Double Wassup!

One thing that I was trying to get to in the last post was using my reading of sign=trigger to help understand the perpetually difficult idea of the Eternal Return.  This question really goes beyond the introduction, but it becomes important in Chapter 1: Difference in Itself.  In other words, I'm going to go way off track here.

Accordingly, some background is required.  Chapter 1 asks if there's a way to think of the concept of difference in itself and fundamentally.  This means thinking of difference as prior to identity.  If we just see difference as the difference between identities, as always a kind of comparison of identities, we are never going to be able to have a concept of difference in itself.  There are two reasons for this.  First, our concept of difference will just end up being whatever is left over or not matching in the comparison of two identities.  Difference won't be defined autonomously, but just negatively, as not-identity.  Second, who's going to do the comparing?  Difference is only going to be defined by reference to a third party who subtracts the two identities.  Identity is seen as self-sufficient and directly apprehended, but difference is going to require mediation by a third party.  

How could we flip this around?  At first it seems kind simple.  We'll just make the identities the result of a comparison of differences, into differences of differences.  For some reason I think of this in terms of network diagrams.  We are given a bunch of nodes, which are represented as points, and we connect them with links, which we draw in as lines.  What if you replace all the lines with points, making the old links the new nodes?  It seems straightforward, but when you actually try to draw it you run into some weird problems with recursion every time you see multiple links coming off of a single node (in the original diagram).

Maybe this is related to the way that thinking of a world without identities seems to always slip away from you in an infinite regress.  Consider my favorite example -- the vortex.  The water spiraling down the drain in your bathtub is composed of water molecules organizing themselves under the influence of gravity.  "It" is really composed of nothing more than the differences in speeds of the molecules involved.  It has what you intuitively call an identity, but it's a funny dynamic sort of identity.  People throw around epiphenomenalism and other terms to try to discuss the reality of this identity, but it always seems simplest to me to just call it a process and let it go at that.  There is one problem with that strategy though, because some clever sophist might say, "sure, the vortex is a process, but a process has to act on some thing".  If you go on to point out that one could also see the water molecule as a process (though obviously operating at a different time scale) they'll hit you with atoms, and the quarks, and then strings ... they won't be satisfied till they hit something that sounds like a fundamental thing, like a metaphysical marble, that can give them the ready-to-go identity to ground the whole chain.  I note in passing that these people have usually never studied quantum mechanics.  At any rate, you can see that a view of the world that truly never appealed to a concept of identity would have to be difference all the way down.  Every thing in it would have to be defined in terms of everything in it (hence the title of the last post).  Vortices made of swirling vortices ad infinitum.  Or concentrations of certain chemicals regulating genes that end up changing the concentration gradient of other chemicals, that ...

The egg is a space of unfolding differentiation that is exactly a world of vortices stacked upon vortices.  The organs it forms are nothing more than differences of differences of ... This is not what they look like when their development reaches the asymptotes that we're used to seeing, but if you watch the process unfold, you can see how the organs arise as differences in intensity (concentration being an intensive property) that come to occupy the body-without-organs.  We tend to treat them as things just because of the timescale of their change relative to the timescale of our thoughts. I would actually propose this as a definition: a thing is a process as seen from the vantage point of another process with a much much faster characteristic time scale.  Conversely, we might define something as a hallucination or an illusion (a not-thing) as a process viewed from a vantage point with a much much slower time scale.  This, to me, is the basic insight geology has to offer; all that is solid melts.

But I digress.  Because the question I'm after is actually how we recuperate the idea of identity once we understand the whole world as nothing but difference all the way down.  This world of Heraclition flux is exciting but risks verging on complete chaos.  Our goal, however, wasn't to dismiss identity as some sort of illusion.  We were merely trying to found identity on something that seemed more direct and more empirical, and see how it was constructed.  Now we seem to be in danger of losing the concept entirely.

I don't foresee this line of thought fully yet, but this has to be why repetition is part of the title, and the Eternal Return starts appearing as the culmination of metaphysics (and also the point where metaphysics becomes real action).  Instead of identity appearing at the beginning of the story, it now appears only at the very end.  The only thing that has one unified identity in the egg world is the egg itself, the totality.  You only reach the One when you pack in the full multitude of Everything.  Just like with the Eternal Return, you only reach this exact moment, the moment that will "repeat", when you pack in all the infinite possible variations that went into it.  This is when you "become who you are".  The idea goes way down and I believe is Deleuze's spin on the oldest proposition in the philosophical playbook: "ALL IS ONE" -- he's suggesting we read that as "ONE IS ALL", the only ONE is ALL.  

