Why is there always something new?

Let's use Deleuze's own method, and back up from the abstraction a bit so that we can see the concrete problem.  The problem lurking beneath this whole chapter is: how there can be anything new?  How can a new thing come to exist?  Since the chapter is titled "Repetition for Itself", it was not immediately clear that the real problem is novelty.  But as soon as we started thinking about repetition we were already on the road to thinking about novelty. 

First, we asked: how can some element could be repeated exactly if time passes?  Isn't it technically something different the second time around?  Second, we asked: is it rather the whole trajectory of an element that is repeated, and not the element itself?  Can we say that what is repeated is a memory or model, perhaps a timeless law that governs the apparent repetition of an element though time?  Either of these could serve as a definition of repetition, a concept that we know is somehow at the base of our understanding of time.  

But then we realized that either definition of repetition would not bring us to understanding repetition for-itself.  Because either way, we were discussing the repetition of something, something whose identity we had already taken for granted.  In the first case, we needed the identity of the element we were using to count off repetitions every time it popped up.  In the second case, we needed the identity of the Whole of time -- the immemorial model, the realm of Forms, or the timeless universal law.  This more abstract identity was repeated in the sense that every concrete incarnation was just another instance of it, every universe was just another solution to one and the same equation.  

So finally we asked: how can we think of repetition for-itself, prior to a repeated identity?  How can we think about repetition without simply counting off the number of times we circle past the identical point?  All the paradoxical abstraction of the third synthesis is aimed at addressing this problem.  It does this by kicking the whole discussion up a level and focusing on the form of repetition, rather than the content.  This is why it's the 'transcendental' synthesis.  The only 'thing' repeated exactly is the form of repetition, which is nothing less than the passage of time, the way it always unfolds a before and after separated by a qualitative transformation.  What's repeated is change.  Which is to say that repetition for-itself is precisely continuous novelty.  

So the whole complicated apparatus of the third synthesis, with the fractured I, the order of time, the split symbol and the caesura, is all meant to be a theory of the new.

I'm sure this all still sounds either ridiculously abstract, or completely vapid and new-age (or perhaps both).  I mean -- "the only constant is change?" -- deep thoughts dude.  All I can say is that they call them truisms for a reason.  You've heard all the profound things before.  You just haven't repeated them yet in your own words.

Hamlet

Or Oedipus.  Or Zarathustra.  It doesn't really matter which we use to illustrate the time of the third synthesis.  Deleuze claims that, "Drama has but a single form involving all three repetitions".  For reasons we'll see in a minute, his examples are all drawn from characters who killed God the Father, but he doesn't mean that all dramas have this same Freudian form.  The idea is more that what we call dramatic is the enactment of some transformation through identification that makes us capable of something new.  As the old theory of catharsis would have it, drama is a way for the audience to feel an emotion or understand an idea by living it through identification with the characters.  Drama is an experience, rather than a conceptual representation.  In this sense is fundamentally about "becoming who we are", and its single form is the identification of who we are by means of transforming ourselves into another. 

[Now that I hear myself describing it, this sounds an awful lot like the description of Freudian transference that appeared in the introduction (pg. 18-19).  We'll have to come back to this idea.]
 

That's a bit abstract though, so let's talk about Hamlet.  To avoid any spoilers, I encourage you to first refresh your memory by watching the Laurence Olivier version.  That boy can really act.  The play is pretty simple really.  It's basically the story of how he gets up the gumption to kill his Uncle/Father/King.  Most of it is taken up with Hamlet's wavering indecisiveness in the face of the tremendous deed the ghost of his real father exhorts him to.  He's too depressed.  He's too calculating. He's just too 'mad', in every sense, to get anything done.  He cannot act.  The play is basically the story of how he becomes capable of action. 

In effect, there is always a time at which the imagined act is supposed 'too big for me'. This defines a priori the past or the before. It matters little whether or not the event itself occurs, or whether the act has been performed or not: past, present and future are not distributed according to this empirical criterion. Oedipus has already carried out the act, Hamlet has not yet done so, but in either case the first part of the symbol is lived in the past, they are in the past and live themselves as such so long as they experience the image of the act as too big for them.

Hamlet the play mostly illustrates this before.

So then, when does Hamlet actually reach the point of being able to carry out the act?  Note that this is not the same moment in which the act is carried out -- Deleuze distinguishes between the event (the during of becoming equal to the act), and the act itself.  The event is the moment when a character becomes capable of the act, when the act becomes 'thinkable', when it enters into the realm of possibility, regardless of when this moment lies in relation to the moment of the act itself.  For Hamlet, it turns out that he reaches clarity and becomes capable of killing Claudius in a moment that happens off stage.  

I had never noticed this weird aspect of the play, but it's very obvious once someone points it out.  The first three quarters of the play are taken up with Hamlet dicking around.  Will he or won't he?  He swears to the ghost of his father but then hems and haws.  He falls in love with Ophelia and then falls right back out.  He accidentally kills Polonius.  He has a blowout fight with his mom.   And he passes up a golden opportunity to off Claudius.  Then, the still extant King sends Hamlet off on a sea voyage to England, along with a sealed letter addressed to his traveling companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who are dead), ordering his death by 'accident'.  When he returns though, saved by an attack of noble pirates along the way, he's suddenly all business.  He's completely determined to kill Claudius.  There's no trace of the earlier indecisiveness, and the little bit of the play that's left is mostly occupied by the improbable action-adventure finale that probably triggers PTSD in poison control hotline operators.  

