nth Awareness. Phenomenology of Deleuze's Difference & Repetition series

by Corry Shores
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[James DiFrisco is an extraordinarily talented and erudite scholar researching at the Husserl Archives and Centre for Phenomenology at the University of Leuven in Belgium. He has organized a Deleuze Difference & Repetition reading group. This Phenomenology of Deleuze's Difference & Repetition series will translate concepts from the text into phenomenological discourse.]

nth Awareness

Phenomenology of
Deleuze's Difference & Repetition, series

What does infinite phenomenal implication got to do with you?

We might have some experience that causes us to look back at past moments in our lives and view them differently. This is continually going on. The meaning of our lives is in flux. Any one moment of our life can in the future take on any of a variety of unforeseeable significances. This is because all these other elaborations are contained implicitly in that moment. Let's consider a time when we were deceived by someone and later found out. Often times, we later remember that while we were being deceived, something did not feel right about the situation. There was something implicit in that moment that only later came to light. The future discovery of the deception recalls that prior moment, and in that way repeats it. But when it first happened, because it was felt implicitly, it was in a way repeated in advance. The moment that we treated as ok was also already given as repeating again in our awareness as deceit. Contained in all moments of our lives is an infinity of virtual repetitions, all given instantaneously and immediately, without the passage of time.

Brief Summary

Each act of awareness gives us its repetitions already from the beginning, but in the form of implicit virtual variations that can later be made explicit in future acts of awareness that recall the prior moment.

Points relative to Deleuze

A Deleuzean phenomenology would focus primarily on the absolute immediacy of our awareness.

nth Awareness

We will need to conceive of an immediate repetition. But doesn't repetition need time? No, not necessarily. We have explored previously Deleuze's motionless version of Bergson's duration. A Deleuzean phenomenal time would be intense and immediate. Time would be fully given in the absolute present somehow, in a flash, with the dimension of time being an intensive depth rather than an extensive distance. When we abruptly notice signs of age, we sense years have passed in that instant of non-self-recognizative self-awareness. We feel a depth of time, rather than feel its gradual continuous passing for an extent of some years.

We also discussed in that entry bifurcation. There were two related senses of bifurcation. One is forking-off in a new direction. The other is moving down multiple paths of development simultaneously. Let's focus on the first kind of spontaneous forking. We had this to say:

We see the relation between bifurcation and flashback shown even more vividly in Mankiewicz’ A Letter to Three Wives. In this story, a woman writes a letter to three wives saying she ran off with one of their husbands, but she does not specify which one. This is a forking in their lives, and it causes them to recall prior forkings in the past that foreshadowed the current situation. In one wife’s recollection, we see her discover a possible reason her husband might have left with the other woman. Her face makes a certain expression that is almost identical with her current one, as if in her past she was already flashing forward to the future. And likewise, events in the present unfold where she gets news that seems to confirm her suspicions, and she makes that same facial expression again, linking all three moments together.

So when something happens in our lives that takes us down a diverging unexpected path, we on the one hand might flash back to another forking in the past that only implicitly hinted at the current bifurcation; yet on the other hand, we are already living the present moment as a memory given in advance of its future recollection, only we don’t know yet what future forkings will bring out the present moment’s implicit significance. In the instant of the flashback, past, present, and future are all simultaneous and immediate to our consciousness, as if we are always in a way standing outside of time’s flow and experiencing events from the perspective of eternity. [from Shores, Motionless Duration in Deleuze's Bergson, 2011]

We might begin to notice that every moment of our awareness presents some newness. Even if we stare at a boring still scene for a long time, our imaginations might take over and give us various new things to have in mind. Every moment is a forking of some sort, a diverging down a new path of awareness. And thus every moment gives new cause to recall past moments and revise our grasp of them. As well, every moment of our awareness provides new memories whose implicit contents and meanings will later be explicated by another divergence in our awareness.

This means that each moment of our awareness will repeat itself, each time as something new, in the form of variational recollections of it. Consider when the wife first noticed her husband with the other woman. She sensed some deeper meaning in this plot twist in her life, but she did not know explicitly what that significance was. Later she receives the letter from the other woman saying she ran off with one of the husbands. This is a plot twist that recalls an implicit meaning in the prior plot twist. So there was something implicit in moment A that became explicit in moment B. Later she gets the note that seems to indicate her husband is the one who ran off with the woman. This brings moment A out yet again, telling more of its significance.

Each moment of our awareness has in it already all its repetitions, but only in implicit form. They are all packed into that instant. Because it is just an instant, these moments do not present an extending time line like the one that eventually follows. Rather, they present all these virtual explications as implicit tendencies for that moment to repeat variationally. They are given as virtual intensities.

This is repetition in immediacy. Each moment of our awareness is implicitly an infinity of virtual repetitions, each one a repetition not because it is the same thing over and over, but because it is a variation based on the same seed. Yet every seed is already a variation on another, so somehow there is no act of awareness that is the ultimate seed. Variation itself is somehow primary. If we had an initial act of awareness, it was not so much a thing we were aware of as much as we were aware of variation itself, perhaps in the transition from non-awareness to awareness.

So we consider this passage from the introduction to Difference & Repetition:

perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable'. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself: as Péguy says, it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days; or Monet's first water lily which repeats all the others. (1968: 7-8 / 1994: 1d)

[Later Deleuze writes of repetitions happening: "dans un instant" (10b / 3c); and he writes regarding the n in nth: "what is important in principle is 'n' times as the power of a single time, without the need to pass through a second or a third time" (10b / 3d)]

A large part of the phenomenal richness of any act of awareness is its infinite wealth of implicit virtual repetitions, contained all within that instant of consciousness. Each variational recollection takes that moment to a new level of phenomenal significance, takes it to a higher power, with no upper bounds (nth power) as if it were an infinite Russian doll series.

