Deleuze and Analytic Philosophy
by Jeffrey A. Bell
Presented as the SEP-FEP Joint ConferenceSeptember 9, 2006
Fifty years ago H.P. Grice and P.F. Strawson published their now famous essay, “In
Defense of a Dogma,” as in large part a reply to W.V. Quine’s equally famous essay,
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Both essays have set the agenda for a number of the
debates that have arisen in analytic philosophy in the past half century. When Quine’s
essay was first published in 1951, in fact, analytic philosophy was not nearly as
dominant in the academy as it has since become. The pragmatist tradition in American
philosophy was still, by 1950, quite strong in the United States; and in Britain the
influence of Wittgenstein, who is seen by many American pragmatists such as Rorty
as a kindred spirit, was also quite strong. In most graduate programs in philosophy
today, by contrast, in the United States and Britain, one finds the clear, undisputed
dominance of analytic philosophy. This dominance is not recent, moreover, for from
the 1950s on analytic philosophy quickly acquired the dominance it has maintained to
this day.
Rather than add to the litany of work that has either sought to explain the rise of
analytic philosophy and the subsequent rift between analytic and continental
philosophy (in which I include pragmatism), or the work that has attempted to
overcome the difference between them altogether, we will focus, instead, upon
concepts of philosophers in both the continental and analytic traditions. These
concepts, it will be argued, need to be understood relative to the problems these
philosophers are responding to, and these responses, as we shall see, are of use to
philosophers in both traditions. It is in this spirit, then, that we return to the debate
between Grice/Strawson and Quine, showing how the problems within this debate,
problems which quickly became the dominant themes of the analytic tradition, were
problems equally addressed by later philosophers both in the analytic tradition –
especially the work of Saul Kripke and Hillary Putnam – and by those writing in the
continental tradition – we will bring in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour
(and in a long version of this paper, Alain Badiou). In setting these comparisons forth
we will conclude, finally, that it would be to the detriment of both analytic and
continental philosophers to remain indifferent to or even dismissive of the work going
on in other traditions.
I
At the heart of the debate between Grice and Strawson and Quine is the analytic-
synthetic distinction. Yet as Grice and Strawson readily admit, Quine’s objections to
this distinction can be broadened to include much more: ‘Quine’s objection is not
simply to the words “analytic” and “synthetic,” but to a distinction which at times
philosophers have supposed themselves to be expressing by means of such pairs of
words or phrases as “necessary” and “contingent,” “a priori” and “empirical,” “truth
of reason” and “truth of fact”…’1 If Quine’s objections were to hold up, therefore,
then much more would be at stake, according to Grice and Strawson, then the
analytic/synthetic distinction. For Grice and Strawson, though, Quine’s objections do
not hold up, and they base their response to Quine upon a specific notion of meaning,
what they refer to as “cognitive synonymy,” a notion they take to be part of the
“analyticity-group.”2
1 P.F. Strawson and H.P. Grice, “In Defense of a Dogma,” The Philosophical Review 65 (2), 1956, p. 142.2 Ibid. p. 145.
2
Two expressions are cognitively synonymous, Grice and Strawson argue, is “roughly”
equivalent ‘to what we ordinarily express by saying that x and y have the same
meaning or that x means the same as y …’3 For Quine, however, as Grice and
Strawson read him, to mean the same as, when applied to predicate-expressions,
differs from and goes ‘beyond the notion of being true of just the same object.’ The
predicate-expressions, to use Quine’s example, ‘the creature with a heart’ and ‘the
creature with a kidney’ may indeed be true by virtue of referring to one and the same
object, and yet they are not ‘cognitively synonymous,’ much as Frege’s famous
example of the morning star and evening star were not cognitively synonymous. In
other words, it is not what is thought about that determines cognitive synonymity, but
rather it is the way it is thought about that is the same, which is clearly not the case in
the examples just given.
The problem, for Quine, is that there would be no example that would or could satisfy
the conditions of cognitive synonymity, or analyticity as Quine extends his critique.
The very notion of analyticity itself, Quine argues, derives from Kant, who
‘conceived of an analytic statement as one that attributes to its subject no more than is
already conceptually contained in the subject.’4 Among the problems with this
understanding of analyticity is the manner in which an analytic statement can
‘conceptually contain’ all that is necessary without reference to anything outside, to
something that is contained, and thus containment must be taken ‘metaphorically.’5 In
his use of the term, Kant appears, according to Quine, to take a statement to be
analytic ‘when it is true by virtue of meanings and independently of fact.’ If taken in
3 Ibid.4 W.V. Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in Philosophical Review, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 1951), p. 20.5 Ibid., p. 21
3
this way, which is precisely how Grice and Strawson understand Quine, then analytic
statements can in no way be subject to revision for they already ‘contain’ the meaning
that makes them analytic, and they do not refer to an outside or other which would
prompt a possible revision. Quine is clear on this point: ‘Furthermore, it becomes
folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on
experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be
held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the
system.’ ‘Even a statement very close to the periphery,’ Quine adds, ‘can be held true
in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain
statements of the kind called logical laws’; or, by contrast, even ‘the logical law of the
excluded middle,’ a worthy candidate for an analytic, unrevisable statement, has been
proposed for revision ‘as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics.’6 In other
words, the analytic distinction is to be understood as a difference of degree on a
continuum of variation, whereby analytic are those statements most resistant to
variation and synthetic statements most susceptible to variation. To maintain the
distinction between an analytic, necessary, and unrevisable statement and a synthetic,
contingent, and revisable statement is thus, for Quine, untenable. The
analytic/synthetic distinction, in short, is made possible by what Quine will later refer
to as the web of belief, and a proper empiricism, an empiricism without the dogmas
associated with analytic and synthetic statements, will better appreciate the
complexities associated with our knowledge claims.
