Back to retention then:

Is it so implausible, for example, that I might be stimulated to hear a tonic-flavored dominant out of the blue, without actually having perceived a tonic beforehand? In such a way that I could not phenomenologically distinguish between these?

It seems implausible to me. It's easy to imagine hearing a note out of the blue, but, again, a dominant is relational. There is no more a dominant without a tonic then there is an uncle without a niece or nephew. To hear a dominant is to hear the tension between itself and the tonic. So, even if we didn't actually perceive a tonic before, we'd have to hear to the dominant as if we had - and how would one characterize this as if?

If so, it seems implausible to say that I experience the dominant in relation to the tonic in virtue of literally retaining the tonic in perception, rather than there just being facts about my present perception that are influenced by immediately preceding perceptions.

Can you expand what you mean by the preceding perception 'influencing' one's present perception and how you see that as different than retention?

If we're not seeing the future, then protention is not, contrary to Husserl's claims, preception. We can of course project into the future without seeing it in any sense. This is ordinarily how we think about these things, and is not what Husserl is claiming, so far as I see it.

To make clear just how weird this is, say you're listening to a piece of music you've never heard before. You have certain expectations, perhaps, based on genre stereotypes and certain biologically or culturally ingrained notions of how music ought to proceed, involving tonality and resolution, rhythm, and so on. Let's say that you're broadly correct about which direction the piece will go: it doesn't pull a fast one on you so hard that you think 'what the hell just happened?' What is the best way to describe this situation? Did you perceive the piece as it approached, in the way you might see a truck approaching? That is, is it in virtue of the perceptible qualities of the piece that you understood what course it would take? It seems not – for you would have the same expectations regardless of whether the piece actually went that way, making the qualities of the piece itself irrelevant to your expectations and protentions. But if protention is a matter of perception, it must have been in virtue of perceiving the piece that this was possible.

This makes the case excellently that Husserl cannot really mean 'perception' in the traditional sense, but that he simply is using the term to differentiate his understanding from Brentanos, as Derrida suggests. If we think Husserl means 'perception' in the traditional sense, we have to literally understand him as saying we can see into the future, which is absurd for the reasons you've adduced.

thanks for the respose - presidential debate is starting and im watching out of morbid curiosity but ill respond after the carnage finishes

I know I have completely de-railed this thread, I really ought to bail.

Stick up for yourself! I stand by my criticisms, but you had something to say about other ways of looking at similar themes. I don't think there's anything wrong with criticism provided one is upfront about the degree to which one is familiar with what one's criticizing. That's the real bone of contention here, not that you don't like some of the guys that I like. How do you understand pomo and how do you understand it as antithetical to what you hold dear?

How does retaining the sound of a past tonic describe the hearing any more than the present perception of a tonic-colored dominant?

It's hard to answer this because I don't see the difference between the two alternatives. A note is not dominant in-and-of-itself, but only by relation to the tonic. The idea of tonic-colored dominant which doesn't rely on a recently heard tonic is a contradiction in terms.

It would not be a very good crystal ball – maybe on the order of milliseconds, and unable to move where one looks, but yes. That is, being surprised or interrupted would have meant, on your account, that in the same way we missee an object, we can missee the future – look at it, but apprehend its properties wrong. It seems more natural to describe the future as something that can't be perceived, not something that we sometimes misperceive.

I think this is a wrong way to look at protention though. It's not that we see or missee a future that is there - it's that we're incessantly projecting into the future. I don't think there's anything mystical about this.

I'm as confused as you are about 'porno' getting into the convo, why'd you bring it up?

I have no animosity toward your tradition - in fact I have a lot of sympathy - but the packaging of it as an alternative is strange if you dont know what its actually an alternative to. (it seems like you're content to render pomo as self-interested, anything-goes secularism and leave it at that.)

if theres one lesson to be learned from this thread, its that 5 or 6 people who appear to have read almost no 'pomo' literature have very strong feelings about 'pomo' literature. @Wayfarer for example,has some incisive things to say about deleuze but seems to have read, at most, a wiki article or two. (& you know wayfarer would have no patience for someone criticizing buddhism who knew only bare wiki stuff) I have all sorts of problems with many of the 'pomos' but c'mon guys what are you even doing here.

