We're Virtually There!

It's time to try and sum up virtual objects as best we can.  I'm still uncertain I really understand the psychoanalytic context of this concept, but at least we've explored it a little.  Now we'll try to use those ideas from Freud, Klein, and Lacan to better situate virtual objects in their proper place in Deleuze's scheme.  We should bear in mind two things in what follows.  First, the problem is: how do you make a self?  Second, we've already met the paradoxes of the virtual once before; the pure past is virtual totality, a past that never was present, a mythical, immemorial past.  The pure past is not a collection of memories of former presents, but like the space of all possible presents.  We can use some of that understanding to further elucidate the virtual objects.

Let's start with the problem.  We've got an infant.  They are just a bundle of passive local egos -- drives -- that are the product of pre-existing habits of evolution.  Gradually, that goo becomes a person.  On some level, we might consider this development from a bundle of joy to an integrated unity as another of evolution's habits, a duplicate version of the first passive synthesis that takes as its building blocks the initial habits.  For reasons I'm not entirely clear on right now, we're going to look at this development as a whole new type of passive synthesis -- the second passive synthesis of memory.  This makes the second passive synthesis into something more like learning.  The infant gradually learns to recognize objects in the real world, and learns to recognize its self and corresponding body as objects.  We are no longer in the domain of self-fulfilling habits, but are now asking how habits get established.  It's as if we've discovered the elements that become contracted in a habit need to have some sort of prior capacity to relate in order for them to get linked together at all, but that this only became apparent when we wondered how those habits themselves get linked into a larger structure.  

Habit is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the passing present. The claim of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground of time. It is memory that grounds time. We have seen how memory, as a derived active synthesis, depended upon habit: in effect, everything depends upon a foundation. But this does not tell us what constitutes memory. At the moment when it grounds itself upon habit, memory must be grounded by another passive synthesis distinct from that of habit.   

The second synthesis splits into two distinct but interdependent directions.  Both posit some object (you might even say some substance or "substantive") that holds together various parts of a whole.  On one side, reality is synthesized as something the infant needs to actively go get to satisfy its most important drives and keep its nascent self in business.  Hence the infant learns to distinguish real objects which hold together enough to hold itself together.  On the other side, the various drives can be put into relation to one another by locating them in the virtual space of memory.  Virtual objects are like attractors in memory space capable of drawing together the drives.  This 'drawing together' is the second passive synthesis of memory.

In fact the child is constructed within a double series: on the basis of the passive synthesis of connection and on the basis of the bound excitations. Both series are objectal: one series comprises real objects which serve as correlates of active synthesis; the other virtual objects which serve as correlates of an extension of passive synthesis. The extended passive ego fulfils itself with a narcissistic image in contemplating the virtual centres.

So far I've outlined what are basically the general job descriptions of the real and the virtual.  They are the stuff or material that is necessary for the infant to develop a world and a self.  Agglomerations or attractors in 'reality space' define real objects external to the infant or parts of its world.  These become the goals of an active ego.  Likewise "centers" in 'memory space' define virtual objects which are internal to the infant or parts of its self.  These become objects that an extended passive ego contemplates (without acting) to form itself.  These two sets of objects, and their corresponding types of ego, interact, and the full Ego is built from this interaction.

... the infantile world is in no way circular or egocentric but elliptical; that it has two centres and that these differ in kind, both nevertheless being objective or objectal.  In virtue of their dissimilarity, perhaps a crossing, a twist, a helix or a figure 8 is even formed between the two centres. What, then, would be the ego, where would it be, given its topological distinction from the Id, if not at the crossing of the 8, at the point of connection between these two intersecting asymmetrical circles, the circle of real objects and that of the virtual objects or centres?

Deleuze spends most of the time talking about the strange virtual objects needed for the second passive synthesis, since we mostly (think we) know what a real object is and how it governs our activity.  Ultimately, what makes virtual objects so strange and paradoxical is that the stuff they are made of -- the space of memory, the pure past -- is not real.   

We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is.

The virtual is, it has an effect, but it does not act, and so in that sense is not real.  Because the virtual objects are not real they have many other strange and wonderful properties.  Some of the psychoanalytic concepts we've talked about can help illustrate these.  

To begin with, a memory is obviously not like an external object, but something closer to the internal objects we saw Melanie Klein describe.  We have to be slightly careful with the way we construe this analogy because we don't want to presume the existence of the Ego we're trying to construct; the dividing line between inside and outside has to emerge.  Remember that the type of pure past we're talking about doesn't belong to anyone.  It's not a particular memory of a particular moment some individual once actually experienced as a present.  It's more like the space of possible experiences, possible presents that could incarnate that memory in different ways.  Which is also in a sense the space of possible selves who can have that experience (should we call these experimenters?).  

[Now suddenly I understand the sentence just before the quote about habit and memory I used at the beginning of this post.  The second synthesis has to provide a measure for the relationship between the possessor and its possessions.  It has to simultaneously produce a subject and an object, which is why Deleuze calls the second passive synthesis transcendental.

The first synthesis, that of habit, is truly the foundation of time; but we must distinguish the foundation from the ground. The foundation concerns the soil: it shows how something is established upon this soil, how it occupies and possesses it; whereas the ground comes rather from the sky, it goes from the summit to the foundations, and measures the possessor and the soil against one another according to a title of ownership.

]

Though they exist "objectally" (they are not simply created by the subject) memories are like internal objects in the sense that they relate to what it feels like, on the inside, to interact with some real external object.  But because they are possibility spaces -- immemorial memories that never were any subject's experience, and possible selves that might have that experience -- these internal objects differ in kind from the external ones.  Like two mirrors facing one another, the possible experiences reflect the possible experimenters that reflect the possible experiences ... and so on.  Like every good paradox, they directly capture a sense of movement.  In addition, as potentials, the virtual objects aren't subject to a binary either/or logic, but obey a logic of indefinitely iterated addition.  Deleuze cites Klein's idea of the "good and bad object", to which a principle of non-contradiction does not apply.

It lacks its own identity. The good and the bad mother -- or, in terms of the paternal duality, the serious and the playful father -- are not two partial objects but the same object in so far as it has lost its identity in the double.

The same recursive structure we saw where each part of a fractal past reflects the whole and implies an "ever-increasing coexistence of levels of the past" also means that the virtual object is never complete.  This is like the flip side of the possibility of addition.  There's always some more of a virtual object that's missing, as befits a pure potential.  Just like the virtual object is added to reality or "planted in it like trees from another world", as another possible experience of the real object, it is also subtracted from reality.  Neither procedure produces a whole though.  They only give us a partial object -- part of the real object, part of our self, and part of itself because of its perpetually unfinished circulation between these two parts.

