Deleuze is insistent in his book on Foucault: despite appearances, despite the fact his recently deceased friend placed emphasis on discourse, he was a thinker of what Deleuze calls visibilities (and we should not be too quick to look for a definition of this word).
The elegant, but complex argument of Deleuze's Foucault shows us how saying and seeing, 'discursive practices and forms of self'evidence' are divided - how the articulable and the visible, the forms of expression and the forms of content never quite coincide even as they combine to make possible particular behaviours, mentalities or sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (strata).
And not only that. Deleuze wants, too, to show how Foucault thinks their interrelationship as it draws upon a 'non-relating relation' such as Blanchot formulated it (albeit in a different context), which will require a unique ontology made up of folds and foldings, of the single plane of the outside that lends itself to particular interiorisations, but periodically shakes them out like a tablecloth, only to allow new crumplings, mutations by way of which new behaviours, mentalities and sets of ideas are distributed.
One Speaks, One Sees
Foucault's archeological endeavour, Deleuze notes, 'is firstly to discover a true form of expression which cannot be confused with any linguistic study, be it signifier, word, phrase, proposition, or linguistic act'. His particular target is the Signifier, where (Deleuze quoting Foucault) "'discourse is annihilated in its reality by entering into the order of the signifier'".
True, Deleuze grants, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and elsewhere, discourse is granted primacy, but this does not mean the visibilities can be reduced to discourse; Foucault comes to believe, Deleuze notes, that his early books do not show this primacy forcefully enough - 'this is his reaction against phenomenology'; nevertheless, the visible remains irreducible; it has its own laws and its own autonomy.
Against phenomenology: Foucault sets himself against the idea of the primacy of the subject to whom the world is visible. For the phenomenologist, what matters is not consciousness in itself, or the world in its natural reality, but the network of relations that reveals itself in the specific combination of the empirical and the transcendental that characterises intentionality.
What, then, of Foucault's visibilities? Saying and seeing, discusivity and visibility are comprised of practicies, or positivities, says Deleuze. They make possible the behaviour, mentality and sets of ideas that belong to particular historical formations (Foucault calls them strata). The articulable and the visible become, with Foucault, the two elements of stratification. Together, considered as 'a "mechanism" of statements and visibilities', they constitute knowledge, understood as 'a practical assemblage' as it combines both discursive and non-discursive practices.
Does this mean Foucault seeks to relativise the findings of phenomenology to a particular historical formation? More than that. For what matters with Foucault's archaeology is to open up words, phrases and propositions to retrieve statements on the one hand, and to open up qualities things and objects to retrieve visibilities on the other. Statements, they become readable in relation to the conditions that make them so, says Deleuze, and visibilities visible likewise.
This implies the displacement of the subject in Foucault's archaeology. The subject, Deleuze comments, is merely a 'variable, or rather a set of variables of the statement' - it is a function that is derived from the statement, and its author is merely a position with respect to the statement. What comes first, for Foucault, is 'an anonymous murmur in which positions are laid out for possible subjects' - the 'ONE SPEAKS', understood as the drone of discourse that precedes and withdraws from speakers and listeners, writers and readers, always threatening to return.
What matters, as I have tried to clarify in a previous post, is the 'it speaks' rather than the 'I speak'; the 'there is language' or 'the being of language', the great murmur that varies in each historical formation. In the classical age, the being of language is confined by the regime of representation. By the nineteenth century, it has begun to escape these limits, losing its unifying function and rediscovering it in a new sense in literature. Henceforward, a certain literature presents language as the outside - as its historical being fails to be encompassable by an inner consciousness.
Roughly the same can be said of the visible. Visibilities, says Deleuze,
are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible, such as qualities, things, objects, compounds of objects[....] Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms that would show up under light, but rather forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer.
Then with the notion of visibilities, Foucault has created a function that doubles that of the statement. What matters is not simply to see, to attend to what has been delivered us by way of intuition, but to 'break things open'. This is what happens with the figure of the panopticon of Discipline and Punish, where we find, Deleuze remarks,
a luminous form that bathes the peripheral cells in light but leaves the central tower opaque, distributing prisoners who are seen without being able to see, and the observer who sees everything without being seen.
Foucault does not begin, like the phenomenologist, from a particular perspective, but from the light that belongs to a particular 'mechanism' or 'machine' (Deleuze's words), just as statements belong to particular systems.
Likewise with Foucault's famous reading of Velasquez's Las Meninas in terms of its distribution of 'what is seen and who sees, the exchanges and reflections, right up to the place of the king who can only be inferred as existing outside the painting ...' What matters once again is that luminosity from which the position of participants in the scene can be observed (or deduced).
Thus we can speak of a 'there is' of light, of a being of light. As in the case of discourse, this light-being is historical insofar as it cannot be separated from the way it falls into a formation, the way it gives itself up to be experienced, but also absolute as it outstrips that formation, just as the 'there is' of language, language-being outstrips any particular system of discourse. And just as the being of discourse cannot be thought from the intention to speak of an individual speaker or writer, visibilities are not defined by sight.
