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  • Currently Reading
    Gilles Deleuze - Foucault
    Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari - Kafka
  • The War on Terror
    And from there onwards it has been an absolute disaster. American foreign policy deciders came punch drunk of the easiness of doing whatever and absolute idiots full of hubris as the neocons erased away everything what was left of a rational and cautious foreign policy. Nothing did matter anymore. What were the actual political situation on the ground in these countries? How would other nations react? That was totally meaningless. The US could do whatever it wanted and it went on into this crazy binge of being a bully.ssu
    Moronic stupidity overwhelmed everything. Because, why not? Nobody cared. There were no backlashes. War on Terror, war against a method. And once Bush the younger made it so, no President couldn't escape the trap as everything was already FUBAR.ssu

    The neocons are not in the current administration. But, it looks like you are right and even now American foreign (and others) policies are shaped by the logic of phantasmic and imagenary achievements. What makes it possible and even necessary? Likely, in the US there is no
    place for a neutral and independent position that allows to make weighted and qualified judgements. That is why the narative of building a self-sustainable Afghan government
    and military has been so persistent.
  • The War on Terror
    The fall of Afghanistan would have serious consequences. It could be well the end of the US as a Superpower and the beginning of it being just the Largest Great Power.ssu
    About 12 years ago, The International Institute for Strategic Studies
    in London has developed a cynical strategy of withdrawal from Afghanistan. It could be divided into
    tribal and religious fractions. Then, the US could choose one of the sides and benefit from managing
    a controlled civil war and anarchy. So, what is going on there can become an invitation ( a lure) for the next
    Power (China) to get involved.
  • The War on Terror
    in truth I don't think there is a highly controlled and organized fighting force as "The Taliban". How many of them are local militias, smugglers, groups controlled by some warlord that has been deemed to part of the Taliban?ssu

    If there is not 'a highly controlled and organized fighting force as "The Taliban"', how can you explain
    their success? And why is the current Afghan government's military so demoralized and helpless?
  • History as End
    Yet, he asserts that “Leaving behind the End of History, we have arrived at something like History as End.”
    — Number2018

    I wonder what that's supposed to mean. Must I read the damn essay to understand?
    Ciceronianus the White
    No, you do not need to read the essay. Matthew Karp means that we deal now with a new, extremely politicized function of history.

    I think it's more likely other factors played a part, and that it's as certain as it can be American institutional slavery would have come into being even if instead of the 20 enslaved persons, Jesus Christ himself, his mother, the apostles and all the saints had been brought to the shores of British colonial America in 1619.Ciceronianus the White
    You are right, the event of 1619 has no importance. Karp, a historian, knows it well. However, his essay is not historical; it is about the politics of the past. It is a protest against the newest role of history.
  • History as End


    And the interesting thing is that regardless of what the film maker shows, all of it will be factual, but the myth that is advanced would be purposeful and subject to the intention of the historian. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but I do disagree with those who claim that really Thomas Jefferson was not all he's been said to be. Those people aren't correcting history and myth busting. They're just replacing the old myth with their new one. If they are able to do that, that signals only a shift in politics, not an evolution toward more accurate truth.Hanover

    In our situation, ‘an evolution toward more accurate truth’ is left just for professional historians who can stay protected by relatively stable rules of their academic game. For non-historians, there is the choice between the two incompatible versions of history. Both are ideologically and politically motivated constructions.
  • Suppression of Free Speech
    Like Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Castro, totalitarian governments abide by the dictum: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

    This is exactly what the Biden Administration, using the cover of the issue of Covid vaccination, is seeking to accomplish right now in the USA in intimate cooperation with the leadership and censorship activities of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
    charles ferraro

    It could be interesting to compare the level of concentration of power of the US government
    with what the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century possessed. Likely, the task is not workable. Yet, despite the enormous increase of the means of social control, neither most people perceive the Biden administration as totalitarian or authoritarian, nor are these views accepted in academia.
  • History as End
    What is history? Lacking an answer to that, teaching it is the blind leading the eyeless. That is, what is it? What is its purpose and goal as history? How is it done? And to what end?tim wood

    I think that history is one of the ways society recognizes and understands itself. It is a kind of social construction. If the politics of the past had become shaped by a predominant metanarrative, it would mean a dramatic societal transformation.
  • Spanishly, Englishly, Japanesely
    For Benjamin, the differences between languages are, at base, differences between how words meanStreetlightX
    ‘The Task of the Translator' central theme is the relation between the original and a copy, or the origin and its outcome. Benjamin asserts that the connection between any two languages is primarily based on 'the ideal pre-language' (the origin). Later, he reconsidered this approach. In 'The Work of aAt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, there is no origin anymore. Since 'the aura as the unique phenomenon of a distance' has been completely lost, the origin appears deceptive and illusory. Therefore, Benjamin started rethinking the relation between seeable and sayable (meaning and words).
  • Eleven Theses on Civility
    In the article, incivility is firstly defined as anger, as an act of outrage. https://socialtextjournal.org/eleven-theses-on-civility/
    "Incivility is anger directed at unjust civil ordering.
    — Number2018

    Where do you think blame and moralism fit into this act of ‘outrage’ against ‘ injustice’?

    Specifically , do you think it is what Ken Gergen is critiquing as the moralistic blamefulness and indignation of identity politics? Would anger, outrage and condemnation apply if one throughly rejects the ethical foundationalism on which rightness and justice are grounded?
    Joshs
    In principle, our perception of the social and political realities, and the facts used in acute political debates are not directly related to our first-handed communal experience. We identify ourselves with images that in-form our reality and that simulate what is true or right. The images (in Bergson’s sense) are not primarily representative or informative. They exist in-themselves and for-themselves in the digital medium and generate what we perceive as politics. They contract, integrate, and simulate ‘all what we ever believed, valued, or fought for’; their semantic and semiotic levels are enacted and amplified by the redundancies of our affective involvements. The evolving event of the images self - regeneration and enactment is the system that continuously actualizes the construction of our social reality. As Gerden noted, identity politics contains opposite forms and dichotomy figures: incorporation and repulsion (marginalization), a victim and a persecutor, and so on. They are coexisting and working together through the synthesizing image of a savior, rescuer, expressing the primary Western ( Christian) archetype. In fact, before appearing as an anger, an act of outrage, or rhetoric of blame and moralism, the incivility is the system of images, operating the core regime of construction and re-construction of our social reality. We affectively invest images that simulate outrage based on the ethical fundamentalism. That is why identity politics is so effective and successful: it fits perfectly to the digital medium of social control.Therefore, I do not think that Ken Gerden's critique is effective. One can throughly reject the ethical foundationalism on which rightness and justice are grounded, and simultaneously and unconsciously enact identity politics on a micro-level..
    Why can’t we follow Gergen’s lead and jettison the outrage in favor of a throughly relativistic approach to societal transformation?Joshs

