The Visual Theater of Creulty; Anti-Oedipus, Part 7

All eyes on deck. There's a judgment brewin'

Before we get to the elaborated theory of Schizoanalysis that is present to us in the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus, there are more than a couple themes along the way that will give a more direct sense to the later theory. One will be the structure and gap that happens in-between Barbarian civilization and capitalism (Feudalism) and the phenomena of desire in the cultural happening. This will be addressed in the next post. This post though will deal with savage formation which D&G separate from Barbarian civilization and capitalism. More specifically, this post will deal with the beginnings of the categorical structure of social-being in its savage state. We will see parallels between any form of socius and one that others would like to think operated in some purity against later formations of socius that are easily criticized today (Every socius is easily critiqued when protected under "1st amendment" laws). D&G being thorough analysts/ethnologists won't aggressively attack modern forms of structural government over and against contemporary modes government in a Rousseauian fashion that contemporary critics find so easy to do. D&G for better have maturity on their side when writing a theoretical account of political and psychological structures; I.E. they approach the subject as rigorous Ethnologists. We will see in the post that savage formations were graphic, oral, and visual. The visual character of the savage serves as the mediation between the graphic and oral gestures of savage-being. And when I say that they serve as a mediation, I mean to say that they are a certain and very different mode of operation in the world from the word and it's graphme. We will see just how large of a complex is created in being when the visual category manifests. What this entails we will go into next.

"Savage formations are oral, are vocal, but not because they lack a graphic system: a dance on the earth, a drawing on a wall, a mark on the body are a graphic system, a geo-graphism, a geography. These formations are oral precisely because they possess a graphic system that's independent of the voice, a system that is not aligned on the voices and not subordiante to it, but connected to it, co-ordinated 'in an organization as it were,' and multidimensional." The first key to this statement is the insistence that vocal culture and graphic culture aren't separated. There isn't speech at one time that is separated from a graphic system. But when D&G include "a dance on earth" they mean to expand the concept of inscription to a character far more expansive than the physical writing. The graphic system and inscription are analogous. Not only is the graphic system (inscription) a "drawing of a wall" or a "mark on a body," but a "dance on the earth." Basically, anything that happens to the naked earth (the body without organs) by being is a writing (inscription) on this body without organs. D&G are very aware of making their concepts clear no matter how difficult they seem to be on first glance. Right after they mention these inscriptions, they connotate these inscriptions by calling them a "ge0-graphism," eluding to our point of anything happening to the earth (body without organs) as being an "inscription" to it; and addition to it (or negation. Addition and negation are philosophical concepts that can be applied to these types of phenomena depending on the context of the writing). They spell out clearly that it's a "geography" being good materialists that they are (consistent, which is the most we can ask for from something nominalized as "philosophy"). These modes of being are "oral because they contain a graphic system independent of the voice," showing how the oral isn't necessarily condemned to the mouth. They are connected with the voice instead. There is not the word and then writing. There is already the word and inscription. If we were to look at this metaphysically, we understand that there is already expression and input to the earth. Expression is the writing to the body with organs. The dance that happens spontaneously is a inscription the earth as much as it's an oral expression "on it's own." "On it's own" gets quoted here because it's tied to inscription. Oral expression is inscription. It's already a writing (inscription) to the earth, to the body without organs. Inscription isn't subordinated to the voice, the word, it's the coordination with it that at one and the same time expressed and inscribes, an affectation that effects. No correlation is place between affectation and effect. Instead, they are coordinated in the same space a-temporally. They form their own organization that isn't seen as being vertical but horizontal since they are not correlative, but rise together and inscription and expression. To be brief, something happens to the body without organs by a being that does things. Understanding this abstractly as possible goes far to disengage a correlationist order between the two. But in the inscription and the voice, there exists a third element. There is not only the "dance on the earth" and it's inscription onto something that was never danced on before. There is the eye that perceives everything that's happening. There is the eye as the third party that is neither a "pure" affectation by oral-being, nor a "pure" inscription brought to earth along with the expression of affectation. There is the eye that sees all this happening, and not just the eye physiologically, but the eye as a third form of being that completes the complex of being. "Isn't it necessary to add a third element of the sign: eye-pain, in addition to voice-audition and hand-graphics? In the rituals of affliction the patient does not speak, but receives the spoken word. He does not act, but is passive under the graphic action: he receives the stamp of the sign. And what is his pain if not a pleasure for the eye that regards it, the collective or divine eye that is not motivated by any idea of revenge but is alone capable of grasping the subtle relationship between the sign engraved in the body and the voice issuing from a face - between the mark and the mask. Between these two elements of the code, pain is like the surplus value that the eye extracts taking hold of the effect of active speech on the body, but also of the reaction of the body insofar as it is acted upon." The nuance of this statement is incredible. We will see why as we move through this incredible passage that surmises an ethological description. The voice speaks and inscribes. Inscription is an inscriptive voice. But within this phenomena, there is the phenomena of the eye, the visual aspect that Merleau-Ponty calls the sense, the sense that experiences in the most intense way. D&G go right at the eye as eye-pain, as the eye that sees pain, as the eye that supplements experience by adding pain to it which will form the creditor-debtor relationship described by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals. What does the eye do that sees the coordination of inscription and the voice? In the savage rituals of affliction (E.G. a part of the body being held to fire in order to "absolve" oneself from from an injunction. From this we see how the credit-debit/guilt phenomena starts to manifest), there is a third. Not only a third person, but a third person who has eyes. The "patient" (or in this case, the savage trying to absolve themselves from an injunction by experience of an immediate affliction) does not speak, but receives the spoken word. The "patient" has already spoken, and not they will receive the spoken work for haven spoken. The "patient" stands (or sits there) while being graphicized (think of a cow being brandished). This patient receives a sign that may stay with them forever, and that's the point. The mark of the world, the inscription of the world as expression, inscribes itself to the body without organs through being. But what is the pain of the patient? We don't know the "pain" of the patient without the third party, without the eye. The eye watches in horror at the ostensible cruelty being applied to the "patient." But is this horror really being experienced as cruelty? Or is there a subtle pleasure in the "pain" administered to the patient. As I stated in a post on wedolists.com, "If you’re around someone who noticeably enjoys themselves when you are (pridefully) talking about your shortcomings, you can be sure they are just as prideful as you talking about your shortcomings," I.E. pain is experienced as pleasure, by the eye. Who sees this "ritual of affliction?" The collective and divine eye. We can interpret this as the people in a savage group who circle the event of the ritual, and watch with their eyes at the spectacle. It would be easy for us to say here that the third-person eye gains pleasure out of this event of a sense of vengeance and/or a sense of this ritual not happening to them. But it's not so simple for D&G much to there appreciation of a complex event. The eye grasps "the subtle relationship between the sign engraved in the body and the voice issuing from a face - between the mark and the mask." The eye isn't Oedipalized in savage-being. It doesn't have a sense that "nothing goes right for me" or that the "world is against me." The eye in savage-being is in "the real," to whatever extent we can conceptualize "the real." But yet, in this "real," the eye extracts a surplus-value of pleasure from the ritual event. It doesn't extract pleasure from the fact that someone else is being tortured or that someone else is being afflicted and not them. Rather, the eye is acting on it's own when establishing the relationship between inscription and the voice, between the body and the inscription. In "the real" an affliction is applied to the body which the eye sees, and then the eye sees the reaction of the body coming from the face (simply put, we can think of a scream or some sort of vocal squirm). The eye sees inscription and it's reaction my the word. And what happens with the eye when it sees this? It extract pleasure not from the above stated examples that apply to a relative oedipalized modernity, but from a pure reaction of the eye in the real. The inscription happens in "the real," the word-reaction happens in "the real," and the perceptive-eye happens in "the real," which extracts more out of the previous two "reals" than was happening in them alone. This "pure extraction" as a surplus to the event is a pleasure. The eye sees what's happening between the mark and the mask and something comes out of the eye, an unconscious interpretation of sorts. "These are the three sides of a savage triangle forming a territory of resonance and retention, a theater of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciative eye." What happens in this event, this spectacle, is resonance and retention. The hand (inscription) applied to the body (the voice) where an eye watches this application resonates with the eye and is retained by the eye. The eye retains what happens. It sees the bodies reaction. It sees the squirms. It realizes the relationship between the hand that applies the "afflictive ritual" to the body and the body that receives this affliction. Not only does this event resonate for the third party eye, but the intensity of the event creates a memory for the eye. The eye remembers intensity (as we understand perfectly from Nietzsche in that man forms memory for himself by afflicting himself with intense pain). History is born out of intensity. History is born out of subjective pain. History is born out of a set of important wars whose importance depends not just on the quantity of dead lives, but the quality in which these deaths took place. Memory and (H)istory is formed from intensity to the subject. It's not just the intensity though. It's the tripartite matrix of inscription, the voice, and the eye; where the eye perceives whatever is happening as intensity. It perceives for the first time the theater of cruelty in savage-being and the relationship between the other two characters in the matrix.