Is the phenomenologist to be understood as a function of discourse, the 'I' of the investigator giving way to the 'one' of 'one writes' or 'one speaks', and likewise the 'I' who sees and to whom being is revealed (the transcendental ego) to the 'one' of 'one sees'?
Literature and Seeing
(When Deleuze reads literature, it is always to emphasise what is made visible by this 'one sees', even as it does so by way of the 'one speaks' of the written. This is what he writes very beautifully, in his book on Foucault, of Faulkner:
statements trace fantastic curves which pass through discursive objects and mobile subject-positions (the one name for several persons, two names for the one person) and which are inscribed within a language-being, in a reunion of all the language unique to Faulkner. But the descriptions conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature's greatest 'luminist').
This reading sets Deleuze, I think, against Blanchot, an important figure in the Foucault book. For Blanchot, speaking, writing, have a primacy with respect to the visible. As Deleuze puts it, '... while Blanchot insisted on the primacy of speaking as a determining element, Foucault, contrary to what we might think at first glance, upholds the specificity of seeing, the irreducibility of the visible as a determinable element'. This seems to me exactly right, and can be understood in terms of the importance of Levinas to Blanchot, and to a whole tradition in Rosenszweig and others that places emphasis on speaking and listening (on call and response) rather than seeing.)
Extractive Conditions
What is the role of archaeology with respect to the sayable and the seeable?
The statement is not a simple given, but has to be broken open from words, phrases and propositions. Likewise with the 'content' that is expressed - Deleuze emphasises for Foucault it is not to be understood as a signified, nor indeed as a referent. Visibilities are not simply visible or perceptible; they are not given in the forms of objects, since it is objects they reveal. Rather, they are forms of luminosity in relation to which things, objects exist 'only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer'.
Archaeology opens up words, phrases and propositions and open up qualities, things and objects, says Deleuze; 'It must extract from words and language the statements corresponding to each stratum and its thresholds, but equally extract from things ans sight the visibilities and "self-evidences" unique to each stratum'. The archaeologist must discover the extractive conditions that allow the uncovery of what is said.
This uncovery reveals, certainly, what was previous hidden. But it does so all at once: the archaeologist opens everything that is seen and said in a particular stratum; everything, that is, that is known. This is 'Foucault's greatest historical principle', says Deleuze: there is nothing hidden behind the curtain; but this makes it all the more important to describe the curtain. He gives the example of politics:
politics hides nothing, in diplomacy, legislation, control or government, even though each cluster of statements assumes a certain method for intertwining words, phrases and propositions. We need only know how to read, however difficult that may prove to be. The secret exists only in order to be betrayed, or to betray itself. Each age articulates perfectly the most cynical elements of its politics, or the rawest element of its sexuality, to the point where transgression has little merit. Each age says everything it can according to the conditions laid down for its statements.
Nothing is hidden: and the same is the case for visibilities; 'Each strata sees and reveals everything it can according to the conditions for visibility', Deleuze writes, just as everything it says is so in terms of the conditions for statements.
Neo-Kantianism?
It is also crucial that we understand these conditions as they escape the interiority of consciousness: if they are to be understood, as Deleuze recommends, as a priori conditions, this must not be understood as a neo-Kantianism. Conditions, here, are to be thought in terms of real experience - they belong on the side of the 'object' rather than the universal subject; the a priori is itself historical. Nevertheless, Deleuze notes,
... if there is any neo-Kantianism, it is because visibilities together with their conditions form a Receptivity, and statements together with their conditions form a Spontaneity. The spontaneity of language and the receptivity of light.
How should we understand this? On the one hand, for Kant, space and time exist as forms of intuition - as products of the subject. The concrete matter of the intution is given in terms of its prior form, which is not found in the things themselves, but in the mind of the subject. Intution is receptive.
On the other hand, we have the abstract categories of the understanding, which, although likewise belonging to the mind, are of a different kind than intuited matter or the forms of intuition (space and time). Understanding, on Kant's account, is spontaneous.
Deleuze comments,
In Foucault, the spontaneity of understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the 'there is' of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time).
Of course the parallel can only go so far; but it is useful in terms of presenting the next step Deleuze wants to take.
The Primacy of Discourse
Deleuze, as we have seen, wants to highlight the importance of the visible for Foucault, but he also has to account for what is, for Foucault, the primacy of discourse. The visible and the articulable differ in the manner of the form of content and the form of expression even as they continually overlap to form particular strata or forms of knowledge. But between the two, Deleuze emphasise, 'there is no isomorphism or conformity, in spite of a mutual presupposition and the primacy of the statement'.
