Social Groups as Deleuzian Multiplicities

Paul Hammond Social Groups as Deleuzian Multiplicities *** Draft Only *** Please do not cite without permission ***

Social Groups as Deleuzian Multiplicities Paul W. Hammond Presented at Collectives in Contemporary French Thought Workshop Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia Friday, 11 Nov 2014

The contemporary social world is one in which, in addition to interacting regularly

with a variety of different individual people, we find ourselves more and more often

interacting with entities that we more naturally think of as groups of several individuals.

Thus, in addition to my friends, my coworkers, and members of my family, I also have

regular meaningful interactions with my bank, my employer, and my government. It

seems correct to call corporations and similar entities groups of people, rather than

individuals, but in our everyday practices we talk about them as having beliefs,

motivations, and goals, and as carrying out activities like thinking, planning, and

deciding. We frequently say things like that Airbus and Boeing are closely monitoring

one another’s product offerings, or that Apple believes that holding large amounts of

cash offshore is the best way to minimize its US tax liability. These are ways of

speaking that are most natural with individual people, but most types of mental states

which can be ascribe to individual people can, in some circumstances, be sensibly

applied to corporate entities as well.

What exactly we mean when we ascribe mental states and intentional attitudes to

individual people is a philosophical question that is far from settled. Many thinkers argue

that this is merely a metaphorical way of speaking, while others claim that the groups in

question really do have mental states. A further question arises among those who argue

for the reality of these collective mental states: Does the group’s having mental state x

imply that some or all members of the group have x as well, or something related to it?

Many thinkers seem to assume that it does and spend time trying to analyze what

exactly the essential relationships between the collective and individual mental states

are.

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I want to argue here that not only do certain groups really have mental states, but

that the existence of these group mental states doesn’t necessarily imply anything about

the mental states of any group members. For example, I think that ‘Microsoft believes y’

doesn’t mean that any Microsoft employees or managers believe y or something closely

related to y. I will argue instead that it’s possible to treat our ascriptions of mentality to

corporations and other collectives in a way that is strictly parallel to our treatment of

mental phenomena in individual people.

I think that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy gives us several important resources

thinking about the mental activity of groups in this way. To make my case, I’ll need to

delve into two elements of Deleuze’s thought. First, I’ll outline his ontology of parts and

wholes, according to which multiplicities, not unities or pluralities, are the ultimate

foundation of ontological analysis. Crucial to our discussion of Deleuze’s theory of

multiplicities will be his distinction between the virtual parts, or internal relations, of

every multiplicity and its material or physical parts. Secondly, I’ll consider Deleuze’s

structural and functional account of the mental faculties insofar as it describes the type

of multiplicity that can be characterized as having a mind. I’ll give some examples of

grouplevel processes that seem to correspond to the mental faculties, and therefore

argue that we are right to describe some collectives as thinking individuals in the same

way we do individual people.

Deleuze’s Metaphysics of Multiplicities

If we were interested in summing up Deleuze’s thought with a slogan, “everything

is a multiplicity” would surely be a candidate. The phrase certainly evokes a liberatory

feeling which many interpreters of Deleuze, focusing on his notion of the affirmation of

difference, have observed and rallied around. However, this mantra by itself doesn’t

take us very far without understanding precisely what Deleuze means by “multiplicity,”

and the way in which he thinks the assertion of this thesis really represents a break with

earlier philosophical positions.

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Deleuze makes clear that his intention in introducing the idea of multiplicity is to

introduce a way of thinking of individuals that is distinct from earlier metaphysical

systems, especially that of Hegel. In Difference & Repetition, he says of the concept of

multiplicity “the utmost importance must be attached to the substantive form: multiplicity

must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation

belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form

a system.” Multiplicity is the fundamental ontological category for Deleuze, prior to 1

oneness and multipleness themselves, which he considers to be unnecessary

abstractions. But how is the notion of a multiplicity supposed to be less abstract than

that of unity or multitude in general? In order to see this, we need to briefly follow the

Deleuzian notion of multiplicity through its historical antecedents in order to get clear on

what it means, and how exactly it is supposed to replace the opposed concepts of one

and many.

