In this next section (pg. 103-106) Deleuze comes back more explicitly to the theme of the chapter and connects virtual objects to the idea of repetition for itself. We've already seen that these objects are partial, inherently mobile, always missing from themselves, and symbolic. But what do any of those characteristics have to do with the concept of repetition?
As always, to sort this out, we have to step back to the problem. Chapter 1 tries to conceive an atomized world of pure flux, pure instantaneous difference. Chapter 2 then begins to ask how, in such a setting, we could ever come up with a concept of identity. Repetition in time, or across time, is the closest we can come to the concept of a stable identity given our starting point. So the overall problem of repetition is really a problem of how identity can be constructed. Within that general question, the whole psychoanalytic section we are working on now addresses the more specific problem of how a human identity that senses, remembers, and even thinks, can be constructed from infant milquetoast. Finally, the specific part of that section we're working on today has been addressing memory. We might state the problem as: how can I develop a sense of my self as an ongoing substantial entity that's the same from moment to moment? How can I remember who I am? If I don't take this identity for granted at the outset, if I think of each instant as a completely different and new moment, it would seem I have to develop some notion of how my current self now repeats my former self. But then the question immediately becomes, "wait, repeats what exactly?" Where would the first self have come from? This is going to be the jumping off point for understanding Deleuze's difficult idea of the way a virtual object is a kind of symbolic repetition that is defined precisely by never having a first time.
I think the easiest way into this idea is to frame it as a question of intersubjectivity. In a world of difference, 'I' am not one subject but many -- an infinity of former and present selves. The question is what holds these subjects together. We usually ask this as: what stable underlying object is being repeated each time one of these subjects appear? We imagine the production of a copy made according to a model. There is an initial model, from which we can derive an infinite number of copies, each with some acceptable amount of variation (because if the variation is too big, it's not 'the same' as the model, it becomes something different). In the case of a human self though, where would this initial model have come from? For psychoanalysis, the answer is obvious -- it came from our childhood interaction with our parents. This moment sets up the model that we repeat in disguised form for our whole life.
For Deleuze, of course, this whole schema of the model and the copy is problematic, because it presumes that we can identify the original model. He is therefore critical of the stress most psychoanalysis places on childhood memory. In place of thinking about a model -- a thing or particular empirical memory -- being repeated, he wants us to put the process of repetition first. This sounds a bit counter-intuitive. How can we recognize a repetition without having a first thing to repeat in a second instance? But this problem vanishes (or at least changes form) if what's repeated is a process which produces all N instances of the thing as a result. Instead of considering each copy of ourselves as a chip off the old block, we have to see that the copies directly relate to one another through a process of causal transformation. They need not be mediated by some central original from which they each differ. As a result, what we usually call a self is actually not a thing, but a relationship between things, the process of the transformation of one into another. In other words, an inter-subjectivity. The virtual is intersubjective, or as we said earlier, it's a relationship between possible selves (or perhaps sets of possible selves).
Clearly, the 'thing' repeated here, the process, is a different kind of thing than the repeated products. That's why Deleuze describes it as virtual, and why it has so many paradoxical properties.
Repetition is no more secondary in relation to a supposed ultimate or originary fixed term than disguise is secondary in relation to repetition. For if the two presents, the former and the present one, form two series which coexist in the function of the virtual object which is displaced in them and in relation to itself, neither of these two series can any longer be designated as the original or the derived. They put a variety of terms and subjects into play in a complex intersubjectivity in which each subject owes its role and function in the series to the timeless position that it occupies in relation to the virtual object. As for this object itself, it can no longer be treated as an ultimate or original term: this would be to assign it a fixed place and an identity repugnant to its whole nature. If it can be 'identified' with the phallus, this is only to the extent that the latter, in Lacan's terms, is always missing from its place, from its own identity and from its representation. In short, there is no ultimate term - our loves do not refer back to the mother; it is simply that the mother occupies a certain place in relation to the virtual object in the series which constitutes our present, a place which is necessarily filled by another character in the series which constitutes the present of another subjectivity, always taking into account the displacements of that object = x. In somewhat the same manner, by loving his mother the hero of In Search of Lost Time repeats Swann's love for Odette. The parental characters are not the ultimate terms of individual subjecthood but the middle terms of an intersubjectivity, forms of communication and disguise from one series to another for different subjects, to the extent that these forms are determined by the displacement of the virtual object.
While this idea of an intersubjective virtual is basically what I wanted to convey in this post, I now find myself wanting to add all sorts of addenda to head off various possible misunderstandings. Because it's very easy to take the words "the process not the product is what is repeated" at face value, to substitute one object for another and miss the most crucial point. All of the paradoxical apparatus of virtual objects is meant to help us conceive in detail exactly what is the difference between a process and a thing.
A process is not just a more abstract version of a thing. It's also not merely a part or aspect of a thing. When we speak of the intersubjective nature of our virtual self, we don't just mean what attributes all of our different present selves have in common. The virtual self is not just the totality or overlap or least common denominator of all the real selves. This would not take us outside the concept of identity. We would still be taking the individual identity of each of the selves for granted as a sort of substance with various attributes or properties. Their coincidence would then be some essential core of our self, and each individual self would be related to this core analogously. All the different incarnations would reference the same underlying 'me'.
A true process, on the other hand can't be conceived as a normal sort of object. It inherently involves time, movement, the qualitative change of transformation. It is never static but always circulating, perpetually missing from its place. We never see it directly but only hidden in its products. It's like the wind in this respect. The great symbol of the spirit for a good reason.
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