I argue that all formations of empirical truth are and always have been socially constructed according to forms of meaning and value which change from era to era. This doesn’t mean that truth is ‘fake’, but that what you would call bias, distortion and prejudice are necessarily built into what it means to produce truth., that its meaning is contextually and social situated

What is different about the contemporary era compared with previous periods of history is not that it is Post Truth, but that a growing number of people are only now recognizing in our highly polarized times what has always been the case, but was until recently denied in favor of a ‘God’s eye’ view of truth, the inextricable relation between socially formed practices and the determination of truth. — Joshs

Here is a correct point of an extremely high level of polarization in the contemporary political community. Opposed parties always try to transform their particular interests into a universal, truthful articulation. However, paradoxically, nowadays, the dimension of truth is not primarily based on rationally organized discourses or representations of sets of values but on the relying on an affective factor. Collective social emotions have been amplified, echo-chambered, and structured by social and mass media. Post Truth era means that political discourses express primarily the self-referentiality and authenticity of a political subject of affect. As a result,
the opposing parties systematically attribute each other the status of an evil Other so that civil discourse becomes ultimately impossible.

The arbitrariness of the sign, per Saussure, refers to the conventional nature of the linkage between the signifier and the signified, iirc. But there are some famous studies suggesting that might be overstated a bit (bouba/kiki for starters).

Is it not language unless the meaning relation is conventional rather than natural? The traditional answer is obviously "yes" but I'm not so sure. Especially if you wonder how language could get started in the first place.

If it's not absolutely essential, then what's the relation here? Is it the other way? That is, conventional meanings as a subset of linguistic meaning? — Srap Tasmaner

The relation between the signifier and signified has become an object of a rigorous research and critique in some postmodernist theories of language. They discover the insufficient and even illusionary character of the conventional appearance of linguistic meanings. Instead, they emphasize the critical role of organizations of power, indirectly entertaining coercion and enforcement. For example, a gender theorist, Judith Butler, frames her project as an attempt to negotiate and relax the linguistically shaped ‘assignment of gender’ at an early age. “An utterance brings what it states into being (illocutionary) or makes a set of events happen consequently (perlocutionary)… A diffuse and complicated set of discursive and institutional powers comes with primary inscriptions and interpellations of others. In the case of gender, they affect us in uncontrollable ways, animating and structuring our responsiveness.” (Butler ‘Notes toward a performative theory of assembly,’ p. 29) In a more general manner, some thinkers assert that language entertains an essential link between implicit and coercive norms and an overall processes of socialization and identification.

It comes back to the issue of identity. Same kind is not identical kind. The same only continues to be itself slightly differently from one moment to the next. Iterability produces
"an imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”“Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion. (Derrida) — Joshs

Derrida wants to say here that the old ontological metaphysics, built around the notion of ‘presence’, is over. It means that the present that eludes our consciousness is the other, always unknown side of what sustains ‘pure repetition’. The significant part of whatever we are doing now, at this present time, is completely absent from what we can see or feel. Yet, it is not clear how the absolute break, ‘pure repetition’ is related to iterability. But what is the process of the production of the same? It should not be simply attributed to iterability, mark, or differance. The identical is not the ultimate gap designating one of these, but the structure of operative recursive connections, maintaining temporal stability of persistent self-reference.

Overall, I share your position, and you developed a high-quality argument. I want to add a few remarks.

There may be a giant hole in this argument. I gestured at the evidence that infants have a concept of object permanence, later acquire object identity, later still recognize other minds, and so on. That's all infra-linguistic, so aren't these very studies evidence that we have such concepts and that they are among the metaphysical assumptions I would place in our unconscious brains? — Srap Tasmaner

You could strengthen your argument by emphasizing the role of the social environment in infants’ acquiring patterns of permanence. The features of psychological development could be attributed to the historical but most stable factors of a child’s socio-communicative medium.

Another way I could put it is this: if there are invariants in the models our brains use, something we might call artifacts of those models, then those would in some sense be our "metaphysical assumptions." But I think there's a whole separate set of invariants at work in our linguistic communication with one another, and they need not be based on how our brains are modeling our bodies and environments; they are what we've landed on as the structure of our communication, and I think by and large the structure of our introspective thought reflects that structure, not the modeling our brains are doing below the level of our awareness. Our metaphysical assumptions, if there are such things, are probably no more accessible to us than they are to non-linguistic beings. There do seem to be a whole host of assumptions underlying our speech and our conscious thought, but no reason to think they are the "assumptions" of our unconscious modeling. — Srap Tasmaner

What do you mean by writing, ‘the structure of our introspective thought reflects the structure of our communication’? It looks closely to Searle’s explanation of the relation between sets of socio-behavioural, potentially linguistically articulated codes and blocks of ‘know-how,’ built into domains of our institutionalized milieu: “There is a set of dispositions that are sensitive and responsive to the specific content of the constitutive rules… The ‘Background’ is the set of “nonintentional or pre-intentional capacities, abilities, dispositions, and tendencies that enable intentional states to function. There is a parallelism between the functional structure of the Background and the intentional structure of the social phenomena to which the Background capacities relate”. (Searle, ‘The Construction of Social Reality’, pg. 143)
So, no unconscious modelling is built into the infrastructures of our brains or conscious thought. Yet, there is still a problem explaining the nature of Searle’s ‘parallelism’ or your thesis that ‘the structure of our introspective thought reflects the structure of our communication.’ Is there an utterly isomorphic relation? Do we rely entirely on the existence of self-sufficient processes built into a socio-technological system that functions independently of the personal motives of the participants? If so, we could explain inherent to ourselves identical repetitions, but the phenomenon of conscious intentionality becomes the secondary effect of the institutional practices conditioned by the ‘Background.’

there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist, nothing anywhere approaching the discussions of right & wrong, of politics, of aesthetics, even of whether you have enough evidence to conclude that your boyfriend is cheating on you. (Austin was fond of reading legal opinions, and thought philosophers were ignoring a great body of practical reasoning.) Ontology, as we here think of it, is a game that only philosophers play. — Srap Tasmaner

Sartre asserts that our everyday decisions sustain a two-level ontology. On the lower level, there is a domain of personal matters and choices, so that we ensure particular parcels of social reality. On the upper level, a personal intention resonates with the existence of a global aspects of collective projects. So, people regularly affirm that certain kinds of things and states of things exist. Some portions of the real world become objective facts that are only facts based on human decision and agreement. This kind of reality comes into existence in the performance of intentionality by humans, and it continues to exist only as far as the intentionality maintains it.

"If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man."
(Sartre, ' Existentialism and Humanism')

Thank you for interesting questions.

- Could you give an example of how a person would resort to standard explanatory schemes concerning their intentions?

- How does the issue of necessary statements arise in this context? — J

Often, one could resort to exposing her intentions during an interview or responding to a personal or professional conflict or misconduct. For Habermas, the primary example of communication coordination is a psychoanalytical dialogue during which participants reach a shared understanding of the common semantic content. He assumes that the asymmetrical inception may establish a symmetrical dialogue where a person and analyst have the same interpretation of the client’s background. Yet, it could be shown that psychoanalysis operates as the framework that imposes a set of boundaries and conditions, pre-given in advance. The participants recognize one another in their proper roles while their statements establish certain points. Seemingly natural and spontaneous, the dialogue is structured to constitute the normative character of the Other, her acts and statements.

- T/F is certainly one way of deciding a verification question, but why must the verifying procedure remain at this level? Why would the procedure be (necessarily) dogmatic? — J

In a more exact sense, the verifying procedure can proceed at two different levels: “Every speech-act-immanent obligation can be made good at two levels: immediately, in the context of the utterance, through indicating a corresponding normative context, or in discourse or in subsequent actions. If the immediate justification does not dispel an ad hoc doubt, we pass to the level of discourse where the subject of discursive examination is the validity of the underlying norm.” (Habermas “Communication and the Evolution of Society”p 67) So, when the ‘underlying norm’ is not immediately apparent, one needs to proceed to the more complicated process of exposing the inherent normative nature.

