Category: Deleuze

(More paraphrastic notes on Deleuze’s Foucault, following this post and that one. My general aim is to explore Deleuze’s relationship to the linguistic turn and to understand his account of literature.)

Power and Force

The chapter, ‘Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)’ begins with a simple question, ‘What is Power?’

Foucault’s great theses on power […] develop under three headings: power is not essentially repressive (since it ‘incites, it induces, it seduces’); it is practised before it is possessed (since it is possessed only in a determinable form, that of class, and a determined form, that of State); it passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the hands of the masters (since it passes through every related force). A profound Nietzscheanism.

What is power?, Deleuze asks, and gives us an answer that recalls his own study of Nietzsche: it is a relation between forces, ‘or rather every relation between forces is a “power relation”‘. Forces are always found in the plural, Deleuze says; each force exists in relation to other forces.

Here, we must distinguish force from violence, which acts on specific bodies whose form it destroys or changes. Force, by contrast, takes as its ‘object’ only other forces, and does not exist apart from the relation. As Foucault puts it, force is ‘an action upon an action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present or future’; it is ‘a set of actions upon other actions’. The relation between forces can be expressed, Deleuze suggests, by infinitives such as to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or difficult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable, and so on. In each case, it is a power relation that is at issue, as it names the effect of actions upon actions.

Power has to be understood, Deleuze says, in terms of affectivity. Force is to be understood in terms of its power to affect other forces to which it is related, and to be affected by other forces in turn. Inciting, provoking, producing etc. are examples of active affects; a reactive affect is given in terms of the capacity to be incited or provoked, or in being induced to produce.

This does not mean, Deleuze emphasises, that reactive affects are merely the passive side of active forces; they are to be understood in terms of an encounter between active and reactive forces that cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy. Nevertheless, Deleuze does allow that spontaneity and receptivity, those Kantian terms he drew upon in his previous chapter, can be used to understand how every field of forces distributes those forces in terms of their relations, respectively to affect and to be affected.

For Deleuze, ‘the power to be affected is like a matter of force, and the power to affect is like a function of force’. This function is not formalised, and can be described as ‘pure’ insofar as it remains independent of the particular forms into which it is organised, as well as the aims it might be made to serve or the means upon which it would draw.

The Diagram

How should we understand the distribution of the power to affect and to be affected within a particular context?

This is best understood by way of an example. Deleuze explains that the role of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish exists as a ‘pure function’, that of ‘imposing a particular taste or conduct on a multiplicity of particular individuals, provided simply that the multiplicity is small in number and the space limited and confined’.

Foucault is not focused upon the forms that determine the ends and means of this function, e.g. education, care, punishment, production. Nor is he interested in particular by the formed substances who are acted upon by the function, e.g, schoolchildren, the sick, prisoners, workers. Rather, Foucault points to the way in which the Panopticon ‘traverses all these forms and is applied to all these substances: it is this sense that a category of power exists, as a pure, disciplinary function’.

Foucault calls this the diagram – a function that must be understood in terms of its specific use, and as it is exercised over a specified substance. The diagram names the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected, understood as the function of force as it is found ‘beneath’, so to speak, a particular historical formation. It concerns the pure or abstract physics of action that operates in the context of a disciplinary function as it mixes with the ‘unformed pure matter’ that it acts upon. In each case, purity must be understood as a determination unique to a particular diagram (in this case, the panopticon) and the medium in which it operates.

Strategies

What is the relationship between knowledge and power as we find it in Foucault?, Deleuze asks. Power concerns forces, and knowledge forms – those formed matters (substances) and formalised functions that are given in terms of the more general formal functions of seeing and speaking. Power is given in a diagram as it mixes pure functions and pure matter; it is flexible. Knowledge is stratified and allows itself to be fixed in an archive; it is given a rigid segmentarity.

Power can be understood to pass though particular forces – as Deleuze presents it, through the particular points which on each occasion mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation to others. As such, the diagram can therefore be understood to transmit or distribute particular features; power relations move from one point to another rather than emanating from a single central point.

These relations are always local, even if they are not localisable at a given moment; they are always mobile, shifting from point to point, darting suddenly within a complex field of forces. Marking inflections and resistances, power relations twist and turn without reference to a unitary sovereignty.

