Showing posts with label habit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label habit. Show all posts

4 Jan 2012

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

summary by Corry Shores

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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.

17 Nov 2009

Walls Full of Dreams. Proust. Du coté chez swann (Swan's Way). Part 1, Combray, §10 / 11


by
Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[May I sincerely thank the sources for the images below. Image credits are provided near the images and at the end.]



Walls Full of Dreams

Marcel Proust

Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I

Swan's Way. Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past

Première partie

Overature

Combray

I.

§10 /

§11



The narrator takes evening naps. He is disoriented whenever he awakes. His memory runs through all the rooms he ever slept-in, before realizing where he awakes. Previously he explained how he often continues lying and remembering those other rooms, even after knowing he does not sleep in them.

Right now he recalls evenings in his bedroom when a child in Combray. Someone had given him a magic lantern to cheer him up.


[commons.wikimedia.org]


Using light from his lamp, it projects colorful images on his wall.

in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.

à l’instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l’âge gothique, elle substituait à l’opacité des murs d’impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané.

[Below are some drawings of the way the projector works.

And here are some magic lantern images.


To view some parts of a show, see this site by the Laterna Magica Galantee Show. Or watch this video, from youtube clips by null66913 and ilovetoeatmicedotcom.]

As the narrator explained before, our memory develops the habit of recognizing our rooms when we awake in them. This makes them less strange and hence more livable for us. The problem with the magical lantern projections is that it makes his room less recognizable. This causes him to feel uneasy about sleeping there, “as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.”



From the English translation.

At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.


From the French:

A Combray, tous les jours dès la fin de l’après-midi, longtemps avant le moment où il faudrait me mettre au lit et rester, sans dormir, loin de ma mère et de ma grand’mère, ma chambre à coucher redevenait le point fixe et douloureux de mes préoccupations. On avait bien inventé, pour me distraire les soirs où on me trouvait l’air trop malheureux, de me donner une lanterne magique, dont, en attendant l’heure du dîner, on coiffait ma lampe; et, à l’instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l’âge gothique, elle substituait à l’opacité des murs d’impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané. Mais ma tristesse n’en était qu’accrue, parce que rien que le changement d’éclairage détruisait l’habitude que j’avais de ma chambre et grâce à quoi, sauf le supplice du coucher, elle m’était devenue supportable. Maintenant je ne la reconnaissais plus et j’y étais inquiet, comme dans une chambre d’hôtel ou de «chalet», où je fusse arrivé pour la première fois en descendant de chemin de fer.





Proust, Marcel. Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I.

Available online at:

Proust, Marcel. Swan's Way. Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past.Transl. C.K. Scott Moncrieff
Available online at:



Video credits:










16 Nov 2009

Galloping Delusions. Proust. Du coté chez swann (Swan's Way). Part 1, Combray, §8



by
Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]

[Image and animation credits given near images and at the end. Thank you very much, source.]



Galloping Delusions


Marcel Proust

Du coté chez swann.

A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I

Swan's Way

Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past

Première partie


Overture

Combray


I.


§8 /

§9



Previously the waking narrator realized he overslept his evening nap. Prior to that, he explained his deliriums upon awaking. He would not initially know where he was or the time he awoke, or even recognize the things spinning around his room. It was not until his body oriented its position to the objects around him that he realized where he was. But this requires that his body rapidly recall all the rooms he ever slept in, until finding the recollection that fits his current circumstances.

He explains now that upon awaking, he runs through all these remembered rooms so quickly, that he does not distinguish them. It is like how we do not notice the frames of a film. Rather, they all blur together. He speaks specifically of the successive poses of a galloping horse played through a kinétoscope.





Galloping Horse kinétoscope


He would, for example, recall all the sensuous details of the rooms he slept-in during winter or summer. Our habits torture our minds with these exercises. But we are lucky to have them. For, such habits make our rooms habitable.


From the English translation:


These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.


