Does this sound familiar?

Since I'm reading Whitehead's Process and Reality at the same time, I am struck by similarities, and these distract me to the point that I must share it with you. The first following quote is from Whitehead, the second is Deleuze talking about Bergson:

"Consciousness is only the last and greatest of ... elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the eternal totality from which it originates and which it embodies."

and

"...further study of consciousness lead him [Bergson] to demonstrate that it only existed in so far as it opened itself upon a whole, by coinciding with the opening up of a whole."

Deleuze goes on to explain how closed systems are discernible as separate objects, but movement, which changes the relation of these separate objects, actually reflects qualitative change in the entire open system of the whole. Thus consciousness seems to take the place of one of these apparently separate objects (it is why we feel so separate!) but in fact, it exists separately only insofar that it is open to the whole - a by-product, if you will, of the whole and its internal, immanent movement. If we are to follow this train of thought diligently, I believe we would come to the insight that every consciousness is indeed indivisible from the whole - to divide it into a subject ('your' conscious subject, or 'my' conscious subject) actually makes a false cut in duration. Changing a method of selection to a concrete object: something Whitehead might refer to as "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness."

pile-up

It seems to me that the non-linear coming into being that Ryan mentions is also Deleuze’s second aspect of time; no longer a succession of movements and their units, but time as simultaneism and simultaneity (46). This second aspect of time is the fundamentally open whole in which the indivisibility of movement is understood as continuous and limitless, always giving rise to something new. I think of this open whole as the plane of immanence, which Deleuze tells us is both the movement established between sets and the movement which keeps them open, allowing them to move and change and get messed up with us as bodies, too