§94. Ever Not Quite
Deleuze's philosophy is an empiricism because like Epicurus and Locke he begins with sensibility as a response to shock from outside, and because like James and Dewey, relations are empirical and discovered by affect.
Here is his ponderous variation on the old motto of empiricism: “On the path which leads to that which is to be thought, all begins with sensibility.” He proposes to establish this empiricism “transcendentally,” that is, immanently, without introducing anything beyond experience and what can be deduced of its empirical genesis. Transcendental empiricism is a more consistently empirical empiricism, and it is James's radical empiricism as seen by a uniquely acute scholar of European philosophy.11Any organism's cognitive powers are effects of evolution, adaptations mindlessly tuned by natural selection, or we may suppose that they are. They have therefore a normal function, an ordinary operation, doing the adaptive service they were naturally selected to do. But these powers are not limited to this evolved function. Our eyes did not evolve to see stars we cannot act on, but see them we do. Sensible affect in response to environmental change can activate either the ordinary collaboration of cognitive powers for which neurology is adapted, that being the normal use of concepts; or it may activate what Deleuze calls the higher form of sensibility, transcending the normal, average, everyday, evolved, adaptive function, and breaking out new territory for sensibility to explore with new concepts incommensurable with what has gone before (an argument also in Nietzsche and Bergson [§81]).
Each faculty or cognitive power may encounter something that surpasses it from the standpoint of normal, everyday “empirical” use, and which elicits from it what Deleuze calls a transcendent (not “transcendental”) operation. The faculty rises to its distinctive operation (what solely it can do) only in the wake of a powerless moment of shock.
“Each faculty must be borne to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable from the point of view of its empirical [i.e., normal] exercise.” The outcome of such interaction is not veridical representation but a kind of experimentation and poetic creation. The allure that stimulates empirical concept creation is affect, the joyous passage to augmented power, with a desire to repeat. Such experience, especially the desire, poses a problem. How do we repeat what we have no concept of? We have to think, experiment, create the concept. This is problematic empiricism in perhaps its most far-reaching form.12In its transcendent exercise a cognitive power tends to excess, in anarchic indifference to collaboration with other faculties or competent authorities. It chases qualities for which there is as yet no music, no recognition, no common sense, being only a visual or aural intensity. In this moment we sense qualities that can only be sensed, without the collaboration of language, concepts, or principles. We feel what Epicurus described as the enargeia of primitive aisthesis. We stumble and stutter in response to sensible shock, James's pure experience, and provoked by these disparate sources—which were not meant for us, not meant to be thought, not ideal forms already akin to thought—thinking is forced to exercise a singular power of invention.
Such activity by a sensory power transcends all the other faculties, sharing no common object. That is its singularity, though with repetition normality sets in. Quotidian life plays out on an accumulated mass of such repetition, but this normalcy has a genesis in transcendent sensibility, in singularities, thresholds passed, emergent new qualities and affects. The allure that draws out conceptual creation is an affect and the desire to repeat, which is what allure does to us, the creation of concepts chasing this transcendent sensibility.
One wants to repeat something for which one has no name and no concept, only a qualitative memory of intensity. The allure of the affect motivates the creation of a concept, obscure but distinct, of what we want, and funds experimentation. Such concepts are empirical not because they derive from sensations but because they chase them, their creation being forced on thought by the strangeness of a sensitive life. Thought starts with a shock from the outside, a shock to sense. The shock, to be shocking, has to be strange, unrecognizable, unforeseen, inducing the disequilibrium that Dewey associated with experience. Thought responds to sensibility by creating concepts, trying to catch up, though it never succeeds, remaining forever a posteriori.Deleuze closes this argument with the admission of “transcendental empiricism's profession of faith,” drawing on a source that confirms his appreciation of James's work. He makes an unlikely reference (for a 1960s Paris avant-garde philosopher) to The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), by the little-known American author Benjamin Paul Blood. His source is Jean Wahl, who was quoting William James, an admirer of Blood's work, and who published an appreciation with extensive quotations. Deleuze quotes Wahl quoting James quoting Blood: “Nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true, ever not quite.”13
The engraver's lathe is an image of what Peirce describes as nature's infinitesimal tendency to diversification. Every new phase of movement is different, and the difference has to be redistributed over the whole past, infinitesimally altering every trajectory. That is why Bergson insisted that trajectories are retrospective constructions. The future does not exist; it is really future and becoming, “ever not quite.” Wahl wrote that, for James, “empiricism is essentially a philosophy of the fragmentary, of the scattered.” It was to illustrate this that he quotes James quoting Blood and “ever not quite,” words James says are “fit to be pluralism’s heraldic device.
There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some genius of reality escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says ‘hands off.’ ”14James describes radical empiricism as “a philosophy of plural facts.” This empiricism implies pluralism in natural philosophy because empirically real external relations presuppose original manyness. If empirically attested relations are really external to their terms, then there have to be many, an original multiplicity and difference. Nature is “unfinished, growing in all sorts of places.” Nature “grow[s] not integrally but piecemeal by the contribution of its several parts.” “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along, after every sentence. Something always escapes.”15
That passage impressed Deleuze. “and... and... and, stammering. Empiricism is nothing other than this.” The plurality of this pluralism does not lie in the count of terms, how many there are, or how many kinds; the essence is the and, the primitive conjunction that joins new elements to open sets. He says this “method of and” does away with “Being = is.” “The conjunction ‘and... and... and...’ carries enough force to shake and uproot the very ‘to be.’ ” This primitive conjunction, “the constitutive ‘and’ of things,” is not one specific relation (or logical connective) among others; rather, “it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms. A quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life.”16
Deleuze describes empiricism as “thinking with and, instead of thinking is” Thinking with and means thinking relations as real connections, not intentional or fictive, yet external, that is, not analytic or conceptual. Each relative item is different and can only be added “experimentally” to an intrinsically unfinished assemblage.
And... and... and, stammering, broken, incomplete, but consistent for the duration. Those stammering conjunctions break out new territory for thought and action. “Relations are not the object of a representation, but the means of an activity.” Relations are not represented, not perceived, not present objects, but rather affects and lures, springs to action. “The same [empiricist] critique that takes relation away from representation, gives it back to practice.” That is how Deleuze understands Hume. Relations are not for knowledge; their value is practical, not theoretical, problematic, not theorematic. Making the relation is an experiment we try, and the test is affect, “belonging to the moral, passional, political, and economic order.”17“This is what empiricism is, syntax and experimentation.” Syntax alludes to operations of assembly and disassembly, and experimentation responds to the necessity imposed by external relations for a trial. Whether one element is consistent with some other really different one cannot be deduced by analysis. It takes experience and experiments to discover relations worth knowing. The inquiry is endless because the past won't stop changing.18