Unscrambled Eggs

Let's keep going with the embryogenesis metaphor.  It makes it really easy to see the difference between the two types of repetition that Deleuze has now uncovered:

it is essential to break down the notion of causality in order to distinguish two types of repetition: one which concerns only the overall, abstract effect, and the other which concerns the acting cause. One is a static repetition, the other is dynamic. One results from the work, but the other is like the 'evolution' of a bodily movement. One refers back to a single concept, which leaves only an external difference between the ordinary instances of a figure; the other is the repetition of an internal difference which it incorporates in each of its moments, and carries from one distinctive point to another.

Our bodies appear to be made of repeated forms like our hands, but the identity of these are merely the final steps in a dynamic process of differentiation that is repeated in each of our limbs.  Before, when we thought about repetition we were continually asking how a particular form could be identically repeated in a world of natural and moral law, or in a world where our conceptual representations should be able to capture any real difference.  We took the finished identity of the form in question for granted, as if we had a little picture in our heads of one hand, and went looking for somewhere in time or space where we found another matching hand that duplicated it.  Now, however, we're interested in the hidden repeated process that may (or may not) give rise to outwardly repeated forms.

What's changed, you might ask?  Are we just shuffling terms around here, exchanging "process" for "form"?  It's important to stop and wonder about this.  The most important change is that the shift in level from form to process means we are no longer taking the form as pre-built and repetition as a game of matching, but are trying to explain how the form got built twice.  We're actually explaining the repetition, rather than just noticing it (which only pushed the question of what's repeating off into another realm anyhow, because how did we know it was repeated?  How did we become conscious of the repetition?  Or how did the repetition become conscious of itself as such?).  

Shifting levels has a bunch of other consequences though.  Now that the repetition has a cause we are no longer engaged in a matching memory game, so the cause and the effect (the thing repeated) don't look anything like another another.  Specifically, the genetic program that (often, in the right mileu) produces one hand and another hand doesn't look anything like a hand; there's no representation of a hand in the genome.  There's no "gene for the hand" or picture of the hand in the embryo.  We often hear about the "genetic blueprint".  A worse metaphor could hardly be devised.   The fascinating part of embryogenesis, and morphogenesis more generally, is precisely that there is not a picture of the finished form contained in the genome, not even "in code".  The code just codes for proteins.  The proteins interact with the code to produce new proteins that attach to one another and create chemical gradients that effect the concentrations of other proteins, etc ... There's no picture of the finished product nor of the intermediate states, there's just a cascade of differences.  

Nor is there a pre-defined space to contain a pre-defined form.  The embryo doesn't know "where" to put the hand.  It's a bit like the old joke about how long a man's legs should be (long enough to reach the ground).  Pre-existent forms require a simple location in a pre-existent space.  With embryogenesis though, the space and the form grow together.  In some sense you might even say that the two become indistinguishable, or at least go round and round in circles.  This is an active space that isn't just a passive receptacle or container for finished forms.

in the dynamic order there is no representative concept, nor any figure represented in a pre-existing space. There is an Idea, and a pure dynamism which creates a corresponding space.

Ideas are eggs.  Seeds from which stuff grows when the conditions are right.  But also, if they are to be successful organisms, the result of interactions with those conditions.  

Embryogenesis

I think the section that begins on pg.19 and runs through the top of pg. 26, with its discovery of two types of repetition, is really the main meat of the introduction.  It falls into two pieces at the beginning of the last paragraph on pg. 23.  The first piece gives some examples of how we can see something going on under the repetition of the same form; the second piece treats the idea of a hidden repetition beneath the outward repetition, of a subject and an object of repetition more generally.

Our problem concerns the essence of repetition. It is a question of knowing why repetition cannot be explained by the form of identity in concepts or representations; in what sense it demands a superior 'positive' principle. This enquiry must embrace all the concepts of nature and freedom. Consider, on the border between these two cases, the repetition of a decorative motif: a figure is reproduced, while the concept remains absolutely identical ... . However, this is not how artists proceed in reality. They do not juxtapose instances of the figure, but rather each time combine an element of one instance with another element of a following instance.

I've added some emphasis to that paragraph that's not in the original because I found it tough to understand the original without explicitly understanding why those phrases were there.  How is the repetition of a decorative motif "on the border" between "concepts of nature and freedom"?  And why is Kadiweu face painting the first example we get?  I only made sense of this passage when I flashed on the idea that the "artist" here is not necessarily a human one.  Birds and bees and nature in general produce plenty of "repeating decorative motifs", and so do the Caduveo, the muslims, and M.C. Escher.  Everything from birdsong to a hexagonal nest to the zebra's stripes to the drawings that might illustrate those fit here.  Hence the example can be considered either as part of nature or part of freedom (both human and animal), depending on who you take to be the artist at work.  The perfect illustration of this is naturally some indigenous art that we industrialists study as a way of understanding our own seemingly lost connection to a natural world.

