“We Will Speak of the Brain . . .”

Let us return finally to 1991. The new image of thought proposed in Deleuze and Guattari’s last work together is at once extremely beautiful and incredibly violent, depicting a process of thinking marked by explosions and incredible speeds, but also by moments of unsupportable slow motion, both of which outstrip conscious perception. Here, we are confronted with an image of the brain determined as an a-centered and probabilistic system that is always subject to a confrontation with chaos, unable to support the unconscious leaps of memory and association belonging to what they define as a “Non-Objectified Brain.” In fact, there are multiple leaps and just as many levels; each level or chain of associations representing what they define, following the thought of Michel Serres, as “successive filters placed over chaos.”1

In the Conclusion I will focus on just one level of association—the leap between philosophy and cognitive psychology, Gestalt theory in particular, as one language of possibility space they employ to explore the plan of immanence that is defined by the modern brain (cerveau). In fact, many of the terms they propose, such as productive thinking (i.e., creation) vs. reproductive thinking (i.e., opinion), also have their corollaries in Gestalt theory. Here, I underline three major principles of productive thinking:

1. A relative increase of speed in mental processes
2. The relative quantity of short-circuiting that occurs in normal reasoning
3. Finally, an unconscious leap in thought

I will take these up in order, because the third principle, the unconscious leap in thinking, is perhaps the most difficult to achieve and the first two themes might be understood as its conditions.

But first we need to have a better idea what Deleuze and Guattari mean by thinking as a creative process. Just as a painter does not paint on a blank canvas, or a writer on a blank page, the philosopher does not think from the beginning. Thought, the act of thinking, is predetermined from the outside and from within by a model of recognition (what Deleuze identifies with the functions of doxa, or opinion) that already gives what can be thought, what can be identified as thinking, and what remains to be thought (or, according to a term often employed by Heidegger, “what gives food for thought” [Denkanstoß]).2 Yet, to paraphrase a statement by Michaux, what often suffices as a meal for “current ideas” does not suffice for “vital ideas,” and the latter must be created rather than merely recognized.3 Our problem, therefore, is to determine a process that would necessarily result in the creation of vital ideas—thus, to produce an image of a cerebral interval during which the genesis of thinking occurs.

Taking up the first principle, Deleuze and Guattari offer an initial description of this process in the following manner: to arrive at a concept, one must go beyond mere abstractions and arrive as quickly as possible (le plus vite possible) at “mental objects determinable as real beings”; one must make use of ideas and abstractions to get to the plane “where we leap from real being to real being.”4 Later on, I will return to the phrase “as quickly as possible” (le plus vite possible), which designates the act of leaping from ideas and abstractions to arrive at “mental objects determined as real beings.” This represents only the first leap in Deleuze and Guattari’s description; it does not stop there, because once the plane of real being is attained, then one must leap from real being and advance through the construction of concepts. To think quickly, to think on one’s feet, entails a movement of leaping away from ideas and abstractions. Ideas and abstractions are merely the springboard for the philosophical diver to achieve the plane occupied by concepts (“mental objects determinable as real beings”), as if crashing through its surface and touching its depths. According to this analogy, any philosopher (or “theorist,” for that matter) who spends too much time on the preexisting plane of ideas and abstractions is like the diver who never enters the pool.

As an example of this, let us take the “current idea” of the virtual. This idea still remains an abstraction. Is this the fault of the concept, of Deleuze who first introduces it in Bergsonism (1966) and then returns to take it up many times throughout his works? Or rather is it the responsibility of the kind of thinking that never takes a leap and advances from the idea itself to the virtual as a real being? Many recent commentaries dwell on the idea of the virtual, trying to define it as if it belonged to an ontology (e.g., the virtual is this, the virtual is not that), but Deleuze himself already left these questions behind long ago by taking a veritable leap with the following intuition: The virtual is the brain itself (or rather, it is the “turning point” where the brain becomes a subject). But at this point the question immediately becomes, What is a brain? Here the task is to create an image of the brain that is capable of supporting the leap of association in the construction of the concept of the virtual.

The organic brain, the one we have as an image, is not yet capable of such a leap, and it is only for this reason that the brain-image remains abstract or is immediately lost in a chaos of associations. Chaos is not simply a disorganized whole, but rather the infinite speed by which ideas disappear, half formed, “already eroded by forgetfulness and precipitated into others we no longer master.”5 Thus, chaos is the constant pressure of formlessness, and here we might understand the deep image of Gestalt as the expression of the organic brain that is trying to maintain all of its integral connections in the face of a constant pressure to dissipate its intensities and excitations into an immobile block of purely chemical energy. It is into the interval opened by the specific tension that the function of “opinion” (intelligent instinct, or instinctual intelligence) emerges as a representative of the brain in its struggle with chaos, since “we require just a little order to protect us from chaos.”6

But who is the “we” here? It is not the “subject” (neither man, the cogito, a transcendental Subject, nor an original and pre-ontological intentionality) that issues this demand for a little order as protection against chaos. In other words, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “there would not be a little order in ideas if there was not also a little order in things or states of affairs, like an objective anti-chaos.”7 In fact, it is the brain itself that becomes the true locus of this order, or rather, the idea of order itself appears as a certain “cerebral crystallization” of a Non-Objectified Brain, which might very well have assumed the image of Reason, as in the case of Kant’s transcendental synthesis, or of God as the principle of Harmonia Prestabilitia, as in the system of Leibniz, or the mystery of parallelism that belongs to Nature itself according to Spinoza. In each case, the brain becomes the subject, or rather “superject,” as Deleuze says following the thought of Whitehead.

The concept becomes object as created, as event or creation itself . . . and philosophy becomes the plane of immanence that supports the concepts that the brain lays out.8

It is here perhaps that we find Deleuze and Guattari’s greatest insight, which is to link the Gestalt principle of psychophysical isomorphism to Spinoza’s earlier doctrine of parallelism in order to update, and at the same time introduce, the brain as the true representative of Natura naturans. The classic example of a plane of immanence that could be offered by Gestalt theory is that of a soap bubble, whose spherical shape is not defined by a rigid template, a Structure, or a mathematical formula; rather, its plane emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. Thus, a correlation exists between actual things and cerebral activity, but this correlation (or parallelism) must now be understood as the relationship between two random variables that exist within a Non-Objectified Brain. In turn, this corresponds to a further parallelism in social organization that is the subject of one of Deleuze’s earliest texts, Instincts and Institutions (1953), and is also the basis of Bergsonism (1966), specifically concerning the concept of élan vital and what Deleuze calls at that point “the virtual instinct.”9