In other words, the psychological climax the play has been building towards isn't even in the play!  We hear about the sea voyage through a couple of letters.  These are embellished in the film into some flashbacks.  But basically, the moment we've been waiting for, the moment when dithering Hamlet somehow transforms himself into death dispensing agent of justice, is not shown.  The during that should naturally come between before and after is missing.  The hinge on which time would swing is not there, and in place of the transformation we're interested in, we get a gap, a cut, a caesura.  I think of John N.R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head.  Or as Deleuze puts it:

The second time, which relates to the caesura itself, is thus the present of metamorphosis, a becoming-equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act (this is marked by Hamlet's sea voyage and by the outcome of Oedipus's enquiry: the hero becomes 'capable' of the act). 

We could go through a detailed analysis of the way the caesura works works in Oedipus as well, but I think it will take us too far afield.  In this case, the crucial moment is in the play -- according to Hölderlin, it's the fight between Oedipus and Tiresias towards the beginning -- but the whole point of this moment is to be hugely significant precisely because it is ignored.  When Oedipus inquires who killed the former king, his father Laius, Tiresias tells him flat out that it was Oedipus himself.  Oedipus is too blind to hear this answer, so to speak, yet his rage at hearing what turns out to be the simple truth sets the whole play in motion.  So, like with Hamlet, there's a sense in which the crux is missing, in this case almost the act of missing itself or the moment when the self becomes divided from itself.  Oedipus is blind to what is right in front of his eyes; he's already committed the act that he's only just now becoming capable of seeing.

Finally, following the before and during, there is an after, which is basically the future created by the act itself.  This future is not really about the effect of the act as a cause of other, more distant, acts.  If anything, it's the effect of the event by which the actor becomes equal to the act.  So we're thinking more about a future in which this act has become possible, thinkable, real in whatever sense this makes it, regardless of whether the act is actually accomplished in fact.  It's more like thinking about a whole world that would include this act.  As in: "what would the world have to be like in order for this act to actually exist?"  This clearly carries with it the subquestion: "who would I have to become to be the actor capable of this act?"  

At this point we realize why Deleuze's examples are drawn from tragedies.  The grandeur and audacity of the act require the actor to transform themselves into something completely new.  To act, the old self must die.  

As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself.

The death may be metaphorical of course.  Oedipus merely blinds himself.  The point is that to become capable of the act, we have to change.  We have to develop.  Time has to be made to pass from before to after.  But this doesn't occur because we reach some pre-determined moment of maturity where we're finally licensed to kill God the Father King and take his place.  The identity that would define the hinge on which time revolves has gone missing.  So when we say we live out the drama of transformation through identification, we mean that we are identifying with the future.  By asking the question "Who am I? Who would I have to be?" we become equal to the change needed to produce something new.  This is what Deleuze means by the self being split, becoming equal to the unequal, to time as the changeless form of change.  

Now I think we're in a position to more completely understand the way Delueze introduces the idea of a temporal series as the correlate of the pure order introduced by the caesura.  

Having abjured its empirical content, having overturned its own ground, time is defined not only by a formal and empty order but also by a totality and a series. In the first place, the idea of a totality of time must be understood as follows: the caesura, of whatever kind, must be determined in the image of a unique and tremendous event, an act which is adequate to time as a whole. This image itself is divided, torn into two unequal parts. Nevertheless, it thereby draws together the totality of time. It must be called a symbol by virtue of the unequal parts which it subsumes and draws together, but draws together as unequal parts. Such a symbol adequate to the totality of time may be expressed in many ways: to throw time out of joint, to make the sun explode, to throw oneself into the volcano, to kill God or the father. This symbolic image constitutes the totality of time to the extent that it draws together the caesura, the before and the after. However, in so far as it carries out their distribution within inequality, it creates the possibility of a temporal series.

Time is split by a moment of transformation.  This moment isn't 'in' time though, since its defined by gap or missing piece.  Instead, it synthesizes or defines time as change, transformation, movement from before to after.  To capture this unusual idea that the moment which splits time is equal to the whole of time, and yet is not part of it, the way it is always either too big or too small, we need to see that the split itself is split.  The symbol of the split is itself divided between the act (the totality of time) and the event of becoming equal to the act, or the act becoming possible (the caesura that divides time).  What divides simultaneously holds together, so like a fractal, it is itself held together by division.  This is the essential paradox of the third synthesis.

It's pretty hard to talk about the third synthesis without getting lost in abstraction.  Deleuze tries to help us by giving us a section (pg. 91-96) that looks at all three syntheses as a whole, and relates them to the idea of how 'history repeats itself'.  In that context, I'm finding it useful to think about the repetition implied by the third synthesis as a sort of resonance between the first two.  The future is created by a resonance of past and present.  The symbol of the third synthesis is created by a resonance of the passing present (first synthesis, the event of becoming equal) and the pure past (second synthesis, time as a whole, the act).  Resonance is an interesting image to me because it expresses a force that can be very powerful but that really isn't anything in-itself; it is nothing but the coupling between two systems.  We'll see if I can expand on that concept next time.

Unhinged Time

Suddenly, we're talking about Hamlet.  This is supposed to help us understand the third synthesis, which produces a time that is "out of joint". 

What does this mean: the empty form of time or third synthesis? The Northern Prince says 'time is out of joint'. Can it be that the Northern philosopher says the same thing: that he should be Hamletian because he is Oedipal? The joint, cardo, is what ensures the subordination of time to those properly cardinal points through which pass the periodic movements which it measures (time, number of the movement, for the soul as much as for the world). By contrast, time out of joint means demented time or time outside the curve which gave it a god, liberated from its overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made up its content, its relation to movement overturned; in short, time presenting itself as an empty and pure form.

