st engers warwick

7/31/2019 St Engers Warwick

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/st-engers-warwick 1/15

How to understand Deleuze’s and Guattari last message, honouring the

divergence between functions and concepts ?

Isabelle Stengers

For many, Gilles Deleuze’s last message about science and philosophy , in

What is philosophy ?, written together with Felix Guattari, came as a surprise,

even something like a disappointment. Indeed in What is philosophy ? we face a

strong differentiation between the creative adventures of philosophy, of science

and of art. I will leave art besides, and concentrate myself on the differentiation

between philosophy as creation of concepts and science as dealing with

functions. Here, it seems that we have indeed an either/or situation, the

affirmation of a difference to be respected. “ It is in their full maturity, and not in

the process of their constitution, that concepts and functions necessarily intersect,

each being created by their own specific means. “ (p. 161) Thus indeed concepts

and functions may well cross, but only after each has achieved its own specific

self-fulfilment. We know that some philosophers see their job as that of

intervening where scientists appear to stutter, to face problems which challenge

the limits of science. But it is not only this kind of law and order intervention

which is explicitly prohibited. Deleuze and Guattari also disappoint those who

did follow them in the affirmation of productive connexions, the creation of

deterritorializing processes escaping fixed identities, transgressing boundariesand static classifications, destroying the power of exclusive disjunction, that is

the either/or alternative, such, for instance, as doing either science or

philosophy.

1



This will be my starting point. But I will not stay within Deleuze’s text

but rather follow his own advice : we should be interested in tools for thinking,

not in exegesis of his ideas. An idea is always engaged in what he calls a matter.

It is only when so engaged that the how and the why this idea indeed matters,

the kind of difference it makes, do come into processual existence. I selected asan heterogeneous, relevant matter the contrast between science made and

science in the making as characterized by Bruno Latour in his well-known

Science in action. Indeed what we have to grasp is the kind of trap Deleuze is

warning us against when being seduced by the possibility of a direct intervention

in science in the making.

In order to emphasize the contrast between science in the making and

science made, Bruno Latour has proposed a double, Januslike figure. One face is

that of a beardless youth telling about the risky production of scientific facts and

its social constructive dimension as it requires the coming together of people

whose interest must be gained and who participate in the very definition of the

meaning and importance of the scientific facts. The other face, that of an old

bearded man explains the robustness of science by its truth, by its objectivity, by

its respect of facts, and so on. Why then did Deleuze and Guattari choose to

address the bearded old man only ?

Learning how Deleuze’s and Guattari’s may matter requires avoiding easy

solutions, for instance that Deleuze and Guattari would ignore the work of

sociology and anthropology of sciences and believe in the bearded account of science. Any reader of A thousand plateaus knows otherwise. I will also

concentrate on experimental sciences where the contrast is alive – some other

so-called sciences do indeed seem to be born with a beard. But it also requires

that Bruno Latour’s double face be not understood not as a denunciation - the

bearded old man would just be lying. The achievement he celebrates must

matter as it is the full-bearded maturity Deleuze and Guattari ask philosophers to

address.

A first answer is that indeed the two faces offer not a contradiction but acontrast, a contrasted unity. The kind of science the youth has learned is the

bearded one. He is speaking about a problem in construction but he knows that

if he is to succeed, if the story of the construction is to be told as the story of a

scientific achievement, it will be told in the terms of the bearded old man. In

other words, the dreams of the youth, his ambitions, are bearded ones.

But here we face a choice. We certainly may imagine, wish for, and

struggle for, a less dissociated or amnesic personality than the Janus one, for a

bearded old man who would remember and celebrate the adventurous processwhich any scientific achievement does entail, instead of describing the achieved

2



result as the direct consequence of a normal, rational method. This may indeed

be the most important challenge, in political terms, because the price paid for the

reduction of experimental achievement to a normal operation is the general

authority given to such an operation, the definition of science and scientific

expertise as what I would call the thinking head of humanity. It would thus be astrong temptation to directly challenge the dreams of the youth.

