Pirates & Revolutionaries

Time Cut. Ch.4.3 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

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Time Cut

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 4: The third synthesis of time

Part 3: Pure and empty form of time

What does the cut in time got to do with you?

The moment right now is significant. It opens you to a new future. But that means it cuts time apart, making it fork off into a new direction.

Brief Summary

Deleuze turns to drama to further explain the third synthesis of time. It is a dramatic cut that determines before and after. It presents an undetermined future. It is the condition for novelty. As a condition for something undetermined, it is pure and empty. Time is out of joint, because it loses its cardinal points of orientation, and is pure ordering rather than an ordering governed extrinsically. The cut is not a point but an event or process of dually cutting moments apart while joining them in succession. Something is before when it is too great for the underlying processes the subject is passive to.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Drama determines temporal order.

Summary

There are two concepts that will help us answer certain questions regarding Deleuze's third synthesis of time:
1) "open determinability as a given, and"
2) "drama as form." (87a)

Deleuze will turn to Hölderlin and Hamlet.

Williams outlines the significance of this turn to drama.
1) The dramatic actions of the subject determine the self in time.
2) But because the subject depends on a passive self, it is fractured.
3) This means that the subject is not the condition for determinability. Rather, it is "the vehicle whose actions are further conditioned by passivity." (87b)
4) Thus there is a circular relation between dramatic actor and determinable self. "The actor is conditioned by the self that is created by the actor’s dramatic action." (87b)

Even though the passive self determines the subject, activity "is still undetermined in relation to novel differences that can be introduced into ongoing processes." (87c) In the third synthesis of time, "only difference returns and never sameness. This is the synthesis’s capacity for genuine novelty, rather than a repetition of the past. The third synthesis of time is the condition for novelty, which is why it must be pure and empty." (87c.d)

Deleuze turns to Hamlet and Oedipus to illustrate why "time has to be dramatised, that is, it must be assembled through a novel creative attempt where past, present and future are unified but only also as divided around an encounter with the new." (87d)

Williams then explains Deleuze's meaning for 'time is out of joint', from Hamlet. When we lose points of orientation in our lives, time comes out of joint.

"The Latin root for ‘gond’ is ‘cardo’ the hinge or axle, the north–south axis in a city, or orienting direction and cardinal points for a circle, for instance north on a compass. The number of revolutions of a circle can then be measured thanks to cardinal points, for instance, in the number of times a clock passes midday or a horoscope passes a birthday. The passing of time, as much for the soul as for the world, he says, is measured thanks to such cardinal points. When these go missing time goes out of joint and becomes maddened and disordered, as it does for Hamlet and the kingdom of Denmark when he receives the news, from his father’s ghost, of his uncle’s betrayal: ‘Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand / Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatched’ (Hamlet: I, v, 74–5)." (88b.c)

Time is empty because loses ordering, and pure because it is not contaminated by that ordering. There is no cardinal point to orient the cycling of events.

"Time out of joint or the third synthesis of time is therefore empty, in the sense of lacking cardinal numbering, and pure, in the sense of lacking hierarchies associated with numbering. We can understand this disruption further by returning to Deleuze’s critique of Plato. In the Platonic context, time out of joint means that the ideal is removed from the circle; we therefore are left with simulacra with no principle of resemblance. For Hamlet, once | his father’s ghost has spoken, the numbering and legitimacy of kings is out of joint and his time becomes empty (there is no next numbered ruler) and pure (there is no legitimate ruler). Hamlet’s task is then to revenge his father by killing his uncle, thereby re-establishing numbered order and legitimacy based upon it." (88-89)

Rather than cardinal, time becomes ordinal, pure ordering without orientation to that order. (89b) In the third synthesis, this ordering is a cut or caesura. Every present is a cut in the present into an ordering of before and after. (89c) "the third synthesis is static because its sole characteristic of order always remains the same, the before and after of each cut always remain." (89cd) "If novelty is accepted in any process (animal, vegetable, mineral) then a third synthesis of time is implied as condition for the new." (90a)

[Our self is fractured into an active and a passive part. The active selects novel differences. The passive part of us is determined by synthesis that the active side cannot control. The subject is the process doing the selection.] The fracturing of the subject should "be read as implying that any activity is also passivity and fracturing of the subject of that activity, where active means selecting by introducing a novel difference, passivity means determined by syntheses outside the control of activity, subject means process of selection, and fracturing means dissolution of the subject through the syntheses it is passive to." (90b)

The third synthesis, on account of its caesura, is both a break and a division into unequal parts. (90d)

Every point on the line of time is such a cut. This cut is not point-like or instantaneous. (91a) Deleuze elaborates with the concepts of assembly and series. (91a)

Deleuze time is not a time-line series of points succeeding before and after one another. (91b) The caesura is an event and dramatic division that is not a point between points but is something that gathers the points before and after together dramatically. (91c) So events in time are both assembled, by relating them dramatically, but also severed, because that ordering occurs on the basis of cutting them apart. (91d)

"Each point on the line has a set of points before and after it. This is not Deleuze’s model. Instead, the caesura is an event and has a depth to it. It is not instantaneous but rather must be considered with its effect on the points before and after it. This is why the caesura implies a drama: it divides time such that a drama is required to encompass this division. This event-like and dramatic division is in contrast with the thin logical point and set account of the line of time where an arbitrary point is taken on a line and every point before it is defined as before in time and every point after as after in time." (91b.c)
"the ensemble is rather a process of gathering and tearing apart. Why is this? It is because the whole of time is ordered, but it is ordered differently, that is, into before and after. The events of time are gathered in an ordering, but they are also torn apart, since some are irreparably before and others irreparably after the dividing event." (91d)

Drama establishes what is before and what is after.

"A series is ordered by a dramatic event according to the following principles: ‘before’ is determined in accordance with the assembly of the line of time in an image operating as a symbol for that assembly. When the image is posed as ‘too great for me’ for a given event, then we have something before." (92b)

We should not, as the English translation suggest, consider the action under consideration as being imagined. (92d) "However, the difficulty remains that Deleuze is referring to actions by subjects and to what certainly appears to be a conscious awareness of an image that is ‘too great for me’ is posed as ‘too great for me’ for a given event, then we have something before." (93b)

"the image is too great for the self, that is, for the underlying processes the subject is passive to. It exceeds those processes as past or before. None of this depends upon an empirical experience. It is rather a formal connection between processes of cutting, assembly and setting into series in relation to the future as novelty: As for the third time that uncovers the future: it signifies that the event and the action have a secret coherence that excludes the coherence of the self. It has become equal to them and they shatter it into thousands of pieces, as if the bearer of the new world were taken up and dissipated by the shattering of what it, in the multiple, gives birth to. The self is equal to the unequal in itself. (DRf, 121)" (93d)

The cut, assembly, and serialization produces the future not as a dimension of the past and present. Williams then offers a helpful summary.

"The third synthesis of time, or pure and empty time, is a cut, an assembly, an ordering and a seriation. It is deduced as an a priori condition for action, which in simple terms claims that any novel action depends on a cut in time. This cut though must also assemble what comes either side of it. This assembly is itself dependent on a putting of time into an order of before and after the cut. The third synthesis of time is therefore a division of time and an ordering of time. This ordering though is also a seriation; it distinguishes the before and the after, rendering time asymmetrical. This complex third synthesis is the time of the future making the present and the past, which become dimensions of it, because the action it is posited upon is essentially determined by an open future. Neither the subject nor the self is a foundation for Deleuze’s philosophy, because in the third synthesis of time they are both ungrounded. The subject is divided by selves it is passive to. These selves though are shattered by the structure of the third synthesis that makes them past in relation to a future they cannot determine. All of these components of time are formal and deduced as necessary conditions for any novel action. So though Deleuze depends upon examples and vocabulary from drama to introduce and explain the third synthesis of time, this drama is strictly defined formally as the cut, assembly, ordering and seriation which can be explained by reference to Shakespearean drama but is not derived from it. As Deleuze insists all the way through his work on the third synthesis of time, it is a priori and not dependent on empirical observation." (94b.d)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Cycles of Synthesis. Ch.4.2 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:

2012-01-07T06:32:00.000-08:00

Cycles of Synthesis

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 4: The third synthesis of time

Part 2: Back to Plato

What does Deleuze's modification of Plato's circle of time got to do with you?

You once returned to a place that you haunted in your childhood. The past returned to you, but as completely new, because wasn't the experience so much different than when you experienced that place as a child? But in every moment of our present living, doesn't the past inform us? It is never as though we see the things around us for the first time. They have become familiar. But the present moment itself, doesn't it always feel fresh? Even when we are bored, isn't the problem really that the present keeps imposing itself anew, and we are doing something unstimulating with that freshness of the moment? Is boredom maybe a tension we feel, having before us the immediate feeling of newness accompanied secondarily by forced distracting redundancies?

If you get bored staring at a clock, is it because the past keeps returning redundantly as the same? Or is it that the past keeps returning differently; each moment of seeing the clock has its own unique qualities and feels, but the situation compels us to ignore the differences from moment to moment, hence we become frustrated? Perhaps an interesting exercise might be not so much a meditation where you try to keep your focus on the clock or some other thing and stabilize your awareness, but rather an antimeditation where you keep your focus on the clock and experience each moment in its new freshness. Perhaps then boredom will be less a factor in your life, as you come to find normal redundancies continually renewed. The past is cycling back into the present always as something new. We can feel it.

Brief Summary

To expand the concepts of pure and empty time, Deleuze turns to Plato's theory of reminiscence and circular time. The main difference is that the return of the past is not based on an ideal and resemblances, but rather the past returns as something undetermined and yet also determinable.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze has a cyclical temporality.

Summary

To further explain a pure and empty form of time, Deleuze turns now to Plato's theory of reminiscence: "knowledge must be remembered ... rather than acquired through the senses." Yet because knowledge is recalled, it must have been first forgotten. (84b) The Plato material also fits nicely with the concepts of the pure past and circular nature of time in the eternal return.

