Synthesis 3: The Undoing

We've finally made it to the third film in the trilogy.  The ending is predictable Deleuze -- the forces of chaos triumph and everything you thought you understood comes undone.  The pattern of the three passive syntheses of time is pretty clear.  The first constitutes all of time as the ever mobile passing present -- a time composed of atomic elements.  The second synthesizes all of time as the whole of the past -- a time composed as a monolithic fractal whole.  The third, and in some sense the deepest, constitutes all of time as the future -- as the form of change that merely defines a before and an after but that is otherwise completely empty, composed of nothing more than this distinction itself.

If the first two syntheses are defined by different types of contraction, the third will be associated with a sort of contraction that actually blows everything apart.  If the first two states show us different types of repetition, the third will be based on a strange type of repetition that produces absolute novelty.  And if the first two syntheses shows us different forms of difference itself, the third will show us a pure and transcendental difference-in-itself that is simultaneously the most common thing in the universe (existence in time).  The third synthesis is pure paradox, time as the unchanging form of change itself, time as the concept of change, some paradoxical point where difference and repetition touch.

Let's try to go through in detail what all this poetry means.

This section (broken into two pieces on pg. 85-96) begins with a contrast between the Cartesian and the Kantian conceptions of the cogito, the I or self in "I think therefore I am".  Kant makes short work of the self-evident certainty of Descartes' formulation.  Descartes is right; there's no doubt that some thinking is happening, existing right now, as I have the experience of thinking about this question.  What's not obvious at all is that this thinking is "mine".  Does my thinking at now1 belong to the same "me" as my thinking at now2?  If so, where did the continuity of this me come from?  Without this presumed continuity of my self-identical being, does the fact of my current thinking experience prove anything more than "there exists some thinking" right now?  It certainly doesn't seem to prove that any sort of stable, solid, continuous I exists.  But you just can't get famous for tweeting: "I think therefore ... there is some thinking going on".

Deleuze phrases this critique as an objection to the way Descartes' slight-of-hand magically converts a bare undetermined existence (mere existence or naked Being, if you will) into a solid thing or substance that can have properties like thinking.  In other words, he has smuggled in the assumption that the I that's doing the being here will have the same form as the familiar I that (we assume) does our thinking.  But is the I that thinks really the same as the I that is?  Or does thinking require being without really telling us very much about it?

It is as though Descartes's Cogito operated with two logical values: determination and undetermined existence. The determination (I think) implies an undetermined existence (I am, because 'in order to think one must exist') - and determines it precisely as the existence of a thinking subject: I think therefore I am, I am a thing which thinks. The entire Kantian critique amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The determination ('I think') obviously implies something undetermined ('I am'), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this undetermined is determinable by the 'I think': "in the consciousness of myself in mere thought I am the being itself, although nothing in myself is thereby given for thought." Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable, or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by the determination).  This third value suffices to make logic a transcendental instance.

The emphasis here on the form in which being can appear to us (rather than focusing on the being in itself) seems to be the essence of the Kantian transcendental.  I don't know enough about Kant to say much of anything interesting, but I did review Louis White Beck's introduction to my copy of Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics, which contains this helpful footnote:

It is important to distinguish between "transcendent" and "transcendental."  The former means "transcending the limits of experience," and hence metaphysical in the usual sense of the word; the latter means "lying at the base of experience," and hence epistemological in the ordinary sense.

Perhaps there are a whole set of transcendental forms that do not "... signify something passing beyond all experience but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make knowledge of experience possible" (as Kant himself puts it).  The one we're interested in now though is Time.  We experience out thoughts as happening in time.  All of our experience is experience-in-time.  This is the only form in which we can experience either our thinking or our being.

Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ... The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time.

If the only way we can get at our existence is though time, then Descartes' existential equation no longer shows us what he claims.  My thinking doesn't reveal the presence and activity of a substantial underlying self that exists continuously.  In fact, since I can't get at the being of this self except through thinking, what this being is like in itself remains a mystery.  All I can know is that this being appears within time, because my knowledge is limited to how my experience of thinking works.  For this being to be consistent across time, for it to be my being or thinking in the sense of a "property of underlying me", we need to add another assumption.  For Descartes, that assumption was God.

Descartes could draw his conclusion only by expelling time, by reducing the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of continuous creation carried out by God.  More generally, the supposed identity of the I has no other guarantee than the unity of God himself. For this reason, the substitution of the point of view of the 'I' for the point of view of 'God' has much less importance than is commonly supposed, so long as the former retains an identity that it owes precisely to the latter. God survives as long as the I enjoys a subsistence, a simplicity and an identity which express the entirety of its resemblance to the divine.

Recall that Descrates' God played a very prominent and unusual role in a philosophy that was supposed to doubt everything that could be doubted.  He guarantees the unity of the world, safeguards our senses from deceptions by evil geniuses who want to farm out our brains to vats, and, of course, implicitly gives us a model for the substantial and enduring self.  In practice, like we observed at the outset, the logic probably moves in the opposite direction -- Descartes assumes that God is a continuous unified substance because he experiences his own self that way (as so many of us do).  In any case, whatever unity we posit that holds across time -- whether God, Self, or World -- is not a unity we can actually experience, since all of our experience arises and passes within time.  

Without recourse to Descartes' God, how will Kant guarantee to us that the I that appears in my thoughts is the same from moment to moment?  And if each flickering thought -- even if the contents of that thought are an image of a persistent self -- can only appear as a thing within time, then how will Kant guarantee that we exist as stable thinking entities?  Finally, if we take apart one side of the equation (our unity as thinker) and take apart the other (our unity as exister), then what's left of the equation?   

For Deleuze, the answer is basically nothing.  He thinks that Kant has opened up a real can of worms here.  He has created an unbridgeable gulf between thinking and being.  He has killed God and dissolved the self.  "My" thinking can no longer prove my existence.  There is thinking, which means there is existence, but this existence isn't the property or activity of a substantial me.  It (thinking or being) seems to "just happen"; I'm not the subject or author of it.  

Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ... The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the 'I think' cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought - its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I - being exercised in it and upon it but not by it.  Here begins a long and inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense. The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself. To 'I think' and 'I am' must be added the self - that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time.

In fact, the only tenuous thread left connecting anything is the meta-level form in which all things appear -- time.  Since this form must apply to any contents, we might characterize it as "empty".  Yet this exact same transcendental form of time that connects all contents, perpetually separates undetermined being-in-itself from any more concrete determination of it (say, as a thinking type of being).  As a result, we might call it a "fracture" or a "fault" through our very core, something that separates us from ourselves.  The empty form of time separates thinking from being, even as it relates them a priori.  

It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.

We'll come back to this concept of the fractured I and its relationship to the form of time in many posts, I'm sure.  It's a strange and paradoxical one, because the fracture holds the pieces together by the thinnest of threads even as it separates them.  It represents Difference in itself, a difference that has been made internal to ... something which is not exactly a unity, namely, difference itself.  "... time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change".  

The Geometry of Experience

One thing I've discovered in meditating is that experience can present itself in different geometrical forms.  Sometimes there's a feeling that I am the center of my experience -- the commonplace idea we call having a point of view.   Sometimes, in contrast, I am not the center of my experience.  Somehow, the experience contains a center, but that center is experienced as being somewhere else.  This might be part of what people mean when they say they have an "out of body" experience.  Even more strangely, an out of body experience is really just the tip of the iceberg.  That experience still conforms in every respect to our typical unified self-centered (I don't mean this term in a judgmental sense) everyday experience.  It's like an exact double of that experience, just with the location shifted somewhere else.  

