shores.corry.melodiesoftime.deleuzestudies.2009

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[The following is material for my presentation at the International Deleuze Studies conference, August 2009, University of Cologne.]

Corry Shores

Melodies of Time:

Deleuzes Anti-Husserlian Theory of Phenomena

Many great minds of the 20 th century mark their start in Husserls phenomenology,

Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas are but a few. Deleuze follows an alternate philosophical

lineage. His theory of phenomenal temporality bypasses Husserl. He does so in part

by finding the concept of intensity to implicitly underlie Spinozas, Humes, and

Bergsons notions of duration. And for that reason, I think Deleuze was more able

than Husserl to explain intensely phenomenal experiences. To distinguish the different

theories of phenomenal time, I employ the following distinctions.

1) Continuous vs. discrete.

Does time flow as an unbroken continuum? Or is it made of discrete atomic instants

that fall in succession?
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2) Intensive vs. extensive.

Do we experience the now moment as extending outward towards the past and future?

Or is the present an indivisible limit marking the definitive boundary between the past

and future?

3) The Law vs. the Wild.

Do lawful regularities govern what consciousness will next experience? Or do

phenomena forever journey into the unpredictable wild?

Hume, Bergson, Husserl and Deleuze all evoke the experience of a melody to

illustrate their theories of time-consciousness. And as well, Deleuze characterizes

Spinozas duration as melodic. So we will compare their melodies to illustrate their

theories.

My final aim is to portray Deleuzes wild, intense, and splintered temporality as a

critical alternative to Husserls continuous, extensive, and law-abiding time-

consciousness.

We find these traits of Husserlian time in the smooth forward flow of his melody. The

passage between tones is an unbroken continuity. When we perceive the melody, we

direct our awareness into the present instant of the current tone. So in the first place,

consciousness has this tendency to tend-inward into the present moment. We intend


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the current tone, in Husserls terminology. But one tone does not a melody make. Our

awareness tends-backwards as well. It retends the notes that have passed, and retains

them in our primary memory. Also, we feel the melody pulling us along. We

anticipate the general direction of its flowing changes. So our awareness of the

melody tends-forward as well. We protend what is to come. These three interweaving

tendencies tending backward, tending inward, and tending forward together

endow us with the experience of the melody as a temporal object. And they provide

the grounds for us to unify the melodys tones into one identifiable tune. In

geometrical terms, Husserls time forms a line. It continually tends outward. Hence, it

is extensive. Yet, Husserl does speak of an instantaneous now that is an indivisible

ideal limit. It is inextensive, so he calls it the limit of intensity. In a sense, time

passes through an infinity of these limits. But the tone is continuously changing. And

change needs duration. So Husserl says we never experience any such instant of the

tone. The present moment for us is a slightly extended temporal field. And it is

continuously connected to the broader line of time.

Husserls time-flow is unbroken, because moments overlap each other. Thus at any

given instant you will find two moments that coincide simultaneously, even though

one moment follows the other. The first fades-out just while the next fades-in. It is for

this reason that we can never experience a completely discontinuous change. Melodic

note A might bend gradually into B. It is a continuous qualitative change.


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But, says Husserl, this is just a change in species. One note changes to another note.

So the qualitative transition from A to B remained within the same genus, pitch. All

such temporal connections are continuous in this way. Husserl calls this the law of

transformation and also the lawful regularity of immanent genesis. He writes:

discontinuity is not possible in every time-point. So, like an analog record album,

there is but one continuous groove of time.

By contrast, Humes time is like digital. It is a series of discrete moments, like how a

digital image is made-up of separate pixels. One moment is distinct from its

neighbors. So none overlap continuously. No matter how contiguous moments might

be, they can never co-exist, like Husserls do. Hume writes: the year Seventeen

Thirty Seven cannot concur with the present year Seventeen Thirty Eight. Every

moment must be distinct from [...] another.

And Humes time does not extend. Spatial objects are extensive, because their parts

simultaneously coexist. But, because moments never coincide, time can never extend

beyond the present instant. So then how does Hume explain our experience of

duration?

Like with Husserl, tendencies are what produce our sense of time, in Humes theory.