I agree that Habermas is searching for transcendental conditions. Are you placing this in opposition to a particular understanding of performativity? — J

Habermas’s project is about creating universal pragmatics as a development of the philosophy of performativity and a foundation for a general theory of society. He views his philosophy as opposing the radical critique of Reason in contemporary poststructuralism. He argues that Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault are exclusively focused on the role of power, and they cannot escape the ‘performative contradiction’ involved in using Reason to criticize Reason. Emphasizing the role of “the normative content that has to be acquired and justified from the rational potential inherent in everyday practice,” Habermas separates the theory of performativity from diagnosing an entanglement of forces that inheres in any seemingly settled state.

The stance may be incorporated within endless performative recontextualizations so that Habermas's requirement of the clear cognitive commitment to communication cannot be univocally verified.
— Number2018

Excellent point. Does it damage Habermas's theory? It may well, if we insist on understanding "clear cognitive commitment" as being the same as having an intention, and bring to bear some of the standard puzzles about intention. — J

No, it is not about having an obvious intention. ‘Clear cognitive commitment’ means that the speaker and her hearer, involved in the speech act, can offer a socially justified account of their communicative action. The intention should have the possibility of making it public, transparent,
and defendable: “the illocutionary force with which the speaker carries out his speech act and influences the hearer can be understood only on the basis of a reciprocal recognition of validity claims.”

the performative nature of the participants' illocutionary force remains opaque and undetermined not just in the discussed examples but in most non-normative social situations.
— Number2018

Why do you say this? Again, I may not be understanding clearly, but I would have said that "opaque" is much too strong, "undetermined" usually not the case, and that in general we "read" each other's illocutionary stances very well. The question I see being raised is more along the lines of, "But doesn't Habermas assume intention as trumping performance?" How we then go on to determine intention is a separate and, I'm saying, generally easier question. Could you say more? — J

The point I defend here is that even if "in general, we "read" each other's illocutionary stances very well," in most cases, we cannot accurately account for our performative situations. When asked about our or other intentions, we usually quickly resort to standard explanatory schemes. Habermas himself admits the necessity of covering the gap. "In order to make necessary statements, we need to change our perspective…We need a theoretically constituted perspective." Yet, the rationality of verifying procedure remains at the level of the logical-positivist constative utterance. In fact, Habermas's commitment to communication verification requirements means resorting to the dogmatic question of reference or constative truth.

We encounter the dictator and the free-rider in actual life, not merely as philosophical possibilities. We've gotten so used to hearing both these stances expressed (with varying degrees of subtlety, presumably) that we "understand them completely," but we need to ask whether this is really the case. Are we simply assuming their rationality -- a kind of "familiarity breeds plausibility" situation? — J

I appreciate your patience and trying to understand my posts. Again, I would like to clarify the relation between the two given stances and Habermas's theory of communicative action. Supposedly, there is a performative contradiction between the content
of each stance and the communicated statement made by the acting individual. Accordingly, if the contents are accurate, the participants were not fully committed to the rationality of communicative action. Reciprocally, if individuals involved are truly committed, they should not be referred to their situations. This situation constitutes a false dilemma. Because for Habermas, the claim for rationality is non-separatable from the binding force of reciprocal recognition of validity claims: "With their illocutionary acts, speaker and hearer raise validity claims and demand they be recognized. But this recognition need not follow irrationally, since the validity claims have a cognitive character and can be checked" (Habermas, 'Communication and the Evolution of Society,' p 63). Both stances do not satisfy this description of communicative action. One cannot demand recognition of the validity of her egoistic, self-selfish intentions. Yet, on the other hand, both cases could point out the essential flaw of Habermas's theory itself. It can be traced back to one Derrida vs. Searle debate aspect. For Searle, any language usage is precluded by the communication of intended meanings. On the contrary, for Derrida, communication is carried along not by clear subjective intentions but by impersonal performative forces. Let's say that your first 'dictator' stance is proclaimed by an actor playing her role. Or was it stated during a political debate, or was it just a joke? The stance may be incorporated within endless performative recontextualizations so that Habermas's requirement of the clear cognitive commitment to communication cannot be univocally verified. Further, the performative nature of the participants' illocutionary force remains opaque and undetermined not just in the discussed examples but in most non-normative social situations.

Where I'm going with this is: Can we turn away from this modern problematic, which certainly raises all the doubts you cite, and find something in the more basic concept of communicative action that would be transcendental in Habermas's sense that it would remain in any background of any "common lifeworld"? In other words, perhaps we can find a way of showing that a commitment to intersubjectivity transcends the (temporary, contingent) modern, and is built in to the structure of communicative action itself. — J

Of course, we can. Indubitably, the notion of communicative action expresses a reality of double enactment inherent to any speech act. One is acted upon by one’s social situation and simultaneously effectuates its complexity. Habermas tries to overcome the contingency and temporality of our social interactions. So, he erects an impressive transcendental scheme supposedly embedded within any articulable communication. Yet, we should not take ‘a commitment to intersubjectivity’, ‘achieving a mutual understanding,’ and ‘sharing a common lifeworld’s horizon’ as a set of ultimate transcendental conditions. What should be explained should not be granted the status of ultimate presuppositions. What exactly makes us understand each other? Is there an innate social faculty? Our sociality does not necessarily express itself in conformity, consensus, or coordination.

Concerning the dictator and the free rider: I'm not sure what you mean. You ask what makes these stances "understandable and articulable." Do you mean by us, as samples of ethical stances that may or may not be rational? Or do you mean within Habermasian communicative action, as samples of stances that cannot be argued because they are performative contradictions? If you could say more about that, I could better understand your further point about embedded practices that separate normal from abnormal. — J

I will clarify what I meant. Both stances are applied here in a double sense: as theoretical constructions and as examples of our daily pragmatical encounters. Therefore, both domains inform each other and create a shortcut; they are overloaded with our habitual experience. This situation makes the stances completely understandable but raises questions about the grounds of our social expositions. Further exploration may reveal conditions utterly incompatible with the universalist perspective on lifeworld. Thus, one’s articulated stance or understanding may be driven by the motivation to avoid some intervention of putting back on the ‘right track.’ There are so many hidden practices for preventing dissensus. Their ‘rationality’ eludes Habermas’s definitions of rational and irrational.

Now Habermas asserts that, within rationality, (at least) two stances create performative contradictions. One is (borrowing from Rawls) the “first-person dictator” stance, in which I claim that trying to get my own way, as far as possible, is a perfectly rational position. The second is the familiar “free rider” stance, in which I claim that there is nothing contrary to reason in my letting everyone else do some necessary task that is difficult or tedious and requires near-total communal participation; my absence won’t be noticed, and I’ll get the benefit of the results.

Let’s be clear that the question is not about whether such stances produce violations of the ethical norms that most of us abide by. Rather, we’re asking, “Are such stances irrational, given the commitments to communicative action that Habermas advocates (which view rationality as more than strategic)? Would it be irrational to argue for them within Habermasian dialogue?” — J

It is possible to argue that both stances do not allow for rendering them irrational within Habermas’s theory of communicative action. A commitment to intersubjectivity implies that “speakers and hearers straightforwardly achieve a mutual understanding about something in the world, they move within the horizon of their common lifeworld; this remains in the background of the participants – as an intuitively known, unproblematic, unanalyzable, holistic background” (Habermas ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,’ p 298). Behind the theoretical Habermasian verification procedure lies the presupposition that an individual taking a stance and her audience aspire to achieve a mutual understanding. However, what makes the ‘first person-dictator and free-rider stances’ understandable and articulable positions? Perhaps it is not the result of a shared communal life’s horizon but an effect of an embedded practice of separating normal from abnormal, further manifesting a presence of normalizing judgment. In any case, we cannot rely today on the assumption of ‘an intuitively known, unproblematic, unanalyzable, holistic background’ of the participants in socially relevant communication.

