Philosophy as the Mirror of Nature

The next section reminds me strongly of Richard Rorty's thesis that philosophy has long been driven by the metaphor of concepts in a mind mirroring objects in nature.  The goal of philosophy then becomes to make sure that the mirror is flat and polished and provide an accurate reflection of reality.  If we could reach the perfect mirror, every existing thing in the world would have a 1-to-1 mapping to clear concepts in our mind.  Call it representationalism.

Naturally, this idea is batshit insane.  Taken to its limit, this line of thinking leads to something along the lines of Funes El Memorioso not to a chimp who has spent most of its phylogenetic life running from tigers, grubbing for food, and conning the other chimps.  Whatever mirroring we actually do has always served a purpose.  Nevertheless, the habit of thinking is deeply deeply engrained.  

It's immediately clear why repetition creates problems in a bijective universe.  I only need one concept to talk about two ducks that are exactly the same.  Accordingly, repetition must mean there's something wrong with the mirror, a glitch in the Matrix.  The section from pages 11-15 proposes 4 things that could have gone wrong with mirror.

The first two things that can go wrong actually seem to me like different flavors of the same problem.  

The mirror metaphor comes along with some implicit baggage that may not be immediately apparent.  Since we automatically assume that our thoughts and concepts have some sort of logical structure, the idea of the mirror means that the world must share this same structure.  Right at the root of logic is the tree metaphor (wacka wacka).  We assume our concepts are organized in a natural phylogenetic sort of tree: living thing>animal>human>John>John-on-the-Tuesday-after-the-4th-of-July-puking-on-the-flag.  Since the real world is completely determined down to the tiniest detail in each and every moment, the tree is theoretically infinitely precise, which, by virtue of the fact that our mind mirrors it perfectly, means that we should have a distinct concept for each and every one of the leaves.  Obviously, in practice, we find it useful to use the structure of the tree to talk about "big" concepts like "human" or "John" as if they were one thing, even though in reality, they are an infinite collection of things that resemble one another because they all branch off from the tree at a particular point.  ("Extension=1" here is just Deleuze's way of describing perfect correspondence -- nothing left out, nothing left over, and nothing mapped to more than one thing)

Every logical limitation of the comprehension of a concept endows it with an extension greater than 1, in principle infinite, and thus of a generality such that no existing individual can correspond to it hic et nunc

 and later:

Let us suppose that a concept, taken at a particular moment when its comprehension is finite, is forcibly assigned a place in space and time - that is, an existence corresponding normally to the extension = 1. We would say, then, that a genus or species passes into existence hic et nunc without any augmentation of comprehension. There is a rift between that extension = 1 imposed upon the concept and the extension - - that its weak comprehension demands in principle. The result will be a 'discrete extension' - that is, a pullulation of individuals absolutely identical in respect of their concept, and participation in the same singularity in existence (the paradox of doubles or twins).

The subtle distinction between these two cases comes in whether you're looking at the problem of mistaking a branch for a leaf as a logical or a linguistic one.  You could argue that your conceptual mirror really is perfect, but that sometimes its easier to use a sort of logical shorthand that grabs a whole branch at once in order to get something done; but you could always go back to the individual concepts.  Or you could think a little more concretely about how we actually use concepts and observe that we don't transmit them directly via mindspeak but use words.  Those words are real existing things that work just like the logical concept, summarizing and manipulating an infinity of leaves as one unit.

... the existence of words, which are in a sense linguistic atoms, cannot be doubted. Words possess a comprehension which is necessarily finite, since they are by nature the objects of a merely nominal definition. We have here a reason why the comprehension of the concept cannot extend to infinity: we define a word by only a finite number of words. Nevertheless, speech and writing, from which words are inseparable, give them an existence hic et nunc; a genus thereby passes into existence as such

Looked at this second way, the fact that we often use the same grunt "duck" to refer to one or another actual duck means that there has been a true repetition in nature (namely, us grunting "duck") rather than just a theoretical, logical repetition in our head (which could always in principle be eliminated).

This phenomenon of discrete extension implies a natural blockage of the concept, different in kind from a logical blockage: it forms a true repetition in existence rather than an order of resemblance in thought.

As I said, two flavors of the same problem.  In both cases a neighborhood has been substituted for a precise address.

The third way that the mirror can break down is what Deleuze refers to (following Kant) as the "paradox of symmetrical objects".  Consider your left and right hand.  As mirror images, we only need one concept to correspond to the two of them.  This isn't the same sort of approximate neighborhood problem we saw in the first two cases.  We can specify all the way down to the concept of my particular hand at a particular time, etc ...  in other words we can increases the detail of the specification indefinitely, and yet the end product is still duplicated in fact but not in concept.  

You may be tempted to argue here that my two hands are actually not exact mirror images.   This is certainly true, but hold off on pushing this particular objection until you read page 20.  In the meantime, consider things that as far as we know are exact mirror image duplicates, like, say, the positron and the electron.  The symmetry is not left/right but plus/minus in this case, but the point is identical.  The two are conceptually the same, but differ only in sign.  Remember all those times you screwed up a physics exam because you got a sign wrong somewhere?  But it was just a freakin' sign!  You basically understood it, right?  This sort of symmetry is pervasive in nature at many levels, which means that the whole works is sort of shockingly redundant.  