This was about as clear as mud to me when I first read it, and it turns out that part of the problem is that something is lost in translation.  Twice.  First, it's helpful to note that Shakespeare wrote in English, motherfucker.  And Deleuze is quoting Hamlet in French.  But then he goes on to translate the French term into Latin.  If you look up "cardo in Latin" you'll find that it doesn't mean "joint" in the sense of an articulated joint of the body or a piece of furniture.  Instead, it refers to the cardinal points of the compass the Romans used to orient the axis of the main street of a city.  So "time is out of joint" would be better translated in this context as "time is off its axis".  Or better still, since Deleuze wants to give a hint of madness to this time, as "time is unhinged".  Unfortunately we're stuck with Shakespeare.  

Shortly after putting this together I discovered that I had reinvented the wheel; here's a quote from James Williams' book Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time.

The dramatic phrase uttered by Hamlet that Deleuze focuses on is 'the time is out of joint' (Hamlet: I, v, 189); in the French translation used by Deleuze, 'le temps est hors de ses gonds'.  'Gond' means hinge, as in door hinge, rather than simply joint; so some of the richness of the original is lost in this more precise word.  According to Delueze, in line with a standard interpretation of Hamlet, time has become unhinged or disjointed (in the way the ball and socket joint of a shoulder might come separated).

The Latin root for 'gond' is 'cardo' the hinge or axle, the north-south axis in a city, or orienting direction and cardinal points for a circle, for instance north on a compass.  The number of revolutions of a circle can then be measured thanks to cardinal points, for instance, in the number of times a clock passes midday or a horoscope passes a birthday.  The passing of time, as much for the soul as for the world, he says, is measured thanks to such cardinal points.  When these go missing time goes out of joint and becomes maddened and disordered ...

At first it might seem like a point moving around a circle is a great image for capturing the repetitive way that time keeps on happening without really changing form.  The way it's always now ... now ... now.  Every instant seems to be interchangeable with every other in terms of its form.  But Deleuze is pointing out that the circle only works as a way of counting the passing of time if we keep track of the number of revolutions.  We do this by picking out a special point on the circle, defined by where some line intersects it, and counting how many times we go past that same point.  This is time with a "hinge" that joins the one revolution to the next.  It's a time that's measured by the repetition of the same identity.  We measure all of time this way, whether it's through the sun being in the same position on the solstice, the clock hand being in the same spot next to 12, or the caesium atom being at the same point in its frequency cycle.  In short, we measure time by cycles of similarity.  

The circle only captures the form of time if we pick out a special point, a bit of content.  So, it doesn't capture "the pure and empty form of time" that we're after with the third synthesis.  This is like the brute fact of time passing.  The form of change, rather than the form of repetition.  Ultimately, the question with time is why there's change at all, why there's constantly more difference.  We can't get at this by counting the number of repetitions of the same.  How could it be "the same" if time passed?  This is precisely the problem we met back in the introduction; how can there be an exact repetition?  Restating this question in terms of time brings it to its sharpest point.  If time is real, how can any two things be exactly the same?  And yet, we typically measure time by the fact that "exactly the same thing" is repeated.  We measure the form of time by its contents.  We drive a street through the heart of the circle to give it some coordinates.

By contrast, time out of joint means demented time or time outside the curve which gave it a god, liberated from its overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made up its content, its relation to movement overturned; in short, time presenting itself as an empty and pure form. Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding within it (following the overly simple circular figure). It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time.  Holderlin said that it no longer 'rhymed', because it was distributed unequally on both sides of a 'caesura', as a result of which beginning and end no longer coincided. We may define the order of time as this purely formal distribution of the unequal in the function of a caesura.

If we can't understand the true form time as a circle, how should we conceive of it?  Deleuze introduces two new images here.  The pure order of time.  And the caesura.

The idea of the order of time references the mathematical distinction between cardinal and ordinal numbers.   Cardinal numbers measure the size of a set (1, 2, 3 ... elements) while ordinal numbers describe its position in a series (first, second, third ...).  One way to think about this would be to say that ordinal numbers are qualitatively distinct whereas cardinal numbers are quantitatively distinct.  We only know that one ordinal number is "bigger" than another because it comes "after" another in the series.  Third comes after second.  But we don't know how much bigger third is than second, and we also don't know whether fourth is that same "amount" bigger than third.  In other words, the space ordinal numbers doesn't have a metric, a measuring system that lets us compare size or distance.  They only deal with what comes before and after, first and second.  

[As an aside, it turns out that one can define some arithmetic operations on ordinals.  Addition, multiplication, and exponentiation all makes sense, though they are a bit weird (non-commutative).  Subtraction, however, is pretty much completely busted.]

The cardinals that measure the size of a set do have a familiar metric, the one we use for arithmetic.  This makes them perfect for counting the revolutions of a circle if we just click another off every time we go past the point on it marked 'North'.  You can't do this with the ordinal, because while you may say conceptually that this is the first, second, etc ... time you've been around the circle, you can only determine that by referring to the cardinal point.  Thinking about this also illustrates that ordinal time is irreversible -- you can't go back from the third revolution to the first -- whereas it makes perfect sense to go around the circle in the opposite direction and decrement the cardinal numbers as you pass the point; cardinal time is reversible.

