Comments
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Technology, Complexity, Science- No Bastion for Meaning EitherI guess the big question is, WHY is it meaningful to create technologies? — schopenhauer1
The gent scholar types want to think that understanding principles of science, and applications in technology provide some inherent meaning. Thus, by edifying themselves in the immersions in these topics, they feel they are participating in something grander or important. — schopenhauer1
Heidegger:
“modern science, as the theory of the real, is not anything
self-evident. It is neither a mere construct of man nor something
extorted from the real. Quite to the contrary, the essence of
science is rendered necessary by the presencing of what presences at the moment
when presencing sets itself forth into the objectness of the real. This moment remains mysterious,
as does every moment of its kind. ..The sciences are not in a position
at any time to represent themselves to themselves, to set themselves
before themselves, by means of their theory and through
the modes of procedure belonging to theory.
If it is entirely denied to science scientifically to arrive at its
own essence, then the sciences are utterly incapable of gaining
access to that which is not to be gotten around holding sway in
their essence. Here something disturbing manifests itself.”
If we accept that science itself “remains mysterious” it is possible
to challenge a variety of meaningful anthropomorphic narratives describing science. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I think that these fragments show how brilliant Massumi’s account of an event is. I’d like to pay your attention to the contemporary political developments in the US since November 2016, when Trump was elected. We can witness the rise and the fallWe see the same reductive tendency in Massumi to begin from self-centered algorithmic iterations which only later interaffect, resonate or disrupt each other. Whta’s lacking is a more radical thinking of interactivity. Non-linearity isn’t enough because it still operates as a deterministic metaphor. — Joshs
of numerous attempts to explain what happened, ranging from political philosophies (Badieu and Bifo Berardi, for example) to mass media and simply conspiracy (it is often difficult to distinguish between them). Theories, models, explanations, and narratives have replaced each other with vertiginous speed. Moreover, today, the absolute majority of writers and their listeners (readers) do not remember (and do not reflect on)
what was in the center of their attention 24-27 month ago, being wholly preoccupied with current events. Can we conclude, that affect was at the core of these discursive surges?
Therefore, we definitely must agree with Massumi, when he wrote:
“Our “habit of dwelling upon the long future and the long past” is a“literary” effort of “purely abstract imagination, devoid of any direct observation of particular fact. “In considering our direct observation of past, or of future, we should confine ourselves to time-spans of the order of magnitude of a second, or even fractions of a second.”
“It is not the forecasting or back-casting of the critical observer who places emphasis on. There is no overlook allowing an emphasis to be laid on from outside or above. Rather, Whitehead says, the observer, is on the “utmost verge” of events’ taking shape in their own “process of self-completion.” On the verge of history, past and future are “immanent” to the present and, in that interval, to each other. The critique of history has nowhere to be but in the reciprocal immanence that is the verging toward the self-completion of events in the making. The fraction of a second-scale is where we must mark the singularity of events, and grasp their return. This is no easy task: because the verge of history is also events’ lacuna point, the moment they have not taken place. This is why Nietzsche argues that what history is most intensely about is the “untimely.”
This is why Foucault asserts the need for an effective history that is a “history of the present”… “Effective history . . . shortens its vision to the things nearest it—the body, the nervous system . . . energies”. Only an immanent critique can effectively “observe” what is energetically not taking place, coeval with a moment’s effective self-completion: in the interval of history’s in-the-making.”
To become the observer on the “utmost verge” of history, one must discover the exact point
of indiscernibility, where the intensity of the event, bodily affects, and energies, are not separated yet from the fabulated narratives and discourses.
Further, one can discover that intensive becoming, the Nietzschean “untimely” doubles history; that there are endless circuits of the actual physical real and virtual intensive real, which carries everything, continually following each other, running behind each other and referring back to each other around a point of emergency.
“There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only
a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together.”
What we need to understand is how our primary and unrecognizable affects and patterns are
built “in between.” Between an intensive-virtual-social-politic, and individual-personal-actual-formed. The unconscious drives, desires, and impetuses are enclosed within the one circuit,
so that “Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all
of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any
meaning whatsoever.”
That is why Massumi wrote:
"Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic
remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing,
from narration, as it is from a vital function. It is narratively de-localized, spreading over the generalized body surface…
When on the other hand language doubles a sequence of movements to add
something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case, a sense of futurity,
expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. "
Getting back to the events of November 2016 (and, in general, considering how mass media work, or New York Stock Exchange functions) , one should conclude, that on the “utmost verge” of the event is affect,
condensed to the striking intensity of shock; the unresistable request to get involved, to get a response of any kind.
Note here that beginning from system as logical procedure creates a sharp oppositionality between structure and change, rule and paradox, the cognitive and the affective. — Joshs
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to apply to unconscious intensity the nature/culture opposition, the dichotomy between chaotic and disastrous affective flows, and a cultural, civilized, and rational symbolic order. If we turn to Guattari’s basic scheme of a general contemporary assemblage, we can find
there that signifier, labor, libido, and Capital are united under the rubric
The economy of flows. Practically, it means that any intensity of the event, taken up by mass media, would be immediately converted into the individual libido and desires, simultaneously transformed into appropriate discourses, will become the flow of “immaterial labor,” and, finally will be appropriate as the surplice value in some form of
Capital. All these processes should maintain an endless motion and acceleration. Yet, our contemporary societies are not built to entirely control and manage the event. Massumi: “"Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox. A tinge of the unexpected, the lateral, the unmotivated, to lines of action and reaction. A change in the rules. The expression-event is the system of the inexplicable... The affect is to be modulated by a variety of strategic improvisational techniques, they modulate an unfolding of the event on the fly, but they cannot completely control the outcome. Affective techniques apply to situations more directly than to persons. They are directly collective. They are fundamentally participatory, since they are activated in a situation, couched singularly in the occurrence of that encounter. They are event factors, not intentions.”
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Is consciousness a multiplicity?
Thank you for doing the work and making this case of "a cool blood killer.” It was interesting reading. DG’s concept of “an assemblage” is one of the most difficult ones; but it is a key notion to understand better “the varieties of fascism, that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.” (Foucault). The political and ethical implications of different assemblages are significant – what is at stake is the question of the essence of the subject of action – is that a conscious, responsible individual or a collective impersonal agent of some kind?Protevi has spent that past few decades trying to convince us that his reading of DG gives him a method of analyzing notorious affective-socio-political situations such as Columbine that can supplement 4ea accounts. I think the details of his method give us a good opportunity to judge the usefulness of his ordering strategy, particularly with regard to affect and motivation.
I have selected what I think are pertiment passages from Protevi's 'AFFECT, AGENCY AND
RESPONSIBILITY:THE ACT OF KILLING IN THE AGE OF CYBORGS' to demonstrate how
difference operates via assemblages for him: — Joshs
It looks like for Thompson there is no problem, whereas Protevi could find and pose one. Could you explain the status of “problem” of consciousness in the cognitive psychology and neuroscience field?
Does the 4EA - model have some social – political implications?
After looking through Protevi’s books, I started thinking that you are right in your critique. He tries toI think Protevi’s approach belongs to the larger framework of enactivism, based on his numerous analyses of Gallagher, Thompson, Merleau-Ponty and Varela. But I also suspect it represents a less sophisticated, more reductive version than that of Thompson or Gallagher, in spite of its claims to situate subjectivity within a wider realm of the bio-political.
Whereas Protevi thinks his view is wider in scope, it may simply be more fragmented, lacking the extent of integrative impetus in Thompson-Varela’s thinking. Proteiv’s reliance on dynamical systems metaphors seems to too often begin from algorithmicly-themed and internally centered machinic processes(near-reflexive affect modules, cognitive programs). Then creativity and transformation consists of the clashing, interruption and intgerating among such independent flows, machines, algorithms.. — Joshs
combine 4-e model with DG’s approach, but in spite of his claims, he could not formulate the problem
quite in the spirit of DG’s thought. So it is not just about “more reductive version than that of Thompson or Gallagher,” but also of DG.
Nevertheless, he could formulate his thesis: "there is another sense of “agent” as nonsubjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases, the military unit and nonsubjective reflexes and basic emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers’ subjectivity qua controlled intentional action. In these cases, the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual person or subject but the emergent assemblage of a military unit and nonsubjective reflex or equally nonsubjective affect program… though we could argue that the practical agent of the massacre was the assemblage of the unit and the distributed nonsubjective rage agents…"
It is a more reductive version of DG’s definition of assemblage: “it has two sides – it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, and it is a machinic assemblage of desire…It is a social machine, taking man and women into its gears, or, rather, having men and women as part of its gears
along with things, structures, metals, materials.” So, there are two sides of the same assemblage –
expressive one, including all possible ways of collective expression, and desire’s one, including
a variety of bodily affects, taken together and connected with technical machines, mechanisms, materials, etc. DG’s understanding implies that the real subject of a statement as well as of an action is the particular assemblage. The question is how general is their definition? Should it be applied to some particular situations (in Protevi’s case, one might think that when the solder comes to normal life, he starts regretting what he did)? Should we assume that the notion of assemblage applies to some extreme situations, but in general, there is still a place for a rationally thinking normal individual?) It could be beneficial to check how DG’s approach is compatible with Judith Butler’s one: “Assembly only makes sense if bodies can and do gather or connect in some way, and speech acts that unfold from there articulate something that is already happening at the level of the plural body. But let us remember that a vocalization is also a bodily act, as is sign language, and this means that there is no speaking without body signifying something, and sometimes the body signifies something quite different what a person actually says…
If the plural subject (of assembly) is constituted in the course of its performative action, then it is not already constituted; whatever form it has prior to its performative exercise is not the same as the form it takes as it acts, and after it has acted. So how do we understand this movement of gathering, which is durational, and implies occasional, periodic, or definitive forms of scattering? It is not one act, but a convergence of actions different from one another…Temporal seriality and coordination, bodily
proximity, auditory range, coordinated vocalization – all of these constitute essential dimensions
of assembly and demonstration”.
I do not want to critique Butler’s approach, trying to find out
how her model is different from the known theories of Le Bon, Sorel, and Canetti. What is important here is that the essential emergent, performative components, necessary for maintaining an assemblage do not require the physical proximity and the abruptness of gathering (the main points for Butler), or some special circumstances (battlefield, or war for Protevi). The communicative-expressive components, as well as bodily constellations, mentioned by Butler, are constitutive even for some virtual Internet communities. Further, “speech acts that unfold from there articulate something that is already happening at the level of plural body”- in Protevi’s case, the military training complex, plying an essential role in “dehumanizing the solder’s actions,” functions as a generative matrix, as a diagram of intensities and crucial thresholds.
However unexpected and spontaneous Butler’s assembly looks like, one could find a virtual prototype of the event, and map its crucial intensive components.
If we consider some bureaucratic agency, the conventional theory is that it has an authority structure, in which rights and obligations are distributed in a hierarchical way, as well as clearly defined roles and positions. Further, the exercise of authority is backed by legitimacy, so that the personal beliefs of a member of an organization or her knowledge of the cost of a breach of the agency’s written regulations. Definitely, one could find these primary structural constituents. Nevertheless,
cannot we also discover here all the essential components of Butler’s model? There are two interdependent regimes – an expressive (including linguistic one), as well as a bodily one (including
a set of behavioral patterns, working techniques, interactions with machines and colleagues). All employees gather together, speak the same organizational jargon, reflecting and effectualazing a process of their bodily transactions. Apparently, assemblage’s performative acting components are much more important for employee’s functionality, than an organization’s authority structure, ethics code, its written rules, employee’s values or beliefs. Therefore, in principle, it has satisfied the DG’s definition of assemblage. Further, getting back to Guattari’s general model, one could locate the agency on a general map of intensive flows of information, money, libidos’ investments and interactions, essential existential territories, and virtual discursive communities.
