pluralism where homogeneity had previously reigned” (Buchanan, 1997, p. 491).

In this sense, Deleuzian freedom appears not only as the opposite of the

unfreedom in diverse forms, but also of the freedom of the slave. Or in terms of

Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, enterprising freedom is a Dionysian freedom that

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involves itself in production of the new. With regard to the enterprising feature,

Deleuze has learned something from Nietzsche (“will to power”). “What a will

wants is to affirm its difference” (Deleuze, 1981, p. 9). Accordingly, the

affirmation of difference, the enjoyment of difference, is “the new, aggressive and

elevated conceptual element that empiricism substitutes for the heavy notions of

dialectic” (Deleuze, 1981, p. 9). A Deleuzian freedom is enterprising because it

can completely exploit what it can do: to freely preserve this difference and freely

put it into production. After all that, the enterprising feature of freedom is its

desire to produce and to create through the appropriation of actives forces. It

concerns the power and the ability that allows the active forces to be in play rather

than domesticate them in the name of some given laws or values. To figure such a

process of creation, Deleuze defines the productive forces—pre-individual

desire—and the production mechanism – desiring-machine that can produce flows

of desire. Freedom thus becomes the intrinsic attribute of this mechanism.

Deleuze regards the question of freedom as the one of “outside thought”

that is always alien to the existing conditions (1988a, pp. 89–90).42 However,

such “outside thought” does not come from an outside field or culture. According

to Deleuze, to produce outside thought, is to “make thought a war machine”

(Deleuze & Guattari, 19887, p. 377). With the concept of war machine, Deleuze

succeeds in evading the subjective character of traditional philosophy, focusing on

the conditions of creating the new. The war machine is a nomadic force of

42 Deleuze claims that “The outside is the negative space, from which the resistance derives its forces” in Berrsonism, p. 89.

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aggression or resistance that ultimately is helpful to preserving heterogeneity.

Deleuze (with Guattari) opposes it to the state apparatus in A Thousand

Plateaus.43 According to Deleuze and Guattari, as the maintenance of the existing

system and identity, the state apparatus strives for keeping homogeneity and

totalitarianism. It has a tendency to reproduce itself and remain identical to itself,

although its policies vary with situations. Thus, being the opposite of the

state-apparatus, the war machine signifies an anarchic presence beyond the order

of state, because war is the “surest mechanism directed against the formation of

the State” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 357). Here, war does not appear as a state

of chaos or out-of-order; rather, it raises a kind of new order that turns against the

one of state. In this sense, the war machine can be seen as a mechanism of

production that brings about outside elements to challenge the conventional:

“It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine

as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the state apparatus

constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or

according to which we are in the habit of thinking.” (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1987, p. 354)

Nevertheless, the term war here does not mean an armed and violent conflict;

rather, it is declared against the Establishment. Although to some extent war aims

for “the annihilation or capitulation of enemy forces” (Deleuze and Guattari,

1986b, p. 111), it means a flight rather than a battle. Hence, the war machine does

43 See Part 12 of A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine”.

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not have war as its object. It is a linear assemblage that constructs itself on lines of

flight: it is the invention of the nomad (p. 111). As the outside of the sate, the war

machine unsettles the sedentary order and puts it into turbulence. Therefore, those

elements, regulated or governed, are liberated from the normal order and become

new flows. In the course of their operation, these new flows must conflict with the

governing system and form their own territory for preserving themselves. The

process of the operation is the deterritorialization of those sanctioned flows of

power. However, this process of deterritorialization is simultaneously a process of

reterritorialization: it opens a new space. As Deleuze puts it, war machines are

“linear arrangements constructed along lines of flight. Thus understood, the aim of

war machines isn’t war at all but a very special kind of space, smooth space,

which they establish, occupy and extend. Nomadism is precisely this combination

of war-machine and smooth space.” (1995, p. 33)

The most notable character of Nomadism is its free movement of migration.

It is a way of life that goes across the new space opened by the war machine. The

nomads are not those people who leave one state and go to another; instead, they

are in constant change and never settle down. They are in dissociation, not

belonging to any state. In spite of their incessant movement, the nomads still have

territory. With regard to this territory, it is not a fixed and established state. The

nomads move from one point to another, but in the territory constituted by these

points lines of light be found every where. Such a territory asserts its power of

deterritorialization. Nomadism in this sense is becoming. The freedom of

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movement is just realized in becoming. Deleuze’s substitution of becoming for

being reflects his opposition to institutionalization and totalization. Nomadism is

the practical form of freedom advocated by Deleuze. By this means, freedom is no

more an issue that involves laws and morality. Now it has become a style of life:

life is always on the way. This style of life is the chance that can lead to greater

freedom. Such a freedom is in some shifting intensities that are blocked and

unblocked flux. However, Nomadism does not signify an aimless life: it is the

potential for freedom. Nomadism as freedom is in fact the deterritorialization of

state power: it is the absolute outside. It can “make the outside a territory in space;

consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory;

deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize

oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986b, p. 4).

Difference, multiplicity and change are immanent to such a freedom as becoming.

For Deleuze and Guattari, it is necessary to release desire from being so it can

enter more freely into becoming. Furthermore, such freedom is active. To some

extent, it is even aggressive or enterprising. Using these terms, I of course do not

mean that Deleuzian freedom instigates an invasive war or advocates violence. On

the contrary, I attempt to stress a characteristic of freedom in Deleuze’s

philosophy that it shows initiative to pursue the new.

Paul Patton characterizes this Deleuzian model of freedom as “critical

freedom”. According to him, it “differs from the standard liberal concepts of

positive and negative freedom by its focus upon the conditions of change or

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transformation in the subject, and by its indifference to the individual or collective

nature of the subject” (2000, p. 83). In this sense, true freedom lies in its power to

determine the conditions of change for social structure itself. As I have indicated

elsewhere, being a transcendental empiricist, Deleuze focuses on the conditions of

actual experience all the time. In Anti-Oedipus, by describing the modes of

production in the different social modalities, Deleuze and Guattari aim to find the

conditions that can help production transgress the restriction of the Oedipal

triangle. In doing this, they hope to free the positive potential of capitalism—the

capacity to create the ever-new relations between elements—from its regressive

tendencies that reduces those relations to a certain axiomatic of production. This is

actually to construct life on the basis of free flux of different forces. According to

Deleuze (1981), life is freedom; it is itself difference: it is the power to think

otherwise. In Nietzschean terms, life as freedom is a Dionysian yes, because it

“knows how to say no: it is pure affirmation, it has conquered

nihilism and divested negation of all autonomous power. But it has

done his because it has placed the negative at the service of the

powers of affirming. To affirm is to create, not to bear, put up with or

accept.” (pp. 165–86)

This argument relates pure affirmation of difference to the activity of creation. For

Deleuze, difference has contained the free elements in itself that can pervade and

enter into every corner of life. Therefore, to create difference, is a Deleuzian

freedom. Although this freedom appears as an absolute outside, it can be realized

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in the empirical world. Freedom, for Deleuze, is a revolutionary element that can

exist in the current system.