"On the one hand, there are aspects shared by the two philosophies: a circular notion of time, a relation between a phenomenal world and a world of Ideas (the actual and the virtual in Deleuze), and the foundation of time through the past rather than the present (explaining the priority of reminiscence for Plato and the necessity of the second synthesis of time for Deleuze). " (84-85)

Yet there are important differences between Deleuze and Plato. For Plato, the circle of time has layers of resemblance that culninate in the in-itself of the ideal. Things resemble the ideal, and they do so to more or less of a degree. If the soul can preserve the ideal or in-itself, it can escape the circle. "It does not return but is always the same ideal other things return to – to greater or lesser extent in relations of resemblance. In Deleuze’s circle, taken from Nietzsche’s eternal return, there will be no order of resemblance, no ideal or in itself and no escape through true knowledge." (85a)

For Plato, our lives are circular, because we undergo the cycle of death and rebirth.

"But each soul can return to the ideal or immortal part of its former incarnations through knowledge of the Idea, that is, through a return of the Idea as the same origin from which all phenomena decline. This means escaping the circle, because the ideal remains the same and hence does not revolve." (85b)

The only things that revolve are things that resemble, the simulacra. Deleuze's pure past is a 'founding' rather than a 'foundation', because it is a process that allows the present to pass. Plato's
past is a foundation and is

"still a present, because it is a present that has become past. However, it is not a present like any other, since all other presents | exist in relation to that foundation. So the present as foundation has to be a mythical present: ‘[. . .] the Idea is like the foundation from which successive presents are organised into the circle of time such that the pure past that defines it must necessarily still be expressed in terms of the present, as an ancient mythical present’ (DRf, 119)." (85-86)

Thus

"Deleuze’s objection to Plato is then two-fold. First, the past becomes the ground for identity and representation in the circles of resemblance of presents to mythical present. Second, this mythical present subsumes the past itself to representation and identity, and thereby it turns the past back on to presents that it is supposed to found, in the sense of make pass or dissolve in terms of identity: ‘This is the insufficiency of the founding, to be relative to what it founds, to borrow the character of what it founds, and to be proven by them’ (DRf, 119)." (86a.b)

Because of Deleuze's restricting representations from the cycling returns, "when the past returns with a new present it does so free of any determinations." (86c) This means that the new present is radically new; it is completely undetermined, although it is determinable. "This is why he adds the work on Plato to the work on Kant: it allows him to introduce the idea that time is circular with the paradox that this circle must not involve the return of identity and representations, of the same and the similar." (86c.d)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Cracking Kant's "I". Ch.4.1 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-07T06:28:00.000-08:00

Cracking Kant's "I"

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 4: The third synthesis of time

Part 1: From Descartes to Kant

What does Deleuze's novel reading of Kant's "I" got to do with you?

You see yourself in the mirror. Each time you look slightly different. But you assume there is one you the whole time. Does that mean you have a unified self that stays the same, or does it mean that you are constantly an alien to yourself, as you see variations of yourself that do not reflect the identity you think you have, as for example when being surprised by signs of age like wrinkles?

Brief Summary

Deleuze works with Kant when describing the empty form of time and fractured self in the third synthesis of time. Expanding from Kant's inner sense, Deleuze regards there being a fracture between an active subject and a passive self, implied in Kant's treatment of the formulation "I think, therefore I am". On this basis, Deleuze claims that "I am an other", and he will work with Hölderlin to further explain.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze has a novel reading of Kant's "I".

Summary

When explaining the third synthesis of time, Deleuze relates Descartes and Kant with the concepts of subject, time, and determination. But the subject for Deleuze is fractured and thus is not "a subject as philosophical foundation or to a specific form of time independent of prior processes." (80b)

Deleuze, as with the first two syntheses, makes use of transcendental deduction in the third synthesis. (80c)

For Deleuze, the "I" is not a generality but "a singular self as condition for a now singular subject stating the proposition ‘I think’." (81a) Yet Deleuze is not grounding his philosophy on the subject nor saying we need to begin with it and then dig for something more fundamental. "Instead, Deleuze’s main point is about determinability, passivity and time. The subject presupposes the self. The self passively presupposes a form of determinability. This form of determinability implies a fracturing of the self and hence of the subject because it is a pure and empty form." (81a) In the claim, "I think, therefore I am," the first "I" is determined as the "I" that thinks, but the second "I" has no such determination, and thus is undetermined. "How the 'I' exists is left open." (81b) Yet, Kant explains that the "I" is determinable in many ways, and this is only under the condition that the "I" is in time. Here Deleuze "is concerned with two consequences. First, activity presupposes passivity. Second, this passivity involves a different form to active consciousness and one that is inaccessible to the active one." (81bc)

All determinations of the "I" require time. We cannot control or deny this, and it is passivity. But it is doubly passive.

"This is because it is not the subject of the active conception that is directly passive, but rather, it is passive through a self positioned in time. The ‘I’ that conceives of the proposition is different from the ‘me’ positioned in time by being a living and sleeping thing. So now being is divided between an active subject and passive self where any action by the subject presupposes that self because the subject is only passively determinable in time through the self. A passive self is the condition for any active subject. The ‘I’ is therefore fractured or traversed by a fault line, because of the way the self is determinable in time" (81d)

Deleuze concludes from this that the "I" is an other, which is the paradox of inner sense. (82b)

The form of time implied in the fractured "I" is pure and empty. It must be pure and empty, for otherwise "it will lead to a determination of the self, rather than an open determinability, and therefore not to inner sense as paradox, but rather as a determined and fixed relation of subject to self." (82c)

For Descartes, the "I" is not situated in time. There is only the present instant. It is God continually creating the world that allows the "I" to be found across series of instants. It is only because God remains identical each moment that he can grant us our continuous identity. (82-83) Kant's account of moral action and passive receptivity provides a grounding identity for both the active subject and the passive self. (83b) Deleuze, however, finds a paradoxical relation between the active subject and passive self in Kant's inner sense. (83bc)

"The criticism of Kant gives Deleuze a set of indicators for answering the question of why the form of time must be pure and empty in the fracturing of the subject through its dependence on the self as another." (83c) In Deleuze's critique, the self is not identified by means of an external guarantor like God or through enduring receptive passivity. Thus,

1) The self is an other, and it is resistant to identity and representation. (83c)
2) "time itself cannot be determined in such a way as to allow a subsequent determination of things in time." (83cd)
3) we cannot identify time through external reference like God

Hölderlin's work on Kant and Sophocles will explain "the pure and empty form of time through ‘the continuous diversion of the divine, the prolonged fracture of the “I” and the constitutive passion of the self’ (DRf, 118)." (83d)

"The identity of the ‘I’ must therefore remain fractured through an ongoing process, and the self, as constituted by passivity, must not have a prior identity restricting this passivity, for instance, through the Kantian definition of receptivity." (84a)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Rescuing Your Past. Ch.3.4 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

Rescuing Your Past

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 3: The second synthesis of time

Part 4: How to save all the past for us?

What does saving your pure past got to do with you?

Whenever we remember a past moment, we are not remembering it perfectly. In a way, we are continually recreating our past. But this in a way keeps it alive and relevant to our present experiences.

Brief Summary

If we want to save the pure past, we cannot use representation and we cannot consider it as the present it once was. We can save it by reliving it creatively, and this happens through forgetting. Because we forget the past as it was when it was present, we continually recall and relive it as different.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

We recreate the past in recollection.

Summary

Our past is in continuous flux. But how should we act then? And if we cannot adequately represent our past, do we have any responsibility to it? Such practical questions lead Deleuze to a third synthesis of time. (76b)

Deleuze wonders how we may penetrate the pure past without reducing it to the former present that it was or to the actual present happening now, in related to which it is past. "How to save it for us?" (Deleuze qtd 76c)

To address this matter, Deleuze shifts from Bergson to Proust. Proust

"through his study of reminiscence, has shown how the past can be saved for us without reducing it to representations of a former age or to representations of our age (the past as how it could be). Instead, the past is given ‘as it was never lived, as a pure past revealing its double irreducibility to the present that it was, but also to the actual present that it could be, in favour of a telescoping of the two’ (DRf, 115)." (77c)

Thus "Reminiscence shows that the past is lost and forgotten as a past present. It accepts it." (77c) But also, reminiscence takes both the past and present representation together, and makes a third image, and in this way saves the past. "It is in this special kind of forgetting and recreating that the past is lived with in forgetting." (77cd)

We can save the past because it is a necessary process for present moments to pass. And we can save it in how our forgetting recreates it in the present. (77d) "Only as a recreation of past presents | as forgotten, as in need of being lived differently, can the past be saved for us." (77-78) Yet the pure past "what we must create with, it does not show us how." (78a) For this we need a third synthesis. Deleuze's explanation of how Eros allows us to penetrate Memory takes him to the third synthesis. (78ab)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Destined to be Free. Ch.3.3 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

Destined to be Free

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 3: The second synthesis of time

Part 3: Destiny and freedom

What does the destiny and freedom implied in the pure past got to do with you?

You are free to let your past haunt you, teach you, distract you, etc as much or as little as you choose. But because your past never goes away, you are destined to always live it freely as new moments of your life act like plot twists that change the way your past appears to you.

Brief Summary

In the second synthesis, repetition is found as the degrees of contraction in our memory. [We live the whole of our lives each moment at a different level of Bergson's cone.] This is destiny [although it is somewhat unclear why]. But although it is destiny, we have the freedom to choose that level of intensity. The pure past is virtual, because it is real and not actual, and it is noumenal, because it is the condition for the present's passage. Repetitions cannot be represented.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Freedom and destiny are intertwined in the pure past.

Summary

Previously Williams ended with this question.

