Is consciousness a multiplicity?

I think it has to be continuous and discontinuous, both have to be aspects of consciousness. I am not really sure how to clarify the two or how to understand how both exist together. The mind permits for both, though.

I don't see how this is even a question really. Consciousness is obviously a bunch of different things, different processes working in different ways, and it's obviously not always "on."

Reply to Josh Alfred
Quoting Josh Alfred

I think it has to be continuous and discontinuous, both have to be aspects of consciousness. I am not really sure how to clarify the two or how to understand how both exist together. The mind permits for both, though.

Reply to Terrapin Station
Quoting Terrapin Station

I don't see how this is even a question really. Consciousness is obviously a bunch of different things, different processes working in different ways, and it's obviously not always "on."

The problem is that the whole concept of consciousness is related to the set of notions,
supporting the unity, oneness, and substantiality of primordial "I," substantial cogito, and the transcendental Ego. So, it is not merely a question of the same mind that is able to experience
different states of consciousness. Do these states have entirely various qualities?

As Joshs noted: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4929/perception-of-time/p2
“The impression we get of consciousness as the commander of decision, as unfolding meaning as a linear causal sequence of nows (one damn thing after another), is the result of the way linguistic grammar is constructed , Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness. So the notion of agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents.”

Reply to Number2018

Not being all that familiar with James, does he say what he thinks consciousness to be? Without that, how can it said whether or not it is discontinuous? Given the general conception of it, it is easy to say consciousness is continuously interrupted, merely from the mind being in a state of deep sleep, and by association, recommencing upon the attaining the state of awareness.

But that in itself being sufficient reason with respect to a specific conception, says nothing about consciousness as a “multiplicity”, which implies various kinds of consciousness, rather than various conditions of a single consciousness.

Would it be appropriate to suppose James doesn’t define consciousness, as the ground for not being able to answer his own question? If not, it remains the purview of the respondant to conceptualize consciousness in his own terms, theorize the possibility of it being capable of obtaining to a multiplicity, or simply being one initially, and finally, to justify one or the other.

Quoting Mww

Not being all that familiar with James, does he say what he thinks consciousness to be? Without that, how can it said whether or not it is discontinuous? Given the general conception of it, it is easy to say consciousness is continuously interrupted, merely from the mind being in a state of deep sleep, and by association, recommencing upon the attaining the state of awareness.

I think that James did not define consciousness rigorously, but he brought a lot of clarifying examples, even of someone sleeping, or in the state of delirium. As far as I understood, he posed the problem of continuity, but not of a multiplicity of consciousness.
Quoting Mww

But that in itself being sufficient reason with respect to a specific conception, says nothing about consciousness as a “multiplicity”,

James did not think
of consciousness as a multiplicity.
Quoting Mww

it remains the purview of the respondant to conceptualize consciousness in his own terms, theorize the possibility of it being capable of obtaining to a multiplicity,

It looks like when some thinkers assume a multiplicity of consciousness, they really break with traditional apprehensions

Reply to Number2018

Agreed. The traditional apprehension with respect to the conception of consciousness is that it is a singular faculty, or functionality, or rational enterprise.....or this thing that does this something.

What do you think? How would you fill in the blanks?

Reply to Number2018 William James put it thusly:

"Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. But now there appears, even
within the limits of the same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of
belonging together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which this
statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are produced by sudden contrasts in the
chain, making often explosive appearances and rending each other in twain. But their comings and
goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the time
and the space in which they lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we may be so
stunned and confused for a moment by the shock as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has happened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the
consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted
with each other most violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still remain between the
thoughts by whose means they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of
the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder
pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.[12] Our feeling of the same
objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder
a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence;
but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find
in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an
inkling of anything that went before. Here, again, language works against our perception of the truth.
We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else."

Reply to Number2018 on the other hand, Shaun Gallagher talks about socially distributed cognition:

“Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive
processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies,
environments, institutional structures, etc.”
Such processes don’t originate in individual minds but are shared among a community of participants in an activity.

Quoting Number2018

The problem is that the whole concept of consciousness is related to the set of notions,
supporting the unity, oneness, and substantiality of primordial "I," substantial cogito, and the transcendental Ego. So, it is not merely a question of the same mind that is able to experience
different states of consciousness. Do these states have entirely various qualities?

"unity" "oneness" etc. all seem rather "mysterian" and as if one is trying to make some sort of quasi-religious idea the trump card.

Reply to Terrapin Station The unity of the 'i' that Number2018 is talking about was a common presupposition in philosophy and psychology from Descartes and Kant to Sartre. It was assumed in cognitive science research and is implied in any notion of consciousness in which memory is assumed to be accessible as stored traces.

Reply to Joshs

What does "unity" refer to there, exactly?

Reply to Terrapin Station Some sense of meaning that can return to itself identically in relfection.

Reply to Joshs ""{IT} return(s)to itself identically in reflection." That is the unity of consciousness rather than the multiplicity of it, I would gather. There should be a single term for such an amazing summary of what you state here. Because there is some sense of similarity between self now and later there is "unity of consciousness" maybe even "coherence of consciousness"??? However, does it mean, "I" or "self-reference"? I think it does. I think Hume and James were both onto it. Its temporal bond, and "what bond" (see: "what" flow, brain streams)

Now that we can deduce that much, it must be possible to reference the "multiplicity of consciousness" more thoroughly. Do you have a elaborating words on that subject, anyone?

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Reply to emancipate That sounds intuitively sound. I notice that my inner voice is nuanced yet the awareness behind it has not changed. Its like painting a canvas. The canvas remains the same (a canvas) no matter what you paint on it. I think E.Tolle did a stint on consciousness using that metaphor.

Reply to Josh Alfred James argued that, Hume couldnt find any unity in consciousness so he cheated by imposing a metaphysical unifying factor externally.
There are different ways of understanding the notion of unity in relation to consciousness. The metaphysical option that prevailed in different ways from Descartes to Sartre to Husserl made some aspect of the 'I' able to return to itself and reflect on itself as itself identically. Hume,as I mentioned, accomplished this through a metaphysical unifier. Husserl said that although the contents of consciousness, the objects that I intend, are always different, there is an 'empty' 'I' that is mere sense of self as that which always accompanies my intending acts. This 'empty I' is self-identical over time.
It is what gives all our actions a sense of 'mineness' even though its is always something different that I am involved with.
For James the 'I' is not self-identical but self-consistent in time, due to the fact that intended meanings refer back to previous intentions as part of their own sense.

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Reply to Number2018 A long time ago I read a book called "The Fourth Way." It was recommend to me. In this book the Author illustrates that there are various different "I" functioning within the "collective self". I don't remember much more, but I think that may be a book that could get one started on better understanding the multiplicity of self.

Reply to emancipate Yes, but if the meaning of what is experienced in conscious is always different. then what exactly is continuous? Or does continuous here just mean self-similar?

Reply to Joshs "The empty I" ____ yes, it does seem like an open set : {_}. The subject kind of falls into the emptiness of the cup.

What is self-consistency? Does self-consistency exist without identical identification? So say, I identify myself now as a person sitting, can I identify myself later as a person laying? Seemingly, yes I can. The states change but the "reference point" is identical.

Quoting Josh Alfred

However, does it mean, "I" or "self-reference"? I think it does.

As do I. “I” is the pure representation of the unity of consciousness, such that it becomes possible to think all contents of consciousness, whatever their names, belong to me, or, as was said, such unity is self-consistent over time. It is from this unity that understanding works, in the construction of its conceptions a priori, or the conjoining of intuitions to phenomena from which empirical representations follow, each the precursor to knowledge.

Reply to Josh Alfred You're trying to understand self-consistency via a conception of time imported from the natural sciences,i.e. self as an object in motion.
But organisms are self-organizing. Their way of changing themselves is non-linear, self-reflexive, they feedback into themselves as their way of being themselves, The same is true of consciousness.
To be a meaning (an "i" this instant) is to borrow from and transform a previous meaning. So the present meaning is framed by the immediately previous one. The past is changed and defined by the present. Consciousness is also anticipative. In experiencing the 'now' of the present it is meaning ahead of itself. So past , present and future belng simultaneously to the now . The now is multiple.

Reply to Mww This sounds like Kant, but not very much like current thinking in psychology(or philosophy)

Reply to Joshs

Yeah, probably. Simple case of I don’t know any better.

Reply to Mww I would give anything to hear an academic philosopher say that just once.

Reply to Joshs

LOL. I don’t have to worry about keeping my job. Or keeping my publisher off my back.

Plus the best part....everybody can say I’m hopelessly outdated, but nobody can say I’m hopelessly wrong.

Reply to Mww Quoting Mww

The traditional apprehension with respect to the conception of consciousness is that it is a singular faculty, or functionality, or rational enterprise.....or this thing that does this something.

What do you think? How would you fill in the blanks?

I think that we definitely need to think of consciousness as a multiplicity. But, this is just a first step. Next, it is necessary to conceive the nature of this multiplicity, each distinct “state of consciousness” should be identified as a working part in an appropriate assemblage – technological, scientific, social, cultural, etc.

Reply to Joshs Quoting Joshs

Shaun Gallagher talks about socially distributed cognition:

“Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive
processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies,
environments, institutional structures, etc.”
Such processes don’t originate in individual minds but are shared among a community of participants in an activity.

I agree with this. I just want to question the nature of “community of participants in an activity.” Who are these participants? For some thinkers, they are machines or some automatic processes. As Felix Guattari wrote: “When we drive, we activate subjectivity and a multiplicity of partial consciousness connected to the car ‘s technological mechanisms. There is no “individuated subject” that is in control of the driving. If one knows how to drive, one acts without thinking about it, without engaging reflexive consciousness…We are guided by the car’s machinic assemblage. Our actions and subjective components (memory, attention, perception, etc.) are “automatized,” they are a part of the machinic, hydraulic, electronic, etc. apparatuses, constituting non-human parts of the assemblage. Driving mobilizes different processes of conscientization, one succeeding the next, superimposing one onto the other, connecting or disconnecting according to the current events of driving.”
One could argue that any way we face here a version of “Shaun Gallagher socially distributed cognition.” Yet, in favor of a more radical Guattari’s comprehension of consciousness one could say, that our practice of driving a car, in spite of being a subject of the intervention of many institutions, in fact, has become entirely autonomous, self-driving collective activity, where machines and automatized
processes are substituted for intentional, conscious individual acts.

Reply to Joshs Quoting Joshs

For James the 'I' is not self-identical but self-consistent in time, due to the fact that intended meanings refer back to previous intentions as part of their own sense.

Don't you think that "self-consistent in time" presupposes a kind of self-identity?

Reply to Number2018 Derrida has been known for deconstructing discourses that assume self-identical structures, forms, objects, meanings, the presence-to itself of intention.The metaphysics of presence, as he calls it, is auto-affection itself . It would seem that Derrida is attempting to see sense and symbol as Deleuze does, as always multiple, differentiated. But htere's an important difference between them. Deleuze begins from objects, paired down and relational, as polarities, as fundamentally arbitrary. I am alienated from myself every moment because the 'I' is nothing but arbitrary, polarized and polarizing vectors, gestures, signs. Derrida beings with signs also, but digs beneath signs to show that a sing sign is already divided with itself as other than itself. So there is no simple sign, but an already hinged or bifurcated presencing -absencing gesture. Heidegger's notion of temporalty does something similar. IT splits up a sign before it can simply be itself as sign. The effect of where Heidegger and Derrida situate the site of difference(unlike Deleuze they split difference before it can simply be itself as a difference) si that signs, objects, forms no longer have the power of polarization and arbitrariness that they do for Deleuze. Not because the are assimilated to a subject, but the opposite. It is only when you give too much power to the elements of the world(whether you dub them affective, material, political, linguistic, that you are assigning them presence, not breaking away fully enough from Cartesianism. Derrida's notion of the trace begins before language as human speech, before any notion of consciousness or humanity or animality or the biological.
BUt notice that the effect of deconstruction is that any text shows itself to already be dissimulating itself at every moment, not gathering together as a unitary structure. But the same radical otherness within itself as repetition of the sign prevents one from simply saying that it's unfolding is arbitrary in the way that it appears for Deleuze. Rather, as Derrida says, there is a way of being the same differently.
This allows him to see certain threads of continuity through difference in a text. Not to recognize this in being with others prevents one from really seeing them. In all the varied activities you mentioned earlier that we can involve ourselves with, we move through all those activities in a way that is the same time differing with respect to itself every moment, and maintaining a thread of continuity. To say otherwise is to uphold a claim of difference that needs to be deconstructed. What gives something the power to differ purely? So neither the Cartesian unity nor the Deleuzian difference, but a gesture more primordial, already divided within itself before it can simply be the same or different,

.

Quoting Joshs

Some sense of meaning that can return to itself identically in relfection.

That's more confuddled than the term "unity." It seems like you're quickly approaching "insists upon itself."

Quoting Number2018

think of consciousness as a multiplicity.

In the interest of graduating from the outdated....OK, in principle.

Quoting Number2018

conceive the nature of this multiplicity, each distinct “state of consciousness” should be identified as a working part

Yep....”nature of” just so conceived, “states of” just so identified, got the moldy tome from which to take references.

Quoting Number2018

in an appropriate assemblage.....technological, scientific, social, cultural, etc.

Err......what? What is meant by technological, social assemblages? Within the context of being a working part in a multiplicity of conscious states, I mean.

Imho, consciousness is a symptom of the divisive nature of thought. So, we experience "me" and "my thoughts" as if they were two different things. Consciousness is an experience of the conceptual dualism that thought imposes on everything.

Consciousness, this experience of division, isn't continuous but is interrupted all the time. A loud noise happens behind you and you turn to look. In that moment of looking there isn't a division between observer and observed, the observer and observed become one. And then, once the data from the external world has been imported, consciousness returns and begins processing the data. The conceptual division between "me" and "the data" is restored.

This shift in and out of consciousness happens so fast and is so utterly normal that we typically don't notice the shift. You know how a movie is really just a series of static images that fly by so fast that the illusion of movement is created? It's like that. The shift in and out of consciousness happens so quickly that we experience it as a continuous consciousness, but that is just a useful illusion.

Quoting Jake

we experience "me" and "my thoughts" as if they were two different things.

I don’t think the average human being does that. It is only when I stop to theorize about what’s going on between my ears do I have to distinguish between the thinker and the thought, such that I can understand how it is my experiences even occur. Not THAT I have them, which is sometimes even painfully obvious, but HOW I have them, and that from a metaphysical point of view, the only method available to the common man. It follows that the dissection of functionality is paramount, for the entire range between perception and cognition, of which consciousness is usually viewed as a fundamental, if not the primary, aspect.

What if consciousness doesn’t process anything? Or rather, if it does, what is the function of all the other faculties of human resource used to recognize experience for what it is? If consciousness does process, either there are no other faculties sometimes considered as the processor, or those other faculties do something else. I don’t think we should so haphazardly relegate “judgement” or “understanding” to the psychological junk pile, which implies we had best find out how they fit into the picture.

A loud noise behind you is itself a perception. Otherwise, what grounds the proclamation there has been a loud noise at all? Data is already in play even before you turn to look. Any other subsequent perception, as in sight or the feeling of concussion, is merely additional data used to narrow down and help identify the experience. What in that process suggests consciousness has altered in any way?

Know what I think? I think people invent 140mph cars for no other reason than a 120mph car has already been invented. After a whole bunch of those, we reach 300mph cars and you just gotta ask....why? Who in the world needs one, how could it possibly be a benefit, and what does it prove except it can be done? Switch philosophy for cars and you catch my drift.

Reply to Joshs Quoting Joshs

Deleuze begins from objects, paired down and relational, as polarities, as fundamentally arbitrary. I am alienated from myself every moment because the 'I' is nothing but arbitrary, polarized and polarizing vectors, gestures, signs.

I disagree. Deleuze wrote that: ““Self, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the “I think” cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought.”
There is nothing arbitrary about this relation: If “I” defines our existence as passive
and changeable existence of “Moi” in time, the time has been the formal relation, through which the mind effects itself through affect; or the time is the way through
which we are able to experience affect.” I think that this formula allows us to differentiate what is given to us while applying a variety of available recourses.
The I split not arbitrarily, but by the time and affect. However, Deleuzian time and affect are not metaphysical or logic-discursive essences, they are our time and affect, intervened with our experiences, knowledge, lives, etc.
Quoting Joshs

Derrida's notion of the trace begins before language as human speech, before any notion of consciousness or humanity or animality or the biological.

If so, where can one find it? For me, it looks utterly mysterious, or (using your term) arbitrary.

Quoting Joshs

To say otherwise is to uphold a claim of difference that needs to be deconstructed. What gives something the power to differ purely? So neither the Cartesian unity nor the Deleuzian difference, but a gesture more primordial, already divided within itself before it can simply be the same or different,

It could be useful to consider this gesture, this power to differ purely.
Derrida wrote:” division, delay, d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _must be capable of being brought to a certain absolute degree of absence for the structure of writing, supposing that writing exists, to be constituted. It is here that d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _as writing could no longer (be) an (ontological) modification of presence. It must be repeatably iterable in the absolute absence of the addressee or of the empirically determinable set of addressees. A writing that was not structurally legible iterable beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence, "death," or the possibility of the "death" of the addressee, inscribed in the structure of the mark (and it is at this point, I note in passing, that the value or effect of transcendentality is linked necessarily to the possibility of writing and of "death" analyzed in this, way).” As far as I see, the power of this gesture is the erection of the lethal transcendental subject, acting through deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction.

Reply to Mww Quoting Mww

What is meant by technological, social assemblages? Within the context of being a working part in a multiplicity of conscious states, I mean.

If one is working as the financial trader at the stock market, one’s mind is preoccupied with a multiplicity of heterogeneous realities: the reality of the “real” economy, the reality of forecasts about the economy, and the reality of expectations of these prices rising or falling. All of above are given through diagrams, curves, other ways of presenting data and various flows of information. So, being conscious while multitasking processing information, trader’s mind operates according to pre-designed and pre-constructed schemes and algorithms. Can we say that this is an independent, autonomous, and conscious activity?

Reply to Number2018

Being conscious while multitasking, yes. These are the multiplicity of occasions for, and the multiplicity of forms of, empirical data given to perception.

I see conscious activity, but I’m having trouble pinning independent and autonomous to that conscious activity. Independent how, with respect to what? Conscious activity is independent from the outside empirical data? No, can’t be, otherwise there’s nothing with which to be consciously active. Independent from physiology? Sure, but I would think that irrelevant to the subject at hand. Autonomous as existing in itself? Conscious activity may be autonomous as a whole, re: the proverbial rational agent, but it’s parts certainly are not, insofar as they need to work together.

In the interest of my continuing exposure, I’ll just say yes, we can say that. I suspect you’re going to elucidate by taking the next step.

Quoting Mww

I see conscious activity, but I’m having trouble pinning independent and autonomous to that conscious activity. Independent how, with respect to what? Conscious activity is independent from the outside empirical data?

I mean this is not the conscious activity in the manner of cartesian Cogito.

Reply to Mww Quoting Mww

I suspect you’re going to elucidate by taking the next step.

Felix Guattari wrote: “When we drive, we activate subjectivity and a multiplicity of partial consciousness connected to the car ‘s technological mechanisms. There is no “individuated subject” that is in control of the driving. If one knows how to drive, one acts without thinking about it, without engaging reflexive consciousness…We are guided by the car’s machinic assemblage. Our actions and subjective components (memory, attention, perception, etc.) are “automatized,” they are a part of the machinic, hydraulic, electronic, etc. apparatuses, constituting non-human parts of the assemblage. Driving mobilizes different processes of conscientization, one succeeding the next, superimposing one onto the other, connecting or disconnecting according to the current events of driving.”
What we call state of consciousness is actually the combination of a variety of many subjective
components (memory, attention, perception, etc.). What does it mean that they are “automatized”? They operate as cogs in different apparatuses, responding, reacting, processing,
inputting, and outputting – simultaneously with the work of “pure” machines. Guattari calls this operative field Machinic Unconscious – in an entirely different sense comparing to the psychoanalytical unconscious. My example is a very approximate and limited model.

