Deleuze gives us the concept of a pure past, which is essentially equal to all of time, as a solution to the problem of active memory. Before a subject can have a present memory, there has to be 1) a subject (first passive synthesis of habit) and 2) a temporal space that a former present and a current present can be embedded in (second passive synthesis of memory). We're still working on translating the paradoxes that characterize this pure past into simpler terms. So far, we've concluded that the past is a sort of substantial element from which time is fashioned.
I think maybe the key to understanding this second synthesis is to think more about how Time could be a substance. This conception clearly takes us away from thinking about time as a collection of atomic presents, a heap of presents that accumulate one by one. Instead, we have to think of time as one whole substance that somehow contains all the various presents within itself. Basically, each present is an expression or slice of time that contains all of time as seen from a certain angle or perspective. In this sense, each moment is a reiteration of the whole of time, with all of the past and future telescoped down to one point of present. If this sounds pretty weird, consider that perhaps the problem of memory itself is the weird thing -- what exactly is a memory if everything that "is" always is in the present?
Deleuze describes this continual remixing of the past as a whole with recourse to the same cone image from Bergson we saw in the context of the cinema books.
... the present designates the most contracted degree of an entire past, which is itself like a coexisting totality. Let us suppose, in effect, in accordance with the conditions of the second paradox, that the past is not conserved in the present in relation to which it is past, but is conserved in itself, the present present being only the maximal contraction of all this past which coexists with it. It must first be the case that this whole past coexists with itself, in varying degrees of relaxation ... and of contraction. The present can be the most contracted degree of the past which coexists with it only if the past first coexists with itself in an infinity of diverse degrees of relaxation and contraction at an infinity of levels (this is the meaning of the famous Bergsonian metaphor of the cone, the fourth paradox in relation to the past).
Just in case, here's the diagram again, where, as Bergson says:
At S is the present perception which I have of my body, that is to say, of a certain sensory-motor equilibrium. Over the surface of the base AB are spread, we may say, my recollections in their totality. Within the cone so determined the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and the base AB. In S it would take the clearly defined form of a bodily attitude or of an uttered word; at AB it would wear the aspect, no less defined, of the thousand individual images into which its fragile unity would break up.
This time though, we need to interpret the diagram a little differently. Rather than seeing this as a light cone that defines all the parts of the past that are able to interact with our present observation at S, he wants us to read each of these circular slices (AB, AB', AB", and even the infinitesimal circle at S) as a possible level of the past that could express its entirety in the same way that S seems to by being at the bottom of the funnel. In other words, our experienced present could be S in this diagram, or it could be AB'. These would be different experiences summing up the entire past, but they would equally all be possible presents. AB is the experience of our entire past as a set of distinct individual memories (like a dream or like Funes) available to consciousness, and S is the experience of that entire past focused as it bears on my present action. Clearly, at S, most of the past is experienced unconsciously.
I'll quote Bergson at length on this because he is such a remarkably lucid writer.
Let us, for a moment, suppose our psychical life reduced to sensori-motor functions alone. In other words, suppose ourselves placed be considered, on the in the diagrammatic figure at the point S, which corresponds to the they coincide; greatest possible simplification of our mental life. In this state every perception spontaneously prolongs itself into appropriate reactions; for analogous former perceptions have set up more or less complex motor apparatus, which only await a recurrence of the same appeal in order to enter into play. Now there is, in this mechanism, an association of similarity, since the present perception acts in virtue of its likeness to past perceptions; and there is also an association of contiguity, since the movements which followed those former perceptions reproduce themselves, and may even bring in their train a vast number of actions coordinate with the first. Here then we seize association of similarity and association of contiguity at their very source, and at a point where they are almost confounded in one - not indeed thought, but acted and lived. They are not contingent forms of our psychical life; they represent the two complementary aspects of one and the same fundamental tendency, the tendency of every organism to extract from a given situation that in it which is useful, and to store up the eventual reaction in the form of a motor habit, that it may serve other situations of the same kind.
Let us jump now to the other extremity of our mental life, and, following our line of thought, go from the psychical existence which end, secondly, is merely 'acted,' to that which is exclusively 'dreamed.' In other words, let us place ourselves on the base AB of memory where all the events of our past life are set out in their smallest details. A consciousness which, detached from action, should thus keep in view the totality of its past, would have no reason to dwell upon one part of this past rather than upon another. In one sense, all its recollections would differ from its present perception, for, if we take them with the multiplicity of their detail, no two memories are ever precisely the same thing. But, in another sense, any memory may be set alongside the present situation: it would be sufficient to neglect in this perception and in this memory just enough detail for similarity alone to appear. Moreover, the moment that the recollection is linked with the perception, a multitude of events contiguous to the memory are thereby fastened to the perception - an indefinite multitude, which is only limited at the point at which we choose to stop it. The necessities of life are no longer there to regulate the effect of similarity, and consequently of contiguity; and as, after all, everything resembles everything else, it follows that anything can be associated with anything. In the first case the present perception continued itself in determinate movements; now it melts into an infinity of memories, all equally possible. At AB association would provoke an arbitrary choice, and in S an inevitable deed.