Ces évocations tournoyantes et confuses ne duraient jamais que quelques secondes; souvent, ma brève incertitude du lieu où je me trouvais ne distinguait pas mieux les unes des autres les diverses suppositions dont elle était faite, que nous n’isolons, en voyant un cheval courir, les positions successives que nous montre le kinétoscope. Mais j’avais revu tantôt l’une, tantôt l’autre, des chambres que j’avais habitées dans ma vie, et je finissais par me les rappeler toutes dans les longues rêveries qui suivaient mon réveil; chambres d’hiver où quand on est couché, on se blottit la tête dans un nid qu’on se tresse avec les choses les plus disparates: un coin de l’oreiller, le haut des couvertures, un bout de châle, le bord du lit, et un numéro des Débats roses, qu’on finit par cimenter ensemble selon la technique des oiseaux en s’y appuyant indéfiniment; où, par un temps glacial le plaisir qu’on goûte est de se sentir séparé du dehors (comme l’hi rondelle de mer qui a son nid au fond d’un souterrain dans la chaleur de la terre), et où, le feu étant entretenu toute la nuit dans la cheminée, on dort dans un grand manteau d’air chaud et fumeux, traversé des lueurs des tisons qui se rallument, sorte d’impalpable alcôve, de chaude caverne creusée au sein de la chambre même, zone ardente et mobile en ses contours thermiques, aérée de souffles qui nous rafraîchissent la figure et viennent des angles, des parties voisines de la fenêtre ou éloignées du foyer et qui se sont refroidies;—chambres d’été où l’on aime être uni à la nuit tiède, où le clair de lune appuyé aux volets entr’ouverts, jette jusqu’au pied du lit son échelle enchantée, où le clair de lune appuyé aux volets entr’ouverts, jette jusqu’au pied du lit son échelle enchantée, où on dort presque en plein air, comme la mésange balancée par la brise à la pointe d’un rayon—; parfois la chambre Louis XVI, si gaie que même le premier soir je n’y avais pas été trop malheureux et où les colonnettes qui soutenaient légèrement le plafond s’écartaient avec tant de grâce pour montrer et réserver la place du lit; parfois au contraire celle, petite et si élevée de plafond, creusée en forme de pyramide dans la hauteur de deux étages et partiellement revêtue d’acajou, où dès la première seconde j’avais été intoxiqué moralement par l’odeur inconnue du vétiver, convaincu de l’hostilité des rideaux violets et de l’insolente indifférence de la pendule que jacassait tout haut comme si je n’eusse pas été là;—où une étrange et impitoyable glace à pieds quadrangulaires, barrant obliquement un des angles de la pièce, se creusait à vif dans la douce plénitude de mon champ visuel accoutumé un emplacement qui n’y était pas prévu;—où ma pensée, s’efforçant pendant des heures de se disloquer, de s’étirer en hauteur pour prendre exactement la forme de la chambre et arriver à remplir jusqu’en haut son gigantesque entonnoir, avait souffert bien de dures nuits, tandis que j’étais étendu dans mon lit, les yeux levés, l’oreille anxieuse, la narine rétive, le cœur battant: jusqu’à ce que l’habitude eût changé la couleur des rideaux, fait taire la pendule, enseigné la pitié à la glace oblique et cruelle, dissimulé, sinon chassé complètement, l’odeur du vétiver et notablement diminué la hauteur apparente du plafond. L’habitude! aménageuse habile mais bien lente et qui commence par laisser souffrir notre esprit pendant des semaines dans une installation provisoire; mais que malgré tout il est bien heureux de trouver, car sans l’habitude et réduit à ses seuls moyens il serait impuissant à nous rendre un logis habitable.


Proust, Marcel. Du coté chez swann. A la recherche du temps perdu. Tome I.
Available online at:

Proust, Marcel. Swan's Way. Vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past.Transl. C.K. Scott Moncrieff
Available online at:


Images from:


11 Oct 2009

Habits of Successful Plants. Samuel Butler. Life & Habit. Chapter 5: Personal Identity. pp.78-82




by
Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

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Habits of Successful Plants


Samuel Butler


Life & Habit (1910)


Chapter 5: Personal Identity


pp.78-82



The more times we practice something, the better we get at it. In a sense, we are contracting all our past performances into a present habit. [For more on habitual contraction, see §39 & §40 of Bergson’s Matter and Memory, and §215, §218, §219; §234; §310; & §333, §352, §355 of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature]. Now consider also how corn plants have the ‘habit’ of growing outward towards water, nutrients, and light. In a sense, they presuppose these things, so in a way, a plant ‘contemplates’ those things it reaches-out for. And then it brings these presupposed things into itself, contracting with them. Such an example illustrates Deleuze’s notion that habitual contractions cerebral or not are ‘contemplative.’ In Difference and Repetition, he draws this illustration from Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit. Deleuze writes:

No one has shown better than Samuel Butler that there is no continuity apart from that of habit, and that we have no other continuities apart from those of our thousands of component habits, which form within us so many superstitious and contemplative selves, so many claimants and satisfactions: ‘for even the corn in the fields grows upon a superstitious basis as to its own existence, and only turns the earth and moisture into wheat through the conceit of its own ability to do so, without which faith it were powerless ...’. Only an empiricist can happily risk such formulae. What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation. By its existence alone, the lily of the field sings the glory of the heavens, the goddesses and gods – in other words, the elements that it contemplates in contracting. What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates, thereby intertwining all the habits of which it is composed? [Deleuze Difference and Repetition 1994:75a.b]


