I'm actually kinda pleased with this piece

so I'm posting a link to it here. I wrote this (and spent too much time on it) after I was informed about the event. I will say that I've actually thought about what I claim in the piece, especially in the way I try to "make use of" the Derridean notion of "the Supplement", and I actually think that I have more to say. Of course, the silly thing is that to say more about something as inconsequential as a little internet brouhaha is silly (and slightly obsessive, though that might indeed be the point of the Derridean Supplement, it overtakes). Anyway, here's the link.

Difference and Repetition III

This is a final post on the book. I'll just put all that emerged from reading about half of the work here. I've put it aside for another day when I feel like another bout of intellectual flagellation:

Difference in itself

About sixteen pages into the chapter (page 52), just before Deleuze discusses Hegel and Leibnitz, he begins to discuss "the Small and the Large". This seems to be an important moment in the discussion because it appears that through these, the "infinite" is discovered "within representation", and this promises to be a way for difference to break the mold of identity, of being just secondary or negative, where "organic representation" gives way to "orgiastic representation". I find what immediately follows, as well as the discussion of Hegel and Leibnitz to be difficult to follow (Which is why I now own a copy of Phenomenology of Spirit and probably have to work through that some time soon...) What happens with the discovery of infinity within representation appears to be a simultaneous experience of extremes: "a short-sighted and a long-sighted eye are required in order for the concept to take upon itself all moments ...." Is Deleuze suggesting that a moment like this forces the breakdown of representation and allows pure difference to emerge? What confuses me most at this moment is the way "the concept" is mapped onto "the Whole" and why this is important to the argument.

Repetition for itself

The hardest element, for me, is the third notion of time, the passive synthesis of memory. I can't really put a handle on what this third experience of time/memory is. I get the sense that the first synthesis (the passive synthesis) is a kind of instinctual, habitual whirring of impulses, that the second (the active synthesis) involves memory, recording and signification, but the third thing is difficult to get at. Despite what Deleuze says about Hegelian dialectic being a false, abstract movement of thought, he seems to involve in that kind of dialectical thought in unearthing this third synthesis: he seems to suggest that we know of this third synthesis because of a kind of joining of "Habitus" and "Mnemosyne" (page 101 in my edition, about 11 pages into the chapter).

Deleuze seems to be clearest when he uses Proust as an example and says that this is actually "reminiscence ... an involuntary memory which differs in kind from any active synthesis associated with voluntary memory" (page 107 in my edition, about 17 pages into the chapter). I don't think he's differentiating active and passive memory on the grounds of volition, the will or the act of deliberately trying to remember something (or is he?) even though there is the sense that the active synthesis of memory requires self-consciousness to put it into effect. He seems to be saying that there is an unconscious (?) element to memory itself, that escapes the active synthesis of memory but persists (or as he puts it "insists") as a "pure past" that is "beneath representation".

Another thing that came to my mind as I was reading this was the possible links that this has with Anti-Oedipus and the three synthesis that Deleuze and Guattari lay out in the open sections of the book. I think there are some similarities between the first two pairs, because in both cases there is a correlation between the instinctual/connective (the first synthesis) and the recording of the second synthesis. It's the third pair that doesn't quite seem to match up because in Anti-Oedipus the focus seems to be consumption and residual production of a sense of "subjectivity", while in Difference and Repetition, the third synthesis, involves some kind of presence that is never properly remembered.

A Wiki Interlude

Everyone uses Wikipedia. I depend on it for all sorts of things, from the names of obscure anti-popes to figuring out if there really is a Foucault's Pendulum (apparently there are several scattered around the globe). But I've never really thought about contributing to the entries: the world seems full of really knowledgeable people who are most willing to spend hours either churning out information or copying it from existing sources.
But of course, that all changed when I embarked on reading John Gower's Confessio Amantis, a longish Middle English poem that has lived in the shadow of the Canterbury Tales (like how Pound's Cantos have lived in the shadow of Eliot's Wasteland), over the weekend. There's already a decent entry on Wikipedia but I've decided to get in on the fun by listing the various 'tales' that appear in the poem. I'm sure the information is readily available in books or elsewhere on the Internet. But the redeeming illusion that we're contributing to something when the object of study doesn't immediately turn in a profit or change a life, is always comforting.

Difference and Repetition II

A difficult moment from the Introduction:

The introduction actually begins in a rather enchanting fashion. Delueze tries to show how "generality" and "repetition" are extremely incompatible concepts. He demonstrates that the "general" relates to that which can be exchanged, the substitutable, to laws that may be applied; whereas "repetition" involves the return of the singular, that it is "a necessary and justified conduct only in relation to that which cannot be replaced." Some of the writing is extremely moving. For instance: "The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without concept, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head of the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repeitition."

After dealing with what repetition opposes, and the distinction between "false" and "true" movement, Deleuze turns to specifying a "third opposition [between repetition and generality] from the point of view of concepts or representation". And then the going gets tough.

