Immanence 1: Departing, Remaining, and Abandoned Homes

Immanence: to remain in... Immanence is not and can not be presence, which is simply to be, to be there, to be therein. Im-manence: to remain in, therein, which already refers to contrast with departing, imparting, or parting-with. Immanence remains in, rather than departing, stepping out. And in this sense, immanence already includes something which does or has passed, has departed or left behind its there, its presence. Not absence, not necessarily a being which was and now is not present, but a presence, a therein (a being that is in what it is) that passes outside itself, that is no longer in what it is, but is outside what it is, that is outside itself. Does this mean in another? Or is it already in-nothing, outside of everything, standing at the limit of all inclusion? This is the question of transcendence, of going beyond or stepping out, of leaving, departing, escaping.

Immanence thus cannot do without reference to a movement of transcendence by which something has departed and gone outside itself, leaving that which it was in, that is to say, leaving itself (an in-itself that has left itself, leaving itself empty). Immanence is that which, in regards to this movement of departing, nonetheless remains in. It is what stays behind, is left or abandoned. Yet it is not simply there, simply present. It is only there as left there by something that has gone. And, in leaving itself, the being leaves only an empty therein, wherein nothing remains, an empty itself without that which is itself and is in-itself. So we can propose that immanence is that pure therein that is no longer a being-in, as the presence of the being within has been evacuated.

This does not leave us with an absence, but with an abandon which is not the lack of presence, but a presence which gives only the loss of presence, a presence of the place itself without that which was in it. Absence prefers the place as emptied container, a pure, neutral recepticle. Abandon is, rather, the place as itself presence, now visible as itself in the lack of what occupied it. This is immanence: the abandon that resides in the vacated residence itself, the homelessness not of the being that has gone, but of the now unoccupied home that cannot be itself for lack of those it would keep in dwelling. Immanence is what remains in when no one is home.

Critique and the 'Critical Point'

In Parables for the Virtual, Massumi says,

Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is "selected." [32]

This notion of the 'critical point' can help shed light on a mode of reading, approaching, and critiquing a philosophical work that does not fall into the traps of representation. A few days ago, I wrote some rough comments in response to this post from Zoēpolitics, which I'll elaborate on here. I was particularly responding to these statements:

"What if instead of reading these thinkers in terms of whether we agree or disagree with them, instead we were to consider the more general question of 'how they make us think'? What if, in other words, we were to read them against the grain of how they are 'normally' interpreted, in order to tease out the alternative potentialities they unlock?...In short, what if instead of spending so much time 'debunking' we were to 'foster' instead (Massumi)?"

'Fostering' certainly seems more fruitful, productive, and interesting than 'debunking'. The former seems to correspond to the affirmative sense of critique that Deleuze finds in Nietzsche, the latter to critique as Lyotard construes it in Libidinal Economy: caught hopelessly in the representational space of the prerogative being critiqued. The former rescues the most forceful and explosive particles from the thing criticized, engaging them with expressive traits that are themselves drawn out by the most forceful lines of the reader. Rather than sterilizing both in an ineffectual representation with only the most banal effects, it selects that which can escape such sterility, that which can free itself and fly into a pure differing, a pure creation, that which draws both into a becoming-other. It is a joyous affirmation of a difference in-between the reader and what was read. Only such an affirmation can bring forth something 'new' in the most extreme and authentic sense, the sense of attaining absolute deterritorialization.

Instead of responding to the solutions, the conclusions, the propositions of an argument, rejecting or accepting them, falling into a rigid binary, 'fostering' would seek out the problems, the complex problematic fields, of which the solutions are only effects. It would seek to rediscover the force of these problems, buried under calcified layers of understanding. The reader would negotiate these fields, these 'complexions', in order to find those sites of the most intense resonance between the constellations of problems composing the field and those composing the reader's own complexion. These are the sites of 'forced movement', where difference itself opens up in the new, in the line of flight. Here we might find a nomadic distribution of problems and solutions, the immanent evaluations of the Overman, of an Ethics. There is no longer an issue of interpreting and judging a representation, nor of representing one's reaction. Critique is no longer that of the conclusions, of what they represent as being 'good or bad', 'right or wrong', 'true or false'.

