The first passive synthesis was habit. But what we meant by habit was not our customary habits of mind or the habits of action of a previous identified subject. We meant something more like the habit of the world that actually creates those subjects. From a repetition of elements, the world 'contracts' a habit, which creates a new difference -- the existence of the subject constituted by the contraction.
In our earlier discussion of habit we saw Deleuze illustrate this point by choosing "wheat" as the subject created by the habitual contraction of soil, water, sun, etc ... So it was already clear that "subject" doesn't necessarily mean human subject. Here, he makes it even clearer that the concept of habit extends beyond the human by using the term Habitus instead. Habitus refers to the general shape or appearance or mode of life of a thing, what you might call its morphology, or simply its form. He also introduces another terminological change by replacing "contraction" with "binding". This change is meant to put the concept of habit into contact with Freud's ideas and allows us to identify the form created by habit as a passive and larval type of Ego (whereas he previously used the more neutral term self for the product of a contraction).
With those changes in mind, I think we can understand the first example Deleuze gives for a binding synthesis -- the eye. Now that I think about it, the choice is perhaps a sly pun.
This binding is a genuine reproductive synthesis, a Habitus. An animal forms an eye for itself by causing scattered and diffuse luminous excitations to be reproduced on a privileged surface of its body. The eye binds light, it is itself a bound light. This example is enough to show the complexity of synthesis. For there is indeed an activity of reproduction which takes as its object the difference to be bound; but there is more profoundly a passion of repetition, from which emerges a new difference (the formed eye or the seeing subject).
An eye is exactly something that gathers many different reflective intensities together in one place, reproduces them on the back of the retina and binds them into a coherent image. But from the perspective of the organism, this binding doesn't just reproduce differences that are out there in world. It actually introduces a new difference, a new possibility, a new form, into the world. Now the animal can see. When the animal forms an eye for itself, it creates a new form and a new set of possible actions based on the integration of the external differences. This is a creation of a habitus, simultaneously a morphology and a mode of living.
It might at first seem odd to say this is the animal "contracting the habit of seeing", but when you think of it in terms of evolution, you discover that's a great description. It's a reproduction of the world useful for the reproduction of the animal. You might say that it's the process of the world acquiring a structure relative to the animal. If this particular type of binding and reproduction of the world's excitations is successful enough, it leads, through the animal's reproduction, to another binding of exactly this same type. The world and the organism both acquire a stable repeating habit, a habit expressed as the form of an eye. As with everything in evolution though, there's no active agent -- neither the world nor the animal "want" to acquire this habit, even if once they the do acquire it, they behave as if they "want" it to continue. In other words, the binding involved in an eye is a passive synthesis, a passion for repetition on the part of the animal, and ultimately the world.
Now that we have some sense of what a binding is -- a contraction or integration of differences in the world that creates a new difference that we usually call a form -- we can relate this to Freud's idea of psychical binding or investment as he discusses it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Unfortunately, Freud never really gives totally clear definition of what a bound excitation is in that book. The first mention of it comes early on, in the context of his definition of pleasure:
We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation that is present in the mind but is not in any way 'bound'; and to relate them in such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution.
The Standard Edition text I've got has a little footnote here referring to his Project for a Scientific Psychology (a very early work which incidentally seems like it could be quite interesting) and says that the concept of 'bound' excitations occurs throughout Freud's writings, though it doesn't try to define the term. And indeed, the idea of binding appears in several other places in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, mostly in relation to Josef Breuer's idea that there are two types of energy in the brain that correspond to two types of psychological process -- a freely mobile energy and a bound energy. [I didn't realize that Breuer was Freud's mentor and early co-author; you might even say he was the co-inventor of psychoanalysis.]. To give one example:
As a new factor we have taken into consideration Breuer's hypothesis that charges of energy occur in two forms; so that we have to distinguish between two kinds of cathexis of the psychical systems or their elements a freely flowing cathexis that presses on towards discharge and a quiescent cathexis. We may perhaps suspect that the binding of the energy that streams into the mental apparatus consists in its change from a freely flowing into a quiescent state.
Since I'm not familiar with Breuer, a references like this doesn't exactly clear things up, but they at least it gives us some hints. To understand it though, we have to start with a longer detour through the argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Freud starts off with that definition of pleasure that we've already seen, along with the intuitive notion that we seek pleasure and avoid pain -- we are ruled by the pleasure principle. But then why, if the pleasure principle is so dominant, aren't we, you know, happier? If our whole psychical life is devoted to finding pleasure, why do we so often fail? In particular, Freud considers whether the pleasure principle can explain cases of 'traumatic neurosis' (what we would now call PTSD) where someone constantly dreams about an unpleasant experience. Or, for that matter, how can the pleasure principle explain people's need to reenact or relive the pain of some childhood trauma in therapy? Why can't we just remember or realize intellectually that wanting to kill dad and sleep with mom sucked, and move on? As a result, Freud starts to consider whether there is some other principle of psychical life beyond just the pleasure principle. Is there some instinct that causes us to want to compulsively repeat an experience, regardless of whether it was pleasant or unpleasant?