Things can get much weirder, it turns out.  Consider a patchwork of experience with multiple centers, none of which coincide, and which don't together constitute a space.  An out of body experience often still contains a reference to the initial position of the body.  As in, "I was floating above myself".  An experience that contains multiple centers may lack this reference completely.  "I" may not necessarily be any of the centers, nor a point located by some sort of triangulation of them.  The centers can each define a separate patch of space, but these patches may not exist in any relation to one another.  There is no single unified space in which they can be embedded.  You can't even call this an out of body experience because there's simple no reference left to the body.

Or is there?  Multiple centers that can't be unified explodes (literally) our normal concept of the body.  But there are still centers here.  Each center unifies something, even if they are irreducibly multiple and can't be put together.  Each center still functions as a body.  Call it an "out of the three body problem" experience.  I've even had an odd experience that is best described as being "out of someone else's body".  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The next question is obvious.  And the answer is yes.  

You can have an experience that lacks a center entirely.  How might you go about describing this experience that lacks all of the reference points we usually use to describe our world?  As a set of waves folded within waves?  As an infinitely fast movement that traverses every point and fills all of space?  Would "space" then be the center of the experience?  What makes this "an" experience?  If it doesn't have a center in space, does it at least have a center in time, presumably halfway between when it starts and stops?  

I don't really know how to answer these questions, but I think Deleuze is getting at something like this experience when he talks about the Eternal Return.  It's an experience that breaks open the universe and has no center to its repetition.  It's an experience that dissolves all identity and constitutes a world of pure difference.  It's very difficult to describe.  And as a result, I think a lot of Deleuze's writing style is dedicated to trying to trace this experience out, so that as you follow along with him, you have the experience for yourself.  He's not just trying to tell you what the experience is like, or ask whether it is "true" (whatever that would mean in the context of an experience).  He's trying to show you how to have the experience.  You have to follow the words and  images and the movement of the concepts, tracing them again and again, practicing the pattern, till you have some sort of epiphany where now you sorta know what he means because you've had some new experience yourself.  His whole theory of pedagogy, and his whole literary style rest on this technique because the type of experience he's trying to get at requires this approach. 

We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do'. Our only teachers are those who tell us to 'do with me', and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.

Is there any better description of the difficulty inherent in teaching someone how to meditate?

The Second Coming of Repetition

I think we're finally at the point of closing out this second section of the second chapter (pgs. 79-85) that deals with the second passive synthesis.

We know that for something like memory to exist there has to first be a passive synthesis of the past with itself to constitute an entire space of time, in which individual memories would be actively located.  Past = Time.  We've also figured out that this synthesis needs to have a fractal form where each present contracts all of the past, that is, all of time, all of the possible presents, including itself, expressed in a certain manner.  Time, or the past as a Whole, is then an infinite number of possible contractions each of which is itself infinite.  Present = Fractal Past = Time.

I'd have to think more about the subtle mutation it undergoes in a new context, but the pure past Deleuze describes here seems to be basically the same concept as the Plane of Consistency or the Plane of Immanence as these appear in his later writing with Guattari.  Maybe this gives us a hint as to why he wants to call this the Past, when it seems to be what we would normally call Time, since it really includes all of the past, present, and future.  The past always appears to us as a pre-existent background that's just given a priori.   You can't change the past.  Each time it re-presents or re-iterates all of itself as a present, it lays out an entire time line that locates the present in a now fully determined space.  Even though each slice contains all of time, including the present and future, this time is present-ed as given to us and already determined, just as we experience the conventional past.  

This fractal pre-determination also explains why Deleuze reaches for the word "destiny".  

Consider what we call repetition within a life - more precisely, within a spiritual life. Presents succeed, encroaching upon one another. Nevertheless, however strong the incoherence or possible opposition between successive presents, we have the impression that each of them plays out 'the same life' at different levels. This is what we call destiny. Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions. We say of successive presents which express a destiny that they always play out the same thing, the same story, but at different levels: here more or less relaxed, there more or less contracted. This is why destiny accords so badly with determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in choosing the levels.

Destiny seems like a good word to describe the experience of the entirety of time being given at once.  It isn't the same thing as deterministic cause and effect, where one given moment determines the next adjacent moment in a step-by-step progression in a single direction.  With destiny, the movement is infinitely fast in both directions, so to speak (What is Philosophy? emphasizes the infinite movement and infinite speeds of thought).  The present as fractal past simultaneously determines all of the past and all of the future as a single whole, without going through the stepwise connection of other presents.  My life, my succession of presents, is really just re-presenting this whole past from different points of view, with each point of view simultaneously containing the whole.  

But let's leave further explorations of the paradoxes of destiny and metempsychosis as exercises for the reader and find out what difference and repetition mean in the context of the second synthesis.  This is probably the main point of the whole section, and brings us back to the two kinds of repetition we met way back in the introduction: repetition of forms, and repetition of processes.

Between the two repetitions, the material and the spiritual, there is a vast difference. The former is a repetition of successive independent elements or instants; the latter is a repetition of the Whole on diverse coexisting levels (as Leibniz said, 'everything can be said to be the same at all times and places except in degrees of perfection').  As a result, the two repetitions stand in very different relations to 'difference' itself. Difference is drawn from one in so far as the elements or instants are contracted within a living present. It is included in the other in so far as the Whole includes the difference between its levels.  One is bare, the other clothed; one is repetition of parts, the other of the whole; one involves succession, the other coexistence; one is actual, the other virtual; one is horizontal, the other vertical. The present is always contracted difference, but in one case it contracts indifferent instants; in the other case, by passing to the limit, it contracts a differential level of the whole which is itself a matter of relaxation and contraction. In consequence, the difference between presents themselves is that between the two repetitions: that of the elementary instants from which difference is subtracted, and that of the levels of the whole in which difference is included. And following the Bergsonian hypothesis, the bare repetition must be understood as the external envelope of the clothed: that is, the repetition of successive instants must be understood as the most relaxed of the coexistent levels, matter as a dream or as mind's most relaxed past.

In the first passive synthesis of habit, repetition is material repetition, the repetition of an organic form.  Atomic instants, no two of which are ever exactly the same, were contracted into a present, and a general difference drawn from the expectation that this new form would itself repeat.  The difference introduced into the world, drawn from the world's habit of repeating certain elements, was the very existence of that new form.  Every thing was the passing present, forced to continually reconstruct itself and reiterate its difference, or risk dissolution.

In the second passive synthesis, everything is the past, but a past which encompasses all of time including the present and the future.  This past repeats itself on an infinity of different levels, but each level contains an image of the whole just like a fractal.  The object being repeated here is always the past as a whole, though each time it appears in a new guise, through the selection of a new level.  This is how we should think of the repetition of a process that is able to produce many possible forms, and starts to explain why there seems to be some ambiguity between whether to call this a repetition of the process, or simply to say that the process is ongoing or continues.  It's the same whole past that keeps appearing and re-appearing, organized in different ways.  But all these different levels are internal to a single past because of its curious fractal structure.  Each level is a particular present that contains within it a certain layout of the set of all the possible presents.  The difference that characterizes the present has shifted from being an external difference, drawn out of the present in the first synthesis, to being an internal difference, included within the present in the second.  The first synthesis produces one form, the identity of which is repeated again and again.  The second synthesis is a repeating process that produces an infinity of possible forms..  

