§95. Empirical Repetition
Wittgenstein discussed a puzzle about repetition, doing the same thing again, for example, following the same rule. Let us say I am shown the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and asked to continue.
I have to do the same again, apply the same rule, but what is the rule? Anything I do will be the same according to one rule and different according to another. “How can a rule show me what I have to do at this point?” Wittgenstein's interlocutor cries. “Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.” Rule following is paradoxical because we feel constrained: the series is determined by its rule and only one continuation is the same and right. Yet nothing actually determines what we must do, and anything we do is logically consistent with the whole past. In his discussion, Wittgenstein tries to defuse the paradox (“It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here”), while Deleuze intensifies it.19The mathematical character of the puzzle is for exposition only. The problem is posed for anything, for existence. The endurance of beings is a repetition and as such a series of differences, posing the problem of when something is the same and when it has changed. Individual endurance “transforms an empirical sequence into a series: a burst of series... which tend in themselves in the direction of a limit, which orients and inspires the first sequence (the before) and gives way to another sequence organized as series which tends in turn toward another limit (the after).” Endurance and continuity are problematic, a matter of tendencies only, no matter how powerful.20
Before I can do the same again or follow the same rule, the past must become a signal to which I respond, and before I can respond to a signal I have to notice it. The notice cannot be my action, or involve judgment or interpretation. I cannot do anything except receive what memory offers in recognition.
A signal from the past finds me, not I it. It feels right, so I take it, recollect it, make past images operant again, adding their experience to choice. All we can offer to memory are problems and questions. Appropriate recollection either comes or not, feels right or not, solves the problem or not. Deleuze describes this attitude of problematic receptivity to the past as “contemplation.” The difference from classical theorein or contemplatio is that while theoretical contemplation gazes upon a fully present form, the contemplation with which we open ourselves to the past is not a gaze cast over a landscape of forms, or a relation to anything actual or present. It is more like peering into fog, awaiting the obscure yet distinct image of past existence. We cannot act on the past, and merely feel recollection when it comes and take its experience into perception and choice. Memory is not a mechanism and recollection is not a mechanical effect. No mental faculty can act on memories, which as virtual and past do not exist as actualities on which a power can act. Mnemic receptivity has to be thought “in terms of the passive syntheses of contemplation or [temporal] contraction.”21A problem arises, a shock, a sudden instability. How do I go on, repeat, or endure? Where else but in the past should we look for an answer? So I attend to the past and await a signal. It comes (if it does) as a felt resemblance that condenses into a diagram of what “doing the same” would feel like now. The signal is felt rather than distinctly perceived. It is not visual or propositional but proprioceptive: we feel a relation; that is how relations are cognized, as James said. This relation is to the past and is therefore virtual, for no actual relation, whose terms are no less actual, can be a relation to the past, where terms are virtual. A rule is a virtual tendency. Indeed, continuity of all varieties, all the ways that things endure or go on the same, is virtual tendency.
The becoming and enduring of nature is one infinitely heterogeneous virtual tendency, Bergson's elan vital.Any rule that people really follow is a virtual tendency. Not actual or individual and never present, the tendency is obscure yet distinctly palpable to the trained body in the virtual difference among elements of a series. Logically speaking, of course, more than one rule will always define a series to a point and then diverge arbitrarily, on the model of “grue.” But we are not concerned with logic. If people are following a rule, then a tendency exists, whether logic apprehends it or not. In fact, logic cannot apprehend it, as only feeling finds relations and a tendency is a relation, indeed a temporal relation, temporal interpenetration. We feel the continuity, the sensible consistency, between the tendency of action in the past and what we begin to prepare in the present. We lay ourselves open to the past, feel a tendency, prepare a movement, and act. The tendency is not an infinitely determinate continuation and confers no rationality on what people do, but it is the presupposition of rules really followed.
Choice in following a rule is not blind. We select the tendency we remember, and that remembering is a feeling, what feels the same as former action. It is not a judgment whose ground might be assessed, but rather a resonance, a felt resemblance arcing across time from past to present, the affect of continuity, the feeling of contraction and interpenetration. Is this seriously an answer to Wittgenstein? Does it explain how someone can mean green, say, and not have meant grue (by “green”) all along? It depends on what one expects in the way of an explanation.
The idea is that when we follow the same rule we respond to the recollected feeling of a virtual tendency to which training has initiated us. This virtual tendency does not logically determine one act as uniquely consistent, though the way it tends is the way it tends for all who follow the rule. There is no authority for the certainty with which we act, which is felt and not a product of judgment. The rightness of a response to the continuation of the series is ultimately a matter of virtual tendency in a socius, as Wittgenstein seemed to say (“agreement in form of life”). This explanation of following a rule can be taken in an empirical spirit, as counteracting a superstitious sublimation of practice, an antinomian part empirical philosophy has played ever since Epicurus, and whose value Wittgenstein also acknowledged.22