Further in the chapter Deleuze writes:

With habit, we act only on the condition that there is a little Self within us which contemplates: it is this which extracts the new - in other words, the general - from the pseudo-repetition of particular cases. Memory, then, perhaps recovers the particulars dissolved in generality. (15c / 7d)

Each moment of consciousness is unique. When we think to ourselves that a present event resembles a past one, we are extracting something new from these moments, which would be whatever generality we impose on them. We might express love for a sibling, and call that love like the love we expressed for a romantic partner. But these expressions of love were perfectly unique and singular when they happened. We add something to both, the generality of both being love, when we associate them. But this is just habitual contraction (see this entry from the Second chapter on habitual contractions). Memory is more a matter of bifurcation. It would seem that the memory-linked moments of the wife's life conjoin on account of their semblance. But really they join because there is a particular in the prior instance that is ignored by the generality of their assimilation.

Deleuze continues:

repetition is the thought of the future [...]. It is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetting becomes a positive power while the unconscious becomes a | positive and superior unconscious [...]. When Kierkegaard speaks of repetition as the second power of consciousness, 'second' means not a second time but the infinite which belongs to a single time, the eternity which belongs to an instant, the unconscious which belongs to consciousness, the 'nth' power. (15d / 7-8)

In an act of awareness, we said, there are implicitly enveloped virtual repetitions of variational recollections. This immanent repetition, then, is the 'thought of the future'. The unconscious is our implicit awareness of these virtual repetitions, and under this function it is 'a positive and superior unconscious', because it has the power of infinite recreation. Forgetting is what allows those repetitions to spring up in the future in sudden realizations and recollections. Hence forgetting becomes a positive creational power in this immanent repetition. Thus repetition is the "infinite which belongs to a single time, the eternity which belongs to an instant, the unconscious which belongs to consciousness, the 'nth' power". This infinite belongs to a 'second' time. It is not second in order. In fact, the implicit time of virtual repetitions could very well be more primordial, because it immanently opens channels for explication throughout the extending passage of time.

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

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

Object Oriented Phenomenology: Deleuzean Differential Objects and Merleau-Ponty's Organisms

by Corry Shores
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Object Oriented Phenomenology:

Deleuzean Differential Objects and Merleau-Ponty's Organisms

What does object constitution got to do with any of us?

The way we go about our lives has a lot to do with what we take to be the objects around us. If there are limitations to how we understand what makes-up the objects, then there might be limitations to the possibilities of how the world appears to us and how we interact with it. If things can appear new to us tomorrow, then we have awoken to a new world. Perhaps if the world were composed purely of differences, then the potential for creation in our world will be greater.

Brief Summary

For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenal object is something whose parts and properties organically integrate with one another.

Points Relative to Deleuze

Yet for Deleuze, an object, phenomenal or otherwise, is something made solely of difference.




So for Merleau-Ponty, an object's qualities are organically integrated. Any one of them already expresses the others and the whole they make-up.

An object is an organism of colours, smells, sounds and tactile appearances which symbolize, modify and accord with each other according to the laws of a real logic which is the task of science to make explicit, and which it is far from having analysed completely. (Phenomenology of Perception 45a / fr. 64)

Let's distinguish Merleau-Ponty's sense of a phenomenal object from what a Deleuzean sort would be. What makes something an object? Normally an object is something whose parts hold together somehow. While it may be divisible into these parts, there is an element of indivisibility, or a dimension of indivisibility, which is like the glue that holds the parts together. So in Merleau-Ponty's case, the dimension of indivisibility lies in the integrated coherence of the parts, the holistic glue holding them together.

A Deleuzean object would be based solely on difference. Is Deleuze an emergentist and a process-relationalist, as some think? We all need not think so. Let's hold tight to his philosophy of difference. [To read some blog postings that seem to classify Deleuze in these other camps, see recent interesting discussions of: Adrian J Ivakhiv; Levi Bryant; and Graham Harman].

For Deleuze, an individual is like a calculus differential. It is a pure relation of difference without related parts. So in this way it is indivisible. But how can something indivisible also be a pure difference? Does not difference presuppose different things being differentiated? And thus would not an object made of difference also have parts being differentiated?

To illustrate a differential relation without related terms, Deleuze refers us to Leibniz' double triangle demonstration of the differential relation between vanishing values.

(Animation above is my own, made with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze.)

The sides of the smaller triangle begin with a particular ratio of one to the other. Because the larger triangle is proportional to the smaller one, the ratio of its sides is the same as for the smaller triangle. And as the smaller one shrinks, the larger one continues to maintain the smaller's ratio. Now we are to imagine the sides of the smaller triangle vanishing to the infinitely small. So they have no extensive finite value any more. However, the differential ratio between them remains. It can still be determined by the larger triangle. So here we have a differential relation without component terms, because they have vanished from the extensive world. Such a differential relation is an individual for Deleuze [For more, see Deleuze's Cours Vincennes 17/02/1981 and Cours Vincennes 10/03/1981].

So this individual is not divisible into its parts, because its parts have been divided already to infinity, leaving just the relation between them. Perhaps this is the closest thing we have to a Deleuzean 'object'. Yet note also that all bodies in extension can be considered as infinitely divided into these smallest parts, which make up larger bodies on the basis of more differential relations [for more on simplest bodies, again see Cours Vincennes 17/02/1981 and Cours Vincennes 10/03/1981; for how composition is a differential relation between simplest bodies, see this entry on Spinoza and rhythm].

