they feel threatened, and, more importantly, are reacting accordingly. The attempt to close ranks and halt buying across multiple platforms is pretty wild, as is the sheer ramping up of propaganda across finance media to portray what's going on as some kind of kiddish trolling - as if these funds do not do the exact same thing only with a suit and a tie on; as if the consequences may not be entirely incommensurate with that portrayal.

Second, you seem to be holding on to some idea of purity with respect to the instruments involved, as if any challenge to the financial order must appear ex nihilio from a place of unsullied soil of virginal revolution. But this is messianic fantasy. If the instruments used to maim the master belong to the master then so be it. In fact, all the better. I hope people use their regulation against them, I hope people turn their speculation against them. That this stuff is finally happening on their own turf is an occasion for delight, not pessimism. — StreetlightX

I agree that I could miss a few critical nuances. No doubt, what is unfolding right now possesses the features of an event. It is unpredictable, and it could help to expose the nasty side of hedge fund speculations. There is indeed a threat. But this threat is no more than one of the crises that are regularly generated by the capitalistic financial system itself and are resolved by this system and its further development. The threatening effects were caused by implementing the newest apps and platforms, constituting the medium for Redditors’ collective action. They are not just technical means. You may underestimate the role of the medium in creating a sense of participation and what you call ‘solidarity.’ It could be incorrect to say that institutions and corporations that control the digital medium also control ‘solidarity,’ but digitalized affective flows of images and information that we deal with in the GameStop’s crisis are unseparated from the very flows that ground contemporary capitalism.

this stuff has raised more class consciousness than the entirety of BLM and Occupy combined. — StreetlightX

“The current prosthetization of counsciousness, the systematic industrialization of the entirety of retentional devices, is an obstacle to the very individuation process of which consciousness consists.” ( Bernard Stiegler, ‘ Technics and Time').Today, the use of the concept of consciousness, as well as of class consciousness looks problematic. Their constitutive processes are ultimately dependent on external digital retentional networks. Compared to The Occupy Movement, the concerted and autopoietic action of Redditors has become completely digitalized. It should be studied how contemporary ‘virtual digitalized solidarity’ impacts collective social agency and the people’s ability to act in-concert.

Debt has only ever been an instrument of sovereign and subjective discipline - there is no reason to think that these people will not pick and choose who to enforce debts upon, as and when it suits them. Don't give them that credit. — StreetlightX

The enormous latest COVID-relief packages in the US express the accelerating ability to create unlimited amounts of money. It may become possible due to the neoliberal elite's newest reorganizations. As Biden’s administration shows, the global elite is simultaneously in charge of the state, the leading corporations, international financial institutions, and has close reciprocal relations with the most significant creditors. Remarkably, according to numerous reports, a considerable portion of the money that Redditors operate comes from the recent US relief packages. Swiftly closing the short circuit, money goes back to the site of its origin.

The best thing this could do is to expose the absurdity of unrestricted speculation. But the myth-making that's already starting will just obscure that message. — Echarmion

This event indicates well the resilience of the financial gambling system. Las-Vegas is closed due to
COVID-19, but its model of business has become ubiquitous via WallStreetBets. The myth-making and narration simultaneously obscure and deliver this message.

There are attempts to frame an unprecedented situation that has unfolded over the past week as class warfare and even Reddit's retail investors' revenge. As if they have personal reasons to pay back to the same financial elite that crashed their fathers' generation in 2008. There are different accounts of Redditors' motivations:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/investing/wallstreetbets-reddit-culture/index.html
No doubt, that Wall Street hedge finds abuse their power and change the rules mid-game. Yet, it would be incorrect to represent the event as the rise of the 'little guy,' as a revolt of the people. There are no just rules in the accelerating process of financial speculations. Redditors' way to skyrocket the price of GameStop is a kind of massive speculative action. It harms several hedge funds, but it does not threaten The Wall-Street's financial order. Do the people claim their right to create fiat money from the state and banks? They do not. In fact, the Redditors' speculation is dependent on the same regulations and mechanisms that allow short-term bets. There are no new instances of the fiat money creation. Maybe the hedge funds will eventually experience the brute losses, but Wall Street will enjoy the further transformation of money of payment into speculative, dematerialized capital.

