Finally we come all the way back to the third synthesis. The synthesis of the form of time as a static entity, conceived as a whole once and for all. The time crystal. But of course, Delueze's whole point is that this form, while static, while always the same, is fractured, split between before and after and continually splitting within itself. It's frozen, but vibrating, as Feldman put it. The incredible chain of events that led to the tremendous now just keeps on happening; this moment that contains everything is just like every other.
This final presentation of the third synthesis though, seems to focus on the peculiar whole created by this infinite series of splittings. In other words, the entire movement-in-place I just tried to describe. It amounts to chaos. A totality which contains everything but is never self-identical. An infinite potential for difference, for further differentiation, conceived as an identity of sorts. The "beyond" that all the series point to when they resonate together. The thing, so to speak, that all the differences have in common. It's hard to talk about this without lapsing into poetry. That's probably why the muslims use mathematics.
The essential point is the simultaneity and contemporaneity of all the divergent series, the fact that all coexist. From the point of view of the presents which pass in representation, the series are certainly successive, one 'before' and the other 'after'. It is from this point of view that the second is said to resemble the first. However, this no longer applies from the point of view of the chaos which contains them, the object = x which runs through them, the precursor which establishes communication between them or the forced movement which points beyond them: the differenciator always makes them coexist.
All the series of differences, what we were calling oscillators, are enmeshed in this chaos. But I think it's crucial not to see this chaos as the mere collection of these different series. Because in that case, what would be capable of holding these differences together as a collection, instead of a mere unrelated diversity? Only the concept of identity. If we treat the series as things, then the chaos becomes the abstract collection of all possible things. However, if this chaos is a space of possibility, it's not one that pre-exists the things, but one that is drawn by the way they interact. If this seems to introduce a circularity into the notion of possibility, where somehow the real things arise at the same time as their own possibility, we are on the right track. Think again of the egg metaphor. Things differentiate themselves within the developing embryo. Yet this differentiation depends on some singularity, some potential phase transition that links one set of differences to another set across different scales.
I think this is why Deleuze relates the chaos which contains all the series to a forced movement created by the resonant singularity of the dark precursor. The forced movement is chaotic, destructive of individual identity. It's the death instinct at work. In this sense the chaos is created by the communication of the series. But in another sense the singularity that lets the series communicate through resonance has an existence apart from them. Many different coupled systems might share this same phase transition. If we think of the chaos as the forced movements that affect the series when they resonate, then it comes after the series. If we think of it as the collection of singularities that structure this resonance, then it comes before the series. Ultimately the chaos is a circular place where the law of linear logical causality no longer applies. There is no before and after either in temporal or a causal sense. The chaos is neither derived from the series, nor are the series derived from the chaos; there is no first term here.
I've already kicked the analysis up a meta-level here though, where Deleuze only seems to hint at this causal circularity at the very end of the section. First, he discusses the chaos as the coexistence of before and after in time. This is what we saw as the pure past of the second synthesis. It is a space beyond any empirical memory that permits two experiences to be situated within it in such a way that one is conceived as a memory of the other. Both past and present have to independently coexist in the space before we can experience something as the past of this present (ie. an experience marked as memory). Deleuze illustrates this pure past of temporal coexistence using the classic Freudian idea of childhood memory.
When Freud shows that a phantasy is constituted on the basis of at least two series, one infantile and pre-genital, the other genital and post-pubescent, it is clear that the series succeed one another in time from the point of view of the solipsistic unconscious of the subject in question. The question then arises how to explain the phenomenon of 'delay' which is involved in the time it takes for the supposedly original infantile scene to produce its effect at a distance, in an adult scene which resembles it and which we call 'derived'.
We know already though that nothing can be "derived" from anything else in Deleuze's world. There is no first term from which to derive it, no model from which to make a copy. Derivation can only mean establishing a relationship between two things. Or rather, establishing a circular relationship that produces two things, differentiating them at the same time as holding them together. This is always the problem with memory -- given that any two moments have many things in common, we have to explain how we find some particular thing relevant to both moments in a way that joins them. In the case of Freudian phantasy, Deleuze will interpret the childhood event as exactly the thing capable of joining those two moments and creating our subjective desire.
It is indeed a problem of resonance between two series, but the problem is not well formulated so long as we do not take into account the instance in relation to which the two series coexist in an intersubjective unconscious. In fact the two series - one infantile, the other adult - are not distributed within the same subject. The childhood event is not one of the two real series but, rather, the dark precursor which establishes communication between the basic series, that of the adults we knew as a child and that of the adult we are among other adults and other children.
Remember that in this passage we are talking about erotic phantasy. You might think about it in Freudian terms as a question of whether your wife looks like your mother, or, on the contrary, it's your mother who looks like your wife. Do we find our lover attractive because they remind us of another we had, and another we had, in an unbroken chain stretching back to our first Oedipal fixation? Or is desire more mysterious than this, and it's our current paramour who casts a light into the past to illuminate what we didn't even realize we loved about her predecessors? The idea is that time doesn't run in just one direction here, but circularly. Memory isn't an objective reproduction, but a subjective reconstruction. It's mutability means that my current subjective experience is shaped by a past that it, in turn, shapes. The subject I am now and the subject I was then are not the same subject. Both are drawn together from what you could only describe as an intersubjective field. The experience of memory with its consciousness of before and after, only occurs when these two subjects reflect back and forth off of each other, or resonate together. The childhood event triggers this resonance and produces the identity of the remembering subject, which now appears to span time.
There is no question as to how the childhood event acts only with a delay. It is this delay, but this delay itself is the pure form of time in which before and after coexist.
The phantasy is the manifestation of the child as dark precursor. Moreover, what is originary in the phantasy is not one series in relation to the other, but the difference between series in so far as this relates one series of differences to another series of differences, in abstraction from their empirical succession in time.
Maybe now it makes more sense to return to the meta-level I mentioned earlier. The structure of the pure past (with its memories coexisting in time), is the same as the ontological structure of chaos (in which all the series coexists logically), and both are the same as the eternal return (which makes each of Deleuze's syntheses of repetition coexist as part of 'the same' idea). Or this, I hypothesize, is why the second chapter has such a strange structure that repeats at biological, psychological, and ontological levels.
Regardless of the merit of this stylistic hypothesis, it's clear that we've been building towards a definition of the repetition of "the Same" phrased only in terms of difference. Whatever we call it -- the unconscious, chaos, the third synthesis, or univocal being -- the point is that all things only belong to this largest totality on account of their difference. All they share, their whole common ground that brings them together as a coexistent group, is difference.
For it is in the same movement that the series are understood as coexisting, outside any condition of succession in time, and as different, outside any condition under which one would enjoy the identity of a model and the other the resemblance of a copy. When two divergent stories unfold simultaneously, it is impossible to privilege one over the other: it is a case in which everything is equal, but 'everything is equal' is said of the difference, and is said only of the difference between the two.
The coexistence of things is not based on one common root from which they are derived, either through resemblance or analogy. Even their Being is not "the Same". Instead, they are held together in sharing a process of differentiation, and they express this, their coming into being, their becoming, in a single and same resonant voice. I can only presume it says "ommmmm".
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