Fifth Series of Sense

Page 28: Deleuze not only refers to sense as a frontier, but the "cutting edge, or the articulation of difference." Once again, we see Deleuze positing sense as this differentiating function between two series. Equally important is this attribute of sense as a "cutting edge". In later books, he (and Guattari) use this aspect of sense to define the Body without Organs (BwO). Sense, or becoming, has real productive force that can result in division, or at its most chaotic, destruction.

Page: 28: The Paradox of Regress, or of Indefinite Proliferation. Previously, Deleuze wrote on both the indeterminacy and the infinitude of sense and becoming. Here, he takes the logic of What the Tortoise Said to Achilles and applies it directly to sense. Propositions are linked together as in a chain. In order to gain the sense of any of them, they must refer to another proposition. In this way, one can never speak about something and its meaning at the same time. (29) This is analogous to never being able to determine both an electron's position and velocity at the same time. Propositions propagate in this way. If one was to visualize a diagram of this, one could picture an upside-down triangle. As you move from the top to the bottom, the triangle gets skinnier -- the propositions (imagine horizontal cross-sectional slices) get more and more contracted. But the sense running throughout the diagrams is a 3-D gyre or spiral running continuously from top to bottom, like a tornado. The gyre carves out a space from out of which sense can emerge. Another illustrative diagram would be the Fifteen puzzle: in this puzzle, one missing tile sets the board in motion. Out of this gap, the player is able to rearrange the pieces. When the pieces are put in order, sense is made only because of the missing piece. More generally speaking, propositions spawn themselves out of this aleatory gap in the hope of rearranging themselves into an order that causes sense (e.g. an epiphany) to leap up off the page and into this emotive dimension.

Again, to show the alternating parts of the puzzle, Deleuze is contrasting dualities, "the name that denotes something and the name which denotes the sense of the name." (30) Here, as elsewhere, there is a real elemental, essential sense to the signifier and signified. In The Fold, Deleuze speaks of an allegory of two levels of a Baroque house, where the ground floor is "animal", and the upper level is the "soul". (4)

The production of sense is an affirmative act, yet the logical attribute (or valence) of sense is neither affirmative nor negative. (It is neutral and its only axis of magnitude is intensity.) Instead, it is a sublime feeling that separates us from the affirmative or negative logical content of the proposition. In this way, sense is but an "evanescent double", a shadow, a "smile without the cat or a flame without a candle". (32) This doubling of sense allows the event to crop up twice, once in language and once in actual things. (The direct corollary here is to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx where states that history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce".) Deleuze states that these doubles are "two simultaneous faces of one and same surface." (34) One can visualize a textured surface -- hills on one side of the surface are valleys on the other. One side is the sense defining the other -- it decodes the gaps. Going back to the Fourth Series, sense is this "line of articulation of difference" -- measuring and providing a code by means of gaps (differences) to map a surface. Sense is "indifferent to all opposites" because it itself is the production born of opposition. (35)