The Conditions of the New

THE QUESTION OF THE NEW: CHANGE, CAUSALITY, EMERGENCE

What is the status of the new as a philosophical problem?Deleuze frequently said that the question of the conditions for the production of novelty (Bergson) or creativity (Whitehead) was one of the fundamental questions of contemporary thought, entailing a profound shift in philosophy away from the eternal to the new, from the universal to the singular.Most generally, Deleuze's response to this question was that the conditions of the new can be found only in a principle of difference, or more strongly, in a metaphysics of difference. The reason: if identity were the primary principle—that is, if identities are pre-given or presupposed, then there would in principle be no production of the new (no new differences).Yet the status of the new is a highly 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, new “news.” If the new means “what did not exist before,” 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 and regularities. 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 même chose (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”).