Anti-platonism
So let’s start by seeing the kernel of this relation, which relates clearly to Plato. As I have already mentioned, the rise of the simulacrum, which is neither the essential thing nor its proper image – not the model idea or it’s true copy but the copy of the copy – is the ‘antidote’ to Platonism, to the dualism of model and copy. This orientation Deleuze takes from Nietzsche and which, like much of post-structuralism and deconstruction, but differently, has Hegel as the more immediate target, signifying – perhaps too conveniently – a too habitual form of thought in its assumption of the bad guys. Habit being something that philosophy is always tasked to overcome. That’s to say, thought is always a movement of which the thought produced is a stasis. The conflation of the two or the reversal of their relations is the false movement of the dialectic.
So instead, to reverse Platonism, Deleuze says, must be to find his motivation which is to say, put Plato on the scene, in context, as a man thinking, as Nietzsche said – something we know Plato critically rejected. We will come back to the details of this reversal, whose essence is to let the simulacrum rise and take power – which is to say, to be it’s own thing, the thing that it is, not subject to the determinations of the dualism that for Deleuze, Plato is trying to protect.
So for Deleuze, a philosophy matters in terms of what it makes possible. And of course it wouldn’t be much of a philosophy if it didn’t make something possible; realise out of itself as question or problem etc., something which the knowledge of the everyday, supposed as part of its own conditions, considered impossible. In this sense, then, a philosopher might constitute an event.
As one commentator puts it Deleuze’s concept of the event can be understood (as he did) ‘in terms consonant with the Stoic conception of lekta: as incorporeal transformations that subsist over and above the spatio-temporal world, but are expressible in language nonetheless. As the product of the synthesis of forces, events signify the internal dynamic of their interactions.’ (Dic.) In other words, an event is an actualisation but one not linked to any state of affairs as such, that’s to say, that it happens cannot be reduced to some causal chain: ‘an event is the potential immanent within a particular confluence of forces.’
But note, it’s less what happens or takes place – thus an essence rises as itself or changes in its form – than the very becoming of the thing that it is. The famous terminology is not that a tree becomes green or a tree is green but that ‘a tree greens’. So note that the predicate to this ‘being as becoming’ here is the potential infinite – that inexhaustible one that is so precisely because, as old Aristotle determined, it cannot be actualised – and an event is then the expression of this infinity as actual. Thus what is in all as its becoming. But as the potential is unknown and thus cannot be conceived causally or as teleological, becoming is undetermined. The event is the possibility of this becoming without cause or order or determination. The event is not a disruption of some continuous state, but rather the state is constituted by events 'underlying' it that, when actualised, mark every moment of the state as a transformation.
It’s the radical indeterminate in any determination we can say, and Deleuze conceives this in direct distinction with Plato who, supposedly, ‘established a contrast between fixed and determinate states of things defining the identity of an object on the one hand and, on the other, temporal series of causes and effects having an impact upon the object.’
In this structure, then, the event or should I say, the pure eventality, its inherent dynamism or discontinuity or play of forces to use Nietzsche’s term, is lost or better: is that which Platonism has covered over in its will to solve the problem of the true form. The event in this sense considered as something like the kora or the pharmakon was for Derrida – an always in the middle, neither/nor, ‘never constituted by a preliminary or precedent unity between the forces of its production, being instead the primitive effector change generated at the moment of their interaction … produced neither in the image of some model nor as representative copies or likenesses of a more fundamental reality, being instead wholly immanent, original and creative productions … and as pure effect, an event has no goal.’ It’s a false third in terms of what Plato constructs – a point of indistinction we can say and so, Deleuze suggests, a danger to Plato’s construction.
So Nietzsche is an event insofar as he is not a philosopher – thus belonging to a state of affairs known as philosophy – but as the tree greens he philosophies. Through him what in philosophy is possible issues: new concepts, concepts as creation. This, for Deleuze, is what’s at stake. To put oneself in the place of what is possible, in the indeterminate middle as it were, the moment at which new forces might be brought to bear. Thus for Deleuze, this means to make thinking its own event.
