Transcendental Empiricism

Well, we've reached the end of Chapter 1: Difference in Itself.  Certainly, much more could be written. But I'm a little behind deadline here since I was hoping to get through the first chapter in under a year, and my first entry was July 4, 2018.  So I think I'll end with one last thought inspired by the final paragraph, and then take a bit of a break.

Deleuze often refers to himself as a transcendental empiricist, a term I've always found less than illuminating.  I think I know what empiricism means -- building a hypothesis on the back of data -- but how would that type of thinking change if it were 'transcendental', and what does that term even mean?  Gradually though, I've realized that transcendental means nothing more than thinking beyond or before the subject-object duality.  Which is to say thinking beyond representation of an object by a subject.

The fault of representation lies in not going beyond the form of identity, in relation to both the object seen and the seeing subject. Identity is no less conserved in each component representation than in the whole of infinite representation as such. Infinite representation may well multiply points of view and organise these in series; these series are no less subject to the condition of converging upon the same object, upon the same world. Infinite representation may well multiply figures and moments and organise these into circles endowed with self-movement; these circles no less turn around a single centre which is that of the great circle of consciousness.

Regular empiricism, as in the case of Hume, takes the subject and object for granted.  We have distinct sense perceptions.  From these solid starting points we will empirically investigate what we do or do not know and how we know it.  But us the knowing subject, and the objective sensory experience presented to us are assumed at the outset.

Of course, there's quite a lot of twentieth century philosophy (as well as a lot of Eastern philosophy) that proposes to go beyond the dualisms of mind and body or subject and object.  Deleuze's criticism of those categories though, and his idea of what's beyond them, is unique.  Because he's not claiming that either subjects or objects are illusions.  And he's not claiming that they are manifestations of some deeper principle, like Heideggerian Being, for example, that philosophy might be able to say something general about.  Instead, the problem is that both subject and object presume the pre-existent identity of themselves.  They conserve the idea of the form of identity without questioning how this identity came to be produced.  And if we ask what's beneath those forms of identity, the answer is: difference, in the sense of the univocity of Being or Eternal Return, which are really just names for the chaos of difference differentiating itself.  All of which is to say that if we want to dig into how the unity of subject and object were created, we will simply have to investigate empirically.  There's nothing general to be said.  Except for perhaps that there's always more that can be said?  

So instead of assuming that all experience takes the form of a unified subject encountering a given object, and asking what general categories apply to all possible experience (eg. it is in space and in time) we have to go looking for real experience, which of course changes its meaning once its not confined to happening between fully formed subjects and objects.  

Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned. The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself, such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy. It is in this direction that we must look for the conditions, not of possible experience, but of real experience (selection, repetition, etc.). It is here that we find the lived reality of a sub-representative domain.

Understood this way, the idea of transcendental empiricism becomes very interesting.  We're going to go out there and look for all kinds of experiences, that might go well beyond our human constraints. We have to figure out when an experience happens, what we now mean by this term.  Investigating animal experiences is an obvious first stop.  But we can continue asking whether there are geological experiences, or computational experiences.  Transcendental empiricism becomes the best version of sci-fi.

The 'superior form' is not to have a form

Deleuze has repeatedly contrasted the 'average form' as conceived by the Greeks with the 'superior form' as created by Eternal Return.  We've already delved deeply into the way Aristotle's average forms tame difference, and limit it within the bounds of a representative concept.  Translated into the context of ER, the same thought process outlines the easiest way to misread it as a circle -- an identity that happens a first time is duplicated as the circle passes through it a second time; from this we extract the average or the commonality of the two different moments as the essential thing-in-itself.  The 'superior form' changes this picture by starting with an ongoing flow of difference or differentiation that somehow leads to the possibility of their being two.   While we first became aware of this possibility by looking at symmetrical objects, the real multiplicity built into the superior form is between the actual and the possible.  I'm using 'possibility' here in colloquial sense to avoid falling back on a technical term like 'the virtual', but we already know that we have to think of possibility not as another copy of something that already exists with a few details changed, but as the structure of the process that produced the actual moment to begin with.  In other words, the superior form puts two different things into relationship just like the average form, but these things are different in kind -- actual versus possible -- rather than just numerically different -- original 1 and copy 2.

