Serials:
Why is this the time of the series? Why is memory so very serial? After all series is such a precise mathematical terms. A sequence of distinct numbers, lined by a certain rule, which is busy quietly doing something. Hat can such a definition have to do with anything else? Why should it do with anything else?
Perhaps the place to start here is where Deleuze does, with the idea of convergence. It is a facet of series that given the apprioriate numbers then can converge on a certain point. At the point moreover many series might also meet: indeed mathematically continuity itself is defined as the meeting point of related series. From which it follows that this meeting in a certain point, and the rules which give this meeting, have a deep connection with our idea of continuity – an idea that tears through the simple being of ‘being all together’, or being across a time period.
From this last point Deleuze’s elements of series construction emerge. On he one hand any one series has its own rule. It must link up to itself. it must hang together in a certain way. But that hanging is bound up (is only able to be continual) if there exists a certain point at which this series (or the elements within it) exist in an infinite tendency. That is series are only continual because there are points of rupture around which series exist, and to which they infinitely tended. Each series of memories, will therefore be taught up in containing, but also in being, a tendency toward a certain point, to which another series also tends (the nature of times continuity being given here). And yet this tendency is never simple, never equal. Not every series converges. On the contrary the rules which give that converge imply that one series is already caught up by another. The rules by which it is given, and by which it converges therefore tie it to the other series which it theorectically is independant from. Moreover as these rules are peculiarly defined by a point of convergence, it follows that if that point ‘wandered’ if it were rogue, it could create for itself an infinity of differing series, each converging. The rule by itself is therefore never simply sovereign, is rather depends on what the imposible pont is doing(and what it is doing with the other series).
,Maths blows events apart, an entire topology of different possible emerge. Different ‘points- or better as each point is only defined in the convergence of these series (which at each point are given together), the same point straddles multiple possible varations of series (it creates many rules of possible converge). Two series might then include within their intermeshing other point, other series, as the rule in which they are given varies, and varies again. The entire fabric ofthe space in which we live, is thereby caught up and restich or restrict by events which exist at the juncture of two other series, each which series could, given the apprioriate event be arranges (and still converge) across a multitude of other series.
And yet this is of course really rather abstract. Or better (for it si really far from abstract at all0 the full implcatino of what is being said here are rather difficult to immediately fathom. The issue is not really about maths, but rather the nature of convergnce – or better the sense that one memory is imeshed with another. Take (and theexample comes from Foucault) two series in one a child is murdered by a can in a certain ca and wearing a red jumper. In another a man runs away from he seen of an accident, and has has blood stains (his own ) in a car which is of a different type from that seen at the murder (andhe is wearing another jumper). And yet there is a strange point of convergnce. Why did he run, given he wasbalmless in the accident. Why did he behve gultly? Washe guilty of another crime? Did he have something else to hide? Ad wh ycan he not account properly for his action bfore the accident (and at the time to murder was commited). Two distinct series of event, two different sets of memoies appear caught up in eac h other, by rules that are deeper than the rules of cause and effect and far deeper than simple association.
There is something in the guilt, in the running away, in the lack of memory, something that might very well lead one to say that the two series converge at the same point. The point that this is the man who murdered the child. This vent, driving carelessly, having an accident running, is what happened next. It is the point one series, murder converged to, after the hidden element in that series, the murder, the actor left the seen of the crime.
Immediately the guilt is confused between the two series, then all the rules of construction change. If that is the same guilt what then? The series n which the man lived, or rather all the series in which he registered a life, are pulled immediately to his moment, to this guilty act, and the murder that it was meant to be being converged with. Facts are gleaned from a past, facts that at a different time would mean something rather different. He lives with his mother so he is repressed. He has never married he has no proper girl friend… A life is made to converge on a supposed point. On the other side, the details which do not fit into the the story (the make of car or red jumper) a quietly forgotten.: For one all knows that witness evidence is so unrealible, while guolt (is excess) is guilt in excess. The series of the murder, is then caught up and changed, it is pulled to a point of convergence with the truth of an excess of guilt, and a man with a shifty look in his eye. The two are one and the same.
