The mechanism is by taking the distinction between the actual and the ideal and dissolving it; which works by recognising it (assuming it) as already dissolved — fdrake

What's actually interesting too is the way it does this: knowing that it's literally impossible to move from ideality to actuality, it begins in actuality ('God exists in thought', etc), but always a kind of deficient actuality. From here, two steps are necessary - first, showing how this beginning in actuality can't measure up to the ideality of what God 'ought' to be ('the greatest being conceivable'), and second, concluding from this failure of initial actuality that the ideality must therefore be the case. This three-step dance of sophistry is what characterizes every ontological argument, and also exposes it for the fraudulent magical thinking that, as you rightly point out, it is.

The long and short of all 'ontological arguments' is that there is no possible move from concept to existence. Even when they seem to discuss 'existence', it is always a second-order 'concept of existence' at stake, and never actual existence. So the basic trick is to look for points at which actual existence is surreptitiously slipped-in and silently substituted for conceptual/hypothetical existence. It's the one of the oldest, mostly easily identifiable tricks in the book which suckers continue to fall for.

(1) God exists in the understanding, but not in reality (assumption for reductio).
(2) Existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone. (premise)
(3) A Being having all of God's properties plus existence in reality can be conceived. (premise)
(4) From (1) and (2), a being having all of God's properties plus existence in reality is would be greater than God.
(5) From (3) and (4), a Being greater than God can be conceived.
(6) It is false that a Being greater than God can be conceived (by definition).
(7) Hence, it is were God to exist, it would be false that God exists in the understanding, but not in reality. — Alvin Plantinga

Fixed it.

First I fixed the illegitimate use of 'is' in (4), which sneaks existence in through the back-door, and made it what it should be: a 'would be', insofar as, at this point, were still talking about a hypothetical being. But having made obvious that we're dealing with a hypothetical being, it becomes clear that (7) also deals with a hypothetical being: the whole 'proof' is simply definitional: it works by offering two different and incompatible definitions of God ((1) and (6)), and shows that by the standards of the second definition (in which no Being greater than God can be conceived - (6)), the first definition (1) is inadequate. Which of course follows, tautologically. To be super clear, this is what's happening:

(1) God is like X. (1)
(2) But according to my definition of God, God is not like X. ((2)-(6))
(3) Therefore God is not like X. (7)

Where X is 'does not exist in reality'.

It's a clever bit of sophistry that hides it's conditional nature a bit better than the traditional form of the argument, but is equally tautologically nonsensical - as all cosmological arguments are. Shame on those who take Plantinga seriously as a philosopher. In order to fully understand the depth of the conceit involved in this 'argument', there's a bit more to be said regarding how 'existence' is used equivocally here, but this is enough for the moment. 10 points to anyone who can see the problem with the use of 'existence' in it (hint: can existence be qualified?).

(Y)

-But it seems to me that your emphasis on sense-making - or rather, the modality of sense-making you keep insisting on - is individual, all-too-individual: this being, in some way, the problem with phenomenology as a whole, but even the very scenario of 'sitting in a room trying to make sense of someone's world' seems to presuppose a kind of well-adjusted subject, one able to 'integrate' and 'assimilate' (as you put it before) his or her experiences according to a narrative arc, 'coping', working thorough, etc. But what of the unintergratible, the unassimilable, the infraction, the singular? Perhaps you ought to consider that Protevi's (almost-reflexive) killing machines are in someways pathological, precisely because the 'conditioning' in question takes place at a supra or infra-subjective level, at a way in which, when you're in that room with them afterwards, they splutter and cry when trying to make sense of things? (I think here of Bataille and Blanchot who militated against the whole idea of a phenomenological 'project'). What if they can't anticipate because they've lost their 'care'-orientation? What if they have no 'world', or occupy a 'world' in fragments? (Malabou: "One must be in good shape to welcome the trace.")

Of course now you say something like 'hah, see, sociality is only ever an imposition, a infracton from the outside'. Well no, just in this particular case, especially when discussing the columbine killers and military units, which are surely among the limit cases of human experience. And in any case an attention to différance ought to disable any easy demarcation between the normal and the pathological here. Among the attractions of Deleuze's account of thought or cognition for me is precisely this undermining of this simple division, wherein all genuine thought - that which is most internal to us - is impelled precisely by an infraction from the 'outside', an encounter which calls fourth a moment of genuine creative response. There is a topology of affect. Again, it seems to me that you keep eliding the specificity of Protevi's account in trying to make it a metonym of an account of affect 'in general', whereas it's mean to account for a particular assemblage of it.

And speaking of which, I don't understand how you see S-J, Lingis or Stern (only the latter of which really professes any allegience to psychoanalytic thought) developing 'affective dynamics at the level of social interactions': Neither the quotes by stern or S-J do anything of the sort, and the whole idea behind Lingis (who is barely a 'psychoanalytic thinker', and instead one far more indebted to Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Nietzsche) is that movement is an index of that which is prior to any division between the social (the 'other') and the self, or even, in your preferred terminology, the 'interpersonal we' - a reworking, anyway, of Heidegger's being-with? (and what's so wrong with psychoanalysis anyway? There've been some great work done on affect and psychoanalysis - I'm thinking Adrian Johnson and Colette Soler in particular...)