And thus, finally, after many labors, I come to my point.  Which was to use the metaphor of embryology and the idea of sign=trigger to try and illuminate passages like this:

That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass. In this sense, the simulacrum and the symbol are one; in other words, the simulacrum is the SIGN in so far as the SIGN interiorises the conditions of its own repetition. The simulacrum seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model.

The simulacrum (which is the crowning moment for Deleuze, the moment of the Eternal Return) is when the sign becomes a sign of itself.  When something becomes the trigger of itself in a feedback loop.  But that trigger has to pass through the whole environment that it (partly) triggers to manage this.  Is there any better description of that than an egg?

Every-thing is Everything

Last week's episode ended with the dramatic unveiling of embryogenesis.  I was more or less claiming that this is a key metaphor for understanding the two types of repetition Deleuze is uncovering towards the end of the introduction as well as thinking about the relationship between repetition and difference (qua cellular differentiation).  You may have thought that this was a perfectly nice neat package that explained pretty much everything, but under the surface I could already see trouble brewing.  Because, while I'm trying to finish writing about the introduction here, I've actually read all the way up to the end of chapter 1.  Which made me acutely aware that I really still didn't understand the bit about signs and signaling which immediately follows the passage I claim refers to embryogenesis:

For it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled. For this reason, the logical relation of causality is inseparable from a physical process of SIGNALING, without which it would not be translated into action. By 'SIGNAL' we mean a system with orders of disparate size, endowed with elements of dissymmetry; by 'SIGN' we mean what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates. The SIGN is indeed an effect, but an effect with two aspects: in one of these it expresses, qua SIGN, the productive dissymmetry; in the other it tends to cancel it. The SIGN is not entirely of the order of the symbol; nevertheless, it makes way for it by implying an internal difference (while leaving the conditions of its reproduction still external).

Hence yesterday's post pulled out every reference to signs, signaling, and signifying in the introduction and chapter 1.  Since I've given such a specific reading of the discussion of causality and the example of repeated decorative motifs, I feel like I need to be able to map what he says about signs onto that metaphor.  So here goes an attempt at that.

A sign is like a trigger.  A trigger is not the same thing as a cause, but is intimately related to it.  If we're talking about firing a gun, the distinction between "trigger" and "cause" can seem like a completely boring and semantic one.  Okay, sure, the trigger doesn't itself shoot the bullet out of the muzzle; it's just at the end of a long chain of things that "caused the shot to be fired".  The distinction is more interesting though when we're talking about complex or chaotic systems where you don't have a nice linear chain of causes to explain things.  Consider, for example, the famous Californian butterfly whose flapping wings "cause" a hurricane in Indonesia.  The butterfly may be a trigger, but it doesn't really make sense to call it a cause of the hurricane in this case.  The hurricane really has a dynamic of its own that's ready to go; in some sense you have to say that it is the cause of itself (given the feedback loop that characterizes it).  But this particular hurricane appearing in this particular place can still have a particular trigger.

This idea of a trigger fits nicely with the story of embryogenesis.  The symmetry breaking stimulus that began the cascade of differentiation that led to a symmetrical left and right hand is a trigger.  It didn't cause the hands to form.  Yet it was a sort of necessary intervention that kicks off their mechanism of formation.  I think we can unravel all of the references to signs with this equation of SIGN = SYMMETRY BREAKING STIMULUS (more broadly, I suppose this latter could be "differentiating stimulus", but our way into this problem is through symmetrical repetition).   For example, it now makes perfect sense to say that the sign expresses a "productive dissymmetry" which it then tends to "cancel" -- there will be a difference between left and right, but they will be the same; and both the difference, as well as the similarity, are expressed by the combination of stimulus and mechanism.