By finitude, Heidegger, like Derrida, Deleuze and Nietzsche, doesn’t mean we are hemmed in by cultural norms or our past. On the contrary, finitude is the eternal return of the different and the unique. It is not our past that produces our finitude, it is the utter individuality of our future. — Joshs

What is finitude for Nietzsche? He affirms the primacy of a world of becoming over a world of being: “That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being.” (WP, 617). Likely, 'a word of being' corresponds to 'finitude'. Nietzsche does not deny that there are regularity, patterns, and identity, the same or the similar. Yet, they acquire stability of the same due to an endless translation and articulation of what becomes into what we perceive as the recurrence of the same. Deleuze formulates the principle of the eternal return such that only difference in itself (pure difference) returns, and never the same. It means that the same necessarily implicates time.
The time implicated in this way is also implicated in itself. The communication of time with itself, or the interplay of the past with the future, composes the eternal return of pure difference.

Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive from the nature of our experience? If so, how? If not, why not?

Can anyone point me in the right direction as I have no idea how to help her? — OwenB

You can access a reality beyond a direct and immediate perception by looking at theories of a spectator’s or reader’s relation to a film, text, or artwork. Thus, Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy attempts to uncover the ‘unperceived’ in the perceived, to think that which is unthinkable. “The cinema does not have natural subjective perception as its model because the mobility of its centers and variability of its framings always lead to restoring vast a-centred and de-framed zones. One passes imperceptibly from perception to affective and re-active tendencies of actions” (Deleuze, Cinema 1, pg. 64). On the first level, we perceive isolated, separated things and objects. On the second, determinative one, there is an unfolding of a relational event. It takes up the pasts of different orders that include our habitual and acquired perceptions, inclinations, and desires and enacts the tendencies and potentials of the immediate future.
Differently from phenomenological reduction, Deleuze does not refer to the subject-centered approach.
For him, no pre-existing spectator watches a film, there are only matrices of the interactive fusion that formed during the act of watching.

Nietzsche didn’t speak of will to meaning but will to truth, a subset of will to power. His notion of power wasn’t some kind of concentrated energy possessed by certain individuals or institutions to be used for good or evil. He believed that all meaning is the effect of differential relations within a system of values. Each individual psyche is organized as such schemes, gestalts, matrices of inter-affecting vectors of drives competing with and altering each other. Social power works the same way, as differential forces flowing though and between persons in a culture, so that each of us in our practices reciprocally affect each other to form social systems and institutions shaped in certain ways, producing and changing the meanings that they have for us. — Joshs

This interpretation closely follows Foucault’s perspective on the Nietzschean theory of will to power. Thus, it assumes a strong correlation between the organization of an individual psyche and social self-arrangements. Power functions as a primarily and autonomous hinge between both levels.
Deleuze disagrees with Foucault on the ontological and strategic status of power. “There is heterogeneity, a difference in the nature between micro and macro, which in no way excludes the immanence of the two. Is the notion of power applicable at the level of micro-analyses? If I talk about assemblages of desire, it is because I am not sure that micro-arrangements can be described in terms of power. Desire is one with a determined assemblage, including power arrangements that would not assemble or constitute anything” (Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure. Two Regimes of Madness’ pg. 125)
Deleuze asserts that the pre-individual, saturating, and intensive field of the micro level is reciprocally interconnected with the social level behind the arrangements of power and the grid of intelligibility. Differently, for Foucault, the most intimate affects (pleasures), penetrating all meaning, are the derivatives of power.

Well, I don’t think following Habermas’s Kantian modernist path is the answer. — Joshs

Habermas insists that his theory breaks with Kantian philosophy of the subject. And, if we leave aside Habermas’s insistence on the primacy of implicit rationality, solidarity, and consensus, we should admit that he could successfully advance our understanding of contemporary social realities. In his conceptual framework, lifeworld has become an inexplicable and resourceful background and shared horizon of social agents; it is the store of knowledge and the source of symbolically mediated legitimate orders regulating a field of interpersonal relationships. ” Personality serves as a term for art for acquired competencies and renders subject capable of speech and action, to participate in processes of mutual understanding in each given context and to maintain his own identity in the shifting contexts of interaction. Individuals and groups are ‘members’ of a lifeworld only in a metaphorical sense” (‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity’, p 343). This conceptualization of the self is quite close to Deleuze and Guattari’s apprehension of a conscious individual as an assemblage of the mechanical, bodily, affective, perceptive, and cognitive capacities embedded within the socio-technical terrain. ‘The shifting contexts of interaction’ animate intersubjective events of communicative actions so that social actors exercise their cognitive, normative, and personal faculties. Further, each act of communicative practice sustains the universal structures of the lifeworld and the concrete forms of life. While the reproduction of lifeworld has become “less and less guaranteed by traditional and customary means, highly abstract ego-identities condition the risk-filled direction of the self’s identification.” (p 345)

For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. — Joshs

This Nietzschean insight has undoubtedly determined some aspects of postmodernist thought.
Thus, in 'Difference and Repetition', Deleuze completely follows Nietzsche:” What the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself…The I which is fractured and the self which is divided find a common descendant in the man without name, without qualities, without self or I” (D&R, p 90). Yet, Deleuze also insists that in fact and principle the drives and impulses comprising the self are not simply fractured but are always assembled or arranged. Clarifying the nature of this synthesis has always been the primary task for Nietzsche and his followers. ‘The Genealogy of Morality’ can be read as the inquiry into the conditions of
moral ranking of impulses so that the mechanisms of morality maintain the integrity of self. In ‘Anti-Oedipus’, Deleuze and Guattari have offered the different theory of self, but, later, Deleuze
admitted the need to further develop the notion of an assemblage of non-personal individuations.
Identity politics affirms that there are highly conditioned and intensified processes of autonomous will formation. The self is an assemblage of multi-levelled societal and individualizing processes and components.

For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. Will is equal parts determinism and freedom. The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of
being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative. — Joshs

It is an interesting and affirmative but incomplete perspective on the implications of the theory of a will to power. There is a need to clarify what kind of ethics can be conceived beyond the Nietzschean fictions of the world comprised of precarious objective truths, illusory identities, and morally acting subjects. For Habermas, Nietzsche has become a founder of the aesthetic Dionysian program based on self-dissolving and self-oblivion: “What Nietzsche calls the ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ is disclosed in the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from everyday conventions of perceiving and acting. Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open”. (Habermas, ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,’ p 93). How can we abandon firm and stable grounds of self-nurturing while avoiding the pitfalls of self-oblivion?

I'm pretty much taking your word on Lacan here. I've read people influenced by him but never took that plunge. With that being said I'd say the natural and necessary desires would stand out in Lacan's theory of desire, which are re-occurring due to the nature of life but satisfiable. But I suspect that Lacan would take these facts of hunger and thirst and say that due to their reoccurrence they are never fully satisfied. Or, perhaps, just that we have reoccurring desires is enough to generate a ceaseless sense of incompleteness.

In which case I think it'd be safe to say that Lacan's desire runs orthogonally to Epicurean desire. If desire is never satisfiable, if there's is always a lack and a sense of incompleteness, then the Epicurean cure is a fraud. You'd be making the desire for desire itself a groundless desire which cannot be satisfied.