There are a few more critical remaining questions: the degree of the independence of an employee,
of her own agency, related to the assemblage’s plural subject; her sense of her own agency, homogeneity, and heterogeneity of practices through consequential social fragments.
Going back to Protevi’s case – when a soldier comes home to normal life, he experiences remorse and regret.
Does it mean that he is coming back to possession of an ordinary subjectivity? If yes, the assemblage theory should be reserved just for individual cases.
DG’s answer: the social field is comprised of blocks, fragments (assemblages) that are located on
“a continuous and unlimited line, with their doors far from each other, and contiguous back doors
that make the blocks themselves contiguous.” Probably, it could be an interesting and challenging task to show how assemblages, comprising the solder’s normal life, are contiguous to his last military
experience. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
• I’ve taken most vocabulary from Guattari’s book “Schiizoanalytic cartographies”; mimetic emulation is from Girard; I used Guattari’s model on pg. 27:First, a couple of questions. Who are the primary references for the vocabulary you are using here? Deleuze-Guartari? Does ‘mimetic emulation’ come from them or Rene Girard? Where does the term ‘conscientious universes’ come from? — Joshs
Machinic Consciential
Phyla Universes
The economy of Flows Territories of virtual real
(signifier, labor)
libido, Capital)
Sorry, not conscientious, but consciental. DG used in “A Thousand Plateaus” another term instead of this one - incorporeal transformations.
Guattari attempts to lay down the general model of an assemblage. There are a few organizing principles:
a separation between subjectivity and consciousness; mutual interdependence and interrelation of the four domains; their materialistic ontological status, the endless process of motion and variation, described in terms of deterritorization and territorization; verification and application through comparison with differently established models.
I could begin with a warning. While it sounds impressive to throw in every conceivable source of input, information, flow, both signifying and a-signifying, as possible impingments upon and definers of subjectivity, we don’t end up with anything interesting or useful except as such impingements can be seen in the light of ordering structurations and patterns. Without minimal coherence and consistency there is only pure randomness. If we are to choose a DG account of affectivity and subjectivity over other philosophies and psychologies, it must be because it is more useful to us, more clarifying and , in some overall sense, more effectively ordered, not because it offers a laundry list of infinite sources of random impingement. That large list you gave me (room, psychology, signifying and a-signifying flows, etc, etc,) is less significant in and of itself than in how it is specifically understood in its orders of relationship. We know that all these impingements jostle, form and reform subjectivity, but how do we make sure that we don’t end up reifying them such that the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings? I have no problem in embracing DG in this regard as preferable to Freudian, stimulus-response and first generation cognitive models of the subject, because while at a micro level DG abandons the ordered structures and processes that define these approaches, at a metalevel it is posits a less arbitrary and less polarized model of experiential change. All that stuff coming at subjectivty from above, below and within that dissolves, ovewhelms and displaces psychodynamic id, ego and superego has a more radically intricate kind of order or logic to it that persuades us that we understand persons better through it that via Freudianism. — Joshs
I think that DG’s project is going far beyond the critique of psychoanalysis. Foucault noted:
“Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics… How does one keep from being fascist, even
(especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?
How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of
fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our
behavior? The book is about the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from
the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that
constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”
Foucault’s evaluation of DG’s thought is still entirely relevant. The ethical-political dimension
helps to find a way out of an impression that DG intended to show that “the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings.” Subject’s operating conditions are not random, they are primarily the same as the operating assemblages, maintaining the essential, power relations of our societies. Therefore, “the sequence of random operant conditionings” is not endless; it is finite and well defined. Further, whereas you wrote that “rather than a single linear causal intentional vector, consciousness can more accurately be described as a site of competing streams offragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention,” for DG “the site of consciousness” is the place where the economy of the power’s interventions and strategies is applied. (The faciality machine that we used to discuss is one of the examples).
Further, these “competing streams offragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention” – aren’t they are already ready-made - images of images, perceptions of perceptions, arriving at the site of consciousness after being intensively processed not by some uncertain environment, but by our essential social-political machines?
If the “subject” has become primarily determined by implicit and hidden forces and social
presuppositions, so that its most intimate desires and motivations are just working parts of the dominating system (in spite of seemingly different “conscious” subject’s own declarations) – don’t we deal with the kind of fascism in Foucault’s sense? That is why Foucault pointed out that DG’s thought provides ethical guidance - when one, following DG, finds his/her own “operating conditions,” one gets a chance to exercise freedom, to practice becoming.
“If we are to choose a DG account of affectivity and subjectivity over other philosophies and psychologies, it must be because it is more useful to us, more clarifying and, in some overall sense, more effectively ordered, not because it offers a laundry list of infinite sources of random impingement.” I agree with you, DG’s project is not effectively ordered – they were busy with so many challenges so that they often did not put the clearance as their first priority. Further, they often disorganized their work deliberately, as the way to distinguish themselves and to invent the new forms of expression, as well as due to militant and provocative aims. That is one of the reasons
why after so many years of intensive scholarship, there is still room for further problematization and application of their thought.
"all these impingements jostle, form and reform subjectivity, but how do we make sure that we don’t end up reifying them such that the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings?"
DG's account on the subjects and subjectivity can be found in their assemblage theory. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
We can discuss my model of consciousness. — Joshs
I’d like to get back to the first post of this thread. The financial trader in the trade room may represent a good case to check the appropriateness of different models of consciousness. She looks at diagrams, curves, and various types of data, surrounded by computer’s screens, assisted by numerous machines, makes decisions about price-setting in real time. It is possible to distinguish four separate heterogenic domains, playing a decisive role for her conscious processes and synthesis. First, there is the room itself. It is the part of the office, the working place. Yet, it is an existential, habitual territory – it has
some personal belonging, reminding an ordinary human milieu. Second, there is the domain of the trader psychological processes: her desires, pre-personal affective mimetic perceptions, reactions, involvements, motivations, and individual
cognitive acts. Third, there is the domain of conscientious universes: groups, lobbies,
interested economic and political parties, schools of economic thought, working rules, and labor ethics express themselves through her mind. Fourth, there are intensive a-signified as well as signified sign flows: financial flows of “real economy ”, informational flows of forecasts about the economy, flows of share prices, and informational flows of expectations of these prices rising or falling. Each domain has its own and autonomous temporality: first, there are regular rhythms of human existential territory.
Second, there is the time of an a-personal affective, mimetic emulation, of an extremely competitive trading environment. Thirdly, there is a highly elaborated field of discursive rationalities, presupposing sets of roles, ethical-political and social positions, and strong performative functions.
Each speech act, said, written, or even reproduced in the trader’s mind is engaged in a variety of virtual professional, social, or scientific “communities.”
The final domain is completely machinic - there is an endless automated process of generation and translation of various financial, economic, scientific and analytic information as well as a self-supported flow of various material transactions. This machinic phylum has a decisive role, maintaining the accelerating growth, an endless renovation, and interrelation of all other temporalities. The differentials, composed by the third and second domain, often affect the trader’s mind instantaneously, even without recognizing virtually existing real factors. Therefore, we need to reconsider the essence of time synthesis that can be used to explain the trader’s conscious as well as unconscious acts.
Probably, your model -“consciousness can more accurately be described as a site of competing streams of fragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention. Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness… it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents. Consciousness performs a momentary synthetic function, making it appear that this community is a single 'I.'”- should be regarded as an undoubtedly correct, but a limited and isolated phenomenological model. "Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness"- most of these
unconscious processes are caused by direct involvement in a-signifying subjective agencies. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I would like to set up a dichotomy and see what you think of it. On the one side would be discourses which follow upon Hegel-Marx. These would include Adorno, Habermas, Badiou, Jameson, Althusser and Zizek. On the other would be post-structuralists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and Nancy. — Joshs
Definitely, in spite of enormous differences within each group, it is possible to set up this dichotomy. Maybe, one could add Baudrillard to the second group.
While there is a shared interest uniting the Marxist and poststructurlist thinkers regarding the need to subvert representational norms, ideologies, network of significations, what would unite the Marxist group is the use of a dialectics(negative for Marx and Adorno, affirmative for Badiou) that thinks history in terms of an emancipatory telos. That is to say , while they reject an enlightenment notion of progress, they maintain a certain messianism in their faith in radical progressive political becoming. This marks the modernist element in their thinking. — Joshs
I agree.
The post-structuralists, in contrast, make the postmodern philosophical move of putting into question the justification of any notion of emancipation. They read Nietzsche as determining a trajectory of emancipation as originating in a Will to emancipation, which must be subordinate to Will to Power, which has no emancipatory or any other telos. The only trajectory of Will to Power is difference. For them , political history is not diaelctically emancipatory but incimmensurably geneological. — Joshs
I am not sure that Nietzsche inspired Lyotard or Baudrillard, and I doubt that “The only trajectory of Will to Power is difference” is the essential principle for all “post-structuralists”. Yet, I agree with the general meaning of your formula. I would add to your account that for both Deleuze and Foucault it was essential to convert their thought into their becoming, to transform it into their own experimental de-individualized emancipation of a new kind. (even though both projects of becoming were entirely different)
I think its important to recognize a distinction between what a writer like Deleuze is trying to do
and what radical post-marxist emanciaptory thinkers like Zizek and Badiou are aiming at. — Joshs
I agree. I do not entirely understand what Zizek does. Sometimes it looks like he does not take his Marxism seriously; being eclectic and inconsistent, he makes an appearance of a kind of Nietzschean-Dionysian becoming. Or, is it just a simulation? -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
Yes, I want to talk about Adorno’s Aesthetics. This work is fundamental and encyclopedic.So, ltLet's talk about Adorno. . Have you found his writing to be particularly useful to you? — Joshs
could be interesting to try to apply his aesthetics to contemporary art. (maybe performance art) I use his writing as a counterexample, as an experiment - why his great thought does not work anymore? I love "Dialectic of Enlightenment".
Concerning time as duration, may be you could talk a little about how you understand Deleuze's concept of duration. Do you see it as similar to Bergson's? — Joshs
Instead,I would prefer to come back to your model of counscessness,
and during this discussion I would lay out my understanding.
"The mind functions as an inseparable interaction with environment and body. It is nothing but this interaction. There is no self-identical self in this model. Self is a bi-product of the constant constructive interactive activity of the organism-envirnmental interaction. Consciousness is not self-conscious in the sense of being able to turn back on itself and grasp itself identically. To reflect back on the self is to alter what one turns back to. The impression we get of consciousness as the commander of decision, as unfolding meaning as a linear causal sequence of nows (one damn thing after another), is the result of the way linguistic grammar is constructed , But rather than a single linear causal intentional vector, consciousness can more accurately de described as a site of competing streams offragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention. Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousnessoutside of its awareness. So the notion of agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents. Consciousness performs a momentary synthetic function, making it appear that this community is a single 'I'." When you write: “Consciousness performs a momentary synthetic function”, how do you understand this operation? What does it mean “Consciousness performs”? And -" a momentary synthetic function"? There are some approches trying to apply the notion of autopoiesis.
I am afraid that you will again try to apply Heideggerian-Derrida’s temporalities. What about Merleu-Pontu? Or, anything different? -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
First, I do not endorse. Second, it was not just about Adorno’s reading of Heidegger. As far as I see it, this book reflected his existential position,his fight, and "Jurgon of Authenticity" is the least dialectical, and the most concrete Adorno's book. Later, Bordieu further developedIf you really endorse Adorno's reading of Heidegger you've got a got of a conflict on your hands. — Joshs
Adorno's ideas, without any support of "Kierkegardian reading". I think that "Jargon" attempted
to tie German existentializm (not just Heidegger)with the general spirit of that time. The book is not a "reading", it is not about interpretarion or hermeneutics.
