Repetition is Virtual

In our last episode I added yet another word (intersubjectvity) to describe what's quickly becoming the most over-loaded concept of all time -- the virtual object.  

I tried to illustrate how me might consider our self as a virtual object.  This object would be something like the process that establishes the intersubjective relation between all our various selves at various time points.  It aims to account for how we can experience an ongoing self across time without taking any particular instantaneous self, or even the general collection of all our selves, as the model for our true self.  There is nothing more than ongoing flow, the process of transformation of one possible temporal self into another.  The virtual object 'self' is the structure of that process, an invariant, in the mathematical sense, of those transformations.

Like I say, this just added yet another way to describe the virtual object.  It's a reflection of a reflection.  It's a sexual drive.  It's a partial object, a part of a real object and a part of our self.  It's a missing object, a part of its own self, without identity and in constant motion.  It's a fragment of the pure past, a memory that never actually happened.  It's a symbol.  It's intersubjective.  It's not a thing but a process.  This proliferation of terms is meant to help us 'identify' something inherently unidentifiable. 

Ultimately, what we're trying to 'identify' is really the concept of identity itself.  And in a world of difference, identity can only mean repetition.  Not repetition of something, because this would presume a repeated identity.  But repetition for itself, repetition repeating itself.  Identity is produced when repetition for itself succeeds in relating differences to one another.  Different possible outcomes are related to one and the same process.  The repetition of this process of relation becomes prior to the things repeated.

But this is a very difficult idea.  It might help to back up a couple of pages and talk a little about what Deleuze is not saying.  In fact, he starts this section with a critique of the failure of every psychoanalytic concept of repetition.  

There are a variety of places where repetition appears in psychoanalysis.  The most concrete is the suggestion that our neurotic fixations stem from hidden aspects of our childhood sexual experience that, so long as the analyst is unable to help us see them, we are doomed to repeat.  In other words, it claims that our counterproductive present behaviors repeat our childhood traumas because we have repressed those memories.  Slightly more abstractly, psychoanalysis makes use of repetition as a therapeutic device.  We are meant to project our problematic childhood relationships onto the analyst himself in the form of a transference neurosis.  With his help, we then are able to not merely see, but to dramatize those lost events.  We play them out again in therapy in the hopes of achieving some catharsis.  Repetition also appears in psychoanalytic theory more abstractly.  Freud thought of the death drive as the desire of a living thing to repeat or return its 'natural' or original state -- inorganic material.  And Jung thought that our individual unconscious was constantly repeating or reincarnating archetypes contained in some larger collective unconscious.  It's not immediately obvious why the unconscious should be so dominated by repetition, by psychoanalysis keeps coming back to it again and again.

I lay all these out because Deleuze goes after each one and shows us how all of them are based on an idea of repetition that necessarily involves a first time, an original model, repeated a second time, as copy.  

The question is whether repetition may be understood as operating from one present to another in the real series, from a present to a former present. In this case, the former present would play the role of a complex point, like an ultimate or original term which would remain in place and exercise a power of attraction: it would be the one which provides the thing that is to be repeated, the one which conditions the whole process of repetition, and in this sense would remain independent of it.  The concepts of fixation and regression, along with trauma and the primal scene, express this first element. As a consequence, repetition would in principle conform to the model of a material, bare and brute repetition, understood as the repetition of the same: the idea of an 'automatism' in this context expresses the modality of a fixated drive, or rather, of repetition conditioned by fixation or regression.

This bare or material repetition could also be called numerical repetition.  It involves counting the number of distinct instances of the same thing.  

Of course, if recognizing a repetition were as simple as counting sheep, we wouldn't need Herr Doktor Freud monkeying about in our dreams.  So the psychoanalytic theory of repetition has to have a second element to it to explain why repetition is not immediately obvious -- each time the same thing returns, it has a new disguise.  This disguise is created by our repression, some force which tries to prevent the original term from repeating itself.  This force that is opposed to the power of repetition never really succeeds completely.  It only manages to change the form in which the repeated original manifests itself, either by introducing some code for it (my what a big cigar you have Herr Doktor!) or, at the limit, by sublimating the original sexual drive and turning it into some 'higher' principle (how aesthetically magnificent is the world's tallest tower!).  But the most important point for Deleuze is that this force is separate from and opposed to the force of the repetition.  It comes from outside the repetition, which always strives to produce exactly the same thing, not some modified or disguised copy.

