How does difference create identities?
How does a problematic field give rise to solutions?
How does the virtual get actualized?
All ways of asking the same question. And the answer is: through intensities.
You have the virtual realm of difference. It’s a realm in which you have no identities. It’s all relations without any particular identity. The identities come later.
Deleuze’s philosophy accords with narrative therapy because they both deny that we have these deep identities that it’s our job to discover.
Imagine it’s a family session and the dad goes ballistic. He starts screaming at the mother, ‘you’ve always marginalized me, I feel outside the family.’ And it seems like it’s coming from nowhere.
One way to think of it, and Delueze would say this is the wrong way to think of it, would be that the anger already exists, it sought an outlet, and it found an outlet at this moment. But what Deleuze is gonna say is, you had a set of fraught and intense relationships going on in the room, and something happened to actualize that intensity in the form of anger at that moment.
But it doesn’t have to be anger that necessarily gets actualized out of that intensity. Something else could happen. You could imagine the same level of intensity going on, and somebody says something, perhaps different, and instead of anger, let’s say the father starts to cry.
If you assume that anger already exists, just waiting to be released, then the kind of work you’ll do is very different from if you think of emotion as a field of relative intensities that can be actualized in various ways—anger being just one of them in this case.
A psychoanalyst might interpret the anger as pre-existing, perhaps rooted in an unresolved Oedipal dynamic. But if we instead view this as a field of potential expressions, then we open up space for other forms of actualization, each tied to different understandings of the self—of who I am and what I’m about. It becomes creative.
For the narrative therapist, any intervention that you make is going to be an actual intervention. You’re going to say something, or you’re going to do something. You’re intervening on an actual slash-virtual-field in such a way as to have one effect or another. And maybe that effect will change something. Every intervention that you make in the course of discussion with someone has got to be an experiment – an experiment that’s particularly fraught at moments or at places of intensity. Because different things can break out and we don’t always know what they are.
May uses love to show how the virtual and the actual are inseparable—how what happens between people is always both.
The energy field between people is something that doesn’t itself always have a particular name. We use the word ‘love’ to say something about it, but in thinking about it, there’s more. Imagine, with two people, there is an intensity that’s going to break out in a particular way. For instance, two people sitting across the table from each other, and something happens where one person reaches over and puts his hand on the other person – movement in the actual.
What happened was there was a set of intensities going on between them, and that set of intensities was such that at a certain moment, it broke out into a movement in the actual.
I want to ask, what is the love part? Perhaps the love part is not just the feelings themselves, the intensities – which are often difficult to name and shifting – on the one hand, nor is it just the expressions.
We might say that love is the actual-slash-virtual whole of what is happening between them. So love is not something that just happens in the actual. It’s not something that just happens in the virtual. Love is going to involve a set of shifting and intense virtual relationships that actualize themselves.
Origami further elucidates the ever-evolving field.
So you have a piece of paper and you fold it into origami. And you can unfold it into something else. But once it’s folded into something, you can’t unfold it completely again. What you can fold it into next is based, in part, on what you’ve folded it into. You can’t just fold it into anything. You can fold it into only those things which this particular figure would allow. And there’d be many of them, and we don’t know how many of them. But you can’t just fold anything. That would be the limitation. The thing that you’re folding, the paper itself, that would be the equivalent of the virtual field. And once you’ve folded something, we might say that there are certain points at which folding becomes easier, and those will be the (stronger) intensities.
And now, finally, May brings it back to the point of my whole series – why dialectics should give way to difference. One negates, the other affirms.
Hegel said that things happen through opposition and negation. You have a situation, there’s a tension, something opposes it, that opposition creates another situation, so everything moves by negation. For Hegel, history’s progressing through denials. Delueze wants to see the unfolding of things not negatively, but positively.
If we think of it in terms of the intensities, then the intensities in fact are creative. What happens is you have a virtual field, that virtual field operates through creation, and that creation operates through the breakup of intensities. So what you have now is not the unfolding of reality through a constant negation, but the unfolding of reality through constant creation.
The intensities affirm the unfolding of reality as a creative process, rather than a negative process. As something that yields joy, rather than what Hegel calls ‘the labor of the negative’,
Deleuze’s Hard Law of Explication:
What gets explicated, gets explicated once. It appears. It disappears. But the process of explication, the process of swarming, the process of creating, the process of intensities breaking out into new forms, explicating themselves in other ways, in which they remain implicated, that process is eternal. That’s the eternal return.
The identities come and go, the process remains. Or put another way, reality is a process of continuous creation in which rather than holding on to the identities that present themselves to us as all there is, we can ask ourselves and we can ask ourselves at every moment because it’s always there: What might we create? What might we make?
May ultimately boils down Deleuze’s entire philosophy to the question, How Might One Live? Despite this very personal framing, Deleuze’s philosophy also tells us how to change the world (which is the whole point of philosophy itself, Marx tells us). Marx will always be indispensable in showing how capital captures life. But Delueze shows us how life might escape–and create otherwise. Instead of seeing revolution as the negation of capitalism, we can see it as the creative construction of new assemblages—new ways of life, organization, production, desire.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the clearest example of this move, so next up is Anti-Oedipus.