    20 years ago, Gerden wrote: “As many propose, identity politics is reaching an impasse. No longer does it seem an effective means of securing voice, dignity and equality. More positively, however, I see significant signs of transformation in both identity politics and in social constructionism.” He wrote it 20 years ago, but identity politics is now doing better than ever, being interwoven with the processes of contemporary societal transformation.
  • Eleven Theses on Civility
    The way I read the op, the incivility that is in contention is a product of the discourse being advocated , which takes subjectivity to be a product of sociallly constituted dynamicsJoshs
    In the article, incivility is firstly defined as anger, as an act of outrage. https://socialtextjournal.org/eleven-theses-on-civility/
    "Incivility is anger directed at unjust civil ordering. It is a rage directed at political structures that triggers a negating response that labels it “personal.” But incivility is radically different from the disinhibited expression of anger and the incitement of violence in the service of a white settler order, such as we daily experience around us. Left incivility is the strategic outward direction of rage–out-rage. If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention. If you are outraged, we need your anger as an energy. Don’t be fooled or misdirected. a radical incivility makes space for the fullness of the presence of pain and anger, as well as a diversity of styles through which both pain and anger emerge to be heard as objections to the crisis ordinary. Far from giving in to individuation, radical incivility turns us from individual pain to structural analysis; it is a with-ness that turns us toward each other. In this sense we understand radical to be a term that undoes the arkhe of subjectivity."

    The incivility is represented as the response to the urgent situation of a crisis, the means of collective mobilization and action-in-concert. It is well known that crowd-like collective subjectivity can be created and remained united just for a short time. The discursive and ideological constitutive components are less important than the affective factors, such as anger or rage. Also, crowd subjectivity is critically dependent on the people’s physical proximity. It is an emergent, evolving, singular and unpredictable event. By contrast, the contemporary leftist solidarity depends less on a direct and first-handed communal experience. The collective affective mobilizing constituents are continuously maintained and reinforced by the arrangements of digital and ideological apparatuses.
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    But what is your deepest desire? Is it identical to what was behind your previous the most intensive debates?
    — Number2018

    Who gives a damn?

    Although it's notable that this is like the 3rd or 5th time someone's tried to 'personalize' this and make this about who "I" am (is he happy? is he mentally OK? What's your deepest desire?). I love these questions. They're an an admission of utter substancelessness. They're a sign that one is one the exact right track. It gives me life, right before I ignore this kind of shit entirely.
    StreetlightX
    Your answer shows that you misunderstand my question and my apprehension of the concept of desire. I do not care about your mental health; it is none of my business. So, when I ask: "what is your deepest desire?" I mean, what are you doing while posting here.
    By the way, your answer also manifests your implicit understanding of
    desire as an individual psychological faculty. I try to apply the different concept of desire, taken from D&G's 'Anti-Oedipus': it is the ultimate collective investment into the overall societal order. One of the central themes of 'Anti-Oedipus' is the metamorphosis of desire: How can we start desire our own oppression? One of the D&G answers is that the seemingly revolutionary desire may disguise counter-revolutionary investments. For me, it is alarming when a left-wing intellectual is fighting for the noblest goals, but the actual result is the intensification of the left identity politics, accompanied by the erosion of liberal individual freedoms and the progressive concentration of power of the corporate media, big tech companies, and the neoliberal elites.
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    Ok. But what is your deepest desire? Is it identical
    to what was behind your previous the most intensive debates?
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    And some vapid shit like Number2018 will say that all this isn't about Israel, employing philosophy in the most cynical, self-serving manner - or should I say copy-pasting, considering that is the only thing he or she knows how to do .StreetlightX
    iIn principle, we need to determine if Zizek's line of thought still could be relevant. Zizek offered a particular model of a political unconscious. Do we deal here, in this thread, with a kind of ideological system, implying the implicit dimensions and mechanisms? A keen anti-Israeli debater contends that Israel bears full responsibility for the existence and escalations of the Arab Israeli conflict. Her (or his) vision of the conflict and its resolution presupposes exhaustive knowledge of facts and the ultimate rightness of her ethical and moral believes. She possesses clear distinctions and dichotomies between good and evil, light and darkness, victims and aggressors. These positions are backed and reinforced by intensive affective and emotional commitments and responses. Strikingly, these cognitive and affective patterns are not necessarily may be evoked by the atrocity and inhumanity of the current conflict in the Middle East. Three years ago, she demonstrated almost identical attitudes during Justice Kavanaugh's nomination.
    Last summer, in a similar manner, she championed BLM's cause and fought for racial justice. On any occasion, she promotes an extreme, left-wing viewpoint. So far, her repetitive patterns are not necessarily symptomatic because they can indicate the aspiration to change our overall societal order ultimately. Yet, there are a few more factors: she regularly acts in concert with the intensive mass media hysteric events, maintained and reinforced by the corporate media, big tech companies, and the neoliberal elites. Regardless of the content of a particular event, she always takes part in the intensification of the left identity politics, causing the erosion and degradation of liberal individual values and the progressive concentration of power. Therefore, the conscious revolutionary desire for radical change disguises the unconscious counter-revolutionary totalitarian aspirations. The creation and proliferation of the newest tribal identities incorporate the production of their doubles, the opposite ideological figures, invested with negativity and monstrosity: 'a sexual predator,' 'a racist,' 'a fascist,' 'an apartheid Israel,' ‘a science denier’, etc. The ideological figure of Zizek's 'Jew' has been replaced, transformed, and proliferated 'to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.' The newly created 'pathological, paranoid constructions' swiftly occupy digital platforms and all our sites of public social life. Not just a left-wing intellectual, but all of us are programmed to mirror and reflect our ideological others. Yet, comparing with Zizek's analyses, there is a new assemblage of desire and identification. The decisive role of the digital medium in the reproduction of our political unconscious makes Zizek’s reliance on Lacanian concepts unproductive and ineffective.
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    Israel has become a flashpoint for the left not just because of its subjugation of palestinians
    but because its form of nationalistic democracy exemplifies the Enlightenment era liberal political self-identity that the West is trying to distance itself from via brutal self-critique. There is nothing quite so threatening to a person than witnessing a way of thinking in an other that they have themselves only recently struggled to free themselves from. This is a thread common to the intensity of. BLM, #Metoo and anti-Israel sentiment. Israel is us Westerners, the way we used to be, the way many of us still are ( Trump , Brexit supporters) .
    Joshs