But this is where I think the appeal to nature -- even though it's fallacious! -- is actually a strength. Running along with the philosophy as I did with Sadomaoschistic desire: Surely if the goal is tranquility then building up desires about desire would result in anxiety if our desires about desire lead us to desire things which cannot be satisfied. But if you, instead, come to live with your own nature -- in this case a ceaseless sense of incompleteness due to the nature of desire as a lack -- you can come to see that it's just a little bit of pain, and that pain isn't all that bad to deal with after all. The pain will come again, and so will go away, and the pleasure will fade away, but will come about again. — Moliere

Thank you for your response. You are correct that Lacan’s desire is incompatible with the Epicurean’s. There is no simple dichotomy for me, with a groundless desire as a lack from one side and a possibility of tranquillity and fulfillment from another. Both perspectives assume
an ahistorical, universalist nature of desire. Yet, for Lacan, any concrete desire co-exists and co-relates with the symbolic order and the primordial pre-conscious and unconscious settings (the mirror stage, etc.). He offers an elaborated modification of Freud’s theory of psychics so that an ultimate lack and ceaseless desire becomes one of the primary human conditions. I will not take sides here; I see this discussion as an opportunity to enhance my understanding. Certainly, we cannot clearly define human nature that stands independently from a concrete social situation. Even hunger and pain in certain circumstances can be experienced as satisfactory and positive. Our emotional sphere is penetrated with social forces in such a manner that even the most intimate feelings cannot be separated from collective affective impacts. To state the opposite, one should assert the exceptionality of the chosen ethical and theoretical perspective. Paradigmatic examples of the Sadomasochistic desire as an exemplary perversion and the achievement of the state of tranquillity in an ashram or Enlightenment in a Buddhist monastery show the decisive role of a particular social constellation. On the other hand, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Guattari contend that the lack becomes the desire’s ultimate feature exclusively under the historical conditions of a capitalist society.

There is no one self, no one overarching desire, but a society of selves and a society of desires that manifest a relative ongoing thematic unity throughout its changes. Tyranny and power are not properties of individuals, they are manifestations of affects circulating though a culture , from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Subjects are produced by the way power circulates though a community. — Joshs

This perspective asserts the primacy of power and the way it circulates through a community.
But in what way? The circulation ‘from the bottom up rather than from the top down’ and back to the bottom affirms ‘thematic unity’ of smooth continuous movement through culture and of a non-coercive intersubjectivity of communal consensus. It follows the spirit of Habermas’s appeal to reason as a healing power of unification and reconciliation. Yet, it is far from the Nietzschean Deleuze’s approach to power and desire. The will to power ‘makes the difference’ and dominates over the domain of diverse and incommensurable tendencies. It generates and in-forms forces into actual, representable types from a virtual level of intensive and differential relations of mutual imbrication and tension. 'The ongoing thematic unity' of the plain of consistency resonates with ‘the informal outside, a battle, a turbulent zone where particular points and the relations of forces between these points are tossed about.’

Deleuze’s Nietzschean-inspired model posits assemblages of desiring elements which produce what he calls a plane of consistency. This plane creates relational connections within the person , and a point of view or perspective, without any overarching synthesis. There is no one self, no one overarching desire, but a society of selves and a society of desires that manifest a relative ongoing thematic unity throughout its changes. — Joshs

As far as I know, Deleuze never applies the term society regarding his theory of desire. For him, the concept of ‘a society of selves and a society of desires that manifest a relative ongoing thematic unity' would display a return to a totalizing process of identification, the revival of outmoded naturalized notions of collective subjectivity. 'This plane creates relational connections within the person, and a point of view or perspective.' This account of Deleuze's perspective on desire misses desire's actual productive capacity and assumes the person's existence before and aside from syntheses of desire. Assemblages of desiring elements produce not a plane of consistency but an unstable and autopoietic unity of processes of heterogeneous drives, flows and partial objects that populate the unconscious. The three primary passive syntheses of desire give rise to a form of the subject that emerges as an I that recognizes itself and its desires retrospectively. The encounter of the molecular realm of the unconscious with the sphere of social production results in organizing distinct and exclusive objects and persons according to the principles of identity, negation, and contradiction. Further, Deleuze's concept of abstract machine expresses the complex, recurrent, and metastable relations that maintain assemblages of molar and molecular domains. It opens up a conception of subjectivity
beyond the naturalizing representations of desire and culture. That is why Foucault calls 'Anti-Oedipus' ‘a book of ethics that ferrets out the fascism that is ingrained in our behaviour.'

Perverse desire belongs to the final category -- not groundless, and not necessary. Epicurus doesn't speak in terms of perversion, but I think this set of categories helps to clarify perversion and that his explanation thereafter -- where he speaks of people habituating themselves to luxury or treating evil as a good -- helps to describe perverted desire. It's technically perverted because there's nothing wrong with, say, sexual desire (I choose sexuality because it's something that should communicate. I believe this holds for other desires of the same category though). It is a natural desire. But it is possible to treat sexual desire as if it's necessary to satisfy, and to become anxious about satisfying sexual desire. To add something to the theory I'd say that sexual desire is such that it can either be satisfied in a simple manner -- which is what Epicurus advocates for in pursuing the tranquil life -- but it can also "run away" with itself. One can become attached not to the satisfaction of sexual desire but rather to its excitement and seek to deepen that excitement and become attached to a luxurious sexuality which is never satisfied (and, hence, would lead to a non-tranquil life, which is evil in Epicurean ethics). — Moliere

For Lacan, desire is never fully satisfied. Any material or ‘natural’ need requires articulation and recognition demanded from another. After transferrence onto the general form, desire bears on something other than the satisfaction it can bring. The particularity of a need assumes an irresolvable lack that transcends the given situation and generates a ceaseless sense of incompleteness. Lacan entirely transforms the perspective on transgression and perversion.

Being immersed in practices undertaking, how can one keep any basis for comparative evaluation or any means of applying normative criteria?
— Number2018

My point is that we do have criteria for each practice for the judgments we make about them (whether they are appropriate within what we identify as that thing). What is normative is our lives themselves Cavell says. And we can make explicit those criteria for, say, an excuse, an apology, what we would call “following a rule”, or pointing, walking (compared to running)… — Antony Nickles

It could be understood that your point is based on the premise of a clear and transparent meaning of
‘we.’ When you write: ‘We do have criteria,’ ‘We can make explicit,’ ‘We would call,’ and ‘Our lives,’
there may be an implicit reference to a legitimate community, establishing a comprehensive ground of rationality. Yet, my life interrelates to broader life networks that are not mine. My living
and my practices are embedded into rapidly changing, unstable social, economic, and organic environments that affirm and support their interdependency. Under these conditions, how can one rely upon universal community consensus on Reason and Judgement? From Derrida’s point of view, one should confront the generative, performative moment of decision—the event where one engages in an outcome that’s never guaranteed by the process (in the moment of deliberation, you can’t know if it’s the “right” decision). “A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable. Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this experience experiment of the undecidable". (Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, p 116;) Preceding our recourses to a community and objectivity, the event of deciding necessitates their ongoing re-invention and re-explication.

there is no standard against which we would call most of our practices “accurate”. The “conditions for objectivity” have “not been lost”, they were imposed in the first place. The desire for that certainty creates the need for a theoretical solution to what is just the varied conclusions available or not under our ordinary criteria. — Antony Nickles

New materialism revokes the problem of evaluating modes of existence using criteria immanent to the mode itself or to practices as self-sufficient, autonomous arrangements (‘the intra-active engagements of our participation’). Being immersed in practices undertaking, how can one keep any basis for comparative evaluation or any means of applying normative criteria? Answering this question, Deleuze formulates his immanent ethics thesis as “There are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life.” (Deleuze, ‘What is philosophy,” pg 74).