Let's look at the alignments.Deleuze never wrote about Heidegger, but we know Derrida is very close to Heidegger. We also know that Derrida wrote he didnt find anything objectionalble in deleuze's ideas. We also know that a community of post-structuralists including Foucault, Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lyotard and Derrida were united in their reading of Nietzsche against
existentialist interpretations of him. We also know that Nancy talked of his close proximity in thinking to both Derrida and Deleuze, and his debt to Heideger as another post-Nietzschean thinker. My assumption is that neither Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard or Nancy would agree with Adorno's Kierkegaardian reading of Heidegger. — Joshs
As far as I know, Lyotard adopted Adorno's ideas from "Negative dialectic" in his book about Heidegger.
I think that this kind of discussion is not constructive, since it is always possible to ground any
favourable opinion. We can point out names, schools, opinions, and interpretations; yet we do not improve our understanding, and we do not solve problems that preoccupy us. But, I could point out that both Foucault and Deleuze developed their own “reading” of Nietzsche, utterly different from Heidegger’s. If Deleuze or Foucault did not mention him, that means that they did not find it useful and relevant.
Lyotard (“Heidegger and Jews”), Bourdieu (“Political ontology of Martin Heidegger”), and Derrida (“Of Spirit: “Heidegger and Question”) took an active role in the discussion about Heidegger.
I think that this topic can consume too much time .
the post-structuralists were united in rejecting Adorno's Hegelian emancipatory thinking, and none of them would likely refer to Derrida's approach as negative theology. — Joshs
Ok, in principle, I don't mind Derrida or Heidegger, they simply do not help me right now.
I feel that I cannot solve my problems applying their thought. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I disagree. Our present time is composed of primarily cinematographic, telecommunicational duration.
— Number2018
What is "cinematographic, telecommunicational duration"? — Terrapin Station
When you come to the cinema, or when you watch the news or a show, or when you get
exposed to a multiplicity of communicational, computerized factors at the office, you become an object of a tremendous number of forces and manipulating techniques. They are wrapped up, contracted, and operate instantaneously. Most of us experience these situations as entirely natural and adequate. Yet, it is known and well documented how shocking could be the first encounter with the cinema, a computer, or a cell phone.
McLuhan:
“This man—the sanitary
inspector—made a moving picture, in very slow time, very slow technique,
of what would be required of the ordinary household in a primitive African
village in getting rid of standing water—draining pools, picking up all empty
tins and putting them away, and so forth. We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn't know that there was a fowl in it! So we very carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame.
Someone had frightened the fowl and it had taken flight, through the right hand, bottom segment of the frame. This was all that had been seen. The other things he had hoped they would pick up from the film they had not picked up at all, and they had picked frame. This was all that had been seen. The other things he had hoped they would pick up from the film they had not picked up at all, and they had picked up something, which we didn't know was in the film until we inspected it
minutely. Why? We developed all sorts of theories. Perhaps it was the sudden movement of the chicken. Everything else was done in slow technique - people going forward slowly picking up the tin, demonstrating and all the rest of it, and the bird was apparently the one bit of reality for them. For them there was another theory that the fowl had religious significance, which we rather dismissed.
Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly
translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness.
Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible.” -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I disagree. Our present time is composed of primarily cinematographic, telecommunicational duration.367
↪Number2018 "How could one present “present”? When we write or say something about our current present, we must think of the time of the occurrence of our sentences, which is our present time. This present time cannot be grasped as such: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp the presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event."
Heidegger does a good job of explaining this. Each of the steps you mention, bringing something into view as something new, having it present, presenting it, grasping it, identifying it, using and referring to it, these are all further articulations which do refer back to that which they articulate , but in articulating further they subtly change what they articulate , by bringing out something new about it. This isn't a problem for us because such steps are experienced as dealing with, examining, having, pointing to, positing something present. Each transforms what it deals with in its own way, as bringing it into view in THIS or THAT manner. — Joshs
The problem is that in most cases we do not realize how we perceive as well how we are perceived while being part of this radical novelty of our temporality.
“In the Time Image, “time is out of joint;” movement subordinates itself to time: time causes aberration or normalization in movement, the objects are not acting to cause change, but time inflicts change on them. The images are experienced as pure “opsigns” and “sonsigns,” images that are not going anywhere, but “empty, disconnected, abandoned spaces” that instead of inspiring the question “what is there to see in the next image,” make us ask, “what is there to see in the image?” These disconnected images link up (or “re-link”) with “recollection images” and “dream images” unlike the “action images” and “affection images” of the Movement Image. Again, Deleuze’s concepts for the new cinema resonate with those developed in new media. For Deleuze, these images are moving towards a more open whole: recollection images expand the present (through metonymy), dream images expand the whole or world (through metamorphosis or metaphor). These images embody both the actual and virtual, and make indiscernable the real from the imaginary, the outside and inside, the out of set/frame and in set. This shock or confusion inspires around our perceiving senory-motor schema (which Deleuze sees as the seat of ideology) to create new thought.
When Deleuze speaks of bringing about a direct representation of time, he seems to be speaking about realization beyond the pro-filmic world, but a realization of time within the audience, an experience of stepping out of language and actually experiencing a duration. Deleuze describes the Time Image as something which may not exist in perfection (or even abundance) within cinema, but a limit that cinema can approach.”
In other words, they reduce the ontological difference to a difference between two ontic determinations. Being conceived as the performative difference between schematism and existence is a difference between two ontic determinations and therefore is itself on the ontic plane of propositionality. It is a present to hand thinking masquerading as post-metaphysical.
When one begins from the subjectivism of representationality, the way of out of Kantian a priorism must stand as the absolute other to representation, that is to say, it must arrive in the guise of the performance of the differentiation between Subjective structuring and Objective determination. Only in this way can the empirically conditioned and contingent beginning of thought avoid being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Heidegger and Derrida give us a way to avoid grounding fundamental ontology in the performative difference between schematism and existence as its condition of possibility. — Joshs
I doubt that Heidegger and Derrida are able to give us a way out. Derrida’s differance is impossible without negative theology, which
definitely belongs to “schematism.”
As Adorno showed, Heidegger’s primary distinction between ontic
and ontological is profoundly controversial and applies a variety of linguistic manipulations. Therefore, both gestures, however attractive they look, are not the absolute other to representation.
How deeply rooted are the societal elements in
Heidegger's analysis of authenticity is involuntarily
revealed by his use of language. As is well known,
Heidegger supplants the tradition al category of subjectivity
by Dasein , whose essence is existence . Being,
however, which "is an issue for this entity in its very
Being, is in each case mine . " This is mean t to distinguish
subjectivity from all other existent beings. It
intends, furthermore, to prohibit existence from being
"taken ontologically as an instance or special case of
some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand.”
This construction, which is inspired by Kierkegaard's
doctrine of the "transparency" of the self ,
would like to make possible a starting out from some
element of being. This latter is valued as the immediate
givenness of the facts of consciousness in traditional
epistemology; yet, at the same time, this element of
being is supposed to be more than mere fact, in the
same manner as the ego of speculative idealism once
was. Behind the apersonal "is concerned," nothing
more is hidden than the fact that Dasein is consciousness.
The entrance of this formula is Heidegger's scene
a faire . From an abstract concept Being turns into
something absolute and primary, which is not merely
posited. The reason for this lies in the fact that Heidegger
reveals an element of Being and calls it Dasein,
which would be not just some element of Being, but
the pure condition of Being-all this without losing
any of the characteristics of individuation, fullness,
bodiliness . This is the scheme that the jargon follows ,
intentionally or unintentionally, to the point of nausea.
The jargon cures Dasein from the wound of meaninglessness
and summons salvation from the world of
ideas into Dasein. Heidegger lays this down once and
for all in the title deed, which declares that the person
owns himself. The fact that Dasein belongs to itself,
that it is "in each case mine," is picked out from individuation
as the only general definition that is left
over after the dismantling of the transcendental subject
and its metaphysics . The principium individuation’s
stands as a principle over and against any particular
individual element. At the same time it is that
essence . In the case of the former element, the
Hegelian dialectical unity of the general and the particular
is turned into a relation of possession. Then it
is given the rank and rights of the philosophical
a priori. "Because Dasein has in each case mineness
one must always use a personal pronoun when
one addresses it." The distinction between authenticity
and inauthenticity-the real Kierkegaardian one
-depends on whether or not this element
of being,
Dasein, chooses itself, its mineness . Until further
notice, authenticity and inauthenticity have as their
criterion the decision in which the individual subject
chooses itself as its own possession . The subject, the
concept of which was once created in contrast to reification,
thus becomes reified . Yet at the same time
reification is s c offed at objectively in a form of language
which simultaneously commits the same crime .
The general concept o f mineness , in which this language
institutes subjectivity as a possession of itself,
sounds like a variant of meanness in Berlin slang .
Whatever formerly went under the name o f existential
and existentiell now insists on this new title deed of
possession . By the fact that it is ontological , the alternative
of authenticity and inauthenticity directs itself
according to whether someone decides for himself or
not. I t take s its directive, beyond real states of affairs,
from the highly form al sense of belonging to oneself.
Yet its consequences in reality are extremely grave.
Once such an ontology of what is most on tic h a s been
achieved, philosophy no longer has to bother about
the societal and natural-historical origin of this title
deed, which declares that the individual own s himself .
Such a philosophy need no longer be concerned with
how far society and psychology allow a man to b e himself
or become himself, or whether in the concept of
such selfness the old evil is concentrated one more
time . The societal relation, which seals itself off in
the identity of the subject, is de-societalized into an
in-itself. The individual, who himself can no longer
rely on any firm possession, holds on to himself in his
extreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly unlosable
possession. Metaphysics ends in a miserable
Consolation : after all, one still remains what one is.
Since men do not remain what they are b y any means,
neither socially nor biologically, they gratify themselves
with the stale remainder of self-identity as
something which gives distinction, both in regard to
being and meaning. This unlosable element, which
has no substratum but its own concept, the tautological
selfness of the self, is to provide the ground, as Heidegger
calls it, which the authentic possess and the
inauthentic lack. The essence of Dasein , i. e . , what is
more than its mere existence is nothing but its selfness
: it is itself. The quarrel with Heidegger's language
is not the fact that it is permeated, like any
philosophical language, with figures from an empirical
reality which it would like to transcend, but that it
transforms a bad empirical reality into transcendence." -
Nietzsche and the Abyss“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” — Avro
Nietzsche’s vision reflected how he grasped the essence of his time. Further, it served as a grounding point for such thinkers as Foucault and Deleuze. Man is no more than an artificial
construction, oscillating between the two substantial poles, between self and the thought from outside. In “I think; therefore I am,” “therefore” is no more than the abyss, covered by a rope or a bridge.
Deleuze:
“Self, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the “I think” cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being,
but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought.”
