repetition

  ---- by Adrian Parr

  The concept of 'repetition', as it appears in the Deleuzian corpus, encompasses a variety of other concepts such as 'difference', 'differentiation', 'deterritorialisation', and 'becoming'. To begin with, it should be noted that for Deleuze, repetition is not a matter of the same thing occurring over and over again. That is to say, repetition is connected to the power of difference in terms of a productive process that produces variation in and through every repetition. In this way, repetition is best understood in terms of discovery and experimentation; it allows new experiences, affects and expressions to emerge. To repeat is to begin again; to affirm the power of the new and the unforeseeable. In so far as life itself is described as a dynamic and active force of repetition producing difference, the force of which Deleuze encourages us to think of in terms of 'becoming', forces incorporate difference as they repeat giving rise to mutation.

  The first question that arises is: How is repetition produced? For Deleuze, repetition is produced via difference, not mimesis. It is a process of ungrounding that resists turning into an inert system of replication. In fact, the whole Platonist idea of repeating in order to produce copies is completely undermined by Deleuze. For Deleuze maintains this approach is deeply flawed because it subsumes the creative nature of difference under an immobile system of resemblance. Deleuze refuses to seek an originary point out of which repetition can cyclically reproduce itself. He insists that the process does not depend upon a subject or object that repeats, rather it is self-sustainable. Whilst repetition is potentially infinite, consisting of new beginnings, it is crucial we do not mistake this to be a linear sequence: the end of one cycle marking the beginning of the next.

  In his innovative discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return, Deleuze turns his back on a teleological understanding of repetition condemning such interpretations to be flawed. Instead, he insists that the process Nietzsche outlines is considerably more complicated than that: the return is an active affirmation that intensifies as it returns. Put differently, heterogeneity arises out of intensity. In addition, the return points to a whole that emerges through difference and variation: one and the multiple in combination. In his reading of Nietzsche, Deleuze explains in his 1968 work Difference and Repetition that this is the 'power of beginning and beginning again' (D 1994: 136).

  This now leads us on to the second question: What is repeated? First, it is important to note that repetition is not unidirectional, there is no object of repetition, no final goal toward which everything that repeats can be said to direct itself. What repeats, then, is not models, styles or identities but the full force of difference in and of itself, those pre-individual singularities that radically maximise difference on a plane of immanence. In an early essay from 1956 on Henri Bergson, Deleuze insists repetition is more a matter of coexistence than succession, which is to say, repetition is virtual more than it is actual. It is this innovative understanding of the process of difference and differentiation that mutates the context through which repetition occurs.

  Thus, in a very real sense, repetition is a creative activity of transformation. When Deleuze speaks of the 'new' that repetition invokes, he is likewise pointing to creativity, whereby habit and convention are both destabilised. The 'new', for Deleuze, is filled with innovation and actually prevents the trap of routines and clichés; the latter characterise habitual ways of living. As a power of the new, repetition calls forth a terra incognita filled with a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity. For instance, this is a far cry from Sigmund Freud who posited that we compulsively repeat the past, where all the material of our repressed unconscious pushes us to reiterate the past in all its discomfort and pain. Actually, psychoanalysis limits repetition to representation, and what therapy aims to do is stop the process entirely along with the disorders it gives rise to. Deleuze, on the other hand, encourages us to repeat because he sees in it the possibility of reinvention, that is to say, repetition dissolves identities as it changes them, giving rise to something unrecognisable and productive. It is for this reason that he maintains repetition is a positive power (puissance) of transformation.

  Connectives

   § active / reactive

   § becoming

   § difference

   § eternal return

   § psychoanalysis