The eye in a strong sense is the gap between save-being and barbarian-being which we will elaborate on in the next post. The eye serves as the memory of what an intensity is. It sees and remembers. When it remembers, the event "made an impression" on it. When this impression is made, a memory is made. This memory has an intensity at its disposal, a disposal it may not want to partake in. While D&G have given a commendable analysis of this phenomena by characterizing the event as a relationship between the tripartite matrix that enveloped the phenomena in, it's also easy to understand that this intensity that the eye perceives becomes much more than a relationship. It becomes fear literally in the eye of the beholder. In other words, it becomes oedipalized. The flow of the event is no longer the flow of the event. The event is memorized as something to fear. The fear of intensity. Of course, D&G understand this when they affirm that the eye extracts a surplus-value out of the event but we should be more specific now. This surplus-value that is extracted out of the event we can call "fear." This "fear" though is not to be understood as something that the eye purposely tries to avoid, on the contrary; the eye is enamored with the fear it sees in the event (Why else could you explain why "scary movies" are so popular?). But there are two different ways in which the eye sees the event for us and D&G. For now, we see the event through the eyes of savage-being as a set of relationships. After, in oedipalization, we see the event through the eyes of a surplus-socius, as a desire to see "fear" as something not happening to oneself (as an outside spectator). This personality (or cult, or fetish) of fear is limited to ones own understanding of the relationship of primordial acts. When the memory has become so ingrained (by memories), the question of the relationship between component parts doesn't happen at first, but becomes historicized as an auto-response to an event. This auto-response is oedipus. It knows to fear. It likes to fear. But this knowing and liking never formed the relationship that constituted the event of savage-being that would eventually go on to establish oedipus-man.

1-Dimensional; Ideas 1 Part 3

"If I only could see the back of this chair, I wouldn't be thinking about not seeing the back of this chair"

Slowly and meticulously, Husserl gets to the ideas of phenomenology. This is in distinction from him spending 100 pages criticizing every method before him that tries to establish an a priori science either pyschologistically or metaphysically. So this post will deal neither with the crossing out of one's existence when doing phenomenology, nor the criticism of empiricism and idealism explored in the last post. Instead, this post will go into insights into phenomenology. Still these insights into phenomenology aren't phenomenology itself, as a pure descriptive process of what happens in phenomena. In a certain sense, these are still precautions and an elaborations of the method of phenomenological research. Insights though go beyond criticisms of method, and it's here that we will first start to understand Husserl's method of understanding the experience of consciousness. We will see how articulate he is in his analysis of consciousness that places firmly in distinction to the "phenomenology" of Heidegger for example. This isn't to criticize Heidegger and all that extra-important insights he brought into 20th century philosophy. I think if anything, it's to distinguish phenomenology from ontology. This has always been an instinct that I have when reflecting on Book 1 of Being and Time in regards to Husserl's practice. It truly is the case that Being and Time operates as an existential analytic. It categorizes beings in the most general way (E.G. "Looking around for something to do") which of course changes the way anyone looks at philosophy. But this project is different from Husserl's project. The existential is parenthesized out of the development. This will be elaborated on in this post. Hopefully by the end of it, a distinction will be made between the thought of Husserl and Heidegger and how it's simply justifiable to see Heidegger as an ontologist (concerned with the beingness of Dasein) and Husserl as a phenomenologist (concerned with the possibilities required for there to be such thing as a Dasein). What is about to be explored is not explored by Heidegger, and what Heidegger explores in what Husserl terms as a "sociology" (somewhat pejoratively) is not explored by Husserl. So lets make this distinction, with the motivation of of distinguishing two modes of thought, rather than having them under the general rubric of what the Northwestern University Press would like to have them.