That's fair and I do agree that a strong narrative is a good way of organizing scattered facts and events in order to gain some real insight (provided one maintains a healthy skepticism)I think I went a little too hard in my criticism because I was so 100% uncritically on board with him when I was younger. I stand by my criticisms but there's definitely much of value in his movies. I really did learn a lot from hyper-normalization. Again, the Gaddafi thing was exemplary (while the suggestion that Trump's empire fell apart due to a single high roller and the yakuza was a little silly. I followed up on that one too and the details are mostly right, but the idea that this was his downfall is bogus).

I've seen a few of his other films, I was into him a lot as an undergrad. The problem is I don't get the sense that the narrator of any Curtis film has seen any of the other movies. Every movie is presented as the master key to understanding what's going on. But you're right, it works for dramatic purposes, and I guess that's a pill worth swallowing in order to get a lot of these ideas to a more general audience.

I particularly appreciated the way he told the story of Gaddafi. I knew most of it, but the sheer absurdity had never really hit me before.

Same here, besides the Surkov bit, it was probably my favorite part of the whole movie.

All very interesting but really nothing that wasn't said in Augustine's City Of God.

lol

One of the things I like about Curtis's documentaries is the way he reveals the recklessness and incompetence of power, but with the thrilling style of a conspiracy theory. As far as actual conspiracies make an appearance in his narratives, it is to show that they fail or have unforeseen consequences. Nobody is running the show, though many have tried to, and the world's complexity exceeds everyone's grasp.

I agree and I definitely think he's a cut above many others --buuut, he's still, ironically, guilty of drastic oversimplification - he gets rid of the shady eminence grise you find in standard conspiracy fare, but he's replaced them with all-knowing supercomputers and infallible algorithms. And somehow Syria's role in the middle east conflict has become the role - all roads lead back to Syria, every time, every event - Kissinger slighted Assad once and that's why the middle east is the way it is today. (Even if you didn't know that Saudi Arabia existed, this movie about state-sponsored islamic terrorism would still be entirely intelligible!) What's lacking is an admission that he's only looking at certain pieces of the puzzle, and through a certain lens. Curtis seems constitutionally unable to present any historical fact as something less than infinitely significant. Everything is always presented within this grand narrative where each element fits perfectly into place. In other words: the world's complexity exceeds everyone's grasp except Adam Curtis.

I enjoy his movies, and I enjoyed this one too, but I think they're best understood as a kind of entertainment. (superior to some other forms of entertainment in that they can prompt you to undertake your own investigations. Vladislav Surkov is fascinating and I didn't know anything about him before this movie. I've been reading up on him and learning a lot about contemporary russian culture.)

Anyway, here's this:

Which would mean that it has a kind of existence (existance?) -- it is the concept of the origin, and the sort of ideal meaning, and the notions of language, rather than all the conclusions of Husserl that are threatened. — Moliere

I think, though, that he's trying not to say that the sign, as opposed to presence, is the concept of the origin, but that the sign undermines the concept of originality altogether (while it's also what makes the notion of 'origin' possible.) To put it cutely: origin and non-origin would be co-original. Hence the significance of the 'trace'.

By the by, has anyone else dabbled in Kabbalah? I'm getting some heavy ein-sof vibes from the discussion in the later chapters. (the "trace" is also very similar to the 'reshimu'

" Ein-Sof must be constantly redefined, as by its very nature, it is in a constant process of self-creation and redefinition. This self-creation is actually embodied and perfected in the creativity of humanity, who through practical, ethical, intellectual and spiritual activities, strives to redeem and perfect a chaotic, contradictory and imperfect world.

The Kabbalists used a variety of negative epistemological terms to make reference to the hidden God; "the concealment of secrecy", "the concealed light", "that which thought cannot contain" etc. (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 88) each of which signifies that this God is somehow beyond human knowledge and comprehension. However, there are other terms, e.g., "Root of all roots", "Indifferent Unity", "Great Reality," (Scholem. Major Trends, p. 12) "Creator," "Cause of Causes" and "Prime Mover" (as well as the term, Ein-Sof, "without end") which signify that God is the origin of the world, the reality of the world, or the totality of all things. Yet in spite of the positive connotations, even those Kabbalists who utilized such terms held that they referred to a God who is completely unknowable and concealed." - from newkabblah.com, which who knows how authoritative it is, but that quote seems entirely in keeping with what you'll read about the ein sof just about anywhere else.