With this reading in mind, you can choose something like "an organism with a symmetrical left and right side" to be the motivation for the following part:

These remarks stand for the notion of causality in general. For it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled.

I think Deleuze is thinking specifically of embryogenesis here, an idea I know is close to his heart.  Consider the egg you once were.  Ahhh, the good old days.  You started off as an undifferentiated oval.  Yet somehow, though a complicated process of chemical signaling that resulted in gradual step-by-step differentiation, you ended up with a left and a right, a top and a bottom, a front and a back.  If we just focus on the left-right symmetry that results, we can easily see what may literally be our very model for "the same" being repeated -- having two hands and feet.  And I think the Deleuze is even suggesting here that bi-lateral symmetry may provide our deepest model for causality.  Consider Hume's objection to the concept of causality -- it has to be more than just regular and repeated conjunction.  Okay, fair enough, but how about regularity and repetition on display at the same time?  Does looking at your hands put the idea of causality into your brain to begin with?  I'm not going to head down Lakoff and Núnez's speculative road here, but it does seem intriguing.

At any rate, what scientists call symmetry-breaking differentiation can become our model for what Deleuze means by repetition.  The important point is not the two identical hands that result from the process, but the cascade of differences that drive the process (beginning apparently with the way cilia on the embryo create a uni-directional flow of extra-embryonic fluid).  Admittedly, he's using "symmetry" here in the opposite sense that scientists use it, but in a way that's much closer to our everyday use.  Most of us don't normally rush to call a circle symmetrical, but draw a couple of dots in it: 😶 and you are halfway to a symmetrical face.  Mathematically, you've actually reduced the symmetry of the object by adding the eyes because you can no longer recover the same shape when you rotate it 90 degrees: but, kinda interestingly, most folks will immediately tell you that the first face is symmetrical and will hesitate on the second, and on the original circle.

And now I think we're really cooking with gas, metaphorically speaking.  I suspect that embryogenesis is going to be the core metaphor of the book because it illustrates the way that the identity of repeated forms is produced from a cascade of differences.  In other words, repetition is difference, and the difference of differences, and it's turtles all the way down.  

The negative expression 'lack of symmetry' should not mislead us: it indicates the origin and positivity of the causal process. It is positivity itself. For us, as the example of the decorative motif suggests, it is essential to break down the notion of causality in order to distinguish two types of repetition: one which concerns only the overall, abstract effect, and the other which concerns the acting cause.

Instead of just understanding repetition categorically as a process, we can now point to a specific process that illustrates what we're talking about.   Eggs, seeds, and God are the original rhizome.  Yeah, God.  But we'll have to come back to that.

Repetition and Death

Before I move on to the next section (which actually is the last one before the brief summary that ends the introduction) I want to think a bit more about why Death is coming up in the context of Repetition.  Why is their something negative about repetition?  Why does it seem connected to terror somehow?  And (as we'll see in the first Chapter) why is difference something potentially monstrous, and something inherently cruel?  What's with all the negative energy, man?

Seems to me that this is somehow related to the shift in ontological level between thinking about things (or finished forms) and processes (or mechanisms).  We're discovering that what's important about repetition is not so much that the "same" form appears again as an output, but that the same process must be at work underneath in order to produce this sameness.  But the process is really indifferent  to the forms it produces.  The two aren't on the same level and never meet.

I think it must be this indifference to forms that accounts for the negative associations with repetition.  You might phrase it as, "to death you are just a pile of molecules".  But focusing on death as a return to the "material model" doesn't get it quite right.  What's lost in death isn't the molecules, but the identity that held you together.  In fact, you were always just a pile of molecules in some sense, but more fundamentally you were the process that animated those molecules.  Or at least part of that process, if we can say it this way.  After your death the molecules are swept up in other processes.  Actually, even before your death, they were as well.  What was properly you was a new process (temporarily) overlaid on all these others.

Looking at yourself this way involves a pretty big radical (note: the word "radical" is being henceforth banned in philosophical discussions because its overuse has made it indistinguishable from "large" or "thorough" or "complete") change in self-definition.  It seems appropriate to start talking about a soul here, and to make connections to religions (above all to buddhism). Unfortunately, it's really, really easy to slip into making the soul look just like a glowing-blue afterlife version of you that can keep coming back like Yoda's ghost in Star Wars.  But that image just makes a thing out of a process; it's an error in kind.  You the process doesn't look anything like "you" the result.  Deleuze is constantly warning about the dangers of resemblance, of empiric-ideal doubling, of the logic of models and copies, of confusing the possible with the virtual.  I'm sure we will get into all of those warnings in more detail later, but the point for right now is that process-you is completely indifferent to the form of output-you-right-now.  Today's you is just one solution to the problem of being you.

