Russell J. Duvernoy - Pure Experience and Planes of Immanence

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Pure Experience and Planes

of Immanence: From James to Deleuze
Russell J. Duvernoy
university of oregon
abstract: The article explores the connection between Jamess radical empiricism
and Deleuzes transcendental empiricism with a particular focus on the concept of
pure experience. It argues for the substantial nature of this connection in terms of
both philosophical motivations and formal innovations. Both thinkers are motivated to
construct better empiricisms that do not complacently accept conventional conceptual
representations as exhaustive of the real. Moreover, radical empiricism develops a latent
critique of representational models of consciousness that is accomplished through a turn
to events or processes as ontologically primary. These innovations are further developed
by Deleuze in his treatment of the problem of individuation. Taken together, they help
to specify the metaphysical reasons for the experimental pluralism that both James and
Deleuze affirm, showing how these reasons are inextricable from the radical empiricist
impulse to be maximally inclusive of modalities of real experience, including the felt, the
vague, and the affective. Emphasizing the metaphysical dimensions of these alternative
empiricisms brings into clearer focus the stakes of philosophical thought as part of the
open-ended and ongoing relational processes by which the universe continues to unfold.
keywords: radical empiricism, William James, Deleuze, metaphysics, experience
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 30, no. 4, 2016

Copyright 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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428 russell j. duvernoy
While Deleuzes studies in the history of philosophy include references

to a diverse array of figures, they are rarely in the service of a comparative
schema.1 One suspects that Deleuze would be suspicious of overarching
comparative schemas, seeing them as inherently tending to the medio-
cre insofar as they annul rather than maximize the stakes of difference.
Comparative studies would appear to be the invariable product of what
Deleuze calls the beautiful soulthe thinker who sees differences every-
where and appeals to them only as respectable, reconcilable, or federative
(1994, 52) and in so doing shirks the task of creation that is constitutive of
real thinking.
Yet Deleuze himself is a thinker who is constantly making connections,
whose ontology arguably situates this as an ethical imperative: to
connect!to connect in an unpredictable way, to push this novel connec-
tion to its maximal limit in order to create a new condition of difference.2
The problem then becomes: how to establish or create a connection that
does not presume the common ground of a mere comparison, that respects
irrevocable difference while nonetheless affirming the meaning of an
encounter across it.
Investigating the connection between Jamess radical empiricism
and Deleuzes self-described transcendental empiricism is paradigmatic
of such difficulties. While there has been a significant amount of recent
interest in the relation between Deleuze and classical pragmatism in
general, there is yet to be any consensus as to how best to understand
this relationshipor, more relevantly, what to do with it.3 This question is
especially complex with regard to James, since of all the classical pragmatists
he had the most extensive reception in twentieth-century French philosophy
and is the most frequent to appear in Deleuzes work.4 One way that this
connection has been put to work is by exploring the shared impulse to
experimental pluralism that is a hallmark of Deleuze and James. Such
exploration has tended to focus on the normative implications that are
bound up with this experimental pluralism, exploring the different ways in
which both James and Deleuze offer alternatives to normative theories that
assume a voluntaristic agent as the necessary locus of ethical judgment.
Following the basic pragmatist lesson that normativity is always negotiated
within particular contexts such that universal normative concepts cannot
be extracted as eternal prescriptions, the more radical Jamesian/Deleuzean
suggestion challenges the idea that an ethical judgment must assume the
unquestioning coherence of a self-standing subject.5
from james to deleuze 429
In this article, I study the metaphysical reasons for these normative

implications, arguing that they are inextricable from the radical empiri-
cist impulse to be maximally inclusive of modalities of real experience,
including the felt, the vague, and the affective. This radical empiricist
impulse toward maximal inclusion is simultaneous with its resistance to
complacent acceptance of basic conceptual habits such as the opposition
between mind and world. It would be a mistake to understand this resis-
tance as exclusively negative. Instead, it also contains positive speculative
components that are most coherently articulated as suggesting an inchoate
process ontology. I show how these largely latent elements in James are
explicitly thematized in Deleuze, who goes further in formally investigating
the question of how to account for individuated experience without relying
on the ontological givenness of the subject. Emphasizing the metaphysical
dimensions of these alternative empiricisms brings into clearer focus the
stakes of philosophical thought as part of the open-ended and ongoing rela-
tional processes by which the universe continues to unfold.
Such metaphysical concerns are closely linked to the lived challenges
of normativity. While the article is tangential to those who approach the
normative question head-on, it is, I believe, deeply compatible insofar
as it seeks to further specify the metaphysical conditions that lead to the
experimental pluralisms of both. Doing so can help us better understand
the difficulties of an experimental and pluralist normativity, especially by
complicating reactionary charges of relativism or nihilism in showing the
metaphysical reasons why such charges miss the mark.
1. Pure Experience as Methodological and Speculative
In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze describes a plane of immanence as a kind

of radical empiricism: When immanence is no longer immanent to some-
thing other than itself it is possible to speak of a plane of immanence. Such
a plane is, perhaps, a radical empiricism: it does not present a flux of the
lived that is immanent to a subject and individualized in that which belongs
to a self. It presents only events (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 4748). As
is typical of Deleuze, this highly compressed statement presumes thorough
acquaintance with his motivating concerns. Two points are relevant: First,
Deleuzes description of a plane of immanence indicates a desire to be max-
imally inclusive while not presuming standard conceptual reifications as
ontologically self-evident. This desire follows Deleuzes commitment to a