It seems by the way that the translators of What is philosophy ? have been

so tempted. Indeed in order to characterize the bearded achieved result, Deleuze

and Guattari wrote about functions having for their reference “des états de

choses” and this has been translated as “states of affairs”, while the obvious

translation would have been “matter of fact”. Now the youth Janus face indeed

describes “states of affairs”, and challenging its bearded dreams would mean

that you can never escape states of affairs to some kind of a purified “matter of

fact”. Whatever your achievement, it will always refer to a “state of affairs”. But

this was Deleuze’s and Guattari’s choice and we should take seriously their use

of “états de choses”. It is not a matter of respecting scientific dreams as such,

but of choosing how to address them. How to modify a dream without

destroying the dreamer. It is here that we meet the struggle against the either/or

disjunction. Scientific achievements are not a normal ones, reducible to a

normal, rational procedure, but they cannot be reduced either to normal states of

affairs, the production of a human, conventional characterization referring to

something which would remain mute, unable either to agree, to come into

agreement, or to disagree. Scientific functions and their referred matters of factsare creation. Something new has entered the world.

It is important to stress that Deleuze and Guattari’s aim in What is

philosophy ? was also to defend both science and philosophy against their

threatening reduction to logic as dominated by the true and false binary values.

Logical functions are no creation, they correspond to a “good will” of thought.

Everybody will admit with me that Socrates is a man, or that the cat is on the

mat has got a definitive meaning such that the proposition may be right or true.

In contrast what Deleuze calls thinking is a matter of bad will, as the thinker isforced to think, not allowed to think by consensual evidence. The creation of

scientific functions and their matter of fact, as the creation of concepts and

because they are creations, are a matter of bad will. They have nothing to do

with consensual propositions and what can then be indeed called “state of

affairs”, when such a state of affairs allow us to feel that we know what we are

saying, or that we can define what we are perceiving, in brief when there is no

creation of thought, no problem, only recognition. Deleuze and Guattari

proposed to call functions the argument of which are perceptions and affections

“functions of the lived” and they wondered by the way if the whole of human

3



sciences must not be included : however sophisticatedly presented or statistically

verified they would just be scientific opinion.

Thus, whatever the danger of scientists’ dreams and amnesia Deleuze and

Guattari do ask us not to the easy road of deriding the old bearded face, of claiming that behind any fact there is an affair dressed with the social power to

parade like a fact. And it is precisely because the dissociated personality of the

Januslike scientist has become a matter of public, political concern that Deleuze

and Guattari insistence on scientific matter of facts as distinct from common

states of affairs may be important. We may wish for a transformation of some

bad habits of scientists, but we should be careful of the way we formulate such a

wish in order not to join others who also ask scientists to forget about their

dreams and deserve the money they get.

Now how to understand the specificity of scientific achievements in a way

which avoids reducing them to a simple case of social construction, dependent

on states of affairs ? Again Bruno Latour help us here. In Pandora’s Hope, he

described the scientist as producing a “state of affairs”, indeed, and a complex

one as it includes four kinds of ongoing, distinct and correlated processes of

social construction. In order for his work to be possible, to get importance and to

achieve consideration an innovative scientist has to form alliances with State or

industrial powers, that is get them to claim that they indeed need the kind of

results he is working to obtain. He has to achieve academic recognition,

meaning that the academic demands and criteria for the new innovative fieldwill be the relevant ones, as autonomously produced and discussed by the

colleagues in this new field. He has to succeed in mobilizing the world, meaning

getting the needed resources, relevant instrumental equipment but also the

ambitious, innovative students with an adequate formation and an interest and

loyalty for the new field. He has finally to produce a public representation of

this field, have it accepted as the legitimate outcome of scientific progress, as

rationally answering important questions which do or should interest everybody,

as promising positive consequences for human development and well-being.

As such each of those four processes of construction are not specific.

Their strong correlation is already more specific, because if one fails the others

will be denounced as pathological, in one way or another. But what makes them

all properly scientific is the fifth ongoing activity which Latour characterizes as

Links and Knots. That is, the activity most scientists would define as what does

truly matter, i.e. the actual production of those very matters of fact the bearded

old scientist will later use as sufficient to explain the scientific achievement.

