by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own.]
Henry Somers-Hall
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.
An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Part 1
A Guide to the Text
0 Introduction: Repetition and Difference
0.2 Science and Repetition (1-3/1-4)
Summary
Brief summary:
Scientific experimentation seems to repeat situations as if all were equivalent. But this is a mistake. They are not equivalent. They seem so, because by artificially selecting certain parameters and excluding others, the real distinguishing differences go unnoticed. Also, all features of the situation, including qualitative ones, are quantified, which equalizes all these differences in kind to the common system of numerical symbolization, which ignores all individuality of the things being quantified. Also, when laws are formulated on the basis of experimentation, it is always just a hypothesized sameness: ‘given the same circumstances …. [expect these same results]’.
Summary
Previously Somers-Hall gave an overview of DR’s Introduction. He noted that repetition is not to understood in terms of generality and law. We do not then encounter repetition in scientific experiment, moral law, and psychological habit, which are matters of generality. Now we address the question, why is there not repetition in science? Bergson notes the idea of reversibility, that physical situations that change can go back to the prior states by moving in reverse (8) [See §10 of Creative Evolution] This is a precondition for the scientific method which recreates situations (8) [I am not sure why the reversibility is needed for replication. Could not a series of non-reversible sequences be reiterated? Or is the assumption that any such reiteration would require that a developed state be returned to a prior one? In other words, is it that we cannot set up an initial state unless we derive it by means of reversal? So might we say for example, if we set up dominoes, they must be down already, and thus have fallen down already?] “It is by recreating the same situation that we are able to develop laws, by showing that bodies always behave the same way, thereby showing that the law is universal” (SH 8). SH then notes the common sense notion of repetition in scientific experiment, which is an idea that Deleuze is trying to over-turn. We might think that for there to be repetition, we somehow need two objects that are identical.
Our common sense conception of repetition (which Deleuze will aim to overturn) seems to require both that we are presented with at least two objects (we need at least a second object to have a repetition of the first), and that they are absolutely identical with one another (otherwise we do not have repetition of an object, but two different objects).
(8)
[I am not entirely clear on the formulation. If the objects were not identical, then the second could not be the first under repetition. However, if it is “absolutely identical” then I would think it is one and the same. So how could it be two objects, as first postulated? The basic insight in Deleuze’s notion of as I had understood it is that you cannot have repetition if each case is identical, because then it is merely the same thing continuing rather than repeating. In other words, if the objects are identical, then you never had a second instance that could have repeated, as you only had one thing to begin with. We might later learn that my interpretation is wrong or maybe that it reflects the non-common-sense view of repetition that SH will later explain.] The reason that scientific experimentation is not true repetition is because scientists artificially recreate situations, arbitrarily including some factors and excluding others. What is also artificial is the idea that there are discrete factors that can be excluded from others. Then, we suppose that these factors are quantitative. [If we say we have two of something, that numeralization ignores all differences between them so that they can be understood as two of the same things. See this sort of thinking about quantity in § 395 of Hegel’s Science of Logic.]
in order to conduct an experiment, we presuppose that the pertinent features of a system can be understood in numerical terms. Once this has been done, ‘phenomena necessarily appear as equal to a certain quantitative relation between chosen factors’ (DR 3/3). Deleuze therefore argues that physics comes to natural phenomena with a mathematical understanding of them, which opens the possibility of different situations being equal.
(8)
Even properties are understood as quantifiable. [We have different orders of generality, perhaps for example, the order of qualities (color as frequency, warmth as vibrational energy, sound as wave frequencies) and the order of transfers (exchange of motional energy, heat, etc), and other such orders, all reduced and inter-relatable by means of quantification.] “We can say, therefore, that science presupposes a principle of repetition that allows it to relate different orders of generality to one another, but it doesn’t explain this principle.” (8)
Also, repetition in scientific experiment is hypothetical. “The experiment generates a law of the form, ‘given the same circumstances’, i.e. a hypothetical law.” (8) [The next point seems to be that even if the scientist equates one situation with the next, that does not mean they cannot be different in kind. I am not sure how to exemplify this. Perhaps we might draw from the idea Bergsonist/Deleuzean idea that the entirety of the world changes each moment, so even though in controlled circumstances an experiment shows the same quantitative functional relations, we are forgetting that it is a small part of larger and larger systems, the largest of which having changed in kind, thus the smallest of which doing the same as well, even though we blind ourselves to it by artificially sectioning off systems and imposing on them parameters we bring from prior experiments.]
In this case, repetition is given as an extrapolation from experiments which provide at best similar circumstances. As Deleuze writes, ‘repetition can always be “represented” as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind’ (DR 2/2).
(9)
[I am not entirely clear on the formulation. If the objects were not identical, then the second could not be the first under repetition. However, if it is “absolutely identical” then I would think it is one and the same. So how could it be two objects, as first postulated? The basic insight in Deleuze’s notion of as I had understood it is that you cannot have repetition if each case is identical, because then it is merely the same thing continuing rather than repeating. In other words, if the objects are identical, then you never had a second instance that could have repeated, as you only had one thing to begin with. We might later learn that my interpretation is wrong or maybe that it reflects the non-common-sense view of repetition that SH will later explain.]
ReplyDeleteOne of the key questions in the introduction is how this common-sensical (but faintly paradoxical) notion of repetition outlined above is possible – i.e., how can the same thing happen twice? As you say, we’ll encounter several ways of reconciling these two conditions. One, for instance, is to treat the world as constituted from atoms that share all properties. Given such atoms are indistinguishable (in an ontological sense), each atom ‘repeats’ the others. Kant provides another solution – two objects can have all the same properties (so they share the same concept), but yet differ in non-conceptual ways (in their relations to spatial intuition, for example in the case of incongruent counterparts). I suppose if I were to reformulate my claim, I would say that what’s important is that two events have to be conceptually identical, but yet distinct, to make common sense repetition possible.
[The next point seems to be that even if the scientist equates one situation with the next, that does not mean they cannot be different in kind. I am not sure how to exemplify this. Perhaps we might draw from the idea Bergsonist/Deleuzean idea that the entirety of the world changes each moment, so even though in controlled circumstances an experiment shows the same quantitative functional relations, we are forgetting that it is a small part of larger and larger systems, the largest of which having changed in kind, thus the smallest of which doing the same as well, even though we blind ourselves to it by artificially sectioning off systems and imposing on them parameters we bring from prior experiments.]
I think Deleuze is here drawing on an idea in Merleau-Ponty and Bergson that in order to constitute an experiment we choose a number of variables and take them to be essential, while seeing others as accidental – i.e., we treat different aspects of the world as essentially discrete from one another, and hence separable. We assume that the same experimental situation obtains even if the accidental aspects of the situation change. Thus, we abstract from context, and this allows us to see what are situations that merely resemble one another as being repetitions of one another. Another way of seeing the same issue would be to say that repetition in scientific experiments requires the assumption that events don’t have a history to them. Bergson’s critique of quantitative psychology in Time and Free Will is that it assumes that mental states can be seen to ‘start again’ at points, whereas in fact every mental state is inflected at least to some degree by the whole history of our mental lives. Here’s an example of this process in the physical world that Bergson uses in Creative Evolution:
‘If I boil water in a kettle on a stove, the operation and the objects that support it are, in reality, bound up with a multitude of other objects and a multitude of other operations; in the end, I should find that our entire solar system is concerned in what is being done at this particular point of space. But, in a certain measure, and for the special end I am pursuing, I may admit that things happen as if the group water-kettle-stove were an independent microcosm.’ (CE 214)