FUCK THEORY
Experiments in visceral philosophy.
Three Notions of Conceptual Value, Pt. III - What Is a Concept?
(previous posts here, here, and here)
With typically brilliant elegance, Deleuze brings together the Nietzschean and Spinozan notions of conceptual adequacy: like Nietzsche, his primary question is what a concept does; like Spinoza, his conception of adequacy is centered on the immanence of the concept’s formation. Like both philosophers, conceptual work is, for Deleuze, primarily a question of activity and production. But where Spinoza’s conception of adequacy is based within the thinking entity - that is, even though the Spinozan subject is immanent and contingent rather than transcendent, his concept of adequacy still presupposes an actively thinking subject - Deleuze locates the specificity of the concept not in the subject but in the plain of immanence from which the concept emerges. The Deleuzian concept traverses the subject but is not contained by it, nor is the subject the necessary or sufficient cause of the concept.
More simply:
For Deleuze, the task of philosophy is the creation, modification, and dissemination of concepts. Thinking which is not organized around concepts does not, for Deleuze, warrant the name philosophy; it is at best creative thinking, and at worst discussion or opinion (“This is the Western democratic, popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s” - WiP?, 144. Ouch.).
As the quote above suggests, concepts emerge from a specific constellation of questions and immanent conditions - the “problems without which they would have no meaning.” This specific constellation is the concept’s plane of immanence. This plane of immanence should not be understood as a single question: abstracted into an individual problem, “What is the meaning of life?” doesn’t get us very far as a starting point for conceptual inquiry. Rather, the plain of immanence is both a specific question and all of the epistemological formations which make that question possible - the pre-existing concepts which underpin it, the relations of force which cause the question to emerge, and the material organization which makes the question possible. (I call this total constellation the concept’s problematic).
The second qualifier of the concept is what Deleuze calls its “endoconsistency”: the concept is organized of distinct parts (which we can think of as other concepts). These other concept-blocks are part of the concept’s problematic, insofar as they are the precondition for its emergence; however, they are not reducible to the larger concept. In other words, the concept is an emergent property of its problematic: it is composed of the elements of its problematic, but it is greater than their sum. A perfect example of such a concept is Gramsci’s notion of the “historical bloc”: the historical bloc originates in the relationship between the material base and its superstructure, but their interrelation cannot be reduced to the formula base+superstructure=historical bloc.
In short, a Deleuzian notion of conceptual value (and please note that I’m ventriloquizing Deleuze here, since he doesn’t explicitly say this) would ask two primary questions: to what extent does a concept answer the problematic from which it emerges? and to what extent does a concept actively produce a new formation that is not reducible to any of its parts?
(Even though What Is Philosophy? is credited to both Deleuze and Guattari, I call these ideas “Deleuzian” because they summarize the philosophical approach Deleuze spent his entire career refining, and because, as Francois Dosse’s biography reveals, the book was almost entirely written by Deleuze alone).
Fuck, that was a long post. I’m going to go eat some peanut butter.
