Iterate

To utter again or repeatedly; iterative means characterized by or involving repetition or recurrence. According to the on line Mirriam Webster Dictionary, the first known use of the word was in the 15^th Century.

This word can refer to the act of repeating a process, usually with the aim of approaching a desired goal or target (every spring I wait for my Tulipa Tarda to come up, and then I get ready to plant the annuals).  The results of one iteration are the starting point for the next.

Iteration is used in mathematics with functions and in the sieve of Eratosthenes.  The latter is a process to find all the prime numbers up to a given limit, and is usually done by computer through an algorithm, using a repetitive process. Iteration is used in computer programming (looping), as well as in business to develop and deliver increments of a product of process.

In renga, a Japanese collaborative poetry, three, four and up to fourteen or fifteen people work together to write a poem. The first stanza contains 5 – 7 – 5 sound units, the next 7 – 7 and then it`s back to 5 – 7 – 5, and the pattern repeats.  Haiku developed as a separate form of poetry from the first verse of the renga.

In his book, Difference and Repition (1968), French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze spoke of three different levels of time in which repetition occurs. One might think these would be past, present, and future, but according to Deleuze’s theory, the present contains both past and future.  His levels of time are passive synthesis exemplified by habit; active synthesis exemplified by memory (i.e. a repetition of time); and empty time that breaks free of simple repetition of time because of a huge symbolic event (e.g. Oedipus’ murder of his father). The latter seems to me have something to do with becoming part of an archetype, a Jungian sort of view, perhaps. (I find the above interesting, though I’m not sure that I really understand Deleuze or Derrida for that matter.)

A contemporary of Deleuze was philosopher Jacques Derrida. The on line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Derrida states:

 “What is happening right now is a kind of event, different from every other now I have ever experienced. Yet, also in the present, I remember the recent past and I anticipate what is about to happen. The memory and the anticipation consist in repeatability. Because what I experience now can be immediately recalled, it is repeatable and that repeatability therefore motivates me to anticipate the same thing happening again.”

Side note: Derrida also originated deconstructionism, a way of criticizing literature, philosophy and political institutions.

Though I think repetition can be useful, I also wonder if when we get up, have breakfast, brush our teeth, and go through the routines of our days perhaps we are living lives of boring iteration (my version of Henry David Thoreau: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”).