I'm not really completely clear on how this is related to memory.  I do see how this means that the concept of a left and right is not "in" nature but is more "of" or "about" nature.  Does nature "know" that there has been this symmetrical mirroring?  It's more like these two parts exist alongside one another without being aware that there's been a duplication.  The only way they can be put back together, or understood as the same concept, is by a third party mind who stands outside nature and provides the link between them.  I suspect that the connection to memory may be completed by another bit of unexamined baggage that got smuggled in with the Mirror of Nature metaphor.  Somebody has to compare the contents of the mirror and the contents of the world to make sure they match.  This implies a faculty of recognition, or better, re-cognition.  

The fourth and final thing that can go wrong with the mirror seems to me another version of this meta-problem.  What happens if you are unable to remember that this is the second time you're seeing something?  You may still be able to know that two forms are the same, but do you know that you know?  In other words, can you do something with that knowledge?  (I wonder idly whether this is a little like some mental syndrome where someone is able to look into a mirror and look at themselves and see that the person in the mirror is the same as the real person, but be unable to recognize that the person in question is in fact them).  

Take an individual notion or a particular representation with infinite comprehension, endowed with memory but lacking self-consciousness. The comprehensive representation is indeed in-itself, the memory is there, embracing all the particularity of an act, a scene, an event or a being. What is missing, however, for a determinate natural reason, is the for-itself of consciousness or recognition. What is missing in the memory is remembrance - or rather, the working through of memory.

Not "knowing that you know" dooms you to rediscover the same thing again and again.  You may have memories, but not be sure that they are "your" memories.  At first this might sound impossible, but spend five minutes reading Freud and you'll realize that it happens to you every day of your life.  We're constantly unconsciously repeating the reaction we had to some earlier event.  It's not that we're not capable of distinguishing that past event from the present one, it's that we don't know that we're capable of it.  Here, nature repeats itself because we don't know (to infinity) that the mirror is perfect.  

When the consciousness of knowledge or the working through of memory is missing, the knowledge in itself is only the repetition of its object: it is played, that is to say repeated, enacted instead of being known.

The Process of Repetition

Once I understand that what's repeating is a process, rather than a thing, I think a lot of things in this section on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard fall into place.  In particular, this realization dissolves a whole lot of the seeming paradoxical-ness of repetition.  For example, it no longer sounds very weird to say that what's repeated doesn't pre-exist the repetition.  What's repeated and repeating is a process, the outcome of which may be different every time, and which is only determined by instantiating the process and running it again.  Repetition is the process of the production of forms.  

(I'm slipping into process=algorithm quasi-deliberately here.  I'm not sure it's wise, but it does seem to bring up a bunch of interesting questions that I suspect are going to be relevant later on in the book.  For example, how do you know if two algorithms are the same?  Or how do you measure the "distance" between them?  Or how do you even know that it's "a" process?  Aren't there always sub-processes?  Is there such a thing as an "atomic process"?)

It also makes perfect sense to talk about how repetition is above the law (moral or natural), or somehow making its own law.  There's a difference in ontological level between process and things, just as there is a difference in level between the form of the law and the thing that obeys it.  

And it's easy to see how repetition would be related to novelty now as well, since we're talking about the very process of producing new things, each one a novel solution to the same problem.  This novelty isn't created by a mind which contemplates the finished forms from without and extracts the abstract principle of their similarity (this would be the type of generalization we make in the case of laws).  Rather, the process itself is a novelty machine, constantly spitting out new forms.

Kierkegaard specifies that it is not a matter of drawing something new from repetition, of extracting something new from it. Only contemplation or the mind which contemplates from without 'extracts'.  It is rather a matter of acting, of making repetition as such a novelty; that is, a freedom and a task of freedom.

...

For it is perhaps habit which manages to 'draw' something new from a repetition contemplated from without. With habit, we act only on the condition that there is a little Self within us which contemplates: it is this which extracts the new - in other words, the general - from the pseudo-repetition of particular cases.

 The connection to Will and to Power is a bit more difficult, but I definitely think it's related to this understanding of the way repetition is (I would have said paradoxically) creative.  After all, what do we value in the will and what do we want out of power if it's not to be able to make a new world?  We really want freedom.  We really want to feel like "we" are on a different level than everything else, that somehow we are not determined by everything else and by using our secret inner freedom of willpower we can change everything else.  Traditionally though we image our will standing outside of things, like a sovereign third party observer, or a little homunculus.  But then it becomes only literally magic that can explain how the little us learns about the world or exerts its will in it.  If we conceive of our will as creative in the same sense as the process of repetition we can see how a mechanism could produce something new and perhaps recover the continuity of our freedom with other freedoms (say, animals') in the world; human selves are not the only creative process.  There's still a long way to go to flesh out this idea though.  It's not clear that this process gives us what we want out of the concept of freedom.  And it's also not clear quite how the process is part of the same world as the things it produces.  In fact, we've explicitly introduced a difference in level between these that might lead us right back to the transcendent homunculus by accident.  But hey man, you're being very undude, it's just page 11.

Repetition and Novelty

Last time I was pondering the connection between theater and repetition.  Another angle would be to follow this section more explicitly and understand how Deleuze has given us a, "theatrical confirmation of an irreducible difference between generality and repetition".  In other words: what's the connection between theater and generality?