To think is to create, thus what is thought is the creation in thought of what is thus becoming, avoiding the objective and subjectivist framework at once. For Deleuze, after all, every thinker begins with an image of thought as such. One doesn’t just think. Any thinking plays out the image the thinker has of what it is – to think. All systems are this manifest image we might say, what Nietzsche referred to as the philosophical biography. So, what if your image of thought is that all thought begins with its image? Well the image would seem to take on a life of its own, and thus be irreducible to its placement in the schema of a thought as the determinate other side of the thing itself.
Deleuze’s thought of thought, then, is Nietzschean insofar as Nietzsche freed what could be thought from this determinate structure of Plato or at least showed in Platonism what or where Plato was. That’s to say, that Plato builds thought in his image and that this was the very life of thought itself. Which of course Plato set out a framework to deny. Hence the accusation that if Christianity is the life denying philosophy par excellence, then it is so as a Platonism for the people. Which is why also Deleuze’s philosophy is precisely one of affirmation, the affirmation of life itself in thought as in anything else. In life is the possibility that what is or what is determined to be might be anything else because precisely the framework of thing and copy, being and appearing, is itself already only possible because, precisely, it is only possible. But Deleuze is not a relativist, which is where difference comes in: what is possible is possible because life itself as play of forces, is difference itself.
Difference is the ontological possibility of the same and as such any same is potentially different. You might say that difference is something like Deleuze’s version of will to power: the immanent force of differentiation as such, that no determination can capture whole as it were. The paradox is that ‘every actualisation is the same insofar as it is what the play of differences actualises; or in other words, in every event of actualization, every becoming which is evental, the same event resonates.’ This is the principle of univocity. The same difference for all differences. This is what Badiou takes up in his book on Deleuze, that this univocity invokes a One whose actuality cannot be conceived in terms of difference and concomitantly that such a conception of the one, especially insofar as its activity resides in potential, hence the inexhaustibility of difference as such, is inconsistent, conceptually.
For Badiou, the infinite can itself be (has been) actualised, which then opens onto the concept of infinite infinites thus very distinct from the One infinite of inexhaustible difference. At the limit, then, Badiou is suggesting, Deleuze, despite himself, situates invention or creation in Being rather than the event and this really for Badiou because Deleuze’s ontology is finally a vitalist one, meaning, then, that ‘life as the name of being’ is, insofar as it expresses only itself, the one and only event. Following Nietzsche, for Deleuze, ‘Life is a power of singularisation; a power to create differences.’ Or in other words, ‘all living is characterised in terms of power, so as more or less, active or reactive and so on, thus a plurality of forces acting upon and being affected by each other, and in which the quantity of power constituted the differential element between forces.’
Power, which is the power of difference itself is not then something some-one holds etc. but is always already active in any form of expression or becoming, if you like. Even in the worst reactive, life denying there is still life. Nietzsche said ‘man would rather will nothing that not will at all’ and this finds it’s place in Deleuze’s thought. Of course the up side here is the supposition that because of this active power of life every state of affairs is immanently reversible. Someone like Negri and also more currently the chap speaking for the Nuit Debout movement in France, Frederic Lordon, following Spinoza, whose insight here Nietzsche has taken for his own, thinks that the multitude, Spinoza’s name for the people as determined by those who hold power over a state of affairs, at some point need only remove its ‘passional’ support for this state of affairs and it will be over-thrown.
That’s to say Spinoza too has a vision of the One as such, within which plays of forces are its active actualisation, and in which any state of affairs depends not just on the active power of those who have come to rule – but on the passional support of those who don’t – thus, on reactive power. Thus any state of affairs is as such relative to the conditions of its creation by us – it’s not external, but, if you like, an expression of a time and place relative to the forces at play. Note I am mixing Spinoza and Nietzsche a bit but so does Deleuze. Lordon, says – the context being political here – that ‘Sedition begins when a fraction of the multitude no longer identifies with the state’s norms – for example the norm that has us voting once every five years before shutting us up the rest of the time. Thus the multitude becomes a threat to the state, which only in these circumstances notices that all its power is borrowed, and that without the power the multitude lends it, it is nothing.’
But we can ask, as a Platonist would, concerned by the fee reign of the simulacrum, what’s on the other side of this withdrawal – which is event like? What sustains the withdrawal into something else, some other configuration. That’s to say, how do we not repeat or how is this difference not a repetition. Yes, it’s a different configuration of forces but how will this configuration not repeat the state of affairs. It seems what is relied on here is just the ontological fact of difference itself and thus there is no thought in it. That’s to say, no space for a thought which is not already inscribed in this ontology of reversal, which is the stuff of life.