philosophy that uncovers the conditions of real experience, and not only of
possible experience (1994, 285).6 We cannot be sure that real experience is
fully captured by Kants categories, because we cannot be sure that real expe-
rience is necessarily and exclusively tied to a constituting rational subject.
Exclusive emphasis on the rational subject as the only locus of possible expe-
rience reduces and disfigures a fuller experiential reality, especially insofar
as it covers over qualities of vagueness, intensive sensation (rather than
extensive representation), and feeling. A plane of immanence therefore
insists on taking a maximal number of modalities seriously as real.7 Second,
maintaining such a desire involves a turn to theorizing events as metaphysi-
cally primary. My task in what follows is to show how the first of these points
is consistent with James by stressing two components of his radical empiri-
cism: the methodological/empirical and the speculative/ontological.
James describes radical empiricism as consisting of a postulate
. . . a statement of fact . . . [and] a generalized conclusion (1975, 6). The
postulate urges that philosophical debate maintain the necessity of things
definable in terms drawn from experience (James 1975, 6) and as such
affirms a general empiricist orientation. In combination with the statement
of fact and generalized conclusion, however, this empiricist orientation is
radicalizedthat is, the statement of fact and the generalized conclusion
work to destabilize and enlarge complacent assumptions about the
self-evidence of experience as such.8 It is as a term of this destabilization
that James proposes pure experience. In assessing Deleuzes uptake of
radical empiricism, everything hangs on how we understand this proposal.
In particular, we must consider whether or not pure experience is
primarily a kind of phenomenological reduction akin to Husserls epoch
or whether it is, to some extent, a positive metaphysical or speculative
posit. Clarifying this requires tracing the genesis of the concept of pure
experience in relation both to the tenets of radical empiricism in general
and to its motivating philosophical problem in particular.
Following the methodological postulate, Jamess statement of fact
operates as a crucial premise by affirming experiential access to both con-
junctive and disjunctive relations. Previous empiricisms had denied expe-
rience of conjunctive relations and instead described experience as a series
of discrete and atomistic sense impressions. (Whether or not this assump-
tion is operative in the letter of Hume, it had by the time of James become
the standard inheritance of what he calls the British Associationists.9)
James in contrast declares that relations between things, conjunctive as

well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience,
neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves (1975, 7; empha-
sis added). From the postulate and this statement of fact, James moves to
a generalized conclusion: The parts of experience hold together from
next to next by relations that are themselves part of experience. The directly
apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective
support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure
(1975, 7; emphasis added). To say that our experience is not exclusively of
discontinuous and self-contained independent impressions but that we
also experience the and of conjunction is thus to affirm a kind of conti-
nuity but also resist the need to ground this continuity in a necessary con-
cept that encloses experience in a whole. It is therefore to suggest that our
experience of contingency might be understood as ontological rather than
a feature of subjective ignorance.
Within this context, Jamess proposal of pure experience emerges in
response to a specific philosophical problem: understanding the relation
between mind and world and the status of consciousness as an entity that
differs in kind from physical matter. Pure experience is a radical posit that
seeks to reconfigure the terms through which this problem is traditionally
approached. Rather than assume that such a difference in kind is given
in experience, James suggests that we instead return our attention to expe-
rience without presuming the necessity of the conceptual habits through
which it is typically viewed. The most salient of such conceptual habits is
of course the distinction between subject (mind) and object. As such, pure
experience is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For
the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that
(James 1976, 13).10
If James troubles the assumption of an ontological difference between
mental consciousness and physical object as separate and given to con-
sciousness, this troubling is arrived at not by fiat but through an appeal to
immediate experience. Pure experience is pure in the literal sense of a
that which is not yet any definite what (James 1976, 46). As we saw above,
radical empiricisms statement of fact argues that experience includes
relations between moments or bits of experience, both conjunctive and dis-
junctive. While pure experience does not in principle say anything dif-
ferent, it stresses that the common tendency to construe these relations
as necessarily mediated by division into a subject (as consciousness) and
thing (as object for consciousness) is an addition to what we find in pure

experience itself: In its pure state . . . there is no self-splitting into con-
sciousness and what consciousness is of. Its subjectivity and objectivity
are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is taken,
i.e., talked-of (James 1976, 13).
This shifts our understanding of the ground of basic categories. Rather
than closed determinate sets straightforwardly representing ontological dif-
ferences in kind, the categories of mind and matter are sortings adopted for
practical or theoretical purposes. Such sortings are active selections within
the ongoing horizontal relations of pure experience, which depend upon con-
text. To illustrate this point, James uses the example of rotting meat. The dis-
gustingness of rotting meat is only mental if we consider it in contrast to
the perspective of its interactions with the sun or with the wind, where such
disgustingness presumably makes no sense in the physical interaction. But in
a different relation, this mental quality does operate physically in interac-
tion with our stomach, insofar as it turns our stomach by what seems a direct
operation (James 1976, 76). This ambiguity is better explained if we under-
stand the categories of mind and matter to involve sortings of relations of
experience rather than overarching givens that precede and universally order
being as such. As James puts it: There is no original spirituality or materiality
of being, intuitively discerned (1976, 74). Prior to our sorting into the mental
or the material, a sorting that happens according to particular purposes and
from particular perspectives, the most general thing that we can say about
pure experience is that it is characterized by a translocation of experiences
from one world to another (James 1976, 74).
James is careful to stress an agnosticism about the ultimate metaphys-
ical nature of the constitutive elements or bits of pure experience. Though
he does describe pure experience in terms of a primal stuff, this term
is meant as a neutral marker rather than an ontological description since
there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as
many stuffs as there are natures in the things experienced (1976, 4, 14).
Such agnosticism is a form of bracketing the assumption that the collective
categories of mind or matter are ontologically comprehensive. The diffi-
culty of this is that it asks us to make an imaginative and speculative leap
in understanding pure experience to be neither mental nor physical
though potentially sortable (and resortable) as both. The elements of expe-
rience are understood as fragments that are connected through active tran-
sitions, rather than predetermined parts of a fully encompassing whole.
The problem with the complacent presumption of the categories of