"‘condition’ has a different meaning to Deleuze’s. Bergson is not deducing a general transcendental condition for a formal process (such as the passing away of the present). Instead, like Deleuze, he is offering an alternative to the concept of cause, but unlike Deleuze, he is doing so in order to give an account of how each individual consciousness relates to its past as shown in the true operation of memory. This is where we can raise the question of the legitimacy of Deleuze’s work when compared with Bergson’s. What is the validity of an account of the past that does not base itself on a scientific account of causality (or some other contemporary candidate for explaining relations between states of affairs scientifically) but equally does not observe the operations of memory in detail or offer a full theory of memory in relation to consciousness, but instead constructs a speculative transcendental frame with abstract terms such as the pure past?" (68a.b)

Williams now addresses a possible objection to Deleuze, "that he does not observe memory or consciousness in a thorough or consistent way." (68bc) Williams offers as an answer to this objection:

"He is not primarily concerned with human memory or consciousness, but rather in a general study of repetition in relation to time. He is not constructing a philosophy according to an empirical approach, but rather combining a minimal observational element with a series of transcendental deductions guided by a speculative conceptual frame." (68c)

The way that repetition operates in the first synthesis is different from how it works in the second. In the first, repetition is based on a succession of elements that are contracted. In the second, repetition is found in "degrees of contraction of a whole ‘that is in itself a coexistent totality’ (DRf, 112)." (68d) [It does not seem here that Williams is thinking yet of the degrees as layers of the cone.]

Deleuze will relate these concepts to destiny, determinism, and freedom in our lives. Quoting:

"‘Nevertheless, we have the impression that, however strong the possible incoherence or opposition of successive presents, each one plays “the same life” at a different level. This is what we call destiny’ (DRf, 113)." (Deleuze qtd in Williams 69d)

To explain [again, rather than turning here to the layers of the cone], Williams notes that we have durations of differing lengths, like the time we have to finish our coffee or our life as a father. These can be incoherent. To explain destiny, Williams writes: "This preliminary definition of destiny is explicitly loose and Deleuze is careful to point out that it is based on an ‘impression’, that the incoherence and opposition are ‘possible’." (70a)

To further develop his concept of destiny, Deleuze contrasts it to determinism. Destiny is not determined; our life is not a single continuous line. (70c) But how can one life be multiple in this way?

[Here Williams seems to consider the 'levels' as overlapping durations, perhaps like the coffee and father examples above, rather than the layers of the cone] "The condition for connecting fragmentary durations into a life is that they are playing the same life but at different degrees and levels." (71a) What is destined is that each moment gives us the freedom to 'reprise' past moments. (71c) "The meaning of freedom in relation to destiny in Deleuze is then not the freedom to add to a sequence, for instance, when a new director adds a new film to an established franchise (My Life IV). Instead, we are free to make a new cut of an existing film (My Life, The Director’s Cut)." (71c.d)

Williams then seems to interpret the degrees and levels in terms of how much significance we regard past moments, and at each moment we have the freedom to grant those moments more or less significance. "Freedom exists in relation to destiny and determinism for Deleuze because we are free to change the relations of level and degree given to all past events through our present acts." (72d) Williams then seems to offer an interpretation of the levels and degrees more like the cone layers of differing expansion and contraction of the past.

"We are not free to change determined relations between actual presents. Here, changes in level and degree can be understood as changes in the intensities of distinctness and obscurity of relations in the pure past, that is, some relations in the past will be made more distinct as others become more obscure. For example, an act of atonement in the present can change nothing of the actual acts it seeks to atone for. It is free, though, to change the hold such acts have on new passing presents, perhaps by making them less significant in their relations to other events, or by making them more obscure and distant, and thereby diluting their hold on novel ones. Thus, to heap betrayal upon betrayal might increase the intensity of treach- | ery as a line leading from the past to the present, whereas to forgive might weaken it. Within Deleuze’s metaphysics, this freedom exists because the pure past makes all presents pass and coexists with them." (72-73)

To distinguish the second synthesis with actual presents, Deleuze appeals to Kant's noumenal and Bergson's virtual. The pure past is virtual, not actual, and as the condition for the present's passage, it is noumenal. (73b) Deleuze's noumenal then is not like Kant's realm of things-in-themselves but rather a transcendental pure past, a "realm that all actual things determine and are determined by. It becomes a virtual and ideal realm as condition for all events and not just those of human memory." (73c)

Deleuze also articulates these ideas in terms of 'metempsychosis."

"Since each one is a passing present, a life can take another on, at a different level: as if the philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint played the same past, at different levels of a giant cone. This is what is called metempsychosis. (DRf, 113)" (Deleuze qtd 74a)

Williams explains: "for Deleuze, humans are not fully human until they express the pig within them and the true philosopher is one who is also or even foremost a fool." (74b)

Deleuze also then discusses "the return of difference" in terms of material and spiritual repetition. (74d)

"In material repetition, the synthesis of the living present or first synthesis of time, difference is subtracted, because a selection is made of a particular series within many differences. In ‘spiritual repetition’, the second synthesis of time, difference is included, because all differences are taken up, but at a particular level and degree." (74d)

This sort of difference cannot be represented. "When repeated elements are represented the subtraction that representation depends upon is erased. When repetition within the pure past is represented a subtraction is imposed on it such that it is no longer the whole of the past." (75bc) "difference is between the living present and the passing present that they belong together. One subtracts from the other while the other adds it back, but always differently in an ongoing creative process." (75cd)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

The Presence of the Past. Ch.3.2 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:

2012-01-06T09:02:00.000-08:00

The Presence of the Past

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 3: The second synthesis of time

Part 2: The deduction of the pure past

What does the transcendental deduction of the pure past got to do with you?

You carry your past around with you in your memories. But how did those past moments, back when they were happening, pass into the past? It might be because present moments begin already with the character of the past. We might be living in the past right now. Each present moment might from the beginning take the form of a memory. Do we not often feel like certain intense present moments are 'memorable', even before enough time has passed for us to recall them?

Brief Summary

In the second synthesis of time, what enables the present to pass is the past in general, which is not to be understood as all past moments taken together. The pure past is like an a priori for the present's passage. Deleuze explains the pure past by means of Bergson's Matter and Memory. He identifies three paradoxes of the second synthesis, building from Bergson's analyses: "the past must be contemporaneous with the present that it was; all the past must coexist with the new present in relation to which it is past; and the pure element of the past pre-exists the passing present." (63c) Each synthesis is its own unique time and process, and the others are dimensions of it. The present is a dimension of the pure past, and the past forms its present-dimension as having the character of something that passes. Deleuze's description varies from Bergson's in that it "constructs a speculative transcendental frame with abstract terms such as the pure past" (68b)

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze's explicates his second synthesis by means of "a speculative transcendental frame." (68a)

Summary

The pure past of the second synthesis is general, because it is the condition for the possibility of the present to pass. Active recollection however is the particular selection of moments in memory: "the aiming present as active memory is now particular, since it approaches the past in a particular way and for a particular aim, whereas the past as condition for any possible past present that could then be aimed at is general." (59d) Yet, Williams wonders why this past must be general and not instead a collection of particular memories. (59a)

Active memory as associative only selects artificial signs.

"As shown in the previous chapter on the first synthesis of time, these signs are not about the synthesis of the past in the living present, but instead depend on a distinction drawn between past and present such that something in the present is taken to represent something in the past." (60bc)

When we select past presents, we place them in relation to the aim of our present search, and in that way, "When a past present is actually represented, this representation also includes a representation of that actual representation to itself." (61bc) [So there is past moment that satisfies the search, but there is also the moment in the former present when we initiated that search.] But the actual passing present of the search is different from the represented past selected moment.

"The passing actual present that set out to recollect has a different status to the ones it set to search within: ‘The actual present is not treated like the future object of a memory, but as that which is reflected at the same time | as it forms the remembrance of the former present’ (DRf, 109–10)." (Williams 61-62)

There are "two processes are at work in the active synthesis of memory: reproduction and reflection." (62a) And, there are "two distinct ways in which the presents are represented." (62a)

"When it is a particular former present represented as the aim of a search, we have recollection and memory. When the present that embarked on the search is represented we have reflection, because it is represented to itself with the added element of the memory." (62a)

These reflected moments index deeper layers which index deeper ones, and in this way contain one another. The condition for this containment is the past in general. (62bc)

In order to recall past events, the past cannot be a collection of former presents but must instead be a past in general allowing for any reproduction. "It must therefore not be a past dependent on a particular experience of presents, a subset of occurrences, and must hence be a priori (prior to any given experience)." (62d) Also, the past in general is pure in the sense of it not being characterized or limited by any particular set of past presents. (62d)

Deleuze explicates the pure past through Bergson's Matter and Memory. However, Deleuze's portrayal of the general past is not exactly the same but rather a development on it. Williams then notes how

"Deleuze identifies three paradoxes relevant to the pure past in Matter and Memory. These are: the past must be contemporaneous with the present that it was; all the past must coexist with the new present in relation to which it is past; and the pure element of the past pre-exists the passing present. Rephrased in more simple terms, the first three paradoxes are: since the past adds nothing to the present that passes into it, it must be contemporaneous with that present; since the past must be contemporaneous with each passing present, all the past is contemporaneous with each passing present; and since all the past is contemporaneous with each passing present, the past is contemporary with all of time and pre-exists any passing present." (63c.d, emphases mine)

These paradoxes have both critical and productive functions.
1) Critically. They are critical of the notion of the past as a collection of particular moments, and they are critical of the notion of an active memory as the power to recall the past presents. (63d)
They "support the transcendental deduction of another version of the past, the pure past, not resembling such a collection." (63d) [This might be productive instead of critical.]