This approach seems to come more easily, since we already have a distinction between types of theater:

The theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation, just as movement is opposed to the concept and to representation which refers it back to the concept. 

 and even an exemplar of the theater of representation:

Hegel substitutes the abstract relation of the particular to the concept in general for the true relation of the singular and the universal in the Idea. He thus remains in the reflected element of 'representation', within simple generality. He represents concepts instead of dramatizing Ideas: he creates a false theatre, a false drama, a false movement.

We might sum this up by saying that theater is not meant to be a treatise.  If your goal is to take a clear conceptual picture of the world, built from concepts that represent how it works, and then transmit these concepts to a recipient so that the same picture somehow appears in their head, then you want to write a treatise; you should write an essay, not a play.  

I find myself criticizing a great deal of art, film, theater, and fiction for failing to understand exactly this point.  If you have something to tell me, some information to convey, some point of view or fact that you'd like me to be aware of, just freaking tell me what it is!  Just write down what you'd like to say in an essay.  Don't try to dance your architectural thesis, or code the message into symbols and hide them in a novel, or paint your political opinion in 62 shades of mauve on the gallery wall.  Just write it down.  Ask yourself what part the "art" contributes.  Is it basically just an ad to make people swallow your opinion without thinking about it?  Or is it building an argument for convincing people of your view?  Is it art, or is it propaganda?  In short: does it represent or symbolize a concept or does it dramatize an Idea?

Good theater, art, film, etc ... goes way beyond trying to communicate some general concept.  It gets you to feel something specific.  It creates an experience.  Yes, it has an Idea, but it's the sort of idea that you can't represent in words.  This is why it has to be "dramatized".  The opposition is between using some general concepts (often words) to represent the world versus using a whole set of sensory modalities to guide someone towards a new experience in this world.  Deleuze is using the concept of theater to summarize the latter, and stand in for our experience of any art.

With this connection between theater and generality in place, I find it easier to understand the relationship of theater to repetition and to novelty.  Consider the relationship of what the author thinks to what the audience thinks after either the play or the essay.  The essay transmits a picture of the authors thought that the audience is supposed to receive, or "get".  The information sent and the information received are supposed to be "the same".  If they aren't, then there's been some sort of failure or distortion somewhere along the line.  We're aiming for a reflection of the thoughts of the author in the reader, a sort of mind mirroring effect where both heads end up with the same picture.  Some mention of Heidegger's essay The Age of the World Picture belongs here.

This isn't how we imagine theater to work at all though.  We don't see it as a question of the transmission of ideas, but more as one of stimulus and response. We revel in the fact that we can draw new meaning for the modern world from an old play.  We love how it has a different impact on different people or that they "interpret" it differently.  And unless we're one of those people who have a crushing pedantic biographical obsession, we're not that concerned with whether our picture is the same as the one that was in the author's head.  

At first it seems that repetition would describe what happens in the case of the essay.  Isn't the picture in the author's head repeated in that of the audience?    Yes, but it's not repeated exactly.  It would be better to say that it is reproduced, or "reflected", like, say, the way two symmetrical objects are reflected around a central axis.  We presume there are actually two distinct forms involved.  Sender and receiver.  And we say that the message was "understood" not only when the forms are exactly them same, but when they are similar in enough respects, or with respect to some particularly salient dimension.  Hegel's understanding of his philosophy and my understanding of it are not going to be exactly the same.  We do expect them to land in a similar neighborhood however.  They are supposed to resemble one another, and ultimately be able to be substituted for one another in the variable "what Hegel meant".  This is exactly the formula we saw in the first part about the relationship between general and particular in the Law.  

Exact repetition would involve something other than the transmission of generalities we expect from a fully comprehended essay.  But given how I've explained what happens between author and audience with theater, at first it seems hard to call that repetition either.  This is exactly where I think the key insight lies though -- what's repeated exactly in theater isn't the thing, but the process of its formation.  In the case of the essay, we assume the packed-up concept in the author's head to be a fully distinct and articulated form unto itself, ie. a thing.  This things was supposed to be repeated exactly, but as we've seen the end package is only generally similar to the starting point.  With art or theater, we feel better saying that the author had some Idea which he "set in motion" (I don't think the terms are crucial here, but so far Deleuze has been opposing Idea to concept, so I'll follow suit).  There's no packaged input that we are waiting to see repeated in the output.  Instead, what's repeated is the process of the motion.  Motion itself is a process and true theater.  And this process can actually be repeated exactly in the author and in each member of the audience with different things appearing each time as a result.  

In other words, repetition is a process.  The process, the movement, is what's repeated.  And this repetition doesn't produce the same, it produces novelty every time.  Deleuze is most definitely a "process philosopher" even if, unlike his big influence Whitehead, he never seems to self-apply the term.  

Theater

The last entry was really just a rambling reflection on my own approach to making sense of the idea of the Eternal Return.  Only loosely connected to Delueze.  Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that what he wants to accomplish with this section is to bring the idea he introduced in the first section -- the opposition between repetition and generality -- into focus as a real lived question, and not merely an abstract philosophical question.  Which of course is exactly what I was trying to do last time.  