Deleuze credits the 19thCentury mathematician Bernhard Riemann with first

using the notion of multiplicity in a way similar to the way Deleuze himself wants to use

it. Riemann defines a multiplicity in a very general way as any “general notion which 2

admits of different specifications.” What matters for Deleuze is not so much the general 3

notion, however but the way that multiplicities are divided into different types. The

starting point of Riemann’s foray into the foundations of geometry is to distinguish

“continuous” from “discrete” multiplicities according to the types of relations that exist

among their specific parts. In a continuous multiplicity, a path exists within the

multiplicity connecting any two points in it to one another. We might think of space as a

paradigm example of a continuous multiplicity: from any point in space we can draw a

continuous line to any other point, with all of the points we will cross over on the way

1 DR 182.

2 Throughout my discussion of Riemann and throughout this chapter, I'll use the term “multiplicity” as it is almost always used to translate “multiplicité” in Deleuze into English. The term in German, as it appears in Riemann, Husserl, and others is “mannigfaltigkeit,” and it is more often translated directly into English as “manifold” or “manifoldness.” It is important to recognize that this is the same term Deleuze is referring to when he discusses Riemann's or Husserl's treatment of multiplicities. 3 Riemann, Hypotheses, 2.

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belonging to the multiplicity as well. n a discrete multiplicity, however, we cannot pass

along a continuous path from one element to another. The elements are distinct without

a path connecting them. Riemann suggests that any concept that can be broken down

into further specifications can be seen as a discrete multiplicity. We can describe, for

example, the set of all cats as a discrete multiplicity, because there is no way to pass

through continuous variation from one individual cat to another one. What is important 4

to Deleuze about the distinction here is the method that Riemann uses to make it. The

distinction between continuous and discrete multiplicities in Riemann is made by

distinguishing the types of internal relations characteristic of each one. The difference

between the two kinds consists in what relations the specifications of a given multiplicity

bear to one another: can they be connected continuously or not? Deleuze won't put a

great deal of weight on the difference between discrete and continuous multiplicities as

such, but what is crucial to him is the way that the division into types takes place.

Essential to Deleuze's concept of multiplicity is the fact that they can be classified

according to internal relations, relations that their parts bear to one another.

Deleuze sometimes calls this structure or organization according to which

multiplicities are distinguished “internal difference,” especially when discussing

Bergson’s doctrine of multiplicities. According to Deleuze, Bergson carries on

Riemann’s method of distinguishing multiplicities according to their internal relations.

Bergson sometimes uses the same terminology of continuous and discrete as Riemann,

but in a different way. He also uses the term “quantitative” for “discrete” and “qualitative”

for “continuous.” Bergson’s method divides discrete from continuous not according to

the possibility of continuous passage from one specification to another, but according to

what happens when the parts of a multiplicity are separated from one another. Space

and spatial measurements are an exemplary form of quantitative multiplicity for

Bergson. The idea is that the parts of any spatial measure or amount are all the same

the first centimeter in a meter is the same as the 50th and the 100th and if you take

any of them away from the whole 100 centimeters the removed portion doesn’t change

4 It’s possible that the logical space of all possible cats is a continuous multiplicity. I’ll leave speculation about this question as an exercise for the reader.

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from what it was as part of the whole. Time, at least time as experienced, is not this

way, however. Bergson describes the example of a melody to show that the different

temporal moments cannot be separated from one another and rearranged in any order

and that the melody as a whole is a different kind of thing than the individual notes

which make it up.

Bergson's distinction between multiplicities that change in nature when they

divide and those that do not remains in Deleuze's own thought, but is transformed and

put to different purposes. Rather than opposing qualitative to quantitative multiplicities,

Deleuze frequently speaks of a difference between virtual and actual multiplicities. This

terminology exists in Bergson as well, and Deleuze makes clear in his book on Bergson

that he takes it to line up with the qualitative/quantitative distinction. The virtual/actual

terminology, however, highlights the general application that Deleuze wants to apply to

this classification. Deleuze applies the term “virtual” to Bergson's qualitative

multiplicities, and uses Bergson's definition as the foundation of his conception of Ideas.

Deleuze says, “An idea is an ndimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity.” We 5

should take “continuous” here to indicate that Deleuze is drawing on Bergson's

conception of a continuous multiplicity. The n dimensions of the idea are the parts which

cannot be separated out from the complete idea without it changing in nature.