Again, what orientation can make a new life possible if every orientation is an affect of life itself whose watchword is difference, a matter of styles and intensities, yes, but oriented to what? Hence no true or false, no model or copy etc., just the ‘fulcrum of the image’ as what makes possible the reversibility of one thing into another and this given that the image is precisely this – neither the thing nor its copy nor the relation of one to the other? I can see the image as event or eventality but I cannot see beyond the event, if you know what I mean. What is there to take up the event, to hold what it marks in place, what does it give rise to, orient and so on that is not recursive to the state of affairs? What can make of the event something other than the differential return of the same, which is to say, the appearance of difference?
You can see, I think, but you might have an answer – I know we are all Deleuzians now, right? You can see that Deleuze’s ontological conception is critical here. ‘The rigorous attempt’, Constantin Boundas says, ‘to think of process and metamorphosis – becoming – not as a transition or transformation from one substance to another or a movement from one point to another, but rather as an attempt to think of the real as a process.’ Hence, as we see, instead of substances or essences and things or objects we have forces – differentiated in terms of their action or ‘will’, and against points we have, as you know, the notion of lines, transversal, lines of flight, as they are later called.
It’s clearly an ontology and in this aspect Deleuze is clearly a metaphysician and he is one of the very few to admit this post Heidegger – maybe in the Continental tradition only Levinas is happy to also say this and also Badiou. As you know, for Deleuze this Real – which is clearly One is constituted by two types – actual and virtual. But note here some commentators say that the Real divides into two – virtual and actual but this would be to say that the Real and the virtual are without the Real in some way and that the Real is their effect but what we are calling the Real here is instead the very possibility of this division which, anyway, is a relation, given that for Deleuze we cannot have one without the other. So clearly, the relation of virtual to actual precedes their division hence, the priority of the One.
As you know, what makes up the actual real, let’s call it, following here Boundas’ explanation, are ‘present states of affairs, or bodies with their qualities and mixtures’; what makes up the virtual real are ‘incorporeal events’. Boundas says: ‘The nature of the latter’, as we have seen, ‘is to actualise itself without ever becoming depleted in actual states of affairs.’ Hence, as we saw, becoming – which is what is being for D – is said in one and the same sense in the actual real and the virtual real; becoming invests both, basically, hence they are ontologically indistinct and indeed in some sense the virtual is always already in the actual being it’s past and also it’s future.
Thus prior to actualisation the actual is virtual and this virtuality which is actualised maintains this virtuality left over in it, so to speak, as its future de-actualisation too because we know nothing remains the same. Following Bergson’s notion of duree, Deleuze gives this ‘a synthetic, temporal dimension too – the time of habit, the time of memory, and the empty time of the future.’ So this synthesis effect which is elsewhere called ‘disjunctive syntheses’ clearly supposes multiplicity – that is to say, if all is process in some way, ‘series, synthesis, convergence, divergence deterritorialisation’ etc. – then this requires a certain fluidity in being so to speak, one that breaks with an ancient metaphysics of the one and many – thus the many being what makes up the one or the one being the product of the many etc.
Boundas sums it up like this: ‘multiplicities, unlike the 'many' of traditional metaphysics are not opposed to the one because they are not discrete (they are not multiplicities of discrete units or elements), with divisions and subdivisions leaving their natures unaffected. They are intensive multiplicities with subdivisions affecting their nature. As such, multiplicities have no need for a superimposed unity to be what they become. Forces determining their becoming operate from within – they do not need transcendent forces in order to function. It is in the virtual that intensive multiplicities of singularities, series, and time subsist. It is the virtual that is differentiated in terms of its intensive multiplicities. As the virtual actualises and differenciates itself, the series it generates becomes discrete, without ever erasing the traces of the virtual inside the actual.’
So differenciation is being as such but clearly it is active and so is being as becoming, manifest in this dual way – via the virtual and the actual with the virtual itself being in the actual that inexhaustible access to difference which makes it possible. So the virtual, which is inexhaustible is the trace in the actual of this becoming as such which then actually becomes, though remains as actual, different from difference as such. But any actualisation retains in it via the virtual the many possible differences not yet actualised, which would of course be infinite in this sense. Hence, again, any actual could be actually other. (Which reminds me of Q. Meillassoux.)