And if this material model is in fact perturbed and covered over with all kinds of disguises, with a thousand and one forms of disguise or displacement, then these are only secondary even if they are necessary: the distortion in the majority of cases does not belong to the fixation, or even to the repetition, but is added or superimposed on to these; it necessarily clothes them, but from without, and may be explained by the repression which translates the conflict (within the repetition) between the repeater and what is repeated. The three very different concepts of fixation, automatic repetition and repression testify to this distribution between a supposed last or first term in relation to repetition, a repetition which is supposed to be bare underneath the disguises which cover it, and the disguises which are necessarily added by the force of a conflict.

I think this critique is pretty clear when it comes to Freud's psychoanalytic method.  But Deleuze also critiques psychoanalytic theory by extending the same idea to cover a more abstract range of possible "ultimate or original terms".  For example, the thing repeated by the death drive is the state of being inorganic matter.  But this too is just a state, a fixed type of identity, albeit a more abstract one defined by the property 'not-alive'.  

Even - and above all - the Freudian conception of the death instinct, understood as a return to inanimate matter, remains inseparable from the positing of an ultimate term, the model of a material and bare repetition and the conflictual dualism between life and death.

Likewise, making the original or ultimate term imaginary or spiritual instead of material doesn't help either.  So long as we continue to think of it as a state defined by some pre-established identity we will still just be counting the number of copies of some model. 

It matters little whether or not the former present acts in its objective reality, or rather, in the form in which it was lived or imagined. For imagination intervenes here only in order to gather up the resonances and ensure the disguises between the two presents in the series of the real as lived reality. Imagination gathers the traces of the former present and models the new present upon the old.

Even if my childhood was actually blissful and I merely imagined it as traumatic, I would still be copying the model of that same imagination by reliving it as a neurotic adult.  In fact, the problem persists even if we assume the original imagination wasn't my own, but an image selected from some universal or cultural unconscious, since in both cases, this mysterious ur-memory would simply be repeated twice in my own imaginative experience.  

Nor do we believe that the Freudian discovery of a phylogenesis or the Jungian discovery of archetypes can correct the weaknesses of such a conception. Even if the rights of the imaginary as a whole are opposed to the facts of reality, it remains a question of a 'psychic' reality considered to be ultimate or original; even if we oppose spirit and matter, it remains a question of a bare, uncovered spirit resting upon its own identity and supported by its derived analogies; even if we oppose a collective or cosmic unconscious to the individual unconscious, the former can act only through its power to inspire representations in a solipsistic subject, whether this be the subject of a culture or a world.

In summary, every aspect of the psychoanalytic theory of repetition is based on the model of recognition and representation.  It counts identities.  This theory will never help us build a self, to follow the construction of a subject capable of having experiences.  Instead, it is constantly presuming the identity of that subject experiencing a real or imagined object at the outset, as an original model which keeps coming back in the form of a disguised copy that partially resembles it.  It takes the conclusion as a premise.

The traditional theory of the compulsion to repeat in psychoanalysis remains essentially realist, materialist and subjective or individualist. It is realist because everything 'happens' between presents. It is materialist because the model of a brute, automatic repetition is presupposed. It is individualist, subjective, solipsistic or monadic because both the former present - in other words, the repeated or disguised element - and the new present - in other words, the present terms of the disguised repetition - are considered to be only the conscious or unconscious, latent or manifest, repressed or repressing representations of the subject. The whole theory of repetition is thereby subordinated to the requirements of simple representation, from the standpoint of its realism, materialism and subjectivism. Repetition is subjected to a principle of identity in the former present and a rule of resemblance in the present one.

Okay, but then so if we can't understand the repetition that Deleuze wants us to think about by counting things that resemble an original identity, how can we understand it?  Basically, by paradoxically taking non-identity as the original term that is repeated.  Instead of seeing one thing repeating another we focus on the way the relationship between them is repeated.  We think of this relationship coming before the identity of the things that it relates and giving rise to this identity.  The virtual object is exactly an attempt to think of this between as a 'thing' in its own right.  It's a sort of figure-ground reversal of our usual way of looking at things.  Instead of things that then get related, we take the relation as a 'thing' in and of itself, and the distinct things to be various modifications of that relation.

However, while it may seem that the two presents are successive, at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact they form, rather, two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them.

Repetition is constituted not from one present to another, but between the two coexistent series that these presents form in function of the virtual object (object = x). It is because this object constantly circulates, always displaced in relation to itself, that it determines transformations of terms and modifications of imaginary relations within the two real series in which it appears, and therefore between the two presents.

This kind of repetition in some sense creates the identities of the things we can later count, and it creates them precisely as related, as instances of 'the same thing'.  It is exactly the idea we need to get past the problem of taking some identity for granted as we try to explain how we recognize and remember who we are through time.  Otherwise the whole action of remembering or identifying is left as fundamentally mysterious and undefined.

