(Lecture recap from my Philosophies of Time and Process course, spring 2017)
on the relation between ‘I’ and ‘me’, ‘subject’ and ‘self’, and actual and virtual in Deleuze’s three syntheses of time
I’m going to attempt an unusual summary of our coverage of Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, working backwards from the third synthesis to arrive at the first. I want to do this to reinforce that the syntheses do not form a sequence; that each is always ongoing, and all inform and inflect one another.
We spent a good deal of time on three pairs of words: I/me, subject/self, actual/virtual. These are all deeply interconnected; to really understand this connection we need to continuously remind ourselves that, like with Bergson, we’re turning away from things and toward the relationships through which those things are constituted. Remind yourself of that every few minutes—it’s a crucial concept that we shouldn’t let go of even for a second! So, we’ll see, a subject is that which is in a constellation of relationships, through which the identity of the self is drawn. More on this momentarily.
Let’s start with the I/me pair. Deleuze describes these as:
· the ‘I’ that is doing, and
· the ‘me’ that I am in the process of becoming.
We noted how ‘I’ in normal usage is the active construct (I brought her a coffee), while ‘me’ is passive (she brought coffee to me). In the first case, ‘I’ is a locus of action, whereas in the second case ‘me’ refers to me in a more general sense, including the me that I have been and the me that I will become (which, importantly, is all simply ‘me’—see below). ‘I’ and ‘me’ ground each other: ‘me’ is the range of passive conditions within which ‘I’ can act; ‘I’ continually re-creates ‘me.’
The relationship between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is fractured in the third synthesis of time. This is because the now-active ‘I’, doing something (acting) in the living present, is in the process of determining the ‘me’ that I will become; the future ‘me’ (which is a product of all of the ‘me’s that I have been so far[1]). This means that my now-ongoing actions in the living present have an effect on how I will become. This can be huge and obvious (say, if in this now-ongoing living present I suddenly invent a cure for lycanthropy or win a presidential election), or it can extraordinarily small and nuanced (say, I drink the coffee she brought me, and feel a tiny bit better for the rest of the day).
In order to generalize this concept, let’s replace I/me with subject/self. ‘I’ and ‘me’ are simply subsets of ‘subject’ and ‘self’; the latter allow us to think about identity and process without having to locate a human subject in the center of it all.[2] This is very important, in order to get away from the idea that we’re talking about human subjects. How can, say, an inanimate object (or a musical expression) be a subject? Because a subject is that which is in a constellation of relationships in a living present—remember that we’re turning away from things-as-subjects and toward the relationships that constitute those things.
In other words, we have a ‘subject’ that is doing, and a ‘self’ that the subject is in the process of becoming.
The subject is a location where action takes place. It is a dramatic actor; it is what William James calls “something doing.” (note that both “location” and “something doing” suggest a creative definition of subject that goes far beyond conventional usages) I’ll come back to the relation between those dramatic actions and the past. But for now, thinking about the relationship to the future in the third synthesis, the subject, as dramatic actor, is (partially) determinant of the self. To use active language, the subject (partially) determines the self. This means that the dramatic actions of the subject (in the living present) have a determining effect on how the self will be. The self is fractured from the subject—it transcends those dramatic actions, even when (partially) determined by them. The self, to borrow loosely from Heidegger, is all of the self—for my self, it is the lived totality of my entire life; all of my history and my future (as a singular series of acted events), all of my relations, all of the ways in which my living presents have (passively and actively) contracted pasts into them, all of the ways in which my passing present has folded back in the pure past to transform the relation between the past and new living presents; all of the eventful cuts into the future that have opened my subjective present to my transcendent self.
Another way to put this is that self is that which subject is already in the midst of, and/but is also in a process of constituting. This will relate to Deleuze and Guattari’s milieu, which we’ll get to next week.
So, back to the fracture, there is here what Deleuze calls a double movement: the subject determining the self, but also the self conditioning how the subject can be. This is what that in-the-midst-of and in-the-process-of-constituting pairing means. This is a paradox: how can something be in the middle of something that it is also determining? Here, maybe, we should turn to a musical illustration.
