Is the Unconscious just the Not-conscious?

That question might be another way to express the question Deleuze investigates in the next section (pg. 106-108).  Perhaps this is a better, or at least more tractable, question than why is there an unconscious.  After all, before we can effectively ask why the unconscious exists, we need to characterize how it differs from consciousness.  Putting the question this way also has another advantage.  Freud addressed what makes the unconscious different in The Ego and the Id, and Deleuze begins with a critique of Freud's way of posing the question

Freud distinguishes between a descriptive and a dynamic use of the term unconscious in psychoanalysis.  The descriptive version of the term is just like it sounds -- you describe a state as unconscious because you do not happen to be conscious of it right now, but you are aware that you could be.

'Being conscious' is in the first place a purely descriptive term, resting on perception of the most immediate and certain character. Experience goes on to show that a psychical element(for instance, an idea) is not as a rule conscious for a protracted length of time. On the contrary, a state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about. In the interval the idea was - we do not know what. We can say that it was latent, and by this we mean that it was capable of becoming conscious at any time. Or, if we say that is was unconscious, we shall also be giving a correct description of it. Here unconscious' coincides with latent and capable of becoming conscious'.

The dynamic version of the term is the proper domain of psychoanalysis.  It refers to something that is unconscious on purpose and essentially rather than simply accidentally.  You cannot become conscious of the dynamic unconscious without the special apparatus of psychoanalysis.  

But we have arrived at the term or concept of the unconscious along another path, by considering certain experiences in which mental dynamics play a part. We have found - that is, we have been obliged to assume - that very powerful mental processes or ideas exist (and here a quantitative or economic factor comes into question for the first time) which can produce all the effects in mental life that ordinary ideas do (including effects that can in their turn become conscious as ideas), though they themselves do not become conscious. It is unnecessary to repeat in detail here what has been explained so often before. It is enough to say that at this point psycho-analytic theory steps in and asserts that the reason why such ideas cannot become conscious is that a certain force opposes them, that otherwise they could become conscious, and that it would then be apparent how little they differ from other elements which are admittedly psychical. The fact that in the technique of psycho-analysis a means has been found by which the opposing force can be removed and the ideas in question made conscious renders this theory irrefutable. The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis. Thus we obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us.

In either case though, the unconscious is the opposite of consciousness, either by accident or by design.  In the second case, the two are not merely logical opposites, but are literally locked in conflict.  Deleuze will trace the roots of this opposition between the conscious and the unconscious to Freud's idea that there are ego-drives and sexual-drives, and ultimately to his idea that there are life instincts (Eros) and death instincts (Thanatos).

The phenomena of the unconscious cannot be understood in the overly simple form of opposition or conflict. For Freud, it is not only the theory of repression but the dualism in the theory of drives which encourages the primacy of a conflictual model.

Though this reverses the historical order in which Freud explored these problems, conceptually, everything stems from the dualism between the life and death instincts that he introduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  The death instinct was needed to explain why people suffered from a compulsion to repeat exactly, ultimately rooted in the attempts all organic matter to return to its 'original' inorganic state.  By contrast, the life instinct is a force that tries to prevent this exact repetition, a force that tries to preserve and combine things rather than break them down into their simplest repeating elements.  

Looking back, I see that we didn't really discuss this dualism completely.  When we first spoke of Freud we were focused on what might be beyond the pleasure principle and lead to its operation as a principle.  When we later discussed the difference between ego-drives and sexual-drives it was from the perspective of understanding the difference between virtual objects and real objects.  But both of these oppositions can ultimately be seen as restatements of the opposition of repetition to difference.  

Let us, however, return to the self-preservative sexual instincts. The experiments upon protista have already shown us that conjugation that is, the coalescence of two individuals which separate soon afterwards without any subsequent cell division occurring has a strengthening and rejuvenating effect upon both of them. In later generations they show no signs of degenerating and seem able to put up a longer resistance to the injurious effects of their own metabolism. This single observation may, I think, be taken as typical of the effect produced by sexual union as well. But how is it that the coalescence of two only slightly different cells can bring about this renewal of life? The experiment which replaces the conjugation of protozoa by the application of chemical or even of mechanical stimuli (cf. Lipschtitz, 1914) enables us to give what is no doubt a conclusive reply to this question. The result is brought about by the influx of fresh amounts of stimulus. 

