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

Conceal, reveal, revisit

“We know that things and people are always forced to conceal themselves, have to conceal themselves when they begin. What else could they do? They come into being within a set which no longer includes them and, in order not to be rejected, have to project the characteristics which they retain in common with the set. The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured” (3).

At first glance, the quote above seems to suggest a progression characterized by linearity. There is an initial “coming into being” that leads to an intermediary state marked by the appearance of an essence. What would follow “the middle” as the course of “development” extends? One could imagine a sort of “regression/development,” where the thing or person turns to attend to the initial stage and probes the nature of the “coming into being within a set which no longer includes them” with acquired knowledge of the essence at its disposal, in a sense, causing the trajectory to stray from what initially appeared to be a sense of linearity. The stages of this “development” would appear able to converse with and translate each other. I am not sure that there is any direct way of mapping this concept onto the nature of the linkages inherent in the three levels discussed by Deleuze (sets and closed systems, the movement of translation, the duration or the whole), but it is not surprising that his discussion of these three levels would lead one to dwell on the quote above. In moving past the notion of simple linearity – in the mind, if not in time – one is enticed by the idea of oscillations between “divisions and reunions,” which may be sensed in the quote above, and is certainly present elsewhere in Deleuze’s exploration of the cinema…

“Given that it is a consciousness which carries out these divisions and reunions, we can say of the shot that it acts like a consciousness. But the sole cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, not the hero; it is the camera – sometimes human, sometimes inhuman or superhuman” (20).