Returning now to Grice and Strawson’s defense of the analytic-synthetic dogma, they
argue that despite Quine’s arguments that efforts to define analyticity in terms of
cognitive synonymy, or despite the fact that a formal, conceptually contained 6 Ibid. p. 40.
4
definition is not possible, it does not warrant the assertion that there is no meaningful
distinction to be made here. ‘The fact,’ they say, ‘if it is a fact, that expressions cannot
be explained in precisely the way which Quine seems to require, does not mean that
they cannot be explained at all.’7 In support of this view they offer the following
example:
1. My neighbor’s three-year-old child understands Russell’s Theory of Types
2. My neighbor’s three-year-old child is an adult
Statement (1) is, however unlikely, verifiable. There is a way in which this statement
can be taken to be true. Statement (2), by contrast, is something we cannot understand
unless we undergo a wholesale revision of our concepts ‘child’ and ‘adult.’8 The
second statement would be an example, for Grice and Strawson, of an analytic
statement. Barring a conceptual revision, no empirical evidence will lead us to accept
that a three-year-old child is an adult; whereas the first statement could indeed be
found to be true if such a child prodigy were found, in experience, to exist, and thus
this would be an example of a synthetic statement. Quine’s criticism here, as Grice
and Strawson read him, is that ‘those who believe in the distinction [between analytic
and synthetic statements] are inclined at least sometimes to mistake the characteristic
of strongly resisting revision … for the mythical characteristic of total immunity from
revision.’9 Stated otherwise, Quine’s assumption seems to be that ‘As soon as we give
up the idea of a set of experiential truth-conditions for each statement taken
separately, we must give up the idea of explaining synonymy in terms of identity of
such sets.’10 And yet, Grice and Strawson argue, we need not take a statement
7 “In Defense of a Dogma,” p. 149.8 Ibid. p. 151.9 Ibid. p. 155.10 Ibid.
5
separately or even reject the notion of conceptual revision. In fact, they argue that ‘All
we have to say now is that two statements are synonymous if and only if any
experiences which, on certain assumptions about the truth-value of other statements,
confirm or disconfirm one of the pair, also, on the same assumptions, confirm or
disconfirm the other to the same degree.’11 Furthermore, if we can make sense of the
notion that the same form of words, given one set of assumptions, may express
something true, and, given another set of assumptions, express something false,
‘then,’ they conclude, ‘we can make sense of the idea of conceptual revision. And if
we can make sense of this idea, then we can perfectly well preserve the distinction
between analytic and synthetic.’12
Before moving on it will be helpful to take stock of some of the key elements in the
debate between Quine and Grice and Strawson. First, and most especially for our
purposes, is the notion of meaning as a set which contains certain elements. As Quine
understood an analytic statement, its meaning wholly contains the elements within
itself and, because it is closed off to contingencies of empirical experience, it
necessarily involves ‘the mythical characteristic of total immunity from revision.’
Grice and Strawson, as we just saw, argue that we can continue to adhere to the
distinction between analytic and synthetic if we can make sense of the notion that
conceptual set associated with a meaningful statement can be revised even though
they may be strongly resistant to revision – e.g., the concepts child and adult. What
remains consistent throughout this debate, however, is a continued adherence to the
notion that there is a relationship between the meaning of a statement as an abstract
11 Ibid. p. 156.12 Ibid. p. 157.
6
set or property and the elements that embody the use of this statement, or the elements
of experience that verify this meaning and/or give it content.
The continued adherence to this distinction becomes apparent in later work in the
analytic tradition. In fact, it is perhaps not inaccurate to argue that this relationship
between sets and contents of sets is the problematic that has generated much of the
work in analytic philosophy – and hence the importance of Russell’s paradox (i.e., is
the set of sets that are not members of themselves a member of itself?) and Tarski’s
theory of truth that attempts to circumvent the paradox. Alain Badiou’s work in the
continental tradition has also maintained an adherence to this distinction between sets
and elements, understood in this context from a Cantorian perspective of infinite sets.
Badiou does argue that the relationship between sets and elements is not a simple
matter of sets including their elements; to the contrary, the Cantorian sets that most
interest Badiou entail a fundamental impasse, an abyss without mediation, between
the elements that belong to and are presented in the set and the unpresentable set of
subsets that is included and represented within the set. Badiou’s work, however, as he
himself admits, is nevertheless work that continues to develop within the analytic
tradition the ‘mathematico-logical revolution of Frege-Cantor.’13
II
At this point we can turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze, for in his writings we find an
effort to understand the relationship between an abstract set of rules on the one hand
and the actual, material content on the other. Deleuze, however, offers an account that
may well elucidate and extend the work of analytic philosophy in that he attempts,
with his notion of the ‘abstract machine,’ to offer an understanding of abstract rules 13 Being and Event, p. 2.