I've studied alot is in the case of sovereign debt, where solidarity among lending institutions (banks and so forth) simply refuse to lend more to indebted countries in order to enforce austerity and political change (this is basically the story of international finance relations since the 70s, and no one talks about it). This kinda of neoliberal strategy is favoured because it sticks with the script of "open-markets": the state isn't denying anything, it's allowing certain institutions to do stuff (even if that stuff happens to be denying access). It's devolution of power 'outside' the state and 'freedom' to corporate action. — StreetlightX

Following the recent COVID-related drastic increase of America's sovereign debt, there are the newest neoliberal strategies: no austerity (so far), helicopter money instead, and even more dramatic political change. It looks like elites do not care about the debt anymore. (Biden even has proposed an additional 1.9 trillion $ of 'COVID' relief.) Neither debtors nor creditors think of re-paying or reimbursing of debts. With zero interest rates, the accelerating virtualization and dematerialization of money will continue to be the engine and source of the neoliberal financial system's power. It looks like the neoliberal corporate power 'outside' the state will resonate with the power of the state itself.
Do we witness the rise of post-neoliberal order, where the distinction between major
debtors and creditors become insignificant?

Precisely because power is everywhere, there are infinite forms of resistance and ways to obtain freedom. — Giorgi

It is the well known argument of Foucauldians. Yet, there are the unanswered questions regarding contemporary forms of resistance:
what makes it possible for neoliberalism to appropriate progressive leftist and liberal
discourses? Have big tech companies, mainstream media, and multicultural corporations become champions of the noblest and humanistic programs and goals? In fact, they primarily shape and manage the most
robust movements of resistance today. (“ Me too”, environmental, gender, and anti-racist
movements) Can Foucault's conceptual framework of power and resistance help to answer these questions?

Power does NOT require a foundation. It operates effectively without a ground or an essence. It is not based on anything. — Giorgi

In terms of Deleuze, I see a possible reconciliation. If we speak of "unconventional libidinal investments" as things that can occur either spontaneously or consciously we could say that in the first case we have resistance (unconscious deterritorializations) and in the second a determined struggle or movement. — Giorgi

We live in a punitive and disciplinary society, — Giorgi

I do not think that there was a reconciliation between Foucault and Deleuze. As well known,
Deleuse declared in “Postscript on Control Societies” that we no longer live in a punitive and disciplinary society. When Foucault stopped writing on power, he probably felt a necessity to reformulate and redefine his conceptual framework. Our agency
and subjectivity are not anymore based primarily on panoptical, disciplinary, or biopower normalizing mechanisms. Foucault’s power is power-knowledge; there are two unseparated sides of Foucault’s power: bodily behaviour patterns and discursive formations. In any social interactions, there are no force-force relations without expressive reinforcements and fixations. (I think that you systematically omit the discursive dimension of Foucault’s power). In “Discipline and Punish,” Foucault could not successfully show how panoptical – surveying disciplinary apparatuses are related to legal, juridical discourses of that time. Deleuze completed this task: “The abstract formula of Panopticism is no longer ‘to see without being seen but to impose particular conduct on a specific human multiplicity… a new informal dimension links the two variables of unorganized matter and unformalized functions… It is a diagram, a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine”.
(Deleuze, ‘Foucault’) There is no single, isolated exercise of power, it appears and acquires its effects and regularity in the field of strategic social unfolding, it belongs to dispositif. Foucault ‘s dispositif has three dimensions: force, subjective and discursive. There are interrelated, accumulating mutual effects and reinforcing each other. Deleuze’s diagram, an abstract machine, functions similarly to Foucault’s dispositif. Also, it shows how knowledge-power is immanent to the open whole of the unfolding social body. It strategically shapes societies and manages the field of social interactions independently from individual social actors. This conceptual framework allowed Deleuze to move to propose the existence of post-disciplinary societies of control.