It is as such, for Deleuze, they can be understood in terms of what he calls a strategy (an anonymous cluster of strategies). Since power differs from knowledge as outlined, strategies must be understood to differ from stratifications, evading the stabilised forms of the seeable and the sayable; they are not known.

Then the practice of power cannot be reduced to knowledge. Power relations involve a different type of relations, to which we can attend only by that microphysics that can explore them in their irreducibility. Here, the prefix ‘micro-‘ must be understood as it refers to this specific domain – to what Deleuze calls ‘mobile and nonlocalisable connections’, rather than to a microscopic view of seeable and sayable forms.

At the same time, power and knowledge are not simply external to one another; they are also co-implicated in relations of presuppostion and capture. The human sciences are inseparable, as Foucault has shown on many occasions, from the power relations that are their condition of possiblity; the form of knowledge they propose depend upon a diagram of forces. In the case of prison in a disciplinary society, what matters is the diagram of the Panopticon that reveals itself in the prison, as it does in other institutions.

Institutions and Integration

As such, we must not understand power monolithically. The features in question are not integrated in a single seamless whole; there is, Deleuze writes, ‘a multiplicity of local and partial integrations’, each of which must be understood in terms of its ‘affinity’ with relations or points. Institutions themselves – Deleuze gives as examples the State, but also the Family, Religion, Production, the Marketplace – and even, Art and Morality each depend upon integrating factors, upon ‘agents of stratification’.

Lacking essence or interiority, institutions are practices that locally ‘fix’ power, presupposing its relations. As such, the source of power does not lie in the State or in Morality; power merely lends itself to a local and specific determination, which may reproduce itself across the social field. As Deleuze succinctly puts it, ‘There is no State, only state control, and the same holds for all other cases’. Granted, there are State-forms in particular historical formations that have captured power relations, but this is only because something analogous to ‘continual state control’ was already produced in the realms of education, law, the economy, the family and in sexual domains.

The State, in this case, implies the power relations whose source it appears it is. The function of governmentality precedes the State, so long as government is understood as ‘the power to affect in all its aspects’ – the govenment of children, criminals, the sick, families, etc. Molecular or microphysical relations precede and give rise to particular molar agencies – the sovereign or the law; the father; money, gold or the dollar; God; sex and so on.

Thus in The History of Sexuality, Foucault explores Law and Sex, showing how desire is normalised by the hystericisation of sexuality. But beneath these molar agencies, there is that molecular sexuality, those thousand tiny sexes that precede and outstrip the integration of particular sexes. Forms of knowledge [savoir] are found at the level of molar agencies, e.g., the ‘scientia sexualis‘ Foucault details. 

How, though, does an institution effect integration?

Foucault claims an institution has two poles or elements – apparatuses and rules. Deleuze paraphrases this remark by reintroducing his distinction between seeing and saying – an institution, he says, organises visibilities and systems of statements. The integration effected by a system operates by actualising these elements in their divergency.

It operates as, in his words, ‘a system of formal differentiation’, distributing a form of receptivity that constitutes the visible element, and a form of spontaneity that constitutes the articulable element. The forms in question are derived from the two basic aspects of affect or force – the receptivity of the ability to be affected and the spontaneity of power’s ability to affect, but do not coincide with them.

The power relation, says Deleuze,

establishes contact between unformed matter (receptivity) and unformalised functions (spontaneity). On the other hand relations of knowledge, on each side, deal with formed substances and formalised functions by using the receptive kind of visible element, or the spontaneous kind of articulable element.

This recalls discussion in the previous chapter. Visibilities reveal formed substances, and the statement reveals formalised or finalised functions. This is why we can distinguish the affective categories of power – inciting, provoking, etc. from the formal categories of knowledge – educating, punishing, etc. Formal categories pass through saying and speaking in order to actualise affective categories; knowledge actualises particular constellations of power.

In this way, a particular institution can integrate power-relations as it constitutes particular forms of knowledge. Each time, the power relations are actualised, modified and redistributed as part of the production (or reproduction, considered from the perspective of the social field) of visibilities and statements that allow them to appear as political, legalistic, economic, educational etc.