7
that are both inseparable from and dependent upon the actual, material systems of
which they are the rules, and rules that are nonetheless distinct from and not to be
confused with the material systems that actualize them. In a telling and appropriate
passage for our purposes, Deleuze argues that ‘All methods for the
transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with
universals, from Russell’s logic to Chomsky’s grammar, have fallen into the worst
kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and
not abstract enough.’14 Their logic and grammar is too abstract in that it separates—
abstracts—the form from the content, the abstract set of formal, logical rules from the
content of this set; and it is not abstract enough, Deleuze argues, ‘because it is limited
to the form of expression and to alleged universals that presuppose language.’15 In
other words, the abstract logic and grammar, as confined to presupposing language, is
unable, as an abstraction, to be applied to understanding other material processes. It is
only good for understanding language, and hence it is not abstract enough.
What Deleuze offers as an alternative to the approach of Russell and Chomsky is the
notion of an ‘abstract machine.’ The abstract machine does not presuppose the
distinction between an abstract set and the content of these sets, or between an
abstract set of formal rules and the concrete behaviours that are the embodiment of
these rules. As Deleuze puts it,
The abstract machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it into strata, domains, and territories.16
14 A Thousand Plateaus, p. 148.15 Ibid., p. 141.16 Ibid.
8
A few lines later, Deleuze then defines an abstract machine as ‘the aspect or moment
at which nothing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance
nor form, neither content nor expression.’17 The abstract machine, in other words, can
neither be thought of in terms of the abstract, universal logic and grammar of Russell
and Chomsky, nor, for that matter, can it be thought of in terms of the
communicative-intentions and behaviours of speakers as Grice and Austin would have
us understand it; rather, the abstract machine can be thought in terms of neither if such
thinking entails the continued adherence to the distinction between form and
substance, content and expression. More to the point, these distinctions themselves
can only be thought by virtue of the abstract machine that makes them possible. This
point is made quite explicitly in the closing lines to their chapter in A Thousand
Plateaus, “On Several Regimes of Signs,”
“Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.18
With the notion of an abstract machine, therefore, Deleuze and Guattari propose to
understand meaning in a way that avoids the problems and debates which ensue when
one begins with the distinction between formal rules on the one hand and concrete
linguistic behaviours and utterances on the other. And yet how does the abstract
machine ‘preside over’ the distinction between form and substance, content and
expression; or, to restate the question, how is it that the abstract machine is the
‘fundamental element upon which all the rest depend,’ the rest being logic, syntax,
and semantics?
17 Ibid.18 Ibid. p. 148.
9
What we propose is that we can best understand Deleuze and Guattari if the abstract
machine is understood to be a dynamic system at the edge of chaos. In taking this
approach we follow, in many respects, the work of Manuel Delanda who, in his A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History and in his more recent work, Intensive Science
and Virtual Philosophy, has shown how fruitful this approach to the work of Deleuze
and Guattari can be. Where the approach offered here differs slightly is that we
emphasize that the notion of an abstract machine as a dynamic system at the edge of
chaos ought to be used, where relevant, in addressing the problems and debates within
the history of philosophy, including the history of analytic philosophy. That said, we
can turn now to clarifying precisely how we take Deleuze’s theory of meaning to be a
theory of dynamic systems at the edge of chaos.
For the sake of time, I can say simply that a dynamic system at the edge of chaos is a
system that has not settled into a stable, stratified system, or what is also known as a
basin of attraction by complexity theorists; nor is it a system that is chaotic, for such a
system would not even allow for the emergence of new forms. And it is precisely the
emergence of new forms and the creativity of thinking that is a central concern in the
philosophical work of Deleuze. The term edge of chaos was used by Christopher
Langton in describing the conditions necessary for the emergence of new life-forms
Langton performed through computer modelling. He found that if the mutation rate of
life forms were set too low, there would be insufficient evolution and the result would
be the extinction of species through a failure to adapt; and if the rate were set too
high, stable new forms (i.e., species) would be unable to emerge and the result again
would be the extinction of life. Life is most vibrant, Langton found, at the point where
there is sufficient variation but not to the point of becoming a self-destructive chaos –
10
life thrives, then, at what Langton, and more recently Stuart Kaufmann and others,
have called the edge of chaos. This dynamic state of the edge of chaos is thus not the
stable life-forms themselves; rather, it is the condition for the possibility of their
transformation, for their becoming other life-forms.
In applying this idea to Deleuze’s theory of meaning, we can begin to see that the
abstract machine, as a ‘movement of deterritorialization’ that allows for the possibility
of stable systems and hence for the logic, syntax, and semantics that formalizes these
systems, is not to be confused with the stable forms of meaning, the established
relationships between content and expression, form and substance. As a dynamic
system at the edge of chaos, a statement is meaningful not because of an established
relationship it has to an already identified object, but it is meaningful to the extent that
these established relationships become deterritorialized, become other, and in doing
so allow for the emergence of new forms of established meaning. One of the frequent
mistakes one finds among Deleuze commentators is the assumption that because
Deleuze was critical of representational language – such as philosophy being the
expressive representation of identifiable thoughts – he was offering instead an anti-
representational, abstract philosophy with nothing in common with representational
uses of language. Such a characterization presupposes the type of either/or thinking
the notion of the abstract machine was precisely an effort to avoid. In A Thousand
Plateaus, for example, they reject just this type of thinking as it was applied to the
relationship between tonal and atonal music:
the important thing is certainly not to establish a pseudobreak between the tonal system and atonal music… The essential thing is almost the opposite movement: the ferment in the tonal system itself (during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) that dissolved temperament and widened chromaticism while preserving relative tonality, which reinvented new
11
modalities, brought a new amalgamation of major and minor, and in each instance conquered realms of continous variation for this variable or that.19
The key, then, is not to break with the tonal system, nor is it to break with
representational or established forms of meaning, but instead to inject a ferment into
the tonal and representational systems themselves, a ferment that can allow for ‘new
modalities.’ This is why, in a much later essay, Deleuze is quite forthright in saying
that ‘the novelty of a statement is its meaning.’20
In Difference and Repetition, to cite another example, Deleuze speaks of the linguistic
multiplicity of phonemes that is the ‘virtual system of reciprocal connections between
“phonemes,” a virtual system that is then ‘incarnated [or actualized] in the actual
terms and relations of diverse languages.’21 On our interpretation, this linguistic
multiplicity is the dynamic system of ‘reciprocal connections between “phonemes,”
and it is a virtual system for although the phonemes are real they are, as linguistic
multiplicity, yet to be actualized within the ‘terms and relations of diverse languages,’
languages with their established relationships between expression and content, form
and substance. This virtual, dynamic system of phonemes, however, ‘cannot,’
Deleuze makes clear, ‘be spoken in the empirical usage of a given language, but must
be spoken and can be spoken only in the poetic usage of speech coextensive with
virtuality.’22 In other words, with the ‘poetic usage of speech’ one injects a ferment
into the actual, empirical usage of a given language, and it is this creative, novel usage
of language – what Deleuze will also refer to in other places as minor literature – that
is what Deleuze takes to be meaning as abstract machine. To clarify these points
19 A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 95-6.20 “Mediators”21 Difference and Repetition, p. 193.22 Ibid.