This tallies well with the hypothesis that the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical tensions, that is to say, to death, whereas union with the living substance of a different individual increases those tensions, introducing what may be described as fresh 'vital differences' which must then be lived off. As regards this dissimilarity there must of course be one or more optima. The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the 'Nirvana principle', to borrow a term from Barbara Low) a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.

Because Freud has a material model of repetition that imagines all matter as tending to repeat an original identical state of equilibrium as best it can, any variation, any "vital difference", will be directly opposed to this tendency.  Difference, in other words, will be opposed to repetition.  We have a force for repeating (Thanatos, the death instincts) directly opposed to a force that blocks this repetition (Eros, the life instincts).  Importantly though, this second force is conceived as merely opposed.  It just functions as not-repetition, non-equilibrium.  The life instinct isn't doing anything creative here.  It's just introducing random departures from equilibrium that the death instinct then has to go to all the trouble of cancelling out.  The pleasure principle is nothing other than a systemization of this cancellation.  All our various pleasures and the lives we lead are really just disguises for one and the same death, or as Freud puts it: "What we are left with is that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion".  He even cites Schopenhauer and suggests that Death is the true purpose and identity of Life, and is only covered over by the endless cycles of rebirth.

We already know though that Deleuze believes opposition is only created when difference is confined by representation.  Opposition is just a product of negation, which will always be secondary, produced merely as a byproduct of affirming something different.  For Deleuze, repetition isn't opposed to difference. In fact, "repetition is, for itself, difference in itself".   This is repetition for itself, not repetition of something, just like we tried to conceive difference in itself, not as the difference between things.  Repetition doesn't operate on a material or numerical model where it attempts to repeat the same thing or the same state.  It isn't opposed to variation and disguise, but is a process of relation built directly from these, a process that carries difference within itself and relates one difference to another, without a mediating 'same' term in the middle.  In short, repetition is virtual, spiritual, and not material. 

As a result of looking at repetition in this new way, we can longer think of the unconscious as the opposite of consciousness, either the descriptive logical opposite, or the dynamic conflicting opposite.  The unconscious can't be just the not-conscious, the negation of consciousness.  We have to come up with a new way of thinking about how they are related that reflects their difference in kind, and not just their quantitative difference in size or sign in some libidinal economy.  For the concept of opposition, Deleuze will substitute the idea of the problematic.

However, the conflicts are the result of more subtle differential mechanisms (displacements and disguises). And if the forces naturally enter into relations of opposition, this is on the basis of differential elements which express a more profound instance. The negative, under its double aspect of limitation and opposition, seemed to us in general secondary in relation to the instance of problems and questions: in other words, the negative expresses only within consciousness the shadow of fundamentally unconscious questions and problems, and owes its apparent power to the inevitable place of the 'false' in the natural positing of these problems and questions.

We've touched on the type of being of problems and questions a couple of times already.  First, in the context of Plato and the Sophist, where Deleuze claimed that, "not-being is not the being of the negative."  Instead, he talked about (non)-Being or ?-Being as more fundamental than the being of the negative and giving rise to it.  The second time, we met the being of the question only briefly, when we tried to make sense of the role of fatigue in the first passive synthesis.  The synthesis of habit turned out to revolve around the problem of life and death, the question of how we can exist, how we can 'contract' the habit of being in the world.  

However, in those cases I don't think I understood the importance of substituting the idea of problems for the concept of negation.  I probably still don't completely, but the depth of this way of looking at things is slowing dawning on me now that we have seen the pieces necessary to characterize what a problems is.  The punchline would be that problems and questions are what is repeated in a spiritual or virtual repetition.  We repeatedly ask -- and never fully answer -- the perennial philosophic questions.

First, though, Deleuze distinguishes what a problem is not.  His problems are 'objective' realities, not just the result of some lack of human knowledge.  They are ontological, rather than epistemological.

Questions and problems are not speculative acts, and as such completely provisional and indicative of the momentary ignorance of an empirical subject. On the contrary, they are the living acts of the unconscious, investing special objectivities and destined to survive in the provisional and partial state characteristic of answers and solutions.

