The notion of an “ocean of dissemblance” would be contingent on two concepts, the oceanic, implicitly a principle of unity; and the principle of similarity/dissimilarity implicit in dissemblance.
So at the root of the notion is the play of ‘likeness’.
The play of likeness necessarily presumes at least two entities bearing the relation of likeness with respect to each other.
The metaphysical status and characterisation of these entities and relations would obviously seem to suggest subsequent scenarios of supervening operations regarding those entities and relations. That is to say, if metaphysical characterisation has to do with; the contextual production of those entities and relations; or an economics of which those entities and relations are contingencies; then it’s quite naturally the case that such metaphysical characterisation works as a principle of unity whose metaphoric expression is the oceanic, but not any less a formal principle because of such metaphoricity.
So Deleuze’s notion, whatever privileging of apparent disjunction, difference, or as he says, “dissemblance”, might be ascribed to it; the very notion itself implicitly utilises the principle of unity to achieve its formalist effects. If an opposite privileging were offered, a similar implicit utilisation, mutatis mutandis, would result.
Within the networks of these formal possibilities it is possible to derive or construct pretty much anything in the way of conceptual innovation or philosophies of-; this is merely conceptual combinatorics, though it can nevertheless exercise profound effects depending on the natures of the commitments involved.
It is understandable that there are existential and referential anxieties bound up with these networks of formal possibility, which are not merely ‘formal’, but intimately complicit and unified with those anxieties and their bases.
The production of an identity is the production of a concept, the conceptual seed of a discursive logic. The production of a concept, of that conceptual seed of discursive logic, is susceptible to elaborations of configurative force, the configurations of that concept. The resulting discursive formations are merely the systematic elaborations of such configuration. Discursive formations are not merely that which is commonly thought of through the rubric of the linguistic.
The notion of non-identity is equally the production of identity and the concept. Identity still functions as a configuring force.
People like Deleuze and Laruelle are still working within economies of referential relation, existential anxiety, and expediency, their concepts revolve around these supervening formations.
Whether or not this is philosophy in a wider sense, or practical philosophy, or ‘non-‘ philosophy; such category anxieties probably bespeak uncritical dogmas of initial assumption, too much, those anxieties continuing to configure repetitions of such assumption without developing the insights that might be expected from a more progressive understanding. Battling a history of bad receptions and interpretations belonging to particular groups, whilst ignoring a history of past insights belonging to others, or perhaps even those same groups, probably reflects the marketing procedures of intellectual commodity rather than any other notion of progress.
Whether this leads to a kind of social proletarianisation, or proletarian socialisation, of insight and wisdom; as a kind of reactive and recollective backward step; and whether this was what Deleuze and Laruelle were and are trying to do; is an open question. Even if that were the case, it is highly doubtful that such a particularly contained set of cogitations and understandings, so bound up with analyses of shifting structures and tendencies of alleged error, could lead to anything other than redistribution of such alleged errors, without more radical understandings.
Though the overarching resolutions of epiphanic understanding, whether in philosophical or religious forms, are personal, and not necessarily effective as programmes of social administration, it is persons that constitute the social, and if their understandings enable more effective and happier forms of administration, those epiphanies should not be ignored.