John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity Book

It was just one of those parties - I mean, no one really expected it to turn out in the way that it did. Hegel had been drinking bottle after bottle of some sort of sweet Rhine wine and sharing big glasses of it with Darwin. Nietzsche and Heidegger were passing a joint between themselves while Freud had been lining up shots of schnapps all night all on his own. The sex thing that suddenly happened between them all was completely unexpected, as was the child it produced - none of them afterwards admitted to even being at the party, but that is how we ended up with Deleuze.

This guy is really, really hard work. Even in commentary he makes my head spin. The fact I barely understand him makes me furious as I'm quite sure he has lots to say that I ought to find incredibly interesting. But he has too many philosophical parents - even if most of them would probably disown him if given half a chance.

I probably understood about a third of this. Here is what I think I got out of it.

Deleuze takes the idea of becoming quite literally. He has completely abandoned the idea of us having any 'being' at all - any central ground to ourselves. Being is a kind of universal category for him - what I might call God if I was being particularly unkind - and so is something we all partake in but don't really have. He is trying to avoid there being any essential truth (essential ground) to us - we are becoming, but forever becoming - we are not progressing towards something, we are not moving towards perfection or anything else - we are like eruptions that are made up of moments of forces. We are the resolution of the infinite forces acting on us and that are in constant change and so we too are in constant change.

A good way to understand this is perhaps cinema. Except I really struggle to understand his idea of movement-image and I think this is his central idea and key to understanding him at all. (so, that might be a bit of a problem…) If you are going to talk about change as being the key to understanding the world then time is going to have to be central to your thinking. Things change in time. But what is time? I think I've decided that time is pretty close to proof that there is a god and that he hates us. Time is so hard to understand and so central to our being in the world that only a perverse god would come up with such a thing. It is hard to understand because it involves us in endless paradoxes and contradictions. We live in the present, but there is no present. As soon as I say NOW it is no longer now, but immediately then. There is no future either, the future is always just beyond the present, but we never quite reach it. And we've already seen that the present doesn't exist anyway - so how can the future be just out of reach from something that doesn't exist? Which leaves us with the past - but show me the past. If there is no future, no present and no past - what does that leave of time? And this is just the start of the problems that time presents us with. Physics is no help - Einstein talks of Space-Time - but you can walk backwards and forwards in space, but you can only go forwards in time. Why? The equations should let you go in either direction - it is just the world doesn't let you. Philosophers who talk about time are equally paradoxical (and often unreadable).

Camus said the only serious philosophical question is why don't I kill myself - I sometimes think the only serious question is what the hell is time.

The movement-image Deleuze talks about is a case in point. He says we spatialise time. We find ways to understand time by reference to space. So, time is the movement of the sun across the sky or the hands around the face of a clock. In cinema (at least, the best cinema) you get a notion of time that isn't perverted by our common sense ideas of how time works - our spatial ideas. Time becomes new ways of understanding the world based on a kind of narrative - a narrative outside of normal time. The narrative of the story told in images. And if there is one thing Deleuze definitely likes, it is anything outside of the normal.

The world conspires to give us a more or less simple way of understanding it. But we need to beware of this version of common sense as the world is anything but simple. He talks of Majoritarian and Minoritarian views of the world. My version of this idea goes like this. There are the accepted 'truths' - ideas like, men are rational and women intuitive, or every man in possession of a good fortune is in want of a wife. These are majoritarian, not just because they are accepted by the majority, but also because they do nothing to undermine the established view of the world. Minoritarian views force us to see the world in ways that are not the same as received wisdom. Great literature is always minoritarian.

Great literature is also timeless. As is pointed out repeatedly in this book, we don't watch a play by Shakespeare to connect with Elizabethan England - we watch Shakespeare to find out more about ourselves. He speaks directly to us. Like those Christians who read the Bible to see what it says about Obama's presidency, great literature always has qualities that are outside of our normal notions of time and space.

Some of this guys metaphors are really something else. The idea that we are like folds in a huge piece of paper - the paper being 'being' and we are the stuff that is on the inside of the boundaries that the folds make and the rest of the world is on the outside - but the folds don't really exist except as momentary expressions - is an interesting idea, but too much for me to hold for more than a moment.

I can't let go of rationalism for long enough to truly follow this guy to where he would like to take me. But I have to say again, he is a disturbing guy to read. Or even to read about.