I think the objection from the omnipresence of power can only be used as an effective argument against Foucault, if we forget that for Foucault, power is not identical to domination. Power in itself is not something we want to avoid or neutralize, but something we want to appropriate and "condense" so to speak. — Giorgi

It looks like you try to avoid the discussion of the problem of resistance by redefining it as a way of appropriation
and ‘condensation’ of power. May be, it fits Foucault’s personal experiment. Nevertheless, it does not eliminate a certain vagueness of his conceptualization of power.
For Foucault, power is not specifically localized and is not primerily located in the machinery of State or other distinguishable institutions; it is embedded within common social and every day practices, and it is immanent to the entire social field. Therefore, power becomes undetectable and unrecognizable. It can require a long-term effort and special skills to perform a task of genealogical work to identify particular effects of power alignments. On the contrary, those subjected to power submit to it as if it were a natural order, forming the horizon of sense. It is not clear how one could resist or modify the effects of
the omnipotent, omnipresent, and indiscernible power. For Deleuze, the question of resistance was one of the points of disagreement with Foucault. “ For myself, status of phenomena of resistance is not a problem, since lines of flight are primary determinations, since desire assembles the social field”. ( Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure’). Instead of the program of resistance, he offers the project of re-investment of desire that can crash or seal off the dispositifs
of power.

re-reading Foucault is very important. — Giorgi

I agree that under certain circumstances reading and re-reading Foucault's texts can become an act of resistance.

Precisely because power is everywhere, there are infinite forms of resistance and ways to obtain freedom. — Giorgi

Foucault's insistence
on the omnipresence of power can undermine his concept of resistance. Baudrillard, in his book 'Forget Foucault', claimed that Foucault expressed the new capitalist mode of production that knocked down and re-created every form of social communication: “This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated situation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining the body. It is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate, gravity and any fixed point must disappear…This is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies." Likely, Boudrillard capitalized on the Foucault’s assertion of the proliferation, saturation, and intensification of power.
Since power is everywhere, any place could become the site of resistance. This claim may deprive the problem of resistance of its specifics and concretization. Since power is not repressive and ideological but productive, it could result in the inclusion of resistance into the dominating social order. Further, social actors usually do not experience their social engagements as shaped by power alignments. For example, newly created contemporary gender identities are commonly considered as the liberation movement, but not the effect of the power-knowledge complex of dispositif of sexuality. Foucault’s turn to techniques of self-discipline could be viewed as his answer to the problem of resistance. Yet, he could not foresee that the newest tendency of capitalistic biopolitical production is precisely the focus on one’s experiences where one’s subjectivity
can be intensified, bent, and re-tooled.

Foucault's discourse is being appropriated and re-deployed by both governments and corporations. I see research being done in management and corporate governance, even cybersecurity where Foucaultian analysis is used to extend technologies of subjugation instead of resisting them. — Giorgi

In a broader perspective, we could see the processes of appropriation and redeployment
not just of Foucault's discourse, but of a vast spectrum of discourses of resistance. To better understand and deal with this situation, we can turn again to Foucault's parrhesia.
It was his way to defend himself against the accusation of killing
any hope for resistance: if power-knowledge is omnipresent and ubiquitous, there is no place
and discourse for resistance. Yet, Foucault's authentic parrhesia is not his story of himself, disguised as the research of ancient philosophers. It is his account on personal exposure to contemporary power relations. Implicitly, his texts on power combine both dimensions of truth-telling. Re-reading and re-interpreting Foucault's texts are not sufficient. Likely, to perform an act of parrhesiastic enunciation, one should discover how power impacts oneself and one's discourses, including what one considers parrhesiastic and resistant ones.

My point is that "speaking out" or "having an impact" may be a serious political trap unless we qualify these statements. I think the U.S. in particular has an ingenious political field which can create a powerful illusion of change and radical reform, while remaining perfectly within the confines of the status quo. — Giorgi

I agree.I think that Foucault's turn to parrhesia was a way to represent his situation.
In parrhesia, the speaking subject's truth-telling has a double performative effect of
impacting others and transforming the enunciating subject himself. No doubt,
Foucault was effective in both dimensions. Yet, it looks like in our situation
accomplishing the successful parrhesiastic enunciation has become quite challenging.