Indeed the first four activities, as Latour characterizes them, do constructa rather peculiar affair. They create a relation with an outside which must be

4



both actively interested and also put at distance, with a different kind of distance

in a different kind of space for each one. Whatever the success of the four others

processes of construction, they must be presented as nourishing the making of

Links and Knots, as being conditions for the achievement, not the explanation of

this achievement. If one claims that it is a matter of presentation only, Latour’sdescription will be reduced to simple social constructivism, and looses any

relevance for understanding Deleuze. Avoiding this claim means that the art of

distances indeed means that the making of Links and Knots is what scientists

define as what matters, what they have to protect, what makes a scientific

achievement.

What means achieving Links and Knots ? The scientists are not linked

together by their common submission to rationality or objectivity, or by some

good will which would explain that they are able to listen to each other and

respect the rules of rational discussion. The link is not among humans, it exists

only because those humans give to the creation of reliable Knots, reliable

reference between a function and a matter of fact, the power to force them to

interact, to build together the kind of agonistic cooperation on which they all

depend.

When Galileo wrote that one man will win against a thousand

rhetoricians, whatever their gift for persuasion or the authority of their

references, if this one man has the facts on his side, we usually recognize some

kind of a positivist statement. And indeed Galileo was in the process of buildingthe first public representation of experimental science, producing a state of

affairs where experimental fact claims the power to silence both philosophers

and theologians. But we should not forget that the Galileo who was writing was

himself the product of the first experimental achievement.

In The Invention of Modern Science, I did characterize this achievement as

the ability to short-circuit the sceptical argument which refers any general

statement to the power of fiction. Indeed the event of the experimental invention

which produced Galileo as its spokesperson can be characterized as “theinvention of the power to confer on things the power of conferring on the

experimenter the power to speak in their name” (88). Power intervenes three

times in this characterization, each time with a different meaning.

“Invention of the power to confer on” refers to Galileo in the very process

of discovering the power of the first experimental device, the inclined plane.

This device did give him the power to transform an usual state of affairs, a

function of the lived perception of falling bodies, into a scientific matter of fact,

correlated to a scientific mathematical function. Indeed the power of the inclined plane was to transform the fact that heavy bodies do perceptively fall into an

5



articulated fact, defined in terms of variables the value of which can be

modified at will, and the articulation of which produces a functional description.

In other words the reference of mathematical function to matter of fact is not a

right and it is not an enigma, it is the very meaning of an experimental

achievement.

“A thing having the power of conferring on a human…” is the very

definition of the knot, the creation of a matter of fact as a reference for a

scientific function. Knot is a very happy word as such an achievement is a case

of what Deleuze and Guattari did call a “marriage against nature”. Before the

event the two lines, that of the falling bodies and that of the human problems

about the kind of knowledge we can gain about things, had nothing specific in

common. There was only a discursive reference to the perceptual fact that

bodies do fall down. Such a falling down had no power to force thinking, it was

consensual evidence. All heavy bodies do fall down. This apple is an heavy

body. Thus this apple will fall down if I open my hand. Now you don’t have

apples any longer, or a tree crashing on the ground or a man falling from a

window. You do have a Galilean body, a body which can exist nowhere but in

the lab or in the sky, since its motion must approximate a frictionless one in

order for the function to have any power of definition. Correlatively the line of

human discursive argumentation about interpretation and fiction has bifurcated.

One particular functional interpretation has got a reliable witness. Galileo has

no longer any need to argue, he is able to turn his back against his human

brothers, to cut any kind of intersubjective debate. The experimental device gavethe Galilean body the power to allow Galileo to remain mute, to just show the

fact.

“…the power to speak in their name”. It is because Galileo may present

himself as essentially mute that he can claim that he has the power to speak in

the name of the falling bodies. He is just representing the thing. Scientific so-

called objective representation is an event because it happens to be authorized

by what is represented, while what is represented as no human voice. But who

will be interested in this claim ? Who will celebrate as an event the fact thatGalileo is able to represent the way a body is falling down in a frictionless

environment ? Galileo needs colleagues, who will take as primordial the

verification that a knot has indeed been created, that none of their objections can

defeat it. He needs colleagues who will accept being linked not to him, not

because of his persuasive power, but by the production of the knot. In other

words, in order for the specific character of his achievement to be verified, he

needs not the good will of colleagues agreeing with him but the specific bad will

of colleagues willing to test the reliability of the witness he claims to have

produced.