Thought is itself inextricably material and discursive in Barad’s sense of materiality as intra-action, thought is just one of infinitely many sites of material entanglement. — Joshs

The new materialistic perspective of the co-constitution of all things in a ceaseless movement of intra-action evacuates distinctive features evaluating thought as a particular site of the highest modes of human existence. If nature is a flow running through everything rather than a prescriptive essence unique to each being or species, it does not seem that anything effectively concerning human ethical or political norms arises from that new materialist realization.

The direct contact with the general relational field does not ground the materiality of discourses. There is no immediate access to a world external to thought. We cannot avoid a communication medium that structures, organizes, and directs what can and cannot be said, assumed or proposed. A discursive formation employs the entire material density of multifarious institutions, rituals, and acts, embedded within the practices of articulations. “What is ‘‘disclosed'' is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world's differential becoming.” ‘The intra-active engagements of our participation’ can become intelligible, expressed, recorded, and then ‘disclosed’ just as the result of the effective discursive recursiveness.

That’s interesting, thanks. So you think that Deleuze is in closer accord with Butler on this matter than he is with Foucault? — Joshs

I think that in spite of his statements, Deleuze is close to Foucault; he tries to further reinterpret, radicalize, and reapply the deindivinduation segment of Foucault’s propositions on power. Yet, unlike Foucault, in ‘The Postscript’ he just briefly outlined his latest perspective on power. Further, it seems that Deleuze’s framework is utterly incompatible with the entire approach of Butler’s
project, and her resonance with the ideas from ‘The Postscript’ is just an unintentional coincidence. The final analysis may indicate that despite the advantage of witnessing the latest developments and taking an active role in contemporary social movements, Butler overlooks the newest technologies of power.
.

I know that Foucault’s approach is different from Butler’s. — Joshs

The key notion I want to emphasize is that for Foucault socially constructed knowledge and values are not imposed on a community by an individual or group wielding power and desiring that the community act a certain way. Instead, they form an integrated pattern of understanding with its own internal ‘logic’ not imposed by anybody in particular, and not in top down fashion but disseminating itself through a culture from the bottom up , as a shared pattern of thinking and behaving. — Joshs

It is worth considering again the principal difference between Foucault and Butler. Butler writes:” I contravene Foucault in some respects. For if the Foucauldian wisdom seems to consist in the insight that regulatory power has certain broad historical characteristics and that it operates on gender as well as on other kinds of social and cultural norms, then it seems that gender is but the instance of a larger regulatory operation of power. I would argue against this subsumption of gender to regulatory power that the regulatory apparatus that governs gender is one that is itself gender specific. Gender requires and institutes its own distinctive regulatory and disciplinary regime.” (Butler, ‘Undoing gender,’ pg. 41) On another side, Foucault asserts that biopolitical norms do not primarily work to exclude and repress the deviating individuals; in contrast, they encompass the whole spectrum of practices, producing an account of what is normal and abnormal. ‘Power that comes from everywhere’ animates the discursive formation and the encompassing greed of intelligibility concerning gender. So, while Foucault’s project is based on ‘constitutive inclusion,’ Butler insists on the principle of ‘constitutive exclusion.’” Even when a form of recognition is allegedly extended to all the people, there remains an active premise that there is a vast region of those who remain unrecognizable.” (Butler, ‘Notes toward a performative theory of assembly,’ pg. 5) A disenfranchised group should find a way to claim effective all-embraced recognition. An open-ended hegemonic struggle should produce performative effects reconfiguring the general field of acceptability and identification. To a considerable extent, Butler’s approach expresses today’s dominating tendencies in the struggle for gender equality and identity politics. Yet, contradicting her premise of the importance of a precarious community, Butler underlines a crucial role of media globalization: “The performativity of gender presumes a field of appearance in which gender appears, and a scheme of recognizability with which gender shows up…The media does not merely report the scene of appearance; it constitutes the scene in a time and space that includes and exceeds its local instantiation…it depends on that mediation to take place as the event as it is” (‘Notes toward a performative theory of assembly,’ pg. 92) Here, Butler does not refer back to Foucault’s discursive formation of socially constructed shared pattern of thinking and behaving. Instead, she implicitly invokes the decisive role of the global digital medium. Accordingly, as Deleuze points out in ‘The Postscript of control society,’ we should discern the bits and flows of data that make up dividuals and data banks, always passing beneath the individual. The newest techniques of power permeate the patterns of desires, ideas, and imaginations that constitute our subjectivity and agency.

my view of gender is actually much closer to the social constructionist approaches to gender of authors like Butler and Foucault than your cultural perspective is. Like me, they view gender in terms of a constellation of shared patterns of behaviors that bind communities. — Joshs

Foucault’s approach is quite different from Butler’s. For Foucault, gender is the effect of the ongoing transformations and intensification of supple forms of power. He argues that the nineteen-century “growth of perversions is not a moralizing theme that obsessed the scrupulous minds of the Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power (biopower) on the bodies and their pleasures.” (HS, 1; pg 48) Unlike Butler, Foucault asserts that biopolitical norms do not primarily work to exclude the deviating individuals; instead, they work on accounting for them as such to render them normal or abnormal.

It may not be practical for a community to make political decisions protecting the rights of individuals to behave in ways that that community considers to be the result of private whim or compulsion on the part of the individual, and does appear to belong to a larger pattern, constellation or theme of personality that all of us possess, each in their own way. In other words, if that community defines gender the way you do, as random, subjective whim, then that community cannot justify enacting new and special public protections for something considered to be a private choice like any other, — Joshs

Foucault rejects the essentialist perspective on the source of power as an ultimate instance of rights, identity, intelligibility, or recognition. There is no power- sovereignty, based on a monarch or community’s subjectivity. Biopower does not bear on legal subjects but enacts various strategies embedded within social practices and comprises the entire political technology of life.

1 ) I believe X.
2 ) Another person tries to show X implies Y.
3 ) I believe Y is bad.
4 ) I now defend not(X implies Y)
5 ) The other person tells me that I am defending Y by defending not(X implies Y).
6 ) I still believe Y is bad.
7 ) I now defend not( not(X implies Y) implies Y)
8 ) The other person now tells me I believe Y.

I don't believe any of this depends upon any of the contained statements being true. As in X, Y, X implies Y, and the perverse negations like not(X implies Y). I also don't trust that it's rightly construed as just a fallacy of inference. Why? It seems also to be about assigning inconsistent meanings to positions. Rather than just about defending a precisely articulated position incorrectly. In that regard I think cognitive dissonance plays a key role in that dynamic. And as a corollary, trying to point the fallacy out will appear as castigation. — fdrake

Thank you for your post, the logical analyses, and the broad conclusions. As you rightly noted, there are no consistently articulated meanings of defended positions, so there is not just a fallacy of inference. However, I can't entirely agree with your point that cognitive dissonance primarily animates the debate's dynamic. Nicholas Shackel qualified 'the motte-and-bailey debate' as a fallacy. Following Habermas, he brought Foucault's "arbitrary redefinition" and confusion of "elementary but inherently equivocal terms such as 'truth' and 'power'" as the principal example of the motte position. But, from the other side, he also attributed the Foucauldian methodology to our postmodern conditions. So, his argumentation could be more consistent. The systematic and widespread confounding of different types of rationality, formal rationality, and value-rationality reveals a sweeping collective tendency. For Foucault, there are certain discursive regularities that govern what can be legitimately said. The unconscious structuring of discourse sets the character and boundaries of the debate and disposes the fluidity and inconsistency of its subjective positions.

The motte-and-bailey fallacy occurs when someone advances a controversial claim—one that's difficult to defend—and when challenged retreats to an uncontroversial claim. The bold claim is the bailey, the safe claim the motte.