”The I which is fractured according to the order of time and the Self which is divided according to the temporal series correspond and find a common descendant in the man without a name, without family, without qualities, without self or I, the already-Overman.” -
Yellow vests movement
Let's call then No name No Aim .... Sin nombre sin objectivo. — Avro
Christophe Guilluy argued that there is “a new class conflict” in France. According to
Guilluy, “No name No Aim .... Sin nombre sin objective” movement has deep cultural, economic, and political roots.
guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/02/france-is-deeply-fractured-gilets-jeunes-just-a-symptom
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yellow-vest-became-symbol-of-protest-beyond-france-gilets-jaunes
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/17/twilight-of-the-elites-christophe-guilluy-review -
Yellow vests movement
The French -- or at least some French -- seem to have a history of collective action which American workers don't seem to manifest. One thinks of the much more frequent strikes in France, of student demonstrations, ands so on. I don't think the French state differs all that much from other states -- they are in business to arrange the affairs of the bourgeoisie, as Marx said -- and if they have been generous with working class benefits, well, that is probably in the past. — Bitter Crank
One can hope that Americans will take a hint and follow the suit with the gilets jaunes, but I wouldn't count on it. The memory of active resistance to the power of corporation and state has, I think, become too distant for most Americans. — Bitter Crank
It looks like you think that collective memories (therefore, contemporary temporalities) are the main reason as well as the explanatory model, explaining the phenomenon of Yellow vests movement. I am not sure that it is an entirely Marxist approach.
Considering France’s May 1968 uprising, Jean Baudrillard proposed that the revolutionary event’s temporality, being mediated by mass media, loses its explosive potential:
“The contemporary eruption of tabloid trivia and natural disaster in the political sphere (which converges with Benjamin’s notion of the graduation of the art object to the political stage by virtue of its reproducibility). There is a tidal wave in Pakistan, a black title fight in the U.S.; a youth is shot by a bistro owner, etc. These sorts of events, once minor and apolitical, suddenly find themselves invested with a power of diffusion that lends them a social and “historic” aura. New forms of political action have crystallized around this conflictualization of incidents that were hitherto consigned to the social columns. There is no doubt that, to a large extent, the new meanings they have taken on are largely the doing of the media. Such faits divers are like undeliberated “symbolic actions,” but they take part in the same process of political signification. Doubtless, their reception is ambiguous and mixed; and if, thanks to the media, the political re-emerges under the category of faits divers, thanks to the same media the category of faits divers has totally invaded politics. Furthermore, it has changed status with the extension of the mass media: from a parallel category (descended from almanacs and popular chronicles), it has it has evolved into a total system of mythological interpretation, a closed system of models of signification from which no event escapes. Mass mediatization: that is its quintessence. It is no ensemble of techniques for broadcasting messages; it is the imposition of models. McLuhan’s formula is worth re- examining here: “The medium is the message” operates a transfer of meaning onto the medium itself qua technological structure. The general strike itself, this insurrectional myth of so many generations, has become a schematic reducing agent. That of May ’68, to which the media significantly contributed by exporting the strike to all corners of France, was in appearance the culminating point of the crisis. In fact, it was the moment of its decompression, of its asphyxiation by extension, and of its defeat. To be sure, millions of workers went on strike. But no one knew what to do with this “mediatized” strike, transmitted and received as a model of action (whether via the media or the unions). Reduced to a single meaning, it neutralized the local, transversal, spontaneous forms of action (though not all). The Grenelle accords24 hardly betrayed this tendency. They sanctioned this passage to the generality of political action, which puts an end to the singularity of revolutionary action. Today it has become (in the form of the calculated extension of the strike) the absolute weapon of the unions against wildcat strikes. The general strike itself, this insurrectional myth of so many generations, has become a schematic reducing agent. That of May ’68, to which the media significantly contributed by exporting the strike to all corners of France, was in appearance the culminating point of the crisis. In fact, it was the moment of its decompression, of its asphyxiation by extension, and of its defeat. To be sure, millions of workers went on strike. But no one knew what to do with this “mediatized” strike, transmitted and received as a model of action (whether via the media or the unions). Reduced to a single meaning, it neutralized the local, transversal, spontaneous forms of action (though not all). The Grenelle accords24 hardly betrayed this tendency. They sanctioned this passage to the generality of political action, which puts an end to the singularity of revolutionary action. Today it has become (in the form of the calculated extension of the strike) the absolute weapon of the unions against wildcat strikes.”
Nevertheless, so far, in spite of the intensive media coverage, Yellow vests movement is still alive. Has Baudrillard’s thesis become outdated? -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
If one agrees with you that this is the key question, it is worth considering your answer(s):As James(1978) wrote:”...earlier and later are present to each other in an experience that feels either only on condition of feeling both together” ( p.77).
The key question is how this ‘both together’ is to be construed. Is the basis of change within a bodily organization, interpersonal interaction, and even the phenomenal experience of time itself, the function of a collision between a separately constituted context and present entities? Or does my dynamic ‘now’ consist of a very different form of intentionality, a strange coupling of a past and present already changed by each other, radically interbled or interaffected such that it can no longer be said that they have any separable aspects at all? — Joshs
1)“my dynamic ‘now’ consist of a very different form of intentionality, a strange coupling of a past and present already changed by each other, radically interblend or interaffected such that it can no longer be said that they have any separable aspects at all?” 2)“the past is partially or eventually affected by the present, but that its modification is globally and immediately implied by present experience. The past is inseparable from the future, which is framed by it. Because all meanings are referential, they don't appear out of thin air but from a prior context. On the other hand, the past in its entirety is at the same time implied and transformed in present context. There is no past available to us to retrieve as an archive of presumably temporarily or partially preserved events of meaning.” 3) I maintain that what is implicated for me in an interpersonal social situation is not `the' social forms as shared homunculi, based on what Gallagher calls a ‘common body intentionality’ between perceived and perceiver, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which one could say are unique to the implicative thrust of my own construing, belonging to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity.”
Definitely, it is difficult to disagree with your comprehension of the event and its temporalities; it contains conventional and correct truths and observations.
Nevertheless, your vision of the event is still incomplete and lacking a few key components. How could one present “present”? When we write or say something about our current present, we must think of the time of the occurrence of our sentences, which is our present time. This present time cannot be grasped as such: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp the presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event.
Further, what stands behind the presenting present is the “duration or the opened whole, a spiritual reality which constantly changes according to its own relations. The whole creates itself, and constantly creates itself in another dimension without parts – like that which carries along the set of one qualitative state to another, like the pure ceaseless becoming which passes through this states”. What is missing in your account on the event – is the whole of our time. Indeed, there is a paradoxical situation – often, when one tries to represent the event, one actually exercises a mastery of self over self, and takes the risk of isolating himself and his representation from the whole. Indeed, the event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It invokes that the self is essentially passible to recurrent alterity. If one tries to get access to the event through the ready-made, pre-existing theories, and models, one can successfully protect and keep untouched his/her own identity, paying the price of isolation and illusiveness. So, to take account of our present time one should get exposed to its explosive differentials and tendencies. Uncontained and emerging, they are arising, coming passionately out of immanence, directly affecting one’s mind and avoiding any representational forms. They compose life’s field of exteriority. (This is the second key point that should be added to your apprehension of temporalities.) Further, the duration of the present has an ethical-political dimension – our institutions, quazi-institutions, and numerous
apparatuses of capture function as motional-relational knots that come to stand out as saliencies against the background activity from which they arise; they stratify and maintain the field of life, simultaneously extracting surplus value,
necessary for unlimited expansion and growth of our neoliberal capitalistic society. Without this dimension of the opened whole, any model of time would be just one more limited and artificial theory.
Brian Massumi:
“The historical task of philosophy cannot be achieved solely through empirical analysis
of actually existing formations. It must dedicate itself to the superempirical flushing out of what in-forms the very possibility of empirical analysis. It must be radically empirical. Radical empiricism is defined by the postulate that relationality is a mode of reality in its own right, and that relation can be directly perceived (if only as in-forming the immediacy of its effects).
Preemption, it is argued, is the most powerful operative logic of the present. It is the untimely force of attraction around which the field of power is bending. They are not binaries. They are divergent procession destinations. Binaries are general abstractions. They have to do with contradiction and opposition
on the level of meaning. The limits toward which a tendency tends are poles bounding a dynamic field of the process. They never come alone, and no sooner come in pairs than proliferate into a many. The multiplicity of the tendencies they orient and of the apparatuses tending the tendencies are expressions of the productive paradox of the operative logic. The paradox of the operative logic in-forms each and every tendential expression. It is everywhere immanent to the processual field, constitutive of its very problematic nature. It is the field’s constitutive immanent limit. This limit answers, at an abstract distance, across the spacing out and stringing along in the time of cases of the solution, to the field’s ulterior limits, or the ideal endpoints bounding the field’s furthest reaches. Its answer takes the form of inflection of the field’s problematic working-out, tendentially bent as by an ulterior motive. The constitutive immanence of the problematic
node—of the conceptual formula that is the engine of the process—means that it is in every iteration of a case of a solution, throughout the field, in every spacing-out that it is in every timing, everywhere, always and again tendentially inflected by its own ulterior reaching. This is why the ulterior limit is not an “outside” limit in any usual sense of the term: it abstractly folds into the operative logic’s working-out. This is also why the conceptual formula is nonlocal. It in-forms each singular event in the series with its productive tensions and resolving infections. It returns as the matrix for each iteration. “ -
Could the wall be effective?
-
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
Gallagher writes:” a set of cultural norms is learned through practice such that these become second nature. By this means common expectations that are meant to apply to all, equally, are established. By learning how I ought to behave in such and such a circumstance, I learn how you ought to behave as well. And this supplies a ready guide to your behavior in so far as you do not behave abnormally. Such learning does not take the form of internalizing explicit rules (at least not as a set of theoretical propositions), nor does it depend on applying ones that are somehow built-in sub-personally. It involves becoming accustomed to local norms, coming to embody them, as it were, through habit and practice. “ Ratcliffe(2007) suggests that “many thoughts, interpretations and viewpoints ...belong to nobody in particular and are shared products of interaction”(Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation, Palgrave Macmillan, p..175).
Notice that the claim by Gallagher and others that individual behavior in social situations is guided by narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints implies the belief that essentially the same social signs are available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency . — Joshs
I am not sure that you correctly interpreted the Gallagher and Hutto approach. As Fiebich, Gallagher, and Hutto -https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311984200_Fiebich_Gallagher_and_Hutto_2016_Pluralism_interaction_and_the_ontogeny_of_social_cognition
wrote: “people typically use folk psychological narrative practices when understanding
other people behavior in terms of beliefs and desires, are built upon socially-supported story-telling activities and are needed to be understood as skillful know-how.” Combining with their another assertion that “there is reason to think that the great balk of basic socio-cognitive processes do not obviously or necessarily rely on any kind of mental state attribution”, one could conclude that in spite using the notion of “belief”, their meaning of it is quite different from
the traditional one. Also, so far I could not find that they assume “that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency.” (Maybe, you referred here to Gallagher and Hutto’ book?) In the article, they write about the set of socio-cognitive skills or competencies, acquired through the three stages of ontogeny. When you write about “non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency” it is possible to understand that you assume that the meanings are originated in a kind of Being.
(I am not sure that I understood you correctly; this part is the most interesting for me) -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
But, what is “a priory"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this
identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual
"element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or
fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)." — Joshs
differential structure escaping the logic of presence”? Derrida: ‘there may be a difference still more unthought than the difference between Being and beings…. It ceaselessly
differing from and differing (itself), would trace itself from itself – this difference would be the first or last trace if one still could speak, here, of origin and end.” So, Derrida attempts to establish the formal structure, aimed to transcend any possible and thought presence. But, if this formal structure is laid out beyond the capacity of one’s thought, how can one achieve the knowledge of this truth? The answer is that one should undertake a persistent exploration of the experience of “difference”,in Derrida’s terms
“the experience of impossible”: “If the gift is another name for the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it in its present existence or its phenomenon.” So, to philosophize, one
should desire to achieve impossible. Further, this impossible is called the Idea of justice,
which is an infinitely transcendent Idea that is unknowable, and is independent of any determinable context. We can experience the Idea of justice practically as a call, as a call for justice, as an absolute demand for justice; on the other hand, this Idea provides us no rule for determining what is just or unjust. (One can find here an affinity with the Calvinist version of the protestant doctrine). Therefore, in spite of denying the presence of both Being as well as being, Derrida’s philosophy is based on a few strong a priory transcendental principles, one of them is the passionate search for the absolute Other: “To go toward the absolute other, isn’t it the extreme tension of a desire that tries thereby to renounce its own proper momentum…
And since we do not determine ourselves before this desire, since no relation to self can be sure of preceding it, of preceding a relation to the other, all reflection is caught in the genealogy of this genitive”.
