I don't understand Deleuze's explanation of "synthesis". On the one hand, the present alone exists. On the other hand, within this present there is a "temporal flow".

How can there be a flow of time within a single moment in time? — RussellA

The question is, does this make any difference in one's (genitive) "objective" time? This analysis of time, Bergson (haven't read), Deleuze, Husserl (The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time) , does invite a violation, if you will, of objective familiarity, such that time as sequential events yields to the more basic analysis. — Astrophel

subjective duration of time exists in a single objective moment of time.

For me, philosophically, an interesting question not raised by Thompson's article is how we are able to subjectively feel the duration of time within a single momentary objective instant of time. — RussellA

At the moment I hear the clock strike for the fourth time, I have the memory of hearing the clock strike for the first time. When I hear the clock strike for the fourth time, for me, this is my "now". My memory of hearing the clock strike for the first time is also in my "now". In my "now" are both the memory of the clock striking for the first time and hearing the clock strike for the fourth time. The relation between the memory of the clock striking for the first time and hearing the clock strike for the fourth time comprises my awareness of subjective time. But this subjective time only exists for me in my "now", meaning that my subjective time is an instantaneous thing that requires no objective time at all. — RussellA

in order for the mind to have a consciousness of a subjective time, how exactly does the mind connect an objective past to an objective present?

1) Do people exist in both the objective past and objective present, thereby allowing them
an awareness of the flow of time?

2) Does the person only exist in the objective present, the "now", but their mind is able to go back to an objective past, thereby allowing them an awareness of the flow of time?

How exactly does a person connect an objective past to an objective present if not by a memory that exists in the objective present? — RussellA

there is no 'objective time' per se - time itself is inextricably linked to the subjective awareness of it — Wayfarer

There is the question as to how "subjective time" relates to time.

We have a memory of driving through the city and we are aware of presently walking through the forest. But even our awareness of presently walking through the forest is a memory, because the transfer of information from the forest to our mind is limited by the speed of light.

Therefore, the conscious mind is always comparing two memories, the memory of driving in the city and the memory of walking through the forest. The conscious mind is aware that these two memories are different, and the conscious mind understands that memories that are different have different "times".

Yet, as the clock only exists in the "now", the conscious mind can only exist in the "now". As you wrote about the clock “Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct". Exactly the same applies to the mind, such that “Each successive ‘now’ of the conscious mind contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct".

The conscious mind, which only exists in the "now", can compare two memories, which also only exist in the "now". The conscious mind can be aware that these memories are different, and this difference is labelled as "time".

For the conscious mind, "time" is something that can only exist in the "now" as a difference in memories, which also can only exist in the "now".

In effect, a difference in memories that are both in the "now" can be labelled "a change in time".

Subjective time in the conscious mind is something that can only exist in the "now".
a day ago — RussellA

I can agree that there is objective time and psychological time, but I am unsure that there is subjective time.

P1 - Objective time is inferred to exist in the world.
P2 - Psychological time exists in the conscious mind, in that we are conscious that at one time we were driving in the city and at another time we were walking through a forest. As you say, "We, however, experience the passage of psychological time".
P3 - The conscious mind is a physical substance that changes with objective time.

P4 - If there was a subjective time, it would exist in the conscious mind.
P5 - At one moment in objective time, subjective time cannot change.
P6 - Between two different objective times, subjective time would change.
C1 - But as you say "We, however, cannot experience the subjective time since we exist within each instant of it"
C2 - We can experience psychological time and we can infer objective time, but as we cannot experience subjective time, then the concept of subjective time becomes redundant. — RussellA

Subjective time is a substance:

P1) Subjective time exists and changes since there is a change in a physical#1 (please see the Argument below)
P2) Any change requires subjective time (please see the Argument below)
C1) Therefore, we are dealing with an infinite regress since subjective time is required to allow a change in subjective time (from P1 and P2)
C2) If so, then there must exist the Mind that is a substance#2 with the ability to experience and cause subjective time
C3) So, subjective time is a substance — MoK