Ordinal time, the synthesis of an order of time, is exactly what we need to think about the idea that all thought happens within time.  The most basic form of time is that it has a before and an after.  Thinking may involve a long time or a short time, but the idea that it takes time, that it is within time or inherently requires time as an a priori condition, is perfectly captured by the pure order of time.  "Being in time" requires a first part, a second part, and a third part.  It is precisely the fact that thinking has parts, that it is composite, that it unfolds as a series, that makes Descartes' instantaneous thinking a myth.  The process of thinking needs time not because it moves through or takes up a specified block of pre-existent time, but because it actually synthesizes time within itself insofar as it has an order.   Though I think Deleuze would probably reverse these terms and say that the third synthesis of time is thought.  Or how we define thinking.

... the future and the past here are not empirical and dynamic determinations of time: they are formal and fixed characteristics which follow a priori from the order of time, as though they comprised a static synthesis of time. The synthesis is necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinated to movement; time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change.

By now the attentive reader has heard me mention three parts to the order of time, but only offer two -- before and after.  This begs the question: before and after what?  Before and after the caesura.  This turns out to be another Latin term for a break or pause introduced into a line of poetry.  So it's a fracture or gap or cut that occurs between the before and after.  Basically, the during, the moment of creation.  However, to avoid falling back into the problems we've discussed, this has got to be a strange and paradoxical during.  It cannot function as a special point defined in advance that acts as a hinge jointing past with future.  Instead, it's a gap.  It's a missing piece or cut that prevents the circle from closing.  It's not a point with a solid identity in and of itself, but is in-itself just the distinction of past from future.   The order of time and the caesura are two sides of the same coin meant to enable us to stop thinking about time as the repetition of some identity, and start thinking of it as the repetition of difference itself, as the way difference keeps on differentiating itself.

The caesura is pure paradox.  It marks a time that has come un-hinged and a circle that never repeats.  As we'll see more next time, it's a monumental moment that defines the entirety of time as split irrevocably between before and after, yet at the same time, it's nothing in itself but the distinction between these two.  The definition is completely circular -- before and after are defined relative to a caesura, and the caesura is defined as the transition between the before and after.  You might think of it as whatever non-number there is between any two ordinals, the nothing between first and second place.  Though my favorite image is the one Deleuze is alluding to in Cinema 2 -- an irrational Dedekind cut is a very pure illustration of the caesura.

But cinema and mathematics are the same here: sometimes the cut, so-called rational, forms part of one of the two sets which it separates (end of one or beginning of the other).  This is the case with 'classical' cinema.  Sometimes, as in modern cinema, the cut has become the interstice, it is irrational and does not form part of either set, one of which has no more an end than the other has a beginning: false continuity is such an irrational cut.

The caesure is a tiny gap, equal to all of history, that splits it into before and after.  

Just Say No to Drugs

So, we saw that for Plato, the thinking that philosophy involves is the movement through time we usually call remembering.  We remember that we knew about the realm of Platonic Ideas in a past life.  Or, put more accurately, we remember a time before we were born, when we were just a soul without a body, floating in Platonic heaven.  This is the myth Plato offers us of what it means to think.  It contrasts with Descartes' myth of instantaneous thinking that just spontaneously happens every time 'I think'. 

But the main point Deleuze wants to make in this paragraph (pg. 87-88) is that neither of these myths really satisfy Kant's transcendental criteria that thinking must happen as a change within time.  With Descartes, this is pretty obvious.  His thinking arises on the spot, as the instant activity of our existing being.  This mathematical point of thought, as it were, might be later located along some line of time.  However, that doesn't make it thinking within time, in these sense of thinking that happens through time, as a process that inherently involves time or "takes time".  With Plato, the situation is more subtle.  His thinking does involve movement and change, the movement between forgetting and remembering.  But the type of time that this movement implies is a completely closed circle, whose revolutions are marked by our passing through the same transcendent heaven of the Ideas between births.  Thinking is the process of tracing this circular time line.  Plato's time is defined by the fall from and rise back towards the fixed point of these Ideas.  

But the question is: In what form does reminiscence introduce time? Even for the soul, it is a matter of physical time, of a periodic or circular time which is that of the Physis and is subordinate to events which occur within it, to movements which it measures or to events which punctuate it. This time undoubtedly finds its ground in an in-itself - that is, in the pure past of the Ideas which arranges the order of presents in a circle according to their decreasing or increasing resemblances to the ideal

This kind of time does involve movement, but it doesn't really produce any truly novel qualitative change.  We forget and remember, forget and remember, ad infinitum, just alternating between these two states.  The whole space of this time is defined by our distance from the Platonic Ideas -- a time defined by its contents.

That's not what Deleuze has in mind when he says that thinking happens within time.  Plato is describing thinking as a vehicle that moves us through a pre-established space of time, one defined and measured by landmarks within that space.  Deleuze is talking about thinking as a synthesis of time, a passive synthesis that creates the space of time as it goes.  Kant's transcendental condition means that thinking is always a process that happens through an unfolding of time, as a true process of change.  Plato's circular Madame Psychosis is not going to be enough to let us see this because, "it introduces movement into the soul rather than time into thought".  

There's a number of ways to try and restate this distinction between Plato's time and the time Deleuze has in mind (and partially attributed to Kant) in this section of the third passive synthesis. We'll revisit a bunch of them I'm sure.  But the way he first puts it in this paragraph may be the simplest.  The Platonic Ideas are like the pure past of the second synthesis of memory.  It is precisely a "past that never was present".  Remember that this pure past was meant to be the ground that supported the foundation of any particular present (as defined by the first synthesis) even though, since it was a synthesis of the whole of time, it went beyond any present and caused each one to pass.  Unfortunately, this pure past was still conceived as a whole, as a unit that embraced all presents.  