According to this early text, the “we” of opinion constitutes the “pressure of society” that determines order in the form of closure and thus reduces that quantity of variability that can take place on the plane (plan) of nature. Deleuze writes in this earlier text, “The societies that the human forms are no less closed than animal species; they form part of a plane (plan) of nature; and man goes round in circles in his society just as much as species do in theirs or ants in their domain.”10 In fact, the only difference between these two societies in reaction to their specific environment (Umwelt) is not found in the order of Nature, but is owed to the fact that the human order of society is founded upon a kind of “virtual instinct,” which is composed partly of intelligence and partly of purely instinctual life, such that instinct produces an ersatz of intelligence, and intelligence becomes an equivalent of instinct.11 We must regard this statement in some ways as pure speculation on Deleuze’s part, because we have no way of knowing, for example, if ants also have something comparable to a metaphysical explanation for their domain. In any case, in the closed society of the human species, the virtual instinct would descend into this interval (écart) between the mere requirement for order (forming the basis for institutions and disciplinary orders that shape and enforce the forms of opinion and habit) and the discernment of an agreement between instinct and intelligence: a common sense, a special faculty whose function is to create reasons to believe in “the necessity of Order” and thus to cause it to be obeyed. According to Deleuze, however, because the brain is no more founded on a rationale system than the world is reasonable, the absolute requirement for order is itself partly instinctual; “it is not grounded in reason, but in a requirement of nature, in a kind of ‘virtual instinct,’ that is, on the counterpart that nature produces in the reasonable being in order to compensate for the partiality of his intelligence.”12

In many commentaries, including the later writings of Deleuze and Guattari themselves, this “virtual instinct” is often provided with an emancipatory value (whether this is expressed in moral and political terms as “freedom,” or aesthetically in terms of “creative openness”). This is an apparent contradiction in the theory of the virtual, because initially it serves an essentially conservative (or reactive) function of supra-intelligent instinct that reinforces the force of opinion (doxa). For example, in Bergsonism, the power of the virtual instinct is first identified as a “storytelling function”: “it is the creator of gods, inventor of religions,” and of all fictitious representations “which will stand up to the representation of the real and which will succeed, by the intermediary of intelligence itself, in thwarting intelligence itself.”13 How can we account for or explain this apparent contradiction? For example, it cannot be resolved by creating a moral division in instinct, as if there were two creative and semi-autonomous forces of nature, one of which serves a positive or liberating function, the other of which only serves to enslave and repress, or to mystify. (This is the moral image of the virtual, for example, that is offered by most traditional conceptions of ideology.) Therefore, it is a form of contradiction that can be resolved, not by means of dualism, but as Deleuze writes, by recognizing “a circular play” between instinct and intelligence, and making use of the play of circles “in order to break the circle, just as memory uses the circular play of excitation and reaction to embody recollections in images.”14

The concept of the virtual that Deleuze gives us in 1966 is primarily indebted to his reading of Bergson, which remains somewhat unsatisfactory because it fails to resolve the contradiction stated above without resorting to some degree of mystification. How can the same instinctual intelligence be, at once, the condition of closure by which society causes its specific order to be obeyed (by the invention of new storytelling functions, or ideology, tout court) and, at the same time, the condition of openness by which the human species accedes “to another cerebral interval” between instinct and intelligence in man, thereby “going beyond his plane (plan) and his condition”?15 I would even risk saying that Deleuze’s earliest conception of the virtual is uncannily Heideggerian, particularly in the reference to “man’s circular play in order to break the circle of closed society.” For example, it is precisely this solution, or at least a variation thereof, that Deleuze and Guattari will later take up in Anti-Oedipus in their theory of unconscious desire that makes use of the circular play of instinct and intelligence that exists in schizophrenia in order to break through the closed society produced by an essentially Oedipalized and neurotic form of individuation.

Furthermore, I would argue that Deleuze’s earlier conception of this virtual instinct runs the risk of mythologizing the concept of creation itself by turning it into the expression of cosmic memory communicated across time and space by “great souls”: “This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions, only takes place in privileged souls. It leaps from one soul to another, only every now and then, crossing closed deserts.”16 In other words, the solution of leaping from a closed society, bounded by the circular play of instinct and intelligence, to an open society, “a society of creators,” appears a bit too aristocratic and Nietzschean at this stage; like Bergson before him, Deleuze must have recourse to a notion of a cosmic and transpersonal memory that leaps from one closed society to the next, “but undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls.”17 Here Deleuze evokes the original idea of reminiscence, partly Platonic and partly derived from Bergson’s notion of the élan vitale, as “mystical intuition,” in order to resolve the problem of scarcity, or rather, the temporal intervals between vital ideas that can serve to “liberate man from the plane (plan) that is proper to him, in order to make him a creator and adequate to the whole movement of creation.”18 But is this not also the return of one of the most autochthonous myths of philosophy itself? An original myth that is equally embodied in a quasi-mystical form of community: a society of individuals liberated from the conditions of time and place, from history and territory (language); a form of communication that transcends these local conditions and passes between one genius and another “through the intermediary of disciples or spectators or hearers”—in short, a transmigration of souls, a metempsychosis of transhistorical faculties, an “open society” of philosophers?19

These judgments might appear a bit harsh to some readers, but they only serve to correct a common misperception that Deleuze’s solution to the problem was there from the beginning and all we need is a little hermeneutic investigation to make it more explicit and less abstract. As Deleuze says also in Bergsonism, in this case concerning the evolution of the brain, each problem has more than one solution-state; accordingly, all we can say each time is that it is the best solution possible “given the way the problems were stated.”20 Therefore, we must conceive of the state of problems and solutions in terms of “creative evolution” (Bergson) and not from the Hegelian, quasi-eternal conception of Absolute Knowledge. According to this former viewpoint, if the concept of the virtual was there from the beginning, it was only in the form of an intuition and concerned a problematic that is stated clearly throughout the final chapter of Bergsonism: How is it possible to leap from a closed society to an open society by achieving another intercerebral interval between “instinct” and “intelligence”?

The second answer Deleuze provides to this question in 1966 is “creative emotion,” or the composite of emotion and representation that appears in the interval “between the pressure of society and the resistance of intelligence,” producing the conditions of a variability that allows emotion to become embodied in a “pure element” that is personal, though not individual—this is the specific emotion of thinking itself. “It is like the God in us.”21 Here the genesis of creation is likened more to mystical intuition than to a philosophical concept, and it still remains for Deleuze to construct a concept of what still remains “virtual” and “indeterminate,” as if to extend the lines of probability to a point where it transmutes into certainty, becomes actualized as a purely philosophical concept of creation, as opposed to a mystical or spiritualist notion of absolute knowledge.