I like the idea of Derrida 'inhabiting' Husserl, and I also read V&P that way at the beginning (I called it the 'sussing out of the text's immanent logic'.) But from the beginning, he's signaled that the telos of this inhabiting is the undermining of Husserl's larger project. (You could make a fine distinction and say that Derrida's not actively undermining anything, the text undermines itself. I've heard that distinction made, but it's a specious one I think. To point out inconsistencies and untenable distinctions is to undermine. Another term for this sort of thing would be, simply, arguing. )

I suspect more and more that this 'inhabiting' and all the close reading - they're stylistic gestures carried out for the sake of demonstrating virtuosity. @@StreetlightX has brought in a ton of outside quotes which are very interesting and thought-provoking, but which, by and large, have nothing to do with the argument of the book. They illuminate Derrida's motives, methods, and conclusions, but don't, in my opinion, help explain the path of the book itself. They tell us how to think and talk like a Derridean, but little insight on how to follow this particular Derridean exercise.

I don't think so, unless you assume to begin with that all that can be 'there' must be temporally present. (and so Derrida's favorite pun, present-present, which while evocative is not an argument). Much of what seems to be going on here looks to me like this incredulity in the face of what Husserl actually says.

But take that music example. If we're listening to a piece that began with the tonic, and has moved on to the dominant - in what sense is the tonic 'there'? Certainly it's not there as a note we're presently hearing. But do we still 'hear' it as past? I don't think we do. What we hear is the dominant as colored by the tonic, whose sounding we've retained. So if it's 'there,' the tonic, it's there in a very strange way. But you seem to be using 'there' in a typical, (tho, yes, non-temporal) way as in this quote, from above:

Also, note the oddity that if protention is literally perceptive, this means that the future is in some sense 'there' to be seen. A disruption would have to be literally a kind of illusion, rather than a mistaken doxastic attitude, however momentary.

Are you suggesting that for protention to be a real thing, we'd have to literally see into the future as through a crystal ball or sci-fi wormhole? If that's what you mean, that seems like a deep misunderstanding, but I may not be following your point.

a simpler way to put that last point: If Husserl himself, in later works, undermines that distinction and admits it, then its pointless to try to undermine it again through intricate analysis of a brief section of an early work - especially if the crux of your argument winds up just being Husserl's argument anyway. I find the Hagglund stuff interesting but it feels like it goes beyond what Derrida's doing here. Tho i haven't read the last two chapters

I actually sympathize with that Land quote a whole bunch (tho Land himself scares me a lot. He was too smart for his own good and went too deep down a drug/deleuze hole, to emerge bitter and honestly kinda evil. I tried reading his book on Bataille and it was painful, by turns deeply irritating and alarming - Nick Land may be the single best example I know of that kind of bloated self-hating narcissism which usually produces abusive drunks, but may sometimes, in strange conditions, if the subject is smart enough, produce authentically vile academics)

Anyway - while I sympathize with that quote, that's not quite what I meant. I'm talking about V & P's argument specifically. Derrida clearly means to collapse the indication/expression distinction in order to put into question all of Husserl's work. But if you use Husserl's work to collapse the distinction ..... then you've created a weird loop where you're trying to undermine the thing you rely on to produce that undermining, which therefore can't be undermined, lest it no longer serve as a way to undermine itself - this isn't even circularity, I don't know what you would call it.

How can I distinguish that from living purely in a present where I simply know what to do at each (the only) moment? Put another way, perhaps protention only gains plausibility as a retrojection of disappointment and tripping and so on.

Well first, the very idea of doing something in a single moment already strikes me as viewing things through an artificial lens. Any action I can think of requires some duration for its execution. But even if protentional life could only be distinguished from pure-moment-life through some kind of disappointment or tripping - does it matter? We've all tripped and been disappointed, so it's there for us to see - and to see as having been there all along. There are many things we've only been able to learn about through stumbling onto something unexpected which throws what came before into a new light (science progresses this way no?) Perhaps there's even an anstoss-y element to the whole thing: that very disappointment is the condition of our introduction into time.