The Ideas none the less remain the ground on which the successive presents are organised into the circle of time, so that the pure past which defines them is itself still necessarily expressed in terms of a present, as an ancient mythical present. This equivocation, all the ambiguity of Mnemosyne, was already implicit in the second synthesis of time. For the latter, from the height of its pure past, surpassed and dominated the world of representation: it is the ground, the in-itself, noumenon and Form. However, it still remains relative to the representation that it grounds. It elevates the principles of representation - namely, identity, which it treats as an immemorial model, and resemblance, which it treats as a present image: the Same and the Similar.

In other words, the pure past of the second synthesis is just the ancient mythical present of Platonic heaven or the dreamlike  reminiscence of an immemorial childhood in Combray.  And its unity as a whole is secretly modeled on the only unity directly available to us -- our present experience.  So the synthesis of the pure past doesn't escape the problem of treating identity as primary and relegating difference to secondary status.  It doesn't synthesize time as the repetition of a concrete particular instance of a thing (first synthesis).  Instead it synthesizes time as the Nth copy or instantiation of some abstract model.  Time is still subordinated to the repetition of a fixed identity.  Which means that time is merely a circulation through the appearance of various essences which stand eternally outside time.  This time is not the actual development and emergence and change of those forms.  

Stay tuned next time for a closer look at the time of the third synthesis.  Unpulsed time, which defines a repetition rather than being defined by it.  Time as the pure and empty form of change.

A Brief Detour Through the Time Before You Were Born

Kant points out that thought happens in time.  Time is the transcendental condition of thought.  The movement of time passing lies at the base of all of our experiencing.  When we realize this, Descartes' argument falls apart.  We cannot take its two I's to each be self-identical through time -- they can no longer be simple instantaneous phenomena, but have to arise and pass away in time.  And without two clear identities, their equation, the 'therefore', can't be sustained either. 

But, Deleuze asks, haven't we heard this story before?  Didn't Plato already link thinking to a movement in time when he told us that knowing the Forms was just remembering something we once knew but somehow forgot?  After all, the movement of birth and re-birth, a continual metempsychosis that we only overcome through memory, is so important to Plato that he actually concludes The Republic with a myth describing the process.

Nevertheless, is it really Kant's prestigious contribution to have introduced time into thought as such? Platonic reminiscence would seem already to have implied this. Innateness is a myth, no less so than reminiscence, but it is a myth of instantaneity, which is why it suited Descartes. When Plato expressly opposes reminiscence and innateness, he means that the latter represents only the abstract image of knowledge, whereas the real movement of learning implies a distinction within the soul between a 'before' and an 'after'; in other words, it implies the introduction of a first time, in which we forget what we knew, since there is a second time in which we recover what we have forgotten.

[Aside: I really like the notion that innateness too is a myth.  Anytime we are told that something is "innate" or "instinctual" or a "drive", we should be careful.  Innateness explains nothing and itself needs to be explained.  It is the first refuge of scoundrels.  It's the concept people grab when they want to stop talking about how something actually came into being, and especially to stop discussing over what time scale it might change and inevitably go out of existence.  In other words, it's a concept meant to limit the possibilities of something to an essential set of properties.  Innateness mythologizes.  It packs whatever you were trying to figure out into a mysterious black box marked 'essence' that doesn't allow for any development or change but just instantaneously appears out of nowhere.]

Plato's idea of knowledge involves the movement of learning, the transition from not-knowing to knowing, from before to after.  Knowledge involves some change in our minds.  I like this basic idea that to know you have to learn.  If you think this idea doesn't really apply to something you know 'innately' or 'intuitively', something like your self-identity and existence as a thinker, you should try asking a 2 month old how they feel about the self-evidence of Descartes proposition, or even to recognize themselves in a mirror.   But I was puzzled by the way Delueze then claims this requires a first time that we forgot so that we can move back to remembering it.  Can't knowledge just arise as a brand new creation?  As we learn, we move from not-knowing to knowing?  Why would we think of that movement as 'remembering'?

Here, it helps to know the context for Plato's discussion of reminiscence versus innateness.  Deleuze is making reference to Plato's Phaedo.  The question there doesn't involve just any sort of knowledge, but specifically the knowledge of the Forms or essences like Equality, Beauty, Justice, Goodness, etc ...  Naturally, since these Ideas are abstract, we cannot learn about them in the same way that we learn about sensory objects.  We can't get to the notion of absolute equality simply by looking at lots of equal things.  That concept goes beyond what can be given by the senses, just like Hume's causality, or any other notion that we'd like to see as a priori.  If these Ideas are real, but can't be learned from experience, we might simply say that they are innate. We're born knowing them.  But, then, most of us don't think anything about these Forms.  If they are innate, why is it so rare for us to talk about them?  Since nobody learns these things from experience we can't say that those people just haven't gotten there yet.  Instead, it must be that most folks have simply forgotten the Forms, and those of us who do think about them must be remembering something that we too had forgotten.  So the change that happens in our mind as we learn any concept that goes beyond what the senses can give us is a movement of recollection.