Now, let us return to the conclusion of What is Philosophy?, written with Guattari twenty years later, to see if a concept of creation (and the virtual) is achieved there. Of course, we immediately discover the concept of “creation” emphasized again, although here it is identified with the activity of the philosopher (“the creator of concepts”) in contrast to the disciplines of science and art—these are no less creative in their own domains, but it is in philosophy that the art of creating concepts achieves its specialized faculty. This thesis has become well known. As Deleuze clarifies in a seminar on the concept of creation:

Philosophy is a discipline that is just as creative and inventive as any other discipline. It is only that philosophy is a discipline that involves creating or inventing concepts, and concepts do not exist in a kind of heaven where they would expect a philosopher to understand them. Of course, it does not work that way. You do not say one day: “Hey, I’ll make such and such a concept,” or “I’ll invent that concept.” No more does a painter say, “Hey, I’ll make a picture like that!” There must be a necessity . . . otherwise, nothing happens.22

With regard to the concept of the virtual, moreover, what is most striking is Deleuze and Guattari’s optimistic assertion that philosophy, science, and art cannot be reduced to being merely the representatives of the “storytelling function” of society. They “are not like religions that invoke the dynasties of the gods, or the epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella, like the figures of an Ur-doxa from which opinion stems.”23 In other words, they cannot be reduced to becoming purely ideological functions as in most “anti-Enlightenment,” Marxist, and postmodernist interpretations of philosophy, science, and art. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari argue that while “we [i.e., the subjects of opinion, of habit, members of a closed society] want a little order to protect us from chaos, they [i.e., the planes composed by philosophy, science, art] want more,” that is, a little bit of chaos released back into our idea of Order.24 What was earlier defined in Bergsonism as “the little interval . . . that defines a variability appropriate to human societies,” in this later argument becomes embodied within these three disciplines (or rather, these faculties). According to the well-known and frequently quoted refrain, in their respective encounters with Chaos philosophy brings back variations, science introduces variables, art returns with varieties.

In response to the above statement, “they want more,” this claim should immediately strike us as being somewhat contradictory to the dominant tenants of critical theory over the last fifty years or so, particularly with regard to our normal opinions concerning science, following the influence of the Frankfurt School. In What Is Philosophy? this assertion even assumes a characteristic of certainty extending along a line of probability that determines the specific form of “variability” belonging to science, philosophy, and the arts. What form does this variability take? According to the descriptions offered in the passages following this claim, variability occurs when chaos is reintroduced into an interval between thinking and intelligence. Initially it takes the form of “a leap in thought,” which might actually appear as a form of error at first. In art (more specifically, in painting), for example, it might assume the event of a catastrophe that leaves its trace on the canvas in a splotch or spill that destroys the work—representing a failure and loss of form, at first, but then suddenly transforming into the force of a creative leap that causes the painter to break with conventions of form and technique. In science, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, it might occur when the mathematician, in the example offered, “skips over calculations” by introducing the hastened desire to arrive at the truth, which disturbs the tranquility of calculation until finally a “eureka moment” appears. Finally, in philosophy, the event of error occurs when the philosopher attempts to bring all of his concepts into a final accord (within a system supposedly ruled by consensus and friendship), only to find this “image of thought” suddenly traversed by a spirit of hatred that threatens to return everything to “coexisting chaos.” By this, I understand Deleuze and Guattari to be referring to those moments when philosophy is dispersed by polemic and disagreement at the very point where it had succeeded in expressing a state of “absolute knowledge,” as in the case of the Hegelian image of thought, which quickly dispersed into the last century of “anti-Hegelian” philosophies.25

However, it is essential to point out that this expression of variability does not refer to an active intellegence, but rather to what Deleuze also calls a “pure contemplation without knowledge,” following the philosophy of Leibniz. In other words, the event of “creation” could be said to be virtual when something happens that, in different ways, resembles haste and miscalculation, crisis and shock, forgetfulness or a lapse of memory, exhaustion and weariness, catastrophe and failure. (As an aside, this understanding of the event of creation might immediately lead us to reconsider the notion of “vitalism” that is so often ascribed to Deleuze’s philosophy.) What is an event of creation when this does not seem to occur by means of an active intelligence or will, but appears to be detached from both conscious action and movement (as also in the case of the “crystalline-image” in Cinema 2, which I will return to below)? If the concept of creation that Deleuze and Guattari invoke occurs without the intervention of an active intellect or will, “a pure contemplation without knowledge,” then the event can in some ways be likened to the particular duration that follows a “brutal accident,” or even to the duration when nothing happens.

Events always involve periods when nothing happens . . . they’re part of the event itself: you can’t, for example, extract the instant of some terribly brutal accident from the vast empty time in which you see it coming, staring at what hasn’t yet happened, waiting for ages for it to happen.26

In fact, the image of the brain that Deleuze and Guattari give to philosophy is not young and vital, but can be compared to a tired and aging brain that is unable to maintain its connections and integrations of memory. Instead of falling back on opinion, however, the brain of contemporary philosophy is divided by the relative speeds at which it moves from one point to the next, or from one idea to the next, or from one “current idea” to the next. For example, there is the speed of discourse and moving quickly from one topic to the next one with a mental agility and quickness that is often ascribed to younger philosophers; or there are slow-motion and stagnant discussions that take place in the emptiness of an aging philosopher’s head, as if he were sitting alone like one of Beckett’s characters going back over all of his earlier opinions only to find that they are unfounded once again. If the brain of philosophy is divided between these relative speeds, as if divided against itself both externally and internally, then it is not capable of making a vital leap that would arrive in a moment of certainty and decision.

How would we then introduce vitality back into the philosophical brain, or “image of thought”? Returning now to the first Gestalt principle listed above, “an increased speed in mental processes,” how would the imperative of “more speed” become part of the solution? As stated above, one of philosophy’s relative speeds is that of discourse, which moves from one associated idea to the next, constituting a signifying chain of associations, but is unable to reconstitute these associations into the form of a concept. The concept gets lost in the dizzying array of significations; it remains abstract, referring to the specific quality of emotion that is attached to the appearance of the idea. An abstract notion evokes the “I FEEL” of the given idea or concept, like in the case of an image in cinema; it represents an image of thought that has failed to “section and distribute the reality of the given domains,” causing the zones of indetermination to converge in the form of intuition. This is because its method was insufficient and “the virtual” (idea) fails to become actualized in relation to perception and cognition. I think what I am describing here happens frequently in the discourse of what is commonly called “theory” today, which exhibits many of the features of the Gestalt diagram of a possibility space called a “Klondike Wilderness,” or a “clueless plateau” where many parts of conceptual space, being similar, give no clues as to the direction in which answers may lie. For example, this might describe the kind of discussions that have taken place most recently around the ideas of “bio-power,” “the event,” “immanence,” and as I noted in the beginning, the idea of “the virtual” itself. This is not intended as a criticism, necessarily, and I am offering these only as examples of ideas associated with an enormous amount of discussion that has attempted to give them reality but as of yet has yielded little more than a number of conflicting definitions that resemble different opinions, or in the language of possibility space, “a large region of neighboring possible states where the measure of promise does not vary much, or varies erratically from state to state around the average for the whole plateau, so there is no trend.”27

As Deleuze and Guattari write, “ideas can only be associated as images and can only be ordered as abstractions”; once again, “the point is to go beyond both of these and arrive as quickly as possible at mental objects determinable as real beings.”28 In this description, the specific speed referred to, “as quickly as possible,” is the leap from ideas to “mental objects determinable as real beings.” One might immediately object that these “mental objects” are no less abstract than the aforementioned ideas. What are, after all, “mental objects determinable as real beings”? Are we—that is, am I—not just speaking in circles? Actually—no. Very simply, “mental objects determinable as real beings” are what Deleuze and Guattari call “concepts,” which must be distinguished from ideas. Ideas may very well be mental objects, but they are not necessarily determinable as real beings. “A concept,” however, is defined as “a set of inseparable variations that is produced or constructed on a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the chaotic variability and gives it consistency (reality).”29 In other words, concepts are ideas rendered consistent (real), and “vital”; all concepts are vital, and this is the quality that distinguishes them from “current ideas.” Consequently, Deleuze and Guattari will often speak of the “mental objects” of philosophy, science, and art as “vital ideas” that emerge only “in the deepest synaptic fissures, hiatuses, intervals, and meantimes of a nonobjectified brain.”30

