‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’: GILLES DELEUZE AND 1.

In the terms made

familiar by centuries
of scholastic debate,
CREATIVE UNIVOCITY that being is univocal
means that creatures
exist in essentially
the same way as
their creator. On this
Peter Hallward point see Daniel
Smith’s
exceptionally clear
paper, ‘The Doctrine
The central thesis of the conference in which a version of this article was of Univocity:
Deleuze’s Ontology
first presented - that contemporary understandings of art and science belong of Immanence’,
to a single paradigm of thought, a single way of thinking - surely finds its Deleuze and Religion,
Mary Bryden (ed),
most emphatic philosophical justification in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Routledge, London,
This most inventive of contemporary French thinkers seeks to understand 2001.

the individuation of all possible beings and experiences as part of one and
2. The most
the same productive process, where everything thus individua ted or systematic text to
produced - planets, bodies, perceptions, dreams, paintings, delusions - is deal with this
question is Gilles
produced in essentially the same way. Deleuze’s work everywhere asserts Deleuze and Félix
the strict univocity of being. All that is can be said to be in exactly the same Guattari’s What is
Philosophy? Minuit,
sense, all that can be said of being must be said in one and the same voice. 1 Paris, 1991, Hugh
Tomlinson and
And if all that falls under the concept of being must be treated in the same Graham Burchell
way and said in the same voice, then the essential compatibility of art and (trans), Columbia
UP, 1994; it provides
science follows as a matter of course. (Artistic) interpretation and (scientific) this article with its
explanation become aspects of one and the same ‘expressive’ project.2 main point of
reference. Further
All of Deleuze’s notoriously complex work presumes this essential references to this
reduction, this essential compatibility of art and science, for the simple title will be given in
the text as WIP,
reason that it eliminates the epistemological basis of their broadly Romantic followed by page
distinction - namely, the difference between deduction and insight, between number. (Where a
reference contains
what can be demonstrated ‘objectively’ and what resonates ‘subjectively’, two page numbers
separated by a
between the natural sciences and the human sciences, and so on. Deleuze’s
forward slash, the
project begins with the evacuation of any rigorous difference between subject first number refers
to the original
and object or natural and human, so as literally to ‘clear the mind’ for the edition and the
intuition of that single productive energy that saturates, in essentially the second to the
translation; ‘tm’
same way, every dimension of existence and experience. His project then stands for
develops, along each of its many bifurcating paths, on the presumption ‘translation
modified’).
that ‘the identity of the self is lost […] to the advantage of an intense
multiplicity and a power of metamorphosis’.3 3. Deleuze The Logic
The creature’s loss, we might say, is creation’s gain. For in the absence of of Sense, Minuit,
Paris, 1969, Mark
subject-centred distinctions, everything will be seen to cohere on the same Lester with Charles
virtual plane of immanence or multiplicity, ‘a plane upon which everything Stivale (trans),
Columbia UP, New
is laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms’, a plane populated York, 1990, p345/
by ‘a single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate it’. Every 297.

being can be described as a creative movement across the ‘One-All’ defined

4. Deleuze and
by this plane, and these movements ‘are distinguished from one another Guattari, A Thousand
only by speed and slowness’ (WIS, 41/38). 4 As a matter of fundamental Plateaus, Minuit,
Paris, 1980 Brian
principle, ‘there is only one kind of production, the production of the real’, Massumi (trans),

‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’ 61
Minnesota UP, and our only goal is to draw close ‘to the beating heart of reality, to an
Minneapolis, 1986, intense point identical with the production of the real’.5 Any effort to
pp311-312/254-255.
Further references to complicate this schema by introducing anthropocentric alternatives like
this title will be ‘imaginary’ or ‘symbolic’ (let alone natural and human, or objective and
given in the text as
ATP, followed by subjective) can amount solely to the introduction of error pure and simple.
page number. Strict ontological univocity has, as its immediate implication, that ‘it is the
nature of consciousness to be false’.6 Consciousness as such can only get in
5. Deleuze and
Guattari, Anti- the way of active participation in univocal expression. In this as in every
Oedipus, Minuit, associated case, ‘all our false problems derive from the fact that we do not
Paris, 1972, Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem know how to go beyond experience toward the conditions of experience,
and Helen Lane
toward the articulations of the real [du réel]’.7
(trans), Minnesota
UP, 1977, pp40/32, In what follows I will try to outline, in terms directed at mainly non-
104/87.
specialist readers, what is involved in this ‘production of the real’ and the
notions of art and science that ensue. I will argue, in spite of certain thematic
6. Deleuze, Difference
and Repetition, PUF, appearances to the contrary, that Deleuze encourages us to understand such
1968, Paul Patton
production as a peculiar, thoroughly contemporary version of creationism -
(trans), Columbia
UP, New York, 1994, the idea, which Deleuze adapts mainly from Spinoza and Leibniz, that all
pp268-269/208.
Further references to
actual beings exist as unfolding parts of the ‘expression’ or ‘explication’ of
this title will be an all-powerful, purely intensive, purely virtual creative force.8 An infinitely
given in the text as
D&R, followed by creative force gives rise to an infinitely differentiated creation. The task of
page number. any particular creature - any particular actuality - is ‘simply’ to give
appropriate voice to that part of creative becoming that it is able to express.
7. Deleuze,
Bergsonism, PUF, Grasped in itself - grasped, we might say, as an attribute of the ‘creator’
1966 Hugh per se, considered independently of creation - this force remains exclusively
Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam virtual. Its expression or self-differentiation will individuate every actuality
(trans), Zone Books, with absolute determining power, but it itself qua virtuality, qua creativity,
1988, p17/26.
Further references to will never become actual. It will never be limited by the stasis of material
this title will be actuality. Every particular creation, however, will have both a virtual and an
given in the text as
Bergsonism, followed actual dimension. It will exist both as a purely virtual creative thought, i.e.
by page number.
as a ‘creating’, as a thought in the creative Mind, and as the thoroughly
actual expression of that thought, i.e. as a ‘creature’, as a distinct element in
8. Regrettably, there
is no space here to the field of creation. In Deleuze’s work, ‘virtual’ and ‘creative’ (in this strong
tackle the most
creationist sense) are effectively interchangeable terms.
obvious (but also
most difficult) Though it is always the virtual or creative dimension that determines
question raised by a
description of
the course of creation, the expressiv e individ uation of this force is
Deleuze’s thought as simultaneously spiritual and physical. From what we might call the ‘creative
essentially
creationist, namely
point of view’, ‘thinking and being are […] one and the same’, since purely
its relation to a creative thought must immediately give rise to whatever it thinks. Every
broadly evolutionary
perspective; the genuine thought is a creation. Though ‘the plane of immanence is always
pertinence of such a single, being itself pure variation’, it has ‘two facets, as Thought and as
perspective has been
demonstrated in Nature’ and the one is immediately expressive of the other. Creatings are
compelling detail by distinguished by their speed alone, i.e. by their proximity to infinite speed,
Keith Ansell
Pearson’s recent since creativity itself ‘is a single speed on both sides: “the atom will traverse
book, Germinal Life:
The Difference and
space with the speed of thought” (Epicurus). The plane of immanence has
Repetition of Deleuze, two facets as Thought and as Nature, as Nous and as Physis’ (WIP, 41-42/38-

62 NEW FORMATIONS
39).9 It is the essential singularity of the arrangement that necessarily boggles Routledge, London,
every limited understanding of mind, since it coheres only from the point 1999. See also my
forthcoming study,
of view of a mind that creates at every moment every object of its thought - Creationism in
Philosophy: Deleuze.
that is to say, from the point of view that in Leibniz and Spinoza corresponds
to the mind of God.10 The immediate methodological implication, however,
9. The concept of
is perfectly straightforward: if everything that is is real, if all that exists pure creativity (or
infinite speed)
exists in the same way, then there can be only one mechanism of
satisfies the essential
understanding or perception, one faculty of expression-interpretation, and creationist
obligation: ‘the
this faculty will apply indifferently to the material, semantic, or spiritual whole ought to
composition of things. belong to a single
moment’, in
As a result, the differences between philosophy, art, and science do not Deleuze, Nietzsche
reflect differences in the substance of their concern any more than they and Philosophy, PUF,
Paris, 1962 Hugh
correspond to genuinely distinct faculties of the mind. Philosophy, art and Tomlinson (trans),
science are names given to the three forms of thought able to sustain Minnesota UP, 1983,
p81/72. Further
proximity to pure creativity as such, i.e. to pure creative chaos: they are the references to this
‘three Chaoids, realities produced on the planes that cut through chaos in title will be given in
the text as N&P,
different ways’ (WIP, 196/208tm).11 They differ only in the intensity of their followed by page
number.
approximation to the purely creative point of view. The effort to conceptualise
configurations of creative thought as such, the effort to lend conceptual
10. ‘The universe is
consistency to its infinite turbulence, is the particular task and privilege of like a whole which
God grasps in a
philosophy. Art and science take up their distinct epistemological positions
single view’, Leibniz,
with respect to the resulting hierarchy: whereas science abandons any direct Letter to von
Hessen-Rheinfels 12
intuition of pure infinity (infinite chaos, infinite speed, infinite determination April 1686, in
… ) so as to isolate a plane of reference in which finite states of relative Leibniz, Philosophical
Texts, R.S.
speed or relative complexity can be observed and analysed, art attempts, Woolhouse and
through its finite compositions, to serve as a conduit or vector for an infinite Richard Francks (ed
and trans), OUP,
compositional power. In short: if what truly is is a pure creative energy that 1998, p.99; cf.
proceeds with the infinite speed of thought, philosophy is the discipline of Spinoza, Ethics V,
Proposition 25.
thought that establishes zones of conceptual consistency within this infinite
difference, whereas science withdraws from the infinite to so as to measure 11. Alternatively -
the finite, leaving art with the ‘peculiar’ power of being able ‘to pass through although it amounts
to the same thing -
the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite’(WIP, 186/197, my they are ‘the three
emphasis). These disciplinary differences are established solely with reference aspects under which
the brain [or mind]
to the underlying dynamic of creative thought as such, or the mechanics of becomes subject,
Thought-brain’,
infinite speed - and not in terms of ineluctably anthropocentric distinctions
p198/210.
between explanation and interpretation, or perception and imagination,
or accuracy and insight.

