Deleuze: History and Science.??
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements. Assemblage Theory and Human History. Materialism and Politics.
Assemblage Theory and Linguistic Evolution. Metallic Assemblages.
Materialist Metaphysics.
Intensive and Extensive Cartography. Deleuze in Phase Space.
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2 Deleuze: History and Science.
?? ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
Some of the essays that make up this book are published here for the first time, but some have appeared in other publications in modified form. The publishers acknowledge that some material has been previously published in the following collections:
Deleuzian Social Ontology and Assemblage Theory. In Deleuze and the Social. Edited by Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier S?rensen. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.)
Deleuze, Materialism, and Politics. In Deleuze and Politics. Edited by Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.)
Molar Entities and Molecular Populations in History. In Deleuze and History. Edited by Jeffrey Bell and Claire Colebrook. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.)
Deleuze in Phase Space. In Virtual Mathematics. Edited by Simon Duffy. (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2006.)
Deleuze: History and Science.??3
Assemblages and Human History.
We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once
existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all those particular parts but does not unify them; rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The Anti-Oedipus. 1
A crucial question confronting any serious attempt to think about human history is the nature of the historical actors that are considered legitimate in a given philosophy. One can, of course, include only human beings as actors, either as rational decision-makers (as in micro-economics) or as phenomenological subjects (as in micro-sociology). But if we wish to go beyond this we need a proper conceptualization of social wholes. The very first step in this task is to devise a means to block micro-reductionism, a step usually achieved by the concept of emergent properties, properties of a whole that are not present in its parts: if a given social whole has properties that emerge from the interactions between its parts, its reduction to a mere aggregate of many rational decision makers or many phenomenological experiences is effectively blocked. But this leaves open the possibility of macro-reductionism, as when one rejects the rational actors of micro-economics in favor of society as a whole, a society that fully determines the nature of its members. Blocking macro-reductionism demands a second concept, the concept of relations of exteriority between parts. Unlike wholes in which “being part of this whole” is a defining characteristic of the parts, that is, wholes in which the parts cannot subsist independently of the relations they have with each other (relations of interiority) we need to conceive of emergent
4 Deleuze: History and Science.
wholes in which the parts retain a relative autonomy, so that they can be detached from one whole and plugged into another one entering into new interactions.
With these two concepts we can define social wholes, like interpersonal networks or institutional organizations, that cannot be reduced to the persons that compose them, and that, at the same time, do not reduce those persons to the whole, fusing them into a totality in which their individuality is lost. Take for example the tightly-knit communities that inhabit small towns or ethnic neighborhoods in large cities. In these communities an important emergent property is the degree to which their members are linked together. One way of examining this property is to study networks of relations, counting the number of direct and indirect links per person, and studying their connectivity. A crucial property of these networks is their density, an emergent property that may be roughly defined by the degree to which the friends of the friends of any given member (that is, his or her indirect links) know the indirect links of others. Or to put it still more simply, by the degree to which everyone knows everyone else. In a dense network word of mouth travels fast, particularly when the content of the gossip is the violation of a local norm: an unreciprocated favor, an unpaid bet, an unfulfilled promise. This implies that the community as a whole can act as a device for the storage of personal reputations and, via simple behavioral punishments like ridicule or ostracism, as an enforcement mechanism.
The property of density, and the capacity to store reputations and enforce norms, are non-reducible properties and capacities of the community as a whole, but neither involves thinking of it as a seamless totality in which the members’ personal identity is created by the community. A similar point applies to institutional organizations. Many organizations are characterized by the possession of an authority structure in which rights and obligations are distributed asymmetrically in a hierarchical way. But the exercise of authority must be backed by legitimacy if enforcement costs are to be kept within bounds. Legitimacy is an emergent property of the entire organization even if it depends for its existence on personal beliefs about its source: a legitimizing tradition, a set of written regulations, or
Deleuze: History and Science.??5
even for small organizations, the charisma of a leader. The degree to which legitimate authority is irreducible to persons can, of course, vary from case to case. In particular, the more organizational resources are linked to an office or role (as opposed to the incumbent of that role) the more irreducible legitimacy is. Nevertheless, and however centralized and despotic an organization may be, its members remain ultimately separable from it, their actual degree of autonomy depending on contingent factors about social mobility and the existence of opportunities outside the organization.
It is this type of social whole produced by relations of exteriority, wholes that do not totalize their parts, that the opening quote refers to. But that quote also mentions another important characteristic: that the wholes are peripheral or exist alongside their parts. What exactly does this mean? It is not a spatial reference, as if communities or organizations existed nearby or to one side of the persons that compose them. Deleuze and Guattari may simply intend to say that the properties of the whole are not transcendent (existing on a supplementary dimension above its parts) but immanent. But it may also be an ontological or metaphysical remark: communities or organizations, to stick to these examples, are as historically individuated as the persons that compose them. While it is true that the term “individual” has come to refer to persons (or organisms in the case of animals and plants) it is perfectly coherent to speak of individual communities, individual organizations, individual cities, or individual nation states. In this extended sense the term “individual” has no preferential affinity for a particular scale (persons or organisms) and refers to any entity that is singular and unique. Unlike philosophical approaches that make a strong ontological distinction between levels of existence (such as genus, species, organism) here all entities must be thought of as existing at the same ontological level differing only in scale. The human species, for example, is every bit a historical individual as the organisms that compose it. Like them, it has a date of birth (the event of speciation) and, at least potentially, a date of death (the event of extinction). In other words, the human species as a whole exists “alongside” the human organisms that compose it,
【德勒兹研究】德勒兹：历史与科学
