• Number2018
    550
    Let’s get specific. I’m going to take Kenneth Gergen’s
    approach to psychotherapy as reasonable proxy for Foucault-Deleuze.
    For Gergen, we only exist as the kind of ordinary, everyday persons we are, within certain, socially constructed, linguistically sustained "living traditions" - within which, what people seemingly talk 'about' (referentially) is in fact, constituted or constructed 'in' their responses to each other in the talk between them. In Gergen's version, such a tradition [end p.43] seemingly exists as "a repository of linguistic artifacts," sustained as such "in virtue of negotiated agreements widely shared within the culture" (MSp.9). For him, these socially negotiated agreements influence, not only what we take our realities to be, but also the character of our subjectivities, our psychological make-up.
    Joshs

    It looks interesting. Could you write the name of the book?
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    Actually , those quotes came from an article by John Shotter (IN DIALOGUE: SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM AND RADICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM). But I’d recommend Gergen’s Realities and Relationships .
  • Luke
    2.6k
    Wittgenstein is making a distinction between thinking as classical reflective cognition and his notion of practice [...where], according to the traditional notion of reflective cognition , one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private.

    But Wittgenstein did not have available to him other ways of conceiving ‘thinking’.
    Joshs

    You've got a lot of work to do to demonstrate that Wittgenstein was committed to this (narrow) view of thinking or understanding. I'm not sure where you get this from - perhaps by completely missing the point of his 'five red apples' example and almost all of his later philosophy? Consider this reading:

    It has been noted that the trip to the grocer that Wittgenstein
    presents us with in the opening remark of Philosophical Investigations
    is apt to strike readers as somewhat odd (see Mulhall 2001; Hutchin-
    son 2007). The grocer seems dumb (or extremely miserable and rude);
    moreover, he seems in need of colour charts so that he might associate
    the word “red”, as written on the note passed to him by the shopper,
    with the colour of the apples, which he keeps in drawers. Is there a
    reason for such an eccentric presentation of an otherwise familiar and
    mundane scenario? I submit that there is. Wittgenstein structures the
    story of the trip to the grocer as such to reflect the form of a dominant
    picture of “inner mental processes”. Wittgenstein tries to tempt his
    reader/interlocutor into asking for more, into asking for something
    that will serve as grounds for predicating of the grocer understanding.
    His interlocutor in Philosophical Investigations obliges: “But how does
    he [the grocer] know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’
    and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” Wittgenstein thus succeeds
    in tempting the interlocutor into undermining her own prejudices. As
    Stephen Mulhall writes, commenting on this passage in his book Inher-
    itance and Originality
    : “If the public, externalised versions of such
    procedures were not in themselves enough to establish the presence of
    understanding to the interlocutor’s satisfaction, why should their inner
    counterparts?” (2001: 45).

    Let us consider this for a moment. Can it be that inner processes
    would be more satisfactory to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in virtue of
    their being simply inner? If we theorize modules and elicitation files
    matching mental images of colour with files having semantic content,
    then why should this satisfy the interlocutor when the grocer, having
    done the same externally in the scenario, failed to so satisfy her? Surely,
    “going inner” is not enough?
    The subtlety of Wittgenstein’s example does not stop there. Mulhall
    writes,

    If Wittgenstein’s shopkeeper’s way with words strikes us as surreal
    and oddly mechanical, to the point at which we want to question
    the nature and even the reality of his inner life, and yet his pub-
    lic behaviour amounts to an externalised replica of the way we
    imagine the inner life of all ordinary, comprehending language-
    users, then our picture of the inner must be as surreal, as oddly
    mechanical, as Wittgenstein’s depiction of the outer. (Ibid.: 46)

