Let's start with something I think I more or less understand. Deleuze's description of real objects is straightforward if we keep in mind one crucial distinction. When we call something a real object, we usually mean, in the parlance of our times, that it is some material entity objectively hanging around out there in the world. Like, say, a rock, or a tree that has fallen in the woods. This is not what Deleuze means by the term. He signals this by using the term 'objectal' in place of the normal 'objective'. He means to convey that a real object exists, as an object, for some subject. It is indeed posited as outside that subject, as something that constitutes a reality beyond the subject that is necessary for sustaining it. But it is not objective in the sense of 'being independent of a subject' that we usually give to this term.
[In this context, the word 'objective' actually seems like a weird way to describe some sort of substantive bedrock of reality. If it's supposed to be something that doesn't require any subjects to exist, then why exactly would you call it object-ive? Doesn't the term object pair inseparably with subject? You might instead claim that the measure of objectivity is whatever is conserved between subjects, at the limit, whatever experience would be the same for every possible subject. But then, that also doesn't seem like a good candidate for some independent object-ive substance of reality, since it actually requires all subjects, and nothing but subjects, for its definition. Either way, you'd be better off describing underlying reality as transcendental -- beyond the subject and object, as the process by which they are reciprocally fashioned.]
Deleuze's definition of a real object is basically whatever an organism seeks that reliably brings it pleasure. It's a very pragmatic definition of reality that brackets entirely whether the object in question is a true representation of the world. If it mobilizes my action as an organism according to the pleasure principle, and hence works to keep me around and reproducing myself, then it's real, by definition. For example, food and water are going to be the top real objects for mammals.
Real objects are defined relative to a subject. We're not trying to determine the metaphysical furniture of the world that would be available for any subject to sit on. Every organism is just a little machine that captures, or binds, the parts of the world need to produce and reproduce its form. As we saw, the contraction that forms the machine, its power of reproduction, and the dominance of the pleasure principle all arise together as three aspects of the first passive synthesis of habitus.
With the active synthesis of reality we're discussing here, the passive synthesis extends from the desire for pleasure as satisfaction in general, to the desire for specific pleasures, you might say intermediate pleasures, along the way to the most basic pleasure of self-reproduction (narcissism). These intermediate objects serve as goals that mobilize the organism to action. They are the supposed endpoints of these actions, even though they are better described as the best means of getting what the organism fundamentally seeks (ie. existence, repetition in time). Each organism will have a different set of goals and hence a different set of real objects because each organism is produced by a different form of binding. For my monkey ancestors, food, water, and dangerous tigers were all real objects. For plants, tigers are not going to be an object at all, and the sun is going to figure more prominently in the list. No organism binds everything. Each produces for itself just the real objects that it needs to seek out through its actions. No matter which organism we're talking about, most of what we scientifically call "objective reality" is going to be left out, just the way the real objects in my world leave out the ultraviolet and the infrasonic. The reality of what we might call scientific objects is an interesting question, but not the more ethological one we're interested in right now.
But we should get back to the text, because I realize I've written a long preamble that is just meant to ward off confusion without having explored what Deleuze actually says about real objects. First, he describes how real objects are synthesized.
... an active synthesis is established upon the foundation of the passive syntheses: this consists in relating the bound excitation to an object supposed to be both real and the end of our actions (synthesis of recognition, supported by the passive synthesis of reproduction). Active synthesis is defined by the test of reality in an 'objectal' relation, and it is precisely according to the reality principle that the Ego tends to 'be activated', to be actively unified, to unite all its small composing and contemplative passive egos, and to be topologically distinguished from the Id. The passive egos were already integrations, but only local integrations, as mathematicians say; whereas the active self is an attempt at global integration.
So real objects develop as a second level of synthesis situated on top of the first passive synthesis that bound together each of the organs (like the eye) of an organ-ism. The multiple drives for pleasure that characterized each local passive ego in the first synthesis are integrated into a global form. They are integrated, prioritized and, as it were, projected onto an object that is supposed to satisfy them, creating the unified active Ego at the same moment as the object this Ego wants.
Reality, in other words, is constructed. It is defined as the object of the global activity that unifies the passive local egos. Reality is what brings us what we want, the stuff capable of bringing all the fractious drives into an organization that satisfies them. Following Freud, Deleuze sees the reality principle as an extension of the pleasure principle, not as a force in opposition to it. Reality is just the means by which we get pleasure, not fundamentally something that prevents or limits our pleasure. In fact, as we saw, pleasure already was curiously unsatisfactory in itself. It had a lack of pleasure, a wanting, built into it already, and needed to be repeated all the time. The reality principle simply extends this search for pleasure by positing some object as our most reliable means for repeating it.
It would be completely wrong to consider the positing of reality to be an effect induced by the external world, or even the result of failures encountered by passive syntheses. On the contrary, the test of reality mobilises, drives and inspires all the activity of the ego: not so much in the form of a negative judgement, but in moving beyond the binding in the direction of a 'substantive' which serves as a support for the connection. It would also be wrong to suppose that the reality principle is opposed to the pleasure principle, limiting it and imposing renunciations upon it. The two principles are on the same track, even though one goes further than the other. The renunciations of immediate pleasure are already implicit in the role of principle which pleasure assumes, in the role that the idea of pleasure assumes in relation to a past and a future. A principle is not without duties.
In the case of the eye, the real object is right under our noses. It's our everyday world of visual objects. The eye binds together differences in the intensity of light. It extends this synthesis into the brain as it posits or constructs whatever object produced those differences and reflected them into the eye. The visual system as a whole then is based on the passive synthesis of an eye the collects a bunch of differences, and the active synthesis of a visual object that guides our action. Oh shit, that fast moving blur of stripes is a tiger, run! A real object arises when there is a thing that an animal can do something about, something that affects it globally and stirs it to action. This concept of reality seems to be a restatement of the pragmatic principle that the truth is what works.
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There's still some confusion in my mind about how exactly this synthesis works. Deleuze calls it an active synthesis. But is it really prepared by a second round of passive synthesis, this time a global passive synthesis of the Ego made from the building blocks of the passive local egos? It sounds a lot like it repeats the same structure as the first passive synthesis on a higher level. Then the Ego could become "activated" by the search for a global object that would satisfy its pleasure, which would be a third synthesis, this time an active one that synthesizes an object for this newly created global Ego. Though maybe if it follows the form of the first passive synthesis, there's no difference between the synthesis of the Ego and the synthesis of the object, which would make the whole thing read like a passive synthesis of an active agent.
I feel like there's a question of part and whole lurking here that I haven't completely grasped yet. The problem actually seems to correspond to one that comes up in Beyond the Pleasure Principle when Freud investigates whether a single cell organism like an amoeba could have a death drive, or whether the death drive can only happen in an organism of at least multicellular complexity, where one part can work against another unknowingly. Do 'I' desire 'my' death directly, or is there something 'within me' that desires an impersonal sort of dissolution that just accidentally happens to kill me?
So far, I've been treating the first passive synthesis as if it pertained immediately to a full organism with its drive for self-replication. Deleuze, however, gave us the organ of the eye as an example. The eye may focus and reproduce scattered light, but it does not reproduce itself (at least not by itself). We might see the organization of the form of the eye as reflecting a "passion for repetition" on the part of the full organism that does reproduce itself directly, and so "forms an eye for itself" as passive adaptation to an environment that serves to reproduce an organism with this form. But this seems to already require a fully formed organism, which I thought was what we were only just now talking about with the second, active synthesis. In addition, Deleuze calls the eye a passive ego, a "seeing ego", that enjoys a narcissistic satisfaction in its own existence. This suggests that the pleasure involved in the binding is the eye enjoying itself, and not the organism enjoying its eye. Perhaps those two converge if we interpret the binding as introducing a drive for repetition that operates both for itself and for the organism at the same time. But here again, it seems we would need an organism, which I thought we were only getting now, at stage two. I suspect that there is some recursive fractal structure at work here, similar to what we found in our first study of the three repetitions, and it will only become clear when we again reach the third synthesis. Is the passive local ego of the organ somehow simultaneously synthesized as a whole form in itself and as part of a larger totality in the process of formation? It's a thing in its own right, but always in some context that extends beyond it?
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