Succession is not sequentiality
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Loved our first conversation last night. The theme that really struck me during our conversation had to do with temporality. Looking forward to more on this topic!
Coming out of it last night, the thought that occurred to me was that perhaps (as I think Jacob was alluding to), we have to expand or change our conception of temporality.
I think the idea is that temporality is not universal, nor a priori.
Nor is it merely a sequential series, linked in a tight chain of chronological causality.
Rather the process of becoming manifests as a succession of repetitional differencing and not only incorporates a multiplicity of relations but produces a multiplicity of such relations as well. A self is never a simple self.
Does that sound right?
I agree Deleuze has a different conception of time in mind, one that is (contra Kant, and as you suggest) not a transcendental category. it’s not clear to me yet what his conception of time is exactly. You’re comment reminded me, though, of something from the preface that seems relevant.
“The task of modern philosophy is to overcome the alternatives temporal/non temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal. Following Nietzsche we discover, as more profound than time and eternity, the untimely: philosophy is neither a philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the eternal, but untimely, always and only untimely – that is to say, “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come”. Following Samuel Butler, we discover Erewhon, signifying at once the originary “nowhere” and the displaced, disguised, modified and always recreated “here and now” and quote. Neither empirical particularities nor abstract universals: a Cogito for a dissolved self.”
In Deleuze Beyond Badiou, Clayton Crockett summarizes the 3 syntheses of time as: present (habit), past (memory) and future (death) [pp. 34-37].
Crockett places special emphasis on how the 3rd synthesis is reached through Kant, for whom “time is in the Self”. Kant’s distinction of the empirical self and active subjectivity splits the I, “and time is the name of this split”. For Deleuze, “it is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time” (DR 86).
Crockett says: “The pure and empty form of time becomes the opening to the future, the passage of death that constitutes the third synthesis of time. [p. 35].” This form also becomes the time-image in Cinema 2 [p. 26]. These ideas have overtones of Heideggerian temporality, but Deleuze plays them off of Nietzsche. “We repeat, become different, only by dying to our identity and becoming subject to Deleuze’s reformulation of the eternal return: only what becomes returns. Only what dies repeats” [p. 36].
My ideas here are a bit underdeveloped, I hope to sharpen them as our reading of D&R continues. But it has struck me that, while there are three syntheses of time in D&R, in Deleuze’s much later Cinema volumes there are really only two. The first Cinema volume, The Movement-Image, is coherent with habit as the synthesis of the present in D&R. But in the second volume, The Time-Image, it seems to me that Deleuze combines the attributes of the other two syntheses: this image is both past/memory and future/rupture at once. I am not sure what to make of this. James Williams, in his book on Deleuze’s philosophy of time, dismisses the Cinema books, seeing them as losing the insights of D&R. But I would like to think more about this conflation of the past and future syntheses.
It might be worth thinking the discussion of temporality in chapter two through readings of Henri Bergson and Simondon (this might also explain the distinction with the Cinema books, which I haven’t read but understand to be strongly Bergsonian).
The first two syntheses of time, which relate to the ‘living present’ and the ‘pure past’ are largely driven by Deleuze’s reading Bergson (though the use of ‘habit’ would seem grounded in Deleuze’s book on Hume). It is only the third synthesis, which relates to the future, that we get Deleuze’s original addition. For this, he leans on Nietzsche’s eternal return and Freud’s death instinct. My position would be that this designation of time also instigates a shift in temporality. [Perhaps this comes out of Heidegger’s critique of Bergson, given that in Being and Time, Heidegger argues that Bergson provides an ontic treatment of time and and ontological treatment of space]. In the introduction of Individuation in light of notions of form and information Simondon outlines his theory of ‘transduction’ in contradistinction to Hegelian ‘dialectics’ (which he generally praises), writing:
…just like dialectics, transduction conserves and integrates the opposed aspects; unlike dialectics, transduction does not suppose the existence of a preliminary time as the framework in which the genesis unfurls, since time itself is a solution, a dimension of the discovered systematic: time emerges from the pre-individual just like the other dimensions according to which individuation effectuates itself.(15-16)
If we translate this into Deleuze’s lexicon, it suggests that rather than thinking the operations of differenciation within time, the third synthesis of time is itself a consideration of the genesis of time through differenciation. Here, then, we’ll find the ‘actualisation’ of a ‘virtual time’ in the process of difference and repetition. This is not the repetition of difference in a ‘dialectical time’ but the construction or ‘actualisation’ of time through the repetition of difference. This process would, then, be constitutive of both time and space.
I’ve been trying to post this as a separate thread
I will expand this later, but the basic idea of time seems to be similar to a Fourier analysis. This would come from Bergson and Husserl, both of whom were mathematicians, as well as from Poincare and Einstein.
Each incident is an event at a point of space-time. An incident is defined by thee cohesion of a certain set of states at a certain point.
A space-time event sents out waves through the fabric of space-time.
The snapshot of any moment is the sum of these prior wave functions. Apparent stability is a product of wave functions, a temporary “standing wave”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_analysisThis is where the term “non-localizable” comes from, for example.
Because space-time events emerge from a sum of waves, it creates some issues for questions of generality and particularity.
Namely, the problem of noise arises inevitaly for any stable construction — stability and noise are two aspects of the same process
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/03/30/archive-and-in-the-news-noise-hinders-human-judgement
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