You claim that “difference” is not about the transcendence:
“When Derrida says that differance is neither presence nor absence he does not mean that it is BEYOND them, that it transcends them.
Rather, it is presupposed by them; it is WITHIN them. Why? Because we don't realize that what we think of as the simple presence of a name, a concept, an absence(because simple absence or negation is also thought of as a presence-to-itself), an entity, a thing, a singularity, is already a transit, even before we pair it with something else. “
However, even if formally “differance” rejects the presence of Being, yet anyway, its a priory structure is just one side of the Derrida’s project. Another essential part is the passionate search for the transcendence, for unachievable and unknown absolute law.
And, passion for an absolute law is the engine, which is moving the process of “differance.”
Deleuze’s formula of Derrida’s philosophy is: “Having no object and being only pure form, the law cannot be a domain of knowledge but is exclusively the domain of an absolute practical necessity…The law is operative only in being stated and stated only in an act of punishment: a statement directly inscribed on the real, on the body and on the flesh; a practical statement opposed to any sort of speculative proposition.”
When Derrida wrote: ” division, delay, d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _must be capable of being brought to a certain absolute degree of absence for the structure of writing, supposing that writing exists, to be constituted. It is here that d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _as writing could no longer (be) an (ontological) modification of presence. It must be repeatably iterable in the absolute absence of the addressee or of the empirically determinable set of addressees. Writing that was not structurally legible iterable beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence, "death," or the possibility of the "death" of the addressee, inscribed in the structure of the mark. in this, way).”
Doesn’t this quote confirm what Deleuze says?
What iterability does - "The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this
identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference” – it is “writing of the differance”, and it is writing for itself that deconstructs, destroys both the writer and the addressee.
P.S. As far as I know, nowadays, if one honestly practices the search of the Absolute in his/her everyday life, the socium marginalizes, isolates, and pushes one to the desert of loneliness. (Unless one is protected by membership in some religious organization). Did Derrida himself, by his own life, set an example of a heroic, passionate search for the Absolute? -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?Thank you for interesting reading. I think that Gendlin’s insights are indeed right and useful, so I understand your enthusiasm about him. I just want to point out that it looks like Gendlin’s work is isolated from a variety of socio-political contexts. Let's compare Gendlin vs. Deleuze approaches. Gendlin: “each point somehow implies each other point; each part of a meaning organization somehow “knows about,” belongs to and depends intrinsically on each other part.” Deleuze: ”The diagram or
abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which
proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, or rather in any relation from one point to another…The diagram acts as a non-unifying
immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like
the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations, and these relations between forces take place “not above,” but within the very tissue of the assemblages they
produce”. Probably you will point out, that Gendlin’s theory, differently from Deleuze’s, is much closer to the contemporary cognitive psychology’s field and is written in a more understandable language, and you will be right. Yet, I am sure, Deleuze’s thought has a huge potential and flexibility. Instead of pointing that “each point somehow implies each other point;” (I would like to draw your attention to the word somehow), Deleuze provides an immanent and elaborated approach. “Notice that the claim by Gallagher and others that individual behaviour in social situations is guided by narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices, and social constraints implies the belief that essentially the same social signs are available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency”. From the reading of your post, I found that there is a vast gap between Gendlin’s insights and Gallager’s approach.
According to Gallager, individual behavior is based on the belief of those who interrelate in a particular community. So, the is a double affirmation of the primordial Ego
and I – the individual, who believes, and the union, the identity of a community.
“there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency” – why meanings ?(it again implicitly assumes an individual mind),
but what is this agency? Why it is just expressive? It could be interesting to compare and contrast the functions of this “impersonal expressive agency” with Deleuze-Guattari”s machines.
“I would like to suggest that the very being of an event of meaning already is composed partly of that which it is not, that which it is no longer. The role which this ’no-longer’ play isn’t just as a duplication of ‘what it was.’ It is a fresh, never before experienced version of my past which forms part of the essence of a new event for me. What do I mean by this? Not only does a fresh event belong to, carry forward, imply the immediate context, which it transforms, but this inter-contamination between past and present operates at the same time in the opposite direction. The carried-forward past which, as I have said, inseparably belongs to a new event, is already affected by this fresh present.”
I do not understand how your comprehension of the event is compatible with your assertion: “Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history(which is itself reshaped by its participation in these situations) , even when they believe that their interpersonal interactions are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their language community”.
I understand - unique as a collectively taking part in the same event, or a unique as a personal story?
From one side, you affirm a radical, transcendental version of temporality. From another one,
you assert that each individual has his/her own unique history,( May be I misunderstood you), that one has beliefs about the same discursive conventions. ( the notion of belief should be clarified). There are some controversies between your grounding points and your conclusions about the social. In my opinion, Deleuze’s account on the event is no less radical, but it is much more comprehensive and allows the smooth and non-controversial transition from the grounding theory to the social applications. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
Heidegger wrote:
“Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” If so, what is required from us to start thinking?
“What must be thought about turns away from a man. It withdraws from him.
What withdraws from us draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or
not we become aware of it immediately, or at all. Once we are drawn into the
withdrawal, we are—albeit in a way quite different from that of migratory
birds—caught in the draft of what draws, attracts us by its withdrawal. And
once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward what draws us, our essential
being already bears the stamp of that “draft.”
To the extent that man is in this draft, he points toward what withdraws. As
he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. Man here is not first of all man,
and then also occasionally someone who points. No. Drawn into what
withdraws, drawn toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is the man. His essential being lies in being such a pointer. Something which in
itself, by its essential being, is pointing, we call a sign. As he draws toward
what withdraws, man is a sign. But since this sign points toward what draws
away, it points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal. The
sign remains without interpretation.”
So, to start thinking, we need to maintain a duality of Man and his transcendental,
essential truth. They support each other; they are like twins or the two sides
of this kind of thought. No doubt, this project is doing well so far.
Therefore, Foucault’s answer to this thought is still the actual one:
“To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.” Foucault’s fight was against the thought that facilitates the return of the man, the return of the Nietzschean “last man.”
“What Derrida is getting at is that unity, 'itness', the mark, the 'is', being, the self, are already double in the 'instant' of their being a singularity. How can this be so? Because it is impossible to think of a singularity that is not a 'from this to that'. This differential is not first what was and what is. It IS as both absencing and presencing. Both together are the one, the 'it', the 'I.”
This is the exact quote from Derrida:
”“is” neither this or that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither superior nor inferior, neither present nor absent, not even subject to a dialectic with the third moment. Despite appearances, then, it (differance) is neither concept nor even a name; it does lend itself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the structure of predictive discourse. It “is” not and does not say what it “is”.
If so, how could one grasp the starting point of Derrida’s philosophy?
Meister Eckhart, a medieval German theologian, said that “God is not”
rather than “God is”, because “x is” is a statement that is said of being like you and me, whereas God is eminently superior to being, beyond being. This allows God to appear in his “super-essential” eminence,
as far from all negation as he is from any affirmation. Therefore, one
finds here negative theology: Eckhart goes beyond affirmations (God is good) via negations (God is not good in the human sense of the term);
then, after overcoming negations, he attains God’s eminence (God’s
Goodness transcends all goodness). Simply, the formula of this transcendence is to say that something neither x nor not-x, because
it is beyond both. Derrida adopted this formula and it is grounded his notion of differance.
This notion is a powerful tool of deconstruction: the vast majority of philosophical texts still have “imprints” or “traces” of the withdrawn, disappeared,
or dead God – negative theology constitutes their essential structure.
Or, negative theology may inspire you to write new texts – it is like poetry, who can say that it is useless?
Nevertheless, how can “differance” be applied to the variety
of social, political, and technological realities of nowadays? -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?“The most important thing to understand is that these two poles that comprise a singularity, an 'it', give the the origin of stability and change, of identity”.
I do not understand how your interpretation of Heideggereian-Derridarian thought can explain the existence of identity, how it is grounded. And, you admit it:
“None of this so far gives you the pragmatic examples you want”.
“such a determination of singularity, entityness, unity, immanence, comes before Deleuze's starting point, by already splitting apart and seeing as multiple what Deleuze renders as a simple 'it'”.
As far as I know, Deleuze starts from “problematic”: a problem is an objectively determined structure that is in reciprocal, interdependent relations with its actual solutions. The problem has its differential relations, its reciprocally determined elements, and its singularities. Further, the problematic was developed into the notion of the virtual multiplicity, of the immanent, machinic reason. The immanent reason actualizes itself, and in being actualized, it differs from itself, it produces a difference, it is the production of the new. So, there is the process of differentiation/differensiation, which allowed Deleuze to unfold and develop his philosophy up to defining and explaining a variety of concrete examples from our social life, arts, science, cinema, literature, etc.
“I want to come back to something you said earlier. "If all my past experiences are present in my current “content”, doesn’t it mean that I am still enclosed in the totality of my mind? Even my intention to say something is no more than a simple repetition of the similar past intention… because you are starting from presenting in your thinking. If we start from that basis, then it would seem that we would have to add a gesture of change, transformation, subversion, from the outside. That is to say, in a separate step… That is the old way of thinking. only entities thought of a simple presences in themselves can be in opposition, contradiction, difference. Only when a thing is given the force of simple presence do we need to posit conditioning, shaping, intervention, subversion as the basis of relationality and change.”
I disagree. It is not about some additional gesture from the outside. When one discovers his/her location in the field of “problematic,” one faces the encounter with the outside forces. Further, one recognizes that all past experiences are caused by unconsciously taking part in a variety of machinic assemblages. Therefore, to avoid a mechanical reiteration caused by being trapped by the past, one needs to practice becoming, openness toward other machines. Anyway, one does not start from presenting in one’s thinking. One begins from shock, from pain, from desperation. If one recognizes that he/she repeats by saying the same, one should stop talking for a while.
“we would have to add a gesture of change, transformation, subversion, from the outside. That is to say, in a separate step. This is what the faciality machine implies, it is also what conditionings of various sorts imply.”… “A point is 'what was that is now' , a hinge, a bifurcation, a transit, a presencing and a subversion at the same time? (In fact this is the only meaning of temporality). The world is nothing but the repetition of differance as the hinged, bipolar unity. This is how Derrida and Heidegger get to call this an 'itself'”
I think I understand what you mean. You assume that “the faciality machine” comes from outside, whereas our way of being and thinking is pre-determined by Heideggerian– Derridarian primordial-fundamental structures. Therefore, the knowledge of this truth should be the first one’s priority. Further, one can find refuge, an immunity and protection even facing the challenges and realities of our world.
Nevertheless, the inside, the essential grounding structure (as you understand it) is the result of the constitutive exterior forces. The machines came to you when you were a child or a student. Your first meaningful utterances were formed by invisible social presuppositions,
they got you involved in a variety of particular social relations.
(the philosophic knowledge comes much later). If a pupil hears a teacher say 'working hard is good', this can be translated through a series of statements: 'She thinks that working hard is good', is then conjugated with 'If I please her, she will like me', so as to become 'I want to think that
. working hard is good', 'I think that working hard is good,' 'working hard is good.' Once the process becomes habitual, one can move straight from hearing the statement to repeating it. Belief in those who issue statements is not a precondition for subjectification, but a product. That is how the machine of faciality works: it comes and starts working through one’s early immediate social interactions, and it stays with one after becoming an adult.
