The Refrain

My division of this third repetition of the three figures of repetition (pg. 116-126) get a little more nebulous after the note on Proust on pg. 122.  Deleuze seems to continue discussing the dark precursor in a literary context, but also smoothly shifts into discussing the system that the dark precursor connects or animates.  In a sense I think this blurring may be inevitable and my divisions arbitrary.  It's clear that somehow the creator, the creation, and the space of possible creation (to use yet another way of slicing the three repetitions) are all what Deleuze would call 'the same', that is, are connected series of difference.

In any event, the next section is interesting because it anticipates Deleuze's later ideas about nonsense (developed in The Logic of Sense).  As you can probably guess by now, Deleuze doesn't look at non-sense as the absence of sense or its negation.  In fact, we should probably write it as ?-sense instead of non-sense.  The idea is roughly that the perpetual movement of the dark precursor, the fact that it only exists as a thing by being a process of vortical flow, is a privileged instance which illustrates how the whole system is constructed.  

The structure seems vaguely reminiscent of the various diagonalization arguments in mathematics (Cantor, Gödel) that use self-reference to define a perfectly clear example of something which falls outside of a system you assumed was complete.  In Gödel's case specifically, it doesn't help to add this new item back to the system either, because another escaping instance can always be constructed by the same means.  A special part constructed within the system demonstrates that something will always fall outside it; the system is inherently incomplete.  Likewise, the linguistic dark precursor is an instance of self reference that inherently falls outside the system of sense -- it is nonsense.

The question of whether psychic experience is structured like a language, or even whether the physical world may be regarded as a book, depends upon the nature of the dark precursors. A linguistic precursor or an esoteric word does not have an identity by itself, not even a nominal one, any more than its significations have a resemblance, even an infinitely relaxed one: it is not just a complex word or a simple gathering of words, but a word about words which is indistinguishable from the 'differenciator' of first-degree words and from the 'dissembler' of their significations. Its value, therefore, lies not in the extent to which it claims to say something but in the extent to which it claims to state the sense of what it says. The law of language which operates within representation excludes that possibility: the sense of a word can be stated only by another word which takes the first as its object. Whence the following paradoxical situation: the linguistic precursor belongs to a kind of metalanguage and can be incarnated only within a word devoid of sense from the point of view of the series of first-degree verbal representations.

By now, this structure is familiar to us.  However, I do like the way he sets up the problem here with those first few lines.  We want to know whether our psychological experience, or the world itself, make any sense, have any meaning, in the way a language does.  This may seem like a straightforward question at first, but as soon as you throw your starting point into question things get complicated; do we really understand how a language makes sense to begin with?  How does language get its representational ability?  When the passage continues, it makes clear that this was the problem underlying Deleuze's initial question.  We can agree with Lacan or Galileo that the psyche or the physical world is structured like a language only if we can uncover a dark precursor in those systems that works via the same mechanism of self reference.

This double status of esoteric words, which state their own sense but do so only by representing it and themselves as nonsense, clearly expresses the perpetual displacement of sense and its disguise among the series. In consequence, esoteric words are properly linguistic cases of the object = x, while the object = x structures psychic experience like a language on condition that the perpetual, invisible and silent displacement of linguistic sense is taken into account. In a sense, everything speaks and has sense, on condition that speech is also that which does not speak - or rather, speech is the sense which does not speak in speech.

The final line here is clearly another of Deleuze's koans we need to ruminate over.  He seems to be saying that everything in our inner experience and the outer world at larger means something.  It all makes sense.  But we must understand that sense is created when we find a structure where signs refer only to other signs perpetually.  This is the structuralist conception of language.  Language doesn't mean something because of some one-to-one correspondence between words and stuff, but because the language contains a structure of differential elements (phonemes and words) which can be coupled to the structure of the differential elements in an idea or the world.  Sense is only created by the structure of this coupled system of differences as a perpetually expanding indefinite whole.  It does not reside within any individual element of it.  Any single element that tries to refer to the whole process of sense gets sucked up into a problem of self-reference since it must be merely part of this whole, and can only itself acquire sense on that condition.  The dark precursor or self-referential element is like a part that tries to stand in for the whole it is part of, creating an infinite regress.  This produces nothing but paradox and nonsense at the level of the element, but shows us how sense is produced at the level of the whole system.

In this manner, the conditions under which a book is a cosmos or the cosmos is a book appear, and through a variety of very different techniques the ultimate Joycean identity emerges, the one wefind in Borges and in Gombrowicz: chaos = cosmos.

I often think that the final equation could be practically the summary of Deleuze's whole philosophy.  God = chaos.  The infinite potential.  We seek to get as close to it as we can, which we can only do by producing more of it ... in such a way that we can then continue producing even more of it.  Or as they put it in A Thousand Plateaus:

Were you cautious enough?  Not wisdom, caution.  In doses.  As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of caution.  Many have been defeated in this battle.

Maybe now we can better appreciate the blurring I mentioned at the beginning.  The dark precursor as an element which joins and differentiates the series blurs into the whole chaotic totality that it depends on to make sense. I find the diagonalization image helpful here, or its psychoanalytic correlate: "the narcissistic libido, the reflux of the libido into the ego", the way the self takes itself as an object in the synthesis of death.  Ultimately though, Deleuze's point is less about this one special moment of self reference than the way it forms a necessary part of a three part system.  In fact, this whole section seems to be built like a fractal where we see repeatedly that the third synthesis itself has three parts, with the third part referring to the three part system created by the relation of the first two, etc ... ad infinitum.  As a result, we seem to be encouraged to shuffle around the various terms for these three parts.  So it's not only the dark precursor's resonant singularity that blurs into the forced movement of the chaotic totality it must represent as nonsense, but that chaos which also blurs into the divergent series of differences we started with.

The basic series are divergent: not relatively, in the sense that one could retrace one's path and find a point of convergence, but absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos. This chaos is itself the most positive, just as the divergence is the object of affirmation. It is indistinguishable from the great work which contains all the complicated series, which affirms and complicates all the series at once.

This all sounds like quite a mouthful, but I think the intent is actually understandable however we phrase it.  Every time we're trying to draw the same tortuous, seemingly self-referential, circle that never actually closes on itself, because there was never any self there to close on.  Instead the center of the circle moves around at random, and it's speed of rotation and radius are likewise drawn by the lottery officials at Babylon.  It really gives a new dimension to the old chestnut: "God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

The trinity complication-explication-implication accounts for the totality of the system - in other words, the chaos which contains all, the divergent series which lead out and back in, and the differenciator which relates them one to another. Each series explicates or develops itself, but in its difference from the other series which it implicates and which implicate it, which it envelops and which envelop it; in this chaos which complicates everything. The totality of the system, the unity of the divergent series as such, corresponds to the objectivity of a 'problem'.