A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity.
— Number2018

What are the effects of its unity? — frank

The pre-given whole exists prior to the emergence of its parts. The consistency and stability of its unity prevent the development or recombination of the parts, as such changes would threaten its very existence.

I imagine you don't need assemblages as a vocabulary to do work like the above. No physical scientist or mathematician I've met has cared about or even been aware of assemblage theory. Social scientists are sometimes though. So why use it? — fdrake

The assemblage theory helps to emphasize a social entity's contingent and constructivist nature. It allows us to conceive of it not as a unified whole governed by a single determinative principle. A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity. In contrast, a social entity can be seen as an assemblage of institutions, forms of organization, practices, and agents which do not follow a single, consistent logic. Thus, assemblage theory offers an alternative to the logic of unity, highlighting the interaction of its heterogeneous components.

Before 2016 you had oligarchy on both sides of the U.S. aisle. In 2016 we had democracy/populism rising up from both left and right (Sanders and Trump). Trump toppled the oligarchic GOP primaries; Sanders was not able to do so, although he came close in 2020. Biden was the DNC oligarchy's answer to Sanders, for the DNC used its oligarchic resources to dramatically reshape the race after Sanders began winning in 2020. Harris was the DNC oligarchy's answer to Biden's poor debate performance. Harris' candidacy was expressly oligarchic rather than democratic, as she was an unelected candidate. — Leontiskos

It is a relevant brief account of recent U.S. history. I would just add that what you refer to as ‘oligarchy’ is likely an extremely complex agglomeration of political, bureaucratic, and corporate groups and forces. We do not know its exact structure and mechanisms, but it seems reasonable to assume that the ‘oligarchy’ progressively augmented its power and its detachment from the ‘demos.’ Otherwise, it is impossible to fully understand its chain of unprecedented missteps and risky strategies that led to Trump’s victory.

There are lots of things Trump voters were voting against, but I think much of it was tied up with the unabashed oligarchy of the DNC (which is now also bound up with progressive theories which are out of step with the demos). It sounds like Laclau sees populism as a quasi-revolutionary movement borne out of frustration with the status quo. That makes sense and I think it is reflected in the 2024 U.S. elections (as well as recent elections in Germany, Canada, France, and elsewhere).

(But with that said, it isn't necessarily revolutionary to elect the elected candidate over the unelected candidate in a democracy. Populism and democracy seem to very much go hand in hand in this case.) — Leontiskos

Your understanding of Laclau’s theory is quite similar to mine. He provides an elaborate conceptual framework for understanding the rare and precarious events of democratic eruptions.It is a valuable contribution to the discussion of our political realities, avoiding partisan clichés, stereotypes of mundane language, and biased media coverage. Another challenge is the incredible speed with which the political landscape shifts and the rapid alteration of related narratives. Who remembers Brexit or the COVID pandemic today? It is also quite frustrating to observe the reflections and commentaries of most of
pundits and academics. Many of them seriously argued that Trump’s election marked the revival of Nazism in the U.S. or he constituted a genuine threat to democracy. So, I believe that Laclau does not sufficiently elaborate on the affective component of the populist process of 'constructing internal frontiers and identifying institutionalized 'others.' His book was published 20 years ago, and he could not have predicted the ubiquitous spread of the 'woke' attitudes and the overflow of various aspects of populist phenomena.

And because then the party leadership just put Kamala as the new candidate annoyed the voters. Remember that Americans do believe in the strange theater called "Primaries" and don't like the party leadership just selecting the candidate. In a multiparty system this isn't a problem as people just select between parties and don't care shit about the internal selection of the party candidates. But in a system where there are only two parties (or so Americans believe), it's very important. — ssu

Trump administration will look like a mess, — ssu

Trump will continue things like wanting to buy Greenland from Denmark and other crazy tweets. Hence it's really hard then to see "long term policies" when the media focus is on what Trump has said and wanted today. — ssu

You make a good point. The media will undoubtedly portray Trump’s administration as a chaotic mess of incoherent policies. Nevertheless, I believe that before the elections Trump could clearly articulate his goals in three major policy areas: immigration, the economy, and culture. This focus on concrete policies resonated with large groups of voters and was at least as important as the absence of democratic primaries or Biden’s mental condition. Therefore, the fate of MAGA will not be determined by the media’s coverage. What matters to Trump’s base is neither the media’s framing nor Trump’s bombastic tweets. What matters is the tangible and consistent implementation of his key policies.

Trump has no political ideology. It's telling that Trump himself didn't last time think that "drain the swamp" rhetoric would go anywhere, but he can read his audience and notice how it sank to his base. Otherwise when looking at it objectively, the whole 'MAGA' thing is a mess. Isolationism and then wanting Greenland and the Panama Canal? How do those to fit together ideologically? Even more logical would be "KAG", hence "Keep America Great" as the US hasn't yet lost it's Superpower status. — ssu

This is just an example of how people will desperately cling to the politician promising better times as they had before and turn away from the ones trying to make a realist effort on how to something when the change is permanent. — ssu

Do you think that 'the whole 'MAGA' thing is a mess,'? If you think so, does your second quote explain why Trump won the popular vote and became the second Republican to do so since 1988?