2) Productively. In the first paradox, the past is set within the passing present that is contemporaneous with the pure past but not identical to it. (64b)

"the creative move is to replace the idea that the past is the same as the present that was, with the idea that the past is a different kind of condition for the passing of the present occurring with the present or contemporaneously: ‘A present would never pass, if it was not past “at the same time” as it was present; a present would never be constituted, if it was not first constituted “at the same time” that it was present’ (DRf, 111). Deleuze has therefore replaced a notion of simultaneity where two things of the same kind are simultaneous, with a relation of contemporaneity between an actual present that can be represented (as present or past) and a different element, the pure past, accompanying every present and making it pass." (64bc)

Recall that the second paradox is "about the coexistence of all of the past with any present." (64d)

"the pure past is the whole of the past and cannot change in relation to each new present in the way a collection of copies of presents might: ‘That’s why, far from being a dimension of time, the past is the synthesis of the whole of time and the present and future are only its dimensions’ (DRf, 111)." (65ab)

So we see that in each synthesis there is only one time, and the others are dimensions to it. And also, each time has its own unique processes. (65bc)

"In the second synthesis, the present is the most contracted state of the passive synthesis of all of the past. It is no longer a synthesis of a particular pattern from the past in the present, but rather a dimension of an ongoing synthesis of all of the past in the past. We therefore have two sides of any present (as we shall see, there will be another with the third synthesis of time). There is the present as contracted synthesis, a particular stretch in the present, and there is the present as the most contracted state of the all of the past, of the pure past. Neither of these times can be reduced to one another and Deleuze’s philosophy of time is therefore one where time is only complete when taken from different sides or perspectives: a time of the living present and a time of passing present in relation to the pure past." (65c.d)

In the second synthesis, the past precedes the present "because the present is only a dimension of the pure past that must therefore pre-exist it." (66a)

Williams examines the vocabulary in this Deleuze quote:

"The paradox of pre-existence therefore completes the other two: each past is contemporary to the present that it was, the whole of the past coexists with the present in relation to which it is past, but the pure element of the past in general pre-exists the passing present. (DRf, 111)" (66a)

Williams seems to read "each past is contemporary to the present that it was" to mean that a past moment is contemporaneous not with a present moment but rather with a moment that has passed. And it is not that the whole of the past is contemporaneous with the present, but rather that it 'coexists' with a present in relation to which the whole of the past is considered past. But the past in general, as the condition for present moments to pass into the past, preexists the present's passing. (66b)

In the first synthesis, the present makes the past as a dimension of the present. But in the second synthesis, the past creates the present as one of its own dimensions in that the past creates the present's "essential properties, the main one of which is that every present must pass and is accompanied by the pure past." (66d)

Deleuze's reading of Bergson in this case varies slightly.

"‘condition’ has a different meaning to Deleuze’s. Bergson is not deducing a general transcendental condition for a formal process (such as the passing away of the present). Instead, like Deleuze, he is offering an alternative to the concept of cause, but unlike Deleuze, he is doing so in order to give an account of how each individual consciousness relates to its past as shown in the true operation of memory. This is where we can raise the question of the legitimacy of Deleuze’s work when compared with Bergson’s. What is the validity of an account of the past that does not base itself on a scientific account of causality (or some other contemporary candidate for explaining relations between states of affairs scientifically) but equally does not observe the operations of memory in detail or offer a full theory of memory in relation to consciousness, but instead constructs a speculative transcendental frame with abstract terms such as the pure past?" (68a.b)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Memory in Passing. Ch.3.1 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

Memory in Passing

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 3: The second synthesis of time

Part 1: A time within which time passes

What do the conditions for time to pass got to do with you?

The moments of your life slip away. Where do they go? What makes them leave? Or do you carry them with you always? In what way? How is it that you have a past?

Brief Summary

The second synthesis of time is a memory process that allows the present to pass into the past, all while this process is conducted completely in the present. This is because Memory is the condition of possibility for the past to be ordered and for the present to enter into determinate (but not determined) relations with the future.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze's second and first syntheses interact.

Summary

The second synthesis is a 'synthesis of the past'. Deleuze's temporality involves multiple interacting syntheses. "Time is therefore manifold for Deleuze, with different syntheses interacting in a fractured and complex manner, allowing for dislocations and changes in perspective." (51bc) "Time and process coexist like reflections in a hall of broken mirrors, offering multiple perspectives to follow and recreate, but never a full image." (51c) The fact that we are now considering two different syntheses raises many questions regarding their relations and the temporalities they produce. (51-52)

Deleuze builds from features of the first synthesis: "the first synthesis is originary but not a pure origin; the present in the first synthesis of time is a passing present; the present is constituted of many durations or stretches that overlap." (52a)

The first synthesis operates in the second synthesis. (52d)

There is a paradox to the present. It both constitutes time while also passing into that constituted time. The time we constitute is both passing away and yet is a present process. "If the present constitutes the past first, then it must pass away into a past that it has not constituted, since there will be an interval, a difference, between the constituted past and the one the present passes away into." (53b)

To handle the paradox, Deleuze separate two things: a) the time that the present passes away into, and b) the first synthesis.

In Williams' reading, the syntheses of time are productive processes. The present does not pass into another time acting as a container. The first synthesis of time transforms as it passes into the second.

"Both syntheses of time are active in many different ways and passivity must itself be understood as a process in Deleuze, rather than inertia or indifference. So the meaning of ‘to pass away’ should not be seen as an inert falling into disuse. It is quite the contrary. To pass away is to pass away in a synthesis of the past as memory defined as the second synthesis of time." (54a)

There are two important principles in Deleuze's speculative metaphysics:

1) nothingness or void can never serve as an explanatory principle, and
2) all processes are two-way and asymmetrical

Deleuze speaks of necessary consequence and necessary referral. It is not logical necessity (because it "does not follow from formal logical operations") but rather it is speculative necessity (because it "follows logically only if we accept the structure of a complex speculative metaphysics.") (54bc)

Yet, perhaps Deleuze is wrong, and time passes into a void of some sort. (54-55) Williams also finds problematic Deleuze's distinction between the two process of foundation and founding. "The first synthesis of time is a foundation because it is a process of ‘occupation’ and ‘possession’, that is, it determines an open space according to patterns and to differences." (55bc) But, what is not given is the form and determination of the passing away of living presents. And what is the condition allowing for past things to be recalled? (55d) Here we turn to the concept of founding. The second synthesis makes present moments pass by placing them into well-determined relations of what is to come. (56a) However, this is not a final determination. (56cd)

"This is because the second synthesis of time as that which makes the present pass through a process of foundation cannot depend upon or lead to a finally established and identified true foundation. It has to allow the present to be determined differently as proper and appropri- | ate." (56-57)
"The pure past will be defined as determining the form of the passing present – that it must pass, and how it must pass – but it does not determine or cause the content of any particular passing present. The pure past cannot be the cause of the present or completely determine it. Deleuze’s philosophy cannot be deterministic." (57a)

Williams considers an objection. Note again how signs of the past are not in the past, but are given immediately in the present. Recall is not necessarily a going back to past presents but is instead an inspecting of present codes and signs. (57a) So if recall happens in the present, why is it necessary that there be a founding of past presents? The problem is that these interpretations of present signs of the past are active processes, yet the second synthesis is passive. (57d) The second synthesis does not synthesize particular moments but instead it synthesizes 'levels' that provide the conditions for an ordering of the past.

"the passive synthesis of the past is a synthesis not of particulars but of levels, that is, not of the passing presents themselves, but of the conditions for any ordering of them. For all passing presents to be ordered and related the successive levels created by their passing have to be connected or, to use Deleuze’s term, they have to be encased in one another." (58a)

Deleuze distinguishes capitalized Memory from uncapitalized memory:

"‘Memory’ as capitalised for the process of the second synthesis and ‘memory’ for active memory: ‘Habit is the originary synthesis of time, constituting the life of the passing present; Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time, constituting the being of the past (making the present pass)’ (DRf, 109). The being of the past is not the representations, records or codes of an active memory in the present. It is the condition of possibility for all the different active memories, their differences, but also their connections, above all their connections with the passing presents that came before them – all of them." (Williams 58b)

The different temporal processes condition one another asymmetrically. (59b)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Passing Habits. Ch.2.4 of Williams' Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-05T13:45:00.000-08:00

Passing Habits

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 2: The first synthesis of time

Part 4: The passing present

What does the passing present got to do with you?

Every present moment of your life passes on. But consider how your habits in a way express passed moments when you previously performed those actions which built up into the habit. You contract these moments into the present while that present is passing. Yet, each contraction changes you in a way, and it alters how you construe your past and anticipate your future. You are a 'larval subject'.

Brief Summary

In the first synthesis of time, the present continually passes into its contractions, which produces a 'fatigue' of sorts. Need can be understood as fatigue rather than lack, because when we need something, we are constantly making contractions that anticipate what we need, which exhausts us. Need understood as lack has a negative structure, and this structure does not allow for questioning, because it presupposes the needed answer. The self of the first synthesis is multiple and continuously becoming as contractions continually to alter it, and it is understood not on the normal philosophical basis of the opposition between active and passive.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

On the basis of his account of habit in the first synthesis of time, Deleuze offers an original view of the self.

Summary

Williams quotes: "‘Nonetheless, this synthesis is intra-temporal, which means that the present passes’ (DRf, 105)." (Williams 45c) But does the present pass into itself, or does it pass to one of its dimensions?

Consider the paradox that arises when we think that the present passes into the past. The present moment has transformed the past through its synthesis. Thus that past has disappeared. But if the present somehow passes into the future, then it is passing into something that is only awaited and thus not something it can pass into. (45-46)

"If the present passes into its past dimension, it must change the particulars it has already synthesised. If the present passes into its future dimension, it carries actual particulars into the generality of the future, thereby contradicting its definition as only generality. In the first case the arrow of time must be reversed. In the second, it is denied." (46b)

Every contractive synthesis is already a passage. To contract the fourth bell toll, the third had to have passed.