So what about things we normally call objects, like beer bottles? How do we understand them in a Deleuzean way? It seems that the parts of the bottle hold together. Otherwise the beer would slip out.

Here, the Deleuzean object would not be the bottle, but the differential relations between the parts of the bottle and the parts of everything else. These are not the only differential relations. The parts within the bottle differentially relate in the same way, as between the glass and the cap. But the Deleuzean object is neither the glass nor the cap, it is the set of differential relations between the parts of each. These are 'objects' because as differential relations, they are relations between vanished terms, and hence are indivisible.

This is not yet speaking of the phenomenological object, but the Deleuzean phenomenal object is based on the same idea. We have microperceptions, which are also differential relations, just like the simplest bodies. [See this entry on differential perception for a more detailed explanation]. These microperceptions are too small for us to be explicitly aware of them. It is only when there is a differential relation between sets of these that there is a noticeable phenomenon. And this happens when the differential relation between them is so notable or remarkable that it flashes-out into our awareness. The bottle's difference from the table might strike us when we make use of that difference to lift the bottle. Then the difference between the beer and the bottle flashes before us when we tip the beer from the bottle to our mouths. But in each of these cases, the Deleuzean phenomenal object is not the beer and the bottle, for example, but instead the differential relations between, which we said were indivisible individuals. The differentiations between the microperceptions produces the larger macroperception.

Why is this not emergentism? It might be, so long as we do not say that the emergent phenomenon is either the beer or the bottle. If there were such a thing as an emergent (phenomenological) phenomenon, it would be the collective impact that all the differential relations between the two has on our bodies. When the beer bottle stands-out to us, all the differential relations of its parts to those around it each affect us in different ways. But first consider a case where this might not seem to be so. [again, see this entry for more detail]. Green is the differential relation between yellow and blue, says Deleuze. When the yellow and blue parts diminish to the infinitely small, the microphenomena of yellow and blue become imperceptible, leaving just the differential relations between, which are green. This might seem like an emergent (phenomenal) phenomenon. And perhaps it is.

(Animation above is my own, made with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze.)

But also consider these two cases:

The checkered form on the right gives us a slight differential green macro-perception, but the checkered form appears slightly differently in each case, maybe because the different parts stand-out in different ways. In other words, even the seeming 'emergent phenomenon' is conditioned by differential relations exterior to it. So in the first case of the animation, the green that emerges only appears in that given way partly on account of its parts differential relations to all the other parts outside it in our visual field (the text and other colors surrounding it). Thus the phenomenon could not possibly have emerged just from its parts, like emergentism would have it. The Deleuzean phenomenological object would not be produced emergently, despite there being layers of macro and microperceptions. It is just the multiplicity of all the differential relations all given simultaneously, not some grouped together and organized organically to produce their own distinct higher level.

But this might only hold for perception. What if we were thinking about objects but not in terms of our perceptions of them. Would we think that the parts of an object like a beer bottle together produce the emergent object, the bottle itself with all its emergent properties? Such a view might think of the bottle's parts as being parts of an assemblage that is fluidly becoming, changing its arrangements so to become other objects, that is, other assemblages.

To find another view, let's first note an example of such a composed body that Deleuze discusses, the blood being made of lymph and chyle [again, see this entry on Spinoza and rhythm for a summary of the blood example]. The blood is constituted by the differential relations between the infinitely small parts of lymph to those of chyle. Blood would seem then to be an object emerging from its parts, lymph and chyle. These differential relations determine the blood's power, that is, its ability to affect other bodies and its capacity to withstand the affection of other bodies. But what also determines the blood's power is its differential relation to other bodies. The parts of blood are always in contact with other bodies. Consider for example when arsenic enters the blood. The differential relations of the blood will perhaps decrease in power. So the seeming 'emergent' object, the blood and its properties, is not just the emergent result of its parts. It is also the result of those parts' relations to the bodies impacting them. But the blood also affects the arsenic, perhaps by converting it to something less toxic. If there is anything of a constitutional nature, it is the differential contact between the arsenic and the blood. It is that differential contact which serves to constitute the parts.

The assemblege in this instance is the arsenic with the blood. In the case of the blood it is the lymph and the chyle. But as we noted, these are not really distinct assemblages. The only distinct things are the individuals, the differential relations which have no parts. We cannot speak of the blood's constitution without also speaking of the things it is differentially contacting. But even if we take those two things as parts of a greater whole, we only have that greater whole on the grounds that it is making a differential contact with another one. But what seems to be happening fundamentally is that all the differentials on the lowest level are in contact, and these seeming higher levels are arbitrary distinctions our minds make for practical purposes. The beer bottle is one object. When I go to drink from it, it is two objects. Really, it is an infinity of objects, which are merely differential relations.

Nonetheless, we still might think of Deleuze as a process philosopher. The differential relations seem always to be in flux. The bottle thrown to the sea becomes beach glass. The differenentials of the world seem always to be rearranging, the assemblages continually reassembling.

Yet, what we call the beer bottle is a set of differential relations, and these are all instantaneous affections [and again, see this entry on Spinoza and rhythm for the connection between simple bodies and affections]. This means the constitution of what we call the bottle, phenomenological or otherwise, is nothing temporal. The differential relations between simplest bodies is just how they are affecting one another at a given moment. The temporal continuity from one moment to the next is secondary to the differential constitution of things. Phenomenologically speaking it is on the grounds of differences from one moment to the next that something stands-out to us and is thus a phenomenon. So many phenomena are based on temporal discontinuities.

