Deleuze's Three Syntheses of Time: A Primer
Merry Christmas! My present is this utterly unmotivated post on Deleuze's three syntheses of time, meant to give the general gist of what's going on, without being too technical about it. This is anything but exhaustive. If I pull this off right, this might be the shortest exposition of the syntheses that have otherwise filled entire monographs! So here we go:
The cover illustration on one of the editions of Borges' Labyrinths.
The 2nd Synthesis
The 3 syntheses (elaborated in chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition) are easily among the toughest although most important bits of Deleuze's writing. But they can be rendered digestible by starting with a simple example: the example of déjà vu. It's not an original example, and in fact, it was Bergson himself who furnished it in his own essay on the "Memory of the Present and False Recognition". We're more or less going to crib from it to make Deleuze a little clearer (hopefully). Speaking very roughly, the 3 syntheses relate to the syntheses of the present, the past, and the future, and how together, they constitute time. To get a handle on them, we're going to start with the 2nd synthesis, which is more properly understood as the synthesis of memory.
So, what is déjà vu? Déjà vu is what happens when you recognize the present as an event which has already happened. An "I've been through this before". Bergson calls it false recognition because it usually hasn't, even though it feels like it has. For Bergson, this experience gives us a glimpse into an essential fact about memory: that it is formed exactly at the same time as perception. In déjà vu, the past and the present arise together, as two forms of time, that bear on the same content of time. In Bergson's lovely turn of phrase: "Step by step, as perception is created, the memory of it is projected beside it, as the shadow falls beside the body... it is twofold at every moment, its very up-rush being in two jets exactly symmetrical".
Déjà vu makes concrete the famous Bergsonian/Deleuzian claim: that the past co-exists with the present. Far from being a pathology of time, déjà vu is the original experience of time. Bergson's thesis is that we don't usually experience déjà vu
because there's simply not much use in remembering what's right there in front of us.
But all this leads to a pretty incredible consequence: it implies a treatment of the past independent of content: as if one can bolt-on the 'past-form' onto the content of the present.
This is, in Deleuze's words, a matter of a 'past which was never present', an 'a priori past', or even a 'past in general' (as distinct from any particular past). Or in yet other words, this is a past that isn't an empirical past but a 'transcendental' one.
It is this 'immemorial past' that grants us - as with the feeling of déjà vu - the power of recall. To say: 'Ah yes, I remember that'. Memory is déjà vu (and vice versa), but 'activated' at a later time than the present (which is the case with déjà vu): it brings past presents to bear on the present present, if you will.
The 'discovery' of the transcendental past is important, because it is what allows the present itself to pass. But why? And what is 'the present' here anyway?
The 1st Synthesis
Here's where we're going to move on to talk about the 1st synthesis of time: the time of the present.
This time of the present is a little misleadingly named, because it contains, 'within itself' both a certain kind of past, and a certain kind of future. Deleuze calls it a 'living present', that "goes from the past to the future": it is a matter of duration.
Durational presents are like little floating islands of time: their past and future only pertain to what is in their immediate temporal 'vicinity': a matter of anticipations and retentions, like anticipating the next note in a melody on the basis of the recent ones past.
This synthesis of time does not extend as far as reproducing the past, or predicting the future: the past involved here is a matter of impulses which are fed-forward, while the future is a kind of shaped expectation, both of which bind the living present on either side.
In a word, these islands of 'habitual' time do not form any kind of chronology; time here is anarchic, unserialized, perpetually present. These are scattered presents, spatially distributed, as when Deleuze refers to durations 'above and below us' (astral cycles, heartbeats).
But if these presents are so perpetual, how is it that they pass? By means, of course, of the 2nd synthesis. It's the latter which bestows upon the living present its reproducible form. Déjà vu's "I've seen this before" is something new with respect to the living present,
whose 'past', on its own, does not lend itself to doubling, or to being recalled again. What Memory does is to index the present, introducing a before and after, an asymmetry of presents that is more than just the equal exchange of one present for another in succession.