A problem doesn't just exist in some ex-chimp skull.  It is constituted when any two instances (things, memories, images, terms) get related as distinct products of the same process.  The two become 'problematic' for another other in the sense that together they become a sign that there is a missing third term, namely, the relation between them.  Thus, a single term in and of itself cannot be problematic.  In one sense, we can only reveal this underlying relationship through the two terms.  We need them to become aware that there is a problem here.  But in another sense, the whole idea of virtual repetition is that this relationship between instances in some sense pre-exists them and creates or shapes those instances.  The only answer to the question -- "Which comes first, the real terms or the virtual relationship?" -- is "yes"; the two are locked in an endless feedback loop.

However, because it is different in kind from the instances, the relation cannot serve as a model for them.  It isn't like them.  It doesn't resemble them.  It's not taking them bowling.  Nevertheless, though it isn't an identifiable thing in the usual sense, the relationship does have a structure to it.  The structure of the relationship that defined the problem is the question.  Or at least, this is my current way of understanding the tricky distinction between problems and questions. 

The problems 'correspond' to the reciprocal disguise of the terms and relations which constitute the reality series. The questions or sources of problems correspond to the displacement of the virtual object which causes the series to develop.

Notice that Deleuze puts 'correspond' in scare quotes here.  Each real term is a disguise.  Not a disguise of some theoretical original un-masked model though.  Each real term is a disguise of a disguise of a ... ad infinitum.  There's no thing for the disguise to be a disguise of.  Hence there's nothing for the terms to correspond to, unless perhaps we think of the process of disguising in this light.  When they are put into relation by a question, the relation between each of the real terms becomes a problem.  Together those problems make up the question, which is something like the circulation of the virtual object that relates one term to another in an endless chain.  The question is the structure of a set of problems.  

So far this is all still very abstract.  But by now we at least have some amount of idea what a virtual object is, so we've got at least some handle on what it means to say that the problem is like the disguises virtual object takes on and the question is like its circulation.  This doesn't immediately explain how this problems would relate to the negative though.  For that, we have to connect our new understanding of repetition back to our earlier analysis of Plato's Ideas.

Plato's Ideas -- the Platonic Forms -- work like questions.  This is not how we usually think of them, and probably not what Plato meant by them, but this is what they will become in the hands of Deleuze.  I find this an absolutely brilliant inversion.  

We often think Plato tried to define the Form of the Good, or Justice, or Love, or the Sophist, as if he were describing the properties of some existing metaphysical thing.  It's a bit like our image of mathematics.  The object is out there, it's abstract and immaterial, but it has a form of identity just like any other object.  And Plato will describe various properties of this object as if it were sitting in front of him and he were drawing its likeness.  A triangle, say.  It's got 3 sides, angles that sum to 180, etc ... No real triangle looks exactly like this Form of a triangle, but once we know what the Form 'looks like', we recognize its degraded likeness in the world. 

However, what if the Forms are less like things, and more like questions?  After all, Plato doesn't do a lot of straight up defining, but he (or Socrates) certainly does a ton of questioning.   And in fact, aren't most of the Dialogues best summarized as posing a question?  Does the Symposium define the Lover?  Does the Republic define the Justice?  Does the Sophist define its headliner or the Statesman define who is the true Shepherd of men?  If Plato wanted simply to expound a system, why didn't he?  These dialogues are really just long questions.  The Forms they indicate are little more than the process of posing the question and beginning the search for the many things that respond to that question.  Who is the true Shepherd of men?  Who is the true Lover?  What is Justice?  Maybe the infamous "Form of the table" is nothing more than the question "What is a table?".  

The question itself doesn't look anything like the answers to it.  A relationship of identity and resemblance doesn't make any sense here because these two things are clearly different in kind.  Yet a question still works a lot like the way our classical version of the Ideas work.  A question structures a whole set of different answers as related to one another and to the question itself.  They are not related as a model to a copy of course.  But the question still produces a sort of unity that explicitly subsumes and orders a whole bunch of different instances as being in some sense 'the same'.  Unlike a model, the unity of the question doesn't oppose the repetition of some original identity to its various different copies.  It explicitly uses those variations to establish exactly what question is insistently being asked through them.  In other words, a question turns difference (in the answers) into repetition (of the question).  