And lastly, because the 'rage module' seems to be a bit a sticking point with you, I can only say I'm not very bothered by it because (a) Protevi's whole point is that it works differentially on account of entrainment across thresholds so it's hardly a matter of 'pre-programming' or determinism or whatever you'd like to call it (b) it's hardly mandated by a Deleuzian POV and is only present in Protevi's account, I suspect, as a way to more deeply integrate biology into the account, and (c) I don't think much of the account which be that much changed if we dropped the reference to the 'rage module' altogether - although perhaps it would have to be compensated for by some other kind of phylogenetically accounted for neuroplastic mechanism that not as simplistic and straightforward.

White fathers worry about their children too but they don't have this kind of worry. White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate. — Cavacava

Yeah, that's actually a really fascinating point, the idea that white identity - to the extent there is one - ends up often being sublimated into class or even 'attitude' categories ('hardworking, etc'). I wonder if this is a kind of socio-psycho response to a phenomenon that might be called the particularization of white identity, that is, the creeping acknowledgement that 'white' no longer stands for a universalist non-ethnicity (as when 'ethnic' simply means 'non-white'), and is coming to be seen as one ethnic identity among a circle of others (complex and problematic as it might be). And I mean this in the most banal way as when TV shows or memes now speak of 'white people things'.

There's a moment in one of my favourite recent films, End of Watch, when Michael Peña's Latino character jokingly tells Jake Gyllenhaal's white character to leave him alone and enjoy his 'white people stuff' - an evening at the symphony that Gyllenhaal had planned with his girlfriend. I don't think this is a joke that could have been made - or even thought-up as a joke - 10 or so years ago. And there's a kind of lovely dialectical implication in the joke too,insofar as, as a joke it pokes fun of there being 'any-color-people stuff' at all.

But if you couple this emergent particularization of whiteness with (a) the problematic historical discourse of 'whiteness' (often associated, for good or ill, with racism and bigotry), and (b) the complex political dynamics of racial history in the US, and you get a recipe for just the kind of sublimation, I think, described in the report you link. So it's definitely the case that white people negotiate race too, in a way specific to them, and in a way definitely worthy of study as well.

I have always been a big fan of philosophers who start their investigation by locating that about which one can say 'at least this much is true, always,everywhere' , the irreducible conditions of possibility for any thing to appear in the world.

You and I aren't going to agree on the validity or usefulness of this move. From my perspective, you are among the majority of philosophically minded people( especially those from Anglo cultures) who view that sort of attempt to ground ontology in such a fashion as wrong headed from the get go. Or perhaps you see the value or legitimacy of that move in earlier thinkers like Descartes, Kant and perhaps Hegel, but don't think that Heidegger and Derrida have managed to pull it off( — Joshs

A quick note on this, as it is somewhat tangential although still interesting and important: I'm all for metaphysics in the grand, classical sense, but I think it demands an incredible reworking of what we understand metaphysics can be. I also think Heidegger and Derrida are indispensable guides for what can and cannot be done, and I situate them not so differently to how I situate Kant: Kant marks a caesura such that one speaks of a philosophy before Kant and a philosophy after Kant, the latter being irreducible to the former; just as there is philosophy both before Heidegger and after Heidegger - so too Derrida. To be unfamiliar with their projects and what they entail would be a vast handicap in the development of any metaphysical project.

And crucially, metaphysics cannot be the same in their wake; any possible metaphysics after them would not be another in a long line of metaphysical 'systems', but would, or ought to, transform the very meaning and scope of metaphysics itself. Arguably, every grand metaphysican has done exactly this, but now more than ever do we need to be self-aware of the legacy of those transformations, and how to work with - and in some cases - against them.

I'm not convinced that we're talking about two different topics, though I think that the fact that you think we are says something about the nature of our disagreement. For while I didn't make it explicit for want of space, the focus on movement and speed that I accented in the my last post is inseparable from the question of affectivity. What all these authors emphasize - in a way that I left out - is that movement is nothing less than the ground of affection.

Massumi actually opens his book by drawing attention to exactly this: "When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative difference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling ... Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change." (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual).

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone specifies further: "Any movement has a certain felt tensional quality, linear quality, amplitudinal quality, and projectional quality. In a very general sense, the felt tensional quality has to do with our sense of effort; the linear quality with both the felt linear contour of our moving body and the linear paths we sense ourselves describing in the process of moving; the amplitudinal quality with both the felt expansiveness or contractiveness of our moving body and the spatial extensiveness or constrictedness of our movement; the felt projectional quality with the way in which we release force or energy.

Linear and amplitudinal qualities obviously describe spatial aspects of movement; tensional and projectional qualities obviously describe temporal aspects of movement, what we recognize as the felt intensity of our moving bodily energies and the felt manner in which we project those bodily energies — in a sustained manner, for example, in an explosive manner, in a punctuated manner, in a ballistic manner, and so on. Temporal aspects of movement are the result of the way in which tensional and projectional qualities combine; that is, the temporal quality of any movement derives from the manner in which any particular intensity (or combined intensities) is kinetically expressed.

