The Pleasures of Habit

I know I'm constantly saying this, but I fear my last post may have gotten a little technical, and I'd like to reexamine the same idea in less abstract terms.  I do think there's value in exploring the cell membrane interior/exterior metaphor, as it's an important component of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  But that line of thought will only appear more clearly a bit later in Difference and Repetition; right now Deleuze is more interested in Freud's conclusion than the somewhat convoluted path by which he reaches it.  And that conclusion is that a compulsion to repeat, to bind, comes before a compulsion to seek pleasure and avoid unpleasure.  

Translated into more prosaic terms, we might think of this as a solution to the sort of chicken vs. egg problem posed by the relationship between habit and pleasure.   Do we repeat habits because they produce pleasure (sex), or does a lack of pleasure force us to habitually repeat an action (food)?  Like the chicken and the egg, this paradox makes us realize that the question is poorly posed, and that habitual actions and the drive for pleasure must both have evolved from something beyond either of them.  In this case, the paradox dissolves when we understand that there is a passive habit that defines pleasure as what we continually seek.  Passive repetition and instantaneous pleasure are actually the same thing.  From this root grows both our habitual actions as well as the active seeking and avoiding behavior of the pleasure principle.  

The problem of habit is therefore badly framed so long as it is subordinated to pleasure. On the one hand, the repetition involved in habit is supposed to be explained by the desire to reproduce a pleasure obtained; on the other hand, it is supposed to concern tensions which are disagreeable in themselves, but may be mastered with a view to obtaining pleasure. Clearly, both hypotheses already presuppose the pleasure principle: the idea of pleasure obtained and the idea of pleasure to be obtained act only under this principle to form the two applications, past and future. On the contrary, habit, in the form of a passive binding synthesis, precedes the pleasure principle and renders it possible. The idea of pleasure follows from it in the same way that, as we have seen, past and future follow from the synthesis of the living present. The effect of binding is to install the pleasure principle; it cannot have as its object something which presupposes that principle. When pleasure acquires the dignity of a principle, then and only then does the idea of pleasure act in accordance with that principle, in memory or in projects. Pleasure then exceeds its own instantaneity in order to assume the allure of satisfaction in general.

We might make this point even less abstractly by putting it in Buddhist terms.  Have you ever noticed how pleasure never really seems to satisfy even though it's what we constantly seek?   Whichever habitual pleasure we're talking about, whether it's eating, talking, fucking, etc ... we always seem to want it again.  We live with the anticipation and memory of pleasure much more than the direct experience of it.  Naturally, the same thing applies to pain.  It takes quite a lot of concentration and practice to actually feel what pleasure or pain feels like right now, without representing it to ourselves as occurring at some other moment, without it pushing us immediately into action.  

Of course, in Buddhism, this connection between pleasure and repetition is the first noble truth and the source of our suffering: 

The first truth, suffering (Pali: dukkha; Sanskrit: duhkha), is characteristic of existence in the realm of rebirth, called samsara (literally "wandering").  

Usually people think of rebirth happening after you die, making it a cosmological myth very similar to the metempsychosis we already saw in Plato.  Reincarnation, however, is more usefully thought of as what happens between any two moments, not just between one life and the next.  We die and are reborn every instant, constantly repeating the habit of being.  The binding between those moments defines us as a self, an ego, existing across time, contracting two moments till they touch.  At the same time, it defines pleasure as what we are always chasing but never attaining once and for all, most fundamentally all those things that would let us repeat ourselves again.  This habit of rebirth -- which we would usually just call the persistence or existence of our self as an object -- installs pleasure as an ideal principle, which when you think about it, merely guarantees a psychical life dominated by suffering.  

You can similarly interpret the second of the three characteristics -- all experience is unsatisfactory -- in the same light.  As Deleuze says, when pleasure is elevated to a principle, it assume "the allure of satisfaction in general".  Any particular pleasure necessarily falls short of this general satisfaction and becomes unsatisfactory.  In the context of the repetition implied by habitus, no experience is an instantaneous island, but always part of an infinite archipelago that extends forwards and backwards in time (in fact, defines forwards and backwards in time).  As I vaguely sketched out at the end of my earlier ramblings about mysticism, this is closely connected to the first characteristic -- impermanence.  Each experiences that bangs into us from without is seen from the inside as unsatisfactory, not a stable stopping point.  

And all of this is the fault of being bound up within the cursed consciousness of our cell membrane!  Buddhism sees this whole narcissistic cycle of rebirth as something to be overcome.  Deleuze here has a more descriptive take, just identifying consequences of the fact that habit is a card we have always already been dealt.  But remember, this is just the first passive synthesis we've been talking about so far.  That cell membrane is destined to burst.