Consider the two presents, the two scenes or the two events (infantile and adult) in their reality, separated by time: how can the former present act at a distance upon the present one? How can it provide a model for it, when all its effectiveness is retrospectively received from the later present?

It's not that my current self happens to remember my childhood self.  Instead, my current self is produced as remembering that childhood self.  The memory, the middle term or relation, draws together the terms as a repetition.  It gives a commonality to those terms which didn't pre-exist this relation.  The only thing repeating here is the process of drawing together, which has as its product two related moments. 

Maybe we can make this more concrete by considering how biological memory actually works.  We tend to think of our memories by analogy to a computer (or formerly a book) -- we say they are stored somewhere, and that we have go locate and retrieve them.  In short, we treat them like objects.  But if a past memory is an object, how does it ever do anything in the present?  What is its mechanism of action-at-a-temporal-distance?  We say that something in the present object reminds us of this past object, and then we go call it up.  But then the present can't really be copied from that memory.  Why would the copy set off in pursuit of a model it doesn't have any reason to believe exists, and that can only be useful once it's dragged back to the present?  The model doesn't seem to have any causal effect here.  It's just a placeholder for some internal mechanism we don't see but by which present stimulus produces present perception or action.  On the other hand, if the present is the model and the memory is the copy, then what's the point of producing a memory at all, since it seems like this wouldn't invoke a real past, but just an imaginary one that anyhow doesn't seem to add anything.  The passage I quoted above continues:

Furthermore, if we invoke the indispensable imaginary operations required to fill the temporal space, how could these operations fail ultimately to absorb the entire reality of the two presents, leaving the repetition to subsist only as the illusion of a solipsistic subject? 

Either way you look at it, it's difficult to know how the memory, considered as a snapshot of a no longer real past experience, can have any effect in the present.

Of course, we know that memories are not like objects stored like photos in file cabinets somewhere in the brain.  We know that on some level a memory has to be something marked, in the present, as a re-creation of something marked as not-present.  As far as I know, no one really understands the neural mechanism for this, at least for conscious human memories.  But we do know something about the way memories are 'stored' in simpler neural systems.  They're stored in the structure of the connections between neurons.  "Neurons that fire together wire together".  What makes something a memory is that it reactivates a structure that had been modified by earlier activation patterns.  This neural mechanism of memory gives us a clear image of how two different triggers get related as memories by repeating the same process of activity.  In this case, there is really no original instance of which later memories would be copies.  Memories are continuously encoded in the ongoing modifications of the structure of the brain.  The water flows down this gully because of the pattern of erosion created by an earlier flow.  

Hopefully that digression helps us to better understand how the essence of memory, of identity across time, is a process of transformation that leaves behind a residue in a structure of the world.  Deleuze of course puts this more poetically by saying that disguise is an essential, and not an accidental, part of repetition.  There is no first instance which appears modified by disguise a second time.  What's repeated is the modification, the variation, the constantly transforming process of activation leading to reactivation.

The displacement of the virtual object is not, therefore, one disguise among others, but the principle from which, in reality, repetition follows in the form of disguised repetition. Repetition is constituted only with and through the disguises which affect the terms and relations of the real series, but it is so because it depends upon the virtual object as an immanent instance which operates above all by displacement.

I think there are a variety of reasons that Deleuze talks about this as form of "disguise".  It ties it to the symbolic disguise that psychoanalysis identifies in our dreams.  It relates it to Nietzsche's idea of masks.  But translated into plainer English, disguise and displacement are simply meant to describe the way we never as see a process itself directly, but always have to infer it from its products.  A process is an odd object because it is always hidden behind those products.  It can't be known in any other way.  In which case every time we attempt to grasp it we come at it through some relationship between multiple products.  This is the easiest way to understand the displacement here.   Nor can it ever be exhausted by any finite collection of products.  There is always a part of it that remains in reserve, as a potential for further transformation and new products.   It never coincides with itself, so to speak, as a plainly self-identical object, but is always moving.  It is motion.

Behind the masks, therefore, are further masks, and even the most hidden is still a hiding place, and so on to infinity. The only illusion is that of unmasking something or someone.

In the first place, the mask means the disguise which has an imaginary effect on the terms and relations of the two real series which properly coexist. More profoundly, however, it signifies the displacement which essentially affects the virtual symbolic object, both in its series and in the real series in which it endlessly circulates. (Thus, the displacement which makes the eyes of the bearer correspond with the mouth of the mask, or shows the face of the bearer only as a headless body, allowing that a head may none the less, in turn, appear upon that body.) 

The virtual is always a very slippery concept that can easily be misunderstood in a number of ways.  It is as inherently hard to grasp as the notion of time itself.