    Good points! Yet, the escalation of the anti-Israel rhetorics requires additional explanation. I would like to bring my previous post that could help to understand why Israel keeps
    attracting so much attention and hatred:
    "It is worth clarifying how the debate in this thread is unfolding. There is one
    side, so-called "pro-Israel," pointing out various dimensions and complexity of the ongoing conflict so that the achievement of peace would require patience and a trade-off. And there is another side, "anti-Israel," contending that Israel bears full responsibility for the existence and escalations of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Strikingly, these positions and arguments are similar to one of Zizek's outstanding examples of ideological blindness: "Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves from so-called 'anti-Semitic prejudices' and learn to see Jews as they really ar - in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the 'Jew' is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire. The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not 'Jews are really not like that' but 'the anti-Semitic idea of 'Jew' has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of the ‘Jew’ is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system."
    (Zizek,' The sublime object of ideology’). No, an "anti-Israel" protagonist is not necessarily an anti-Semite. But the ideological operative system here is similar to the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology in Zizek's sense. The grounding desire, an aspiration to immediately achieve the ultimate peace and justice, presupposes the evil ('sublime') object, invested with negativity and monstrosity. As a result, an ideological figure of 'Israel' has been constructed. 'Israel' has been labelled, demonized, and removed from civil discourse and the historical context. As Zizek points out, 'a pathological, paranoid construction' rejects objective facts and arguments. It employs them just for rationalizations and self-affirmations."
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    So, you justify killing of Israeli civilians.
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    When I say that the Isreali state should stop murdering children and engaging in settler colonialism, it really does have everything to do with the Isreali state, which is murdering children and engaging in settler colonialism.StreetlightX

    Should the other side stop firing missiles?
  • Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
    let's get back to how Isreali apartheid is finally being shown for what it is.StreetlightX
    It is worth clarifying how the debate in this thread is unfolding. There is one
    side, so-called "pro-Israel," pointing out various dimensions and complexity of the ongoing conflict so that the achievement of peace would require patience and a trade-off. And there is another side, "anti-Israel," contending that Israel bears full responsibility for the existence and escalations of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Strikingly, these positions and arguments are similar to one of Zizek's outstanding examples of ideological blindness: "Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves from so-called 'anti-Semitic prejudices' and learn to see Jews as they really are - in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the 'Jew' is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire. The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not 'Jews are really not like that' but 'the anti-Semitic idea of 'Jew' has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of the ‘Jew’ is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system."
    (Zizek,' The sublime object of ideology’). No, an "anti-Israel" protagonist is not necessarily an anti-Semite. But the ideological operative system here is similar to the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology in Zizek's sense. The grounding desire, an aspiration to immediately achieve the ultimate peace and justice, presupposes the evil ('sublime') object, invested with negativity and monstrosity. As a result, an ideological figure of 'Israel' has been constructed. 'Israel' has been labelled, demonized, and removed from civil discourse and the historical context. As Zizek points out, 'a pathological, paranoid construction' rejects objective facts and arguments. It employs them just for rationalizations and self-affirmations.
  • Free speech plan to tackle 'silencing' views on university campus
    Despite saying some of the stupidest possible shit one could say about potential treatments for the pandemic, he almost fucking won anyway.

    How?

    Because people believed him and nothing - evidently - could be done to stop him from dominating the discourse by defrauding the American public.
    creativesoul

    But why? Why did so many people vote for Trump despite all his lies?

    I've a little different take on the notion of unfettered free speech.creativesoul
    One of the widespread approaches to the freedom of speech has a few premises. First, there is a set of apparent, obvious basic facts. Second, one can possess a reliable access to what constitutes
    a safe and credible reference. Third, it is possible to exercise the responsible and correct interpretation of 1) and 2) to deduct a set of ultimate judgments. Finally, the resulting indisputable truth and the sense of rightness allow to clearly separate information from misinformation and to assert the benefits of the restrictions of the free speech.
  • Free speech plan to tackle 'silencing' views on university campus
    The government has announced plans for a "free speech champion" to ensure universities in England do not stifle freedom of speech and expression.

    The champion will regulate matters such as "no-platforming" of speakers by universities or student unions.

    But groups representing the sector are cautious, saying universities need to keep their "institutional autonomy".

    The National Union of Students says there is "no evidence" of a freedom of speech crisis on campus.
    counterpunch

    For a few reasons, the discussion here could become vague and unproductive.
    Without the exact context, the current government vs. universities confrontation can easily be framed as a brute political intervention: the government tries to impose its own arbitrary rules on universities and knock down their autonomy. Also, it may look obvious that it intends to determine the content of applying the freedom of speech.
    So, could you briefly outline your vision of the actual context of the current collision?
    Due to the Brexit and the COVID pandemic, the UK would’ve currently experienced an intensification of the spectrum of social and political conflicts.
  • GameStop and the Means of Prediction
    they feel threatened, and, more importantly, are reacting accordingly. The attempt to close ranks and halt buying across multiple platforms is pretty wild, as is the sheer ramping up of propaganda across finance media to portray what's going on as some kind of kiddish trolling - as if these funds do not do the exact same thing only with a suit and a tie on; as if the consequences may not be entirely incommensurate with that portrayal.

    Second, you seem to be holding on to some idea of purity with respect to the instruments involved, as if any challenge to the financial order must appear ex nihilio from a place of unsullied soil of virginal revolution. But this is messianic fantasy. If the instruments used to maim the master belong to the master then so be it. In fact, all the better. I hope people use their regulation against them, I hope people turn their speculation against them. That this stuff is finally happening on their own turf is an occasion for delight, not pessimism.
    StreetlightX
    I agree that I could miss a few critical nuances. No doubt, what is unfolding right now possesses the features of an event. It is unpredictable, and it could help to expose the nasty side of hedge fund speculations. There is indeed a threat. But this threat is no more than one of the crises that are regularly generated by the capitalistic financial system itself and are resolved by this system and its further development. The threatening effects were caused by implementing the newest apps and platforms, constituting the medium for Redditors’ collective action. They are not just technical means. You may underestimate the role of the medium in creating a sense of participation and what you call ‘solidarity.’ It could be incorrect to say that institutions and corporations that control the digital medium also control ‘solidarity,’ but digitalized affective flows of images and information that we deal with in the GameStop’s crisis are unseparated from the very flows that ground contemporary capitalism.

    this stuff has raised more class consciousness than the entirety of BLM and Occupy combined.StreetlightX

    “The current prosthetization of counsciousness, the systematic industrialization of the entirety of retentional devices, is an obstacle to the very individuation process of which consciousness consists.” ( Bernard Stiegler, ‘ Technics and Time').Today, the use of the concept of consciousness, as well as of class consciousness looks problematic. Their constitutive processes are ultimately dependent on external digital retentional networks. Compared to The Occupy Movement, the concerted and autopoietic action of Redditors has become completely digitalized. It should be studied how contemporary ‘virtual digitalized solidarity’ impacts collective social agency and the people’s ability to act in-concert.