And now, looking back at the quotes from pages 8 and 18, we see how signification is opposed to representation.  Whatever trigger causes the beginning of left/right symmetry or the arm to branch into a wrist and 5 fingers is not a representation of the hand.  There's no picture of the hand, no code for the hand.  There's just a stimulus that, combined with the existing mechanism and under the "normal" conditions, produces a hand.  What's being repeated in development is the process that produces a hand, but so long as the connection is stable, we can usefully point to that process by the initial stimulus that reliably triggers it.  That pointing -- not representing -- is signification.  Suddenly you can see why Deleuze reaches for the word "mask".  We want to talk about the process of digital (as in possessing digits) differentiation.  We can refer to it by the trigger that sets it off, but that in some sense is completely beside the point and tends to hide that we're talking about a process.  On the other hand, it's just as misleading to call it the "hand process".  The hand is not the point or culmination of the process in any deep sense.  It's just one possible output of the process. Just a few tweaks here or there and it produces a paw or a set of talons or a flipper.  Referring to the whole process by pointing to its starting or ending point just masks what is going on.  In fact, the more you think about it, the more you find that "starting" and "ending" points are just some arbitrary limits we use to slice up an unbroken flux.  Behind those masks are other masks, ad infinitum ...

But wait, there's more!  Let's put trigger in for sign in this passage:

SIGNS involve heterogeneity in at least three ways: first, in the object which bears or emits them, and is necessarily on a different level, as though there were two orders of size or disparate realities between which the SIGN flashes; secondly, in themselves, since a SIGN envelops another 'object' within the limits of the object which bears it, and incarnates a natural or spiritual power (an Idea); finally, in the response they elicit, since the movement of the response does not 'resemble' that of the SIGN.

The fact that the trigger is not a cause accounts for the first heterogeneity; it's just a tiny difference that sets off a whole huge system.  I think I've even seen this disparate size idea phrased in terms of the energy released by the two pieces -- a sign can use a very small amount of energy to create a massive energy release in the system it triggers (not unlike a word resulting in a brawl) which in a different context might even be part of the definition of what makes it a sign rather than a cause.  The second heterogeneity also makes sense now, since we are using the "sign stimulus" to signify the "hand process".  These are of completely different orders though, since one is a thing and one a process, which is why 'object' appears in quotes in this case.  An Idea is not an object, but exactly a natural or spiritual process of differentiation (what's the difference?) that is kicked off somewhere specific.  An object becomes a sign precisely when it manages to signify this process to some"one"/thing.  So this second heterogeneity is between the actual and the virtual, the concrete assemblages and abstract machines, etc ... all the dualities that constantly appear in Deleuze's philosophy.  Substituting "trigger" also explains the final heterogeneity.  The hand as product looks nothing like the stimulus that triggered it or the process that produced it.  There's no resemblance.

There's more to go here.  We've got signs and learning, signs and problems, and signs and the simulacrum and the Eternal Return still to come.  And that's just to get up to the end of Chapter 1.  But for now, I think we've cracked the nut/seed/egg.

Searching for Signs

8

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression. In relation to them we speak readily of an overcoming of philosophy. Furthermore, in all their work, movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement - in other words, the abstract logical movement of 'mediation'. They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct SIGNS for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind. This is the idea of a man of the theatre, the idea of a director before his time

10

When we say, on the contrary, that movement is repetition and that this is our true theatre, we are not speaking of the effort of the actor who 'repeats' because he has not yet learned the part. We have in mind the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the SIGNS and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles; we think of how repetition is woven from one distinctive point to another, including the differences within itself.

18

The mask, the costume, the covered is everywhere the truth of the uncovered. The mask is the true subject of repetition. Because repetition differs in kind from representation, the repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be SIGNIFIED, masked by what SIGNIFIES it, itself masking what it SIGNIFIES.

20

For it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled. For this reason, the logical relation of causality is inseparable from a physical process of SIGNALING, without which it would not be translated into action. By 'SIGNAL' we mean a system with orders of disparate size, endowed with elements of dissymmetry; by 'SIGN' we mean what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates. The SIGN is indeed an effect, but an effect with two aspects: in one of these it expresses, qua SIGN, the productive dissymmetry; in the other it tends to cancel it. The SIGN is not entirely of the order of the symbol; nevertheless, it makes way for it by implying an internal difference (while leaving the conditions of its reproduction still external).

