5 results
1 - Causality and Meaning in the New Materialism
- Edited by Maria Voyatzaki, Anglia Ruskin University
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- Book:
- Architectural Materialisms
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 17 September 2018, pp 31-45
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Summary
At first sight the concepts of causality and meaning seem quite alien to each other, at least in the context of materialist philosophies in which causal relations are thought to exist between mind-independent entities, while meanings are taken to belong exclusively to human minds and human societies. This sharp divide is not characteristic of other philosophies, idealist or empiricist. In an idealist philosophy, such as that of Kant and his followers, causality is conceived as a conceptual condition of human experience, together with other concepts such as space and time. Hence, causality and meaning can go together. In an empiricist philosophy, such as that of Hume and his followers, causality is defined as the observed constant conjunction of two events, like the collision of two billiard balls and the changes in the state of motion of the two colliding balls. Here meaning is also linked to causality via the mediating role of the observer. But for a materialist philosopher, causality is an objective relation in which one event produces another event, whether there is a human being witnessing this production or not. Hence, if meanings are conceived as something inherently conceptual or linguistic, their relation with causes becomes problematic.
In this chapter I want to argue that the disconnection between causality and meaning is only apparent. These two concepts, on the other hand, need to be re-analysed in order for their relation to become intelligible to a materialist. Let us begin by enriching the concept of causality to get rid of its ancient connotations of linearity. The formula for linear causality is ‘Same Cause, Same Effect, Always’. Different forms of nonlinear causality can be derived by challenging the different assumptions built into this formula. The word ‘same’ can be challenged in two ways because it may be interpreted as referring both to the intensity of the cause (‘same intensity of cause, same intensity of effect’) as well as to the very identity of the cause. Let us begin with the simplest departure from linear causality, the one challenging sameness of intensity. As an example, we can use Hooke's Law capturing a regularity in the way solid bodies respond to loads, such as a metal spring on which a given weight is attached.
10 - Deleuze, mathematics, and realist ontology
- Edited by Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University, Indiana, Henry Somers-Hall, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze
- Published online:
- 05 December 2012
- Print publication:
- 27 September 2012, pp 220-238
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REALISM IN HISTORY
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Deleuze was a realist philosopher. But his realist stance was deeply innovative and constituted a sharp break with the brand of realism that dominated Western thought for 2,500 years, the one created by Aristotle. As is well known, the Greek philosopher’s world was populated by three categories of entities: genus, species, and individual. Entities belonging to the first two categories subsisted essentially, those belonging to the third one subsisted only accidentally. The genus could be, for example, Animal, the species Human, and the individual this or that particular person characterized by contingent properties: being white, being musical, being just. A genus was linked to its various species (Horse, Human) by a series of logically necessary subdivisions. The genus Animal, for example, could be subdivided into two-footed and many-footed types; then subdivided into differences in extremities: hooves, as in horses, or feet, as in humans. When we reached a point at which any further distinctions were accidental, like a foot missing a toe, we arrived at the level of the species, the lowest ontological level at which we could speak of an essence or of the very nature of a thing.
Possession of these essential traits is what guaranteed the mind-independent identity of things in Aristotelian realism. It follows that any new brand of realism, if it is to be truly novel, must replace the categories of genus and species with something that does not imply an ontological commitment to transcendent entities (essences). This task is easier for species than for genera. The transcendent nature of species can be eliminated simply by transforming them into historical entities, like Darwin did. In evolutionary theory a biological species is as singular, as unique, and as historically contingent as an individual organism: a species is born when its gene pool is closed to the flow of genetic materials from other reproductive communities – that is, it is born through reproductive isolation – and its dies through extinction. In other words, species like organisms are “subject to corruption and decay,” as Aristotle would say. And their defining properties are not logically necessary.
11 - Molar Entities and Molecular Populations in Human History
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- By Manuel DeLanda, University of Pennsylvania
- Edited by Jeffrey Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University, Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
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- Book:
- Deleuze and History
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 12 March 2009, pp 225-236
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We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalise them; it is a unity of all those particular parts but does not unify them; rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-OedipusA crucial question confronting any serious attempt to think about human history is the nature of the historical actors that are considered legitimate in a given philosophy. One can, of course, include only human persons as actors, either as rational choosers (as in microeconomics) or as phenomenological subjects (as in micro-sociology). But if we wish to go beyond this we need a proper conceptualisation of social wholes. The very first step in this task is, clearly, to devise a means to block microreductionism, a step usually achieved by the concept of emergent properties, properties of a whole that are more than the sum of the properties of its parts.
8 - Deleuze, Materialism and Politics
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- By Manuel Delanda, University of Pennsylvania
- Edited by Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong, Nicholas Thoburn, University of Manchester
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- Book:
- Deleuze and Politics
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
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- 20 May 2008, pp 160-177
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For most of their history leftist and progressive politics were securely anchored on a materialist philosophy. The goal of improving the material conditions of workers' daily lives, of securing women's rights to control their bodies, of avoiding famines and epidemics among the poor: all of these were worthy goals presupposing the existence of an objective world in which suffering, exploitation and exclusion needed to be changed by equally objective interventions in reality. To be sure there was room in this materialism for the role of subjective beliefs and desires, including those that tended to obscure the objective interests of those whose lives needed improvement, but these were never allowed to define what reality is. The concept of ‘ideology’ may be inadequate for analy – sing these beliefs and desires, but it nevertheless captured the fact that there is a material reality with respect to which these subjective states should be compared.
Then everything changed. Idealism, the ontological stance according to which the world is a product of our minds, went from being a deeply conservative position to become the norm in many academic departments and critical journals: cultural anthropologists came to believe that defending the rights of indigenous people implied adopting linguistic idealism and the epistemological relativism that goes with it; sociologists, both social constructivist and ethnomethodologist, correctly denounced the concept of a harmonious society espoused by their functionalist predecessors only to embrace an idealist phenomenology; and many academic departments, particularly those that attach the label ‘studies’ to their name, completely forgot about material life and concentrated instead on textual hermeneutics.
13 - Deleuzian Social Ontology and Assemblage Theory
- from V - Social Constitution and Ontology
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- By Manuel DeLanda, Columbia University
- Edited by Martin Fuglsang, Copenhagen Business School, Bent Meier Sorensen, Copenhagen Business School
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- Book:
- Deleuze and the Social
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 21 June 2006, pp 250-266
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The most critical question which a philosophical analysis of social ontology must answer is the linkage between the micro and the macro. Whether one conceives of these levels as ‘the individual and society’ or as ‘agency and structure’ or even as ‘choice and order’, an answer to the question of their mutual relations basically determines the kinds of social entities whose existence one is committed to believe. One family of solutions to the micro–macro problem relies on a reductionist strategy, either reducing the macro to the micro (microreductionism) or vice versa, reducing the micro to the macro (macroreductionism). The first strategy is often illustrated with classical or neo-classical microeconomics in which the key social entities are rational decision-makers making optimising choices constrained only by their budgets and ranked preferences. But the branches of microsociology born in the 1960s (ethnomethodology and social constructivism) are also microreductionist even if their conception of agency is quite different, based on phenomenology and stressing routine behaviour rather than rational choice (Garfinkel 2002; Berger and Luckmann 1967). Microreductionism does not imply disbelief in the existence of society as a whole, only a conception of it that makes it into an epiphenomenon: society is simply an aggregate or sum of either many rational agents or many phenomenological experiences shaped by daily routine. In other words, this macro entity does not have emergent properties of its own.