Philosophy Today, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, September 2007.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

One of Gilles Deleuze's major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza's substance, presents two sidespure extension and thoughtor, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking. This virtual continuum receives a variety of designations throughout Deleuze's corpus: "intensive spatium" in Difference and Repetition1, "ideal or metaphysical surface" in The Logic of Sense2, "plane of consistency" in A Thousand Plateaus (written with Flix Guattari)3 and "plane of immanence" in What is Philosophy? (equally co-authored with Guattari)4. While these diverse terms may be argued to accentuate different aspects of the continuum so-designated, Deleuze's characterization of the latter remains, nevertheless, fundamentally constantsuch that, as one commentator puts it, the various "objects" in question (spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace) are all rigorously homothetic.5 Such a continuum is, accordingly, consistently described as a preextensive, non-qualified "milieu" or "space-stratum" enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field that, assembling the conditions of realand not merely possibleexperience, would neither resemble the corresponding empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects) nor amount to an undifferentiated "depth" or groundlessness (sans-fond indiffrenci) identified as pure chaos. Aiming in this way to escape the ultimatum, laid down by both metaphysics and Kant's transcendental philosophy, which claims the transcendental field must be defined in terms of

a supremely individuated Being or an intensely personalized Form if it is not to end up inevitably confounded with an undifferentiated abyss or pure chaos, Deleuze consistently mobilizes what we might call a "topological model" in order to describe the properties of this real transcendental field. Along lines similar to Michel Serres' positioning of topology as
the first objective elaboration of a transcendental field ("field of invariants") or, indeed, to
1

Originally published as: Diffrence et Rptition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. Tr.: Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 2 Originally published as Logique du sens, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969. Tr.: Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 3 Originally published as Capitalisme et schizophrnie, tome 2: Mille Plateaux, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. Tr.: Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 4 Originally published as Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991. Tr.: Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 5 See: Villani, A., "Geographie physique de Mille Plateaux", Critique, n 455, April 1985, note 29, p. 347.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

Merleau-Ponty's exhortation to "take topological space as the model of being", Deleuze views the topological "categories" of position, junction, and connection as the best able to explain the way in which the transcendental plane gives consistency to the elements (multiplicities, pure intensities or singularities) that populate it. One of the most rigorous statements of the "topological" nature of the transcendental field is found in Deleuze's early article on structuralism where, after defining structuralism's "scientific ambition" as being "topological and relational", he notes that, for this reason, "structuralism is inseparable from a new transcendental philosophy where places are more important than what fills them."6 In short, "what is structural is space, but a non-extensive, pre-extensive, pure spatium."7 Such a space is a space of co-existence, articulated by a system of differences that, far from being external relations defined with regard to pre-existing entities, are, on the contrary, relations constitutive of the "reciprocal determination" of the singularities which occur in the space "like topological events" and which compose multiplicities. As Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: "These elements must, in effect, be determined, but reciprocally, by reciprocal relations which allow no independence whatsoever to subsist. Such relations are precisely non-localizable ideal connections, whether they characterize the multiplicity globally or proceed by the juxtaposition of neighboring regions. In all cases, the multiplicity is intrinsically defined, without external reference or recourse to a uniform space in which it would be submerged."8 In sum, it is, above all, the category of connection that Deleuze takes from topology in order to determine his transcendental plane in terms of a structurally stable (or better, "metastable") system auto-regulated by a relational and dynamic, non-quantitative, organization of potential values. The plane precisely gives consistency to its elements through the way it meshes these together to form a heterogeneous whole, with Deleuze and Guattari explicitly defining the plane of consistency in A Thousand Plateaus as "the mode of connection".9 Deleuze's major reference as regards the category of connection is, of course, Riemann,

whom he constantly credits, from his earliest texts on, with having inaugurated a fundamental epistemological revolution through the definition of spaces as "multiplicities" (or, more strictly, in English, "manifolds") insofar as such a definitionwith its use of the substantive form "multiplicity", rather than "multiple", or "manifold" rather than "many"displaces the dialectical opposition of the one and the many, or the one and the multiple, proffering in its place, a typological (as well as topological) difference between
6