We see both that the virtuals are deducted from the series of reals and that they are incorporated in the series of reals. This derivation implies, first, an isolation or suspension which freezes the real in order to extract a pose, an aspect or a part. This isolation, however, is qualitative: it does not consist simply in subtracting a part of the real object, since the subtracted part acquires a new nature in functioning as a virtual object. The virtual object is a partial object - not simply because it lacks a part which remains in the real, but in itself and for itself because it is cleaved or doubled into two virtual parts, one of which is always missing from the other. In short, the virtual is never subject to the global character. which affects real objects. It is -- not only by its origin but by its own nature -- a fragment, a shred or a remainder. It lacks its own identity.

Conversely, these virtual objects are incorporated in the real objects. In this sense they can correspond to parts of the subject's body, to another person, or even to very special objects such as toys or fetishes. This incorporation is in no way an identification, or even an introjection, since it exceeds the limits of the subject. Far from opposing itself to the process of isolation, it complements it. Whatever the reality in which the virtual object is incorporated, it does not become integrated: it remains planted or stuck there, and does not find in the real object the half which completes it, but rather testifies to the other virtual half which the real continues to lack.

Finally, our discussion of Lacan and his object a gives us the most succinct image of a structure that inherently lacks completeness in itself yet sets everything in perpetual motion.  This was supposed to be a "substantial lack", a perpetually missing piece, an object that we only find as lost.  All of these are descriptions of the partial, unfinished, and hence simultaneously creative nature of the virtual.  For Lacan, what causes desire, the object-cause of desire, was also a memory, but precisely a hazy sort of memory from a time before we were a fully formed subject.  So again, this memory comes to us as something that doesn't really belong to us, in the proper sense of the term.  It's a fragment of our formative infant experience from before there was an us to experience it.  But this possible experience sets in motion the search for a possible self to whom it would correspond.  This would be exactly whatever self it is that would enjoy this lost ur-experience.  The possibility on both sides of this equation is always just a part of the object or the self, and not those finished products in themselves.  In some ways it's more than just the object or self, since it includes variations of those (the lack could be construed as a surplus).  But in another sense it's always less than they are, since they never actually correspond to it directly but to aspects or parts of it.  Either way you look at it, I think the key concept is the sense of perpetually unfolding recursion of two mirrors facing another.  In fact, I think this is almost always the key concept in Deleuze.

Although it is deducted from the present real object, the virtual object differs from it in kind: not only does it lack something in relation to the real object from which it is subtracted, it lacks something in itself, since it is always half of itself, the other half being different as well as absent. This absence, as we shall see, is the opposite of a negative. Eternal half of itself, it is where it is only on condition that it is not where it should be. It is where we find it only on condition that we search for it where it is not. It is at once not possessed by those who have it and had by those who do not possess it. It is always a 'was.' 

I don't know whether I've really done justice to virtual objects and their relationship to psychoanalysis, but at this point we have to move on.  It's not as if we won't see all this same structures again and perhaps improve our description.  To set up the next section, though, we have to deal with one last point, which is the link between the virtual and the symbolic.

We've already hinted at this in discussing Klein's partial objects.  These seemed to relate to what various objects in the infant world meant to the infant.  I almost want to say what they 'represent' to the infant, but this is a very specific word in Difference & Repetition, and I think we are still investigating how a representative view could be formed.  The partial objects are (partially) an "isolation or suspension that freezes the real in order to extract a pose, an aspect, or a part".   

Deleuze continues this line of thought when he quotes Lacan talking about Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter.  It isn't actually a very interesting story in my opinion, but it does work well as an image for something that is hidden by being in plain sight.  The letter in question is eagerly sought after by a detective who searches every possible secret hiding place of the suspect's residence without success.  The armchair detective hero of the story deduces that this valuable letter is hidden not because its location is concealed, but because it is laid in the open and disguised as a worthless scrap of discarded paper.  This illustrates Lacan's ideas that there is a lack, a piece inevitably missing from the center of the story.   

In this sense, Lacan's pages assimilating the virtual object to Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter seem to us exemplary. Lacan shows that real objects are subjected to the law of being or not being somewhere, by virtue of the reality principle; whereas virtual objects, by contrast, have the property of being and not being where they are, wherever they go: 

 

what is hidden is never but what is missing from its place, as the call slip puts it when speaking of a volume lost in the library. And even if the book be on an adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visibly it may appear. For it can literally be said that something is missing from its place only of what can change it: the symbolic. For the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always in its place; it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from it.

We'll get a lot more explanation of the symbolic in the next section.  But we can already sketch some of its important characteristics.  A symbol is like a memory in that it never was anything concrete.  There's a double arbitrariness to the symbol, so to speak, in that it can use any old signifier to refer to a whole class of signifieds.  For example, I can use a whole bunch of distinct sounds or combinations of little marks to symbolize 'table', and each of these different instantiations of the symbol can refer to an infinity of different physical objects that would fall into the category 'table'.  In other words, the symbol "table" is not a one-to-one correspondence like we usually think of it, but actually a many-to-many correspondence.  It links possible tables to possible experiences of pointing to tables.  The missing aspect of the symbolic, its mobility or ability to change place, is like the flip side of this observation.  The 'same' idea 'table' always appears in some different disguise.  It's impossible to pin down or hold in place.  Being able to move around like this -- ultimately not being anything more substantial than this motion itself -- is literally the essence of something being symbolic.  

Lacan's Lack

Everything I know about Lacan I learned from this long (but quite readable) essay explaining his concept of "object a".  This term, which Deleuze mentions a couple of times, is meant to be read "object lowercase a".  Understanding it at least roughly can help us uncover more of what he has in mind by his virtual objects.  Which means I need to start by summarizing the important points I took from the essay; from there we can go on to see how it fits with Deleuze.

First, object a is a paradoxical object because it's the form we only retrospectively project on our experience.

The objet a is a paradoxical "object" directly because of the relation between its emergence and loss. Žižek clarifies this for us: "This coincidence of emergence and loss, of course, designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objet petit a which emerges as being-lost" (The Plague of Fantasies, p. 15). The idea is objet a is not an actual object we once possessed but, then, lost. The very moment it emerges it does so as a lost object. This is its trick. We never really had a perfect drive satisfaction (jouissance), but we retroactively produce this illusion as soon as restrictions are placed on the jouissance we had at our mother's body (das Ding).