The details of Deleuze's notion of the virtual have been debated at length in

secondary literature. Without wading into those disputes here, I think it’s possible to 6

say that the crucial thing about Deleuze's virtual multiplicities for our purposes is that

their parts bear the Bergsonian relation to one another: the parts of a virtual multiplicity

cannot be extracted from the whole without becoming different in kind. This means that

the nature of the parts within such a multiplicity is reciprocally determined, that is, that

each part is determined by the relationship it bears to other parts, and determines the

nature of the other parts in turn. Deleuze also refers to virtual multiplicities as

“structures,” saying that “the reality of the virtual is structure,” referring to the 7

5 DR 182.

6 See Badiou, Deleuze, Toscano, Theatre of Production, DeLanda, Intensive Science. 7 DR 209.

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methodology that he thinks unifies the various French thinkers grouped under the

heading of “structuralism.” Such a structure is a Bergsonian continuous multiplicity, in 8

that it has parts in the different mutually determining elements, but those parts lack their

individual meanings if separated from the whole they belong to.

In Deleuze’s application of Bergson’s definition of virtual multiplicities, however,

the use to which the concept is put has shifted from what it was in Bergson. Instead of

distinguishing two types of multiplicities now, Deleuze is interested in characterizing two

different types of multiplicities belonging to a single thing: a virtual multiplicity of its ideal

parts as opposed to a discrete multiplicity of its material parts. We could say, indeed,

that it has become a scheme for describing two different kinds of parts that a given thing

has: those belonging to the idea and those belonging to its instantiation in a given

material body. “The virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object … There

is another part of the object which is determined by actualization.” Ideas are in fact 9

incarnated in real things, such that we can say every real thing has a material half

consisting of parts which are indifferent to separation, and an ideal half of elements

fused together in a virtual multiplicity. The ideal part constitutes the individual nature of

the thing, insofar as it corresponds to a nature which is identical with the ideal elements

which bear essential relationships to one another, and the material part constitutes its

actual existence in a physical reality. 10

8 See the essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism” in DI 170192 for details on what Deleuze sees as the methodology unifying these thinkers. 9 DR 209 10 This application of the concept of a multiplicity can perhaps be seen most clearly in the way that Deleuze interprets Spinoza in his important study, Spinoza and the Problem of Expression, or Expressionism in Philosophy. In this text the same relationship obtains between the essence of a thing and its existence. In Spinoza’s terms, the essence of a mode is defined by the relationship among parts characteristic of being the type of thing that it is, whereas its existence consists in there actually being an very great number of infinitely small physical parts actually bearing that characteristic relationship to one another. The physical parts, then, clearly constitute a discrete multiplicity, in the Bergsonian sense: nothing changes about them when they are separated from one another and recombined into other things. The Spinozist essence, however, fits very closely Deleuze's conception of a virtual multiplicity. It is defined entirely by characteristic relations among parts, thus constituting an ideal structure, independent of its physical instantiation or actual existence. The essence itself is not an image of the actual object, but defines the internal relationships characteristic of that object. Changes in those relationships, furthermore, constitute changes in the essence of the thing and in its degree of power, in the way in which addition or subtraction of virtual parts constitutes a change in the nature of a continuous multiplicity. The interpretation of Spinoza we find in Expressionism in Philosophy therefore gives perhaps the clearest picture of Deleuze’s own theory of multiplicities, according

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We have seen here how Deleuze employs the concept of multiplicity to develop a

theory of the constitution of individuals out of two types of parts. Each individual has an

ideal aspect, defined by the virtual or ideal elements which make up a continuous

multiplicity. These elements are not separable from one another without a change

coming about in the nature of the whole that they make up. On the other hand, an

individual has an actual aspect, corresponding to its physical or spatiotemporal parts,

which can be separated without affecting the nature of the thing or changing the nature

of the parts. This conceptual framework is the way that Deleuze defines an individual in

an attempt to overcome the abstract opposition between the one and the multiple. By

distinguishing the virtual from the actual aspects of an individual, Deleuze can

characterize it as having a unity corresponding to the particular idea instantiated in the

combination of its virtual elements, while still conceiving of it as made up of parts.

Moreover, each individual is a multiplicity of two distinct types of parts, both the physical

parts which actually make it up and the parts of the idea, which can be distinguished

from one another, although separating them from their embededness in a system of

reciprocal determination with other parts would change their nature. With this framework

in mind, we can look at other aspects of Deleuze's work as attempts to describe the

virtual multiplicities or ideal systems corresponding to different actually existing

individuals.