    Debt has only ever been an instrument of sovereign and subjective discipline - there is no reason to think that these people will not pick and choose who to enforce debts upon, as and when it suits them. Don't give them that credit.StreetlightX
    The enormous latest COVID-relief packages in the US express the accelerating ability to create unlimited amounts of money. It may become possible due to the neoliberal elite's newest reorganizations. As Biden’s administration shows, the global elite is simultaneously in charge of the state, the leading corporations, international financial institutions, and has close reciprocal relations with the most significant creditors. Remarkably, according to numerous reports, a considerable portion of the money that Redditors operate comes from the recent US relief packages. Swiftly closing the short circuit, money goes back to the site of its origin.
  • GameStop and the Means of Prediction
    The best thing this could do is to expose the absurdity of unrestricted speculation. But the myth-making that's already starting will just obscure that message.Echarmion

    This event indicates well the resilience of the financial gambling system. Las-Vegas is closed due to
    COVID-19, but its model of business has become ubiquitous via WallStreetBets. The myth-making and narration simultaneously obscure and deliver this message.
  • GameStop and the Means of Prediction
    There are attempts to frame an unprecedented situation that has unfolded over the past week as class warfare and even Reddit's retail investors' revenge. As if they have personal reasons to pay back to the same financial elite that crashed their fathers' generation in 2008. There are different accounts of Redditors' motivations:
    https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/investing/wallstreetbets-reddit-culture/index.html
    No doubt, that Wall Street hedge finds abuse their power and change the rules mid-game. Yet, it would be incorrect to represent the event as the rise of the 'little guy,' as a revolt of the people. There are no just rules in the accelerating process of financial speculations. Redditors' way to skyrocket the price of GameStop is a kind of massive speculative action. It harms several hedge funds, but it does not threaten The Wall-Street's financial order. Do the people claim their right to create fiat money from the state and banks? They do not. In fact, the Redditors' speculation is dependent on the same regulations and mechanisms that allow short-term bets. There are no new instances of the fiat money creation. Maybe the hedge funds will eventually experience the brute losses, but Wall Street will enjoy the further transformation of money of payment into speculative, dematerialized capital.
    I've studied alot is in the case of sovereign debt, where solidarity among lending institutions (banks and so forth) simply refuse to lend more to indebted countries in order to enforce austerity and political change (this is basically the story of international finance relations since the 70s, and no one talks about it). This kinda of neoliberal strategy is favoured because it sticks with the script of "open-markets": the state isn't denying anything, it's allowing certain institutions to do stuff (even if that stuff happens to be denying access). It's devolution of power 'outside' the state and 'freedom' to corporate action.StreetlightX
    Following the recent COVID-related drastic increase of America's sovereign debt, there are the newest neoliberal strategies: no austerity (so far), helicopter money instead, and even more dramatic political change. It looks like elites do not care about the debt anymore. (Biden even has proposed an additional 1.9 trillion $ of 'COVID' relief.) Neither debtors nor creditors think of re-paying or reimbursing of debts. With zero interest rates, the accelerating virtualization and dematerialization of money will continue to be the engine and source of the neoliberal financial system's power. It looks like the neoliberal corporate power 'outside' the state will resonate with the power of the state itself.
    Do we witness the rise of post-neoliberal order, where the distinction between major
    debtors and creditors become insignificant?
  • Michel Foucault, History, Genealogy, Counter-Conduct and Techniques of the Self
    Precisely because power is everywhere, there are infinite forms of resistance and ways to obtain freedom.Giorgi

    It is the well known argument of Foucauldians. Yet, there are the unanswered questions regarding contemporary forms of resistance:
    what makes it possible for neoliberalism to appropriate progressive leftist and liberal
    discourses? Have big tech companies, mainstream media, and multicultural corporations become champions of the noblest and humanistic programs and goals? In fact, they primarily shape and manage the most
    robust movements of resistance today. (“ Me too”, environmental, gender, and anti-racist
    movements) Can Foucault's conceptual framework of power and resistance help to answer these questions?
  • Michel Foucault, History, Genealogy, Counter-Conduct and Techniques of the Self
    Power does NOT require a foundation. It operates effectively without a ground or an essence. It is not based on anything.Giorgi

