Inventive Temporalities

May 27, 2017 | Autor: Antonia Pont | Categoria: Creativity, Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche, Eternal Return, Diffrence and Repetition, Philosopies of Time
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Inventive Temporalities Dr Antonia Pont - Deakin University

... but this immediately raises the question, one to which Nietzsche returned in many different connections: what must someone do to 'create' new names? Bernard Williams, 'Introduction', in Nietzsche, F. The Gay Science, p. x *

Most significantly, it also means that the present is not one process but many, dependent on its place as primary synthesis or as dimension. James Williams, Gille's Deleuze's Philosophy of Time, p. 3 (emphasis added)

Introduction This chapter considers how an attitude or approach to time, and subsequently the ways we conceptualise it, might have an, or any, impact upon creativity, or the inventiveness of practitioners (see Derrida 1987 for a distinction between creativity and invention). It will also consider the role played by temporal thinking in practice itself, and how this relates to practice-in-itself. What follows below attempts to go some way to opening the question of how our understanding of time, and resultantly, how we approach it (our stance, then, on temporality; our ability to think it) might impact on both our ability to engage creatively and on 'what' emerges from this engagement? I will begin by presenting several pedestrian takes on the 'present', before approaching several of Deleuze's conceptualisations of time from his 1968 text Difference and Repetition (1994), in which he himself leans on and extends several inherited paradigms. In this work, as part of a triptych of framings of time referred to as syntheses, newness and its mechanisms are linked fairly explicitly to the third of these, which is a radical reading by Deleuze of Nietzsche's mechanism of eternal return, and essentially an attitude to futurity. Finally, as coda, I will consider the arguable role of temporality in the strange doing we might term 'practice'. Via two criteria of practice – repetition and something resembling 'intentionality' – the essay concludes by drawing together Deleuze's conceptual labour regarding time and the activities of making, to show how a temporal curiosity can support and feed inventiveness in a life. Most of us (so-called artists or otherwise) often don't know what we think about time, or we may not think it explicitly. Whether we know our attitude to time or not, the likelihood, however, is that we have one (or several) and that they work on and through us. I'm therefore curious about received or ubiquitous temporal assumptions and to note the

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effects that such assumptions have on how we engage or live creatively. Due to the length of this essay, I will only be able to present a limited number of these as illustrative examples. There are, undoubtedly, many many imaginaries of time in circulation at any particular time, and produced by cultural, historical and political contexts. The inquiry of this section of my inquiry, then, is not seeking to test the so-called accuracy of any paradigm (which would require a far more exhaustive exploration; to this end the reader is directed to Williams' work from 2013). Rather it seeks to note the force of particular ways of thinking time, as a provocation to, and support of, makers – writers, dancers, sculptors, animators, musicians, not to mention activists (who may need to be the most inventive of all). I will begin by outlining two commonly encountered, pedestrian conceptualisations of the 'present'. My reason for this is the observation that this temporal mode, within certain popular and even professional enclaves, has been, and continues to be, viewed in a kind of emancipatory, or at least productive, light. I will consider the features of this trend, while offering a critique of its logic, and go on to examine several of Deleuze's conceptualisations by way of comparison. As Williams emphasises, Deleuze offers a thinking of time that is both 'irreducibly' multiple and complex (2011: 5). Deleuze thinks time in terms of a number of modes in which time is synthesised. There are three of these: the first (passive) synthesis; the second (passive) synthesis; and the third synthesis of time. I will offer fairly brief, but hopefully coherent, accounts of these as introductions for an unfamiliar reader, and before embarking upon a précis of Deleuze's unusual reading of Nietzsche's 'eternal return' [die ewige Wiederkehr]. Rather than 'inhabiting the present', or moving between the present and the past as reminiscence, this synthesis challenges the artist to face and think future-as-such. It might, I contend, have much to offer the practitioner of making who is seeking to displace and subtract themselves from various dominant attitudes to the past, present and future, that are not only tired and dubious, but also real hindrances to thought, as Deleuze defines it (see 2004: 176), and to making and transformation. But first, I'll begin with an exposition of two easily recognisable pedestrian conceptualisations of the present and the attitudes that arguably accompany them. This preliminary exercise hopes not to be a setting up of straw men, but rather an attempt to bring the pedestrian accounts (which weigh into our shared dialogues more than we might admit) and some philosophical conceptions into conversation and to find their overlaps. This is with the aim of helping the artist – who may not wish to be a philosopher – to consider their intentional and received stances on time and the impact of these on making. Present as Cleared Space of the Now, and the imperative 'Be Present!' In this not-uncommon conception, the present is imagined as a clearing associated with something called 'now'. The latter drains into the past as it passes, with its future constituted by that which the present 'will contain'. Deemed a clearing, the now becomes akin to a 'place' where one can 'be'—and we note the spatial imagery. This accessible, and currently quite ubiquitous, notion of time as being first and foremost the present also thinks time spatially. Bergson himself, at the end of the 19th century proposes an argument of time (the pure past, in his case) being approached with a logic akin to how we approach space (see Bergson 1991, Chapter III). Contemporary physicists also continue to view time as a dimension, in addition to the three of what we commonly understand to be 'space'[1] – 2

what we know as the space-time continuum. However, James Williams remarks that a Deleuzian conception of time: avoid[s] any general spatial representation of time as something pre-existent that things can be placed on or in. There is no general line of time and no space–time continuum. Instead, singular processes make their own times within the limits set by some wider formal principles, such as asymmetry. (2011: 5)