To address this obscure psychological question, Freud sketches a (self-admittedly) speculative theory of how our conscious perceptual system is related to our unconscious. He hypothesizes that it's just a surface layer of our mind. It's like a skin, a barrier, mostly a shield against a hostile environment and a way of selecting and responding to the tiny chunk of environmental data relevant to our survival. He even analogizes it to the lipid bilayer membrane of an amoeba. In short, it divides an inside from outside, and its functional role is mainly to block, or at least channel or sample, any stimulus coming from outside.
This theory has an interesting corollary. Because the membrane faces out, so to speak, it is not symmetrical. It is good at blocking or filtering external things, but is very sensitive to excitations coming from the inside. As a result, most of what registers in conscious experience is a reflection of the various energies circulating within the organism. Freud even suggests that repression and neurosis begin when these internal energies impinge too strongly on the conscious surface, which then attempts to block them as it does most external excitations. They end up treated as if they had come from the outside, which accounts for the origins of psychological projection.
The fact that the cortical layer which receives stimuli is without any protective shield against excitations from within must have as its result that these latter transmissions of stimulus have a preponderance in economic importance and often occasion economic disturbances comparable with traumatic neuroses. The most abundant sources of this internal excitation are what are described as the organism's 'instincts' -- the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus -- at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research.
It will perhaps not be thought too rash to suppose that the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge. The best part of what we know of these processes is derived from our study of the dream-work. We there discovered that the processes in the unconscious systems were fundamentally different from those in the preconscious (or conscious) systems. In the unconscious, cathexes can easily be completely transferred, displaced and condensed. Such treatment, however, could produce only invalid results if it were applied to preconscious material; and this accounts for the familiar peculiarities exhibited by manifest dreams after the preconscious residues of the preceding day have been worked over in accordance with the laws operating in the unconscious. I described the type of process found in the unconscious as the 'primary' psychical process, in contradistinction to the 'secondary' process which is the one obtaining in our normal waking life. Since all instinctual impulses have the unconscious systems as their point of impact, it is hardly an innovation to say that they obey the primary process. Again, it is easy to identify the primary psychical process with Breuer's freely mobile cathexis and the secondary process with changes in his bound or tonic cathexis. If so, it would be the task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation reaching the primary process. A failure to effect this binding would provoke a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis; and only after the binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and of its modification, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered. Till then the other task of the mental apparatus, the task of mastering or binding excitations, would have precedence not, indeed, in opposition to the pleasure principle, but independently of it and to some extent in disregard of it.
Now we can come back to the distinction borrowed from Breuer between excitations that tend to freely discharge themselves, and ones that become 'bound' but somehow still retain their charge. Binding seems to be some more controlled or channeled type of energetic discharge. The distinction has an almost mechanical flavor that makes it nearly equivalent to blocked and unblocked. Since consciousness lies at the surface layer of the mind, between the deeper unconscious mind and the world, it naturally binds the world on one side, and the internal instincts on the other. In fact, as this definition of cathexis points out, "Freud frequently described the functioning of psychosexual energies in quasi-physical terms". I think we're meant to imagine a flowing psychical liquid that sometimes moves following its own rheological laws, and sometimes gets blocked or channeled or captured in such a way that the energetic difference that powered the flow gets repurposed, and instead of being immediately discharged, has its charge pressed into the service of maintaining an organism -- it gets 'bound'. In other words, binding creates a psychodynamic potential difference that enables the organism, as a non equilibrium physical system, to avoid dissipation. Binding excitations that come from the outside creates the organism at the same time that binding excitations coming from the inside creates the organism's needs and defines its pleasures.
Deleuze equates unbound pleasure to an immanent field of difference and binding to the first synthesis of habit that defines the organisms and makes pleasure into what it seeks 'in principle'.
Biopsychical life implies a field of individuation in which differences in intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations. The quantitative and qualitative process of the resolution of such differences is what we call pleasure. A totality of this kind - a mobile distribution of differences and local resolutions within an intensive field - corresponds to what Freud called the Id, or at least the primary layer of the Id. The word 'id' [Ça] in this sense is not only a pronoun referring to some formidable unknown, but also an adverb referring to a mobile place, a 'here and there' [Ça et lá] of excitations and resolutions.
[It's too bad the Standard Edition translates 'das Es' as 'the Id', when it literally means 'the It'. A 'formidable unknown' that refers to both the impersonal liquid field of difference, and its spontaneous flow that produces little vortices. This probably makes it a misnomer to call it "you" Id. Don't take it personally.]