Turning now to the second Gestalt principle, “the amount of short-circuiting that occurs in processes of normal reasoning,” the problem of scarcity can also be explained by the organization of instinctual thought into institutions that are governed by habit and opinion. (This is Foucault’s great thesis of disciplinary orders.) Institutions are the habitual and disciplinary orders that shape closed societies, which is why institutions are composed partly from instinct and partly from intelligence. Here I am not speaking simply of the grand institutions, but also of the little institutions erected in our heads that already make our brains function as “subjects.” In other words, if variability occurs only through the introduction of a little chaos into the order of opinions and already associated ideas, which is said to happen quite rarely due to the instinctual dominance of opinion and habit, then the chances for vital ideas are necessarily scarce. For example, this is why Deleuze and Guattari argue that in the institutions of philosophy and politics, the Western democratic ideal of the conversation between friends has never created any new concepts (“vital ideas”); it is the same old conversation, only the number of conversational partners has increased exponentially, which is not to say that the concept of friendship has radically changed either in the concept or in its diversity of forms. This is highlighted at the very beginning of What Is Philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari argue that the democratic idea of friendship has remained an abstraction, despite centuries of philosophical discussion, and today might no longer even designate “a transcendental-lived category” (une catégorie vivante, un vécu transcendental).31 This is to say, if it was once created as a concept, as a living category of the societies that took it up and infused it with new variables, today the concept of democracy has been demoted to the level of an idea; moreover, it is an idea that has become jaundiced, having lost much of its former vitality, and thus fails any longer to “make new friends,” much less to create new forms of society. “To create concepts is, at the very least, to make something.”32 An idea without a concept, on the other hand, is like a conversation that fails to actualize the very thing it takes up as its very subject matter.

Today, another form of conversing without concepts is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to by the term “communication.” But what is this? Have we not been told, at least since we were children, that communication is a good thing, particularly in democratic societies? For example, that it is necessary to learn to communicate effectively (and for this we were given little notebooks and introduced to techniques of forming our thoughts and our subjective identities in written exercises, and then later on, in communicating all our desires and fantasies in the various forms of writing)? We are never informed of those occasions when lying and keeping silent may be more effective than communicating openly; we gain this practical knowledge only through the trials of experience. This is because the categorical obligation to communicate is not itself founded on a rational principle, even in democratic societies where this principle assumes the form of an essential gregariousness, or the demand to speak out in the public sector. In this sense, the demand to communicate can be compared to what Deleuze also says in Bergsonism concerning morality, or the “obligation to have obligations,” which is that “it has no rational ground.”33 Similarly, we might say the same thing concerning the democratic imperative of communication: the only thing that is grounded in communication is the fact of having to communicate, “the whole of communication,” and often without regard to having anything to say. As a result of this obligation, each particular form of communication may be conventional and can border on a kind of “speech for speaking’s sake”—as in the case of fiction, or today, in most digital communications like e-mails and Twitter.

Aside from the fact that most communication is grounded upon an irrational principle, one that is determined by convention and by the institutions of opinion and habit (particularly the habits of saying “I” in the statements “I think,” “I feel,” and “I believe,” which have no necessary or determinable relationship to the real subjects of thinking, emotion, and belief), what else can Deleuze and Guattari possibly have against communication? If communication is the quasi-organic socialization of the idea, is there another sociality of the idea that they privilege? As Deleuze remarks in a 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, today the problem is that communication is already permeated by money. Thus, anything communicated is already invested with value, which is to say that capitalism has invested the idea of communication to the point of completely saturating it, in order to turn it about so that it appears that every social form of communication is already an expression of value that is consistent with capitalist society. Consequently, if certain forms of communication are in the process becoming less effective, or have already become outmoded forms (such as the novel), it is because they have been less efficient in reproducing social values and new collective subjectivities than newer technological media. Negri remarks in the same interview:

In the Marxist utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes precisely the form of a transversal organization of free individuals built on a technology that makes that possible. . . . Maybe in a communication society it’s less utopian than it used to be.34

What happens to the original idea of philosophy when, according to a major argument put forward in the conclusion of What Is Philosophy?, the emergent capitalist disciplines of communication (computer science, marketing, design, advertising) lay claim to the actuality of the concept as their specific domain, or area of concern?

From philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, marketing has preserved a certain relationship between the concept and the event; the event has become the exhibition or display of the concept’s actuality, which must be distinguished from its reality. The earlier relationship can be discerned the history of philosophy when the act of introducing of a concept is also identified with the object of its own self-positing, which has a form of actuality (if not always reality) from that moment onward. This could be called the Hegelianism of the concept, or “the concept of the Concept.” As Deleuze and Guattari write, it is the “post-Kantians, and notably Schelling and Hegel, who . . . paid most attention to the concept as a philosophical reality in this sense.”35 For example, Hegel traced all the moments in which the concept of “Mind” (Geist) was figured in this activity of self-positing; therefore, each moment in the history of the Spirit was grasped as the event of the concept’s own self-positing reality. However, it is this very relationship between the reality of the concept and its event of self-positing that marketing today has grasped as an essential mode of realization. The concept has become a set of creative product displays (Darstellungen), and the event has become an exhibition that sets up various displays for product promotion.36 Here, the inner unity between concept and event is the power of the concept’s productivity (i.e., creativity) in setting up various displays that exhibit the concept’s passage from virtual to actual; however, the true objective of the exhibition of the concept is always to present the virtual as being in excess of the actual so that the most essential portion of the concept’s reality is its pure potentiality. It is still a bit like Hegelian Geist, in the sense that its myriad forms (Gestalten) do not grasp the concept’s essential reality, but instead reveal-conceal a surplus of virtuality, which is excessive and purely potential (en potentia), and becomes the source of future forms. Apple is perhaps the best contemporary example of pure potentiality communicated by a marketing concept; all of its product displays exhibit this same excessive sense of virtual over actual, the sense of constant innovation, or élan vital.