II

Deleuze’s point of departure is brutally straightforward. ‘Being is univocal.

There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave
being a single voice [...]. From Parmenides to Heidegger it is the same
voice which is taken up, in an echo which itself forms the whole deployment
of the univocal’ (D&R, 52/35). All distinct beings ‘are distributed across the

‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’ 63
 space of univocal being’, within a single ‘plane of immanence’ or inclusion,
and they sing their being in one and the same voice. They sing ‘a single
12. Alain Badiou clamour of Being for all beings’ (D&R, 388-89/304).12 Being says all that it
takes this phrase as
the subtitle for his
has to say according to a single ‘logic of sense’, which applies indifferently
brief but decisive to God or man, animal or plant, dream or perception, word or thing.
critique of Deleuzian
univocity in Badiou, Now if all beings express Being in the same way, does this mean that all
Deleuze, la clameur de beings express the same intensity of being? Does ontological univocity imply
l’être, Hachette,
Paris, 1997, Louise ontological equality? Far from it: it’s essential to understand that although
Burchill (trans), ‘equal, univocal being is immediately present in everything, without
Minnesota UP, 1999.
For broadly mediation or intermediary’, nevertheless ‘things reside unequally in this
comparable readings equal being’(D&R, 55/37). Univocity simply ensures an exclusiv ely
of Deleuze’s singular
orientation, see my quantitative understanding of expressive difference, where every difference,
‘Deleuze and
ultimately, is a matter of being more or less expressive of the ‘One-All’,
Redemption from
Interest’, Radical more or less adequately expressive of being as that immanent whole in which
Philosophy, 81 (Jan
1997), pp6-21;
‘everything coexists with itself, except for the differences of level’ (Bergsonism,
‘Deleuze and the 103/100). All actual individuals actualise ‘varying degrees’ of a single virtual
World Without
Others’, Philosophy force (ATP, 62/46), and when we come to investigate the apparent diversity
Today, 41:4 (Winter, of the natural world ‘we see, between plant and animal, for example, between
1997), pp530-544;
‘The Limits of animal and man, only differences in degree’ (Bergsonism, 105/101).
Individuation, or But why this inequality? Why is ontological ‘hierarchy the originary fact,
How to Distinguish
Deleuze from [as] the identity of difference and origin?’ ( N&P, 8-9/8). Because Deleuze
Foucault’, in takes Nietzsche’s side in his quarrel with Schopenhauer: like any creationist,
Angelaki, 5:2 (Aug
2000), pp93-112. Deleuze maintains that creation necessarily creates distinct creatures, that
Some of the material
discussed in the
production gives rise to distinct products. The illusions of subjective
present essay autonomy must be dispelled, yes, but not in favour of a purely indeterminate
overlaps with
material analysed in or ‘undifferentiated abyss’. The deluded pretension to a distinctive human
these earlier articles. voice (i.e., to ontological equi-vocity) must certainly be disarmed and
‘replaced, but in and by individuation, in the direction of the individuating
factors which consume them and which constitute the fluid world of Dionysus.
What cannot be replaced is individuation itself ’ (D&R, 332/258). And in
order to conceive of such individuation/differentiation as immediately active,
as purely creative, it must be abstracted from any process - of interaction,
communication, interpretation, negation - that might mediate, qualify,
modulate or interrupt its operation. Creation does not hesitate. It does not
pass through anything external to itself. Fully creative ‘difference must be
articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without
any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the
opposed’ (D&R, 154/117).
Moreover, once actual individuation is explained in terms of the internal
differentiation of a single, purely intensive creative force then the quantitative
or ‘hierarchical’ basis of the procedure follows as a matter of course. The
individuality of an individual can only correspond to its degree of expressive
power, its place on the single expressive scale. The philosopher whom
Deleuze reveres as ‘philosophy incarnate’, as the ‘Christ of philosophers’,
demonstrates the essential logic with unrivalled clarity: ‘individuation is, in

64 NEW FORMATIONS
Spinoza, neither qualitative nor extrinsic, but quantitative and intrinsic,
intensive’, ‘purely quantitative’, according to ‘the degree of [a thing’s] power’.13 13. WIP, 59/59-60;
49/48-49. Deleuze,
Any actual individual (any individual ‘mode’, to use Spinoza’s own term) is, Expressionism in
‘in its essence, always a certain degree, a certain quantity, of a [divine] quality’, Philosophy: Spinoza,
Minuit, 1968, Martin
and all modes ‘are quantitatively distinguished by the quantity or capacity Joughin (trans),
of their respective essences which always participate directly in divine Zone Books, New
York, 1990, pp180/
substance’ (EINP, 166/183). Ontological inequality is compounded, 197, 166/183.
Further references to
furthermore, by the fact that in order to individuate fully distinct creatures, this title will be
creative force must temporarily abandon them to their own distinction. As a given in the text as
EINP, followed by
matter of course, once ‘extended’, purely intensive ‘difference is explicated page number.
in systems in which it tends to be cancelled’ (D&R, 293/228), just as, in
Bergsonian terms, ‘life as movement alienates itself in the material form
that it creates; by actualising itself, by differentiation itself, it loses “contact
with the rest of itself ”’(Bergsonism , 108/104; cf EINP, 195-196/214-215).
Quantitative difference is inevitable once we leave the uninhabitable domain
of pure creativity (pure intensity) as such.

III

The expressive scale is defined, then, by two simple principles, which Deleuze
adapts more or less tel quel from Leibniz. These principles are: ‘Everything
is always the same thing, there is only one and same Basis; and: Everything
is distinguished by degree, everything differs by manner [...] These are the
two principles of principles’.14 Perceived in terms of these two principles, 14. Deleuze, The
Fold: Leibniz and the
every apparent difference in ‘quality is nothing but difference in quantity’ Baroque, Paris,
(N&P, 50/44; cf Bergsonism, 73/74), and these quantitative differences Minuit, 1988, Tom
Conley (trans),
correspond directly to differences in proximity to pure creative thought, Minnesota UP, 1993,
that is to say to a form of expression which, very literally, says anything and p78/58 (referring to
Leibniz).
everything. Expressive power varies on a scale ranging from this infinite
articulation (the expression of ‘all-in-one’, the expression of unlimited
difference in a new monism) to merely unitary articulation (the expression
of only one affect or thought, the assertion of a simple, static existence).
At the highest end of the scale stands the utterly chaotic, purely virtual
limit of infinitely expressive thought - that inconceivable intensity of thought
which, at every moment, articulates all that can possibly be articulated. As
Deleuze understands it, this creative

chaos is characterised less by the absence of determinations than by the

infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. This is not a
movement from one determination to the other but, on the contrary,
the impossibility of a connection between them, since one does not appear
without the other having already disappeared [...] Chaos undoes every
consistency in the infinite (WIP, 44-45/42).

Chaos as such exceeds articulation, by itself it cannot consist. Chaos as such

‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’ 65
exceeds our (‘creaturely’) powers of thought. In chaos all beings become
something other than themselves, without interruption. Chaos is pure
creativity, abstracted from any sustainable creating; it undoes what it does
in the immediate instant of infinite transformation. Infinite creative
difference is conceivable only in a dimension traversed at infinite speed,
and Deleuze knows that ‘from Epicurus to Spinoza (the incredible book five
[of the Ethics]) and from Spinoza to Michaux the problem of thought is
infinite speed’. More, such ‘speed requires a milieu that moves infinitely in
itself - the plane, the void, the horizon’ (WIP, 38-39/36).
Philosophy is the discipline of thought that dedicates itself to the creation
of concepts entirely within such milieu. Every philosophical ‘concept is a
chaoid state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent,
become Thought’. Or again: ‘the problem of philosophy is to acquire a
consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges ... ’(WIP,
45/42). Philosophy is the closest thought can come to pure creative chaos,
without being ‘undone’.
The lowest end of the scale, by contrast, is populated by relatively thought-
less forms of existence, by minimally expressive (or creative, or active … )
forms of being. These are beings that can sing only a very limited part of
the general clamour of Being, in other words beings that cohere at a
maximum distance from chaos. Such beings exist in such a way as to avoid
‘becoming som ething other than themselves’. It would be m ere
anthropocentric hubris to identify this scale with something like the Great
Chain of Being, a chain in which the more ‘complex’ forms of life occupy a
naturally elevated place. For all creatures capable of thought themselves
need to become thoughtful; a creature expresses creation only by being, in
the most active and inventive sense, creative. Thinking is part of an arduous
learning process. All thoughtful beings begin their existence in ‘impotence
and slavery’, in ‘ignorance’ of their true creative nature, and remain ignorant
until they manage to remember or reinvent this creativity (EINP, 24/263;
268/289-90). Sadly, human beings, far from occupying a naturally privileged
place on the expressive scale, have a particular affinity for thoughtlessness.
We have a knack for transforming our active, open or creative dimension
into reactive closure and inertia. Creative force is active, it creates the very
objects of its perception, but ‘becoming-reactive is constitutive of man.
Ressentiment, bad conscience and nihilism are not psychological traits but
the foundation of the humanity in man. They are the principle of the human
being as such’ (N&P, 74-75/64).
It is thus we who are thoughtless, insofar as we consciously cut our particular
voice off from the general clamour of being, insofar as we tolerate (if not
cultivate) being trapped within the limits of consciousness, subjectivity, and
representation. As soon as we begin to represent the elements of our
experience and to formulate opinions about this experience, we cease to
present directly that part of creative thought to which we are able, in
principle, to give voice. What we express of active or creative being becomes

66 NEW FORMATIONS
reactive - passive, dampened, indirect (N&P, 46/41). Opinion is thought
become weary. Where creative thought moves at absolute speed, and passes
through its every articulation in one and the same moment; ordinary opinion
moves at relative speeds, and is concerned only with the succession of
movements from one point to another.15 Likewise, investment in the means 15. ‘Our misfortune
comes from
of representation and the pseudo-philosophical supervision of ‘appropriate’ opinion’, WIP,
representation requires the consolidation of all that isolates and distinguishes pp194-206.