6.2 Adorno: Redemption as Aesthetic Freedom

As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, Adorno develops his

theory of freedom on the basis of a critique of Kant’s moral philosophy, especially,

of his concept of practical reason.44 He aims to disclose what he sees as the truth

of Kant’s conception of freedom to argue for the impossibility of its realization in

the practical sense. Kant connects freedom with morality. His moral philosophy is

based on rationality. For Kant, man knows that he is free by knowing his duties.

Accordingly, man is free because he can choose to act according to the rational

principle. Such rational principle is indeed a self-reflexive judgement. In doing

this, the Kantian concept of freedom achieves a unity of theory (rationality) and

practice (action). However, this is the point that Adorno intends to refute.

According to Adorno, although all philosophy since the seventeenth century

has regarded the pursuit of freedom as the ultimate mission, their concern is

problematic. The idea of freedom has lost power from the outset; freedom has

never been realized in this history. This is because the conception of freedom is

above all defined within the realm of rationalist philosophy, and its demand for

autonomy conflicts with the necessity of rationality (1973b).

44 “Freedom” is the first topic in the third part of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. The subheading of this section is “On the Meta-critique of Practical Reason”.

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“It [the conception of freedom] goes against the old oppression

and promotes the new one, the one that hides in the principle of

rationality itself. One seeks a common formula for freedom and

oppression, ceding freedom to the rationality that restricts it, and

removing it from empiricism in which one does not even want to

see it realized.” (p. 214)

In the Kantian philosophy, the idea of freedom is subject to the law of causality,

because causality, as a condition of existence, resides in the way that the human

mind is constructed. Consequently, no matter what the content of freedom is, it is

in the first place compatible with the acquired knowledge that is structured

according to the principle of causality. This principle signifies a two-fold sense:

natural laws and human reason. For Kant, the former is just respect for the law, “a

sense of the will’s free submission to the law, a submission free and yet bound up

with an unavoidable compulsion that is exerted” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 232).45 That

is to say, man cannot pursue his freedom beyond the natural laws. His free will

may be realized only when it obeys these laws. This first dimension of sense

concerns the knowing ability of man as the agent of freedom. Obeying all the

natural laws, man has the right to make free decisions. However, these decisions

are made according to their knowledge, knowledge about the external – the

context of the society – and knowledge about the internal – the subject himself

and his right of free decision-making. This second dimension concerns a

45 The words are from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Adorno quotes them in his argument in Negative Dialectics.

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rationalist view that appeals to reason as a source of knowledge. In fact, the

correlation of freedom to the rationalist philosophy makes the concept of freedom

a rather abstract and empty one, because the precedence of reason cannot endow

freedom with any detailed content before making it obedient to reason. That is to

say, the exercise of freedom, even the recognition of freedom itself, depends upon

the knowledge of the agent as an empirical subject. However, for an empirical

subject, knowledge itself is limited, because the recognition rests with the

individual experience and with the way it is acquired. This is the other aspect of

the traditional doctrine of freedom: free will is rationalist, empirical and

subjective. But from the viewpoint of Adorno, the attempt to localize the question

of free will in the empirical subject is still a failure. According to idealists,

including Kant, freedom or free will, as well as reason, is logically prior to

experience. Nevertheless, free will is immanent to the empirical subject that “is

itself a moment of the spatial-temporal ‘external’ world” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 213).

Therefore, the empirical subject has no ontological priority over the external

world. This logical contradiction demonstrates the inconsistency of the idealist

conception of freedom.

From a pessimistic standpoint, Adorno argues that it is impossible to realize

freedom (in the traditional sense) in the modern world, or, in his words, the

“organized world” or “administered world” that advocates the principle of

individualization. Freedom, or more specially, free will orients the direction of

individualization. It represents a system without restriction. However, in reality,

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by a way of dualism, freedom is always defined as the opposite of unfreedom. Its

realization lies in the cancellation of contradictions by negation. This definition

signifies a passive dependence upon the totality of whatever restricts the

individuality of the empirical subject. Thus, freedom that radically rejects totality

and the movement of totalization in history, is actually defined by the ontology it

denies. Accordingly, freedom becomes a moment that has two dimensions of

sense: “It is entwined, not to be isolated; and for the time being it is never more

than an instant of spontaneity, a historical node, the road to which is blocked

under present conditions”. (Adorno, 1973b, p. 219)

Here, freedom encounters a dilemma analogous to that of Adorno’s concept

of nonidentity.46 It only appears as the resistance against unfreedom. If we also

call freedom “the outside”, it is not in the sense of Deleuze’s outside as

Nomadism. For Adorno, the attempt to realize complete freedom in an organized

world (e.g., capitalist society) is equivalent to trying to reach the outside in the

inside: it is definitely impossible. With these arguments, Adorno expresses his

pessimistic posture to define freedom as the negation of a specific unfreedom.

Such pessimism is much deeper than other critical theorists like Marcuse, because

what drives him to despair in the first place is not the pervasive and insuperable

unfreedom in the oppressive world, but the problem of freedom itself.

However, this does not mean that the Kantian conception of freedom has no

value at all. It also does not mean that there is no freedom in empirical life.

46 See Chapters 3, the second section.

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Instead, Adorno indicates that it is in the practical sense that he insists that

positive freedom47 is merely a fiction. The impossibility of realizing freedom

refers to positive freedom. As he has argued, the Kantian conception of freedom

cannot break the bondage that comes from its relation to the empirical subject in a

given circumstance. Due to this unavoidable bondage, positive freedom can be

realized in the real world by no means. It turns into negative freedom, a resistance

to repression, even, the altered forms of unfreedom to some extent. Since negative

freedom emerges as a negative of unfreedom, it is sub-servient to unfreedom

while considering itself to be Utopian. Although Hegel relates freedom to

dialectics, he does not completely resolve this problem. What distinguishes him

from Kant is his concern with history. However, as Adorno argues in Dialectic of

Enlightenment, with the development of the culture and reason of Enlightenment,

there is still domination and oppression in society. Human history is really a book

in which unfreedom can be found everywhere.

Moreover, such unfreedom originates not in injustice and inequality in laws

or property, but in Enlightenment reason itself. A number of philosophers describe

history as the development and progress that can overcome unfreedom. Marx is

among them. However, as long as history is dominated by reason, it is impossible

to avoid this problem – it is the kingdom of necessity. Therefore, even from the

perspective of Hegelian dialectics, history promises universal freedom, however,

it in fact delivers universal compulsion, that is, unfreedom. This is the repressive

47 Isaiah Berlin draws a distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom. According to him, freedom as the absence of restraint means unwilling to subjugate. In this sense it is negative freedom, while positive one one's power to make choices leading to action.