Through the concept of a multiplicity, we see that Deleuze provides us with a

welldefined way to think about the relationship between a whole and its parts. Of

particular importance is the distinction Deleuze draws between the material parts of an

individual and its virtual parts or structure. The distinction here has important

implications for thinking about the relationship between a group and its members.

Insofar as we think of a group as merely consisting of the aggregate of its members

without analyzing relations among them, this is to consider the members as only

material parts and to consider the group as merely a quantitative multiplicity. This

to which each actually existing thing is made up of an ideal, virtual multiplicity and an extensive, actual multiplicity.

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captures an aspect of any group, but it may ignore relations between members which

constitute the group as a virtual multiplicity as well.

This point can also be put as a clarification of the concepts of “groups” and

“individuals.” It feels natural to oppose the terms, to say that anything must be either a

group or an individual, possibly because this is the way the terms tend to be used in

social scientific contexts. Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity allows us to see, however,

that all individuals are groups in some sense. Anything that has material parts as well as

internal relationships among those parts is an individual because it has systematicity by

virtue of these structural internal relations. There may be some things that are best

described as pure groups, because they have no salient internal relations whatsoever.

Most social groups, however, are not going to be in this category. Labor unions,

commercial firms, and political parties pretty clearly have some kind of internal structure

which makes them something more than the aggregates of their members. One way to

see this is to note that they are most naturally identified by proper names. “BP,” “The

AFLCIO,” and “The United States Army” all grammatically refer to specific individuals

and we have to think a minute to notice that they are each comprised of a large number

of people.

Mentality as a Virtual Multiplicity

We can see that there is a clear way in which we can make sense of talking

about certain social groups as individual entities if we analyze them as Deleuzian

multiplicities. This result doesn’t fully allow us to address our original question regarding

the mental states of such entities, however. The framework of analyzing actually

existing individuals as a virtual and a material multiplicity is a very general one which

merely gives the universal conditions of individuality. Merely the existence of some

internal structure in a collective does not imply that it has the capacity to have its own

mental states or say anything about whether there is a relationship between group and

member mental states. To answer those questions we need to consider a much more

specific issue: the particular internal structure characteristic of individuals which have or

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are minds. There are, of course, many possible accounts of what such a structure would

look like, and it would go far beyond the scope of this paper to defend fully a substantive

account of the mind that would answer these questions in a completely satisfactory way.

I contend, however, that Deleuze himself provides a plausible virtual account of

mentality in Difference & Repetition and that if we follow this view we can arrive at a

Deleuzian answer to our questions about collective mentality.

Chapter 2 of Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition can be read as, in part, putting

forward a theory of the mental faculties following the method of describing a virtual

multiplicity. Unfortunately it’s not possible here to give a full synopsis of this account or

to fully defend the view that Deleuze intends to provide a theory of the mind or of mental

faculties. Doing so would require a painstaking catalogue of Deleuze’s terminology 11

and a justification for transposing it into a somewhat different idiom. However, it’s clear

enough from a basic reading of the text that a major part of it is an attempt to describe

the system of the faculties, using the term “faculty” in a way that is clearly contiguous

with the way many philosophers from Descartes to Kant used it to refer to the faculties

of the mind or the mental faculties of the human being. Deleuze’s three faculties are

imagination (or habit), memory, and thought, in clear parallel to Kant’s threefold account

of the faculties of imagination, understanding, and reason. I think this strongly suggests

that Deleuze is attempting to use the theory of the faculties to describe an account of

the mind that is supposed to be instantiated in any thinking individual. It’s clear that the

faculties are meant to identify virtual parts, or parts of a qualitative multiplicity, for

Deleuze, because each is identified with a particular mode of synthesizing mental

content, not a type or piece of mental content itself.

Thus, we can say that Deleuze conceives of a minded individual as instantiating

a system of three interacting mental faculties or powers of synthesis: imagination,

memory, and thought. The question to be considered regarding collective entities is

then whether they can be said to have these faculties as individuals themselves as well,

or whether any putative mental capacities derive directly from the mental capacities of

11 See Hughes and Bryant for detailed accounts of the faculties in Difference & Repetition that I believe are consistent with my claims here.

