Theory: Summary (Deleuze and Guattari)

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari explain that philosophy needs three elements that are simultaneously unique and dependent on each other : "the prephilosophical plane it must lay out (immanence), the persona or personae it must invent and bring to life (insistence), and the philosophical concepts it must create (consistency)" (76-77). "Prephilosophical" means "something that does not exist outside philosophy, although philosophy presupposes it" (41).

Components:
The philosophical concept is comprised of multiple components, but it can never hold a totality of components. Every philosophical concept has relationships to other concepts in the present, past, and potential future (19). Also, concepts have "components that may, in turn, be grasped as concepts" (19). Deleuze and Guattari use an example of a "frightened face loom[ing] up that looks at something out of the field" and utters, "I am frightened," in a hypothetical world that only knows calm and rest (17) to explain how components function and how concepts "render[ them] . . . inseparable within itself" (19). The face of the "Other Person," they explain, holds all its possibilities behind its bounded (as such) image (it is an unknown "possible world" (19)). The expression of fear it presents as "other" in the known world needs the face for its expression, and the voice that confirms the expression of fear needs the face as "the vicinity of the words for which it is already the megaphone" (19). The face is the "face among its components, but the Face [can] itself be a concept with its own components" (19). The face is an "other world" that "exists only in its expression" (17) until it speaks and gives a material reality to the new possible world it has created. Therefore, this other world of the face "is a concept with three inseparable components: possible world, existing face, and real language or speech" (17).

Zone of Neighborhood:
The components that make up a concept are distinct within themselves but they also share a commonality that Deleuze and Guattari call a "zone of neighborhood . . . or a threshold of indiscernability" (19). This zone or threshold that binds components of a concept together is the concept's "internal consistency" (20). In the example above, the internal consistency is the face, through which the possible world, the expression of fright, and the actuality of speech are bound together to create a reality, inside a field of calmness and rest, of "something out of the field" (17) of known knowledge (fright). This face as internal consistency maintains the integrity of the concept, even though its components may co-exist wholly or partially within other concepts on the same plane (18).

Plane of Immanence:
The plane itself is the outer equivalent of the internal consistency of a concept. Concepts connect to each other through "movable bridges" (23) on this plane. Deleuze and Guattari describe the plane of immanence as "an image of thought[;] the image thought gives itself of what it means to think" (37).

Events:
Concepts, their components, and their point on the plane of immanence are "pure Events" (21)--a concept "speaks the event" (21) of what it is. "The only regions on the plane are concepts themselves, but the plane is all that holds them together" (36). Concepts and all of their components exist as "point[s] of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of [their] own components" (20) on this "plane of immanence" (35).

Conceptual Personae
Philosophy and chaos meet in conceptual personae. Concepts need "conceptual personae . . . [because they] play a part in their definition" (2). The friend as self and "other" is a conceptual persona (a friend/lover and rival in one). A conceptual persona, in this manner, is the "condition for the exercise of thought" (4). It comes into being through the concept's creator (and his or her associations with the world of nonphilosophy) (7) and the name attributed by the philosopher to his or her concept (a proper name).  "The idiot is a conceptual persona;" a person who wants to think, and who thinks for himself" (62). Conceptual personae are therefore associated with chaos in philosophy. "They . . . indicate . . bad perceptions, bad feelings, and even negative moments that emerge [from the plane], and they will themselves inspire original concepts whose repulsive character remains a constitutive property of that philosophy" (63).

Conceptual personae have relational features (70), dynamic features (71), judicial features (72), and existential features (72). Conceptual personae are therefore an integral part of philosophy. They are associated with the invention process (which is associated with chaos and is the "personalistic" (77) feature of philosophy); the element of "laying out" is associated with the "diagrammatic" feature of the plane (77); and the creation of concepts is associated with the "intensive features" (77) that constitute them.

Vital Anecdote:
Vital anecdotes are an existential feature of conceptual personae. They are stories associated with the lives of philosophers. Deleuze and Guattari explain that vital anecdotes "do not refer simply to social or even psychological types of philosopher . . . but show rather the power of conceptual personae. . . . Vital anecdotes recount a conceptual persona's relationship with animals, plants, rocks, a relationship according to which philosophers themselves become something unexpected and take on a tragic and comic dimension that they could not have by themselves" (73).  Examples: "Kant's stocking suspender," "Diogenes and his barrel," and "Spinoza's liking for battles between spiders" (72).

Taste
Something is needed to relate these three elements of philosophy, to establish a consistency, as such, and explain how grouping works in philosophical planes. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this need to establish a "coadaption of the[se] three" elements "([which] also regulates creation of concepts) . . . [as] taste" (77). Taste, they explain, is to be understood as "the rule of correspondence" (77) between the laying out the plane of immanence (reason), the invention of personae (imagination), and the creation of concepts (understanding) (77).