12
further, and to return to themes with which this essay began, we turn now to show
how Deleuze’s understanding of an abstract machine may be brought to bear upon
issues within analytic philosophy.
By understanding meaning as the virtual, dynamic system at the edge of chaos that is
the poetic usage of speech inseparable from its actual usage, the deterritorialization
and fermenting of this usage allows for an actualization of the linguistic multiplicity
that is indeterminately determinable. In other words, the linguistic multiplicity, as the
condition for the actual usage of language, i.e., for the relationship between
expression and content, does not predetermine which usages will be actualized. As
such, the linguistic multiplicity is indeterminately determinable. This phenomena
emerges in the analytic tradition, according to Deleuze, with Frege’s paradox. Frege’s
paradox is the result of what Deleuze refers to as the ‘infinite proliferation of verbal
entities’ that results as the sense becomes the referent of a new name, a name with its
own sense that can become a referent, and so on ad infinitum.23 Rudolf Carnap, in his
book Meaning and Necessity, has recognized that ‘Frege’s method [i.e., his name-
relation method] leads, further, to an infinite number of entities of new and unfamiliar
kinds; and, if we wish to be able to speak about all of them, the language must contain
an infinite number of names for these entities.’ But in doing so, Carnap argues, one
opens a series of difficulties and antinomies that Frege, Quine, and Carnap, among
others, have sought to avoid. Among the difficulties is the very difficulty of fixing
reference at all, or of having to take into consideration an infinite series with each
attempt to name the sense of another name.
23 Logic of Sense, p. 29
13
One way to avoid the multiplicity of sense, or what we would call the indeterminately
determinable nature of meaning as abstract machine, is to halt the proliferation of
differences within a founding identity. To cite just a few of the efforts to do just this,
Frege grounds the sense or meaning of an expression within the object or independent
variable – though this, as Carnap also points out, does not eliminate other problems
for Frege’s system; Husserl sought to ground the infinite series within the things
themselves and, ultimately, in the transcendental ego; and Russell, finally, halted the
regress at logically proper names. For Russell, to elaborate slightly, meaning is a
function – f(x)(x is the author of Waverly), to use Russell’s well-known example –
and the independent variable, or what is also called the argument, completes this
function, resulting in a true proposition when x is replaced by ‘Scott.’ Yet to avoid the
difficulties of relating descriptive properties, properties that can be multiplied
indeterminately, to the objects these properties are properties of, Russell proposes the
logically simple names as the bedrock upon which meaning can then function.
It is at this point where Deleuze, armed with his notion of the abstract machine, turns
critical of the analytic tradition. In his most extended discussion of analytic
philosophy, Deleuze, along with Guattari, argue that the efforts of analytic
philosophers to establish the logical relations between sense and reference – whether
in the logic of syntax, semantics, etc. – have done so only by ‘detaching the
proposition from all its psychological dimension…[with the result that this logic]
clings all the more to the set of postulates that limited and subjected thought to the
constraints of a recognition of truth in the proposition.’24 In other words, by grounding
sense upon the ‘truth’ of propositions, or upon the functional relationship between a
proposition and a state of affairs in the world, the result is that the effort of 24 What is Philosophy, p. 139.
14
philosophers to become scientific has led them to an analysis of what is already there,
to a discussion and clarification of words already spoken. Whether it be the proverbial
cat on the mat, or Scott as the author of Waverly, in each of these cases, for Deleuze,
‘Logic is always defeated by itself, that is to say, by the insignificance of the cases on
which it thrives.’25
What Deleuze and Guattari propose, instead, is rather than representing and analyzing
actual statements and discourses to move from the actual to the virtual, to the
multiplicity and abstract machine coextensive with the actual, so as to allow for the
creation and invention of new modes of thought and speaking. To do this, Deleuze
and Guattari argue,
it would be necessary to return to the interior of scientific states of affairs or bodies in the process of being constituted, in order to penetrate into consistency, that is to say, into the sphere of the virtual, a sphere that is only actualized in them. It would be necessary to go back up the path that science descends, and at the very end of which logic sets up its camp.26
This process of returning to the virtual rather than, as with the sciences and logic,
moving from the virtual to the actual, is precisely the effort to unleash the abstract
machine of meaning that is inseparable from and underpins the actual usage of
everyday speech. In analytic philosophy, on Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, the
tendency is to separate the linguistic multiplicity, the virtual as indeterminately
determinable, from the actual and to make of the actual that which completes the
virtual by giving the multiplicity of descriptive properties a referent, and the
subsequent proposition – e.g., Scott is the author of Waverly – a truth value. The
subsequent problem in doing this, and a problem the solution of which analytic
philosophers have battled over for years, is to account for the relationship between the
25 Ibid.26 Ibid. p. 140.
15
multiplicity of various descriptive properties and the ‘things’ they are properties of.