On the way to spelling out the nature of these qualities more precisely, I should call specific attention to the fact that movement creates the qualities that it embodies and that we experience; thus it is erroneous to think that movement simply takes place in space, for example. On the contrary, we formally create space in the process of moving; we qualitatively create a certain spatial character by the very nature of our movement — a large, open space, or a tight, resistant space, for example." (Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement).

I quote all of this to emphasize that these things cannot be neatly parceled out: movement, physiology, development, affectivity. The philosophical reason why this is important is that these all imply a primacy of relation: all these terms only make sense as factors of relationality: they constitute a pre-personal or pre-individual relational/differential field out of which 'persons', 'individuals' or particulars attain stability (or even 'metastability', to appropriate Simondon's systems inspired vocabulary). Which is, all again to say that to attribute to this view one of 'externally cobbled relations between moments of experience' is simply wrong; and so too would it be wrong to speak of 'internally related moments of experience' insofar as both 'internal' and 'external' are themselves developmental derivatives of the preindividual field out of which these terms are born.

It's not evil though. It's quite excellent, in fact.

I'm okay with opressing racists, and I'm okay with depriving them of their freedom to express their racism. In fact I encourage everyone to opress a racist every now and then, it's a nice, healthy activity for the soul.

In other words, people will think / not think things and say / not say things based on emotions such as shame, not as the result of rational consideration/reflection. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Obviously. But then, it would be rational to be ashamed in some circumstances.

But then I take it you're American, and they consider Stephen Pinker an academic over there so maybe I'm not that surprised afterall. — Pseudonym

:D

Thinking about the kind of 'privilege' involved here, I think part of why it's so hard to talk about and articulate is that it isn't privilege in a positive sense, of having something someone else doesn't, but instead a strange privilege that involves not having something, a privilege involving an absence of something and not it's presence. It's a privilege involving not having to do, think, or talk about certain things, in a way that others might have to. I think @andrewk's examples are apposite, but a particular instance of this resonated with me when I heard about recently - the idea of 'the talk', a phenomenon so widespread as to have it's own little designation: that involving black parents in America universally having to educate their children on how to survive police encounters, as a matter of necessity: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12401792/police-black-parents-the-talk

There was an article by ProPublica a while back that really captured the difference in behaviour this kind of thing incurs: https://www.propublica.org/article/yes-black-america-fears-the-police-heres-why . An except:

"The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.

...Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.

“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”

My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it. We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons .... As far as we could tell, no one had been hurt. The shooter was long gone, and we had seen the back of him for only a second or two. On the other hand, calling the police posed considerable risks. It carried the very real possibility of inviting disrespect, even physical harm. We had seen witnesses treated like suspects, and knew how quickly black people calling the police for help could wind up cuffed in the back of a squad car."

I think this resonated with me in particular because I'd be that person calling the police (I'm not exactly white, but these are issues that remain somewhat removed from me). I don't think I would have thought there would be any reason not to.

I appreciate your self-citations (hah), and I believe I understand your point quite well, but there's still a misunderstanding here. The basic issue is that I think you're posing a false dilemma: either otherness has it's source in intersubjective relation(s) - what you call 'constructivism' - or it stems from a more primordial "pre-reflective personal ‘I’ or interpersonal ‘we’". But do these two options exhaust the field of alternatives? No, they don't. There is a third way, one which doesn't simply locate otherness in the intersubjective relation, nor in a mystical and wholly inexplicable pre-social sociality. While I agree with you wholeheartedly with your critique of constructionism, I still find your own account lacking on account of the fact that it doesn't actually provide an account of this pre-social sociality. It just kind of posits it as a kind of brute factum without in fact, providing any kind of developmental account of its genesis.

And while you might object that any such developmental account would simply lapse back into the constructivist paradigm which you're trying to avoid, I think this is manifestly not the case. One can reject the thesis of intersubjectivity as the source of otherness/sociality while still being able to provide a developmental account of the the genesis of otherness. How? In recognising, first of all, that the ego's relation to the self does not differ in kind to the ego's relation to others. That in fact, the very distinction between self and other is itself emergent from a more primordial sensorial field, James's 'blooming, buzzing, confusion' of the infant, Freud's 'oceanic feeling', or what child psychologist Daniel Stern referred to as the field of 'vitality affects', or 'life-feelings', "elusive qualities ... better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, ‘bursting’, ‘drawn out’, and so on."

Importantly for Stern, at this level, there is no self-other distinction: "infants experience these qualities both “from within” and “in the behaviour of other persons” such that "the originary temporal structures of experience are cardinal in nature; vitality affects — surgings, fadings, and all such qualitative features of experience — are primary with respect to our experiences of ourselves and our experiences of others" (my italics). It is only subsequently that these vitality affects become differentiated into self and other by processes of symmetry breaking, as it were. The infant learns to be a 'self' - or rather learns to 'locate' these (trans-personal) affects within a self - by means of coming to grips with the regularities of bodily coordination which break the symmetry between self and other. These coordination processes are those of if/then relationships: if 'I' move this shape like so, then such and such follows. Nothing happens if I try and move the shape over there, however. Ipso: this shape is 'mine'.