    In terms of Deleuze, I see a possible reconciliation. If we speak of "unconventional libidinal investments" as things that can occur either spontaneously or consciously we could say that in the first case we have resistance (unconscious deterritorializations) and in the second a determined struggle or movement.Giorgi
    We live in a punitive and disciplinary society,Giorgi
    I do not think that there was a reconciliation between Foucault and Deleuze. As well known,
    Deleuse declared in “Postscript on Control Societies” that we no longer live in a punitive and disciplinary society. When Foucault stopped writing on power, he probably felt a necessity to reformulate and redefine his conceptual framework. Our agency
    and subjectivity are not anymore based primarily on panoptical, disciplinary, or biopower normalizing mechanisms. Foucault’s power is power-knowledge; there are two unseparated sides of Foucault’s power: bodily behaviour patterns and discursive formations. In any social interactions, there are no force-force relations without expressive reinforcements and fixations. (I think that you systematically omit the discursive dimension of Foucault’s power). In “Discipline and Punish,” Foucault could not successfully show how panoptical – surveying disciplinary apparatuses are related to legal, juridical discourses of that time. Deleuze completed this task: “The abstract formula of Panopticism is no longer ‘to see without being seen but to impose particular conduct on a specific human multiplicity… a new informal dimension links the two variables of unorganized matter and unformalized functions… It is a diagram, a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine”.
    (Deleuze, ‘Foucault’) There is no single, isolated exercise of power, it appears and acquires its effects and regularity in the field of strategic social unfolding, it belongs to dispositif. Foucault ‘s dispositif has three dimensions: force, subjective and discursive. There are interrelated, accumulating mutual effects and reinforcing each other. Deleuze’s diagram, an abstract machine, functions similarly to Foucault’s dispositif. Also, it shows how knowledge-power is immanent to the open whole of the unfolding social body. It strategically shapes societies and manages the field of social interactions independently from individual social actors. This conceptual framework allowed Deleuze to move to propose the existence of post-disciplinary societies of control.
  • Michel Foucault, History, Genealogy, Counter-Conduct and Techniques of the Self
    I think the objection from the omnipresence of power can only be used as an effective argument against Foucault, if we forget that for Foucault, power is not identical to domination. Power in itself is not something we want to avoid or neutralize, but something we want to appropriate and "condense" so to speak.Giorgi
    It looks like you try to avoid the discussion of the problem of resistance by redefining it as a way of appropriation
    and ‘condensation’ of power. May be, it fits Foucault’s personal experiment. Nevertheless, it does not eliminate a certain vagueness of his conceptualization of power.
    For Foucault, power is not specifically localized and is not primerily located in the machinery of State or other distinguishable institutions; it is embedded within common social and every day practices, and it is immanent to the entire social field. Therefore, power becomes undetectable and unrecognizable. It can require a long-term effort and special skills to perform a task of genealogical work to identify particular effects of power alignments. On the contrary, those subjected to power submit to it as if it were a natural order, forming the horizon of sense. It is not clear how one could resist or modify the effects of
    the omnipotent, omnipresent, and indiscernible power. For Deleuze, the question of resistance was one of the points of disagreement with Foucault. “ For myself, status of phenomena of resistance is not a problem, since lines of flight are primary determinations, since desire assembles the social field”. ( Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure’). Instead of the program of resistance, he offers the project of re-investment of desire that can crash or seal off the dispositifs
    of power.
  • Michel Foucault, History, Genealogy, Counter-Conduct and Techniques of the Self
    re-reading Foucault is very important.Giorgi
    I agree that under certain circumstances reading and re-reading Foucault's texts can become an act of resistance.

    Precisely because power is everywhere, there are infinite forms of resistance and ways to obtain freedom.Giorgi
    Foucault's insistence
    on the omnipresence of power can undermine his concept of resistance. Baudrillard, in his book 'Forget Foucault', claimed that Foucault expressed the new capitalist mode of production that knocked down and re-created every form of social communication: “This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated situation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining the body. It is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate, gravity and any fixed point must disappear…This is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies." Likely, Boudrillard capitalized on the Foucault’s assertion of the proliferation, saturation, and intensification of power.
    Since power is everywhere, any place could become the site of resistance. This claim may deprive the problem of resistance of its specifics and concretization. Since power is not repressive and ideological but productive, it could result in the inclusion of resistance into the dominating social order. Further, social actors usually do not experience their social engagements as shaped by power alignments. For example, newly created contemporary gender identities are commonly considered as the liberation movement, but not the effect of the power-knowledge complex of dispositif of sexuality. Foucault’s turn to techniques of self-discipline could be viewed as his answer to the problem of resistance. Yet, he could not foresee that the newest tendency of capitalistic biopolitical production is precisely the focus on one’s experiences where one’s subjectivity
    can be intensified, bent, and re-tooled.
  • Michel Foucault, History, Genealogy, Counter-Conduct and Techniques of the Self
    Foucault's discourse is being appropriated and re-deployed by both governments and corporations. I see research being done in management and corporate governance, even cybersecurity where Foucaultian analysis is used to extend technologies of subjugation instead of resisting them.Giorgi

    In a broader perspective, we could see the processes of appropriation and redeployment
    not just of Foucault's discourse, but of a vast spectrum of discourses of resistance. To better understand and deal with this situation, we can turn again to Foucault's parrhesia.
    It was his way to defend himself against the accusation of killing
    any hope for resistance: if power-knowledge is omnipresent and ubiquitous, there is no place
    and discourse for resistance. Yet, Foucault's authentic parrhesia is not his story of himself, disguised as the research of ancient philosophers. It is his account on personal exposure to contemporary power relations. Implicitly, his texts on power combine both dimensions of truth-telling. Re-reading and re-interpreting Foucault's texts are not sufficient. Likely, to perform an act of parrhesiastic enunciation, one should discover how power impacts oneself and one's discourses, including what one considers parrhesiastic and resistant ones.
  • Michel Foucault, History, Genealogy, Counter-Conduct and Techniques of the Self
    My point is that "speaking out" or "having an impact" may be a serious political trap unless we qualify these statements. I think the U.S. in particular has an ingenious political field which can create a powerful illusion of change and radical reform, while remaining perfectly within the confines of the status quo.Giorgi

    I agree.I think that Foucault's turn to parrhesia was a way to represent his situation.
    In parrhesia, the speaking subject's truth-telling has a double performative effect of
    impacting others and transforming the enunciating subject himself. No doubt,
    Foucault was effective in both dimensions. Yet, it looks like in our situation
    accomplishing the successful parrhesiastic enunciation has become quite challenging.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    The bodily felt sense of situation can also be related to Heidegger's (1927) concept of "being-in-the-world." The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty wrote powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger presented a fascinating
    analysis of being-in-the-world that always included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. Heidegger argued that in our felt understanding we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach."
    Joshs
    I feel that I need to come back to answer your post and to discuss time again.
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9913/introducing-the-philosophy-of-radical-temporality
    There are a few interrelated concepts:
    the context, event, present time, and unconscious. If this attempt is productive, it can become possible to return here to clarify how these concepts are related to D&G ‘s perspectives on machinic functioning of body, body without organs, transcendence, and language.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think

    Here’s Heidegger:

    “In its familiar being-in-relevance, understanding holds itself before that disclosure as that within which its reference moves. Understanding can itself be referred in and by these relations. We shall call the relational character of these referential relations signifying. In its familiarity with these relations, Da-sein "signifies" to itself. It primordially gives itself to understand its being
    and potentiality-of-being with regard to its being-in-the-world. The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.“

    Can you imagine Deleuze assenting to this way of describing moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation?
    Joshs

    This is how Deleuze and Guattari describe our 'moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation' :smile: :razz: :
    "It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces
    something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors." (Deleuze and Guattari, 'Anti-Oedipus')