Jouissance could use a whole 'nother essay, but it seems to be roughly pleasure, or maybe more accurately the pleasure principle we saw associated with drives and which implies the whole cycle of alternating need and fulfillment.  Probably the easiest way to understand this paradoxical quality of object a is to think about our everyday reminiscences of pleasurable moments.  Memory is a funny thing, much more creative than we give it credit for.  We don't remember something as we actually experienced it, as if we were watching it on film.  What we live is a sort of recreation of some aspect of that experience.  In our airbrushed memory, the experience is way more fulfilling than it was at the time.  I get older, but it stays the same age, so to speak, and that immortality or immemoriality is what we love about it.  Object a is an image of this lost paradise, a reminder of something that never really existed on its own.

Second, Lacan's idea seems to be that the subject, the whole ego, develops around this longing to recapture something ineffable that never was.  This leads him to describe the subject as defined by its structurally lacking something.  The always missing part of ourselves is object a; this image of a pleasure we lack comes to define us.

Remember, the being of an infant is that of unmediated jouissance or libidinal plenitude. For a baby, to lose this sort of jouissance is to lose its very being. The moment language takes hold and places restrictions on jouissance is the moment when a structural lack is produced within the human being — the lack of immediate jouissance. Now one's being is a sort of non-being. "I am my inability to be." Now there's some-thing that I'm missing, that I lack, that I must have in order to be whole again. There's some "part" of myself that I have been separated from. This some-thing is objet petit a. We could say that objet petit a is the ghost of one's primordial jouissance that emerges through the socialization process. The objet petit a is that little remainder of the excessive jouissance we were once submerged in. As Lacan put it, "The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. . . . It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack"

You can probably already see where this is going.  He fixes the cable.   The "organ" in question is the phallus, and we are separated from it by symbolic castration. So the phallus becomes the ur-symbol of how we need some symbolic memory of what never happened in order to experience what happens. The phallus is the head virtual object.  

For jouissance to become virtual is for it to cease to be immediately present. In other words, it is something the subject lacks. In fact, the subject is this very lack. The desiring subject, all the days of its life, will be unknowingly chasing this lost "object" in the form of the virtual jouissance we call objet petit a.

The objet a is both the void, the gap, and whatever object momentarily comes to fill that gap in our symbolic reality. What is important to keep in mind here is that the objet a is not the object itself but the function of masking the lack. 

From the sounds of this essay, Lacan and especially Žižek have written themselves in circles about the "substantial void" at the heart of the subject (its "constitutive lack" or "reified emptiness") and the tragic consequences of the fact that we only want what we can't get.  These psychoanalysts always seem frightfully obsessed with having their Johnson cut off.  Bunch of fucking amateurs.

I don't think that exploring lack and emptiness in any depth is going to help much with Deleuze.  The idea of a memory that functions as a creative force in its own right is clearly relevant and interesting.  But I don't think Deleuze intends to take us into the Hegelian and ultimately Christian territory Lacan's and Žižek's theory seems to lead towards.  Negation negating itself and our experience of ourselves as primordially fallen from joy is not really Deleuze's style.  In fact, though it's been 20 years since I read it, I now suspect that the sustained critique of "lack" that I recall occupying a big chunk of Anti-Oedipus Volume 1 is directed as much at Lacan as at Freud.  I think Deleuze prefers to conceive of the lack or partiality of object a less as a "substantial void" than as a line of flight -- a gap that sets things in motion and opens up the edge of an expanding space, ultimately a positive potential.  In other words, the lack isn't an identity, but a difference -- not a thing but a process.  We always get something different than what we want because we are always in a sense inventing exactly what it is we want.

Which brings us to the third and final takeaway from this essay on Lacan.  

The Lacanian object or objet petit a is not the object of desire. Instead, it is the object-cause of desire, that is, it is the object that causes you to desire the object you actually desire. Imagine being in a theater watching a graceful ballerina perform a spotlit solo. You find yourself completely captivated and memorized by this dancer. However, what in this analogy is the condition of this enchantment? It is the very spotlight in which the ballerina stands out from the darkness. In a sense, we are not even conscious of this light — it is "unconscious". Analogously, it is this "object" that causes the ballerina to attract our attention.

The object-cause of desire is like the proverbial donkey's carrot that functions as an unattainable lure or enticement.

[The essay also gives several other interesting images to illustrate the object-cause of desire.  Check them out if the prima donna doesn't do it for you]

I think this idea of object a as the object-cause of desire helps us understand better why Deleuze calls it both a virtual object and a partial object.  It's virtual because it differs in kind from a real object.  It's not the object itself we want, but the aura of satisfaction that we associate it with and that sets in motion a process which constructs both the "we" and the "what we want".  Like we saw with Klein, object a is not an external object, but an internal one, though now this internal object is understood not as something we have but as something we lack -- namely the direct pleasures the drives have become cut off from as the ego begins to form.  

There are two main senses in which objet a is the cause of desire (it's worth noting that Lacan devoted a whole session to this concept of the cause in Seminar X). First, objet a is literally the cause of all desire, that is, it's emergence is the very reason why human beings start to desire at all. Before the "falling away" of objet a, we are not desiring subjects, but, instead, are little bundles of wild drives and unregulated jouissance. The "breaking off" of objet petit a is precisely what causes desire as such. This is easy enough to understand, since we already know that the Law (name-of-the-father, prohibition) separates us from das Ding (maternal body of jouissance) and, thereby, produces a fundamental lack (objet a) "in" us that causes us to desire.  This constitutive, structural lack is one that all of us as desiring subjects have in common.

Virtual objects are also inherently partial because they are only a part of the real object and only a part of us.  We've already talked about how they are like idealized memories of some experience.  They abstract some trait or aspect of our particular experience.

However, the objet a also comes to cause specific desires. We all have our own particular histories of desire and objet a in its idiosyncratic dimension is the hidden cause at work behind the scenes.

Each of us in our own ways (via fantasy) come to unconsciously associate certain empirical features with that missing "part" of ourselves. If we can just find the right object of desire, then we will finally fill the void. If we can just get ahold of IT (no, not that killer clown), then we will be complete. Of course, this is impossible, but it's the impossibility that makes desiring subjectivity continue to be possible.

Put differently, objet petit a gets linked to certain idealized and libidinally-invested traits. One of the easiest ways to see this mechanism at work is to consider that many men end up marrying women that strikingly resemble their mothers.