I guess it's reflective of the sad state of modern philosophy that this needs to be a special detour.  As far back as the Greeks (at least) people understood philosophy as the quest to examine the world in order to live the good life.  Whatever happened to the idea of philosophy as practical wisdom?  Whatever happened to the idea that contemplating the world would naturally lead you to act differently in it, that, in fact, contemplation (properly thought of) is an action?

Given their literary styles, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are naturally going to be perfect exemplars of that great tradition that made philosophy important for life.  But of course the same question can't help but show up in the content of their concepts as well.  Indeed, one of the main points Deleuze is trying to make here is that there's not really a distinction between form and content, between concept and action.  I believe this is the basic thread that leads him into talking so much about theater in this section.

They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind. This is the idea of a man of the theatre, the idea of a director before his time. In this sense, something completely new begins with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

The work itself is supposed to create movement, not just be a representation or a picture of an abstract movement.  Reading their books is supposed to be an experience.  The idea of philosophy cannot be to simply give us a different picture of the world .  The whole content of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard's philosophy is that this transcendently neutral third-party representation doesn't exist to begin with.  It has to be to give us a new experience of the world.  The writing and the reading are a "concrete" doing (subspecies of thinking).  Which also reminds me of my reflections on the preface regarding the evolution of Deleuze's style.  This isn't a mere literary flourish at work, but a stylistic change directly driven by the needs of the philosophy.  

What I've just described though doesn't sound much like philosophy, but it does sounds a great deal like theater.  Or better yet film, thought it seems that perhaps Deleuze hadn't yet come to the realization that film is an even better example of "thinking in action".  A good piece of theater clearly has ideas in it, the story clearly "means" something, but that isn't really why we watch it.  We watch it to feel something.  Sure, we watch to feel our identification with the actors to some extent.  This is kinda the lowest level of feeling that theater can bring us though, since in fact it's really the work as a whole that moves us when it's done well.  The goal is a real "dramatization of ideas" so that we don't think about them so much as live them directly and concretely, even though the idea itself may be very abstract.  

It's not completely clear to me exactly how Delueze sees theater and repetition as connected.  We get this bit:

When we say, on the contrary, that movement is repetition and that this is our true theatre, we are not speaking of the effort of the actor who 'repeats' because he has not yet learned the part. We have in mind the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the signs and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles; we think of how repetition is woven from one distinctive point to another, including the differences within itself.

It still seems a little abstract to me though.  Since we are explicitly dissuaded from making the connection between an actor learning his lines and repetition, the only other concrete connection I see between the two is the peculiar relationship of a play as it exists on paper and in a performance.  The image of the model and the copy definitely does not do justice to the relationship between these.  Every staged version of a play is going to be a re-enactment of a thing that doesn't have an original version.  That's certainly along the lines of how we are supposed to understand repetition, but this doesn't seem to be quite what Deleuze has in mind here.  And this doesn't clear up for me when he later elaborates:

In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters - the whole apparatus of repetition as a 'terrible power'.

I get the "before" aspect he's referring to, both in reference to theater and especially to film.  In fact, I often find that way of experiencing things is the best way into a lot of very abstract film that often scares people off as too dense or complicated and makes them feel like they don't "get it", or lack some crucial insight to unlock a puzzle.  For example Tarkovsky.  There's certainly a lot to Tarkovsky, but the most important thing is just to watch the images.  Experience the flow of sight and sound, of rhythm and texture and color and, yes, also where the words take your head as one element of that whole.  This is actually how Tarkovsky wanted people to watch his movies.  They weren't made as a full employment program for film studies departments.

If I had to venture further than this, I'd say that theater and repetition are connected by the curious way in which repetition is paradoxically always something new.  The theater too doesn't transmit an experience so much as create it anew for the first time, every time.  I think this connection is going to require more development though.  Wait for the exciting conclusion!

The Eternal Return

Suddenly we get this long section about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, neither of whom I've read since college.  With Kierkegaard, I actually read so little that I don't have much of anything to offer here.  With Nietzsche, it's certainly been a while, but I adored him in college and actually wrote an entire undergraduate thesis on the fourth and final part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  And that's how I got into finance.

But seriously, the thing I most remember out of Nietzsche is his idea of the Eternal Return.  As a metaphysical idea, I've always found it wonderfully bottomless and kinda dizzying.  It provides a very concrete image that you can nevertheless feel dissolving under your feet the more you think about it.  I think the idea has really stuck with me though less for its abstract content than for the "moral" way it asks you to examine your life.  

Contemplate the idea that everything that has happened to you to bring you to this exact point right now is going to happen in exactly the same way again and again, repeated ad infinitum, to bring you back to this exact same moment.  Put aside, for the moment, making logical sense of the idea, asking where the beginning was, or when it starts to repeat.  Like I say, you can quickly feel like you're talking to Zeno.  Instead, just think about the weight the idea gives to the moment.  You entire life, all the big and small decisions, all the random twists and turns, all the sorrows and triumphs had to happen exactly like they did to bring you to this exact point here and now.  Imagine that all of it will happen all over again in exactly the same way, down to the last detail, playing out your fate like it was a Greek tragi-comedy.  Anything that had been different would have resulted in a different you than the one standing here contemplating this.