As Deleuze and Guattari have also observed, this new relationship between event and concept, between exhibiting power and the actuality of the idea, has also returned to determine the manner in which contemporary philosophy communicates, and philosophers and theorists today are no longer immune to promoting their own products (or theories) through exhibitions and displays, or to communicate the actuality of their own brand of philosophy according to contemporary marketing strategies. In a very real and demonstrable sense, of which there are many contemporary examples, every new theory dreams today of being Apple. Consequently, the most powerful theories are those that lay claim to the concept’s self-positing actuality and express ideas that appear suddenly (as if sprung from the head of Zeus himself) to dominate an entire field or discipline. It is not purely accidental that academic conferences and auto shows have essentially the same manner of exhibiting their “mental object’s” mode of self-positing actuality, including the ideas of innovation and progress, but also the active forgetting of last year’s products and stale models. Some would limit this resemblance to a merely superficial analogy, or “mere resemblance,” that does not touch upon the essence of both activities; others, more inclined to cynicism, have grasped this resemblance as an opportunity to fulfill the desire of essential egoism, and have fashioned a philosophy that is perfectly fitted to the marketing and promotion of a new product brand, along with all the promises that their philosophical line has surpassed all others and is best positioned to seize the reality of the “truth-event.” In Bergsonism, Deleuze already remarks that the greatest leaps of thought often occur in the name of an essential egoism; however, this already limits the possibility of leaping outside the closed circle of human societies, since the ego is only a cog in the wheel of a vast machinery, and the philosopher today would have to be a saint to resist the temptations offered by this form of communication—and, most of all, recognition and fame—even when these qualities are barely measurable in larger market standards. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari caution us against these grosser virtues, but here they are speaking more like old men who can resist this temptation only because they have grown too weary of their own worldly desires and, thus, have been surpassed by a younger and impudent breed of commercialized philosophers. Nevertheless, they argue, “this is an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, especially when these benefits can only be extolled from the viewpoint of universal capitalism.”37 But why is this so surprising? After all, would it not be natural to expect that philosophy, as a social form of communication, would presuppose an “image of thought” that is more or less consistent with the society in which it finds itself located, or would employ the same models of recognition and subjectivity that reflect the dominant values of communication and communicability?

In what sense can what is called philosophy today, that is, a certain tradition of institutionalized thinking (“theory”), lay claim to another idea of communication and another manner of socializing thought? In other words, how can “theory” accede to a point of view other than that of universal capitalism? Many philosophies today make this claim, but recalling the argument made in the Introduction concerning a new form of dogmatism, how can this major presupposition that belongs to contemporary critical philosophy be grounded upon anything more than a form of transcendental opinion (Ur-doxa)? How can we be assured that this is not merely a foundational myth of philosophy itself—the belief in metempsychosis of great souls communicating across closed deserts of time? Even the promise of a leap from a closed to an open society has become a clichéd form that can be found in many major philosophies and theories today. Again, these potential criticisms may seem a bit harsh, even somewhat contradictory, since we have already detected the presence of the same myth—perhaps even the same cliché!—circulating in Deleuze’s early philosophy, or even in the major presuppositions of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Nevertheless, how can thinking become critical of the actual image it presupposes and, at the same time, completely fail to become critical of the aspect of the virtual image that serves as our own particular “storytelling function”—that is, an image created to compensate for the partiality of our own intelligence?

Here, I will illustrate how several current theories perform a storytelling function, that is, referring to the quasi-mythic (even unconscious) leap in thought that presupposes an open society beyond the current closed societies of late capitalism. For example, Hardt and Negri essentially create the image of an open society from the perspective where the very form of Empire completely turns about in its own circle and discovers that it is no longer able to include, as moments internal to its own sovereignty, the new societies created by “the Multitude,” which is why they constantly say that the societies created by the Multitude disperse themselves across the surface of Empire as purely exterior and autonomous social forms—“the movements of the multitude designate new spaces, and its journeys establish new residences.”38 As a second example, Giorgio Agamben’s entire theory of sovereignty attempts to trace the trajectory of “the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West” to the “very threshold of modernity,” at which point every subsequent division upon which closed societies are based (nation, territory, race, and/or ethnicity) empties out into bare political life.39 At this very threshold, however, Agamben continues to speak of the pure potentiality of an “opening,” no longer determined by this earlier division, and “the constitution and institution of a form of life that is exhausted in bare political life and a bios that is only its own Zoē,” even though he also fails to grasp the concept form of life and vaguely refers his intuition of this threshold “to the analogies between politics and the epochal situation of metaphysics.”40 In his later works, Derrida will continually speak of a “politics of deconstruction” from the perspective of an aporia between the determinations of the concept of Democracy, that is, beyond the limit of this closure demarcated by the concept’s current reality, and of a “democracy to come.”41 In turn, Jean-Luc Nancy, after the manner of Derrida, has more recently defined what he calls “the (auto)deconstruction of Christianity” as precisely the horizon of an opening “beyond” the Christian enclosure of Being. As he writes, “The Open (or ‘the free’ as Hölderlin also called it) is essentially ambiguous. . . . In its absoluteness it opens onto itself and opens only onto itself, infinitely.”42 In all these examples, the question to ask concerning this image, as Nancy also immediately observes, is this: “What would be an opening that would not sink into its own openness?”43 In other words, if theoretical discourse often speaks of an opening, or posits its subject beyond the leap from closed society, we might recall that the essential part of what is called an “event” refers to a duration in which “nothing happens,” since the exact instant of the leap either remains unconscious, or has not yet become a definite moment of experience. Here, I believe we have returned precisely to the same place that Deleuze earlier articulated as the relationship between philosophical method and mystical intuition, which can be viewed only from “the outside.”

According to the last Gestalt principle, what is called “an unconscious leap in thought” can now be characterized in two different manners. First, according to the more critical understanding already noted above, it is unconscious because it is mythical, that is to say, it is conditioned by the possibility of genre and language that allows us to “speak of things beyond the boundaries of the lived and the livable.” (This is one of the original definitions of mythic speech, mythos, in Plato.) It is because of the possibility of language that “an unconscious leap in thought” can too easily be mistaken for a series of forms (Gestalten) that attempt to signify its “taking place,” its “immanent arrival,” or to provide an “intuition of openness” as in the examples above, and these forms of signification and discourse can often be mistaken for the sense that can only belong to the event itself. This would be one way of understanding what Nancy calls “an opening that sinks back into its own openness.” For example, when Derrida writes of a “democracy to come,” Agamben of “the coming community,” or Hardt and Negri of the arrival of “the Multitude,” we may already have an abstract signification of what this means, and it is this sense that belongs to the order of myth that makes this sense possible; however, does the specific sense of the “event” designated by the above statements actually refer back to the possibility of statements and propositions themselves, that is, to a specific kind of “openness” that belongs to language? In this regard, it is especially important to note that Deleuze was more interested in other kinds of statements like “there’s a concert this evening,” or “there’s going to be a naval battle tomorrow”; moreover, he would not have determined the sense of the events that these statements express to be fundamentally different from the statements concerning the arrival of the Multitude, the coming community, or “Absolute Democracy.” Both kinds of statements express a similar, if not the same, incorporeal sense of the event, which is perhaps one reason Deleuze also did not privilege statements concerning “the end of Metaphysics.” As he said, in fact, “the most ordinary events cast us as visionaries.”44

