I hate reading philosophy, it's true. But I do enjoy talking about it. It makes me think that Socrates was onto something, and that philosophy is fundamentally discursive. While Deleuze and Guattari have noted otherwise, that the real work of philosophy is a solitary activity, I think it quite obvious that if no new concepts are birthed by discussion, they are at least carried to term. But there is another reason I don't like reading philosophy, and that's because it's just so difficult to understand. The text seems opaque to me sometimes, and I have to wait for class time to get a clear picture of what exactly the author was talking about. That's what I want to reflect on for a bit.
We've all noticed how difficult it can be to follow the course of this book, and I've had to fight not to accuse Deleuze and Guattari of obscurantism. This claim is unmerited, because as the two men are attempting to articulate a new concept they bump up against the limitations of language and have to fumble a bit to get their point across. Even then, I feel more than understand what they're trying to say sometimes. And in my other class we're grappling with Whitehead, not himself the master of lucid prose.
I was saying yesterday that it's difficult for me to relate Whitehead's concepts to another person using different words, and the same is true of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts. Planes, zones, neighborhoods, conceptual personae--I feel that trying to describe these things in terms of other things will always only yield a "not quite." "Why can't they just explain what they mean in more simple terms?" I shout irritatedly. But what if they can't? Which makes me wonder about the relationship between concept and language.
Let's imagine that concepts are islands in a vast ocean, and words are the bridges that we have built to travel between these islands. According to D and G, there are new islands rising out of the ocean (the plane of immanence?) all the time, and it seems as if it just takes time for us to build language-bridges connecting these new islands to other, more familiar ones. Like Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari are nominally creating brand new islands. And until the water settles and we've mapped out a path using the looking-glass of metaphor, these new concept-islands are going to exist in solitude. We can't
get there, as it were, because they have yet to be related to anything other than themselves. We can only look from afar and say, "That's what it seems like from here." Like a dictionary to someone who doesn't know a word of English, the concept is completely cohesive and absolutely self-contained. One can get around perfectly well within it, but one cannot yet move in from outside.
So in a sense it's no wonder philosophy is hard to read. We are exploring uncharted islands, without the comforts of the well-traveled linguistic roads we are used to. It cannot yet be reduced, cannot be interconnected with our mental picture of the world, except by great struggle to build bridges. That's where discussion comes in, I think. Even if philosophy is creating concepts, and all of these concepts are "signed" and solitary, it is the dialogic encounter that enables us to connect ourselves with the concepts we create.