Interpreting the two syntheses as repetition of form and repetition of process, respectively, helps with up a couple of other nagging thoughts I've had.  

The first stems from the reference to Bergson in the last quote.  Last time I mentioned in passing that one way of conceiving all of time was as a set of unrelated atomic instants that appear and pass away.  You might call this an experience of time (the past as a whole) in its least contracted state.  Since each slice or level of the past is always a repetition of an entire set of possible presents (or a continuation of the ongoing process of the past) we might think of one mode or level of operation of this process as the production of a whole series of unrelated atomic instants.  Deleuze has been calling the second synthesis "noumenal" or "spiritual" or "virtual".  The repetition of the entire past is the repetition of a process, a thing without material form.  Is Bergson suggesting that one mode of this spiritual repetition, this continual reiteration of the whole of time, might be to realize the loosest and least contracted form of time -- precisely the set of atomic instants that we associate with a materialist view of the universe?  Matter as mind's most relaxed part?  And conversely mind as matter's most contracted state?  Does one mode of the spiritual process spit out the material and temporal form of the universe?

The second issue that might be illuminated by looking at the second synthesis as the repetition of process is this question of the present as "passage to the limit".  How is one level of the past, one infinite set of possible presents, each of which is more or less contracted or relaxed, selected from the others and contracted into a present?  By passing to the limit.  Deleuze says it here, and in my mind it echoes his description of the 'obligation' of each of Spinoza's modes (pg.40).  I don't have a fully worked out thought here, but in the context of a process (and we should think here of Deleuze's paradigmatic process, embryogenesis) "passing to the limit" doesn't imply going outside the ongoing process but passing through a phase transition within that process.  So maybe we should be thinking of the levels of the past as lines drawn immanently within it that describe the phase transitions inherent within some ongoing process.  I guess this process would be something like the unfolding of time.  The same system can be ice, water, or steam depending on the context.  To pass to the limit might be to cross some threshold that precipitates a new behavior from the same old process.

Expansion, Contraction, and the levels of the Past

Deleuze gives us the concept of a pure past, which is essentially equal to all of time, as a solution to the problem of active memory.  Before a subject can have a present memory, there has to be 1) a subject (first passive synthesis of habit) and 2) a temporal space that a former present and a current present can be embedded in (second passive synthesis of memory).  We're still working on translating the paradoxes that characterize this pure past into simpler terms.  So far, we've concluded that the past is a sort of substantial element from which time is fashioned. 

I think maybe the key to understanding this second synthesis is to think more about how Time could be a substance.  This conception clearly takes us away from thinking about time as a collection of atomic presents, a heap of presents that accumulate one by one.  Instead, we have to think of time as one whole substance that somehow contains all the various presents within itself. Basically, each present is an expression or slice of time that contains all of time as seen from a certain angle or perspective.  In this sense, each moment is a reiteration of the whole of time, with all of the past and future telescoped down to one point of present.  If this sounds pretty weird, consider that perhaps the problem of memory itself is the weird thing -- what exactly is a memory if everything that "is" always is in the present?

Deleuze describes this continual remixing of the past as a whole with recourse to the same cone image from Bergson we saw in the context of the cinema books.

... the present designates the most contracted degree of an entire past, which is itself like a coexisting totality. Let us suppose, in effect, in accordance with the conditions of the second paradox, that the past is not conserved in the present in relation to which it is past, but is conserved in itself, the present present being only the maximal contraction of all this past which coexists with it. It must first be the case that this whole past coexists with itself, in varying degrees of relaxation ... and of contraction. The present can be the most contracted degree of the past which coexists with it only if the past first coexists with itself in an infinity of diverse degrees of relaxation and contraction at an infinity of levels (this is the meaning of the famous Bergsonian metaphor of the cone, the fourth paradox in relation to the past).

Just in case, here's the diagram again, where, as Bergson says: 

At S is the present perception which I have of my body, that is to say, of a certain sensory-motor equilibrium. Over the surface of the base AB are spread, we may say, my recollections in their totality. Within the cone so determined the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and the base AB. In S it would take the clearly defined form of a bodily attitude or of an uttered word; at AB it would wear the aspect, no less defined, of the thousand individual images into which its fragile unity would break up.

This time though, we need to interpret the diagram a little differently.  Rather than seeing this as a light cone that defines all the parts of the past that are able to interact with our present observation at S, he wants us to read each of these circular slices (AB, AB', AB", and even the infinitesimal circle at S) as a possible level of the past that could express its entirety in the same way that S seems to by being at the bottom of the funnel.  In other words, our experienced present could be S in this diagram, or it could be AB'.  These would be different experiences summing up the entire past, but they would equally all be possible presents.  AB is the experience of our entire past as a set of distinct individual memories (like a dream or like Funes) available to consciousness, and S is the experience of that entire past focused as it bears on my present action.  Clearly, at S, most of the past is experienced unconsciously.  

I'll quote Bergson at length on this because he is such a remarkably lucid writer.

Let us, for a moment, suppose our psychical life reduced to sensori-motor functions alone. In other words, suppose ourselves placed be considered, on the in the diagrammatic figure at the point S, which corresponds to the they coincide; greatest possible simplification of our mental life. In this state every perception spontaneously prolongs itself into appropriate reactions; for analogous former perceptions have set up more or less complex motor apparatus, which only await a recurrence of the same appeal in order to enter into play. Now there is, in this mechanism, an association of similarity, since the present perception acts in virtue of its likeness to past perceptions; and there is also an association of contiguity, since the movements which followed those former perceptions reproduce themselves, and may even bring in their train a vast number of actions coordinate with the first. Here then we seize association of similarity and association of contiguity at their very source, and at a point where they are almost confounded in one - not indeed thought, but acted and lived. They are not contingent forms of our psychical life; they represent the two complementary aspects of one and the same fundamental tendency, the tendency of every organism to extract from a given situation that in it which is useful, and to store up the eventual reaction in the form of a motor habit, that it may serve other situations of the same kind.

Let us jump now to the other extremity of our mental life, and, following our line of thought, go from the psychical existence which end, secondly, is merely 'acted,' to that which is exclusively 'dreamed.' In other words, let us place ourselves on the base AB of memory where all the events of our past life are set out in their smallest details. A consciousness which, detached from action, should thus keep in view the totality of its past, would have no reason to dwell upon one part of this past rather than upon another. In one sense, all its recollections would differ from its present perception, for, if we take them with the multiplicity of their detail, no two memories are ever precisely the same thing. But, in another sense, any memory may be set alongside the present situation: it would be sufficient to neglect in this perception and in this memory just enough detail for similarity alone to appear. Moreover, the moment that the recollection is linked with the perception, a multitude of events contiguous to the memory are thereby fastened to the perception - an indefinite multitude, which is only limited at the point at which we choose to stop it. The necessities of life are no longer there to regulate the effect of similarity, and consequently of contiguity; and as, after all, everything resembles everything else, it follows that anything can be associated with anything. In the first case the present perception continued itself in determinate movements; now it melts into an infinity of memories, all equally possible. At AB association would provoke an arbitrary choice, and in S an inevitable deed.