Now I think it becomes easy to see why repetition as a process is linked to death, and why it can inspire terror.  Defining yourself as a process obliterates all the forms of you, all the formed "yous".  How much terror could this inspire if you were attached to, even identified with, those forms?  And how monstrous is it to contemplate all the forms of you that you might become that are nothing like the form you recognize.  But at the same time, we are talking about some concept of of you that is beyond death, indifferent even to whether there is a particular you alive at all.  If this isn't the immortality of a floating blue Yoda, it's still stretching towards eternity of some sort.  Not in the sense of everlasting infinite duration, but in the simpler sense of not being in time the same way as the output forms.  Terror and Freedom.  Saved and Enchained.  Immortality was always going to be a matter of self-definition.

180808.2

Probably not going to be improved by me re-typing it:

The Death Instinct

Apparently, Freud himself proposed something that hinted in the direction of a true explanation of (psychic) repetition -- the Death Instinct.  I found this suggestion a bit surprising, but then I haven't read enough Freud to know where and why he introduced the Death Instinct.  I only vaguely remember that it played some role in Civilization and Its Discontents, which was already a late book pretty far afield from psychological case studies.  But apparently it was introduced to account for repetitive phenomena in his aptly named Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 

Not knowing a lot about Freud's theory, I found this section that introduces the Death instinct (pg. 15-19) to be tough sledding at first.  It does seem interesting to ask why schizophrenics and other psych-ward types often have repetitive and obsessional gestures and phrases.  As per the last post, we might look here for understanding how our own "normal" habits work.  But how repetition is related to death is related to masks was not immediately apparent.

I found the way in was through trying to make sense of these counter-intuitive claims:

I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress, because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode of repetition. I am determined to repress whatever would prevent me from living them thus: in particular, the representation which mediates the lived by relating it to the form of a similar or identical object.

These lines are meant to jar our sense of paradox.  We normally imagine that we repress some painful childhood incident because we don't want to remember that pain.  Forgetting the incident dooms us to repeat it though, since what has really been lost is not the incident itself, but just our conscious reckoning with it.  Subconsciously, it continues to influence our behavior and we end up repeating the same situation.  This is the sort of thinking we use to explain why children who were beaten by alcoholic parents go on to themselves become alcoholics who beat their children.  

How could this story be reversed though?  The opposite direction doesn't seem to make sense.  I forget because I repeat?  Think about what actually happens on the inside of this experience though.  Think about your own experience of repression and forgetting and not the experience of someone lying on your therapeutical chaise.   What actually seems to happen when we repress is that we encounter a situation that somehow triggers the same response we had to an old one.  If we are very conscious of exactly how this triggering works and exactly how it drives our feelings, we may remember what happened, and connect that past trauma to the present moment.  But mostly we're not.  Conscious that is.  What we actually do is try to spare ourselves the memory of that earlier pain by blocking out the similarity between the past and the present.  In other words we try to live the present as if it were for the first time even though this dooms us to repeat exactly our earlier response to the trigger.  The repression is a way to disconnect the past from the present.  We repeat because we want to repress, not because we've just accidentally forgotten what happened, or somehow don't happen to consciously realize that the same thing is happening again.  

Freud noted from the beginning that in order to stop repeating it was not enough to remember in the abstract (without affect), nor to form a concept in general, nor even to represent the repressed event in all its particularity: it was necessary to seek out the memory there where it was, to install oneself directly in the past in order to accomplish a living connection between the knowledge and the resistance, the representation and the blockage. We are not, therefore, healed by simple anamnesis, any more than we are made ill by amnesia. Here as elsewhere, becoming conscious counts for little. The more theatrical and dramatic operation by which healing takes place - or does not take place - has a name:. transference.

In order to really remember and process the past, in order to live the present as a repetition, we have to work through a reenactment of it in what is essentially a little theatrical procedure.  If we repeat in an effort to forget, we can only remember through repetition as well.  This is the only way we can understand how the triggers of the present and past are related and how they set into motion the same mechanism or process of our response.  

The mechanism here is us though!  Our very selves and identity.  Our habits and patterns.  Which immediately opens another question that hides behind our adult repressions -- why was the original memory so painful?  Why did we experience it this way to begin with?  Should we think that even the "original" feeling was a repetition designed to help us forget something even further back?