    Likely, our shared context also profoundly impacts our verbal performances. The context and medium determine language. I mean that after being placed into the ultimately different context, philosophical, literary, and poetic texts and citations can inevitably lose their original meaning. In our situation, even the most significant philosophical texts could become the means of the endless
    re-citation, re-interpretation, and re-activation of one’s pre-given and pre-shaped subjectivity. Often, these texts cannot provide an access to Authenticity, Truth and Being. That is why Deleuze and Guattari moved to anti-text, anti-poetics, and anti-philosophy.Equally important, they insist that our context and unconscious are maintained and shaped by
    machinic, iterative, and exterior processes.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    I still do not understand why you claim that “The point where Derrida steps in is before you get to start with your structures and then show how they relate to each other. He breaks apart the ability to claim that there is a structure of any kind ( or force, energy, power, quality) in the first place that isn't already divided within itself prior to its claim to be an itself. The practical significance of this is not only to unravel the presuppositions of psychoanalytic models , not only to problematize Foucaultian or social constructionist notions of a socially created subjectivity determined and re-detemined by cultural interchange (and Deleuze's approach I think belongs to this zone), not only to recognize the site of culture within the so-called subject even before expose to a social-linguistic community, but to situate the place of this decentering even before a single mark or fold can claim to be an entity ,an itself.”
    As far as I see, Derrida could not successfully manage the transition from his deconstruction project to the conceptual framework that is able to take account of a stable and apparent socially created subjectivity. On the contrary, after working on deconstruction of misrepresented ontological and epistemological foundations of our society (‘History of Madness,’ ‘Order of Things,’ and ‘Archeology of Knowledge), Foucault moved to the research of the creation of the social.

    Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants.
    — Number2018

    How does a social determinant have its effect on my behavior and thinking? Does it operate as a form
    of conditioning, behind my back so to speak , in spite of my explicitly construed intent?
    Joshs
    There is the apparent controversy: from one side, one can make choices in an ever-expanding range of situations; one becomes responsible for the creation and construction of a 'life of one’s own.’ Human identity is being transformed from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ with the responsibility for performing that task and for the possible consequences and the ‘side-effects’. Therefore, the role of intentionality, self-reflexivity and personal accountability has dramatically increased over the recent time. From the other side, we evidence that our ways of life, social engagements and personal experiences are shaped, reproduced and incorporated into the dominating social order. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. Foucault’s conceptualization of contemporary subjectivity could help to understand the reciprocity of the growing individuation and the overwhelming socialization. He characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of socialization and power as ‘environmental’: “governmentality acts on the social environment and systematically modify its variables…Biopower’s formula is to ’make live or die’. It seeks to optimize a state of life by maximizing and extracting forces…Neoliberalism finds its rational principle in an artificially arranged freedom: the creation and management of the competitive behavior of economically rational individuals in the regulated environment ” (Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’).
    In our lives, we deal with various forms of conditioning that modulate behavior and stimulate intentionality by implanting directive presuppositions and activating certain tendencies. The psychological mechanisms behind these ways of behavior management are called priming. Lars Hall and others studied them:
    https://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hall-et-al.-2010-Magic-at-the-Marketplace-Choice-Blindness-for-the-Taste-of-Jam-and-the-Smell-of-Tea.pdf
    Priming operates less through stimulus-response than through cues whose force is situational. Priming includes the presuppositions that orient a social actor’s entry into the situation and direct her self – management after the encounter. We are continually immersed in highly organized artificial domains. During any encounter, one can experience her individual situation as profoundly personal and intimate. Nevertheless, one’s inner self and explicitly construed intents are primarily formed by a complex of pre-given organizing principles.

    Radically temporalapproaches , by contrast , sees each person as only being able to relate to, assimilate , construe that in the social sphere which can be construed on some basis of similarity with respect to one’s history of understanding. So we find in Kelly, Gendlin, and Heidegger a description of the ongoing history of an individual’s experiencing in terms of an overall pragmatic self- continuity:Joshs
    Coming back to our discussion of the concepts of context and unconsciousness, priming-like notions would be more appropriate to consider our situation than the philosophy of radical temporality. Derrida’s differance or mark cannot explain the structuring iterative unconscious forces that impact us. People have similar experiences primarily due to the fact of being immersed in the common highly organized, but shocking and affectivily charged environment.

    In Kelly’s approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one’s own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.
    “Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is
    that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and
    between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).
    “It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds
    of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

    One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways’ that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same’ cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.

    Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory.”
    Joshs

    I need to think about this. May be it is correct, but it is against my personal experience and observations.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    Let’s get specific. I’m going to take Kenneth Gergen’s
    approach to psychotherapy as reasonable proxy for Foucault-Deleuze.
    For Gergen, we only exist as the kind of ordinary, everyday persons we are, within certain, socially constructed, linguistically sustained "living traditions" - within which, what people seemingly talk 'about' (referentially) is in fact, constituted or constructed 'in' their responses to each other in the talk between them. In Gergen's version, such a tradition [end p.43] seemingly exists as "a repository of linguistic artifacts," sustained as such "in virtue of negotiated agreements widely shared within the culture" (MSp.9). For him, these socially negotiated agreements influence, not only what we take our realities to be, but also the character of our subjectivities, our psychological make-up.
    Joshs

    It looks interesting. Could you write the name of the book?
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    the way that I want to interpret the way Derrida uses terms like context and unconscious is that they are sequential changes in intention, rather than a ‘co-existing’ unconscious context. The unconsciousness, then, would not be within but beyond, the unavoidable exposure of intention to the alterity of new context with each iteration of the ‘same’ intention. Put differently, context would not be a spatially present surround but a temporally spacing ( and transforming) interation.Joshs
    I do not know if Derrida himself developed an expanded theory based on his insights:
    "Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place, it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [l'enonciation]. The first consequence of this will be the following: given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through the present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential." (Derrida, 'Signature. Event. Contest') Without realizing Derrida's program, it is still uncertain why language norms and rules expose the apparent iterative, repetitive patterns. Your interpretation of Derrida's central concepts of context and structuring iterative unconscious underlines just the context's alterity. When you claim that: "If each participant in a language game is experiencing a 'shared' language context but is borrowing from their own individual history as they share in the 'same' context, it seems to me that the norms, rules, practices, grammars and conventions that belong to language use must be understood as abstractions from a multiplicity of differing individual experiences of it," we still need to deal with a few gaps here. What do you mean by a 'shared' language context? Is that what you understand as Derrida's 'context'? If yes, there is a gap between this context and the general regularities of language. If not, you would contradict yourself. I think that Foucault and Deleuze, using different concepts, could further develop Derrida's program of the founding of the iterative unconscious structuring. That is why I disagree with your claim that "radically temporal approaches are more effective at understanding others, as individuals and as groups, than Deleuze's approach. What he would see as arbitrary, they would perceive a finer order hiding within. As a 'psychotherapeutic' approach, Deleuze would look for how individuals are defined and created by their positioning within a social arrangement. Radical temporal approaches see the social rearrangement as secondary and derived in relation to the social movement that already defines the individual.” Are you familiar with 'Anti-Oedipus'? You can call this work arbitrary, but it is effective. All in all, our disagreement is primarily about choosing a more effective conceptual framework. So far, I still do not see that 'radical temporal approaches' are more effective.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants.
    — Number2018

