Complicating the Dualisms: History versus Becoming

Abstract

Complicating the Dualisms: History versus Becoming Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Pages 218. Craig Lundy's History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity is an ambitious work that engages the question of history in Deleuze's thought, attempting to demonstrate "the vital importance of Deleuze's philosophy of history to his wider creative agenda" (1). Lundy claims secondary works to date have largely misconceived the relation of history to Deleuze's thought. He criticizes Jay Lampert's problematic distinction between a "good" and a "bad" history in Deleuze--Lampert associates the former with "nomadic" history based on "pure becoming" and the latter with "historicism" (103)--as well as Manuel Delanda's distinction between ideal, top-down histories and material, bottom-up histories (8). Lundy claims "Deleuze's hostility towards history is highly superficial" (37). Critical remarks Deleuze makes concerning history bear on a specific account of history, an understanding of history as "historicism." Hence, Lundy's primary aim is to show that "history need not be condemned to historicism" (157), and that conceptual resources exist in Deleuze's work to formulate an account of history in terms other than historicism, what Lundy describes as an understanding of history as a process of creation (38). Lundy links this account to figures discussed by Deleuze throughout his work, "Peguy, Nietzsche and Foucault, who all promoted an alternative kind of history" (181). Lundy includes Braudel in this list as well (180). Central to an understanding of history in these terms is Deleuze's notion of becoming. The relation between history and becoming in Deleuze's thought should not be understood in either/or terms--where Deleuze rejects history in favor of becoming. Rather, one can take up and explore Deleuze's conception of becoming, explaining how this notion lies at the heart of a Deleuzian account of history. Towards this end, Lundy focuses on complicating--or "complexifying"--a number of dualisms in terms of which Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari are commonly explained (66). The oppositions Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari establish between--for example--depth and height, and the nomad and the state, consist in "extractions or abstraction of de jure purities from de facto mixtures" (102). Deleuze's characterization of "a monism that in fact equals pluralism," says Lundy, can be understood in these terms (89), as well as the emphasis Deleuze places on "the diagonal" in his reading of Foucault (90-91). Lundy justifies this approach with reference to Deleuze's "distaste" for extremes (63), the fact that Deleuze gives priority to the "between" (56) or "middle realm" (97). Building on this claim, Lundy says Deleuze's thought should not be understood in terms of "revolutionary becoming" alone, but is characterized by precaution and prudence (98). Similarly, one cannot overly demonize capitalism or overly valorize schizophrenia in reading Deleuze and Guattari (140). In fact, capitalism has itself a great capacity for change--creating new things--which Lundy explains in terms of the fact capitalism is characterized by an axiomatic; it lacks an essential "code or sign of its own" (122). Lundy goes on to further complicate the distinctions made between depth and height, Chronos and Aion, the nomad and the state, and the smooth and the striated in Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's thought. …