It is worth holding open for later in this essay that there may be a non-spatially inflected way to think time. However, if we persevere for now in imagining temporality as a spacelike register within which one finds oneself located, then the obvious corollary to this idea is that wherever/whenever one is, is the present. Oddly, however, such a conceptualisation in this historical moment also tends to be accompanied by a quite peculiar suggestion/injunction: namely versions of the exhortation 'Be present!' or 'Stay in the present'. If the present is a region, according to this logic, then one can obviously 'inhabit it' and be ordered or implored to do so. (If time is multiple for Deleuze, we can ask at this point: who is wanting us to remain in the present, and what are their investments in having us direct our energies in this way?) Benign as this simple encouragement or sound-byte might seem, it risks – and not only due to its grammatical form – functioning (and in my opinion often does function) as a new kind of moral injunction, as the currency for a new piety. Where once we might have been told to resist thinking about sex, or 'stop it or you'll go blind', now we are given a command to do what we are already doing – a constellation that is logically awkward. 'Be present', in effect, and accompanied by its conceptualisation of the present as site in time, operates as an absurd instruction. If the present is the clearing where we are, then where else could one be? Giddy from being told to do what one can't not do, this seemingly-amiable, even parental, suggestion runs the risk of leaving its recipient feeling endlessly inadequate to the task. (It is, in other words, briskly co-opted and transformed into imperative or 'law', becoming potential grist for the mill of the super-ego). Within this logic, one can't try to become present, since one can only be present. It also suggests that being-present is a kind of 'doing', and this in itself deserves closer questioning. To counter my doubts and critique, anecdotal accounts suggest that something in this approach works for people (but works to do what?, one must ask). Therapists using versions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or the more contemporary 'Acceptance Commitment Therapy', for example, remark the usefulness of 'mindfulness' (that may be framed as being 'present to one's current circumstances and actions') in the treatment of chronic anxiety [2]. Possibly, the equation also works because it replaces more odious and invasive superego commands with a less vicious (although paradoxical) one. In any case, I'd maintain that guilt remains a possible term in the equation – as do success and failure – and the degree to which guilt's operation is weakened may depend on how the imaginary of 'presentness' is nuanced, and on the therapist's, or the person's capacity to duck and weave some of its logical shortcomings. My contention is that this version of thinking the present may work to manage certain patterns of dysphoria, but this doesn't recommend it as a rich and generative modus operandi for the inventive practitioner. In The Logic of Sense (2004a), Deleuze makes use of a different division of time to that which he deploys in Difference and Repetition (2004). In the latter, the framing is that of the three syntheses (upon which this essay primarily focuses), however, in the former work

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and borrowing from the Stoics, he puts to use the dual conceptions of Chronos and Aiôn (2004a: 89). (Williams notes, however, that the systems interlock, since 'the two times lead to the same six relations as the three syntheses' (2011: 138).) The complexities brought to life by this dual framing in The Logic of Sense are considerable, however we can cite him briefly in his description of Chronos, since this first pedestrian conception recalls it, even if only sketchily: Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and the future its two oriented dimensions so that one always goes from the past to the future – but only to the degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial systems.' (2004a: 89)

Later in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze unpacks the tendency within chronos of 'a becomingmad of depth' (2004a: 187) due to its being the 'regulated movement of vast and profound presents' (2004a: 187). Without diverting here into a description of this tendency, it suffices to note that a stance on temporality that privileges the present in such a way is here shown not to be without its perverse tendencies, and the Stoics already suspected this millennia ago. With this in mind, let's turn to the second of my pedestrian examples, an arguably contrasting conceptualisation, where nevertheless we find a curious relation to this first version. As an altering of the inflection of the first, it might offer an explanation for the efficacy in some cases of this strange imperative to 'Be present!'. Present as Dividing Line What I'm identifying as a second version of a pedestrian 'present' displays more commonalities with Deleuze's notion of aiôn, which he describes in the following way: In accordance with aion only the past and the future inhere or subsist in time... a future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once... it is the instant without thickness and without extension... (2004a: 188, emphasis added)

Conceiving the present as a break between past and future, this version of the 'present' operates as an operation of endless division – with no thickness. For this reason, one can never 'be present', since there is no 'space' or clearing in which one could dwell. Based on this conceptualisation, the imperative to 'be present' (which with an artist might be frequently bombarded, say, on national radio, or in certain sections of reputable book stores, or in a session with their well-meaning therapist) becomes counter-intuitive, and for that perhaps more interesting. If there is no present-that-is in which to be or tarry, trying to 'be present' becomes more like a koan (a generative aporia). Inflected now as pure attempt, with no 'success' or adherence to its letter possible, its operation shifts towards displaying redeeming, even radical (im)possibilities. Going from 'moral imperative' towards attitudinal laboratory (although it could at any moment flip back to the former), it resonates more with the paradoxical mechanisms of certain ontological registers, and therefore bodes better for the artist. Considering the paradox more broadly, Deleuze is very clear: The force of paradoxes is that they are not contradictory; they rather allow us to be present at the genesis of the contradiction. (2004a: 86, emphasis added)

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Noteworthy for our purposes is this mention of genesis. Deleuze argues convincingly that paradoxes are generative, and why we might expect to find them in the vicinity of creativity or moments of genesis. He cautions against confusing them with contradictions, since paradox is different in kind to the former. 'Contradiction', he writes, 'is applicable to the real and the possible, but not to the impossible' (2004a: 86). If we merely want to remain among things that are already possible, the status quo, life as it is, our thinking as it has been, and so on, then remaining in the hamster wheel of contradiction is a good way to maintain that. To nudge towards inventiveness, however, we need to expose ourselves to paradox, and let it work on us. We need, to read the term literally, place ourselves beside doxa, beside logics that are established and which can be described easily in the terms of the current moment. The first example, above, of the present-as-(spatial)- clearing, tends to lead – I contend – towards contradiction, whereas the second inflection (the present as hinge or dividing line: an approximation of aiôn's register) offers a way in to a paradoxical mechanism that may serve to unhinge our link to how things are, through the manoeuvre of actively attempting what is structurally precluded. Let us now turn more explicitly towards the 1968 Deleuze of Difference and Repetition, where aspects of these two pedestrian versions show up, but now framed rigorously and, for my argument, more instructively. Deleuze and the Syntheses of Time In what he calls 'the first synthesis', Deleuze acknowledges his considerable debt to Hume. In it, he explains that time is only able to arise at all because a series of repeating instants, which would otherwise occur and disappear (the tolling of a bell, for example), is retained in the imagination of a 'contemplative soul'. This is what gives rise to what we experience as the 'lived, or living present' (le présent vivant)(1994: 70), but as Williams notes, it is important not to assume that this 'soul' or this imagination is something exclusively human, or pertaining to consciousness. More helpfully, he suggests approaching it as a kind of 'unconscious receptivity' (2011: 27). This follows Deleuze, who takes care to emphasise that although these contractions take place in a mind, by dint of the faculty of the imagination, they are not done by the mind. In this way, this first synthesis is deemed passive (see Deleuze 1994: 70-72). Deleuze's version of this present, then, is subjective, but 'in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject' (1994: 71, emphasis added), and not in the sense that we normally understand subjectivity (see Williams 2011: 29). What is interesting about this first synthesis is that the living present is deemed to include the other two aspects of past and future within it (which clearly renders it more nuanced and thorough than its pedestrian cousin). This inclusivity relies on Deleuze's definition of the imagination, which: ...is defined here as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears. (1994: 70)

This creates a sense of what Williams calls 'expectancy' (2013: 93) and which Patton translates as 'anticipation' (1994: 71). The 'past' of this first synthesis is attributed to the preceding instances that are retained, while the 'future' of this synthesis comes about through the anticipation of the same contraction. It is this which 'imparts direction to the arrow of time' (in Patton's translation, Deleuze 1994: 71) or in William's translation, 'orientates' it (2011: 28).

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Curiously, the stretch of the living present seems to be... well, stretchy. We see intimations of this in Chapter II of Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze speaks of the possibility of conceiving of a 'perpetual present' (2004: 98) but he explains that this would not be physically possible since the duration of the living present always 'varies according to the species, the individuals, the organisms and the parts of organisms under consideration' (2004: 98). It frames contemplation, contraction, as a kind of capacity which varies. As an artist one speculates on what might cultivate a more expansive living present, and has one's suspicions... It seems that the past that belongs to the living present is limited, not perpetual . This 'immediate past of retention' (Deleuze 1994: 71), in this sense, must be distinguished from memory. Memory, in this context – along with its sibling, understanding – only arise in an active synthesis that builds upon this initial, passive one. On the basis of the initial 'qualitative impression in the imagination', memory is that operation which reconstitutes the particular cases and turns the immediate past of retention into the reflexive past of representation (Deleuze 1994: 71). This is memory, as we normally know it, and its corollary, then – what Deleuze calls understanding – occurs when, through the active synthesis that relies on the originary passive synthesis: ... the future ceases to be the immediate future of anticipation in order to become the reflective future of prediction, the reflected generality of the understanding. (1994: 71)

If we want to paint a loose but accessible picture, then it is (in a certain light) by dint of the first passive synthesis that there is the experience of being in time at all. (The syntheses, remember, 'make' time.) This one involves the subjective (but not voluntary) modes of the 'just gone' and the 'up-ahead' – and, like a region of illumination, constructs our lived present, and constitutes our expectation that we, as selves, as cases, will continue (Deleuze, after Bergson, will call this 'habit' - see 1994: 74ff). It seems that when the added capacity of reflection or understanding enters and we move from a passive synthesis to an active one, our more intensive experience of time's phases or modes begins. Through the activity of memory representing to itself particulars of the past, we have a sense of a past-that-was. Through the understanding's capacity to weigh up the cases and in light of expectation, we enter the realm of a future that we not only anticipate in the lived present, but actively engage in predicting (Deleuze 1994: 71). If the two pedestrian versions of the present outlined above, carry with them various attitudinal corollaries, or suggested ways to inhabit time, or temporal stances, then what might the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition intimate in this regard? To translate from one paradigm to the other, it would seem that the injunction 'be in the present' might be read as corresponding to an exhortation to remain in the passive synthesis, to abstain from the active work of reflection and understanding which lead a subjective entity into a more nuanced (or mobile or varied) relationship with time, its opportunities and strictures, in other words with the thralls of memory and/or prediction that many perceive to besiege and grace their day-to-day experience. (We know Deleuze is not primarily concerned with the human in all of this, so this emphasis is a slight distortion, however this essay is about how the artist can put this broader thinking to work.) That memory would pile up 'behind us', once we enter into our active capacity to recall it via representation, bringing with it all its particulars, many dull, cruel, misguided or catastrophic, is surely a weight for the remember-er. But also quite heavy is the fact that

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we enter, via the understanding, and based on past cases, into the activity of prediction, fraught as that is by an overwhelming not-knowing, and likely to be smeared either in an optimistic direction or tainted by prognostication of terrors or disappointments – inevitable boredoms, failed hopes, frailties or shrinking opportunity. If memory and predictive understanding include this vast array of accumulated incidents and projected unfoldings, then the injunction to the seeker of contentment to stay away from this synthesis seems plausible, if timid! I would argue, however, that firstly, we cannot as artists, or would-be inventive animals, avoid this synthesis, since it is plaited together with our very capacity for intelligence, thought and generative stupidity, and also because its avoidance is surely that: an avoidance. To exist solely in the living present would serve as a kind of retreat to a sheltered mode (the precarious, or vertiginous one of chronos) were it even possible, which it seems it isn't. Read, however, as instruction or as pedagogical strategy, however, it may hold more water. Making the absurd attempt to 'dwell in the lived present' could arguably function to unveil the very mechanisms of reflected memory and predictive understanding, and this unveiling, like a gentle deconstruction, may well cast the active synthesis, and the intensity it can conjure, in a slightly less consuming light. But the question is whether there is another stance, another attitude that can be assumed, one that would not just offer a shelter from time's ordeal, but an efficacious stance for inventiveness proper? Such a temporally savvy attitude might – I contend – constitute how makers think and face time already, but unknowingly, becoming animals who slip the bonds of mere possibility and who, via their surfing of ontological mechanism, are there at the site where newness arises, and also, to some degree not there, but I'll get to that. Beforehand, for thoroughness and the elegance of its conception, I'll outline another register contributing to Deleuzian time(s) — namely, that which draws on Bergson's notion of a pure past, and its intersection with the present, or 'actuality'. As Williams clarifies: '[t]his past is pure, in the sense that it does not contain entities open to representation.' (2011: 12) Bergson's Pure Past as 'Reservoir' for Makers In his important work Matter and Memory, first published in 1896, Bergson explains that he is 'endeavoring to discover the exact relation between the body and mind' (1991: 172). An ambitious project, it will take him – helpful to our purposes – via the question of whether memory is a kind of 'thing' that is stored, materially, in the brain. The answer, approached from various angles throughout the work, is unequivocally No. What Bergson proposes then as a way of thinking memory and how it operates involves also proposing a particular conception of the relation between past and present. Intimating his reference to Bergson that will follow, Deleuze writes in the 'Repetition for Itself' chapter of Difference and Repetition: Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (the which causes the present to pass). (2004: 101)

Let's unpack this a little for the purposes of this essay. Deleuze has identified (as outlined above) the first passive synthesis of time, which can be called 'habit', where the 'living present' is constituted as a kind of lived duration, thanks to the contraction in the imagination of a succession of instants. Its 'past' is the 'just gone' (and is made up of particulars) and its 'future' is that of anticipation (and is by its nature general). In a clear, but nevertheless complex exposition, Deleuze raises the question of why the present

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moment would pass into being past: what, in other words, would make it pass? Calling the first passive synthesis the foundation or the 'soil', he introduces Bergson's notion of the pure past, an a priori past, which is the 'ground' of all time (2004: 101ff). This will be the passive synthesis of memory which 'constitutes the pure past in time, and makes the former and the present present ... two asymmetrical elements of this past as such' (Deleuze 2004: 103, emphasis added). In other words, the present and the future are elements of this a priori past. After outlining two paradoxes that contribute to framing the pure past rigorously (that I will not develop here), Deleuze writes: ...whence the Bergsonian idea that each present present is only the entire past in its most contracted state. The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is. (2004: 103, first emphasis added)[3]

Thus, to Bergson is attributed the work of clarifying something crucial about the past, something which Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, recalls, redescribes and extends. Bergson's original contribution is most often summarised in the now famous figure of the cone. In Matter and Memory, he introduces us to its logic via a simple comparison of space, time and what may be termed the unconscious. He explains that we have no difficulty imagining that the objects that populate the world, but with which we have no current contact, continue to exist when we do not see, or are not impacted by, them. Due to their irrelevance to our current situation, they are filtered out and come to reside in an unconscious. In the same way, he proposes, we can also approach time and those instances with which we are not in contact, since they are not 'present'. These, he explains, can also be said to have kind of being in the unconscious. Just because they are not relevant, and are filtered out by that which occupies our current focus, does not mean that they too, like distant objects, do not populate our unconscious. Bergson offers the following explanation for our struggle to approach them analogously: This survival of the per se forces itself upon philosophers, then, under one form or another; the difficulty that we have in conceiving it comes simply from the fact that we extend to the series of memories, in time, that obligation of containing and being contained which applies only to the collection of bodies instantaneously perceived in space.(1991: 149)

In other words, there is a 'region' of pure memory, a register, if you prefer, which for Deleuze will form the ground of time, and for Bergson will offer a means to clarify that memory does not consist of literal images stored in the brain. Approaching Deleuze's distinction between existing and being in another way, Bergson writes the following: ...the question is just whether the past has ceased to exist or whether it has simply ceased to be useful. You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past. (1991: 149-50, emphasis original)

We immediately see Bergson's calling on a notion of aiôn (outlined above): the present as dividing line, and the consequences of that conception. The latter are that the present isn't, so to speak, rather it becomes (or as Deleuze might also frame it: exists), and is-ness becomes 8

a more rigorous description for that register which, after Bergson (1991: 127), Deleuze will call 'the virtual'. Appearing perhaps counter-intuitive at first, upon close examination, the logic of their shared argument is sound. Let's return to the figure of the cone, which Bergson uses in his book to offer a pictorial means to show the interaction between the present and the pure past. The body of the cone can be understood as the latter, at various degrees of concentration (like two-dimensional discs all stacked on top of each other, of slightly increasing sizes or as Williams frames it 'where the past is a series of levels of pure differences' (2011: 13)), and the present corresponds to a plane beneath the upturned cone, the very tip of which is the point of intersection between it and memory.[3] Being a 'point', it reflects an aspect of aiôn, in so far as the point itself has no thickness or volume. There is then an interaction between memories that 'reside' in the cone and the point that corresponds to the existing or being made present, which interestingly can also be seen to resonate with the role of our body, as 'a place of meeting and transfer' (1991: 173). Bergson elaborates: ... the sensori-motor apparatus furnish to ineffective, that is unconscious, memories, the means of taking on a body, of materializing themselves, in short of becoming present. For, that a recollection should reappear in consciousness, it is necessary that it should descend from the heights of pure memory down to that precise point where action is taking place. (1991: 153)

For the purposes of the creative practitioner, it is at this point that this conceptualisation becomes perhaps more transparently relevant. Bergson, some pages after (1991: 163), explains that the 'normal self' (... probably not an artist!) moves between the extreme positions of 'dreamer' (who would remain in the realm of pure memory at the wide top/'base' of the cone) and someone driven solely by 'impulse' (who would only access the point of the cone, where the present does its 'gnawing' (1991: 150)). This idea of a kind of nimbleness within the cone itself is fascinating, alerting us – from another angle – to the pitfalls of taking either of the pedestrian examples above to any literal extreme. It may be that the exhortation 'Be present!' (or 'head down to the point of the cone!') works to steer a subject back on course, whose inhabiting of time has become top-(or memory-)heavy, so to speak. It is a mere course of repair, however, and less of a strategy for supporting – or courting – inventiveness in an intentional way, and with onto-temporal savviness. But Bergson also emphasises at many points that, at the point of the cone, pragmatic (or matters pertaining to action) dominate. There is a filtering out of anything that cannot be of use (see earlier chapters of Matter and Memory). The present, in this sense, in this conceptualisation, is actually very narrow, concentrated and focused on immediate needs and demands of life as it's happening. If the 'dreamer' is reminiscent of the worst caricatures of artist-types, who are incapable of engaging in quotidian tasks with any degree of consistency or responsibility, then we begin to see how Bergson's vision is illuminating. This raises the question, for this author at least, of the idea of a capacity for transition. Elsewhere, speaking specifically of practice, I've addressed this question via the following aphorism: Practice is a training in 'intensity', that results in a fitness for 'intensity': an ability to transition with the least effort...(AntoniaPont 2015)

There is a circularity here in my logic, but arguably not a pernicious one. Practitioners are those who practice (and what this means for this essay will be fleshed out some more 9

below) and the very work of practice will consolidate their training 'in intensity' and their capacity for transitioning (between levels of intensity, that is: difference). This capacity for moving across 'layers' then, if we bring Bergson's cone into the mix, will allow the practitioner to be both like the 'normal person' – who apparently moves between the cone's extremes in an ad hoc fashion – and unlike them, since this movement may (ideally) become more and more intentional. Or let's speculate that it could... The latter could be envisaged like a refined intentionality around both inhabiting the point-without-volume or linewithout-thickness of aiôn, while also retaining the means to access the amplitudes of the pure past, to navigate inside the cone's volume. If Proust's madeleine was like the diving bell that takes him into the pure past of Combray (see Deleuze 2004: 107), then how can we think the interaction, the reverberation between practice, which is what the artist does, and what Deleuze calls reminiscence (2004: 107)? Can we, in other words, practice reminiscence, and how would we do that intentionally rather than accidentally or impotently – other than by simply being errant subjects, incorrigible dreamers? Or would we practice an intentional errancy? Since practice lies at that delicate cusp between dreaming and doing, our nimbleness, our capacity for transition is no extraneous matter. In his own way, Deleuze explicitly asks a similar question: The question for us, however, is whether or not we can penetrate the passive synthesis of memory... The entire past is conserved in itself, but how can we save it for ourselves, how can we penetrate that in-itself without reducing it to the former present that it was, or to the present present in relation to which it is past? (2004: 106-7)

If this is the question, and if its answer is reminiscence, the missing piece of the puzzle – which Deleuze will reveal – is not only poetic but rigorous. It will (and must) be within Forgetting that we would come to access pure memory and be able to move within its volume (see 2004: 107). On this basis, I would contend, then, that practice – since it results in this capacity to transition, involves at some register of its complex operations some curious relation to forgetting. As we will see in the following section of this essay, the operations that may unlock a diving into the a priori past might also echo something of the mechanisms pertaining to how the future emerges, or how it appears to make itself in our hands. Deleuze and the Eternal Return If pure memory constitutes the second – passive – synthesis, let's turn now to what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time, which owes a debt to Nietzsche's thought experiment known as the eternal return (see Williams 2001: xvi). The mechanism of the latter arguably relies upon the nuance between merely accepting something and actively affirming it, with latter again involving forgetting. In Nietzsche's original aphorism called, 'The heaviest weight', we read the words of the thought experiment's demon: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...' (2001:194)

In the demon's catalogue what is offered up for explicit affirmation is nothing less than everything - every particular that has gone before. The eternal return invites us to

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acknowledge the past and, as an act in the present, project that content into the future for an eternal or endless repetition. (What it asks us to do, however, doesn't bear a straightforward relation to what it does.) To pass the test of the eternal return involves saying 'Yes!' to the accumulated past, to the world's 'pain and its cruelty and humiliation', as well as to 'its triviality, emptiness and ugliness' (Williams, 2001: xvi) and to how we are, how we do things and the consequences of that – in other words our singularities, unconfirmed by authority or approval. What might appear thrilling and possibly outré at first, also reveals itself to be of an overwhelming weight, as the original name of the aphorism acknowledges. Its alternative, however, and this may be Nietzsche's point, is a worse position of resentment, a monotonous stance of ruefulness and complaint, and one perhaps that does not tend to be accompanied by creativity, or in fact may operationally preclude it. Pushing the eternal return's operation beyond that of simple test or psychological wager, Deleuze aligns Nietzsche's offering with what he terms the third synthesis of time. Where the second synthesis involves reminiscence, the third definitely does not involve holding grudges. The difference is considerable, and we perhaps need both 'literary' examples (that of Proust and the fantastic demon) to press home its atmospherics. If we read Nietzsche's set-up as a way of making affirmation palpable – a performing of it, rather than a safe rumination – then Deleuze thrillingly extends its logic. In his hands, the eternal return involves the evacuation of all content from that which returns, leaving only, for eternity, the movement of returning and the difference that comes with it. On the problem of the eternal return, he writes – most instructively for the artist: ...it is properly called a belief of the future, a belief in the future. [It] affects only the new... However, it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return; on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product, the independence of the work... It is itself the new, complete novelty. It is by itself the third time in the series, the future as such. (1994: 90, emphasis original)

The future (no matter what the demon whispers) is by definition unformed and unknown. For this synthesis, the present and the past are products of the future, from which the other dimensions of time stem. The present, more than just being the dividing line of aiôn, is a cut that will untether everything that has gone before from what's to come — evolution as cut, artwork as cut, even falling-in-love as cut. If with Nietzsche we ponder, as an exercise, the return of everything that has ever been, then this, through its exigent demand, only serves to better prepare us for our ability to bear or survive (or ideally welcome!) what the future really brings, which is pure difference— form emptied of all content, of all sameness and known identities (see generally, Williams 2013: 9-11). It is called the pure and empty form of time (Deleuze 1994: 86). It is for this reason, as intimated above, that the artist may be both the animal who is witness to newness arising, but also not there. As identity they too are spun out or evacuated by the force of the eternal return, which only allows pure difference, the rigorous form of the future, to return. This is why, when art happens, there is a kind of death of the artist, who, entering the cyclone, emerges as being discontinuous with any prior self.[5] Williams, in his summary and commentary on Difference and Repetition, writes the following, emphasising a thread that is central to Deleuze and also helpful for our purposes:

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So the affirmation of real difference must be a shedding of ballast that neither affirms a well-defined thing or identity nor negates one. ... The doctrine of eternal return is at the heart of Deleuze’s principle of forgetting, where to forget is to leave things behind through the affirmation of something that is itself not carried on... We can become conscious of the erasure of identity in eternal return but only after the fact (I do not sing to forget. I forget when I sing.): ‘The genius of eternal return lies not in memory but in waste, in active forgetting’ (DR, pp. 55, 77). (Williams 2013: 84)

We could speculate that creative practice, which ostensibly draws on reminiscence, must 'dive' into the pure past, where there are no representations, and somehow invent and build a way of saying, depicting, performing or composing in the face of the absolute inaccessibility of representation peculiar to that reservoir. In other words, reminiscence or not, invention is still in play, since in its absence we see the kind of sentimental or clichéd collapsing into existing modes that mark a failure of invention – part of those almost unavoidable failures, in any case, that the artist must include and countenance as they persevere with making. What Deleuze, and Williams after him, drives home is the way that the future and our willingness to meet its squall-like emptiness, its absolute and essential absence of guarantee, template or precedent, remain the ordeal of what we call 'art'. My point here is that mostly we navigate this terrain haphazardly, and that there may be a way we can let Deleuze help us. We see, for example, that the pure empty form of time is met via an exercise of repetition, which in itself might appear at first baffling or paradoxical. If the eternal return is anything it concerns deploying repetition in a very particular way from which difference emerges. In the final section of this essay, I will speak briefly to repetition, and intentional repeating, as one key to what we can do, as practitioners, to put to work Deleuze's conceptual labour in both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. Practice: Intentional Repetition and Forgetting Let us begin with a curious statement by Deleuze, from the 'Introduction' to Difference and Repetition. Perhaps, after the above discussion, something of it will strike the reader as incisive, rather than only absurd or opaque. If repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than law. It is against the law: against the similar form and the equivalent content of law. If repetition can be found, even in nature, it is in the name of a power which affirms itself against the law, which works underneath laws, perhaps superior to laws. [...] In every respect, repetition is a transgression... denounc[ing] [law] in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality. (2004: 3, emphasis added)

The suggestion that repetition is not the norm, is not what we are doomed to, but rather that it has to do with transgression and miracle can appear to those unfamiliar with its operations as utterly counter-intuitive. Aren't our lives constrained and dulled by the very mechanism of how much everything repeats? Deleuze's bald assertion here, that will require at least the length of Difference and Repetition to unpack, prompts our reconsideration. It is my contention that if we wish not only to understand repetition in this guise, but also to know and live it, then practice is the means whereby a thinker can do this. Although there are a number of ways that the term 'practice' is used, for the purposes of this essay (and for the present author's on-going research) practice could be most simply summed up as: a kind of 'strange doing' that involves repeating a bounded set of actions intentionally, over time. We can retrospectively clarify whether something 'was' practice by that which

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reliably accompanies it (I don't want to say 'causes'): namely, a transformation (sometimes of a universal nature); as well as a certain 'unusual' kind of stability, one that is not entangled with, or depending on, any reinforced identity (think to William's citation above – 2013: 84). This recalls both the transgression and miracle of the above citation. Practice is a kind of evidence for the fact that the world can at once be transformed and without the necessity of destruction in the process of that differentiation. Many people practice, whether they employ the term itself or not, and there are consistent patterns of transformation and stability that can be observed in the vicinity of practising. It is this anecdotal consistency that is the motor for my curiosity and research of the last decades. This essay doesn't allow me to unpack my contentions around this question in any exhaustive way, however, given our discussions above, we can look at two related, perhaps implicated, criteria of practice and consider them in relation to a stance on temporality informed by Deleuze. Firstly, practice is arguably the lived constellation where Deleuze's approach to repetition can be seen operating in a surprisingly transparent way. The practitioner – be it golfer, sculptor, contemporary dancer, meditator &c. – is committed to certain set of actions, a bounded set of behaviours, if you like, which are repeated on occasions that are (depending on the intensity of the practice) both frequent and consistent, as well as decided in advance. Due to the latter, I use the term 'intentional'. Practice is the unusual constellation of acquiring a habit intentionally in order to be able to attempt to repeat it exactly, and for the repetition to also be intentional rather than habitual or compulsive. Practice is a kind of laboratory; it is a context rather than a thing or even an action. It is arguably the activity of cultivating a context for the new. Now, neither the particularities of the set of behaviours, nor the outcome of their ostensible actions, are relevant to the fact (or not) of practising. It does not actually matter whether it is golf or dance, nor does it matter within golf or dance, what the level of accomplishment within each of these fields amounts to. Those questions may pertain to competency, to skill or expertise, but their relation to practice per se is incidental. It may matter to the practitioner of golf, for example, that she win the tournament, but in terms of practice this is a mere detail, and of little importance to the transformations and stability that practice courts. (We know also that an over-investment in the outcome often results in a blockage of the success of the activity, and our discussions go towards making of this a rule rather than an incidental malfunction). For the purposes of practice, what matters is that the practitioner works with habit in a counter-intuitive way – a non-habitual and noncompulsive way. It is to participate in the contracting of a habit. This recalls the first synthesis, which is itself a contraction, and I'd suggest this lens on practice intimates perhaps a sidling up to, a co-operation with its very mechanisms. Usually humans (if we are speaking of them) worry about their habits and wonder how to shed them. Practitioners, instead, contract new 'habits' on purpose, and then seek to repeat them with no explicit aim or goal. The more advanced the practitioner, arguably, the more they understand how irrelevant the outcomes of measurable proficiency are. Practice, to the baffled observer, can appear to be completely pointless (and is!), however, following our brief foray into temporal mechanisms above, we may be coming closer to an appreciation of how deep and sound the logic of practice is, and that it arguably rides the ontological mechanisms that permit change to happen at the point of genesis itself.

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So, we can consider whether the practitioner is a conduit for repetition-for-itself, which we know, after Deleuze, is difference-in-itself (1994: 76). The practitioner is someone who knows how to work with the very mechanisms of change and stability, the tissue of all of our dimensions, in order to renew and affirm. The practitioner repeats for no other reason than repeating itself, and it is this nuance that courts generative difference. To repeat for something – improvement, outcome, excellence, and so on – derails definitively these mechanisms, and we thereby relinquish transgression and miracle, to remain in a quotidian register where normal laws are at work. Returning to time, we read: The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated. (Deleuze 2004: 117)

We practise, with our bodies, in the present. What we think of as repetition arguably forms the tissue of the past, but the future is where what emerges from repetition-for-itself manifests as a something: the artwork, the new social structure, the unrecognisable person, the mathematical concept. The repeater, or their identity, is evacuated from this future equation, burning up in its conflagration. The repeater is forgotten, and must forget themselves in an absolute commitment to the bounded set of actions, to a cultivation of context, of which the actions are the only obvious, discernible scaffolding. Thus, practice involves at various registers of its operations a clear relation to forgetting. This helps to frame William's formula of: I don't sing to forget; I forget when I sing. (2013: 84). The practitioner knows that for forgetting to function the outcome cannot be the driver. The singing itself slips the bounds of identity and the Same, allowing for an active forgetting of that which will be shed. The affirmation, if we return to Nietzsche, is crucial (to avoid the stickiness of resentment), the practitioner shines a spotlight on the activity of, on the scaffolding provided by, the singing. This concentration-on evades mechanisms of destruction, rendering them not only superfluous, but also counter-productive. Forgetting is an active accompaniment to the activity of singing. Intention here becomes interesting. The intention is not 'to forget'. For the practitioner, the result can never be the intent. The intention more effectively pertains to periods of time and frequency of these, and to a remaining within the bounds of the chosen set of behaviours. To practice savvily, it is usually necessary to practice for a specified time (decided in advance) and to decide to practice (the frequency) in advance of embarking on a session. If this is not always happening in every instance of practice, it can be because the intention to practice is framed more broadly ('Painting is what I do.') In all cases, there is an absence of the ad hoc. Even artists who give the appearance of working in this fashion often conceal rhythms that amount to very dedicated schedules and intensive frequencies, whether these are consciously appreciated or not. Intention here is less, then, a human, conscious supplement, and more of a temporal fact. We do not stumble into practice; we approach it in advance of itself. The artist in this way is in a vivid and demanding relation to Deleuze's third synthesis. The necessity of affirming that one practises, but with no prediction or nostalgia for the content of what that practice will unleash is arguably an analogous operation to facing the pure and empty form of time. The practitioner does not intend to make the future; the practitioner faces the future intentionally, as something that is by definition yet-to-be-made. It is an

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appreciation of Deleuze's synthesis as a contentless and sheer container for the new, for that whose only identifying feature is that it is that which is repeated[6] Conclusion To conclude, and to gesture towards further dimensions of this argument, I would repeat my contention that time, and a stance on temporality is crucial for the practising artist, and for invention and inventive subjects more generally. I would advocate supplementing pedestrian readings of the present with Deleuze's nuanced conceptualisations in order to enter a thinking of the present via paradox, rather than via an earnest imperative mode. Exploring the finesse of Deleuze's three syntheses alongside the related framings of chronos and aiôn, this paper urges an engagement with Deleuze's third synthesis of time – the future-as-such; as pure difference – which requires our weathering the gales of time's empty form, and putting our known selves aside in favour of that which we as artists fear and long for – art, thought and lives which we cannot know in advance. [1] For an accessible introduction to the notion of multiple dimensions, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Gotl9vRGs, retrieved May 21 2015. [2] Personal conversations, May 2015. [3] The distinction between existence and is-ness, is worth noting here, otherwise it can seem confusing. Various philosophers make this productive distinction between a register of 'being' and one, for want of a better word, of 'actuality' (Badiou, for example, among others – see 2007: 31ff) [4] For ease, any web search of images of 'Bergson's Cone' will provide the current reader with a diagram as visual reference. [5] This goes some way to unpacking the ubiquitous reluctance that even established artists experience in the face of practice. Procrastination, in other words, may have a relation to our relation to death. This would shift this phenomenon from the realms of poppsychology into a paradigm with its own logic, problematic rather than pathological. [6] See Derrida 1987 on the iterability of the invention, p. 16.

REFERENCES: AntoniaPont 2015 ' Practice is a training in 'intensity', that results in a fitness for 'intensity': an ability to transition with the least effort - see G.D.' 18 March, Twitter post, viewed 19 May 2015, Badiou, A 2007 Being and Event, Feltham, O (trans.) London: Continuum Bergson, H 1991 Matter and Memory, Paul, N.M. & Palmer W.S. (trans.), New York: Zone Books Deleuze, G 2004 Difference and Repetition, Patton, P (trans.), London: Continuum -------------1994 Difference and Repetition, P. Patton (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press ------------- 2004a The Logic of Sense, Lester, M (trans.), London: Continuum

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Derrida, J. 1987. Psyché - Inventions de l'autre. Paris: Editions Galilée Nietzsche, F 2001 The Gay Science, Williams, B. (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Williams, B 2001 'Introduction' in Nietzsche, F. The Gay Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Williams, J 2011 Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press --------------2013 Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide, 2nd ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

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