On the Realism of Manuel DeLanda (and Gilles Deleuze)

Manuel DeLanda has often spoke at the European Graduate School as part of the Gilles Deleuze chair he holds there. The EGS publishes many of its lectures online, and a 2007 lecture DeLanda gave there dealing with Chapter 3 of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus has made its way onto Youtube (for the lecture series, visit: http://youtube.com/watch?v=zqisvKSuA70&mode=related&search=).

The subject of this lecture dealt with Deleuze's interest in the animal world, and why humans concerned only with the human world must expand the scope of their interests to the the 'natural' world in order to more fully experience the richness of life. As DeLanda notes, we must "learn from the world itself", in order to ensure that our "pride of being human" doesn't prevent the deeper experiences we have when relating with our environments. In short, we must try to be "like rocks, or like birds". While I thoroughly agree with the principle of this position - that life itself should not, and cannot be limited to the human realm, that instead we must embrace the phenomenal diversity of the human experience - my point of critique is primarily methodological.

DeLanda begins by discussing 'expressivity' as a fundamental feature of the living and nonliving world. A crystal expresses its 'crystalness' regardless of human interaction when its molecules interact with light, when its molecules rest atop soil molecules, when it transforms the path of wind by its simple presence. This is a very attractive concept, and so encompassing (some might say 'totalitarian'), that it is hard to disagree with. Indeed, I don't wish to reject the concept of expressivity, if I do think the concept is a slightly clunky replacement for materiality. However, the use of 'expressivity' to account for this phenomena in ontology does imply, to me, something essential, something independent, something immanent.

And this is precisely what DeLanda states explicitly - he and Deleuze are realists precisely because they believe in the independence, one might say the isolation, of materiality. Things come from themselves, not from something else. It is hard to disagree with this point as well. We cannot say that the bourgeois make alienation, or that the sun makes cherry blossoms flower. To 'make' this extreme claim, one would have to tread towards dangerously close determinism. However, the other extreme (though not so distanced), that every aspect of materiality is independent and individual is equally worrisome. It is not an either/or question of ontology, but rather the space in between - the interactions, the interconnectedness, the inseparability of materiality.

This must apply to the human world as well, and therefore it is more than a little problematic to talk about these separate spheres of 'animal', 'plant', 'geologic' and 'human' as differentiated worlds (and within them, countless differentiations as well). They are deeply intertwined, contingent 'spheres'. And it is here where my point of contention with DeLanda (and probably, by extension, Deleuze) lies. I can accept this differentiation of ontology as existent, but this is where the ability to say more about our world, and indeed to experience that world, ends. The next step is a question of interpretation, and this is, since we are humans, a human endeavour.

It is easy to see how, through language, our interpretation of the world is constructed. But even our experiences, constantly vetted by our socialization, (or, if you prefer, environmentalization) and by our very 'humanity', are regulated in immensely complex and interdependent, but finite ways. Now, this is not to make a case for a highly complicated determinism. Rather it is to say that human action is contingent on the confluence of ontology and epistemology at any given moment. Thus, it is impossible, as humans, to talk about understanding the (non)lived experience of a crystal without referring to the contextuality of the human (but more often much more cultural, social, political and personal) experience.

One might present the teleological argument that humanity is full of potential that we must actualize, and I am not necessarily against this position directly. Human nature, the range of all possible human experience and expression is impossibly vast and entirely out the scope of my thinkable range to provide even a brief overview of it at this given moment, let alone at all temporal points. However, this vastness and the unpredictability of history makes these kinds of claims extremely difficult. It is always easy to look at an Oak tree and hold a seed and make the link, but much harder to predict from the seed what will emerge.

The point of all this is to say that the interconnections of our atoms that relate to form our psyches, whose manifestations relate to form our society which relate to form our humanity, which is itself only a small part of an interrelationship between our ecology, and so on, preclude us of making definite statements on the veracity of independent reality. What we are ultimately making statements about is our interpretation of this reality.

Thus, when DeLanda says "we must be more like a rock, or more like a bird", what he is really saying is "we must be more like our personal and social human interpretation of the expressivity of 'rockness'". This might be a moot point to some, but it is a debate that is laden with power. The knowledge that we create when we express our experiences affects us in very real ways but it can only ever explain the power relations that actually “do” the shaping of our realities, since it is a product of these relations themselves. Simply, there may be a “truth” existing in the world, an absolute form of 'rockness' independent of individual or social subjectivity – that is, traditionally ‘objective’ – but it is unimportant, since we can never know it because our understanding of it will always be mediated by our surroundings.