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.  

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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.