Perhaps there is a more fundamental question that we have yet to pose: how are we to read WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?.
A first approach would be to read it for its specific theses, for its answers to particular questions, but this would be a reductive reading, in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari « propositions ». This would be to situate philosophy on the plane of reference, on the model of the sciences.This is what Deleuze and Guattari call an abstract approach.
Insofar as it is a book of philosophy, it is not enough to read WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? for its theses or propositions. One must reconstruct the concepts that are created and that give sense to the theses. But even this advice sounds too familiar, unless we understand it concretely. We must reconstruct the problematic, the system of concepts. This is not a task for the Understanding, but for Reason, the noetic faculty, that Deleuze and Guattari call here the « problematic faculty ».
« a problem, in science or in philosophy, does not consist in answering a question but in adapting, in co-adapting, with a higher « taste » as problematic faculty, the corresponding elements in the process of their determination » (page 133, translation modified)
Thus, we have a first maxim:
1) read for the concepts
This maxim is made more concrete by means of the problematic:
2) reconstruct the problematic that gives sense to the questions and to the answers.
To make this advice even more concrete Deleuze and Guattari specify the task of reading in terms of a sensitivity to the type of enunciation. We must not read the book in terms of propositions enunciated by a subject, but in terms of concepts assembled and articulated in problematics, enunciated by a series of agents, the conceptual personae of the book.
« Il se peut que le personnage conceptuel apparaisse pour lui-même assez rarement, ou par allusion. Pourtant, il est là ; et, même innommé, souterrain, doit toujours être reconstitué par le lecteur » (QP?, 62).
« It is possible that the conceptual persona appears for itself only rarely or allusively. Nevertheless, it is there; and even nameless, subterranean, it must always be reconstituted by the reader » (WIP?, 63, ).
The third maxim is:
3) read for the conceptual personae (reconstitute the explicit and implicit agents of enunciation).
I have talked about the necessity of criteria in an earlier post. Our criteria of evaluation need not coincide with those of Deleuze and Guattari, but in order to read the book we need to take into account their criteria.
« We cannot say in advance whether a problem is well posed, whether a solution fits, is indeed the case, or whether a persona is viable. This is because the criteria for each philosophical activity are found only in the other two, which is why philosophy develops in paradox » (82).
The process of co-adapting the various elements in the construction of a philosophy is to be evaluated in terms of criteria that do not belong to the faculty of Understanding with its exclusive concern for the true and the false, but to the noetic faculty (Reason) whose criteria are categories of the Spirit:
« Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure. Now, one cannot know this before having constructed. We will not say of many books of philosophy that they are false, for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept or contribute an image of thought or beget a persona worth the effort. Only teachers can write « false » in the margins, perhaps; but readers have doubts about the importance and interest, that is to say, the novelty of what they are given to read. These are the categories of the Spirit » (Page 82-83, translation modified).
This leads to a fourth maxim of reading:
4) read for the new, the interesting, the remarkable, the important.
A fifth maxim can sum all this up
5) Read noetically (in terms of creation of concepts, problematics, conceptual personae and landscapes, and their novelty, interest and importance).
AGENT SWARM 