The way I'm dividing it, the second part of this penultimate re-presentation of the three syntheses runs from pg. 119 through the note about Proust on pg. 122. It introduces the "dark precursor", which is clearly patterned on the missing-in-place virtual objects of the pure past that we struggled so mightily with in the examining the second synthesis.
Picking up where we left off in our discussion of series or oscillators, we might say that the question asked now is how or why the two oscillators got coupled to form a system to begin with. We saw that if we started with two series of differences, they could get coupled, resonate, and finally produce a resonant feedback loop that made the two series into a single system capable of showing all kinds of interesting emergent dynamics. But didn't we take the eventual construction of this system for granted at the outset by assuming that the two series were already coupled? How did this happen? What force or agent couples certain series and not others?
When we speak of communication between heterogeneous systems, of coupling and resonance, does this not imply a minimum of resemblance between the series, and an identity in the agent which brings about the communication? Would not 'too much' difference between the series render any such operation impossible? Are we not condemned to rediscover a privileged point at which difference can be understood only by virtue of a resemblance between the things which differ and the identity of a third party?
To begin with, what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated.
Deleuze's basic answer to this is that they are coupled by nothing. The dark precursor he proposes as the agent of and reason for the connection is the same type of constantly displaced and disguised no-thing-in-itself that we've seen before as the pure past and the virtual object. I think it's a huge mistake to conceive of this non-entity along the lines of Lacan and Zizek as some sort of "substantial void" or as some simplistic version of the Buddhist emptiness. This reifies the nothingness into a thing, a unity, an identity. It's the same void every time; there's only one nothing if you think of it this way. Really, this version of Nothing is just Being with a minus sign. This would solve our problem of how two series get coupled as part of one system -- generally, because they resemble one another in some way, in the final instance and at a minimum in the way all things resemble one another in nothingness/being -- but only at that price of reintroducing some abstract identity at the base of all difference. Instead, Delezue wants us to consider a type of nothing that inherently involves time and circulation, that is never identical to itself, but always comes back transformed by a new disguise. It's a nothing much closer to chaos than the void.
The dark precursor is a virtual object and a shred of pure past, and is just as difficult to characterize as those were. We can go back and review all the November, December 2019 and the April 2020 posts to refresh ourselves on our various attempts. Here I'll just deal with the two interesting new images these concepts get associated with. These are the lightning strike, and resonance.
While it's not completely clear from the text, some material that appears in the A to Z interviews makes it apparent that when Deleuze says the dark precursor invisibly precedes the lightning strike he is making a direct reference to the phenomena called a lightning leader. Turns out, the reason that we see a lightning discharge that moves from A to B along a certain path is because this path has been specified in advance by the growth of a channel of ionized air. It's only afterwards that we see this path lit by a discharge. Here's a wonderful long quote from Stivale's book about the interviews summarizing the discussion under Z for Zigzag.
So what happens in Zed, he asks? Musing aloud, he sees Zen as the reverse of Nez (nose), which is also a zigzag. (Deleuze gestures the angle of a nose in the air.) Zed as movement, the fly, is perhaps the elementary movement that presided at the creation of the world.
Deleuze says that he's currently (1989) reading a book on the Big Bang, on the creation of the universe, an infinite curving, how it occurred. Deleuze feels that at the origin of things there's no Big Bang—there's the Zed, which is, in fact, the Zen, the route of the fly. Deleuze says that when he conceives of zigzags, he recalls what he said earlier (in section U) about no universals, but rather aggregates of singularities. He considers how to bring disparate singularities into relationship—or to bring potentials into relationship, to speak in terms of physics. Deleuze says one can imagine a chaos of potentials, so how can one bring these into relation? Deleuze tries to recall the "vaguely scientific" discipline in which there is a term that he likes a lot and that he used in his books (in fact, Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition). Someone explained, he says, that between two potentials occurs a phenomenon that was defined by the idea of a "dark precursor" (précurseur sombre). This dark precursor places diverent potentials into relation, and once the journey (trajet) of the dark precursor takes place, the potentials enter into a state of reaction from which emerges the visible event. So there is the dark precursor and (Deleuze gestures a Z in the air) then a lightning bolt, and that's how the world was born. There is always a dark precursor that no one sees, and then the lightning bolt that illuminates, and there is the world. He says that's also what thought should be and what philosophy must be, the grand Zed, but also the wisdom of the Zen. The sage is the dark precursor, and then the blow of the stick comes, since the Zen master passes among his disciples, striking them with his stick. So for Deleuze, the blow of the stick is the lightning that makes things visible . . .