6



In order to celebrate the successful knot, scientists will sometimes

announce that “Nature has spoken”. This triumphal statement is obviously

misleading, but the way it is misleading is important. Indeed the point is not the

traditional philosophical one, that things are mute and only humans speak. The

point is that if nature had indeed spoken, all humans would be concerned. Goodwill listening would be the answer. A knot, a “marriage against nature” on the

other hand, is always a local, selective event. The only concerned ones are those

who belong to the two lines, those non humans which can effectively, that is

experimentally, be defined as reliable witnesses, and those humans – those I call

competent colleagues – who will consider as crucial for their own, active

practice to verify that a colleague was indeed authorized to claim the triple

power achievement. Those and only those will be linked by the event,

adventuring on the consequences, testing the new “if… then maybe…” which

may follow as eventually entailed by the event. A “marriage against nature” is

never between “man” and “nature”, which would mean a convergence, an at last

adequate knowledge. The marriage knot produces a divergence, it links this kind

of human, endorsing very strong specific obligations, and that kind of

phenomena, verifying very selective requirements.

As Deleuze wrote in Logique du sens, only what diverges is able to

communicate. This can be understood in a non paradoxical way if we do not

take divergence as not a static fact, but as the mark of an adventure creating its

own diverging values. I take here adventure as embodying Deleuze’s claim that

there is no relativity of truth but there is truth only of what is relative (What is Philosophy ?, p. 130). There is a scientific truth because science is relative to the

adventure of the creation of Links and Knots, but we may also think here to the

adventure of making a movie, of writing a text, but also to an alpinist careful

and risky climb, to a mathematician in the process of producing a demonstration,

or even to a judge hesitating about his or her judgement. The important point is

that none of those adventures needs to belittle the other ones in order to affirm

itself. Each has indeed its own truth and its own kind of loyalty, as it affirms its

own diverging value. And it is because of this divergence that a writer can

understand something about an alpinist discipline, or the device builder aboutthe judge’s selective and creative processing of a case.

The “Nature has spoken” statement however dramatically expresses how

the scientific adventure may become an epic, the scientist becoming then the

thinking head of mankind, the one who is able to get out of the cavern, to escape

a world of mere opinion, of arbitrary human fabrication. The demand that we all

feel concerned is indeed part of the public representation of a scientific

achievement. It should matter for all of us, who are thereby defined as mere

opinion, to be convinced that our own knowledge can be explained away interms of irrational belief and blind interests. Coming back to Bruno Latour’s

7



four correlated social processes of construction, a scientist will never tell a

colleague, a demanding ally or a provider of mobilizing resources, that “Nature

has spoken”, and that they have to be concerned. Their interest has to be won,

and cannot be dismissed as blind.

The epic story of scientific progress, grounded on facts, as opposed to

arbitrary opinion is, since Galileo, part of the public representation of science,

requiring and maintaining a definition of the public as having to trust science as

the only way to escape opinion. And here philosophy enters the scene, but not as

creation of concepts. The kind of philosophers the public representation of

science needs will not be a partner in the production of links and the creation of

knots, but an ally participating in the public representation of science. An ally

whose good will is demanded. Philosophy is welcome if it puts its own means,

whatever they be, at the service of the image of thought science requires. It may

be a direct celebration of the opposition between rational science and opinion,

but as soon as a philosopher helps, one way or the other, enforcing the idea that

opinion is something to be criticized and overcome, a strategic alliance is

possible and scientists may include him in their public representation. Even

Heidegger has been so included.