If, as we have seen, eternal return serves to establish a difference in kind between the average and the superior forms, then there is also a difference in kind be- tween the average or moderate positions of the eternal return (whether these involve partial cycles or approximate global return in specie) and its strict or categorical position. For eternal return, affirmed in all its power, allows no installation of a foundation-ground. On the contrary, it swallows up or destroys every ground which would function as an instance responsible for the difference between the original and the derived, between things and simulacra. It makes us party to a universal ungrounding. By 'ungrounding' we should understand the freedom of the non-mediated ground, the discovery of a ground behind every other ground, the relation between the groundless and the ungrounded, the immediate reflection of the formless and the superior form which constitutes the eternal return.

Boiled down though, this means that the superior form isn't a form at all, in the sense we usually use this term.  It's actually the formlessness of this singular moment captured as such by relating it to its possibility.  As we tried to describe more prosaically last time, it's this moment conceived through all the variations that make it what it exactly what it is.  On the one hand, the form is like finding the instantaneous trajectory of this moment of flux.  On the other, it reaches out towards everything, to all the nested and overlapping contexts that form the form, so to speak.  At the limit, this form, every form, is everything.  Which accounts for its superiority and its eternity.  Everything always is.

And it also accounts for its near schizophrenic descent into chaos.  Because ultimately that's what we're after here, conceiving untamed difference, total and unlimited possibility, chaos.  There's a temptation to ask exactly how the repetition happens and exactly how an actual and a possible dimension get conjoined in a particular moment.  I'm sure we'll start asking that question in the "Repetition for Itself" chapter.  Right now though we're still focused on difference in itself, on trying to think of a world without identity.  Which of course means a world without our identity.  Eternal Return is a paradoxical concept that blows itself up in a new and different way each time you approach it.  As Klossowski puts it in footnote 19:

'Does this mean that the thinking subject loses its identity on the basis of a coherent thought which excludes it? ... What is my role in this circular movement in relation to which I am incoherent, in relation to that thought so perfectly coherent that it excludes me at the very moment I think it?'

ER never lets us rest.  It strips all the forms out of the world and gives us only movement.  The moment it makes coherent keeps slipping away from us.  This isn't because of the way it takes time to articulate the present, as if we were continually repeating, "now ... now ... now ..." to periodically mark a completed instant.  The moment slips away because of the way in which it is never complete.  The thought of difference in itself has possibility built directly into it; there is always more difference.  The real repetition here is the immediate relationship of actual to possible, the 'alternation' of which is like the very pulse of time, and already extends to infinity from the beginning.

In reality the 'nth' power does not pass through two, three or four: it is immediately affirmed in order to constitute the highest power; it is affirmed of chaos itself and, as Nietzsche said, chaos and eternal return are not two different things.

I think the endlessness of difference, the way we keep coming back to it, is meant to be a description of why or how time flows.  In fact, in the cinema books, Deleuze will talk about "crystals of time" which seems like the perfect image here.  "It’s frozen, at the same time it’s vibrating"

Plain English motherfucker, do you speak it!?

Let’s take Samuel L. Jackson’s question seriously. I worry that we’ve strayed from our mandate over the past several posts, and I’d like to write something about Eternal Return with less jargon. 

I often think of ER when I’m on the top of a mountain looking at a nice view.  I think about the circuitous path that led me there, literally of course, but also the path through life that led me to this moment of clarifying vision and reflection.  In a sense, I am this path, really, and nothing else.  I am those choices I have made, and experiences I have had, and contexts I was born into and traveled through.  And then I think about the depth of that context, and the way it is interacting with me even now at the top of this mountain.  For example, I think about the geology that has produced such inspiring shapes, and I ponder why some hairless chimp like myself finds them so beautiful.  I think about the past and future of this planet, and wonder what other sorts of experiences that other beings (human and otherwise) have of it.  To summarize, I think about everything, and all the possible variations are actually built right into my experience of this moment.

