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Organising time: contraction, synthesis, contemplation

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14759550902925302

1477-2760

Simon Lilley,

French Literature and Critical Theory

Abstract In his exploration of 'repetition for itself', Deleuze (2004a), beginning with Hume, invites us to see imagination, prior to understanding, as site of contraction of instants and place of synthesis of time, through contemplation. But synthesis and contemplation here are not the deliberative work of the mind. Rather, they occur 'in the mind… prior to all memory and all reflection' (91, original emphasis). Working through Bergson and Butler, Deleuze moves us up and down different levels of his contraction–synthesis–contemplation triptych in dizzying whorls of mutuality of the active and passive. Down to matter, through its contemplation by the ordering of organism; up to memory and its potential for reflection and representation; down again (or is that up?) to reminiscence. In the process time slips. not by but in and out, as variously both condition and agent. Kant and Descartes are contrasted, identity put in its place, the difference between repetitions of the eternal return celebrated. Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan, Klein and Borges circle this difference, both nurturing and threatening it as they invite in and expel the suffocations of the same. Proust, Joyce, Caroll and, finally, Plato's Socratic cipher cross the stage of the page as imitation and resemblance transform into simulacra and 'give… way to repetition' (156). It is a text about time and organisation and difference worth repeating. In this paper, such repetition is enacted through a close reading of the temporal in Michel Tournier's Friday or the other island: a repetition of Defoe (his precursors and his political economic apologist followers) through which time, organisation and their sympathies are revealed in the re‐writing of a 'world without others' (Deleuze 2004b Deleuze, G. 2004b. "Michel Tournier and the world without others". In The logic of sense, Edited by: Deleuze, G., Lester, M., Stivale, C. and Boundas, C.V. 341–59. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar]). Keywords: representationrepetitionDeleuzeRobinsonade Notes 1. This paper has benefited from comments provided by participants at the It's about time! Increasing the temporal focus of organizational research symposium, that took place in Maastricht in June 2006, as well as those who witnessed its presentation at the University of Leicester. I would also particularly like to thank Arko Sen, Martin Parker, Sverre Spoelstra, Alan McKinlay and the anonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts. Inadequacies that remain are, of course, all my own work. 2. See Lightfoot and Lilley (2002 Lightfoot, G. and Lilley, S. 2002. Moments, monuments and explication: The standing of the Millennium Dome. Culture and Organization, 8(3): 239–54. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) for an attempt at a disruptive application of these ideas to the monumentalisation of a moment constituted by the Millennium Dome. 3. Daniel Defoe's text was originally published in 1719, bearing the full title, The life and strange and surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It 'is often considered to be the first English novel' (http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/17/31/frameset.html, accessed 28 April 2006). Defoe's text is itself a repetition, with fictional precursors including Henry Neville's Isle of pines and the apparently 'non‐fictional' source being Woodes Rogers's writing of Selkirk's story, Cruising voyage. Derivatives of the Robinsonnade are too numerous to mention, but the interested reader could do considerably worse in pursuing critical readings of its influence than beginning with Marx (1990 Marx, K. 1990. Capital: A critique of political economy, volume one, Edited by: Fowkes, Ben. London: Penguin Classics. [Google Scholar], 169 et passim). Concerns around the 'reality' of the inspiration for the story and the ways in which it may or may not have travelled to Defoe continue to this day (see, e.g., Takahashi et al. 2007 Takahashi, D., Caldwell, D.H., Cáceres, I., Calderón, M., Morrison‐Low, A.D., Saavedra, M.A. and Tate, J. 2007. Excavation at Aguas Buenas, Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile, of a gunpowder magazine and the supposed campsite of Alexander Selkirk, together with an account of early navigational dividers. Post‐Medieval Archaeology, 41(2): 270–304. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 4. A Bible, previously retrieved by Crusoe prior to his work on the Escape, immediately following his shipwrecking, appears to be the only text to make it to the island in traditionally functional form. 5. The new name Robinson has given to his island following the ordering and mapping of it he had embarked upon since the hallucination catalysed his turning away from the sea and the mire. On his arrival he had titled his new habitat the Island of Desolation, but: Being struck, during his reading of the Bible, by the admirable paradox whereby the Christian religion makes despair the unforgivable sin and hope one of the three cardinal virtues, he resolved to call it Speranza, the Island of Hope, a tuneful, sunny word which, moreover, evoked the wholly profane memory of a hot‐blooded Italian girl whom he had once known. (Tournier 1984 Tournier, M. 1984. Friday or the other island, Edited by: Denny, N. Harmondsworth, , UK: Penguin. [Google Scholar], 42) 6. Tournier's Robinson thus begins the accumulation of a surplus that can never be sufficient for its transcendental goal. However the preservation of production is for him superior to consumption not only because it enables expansion of the present to the future but also because it invokes others in its contradistinction to consumption: 'one always consumes alone and for oneself' (Deleuze 2004b Deleuze, G. 2004b. "Michel Tournier and the world without others". In The logic of sense, Edited by: Deleuze, G., Lester, M., Stivale, C. and Boundas, C.V. 341–59. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar], 353). Defoe's Robinson is most easily read, needless to say, as adopting precisely the opposite take: 'evil begins with surplus production' (Deleuze 2004b Deleuze, G. 2004b. "Michel Tournier and the world without others". In The logic of sense, Edited by: Deleuze, G., Lester, M., Stivale, C. and Boundas, C.V. 341–59. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar], 353). 7. Or perhaps better, following Tuan (2001 Tuan, Y‐F. 2001. Space and place: The perspectives of experience, Minneapolis, MN: University. of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]), his transformation of the clutter and disorder of the latter into the tidy idealisations of space. 8. Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique is the title under which the original French text appeared in 1967, a formulation in which the meaning of the latter sub‐clause would seem to oscillate between the limbs and limbo of the Pacific. Or, of course, such oscillation could simply be the result my limited understanding of French! 9. Friday, as we shall see, will be the vehicle that enables both to reach this destination, the end of their epic journey, but he is not yet present. 10. Sympathies with Heidegger (particularly, of course, 2000 Heidegger, M. 2000. Being and time, Edited by: Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]) are, it should be needless to note, substantial, to say the least! 11. Perhaps the ultimate conceit against God, particularly for a (once) puritanical, Quaker draper's son. 12. 'Reminiscence does not simply refer us back from a present present to former ones, from recent loves to infantile ones, from our lovers to our mothers … [B]eyond the lover and beyond the mother, coexistent with the one and contemporary with the other, lies the never lived reality of the Virgin' (Deleuze 2004 Deleuze, G. 2004a. "Repetition for itself". In Difference and repetition, Edited by: Deleuze, G. and Patton, P. 90–163. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar], 107). 13. A practice which takes place over several months before the 'moral significance' of a spider sting to his member is taken to symbolise 'French sickness' and reveal the 'vegetable way' to be another experiment which should be discontinued (Tournier 1984 Tournier, M. 1984. Friday or the other island, Edited by: Denny, N. Harmondsworth, , UK: Penguin. [Google Scholar], 100). 14. The production here is some rather unusual mandrakes, which Robinson takes to referring to as his daughters. 15. Recall that it was this that was lost prior to and through his retreat to the mire. And it is ongoing fear of similar retreat that continues to animate the perpetuation of ordering and organisation (Tournier 1984 Tournier, M. 1984. Friday or the other island, Edited by: Denny, N. Harmondsworth, , UK: Penguin. [Google Scholar], 97). 16. The allusion is intended to Serre's Parasite (for particularly lucid articulations of the often difficult argument to be found there see Brown 2002 Brown, S. 2002. Michel Serres: Science, translation and the logic of the parasite. Theory, Culture and Society, 19(3): 1–28. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2004 Brown, S. 2004. Parasite logic. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 17(4): 383–95. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 17. See Deleuze (2004c Deleuze, G. 2004c. "Asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible". In Difference and repetition, Edited by: Deleuze, G. and Patton, P. 280–329. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar]) for some phenomenally productive reflection upon the nourishment provided by such left overs for those who wish to inhabit a world worthy of the name. 18. Friday's slaying of the old Robinson to enable the new one to emerge and soar in the sky – to inhabit the lightness of air, the surface rather than the depth of the earth, to fly and sing – is repeated for us in Tournier's text through the catalyst of change's slaying of the great goat Andoar and his transformation of his body into kite and Aeolian harp ('[T]he only instrument whose music does not need time for its development but exists entirely in the movement', Tournier 1984 Tournier, M. 1984. Friday or the other island, Edited by: Denny, N. Harmondsworth, , UK: Penguin. [Google Scholar], 179; see also 158–71; Deleuze 2004b Deleuze, G. 2004b. "Michel Tournier and the world without others". In The logic of sense, Edited by: Deleuze, G., Lester, M., Stivale, C. and Boundas, C.V. 341–59. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar]). 19. See Deleuze (2004b Deleuze, G. 2004b. "Michel Tournier and the world without others". In The logic of sense, Edited by: Deleuze, G., Lester, M., Stivale, C. and Boundas, C.V. 341–59. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar], particularly 357–59). 20. To speak of the new when one lives 'wholly in the moment' is clearly something of a paradox. For an exploration of such, drawing upon some of the same sources as those that animate Deleuze (2004a Deleuze, G. 2004a. "Repetition for itself". In Difference and repetition, Edited by: Deleuze, G. and Patton, P. 90–163. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar]), see the magical Borges (1970 Borges, J.L. 1970. "A new refutation of time". In Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings, , 2nd ed., Edited by: Yates, D.A. and Irby, J.E. 252–69. London: Penguin Books. [Google Scholar]). 21. Mirroring of course the new Robinson's understanding of his new position in the sun. 22. The trade between Eros and Thanatos in Tournier's novel is a theme of Deleuze's (2004b Deleuze, G. 2004b. "Michel Tournier and the world without others". In The logic of sense, Edited by: Deleuze, G., Lester, M., Stivale, C. and Boundas, C.V. 341–59. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar]) reading of text. This trade in its less specific form also features heavily in Deleuze's Difference and repetition, where its relation to matters temporal is most explicitly explored in 'Repetition for itself' (2004a Deleuze, G. 2004a. "Repetition for itself". In Difference and repetition, Edited by: Deleuze, G. and Patton, P. 90–163. London: Continuum. [Google Scholar]). Perhaps the neatest introduction to this most dangerously fecund of themes is Caillois (1984 Caillois, R. 1984. "Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia". In OCTOBER: The first decade, Edited by: Shepley, J. Paris: Gallimard. [Google Scholar]). 23. See Žižek's (2001 Žižek, S. 2001. On belief, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) writing on 'Christian repetition' (148) and 'the Christian position of enunciation' (141), also utilised in Lightfoot and Lilley (2002 Lightfoot, G. and Lilley, S. 2002. Moments, monuments and explication: The standing of the Millennium Dome. Culture and Organization, 8(3): 239–54. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]).