Deleuze begins Logic of Sense by introducing what he calls a category of special things, which appear throughout Lewis Carroll’s Alice books – “events, pure events.” One such event is when Alice, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, becomes larger after she drinks from the bottle labelled “drink me.” In saying that Alice becomes larger, Deleuze means “she becomes larger than she was; however, by the same token, she becomes smaller than she is now.” She is not bigger and smaller at the same time, she is larger now; she was smaller before. In becoming larger than one was in the past, one is, at the same moment smaller than one becomes in the future. Deleuze calls this becoming larger and smaller at the same moment “the simultaneity of becoming,” a simultaneity that eludes the present. Becoming does not separate larger and smaller in terms of before and after. The essence of becoming is “to move and pull in both directions at once.” Alice, in becoming smaller and larger at the same time, has two senses or directions, here the word “direction” translates the French word sens. Alice does not grow without shrinking, nor does she shrink without growing – a paradox.
Plato distinguishes between “two dimensions” of things, one measurable, one unmeasurable. The first dimension is that of “limited and measured things,” individual things fixed or limited in the present, and assigned to a subject, i.e. one who has a “particular largeness…at a particular moment.” The second dimension is that of events of pure becoming “without measure;” which, like Alice, are always going in two directions at once, becoming larger and smaller, hotter and colder, younger and older, without reaching a definite end, a limit. These two dimensions form a dualism, but it is not the dualism of mind and body, by which matter is conformed to the Idea, in a Platonic model/copy relationship. It is, instead, what Deleuze calls a “subterranean dualism” of that which is subject to the Idea, the copy, and that which eludes the Idea, while contesting both elements in the model/copy relationship. The function of the Idea is to limit things, yet beneath these limited things there is always the “mad element,” which refuses the limitations that the Idea seeks to impose on things – this is the simulacrum – the thing that appears as what it isn’t.
Plato wonders if the relation between the limited and the unlimited, the copy and the simulacrum, is essential to language. Without something to limit it, the flow of language would never cease, the name would slide across the surface, missing its referent, i.e. it would not stop at the thing that it refers to. Deleuze muses further, perhaps there are two languages, one for each of these dimensions, one the language of limitation, designating the “pauses and rests,” the nouns and adjectives through which the thing receives the action of the Idea. The other expressing the unceasing movements, the “rebel becomings,” which refuse the action of the Idea. Or perhaps there are two distinct dimensions internal to language, “one concealed by the other, yet continuously coming to the aid of, or subsisting under, the other?”
The paradox of pure becoming, the duality of before and after, which eludes the present, is also the paradox of infinite identity, “the infinite identity of both directions or senses at the same time.” The two senses of becoming diverge from one another, they are different, yet, at the same moment, they are equal to one another. Language has the capacity to fix the limits, to say, for example, when too much begins; but it is also able to “transcend the limits,” to restore both limits to the “infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming.” To illustrate this, Deleuze draws on a passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “don’t hold a red [hot] poker for too long, it will burn you, don’t cut yourself too deeply, it will cause you to bleed.” Here the limitations of too much and not enough are overcome, and are restored to the “infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming.” The sense of holding the red-hot poker, is that, one is, at the same moment, becoming burnt and becoming not burnt, the sense of cutting one’s finger, is that, one is, at the same moment, becoming cut and becoming not cut. Such paradoxical statements of infinite identity, with their intrinsic reversals, are the means by which Alice’s adventures are constituted. In addition to becoming larger and becoming smaller, Alice experiences the reversal of the day before and the day after, which always excludes the present: “jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today;” reversals of larger and smaller, more and less and active and passive.
All of these reversals have the effect of contesting Alice’s personal identity, who she is, through the loss of her proper name. The proper name is guaranteed by the general names or concepts, which designate the pauses and rests, which names as words undergo. Alice’s personal self, embodied in her proper name, needs the names of God and the world, as concepts, to guarantee the manifestation of Alice’s personal self as the one who speaks. Nouns and adjectives “begin to melt” when they are “carried away” by verbs of pure becoming, and “slip into the language of events.” Certainty now gives way to uncertainty, embodied in Alice’s cry of “which way, which way?” There are always two ways to choose from. In this manner the finite identity of the “self, the world and God,” is lost, in its place, the infinite identity of an unlimited divergent duality (a logical disjunction).
The loss of her proper name is the adventure repeated throughout Alice’s adventures. Alice, after falling down the rabbit hole, in chapter two of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wonders if she is still herself or if she has changed into someone else. In order to confirm that she is herself, she attempts to recite a poem, Isaac Watts’ “Against Idleness and Mischief,” which begins “How doth the little bee.” Deleuze calls such repetitions a “test of knowledge and recitation,” a test which has the ultimate effect of stripping Alice of her identity. When Alice undertakes the test, the poem emerges as a parody, uttered in a strange voice, as if spoken by someone else. “How doth the little bee” becomes “How doth the little crocodile.” The poem of the bee espouses the virtues of work, while the new poem describes the virtues of a smiling deception that the crocodile employs in order to lure fish into its mouth.
“How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!”
Deleuze concludes series one by saying that paradox puts what we know and who we are into question; it is as if events of becoming have an unreality “which is communicated to knowledge and to people, through language.” The uncertainty of who we are and what we know, is not a doubt external to what is happening, but an objective structure of the event, which, when it moves in two directions, fragments the knowledge and identity of the one who experiences it. Paradox, therefore, first destroys good sense, as the only sense or direction, and then common sense, which assigns a single sense across all our faculties.
Derek Hampson 