Perhaps another way of understanding the manner in which “an opening (an event, an intuition of a real determinable being) sinks back into its own openness” occurs most often in the function of commentary and “secondary representation.” In other words, why so much commentary? In reply, commentators can be understood as the reproductive instances or, as Bataille might say, the sexual organs of opinion. To avoid being misunderstood, I am not rejecting either the function of commentary or secondary works, but rather see these functions as quite necessary and corresponding to the requirements of an organically coordinated brain, made up by its connections and secondary integrations.45 Therefore, commentary serves the necessary function of connection and integration. According to the allegory of the umbrella that appears in the conclusion of What Is Philosophy?, for example, artists and writers tear a little slit in the umbrella of common perception and opinion to allow a little chaos in; “then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinion: communication.”46 Hence, the function of commentary and imitation (for example, of copying in art and music) must be understood as the deindividualized process of an organically based brain trying to remain integrated and ordered in its confrontation with the little bit of chaos that seeps in through the rent. The product–moment correlation of reproduction is the very manner in which these connections and secondary integrations are introduced into a social assemblage that includes all of the following: ideas, thoughts, statements, descriptions, institutions (“schools,” “movements”), and lastly, individuals. For this process of integration to occur on the plane of ideas, for example, first a relative degree of similarity is required for a corresponding degree of connection and fusion as the condition of reproduction. This similarity occurs, first of all, on a literal level in citation, but it also occurs in the creation of a Gestalt image (i.e., a deep image) that the secondary work participates in creating (e.g., in philosophy: neo-Kantianism, Hegelianism, Marxism; the phenomenological image, the image of deconstructionism, and the Deleuzian image). This Gestalt image may or may not be presented by the so-called primary work, and something interesting occurs when this Gestalt takes on a life of its own and begins to become instituted in all kinds of manners to determine the work’s meaning in the form of a “theory.” However, rather than referring to the specific meaning that belongs to a discrete body of written works, this determination actually refers to the “vitality” of an idea as a force that causes us to think and reproduce the same idea as a distinctive social assemblage. In other words, according to the standard definition, the virtual is not opposed to the real, but rather to the actual; the virtual is real and is capable of producing real effects. These effects are not restricted to being merely discursive events (or ideas), but also take place in forming new opinions and habits in social institutions, in creating new epistemological subjects of study, if not new subjective forms of desire and identification that have real social existence. (As I have discussed elsewhere, Fredric Jameson perhaps best understood this productive sense of commentary—communication and opinion—in the opening pages of The Political Unconscious.)47

As long as we continue to understand what is called “theory” as simply a chain of discourse or associated ideas, without regard to what social and institutional assemblages it produces, but more importantly what kind of desires it invents as its conditions of possibility, then its particular image of thought will always remain abstract. All of the examples I have offered above can be understood as different collective assemblages of “theory,” or what I have called the different living languages of possibility space. In fact, it would be an interesting exercise to create a cognitive map of all the current solutions offered by contemporary theories that, upon first glance, would be seemingly remote from one another in terms of their stated objectives and theoretical problems. If my suspicion is correct, such a map would quickly resemble the diagrams of a “Klondike Wilderness” and the solutions themselves could be compared to the various different “Klondike traps” in possibility space: “clueless plateaus,” “narrow canyons of exploration,” and the inevitable “oasis of false promise.” As an example, I will simply list the four problems of possibility space and their corresponding solutions:

1. The Problem of Rarity: Valuable solutions are sparsely distributed in a large area of possibilities, because of the virtually infinite recombinations or configurations of past elements, many of which are not viable as solutions. (Solution: Employ quick conceptual sketches to identify a range of possible solutions.)
2. The Problem of Isolation: The places in the conceptual space where valuable solutions are to be found can be widely separated and unconnected. (Solution: Cultivate “chance leaps” around the space, rather than following a path of logic toward a deterministic solution.)
3. The Problem of Oasis of False Promise: When solutions have been found in one place, it is hard to leave them to try elsewhere. (Solution: Deliberate a move to other parts of the space to achieve a different perspective.)
4. The Problem of Clueless Plateaus: Many parts of conceptual space, being similar, give no clues as to the direction in which fruitful or fruitless explorations may lie. (Solution: Jump around or “trawl” using systematized chance.)48

Concerning the last problem, which has been the subtext of my entire argument, it is apparent that most theories today express some version of the leap from closed society to open society (whether the former is defined nationally, sexually, ethnically, or in terms of the “open society” that lies outside universal capitalism). In other words, although the actual terms and stated problems may vary, the different manners in which the virtual is actually conceived do not vary much from one expression (or theory) to the next. The above examples I have provided all demonstrate characteristics of the same basic Gestalt image of how an “open society” might appear between the positing of the concept of the self-positing (or arrival) of the event.

I return to Deleuze and Guattari’s complaint concerning the current relationship between the event and the concept’s self-positing reality, which is expressed most powerfully by the languages of contemporary advertising and marketing. Some will say I have simplified things and have moved too quickly from one level of the problem to the next. “Certainly,” my philosophical friends will say, “you are not suggesting we abandon the more sophisticated and theoretical concepts of philosophy for those of cognitive psychology and Gestalt theory! After all, they are just metaphors!” But in response, in what sense can philosophy prove that its own concepts are founded upon anything more than belief, and are simply another language of possibility? I cannot say. Nevertheless, I have found it to be an interesting “thought experiment,” if only to raise the possibility, that is, to bring one language into proximity with another, to draw a different map in order to survey the current state of “what is called theory”; moreover, to ask questions like “What have we been doing?” and “What are we looking for?” rather than “What is the next Big Theory?” Too often, I feel, students of “theory” are all scrambling around this plateau looking for hints and clues that will lead them to the next theoretical trend, somewhat like the joke told by Nietzsche in The Gay Science that after Kant discovered the categories of reason, all the seminarians at Tübingen were out in the bushes looking for new categories. Discussions in “theory” seem particularly prone to this kind of trend-setting thought, which is why I employed it as an example, since the idea of an unconscious leap in thought already presupposes a kind of “turning” (Die Kehre).

How many times in the past twenty or thirty years have we been witness to some version of the idea of “the turning” (Die Kehre)—the phenomenological turn, linguistic (or structuralist) turn, the post-structuralist, the cultural turn, the visual turn, the affective turn, the turn to religion? Of course, it is not merely coincidental that these mark institutional trends in production and reproduction, particularly in academic publishing and conference proceedings, but what is most surprising is that this parallelism has been remarked upon by almost every major theorist, and yet this has never led to any real questioning regarding the adequacy of this form in representing the true nature of progress in thinking. I might even suggest that the form has become so rampant that any major thinker, either living or dead, is now required to have one; if such a turning is not evident, then one will be provided by secondary readers, and the body of their work will be interpreted accordingly. Although our understanding of this event was first derived from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which normal science is portrayed as operating through the suppression of new paradigms, what is crucial to observe is that what Kuhn called a “paradigm shift” has become the run-of-the-mill business, or the normal science called “theory,” and might even explain why there have been just as many claims concerning the “end of theory” as there have been announcements of the “next Big Theory.” However, if the Form (Gestalt) of a “paradigm shift” has become the epistemological business of “theory” as a normal science, and the function of normal science is to suppress all new paradigms, then the actual event of a “turning” will not resemble the Form (Gestalt) of the “paradigm shift” that “theory” produces as the condition of perpetuating its institutions and its authorities. This is our particular circle, today, and its perpetual revolution constitutes the closed society of “theory” itself. All the various turnings recounted above—including the next one yet to be named—can be understood as figures that express the different regions of the clueless plateau we occupy today.