But this was precisely the job description of Plato's Forms!  All the real things are seen as variations of one Idea that they repeat.  The problem lies only in how Plato misconceives the repetition and identity involved in that sentence.  He did emphasize the change in level, the distinction in kind between the Forms and the the world, the ideal and the real, but then he promptly went and conceived the Forms as sitting around in some mythical heaven like so much metaphysical furniture we stuck in storage till our next rebirth.  Once the Forms are treated as identities -- as answers instead of questions -- the world becomes a facsimile that repeats and resembles them by degree.  Difference becomes a process of degradation that terminates in the fake, the simulacrum, the impure -- a copy so degraded that we can no longer even tell what Form it came from.  When the difference is great enough, or when different differences start to mix, it eventually becomes opposed to repetition.  In this way, for Plato, the negative reappears at the end of the chain of likenesses, when it tails off into a chaotic ocean of non-Being.

If instead we treat the Forms as a question, they can unfold endlessly.  There's no limit to the number of answers that can respond to it, and no limit to the number of instances that can be put in problematic pairwise relation as slowly mutating versions of the question.  We never reach the point of opposition; it's just difference repeating itself all the way down.  

Birth and death, and the difference between the sexes, are the complex themes of problems before they are the simple terms of an opposition.

There are no ultimate or original responses or solutions, there are only problem-questions, in the guise of a mask behind every mask and a displacement behind every place. It would be naive to think that the problems of life and death, love and the difference between the sexes are amenable to their scientific solutions and positings, even though such positings and solutions necessarily arise without warning, even though they must necessarily emerge at a certain moment in the unfolding process of the development of these problems. The problems concern the eternal disguise; questions, the eternal displacement. 

I think Deleuze is referring here to the way that questions can have an unfolding progressive specification to them.  For example, to stick with our psychoanalytic theme, the question: "What is the difference between the sexes?" can be asked on a number of different levels.  It's a sexual and reproductive question for animals, a social and behavioral question, a scientific anatomical and hormonal question, etc ...  Each of these different ways of posing the question becomes relevant depending on the context.  One of them is not more ultimate or definitive than another, and they can all get tangled together, a fact you can easily see if you consider this particular question of the sexes from the point of view of a trans-gendered person.  

The insistence, the transcendence and the ontological bearing of questions and problems is expressed not in the form of the finality of a sufficient reason (to what end? why?) but in the discrete form of difference and repetition: what difference is there? and 'repeat a little'. There is never any difference - not because it comes down to the same in the answer, but because it is never anywhere but in the question, and in the repetition of the question, which ensures its movement and its disguise.

Because of the open-ended-ness of the question, there is no wrong answer, in the sense of one that negates or opposes the question.  How would an answer negate a question?  There are, however, false answers, in the sense of answers that aren't relevant to this question, answers that should be related by a different question.  When faced with the chaotic ocean of the world, it can be hard to know what the right question actually is.  It can be hard to know in which way two instances are related, and what difference that relation might make to us.  This isn't because the appearances of the world are opposed to the reality of the Forms though.  It's simply because we cannot be sure which Idea to associate with which instances in the world.  We may falsely associate an instance with an Idea, a problem that becomes inevitable when in reality we are always dealing with the dangling ends of the Great Chain of Platonic Copy Being.  

the negative expresses only within consciousness the shadow of fundamentally unconscious questions and problems, and owes its apparent power to the inevitable place of the 'false' in the natural positing of these problems and questions.

With questions, it's no longer a matter of opposing difference to repetition, but of linking differences to the repetition which 'corresponds' to them.  Unlike with Forms as models, this 'correspondence' isn't a matter of resemblance to an identity, but is better captured by the word relevance.  "What difference is there?"  What difference does it make ... to the questioner.  Answers can't be fundamentally wrong, but they can be irrelevant to the question at hand.  They can lead you astray, not get you where you want to be going.  

In fact, this becomes Deleuze's pragmatic definition of madness.  Once we do away with negation and opposition as non-identity, the danger is no longer falling into error, but wandering in madness, dealing with hallucinations that are perfectly real, but get us nowhere and bring only suffering.  For Deleuze, there is no better definition of the insane than "those who suffer".

They bear witness to that transcendence, and to the most extraordinary play of the true and the false which occurs not at the level of answers and solutions but at the level of the problems themselves, in the questions themselves - in other words, in conditions under which the false becomes the mode of exploration of the true, the very space of its essential disguises or its fundamental displacement: the pseudos here becomes the pathos of the True.

So now to sum up this mess and come back to our initial question.  The unconscious is not the opposite of consciousness.  The unconscious poses the questions to which consciousness gives the answers.  In which case, the problem naturally becomes whether or how we can explore those questions consciously.