Reply to Number2018 Notice that Guattari is relying on mechanistic, machinic metaphors in attempting to unseat the Cartesian self. Of course, the causal logic of machination is itself a product of Gallilean-Cartesian thought. One could argue that Guattari is using this language against itself , but there are certain risk here.
I dont see Deleuze and Guattari as wanting to maintain a causal logic of objects in interaction, but they do rely on a kind of behaviorist conditioning vocabulary to describe the way that world impinges on and shapes and transforms 'us'( itself). THis is where I find the chiasmatic intertwining descriptions of Merleau-Ponty to more effectively escape the implication of classic causality.

Deleuze likes to cite dynamical systems models to convey the reflexive self-transformative quality of experience. But dynamical systems is a deterministic description
in its original uses and so must also be understood metaphorically if one want sot avoid sliding back into determinism.

Reply to JoshsI brought just an elementary and simple example which do not represent the whole Guattari’s project. From this example, one indeed can get the impression that it is about
a kind of mechanical determinism. Yet, Guattari’s model of consciousness is much more complicated, it includes a variety of heterogenic domains and levels so that there is a place for chance and indeterminism. I will try to represent it later.

Reply to Number2018

So is that what this is...Josh’s “dynamical systems models to convey the reflexive self-transformative quality of experience”?

OK, sure. There’s no “individuate subject that is in charge of the driving”. I suppose this is the most serious flaw in pre-modern philosophy, the lack of a director for the faculties responsible for cognitions, and this new stuff is trying to make it so a director isn’t needed. Being left to the nature of the beast was always good enough, in the Good Ol’ Day’s, the faculties know what they’re supposed to do because Nature wouldn’t have put them there to do a job if they weren’t also given the means to do it. Yet, even to this day, we still don’t know how the finer things in thought work.

I submit the subject/object duality is here to stay. It’s been that way since the dawn of reason, and in 5000 years, it hasn’t dissipated very much. If I were to speak up for it, I would just say.....don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

I think that Guattari’s approach in some sense is parallel to what StreetlightX wrote in this thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/220119
“this post has nothing to do with 'consciousness'. Anyone expecting a discussion of that kind is welcome to post elsewhere. If I could avoid using the term 'subjectivity' in favour of something like 'way-of-being' or 'ethoi' (plural of ethos), I would, but the former is too messy, and the latter is too strange, so I'm sticking to 'subjectivity' - which is what the literature on the subject calls it anyway. This also has nothing to do with boring debates about subjectivity vs. objectivity, so if one feels inclined to talk about that, kindly do so elsewhere.

A common notion that is often discussed in philosophical literature is that of varying kinds of subjectivities. As I hinted in the note' above, these 'subjectivities' have nothing to do with 'consciousness' and have everything to do with one's range of capacities in a particular situation. A 'subject' here is one that can act or be acted upon in a range of ways, depending on the context at hand; so, for example, one can speak of a subject of street-walking: the subject of street walking is involved in traversing a certain terrain, in making a way to a destination, of admiring sights, of avoiding traffic, of waiting at traffic lights, and so on. There is a kind of subjectivity involved in being a walker of the streets, that is not the same as that involved in say, playing chess.

The street walker is a limited example, but the concept can be expanded much further. For one, the 'subject' doesn't even have to be embodied: one can speak of the subjectivity of the internet browser: this subjectivity is largely disembodied, interacting with his or her computer though a mouse or keyboard, mostly passively absorbing words or pictures on the screen, while only sometimes actively involving themselves in the world they are exploring by, say, posting on an internet forum, or 'liking' a Youtube video. The subject of the internet browser is very different from the subject of the street walker. The subjectivities involved draw on different ranges of capacities, interests, attentions, limits, and approaches to creative action. One important thing that this should make clear is that a subject is not simply a correlate of an 'individual': an individual may traverse different subjectivities, first as a walker on the street, then as a browser of the internet - and so on.”
StreetlightX said: ”Forget consciousness, forget objects,” these kinds of subjectivities
Has nothing to do with consciousness”.
Nevertheless, for each of his examples, the acting subjects operate a set of states of mind, (they can be called “conscious,” or differently) – they are still important parts of the “subjectivity.” Guattari calls these subjectivities “machinic assemblages.”

Reply to Number2018

Now this makes sense to me. These “machinic assemblages”, as “important parts of subjectivity” already have names, their job descriptions are already given, their co-dependence and interactions well-discussed, and have been for close on to 300 years.

That being said, and with this more substantial groundwork......what’s next? Given a description of what’s happening, machinic assemblages, how does all that actually come about?

Reply to Number2018 If you and i are in a room with a dog, a child and an old woman from an Indian village in Equador, how does the flow of interaction proceed? There are many considerations, of course. Do the humans all speak the same language? Lets say yes. But lets say the goal for you and me is to interaction with each individual in the room and attempt to gain as effective a sense as possible of their ongoing experiencing , including being able to anticipate as well as possible how to engage with them and how they will react to us, how to make them react as positively as possible, how to avoid conflict. What strategy do we use? Lets start with the dog. You and I will likely be aware of our body language and the dog's body language. Does it appear threatened or frightened? What does fear mean? Do we impute to the dog intentions and interpretations, such as this 'oerson may harm me'? DOn't we , through our interaction with thte dog, in the tone and pitch and rhythm of speech that we chose, attempt to establish a particular 'dance' with the dog? We know some do this better than others. TO succeed, and not just for a few minutes, but to succeed in knowing how to slip into a dance in varying conditions and circumstances with the dog(maybe it is better tho describe this dancing over time as engaging in a multitude of different types of dances conveying different moods and attitudes) is to recognize the dog as having a certain consistent 'style' of dance, regardless of the particular circumstances.

Isnt this how we interact with every individual in the room, finding what each peron's style of dance is, regardless of changing circumstance? If subjectivity is machinic activity and machinic activity always mutates and changes, where how does ongoing style emerge?
How is ongoing worldview, gender to be understood? IF I engage with my friend according to my understanding that there is an ongoing worldview(a worldview that is alwasy changing but maintains an overall thread of internal consistency) including political, religious and ethical outlook that guides their thinking , then I may slip intricately into his outlook , merging my dance with his, in such a way as to anticipate his joys and suffering, what causes him guilt , anger , anxiety.
My prediction is if one attempts to engage with him such the interaction itself is thought as a mobile environment of shifting machinic processes with no thread of consistency, I will have no way to be with him intimately in his affective-intelellectual modulaltions. His behavior will appear somewhat arbitrary to me rather than flowing out of itself.

Do the ongoing concerns of the person driving a car not interaffect the supposed purely 'automatic' act of driving? Do the pieces not interaffect each such as to form a relational totality unified according to what matters to the person? Is each subjectivty merely a blind vector of irrelevance? Are words like significance, relevance, being-for-the-sake -of, involvement, interest , mattering, are these notions derived from the arbitrary chaos of dfference, or is difference itself to be understood as always RELEVANT difference?

One could point out the way that over time, of the old woman, the dog, you and I and the child all become friends, we all interaffect each other as one larger subjectivity. But the dog will still maintain its own affective rhythms and attitudes , and all the humans in the room, regardless of how many years they spend together, will maintain separate ongoing threads in style.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

If subjectivity is machinic activity and machinic activity always mutates and changes, where how does ongoing style emerge?

First, I’d like to return to your question from another thread:
You asked:
How does Deleuze explain stable personality features?
I answered:
In principle, Deleuze avoided using this kind of discourse. His project was to consider things in their interdependency, endless variation, and immanence.
I admit that this was not entirely correct account on Deleuze’s approach. In fact, he considered stable features, and he explained them using the notion of strata. The classical Aristotelian concept of duality between a form and a content was further elaborated and developed by Deleuze. So, “stable personality features” are explained as the result of some process of stratification – it can be applied to geology, for organisms, and for social or personal facts. “Stable personal features” are placed at the certain strata, and caused as well as expressed by double articulation – social-scientific-discursive from one side, and
vital – organic-phenomenological-living experience from another one (I am sorry for pure terminology). This method allows to show a variety of heterogenic factors involved and to grasp stability simultaneously with becoming and variation.

Quoting Joshs

IF I engage with my friend according to my understanding that there is an ongoing worldview(a worldview that is alwasy changing but maintains an overall thread of internal consistency) including political, religious and ethical outlook that guides their thinking , then I may slip intricately into his outlook , merging my dance with his, in such a way as to anticipate his joys and suffering, what causes him guilt , anger , anxiety.
My prediction is if one attempts to engage with him such the interaction itself is thought as a mobile environment of shifting machinic processes with no thread of consistency, I will have no way to be with him intimately in his affective-intelellectual modulaltions. His behavior will appear somewhat arbitrary to me rather than flowing out of itself.

When you engage with your friend, both of you adjust to mutually shared socio-cultural established norms of communication, aimed to minimize possible disruptions and interruptions. None of you needs to apply a higher level of reflective thinking, and maybe, philosophy. Yet, if your relationship is in crisis, or your friend is a philosopher as you, you can get engaged in a different
kind of communication. By the way, it could lead one to a direction of Deleuzian-Guattarian thought, if one will try to problematize the ground of our cultural norms: they are still stable in spite of apparent flow of omnipresent innovations.
(you are right about this!) But what keeps them alive: Traditions? Values? Coercions? Education? Or, maybe, they have a different grounding?

Quoting Joshs

Do the ongoing concerns of the person driving a car not interaffect the supposed purely 'automatic' act of driving? Do the pieces not interaffect each such as to form a relational totality unified according to what matters to the person?

They do interact, they superimpose over each other. You wrote: Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness. So the notion of an agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents.”
Guattari’s machinic assemblages can help to understand what kind of community it is.
Some thinkers proposed to differentiate between a few kinds of subjectivities: "conscious-social-discursive", and "entirely machinic, a-signifying of machinic enslavement, and a-signifying of various additional modes.

Quoting Joshs

If subjectivity is machinic activity and machinic activity always mutates and changes, where how does ongoing style emerge?

Most of the machinic subjectivities are entirely relevant from the point of an adjustment of a subject to the social, cultural, and working environment. It is possible to find some parallels with Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”

quote="Joshs;250938"]Is each subjectivty merely a blind vector of irrelevance?[/quote]
Stern and Guattari proposed that there are also a few more fundamental kinds of subjectivities,
which are formed by a child before acquiring language: the emergent self, a core self, and the Sense of a Subjective self. All of them are necessary for the emergence of the verbal, symbolic self;
but they do not disappear later, various modes of subjectivity still function, operating outside of consciousness.

Quoting Joshs

are these notions derived from the arbitrary chaos of dfference, or is difference itself to be understood as always RELEVANT difference?

The difference is not an essence or an absolute. It is a matter of choice and workability. Yet, most of the differences are not arbitrary; they need to be chosen
with the careful and rigorous selection.

Quoting Joshs

One could point out the way that over time, of the old woman, the dog, you and I and the child all become friends, we all interaffect each other as one larger subjectivity. But the dog will still maintain its own affective rhythms and attitudes , and all the humans in the room, regardless of how many years they spend together, will maintain separate ongoing threads in style.

If the harmony prevails, there is no place for questioning and problematization.:smile:
By the way, why this idyllic scene does take place in faraway Ecuador?:smile:

"why this idyllic scene does take place in faraway Ecuador?"
I don't know Maybe because it's 5 degrees and snowing here in Chicago.

"Most of the machinic subjectivities are entirely relevant from the point of an adjustment of a subject to the social, cultural, and working environment." "When you engage with your friend, both of you adjust to mutually shared socio-cultural established norms of communication,"

But you know, each of us interprets the meaning of those so-called cultural norms differently. This is why today there are violent disagreements in the U.S. concerning social and ethical and political norms.The understanding of the norms themselves differ from person to person, but normally so subtly that it appears as though those of us within a particular community(urban vs rural) united by those norms believes that we just assimilate them automatically. But even within a community of supposedly shared norms, even within a single family, there can be violent disagreements over the meaning of those 'norms'.

"If the harmony prevails, there is no place for questioning and problematization."
An ideal harmony generally does not prevail in social situations, in direct proportion to the failure of the participants to slip into the perspective of the other. This is especially true in today's political climate.

Identity politics, the #metoo movement, #blacklivesmatter, are just some examples of the way we on the one hand recognize each others' differences more effectively over time, and yet fail to understand why those who we blame fail to live up to our standards.
Most of the philosophical underpinnings of these movements, particularly marxist ones, contain an underlying moralism that drives the blamefulness of their rhetoric. A Foucaultian-Deleuzian account
avoids the moralistic-blame of emancipatory positions because it doesnt try to organize thought around a developmental telos. And yet, it still blames in the sense of pointing a finger at arbitrary sources of conditioning. We are 'shaped by', 'adjust to', 'conditioned by' the affect, social, physical worlds.
Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me , but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

The understanding of the norms themselves differ from person to person, but normally so subtly that it appears as though those of us within a particular community(urban vs rural) united by those norms believes that we just assimilate them automatically. But even within a community of supposedly shared norms, even within a single family, there can be violent disagreements over the meaning of those 'norms'.

I think that the concept of “community” is too often overused. In your previous posts, you wrote: “Consciousness, far from being the self- knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness. So the notion of the agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents.” Or,” “Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies, environments, institutional structures, etc.”
Such processes don’t originate in individual minds but are shared among a community of participants in an activity."
Generally, the notion of community presupposes a process of identification, a desire for collective identity and unity, the communal union. I doubt that it can be applied appropriately to explain how “distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies, environments, institutional structures, etc.” arefunctioning and interacting together in our machinic, telecommunicational, capitalistic society. Therefore, in this contest, “community” has indeed become “the ghost in the machine.” It could be beneficial to ask: why one systematically invokes this ghost?
Foucault wrote: “The concern for man,
the care with which this thought attempts to define him as a living being,
an individual at work, or a speaking subject, herald the long-awaited
return of a human reign only to the high-minded few; in fact, it concerns, rather more prosaically and less morally, an empirico-critical
reduplication by means of which an attempt is made to make the man
of nature, of exchange, or of discourse, serve as the foundation of his
own finitude. In this Fold, the transcendental function is doubled over
so that it covers with its dominating network the inert, grey space of
empiricism; inversely, empirical contents are given life, gradually pull
themselves upright, and are immediately subsumed in a discourse
which carries their transcendental presumption into the distance.
And so we find philosophy falling asleep once more in the hollow of
this Fold; this time not the sleep of Dogmatism, but that of Anthropology.”
The point of Foucault that the return of the man, of an identity, of a community, going together with
the unfolding of the transcendentalism, have kept defining our way of thinking
regardless of any objections and denials, given by the reality.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

A Foucaultian-Deleuzian account
avoids the moralistic-blame of emancipatory positions because it doesnt try to organize thought around a developmental telos. And yet, it still blames in the sense of pointing a finger at arbitrary sources of conditioning. We are 'shaped by', 'adjust to', 'conditioned by' the affect, social, physical worlds.
Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me , but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us.

I think that your apprehension of “A Foucaultian-Deleuzian account” is not completely correct, especially when you attribute to both Foucault and Deleuze that “We are 'shaped by,' 'adjust to,' 'conditioned by' the affect, social, physical worlds.
"Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me”. That means that you assert that both thinkers proposed that “relevance, significance” condition you and me. I will try to show that it not correct. When you wrote: “The impression we get of consciousness as the commander of decision, as unfolding meaning as a linear causal sequence of nows (one damn thing after another), is the result of the way linguistic grammar is constructed.”
You mean, that linguistic grammar is a necessary part of how are our conscious sense of self and I operate. Yet, this is just one dimension of the process. Deleuze and Guattari call this dimension syntagmatic.
Another dimension is paradigmatic, referred to the meaning of the unfolding linear linguistic sequence. Both have composed signifying strata, upholding the subject of enunciation, framing one in the totality of the current socio-linguistic field. Power operates through grammar.
Another related to linguistics strata is one of subjectivation.
There is a split, a doubling of a speaker onto two subjects:
a subject of a statement, and a subject of enunciation.
When somebody (a child, a student, or you and I) starts speaking, this one unavoidably uses sentences with meaning, pre-given by the dominating social reality. Further, the speaker usually believes that he/she (or his/her I, or ego) is an authentic author of the spoken sentence. In this way,
a subject of enunciation, the speaker, recoils into the subject of the statement. Its dominant reality is given by the range of statements which are possible for it. One learns the variety of possible options that one is allowed to think, believe, want, or love from those given within society: a subject of enunciation forms its consciousness of itself out of the statements which it is able to make as a subject of a statement.
Descartes's cogito often considered the founding of modern subjectivity, is exemplary in this respect: 'I think [the subject of the statement, independent of its object] therefore [movement of recoiling] I am [the subject of the statement now designates the subject of enunciation]. The speaker then knows himself as a thinking substance. The verb 'to be' always functions as a shifter that moves from an expressed statement to give a 'reality'; this movement is mediated in modern thought by the process of subjectification through which the speaker identifies a given reality with the statement. In this way, reality comes to be constituted by subjects acting as though their statements were true. The self-consciousness of human subjects is a simulated product of language. A person identifies himself or herself with the subject of the statements, which he or she is able to make. Since the constituted in this way subject has two distinct dimensions, a double articulation – a subject of enunciation, and a subject of a statement, Deleuze and Guattari propose that this subjectivation takes place on the specific strata. Further, when both strata – signifying and subjectivation are working together, (they call this combination the faciality machine) a speaking or thinking subject has caught in a double net of social enslavement. The subject may think of himself/herself as an independent, free-minded individual while obeying a variety of dominating norms – this is one of the Deleuze-Guattari approaches to the notion of a social norm. (Foucault had a different comprehension). So, when you say:” Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me, but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us,” I think that the notion of “a unique interpretation” carries a high risk of being caught in a kind of the faciality machine.

Reply to Number2018

Let me try to deconstruct your account of Deleuze-Guattari. In doing so i'm going beyond Merleau-Ponty and instead channeling the thinking of Heidegger and Derrida.

"Another dimension is paradigmatic, referred to the meaning of the unfolding linear linguistic sequence. Both have composed signifying strata, upholding the subject of enunciation, framing one in the totality of the current socio-linguistic field. Power operates through grammar."

Both Heidegger and Derrida trace grammar back to logic, and logic back to the metaphysical presuppositions underlying modern objective thought
Thus they deconstruct 'grammar'', the propositional schematic description of a meaning. Power implies self-constitution , but in constituting itself , power must transcend itself and thus power-grammar is split within itself before it can simply constitute itself as force, concept, scheme.

"There is a split, a doubling of a speaker onto two subjects:
a subject of a statement, and a subject of enunciation.
When somebody (a child, a student, or you and I) starts speaking, this one unavoidably uses sentences with meaning, pre-given by the dominating social reality."

"Pre-given "implies co-opted,conditioned by. Does "Dominating social reality" dominate from outside, as a schematic outside, already composed as a conditioning grammar-power that is incorporated into a subject?

" Its dominant reality is given by the range of statements which are possible for it. One learns the variety of possible options that one is allowed to think, believe, want, or love from those given within society: a subject of enunciation forms its consciousness of itself out of the statements which it is able to make as a subject of a statement."

Does one 'learn' what is possible to think from out of this supposed schematic outside power-grammar?
Or is there a more intimate and immediate play, as temporality, between one's history as the 'having been' and the future-directed presenting of the present? This play would project its own possibilities out of one's own 'having been', in an endless repetition . This would not be the subjectivity of a subject. there is no constituted subject here. There is only temporality as this intimate play of a projecting , fore-structuring 'having been' that is always already ahead of itself in being itself. The 'being of this temporality, its ''is'-ness IS this internal articulation. Never simply present to itself or capable of auto-affection. it 'IS' by being other. It is being as already other, already being-with. Power , the social, grammar are all derived modifications of this primary 'already other' that is not yet subject or object.