"Physical duration is therefore the stretch that it takes for a contraction to pass. Durations are therefore multiple and overlapping: ‘An organism has a present duration, diverse present durations, following the natural scope of contraction of its contemplating souls’ (DRf, 105)." (47a)

The first synthesis as a passing present necessarily involves exhaustion and fatigue. The concept of fatigue could even help scientists and other sorts of researchers, although it has a special meaning for Deleuze. (47c.d) When we think in terms of our active syntheses, like when we representationally consider that tomorrow morning we will need to have coffee, then our needing of the coffee can be considered a lack [because we are taking into consideration a future contraction that has not yet happened.] However, when we consider the passive syntheses that are automatically making all these contractions, [our needing coffee is not our lacking it, but rather the exhaustion that results from us constantly making anticipatory contractions. So when we feel like we need something, we feel a discomfort. It is not a frustration that the situation is not otherwise. Rather, it is us exhausting ourselves by channeling our contractions so to guide us to what we need.] [Note: I do not follow Williams' example here. His example sentences are: "I need coffee in the morning" for need as lack and "Too tired even for coffee" for need as fatigue. I have not yet figured out how the second example sentence illustrates a contractive synthesis.]

Signs are present in our contractions. There are two sorts of signs.

"A natural sign relates to a present, to the work of present passive syntheses in a living present and in relation to the passing present. An artificial sign refers to the past and to the future as distinct from the present (Imagine your life free of your coffee addiction), for instance when we ask ourselves abstractly what we want to be, before we seek out the signs of what we are becoming in the present, before attempting to learn our present signs." (49a)

When we conceive need as lack, we do so on the basis of a negative structure. But really need results from changing contractions. We cannot properly question in a structure of negativity because "we presume to know what we need and hence the sole difficulty is how to get it." (49bc)

"A question draws on (‘soutire’) an answer, that is, it refines and selects within it, sets it within a series of repetitions. More importantly, it does so by experimentally searching for a novel difference that has passively appeared within the series; this novel difference is a larval subject driving towards a further synthesis of | the series." (49-50)

Deleuze's account of habit portrays our selfhood in the first synthesis as pre-reflective not limited to philosophy's normal opposition of passivity and activity.

"Habit as defined on the basis of Deleuze’s work on the first synthesis of time is itself the process where the syntheses of the passive self, ‘the world of the passive syntheses constituting the system of the self’, are also larval subjects, that is, the multiple subjects of actions prior to reflection, representation and understanding. Deleuze’s philosophy of time allows him to turn philosophy away from the opposition of passivity and activity, to an understanding of life – of all things that become – as activity drawn from passivity." (50bc)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Souls of Habit. Ch.2.3 of Williams' Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

Souls of Habit

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 2: The first synthesis of time

Part 3: Of pebbles and their habits

What do the contractive habits of your body parts got to do with you?

You might witness a catastrophic traffic accident. You would feel something all throughout your body. Every part of you in a way is confronting the event. Your twitching muscles are in a sense 'contemplating' this moment, combining it with other frightening experiences that required the muscles move your body to safer locations, hence they twitch now. Each body part is performing their own individual contractive contemplations, and thus they are all like souls that make up who you are. But, who are you then? You are not any of the souls. Nor are you somehow the average of them all, if such a thing could be conceived. No, you are the differential relations between your soul components' contractions. Feel the difference within you. It makes you who you are.

Brief Summary

Habits create differences. This is because we are made up of a multiplicity of contemplating souls each contracting events in their own ways. This process never ends.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

The first synthesis of time involves multiplicity.

Summary

Deleuze portrays inanimate objects as also performing the contemplation and contraction of habit at work in the first synthesis of time. (38b) According to Deleuze, habit "draws" difference from repetition, (38c) and in this way it "creates a change or becoming in the series" of repetitions. (40ab) Williams goes on to explain the French term for 'draws'. The process involved in the synthesis is one of intensive variation. (40b.d)

"‘Soutirer’ is a technical term with a chemical basis from winemaking. It is one of many taken from chemistry and biology used by Deleuze when he wants to point to this differential variation (at other times he uses examples such as ebullition, at DRf, 296, for example). The term means to draw wine from one barrel into another, for instance, in order to remove sediment. It is important, however, not to identify the concept with the casks, or the wines in their apparently fixed states in each one. The process Deleuze wants to map his philosophical concept on is not the passage from one state to another. Instead, Deleuze is interested in the process itself and, more precisely, in the introduction of a difference in intensity, a differential variation, in the process synthesised as time. So habit is a contraction, not in the sense of a passage from a dilated to a contracted state, as Deleuze says about heartbeats, but rather a synthesis of events (contraction and dilation) as a differential, an ongoing variation of intensity or a becoming – and not a difference between two states. So we can now better understand what habit is as retention and expectation: it is the synthesis of a variation in intensity over events, where retention is the absorption." (40b.d)

When habit draws difference from repetition, it is synthesizing the series "in a novel manner, such that differences in intensity appear within the series and contract it differently in relation | to other series." (40-41)

"the process he is defining and describing is not about associating identified causes and effects repeating in the same way over time. Instead it is about a novel variation continuing to vary, thereby constituting time as the synthesis of the variation." (41b)

New contractions change the intensive relations in the series of repetitions, (41c) (as when a new occurrence changes how we configure our pasts and anticipate our futures, perhaps like when a plot-twist occurs).

Deleuze does not abandon a scientific perspective which would regard the synthetic process as constituting identities rather than differences, because Deleuze does not exclude identity from the process; he merely gives difference the primary role. (42b)

"From both angles, he does not seek to deny scientific evidence and theories, but instead seeks to complement them with an account of the role of difference as taking a primary but never complete role in relations of determination between actual identities and ideal differentiations. We can and should consider an event as the referent of scientific accounts. However, these accounts are incomplete unless taken with a more speculative model explaining the intensive difference making each event different." (42b)

Contraction is performed by a contemplative soul. (42c)

"The soul is the intensive difference contracted by a habit. It is the difference allowing a series of events to be synthesised in a living present, as different from identifications and representations of sameness to other events. The soul of any thing is therefore the singular way in which it contracts past and future series." (42c)

There are souls for all things. Deleuze's world is multiple and non-hierarchical.

"Deleuze’s world is radically multiple: it is constructed from multiple and irreducibly different syntheses forming many different perspectives on one another (where perspective is a way of describing different syntheses and contractions). A beach is not a totality of beings. It is a multiplicity of contractions which cannot be organised into a final order, logic or pattern without imposing an illusory sense of the real." (43a)

This also means each part of us, heart, muscles, nerves, is also a contracting soul. And thus, we are made up of a multiplicity of passive souls. (43c.d) [We are the differential relations between our multiple contractive souls.]

According to Williams, there are two types of contractions.

1) [Integration] Contraction of particulars into generalities [contracting series of occurrences] (43-44)
2) [Differentiation] Contemplative contraction at work in individuation [each soul differentiating itself as individual through its own particular manner of contraction] (44a)

Deleuze says that difference is between two repetitions. Is difference like an entity or substance lying between repetitions, or is difference "in the relations of the processes of repetition themselves"? (44bc)

Integrative contraction draws two sorts of difference from the "chaos of passing instants": "difference as opposition between represented identities, but also and primarily, difference as passive synthesis. This second difference is differentiation, where any integral thing is undone into a multiplicity of passive selves or syntheses in time." (44c) Thus

"The first synthesis of time is therefore a differentiation and an integration, a contraction allowing for action, and a passive synthesis undoing that contraction and opening up to novel differences. [...] The primary rep- | etition in the first synthesis of time is hence in passive synthesis, in the renewal afforded by a differentiating synthesis that means that no process of integration is final, determining of a complete entity, or free of internal differences and differential intensities." (44d; 44-45)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Time & Method. Ch.2.2 of Williams' Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2012-01-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

Time & Method

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 2: The first synthesis of time

Part 2: Synthesis and method in the first synthesis of time

In Deleuze's account of his first synthesis of time, what does his methodological shiftings from empirical to transcendental got to do with you?

Who are we? Does it have something to do with how we behave and view the world at any moment? Our minds put experiences together. So each time we let go of something heavy, we anticipate it dropping; so perhaps we automatically move our feet out of the way. This is on the basis of empirical observation. But would we not also say that part of being who we are is that this contracting process always is going on, because if new occurrences did not come into and merge with past ones, we would stay the same in a timeless way, which is like death in way. When we deduce that it is logically necessary that this process is at work, we are using a transcendental methodology: we are explicating the conditions of possibility for our lives to move forward in time.

Brief Summary

Deleuze mixes empirical and transcendental methods. We empirically observe our mind's tendency to contract. We transcendentally deduce the necessity of passive synthesis for this tendency to be at work.

Deleuze also does not limit his account to subjective and objective perspectives. The repetition of cases is not seen objectively, because the occurrences do not each already have contracted relations to the others (it must be performed on them). Yet, the repetition is not understood subjectively [perhaps because each contraction changes the mind itself, so the contractions are not based on some stable subjectivity; rather, that subjectivity is under alteration on account of the contracted occurrences].

There are three moments involved in repetition: succession, contraction, and representation.

There are two further ways to distinguish repetitions. The first regards additions. They are closed insofar as an addition will change it qualitatively, like how the fifth bell toll feels different than the fourth, and thus the fourth one was closed off to further addition. And they are open insofar as the addition strengthens quantitatively certain paths of anticipation. So the more times we hear the bells toll at five o clock, the more we anticipate the fourth toll being followed (and contracted with) the fifth toll. Another way to distinguish repetitions is on the basis of grouping status. Each new toll makes a new contraction, and this is the repetition of elements. But each toll is what it is on account of its paired contractions, and this is the repetition of cases.

When our sense impressions contract, they do so on the level of passive synthesis, but also we may more explicitly consider representations of occurrences not seen in terms of their mergence with others. The representational level is not adequate to capture everything about the immediate sense experiences, and so also thinking representationally about our habitual contractions is not enough to change them; we must instead somehow do so on the level of passive synthesis. Each contraction is a sign for how we might make future contractions. But interpreting the sign representationally misses implicit components of its meaning.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze mixes empirical and transcendental methods. Also, he regards representation as inadequate for a description of what is going on in the syntheses of the lived present.