For the phenomenologist, Alphonso Lingis, the key here is movement: "movement .... mediates this identification [of my sensibility reflexively recognizing itself in sensuous opaquness]. For if I recognize this hand I see, these eyes I touch, as alive, it is because I perceive ripples of movement in them. I perceive there movements of the same types as those I feel within, by kinesthetic sensation, movement taking form in that sensation-field which is my body-zone felt from within - movements that are spontaneous, ego-originating, and teleologically structured, goal-orientated. ... Movement is the common term that permits perceiving as synthetically one a sensitive zone and a sensible substance perceived externally, because I have a double experience of body movement". Importantly, movement is no less the index of the other: "The consciousness that recognises itself in its own sensible form can recognise conscious life in the sensible form of another. The right hand that recognises touch in the left hand in touches can also, by the same sort of perception, recognise touch in the hand of another… the other’s conscious life is perceivable in the form of movements of his sensible body" (Lingis, "The Perception of Others", in Phenomenological Explnations).

In keeping with this accent on movement, for the Deleuzian Brian Massumi, it is ultimately speed which distinguishes self and other, subject and object: "What the body lends in the first instance is its slow­ness, not its presumptive unity. The unity appears "Out there," in the greater-varying accompaniments to habit, as recognizably patterned by habit in such a way to reduce its complexity by a factor. The "out there" becomes an "outside" of things. The produced unity then feeds back "in." The oneness of the body is back-flow, a back-formation (as always, at a lag). The body's relative slowness returns to it, after a habitual detour, as its own objectifiable unity. Thus back-formed, the body may now appear to itself as a bounded object among others. Spatial distinctions like inside and outside and relative size and distance are derivatives of a greater "out there" that is not in the first instance defined spatially but rather dynamically, in terms of movement and variation" (Massumi, "Chaos in the 'Total Field' of Vision", in Parables For the Virtual).

These are the kinds of developmental - but still phenomenological - accounts needed that don't simply reify différance into a mystical ahistorical, free-floating, anstoß that lodges itself here, there, everywhere, with no attention paid as to how in this or that concrete assemblage, it makes itself felt. Demanding attention to specificity does not mean having to choose one side of the false-choice between otherness as intersubjectively prompted or simply always-already at work, abstractly and unaccountably. There is no possible coherent reading that would locate someone like Deleuze as coming down on the side of intersubjectivity. For these readings, self and other, subject and object, are always a product of a differentiation, a process of mutual distinction, such that différance must be 'played out' in some manner or another, is always materially incarnate, as it were, and not simply a formal-logico principle that transcendentally structures things from some Platonic beyond.

Really? It makes conservatives go away? That's not what I would predict — Saphsin

I never said, nor implied, it would make conservatives go away. I don't believe I even invoked 'conservatives' at all. What I did say is that deplatforming makes it shameful and isolating to hold certain points of view, and that this can be desirable. I have no particular attachment to the sanctity of free speech, insofar as speech, as with all spheres of life, is a potential field of politics, and contrary to liberals like Mill - or indeed, liberals in general - who would aim to pretend that politics doesn't exist - I have no problem both embracing and affirming the political nature of speech. If this means impinging on abstract principles for the sake of it, so much the worse for those principles.

Mill would have disagreed with me, and I'm okay with that. Given the choice between hypothetical 'danger' and real, currently existing danger, I will choose dealing with the latter each time, to the (non-)detriment of the non-existent.

I'm all for deplatforming. The problem has always been one of legitimacy. In allowing arguments from racists, say, to be aired, what is conferred upon them is legitimacy: one admits it as an option to be considered at all in the first place. And shame - the baggage of shame that comes with holding reviled ideas, ideas so unworthy as to be unworthy of even a platform - is a powerful demotivator. Conversely, what platforms allow - for any ideas, reprehensible or not - tend to be a sense of community, a sense that there are others out there 'like me', in the same boat. It can be awful isolating not to have those connections. People are fickle, and it's worth leveraging that.

tl;dr deplatforming can make bad people feel bad, and that's good because they may become less bad. Or drive them deeper. But generally the former.

If anybody has a suggestion for a BRIEF discussion of POMO's history, please post it. — Bitter Crank

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_WcK7WdttxqX0lFWmx5ZGRyQjA/view?usp=sharing

9 pages brief?

Whats missing throughout all of this is the notion that any of the treatments the soldiers are subject to are differently assimilated by each, such that the very meaning of the 'group' varies from individual to individual and thus there is no Supra personal vantage from which the sense of a group gestalt can be defined. The concept of distributed group cognition and the idea of a reflex rage module reify to an extent both subjective and objective components of assemblages. — Joshs

Three things. First, I don't understand why you think an account like Protevi's in any way prohibits such a theoretical extension. To the degree that any such differential assimilation is relevant, the latter wouldn't so much be a corrective than a deepening. Second, given that the unit of analysis here is military training - that is, group training - it's not clear that any such extension is relevant. Perhaps it could be made relevant by shifting the accent of analysis upon, say, PTSD and the psychological aftereffects of killing for the individual, but that's expressly not what the paper is about.