us as particular beings, as if suspended from the vital flow of creative energy

that we nevertheless continue to express - only with minimal intensity. We
thereby identify with our inherited organic limits, rather than seek out the
echoes of that anorganic life we share with the rest of the cosmos. We co-
ordinate our interactions with others in the consensual interests of a ‘common
sense’, rather than seek to ‘become-other’. We align ourselves with our
particular fragments of territory, rather than pursue those creative ‘lines of
flight’ that cross every boundary and uproot every dwelling. Rather than
think at that creative level of coherence which is indistinguishable from a
being-thought, we thereby restrict thought to the abject supervision of mental
‘behaviour’ (recognition, classification, consumption …) that preserves our
bio-cultural distinction at the price of creative sterility. ‘To surpass the human
condition, such is the meaning of philosophy’.16 16. Foucault, op. cit.,
pp139-140/124-125.
Hence the essentially redemptive role for those intermediary practices,
art and science, whose mobility along the expressive scale allows them to
draw near to the limit of infinite speed. Like philosophy itself, art and science
are procedures that think (that create) in proximity to chaos. Every such
procedure has a ‘negative’ and a ‘positive’ aspect. Negatively, art and science
must puncture the repressive walls people generally erect to protect
themselves from chaotic creativity. In the interests of security, normality,
familiarity and order, people normally take shelter from the chaos forever
raging ‘over their heads’ under a conceptual ‘umbrella, on the underside of
which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions’.
But artists and scientists, like philosophers, ‘make a slit in the umbrella,
they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos
and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent’.
Though this rent will quickly be patched over with commentaries, imitations
and further opinions, the glimpses of reality it affords serve as a constant
invitation to assume a higher expressive power:

Art, science and philosophy cast planes over chaos. These three
disciplines are not like religions that invoke dynasties of gods, or the
epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella.
Philosophy, science and art want us to tear open the firmament and
plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price. 17 17. WIP, pp 191-192/
202-203, referring to
D.H. Lawrence.
It remains a matter of defeating chaos because while our task is to think
chaos, to let chaotic thought course through us, in order for such thought

‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’ 67
 to continue we ourselves must remain at a mastered distance from chaos. To
fall entirely into chaos is to be consumed in a kind of conceptual black hole.
Chaos as such consumes all form and undoes every doing: we must never
be directly ‘precipitat[ed] into the chaos that we want to confront’ (WIP,
188/199).
So positively, then, philosophy, art and science will establish zones of
durable consistency from within or close to the element of chaos. Only the
philosopher can bring back from chaos ‘variations that are still infinite’,
purely virtual variations that pulse with the infinite speed of thought (WIP,
190/202). True philosophical concepts are articulated upon the same virtual
plane as the chaotic movements of thought which they channel or configure
(WIP, 112/118).
The scientist, by contrast, is preoccupied with the actual processes by
which such speed becomes finite, that is to say with the actual, extended
forms in which pure intensive difference explicates itself. Whereas
‘philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency […] science,
on the other hand, relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference’, by
laying out, as if ‘on top’ of the virtual plane of constant variation, an open
empirical plane through which actual movements and propositions can be
distinguished and assessed (WIP, 186/197). ‘Science passes from chaotic
virtuality to the states of affairs and bodies that actualise it’; the scientist
‘brings back from chaos variables that have become independent by slowing
down’, that through their actualisation have been separated from the virtual
vitality that engendered them (WIP, 147/156; 190/202). Thus actualised,
these variables can be observed or modelled, measured or analysed. And if
science moves from the creatively virtual to the derivatively actual, art seeks
to reverse the process - to tap into virtually infinite creative power from
within the limits of actual materiality, to arrange patterns of sensation in
such a way as to point the way towards their creative source. Art is not itself
chaos but it opens a path back toward chaos, towards what Joyce called a
‘chaosmos’ (WIP, 192/204).

IV

The essential compatibility of art and science stems from ontological uni-
vocity, since the immediate casualty of its affirmation is the peculiarity of a
distinctly human voice - a voice that something called the ‘humanities’ would
18. Deleuze, Périclès
et Verdi: la philosophie seek to transcribe, ‘for its own sake’. Every artistic and scientific project
de François Châtelet, worth the name leaves anthropocentric illusions in ruins. Every discipline
Minuit, Paris, 1988,
p11. of thought has as its object not the consolidation of merely human liberty
but rather liberation from the human - ‘freedom become the capacity of
19. ‘Event or man to vanquish man’.18 The challenge in each case is to dissolve the subject
creation’ - the two
terms are effectively so as to reveal the absolute sufficiency of the ‘object’, grasped as a dynamic
synonymous, in What
is Philosophy, op. cit.,
creating or ‘event’,19 rather than merely specified as a particular creature
p198/211. defined by particular attributes. Ultimately, ‘nothing other than the Event