The mechanism of integration and actualisation must be understood precisely. In The Archeaology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses the ‘regularity’ of a statement as a curve that joins, as on a graph, individual points, producing a rule. These points were produced by particular relations between forces; the curve that connects them is different to them, since the points were outside the statement. Granted, the statement may resemble them – the statement QWERTY resembles the keys on the typewriter, but there is a vital difference between them.

In the case of visibilities, however, there is a difference – they are external to the statement, but are not its outside. Visibilities do have a relationship to the outside which they actualise, but they do so in a different way to statements.

Statements, then integrate into language the intensity of affects, understood as the relations between forces. As curves, they organise particular features of power, potentiailities. Visibilities organise the same features, the same differential relations between forces, into light. Visiblities fix relations between forces, regularising particular points, and, to use a favourite term of Foucault, constitute scenes that, Deleuze explains, ‘are to the visible element what a statement is to the sayable or readable’.

In summary, the scene (or the description-scene, as Deleuze will call it) is the regulation that belongs to visibilities, and the statement that which belongs to sayabilities. The diagram of forces gives itself in description scenes and in statement-curves. The seeable and the sayable are thus thoroughly intertwined. Visibilities entail statements and vice versa, even as they cannot be confused with one another.

An Aside on Literature

This is what reveals itself, Deleuze says, in literature. ‘[S]trictly literary analysis, even as its very heart, is likely to rediscover the difference between scenes and curves: descriptions may be verbal, but they are none the less different from statements’. He then writes a brief, dazzling passage on Faulkner, describing the ‘fantastic curves’ statements trace in his work as they pass through ‘discursive objects’ and ‘mobile subject-positions’; at the same time, says Deleuze, these descriptions

conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature’s greatest ‘luminist’).

How should we understand these lines? It is best to look elsewhere in Deleuze’s oeuvre, to his collection Critique and Clinic, where Deleuze raises the question of the outside of language. Here, he refers to the limit of language, the outside, in a useful analogy from Bogue, being analogous to the outer surface of a sphere.

The outside is in contact with the non-linguistic, allowing them to communicate along the sphere’s surface. As such, the limit can be considered as a kind of membrane, as a ‘permeable limit common to inside and outside’. In Deleuze’s own writings on literature, notably his essays on T.E. Lawrence and Beckett, the limit of language is presented in terms of nonlinguistic visions and auditions, which are rendered possible through language. I will return to this account in much more detail on another occasion.

The Outside, the Emergence of Forces

What is the relationship between the seeable and the sayable, between scenes and curves?

The seeable and the sayable constitute two forms of knowledge that are then integrated and thereby enter into an indirect relation with one another. There remains a divide between them that is analogous to the Kantian schematism – spontaneity and receptivity remain forms irreducible to one another with respect to the forces they organise. Deleuze expresses this by borrowing from Blanchot the idea of a relation without relation – a ‘non-relation’ that exists between statements and visibilities, curves and scenes.

(Note that the ‘relation without relation’, which Blanchot develops in conversation with Levinas, is put to an entirely different use by Deleuze.)

The two forms, the visible and the articulable, as strata or historical formations, are different to the microphysics of power, which operates outside of strata. Note, however, this is not a transcendence or a beyond of the strata – Foucault is not pointing us to what lies outside strata, transcending their sphere so to speak, but to what forms the outside of strata, the permeable surface of the sphere, as it brings into contact inside and outside. As such, relations between forces remain historical; their aprioricity does not place them outside history, but as the outside of history. Each historical formation refers back to the temporary set of relations of the diagram of forces that is its outside.

Diagrams are in a perpetual state of turbulence even as must also be considered as a priori elements. Famously, Foucault will attempt to lay bare the diagrams that underlie particular historical forms of society through the account of the operation of particular categories of power as they are marshalled to produce particular effects – controlling the body, say, or the population in our time. Older, sovereign socieities saw those categories working in a different sense – as bestowing life or death, rather than administering it, and applying levying in actions and products.

