Deleuze says, "the Epicureans did not succeed in developing their theory of envelopes and surfaces and they did not reach the idea of incorporeal effects, perhaps because the 'simulacra' remain subjected to the single causality of bodies in depth" (The Logic of Sense, p. 94). I'm not sure about exactly what problem Deleuze sees with causality, but he evidently does see a problem with causality as this would explain why he would propose thinking of two types of causality. I'll call the two types of causality naked causality and clothed causality after Deleuze's discussion of two types of repetition, because perhaps the problems and the ways of addressing them are similar. (Don't ask me whether clothed causality deserves to the name of causality, because I am just getting into this.) Naked causality is straight up causality, whatever that might be. Clothed causality Deleuze calls quasi-causality or ideational causality. It concerns how surface effects "cause" other effects. Deleuze associates clothed causality with immanence, which I presume to be neither naked nor clothed for the time being. The point Deleuze is getting to in this section ("Fourteenth Series of Double Causality") is that "[t]he foundation can never resemble what it founds" (p. 99). The impulse to think of causality as doubled, like the impulse to think of repetition as doubled, responds to an impasse encountered in the course of Deleuze's critical engagement with representationalism (or simply his criticism of the idea of the same), as I see it. Deleuze then says something that quite intrigues me. He says that the foundation is another geography without being another world (ibidem). Evidently he thinks of founding as a relation of clothed causation. A question I have, then, is whether this way of thinking, or deterritorial thinking generally, is a monism. More concretely, I wonder what can be said about the character of the world to which the foundation and that which it founds belongs. Further along those lines, I wonder whether theory in the human sciences in general, or anywhere people care about foundations, isn't driven by a curiosity about the character of such an inclusive world, and whether it can ever be definitively said that such a curiosity would be fruitless. What would it mean to say that such a curiosity is misplaced? Well, if one would never think such a thought from within a curiosity, does a project of curiosity nevertheless open itself to such a critical thinking, and must it embrace the possibility of fruitlessness, the utter failure of a curiosity. (A curiosity can never resemble a project of curiosity–problem solved?) What is the character of a paradigm that would put curiosities to the test?
Labels: causality, curiosity, Deleuze