Third, and I think most importantly, your own desconsturctive impulses ought to disabuse you of your implicit privileging of the individual over the group, as if - to reverse your own charge - one ought to begin with the clearly-demarcated individual soldier before moving out centrifugally to the supra-individual (of course, neither pole ought to be considered as fixed or clearly-demarcated). To the degree that, as you put it, every particular is already its own gestalt*, what matters is a concrete analysis of the actually existing mechanisms by which any particular phenomenon is constituted. [*A better way to put it might be: every particular is already its own gestalt by virtue of which it becomes a particular.]

If Protevi speaks of a group subject, of distributed cognition presided over by a 'topsight' commandant, that's because that's how the actual real life military assemblage under consideration functions. The description involved is not a 'metaphysical' one, he's not providing some kind of timeless account of all military action ever, he's saying that this, in concreto is a mechanic assemblage that works through this kind of conditioning. Does this mean that it cannot 'malfunction'? Not at all. A Derridian supplement might be of relevance when trying to explain say, a deviation - perhaps, to take pop-culture reference, Finn's horror at killing civilians during the opening scene of The Force Awakens. The Derridian operation would involve trying to account for this possibility, of how, despite the well-oiled engine of military training, not everything can go according to plan (an account which can actually be given wholly on the grounds of a theory of assemblages, but I won't go into that).

This is what I mean when I say that Derrida can only ever gesture towards possibility, opening, otherness, without, for all that, providing any means to show how otherness is, as it were, instantiated in any actual system. It's a kind of residual, minimal idealism or formalism - perhaps the most minimal idealism imaginable, but an idealism nonetheless - that I think demands overcoming.

I think this actually cuts both ways. That for some, Marxism is ever more threatening, I think can be attributed to a correlative rise in interest and appreciation of Marxist thought - or at least impulses. In 2010, who would have thought that a self-labelled socialist could run for president in the US? It was, if my memory of the mood is right, completely unthinkable. This not to speak of the popularity of Corbyn in the UK. The popularity of Peterson in some manner rides the coattails of this reaction: it's a response to a renewed threat that is indeed real. It's reactionary in every sense of the word.

"Nature is the endless generation of problems for culture: the problem of how to live amidst the world of matter, other living beings, and other subjects is the generic problem that each culture responds to and addresses according to its own methods. It is the insistence of such intractable problems, problems that do not have solutions but generate styles of living, that prompts human, or cultural, innovation and ingenuity, self-overcoming, and the creation of the new. Cultural life... exploits the virtuality of the natural according to the forces and materialities that the natural bequeaths to each culture. Culture can be understood as part of the ongoing evolution of the natural, the variable spirals and complications of a nature that is always already rich in potentiality to be developed in unexpected ways."

Elizabeth Grosz, The Nature of Culture

"Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other, just as science is the opening up of the universe to practical action, to becoming-useful and philosophy is the opening up of the universe to thought-becoming. Art is the most direct intensification of the resonance, and dissonance, between bodies and the cosmos, between one milieu or rhythm and another.

... What philosophy can offer art is not a theory of art, an elaboration of its silent or undeveloped concepts, but what philosophy and art share in common—their rootedness in chaos, their capacity to ride the waves of a vibratory universe without direction or purpose, in short, their capacity to enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects. They are among the most forceful ways in which culture generates a small space of chaos within chaos where chaos can be elaborated, felt, thought."

Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art

So any simple edge or mark , in being inseparably, undecidably, both a passing of a past present and a presenting of a now, is both formal and empirical, both of form and content indissociably, not one opposed to the other, but originally both. Is this a a profoundly different situating of the origin of difference than what we find in Deleuze? — Joshs

I agree that this is where both meet, but also depart from one another (both/and?). A point of refraction or bifurcation, if you will. Again, the point is that Derrida never gets beyond diagnosis, he never pushes beyond symptomology to theorise difference-in-itself. As Catherine Malabou points out, of the two valences of différance that Derrida constantly refers to, to defer and to differ, the most obvious one, the one that relates most obviously to difference, that of change and variation, is altogether absent*. Derrida always begins with the static to get to the dynamic, and while he does get there, he cannot rid himself of the reference to the static. He even goes so far as declare this impossible, which, again, is less a limit to theorization than it is a limit of Derrida himself.

Which is why to all you write I simply say - yes, yes, of course, that's all right, but there's just so much more to be considered, so much more that doesn't simply involve constantly repeating the fact that différance inheres in all things, that the trace haunts all systems, that arche-writing distends any self-present Voice, and that death contaminates all life. Being uncharitable, almost the entirety of Derrida's oeuvre is a matter of repeating this same point, ad nauseum, in different contexts, for different objects of analysis (friendship, democracy, law, ethics, politics, animality, metaphysics, etc, etc). If you've read Derrida once, you've read everything he's written always-already. But the question for me is: once you accept this, what then? Once you agree, wholeheartedly with this, then what? Derrida here provides no way forward.

*From Malabou: "It is surprising to see that in his article “Différance” Derrida does not recognise an essential, even if banal, meaning of the word “difference,” namely “change,” “variation,” or “variant.” ... The meaning of transformation, of becoming other, through metamorphosis, for example, remains in the shadows. ... Hence for Derrida ... the exceeding of metaphysics is not, and cannot be, literally speaking, a metamorphosis. ... The specific mobility of difference, as reinterpreted by Heidegger and those following him, is essentially reduced to the journey, the transfer, the change of place in general." (Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing).