How does that idea make you feel?  Probably it depends on how you are feeling about life right now.  How does it feel to be you, and not someone else?  If you are reconciled to life right now, if it feels like it, "all worked out in the end", you might approach the possibility of it all repeating itself the same way you would hearing your favorite piece of music again.  Of course you want it to be exactly the same.  Of course it has to have that minor key modulation before you approach the climax, which wouldn't be the same without it.  If you feel like your life has somehow gone off the rails and you've made some decision you regret or you had some bad luck, it's going to be miserable to imagine the whole thing playing out exactly the same ad infinitum.  

In fact, Nietzsche presents the Eternal Return as either a crushing weight or an immense lightness and joy, depending on how you look at it.  It's a question of your attitude towards life (since by hypothesis you can't change what has already happened and is fated to always happen again).  And of course, your attitude towards death.  Because the core question here is what freedom you have to change the way you experience the inevitable.  Death is our great symbol of mortal inevitability.  But the Eternal Return forces us to think of every moment as inevitable.  It transforms the pithy new age idea of "living every moment as if it were your last", and even the deeper buddhist wisdom of "staying in the present moment" into something more realistic -- live every moment as if it were exactly this moment, by imagining it repeated forever in its precision.  This moment isn't the one special moment of your deathbed, but neither is it an entity unto itself, disconnected from all the other moments.  This moment contains all those other moments, all your thoughts of the past and all your plans for the future, all those things that make you who you are right now.  At the limit, this moment is everything, the world in a grain of sand, the monad.  That's why it's impossible to tell how big the "circle" of Eternal Return is.  Is the whole cosmos contained in this tiny moment, or do past and future stretch out so infinitely in both directions that time looks like a straight line to us?  

The Law and Repetition

Okay, so, where are we at here most of the way through page 5?  The key concept so far is that exact repetition breaks (or makes?) the law because the thing being repeated doesn't pre-exist the repetition.    

Laws are all about taking individualized units or instances and either classifying their lowest common denominator (resemblance) or deducing examples from some abstract first principle (equivalence).  In other words, laws are about generalization.  There isn't any real thing being repeated because no matter how close the model may be to any of its copies, each one is going to be slightly different.  I'm leaving it open that maybe there's some sense in which the model is being repeated, but I feel like this is a tricky issue because, at least for right now, we're taking "modeling" to be a uniquely human activity known more colloquially as thinking.  

Repetition seems to be about catching the creation of the law, the creation of the model, in the act.  In this way it's above the law.  The repeated terms aren't pre-formatted individualized units we take as given.  Repeating and repeated are somehow part of the same process, as if the model and the copy lost their categorical distinction and somehow got caught in a sort of feedback loop with each side extending the other.  This is why Deleuze emphasizes the connection between repetition and singularity.  Each instance is not a new distinct copy of the model; all the instances are one, but this singularity can only elaborate itself through the multiple instances.  

This all sounds very paradoxical and we're not really sure how it works yet.  But hey, page 5 dude.  It's a book not a tweet.  Patience young grasshopper.  

We do have one concrete image which provides food for thought.  Holidays repeat some historic event, and there's some weird feedback loop between that original event and the repetition.  Without the repetition in the form of a holiday, the event wasn't really very historic, now was it?  But without the event being historic in advance, no one would bother repeating it as a holiday (eg. I have had little luck getting the celebration of Interdependence Day off the ground, and I don't think that's just because we haven't yet, quite, reached the Year of the Depends™ Adult Undergarment).  Past and present are mixed up here in a funny way that testifies to the importance of some singular event that's not in time the same way as normal events.

Repetition and Moral Law

Last episode we discovered that nothing in Nature repeats, except perhaps the experimental setup we create to extract and understand the laws themselves.  Does this mean that perhaps human thinking constitutes a sort of higher law not subject to the laws of Nature in the same way as everything else?

One place we definitely imagine ourselves as free of the laws of Nature is in the moral sphere.  In fact, you might say that if we didn't have this freedom, there really wouldn't even be such a thing as a moral sphere:

what good is moral law if it does not sanctify reiteration, above all if it does not make reiteration possible and give us a legislative power from which we are excluded by the law of nature?

And yet, strangely, we want even this moral sphere to follow certain laws.  We want there to be some moral principle that would dictate, universally, which action is the moral one given certain circumstances.  The idea of a moral law turns us into cogs in a machine if our own making.  

Conscience, however, suffers from the following ambiguity: it can be conceived only by supposing the moral law to be external, superior and indifferent to the natural law; but the application of the moral law can be conceived only by restoring to conscience itself the image and the model of the law of nature.

I find it interesting to rephrase this moral automatism as a question of repetition.  You want to be able to repeat your one-true-moral-action in the face of an ever changing world.  And if you subscribe to some version of the Golden Rule (or the Categorical Imperative) you want the repeated action to be exactly that action that everyone can and should repeat.  It's like an endless Kumbaya sung in the round by an infinity of Campfire Girls.

But just like our discussion of natural law, here again we run into the question of how we are supposed to uncover the law.  When we investigate that process, we discover that if anything is truly being repeated here it's our process of extracting the specific content of the law.  In other words, the form of the law is being repeated.  Each moral action is itself going to be individual and unique. We have to first decide exactly what constitutes a "right" action by comparing the resemblances between similar actions and classifying them according to which are close enough to our model moral action to pass muster.  And then we also have to figure out which situations are equivalent and should all equally trigger that morally correct action.  

