morgan woodfall.

an unfinished part of an essay on ‘adlerianism’.

Bergson finds himself at odds with the arrival of the quantum. Science, forever the enemy of the untouchable quality of duration, suddenly develops a technology to resolve the apparent contradiction between divisions at time t and the experience of indivisible continuity expressed by our lived durations. Waves transform from expressions of a field to expressions of a series of multiplicitous incidences (waves) – in other words, the exact idea Adler expresses when he says that our lives are discrete moments between which we dance. The quantum aspect of discrete quantities at the smallest levels determines the between-ness that resolves duration into times t… Bergson, then, is wrong only in the thrust of his distinction and not in his initial explication – there really is something like a cone or structure of memory which touches the present and endows us with a textual sense of the plane of immanence, the principle fold between transformed lightness and regressive darkness, but this in no way excludes discrete quantities from the actuality of being. Discrete quantities are no longer an abstraction but an element or force (an individuum). A wave can turn into a particle and back but only by emerging into inbetween-ness out of the repetition of being. Contra Bergson, it only takes a discrete series of particles to go from time t to the continuity of duration. Discrete quantities in Bergson are yet to be endowed with the force of acting that enables them to develop waves in their actual form as expressive of plastic forces and expressed by combinations of discrete series. However, we do not want to fall foul of multiplying categories of entities beyond what is necessary and sufficient among the entities in themselves. So when we are asked by Adler to live in the moment, we do not yet know what he means unless we imagine particles as discrete quantities that are nonetheless expressive in their inbetween-ness of a ‘memory of the present’, a continuity forever arriving in the discrete. In concise terms, waves as a phenomenon belong to and are determined by an inbetween-ness which we cannot imagine without discreteness as a starting point, and yet, the virtual primacy of waves, and by extension duration, in assembling the world as it happens, or as it becomes, necessitates a multiplicity of discrete quantities such that there is never not an inbetween to constitute the ordering of things as an active process. A note is never one beat or two but multiple, a series, and the ‘frequency’ is always dancing between the beats until we slow it down and discreteness returns. Existence tends to go at a certain pace, always building speed onto slowness until duration is achieved and that speed and slowness can be reimagined at a second, third, n order. When we are asked to imagine out of what basic quantum strata the universe in its all its diverse repetitions and creations was created, we often fail to understand that for things to undertake the kinds of phase transitions necessary for a diversity to sustain itself as a diversity. One or two are both not enough – being only difference or unity, both would surely pass back into absence. It is when difference happens over and over again that a reliable fabric of reality can imagine becoming itself. 

Why is there something rather than nothing? Between some things is always nothing, and yet there is never ‘some thing between nothings’. Perhaps this lends nothingness a pre-universal primacy. Certainly when we speak of the ‘void’ or ‘emptiness’ we gesture at such an idea. And yet there were no rules at this stage, only tendencies – nothing was stronger than something without being superior to it. In this case it took something overcoming nothing, progressively and by incorporating nothing into the fabric of its series in stages, to proliferate the quantum into a time-bound diversity of self-constituting positivities – a universe. Retaining nothing as its contingent expression of unity among the myriad repetitions of self-identity perhaps expressed by the quark or its exceeding substrate, being won the war for being. Note that this account is agnostic with regards to the overall primacy of nothingness, only expressing that for now something rather than nothing tends to fix our attention and bind us to the real. Nothingness lives at the fringes of our lives, embroiled in positivity as they are, dissolving not our objects but our ideas the longer they insist upon themselves, hacking at the fringes of our arguments, insisting that what we take to be concrete is only concrete in virtue of itself – solidity is a circular definition. And yet nothingness never seems to win out. It cannot even persuade us that things could be any which way, that something ought to lose purely due to its ad hoc personality, its tendency to create absurdities. No, we insist, even the Hegelians know that reason guarantees the shape of the universe to be this rather than that – to have life rather than lack it, to have a complex array of forces whose indefeasability expresses a note of the rational rather than lack definition, to continue existing, to become being for so long and with so little rest. Being has not yet given up on us, its strangest production.