mind and matter as referring to comprehensive and determinate ontologi-
cal distinctions in kind is that this generalizes in a manner that blocks the
active possibility of different relational sortings occurring at the level of
particular relations between different bits. We then run into the problem of
the status of so-called subjective qualities such as taste or scent, since these
would seem to move across the two ontological kinds.11 Pure experience
as a marker that is ontologically prior to these categorieswhich destabi-
lizes what we take as their ontological groundenables a greater specificity
in tracing the varieties of relations as they connect in the unfolding of expe-
rience. To be a radical empiricist is therefore to pay closer attention to the
grain of actual experience while bracketing the comprehensiveness of the
categories through which it is so often approached.
Jamess creative posit of pure experience is reflected in the Deleuzean
plane of immanence, indicating a shared philosophical orientation: do not
dismiss, reduce, or otherwise distort the complexity of real experience.
Both philosophers are suspicious of the role that complacent acceptance
of prevailing conceptual habits has in leading to a failure of philosophical
thought to adequately encounter this complexity. For James, a paradigmatic
example is what he calls vicious intellectualism, in which a definition is
treated as excluding from the fact named what the names definition fails
positively to include (1971, 150). The chief confusion of this procedure is
assuming that a concept is exhaustive of reality, rather than partial and sit-
uated within a context. For Deleuze, his diagnosis of the dogmatic image
of thought shares this basic concerndo not assume the epistemic and
ontological priority of representational concepts as the universal form for
thinking: Conceptual philosophical thought has as its implicit presuppo-
sition a pre-philosophical and natural Image of thought. . . . [A]ccording
to this image, thought has an affinity with the true; it formally possesses
the true and materially wants the true. It is in terms of this image that
everybody knows and is presumed to know what it means to think (1994,
131). In both cases, the assumption that our representational concepts are
exhaustive of reality licenses claims that deny the reality of alternative
modalities.
When Jamess pure experience is understood to include a specula-
tive ontological posit, we see that it shares basic features with Deleuzes
plane of immanence. David Lapoujade has argued that pure experi-
ence is univocal in the Deleuzean sense since it begins from a field in
which experience is virtually subjective or objective, indifferently mental or

physical, but also primitively neither one nor the other (2000, 193). Pure
experience is experience free from the categories with which it is tradi-
tionally partitioned (Lapoujade 2000, 193). This understanding of pure
experience must face the challenge of dual constraints. On the one hand,
affirm maximal inclusion of experiential modalities without presuming the
foundational necessity of any inherited ordering categories; on the other
hand, do not presume that such maximal inclusion means that all of the
moments, modalities, or elements included are fundamentally the same.
Such a reading therefore resists the notion that pure experience is a neu-
tral monism if such monism means that each element of experience is
interchangeable with every other. Rather, pure experiences maximal inclu-
sion retains the differences of its constitutive moments or elements. Using
the patchwork metaphor of which Deleuze is fond, Lapoujade writes,
The textile matter of pure experience is composite. . . . [I]t consists of frag-
ments linked to each other in different ways (2000, 196). The linkage
of such fragments is a matter of relations that extend between them and
which vary accordingly depending upon the context, perspective, and par-
ticular fragments in question.
2. From Radical Empiricism to Process Ontology
I have argued that Jamess pure experience and radical empiricism and
Deleuzes plane of immanence share a philosophical orientation and
basic structure (maximum inclusivity/minimal conceptual presupposi-
tion). I will now consider the second component to Deleuzes plane of
immanence: the turn to events as ontologically primary.12
Jamess pure experience has often been criticized for leading to
a subjectivist relativism, since it appears to offer no criteria for separat-
ing claims that achieve objective consensus from those that are merely
affirmed subjectively. Insofar as such latter claims work, this kind of crit-
icism goes, then James has no tools for decrying their status.13 Recently,
Jon Roffe has offered a version of this kind of argument in the interests of
drawing a contrast between Jamess radical empiricism and Deleuzes tran-
scendental empiricism. Roffe argues that Jamess account of pure expe-
rience does not sufficiently reckon with the necessary manner in which
thought posits illusions that extend beyond the proper limits of what can
be judgedwhat Deleuze, following Kant, calls transcendental illusion.

Such transcendental illusions confuse the regulative Ideas of reason (God,
self, the world as a totality) with representations of actual objects. Roffe
argues that Deleuzes transcendental empiricism consistently dwells on
this problem while James does not. Roffe has in effect taken the standard
subjectivist relativist criticism and upped the ante, since his concern is not
merely with the possibility of objective errors but, rather, with the deeper
issue of transcendental illusion.
The issue hangs on how we understand pure experience. For Roffe,
the very concept of experience means that James retains at an implicit
level the opposition he explicitly opposes (Roffe 2014, 81)namely, the
subject/object distinction. Accordingly, he makes much of passages in
James that appear to endorse a thin and naive conception of pure experi-
ence as exclusively a self-certifying perceptual field. Since pure experience
is self-luminous and lacks inner duplicity, Roffe sees James as assum-
ing a harmonious nature between thought and the real that is unable to
encounter the structural necessity of illusion.14 He thereby assumes that
pure experience is a descriptive phenomenological concept and denies its
speculative ontological components.15
I have already suggested that a thorough accounting of the different
descriptions of pure experience troubles the idea that it is always and
only a phenomenological concept, since it requires dismissing passages in
James that emphasize the double-barreled nature of experience in includ-
ing what is known as subjective and objective.16 For this reason I have
argued that pure experience be understood as containing both phenome-
nological and speculative ontological components. The difficulty of under-
standing the speculative ontological component is a difficulty of resisting
the temptation to fall back into the givenness of the very categories (mind,
matter) that are under question. Describing it this way makes it seem like
the difficulty is primarily negativeresisting the fall back to standard cat-
egories and replacing them with the ambiguous concept of pure experi-
ence. However, James gives us more than this, insofar as he begins to
characterize the implications of pure experience in terms that suggest an
incipient turn to process. Such a turn marks another deep resonance with
Deleuzes subsequent developments.
In critiquing representational models of consciousness that presume
an ontological difference in kind between consciousness and mate-
rial, James proposes that we attend to experience as a dynamic series of
events and resist the commonsense urge to ascribe substantiality to its