This is exactly parallel to the discussion of whether repetition is possible in a world governed by natural law.  In both cases it seems at first like a law governed universe should lend itself to exact reproducibility.  But what we end up with in practice is just a classification scheme that says these two things are similar enough to be interchanged for one another in two "equivalent" circumstances.  There's no exact repetition, it's all just "good enough for government work"

Repetition and the Law

When I asked earlier what place repetition could have in a law-like material universe, I was actually getting one page ahead of myself.  The simplest image we have for how laws work would be something like a mathematical law  -- let's say the law governing the position of a body in a vacuum falling due to gravity y=1/2at^2.  You plug in a particular example of the independent variable, combine it with a constant, and it determines the particular value of the dependent variable.  Later, the dependent variable you are interested in will have changed to a new particular value.  

On the other hand, generality belongs to the order of laws. However, law determines only the resemblance of the subjects ruled by it, along with their equivalence to terms which it designates. Far from grounding repetition, law shows, rather, how repetition would remain impossible for pure subjects of law - particulars. It condemns them to change.

Anything subject to a law is condemned to change in this mechanical way.  It has no freedom; it can't not change, it is impermanent.  Even the constant "a=g" here is dependent on another law, Newton's law of gravitaion F=GmM/r^2.  Etc ... etc ... Even the constants are variables one you look one level higher.  The only thing that's ultimately really preserved here is the form of the law.  An unchanging form for an ever changing world.  

I'll have to come back to this later, but I believe this is why Deleuze thinks of any change in this type of world as a "false movement":

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression. In relation to them we speak readily of an overcoming of philosophy. Furthermore, in all their work, movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement - in other words, the abstract logical movement of 'mediation'. They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action.

Even though there's continual change in a law-like world -- in fact, everything governed by the laws is condemned to change in accordance with them, never to repeat itself -- there's really, "nothing new under the sun".  There's not any real development or evolution, just the mechanical working through of the consequences of something that we presume stands outside Nature (ie. the form of the law). 

But doesn't science base itself explicitly on discovering the ways in which Nature repeats itself?  If we read of a "replication crisis" it must be because "normal" science (when it's not having a crisis) is all about exact reproducibility of experimental results, right?  Well, sure it does.  Think about the way it goes about this in practice though.  There's all kinda of stuff going on everywhere in Nature all the time.  From this constant chaos we grab onto this thing, which seems to kinda resemble that other thing.  Once we decide that these two phenomena are related, we try to isolate some quantitative aspect of them while holding every other way in which they might differ constant.  

Consider how it works with the apple and the moon.  Newton, spliffed out under a tree: "Dude, it's like they're both sorta falling, man".  But an apple and the moon are quite obviously different.  And it's actually a pretty long road to make a connection between the way that they are indeed similar, and the experimental setup that allows you to exclude all the factors like friction, the influence of other planets, etc ... that would prevent them from being substituted for m and M in the equation above.  In short, an experiment is an elaborately "artificial" setup whose goal, at the limit, is to try and hold the entire universe constant in order to convert our perception of the similarity of two things into a law about how they are interchangeable in one particular quantitative aspect.  I'm just re-writing this passage in my own terms:

From the point of view of scientific experiment, it seems difficult to deny a relationship between repetition and law. However, we must ask under what conditions experimentation ensures repetition. Natural phenomena are produced in a free state, where any inference is possible among the vast cycles of resemblance: in this sense, everything reacts on everything else, and everything resembles everything else (resemblance of the diverse with itself). However, experimentation constitutes relatively closed environments in which phenomena are defined in terms of a small number of chosen factors (a minimum of two - for example, Space and Time for the movement of bodies in a vacuum). Consequently, there is no reason to question the application of mathematics to physics: physics is already mathematical, since the closed environments or chosen factors also constitute systems of geometrical co-ordinates. In these conditions, phenomena necessarily appear as equal to a certain quantitative relation between the chosen factors. Experimentation is thus a matter of substituting one order of generality for another: an order of equality for an order of resemblance.

If you consider what it is that's "repeating" here, it's not really Nature, so much as your experimental set-up.  Obviously, that's part of Nature too, but looking at it this way I think changes your idea of what's going on in a subtle but important way.  The whole thing kinda reminds me of the debate that surrounds Wigner's famous Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences: "Some men went fishing in the sea with a net, and upon examining what they caught they concluded that there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea."  This isn't meant to imply that you didn't learn something "real" and "true" about the universe by going fishing -- if you bring this net, these are the fish you will catch.  It's just that it might not be what you thought you learned. 

Repetition is an infinite series

I read this whole first section (pg. 1-5) as distinguishing between two concepts that at first seem like they should be identical -- Repetition and Sameness.  I mean, isn't it somehow redundant to say that "the same thing" is repeated?  

But what does it mean for two things to be "the same"?  When I read this section, I keep hearing "exactly the same", even though I don't think Deleuze emphasizes it exactly that way here.  How could two things be exactly the same in a law-governed materialist universe?  Basically, they can't be.  Each configuration of the universe at each moment is completely unique, never to be repeated.  When we say that any two things in this universe are the same, we really mean that they are similar enough to be interchanged for a particular purpose.  They're not exactly the same.  Each snowflake is unique.