Though we've also touched on it, but it's much more difficult to understand how virtual objects are partial "on the inside", so to speak.  They are our own autonomous drives reflected back to us as part of a self.  They no longer appear as self-sufficient forms seeking nothing more than to repeat themselves.  They have gained a "higher" purpose they didn't have to begin with.  Lacan seems to look at this partiality from the perspective of the global ego.  There's a primordial lack of fulfillment for some local egos implied by the ordering and regulation of all those "wild drives".  Deleuze might be trying to looks at the situation from the perspective of the component drives.  Some may indeed be cut off from their goal, from their self, while others are gratified, but all of them shift from being ends in themselves to being a parts of some global ego.  Perhaps this is why he seems to focus on the lack, the negative, or the void, and instead talks more about how the virtual object is missing from its place, no matter where it's at.  But we'll come back more specifically to what use Deleuze makes of Lacan next time.

Klein's Bottle

I know about as much about Melanie Klein and her partial objects as you do.  I think Deleuze introduces them here just to give some more tangible way to think about the paradox inherent in virtual objects.  Remember our working hypothesis is that the virtual object is a mirror image of something that doesn't exist before the mirroring; it's an image created from two mirrors facing one another.  To see how Klein's ideas are going to help though, we have to do a bit of background work. 

Fortunately, we already know Freud backwards and forwards, amirite?  Klein's position appears to be a modification of his idea that sexual drives have an external object, and that ego-drives and simply ones that have taken the self as their erotic object.  For Klein, the drives are aimed at objects that are only a part of what we would normally term a real object (apparently this idea also had some precedent in Freud).  Then later, when the ego begins to form and take itself as a narcissistic object, this does not represent the ego relating to itself as an external object (which in Klein's theory has become partial and hence not really a good model for the ego's wholeness and unity) but as the contemplation of a collection of internal objects.  At least, that seems to be how this paper describes her ideas. 

Klein further developed the notion of internal objects, and this was central in the expanded role of objects in her own and Fairbairn's work. In her early papers she had described more and more complex phantasies in young children concerning their mothers' "insides." The latter were believed to contain all varieties of substances, organs, babies, etc. During the late 1920's, Klein began to write of parallel phantasies which the child develops concerning his own insides, a place similar to his mother's interior, also populated by body parts, substances, people, etc. In contrast to Freud's super-ego concept, Klein suggests that these phantasies of internal presences begin in the first months of life. As development proceeds, Klein suggests, representations of all experiences and relations with significant others also become internalized, in an effort to preserve and protect them. This complex set of internalized object relations is established, and phantasies and anxieties concerning the state of one's internal object world become the underlying basis, Klein was later to claim, for one's behavior, moods, and sense of self. Klein conceives of the drives as more tightly bound to objects, both internal and external, than did Freud, and hence she rejected the notion of "primary narcissism."  The infant, Klein argued, has a much deeper and more immediate relation to others than previous psychoanalytic theory has credited him with.  This rejection of the concept of "primary narcissism" was no mere theoretical refinement. Narcissism had been applied, within classical psychoanalysis, as an explanatory concept with regard to many clinical phenomena, ranging from tics to schizophrenia, and as a tool for understanding rigid resistances within the psychoanalytic situation itself.  Klein and her collaborators took issue with these explanations. They argued that seemingly narcissistic manifestations like tics, schizophrenia and extreme resistances in analysis are not objectless states (i.e., with only the ego as object), but reflect intense relations to internal objects. For Klein, the content and nature of relations with objects, both real people in the outside world and phantasized images of others imagined as internal presences, are the crucial determinant of most important psychical processes, both normal and pathological.  She argued that Freud's "narcissistic libido" reflects not a cathexis of the ego itself, but of internal objects, and thus replaced Freud's distinction between narcissistic libido and object libido with the distinction between relations to internal vs. relations to external objects.

Here you can start to see why Deleuze calls these internal objects virtual.  They are the phantasies (with a "ph" to distinguish it from fantasy), images, projections that are taken back within.  And, since they relate to the self-fulfilling habits of passive local egos (aka drives), they are like hallucinations that spontaneously bring themselves into being.  In fact, for those local egos, it would make sense to talk about a "primary narcissism".

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.

It seems like one way to describe these internal objects is as symbols that indicate how parts of the world makes parts of us feel.  Of course, the relationship does not have to be one-to-one; our parts can feel differently about a given part-object, which goes towards explaining our global ego's unconscious ambivalence to many things.  One real object can contain many virtual objects, and one virtual object can appear as part of many different real objects.    

Klein posits the view that the real others in the infant's external world are constantly internalized, established as internal objects, and projected out onto external figures once again. Klein does not seem to consider such internalization to be a defense mechanism per se, but rather a mode of relating to the outside world. "The ego is constantly absorbing into itself  the whole external world".  Internal objects are established corresponding to real external others, as "doubles." Not just people, but all experiences and situations are internalized. The child's internal world "… consists of innumerable objects taken into the ego, corresponding partly to the multitude of varying aspects, good and bad, in which the parents appeared to the child's unconscious mind … they also represent all the real people who are continually being internalized".

Deleuze's description of the relationship between virtual and real objects quickly gets more complicated than what Klein appears to be saying here.  From the little I've read it does not seem that she focused on the mirroring aspect implicit in her definition of internal objects -- the way they internalize an aspect of something only to project it back onto that thing in an endlessly circulating self-fulfilling prophecy.  To better understand that we will need to discuss Lacan next time.  

But we can end here by examining what Deleuze says about the way virtual objects are incorporated into real ones, since it specifically refers to Klein.

Conversely, these virtual objects are incorporated in the real objects. In this sense they can correspond to parts of the subject's body, to another person, or even to very special objects such as toys or fetishes. This incorporation is in no way an identification, or even an introjection, since it exceeds the limits of the subject. Far from opposing itself to the process of isolation, it complements it. Whatever the reality in which the virtual object is incorporated, it does not become integrated: it remains planted or stuck there, and does not find in the real object the half which completes it, but rather testifies to the other virtual half which the real continues to lack. When Melanie Klein shows how many virtual objects the maternal body contains, it must not be thought that it totalises or englobes them, or possesses them, but rather that they are planted in it like trees from another world, like Gogol's nose or Deucalion's stones.

[First off, Gogol's nose is a reference to Nikolai Gogol's short story The Nose, which you can read in full here.  It's an amusing little satire of a low level bureaucrat who wakes discover that his nose is missing.  Horrified, he goes in search of it, only to discover that it has taken on a life of its own and is evading him.  The point is that the nose can show up anywhere.  It's an autonomous part of the world, a piece of Major Kovalyov (the noseless hero) that he finds wandering around outside himself.  