We talked about the Bb7 in measure 8 of Bill Evans’s “Very Early.” Here is the eight-chord progression up to and including it:
CMaj7 Bb7 EbMaj7 Ab7 DbMaj7 G7 CMaj7 Bb7
As the event of a living present, that Bb7 chord contracts the past into it. We discussed how one selection from that past is the progression of chords that immediately precede, but there are many, many other perspectives on the past that are passively contracted (refer to the fictional jazz scenario from my article that we read). That Bb7 chord also contracts the future, as expectation: what range of next events is likely to happen? The openness onto the future, in the event of the living present, is the cut or caesura that fractures time and orders it into past and future series. The Bb7 is the ‘subject’, its affective identity (including how the impingements of pasts on it passively and actively construct that identity) partially determines the future of the ‘self’, which we might say is the unfolding identity of “Very Early,” or of this particular performance of “Very Early.” The double movement here is the way each constitutes the other: the event of the movement of the Bb7 chord to whatever comes next determines aspects of future events; future events, as virtual (but real) expressions of the ‘self’ of the tune or of the performance, condition how the Bb7 chord comes to be and what it does. This double movement is not a sequence (as I note in the article, many authors make the mistake of suggesting that it is), it is a co-constitutive action that is always in the process of taking place. There is always something-doing, that what is doing is that double movement.
How can a chord be a subject? Because, as I described above, during the time of its temporal utterance, it is a locus of relationality; it is the “place” where relationships are happening. It is where the action is—from here it is only a small move to think of it as an actor.[3] Some of those relations are right there in the living present; others are force-relations with virtual pasts and futures.
(By the way, as we discussed in class, the reason “Very Early” is an interesting illustration is that, at least upon first hearing the tune, the move of that Bb7 to DMaj7 to begin the next phrase is utterly unexpected, so it puts a spin on the cut in time of the third synthesis and turns what might ordinarily be a very small event (yet another V-I) into a Deleuzian big event, a shock of recognition that nothing will ever be the same again…)
So, if that clarifies the co-constitutive subject/self (or I/me) relation, what of the actual/virtual relation? Remember that for Deleuze, both the actual and the virtual are real. Simply put, the actual is the constellation of relations that are now taking place, in this now-ongoing living present. There’s more to it than that, but that’s enough to get the idea. There are two (or maybe four) virtual fields at work though, and this is where the relationship between the three syntheses comes into play:
1a) The pure past of the second synthesis is virtual in that it consists of an expanding array of past-presents—each of which has become-virtual by way of folding back into the past. A past present is virtual because it is no longer actual, but it remains real in that it is expressible through (actual) actions in the present. The present, in this synthesis, is an expression of the past, what we called the “least past past” in class. The pure past is also virtual because each new passing present modifies it (including, as we determined, modifying the ways in which it can impinge on new presents), so its status is constantly in flux.
1b) The past of the first synthesis is also virtual in that it acts on the present by passively conditioning aspects of the present’s identity. This is what it means for the living present to contract the past into it. This is another reason the virtual is real—if it wasn’t real it couldn’t have a real effect on the identity of the present, there could be no flow of affective relationships between past and present forces.
2a) The future of the first synthesis is real because, as a virtual range of possible or expected next actions, it again impinges on the present. This is what it means for the living present to contract the future into it. When we pass into a next living present, one or more of those possibilities becomes-actual.
2b) And the future of the third synthesis is real because, as the virtual openness of the self that conditions the subject of dramatic action in the living present (the virtual ‘me’ in relation to the actual ‘I’), the future holds the what-will-become that is part of the identity now being expressed by and in the subject.
So through the relationship between the virtual and the actual we can start to see the relationship between past, present, and future as expressed through each of the three syntheses of time (and also the relationship of the three syntheses to one another).
[1] Think “product” here like the product in multiplication, but instead of multiplying numbers (which is quantitative), we’re proliferating qualitative multiplicities. Think of “all the ‘me’s” as Deleuze’s take on Plato’s metempsychosis: rebirth, a continual return, but what returns is difference. Each new ‘me’ is still simply me, but in returning as a new ‘I’ in each living present draws on past ‘me’s differently (since, as we learn in the second synthesis, the larger arc of past-‘me’ is transformed—is different—with each folding back into the past of a present ‘I’).
[2] This is the focus of Erin Manning recent book The Minor Gesture—much of Manning’s book focuses not only on what she calls the more-than-human of ecological experience, but is also a call to get us thinking beyond neurotypical modes of experiences; those ways of experiencing, relating, and interacting that mainstream society/culture have taught us are “proper” ways. So a predominant theme for Manning (in this book and elsewhere) is a valorization, even celebration, of neurodiversity—of autistic experience, for example. She wants to know what we can learn from autistics; what modes of experiencing and relating are possible beyond the limited (and limiting) purview of neurotypical frameworks.
[3] See Fred Everett Maus’s “Music as Drama,” which I touch on in my “Time, Territorialization” article. I go much further into this concept in a recent article on musical bodies, and in a forthcoming essay titled “Affect and Improvising Bodies.”