apparent objects, including selves: If we start with the supposition that
there is only one primal stuff . . . and if we call that stuff pure experi-
ence, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.
The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its terms becomes
the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes
the object known (1976, 4; emphasis added). I have so far stressed the
way that this changes assumptions about the nature of mental think-
ing, such that it is now one kind of relation within the broader category
of pure experience. However, consistency requires that we extend this
implication to the other side of the subject/object divide, and it is just
this extension that most critics of James, including Roffe, fail to acknowl-
edge. Given the counterintuitive nature of the outcome of such an exten-
sion, as well as Jamess relative lack of attention to it, such dismissal
is understandable. However, it is undeniable that James himself does
recognize this implication. Indeed, material objects are also described as
processes of relations within pure experience: The puzzle of how the
one identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of
how one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at
their intersection; and similarly, if the pure experience of the room were
a place of intersection of two processes, which connected it with different
groups of associates respectively (James 1976, 8). Perceptual experience
is an intersection between two series of processes, and there is no need to
posit a representative doubling in which the mental object does or does
not match the material as a copy matching an original.
This entails an excess to any particular experience, since it is a mem-
ber of diverse processes that can be followed away from it along entirely
different lines (James 1976, 8). Jamess account involves the intersection
between potential human experiences of a physical room and the room
itself described as an experience: As a room, the experience has occupied
that spot and had that environment for thirty years (1976, 9). The diffi-
culty of thinking this is mitigated if we understand pure experience as
containing an ontological posit that is not limited to human experience per
se. The room, on this accounting, is constituted through a complex series
of ongoing processes that include the physical components that make it
up but also events such as the builders physical actions, the plans of the
architect, and so on.
By proposing pure experience, James places events, processes, and

series of such as ontologically primary. This has the effect of construct-
ing a single plane within which to conceptualize the knowing-relation as
one kind of transaction that does not depend upon a transcendental soul
outside of it, thereby excavating a certain image of objectivity such that
the final correct description of any experience is destabilized. Since the
knowing-relation functions horizontally to knit transitions between bits
or moments within the complex and ongoing patchwork of relations con-
stituting pure experience, the very concept of knowledge is transformed.
To a certain perspective, this does look like a move toward a subjectivist
relativism since it seems that our interests entail what we take to be the
correct description. However, there is nothing in James that asserts that
all subjectivist accounts are epistemologically or normatively equivalent.
Rather, his account has the effect of both destabilizing a certain image of
objectivity and affirming the importance of concrete experience as a real,
potentially inexhaustible source of subsequent descriptions. What is being
denied is the idea that there could be a static, complete, and final descrip-
tion from any one single perspective. That model of objectivity relies on
the presumption of a gap between a static given object and the mind as
independent discrete spectator. To deny such a gap is not to conflate the
two completely. The radicality of Jamess proposal is not that it completely
upends objectivity but that it redescribes the conditions within which
our descriptions take place such that they become active components in
the ongoing unfolding of experience, rather than static representations.
The criterion for their success is therefore shifted from one of a binary
true-false correspondence to something more ambiguous and uncertain.
This ambiguity and uncertainty is a mark of the provisionality of the
knowing-relation: an idea works or does not, but such a working is always
open to the future possibility of failure. This very openness disputes the
charge of naive relativism.17
The challenge of thinking Jamess proposal is a measure of the extent
to which its epistemological commitment to an empiricism is inextricable
from a concomitant speculative hypothesis of pure experience. The pro-
posal of pure experience as a new category is both highly abstract and yet
grounded in the concrete actuality of lived experience, a lived experience that
is excessive to our static conceptualizations of it. This puts perspectivism on
new grounds, since it constructs an ontology that is better able to account for
the experience of differing perspectives. As Deleuze writes, alluding explicitly
to James: Perspectivism amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we

take for granted. It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the
condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject (1993, 20).
The role that variation plays can be mapped to Jamess account of experi-
ence as intersections of ongoing lines of functionsso that any point (a
point of view in a particular place at a particular time) is understood as an
intersection of many different lines (or series, in Deleuzes language). If there
is a relativism here, it is not a subjectivist relativism but, rather, what might
be called an objective relativism, since relations are constitutive events for
all of experience.18 These events cannot be presumed to all order themselves
around the human subject/object relation, because this is only one possible
distinction, not the only one.
Such a suggestion is innovative and incomplete.19 It suggests a new
line of conceptualizing that raises new forms of problems. In particular, it
raises questions about the metaphysical status of individuals and the pro-
cess of individuation.20 Since we cannot appeal to the essential givenness
of subjects or objects, we have to find a different way of accounting for
conventional experience of their existence and stability. This question the-
matizes the intersection between the high abstractions of a process meta-
physics and the lived reality of our concrete lives. Deleuze and James tend
to diverge in their points of emphasis with regard to this intersection. The
incompletion of Jamess metaphysical speculation is as much a result of
his refusal to depart from an overriding concern with concrete lived real-
ity, even as he recognizes that such lived reality is never fully independent
from the abstract concepts through which it is lived. Deleuze, on the other
hand, goes further in seeking to think through the consequences of the
implications of a pure experience posit, even as doing so takes us further
from anything conventionally recognizable as lived experience.
In this sense, Deleuzes move to propose a transcendental empiricism
is motivated by a formal question that James implicitly raises but does not
adequately treat. If pure experience is exclusively horizontal in affirming
relations that happen between bits of experience, then how can we account
for the discontinuity or important difference that obtains between some
such bits, as at the border between two different individuals[,] and not
others? While Deleuzes account is primarily formal, the difficulty of
this question is both existential and normative. Indeed, since a particular
description of a knowing-relation is a function of the transition involved in
that relation, it therefore would seem to involve a selection of components
corresponding to the interests and needs manifested by the locus of that

experience. What is a locus of experience if not a subject? It is difficult
to construe interests and needs independent of a constituted subject, and
yet talk of a constituted subject would seem to reintroduce a transcenden-
tal agent. So, the problem is that we must account for the selectivity of a
knowing-relation within pure experience without positing a discrete or
transcendental agent that stands outside of the constitutive processes.
3. The Genesis of Individuation in a Superior Empiricism
Jamess positing of radical empiricism gives a new form to the perennial