"The perception of a physical thing involves a certain inadequacy. Of necessity a physical thing can be given only "one-sidedly"; and that signifies, not just incompletely or imperfectly in some sense or other, but precisely what presentation by adumbration's prescribes". Husserl here delimits our immediate perception to the idea that you only see 1 side of something when you're gazing over it. I'm not able to see the object in it's entirety. I would be secondary, and probably even more eyes to see every single part of an object that would all have to be appropriated in consciousness as the entire object. But this is not how consciousness works for Husserl. What one-sidedness signifies, is an imperfectability. I can see one side of an object, but I can't see a whole object, therefore making the object imperfectly seen. Of course if we were to analyze this further independent from the thought of Husserl, we can say that his conception of perfectibility is an ideal, an idea that he's imposing to consciousness that consciousness can't fulfill. But Husserl addresses this by saying that it's not within consciousnesses jurisdiction to give perfected appearances of an object. He adds at the end of the quote that imperfectability signifies "what presentation by adumbration prescribes". As a warning, if you don't know what "adumbration" means in the most basic sense, and then eventually in the Husserlian sense, that one can get lost easily in the labyrinth of Husserl. An adumbration is a sketch, a rough outline of something. What then is Husserl saying in this statement? He's saying that seeing an object imperfectly is because consciousness prescribes an adumbration of the presentation. In other words, consciousness first gives a sketchy, rough outline of what it perceives. Consciousness is a process of adumbration. It gives things in a sketchy manner which don't ("at first") encapsulate the entirety of the object, and for Husserl, when an object is not it's totality (an impossibility), it's imperfect, which is precisely the mode of consciousness; to give imprecise "visions" of an object by way of adumbration's (sketches that serve to give you some idea of the object. Not the entire idea). So what do we get from this? Operating consciousness gives an imperfect idea of an object outside of itself, an object which it constitutes for itself imperfectly. However, consciousness has time (Internal Time Consciousness), so while for one time, consciousness only sees one side of an object, this won't be the case the more times consciousness is able to see an object, and here is where time because an essential structure to consciousness. "The indeterminateness necessarily signifies a determinableness which has a rigorously prescribed style. It points ahead to possible perceptual multiplicities which, merging continuously into one another, join together to make up the unity of one perception in which the continuously enduring physical thing is always showing some new "sides" in a new series of adumbration's). While the object can be seen in some ostensible entirety at first, time will allow consciousness to expatiate on the object it's focused on. While consciousness at one time had an object with a load of indeterminate qualities that it wasn't grasping, it will eventually (temporality) become more determined over time. While at one time I can only see one side of the chair, at another time I can see another side of the chair, at more times I can see other "perceptual multiplicities" which merge into one another as an idea as the object. The object becomes more idealized the more points of view are being seen in it; the more consciousness has these data of sensation (Husserl's verbiage). The physical thing is always showing new sides besides the 1-dimensional side it showed at first. These new sides though are adumbration's themselves, which means sketchy outlines themselves. So we have a lot of sketchy outlines of an object that "join together" to make something that is more ideal. You can see the motivation of Husserl to see an object never becoming fulfilled by his use of the word "adumbration". He want's to make sure that whatever is visible, is only visible as a sketchy outline. Inferred in this concept is that it's not perfect. From my reading of Husserl, I can't claim that this was ever Husserl's goal; to come up with a theory that would be able to realize what a perfectly ideal object is. Instead I think it was more of his goal to see that an object goes through a process of objectivation where adumbrated sedimentation's are slowly building on previous perceptions to create something more than what was originally perceived as 1-sided. Husserl establishes his goal independent from my statement that he's seeking a "clear" object when he states "To be in infinitum imperfect in this manner is part of the unanullable essence of the correlation between 'physical thing' and perception of physical thing". It's an essence. It's independent of "reality" or a "fact". What the "Physical Thing" is I can never know of independent of my consciousness of that correlative experience of something called a "thing". In this sense, I can never have a "pure" in-itself experience of the object because everything perception belongs to consciousness which is a process of 1-sided adumbration's that concatenate with other eventual perceptions, that never get the whole of the "physical thing", if we are certain that consciousness is an adumbrative process, meaning that it only gives an outline to what's outside of itself and is not what an object would be "all to itself". In this formal sense, there is no such thing as the in-itself. Kant would conjecture that the in-itself is unknowable, but inferred in this statement is that is existed and that we as subjective consciousnesses could not grasp what this ever was. Husserl though explains the fact that consciousness is what comes up with the idea of a physical thing, and comes up with the idea of this physical thing having an ostensible perfect understanding to itself, as if the chair were able to think for itself on what it exactly is. All these mental processes are just that, mental processes; predication by the ego in order to grasp an "essence" of something outside of itself. This is an eidetic truth. But an inference is not needed into what the in-itself of the object holding some "purity" to it independent of consciousness would be. (Heidegger would try to subtly criticize Western Metaphysics by saying that all objects are there for us, "ready-to-hand", meaning they are there for us to use independent of the existence of themselves, and so gives credence to the idea of an in-itself that Man has just not been able to grasp or touch. Heidegger would then turn in his later philosophy to the poetical form and "careful use of language" to be able to see the "essence" of an object independent of the subjectivity placed upon it by subjects. In this sense, to say that Heidegger had a nostalgia to some primitive mind is an understatement. In a sense it wouldn't be inappropriate to call him a naive idealist). The in-itself is simply a correlation of an ego that receives mental processes that concatenate experience. And when this joining-together by concatenation happens, the ego will go on it's way towards thinking about something called the "in-itself", the perfectibility it want's to posit. But this perfectibility is dependent on consciousness coming up with the idea itself. If anything is perfect, it's not an object that is able to be the semblance of "all-sides", it's consciousness that is able to posit all these impossible possibilities in the first place. "Necessarily there always remains horizon of determinable indeterminateness, no matter how far we go in our experience, no matter how extensive the continua of actual perception of the same thing may be through which we have passed". Lets flesh out this idea of "determinable indeterminateness". It's determinable, it's certain that there are things that we just can't know. This is a horizon of experience; We have things that we can't know, yet by a 1-sided perception of an object, we have some sort of grasp of something outside of consciousness. And by other adumbrative grasps of this thing outside of ourselves, we are shown new sides. What was once indeterminate because of a 1-sidedness, becomes more determined. They become more clearly given, but never so much as to take away consciousness's process from giving adumbrations of what's outside of itself, to essentially never give to itself some sort of "perfect clarity", but will build on ("Sedimentation" is the choice word used in Experience and Judgment) the original 1-sidedness with new forms of adumbration's pertaining to the "object" that's outside of consciousness. Let us note that this is in regards to the perception and reflection of a physical object. Later on, Husserl will go into the presentation of a mental process, or how it's never presented, but only "seen" in reflection. Mental processes don't get adumbrated. They don't have sides. They aren't spatial. There's intensities but there is not thing as a "perfected outside object" in a mental processes precisely because a mental process is immanent, meaning in consciousness. Of course, we can fantasize of the "flying centaur" (one of Husserl's peculiar examples of what one daydreams about), but when "objectifying" the mental process it's absolute as an act (E.G. reflection). So this post was limited to consciousness's 1-sided perception of something outside of itself (in classical terms, an object) which would then point ahead to other multiplicities that make up this outside in a more clarity, albeit, a never perfect clarity, which is not the task of Phenomenology, because of understanding it's counterscensical nature based on the fact that consciousness first conceives that possibility of perfection, and so, the idea of perfection, can either be seen as a motivation of a later ego that want's to posit things in an exactitude for it's own purposes, or a fantasy within consciousness that will always want more to the point of something called perfection (these two possibilities are somewhat similar. The former is a psychoanalytical description of the ego in general, and the later is a psychoanalytical description of a "surplus operation". In this sense, the motivation of the ego, is one of surplus). At the very least a distinction is made between Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl operates in a very immanent sense of the world, while Heidegger operates in an existential analytic of being (a theoretical description of what being does in the most general sense possible). Husserl doesn't get to the existential being, and will criticize this as ever being a science in his Crises, while Heidegger will find the primary grounding of the world precisely not in the immediate logico-phenomenological perception that Husserl hypothetically (metaphorically) writes on. The "ecstatic" experience first grounds being, not the fact that being (before recognizing themselves as being) is only seeing 1 side of an object. A further elaboration of this distinction will be made in a later post, with a tendentious regard for how being first happens. Of course, it must be remembered from the lessons of Derrida and Mearleau-Ponty's The Visible and The Invisible, that all these terms (consciousness, perception, being, ect.) are being used with a knowing being already "at-hand". In this sense, this author will be taking the luxury of hypothetical existence for grounding being, knowing fully well it's dependency on language, which will have to be explained along with the hypothetical existence. Still, we will see, that language can find a way of tricking itself into showing the subject that something happened to the subject independent of the direct meaning of the language being read. This is where Phenomenology will become most insightful.

Positing existence independent of yourself; Ideas 1 Part 1

Blue background, white text, this shit's serious.

Every time you finish a book, you feel guilty for not having read another book which makes you read eternally. In this case, I'm guilty of having not read Husserl's Ideas I when I claim to come from the school of Husserl's thought. I really don't claim this for myself, by I talk about him incessantly and reference him in just about every piece of writing that I do. Nonetheless, the most "formal" work I've done is on Husserl and because of this I have recently been castigated by 2 professors for not reading his Ideas I while giving myself the liberties of being able to reference Husserl in sometimes over-generalized ways. I admit this myself. The only defense I have is that I have closely read every other of his published works which has given me a strong sense of the thought of Husserl. It's never an "official" understanding though until you've read every published piece of work by the author. I can take this a step further and say that one never really reads an author because it's easily possible to have 1 bad reading of a text, making one's reading of an author forever "unofficial". Regardless of my caustic response in defending my readings, I always knew that I was going to read Ideas I. I just haven't gotten to it yet! Tout le monde se détendre!

I am in the great position of "having a lot of Husserl on my side" when reading this text, which is considered one of his most important texts. I'm fairly certain that most of the themes expressed in this text I've come across through one of his other texts. If anything, this will be a good reminder of a primary text from Husserl which I haven't visited for about 7 months now. Let us now throw ourselves into the peculiar world of Husserlian Phenomenology done by the man himself.