And what Deleuze calls 'becoming' might be something instantaneous. Deleuze writes that the event is something extensive. "That is clearly the first component or condition of both Whitehead's and Leibniz's definition of the event: extension. Extension exists when one element is stretched over the following ones, such that it is a whole and the following elements are its parts." [The Fold p.77bc] But is not becoming something intensive for Deleuze, rather than being something extensive? We might wonder, when we strike a match, what would be the wood's becoming fire? We might say it is a process that extends over the duration of the strike. But in a calculus sort of way, we might consider that instant at the limit before the flame breaks out. No time extends between it being wood and it being fire. It is virtually fire while actually being wood. When physicists determine instantaneous velocities, the objects are not actually going that speed, because there is no motion in an instant. But the instantaneous velocity is real, even though it is not actual. It is virtual. Becoming might be the simultaneous overlap of a fully real virtuality with an actuality, as in the case of the limit of fire and wood [see this entry on the paradox of becoming for more explanation]. But in terms of the differentials making up the wood and fire, we have the differentials of the wood differentiating from their very own selves, because they in their given place are both the differentials of the wood and the differentials of the fire, but contracted upon each other in the instant. This is Deleuzean becoming, as I understand it, which has little to do with the event. It is rather what he calls static genesis.

So in sum, Deleuze might not be a relationalist, because his differential relations do not have parts. He might not be an emergentist, because whatever we might consider to emerge from a substrate is conditioned just as much by other things as by its substrate. And Deleuze might not be a process philosopher, because becoming for him does not involve an extensively temporal event.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Transl. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.


Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.

Naive Infinity: Original Perception in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

by Corry Shores
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Naive Infinity:
Original Perception in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

What does a pure experience of color got to do with us?

The way we interact with our world has a lot to do with how we think it is structured. But perhaps it is structured purely by difference. And if so, this means there is absolute freedom in how the world might appear to us, so long as we are not enforcing the same structure upon it.

Brief Summary

The child's world is made of indeterminate parts. Their determinations are just on the horizon of their awareness. Once they become explicit, the child now sees the word in terms of those explicit structures, and thus no longer with such a sense of indeterminacy.

Points Relative to Deleuze

Or perhaps we might instead think that the world is originally given in definite differences, even though not all of them make a practical difference in a given situation, so they do not appear so pronounced. And thus, the possibility remains that we might experience the world as pure variation, without distractions of constituted structures.



Merleau-Ponty writes of the child's initial experiences of color. She first can only distinguish colored things from non-colored things. Then, she distinguishes warm and cool shades of colored regions. Finally, she can discern different colors. The psychologist mistakenly thinks that the different specific colors were perceived by the child but just not recognized as having its particular identity. Merleau-Ponty instead says that the colors were originally seen in an indeterminate form, and only gradually does the child come to constitute them distinctly. In other words, the child sees different colors but not so much the differences/distinctions between them, although these differences are on the horizon of their awareness. In other words, there are relations between the colors that are seen, but only implicitly. The child might see a green apple next to a red one. She may then have a vague feeling that one is different from the other, but she has not yet compared different red things with each other and different green things with each other, and then contrast the two. When finally she does do this, she sees that her previously vague feeling of the difference between the colors was based on one being red and the other green.

it has long been known that during the first nine months of life, infants distinguish only globally the coloured from the colourless; thereafter coloured areas form into 'warm' and 'cold' shades, and finally the detailed colours are arrived at. But psychologists would concede here no more than that ignorance or the confusion of names prevents the child from distinguishing colours. The child must, it was alleged, see green where it is; all he was failing to do was to pay attention and apprehend his own phenomena. The reason for these assertions was that psychologists were not yet able to conceive a world in which colours were indeterminate, or a colour which was not a precise quality. The criticism of these prejudices, on the other hand, allows the world of colours to be perceived as a secondary formation, based on a series of 'physiognomic' distinctions: that between the 'warm' and the 'cold' shades, that between the 'coloured' and the 'non-couloured'. We | cannot compare these phenomena, which take the place of colour in children, to any determinate quality, and in the same way the 'strange' colours seen by a diseased person cannot be identified with any colour of the spectrum. The first perception of colours properly speaking, then, is a change of the structure of consciousness, the establishment of a new dimension of experience, the setting forth of an a priori. Now attention has to be conceived on the model of these primary acts, since secondary attention, which would be limited to recalling knowledge already gained, would once more identify it with acquisition. To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. They are preformed only as horizons, they constitute in reality new regions in the total world. It is precisely the original structure which they introduce that brings out the identity of the object before and after the act of attention. (34-35 / fr. 54, boldface mine)

Let's contrast that now with a Deleuzean phenomenological perspective. We might begin with Deleuze's reference to Stan Brakhage's exploring a "Cézannian world before man, a dawn of ourselves, by filming all the shades of green seen by a baby in the prairie" (Deleuze Cinema 1, p.87). Deleuze also refers us to Louis Marcorelles’ Éléments pour un nouveau cinéma, where he quotes Brakhage as writing:

Imagine an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything, but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “green?” How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” (Marcorelles, p.142-143; qt from Brakhage Encounters)

This sort of encounter with color seems as though it might not have the idea of a horizon of color formations. So the child is not even implicitly aware of general color variations like green and red, but rather only sees pure variations of color. This will bring us closer to Deleuze theory of perception. A perception of a color is a differential between other visual givens. We perceive green when there are countless differences between yellow and blue flashing before our eyes.

(Animation above is my own, made with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze.)