But these are only two extreme limits, at which the psychologist must place himself alternately for convenience of study, and which are really never reached in practice. There is not, in man at least, a purely sensori-motor state, any more than there is in him an imaginative memory: life without some slight activity beneath it. Our psychical life, as we have said, oscillates normally between these two extremes. On the one hand, the sensori-motor state S marks out the present direction of memory, being nothing else, in fact, than its actual and acting extremity; and on the other hand this memory itself, with the totality of our past, is continually pressing forward, so as to insert the largest possible part of itself into the present action. From this double effort result, at every moment, an infinite number of possible states of memory, states figured by the sections A'B', A''B'' of our diagram. These are, as we have said, so many repetitions of the whole of our past life. But each section is larger or smaller according to its nearness to the base or to the summit; and moreover each of these complete representations of the past brings to the light of consciousness only that which can fit into the sensori-motor state, and consequently that which resembles the present perception from the point of view of the action to be accomplished. In other words, memory, laden with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state by two simultaneous movements, one of translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less, though without dividing, with a view to action; the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns towards the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself which may prove to be the most useful. To these varying degrees of contraction correspond the various forms of association by similarity.

Everything happens, then, as though our recollections were repeated an infinite number of times in these many possible reductions of our past life. 

As you can see, Deleuze takes a lot of the idea of the first passive synthesis of habit straight from Bergson.   Our active sensory-motor experience at S is based on all the past habits defining our organism.  From this perspective, we are input-output machines that have been wired up by evolution and learning, and our present of action and reaction is the contraction of that entire past down to a point that constitutes us, now.  You can also see the kernel of the idea for the second synthesis is taken from Bergson as well.  If we aren't acting, but are instead involved in the experience of reminiscing or dreaming, we can experience the past on various different levels, or in different aspects.  

But Delezue modifies this understanding of what the cone represents by taking the active subject out of the memory.  It's somewhat ambiguous, but Bergson here seems to be saying that we as human thinkers can slice up the past and experience it in various ways that are disconnected from the active present, that is, we can experience and represent it as a past.  Deleuze removes the "we" from this activity, making it passive, as if the past were recollecting itself, without the need for a human subject to do any remembering.  He actually frequently transforms Bergson in this way, taking what seems to be a subjective, human psychological process, and turning it into an objective and ontological process that goes beyond human experience and grounds it.  In this case, our ability to focus on different parts of the past as a whole depends on the past's own ability to focus all of itself into an infinity of different presents.  Our active synthesis of any two parts of the past as a memory is dependent on the passive synthesis of the entire past with itself in an infinity of different possible ways, each of which is a way of representing the whole of the past as a present.  

I've been saying that the present somehow focuses all of the past, but it's probably more accurate to say that the past synthesizes all of the possible presents into a single present.  It's this set of all possible presents, the past as a whole, that can be focused or contracted in different ways to produce different levels, each of which is a distinct present.  As we've now come to expect, the past has a fractal structure.  Each present is actually equal to the set of all possible presents considered from a certain perspective.  We could conceive of the past (Time as a whole) in a relaxed fashion, as a set of individual atomic moments with no inherent relation between them, or as contracted into a tightly organized whole.  These would be two different experiences of the past, of the set of all presents, but each is equally a single possible present experience.  The whole structure reminds me of how each of Leibniz's monads contains an expression of the whole world.  The cone image illustrates the "fourth paradox in relation to the past".  Each slice is a part of the past that expresses the whole of the past; a single event that can be mapped to an infinite series.  

Giving the past a fractal structure is the only way I can find to make sense of Deleuze's repeated description of the present as a contraction of a level of the past that is itself relatively contracted or relaxed.  For example, here:

It must first be the case that this whole past coexists with itself, in varying degrees of relaxation ... and of contraction.

Or here:

We say of successive presents which express a destiny that they always play out the same thing, the same story, but at different levels: here more or less relaxed, there more or less contracted.

Or again here:

The present is always contracted difference, but in one case it contracts indifferent instants; in the other case, by passing to the limit, it contracts a differential level of the whole which is itself a matter of relaxation and contraction.

Or finally here:

In short, what we live empirically as a succession of different presents from the point of view of active synthesis is also the ever-increasing coexistence of levels of the past within passive synthesis. Each present contracts a level of the whole, but this level is already one of relaxation or contraction.

If each present lays out an infinite series of presents, because each level of the past reiterates the whole past, this fractal past also accounts for why the present is reflected in the past as a supplementary dimension.  The current present has to contain itself as part of the entire past that it contracts.

... if the new present is always endowed with a supplementary dimension, this is because it is reflected in the element of the pure past in general, whereas it is only through this element that we focus upon the former present as a particular.

I'll have to continue next time with the way the fractal past helps us understand why difference and repetition appear differently in the first and second synthesis.  

Madame Psychosis

Let's revisit Proust's opening via another translation

For a long time I went to bed early.  Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep."  And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try and sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.  This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit.  Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark.

Compare this to what Deleuze says about the way each present always replays the whole past, which really includes all of time, suggesting that this life, "my" life has already been lived before in some sense.

Moreover, what we say of a life may be said of several lives. Since each is a passing present, one life may replay another at a different level, as if the philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint, played out the same past at different levels of a gigantic cone. This is what we call metempsychosis. Each chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps even his lyrics, but the tune remains the same, and underneath all the lyrics the same tra-la-la, in all possible tones and all pitches.

I'm hardly saying this idea of the transmigration of souls is easy to understand or makes complete sense to me.  But if we're in the business of investigating how identity is constructed, rather than given, if we're willing to entertain some flexibility in our definition of ourselves, if, at the limit, we're willing to wonder what an eternal life outside of time might mean -- well, then maybe the idea of reincarnation starts to make more sense.  Maybe my eternal life isn't mine after all.

The Pure Past

We need the concept of a pure a priori past to understand how a former present can be embedded in a current one.  It is the medium that both presents are embedded in.  By definition this past can't be experienced in a normal present, because it would reduce this all embracing past to that present.  But we do have an image from Proust to describe this strange experience -- it's like dreaming that you're awake or feeling like you're living a fiction as real life. 

Since this hardly clears the matter up much, it's time to turn back to Deleuze's technical description of the pure past and see if we can use Proust's imagery to understand what he calls the three paradoxes that define it.  These all come from Bergson's Matter and Memory (which incidentally is a pretty interesting and readable book).  The three paradoxes are contemporaneity, coexistence, and pre-existence.

... each past is contemporaneous with the present it was, the whole past coexists with the present in relation to which it is past but the pure element of the past in general pre-exists the passing present. There is thus a substantial temporal element (the Past which was never present) playing the role of ground.

The first paradox can be seen as answering the question we wrestled with in the previous section: why does the present pass.  Previously, I said that this seemed to be because the present only came together as an entity on the basis of its being repeated.  Repetition seemed to serve as almost the definition of a present in the first synthesis, which seemed to build passing, and future reappearance, directly into the notion of the present.  I think this still turns out to be (sorta) correct, though its sense has to be modified in light of the second passive synthesis.  In fact, in a way, the direction of repetition has been reversed -- the present passes because it is already past, not because it will come again.  It is past at the same time as it is present.  The past and present are con-tempor-ary.  So it's less that the present will repeat, then that it already has repeated the past, it is the past.  There's really no "first" instance of a repetition; how could there be in a world of pure difference?