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I take that quote to be saying that Derrida considers Husserl's characterization of protention/retention as perceptive as primarily a reaction against Bretano, to say that there is a kind of memory and anticipation that is quite different then recollection and reflective expectation. But if we keep the idea of perception as involving something being 'there' we lose sight of retention/protention altogether. Thus there's some equivocation with 'perception' in Husserl's account.

To go back to music. Much of the emotion and tension comes from a movement away from, then back to the tonic. We feel this tension listening to music. But obviously the tonic is not 'there' in the sense that we can 'hear' it. We've retained it - that's precisely what explains our emotional reaction to the note we hear now.- but it's not 'present'

Also, note the oddity that if protention is literally perceptive, this means that the future is in some sense 'there' to be seen

!
But the way you're using 'perceptive' here is precisely Derrida's point when he says, apropos of Husserl characterizing retention as 'perceptive' immediately after saying it isn't: ""We can therefore suspect that if Husserl nevertheless calls [retention] perception, it is because he is holding on to the radical discontinuity as passing between retention and reproduction, between perception and imagination etc. and not between perception and retention. (bottom of page 55)

The way you're using 'perceptive,' above, can not possibly mean the same thing as the the 'perceptive' elements of protention/retention.

Which, incidentally, may explain your skepticism of the whole Husserlian analysis.

But I'm not talking about expectations you explicitly call to mind (imagining meeting a friend tomorrow, anticipating traffic during the morning commute). I mean think of anything - playing a video game, going outside to have a smoke, typing an email, eating a meal, playing pinball, shining a shoe - in each case there's clearly some sense of what's coming next, even if you're not focused immediately on it. I genuinely have trouble imagining an experience without this layer.

It doesn't seem that contentious to me. I find it very difficult to imagine an experience where I'm not implicitly anticipating what's to come. It's not as obvious, but it's easy to draw it out by imagining an unanticipated disruption which prevents what you were experiencing or doing from continuing.

I've honestly kind of lost the plot - sometimes it all seems to hold together, for a second, but then I lose it. All I have, at this point, is something like: retention/protention introduce a non-present into the present the way an indicative sign does, so the 'solitary life of the soul' is infused with non-presence from the get-go.

More or less what @Moliere said above:

At least, that's the gist I'm getting from reading -- the goal isn't so much a criticism for participating in the same metaphysical tradition in the sense that he ought not to do it, but rather, that in one case the sign is relegated to a modification of presence -- an eternal "now" outside of, or prior to, the sign, where the sign is produced as a series of exits -- but in the other case this "now" is disrupted in the sense defended in the LI as the basis for expression.

------ edit -

Thoughhh, now that I think about it, that would be pretty circular. The point of demonstrating that the indication/expression distinction cannot hold is to then show how the failure of that distinction compromises the rest of Husserl's project. But if the rest of Husserl's project is precisely what you need to collapse that distinction....

haha, its tough being a statue of a maine lobsterman

But what looks like a hand on the chin is actually a hand holding a cigarette! Close enough?

Doing my best French douche.

yeah but he's wearing a leather jacket like a big old douche

Somewhere or other Cioran wrote about his experience of seeing Beckett on a parkbench and feeling deep envy at how much more Beckett exuded suffering.

I find it difficult to understand (and I don't mean this rhetorically, it's authentically mystifying to me) how you can't see the way in which Schopenhauer and Cioran have clearly taken pains to make sure they are photographed in a certain way so as to enhance their suffering genius-ness.

The only thing I can think is that, maybe, the valorization of the suffering genius is something you hold very dear, so that you're blinded to the kitschy elements of such photographs (the same way a very sentimental grandfather might be blinded to the kitschy elements of Norman Rockwell.)

Anyway, yeah, a lot of French thinkers pose, I agree, but, like, most people pose, even the v smart sadboys what are misunderstood.

haaaa, that sweater article couldn't be more perfect here.

Yep, a rifle. He's been out pheasant hunting, I assume, and is relaxing by the hearth.

The sweater is my favorite part!

You do realize that the suffering genius thing is heavy - just dripping - with self-consscious posturing, right? It's baffling me that you would cite Cioran - Cioran! - as someone who doesn't try to strike a pose. Cioran!