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.

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.

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.

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?

the way that I want to interpret the way Derrida uses terms like context and unconscious is that they are sequential changes in intention, rather than a ‘co-existing’ unconscious context. The unconsciousness, then, would not be within but beyond, the unavoidable exposure of intention to the alterity of new context with each iteration of the ‘same’ intention. Put differently, context would not be a spatially present surround but a temporally spacing ( and transforming) interation. — Joshs

I do not know if Derrida himself developed an expanded theory based on his insights:
"Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place, it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [l'enonciation]. The first consequence of this will be the following: given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through the present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential." (Derrida, 'Signature. Event. Contest') Without realizing Derrida's program, it is still uncertain why language norms and rules expose the apparent iterative, repetitive patterns. Your interpretation of Derrida's central concepts of context and structuring iterative unconscious underlines just the context's alterity. When you claim that: "If each participant in a language game is experiencing a 'shared' language context but is borrowing from their own individual history as they share in the 'same' context, it seems to me that the norms, rules, practices, grammars and conventions that belong to language use must be understood as abstractions from a multiplicity of differing individual experiences of it," we still need to deal with a few gaps here. What do you mean by a 'shared' language context? Is that what you understand as Derrida's 'context'? If yes, there is a gap between this context and the general regularities of language. If not, you would contradict yourself. I think that Foucault and Deleuze, using different concepts, could further develop Derrida's program of the founding of the iterative unconscious structuring. That is why I disagree with your claim that "radically temporal approaches are more effective at understanding others, as individuals and as groups, than Deleuze's approach. What he would see as arbitrary, they would perceive a finer order hiding within. As a 'psychotherapeutic' approach, Deleuze would look for how individuals are defined and created by their positioning within a social arrangement. Radical temporal approaches see the social rearrangement as secondary and derived in relation to the social movement that already defines the individual.” Are you familiar with 'Anti-Oedipus'? You can call this work arbitrary, but it is effective. All in all, our disagreement is primarily about choosing a more effective conceptual framework. So far, I still do not see that 'radical temporal approaches' are more effective.

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

The best way to answer is to turn to Derrida’s critique of Austin’s speech acts theory.
“Without a general iterability (a general citationality) there would not even be a "successful" performative. The intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. This essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context. In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense required by Austin, conscious intention would at the very least have to be totally present… and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center [foyer] of context.” (Derrida, Signature. Event. Contest)”
Derrida’s main point here that there is no speech act without intention, but there is the gap between one’s conscious intention and the unfelt determinants of the enormously complexed
indiscernible context. Derrida uses the concept of ‘contest’ instead of the set of analytical conditions that Austin underlined as necessary for a successful speech act. The unavoidable presence of various unconscious factors makes any context of iterative performative utterance analytically undeterminable, so that “any saturation of the context is prohibited.” Consequently, it would mean the failure of Austin’s attempt to take account of ‘total context’ (the total speech situation), able to produce an illocutive force. Also, it would prove the effectiveness of Derrida’s differance. Can one of Austin’s most celebrated examples refute these assertions?
"One of our examples was, for instance, the utterance 'I do' (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something - namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying… Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether 'physical' or 'mental' actions or even acts of uttering further words." (Austin, How To Do Things With Words). When one says 'I do,' one joins an infinite variation
of different ceremonies without which the wedding would have no meaning. Therefore, in principle unlimited, there is a series of ways other bodies can be joined in matrimony in different places by different authorities for various reasons to achieve different effects. It looks like Derrida is right that general iterability is the central factor of a successful speech act, and its context is in principle undefined. Nevertheless, Derrida could not sufficiently make explicit his notion of a general citationality.

