Last time I tried to lay out the high level view that connects the idea of repetition-for-itself to the production of the absolutely new: "repetition is, for itself, difference in itself." Now we have to go back and specify more exactly how Deleuze gets from A to B.
I think the place to start is a couple of puzzling quotes that constitute a sort of Deleuzian theory of history.
Historians sometimes look for empirical correspondences between the present and the past, but however rich it may be, this network of historical correspondences involves repetition only by analogy or similitude. In truth, the past is in itself repetition, as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other. Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced. It is not the historian's reflection which demonstrates a resemblance between Luther and Paul, between the Revolution of 1789 and the Roman Republic, etc. Rather, it is in the first place for themselves that the revolutionaries are determined to lead their lives as 'resuscitated Romans', before becoming capable of the act which they have begun by repeating in the mode of a proper past, therefore under conditions such that they necessarily identify with a figure from the historical past. Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection.
The emphasis is there in the original, and I think it's meant to constitute a kind of paradox that prompts us to think about how it could make sense (Deleuze's favorite rhetorical device). When we commonly say that "history is repeating itself" we usually mean that there is an analogy between the present and the past. But to form an analogy we have to compare point by point the identity of two things that are already given to us. What would it mean to reverse this order and try to think about the action of repetition before thinking about the identity of the things repeated? How does becoming capable of a new action necessarily involve some sort of repetition of history? Wouldn't that sort of repetition just produce the same old thing again and again? It seems like repetition should surely be the outcome of action, and not its condition. And of course, by definition, it shouldn't produce anything new.
Deleuze returns to this paradoxical idea on the next page when he talks about Marx.
Marx's theory of historical repetition, as it appears notably in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, turns on the following principle which does not seem to have been sufficiently understood by historians: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte turns out to be where the earlier examples linking Luther with Paul and the Revolution of 1789 with the Roman Republic came from. I haven't read the whole works, but I think you really only need to go over the first five paragraphs of Chapter 1 to understand what Deleuze is getting at. Basically, Marx is not talking about just any action, but about revolutions in particular. His theory is that the novelty of revolutions has always needed to hide behind the mask of returning to or channeling some past epoch.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
It's not clear from the little I read whether Marx considers this just a cynical rhetorical strategy on the part of these revolutionaries. Is it just meant to recruit people to something they can rally behind, while concealing the true end? Or do the revolutionaries themselves not know what they are creating? Also not clear from Chapter 1 is whether his communist revolution will need this sort of goosing from behind.
I don't think any of those questions matter to Deleuze though. He's just pulling out the idea that you cannot create something revolutionarily new without understanding both the past, and your present relationship to that past. Revolutions are self-consciously 'historic' in that sense -- this is a historic moment. They involve the idea that some present revolutionary agent has somehow become capable of changing the patterns of power that conditioned the past. The revolution's TV airtime may be long overdue, but it cannot happen until the moment is ripe. You can see how this connects to our discussion of the structure of Hamlet, whose central drama is how he becomes capable of his tragic act. Revolutions illustrate the three part order of time that Deleuze uses to define the third synthesis. There is always some moment before the revolution, when the revolutionary is yet incapable of acting, still controlled by the powers of the past, "repeating in the mode of a proper past." It's not a revolution without something to overthrow, something you were just part of. And the job of the revolution is to use something about its present circumstances to transform itself into a force capable of overthrowing its own past and creating a new future.
Now when we substitute "revolution" in our initial paradox, we get:
Repetition is a condition of revolution before it is a concept of reflection.
and
... historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical revolution itself.
... which makes a lot more sense. If you're still in doubt that Deleuze is asserting that there's no concept of revolution without a concept of repetition, this reference to Harold Rosenberg should settle the matter.
... historical actors or agents can create only on condition that they identify them- selves with figures from the past. In this sense, history is theatre: 'their action became a spontaneous repetition of an old role.... It is the revolutionary crisis, the compelled striving for "something entirely new", that causes history to become veiled in myth ...'
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Now that we know that the 'repetition' in the third synthesis is actually 'revolution' we can start to inquire how exactly this kind of repetition is related to the first two. I think the basic idea is that the repetition of the third synthesis happens when the repetitions involved in the first two are seen as repeating some 'thing'. In other words, the third repetition is a repetition of repetitions -- it is repetition repeating itself. Remember that the whole idea of the third synthesis is to kick the problem up a level (to the transcendental) to ask about the form of pure and empty repetition, without any content repeated.
This all sounds mind-bendingly circular and meta. But Deleuze does give us some signposts that lend a little more body to the abstraction. The first synthesis of time was the repetition of habit that defined the identity of an agent. All of time was seen as a present, albeit a present that inevitably passed and repeated itself. The second was the repetition of memory that presented the whole past as a default a priori condition. All of time was the seen as the past, and each passing present was just the tip of the iceberg poking above the waterline, or the telescoping of the whole down to a point. The first synthesis produced and reproduced organic forms, tangible agents. The second synthesis was related to the way the same process could be repeated, each time producing a different form as output depending on the conditions.