Consider this. Some cannot resist fire's seduction. What power does this beauty

possess? We reach into it. And we burn. Yet we try again. Touch & Burn. Touch &

Burn. Touch & Burn. Soon our hands become disinclined to touch the fire. As they


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near it, our minds cannot but invoke the past impressions of heat. With each repetition

of the pairing, the connected impressions become more vivid in our minds. The

tendency to associate fire with heat increases every time. All the previous instances

contract into the present one, which is why we withdraw our hands as they near the

flame. And it is by the same process that we experience time.

Hume has us imagine a flute playing five notes. With each note, we experience

duration. But we do not experience it as something in addition to the note we hear.

Thus when we arrive upon the fifth note, we do not experience time as an additional

sixth impression. Rather, with each transition from note-to-note, we experience a

succession. Everything else we have ever experienced also fell in succession. So at

each instant, we have a strong tendency to associate the current succession of notes

with every other succession we ever experienced. Our feeling of duration results from

the power of our minds tendency to evoke every other impression of succession that

we ever had. But this phenomenon of duration does not itself have a duration. It is

instantaneous. All our impressions of successions contract into that one discrete

moment. But, we feel this tendency every instant. So we are endlessly reminded of

succession. This gives us the feeling that time proceeds continuously when in fact it ismade of discrete parts.

Bergsons duration also involves a similar sort of contraction. He has us consider

present perceptions in the following manner. We hear the first instant of the melodys


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tone. Our senses send an image of the sound to our minds. But just as soon as our

minds receive it, they send it back to our ears. In the mean-time, the tones qualities

changed somewhat. Nonetheless, we contract the sound from a moment ago with the

sound as we hear it now. This new modified contraction of the past and present

sounds is then sent as one impression back to the mind. And again, the mind sends

this new modified memory-image back to the next present sensation, whose qualities

have changed once more. This feedback circulation never ceases. So gradually, our

memories broaden, and our present perceptions become increasingly enriched by the

past. Because every perception is contracted with past memories, perception is always

recollection. To perceive something, it is necessary that we superpose all our past

memories onto our current experience. Hence, the past never comes after the present.

The two must always coincide. They crystallize together.

When a musician learns a melody, she might repeatedly run through it. Each

additional repetition contracts with the rest. This forms a habit rather than a distinct

recollection. So when she finally plays it by heart, she does not explicitly recall

previous repetitions. Rather, her body automatically plays all at once the prior

repetitions, which have contracted into the given instant of their performance.

But habitual contraction is not a pure and simple tendency. We might tend instead to

relax our past memories so that they expand more explicitly in our minds. If we ask

the musician to describe how she learned the melody, explicit images will extend out


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in her mind as she contemplates individual occurrences. There is still an element of

contraction, because the whole past never stops reinserting itself in the present.

However, certain parts of our memories will come to our attention when

circumstances make them useful. So to explain how she learned the melody, the

musician will not tell us much by playing it again in its habitually contracted form.

Rather, she will take more distance to her bodys contractions, and contemplate the

expanding imagery in her memory. Bergson illustrates these tendencies with his

famous cone diagram. If we are living in the moment, so to speak, then all our

memories are contracted down to the bottom point of the cone. But if we pause more

to reflect and contemplate, our memories expand before our explicit awareness. So the

cone expands upward and outward. As it expands even higher, the cones top circle

will expand even wider. However, the rest of the contraction does not go away. Still

part of us is living in the moment, down at the tip of the cone. But another part of us

has taken a step back from our automatic bodily habits.

Now even though part of us is always contracting memories down into the present

moment, we never really experience a pure instantaneous present. In this sense,

Bergsons duration is continuous like Hussserls. But it is not a linear continuum, for

Bergson. Time cannot be spatialized. Moments of duration succeed one another, but

not along a line. For Husserl, some quality of the tone, like volume, can continuously

change more-or-less, while still being the same quality. But for Bergson, sensations


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pitch. Deleuze calls this the melodic line of continuous affective variation. But

duration is not an extent of this variation. Nor is it to be found in one instantaneous

cut within it. Rather, duration is the phenomenon of passage that we experience when

transiting from one moment to the next. Just as we might find an instantaneous

velocity in physics, there are instantaneous changes of affection at each moment. Yet

change cannot actualize in just an instant, so it is more like a tendency towards

variation. Our experience of duration is the feeling of passing from one level of

affection to another level, as we move from one discrete tendency to the next.