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

I feel that I did not answer it, may be I will do it better after discussion of Derrida vs. Austin

Therefore, don't we have the two incompatible functions of language?
— Number2018

No, because even such an expressive use of language is still a technique, it responds and is constituted by imperatives of communication - grammar key among them - that are social through and through. — StreetlightX

First of all, in principle, I agree with you that 'They are not two different functions of language,' and I share your view that 'Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination.' Yet, I think that you are too fast and there is still a problem of bridging the gap. When you say:

The idea of language as a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states' is a narrow, ivory-tower view of language usually promulgated by people who, having never consulted a single work of linguistics in their life, model language on old dead white men transmitting thoughts via books to them. — StreetlightX

you can depreciate the philosophical tradition based on self-reflection (from Descartes and Fichte to Husserl and Sartre) and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Likely, the first function of language is not just to provide an expressive medium of 'inner states.' "It is precisely the thinking activity of the cartesian self-reflection – the experiences of the thinking ego -that gives rise to doubt of the world reality and of my own. Thinking can seize upon and got hold of everything real – event, object, its own thoughts. The world itself got transformed into the flow of consciousness, and further become the object of reflection" (Hannah Arendt, ‘Human condition’). Activities of the mind, mediated by language, cannot be reduced to simple utilitarian performative functions. When we are writing these posts, we are not merely 'facilitative and action-oriented: you warn, exclaim, command, promise, cajole, demand, insult, soothe, direct, cheat and so on'. We are doing much more.

Speech-acts, then, are socially negotiated, stereotypical communicative behaviors, highlighted and isolated from the experiential continuum of communication, which, when practiced according to a set of mutually identified conventions, allow for the successful mediation of the speaker’s intention across the experiential gap. — StreetlightX

This account of the performativity of language is excellent, but it is still insufficient. Though Arendt’s conceptual framework can become irrelevant for us, she provided an expanded vision of 'the cartesian performativity’. Our ‘speech acts’, expressed by language, momentarily synthesize and effectuate a complex of primarily unfelt and unrecognizable social determinants. Often, they are disguised by ordinary social conventions and norms. Also, reciprocally, we intervene and may impact the constitutive factors of our agency. Austin's theory of performativity represents just a superficial layer of what we do with words.

Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination; it's value is not (primarily) cognitive; it is above all facilitative and action-oriented: you warn, exclaim, command, promise, cajole, demand, insult, soothe, direct, and so on. You understand what is said only to the extent that you understand what language does: it's role in action. The idea of language as a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states' is a narrow, ivory-tower view of language — StreetlightX

Nonetheless, language can also function as "a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states'" in so-called inner speech, an inner monologue, etc. This function is not just cognitive, here language is in charge of the constitution and affirmation of self. And I agree that 'Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination; its value is not (primarily) cognitive; it is above all facilitative and action-oriented.' Don’t we have the two incompatible functions of language?

In my notion language is ‘private’ only in the sense that it does not require the direct or indirect participation of a contextual community of other persons. But it is ‘public’ in the sense that the individual is already a community unto itself, sequentially transforming itself. Thinking and perceiving is already expressive, before and beyond the participation of other persons. Fundamentally, we show, express and check our language in relation to our own anticipations, in a kind of internal conversation. From this vantage , interpersonal communication is secondary and derived. — Joshs

Likely, you are not aware of the domain of social psychology, founded by Lev Vygotsky. In his book “Thinking and speech,” he convincingly showed that inner speech has an exact social origin. Children obtain inner speech abilities just after a certain period of exposure to playing and communicating in groups of other kids. I could bring other evidence that one acquires language via various processes of socialization. Nevertheless, let me assume that I embrace your notion that our common language is the derivative of the inner language, originated within the ‘constitutive community of oneself.’ When you claim that ‘the individual is already a community unto itself,’ how do you conceive the social constituency of this ‘community within the individual’? Please correct me if I misunderstood you: for you, all humans share the fundamental structures of what you call ‘radical temporality.’ These structures of one’s most essential inner temporary and affective processes found common ground for the social-collective nature of one’s private-inner language that later develops into our common ordinary language. If this is right, you may incorrectly represent the social character of ‘our inner communities.’

The question, then is whether MP's gestalts are indeed irreducible primitives of meaning or whether they are derived abstractions hiding within their 'fatness' a more intricate structure of sense. Similarly, we must ask whether the irreducible primitives of content in Deleuze and Massumi are not in fact over-determined abstractions resulting in a model of inter-personal change that is too arbitrary and violent.

Derrida can help us out here. 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. — Joshs

I try to understand your points and your enthusiasm about Gendlin, Kelly, Heidegger, and Derrida. Honestly, I am more familiar with Derrida's works than the rest of them, and we could discuss Derrida's philosophy of time in more detail. We could take his essay
"Before the law" as an example of his conceptualization of time, differance, and identity.

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 redetemined 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.

What Eugene, Gendlin, Geoge Kelly, Heidegger and Derrida have in common is that they don't being with gestalts, patterns, configurations, flows, concepts that interact with each other to form bodies and worlds. They begin from something more intricate, a simple referential differential. Not a difference between concepts or pattern or any other form, but differences of differences of differences. — Joshs

There is nothing in Deleuze that allows for the fact that each of us in social relations maintain a thread of assimilative self-continuity above and beyond the way that we are mutually shaped in interaction with others. There is nothing in Deleuze
that recognizes that affect and intention are the same thing, not interacting elements — Joshs

No doubt, your group of thinkers have contributed a lot to understanding the founding of 'continually changing relation to yourself moment to moment, day to day.' By the way, I hope that you agree that your conceptualization of time is not an absolute and ultimate truth that should be accepted by everyone. It is an influential and interesting phenomenological perspective that can match well with one's experience of time and operate as an orienting grounding for a few domains of science and psychology. Yet, what is at stake here is not how the philosophy of time can serve as a better foundation for understanding a more significant number of texts or writing academic papers. It is not just about the ontological or epistemological foundation of apprehension of our time, answering the question: What is our time? It is more about an ethical question: How should one live in our time? You claim that your 'radical time' could help us maintain ‘a thread of assimilative self-continuity.' That means that one should be extremely attentive to one's most profound, usually indiscernible mental processes. The result could be the achievement of a culminating gestalt, of discovering and preserving one's authentic identity. (Despite all your claims that your philosophy is beyond any subjectivity). Yet how is this program related to our social realities, to our ordinary identities that we need to play out continually?
I do not see (so far) how you can bridge the gap. It looks like you misunderstand or misinterpret how Deleuse starts. He does not begin from separate entities or processes, but develops a transcendental empiricist dialectics of virtual and actual. When he writes: "As for the third time that uncovers the future: it signifies that the event and the action have a secret coherence that excludes the coherence of the self. It has become equal to them, and they shatter it into thousands of pieces, as if the bearer of the new world were taken up and dissipated by the shattering of what it, in the multiple, gives birth to. The self is equal to the unequal in itself", he lays out an ultimately different (from yours) existential program: one should not maintain and preserve any stable identity. Why? Because they are not authentic anymore. They are created and reproduced primarily for valorization or utilization purposes. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. One cannot discover or retain any authentic experience. One should live in 'the middle of things.' Has an almost inaccessible experience of death become the most authentic experience?

"Events understood as interaffectings of interaffectings, working within and beyond relations
among presumed temporary essences (conceptual, affective-bodily, interpersonal), do not achieve their gentle integrative continuity through any positive internal power. On the contrary, they simply lack the formidability of static identity necessary to impose the arbitrariness of
conditioning, mapping, mirroring, grafting and cobbling, on the movement of experiential
process.
Feeling, the event, the inter-bleeding of subject and object, transformation without form: all of these terms reference the same irreducible ‘unit’ of experience, concealed by but overrunning what bodies, dispositions and other states are supposed to do. A ‘single’ state (whether so-called conceptual or bodily-affective) is already a panoply of intimately changing variations and momenta of felt meanings, in(as) the instant it is accessed, infusing the allegedly conceptual with feeling (and the sensate with intentionality) from within its very core, embodied before any consultation with a separate bodily ‘outside’."