Critique has become a gathering of forceful problems selected in and of, by and for the encounter between two complexions, raising their intensities to the critical threshold at which something new and different can emerge: new arrangements of problems, new pathways of solution, new connections with the outside. This emergence marks the overturning of everything implicated insofar as it becomes distributed in a field of differences, a smooth space. The theme of emergence is what leads me to quote Massumi, as the notion of the 'critical point' is precisely the threshold of intensity that, once crossed, opens onto an emergence of the new. Critique in the mode of 'fostering' would seek to map out these critical points, the points of transformation of formalizations of expression.

These points are nodes of 'machinic heterogenesis', as Guattari says, autopoietic nuclei that enter catalytic relations with expressive traits, the intensive features of a machine. These nodes or singularities constitute the 'critical points' of a structure (regime of signs), which, in forming catalytic couplings with elements of that structure (expressive traits), generate machinic arrangements that open onto other orders, other 'Universes of values'. This generation or heterogenesis is precisely where the biunivocality of content and expression imposed by stratafication gives way to intensive order of matter/sense or the plane of consistency: there is a double transversality, as the singularities of content (nodes or critical points) deterritorialize the form of expression (structure), and the traits of expression (machinic components, intensive features) deterritorialize the form of content (Universes, constellations of singularities composing the diagram or 'virtuality' of a structure).

Cartography has a double edge: mapping the singular nodes embedded in a structural order, marking points of potential transformation and machinic heterogenesis, points at which several different structural orders can become involved in a conjunction that belongs to a machinic order that is different in kind from structure; and diagramming the expressive traits that engage these nodes and are catalyzed by them, opening onto new 'Universes', new constellations of traits, new permutations of the machinic phylum. This twofold function should thereby shed light on the abstract machines at play, by mapping the domain in which they can function and diagramming the range of functional possibilities they manifest. The abstract machine can only act in the concrete arrangements formalized by expression, by the 'regimes' or 'structures' left cooling, stratifying, in the wake of the machinic phylum. Yet the abstract machine has open to it an unlimited resevoir of virtual components and their possible functions, defined by the Universes, the diagrams, the constellations of singularities drawn by the very cutting edges of the phylum.

Together, these functions work to elucidate the machinic plane of consistency which the abstract machines traverse, the whole intensive and micrological order underlying and conditioning the order of structures, regimes of expression, molar signifiance and subjectification (representation and identity). By mapping the critical points or nodes of transformation, and diagramming the machinic components that can engage them and open a bifurcation, planomenology will be attentive to the dynamic and singular arrangements composed by any given encounter. The critical points are those particles of content embedded in expressive formalizations that have the potential to destabilize and mutate that formalization. The machinic components are those particles of expression that constellate around the edges of the diagram of content, composing those most deterritorialized functional arrangements that open onto new Universes and new diagrammatic configurations. The simplest example pertaining to the reading of a work of philosophy would have the critical points as those promiscuous concepts or ambiguous propositions that have the most potential to overturn a reading and allow it involve several other 'understandings', or even invent new ones, while the machinic components would be those ideas, problems, interpretative tendencies, 'frames of reference', even delirious 'misunderstandings' of the reader that can potentially open the text onto new fields of reference and orientation.