Finally, let us return more specifically to the image of “the turn” that belongs to the last work of Deleuze and Guattari. It is given in the proposition with which we began: The virtual is the brain itself (or rather, it is the “turning point” where the brain becomes a subject). “It is the brain that says I, but I is an other.”49 How is this image of turning any different from those I have recounted above? If I stated in the beginning that the image of the brain now shared by philosophy, science, and art is both beautiful and violent, it is because here we have a description of a process of real thinking that is full of explosions and detonations that first take place in the brain, “an uncertain system,” defined by probabilistic, aleatory, quantum mechanisms.50 In understanding this statement, I would like to call attention to something quite remarkable, which becomes visible only when we compare the conclusion of Bergsonism (where the concept of the virtual is first introduced) to the conclusion of What Is Philosophy? where it returns as a major theme. A passage from the 1966 text:

Servant of an open and finite God (such are the characteristics of the Élan Vital), the mystical soul actively plays the whole of the universe, and reproduces the opening of a Whole in which there is nothing to see or to contemplate. Already motivated by emotion, the philosopher extracted the lines that divided up the composites given in experience. He prolonged the outline to beyond the “turn”: he showed in the distance the virtual point where they all met.51

In this early passage we see the passage of the virtual “beyond the turn of experience,” which is figured as the probability lines that the philosopher extracts from the composites of experience in order to achieve a point of view, albeit always from the Outside, comparable to that of the mystical soul, except that the philosopher’s viewpoint lacks certainty. By contrast, the point of view of the mystical soul is that of creation itself; “it plays with the whole of creation [and] invents an expression of it whose adequacy increases with its dynamism.”52

In 1991, however, the faculty of creation becomes in What Is Philosophy? the “signature” of the philosopher’s activity, “or the art of creating concepts.” Moreover, what is called a concept can also be defined precisely as “an expression whose adequacy increases with its dynamism” (a vital idea); however, what is more important to notice is that the figure of the mystical soul is replaced in the latter text by the brain, and here it is not only the philosopher who extracts the lines of experience and extends them beyond the turn of experience (formed by opinion and habit), but science and art as well. And yet the brain is not a perspective in this latter text, but rather what must be subtracted from all perspectives, given that it is immanent to all perspectives, and in a certain way it could also be said to be a “Whole in which there is nothing to see or to contemplate”—in other words, here we have precisely the image of a Non-Objectified Brain! Has the brain simply become a metaphor of the mystical soul, or was the mystical soul already a certain cerebral crystallization of the brain? The visionary, the seer, or the mystical soul of the thinker—all figures of “the one who sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing of time as dividing in two, as splitting.”53

According to the above thesis, what now appears in the interval (écart) between intelligence and instinct is an image of thought that is now associated with the brain, but that for this reason must also be distinguished from both the perception-image and the memory-image. The nature of the image is affection, or self-affection, which is identified with thinking, because thinking is also defined as what happens in the interval (écart) between stimulus and response; therefore, intuition may very well be an image of what appears in this interval, but this primarily refers to a quality of affection that is different from perception-image, the action-image, or the memory-image. In other words, the idea of “mystical intuition” is no longer even necessary, because we have no more certainty regarding the source of our most common intuitions than we have regarding the specific functioning of the brain (which modern neurology is still only in the process of discovering). As Deleuze exclaims in a 1987 seminar on the movement-image, in part rejecting the common view of spiritualism ascribed to Bergson’s concept of intuition: “What is an écart? The brain is an écart! There can be no more materialist a solution.”54 Although the material reality of both forms of intuition and knowledge continues to elude our perspective and thus remains purely virtual, we can say with more or less certainty that the brain is real, no less than the universe, as the distant point where all the lines extracted from given experience meet, beyond the turn of experience. To arrive at this distant point, a point that is farther than the external world composed of objects, and nearer than the subjective form of intuitions, requires a leap, as well as a method of leaping.

Again, in Bergsonism, Deleuze first compared this method to “mystical intuition” following Bergson—“as though the properly philosophical ‘possibility’ extended itself into mystical certainty”—but then immediately qualified this by saying that “philosophy can only consider the mystical soul from the outside,” that is, “from the point of its own lines of probability.”55 In 1988 Deleuze clarifies this method:

The means used by intuition are, on the one hand, sectioning and distributing reality in a given domain according to lines of different natures, and on the other hand, intersecting lines taken from various domains that converge together.56

In other words, philosophical intuition is achieved by means of constructing a method of combining the aspects of perception, emotion, imagination, and thought into one form that represents the virtual point where all these aspects meet; mystical intuition, by contrast, appears as a form of thinking without method and, thus, represents the kind of “leap in thought” that philosophy always seeks to achieve but fails to actualize because it lacks the power of pure intuition. Perhaps this is another way of explaining why many of its concepts remain abstract, or fail to leap beyond abstraction to express the condition of vital ideas (“mental objects determinable as real beings”). However, in this later text the true subject of the leap is not man as a subject who thinks, invents, or creates; it is the brain that thinks, not man. A brain is not in your head, any more than it is in the next thought, or the next perception, association, or memory; it is all of these at once and more. What is more is the plane on which all of these take place at once, as if simultaneously, even though this plane never appears as an object of representation, that is to say, does not refer to any external point of view. Thus, the brain is not opposed to the world, but rather the world is composed of a special type of brain-matter. Therefore, when Deleuze and Guattari talk about a “survey” (survol) of a plane of immanence, they are referring to the “absolute speed” by which a concept composes a reality.

In the last text, “The Virtual and the Actual,” supposedly written by Deleuze shortly before his death and later published in 1996 as an appendix to Dialogues II, Deleuze returns once more to meditate on a key passage from Bergson’s Matter and Memory that forms the basis of Bergsonism, and which we also find in Cinema 2 concerning “the crystals of time.” Eric Alliez is purported to conjecture that the telegraphic style of this small piece, which is almost completely “styleless,” should be understood as notes on an incomplete or unfinished project.57 Instead, I would argue, it addresses the most essential problem of Deleuze’s entire philosophical project begun in 1966 with Bergsonism and returned to at several points, including in the works by Guattari: the problem of the genesis of intuition as a method of philosophy, or the creation of the concept of the virtual. If this remains in a state of being incomplete or unfinished at the end of Deleuze’s philosophical career, this is because this already refers to a duration of philosophy recounted above in which the actual number of concepts (“vital ideas”) are relatively few and the interval between new concepts must be viewed from the perspective we have likened to the evolutionary brain, which is to say, from the perspective of Natura naturans (“nature doing what nature does,” which can even be phrased as “nature doing the best it can,” given what it has been given to work with, namely, the organic composition of the human brain).