Now, the brand of philosophy scientists do appreciate is precisely the one

Deleuze was fighting against when he defined philosophy as creation of

concepts, the philosophy which produces judges and examines grounds for

judgement. And it may happen that a strategic alliance made possible by asystematic misrepresentation, as it is the case when the scientific diverging

adventure disguises itself into the convergent source of valid knowledge, does

backlash. This did happen when this particular school of critiques, the social

constructivists, instead of claiming that all is construction but sound science, did

turn their criticism against science itself. The frontal crash was unavoidable.

One may say it was a well-earned return, since this analysis did use against the

claims of scientific practice all the very interesting economies of thought which

are allowed by the kind of statement as “the facts do show”, or “Nature has

spoken”, that is the whole story of the laborious, hesitant, socially embeddedmaking of the scientific event, the knot or marriage against nature to be created

with non humans. It was nevertheless a war proclamation since it did deny the

very point of the scientific adventure, what links together competent colleagues,

even when they fight against each other, that is the production of the assemblage

creating the possibility for the non human to make a difference between them.

What links scientists together maybe, but maybe no longer in the future. If

you read Donna Haraway’s Modest Witness, you will quite easily conclude that

the adventure I have just characterized may be relevant for Galileo Galilei,Robert Boyle, Louis Pasteur, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, but not, emphatically not, for

8



contemporary biomedicine or biotechnology. Indeed in those case, we may say

that the art of distance required by the Links and Knots demanding construction

has been swept away, and that we deal with a new kind of articulation between

powers. It will not be possible any longer to tell the tale of those developments

without having for the leading protagonists those powerful allies who are quiteready to accept nominal definitions as long as it means new possibilities for

industrial innovation.

However, today, the past is still with us, it is present in the very feeling of

unhappiness and betrayal many scientists do suffer. It is one of those dreadful

historical irony that social constructivism may be seen as unwittingly

collaborating to the destruction of those aspects of the scientific construction of

facts which scientists were unable to present as what causes their adventure to

diverge and create.

Till now, I have used the philosophical definition of philosophy as

creation of concept as if what it demands, the kind of diverging adventure it

entails was obvious. But the fact that social constructivists did enter my scene as

betraying the role the public representation of science attributed to philosophers

requires attention. It is not possible to participate in the adventure of producing

links and knots without knowing it. Would it be possible to take up the role of

philosopher without knowing it, claiming to belong to fields such as sociology

of science or cultural studies ?

When social constructivists do explain away the specificity of scientific

means, they often use the famous pragmatic “it works” as explanation of why

this or that particular scientific belief came to be accepted. Just as I

disconnected the scientific links and knots production from its public

representation in order to honour its diverging value, I have now to disconnect

the pragmatic “it works” concept from its as reduction to a social explanation,

mobilizing settled interests and balance of power. Here also we need to honour

bad will, diverging creation, in order to disentangle philosophy from what maydestroy it, its reduction to consensual function of the lived, function du vécu.

In What is philosophy ?, Deleuze and Guattari pay a beautiful homage to

the great anglo-american philosophical tradition, linking adventurous, not

judging, empiricism and pragmatism. “The English nomadize over the old Greek

earth, broken up, fractalized, and extended to the entire universe. We cannot even

say that they have concepts like the French and the Germans; but they acquire

them, they only believe in what is acquired – not because everything comes from

the senses but because a concept is acquired by inhabiting, by pitching one’s tent,by contracting an habit (…) Wherever there are habits there are concepts, and

9



habits are developed and given up on the plane of immanence of radical

experience : they are “conventions”. That is why English philosophy is a free and

wild creation of concepts. To what convention is a given proposition due; what is

the habit that constitutes its concept ? This is the question of pragmatism.” (105-

106)

If pragmatism is to escape its reduction to an explanation by consensual

functions of the lived, the “it works” as associated with a convention must be

celebrated as an event. Something new has entered the world, a new tent has

been pitched, and not on a settled ground which would explain its stability but in

a process of fractalization : the new ground is produced together with the new

tent pitched into it. In each case the pragmatic “it works” then entails

considering what is an achievement in this case, for this kind of practice,

producing that kind of convention. A convention is never explained by

something else, it is a creation, a “marriage against nature”, it creates what may

become a matter of consensus, what will be used afterwards to explain or justify

it.

