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.