The way that I am exposed to otherness via sociality is as an assault, an imposition, a conditioning. It is more interesting and complex than this. — Joshs

But this is simply not true for the targets you're trying to pin this on. Insofar as, for a Deleuzian anyway, all identity is emergent from difference (and specifically, difference-in-itself), it simply wouldn't make sense to say that otherness constitutes anything like an assault or imposition of a conditioning. It's true that Deleuze and many in his wake sometimes employ the language of conditioning, but it's important to remember that Deleuze's 'conditions' are of a radically reformulated type from Kantian conditions of possibility (Kant's infamous 'transcendental') and instead bear upon conditions of actuality: conditions which are immanent to what they condition, co-extensive with them, and in no way an 'imposition' upon them. This becomes all the more clear when you study the actual 'drama of individuation' that Deleuze theorizes, which, following Simondon, eschews any notion of conditioning that would impose from any kind of outside.

In fact in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze goes so far as to oppose 'conditioning' to 'genesis', coming down on the side of the latter and rejecting the former as wholly inadequate. Moreover, there's an interesting and productive point of comparison to be made with Derrida's own refashioning of the transcendental, in which conditions of possibility are recognised to be always-already at the same time, conditions of impossibility. It's the theorisation of this vacillation, this double-bind between conditions of possibility and conditions of impossibility that marks Derrida's entire philosophical operation (something that Gasché brings out very nicely). As ingenious as this is, the problem is that this whole discourse is itself bound to picking apart oppositional differences, of sounding out, as you put it, the articulatory hinge between distinctions like identity and difference, subject and object, form and content. Derrida's whole enterprise, in other words, is geared toward grasping the double-bind which makes pairs like this both possible and impossible.

Yet as Jeffrey Bell nicely points out, this whole issue is simply bypassed in Deleuze because the latter is simply not working with oppositional differences (either/or): the whole point of the philosophy of difference is to articulate a point 'prior' to the either/or split that deconstruction interminably circles around, a point composed instead of 'inclusive disjunctions', of both/and. If it can be put this way: whereas for Derrida différance always marks something like a symptom, a trace of this double-bind from the point of view of oppositional differences, Deleuze directly theorizes the differential field itself, difference-in-itself out of which the distinctions beloved of deconstructive thought are produced. This is why it doesn't make much sense to me to say that otherness in Deleuze is somehow an assault or imposition: identity is in and of itself differential from the get-go, such that the very distinctions between self and other are themselves produced in the ontogenetic individuation of being/s.

And the reason that Derrida can't do this, why he doesn't have the intellectual tools available, is because his refiguring of the transcendental remains, ultimately, at the level of possibility, even if, taking a step beyond Kant, he couples it inextricably with the impossible. For Deleuze by contrast (and following Bergson + Simondon on this matter), the whole modality of the possible is itself suspect, a retroactive back-projection that, as he puts it, 'traces the transcendental from the empirical', a kind of ontological reverse engineering that explains individuation by a vicious and circular reference to the thing so individuated (see here [PDF] for more detail). This is what motivates Protevi's comment that Derrida can only 'prepare the way' for a Deleuzian materialism, insofar as it simply 'rests content' with 'the deconstruction of idealist philosophy and the consequent shaking of those political structures still reliant on identity', without, for all that, actually being able to conduct any analysis at the level of the actually existing, historically-situated systems and events.

Aaah so much interesting looking stuff here! Got a top 3?

Current:

Elizabeth Grosz - Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (rereading)
Elizabeth Grosz - Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art

I find it difficult to tease out the substantive arguments of many philosophers, especially those who write in a an evocative style( Deleuze, Lyotard, Lacan, Heidegger) without finding a way to translate their ideas into a form that I can then match up with more, let us say, ' empirical' or pragmatic fields. — Joshs

I absolutely appreciate this, and in truth I think this is one of the most important tasks for anyone engaging with continental philosophy today (my own interest in this respect is in questions of morphogenesis, but I'm relatively familiar with the cog-sci approach that you're partial too as well. David Morris, who does some great work on Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology and the sciences among other things, is a favorite of mine). On the other hand, I'm alot more skeptical about the utility of Derrida in pursuing this task. I mean, yeah, look, I get it, there is no structure that isn't always already riven with otherness etc etc, but the solution - easier said than done, I acknowledge - is to rethink structure and force in a new way. Contrary to Derrida's rather self-serving claims that any attempt to step out of the circle of metaphysics is to mire oneself all the more in it, I think the point is simply to accept Derrida's claims and move on. He's identified an issue. Great, let's work though it and get to the other side.