Such an adventurous definition of conventions requires loosing the habit

of asking for a consensual justification but as a result it may produce an escape

line from the stage initiated by Galileo as dominated by the grand alternative :

either a human fictive construction, or the continuation of the epic of objective

knowledge. Yes the scientific achievement of an experimental knot is a

convention, but it is not “only a convention”, it fractalizes the ground followingits own diverging demands; its own definition of what matters and how. It is

only if scientific achievements are pragmatically put on the same plane together

with other diverging practical achievements, each with its demanding definition

of what matters, that we can both avoid insulting scientists and make a positive

difference between what links scientists together and what claims to make

authority for any rational being.

What matters for you does not matter : this is the way scientists address

the public, defining it as mere opinion. As it resists its reduction to a livedfunctions of settled interests and balance of power, the pragmatic “it works”

may help evaluating habits and conventions with different criteria. The strength

of the proper scientific convention, the reliability of the created knots depends

on the power successfully conferred on things to intervene into human affairs

and discussions. The thing is enabled to make a difference. The public

representation of this success is quite an other convention since it depends on

the habit of public to accept being addressed as powerless, mere opinion, unable

to make a difference. Science, as we know it, as it is now in crisis, relies on

what I would call a bad convention, a convention which depends on thecontinued weakness and submission of an ingredient it needs. We are back to the

10



old bearded man in Latour’s Janus faces, unable to celebrate the scientific

achievement in other words than those which present the general, consensual

triumph of rationality over opinion. I would claim that if the specific mode of

divergence which characterizes the adventure of science is to survive, the

bearded face must learn to address not the general public, with consensualwords, but a fractalized one with whom production of relevant alliances may be

possible. Only a change in what is meant by the public may indeed produce the

kind of allies the scientists need today in order to resist its traditional allies.

The important point, answering the pragmatic concern for successful

conventions, is that I am not speaking here of a general democratic right of the

public to participate. What matters, what may play a role in the survival of

science is the historical emergence of empowered minorities intruding into

questions which were meant to be none of their business, and producing their

own kinds of demands, their own kinds of objections.

The difference between a right to participate and the empowering process

which enables to participate is a pragmatic problem, and as John Dewey

emphasized in The Public and its Problem, it is not a general problem, the

production of a sovereign citizen generally able to participate, but an itinerant

process, the process of emergence of empowered groups who create their own

means to object. Here again the pragmatic “it works !” must be heard against

any kind of reduction to consensual functions of the lived as may be proposed

by psychology for instance. While consensual functions of the lived, “functionsdu vécu”, rely on the continuation of stable habits, here we deal with the

pragmatic concern for the creation of new habits, as something new entering the

world and modifying it.

The point is not to denounce habits, obviously, but to avoid the mistake of

asking some sciences, psychology or sociology for instance, to explain how it is

the case that new, non consensual, diverging habits may come into being. Here

the Deleuzian definition of science as dealing with functions is precious.

Whatever the function, be it produced by a successful marriage against nature or by a lived consensus about what matters and how, it requires a stable world,

allowing for a stable articulation between those aspects the functional being is

taking into account. No function can deal with learning, producing or

empowering new habits, as all require and achieve the production of different

worlds, non consensual worlds, actively diverging worlds.

It is probably what Guattari had in mind when he did call, in Chaosmose,

for a new paradigm which would be an ethico-aesthetico-political one. It is

tempting to think that this paradigm, as it aims at making the creation of new perceptual and affective habits a matter of concern, should privilege art, which is

11



the third kind of creative adventure characterized in What is philosophy ? But

here we must slow down and pay attention. We should never forget that the very

possibility to associate science, art and philosophy also to creation testifies for a

depopulated world, and that those practices must also be considered from the

point of view of the price they pay for their domesticated survival, diverging prices but heavy ones anyway. Deleuze considered the price philosophy did pay

when its creation is reduced to judgement and care for rational, that is

consensual, communication. I have considered the price science pays as

presenting itself under the guise of the old fight of reason against mere opinion.