Can we say this is an ontology of life? This, then, would be Deleuze’s own vitalism – hence not that kind we saw from biology, even if there is some bios in it, but an ontological vitalism – which is really to say a new creature entirely, a new creation, a new concept – a concept of life as John Protevi puts it that ‘has a double sense, reflecting both stratification and destratification. It means both ‘organisms’ as a certain set of stratified beings and it also means the creativity of complex systems, their capacity to produce new emergent properties, new behavior patterns, by destratifying and deterritorializing.’ The extension, if I can use this term, is such that inorganic, organic and social beings can all be treated with the same concepts.
Let’s look more directly at what all this means in terms of the overturning of Plato or Platonism, which for Deleuze and Nietzsche are the same thing once we accept their vitalist ontogenesis, which regards all thought in the first instance as predicated in the image of it held by a thinker. An image he or she inherits, of course, as habituated. Let’s recall that Nietzsche, from the very first stakes out his position: “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the better it is. Living in semblance as goal.’
This goal, as I said, Deleuze assimilates to himself as project. The question is of course, following Daniel W. Smith, what does it mean to invert Platonism? We have traversed some of the consequences above but clearly a lot is involved: There is of course the judgement implicit; that the Platonic position dominates somehow. There is the judgment that this domination is a problem for philosophy, for politics and the way of the world as such. There is the problem of what is Platonism and of also conceptualising how we’d go about approaching it as a question or how we can determine it as a problem. There is the requirement to demonstrate Platonism, its theory of being as it were and then there is not only the means of the inversion, such that it has been determined necessary, but what is inverted? How much, what bit – will one inverted aspect invert the lot. What is an inversion – the process, the means the limits etc. Why an inversion? Why is inversion overcomimg? Why not a refutation thus a negation? And so on and so on.
And as we know or have seen so far almost every philosophy hitherto has been an effort in this vein – it’s not a new goal, is it? Although to enter into the anti-Platonic list on the side of semblance might be an original position – it’s certainly is not what Aristotle was about or Heidegger. But this way of entering into the list is also not that horribly banal but nevertheless still current idea that all we need to do is turn Plato upside down and so put on top all the things he said were on the bottom and then everything will be right side up and the best of all possible worlds. All this does is replace reference to the Idea with something else determined as positive, begging the question of the ground of that determination. At least in the Idea as it is usually depicted, its use or availability to determination was restricted by its unknowability as such. Meaning we couldn’t suppose ourselves as the final word on everything. Man is not the measure of all things, thank God.
For Deleuze of course, given all we have said about the approach he takes, the need was to discover in Plato the sense in the orientation he takes; that’s to say to go back to Plato himself, and attempt to locate in precise terms the motivation that led Plato to distinguish between essence and appearance in the first place. It’s not via the distinction as such, then – either for or against – it’s in what made it possible, what was the play of forces and its affect. This, as we know, because life is the possibility of all thought.
Dan Smith, who is one of the best commentators on Deleuze in the English speaking world I think – also see Rofe, Protevi, Bogue and Lambert, I reckon – sums this up very clearly: For Deleuze, ‘Plato’s singularity lies in a delicate operation of sorting or selection that precedes the discovery of the Idea, and that turns to the world of essences only as a criterion for its selective procedures. The motivation of the theory of Ideas lies initially in the direction of a will to select, to sort out, to faire la différence (literally, “to make the difference”) between true and false images. To accomplish this task, Plato utilises a method that will master all the power of the dialectic and fuse it with the power of myth: the method of division. It is in the functioning of this method that Deleuze uncovers not only the sense of Nietzsche’s inverted Platonism, but also what was the decisive problem for Platonism itself—namely, the problem of simulacra.’
