Summer vacation is over and it's time to dig into Chapter 2: Repetition For Itself. Picking up right where we left off, we begin with Deleuze's very interesting discussion of David Hume's empiricism.
Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it. Hume's famous thesis takes us to the heart of a problem ...
Hume takes as an example the repetition of cases of the type AB, AB, AB, A .... Each case or objective sequence AB is independent of the others. The repetition (although we cannot yet properly speak of repetition) changes nothing in the object or the state of affairs AB. On the other hand, a change is produced in the mind which contemplates: a difference, something new in the mind. Whenever A appears, I expect the appearance of B. Is this the for-itself of repetition, an originary subjectivity which necessarily enters into its constitution? Does not the paradox of repetition lie in the fact that one can speak of repetition only by virtue of the change or difference that it introduces into the mind which contemplates it? By virtue of a difference that the mind draws from repetition?
I really like this simple starting point because it immediately makes us see that there is something very odd about the concept of exact repetition -- it immediately implies an extra dimension outside of things in which two things that are theoretically identical are somehow compared and counted as different instances of the same.
If we begin, as always, with the assumption of a world of pure Hericlitean flux, from a sort of naive materialism of whizzing particles rushing past, then there's not really any room for repetition. You can't step in the same river twice; the "same" current is actually a completely different set of molecules. At best, the only thing that might be the same in this universe would be the form of identity of the atomic building blocks and the form of the space they move in. But, if we have a more thorough form of temporal atomization (like the one I attribute to Whitehead) then even those pre-established identities break down, and we are left with an image of pure matter where every instant a complete universe disappears and another appears.
To recognize a repetition, to pull a form of identity out of this chaos, it seems we need some sort of mind. We need something that can link up two unique atoms. This has to be something beyond or outside matter, because there's no way of associating different moments within our atomized concept of matter. The factor that puts the two original atoms into association can't itself be an atom, because the whole notion is that atoms are, well, you know, atomized -- they are each self contained and have nothing to do with one another. Only a mind, or a memory, or an imagination, or whatever you'd like to call something that operates in a dimension supplementary to the atoms, is going to be able to associate them and to "stitch time together", so to speak, so that we can observe a repetition.
Does it have to be a human mind though? Will only the conscious recognition and representation of a hairless chimp allow for exact repetition? Loyal reader, I'm sure you can guess by now that we're exceedingly unlikely to limit mind to humans. That would be a completely ad hoc and self-aggrandizing philosophical assumption. What's more, it would obfuscate more than it would explain. Do we have any good idea how the human mind gets this extraordinary and unique power? We take for granted that we can recognize two instances of the same thing, but we have no clue how the process works. Invoking this ability here would be a form of deus ex machina. What we really need is some mechanism that proposes to bridge this gap, some intermediate step between matter and human mind that would explain how the two come into contact. We need a kind of proto-mind that relates matter to itself somehow.
Deleuze claims that this is exactly what Hume's discussion of habit or custom gives us. Before we have a full blown human mind capable of linking the idea of A to the idea of B we have the repeated conjunction in the world of A and B that establishes them as a linked sequence AB. There is a repetition, or what Deleuze is going to call a contraction, prior to our being about to represent it to ourselves as two separate instances: AB1 and AB2. Another way to put this is that our mind has to operate on some prior recognition, some presentation, before it can re-present to us a repetition.
Hume explains that the independent identical or similar cases are grounded in the imagination. The imagination is defined here as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears. It contracts cases, elements, agitations or homogeneous instants and grounds these in an internal qualitative impression endowed with a certain weight. When A appears, we expect B with a force corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted ABs. This is by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection. Properly speaking, it forms a synthesis of time.
Starting from the perspective of total temporal atomization, this is like the creation of time. Without the connection or contraction we just have a grab bag of atomic instants without any succession or relation to one another at all. Nature's repetition of itself allows some new connection to be drawn between instants. They are made to coexist now, that is, basically, to constitute the existence or identity of a repeated thing across time. That connection establishes a present time on the basis of a past instant which is repeated now, and a future which we expect to be an analogous instant that repeats the current one. I can dimly glimpse how we're tracing a peculiar type of curve here, stitching together a previously disconnected space.
The past and the future do not designate instants distinct from a supposed present instant, but rather the dimensions of the present itself in so far as it is a contraction of instants. The present does not have to go outside itself in order to pass from past to future. Rather, the living present goes from the past to the future which it constitutes in time, which is to say also from the particular to the general: from the particulars which it envelops by contraction to the general which it develops in the field of its expectation ... In any case, this synthesis must be given a name: passive synthesis. Although it is constitutive it is not, for all that, active. It is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind which contemplates, prior to all memory and all reflection. Time is subjective, but in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject. Passive synthesis or contraction is essentially asymmetrical: it goes from the past to the future in the present, thus from the particular to the general, thereby imparting direction to the arrow of time.
After this passive synthesis has constructed time by contracting instants and allowed for there to be a repetition, we can then move on and have a normal human mind come along and actively recognize and count the instances that the passive synthesis defines for it. We'll get into the active synthesis next time.
But first, I should address the fact that it feels like there's something circular going on here. The goal was to explain how repetition was possible in a material world. It seemed like this required something qualitatively different from matter. Even with that idea of mind though, that didn't explain how the two could touch. So we added this halfway step between matter and the representative human mind. We called this intermediate step contraction, and it was the creation of some new thing made possible by ... repetition. Which, wait, wasn't that what we were trying to explain!? Far from being a refutation, I think this circularity is by design. In fact, it's classic Deleuze. Another recursive concept. Another time where we begin in the middle, which is the only place you can start once you've lost your belief that everything can be deduced from first principles. I don't think I understand this particular moment of self-reference yet, but I did want to note it. I'm pretty sure we're about to head down the circular causality rabbit hole real soon.
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