Instead of considering the price art is paying, I will stress that Guattari’s ethico-

aesthetico-political paradigm may as well designate “magic”, as neo-pagan

witch Starhawk characterizes it. That is, not in supernatural terms but as an

experiential and experimental art, daring to try and test what it takes and what it

requires to produce ethico-aesthetico-political empowerment.

I choose to take the risk of using the term “magic” just as witches do take

it. For them the very fact to name magic what they are doing is already an act of

magic, producing the needed sense of importance any learning process or

change of habits demands in order to be cultivated and not consensually taken

for granted. And if those contemporary witches took upon themselves to call

themselves witches, such a shocking name, it was in order to produce the living

memory of the Time of Burning, the destruction of the Great Art, which did

happen at the very epoch when Man as the majority standard came to impose

converging, consensual functions of the lived, explaining away as illusions andsuperstitions every active divergence but the three surviving ones, philosophy,

science and art. I am convinced that, as philosophers, scientists, and artists, we

cannot save ourselves alone, by our own means, because the way we

characterize those means uses words which may well ratify both our

domestication and the destruction we survived. Today one does not burn witches

any longer, but taking interest in empowering processes needs knowing that we

risk having those words used against us. Indeed it may well mean facing such

accusations as irrationality, superstition, regression : back to Plato’s cavern.

Thus, witches and magic do lead me back towards philosophy with a

double antagonist move. On the one hand, towards the historical origin which

may certainly be associated with their repudiation, with the choice of public and

consensual arguments against powers to be excluded or domesticated. But on the

other hand, towards the power of transformation Deleuze associates with the

philosophical concept as such, when he writes for instance that thinking “implies

a sort of groping experimentation and its lay out resorts to measures that are not

very respectable, rational or reasonable…. To think is always to follow the

witch’s flight.” (What is P ?, 41) Indeed it maybe that if philosophy did surviveits Greek origin, it is because it unwittingly did capture in a disguised manner,

12



something quite different from rational argumentation. Maybe the

prephilosophical plane it did profit from, and secretly, unwittingly continued,

was inhabited not only by urban Sophists, as it is officially recorded, but also by

those others whose not very respectable, rational or reasonable measures the

sophist art of language had already urbanized. And it may well be that if youseparate philosophy from what it profits from and secretly, unwittingly

continues, you kill philosophy. For Deleuze, Russell, Wittgenstein and others

are killers.

Such an hypothesis is also a speculation for the future, a future where

philosophy could play a part in the kind of environment needed for Guattari’s

ethico-aesthetico-political paradigm, an environment able to resist the power of

consensual functions, to honour the active divergence between the achievements

and requirements of functions and of empowerment processes.

Since I am speaking on English ground, I will end this intervention with

an example, that of the very strange flight, really a witch’s flight, of the English

mathematician turned into a philosopher, Whitehead, who paid the price for

leaving the consensual ground. His name has been obliterated in philosophy, and

in particular in his original home town, Cambridge, as if it defaced the noble

college he had so long inhabited.

Whiteheads’ adventure was indeed a strange adventure, probably made

possible by a mathematician constructive humor. Never did a philosopher so pragmatically developed and gave up (in French, faire et défaire) concepts in

utter disregard for the kind of pious loyalty we so easily dedicate to what aims at

truth. For Whitehead, philosophy was indeed nearer to engineering than to

contemplation. It was engineering of abstractions defined as equipment, both

tools and lure, for feeling and thinking. As any creative mathematician,

Whitehead thought there was nothing as important as equipment, the important

point being that we should not be prisoners of our equipment, of our habits of

thought. The kind of lure and constraint our abstractions provide should be

actively examined and their pragmatic value evaluated. This was the task of philosophy and it was not a matter of criticizing inadequate ones but of creating

and empowering new ones.

