re:habitus, representation

[from Melissa]
WHOOPS - pressed send instead of cancel.

Anyway, Chris, I guess before I can think of a response I want to
clear some technical things up about the question.

I wouldn't say that habitus is "maintained in the pure past" - the
present is rather the most contracted degree _of_ the past, a la
Bergson, the point of the cone. In fact, if we follow this line, the 
present would not be virtual at all, but rather the actual, or at least 
the actualisation of the virtual (the past is the virtual that runs
alongside the actual, and is sometimes actualised). But then, I've been reading
Bergson, and maybe I'm making the equivalence too strong.

The generality thing: again, a prepositional problem. I dont think the
general is _in_ habitus, but rather produced by it, or extracted by it.
And this generality, on my reading, just _is_ the difference that habit
draws from repetition, or rather it is the difference that allows
repetition to exist at all (nb. only a certain _kind_ of repetition -
there are several in D&R). This is perhaps unclear. Ny reading is that in
the passive synthesis of habit, elements, which of themselves would have
no relation to each other, not even that of succession, are contracted,
this contraction being the site of a difference, namely the site where
the particular is converted into the general (nb. this is even not quite
right. I think it is rather the site where the _singular_, the free
element, bifurcates into an immediate past, which is the realm of the
particular, and an immediate future, which is the realm of the general...)

the sense thing: I am not sure that habitus is feeling or sense as such.
My reading of the passage you refer you is that Deleuze is distinguishing
"his" habitus from Bergson's and Hume's, which "leave us at the level of
perceptual and sensible syntheses". He wants to distinguish a sensibility
of the whole organism, from the "sensibility of the senses" themselves,
which no longer have much to do with feeling, as we know it, but simply
consists in the contractions and contemplations that Deleuze outlines -
the distinction perhaps from the feeling that we "have" and the feeling that
we "are".

So, I think each the particular and the general function within each habitus,
but you could also see each habitus producing its "particular generality", ie the generality of one habitus could form an element that would serve as the
particular for another....

Better stop there for now...What do you think?

Melissa

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