Deleuze illustrates with Scotuss white wall. If we were to draw shapes on a white

wall, then we could distinguish one extensive region from the rest.

But there are intensive distinctions as well. There are different degrees of whiteness.

And the rate of change from one point to the next also varies continuously.

Deleuze draws the following conclusion: Because Bergsons duration is qualitatively

different at each instant, like the white wall is qualitatively different at each point,

really duration is more fundamentally made-up of quantitative intensive changes.

There is a more-or-less qualitative variation from one moment to the next. Deleuze

writes, Certainly, a qualitative difference does not reproduce or express a difference

of intensity. However, in the passage from one quality to another, even where there is

a maximum of resemblance or continuity, there are phenomena of delay and plateau,

shocks of difference, distances, a whole play of conjunctions and disjunctions, a


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whole depth which forms a graduated scale rather than a properly qualitative

duration. (DR 238)

So Deleuze rejects Bergsons polemic against intensity. As we pass from state to state,

we undergo a radical change, even though no extent of time spans between these

unique moments. The transition does not tend outward extensively through time, but

rather inward, deeply. It is intense. Its intensive depth produces the different levels of

change from one moment to the next. And so we also see, that before we arrive into

the next qualitative state, we first must undergo the phenomenon of passage through

the intensive depth in between instants. So first we experience the phenomenon of a

quantitative transition, and only afterwards do we discover the qualitative differences

that have undergone the alteration. So we cannot know what the next instant will be

like, based on the current one. Like Humes temporality, Bergsons duration wanders

wild. But for Deleuze, this is because chance governs phenomenal changes. From one

instant to the next, the fate of phenomena is decided by a cast of dice. And every new

phenomenal experience modifies our habits. So these unpredictable changes alter who

we are. Hence, we repeatedly leap the depths between one instant and the next, ever

arriving in completely new worlds as unexpected selves.

So how then might we characterize Deleuzes phenomenal temporality? It is like

Humes time, where moments are discretely distinct. Deleuze calls this the "rule of

discontinuity or instantaneity in repetition." He writes, the present does not stop


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moving by leaps and bounds which encroach upon one another. (DR79) And it is

qualitatively discontinuous and unpredictable, like Bergsons duration. We experience

the phenomenon of time as a procession of intensities. We leap great depths from one

instant to the next. So Deleuzes time is discrete, intense, and unpredictable, unlike

Husserls continuous, extensive, and lawful flow of phenomena.

So chance decides the way phenomena change. And phenomenal changes determine

our habits of contraction. But if that is so, then are we merely passive players in our

lives, like a sound-system that merely plays-back the recorded music that is fed into

it? Deleuze turns back to Bergsons levels of contraction and expansion to explain

why this is not so.

Recall how we continually swing between two poles of the cone, from living moment-

to-moment in our bodily habits at the instantaneous tip of the cone, all the way up to a

dream-like state where we step-back from our bodys activity, so that memories can

expand and be contemplated more distinctly. In between these two extremes are an

infinity of other levels of contraction and relaxation. Now, it seems that we do not

have much control over which phenomena will appear to us, and how they will do so.

In a sense, this means we do not choose very much of the contents that will enter our lives. However, there is one thing that is always a creation of our free choice. We

decide for ourselves how much or how little to contract our memories at any given

moment. Deleuze says that a succession of present moments expresses a destiny when


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they play out the same thing, the same story, but at different levels: here more or less

relaxed, there more or less contracted. We are continually fluctuating our states

between living in the moment and stepping back into daydream. This melodic line of

continuous variation is the living tune that we write for ourselves.

Deleuze explains, Each chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps even his lyrics, but the

tune remains the same, and underneath all the lyrics the same tra-la-la, in all possible

tones and pitches. So this is Deleuzes melody of destiny. Chance calls the tune of

our lives. But we choose how to play it.

shores.corry.melodiesoftime.deleuzestudies.2009

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