If a new present were required for the past to be constituted as past, then the former present would never pass and the new one would never arrive. No present would ever pass were it not past 'at the same time' as it is present; no past would ever be constituted unless it were first constituted 'at the same time' as it was present. This is the first paradox: the contemporaneity of the past with the present that it was. It gives us the reason for the passing of the present.

The second paradox extends the first by thinking about what it means for the collection of all the former presents to be available as past for the current present.  Since those former presents, as well as the current present, are all simultaneously past as well, this means that the whole past coexists with the current present.  The present is a repetition of the whole past in a certain aspect, as if it were some sort of focusing or telescoping all of time down to a point.  Again, if the first synthesis is a repetition waiting to happen, expecting to happen, the second is a repetition that has already happened.  It is the past repeating itself as present.  Perhaps we should think of paradox one as proving the reason why the present passes away -- each present is already past at the same time -- and paradox two as showing us why the present arises to begin with -- the whole past is already present in each moment?

A second paradox emerges: the paradox of coexistence. If each past is contemporaneous with the present that it was, then all of the past coexists with the new present in relation to which it is now past. The past is no more 'in' this second present than it is 'after' the first - whence the Bergsonian idea that each present present is only the entire past in its most contracted state.

Finally, the third paradox takes us from thinking about each past of each former present, through the collection of all the pasts that coexist with the current present, to the idea of pure past which can't be contained in any present.  This pure past then doesn't have any time marker at all, so it appears to be a pre-existent given at all times, as if it were the very space from which presents can be picked out.

In this sense it [the past] forms a pure, general, a priori element of all time. In effect, when we say that it is contemporaneous with the present that it was, we necessarily speak of a past which never was present, since it was not formed 'after'. Its manner of being contemporaneous with itself as present is that of being posed as already-there, presupposed by the passing present and causing it to pass. Its manner of coexisting with the new present is one of being posed in itself, conserving itself in itself and being presupposed by the new present which comes forth only by contracting this past. The paradox of pre-existence thus completes the other two:

Obviously, these are all called paradoxes for a reason.  They are all real noodle-bakers that destroy our usual image of time.  In some sense though, I don't see them as independent of one another.  They seem to all be restatements of the basic idea that the past is this substantial temporal element that provides for the arising and passing away of the present.  The pure past seems to be functioning as a synonym for time as a whole.  If in the first passive synthesis there was "nothing but present", in this second one there is "nothing but past".  The pure past is the substance of time, the ground on which is built the foundation of the present, which still has to be built through the first passive synthesis.

The first synthesis, that of habit, is truly the foundation of time; but we must distinguish the foundation from the ground. 

All of this suggests that the succession of presents is less like moving along a fixed external time line than it is traveling within time itself.  The past is all of time, including what we normally call the future, and each present is some contraction of this whole, some slice of it, the tip of the iceberg.

The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is.

The pure past is not the accumulation of presents that have disappeared.  It is closer to the pre-existing collection of all possible presents.  In fact, I believe that this section is the first point in the book at which Deleuze introduces one of his most famous terms: "the virtual".  The pure past is a virtual totality.  It is something that exists, that we have to say is real, despite the fact that it is never itself actualized, never present and active at any moment.  With a few technical caveats, the easiest way to think about it is as a space of possibilities.  It makes a lot of sense that the first virtuality is Time.  After all, what is Time if not the inexhaustible possibility of change?

Reminiscence

In a general sense, it's clear what the pure past would need to be.  It is the substance that all the presents -- the former as well as the current -- are embedded in.  It's some sort of pre-existing, a priori whole that doesn't simply contain the accumulation of the past presents up till now, but is like the collection of all possible presents.  Basically, the pure past is Time itself, which is perhaps one reason why Deleuze very rarely mentions the future in his writings.  The trouble is not in stating this general requirement of what the past needs to do to solve the problem of how there can be memory.  The trouble is in making sense of what this pure past might actually be like for us, or, as Deleuze puts it:

The passive syntheses are obviously sub-representative. The question for us, however, is whether or not we can penetrate the passive synthesis of memory; whether we can in some sense live the being in itself of the past in the same way that we live the passive synthesis of habit. The entire past is conserved in itself, but how can we save it for ourselves, how can we penetrate that in-itself without reducing it to the former present that it was, or to the present present in relation to which it is past? How can we save it for ourselves?

I'd put the emphasis here on the "living" of the past.  As in: how could we experience the past in itself, as the past, and not as a former present encased in and represented to us through a current present?  Deleuze's answer to this question turns out to be straightforward.  We experience the past in itself through reminiscence (which is not the same as memory) and the model for this experience is Proust writing about Combray in The Remembrance of Things Past.  So, before we go into trying to make sense of the more technical and abstract job description of what the pure past needs to be like to solve our memory problem, I want to spend a little time thinking about how me might experience this abstraction directly, like Proust apparently did.

... reminiscence. In effect, this designates a passive synthesis, an involuntary memory which differs in kind from any active synthesis associated with voluntary memory. Combray reappears, not as it was or as it could be, but in a splendour which was never lived, like a pure past which finally reveals its double irreducibility to the two presents which it telescopes together: the present that it was, but also the present present which it could be. Former presents may be represented beyond forgetting by active synthesis, in so far as forgetting is empirically overcome. Here, however, it is within Forgetting, as though immemorial, that Combray reappears in the form of a past which was never present: the in-itself of Combray.

The image of Combray is not the objective image of childhood reproduced for our present as if it were a home movie.  What we're getting in reminiscence is more like the past applied to the present, that part of the past that can help us live now.  This still doesn't quite express the idea though, because the present only is what it is now on the basis of its entanglement with the past.  As in involuntary memory, reminscence doesn't start with a clear construction of what the current present is, and then go looking for a past that might be somehow analogous.  Instead, our experience of the the present is colored by our subjective reading of the past.  In other words, the subjective experience of an involuntary memory (the passive synthesis of memory) creates both the objective former present and the objective current present as tied together by a memory.   This latter is the active synthesis of memory.  It probably shouldn't be called "objective", since it's still a subjective experience; in fact, it's we usually just call "remembering".  But this synthesis is an activity of a subject in a present, whereas the passive synthesis is something the operates beneath or before the activity to establish who the subject is now to begin with.  Spontaneous memory functions as an experience without a stable marker in time that actually creates the present and the past in one motion.  This is what makes it a direct experience of a pure past.  

Turns out this is not a bad description of the very first lines of The Remembrance of Things Past.  Here's how Proust describes the experience.

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.

I think this extraordinary image of dreaming that you are awake and thinking that you are living the reality of a fiction helps a lot to get our arms around what the experience of a pure a priori past is like.  One thing for sure -- it's going to lead to a significant loss of our stable identity.

The Passive Synthesis of Memory

Well, I have to admit that I'm not sure quite what to make of the second section of chapter 2 (pg. 79-85) quite yet.  It introduces a new complexity I hadn't expected, and is forcing me to rethink the last post about why the present passes.  But this is all part of the roller-coaster thrill ride of live blogging one of the great philosophical magna opera!