And Deucalion is some forgotten Greek hero (being the son of a God just ain't what it used to be) who repopulated the earth after the flood:

Once the deluge was over and the couple had given thanks to Zeus, Deucalion (said in several of the sources to have been aged 82 at the time) consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth. He was told to "cover your head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder". Deucalion and Pyrrha understood that "mother" is Gaia, the mother of all living things, and the "bones" to be rocks. They threw the rocks behind their shoulders and the stones formed people. Pyrrha's became women; Deucalion's became men.

Again, the theme is of mobile objects sprouting out of a fixed one.]

So the overarching point here seems to be that the virtual objects are parts, but, strangely, they are not really parts of a whole.  Added together they don't sum up to the full real object.  Likewise, they are parts of an ego that doesn't exist yet; a collection of drives is not a person.  In both cases, they are inherently incomplete, they lack the whole to which they would be the corresponding parts.  I believe this is what Deleuze is trying to get at when he says that the incorporation of the virtual object into the real complements, instead of opposing the isolation, or the carving out, of the virtual object from from the real one.  

We see both that the virtuals are deducted from the series of reals and that they are incorporated in the series of reals. This derivation implies, first, an isolation or suspension which freezes the real in order to extract a pose, an aspect or a part. This isolation, however, is qualitative: it does not consist simply in subtracting a part of the real object, since the subtracted part acquires a new nature in functioning as a virtual object.

The isolated part can't be identified with the real object, and even when it is reincorporated into it, it doesn't complete the circle and reform the whole.  Conversely, the whole real object cannot be internalized (or introjected) because it would require an already formed ego to serve as its representative, and all we have so far is a collection of local passive egos.  Hence an introjection would, "exceed the limits of the subject".  The virtual object is split between two sides -- an internal and an external one -- and each of these sides is itself partial or fragmentary.

The virtual object is a partial object - not simply because it lacks a part which remains in the real, but in itself and for itself because it is cleaved or doubled into two virtual parts, one of which is always missing from the other. In short, the virtual is never subject to the global character. which affects real objects. It is - not only by its origin but by its own nature - a fragment, a shred or a remainder. It lacks its own identity.  The good and the bad mother - or, in terms of the paternal duality, the serious and the playful father - are not two partial objects but the same object in so far as it has lost its identity in the double. 

The Virtual is Sexy Because It's Us

After giving us a general introduction to the virtual object in a childhood development context, Deleuze goes on to relate the concept to psychoanalytic theory much more specifically.  He starts by describing how the real/virtual distinction is parallel to the distinction Freud makes between the self-preservative and sexual instincts.  Then he goes on to relate the virtual object to Melanie Klein's partial objects, and Lacan's object a.  At this point I've read a bit about each of these ideas, and while they are really still above my pay grade, even a rudimentary understanding of them can help illuminate what Deleuze means by the virtual object.  So let's take these references in order.

I don't know when Freud first started distinguishing between instincts for self-preservation and sexual instincts.  It probably doesn't matter though since it's clear that his theory evolved very substantially.  In fact, he gives a synopsis of this evolution in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that I found very interesting:

Here then is an opportunity for looking back over the slow development of our libido theory. In the first instance the analysis of the transference neuroses forced upon our notice the opposition between the 'sexual instincts', which are directed towards an object, and certain other instincts, with which we were very insufficiently acquainted and which we described provisionally as the 'ego-instincts'.  A foremost place among these was necessarily given to the instincts serving the self-preservation of the individual. It was impossible to say what other distinctions were to be drawn among them. No knowledge would have been more valuable as a foundation for true psychological science than an approximate grasp of the common characteristics and possible distinctive features of the instincts. But in no region of psychology were we groping more in the dark. Everyone assumed the existence of as many instincts or 'basic instincts' as he chose, and juggled with them like the ancient Greek natural philosophers with their four elements earth, air, fire and water. Psycho-analysis, which could not escape making some assumption about the instincts, kept at first to the popular division of instincts typified in the phrase 'hunger and love'. At least there was nothing arbitrary in this; and by quite a distance. The concept of 'sexuality', and at the same time of the sexual instinct, had, it is true, to be extended so as to cover many things which could not be classed under the reproductive function; and this caused no little hubbub in an austere, respectable or merely hypocritical world.

The next step was taken when psycho-analysis felt its way closer towards the psychological ego, which it had first come toknow only as a repressive, censoring agency, capable of erecting protective structures and reactive formations. Critical and far-seeing minds had, it is true, long since objected to the concept of libido being restricted to the energy of the sexual instincts directed towards an object. But they failed to explain how they had arrived at their better knowledge or to derive from it anything of which analysis could make use. Advancing more cautiously, psycho-analysis observed the regularity with which libido is withdrawn from the object and directed on to the ego (the process of introversion); and, by studying the libidinal development of children in its earliest phases, came to the conclusion that the ego is the true and original reservoir of libido, and that it is only from that reservoir that libido is extended on to objects. The ego now found its position among sexual objects and was at once given the foremost place among them. Libido which was in this way lodged in the ego was described as 'narcissistic'. This narcissistic libido was of course also a manifestation of the force of the sexual instinct in the analytical sense of those words, and it had necessarily to be identified with the 'self-preservative instincts' whose existence had been recognized from the first. Thus the original opposition between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts proved to be inadequate. A portion of the ego-instincts was seen to be libidinal; sexual instincts -- probably alongside others -- operated in the ego. Nevertheless we are justified in saying that the old formula which lays it down that psychoneuroses are based on a conflict between ego-instincts and sexual instincts contains nothing that we need reject today.  It is merely that the distinction between the two kinds of instinct, which was originally regarded as in some sort of way qualitative must now be characterized differently namely as being topographical. And in particular it is still true that the transference neuroses, the essential subject of psycho-analytic study, are the result of a conflict between the ego and the libidinal cathexis of objects.

I highlighted some of the stuff there that's particularly relevant to our discussion.  First off, for Freud, what made an instinct "sexual" was that it had an object.  Like, say, a breast.  Later on, Freud decided that the first object of our sexual desire was actually our self, experienced as an object.  Calling this "Narcissism" was a stroke of genius, since we are precisely falling in love with the reflection of something we find in the world that we don't know to be ourself, just as in the myth.  This radically changed how he thought of the ego-instincts related to self-preservation. These are now not defined as lacking an object (other than the rather vague one of keeping oneself around) but have a very precise object, namely the projection of our self onto some part of the world and its reflection back to us.  This is why he concludes that the distinction between the two types of instinct is no longer qualitative (since they both have an object they are both of the same type) but topographical.  Presumably Freud meant to convey a higher and a lower mind, a tip of an iceberg and a part underwater, with the ego being the part of the bigger erotic (libidinal, sexual) self visible in the world.   Deleuze actually changes this term to "topological", which makes a lot more sense to me.  The distinction really seems to be more about an inside and an outside, about an inside that's been discovered outside, making the ego into a sort of surface level of the mind, or a screen on which we see ourselves projected.  

Deleuze takes most these same ideas and organizes them in a new way since his question is slightly different.  Despite all the talk of childhood development Freud actually seems to almost take the ego, or at least the normal form of unity and identification that the ego should take on if it's not neurotic, for granted.  He doesn't really seem to discuss how this narcissistic ego could form itself, and skips directly to it recognizing itself or identifying itself in an object.  The form of the ego and the form of the object both presume a prior concept of identity that allows for their identification.  Since Deleuze is trying to not take for granted any concept of prior identity as a starting point, his question becomes roughly, "how does the ego know that it's seeing itself in the object if there's neither unified ego nor unified object to begin with"?  It's in trying to answer this that he brings in real objects, virtual objects, and their interaction.

The differenciation between self-preservative and sexual drives must be related to this duality between two correlative series. The self-preservative drives are, after all, inseparable from the constitution of the reality principle, from the foundation of active synthesis and the active global ego, and from the relations with the real object perceived as satisfying or menacing. The sexual drives are no less inseparable from the constitution of virtual centres, or the extension of passive syntheses and the passive egos which correspond to them: in pre-genital sexuality, actions are always observations or contemplations, but it is always the virtual which is contemplated or observed.

Following Freud, Deleuze sees both types of drives as pursing an object (ie. they are "objectal").  The difference is in what type of object they seek.  Freud imagined our sexual drives pursuing ordinary objects like tits and ass and antenna.  What he initially saw as the self-preservative drives were the ones he later discovered covertly pursuing a strange projected object which turned out to be our ego.  

For Deleuze, this order is almost reversed.  The sexual drives pursue strange virtual objects which correspond to what each of the passive local egos has a passion for repeating (as we saw this is really just what they are, and what brings them pleasure).  Because these objects arise locally, so to speak, they don't initially reflect us as a totality, but just part of (what is a yet to be defined) us, which is why next time we'll talk about Klein and her partial objects.  A full "extended passive ego" -- essentially, our selves as a subject, Freud and Kant's starting point -- still has to be synthesized as a contemplation-contraction of these virtual objects.  We'll see later that the contemplation involved in this synthesis is still passive, but it's built on memory, rather than the habit of the first passive synthesis.  

By contrast, in Deleuze's scheme, the self-preservative drives are the ones that aim at what we would call ordinary real objects like apples and water.  These drives seek objects capable of (temporarily) satisfying the biological realities that are needed to hold all the passive local egos together as a single overall unit capable of coherent action.  The objects are constructed as wholes (instead of parts) and motivate the action of a whole active ego (whereas with the sexual drives, we are thinking with our 'parts' so to speak).  

The fact that these two types of drives are distinct doesn't mean that either can exist on its own.  The only way to answer our initial question of how the full ego got constructed is to notice how the two objects reciprocally presuppose one another.  Each sexual drive finds its virtual object -- its reflection of itself -- contained in some aspect or part of the real object.  In fact, the real object is nothing but whatever contains enough of these virtual objects to satisfy the various sexual drives well enough that they cohere together and preserve themselves (reproduce through time).  These sexual drives though just started off as a motley collection of different parts and not an integrated whole.  This whole is only brought together through the passive contemplation of the virtual objects that compose the real.  

The fact that the two series cannot exist without each other indicates not only that they are complementary, but that by virtue of their dissimilarity and their difference in kind they borrow from and feed into one another. We see both that the virtuals are deducted from the series of reals and that they are incorporated in the series of reals.

This explanation is still too tentative and abstract.  We'll discuss aspects of this same structure again as we go through Klein and Lacan, and then return to see if we can manage to sum it all up more concretely.  For now, I think the key takeaways are that the real is associated with an active and total whole composed of unknown parts, the virtual is associated with parts in the context of a whole which has not yet been defined, and the two sets of objects only stand up by drawing on one another.

Who's your virtual mommy?

The first example Deleuze gives us of a virtual object turns out to be the virtual mother.  The mother as a virtual object appears as if it were a second and simultaneous goal of an activity like walking.  However, the virtual object is never really the goal of an activity the way a real object is because it functions more like the mirrored self-contemplation of the subject that would be interested in this particular goal to begin with.  What kind of self wants to walk to mom?  What's so great about mom that she can mobilize an activity as complex and integrated as walking?    

A child who begins to walk does not only bind excitations in a passive synthesis, even supposing that these were endogenous excitations born of its own movements. No one has ever walked endogenously. On the one hand, the child goes beyond the bound excitations towards the supposition or the intentionality of an object, such as the mother, as the goal of an effort, the end to be actively reached 'in reality' and in relation to which success and failure may be measured. But on the other hand and at the same time, the child constructs for itself another object, a quite different kind of object which is a virtual object or centre and which then governs and compensates for the progresses and failures of its real activity: it puts several fingers in its mouth, wraps the other arm around this virtual centre, and appraises the whole situation from the point of view of this virtual mother. The fact that the child's glance may be directed at the real mother and that the virtual object may be the goal of an apparent activity (for example, sucking) may inspire an erroneous judgement on the part of the observer. Sucking occurs only in order to provide a virtual object to contemplate in the context of extending the passive synthesis; conversely, the real mother is contemplated only in order to provide a goal for the activity, and a criterion by which to evaluate the activity, in the context of an active synthesis.

It bears emphasizing again what problem leads Deleuze to introduce virtual objects.  Obviously, the specific problem here is, "how do we learn to walk?"  But this is a subset of a more general problem, which is, "how do we make a self capable of any activity?"  In fact, this whole chapter should be read as an attempt to ask, "how we can manufacture any identity in a world of pure difference?"  Bear in mind that this is why we're talking about psychoanalysis and early childhood development to begin with.  The sequence of infant development provides the most concrete study of how an Ego forms itself.  In childhood, we go from not having an ego to having an ego -- our selves get built.  This is exactly the process we're interested in, and you can think of it alternately as a construction or a learning.

I think the virtual mother is meant to function as a symbol of just what it is that's desirable about the mother as an object.  What pleasures do we expect to get from her that would be capable of organizing all our little passive local egos into a whole that's unified enough to go seek her out?  In other words, how does she makes us feel, overall?  