So in Deleuzean phenomenology, we do not take the psychologist's view that the child sees the colors but has not developed the capacity to identify them. For, the psychologist assumes that the perception of color is of a homogeneous field of similarity, where for Deleuze what we primarily perceive are microperceptions, each one being a differential variation to another, and only on a higher order will there appear another level of differentiation that makes one color stand-out against another one. Yet Deleuzean phenomenology is not like Merleau-Ponty's either. It is not that the child sees all the holistically integrated relations between colors implicitly on account of them being on the horizon of her awareness. This is because to see any one of the variations means that it is standing-out. It presents itself as not fitting-in. This is on the basis of a fundamental incoherence of the parts of perception. And also, note how Merleau-Ponty says that once the child learns to discern the different colors, she now has a new structure of consciousness, a new a priori, which means from now on she automatically sees green as green and not as an indeterminate color. Deleuzean phenomenology would be based on there remaining the possibility that we can return to our original capacity to see just pure variation. So in Deleuzean phenomenology, we would regard us as always perceiving just pure variation, in the form of infinitely small differential microperceptions. All there would be are intensive differences, that is, differences in degree of change between them [See Deleuze's discussion of Scotus' white wall for more on how our visual field can be pure intensive variation, at Ch. 12 of Expressionism in Philosophy and Cours Vincennes 10/03/1981]. Now consider if we see a rainbow. It is possible to see it as pure variation. But we might see it against a blue sky, which for some reason causes the yellow variations of the rainbow to stand-out. So all the variations in the yellow band go less noticed. But all these variations are then differentially related to the variations of blue in the sky. So this is a higher order of differentiation, and the phenomenon here is the differential relation between the sky's blue variations and the rainbow's yellow variations. This does not eliminate the smaller variations, it only adds on a higher order another layer of difference. But by doing so, this allows us to take the yellow variations together as extending in a certain region of the rainbow and constituting a certain general quality, yellow. We often have practical reasons for doing such extensive qualitative constitutings. It is useful to cut-up the world into different pieces that may functionally relate to one another. I might just need to recognize the difference between green and red so to pick the right apple. Or maybe I need to distinguish different types of red to pick the right red apple. It is all based on the differences that make a difference in a particular situation. And making these divisions allows us to establish boundaries between extents of space and generalizations of qualities, like regions of shade on a white wall. So we might think of ourselves as being in either an intensive or an extensive mood. The child is in an intensive mood; she only perceives pure variations. But we, when regarding our world as being made of extensive parts with generalized qualities, we are in the extensive mood. Yet Deleuzean phenomenology is based on our capacity to leave the extensive mood to enter a state where we experience pure variations. This happens for example when we have sublime experiences or when we view a Francis Bacon painting. So here is a difference with Merleau-Ponty, who said that the structures of the child's perception change after learning the colors. For Deleuze, the structures do not change, only new ones are added, and these new structures can be broken back down to the perception of pure intensities.




Brakhage, Stan. “Encounters,” By Brakhage – Anthology (Criterion, 2001).


Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Transl. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam. London: The Athlone Press, 1986.


Marcorelles, Louis. Éléments pour un nouveau cinéma. Paris: Unesco, 1970. Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Film-making, Transl. Isabel Quigly. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1973.


Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.

Enfolded Sensations: Merleau-Ponty's Gestaltist Integrated Phenomena and Deleuze's Differential Perception

by Corry Shores
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[Images and animations are my own. I made them using Open Office Draw and Unfreeze. There is one exception, the diagram from Leibniz' letter.]

Enfolded Sensations:
Merleau-Ponty's Gestaltist Integrated Phenomena and Deleuze's Differential Perception

(Animation above is my own, made with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze.)

What does integrated or differential perception got to do with us?

What we are sensing is what we are after, what we are feeling-for, what we are sensitive to. Just the natural way we feel-out the world tells us we already care about something very profound about what goes on around us. So it should matter to us to know what it is we are feeling-for. It might be we are sensing the way things are already belonging together right as we sense them. If that were so, we care about the glue that holds together the world around us. But maybe it is the opposite. Perhaps what we care about is really the moments when things do not fall together right. That is what catches our attention, is it not, when something does not fit in right or stands-out for some reason? Perhaps we are difference-feelers. What we immediately care about is not how things hang-together, but how they are cracked apart from forces of differentiation.

Brief Summary

When we see a part of something, we might also be seeing all the other parts of that something there implicitly as well. Or, when we see a part of something, we might be sensing something that stands apart from the other parts on account of its differential relations.

Points Relative to Deleuze

A Deleuzean phenomenology would be anti-Gestaltist. It would be based on the non-integration of the parts of our perceptions.

Merleau-Ponty's introductory illustration of Gestalt

[Quotation:]

Let us imagine a white patch on a homogeneous background. All the points in the patch have a certain 'function' in common, that of forming themselves into a ' shape' The colour of the shape is more intense, and as it were more resistant than that of the background; the edges of the white patch ' belong' to it, and are not part of the background although they adjoin it; the patch appears to be placed on the background and does not break it up. Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. But if the shape and the background, as a whole, are not sensed, they must be sensed, one may object, in each of their points. To say this is to forget that each point in its turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background. [...] The perceptual 'something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a 'field'. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. [...] The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception. If it is introduced, it is because instead of attending to the experience of perception, we overlook it in favour of the object perceived. [...] An isolated datum of perception is inconceivable, at least if we do the mental experiment of attempting to perceive such a thing. But in the world there are either isolated objects or a physical void. (4 / fr. 26, boldface mine)

Merleau-Ponty goes on to say that we never perceive any quality by itself, but rather in relation to other qualities. There is no pure impression, but rather only composite perceptions, each one saying a bit about the whole.