By the way, you are right making a point that machines maintain identity and personal stability: one of the functions of “the faciality machine” is to select and support the certain conscious features, experiences of I,
in accordance to dominating social reality. Simultaneously, these machines are demolishing or pushing aside what they process as irrelevant and unnecessary. -
Realism or Constructivism?The essay is interesting.
Von G. wrote himself: “The way that question was put at the very beginning made it impossible to answer, and the attempts that have since been made
could not get anywhere near a solution to the problem.”
I mean that the way the problem was formulated, assumed to push the reader to choose
Constructivism. Yet, the author argumentation is based primarily on his interpretation of
a priory, as well as the Piaget's theory of mental development. “The a priori describes the framework within which such an organism
operates, but it does not tell us what the organism does, let alone why it does it…. the world which we experience is, and must be as it is because we have put it together that way.”
It is a vicious logical circle, kind of tautology,being understood as a universal principle, allows
to lay a philosophical ground of constructivism in Von G.’s interpretation. The second, psychological founding principle is based on Piaget’s apprehension of child development. So, the two principals, unfolding together, support each other and
create an appearance of a solid theoretical foundation. Yet, it is known, that the main
principals of Piaget’s psychology were challenged by Vygotski, who showed the importance of the social environment to a child’s mental development. There is not the
productive building activity of an independent child’s mind, but a mutual, interdependent process, involving both the social as well the child’s mental
operations. Therefore, the aporia – Constructivism or Realism could be avoided, if instead
of isolating both terms involved one would try to include the third term: The Social. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?Thank you for your note! I appreciate your points. Yet, I would like to change
the style of our debate – I am afraid that further interpretation of possible meanings of some terms, or an explication of a few propositions (of Derrida, Heidegger, or Deleuze and Guattari)) can become just one more text on the plain of the Signifier and Representation, without reaching the realities that concern us. So, can we try to take up some concrete problem? I am a pragmatist – if I see that Heidegger, Derrida, or Marlou-Pontu’ philosophy solving real problems more efficiently than Deleuzian approach, I will change my mind and my philosophical priorities.
Or, maybe, it will be better to apply your own way of “thinking about the social”:
“There is an alternative way to think about the social than the via the violently arbitrary immanence of Deleuze. There is a more radical way to think about the site of sociality. My paper critiquing social constructionism also can apply to Deleuze,
Embodied Perception. Redefining the social”
(By the way, I am reading your article. I like your style, and share many of your points and views; nevertheless, in principle, I think that it is impossible to conceive
and deduct a theory, grounded on a single philosophical proposition and applicable to the whole social field). When Deleuze and Guattari write:
“When does the abstract machine of faciality
enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some simple examples: the
maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional
power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the
political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons,
and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of film operating
through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of television. It is
not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the ciphering
it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible. This is an affair
not of ideology but of economy and the organization of power (pouvoir).
We are certainly not saying that the face, the power of the face (la puissance
du visage), engenders and explains social power (pouvoir). Certain assemblages
of power (pouvoir) require the production of a face, others do not.” They make the really
high stakes: they claim that their system of models, including their philosophies of
language, of subjectivization, of strata, of consciousness, and of the actual vs. virtual can be applied to explain a vast variety of concrete historical and contemporary social facts. For me, it is a kind of a problem. I am surprised that most of the Deleuzian scholars when they write about “the faciality machine,” still stay on the theoretical level and prefer not to apply it to our realities. Further, sometimes I find it difficult to discover the work of this “machine” while observing my immediate social surrounding.
I propose to check and compare the strength and explanatory power of your approach (from your article, or using your apprehension of Heidegger and Derrida)
vs. Deleuze-Guattari model of “the faciality machine” regarding some common
social situation: (I take this example from Jean Baudrillard’s book “America”):
“Just look at this girl who serves you in the guest-room: she does so in total freedom, with a smile, without prejudice or pretentiousness, as though she were sitting opposite you. The situation is not an equal one, but she does not pretend to equality. Equality is part of the way of life here. Precisely the opposite of Sartre’s waiter, who is completely alienated from his representation and who only resolves the situation by calling on a theatrical metalanguage, by affecting in his gestures freedom and equality he does not really enjoy”. Baudrillard, (as well as many travelers, coming to North America) got struck by the way a simple receptionist in the guest-room handled him and other customers: her voice, intonations, gestures, postures,
facial expressions, direct eye contact – all looked entirely authentic. The most striking feature, probably, was the direct eye contact. In many cultures, it is possible to look at others eyes just on special occasions, and Levinas even founded his ethics of the relationship with the Other, grounding on looking directly at the Other’s eyes. For Levinas, it was the most challenging moral test – to open yourself toward the other world. In North America, the direct eye contact has become an everyday cultural norm, necessary for being employed even for the most basic jobs.
You wrote
about obeying norms :” And while thinking of himself as 'obeying a variety of dominating norms', the notion of 'obeying norms' can be deconstructed via Heideggerian temporality and Derridean differance, The act of obeying transforms that which it obeys in the very act of obeying, Norms subvert themselves in the very act of constituting themselves. There is never a simple norm or unitary notion obedience.”- Can we apply it to this simple or to any other one of our immediate common social surrounding? Does this “girl from the guest-room” transforms what she obeys in the very act of obeying? The rigorous automatism of the whole complex of her bodily and cognitive behavioral patterns, (there are so many different other examples) can be understood as the cluster of the number of subjectivities : “A common notion that is often discussed in philosophical literature is that of varying kinds of subjectivities. These 'subjectivities' have nothing to do with 'consciousness' and have everything to do with one's range of capacities in a particular situation. A 'subject' here is one that can act or be acted upon in a range of ways, depending on the context at hand…The subjectivities involved draw on different ranges of capacities, interests, attentions, limits, and approaches to creative action. One important thing that this should make clear is that a subject is not simply a correlate of an 'individual': an individual may traverse different subjectivities”.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/220119
I think that the Heideggerian transcendental phenomenology:
“there a more intimate and immediate play, as temporality, between one's history as the 'having been' and the future-directed presenting of the present…This play would project its own possibilities out of one's own 'having been', in endless repetition . This would not be the subjectivity of a subject. There is no constituted subject here. There is only temporality as this intimate play of a projecting , fore-structuring 'having been' that is always already ahead of itself in being itself. The 'being of this temporality, its ''is'-ness IS this internal articulation” – This transcendentalism cannot be used as a reasonable explanatory model here. So, to overcome a pure positivistic –behavioristic approach to a human as a cluster of subjectivities, we can apply the Deleuze-Guattari thought. Before becoming a cluster of behavioral patterns, an individual has been grasped by “the faciality machine,” from “inside” as well as from “outside.”
P.S. Regarding your story of the Indian village in Ecuador: “the faciality machine” was not designed as a universal model; there is also other semiotics.
Remarkably, many western intellectuals take refuge and become happy in faraway places – countries, deserts, mountains, islands, caves, etc. But if one stays,
at any site one is tested by direct eye contact. Are the Levinas’s Others looking at you and me everywhere? Or, are there just “the faciality machine” gazes? -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I think that your apprehension of “A Foucaultian-Deleuzian account” is not completely correct, especially when you attribute to both Foucault and Deleuze that “We are 'shaped by,' 'adjust to,' 'conditioned by' the affect, social, physical worlds.A Foucaultian-Deleuzian account
avoids the moralistic-blame of emancipatory positions because it doesnt try to organize thought around a developmental telos. And yet, it still blames in the sense of pointing a finger at arbitrary sources of conditioning. We are 'shaped by', 'adjust to', 'conditioned by' the affect, social, physical worlds.
Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me , but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us. — Joshs
"Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me”. That means that you assert that both thinkers proposed that “relevance, significance” condition you and me. I will try to show that it not correct. When you wrote: “The impression we get of consciousness as the commander of decision, as unfolding meaning as a linear causal sequence of nows (one damn thing after another), is the result of the way linguistic grammar is constructed.”
You mean, that linguistic grammar is a necessary part of how are our conscious sense of self and I operate. Yet, this is just one dimension of the process. Deleuze and Guattari call this dimension syntagmatic.
Another dimension is paradigmatic, referred to the meaning of the unfolding linear linguistic sequence. Both have composed signifying strata, upholding the subject of enunciation, framing one in the totality of the current socio-linguistic field. Power operates through grammar.
Another related to linguistics strata is one of subjectivation.
There is a split, a doubling of a speaker onto two subjects:
a subject of a statement, and a subject of enunciation.
When somebody (a child, a student, or you and I) starts speaking, this one unavoidably uses sentences with meaning, pre-given by the dominating social reality. Further, the speaker usually believes that he/she (or his/her I, or ego) is an authentic author of the spoken sentence. In this way,
a subject of enunciation, the speaker, recoils into the subject of the statement. Its dominant reality is given by the range of statements which are possible for it. One learns the variety of possible options that one is allowed to think, believe, want, or love from those given within society: a subject of enunciation forms its consciousness of itself out of the statements which it is able to make as a subject of a statement.
Descartes's cogito often considered the founding of modern subjectivity, is exemplary in this respect: 'I think [the subject of the statement, independent of its object] therefore [movement of recoiling] I am [the subject of the statement now designates the subject of enunciation]. The speaker then knows himself as a thinking substance. The verb 'to be' always functions as a shifter that moves from an expressed statement to give a 'reality'; this movement is mediated in modern thought by the process of subjectification through which the speaker identifies a given reality with the statement. In this way, reality comes to be constituted by subjects acting as though their statements were true. The self-consciousness of human subjects is a simulated product of language. A person identifies himself or herself with the subject of the statements, which he or she is able to make. Since the constituted in this way subject has two distinct dimensions, a double articulation – a subject of enunciation, and a subject of a statement, Deleuze and Guattari propose that this subjectivation takes place on the specific strata. Further, when both strata – signifying and subjectivation are working together, (they call this combination the faciality machine) a speaking or thinking subject has caught in a double net of social enslavement. The subject may think of himself/herself as an independent, free-minded individual while obeying a variety of dominating norms – this is one of the Deleuze-Guattari approaches to the notion of a social norm. (Foucault had a different comprehension). So, when you say:” Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me, but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us,” I think that the notion of “a unique interpretation” carries a high risk of being caught in a kind of the faciality machine. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I think that the concept of “community” is too often overused. In your previous posts, you wrote: “Consciousness, far from being the self- knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness. So the notion of the agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents.” Or,” “Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies, environments, institutional structures, etc.”The understanding of the norms themselves differ from person to person, but normally so subtly that it appears as though those of us within a particular community(urban vs rural) united by those norms believes that we just assimilate them automatically. But even within a community of supposedly shared norms, even within a single family, there can be violent disagreements over the meaning of those 'norms'. — Joshs
Such processes don’t originate in individual minds but are shared among a community of participants in an activity."
Generally, the notion of community presupposes a process of identification, a desire for collective identity and unity, the communal union. I doubt that it can be applied appropriately to explain how “distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies, environments, institutional structures, etc.” arefunctioning and interacting together in our machinic, telecommunicational, capitalistic society. Therefore, in this contest, “community” has indeed become “the ghost in the machine.” It could be beneficial to ask: why one systematically invokes this ghost?
Foucault wrote: “The concern for man,
the care with which this thought attempts to define him as a living being,
an individual at work, or a speaking subject, herald the long-awaited
return of a human reign only to the high-minded few; in fact, it concerns, rather more prosaically and less morally, an empirico-critical
reduplication by means of which an attempt is made to make the man
of nature, of exchange, or of discourse, serve as the foundation of his
own finitude. In this Fold, the transcendental function is doubled over
so that it covers with its dominating network the inert, grey space of
empiricism; inversely, empirical contents are given life, gradually pull
themselves upright, and are immediately subsumed in a discourse
which carries their transcendental presumption into the distance.