I won’t bore you by hunting for quotes, but I believe that Nietzsche had something like this moment of reflection on, and reconciliation to, life in mind with the Eternal Return.  Deleuze is focusing much more on its metaphysical aspect.  But the two are deeply related.  What makes this moment this moment is the joining of its unique existence with the cloud of possibilities and associations it comes along with.  The actual and the possible are present together at the same time.  That conjunction is the secret of ER.  For this moment to be what it is, everything had to be exactly what it is.  And to think about this moment repeating, to ask the question of what it would mean to repeat it, and hence what it is to begin with, is to think about the whole process that led to it, and all the variations this process is capable of.  So the doctrine of ER isn’t really aimed at asserting that this moment will in fact repeat indefinitely on some sort of loop.  It just uses the idea of returning to uncover what this moment is to begin with, an utterly unrepeatable singularity in a process that stretches out to infinity.  The ‘Eternal’ in ER should not make us think of passing the same point on the merry-go-round again and again.  It should make us think about eternity as one unbroken line.

The Simulacrum is symmetry breaking in time

Let's now leave behind the complexities of interpreting the Sophist and focus instead on a different aspect of what Deleuze has in mind by overturning our more customary idea of Platonism.  Normally, we interpret Plato's theory of Forms as describing a hierarchy of levels of Being, like we quoted in the Form of a Table discussion in the Republic.  At the top level, there's the abstract Form of the table, which we think of as the real essence of the table.  Then we have actual physical tables, which are like copies of the original tables.  Finally, at the lowest level, we have mere images of tables, artistic representations of the real tables.  These are really nothing but phantasms, copies of copies, shadows of figures illuminated by the Light.  As we saw, the end of the chain is the fake table, the mere appearance of table-ness, the simulacrum table.   

The whole of Platonism, by contrast, is dominated by the idea of drawing a distinction between 'the thing itself' and the simulacra. Difference is not thought in itself but related to a ground, subordinated to the same and subject to mediation in mythic form. Overturning Platonism, then, means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections. 

At first overturning this might sound simple.  If the story runs from 'table-in-itself' to 'simulacrum-of-table', then just reverse the direction.  Unfortunately, just saying that reality is nothing but appearances doesn't get you anywhere.  It simply reshuffles the names by making appearances the reality and 'reality' into an illusory appearance floating around the human skull.  To overturn this logic, we have to scrap the entire distinction between appearance and reality.  We can no longer have one true original reality and many false appearances.  The two sides have to be the same thing.

Nietzsche's Eternal Return is the solution to this problem.  It's meant to be the paradoxical concept that helps us to think of the reality of the simulacrum without positing anything essential behind or beneath it.  As we explored before, Eternal Return only makes sense in response to the problem of a chaotic world without identity.  We have to imagine a world of pure Heraclitean flux with no forms of unity and identity at all, with no things-in-themselves.  The only Being in this world of pure Becoming is the way something returns to an identity that did not pre-exist the returning.

... taken in its strict sense, eternal return means that each thing exists only in returning, copy of an infinity of copies which allows neither original nor origin to subsist. That is why the eternal return is called 'parodic': it qualifies as simulacrum that which it causes to be (and to return). When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form - the 'being' - of that which is. When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity, and begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.

This describes the paradox of Eternal Return: how can you "return" to a place if it was nowhere to begin with?  How can we imagine an endless and eternal 'circle' that never closes on itself?  How can this ocean of difference ever constitute an identity?

By now though, we have all the tools to make sense of this paradox.  What's repeated in the eternal return of the Same is not an identity, but a process, or a problem, that has resulted in multiple solutions.  Back in the introduction, we saw that the simplest version of this repetition was the case of symmetrical objects, like a left and right hand, that emerge through a process of embryological differentiation.  Then we saw that these processes of differentiation actually define a space as they go, a space structured by a singular Idea.  After talking about Plato's Ideas as singularities that structure (and are simultaneously defined by) a space of possibilities, this image has gotten a lot more concrete.  In fact, we even drew some diagrams of a modified version of Platonism that depicted how the circulation of pure difference could define an idea, and an idea could simultaneously structure that circulation.  Finally, we talked about how the sign was another name for the trigger that breaks the symmetry of an initially unformed state into two sides.  I admit, there's still some confusion in my mind between sign and singularity.  Broadly speaking, these both seem to be ways to grasp a whole space of possible differentiations as a unity.  We may discover later they are slightly different, perhaps having to do with who is receiving the sign.  