Summary

Deleuze's writings on the first synthesis of time also raise questions of philosophical method. Recall the role of retention and expectation in the 'living present' (from Ch.2.1). For example, we always find that heavy things fall when we let go of them in the air. We retain all these similar particular events retentionally in our mind. Then, just as soon as we see ourselves about to let go of a heavy object, all similar past occurrences contract together to make our mind anticipate the object falling. This much is empirical, because it is all based on experience. But what is not empirical is the very fact that synthetic processes are required for this contraction; for, "It is a logical deduction from the independence of instants" [For different instants to relate together in the contraction, they must first be different, thus they are not inherently related, and so an additional synthetic exercise is necessary to relate them contractively.] What is also not empirical is the fact that the processes involved are conditions for each other and also that that their relations are asymmetrical. [The conditions for example for possible future contractions are grounded in actual ones now, and because this concerns the conditions of possibility for other processes,] it is transcendental rather than empirical. However, we do not deduce logically that there are at work these process of the first synthesis of time; rather we observe them as such. Williams wonders why Deleuze turns to Hume's thinking when perhaps there might be more recent and convincing support in psychology, neurology or Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. (30bc.d)

Williams finds the first clue in Deleuze's distinction between the empirical and the formal with regard to processes. What makes Deleuze's argumentation different than scientific and phenomenological ones is that he moves swiftly from empirical to speculative remarks regarding the formal properties of these processes. So he begins with 'a sketchy empirical observation' [contraction of like causal pairings] in order to set out a 'speculative formal frame' [perhaps, an account of the necessity for these processes and their relations] with a transcendental element [describing the conditions of possibility for these necessary processes]. (31a.b)

"This partly explains the difficulty of setting down a label for his philosophy: it is empirical, speculative and transcendental. It also invites a deep worry, since there is a danger of failing in each of these moves and standing as poor (unscientific) empiricism, (non-rigourous) phenomenology and (logically deficient) speculative philosophy" (31a.b)

Deleuze makes use of the resources of all three, without falling victim to their dangers, through a careful analysis of them in the history of philosophy. (31b) To do so, Deleuze first "establishes the priority of passive synthesis and the living present." (31c) So it is not that what is most primary are the individuality of the instants, and then secondarily they are synthesized. Rather, it is only on the basis of the synthetic processes that they can be conceived as separate in the first place [perhaps because they would not be relatable as being different from one another if there were not some synthesis that brings them together into such a relation]. Also, the synthesis is the condition for the incompleteness and the secondary nature of our conception of the separations of occurrences [perhaps because the process is ongoing; or perhaps because the repetitions involved are not merely repetitions of the mind, but continuous new differences given to the mind and thus the mind itself is always changing with its contractions]. (31-32)

"What this means is that repetition cannot be thought of as either the repetition of objects, which explains why Deleuze presented such an approach as leading to a paradox, or as repetition in the subject, which explains why it would be a mistake to associate his reading of Hume with an interpretation of both philosophers as setting down the human mind | as the condition for repetition." (31-32)

So because Deleuze's theory of time avoids taking the objective and subjective perspectives, "Deleuze can appeal neither to brute empiricism, nor to simple phenomenology." (32a) This raises the question as to how we conduct or philosophical inquiries without basing them on objective or subjective grounds. Deleuze shows that the necessity for repetition is not found in any object alone. Instead, repetition is a matter ideal relations that provide the conditions for actual differences. (32d)

Deleuze proceeds then to show that:

"Time and synthesis, as well as the living present, cannot be subjective in the sense of properties of the understanding or memory of a thinking subject." (Williams 33b)

Deleuze reads Hume to be saying that our conceptually represented memory contains individual memories with their own distinct times and spaces. These separated memory representations is not the same as the retended past, because events in retention are inseparable.

Williams then discusses two 'far-reaching conclusions on time and repetition' that Deleuze draws from these ideas.

1) Repetition implies three moments:

1a) objective instants passing away because they cannot be repeated
1b) contracting through passive synthesizing
1c) representing (specific distinguishable occurrences) reflexively in the active memory and understanding (34a)

Each of these moments, however, reciprocally determine the others. (34b)

2) Each moment is necessary and has methodological facets:

2a) "expression of individuation in the living present (duration in Bergson and imagination in Hume)",
2b) "representation of identity in memory and understanding", and
2c) "creation of syntheses in a thinking of the relations of the other two and all presupposed ideal relations." (34c)

There are two sorts of dissimilarity in Bergson's and Hume's examples of repetition (the clock tolls and the AB causal parings) [see paragraph 3 and paragraph 4]

1) Closed vs Open repetition

1a) Closed [contraction changes qualitatively with addition] (Bergson's 4 tolls would change at 5)
1b) Open [contraction changes quantitative 'weight' or tendency for association with each new repeated occurrence] (oncoming Hume's AB parings are contracted together and can keep being contracted as more come) (35d)

2) Element vs Case

2a) Coupled [Case]: "Hume's involves cases of AB couples"
2b) Undivided [Element]: "Bergson has repeated undivided elements or strikes" (34d)

Deleuze notes that in Bergson's example where we hear the bell toll four times, the first and second toll were also contracted as an AB coupling, as was the second and third, and finally the fourth and fifth. So on the one hand, like with Hume, we just have recurrences of AB pairings, but like with Bergson, each pairing can be secondarily differentiated from the others representationally by means of spatializing duration. (35a)

Empirically we observe that the passive synthesis tends to experience the clock's ticking as having tick-tocks (contracted pairings). We know transcendentally that the condition that makes the contraction possible is the synthesis itself. In this way Deleuze integrates empirical and transcendental methods. (35b.d)

The relation between element and case is different on each of the three levels of its operation ("passing away of instants, contraction and representation"), in regard to sensibility and sensation. (36a) The contractions of our sense impressions happen automatically. [Here the elements, each occurrence, and the cases, their groupings, seem to coincide.] On the level of representation, we might inquire whether something will give us some certain sense impression. But doing this presupposes the passively synthesized contractions. [Here the elements are not yet cases, but it is on the basis of their having been contracted into cases that we can pick certain ones out representationally and anticipate the coming contraction of pairings.]

"on one level, our sensibility is just a contraction of organic syntheses, a series of sensations of warmth, say, prior to and independent of any representation or concept: ‘[. . .] a primary sensibility that we are’ (DRf, 99). On another level, though, we are intending beings who can intend towards an object and ascribe a given quality to it, for instance, when we reach out and ask the question, ‘Is it warm?’ From this point of view, contraction is prior to even that sensation, if sensation is defined as a conscious faculty. This is because we cannot have the sensation in that form until there has been a series of passive organic contractions." (36b.c)

According to Williams, each contractive synthesis is a 'level', and each level is a 'sign'. Because a contraction selects paths of how we might contract future occurrences, it is like a sign pointing to the future. (36-37) But to interpret these signs, we need to use representations, which for some reason will always miss something about the prior syntheses it is trying to interpret. So this poses a problem in Deleuze's thinking, because signs have an importance for helping us understand "how we are becoming what we are", while also it is impossible to fully represent and interpret those signs. So, "what is the right way of living with and living up to the passive syntheses constituting and driving us forward?" (37a.b)

If we want to change a habit, we will miss things about it if we remain on the level of representation; thus "learning and unlearning habits must not be seen in terms of the conscious repetition of movement, for instance, but instead must be seen as an interaction with processes that we cannot directly represent or act upon." (37d)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Paths of the Present. Ch2.1 of Williams' Gilles Deleuzes' Philosophy of Time

2011-12-28T05:12:00.000-08:00

Paths of the Present

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 2: The first synthesis of time

Part 1: The living present

What do the synthetic processes of Deleuze's living present got to do with you?

We are most immediately aware of what is going on right now. But we do not live each present moment as if none preceded it. When we get on a bicycle, we do not fall off right away like our first time. Rather, each prior time we rode it contracts together into the present instance. As well, right before beginning to ride, we know what to expect regarding how the mechanisms will work and what we have to do to ride it effectively. So the present is more than just a thin instant. It reaches us into our past and future. And, on account of the past moments we presently contract and the future ones we thereby anticipate, each current moment of our lives determines how we integrate our pasts and futures together into the changing structure of our life-times.

Brief Summary

Deleuze's first synthesis of time is the 'living present,' which contracts past occurrences with current ones. This is like how by means of habit we perform an action automatically because we contract all prior enactments into the current performance. In order for the contraction to relate different moments, they must have occurred originally without this temporal relation. This means that each is given to us as absolutely unique, and only secondarily through this synthesis do we regard them as repetitions of the same occurrence. The synthesis itself is a process that does not occur in time but rather is what creates this sort of time that relates particular past events with anticipated future ones. The future ones are general because we cannot know in advance the particularities of this event that gets contracted with its selected specific predecessors. For this reason, the temporality that the first synthesis produces is asymmetrical in this way, which explains the unidirectional 'arrow of time' [and perhaps then in this synthesis it is not the forward moving flow of time that determines its direction but rather the fact that we cannot go backwards from the particulars we experience to the generalities that anticipated them, because after they occur, we know now what only then could be implicitly anticipated.] The contraction draws from so many past occurrences that our memory and understanding cannot be thought of as actively performing this synthesis. Rather, it is a passive synthesis performed by a passive subject.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze offers a sense of the living present that like in phenomenology regards it as a passive synthesis bringing together past and future events into the present, but unlike phenomenology, this sort of passively synthesized time does not proceed forwardly on account of a primordial flow of phenomenal time but rather the arrow of time results from the asymmetry between the particularity of the selected past events whose selections determine paths to the generalities of awaited futures.

