'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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Deleuze, vitalism, ecology
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November 25, 2008
A good question: How do Deleuze and Guattari help us rethink our ecological crises beyond the impasses of State-sanctioned resource exploitation and reactive environmentalism? I'm not sure of the answer even though I am sympathetic to Deleuze's biophilosophy which I have interpreted along vitalist lines. Now, as Leslie Dema observes in "Inorganic, Yet Alive": How Can Deleuze and Guattari Deal With the Accusation of Vitalism? in Rhizomes:
It is now typically considered an insult to call a philosophical position 'vitalist'. Implicitly, to call someone a vitalist is to accuse them of positing an unknowable factor in their explanation of life. Whether the witholding of this factor is attributed to the vitalist's mystical tendencies, her inability to distinguish between real and pseudo-science, or simply her intellectual laziness, the implication is always that she is sorely lacking credibility. Bracketing some aspect of the living as either intellectually or empirically unaccessible is considered unnecessary, because biology has for a long time been able to explain life in its own terms. Despite having fallen out of fashion, the historical importance of vitalism should be recognized fairly uncontroversially. Little more than two hundred years ago, 'life' was first posited as an ontological state that was unique from the inorganic. At its inception, and in order to gain independence as a unique discipline, biology asserted there was something 'vital' about life that was irreducible to the terms of chemistry and physics.
Dema says that this leads to the question I would like to investigate now: are Deleuze and Guattari relying on the discredited vitalist argument and claiming that there is something vital about life that is irreducible to the terms of contemporary science?
Deleuze and Guattari do embrace the idea that their philosophy of life should be considered to be a kind of vitalism. Dema says that Deleuze and Guattari use vitalism strategically.
This strategy can be broken down into four parts. They aim to: 1) break from one paradigm which defines life biologically; 2) argue that there is some important aspect of life that is being missed in the organic paradigm; 3) open a space in which new theories can gain independence without being required to be reducible to the pre-existing biological framework; and, 4) introduce a novel way of conceptualizing life though their theory of assemblages....In objecting to how the discipline of biology has appropriated life, restricting it within organisms, Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternate theory in which life pervades many diverse modes of existence. The organism is no longer the paradigmatic unit of life, nor is the cell, the genetic code, the population, the species, or the ecosystem.
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The trouble is that despite their postulations all these guys were just as much embedded in the anti-vitalistic world-machine as everyone else.
Newtons single-vision or the sleep of one-dimensional mechanical left-brained reason.
They also thus had no way of breaking out of the trap---no amount of thinking makes any difference whatsoever.
Dylan Thomas summed up this force of "vitalism" in his phrase the "green fuse"---a phrase my favourite "philosopher" refers to a lot, especially recently, because he points out that our collective assault on the "green fuse" (both within our bodies and out there in the world altogether) has brought the entire planet to a potentially catastophic tipping point.
Hence:
http://www.fearnomorezoo.org/trees/learn_tree.php
http://www.ispeace723.org/gcfprinciples2.html
Also a documentary that He highly recommends.
http://adelicatebalance.com.au