The overarching point of the section is pretty easy to understand.  In addition to the first passive synthesis of habit that we've been discussing, there's a second passive synthesis of memory.  Habit synthesizes a present from a repeated series of unrelated atomic instants.  Memory synthesizes a present from the repetition of the whole of the past via some new re-ordering of its levels (whatever that means).  Both types of present have to be synthesized before we can experience the active synthesis of what we usually call memory -- where a former present is represented to us as the past of a current present.  The difficult part is to understand just what Deleuze means by the second passive synthesis.  It's much more abstract than the first.  It's not clear to me how the two relate.  And then, just for good measure, he slips in this cliffhanger at the end of this section suggesting that we still need to talk about a third passive synthesis.  

Why is the exploration of the pure past erotic? Why is it that Eros holds both the secret of questions and answers, and the secret of an insistence in all our existence? Unless we have not yet found the last word, unless there is a third synthesis of time ... .

Given my confusion, I'll only be able to take a provisional stab at translating this section into Plain English.  We'll probably have to revisit it after we learn about the third passive synthesis and see how they are all related.  

------

The first thing that Deleuze does in this section is to call into question my assertion that the present of the first synthesis, the present of habit, must pass because it is repeated.  Yes, the passing of the present is a necessary part of that present, but the cause of that passing is apparently not its need to be repeated.

Although it is originary, the first synthesis of time is no less intratemporal. It constitutes time as a present, but a present which passes. Time does not escape the present, but the present does not stop moving by leaps and bounds which encroach upon one another. This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time while passing in the time constituted. We cannot avoid the necessary conclusion - that there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur. This refers us to a second synthesis. By insisting upon the finitude of contraction, we have shown the effect; we have by no means shown why the present passes, or what prevents it from being coextensive with time. 

It's as if the first synthesis is "nothing but present" -- past and future are dimensions of this present -- albeit a paradoxical present that inherently passes.  But in order to pass, these presents must be embedded in some temporal space that includes stuff other than the present.  To see the present as passing, you need a space that includes both the present and the not-present, that is, the past and memory.  

The claim of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground of time. It is memory that grounds time. We have seen how memory, as a derived active synthesis, depended upon habit: in effect, everything depends upon a foundation. But this does not tell us what constitutes memory. At the moment when it grounds itself upon habit, memory must be grounded by another passive synthesis distinct from that of habit. The passive synthesis of habit in turn refers to this more profound passive synthesis of memory

In the last section, it seemed like the active synthesis was going to somehow accomplish this embedding all on its own, at least once the first passive synthesis brought the present into existence to begin with.   Now we see that a second passive synthesis will be required, one that constructs a general space of memory that allows for two particular points in the space to be drawn together.  The active synthesis of memory depends not just on the existence of two distinct presents (which the first passive synthesis of habit provides for) but on the possibility that these two presents can somehow be drawn together and related.  

Before really getting into the second passive synthesis of memory, Deleuze spends some time reviewing what the active synthesis was supposed to accomplish, and how the general and particular are distributed within it.   

At first sight, it is as if the past were trapped between two presents: the one which it has been and the one in relation to which it is past. The past is not the former present itself but the element in which we focus upon the latter. Particularity, therefore, now belongs to that on which we focus - in other words, to that which 'has been'; whereas the past itself, the 'was', is by nature general. The past in general is the element in which each former present is focused upon in particular and as a particular.

This may sound ridiculously abstract at first, but if we just spend some time improving the notation and thinking carefully about what's involved in our commonplace experience of remembering something, it quickly becomes more concrete.  Consider: "I remember locking the car".  What has to happen for me to have an experience like this?  Well, first, there has to be an "I" having a present experience.  That's what the first passive synthesis was all about.  Second, though, I have to be experiencing a current present that somehow includes a former present that I also experienced (as a present at that time).  That former present is a particular experience.  The current present is also a particular experience.  From the perspective of my current present, where do I go to look for the particular former present I'm trying to remember?  I have to look for it in the past in general, which contains a whole lot of stuff, some of which I would like to focus on and draw forth as related to my current present.  

... from the point of view of the reproduction involved in memory, it is the past (understood as the mediation of presents) which becomes general while the (present as well as former) present becomes particular. To the degree to which the past in general is the element in which each former present preserves itself and may be focused upon, the former present finds itself 'represented' in the present one.

[I have no idea why you would choose to call it the "present present" when "current present" is available and way clearer]

The past is the general store of stuff I go hunting in to find particular memories.  The idea is that without that general warehouse, there wouldn't be any place for memories to come from and to become related to the present as memories.  There would either be no memories at all and only present experiences, or every memory would literally transport us back to the lived present moment of the original experience, and right out of the current present we started from.  The phenomenon of memory seems to require some extra dimension of the present that defines an axis extending from "now" to "not-now".  

[

This, however, is not the same "extra dimension" we saw in the arrow the first passive synthesis gave to time.  Recall that habit synthesized time by contracting a past repetition into a present moment and generating an expectation that the repetition would extend into the future.  In that case, the past and future were really defined as dimensions of the present, and nothing went outside that present. What was particular and what was general in that first synthesis was the opposite of the way the former and current presents are particular and the past general in the second.

... what we earlier called the retention of habit was the state of successive instants contracted in a present present of a certain duration. These instants formed a particularity - in other words, an immediate past naturally belonging to the present present, while the present itself, which remains open to the future in the form of expectation, constitutes the general.

]

Clearly, this extra dimension is tied up with the ability of the current present to represent the former present as former.  It's the dimension required for the "re" in re-production and re-presentation.  An arrow goes from "then" to "now", which means that "now" somehow has to reflect itself as "now" in order for "then" to be "then" -- the two are relative.

Now the former present cannot be represented in the present one without the present one itself being represented in that representation. It is of the essence of representation not only to represent something but to represent its own representativity. The present and former presents are not, therefore, like two successive instants on the line of time; rather, the present one necessarily contains an extra dimension in which it represents the former and also represents itself.

As a result, the active synthesis of memory may be regarded as the principle of representation under this double aspect: reproduction of the former present and reflection of the present present. 

 [Aha. Perhaps Deleuze uses the confusing notation of the "present present" to capture this idea of the present reflecting itself as present]

Let's pause and take stock of where we are.  The problem was: "How can there be such a thing as memory"?  So far we know that there has to be the construction of two different presents via a first passive synthesis, and that these then have to be actively synthesized in some extra dimension of another type of present that represents their difference.  The question now shifts to: "Where did this extra dimension of the present come from"? 

This active synthesis of memory is founded upon the passive synthesis of habit, since the latter constitutes the general possibility of any present. But the two syntheses are profoundly different: the asymmetry here follows from the constant augmentation of dimensions, their infinite proliferation. The passive synthesis of habit constituted time as a contraction of instants with respect to a present, but the active synthesis of memory constitutes it as the embedding of presents themselves. The whole problem is: with respect to what? It is with respect to the pure element of the past, understood as the past in general, as an a priori past, that a given former present is reproducible and the present present is able to reflect itself. Far from being derived from the present or from representation, the past is presupposed by every representation.  In this sense, the active synthesis of memory may well be founded upon the (empirical) passive synthesis of habit, but on the other hand it can be grounded only by another (transcendental) passive synthesis which is peculiar to memory itself.