68 NEW FORMATIONS
subsists, the Event alone, Eventum tantum for all contraries .… ’ - the event
of pure creation as such. The ‘problem is therefore one of knowing how the
individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with
a world, in order to attain to the universal communication of events’.20 To 20. Logic of Sense, op.
cit., pp 207-208/176-
think the event of creation is to be thought by that event, at a level of intensity 178. ‘Individuality is
that consumes and dissolves the thinking subject as such. ‘The highest not a characteristic
of the Self but, on
exercise of thought’ can only be undertaken by a form of what Deleuze, the contrary, forms
after Spinoza, names the ‘spiritual automaton’. ‘Dispossessed of his own and sustains the
system of the
thought’, the automaton is thought through by divine or creative thought as dissolved Self ’, in
such, in a process through which ‘thought thinks itself ’ and nothing more.21 Difference and
Repetition, op. cit.,
The essential question is thus always a variant on the question posed in p327/254.
Cinema 1: how to ‘attain once more the world before man, before our own
dawn, the position where movement was [...] under the regime of universal 21. Deleuze, Cinema
2: The Time-Image,
variation’, where every action was a pure creation within ‘the luminous plane Minuit, 1985,
Tomlinson and
of immanence’?22 And the answer is always a variant of the answer given in
Habberjam (trans),
A Thousand Plateaus: by reducing ‘oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order Minnesota UP, 1989,
p343/263. Again, ‘if
to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter eternal return is the
the haecceity and impersonality of the creator’ (ATP, 343-44/280). 23 We can highest, the most
intense thought, this
then access ‘the non-organic life of things [...] which burns us [... and] unleashes is because its own
in our soul a non-psychological life of the spirit, which no longer belongs either extreme coherence,
at the highest point,
to nature or to our organic individuality, which is the divine part in us, the excludes the
spiritual relationship in which we are alone with God as light’. 24 coherence of a
thinking subject’, in
The distinctive roles of art and science are to be underst ood as Difference and
contributions to this general effort, this attempt to reverse the alienation of Repetition, op. cit.,
p81/58.
virtual force in the actualities it creates. The virtual individuates itself in
actuality, intensive force cancels itself in extension; science and art play 22. Cinema 1, op.
privileged (if ultimately only preparatory) roles in the redemptive process cit., p100/68.

of ‘counter-a ctualisation’ or ‘counter-effectuation’ which leads actual

23. Cf. Cinema 1,
creatures ‘back up’ to the virtual, event-ful creativity from which they spring pp117/81, 171/122.
(WIP, 147-48/159-160).
Science is generally confined to the more limited role in this process. Its 24. Cinema 1, ibid.,
p80/57.
concern is the study of actuality qua actuality. Science busies itself with actual
‘states of affairs’. Whereas through the invention of its concepts, ‘philosophy
continually extracts a consistent event from the state of affairs - a smile
without the cat, as it were - through its functions, science continually actualises
the event in a state of affairs, thing, or body that can be referred to’. The
concern of philosophy is the event of creating, the concern of science is the
creature that results. Science ‘relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in
order to gain a reference able to actualise the virtual’ (WIP, 112/118). For as
soon as the creatively virtual is perceived through a plane of reference, the
speed of creation slows down dramatically, as if caught in a ‘freeze-frame’.
Science operates in slow-motion. Even those values which limit the systems
of co-ordinates used to measure movement on the plane of reference - values
assigned ‘to the speed of light, absolute zero, the quantum of action, the
Big Bang’ - impose radical limits upon the scientifically incoherent notion of

‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’ 69
 ‘infinite speed’ or ‘infinite action’ (WIP, 113/119). Moreover, whereas fully
crea tive or ‘un conditioned’ philosophical concepts maintain ‘the
inseparability of variations’ internal to their consistency, science analyses
its plane of reference in terms of functions that presume ‘the independence
of variables, in relationships that can be conditioned’ (WIP, 119/126) and
ordered in terms of relatively stable equations or formulae. Insofar as science
limits itself to the physical, it necessarily stops short of an exploration of
the meta-physical, which can alone think the sufficient reason of the
25. Deleuze recalls physical. 25
Bergson’s belief ‘that
modern science
But we might say that scienc e - unlike the merely thoug htless
hasn’t found its representation of creatures - analyses actuality so as to prepare it for its
metaphysics, the
metaphysics it would eventual count er-actualisa tion (itself un dertaken through art and
need. It is this philosophy). Deleuze’s privileged scientific references - an eclectic collection
metaphysics that
interests me’, ranging from Maïmon and Saint-Hilaire through Bergson and Whitehead
Deleuze, Interview to Simondon and Prigogine - have at least one thing in common: they restore
with Arnaud Villani,
in Villani, La Guêpe a creative dynamism to the plane of reference as such. What qualifies as
et l’orchidée: Essai sur true science for Deleuze always involves an emphasis on ‘nonmetric
Gilles Deleuze, Belin,
Paris, 1999, p130. multiplicities’, ‘the multiplicities of smooth space’ or constant variation, as
opposed to the apparent stability and stasis of metric measurement and
26. As Pierre Zaoui predictable calculation within a homogeneously ‘striated space’. In keeping
reminds us, from a
Spinozist perspective with Spinoza’s emphasis on a creatively ‘naturing nature’ [natura naturans]
‘to love God as
over its passively ‘natured’ effects, Deleuze affirms a ‘numbering number’
naturing nature
[naturans] is not to over merely numbered quantities - a ‘nomadic’ or ‘independent number’,
love nature or the
real as it is - natured
number as a creative process in itself, whose ‘subsequent function is to measure
nature [naturata]’, in magnitudes in striated space’ (ATP, 605/484-85). 26 Each application of this
Zaoui, ‘La grande
identité Nietzsche- numbering number is an attempt to evoke, from within the limited co-
Spinoza, quelle ordinates of the plane of reference, a purely indeterminate creativity, a
identité?’, Philosophie
47 (Sept 1995), creativity variously at work in the mathematisation of quanta, fractals,
pp71-72. crystals, strings, strange attractors, resonance, turbulence, so many re-
workings of the ancient idea of the clinamen - that pure energy of
27. This aspect of
Deleuze’s work is displacement which distributes atoms across the universe and sets them in
explored to great motion.27
effect in the
endnotes of Brian There is certainly nothing anthropocentric about such creative
Massumi’s User’s numbering. The composition of a plane of reference proceeds through a
Guide to Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, radical ‘perspectivism’ which is ‘never relative to a subject’, but rather
MIT Press,
disseminated through a multitude of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘partial
Cambridge Mass.,
1992. See also observers’: ‘the role of the partial observer is to perceive and to experience,
Pearson, Germinal
Life, 91 and passim.
although these perceptions and affections are not those of a man, in the
currently accepted sense, but belong to the things studied’ (WIP, 124/130).
Partial observers are located in sites ‘devoid of all subjectivity’, in ‘sense
data distinct from all sensation’, and operate like photographic instruments
which ‘capture what no one is there to see, which make these unsensed
sensibilia blaze’. Scientific observers pick up on ‘the singularities of a curve,
of a physical system, of a living organism’, and in doing so - though they
remain within the referential ‘calibration of horizons’ and empirical

