When you have a crisis
(Which is what starts real thought)
You’re no longer in a familiar space
Suppose it is a crisis of love
You can go back to the familiar space.
You read about how it is that the relationships go,
and you just go along with it
OR
You maybe follow that line
Where it’s not clear where this is going to lead
Seeing what can be created in a given situation
May spends most of the fourth lecture focusing on Deleuze’s idea of the problem.
Some problems presuppose a solution.
What is 2 +2?
What battle did Napoleon lose to the British?
In such cases you either get the right solution or you find yourself in error.
Deleuze isn’t interested in such problems (which he calls “stupid”), because they accord with the dogmatic image of thought. What he calls an “interesting” problem is the one that doesn’t have a predetermined solution waiting for it.
May asks:
How is it that the zebra came into existence?
The answer:
There are certain predators. There’s certain prey. There’s certain vegetation. There’s certain environmental conditions. There’s certain weather. And the zebra becomes a solution to the problematic environment in which it arises…Not a problem as a question, but a problem as a field of tensions and that can move one way or move another way. The zebra didn’t have to be created. It wasn’t as though the environment was set up in such a way that the only thing that could come of it was a zebra.
(In the following lecture, May returns to this Zebra example and references Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould that if you rewound the evolutionary tape and played it forward again, it wouldn’t play out the same way.)
Any interesting problem is going to have a multitude of different possible solutions. And those solutions aren’t pre-given.
May uses various approaches to mental health treatment to illustrate Deleueze’s idea of the interesting problem.
One of the things that narrative work does is it denies that there is this identity there to be discovered. It denies there is this solution that if we just keep working, right, we’ll get there. The problem is not: in what ways am I stuck? The more interesting problem in the Deluezian sense would be: how might I live?
May contrasts that with psychiatry, noting that Deleuze says repeatedly that problems always have the solution they deserve (so it really all depends on how you pose the problem).
Somebody comes to you, they’re depressed. The problem is: what is the chemical imbalance here that needs to be treated? And the solution is Lexapro, Elavil, etc.
He says the psychoanalytic approach is more interesting, but not terribly so:
We’re going to have to talk a while to find exactly what went wrong with your sexual fantasies with your parents, how it was stymied in such a way that you just couldn’t really get the thing sorted out and so you wound up doing things that were destructive.
Now, that’s a more interesting problem. But it still has this pre-given solution, or at least a small range of them. And they’re all centered around a discovery of something that happens. It’s maybe a more interesting problem than what’s your chemical imbalance. But not as interesting as the problem, how might I live, in which you create various solutions, and none of which are pre-given, and many of which are wide open.
So, stupid problems reflect the dogmatic image of thought. Interesting problems show how difference can actualize itself in a variety of ways. Moreover, an interesting problem does not go away, but “subsists” in the solution. May elaborates:
Let’s suppose you choose a way to live and it’s working, right? That doesn’t mean that the problem of how one might live is just gone, right? Even if one is experiencing joyful effects, that problem can still be there. Remember, “problem” doesn’t mean “bad thing”. That problem can still be there. Whereas in a stupid problem, what’s 2 + 2? 4, exhausted. There’s nothing else there. 4, you’re done.
Now let’s go back to the zebra. You have a problematic environmental field. And one of its solutions is the zebra. But the zebra still exists now within a problematic environmental field. On the one hand, it doesn’t go away. But on the other hand, it no longer has the same structure.
May then brings it back to what forces thought – the fundamental encounter. A crisis. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it’s something new, that you can follow and see where it goes.
You could turn away, right? You could shut it down. You could say is, that’s a shock, but I’m not dealing with that, right?
But if you follow it, what are you doing, right? Well, what you’ve done then is open a problematic field for yourself. You no longer know how it all goes, right? So, following the shock opens up a problematic field where the answers are not pre-given.
So, the contrast we drew last time between the dogmatic image of thought on the one hand, and you can say what he calls real thought sometimes on the other, is reflected in these two different ways of conceiving problems.
The dogmatic image of thought conceives problems as having pre-given solutions. When you have your goodwill, the truth is going to be out there. We will discover it. When we discover it, we represent it. We re-present it because it’s already present. And now we have it. 4 is a representation of 2 plus 2.
On the other hand, you have the problematic thought. What happens is you have a shock. You don’t know where it’s going. Nietzschean-wise, you follow it. And instead of reacting against it, you follow it. When you follow it, you’ve opened up a problematic field, a field in which there aren’t pre-given solutions.
And now you’re in that moment of creativity.
The encounter can be anything that pulls you off track and makes you begin to sense that there’s something more than what has appeared. And Deleuze says that something-more-than-what’s-appeared can only be sensed (or as May says, palpated). It can’t be brought into recognition, because then it’s brought back into identities.
May then spends some time focusing on language. He says (per Deleuze) traditional frameworks focus on:
Designation: Referring to states of affairs (e.g., “The sky is blue”).
Manifestation: Expressing thoughts.
Signification: The inherent meaning of words or sentences.
On traditional views of language, a sentence, if it is a proper sentence, will speak truly… I say the sky is blue today, there’s a reality out there waiting to get understood.The state of affairs is represented in language.
But Deleuze’s concept of sense operates beyond traditional frameworks, interacting with states of affairs to generate events and transform situations. May gives the example of how a simple phrase like “This is a hijacking” fundamentally alters the sense of an airplane situation without changing its physical facts.
Language didn’t change the state of affairs. The things happen just as they happen. But now language has come to interact with them, and there’s a change in the sense of it.
Language is not simply a set of actual words that combined in a certain way can correspond to identities that are already out there. Language is also a field that can be brought to bear on states of experience in order to change their character. So, sense then opens up a problematic field in the second sense we’re talking about. A field in which things can happen but we don’t always know what they can happen and they can be multiple and complicated.
May concludes the lecture with a few notes on contrasting the dogmatic image of knowledge versus the real image of learning:
Knowledge on the dogmatic view is, you work your consciousness, you come to it, it’s out there, your words correspond to it, now you have knowledge.
Learning is moving into a space that you don’t know and seeing where it will lead you.