Summary

When we do something habitually over and over, the past occurrences speak themselves if you will in the current enactment. Thus "the current motion is a passive synthesis of earlier events." (21cd) Deleuze explains this by means of some of Hume's ideas. In habit, our imagination draws together different impressions. This is not reflection, so it is not a memory or an act of understanding. Rather, it is an [instantaneous] contraction of the past into the present. (21d)

To understand why contraction is not simply memory, we first consider Deleuze's notion of 'repetition for itself'. (22c) Deleuze observes this following paradox:

a) for something to repeat, one instance needs to be related to another instance
b) but this means each instance must have occurred independently (22-23)

Thus repetition implies that all instances are not in themselves related, so something outside them must contract them. (23a)

"This is a case of Deleuze's reliance on Leibniz's law or the principle of indiscernibility of indenticals: '... no two substances are entirely alike and differ only in number ' (Leibniz, 1998:60)" [Leibniz Philosophical Texts Oxford]

If one instance was followed by another that is exactly the same, then really there has not been the movement to another instance.

"The paradox of repetition is then that although it is defined as the repetition of something that is the same, it can only be the repetition of a difference for something that is not the repeated thing". (23bc)

So when we think we are repeating something, in fact each occurrence is distinct from the others. Secondarily our mind contracts them, and in that way, as Deleuze writes "Repetition ... changes nothing in the object, in the state of things AB. ... a change takes place in the mind that contemplates. (DRf, 96)" [qtd, with my elipses, from Williams 23d]

Deleuze's explanation for the relation of instants in time cannot

a) involve conceiving instants as implying one another, because they are independent, and it cannot
b) portray instants as being contained in a larger grouping [like divisions of a flow of time], because that means all instants share a certain property and thus there would be a connection between instants that we have already said were inherently unconnected.

But

"Repetition does not require a mind, it requires a contraction. Repetition does not take place in time, but rather time - or one of the syntheses of time, the first one - is a contraction: 'Properly speaking, [contraction] forms a synthesis of time' (DRf, 97)." (24d)

Contraction's 'third term' then is not necessarily a mind but is rather a process. (24d) And it is an 'originary' but not an 'original' synthesis. (25a) It is not original, because it is not the fundamental ground of time. But since it produces a sort of temporality, contractive time, we may still consider it originary. (25a.b)

The first synthesis, or living present, is a process that brings together the past and future, because past occurrences are contracted into the present one, and future occurrences that will later contract with the current and past ones are now being anticipated. (25c.d) "This leads Deleuze to make the claim that past and future are only dimensions of the living present with no existence distinct from their contraction in it." (25d) Our memory and understanding cannot conceivably perform an action that remembers every single past contracted occurrence and anticipate every sort of future one, so the contraction cannot be considered active and is thus a passive synthesis. (26b)

The first synthesis contracts particular past occurrences with the present one, yet it cannot know in advance the future ones, so it 'awaits' rather than expects generalities and not particulars in the future. (26-27) And because the quantity of particulars and generalities is too great for any act of the mind to consider all at once, this contraction is an unconscious receptivity rather than a conscious action. (27b) It does not select specific particulars and thus is not an activity.

"even in activity the present is contemplation, that is, passive absorption and transformation of retained particulars beyond the set considered in an action." (26b) "passivity and activity are distinguished as processes where passivity is a form of retention and of expectation that is not related through a process selecting particular past events and associating them with a restricted number of general outcomes. This latter process is activity, but passivity is the wider condition for any active process." (26d)

Because past contracted events are particular and future ones are general, there is an asymmetry resulting from the first synthesis and it is responsible for the forward-pointing arrow of time. (28c)

"The passage is from particular to general and not the reverse." (28c) "Asymmetry [...] refers to the essential difference between particulars and generalities, where the former are actual and retained and transformed in the present and the latter are possible and expected in the present. There is no symmetry between the two because any set of particulars determines a much wider set of generalities, yet also, any given set of generalities neither determines nor includes a set of particulars." (28-29)

We may now reject two interpretations of the living present. It is not

1) psychological, because contractive contemplation can be performed by all sorts of beings. And

2) the living present is a process and not a "present instant for consciousness". (29b)

The subject involved in the second synthesis is not an acting human subject but is rather a subject that makes the transformation between past particulars and future generalities. (29bc)

In sum, the living present is necessary because otherwise repeated terms would have no connections. The synthesis establishes paths from the particular past events that it selects to future expected possible outcomes that are determined by that given selection. (29-30) "there is no repetition, no relation between actual events and possible events, and no relation between instants, without the living present." (30ab)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Revolutionary Times. Intro .3 Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2011-12-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

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[The following is summary]

Revolutionary Times

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction

Part 3: The critical power of Deleuze's philosophy of time

What does the critical power of Deleuze's temporality got to do with you?

At work, our unique daily living experiences are not seen by our bosses the way we lived them. They try to homogenize all our living presents into one present flow of production. Would we not want to fight for a view of time management that does not treat us so objectively? And also, do we not want to feel free from historical views that try to confine our historical identities to something redundant rather than letting them evolve?

Brief Summary

Deleuze's theory of time has the ability to critique powers who try to strip each of us of the uniqueness of our living presents. It can also resist historical interpretations that confine peoples to a homogenous historical identity.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuze's theory of time has political power.

Summary

Because Deleuze's sort of time involves multiple processes that produce beings, we can apply it to life and other disciplines within and without philosophy. His time also makes these created beings passive and cleaved subjects, which renders it powerfully critical against both objective and subjective views. Deleuze's manifold time, for example, can offer a critique of labor time management techniques that objectify time and force all workers' times into one overall time whose productivity is measurable by a single metric. The first synthesis shows that really there are as many living times as workers, and their living present is not limited to the organization's singular goals. (17-18) The second synthesis tells us that there is no singular past to hold sway over the present. (18c) Historical identities are not essenses or pure identities but are continually able to reformulate through the novel assemblages produced by time. (18-19) Thus the past as well rearranges continually. (19b.c) Under Deleuze's theory, we can better examine how historically speaking things are continually differing. (19-20)

"Deleuze's philosophy of time is therefore not only critical. It is revolutionary. It is not only revolutionary as a philosophy of time. It is a time of the necessity of revolution, not once, or in one place, but eternally and everywhere." (20a)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

James Williams, Entry Directory, Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2011-12-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

summary by Corry Shores
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James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction

Part 1: Why study Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of time?

Time & Multiplicity. Intro .1 of James Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time, summary

Part 2: The Do's and Don'ts of Time Travel

Time Journeys. Intro .2 James Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 3: The critical power of Deleuze's philosophy of time

Revolutionary Times. Intro .3 Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Chapter 2: The first synthesis of time

Part 1: The living present

Paths of the Present. Ch2.1 of Williams' Gilles Deleuzes' Philosophy of Time

Part 2: Synthesis and method in the first synthesis of time

Time & Method. Ch.2.2 of Williams' Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 3: Of pebbles and their habits

Souls of Habit. Ch.2.3 of Williams' Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 4: The passing present

Passing Habits. Ch.2.4 of Williams' Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Chapter 3: The second synthesis of time

Part 1: A time within which time passes

Memory in Passing. Ch.3.1 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 2: The deduction of the pure past

The Presence of the Past. Ch.3.2 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 3: Destiny and freedom

Destined to be Free. Ch.3.3 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 4: How to save all the past for us?

Rescuing Your Past. Ch.3.4 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Chapter 4: The third synthesis of time

Part 1: From Descartes to Kant

Cracking Kant's "I". Ch.4.1 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 2: Back to Plato

Cycles of Synthesis. Ch.4.2 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Part 3: Pure and empty form of time

Time Cut. Ch.4.3 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Time Journeys. Intro .2 James Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

2011-12-21T07:51:00.000-08:00

Time Journeys

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction

Part 2: The Do's and Dont's of Time Travel

What does Deleuzian Time Travel Got to Do With You?

We find ourselves always living in a present. But is not the past still here in a way, like when we have flashbacks? When flashing back, we never leave the present, and instead we see how the past is already here implied in the present situations and conditions that triggered the memory.

Brief Summary

Deleuze's three syntheses are 'time travels' of sorts. The first synthesis, the living present, continually synthesizes past and future in novel ways, and in that sense we in the present travel to the past and future. The second synthesis involves the pure past. The present is passing only because it is contemporaneous with the past, and in this way we travel from the past into the present and future. The third synthesis regards the future. The novelty of events is what provides the other syntheses with the differences they synthesize, and in that way we move from the future to the present and past.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Deleuzian time should be seen as involving separate processes that reach into one another and inter-operate.

Summary

To see how Deleuze's theory of time differs from others, we will examine why his allows for time travel while others do not.

Time travel is moving either backwards through the past or forwards into the future. For Deleuze, present processes in a way move backwards and forwards in time. "The past and the future are not simply realms we might be able to visit, they are processes fully implicated in our present ones." (8c)

Deleuze's time travel is not the science fiction sort that in a way is self-contradictory, like when going back in time and removing the conditions which allow for that same backwards trip. In fact, Deleuze's sort of time travel does not require any such machine or procedure, because all present temporality is already time traveling: "Any actual present is altering the past and the future, not in a causal | or statistical manner but instantaneously and for all the past and all the future." (8-9)

Past, present, and future are not independent dimensions; rather, they are somehow dimensions of each other insofar as each is a process operating on series of events. (9b) Yet there is not one law that governs the workings of all the processes. (9-10)

We see these relations in Deleuze's three time syntheses. The first synthesis generates a 'living present' of sorts, and past and future are dimensions of this present. "This means that a process in the present, often described by Deleuze as the 'living present', determines processes in the past and in the future such that the present process changes the past and the future by synthesising them in a novel manner;" (10b) "in the first synthesis, past events and future possibilities become fully actual, fully present." (10c) Living presents of different creatures interlock while maintaining their perspectival singularities. (10-11bc) Thus in the living present we 'time travel' not only through our own past and futures, but we travel into the living presents of other creatures intersubjectively/intertemporally. (11c)

The past as understood in the second synthesis is difficult to grasp. It is a pure past that we cannot represent, and it operates on the present so to make the present pass. (12a) Deleuze derives this notion of the past from Bergson. (12c) The present lies at a limit of all pure differences, and this is what makes it pass. (13b.c) The present moment is so singular and unique that when we try to represent it, we fail to capture all the singular particulars of the event. (13d) Hence we see that there are different processes at work depending on whether the present is a dimension of the past or the past a dimension of the present. (14b)

In the third synthesis, the future has its own processes and the past and present are dimensions of it. (14d) The different processes involve the future being a novel event. (14d) That novelty is what explains the emergence of the novel singularities that appear in the present and pass into the past. (14-15) Thus in a way, all events are cuts or 'caesura' in the series of happenings. (15b.c) "Everything changes with every new event." (15c) However, still before and after come together, because "each novel event assembles all other events in a novel manner." (15d) In this way the novel event time travels through all the rest, and forms a series. (15d) There is an eternal return in the sense there are always new differences arriving in the present on the basis of things moving into the past, because as present events pass, they leave traces of pure novel differences. (16b)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Rhythm without Time: Difference & Phenomena

2011-12-21T01:56:00.000-08:00

by Scott Wollschleger and Corry Shores

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[The following is a presentation we gave at the London Graduate School's Rhythm & Event conference, 29 October 2011. May I thank Eleni Ikoniadou and all those involved in organizing the conference, and may I thank John Mullarkey for his incredible help with my research.]

Scott Wollschleger
Corry Shores

"Rhythm without Time:
Difference & Phenomena"

Presentation at the London Graduate School
Rhythm & Event conference

[Audio]

Deleuze defines the phenomenon as the flash of difference communicated between the terms of heterogeneous series. Now, following Husserl, we might consider simultaneous and successive elements of our phenomenal consciousness. At any moment of our visual awareness, for example, there will be variations throughout our field of vision that are all given together at once. But even if we are staring at a motionless scene, there will still be slight variations in the way things appear from moment to moment. Yet from this Husserlian perspective, there will be associating similarities within each moment and also carrying-on between moments. A more traditional phenomenology might be concerned with how these parts synthesize into self-same phenomenal objects over the course of time. A Deleuzean phenomenology, however, would instead be concerned with the differences flashing between the simultaneous and successive series of variations. So, something appears phenomenally when it stands-out. And something stands-out on the basis of a differential relation. A Deleuzean phenomenology would regard these differential flashes as lying at the basis of phenomenal appearings.

Deleuze also describes rhythm in similar terms. The rhythm of sensation, for example, involves the differential coupling of continuously varying waves of intensity. What we wonder is whether time as we normally understand it in phenomenology and music is in fact not what is most immediately involved in our experiences of musical and phenomenal rhythm.

[Audio]

In Husserl’s phenomenal time consciousness, for example, each moment overlaps with its neighbors, creating a bloated and somewhat extending now-moment of our awareness. The now of consciousness is not instantaneous, and it is impossible for any moment to be discontinuous with the rest. It is on the basis of these continual overlappings of moments that objects become constituted as self-same, despite their variations over time. Also, in Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of phenomenal time, each moment is thoroughly integrated with the rest. What we now experience already in an implicit way is indirectly announcing future phenomena, because all moments of our consciousness are woven together like a fabric. One value of Deleuze’s concept of rhythm is that is can give us a way to understand phenomenal givenness on the basis of a different sort of temporality, one which is bordering on being a sort of non-temporality.

In Difference & Repetition, Deleuze distinguishes cadence repetition from rhythm repetition. Cadence repetition is “a regular division of time, an isochronic recurrence of identical elements.” Consider if we were to focus on the ticking of a clock. At first it might begin as the phenomenon in the forefront of our awareness. But as its homogenous and redundant pattern becomes increasingly monotonous, it fades from our attention, becoming less phenomenal. If the clock malfunctioned, however, and produced irregular ticking, it would pop back into our awareness again. This is something like what he calls rhythm repetition. It is heterochronic rather than isochronic. Its recurrences appear through unequal and incommensurable relations. Deleuze writes “The reprise of points of inequality, of inflections or of rhythmic events, is more profound than the reproduction of ordinary homogeneous elements.”

Deleuze derives this concept of rhythm as heterochronic from the theoretical writings of music composers Messiaen and Boulez. Boulez speaks of rhythm in terms of an irregular pulse. He says that one way he accomplishes it is by dividing the time into such a nuanced pattern that only a machine could perform it with perfect precision. This causes the human performer to produce a rhythmic pulse that continually defies a regime of regularity. According to Messiaen, a military march is not rhythmic, because there is nothing about its regular pattern that interferes with the listener’s pulse, breathing, or heartbeats, and thus she receives no shock. He continues, “the march, with its cadential gait and uninterrupted succession of absolutely equal note-values, is anti-natural. True marching is accompanied by an extremely irregular swaying: it’s a series of falls, more or less avoided, placed at different intervals.” What seems to underlie these notions is that rhythm is characterized by motion and change; and if the same standardized patterns are repeated without variation, then the motion stagnates and loses its rhythmic feel.

Deleuze says that artists and musicians should hone our attention so that we directly perceive the infinitely intricate differential variations of rhythm from moment to moment. He writes, “When Fred Astaire dances the waltz, it is not 1,2,3, it is infinitely more detailed. When Africans dance, they are not seized by a rhythm demon, they hear and perform all the notes, all the times, all the tones, all the pitches, all the intensities, all the intervals.” Here is some of Fred Astaire’s infinitely intricate waltzing.

[Audio]

Like Fred Astaire, when Horowitz plays the waltz, he adds infinitely more rhythmic detail. Compare the mechanized midi version with Horowitz’s rendition.

[Audio]

When discussing non-pulsed time, Deleuze refers us to Boulez’ Eclat. In this piece, Boulez instructs the musicians not only to vary the tempo, but also to do so in continuous variation, as if slowing down or speeding up a turn-table. He indicates these tempo disfigurations with up and down arrows. We will look at the opening part.

[Audio]

We might feel the acceleration in the way that the piano notes seem to tumble out with increasing rapidity. We repeat those notes, each time slowing them down so we might perceive the variation more closely.

[Audio]

In this clip we see Boulez overseeing the performance, and we might also sense the continuous variations of tempo.

[Audio]

We will now look more closely not merely at successive heterogeneity but also at simultaneous heterogeneity, which adds another layer of differential rhythm.

We see these two rhythmic differentiations at work in Michael Gordon’s composition, Yo Shakespeare, described as having “irregular rhythms, sudden, precise tempo changes, and simultaneous different meters.” Or as Gordon himself says “there's […] three types of dance rhythms going on at the same time […] almost as if there are three different dance rooms with three different dance bands playing at [once] […] playing different songs and different tempos, but somehow you […] dance to it.”

A glitch in Gordon’s computer program allowed him to juxtapose even and odd divisions of time along the motion of particular instruments. So each such instrumental voice collides with itself in a continual stutter. Yet also, each instrumental motion is in metrical defiance with the others.

[Audio]

Let's now consider Deleuze’s analysis of Leibniz’ micro-perceptions. They are the differential relations between perceptions that have diminished to the infinitely small. They have vanished, but the relation between them remains. To help us visualize this, Leibniz describes a geometrical figure with two triangles, constructed with the same line. As this line moves to the right, one triangle increases while the other decreases.

Yet the sides of both triangles remain proportional, so the ratio of the larger one always indicates the ratio of the smaller one. This holds even as the smaller triangle’s sides diminish to the infinitely small. They have vanished, but their differential relation remains, still discernible in the larger triangle.

Our micro-perceptions are also like these differential relations between vanished terms. For example, when we perceive green, we are really noticing the differential relations between infinitely small perceptions of blue and yellow. At their basis, all our perceptions are primarily these undetectable micro-perceptions.

So the perception of green is not merely the addition of yellow and blue, like when we mix paint. Green results not from their assimilation and bleeding into one another, but rather from their jarring up against each other.

So at any moment, seeing green might be a matter of viewing differential flashes between simultaneously given tiny blues and yellows.

Now, to better grasp the phenomenality of successive variations, I suggest we turn to filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

Deleuze refers to him when discussing the infinites of variation in our fields of perception. One thing Brakhage says he likes about film are its “sharp hard clarities of snapping individual frames.” In many later works, he hand-painted every frame individually. Each one could be a work of art on its own. But, is it only the pictures that we notice when watching his films? Or is there phenomenal content to the differences between the images, which are responsible for making each new frame stand-out in the first place?

First consider this simpler example from an earlier work. Moving one frame to the next, we change from black to red then return to black, all between other shifting imagery. We will repeat this rapid transition here a few times, because it is easy to miss.

[Audio]

Is the phenomenon the red or the black, or is it not the shock we feel between the two?

Rhythm and phenomena in this Deleuzean sense are based on differential relations between simultaneities and within instantaneities. In other words, at their basis, neither rhythm nor phenomena are most fundamentally experienced throughout an extended flowing passage of time. They are given in immediacy. I would like to close with this passage from Brakhage where he articulates a sort of rhythmic appearance of phenomena that are given to him on the basis of their differential incompatibilities.

Questions Section

[Audio only]

Audio gratefully taken from:
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/10/corry-shores-scott-wollschleger-manhattan-school-of-music-rhythm-without-time/
Thanks for recording the presentations and making them available

Conference page:
http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/blog/symposium-rhythmevent/

Blog Hyperlinking Now Complete

2011-12-21T01:42:00.000-08:00

by Corry Shores
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Pirates & Revolutionaries and Deleuze Cinema Project are now both completely linked between and within themselves by means of a central entry directory. Something like a circulatory system where blood from all parts of the body flows to the heart from where it flows to all parts of the body, the central entry directory and all the postings' links to it allow us to go from any posting to any other in a directed way. Have fun, and I hope it helps you somehow. It has proven a huge benefit to my own writing.

-Corry

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