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their members. Does Google form images, remember, and think for itself, or does it do

so only through the mental faculties of its employees or other functionaries? If the

former is true, then it ought to be thought of as having a mind of its own, because it is as

a whole that it has the capacities of a mental system.

I think we can say that a sufficiently organized collective does have mental

faculties at the macro level. It may not be possible here to make a definitive argument

for this conclusion, or to define the level of organization sufficient having mental

capacities. However, I think I can bring forward several plausible cases to illustrate what

seem to be instances of mental faculties being exercised by collective entities, such as

corporations.

The faculty of habit or imagination, for Deleuze, is characterized by the capacity

to form an expectation on the basis of repeated instances of a stimulus. Exemplified by

the ticktock of a clock’s moving second hand, habit is the organic expectation of the

continuation of a pattern makes a failure to conform to that pattern noticeable. Many

processes taking place within a firm could correspond to the formation of such

expectations and the corresponding ability to sense deviations. A working organization

depends not only on decisions from the top, but also on many unreflective, habitual

processes going on as they usually do throughout the company. Buyers and supply

chain managers monitor the price and availability of inputs and expect these to vary

more or less continuously. Marketers regularly check various indicators of demand for

the company’s products or services. Factory workers perform regular maintenance on

machinery which operates in a consistent and regular way in the process of production.

Each of these tasks might sometimes be done with conscious attention by the person or

group responsible for carrying it out, or they might be so minute and regular as to be

performed by rote. From the perspective of the function of these processes for the

company this does not matter what matters is the continuous and regular

performance of these habits is a baseline of receptivity of the environment which is

adapted to the goals of the company and relative to which decisions about what to do in

a particular circumstance are made.

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The second Deleuzian faculty is the faculty of memory, and again we can

conceive many examples of how this might be instantiated in a corporation or other

organization separate from the memories of individual employees. For example, the firm

almost certainly has a standardized practice for keeping accounts to ensure that all

employees make bookkeeping entries in the same way. This means that, in fact, it is

unlikely that any individual accountant remembers all of the history of transactions on

the company’s books, but the memory of the company is instantiated in the balance

sheet itself, and the shared methods of interpreting it, not in the memories of any

accountants. The same goes for any kind of recordkeeping, which is much more likely

to be done in a standardized, physically recorded way which is accessible by a number

of employees but completely known by none of them.

The final mental faculty in Deleuze’s account is called “thought,” and it is perhaps

the most difficult to understand of the elements of Deleuze’s analysis of the mind. The

most clear way to get at how Deleuze characterizes the faculty of thought is to

understand that thought is the capacity to pose problems, not just to solve them. This

means that thinking involves the capacity to invent the terms in which a problem can be

posed to make its solution possible. The important part of thinking, for Deleuze, takes

place not in working out the answer to a problem given from outside, but in moving from

an experience of general unease with a situation to the invention of concepts which

make the situation precisely understood enough to permit a solution.

Deleuze’s definition is, in some ways, a high bar for what is to be considered

thinking. It’s by no means clear that most individual human beings engage in this kind of

thought on a regular basis. It is certainly less common than mere employment of

previously learned rules or algorithms to solve a problem that is already welldefined. Is

it plausible, then, to say that corporations or other organizations engage in this kind of

thought, which is arguably rare? I think we will find that this kind of thinking is crucial for

the success and survival of business firms and other collectives. Determining the best

strategy for success in a competitive market, even if success mostly consists of

maximizing shareholder value, requires insight and the ability to, at least periodically,

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reconceive the nature of the affordances and obstructions that the company faces. This

amounts to taking given information and organizing it into a novel conceptual structure

which allows it to be posed as a soluble problem. I would expect the capacity to think in

this kind of adaptive way to be present in most organized and persisting collective

entities.

Even if this kind of thinking takes place in companies, however, one might

wonder whether it really takes place only in the heads of individual executives and

decisionmakers. No doubt this can happen sometimes. However, I don’t think there is

any reason to suppose that this is universally, or even predominantly, the case.

Problemsolving cases like this are often actually addressed in the context of a

collaborative small group, where the group working together can come up with a way to

pose the problem which is superior to anything that any individual could have come up

with working alone. In cases like this it seems that we have a clear case where the

faculty of thought for the group is instantiated. I would contend that we can identify the

thinking process as being that of the group if it takes place within one individual’s mind

as well, as long as it is a group problem, determined using groupaccessible

information. However, it is even clearer in a case of distributed problem solving that the

faculty of the group can be an emergent property of group interaction and need not be

the same as that of any members.