    Of course, one of the driving forces behind the interlocutor’s ques-
    tion (her craving for more) is the thought that the outer behaviours
    described by Wittgenstein in this scenario are merely contingent,
    merely accoutrements: for, obviously we can imagine a grocer who
    simply picks up five red apples (without the use of colour charts etc.)
    and of whom we are happy to say that they have understood the
    request. This makes the interlocutor assume that something general
    must be going on “behind the scenes” – in the grocer’s head – that
    affords us the right to attribute to him understanding. What this sce-
    nario does, therefore, is facilitate one’s realization that what is at issue
    is not whether certain practices are internal or external, mental or
    physical, but rather what would count for us (for Wittgenstein’s inter-
    locutor) as a grounding for an attribution of “understanding”. The
    craving for generality [that W is attempting to subvert] leads us to
    look for general grounds underlying all instances of understanding.
    Phil Hutchinson

    You might have an interesting point to make, but your conspicuous misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy isn't helping.
  • Joshs
    5.2k

    You might have an interesting point to make, but your conspicuous misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy isn't helping.Luke

    You need to make your point yourself, instead of throwing a long quote at me and then concluding that I completely misunderstand Wittgenstein, without telling me how specifically you are interpreting my claims, and how the quote refutes them. I may indeed completely misunderstand Wittgenstein , but please make the argument yourself so I know what the hell you are talking about.
    In the meantime , you might want to glance at this paper I wrote ( published in Theory and Paychology ) that discusses social constructionist positions influenced by Wittgenstein. That may clarify my argument.

    https://www.academia.edu/1342908/Embodied_Perception_Redefining_the_Social
  • Number2018
    550
    I still do not understand why you claim that “The point where Derrida steps in is before you get to start with your structures and then show how they relate to each other. He breaks apart the ability to claim that there is a structure of any kind ( or force, energy, power, quality) in the first place that isn't already divided within itself prior to its claim to be an itself. The practical significance of this is not only to unravel the presuppositions of psychoanalytic models , not only to problematize Foucaultian or social constructionist notions of a socially created subjectivity determined and re-detemined by cultural interchange (and Deleuze's approach I think belongs to this zone), not only to recognize the site of culture within the so-called subject even before expose to a social-linguistic community, but to situate the place of this decentering even before a single mark or fold can claim to be an entity ,an itself.”
    As far as I see, Derrida could not successfully manage the transition from his deconstruction project to the conceptual framework that is able to take account of a stable and apparent socially created subjectivity. On the contrary, after working on deconstruction of misrepresented ontological and epistemological foundations of our society (‘History of Madness,’ ‘Order of Things,’ and ‘Archeology of Knowledge), Foucault moved to the research of the creation of the social.

    Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants.
    — Number2018

    How does a social determinant have its effect on my behavior and thinking? Does it operate as a form
    of conditioning, behind my back so to speak , in spite of my explicitly construed intent?
    Joshs
    There is the apparent controversy: from one side, one can make choices in an ever-expanding range of situations; one becomes responsible for the creation and construction of a 'life of one’s own.’ Human identity is being transformed from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ with the responsibility for performing that task and for the possible consequences and the ‘side-effects’. Therefore, the role of intentionality, self-reflexivity and personal accountability has dramatically increased over the recent time. From the other side, we evidence that our ways of life, social engagements and personal experiences are shaped, reproduced and incorporated into the dominating social order. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. Foucault’s conceptualization of contemporary subjectivity could help to understand the reciprocity of the growing individuation and the overwhelming socialization. He characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of socialization and power as ‘environmental’: “governmentality acts on the social environment and systematically modify its variables…Biopower’s formula is to ’make live or die’. It seeks to optimize a state of life by maximizing and extracting forces…Neoliberalism finds its rational principle in an artificially arranged freedom: the creation and management of the competitive behavior of economically rational individuals in the regulated environment ” (Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’).
    In our lives, we deal with various forms of conditioning that modulate behavior and stimulate intentionality by implanting directive presuppositions and activating certain tendencies. The psychological mechanisms behind these ways of behavior management are called priming. Lars Hall and others studied them:
    https://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hall-et-al.-2010-Magic-at-the-Marketplace-Choice-Blindness-for-the-Taste-of-Jam-and-the-Smell-of-Tea.pdf
    Priming operates less through stimulus-response than through cues whose force is situational. Priming includes the presuppositions that orient a social actor’s entry into the situation and direct her self – management after the encounter. We are continually immersed in highly organized artificial domains. During any encounter, one can experience her individual situation as profoundly personal and intimate. Nevertheless, one’s inner self and explicitly construed intents are primarily formed by a complex of pre-given organizing principles.