22-23

Learning takes place not in the relation between a representation and an action (reproduction of the Same) but in the relation between a SIGN and a response (encounter with the Other). SIGNS involve heterogeneity in at least three ways: first, in the object which bears or emits them, and is necessarily on a different level, as though there were two orders of size or disparate realities between which the SIGN flashes; secondly, in themselves, since a SIGNenvelops another 'object' within the limits of the object which bears it, and incarnates a natural or spiritual power (an Idea); finally, in the response they elicit, since the movement of the response does not 'resemble' that of the SIGN. The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as SIGNS. That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an innate or acquired practical familiarity with SIGNS, which means that there is something amorous - but also something fatal - about all education. We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do'. Our only teachers are those who tell us to 'do with me', and are able to emit SIGNS to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other words, there is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity. When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other - involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted. To learn is indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with SIGNS, in which the distinctive points renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself. Apprenticeship always gives rise to images of death, on the edges of the space it creates and with the help of the heterogeneity it engenders. SIGNS are deadly when they are lost in the distance, but also when they strike us with full force. Oedipus receives a SIGN once from too far away, once from too close, and between the two a terrible repetition of the crime is woven. Zarathustra receives his 'SIGN' either from too near or from too far, and only at the end does he foresee the correct distance which will turn that which in eternal return makes him ill into a liberatory and redemptive repetition. SIGNS are the true elements of theatre. They testify to the spiritual and natural powers which act beneath the words, gestures, characters and objects represented. They signify repetition as real movement, in opposition to representation which is a false movement of the abstract.

24

It is true that we have strictly defined repetition as difference without concept. However, we would be wrong to reduce it to a difference which falls back into exteriority, because the concept embodies the form of the Same, without seeing that it can be internal to the Idea and possess in itself all the resources of SIGNS, symbols and alterity which go beyond the concept as such.

56-57

Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an 'effect', that phenomena flash their meaning like SIGNS. The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism.63-64

Neither the problem nor the question is a subjective determination marking a moment of insufficiency in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing them to be grasped as SIGNS, just as the questioning or problematising instance is a part of knowledge allowing its positivity and its specificity to be grasped in the act of learning.

67

That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass. In this sense, the simulacrum and the symbol are one; in other words, the simulacrum is the SIGN in so far as the SIGN interiorises the conditions of its own repetition. The simulacrum seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model.

Unscrambled Eggs

Let's keep going with the embryogenesis metaphor.  It makes it really easy to see the difference between the two types of repetition that Deleuze has now uncovered:

it is essential to break down the notion of causality in order to distinguish two types of repetition: one which concerns only the overall, abstract effect, and the other which concerns the acting cause. One is a static repetition, the other is dynamic. One results from the work, but the other is like the 'evolution' of a bodily movement. One refers back to a single concept, which leaves only an external difference between the ordinary instances of a figure; the other is the repetition of an internal difference which it incorporates in each of its moments, and carries from one distinctive point to another.

Our bodies appear to be made of repeated forms like our hands, but the identity of these are merely the final steps in a dynamic process of differentiation that is repeated in each of our limbs.  Before, when we thought about repetition we were continually asking how a particular form could be identically repeated in a world of natural and moral law, or in a world where our conceptual representations should be able to capture any real difference.  We took the finished identity of the form in question for granted, as if we had a little picture in our heads of one hand, and went looking for somewhere in time or space where we found another matching hand that duplicated it.  Now, however, we're interested in the hidden repeated process that may (or may not) give rise to outwardly repeated forms.

What's changed, you might ask?  Are we just shuffling terms around here, exchanging "process" for "form"?  It's important to stop and wonder about this.  The most important change is that the shift in level from form to process means we are no longer taking the form as pre-built and repetition as a game of matching, but are trying to explain how the form got built twice.  We're actually explaining the repetition, rather than just noticing it (which only pushed the question of what's repeating off into another realm anyhow, because how did we know it was repeated?  How did we become conscious of the repetition?  Or how did the repetition become conscious of itself as such?).  