At the beginning of this behemoth of a text is Husserl's perennial task at creating a method where the "subject" is able to have a sense of existence independent of the subject actually positing anything about it; the extension of Descartes Meditations and/or The Phenomenological Epoche. Always trying to avoid a psychological interpretation of consciousness (pyschologism), Husserl takes great pains to bracket out his existence along with the readers existence during his texts. One of the first Ideas conveyed in Ideas I is the differentiation between "Matters of Fact" and "Eidetic Intuition" which we will go into later in a much more precise manner (specifically, what an "Eidetic Intuition" actually is; What an "Eidetic Science" would be). To be able to do this though, one has to distinguish themselves from themselves which means operate without anything external to them but "purely" within the cogito, the thinking substance that is without ego, the ego that is need of being bracketed out that will always and already want to posit an "objective" existence. "The unrestricted universality of natural laws must not be mistaken for eidetic universality. To be sure, the proposition, 'All bodies are heavy,' posits no definite physical affair as factually existing within the totality of Nature. Still it does not have the unconditional universality of eidetically universal propositions because, according to its sense as a law of Nature, it carries with it a positing of factual existence, that is to say, of Nature itself, of spatiotemporal actuality". The proposition "All bodies are heavy" is a statement of fact. It includes "All bodies". We already have a conception of what a "body" is and are giving it an attribute of heaviness. As a "Law of Nature" for Husserl, it is in the "region" of a "fact". We are attributing bodies to nature. We are attributing a fact. This proposition being stated and belonging to nature make it positing of an attribute. It's something an ego would say based on the fact that there is a totality to nature and things can be said about it. What then is the distinction that will be so crucial for Husserl when he speaks of "eidetic" validity (In Greek, Eidetic means "form". Husserl want's to use the term as a sort of Genus for a fact, meaning he wants to privilege the form of validity over any specific instance of validity in existence. In other words he wants to show the logic of validity independent of humans even existing at all). The answer may be surprising at first because of how similar the look of this statement is in comparison to the "matter of fact" statement. "The proposition, 'All material things are extended,' has eidetic validity and can be understood as a purely eidetic proposition provided that the positing of factual existence, carried out on the side of the subject is suspended. It states something that is grounded purely in the essence of a material thing and in the essence of extension and that we can make evident as having 'unconditional' universal validity'. So the statement "All material things are extended" has a privileged sense over "All bodies are heavy". The former being an eidetic truth and the later being a matter of fact. But a proposition is still being made by a subject. If this is the case, then the grasping of an eidetic will fail. This is where positing on behalf of a subject will be suspended. So we have to think of not stating a proposition while at the same time reading graphematic writing that was posited by Husserl himself. This is not very easy to understand and Husserl never found it necessary to explain some of these complications. The complication is in how he read each statement. If the reader doesn't read the statements like he read them, then you would see both as simply being matters of fact. Lets think about these two propositions for a moment. "All bodies are heavy" is qualified by measuring "weight". "A body" is qualified by the fact that there is a structure of things that make up a whole (set theory overlaps big time here. Pun!). In this proposition about nature, that we want to attribute to nature, we are given the facts of "Body" and "Weight" that are able to make this fact, a fact. On the contrary, "All materials are extended" has a different sense to it for Husserl, an eidetic sense to it. A "material" isn't a fact. It can be "anything whatsoever" for Husserl including anything that one imagines. In this sense, it doesn't have to operate in "real-time". A material is literally anything. On the same line we have the concept of "extension". For Husserl, this would be the case independent of an ego being able to make the statement of extensionality. Anything, whatsoever, are extensions. Anything, can't be nothing. It has to be extended somewhere. It doesn't have to be weight though, nor does it have to be what we call a body. Still, the differentiation is hard to make. Extension is still a property of material, and a material is still a positing by a subject. For Husserl though, he can imagine in his head the idea of an extended material, but he can't imagine a heavy body as fact. He knows for sure that something takes up space and that something, is something. He doesn't know if that something (anything whatsoever) is a "body" nor if that body has some type of quality called "heaviness". The heart of all this is Husserl's idealism or imagination that is able to think of these invariant possibilities that for him show eidetic essences. "We do this by making the essence of the material thing something given originarily (perhaps on the basis of a free phantasying of a material thing) in order, then, in this presentive consciousness, to perform the steps of thinking which the 'insight,' the originary giveness of the predicatively formed eidetic affair-complex explicitly set down by that proposition." A couple things happen here. Firstly, "the material thing is given originarily". Husserl will privilege "material" over the concept of "bodies" because "materials" come to a "subject" (who's not yet a "subject) by "insight", not by a predicated statement regardless of the fact that the subject only knows about this "insight" after the fact of the subject stating it. Husserl gives himself the luxury of being able to use a term that is used as a completely random variable that comes by way of insight and so earns a status of being eidetic. Husserl even says "We do this by making..". We have the option to make something "original". We can do this by freely fantasizing (imagining) about the material thing, rather than seeing it in "real existence". Materials "present" themselves to consciousness, and then we gain an "insight" during this presentation. What is this insight? That we have something that was from somewhere. And here is an eidetic necessity, that something came from somewhere. Husserl though slightly oversteps the tight boundaries he wants to make for an eidetic science by saying that this material will come "originally" rather just from "somewhere". If he wanted to establish the idea of an eidetic science, he would have been better off not to posit an ostensibly "original" place in time. The variable concept of "somewhere" can belong to an eidetic science, but the absolute concept of "originality" only belongs in one place, making it very much a fact. Still we can imagine a material, a random variable coming to something called "consciousness" in which we then are "enlightened" (insight) by the material that comes to us. For any proposition to occur, there must be somewhere that throws something to something called consciousness. As a note, there is a big problem with using the word "consciousness" here. We don't know what he's talking about. We can only infer that it's a machine that takes something from somewhere, much like Freud's psychic apparatus. We aren't giving a metaphor like Freud will give his readers in his writing/psyche analogy. For Husserl, these are things that have to happen for anything to happen in the first place. These are eidetic necessities. Certainly the proposition had to be made for us to realize this eidetic necessity, but an eidetic necessity doesn't require an "us", a subject, an ego, for the necessity of its happen. It's always and already the case that this insight will come to something at one time not understood or called a "subject" before the subject is able to make a proposition based on this eidetic necessity, that the subject will call an eidetic necessity. Basically, Husserl is saying that just because we have words and expression in general to elaborate on what at one time wasn't expressed, doesn't mean that this invalidates the phenomenology. We can borrow words from Being and put it to Nothingness, but this doesn't taking away from the operation of nothing. For Husserl, if we are only subjects independent of ourselves can we understand this. This is the Husserlian leap of faith; to be able to believe that you are nothing in order to do phenomenological science. It is no doubt a leap of faith to borrow signifiers from being in the presence of language and attribute them to a place where there was no signifiers. It's something that Merleau-Ponty elaborated on at the end of the The Visible and The Invisible; the intertwining effect of each which essentially would make any "pure" phenomenology impossible. However, we know this at the very least, that something happens to us, and then somewhere we gain an insight and have a compulsion to represent this empty variable of something happening in loaded heavy-handed concepts (a sure amount of irony here). These are eidetic necessities though independent of expression for Husserl. "That something actual in space corresponds to truths of that sort is not a mere fact; instead, it is an eidetic necessity as a particularization of eidetic laws. Only the actual thing itself, to which the application is made, is matter of fact here". Something Actual is an eidetic necessity, not a matter of fact. It's a fact that there is "something actual". Something Actual is what eidetically grounds a matter of fact. Of course, another eidetic necessity is space and here again, like "materials" and "extension" (which to be fair is basically synonymous with "space") "space" is given a privileged from as an eidetic necessity, as long as the "subject is suspended", in other words, as long as you suspend yourself in making the assertion. It's a law, not a fact, that "Something Actual" has to first be the case for a fact to be established. We can conceive this surely. For me the problems lies in using concepts beyond the concepts that earn their emptiness-status like "anything", "something" "whatsoever" and so on. In this sense, the heart of Heidegger's Being and Time is somewhat more faithful to eidetic necessities because it never allows itself to go beyond ontological categories into a geometrical space, a geometrical space that Husserl to be sure privileged since his first work on the Philosophy of Arithmetic. There was always "pure" Euclidean geometrical space for Husserl. I'm not going to make a criticism of it here because Derrida already did it in his Introduction to Husserl's Origin's of Geometry which I do an analysis of in prior posts in this writing space. Still if we ignore the fact of Husserl equating geometry with ontology, we gain the insight needed into what an eidetic insight is by the deconstructed subject operating only within the ontological category of "something actual" for example. What is a matter of fact is the actual thing itself. The actual thing in space that corresponds to a truth, for example, a ball, a tone, a "cultural fact", are matters of fact. The eidetic necessity that there is "something actual" first for a subject before the subject realizes itself as a subject is privlidged over the signified object temporally, hence the imposed "originality" placed on eidetic necessity. If anything, eidetic necessity is a temporal concept; A first in the line of a series that will end up getting to a matter of fact. I suspect that this will come up later in Ideas I as all of Husserl's text's always end up addressing temporality as the function of the ideality that he is searching out, in this case in the name of "eidetic necessities". But to which this "something actual" is applied, where this application is made, is where a matter of fact happens. Eidetic necessities makes matters of facts then. It's operation is an application to a fact. A transcription from one place to another. Sound familiar to the prior posts on Freud's picture of the Mystic Writing Machine where the psyche was first thought of as being in a place in waiting to be written on? The key to this post though and the beginning of this text by Husserl though is the fact that we are able to use language and expression to posit existence "independent" of the fact that we are using language and expression to posit existence. We can imagine to ourselves by Husserl's "free imaginative variation technique" that something like we just described by the proposition of "material things being extended" happened independent of us having to express it. We can imagine it. Was it the same thing in this type of a-priori consciousness? I doubt it. But can we imagine something being presented to something called "consciousness" that will then "perform the steps of thinking" that will lead to the "insight" which in turn gives us the desire to set it down by proposition? Certainly. For all this to happen, there has to be a place where something is able to happen; something actual. A place where something is able to happen: an eidetic necessity. What we propose as something that has to happen for us to be able to say that this very exact thing has happened.

Dream interpretation, An excessive preoccupation with content; Part 3 of Freud and the Scene of Writing

"Give me your money and I'll tell you things you want to know about yourself little by little."