problem of the relation between thoughts and things, reconceptualizing
it within a field of pure experience. Relations within this field are events
or processes that are constitutive of both subjective and objective
moments. This speculative hypothesis poses the relation in a new way and
thus emphasizes differently what explanations are owed. The chief ques-
tion now becomes how to account for individuation within the field of pure
experienceHow do we account for the loci of interests that arise as a
result of intersecting series of different processes?
Jon Roffes critique of James presents a more critical way of asking this
question: Does pure experience assume a natural harmony between our
conscious experience and reality? Does it assume that we must presup-
pose a natural bond with this experience; [that] experience must be given
to us in truth and not deceptively (Roffe 2014, 81)? I have argued above
that it does not, since James means to destabilize the presumed ontological
ground of some of our most basic concepts. But in denying this natural
bond we now must account for the reason why these concepts (subject,
object) arise so consistently, without presuming that they are given.
This problem is one of Deleuzes primary interests in Logic of Sense.21
Deleuze diagnoses two ways it has been foreclosed in the history of philos-
ophy: the metaphysical and the transcendental. This is the choice between
either an undifferentiated ground . . . an abyss without differences and
without properties, or a supremely individuated Being and an intensely
personalized form (Deleuze 1990, 106). The former is a supreme case
of a metaphysical abstraction that denies concrete experience insofar as it
relies upon a claimed metaphysical unity that is already analytically one. In
this case, there is no formal problem of individuation, because, properly
speaking, there are no distinct individuals. Such a solution, however, clearly

is insufficient if measured against the radical empiricist impulse to do jus-
tice to experience, which is primarily experience of difference.
The second alternative would therefore appear more promising, since
it does not make an all-encompassing claim of metaphysical unity as such
but, rather, understands experience of individuated difference to be the
result of constructive activity on the part of a transcendental subject, as in
Kant. However, for Deleuze, this alternative also rests on an unfounded
presumption of unified identity. This presumption of a necessary unity
of consciousness is correlative with what Deleuze calls the Urdoxa, which
unquestioningly privileges the rational mode of a good sense and a com-
mon sense (1990, 102).22 If one is to maintain a rigorous radical empir-
icism, then this Urdoxa itself must be subject to question, rather than
presumed as an undoubted necessity.
Deleuzes primary target in these discussions is the tradition of phe-
nomenology as he understands it. Accordingly, the intensely personal-
ized form is not only applicable to Kant but also operative in Husserls
transcendental phenomenology.23 Both Husserl and Kant rely upon the
basic form something = x or object = x such that they assume at the
transcendental level what they are explaining at the empirical level. Rather
than offering a genetic account of how individuation emerges, they give
up genesis and constitution and . . . limit [themselves] to a simple transcen-
dental conditioning (Deleuze 1990, 105). From Deleuzes perspective this
assumes that the empirical and the transcendental have a formal relation
of resemblance and representation: The error of all efforts to determine the
transcendental as consciousness is that they think of the transcendental
in the image of, and in the resemblance to, that which it is supposed to
ground (1990, 105). Why is this a problem? Couldnt we just jettison the
very notion of the transcendental as such?
It might be suggested that this is what James is doing with his con-
cept of pure experience. However, such a suggestion overlooks the positive
speculative components that affirm relations and processes as ontologically
basic. The problem is that pure experience alone, while a useful metacon-
cept for destabilizing entrenched and reified conceptual habits, cannot
explain why certain relations and processes result in apparent individuals
while others do not. It is because of this problem that Deleuze thinks we
need a transcendental level, but in keeping with his criticisms of resem-
blance and representation, such a transcendental level or field cannot be
modeled on assumptions of unity and identity. Failure to attend to this

constraint will only resurrect the Essences and the divine Being of the
old metaphysics (Deleuze 1990, 105), with the transcendental level being
populated by generals or universals that are then instantiated in particulars
in a top-down manner. This cannot account for fundamental features of
actual real experienceits transitions, its contingencies, its novelties. So,
on the one hand, a transcendental field is necessary if a radical empiricism
is to be coherent in its ability to account for the experience of individuated
differences in quasi-stable objects and subjects; but on the other hand, if
this transcendental field straightforwardly resembles the empirical that
it conditions, we are unable to account for genuine novelty and genesis.
Deleuze thinks that Husserls transcendental phenomenology fails to ade-
quately meet this second constraint.
Deleuze judges Sartres arguments against the Husserlian constituting
transcendental ego as decisive insofar as they expose the doubling
the presupposition of a unified ego based on the experience of the unified
object (Deleuze 1990, 105).24 But Deleuzes interpretation of the implica-
tions of Sartres argument also rejects phenomenology as a viable method
of access to the transcendental field. Indeed, framing this relation in terms
of access is the wrong way to ask the question for Deleuze. The question is
not how to conceptually represent the transcendental in terms of a stable
propositional account of its content. Such an account will invariably reify
the structure in question and therefore block its genetic potential for pro-
ducing novelty and difference.
Deleuzes innovation in the face of this problem is to privilege sen-
sibility, which is subrepresentative, as the crucial mode of encountering
and experiencing reality. Sensibility itself is further distinguished into its
empirical and transcendental faculties. While empirical sensibility per-
ceives sensible qualities, the ordinary conceptual description of these quali-
ties covers over their transcendental source, which Deleuze calls intensity
(1994, 144). Intensity is not a condition of possibility or an inaccessible
noumenon; it is directly and immediately experienced in sensibilitys
encounter with its limit. This is what Deleuze means when he affirms the
lived reality of a sub-representative domain as that which can only be
sensed (1994, 69, 57).
This appeal to sensibility resonates with Jamess description of pure
experience as but another name for feeling or sensation (1976, 46),
provided we resist the temptation to think of such feeling or sensation as
merely equivalent to conventional perception. For Deleuze, transcendental