70 NEW FORMATIONS
deceleration of creative speed - they glimpse that ‘virtual’ or ‘potential’
force without which every state of affairs is deprived of ‘activity and
development’. Science indicates that even in the field of actuality, ‘nothing
is passive but everything is interaction, even gravity [pesanteur]’ (WIP, 146/
154). In the end, science itself demonstrates that ‘a state of affairs cannot be
separated from the potential through which it takes effect’.28 In short, science 28. Deleuze and
Guattari give an
observes actuality at a distance from the creative chaos that gives rise to it, example from
but ‘it is inspired less by the concern for unification in an ordered actual particle physics, a
discipline populated
system than by a desire not to distance itself too much from chaos, to seek by ‘countless
out potentials in order to seize and carry off a part of that which haunts it, infinitely subtle
observers’: ‘in the
the secret of the chaos behind it, the pressure of the virtual’ (WIP, 147/156). actuality of the
atomic nucleus, the
nucleon is still close
V to chaos and finds
itself surrounded by
a cloud of constantly
Now if art is ultimately more creative (and thus closer to philosophy) than emitted and
reabsorbed particles;
science, this is clearly not because it is somehow more intimate or humane, but a further level of
more subjective or personal - less abstract - than science. On the contrary: actualisation, the
electron is in
art’s privilege stems precisely from its higher impersonality, its more radical relation with a
power of abstraction, its ability to transcend, without abandoning the ‘logic potential photon
that interacts with
of sensation’, the scientific plane of reference and actuality. the nucleon to give a
Art thus occupies an inter-mediate place between the pure virtuality of new state of the
nuclear material’, in
philosophical concepts and the pure actuality of scientific states of affairs. WIP, op. cit., p145/
153; p124/131.
Art composes actively creative works of sensation, whose ontological status
is neither virtual nor actual but ‘possible’ (WIP, 168/177). Insofar as what is
composed is sensation - insofar as ‘the work of art is a being of sensation
and nothing else’ - it leans toward the realm of actuality. But insofar as the
creation of such beings is itself active and inventive - insofar as the ‘compound
of created sensations stands up on its own’ (WIP, 155/164) - art participates,
immediately and without reserve, in the univocal expression that is creation
in general. ‘Sensation is pure contemplation’, but ‘contemplation is creating’:
embodied thought, sensation is nothing other than ‘the mystery of passive
creation’ (WIP, 200/212). If philosophy’s ‘conceptual becoming is [creative]
heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form’, art’s ‘sensory becoming is
otherness caught in a matter of expression’ which unlike science does ‘not
actualise the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it: it gives it a body,
a life, a universe’ (WIP, 168/177).
Art, we might say, creates an echo chamber in which pure sensation can
vibrate in itself, in its undiluted intensity, independently of both the object
and the subject of sensation. Independently of the object, because art is
defined by its ability to make sensation (a smile, a grimace, an emotion …)
endure for its own sake, without regard for the corruption of its material
support. Through artistic composition, ‘it is no longer sensation that is
realised in the material but the material that passes […] ascends, into
sensation’ (WIP, 183/193). And independently of its subject, because every
movement back toward the virtual or creative must proceed, by definition,

‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’ 71
in the absence of an ‘independent’ subject. Artists are conduits for the
anonymous creatings that proceed through them, channels for the
‘nonhuman becomings of man’. Or again: art is the answer to the question,
‘how can a moment of the world be made to exist by itself?’, where this
answer always involves the extraction of that moment from its apparent
object and subject, its fusion with the surging energy of a cosmic becoming,
through a ‘gesture that no longer depends on whoever made it’ (WIP, 162-
63/172-73; 154/163-64).
The purpose of art is not to represent the world, still less to cultivate or
enrich our ‘appreciation’ of the world, but to create new and self-sufficient
compositions of sensation, compositions that will draw those who experience
them directly into the material vitality of the cosmos itself. The artist is not
the more refined cousin of those craftsmen who impose beautiful form upon
inert matter, but rather the liberator of creative anarchy in matter itself.
The artist does not observe the world or inhabit the world, so much as
demonstrate how ‘we become with the world […] Everything is vision,
becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular,
becoming zero …’ (WIP, 160/169).
Freed from an object, stripped of a subject, deprived of reference, these
becomings or sensations cannot be contained within the confines of lived
experience [le vécu]. In its virtual intensity, life ‘creates zones where living
beings whirl around, and only art can reach and penetrate them in its
enterprise or co-creation’. Co-creators with life, every artist is ‘a seer, a
becomer’, someone who lives at an intensity that ordinary life cannot sustain.
The artist is someone who ‘has seen something in life that is too great, too
unbearable’ for ordinary communication. Literary characters, for example,
can only exist ‘because they do not perceive but have passed into the
landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensations. Ahab
really does have perceptions of the sea, but only because he has entered
into a relationship with Moby Dick that makes him a becoming-whale and
forms a compound of sensations that no longer needs anyone: ocean’ (WIP,
154-162/164-173).
Consider Deleuze’s most highly developed example: cinema. What
cinema demonstrates above all, says Deleuze, is the machinery of time as
such. As it evolves from its early confinement in Hollywood’s entertainment
industry through to the more purely experimental terrain of Europe’s
nouvelle vague, cinema progresses from an essentially indirect treatment of
time - time filtered through actual movement, through the co-ordination of
actions and reactions in a well-defined field of reference - to an ultimately
direct or immediate treatment, one that blends with the pure creative virtuality
of ‘time in its pure state’. In the process, cinema sacrifices the co-ordinating
subject of ordinary action (the subject exemplified by the great Western
heroes) so as to clear the way for an exposure to pure ‘sound and optical
situations’, situations in which it is impossible to live, situations impossible
to endure, but which open directly onto that ‘beating heart of reality’ that is

72 NEW FORMATIONS
Deleuze’s invariable concern. Paralysed, dismembered, actors become ‘pure
seers’, exposed without reserve to an intensity that explodes all actuality.29 29. Cinema 2, op.
cit., p59/41.
Such seers, though actually ‘helpless’, are co-creators with time in its pure
(or exclusively creative) state. There is no more an ‘in-between’ art and life,
for ‘it is the whole of the real, life in its entirety, which has become spectacle’
- this is ‘life as spectacle, and yet in its spontaneity’.30 They are absorbed 30. Ibid., p112/84;
118/89.
with the ultimate identity of virtuality and pure thought, in a creative
movement that unites ‘negative and positive, place and obverse, full and
31. Ibid., p281/215;
empty, past and future, brain and cosmos, inside and outside’.31 Cinema 1, op. cit.,
p290/215.
An essential part of this process, accomplished in any genuinely artistic
sequence, is the conversion of an actualised space into a quasi-virtual or
creative space, what Deleuze calls an ‘espace quelconque [any-space-whatever]’.
Such a space is

a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that
is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts,
so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a
space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What
in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of
such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it
were, prior conditions of all actualisation, all determination […]. The
any-space-whatever retains one and the same nature: it no longer has
co-ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and
Qualities, independently of the states of things or milieux which actualise
them (have actualised them or will actualise them, or neither the one
nor the other - it hardly matters).32 32. Cinema 1, ibid.,
p155/109; 169/120.

Access to such a space is nothing less than access to a place of pure creation,
abstracted from the limits of actuality. The outcome is anticipated in the
visionary films of Yasujiro Ozu, in which co-ordinated movements and ‘action-
images’ have been replaced ‘by pure optical and sound images’. Along the
way, whether through disconnection or evacuation, ‘Ozu’s spaces are raised
to the state of any-space-whatevers’ . They thereby ‘reach the absolute, as
instances of pure contemplation, and immediately bring about the identity
of the mental and the physical, the real and the imaginary, the subject and
the object, the world and the I’.33 33. Cinéma 2, op.
Access to the plane of this identity, the plane of pure creation in which cit., pp27-32/16-20;
cf. 281/215.
‘everything is real’ and every reality is in the same way, is the exclusive
concern of Deleuze’s philosophy. The way we structure our ordinary
experience amounts to an attempt to cut ourselves off from this plane. We
remain trapped in delusions of equivocity, caught up in the merely apparent
distinctions that divide mental and physical, real from imaginary, and subject
from object. As actual beings we tend to forget the virtuality we express. Art
and science make complementary contributions to its philosophical recovery
insofar as they prepare for and enable the redemptive movement of counter-

‘EVERYTHING IS REAL’ 73
actualisation, the movement whereby a particular creature can reverse the
course of its genesis (and the cause of its forgetfulness) and thus access the
active, impersonal creating that it most essentially is. Science orients static
actuality in line with dynamic virtuality, whereas art evacuates actual sensation
so as to expose, in an espace quelconque, the creative intensity it contemplates
or contains. Only philosophy, however, will be able to claim a fully virtual
consistency, a creative power unlimited by its medium or element. Only
philosophy can claim to be fully autonomous in its creation, in the creation
of concepts that owe nothing to actuality. Only philosophy, in short, can
claim immediacy to the infinite speed of creative thought as such.

74 NEW FORMATIONS