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character of the doctrine of freedom. For Adorno, it is because Kant and the

idealists after him define freedom according to a bourgeois value of universality

and equality that freedom has to confront the compulsion and repression resulted

from itself. Relating freedom to the principle of identity, this bourgeois ideology

fails to attach importance to the deferential elements that can lead to the thought

and action. As a result, it is satisfied with the ostensible equality of universal

rights. For example, in the free market of capitalist society, in the name of

freedom and equality, the salary of wage-workers and the exchange of

commodities conceal the surplus value created by workers’ labor. Freedom is

surely the principle of exchange in the market, but worker’s freedom only lies in

their acceptance of the salary or not while consumers’ in their acceptance of the

price or not. No one compels them, but they are compelled. So long as they live in

this society, they have no other options except this.

However, no matter whether they accept, the inequality behind the principle

of identity cannot be changed. To be free is to choose what is all along the same.

In fact, it is in this sense that the principle of identity cannot achieve positive

freedom; instead, it reinforces the compulsion in the society. “We feel that identity

is the universal coercive mechanism which we, too, finally need to free ourselves

from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through

coercive civilization, not by way of any ‘back to nature’” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 147).

It is impractical to go back to nature; neither can it bring forth freedom. At the

same time, to pursue civilization is to confront and bear its compulsion and

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inequality. This is the irresolvable problem of the reason of enlightenment that

Adorno specifies in the co-authored work Dialectic of Enlightenment.

This critique of freedom can also be applied to Marxian theory and even

post-Marxian theory (e.g. Lukács’). Despite the different attitudes of Marx and

Lukács toward reification, they share a common idea that freedom can be

achieved through the efforts of the proletariat to overcome the ideology of the

bourgeoisie. But for Adorno, this utopian ideal cannot be realized in the practical

sense, since the proletariat, the supposed subject or the agent of this revolution

cannot obtain willingness for creating a definitely different freedom in the

domesticating of capitalist ideology. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s term, such

ideology is molded by culture industry. Consciousness of freedom is not a given

rooted in the proletariat, but arises from the conditions of the social situation. The

standardized values produced by the culture industry tend to tame the masses and

manipulate them into the passive and negative. It is not simply to say that the

masses (or in Marxian terms, the proletariat or working class) has lost the

consciousness of revolution. To a higher extent, even their consciousness of

freedom and revolution is no more than a resistance to the present oppression.

In my opinion, such a consciousness is in fact close to Nietzschean

consciousness of slave. For the slave, true freedom from the master is beyond

their conception. In like manner, truly positive freedom that transcends the

bourgeois value is inconceivable for the masses in capitalist society. This

inconceivability reflects the limit of consciousness and imagination, which is

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subjected to the existing conditions. We can relate this to a question in writing

science fiction – the description of the alien body. No matter how grotesque and

horrendous these alien bodies are, they are merely a kind of combination of some

characters of human and animals, corresponding to the principle of empirical

selectivity. The difficulty in the representation of alien existence, or in other words,

of the imagination of the radical otherness, reflects the demands for the new

power and moment that can provide justification for a spontaneously active

revolution. However, this new power cannot be found in reality. This is the

situation of Marx and his followers: they fail to find a source from which they can

derive a new consciousness of positive freedom. Freedom of the proletariat loses

both its form and its content.

Adorno tries to avoid this abstract and impotent freedom. His opposition to

Marxian freedom indeed lies in his posture against practice. He argues that, “the

ephemeral traces of freedom which herald its possibility to empirical life tend to

grow more rare” (1973b, p. 274). The true question for freedom is not to find what

it is, or what it fights against, but what it arises from, namely, the conditions of

freedom. Unfortunately, Adorno fails to determine these conditions. This probably

relates to his believing in the impotence of freedom in a practical sense. Seeking

an alternative, he finally localizes the way of redemption in aesthetics. Art, being

defined as the medium of realizing freedom, can free thought from the doctrines

that restrict it, e.g. instrumental reason – because “art cannot concretize Utopia,

not even negatively” (Adorno, 1984, p. 48). Continuing his own theory about the

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subject-object relation, Adorno emphasizes the primacy of the object in the

artwork. For him, “in art the primacy of the object, understood as the potential

freedom of life from domination, manifests itself in the freedom from objects”

(1984, p. 366). This is because the artwork, which is not committed itself to the

political, has autonomy from reality. Hence, it can be seen as a critical power. The

primacy of the object inherent in the artwork is the experience of art that is

different from experience in the empirical world. As a created work, art is itself

mediated. Consequently, its experience is neither identical to itself nor to the

world it represents. “Aesthetic identity is different, however, in one important

respect: it is meant to assist the non-identical in its struggle against the repressive

identification compulsion that rules the outside world” (Adorno, 1984, p. 6). Thus,

Adorno opens a possible field of aesthetic experience by endowing it with a

nonidentical moment. Such nonidentity derives from its distance from the

empirical world and implies some kind of critical power. And the distance

achieves the reconciliation between nonidentity and the world.

This conception of freedom indeed serves as the potential energy to create

the new. In this way, Adorno rejects the relation of freedom to the individual.

Freedom does not specially involve the situation and the rights of the individual. It

derives from the need to develop the new (otherness different from the existing

conditions). According to Adorno, the new is necessarily abstract. It is not a

certain concrete and specific end, but the longing for the new. Therefore, to be

free to create the new is not to realize a practical goal; instead, it promises a

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possibility. If it is actualized, it comes to an end.

6.3 Exit to Freedom: Where Does Freedom Arise from?

Deleuze and Adorno unfold two radically different accounts of freedom.

However, by the distinctive routes, they reach the same goal: a non-subjective

freedom to create the new. Undoubtedly, neither of them associates freedom with

the experience and situation of the individual, but with a kind of possibility and

potentiality. Leaving this same end alone, the two distinctive routes reflect their

difference views of practice in empirical life.

In Deleuze’s philosophy, difference is defined as the demand immanent to

everything that has the need to affirm and develop its own difference. Therefore,

to create the conditions to develop such difference is the freedom that Deleuze

wants to seek. Deleuze tries to prove the primacy of difference and to distinguish

it from a metaphysically abstract being; however, he cannot conceal its nature as

an ontological qualification. In contrast, we cannot find an ontological

presupposition similar to difference-in-itself in Adorno. Although he also tries to

determine the conditions to freely create the new as a kind of otherness, this

otherness, the heterogeneous moment derives from the nonidentity between the

object and the world it represents. For the centrifugal effect resulting from

distance can bring the non-identical elements into the relation of the object to the

empirical world. And it can produce a new power that serves to create the new.

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With regard to these two qualifications, Adorno goes further than Deleuze in

abandoning metaphysics. Adorno drastically rejects all pre-philosophical

suppositions, whether it is the Kantian transcendental “I” or the Marxian liberated

consciousness of the working class. All of them are transcendentally given. Indeed,

Deleuze’s difference-in-itself is subject to this type of categories. Deleuze does

not explain the source of difference as Adorno has done, only treating difference

as the given as being (of becoming) itself. What the difference in a being affirms

is not otherness from other objects, but the drive to display its own difference.

