And we're back

Okay, enough about Stengers and the War Machine and the philosophy of science.  It's time to get back to Difference & Repetition.

Last episode on FPiPE we were using embryogenesis as our central metaphor to get a grip on what Deleuze has in mind when he talks about true repetition and its relationship to difference in the introduction.  I got a lot of mileage out of that analogy, and I generally find it useful to think of Deleuze modeling his philosophy after biology rather than after physics or mathematics.  But it's probably time to back up a step and and think a little more abstractly about the point we've arrived at and not get locked in to one metaphor.

The broad sweep of the Introduction seems to be:

1. How can true perfect repetition exist in an objective rule based world?  
2. If true repetition is an illusion, what's happening when we see something that looks like repetition?  It must be that we're seeing a general form or concept get repeated, with some of the particular details changed.  This general form would either be some objectively existing Platonic thing out there in the world, or some concept existing in our head.  Either way, the phenomenal world would be understood as never repeating.  Each moment of each thing is completely distinct and unique.  Our sense of true deja vu (as opposed to general) repetition would only arise when we see two things that are so close that they should share one concept, but somehow there are mysteriously two of them, like a left and a right hand.  These must be some sort of "degenerate" case (as the mathematicians like to say).
3. But wait, nature shows us all kinds of things like left and right hands that seem to be exact repetitions of the same concept.  This presents a major problem if we think that there should be a 1-to-1 correspondence between conceptual forms and things in the world.  The difference between left and right hands doesn't seem to map onto a conceptual difference.  And yet that difference also doesn't seem to fall into the form of a particular variation of a general form (like, say, longer or shorter fingers might).
4. So there seem to be some cases of true repetition that aren't general but that don't correspond to conceptual differences.  This is what real repetition is -- difference, but without a concept for it.
5. This kind of repetition can be explained by a repeated or ongoing process that has some difference within it that leads it to produce two forms as an end product. This is where embryogenesis came in.  The process, as an algorithm or recipe, can be repeated exactly, but the outcome can be slightly, or even radically, different every time.  The difference between the final forms isn't an external conceptual difference (as there is none in the case of symmetrical objects), but a difference internal to the process that creates the forms.  And the difference is also not a particular difference that falls within some general limits.  The difference between left and right can't be explained on the basis of how close they are to one another or to some general model.  The "level" at which the difference happens isn't the same level of the two distinct forms, it is somehow before or beneath them.

I've collected a few of the quotes that step 5 translates: 

We are right to speak of repetition when we find ourselves confronted by identical elements with exactly the same concept. However, we must distinguish between these discrete elements, these repeated objects, and a secret subject, the real subject of repetition, which repeats itself through them. Repetition must be understood in the pronominal; we must find the Self of repetition, the singularity within that which repeats.

It is true that we have strictly defined repetition as difference without concept. However, we would be wrong to reduce it to a difference which falls back into exteriority, because the concept embodies the form of the Same, without seeing that it can be internal to the Idea and possess in itself all the resources of signs, symbols and alterity which go beyond the concept as such.

The interior of repetition is always affected by an order of difference: it is only to the extent that something is linked to a repetition of an order other than its own that the repetition appears external and bare, and the thing itself subject to the categories of generality.

So, basically, there are two kinds of repetition -- repetition of process, and repetition of form.  These operate like subject and object.  

For the object, all the differences between instances lies outside the form, external to its completed individuality.  That's why when we think about two repeated objects, we find that the specifying their difference requires invoking some other level of explanation that doesn't have to do with the objects themselves.  We need ideas like "number", or "reflection" or "translation" or some other mathematical transformation that would apply equally to all objects.  The difference between objects isn't itself an object.  We have no concept or form for this repetition like we have for the objects, and when we reach for it, we immediately reach for descriptions that involves process and movement.  

The subject of repetition -- that is, the repeating process -- actually has an inside to it.  The difference that gives rise to the repeated forms is built into the process.  I think this is Deleuze's answer to the question, "what is a subject"?  The subject is a form of interiority.  It has a "what it is like from the inside" to it.  Only processes have an inside.  Finished forms do not.  Sure, we may take them apart and find other forms within them, but that's exactly when we start to say that the larger form is an illusion that "is really" reducible to smaller forms following laws which are also external to them.  

Now we find ourselves at a strange moment though.  It seems to me there's an ambiguity in the notion of a repeating process that I've already alluded to a couple of times.  Is it really right to say that the process repeats, in order to produce two forms?  In the case of embryogenesis it was more like the process bifurcated or differentiated based on some internal difference.  In other words, the different outputs were products of one ongoing process, albeit one that can spawn new subprocesses.  This is the paradox, as it were, of true repetition -- it's always yet again for the first time.   This brings us back to where we started with the introduction.  Repetition is an infinite series just like the repeated celebration of the 4th of July.  Because the event is historic we repeat it, and repeating it makes it historic.  Without the repetition, it is no longer a singular event, but just some stuff that happened a long time ago.  To understand the inner and subjective form of repetition, we have to understand the singular process that gives rise to the outward repetition of forms.