A: Trans women are not women. [bailey]

B: That's a transparently bigoted comment, functioning as it does to directly negate the gender identities of trans people and thereby deny their claims to equal treatment.

A: Look, all I'm saying is that biological sex cannot be changed and that women's rights need to be protected. And you call me a bigot! [motte]

[This example is inspired by YouTuber ContraPoints, who uses the idea to criticize J.K. Rowling and her supporters in this video, which is worth watching if you're interested in that particular issue.]

The idea was coined by Nicholas Shackel in The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (PDF). — Jamal

In his example, Shackel rebukes Foucault for “arbitrary redefinition” of “elementary but inherently equivocal terms such as ‘truth’ and ‘power’ in order to create the illusion of giving a profound but subtle analysis of a taken for a granted concept.” Yet, what does render the motte's discourse a kind of preponderance over the bailey's one? There is not a simple confusion or a deliberate misinterpretation of 'elementary but inherently equivocal terms' such as gender identities and bigotry. What is at stake are political claims of what to do with others in a complex society. The 'motte-and-bailey' discussions function to embed identity politics into consensus-building processes. So, Foucault’s redefinition of relations between truth and power is not the example of the erroneous rhetoric but the effective explanatory framework.

What would it mean to approach the past from the future? If the past extends infinitely can the road turn back? Can the long lane backward be the opposite of the long lane forward if they form a circle?

If all that will happen has happened before over and over what is the starting and end point of what happens?

Between the two roads is the gateway "this moment". But it is always this moment. This moment is neither the past or the future, and so in what sense is there a return? — Fooloso4

@Joshs

The figurative style of “The vision and the riddle” allows us to avoid literal and direct approaches to the problem of time. Nietzsche creates paradoxes and dramatizes a series of characters, scientific models, and narrative dynamics. But he does not assert a comprehensive unity, an eternity with an ontological status of a transcendent external Reality, or a universal and unequivocal model of truth or time. “’See this moment!’ I continued. “From this gateway Moment a long eternal lane stretches backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can already have passed this way before? Must not whatever can happen, already have happened, been done, passed by before? And if everything has already been here before, what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must this gateway too not already – have been here? And are not all things firmly knotted together in such a way that this moment draws after it all things to come? Therefore – itself as well?” Here, Zarathustra-Nietzsche utilizes various arguments in favor of the
Eternal Return of the same. Yet, he immediately contests this fragment as a mirage: “I stood all of a sudden among wild cliffs, alone, desolate, in the most desolate moonlight. But there lay a human being! And truly, I saw something the like of which I had never seen before.” Something ultimately new appears,
despite repeating the previous scene of the combat. The accelerating unfolding of the plurality of events constitutes the Nietzschean becoming and causes the disclosure of a circle of simple repetitions. Zarathustra and his doubles, their insights and mental states do not affirm any stable and firm identity, experience, or selfhood. There is no return of the author’s ego or the agent of action. Instead, there is the return of the work itself, ensuing the dimension of subjectivity. The Eternal Return undoes the paradoxes of the past and future. What really matters and generates the effects of time is the intensive recurrent motion, spreading itself out along the entire circumference of the circle of metamorphosis.

Is the contrast you are bringing out between what Moliere and I's shared position and what you're stating is that we're emphasising the poles of the "machinic engagement" rather than their reciprocity. As in, are you interpreting what we've both written as too focussed on individuals and societal processes as really independent entities, rather than ones which are conceptually distinct but mutually determining?

How does the social contract play into that? As a means by which individuals coordinated volitions become normatively binding? — fdrake

As far as I see, @Moliere admitted that his/her position is just a preliminary note of Harvey’s lecture.
I have yet to understand your position, likely because you quickly embraced Moliere's non-elaborated one. But, yes, it looks like both of you are talking about individuals and systems rather in terms of really independent entities than in terms of processes. For me, both individuals and systems are moments, and may be results of interdependent societal processes. They do not designate stable unities; instead, they are appearances of structured, complex, self-completing processes. Stating that 'people create systems' resembles a post factum fabulation that may be affiliated with the Social Contract theories. Under certain conditions, events in the making can appear as retaining their identity and even as 'individuals coordinated volitions.' Systems theorist Nicklas Luhmann noted: "' Homo economicus' is a social construct. What constitutes the unity of action and how the identity of an actor can be determined through the attribution of actions cannot be discovered by plumbing his internal mental life. For the continuation of its own operations, society, and its organizations, assume the unity of individual and person as an operational fiction." (Luhmann, 'Organization and decision' p 67) System's 'normatively binding' cannot merely be a result of 'individuals coordinated volitions', it is an autopoietic operational domain. What one experiences as rational choices and volitions most often emerges on the level hiding the imperatives of the encompassing machinic engagement. A spectrum of rational judgements is pre-given and pre-determined. The unconscious presuppositions implanted in the field make the unfolding event unrecognizable. Most often, systems secure possible chains of effects and outcomes independent of the will of individual.

I wouldn't read your contrast, Numbers, as a contradiction. It can very well be that people create systems together which are impersonal and have a bizarre logic that constrains them. A bureaucracy, any workplace culture, a conflict dynamic in a relationship. The bizarre powers that guide people's relationships. — fdrake

@Moliere I do not think, fdrake, that when you write ‘people create systems together,’ you imply one of the theories of the Social Contracts. They are precisely the ones that Marx criticized. Let’s return to the quote from ‘A preface.’ ‘Men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will,’ which means he talks about conscious individuals with their intentions and goals. On the other hand, ‘the totality of these relations of production constitutes the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.’ What is the relation between individual consciousness and ‘forms of social consciousness’? Marx pointed it out: “The epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society” (Marx, Grundrisse, p 18). So, in ‘A preface,’ Marx starts with people who ‘create systems’, but means that social symbolic systems ultimately determine individual consciousness. Yet, there is neither a circular causality nor the Hegelian sublation of dialectical moments. Because ‘the definite relations of production’ has the ultimate priority as an intrinsic cause.

the specifically productive relationships that have conscious people "collide within them" are characterised by a bizarre alien, self sustaining logic that the process of production generates and sustains. — fdrake

In the Marxist tradition, articulating the relations of individual and larger social forces has always been one of the most challenging problems. Because masses or ordinary members of totalitarian or bureaucratic organizations too often have not recognized their inferiority. They do not feel like they are ruled by an alien, violent imposition. Ideology as the explanatory theoretical framework has ultimately failed. In ‘Fragments on the Machines,’ Marx briefly outlined how to evade a trap of ideological and essentialist conceptualizations.“The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it but in the real production process itself.” (Marx, Grundrisse, p 694) The infrastructure is not conceived here as an essence, having an ultimate literal sense; it is in the process of capital’s metamorphoses. On the other hand, the mechanical, cognitive, and social ‘organs’ of the social brain, the living labour, and the workers themselves constitute moments of the same process. All are subsumed under the overall automatic activity. Therefore, the social and individual domains no longer confront each other. Social subjection and individual agency have become indiscernible poles of the machinic
engagement.

the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them,

I am not sure I understand your account of Harvey’s lecture correctly.
It may be concluded that instead of this appearance - ‘the totality of the process appears as an objective interrelation,’- it is indeed generated by ‘the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another and by their own collisions with one another.’ And yet, there is also ‘an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.’ So, aren’t there two mutually controversial generative processes? On the one side, you mention ‘collusions and interactions of ‘conscious individuals’; on the other, you write that precisely these interactions are produced by ‘an alien social power standing above them.’ Marx himself evaluated the process of social production as the important notion of his work: “The guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’).
Will Harvey talk again about the production of social relations of production? In ‘Fragment on the machines’, Marx briefly outlined the production process as a whole.