This problem, however, is not new to the history of philosophy. It can be found, for
instance, in the attempts to explain the relationship, in Spinoza’s Ethics, between the
attributes and modes of substance. If, as the problem goes, the attributes constitute the
essence of substance, then why does Spinoza define the attributes as that which is
perceived by an infinite intellect. If the mode is a mode of an attribute, then why
define the attributes in terms of a mode? As I have argued elsewhere, the difficulties
commentators have had in explaining how Spinoza understands the relationship
between the attributes and modes stems from assuming that the modes and attributes
are identifiably distinct, when, on our reading, the attributes are only identifiable as
modified, or it is the actual modifications of substance that enables one to identify the
attributes. The attributes, in short, are the virtual indiscernible from the actual. It was
for this reason that Deleuze was interested in Spinoza, for in Spinoza’s work
substance hinged upon the modes of substance, or upon the actual. Similarly, on our
reading of the abstract machine and its relationship to analytic philosophy, the
descriptive properties of things are not to be understood as identifiably distinct or
separable from the actual things. We do not have, on a Deleuzean reading, a set of
descriptive properties that is distinct and separable from the actual object that may or
may not be referred to by this set. To the contrary, and following through on
Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, it is the actual thing that enables the possibility of
abstracting properties and possibilities that are separable and distinct from this thing.
Moreover, within the analytic tradition itself we find just this argument being made,
most notably in the work of Saul Kripke.
III
16
Kripke could not be more clear in his criticism of the Russellian-Fregean approach to
fixing reference – the actual – by means of a set of descriptive properties. As he states
his position, ‘contrary to most recent theorists, [I claim] that the reference of names is
rarely or almost never fixed by means of description. And by this I do not just mean
what Searle says “It’s not a single description, but rather a cluster, a family of
properties which fixes the reference.” I mean that properties in this sense are not used
at all.’27 By using heat as an example, Kripke argues that our current understanding of
heat as the ‘motion of molecules’ is not contingent if by that it is meant that heat
might not be the motion of molecules. The tendency for some to think that it is
contingent in precisely this sense results, according to Kripke, from thinking of heat
as the motion of molecules as an entity or object that was in some sense fixed or
determined by the various descriptive properties we, as human observers, happened to
amass over time. For Kripke, however, there is a difference between what he refers to
as epistemological necessity, or the analyticity of knowing a claim to be true a priori,
and metaphysical necessity. As Kripke puts the distinction, ‘One of them
[epistemological necessity] has to do with knowledge, of what can be known in
certain ways about the actual world. The other one has to do with metaphysics, how
the world could have been; given that it is the way it is, could it have been otherwise,
in certain ways.’ Kripke then asks, ‘Is everything that is necessary knowable a priori
or known a priori?’ And the answer for Kripke is no. With the case of heat, for
example, for Kripke heat is, of metaphysical necessity, the motion of molecules, while
as a matter of contingent fact humans know of heat through certain sense faculties,
etc.
What gives the illusion of contingency is the fact we have identified the heat by the contingent fact that there happen to be creatures on this planet—(namely, ourselves) who are sensitive to it in a certain way, that is, who are
27 Naming and Necessity, p. 94.
17
sensitive to the motion of molecules or to heat. So we use the description, “that which causes such and such sensations, or that which we sense in such and such a way,” to identify heat … just as we use the contingent property of Cicero having written such and such works to identify him.
And this is where the distinction between epistemological and metaphysical necessity
becomes most prominent in Kripke’s work, for, as Kripke argues,
even if we fix the reference of such a name as “Cicero” as the man who wrote such and such works, in speaking of counterfactual situations, when we speak of Cicero, we do not then speak of whoever in such counterfactual situations would have written such and such works, but rather of Cicero, whom we have identified by the contingent property that he is the man who in fact, that is, in the actual world, wrote certain works.
Had Deleuze lived to complete a book on Marx, we would not be speaking of
someone who had written a book on Marx as well as A Thousand Plateaus, Difference
and Repetition, etc.; we would be speaking of Deleuze as the actual author of these
books and the possibility of Deleuze having written yet another book. In discussing
the case of heat as the motion of molecules, Kripke will similarly argue that even if an
alien race sensed different properties when exposed to the motion of molecules – such
as a tingling feeling – this would not make of heat a contingent identity. For Kripke,
once heat is identified as the motion of molecules it becomes ‘rigidly designated’ –
Kripke’s term – and we would say, quite correctly according to Kripke, that the alien
race simply has a different reaction to what, in this actual world, is heat. The same is
true of Cicero, or of Deleuze. It is not a matter of whether Cicero or Deleuze would
have been otherwise if they had not written certain works; it is rather a matter of
taking Cicero and Deleuze as actually identified and using this as the basis for
considering the possibility of a Cicero or Deleuze that did or did not write certain
works. For Kripke, then, as for our Deleuzean reading of abstract machines, it is the
18
actual that is the basis for thinking the virtual, for thinking the creative possibilities of
the actual.
