The geography of thought is one of the most difficult aspects to capture

Difference and Givenness, The Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence Levi Bryant

Geophilosophy? I’ve picked up Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Dawkin’s The God Delusion, out of curiosity about the rhetoric of these texts. What interests me about these works isn’t the sophistication of their arguments, but rather the fact that they’re directed towards a popular audience and are designed to have an impact on popular debates here in the United States. That is, books like this strike me as trying to put an option on the table within the field of popular discourse that isn’t currently there and I’m interested in seeing how this rhetoric functions to do that. In this regard, I certainly don’t share the biologism or scientism of these thinkers, nor am I looking to these works for a scholarly discussion of religious metaphysics versus other ontologies.

The very first paragraph of Dennett’s book caught my eye as it is something that’s come up here at Larval Subjects in my discussions with Orla from time to time. There Dennett writes,
Let me begin with an obvious fact: I am an American author, and this book is addressed in the first place to American readers. I shared drafts of this book with many readers, and most of my non-American readers found this fact not just obvious but distracting– even objectionable in some cases. Couldn’t I make the book less provincial and outlook? Shouldn’t I strive, as a philosopher, for the most universal target audience I could muster? No. Not in this case, and my non-American readers should consider what they can learn about the situation in America from what they find in this book. More compelling to me than the reaction of my non-American readers was the fact that so few of my American readers had any inkling of this bias– or, if they did, they didn’t object. That is a pattern to ponder. It is commonly observed– both in America and abroad –that America is strikingly different from other First World nations in its attitudes to religion, and this book is, among other things, a sounding device intended to measure the depths of those difference. I decided I had to express the emphases found here if I was to have any hope of reaching my intended audience: the curious and conscientious citizens of my native land– as many as possible, not just the academics. (xiii)

It seems to me that if we accept something like Deleuze’s account of individuation and immanence, then we are necessarily led to think in terms of situations or constellations that are geographically local, and that think the constitution of a phenomenon in terms of the context in which it emerges it. I don’t know that philosophy has ever thought “geographically” in this way or just how one might go about thinking geographically. Rather, space seems to be something that is perpetually subtracted from the generalizing and totalizing urges of philosophical speculation in ways that are perhaps even more profound than the way in which phenomena are detemporalized.

There have been stabs in the direction of “geophilosophy”. Foucault’s archaeologies and geneaologies are both very situated in how they analyze formations of thought and the bodies that accompany them in terms of their geographical site of emergence. There’s something tremendously irritating in the way Foucault’s analysis of the penal system or the discourse of madness is then generalized as if it can be taken to apply anywhere. For instance, shouldn’t someone write a geneaology of the DSM-IV and how it has functioned in the United States? A geophilosophy would thus be an ecophilosophy, rejecting any sort of generalization for a phenomenon but examining the manner in which it is a technology or way of life deeply wedded to a certain field of singularities or relations. Over at Rough Theory I’ve made a few stabs trying to articulate just what this would be in terms of assemblages and constellations, but I’m still far from being clear as to how to precisely articulate what I’m trying to get at. ~ by larvalsubjects on April 25, 2007. 2 Responses to “Geophilosophy?”

Thank you, Levi, for doing a “Lazarus” on our previous conversations. It is of course to Dennett’s credit that he is explicitly aware of the localization field he is operating in, which is not the case in Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, whereas Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion is geographical in its attack on the fundamentalist American religious right. The question is, of course, one of categorization: whether the recent series of “atheist revival (sic!) books” really belong in the philosophical domain. Maybe they should be read more as social and political critiques of the usurpation of power by American neo-con religious forces. But welcomed they certainly are!
The other question you raise of the possibility of geophilosophy is fascinating, especially in relation to Deleuze who as you know devotes a whole chapter in What Is Philosophy? to that particular theme. Thank you for drawing my attention back to that part of the book. Although he is chiefly concerned with an inspiring discussion of the role of the geography of Greece in the genesis of philosophy, he also asks the following question where he touches upon both religion, place, concept creation, the universality of the plane of immanence, and philosophy,
Can we speak of Chinese, Hindu, Jewish or Islamic “philosophy”? Yes, to the extent that thinking takes place on a plane of immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by concepts. However, this plane of immanence is not exactly philosophical, but prephilosophical. It is affected by what populates and reacts on it, in such a way that it becomes philosophical only through the effect of the concept (p. 93).
Although Deleuze naturally on several occasions has vehemently denied that he is erecting a new metaphysics, I have always had a suspicion that the plane of immanence and vitalistic constructivism in general belong to a metaphysical hinter-Welt and is thus to be understood universally. I am more creatively undecided than anxiously confused about this. Let’s get back to the thirty pages on geophilosophy. Orla Schantz said this on April 25th, 2007 at 10:40 pm

Orla, I don’t know that I would include this genre of books in the domain of philosophy. What I find interesting about them is first the way they seem to repeat– in a very standard way –naturalistic Enlightenment critiques of religion advanced by figures such as Hume and Spinoza, almost as if they’re reinventing the wheel. Will we get a reincarnation of Feurbach next? But I’m also interested in how works like this function in the domain of popular discourse rhetorically. In this regard, books on entirely different issues could be substituted to make the same point. For instance, we could talk about Friedman’s The World is Flat or Lakoff’s Moral Politics or that book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. There are also religious books we could talk about in this context, like The Purpose Driven Life. It’s not the content I’m interested in with texts like this, so much as how they function to produce a sort of collective common sense or received wisdom or archive somewhat like the archive described by Foucault. Consequently, when I bring up books like this I’m approaching them as Foucault might. That is, I’m not evaluating their truth claims or the sophistication of their argument. I’m bracketing all that as a phenomenologist might, and simply looking at them at the level of discourse as material facts of a particular social environment.
Nonetheless, I was intrigued by Dennett’s emphasis on the geographical localization of his text. I find that the geography of thought is one of the most difficult aspects to capture. As Derrida compellingly argued in his exchange with Searle, statements perpetually exceed and overflow their context, producing all sorts of unanticipated effects of sense. In the religious discussions that have occured on this blog and elsewhere, this phenomenon has perpetually come up, though often without being explicitly addressed.
If something like Deleuze’s theory of individuation is true, then anything, even a statement, is the result of a field of individuation and part of understanding something will consist in mapping the way in which it relates to that field of individuation. How, then, would this work with statements and texts? I don’t know, I’m only vaguely thinking about it.
It’s been years since I’ve read what Deleuze and Guattari have to say about geophilosophy. At the time I don’t recall getting much from their discussion, though increasingly I find that different texts speak to me at different times. For instance, I despised Hume for many years but now take great delight in reading him. So perhaps it’s time that I return to that chapter with new eyes. I’ve never sensed that Deleuze was hostile to metaphysics. Doesn’t he explicitly say, on a few occasions, that he felt contempt for his fellows that reject metaphysics? larvalsubjects said this on April 26th, 2007 at 2:51 am