Active and Passive

In an earlier episode, I talked a bit about why Deleuze might call the passive synthesis, the habits of the world, the habits that we are, "contemplations".  The point was that these habits function like a sort of proto-mind that can create a repetition.  They pull an identity out of the flux by contracting two repeating elements into a case, which can then itself be repeated. They imagine (literally give image to) a form that did not exist before.  Since we normally think of imagination as a property of the mind, it makes some sense to call these contemplations.

However, Deleuze has a second reason for calling the passive synthesis a contemplation.  He wants to distinguish it from the active synthesis which can be built on top of it, and which clearly has to do with action.  For action, we need an actor, a subject, an already completed self that can count particular instances of a repetition and compare them in an "auxiliary" space.  In fact, when we think of the word habit, we usually think of habitual action patterns that tie a particular instance of a stimulus to some general response.  These work like input-output relations -- I ring the bell, Spot salivates.  The question we're asking now though is how stimulus and response got associated to being with. 

What is in question throughout this domain that we have had to extend to include the organic as such? Hume says precisely that it is a question of the problem of habit.  However, how are we to explain the fact that - in the case of Bergson's clock-strokes no less than with Hume's causal sequences - we feel ourselves in effect so close to the mystery of habit, yet recognise nothing of what is 'habitually' called habit? Perhaps the reason lies in the illusions of psychology, which made a fetish of activity. Its unreasonable fear of introspection allowed it to observe only that which moved. It asks how we acquire habits in acting, but the entire theory of learning risks being misdirected so long as the prior question is not posed - namely, whether it is through acting that we acquire habits ... or whether, on the contrary, it is through contemplating? Psychology regards it as established that the self cannot contemplate itself. This, however, is not the question.  The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation.

Before we can carry out the action, there had to be some process by which the input-output machine got wired up to produce that response if given that stimulus.  That linking, that learning, that adapting, is a process of thinking, of contemplating, that occurs before we can act.  We imagine connections because we find repetitions in the world that are salient to us, which is to say ones that allow us to keep repeating.  Humans are not the only ones doing this sort of thinking; it is an organic an evolutionary thinking.  You might object that many of our habitual actions rise to the level of instincts that were selected for by evolution.  But instinct is just another name for habit operating at a different time scale.  Instincts too had to get programmed by contracting the elements of an environment into an action ... relevant to repeating an organism.  That contraction is a contemplation because it occurs before or beneath the action and renders it possible.  In fact, these contemplations create the space of possible actions as they (the contemplations) occur. 

It's important to understand that Deleuze is not saying that the self contemplates an action before acting the way I (briefly) contemplate having my third martini before drinking it.  Instead the self IS a contemplation.  Contemplation is like the creation of a possibility, the creation of a thing in a world without form, a creation which necessarily proceeds through repetition.  It's not simply the consideration of one of several possibilities that were already available.  I'm going to come back to this creative aspect of contemplation in another post because it's crucial to understand the way that contemplation is self-actualizing, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Right now though, we're just focused on how the level of passive contemplation can get overlooked if we focus exclusively on activity.

Action is constituted, in the order of generality and in the field of variables which correspond to it, only by the contraction of elements of repetition. This contraction, however, takes place not in the action itself, but in a contemplative self which doubles the agent. Moreover, in order to integrate actions within a more complex action, the primary actions must in turn play the role of elements of repetition within a 'case', but always in relation to a contemplative soul adjacent to the subject of the compound action. Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me'. These contemplative souls must be assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each muscle of the rat. Given that contemplation never appears at any moment during the action - since it is always hidden, and since it 'does' nothing (even though something is done through it, something completely novel) - it is easy to forget it and to interpret the entire process of excitation and reaction without any reference to repetition - the more so since this reference appears only in the relation in which both excitations and reactions stand to the contemplative souls.

It's easy to interpret Pavlov's dog by simply saying that the excitation of the bell causes the re-action of salivation.  But that neglects the fact that somewhere along the way Spot had to contemplate -- that is to contract -- the ever varying sensation of sound with the instinctual reaction to food.  In this case, it's easy to see that if these two are two far apart in time, or if one of the elements is simply too irrelevant to the dog (aka not food), this contraction won't occur.  The contemplation at work here is the linking of elements that perpetuate the case called Spot.  She thinks a lot for a dog.