But diagrams are less stable than this suggest; they can also be understood as communicating above, below or between particular strata. Deleuze gives the example of a Napoleonic diagram between sovereign society and disciplinary society. Doubling history – the official account of history – Deleuze says, ‘there is an emergence of forces’. Fixed and stabilised by a stratified formation, the diagram is nevertheless outside of the strata, and therefore grants the chance of mutation.

The Thought From Outside

The outside, as it is temporarily localised in a diagram, and then fixed in particular strata, directly concerns force. As Deleuze writes, ‘It is always from the outside that a force confers on others or receives from others the variable position to be found only a particular distance or in a particular relation’. Distinct from the history of forms is the emergence of forces as they operate as the outside.

Here, Deleuze takes us back to the theme of Foucault’s essay on Blanchot. Seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, for Foucault, says Deleuze, and can be said to constitute forms of thinking. However, they are to be distinguished from the thought of or from the outside, which occurs in the interstice between them, in the disjunction, the ‘non-relation’ between seeing and speaking.

Thought pertains to the set of relations of forces that is the diagram. It is an attempt to reach that outside which comprises a diagram, and hence the possibility of mutation. Thinking in this way is difficult, since it is not merely the exercise of an innate faculty. Rather, thinking must become thought as it attends to the intrusion of the outside into the interval between the visible and the articulable.

What does it mean to think the outside? Take Foucault’s famous claim that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides. Deleuze explains this claim as follows: the human being is a composition, a compound, that appears with the collapse of the classical past, and the future, already here, in which what has been called man enters into new compositions – perhaps with information technology, with silicon-based man-machine systems.

But the thought from outside has repercussions which are not simply theoretical. It also brings with it the possibility of resistance, to the extent that it is in contact with what is always broader in possibilities that the strata in which the human being is caught. It is in these terms that we might, Deleuze suggests, understand Foucault’s own political activism.

As such, the thought from outside bears witness to Spinoza’s famous claim that there is no telling what a human being might become. At the end of the chapter, Deleuze invokes Nietzsche’s superman, commenting that it is no more than the affirmation that ‘it is in man himself that we must liberate life, since man himself is a form of imprisonment for man’.

Deleuze is insistent in his book on Foucault: despite appearances, despite the fact his recently deceased friend placed emphasis on discourse, he was a thinker of what Deleuze calls visibilities (and we should not be too quick to look for a definition of this word).

The elegant, but complex argument of Deleuze’s Foucault shows us how saying and seeing, ‘discursive practices and forms of self’evidence’ are divided – how the articulable and the visible, the forms of expression and the forms of content never quite coincide even as they combine to make possible particular behaviours, mentalities or sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (strata).

And not only that. Deleuze wants, too, to show how Foucault thinks their interrelationship as it draws upon a ‘non-relating relation’ such as Blanchot formulated it (albeit in a different context), which will require a unique ontology made up of folds and foldings, of the single plane of the outside that lends itself to particular interiorisations, but periodically shakes them out like a tablecloth, only to allow new crumplings, mutations by way of which new behaviours, mentalities and sets of ideas are distributed.

One Speaks, One Sees

Foucault’s archeological endeavour, Deleuze notes, ‘is firstly to discover a true form of expression which cannot be confused with any linguistic study, be it signifier, word, phrase, proposition, or linguistic act’. His particular target is the Signifier, where (Deleuze quoting Foucault) “‘discourse is annihilated in its reality by entering into the order of the signifier'”.

True, Deleuze grants, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and elsewhere, discourse is granted primacy, but this does not mean the visibilities can be reduced to discourse; Foucault comes to believe, Deleuze notes, that his early books do not show this primacy forcefully enough – ‘this is his reaction against phenomenology’; nevertheless, the visible remains irreducible; it has its own laws and its own autonomy.

Against phenomenology: Foucault sets himself against the idea of the primacy of the subject to whom the world is visible. For the phenomenologist, what matters is not consciousness in itself, or the world in its natural reality, but the network of relations that reveals itself in the specific combination of the empirical and the transcendental that characterises intentionality.

What, then, of Foucault’s visibilities? Saying and seeing, discusivity and visibility are comprised of practicies, or positivities, says Deleuze. They make possible the behaviour, mentality and sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (Foucault calls them strata). The articulable and the visible become, with Foucault, the two elements of stratification. Together, considered as ‘a “mechanism” of statements and visibilities’, they constitute knowledge, understood as ‘a practical assemblage’ as it combines both discursive and non-discursive practices.

