There's one more thing we can get out of the section ending on pg. 108, and that's a brief translation of the way Deleuze uses size as a technical term. At the end of this section he goes back to the question of whether the conscious and the unconscious are in opposition, or whether they are just structured differently. Often we presume that the unconscious looks just like the conscious, except it's dark, so we can't see what's in there very clearly. Even Freud's dynamic unconscious -- the truly repressed and not merely the pre-conscious -- is actually a lot like regular consciousness. It's filled with images, with memories of events, with objects that it wants. We can't find these easily because there is some force hiding them, but the idea seems to be that we'll recognize what's in the unconscious when we finally get a good look at it. Oh, I wanted to sleep with my mom.
We already know that Deleuze thinks this apparent opposition is actually a secondary factor created by the fact that the two systems are structured in completely different ways. Consciousness represents the complete and stable identities of real objects. The unconscious contemplates the various disguises and constant displacement of virtual objects. The latter deals with differences that cannot be fully represented. The virtual object is never complete, only partial; never self-identical, but always paradoxically missing from dis-place. For that reason it always requires a series of real terms for its definition. Deleuze will often characterize these differences at work in the unconscious as "little".
To ask whether the unconscious is ultimately oppositional or differential, an unconscious of great forces in conflict or one of little elements in series, one of opposing great representations or differenciated little perceptions, appears to resuscitate earlier hesitations and earlier polemics between the Leibnizian tradition and the Kantian tradition.
And last time we saw him mention that "the ontological bearing of problems and questions" was expressed as "repeat a little".
Obviously, "little" here doesn't mean that something is just quantitatively smaller. It is being qualitatively opposed to "great". Used this way it carries more of the sense of partial, unfinished, etc ... We repeat the question "a little" because it's impossible to repeat the whole thing, since it is not, in fact, a thing that could be repeated and integer number of times. The perceptions are "little" because they are the perceptions of parts, in the sense that they are the part's perceptions.
We've already met these perceptions; they were the passive, partial, larval, local egos of the first synthesis. Which helps to partially answer a question that came up for me at the time. If the problem of this chapter is how to construct and identity in a world of difference (to which the answer is repetition), then how does talking about little egos in every, "rat in the labyrinth and to ever muscle of the rat" get us anywhere? Aren't we in danger of reintroducing the same unity we were trying to derive? It could be that on some level we are. I think Deleuze's concept of repetition is constructed repetitively, through the relation of three different concepts of repetition, which suggests a sort of bootstrapping effect or feedback loop of some sort. But that's for later. Right now, the idea is that the little egos are qualitatively different from the great ego because they are partial, not total, and passive, not active, productive processes, not products. They are essentially virtual, which is perhaps part of why he calls the pleasure of their auto-satisfaction "hallucinatory".
The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfilment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else: the eye or the seeing ego is filled with an image of itself in contemplating the excitation that it binds. It produces itself or 'draws itself' from what it contemplates (and from what it contracts and invests by contemplation). This is why the satisfaction which flows from binding is necessarily a 'hallucinatory' satisfaction of the ego itself, even though hallucination here in no way contradicts the effectivity of the binding.
In short, even if there is a sort of self-similar fractal structure to the concept of repetition, the form of each level is different. Call it a qualitative, rather than a quantitative fractal, if that makes any sense. So when Deleuze introduces passive local little egos, he is not just begging his own question, but is showing us another level that involves a different set of forces that can serve as an invisible-hand explanation of identity or repetition at the macro level.
This discussion reminded me of Todd May's remarks about the molecular and the molar, macro and micro politics, in his introduction to Deleuze.
To embrace the concept of the machine is to move from a focus on the macropolitical to the micropolitical, from the molar to the molecular.The distinction between these two pairs of terms is one of the most misunderstood in Deleuze's thought.
Deleuze and Guattari write, "the molecular, or microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by the smallness of its elements but by the nature of its 'mass' – the quantum flow as opposed to the molar segmented line." It is not smallness but something else that defines the molecular and micropolitics. The quantum flow as opposed to the molar segmented line. What is a quantum flow? It is what we encountered in the discussion of science. A quantum flow is a virtual field that actualizes itself. It is a machinic process. Genetic information is a quantum flow. An egg is a quantum flow. Matter is a quantum flow, a fact we understand when we subject it to conditions that are far from equilibrium. In physics, quantum theory tries to understand matter as often being subject to chance and unpredictability. Einstein's quarrel with quantum theory concerns precisely this. "God does not play dice with the universe," he said. Oh, but God does, replied the quantum theorists, and Nietzsche and Deleuze with them. There is more to the universe than meets the eye, even the eye of the relativist. Molar segmented lines: given identities with recognizable borders.Quantum flows: fluid identities that arise from a chaotic and often un-predictable folding, unfolding, and refolding of matter. Micropolitics is not an issue of the small; it is an issue of quantum flows. It is an issue of machines.
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