From the vantage of poststructuralist thinking, which deconstructs subjectivity, the problem of the alienated capitalist subject vanishes and in its place emerges a pluralism of strategies for ensuring that new openings or ‘lines of flight’ are created within discursive structures (economic, social, technological). — Joshs

Deconstruction of subjectivity as a way of existence and the production of the new was inherited by Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida from Nietzcshe. I discussed one of its modes in my previous post. Are these strategies still in effect? Have the leading postmodernist thinkers' conceptual frameworks and practices remained relevant in our situation? Today, it looks like the problem of the construction of an autonomous self–affirming subjectivity, the resistant self-positioning existence, has not been rigorously articulated and resolved yet. As Deleuze put it in 'Postscript on the societies of control': "Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated,' they re-request apprenticeship and permanent training. It is up to them to discover what they are being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill."

Mark the singularity of events. . . . Grasp their return. . . . Define their lacuna point, the moment they did not take place. (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’). Through the figure of Baudelaire, Foucault re-affirms the reality of the Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic existence.
— Number2018

So then it is the eternal return of the same. — Joshs

No, it is not. The figures of Nietzsche’s Dionisius, Foucault’s Baudelaire, and Deleuze’s Proust and Kafka have not returned the identity of the same. On the contrary, their subject of return has been becoming. The author himself, a figure of a character, literary, conceptual, and aesthetic components of the work compose a singular multiplicity. The work and the producer have simultaneously become and effaced; they have acquired the temporary, fragile, self-sufficient modus of existence. “Eternal return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by intermediary of metamorphosis. However, it causes neither condition nor agent to return on the contrary it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product. It is repetition by excess which leaves nothing of the becoming-equal”. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 90).

I hypothesize that , of the many readings of Deleuze , you resonate with those that I find in writers like Massumi , Protevi and Delanda. — Joshs

Do you agree with Protevi that this analysis of the ‘above’ into the political and the ‘below’ into the biological is compatible with Deleuze? — Joshs

I used to read Massumi’s books. He is interested in the problem of our autonomy and subjectivity that we deal with in this thread. But, as far as I know, he has not solved it yet.” The call to go beyond ideology is a call to attend to the novelty of the situation, and to find ways of conceptualizing the current mode of operation of the capitalist process, and the new kinds of spin-off effects it produces, that can grasp its novelty and complexity. How can a relational approach give us a new understanding of capitalism as a self-proliferating What are the new figures of that relation? Is the figuring still a question of personification? If so, is identification still at the basis of the figures of capital? What does it mean to ‘personify’ a derivative? A credit default swap?” (Massumi, ‘Politics of affect’, p 90)
Regarding DeLanda, I think that Ian Buchanan’s critique of his ‘assemblage theory’ is entirely appropriate.
Also, I looked through Protevi’s book. His themes, style, and vocabulary are very close to Deleuze and Guattari’s. Yet, it seems that he cannot grasp the singularity of our current situation. He analyzes limited domains and cuts off a few essential dimensions of the Deleuzian conceptual framework. I will clarify my position by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s perspectives on writing. “Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted, write at n -1 dimensions, in the middle of things… A system of this kind can be called a rhizome… There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). One cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside”. (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘A thousand plateaus’, p 23). Thus, Protevi does not write at n – 1 dimensions. To add one more dimension of the unique, higher principle of writing means to follow a pre-given, pre-calculated hermeneutic, interpretative, scientific or transcendental method or paradigm. It results in the return of the same, of the identity of the supreme instance. Indeed, D& G’s view on writing ensues from Deleuze’s interpretation of internal return. For them, to write means to deconstruct themselves to achieve the production of the new.

↪Number2018
For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.'…At the heart of the present is an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity.
— Number2018

This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same
— Joshs

No, it is not.

This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, which Heidegger depicted thusly:

“The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its supreme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal recurrence of the same.” — Joshs

Heidegger asserts the rollback of Nietzsche's thought to metaphysics. He misrepresents the doctrine of the will to power and identifies Nietzsche as an ally of Descartes.

"Recurrence" thinks the permanentizing of what becomes, thinks it to the point where the becoming of what becomes is secured in the duration of its becoming. The "eternal" thinks the permanentizing of such constancy in the direction of its circling back into itself and forward toward itself. What becomes is the same itself, and that means the one and selfsame (the identical) that in each case is within the difference of the other. The presence of the one identical element, a presence that comes to be, is thought in the same. Nietzsche's thought thinks the constant permanentizing of the becoming of whatever becomes into the only kind of presence there is-the self-recapitulation of the identical. (Heidegger, ’Lectures on Nietzsche’, p165)

Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s eternal return is entirely different from Foucault and Deleuze’s interpretations.


“What will to power brought to light? A reality that has being freed from (immutable, eternal, true) being: becoming. And the knowledge that unveils it does not unveil being” (Foucault,’ Lectures on the will to know’, p319)

For Foucault, there is no returning of the identity of the same.

“Mark the singularity of events. . . . Grasp their return. . . . Define their lacuna point, the moment they did not take place.” (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’)

So, what is returning is the singularity of events, the difference itself. The eternal operates in the lacuna points, where the perceiver does not distinguish himself from the perceived. Through the figure of Baudelaire, Foucault re-affirms the reality of the Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic existence, the construction of a singular subjectivity. The processes of self–affirmation, the resistant self-positioning cannot be merely achieved by applying psychological, cognitive, or informational methods and paradigms. One must traverse the unnamable lacuna points of the rupture with dominant social realities.

↪Number2018

According to Heidegger, the Being of entities can only be grasped in the present through the awareness that something appearing 'here and now' has the temporal structure of a 'making present' of something. So, it is only through temporality the meaning of Being can become articulated. Yet, in our current environment, the totality of pre-calculated and pre-programmed situations precisely targets the moment of 'here and now'.
There is no more future; it has already arrived as an overwhelming aggregate of pre-formed retentions. There is no past because it is separated from individual memory and "settled" in the collective digitalized network. Only the present remains, that is, the continuing time of perception, in which the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived.
— Number2018

Is this from Baudrillard? Doesn’t sound like Deleuze. — Joshs

This image of time ensues from Benjamin and Foucault's perspectives on Baudelaire's attitude to modernity.
For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.' The task compels him to produce himself in a particular aesthetic mode. On the other hand, Benjamin's Baudelaire reveals
that the era he called modernity (modernité) expresses itself in various figures of shock. The inevitable contact of the poet with the crowd and the new content of sensual cause the anesthesia effects. Therefore, the shock becomes a remedy and a condition for the possibility of perception as such. You can't be modern without being shocked. Foucault and Benjamin agree on a necessarily aesthetic mode of our existence in the present. It is the time of perception in which the perceiver does not distinguish himself from the perceived. At the heart of the present strikes an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity.

as Heidegger argues, events always mater to us, are relevant and significant. This is because a pre-understanding operates to make the world familiar to us at some level. This pre-understanding is that frame , that totality of relevance, that makes the world
recognizable to us — Joshs

Undoubtedly, Heidegger's philosophy of time significantly supports your affirmation of an individual's capacities to maintain autonomy and adaptability. I would argue that phenomenology cannot provide
a relevant framework for understanding our current conditions. According to Heidegger, the Being of entities can only be grasped in the present through the awareness that something appearing 'here and now' has the temporal structure of a 'making present' of something. So, it is only through temporality the meaning of Being can become articulated. Yet, in our current environment, the totality of pre-calculated and pre-programmed situations precisely targets the moment of 'here and now'.
What is attacked would be space and time as forms of the given of what happens. The retreat of the given causes the phenomenological pre-understanding temporal structures not to operate 'here and now' anymore. Therefore, we no longer have a dominant temporal horizon for the event, framing and shaping our 'here and now'. There is no more future; it has already arrived as an overwhelming aggregate of pre-formed retentions. There is no past because it is separated from individual memory and "settled" in the collective digitalized network. Only the present remains, that is, the continuing time of perception, in which the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived.