Does this mean Foucault seeks to relativise the findings of phenomenology to a particular historical formation? More than that. For what matters with Foucault’s archaeology is to open up words, phrases and propositions to retrieve statements on the one hand, and to open up qualities things and objects to retrieve visibilities on the other. Statements, they become readable in relation to the conditions that make them so, says Deleuze, and visibilities visible likewise.

This implies the displacement of the subject in Foucault’s archaeology. The subject, Deleuze comments, is merely a ‘variable, or rather a set of variables of the statement’ – it is a function that is derived from the statement, and its author is merely a position with respect to the statement. What comes first, for Foucault, is ‘an anonymous murmur in which positions are laid out for possible subjects’ – the ‘ONE SPEAKS’, understood as the drone of discourse that precedes and withdraws from speakers and listeners, writers and readers, always threatening to return.

What matters, as I have tried to clarify in a previous post, is the ‘it speaks’ rather than the ‘I speak’; the ‘there is language’ or ‘the being of language’, the great murmur that varies in each historical formation. In the classical age, the being of language is confined by the regime of representation. By the nineteenth century, it has begun to escape these limits, losing its unifying function and rediscovering it in a new sense in literature. Henceforward, a certain literature presents language as the outside – as its historical being fails to be encompassable by an inner consciousness.

Roughly the same can be said of the visible. Visibilities, says Deleuze,

are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible, such as qualities, things, objects, compounds of objects[….] Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer.

Then with the notion of visibilities, Foucault has created a function that doubles that of the statement. What matters is not simply to see, to attend to what has been delivered us by way of intuition, but to ‘break things open’. This is what happens with the figure of the panopticon of Discipline and Punish, where we find, Deleuze remarks,

a luminous form that bathes the peripheral cells in light but leaves the central tower opaque, distributing prisoners who are seen without being able to see, and the observer who sees everything without being seen.

Foucault does not begin, like the phenomenologist, from a particular perspective, but from the light that belongs to a particular ‘mechanism’ or ‘machine’ (Deleuze’s words), just as statements belong to particular systems.

Likewise with Foucault’s famous reading of Velasquez’s Las Meninas in terms of its distribution of ‘what is seen and who sees, the exchanges and reflections, right up to the place of the king who can only be inferred as existing outside the painting …’ What matters once again is that luminosity from which the position of participants in the scene can be observed (or deduced).

Thus we can speak of a ‘there is’ of light, of a being of light. As in the case of discourse, this light-being is historical insofar as it cannot be separated from the way it falls into a formation, the way it gives itself up to be experienced, but also absolute as it outstrips that formation, just as the ‘there is’ of language, language-being outstrips any particular system of discourse.  And just as the being of discourse cannot be thought from the intention to speak of an individual speaker or writer, visibilities are not defined by sight.

Is the phenomenologist to be understood as a function of discourse, the ‘I’ of the investigator giving way to the ‘one’ of ‘one writes’ or ‘one speaks’, and likewise the ‘I’ who sees and to whom being is revealed (the transcendental ego) to the ‘one’ of ‘one sees’?

Literature and Seeing

(When Deleuze reads literature, it is always to emphasise what is made visible by this ‘one sees’, even as it does so by way of the ‘one speaks’ of the written. This is what he writes very beautifully, in his book on Foucault, of Faulkner:

statements trace fantastic curves which pass through discursive objects and mobile subject-positions (the one name for several persons, two names for the one person) and which are inscribed within a language-being, in a reunion of all the language unique to Faulkner. But the descriptions conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature’s greatest ‘luminist’).

This reading sets Deleuze, I think, against Blanchot, an important figure in the Foucault book. For Blanchot, speaking, writing, have a primacy with respect to the visible. As Deleuze puts it, ‘… while Blanchot insisted on the primacy of speaking as a determining element, Foucault, contrary to what we might think at first glance, upholds the specificity of seeing, the irreducibility of the visible as a determinable element’. This seems to me exactly right, and can be understood in terms of the importance of Levinas to Blanchot, and to a whole tradition in Rosenszweig and others that places emphasis on speaking and listening (on call and response) rather than seeing.)