Subjective time is a redundant concept. — RussellA

However, what is contradictory is not reality itself, but the ongoing disarray and imbalance between our actual experience, our sense of things, and the totality of our intellectual apparatus.
— Number2018

Makes sense, but I'm still confused about it. Certainly, Adorno is explicit that contradicitons are in reality itself. — Jamal

what Žižek seeks to do doesn't seem far from what I see as Adorno's goal, though one can seriously doubt that the latter's thinking leads anywhere good, politically. But the idea that Adorno ends up on neutral ground doesn't really fit with how I read his Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, where (arguably) we see negative dialectics in action. — Jamal

reality itself is contradictory, that the contradictions are not just in and between the concepts that are applied to it. Things are more complex, and (I want to put it stronger than this but I'm not sure how) we need to keep ourselves open to the existence of contradictions. Because that is how we actually experience the world. (that's a bit better) — Jamal

Dialectics is a way of thinking that actively traces the contradictions and movements within concepts and things, and avoids freezing them into definitions and treating things as fixed and complete. Dialectics is the way of thinking that recognizes — or put differently, the dialectic is — the process characterized by the instability of concepts and objects, in which concepts and objects are not graspable in their finality but are transformed through an inner, or immanent, mediation between their contradictory aspects. — Jamal

I'd be interested to see others' thoughts on the objection that Adorno attempts to respond to: Why must everything be a matter of contradictions? In my example of market freedom quoted below — the market is a domain of freedom and the market is a domain of coercion — the contradiction can be dissolved by a re-framing that contains qualifications, and in a Left-wing manner too:
The market is a domain of freedom for these people and a domain of coercion for those people. No contradiction. — Jamal

The reason he is getting no opposition from Congress is because they are terrified that if they do oppose him Trump will direct the wrath of his MAGA army on them. Unlike the first time around, MAGA and Trump together have made sure that Trump is surrounded by only yes-sayers in his second administration and in Congress. There is no one left to act as a check on his power, or to question his decisions. — Joshs

I just couldn’t allow myself to imagine that a majority of Americans would elect as president someone who sees power as absolute one-man rule. — Joshs

I don't think the two views are necessarily in conflict. Sokolowski has syntactical structure emerging from the phenomenological character of experience. Hegel ultimately traces this back to being, to the Absolute (in SoL). Sokolowski's inquiry is just significantly more bracketed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata. — J

I am not sure why we should assume that only substances are received through the senses. It is true that one cannot have a "fast motion" with nothing moving, but even given a substance-centric ontology it still seems possible for the senses to capture and transmit relation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

At the opening of the Phenomenology, Hegel (IMO fairly convincingly) demonstrates how sheer sense certainty would be contentless. However, I would take it that "observation" relevant to empiricism would be broader than "sense certainty," else we would have a quite impoverished view of what sensation does for us. If "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," then relation, universals, etc. must be at least virtually present in sensation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. Would an analogy with water help? -- it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "flow." — J

And it is neither a brief interval between the past and future nor a fleeting absence of being.
— Number2018
Isn't it just a mental state? The ability to tell the difference between past, present and future using different type of mental operations in human mind i.e. memory, consciousness and imagination?

Thus, the present moment's reality is shaped by a virtual time, existing as neither what is no longer nor what is not yet, but as the difference between past and future.
— Number2018
Virtual time? Remember when you were a baby and child? You couldn't have known what time is about. As you grew older, you learn about it, read about it, and think about. You have a concept of time. But the nature of time itself is still abstract. When you get older, they say time feels going a lot faster than when you were younger. What does it tell you? Isn't time just a mental state? — Corvus

Space and objects co-exist momentarily; they are co-present. However, for us, the present time is shaped by the current virtual time horizons of the past and future.
— Number2018

What do you mean by "the current virtual time horizon"? — Corvus

I’m referring to a situation where a system of values becomes the foundation for large-scale political struggle.
— Number2018

I don't see why the "digital medium" gives every system of values a populist mode of expression. For example, when the incumbent uses that same digital media to promote the reigning values, what is at stake is not poplism. — Leontiskos