So just note: a will and a function. In Plato there is a will to division that precedes all else; he invents the function to accomplish this will. In turn, and we have seen this move otherwise conceptualised throughout, the method-function makes it possible to posit an essence or Idea which directs the will or to which the will is the corresponding affect. This is the accusation, if I can put it that way. Thus the will is presupposed by Deleuze as what is left out of the account or at least is displaced within it. What appears is a copy of its essence and the means of discerning this division in two is Plato’s aim. What intervenes though and is to be displaced is what is neither model nor copy of anything at all – the will, desire, life, whatever; something that makes possible, that is neither effect nor cause nor telos and, as such, must not rise to the level of the concept. It’s this that Deleuze zeros in on as what Nietzsche was aiming at and precisely as such what was Plato’s own problem. Plato had a problem. This is how D starts all enquiry. Not at the level of the result but in the middle of the thought itself – that is, he jumps into the thought itself, so to speak, because it’s a moving image, a moveable feast.
I have to say that Deleuze is the only thinker about (anti)Plato that has zeroed in on the problem of division as being central to Plato. There might be precursors but I have always like this aspect of Deleuze’s writing. For Deleuze, the problem of division comes up because Plato is concerned with the Athenian state, with its democratic form and thus with the agonistic relations that seem to structure it, and this makes the contrast between a true something and a false one paramount – for what sort of polity is run by a false statesman? Which is a problem for democracy always, no, given that a statesman is conferred by majority, which is to say, he or she doesn’t have to have any necessary connection to the truth of the thing he or she is counted to become. That’s to say, a true statesman cannot be a matter of the majority or of chance, except by chance, so what is the truth of the statesman, which is to say, in Plato, what is he not? Which is the process he goes through in Statesman and Sophist for example, which is of course the negative underside of what he is trying to show about Socrates, who would be the negation of the negation made by the city with regard to him.
So for Deleuze, Plato’s concept of division is the necessary affect or creation of the problem that confronts him. Again, notice the movement back to the will of the thinker. But in the process that Plato has to undergo to discern the true statesman or lover or what have you, a whole series of pretenders arrive: everyone basically puts up their hand as being the true thing – bankers, farmers, merchants, poets, etc., are all ‘Shepherds of men’. But they all also fail the test of this truth or the trial of it I should say. But this is the problem writ large: who are all these pretenders, thus ‘the problem of measuring rivals and selecting claimants’ – just like Penelope.
You can see what Deleuze is putting into play: Plato then needs to construct a ways and means of measuring, and selecting which means, then, of dividing the true from the false. But what does it mean that a real being in the world, say a businessman, who does lead men, within a certain state of affairs, is not at all a leader of men and thus functions ostensibly as a pretender to that which he is not and yet with whom he shares certain functions and affects?
This parallels the movement of thought that also characterises Plato’s dialogues and his times – that of myth to reason. Thus statesmen etc., in their affects conform to the myths told of statesmanship but these representations are themselves without reason. Indeed, the very form is what functions to hold them up as true but the form – myth, poetics, etc. – is itself removed from the true. Myth is a fiction of the true we might say. This is Plato’s criticism of Homer Hesiod et al. as educators of the state – they bequeath a mythos not a reason, a psychological identification which bodies play out, but not the truth of the thing as such and indeed they even present what they say as what is true, thus dissimulating the very idea of it.
But anyway, for Deleuze, that agonism is central in Plato, and is to do with ‘the way the Greek polis presented itself internally, and it terms of its relation to other territories it deterritorialized’. The Greeks treated things geometrically as such, so that everything was organised around a public and so open centre – a sort of flat or striated territory if you like – not hierarchical as in an empire – but a space in which each could enter into contest or alliance with any other – a sort of ‘generalized athleticism’, Smith says Deleuze says. ‘This is what made philosophy possible in this first instance – that everything was immanently conditioned by this agonism. That myth, say, could be put to the test and overcome by reason.’
So under these conditions we get a new image of the thinker too – not one hanging out with the kings and the rich, doing their bidding as in empire times – like now. Socrates had already noted the pathos of this when he himself upended a Homeric maxim. So in Athens we get the ‘philo-sophos, the friend or lover of wisdom, one who searches for wisdom but unlike under imperialism does not possess it—and who is therefore able, as Nietzsche said, to make use of wisdom as a mask, and to make it serve new and sometimes even dangerous ends.’ So we get the friend of the concept or the Idea: ‘The friend is no longer related simply to another person, but also to an Entity or Essence, an Idea, which constitutes the object of its desire.’
