Becoming-Deleuzian

Abstract

The writings of poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze are intentionally designed to defy summary. Their ‘rhizomatic’ (infinitely bifurcating) form renders it impossible to generate a totalizable, self-consistent system from them. They are nevertheless highly ordered and produce concrete effects, including situated meanings and verifiable propositions. It is, in fact, the particular form of their openness which, far from consigning them to slippery irrelevance, charges them with pragmatic power. The pragmatic dimension of the works of Deleuze can be brought out by analyzing the process of their reception, rather than attempting to isolate their content as a closed system. In the encounter between the reader and the work, the work can be seen as performing its own content. That ‘content’ is conceptual, understood in a way that sharply distinguishes ‘concept’ from ‘proposition’. For Deleuze, the concept is a dynamism. It conveys a force that is real without ceasing to be ideal. This makes the encounter with the work a literal ‘event’ in which something always new transpires. Thus alongside situated meanings and verifiable propositions, the work also produces ‘becomings’. Becoming, for Deleuze, can only be grasped as a function of an open system, and with reference to an ontological distinction between the actual and the virtual. Deleuze's emphasis on the ideal as a literal force that enters actual experience without being contained in it, that is actualized without ceasing to be virtual, that cannot but be felt but always escapes, earns his philosophy the paradoxical label of ‘transcendental empiricism’.