Deleuze and Adorno converge at this point when Adorno indicates that the new is

really the longing for the new. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Adorno share the

same philosophical goal. Such a conception of freedom settles the problem that

accompanies the traditional doctrine of freedom and breaks the repression and

compulsion of reason-directed freedom. Freedom is not merely to resist the

present repression; but to find a definitely new way. This way is outside the

current system. It is significant in finding a way to avoid domination (e.g.,

Fascism) in the post-war world.

However, Deleuze and Adorno achieve this goal to different extents.

Deleuze appeals to transcendental empiricism to construct a positive way to

determine the conditions of change while Adorno falls into a utopia of aesthetic

freedom. For Deleuze, the system of production on the plane of immanence

overcomes negativity from its root. Production, completely liberated from

subjective experience and knowledge, depends upon the interactions of

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all-directional forces. In Deleuze’s philosophy, he embodies this way as emphasis

on the minoritarian. The minoritarian, or the marginal, is something expelled by

the dominant ideology, but it is the revolutionary moment that turns against the

majoritarian. “Becoming-minoritarian” is a way to avoid becoming-fascist. In an

apparatus of domination, the minoritarian plays a small but prominent role,

because it indicates the direction and the possibility of change. The minoritarian is

not necessarily the opposite of the majoritarian, but something that is ignored by

the majoritarian. It is the virtual power that can be brought into play under some

conditions.

By contrast, Adorno insists on the impossibility of freedom in a practical

sense. Although he turns to aesthetics to establish a nonidentical relation derived

from the autonomy of the artwork, his redemptive freedom still remains abstract.

By virtue of the absolute negativity of Adorno’s logic of disintegration, the new is

only one concretized potential whose manifestation indicates the existence of the

other potential that has not been realized. Thus with regard to its realization,

Adorno fails to describe a positive freedom, though he has tried his best to prove

that negative freedom is problematic. Art is no more able to concretize utopia of

freedom than philosophy is. It has no specific content than a critical reflection on

reality, namely, a critical reflection on false unity between theory and practice.

“Art is more than praxis because by turning away from praxis art denounces the

narrow-mindednesss and untruth of practical life” (Adorno, 1984, p. 342). Not

being able to concretize the new, Adorno defines it as a pure will. For him, the

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nature of the new is still the image of collapse, disintegration and negation. If

freedom wants to keep its vital force for ever, it cannot be realized and must be

utopian all the time. Freedom is no more than a picture of sunrise on the horizon.

It is always beyond our reach.

Putting the two different accounts of freedom together, we could clearly tell

the opposite positions between them: Deleuze’s positivity contra Adorno’s

negativity. This distinction in the political originates from their philosophically

distinctive opinions of difference. To strive for freedom, Deleuze provides a more

practical way than Adorno’s. When it is to be applied to political practice, it may

encounter a danger. On the one hand, this danger explains the root of Adorno’s

negativity and impotence in the practical sense. On the other hand, it also abate

Deleuze’s attempt to escape from the established system, degrading his

enterprising freedom to a limited one.

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Chapter 7

The Limitation of Freedom: Constant Totalization

“It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”48

——Walter Benjamin

In the previous six chapters I have discussed the six aspects that

demonstrate the common logic and the evident contrast in the theories of Deleuze

and Adorno. On the one hand, the common logic reflects their opposition to the

hierarchical order in cognition and in life. The hierarchical order is usually

reduced to some identity (whatever it is) that both Deleuze and Adorno believe

has repressed the production of the heterogeneous and the new. On the other hand,

the contrast between the two philosophers originates from their distinctive

understanding of the concept of difference. As the title of this dissertation suggests,

Deleuze is engaged in a kind of methodology that can be summarized as “positive

constructivism”, whereas Adorno turns to “negative dialectics”. But, does this

mean we can say that Deleuze can be seen as the opposite of Adorno? The answer

is much more complex than a simple “yes” or “no”. These six aspects that I chose

to study in my dissertation cover their distinctive views of philosophical grounds,

of methodology, and of goal. Of course these aspects have not exhausted the

correlation between Deleuze and Adorno. There are still plenty of points to be

48 This sentence is cited in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1988, p. 257). Benjamin used the sentence to criticize the fascist era, but I here make use of it to describe the potential of freedom that is inherent in the modern totalizing society.

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explored, points that can put Deleuze and Adorno in juxtaposition. For me, these

aspects, which I intentionally select, are the fundamental ones in their

philosophies that indicate their distinctive understanding of difference and lead us

to explore the significance of the comparison between the two philosophers. In

other words, the distinction between Deleuze and Adorno raises a series of

questions. First, to what extent do their philosophies converge or diverge? Second,

what does the distinction indicate? Third, how should we read the practical

significance of their theories? Indeed, these questions arouse my interest in

contrasting Deleuze and Adorno, and I try to answer them in this dissertation. The

previous chapters try to answer the first two questions. And in this chapter I

respond to the last question.

No one can deny the evident differences between the philosophies of

Deleuze and Adorno. The difference can be found in almost every aspect of their

thought: the philosophical tradition they follow, the concepts and terms,

methodology, political positions etc. However, as Chapter 6 indicates, both

thinkers have a similar concern: to oppose totalitarianism and to struggle for

freedom. Freedom here is a political issue rather than an ethical one; hence, we

must confront the question of how to put it into practice. In other words, when we

move from the issue of difference to that of freedom, we need to consider the

possibility in the political practice of today’s world. Theoretically, Deleuze’s

positivity stands in evident contrast with Adorno’s negativity. But, is this also the

case at the level of political practice? More precisely, is it true that Deleuze

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provides a feasible way to realize freedom but Adorno does not? My answer is

partly yes. However, the point I want to highlight is that even Deleuze’s theory of

freedom encounters a danger when it is put into practice. This danger is also the

prime cause of Adorno’s freedom not being practical at all. The danger is

totalization. In the modern world, totalization can be seen as the integrating ability

of society. Such ability offers a synthesis or reconciliation that may assimilate the

heterogeneous. Although Deleuze manages to avoid this problem at the theoretical

level by defining two processes, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, that

take place at the same time, the situation is more complex in reality. When the

heterogeneous is totalized or integrated by the social, it may become part of the

totality. As a result of social totalization, the government is enforced. This is the

case that happens to democratic states and to globalization.

To elaborate this point, I begin with Deleuze’s concept of nomadism.

Defining thought as the outside, Deleuze uses nomadism to express a process in

which the outside constantly penetrates the state. In nomadism, which appears as a

resistance to the state apparatus, all things are “in relations of becoming, rather

than implementing binary distributions between ‘states’: a veritable

becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities

of terms as well as correspondences between relations” (Deleuze & Guattari,

1986b, pp. 2–3). Nomadism, opposed to the constant, the identical and the stable,

calls for a ceaseless trend toward heterogeneity, namely, in Deleuzian terms,

becoming-minor. In other words, Deleuze introduces difference as exteriority into

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interiority though a passage that keeps transcending the limits: the virtual.49

Bringing the forces from another plane or another dimension, the virtual acts as

another species or another nature and opens a channel to differentiation. This is a

new type of synthesis that makes freedom possible, freedom to produce the new.