@Leontiskos@Count Timothy von Icarus
The concept of the ‘empty signifier’ carries a clear paradoxical implication. It stems from Laclau’s ontological position in formulating his political theory. He argues that any social or political identity can only be defined within the relational framework of a given social or political system. Identities are temporarily constituted and articulated; they have no inherent essence or transcendental model. A subject’s identity can only be defined in relation to what it is not. Therefore, the ontological question of constitutive difference must be addressed. For Laclau, this is a matter of ceaseless practice and articulation. “From the beginning of modern times, the reproduction of the different social areas takes place in permanently changing conditions, and they are constantly requiring the construction of a new system of differences. Hence the area of articulatory practises is immensely broadened”. (Laclau, ‘Antagonism and hegemony,’ pg. 126) Like the ‘empty signifier,’ the process of ‘constructing a new system of differences’ is a paradoxical but not self-refuting notion. To construct such a system, one must be able to operate within a conceivable form of universalism, which is necessarily in tension with the presupposed plurality and particularity of social forces and actors. Also, one must entertain a principle of universally valid rationality, at the same time tacitly acknowledging something irrational. This situation requires moving beyond classical two-valued logic, as, for example, George Spencer-Brown did.

If mainstream political parties react to the wishes of the population, populism doesn't take over. Yet the reaction has to be swift and decisive, not just empty promises. — ssu

Could you provide an example from recent Western history where mainstream political parties responded to the wishes of the population? Could the most recent U.S. elections serve as such an example?

Laclau’s project is an attempt to rethink contemporary spontaneous political movements and collective action. It is likely impossible to directly link his theory to any specific historical political movement labeled as ‘populist.’ However, it could be interesting to apply it to the most recent U.S. elections. Can this be done without resorting to partisan clichés and stereotypes? Rather than asking what the slogan 'MAGA' means to Trump’s voters, it might be more insightful to explore how the slogan 'MAGA' functions. What do you think?

Deleuze changes his strong emphasis on Eternal Return and the privilege of the virtual.
“Nietzsche’s aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return. This is much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dualism, with complementarity between subject and object…unity is thwarted in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject”. (‘A thousand plateaus’, pg.6)
To avoid a strong opposition between virtual and actual modes of difference, Deleuze moves toward the phenomena of consolidation. While focusing on describing singular assemblages, he offers a much more elaborated approach to a complex mode of interdependence between the actual and the virtual. Now, he designates the phenomena of becoming a line of flight. At the same time, the actualized individuation and the tendency to organization are expressed through the concepts of the molecular and molar lines. Together, they compose an ‘open whole,’ which is indeed a paradoxical concept. However, the emergence of something qualitatively new cannot be explained exclusively by the means of logical, dialectical or semiotic transition. This obstacle makes any totality simultaneously impossible and necessary, a place of an irretrievable fullness. Deleuze theorizes reality in terms of eventuality and discontinuity. He follows the principle that the nature of elements does not predetermine them to enter one type of arrangement rather than another. Therefore, totality, an open whole, should be conceptualized afresh, depending on a considered problematic field. There is not the same transcendental-empirical synthesis, that Deleuze applies again and again. This vision sets in motion the productivity of the creative construction of Deleuzian philosophy.

physical things are measurable in various ways, but consciousness is not. In what physical terms can we discuss consciousness? — Patterner

You can only measure dimensions and weight of something which is presumed to remain qualitatively the same over the course of the quantitative measuring and weighing. Any calculation of differences in degree presupposes no difference in kind during the process. Otherwise one is dealing with a new thing and has to start over again. The world doesn’t consist of objects with attributes and properties which remain qualitatively the same from one moment to the next. We invented the concept of object as a qualitatively self-same thing so that we could then proceed to perform calculative measurements. — Joshs

Nathan Widder offers an interesting account of overcoming the gap between physical things and consciousness. He considers Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche.

“While mechanism correctly locates knowledge in quantity, through its uncritical assumption
of unity (the atom), it reduces quality directly to quantity and establishes an absolute division
between knowledge (what can be ‘objectively’ quantified) and value (the ‘subjective’
interpretation or assessment of this ‘objective’ reality). Units enable counting and calculation,
but they also abstract away constitutive relations. Thus on a concrete level where no unities
or things pre-exist their relations, quantity cannot be a number but only a relation. As
Deleuze declares: ‘Quantity itself is therefore inseparable from difference in quantity’. This
difference in quantity is intensive, an ordinal relation of more or less. Nietzsche calls it an
‘order of rank’, which is also an order of power, of strength and weakness. As an intensive
difference, it cannot be measured along a fixed numerical scale that could reduce difference
between forces to equality: as Deleuze maintains, ‘to dream of two equal forces…is coarse
and approximate dream, a statistical dream in which the living is submerged but which
chemistry dispels’. Difference in quantity thereby designates a fundamental heterogeneity
within force relations. However, although the world of forces is one of differences in quantity that are only later organized into unities, Nietzsche maintains that this quantitative difference is never
experienced as such, but instead is felt in terms of quality. ‘Our “knowing” limits itself to establishing quantities; but we cannot help feeling these differences in quantity as qualities…we sense bigness and smallness in relation to the conditions of our existence…with regard to making possible our existence we sense even relations between magnitudes as qualities’” (Widder, ‘From duration to eternal return’)

This quote means that our values are inseparable from our qualitative evaluations of relations of forces. On the other hand, relations of forces and their evaluations are embedded within our procedures of quantitative measurements. While qualities remain heterogeneous to quantities, they are not merely subjective interpretations of an objectively independent reality. They compose an integral part of the perspective plane of the will to power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for interesting questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: Trans women are not women. [bailey]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@Joshs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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