"A quoi reconnat-on le structuralisme?" (1972), in Franois Chtelet, ed., La Philosophie, tome 4: au XXe sicle, Verviers, Belgium: Marabout, p. 300. 7 Ibid., p. 299. 8 Op. cit., p. 183. My emphasis. 9 Op. cit., p. 508.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

structures whose organization belongs to the many as such, without any need of unity in order to form a system. Deleuze habitually engages Riemann's work through the intermediary
of the philosopher of mathematics Albert Lautman, whose description of Riemannian spaces or "manifolds" as presenting no pre-determined mode of connection between their different parts or "neighborhoods"which can, consequently, be linked together in an infinite number of ways is referred to time and time again throughout his corpus. While two neighbouring observers

in a Riemannian space can, for example, locate the points in their immediate vicinitywith each neighbourhood of a Riemannian space being therefore like a shred of Euc1idean space they cannot locate their spaces in relation to each other without a new convention. "Riemannian space at its most general", Lautman writes, "thus presents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to each other." The
importance of this definition for Deleuze's own topology is particularly clear in A Thousand Plateaus, where the fact that a multiplicity can be defined, without reference to any metrical system, in terms of the conditions of frequency or, rather, accumulation, of a set of neighbourhoods or vicinities, yields the major characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari's conception of "smooth"i.e., non-metric, topologicalspace. Along with the mode of connection, another major determinant of the transcendental plane's topology, as Deleuze understands it, is its global structure as a surface. "The real transcendental field is constituted by a surface topology", Deleuze declares in The Logic of Sense, referring specifically in this context to Gilbert Simondon's analyses of the processes of individuation in L'Individu et sa gense physico-biologique,10 which Deleuze situates as proposing a new conception of the transcendental. The topological surface's property of putting internal and external spaces in contact, without regard to distance, is pre-eminently what Deleuze retains from Simondon's argument that all organization (understood as comprising differentiation and integration) presupposes the primary topological structure of an absolute outside and inside that then induces relative intermediary exteriorities and interiorities. From The Logic of Sense, through his books on the cinema and Foucault, to The Foldcentered precisely on "the topology of the fold"Deleuze repeatedly refers to such a topological structuration, reiterating in each instancebe the reference to Simondon explicit or notthe essential of Simondon's analyses in this respect, as summed up by the following citation in The Logic of Sense: "The entire content of internal space is topologically in contact with the content of external space (); there is, in fact, no distance in topology; the entire mass of living matter contained in the internal space is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living."11
10 11

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Op. cit., p. 104.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

Crucially, both this topological structuration of the surface, where the outside is lined by an inside that is coextensive to it, and the category of connection emphasize a certain notion of continuityas is, indeed, in keeping with Deleuze's aim to determine what he explicitly names a virtual continuum. Yet, while absolutely determinant for the transcendental plane, this very quality of continuity can be argued to be one of the most problematic aspects of Deleuze's theory of the virtual. Commentators as diverse as Alain Badiou 12, Slavoj Zizek13, Phillip Goodchild14 and Manuel Delanda15 have all brought to light problems accruing to the continuity of the transcendental plane, be these with respect to the difficulty to account for the meshing

together as such of the multiplicities on the transcendental surface, or, conversely, the difficulties that such a virtual continuity entails, not only for an ontology of the pure multiple (for which one would need a concept of the void, according to Badiou), but for any idea of the event as radical rupture, without any connection, with the state of existing "being".
The problem that I would like to elaborate, for my part, concerns the relation of this plane to chaos, of which the most succinct definition might well beto borrow here a key term from Badiou's ontologythat of an "inconsistent pure multiple". That a veritable "structural ambivalence" marks Deleuze's characterization of the topology of the plane of immanence in its relation to chaos is, I believe, indicative of Deleuze's struggling to secure, by the notion of continuity, a certain philosophical determination for his topologyalbeit one that, as I shall try to outline through a very succinct examination of Deleuze's reading of Kant, has ultimately very little to do with "topology" or, for that matter, with "space" as such. Chaos is constantly characterized throughout Deleuze's work as the lack of any relation or connection of its elementsas the lack, in other words, of even a minimum of consistency. The following definition, drawn from What Is Philosophy?, is, in this regard, exemplary: "chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. This is ... the impossibility of a connection between them, since one does not appear without the other having already disappeared (...). Chaos makes chaotic and undoes every consistency in the infinite."16 The plane of immanence is, then, situated as the manner in which philosophy "gives consistency without losing anything of the infinite": "the plane is a like
12

Badiou, A., Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, tr.: Louise Burchill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 13 Zizek, S., Organs without Bodies. On Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge, 2004. 14 Goodchild, P., Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy, Cranbury, NJ.: Associated University Presses, 1996. 15 Delanda, M., Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum, 2002. 16 Op. cit., p. 42.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

a section of chaos and acts like a sieve."17 Yet, while this undifferentiated depth or chaos is described in many of Deleuze's (especially, early) texts as something real (in the sense not of an actual existent but, rather, that of a pure, virtual, disjunctive diversity), Deleuze, elsewhere, either dispenses with the notion of chaos (as in Anti-Oedipus) or explicitly denies any "existence" to it as such. In The Fold, for instance, he writes: "Chaos does not exist; it is an abstraction because it is inseparable from a sieve that causes somethingsomething rather than nothingto emerge from it. Chaos would be a pure Many, a pure disjunctive diversity, while the something is a One, not a pre-given unity, but instead the indefinite article that designates a certain singularity. How can the Many become the One? A great sieve has to intervene."18 In other words, while the plane of consistency/immanence is constantly characterized as instituted through an auto-organization immanent to the plane itself (be this compared to the action of a "sieve" or "filter" or to the action of serialization) by which differentials are extracted from the chaos and given consistency by being put into connection or series, Deleuze sometimes situates this "auto-organization" of the plane as having always/already taken place such that a chaotic state of pure diversity can be nothing other than an abstraction or illusion, while at other times he accords a "reality" to such a state. Indeed, following certain passages in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, the "spatium" itself would seem intrinsically characterized by a "dual" nature or structure. In the absence of any connection of the pure diversity that populates it, the spatium is quasi-identified with the "undifferentiated groundlessness", or "becoming-mad of the depths", that is also named "chaos", and only when this diversity is "brought to the surface" and "put into series" does the spatium itself change in nature. As Deleuze puts it in a formulation which quite literally punctuates the successive series of Logic of Sense: "Nothing ascends to the surface without changing its nature."19 This being the case, however, and insofar as it is always a matter, for Deleuze, of "constituting" or "instituting" the plane, one might wonder whether his topology does not, in a sense, necessarily entail the "existence" of a "pre-structural" space-substrate: a spatium that is not yet constituted as a plane of consistency (such that its "proto-elements" would not yet be put in relation or "series", but would remain completely disjunctive) or again, to put this differently, a spatium that is not yet qualifiable as an "intensive" spatium, insofar as intensities for Deleuze always imply a series or continuum of degrees.

17 18

Ibid. Originally published as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988. Tr.: Tom Conley, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 76. 19 Op. cit., p. 165.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