I think Catherine Malabou's work on trying to rehabilitate Form in the wake of Derrida (particularly her Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing) is the project most explicit about this, but I similarly think that Deleuze and Agamben also provide a post-Derridian metaphysics that isn't mired in all the writhing over ontotheology and Presence and so on. Jeffrey's Bell's book, Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos is among the best documents on how the Deleuzian enterprise quite nicely steps over all the Derridian problematics, providing a far more positively articulated way forward that doesn't continually play the stale and monotonous game of hunting down différance wherever it may be (Kevin Attell does analogous work for Agamben in his Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction). If nothing else, it's my respect for the rigor of Derrida's thought that has long put me on the hunt for those who can both appreciate and move beyond it (Protevi's own book on the Deleuze/Derrida relation, Political Physics, is, unfortunately, not very good).

All of which is to say that I don't think you're justified in dismissing notions of structure or force a priori without looking at the specific ways in which those notions are articulated in concreto. So yeah, again, sure, any binary is always articulated through the always-already purloined out-of-centre ultra-transcendental work of Writing and so on, but there are ways to think about the speicificties of those articulations that don't just licence the unthinking reflex-response of 'it's just différance at work' (I'm not saying this is your reflex, but it's an issue I find with Derridian scholarship in general, and it subterraneiously crops us even in the most unlikely of places). There ought to be, and is, more than can be done in philosophy than that.

Incidentally, you might be interested in Protevi's own specific engagement with embodied cognition approaches - and Deleuze's place in those approaches - here.

The issue though is that one of the fault lines between idealism and materialism is over what kind of thing 'experience' is. That is, at stake is not just the status of the 'objects' of experience - experience on one side, its 'objects' on the other - but experience itself. So the very framing of the OP - speaking of the 'data' of experience - is already to commit to a certain understanding of how experience happens, even at the very level of its grammar. In other words, speaking of 'the data of experience' is not a 'neutral' starting point that can then be treated, as though in a second, unrelated step, in either a 'materialist' or 'idealist' manner.

I don't really understand your response, or at least, in what manner it's meant to be a response to what I said regarding Derrida's formalism and ahistoricism. If I cited Protevi, in that context, it was simply to the degree that I liked his turn of phrase regarding the inability of Derridian analysis to furnish the intellectual tools necessary to engage in an analysis of the material forces at work in any one system. That said, I think your reading of Protevi as a Pinkerite is not at all charitable (affiliating anyone with Pinker is just mean!), and I think the tendency in your post to oppose 'meaning' to an analysis of forces, instead of treating them as complementary or even co-implicated (as I believe Protevi does), is a step backward rather than a step forward.

Again, I don't say any of this because I 'disagree' with Derrida or whatever, but because I want to acknowledge that limits of that approach, which, taken on it's own terms, is perfectly valid. The relevance is that this becomes especially clear when one tries to approach consciousness or a-feel-for-what-it-is-like in terms of différance, where you get a a leveling-out where it becomes impossible to isolate the specificity of consciousness from 'quality' more generally.

Now, although I agree with him,Derrida may be a bit too out there for most. But let me ask you this. Would you agree that there is already an overarching ontology of sorts in place uniting at least the physical sciences, and that this is a different ontology from what one would have found in the thinking of the West 800 years ago? Would you also agree that the metaphysical presuppositions guiding current natural scientific models will change eventually? Could you entertain the possiblity that something like Derrida's differance , that is, an ontology that places qualitative otherness squarely at the heart of entities, may be on the horizon? — Joshs

You're speaking to an almost dyed-in-the-wool Derridian, so yes, I can totally entertain the possibility. My issue with Derridian analysis, insofar as I have one, is that it remains ultimately too formalist. Yes, the trace pervades everything, yes all presence is riven with différance which displaces it from within, etc, etc, and yes, this means that 'qualitativeness' is similarly 'intrinsic' to things, but one must be careful not to make the all-too-quick assimilation of differance to a feeling or 'consciousness' of what-it-is-like (not forgetting that 'consciousness' in Derrida is among the foremost names of Presence in the history of philosophy).

Insofar as there is something like 'feeling' or 'consciousness', I think it'd be more accurate to understand it as a qualified quality, a quality that, at a rough and minimal approximation, is recognized as a quality of itself in a self-reflexive way, and correlatively, what is not 'itself' (a minimal self-other distinction in other words). Regardless of how to think the specific qualification of quality that consciousness or feeling is however, what Derrida does not provide - in my opinion - is any way to think these kinds of second-order quality. He doesn't, in the words of John Protevi, provide any way to conduct any material analysis of forces which specify the kinds of 'quality' at work in any one system. Derrida always remains at the level of a formal 'there is quality' ('il y a quality', if you will): this going hand in hand with Derrida's strange ahistoricism (there is 'historicity' in Derrida, but not, ironically, history; this also being the crux of his (non-)debate with Foucault regarding the cogito).

Granted, Derrida had a hard time getting people to recognize even the basic operation of différance (it's still barely acknowledged!), but the issue isn't that Derrida is 'too out there' - it's that he's not out there enough. There still remains alot to be learned from him, but there is no less a need to attend to what cannot be found in Derrida (hence why I'm more drawn to those who I would consider post-Derridian thinkers like Deleuze, Agamben, or Catherine Malabou)

Why? I never said rationality is the best thinking tool. I only said that holding rationality to the standard of perfection is a dumb thing to do.

