Open question: singular points
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The theory of events is such that they are ideal, nonlocalizable, and subsistent in an entirely different order of their own. “[I]t is correct to represent a double series of events which develop on two planes, echoing without resembling each other: real events on the level of the engendered solutions, and ideal events embedded in the conditions of the problem, like the acts – or the dreams – of the gods who double our history” (DR 189). Take the momentous occasion of the French Revolution; why is it so conducive to statistical methods? If the question surveyed is “does the event subsume a certain date?”, most people (let's say, 99% of respondents) would agree that the year 1789 and the storming of the Bastille grounds a solid and certain “yes”. For 1799, let's say 98% answer the same. And in the other direction, 1779, let's say 90% say the same (when exactly does an event begin? it's hard to say). Taking these, we could create a distribution of responses extending across the whole timeline. There would be the strange respondents (like me) who say the event is still ongoing, others who are ardent in Hammurabi's involvement. The real event of the Revolution betrays its ideal nature, not that it is supratemporal, but that it is atemporal, that its fragments could be found in any thing or any time. The requirements of representation demand of us one thing: that the incestuous involvement of events in one another not be taken metaphorically, lest they fall to relations of resemblance. Thus the distribution can be extended in a second dimension as well, not a line or curve but a blanketing or a topography, where all real terms allow themselves to be surveyed of the previous question: where is the Revolution in this tree, that chicken, this concept, that color? Metaphors presuppose an immediacy that becomes hidden in the metaphorical relation:
So they carried out experiments in this area, it was experimental psychology. They gave the rule of the game: “We’re going to have some fun. Don’t let yourself make an image. We’ll give you a word, and you focus on something that both excludes any image, and yet is not purely conceptual.” What was the result? The result was sorts of orientations of consciousness, in other words spatio-temporal directions. The more abstract it was, the better. The idea was to persuade us that there were three possible attitudes of consciousness: abstract thinking consciousness—for example “proletariat,” where one had to work for the proletariat. First reaction: proletariat = the class defined by… etcetera, etcetera. I would say that that is the conceptual definition of the proletariat. It is a certain attitude of consciousness towards a word: I see the concept through the word. Second attitude of consciousness: based on the word “proletariat,” I conjure up a member of the proletariat: “Ah yes, I’ve seen one!” That is really the empirical attitude, an image. Sartre, in his book The Imaginary, presents the third attitude, that of the Würzburg-type experiments, and he gives descriptions of people’s responses: “I see a sort of black wave advancing.” It defined a sort of rhythm. Managing to grasp an attitude of consciousness, a sort of way of occupying space and time: the proletariat doesn’t fill space and time in the same way as the bourgeoisie. At that moment you have the schema.
– from Deleuze's four-part seminar on Kant, translated by Smith & Stivale
To mistake the black wave for a mere metaphor would be a tragedy. Metaphor asks of us resemblance to a prior identity; we can only allow metaphors if we acknowledge that everything is metaphor, even our representations of the things themselves, that is, even the proletariat must serve as its own metaphor (and this distance cannot be bridged). On the level of immediacy, no two concepts are distant enough that they cannot be bridged with their own proper force of movement. My professor Chin-Tai Kim used to say the copula has three senses conflated into one: the identical, the predicative, and the existential. But is there not a fourth? The proletariat is the black wave, the Idea of the proletariat is co-immanent with Ideas of “black” and “wave"…
So it is the strangest thing to ask how a turning point in history can singularly participate in an ideal event without positing the least amount of resemblance between the two. Why is it that the distribution centers so nicely around the real dates of the French Revolution? I have been asking this question. It is odd that the turning points of history or even of my own life are so localized. When I have a powerful conversation, surely it is that moment which alters the trajectory of my intellectual journey — but why is the singularity there and not anywhere else? There are real turning points in history just as there are real temperatures which mark material phase transitions. It can't be good enough to say the transition was always happening… so what does a philosophy of the “echo” look like?
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This is one of my theses: repetition is the envelopment of singularities. This is all that is meant by Repetition. Maybe this will help?