It is impossible to deny the richness and validity of this outline of time. Yet, it could be beneficial to compare and contrast this approach with Deleuze's philosophy of time. For Deleuze, there are three fundamental syntheses of time, so that each one becomes the foundational grounding for the next. The first, the living present, has similar formal features with your 'radical time' so that the past and the future present operative dimensions. Deleuze's third synthesis of time, having past and present as dimensions of the future, may become a better model for understanding how the primacy of affect and an operativity of the event of the present are ultimately opened towards outside. Developing Deleuze and Guattari's line of argumentation, Brian Massumi goes so far as to propose that the event's processes are not merely self-retaining transcendental a-priory but are doubled and mutually presupposed by exterior power relations.
"On the infra-level, what is at issue is a veritable becoming, a bringing into determinant existence of something prefigured only on the run, in the upswell of as-yet unformed potential. Modulating or manipulating what comes of this level constitutes an extreme form of power: the power to bring to be; the power to make become; the power to harness qualitive transformation. I call it ontopower." (Brian Massumi, "The principle of unrest"). Does Massumi contradict himself? He also asserts: "The concept of affect is tied to the idea of modulation occurring at a constitutive level where somethings are doing, most of the unfelt….There are no subjects that are pre-constituted, but the emergence of the subject, or its re-emergence and reconstitution…" (Brian Massumi, "Politics of affect"). This conceptualization of affect is quite similar to yours. Yet, it could be challenging to show that the event's autopoietic emergent processes and the immanency of valorization matrices of our neoliberal conditions are interdependent upon one another to exist.

Radical time is a past which is changed by the present it functions in , and this present anticipates beyond itself. This complex structure defines a single moment, not three separate time positions. — Joshs

The radically temporal approaches of Derrida, Heidegger, Gendlin and Kelly reject this adaptionist view of the relation between feeling and intention-cognition. They begin from a different motivational principle than that of causal interaction between little bodies(neurons, particles, etc). They dont begin from the notion of 'body' or 'object' at all,, but from something more primitive and fundamental than a body or object. — Joshs

Lacan has offered a scheme of time that achieves similar results by different means. It is not about an intention, being, and self that transforms itself to be itself due to inherent, pre-given mechanisms of 'radical time.' Differently, paradoxical features of time appear due to a gesture of change, transformation, or subversion from the outside. We are not born possessing a-priory
structure of time. One becomes the social and temporal being via the process of interpellation or its modifications.


"A crucial feature of the graph is the fact that the vector of the subjective intention quilts the vector of the signifier's chain backwards, in a retroactive direction: it steps out of the chain at a point preceding the point at which it has pierced it. Lacan's emphasis is precisely on this retroactive character of the effect of signification with respect to the signifier, on this staying behind of the signified with respect to the progression of the signifier's chain: the effect of meaning is always produced backwards, apres coup" (Slavoj Zizek. "The Sublime Object of Ideology.") Our present experiences can decisively determine our past and future due to the displaced processes of socialization.The event of the traumatic and supressed submission to the law and an acceptance of its demand for conformity may continually structure our temporality.

When you use words, you have a belief about how words are used. But what about when you need to use a screwdriver? Do you need words to use a screwdriver, or just the visual of someone using a screwdriver? — Harry Hindu

Any YouTube video about learning how to use a tool has a complement of verbal or finger-alphabet instructions. When one learns how to work with a screwdriver, she necessarily places herself into an already-given organized space where physical motions and bodily dispositions are combined with a set of cognitive operations, believes, and attitudes. There are no mere imitations, mimicking or the manifestation of instinctive tendencies. It is the enactment of the heterogeneous variety of social presuppositions. A learning process presupposes the existence of various institutionalized practices, ordered by the hierarchical system of oral or written instructions, guidelines, programs, etc.

communicating beliefs is a seperate issue than having beliefs. Making sounds with your mouth is a behaviour that expresses your belief just as covering your head and running inside does.

