.

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

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

think of consciousness as a multiplicity. — Number2018

In the interest of graduating from the outdated....OK, in principle.

conceive the nature of this multiplicity, each distinct “state of consciousness” should be identified as a working part — Number2018

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

in an appropriate assemblage.....technological, scientific, social, cultural, etc. — Number2018

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.

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

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.

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. — Joshs

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.

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

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

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, — Joshs

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.

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

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?

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.

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? — Mww

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

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

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.

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.

I 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.

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.”

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?

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.

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

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.

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. — Joshs

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?

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? — Joshs

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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. — Joshs

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.

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'. — Joshs

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.

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. — Joshs

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.

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.

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.

"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.

“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.

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?

"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."

"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)."

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.

"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)." — Joshs

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).