I shall therefore give up any attempt to define sensation as pure impression. Rather, to see is to have colours or lights, to hear is to have sounds, to sense (sentir) is to have qualities. To know what sense experience is, then, is it not enough to have seen a red or to have heard an A? But red and green are not sensations, they are the sensed (sensibles), and quality is not an element of consciousness, but a property of the object. Instead of providing a simple means of delimiting sensation, if we consider it in the experience itself which evinces it, the quality is as rich and mysterious as the object, or indeed the whole spectacle, perceived. This red patch which I see on the carpet is red only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it, its quality is apparent only in relation to the play of light upon it, and hence as an element in a spatial configuration. Moreover the colour can be said to be there only if it occupies an area of a certain size, too small an area not being describable in these terms. (5a / fr. 26)

We will now try to clarify the theory of perception Deleuze explicates in The Fold. We will find that like Merleau-Ponty, perceptions for Deleuze are multiplicities. However, they are not formed under the assumption of greater coherent wholes.

In the chapter "Perception in the Folds," Deleuze discusses the difference between microperceptions and macroperceptions. A microperception is like an infinitely small perception. They can be perceptions of an infinitely small change, or they can be the perception of some infinitely small difference that we sense ("Tiny perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception" p.87ab). We do not consciously notice any of these tiny perceptions, because they are too minute to stand out to us. But somehow our macroperceptions are made up of the micro ones. And yet, a macroperception is not the sum of homogeneous parts. So when we see a field of green, the perception of green does not result from many small microperceptions of green. Deleuze sees an anti-Gestaltism in Leibniz's theory. "We are not dealing with a relation of parts-and-wholes because the totality can be as imperceptible as the parts, as also when I do not sense the grinding noise of the water mill to which I am overly accustomed." (p87d) So it is not that we perceive wholes which are made up of parts. What we perceive is something different altogether than such a synthesis.

So we do not perceive something, like a green area, by moving from its parts to a whole. Instead, there is something phenomenal involved. We go from "the ordinary to what is notable or remarkable." (88a) Deleuze says that "We have to understand literally - that is, mathematically - that a conscious perception is produced when at least two heterogeneous parts enter into a differential relation that determines a singularity." (88a)

This differential relation is a calculus differential. We will need to review a basic calculus idea. Differential calculus, at least as Leibniz conceives it, deals with the ratios between infinitely small quantities. They have no magnitude in comparison with finite ones, because they are infinitely small in comparison. However, when one infinitely small magnitude differentially relates with another so to form a ratio, their relation will have a value. Leibniz devised a demonstration to help us visualize it [click link to follow the details.] For our purposes, we need to focus on one particular idea, namely, the diminution to infinitely small values that form differential relations.

So we are to imagine two triangles formed with a common line.

[From Leibniz' "Justification of the Infinitesimal Calculus by that of Ordinary Algebra.]

The diagonal line moves towards point A (crossing through the dotted diagonal line). But the whole time, the top triangle maintains the same proportions as the bottom one. So the ratio of x - c over y always tells us the ratio of c over e. By sliding the diagonal to the right, we diminish c and e to the infinitely small. With such a small magnitude, we can no longer quantify either of them first and then secondly determine their ratio. However, their ratio does maintain, and it is indicated still by x over y. See this animation.

(Animation above is my own, made with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze.)

The 'dc' means 'an infinitely small part of c.' So the ratio of an infinitely small part of c to an infinitely small part of e equals the ratio of x over y, even though neither dc or de itself has a finite determinable magnitude.

So Deleuze wrote that conscious perceptions arise when at least two heterogeneous parts enter into a differential relation (88a). "For example, the color green: yellow and blue can surely be perceived, but if their pereption vanishes by dint of progressive diminution, they enter into a differential relation

that determines green" (99b). So in this formula, db/dy, the db is an infinitely small bit of blue. It is a microperception of blue. And it has entered into a differential relation with a microperception of yellow. So consider if we see a block of blue next to a block of yellow. We won't see green. It is possible that we have a microperception of green by differentially relating the two, but it is too small to see. Now imagine if we continue shrinking the blue and yellow block, each time adding more, until there is an infinity of them. Now their differential relations stand-out more strongly on account of their sheer number. We no longer then perceive the yellow or blue, but instead just the green. See this animation for a demonstration, and consider the parallel with the triangles: the triangle sides diminished to the infinitely small, but their differential relation remained. In the case of the colors, they diminish also to the infinitely small, yet their differential relation, green, remains.

(Animation above is my own, made with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze.)

We might then wonder what about the blue and yellow? They too could be differential relations, perhaps between two other colors that are too small for us to see or perhaps instead between different shades (of black and white or yellow and blue). "And nothing impedes either yellow or blue, each on its own account, from being already determined by the differential relation of two colors that we cannot detect, or of two degrees of chiaroscuro:

[...] For example, the sound of the sea: at least two waves must be minutely perceived as nascent and heterogeneous enough to become part of a relation that can allow a perception of a third, one that "excels" over the others and comes to consciousness (implying that we are near the shoreline)." (99c.d) In the above equation, we are determining the differential relation that produces yellow (Y). It involves what might be two other infinitely small perceptions of different colors, or it could be microperceptions of different shades (either of yellow or black and white).

Let us point out one difference with Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, all perceptions of a quality involve already the perception of other qualities. The whole in a way is implied in all the parts, and there are never singular isolated qualities that we perceive. For Deleuze, a microperception is in fact a singularity. And green is not implied in the blue or the yellow. The macroperception is not implied in the parts. This is because the perception of green involves a differential perception between blue and yellow. The macroperception of green presents something not anywhere to be found in any of the parts. Hence Deleuze's phenomenology is anti-Gestaltist.