Nul mieux que Samuel Butler n’a montré qu’il n’y avait pas d’autre continuité que celle de l’habitude, et que nous n’avions pas d’autres continuités que celles de nos mille habitudes composantes, formant en nous autant de moi superstitieux et contemplatifs, autant de prétendants et de satisfactions : « Car le blé des champs lui-même fonde sa croissance sur une base superstitieuse en ce qui concerne son existence, et ne transforme la terre et l’humidité en froment que grâce à le faire, confiance ou foi en soi-même sans laquelle il serait impuissant »1. Seul l’empiriste peut risquer avec bonheur de telles formules. Il y a une contraction de la terre et de l’humidité qu’on appelle froment, et cette contraction est une contemplation, et l’autosatisfaction de cette contemplation. Le lys des champs, par sa seule existence, chante la gloire des cieux, des déesses et des dieux, c’est-à-dire des éléments qu’il contemple en contractant. Quel organisme n’est pas fait d’éléments et de cas de répétition, d’eau, d’azote, de carbone, de chlorures, de sulfates contemplés et contractés, entrelaçant ainsi toutes les habitudes par lesquelles il se compose ?

1.Samuel BUTLER, La vie et l’habitude (trad. Valery LARBAUD, N.R.F.), pp.86-87.[102b.d]


According to Butler, we might think our personalities to be some unified aspect of us, which we may cleanly define. Personal identity, could however, be quite the opposite.

But in truth this "we," which looks so simple and definite, is a nebulous and indefinable aggregation of many component parts which war not a little among themselves, our perception of our existence at all being perhaps due to this very clash of warfare, as our sense of sound and light is due to the jarring of vibrations. [Butler 1910:78d]

There are component parts to our personality. But they change moment-to-moment. That means our personality depends on our current state. Yet, the present is evanescent. Just as soon as we try to get it in our grasp, it has slipped away. And also, our component parts are inextricably bound-up with things in the world around us. [Is the air exhaling from our lungs a part of us? Can we regard the personality of a loving father without also considering his relation to his children?] So we are never able to draw determinate lines around us to delimit who we are.

Our bodies are essential to our personalities: when we die, so goes our personhood, and when we modify our bodies, we modify our personalities as well. But our bodies are ridding themselves of wastes on a daily basis. Are they a part of our personalities? If we amputate our limbs, our soul or self seems to remain somehow.

And if we are starving, and then eat, this drastically changes our personality. But there is no clear point in the digestive process when we can say the food has become a part of us.

Some of our parts seem separable. We awake to the cold morning. Our clothes lie upon our chair. When we dress, our clothes become a part of us like food does. Without our clothes we could die from the harms of the cold. And when we dress-up, that changes how we behave. We see then there is no scientific definition for our personhood. We normally deal with our ignorance of the true meaning of personhood by merely presuming everybody should already know what their self is, and leaving the burden of definitions for the over-curious.

When we assume without evidence that everybody knows the meaning of personality, we are being superstitious. Parenthetically, Butler adds that superstition is the cause for the actions of all life forms. Consider when we plant a corn seed. As its roots and stem move outward, there is a presumption in its movement. Its movements presume that if it extends and processes water, nutrients, and sunlight, it will continue to grow and flourish. Otherwise, it would not even begin to expand itself. So the corn has the superstition that it will have the power to perform these feats. The corn operates under a theory: adding and processing these things will empower me. So it implicitly contemplates the water, nutrients, and sunlight as it reaches-out for them. This contemplation is also a contraction. Plants contemplate water as they absorb and contract it into themselves. Butler writes:

Assuming, then, that every one knows what is meant by the word "person" (and such superstitious bases as this are the foundations upon which all action, whether of man, beast, or plant, is constructed and rendered possible; for even the corn in the fields grows upon a superstitious basis as to its own existence, and only turns the earth and moisture into wheat through the conceit of its own ability to do so, without which faith it were powerless; and the lichen only grows upon the granite rock by first saying to itself, "I think I can do it;" so that it would not be able to grow unless it thought it could grow, and would not think it could grow unless it found itself able to grow, and thus spends its life arguing in a most vicious circle, basing its action upon a hypothesis, which hypothesis is in turn based upon its action) [...]. [Butler 1910:82a.b]


Original text [click on images for an enlargement]:








Butler, Samuel. Life and Habit. London: Fifield, 1910. Available online at: http://www.archive.org/details/lifehabit00butluoft


Deleuze, Gilles. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.

Deleuze, Gilles, Difference & Repetition. Transl. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1994.



Image obtained gratefully from: