From the Notebook: Genesis of the Act
This is a transcription of notes I took for myself trying to understand the role and the place of Action within chapter two of Difference and Repetition, and more broadly within a system of contemplations and events. The fundamental question: where is the act? There are events, there are contractions. These I understand. But the act itself is nowhere to be found.
This is part of a larger ongoing effort to contextualize and place the three syntheses in the ontology of the event. There is more work to be done.
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All action can be decomposed into constituent sensations. There are happenings in the world, no?
The present is a perpetual passed (i.e. past). In fact, there is only the past! The transcendental synthesis of memory is the only way I can perceive things at all. Present contemplations form the “raw material” for the past to make sense of (or make proto-sense of, or maybe even just hold). But there must be a present which gives, or else nothing would work out. So the first passive synthesis and the second passive synthesis are operating at the same time. The first synthesis still does construct presents; just because these presents pass doesn’t make them any less real. If the second synthesis is the transcendental ground of time, then the first is the empirical foundation of time.
Is the present contemplation an act? Well…the contraction is definitely only in the contemplating mind; but the mind is not at all separate from the intensities which found it. The mind is a double — we can say difference’s own tendency is to draw itself off from itself! There is an involuntary creation of the mind. But even this framing is misleading, for it posits a creative non-mind prior to it, There is only mind, or minds, larval ones. Then what is it that is given to the mind? Must it not be the past itself? Or rather, maybe the image of the future that all past minds worked together to create…
The pure past is repetition itself. Is it action itself? Are present contemplations already too late, forced to only contemplate because the past took with it all the action? If this is the case, then maybe what the present contemplates is many layers or levels of the past as presents, those presents being various contractions of various intensities of various levels of the past, and themselves being pasts as presents, and so on. If the past is difference and repetition, then it must be what the presents contemplate. This is no different from saying presents contemplate difference, or that they contemplate other presents. These are equivalent.
So, then, what is the act? The act is the past. The past is action. There are not, ontologically speaking, different acts. There is only action, there is only the perpetual act — the perpetual drama.
Displacement and disguise are powerful motivators for narcissism. The act is a humiliation of the subject, always displaced. The subject can only contemplate…how rueful. The pasts and presents, these are all that are.
A sufficiently unfatigued present arises; it lasts long enough to subsume other presents; it asks: “why not me who gets to act?” On a green leg and a red leg it walks. It turns—and everything explodes. It faces the Act, it becomes equal to it, assuming it for itself. Its green leg tears apart, flying back. Its other leg fights to keep the balance, but oh, how hard it is to balance! In its efforts it stumbles and it hops. Gone is the tranquil walk. How much energy it takes to not fall back to the ground, how much food I need to stay upright! I hunger, I suffer, I scream, a thousand dynamisms crowd the inner edges of my mouth and pour out of my lips. Ah…a deer goes by.
(A deer is good eating because it has a heart and blood, a trillion of its own contractions it can give to me as food.)
If the becoming-equal to the act is the taking up of the illusion of having acted, then is this to say all this is predetermined? Well, we can ask: is it possible for the past to dictate the present? It is true that the total sum of pasts is given and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about them. If the past is motion itself, then must not there be a principle of motion? An engine? The aleatory point, the cosmic game of chance, is the production of the new…