So we are given an infinity of infinitely small microperceptions. Then, the differences between some of them will matter to us more than others in a given context. In other words, certain differences will make more of a difference; "if we take thresholds to be so many minimal units of consciousness, tiny perceptions are in each instance smaller than the virtual minimum and, in this sense, are infinitely small. The ones selected in each order are those engaged in differential relations, and hence they produce the quality that issues forth at the given threshold of consciousness (for example, the color green). Inconspicuous perceptions are thus not parts of conscious perception, but requisites or genetic elements, "differentials of consciousness." (88-89) All the microperceptions go unnoticed until their differential relations stand out in clarity. "There are differential relations among these presently infinitely small ones that are drawn into clarity; that is to say, that establish a clear perception (the color green) with certain tiny, dark, evanescent perceptions (the colors yellow and blue). And no doubt yellow and blue can themselves be clear and conscious perceptions, but only if they too are drawn into clarity, each from its own position, by differential relations among other minute perceptions, or differentials of other orders. Differential relations always select minute perceptions that play a role in each case, and bring to light or clarify the conscious perception that comes forth. Thus differential calculus is the psychic mechanism of perception [...]." (90a)

We might put this into phenomenological terms. Every perception of a quality is on a lower order a differential between smaller perceptions. So all perceptions are differentials. We might adopt the Husserlean term, 'primordial data', but instead call it "immediate differential data". Among those differential relations, certain ones will stand out for one reason or another. This means certain microperceptions are forced together, sending a shockwave between them, if you will. This shock is the higher order perception. When yellow and blue collide, green flashes between them. When we see a color-field of green, we are sensing infinitely many differential shocks between yellow and blue. But consider when we place the checkered blue/yellow (green) next to just yellow and next to just blue.

Perhaps when we look at the green next to the yellow, the blue parts of the green stand out more. And vice versa, when we place the blue next to the green, the yellow parts stand out more:

The idea is that the yellow or the blue will stand out more on account of the parts of the green now differentially related to the added color. So difference is the grounds for appearance. Something appears only by means of a differential relation. When one of the colors stands out, it is because it no longer melts in with the rest, it is no longer as much a part of the whole; rather, it is only on account of it breaking from the whole that it appears.

So we distinguish Deleuze from Merleau-Ponty's theory of phenomenal perception in the following ways:
1) For Merleau-Ponty, there cannot be singular isolated qualities that are perceived. But for Deleuze, all perceptions are fundamentally singularities, namely, the differential relation between parts.
2) In Merleau-Ponty's Gestaltism, each part of a perception implies a whole, because the qualities of any part are conditioned by the other qualities of the thing being perceived. (So the redness of an apple is not isolated from its sheen). Yet for Deleuze, no part implies the resulting differential perception between the parts. Green is not implied in yellow or in blue, but it flashes into appearances when yellow and green are forced together and differentially relate.
3) For Merleau-Ponty, any part appears only when it is thoroughly integrated with all the other qualities holistically organized in the phenomenally appearing thing. However, for Deleuze, it is only when the part breaks-out from a holistic integration that it stands out from its context and appears to us, and in fact it is the differential relation itself between the parts that stands out. So when yellow and blue are forced together, and their differential relation matters to us at that moment, then green flashes out into appearance as a phenomenon.


Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Transl. Tom conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Leibniz, Gottfried. "Justification of the Infinitesimal Calculus by that of Ordinary Algebra." Philosophical Papers and Letters. Ed. & Transl. Leroy E. Loemker. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1956.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.

The Forces of Illusion: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, on Gestalt

by Corry Shores
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[Other entries in the Merleau-Ponty phenomenology series.]

[Note: I made the images and animations with Open Office Draw and Unfreeze. The exceptions are the Paul Klee diagram and the Rube Goldberg machine.]

The Forces of Illusion:
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, on Gestalt

What does Gestalt theory got to do with us?

When we sense something, there could be creative forces already immediate in what we see which are trying to change what we are perceiving. Artists seem to be able to make use of these creative disruptive forces. Can we too?

Brief Summary

Merleau-Ponty uses the example of optical illusions to show that what we perceive is often not reducible to the sum of its parts.

Points Relative To Deleuze

For Deleuze, the sensible might instead be those elements of appearances whose disruptions cause us to tend toward seeing the parts a different way.

Gestalt and Generative Perceptions

Merleau-Ponty uses Gestalt examples to illustrate his notion that the 'sensible' is not merely the immediate effect of external stimuli. The whole of what we sense cannot be reduce to the sum of the parts. We would like to suggest that for Deleuze, what is 'sensible' most immediately and most fundamentally are the differential forces disrupting the parts.

So, there is a perspective Merleau-Ponty will dispute. It first considers how our perceptions have parts. Then it holds that to each part of the perceived thing corresponds a part in our perception of it. Merleau-Ponty cites numerous examples of optical and other sorts of illusions. They demonstrate that we often perceive things not to be found in the parts. On a previous page he discusses the Müller-Lyer optical illusion. We might consider the lines taken by themselves, looking equal, and also consider by themselves the additional diagonal lines. But when they are found all together, we perceive two new lengths for the lines, the one being longer than the other. This inequality is not to be found in the lines, but is what we readily sense in the image.

Müller-Lyer optical illusion

the addition of auxiliary lines makes two figures unequal which are objectively equal [citing Koehler, Über unbemerkte Emfindungen und Urteilstäuschungen, MP p.8c ...] In this case, therefore, the 'sensible' cannot be defined as the immediate effect of an external stimulus. [9d, fr 38bc]

Merleau-Ponty concludes that "the 'sensible' cannot be defined as the immediate effect of an external stimulus" (9b/30d) and that the "sensory apparatus, as conceived by modern physiology, is no longer fitted to the rôle of 'transmitter'." (10a/31)

Instead, when we sense something, we always-already integrate the portions we see into a greater whole, implied in the parts and serving to organize them within a larger network of relations. So in the case of the optical illusion, perhaps we from the beginning give it a certain meaning, in this case that meaning could perhaps be a comparison of different sizes. Merleau-Ponty writes:

normal functioning must be understood as a process of integration in which the text of the external world is not so much copied as composed. And if we try to seize 'sensation' within the perspective of the bodily phenomena which pave the way to it, we find not a psychic individual, a function of certain known variables, but a formation already bound up with a larger whole, already endowed with a meaning, distinguishable only in degree from the more complex perceptions, and which therefore gets us no further in our attempt to delimit pure sensation. (10-11/ fr. 32, emphasis mine).