Trump has touted tariffs for a long time, so I don't see this as "the logic taking on a dynamic of its own." Tariffs are basically a simplistic approach to the "America first" mentality that is inevitably bound up with MAGA. — Leontiskos

If populism requires a shift from pre-election promises to post-election actions, then it's not so clear that it fits Trump, because he has a surprising tendency to fulfill his promises. Or at least to try. And maybe that's a problem with Laclau: populism can function fine even when the signifier is not empty. Sometimes the people know what they want, and there isn't a great deal of ambiguity in the signifier. Sometimes the desired change has a clear direction. — Leontiskos

Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist. — Corvus

The dictates of this medium inevitably transform any system of values into a populist mode of expression.
— Number2018

But why? If for Laclau (as also for Reno) populism is a revolutionary desire for change from the status quo, then why must any system of values be transformed into a populist mode of expression? — Leontiskos

and Trump’s second administration can serve as an experimental setting for this. So far, MAGA seems to function as a façade for the vast concentration of executive power, which is where it reveals its affinity with the enactment of a 'liberalism of open, liquid society.'
— Number2018

Well first, can a empty signifier function as a façade? And if not, then it seems that MAGA must be more than an empty signifier. But perhaps you are not claiming that it is MAGA per se that is the empty signifier? — Leontiskos

for the sake of argument let's say that MAGA is all about concentrating executive power. Still, what does that concentration have in common with "the enactment of a 'liberalism of open, liquid society'"? Trump seems to be using the power of the executive to do just the opposite, and all concentrations of power seem to have a conservative bent (in the sense that they want to maintain that power - they want permanence qua power). — Leontiskos

his points about conservatism and progressivism being relative and non-ideological (and populism being neither inherently left nor right). That is, conservatism values permanence and progressivism values change, and apart from that core the doctrines are all historically contingent. Thus a doctrine will not ultimately be a sign of conservatism or progressivism, — Leontiskos

Power, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will (Dionysus himself). The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as weIl as their respective quality in a complex whole. (Deleuze on Nietzsche)

Did Nietzsche give out clear reference or explanation on Will to Power? — Corvus

But surely the brain couldn’t perform these tricks
of condensation, assimilation and categorization if the patterns it construes dont reflect the way the world really is? It could do this in fantasy, but when one attempted to predict the course of actual events on the basis of these mapped out patterns, one’s attempts would be invalidated unless they accorded with the actual flow of events. — Joshs

I was under the impression that, as far as assemblages are concerned, one man's synchronic is another's diachronic. Like you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of theorems and proofs and arguments. Or you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of institutions and geographies. The first guides the second and the second guides the first.
Or if you wanted to do a history of violence in the political north, you might be able to do it from the perspective of lead in paint. — fdrake

If you want it in jargon, the same assemblage can be territorialised in multiple ways and have its {the} body without organs face multiple strata. I — fdrake

I think, for historical reasons, people strongly emphasise the socius' mediating role on assemblages, even though nature plays an expansive role in that mediation. — fdrake

"New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation. — fdrake

I think ↪Number2018 might agree that this is what Deleuze-Guattari refer to as the molar dimension, which they argue is a surface effect of processes within molecular assemblages.

It is only at the submicroscopic level of desiring-machines that there exists a functionalism—machinic arrangements, an engineering of desire; for it is only there that functioning and formation, use and assembly, product and production merge. All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not formed in the same way they function, and the technical machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what is not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an intention. The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves.”(AO) — Joshs

there are many different kinds of assemblage theory, and I’m not suggesting you’re obliged to stick religiously to Deleuze. — Joshs

one can hold the individuating conditions for a given assemblage fixed and give an account of how it works as an assemblage. In the same way as you don't need to know the history of pool cues to describe a pool cue striking a ball.