sensibility is not equivalent to a color perception or a feeling of cold but,
rather, is the encounter with a difference in intensity that is then translated
into these qualitative descriptions. Such an encounter is real and expe-
rienced, but its relation to qualitative empirical perception is not one of
resemblance.
To understand Deleuzes innovation here, we must resist the assump-
tion that feeling and sensibility are necessarily qualitative predicates that
inhere in a constituting subject. This is why Deleuze worries that Husserlian
phenomenology still assumes the form of consciousness as unified at the
transcendental level. The Urdoxa retains the form of the person, of per-
sonal consciousness, and of subjective identity, and is satisfied with creat-
ing the transcendental out of the characteristics of the empirical (Deleuze
1990, 98). While Sartre showed how the Husserlian unifying and individ-
ualizing transcendental ego is superfluous and suggested instead that the
transcendental level be characterized as impersonal, Deleuze argues that
the very form of consciousness, whether personal or impersonal, is still
beholden to the logic of subject (consciousness) and predicate (noematic
quality or attribute): We cannot retain consciousness as a milieu while at
the same time we object to the form of the person and the point of view of
individuation. A consciousness is nothing without a synthesis of unifica-
tion, but there is no synthesis of unification of consciousness without the
form of the I, or the point of view of the Self (1990, 102).
Deleuzes solution is to give up this logic of identity and replace it with
a logic of events. Against Husserls reliance on a monadic nucleus with
corresponding noematic attributes, Deleuze argues that we should concep-
tualize attributes as verbs, as events. In this way, our accounting of individ-
uals does not presuppose the form of the individual as given but, rather,
understands its emergence as an accumulation of events. The appeal to
sensibility should be understood in combination with this logic of events.
Instead of subjects that have feelings, feelings are primary as events, and
subjects are constituted out of and by these events and processes. It is only
in this way that we can understand the functioning of the transcendental
field without assuming the disjunction symptomatic of the metaphysical
and the transcendental approaches: either singularities already comprised
in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss (Deleuze 1990,
103). This kind of conceptualization provides a different way of accounting
for experience that avoids the assumptions of reductive empiricisms: Only
when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and
pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we at last tread on the field of the
transcendental (Deleuze 1990, 103).
We can understand Deleuzes turn to singularities as events of ongoing
series as functionally analogous to Jamess redescription of consciousness
and knowing-relations in terms of ongoing series rather than opposing
entities: A mind or personal consciousness is the name for a series of
experiences run together by certain definite transitions (James 1976, 39).
In addition, Deleuzes emphasis on singularities as events that engender
ordering categories allows for a way of accounting for the internal evolution
and change of categories. Such categories are nomadic rather than static
and collective. This is also in keeping with a basic Jamesian investment:
Individuality outruns all classification (James 1971, 123). In this sense,
Deleuzes transcendental empiricism builds on the basic orientation of
Jamess thought but extends its metaphysical treatment of how to account
for apparently stable identities without presuming their givenness. In both
cases, this hinges on a turn from a traditional metaphysics of substance
and predicate to one of process and events.
4. The Openness of Experience
Reading James through Deleuze, the challenge of pure experience is to

avoid collapsing it into an undifferentiated abyss while also not importing
the necessary form of the constituting subject. Pure experience cannot be
undifferentiated as such, because it would then amount to the metaphysi-
cal claim of an infinite unity, which would not do justice to the experience
of difference or disjunction. However, can we conceive of pure experience
as differentiated without modeling such differentiation on the assumption
that it is exhaustively represented by conventional concepts? Pure expe-
rience must include its own processes of singularization and individua-
tion, its own potential loci of desires and interests, without mapping these
directly from what we presume as given in ordinary empirical experience.
This is a challenge to think through what experience might mean if we
do not presume that our identity is its necessary fulcrum. Despite the high
abstraction of this formulation, such a challenge strikes deep at the heart of
our existential lives. Who are we if we are not the stable subjects so much of
our discourse presumes? While this question is underdeveloped in James,
taking seriously the speculative components of his radical empiricism