And as you might see, what happens, Deleuze argues, is that the Idea becomes the locus of measuring and dividing friends from enemies or true philosophers from false and so on. The agonistics is relative to the Idea – a hatred of false pretenders to the Idea. But for Deleuze, Plato’s use of the Idea as a criterion for ‘sorting out these rivals and judging the well-foundedness of their claims, authenticating the legitimate claimants and rejecting the counterfeits, distinguishing the true from the false, the pure from the impure, winds up erecting a new type of transcendence, one that differs from the imperial or mythic transcendence of the States or empires’ (although Plato would assign to myth its own function). ‘With the concept of the Idea, Plato invented a type of transcendence that was capable of being exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself – within the agonistics. Immanence is necessary, but it must be immanent to something transcendent, to an ideality.’ Thus ‘the poisoned gift of Platonism,’ Deleuze remarks, ‘is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning . . . Modern philosophy will continue to follow Plato in this regard, encountering a transcendence at the heart of immanence as such.’
In staking the terms in this way Deleuze also bypasses Aristotle’s’ conception of Platonic division along genus and species lines; rather Plato’s ‘method of division is not a dialectic of contradiction or contrariety (antiphasis), a determination of species, but rather a dialectic of rivals and suitors (amphisbetesis ), a selection of claimants.’ Plato makes the difference – he doesn’t discern one already existing Deleuze is saying. The procedure he enacts makes the division between those worthy and those false without any need for mediation. This is Deleuze’s crucial insight: the power of the idea in its capacity for division and I do not have a problem with it as such. Plato ‘makes the difference’: but of course for Deleuze, that he does so relative to this posited transcendence, a transcendence that escapes its own positing, is the problem or the poison bequeathed. Basically, that Plato makes it seem like there is nothing left over.
Ok lets try to sum all this up:
Nietzsche bequeaths the task of a reversal as overcoming. So it’s actually a double movement. Mere reversal of the dualistic hierarchy between the intelligible and the sensible doesn’t cut it – Kant, for example couldn’t maintain it, importing back in the moral idea as what finally conditions sensible appearing – what saves it from relativism, basically.
For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s goal is the right one and his aim is true but it’s an external critique – it’s this that relativism takes up without thought. Deleuze looks inside Plato, as it were – what is the problem he is trying to solve and what forces compel him toward this end. Thus, in a way, Deleuze finds in Plato the means of his own overcoming – which is some ways is very Platonic. As we saw, the motive of Plato's theory of the Ideas – which of course he doesn’t actually have – needs to 'be sought in a will to select and to choose lineages and to distinguish pretenders.’
So the basic structure of what Plato presents in the discussion in the Republic about the real and the apparent world looks something like this: Ideas belong to the intelligible realm – to thought as such let’s say – that is a thinking of the thing without recourse to the determinations of sense. The sensible world presents model-copies of these Ideas – or, if you like ( but this really complicates things) the sensible in and through what it makes manifest participates in the Ideas as such. The famous discussion is of the bed – the manifest copy – made by the craftsman, is so long and so high and can carry so much weight and so on. It has particular measurable sensible features that make it up and are essential to it. These vary of course but these features in one way or another must always pertain for it to be a bed. This manifest bed carries within it, so to speak, the very Idea of bed – thus all beds, no matter their measurements, their sensible particulars, are models of the Ideal. These beds make the Ideal manifest let’s say, but note, it’s not the manifest beds that make the Idea – this is Kant, not Plato.
This is then the intelligible and the sensible – the Idea always there, so to speak, in any sensible model. The sensible model is then the copy of the idea. It’s a copy because in its singular proportions it’s one manifestation of many possible manifestations, and not the Idea, which is always the same. But there is another copy – in fact, once you start down this road it’s infinite – and that is the copy of the copy. Thus the question of art – which is what’s at stake in the Republic because the sophistic educators are the inheritors of the poetic tradition and Plato’s problem is that a sophistic/poetic education is the generalised education of the polis – thus you see that if the sophists poets are educators then what they have to teach is several removes from the truth – that is to say, the true Idea. They do not participate in the Idea but copy the copy.