Together, the 1st and 2nd syntheses of time - of the living present and immemorial past - constitute what we might call 'stabilized', or 'normal' time. It is time in which there is (or can be) progression (before-after), but which does not yet admit of the future, properly speaking.
We can make sense of this in terms of cycles: while the cycle of seasons admits of progression, the cycle ultimately returns to its beginning and repeats over. Deleuze speaks of 1st and 2nd synthesis as forming an "alliance" which amounts to a 'circle'. It's a circle in which the 2nd synthesis 'organizes' the anarchic disparity of living presents so as to give them a past in memory, but where those memories are just memories of those presents, extended backward. In Deleuze's words, the problem here is that
memory "remains relative" to what it grounds. The great question that the 3rd synthesis of the future responds to is: how to break this circle? How to unspool this circle so as to form a "straight-line labyrinth" which expels the back-and-forth between present and past?
The 3rd Synthesis
The 3rd synthesis then, is less a synthesis than an un-synthesis: it undoes the alliance between the first two syntheses by ushering in an 'after' which cannot be returned to: irreversibility proper. This is the famous 'caesura' by which time becomes 'unequally distributed'. The caesura 'ordains' a before and after 'once and for all', such that 'before and after' cannot be returned to again. It totalizes all of time and shunts it behind itself, leaving nothing other than the famous 'pure and empty form' of time through which the future alone can 'eternally return': "The expulsive and selective force of the eternal return ensures that the first two repetitions do not return, that they occur only once and for all" (D&R297). Déjà vu is rendered inoperative; what comes next cannot be re-cognized ("I haven't seen that before!").
What
is ultimately at stake here is an effort to acknowledge the
independence or autonomy of time: as not something that measures (or is
derivative of something else - as per the 1st and 2nd syntheses), but undoes all measure - time as tempest, the "unconditioned" (D&R297) upon which all conditions are wrecked upon. And that is how the 3 syntheses more or less 'fit together'. There's a heap that's not here (obvious to anyone who knows this material!), but hopefully this captures a little of what motivates the baroque architecture of the syntheses, which can feel a little arbitrary at times.
Rambling
While there are, at this point, quite a few expositions of the 3 syntheses around in the scholarly literature, I have to here just acknowledge David Lapoujade's text on Aberrant Movements. It is, to my knowledge, one of the very, very few texts which rightly insists on the utter importance of Deleuze's argument about memory being 'relative' to what it grounds. This argument underwrites the entire move to the 3rd synthesis from the 2nd, and almost no one talks about it! It's also stupid important because it links the whole argument to Deleuze's general argumentative strategy in D&R, which is to find a way to break with the dead-end transcendental strategy of 'tracing', in which the conditions of genesis remain 'indifferent' to what they condition. Deleuze's argument in the section on the syntheses of time are a particular case of this far wider reaching effort, which finds its elaboration in "The Image of Thought" chapter in D&R. If you do not think the two together, then you haven't understood the syntheses, or their point!
Also - since at this point I may as well let it all out - so many of the expositions are stifled by following Deleuze's own writing too closely. Alot of it ends up being recapitulation rather than exposition. But what's interesting is trying to see the lines of articulation and unarticulation, to follow the moves from A to B and to understand why those moves were made. Which is why I'm playing around with things and starting with the 2nd synthesis, insofar as it works like a nice hinge between the 1st and the 3rd. Also, ever since I read Virno's Déjà vu and the End of History, I've been meaning to write up a something related to the syntheses 'cause he provided a few "ah-ha" moments thanks to his reading of Bergson, even if he doesn't mention Deleuze at all (barring a passing - and quite scathing - allusion).
Addition: Jon Roffe's book on Badiou's Deleuze also highlights the argument about memory being relative too, now that I'm going over it a little... (unsurprising since Roffe is Deleuze's bestest English speaking reader!).
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