Derrida finds Freud as a breaking with many traditional schemes of classical philosophy. In the last post we found it in reestablishing "originality" as something that's contingent upon difference. In a prior post to that it was the questioning of the metaphor itself as the machine process that makes writing itself possible. As we continue on in the text, Derrida finds Freud's greatest break with traditional philosophy in his criticism or deference to dream interpretation. If I have choosen this theme specifically within the text to elaborate on, then it probably resonates with me as did certain texts of Freud's upon Derrida. What resonates is what one writes about, and the subject of dream interpretation in general resonates with me loudly in terms of Freud's "breakthrough" on it. This post will not simply be an elaboration on this specific Derrida text, but an emphasis on the ambiguity that Freud throws into dream interpretation. Why would this resonate with me? It resonates with me for reasons that would easily make this writing space into a "blog", which to be sure, it is. But as I admit that this is unfortunately a "blog", I obviously admit it with a sense of dejection. This dejection gives me the luxury of being able to write regardless of the the problems I have with "blogs". Yes, a luxury I seek in guilt. What I can do, is state as quickly as possible the reason why throwing dream interpretation into ambiguity is something that I really love and resonates with me: Because it's an easy way for someone to interpret their life...too easy. And as that one statement goes, it will go no further, and the elaboration will begin on this text with the thought in mind that a personality will inevitably have it's say in a piece of writing.

Derrida states "God, the Egyptians believed, had made man a gift of writing just as he inspired dreams. Interpreters, like dreams themselves then had only to draw upon the curiological or tropological storehouse". Dreams were given to man by God. It had to have been the case for Egyptian antiquity that these dreams were for us if they were given to us by something like a God. Because of this luxury that God bestowed to the Egyptians, there were the "job-openings" for interpreters of these dreams. Surely, everyone could believe in what the interpreter had to say if they believed that dreams could be interpreted in the first place; The curiosity and temptation of man to see what was happening to him when they were not thinking, when they were dreaming. This would lead us to the real truth, the real purity. Afterall, God had given them to us, so it was just matter of a sage being able to interpret what was being reported in a dream. There was a storehouse for interpreting what was being reported, an archive of signs that represented these "original signs" in a dream. Tropological, because it would seriously be considered as a practice to interpret figurative meanings as being literal; Curiological, because everything being reported was using Egyptian Hieroglyphics to represent the things and sounds that were being reported. "They would readily find their the key to dreams, which they would then pretend to divine". Interpreters of dreams who were held in esteem because the idea that God had given man dreams to easily be interpreted had keys to these dreams, ways of taking what was being reported as a dream and turning it into something else, into something that the "wanter of dream knowledge" wanted it to be turned into. The interpreters would come as sources of divination and would be held in esteem for the ease of being able to interpret the reports of a dream. Freud states "if a man dreams of a dragon, the Interpreter assured him it signified majesty; if of a serpent, a disease, a viper, money; frogs, impostors." Here was the key to interpretation. The taking of something being reported by one person to another person held in esteem because of their power to consult a "stored house" of significations that could easily be transposed into to a super-meaning. This super-meaning would have greater significance than the writing in the dream, of the psyche operating on it's own without a need for transcription until the idea of dreams meaning more than their own operation, where God was seen as giving dreams to men, and where God gave the keys to certain people to use other significations to attribute super-meanings to these "original" significations of the dream. Freud states "Their customers would look to find a known analogy, become venerable by long application to mysterious wisdom, for the groundwork of their deciphering; and the Decipherers themselves would as naturally fly to some confessed authority, to support their pretended Science. But what ground or authority could this be, if not the mysterious learning of symbolic characters?" Freud will have no problem calling those who went to dream interpreters, customers. Their customers, already ahead of time, would be looking for a known analogy, a transcription from one place to another. From the original meaning, de-privileged, to the super-meaning that would give them the presence, the purity of what they were seeking, the divine word of God would bestow itself to the interpreter for the customer. The customers would believe in what was being given to them as the word of God by repetition. Those who wanted their dreams interpreted would allow themselves to be guided by "long applications" of "mysterious wisdom". Long applications; the duration of a dream interpretation session, the semblance that work was going on, work that the interpreter was doing that would bring the customer to the idea of what the true meaning of their dream was. Long applications; the repetition of sessions that would fully embody a trust in the customer that the length of the session would first enable. Mysterious wisdom; a knowledge, an intuition, that was only meant for certain people to understand. It wasn't for everyone. It was only those with the divine trust of God where people were found who could speak the word of God through other peoples dreams. But even those who were given the divine trust of God; they would "naturally fly" to a confessed authority in support of their science. So then, the interpreters weren't intuiting the meaning of dreams during their sessions, during their work. They were "naturally flying" to another authority, deferring their ostensible authority to another authority, where they would stop and accept this authority. Was this how a dream session would occur? Would this be how the dream session would work? The customer would come into the dream session, tell the interpreter of dreams about their own dreams, and then the interpreter would go to another "confessed authority" to do their work. Were dream interpreters references upon references? Was their work like a living lexicon? If so, how could there be lengthy sessions if the interpreter was merely a reference to another lexicon? How could they convince their customers to trust them if they appeared to only be consulting other texts when doing their work? "The Egyptian priests, the first interpreters of dreams, took their rules from the species of divination, from their symbolic riddling, in which they were so deeply read: A ground of interpretation which would give the strongest credit to the Art; and equally satisfy the diviner and the Consulted: for by this time it was generally believed that their Gods have given them hieroglyphic writing. So that nothing was more natural than to imagine that these Gods, who in their opinion gave dreams likewise, had employed the same mode of expression in both revelations. " The interpreters were seen as being deeply read. So on command, when given the picture or representation being reported in a dream by the customer, by the consulted, they would have at their disposal a "deep reading" of "symbolic riddling". Interpreters were deeply read on riddles. They would tell customers "riddles". They were used to telling customers riddles, and learned to be good at telling riddles to their customers. The length of a session then can be inferred as the telling of riddles to a customer which the customer found appropriate, which would keep the customer coming back for more. If you told the customer exactly everything they wanted to hear in one second, not only would the work of the interpreter be extinguished, but the customer would be dissatisfied. Even as God gave dreams to man and interpreters to man in order to interpret mans dreams, certainly it couldn't be the case that it was as easy as seconds to be able to interpret a dream. Instead, there would be lengthy sessions where no clear cut answer were ever given to the customer, where the customer instead would be told riddles that would vaguely signify a meaning to their dream. And this wasn't just the riddling of the interpreter, the riddling that they were so "well read" on, but it was the riddling of the customer who actually didn't want to be told the immediate truth of their dreams. Instead, meaning had to be surrounded by a long riddling process, that always would be deferred to another session. Both the interpreter and customer were satisfied. The Customer kept coming back for more and satisfying the interpreter, and the interpreter kept deferring the meaning of their dreams, not-so-ironically to the satisfaction of the customer. But beyond this, how important is the idea of God giving man not just dreams, but hieroglyphic writing? This was the grounding stabilizer of the dream interpretation session. Gods gave man dreams. It was only appropriate that if God was going to be this accommodating to man, that the Gods also "employed the same mode of expression in both revelations". If when I dream I see pictures, and dreams were given to me by Gods, then it has to be the case that the interpretations happen in the same mode of expression, in this case, the pictoral graphic, the hieroglyphic. The Egyptians didn't have Descartes. They didn't have someone saying that it was possible for the Gods to deceive them. The God's superseded reason, they superseded whatever "experience" was in Egyptian antiquity, because personal experience wasn't privileged as form of authority for "reality". Instead all authority was giving to invisible divination. It wasn't personal. Authority was open to everyone not through their own personal experiences, but through going to dream interpretation sessions where they would be told their meaning by someone else who was chosen by God to refer to another authority. For interpreters weren't the Gods themselves, but arbiters of his word, by referring to a text, a text that is not accounted for as being self-referencing to it's own authority.
"It's here that the Freudian break occurs". What is this break? "He makes of psychical writing so originary a production that the writing we believe to be designated by the proper sense of a word-a script which is coded and visible in the world-would only be the metaphor of psychical writing.". In the statements made above, the underlying sentiment was that what was "written to psyche" was not graphic, written, or hieroglyphic, but something even more original than these modes of expression. The use of pictures and eventually words to represent a dream were metaphors, meaning a difference from an originality that Freud thought enveloped the psyche. A metaphor is only in the world, and by this, Freud wants to designate dreams as happening outside of the world. And because they operated outside the world, no interpretation inside the world could account for what a dream was about, let alone how it would be possible for dreams to happen in the first place. Many breaks happen here actually. First, Gods are no longer privileged as the arbiters of truth or the word, the "psyche" is. The psyche, specifically in a dream, is something different from what any interpreter could represent it as, in this case, hieroglyphics. The interpretation itself is a metaphor for something that was original. Being stated as "original", it naturally earns for itself a privileged place over any signifiers that were always going back to some originality in order to understand this originality. The signifiers, the hieroglyphics, were only at the service of "originality". Signifiers are "visible in the world". They are literally "hard-coded". The visibility of interpretation, of the metaphor, strips itself of the authority to be the original mise en scene of the dreamer. Visibility takes away the authority it wants to understand what it wants to understand, the invisible (Merleau-Ponty). What is this primary writing of the psyche that Freud privileges, which inevitably de-privileges the signifiers that want it to mean it's originality, its invisibility? "It works, no doubt, with a mass of elements which have been codified in the course of an individual or collective history. But in its operations, lexicon, and syntax a purely idiomatic residue is irreducible and is made to bear the burden of interpretation in the communication between unconsciousnesses." There are a "mass of elements" that have been "codified" to individuals and to their collective history (I.E. a collective unconscious. Again, as an open question, what is the difference between this Freudian pyschologistic concept of a collective unconscious and Husserl's Transcendental Ego?) but the way in which the operation happens to this individual and collective history is "purely idiomatic" and henceforth, irreducible. Additionally, and for our case, most importantly, this operation that can't be represented but by a "contaminated metaphor" is nonetheless made to bear the burden of a "contaminated metaphor". For us to be able to communicate to each other, about our dreams, we have no choice but in being able to use the metaphor in our communication. "No meaningful material or prerequisite text exists which he might simply use". By "rights" of the irreducibility of "psychic writing", there is nothing in the psyche that could represent itself. Only by always deferring to a metaphor can interpreters have their lengthy sessions of riddling. This is the limitation of the Traumbuch (the Dreambook). "As much as it is a function of the generality and the rigidity of the code, this limitation is a function of an excessive preoccupation with content, and an insufficient concern for relations, locations, processes, and differences". Does content here mean anything else other than an immediate understanding? A word, maybe 2 or 3 words, that signify to the customer that the images that they had dreamed of had an immediate meaning that would nonetheless take a lengthy session to reveal. What is my dream about? What does it represent? These are the questions the customer puts to the interpreter which satisfies both. This is an "excessive preoccupation with content". But what about the context of the dragon? Where was the dragon? What was next to him, even if it was empty space? How did it first come onto the scene as a focal point? Why was the dragon the focal point of the dream and not the cloud in which it hovered over? When a dream is remembered, how come none of the context is of any importance? Why is there an "insufficient concern for relations, locations, processes, and differences?" According to Freud, to put it briefly, because customers wanted to be riddled with immediate meanings by interpreters who could provide these sessions. There was a demand for this satisfaction enjoyed by both the customer and interpreter. In Freud's own words, "I, on the contrary, am prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts". And so herein lies the "Freudian break" with classical philosophy. No longer was anything to be found immediately with reference to an authority that itself had to defer it's authority ad infinitum. Instead, content's depended on contexts, and different people. This isn't just a break with "classical" dream interpretation, but a break with how thinking would happen: To no longer look at the possibility of an immediate truth, but to look at all the circumstances that surrounded this initial desire that privileged a presence, that privileged one thing in a dream. Herein is the place not only where dreams become more ambiguous, but reality becomes more ambiguous. And because both dream interpretation and philosophy are not so easily defined, this doesn't stop an interpretation of dreams nor an interpretation of reality. It simply doesn't make it so easy as referring to some Dreambook to interpret your reality and dreams for you.