    Radically temporalapproaches , by contrast , sees each person as only being able to relate to, assimilate , construe that in the social sphere which can be construed on some basis of similarity with respect to one’s history of understanding. So we find in Kelly, Gendlin, and Heidegger a description of the ongoing history of an individual’s experiencing in terms of an overall pragmatic self- continuity:Joshs
    Coming back to our discussion of the concepts of context and unconsciousness, priming-like notions would be more appropriate to consider our situation than the philosophy of radical temporality. Derrida’s differance or mark cannot explain the structuring iterative unconscious forces that impact us. People have similar experiences primarily due to the fact of being immersed in the common highly organized, but shocking and affectivily charged environment.

    In Kelly’s approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one’s own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.
    “Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is
    that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and
    between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).
    “It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds
    of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

    One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways’ that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same’ cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.

    Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory.”
    Joshs

    I need to think about this. May be it is correct, but it is against my personal experience and observations.
  • Luke
    2.6k
    You need to make your point yourself, instead of throwing a long quote at me and then concluding that I completely misunderstand Wittgenstein, without telling me how specifically you are interpreting my claims, and how the quote refutes them. I may indeed completely misunderstand Wittgenstein , but please make the argument yourself so I know what the hell you are talking about.Joshs

    You stated - or, at least, strongly implied - that, for Wittgenstein, 'thinking' is a "classical reflective cognition" according to which "one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private."

    This is exactly the type of view that Wittgenstein was attempting to undermine in his Philosophical Investigations, particularly with his remarks on family resemblances, the private language argument and rule-following, but also more generally throughout.

    To say or imply that Wittgenstein considered there to be one essential defining commonality to all instances and uses of the word "thinking", e.g. "consulting an inner template", would be to ignore his family resemblance concept, according to which the various meanings/uses of a word such as "thinking" do not all have one essential defining feature, but instead those various meanings/uses share "a complicated network of similarities" which lack any essential defining feature.

    Likewise, to say or imply that Wittgenstein considered rule-following to consist in consulting an inner template would be to ignore or misconstrue virtually all of his remarks on rule-following and the private language argument, which seek to evince that the (public) grammar of the word "rule" (and the following of such rules) precludes a strictly private or isolated usage.

    However, your misguided claim was about Wittgenstein's position on "thinking", which Wittgenstein refutes himself:

    316. In order to get clear about the meaning of the word “think”, we watch ourselves thinking; what we observe will be what the word means! — But that’s just not how this concept is used. (It would be as if without knowing how to play chess, I were to try and make out what the word “checkmate” meant by close observation of the last move of a game of chess.) — Philosophical Investigations

    This contradicts your assertion that thinking is something "inner and private". If thinking were something "inner and private", then we could only ever know what "thinking" meant by observing ourselves think. But Wittgenstein explicitly states that this is not the meaning/use of the concept.

    36. What would we reply to someone who told us that with him understanding was an inner process? —– What would we reply to him if he said that with him knowing how to play chess was an inner process? — We’d say that when we want to know if he can play chess, we aren’t interested in anything that goes on inside him. — And if he retorts that this is in fact just what we are interested in, that is, in whether he can play chess — then we should have to draw his attention to the criteria which would demonstrate his ability, and on the other hand to the criteria for ‘inner states’.
    Even if someone had a particular ability only when, and only as long as, he had a particular feeling, the feeling would not be the ability.
    — Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment (aka Philosophical Investigations part II)
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    12.3k
    Newer approaches have discarded the computer analogy in favor of organismic metaphors. Cognition belongs to an embodied self-organizing system. Processes like cognition and perception are not the processing of raw stimuli but forms of interaction and self-transformation. Memory, then, is never veridical because it is not the retrieval of data from a filing cabinet. Rather it is a reconstructive activity that changes rather than retrieves.Joshs

    OK, let's assume that memory is a type of talking to oneself then. I still believe that the intent involved in talking to oneself, in general, is much different from the intent involved in talking to another. That was the point.