Deleuze interprets this synthesis as an encounter of diverse forces. However,

according to Adorno, in the social, what happens in reality is a process of

totalization in which the heterogeneous is accepted and then assimilated. This

model has profound political significance in today’s world: it advocates an

emphasis on the value of the minoritarian. The minoritarian, for Deleuze, is an

angle of view or an attitude rather than a quantity. It reflects a resistant opinion

toward the majoritarian. The minoritarian is not a rigid group; it changes with

different conditions. For example: for today’s world, woman is the minoritarian

and man is the majoritarian; the colored is the minoritarian and white people are

the majoritarian; the Czech language is the minoritarian and English is the

majoritarian; the child is the minoritarian and the adult is the majoritarian, etc.

Therefore, Deleuze’s becoming-minor is indeed a demand that the major becomes

minor. It does not mean to overturn the current laws in the world or to turn the

marginal into the central; instead, it merely refuses to ignore the minoritarian.

According to Deleuze, the minoritarian does not necessarily become the

majoritarian; instead, it is the major that constantly recognizes and introduces the

minoritarian moments. In this way, Deleuze is trying to achieve a kind of

49 See Chapter 3, the section called Deleuze’s Difference-in-Itself. I discuss Deleuze’s accounts of the virtual and the actual when addressing the concept of difference.

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multiplicity.

Deleuze aims to counteract the function of totalization in a nomadic way;

however, in modern society totalization is the means by which the heterogeneous

is introduced into the system, although in an integrating way. In Anti-Oedipus, he

proposes schizophrenic escape as a way of fleeing from totalization. According to

him, the social is not the foe that schizophrenic escape intends to fight and beat

down; what he rejects is the shackle, e.g., the Oedipus complex, of the ossified

totality. Deleuze believes that every schizophrenic investment is social; it always

bears upon a socio-historical field. It is in this sense that deterritorialization is not

a thorough and linear course with a clear goal; instead, it is a ceaseless becoming.

Moreover, deterritorialization and reterritorializtion always take place at the same

time. This is indeed totalization in reality. The movement happens inside the

social and acts on it and makes it enter a new totalization. It is in this sense, I

suggest, that Deleuze’s thorough freedom is viable at the theoretical level:

practically, political freedom is freedom in the process of totalization. Such

freedom does not abandon the values or the laws in society; rather, it is an

infiltration or pervasion into the dominant by otherness.

“The schizophrenic escape itself does not merely consist in

withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the

social to take flight through the multiplicity of holes that eat away

at it and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it…” (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1983, p. 374)

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“The multiplicity of holes” is actually the minoritarian values in the social that

provide a passage to become different. It is a precise metaphor because it succeeds

in describing the situation of the minoritarian: they emerge inside a given totality

but map out a line of flight that escapes the majoritarian value supported by the

totality itself. But, the minoritarian does not act with the goal of taking the place

of the majoritarian. It merely strives after a reasonable living space for itself.

What it really fights against is the autarchy of the majoritarian. “Whereas the

problem is that of a minoritarian-becoming, not pretending, not playing or

imitating the child, the madman, the woman, the animal, the stammerer or the

foreigner, becoming all these, in order to invent new forces or new weapons”

(Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, p. 5). Contrariwise, once the minoritarian turns into the

majoritarian, its opposite or supplement will emerge as the new minoritarian.

Hence I argue that what Deleuze does is to constantly advance new totalization.

He never attempts to subvert the laws of the social with a violent revolution.

Instead, his schizophrenic escape is subject to society’s ability of integrating: to

bring difference into itself and to create the new.

This ability is an immanent demand of totalization. Being an ongoing

moment, totalization consists of two contradictory directions. On the one hand, it

stabilizes all the moments and makes them recognizable. This direction indeed

suggests a pursuit of identity and certainty. On the other hand, it constantly seeks

to introduce new moments (the heterogeneous) to criticize and renew the

established moment. Hence, totalization in the social field can be seen as an effort

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to integrate the discontinuous and the incommensurable into society without

eliminating these heterogeneous moments.

Totalization also indicates the limitation of resistance, or even of freedom.

Through the example of Deleuze’s becoming-minoritarian, the limitation is

revealed by the differentiation of the minoritarian in the first place. To distinguish

the minoritarian from the majoritarian we need to determine several criteria that

vary with the object and its conditions. However, these criteria are not alien ones

from other worlds; they have to be subject to the dominating values and common

sense in a given totality. In other words, to determine the minoritarian it is

necessary to determine the majoritarian first. The latter is the premise of the

former. As a matter of fact, the process of determining the majoritarian involves

the recognition of the dominating values that represent the corresponding totality.

Such recognition of the current totality is in fact a reference to a given unity. In

this sense, the minoritarian is not really the new that indicates an absolute outside:

on the contrary, it only represents infinite and infinitesimal becomings of a single,

inescapable world. This is the point where Badiou’s critique of Deleuze’s

univocity of being arises. Badiou interprets being as pure multiplicity.50 For him,

Deleuze, as well as the Greek philosophers, fails to resolve the question that

concerns the One and the presentation of multiplicity with the univocal being. In

terms of this question, Badiou (2000) argues that,

“The price one must pay for inflexibly maintaining the thesis of

50 In The Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Badiu addresses the philosophical problems involved the thinking of being with mathematics: set theory. Acoording to him, being is not a name of univocity but a void set, which is referred to the multiple.

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univocity is clear: given that the multiple (of beings, of

significations) is arrayed in the universe by way of a numerical

difference that is purely formal as regards the form of being to

which it refers (thought, extension, time, etc.) and purely modal

as regards its individuation, it follows that, ultimately, this

multiple can only be of the order of simulacra.” (p. 26)

I will illustrate this point with an example. If we acknowledge that women

are the minoritarian, then that means we have accepted the idea that in a

patriarchal society men are the majoritarian. In the same way, if we believe the

black or the Indian are the minoritarian, then the premise must be the fact that the

ideology of the white has attained world domination in the field of politics, of

economics, and of culture. The question of language is a much more complex

issue. When Czech is regarded as one of the minor languages, the reason is that

English is the most widely used language in the world. Probably English is not the

language that is used by the greatest number of people (people who speak Chinese

are more numerous than English-speaking people), but it is the one that is spoken

most widely. The situation is more complicated than that. Accepting a language

consists not merely acceptance of its words and pronunciation but also and above

all in accepting the logic that language bears itself. Such logic is reflected in every

respect of the language: vocabulary, genders of nouns, different forms and tenses

of verbs, the structure of sentences and the order of words, special expressions,

the literature, idiom, etc. Accordingly, the process of using a language is the one

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of thinking in its particular logic. Hence, the majoritarian language governs not

only the mouth (to speak) but also the mind (to think). Indeed, the majoritarian

values are the embodiment and elaboration of the specific thinking mode that they

represent.