Rethinking Originality; Part 2 of Freud and the Scene of Writing

In the last post, thoughts were conveyed about the meaning of a text in general regarding where and how it operates. At the end of it, there was some conclusion in the idea of it being a place of waiting for inscription. As Derrida moves on through the works, and thought of Freud in this text, he comes up against the problem of genesis, specifically the genesis of a text. Some preliminary remarks though before we approach the problem of genesis through Derrida and Freud as the genesis of a text. There's always a difficulty in reading Derrida, not just because literally reading him is the mental equivalent on chopping down trees for 18 hours a day. The difficulty lies in him requiring us to have read all the texts he has read in order for us to fully participate in his reading. I can't emphasize this full participation enough. Derrida doesn't say that you have to read the texts he has read to understand him, but it sure would help. He has been criticized for this, but it was never Derrida's intention to be considered a "serious philosopher" by some "philosophical community". At least I don't think that could have been his intention if he was going to require the reader to have read everything he has read before from entering into his text. Nonetheless, his popularity has come from a faithfulness in style that I think that was borne out of readings of Husserl. The idea of accounting for consciousness precisely is a style that I think severely influenced Derrida. Without going into the biographical notes on why this would be the case (E.G. studying at the Husserl archives for as long as he did) I think it carried over into the way he thought. For Derrida, how could he think about an author and his text if he had not read everything by that author? How could he account for all the proper names he wanted to use without reading everything by that author? Certainly he was interested in the way others thought, but he didn't think he could write on it in any "official" way without knowing the whole text(s) of an author. Eventually, I think Derrida came to see the impossibility of ever knowing the entire corpus of an author, and ever fully understanding it which led to his public polemics against the stabilization of authors by biographies and his insistence on the "genuine" thinker being one who "rigorously" extracted as much out of a small portion of a text rather than someone who could name drop. If this was his idea of "narcissistic reappropration then I think the idea succeeded in a very tremendous way for readers of Derrida. I think anyone who reads Derrida more than once, and keeps coming back to him, is addicted to the fact of never having a "pure" authority of what they are speaking on. Eventually though, when one has read enough of Derrida I think they are reading a sort of working encyclopedia of philosophy. "Working" because he approaches philosophers in a very different way than a "Story of Western Philosophy" that was always going to be the tendency of an anglo-saxon writer and one finds this most obvious in Bertrand Russel; A beginning and end to philosophy which listed authors in historical order, explained their ideas, and judged their ideas. Derrida was the last person who would ever attempt this. Instead, an author was given his due by detail examinations of their texts and quotes, a close read if you will. Really close read.

Derrida works with authors, in authors. He does his best to assume their mindset, and after a certain amount of time reading Derrida, a reader can easily come to trust his interpretations. Still though, there's never a full trust. When he interprets, and we haven't read what he interprets, we have an instinct to want to go to the texts he's referencing not simply to "fact-check" Derrida, but to understand the text on its own terms before going onto Derrida's interpretation. There's really two options here. One can read everything Derrida read before reading Derrida (which I think is almost impossible) or one will have to take Derrida at his word during an explanation of a text and then maybe go back afterwords to that text. I know I have that impulse when reading this specific text on Freud. I haven't read Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology but now feel that I'm going to have to, along with every other text that Freud hasn't written. If anything, when one reads Derrida, they are overcome by how much more reading that have to do. One either accepts this somewhat begrudgingly, or criticizes him for subtly asking this of us. If Derrida's interpretations didn't seem so precise (in the way that Searle didn't find his interpretation of J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words as being "correct") then one would probably have a feeling of "skipping" Derrida after a certain amount of texts. I for one don't find this at all. Personally my trust in Derrida was confirmed with his reading of Husserl. After reading Husserl for a good 2 years of my life, I didn't think there was a way to go deeper into his thought, and this wasn't simply confirmed by the amount of time and energy I put into Husserl because of the love I had for Phenomenological thought, but because of the weakness of the secondary texts I had read on Husserl, especially those "Introductions to Phenomenology" that were really bad. They were just too simple and had a focus towards perceptive phenomenology rather than a phenomenology that didn't operate soley under the guise of vision. If Phenomenology was Merleau-Ponty, then I probably wouldn't have so much of a problem with these introductions. It was with this in mind that my skepticism towards interpretations of Husserl beyond Husserl's own thought was laid to rest by Derrida, and why I will continue to read him, still begrudgingly though because of how much more reading is ahead of me if I want to be faithful to others when in use for my own thought. So it's something to bear in mind before approaching Derrida. You have to let him have the authors the way he sees them because he's earned it. With this in mind, I think I have exercised some of my anxiety with Derrida's reading of others, to understand Derrida. I simply accept it.