His discussion of artificial and natural "blockages" to a concept is baffling. I don't quite see how "the concept" (which enters the discussion at this point) stands in for or is related to "representation". Does "the concept" belong to a category of thought objects that are somehow "false" because they are abstractions and which only exist via representation?

Anyway, he seems to suggest that there is a certain limitation to "the concept" as regards to its ability to completely confer absolutely differentiated identity, which leads to paradoxical phenomena such as "twins" who are individuals but cannot be differentiated in conceptual terms. What I have difficulty getting is how this links up to "repetition". Is he suggesting that in spite of the failure of "the concept", in spite of these blockages that put limits, the actual existence of these things argue for some quality that proves their existence apart from "the concept"? This seemed to be an interesting and important moment for me because apart from "Epicurean atoms", he uses "words" as an example. What seems to be at stake here is the distinctiveness of identity that is based on an "abstract" or categorical definition of "self". Delueze seems bent on upsetting that cornerstone of thought – "the concept" – in order to radicalize what comes out of thought.

He later goes on to describe repetition as "difference without a concept, repetition which escapes indefinitely continued conceptual difference." This seems to be another pithy formula (!?) that appears to tie everything up nicely and relate all the terms but one that I can't quite unpack. Is he suggesting that it is only in getting at "repetition" that we get at something truly new and entirely singular?

"Perhaps the mistake of the philosophy of difference , from Aristotle to Hegel via Leibnitz, lay in confusing the concept of difference with merely conceptual difference, in remaining content to inscribe difference in the concept in general. In reality, so long as we inscribe difference in the concept in general, we have no singular Idea of difference, we remain only with a difference already mediated by representation. We therefore find ourselves confronted by two questions: what is the concept of difference -- one which is not reducible to simple conceptual difference but demands its own Idea, its own singularity at the level of Ideas? On the other hand, what is the essence of repetition -- one which is not reducible to difference without concept, and cannot be confused with the apparent character of objects represented by the same concept, but bears witness to singularity as a power of Ideas?"

Difference and Repetition I

I've been struggling with a text by Gilles Deleuze over the last week or so. It's Difference and Repetition and reading Deleuze is probably the quickest way to demonstrate to one's own lack of intellectual finesse. Anyway, in order to extract what I can from the book, I've decided to do a series of posts that "opens up" the text via quotations, questions and "workings out" of the ideas presented in Difference and Repetition.

I'm glad (or perhaps I should be embarassed) to say that I've hung around Deleuzean thought for quite long while. It's been at least ten years since I first started reading Anti-Oedipus. I know that sounds silly but there are difficulties in his thought that I think forces (or seduces?) the reader back to him. Also, there is that vast referentiality that is involved such that to understand a single concept more precisely, one has to reader three or four OTHER people that Deleuze refers to in a single breath. I don't have a background in academic philosophy (though much may be imbibed because one is literate) so there bound to be philosophical catch-phrases that are thick with meaning that I'll miss. Part of the difficulty as well!

Perhaps the most well-known contribution of Delueze (and his later collaborator, Felix Guatarri) is rhizomic 'structure'. In an attempt to dismantle top-down / bottom-up hierarchies and systems of thought, organization and being, they propose a counter structure, that of the rhizome. They oppose this to the more traditional 'aboreal' (tree-like) structures, which schematize from the root the the crown, and that dominate most spheres of knowledge. Instead, they posit a multiplicity of centers and a dense networks of relation and force that emerge out of these different networks. Obviously, they've been credited as prophets of sorts for the wonderful world of the internet, which seems to be the human endeavor that resembles the rhizomic most closely.

Difference and Repetition is an early work (and one of Deleuze's PhD theses) and Deleuze's project involves thinking how we might think "difference" in-itself. I guess the starting point has to do with the way we usually quickly gloss over the idea of "difference". We normally think of differences as the identifiable features that are manifest between two or more objects. But this isn't good enough for Deleuze who thinks that this makes difference a mere adjunct to "identity", merely a conceptual, representational idea.

In effect, Deleuze's project ends up as a crazy meditation on the dominance of "representation" in Western philosophy. He attempts to dismantle the tyranny of the "original-copy" relationship that is the basis of transcendental thought by demonstrating that difference can be "affirmative". He does this because he thinks that while difference has been invoked by a great many philosophers in the Western tradition, they have merely been, well, dancing with shadows. Taking on "difference" in 1968 would have been significant because of the growing disenchantment with structuralism and emergence of now well-enshrined dogma that semiotic phenomena merely operate through a network of arbitrary difference. Deleuze isn't content with the revolutionary insights and freedoms that "arbitrary" affords: he wants "difference".

From the Preface:

"We tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it (from the point of view of the concept or the subject: for example, specific difference presupposes an identical concept in the form of a genus). We also have a tendency to subordinate it to resemblance (from the point of view of perception), to opposition (from the point of view of predicates) and to analogy (from the point of view of judgement). In other words, we do not think difference in itself. With Aristotle, Philosophy was able to provide itself with an organic representation of difference, with Leibnitz and Hegel an orgiastic representation: it has not, for all that, reached difference itself."