." The verb 'to be' always functions as a shifter that moves from an expressed statement to give a 'reality';
" this movement is mediated in modern thought by the process of subjectification through which the speaker identifies a given reality with the statement. In this way, reality comes to be constituted by subjects acting as though their statements were true."

This is similar to Nietzsche. "Truth" equals the stabilizing of a particular value-structure that presents itself to the subject. The subject itself is only Will to Power, the endless positing of values that then define the subjectivity of the subject.
Heidegger argues ,though, that the verb 'to be' is not a shfiter that indicated posited values. 'To be'
splits the notion of statement, value, subjectification. To make a statement is to posit subject-predicate scheme. But the making of a statement, the posting of a 'fact' is a derived modification of a more primordial gesture splitting up a statement before it is simply constituted as an 'it' and the subject as a 'subjectivity'.

"The subject may think of himself/herself as an independent, free-minded individual while "obeying a variety of dominating norms"

And while thinking of himself as 'obeying a variety of dominating norms', the notion of 'obeying norms' can be deconstructed via Heideggerian temporality and Derridean differance, The act of obeying transforms that which it obeys in the very act of obeying, Norms subvert themselves in the very act of constituting themselves. There is never a simple norm or unitary notion of obedience.

:” Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me, but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us,” I think that the notion of “a unique interpretation” carries a high risk of being caught in a kind of the faciality machine."

The facially machine, un-noticed to itself, undermines the univocal implication of of domination'(the dominating is at the same time the dominated), 'norms'(the normal is always an exceptional exemplar of itself), 'enslavement'.
Interpretation is always at the same time unique and conventional. It is 'dominated, historical, normative, at the same time that it is 'dominanting', productive, subversive, exceptional but all this takes place before the simple apparatus of a dominating social norm can ever form itself.

Reply to Joshs Thank you for your note! I appreciate your points. Yet, I would like to change
the style of our debate – I am afraid that further interpretation of possible meanings of some terms, or an explication of a few propositions (of Derrida, Heidegger, or Deleuze and Guattari)) can become just one more text on the plain of the Signifier and Representation, without reaching the realities that concern us. So, can we try to take up some concrete problem? I am a pragmatist – if I see that Heidegger, Derrida, or Marlou-Pontu’ philosophy solving real problems more efficiently than Deleuzian approach, I will change my mind and my philosophical priorities.
Or, maybe, it will be better to apply your own way of “thinking about the social”:
“There is an alternative way to think about the social than the via the violently arbitrary immanence of Deleuze. There is a more radical way to think about the site of sociality. My paper critiquing social constructionism also can apply to Deleuze,
Embodied Perception. Redefining the social”
(By the way, I am reading your article. I like your style, and share many of your points and views; nevertheless, in principle, I think that it is impossible to conceive
and deduct a theory, grounded on a single philosophical proposition and applicable to the whole social field). When Deleuze and Guattari write:
“When does the abstract machine of faciality
enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some simple examples: the
maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional
power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the
political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons,
and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of film operating
through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of television. It is
not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the ciphering
it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible. This is an affair
not of ideology but of economy and the organization of power (pouvoir).
We are certainly not saying that the face, the power of the face (la puissance
du visage), engenders and explains social power (pouvoir). Certain assemblages
of power (pouvoir) require the production of a face, others do not.” They make the really
high stakes: they claim that their system of models, including their philosophies of
language, of subjectivization, of strata, of consciousness, and of the actual vs. virtual can be applied to explain a vast variety of concrete historical and contemporary social facts. For me, it is a kind of a problem. I am surprised that most of the Deleuzian scholars when they write about “the faciality machine,” still stay on the theoretical level and prefer not to apply it to our realities. Further, sometimes I find it difficult to discover the work of this “machine” while observing my immediate social surrounding.

I propose to check and compare the strength and explanatory power of your approach (from your article, or using your apprehension of Heidegger and Derrida)
vs. Deleuze-Guattari model of “the faciality machine” regarding some common
social situation: (I take this example from Jean Baudrillard’s book “America”):
“Just look at this girl who serves you in the guest-room: she does so in total freedom, with a smile, without prejudice or pretentiousness, as though she were sitting opposite you. The situation is not an equal one, but she does not pretend to equality. Equality is part of the way of life here. Precisely the opposite of Sartre’s waiter, who is completely alienated from his representation and who only resolves the situation by calling on a theatrical metalanguage, by affecting in his gestures freedom and equality he does not really enjoy”. Baudrillard, (as well as many travelers, coming to North America) got struck by the way a simple receptionist in the guest-room handled him and other customers: her voice, intonations, gestures, postures,
facial expressions, direct eye contact – all looked entirely authentic. The most striking feature, probably, was the direct eye contact. In many cultures, it is possible to look at others eyes just on special occasions, and Levinas even founded his ethics of the relationship with the Other, grounding on looking directly at the Other’s eyes. For Levinas, it was the most challenging moral test – to open yourself toward the other world. In North America, the direct eye contact has become an everyday cultural norm, necessary for being employed even for the most basic jobs.
You wrote
about obeying norms :” And while thinking of himself as 'obeying a variety of dominating norms', the notion of 'obeying norms' can be deconstructed via Heideggerian temporality and Derridean differance, The act of obeying transforms that which it obeys in the very act of obeying, Norms subvert themselves in the very act of constituting themselves. There is never a simple norm or unitary notion obedience.”- Can we apply it to this simple or to any other one of our immediate common social surrounding? Does this “girl from the guest-room” transforms what she obeys in the very act of obeying? The rigorous automatism of the whole complex of her bodily and cognitive behavioral patterns, (there are so many different other examples) can be understood as the cluster of the number of subjectivities : “A common notion that is often discussed in philosophical literature is that of varying kinds of subjectivities. These 'subjectivities' have nothing to do with 'consciousness' and have everything to do with one's range of capacities in a particular situation. A 'subject' here is one that can act or be acted upon in a range of ways, depending on the context at hand…The subjectivities involved draw on different ranges of capacities, interests, attentions, limits, and approaches to creative action. One important thing that this should make clear is that a subject is not simply a correlate of an 'individual': an individual may traverse different subjectivities”.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/220119
I think that the Heideggerian transcendental phenomenology:
“there a more intimate and immediate play, as temporality, between one's history as the 'having been' and the future-directed presenting of the present…This play would project its own possibilities out of one's own 'having been', in endless repetition . This would not be the subjectivity of a subject. There is no constituted subject here. There is only temporality as this intimate play of a projecting , fore-structuring 'having been' that is always already ahead of itself in being itself. The 'being of this temporality, its ''is'-ness IS this internal articulation” – This transcendentalism cannot be used as a reasonable explanatory model here. So, to overcome a pure positivistic –behavioristic approach to a human as a cluster of subjectivities, we can apply the Deleuze-Guattari thought. Before becoming a cluster of behavioral patterns, an individual has been grasped by “the faciality machine,” from “inside” as well as from “outside.”

P.S. Regarding your story of the Indian village in Ecuador: “the faciality machine” was not designed as a universal model; there is also other semiotics.
Remarkably, many western intellectuals take refuge and become happy in faraway places – countries, deserts, mountains, islands, caves, etc. But if one stays,
at any site one is tested by direct eye contact. Are the Levinas’s Others looking at you and me everywhere? Or, are there just “the faciality machine” gazes?

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Reply to Number2018"To overcome a pure positivistic –behavioristic approach to a human as a cluster of subjectivities, we can apply the Deleuze-Guattari thought. Before becoming a cluster of behavioral patterns, an individual has been grasped by “the faciality machine,” from “inside” as well as from “outside.”"

I want to come back to something you said earlier. "If all my past experiences are present in my current “content”, doesn’t it mean that I am still enclosed in the totality of my mind? Even my intention to say something is no more than a simple repetition of the similar past intention."

Derrida has said:

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

What do you suppose this means?

Every time I talk to you about an intention, being, self that transforms itself in order to be itself, you say it is Cartesian, subjectivism, transcendentalism. Thta's because you are starting from presencing in your thinking. If we start from that basis, then it would seem that we would have to add a gesture of change, transformation, subversion, from the outside. That is to say, in a separate step. This is what the faciality machine implies, it is also what conditionings of various sorts imply.
What Derrida is getting at is that unity, 'itness', the mark, the 'is', being, the self, are already double in the 'instant' of their being a singularity. How can this be so? Because it is impossible to think of a singularity that is not a 'from this to that'. This differential is not first what was and what is. It IS as both absencing and presencing. Both together are the one, the 'it', the 'I.

Thinking in this way leads to a very different way of following any history. It may on the surface look like a Nietzschean-Deleuzian geneology.

You think that Heidegger is talking about what belongs to 'me' when he constructs his temporality.
But what does 'me' mean for him? What is me, mine, self, ipsiety? What is it for Derrida?
It implies same, reflection, coming back to itself. Can there be a self that doesnt come back to itself in order to know that it is the same? What if I were to tell you that for Derrida and Heidegger there is no such thing as 'the same' in the way that it has traditionally been thought?
No identity. Now, if this is so, would it not be impossible to ever talk about recognition, plurality, scheme, continuity, meaning? Can you imagine if it were the case that there was no possibility to gather, to be similar, to recall? There would be no possibility of a world. Does Deleuze posit such a philosophy? OF course not. He allows for plurality, continuity, pattern. That is why he uses a word like machine, rhizome, which implies pattern. But how do Derrida and Heidegger explain pattern and gathering if they argue what I am claiming about identity? They say memory is simply past, past is simply the past right now, the past right now is a new past. But it isnt a thing. It never is by itself. It is only ever together with a present. The present doesnt mean or say anything without this past , and the past doesnt mean or say anything without this present. Neither is an entity, scheme, horizon, thing, being, self. They are only poles of a singularity. The most irreducible thing we can imagine, that can exist, is a singularity, an entity, an 'it'. And as such, an entity, an 'it' IS these two poles. The 'what was that is now'.
The 'what was that is now' should not be thought as a sequence, because then we're splitting it into two entities. The most important thing to understand is that these two poles that comprise a singularity, an 'it', give the the origin of stability and change, of identity and alteration, of presence and absence, of form and content, of the transcendental and the empirical. And yet we can't say that we have either of these two oppositional conceptual domains. All we have is the suggestion of both domains within a singularity, within an 'it', an entity. How does a world appear at all from this starting point, which is of course only a 'point' if we remember that something as seemingly unitary as a point is already the two poles. A point is 'what was that is now' , a hinge, a bifurcation, a transit, a presencing and a subversion at the same time? (In fact this is the only meaning of temporality). The world is nothing but the repetition of differance as the hinged, bipolar unity. This is how Derrida and Heidegger get to call this an 'itself' . I again need to remind you to do the work and instead of falling back on old thinking that tempts you to call out Cartesianism!, Transcendental! whenever you hear the word 'itself', recognize how an 'itself' as the hinged differance repeats no identity back. We can call 'it' an 'it', knowing that an 'it' is two poles. So 'it' , itself' , self' , 'I', means two poles, means presence-absence, means transit, means "a differential structure escaping the logic of presence" as Derrida says. Can you see how such a determination of singularity, entityness, unity, immanence, comes before Deleuze's starting point, by already splitting apart and seeing as multiple what Deleuze renders as a simple 'it' ? Do you also see that the 'it', 'entity' ,self' is always already other than itself, because past-present as the indissociable, irreducible unity of singularity means two things at the same time? So the starting point for Derrida and Heidegger is being other as the singularity, and temporality is the repetition of being other(in always a new way. that's why it is temporal). Now comes the most difficult and important idea to understand. We cannot say that the singularity as being other is an opposition, a contradiction, a difference between.
That is the old way of thinking. only entities thought of a simple presences in themselves can be in opposition, contradiction, difference. Only when a thing is given the force of simple presence do we need to posit conditioning, shaping, intervention, subversion as the basis of relationality and change.
Only that which was never quite a presence to begin with never quite be subverted. IF there was no power of same, there is no force of alienation. There is instead a more insubstantial play .

This leads to the strange, paradoxical situation of deconstruction and Heideggerian destructuring.
There is never any gathering of the order of a self-consistency of a machinic or rhizomatic dynamic, but at the same time Derrida says "there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a 'style'". One will always be able to trace a thread, within any history, as geneology, of what seems almost , close to, like a continuity, a 'thematics', and changes of thematics will themselves seem to be close to, almost like a change that is itself authorized in relation to a thematics. The appearance of an ongoing thematics is an artifact of the intimacy of the repetition of differance. A thematics never simply affirms or upholds without the basis of the upholding being contaminated as it is upheld.

None of this so far gives you the pragmatic examples you want, but it is necessary as a starting point
You can't start with 'what works' without having a basis for understanding what 'working' could mean.

Reply to Joshs “The most important thing to understand is that these two poles that comprise a singularity, an 'it', give the the origin of stability and change, of identity”.
I do not understand how your interpretation of Heideggereian-Derridarian thought can explain the existence of identity, how it is grounded. And, you admit it:
“None of this so far gives you the pragmatic examples you want”.

“such a determination of singularity, entityness, unity, immanence, comes before Deleuze's starting point, by already splitting apart and seeing as multiple what Deleuze renders as a simple 'it'”.

As far as I know, Deleuze starts from “problematic”: a problem is an objectively determined structure that is in reciprocal, interdependent relations with its actual solutions. The problem has its differential relations, its reciprocally determined elements, and its singularities. Further, the problematic was developed into the notion of the virtual multiplicity, of the immanent, machinic reason. The immanent reason actualizes itself, and in being actualized, it differs from itself, it produces a difference, it is the production of the new. So, there is the process of differentiation/differensiation, which allowed Deleuze to unfold and develop his philosophy up to defining and explaining a variety of concrete examples from our social life, arts, science, cinema, literature, etc.

“I want to come back to something you said earlier. "If all my past experiences are present in my current “content”, doesn’t it mean that I am still enclosed in the totality of my mind? Even my intention to say something is no more than a simple repetition of the similar past intention… because you are starting from presenting in your thinking. If we start from that basis, then it would seem that we would have to add a gesture of change, transformation, subversion, from the outside. That is to say, in a separate step… That is the old way of thinking. only entities thought of a simple presences in themselves can be in opposition, contradiction, difference. Only when a thing is given the force of simple presence do we need to posit conditioning, shaping, intervention, subversion as the basis of relationality and change.”

I disagree. It is not about some additional gesture from the outside. When one discovers his/her location in the field of “problematic,” one faces the encounter with the outside forces. Further, one recognizes that all past experiences are caused by unconsciously taking part in a variety of machinic assemblages. Therefore, to avoid a mechanical reiteration caused by being trapped by the past, one needs to practice becoming, openness toward other machines. Anyway, one does not start from presenting in one’s thinking. One begins from shock, from pain, from desperation. If one recognizes that he/she repeats by saying the same, one should stop talking for a while.

“we would have to add a gesture of change, transformation, subversion, from the outside. That is to say, in a separate step. This is what the faciality machine implies, it is also what conditionings of various sorts imply.”… “A point is 'what was that is now' , a hinge, a bifurcation, a transit, a presencing and a subversion at the same time? (In fact this is the only meaning of temporality). The world is nothing but the repetition of differance as the hinged, bipolar unity. This is how Derrida and Heidegger get to call this an 'itself'”

I think I understand what you mean. You assume that “the faciality machine” comes from outside, whereas our way of being and thinking is pre-determined by Heideggerian– Derridarian primordial-fundamental structures. Therefore, the knowledge of this truth should be the first one’s priority. Further, one can find refuge, an immunity and protection even facing the challenges and realities of our world.
Nevertheless, the inside, the essential grounding structure (as you understand it) is the result of the constitutive exterior forces. The machines came to you when you were a child or a student. Your first meaningful utterances were formed by invisible social presuppositions,
they got you involved in a variety of particular social relations.
(the philosophic knowledge comes much later). If a pupil hears a teacher say 'working hard is good', this can be translated through a series of statements: 'She thinks that working hard is good', is then conjugated with 'If I please her, she will like me', so as to become 'I want to think that
. working hard is good', 'I think that working hard is good,' 'working hard is good.' Once the process becomes habitual, one can move straight from hearing the statement to repeating it. Belief in those who issue statements is not a precondition for subjectification, but a product. That is how the machine of faciality works: it comes and starts working through one’s early immediate social interactions, and it stays with one after becoming an adult.
By the way, you are right making a point that machines maintain identity and personal stability: one of the functions of “the faciality machine” is to select and support the certain conscious features, experiences of I,
in accordance to dominating social reality. Simultaneously, these machines are demolishing or pushing aside what they process as irrelevant and unnecessary.

Reply to Joshs
Heidegger wrote:
“Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” If so, what is required from us to start thinking?
“What must be thought about turns away from a man. It withdraws from him.
What withdraws from us draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or
not we become aware of it immediately, or at all. Once we are drawn into the
withdrawal, we are—albeit in a way quite different from that of migratory
birds—caught in the draft of what draws, attracts us by its withdrawal. And
once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward what draws us, our essential
being already bears the stamp of that “draft.”
To the extent that man is in this draft, he points toward what withdraws. As
he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. Man here is not first of all man,
and then also occasionally someone who points. No. Drawn into what
withdraws, drawn toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is the man. His essential being lies in being such a pointer. Something which in
itself, by its essential being, is pointing, we call a sign. As he draws toward
what withdraws, man is a sign. But since this sign points toward what draws
away, it points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal. The
sign remains without interpretation.”

So, to start thinking, we need to maintain a duality of Man and his transcendental,
essential truth. They support each other; they are like twins or the two sides
of this kind of thought. No doubt, this project is doing well so far.
Therefore, Foucault’s answer to this thought is still the actual one:
“To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.” Foucault’s fight was against the thought that facilitates the return of the man, the return of the Nietzschean “last man.”


“What Derrida is getting at is that unity, 'itness', the mark, the 'is', being, the self, are already double in the 'instant' of their being a singularity. How can this be so? Because it is impossible to think of a singularity that is not a 'from this to that'. This differential is not first what was and what is. It IS as both absencing and presencing. Both together are the one, the 'it', the 'I.”
This is the exact quote from Derrida:
”“is” neither this or that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither superior nor inferior, neither present nor absent, not even subject to a dialectic with the third moment. Despite appearances, then, it (differance) is neither concept nor even a name; it does lend itself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the structure of predictive discourse. It “is” not and does not say what it “is”.
If so, how could one grasp the starting point of Derrida’s philosophy?
Meister Eckhart, a medieval German theologian, said that “God is not”
rather than “God is”, because “x is” is a statement that is said of being like you and me, whereas God is eminently superior to being, beyond being. This allows God to appear in his “super-essential” eminence,
as far from all negation as he is from any affirmation. Therefore, one
finds here negative theology: Eckhart goes beyond affirmations (God is good) via negations (God is not good in the human sense of the term);
then, after overcoming negations, he attains God’s eminence (God’s
Goodness transcends all goodness). Simply, the formula of this transcendence is to say that something neither x nor not-x, because
it is beyond both. Derrida adopted this formula and it is grounded his notion of differance.
This notion is a powerful tool of deconstruction: the vast majority of philosophical texts still have “imprints” or “traces” of the withdrawn, disappeared,
or dead God – negative theology constitutes their essential structure.
Or, negative theology may inspire you to write new texts – it is like poetry, who can say that it is useless?
Nevertheless, how can “differance” be applied to the variety
of social, political, and technological realities of nowadays?

Reply to Number2018

"One recognizes that all past experiences are caused by unconsciously taking part in a variety of machinic assemblages. Therefore, to avoid a mechanical reiteration caused by being trapped by the past, one needs to practice becoming, openness toward other machines."

You're operating from a particular understanding of temporality. I discuss that here:


"The primordial ‘unit’ of experience is not a form that is transformed by contact with another entity, not a presence that is changed by a separate encounter with another presence, but an experience already other, more than itself in the very moment of being itself, not a form, presence or shining OCCUPYING space but already a self-exceeding, a transit, a being-otherwise. What I am suggesting is that there are no such things as discrete entities.