Shifting levels has a bunch of other consequences though.  Now that the repetition has a cause we are no longer engaged in a matching memory game, so the cause and the effect (the thing repeated) don't look anything like another another.  Specifically, the genetic program that (often, in the right mileu) produces one hand and another hand doesn't look anything like a hand; there's no representation of a hand in the genome.  There's no "gene for the hand" or picture of the hand in the embryo.  We often hear about the "genetic blueprint".  A worse metaphor could hardly be devised.   The fascinating part of embryogenesis, and morphogenesis more generally, is precisely that there is not a picture of the finished form contained in the genome, not even "in code".  The code just codes for proteins.  The proteins interact with the code to produce new proteins that attach to one another and create chemical gradients that effect the concentrations of other proteins, etc ... There's no picture of the finished product nor of the intermediate states, there's just a cascade of differences.  

Nor is there a pre-defined space to contain a pre-defined form.  The embryo doesn't know "where" to put the hand.  It's a bit like the old joke about how long a man's legs should be (long enough to reach the ground).  Pre-existent forms require a simple location in a pre-existent space.  With embryogenesis though, the space and the form grow together.  In some sense you might even say that the two become indistinguishable, or at least go round and round in circles.  This is an active space that isn't just a passive receptacle or container for finished forms.

in the dynamic order there is no representative concept, nor any figure represented in a pre-existing space. There is an Idea, and a pure dynamism which creates a corresponding space.

Ideas are eggs.  Seeds from which stuff grows when the conditions are right.  But also, if they are to be successful organisms, the result of interactions with those conditions.  

Embryogenesis

I think the section that begins on pg.19 and runs through the top of pg. 26, with its discovery of two types of repetition, is really the main meat of the introduction.  It falls into two pieces at the beginning of the last paragraph on pg. 23.  The first piece gives some examples of how we can see something going on under the repetition of the same form; the second piece treats the idea of a hidden repetition beneath the outward repetition, of a subject and an object of repetition more generally.

Our problem concerns the essence of repetition. It is a question of knowing why repetition cannot be explained by the form of identity in concepts or representations; in what sense it demands a superior 'positive' principle. This enquiry must embrace all the concepts of nature and freedom. Consider, on the border between these two cases, the repetition of a decorative motif: a figure is reproduced, while the concept remains absolutely identical ... . However, this is not how artists proceed in reality. They do not juxtapose instances of the figure, but rather each time combine an element of one instance with another element of a following instance.

I've added some emphasis to that paragraph that's not in the original because I found it tough to understand the original without explicitly understanding why those phrases were there.  How is the repetition of a decorative motif "on the border" between "concepts of nature and freedom"?  And why is Kadiweu face painting the first example we get?  I only made sense of this passage when I flashed on the idea that the "artist" here is not necessarily a human one.  Birds and bees and nature in general produce plenty of "repeating decorative motifs", and so do the Caduveo, the muslims, and M.C. Escher.  Everything from birdsong to a hexagonal nest to the zebra's stripes to the drawings that might illustrate those fit here.  Hence the example can be considered either as part of nature or part of freedom (both human and animal), depending on who you take to be the artist at work.  The perfect illustration of this is naturally some indigenous art that we industrialists study as a way of understanding our own seemingly lost connection to a natural world.

With this reading in mind, you can choose something like "an organism with a symmetrical left and right side" to be the motivation for the following part:

These remarks stand for the notion of causality in general. For it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled.

I think Deleuze is thinking specifically of embryogenesis here, an idea I know is close to his heart.  Consider the egg you once were.  Ahhh, the good old days.  You started off as an undifferentiated oval.  Yet somehow, though a complicated process of chemical signaling that resulted in gradual step-by-step differentiation, you ended up with a left and a right, a top and a bottom, a front and a back.  If we just focus on the left-right symmetry that results, we can easily see what may literally be our very model for "the same" being repeated -- having two hands and feet.  And I think the Deleuze is even suggesting here that bi-lateral symmetry may provide our deepest model for causality.  Consider Hume's objection to the concept of causality -- it has to be more than just regular and repeated conjunction.  Okay, fair enough, but how about regularity and repetition on display at the same time?  Does looking at your hands put the idea of causality into your brain to begin with?  I'm not going to head down Lakoff and Núnez's speculative road here, but it does seem intriguing.