But these are only two extreme limits, at which the psychologist must place himself alternately for convenience of study, and which are really never reached in practice. There is not, in man at least, a purely sensori-motor state, any more than there is in him an imaginative memory: life without some slight activity beneath it. Our psychical life, as we have said, oscillates normally between these two extremes. On the one hand, the sensori-motor state S marks out the present direction of memory, being nothing else, in fact, than its actual and acting extremity; and on the other hand this memory itself, with the totality of our past, is continually pressing forward, so as to insert the largest possible part of itself into the present action. From this double effort result, at every moment, an infinite number of possible states of memory, states figured by the sections A'B', A''B'' of our diagram. These are, as we have said, so many repetitions of the whole of our past life. But each section is larger or smaller according to its nearness to the base or to the summit; and moreover each of these complete representations of the past brings to the light of consciousness only that which can fit into the sensori-motor state, and consequently that which resembles the present perception from the point of view of the action to be accomplished. In other words, memory, laden with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state by two simultaneous movements, one of translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less, though without dividing, with a view to action; the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns towards the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself which may prove to be the most useful. To these varying degrees of contraction correspond the various forms of association by similarity.
Everything happens, then, as though our recollections were repeated an infinite number of times in these many possible reductions of our past life.
As you can see, Deleuze takes a lot of the idea of the first passive synthesis of habit straight from Bergson. Our active sensory-motor experience at S is based on all the past habits defining our organism. From this perspective, we are input-output machines that have been wired up by evolution and learning, and our present of action and reaction is the contraction of that entire past down to a point that constitutes us, now. You can also see the kernel of the idea for the second synthesis is taken from Bergson as well. If we aren't acting, but are instead involved in the experience of reminiscing or dreaming, we can experience the past on various different levels, or in different aspects.
But Delezue modifies this understanding of what the cone represents by taking the active subject out of the memory. It's somewhat ambiguous, but Bergson here seems to be saying that we as human thinkers can slice up the past and experience it in various ways that are disconnected from the active present, that is, we can experience and represent it as a past. Deleuze removes the "we" from this activity, making it passive, as if the past were recollecting itself, without the need for a human subject to do any remembering. He actually frequently transforms Bergson in this way, taking what seems to be a subjective, human psychological process, and turning it into an objective and ontological process that goes beyond human experience and grounds it. In this case, our ability to focus on different parts of the past as a whole depends on the past's own ability to focus all of itself into an infinity of different presents. Our active synthesis of any two parts of the past as a memory is dependent on the passive synthesis of the entire past with itself in an infinity of different possible ways, each of which is a way of representing the whole of the past as a present.
I've been saying that the present somehow focuses all of the past, but it's probably more accurate to say that the past synthesizes all of the possible presents into a single present. It's this set of all possible presents, the past as a whole, that can be focused or contracted in different ways to produce different levels, each of which is a distinct present. As we've now come to expect, the past has a fractal structure. Each present is actually equal to the set of all possible presents considered from a certain perspective. We could conceive of the past (Time as a whole) in a relaxed fashion, as a set of individual atomic moments with no inherent relation between them, or as contracted into a tightly organized whole. These would be two different experiences of the past, of the set of all presents, but each is equally a single possible present experience. The whole structure reminds me of how each of Leibniz's monads contains an expression of the whole world. The cone image illustrates the "fourth paradox in relation to the past". Each slice is a part of the past that expresses the whole of the past; a single event that can be mapped to an infinite series.
Giving the past a fractal structure is the only way I can find to make sense of Deleuze's repeated description of the present as a contraction of a level of the past that is itself relatively contracted or relaxed. For example, here:
It must first be the case that this whole past coexists with itself, in varying degrees of relaxation ... and of contraction.
Or here:
We say of successive presents which express a destiny that they always play out the same thing, the same story, but at different levels: here more or less relaxed, there more or less contracted.
Or again here:
The present is always contracted difference, but in one case it contracts indifferent instants; in the other case, by passing to the limit, it contracts a differential level of the whole which is itself a matter of relaxation and contraction.
Or finally here:
In short, what we live empirically as a succession of different presents from the point of view of active synthesis is also the ever-increasing coexistence of levels of the past within passive synthesis. Each present contracts a level of the whole, but this level is already one of relaxation or contraction.
If each present lays out an infinite series of presents, because each level of the past reiterates the whole past, this fractal past also accounts for why the present is reflected in the past as a supplementary dimension. The current present has to contain itself as part of the entire past that it contracts.
... if the new present is always endowed with a supplementary dimension, this is because it is reflected in the element of the pure past in general, whereas it is only through this element that we focus upon the former present as a particular.
I'll have to continue next time with the way the fractal past helps us understand why difference and repetition appear differently in the first and second synthesis.
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