It is important to note, moreover, that in this last text all the above themes come together around a tightly contracted point or “peak” of the actual present: mystical intuition, brain-image, the image of thought, a method of extending the lines of probability beyond the turn of experience. Recalling the Bergsonian diagram of the cone, here the brain can be said to occupy both poles, above and below, the peak of intuition and the unconscious ground (even the “sans fond,” the filter or sieve placed over chaos), except, as in Bergson’s original scheme, the cone is inverted to show the position of the ground occupied by the actual, and not by memory or unconscious intuition. According to Bergson’s original definition, however, the actual does not encompass perception only, but the most intensive point or peak where the body-image is concentrated on a plane that both receives and emanates every other image of which this plane is composed: “it represents each moment of my present incessantly advancing, and also incessantly in contact with the mobile plane (plan P) composing my actual representation of the universe.”58 This scheme will become the basis for Deleuze’s “transcendental empirical method”: the image of the actual object is the ground, but the image is already divided into virtual and actual, producing a crevice that is located between the brain and the world. On one end, therefore, the brain-image would be the narrowest circuit, at that point where the two aspects of the image are so close that they become indistinguishable, or split apart into virtual image and actual object. The other pole is defined by degrees of dilation and envelopment, which at its furthest point becomes a world, a universe. Thus, brain-image and brain-world are related to one another within a single duration.

But the point is far more radical for Bergson, which is why Deleuze will refer to his philosophy as the “Theory of Multiplicities.” At each pole, or extreme limit, this splitting between virtual image and actual object “never goes right to the end,” but also exchanges or leaps from interval to interval, never arriving at a point of completion that would be represented by pure intuition of the Whole.59 Thus, in Cinema 2, Deleuze describes the virtual and the actual as “the little crystalline seed and the vast crystallizable universe . . . memories, dreams, even worlds are only the relative circuits that depend on variations of this Whole.”60

This also seems to echo an intuition that we find in Proust as well: true subjectivity assumes the form of nonchronological time that is grasped in its foundation.

Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, “the affection of self by self” as definition of time.61

In the above passage, the virtual is defined as the subjectivity of time itself, or a subjectivity that is never ours, but within which we dwell nevertheless. Therefore, the virtual is defined as the spiritual self-affection of the present, “the affection of self-by-self,” from which the actual subject is always excluded as an other. As Deleuze explains, although it is commonplace to assert that Bergsonian duration is only the equation of the most general form of subjectivity and the form of time (i.e., duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life), in fact what Bergson actually understood was far more radical: “The only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time, grasped in its foundation.”62 What is this foundation, as we have seen, but that point that represents time in its most contracted state, as in the brain? Here, the brain is the subject. If the brain is the foundation of subjectivity, then it is only at this point that we might now understand the phrase from Cezanne: man absent from the landscape, but completely within the brain!

What does all this mean? In other words, what does contemporary philosophy (according to a Deleuzian image of thought) now “presuppose” as its pre-philosophical image? The brain? But as we have seen earlier, the brain is not an image but rather a line of probability beyond the turn of experience where all the divergent lines must meet in order for there to exist human and world, subject and object. I only point out that in contrast to the earlier solution, rather than resorting to the Platonic myth of reminiscence, or to “cosmic Memory,” the search for another cerebral interval between instinct and intelligence ends here in the brain itself, the most contracted circuit where virtual and actual split apart, in a constant gushing forth of both time and space. What happened? Simply put, at the end of his career Deleuze simply changed his “plan of immanence,” drawing new coordinates and causing a variation in what it means to think and “how to orient oneself in thought.” Except that this time, rather than resorting to myth, he refers for his pre-philosophical image (upon which philosophy depends as the condition for the creation of its concepts) only to our current knowledge of the brain. This would seem a less than triumphant ending, the final discovery of a lofty philosophy career: only the brain and the limited knowledge of it that neurobiology has thus far discovered. According to these new coordinates, philosophy still remains “outside” and has no more certainty with regard to the brain that it did concerning mystical intuition. There is no certainty in our knowledge of the brain either, or whether this will lead to the “right” construction of the plan(e) of immanence. “We’ve got no model for dealing with this question, no guide even, but there is something that we can constantly refer and relate it to: what we know about the brain.”63

If it is true, as Deleuze and Guattari write, that every great philosopher lays out a new plan(e) of immanence, introduces a new substance of being and draws up a new image of thought, so that we could not imagine a philosopher of whom it could not be said that he has changed what it means to think, or has “thought differently,” then this last claim appears somewhat anachronistic to Deleuze’s final image of thought. What does philosophy now presuppose? The brain. But what is the brain? In response to this new presupposition, Deleuze explains, “It’s not that thinking starts from what we know about the brain but any new thought traces uncharted channels directly though its matter, twisting folding, fissuring it. . . . New connections, new pathways, new synapses, that’s what philosophy calls into play as it creates concepts” on a plane of immanence, which now means both in and with the brain.64 Thus, each time new images are created, like new circuits in the brain, they also first become possible in a world, enlarging our sense of reality.

The crystal of time gave me for the first time a direct image of time in the form of the unfolding of the present. Here, we have for the first time a direct figure of the thought, in the form of the complementarity of the levels of thought. What I am calling levels of thought, as Bergson also knew, is that each time I am obliged to make a new circuit. These are not metaphors, each time an increasingly major aspect of reality will emerge. . . . There is an infinity of cuts that do not preexist; they must be fabricated. All this is very moving. It is necessary to place everything in movement. Just like the circuits, this mobile plan does not preexist movement.65

The description of the brain-image as a circuit already determines the infinite speed of this very special kind of circuit as well as its various avatars: computer circuits, chemical signals, light waves. Although they might give a more approximate image of the nature of the perception and intuition that take place in the brain, these new images are themselves too slow to capture the precise point of the splitting of every perception into actual object and its virtual image. The fact that human consciousness can only be located in the middle of the scale, bordered in one direction by memory that expands into the longest duration imaginable, limited only by unconsciousness and death, and in the other direction, by actual perceptions that enter into tighter and more contracted circuits that, at their assignable limit, are equated with a period of time that is smaller than the smallest period of continuous time imaginable. It is only in this sense that thinking is creative, because actualized perception is equivalent with the creation of the object of thought; in other words, thinking is actual—that is, real—being. Or, as Deleuze says earlier, it is only in this sense, and according to this image of thought, that we can now understand why “philosophy merges with ontology,” as in the famous proposition (one that has been so famously misunderstood by Badiou!) “Being cannot be said without also occurring”—that is, if we now understand this image of simultaneity (i.e., nonchronological duration) to refer to what happens in the brain, and not to a philosophical image of temporality, such as the one most recently offered by phenomenology.66 (After all, where is the foundation of time itself if not already in the brain?) According to this new image, thought can still be defined as soul or force (using the old language), and can still take on the form of “pure contemplation,” but it now assumes the image of a crystalline event. It is only once we perceive this image, as founded also in reality, that we might also come to understand why it is “the brain that thinks, not man—the latter being only a cerebral crystallization.”67