"Now then," said he, "do the equal pieces of wood and the equal things of which we were speaking just now affect us in this way: Do they seem to us to be equal as abstract equality is equal, or do they somehow fall short of being like abstract equality?"
"They fall very far short of it," said he.
"Do we agree, then, that when anyone on seeing a thing thinks, 'This thing that I see aims at being like some other thing that exists, but falls short and is unable to be like that thing, but is inferior to it', he who thinks thus must of necessity have previous knowledge of the thing which he says the other resembles but falls short of?"
"We must."
"Well then, is this just what happened to us with regard to the equal things and equality in the abstract?"
"It certainly is."
"Then we must have had knowledge of equality before the time when we first saw equal things and thought, 'All these things are aiming to be like equality but fall short.'"

"That is true."
"And we agree, also, that we have not gained knowledge of it, and that it is impossible to gain this knowledge, except by sight or touch or some other of the senses? I consider that all the senses are alike."
"Yes, Socrates, they are all alike, for the purposes of our argument."
"Then it is through the senses that we must learn that all sensible objects strive after absolute equality and fall short of it. Is that our view?"
"Yes."
"Then before we began to see or hear or use the other senses we must somewhere have gained a knowledge of abstract or absolute equality, if we were to compare with it the equals which we perceive by the senses, and see that all such things yearn to be like abstract equality but fall short of it."
"That follows necessarily from what we have said before, Socrates."
"And we saw and heard and had the other senses as soon as we were born?"
"Certainly."
"But, we say, we must have acquired a knowledge of equality before we had these senses?"
"Yes.
"Then it appears that we must have acquired it before we were born."
"It does."
"Now if we had acquired that knowledge before we were born, and were born with it, we knew before we were born and at the moment of birth not only the equal and the greater and the less, but all such abstractions? For our present argument is no more concerned with the equal than with absolute beauty and the absolute good and the just and the holy, and, in short, with all those things which we stamp with the seal of absolute in our dialectic process of questions and answers; so that we must necessarily have acquired knowledge of all these before our birth."
"That is true."
"And if after acquiring it we have not, in each case, forgotten it, we must always be born knowing these things, and must know them throughout our life; for to know is to have acquired knowledge and to have retained it without losing it, and the loss of knowledge is just what we mean when we speak of forgetting, is it not, Simmias?"
"Certainly, Socrates," said he.
"But, I suppose, if we acquired knowledge before we were born and lost it at birth, but afterwards by the use of our senses regained the knowledge which we had previously possessed, would not the process which we call learning really be recovering knowledge which is our own? And should we be right in calling this recollection?"
"Assuredly."

 

[76a-d referenced in Deleuze's footnote starts here]

"For we found that it is possible, on perceiving a thing by the sight or the hearing or any other sense, to call to mind from that perception another thing which had been forgotten, which was associated with the thing perceived, whether like it or unlike it; so that, as I said, one of two things is true, either we are all born knowing these things and know them all our lives, or afterwards, those who are said to learn merely remember, and learning would then be recollection."
"That is certainly true, Socrates."
"Which then do you choose, Simmias? Were we born with the knowledge, or do we recollect afterwards things of which we had acquired knowledge before our birth?"
"I cannot choose at this moment, Socrates."
"How about this question? You can choose and you have some opinion about it: When a man knows, can he give an account of what he knows or not?"
"Certainly he can, Socrates."
"And do you think that everybody can give an account of the matters about which we have just been talking?"
"I wish they might," said Simmias; "but on the contrary I fear that tomorrow, at this time, there will be no longer any man living who is able to do so properly." [Platonic LOL]
"Then, Simmias, you do not think all men know these things?"
"By no means."
"Then they recollect the things they once learned?"
"Necessarily."
"When did our souls acquire the knowledge of them? Surely not after we were born as human beings."
"Certainly not."
"Then previously."
"Yes."
"Then, Simmias, the souls existed previously, before they were in human form, apart from bodies, and they had intelligence."
"Unless, Socrates, we acquire these ideas at the moment of birth; for that time still remains."
"Very well, my friend. But at what other time do we lose them? For we are surely not born with them, as we just now agreed. Do we lose them at the moment when we receive them, or have you some other time to suggest?"
"None whatever, Socrates. I did not notice that I was talking nonsense."
"Then, Simmias," said he, "is this the state of the case? If, as we are always saying, the beautiful exists, and the good, and every essence of that kind, and if we refer all our sensations to these, which we find existed previously and are now ours, and compare our sensations with these, is it not a necessary inference that just as these abstractions exist, so our souls existed before we were born; and if these abstractions do not exist, our argument is of no force? Is this the case, and is it equally certain that provided these things exist our souls also existed before we were born, and that if these do not exist, neither did our souls?"
"Socrates, it seems to me that there is absolutely the same certainty, and our argument comes to the excellent conclusion that our soul existed before we were born, and that the essence of which you speak likewise exists. For there is nothing so clear to me as this, that all such things, the beautiful, the good, and all the others of which you were speaking just now, have a most real existence. And I think the proof is sufficient."

If you read this really carefully, you'll find an odd waffling about whether the senses or the knowledge of equality comes first.  To see two concrete sense objects as equal we have to already have knowledge of the abstract idea of equality.  But knowledge the abstract idea of equality can only be gained through the senses, precisely by examining the way that all sensory equalities fall short of this ideal.  There seems to be some circular reasoning here.

"Then we must have had knowledge of equality before the time when we first saw equal things and thought, 'All these things are aiming to be like equality but fall short.'"