And so we find philosophy falling asleep once more in the hollow of
this Fold; this time not the sleep of Dogmatism, but that of Anthropology.”
The point of Foucault that the return of the man, of an identity, of a community, going together with
the unfolding of the transcendentalism, have kept defining our way of thinking
regardless of any objections and denials, given by the reality. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
If subjectivity is machinic activity and machinic activity always mutates and changes, where how does ongoing style emerge? — Joshs
First, I’d like to return to your question from another thread:
You asked:
How does Deleuze explain stable personality features?
I answered:
In principle, Deleuze avoided using this kind of discourse. His project was to consider things in their interdependency, endless variation, and immanence.
I admit that this was not entirely correct account on Deleuze’s approach. In fact, he considered stable features, and he explained them using the notion of strata. The classical Aristotelian concept of duality between a form and a content was further elaborated and developed by Deleuze. So, “stable personality features” are explained as the result of some process of stratification – it can be applied to geology, for organisms, and for social or personal facts. “Stable personal features” are placed at the certain strata, and caused as well as expressed by double articulation – social-scientific-discursive from one side, and
vital – organic-phenomenological-living experience from another one (I am sorry for pure terminology). This method allows to show a variety of heterogenic factors involved and to grasp stability simultaneously with becoming and variation.
IF I engage with my friend according to my understanding that there is an ongoing worldview(a worldview that is alwasy changing but maintains an overall thread of internal consistency) including political, religious and ethical outlook that guides their thinking , then I may slip intricately into his outlook , merging my dance with his, in such a way as to anticipate his joys and suffering, what causes him guilt , anger , anxiety.
My prediction is if one attempts to engage with him such the interaction itself is thought as a mobile environment of shifting machinic processes with no thread of consistency, I will have no way to be with him intimately in his affective-intelellectual modulaltions. His behavior will appear somewhat arbitrary to me rather than flowing out of itself. — Joshs
When you engage with your friend, both of you adjust to mutually shared socio-cultural established norms of communication, aimed to minimize possible disruptions and interruptions. None of you needs to apply a higher level of reflective thinking, and maybe, philosophy. Yet, if your relationship is in crisis, or your friend is a philosopher as you, you can get engaged in a different
kind of communication. By the way, it could lead one to a direction of Deleuzian-Guattarian thought, if one will try to problematize the ground of our cultural norms: they are still stable in spite of apparent flow of omnipresent innovations.
(you are right about this!) But what keeps them alive: Traditions? Values? Coercions? Education? Or, maybe, they have a different grounding?
Do the ongoing concerns of the person driving a car not interaffect the supposed purely 'automatic' act of driving? Do the pieces not interaffect each such as to form a relational totality unified according to what matters to the person? — Joshs
They do interact, they superimpose over each other. You wrote: Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness. So the notion of an agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents.”
Guattari’s machinic assemblages can help to understand what kind of community it is.
Some thinkers proposed to differentiate between a few kinds of subjectivities: "conscious-social-discursive", and "entirely machinic, a-signifying of machinic enslavement, and a-signifying of various additional modes.
If subjectivity is machinic activity and machinic activity always mutates and changes, where how does ongoing style emerge? — Joshs
Most of the machinic subjectivities are entirely relevant from the point of an adjustment of a subject to the social, cultural, and working environment. It is possible to find some parallels with Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”
quote="Joshs;250938"]Is each subjectivty merely a blind vector of irrelevance?[/quote]
Stern and Guattari proposed that there are also a few more fundamental kinds of subjectivities,
which are formed by a child before acquiring language: the emergent self, a core self, and the Sense of a Subjective self. All of them are necessary for the emergence of the verbal, symbolic self;
but they do not disappear later, various modes of subjectivity still function, operating outside of consciousness.
The difference is not an essence or an absolute. It is a matter of choice and workability. Yet, most of the differences are not arbitrary; they need to be chosenare these notions derived from the arbitrary chaos of dfference, or is difference itself to be understood as always RELEVANT difference? — Joshs
with the careful and rigorous selection.
If the harmony prevails, there is no place for questioning and problematization.:smile:One could point out the way that over time, of the old woman, the dog, you and I and the child all become friends, we all interaffect each other as one larger subjectivity. But the dog will still maintain its own affective rhythms and attitudes , and all the humans in the room, regardless of how many years they spend together, will maintain separate ongoing threads in style. — Joshs
By the way, why this idyllic scene does take place in faraway Ecuador?:smile: -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?I think that Guattari’s approach in some sense is parallel to what StreetlightX wrote in this thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/220119
“this post has nothing to do with 'consciousness'. Anyone expecting a discussion of that kind is welcome to post elsewhere. If I could avoid using the term 'subjectivity' in favour of something like 'way-of-being' or 'ethoi' (plural of ethos), I would, but the former is too messy, and the latter is too strange, so I'm sticking to 'subjectivity' - which is what the literature on the subject calls it anyway. This also has nothing to do with boring debates about subjectivity vs. objectivity, so if one feels inclined to talk about that, kindly do so elsewhere.
A common notion that is often discussed in philosophical literature is that of varying kinds of subjectivities. As I hinted in the note' above, these 'subjectivities' have nothing to do with 'consciousness' and have everything to do with one's range of capacities in a particular situation. A 'subject' here is one that can act or be acted upon in a range of ways, depending on the context at hand; so, for example, one can speak of a subject of street-walking: the subject of street walking is involved in traversing a certain terrain, in making a way to a destination, of admiring sights, of avoiding traffic, of waiting at traffic lights, and so on. There is a kind of subjectivity involved in being a walker of the streets, that is not the same as that involved in say, playing chess.
The street walker is a limited example, but the concept can be expanded much further. For one, the 'subject' doesn't even have to be embodied: one can speak of the subjectivity of the internet browser: this subjectivity is largely disembodied, interacting with his or her computer though a mouse or keyboard, mostly passively absorbing words or pictures on the screen, while only sometimes actively involving themselves in the world they are exploring by, say, posting on an internet forum, or 'liking' a Youtube video. The subject of the internet browser is very different from the subject of the street walker. The subjectivities involved draw on different ranges of capacities, interests, attentions, limits, and approaches to creative action. One important thing that this should make clear is that a subject is not simply a correlate of an 'individual': an individual may traverse different subjectivities, first as a walker on the street, then as a browser of the internet - and so on.”
StreetlightX said: ”Forget consciousness, forget objects,” these kinds of subjectivities
Has nothing to do with consciousness”.
Nevertheless, for each of his examples, the acting subjects operate a set of states of mind, (they can be called “conscious,” or differently) – they are still important parts of the “subjectivity.” Guattari calls these subjectivities “machinic assemblages.” -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?I brought just an elementary and simple example which do not represent the whole Guattari’s project. From this example, one indeed can get the impression that it is about
a kind of mechanical determinism. Yet, Guattari’s model of consciousness is much more complicated, it includes a variety of heterogenic domains and levels so that there is a place for chance and indeterminism. I will try to represent it later. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?I see conscious activity, but I’m having trouble pinning independent and autonomous to that conscious activity. Independent how, with respect to what? Conscious activity is independent from the outside empirical data? — Mww
I mean this is not the conscious activity in the manner of cartesian Cogito.
Felix Guattari wrote: “When we drive, we activate subjectivity and a multiplicity of partial consciousness connected to the car ‘s technological mechanisms. There is no “individuated subject” that is in control of the driving. If one knows how to drive, one acts without thinking about it, without engaging reflexive consciousness…We are guided by the car’s machinic assemblage. Our actions and subjective components (memory, attention, perception, etc.) are “automatized,” they are a part of the machinic, hydraulic, electronic, etc. apparatuses, constituting non-human parts of the assemblage. Driving mobilizes different processes of conscientization, one succeeding the next, superimposing one onto the other, connecting or disconnecting according to the current events of driving.”I suspect you’re going to elucidate by taking the next step. — Mww
What we call state of consciousness is actually the combination of a variety of many subjective
components (memory, attention, perception, etc.). What does it mean that they are “automatized”? They operate as cogs in different apparatuses, responding, reacting, processing,
inputting, and outputting – simultaneously with the work of “pure” machines. Guattari calls this operative field Machinic Unconscious – in an entirely different sense comparing to the psychoanalytical unconscious. My example is a very approximate and limited model. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
If one is working as the financial trader at the stock market, one’s mind is preoccupied with a multiplicity of heterogeneous realities: the reality of the “real” economy, the reality of forecasts about the economy, and the reality of expectations of these prices rising or falling. All of above are given through diagrams, curves, other ways of presenting data and various flows of information. So, being conscious while multitasking processing information, trader’s mind operates according to pre-designed and pre-constructed schemes and algorithms. Can we say that this is an independent, autonomous, and conscious activity?What is meant by technological, social assemblages? Within the context of being a working part in a multiplicity of conscious states, I mean. — Mww -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I disagree. Deleuze wrote that: ““Self, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the “I think” cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought.”Deleuze begins from objects, paired down and relational, as polarities, as fundamentally arbitrary. I am alienated from myself every moment because the 'I' is nothing but arbitrary, polarized and polarizing vectors, gestures, signs. — Joshs
There is nothing arbitrary about this relation: If “I” defines our existence as passive
and changeable existence of “Moi” in time, the time has been the formal relation, through which the mind effects itself through affect; or the time is the way through
which we are able to experience affect.” I think that this formula allows us to differentiate what is given to us while applying a variety of available recourses.
The I split not arbitrarily, but by the time and affect. However, Deleuzian time and affect are not metaphysical or logic-discursive essences, they are our time and affect, intervened with our experiences, knowledge, lives, etc.
If so, where can one find it? For me, it looks utterly mysterious, or (using your term) arbitrary.Derrida's notion of the trace begins before language as human speech, before any notion of consciousness or humanity or animality or the biological. — Joshs
It could be useful to consider this gesture, this power to differ purely.To say otherwise is to uphold a claim of difference that needs to be deconstructed. What gives something the power to differ purely? So neither the Cartesian unity nor the Deleuzian difference, but a gesture more primordial, already divided within itself before it can simply be the same or different, — Joshs
Derrida wrote:” division, delay, d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _must be capable of being brought to a certain absolute degree of absence for the structure of writing, supposing that writing exists, to be constituted. It is here that d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _as writing could no longer (be) an (ontological) modification of presence. It must be repeatably iterable in the absolute absence of the addressee or of the empirically determinable set of addressees. A writing that was not structurally legible iterable beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence, "death," or the possibility of the "death" of the addressee, inscribed in the structure of the mark (and it is at this point, I note in passing, that the value or effect of transcendentality is linked necessarily to the possibility of writing and of "death" analyzed in this, way).” As far as I see, the power of this gesture is the erection of the lethal transcendental subject, acting through deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?For James the 'I' is not self-identical but self-consistent in time, due to the fact that intended meanings refer back to previous intentions as part of their own sense. — Joshs
Don't you think that "self-consistent in time" presupposes a kind of self-identity? -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I agree with this. I just want to question the nature of “community of participants in an activity.” Who are these participants? For some thinkers, they are machines or some automatic processes. As Felix Guattari wrote: “When we drive, we activate subjectivity and a multiplicity of partial consciousness connected to the car ‘s technological mechanisms. There is no “individuated subject” that is in control of the driving. If one knows how to drive, one acts without thinking about it, without engaging reflexive consciousness…We are guided by the car’s machinic assemblage. Our actions and subjective components (memory, attention, perception, etc.) are “automatized,” they are a part of the machinic, hydraulic, electronic, etc. apparatuses, constituting non-human parts of the assemblage. Driving mobilizes different processes of conscientization, one succeeding the next, superimposing one onto the other, connecting or disconnecting according to the current events of driving.”Shaun Gallagher talks about socially distributed cognition:
“Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive
processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies,
environments, institutional structures, etc.”