It is important to clarify a term of art here so that we might fully understand what is meant by ‘inbetweenness’. It is easy to imagine that the between is a kind of interval; but intervals are not what we mean when we describe differences of the kind which are assembled at the smallest level. Instead we have two points which distinguish intervals from the inbetween: for one, when a philosopher seeks to reduce reality to the smallest possible unit or the simplest simple, we will insist that he cannot get beyond at least three things, or in a more general sense a series, without going back before existence – for us, being is a crowd phenomenon which expresses difference in the form of relations between self-identicals. The reason that being needs the third to become itself is because we know that the quantum cannot sustain itself for itself. The quantum requires a tense situation in order to resolve into the indivisible diversity which Bergson diagnoses in the arrangement of spatial phenomena in time. We know that nonetheless, there must be some kind of self-identity at play because we are trying to be as simple as possible, and we have not yet made what is general and universal out of what is simple. So we must imagine self-identity as something which is at once specific and universal, concrete and conceptual. These contradictions dissolve at the level of the first and the second. It is when the contradictions can be held in a flow that they sustain, by being indivisible for themselves and thus spreading difference out from themselves into other things. A ‘quantum discrete’ contains the ingredients for a diverse universe, but must work together with other ‘discretes’ to extract this from itself and impose itself into reality. Secondly, at all times during this process properties are emergent phenomena which are ‘waiting in the wings’. Our radical claim is going to be that when Bergson appeals to the spontaneous creativity of the indivisible flow of reality, he too quickly eschews the influence of the discrete on the indivisible because he has not yet understood the dual quantum and crowd nature of The discrete in its progression towards reality. And so it is not much effort at all to imagine that properties like extension, mass and so on can be derived from something as insular as self-identity – first because it is self-identity within a crowd that ensures that difference and then diversity can be introduced to reality, and second because we can already make a wave. The problem is that waves are different from one another in a way that ‘discretes’ cannot be; they have qualitative differences, which we will call intervals. Inbetween-ness is a necessary condition for the production of waves, but once produced a wave can differ from other waves in frequency and amplitude in such a way that accords with Bergson’s diagnosis of the ‘impossibility’ of the future very closely. No wave predicts another wave and no wave is ‘the same’ as another wave. A discrete is similar in all respects to another discrete except for it being different in virtue of itself, whereas a wave is ‘distant’ from another wave most of the time, by virtue of degree – again, we call this interval. We will need to introduce some non-simple force to account for the orthogonal differentiation of inbetween-ness and interval – we will call this tempo for now – because “a repetition will never by itself form a progression”. Tempo is thus responsible for the strange property that Bergson’s duration has of bending and contorting, of not merely expressing conjunctions but contractions, productive concatenations whose results, as we have elaborated in the simple, paradoxically deny the divisibility of their components to express a continuity of substance. It is worth knowing before we understand tempo, this second and most important reason why an interval is not the inbetween, that tempo in its discrete form is called an individuum. We asked earlier why there is something rather than nothing, and answered that there was an eventual tendency towards the formation of a crowd, and in turn a series, among the collapsing flux of being and non-being. We can also call this tendency an individuum – a force which makes individuals its goal-object and uses crowds to seize them from this flux of being. Existence goes at the pace of the individuum, to be exact. It goes at the pace of the tendency to not only be but have, in the sense that Deleuze sees the monads. Something has a crowd, and in dominating it, in organising its little monads, makes an individual of it, by de-emphasising its difference in itself and emphasising its difference for itself. Having is active and permanently tense, and it is in this most important sense that the discrete crosses into the continuous. There is a midground between nonbeing, something, and becoming – it is to own, to possess, to bind. Crowds of simples, expressing difference in themselves by way of self-identity, do not merely float around expressing self-identity for themselves; whatever seized them out of the flux of being and non-being has continued to influence them, has extracted from their internal contradictions a distinction between a difference in and for themselves, and has made this manifest by organising them from crowds into individuals. At the level of the wave, whereby the tendency in the discrete has continued its conjunctions of doubly different individuals, we now develop the emergent phenomena of frequency and amplitude from the intrinsic phenomenon of tempo. In other words, tempo is an initial level of the individuum, which with its transitory force of ‘having’ distinct from nothing and something is seeking to differentiate, and is in particular the level which we experience as a distribution of diversity into reality.