We may well say that his failure was complete from the usual pragmatic

point of view since our word is still dominated by the modern abstractions he

wanted to displace. We are still poisoned by the double abstraction of

transcendant freedom, as attributed to humans, and functional explanation, as

objectively defining the world. But his philosophical achievement perfectly

exemplifies what Deleuze calls “bad will” as associated to any creation. In order to acquire the concepts for the new habits of thought and evaluation he felt

13



needed, Whitehead did choose indeed to dramatize and not to tame the

incoherence of modern thought. No hopeful, good will, fuzzy interdisciplinary

unity, for Whitehead, no dream of some “half-way house” where functions

would sweetly loose some of their power giving room to something which could

resemble freedom. But the most fabulous process of creation of odd and habitdisturbing concepts, openly speculative ones, as the result of accepting to be

obligated to think all the way down against modern habits.

Whitehead finally choose creativity as his ultimate, and this produces a

witch flight indeed since it means that the wild, untamed, heterogeneous crowd

of our experiences and conventions and explanations are all affirmed together in

a way which destroys any secure distinction between what can be explained and

what would be creative. Nothing has the power to explain anything else, but

everything that comes to existence does creatively explain itself in the process of

determining how it will have been explained by its environment. A deceptively

simple conclusion but try and feel it, you will taste the power of a magic

formula, empowering becoming in the devastated landscape of our impassable

contradictions. Indeed Whitehead’s concepts are neither true nor false, they do

not refer to any state of affairs, nor to any matter of fact, they are efficacious,

deliberately aimed at depriving thought of any power to judge or explain away

part of our experience, or more precisely aimed at having us appreciate

judgement or explaining away together with what is judged or explained, all put

on the same plane, all exhibiting in their own diverging way creativity as the

ultimate they all presuppose and manifest.

The fact that Alfred North Whitehead was a mathematician turned into a

philosopher may explain why he dared to conceive philosophy as an openly

constructive adventure and a self-proclaimed speculative one. He went so far as

to include the creation of a concept of God as he discovered such a concept was

required by the problem as he was constructing. This did not disturb him too

much as mathematicians are used to give mathematical existence to very strange

beings as long as they fulfil mathematical constraints and are required for a

mathematical problem. Those beings are posts for the tent they are pitching,their value is allowing the problem to get the full amplitude it needs in order to

produce an interesting solution. But this obviously did disturb his colleagues

professional philosophers and this is the kind of disturbance I wish to propagate

as it exhibits the positive, creative divergence Deleuze and Guattari challenge us

to cultivate.

Mathematicians are probably those who know best their indebtedness to

the power of the problem, the fact that any answer has meaning only because

and through the adventure which this problem required, without dreaming of the power of converging recognition, and this may be why a mathematician was

14



needed to create the concepts required by pragmatism as irreducible to settled

interests and habits. When a mathematician concludes “it works !” he is

celebrating the truth of what is relative, the only kind of important truth, the

truth of the problem which has achieved the production of its own specific

empowering means and obligations. But so do celebrate the witches when their rituals produce the empowering presence of the Goddess to whom they

pragmatically define themselves as indebted. And so should learn to celebrate

scientists when announcing the coming into being of a new matter of fact

endowed with the power to act as a reliable witness.

William James wrote at the very end of his life, in Some Problems of

Philosophy (230) : “We can and we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the

ground into or towards a world of which we trust the other parts to meet our jump

– and only so can the making of a perfected world of pluralistic pattern ever take

place. Only through our precursive trust in it can it come into being. There is no

inconstancy anywhere in this, and no ‘vicious circle’ unless a circle of poles

holding themselves upright by leaning on one another, or a circle of dancers

revolving by holding each other’s hands, be ‘vicious’. The faith circle is so

congruent with human nature that the only explanation of the veto that

intellectualists pass upon it must be sought in the offensive character to them of

the faiths of certain persons.”

Here is the great lesson of pragmatism, and it may appear a dangerous

one, indeed, since we know that not only there are many diverging kinds of jumps, but that some jumps are dangerous ones. Leaving the common, settled

ground is always a risk. This however is no argument as it is something non

modern traditions knew very well. They knew that parts of the world which

come and meet some jumps may be devouring ones, and that some may become

devouring ones if we do not know how to honour them when we have called

them up. Félix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetico-political paradigm implies that we

can learn from the non modern wisdom, learn how to care without vetoing the

jumps or reducing them to some functions of the lived. This may be why he told

the need of an “ecosophy”.

15

st engers warwick

Documents