From the argument above, we can see that the criteria to determine the

minoritarian rely on the recognition of a specific system and its logic. With this

premise, no matter how effective becoming-minoritarian is, it never can

overthrow the system, because the minoritarian remains the fringe: it does not

become the majoritarian. It does not alter or even menace the totality. The

expression “becoming-minoritarian” essentially restricts the direction of its own

resistance from the very beginning: it admits and accepts the dominating values;

furthermore, it operates without a purpose of altering or supplanting them.

“Becoming-minoritarian” merely indicates a trend of integration. The expression

betrays several limitations. Deleuze uses it only because there is no other way to

precisely represent those values other than the dominant. First of all, the

restriction of the expression derives from the totality itself. To use such an

expression means having accepted the current criteria. This action is itself the

outcome of totalization. Second, becoming-minoritarian indicates the most

important dimension of such a resistance: it is an endless process of becoming in

which the minoritarian does not alter its own property and status in the totality.

Becoming-minoritarian signifies a trend, not a pursuit of any fixed goal.

The two dimensions are sufficient to respond to the question above. In contrast to

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the majoritarian, the minoritarian can do nothing other than function as the forces

of becoming. It is able to create otherness inside the totality. How can it achieve

this? Indeed, the existence of the minoritarian in a given totality indicates its

tolerance. Similarly, the minority reveals the openness of thought.

Becoming-minoritarian makes thought break the limits brought forth by the

attributes and the conditions of the subject. Therefore, what Deleuze’s

becoming-minoritarian aims to achieve is to constantly promote the openness and

the tolerance of the dominant values. But in reality, the extent of openness and

tolerance may result in another extreme: assimilation. As I mentioned, this

function is one of the integrating functions of the society. It absorbs the

heterogeneous and integrates it into the new society. Hence deterritorialization

ends in reterritorialization in this way. This is the limitation of freedom caused by

constant totalization.

The self-identification of the modern democratic state exemplifies this

function. In a democratic state, people have obtained more rights to “freely”

express their dissidence and objection, which used to be suppressed by violent

means in an arbitrary regime. These rights seem to indicate multiplicity and

difference in the political. However, such freedom is limited; it is usually

regulated and controlled. Why? It is true that dissidence and objection can be

expressed, but the form of expressing dissidence or objection is regulated by laws.

For example, when people intend to have a demonstration, they have to first apply

and then do it according to the regulations. In this way, dissidence and objection

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are integrated into the state apparatus, no matter whether the state apparatus will

be accepted or not. Furthermore, when dissidence and objection are absorbed by

the government, they will reinforce its regime. Thus, when dissidence and

objection represent multiplicity and difference on the surface, they are still subject

to the dominant. Another example is multi-culturalism. An idea is widely accepted

that the more types of culture a society can tolerate, the more open it is. This

means that an open society should not ignore the minoritarian; instead, it is

supposed to accept it and make room for it. Then, on the one hand the

minoritarian culture obtains the opportunity to develop, but on the other hand, it

may encounter a danger: it may be absorbed and become part of the mainstream

or even assimilated by the mainstream.51 In today’s globalization, the extinction

of many minor cultures is partly due to this cause. Even though some other

cultures are preserved in globalization, they are only seen as spectacles and do not

influence the dominant. Consequently, such difference is ostensible. Therefore,

when we apply Deleuze’s theory in practice and try to realize Deleuzian

difference, we have to confront this problem.

In fact, because Adorno has considered the probable danger of totalization

he completely rejects reconciliation in the political. I mentioned that the concept

of nonidentity indicates an inherent paradox. Although Adorno’s nonidentity does

not refer to some values as Deleuze’s minoritarian does, it shares several key

51 Slavoj Žižek names such multi-culturalism “the cultural logic of multinational capitalism”: it is a Marcusean “repressive tolerance”. According to Žižek, liberal “tolerance” condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance any “real” Other is instantly denounced for its “fundamentalism”, since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance, i.e. the “real Other” is by definition “patriarchal”, “violent”, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs (1997).

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attributes with Deleuze; accordingly, it also confronts a similar difficulty of

expression. The concept of nonidentity is employed to query the self-identical

subject-object of history and to break the pseudo-totality of identity thinking.

Adorno writes that, “Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first

reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power

of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real” (2000, p. 24).52 But this is

not to say that the concept of totality is presumed to be abandoned from its root.

Instead, even nonidentity itself still presupposes a Hegelian totality. Although

Adorno rejects a Hegelian mediation through the principle of “negation of

negation,” yet he demands a new reconciliation as totality: nonidentity through

identity. Accordingly, his famous statement “the whole is the untrue” (1978, p. 50)

cannot be understood as a thorough renouncing of totality: it merely argues

against a totality of identity that is sustained by the Hegelian “positive dialectics”.

The latter is a product of that process which preserves all of its “moments” as

elements in a structure, rather than as stages or phases. This Hegelian idea of

totality in fact takes a consistent process as its premise: it still presupposes an

identity in the first place. For Hegel, overcoming or subsuming is just the

inevitable stages in the whole process, whose existence is to affirm the validity of

the whole. However, Adorno believes that the principle of identity does not

express the whole relation of thought and object and therefore it fails to recognize

the totality. On the contrary, in the new reconciliation, nonidentity is no longer

52 Adorno, Theodor. The Actuality of Philosophy. From The Adorno Reader.

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secondary to identity; it unfolds the really dialectical relation to identity and helps

grasp the totality. Such nonidentity is able to produce moments of negative

insight into the social totality that produces it. Indeed, nonidentity argues against

every attempt to negate totality and irrupts in a critical engagement of it.

Synthesis for Adorno is also important. His negative dialectics is unfolded

on the basis of rejecting synthesis. Adorno appeals to a more utopian approach:

nonidentity through identity. From this paradoxical expression, we can imagine

the dilemma that Adorno confronts: the difficulty of embodying redemption.

Martin Jay (1984) has argued that Adorno’s concept of totality is far more

negative than positive in a variety of ways:

“Indeed, his stress on negation dictated not only the content of his

thought, but the form in which it was expressed, a form that

refused to hide the irreconcilability of its generating energies. Thus,

despite his protestations to the contrary, Adorno’s work

consistently invited the charge that he had abandoned the

confidence in the possibility of human emancipation which

underlay the Marxist tradition in all its forms.” (p. 242)

Nevertheless, although the impossibility of traditional emancipation has been

demonstrated by Adorno in the sense of class revolution, he believes in dialectics,

his negative dialectic, not Hegelian dialectic. According to him, Hegelian dialectic

presupposes unity in the first place and then drives it into action with sublation.