Here, he pauses and says, "And so we have finished."
This quote kinda has everything (and the "vaguely scientific discipline" is called fulminology by the way). The dark precursor connects different potentials. It is what holds them together as potentials of a single process, just like the virtual object held together possible experiences and possible selves. It does this an invisible way though, or at least in way that only later becomes visible. Which is why we end up taking the effect for the cause.
Are identity and resemblance here the preconditions of the functioning of this dark precursor, or are they, on the contrary, its effects? If the latter, might it necessarily project upon itself the illusion of a fictive identity, and upon the series which it relates the illusion of a retrospective resemblance? Identity and resemblance would then be no more than inevitable illusions - in other words, concepts of reflection which would account for our inveterate habit of thinking difference on the basis of the categories of representation. All that, however, would be possible only because the invisible precursor conceals itself and its functioning, and at the same time conceals the in-itself or true nature of difference.
The lightning leader is also a great image because it forms a path defined at each step by differences of potential differences. It is a "cleared path" as Freud called it, a path of least resistance, but one that is only defined piecewise and locally (as a stepped leader) by seeking out a potential difference that would let it extend itself. The identity of the whole path of the lightning strike is just an effect of this series of differences between potential differences.
Resonance is the other image new to this section that helps us understand the strange connection of the dark precursor. We already discussed how two series can resonate even though they have nothing in common, no shared identity or direct connection. But you might think that they would at least be characterized by sharing an identical fundamental frequency. However, even this doesn't need to be the case. While it's again pretty indirect, I think Deleuze may be referring to the fact that even things with widely different fundamentals could resonate through their series of overtones. With resonance, two things can be coupled not because the they are similar -- because the difference between them is small in terms of proximity or fundamental frequency. Instead they could resonate because of their difference in fundamental. So long as this difference is distributed in a certain way it produces their interaction as part of the same system. That is, it seems to produce their identity.
It is well known that in certain cases (in certain systems), the difference between the differences brought into play may be 'very large'; in other systems it must be 'very small'. It would be wrong, however, to see in this second case the pure expression of a prior requirement of resemblance, which would then be relaxed in the first case only by being extended to the world scale. For example, it is insisted that disparate series must necessarily be almost similar, or that the frequencies be neighbouring (W neighbour of W0) - in short, that the difference be small. If, however, the identity of the agent which causes the different things to communicate is presupposed, then there are no differences which will not be 'small', even on the world scale. We have seen that small and large apply badly to difference, because they judge it according to the criteria of the Same and the similar. If difference is related to its differenciator, and if we refrain from attributing to the differenciator an identity that it cannot and does not have, then the difference will be small or large according to its possibilities of fractionation - that is, according to the displacements and disguise of the differenciator. In no case will it be possible to claim that a small difference testifies to a strict condition of resemblance, any more than a large difference testifies to the persistence of a resemblance which is simply relaxed.
This seems to take us into the question of whether difference is quantized or not. Since we've seen this issue of large and small a number of times now, this brings to mind a whole set of connections that I will need to explore. Clearly, Deleuze doesn't want to think of a relative test of largeness and smallness that defines these terms by calculating a distance from an identity. Aristotle tried to tame difference this way by fitting it into a well behaved normal distribution. Even if we allow for infinitely large and infinitely small distances like with Hegel and Leibniz, we fall into the same trap of judging difference on the basis of identity.
But Deleuze also doesn't want to give up on the idea of the large and small completely. We saw recently that in the case of the unconscious, he conceived these terms as applying absolutely and qualitatively. The unconscious was composed of "little differences in series" because these were partial, passive, local processes. Now, it seems as if a small difference is defined as an indivisible relationship, where a large one will be divisible, or have some "possibility of fractionation". This seems to imply a minimum viable unit difference, as if perhaps there were a smallest local process that cannot be further divided without ceasing to exists. By contrast, a large difference would be divisible, but only in the sense in which a series of overtones is divisible. These form a quantized series of intensities that don't multiply or divide like an extensive variable such as length or mass. Every time you try to divide an overtone, you get a qualitatively different pitch. In this simple example division leads to the just intonation scale. But could we imagine the same type procedure applying to water at varying intensities of pressure and temperature? Is the phase diagram of water a map of which differences in those variable are objectively small and which are large (obviously defined with respect to a water system)?
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