These points are not meant to imply that Deleuze is setting forth a version of the
causal theory of reference, as Kripke’s position has come to be known. There are, as
we will see, some important differences. To clarify these differences, we will turn
briefly to the work of Bruno Latour, who in many ways sets forth arguments that are
surprisingly similar to those of Kripke and Deleuze. This comparison will further
illustrate the manner in which our reading of Deleuze’s concept of the abstract
machine as a dynamic system at the edge of chaos can extend and clarify the work
being done both in analytic philosophy and in science studies.
IV
The shift at this point from a discussion of Kripke to the work of science studies and
Bruno Latour might seem at first glance to be a misguided move. There is, however, a
striking comparison to be made between them, and a comparison that reveals, as one
unpacks the implications involved, a number of interesting parallels between analytic
and continental thought. The comparison is between Kripke’s discussion of heat as
the motion of molecules and Latour’s discussion of Pasteur. In both cases they
propose what may at first seem to be an antinomy. For Kripke the apparent antinomy
is that it is both a contingent fact that we know heat to be the motion of molecules and
yet heat necessarily is the motion of molecules. For Kripke the antinomy is only
apparent and is, as we saw, the result of failing to distinguish between epistemological
and metaphysical necessity. For Latour there is a similar antinomy, which he states as
follows: ‘on the one hand facts are experimentally made up and never escape from
19
their manmade settings, and on the other hand it is essential that facts are not made up
and that something emerges that is not manmade.’28 Stating this antinomy with the
example of Pasteur in hand, Latour claims it amounts to holding the following two
statements to be synonymous: ‘the ferment has been fabricated in my laboratory,’ and
‘the ferment is autonomous from my fabrication.’29 For Latour, however, the
antinomy appears not because of a failure to make a distinction, as Kripke argued, but
because of our persistence in making distinctions that should not be made. In
particular, for Latour we have by and large continued, as a culture, to adhere to the
distinction between the human and non-human world, whereby the latter is taken to be
a simple presence awaiting humans to designate it, and designate it correctly through
an overcoming of their lesser passions (i.e. the passions that make us inhuman, or
animals). For Latour, by contrast, and much of his work has been directed towards
detailing just this, the distinction is one that in practice breaks down; or, as he puts it,
there is a ‘social history of things and a “thingy” history of humans.’30
It is on the basis of the critique of this distinction between humans and non-humans
that Latour criticizes analytic philosophy. Within the analytic tradition, according to
Latour, and here he echoes Deleuze, the tendency has been to presuppose the simple
presence of the world which ‘simply awaits the designation of words whose truth or
falsehood is guaranteed solely by its presence.’31 This criticism certainly applies to
Kripke, for although Kripke does emphasize the actual world as the basis upon which
the multiplicity of descriptive possibilities is to be understood, he nonetheless
continues to understand the actual world as a simple presence awaiting a baptismal
28 Pandora’s Hope, 125.29 Ibid., p. 135.30 Pandora’s Hope, p. 18.31 Ibid., p. 48.
20
designation. Although this would no doubt be Latour’s criticism of Kripke’s position,
it is also one found frequently within the literature of analytic philosophy.32
How, then, does Latour’s critique of the human/non-human split lead to a recognition
of the synonymity between the fabrication and autonomy of the ferment; and how in
turn does this clarify Deleuze’s notion of the abstract machine? Put simply, the more
an entity entails a heterogeneous assemblage of human and non-human elements, and
the more this heterogeneous collective (Latour’s term) or multiplicity (Deleuze’s
term) is transformed into what Deleuze would call a plane of consistency and Latour
calls articulation, the more ‘real’ (i.e., autonomous) the entity becomes. In the case of
Pasteur, for example, Latour argues that ‘The more work Pasteur does,’ – that is, the
more fabrication, the more human and non-human connections he establishes – ‘the
more independent the lactic acid ferment becomes, since it is now that much more
articulate…’33 To restate this in the terms of dynamic systems, we can say that
Pasteur’s initial work in the laboratory, and the initial reception of his work in 1858,
pushed the established chemical theories into a state of disequilibrium, and yet as the
work became more articulate the system of associations and connections settled into a
stable pattern and became accepted as a truth. Latour himself describes the process in
quite similar terms: ‘The ferment began as attributes and ended up being a substance,
a thing with clear limits, with a name, with obduracy, which was more than the sum
of its parts … substance is a name that designates the stability of an assemblage.’34
Once this assemblage acquires its stability, once it becomes a strong basin of
32 See, for instance, Gareth Evans …33 Ibid. p. 144. See also, p. 158: ‘An entity gains in reality if it is associated with many others that are viewed as collaborating with it. It loses in reality if, on the contrary, it has to shed associates or collaborators (human and nonhuman) … the reality of Pasteur’s airborne germs is obtained through an ever greater number of elements with which it is associated – machines, lectures, textbooks, institutions, taxonomies, theories, and so on.’34 Ibid. p. 151.