The irreducible basis of experience is the EVENT (many events can unfold within the supposed space of a single so-called entity). Events do not follow one another in time (or in parallel) as hermetically sealed links of a chain. Each event does not only bear the mark of influence of previous events, but carries them within it even as it transforms them. An event is a synthetic unity, a dynamic structure devoid of simply identity. In making this claim, I am contributing to an already rich philosophical discussion on the phenomenal experience of time. This conversation has recently been joined by a number of psychologists (See Gallagher(1998) , Van Gelder(1996) and Varela(1999b)), who support the idea of the nowness of the present as differentiated within itself. They recognize that the present is not properly understood as an isolated ‘now’ point; it involves not just the current event but also the prior context framing the new entity. We don’t hear sequences of notes in a piece of music as isolated tones but recognize them as elements of an unfolding context. As James(1978) wrote:”...earlier and later are present to each other in an experience that feels either only on condition of feeling both together” ( p.77).

The key question is how this ‘both together’ is to be construed. Is the basis of change within a bodily organization, interpersonal interaction, and even the phenomenal experience of time itself, the function of a collision between a separately constituted context and present entities? Or does my dynamic ‘now’ consist of a very different form of intentionality, a strange coupling of a past and present already changed by each other, radically interbled or interaffected such that it can no longer be said that they have any separable aspects at all? I contend that, even taking into account a significant diversity of views within the contemporary scene concerning the nature of time-consciousness, including critiques of James’ and Husserl’s perspectives, current psychologies conceive the ‘both-together’ of the pairing of past and present as a conjunction of separate, adjacent phases or aspects: the past which conditions the present entity or event, and the present object which supplements that past. I am not suggesting that these phases are considered as unrelated, only that they each are presumed to carve out their own temporary identities.

For instance, Zahavi(1999), following Husserl, views the internally differentiated structure of ‘now’ awareness as consisting of a retentional, primal impressional, and protentional phase. While he denies that these phases are “different and separate elements”(p.90), claiming them instead as an immediately given, ecstatic unity, their status as opposing identities is suggested by his depiction of the association between past and present as a fracturing, “... namely, the fracture between Self and Other, between immanence and transcendence”(p.134).

This Husserlian thematic, rendering past and present as an indissociable-but-fractured interaction between subject and object, inside and outside, reappears within a varied host of naturalized psychological approaches that link self-affection to an embodied neural organization of reciprocally causal relations among non-decoupleable parts or subprocesses. While these components interact constantly (Varela(1996b) says “...in brain and behavior there is never a stopping or dwelling cognitive state, but only permanent change punctuated by transient [stabilities] underlying a momentary act”(p.291) , it doesn’t seem as if one could go so far as to claim that the very SENSE of each participant in a neural organization is intrinsically and immediately dependent on the meanings of the others. I suggest it would be more accurate to claim that each affects and is affected by the others as a temporary homunculus (little man) or self perceives an object. Varela(1999a) offers "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"(p.52 ). The bare existence of each of these agents may be said to PRECEDE its interaction with other agents, in that each agent occupies and inheres in its own state, presenting its own instantaneous properties for a moment, apart from, even as it is considered conjoined to, the context which conditions it and the future which is conditioned by it.

Perhaps I am misreading Varela and other enactivist proponents . Am I saying that these contemporary accounts necessarily disagree with Merleau-Ponty’s(1968) critique of the idea of the object-in-itself?

...the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores(p.162).

On the contrary, as different as Merleau-Ponty’s and various enactivist accounts may be in other respects, it seems to me that they share a rejection of the idea of a constituted subjectivity encountering and representing an independent in-itself. Mark C. Taylor(2001) characterizes the enactivist ethos thusly; “Contrary to popular opinion and many philosophical epistemologies, knowledge does not involve the union or synthesis of an already existing subject and an independent object”( p.208). In a very general sense, what is articulated by Varela, Gallagher and others as the reciprocal, nondecoupleable interconnections within a dynamical system functions for Merleau-Ponty as the ‘flesh’ of the world; the site of reciprocal intertwining between an In Itself and a For Itself, subject and object, consciousness and the pre-noetic, activity and passivity, the sensible and the sentient, the touching and the touched. My point is that current accounts may also have in common with Merleau-Ponty the belief that subjective context and objective sense reciprocally determine each other as an oppositional relation or communication (Merleau-Ponty calls it an abyss, thickness or chiasm) between discrete contents. “...that difference without contradiction, that divergence between the within and without ... is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication(Merleau-Ponty 1968 ,p.135).”

By contrast, I assert that the ‘now’ structure of an event is not an intertwining relation between contingent, non-decoupleable identities, states, phases, but an odd kind of intersecting implicating perhaps a new understanding of intentionality; intentional object and background context are not adjacent regions(a within and a without) in space or time; they have already been contaminated by each other such that they are inseparably co-implied as a single edge (Try to imagine separating the ‘parts’ of an edge. Attempting to do so only conjures a new edge). Time itself must be seen in this way as immediately both real and ideal. Events don’t speak with their surrounds. They ARE their surrounds; the current context of an event is not a system of relations but an indivisible gesture of passage.
(FOOTNOTE: This gesture cannot be reduced to either a subjective mechanism of consciousness or to objective relations between particles. Like the idea of the inter-penetration of fact and value informing phenomenological philosophical perspectives, this is a quasi-transcendental(simultaneously subjective and empirical) claim concerning the irreducible nature of reality and time itself, and operates both as a pre-condition and a re-envisioning of subjective consciousness and empirical bodies.)

Gendlin(1997b), in his groundbreaking book 'A Process Model', offers an account of the nature of psychological organization which I consider in many respects closely compatible with my own. He explains:

In the old model something (say a particle or a body) exists, defined as filling space and time. Then it also goes through some process. Or it does not. It is defined as "it" regardless of the process "it" goes through. "It" is separate from a system of changes and relationships that are "possible" for "it."(p.50)...’In the old model one assumes that there must first be "it" as one unit, separate from how its effects in turn affect it...In the process we are looking at there is no separate "it," no linear cause-effect sequence with "it" coming before its effects determine what happens. So there is something odd here, about the time sequence. How can "it" be already affected by affecting something, if it did not do the affecting before it is in turn affected?...With the old assumption of fixed units that retain their identity, one assumes a division between it, and its effects on others. (This "it" might be a part, a process, or a difference made.) In the old model it is only later, that the difference made to other units can in turn affect "it."(p.40)
If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly...“Inter-affecting" and "coordination" are words that bring the old assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting". This makes sense only if one grasps that "they" inter-affect each other before they are a they(p.22).

Gendlin’s account somewhat resembles embodied cognitive and dynamical systems approaches in its rejection of symbolic representationalism and decoupleability, but I believe there are crucial differences. For instance, in current models, interaction spreads in a reciprocally causal fashion from point to point, whereas for Gendlin, each point somehow implies each other point; each part of a meaning organization somehow “knows about”, belongs to and depends intrinsically on each other part. And this happens before a part can simply be said to exist in itself(even if just for an instant). What kind of odd understanding concerning the interface between identity and relation could justify Gendlin's insistence that the inter-affection between parts of a psychological organization precedes the existence of individual entities? Allow me to creatively interweave Gendlin’s text with my own, and suggest that an ‘entity’ can never be understood as OCCUPYING a present state, even for a moment. Its very identity is differential not simply because its relevance is defined by its relation to its context (embodied cognitive notions of the subject-object relation), but because the essence of the event IS this intersection. What is other than, more than an event (its just-past) is built into its own center in such a way that the relation between events is never an arbitrary conditioning the way it seems to be allowed to be in current accounts( as I will discuss in more detail later). That is why an event is better conceived as a transit than a state.

The most important implication of this way of thinking about the organization of meaning and intention is that the interaction between events can be seen as maintaining a radical continuity and mutual dependency of implication. To say that an event exceeds itself , in the same moment and the same space, as both past and present, is not simply to think the now as immediately a differential between the new and a prior context. It is to envision a new event and the context out of which it arises as BELONGING to, PART OF each other’s senses in a radical way, rather than just as externally cobbled together spatially or temporally as a mutual grafting, mapping, mirroring, conditioning between little bodies. This duality within the event is not to be understood as a fracture, opposition or chiasm between an already composed past carried over from previous experience, and an arbitrary element of novelty related to this past across a divide of thickness.

As Gendlin(1997b) argues, ‘The continuity of time cannot first be made by things next to each other, because such a continuity is passive; each bit IS alone, and must depend on some other continuity to relate it to what is next to it...”(p.71). For instance, fresh intentional experience does not simply sit alongside a prior context; it explicates the immediate past ( Gendlin characterizes this past as an an implicatory whole):

...explication is not a representation of what “was” implicit; rather explication carries the implying with it and carries it forward. An explication does not replace what it explicates. If one divided them, one could try to divide between what is new and what is from before. Then one part of the explication would be representational, and the other part would be arbitrary. An occurring that carries forward is an explicating. It is neither the same nor just different. What is the same cannot be divided from what is different (p.71).

What does it mean to say that what is the same can’t be divided from what is different? I would like to suggest that the very being of an event of meaning already is composed partly of that which it is not, that which it is no longer. The role which this ’no-longer’ plays isn’t just as a duplication of ‘what it was’ . It is a fresh, never before experienced version of my past which forms part of the essence of a new event for me. What do I mean by this? Not only does a fresh event belong to, carry forward, imply the immediate context which it transforms, but this inter-contamination between past and present operates at the same time in the opposite direction. The carried-forward past which, as I have said, inseparably belongs to a new event, is already affected by this fresh present. What does this imply? Gendlin(1997b) explains, “When the past functions to "interpret" the present, the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”(p.37 ).

It is not as if other accounts do not recognize the transformative character of recollection. It would be pointed out by any psychologist who had digested Merleau-Ponty's lessons concerning reflection that the attempt to return repeatedly to an object of attention in order to preserve its identity hopelessly contaminates the purity of that identity with the sediments of new context.
(FOOTNOTE:Mark C. Taylor writes:”Neither complete nor finished, the past is repeatedly recast by a future that can never be anticipated in a present that cannot be fixed. Anticipation re-figures recollection as much as recollection shapes expectation.”(The Moment of Complexity,2001,p.198)).

My claim is not, however, that the past is partially or eventually affected by the present, but that its modification is globally and immediately implied by present experience. The past is inseparable from the future which is framed by it. Because all meanings are referential, they don't appear out of thin air but from a prior context. On the other hand, the past in its entirety is at the same time implied and transformed in present context. There is no past available to us to retrieve as an archive of presumably temporarily or partially preserved events of meaning.


"The inside, the essential grounding structure (as you understand it) is the result of the constitutive exterior forces. The machines came to you when you were a child or a student. Your first meaningful utterances were formed by invisible social presuppositions,
they got you involved in a variety of particular social relations."

Here's a snippet from a paper of mine:

My Norms Are Not Your Norms:

Once the radically self-transformational, already fully ‘social’ character of so-called solitary self-reflection is recognized, it becomes clear that my experiences of direct interaction with other persons are but (categorically indistinct) extensions of this primary intersubjectivity. Thus, just as in my private experience, in interacting with others in the world I do not rely on detached internal schemes, in the form of a canned ‘folk psychology’(Dennett) or theory of mind (Baron-Cohen), in order to make the actions of others intelligible to me. Instead, interpersonal understanding, like solitary reflection, is an on-the-fly, non-autonomous, contextually created process. A number of cognitive researchers( Bruner, Gallagher, Ratcliffe, etc) may claim that their own critiques of folk psychology and theory of mind approaches, guided by their advocacy of socially embedded models of psychological processes, demonstrate their having moved beyond the essentialistic tendencies I have cited in this paper .

Gallagher writes:” a set of cultural norms is learned through practice such that these become second nature. By this means common expectations that are meant to apply to all, equally, are established. By learning how I ought to behave in such and such a circumstance, I learn how you ought to behave as well. And this supplies a ready guide to your behavior in so far as you do not behave abnormally. Such learning does not take the form of internalizing explicit rules (at least not as a set of theoretical propositions), nor does it depend on applying ones that are somehow built-in sub-personally. It involves becoming accustomed to local norms, coming to embody them, as it were, through habit and practice. “ Ratcliffe(2007) suggests that “many thoughts, interpretations and viewpoints ...belong to nobody in particular and are shared products of interaction”(Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation, Palgrave Macmillan, p..175).

Notice that the claim by Gallagher and others that individual behavior in social situations is guided by narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints implies the belief that essentially the same social signs are available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency . This is not to say that these accounts deny any role to individual psychological history in the reception of social signs, only that such accounts allow for a sort of cobbling , mapping, mirroring or co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints’ of such interactive bodily-mental and social practices are treated as pre-metaphorical objects-in-themselves. That social interaction for these writers depends on a grafting of one content onto another is suggested by the argument(Gallagher and Hutto(in press), Ratcliffe(2007), Gopnick and Mettzoff(1997)) that linguistic-cultural intersubjectivity is derived from a more primary intersubjectivity , an innately structured ‘intermodal tie’ between one’s proprioceptive bodily feedback and one’s perception of another that is supposedly direct and unmediated. Gallagher cites mirror neuron studies in support of the view that “we innately map the visually perceived motions of others onto our own kinesthetic sensations”(Gopnick and Metzoff ,1997,p.129).

I maintain that what is implicated for me in an interpersonal social situation is not `the' social forms as shared homunculi, based on what Gallagher calls a ‘common body intentionality’ between perceived and perceiver, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which one could say are unique to the implicative thrust of my own construing, belonging to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity.

For even the most apparently trivial cultural routine (getting on a plane, ordering in a restaurant), what I perceive as socially `permitted', ‘constrained’, ’regulated’ or ‘normed’ behavior and understanding of signs is already qualitatively distinctive in relation to what other participants recognize. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history(which is itself reshaped by its participation in these situations) , even when they believe that their interpersonal interactions are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their language community.

Is this resistance of my thinking to would-be interpersonal norms a retreat from a model of full social embeddedness into a person-centered solipsistic essentialism of rule-based mental modules? On the contrary, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner, producing every moment a global reshaping of my sense of myself and others outpacing the transformative impetus realized via a narrative conception of socialization. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I’ or interpersonal ‘we’, there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective-objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies or between-person conditionings."

Reply to Number2018 "Simply, the formula of this transcendence is to say that something neither x nor not-x, because it is beyond both. Derrida adopted this formula and it is grounded his notion of differance."

This is not what differance is about. Derrida's famous phrase 'there is nothing outside the text, means nothing outside context. When Derrida says that differance is neither presence nor absence he does not mean that it is BEYOND them, that it transcends them .
Rather , it is presupposed by them; it is WITHIN them. Why? Because we don't realize that what we think of as the simple presence of a name, a concept , an absence(because simple absence or negation is also thought of as a presence-to-itself) , an entity, a thing, a singularity, is already a transit, even before we pair it with something else. It is already split within itself in order to be itself as transit, already ahead of itself as itself, already an event, a plurality, as an entity Parasitism precedes identity.


Derrida writes, "...an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces"(P29). He adds:

"The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself(P26)"

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this
identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual
"element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or
fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

Reply to Joshs Thank you for interesting reading. I think that Gendlin’s insights are indeed right and useful, so I understand your enthusiasm about him. I just want to point out that it looks like Gendlin’s work is isolated from a variety of socio-political contexts. Let's compare Gendlin vs. Deleuze approaches. Gendlin: “each point somehow implies each other point; each part of a meaning organization somehow “knows about,” belongs to and depends intrinsically on each other part.” Deleuze: ”The diagram or
abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which
proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, or rather in any relation from one point to another…The diagram acts as a non-unifying
immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like
the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations, and these relations between forces take place “not above,” but within the very tissue of the assemblages they
produce”. Probably you will point out, that Gendlin’s theory, differently from Deleuze’s, is much closer to the contemporary cognitive psychology’s field and is written in a more understandable language, and you will be right. Yet, I am sure, Deleuze’s thought has a huge potential and flexibility. Instead of pointing that “each point somehow implies each other point;” (I would like to draw your attention to the word somehow), Deleuze provides an immanent and elaborated approach. “Notice that the claim by Gallagher and others that individual behaviour in social situations is guided by narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices, and social constraints implies the belief that essentially the same social signs are available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency”. From the reading of your post, I found that there is a vast gap between Gendlin’s insights and Gallager’s approach.
According to Gallager, individual behavior is based on the belief of those who interrelate in a particular community. So, the is a double affirmation of the primordial Ego
and I – the individual, who believes, and the union, the identity of a community.
“there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency” – why meanings ?(it again implicitly assumes an individual mind),
but what is this agency? Why it is just expressive? It could be interesting to compare and contrast the functions of this “impersonal expressive agency” with Deleuze-Guattari”s machines.

“I would like to suggest that the very being of an event of meaning already is composed partly of that which it is not, that which it is no longer. The role which this ’no-longer’ play isn’t just as a duplication of ‘what it was.’ It is a fresh, never before experienced version of my past which forms part of the essence of a new event for me. What do I mean by this? Not only does a fresh event belong to, carry forward, imply the immediate context, which it transforms, but this inter-contamination between past and present operates at the same time in the opposite direction. The carried-forward past which, as I have said, inseparably belongs to a new event, is already affected by this fresh present.”

I do not understand how your comprehension of the event is compatible with your assertion: “Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history(which is itself reshaped by its participation in these situations) , even when they believe that their interpersonal interactions are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their language community”.
I understand - unique as a collectively taking part in the same event, or a unique as a personal story?
From one side, you affirm a radical, transcendental version of temporality. From another one,
you assert that each individual has his/her own unique history,( May be I misunderstood you), that one has beliefs about the same discursive conventions. ( the notion of belief should be clarified). There are some controversies between your grounding points and your conclusions about the social. In my opinion, Deleuze’s account on the event is no less radical, but it is much more comprehensive and allows the smooth and non-controversial transition from the grounding theory to the social applications.

Reply to Joshs Quoting Joshs

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this
identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual
"element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or
fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

But, what is “a priory
differential structure escaping the logic of presence”? Derrida: ‘there may be a difference still more unthought than the difference between Being and beings…. It ceaselessly
differing from and differing (itself), would trace itself from itself – this difference would be the first or last trace if one still could speak, here, of origin and end.” So, Derrida attempts to establish the formal structure, aimed to transcend any possible and thought presence. But, if this formal structure is laid out beyond the capacity of one’s thought, how can one achieve the knowledge of this truth? The answer is that one should undertake a persistent exploration of the experience of “difference”,in Derrida’s terms
“the experience of impossible”: “If the gift is another name for the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it in its present existence or its phenomenon.” So, to philosophize, one
should desire to achieve impossible. Further, this impossible is called the Idea of justice,
which is an infinitely transcendent Idea that is unknowable, and is independent of any determinable context. We can experience the Idea of justice practically as a call, as a call for justice, as an absolute demand for justice; on the other hand, this Idea provides us no rule for determining what is just or unjust. (One can find here an affinity with the Calvinist version of the protestant doctrine). Therefore, in spite of denying the presence of both Being as well as being, Derrida’s philosophy is based on a few strong a priory transcendental principles, one of them is the passionate search for the absolute Other: “To go toward the absolute other, isn’t it the extreme tension of a desire that tries thereby to renounce its own proper momentum…
And since we do not determine ourselves before this desire, since no relation to self can be sure of preceding it, of preceding a relation to the other, all reflection is caught in the genealogy of this genitive”.
You claim that “difference” is not about the transcendence:
“When Derrida says that differance is neither presence nor absence he does not mean that it is BEYOND them, that it transcends them.
Rather, it is presupposed by them; it is WITHIN them. Why? Because we don't realize that what we think of as the simple presence of a name, a concept, an absence(because simple absence or negation is also thought of as a presence-to-itself), an entity, a thing, a singularity, is already a transit, even before we pair it with something else. “
However, even if formally “differance” rejects the presence of Being, yet anyway, its a priory structure is just one side of the Derrida’s project. Another essential part is the passionate search for the transcendence, for unachievable and unknown absolute law.
And, passion for an absolute law is the engine, which is moving the process of “differance.”
Deleuze’s formula of Derrida’s philosophy is: “Having no object and being only pure form, the law cannot be a domain of knowledge but is exclusively the domain of an absolute practical necessity…The law is operative only in being stated and stated only in an act of punishment: a statement directly inscribed on the real, on the body and on the flesh; a practical statement opposed to any sort of speculative proposition.”
When Derrida wrote: ” division, delay, d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _must be capable of being brought to a certain absolute degree of absence for the structure of writing, supposing that writing exists, to be constituted. It is here that d_i_f_f_é _r_a_n_c_e_ _as writing could no longer (be) an (ontological) modification of presence. It must be repeatably iterable in the absolute absence of the addressee or of the empirically determinable set of addressees. Writing that was not structurally legible iterable beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence, "death," or the possibility of the "death" of the addressee, inscribed in the structure of the mark. in this, way).”
Doesn’t this quote confirm what Deleuze says?
What iterability does - "The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this
identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference” – it is “writing of the differance”, and it is writing for itself that deconstructs, destroys both the writer and the addressee.

P.S. As far as I know, nowadays, if one honestly practices the search of the Absolute in his/her everyday life, the socium marginalizes, isolates, and pushes one to the desert of loneliness. (Unless one is protected by membership in some religious organization). Did Derrida himself, by his own life, set an example of a heroic, passionate search for the Absolute?

Consciousness is the localization of the non-local; sense data, is better put here data/mind; experience is of the external but it's localized into a conscious observer.

There's no multiplex; consciousnesses are separate to each other.

As you can see there is no conscious A.I that recharges and recallibrates like the human body.

Consciousness is like a rolex watch that charges as you move your wrist.

Sexual intercourse leads to reproduciton, and what's re-produced is a vessel who's momentum is self-sustaining on the planet using it's nature (oxygen, land, etc).

Consciousness is dependant on the non-local, so it's not a multiplex, but a unity (with consciousness support).

Reply to kill jepetto

Can't you be conscious of things that are mental-only? That wouldn't be the non-local.

What's mental-only?
Reply to Terrapin Station

Reply to kill jepetto

Thoughts, imaginings, desires, emotions, etc.

but are these not a product of mind with world/simulation?

Foi ex. I can now imagine a tree because I have seen one; it's likely I comes first, or something I-like, because it has memory.

Quoting kill jepetto

but are these not a product of mind

That's what I'm saying. Something that's a product of mind. That's not non-local if the location we're talking about is mind.

I said of the mind with world/simulation; therefore, it is always at least associated with the world.

Reply to kill jepetto

Ah--and I just noticed that you said NOT a product of mind. (I overlooked the "not" because it's so weird ;-) )

So you don't believe that imagining is something that minds do?

something is always derived from universe.

Reply to kill jepetto '

"Derived from" is different than "is," no?

Peanut butter is derived from peanuts. Is peanut butter the same thing as peanuts?

ELP's "Knife Edge" is derived from Janacek's Sinfonietta. Is "Knife Edge" the same as Sinfonietta?

partially peanuts, and if we're asking the question where did consciousness arise from it clearly is the universe (rather than coming from nothing, you come from sexual intercourse that has momentum enough to create your consciousness; consciousness derives from universe, where human pairs can exist. Where do thoughts arise from; can be traced to universe interaction as well as mind; however - mind is clearly also in the picture. Mind does simulate thought process, but this thought process wouldn't happen without the stimulation from world or environment.

Even if you existed in space - you would still observe an environment - any thoughts you have are co-existent between mind and universe; even if it is just that space; what would you think?

Reply to kill jepetto

Whoa--way too much writing as a response. I didn't read that because it's getting away form the conversation. I wanted you to answer the questions I asked. Let's try it this way: does "x is derived from y" imply "x is identical to y"? (That's a yes or no question. Answer yes or no, please, or alternately, explicitly tell me why yes or no doesn't work as an answer.)

Reply to Terrapin Station

when did i say it was identical? your original answer was disorientated.

Reply to kill jepetto

Okay, so I want to talk about imaginings, desires, etc. qua imaginings, desires, etc. The identical stuff. Not related stuff. Let's stick to the very thing I'm bringing up.

Do you believe those things are mental-only, or do you believe they occur elsewhere?

I'm not asking you about necessary preconditions or anything like that. I'm just asking you about imaginings, desires, emotions, etc. per se.

It is the localized non-local; I am definitely experiecing an outside to sense; as well as being a sensory organism, consciousness is not, but is derived from the non-local, much like peanut butter and peanuts.

Reply to kill jepetto

"Derived from the non-local" isn't at all something I'm asking you about. I'm not asking you about derivation. I'm asking about desires, say, qua desires. Not what desires are derived from.

Desires are mental phenomena, no?

Yes, they are; but aren't they also derived from the non-local? (You should see what I'm saying here).

Quoting kill jepetto

Yes, they are; but aren't they also derived from the non-local? (You should see what I'm saying here).

At the moment, I don't at all care what they're derived from--I'm not asking you about that. You agree that "x is derived from y" doesn't imply "x is identical to y." I'm asking you about x, as x. Not what x is derived from. So can we please stop talking about what it's derived from for a moment? If you want to go back to that later we can, but let me ask what I want to ask you first.

So if desires are mental phenomena, they're local to minds, aren't they?

Reply to Terrapin Station

Yes.

So if you can be conscious of a desire, wouldn't that just be local, and not "localized non-local"?

no.

Reply to kill jepetto

What's the non-local part in this case?

the shape of a tree is as new to mind.

Quoting kill jepetto

the shape of a tree is as new to mind.

No idea what you're saying here.

one example of the non local aspect is the shape of a tree; you create it in mind, but before you can do this you need original environment where a tree shape can at least be theorized.

Reply to kill jepetto


"Before you can do this". We understand that we're not talking about the preconditions for anything, right?

I don't know why you went back to "imagining a tree," but okay, let's use that. We're not talking about what imagining a tree is derived from, or preconditions necessary for it or anything like that. We're supposed to be talking about stuff that's only identical to the imagining per se.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

Gallagher writes:” a set of cultural norms is learned through practice such that these become second nature. By this means common expectations that are meant to apply to all, equally, are established. By learning how I ought to behave in such and such a circumstance, I learn how you ought to behave as well. And this supplies a ready guide to your behavior in so far as you do not behave abnormally. Such learning does not take the form of internalizing explicit rules (at least not as a set of theoretical propositions), nor does it depend on applying ones that are somehow built-in sub-personally. It involves becoming accustomed to local norms, coming to embody them, as it were, through habit and practice. “ Ratcliffe(2007) suggests that “many thoughts, interpretations and viewpoints ...belong to nobody in particular and are shared products of interaction”(Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation, Palgrave Macmillan, p..175).

Notice that the claim by Gallagher and others that individual behavior in social situations is guided by narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints implies the belief that essentially the same social signs are available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency .

I am not sure that you correctly interpreted the Gallagher and Hutto approach. As Fiebich, Gallagher, and Hutto -https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311984200_Fiebich_Gallagher_and_Hutto_2016_Pluralism_interaction_and_the_ontogeny_of_social_cognition
wrote: “people typically use folk psychological narrative practices when understanding
other people behavior in terms of beliefs and desires, are built upon socially-supported story-telling activities and are needed to be understood as skillful know-how.” Combining with their another assertion that “there is reason to think that the great balk of basic socio-cognitive processes do not obviously or necessarily rely on any kind of mental state attribution”, one could conclude that in spite using the notion of “belief”, their meaning of it is quite different from
the traditional one. Also, so far I could not find that they assume “that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency.” (Maybe, you referred here to Gallagher and Hutto’ book?) In the article, they write about the set of socio-cognitive skills or competencies, acquired through the three stages of ontogeny. When you write about “non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency” it is possible to understand that you assume that the meanings are originated in a kind of Being.
(I am not sure that I understood you correctly; this part is the most interesting for me)

Reply to Number2018 By impersonal expressive agency I meant a meaning that could assimilated as more or less the same by multiple participants in a social enterprise. Gallagher's concept of distributed cognition captures this idea.

"In regard to planning out a long-term project or short-term joint action, prospective
deliberation or reflective thinking (e.g., in the context of forming D-intentions or planning
out how to do things) can be a social process, as in the case of my wife and I deliberating
about buying a new car. We can reflect together via communicative actions, about what we
want to do, or about how we should go about doing it. What my initial individual intention
might have been can change through this communicative process into an intention that is
not reducible to just my or your individual intention. There’s no problem here of speaking
about a collectively formed intention. But we can ask, “where” does a collectively formed
intention reside? In our individual minds? Or in what can be called a socially extended
mind, or institution (Gallagher 2013), or what Alessandro Duranti (2015) calls a socially
distributed cognition (Duranti 2015: 219). Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive
processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established
institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve
problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies,
environments, institutional structures, etc."

"Distributed cognition(originated by cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins) means the
distribution of knowledge throughout environments—instructions, instruments, other
people, etc., Gibsonian affordances; Goodwin’s semiotic resources; Searle’s “Background”;
Bourdieu’s habitus. Yes to all of this, but I want to add, narratives too."

"Narrative can work as part of distributed cognition, or in contexts of collective intentionality and group agency."
"Narrative practices can lead to a collective sense of joint agency (in ways that go beyond simply the
sharing of individual mental events); they can help to shape group identity; they can solve problems of
stability of intentions and projects across time; they can provide resources for problem solving; and
provide ways to track progress toward a goal."

"To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends
those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group
members or the group as a whole. Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy)
of their own and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual
members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and
practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they
can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us
to other possibilities."

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

As James(1978) wrote:”...earlier and later are present to each other in an experience that feels either only on condition of feeling both together” ( p.77).

The key question is how this ‘both together’ is to be construed. Is the basis of change within a bodily organization, interpersonal interaction, and even the phenomenal experience of time itself, the function of a collision between a separately constituted context and present entities? Or does my dynamic ‘now’ consist of a very different form of intentionality, a strange coupling of a past and present already changed by each other, radically interbled or interaffected such that it can no longer be said that they have any separable aspects at all?

If one agrees with you that this is the key question, it is worth considering your answer(s):
1)“my dynamic ‘now’ consist of a very different form of intentionality, a strange coupling of a past and present already changed by each other, radically interblend or interaffected such that it can no longer be said that they have any separable aspects at all?” 2)“the past is partially or eventually affected by the present, but that its modification is globally and immediately implied by present experience. The past is inseparable from the future, which is framed by it. Because all meanings are referential, they don't appear out of thin air but from a prior context. On the other hand, the past in its entirety is at the same time implied and transformed in present context. There is no past available to us to retrieve as an archive of presumably temporarily or partially preserved events of meaning.” 3) I maintain that what is implicated for me in an interpersonal social situation is not `the' social forms as shared homunculi, based on what Gallagher calls a ‘common body intentionality’ between perceived and perceiver, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which one could say are unique to the implicative thrust of my own construing, belonging to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity.”
Definitely, it is difficult to disagree with your comprehension of the event and its temporalities; it contains conventional and correct truths and observations.
Nevertheless, your vision of the event is still incomplete and lacking a few key components. How could one present “present”? When we write or say something about our current present, we must think of the time of the occurrence of our sentences, which is our present time. This present time cannot be grasped as such: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp the presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event.
Further, what stands behind the presenting present is the “duration or the opened whole, a spiritual reality which constantly changes according to its own relations. The whole creates itself, and constantly creates itself in another dimension without parts – like that which carries along the set of one qualitative state to another, like the pure ceaseless becoming which passes through this states”. What is missing in your account on the event – is the whole of our time. Indeed, there is a paradoxical situation – often, when one tries to represent the event, one actually exercises a mastery of self over self, and takes the risk of isolating himself and his representation from the whole. Indeed, the event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It invokes that the self is essentially passible to recurrent alterity. If one tries to get access to the event through the ready-made, pre-existing theories, and models, one can successfully protect and keep untouched his/her own identity, paying the price of isolation and illusiveness. So, to take account of our present time one should get exposed to its explosive differentials and tendencies. Uncontained and emerging, they are arising, coming passionately out of immanence, directly affecting one’s mind and avoiding any representational forms. They compose life’s field of exteriority. (This is the second key point that should be added to your apprehension of temporalities.) Further, the duration of the present has an ethical-political dimension – our institutions, quazi-institutions, and numerous
apparatuses of capture function as motional-relational knots that come to stand out as saliencies against the background activity from which they arise; they stratify and maintain the field of life, simultaneously extracting surplus value,
necessary for unlimited expansion and growth of our neoliberal capitalistic society. Without this dimension of the opened whole, any model of time would be just one more limited and artificial theory.
Brian Massumi:
“The historical task of philosophy cannot be achieved solely through empirical analysis
of actually existing formations. It must dedicate itself to the superempirical flushing out of what in-forms the very possibility of empirical analysis. It must be radically empirical. Radical empiricism is defined by the postulate that relationality is a mode of reality in its own right, and that relation can be directly perceived (if only as in-forming the immediacy of its effects).
Preemption, it is argued, is the most powerful operative logic of the present. It is the untimely force of attraction around which the field of power is bending. They are not binaries. They are divergent procession destinations. Binaries are general abstractions. They have to do with contradiction and opposition
on the level of meaning. The limits toward which a tendency tends are poles bounding a dynamic field of the process. They never come alone, and no sooner come in pairs than proliferate into a many. The multiplicity of the tendencies they orient and of the apparatuses tending the tendencies are expressions of the productive paradox of the operative logic. The paradox of the operative logic in-forms each and every tendential expression. It is everywhere immanent to the processual field, constitutive of its very problematic nature. It is the field’s constitutive immanent limit. This limit answers, at an abstract distance, across the spacing out and stringing along in the time of cases of the solution, to the field’s ulterior limits, or the ideal endpoints bounding the field’s furthest reaches. Its answer takes the form of inflection of the field’s problematic working-out, tendentially bent as by an ulterior motive. The constitutive immanence of the problematic
node—of the conceptual formula that is the engine of the process—means that it is in every iteration of a case of a solution, throughout the field, in every spacing-out that it is in every timing, everywhere, always and again tendentially inflected by its own ulterior reaching. This is why the ulterior limit is not an “outside” limit in any usual sense of the term: it abstractly folds into the operative logic’s working-out. This is also why the conceptual formula is nonlocal. It in-forms each singular event in the series with its productive tensions and resolving infections. It returns as the matrix for each iteration. “

Reply to Number2018 "How could one present “present”? When we write or say something about our current present, we must think of the time of the occurrence of our sentences, which is our present time. This present time cannot be grasped as such: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp the presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event."

Heidegger does a good job of explaining this. Each of the steps you mention, bringing something into view as something new, having it present, presenting it, grasping it, identifying it, using and referring to it, these are all further articulations which do refer back to that which they articulate , but in articulating further they subtly change what they articulate , by bringing out something new about it. This isn't a problem for us because such steps are experienced as dealing with, examining, having, pointing to, positing something present. Each transforms what it deals with in its own way, as bringing it into view in THIS or THAT manner.

I've begun reading Deleuze again. I assume that is who you are quoting along with Massumi.
Deleuze starts his philsophy from structures, forms, schemes,states that are always already interacting with each other. There is always multiplicity from the start, and yet, inside of multiplicity are temporary states, forms, frames, enclosures.

I write about this.

Heidegger and Derrida on Structure and Form.


Philosophers in the post Hegel era, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, have recognized that Being, if it is to overcome metaphysics, must take into account, imply, differentiate from, structural beings while not being a structure itself. As a subject constructs and organizes an object via a valuative account, the object is conditioned by this subjective activity. But if that were the end of it, we would not move past Kant’s conditions of possibility. The subject must in turn be reciprocally conditioned by the object. The object grounded by the subject and the subject grounded by the object is a non-grounded grounding, or more precisely, an activity of reciprocal transformation.
. Heidegger was committed to forging a path of thinking integrating, without succumbing to, the dominant philosophical traditions of the 20th century(dialectical and Neo-Kantian subjectivism and positivist empiricism).
Heidegger laid the groundwork for this path in Being and Time. Being distinguishes itself as the unity of the mutual carrying out and trans-formative nature of beings-being. BT's challenge was to formulate the Ontological-Ontic Difference in such a way as to avoid rendering Being as grounding condition of possibility for beings, as unconditioned master concept, a first principle. Via the ontological difference, "Being grounds beings, and beings, as what IS most of all, account for Being. One comes over the other, one arrives in the other. Overwhelming and arrival appear in each other" (Heidegger, Identity and Difference).
With the era initiated by the Kehre, Heidegger further developed a way to think the overcoming of the self-contradiction of a grounding concept that seeks to overcome objectification. Ereignis performs the unity of the difference between Being and Beings as differentiating event.


If Heideggerian Being takes into account, implies, differentiates from, structural beings while not being a structure itself, what does it mean for beings to ’have a structure’? Words like rote and mechanical depict the effects of structure as generator of process of repetition of a dominating theme. And this is what many scholars target in Heidegger’s critique of technology and Gestell. But what is a structure in and of itself, prior to and outside of its production-reproduction? What is the meaning of structure as momentary state, before it is thought as programmatic process, as conversion, formulaic self-unfolding?

Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures, outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints. When thought as pattern, the structural-transcendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. The particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the internal configuration that defines the structure as structure. History would be the endless reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm.


It is this presumed schematic internality of eventness, the power of abstractive multiplicity given to the sign, which causes experience to be treated as resistant to its dislocation, as a lingering or resistant form, pattern, configuration, infrastructure. Of the numerous philosophers since Hegel who have attempted to resuce the subject-object scheme-content relation from metaphysical domination(Kierkegaard, Gadmaer, Levinas, Nietzsche), Heidegger and Derrida are the first to question and dismantle the very possibility of structure-pattern-scheme as subject or object. How so?

Let us examine the phenomenon of structure more closely. How is structure composed? What is the structurality of structure? Contemporary philosophical thinking outside of Heidegger and Derrida tends to think the spatial frame of structure as enclosure of co-present elements. It is an internality, full presence, a resting in itself and an auto-affection. Structure would be a pattern framing a finite array of elements . It would be a system of classification, a vector or center of organization. We can think pattern in abstract(the structure of democracy) or concrete( the structure of a house) terms. A structure has properties in the minimal sense that it is defined by its center, that which organizes and, determines it thematically as that which is the bearer of its attributes, that according to which its elements are aligned. Structure is plurality of the identical.

If a structure is an organization of elements, those elements themselves are structures. The object is structure in that it is self-presence, its turning back to itself in order to be itself as presence, subsistence, auto-affection, the ‘this as itself’. Therefore structure would be irreducible. It would be the primordial basis of beings as objects (point of presence, fixed origin) as internality, space as frame, subsistence, pure auto-affection, representation , category, law, self-presence itself. Also value, will, norm. So much rides on where we begin from in thinking about beginnings.

In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.

“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352)


“The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc p53)."


In their essence, Beings don’t HAVE structure or constitution. There is no such THING as a form, a structure, a state. There is no trans-formation but rather a trans-differentiation, (transformation without form, articulation as dislocation) What is being transcended is not form but difference. Each of the elements in the array that define a structure are differences .They do not belong to a structure . They are their own differentiation. There is no gathering, cobbling , synthesis, relating together, only a repetition of differentiation such that what would have been called a form or structure is a being the same differently from one to the next. Not a simultaneity but a sequence. So one could not say that form of nature is the way in which nature transitions through and places itself into the forms and states that, from a schematic perspective, constitute the path of its movement, and nature turns into natural things, and vice versa. Nature would not transition through forms and states, Nature, as difference itself, transitions though differential transitions. Differences are not forms. Forms are enclosures of elements organized according to a rule. Forms give direction. Difference does not give direction, it only changes direction. What are commonly called forms are a temporally unfolding system of differences with no organizing rule, no temporary ‘it’. The transformation is from one differential to the next before one ever gets to a form.