However one needs so much caution here. The result is not necessarily false. An excess of guilt might indeed mean murder. The problem is rather elsewhere. It relates back to that problem of events and convergence A problem which plagues humanity in that it is all too easy to resolve. It does not take much tyo have an event pulled in the mind into other thoughts. Indded its truth always lay in it ability to do so, given a certain point of convergence. Any event therefore which is taken up with an excess of haste and given over to another event, can be resolved into something it was not initially (but then what was it). The event of convicting the wrong man, it was of course caught up in another series, say the retirement of a police officer, who want one last conviction, or the existence of the death penalty, or the feeling of the jurors on the matter of children, and men with a shifty looks… T
The problem, and yet what makes this series so easy to comprehend) with JUSTUCE is that it demands a resolution of what is perhaps irresovable in this means. That is it demands an accord a one to one simple equivocation between possibly rather different dimensions of existence. It demands then that somewhere in the world there is in the sate of affaris, a series of perceptions which actively give reality as it was – as it must be. It then goes out to uncover this series. It gves, or better demands what event lack. It demands they have a MEANING. Morevoer the meaning s tied to a vertai nelement –a terrible event in need of punishing (or a squalid crime in need of gongoring). Once this move is made, once an empty throw or better a demand or ultiamiatum – THERE MUST be a convergence is issues then all of truth, or at least thse sequence of memroeis or continuities that are close at hand to the event themselves become so very vulnerable. Meaning, demands truth and warps sense. it wages a war upon sense.
The advantage to the teacher is clear. How else to explain the otherwise rather inexplicable. The disadvantage to guilty men with shifty eye, is of course equally apparent.
T
The poit though is that memory, and the continuity of time that it applies is such a power element in this resticthing. The same sense –caven wen it is utterly complex, yet when it is drawn into an event, already be caught up by numerous other dimensions, numerous other aspects of a life. To be guilty, can lead to a speeding convicting, an accident, a successful meeting or even having you head choppoed off by a guillotine. Moreover each event is constantly taken up into another events We say ‘ I am glad I did that, or I understand how that has influenced everything, or I felt that this too must follow’, as one memory one set of existing caughtup others. Likewise we reply to ourselves, that ‘we understand what we were doing now’, now that is things other things have happened. We see our hidden motive/fs (and invent nice little unconsciouses to ensure those hidden motives were always still there) . And yet of course these elements endless unstick each other. The motif/ves will in a different throw of events appear so very different (why did I run away from that crash, maybe I am a murder after all). Or again, I suppose I must have always wanted somewhere this utcome. I must always have supposed this was the case (although I never at no point realized the fact). The very continuity of memory or better of time becomes the game in which new elements are bred and rebred. That is lookinh back onto a past is really divisive. I in its very continuity, in its demand that you are the same person breeds in ones pasts other use, which lie dormant, always awaiting to be the actual one.
The continuity of time makes fools of us all. Or better it pitches any help of another other unity (or subject of self) down into an infinity of becoming: A infinity of not being what one was. Or at least it appears to be so. However perhaps one needs not to take Deleuze ssolemly here (it is sure he never did, so why should we). This in not the last world on this matter. Perhas one negiocate for oneslf three other possible ruses here.
On the one hand late Deleuze suggests that it is perfectly possible to envisage a relatino of perception and the body which ercievs, which directly inhabit events as their creative phenomen 0 and can endless differ what it is, in a way thay remains apart from the event itself (but is defined in the very plastic, the enfolded) nature of the body itself. The body might therefore itself contain and link to, in its foldings infinite textures, each one awaiting the nuancing out of a perception. In such a case the deep questions of justice or to law or meaning, the questions of philosophy are lost. What matters instead are perceptions (or the percept) as its ability to making the perceiving element relate into its body anew and differently. Continuity would of course in this case still be productive, It would still matter and yet that continuity is not the continuity of time so mush of the cosmos itself. It is given then not in converging point, but the frame of a body, which binds the forces of the cosmos into a certain series of relations (relations which can always mover otherwise).
