Deleuze, Self-Concept, and the Three Ethics

part 1 of an inquiry into self-concept through a reading of Deleuze

How do we experience ourselves?

Gilles Deleuze, in his 1993 essay Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’, seeks to trifurcate the ‘great and continuous fluvial chain’ of Spinoza’s Ethics into distinct forms of understanding: signs (interactions between bodies and their effects), notions or concepts (the rhythm and commonalities inherent to a system of bodily relations), and essence (existence ‘in itself and for itself’). These three methodologies of experience describe the maturation of the self-concept from chance and reaction to synergy and the absolute.

The form of understanding which dominates our experience from infancy to late adolescence is that of the sign. Deleuze defines the sign as chiefly ‘the trace of one body upon another, the state of a body insofar as it suffers the action of another body’. The heat of the Sun on our skin, for example. Signs are vectorial; they encompass not only the stimulus (heat), but the effect it has on the affected (joy of warmth, or perhaps discomfort at overheating). I described the interaction between bodies in an essay last month as occurring only at edges and surfaces. Deleuze does the same: ‘signs are shadows that play on the surface of bodies … always on the edge … We have knowledge of bodies only through the shadows they cast upon us, and it is through our own shadow that we know ourselves’. This means, importantly, that signs are derived from only the perceptible edges of a body, and are unrepresentative of the whole of the entity. They are, as Deleuze says, bound to the ‘chains of association’ between objects, which determine the signs’ effect. The Sun appears warm and comforting to us from our faraway perspective on Earth. The sign, or effect of the Sun on our state, would surely be quite different if we were instead a few miles from the star. In this example, the associative chains that define perception are spatial; they may also be temporal, emotional, or historical.

The sign is the vehicle of the beginnings of self-concept. At an early age, the self is defined relationally and redefined continuously with succeeding stimuli. Our worldview is entirely composed of signs, causal consequences of the perpetual interaction between bodies. This experience of the self is like being a small-boated sailor in a vast sea. We feel the signs, the self’s reaction to stimuli, as changes in our environment: sadness, joy, anger as rain, gentle breeze, or rogue waves. The emotional sea is capricious, with more intense emotions corresponding to arduous seafaring conditions. In the constantly fluctuating world of vectorial signs, the stimulus and the emotional response are one and the same, packaged together, arriving and enforcing simultaneously. Thus our emotional state becomes our environment and understanding of the world. At this stage, everything is novel. We are completely subservient to our emotional responses, a sailor whose only option is to ride the waves given. Because the effects of a stimulus are dependent on the highly variable associative chains between the actor and the affected, a sign-led perspective leads to an inherently volatile understanding of the world. Deleuze seems to agree: ‘the kind of knowledge [signs] constitute is hardly a knowledge, but rather an experience in which one randomly encounters confused ideas of bodily mixtures, brute imperatives to avoid this mixture and seek another, and more or less delirious interpretations of these situations’. Crucially, the sailor has effectively no power to exert over the sea; the self is fluctuating, indecipherable, a deep water.

So we push further, for a better defined, more stable self-concept. The notion, or concept, is our aggregate understanding of the variability of a given system of bodies. It is an order above the derivative realm of signs, it comprises their volatility. We reach this level of maturity through experience and knowledge of bodily relations. Only through interrogating the relationships between the bodies of our world are we able to create structured systems, systems through which we are able to intellectualize and anticipate aspects of the self, our conscious reactions. Operating within these structures, we begin to exert some power over the previously ineffable self.

The structure, according to Deleuze, is ‘a composite relation … between the infinitely small parts of a transparent body. Since the parts always come in larger or smaller infinities, there is in each body an infinity of relations that are composed and decomposed’. The post-adolescent, in forming structures (concepts) to organize their perception, learns to subsume the ever-changing nature of a body into the predictable patterns of a system. These structures highlight the synergies between their component bodies. Deleuze: ‘Structure is rhythm … if I learn to swim or dance, my movements and pauses, my speeds and slownesses, must take on a rhythm common to that of the sea or my partner’. Seeing synergy, pattern-recognition, is one of the chief methods by which we can escape the absurd perpetual novelty of self-experience. We form the self not from its fluctuating external relations, but from its habits, its preferences, its priors, no longer from momentary changes in passion, but the sum system of tension and release that models our emotional range. Understanding is the catalyst that triggers the escape. It is only through a knowledge of the behavior of the self and external bodies that we are able to construct reliable systems that are stable with respect to time and variability. Deleuze emphasizes that this stage of maturity is not possible without the first; any experience must always be novel, at some point, before it can be intellectualized.