But aren't they all just frozen water?  Of course they are.  Look at what mental operation has been performed here though.  We're grouping and classifying now.  Adding order to the chaos of all those unique snowflakes.  And we usually do this in one of two ways, either top down or bottom up.  Either we start at the top and define an abstract entity that allows us enough wiggle room to think of concrete examples that would still be all equivalently "the same thing", or we start at the bottom and look at a bunch of things to find a lowest common denominator by examining the ways in which they resemble one another.  Whether top down or bottom up we use the logic of the model and its copy, the tree with its single trunk and branches ramifying into individual leaves. 

And if there's one thing we're going to smoke around here, it's trees.

Not that there's anything wrong with trees.  This way of classifying the world isn't an error.  But it's not the only way of looking at things, and it's not going to help us understand the concept of exact repetition.  To think about exact repetition, we're not going to be able to follow this movement of the general law to the particular example, or vice versa.  We're going to have to think about many things which cannot be substituted or exchanged for one another, but that are nevertheless somehow one thing.  In other words, we are going to need to think of an infinite series of distinct terms as one unique thing.  

I told you the fractals were coming.

This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable'. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself: as Peguy says, it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days

This quote didn't really help me with the paradoxical nature of repetition when I first read it.  How does the Bastille celebrate in advance all those 4th of July cookouts?  Sorry frogs.  But this example makes a lot of sense when you think about what's going on in our idea of something "making history".  "It's a historic moment" -- meaning that it will never happen again so we must somehow make it happen again endlessly.  We're re-living history in the present.  Or history is re-living itself through us.  A singular event gets re-enacted forever.  

Cruising Altitude

Repetition and the Eternal Return and the question of Identity are obviously all going to be related. And therefore Death.

Sci-Fi

I guess I have more to say about the preface than I realized, because there's another bit I find interesting here:

Following Samuel Butler, we discover Erewhon, signifying at once the originary 'nowhere' and the displaced, disguised, modified and always re-created 'here-and-now'. Neither empirical particularities nor abstract universals: a Cogito for a dissolved self. We believe in a world in which individuations are impersonal, and singularities are pre-individual: the splendour of the pronoun 'one' -whence the science-fiction aspect, which necessarily derives from this Erewhon.

 

Science fiction in yet another sense, one in which the weaknesses become manifest. How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.

Deleuze mentions in an essay on Hume that he admires the science fiction aspect of his philosophy:

Hume's position is therefore quite peculiar. His empiricism is a sort of science-fiction universe avant la lettre. As in science fiction, one has the impression of a fictive, foreign world, seen by other creatures, but also the presentiment that this world is already ours, and those creatures, ourselves. 

 

...

Hume raises unexpected questions that seem nevertheless familiar: To establish possession of an abandoned city, does a javelin thrown against the door suffice, or must the door be touched by a finger? To what extent can we be owners of the seas? Why is the ground more important than the surface in a juridical system, whereas in painting, the paint is more important than the canvas? 

I really like the idea of thinking of philosophy as a sort of science fiction, a plausible story of possible worlds that of course are just so many distortions and inversions of whatever principles animate our real world.  Ever since reading Nietzsche I've been dismissive of the idea that philosophy ought to be a quest for truth or the queen of the sciences founding all the others on some metaphysical bedrock.  It's really about inventing the story of a world that could be our own.  You imagine what would happen in this world and flesh it out as you go.

I think this idea dovetails particularly nicely with my own interest in the brain and AI.  And I don't mean this just because AI happens to be a perennial theme of regular sci-fi.  One of the "invariant features", so to speak, of all the worlds in which philosophy is being written, is the possibility of writing philosophy.  A metaphysical system that purports to explain the nature of reality but that fails to account for the way in which the system got written down doesn't seem to me to be philosophical at all.  In other words, philosophy as such has to apply to itself, and cannot  leave to the side the question of what thinking is the way science does.  To me it seems natural that one of your first questions as a thinking philosopher is going to be, "how does my thinking work and what other kinds of thinking are there besides mine?"  Hence the AI angle.  Philosophy is required to eat itself.

P.S.  Eventually I wanted to connect the AI line of thinking back to the bolded part of the first quote (the bit about pre-individual singularities).  The point of contact was going to be another quote I had in mind where Deleuze (and Guattari?) talk about "micro-brains".  This takes the idea of AI in the other direction.  Instead of trying to understand and duplicate one big brain, the question "what exactly is thinking" could potentially lead you to see other smaller brains scattered all over the place.  I actually find this a more fruitful direction than contemplating our robot overlords.  Alas, I cannot find that quote.  In the process, I also realized that the connection between pre-individual singularities and micro-brains is promising, but needs some serious work.  Chalk it up to the thrill of live-blogging!

Empricism

Deleuze considered himself an empiricist, albeit a "transcendental empiricist". 

I'm not sure I completely understand this term, but I know that it's meant to be "one level up" from the standard type of empiricism where someone declares that "all we have are sense impressions".  This goes in the right direction -- ie. away from trying to deduce what the world is really like from a bunch of logical concepts or abstract categories, towards a type of experimentalism -- but it still takes too much for granted, in particular an "I" having "a" sense impression.  It's a little like the one-liner critique of "I think therefore I am" -- Descartes should merely have said, "hey, there's some thinking going on here" and instead he's like, all your thinking are belong to us.  Philosophically, the empiricism is a pretense because you are being insufficiently empirical about the concepts you are smuggling in (the self with its possessions).  Hence you have to go up a level and get "transcendental" -- which as far as I can tell is just meant to mean something like, "before presuming subjects and objects".

