We have argued, with regard to both philosophy and neuroscience, that attempts to overcome dualism have created a set of ideas that usefully complicate our grasp of the body in the world: one from the perspec-tive of the worldliness of the body, the other from the perspecperspec-tive of worldliness of the brain (such that both dethrone the mind as the oth-erworldliness of the subject that knows). However, both trajectories still contain traces of Cartesianism to the extent that they presuppose that knowledge of the body in the world is constitutive of our sense of subjectivity (thereby reinstating the knowing subject upon the throne of the world). In this sense, the postulate of knowledge is re-inscribed on to this newly complicated terrain. The result is that the bodily acquisition of habit that we call learning remains subordinate to the end of knowl-edge; the body of knowledge is conceptualised as that which conditions the learning that brings bodily being into the world. That said, we have also traced a trajectory within neuroscience, as mapped by Singer, which established a neuroscientifi c rendering of Deleuze and Guattari’s invoca-tion of a ‘nonobjectifi able brain’. What remains to be done is to connect bodies of learning to the philosophical construction of knowledge in a manner that does not return to a privileged subjectivity and that does not, therefore, reinstate the priority of knowledge over learning.
Deleuze’s example of learning how to swim, as we have discussed above, suggests that overcoming the philosophical roots of Cartesian dualism will not be achieved by privileging the body of knowledge over how we learn but by learning, creatively, how knowledge emerges as a body.
What does this mean? We will give two answers to this question.
The fi rst is ontological in that it presents bodies of learning as the real condition for the emergence of knowledge. The second is critical in that
it activates this ontological claim as a mode of creative experimentation in the world. In the end we will see that these are not so different. As Deleuze puts it in Difference and Repetition,
The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. (1994: 139)
The ‘fundamental encounter’ is learning, but the fi rst task in order to reach this claim is to establish the role of bodies of learning in ‘the genesis of the act of thinking’.
In our view, Alliez provides the best account to date of how this can be understood within Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological system when he elaborates the ‘pedagogy of the concept’ that animates What is Philosophy? (2004: 6). The task of a ‘pedagogy of the concept’ is the production of ‘the concept of the concept’. On Alliez’s account of this pedagogy there is a two-fold movement of the concept that signals its production as concept. On the one hand, there is the self-positing of the concept. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) make clear in their discus-sion of philosophy, every conceptual creation is also the simultaneous production of the plane of immanence that the concept surveys and a conceptual persona that establishes the perspective of the concept to the plane. As we have shown above, the concept ‘learning’ can be said to institute a plane of immanence that is populated by a form of pre-subjective communication amongst differentiated brains instantiated in lived and physical bodies. Moreover, we can now add that what we have called the body of knowledge is a perspective that emerges within the interaction of bodies we call learning. Knowledge is not the end of learning; rather, it is a perspective upon the learning that takes place.
Knowledge emerges ‘as one learns’; it is not that which learning must presuppose as end. Maintaining the perspectival nature of the body of knowledge vis-à-vis learning is not an easy task: for example, the ten-dency within philosophy and neuroscience to treat the body of knowl-edge as that which determines the nature of the learning that occurs between bodies. However, this understanding of the concept of learn-ing as that which resists determination as knowledge does not in itself address the conceptuality of learning as that which occurs beyond its presentation in a form of philosophical idealism.3 The pedagogy of the concept of learning has yet to reach to ‘the pedagogy of the concept of the concept’. As Alliez makes clear, the self-positing of the concept can
only be understood if there is also a materiality to the concept itself. We must address, he says, ‘a pedagogy of the concept that is also its material ontology’ (2004: 23). This is the second movement of the self-positing concept.
It is a movement that Alliez traces initially to the body and then to the brain (though perhaps too quickly, as we will come to argue). The movement he traces is from the conceptualisation of bodies and brains to the materialisation of the body and brain of the concept. Recalling the Spinozist critique of Cartesian dualism at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of philosophy, Alliez situates the real emergence of concepts in the ‘affections of the body’ (2004: 27). Once conceived in this way, as he demonstrates, there is no disagreement to be had between the ‘order and connection’ between lived and physical bodies and the
‘order and connection’ between concepts that establish a body of knowl-edge.4 In the lexicon that we have deployed, this amounts to the claim that the body is the material site of the production of learning and the perspective that knowledge brings to this productive process; or, better still (and with the help of Singer), the communication between bodies is the process of learning that simultaneously gives rise to the body of the concept (that knows). It follows then that learning is not just a concept of the real of knowledge but it is primarily the real of the pedagogy of the concept; learning is the concept of the concept. Learning both conditions the production of the known and is the real genesis of con-ceptuality itself. What we have referred to above as the co-emergence of the three bodies in learning can now be specifi ed: learning occurs as the communication between bodies that produces knowledge as a per-spective upon that communication, where communication itself is now understood as the real production of concepts as bodies.
In a move we agree is decisive in reading Deleuze and Guattari, Alliez refers to the real production of concepts as ‘an operation of being’ called
‘brain’. The brain ‘is ontology delivered over to the pragmatics of being’
(2004: 62). In what sense does the brain deliver ontology to pragmatics?