For when Freud shows -beyond repression 'properly speaking', which bears upon representations -the necessity of supposing a primary repression which concerns first and foremost pure presentations, or the manner in which the drives are necessarily lived, we believe that he comes closest to a positive internal principle of repetition. This later appears to him determinable in the form of the death instinct, and it is this which, far from being explained by it, must explain the blockage of representation in repression properly speaking.

 This even deeper question leads us in the direction of evolution, and towards the question of how evolution invented pleasure for its own purposes of survival.  But is this why experience needs to feel any way at all?  Sociobiology has a tendency to graze this question without really investigating it.  We fear non-conformity because for our ancestors being ostracized from the group meant death.  Sex is fun because we're really just vehicles for our genes to replicate.  These only sound like explanations.  They don't tell us why there would be anything like fun to begin with.  In this sense I can see how we are in need of something kinda weird like a Death Instinct, or at least something that would truly be beyond the pleasure principle because it need to found it.  As Nozick once said of the tricky question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" -- if you think you have an answer, you probably didn't understand the question.

Repetition as Failure

The next section begins with a summary of the previous one:

The discrete, the alienated and the repressed are the three cases of natural blockage, corresponding respectively to nominal concepts, concepts of nature and concepts of freedom. In all these cases, however, conceptual identity or Sameness of representation is invoked to account for repetition: repetition is attributed to elements which are really distinct but nevertheless share strictly the same concept.

and later:

In all these cases, that which repeats does so only by dint of not 'comprehending', not remembering, not knowing or not being conscious. Throughout, the inadequacy of concepts and of their representative concomitants (memory and self-consciousness, remembrance and recognition) is supposed to account for repetition. Such is therefore the default of every argument grounded in the form of identity in the concept: these arguments give us only a nominal definition and a negative explanation of repetition.

In other words, since we take the perfect mirrored correspondence of one distinct thing to one distinct concept as the natural and default state of affairs, every repetition indicates some sort of error or failure or lack in our concepts. The explanation for repetition is that something got fucked up and is abnormal.  

A critique of this "negative" way of explaining stuff runs through all of Deleuze's philosophy, and in my mind actually constitutes one of its deepest lessons.  Maybe one of the easiest ways to see the problem with this way of framing explanations is to consider the way we use the term insane to purportedly explain something.  As in, "he heard the voice of his dog telling him to kill people because he was insane".  This explanation is 99% moral judgement (which might explain your reaction to something but its not going to help at all in explaining the phenomenon in question) and 1% I don't know.  It basically takes a habitual or statistical definition of sane and normal for granted, observes that this case is different, attaches some moral stigma to it, and passes this whole works off as an explanation of what happened.  In fact, you might even go so far as to say that the goal of this type of explanation is precisely to get you to stop asking why something happened and instead to focus on thinking about how bad it was that it did.  

In contrast, a real explanation focuses on the way in which the effect was actually produced.  Because the Son of Sam really did hear the voice of his dog.  Something actually happened there.  It certainly may be out of the ordinary.  Even something we want to discourage in polite society.  But that doesn't make it less real.  And the more you try to search for a genuine explanation of how the voices could be produced, the more you realize that you're not even sure how "normal" voices are produced.  You mostly just take it for granted that the ones you hear in your head somehow represent the "real" ones out there in the world.  Calling the dog's voice hallucination is a non-explanation of how it's different from something you don't understand to begin with!  In fact, one of the very best tools in all of neuroscience has always been to watch what happens to an abnormal brain as a means of inferring what must be going on under the hood in a normal one.  Drugs and insanity are a great window onto those inner workings, but so are crazy lesions like Phineas Gage suffered.  In all these cases, the question should be the same: how did this happen?  No one would even consider it an explanation at all if you said that Gage's personality changed because his accident "drove him insane".

Real explanations try to trace the chain of causal events that produced an effect.  They are positive in the sense that they focus on a ground up explanation of how something came to be, rather than on how it differs from a preconceived normal state of affairs that we take for granted we already understand.  Sometimes Deleuze will even call these explanations or definitions "genetic" (as opposed to "nominal") because they focus on how something we actually generated, rather than just on how we recognize it and give it a name.  It might be easily mis-leading to call these explanations "mechanistic" but that's essentially how I think of them.  Not mechanistic in the sense of "literally reduced to a series of colliding billiard balls" but more as in "possessing some mechanism that doesn't take the outcome for granted but explains how it was produced".  Maybe the better terminology is Nozick's idea of "invisible hand explanations"? I'll have to re-read that bit to make sure it works here.

That seems to be the direction Deleuze shifts in with the remainder of the introduction.  Forget about the way it theoretically seems like repetition should be impossible (or could only be understood as generality) in a law-like world that we are able to fully represent.  Let's look for a positive mechanism by which repetition could actually be produced.  That would constitute an explanation of repetition.