    How does a social determinant have its effect on my behavior and thinking? Does it operate as a form
    of conditioning, behind my back so to speak , in spite of my explicitly construed intent?
    Joshs
    The best way to answer is to turn to Derrida’s critique of Austin’s speech acts theory.
    “Without a general iterability (a general citationality) there would not even be a "successful" performative. The intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. This essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context. In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense required by Austin, conscious intention would at the very least have to be totally present… and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center [foyer] of context.” (Derrida, Signature. Event. Contest)”
    Derrida’s main point here that there is no speech act without intention, but there is the gap between one’s conscious intention and the unfelt determinants of the enormously complexed
    indiscernible context. Derrida uses the concept of ‘contest’ instead of the set of analytical conditions that Austin underlined as necessary for a successful speech act. The unavoidable presence of various unconscious factors makes any context of iterative performative utterance analytically undeterminable, so that “any saturation of the context is prohibited.” Consequently, it would mean the failure of Austin’s attempt to take account of ‘total context’ (the total speech situation), able to produce an illocutive force. Also, it would prove the effectiveness of Derrida’s differance. Can one of Austin’s most celebrated examples refute these assertions?
    "One of our examples was, for instance, the utterance 'I do' (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something - namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying… Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether 'physical' or 'mental' actions or even acts of uttering further words." (Austin, How To Do Things With Words). When one says 'I do,' one joins an infinite variation
    of different ceremonies without which the wedding would have no meaning. Therefore, in principle unlimited, there is a series of ways other bodies can be joined in matrimony in different places by different authorities for various reasons to achieve different effects. It looks like Derrida is right that general iterability is the central factor of a successful speech act, and its context is in principle undefined. Nevertheless, Derrida could not sufficiently make explicit his notion of a general citationality.
    How does a social determinant have its effect on my behavior and thinking? Does it operate as a form
    of conditioning, behind my back so to speak , in spite of my explicitly construed intent?
    Joshs

    I feel that I did not answer it, may be I will do it better after discussion of Derrida vs. Austin
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    Therefore, don't we have the two incompatible functions of language?
    — Number2018

    No, because even such an expressive use of language is still a technique, it responds and is constituted by imperatives of communication - grammar key among them - that are social through and through.
    StreetlightX
    First of all, in principle, I agree with you that 'They are not two different functions of language,' and I share your view that 'Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination.' Yet, I think that you are too fast and there is still a problem of bridging the gap. When you say:
    The idea of language as a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states' is a narrow, ivory-tower view of language usually promulgated by people who, having never consulted a single work of linguistics in their life, model language on old dead white men transmitting thoughts via books to them.StreetlightX
    you can depreciate the philosophical tradition based on self-reflection (from Descartes and Fichte to Husserl and Sartre) and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Likely, the first function of language is not just to provide an expressive medium of 'inner states.' "It is precisely the thinking activity of the cartesian self-reflection – the experiences of the thinking ego -that gives rise to doubt of the world reality and of my own. Thinking can seize upon and got hold of everything real – event, object, its own thoughts. The world itself got transformed into the flow of consciousness, and further become the object of reflection" (Hannah Arendt, ‘Human condition’). Activities of the mind, mediated by language, cannot be reduced to simple utilitarian performative functions. When we are writing these posts, we are not merely 'facilitative and action-oriented: you warn, exclaim, command, promise, cajole, demand, insult, soothe, direct, cheat and so on'. We are doing much more.
    Speech-acts, then, are socially negotiated, stereotypical communicative behaviors, highlighted and isolated from the experiential continuum of communication, which, when practiced according to a set of mutually identified conventions, allow for the successful mediation of the speaker’s intention across the experiential gap.StreetlightX
    This account of the performativity of language is excellent, but it is still insufficient. Though Arendt’s conceptual framework can become irrelevant for us, she provided an expanded vision of 'the cartesian performativity’. Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants. Often, they are disguised by ordinary social conventions and norms. Also, reciprocally, we intervene and may impact the constitutive factors of our agency. Austin's theory of performativity represents just a superficial layer of what we do with words.
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination; it's value is not (primarily) cognitive; it is above all facilitative and action-oriented: you warn, exclaim, command, promise, cajole, demand, insult, soothe, direct, and so on. You understand what is said only to the extent that you understand what language does: it's role in action. The idea of language as a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states' is a narrow, ivory-tower view of languageStreetlightX
    Nonetheless, language can also function as "a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states'" in so-called inner speech, an inner monologue, etc. This function is not just cognitive, here language is in charge of the constitution and affirmation of self. And I agree that 'Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination; its value is not (primarily) cognitive; it is above all facilitative and action-oriented.' Don’t we have the two incompatible functions of language?
  • There is such a thing as private language, but it’s not what you think
    In my notion language is ‘private’ only in the sense that it does not require the direct or indirect participation of a contextual community of other persons. But it is ‘public’ in the sense that the individual is already a community unto itself, sequentially transforming itself. Thinking and perceiving is already expressive, before and beyond the participation of other persons. Fundamentally, we show, express and check our language in relation to our own anticipations, in a kind of internal conversation. From this vantage , interpersonal communication is secondary and derived.Joshs
    Likely, you are not aware of the domain of social psychology, founded by Lev Vygotsky. In his book “Thinking and speech,” he convincingly showed that inner speech has an exact social origin. Children obtain inner speech abilities just after a certain period of exposure to playing and communicating in groups of other kids. I could bring other evidence that one acquires language via various processes of socialization. Nevertheless, let me assume that I embrace your notion that our common language is the derivative of the inner language, originated within the ‘constitutive community of oneself.’ When you claim that ‘the individual is already a community unto itself,’ how do you conceive the social constituency of this ‘community within the individual’? Please correct me if I misunderstood you: for you, all humans share the fundamental structures of what you call ‘radical temporality.’ These structures of one’s most essential inner temporary and affective processes found common ground for the social-collective nature of one’s private-inner language that later develops into our common ordinary language. If this is right, you may incorrectly represent the social character of ‘our inner communities.’
  • Introducing the philosophy of radical temporality
    The question, then is whether MP's gestalts are indeed irreducible primitives of meaning or whether they are derived abstractions hiding within their 'fatness' a more intricate structure of sense. Similarly, we must ask whether the irreducible primitives of content in Deleuze and Massumi are not in fact over-determined abstractions resulting in a model of inter-personal change that is too arbitrary and violent.