Schemes, conceptual, forms, intentions, willings have no actual status other than as empty ontic abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the senses operating within (and defining) such abstractions in subtle but global ways concealed by but overrunning what ontically understood symbols, bits, assemblies, bodies, frames and other states are supposed to be , even if (and especially when) Ereignis as transformative event names the overturning of being as Ge-stell. The briefest identification of a so-called state is an unknowing experiencing of temporally unfolding multiplicity of differences. This is the ontological being of the ontic notion of structure, in the service of which Heidegger puts the old word to work as its deconstruction. In Heidegger’s fundamental ontological ‘forms’ one finds nothing like a structure in any commonly understood sense, only what would be difference as the hermeneutical ‘as’, heedful association, ‘being underway’, producing, project, existing, temporality, care, the 'is', disclosiveness.


In BT, ‘What is a Thing’ and other writings, Heidegger describes a structure-thing as the bearer of properties and underlies qualities. A thing is a nucleus around which many changing qualities are grouped, or a bearer upon which the qualities rest, something that possesses something in itself. It has an internal organization. But Heidegger doesn’t settle for this present to hand account. In a gesture allied with Derrida, he thinks the structurality of structure as the Being of beings. But he doesn’t do this by conceiving Being via the transitioning through and placing itself into, the turning toward and away from, structures, forms, schemes. This would be to pre-suppose the metaphysical concept of structure as present to hand state, and thus leave it unquestioned. It would not only leave it unquestioned , but confuse ontological-ontic difference with ontic-ontic difference. What I see Heidegger doing is locating transformation within structure, as Derrida does in his own way. Heidegger’s discussion of propositional statements in BT sec 33 is key here. In this section he derives the apophantic ‘as’ structure of propositional logic from the hermeneutical ‘as’.

As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating. Heidegger instead describes the 'as' as a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together." Transcendence locates itself in this way within the very heart of the theoretical concept. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It "understands, interprets, and articulates", and thereby "takes apart" and changes what it affirms by merely pointing at it, by merely having it happen to 'BE' itself.
Heidegger’s hermeneutical ‘as’ functions as Derrida’s differential system of signs. Something is something only as differential . Articulation of the ‘is’ transforms in order to articulate. That is, articulation, hinge, IS the ‘in order to’. Thus, the problem of the primordial grounding of the ’is', and the analysis of the logos are the same problem.
Heidegger writes:

"...if the formal characteristics of "relation" and "binding" cannot contribute anything
phenomenally to the factual structural analysis of the logos, the phenomenon intended with the term copula finally has nothing to do with bond and binding."(BT,p160)
"The "is" here speaks transitively, in transition. Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings. But Being does not leave its own place and go over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could be approached by Being subsequently. Being transits (that), comes unconcealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that coming-over." “That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other."(Identity and Difference.p.64)

This is the method of Heidegger’s decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.
The thinking of structure as a singularity implies a multiplicity of supposed ‘parts’ captured in an instant of time. But the assumption that we think this parallel existence of differences at the ‘same time’, as the ‘same space’, organized and centered as a ‘THIS’, must unravel with the knowledge that each differential singular is born of and belongs irreducibly to, even as it is a transformation of, an immediately prior element . Two different elements cannot be presumed to exist at the same time because each single element is its own time(the hinged time of the pairing of a passed event with the presencing of a new event) as a change of place. Thus, whenever we think that we are theorizing two events at the same time, we are unknowingly engaging in a process of temporal enchainment and spatial re-contextualization. The assumption of a spatial frame depends on the ability to return to a previous element without the contaminating effect of time. How can we know that elements of meaning are of the same spatial frame unless each is assumed to refer back to the same ‘pre-existing’ structure?
The same goes for the fixing of a point of presence as a singular object. This pointing to, and fixing of, an itself as itself is a thematic centering that brings with it all the metaphysical implications of the thinking of a structural center. Heidegger’s ‘as’(which is not a structure in itself but a differential) explains, derives and deconstructs form, structure, thing before it can ever establish itself as a ‘this’.

The issue here centers on the understanding of Heideggerian temporality.
Is there a notion of transformation, transcendence, differentiation, event , performance that
doesn't 'take time' but also avoids being a state, concept, intention, presence, structure? Is it possible to think of such a notion without inadvertently lapsing into metaphysical totalization? To fail to deconstruct the concept of structure is to conceive the ‘both-together’ of past-present-future as a conjunction of separate, adjacent phases or aspects: the past which conditions the present entity or event, and the present object which supplements that past. It is not that these these phases are considered as unrelated, only that they each must are presumed to carve out their own temporary identities in order to arrive at a notion of stricture-pattern-scheme as an identity. The association between past and present would be a fracturing, the fracture between Self and Other, between immanence and transcendence, rather than Heidegger’s ecstatic unity. Ontological-Ontic difference is misread as difference between presences. As the overcoming-arriving difference of Heideggerian temporality, it is difference WITHIN presence.
Temporality as a 'split' within will, intention, presence is misread if it is thought as smaller bits of presence. Penetrating the veil of the formal permeating our language of the things within us and around us is not a matter of discovering smaller, faster, dumber, more interactive ‘bits’ within the unities of current approaches, for that would simply displace the issues we’ve discussed onto a miniaturized scale. It is a matter of revealing perhaps an entirely different notion of the basis of entities than that of the freeze-frame state. Being is not an interiority or enclosure(or in between enclosure and overcoming as the event of their differentiation). On the contrary, it exposes and subverts the presumed interiority of conceptuality, representation, will from within its own resources, in the same moment.

To read Being and Time starting from the 'is', not as conceptual binding but as the transit of
'overwhelming and arrival', de-thrones logos, structure, concept and representation, relegating them to where and how we actually find them in BT, as special derived modifications of the hermeutical 'as'.

How are we to do we understand Heidegger's admonitions concerning the
dangers of Gestell? What does one make of those who have not read Heidegger, who have not grasped what he was aiming at, who battle against what they see as the dangerous 'anti-science' relativisms of postmodern thinking, who contribute to the universal objectification of being? As Heidegger points out in Identity and Difference, "the manner in which the matter of thinking-Being-comports itself, remains a unique state of affairs. The inauthentic modes of the ready-to-hand, the present-to-hand, average everydayness, authentic Being, Ereignis all mark different factical experiences. Yet what is common to all possible modes of Being is a certain radical mobility. This means that there is, every moment , within the thinking of each individual who participates in the most apparently rigidly schematic orientations, a radical mobility WITHIN the will to conceptual schematism that is easy to miss (and in fact has been missed for most of Western history , according to Heidegger). Even if the effect of this mobility is subtle enough that it appears for all intents and purposes as though the reign of the dominating objectivizing scheme were absolute, it is crucial to recognize that even in such situations that seem to exemplify the a priori neutralization of otherness, a more originary but radically self-dissimulating a priori, that of Being, is in play, always right now, this instant.

Within and beyond states, forms and structures, lies a universe of barely self-exceeding accents, modulations, aspects, variations, ways of working. Not variations or modulations of STATES but modulations of modulations. The worlds generated from (but never overtaking) this intricate process may be clumsily described via the terminology of patterned interactions between states, but at the cost of missing the profound ongoing internal relatedness and immediacy of this underlying, overflowing movement.
Heidegger reveals Being as an interface both more intrinsically self-transformative and implicatively self-consistent than current views allow for.
The belief in temporary discrete states stifles the intimately interactive potential of their approaches by making the whole works dependent on irreducible units of formal resistance and polarization.
Rather than originating in an invasive, displacing outside. of interactions between partially independent regions, the ‘isness’ of Being is already articulated as intersections of intersections, metaphors of metaphors(as metaphoricity itself), guaranteeing that the person as a whole always functions as an implicatory unity at the very edge of experience. Before there is self or world , there would be this single-split gesture, co-implicating continuity and qualitative transformation in such a way that existing maintains a unity which recognizes itself, at every moment, the ‘same differently’. Aspects hidden within so-called present forms and structures, unique to the implicative thrust of my own existing, belong to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity. On the contrary, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner, producing every moment a global reshaping of my sense of myself and others outpacing the transformative impetus realized via a narrative conception of socialization. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I’ or interpersonal ‘we’, there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective-objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies or between-person conditionings. Events understood as interaffectings of interaffectings, working within and beyond relations among presumed temporary essences (conceptual, affective-bodily, interpersonal), do not achieve their gentle integrative continuity through any positive internal power. On the contrary, they simply lack the formidability of static identity necessary to impose the arbitrariness of conditioning, mapping, mirroring, grafting and cobbling, on the movement of experiential process.



Most readings of Heidegger(Gadamer, Levinas) view the mutual carrying out and trans-formative nature of beings-being as implying, including, and carrying along with it rather than erasing the internal composition of a structure of a being-to-be-modified. Being for them is substance and movement . Being is nature itself as the transformative substance and movement that goes across and beyond formation. Being is the ‘in between’ the subjective conditioning of the object and the objective conditioning of the subject. So the array of elements that are organized and thought together, at once, thematically as this structure-form are carried into their trans-formation(we could also say trans-structuration).

But I have argued here that the purpose of Heidegger's investigation of propositionality is not to identify theoretical objects as ontological givens for Being, but to establish propositional object, concept, representation, Gestell, as ontic existents in order to reveal them more rigorously as grounded ontologically (in the sense of fundamental ontology) in primordial unconcealment. Most readings of Heidegger(Gadamer, Levinas) do the reverse, attempting to ground fundamental ontology, and all of the modal analyses which spring from it, in what for Heidegger is the ontic plane of propositional representation.
In other words, they reduce the ontological difference to a difference between two ontic determinations. Being conceived as the performative difference between schematism and existence is a difference between two ontic determinations and therefore is itself on the ontic plane of propositionality. It is a present to hand thinking masquerading as post-metaphysical.

When one begins from the subjectivism of representationality, the way of out of Kantian a priorism must stand as the absolute other to representation, that is to say, it must arrive in the guise of the performance of the differentiation between Subjective structuring and Objective determination. Only in this way can the empirically conditioned and contingent beginning of thought avoid being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Heidegger and Derrida give us a way to avoid grounding fundamental ontology in the performative difference between schematism and existence as its condition of possibility.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

367
?Number2018 "How could one present “present”? When we write or say something about our current present, we must think of the time of the occurrence of our sentences, which is our present time. This present time cannot be grasped as such: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp the presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event."

Heidegger does a good job of explaining this. Each of the steps you mention, bringing something into view as something new, having it present, presenting it, grasping it, identifying it, using and referring to it, these are all further articulations which do refer back to that which they articulate , but in articulating further they subtly change what they articulate , by bringing out something new about it. This isn't a problem for us because such steps are experienced as dealing with, examining, having, pointing to, positing something present. Each transforms what it deals with in its own way, as bringing it into view in THIS or THAT manner.

I disagree. Our present time is composed of primarily cinematographic, telecommunicational duration.
The problem is that in most cases we do not realize how we perceive as well how we are perceived while being part of this radical novelty of our temporality.

“In the Time Image, “time is out of joint;” movement subordinates itself to time: time causes aberration or normalization in movement, the objects are not acting to cause change, but time inflicts change on them. The images are experienced as pure “opsigns” and “sonsigns,” images that are not going anywhere, but “empty, disconnected, abandoned spaces” that instead of inspiring the question “what is there to see in the next image,” make us ask, “what is there to see in the image?” These disconnected images link up (or “re-link”) with “recollection images” and “dream images” unlike the “action images” and “affection images” of the Movement Image. Again, Deleuze’s concepts for the new cinema resonate with those developed in new media. For Deleuze, these images are moving towards a more open whole: recollection images expand the present (through metonymy), dream images expand the whole or world (through metamorphosis or metaphor). These images embody both the actual and virtual, and make indiscernable the real from the imaginary, the outside and inside, the out of set/frame and in set. This shock or confusion inspires around our perceiving senory-motor schema (which Deleuze sees as the seat of ideology) to create new thought.
When Deleuze speaks of bringing about a direct representation of time, he seems to be speaking about realization beyond the pro-filmic world, but a realization of time within the audience, an experience of stepping out of language and actually experiencing a duration. Deleuze describes the Time Image as something which may not exist in perfection (or even abundance) within cinema, but a limit that cinema can approach.”

Quoting Joshs

In other words, they reduce the ontological difference to a difference between two ontic determinations. Being conceived as the performative difference between schematism and existence is a difference between two ontic determinations and therefore is itself on the ontic plane of propositionality. It is a present to hand thinking masquerading as post-metaphysical.

When one begins from the subjectivism of representationality, the way of out of Kantian a priorism must stand as the absolute other to representation, that is to say, it must arrive in the guise of the performance of the differentiation between Subjective structuring and Objective determination. Only in this way can the empirically conditioned and contingent beginning of thought avoid being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Heidegger and Derrida give us a way to avoid grounding fundamental ontology in the performative difference between schematism and existence as its condition of possibility.

I doubt that Heidegger and Derrida are able to give us a way out. Derrida’s differance is impossible without negative theology, which
definitely belongs to “schematism.”
As Adorno showed, Heidegger’s primary distinction between ontic
and ontological is profoundly controversial and applies a variety of linguistic manipulations. Therefore, both gestures, however attractive they look, are not the absolute other to representation.

How deeply rooted are the societal elements in
Heidegger's analysis of authenticity is involuntarily
revealed by his use of language. As is well known,
Heidegger supplants the tradition al category of subjectivity
by Dasein , whose essence is existence . Being,
however, which "is an issue for this entity in its very
Being, is in each case mine . " This is mean t to distinguish
subjectivity from all other existent beings. It
intends, furthermore, to prohibit existence from being
"taken ontologically as an instance or special case of
some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand.”
This construction, which is inspired by Kierkegaard's
doctrine of the "transparency" of the self ,
would like to make possible a starting out from some
element of being. This latter is valued as the immediate
givenness of the facts of consciousness in traditional
epistemology; yet, at the same time, this element of
being is supposed to be more than mere fact, in the
same manner as the ego of speculative idealism once
was. Behind the apersonal "is concerned," nothing
more is hidden than the fact that Dasein is consciousness.
The entrance of this formula is Heidegger's scene
a faire . From an abstract concept Being turns into
something absolute and primary, which is not merely
posited. The reason for this lies in the fact that Heidegger
reveals an element of Being and calls it Dasein,
which would be not just some element of Being, but
the pure condition of Being-all this without losing
any of the characteristics of individuation, fullness,
bodiliness . This is the scheme that the jargon follows ,
intentionally or unintentionally, to the point of nausea.
The jargon cures Dasein from the wound of meaninglessness
and summons salvation from the world of
ideas into Dasein. Heidegger lays this down once and
for all in the title deed, which declares that the person
owns himself. The fact that Dasein belongs to itself,
that it is "in each case mine," is picked out from individuation
as the only general definition that is left
over after the dismantling of the transcendental subject
and its metaphysics . The principium individuation’s
stands as a principle over and against any particular
individual element. At the same time it is that
essence . In the case of the former element, the
Hegelian dialectical unity of the general and the particular
is turned into a relation of possession. Then it
is given the rank and rights of the philosophical
a priori. "Because Dasein has in each case mineness
one must always use a personal pronoun when
one addresses it." The distinction between authenticity
and inauthenticity-the real Kierkegaardian one
-depends on whether or not this element
of being,
Dasein, chooses itself, its mineness . Until further
notice, authenticity and inauthenticity have as their
criterion the decision in which the individual subject
chooses itself as its own possession . The subject, the
concept of which was once created in contrast to reification,
thus becomes reified . Yet at the same time
reification is s c offed at objectively in a form of language
which simultaneously commits the same crime .
The general concept o f mineness , in which this language
institutes subjectivity as a possession of itself,
sounds like a variant of meanness in Berlin slang .
Whatever formerly went under the name o f existential
and existentiell now insists on this new title deed of
possession . By the fact that it is ontological , the alternative
of authenticity and inauthenticity directs itself
according to whether someone decides for himself or
not. I t take s its directive, beyond real states of affairs,
from the highly form al sense of belonging to oneself.
Yet its consequences in reality are extremely grave.
Once such an ontology of what is most on tic h a s been
achieved, philosophy no longer has to bother about
the societal and natural-historical origin of this title
deed, which declares that the individual own s himself .
Such a philosophy need no longer be concerned with
how far society and psychology allow a man to b e himself
or become himself, or whether in the concept of
such selfness the old evil is concentrated one more
time . The societal relation, which seals itself off in
the identity of the subject, is de-societalized into an
in-itself. The individual, who himself can no longer
rely on any firm possession, holds on to himself in his
extreme abstractness as the last, the supposedly unlosable
possession. Metaphysics ends in a miserable
Consolation : after all, one still remains what one is.
Since men do not remain what they are b y any means,
neither socially nor biologically, they gratify themselves
with the stale remainder of self-identity as
something which gives distinction, both in regard to
being and meaning. This unlosable element, which
has no substratum but its own concept, the tautological
selfness of the self, is to provide the ground, as Heidegger
calls it, which the authentic possess and the
inauthentic lack. The essence of Dasein , i. e . , what is
more than its mere existence is nothing but its selfness
: it is itself. The quarrel with Heidegger's language
is not the fact that it is permeated, like any
philosophical language, with figures from an empirical
reality which it would like to transcend, but that it
transforms a bad empirical reality into transcendence."

Quoting Number2018

I disagree. Our present time is composed of primarily cinematographic, telecommunicational duration.

What is "cinematographic, telecommunicational duration"?

Reply to Number2018 You're going to quote Adorno against Heidegger? Oh dear.
I'm afraid we'll have to take a few steps back from Heidegger then. I don't think we're quite ready for him.
If you really endorse Adorno's reading of Heidegger you've got a got of a conflict on your hands. Because you cannot at the same time read Hedeigger this way, and think of Derrida's work as a 'negative theology"(where did you read this?), while approvingly quoting Deleuze without running the risk of misinterpreting Deleuze. Why do I say this?
Let's look at the alignments.Deleuze never wrote about Heidegger, but we know Derrida is very close to Heidegger. We also know that Derrida wrote he didnt find anything objectionalble in deleuze's ideas. We also know that a community of post-structuralists including Foucault, Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lyotard and Derrida were united in their reading of Nietzsche against
existentialist interpretations of him. We also know that Nancy talked of his close proximity in thinking to both Derrida and Deleuze, and his debt to Heideger as another post-Nietzschean thinker. My assumption is that neither Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard or Nancy would agree with Adorno's Kierkegaardian reading of Heidegger. Furthermore, the post-structuralists were united in rejecting Adorno's Hegelian emancipatory thinking, and none of them would likely refer to Derida's approach as negative theology.

So maybe you've been reading Deleuze through Adorno.


Let's talk about Adorno. . Have you found his writing to be particularly useful to you?
What do you think about his orienting of living in an emancipatory direction? Do you see any imcompatability between his dialectical teleology and Deleuze's Nietzschean notion of becoming? From my reading, by the latter part of Deleuze's career he had finally succeeded in ridding his thinking of the vestiges of marxist and psychoanalytic doctrine.
Concerning time as duration, may be you could talk a little about how you understand Deleuze's concept of duration. Do you see it as similar to Bergson's?

Reply to Terrapin Station
Quoting Terrapin Station

I disagree. Our present time is composed of primarily cinematographic, telecommunicational duration.
— Number2018

What is "cinematographic, telecommunicational duration"?

When you come to the cinema, or when you watch the news or a show, or when you get
exposed to a multiplicity of communicational, computerized factors at the office, you become an object of a tremendous number of forces and manipulating techniques. They are wrapped up, contracted, and operate instantaneously. Most of us experience these situations as entirely natural and adequate. Yet, it is known and well documented how shocking could be the first encounter with the cinema, a computer, or a cell phone.