Interesting - in those photos I see, in order: Cosmopolitan sophisticate, suffering genius (the romantic rehashing of the 'saint'), and bedroom eyes/serene guru. All 3 are trying to convey something about themselves.

One last one - there's a pipe :-O

John Searle

Here's the pic I posted in my deleted comment. It's schopenhauer. He's posing.

I hear you - I'd like to go into what I get out of the commentary (and how it often goes beyond commentary) but it'd take us a bit too far afield, maybe I'll get a thread going sometime soon. (quickly tho, I'll say that any commentary is useless if you don't have that resonance from personal aesthetic experience. But if you find yourself on that same wavelength, you're open to new nuances of understanding which build from there.)

Oh, I wasn't saying there's nothing of value in analytic philosophy, just that it seems to have a very different kind of relationship with its forebears. (I'm not well-versed enough in the tradition to speak about its intricacies, but it sounds similar to the enjoyment I got out of solving programming puzzles during my brief computer science stint. I really enjoyed that and am strongly considering gearing up to give it one last go)

I think continental philosophers have more insightful things to say about culture, art (& spirituality, tho they code it) than do analytic philosophers. There were so many moments for me, in college, reading Deleuze and just being like Yes! - things I'd felt, but didn't know how to express, and hadn't seen anyone express elsewhere. He made me feel much less alone. Recently, I've been having that same experience with Peter Sloterdijk. Derrida has always been one of my least favorite continentals precisely because I don't get any of that from him. I've never had one of those 'aha!' moments with him. Reading him has been fun, if infuriating, but it hasn't really deepened my interest in his work, tbh (tho it has deepened my interest in Husserl.)

(Also fwiw, Deleuze had an alcohol problem, which he overcame, and his writing on alcoholism is the most authentically insightful and compassionate (tho not sentimental) stuff I've ever read on the topic.)

But inspiration is close to madness, and it's more invigorating and interesting than the sort of tedious schizophrenic deferral and linguistic games that are at play in these sorts of descriptions SX is citing

Hey, to be fair, you yourself likened the passage to madness. (couldn't help myself there, I do see where you're coming form)

There is a lot in continental philosophy I sincerely cherish, but there's plenty I don't, and there's a sense in which the tedious, repetitive invocations of this or that radical idea mirror the tedious, repetitive anti-authority gestures of those who came of age in the US in the 60s. One way to view continental philosophy is a means of preserving the intricate ornamentative forms of catholicism or the inexhaustiblity of the text in rabinnic judaism against the pragmatism of a secular age. There is definitely a kind of familiar fondness for the tradition being critiqued or deconstructed- and, in my limited experience anyway, you don't usually see that in analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein being maybe the canonical example here)

But very often I do not actually address myself at all, and there is simply talking inside me. There is a voice. Questioned as to its origin, I would be in no doubt that it’s my own voice, but its habitual presence in me resembles a rapid low-grade commentary without authorship, rather than any Socratic exchange between several loquacious and attentive inner selves.

This seems pretty spot on to me. The voice isn't exhaustive of my experience, I would add, but it's definitely usually there.

The puppet/ventriloquist thing doesn't strike me as suggesting mental illness, but rather as a competent, if familiar, move in a contemporary poetic language game where one expresses one's poeticity through a concatenation of imagery involving the body, words, and passivity. It's about demonstrating one's receptivity to the muses, but in a more earthy, edgy register (the nod to Beckett is characteristic.) I don't hate it, actually used to like it a lot, but I've had a subscription to Harper's for a few years now, and I'm more than sated with the stuff.

Not to get too deep into it, and get too off topic, but when I look into myself, I find...well yes a soul, or personality, but it's something like - if I focus deeply, or if I'm high - it's like a collection of many 'choices' (though the term is bad because they're often the results of deep persuasion, sometimes coercion, sometimes desperate decisions made under duress) but certain ways of experiencing and organizing my understanding that I chose long ago at the expense of other ways and other organizations, and that I've since forgotten I've chosen, or that those other ways are even possibilities. But then all of those choices were to preserve something and survive somehow and I suppose what I need to preserve and what needs to survive is 'me.'