Extractive Conditions

What is the role of archaeology with respect to the sayable and the seeable?

The statement is not a simple given, but has to be broken open from words, phrases and propositions. Likewise with the ‘content’ that is expressed – Deleuze emphasises for Foucault it is not to be understood as a signified, nor indeed as a referent. Visibilities are not simply visible or perceptible; they are not given in the forms of objects, since it is objects they reveal. Rather, they are forms of luminosity in relation to which things, objects exist ‘only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer’.

Archaeology opens up words, phrases and propositions and open up qualities, things and objects, says Deleuze; ‘It must extract from words and language the statements corresponding to each stratum and its thresholds, but equally extract from things ans sight the visibilities and “self-evidences” unique to each stratum’. The archaeologist must discover the extractive conditions that allow the uncovery of what is said.

This uncovery reveals, certainly, what was previous hidden. But it does so all at once: the archaeologist opens everything that is seen and said in a particular stratum; everything, that is, that is known. This is ‘Foucault’s greatest historical principle’, says Deleuze: there is nothing hidden behind the curtain; but this makes it all the more important to describe the curtain. He gives the example of politics:

politics hides nothing, in diplomacy, legislation, control or government, even though each cluster of statements assumes a certain method for intertwining words, phrases and propositions. We need only know how to read, however difficult that may prove to be. The secret exists only in order to be betrayed, or to betray itself. Each age articulates perfectly the most cynical elements of its politics, or the rawest element of its sexuality, to the point where transgression has little merit. Each age says everything it can according to the conditions laid down for its statements.

Nothing is hidden: and the same is the case for visibilities; ‘Each strata sees and reveals everything it can according to the conditions for visibility’, Deleuze writes, just as everything it says is so in terms of the conditions for statements.

Neo-Kantianism?

It is also crucial that we understand these conditions as they escape the interiority of consciousness: if they are to be understood, as Deleuze recommends, as a priori conditions, this must not be understood as a neo-Kantianism. Conditions, here, are to be thought in terms of real experience – they belong on the side of the ‘object’ rather than the universal subject; the a priori is itself historical. Nevertheless, Deleuze notes,

… if there is any neo-Kantianism, it is because visibilities together with their conditions form a Receptivity, and statements together with their conditions form a Spontaneity. The spontaneity of language and the receptivity of light.

How should we understand this? On the one hand, for Kant, space and time exist as forms of intuition – as products of the subject. The concrete matter of the intution is given in terms of its prior form, which is not found in the things themselves, but in the mind of the subject. Intution is receptive.

On the other hand, we have the abstract categories of the understanding, which, although likewise belonging to the mind, are of a different kind than intuited matter or the forms of intuition (space and time). Understanding, on Kant’s account, is spontaneous.

Deleuze comments,

In Foucault, the spontaneity of understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the ‘there is’ of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time).

Of course the parallel can only go so far; but it is useful in terms of presenting the next step Deleuze wants to take.

The Primacy of Discourse

Deleuze, as we have seen, wants to highlight the importance of the visible for Foucault, but he also has to account for what is, for Foucault, the primacy of discourse. The visible and the articulable differ in the manner of the form of content and the form of expression even as they continually overlap to form particular strata or forms of knowledge. But between the two, Deleuze emphasise, ‘there is no isomorphism or conformity, in spite of a mutual presupposition and the primacy of the statement’.

But how, then, is the primacy of the statement to be thought? This question is bound up with others in a tangled network:

In Foucault, the spontaneity of the understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the ‘there is’ of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time). Henceforth it is easy to understand why the statement has a primacy over the visible: The Archaeology of Knowledge can claim a determining role for statements as discursive formations. But visibilities are no less irreducible, because they refer to a form of the determinable, which refuses to be reduced to the form of determination. This marked the point of Kant’s decisive break with Descartes: the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time). The problem is that of the coadaption of the two forms or two sorts of conditions, which differ in nature.

Why does Deleuze find it necessary to reflect on Kant’s break with Descartes? Deleuze’s text becomes particularly dense at this point; I turned to his lecture course on Kant, translated online, to the passages where he comments on the transition from Descartes.