It is, I would claim, Deleuze's desire to avoid giving any form of "ontological" primacy to such a pre-structural "space-substrate" that explains the "ambivalences" apparent in his determination of the topology of the plane of immanence in relation to the undifferentiated state of chaos that he, at times, terms an "undifferentiated depth" and, at others, a "mere abstraction". On my reading, a philosophical determination of the kind of non-intensive, inconsistent pure spatium I'm claiming Deleuze wants "to fend off" is found with Kant's characterization of pure spatial intuition as a pre-given, pure synopsis of an immanent diversity, undetermined by any synthesizing action. While I cannot elaborate this reading here, I would like to indicate how Deleuze's own interpretation of Kantian pure spatial intuitionwhich he explicitly relates to his notion of the intensive spatium or plane of immanenceradically redefines Kant's notion, by not only making it inseparable from an always/already instituted synthesis, but indeed reducing it to just such a synthesis. Let us first recall that Deleuze explicitly situates his philosophical project as a radically revamped "transcendental aesthetic", in which the central role is given to a reworking or "repetition" of Kant's doctrine of transcendental schematism. For Deleuze, in fact, Kant's qualification of the pure schemata as transcendental determinations of time rendering possible an a priori relation between the concepts of the understanding and pure intuition (that is, between thought and being, or as Deleuze often puts it, between the determination per se and the undetermined) constitutes nothing less than the "discovery of Difference", identified as the form of the determinable, that is, time. Hailing the Kantian doctrine, as such, for "introducing time into thought itself", Deleuze nevertheless considers Kant to have made the schema a merely external intermediary between the concept and intuition, and claims for his repetition of transcendental schematism, in contradistinction, the status of an internal "genetic principle" implicated in the production as much of concepts as of space and time qua phenomenological constructs, or, again, of actualized entities, such as individualized subjects and objects. Insofar as the operation by which the genetic principle determines a system of spatio-determinations to correspond to a concept consists in "replacing a logos by a drama", Deleuze gives to his singularly multilayered and extremely dynamic variant of a revamped, transcendental schematism the name of "dramatization".20 What Deleuze names the genetic principle is, as such, absolutely central to his ontology. In accordance with neo-Kantians such as Maimon but also, most pertinently for our purposes, the protagonists of the Marburg schoolnotably, Hermann CohenDeleuze discerns this principle to reside in "intensive magnitudes" or "intensive quantities". For Deleuze, in short, it is intensive quantity, pure intensity, which schematizes or, more precisely, "dramatizes". As he
20

See: "La Mthode de dramatisation", Bulletin de la Socit franaise de Philosophie, n 3, 1967, pp. 89-118.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

writes in Difference and Repetition, "it is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatio-temporal dynamisms and determines an indistinct differential relation in the idea [with the idea here being a multiplicity on the transcendental plane] to incarnate itself in a distinct quality and a distinguished extensity." 21 However, Deleuze refers not only the schemata as such but also pure spatial intuition to intensive magnitude, relying, in this respect, on the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason proposed by Cohen. Indeed, for Cohenin accordance with his general program of "dissolving the Aesthetic within the Analytic"spatial intuition must itself be understood as being "founded" in transcendental schematism, with this, thereby, explaining why it, along with schematism, acquires its "transcendental signification" in the principle of intensive quantity.22 The following passage in Difference and Repetition best shows this complicity with Cohen's reading, while at the same time revealing the philosophical determination Deleuze brings to bear on his appropriation of Riemannian space as "an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to one another": "If, in the forms of intuition, Kant recognized extrinsic differences not reducible to the order of concepts, these are no less "internal" () and can be represented only in their external relation to space as a whole. In other words, following certain neo-Kantian interpretations, there is a step-bystep, internal, dynamic construction of space which must precede the "representation" of the whole as a form of exteriority. The element of this internal genesis seems to us to consist of the intensive quantity rather than the schema (). If the spatial order of extrinsic differences and the conceptual order of intrinsic differences are finally in harmony, () this is ultimately due to this intensive differential element, this synthesis of continuity at a given moment which, in the form of a continua repetitio, first gives rise internally to the space corresponding to the Ideas."23 Pure spatial intuitionunderstood here, precisely, as an ideal or virtual continuum would, then, according to Deleuze, be constituted by the action of an intensive differential element or quantity. The determining factor in this interpretation is clearly that of continuity, in its identity of synthesis, which is in strict accordance with Cohen's positing pure intuition as acquiring a transcendental meaning only by its relation to the "transcendental origin" of objects "schematized" within it through the operation of intensive quantity as a synthesis generating the magnitude of a sensation from its beginning in pure intuition = 0, up to any determined magnitude. The degree 0 marks the differential or intensive quantity qua pure potential, and as such, differentials do not correspond to any given engendered quantity; they are, stricto sensu, transcendental principles that furnish an "unconditioned rule for the genesis of knowledge of quantity and for the generation of discontinuities which constitute its matter or for the
21 22

Difference and Repetition, op. cit., pp. 244-245. Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd edition, Berlin: Dummler, 1885. I've referred to the French translation: La Thorie kantienne de l'exprience, tr.: Eric Dufour & Julien Servois, Paris: Cerf, 2001. 23 Difference and Repetition, op. cit , p. 26. My emphasis.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

construction of series."24 It should be evident from even this very cursory overview what Deleuze's description of the pure spatium, in Difference and Repetition, as an intensive spatium and his analyses of the body without organs, in A Thousand Plateaus, as "non-stratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0"25 owe to this understanding of the intensive quantity as pure synthesis of continuity. Two main consequences follow from Deleuze's interpretation of Kant. Firstly, when Deleuze writesin complete contradiction with the letter of Kant's text "that space qua pure intuition, spatium, is intensive quantity", he is not only attributing a synthetic source to space but, by the same gesture, grounding space in time. The fact is that, while the synthesis of continuity is specified as a synthesis taking place in the instant, such an instant is understood by both Cohen and Deleuze as a differential of time qua continuous quantity. Suffice it to say here that the claim that such a syntheticand thereby, temporal operation underlies the production of pure spatial intuition is completely contrary to the determination that Kant himself gives of the pure intuition of space qua "synopsis", which is, in fact, explicitly distinguished from any and all action of synthesis. By claiming, against Kant, that the very "truth of space" is to found in time, Deleuze's genetic variant of schematism,

incidentally, also significantly concurs with Heidegger's "ecstatic-horizonal" repetition of the Kantian doctrine.
Secondly, and as a corollary, Deleuze's topology is ultimately to be understood as not relating to space at all but, rather, to a primordial time or temporization. What Deleuze terms a topology should, as a result, be more correctly designated a "chrono-logy"or, if one prefers, an "Aeonology". When referring above to the passages in Deleuze's early works concerning the change undergone by the spatium when the pure diversity it contains is "brought to the surface" and "put into series", I omitted an important element that now needs to be specified, for the operator by which this diversity is "brought to the surface" and "put into series" is, in fact, nothing other than "the straight line of Aeon"the line, i.e., of the pure empty form of time. Critically, all the topological structures that Deleuze refers tothe line and the surface membrane or, again, the plane-sieveeffect, as it were, a complication, a putting into connection or into series, of the differentials they extract from a virtual, chaotic diversity, causing these to enter into internal resonance. They are all operators, in sum, of a "minimum of
24 25

Ibid., p. 175. Translation modified. Op. cit., p. 152.

The Topology of Deleuze's Spatium

synthesis", an auto-regulation. Which means they are all operators that are, ultimately, "temporal" in nature. Just as the line is identified as the straight line of Aeon, so too the surface membrane that Deleuze characterizes, following Simondon, as the primary topological structure of an absolute outside and inside, is finally described by Deleuze as a "carnal or vital topology [that], far from being explained by space, frees a time that condenses the past in the inside, brings about the future in the outside and brings the two into confrontation at the limit of the living present."26 To which he adds, in the context, interestingly enough, of his analyses of Foucault's post-Kantism and the influence of Heidegger thereupon: "For a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate spatiality that was deeper than time, but in his late works he offers the possibility once more of putting time on the outside and thinking of the outside as time, on the condition of the fold."27 Our conclusion that Deleuze's topology pertains not to an "original space" but to a "more original structure of time" is, moreover, succinctly confirmed by Deleuze himself in his second volume on the cinema when, by way of expounding the concept of Riemannian space proper to philosophy, he declares that: "what characterizes these spaces is that their nature cannot be explained in any simple spatial way. They imply non-localizable relations. They are direct presentations of time."28 Considering that space is unable to account for its own characteristics, which, on the contrary, depend upon temporal relations, Deleuze does, indeed, reveal himself to be a faithful disciple of Bergson, who, like himself, moreover, was to find his major philosophical opponent, on the terrain of a transcendental determination of a pure nonsynthetic spatiality, in Kant.

Louise Burchill

26

Foucault, tr.: Sen Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 119 (translation modified). Originally published as Foucault, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986. 27 Ibid., p. 108. 28 Cinema 2: The Time-Image, tr.: Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 129. (My emphasis.) Originally published as Cinma-2: L'Image-temps, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985.