Indeed, such a unity that is achieved in the mediation of synthesis has never

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existed in fact. This teleological and dialectical mediation is problematic because

of its affirmative character. In it, negation finally becomes affirmation through

synthesis. 53 Therefore, Adorno turns to negative dialectics. He proposes a

nonidentity between identity and nonidentity against Hegel’s speculative identity

between identity and nonidentity. His negative dialectics is an effort that seeks to

recognize nonidentity between thought and object in the process of identification

(thinking). Although Adorno describes negative dialectics as, in theory, the only

way to find contradiction and to think with contradiction, he fails to give a

practical example that applies negative dialectics to reality. In this respect, his

distinctive attitude towards the relation of theory to practice54 can account for the

impotence of his theory in political reality. For him, Marx’s separation of

interpreting the world from changing the world is thoroughly unnecessary,

because interpreting is itself one of the forms of changing the world. He maps out

the only way to this goal: dialectic. “Only dialectically, it seems to me, is

philosophic interpretation possible” (Adorno, 2000, p. 28). For this reason,

Adorno’s appealing to an aesthetic utopia is essentially of little difference from

the writers of science fiction’s employment of insularity. In most science fiction,

utopia is imagined as a closed system that is completely separated from

“ordinary” society. This closed space may be a state that is separated from other

sates by geographical block, or even a spaceship. It is separation that guarantees

the possibility of utopia refusing to be totalized or even assimilated by other sates.

53 I elaborate on Adorno’s critique of Hegelian dialectics in Chapter 1. 54 See Chapter 5.

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Indeed, the production of science fiction (in various forms) is an attempt to

embody nonidentity in a systematic society, although this attempt must encounter

this or that difficulty. Only in the space that keeps distance from the identified

world can nonidentity exist. Theoretically, Adorno seems to find an escape hatch

for his nonidentity through an “optimistic”55 unity of theory and practice, but this

resolution has little practical significance in the political. To be sure, Adorno’s

rejection of synthesis demonstrates a resistant attitude or a reflection on the

identified reality to some extent; however, it is critical rather than practically

positive.

For Adorno, nonidentity between thought and object reflects above all

nonidentity between the subject and the object. Despite his opposition to the

conventionally identical subject-object relation, his dichotomy of the subject and

the object nonetheless remains an epistemology that depends on the totality. The

action of knowledge-acquisition takes place in a given totality and it must suppose

a totality that accommodates the subject, the object and the dialectical relation

between them. For Adorno, nature is the world of objects. Objects are

conceptualized by the subject only in the course of the social totality. In other

words, the totalization of the social provides the locus for the objects to be

cognized and conceptualized. It is evident that the social totality and the

individual are not identical in the course of knowledge-acquisition: the individual

keeps attaining experiences and knowledge that are mediated by and produced 55 In Marxism and Totality (1984) Martin Jay uses this word to comment on Adorno’s relation of theory to practice. It does not mean that Adorno holds an optimistic view. Instead, Adorno takes a simplified way to deal with the relation between theory and practice: to unite the two into one. He defines theory itself as one of the forms of practice, which accordingly resolves, or in other words obviates, the question about practice.

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through the social totality. However, these experiences and knowledge are

irreducible to any individual; they become the compositive parts of the social

totality itself: the emergence of them causes new movements of totalization.

Accordingly, in this respect, the object can be considered independently of the

subject. Such independence can well account for the nonidentity between the

subject and the object.

Although the source of nonidentity has been explained, how we are to

understand its role in the social as totality remains problematic. Let us take the

example of Adorno’s analysis of an ideal society. According to him, an

emancipated society “would not be a unitary state, but the realization of

universality in the reconciliation of differences” (2003, p. 54). It is at this point

that he and Deleuze converge to some extent. Both of them realize that an ideal

society is supposed to tolerate difference and multiplicity. Moreover, the so-called

“reconciliation of differences” cannot be realized in a society dominated by the

principle of identity. With regard to this principle, Adorno criticizes it for its

ostensible equality that covers up the real inequality. According to his criticism, in

a society that demands the equality of all who have human shape (Adorno, 2003),

“To assure the black that he is exactly like the white man, while he

obviously is not, is secretly to wrong him still further. He is

benevolently humiliated by the application of a standard by which,

under the pressure of the system, he must necessarily be found

wanting, and to satisfy which would in any case be a doubtful

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achievement.” (p. 54)

Such an ironical situation is derived from the abstract and illusory equality of

identity. Furthermore, because totality is itself determined by the principle of

identity in the sense of rational thinking, to realize nonidentity in totality becomes

an “impossible mission.” This explains why Adorno fails to picture the function of

nonidentity and to describe a world grounded on nonidentity.

Furthermore, “the reconciliation of differences” that Adorno demands is

merely a theoretical utopia. Indeed, nonidentity through identity is rather a

philosophical image than a practically political one. Adorno’s retreat from practice

is due to the limitation of totalization. However, it reflects on his intransigent

posture against administered society and its laws. This is a radically different

strategy from that of Deleuze. Deleuze above all acknowledges the partition of the

minoritarian and the majoritarian. He treats the minoritarian as the outside and

continuously introduces it into the majoritarian so that they form a new encounter

and create the new. As I have argued, this means taking the dominating values as

the premise. Politically Deleuze’s strategy can be seen as a process of reinforcing

the established totality by taking the fringe into the project of totalization. But this

is not what Adorno or Deleuze want. In the first instance, being convinced of the

notion that “to think is to identify” makes him unlikely to abandon totality as an

outmoded category. But this reason also determines his dilemma. He is aware of

several practically concrete strategies to improve the social system to a certain

extent, but he is not satisfied with these reformist amendments. He wants to go

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further: to find a kingdom of nonidentity. It thus becomes a question to establish a

utopia. Adorno is undoubtedly profound in this respect: he recognizes the

deficiencies of every form of utopia and finally retreats from political practice.

“The reconciliation of differences” cannot be realized in the political. This is why

he turns to negative dialectics to realize nonidentity in philosophy. For him,

“negative dialectics is focused on the moment of negation, demonstrating that

what appears to be a seamless conceptual totality is in fact scarred by

antagonisms” (Hammer, 2006, p. 102). This theoretical quest is indeed much more

critical than any practical one.

Totalization is a society’s ability to renew itself. It is a synthetic and

ongoing movement, which pierces the established totality and adds some new

dimensions to it. However, such a totalization cannot be understood in the

conventional sense, which is ordinarily described as a unifying process that wipes

out otherness and difference. As for totalization, it is not assimilation but

reconciliation through conflicts and complementarity. Either the minoritarian or

the nonidentity is an expression of otherness that is the limitation of the

established. According to both philosophers, the ongoing totalization attributes to

the historical process the task and the possibility of overcoming the limitation of

the dominant and finally to accommodate difference. Because totalization is

becoming, it does not presuppose any teleological end. In other words, such

totalization moves on without a clear goal; it merely tries to explore one of the

possibilities of reconciliation through conflicts. It is in this sense that

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becoming-minoritarian (Deleuze) or thinking with contradiction (Adorno) can be

subject to totalization. In Deleuzian terminology, this process is one whereby

deterritorialization and reterritorialization, decoding and recoding take place at the

same time. The result of such totalization manages to reinforce the cohesive

capability of totality by making it more tolerant, more comprehensive, though its

intention is to break through the hierarchical law of the established system.

