I think we're finally at the point of closing out this second section of the second chapter (pgs. 79-85) that deals with the second passive synthesis.
We know that for something like memory to exist there has to first be a passive synthesis of the past with itself to constitute an entire space of time, in which individual memories would be actively located. Past = Time. We've also figured out that this synthesis needs to have a fractal form where each present contracts all of the past, that is, all of time, all of the possible presents, including itself, expressed in a certain manner. Time, or the past as a Whole, is then an infinite number of possible contractions each of which is itself infinite. Present = Fractal Past = Time.
I'd have to think more about the subtle mutation it undergoes in a new context, but the pure past Deleuze describes here seems to be basically the same concept as the Plane of Consistency or the Plane of Immanence as these appear in his later writing with Guattari. Maybe this gives us a hint as to why he wants to call this the Past, when it seems to be what we would normally call Time, since it really includes all of the past, present, and future. The past always appears to us as a pre-existent background that's just given a priori. You can't change the past. Each time it re-presents or re-iterates all of itself as a present, it lays out an entire time line that locates the present in a now fully determined space. Even though each slice contains all of time, including the present and future, this time is present-ed as given to us and already determined, just as we experience the conventional past.
This fractal pre-determination also explains why Deleuze reaches for the word "destiny".
Consider what we call repetition within a life - more precisely, within a spiritual life. Presents succeed, encroaching upon one another. Nevertheless, however strong the incoherence or possible opposition between successive presents, we have the impression that each of them plays out 'the same life' at different levels. This is what we call destiny. Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions. 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. This is why destiny accords so badly with determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in choosing the levels.
Destiny seems like a good word to describe the experience of the entirety of time being given at once. It isn't the same thing as deterministic cause and effect, where one given moment determines the next adjacent moment in a step-by-step progression in a single direction. With destiny, the movement is infinitely fast in both directions, so to speak (What is Philosophy? emphasizes the infinite movement and infinite speeds of thought). The present as fractal past simultaneously determines all of the past and all of the future as a single whole, without going through the stepwise connection of other presents. My life, my succession of presents, is really just re-presenting this whole past from different points of view, with each point of view simultaneously containing the whole.
But let's leave further explorations of the paradoxes of destiny and metempsychosis as exercises for the reader and find out what difference and repetition mean in the context of the second synthesis. This is probably the main point of the whole section, and brings us back to the two kinds of repetition we met way back in the introduction: repetition of forms, and repetition of processes.
Between the two repetitions, the material and the spiritual, there is a vast difference. The former is a repetition of successive independent elements or instants; the latter is a repetition of the Whole on diverse coexisting levels (as Leibniz said, 'everything can be said to be the same at all times and places except in degrees of perfection'). As a result, the two repetitions stand in very different relations to 'difference' itself. Difference is drawn from one in so far as the elements or instants are contracted within a living present. It is included in the other in so far as the Whole includes the difference between its levels. One is bare, the other clothed; one is repetition of parts, the other of the whole; one involves succession, the other coexistence; one is actual, the other virtual; one is horizontal, the other vertical. 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. In consequence, the difference between presents themselves is that between the two repetitions: that of the elementary instants from which difference is subtracted, and that of the levels of the whole in which difference is included. And following the Bergsonian hypothesis, the bare repetition must be understood as the external envelope of the clothed: that is, the repetition of successive instants must be understood as the most relaxed of the coexistent levels, matter as a dream or as mind's most relaxed past.
In the first passive synthesis of habit, repetition is material repetition, the repetition of an organic form. Atomic instants, no two of which are ever exactly the same, were contracted into a present, and a general difference drawn from the expectation that this new form would itself repeat. The difference introduced into the world, drawn from the world's habit of repeating certain elements, was the very existence of that new form. Every thing was the passing present, forced to continually reconstruct itself and reiterate its difference, or risk dissolution.
In the second passive synthesis, everything is the past, but a past which encompasses all of time including the present and the future. This past repeats itself on an infinity of different levels, but each level contains an image of the whole just like a fractal. The object being repeated here is always the past as a whole, though each time it appears in a new guise, through the selection of a new level. This is how we should think of the repetition of a process that is able to produce many possible forms, and starts to explain why there seems to be some ambiguity between whether to call this a repetition of the process, or simply to say that the process is ongoing or continues. It's the same whole past that keeps appearing and re-appearing, organized in different ways. But all these different levels are internal to a single past because of its curious fractal structure. Each level is a particular present that contains within it a certain layout of the set of all the possible presents. The difference that characterizes the present has shifted from being an external difference, drawn out of the present in the first synthesis, to being an internal difference, included within the present in the second. The first synthesis produces one form, the identity of which is repeated again and again. The second synthesis is a repeating process that produces an infinity of possible forms..
Interpreting the two syntheses as repetition of form and repetition of process, respectively, helps with up a couple of other nagging thoughts I've had.
The first stems from the reference to Bergson in the last quote. Last time I mentioned in passing that one way of conceiving all of time was as a set of unrelated atomic instants that appear and pass away. You might call this an experience of time (the past as a whole) in its least contracted state. Since each slice or level of the past is always a repetition of an entire set of possible presents (or a continuation of the ongoing process of the past) we might think of one mode or level of operation of this process as the production of a whole series of unrelated atomic instants. Deleuze has been calling the second synthesis "noumenal" or "spiritual" or "virtual". The repetition of the entire past is the repetition of a process, a thing without material form. Is Bergson suggesting that one mode of this spiritual repetition, this continual reiteration of the whole of time, might be to realize the loosest and least contracted form of time -- precisely the set of atomic instants that we associate with a materialist view of the universe? Matter as mind's most relaxed part? And conversely mind as matter's most contracted state? Does one mode of the spiritual process spit out the material and temporal form of the universe?
The second issue that might be illuminated by looking at the second synthesis as the repetition of process is this question of the present as "passage to the limit". How is one level of the past, one infinite set of possible presents, each of which is more or less contracted or relaxed, selected from the others and contracted into a present? By passing to the limit. Deleuze says it here, and in my mind it echoes his description of the 'obligation' of each of Spinoza's modes (pg.40). I don't have a fully worked out thought here, but in the context of a process (and we should think here of Deleuze's paradigmatic process, embryogenesis) "passing to the limit" doesn't imply going outside the ongoing process but passing through a phase transition within that process. So maybe we should be thinking of the levels of the past as lines drawn immanently within it that describe the phase transitions inherent within some ongoing process. I guess this process would be something like the unfolding of time. The same system can be ice, water, or steam depending on the context. To pass to the limit might be to cross some threshold that precipitates a new behavior from the same old process.
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