    Derrida can help us out here. The point where Derrida steps in is before you get to start with your structures and then show how they relate to each other. He breaks apart the ability to claim that there is a structure of any kind ( or force, energy, power, quality) in the first place that isn't already divided within itself prior to its claim to be an itself.
    Joshs

    I try to understand your points and your enthusiasm about Gendlin, Kelly, Heidegger, and Derrida. Honestly, I am more familiar with Derrida's works than the rest of them, and we could discuss Derrida's philosophy of time in more detail. We could take his essay
    "Before the law" as an example of his conceptualization of time, differance, and identity.

    The practical significance of this is not only to unravel the presuppositions of psychoanalytic
    models , not only to problematize Foucaultian or social constructionist notions of a socially
    created subjectivity determined and redetemined by cultural interchange( and Deleuze's approach
    I think belongs to this zone), not only to recognize the site of culture within the so-called subject
    even before expose to a social-linguistic community, but to situate the place of this decentering even before a single mark or fold can claim to be an entity ,an itself.

    What Eugene, Gendlin, Geoge Kelly, Heidegger and Derrida have in common is that they don't being with gestalts, patterns, configurations, flows, concepts that interact with each other to form bodies and worlds. They begin from something more intricate, a simple referential differential. Not a difference between concepts or pattern or any other form, but differences of differences of differences.
    Joshs

    There is nothing in Deleuze that allows for the fact that each of us in social relations maintain a thread of assimilative self-continuity above and beyond the way that we are mutually shaped in interaction with others. There is nothing in Deleuze
    that recognizes that affect and intention are the same thing, not interacting elements
    Joshs

    No doubt, your group of thinkers have contributed a lot to understanding the founding of 'continually changing relation to yourself moment to moment, day to day.' By the way, I hope that you agree that your conceptualization of time is not an absolute and ultimate truth that should be accepted by everyone. It is an influential and interesting phenomenological perspective that can match well with one's experience of time and operate as an orienting grounding for a few domains of science and psychology. Yet, what is at stake here is not how the philosophy of time can serve as a better foundation for understanding a more significant number of texts or writing academic papers. It is not just about the ontological or epistemological foundation of apprehension of our time, answering the question: What is our time? It is more about an ethical question: How should one live in our time? You claim that your 'radical time' could help us maintain ‘a thread of assimilative self-continuity.' That means that one should be extremely attentive to one's most profound, usually indiscernible mental processes. The result could be the achievement of a culminating gestalt, of discovering and preserving one's authentic identity. (Despite all your claims that your philosophy is beyond any subjectivity). Yet how is this program related to our social realities, to our ordinary identities that we need to play out continually?
    I do not see (so far) how you can bridge the gap. It looks like you misunderstand or misinterpret how Deleuse starts. He does not begin from separate entities or processes, but develops a transcendental empiricist dialectics of virtual and actual. When he writes: "As for the third time that uncovers the future: it signifies that the event and the action have a secret coherence that excludes the coherence of the self. It has become equal to them, and they shatter it into thousands of pieces, as if the bearer of the new world were taken up and dissipated by the shattering of what it, in the multiple, gives birth to. The self is equal to the unequal in itself", he lays out an ultimately different (from yours) existential program: one should not maintain and preserve any stable identity. Why? Because they are not authentic anymore. They are created and reproduced primarily for valorization or utilization purposes. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. One cannot discover or retain any authentic experience. One should live in 'the middle of things.' Has an almost inaccessible experience of death become the most authentic experience?
  • Introducing the philosophy of radical temporality

    "Events understood as interaffectings of interaffectings, working within and beyond relations
    among presumed temporary essences (conceptual, affective-bodily, interpersonal), do not achieve their gentle integrative continuity through any positive internal power. On the contrary, they simply lack the formidability of static identity necessary to impose the arbitrariness of
    conditioning, mapping, mirroring, grafting and cobbling, on the movement of experiential
    process.
    Feeling, the event, the inter-bleeding of subject and object, transformation without form: all of these terms reference the same irreducible ‘unit’ of experience, concealed by but overrunning what bodies, dispositions and other states are supposed to do. A ‘single’ state (whether so-called conceptual or bodily-affective) is already a panoply of intimately changing variations and momenta of felt meanings, in(as) the instant it is accessed, infusing the allegedly conceptual with feeling (and the sensate with intentionality) from within its very core, embodied before any consultation with a separate bodily ‘outside’."

    It is impossible to deny the richness and validity of this outline of time. Yet, it could be beneficial to compare and contrast this approach with Deleuze's philosophy of time. For Deleuze, there are three fundamental syntheses of time, so that each one becomes the foundational grounding for the next. The first, the living present, has similar formal features with your 'radical time' so that the past and the future present operative dimensions. Deleuze's third synthesis of time, having past and present as dimensions of the future, may become a better model for understanding how the primacy of affect and an operativity of the event of the present are ultimately opened towards outside. Developing Deleuze and Guattari's line of argumentation, Brian Massumi goes so far as to propose that the event's processes are not merely self-retaining transcendental a-priory but are doubled and mutually presupposed by exterior power relations.
    "On the infra-level, what is at issue is a veritable becoming, a bringing into determinant existence of something prefigured only on the run, in the upswell of as-yet unformed potential. Modulating or manipulating what comes of this level constitutes an extreme form of power: the power to bring to be; the power to make become; the power to harness qualitive transformation. I call it ontopower." (Brian Massumi, "The principle of unrest"). Does Massumi contradict himself? He also asserts: "The concept of affect is tied to the idea of modulation occurring at a constitutive level where somethings are doing, most of the unfelt….There are no subjects that are pre-constituted, but the emergence of the subject, or its re-emergence and reconstitution…" (Brian Massumi, "Politics of affect"). This conceptualization of affect is quite similar to yours. Yet, it could be challenging to show that the event's autopoietic emergent processes and the immanency of valorization matrices of our neoliberal conditions are interdependent upon one another to exist.