One thing that I was trying to get to in the last post was using my reading of sign=trigger to help understand the perpetually difficult idea of the Eternal Return. This question really goes beyond the introduction, but it becomes important in Chapter 1: Difference in Itself. In other words, I'm going to go way off track here.
Accordingly, some background is required. Chapter 1 asks if there's a way to think of the concept of difference in itself and fundamentally. This means thinking of difference as prior to identity. If we just see difference as the difference between identities, as always a kind of comparison of identities, we are never going to be able to have a concept of difference in itself. There are two reasons for this. First, our concept of difference will just end up being whatever is left over or not matching in the comparison of two identities. Difference won't be defined autonomously, but just negatively, as not-identity. Second, who's going to do the comparing? Difference is only going to be defined by reference to a third party who subtracts the two identities. Identity is seen as self-sufficient and directly apprehended, but difference is going to require mediation by a third party.
How could we flip this around? At first it seems kind simple. We'll just make the identities the result of a comparison of differences, into differences of differences. For some reason I think of this in terms of network diagrams. We are given a bunch of nodes, which are represented as points, and we connect them with links, which we draw in as lines. What if you replace all the lines with points, making the old links the new nodes? It seems straightforward, but when you actually try to draw it you run into some weird problems with recursion every time you see multiple links coming off of a single node (in the original diagram).
Maybe this is related to the way that thinking of a world without identities seems to always slip away from you in an infinite regress. Consider my favorite example -- the vortex. The water spiraling down the drain in your bathtub is composed of water molecules organizing themselves under the influence of gravity. "It" is really composed of nothing more than the differences in speeds of the molecules involved. It has what you intuitively call an identity, but it's a funny dynamic sort of identity. People throw around epiphenomenalism and other terms to try to discuss the reality of this identity, but it always seems simplest to me to just call it a process and let it go at that. There is one problem with that strategy though, because some clever sophist might say, "sure, the vortex is a process, but a process has to act on some thing". If you go on to point out that one could also see the water molecule as a process (though obviously operating at a different time scale) they'll hit you with atoms, and the quarks, and then strings ... they won't be satisfied till they hit something that sounds like a fundamental thing, like a metaphysical marble, that can give them the ready-to-go identity to ground the whole chain. I note in passing that these people have usually never studied quantum mechanics. At any rate, you can see that a view of the world that truly never appealed to a concept of identity would have to be difference all the way down. Every thing in it would have to be defined in terms of everything in it (hence the title of the last post). Vortices made of swirling vortices ad infinitum. Or concentrations of certain chemicals regulating genes that end up changing the concentration gradient of other chemicals, that ...
The egg is a space of unfolding differentiation that is exactly a world of vortices stacked upon vortices. The organs it forms are nothing more than differences of differences of ... This is not what they look like when their development reaches the asymptotes that we're used to seeing, but if you watch the process unfold, you can see how the organs arise as differences in intensity (concentration being an intensive property) that come to occupy the body-without-organs. We tend to treat them as things just because of the timescale of their change relative to the timescale of our thoughts. I would actually propose this as a definition: a thing is a process as seen from the vantage point of another process with a much much faster characteristic time scale. Conversely, we might define something as a hallucination or an illusion (a not-thing) as a process viewed from a vantage point with a much much slower time scale. This, to me, is the basic insight geology has to offer; all that is solid melts.
But I digress. Because the question I'm after is actually how we recuperate the idea of identity once we understand the whole world as nothing but difference all the way down. This world of Heraclition flux is exciting but risks verging on complete chaos. Our goal, however, wasn't to dismiss identity as some sort of illusion. We were merely trying to found identity on something that seemed more direct and more empirical, and see how it was constructed. Now we seem to be in danger of losing the concept entirely.
I don't foresee this line of thought fully yet, but this has to be why repetition is part of the title, and the Eternal Return starts appearing as the culmination of metaphysics (and also the point where metaphysics becomes real action). Instead of identity appearing at the beginning of the story, it now appears only at the very end. The only thing that has one unified identity in the egg world is the egg itself, the totality. You only reach the One when you pack in the full multitude of Everything. Just like with the Eternal Return, you only reach this exact moment, the moment that will "repeat", when you pack in all the infinite possible variations that went into it. This is when you "become who you are". The idea goes way down and I believe is Deleuze's spin on the oldest proposition in the philosophical playbook: "ALL IS ONE" -- he's suggesting we read that as "ONE IS ALL", the only ONE is ALL.
And thus, finally, after many labors, I come to my point. Which was to use the metaphor of embryology and the idea of sign=trigger to try and illuminate passages like this:
That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass. In this sense, the simulacrum and the symbol are one; in other words, the simulacrum is the SIGN in so far as the SIGN interiorises the conditions of its own repetition. The simulacrum seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model.
The simulacrum (which is the crowning moment for Deleuze, the moment of the Eternal Return) is when the sign becomes a sign of itself. When something becomes the trigger of itself in a feedback loop. But that trigger has to pass through the whole environment that it (partly) triggers to manage this. Is there any better description of that than an egg?
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