clearly troubles the assumption of an assumed subject/predicate ontolog-
ical structure. Deleuze does not shy away from the speculative challenge
of a truly radical empiricism, even as he maintains a basic commitment to
the maximal inclusion of modalities of the real in experience. The positive
development of such a challenge is most succinctly formulated as the chal-
lenge of developing an internally coherent metaphysics that takes relations
and process as primary. If I have here stressed the formal aspects of this
challenge, it cannot be fully divorced from the existential. To live as a radical
or transcendental empiricist means attending to all the modalities of expe-
rience without presuming that these are captured by our concepts. This is a
conceptual challenge, but it is also a lived challenge, since it involves taking
seriously the vagueness of the sensible. Doing this intensifies the stakes of
thought, since real thinking becomes one more relational and productive
process in an open, contingent, and potentially dangerous universe.
notes
1. Deleuzes study of Hume includes references to Berkeley, Descartes, Kant,
Bertrand Russell, William James, and others, but always as side comments rather
than extensive comparisons. The Kant book follows a similar methodology, as does
the book on Bergson.
2. Braidotti 2012 argues that Deleuzes ontology entails a pragmatic ethics of
relationality and connection. Giving up the unitary subject means that subjects are
constituted through ongoing processes of relations. To connect is to create, and
ethical questions become framed by concepts of sustainability, affirmation, and
vulnerability, rather than rights or duties.
3. A selection of representative works includes Bowden, Bignall, and Patton
2014; Rajchman 2000; and Stuhr 2003.
4. In addition to Jamess correspondence with Bergson, the most important figure
is Jean Wahl, one of Deleuzes teachers and author of the influential encyclopedic
survey of Anglo-American philosophy in the later nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries Les Philosophies pluralists dAngleterre et dAmrique (1920; published in
English translation in 1925 as The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America).
Deleuze credits Wahl for not only introduc[ing] us to an encounter with English
and American thought, but ha[ving] the ability to make us think, in French, things
that were very new (1987, 5758.) This is exemplified in Wahls celebration of
Jamess metaphysical pluralism and its affirmation of positive difference.
References to James appear from the earliest to the latest texts: in Hume:
Empiricism and Subjectivity (Deleuze 1991, 99); in Difference and Repetition
(Deleuze 1994, 31112) as well as the thesis outline for that work; in The Fold
(Deleuze 1993, 20); in Phantasm and Modern Literature, published as an
appendix to Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990, 318); in the essay on Melvilles Bartleby
(Bartleby; or, The Formula) published in Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze
1997, 193n21); and briefly in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 276n).
5. In Bowden 2015, Deleuze is represented as an expressivist alternative
to voluntarist conceptions of normativity and agency. For the expressivist
conception, actions are primary expressions that are constitutive of agents, and
normative evaluations of these actions become a matter of ongoing communal
discussion. The view that I develop in this article is largely compatible with
Bowdens framing, but it goes further in showing how Jamess radical empiricism
and Deleuze following him, when taken to their speculative limit, trouble the very
assumption of an abiding subject as the necessary locus of agency.
6. Franois Zourabichvili observes, Deleuzes most general problem is not
being but experience, though he is careful to explain that by experience
we should not understand merely ordinary lived experience: Transcendental
empiricism means first of all that the discovery of the conditions of experience
itself presupposes an experience in the strict sense: not the ordinary or empirical
experience of a faculty (for the data of empirical lived experience doesnt inform
thought about what it can do), but this faculty taken to its limit, confronted by that
which solicits it in its own unique power (2012, 210).
Similarly, Dan Smith notes that it is Deleuzes concern for the conditions of
real experience, as opposed to merely possible experience or logical possibility,
that distinguishes his project. This search for the conditions of real experience
is bound up with the question of the new, since for Deleuze real experience is
marked by its newness (Smith 2012, 23738).
7. The plane of immanence is related to the earlier univocity of being.
Deleuze calls this the only ontological proposition: Being is univocal (1994, 35).
Since being is said in a single sense we cannot claim substance as the primary
model of being and relegate other categories (relation, location, time, etc.) to be
only in a secondary or analogical sense. However, if being is said in one sense for
all that is, this is not to say that all being is the same. On the contrary, for Deleuze,
if being is said in one sense, then what it is said of, what is, is difference. This
has significant implications for Deleuzes unusual understanding of empiricism.
If difference is what is in the most basic sense, then an authentic empiricist
commitment will be one that attempts to get beneath the conventionalities of
representational concepts in order to encounter this reality directly: Empiricism
truly becomes transcendental . . . only when we apprehend directly in the sensible
that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential
difference, and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity

(Deleuze 1994, 5657).
8. Elsewhere James formulates the postulate as: Everything real must be
experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere
be real (1976, 81).
9. James writes, Ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive
and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully coordinate parts of
experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of
things, and to insist most on disjunctions, going on to mention Berkeley, Hume,
and both Mills as examples of this tendency (1976, 2223).
10. Taking his cue from the James passage cited above, Jeffrey Bell argues that
pure experience plays a similar ontological role as Deleuzes virtual. While this
article agrees with the spirit of this remark, I argue in section 3 that Deleuze goes
further precisely because pure experience as described by James does not give
us any formal tools for specifying the genetic conditions of individuation. See Bell
2009, 1829.
11. The next temptation is to dismiss these subjective qualities as less real
than the extensional qualities that do not seem to move across these boundaries.
This tendency, following the early modern distinction between primary and
secondary qualities, is what Whitehead bemoans as the bifurcation of nature.
His desire to resist this outcome is one reason for his enthusiastic endorsement of
Jamess radical empiricism. See Whitehead 1967, 14245, for discussion of James,
and Whitehead 1920, 2832, for discussion of the bifurcation.
12. I largely understand the terms event and process as structurally synonymous
insofar as both stress the ontological primacy of activity as constitutive. However,
the term event is sometimes understood to signal an honorific status, an activity
that achieves an importance beyond the mundane. Deleuze does not use the term
in this manner. Events can be ordinary, or they can be singular. As Smith writes,
Every multiplicity is characterized by a combination of singular and ordinary
points, such that one could say that there are 2 poles of Deleuzes philosophy:
Everything is ordinary and everything is singular (2012, 115).
13. Subjectivist relativist readings stress the methodological-empirical and
discount the role of the speculative, therefore following a prevailing order of
priorities that takes epistemological questions as primary. Pragmatism has
been most widely disseminated precisely as an epistemological innovation, and
Jamess radical empiricism tends to be read through the pragmatism. Misak
2013 is a recent, well-argued version of this kind of reading that sees Jamess
formulations as insufficiently rigorous to block the possibility that subjective
satisfaction will become a source of evidence for truth. This suggestion is
certainly to be found in James. Moreover, Misak rightly identifies Jamess radical
empiricism as privileging brute experience in giving us indexical access to
the world: On Jamess view, just as in Peirces, sensation, experience, or the
immediately felt life provides us with a connection to that which exists apart from
us (Misak 2013, 57). However, because Misak overlooks the full implications
of the speculative in James, she remains wedded to a constitutive subject and
to representation as the mode of thinking, both conclusions that my reading
questions. As an example, Misak writes that, according to James, we cannot
harness up reality in a way that accurately represents it (2013, 57). But Jamess
point is both subtler and more radical than this formulation, which reinstates a
mind/world gap. In contrast, my reading suggests that concepts do directly work
in reality but that such working is not on the model of representation but, rather,
action. Moreover, satisfaction need not be a psychological state of a constituted
subject but may be suggestive of a pre-representative and presubjective
resonance, which, in such a case, is evidentially relevant though not normatively
conclusive. See Misak 2013, 5376.
Mounce 1997 is a less nuanced example of a pejorative subjectivist relativist
reading. Seigfried 1990 also develops a subjectivist reading, but one that
celebrates rather than condemns its positive implications. The reading I offer
here departs significantly by emphasizing the speculative-ontological over the
epistemological.
14. Roffe combines these characterizations from different passages in James.
The full James quotations are as follows: Experience, I believe, has no such inner
duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by
way of subtraction, but by way of addition; The active sense of living which we
all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous
and suggests no paradoxes (James 1976, 6, 45). The inner duplicity that James
denies is a particular conception of experience that takes consciousness as
an epistemological necessity, even if we had no direct evidence of its being
there (1976, 5). Similarly, the self-luminosity is a characterization of the actual,
which does not imply epistemological standing. Neither quote entails the naive
conception that Roffe assumes.
15. Roffe is not alone in this assumption, and it does have all the force of
convention on its side insofar as the standard definition of experience requires
an experiencing subject and is hence necessarily subjectivist. It is also true that
Jamess characterizations do sometimes allow for this assumption to remain
unchallenged. Roffe, for example, makes much of Jamess use of the newborn, the
drunk, and the dazed to bolster his claim that pure experience is an experience
of unmediated access (Roffe 2014, 83). However, the very notion of unmediated
access is transformed if we attend to Jamess emphasis on relational transitions
because access is never a once-and-for-all relation across a single gap between
mind and world. Access is just a name for the ongoing relational moments that
make up experience. The purity of pure experience is not a matter of free access
but, rather, only of attending to relations without assuming their conceptual
reification as given. The question of harmony is thus transformed from a global
characterization to a local, particular, and ongoing question that is always
contingent and liable to change.
16. David Lamberth mines Jamess lecture notes for his 1904/5 course on
metaphysics for further evidence that his choice of the term experience is motivated
by its capaciousness. One particular motivation is as a contrast with perceive so
as to avoid a Berkeleyan kind of idealism. As Lamberth writes, This ambiguity
relative to phenomenological and metaphysical meaning, this concurrent
reference of experience to both the subjective and the objective, is crucial for . . .
the success . . . of Jamess philosophical vision (1999, 26).
17. As John Stuhr has recently argued, we should distinguish between a naive
subjectivist relativism and a robust form of relativism that recognizes that values
are relational. Stuhr argues that understanding James on this point shows that his
relativism is neither subjectivist nor nihilistic nor irrational. Stuhrs discussion of
these points is closely related to what I call objective relativism below. See Stuhr
2016, 10913.
18. Manuel DeLandas work in situating Deleuzes philosophy within the context
of contemporary physical sciences, particularly thermodynamics, is invaluable
for helping to make the possibility of a nonanthropocentric objective relativism
coherent and plausible. Drawing on the work of systems theorist Arthur Iberall,
DeLanda shows how affordances and relations are relative to both temporal and
spatial scales. We can therefore conceive of the objective properties of an object as
relative to its constitutive relations: Whether a particular body appears solid or liquid
to a given observer will depend on the ratio between relaxation and observational
time scales, in the sense that for sufficiently long observational times the glass
will appear to the observer as a flowing liquid (DeLanda 2002, 105). This is not to
assume that a necessarily human subject is the locus of this perspective but, rather,
that objective properties are the result of relational processes.
19. James frequently characterizes his radical empiricism as a beginning: It
seems to me . . . that many minds are . . . now turning in a direction that points
towards radical empiricism. If they are carried farther by my words, and if then
they add their stronger voices to my feebler one, the publication of this essay will
have been worth while (1976, 44).
20. Typical framings of the metaphysical problem of individuation assume the
substance-predicate model such that the issue becomes how to individuate
objects as the objects that they are. How do we decide which properties of the
object are the ones that make it the particular x that it is? From the perspective of a
process metaphysics, this is begging the question, since it assumes the substance
paradigm at the outset. For examples, see Hazlett 2010; Lowe 2003.
21. I follow James Williams in preferring Logic of Sense to the English translation
The Logic of Sense. As Williams observes, the original French Logique du Sens
is ambiguous with regard to whether this refers to a logic or the logic. See
Williams 2008, 2223.
22. Deleuzes critique of common sense and good sense is most developed in
Difference and Repetition (see especially 1994, 13438, 22427). Common sense
functions to ensure the complacent privileging of unified identity (that which is

common to all), and good sense assumes a telos to thought in naturally aspiring
toward the true. Lawlor argues that these two assumptions (identity and teleology)
embroil Husserl in a vicious circle that cannot account for a transcendental
genesis of novelty: Fundamentally, the criticism that Deleuze levels against the
apparatus that Husserl sets up . . . is that genesis is a kind of copying (2012, 109).
23. A full exploration of Deleuzes complicated relationship with Husserl and
phenomenology is beyond the scope of my argument here, though not irrelevant
given Husserls reading of James. For two excellent treatments of the Deleuze/
Husserl relation, see Beaulieu 2009; Lawlor 2012.
24. For a detailed analysis of Deleuzes use of Sartre, see Somers-Hall 2006.
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and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
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Pure Experience and Planes

keywords: radical empiricism, William James, Deleuze, metaphysics, experience

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 30, no. 4, 2016

While Deleuzes studies in the history of philosophy include references

In this article, I study the metaphysical reasons for these normative

1. Pure Experience as Methodological and Speculative

In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze describes a plane of immanence as a kind

ontologically self-evident. This desire follows Deleuzes commitment to a

James in contrast declares that relations between things, conjunctive as

thing (as object for consciousness) is an addition to what we find in pure

The problem with the complacent presumption of the categories of

which experience is virtually subjective or objective, indifferently mental or

2. From Radical Empiricism to Process Ontology

be judgedwhat Deleuze, following Kant, calls transcendental illusion.

events and resist the commonsense urge to ascribe substantiality to its

By proposing pure experience, James places events, processes, and

to James: Perspectivism amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we

corresponding to the interests and needs manifested by the locus of that

3. The Genesis of Individuation in a Superior Empiricism

Jamess positing of radical empiricism gives a new form to the perennial

speaking, there are no distinct individuals. Such a solution, however, clearly

modeled on assumptions of unity and identity. Failure to attend to this

merely equivalent to conventional perception. For Deleuze, transcendental

4. The Openness of Experience

Reading James through Deleuze, the challenge of pure experience is to

taking seriously the speculative components of his radical empiricism

difference, and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity

functions to ensure the complacent privileging of unified identity (that which is

Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. (1972) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism

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