In the Mediations, Descartes moves from ‘I think, I am’ to ‘I am a thing which thinks’. ‘The ‘I think’ determines the ‘I am’ as a thing that thinks’, comments Deleuze. But Kant, for Deleuze, while agreeing that in order to think it is necessary to be, shows that determination also implies something indeterminate which is to be determined by the determination. The determination of the ‘I am’ as a thinking thing points beyond itself …

Kant asks under what form the indeterminate, that is, in this case, the ‘I think’, is determinable by the determination. Under what form is the ‘I am’ determinate by the determination ‘I think’? For Kant, explains Deleuze in the lectures, it is the form of time. This produces what for Deleuze is the paradox of inner sense:

the active determination ‘I think’ determines my existence […] but it can only determine my existence under the form of the determinable, which is to say under the form of a passive being in space and in time. So ‘I’ is indeed an act, but an act that I can only represent to myself insofar as I am a passive being. […] it’s the same subject which has taken on two forms, the form of time and the form of thought, and the form of thought can only determine the existence of the subject as the existence of a passive being.

The determination of my existence occurs via the ‘I think’, but this depends in turn upon the determinable. I should note there is no mention of time in the Foucault book outside the complex space-time that comprises what Deleuze calls light (the visible). It is as space-time that light refuses to be reduced to the form of determination that is the statement.

I can only present this space-time to myself in terms of receptivity, a prior passivity, but as Deleuze emphasises, this is too simple: space-time is not a simple grid, set up a priori, but can be rearticulated (is this the word?) anew according to various kinds of action. Nevertheless, a difference remainds between the seeable and the sayable, which means the paradox Kant confronts as Deleuze presents it – a subject that has taken on two forms – remains, roughly speaking, in the work of Foucault.

But of course these two forms do not concern a subject, since it is, for Foucault, for Deleuze, the conditions under which the subject is produced that is at issue, the subject being only a function of the seeable and the sayable.  The apparent dualism that Kant confronts arises from the difficulty of joining together concepts, as they pertain to understanding, and intuitions. It is no surprise that Deleuze refers to the role of the schematism for Kant when discussing Foucault’s claim as to the ‘enigma’ of the relationship between the seeable and the sayable.

Deleuze, to run ahead of myself considerably, will propose, drawing on Foucault an ontology of folds, of the outside to overcome this problem. But for the moment (I am commenting, rather casually, and without understanding most of what I read, on chapter 3), Deleuze brings us to the brink of the Foucault’s version of the schematism (albeit as it is articulated in a very different context). In doing so, he still has the question of the primacy of discourse in Foucault’s work before him. His reflection on Kant (and upon Kant’s relationship to Descartes) is not intended as a work of comparative philosophy, but as an attempt to foreground the problem Foucault faces

Let us return to what Deleuze says on the relationship between the sayable and the seeable: ‘the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time)’. Space-time, as we have seen, is rethought by Deleuze (by his Foucault) as light, as the visible. The visible, the seeable, is what is as yet undetermined. The primacy of statements as discursive formations must be understood in terms of the activity of determining; visibilities, however, are not the determined; they do not allow themselves to be reduced to discourse. Light is leftover; the visible remains on its own terms.

The Duel

One more quotation to underline Deleuze’s point.

The statement has primacy by virtue of the spontaneity of its conditions (language) which give it a determining form, while the visible element, by virtue of the receptivity of its conditions (light), merely has the form of the determinable. Therefore, we can assume that determination always comes from the statement, although the two forms differ in nature.

There remains, then, an irresolvable tension between the seeable and the sayable – a ‘duel’, Deleuze says, between two forms of exteriority. The next question to consider is how they can be thought together – for Deleuze, this is what Foucault addresses with his notion of power.

(Note for Sinthome: the chapter of Foucault on which I am commenting begins with an illuminating reference to Hjelmslev:

Stata are historical formations, positivities or empiricities. As ‘sedimentary beds’ they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, from bands of visibility and fields of readibility, from contents and expressions. We borrow these last terms from Hjelmslev, and apply them to Foucault in a completely different way, since content is not to be confused here with a signified, not expression with a signifier.)