If we read these two repetitions in the context of what happens in a social revolution, we can start to see how the simple idea that the present repeats the past could take on new meaning. A revolutionary is someone who at first sees their present habits as conditioned by the past in the same manner as always. Somehow though, they become able to see how those habits were conditioned, and how they as agents are 'conditioned' to repeat them and become yet another output of the same process. But in becoming-revolutionary, it's exactly the past that shaped those habits that needs to be overthrown. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
It's realizing or becoming conscious of the way the present repeats the past that opens the door to the future. The condition of revolutionary action is directly conceiving that form of repetition, simultaneously holding in mind the past process and present product as related. This is a bit odd though, since the revolutionary is the product, at the same time as they are also the holding together. Further, that ability to hold the two together actually transforms them from a first product (so to speak) into something else -- the creator of future. So the tension of holding past and future together splits the revolutionary consciousness into before and after. Becoming capable of making that split is what a revolution is all about. That's how Deleuze believes you make a future. The price of the future though is the transformation of the agent and their habits out of all recognition (and remember that according to the first synthesis, the agent is their habits). Basically, the old agent must die tragically to create the future.
In all three syntheses, present, past and future are revealed as Repetition, but in very different modes. The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated.
A philosophy of repetition must pass through all these 'stages', condemned to repeat repetition itself. However, by traversing these stages it ensures its programme of making repetition the category of the future: making use of the repetition of habit and that of memory, but making use of them as stages and leaving them in its wake; struggling on the one hand against Habitus, on the other against Mnemosyne; refusing the content of a repetition which is more or less able to 'draw off' difference (Habitus); refusing the form of a repetition which includes difference, but in order once again to subordinate it to the Same and the Similar (Mnemosyne); refusing the overly simple cycles, the one followed by a habitual present (customary cycle) as much as the one described by a pure past (memorial or immemorial cycle); changing the ground of memory into a simple condition by default, but also the foundation of habit into a failure of 'habitus', a metamorphosis of the agent; expelling the agent and the condition in the name of the work or product; making repetition, not that from which one 'draws off' a difference, nor that which includes difference as a variant, but making it the thought and the production of the 'absolutely different'; making it so that repetition is, for itself, difference in itself.
I think it's on the right track to call this a resonance between present and past that allows for the agent to transform their habits and create a future. The image is of two separate systems that get linked indirectly, setting up a feedback loop of interaction that can ultimately blow both of them apart. I still feel like this is a bit mysterious though. I remind myself that it happens in a caesura, off-stage. I also keep in mind that Deleuze is literally saying that the present and the past repeat the future; the future is the 'model' not the copy in the scheme, an obvious paradox. Which makes me think that the mysteriousness is actually inherent to the concept, rather than (completely) a failure of my understanding. At bottom, I even think there is a sense in which absolute novelty, absolute difference, is -- to borrow the term Stengers applies to Whitehead's notion of creativity -- 'the ultimate' mystery in Deleuze's philosophy. It's a concept so central to his philosophy that it cannot be explained or defined in itself without dragging in everything else.
And yet (at the risk of repeating ourselves) we can try to understand this a little better. Let's think about what needs to happen for the first two types or levels of repetition to touch and couple without becoming the same. The first synthesis of habit has to do with the repetition of actual organic parts, separate distinct identities or forms. The second synthesis of memory has to do with the repetition of a whole process that produces a variety of possible forms.
[Deleuze usually calls this second the realm of the virtual in order to dissuade us from the idea that it is just like the actual, but, you know, not here and now. The possible isn't all laid out in advance as a complete phase space, with our actual moment occupying one distinct point. It's more like the possible grows alongside the actual, changing and responding to it through a process of mutual adaptation. Some day I will write something about Stuart Kaufmann's idea of the adjacent possible and the Library of Babel. But Deleuze hasn't really gone into this distinction yet in Difference and Repetition, so I think it's easiest to keep using the 'possible' for now.]
So the moment we're interested in is when the actual touches the possible. Each side of this encounter is a repetition. The first a repetition of parts, the second a repetition of a whole. It turns out we've already talk a little about this structure. In discussing the first synthesis we considered the mutual adaptation of organism and environment. The organism repeats itself because the environment repeats itself, and vice versa. In fact, the environment is nothing but the organisms, and vice versa. These are two ways of looking at 'the same' thing. I think Deleuze's idea that these two repetitions repeat one another suggests not only that these sides oscillate back and forth, going round and round in a feedback loop of coevolutionary adaptation, but also that they share a common form, that is, they are both examples of the construction of identity. In other words, the identity of the organisms and the identity of the environment, the actual part and the possible whole, are created together at the same moment by some mechanism of resonant coupling that knows nothing about those identities.
It's very difficult to get a handle on how to express this state that is, as it were, before the identities of part and whole, organism and environment. Deleuze talks about it as 'the future', but it is a future that envelops all of time, and in fact it is what is repeated by both past and present. What they are repeating is the yet-to-come, the production of qualitative change -- ie. the future. This future constantly creates novel identities, but only by using the interaction of the prior identities of organism and environment as a base. The by product of this new creation, however, is the dissolution of the identities that fed it. That's why Deleuze continually emphasizes the way the third synthesis sweeps away with the conditions of the past and transforms the agent that helped produce it, precisely like a revolution does.
Eternal return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of metamorphosis. However, it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product, the independence of the work. It is repetition by excess which leaves intact nothing of the default or the becoming-equal. It is itself the new, complete novelty.
It's as if it were dissolving turles all the way down. It's impossible to figure out whether the future comes before or after. It's actually the form of distinction between before and after, a pure and empty form that nevertheless constantly produces more.
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