At any rate, this cluster of ideas helps illuminate the obscure lines that immediately follows the quote above:

In this sense, the simulacrum and the symbol are one; in other words, the simulacrum is the sign in so far as the sign interiorises the conditions of its own repetition. The simulacrum seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model.

While it's deeply buried here, I think the point is that the simulacrum functions as a symmetry breaking stimulus in time.  The repetition in the eternal return isn't a spatial but a temporal form of differentiation.  The symmetry of eternity is broken by splitting into a past and a future, the same way the symmetry of an egg is broken by splitting into a left and a right.  That broken symmetry is in fact the way that any thing comes to be, to distinguish itself from the flux.  The "constituent disparity in the thing" he refers to here is in fact the thing itself, in so far as it appears twice.  Though it would be more accurate to say that the disparity is not between two copies of the thing, but between the current thing and the ongoing process of differentiation that provides for the repetition of the thing.  Since there is no pre-existing thing-in-itself, we don't really have a basis to compare two instances in themselves (there is no model), but we can see how multiple instances could arise if we put them into relation with an ongoing process of temporal differentiation that has a structure capable of producing them.  As you've probably begun to suspect, at this point we're treading back into the territory of Heidegger's ontological difference.  Being is this universal and formless flux that is not anything until it differentiates into past and future, creating the gap between Being and beings.  In other words, Being is Time.  

 

I find it more interesting to move away from these abstract terms though, and consider the embryological and phase space images that Deleuze has really only hinted at so far.  The sign, or the singularity, provides a single handle for a field of difference in the same way that a symmetry breaking stimulus structures a single key moment in a process of differentiation leading to two reflected sides.  Presumably, the difference between sign and singularity has mainly to do with whether we describe this situation abstractly, or in terms of someone 'receiving', and acting on, the information made available by this handle.  Recall that we discovered this whole notion of embryogenesis by thinking about these remarks concerning causality:

'These elements interlock with each other through dislocation, and it is only at the end that the pattern achieves a stability which both confirms and belies the dynamic process according to which it has been carried out.' These remarks stand for the notion of causality in general. For it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled. For this reason, the logical relation of causality is inseparable from a physical process of signalling, without which it would not be translated into action.

The singularity is making available information about the causal structure of the world.  In the formless world of the Eternal Return, the structure of a space of possibilities that the singularity summarizes is what repetition means in the first place.  At the end of our discussion of Whitehead and Scotus, we saw that Pierce viewed the whole world as objectively filled with these signs, just waiting for some subject to pick them up.  All organisms are in the business of extracting signs in order to survive.  On some level they have to capture, whether consciously or through their morphology or behavior, the causal structure of the world, in order to make make the right move and continue to exist.  Here I can't help thinking about Surfing Uncertainty.  Its thesis of the brain as predictive processor describes all aspects of our thinking (from perception to action) as the interaction between a top down generative model geared towards predicting what will happen next, and a bottom-up sensory stream that we compare to the results of the model.  We extract the statistical structure of the world by essentially simulating what comes next, and then repeatedly checking the simulation against what actually happens.  Of course, we can only do this because the world has a statistical structure created by webs of interacting causality.  And we can only extract this structure and use it if our generative model of what comes next structures a space of possibilities in the same way as the possibilities of the world are structured.  To be useful, the model needs to have at last some of the same topological singularities as the process running through the world itself.  I think it's exactly this sort of resonance between two different sorts of signs that Deleuze was earlier calling learning.

When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other - involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted. To learn is indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with signs, in which the distinctive points renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself.

This line of thinking provides some connection between 'simulacrum' and 'simulation'.  We'll have to see how that develops later.