By considering Deleuze’s theory of multiplicities in general and his theory of the

mental faculties, I believe I have shown two important things about collective entities

and the mental states that we often ascribe to them. First, the mere fact of being made

up of several people should not in any way prevent us from considering whether a

group can be capable of its own mental states as an individual. Deleuze’s theory of

multiplicities provides us with a clear way of understanding how something made up of

distinguishable parts can nonetheless be an individual itself. Second, not only is it

possible to have a collective mind, it is plausible that many actually existing collectives

do have mental states of their own, possibly independently of any of their members

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mental states. Deleuze’s account of the faculties of imagination, memory, and thought

as reciprocally determining virtual parts of the mind gives us a sense of what to look for

to determine whether something is a thinking individual, and I think there are many very

plausible examples which would show that processes taking place within groups

constitute precisely those mental faculties. I think this means that the majority of the

time when we ascribe mental states to collective entities we are doing so in a literal

sense, and in the same sense of the terms as when they are used to ascribe mental

states to individual people. My argument also suggests that we need not think that any

claim about the mental states of a collective implies any particular claim about the

mental states of its members. The former need not be constituted by the latter, although

there may be some cases in which they are.

Bibliography

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001

Bratman, Michael. Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Bryant, Levi. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008.

DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Booksm, 1988.

—. Desert Islands and Other Texts 19531974. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Michael Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.

—. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

—. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1992.

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Gilbert, Margaret. On Social Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Hughes, Joe. Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Reader's Guide. London: Continuum, 2009.

List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Miller, Seumas. Social Action: A Teleological Account. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press. 2001.

Tuomela, Raimo. Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents. Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press. 2013.

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Paul W. Hammond Social Groups as Deleuzian Multiplicities Collectives in Contemporary French Thought Workshop Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia Friday, 11 Nov., 2014 I. Introduction Some examples: “Boeing believes the future of the aviation industry lies in ‘the digital airline.’”

http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/aviationservices/integratedservices/digitalairline.page “Apple Inc. plans to increase the number of its Applebrand retail stores in Greater China to 40 from 15 within two years, Chief Executive Tim Cook said Thursday.”

http://online.wsj.com/articles/appleplansmorestoresinchina1414056873 Question: Do these corporations (and other organized groups) really have mental states like these? Secondary Question: Is there an essential relationship between the group’s mental states and those of its members? II. Deleuze’s Metaphysics of Multiplicities The concept of “multiplicity” is more primitive than “unity” or “plurality” for Deleuze Types of multiplicities distinguishes according to different types of internal relations Riemann’s Multiplicities: Continuous Discrete

There is a path from any point to any other point

There is no path from each element to each other one

Bergson’s Multiplicities: Quantitative/Discrete Qualitative/Continuous

Can be divided without changing in nature

Each part changes in nature when it is separated from the whole

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http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boeing.com%2Fboeing%2Fcommercial%2Faviationservices%2Fintegrated-services%2Fdigital-airline.page&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHxYKUvjpCTgpehlSFdiZm17zy-lA

http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fapple-plans-more-stores-in-china-1414056873&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFWzvtns8IvGxDe_sE6ysPIKkLIFQ


Deleuze’s Multiplicities: Actual/Material Virtual/Structural/Ideal

Can be divided without changing in nature

Each part changes in nature when it is separated from the whole

The distinction no longer divides two kinds of entities, but refers to two aspects of any really existing individual. Preliminary Result: A group of people can be an individual if it has an internal structure III. Mentality as Virtual Multiplicity Question remains: Can a group of people have the structure of a minded individual? Examples of the three mental faculties at the group level 1. Imagination/Habit: Regular performance of activities, such as machine

maintenance, market research, supply orders 2. Memory: Bookkeeping takes place according to a specific system, and so the

memories of accounts exist in the books and the system, not in the minds of accountants

3. Thought: Collective, discussionbased strategic planning which involves redefining the terms of strategic problems faced

Conclusion: Organized social groups have each of the mental faculties in ways that their members do not. Therefore, organized social groups really have minds, and their mental states are independent of those of their members or functionaries.

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Social Groups as Deleuzian Multiplicities