Deleuze and Guattari's Last Enigmatic Message

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes notes I am happy to thank the members of the GECo (Groupe d'Études constructivistes) for their most inspiring comments and critiques. 1 G. Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994) 161. Hereafter WP. 2 I am speaking of Deleuze only, here, because Guattari wrote openly political books. It is not by chance that my text will end with a free interpretation of Guattari's ecosophy, introduced in The Three Ecologies. 3 WP 108. 4 Ibid. 11. 5 Ibid. 12. 6 Ibid. 122. 7 Forget it on this occasion, but the distinction is nevertheless a most important one. Indeed, it offers a line of escape from the Great Sad Problem of scientific reductionism, and its poisoning consequence: the very sad role accepted by philosophers when they see their task as that of defending human values, experience, or responsibility against its reduction to scientific explanatory frameworks. When a scientist affirms that experience should be, and will be, naturalized, explained (away) in "scientific terms," we forget to ask "which function, referring to what?" We recognize the inexorable advance of scientific knowledge that will reduce experience, one way or another, to properties of "the central nervous system." This indeed is a "state of affairs," dominated by consensual recognition. Philosophers try to define human experience in such a way that it would exhibit a recognizable irreducibility to "scientific properties," and scientists take such definitions as their aim, as what they have to explain away. Both science and philosophy are thus poisoned by the state of affairs they produce for one another. 8 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987). 9 9 WP 135. 10 Consensual does not mean dominant but may be connected with the majority/minority contrast proposed in Mille plateaus. A position may well be affirmed by a qualitatively minority group and will be a majority position if it presents itself as what should be accepted by everyone, i.e., as a potentially consensual claim (even if such a consensus would mean defeating powerful illusions, ideologies, balances of power, and so on). 11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999) 99–108. 12 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 88. 13 WP 130. 14 Ibid. 159. 15 John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens: Ohio UP, 1991) 33. 16 Dreaming the Dark (Boston: Beacon, 1997). 17 WP 41. 18 Ibid. 1. 19 Reprinted (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1996) 230.