A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to 'dramas' and by means of a certain 'cruelty'. They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from themselves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.

This is the secret of empiricism. Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an encounter, as a here-and-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed 'heres' and 'nows'. Only an empiricist could say: concepts are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond 'anthropological predicates'.

 As I failed neuroscientist, this is one of the most interesting and challenging aspects of Deleuze for me (and also part of what makes Whitehead so interestingly similar with his "fallacy of mis-placed concreteness").  Accept thoughts as things.  I mean, what else would they be?   Sometimes I almost think of thoughts as things that are similar to the cloud of virtual particles that are meant to surround electrons, etc ... in renormalization theory.  I just mean this as a vague analogy right now; we could quickly slip off the deep end here because its clear that once you start getting empirical about your empiricism, things get complicated and self-reflexive.  You aren't going to be able to reduce consciousness to "real things" like electrons because those electrons are actually already pretty sophisticated thoughts.  But it also doesn't mean that you can be an idealist and assume that everything is "just thoughts" -- there's plenty of "things" we haven't thought of.  

Anyhow, here's the same idea as it is presented in the Cinema 1: The Movement Image.

How is it possible to explain that movements, all of a sudden, produce an image - as in perception - or that the image produces a movement - as in voluntary action? If we invoke the brain, we have to endow it with a miraculous power. And how can movement be prevented from already being at least a virtual image, and the image from already being at least possible movement? What appeared finally to be a dead end was the confrontation of materialism and idealism, the one wishing to reconstitute the order of consciousness with pure material movements, the other the order of the universe with pure images in consciousness. It was necessary, at any cost, to overcome this duality of image and movement, of consciousness and thing. Two very different authors were to undertake this task at about the same time: Bergson and Husserl. Each had his own war cry: all consciousness is consciousness of something (Husserl), or more strongly, all consciousness is something (Bergson). 

 Empiricism and immanence and fractals are all connected.  In fact, I once maintained that all of Deleuze's concepts are meant to be these self-reflexive fractals.  Story for another day though.

Prefaces

I'll mostly skip over the preface to the English edition, other than to observe that Deleuze is not, as some have suggested, attempting to disavow his early "academic" work as insufficiently radical.  I've read his early works on Nietzsche and Spinoza.  They are indeed pretty dry and academic, probably interesting only to folks who have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the originals said.  I've also read The Logic of Sense.  I would certainly describe it as "abstract", and "academic philosophy", and clearly very tough sledding.  However, the issues that interest him in all of these books are exactly the issues that continue to interest him throughout his entire philosophical life, and I find that the "abstract" texts can often explain things lurking in the background of the books written with Guattari. It's not like he suddenly decided that he was on the wrong course somehow.

A new image of thought - or rather, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it: this is what I had already sought to discover in Proust. Here, however, in Difference and Repetition, this search is autonomous and it becomes the condition for the discovery of these two concepts. It is therefore the third chapter which now seems to me the most necessary and the most concrete, and which serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with Guattari where we invoked a vegetal model of thought: the rhizome in opposition to the tree, a rhizome-thought instead of an arborescent thought. 

 I guess you can also see another interesting thing in this quote, which is Deleuze's use of the term "concrete".  An "image of thought" is clearly not going to be something most folks would consider "concrete".  We'll see how this chapter qualifies as more concrete than the rest when we get there, but I can actually offer a preview of what I suspect will happen after following the directions in the second preface (to the original French edition):

It is often said that prefaces should be read only at the end. Conversely, conclusions should be read at the outset. This is true of the present book, the conclusion of which could make reading the rest unnecessary.

I tried following these instructions and read the conclusion first.  What I found was almost like an index to almost every concept I've come across in Deleuze's later works, including the collaborations.  For example, it's only been a few years since I read his books on Cinema, and so many of the images that I remember appearing in those -- the Large and the Small, the 'irrational' cuts, the overall beef with representation -- are right here in the conclusion to D&R.  Of course, the damn thing is so condensed that it definitely doesn't make reading the book unnecessary.  

But I think it does suggest to me something of what Deleuze means when he talks about ideas being more "concrete".  The conclusion here suggests some sort of metaphysical schematic that he laid out at the beginning of his career and then continued to apply to new areas throughout it.  Except that this gives exactly the wrong image of the direction his thinking moves.  I don't think it's a question of application, so much as reinvention.  A kind of reinventing the philosophical wheel where you end up deriving the same concepts by considering a new problem each time from the ground up. You end up "back" at a place that didn't really pre-exist the return.  Which (spoiler alert) turns out to be the basic idea of the first chapter of D&R -- repetition doesn't work like a model and its copies, or a general law and its particular applications.  In other words, it doesn't work like a tree and its branches.  Which makes me suspect that this is exactly why Deleuze changed his style over the years.  He's just practicing what he preaches.

French Philosophy in Plain English

It's a long story.  But, as Chris Knight put it, "these little set-backs are just what we need to take a giant step forward. Right, Kent?  Needless to say, I was a little despondent about the melt down, but then, in the midst of my preparations for hari kiri, it came to me."

I was going to live blog my reading of Difference and Repetition!  

Don't blame me though.  It wasn't even my idea ...