Politically this is indeed the function of self-identification of the democratic

system that reinforces its domination by regulating the form of expressing

resistance and dissidence. To apply this conclusion to the criticism of capitalism,

we can find that what Deleuze and Adorno appeal to is accelerated capitalism

rather than its collapse. Accelerated capitalism is by no means an absolute

deterritorialization, but it manages to realize difference in its totality to the

greatest extent.

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Conclusion

Meditation on Modernity

After World War Two, arguments about modernity and its consequences

emerged with increasing regularity. These arguments tend to focus on two issues:

1) What are the limitations of modernity? 2) What is a society after modernity like?

With regard to the first question, there is not just one and standard answer,

because the defining characteristics of modernity are multi-dimensional. However,

in the final analysis, modernity is the outcome of development of Enlightenment

reason; capitalist society is its highest form of a social-economic system. In this

respect, considering the limitations of modernity is to unfold criticism of

capitalism in the fields of sociology, economics, politics, and philosophy, etc. The

second question is indeed to some extent a positive response to the first one.

Philosophers and social scientists are inclined to use “postmodernity” or

“postmodernism” to refer to the social condition after modernity. Nevertheless,

such a situation has no defining character as explicit as modernity;56 instead, it is

loosely defined as the transcendence of modernity. Surely there are many

theoretical attempts to designate the new type of society “consumer society, media

society, information society, electronic society or high tech” (Jameson, 1991, p. 1),

all of them are trying to provide a description from a specific angle. Generally, the

prefix post- here is rather a kind of attitude of rejection than a particular time.

56 Frederic Jameson (1991) posits two characteristics of postmodernity: pastiche and a crisis in historicity. In my view, it is such an analysis of the postmodern era that represents the difficulty to define postmodernity with clear and rigorous characteristics.

228

More critically, postmodernity “refers to the incipient or actual dissolution of

those social forms associated with modernity” (Sarup, 1993, pp. 130-131). In

other words, it is hard to indicate a date that is widely regarded as the beginning

of postmodern society. For this reason, postmodernity cannot be understood as a

sign of history but a rejection of the limitations of modernity. I prefer

“postmodernity” to “postmodernism” because the postfix -ism refers to a

specifically theoretical system. However, postmodernity lacks the affirmatively

defining ground that modernity had. Although it is characterized as the attempt to

describe a situation, or a state of being, or something concerned with changes to

institutions and conditions57, it is much closer to an atmosphere than to an

integrated system yet.

Postmodernity demonstrates a rejection of modernity and its root, yet it

does not signify an end of reason. It is more inclined to be a reflection upon those

categories behind modernity: rationality, enlightenment, the subject, totality, and

so on. Such a reflection intends to abandon the hierarchy and unification brought

by reason, emphasizing the spontaneity of the conditions that are in nature

inconstant and variable. Thus it is clear that postmodern philosophy holds a

critical view of the foundational assumptions and structures of modern philosophy.

Then, what is the mission of philosophy at this stage? Adorno gives a response.

He claims, “It’s not up to philosophy to exhaust things according to scientific

usage, to reduce the phenomena to a minimum of propositions … Instead, in

57 See Anthony Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identification (1991).

229

philosophy we literally seek to immerse ourselves in things that are heterogeneous

to it, without placing those things in prefabricated categories” (Adorno, 1973b, p.

13). Indeed, this passage describes a contrast between modern philosophy and

postmodern philosophy. The latter is no longer satisfied with the construction of a

self-evident system; on the contrary, what it seeks to determine are the conditions

of otherness, namely, of Giddens’s changes or Adorno’s heterogeneity. To do this,

philosophers have to abandon the traditional self-sufficient subject. It therefore

means that, to determine changes and heterogeneity, they need to substitute

something for subject to channel and integrate radical discontinuity and

indivisibility. Deleuze and Adorno provide two different approaches to achieve

this aim. The two approaches sometimes converge at a number of points,

sometimes parallel, shaping a strong contrast. However, both of them bring us to a

question: how does postmodernity take the place of modernity? Or, putting it in a

way that is more related to the issues discussed in the previous chapters: how can

the heterogeneous be produced under the primacy of identity? I equate these two

questions because I believe that the transition from modernity to postmodernity is

the course in which the primacy of identity is challenged. Thus it is in this sense

that the ethics of difference shared by Deleuze and Adorno can be read as their

response to both of the two questions. This is also the reason why I move to the

issue of the correlation between modernity and postmodernity in the conclusion.

Being one of the stages of the development of Enlightenment reason,

modernity is characterized by constant rationalization. In this development the

230

principle of identity, which is the immanent law of reason, plays an important role.

Hence, to mediate modernity is indeed to reflect on the very principle.

Surely postmodernity can be read as a rejection of modern reason and its

consequences. Nevertheless, from a specific and appropriate point of view, it also

can be understood as a reinforcement of modernity or a radical modernity. In other

words, post- here signifies two different dimensions: the end of Enlightenment

reason and the uttermost enlightenment. The former marks a rupture with

modernity, whereas the latter critically reconstructs social theory in a postmodern

view. The difference between the two dimensions is that between Adorno and

Deleuze. Adorno profoundly criticizes the identity principle of enlightenment

reason. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari try to appropriate the liberating aspects

of capitalist mechanism, the decoding of flows. Of course, each one of them only

represents one of the possibilities. Accordingly, we can find that postmodern

theory can serve a variety of theoretical and political purposes. It can be used to

attack modernity or strengthen it, to criticize capitalism or ameliorate it, to

challenge power or to consolidate it. Therefore, it is in this sense we need to bring

Adorno and Deleuze together to find a viable way to confirm those differences

without abandoning the positive aspects of reason in today’s world of

globalization. This is the significance that my dissertation aims to achieve.

Furthermore, we need to be aware that to confirm difference is more a

socio-political issue than an aesthetic one. Challenging the order oriented from

reason, postmodernity succeeds in bringing our attention to several micro-political

231

phenomena and fringe areas that are usually ignored by state philosophy. These

micro-political phenomena and fringe areas are the heterogeneity and difference

to which postmodernity wishes to give prominence. Nevertheless, how can we

realize them? This is a practical political problem. Modernity has attained much

criticism about its excessive optimism, but this does not mean we have to deny its

significance or advocate postmodernity without any reflection. On the contrary,

reconciliation needs to be made between modernity and postmodernity. It will

help us make room for these differences and heterogeneity without treating them

as something like “Indian reservations” in the USA. Heterogeneity is able to play

a role in the social, not being a particular spectacle to be viewed. When modernity

provides us with a direction to recognize the organization of the social and the

institutions, we still need a postmodern view that is critical.

232

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