Planomenology would necessitate a 'fostering' of critical points, singularities, autocatalytic nuclei and the heterogeneous machinic components that engage them and compose autopoietic arrangements. This requires a very different sense of 'critique': rather than attacking the logic of the propositions of an argument, one intensifies the catalytic couples constellated by critical points until they cross the threshold of transformation, reaching 'critical' intensity, bifurcating and giving rise to an unpredictable and genuine difference through the selective actualization of virtualities. Rather than judging and implicitly moralizing, leveling the differences, desingularizing the problems, subordinating the unique to the identity of a model, it would seek to create an ethos, that is, to bring forth the singular problematic of an encounter or event. Only by negotiating such a problematic in its irreducible singularity is the liberation of the new, the affirmation of chance, possible. Only by analyzing 'how it makes us think' as Jason says, how it composes or is itself a composition of thought and action, of matter/sense, will we attain the absolute singularity of an ethical evaluation, free from the moralizing judgment of representation and argument.

What is Planomenology?

I pose the question only provisionally, as I hope to continue approaching it throughout my life, but it is perhaps an appropriate way to begin. The obvious cue is to phenomenology (as well as phantasmatology, a word Foucault coined to describe Deleuze's early metaphysics). Yet whereas Husserl intended phenomenology as methodological, I do not mean this to denote a method per se; rather, an approach to or prerogative on the ontological. Short of being systematic and exact, it should be anexact yet rigorous.

'Planomenon' is another word for the plane of consistency, perhaps the key concept in Deleuze and Guattari's later collaborations. The Planomenon is the Real as such, the ultimate 'object' of ontology, as the univocal Being of difference itself. It is the field of immanent difference, in which immanence is not ascribed to or said of any transcendent Identity or Actuality: immanence is immanent to immanence alone. Difference is no longer caught between the field of immanence and that to which it is immanent, thereby inscribed in the 'concept in general'. Rather, immanence differs from itself, in itself, by and for itself. This plane describes a field of pure differences or disparities, in which every term is a singularity - unique, unusual, problematic. It is on this plane that every singularity is consistent with every other, precisely as problems, as instances of a problematic field drawn in the course of questioning.

This kind of consistency is prior to and more profound than logical consistency, as contradiction has no meaning or relevance. Rather, it has a properly machinic consistency, that of the Mechanosphere: everything subsists in interconnected lines of flows and breaks, composed of a univocal flow of matter/sense (mening), a pure becoming. As such, it attains absolute deterritorialization, it is the real attaining this absolute limit. This occurs when the question, "What can this body do?", "Of what is this body capable?", is posed with its maximum force and efficacy, drawing a field that implicates and encompasses the entirety of the real. Every connection (of different to different, singularity to singularity) is raised to the height, the limit of its intensity. All of reality is constellated in a becoming-other of Being in which everything takes flight.

The machinic consistency of the Planomenon is thereby drawn not through a logical relation of terms without contradiction, but through a problematic relation of terms without limit, or whose only limit is the absolute of universal bifurcation in which everything is only as yet to come. The real becomes self-consistent in relation to what it can do, what might be coming. Therefore, planomenology will regard the real with an attention to such consistency, following the abstract lines drawn by absolute deterritorialization. Everything transcendent, every actuality, will come up against a force, a cruelty, so intense that it will attain its absolute limit, its vertigo, falling back on the plane of immanence. It is in this sense that Deleuze speaks of the 'transcendent exercise' of the faculties, in which they attain the pure immanence of a thought without image. Nothing can escape, or rather, nothing can avoid escaping, nothing can remain grounded on a substratum, as everything is carried off in a incessant and ruthless ungrounding.

'Planomenon' is literally defined as 'all free-living organisms; those organisms not rooted or attached to a substratum.' Its Greek root has the sense of 'drifting' or 'roaming', and it is related to 'planomania', meaning 'a compulsion to wander', or 'an intense desire to live free from social restraints or obligations'. It is when the question (of what are we capable?) is posed with sufficient force, that is, when there is an intense enough desire driving it, that absolute deterritorialization is attained, and the abstract line carries us off with an infinite speed. Discovering these lines and feeding them into the questioning, and thereby composing problematic machines with increasingly intense forced movements fueling them, is the aim and passion of planomenology. The object of planomenology is, therefore, the abstract line that clandestinely wanders through all of the real, connecting everything back to the univocal Being of difference, absolute Deterritorialization.