At any rate, what scientists call symmetry-breaking differentiation can become our model for what Deleuze means by repetition.  The important point is not the two identical hands that result from the process, but the cascade of differences that drive the process (beginning apparently with the way cilia on the embryo create a uni-directional flow of extra-embryonic fluid).  Admittedly, he's using "symmetry" here in the opposite sense that scientists use it, but in a way that's much closer to our everyday use.  Most of us don't normally rush to call a circle symmetrical, but draw a couple of dots in it: 😶 and you are halfway to a symmetrical face.  Mathematically, you've actually reduced the symmetry of the object by adding the eyes because you can no longer recover the same shape when you rotate it 90 degrees: but, kinda interestingly, most folks will immediately tell you that the first face is symmetrical and will hesitate on the second, and on the original circle.

And now I think we're really cooking with gas, metaphorically speaking.  I suspect that embryogenesis is going to be the core metaphor of the book because it illustrates the way that the identity of repeated forms is produced from a cascade of differences.  In other words, repetition is difference, and the difference of differences, and it's turtles all the way down.  

The negative expression 'lack of symmetry' should not mislead us: it indicates the origin and positivity of the causal process. It is positivity itself. For us, as the example of the decorative motif suggests, it is essential to break down the notion of causality in order to distinguish two types of repetition: one which concerns only the overall, abstract effect, and the other which concerns the acting cause.

Instead of just understanding repetition categorically as a process, we can now point to a specific process that illustrates what we're talking about.   Eggs, seeds, and God are the original rhizome.  Yeah, God.  But we'll have to come back to that.

Repetition and Death

Before I move on to the next section (which actually is the last one before the brief summary that ends the introduction) I want to think a bit more about why Death is coming up in the context of Repetition.  Why is their something negative about repetition?  Why does it seem connected to terror somehow?  And (as we'll see in the first Chapter) why is difference something potentially monstrous, and something inherently cruel?  What's with all the negative energy, man?

Seems to me that this is somehow related to the shift in ontological level between thinking about things (or finished forms) and processes (or mechanisms).  We're discovering that what's important about repetition is not so much that the "same" form appears again as an output, but that the same process must be at work underneath in order to produce this sameness.  But the process is really indifferent  to the forms it produces.  The two aren't on the same level and never meet.

I think it must be this indifference to forms that accounts for the negative associations with repetition.  You might phrase it as, "to death you are just a pile of molecules".  But focusing on death as a return to the "material model" doesn't get it quite right.  What's lost in death isn't the molecules, but the identity that held you together.  In fact, you were always just a pile of molecules in some sense, but more fundamentally you were the process that animated those molecules.  Or at least part of that process, if we can say it this way.  After your death the molecules are swept up in other processes.  Actually, even before your death, they were as well.  What was properly you was a new process (temporarily) overlaid on all these others.

Looking at yourself this way involves a pretty big radical (note: the word "radical" is being henceforth banned in philosophical discussions because its overuse has made it indistinguishable from "large" or "thorough" or "complete") change in self-definition.  It seems appropriate to start talking about a soul here, and to make connections to religions (above all to buddhism). Unfortunately, it's really, really easy to slip into making the soul look just like a glowing-blue afterlife version of you that can keep coming back like Yoda's ghost in Star Wars.  But that image just makes a thing out of a process; it's an error in kind.  You the process doesn't look anything like "you" the result.  Deleuze is constantly warning about the dangers of resemblance, of empiric-ideal doubling, of the logic of models and copies, of confusing the possible with the virtual.  I'm sure we will get into all of those warnings in more detail later, but the point for right now is that process-you is completely indifferent to the form of output-you-right-now.  Today's you is just one solution to the problem of being you.

Now I think it becomes easy to see why repetition as a process is linked to death, and why it can inspire terror.  Defining yourself as a process obliterates all the forms of you, all the formed "yous".  How much terror could this inspire if you were attached to, even identified with, those forms?  And how monstrous is it to contemplate all the forms of you that you might become that are nothing like the form you recognize.  But at the same time, we are talking about some concept of of you that is beyond death, indifferent even to whether there is a particular you alive at all.  If this isn't the immortality of a floating blue Yoda, it's still stretching towards eternity of some sort.  Not in the sense of everlasting infinite duration, but in the simpler sense of not being in time the same way as the output forms.  Terror and Freedom.  Saved and Enchained.  Immortality was always going to be a matter of self-definition.

180808.2

Probably not going to be improved by me re-typing it: