What is a Concept?
Today we began to define a concept, and I referred to Deleuze and Guattari's chapter "Percept, Affect, Concept" from What is Philosophy. I mentioned that for me a concept is like a machine: a set of operations. This means is that a concept is what it does. It also means that a concept is not "like" something - it is not a metaphor. We are familiar with thinking metaphorically, and there is great richness in metaphor (and, in the best cases, the metamorphoses they allow). The issue with metaphor, however, is that a metaphor assumes a certain stability - if something is like something else, that means that there is some certainty that the "something else" preexists it. Metaphors are less machines than mirrors. And of course mirrors have their uses, and their roles (reflection being a very important aspect of how else we can see the world). But they are not concepts.
On the concept, from Deleuze and Guattari, from What is Philosophy:
by Benjamin D. [T]he concept is not given, it is created; it is to be created. It is not formed but posits itself in itself—it is a self-positing. Creation and self-positing mutually imply each other because what is truly created, from the living being to the work of art, thereby enjoys a self-positing of itself, or an autopoetic characteristic by which it is recognized. (11)
[. . .] Hegel showed that the concept has nothing whatever to do with a general or abstract idea, any more than with an uncreated Wisdom that does not depend on philosophy itself. [. . . Yet t]he post-Kantians concentrated on a universal encyclopedia of the concept that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity rather than taking on the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments. If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third—an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism. (12)
[. . .] in philosophy, concepts are only created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed (pedagogy of the concept). (16)
The relativity and absoluteness of the concept are like its pedagogy and its ontology, its creation and its self-positing, its ideality and its reality—the concept is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract. The concept is defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency [i.e., that of its components or parts] and exoconsistency [i.e., that of its relation to other concepts], but it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created. Constructivism unites the relative and absolute. (22)
The same pedagogical status of the concept can be found everywhere: a multiplicity, an absolute surface or volume, self-referents, made up of a certain number of inseparable intensive variations according to an order of neighborhood, and traversed by a point in a state of survey. The concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come. (32-33)
How I love this book!
ReplyDelete"The concept is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies. But, in fact, it is not mixed up with the state of affairs in which it is effectuated. It does not have spatiotemporal coordinates, only intensive ordinates. It has no energy, only intensities; it is anenergetic (energy is not intensity but rather the way in which the latter is deployed and nullified in an extensive state of affairs). The concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing - pure Event, a hecceity, an entity: the event of the Other or of the face (when, in turn, the face is taken as concept). It is like the bird as event. The concept is defined by the inseparability of a finite number of heterogeneous components traversed by a point of absolute survey at infinite speed. Concepts are "absolute surfaces or volumes," forms whose only object is the inseparability of distinct variations." The "survey" [survol] is the state of the concept or its specific infinity, although the infinities may be larger or smaller according to the number of components, thresholds and bridges.
In this sense the concept is act of thought, it is thought operating at infinite (although greater or lesser) speed."
1. Isn't metaphor a machine too? Doesn't it include a set or at least one operation (suggesting A as B)?
ReplyDelete2. Yes, metaphor operates with preexisted materials and creates further values. But if we admit that concept is always created from non preexisted and is always new, then on which parts these two terms overlap each other?
3. Which one is superior to the other?
Farid, yes, a metaphor definitely has mobility. The question is whether its mobility is horizontal or transversal. I would say it's horizontal - from this to this - rather than moving through, transductively (it translates from form to form rather than creating a new process). Superiority is not the issue - the issue is technical, and operative. Metaphors are great and we need them. But they keep us on the same plane. So if we want to work in the activation of new planes of experience, we need concepts, and these concepts are operative in a different way than metaphors.
ReplyDeleteWhat if the uncounsious operation of thought acts metaphorically?
ReplyDeleteWhat If we take metaphor as the most applicable means of experiencing the world and interpreting our environment?
Isn't this the way how we produce signs?
Are we agreed on the fact that metaphor only happens between two signs? or is it possible to recognize it through the figurative/conventional resemblance between a signified and a signifier within a single sign?
If the latter makes sense, then metaphor would not only be considered as a suggestive technique in rhetorics, but also as the most fundamental and innate way of understanding the world.
Yes, metaphor works with preexisted materials. But, who can't acts or thinks in isolation? We are in there. In the preexisted world filled with known (dead metaphors) and unknown (suggestive metaphors) subjects. At the very moment you encounter a new thing, you can't help it but to resemble it as another preexisted thing you already knew. This is how people do their interpretations and transmit their perceptions to others. As a practice, next session one can bring a strange unfamiliar object to the class and ask everyone to name it or just say something about it. So many metaphors would eventually happen and hopefully good ones would potentially produce some great concepts as well.