N as Neurology | Deleuze's Abecedaire

"N as in Neurology"

Parnet announces this title as linking both neurology and the brain. Deleuze says that neurology is very difficult for him, but has always fascinated him. To answer why, he ponders the question of what happens in someone's head when he/she has an idea. When there are no ideas, he says, it's like a pinball machine. How does it communicate inside the head? They don't proceed along pre-formed paths and by ready-made associations, so something happens, if only we knew. That interests Deleuze greatly since he feels that if we understood this, we might understand everything, and the solutions must be extremely varied. He clarifies this: two extremities in the brain can well establish contact, i.e. through electric processes of the synapses. And then there are other cases that are much more complex perhaps, through discontinuity in which there is a gap that must be jumped. Deleuze says that the brain is full of fissures <fentes>, that jumping happens constantly in a probabilistic regime. He believes there are relations of probability between two linkages, and that these communications inside a brain are fundamentally uncertain, relying on laws of probability. Deleuze sees this as the question of what makes us think something, and he admits that someone might object that he's inventing nothing, that it's the old question of associations of ideas. One would almost have to wonder, he says, for example, when a concept is given or a work of art is looked at, one would almost have to try to sketch a map of the brain, its correspondences, what the continuous communications are and what the discontinuous communications would be from one point to another.
Something has struck Deleuze, he admits, a story that physicists use, the baker's transformation: taking a segment of dough to knead it, you stretch it out into a rectangle, you fold it back over, you stretch it out again, etc. etc., you makes a number of transformations and after *x* transformations, two completely contiguous points are necessarily caused to
be quite the opposite, very distant from each other. And there are distant points that, as a result of *x* transformations, are found to be quite contiguous. So, Deleuze wonders whether, when one looks for something in one's head, there might be this type of combinations <brassages>, for example, two points that he cannot see how to associate, and as a result of
numerous transformations, he discovers them side by side. He suggests that between a concept and a work of art, i.e. between a mental product and a cerebral mechanism, there are some very, very exciting resemblances, and that for him, the questions, how does one think? and what does thinking mean?, suggest that with thought and the brain, the questions are intertwined. Deleuze says that he believes more in the future of molecular biology of the brain than in the future of information science or of any theory of communication.
Parnet points out that Deleuze always gave a special place to 19th century psychiatry that extensively addressed neurology and the science of the brain, that he gave a priority to psychiatry over psychoanalysis precisely for psychiatry's relations with neurology. So, she asks, is that still the case? Deleuze says, yes, completely. As he said earlier, there is also a relationship with the pharmacy, the possible action of drugs on the brain and the cerebral structures that can be located on a molecular level, in cases of schizophrenia. For Deleuze, these aspects appear to be a more certain future than mentalist psychiatry <la psychiatrie spiritualiste>.
Parnet asks a methodological question: it's no secret that Deleuze is rather self-taught <autodidacte>, when he reads a neurology or a scientific journal. Also he's not very good in math, as opposed to some philosophers he has studied, like Bergson (with a degree in math), Spinoza (strong in math), Leibniz (no need to say, strong in math). So, she asks, how does Deleuze manage to read? When he has an idea and needs something that interests him, but doesn't understand it at all, how does he manage?
Deleuze says that there's something that gives him great comfort, specifically that he is firmly persuaded in the possibility of several readings of a same thing. Already in philosophy, he has believed strongly that one need not be a philosopher to read philosophy. Not only is philosophy open to two readings, philosophy *needs* two readings at the same time. A non-philosophical reading of philosophy is absolutely necessary, without which there would be no beauty in philosophy. That is, with non-specialists reading philosophy, this non-philosophical reading of philosophy lacks nothing and is entirely adequate. Deleuze qualifies this, though, saying that two readings might not work for all philosophy. He has trouble seeing a non-philosophical reading of Kant. But in Spinoza, he says it's not at all impossible that a farmer or a storekeeper could read Spinoza, and for Nietzsche, all the more so, all philosophers that Deleuze admires are like that.
So, he continues, there is no need to understand, since understanding is a certain level of reading. If someone were to object that to appreciate a painting by Gauguin, you have to have some expertise about it, Deleuze responds, of course, some expertise is necessary, but there are also extraordinary emotions, authentic, extraordinarily pure, extraordinarily
violent, in a total ignorance of painting. For him, it's entirely obvious that someone can take in a painting like a thunderbolt and not know a thing about the painting. Similarly, someone can be overwhelmed with emotion by a musical work without knowing a word. Deleuze says that he, for example, is very moved by <Alban Berg's operas> Lulu and Wozzeck, and that [Berg's] concerto To the Memory of an Angel has moved him above everything else.
So, he knows it's better to have a competent perception, but he still maintains that everything that counts in the world in the realm of the mind is open to a double reading, provided that it is not something done randomly as a someone self-taught might. Rather, it's something that one undertakes starting from one's problems taken from elsewhere. Deleuze means that it's on the basis of being a philosopher that he has a non-musical perception of music, which makes music extraordinarily stirring for him. Similarly, it's on the basis of being a musician, a painter, this or that, that one can undertake a non-philosophical reading of philosophy. If this second reading (which is not second) did not occur, if there weren't these two, simultaneous readings, it's like both wings on a bird, the need for two readings together. Moreover, Deleuze argues that even a philosopher must learn to read a great philosopher non-philosophically. The typical example for him is yet again Spinoza: reading Spinoza in paperback, whenever and wherever one can, for Deleuze, creates as much emotion as a great musical work. And to a some extent, he says, the question is not understanding since in the courses that Deleuze used to give, it was so clear that sometimes the students understood, sometimes they did not, and we are all like that, sometimes understanding, sometimes not.