McLuhan:
“This man—the sanitary
inspector—made a moving picture, in very slow time, very slow technique,
of what would be required of the ordinary household in a primitive African
village in getting rid of standing water—draining pools, picking up all empty
tins and putting them away, and so forth. We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn't know that there was a fowl in it! So we very carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame.
Someone had frightened the fowl and it had taken flight, through the right hand, bottom segment of the frame. This was all that had been seen. The other things he had hoped they would pick up from the film they had not picked up at all, and they had picked frame. This was all that had been seen. The other things he had hoped they would pick up from the film they had not picked up at all, and they had picked up something, which we didn't know was in the film until we inspected it
minutely. Why? We developed all sorts of theories. Perhaps it was the sudden movement of the chicken. Everything else was done in slow technique - people going forward slowly picking up the tin, demonstrating and all the rest of it, and the bird was apparently the one bit of reality for them. For them there was another theory that the fowl had religious significance, which we rather dismissed.


Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly
translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness.
Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible.”

Reply to Number2018

So, a cinematographic duration is?

Quoting Joshs

If you really endorse Adorno's reading of Heidegger you've got a got of a conflict on your hands.

First, I do not endorse. Second, it was not just about Adorno’s reading of Heidegger. As far as I see it, this book reflected his existential position,his fight, and "Jurgon of Authenticity" is the least dialectical, and the most concrete Adorno's book. Later, Bordieu further developed
Adorno's ideas, without any support of "Kierkegardian reading". I think that "Jargon" attempted
to tie German existentializm (not just Heidegger)with the general spirit of that time. The book is not a "reading", it is not about interpretarion or hermeneutics.
Quoting Joshs

Let's look at the alignments.Deleuze never wrote about Heidegger, but we know Derrida is very close to Heidegger. We also know that Derrida wrote he didnt find anything objectionalble in deleuze's ideas. We also know that a community of post-structuralists including Foucault, Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lyotard and Derrida were united in their reading of Nietzsche against
existentialist interpretations of him. We also know that Nancy talked of his close proximity in thinking to both Derrida and Deleuze, and his debt to Heideger as another post-Nietzschean thinker. My assumption is that neither Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard or Nancy would agree with Adorno's Kierkegaardian reading of Heidegger.

As far as I know, Lyotard adopted Adorno's ideas from "Negative dialectic" in his book about Heidegger.
I think that this kind of discussion is not constructive, since it is always possible to ground any
favourable opinion. We can point out names, schools, opinions, and interpretations; yet we do not improve our understanding, and we do not solve problems that preoccupy us. But, I could point out that both Foucault and Deleuze developed their own “reading” of Nietzsche, utterly different from Heidegger’s. If Deleuze or Foucault did not mention him, that means that they did not find it useful and relevant.
Lyotard (“Heidegger and Jews”), Bourdieu (“Political ontology of Martin Heidegger”), and Derrida (“Of Spirit: “Heidegger and Question”) took an active role in the discussion about Heidegger.
I think that this topic can consume too much time .


Quoting Joshs

the post-structuralists were united in rejecting Adorno's Hegelian emancipatory thinking, and none of them would likely refer to Derrida's approach as negative theology.

Ok, in principle, I don't mind Derrida or Heidegger, they simply do not help me right now.
I feel that I cannot solve my problems applying their thought.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

Let's talk about Adorno. . Have you found his writing to be particularly useful to you?

Yes, I want to talk about Adorno’s Aesthetics. This work is fundamental and encyclopedic.So, lt
could be interesting to try to apply his aesthetics to contemporary art. (maybe performance art) I use his writing as a counterexample, as an experiment - why his great thought does not work anymore? I love "Dialectic of Enlightenment".

Reply to Joshs Quoting Joshs

Concerning time as duration, may be you could talk a little about how you understand Deleuze's concept of duration. Do you see it as similar to Bergson's?

Instead,I would prefer to come back to your model of counscessness,
and during this discussion I would lay out my understanding.

"The mind functions as an inseparable interaction with environment and body. It is nothing but this interaction. There is no self-identical self in this model. Self is a bi-product of the constant constructive interactive activity of the organism-envirnmental interaction. Consciousness is not self-conscious in the sense of being able to turn back on itself and grasp itself identically. To reflect back on the self is to alter what one turns back to. The impression we get of consciousness as the commander of decision, as unfolding meaning as a linear causal sequence of nows (one damn thing after another), is the result of the way linguistic grammar is constructed , But rather than a single linear causal intentional vector, consciousness can more accurately de described as a site of competing streams offragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention. Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousnessoutside of its awareness. So the notion of agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents. Consciousness performs a momentary synthetic function, making it appear that this community is a single 'I'." When you write: “Consciousness performs a momentary synthetic function”, how do you understand this operation? What does it mean “Consciousness performs”? And -" a momentary synthetic function"? There are some approches trying to apply the notion of autopoiesis.
I am afraid that you will again try to apply Heideggerian-Derrida’s temporalities. What about Merleu-Pontu? Or, anything different?

Reply to Number2018 Thanks for sharing that it helps me understand what I couldn't put to words.

Reply to Number2018 I love "Dialectic of Enlightenment".
"I would prefer to come back to your model of counscessness, and during this discussion I would lay out my understanding."

We can discuss my model of consciousness. In order to frame that discussion, I would like to set up a dichotomy and see what you think of it. On the one side would be discourses which follow upon Hegel-Marx. These would include Adorno, Habermas, Badiou, Jameson, Althusser and Zizek. On the other would be post-structuralists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and Nancy. I'm not saying that this dichotomy I want to set up is entirely faithful to all the differences within and between these groups. I just would like to know what you think of it.

While there is a shared interest uniting the Marxist and poststructurlist thinkers regarding the need to subvert representational norms, ideologies, network of significations, what would unite the Marxist group is the use of a dialectics(negative for Marx and Adorno, affirmative for Badiou) that thinks history in terms of an emancipatory telos. That is to say , while they reject an enlightenment notion of progress, they maintain a certain messianism in their faith in radical progressive political becoming. This marks the modernist element in their thinking.

The post-structuralists, in contrast, make the postmodern philosophical move of putting into question the justification of any notion of emancipation. They read Nietzsche as determining a trajectory of emancipation as originating in a Will to emancipation, which must be subordinate to Will to Power, which has no emancipatory or any other telos. The only trajectory of Will to Power is difference. For them , political history is not diaelctically emancipatory but incimmensurably geneological.

Merleau-Ponty had been claimed by both the dialectical and the postmodern camps. I prefer to read him as postmodern. The philosophy of mind-cognitive sicence community that is elaborating enactive, embodied, embedded, extended affective auto-poeitic accounts includes both modernist and postmodernist writers. I prefer to read Gallagher as postmodern post-emancipatory.

I think its important to recognize a distinction between what a writer like Deleuze is trying to do
and what radical post-marxist emanciaptory thinkers like Zizek and Badiou are aiming at.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

I would like to set up a dichotomy and see what you think of it. On the one side would be discourses which follow upon Hegel-Marx. These would include Adorno, Habermas, Badiou, Jameson, Althusser and Zizek. On the other would be post-structuralists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and Nancy.

Definitely, in spite of enormous differences within each group, it is possible to set up this dichotomy. Maybe, one could add Baudrillard to the second group.

Quoting Joshs

While there is a shared interest uniting the Marxist and poststructurlist thinkers regarding the need to subvert representational norms, ideologies, network of significations, what would unite the Marxist group is the use of a dialectics(negative for Marx and Adorno, affirmative for Badiou) that thinks history in terms of an emancipatory telos. That is to say , while they reject an enlightenment notion of progress, they maintain a certain messianism in their faith in radical progressive political becoming. This marks the modernist element in their thinking.

I agree.

Quoting Joshs

The post-structuralists, in contrast, make the postmodern philosophical move of putting into question the justification of any notion of emancipation. They read Nietzsche as determining a trajectory of emancipation as originating in a Will to emancipation, which must be subordinate to Will to Power, which has no emancipatory or any other telos. The only trajectory of Will to Power is difference. For them , political history is not diaelctically emancipatory but incimmensurably geneological.

I am not sure that Nietzsche inspired Lyotard or Baudrillard, and I doubt that “The only trajectory of Will to Power is difference” is the essential principle for all “post-structuralists”. Yet, I agree with the general meaning of your formula. I would add to your account that for both Deleuze and Foucault it was essential to convert their thought into their becoming, to transform it into their own experimental de-individualized emancipation of a new kind. (even though both projects of becoming were entirely different)

Quoting Joshs

I think its important to recognize a distinction between what a writer like Deleuze is trying to do
and what radical post-marxist emanciaptory thinkers like Zizek and Badiou are aiming at.

I agree. I do not entirely understand what Zizek does. Sometimes it looks like he does not take his Marxism seriously; being eclectic and inconsistent, he makes an appearance of a kind of Nietzschean-Dionysian becoming. Or, is it just a simulation?

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

We can discuss my model of consciousness.

I’d like to get back to the first post of this thread. The financial trader in the trade room may represent a good case to check the appropriateness of different models of consciousness. She looks at diagrams, curves, and various types of data, surrounded by computer’s screens, assisted by numerous machines, makes decisions about price-setting in real time. It is possible to distinguish four separate heterogenic domains, playing a decisive role for her conscious processes and synthesis. First, there is the room itself. It is the part of the office, the working place. Yet, it is an existential, habitual territory – it has
some personal belonging, reminding an ordinary human milieu. Second, there is the domain of the trader psychological processes: her desires, pre-personal affective mimetic perceptions, reactions, involvements, motivations, and individual
cognitive acts. Third, there is the domain of conscientious universes: groups, lobbies,
interested economic and political parties, schools of economic thought, working rules, and labor ethics express themselves through her mind. Fourth, there are intensive a-signified as well as signified sign flows: financial flows of “real economy ”, informational flows of forecasts about the economy, flows of share prices, and informational flows of expectations of these prices rising or falling. Each domain has its own and autonomous temporality: first, there are regular rhythms of human existential territory.
Second, there is the time of an a-personal affective, mimetic emulation, of an extremely competitive trading environment. Thirdly, there is a highly elaborated field of discursive rationalities, presupposing sets of roles, ethical-political and social positions, and strong performative functions.
Each speech act, said, written, or even reproduced in the trader’s mind is engaged in a variety of virtual professional, social, or scientific “communities.”
The final domain is completely machinic - there is an endless automated process of generation and translation of various financial, economic, scientific and analytic information as well as a self-supported flow of various material transactions. This machinic phylum has a decisive role, maintaining the accelerating growth, an endless renovation, and interrelation of all other temporalities. The differentials, composed by the third and second domain, often affect the trader’s mind instantaneously, even without recognizing virtually existing real factors. Therefore, we need to reconsider the essence of time synthesis that can be used to explain the trader’s conscious as well as unconscious acts.
Probably, your model -“consciousness can more accurately be described as a site of competing streams of fragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention. Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness… it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents. Consciousness performs a momentary synthetic function, making it appear that this community is a single 'I.'”- should be regarded as an undoubtedly correct, but a limited and isolated phenomenological model. "Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness"- most of these
unconscious processes are caused by direct involvement in a-signifying subjective agencies.

Reply to Number2018 First, a couple of questions. Who are the primary references for the vocabulary you are using here? Deleuze-Guartari? Does ‘mimetic emulation’ come from them or Rene Girard? Where does the term ‘conscientious universes’ come from?
I’m going to assume that what you wrote is mainly from DG. What I want to do is compare their thinking with an amalgam of Shaun Gallagher, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Merleau-Ponty that I will label the radicalized 4EA school of thought.
In order to simplify things initially, I am hoping that John Protevi can be used as an acceptable surrogate for DG. The reason is that Protevi is not only a dedicated adherent to Deleuzian thinking but is well versed in cognitive science and in particular Gallagher and Varela.

It seems that Protevi makes similar distinctions between 4EA and DG to your characterization of
4ea models of consciousness as “a limited and isolated phenomenological model”.
Your critique sounds harsher however. One reviewer of Protevi’s book ‘Life, War, Earth’ wrote: “As Protevi argues, a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it. Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”

In Protevi’s own words:“I get to my notion of human nature as “body politic” by putting the “embodied mind” school of cognitive science together with the post-structuralist French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What attracted me to the embodied mind school (e.g., Hubert Dreyfus, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and the late Francisco Varela) is the critique of the standard computer metaphor of cognition as information processing and its alternate vision of cognition as an organism directing itself in its environment. Such embodied cognition is inescapably affective; the old division of reason and emotion needs to be rethought as “affective cognition.”

“What Deleuze brings to the table is a wide-ranging materialist ontology, so that we can use the same basic concepts of self-organizing systems in both natural and social registers. This enables me to couple the “politic” to the “body,” to connect the social and the somatic. Basically, Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.”

I don’t know whether Protevi thinks more radically than Gallagher , Thompson and Merleau-Ponty. I just have a hunch that he is too reductionist in his thinking. While Protevi offers us a detailed comparison of DG vs 4ea, I’m aware of no similar treatment from the 4ea side toward DG-related ideas. All I can do is offers suggestions of how it might be possible for a 4ea-type thinking to answer to the critique Protevi levels against it of risking missing the ‘above’ and ‘below’ in its abstractive determination of subjectivity.

I could begin with a warning. While it sounds impressive to throw in every conceivable source of input, information, flow, both signifying and a-signifying, as possible impingments upon and definers of subjectivity, we don’t end up with anything interesting or useful except as such impingements can be seen in the light of ordering structurations and patterns. Without minimal coherence and consistency there is only pure randomness. If we are to choose a DG account of affectivity and subjectivity over other philosophies and psychologies, it must be because it is more useful to us, more clarifying and , in some overall sense, more effectively ordered, not because it offers a laundry list of infinite sources of random impingement. That large list you gave me (room, psychology, signifying and a-signifying flows, etc, etc,) is less significant in and of itself than in how it is specifically understood in its orders of relationship. We know that all these impingements jostle, form and reform subjectivity, but how do we make sure that we don’t end up reifying them such that the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings? I have no problem in embracing DG in this regard as preferable to Freudian, stimulus-response and first generation cognitive models of the subject, because while at a micro level DG abandons the ordered structures and processes that define these approaches, at a metalevel it is posits a less arbitrary and less polarized model of experiential change. All that stuff coming at subjectivty from above, below and within that dissolves, ovewhelms and displaces psychodynamic id, ego and superego has a more radically intricate kind of order or logic to it that persuades us that we understand persons better through it that via Freudianism.

Protevi has spent that past few decades trying to convince us that his reading of DG gives him a method of analyzing notorious affective-socio-political situations such as Columbine that can supplement 4ea accounts. I think the details of his method give us a good opportunity to judge the usefulness of his ordering strategy, particularly with regard to affect and motivation.

I have selected what I think are pertiment passages from Protevi's 'AFFECT, AGENCY AND
RESPONSIBILITY:THE ACT OF KILLING IN THE AGE OF CYBORGS' to demonstrate how
difference operates via assemblages for him:

"The vast majority of soldiers cannot kill in cold blood and need to kill in a desubjectified state,
e.g., in reflexes, rages and panics."

"Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), among others, distinguish agency and ownership of bodily
actions. Ownership is the sense that my body is doing the action, while agency is the sense that I
am in control of the action, that the action is willed. Both are aspects of subjectivity, though they
may well be a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness rather than full-fledged
objectifying self-consciousness. But alongside subjectivity we need also to notice emergent
assemblages that skip subjectivity and directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic. To follow
this line of thought, let us accept that, in addition to non-subjective body control by reflexes, we
can treat basic emotions as modular “affect programs” (Griffiths 1997) that run the body’s
hardware in the absence of conscious control. As with reflexes, ownership and agency are only
retrospectively felt, at least in severe cases of rage in which the person “wakes up” to see the
results of the destruction committed while he or she was in the grips of the rage. In this way we
see two elements we need to take into account besides the notion of subjective agency: (1) that
there is another sense of “agent” as non-subjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or
basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases the military unit and non-subjective reflexes and basic
emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers’ subjectivity qua controlled
intentional action. In these cases the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual
person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex or
equally non-subjective “affect program.”

“A little more detail on the notion of a “rage agent” might be helpful at this point. Extreme cases
of rage produce a modular agent or “affect program” that replaces the subject. Affect programs
are emotional responses that are “complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this
coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction” (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are
more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place
(though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes
the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor’s notion of modularity, which calls
for a module to be “mandatory … opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes
producing them] … and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access
that in other modules]” (93; my comments in brackets). Perhaps second only to the question of
adaptationism for the amount of controversy it has evoked, the use of the concept of modularity
in evolutionary psychology is bitterly contested. I feel relatively safe proposing a very-widely
distributed rage module or rage agent, since its adaptive value is widely attested to by its
presence in other mammals, and since Panksepp 1998 is able to cite studies of direct electrical
stimulation of the brain (ESB) and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous rage
circuits in humans and other mammalian species (190)."

"In the berserker rage, the subject is overwhelmed by a chemical flood that triggers an
evolutionarily primitive module which functions as an agent which runs the body’s hardware in its place.' Protevi here isnt integrating a rage module with situational intentionality, except as the 'reflex' rage is switched on by a cognitive trigger, after which it proceeds independently of intention. He says:

"a sense of agency is absent during the rage-induced or reflex-controlled act of killing", but Protevi doesn’t seem to recognize that the lack of a conscious sense of agency does not mean that it isnt implicit.. He splits the former off from the latter. They may be loosely integrated within the
larger ecology of thought, body , social realm, but nevertheless can be talked about in 'modular'
terms. Conditioning( not Kantian but Skinnerian, or do these amount to the same thing?) is central to this relation between the cognitive trigger of a reflex rage assemblage
and its appearance.

"Soldiers are acculturated to dehumanize the enemy by a series of racial slurs.
This acculturation is especially powerful when accomplished through rhythmic chanting while
running, for such entrainment weakens personal identity to produce a group subject". This is
another example of conditioning."Desensitization is merely an enabling factor for the role of
classical and operant conditioning in modern training."

Protevi's account is dripping with this arbitrary conditioning, both of affect and cognition:
Protevi's favorite phrase seems to be 'more than reflex', but these impingements of world and
physiology on person act barely more than reflexively.


"In addition to the affective aspect of heightened desensitization, simulation training
constitutes a new cognitive group subject. The instant decision of “shoot / no shoot” is solicited
by the presence or absence of key traits in the gestalt of the situation. Such instant decisions are
more than reflexes, but operate at the very edge of the conscious awareness of the soldiers and
involve complex subpersonal processes of threat perception (Correll et al 2006). In addition to
this attenuation of individual agency, cutting-edge communication technology now allows
soldiers to network together in real time. With this networking we see an extended / distributed
cognition culminating in “topsight” for a commander who often doesn’t “command” in the sense
of micro-manage but who observes and intervenes at critical points (Arquilla and Rondfeldt
2000: 22). In other words, contemporary team-building applications through real-time
networking are a cybernetic application of video games that goes above the level of the subject
(Fletcher 1999). In affective entrainment, instant decision-making, and cognitive “topsight” the
soldiers produced by rhythmic chanting and intensive simulation training are nodes within a
cybernetic organism, the fighting group, which maintains its functional integrity and tactical
effectiveness by real-time communication technology. It’s the emergent group with the
distributed decisions of the soldiers that is the cyborg here, operating at the thresholds of the
individual subjectivities of the soldiers."

Thompson seems to argue against the way that Protevi uses affect as pre-programmed module
split off from subjectivity.
”Evidence is now accumulating that experience-dependent brain activity in particular
environmental contexts plays a huge role in the development of the individual brain.
Rather than being a collection of pre-specified modules, the brain appears to be an
organ that constructs itself in development through spontaneously generated and
experience-dependent activity (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997; Quartz, 1999;
Karmiloff-Smith, 1998), a developmental process made possible by robust and flexible
developmental mechanisms conserved in animal evolution (Gerhart & Kirschner,
1997).”

“Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as ‘a prototype “whole brain event”’, but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event. Affect has numerous dimensions that bind together virtually every aspect of the organism—the psychosomatic network of the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system; physiological changes in the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and the superior cortex; facial-motor changes and global differential motor readiness for approach or withdrawal; subjective experience along a pleasure–displeasure valence axis; social signalling and coupling; and conscious evaluation
and assessment (Watt, 1998). Thus the affective mind isn’t in the head, but in the whole body; and affective states are emergent in the reciprocal, co-determination sense: they arise from neural and somatic activity that itself is conditioned by the ongoing embodied awareness and action of the whole animal or person.”

Thompson addressed concerns by Provi about subjectivism in his model. “A certain tendency to privilege interiority in autopoietic discourse has always worried me. I felt that worry in writing those words in Mind in Life about the reciprocal yet asymmetrical relation between interiority and exteriority, but I did not adequately address the worry because of another argument I was trying to advance, specifically that the genuine interiority of life is a precursor to the interiority of consciousness, and hence that the conception of nature presupposed in standard formulations of the hard problem or explanatory gap for consciousness—namely, that living nature has no genuine interiority—is misguided. So the task is to see whether we can retain the crucial advance that a phenomenological reading of the theory of autopoiesis provides, while situating that advance in an enriched and more balanced account of the dynamic co-emergence and mutual entrainment of living processes and their environments.

In Donn Welton’s words: “The organism enacts an environment as the environment entrains the organism. Both are necessary and neither, by itself, is sufficient for the process of sense-making.”

“But now comes the tricky point. What we have just said implies that the relation between organism and environment is reciprocal, for each acts as a control parameter for the other. But this kind of reciprocity does not imply that their relation is not also asymmetrical, in the relevant sense of asymmetry. Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the
physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the
other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the
environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to
account for the directedness proper to living beings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the
resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.”

I will venture a tentative thesis at this point concerning Prtovei’s interpretation of DG vs Thompson’s 4ea. I think Protevi’s approach belongs to the larger framework of enactivism, based on his numerous analyses of Gallagher, Thompson, Merleau-Ponty and Varela. But I also suspect it represents a less sophisticated, more reductive version than that of Thompson or Gallagher, in spite of its claims to situate subjectivity within a wider realm of the bio-political.
Whereas Protevi thinks his view is wider in scope, it may simply be more fragmented, lacking the extent of integrative impetus in Thompson-Varela’s thinking. Proteiv’s reliance on dynamical systems metaphors seems to too often begin from algorithmicly-themed and internally centered machinic processes(near-reflexive affect modules, cognitive programs). Then creativity and transformation consists of the clashing, interruption and intgerating among such independent flows, machines, algorithms..

We see the same reductive tendency in Massumi to begin from self-centered algorithmic iterations which only later interaffect, resonate or disrupt each other. Whta’s lacking is a more radical thinking of interactivity. Non-linearity isn’t enough because it still operates as a deterministic metaphor.

Massumi: "Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic
remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing,
from narration, as it is from vital function. It is narratively de-localized, spreading over the
generalized body surface, like a lateral backwash from the function-meaning interloops traveling
the vertical path between head and heart.
When on the other hand language doubles a sequence of movements in order to add
something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case a sense of futurity,
expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs
counter to and dampens the intensity. "

Massumi: "Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and
feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to
future." Non-linearity and feedback work to relate disparate contents. "Every event takes place on both levels – and between both levels, as they resonate together to form a larger system composed of two interacting subsystems following entirely different rules of formation.
Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation
point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the
turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually
exclusive potentials, only one of which is “selected.” “Phase space” could be seen as a
diagrammatic rendering of the dimension of the virtual. The organization of multiple levels that
have different logics and temporal organizations but are locked in resonance with each other and
recapitulate the same event in divergent ways, recalls the fractal ontology and nonlinear causality
underlying theories of complexity. "

"For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in
which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative
rules." "Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into
intensity, of rules into paradox. a tinge of the unexpected, the lateral, the unmotivated, to lines of
action and reaction. A change in the rules. The expression-event is the system of the
inexplicable..."

Note here that beginning from system as logical procedure creates a sharp oppositionality between structure and change, rule and paradox, the cognitive and the affective.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

First, a couple of questions. Who are the primary references for the vocabulary you are using here? Deleuze-Guartari? Does ‘mimetic emulation’ come from them or Rene Girard? Where does the term ‘conscientious universes’ come from?

• I’ve taken most vocabulary from Guattari’s book “Schiizoanalytic cartographies”; mimetic emulation is from Girard; I used Guattari’s model on pg. 27:


Machinic Consciential
Phyla Universes


The economy of Flows Territories of virtual real
(signifier, labor)
libido, Capital)

Sorry, not conscientious, but consciental. DG used in “A Thousand Plateaus” another term instead of this one - incorporeal transformations.
Guattari attempts to lay down the general model of an assemblage. There are a few organizing principles:
a separation between subjectivity and consciousness; mutual interdependence and interrelation of the four domains; their materialistic ontological status, the endless process of motion and variation, described in terms of deterritorization and territorization; verification and application through comparison with differently established models.
Quoting Joshs

I could begin with a warning. While it sounds impressive to throw in every conceivable source of input, information, flow, both signifying and a-signifying, as possible impingments upon and definers of subjectivity, we don’t end up with anything interesting or useful except as such impingements can be seen in the light of ordering structurations and patterns. Without minimal coherence and consistency there is only pure randomness. If we are to choose a DG account of affectivity and subjectivity over other philosophies and psychologies, it must be because it is more useful to us, more clarifying and , in some overall sense, more effectively ordered, not because it offers a laundry list of infinite sources of random impingement. That large list you gave me (room, psychology, signifying and a-signifying flows, etc, etc,) is less significant in and of itself than in how it is specifically understood in its orders of relationship. We know that all these impingements jostle, form and reform subjectivity, but how do we make sure that we don’t end up reifying them such that the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings? I have no problem in embracing DG in this regard as preferable to Freudian, stimulus-response and first generation cognitive models of the subject, because while at a micro level DG abandons the ordered structures and processes that define these approaches, at a metalevel it is posits a less arbitrary and less polarized model of experiential change. All that stuff coming at subjectivty from above, below and within that dissolves, ovewhelms and displaces psychodynamic id, ego and superego has a more radically intricate kind of order or logic to it that persuades us that we understand persons better through it that via Freudianism.

I think that DG’s project is going far beyond the critique of psychoanalysis. Foucault noted:
“Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics… How does one keep from being fascist, even
(especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?
How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of
fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our
behavior? The book is about the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from
the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that
constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”


Foucault’s evaluation of DG’s thought is still entirely relevant. The ethical-political dimension
helps to find a way out of an impression that DG intended to show that “the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings.” Subject’s operating conditions are not random, they are primarily the same as the operating assemblages, maintaining the essential, power relations of our societies. Therefore, “the sequence of random operant conditionings” is not endless; it is finite and well defined. Further, whereas you wrote that “rather than a single linear causal intentional vector, consciousness can more accurately be described as a site of competing streams offragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention,” for DG “the site of consciousness” is the place where the economy of the power’s interventions and strategies is applied. (The faciality machine that we used to discuss is one of the examples).
Further, these “competing streams offragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention” – aren’t they are already ready-made - images of images, perceptions of perceptions, arriving at the site of consciousness after being intensively processed not by some uncertain environment, but by our essential social-political machines?
If the “subject” has become primarily determined by implicit and hidden forces and social
presuppositions, so that its most intimate desires and motivations are just working parts of the dominating system (in spite of seemingly different “conscious” subject’s own declarations) – don’t we deal with the kind of fascism in Foucault’s sense? That is why Foucault pointed out that DG’s thought provides ethical guidance - when one, following DG, finds his/her own “operating conditions,” one gets a chance to exercise freedom, to practice becoming.
“If we are to choose a DG account of affectivity and subjectivity over other philosophies and psychologies, it must be because it is more useful to us, more clarifying and, in some overall sense, more effectively ordered, not because it offers a laundry list of infinite sources of random impingement.” I agree with you, DG’s project is not effectively ordered – they were busy with so many challenges so that they often did not put the clearance as their first priority. Further, they often disorganized their work deliberately, as the way to distinguish themselves and to invent the new forms of expression, as well as due to militant and provocative aims. That is one of the reasons
why after so many years of intensive scholarship, there is still room for further problematization and application of their thought.

"all these impingements jostle, form and reform subjectivity, but how do we make sure that we don’t end up reifying them such that the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings?"
DG's account on the subjects and subjectivity can be found in their assemblage theory.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

Protevi has spent that past few decades trying to convince us that his reading of DG gives him a method of analyzing notorious affective-socio-political situations such as Columbine that can supplement 4ea accounts. I think the details of his method give us a good opportunity to judge the usefulness of his ordering strategy, particularly with regard to affect and motivation.

I have selected what I think are pertiment passages from Protevi's 'AFFECT, AGENCY AND
RESPONSIBILITY:THE ACT OF KILLING IN THE AGE OF CYBORGS' to demonstrate how
difference operates via assemblages for him:

Thank you for doing the work and making this case of "a cool blood killer.” It was interesting reading. DG’s concept of “an assemblage” is one of the most difficult ones; but it is a key notion to understand better “the varieties of fascism, that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.” (Foucault). The political and ethical implications of different assemblages are significant – what is at stake is the question of the essence of the subject of action – is that a conscious, responsible individual or a collective impersonal agent of some kind?
It looks like for Thompson there is no problem, whereas Protevi could find and pose one. Could you explain the status of “problem” of consciousness in the cognitive psychology and neuroscience field?
Does the 4EA - model have some social – political implications?

Quoting Joshs

I think Protevi’s approach belongs to the larger framework of enactivism, based on his numerous analyses of Gallagher, Thompson, Merleau-Ponty and Varela. But I also suspect it represents a less sophisticated, more reductive version than that of Thompson or Gallagher, in spite of its claims to situate subjectivity within a wider realm of the bio-political.
Whereas Protevi thinks his view is wider in scope, it may simply be more fragmented, lacking the extent of integrative impetus in Thompson-Varela’s thinking. Proteiv’s reliance on dynamical systems metaphors seems to too often begin from algorithmicly-themed and internally centered machinic processes(near-reflexive affect modules, cognitive programs). Then creativity and transformation consists of the clashing, interruption and intgerating among such independent flows, machines, algorithms..

After looking through Protevi’s books, I started thinking that you are right in your critique. He tries to
combine 4-e model with DG’s approach, but in spite of his claims, he could not formulate the problem
quite in the spirit of DG’s thought. So it is not just about “more reductive version than that of Thompson or Gallagher,” but also of DG.
Nevertheless, he could formulate his thesis: "there is another sense of “agent” as nonsubjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases, the military unit and nonsubjective reflexes and basic emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers’ subjectivity qua controlled intentional action. In these cases, the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual person or subject but the emergent assemblage of a military unit and nonsubjective reflex or equally nonsubjective affect program… though we could argue that the practical agent of the massacre was the assemblage of the unit and the distributed nonsubjective rage agents…"

It is a more reductive version of DG’s definition of assemblage: “it has two sides – it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, and it is a machinic assemblage of desire…It is a social machine, taking man and women into its gears, or, rather, having men and women as part of its gears
along with things, structures, metals, materials.” So, there are two sides of the same assemblage –
expressive one, including all possible ways of collective expression, and desire’s one, including
a variety of bodily affects, taken together and connected with technical machines, mechanisms, materials, etc. DG’s understanding implies that the real subject of a statement as well as of an action is the particular assemblage. The question is how general is their definition? Should it be applied to some particular situations (in Protevi’s case, one might think that when the solder comes to normal life, he starts regretting what he did)? Should we assume that the notion of assemblage applies to some extreme situations, but in general, there is still a place for a rationally thinking normal individual?) It could be beneficial to check how DG’s approach is compatible with Judith Butler’s one: “Assembly only makes sense if bodies can and do gather or connect in some way, and speech acts that unfold from there articulate something that is already happening at the level of the plural body. But let us remember that a vocalization is also a bodily act, as is sign language, and this means that there is no speaking without body signifying something, and sometimes the body signifies something quite different what a person actually says…
If the plural subject (of assembly) is constituted in the course of its performative action, then it is not already constituted; whatever form it has prior to its performative exercise is not the same as the form it takes as it acts, and after it has acted. So how do we understand this movement of gathering, which is durational, and implies occasional, periodic, or definitive forms of scattering? It is not one act, but a convergence of actions different from one another…Temporal seriality and coordination, bodily
proximity, auditory range, coordinated vocalization – all of these constitute essential dimensions
of assembly and demonstration”.
I do not want to critique Butler’s approach, trying to find out
how her model is different from the known theories of Le Bon, Sorel, and Canetti. What is important here is that the essential emergent, performative components, necessary for maintaining an assemblage do not require the physical proximity and the abruptness of gathering (the main points for Butler), or some special circumstances (battlefield, or war for Protevi). The communicative-expressive components, as well as bodily constellations, mentioned by Butler, are constitutive even for some virtual Internet communities. Further, “speech acts that unfold from there articulate something that is already happening at the level of plural body”- in Protevi’s case, the military training complex, plying an essential role in “dehumanizing the solder’s actions,” functions as a generative matrix, as a diagram of intensities and crucial thresholds.
However unexpected and spontaneous Butler’s assembly looks like, one could find a virtual prototype of the event, and map its crucial intensive components.
If we consider some bureaucratic agency, the conventional theory is that it has an authority structure, in which rights and obligations are distributed in a hierarchical way, as well as clearly defined roles and positions. Further, the exercise of authority is backed by legitimacy, so that the personal beliefs of a member of an organization or her knowledge of the cost of a breach of the agency’s written regulations. Definitely, one could find these primary structural constituents. Nevertheless,
cannot we also discover here all the essential components of Butler’s model? There are two interdependent regimes – an expressive (including linguistic one), as well as a bodily one (including
a set of behavioral patterns, working techniques, interactions with machines and colleagues). All employees gather together, speak the same organizational jargon, reflecting and effectualazing a process of their bodily transactions. Apparently, assemblage’s performative acting components are much more important for employee’s functionality, than an organization’s authority structure, ethics code, its written rules, employee’s values or beliefs. Therefore, in principle, it has satisfied the DG’s definition of assemblage. Further, getting back to Guattari’s general model, one could locate the agency on a general map of intensive flows of information, money, libidos’ investments and interactions, essential existential territories, and virtual discursive communities.
There are a few more critical remaining questions: the degree of the independence of an employee,
of her own agency, related to the assemblage’s plural subject; her sense of her own agency, homogeneity, and heterogeneity of practices through consequential social fragments.
Going back to Protevi’s case – when a soldier comes home to normal life, he experiences remorse and regret.
Does it mean that he is coming back to possession of an ordinary subjectivity? If yes, the assemblage theory should be reserved just for individual cases.
DG’s answer: the social field is comprised of blocks, fragments (assemblages) that are located on
“a continuous and unlimited line, with their doors far from each other, and contiguous back doors
that make the blocks themselves contiguous.” Probably, it could be an interesting and challenging task to show how assemblages, comprising the solder’s normal life, are contiguous to his last military
experience.

Reply to Joshs
Quoting Joshs

We see the same reductive tendency in Massumi to begin from self-centered algorithmic iterations which only later interaffect, resonate or disrupt each other. Whta’s lacking is a more radical thinking of interactivity. Non-linearity isn’t enough because it still operates as a deterministic metaphor.

I think that these fragments show how brilliant Massumi’s account of an event is. I’d like to pay your attention to the contemporary political developments in the US since November 2016, when Trump was elected. We can witness the rise and the fall
of numerous attempts to explain what happened, ranging from political philosophies (Badieu and Bifo Berardi, for example) to mass media and simply conspiracy (it is often difficult to distinguish between them). Theories, models, explanations, and narratives have replaced each other with vertiginous speed. Moreover, today, the absolute majority of writers and their listeners (readers) do not remember (and do not reflect on)
what was in the center of their attention 24-27 month ago, being wholly preoccupied with current events. Can we conclude, that affect was at the core of these discursive surges?
Therefore, we definitely must agree with Massumi, when he wrote:
“Our “habit of dwelling upon the long future and the long past” is a“literary” effort of “purely abstract imagination, devoid of any direct observation of particular fact. “In considering our direct observation of past, or of future, we should confine ourselves to time-spans of the order of magnitude of a second, or even fractions of a second.”
“It is not the forecasting or back-casting of the critical observer who places emphasis on. There is no overlook allowing an emphasis to be laid on from outside or above. Rather, Whitehead says, the observer, is on the “utmost verge” of events’ taking shape in their own “process of self-completion.” On the verge of history, past and future are “immanent” to the present and, in that interval, to each other. The critique of history has nowhere to be but in the reciprocal immanence that is the verging toward the self-completion of events in the making. The fraction of a second-scale is where we must mark the singularity of events, and grasp their return. This is no easy task: because the verge of history is also events’ lacuna point, the moment they have not taken place. This is why Nietzsche argues that what history is most intensely about is the “untimely.”
This is why Foucault asserts the need for an effective history that is a “history of the present”… “Effective history . . . shortens its vision to the things nearest it—the body, the nervous system . . . energies”. Only an immanent critique can effectively “observe” what is energetically not taking place, coeval with a moment’s effective self-completion: in the interval of history’s in-the-making.”
To become the observer on the “utmost verge” of history, one must discover the exact point
of indiscernibility, where the intensity of the event, bodily affects, and energies, are not separated yet from the fabulated narratives and discourses.
Further, one can discover that intensive becoming, the Nietzschean “untimely” doubles history; that there are endless circuits of the actual physical real and virtual intensive real, which carries everything, continually following each other, running behind each other and referring back to each other around a point of emergency.
“There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only
a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together.”
What we need to understand is how our primary and unrecognizable affects and patterns are
built “in between.” Between an intensive-virtual-social-politic, and individual-personal-actual-formed. The unconscious drives, desires, and impetuses are enclosed within the one circuit,
so that “Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all
of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any
meaning whatsoever.”

That is why Massumi wrote:
"Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic
remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing,
from narration, as it is from a vital function. It is narratively de-localized, spreading over the generalized body surface…
When on the other hand language doubles a sequence of movements to add
something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case, a sense of futurity,
expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. "
Getting back to the events of November 2016 (and, in general, considering how mass media work, or New York Stock Exchange functions) , one should conclude, that on the “utmost verge” of the event is affect,
condensed to the striking intensity of shock; the unresistable request to get involved, to get a response of any kind.

Quoting Joshs

Note here that beginning from system as logical procedure creates a sharp oppositionality between structure and change, rule and paradox, the cognitive and the affective.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to apply to unconscious intensity the nature/culture opposition, the dichotomy between chaotic and disastrous affective flows, and a cultural, civilized, and rational symbolic order. If we turn to Guattari’s basic scheme of a general contemporary assemblage, we can find
there that signifier, labor, libido, and Capital are united under the rubric
The economy of flows. Practically, it means that any intensity of the event, taken up by mass media, would be immediately converted into the individual libido and desires, simultaneously transformed into appropriate discourses, will become the flow of “immaterial labor,” and, finally will be appropriate as the surplice value in some form of
Capital. All these processes should maintain an endless motion and acceleration. Yet, our contemporary societies are not built to entirely control and manage the event. Massumi: “"Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox. A tinge of the unexpected, the lateral, the unmotivated, to lines of action and reaction. A change in the rules. The expression-event is the system of the inexplicable... The affect is to be modulated by a variety of strategic improvisational techniques, they modulate an unfolding of the event on the fly, but they cannot completely control the outcome. Affective techniques apply to situations more directly than to persons. They are directly collective. They are fundamentally participatory, since they are activated in a situation, couched singularly in the occurrence of that encounter. They are event factors, not intentions.”

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