ORGANISING TIME: CONTRACTION, SYNTHESIS, CONTEMPLATION

1
ORGANISING TIME CONTRACTION, SYNTHESIS,
CONTEMPLATION       Simon Lilley University of
Leicester
2
One more time a Deleuzian reading of the
temporal in Tourniers Robinsonade
3
A repetition, but of what? A copy without
original? Fictional pre-cursors? Henry Neville's
Isle of Pines Non-fictional? Woodes Rogers
writing of Selkirks story, Cruising
Voyage Derivatives? Too many to mention
4
A thinker and writer of difference, who sought to
realise the repetition of difference, the
potential for an affirmative life, and the power
of autonomous social relationships through
assemblages of Others. This must be done in the
present. But the present, in a world of
representation, is pre-sent and thus unamenable
to that which Deleuze desires. He therefore
seeks a ruin of representation, with its fidelity
to linear time, and a disruption of the
territories and space wholly referenced and
mapped through such linear time.
5
DELEUZES TIME TRAVELS
Drawing on Hume Time is synthesised by, is a
product of, the contractile power of a
pre-reflective imagination. The instants brought
together here are but the constantly aborted
moment of birth of time. Their being brought
together constitutes the present. Past and future
are the dimensions of this present, in so far as
it is a contraction of instants. This is passive
synthesis. When memory reflects upon and
distinguishes the instants of this imagination,
we enter the realm of representation. And as we
do so, the pure future of anticipation becomes
the represented future of prediction. This is
active synthesis. What if we add a little
Bergson and Butler?
6
DELEUZES TIME TRAVELS
What is it that does the contracting? These
perceptual syntheses refer back to organic
syntheses which are like the sensibility of the
senses they refer back to a primary sensibility
that we are. We are made of contracted water,
earth, light and air not merely prior to the
recognition or representation of these, but prior
to their being sensed. Every organism, in its
receptive and perceptual elements, but also in
its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of
retentions and expectations. At the level of this
primary vital sensibility, the lived present
constitutes a past and a future in time. Need is
the manner in which this future appears, as the
organic form of expectation. The retained past
appears in the form of cellular heredity.
Furthermore, by combining with the perceptual
syntheses built upon them, these organic
syntheses are redeployed in the active syntheses
of a psycho-organic memory and intelligence
(instinct and learning). We are made up, and
make ourselves up, through contemplation. It is
simultaneously through contraction that we are
habits, but through contemplation that we
contract. (Deleuze, 2004 93 95).
7
DELEUZES TIME TRAVELS
Habit is the foundation of time the passing
present. Memory, depending upon habit, however
grounds time Habit is the originary synthesis
of time, which constitutes the life of the
passing present Memory is the fundamental
synthesis of time which constitutes the being of
the past (that which causes the present to pass).
But what then grounds Memory? For Deleuze memory
is grounded on the immemorial of reminiscence (as
exemplified by Prousts Combray). A pure
pastwhich was never present. The passive
synthesis of memory. The present exists, but the
past alone insists and provides the element in
which the present passes and successive presents
are telescoped. The echo of the two presents
forms only a persistent question, which unfolds
within representation like a field of problems,
with the rigorous imperative to search, to
respond, to resolve. However, the response always
comes from elsewhere every reminiscence, whether
of a town or a woman, is erotic. It is always
Eros, the noumenon, who allows us to penetrate
this pure past in itself, this virginal
repetition which is Mnemoysyne (Deleuze, 2004
106 7).
8
DELEUZES TIME TRAVELS
Freud invoked, we move through Descartes, Kant
and Plato, before celebrating Hölderlin (and, of
course, Nietzsche) in finally reaching the real
repetition of the future of the eternal return.
Here we witness, via Lacan, a pure future that,
in mirroring the pure past, illuminates the link
between Eros and Mnemosyne. Eros tears virtual
objects out of the pure past and gives them to us
in order that they may be lived Eross force of
repetition derives directly from a power of
difference one which Eros borrows from
Mnemosyne, one which affects virtual objects like
so many fragments of a pure past. (Deleuze, 2004
127 134)
9
DELEUZES TIME TRAVELS
When combined with Thanatoss destruction of the
Id and the ego, of the past as well as the
present, of the condition and the agent, we are
delivered into an absence of ground into which we
are precipitated by the ground itself, the
groundlessness of simulacra. As for the third
time in which the future appears, this signifies
that the event and the act possess a secret
coherence which excludes that of the self that
they turn back against the self which has become
their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the
bearer of a new world were carried away and
dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to
which it gives birth what the self has become
equal to is the unequal in itself. In this
manner, the I which is fractured according to the
order of time and the Self which is divided
according to the temporal series correspond and
find a common descendant in the man without name,
without family, without qualities, without self
or I, the plebeian guardian of a secret, the
already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate
around the sublime image. (Deleuze, 2004 140,
141, 112 156)
10
Deleuze and Tournier knew each other when both
were students at the Sorbonne. Deleuze seems to
see literature (and indeed cinema) as
experimental technology, as opportunity to free
our potential from the constraints of the given
so that we may explore new ways of finding life,
making linkages and living. Tourniers
Robinsonade deals with the ruin of Western man,
his philosophy, and his time of representation,
and through that exercise creates a space for the
drawing forth of a potential new time, and hence
new place, for the Other we might become.
11
The Robinsonade is a perversion of the Other and
an erasure of the possible. Tourniers
perversion of the Robinsonade itself, his
evisceration of the time and representation of
others, opens up anew the possibility of
repetition of assemblages, beyond self and
other, beyond subject and object. Others that we
might become. The form of time is there only
for the revelation of the formless in the eternal
return. The ground has been superseded by a
groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which
turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come
to return (Deleuze, 2004)
12
(No Transcript)