Deleuze's Physics

The mind is a delirium, because the given is delirium: it is according to the principle of difference, as difference.¹ Sensibility is the name we give to the infinitesimal spacing,² the interdependent origination,³ the intra-active agency,⁴ of the differential manifold, the minimum of distance as the possibility of sense.⁵

Sense is irreducibly differential, ineluctably hyphenated, always already sense of.⁶ Sense is the rule of pure difference, the moment of contact, double sensation, touching and being touched.⁷ Sense is primary signification, a system of differences without positive terms.⁸

The pure difference of sense is the individuation of what we can name indifference. This is one name among many: boundless,⁹ unlimited,¹⁰ in-itself,¹¹ preindividual,¹² the one,¹³ void,¹⁴ hyper-chaos.¹⁵

Individuation precedes individuals.¹⁶ It is that which has been historically given the name of becoming, which again is one name among many: motion,¹⁷ limit,¹⁸ decompression,¹⁹ dephasing,²⁰ unilateralization,²¹ event,²² auto-normalization.²³

“We must then define the given by two objective characteristics: indivisibility of an element and distribution of elements; atom and structure.”²⁴ The becoming of indifference is the birth to both atom and structure, individual and environment, particle and field, neither term of the conjunction more primordial.²⁵

The given is delirium (atom, chaos); the given becomes a system (structure, complexity).²⁶ Without structure, atom remains chaos. Without atom, structure cannot become. Neither substantialism (priority of atom) nor hylomorphism (priority of structure) can be taken as explanatory, because the given is always given according to the conjunction of these two objective characteristics, neither reducible to the other. Atom and structure are a “metastable complement.”²⁷ Individuation does not occur via the “meeting of pre-existing form and matter … but a resolution springing from a metastable system that is filled with potentials … Neither form nor matter suffices.”²⁸

Sensibility, therefore, is the effect of mediation, which presupposes “an original duality of orders of magnitude and the initial absence of interactive communication between them.”²⁹ This absence of interaction is indifference, but indifference cannot be thought of as a “stable equilibrium,” because if indifference were stable, the sensible given of our experience would never arise; rather, indifference is a “system state like that of supercooling or supersaturation,” a regime of “metastable equilibrium” that is “more than unity and more than identity.”³⁰

Indifference has no identity, but rather “possesses a transductive unity, which is to say that it can dephase itself in relation to itself; it can overflow out of itself from one part to another.”³¹ This overflowing is always a “partial and relative resolution,” the sens (direction) of sensibility, the differentiation whereby “a potential energy (the condition of a higher order of magnitude) actualizes itself, [and] a matter organizes and divides itself (the condition of a lower order of magnitude) into individuals structured into an average order of magnitude.”³²

The mind becomes human nature,³³ good sense arises from madness,³⁴ reason from unreason,³⁵ knowledge from nonknowledge³⁶—and all without cause, as sheer fact.³⁷ Hume’s “atomism” and “associationism” demand a new science, a “logic of physics or of existence,” which Deleuze begins to conceptualize in Empiricism and Subjectivity, and which he will continue to elaborate for the rest of his philosophical career.³⁸ In this early work, Deleuze’s logic of existence starts with the three principles or rules of “association”: “contiguity, resemblance, and causality.”³⁹ But as the later Deleuze will demonstrate in his work with Félix Guattari, there are many more rules than these three, “rules of ‘plan(n)ing,’ of diagramming,” the “concrete rules” of existence, “singular” and “immanent” operations, the “abstract machines” that “constitute becomings.”⁴⁰ Empiricism and Subjectivity gives us the first intimation of this radical science.

Notes