Our personal identities are concerned more with general psychological character and our social identities more with occupation, career, status etc.—not that these don’t overlap or aren’t located on the same spectrum, but that personal identity tends to reflect ideologies of “individuality” (which in so far as they remain within the social sphere [in so far as we are “sane”, i.e. recognizably social actors] are just more social narratives) and social identity tends towards ideologies of the collective. — Baden

This distinction exists just on the fabulation level. It allows one to register the event, translate it into results, accumulate its consequences, and conceive strategies of extensive use of time. Yet, it does not allow us to construct a critical ontology of ourselves. Because on a more fundamental, grounding level, our ‘personal’ and ‘social’ identities are penetrated and constituted by the forces of the entire field of intensive operations. They incessantly contract and determine our present.

I would argue that we always know implicitly what that overarching framework is that guides our motives and understandings, even if not at a level we can verbalize. We mustn’t confuse our inability to articulate in words the contrast poles of our core constructs with their being invisible or unconscious to us. — Joshs

You stress out our freedom to adopt and reconstruct ‘that overarching framework that guides our motives and understandings.’ Yet, this account implies a particular conceptualization of what ‘is being invisible or unconscious to us.’ In principle, it is assumed that it can become visible and articulable. And this premise misses what Benjamin and Adorno have in common with postmodernist thinkers. They agree that we are impacted by the sublime that has always remained unthought and unrepresentable.
“This time without diachrony where the present is the past and where the past is always
presence (but these terms are obviously inappropriate), is the time of the unconscious affect. Ungraspable by consciousness, this time threatens it. It threatens it permanently. And permanence is the name for what happens in the lexicon of the consciousness of time. The decision to analyze, to write, to historicize is made according to different stakes, to be sure, but it is taken, in each case, against this formless mass, and in order to lend it form, a place in space, a moment in temporal succession, a quality in the spectrum of qualifications, representation on the scene of the various imaginaries and sentences.” (Lyotard, ‘Heidegger and “the Jews” p 17).

all issues which have been banned in one way or another from discussion or dissemination on these platforms. None of which are anything to do with politeness or civility, racism, sexism or any other 'ism. They are to do with powerful people constraining the public discourse to promote their interests. — Isaac

Let's assume that you are right, and we are indeed in a situation where the space of allowed
public discourse on social platforms was intentionally constrained so that 'powerful people could promote their interests'. Nevertheless, do people who debate with you here, in this OP, want to help 'the powerful people'? As well as many others, they do not like what Mask is doing now for entirely different reasons. It is difficult to say why, but they likely reject your arguments without considering them seriously or view them as negligible and insignificant.
Further, it would be reasonable to assume that even 'powerful people' and those fired recently by Mask have not simply acted 'to promote their interests'. We do not deal here with pure cynical or ideological schemes or calculations. Is there an effect of the desire to remove obstacles and act without hindrances?

What's happening on those platforms is that ideas about what is the case are being censored for no other reason that that they do not agree with what a particular group of people think is the case. — Isaac

Here, you offer the different explanation. It is better than the previous one. Yet, what is going on is not completely understandable.

Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage.
— Number2018

But is Protevi’s reading doing justice to Deleuze? He argues that “a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it.
Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”

When we look at the way that Protevi wants to rethink enactivist, embodied cognition, however , we find his brand of Deleuzianism to be merely a more reductionist form of embodied cognition. For instance , his understanding of Deleuzian affect incorporates cognitive and neuroscientific approaches like Lisa Barrett, Griffiths, Panksepp and LeDoux, and he associates the anthropological work of James Scott with Deleuzian thought. I see these approaches as not particularly compatible with Deleuze. — Joshs

I want to get back to my previous post. It may be my fault that I could not articulate my central point clearly; it is about the question of the ineffable. For me, your, Protevi or even Deleuze's position regarding phenomenology is less critical than resolving or clarifying the issue. I believe that Deleuze is right, and we live and act within our assemblage; when Deleuze wrote it, that was his one, and right now, we have a different one. Its essential characteristics, according to
Deleuze and Guattari is that "There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. "(D & G, 'Anti-Oedipus, p 29). Later, in 'What is dispositif?' Deleuse introduces the third dimension of self.
Massumi develops this assertion: "There are the nonconscious presuppositions implanted in the field as you brace into it, making the coming event nonoptional. This is the aspect of perceptual judgement: conclusions about the situation that pre-make themselves as the premises of the event and as an energizer of the movements composing it.
The affective intensity of the situation powers it's playing out. Effectively, all this is about desire occurring, not on the individual level… The rational aspects of the event – judgment, hypothesis, decision -were mutually included in the event along with all the other cooperating factors." (Massumi, 2015, p 47) Where is our conscious personal autonomy here? In what way our self emerges and immediately disappears in this gap? An instantaneous translation, reduction, and transformation of the event endlessly occur at a level of our conscious engagement. Since we must act here and now, in a brief moment of time, just a little complexity can be envisaged and processed. We rely on
our reduced cooperative behavioural patterns and apply ready-made, adopted narrations and self-esteem. Our perceptional, cognitive, and social incentives are directly embedded into our environment. The ineffable is that we continue to believe in our conscious, individual autonomy.
How do you see this assessment from the position of embodied cognition? Is there another way to conceive the place and the function of self between the affective and social registers?

Deleuze's(1994) concept of intensive magnitude succeeds in deconstructing the quantity-quality binary by establishing a ‘ground' (as metamorphosis) in difference that is neither qualitative nor quantitative, and thus a basis of number that does not measure.

“Let us take seriously the famous question: is there a difference in kind, or of degree, between differences of degree and differences in kind? Neither.” “In its own nature, difference is no more qualitative than extensive” — Joshs

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). ... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (Ibid, p.8) — Joshs

It is unclear how this ‘the most radical aspect of Deleuze’ that you embrace is compatible with your
perspective on phenomenology and the ineffable. As you wrote before:

“Phenomenology as it was begun by Husserl was about finding our way past preconceptions to the formal conditions of possibility of experience, to what is irreducible, indubitable and universal in experience and thus is communicable and intersubjective . For instance, time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically. This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others in the sense that it doesn’t hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it”

Deleuze’s concept of intensive magnitude implies that only difference returns and is never the same. Anything identified as the same, as something that can be the same, can never return. The differentiating return transforms the return circuit into a departure from the self so that a sense of self only emerges in this gup. Therefore, what is rejected here is not just the anthropomorphism of any discourse that thinks a time in general for man in general, but also the prevalence of the internal, that is valid in all times and all places. Referring to singularity, to the event of becoming, is ultimately incompatible with the phenomenological approach. By contrast, a multiplicity, an assemblage, implies that “Untangling the lines of apparatus means, in each case, preparing a map, a cartography, a survey of unexplored lands…One has to be positioned on the lines themselves…We belong to these apparatuses and act in them. The newness of an apparatus for those preceding it is what we call currency, our currency. The new is the current. The current is not what we are but rather what we become.” (Deleuze, 2007, ‘What is a Dispositif’?) Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage. Together with other lines, that of knowledge (epistemological) and power (ethical), we are not, but we become. What holds an assemblage, an apparatus, together? What makes it a multilinear, opened whole? The ineffable is the relation of what we experience to our assemblage. We need to grasp the dimensions of its processual creativity. Likely, the most radical aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy are notions of the machine, the abstract machine, and the machinic unconscious as ways of explaining the operational unity of assemblages.