21
attraction, it tends to forget the dynamic processes that gave rise to these basins of
attraction, or, as Latour discusses it in his work Science in Action, the process
becomes black-boxed and becomes simply a fact, a truth found in a textbook. And
Latour’s work in science studies begins with these black-boxed facts, with the stable
existents that are taken for granted and unquestioned in our daily life, and uncovers
the dynamic processes, the contingencies, that made the stability of these existents
possible. Latour’s work, in fact, is an example of Deleuze’s call to move from the
actual to the virtual, to the dynamic processes of the abstract machine. And key to this
move, for Latour, was the recognition of the need to move beyond the longstanding
adherence to the perceived split between a human realm that designates and a non-
human realm that is a simple presence awaiting designation, or baptism in Kripke’s
sense. Only by doing this could the dynamics of the associations be appreciated, much
as, for Deleuze on our reading, overcoming the split between expression and content
enables the dynamics of meaning that is the virtual coextensive with the actual. Yet
not all philosophers in the analytic tradition blindly tout the party line that there is a
simple, unchallengeable split between the human and the non-human. Hillary Putnam,
to mention just one prominent example, devoted a tremendous amount of effort to
challenging precisely this split. One could even argue that a dominant concern of
post-Kantian philosophy has been to overcome the problems seen to persist when one
adheres to a form of Cartesian dualism. Turning then to discuss Putnam will help us to
clarify how the efforts of Deleuze, and Latour, are able to address these challenges in
a way that does not perpetuate them.
V
22
We begin with Putnam by discussing ‘learning.’ For those familiar with the work of
Putnam, the concept ‘learning’ would not be the first to come to one’s mind, whereas
‘internal realism’— which is precisely the position Putnam puts forth to avoid the
subject designating-thing designated split – ‘natural kinds’, ‘twin earth,’ and others
likely would come to mind. Yet in his essay, “Is Semantics Possible?” the concept of
learning enters at a crucial point. It enters at the point where Putnam sets forth his
criticism of the description theory of meaning. As Putnam argues, ‘Meaning does not
determine extension, in the sense that given the meaning and a list of all the
“properties” of a thing (in any particular sense of “property,” one can simply read off
whether the thing is a lemon, or acid, or whatever).’35 After detailing the problems
with this view, problems that largely echo those discussed above, Putnam claims that
‘The problem in semantic theory is to get away from the picture of the meaning of a
word as something like a list of concepts; not to formalize that misguided picture.’36
Putnam thus follows Kripke at this point, which is widely known, but it is also at this
point where the importance of learning comes in: ‘If someone does not know the
meaning of “lemon,” I can somehow convey it to him. I am going to suggest that in
this simple phenomenon lies the problem, and hence the raison d’etre, of “semantic
theory.”’37 The problem, in short, is to account for how one who does not know the
meaning of ‘lemon’ can learn it so quickly and easily. For Putnam the answer entails
the learner acquiring from a teacher ‘a few facts about “lemon” or “tiger” (I shall refer
to them as core facts) such that one can convey [and hence learn] the use of “lemon”
or “tiger” by simply conveying those facts.’38
35 “Is Semantics Possible?” in Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds, p. 105.36 Ibid., p. 111.37 Ibid., p. 112.38 Ibid. p. 113.
23
The issue now hinges upon the status of these core facts. For Putnam, these core facts
are offered as an alternative to what he sees as the traditional approach to theories of
meaning. ‘The mistake of the traditional theorist,’ Putnam argues, ‘lies in his
attachment to the word “meaning.” If giving the meaning is giving the meaning, then
it is giving a definite thing; but giving the meaning isn’t, as we shall see in a moment,
giving some one definitive thing … there is no one set of facts which has to be
conveyed to convey the normal use of a word; and taking account of this requires a
complication in our notion of “core facts.”’39 And what Putnam goes on to argue, the
complication in the notion of ‘core facts,’ is that it is not a core set of properties, even
a changing or fuzzy set of properties, that enables one to determine the extension.
This would be to persist in the descriptive theory of meaning. What complicates the
notion of core facts, for Putnam, is that the extension is itself part of the core facts.
Unlike Kripke, therefore, the extension or object designated is not a mute presence
awaiting an original baptism, thus avoiding for the time being Latour’s critique, but
the extension is itself part of the core facts which enables one to learn and use the
term. This is Putnam’s internal realism, whereby a conceptual schema enables the
possibility of determining what entities count, what counts as extension and what not.
This is not a naïve realism, or even Kripke’s original baptism, in that the extension—
the object being identified—cannot even be conceived or thought of independently of
the conceptual apparatus (core facts) which includes what can count as extension in
the first place. At the same time this is not a descriptive theory or a version of the
argument that claims extension is determined by a descriptive list of properties and
concepts. It is the extension, rather, that determines the properties that come to be
associated with it, and here Putnam is in agreement with Kripke: ‘The extension of
our terms depends upon the actual nature of the particular things that serve as 39 Ibid. pp. 115-16.
24
paradigms, and this actual nature is not, in general, fully known to the speaker,’ and
hence intension or a conceptual list of properties is not sufficient to determine
extension. For Putnam we are perfectly able to learn and use terms such as ‘gold,’
‘lemon,’ and ‘tiger’ even if we lack full knowledge of their actual nature. It is at this
point where Putnam claims a social division of labor comes in – we bring a ring to a
specialist who knows the actual nature more than we so that we can determine if the
ring we just received is indeed gold or not. If it turns out not to be gold we will no
longer refer to this ring as a gold ring but will still continue to refer to things as being
made of gold despite our lack of expert knowledge. The conclusion Putnam draws
from this is that ‘Traditional semantic theory leaves out two contributions to the
determination of reference—the contribution of society [the division of labor just
mentioned] and the contribution of the real world; a better semantic theory must
encompass both.’40
Putnam’s call for a better semantic theory that recognizes the contributions of society
and the real world, along with Putnam’s internal realism whereby reference is not
understood in terms of a mental mapping of properties unto an awaiting object, do
bear some strong similarities to Latour’s project. Where Latour, in what we see as his
Deleuzean approach to understanding the emergence of entities, differs from Putnam
and others in the analytic tradition is with the ‘historicity of things.’ Putnam continues
to speak of natural kinds as ahistorical, or as at least largely indifferent to the
historical processes within which humans engage. For example, Putnam argues that if
two communities used the word water and had exactly the same thoughts, feelings,
perceptions, etc., when using the word water, but in one community water refers to
H2O and in the other it refers to XYZ, ‘The word “water,”’ Putnam argues, ‘would 40 Ibid., p. 132.