    There is a matter of competition which makes it beneficial not to disclose to others what you want to talk to yourself about (remember). Further, there is a big issue of deception which we all practice to some extent pretty much on a daily basis. You might say that we ought not be secretive and deceptive, but we're talking about the reality of language, not some ideal.
  • Number2018
    550

    Here’s Heidegger:

    “In its familiar being-in-relevance, understanding holds itself before that disclosure as that within which its reference moves. Understanding can itself be referred in and by these relations. We shall call the relational character of these referential relations signifying. In its familiarity with these relations, Da-sein "signifies" to itself. It primordially gives itself to understand its being
    and potentiality-of-being with regard to its being-in-the-world. The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.“

    Can you imagine Deleuze assenting to this way of describing moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation?
    Joshs

    This is how Deleuze and Guattari describe our 'moment to moment experience in terms of an ongoing self-integrity through self-transformation' :smile: :razz: :
    "It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces
    something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors." (Deleuze and Guattari, 'Anti-Oedipus')

    Likely, our shared context also profoundly impacts our verbal performances. The context and medium determine language. I mean that after being placed into the ultimately different context, philosophical, literary, and poetic texts and citations can inevitably lose their original meaning. In our situation, even the most significant philosophical texts could become the means of the endless
    re-citation, re-interpretation, and re-activation of one’s pre-given and pre-shaped subjectivity. Often, these texts cannot provide an access to Authenticity, Truth and Being. That is why Deleuze and Guattari moved to anti-text, anti-poetics, and anti-philosophy.Equally important, they insist that our context and unconscious are maintained and shaped by
    machinic, iterative, and exterior processes.
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    You stated - or, at least, strongly implied - that, for Wittgenstein, 'thinking' is a "classical reflective cognition" according to which "one consults an already present inner scheme of understanding to locate a rule that one then follows, which makes it inner and private."

    This is exactly the type of view that Wittgenstein was attempting to undermine in his Philosophical Investigations, particularly with his remarks on family resemblances, the private language argument and rule-following, but also more generally throughout.
    Luke

    You misunderstood me. I agree with you. The view that thinking is reflective cognition is the view Wittgenstein is opposing. My point was that there are alternatives to reflective cognition, such as certain phenomenological philosophical perspectives like that Heidegger’s. took of thinking or Metleau-Ponty’s embodied intercorpoeality, that do not posit a hidden inner repository of meaning, and yet offer an origin of language that is more primordial than Wittgenstein’s interaubjective grounding of language.
  • Luke
    2.6k
    You misunderstood me. I agree with you. The view that thinking is reflective cognition is the view Wittgenstein is opposing.Joshs

    Then why attribute this view to Wittgenstein and say that he “did not have available to him other ways of conceiving ‘thinking’”?

    My point was that there are alternatives to reflective cognition, such as certain phenomenological philosophical perspectives like that Heidegger’s. took of thinking or Metleau-Ponty’s embodied intercorpoeality, that do not posit a hidden inner repository of meaning, and yet offer an origin of language that is more primordial than Wittgenstein’s interaubjective grounding of language.Joshs

    AFAIK, Wittgenstein never attempted to “offer an origin of language”.
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    AFAIK, Wittgenstein never attempted to “offer an origin of language”.Luke

    No, he didn’t.