This may seem like a dumb question at first.  I mean, don't we want mom because she has the food?  Isn't that just 'instinctual'?  Yes, certainly it is on same level.  But the question is what we mean by instinct.  We've already identified instincts or drives as the product of the first passive synthesis of habit.  They are like evolutionary and biological habits that bind together simple forms to create local passive egos.  We might even think of these as reflex arcs.  Newborn grasping and suckling behavior fit this description.  Before we become unified egos or individuals, we are born into this world of evolution's habits, which come prior to our own.  The infant is at first just the loose collection of all these local passive egos and their drives to suck, grasp, shit, and startle.  There may be a biological whole to which these instincts refer, but there is no 'infant ego' as such that carries out these activities.  

This type of description won't get us as far as walking though.  Somehow these reflex arcs have to be integrated into larger motor programs.  This requires a second level of synthesis and the formation of objects that pull together the various sub-rountines.  For as much as we may sometimes refer to walking or talking as instinctual, these are not immediate "endogenous" behaviors that can be traced directly to the pieces of our biological morphology.  We have to learn these things.  

Deleuze's idea is that this learning synthesis requires the creation of two types of objects.  We already saw objects that were posited as the goal of the activity in reality -- defined as objects capable of bringing us pleasure consistently.  But why do those particular objects bring us pleasure?  Because they satisfy enough of the various habits or drives of the passive local egos.  I want to walk towards mom the real object because it satisfies my touching-self, my sucking-self, my grasping-self, etc ...  These are the traits that turn a real object into mom, for lack of a better way to put it.  Mom has a sort of global object permanence that brings a global ego pleasure precisely because she combines all these traits or aspects.  Just like there is no ego for the infant, there is also no mother at first.  

Since each of these aspects of mom is a pleasure associated with some local passive ego, these traits don't fundamentally belong to mom, but compose her.  In fact, the first synthesis demonstrated that the form of these egos was inseparable from their fundamental narcissistic pleasure of self-repetition.  These passive local egos had no other goal or object than themselves.  The more global object that contains them, or that, as Deleuze will later put it, they are "planted in", is desired just because it reflects back enough of these little selves well enough to satisfy us.  

The "us" here is actually constructed through this process of reflection.  Deleuze calls it the "extended passive ego".  We'll see later that there is a real noodle-baking interaction between the subject constructed from the integration of these reflections of the parts of itself bouncing off of a real object, and a real object defined as containing enough of these reflections to create a subject.  That sentence alone should make you dizzy.  Right now, I think the important thing is just to understand the high level view that the virtual object is ultimately a piece of our emerging self as it begins to contemplate and bind together the little selves (drives, reflexes) that will compose it.  This self will become the subject that seeks out the real object. 

In fact the child is constructed within a double series: on the basis of the passive synthesis of connection and on the basis of the bound excitations. Both series are objectal: one series comprises real objects which serve as correlates of active synthesis; the other virtual objects which serve as correlates of an extension of passive synthesis. The extended passive ego fulfils itself with a narcissistic image in contemplating the virtual centres. One series would not exist without the other, yet they do not resemble one another.  For this reason, Henri Maldiney is correct to say, in analysing children's movement, that the infantile world is in no way circular or egocentric but elliptical; that it has two centres and that these differ in kind, both nevertheless being objective or objectal.

The two centers in question here are the real object, and the virtual subject.  This latter is synthesized from a passive contemplation-contraction of the virtual objects that correspond to the local passive egos, which is why we're not using the word 'subject' yet.  We'll come back next time to the interweaving of these two series.

 

REꓷЯUM

I don't mean to scare you, but the hard part is coming up.  We have to figure out what a virtual object is supposed to be.  I'm still pretty confused about this concept.  But I had a preliminary breakthrough today that involved thinking about the (self) image of an object reflected in a mirror.  A reflection still looks a lot like a real object (ie. it's 'objectal'), but actually it is the effect of the subject unknowingly reflecting 'itself', just like Narcissus see 'himself' in the image he contemplates in the water.  The 'scare' quotes here are simply meant to indicate that the self that is reflected doesn't pre-exist the reflection in this case; it's more constructed like a video feedback loop.  So this object is actually a subject, or more precisely, I think we'll find that it's some part of the subject, and that part only as given back to the subject in a reflection.  Since it's not a real object, but the image of an object, Deleuze calls it a virtual object.  In addition, this image gives us a sense of how a virtual object could be paradoxically cleaved, doubled, or split from itself and lacking an identity of its own.  Finally, the metaphor of the mirror image accounts for both the connection between virtual objects and memory (which always seems to pre-exist our present and come from somewhere outside it) and their link to a different type of repetition than we saw in the case of habitus (the round trip process of mirroring means that the image is only given as given back).  This metaphor is just meant to give us an intuitive orientation though.  It's going to take a lot of pixels about Freud, Lacan, Edgar Allen Poe, and Gogol's nose to make it more precise.  Pop some popcorn.

Keepin' It Real

Let's start with something I think I more or less understand.  Deleuze's description of real objects is straightforward if we keep in mind one crucial distinction.  When we call something a real object, we usually mean, in the parlance of our times, that it is some material entity objectively hanging around out there in the world.  Like, say, a rock, or a tree that has fallen in the woods.  This is not what Deleuze means by the term.  He signals this by using the term 'objectal' in place of the normal 'objective'.  He means to convey that a real object exists, as an object, for some subject.  It is indeed posited as outside that subject, as something that constitutes a reality beyond the subject that is necessary for sustaining it.  But it is not objective in the sense of 'being independent of a subject' that we usually give to this term.  

[In this context, the word 'objective' actually seems like a weird way to describe some sort of substantive bedrock of reality.  If it's supposed to be something that doesn't require any subjects to exist, then why exactly would you call it object-ive?  Doesn't the term object pair inseparably with subject?  You might instead claim that the measure of objectivity is whatever is conserved between subjects, at the limit, whatever experience would be the same for every possible subject.  But then, that also doesn't seem like a good candidate for some independent object-ive substance of reality, since it actually requires all subjects, and nothing but subjects, for its definition.  Either way, you'd be better off describing underlying reality as transcendental -- beyond the subject and object, as the process by which they are reciprocally fashioned.]

Deleuze's definition of a real object is basically whatever an organism seeks that reliably brings it pleasure.  It's a very pragmatic definition of reality that brackets entirely whether the object in question is a true representation of the world.  If it mobilizes my action as an organism according to the pleasure principle, and hence works to keep me around and reproducing myself, then it's real, by definition.  For example, food and water are going to be the top real objects for mammals.  

Real objects are defined relative to a subject.  We're not trying to determine the metaphysical furniture of the world that would be available for any subject to sit on.  Every organism is just a little machine that captures, or binds, the parts of the world need to produce and reproduce its form.  As we saw, the contraction that forms the machine, its power of reproduction, and the dominance of the pleasure principle all arise together as three aspects of the first passive synthesis of habitus.  