Deleuze comes back to Parnet's question on science that he sees the same way: to some extent, one is always at the extreme <pointe> of one's ignorance, which is exactly where one must settle in <s'installer>, at the extreme of one's knowledge or one's ignorance, which is the same thing, in order to have something to say. If he waited to know what he was going to write, Deleuze says, literally, if he waited to know what he was talking about, then he would always have to wait because what he would say would have no interest. If he does not run a risk, if he settles in and speaks with a scholarly air on something he doesn't know, then this is another example without interest. But if he speaks from this very border between knowing and non-knowing, it's there that one must settle in to have something to say.
In science, it is the same, Deleuze maintains, and the confirmation he has found is that he always had great relations with scientists. They never took him to be a scientist, they don't think he understands much, but some of them tell him that it works. He attributes this to the fact that he remains open to echoes, for lack of a better word. He gives the example of a painter that he likes greatly, Delaunay, and asks, what does he do? He observed something quite astounding, and this returns the discussion to the question of what it is to have an idea. Delaunay's idea is that light forms figures itself, figures formed by light, and he paints light figures, not aspects that light takes on when it meets an object. This is how Delaunay detaches himself from all objects, with the result of creating paintings without objects any longer. Deleuze says he read some very beautiful things by Delaunay, in which he judges cubism very severely. Delaunay says that Cézanne succeeded in breaking the object, breaking the bowl <compotier>, and that the cubists spent their time seeking to glue it back together. So in terms of the elimination of objects for rigid and geometric figures Delaunay substitutes figures of pure light. That's something, a pictorial event, a Delaunay-event.
Deleuze suggests that there is a way that this is linked to relativity, to the theory of relativity, and he argues that one need not know much, it's only being self-taught that's dangerous. Deleuze says he only knows something small about relativity, it's this: instead of having subjected lines of light, lines followed by light <lignes suivies par lumière> to geometric lines, belonging to the experiments of Michaelson, there's a total reversal. Now lines of light will condition geometric lines, a considerable reversal from a scientific perspective, that will change everything since the line of light no longer has the constancy of the geometric line, and everything is changed. It's this aspect of relativity, he says, that corresponds the best with Michaelson's experiments. Deleuze does not mean to say that Delaunay applies relativity; Deleuze celebrates the encounter between a pictorial undertaking and a scientific undertaking that should normally not be in relation with each other.
Another example is Riemannian spaces, about which Deleuze says he knows little in detail, but enough to know that it's a space constructed piece by piece, and in which the connections between pieces are not pre-determined. But for
completely different reasons, Deleuze needed a spatial concept for the parts in which there aren't perfect connections and that aren't pre-determined. "I need this," he says <j'en ai besoin, moi!>, and he couldn't spend five years of his life trying to understand Riemann, because at the end of five years, he would not have made any progress with his philosophical concept. And in going to the movies, he sees a strange kind of space that everyone knows as being the use of space in Bresson's films, in which space is rarely global, but constructed piece by piece. One sees little pieces of space that join up, for example, a section of a cell in _Condamné à mort_, the link not being pre-determined. Asking why this is, Deleuze says it's because they are manual, Deleuze says, from which one can understand the importance of hands for Bresson. In fact, in _The Pickpocket_, it's the speed with which the stolen object is passed from one hand to the other that will determine the connections of little spaces. Deleuze does not mean either that Bresson is applying Riemannian spaces, but rather that an encounter can occur between a philosophical concept, a scientific notion, and an aesthetic percept. Perfect! <Deleuze discusses this spatial effect in _The Pickpocket_ at the start of _L'Image-Temps_ <_The Time-Image_>
In science, Deleuze says, he knows just enough to evaluate encounters; if he knew more, he'd do science, not philosophy. So, to a great extent, he speaks well about something he doesn't know, but he speaks of what he doesn't know as a function of what he knows. He argues that all of this is a question of tact, no point in kidding about it, no point in adopting a knowledgeable air when one doesn't know, but still, Deleuze says he has had encounters with painters that were the most beautiful days of his life. Not physical encounters, but in what Deleuze writes -- the greatest of them being <the Hungarian painter Simon> Hantaï <Thanks to Tim Adams for this spelling and the following references: _The Fold _; 33 and _What is Philosophy?_; 195>, with whom something passed between them. Deleuze says that's what his encounter with Carmelo Bene was about <in _Superpositions_>. Deleuze never did any theater, understands nothing about theater, but he has to admit that something important happened there as well. There are scientists with whom these things work too. Deleuze says he knows some mathematicians that were kind enough to read what Deleuze has written, and said that it works quite well.
Deleuze admits that his comments here are going badly since he feels he is taking on an air of completely despicable self-satisfaction. For him, though, the question is not whether or not he knows a lot of science, nor whether he is capable of learning some of it, the important thing, he admits, is not to make stupid statements <bêtises>, and to establish echoes, phenomena of echoes between a concept, a percept and a function (since, for Deleuze, science does not proceed by concepts, but by functions). From this perspective, Deleuze needed Riemannian spaces, he knew they existed, did not know exactly what they were, but that was enough.

Deleuze's Abecedaire