Alliez refers to this process as ‘the creation of self-determining concepts’
(2004: 64). As we have expressed it, though, this process must occur between bodies in order to ward off any latent idealism of the self- positing concept; that is, it is a process of bodily communication. As such, the brain can be understood as that which expresses that commu-nication. The brain inhabits a body but only to the extent that it is the result of communication between bodies that creates the brain: ontol-ogy delivered to pragmatics, in Alliez’s incisive phrase. In this sense, we can avoid the latent Cartesianism of some neuroscientifi c accounts
by conceiving of the brain as the process of interaction between bodies that we call learning. Even Singer’s account of ‘communication amongst differentiated brains’ can be further specifi ed: the communication is between differentiated bodies and it is this communication that is the brain among these bodies. Therefore knowledge, to the extent that it is found in brains, is not located in a brain that belongs to an individual (human being); rather, knowledge is embodied in the brain that is pro-duced by the interaction of bodies in the world. Knowledge, that is, can never be possessed by an individual subject; rather it is produced in the communication between bodies that conditions how we learn to become subjects.
In this sense, we can specify Alliez’s account of the brain as ‘an operation of being’ when we say that the brain is that process of com-munication that enables bodies to learn how to become, to be, and to keep becoming, a body. In which case, the becoming-brain of learning is always inscribed within a becoming-body of learning and there is a mutual and irreducible conditioning of the one by the other. This is the transcendental condition of a post-Cartesian philosophy of the body and a post-Cartesian neuroscience of the brain. Moreover, maintaining this condition as the real of the pedagogy of the concept will not occur unless the body and the brain are conceptualised in the same move-ment of thought. Where that movemove-ment is maintained, learning is the
‘genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself’ now understood as the becoming-brain of bodies and the becoming-body of brains.
While this ontological account establishes both the necessity of bodies and the necessity of communication between bodies that constitute brains as conditions for the real emergence of learning as the transcen-dental condition of thought, we must return to Deleuze and Guattari’s enigmatic claim that to go in search of the place of vital ideas in the nonobjectifi able brain is to create. It is this claim that gives their onto-logical subversion of epistemology a critical dimension, in the sense that Deleuze refers to a ‘true critique’ as an act of creation. We return, therefore, to the question that emerged from our consideration of learn-ing how to swim: can the creative dimension of learnlearn-ing be expressed in a form that does not subvert Deleuze’s account of the passive syn-thesis of the sensible? This question can now be recast as follows: how does learning function as the real condition for the emergence of a true critique?
On the one hand, this real conditionality is provided by the destruc-tion of knowledge claims that do not acknowledge the learning that con-stitutes them. It is one of the fundamental elements of a true critique that
it must hold all knowledge claims, including those that emerge within the critique itself, as perspectival to the concept and the plane it insti-tutes. On the other hand, such destruction is only possible where learn-ing is able to fl ourish within the critique itself. For learnlearn-ing to fl ourish, the real conditions for the emergence of concepts must be maintained;
namely, the communication that occurs between bodies, their instantia-tion as brains, must remain open to new forms of becoming (where this means new forms of the individuation of bodies and brains). This does not simply mean new ideas, at least not if these are understood as the product of a subject’s synthesis of the world. Rather, it means that there must be a creative experimentation between bodies in the world, where bodies are understood as systems of differential relations, as objective ideas. Deleuze was fond of Spinoza’s claim that ‘we do not yet know what a body can do’ (1992: 217–34); learning becomes active to the extent that it becomes an expression of what our bodies are capable of doing. But what they are capable of, above all (so to speak), is the crea-tion of a vital idea as the brain of bodily interaccrea-tion (not the creacrea-tion of ideas located in the brain of a human body). To fi nd the vital ideas of the nonobjectifi able brain is to create because it is to make new brains.
Equally, we can now say that to go in search of the vital ideas in the brain is to create because it is to create new bodies of learning within the real.
References
Alliez, E. (2004), The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, London: Continuum.
Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London:
Routledge.
Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, San Francisco: City Lights.
Deleuze, G. (1991), Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1992), Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, New York: Zone.
Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, London: Verso.
Grosz, E. (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
MacKenzie, I. (1997), ‘Creativity as Criticism: The Philosophical Constructivism of Deleuze and Guattari’, Radical Philosophy 86, pp. 7–18.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002), Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge.
Modell, A. H. (2003), Imagination and the Meaningful Brain, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
O’Shea, M. (2005), The Brain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose, S. (1998), ‘Brains, Minds and the World’ in From Brains to Consciousness?
Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind, ed. S. Rose, London: Penguin, pp. 1–17.
Singer, W. (1998), ‘Consciousness from a Neurobiological Perspective’ in From Brains to Consciousness? Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind, ed. S. Rose, London: Penguin, pp. 228–45.
Williams, J. (2003), Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Notes
1. Our primary points of reference will be Phenomenology of Perception and Bodies That Matter. We recognise that the thought of each thinker has trajectories within it that include refi nements and self-critiques to the positions elaborated within these texts. It is not the aim of this discussion to map these trajectories within their respective œuvres.
2. The ellipsis removes a reference to ‘action’, where action is defi ned as that which is intended by the subject, not the interaction of bodies that constitute subjectivity.
3. See MacKenzie (1997) for an account of how Deleuze and Guattari’s constructiv-ist presentation of philosophy can be read as a challenge to philosophical idealism.
4. He quotes Spinoza: ‘the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things and, vice versa, the order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas’ (Alliez 2004: 28).