If you can't then it implies you think rationality is perfect. — TheMadFool

No, it doesn't. It implies that that the entire question is bogus and irrelevant, and that perfection or imperfection is a stupid criteria by which to judge rationality. To say that a smell is not round is not to imply that it is not-round. It implies that asking wheater a smell is round or not is a dumb question. So too with the question of 'perfection' with respect to reason.

One thing that seems to be missing from the OPs scenario are differential factors. When you say that, in the hypothetical scenario, 1/100 will cause harm (or 1/1000 after vetting), this treats the refugee population as having, as it were, 'in built' or 'static' characteristics. But violence is more often than not a function of things like social alienation, lack of access to resources (jobs, language, money, housing, etc), which may cause immigrants to turn to local gang communities, say, or black market trade as a result of social/community exclusion.

In other words, capacity for violence needs to be treated not as a 'static' quantity but a dynamic one - a state that invests more resources in intergration - language acquisition, targeted upskilling, cultural awareness programs, housing initiatives, deradicalization programs, access to education and transport, etc - will more likely see less violence among it's immigrants than those states that do not make those investments. The same incoming refugee population will 'respond' differently depending on the manner in which settlement takes place: there are differentials on the ground which will vary the 'harm' involved.

Of course a question involved is whether a state can handle such investments. A well moneyed state might be able to do so - a poorer one may not. And a population influx can bring about advantages too: a broader tax base for a government, more circulating money in an economy, skills and jobs, differing perspectives etc. And of course these are just some parameters that need to be balanced out with others, which can be as much of an economic matter as it can be an ethical or political one.

It's not a fucking flaw. Rationality is morally neutral. It doesn't strive for 'perfection', which is an external criteria which you keep trying to impose on it from the outside. Consider that the flaw is your attempt to foist a criteria upon it which does not belong. To use another quote from Einstein, you're trying to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, and judge the fish deficient. But it's your criteria which is off.

To say that rationality has a flaw implies that it is meant to do something, and fails somehow in that something. But the whole point is that rationality can be put to use to justify anything. Hume's words on this are still among the best: “'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger". Rationality is neither 'light' nor 'dark', just grey, neutral, and this is not a 'flaw', but exactly how things should be.

I'm mostly on board with the 4EA paradigm (Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended, Affective), but I think this way oversteps what can be concluded from its insights:

The most radical implication of the new affective turn is that what has been considered unique to conscious subjects, the feeling of what it is like to be, the qualitative experience of the world, is implied in all of what we call physical processes, not as one thing added on, but intrinsic to them.

The central lesson of 4EA thinking is that how consciousness comes into being matters: you can't separate affective valences from the kinds of bodies that undergo them, nor from the specific environments or ecologies ('worlds') in which they take place among. To simply impute qualitative experience to all physical processes - irrespective of the particular kinds or specificities of the physical processes in question - is to vitiate this insight and fall back into the abstraction that makes of consciousness some kind of free floating ephemera that's just kind of 'everywhere' and in 'everything'.

So while I think it's entirely correct to say that, say, most analytic approaches to consciousness are utterly vacuous, swinging the pendulum in the other direction to simply say that all all physical processes have an experience-of-what-it-is-like is to make the same mistake from the opposite side of things - it amounts to another instance of explaining away. It evacuates all the focus on specificity that marks a central pillar of the 4EA approach. It's also a warmed over panpsychism, but that's neither here nor there.

No as in, Descartes quite literally introduces madness into thought in the form of the malin génie, the 'evil demon' which signifies the utmost derangement that Descartes can imagine. Pathology is at the heart of Descartes 'rationalist' operation, it founds his entire method of approach, not even implicitly but explicitly - he is all too happy to actually do this on his own terms.

Right, so, as I said - absolute doubt goes hand in hand with absolute certainty (that which is 'stable and lasting'). It's as if trying to found philosophy on pathology (I don't even mean this polemically - there have been multiple readings of Descartes as the first to introduce madness proper into our conception of thought, which is in a way a kind of advance in the history of philosophy, if only Descartes didn't paper over it almost immediately). It absolutely makes sense. It's also awful.

But even he ended up taking himself seriously in the end - and inspiring legions of lost souls in his wake.

I've always liked Adorno's quip that those who fetishize doubt always ultimately end up doing so in order to better secure certainty, rather than for any intrinsic affinity for doubt as such: that absolute doubt and absolute certainty, far from being opposed, always end up walking hand in hand. I think he's mostly right about this, and speaks to one of the reasons Cartesian doubt has always struck me as a kind of hilarious false drama, as if a drama queen were to write philosophy.

. The property as put forth in premise one, is the evidence of intelligent design. Thus, if it is the evidence of intelligent design, then it follows with certainty, that is, with a high degree of probability that other artifacts exhibiting these same features are also intelligently designed. — Sam26

'With certainty' herp drep.

(1) The Sun is round.
(2) My cousin Timmy is round.
(3) Therefore it follows with certainty that my cousin Timmy is the sun.
(4) Let them laugh, they're the ones being irrational.

Sure, but the same can be said about any fairy tale you'd like - of which intelligent design is one. 'Just because there's no evidence against it, doesn't mean it didn't happen' can be used to justify unicorns in party hats conjuring things up around a fire no less than an 'intelligent creator'. Fables and fictions for the intellectually fickle.