Another way of putting it is that assemblages, once they're up and running, are often created and sustained through internalised networks rather than the ones which partook to their genesis. — fdrake

Some assemblages behave as if there is a relevant concept of sufficient cause - pool cue strikes ball, ball goes into table pocket. Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you. Things like that. The changes propagate in each case, but to the extent an assemblage can be split into distinct entities with relations, it makes sense to see the state of one relation propagating into others given a change. — fdrake

The immanent cause is realized, integrated, and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual superposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages
— Number2018

I read that as less a statement of arbitrary, recursive mediation and more a statement that assemblage-level laws {abstract machines, things like physical laws} are coextensive with the behaviour of their components {concrete assemblages}. It's roughly a way of saying a law of nature says nothing more than what things already do and can do. — fdrake

Gallagher’s model of body schema and body image is drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal intersubjectivity, whereas Deleuze is informed by Nietzsche’s critique of causality. — Joshs

The elements of an assemblage for Deleuze, the partial objects of desiring machines which are the basis of sense, are affective drives. By contrast, Gallagher and other enactivists partially separate the affective and the conceptual aspects of assemblages. — Joshs

So there's enough normative character to do things with, but the nature of what can be done using those norms is not totally determined by their current state of expression - only what may be expressed with them fully determines their expression {given the current state of the assemblage}. Which is basically a tautology, but no one knows the scope of those rules without knowing all the theorems. An appeal to potential development, there, is an assemblage concept that ↪Number2018 referenced, organisation in accordance with some abstract machine."

The explicit articulation of a system of norms or rules prescribing concrete conduct or behavior for people in a concrete assemblage has a complex and ambiguous relationship with what people actually do. Let’s return to your case of the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage. There are different degrees of conscious adherence to the rules, ranging from the complete automation of the addicts to the high degree of awareness in the social and medical staff involved. Yet, while acting, even the involved professionals do not explicitly follow a system of rules. Similarly, when playing, professional basketball players do not consciously attend to the system of the game’s rules.Shaun Gallagher notes that “When the fielder is trying to catch the baseball, she is not performing tests or sampling the environment. The brain is not located in the center, conducting tests along the radii; it is on the circumference, one station amongst other stations involved in the loop thatalso navigates through the body and environment and forms the whole” (Gallagher, "Enactivist Interventions", p. 19). Gallagher’s enactivist approach aligns closely with the framework of assemblage theory. Thus, apparent rules are situated within the environment, which possesses its own organization, and where discursive, social, and normative components constitute the clearly expressible and articulable system.On the other hand, Gallagher’s concept of the ‘body’ refers to an integration of disparate but interconnected patterns of physical and psychic states, perceptions, reactions, and behaviors. The conscious self-orientation, ‘the brain’, is just one component of the larger complex that constitutes the game’s assemblage. It primarily follows the vectors of alignment between the two planes, which can be referred to as the abstract machine of the game’s assemblage. Similarly, in your example of the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, the conscious participation follows "one station amongst other stations involved in the navigation on the loop." — fdrake

The way I prefer to approach causality in assemblages - and this might be my own brainfarts - is that causality in an assemblage is equivalent to the behaviour of a change propagation through connected parts. Like if you had the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, if you had shitty heroin instead of good heroin it could propagate changes into needle behaviour {up the dose} addict behaviour {inject the higher dose, craving} and social stuff {complain at the dealer, buy more...}. And it's appropriate to think of that as a cause.

Though I agree that the causal order can be tangled in assemblages - if you're considering addict-heroin-socius-needle as an assemblage, it doesn't have any unique event ordering. You could have a change in addict propagating to heroin-socius-needle, then back to addict, or a change in socius propagating to addict-heroin-needle. — fdrake

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves.
— Number2018

Yes. An assemblage doesn't have to make sense at all does it? It just has to work together. A "law" is a durable regularity. Some are so durable that they appear immutable, and may as well be. — fdrake

There are lots of things with lots of structures. Assemblage is a generic term for such a structure. Any particular assemblage will have a structure. Even if assemblages in general have no general laws. — fdrake

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being. If, as Heraclitus says, we “cannot step twice into the same river,” then it also seems we cannot speak of the same river twice either. — Count Timothy von Icarus

↪Number2018

This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within.

What would be an example of such a philosophy? — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out — frank

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out — frank