"That is true."
"And we agree, also, that we have not gained knowledge of it, and that it is impossible to gain this knowledge, except by sight or touch or some other of the senses? I consider that all the senses are alike."
"Yes, Socrates, they are all alike, for the purposes of our argument."
"Then it is through the senses that we must learn that all sensible objects strive after absolute equality and fall short of it. Is that our view?"
"Yes."
"Then before we began to see or hear or use the other senses we must somewhere have gained a knowledge of abstract or absolute equality, if we were to compare with it the equals which we perceive by the senses, and see that all such things yearn to be like abstract equality but fall short of it."

Plato's myth of reminiscence as metempsychosis neatly solves this dilemma.  We did learn about the idea of Equality through our senses.  In our past life.  But then we've forgotten it in this life.  However, we still already have this idea we've forgotten.  In this life, we don't have to (and can't) learn about it through the senses.  We just have to remember it, by waking up from the dream of our life, and realizing that we have one dream like this after another.  In short, Plato's reasoning is circular because his whole conception of knowledge is circular, a fact we discovered back in the Difference chapter.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that a 'forgotten memory' is a very odd object, ontologically speaking.  It is real but it doesn't exist exactly.  This is the paradox of the pure past.  It's also directly related to the Freudian idea of repression that we met all the way back in the introduction.  Our forgotten memories are precisely our subconscious, that strange other that is inside us.  

Da Capo

The ideal of the most high spirited, alive, and world affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo [from the beginning]. (Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche).

Let's try this one more time from the top.  I feel like I've made a hash of the initial discussion of Descartes and Kant in this third passive synthesis section.  But it's now becoming clearer and I think I can improve on my earlier expositions.  

The key thing is to understand that, like the first two, this third synthesis also has a fractal structure.  There are two sides that are split from one another -- thinking and being -- but each of these sides is also fractured within itself.  

Thought is fractured by the form of time.  Since we only think in time, we are aware that this thought cannot directly connect us to a substantial I that persists across time outside this thinking.  The thinking, within itself, nevertheless implies some sort of being, outside itself.  

Being, on the other hand, is also fractured.  This is because, in a world without a transcendent concept of my identity, my being comes into existence and goes out of existence according to the external conditions of the world.  This was the content of the first synthesis, of a passive self that is the contemplation-contraction of the elements outside itself that make itself up. 

So both sides of the equation are fractured within themselves, and then there is a fracture between the two sides.  This makes things tricky to talk about.  On the one hand, when you say thought and being are fractured, you might be referring to the fracture of thought from being within thought, that is, you might be referring to the Kantian transcendental condition that all being must appear to us within time.  On the other hand, you might mean the fracture between thought and being as two distinct sides, each fractured in themselves.  I started off confusing these two fractures.  But the third synthesis is actually the 'synthesis' of these two different fractures.  I put 'synthesis' in quotes here, because the idea is a paradoxical sort of synthesis that doesn't heal the fracture and rejoin these elements into a unity.  Instead, as we'll explore more next time, this synthesis is like a set of correspondences or relays between the two sides that forces you to keep circulating from one to another, producing something new with each lap around the circuit.  In other words, the third synthesis is disjunctive, it actually holds things together by holding them apart.  Maybe imagine a stable configuration of magnets repelling one another, or the Levitron. 

I think this idea of a fractal fracture helps illuminate a lot of peculiar language in those earlier quotes that I mostly just glossed over.  Now that I'm paying more careful attention, I see that Deleuze is actually quite meticulous in using 'I' to refer to the thinking side, and 'self' to refer to the being side. 

For example:

To 'I think' and 'I am' must be added the self - that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. Nor is 'add' entirely the right word here, since it is rather a matter of establishing the difference and interiorising it within being and thought.

The difference, the fracture, is interiorized within both being and thought here, not simply 'added' to each as another term that would related them.  

Or another curious turn of phrase we can understand better now:

It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.

Here it's clear that the fractured I of the third synthesis is correlated to the passive self of the first synthesis.  They are not exactly the same thing.  Each side has its own thing going on, but they communicate (maybe resonate?) with one another.

Or examine again the quote about how Kant covers over the problem and resurrects God and Self as unified forms of identity:

The possibility of receiving sensations or impressions follows from this. It is impossible to maintain the Kantian distribution, which amounts to a supreme effort to save the world of representation: here, synthesis is understood as active and as giving rise to a new form of identity in the I, while passivity is understood as simple receptivity without synthesis.

Kant endows the I that thinks with an active power to reconstitute its fractured identity on the one side, by simply assuming that the self that exists is just an inert lump of identity with no internal composition of its own. So Kant discovers the fracture on the thinking side -- the transcendental condition -- but, since he misses the fracture on the being side, he also misses the ongoing fracture between the two sides.  He takes the assumed identity of an existing self as the model for the unity of a thinking I, hence immediately healing the fracture he himself uncovered within that I, which also closes the fracture he permanently opened up between the two sides.  

For Deleuze, this is an illegitimate method, because it assumes the existence of a stable building block of identity in the form of a simple, passive, atomic, receptive self.  Since his whole goal in D&R is to understand how identity is synthesized from difference, constructed as secondary rather than given as primary, Kant's method just begs the question.  For Kant's 'I' to start engaging in an active synthesis that would close the fracture Kant himself opens, there needs to be a self to begin with.  The activity of thinking needs an actor.  Kant takes this actor for granted, while Deleuze has a theory of where this actor comes from; they are synthesized as a being capable of sensation and action according to the first passive synthesis of habit.  For Deleuze, there's nothing that doesn't require construction.  There are no actors without a passive synthesis of those actors (passive from the point of view of their subsequent activity).  Every thing has to be bootstrapped out of no-thing.

