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.
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