As Alison Ross puts it: ‘…the painter who paints a copy of this bed copies all the things about the bed that are inessential to its use (that it is a particular colour, a particular height, in a particular setting), but is unable to copy any of those features of the bed that relate to its function( that it has a structure able to support the weight of a person). The restriction of painting to the copying of the mere appearance of the objects shows for Plato, that the artist produces things whose internal mechanisms they arc ignorant of. This degradation of use and knowledge in the fabricated object makes art a futile but harmless activity’ (here art means painting, specifically).
But as I mentioned, poetry is another story. While the painter is sort of innocent insofar as the spectator of a painting is external to it – I know it’s a painting etc., and so I also know it’s not the thing it is representing. You see what’s critical is I see the gap between them. This is really what Plato wants to maintain vis a vis the working of the city. He is not at all convinced that the Ideal city is realisable without loss, but it is nevertheless critical toward its possibility that this gap between Idea and sensible be known and acted upon.
Dramatic poetry – Homer being as he was called the ‘educator of all Hellas’ – is a different kettle of fish because as educator it obviates this gap. Worse, it supposes no such distinction at all between Idea and sensible etc. It dissimulates the distinction as the truth of knowledge. Thus as educator it teaches dissimulation as what there is – it deconstructs the division between model and copy – so that acting the statesmen and being a statesman are one and the same thing. This is dangerous, Plato insists – that there is no distinction between true and false means that the worst can itself be elevated to the status of a model. Note that Plato’s problem then is to thwart this which has been the Hellenic form for centuries. So he intervenes with the Idea/copy distinction on this poetic dissimulation – a dissimulation modern relativist are simply trying to reinstate. So who’s the radical and who’s the conservative?
Anyway, Deleuze’s intent is not this modern relativism.
Rather, for Deleuze, to undermine or overcome or reverse Platonism, what matters is another form of the distinction – not that between model and copy but between copy and simulacra: The simulacra are the false copies – that is copies of copies – so those that have no connection to the Idea – representation as such, three removes from the truth. Note of course how representation is aesthetic and political.
For Deleuze, the simulacra, whose existence Plato himself marks, are actually those that place the dualism in question. In other words, their very existence as a third so to speak, in relation to the second, means that the dualism has to be tested over and over: ‘are the copies true copies or false’ and so on and the aim always, Deleuze reckons, is to repress the simulacrum – those copies that are three removes from the Idea so are false almost be definition but must be seen to be so – in favour of the copies. Simulacra are images without Idea. As such they clearly, Deleuze is arguing, undermine the dualism which structures Plato’s thought and thus they ‘undermine the process of regulation and determination that is dependent on this dualism – that everything is pronounced vis a vis it’s proximity to or relation of resemblance with the Idea’. Or it is because the simulacra are not modelled on the Idea that their pretension, their merely external resemblance to the Idea, is without foundation?
You can see that Deleuze is arguing that this difference relative to the model-copy dualism is what forces the process of it’s regulation as such. Thus difference forces the same to appear as its repression. Thus, as Ross sums it, for Deleuze, it is ‘because of this merely external resemblance that the simulacra suggest a conception of the world in which identity follows 'deep disparity', and contest the conception of the world in which difference is regulated according to a prior similitude’ (D 1990: 261). So to assert the right of the simulacrum, to give them their own power as it were, is to overturn Plato’s decisive procedure to regulate sensible appearing via the Idea and to show instead that the Idea can only be the destitution of difference as such – the very form in which life comes first.
Deleuze has inverted Plato’s priority at the level of the simulacrum-copy and not as an attack on the idea-copy dualism. From the other side of this dualism, as it were, the dualism itself can be undone – it can’t be done from inside it, which would be that banal upending we spoke of. In a certain sense we can say Deleuze has taken anti-Platonism to another level.
Not only in he disabusing most anti-Platonists of their anti-Platonist credentials but also in the sense that by taking up Plato’s problem and going further with it he shows himself to be a Platonic anti-Platonist – the difference that shows the rest as the same. Or in another register, Deleuze would be the active force of a certain Platonic passivity, constituted in his opting for the same. As Badiou says of Deleuze: ‘he is the most generous antiplatonist’ … ‘the most open to contemporary creations’ … ‘all that Deleuze lacked was to finish with anti-Platonism itself.’
Secondary Works
Clair Colebrook, Constantin V. Boundas & Alison Ross in A. Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary
Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze
Jon Roffe, Badiou’s Deleuze & The Works of Gilles Deleuze
Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being