This is a radical development, if largely uncelebrated. Consider the emotional adolescent. The process of coming to know the self is wholly trial and error at this stage, what Deleuze describes in signs as random encounters. Encounters with the self, with the emotional responses beyond control. The idea that, through repetition and endurance, we can exert power over random volatile processes is ubiquitously observable. In any skill, there is a rising learning curve. At first, there are too many varying parts to keep track of; in basketball, for example, the position of the ball, the sequence of footwork, the body language of the defender, myriad unfoldings of space and enclosure on the half-court. Through experience, a system is developed that integrates each of these disjoint and jagged variables into a concise structure. Algorithms are developed in the subconscious that trigger different patterns of dribble moves given information like the defender’s positioning or the seconds on the shot clock. We ourselves integrate within these systems. We join the common rhythm that unites the movement of the defender, of the dribbling arm, of the ball. The effect of joining that rhythm is visible: the experienced player, in contrast to the novice, looks smooth, natural, efficient. The radical part comes when we apply this learning process to the adolescent in thrall to their passions. Through thoughtful observation, the adolescent gains not just a knowledge of the signs and relations of their emotions, but an ability to manipulate those relations; crucially, the sailor exerts power over the sea. What once seemed unconquerable is possible through emergent systems.

It may be more accurate to say that both the sailor and the sea are subsumed into an abstract system, one in which emotional causalities and response/regulation occur simultaneously. Thus the observant consciousness learns itself, and is joined with the parts of the self that were previously unpredictable, even alien passions. The world is no longer our emotional state, but an extension of the systems we conceive to organize it.

The learning curve is in fact a common concept in itself, a platitudinal structure comprising the many relations between work and result. Our example displays the most important property of systems: they are all similar. ‘Similar’ meaning here that the objects which comprise them can be as few as two or as many as contained in the universe, without changing the inherent structure. Thus each system can divide to an atomic level or multiply to a universal one. See how the learning curve applies to the ~14 physical objects in basketball (players, ball, nets, court) as well as the uncountable objects involved in the passionate relations of the mind. The same principle of learning holds, despite an enormous amount of variables being subsumed into the system in the second example. Deleuze on similarity: ‘the structure or object is formed by at least two bodies, each of which is formed by two or more bodies, to infinity, while in the other direction they are united into ever larger and more composite bodies, until one reaches the unique object of Nature in its entirety, an infinitely transformable and deformable structure, universal rhythm’. This from the Spinozan idea that each individual concept is simply a mode or projection of some subset of true Nature, Nature being here the underlying structure, the commonalities, between every existence.

This second stage, concept and structure, is likely where most folks’ self-concept stops. The older we are, the longer we have lived in our bodies, successfully sailed the sea of our minds, the less novel experiences are. As we age, our systems entrench into our worldview. Signs, now, are not radical, redefining experiences, but are compressed into our systems, broken into component parts of tension and release, cause and effect. ‘[signs],’ says Deleuze, ‘will subsist, they will double the notions, but will lose their exclusive or tyrannical character to the profit of notions and actions’. ‘Action’ is the crucial word here; the self now defines through consistencies, habits, persistences. This stability costs much of the wonderment and radicality of pure, unadulterated experience. We expect the world to operate as it always has. Stimuli are stripped of their violence and passion and confined to the definitive relational paths of our systems. Hence the famous Louise Glück lines ‘We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory’ (“Nostos”). Where once we lived as beasts of the all-encompassing present, we are now mostly creatures of the past, ourselves confined to those same beaten paths. ‘Mostly’ because novel experiences never truly die. It is possible even late in life to experience system-altering novel passions.

This first part serves mostly to establish the ideas of the first two Ethics in the context of self-perception and examine their properties. I will continue this inquiry in a second part which will focus on the common structures of modernity and how they suppress novelty and devalue meaning through excess and exhaustivity. I will use Deleuze’s idea of the third Ethic to propose a postmodern self-perception that combines the radical experience of signs with the radical understanding of systems. Stay tuned.