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.
I would have to disagreed with your opinion that the language in the book fumbles to get the point across. I feel that I, the novice reader, have a difficulty comprehending their language but it is not to fault the writers necessarily. I think your point about the shortcomings of language in regard to using synonyms to describe philosophical concepts is on the mark. Words like zones, planes, neighborhoods and even concept are difficult to flush out because every attempt to do so seems to dilute the content or just simply fail to fully explicate the meaning behind the initial language.
ReplyDeleteThis is why reading philosophy is hard for me, because I have to simultaneously take the language presented as unique to the author, unless otherwise noted, yet relate the content to my broader understanding of history. This is a difficult task, but then again no piece of good philosophical writing can be understood in just one reading.
"Fumble" wasn't necessarily a derogatory word choice, just a remark on the authors running up against the limitations of language in describing these things.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the form of your "islands in the ocean" image in all but one regard. Both Deleuze and I can agree with you that concepts are separate, like islands, and that they are linked by "bridges" with time. Perhaps I misunderstand you, but I think where both Deleuze and I would disagree with you is in your assessment of these bridges as linguistic. I don't think that D and G have said anything about language yet. On top of that, I think that they could not say that the building of conceptual bridges is dependent in any way upon language. To do so would be to claim that no concept was created pre-language, in which case, we must ask how the concepts that underpin language came about.
ReplyDeleteIn my mind, language is not a part of the conceptual plane. Rather, language is entirely semiotic - its units stand for or translate to, but don't equate with conceptual units. For that reason, language cannot be the bridge between concepts as in your illustration. Language has its own bridges - conjunctions, prepositions, etc.
I was not really trying to render this metaphor in Deleuzian language at all. This is how it seems to me personally. What I was trying to capture was that there exist concepts about which we cannot effectively speak.
ReplyDeleteMy fellow Process classmates, I think, can understand that a certain frustration exists when, for example, I think I have a grasp of a certain concept of Whitehead's, but I cannot describe it adequately using any other words. It becomes orphaned, only self-referential. A regnant nexus is a regnant nexus, and at this point in my understanding of Whitehead any other language I would use or comparison I would make would distort or not fully capture the concept. Here I think D and G would agree with me.
But I think that as we familiarize ourselves with these concepts, we are better able to relate them to the concepts surrounding them in the field, and we can speak of them more easily. I think that, if not the only way, at least the most used and easiest way, to do this is by comparison, metaphor, simile, parallel, illustration, etc. The thing becomes more like itself the more we identify parts of it with everything else.
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ReplyDeleteLike Allen, I like your analogy of concepts as "islands in the ocean". I think your analogy of concepts provides a decently accurate image of how D and G construct the philosophical notion of a concept. More particularly, I find the ocean as a good interpretative example of the plane of immanent. I find this is because our understanding of the ocean and its vastness could encourage us to reconsider how concepts are actually formed. Instead of forming new "islands" (concepts) ourselves, the islands are always immanent to the "plane" from which they come - In this case, the ocean. In general, the example of the ocean portrays the endless possibility of concepts which D and G's "plane of immanence" invites.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with you that philosophy can be a pain in the ass to read, I think the frustration comes from not being able to directly ask D and G what they mean by their terms. I get frustrated with a lot of readings in philosophy classes but I find if I slow down and take each sentence, or even each phrase in a sentence, one at a time, I can slowly put the pieces together. Sure, it might take me ten minutes to get through a single page, but philosophy is hard and requires serious work. I am inclined to say that talking about philosophy isn't as close to philosophizing as is being able to articulate your ideas on a page.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point above, kip. It seems to me that philosophy is intuitively not something which can be deciphered through a group discussion of sorts, because this is merely a bringing together of the opinions discerned after reading the text. In that sense then, it seems that actual philosophizing is more something of an enduring labor which can be quite frustrating. To this end, I also agree completely with the frustrating use of synonyms in this book, which at first had my mind boggled as well. I have found it more useful personally to try and look up the french words used in the original text and transliterate them. This added a level of distance from the terms that allowed me to look at them more as a construction within the text than a word with ingrained meaning (which can be hard to overcome).
ReplyDeleteLike Allen and Kyle, I had the similar thought that the ocean is a good representation of the plane of immanence. We use the word ocean to describe this vast idea that is hard to fully comprehend the magnitude of the single word. There is also so much that we don't know about the ocean and we are constantly learning new information or acquiring more knowledge. These new "concepts" are rising the the service as islands, and this process is virtually endless. Another important thought about the language that is used, we state ocean to create a standard for which are thinking, yet there is so much beyond the thought of ocean. I think this is also showing the difficulty of the language and the limitations we encounter.
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