The extra dimension we're looking for is the past in general, as in, there exists a past.  Somehow this past is just available to every present, as if it constantly surrounded the present with a swarm of possible markers that could be used to label it as some particular former (or current) present.  This is why Deleuze calls it another passive synthesis.  It has to be there in the background before the subject is able to actively recognize a past object and situate a memory with respect to the present.  Because of this sort of pre-existence of the past, Deleuze is actually going to reverse the question of the extra dimension and say that the particular current and former present are actually an extra dimension of the past, rather than vice versa.  In the first passive synthesis, everything was in the present -- the past and future were extra dimensions of the present.  Here in the second passive synthesis, everything is in the past -- the particular presents are extra dimensions of the past in general.  

This is where it starts to get confusing though.  How does the past in general actually exist?  It seems like a total abstraction.  And why are we calling it a "synthesis"?  What is being created if it pre-exists the present?  Also, why are we calling it "transcendental"?  I understand that term to mean beyond or before the subject-object distinction.  Sure, the synthesis that leads to us to conclude "there exists" a past happens before the subject gets to use it to represent a particular past to a particular present.  But I thought that's why we called it passive.  The first passive synthesis also seemed to pre-exist the subject.  Though I guess a subject is synthesized through it, or at the same time as it, whereas with the second synthesis there's no mention of a subject at all.  Still, as I said at the outset, I've grasped the problem, but not, as yet, the solution.

The Present Passes

If there's one thing we know about the present, it's that is passes.  All things are impermanent.  The present doesn't pass by accident though; it must pass.  That's because we're talking about a lived present, an experienced duration, not some abstract slice of time with infinitesimal thickness that we would continually pierce as we move along a timeline.  In fact, another way of restating the active-passive distinction is to say that before we can be inside time in a psychological sense, before we can move from a remembered and represented past to a projected future, time has to be inside us, as the contractions of stuff we are made up of.

That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox.  Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live, and change.

In Difference & Repetition the present must pass because it only takes form on the basis of its own repetition.  The present here is defined as the coming together of something that can be repeated, that is, something which will pass and come again.  Understanding this circularity unlocks some of the weirder passages in this first section, particularly the stuff about pleasure and fatigue.  For example, I puzzled a while over this one:

Whether pleasure is itself a contraction or a tension, or whether it is always tied to a process of relaxation, is not a well-formed question: elements of pleasure may be found in the active succession of relaxations and contractions produced by excitants, but it is a quite different question to ask why pleasure is not simply an element or a case within our psychic life, but rather a principle which exercises sovereign rule over the latter in every case. Pleasure is a principle in so far as it is the emotion of a fulfilling contemplation which contracts in itself cases of relaxation and contraction. There is a beatitude associated with passive synthesis, and we are all Narcissus in virtue of the pleasure (auto-satisfaction) we experience in contemplating, even though we contemplate things quite apart from ourselves.

The passage becomes clearer when you understand that pleasure as a principle is really the feeling of maintaining a self or repeating it from moment to moment.  Pleasure is the principle of the construction of our identity as something that can be repeated.  It is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the contraction of other things that leads to the perpetuation of us.  We are always pleased with our selves.  Narcissus falls in love with a beautiful face reflected in the water, a face which happens to be his own.  Pleasure is a principle and the passive synthesis a "beatitude" because it is the feeling of this self-love, really a self-creation, a self-contemplation.  We don't just happen to enjoy ourselves; we are self-enjoyment, self-satisfaction.

But this auto-satisfaction also contains the seed of its own failure.  It has to be constantly repeated.  It only comes together on the basis of the contraction of things outside itself, and all contraction is made on the basis of some habit of repetition.  A self is a difference, a creation, drawn from the habits of the world, and it needs those habits to repeat for that difference to repeat itself.  A self only contracts the "habit of being" through repetition, which is why we couldn't imagine a perpetual present that contracted an infinite succession of instants -- it would require the universe to be repeated in its entirety.  The fact that the series of excitations and relaxations that define us must be constantly repeated is what leads Deleuze to talk about fatigue.

The duration of an organism's present, or of its various presents, will vary according to the natural contractile range of its contemplative souls. In other words, fatigue is a real component of contemplation. It is correctly said that those who do nothing tire themselves most. Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart. We are made up of fatigues as much as of contemplations. That is why a phenomenon such as need can be understood in terms of 'lack', from the point of view of action and the active syntheses which it determines, but as an extreme 'satiety' or 'fatigue' from the point of view of the passive synthesis by which it is conditioned.

The active synthesis he's referring to here would be something like, "I need water".  It's active because it presumes a subject, an object, and an action connecting them, in this case chugging.  The object of the action can either be around or not -- right now you can lack water.  But beneath this action, remember, there is always a contemplation.  There's really no "I" to begin with without my habit of drinking.  That habit is part of my self-definition.  So while I can lack the action of drinking, "I" cannot stop contemplating water.  But this contemplation is nothing but the habit I've contracted of drinking.   If that habit is not repeated, it's as if "I" have tired of myself.  Fatigue is meant to be the opposite of the self-creation that brings together the present; it's like the self-undoing that causes the present to pass.  This isn't a negation of the present though, as if it became something other than itself (ie. as if it became the past).  The passing is part of the present.  I think it's important not to conceive of fatigue as negation.  It's more like a marker at the end of the present.  Fatigue makes contemplation have to start again.

More precisely, need marks the limits of the variable present. The present extends between two eruptions of need, and coincides with the duration of a contemplation. The repetition of need, and of everything which depends upon it, expresses the time which belongs to the synthesis of time, the intratemporal character of that synthesis. Repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves repetition ...

Every contraction is a presumption, a claim - that is to say, it gives rise to an expectation or a right in regard to that which it contracts, and comes undone once its object escapes.

I know this all sounds like such a self-referential mouthful.   I'm finding it particularly hard to describe how contemplation and contraction could come apart when it seemed that a contemplation was really defined as a contraction.  It's as if a repetition considers its own possibility of ending or something.  Perhaps an easier way to discuss -- the circular causality of contemplation, or the repetition of need, or the passing of the present, or the relation of contraction and fatigue, or whatever you'd like to call it -- is to compare a contemplation to a question.

Need expresses the openness of a question before it expresses the non-being or the absence of a response. To contemplate is to question. Is it not the peculiarity of questions to 'draw' a response? Questions present at once both the stubbornness or obstinacy and the lassitude or fatigue which correspond to need. 'What difference is there...?' This is the question the contemplative soul puts to repetition, and to which it draws a response from repetition. Contemplations are questions, while the contractions which occur in them and complete them are so many finite affirmations produced in the same way as presents are produced out of the perpetual present by means of the passive synthesis of time.

The question that we, as organisms, put to the world is how we can exist.  We are a difference in the world that makes a difference ... to us.  All of our needs have to be seen in light of this question.  To say that we need food and water and air is first to acknowledge their vital relevance to there being an us.  As finite creatures, there are millions of things we lack, but these factors pass by unnoticed because they aren't relevant to our existence, their repetition is not central to creating the relationship that we are.  At the same time, we can tire of a question, we can say that a factor no longer matters ('"what difference does it make?").  At the limit, maybe we can even tire of ourselves, not in the sense of self-negation, but simply because we are too tired to recreate ourselves every moment from scratch.  We lose our "habit of being".