Finally, there's this telling quote that reveals the difference and correspondence between I and self.

In this manner, the I which is fractured according to the order of time and the Self which is divided according to the temporal series correspond and find a common descendant in the man without name, without family, without qualities, without self or I, the 'plebeian' guardian of a secret, the already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image.

 We'll come back to the way the self is "divided by the temporal series" in a manner parallel to the fractured I next time.  My point here is just that 1) there are two sides 2) each has a parallel or analogous division within itself, and 3) that the interaction between these two divided sides does not stabilize and unify each as Kant hoped, but actually blows them both apart.  

Kant Couldn't

In our last post I was a little surprised by how radical Kant sounded.  I associate the death of God and the dissolution of the self with a guy like Nietzsche, who ended up in a madhouse telling anyone who would listen he was "Dionysus", and not a guy like Kant, who used suspenders even for his socks, and whose walks you could literally set your watch by.  Of course, this is a classic example of Deleuze's interpretations -- he sneaks up behind another philosopher and shows you a problem that they themselves briefly opened up, only to immediately "solve" in an inadequate way.  Which, when you think about it, is basically the Socratic method; he lets you put words in your own mouth, so to speak.

If the greatest initiative of transcendental philosophy was to introduce the form of time into thought as such, then this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the passive self. It is true that Kant did not pursue this initiative: both God and the I underwent a practical resurrection. Even in the speculative domain, the fracture is quickly filled by a new form of identity - namely, active synthetic identity; whereas the passive self is defined only by receptivity and, as such, endowed with no power of synthesis. On the contrary, we have seen that receptivity, understood as a capacity for experiencing affections, was only a consequence, and that the passive self was more profoundly constituted by a synthesis which is itself passive (contemplation-contraction). The possibility of receiving sensations or impressions follows from this. It is impossible to maintain the Kantian distribution, which amounts to a supreme effort to save the world of representation: here, synthesis is understood as active and as giving rise to a new form of identity in the I, while passivity is understood as simple receptivity without synthesis. 

WARNING: below is kind of a mess that only came together for me in the final paragraph.  Proceed at your own risk.  I'm leaving it all here because live blogging is not a highlight reel and some nights the Grateful Dead just sucked.

All my experience, including my experience of myself, happens within time.  This is the transcendental condition which makes experience possible.  If there is any underlying thing doing this thinking, an existing self to which this thinking me would belong as its property, it comes from somewhere else, and is provided to the thinking me as already given.  In other words, my thought isn't mine but comes from somewhere else (alternatively, I think you could also phrase this the opposite direction -- my thought, my "own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I" feels like mine, but my being seems to come from somewhere else).  

The somewhere else of being is the passive self.  The activity of thinking and identifying myself seems to somehow attach to a distinct passive self that was already around.  Perhaps another way to put this is to say that, yes, for there to be a thinking me there had to be a me to begin with -- but since I didn't spontaneously produce myself by thinking, these aren't the same me.  Kant makes us aware of this split, but then effectively skips over where the being-me comes from and simply assumes that there is an existing me that is capable of receiving sensations like thinking; my being is out there, continuously intact and in-itself, even if I can only get at it by thinking within time.  He's not interested in how this being got made.  It's there.  It's an identity, a unity.  It's ready to receive our thinking.  You might think of it as a sort of blank screen that our thought is projected on.

Deleuze considers this assumption of the pre-existing identity of our passive self to be an ad hoc attempt to put the genie back in the box.  He has already shown us that the passive self is constructed, synthesized out of the habits of the world, and cannot simply be taken for granted.  This was exactly the point of the first passive synthesis of habit.  The world already provides us a foothold, a point of view or place our thinking can attach to it.  Roughly speaking, it provides our thought with a body.  In a sense this foothold is us.  We are this body.  Though of course in another sense, this body exists outside of "us" as thinkers.  

Kant points out that we are aware of this mind-body split within our thought.  We are aware that our thinking implies a being that is somehow not us, that we cannot identify with.  But he then quickly assumes that this other-being within our thoughts is some pre-constituted identity that is fully furnished and ready for our thought to move into.  (I'm finding it easy to construe as our body, though Deleuze doesn't quite say this).  There's a fracture within thought (ie. we are aware of it) that refers to something outside of thought.  But this fracture is quickly healed because the thing outside of thought -- our being in-itself -- is assumed to have a ready made form that our thought can actively identify with to immediately reconstitute a unified thinking-and-being self.    

But if the passive self is itself a complicated synthesis based on the repetitions of organic life, the situation is much more complicated and the fracture much harder to repair.  I think, therefore I am.  But I think in time, so all I can really establish by thinking is that there's something thinking right now.  Is this me doing the thinking?  Not in the sense of a stable on-going unified self.  I think therefore ... I am aware of this thinking and the way this thinking implies a being outside this thinking.  I think therefore I fracture my self.  Either the being or the thinking is not me.  In my being though -- in the non-thinking subconscious bodily being that is implied by my thinking -- in my organic animal-being, if you will -- I am the contemplation-contraction of all the habitually repeated elements that make me possible.  My being is synthesized out of these elements, out of the way their repetition leads to my repetition.  This being is really the world's contemplation of the possibility of there being a me.  So if I try to identify my thinking with this passively synthesized self, instead of healing the fracture present in thought by identifying my troubled thinking-self with a simple unitary being-self, I end up making the situation even worse, and blow myself apart into the contemplation of all the elements that made me.  The fracture in my thinking widens into the dissolution of myself.