It is here that Freud's problem begins: it is a question of knowing how pleasure ceases to be a process in order to become a principle, how it ceases to be a local process in order to assume the value of an empirical principle which tends to organise biopsychical life in the Id. Obviously pleasure is pleasing, but this is not a reason for its assuming a systematic value according to which it is what we seek 'in principle'. This is the primary concern of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: not the exceptions to this principle, but rather the determination of the conditions under which pleasure effectively becomes a principle. The Freudian answer is that excitation in the form of free difference must, in some sense, be 'invested', 'tied' or bound in such a manner that its resolution becomes systematically possible. This binding or investment of difference is what makes possible in general, not pleasure itself, but the value taken on by pleasure as a principle: we thereby pass from a state of scattered resolution to a state of integration, which constitutes the second layer of the Id and the beginnings of an organisation.
[The Id here starts to sounds a lot like the Body Without Organs, and Habitus a lot like the beginning of territorialization, the organ-ization of the body.]
The key things that Deleuze takes directly from Freud are the ideas that binding precedes or operates beneath the pleasure principle, and that it has something to do with a compulsion to repeat that doesn't care whether it produces pleasure or pain. However, the meaning of the latter changes substantially as it passes from Freud to Deleuze. As we'll see later, Freud ultimately concludes that the compulsion to repeat that founds the pleasure principle is a sort of innate drive of organic matter to 'return' to its inorganic state -- a death drive. Deleuze, interprets the compulsion to repeat as a passion for repetition. It is really the synthesis of habitus itself, which has a sort of fractal repeating pattern already built into it -- passively, evolutionarily, without the need for any pre-existing active agent. In fact, for Deleuze, the repetition of habit, the binding of light we saw in the case of the eye, is the construction of a form. The death drive becomes creative.
This change allows him to take Freud's analogy between the surface layer of consciousness and the cell membrane a step further. The binding that defines the form, that creates an inside and outside, simultaneously defines what internal drives will constitute the pleasures this form must seek in principle in order to repeat itself from moment to moment (ie. to exist). The creation of the form, its drive to repeat itself, and the pleasure that accompanies this repetition, or anything that supports this repetition, are really all three sides of the same coin. In a sense, they are the existence through time of the cell membrane looked at from outside and inside.
Deleuze draws together the exterior and interior view of the binding -- the binding of elements of the exterior world into a form, and the binding or channeling of interior energies into a reproduction of that form -- into a single synthesis with two parts.
Excitation as a difference was already the contraction of an elementary repetition. To the extent that the excitation becomes in turn the element of a repetition, the contracting synthesis is raised to a second power, one precisely represented by this binding or investment.
What is synthesized is exactly a self, a unit, an agent, a little ego.
Investments, bindings or integrations are passive syntheses or contemplations--contractions in the second degree. Drives are nothing more than bound excitations. At the level of each binding, an ego is formed in the Id; a passive, partial, larval, contemplative and contracting ego. The Id is populated by local egos which constitute the time peculiar to the Id, the time of the living present there where the binding integrations are carried out.
And now we can see why Deleuze changed terms from "self" to "ego". Each of the little egos becomes a center of operations for its own pleasure principle. The binding that defined it as an ego, that contracted excitations into an enclosed form, is the same binding that now contracts internal excitations into a maintenance of that form. That's why being alive feel so good! When pleasure is not the random, mobile, and occasional discharge within an open field but becomes bound to the reproduction of a form it becomes narcissistic. All pleasure is, 'in principle', as a principle guiding our actions, narcissistic.
The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfilment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else: the eye or the seeing ego is filled with an image of itself in contemplating the excitation that it binds. It produces itself or 'draws itself' from what it contemplates (and from what it contracts and invests by contemplation).
If calling all pleasure narcissistic sounds odd, this is only because we have lost our understanding of the myth and corrupted the term. Remember, as we saw earlier, Narcissus does not fall in love with himself, per se. He falls in love with a beautiful reflection in the water. That reflection turns out to be his own. He loves himself, but as an external object. Freud also makes it clear that this is why he chose the term:
... psycho-analysis observed the regularity with which libido is withdrawn from the object and directed on to the ego (the process of introversion); and, by studying the libidinal development of children in its earliest phases, came to the conclusion that the ego is the true and Original reservoir of libido, and that it is only from that reservoir that libido is extended on to objects. The ego now found its position among sexual objects and was at once given the foremost place among them. Libido which was in this way lodged in the ego was described as 'Narcissistic'.
I think this situates the starting point for Deleuze's re-working of the rich material Freud provides in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The high level summary might be that the habits of evolution underlie not just our morphological development, but the basic emotions that drive us (and every other creature).
Habit underlies the organisation of the Id
No comments:
Post a Comment