To the first synthesis of time there corresponds a first question-problem complex as this appears in the living present (the urgency of life).

The way Deleuze defines a self may seem very strange.  But we always have to remember the world of pure difference, the world without identity that is the starting point for Deleuze.  The problem in such a world is always  "How do you make a self?"  There is no essence or identity which might define us internally.  So the only way to make your self is by passing outside yourself, by drawing a difference from the habit of repetition of something other than you, and then becoming that repetition that you are.  As loyal readers no doubt recall from pg. 41, the idea that to be is to be repeated was the whole point of the Eternal Return.

That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become ... Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal return.  Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back 'the same', but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different.

Difference and Repetition and Difference and Repetition

We've talked about the active and passive synthesis.  We've talked about elements and cases.  These are both different ways of passing from one repetition to another through a difference that draws something new from the first repetition, and hence imagines a new thing that can itself be repeated in the second repetition.  Deleuze paints these two as orthogonal axes.

Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition which is deployed and conserved for us in the space of representation there was difference, the for-itself of repetition, the imaginary. Difference inhabits repetition. On the one hand - lengthwise, as it were - difference allows us to pass from one order of repetition to another: from the instantaneous repetition which unravels itself to the actively represented repetition through the intermediary of passive synthesis. On the other hand - in depth, as it were - difference allows us to pass from one order of repetition to another and from one generality to another within the passive syntheses themselves. The nods of the chicken's head accompany its cardiac pulsations in an organic synthesis before they serve as pecks in the perceptual synthesis with grain. And already in the series of passive syntheses, the generality originally formed by the contraction of 'ticks' is redistributed in the form of particularities in the more complex repetition of 'tick-tocks', which are in turn contracted.  In every way, material or bare repetition, so-called repetition of the same, is like a skin which unravels, the external husk of a kernel of difference and more complicated internal repetitions. Difference lies between two repetitions.

The cover art for my edition, with its 2D matrix of "differences" and "repetitions", does a pretty good job of illustrating the concept.

Before moving on, I should probably restate each of these two axes one more time to make sure I understand them.  Loyal readers should feel free to skip this part if it seems repetitive.

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The first axis, lengthwise, moves us from repetition-in-itself -- which basically doesn't exist, or is some sort of vanishing limit in a world of pure atomic flux -- to repetition-for-us -- which is where we can perceive and count the repetitions of a thing like a chiming clock by using our memory and understanding.  In the middle, we pass through repetition-for-itself, which is the passive synthesis.  The middle point is the moment of creation of a subject and a thing simultaneously.  It draws a general difference from the world, which means that it constitutes itself as a subject that contracts disparate moments into a form, but it only does this by positing itself as some particular thing that can be repeated in turn.  

The constitution of repetition already implies three instances: the in-itself which causes it to disappear as it appears, leaving it unthinkable; the for-itself of the passive synthesis; and, grounded upon the latter, the reflected representation of a 'for-us' in the active syntheses.

It's tempting to rephrase the two ends of this first axis as process and product.  For example, wheat in general IS the form of a process of contracting earth and humidity, but any particular stalk of wheat is one product of this process that must be taken up as an element in further contractions.   That "must" is an important aspect of this story, because without it, we just have the abstract idea of wheat, without any actual wheat.  It's the key to the fractal circularity and self-reference of the concept Deleuze is trying to create.  It's the key to the "unraveling" he talked about above, where external difference is taken up in more complicated internal repetitions.  I think it's also the key to time and immanence, but I see this only dimly, so we'll have to come back to that.

The second axis, in depth, takes us from elements to cases.  Both elements and cases are types of passive synthesis; any given synthesis could be of either type and there's a natural tendency to move from one type to another.  Elements get contracted into cases, which themselves serve as new elements that repeat and are contracted in turn.  The movement along this second axis is again characterized by the way that the general difference drawn from repetition that forms an element (there exists an A, tick-tick) is converted into a particular difference (A1 and A2, or A and B, tick-tock) that defines a repeating case.  So we can go from one passive synthesis to another, ie. move in a dimension orthogonal to the one defined by the active-passive axis.

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In either case, the movement is from one repetition, through general difference, to another repetition.  Then that second repetition moves through particular difference to yet another repetition.  Etc ...  The circular structure is quite a mouthful to describe if you try to trace it out fully.  I think the idea is not just that the process continues indefinitely higher, constructing new larger units of repetition as it goes, but also that we can follow it inductively in the opposite direction, ever deeper, by realizing that there are smaller units underlying any unit we might have taken as given.  For what it's worth, here's my attempt to capture all this in a diagram.  Your mileage may vary.

There's clearly a curious structure here that I've tried to illustrate with my loopdeloops.  Difference lies between two repetitions.  But in one case it's a general difference, and in the other case it's a particular difference.  Which means that the particular difference is serving as a general difference between another set of repetitions.  As a result, we can reverse the formula. 

Difference lies between two repetitions. Is this not also to say, conversely, that repetition lies between two differences, that it allows us to pass from one order of difference to another? Gabriel Tarde described dialectical development in this manner: a process of repetition understood as the passage from a state of general differences to singular difference, from external differences to internal difference - in short, repetition as the differenciator of difference.

The footnote at the end of this quote is also worth reading.  I don't know a whole lot about Gabriel Tarde beyond this little pamphlet I read maybe 5 years ago.  But I think I still understand what Deleuze wants to get at by flipping our perspective on what is between what.

From this point of view, repetition is between two differences; it is what enables us to pass from one order of difference to another: from external to internal difference, from elementary difference to transcendent difference, from infinitesimal difference to personal and monadological difference. Repetition, therefore, is not the process by which difference is augmented or diminished, but the process by which it 'goes on differing' and 'takes itself as its end'.

The idea that difference-in-itself is something, or better yet, some process, that can keep on differing, that can go to this formless extreme, was the core idea of the first chapter.  We already know from Deleuze's history of univocity that the high point of thinking difference-in-itself is Nietsche's Eternal Return.    So the way for difference to be exactly what it is, the way for it to continue its endless process of differing, is through repetition.  Difference is another fractal concept.  Each difference is composed of a whole host of smaller differences ad infinitum, and the way we pass from one difference to another is through a repetition which differentiates difference.

In the very next paragraph Deleuze will start to talk about the fact that the present necessarily passes.  It is part of the definition of the present, of duration, as it is constructed by the passive synthesis.  To illustrate the point he asks us to imagine a perpetual present that would not pass.

We could no doubt conceive of a perpetual present, a present which is coextensive with time: it would be sufficient to consider contemplation applied to the infinite succession of instants. But such a present is not physically possible: the contraction implied in any contemplation always qualifies an order of repetition according to the elements or cases involved.

To synthesize a perpetual present we would need to consider all the instants of the universe together.  He says this isn't physically possible because contracting the entire history of the universe together as one thing would imply its repetition.  Contraction is actually defined in this recursive fashion, as something that must be repeated, as something that refers inherently to an outside, to another entity.  Can "all of time" be repeated though? And where would you have to sit down to dinner to see two copies of the universe?   And yet, conceiving of the entire universe as repeating again and again is exactly what the Eternal Return is asking us to do.  So while it may not be physically possible, I suspect at some point Deleuze will provide another way this synthesis that contracts the whole universe into one present can happen.