But the title of this post is "Rethinking Originality" and before the anxiety of trusting an author came flying through my consciousness, I stated how the text moves onto the problem of genesis, specifically the problem of genesis of a text, in general. Obviously, "Originality" and "Text" have are related in some way. How does this happen through "Freud and the Scene of Writing"? "It is the very idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic. What we are advancing here does not seem to contradict what Freud will say further on: 'Facilitation is probably the result of a single passage of a large quantity'". What is enigmatic about a first time as originality, as genesis? "For repetition does not happen to an initial impression; its possibility is already there, in the resistance offered the first time by psychical neurons". The idea of a primal impression, this phenomenological idea, is not something that just arrives to a "consciousness". The process isn't streamlined in one swoop. An initial impression can already happen again even before it's "initiality". I can experience something for the first time, but wasn't it already the case that I was going to experience whatever it was that I experienced for the first time? Every time "experience happens", isn't it already the case that "experience is going to happen"? How does this happen? Freud, the early Freud that of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, who operated under making the science of psychology anatomical and physiological refers to "psychical neurons" which offer resistance to life itself. Let's explain this concept a little further. An impression, any impression can hit me but it doesn't "do anything" without a neuronal function that can "do something with it". This "doing something with it" is a resistance to an impression that never was "not going to do anything with it". Freud's psychical neurons don't allow that to happen, unlike the failures of perception that Husserl discuss that never become idealized. Derrida states "Resistance itself is possibly only if the opposition of forces lasts and is repeated at the beginning" and this is where a first time becomes "enigmatic". Firstly, the forces that are in opposition are an impression and the mind, but not just the mind as cogito, not the self-subsistent Cartesian thinking essence, but memory. Consciousness and memory are equivalents here. Memory is the force in which an impression becomes just that, without which the idea of an impression doesn't exist and doesn't happen. Anything can only happen because of memory, because of "the production of the trace as moments of deferring". The trace, as the process of going backwards for seeing a place in which there would be a gap, afterwords where there would be another place. Repetition begins when life and memory contact each other, when memory offers itself to "life" as a resistance. Memory will resist life in it's "purity" by allowing itself to be impressed. Impressionality; the periodicity of the trace, the deferral of life. "Life is already threatened by the origin of the memory which constitutes it, the effraction which it can contain only by repeating it". While life is threatened by memory, the idea of "pure life", it also constitutes it as something to be sought after. When Derrida makes this statement he's implying a teleology not only for metaphysics and philosophy, but for ontology, for Being. Memory, this break with "life", can only be a break if it happens more than once. Memory can only break with the "purity" of what would be a "real-time-life" by repeating itself over and over, by resisting the fact that I can always and already be experiencing something wholly different from myself. Memory breaks "life" by repetition. At the same time, memory constitutes life by repetition. How? Because it enables the "wholly other", the idea of "purity", the "transcendental signified", the ultimate concepts that brings experience into non-differentiation (the religious sublime) . That which is impossible for memory, for Being (Consciousness is memory. Consciousness is the Being of beings. Memory is the Being of beings) is wholly other. The idea of a "present life" can't be established without difference, the difference that pushes one along to think "What about a place with no difference"? Derrida finds it important to mark out where Freud finds a "large passage of quantities" that will be "great breaching happenings" that constitute memory. Freud finds this in pain. "Pain leaves behind it particularly rich breaches". Pain is a great neuronal implication of memory. Freud symbolizes psychological neurons in his early work by symbols that I can't represent here because they aren't on my keyboard. One of these neurons though (to be sure, a symbolic neuron in 1895) is guided by intensity. The neuron capturing an impression as painful has an extra amount of intensity to it making it more of a "facilitation" for the happening of memory. "But beyond a certain quantity, pain, the threatening origin of psyche, must be deferred, like death, for it can ruin psychical organization". Only a certain quantity of pain is allowed into neuronal resistance, enough pain before memory flees away from the scene, remembering why it fled. If memory allowed all the pain in the world without fleeing, it would die. There would be no memory if I had no neuronal impulse to flee if someone was spraying me with a flame sprayer. Remember that old warning sign? "Don't touch to stove!" And if you did, you would remember not to touch it again by the quantity of pain that was endured. What happens though if you keep your hand on the stove? You ruin your "psychical organization". You're no longer being as memory. You are a different being. You are one whose psychical organization doesn't operate by the intensity of a neuron in contact with an impression. B(being) without mind, without neurons, without a sympathetic nervous system. But for Freud, this is not the nervous system. This wouldn't be being as "facilitation's serving the primary function". In other words, Being wouldn't be a function, an operation for itself "under the compulsion of the exigencies of life". How to facilitate these exigencies of life? This "we" don't have to know because our neurons always and already do the work for us. Psychology as Science for Freud was understanding how the primary operation of the mind is to find facilitation's in the face of exigencies. (As a side note; by way of the metaphor of science, was Freud not under the same teleological presuppositions of Rousseau?)

What does this mean for the idea of "Rethinking Originality"? It's to deffer "originality" whenever the concept comes up. It's to deffer the idea of "purity" sought after by western metaphysics and philosophy, not simply as something that is going to be postponed, one fine day (Derrida verbiage), but to see difference as what is "the original happening", thereby making what is "original" enveloped by difference. By the mark of my mind, by the mark of my memory, I trace back periods eternally. The purity of life that I seek, this original "primal impression" that would mark originality is only after a difference whereby I can speculate about what it is to be wholly other than myself, and if this difference always and already wasn't the case, there still wouldn't be originality because there wouldn't be the difference that was necessary to signify something that was "wholly other". My memory constitutes originality. It makes it possible by making it an impossible idea. An idea, as the difference of what a "primal impression" would be without being an idea, without being itself, without being itself as a difference in the semblance of an origin, a genesis. I can only think of an origin. An origin can't happen by itself. An origin is the mind's way of differentiating itself away from itself as difference. It's the very gift of repetition, the very boredom that repetition brings about that makes the memory (those scrupulous neurons firing in the face of repetition) that constitutes what is called "originality". And to be sure, just in case I ever really never wanted to be bored, my neurons would stop this instinct by only allowing a certain quantity of intensity into my psychical organization. My psychical organization that likes to think about "originality", that loves speculating on this fact of the "wholly other" is only allowed by not being in it, by being exactly the difference of it, by constituting it as an idea. The idea, as the difference and the constitution of originality. Who I am, my memory, will always repeat what's happening without myself even knowing that this is happening, and the "originality" that I seek in the coming-to-consciousness of repetition, is nothing other than the difference of myself, the myself that is solely makes "originality" possible...as an idea...as a difference, because of the gift of repetition.

How the Invisible can be understood; Conclusion to "The Visible and the Invisible"