Science

requires that two perceives lines, like two real lines, should be equal or unequal [...] without realizing that the perceived, by its nature, admits of the ambiguous, the shifting, and is shaped by its context. In Müller-Lyer's illusion, one of the lines ceases to be equal to the other without becoming 'unequal': it becomes 'different'. that is to say, an isolated, objective line, and the same line taken in a figure, cease to be, for perception, 'the same'. [12-13/ fr. 34]

So it is not so much that the lines change their size as much as the lines themselves become different lines. Only through our analysis, which takes apart the pieces of the diagram, can we see that they are equal. But then we are no longer dealing with the same lines, and this is because the context changed. The lines as unequal are such because of the whole of the image.


A Deleuzean phenomenology would not be Gestaltist like this. The lines' difference in size would not necessarily be a matter of the whole conditioning the parts or the parts communicating the whole. What might make one line smaller than the other could be the differential forces acting on our eye-muscles.

At times Deleuze's refers to Paul Klee's ideas on rhythm and chaos, and in particular, the gray point. In his sketchbooks, Klee shows us how differential variations between parts of an image can cause our eyes to tend toward certain motions [see this entry on aesthetic rhythm for a more complete discussion].

Consider for example this arrangement of lines.

(From Paul Klee's sketchbooks)

It does not cause a lot of motion in our eyes. However, when they are staggered, notice how our eyes want to jump around rhythmically, and how the lines seem to slide against one another.

(From Paul Klee's sketchbooks)

The differential variation in the second case causes the muscles in our eyes to tend in two directions at once (if not more, like diagonal as well as left and right). So consider again the diagonal lines added to the straight lines in the illusion. First look at if there were only the top ones added.

We see that there is no effect. There must be both, a differential relation between the angles of the top and bottom sets of diagonals.

Perhaps when the two are set off in differential relation, the top ones cause our eyes to want to expand outward with the opening of the lines, and the bottom ones cause our eyes to want to move inward into the line. The forces, then, acting our our eye muscles would then be what causes the top line to seem longer than the bottom. See if this explanation is correct, and be sensitive to the forces you feel trying to move your eyes.

Does the top one give you an open feeling in comparison to the bottom one giving you a constricted feeling? It would not be so if there were only one set of diagonals, what is needed is the differential relation. Consider also if the two lines were off-set only slightly.

Does not this differential relation also produce forces which make them seem like they are sliding against one another?

Deleuze, we will see, discusses this technical element which causes forces to try to alter the image. He calls it the diagram. In this case, the differential relation between the diagonals is the diagram. And because it causes a multiplicity of tendencies-toward-change, it is what produces the rhythm of the sensation. This rhythm results when the sensation causes our bodies to undergo internal differentiation, which we respond-to by internally differentiating ourselves further so to 'adjust' to the conditions of the image. But so long as we feel the differential forces of the illusion, we have not really 'adjusted' to it like when our eyes after encountering bright light soon no longer strain to see. Rather, it is more like we vary our internal functioning so to 'dance' if you will with the variations acting on us, and in that way keeping them in motion.

So for Deleuze, phenomena are not possible on account of the coherence of parts in the world, but rather on the forces that tear them apart and that indicate there is not a coherent whole but rather a large Rube Goldberg machine of sorts: a heterogeneous system of differential 'mechanisms'.

(Thank you Stephen Worth at ASIFA)

The machine forms a functional whole, but not a coherent whole. None of the parts implies the others, although it is only through this precise and delicate arrangement that the given outcome is possible. The parts do not belong together, but are conjoined. Each conjunction serves a function. But the conjunction is between parts that relate differentially, and not coherently. So we might say at each junction there is a functional disjunction. The diagonals of the illusion are like such a functional disjunction, which produces alternate motion-tendencies in the lines.

So what we sense really are not parts organic integrated into coherent wholes. If ever we sense something, we sense a difference. Phenomena are always differences. If we stare at an object for an extended period of time, without noticing new things about it, then the object will fade from our vision. It is only a difference that we notice. Phenomenal awareness is a difference-sensitivity.

Now, something will appear to us only if it is not coherent with its context. When something coheres with its greater whole, then it will not stand out from it. It is only on the grounds of a non-coherence with a greater system that something will stand out and appear to us. So something is a phenomenon only on the grounds of its being placed in a differential relation to some possible whole. In other words, a Deleuzean phenomenology is anti-Gestaltist. And if we were to reduce our mode of awareness from an extensive to an intensive mood, we would bracket-out our efforts to homogeneously extend the parts of our perception out into coherent whole networks, and rather turn our attention toward the forces in our perceptions that cause parts to jump out from their context. In the case of this illusion, we might in our intensive mood attend to the forces we feel causing the lines to shrink or expand instead of sit nicely with each other in the image.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.

Image credits:

Rube Goldberg machine
http://www.animationarchive.org/2008/10/comic-strips-rube-goldbergs-side-show.html
(Thanks Stephen Worth at ASIFA)

Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, (Basel : Schwabe, 1981);
Unendliche Naturgeschickte, (Basel : Schwabe, 1970)