Idealism and the Plane of Immanence
Idealism is inextricably tied with the metaphysics of Presence. That’s the true legacy of Cartesianism; the pure, indubitable being-there that functions as the ground of every ontology. It’s the field of the immediate presence (of the de trop givenness, Sartre would say) that not only survives the epoche, but predates any subject-object differentiation. It simply is. The pure unmediated field is, per definitionem, always included in the ontological account. It is in that sense that Being cannot be thought independently of consciousness – the transcendents (subject and object) have nothing to do with it. That’s why, when in a recent post Levi Bryant listed the central characteristics of idealism, his criteria were sufficient, but not necessary. You don’t have to be a Kantian or a correlationist to be an idealist. You don’t have to insist on categories and subjective construction of reality in order to reject the independence of Being. You only have to be adamant about the Presence (which almost always comes to haunt the realists as a ‘consciousness’).
And, if the true mission of contemporary realism is to debunk idealism (as Badiou recently suggested in an interview for Speculative Heresy), then the primary target for every realist (regardless whether he’s an OOO or a Badiou-Zizekian) has to be exactly that absolute Presence, that even a second-rate idealist can easily transform into ‘consciousness’. Deleuze saw this quite clearly and argued famously for a system of pure immanence liberated from a(ny) transcendent crutch, be it the transcendent subject or, simply, “pure consciousness”. But, his insistence to divorce the virtual field from any transcendence seems to me to be unsatisfactory precisely because of the ambiguous relationship towards the question of Presence. He was adamant that the plane of immanence must not be regarded as an immanence to something (or in something), but the dissociation of the plane from transcendence is far from being sufficient in dispelling the phenomenological genie. The reason for that is Presence itself. A phenomenologist doesn’t have to argue for a transcendent subject that provides a metaphysical support for the plane of immanence. The reason is quite simple: for Husserl and Heidegger the plane of immanence IS Presence. It IS the immediate connection of Being and consciousness, divorced from any subjective or objective instantiations. In that sense, the perennial idealist insight is not correlationism but the contingent, stupid being-there that pre-dates both the Subject and the Object (look also at Schelling’s system). The doubts I have about Deleuzian criticisms of idealism are, therefore, not about the (justified) attacks against transcendence and correlationism, but about the ‘unicity’ of the plane of immanence, which, for me, is only a reiteration of the oldest idealist argument in the book (It is hardly surprising that Deleuze ‘borrowed’ the concept of the plane from Sartre, i.e. from phenomenology).
Deleuze himself very often comes dangerously close to ‘dressing’ the plane of immanence in phenomenological garments. In Pure Immanence: A Life (1995), he writes:
What is a transcendental field? It can be distinguished from experience in that it doesn’t refer to an object or belong to a subject (empirical representation). It appears, therefore, as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self.
Anyone who has read just a little bit of Husserl can immediately recognize the connection (Husserl’s “transcendent subject” is a secondary addition to the model). And, although Deleuze insists on the purely ‘conceptual’ link between the field and consciousness, he never succeeds in divorcing the virtual plane from the field of Presence, the field which, for radical phenomenologists (and absolute idealists), is not immanent to a transcendent consciousness. Quite the opposite, it IS consciousness. As long as the virtual plane is univocal, the idealist ghost cannot be dispelled. In that sense, it is no wonder that in the very same text, Deleuze finds an ally in J.G.Fichte (!) – almost mirroring Fichte’s “pure absolute givenness” with the virtuality of ‘a’ life…
Conclusively, the debunking of idealism is necessarily tied not only with the ostracism of trancendents and Kantian correlationism, but also with a destabilization of the unicity of the field of immanence, ‘a’ Presence acutely vulnerable to phenomenological hijackings (isn’t Badiou’s insistence of the “univocal clamour” in Deleuze the best diagnosis of this?). Therefore, ironically, speculative realism has a lot to learn from Derrida’s project, precisely because of his radical ontology of absence. Paradoxically, it is only absence that can truly debunk idealism and not a ‘pure’ plane of immanence…
What if, instead of a democracy of objects, we need their anarchy?
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This is interesting, though I think the argument is perhaps a bit flimsy. Unveiling the phenomenological roots of the plane of immanence is not enough to demonstrate its inextricability from the philosophy of presence.
Of course, I can see the Badiouian line of thought underlying this, namely, that there is no whole that presents itself, but rather that presentation is irredemeably multiple, such that there can be nothing but a subtractive presentation of the structure through which presentation takes place, namely, Being. The worry is thus that if there is to be some totality involved in the structure of presentation (as the plane of immanence is an aspect of Being in Deleuze) that this breaks with subtraction and demands a direct presentation of this totality and thus of Being itself.
However, although it is certainly not the case that Deleuze is a subtractive thinker, we should be careful of following the Badiouian line of thought, whereby, if there is a totality it must therefore be a presented or presentable situation in its own right. It is possible not to read the structure of Being as the structure of presentation or givenness to thought (which both Badiou and Heidegger do, even if Badiou’s conception of thought is far more austere, i.e., purely quantificational), and despite Deleuze’s discussions of givenness (his transcendental empiricism) I would suggest we read him this way, insofar as there is no pre-defined term which plays the role of thought in his work (unlike Dasein in its multiple guises in Heidegger, and the quantificational structure of the count as one in Badiou).
Thus, that there is a whole implied in the structure of Being, does not for Deleuze imply that this whole is intuitable, thinkable, or indeed that it has any presentable or intelligible content whatsoever. Think of his remark in WIP that there can be no concept of the plane of immanence. This is perhaps crude, given the somewhat unfinished status of his account of concepts, but it implies that the kinds of relations that we enter into with states of affairs on the plane of immanence, both in their givenness to us and in our grasping of them, are not relations that we can have to the plane of immanence itself.
One might here object that the internal consistency of this account demands that we be able to think the structure of the totality, the structure of the plane of immanence, such that we can posit it. This is not the same as the plane being present to us in all its glory (there is a difference between the totality and the structure of totality). However, this is still a difficult problem, and one that Deleuze does not address adequately. He does not endorse a subtractive approach to Being, but neither does he have a positive account of how ontology or metaphysics itself is possible. Indeed, the same can be said for mathematics (the case which Badiou identifies with subtractive ontology).
The best we can manage is to say that it is something about each being’s relation to the totality, what he elsewhere calls its openness, that provides the ground of the possibility of ontology and mathematics. This is flimsy, and requires elaboration, but we can at least see that whatever this relation is, it is something quite distinct from the presentation or givenness of the plane as a whole.
In short, although there is a lacuna in Deleuze’s account, his monism does not thereby become a philosophy of presence.
Hi, Pete, thanks for visiting…
I found it more suitable to comment in a new post…
[...] Over at The Naked Void, Nikola recently put up a post about Deleuze’s proximity to idealism (here). Very loosely, his argument ran that any philosophy of presence is essentially idealism, and that [...]