In the last post we saw Merleau-Ponty making the inevitable philosophical move in summing-up the phenomenological experiences he elaborated on with everything before it. He summed it up as "the intertwining", and to understand it more simply, it can be understood as "the combining" (Almost sounds like a bad movie). The tone of the last post was somewhat caustic because of it. The idea of staying faithful to Phenomenology is something that doesn't bode well for a formal systematic appropriation of past phenomena being described ostensibly under the guise of teleological absence. For better or worse, for my eyes, it's why the only "pure" phenomenologist was Husserl, and why, for better or worse, the discipline was truly extinguished by him. Who can call themselves a phenomenologist? Who can stay away from coming to conclusions ahead of time? In a philosophical sense, Derrida for me is the one who finishes the thought of Husserl, and in a very definite sense, all of philosophy. If Husserl is the end of Philosophy, then Derrida is at once the explanation of the end, and then afterwords, the what-happens-after philosophy. These sentiments were echoed by Husserl himself in one of his last publications in regards to the dream of philosophy being over. I want to spend a couple posts on that one text after this one in order to return to the faithfulness of Husserl's thought, not just to philosophy, but in his actual writing, which was a faithful style, which was an unbending style. After the theory of phenomenology though, it seems to me that theory in general ends, as constituting anything for man, which Husserl goes into in the text I want to elaborate on after this. Without going into the idea of the end of theory and what Husserl's words on it, I want to finish this Merleau-Ponty text by what he sees as a possible afterthought to philosophy, more specifically, to the invisible. He somewhat saves himself at the end of the Chiasm chapter by attempting to reestablish sense via metaphor, basically language, but a poetic language and he turns specifically to Proust here which I think was the saving grace with the end of this text, to essentially turn back to the sense-happening independent of the sense-happening getting anywhere. Let us visit one of Merleau-Ponty's final phrases. "We touch here the most difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the invisible. No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth. For what he says of the musical idea he says of all cultural beings, such as The Princess of Cleves and Rene, and also of the essence of love which "the little phrase" not only makes present to Swann, but communicable to all who hear it..." Merleau-Ponty defers the understanding's attempt at grasping pure sense, wild sense, to Proust (This does make me want to re-read parts of In Search of Lost Time, maybe even from the beginning with Swan's Way with a mindset that is after phenomenology). What is Merleau-Ponty deferring here? He's deferring the essences of life to the poets and to the writers instead of the philosophers, to the philosopher of post-Hegelianism, to Husserl. For the first time we find Merleau-Ponty stating that ideas need not be contrary to what is sensible. He finds this "intertwining effect" in Proust who he sees as someone who's able to embody his ideas with sense, a sense though that is certainly a romantic sense. For Merleau-Ponty, when Proust uses the word "Love", it's not simply a Husserlian logical variable within many others, but loaded with meaning that is communicable to all. I agree with Merleau-Ponty here, essentially that the idea of love is a loaded concept. I think it's why any phenomenologist first enters into the field; to essentially deconstruct loaded concepts without even thinking this is what they will be doing. This is where sense happens for Merleau-Ponty and it's important to distinguish Husserl from Proust now. What is the difference? What happens when Merleau-Ponty starts at Husserl and ends at Proust? Let's give some concrete examples. Husserl will specifically speak of sedimented concepts that last for ages, that have one meaning one age, and a different meaning in another age, but still retain the same variable (or signifier if you will). The phenomenological gesture of Husserl here is to watch the logic of sedimentation, essentially to see how a concept is first established, morphs into a difference from it's inception, continually morphs from the first differences, to eventually come to something that is very different from the incipient concept, yet retains the same name or signifier. The idea of Love is a perfect example here. What was love for Greek antiquity compared to now? This rhetorical question doesn't need to be answered, without at least writing a book about it, and if not, retains it's rhetorical gesture. Husserl then sees traces of what happened to a logical concept during the process of sedimentation. While things are added onto the variable, other things are lost from it's incipient stage. You have the idea of Love that signified one to many different things in one "place" and then gaining more signification through time, to eventually lose it's apparent sense (it's incipient sense), to the point where no one even knows what they're talking about when they use the word "Love". In comes Proust. This is exactly the sense of Love. It's something that has certainly lost it's apparent sense, it's phenomenological sense. If I say the word, nothing appears in front of me. When I speak of a less loaded concept though like the more contemporary value of "sedimentation" I have an idea for example of a rock by the ocean being washed over by the waves and slowly changing size, shape, and color because of the influence of salt and force. The idea of Love though for Proust never is in need of being elaborated. It's always communicable to all who hear it. This is true. But just because something is communicable to everyone who hears it, does this mean it means the same thing for everyone? This certainly is not the case. With any loaded concept in general, any heavy handed concept, it's easy to be lead into misinterpretation. Much like any transcendental signifier (E.G. "God") it means something different to everyone. Yet the variable still remains. This "little phrase" retains it's power by not signifying anything specific except for the fact that it has been unconsciously maintained without effort nor without any philosophical testament to it's meaning. It's not fair to Proust though to say that Proust ever had a philosophical stance of the concept of Love. As a non-philosophical writer, he wasn't guided by a sense of opening up meaning. Proust is able to elaborate on something at will and the reader is able to have a sense for that elaboration without then having to think about what the sense of what that elaboration is". When Proust elaborates on being sick as a child, and how he becomes even more dejected when he comes to the realization that his mother comes to his aid against his fathers wishes (his father who wanted to "toughen up" the child by not having a parental figure at his bedside whenever he was crying) we get a sense of love without going into the process of how the concept came to be, or how any concept can possibly happen. With Proust eavesdropping as a child on a conversation between his mother and father, hearing how his father "gives in" to the fact of not attending to his child's cries, and how he states to his mother "Well, we can't punish the kid", we gain a sense of dejection on Proust's part and love on the Father and Mothers part. No where did we have to first understand how it's possible to be "dejected" nor understand what it is to "Love". We "feel" for the child and see the love of the parental figures without a description of those concepts. "This little phrase" is where Merleau-Ponty sees the invisible. Within language, anything that gives an immediate sense to oneself when being conveyed is adorned, especially those loaded concepts that could never be conveyed just in one book, one fine day, for example. These concepts can mean so much to someone without them really meaning anything upon examination, and this is why Merleau-Ponty favors the poets and writers over the philosophers in some sort of age that would be after-phenomenology, after-philosophy. Heidegger would see the same thing in his later thought with Holderlin. Husserl though would simple call it a day and say the dream is over. It's why I think it's fair to say that Husserl was the only "pure" phenomenologist, because he never saw it becoming something other than a scientific process, albeit an ideal scientific project contrary to a technological one. Sticking with Merleau-Ponty though he states via Proust "the notions of light, of sound, of relief, of physical voluptuousness, which are the rich possessions with which our inward domains is diversified and adorned" are the notions that aren't contrary to sense, but line them and their depth. Notionality need not be elaborated on for them for to become rich. The difference between this richness though and a theoretical philosophers richness is between auto-affectation, on the one hand, and logic on the other. What does this mean? It means that when Proust speaks of a musical motif, you have a sense for the music without going into the reason why you have a sense for it. When Husserl goes into the musical motif you are given the fact for example that the entire phase of a piece of music has to happen over a period of time or one will just hypothetically hear a cacophony of noises in 1 non-time, 1 second. You have a memory for something that just passed that leads to something else. To speak specifically within music, when you are hearing the chorus, you have the bridge somewhere in the back of your mind as a past-present that leads up to and establishes the present chorus. To speak more simply, one is always unconscious of the acts that are happening to oneself at every moment. This just isn't the issue for Proust as a writer and is of benefit for what is called the invisible by Mearleau-Ponty because something happens to oneself where a thinking after doesn't have to happen after for the understanding to occur. Here is the difference though. Somewhere along the line, a philosopher comes in and says "Well, something actually does happen" when sense is happening to oneself without thought. Thought is being added on to a sense in order to understand the thought of the sense. But what makes sense a thought? And does sense include thought? Does sense have it's own internal logic or is it something that just passes over us affecting us because it's in us without us thinking about it. Already though for Mearleau-Ponty we are imposing a logic of sense by saying that it's "affecting us" and that "we don't need to think about it". One person is conveying a story, and the other is concerned with how a story can happen at all. One person can only tell the story they know, and the other can faithfully say that the story can't happen without these preconditions. Merleau-Ponty wants to move the preconditions for sense into the immediate grasp of the present without elaboration which he finds at it's furthest limits in Proust. By being able to stir the imagination with words that don't need to be "read closely", one is in the invisible. An expression has just passed over them and their sense is stimulated and imagination stirring. This simple stimulation of sense regardless of the meaning of the signifier that manifests the sense is the invisible for Merleau-Ponty. It's a presence that is not able to be signified because of the sense of thought that is never present, but always after a sense that hypothetically happened in one moment. Any elaboration of what happened in the present for anything to be able to happen in the first place is ideal, a range of hypothetical's created by the imagination in order for an understanding. The invisible then is not the ideal for Mearleau-Ponty but the real that encloses everything, mind and body included, and unseparated in an eternal "intertwining" or "chiasm". It's an affection, not a thought. It's a presence that is never able to be established in a systematic order, and when a word is used in non-philosophical terms, it is able to convey a meaning which is the biggest paradox here. It was philosophy as science that was given to man through enlightenment that was supposed to give sense to it's existence, but now affection gives sense to existence. It's the sense of a presence that is always changing. To be fair to Merleau-Ponty it's his Hegelian gestures of the final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible where he combines the idea/notion with the invisible/nothingness, but what happens is a switching of what's privileged over the other. While Husserl privileges the fact that one must first be thinking in the world (Cartesian Meditations), even passively, unconsciously, and phenomenologically, Merleau-Ponty privileges the fact that both thinking being and and a pure affective logic "line" each other, and the affective logic is invisible, unable to be elaborated on, only to be spoken, if by language, through a romantically descriptive prose that automatically leads to an affection in the reader. There's no doubt Husserl was addressing some of this with the concept of the Life-World in the Crises, but that he would ever get to Proust as an expressible sign of the invisible, the a priori, the nothingness, I don't think would be the case. If there was ever a more stronger "call to arms" within phenomenology other than the ubiquitous criticism of romanticism, existentialism, and contemporary science by Husserl in the Crises, I don't know where it is, which leads to my final thoughts on The Visible and the Invisible. The question of this text is not simply a question of phenomenology, and philosophy. It's a question of Being and how Being comes to itself. Does Being come to itself automatically without a logic? Does it spontaneously and randomly act affectively on participants, participants who may or may not have been to come? Or was Being disclosed to itself in order to find out for itself that there was always a logic to itself that wasn't randomly affective but sedimented with sense itself? Or, are both the case? Is now, where one no longer asks about itself but is simply affected without a requirement for thought because all the thought about itself has already been established, and essentially thrown back into pure "wild" affectation? Unfortunately (or fortunately), with all philosophical puzzles like these, they always lead back to Hegel; the dialectical stream of coming into Being in order to establish Being, to eventually be thrown out of Being...again and again.