With the active synthesis of reality we're discussing here, the passive synthesis extends from the desire for pleasure as satisfaction in general, to the desire for specific pleasures, you might say intermediate pleasures, along the way to the most basic pleasure of self-reproduction (narcissism).  These intermediate objects serve as goals that mobilize the organism to action.  They are the supposed endpoints of these actions, even though they are better described as the best means of getting what the organism fundamentally seeks (ie. existence, repetition in time).  Each organism will have a different set of goals and hence a different set of real objects because each organism is produced by a different form of binding.  For my monkey ancestors, food, water, and dangerous tigers were all real objects.  For plants, tigers are not going to be an object at all, and the sun is going to figure more prominently in the list.  No organism binds everything.  Each produces for itself just the real objects that it needs to seek out through its actions.  No matter which organism we're talking about, most of what we scientifically call "objective reality" is going to be left out, just the way the real objects in my world leave out the ultraviolet and the infrasonic.  The reality of what we might call scientific objects is an interesting question, but not the more ethological one we're interested in right now.

But we should get back to the text, because I realize I've written a long preamble that is just meant to ward off confusion without having explored what Deleuze actually says about real objects.  First, he describes how real objects are synthesized.

... an active synthesis is established upon the foundation of the passive syntheses: this consists in relating the bound excitation to an object supposed to be both real and the end of our actions (synthesis of recognition, supported by the passive synthesis of reproduction). Active synthesis is defined by the test of reality in an 'objectal' relation, and it is precisely according to the reality principle that the Ego tends to 'be activated', to be actively unified, to unite all its small composing and contemplative passive egos, and to be topologically distinguished from the Id. The passive egos were already integrations, but only local integrations, as mathematicians say; whereas the active self is an attempt at global integration. 

So real objects develop as a second level of synthesis situated on top of the first passive synthesis that bound together each of the organs (like the eye) of an organ-ism.  The multiple drives for pleasure that characterized each local passive ego in the first synthesis are integrated into a global form.  They are integrated, prioritized and, as it were, projected onto an object that is supposed to satisfy them, creating the unified active Ego at the same moment as the object this Ego wants.    

Reality, in other words, is constructed.  It is defined as the object of the global activity that unifies the passive local egos.  Reality is what brings us what we want, the stuff capable of bringing all the fractious drives into an organization that satisfies them.  Following Freud, Deleuze sees the reality principle as an extension of the pleasure principle, not as a force in opposition to it.  Reality is just the means by which we get pleasure, not fundamentally something that prevents or limits our pleasure.  In fact, as we saw, pleasure already was curiously unsatisfactory in itself.  It had a lack of pleasure, a wanting, built into it already, and needed to be repeated all the time.  The reality principle simply extends this search for pleasure by positing some object as our most reliable means for repeating it.

It would be completely wrong to consider the positing of reality to be an effect induced by the external world, or even the result of failures encountered by passive syntheses. On the contrary, the test of reality mobilises, drives and inspires all the activity of the ego: not so much in the form of a negative judgement, but in moving beyond the binding in the direction of a 'substantive' which serves as a support for the connection. It would also be wrong to suppose that the reality principle is opposed to the pleasure principle, limiting it and imposing renunciations upon it. The two principles are on the same track, even though one goes further than the other. The renunciations of immediate pleasure are already implicit in the role of principle which pleasure assumes, in the role that the idea of pleasure assumes in relation to a past and a future.  A principle is not without duties.

In the case of the eye, the real object is right under our noses.  It's our everyday world of visual objects.  The eye binds together differences in the intensity of light.  It extends this synthesis into the brain as it posits or constructs whatever object produced those differences and reflected them into the eye.  The visual system as a whole then is based on the passive synthesis of an eye the collects a bunch of differences, and the active synthesis of a visual object that guides our action.  Oh shit, that fast moving blur of stripes is a tiger, run!  A real object arises when there is a thing that an animal can do something about, something that affects it globally and stirs it to action.  This concept of reality seems to be a restatement of the pragmatic principle that the truth is what works.

-------

There's still some confusion in my mind about how exactly this synthesis works.  Deleuze calls it an active synthesis.  But is it really prepared by a second round of passive synthesis, this time a global passive synthesis of the Ego made from the building blocks of the passive local egos?  It sounds a lot like it repeats the same structure as the first passive synthesis on a higher level.  Then the Ego could become "activated" by the search for a global object that would satisfy its pleasure, which would be a third synthesis, this time an active one that synthesizes an object for this newly created global Ego.  Though maybe if it follows the form of the first passive synthesis, there's no difference between the synthesis of the Ego and the synthesis of the object, which would make the whole thing read like a passive synthesis of an active agent.  

I feel like there's a question of part and whole lurking here that I haven't completely grasped yet.  The problem actually seems to correspond to one that comes up in Beyond the Pleasure Principle when Freud investigates whether a single cell organism like an amoeba could have a death drive, or whether the death drive can only happen in an organism of at least multicellular complexity, where one part can work against another unknowingly.  Do 'I' desire 'my' death directly, or is there something 'within me' that desires an impersonal sort of dissolution that just accidentally happens to kill me?  

So far, I've been treating the first passive synthesis as if it pertained immediately to a full organism with its drive for self-replication.  Deleuze, however, gave us the organ of the eye as an example.  The eye may focus and reproduce scattered light, but it does not reproduce itself (at least not by itself).  We might see the organization of the form of the eye as reflecting a "passion for repetition" on the part of the full organism that does reproduce itself directly, and so "forms an eye for itself" as passive adaptation to an environment that serves to reproduce an organism with this form.  But this seems to already require a fully formed organism, which I thought was what we were only just now talking about with the second, active synthesis.  In addition, Deleuze calls the eye a passive ego, a "seeing ego", that enjoys a narcissistic satisfaction in its own existence.  This suggests that the pleasure involved in the binding is the eye enjoying itself, and not the organism enjoying its eye.  Perhaps those two converge if we interpret the binding as introducing a drive for repetition that operates both for itself and for the organism at the same time.  But here again, it seems we would need an organism, which I thought we were only getting now, at stage two.  I suspect that there is some recursive fractal structure at work here, similar to what we found in our first study of the three repetitions, and it will only become clear when we again reach the third synthesis.  Is the passive local ego of the organ somehow simultaneously synthesized as a whole form in itself and as part of a larger totality in the process of formation?  It's a thing in its own right, but always in some context that extends beyond it?