But how, then, is the primacy of the statement to be thought? This question is bound up with others in a tangled network:
In Foucault, the spontaneity of the understanding, the Cogito, gives way to the spontaneity of language (the 'there is' of language), while the receptivity of intuition gives way to that of light (a new form of space-time). Henceforth it is easy to understand why the statement has a primacy over the visible: The Archaeology of Knowledge can claim a determining role for statements as discursive formations. But visibilities are no less irreducible, because they refer to a form of the determinable, which refuses to be reduced to the form of determination. This marked the point of Kant's decisive break with Descartes: the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time). The problem is that of the coadaption of the two forms or two sorts of conditions, which differ in nature.
Why does Deleuze find it necessary to reflect on Kant's break with Descartes? Deleuze's text becomes particularly dense at this point; I turned to his lecture course on Kant, translated online, to the passages where he comments on the transition from Descartes.
In the Mediations, Descartes moves from 'I think, I am' to 'I am a thing which thinks'. 'The 'I think' determines the 'I am' as a thing that thinks', comments Deleuze. But Kant, for Deleuze, while agreeing that in order to think it is necessary to be, shows that determination also implies something indeterminate which is to be determined by the determination. The determination of the 'I am' as a thinking thing points beyond itself ...
Kant asks under what form the indeterminate, that is, in this case, the 'I think', is determinable by the determination. Under what form is the 'I am' determinate by the determination 'I think'? For Kant, explains Deleuze in the lectures, it is the form of time. This produces what for Deleuze is the paradox of inner sense:
the active determination 'I think' determines my existence [...] but it can only determine my existence under the form of the determinable, which is to say under the form of a passive being in space and in time. So 'I' is indeed an act, but an act that I can only represent to myself insofar as I am a passive being. [...] it's the same subject which has taken on two forms, the form of time and the form of thought, and the form of thought can only determine the existence of the subject as the existence of a passive being.
The determination of my existence occurs via the 'I think', but this depends in turn upon the determinable. I should note there is no mention of time in the Foucault book outside the complex space-time that comprises what Deleuze calls light (the visible). It is as space-time that light refuses to be reduced to the form of determination that is the statement.
I can only present this space-time to myself in terms of receptivity, a prior passivity, but as Deleuze emphasises, this is too simple: space-time is not a simple grid, set up a priori, but can be rearticulated (is this the word?) anew according to various kinds of action. Nevertheless, a difference remainds between the seeable and the sayable, which means the paradox Kant confronts as Deleuze presents it - a subject that has taken on two forms - remains, roughly speaking, in the work of Foucault.
But of course these two forms do not concern a subject, since it is, for Foucault, for Deleuze, the conditions under which the subject is produced that is at issue, the subject being only a function of the seeable and the sayable. The apparent dualism that Kant confronts arises from the difficulty of joining together concepts, as they pertain to understanding, and intuitions. It is no surprise that Deleuze refers to the role of the schematism for Kant when discussing Foucault's claim as to the 'enigma' of the relationship between the seeable and the sayable.
Deleuze, to run ahead of myself considerably, will propose, drawing on Foucault an ontology of folds, of the outside to overcome this problem. But for the moment (I am commenting, rather casually, and without understanding most of what I read, on chapter 3), Deleuze brings us to the brink of the Foucault's version of the schematism (albeit as it is articulated in a very different context). In doing so, he still has the question of the primacy of discourse in Foucault's work before him. His reflection on Kant (and upon Kant's relationship to Descartes) is not intended as a work of comparative philosophy, but as an attempt to foreground the problem Foucault faces
Let us return to what Deleuze says on the relationship between the sayable and the seeable: 'the form of determination I think does not rest on an undetermined element (I am) but rather on the form of a pure determinable element (space-time)'. Space-time, as we have seen, is rethought by Deleuze (by his Foucault) as light, as the visible. The visible, the seeable, is what is as yet undetermined. The primacy of statements as discursive formations must be understood in terms of the activity of determining; visibilities, however, are not the determined; they do not allow themselves to be reduced to discourse. Light is leftover; the visible remains on its own terms.
The Duel
One more quotation to underline Deleuze's point.
The statement has primacy by virtue of the spontaneity of its conditions (language) which give it a determining form, while the visible element, by virtue of the receptivity of its conditions (light), merely has the form of the determinable. Therefore, we can assume that determination always comes from the statement, although the two forms differ in nature.
There remains, then, an irresolvable tension between the seeable and the sayable - a 'duel', Deleuze says, between two forms of exteriority. The next question to consider is how they can be thought together - for Deleuze, this is what Foucault addresses with his notion of power.
(Note for Sinthome: the chapter of Foucault on which I am commenting begins with an illuminating reference to Hjelmslev:
Stata are historical formations, positivities or empiricities. As 'sedimentary beds' they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, from bands of visibility and fields of readibility, from contents and expressions. We borrow these last terms from Hjelmslev, and apply them to Foucault in a completely different way, since content is not to be confused here with a signified, not expression with a signifier.)