Before we leave this rambling line of thought, let's think about the interesting difference point out here between sign and simulacrum, "the simulacrum is the sign in so far as the sign interiorises the conditions of its own repetition".  It sounds like he is describing the simulacrum as the "sign of itself".  Which immediately makes me think of Spinoza's adequate ideas and cause-of-itself.  But what can this mean in the context of our current understanding of signs?  If we run with my earlier understanding of learning, we can see how one sign can propagate and connect to another.  In fact, I guess this is almost in the nature of signs, if we're going to follow Pierce's definition of them (though now I'm wondering if we can have a 'naked singularity' that reveals a structure that has no effect on any other).  But if I learn how to swim by somehow creating a correspondence between the singularities that describe my motor pattern, and the singularities of the water+human system of fluid dynamics, a sign has been repeated, but has only been transmitted 'externally', from one system to another.  The simulacrum would be when this sign some creates the conditions for its own repetition and transmission.  In other words, when it creates a sort of feedback loop, where one moment of differentiation leads to another, and another, etc ... The simulacrum doesn't imply just one repetition, but a repetition of that repetition, and hence a whole infinity of them. It's a trigger that triggers itself again and again by continuing the very process that led to their being a trigger the 'first' time.  This sounds like a very abstract definition of life, which I think means we're on the right track.

The Overturning

After so much time spent on the Sophist, I'm at risk of simply repeating myself if I spend too much more time elaborating our starting point for this Plato section.  The Sophist already overturns Platonism, and we already know how -- the 'fake' things at the end of a chain of division, those furthest removed from the Idea, those Nth level simulacra like the Sophist himself, have a reality of their own.  Their not-Being is also Being.  What seemed a hierarchy turns out to be a circle, and difference, becoming, movement, novelty, etc ... turn out to be built right into the heart of Being.

This can seem awfully abstract though, so I want to consider a concrete image that help me understand the subtle distinction between Platonism and its inversion.  This came up in thinking about the contrast we saw Heidegger draw between the Same and the Identical:

The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical. The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same, by contrast, is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say 'the same' if we think difference....

Deleuze rephrases this distinction in asking whether Plato's Ideas are the Same or the Identical with respect to all the differences in the lineage they structure.

The four figures of the Platonic dialectic are therefore: the selection of difference, the installation of a mythic circle, the establishment of a foundation, and the position of a question-problem complex. However, difference is still related to the Same or to the One through these figures. No doubt the same should not be confused with the identity of the concept in general: rather, it characterises the Idea as the thing itself. Nevertheless, to the extent that it plays the role of a true ground, it is difficult to see what its effect is if not to make that which is grounded 'identical', to use difference in order to make the identical exist.  In reality, the distinction between the same and the identical bears fruit only if one subjects the Same to a conversion which relates it to the different, while at the same time the things and beings which are distinguished in the different suffer a corresponding radical destruction of their identity. Only on this condition is difference thought in itself, neither represented nor mediated. 

When I first read that Heidegger quote, I wondered how the Same gathering together differences into One was related to the concept of analogy.   In fact, the Same in this Heideggerean sense  is precisely the opposite of the Same in analogy (notice that the use of the term changes from the first quote to the second).  Analogy, like Plato's Ideas, tries to isolate the identical common denominator in a set of differences.  To do this you have to begin by taking each of the differences as having a fixed identity.  Then you compare these to one another to see where they overlap.  Once you establish what their identities share in common, you extract this as the root of the analogy, and can now draw a relationship between each difference and this common central point.  The differences now become 'essentially' just examples of the analogy (albeit ordered examples in the case of Plato's Ideas).  We could sketch  the structure as a set of concentric circles of different sizes, but I was thinking of it like this:

IDENTICAL

The identity of each of the points arrayed around the circle is given, and they all refer to a central Identical that they partake in.  The points themselves are not connected here; their only relationship is through the mediation of the central point.

By contrast, we can redraw this network map to illustrate the Same.  But we have to start with the way the various differences arrayed around the circle differ from one another, rather than taking for granted and comparing their self-identities.  We have to follow the direct connection between the points and see how they lean on and transform into one another.  The connection isn't mediated by a central term in this case.  

SAME

Nevertheless, a central term does appear here, but only as a byproduct of the direct relationship of differences.  The Same emerges as the way we can refer to the whole pattern of connection of difference as one entity.  This entity isn't just the overlap of a set of fixed identities though.  It is only defined through the motion of the circulation of difference.