Realismo do Virtual e do Atual

DELEUZE AND THE GENESIS OF FORM
Manuel DeLanda

http://www.artnode.se/artorbit/issue1/f_deleuze/f_deleuze_delanda.html

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To quote from what is probably his most important book, "Difference and Repetition":

"Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. In this sense, actualization or differenciation is always a genuine creation."

And Deleuze goes on to discuss processes of actualization more complex than bubbles or crystals, processes such as embryogenesis, the development of a fully differenciated organism starting from a single cell. In this case, the space of energetic possibilities is more elaborate, involving many topological forms governing complex spatio-temporal dynamisms:

"How does actualization ocurr in things themselves?...Beneath the actual qualities and extensities [of things themselves] there are spatio-temporal dynamisms. They must be surveyed in every domain, even though they are ordinarly hidden by the constituted qualities and extensities. Embryology shows that the division of the egg is secondary in relation to more significant morphogenetic movements: the augmentation of free surfaces, stretching of cellullar layers, invagination by folding, regional displacement of groups. A whole kinimatics of the egg appears which implies a dynamic".

In "Difference and Repetition", Deleuze repeatedly makes use of these "spaces of energetic possibilities" (technically refered to as "state spaces" or "phase spaces"), and of the topological forms (or "singularities") that shape these spaces. Since these ideas reappear in his later work, and since both the concept of "phase space" and that of "singularity" belong to mathematics, it is safe to say that a crucial component of Deleuzian thought comes from the philosophy of mathematics. And, indeed, chapter four of "Difference and Repetition" is a meditation on the metaphysics of the differential and integral calculus. On the other hand, given that "phase spaces" and "singularities" become physically significant only in relation to material systems which are traversed by a strong flow of energy, Deleuze philosophy is also intimately related to that branch of physics which deals with material and energetic flows, that is, with thermodynamics. And, indeed, chapter five of "Difference and Repetition" is a philosophical critique of nineteenth century thermodynamics, an attempt to recover from that discipline some of the key concepts needed for a theory of immanent morphogenesis.

At the beginning of that chapter, Deleuze introduces some key distinctions that will figure prominently in his later work, specifically the concept of "intensity", but more importantly, he reveals in the very first page his ontological commitments. It is traditional since Kant to distinguish between the world as it appears to us humans, that is, the world of phenomena or appereances, and the world as it exists by itself, regardless of whether there is a human observer to interact with it. This world "in itself" is refered to as "nuoumena". A large number of contemporary thinkers, particularly those that call themselves "postmodernists", do not believe in nuomena. For them the world is socially constructed, hence, all it contains is linguistically-defined phenomena. Notice that even though many of these thinkers declare themselves "anti-essentialist", they share with essentialism a view of matter as an inert material, only in their case form does not come from a Platonic heaven, or from the mind of God, but from the minds of humans (or from cultural conventions expressed linguistically). The world is amorphous, and we cut it out into forms using language. Nothing could be further from Deleuzian thought than this postmodern linguistic relativism. Deleuze is indeed a realist philosopher, who not only believes in the autonomous existance of actual forms (the forms of rocks, plants, animals and so on) but in the existance of virtual forms. In the first few lines of chapter five of "Difference and Repetition", where Deleuze introduces the notion of "intensity" as a key to understand the actualization of virtual forms, he writes:

"Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given...Difference is not phenomenon but the nuoumenon closest to the phenomenon...Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned...Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity".