The Conditions of the New (original) (raw)

What are the conditions of the new that one finds laid out in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy? 1 Deleuze frequently said that the question of the conditions for the production of novelty, as Whitehead called it, or creativity, as Bergson called it, was one of the fundamental questions of contemporary thought. 2 It entails a profound shift in philosophy away from the eternal to the new, that is, from the universal to the singular. For Deleuze, the conditions of the new can be found only in a principle of difference-or more strongly, in a metaphysics of difference. 3 The reason: if identity (A is A) were the primary principle, that is, if identities were already pre-given, then there would in principle be no production of the new (no new differences). Yet the question of the new is a surprisingly complex problem. On the one hand, the 'new' seems to be one of the most obvious phenomena in the world: every dawn brings forth a new day, and every day brings with it a wealth of the new: new experiences, new events, new encounters. If the new means 'what did not exist earlier' then everything is new. On the other hand, one can say, with almost equal assurance, with the writer of Ecclesiastes (1: 9-10), that there is nothing new under the sun: the dawn of today was just like the dawn of yesterday, and simply brings with it more of the same. The new seems to come in well-worn and predictable patterns. Talk of the new, in other words, immediately threatens to be pulled back into talk of the old. As the French saying puts it, 'Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose' ('The more things change, the more they stay the same'). These complexities are due to the fact that the problem of the new is easily confused with a host of related but nonetheless distinguishable problems, including questions of transformation and change, causality and determinism, and the possibility of emergence (emergent qualities).