Another alternative is certainly found if Foucault. Events as a point in which things happen serve for Deleuze as the point in which ones ability to talk of a thing, and the state of affiars in which things are given meet once and only once. Sense is the vanishing point of that meeting. The world of events moves away from that meeting, and never meets again with the words which describe it (and endless find new ways for it to be given). Maybe Foucault says this meeting itself never really happens. Maybe it was always a creation of power and resistence (or the process of subjectivification where the two are given in one point). In the first case power and resistence places, the power of the words and the power of things at odds, one attempts to be what the other is (and will enforce that being). The other necessarily rests (and if there was no such resistence) then the power would fail, as the to would dissolve into each other. Subjectification, is then the point of folding, the point that restistecne and power, acting and resisting one oneself, is given ina single throw. In a process whereon is as one acts.
Thus far we are firmly within Deleuze (indeed this is the thought that Deleuze sets out to double up in the Leibniz book). And yet their a little more in the process of subjectification than simply folding. The process, in allowing resistence and power to be given at one, in creating their double in building what we are- allows that building a deep and highly nuanced power with automatically reaches into oneself, as it reached across history. To build now, and to resist that building, is also to be creating echoes for other selves, in their problem of building: Resistence and power, tear beyond a simple process caught up in a here and now (us or the greeks) an create rather anther pole in which time is caught. Each act of building is an act which is caught up n other acts of subjectification (before and after it) as if it were an event (and yet of course each act, in folding it itself no event, no simple singularity). The entire system of memory and reality is a little different. It is more Kantain than Bergsonian. It is not about a difference, which has an ontologocial status of its own, do much as a sense a process in which we are made, is caught up in other process: each is then a point to focus on and in, and is so without formally event.
Finally the tyranny of time is somewhat laky. Deleuze after all needs Bergson to make it seem alright. The ,logic of Deleuze is however that time is riven and only continual as a second order phenomena – r better the construct of the riven. What is then the unity the riven constructed was a unity (aka Heidigger) of tense rather than the stodgy formal unit yof time the past,futre and present might have very many voices and need to not formally articulated on of against the other. One needs no real grounding therefore. or better the ground is formed by a shift elsewhere. One might talk of a past- and yet such a talk wouls lways illicit the question what past is one talking of. Or the future and wonder what future (: here of course Deleuze (wh identifies three future, and Heideigger who in being and tme has two) are peculiarly useful. But maybe the game is not to invent an elaborate philosophy that behaves as if something (call it time) were grounded in an ontological reality, and simply accepts that this grounding is different. The game would then be to endlessly invent new senses in which apt present and future are said, new ways in which and through which they might be related. That is new sense of difference and continuity might be configured.
In effect the Deleuzian theory of events which has event wander across time, might be caught up in allowing the very mechanism of schism and continuity itself to wander, into different universe Deleuze would then merely be one great throw of a dice (akin to Leibniz), other throws, other takes on tense and time would always be open.
Seriality is at once a more than useful sense in which a world of the outside might be given – given that such a world necessarily is (and is in a non-dialetic, as if dialectic manner). That is given that the world is really as it appears to be, and pulled across a sliding scale in which something other than myself is always at stake, always emerging. Given this the serials must be memories norm. That is they must given the trick of being in a memory, and appearing through these memories to be constant (a trick Hume knew was a mere slight of reason’s hand). Series, the eruption of memory at certain point, is bound to a time in which those memories necessarily happen, and which they necessarily assume, and yet which remains distinct from them, and caught up in the outside those memories so carefully given. Continuity (as properly understood) then implicates these memroeis one in the other. Making them as confused and confusing as it can. And yet it can do so only because at each point, and even as it forecloses (or appears to foreclose) a set of series, other series are also their. The same deep continuity is then also at an even deeper level a disruption, where the resolution, of time the healer or harmer is once again thrown up in the air. Continuity which perturbs memory is therefore only continous as at another level those same memories are caught up, and accurate express and event beyond the continuity that appears to perturb them, an event which is creating a world of shifting possibilities (chaosmosis), creates the continuity in the first place. Memory a once is the stooge of continuity, and yet all the while ,and at another rather different level, the same memories as they express event perturb time itself.
However, and Deleuze is very aware of this there is no real compulsion here. It is perfectly possible that the appeal to ontological truth ha other variants, both within the same continuity of time, or outside of it. One might perturb in many way, and Philosophies job is always to blast through a few new ones…And so endlessly recreate a new meta-series of its own.