    “ After such a synthesis of Wittgensteinian philosophy and Merleau-Ponty' s phenomenology of perception, where Wittgenstein grows silent, when we reach beyond the 'language-games' and 'forms of life,' once again the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty presents itself to point toward the Beyond. The precedence and succession of Merleau-Ponty to Wittgenstein is not a temporal or honorary one, but rather, a logical or phenomenological one. For Merleau-Ponty dares to tread where language fears to go; cannot go. While Wittgenstein has restricted himself to ordinary language, Merleau-Ponty has advocated the primacy of perception.”

    Dennnis Heinzig, MERLEAU-PONTY AND LUDWIG
    WITTGENSTEIN: A SYNTHESIS

    Eugene Gendlin:

    “After Wittgenstein philosophers have assumed that only language gives meaning to sensing the body “from inside.” The common experiencing we have all day is philosophically ignored because they think of it as merely internal and indeterminate, made interactional only by language. There is a big difference between my view and that of the current philosophers. They say that the body as sensed from inside is meaningful and interactional only through language (which includes concepts, culture, and history). If we find a bodily sense meaningful, they think this can only be what language and culture have trained into our bodies.”
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines.Number2018

    I've always liked DG's style.Utterly original. Let's say that we think long and hard about what is the simplest, most irreducible and primordial thing we can say about any sense of meaning, and what we come up with is this: The most basic origin of being is something like a machinic algorithm, a conceptual pattern which is designed to do something, something very simple and basic. But it never does this thing alone, it does it as a differential relation to some other machinic process. So all there are are machinic processes and their constantly changing differential relations. Now lets ask the question of HOW this simple machinic functioning changes. If we say that some sub-component of a machinic process is altered, this doesn't really amount to a transcendence of the whole process. Instead it is only a variation WITHIN the already structured function of the machine. A real transcendence requires a move beyond the meaning of the machine in its design and intent as a whole. This implies disconnection, interruption, gap, contrast, becasue the machine does what it does, and to cahnge from one machinic functioning to another is to move on to a new functioning.

    Let me contrast this to Eugene Gendlin's notion of the most basic, irreducible grounding of a sense of meaning. Gendlin begins from the lived body, but his notion of body is not a conventional one. It bears some things in common with Merleau_ponty's notion of body as background-figure gestalt structuration, but for Gendlin , body is what he calls an implicit intricacy, an unseparated multiplicity is not a whole composed of separate parts but an original interaffecting. It exists by implying into occurring. That is, an event which occurs, which is experienced,crosses with the intricacy. An event is this crossing which carries forward the intricacy rather than interrupting it or disconnecting from it. Occurring into implying is not a new event which takes the place of an old event. It is neither the same nor just different, but rather an explicating.

    "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

    Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and
    with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.
    Language elaborates how the body implies its situation and its next behavior.

    We can see the body's primacy and priority when we feel how the body now functions, always in a much wider way than language. The body functions in crucial ways, and in ways that are trans-historical. It is not the five senses but the sentient bodily interaction that takes on language and history - and then always still exceeds them.

    Suppose, for example, that you are walking home at night, and you sense a group of men following you. You don't merely perceive them. You don't merely hear them there, in the space behind you. Your body-sense instantly includes also your hope that perhaps they aren't following you. It includes your alarm and many past experiences - too many to separate out -and surely also the need to do something, be it walk faster, change your course, escape into a house, get ready to fight, run, shout (.....).

    My (.....) expresses the fact that your body-sense includes more than we can list, more than you can think by thinking one thing at a time. And it includes not only what is there. It also implies a next move to cope with the situation. But this implying of your next move is still a (.....) since your actual move has not yet come. Since it includes all this, the (.....) is not just a perception, although it certainly includes many perceptions. Is it then a feeling? It is certainly felt, but "feeling" usually means emotion. The (.....) includes emotions, but also so much else. Is it then something mysterious and unfamiliar'? No, we always have such a bodily sense of our situations. You have it now, or you would be disoriented as to where you are and what you are doing.