25
still refer to different stuff even if the collective mental state in the two communities
were the same. What goes on inside people’s heads does not fix the reference of
terms.’41 To argue contrariwise, Putnam believes. Would be to slip into relativism,
which is precisely what Putnam accuses Foucault and other French philosophers of
doing (and in a footnote he lists Derrida and Deleuze as two other guilty culprits).
What these relativists do, according to Putnam, is to argue that ‘Below what we are
pleased to regard as our most profound spiritual and moral insights lies a seething
cauldron of power drives, economic interests, and selfish fantasies. This is the view
that is at the cutting edge of relativism today.’42 And the fundamental inconsistency of
this ‘French’ view, finally, is the temptation ‘to fall into the trap of concluding that all
rational argument is mere rationalization and then proceeding to try to argue rationally
for this position.’43
In defense of his internal realism against the inconsistent French relativism, Putnam
argues that his position is an attempt to avoid ‘The deep systemic root of the disease
[which is] the notion of an “intrinsic” property, a property something has “in itself,”
apart from any contribution by language or mind.’44 Thus for Putnam H2O or XYZ are
not intrinsic properties independent of the categories, concepts, and properties we
may use in designating these ‘natural kinds,’ and yet for Putnam, at bottom, the
‘contribution by language or mind’ is constrained and limited by the nature of reality,
even if this reality can only be conceived or thought of by means of our conceptual
input.45 Putnam will thus distinguish his internal realism form those who ‘write as if
41 Reason, Truth, and History, p. 25.42 Ibid., p. 157. 43 Ibid.44 Many Faces of Realism, p. 9.45 See, for example, ibid., p. 33: ‘There are “external facts,” and we can say what they are. What we cannot say—because it makes no sense—is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices.’ Or again, p. 52: ‘Kant’s glory, in my eyes, is to say that the very fact that we cannot separate our own conceptual contribution from what is “objectively there” is not a disaster. It is, in fact, a certain kind of
26
they were saving realism (in its Materialist version) by abandoning intentionality! It’s
as if it were all right to say “I don’t deny there is an external world; I just deny that we
think about it”! Come to think of it, this is the way Foucault wrote, too. The line
between relativism á la française and Analytic Philosophy seems to be thinner than
Anglophone philosophers think.’46
From the Deleuzean theory of meaning put forward here, there are two primary
problems with Putnam’s position. First, Putnam does not take the inseparability of the
human (intentionality and conceptual choices) and nonhuman (reality, external facts,
extension) far enough. Secondly, and in support of the first, Putnam presupposes the
very distinction Deleuze, Latour, and Foucault challenge between the human and
nonhuman (or inhuman) when he claims that Foucault, et. al., base their
understanding of truth or reality based on what is inhuman about us – the ‘seething
cauldron of power drives, economic interests, and selfish fantasies’ – in contrast to
what makes us most human – viz. our ‘most profound moral and spiritual insights.’
Without getting too far astray into Deleuze’s theory of drives and affects, we can say,
with Latour, that they have not abandoned the notion of reasonableness. To the
contrary, core to the notion of dynamic systems as employed by Deleuze with his
concept of abstract machines and virtuality, and by Latour in his work on science
studies, is the idea that an unreasonable destabilization of a system may throw it into
chaos with disastrous consequences. The fact of the matter is that Foucault, Deleuze,
Latour, and others begin, as do Kripke and Putnam, with the actual world, and what
we find in the actual world is that we do tend to settle into relatively stable patterns of
interactions with one another and the world. The question for Deleuze, as we have
guarantee; at least as the thought is reconstructed in contemporary terms by Strawson…’46 Ibid., p. 16.
27
seen, is how the multiplicity of ‘particular elements’ settles into stable systems at all.
Why is there not simply an anarchy of power drives, economic interests, and selfish
fantasies? And how might these stable systems be transformed without sending them
into a destructive chaotic state. For Deleuze these are important questions, and
questions he, along with Foucault and others, spend much time addressing. For
Putnam and much of the analytic tradition, by contrast, it is simply assumed that the
inhuman cauldron of drives is to be feared and staved off at all costs, and they tend to
do so by an appeal to the ‘objectivity’ of a passionless natural science. It is precisely
this move, however, that Latour rejects, arguing that this move simply perpetuates the
existing power relationships in society by undermining the possibilities for a more
radical democracy. One could argue that the dominance of analytic philosophy in the
last fifty years has similarly perpetuated and reinforced non-democratic power
relationships, but to make this argument would involve addressing the historical and
sociological factors associated with the rise of analytic philosophy, which is, as I said
at the beginning of this essay, an argument to be made elsewhere but not, perhaps
unfortunately, not here, not today.
28