Such processes don’t originate in individual minds but are shared among a community of participants in an activity. — Joshs
One could argue that any way we face here a version of “Shaun Gallagher socially distributed cognition.” Yet, in favor of a more radical Guattari’s comprehension of consciousness one could say, that our practice of driving a car, in spite of being a subject of the intervention of many institutions, in fact, has become entirely autonomous, self-driving collective activity, where machines and automatized
processes are substituted for intentional, conscious individual acts. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?The traditional apprehension with respect to the conception of consciousness is that it is a singular faculty, or functionality, or rational enterprise.....or this thing that does this something.
What do you think? How would you fill in the blanks? — Mww
I think that we definitely need to think of consciousness as a multiplicity. But, this is just a first step. Next, it is necessary to conceive the nature of this multiplicity, each distinct “state of consciousness” should be identified as a working part in an appropriate assemblage – technological, scientific, social, cultural, etc. -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I think that James did not define consciousness rigorously, but he brought a lot of clarifying examples, even of someone sleeping, or in the state of delirium. As far as I understood, he posed the problem of continuity, but not of a multiplicity of consciousness.Not being all that familiar with James, does he say what he thinks consciousness to be? Without that, how can it said whether or not it is discontinuous? Given the general conception of it, it is easy to say consciousness is continuously interrupted, merely from the mind being in a state of deep sleep, and by association, recommencing upon the attaining the state of awareness. — Mww
James did not thinkBut that in itself being sufficient reason with respect to a specific conception, says nothing about consciousness as a “multiplicity”, — Mww
of consciousness as a multiplicity.
it remains the purview of the respondant to conceptualize consciousness in his own terms, theorize the possibility of it being capable of obtaining to a multiplicity, — Mww
It looks like when some thinkers assume a multiplicity of consciousness, they really break with traditional apprehensions -
Is consciousness a multiplicity?
I think it has to be continuous and discontinuous, both have to be aspects of consciousness. I am not really sure how to clarify the two or how to understand how both exist together. The mind permits for both, though. — Josh Alfred
I don't see how this is even a question really. Consciousness is obviously a bunch of different things, different processes working in different ways, and it's obviously not always "on." — Terrapin Station
The problem is that the whole concept of consciousness is related to the set of notions,
supporting the unity, oneness, and substantiality of primordial "I," substantial cogito, and the transcendental Ego. So, it is not merely a question of the same mind that is able to experience
different states of consciousness. Do these states have entirely various qualities?
As Joshs noted: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4929/perception-of-time/p2
“The impression we get of consciousness as the commander of decision, as unfolding meaning as a linear causal sequence of nows (one damn thing after another), is the result of the way linguistic grammar is constructed , Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness. So the notion of agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents.” -
Perception of timeI agree with you, there are so many ways of thinking, not just one!
It is a matter of choice - what you find more relevant. I will read your paper. -
Perception of time
I think that neither Lacan nor Zizec reflects what we deal withWhat’s your attitude toward paychoanalytically influenced positikns(Lacan, Zizek)? — Joshs
in our lives. In my opinion, they have still stayed at the plain of the Signifier, which is not appropriate anymore.
I am not sure about Marion,I need to check it.What about use of theological tropes by writers like Zizek, Vattimo, Jean-Luc Marion, Caputo? — Joshs
May be I will reread some texts of Adorno (is his aesthetics still working?), not of Habermas.Or Marxist influenced approaches(Habermas, Adorno)? — Joshs
I think it is not the matter of deconstruction. (By the way, the easiest way to nullify Deleuze is to start identifying and classifying him).It is a matter of taking account of our time.Some would argue that Deleuzian thinking deconstructs theological, psychoanalytic and Marxist critical theory. — Joshs
In my opinion, Guattari is not less important than Deleuze. Also, I found that Massumi, Lazarotto, Goodchild, Raunig and de Landa are interesting. Goodchild, Smith, and Sauvagnargues are indispensable for anyone who wants to understand Deleuzian thinking. Foucault, Lyotard, Luhmann are still relevant.I’m wondering what other philosophers and approaches you find particularly relevant to you. — Joshs
I used to read some texts of Vygotsky, Blanchot, Bachtin, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Arendt, but I am not sure that they help me now. Is Kafka a thinker?
I like him so much. Anyway, texts, reading, and authors compose a kind of a sealed universe, so that the process of the endless reading and interpretation can consume all of our time. So, I try to read just what helps me to solve a problem that currently preoccupies me. -
Perception of time
For me, Massumi is one of the leading thinkers of our time, but one should read his texts with great caution.Ruth Leys says Massumi argues the affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology—that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs—because they are non-signifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning. Affects are “inhuman,” “pre-subjective,” “visceral” forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these. Whatever else may be meant by the terms affect and emotion, the affects must be noncognitive, corporeal processes or states. Affect is, as Massumi asserts, “irreducibly bodilyand autonomic”(PV,). — Joshs
I think that a few distortions and misrepresentations allowed to Ruth Leys (as far as I see from your note)
to misinterpret Massumi’s project. I would challenge a few things that could change the whole meaning of Leys’s assertions. First, I do not think that Massumi insists on independence and autonomy of “the affects,” from one side, and “ideology,” from another. Both are irreducibly social, technological, and vital. Second, both are not merely separated and isolated but interrelated in a much more complicated way. Third, to better understand how they work together, one should apply much more appropriate concepts. Fourth, mentioned terms are used not in the traditional manner. Finally, Deleuze and his followers often intentionally use a dichotomy and dualism - as a provocation, a tool for deconstruction, or just a preliminary notion that should be worked out later.
In principle, Deleuze avoided using this kind of discourse. His project was to consider things in their interdependency, endless variation, and immanence.Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic intertwining approach to affect is a corrective to this dualism.
He and the enactivists recognize a certain self-consistency to the organism in its interaction with environment that is missing from Deleuze. How does Deleuze explain stable personality features? — Joshs
Don’t you think that “stable personality features,” after all, are related to keeping untouched a substantial I and a transcendental ego?
Marlo-Ponte stated that our perception is built so that we simultaneously perceive and are perceived. For Deleuze was essential to find out
the ontological and epistemological conditions of this process. It does not happen in a vacuum, just in somebody’s mind. How is that possible? Is that a universal truth? If not, what its genealogy (genesis)? What are the limits of its use? Exceptions? For solving of what problems was it designed? -
Perception of time
I agree with all this, and I do not see how the quote and your commentary contradict with what I wrote about “inside” and “outside.”"Simondon notes the connection between self-reflection and affect. He even extends the capacity for self-reflection to all living things– although it is hard to see why his own analysis does not constrain him to extend it to all things (is not resonation a kind of self-reflection?). "At this point, the impression may have grown that affect is being touted here as if the whole world could be packed into it. In a way, it can, and is."
Notice that the “inside” here is the self-consistent pattern of perceptual perspective that is disrupted from without. You could say that the ‘without’ as affect is already alongside as background, keeping perception from being purely self-enclosed, and therefore the inside is already outside itself. — Joshs
I do not think that Massumi intended to isolate affect and then to elevate its status up the level
of the universal explanatory principle. When he wrote: “there are affect modulation techniques accessible in the event. They become accessible
to the event through reflex, habit, training and the inculcation of skills –
automaticities operating with as much dynamic immediacy as the event…
Affective techniques of thinking-feeling improvisationally are relational
techniques that apply to situations more directly than to persons,” he followed the strategic approach which was laid out by Deleuze and Guattari:
“There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only
a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together.
Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all
of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any
meaning whatsoever.”
Therefore, when you wrote: “The mind functions as an inseparable interaction with environment and body. It is nothing but this interaction. There is no self-identical self in this model. Self is a bi-product of the constant constructive interactive activity of the organism-environmental interaction. Consciousness is not self-conscious in the sense of being able to turn back on itself and grasp itself identically”, I agree with all this. I just want to add that the meaning
of notions “environment,” “body,” and “interaction” has changed.
Question: when Deleuze talks about the effect of cinema on our understanding of time, does he mean that it makes us realize what was always already true about time that we just never realized before, or does he mean that technologies like cinema create an absolutely new experience of time?
I think he means the former. — Joshs
I agree with you. The fundamental question is whether “an absolutely new experience of time” should be attributed to someone, watching a movie at the cinema, or the Deleuze’s cinematographic time-image
has also unfolded at our offices, schools, medical institutions, etc.?
I think that just a few scholars support a more radical version of the answer.
Maurizio Lazarotto writes: ”Enslavement does not operate through repression or ideology. It employs modeling and modulating techniques that bear on the “very spirit of life and human activity.” It takes over human beings “from the inside,” on the pre-personal (pre-cognitive and preverbal) level, as well as “from the outside,” on the supra-personal level, by assigning the certain modes of perception and sensibility and manufacturing an unconscious. Machinic enslavement formats the basic functioning of perspective, sensory, affective, cognitive, and linguistic behavior”.
Should this approach be considered as too militant and far-reaching? -
Perception of time
Thank you for your advice! Definitely, Marleau-Pontu is a great thinker.He understands it in a different way than Merleau-Ponty does. If youve never read him, he was bot5h a philosopher and psychologist. His Phenomeology of Perception offers a detailed account of memory, language , consciousness, perception and affect. There are currently a host of psychological writers who are using his ideas in their embodied, enactive approaches to cognitive phenomena. Its a burgeoning field. Check out the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. — Joshs
Yet, I am not sure that his phenomenology can be applied to some things that I am interested in. I mean that our time has become the “cinematographic, telecommunicational Time”, so that “the momentary synthetic synthesis of competing streams of fragmented perceptions and conceptualizations “ as well as “a community.of interaffecting agents” that you wrote about occur in a radically novel environment. Therefore, our memory, consciousness, perception, and language have been entirely transformed. Has the nature of these momentary syntheses, determining the ways of our being and thought, changed since Marleau-Pontu laid out his philosophy?
the new is the place where an inside is exposed to an outside to challenge, destabilise and transform that inside. Bodliy affect serves that role for Deleuze in relation to linguistic consciousness. It exposes a self-enclosed schematism to a radical otherness./quote]
As far as I know, Deleuze avoided using opposition of terms “inside,” and “outside.” So, he did not just propose that “the bodily affect exposes a self-enclosed schematism to radical otherness,” but he went much further.
For him, the “inner,” (intimate subjective qualities of self), constituting a person, is no more than effects, produced by “a community.of interaffecting agents.” Accordingly, this is how I understand this quote: ”The active synthesis of the future results in the I which is fractured according to the order of time and the Self which is divided according to the temporal series correspond and find a common descendant in the man without a name, without family, without qualities, without self or I, the already-Overman.”
The I, the self is no more than an assemblage of interacting impersonal instances (agents). For me, it has precisely the same meaning as yours “the momentary synthetic synthesis of competing streams of fragmented perceptions and conceptualizations.“ I was wondering if the future that Deleuze wrote about in 1968 has already become our reality?
— JoshsFuture present and past interprenetrate in the same way.
The past is repeatedly recast by a future that can never be anticipated in a
present that cannot be fixed. Anticipation re-figures recollection as much
as recollection shapes expectation. — Joshs
It is an impressive model. Is that possible to assume that we exist in different temporalities? (You described one of them). Nevertheless, does the newest one prevail the others?
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