    Is it not odd that no word or phrase in our language as yet says this? "Kinesthetic" refers only to movement, "proprioceptive" refers to muscles. "Sense" has many uses. So there is no common word for this utterly familiar bodily sense of the intricacy of our situations, along with the rapid weighing of more alternatives than we can think separately. We now call it a "felt sense." Notice that a (.....) is implicitly intricate. It is more than what is already formed or distinguished. In my example it includes many alternative moves, but more: the (.....) implies a next move - the body is the implying of - a next move, but after-and-with all that it includes, that move is as yet unformed.

    The (.....) is interaction. It is the body's way of living its situation. Your situation and you are not two things, as if the external things were a situation without you. Nor is your bodily sense only internal. It is certainly not just an emotional reaction to the danger. It is that, but it also
    includes more of the intricacy of your situation than you can see or think. Your bodily (.....) is your situation. It is not a perceived object before you or even behind you. The situation isn't the things that are there, nor something internal inside you. Your intricate involvement with others is not inside you, and it is not outside you, so it is also not those two things together.

    The body-sense is the situation. It is inherently an interaction, not a mix of two things. The living body is an ongoing interaction with its environment. Therefore, of course, it contains environmental information. The bodily (.....) also implies a further step which may not yet be capable of being done or said. We need to conceive of the living body in a new way, so as to be able to understand how it can contain (or be) information, and also be the implying of the next bit of living. It is not the usual use of the word "body." As we have seen, the body is not just an orienting center of perceiving, nor only a center of motions, but also of acting and speaking in situations.

    The bodily felt sense of situation can also be related to Heidegger's (1927) concept of "being-in-the-world." The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty wrote powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger presented a fascinating
    analysis of being-in-the-world that always included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. Heidegger argued that in our felt understanding we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach."

    Now DG might want to argue that Gendlin's implicit intricacy is a kind of machine, and that authentic change in experiencing would require an interruption of its mode of functioning. Perhaps Massumi would use affect as the body's way of disrupting the flow of the implicity intricacy.

    On the other hand , Gendlin argues that DG's machines are like the way we think of word concepts, as discrete patterns that interact. But he would go on to claim that, just like word concepts and other logical patterns, there is a generating process which they derive from. A machinic pattern is something that drops out from the implicit intricacy.

    "We can phenomenologically study how we use logic – for example in philosophical analysis, or in computing our bank account. We do it by holding the implicit intricacy aside, it is always there. We "know" why we are pursuing this logical chain just now, and what it means for our philosophy or our finances. We keep all this aside so as to follow "only" the logic. Without this implicit holding-aside, the logical thinking would not be possible. Logic does not control where it begins and ends. It also does not control the creation of the defined units it requires. One slight shift in the implicit meaning of any one unit can utterly undo a logical conclusion. By entering the implicit directly, we can generate a whole territory of distinctions and new entities, and then position the logical analysis where it is informed by the implicit intricacy. We can much better use the great human power of logic when we can enter the implicit and consider where to position and re-position the logic, and how to create its units. We do not need the assumption that reality consists of defined units.”

    “ Recent thinking still assumes that all order and all interaction is externally programmed. For example, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) [13] argue that in order to overcome social control, a body would have to be "without organs", since it is through organs that it interacts with others. The assumption is that interaction is externally programmed; the body could be free only if it could give up all points of contact with other people. (The book has a laudatory preface by Foucault.) “
  • Banno
    23.1k
    I concur.

    There is little in this thread that is relevant to the private language argument. It's about something else. A bastardised version, seen through alien eyes.
  • Number2018
    550
    The bodily felt sense of situation can also be related to Heidegger's (1927) concept of "being-in-the-world." The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty wrote powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger presented a fascinating
    analysis of being-in-the-world that always included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. Heidegger argued that in our felt understanding we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach."
    Joshs
    I feel that I need to come back to answer your post and to discuss time again.
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9913/introducing-the-philosophy-of-radical-temporality
    There are a few interrelated concepts:
    the context, event, present time, and unconscious. If this attempt is productive, it can become possible to return here to clarify how these concepts are related to D&G ‘s perspectives on machinic functioning of body, body without organs, transcendence, and language.
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