As an observer of others, your only have access to their beliefs via their actions. Do you need to observe your own actions to know you have beliefs? — Harry Hindu

As far as I understand, your point is that our mental states are ultimately independent of the corresponding verbal expressions. This position fails to take account of the complex social and collective character of our beliefs. They are developed, shaped, and exercised within the networks of our interpersonal interactions. Can we reduce them to simple rituals and behavioural patterns, deprived of the signifying symbolic mechanisms?

Beliefs are not about what can be put in propositional form. How beliefs are communicated is a seperate problem than what beliefs are. — Harry Hindu

If I believe that it is raining, there is my mental state that is expressed in belief. Yet, would my mental state be identifiable and recognizable if I could not understand and articulate it in a sentence “It is raining”? The existence of the statement has two propositional dimensions: ontological subjectivity and a completely objective fact.

What is the debate about? Is it about something being the case - the ontological nature of propositions and beliefs? Does a debate not assume that one side is closer to the truth than the other side, and that each side tries to show how their scribbles are more of an accurate representation of the ontological relationship between propositions and beliefs? — Harry Hindu

Likely, when @Banno asserts that belief is always about states of affairs, this claim indicates a limited domain where beliefs are easily verifiable:
“If I were to say that belief is always about states of affairs, would you agree? Then it only remains to point out that a state of affairs can always be put in propositional form for us to see that beliefs are always about what can be put in propositional form”. However, one can believe in God because one cannot know for sure that He exists. Similarly, one could believe in democracy, communism, climate change, etc. Here, knowledge has to be supplemented by belief; a belief emerges in order to compensate for the failure of knowledge. Even if knowledge and belief can assume the propositional form, they nonetheless express different manifestations of truth.

What you are missing (I think?) is that I count myself among them. — f64

Sorry, I did not understand.

I do wonder how perfectly Plato narrated the story of Socrates. It seems likely enough that he swallowed up a more radical figure in order to cough up yet another story of this-is-how-it-is. We might call it a false assimilation of the negative. — f64

Maybe you are right about Plato vs. Socrates relations. Even if
Plato’s representation of Socrates’s story was polished and censored, it contained scandalous and shocking elements. Differently, nowadays, we see an enormous augmentation of suppressing mechanisms that are ultimately pushing away any expressions of dissent and disturbance. Many of them are deployed at an undetectable, unconscious level of ordinary social interactions. Others are incorporated within the structures of public institutions and social networks. Likely, the individual unconscious self-censorship and self-control function as the most crucial factor in maintaining our social order.

My feeling is that, of the two things you mention, this 'void' is closer to absolute loneliness than death. But I think, at its essence, its an instinctive fear of re-encountering forgotten emotions and memories which are very painful (or a means of delaying encounter with 'pending' emotions built up from things you've lived without fully digesting) — csalisbury

Likely, we do have different personal experiences of the void. Nevertheless, to find common ground, our task could be to conceptualize it. For Zizek, it is a crucial part of his project: "in order to enact the shift from capitalist to analyst's discourse, one has merely to break the spell of objet a, to recognize beneath the fascinating agalma, the Grail of desire, the void that it covers" ((Zizek, 'Incontinence of the void'). The first hypothesis is that the void could be a break, a dysfunction, or social bond destruction. It is how Lacanian classical psychoanalysis proceeds: any treatment procedure to the disruption of some refers to socialization's setting (for example, the mirror stage). Accordingly, the hyper-fascinating retaining of self could be understood as a perversive compensatory reaction, expressing the hyper joy of retaining the lost identity.

The results of my own self-experimentation lead me to think that the idea of a 'void' is a sort of veil over very complex, differentiated fullnesses. — csalisbury

Zizek proposes a more elaborated model. His void is now the current libido economy, directly incorporated into economic, social, and political systems. In fact, Zizek implicitly accepts and further develops Deleuze and Guattari's position that desire is an integral part of economic and political infrastructure. In this case, the void is the newest 'capitalistic' way of organization of the social.
When Zizek states: “: objet a as the void around which desires and/or drives circulate, and objet a as the fascinating element that fills in this void (since, as Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, objet a has no substantial consistency, it is just the positivization of a void)”, he proposes that the fascinating structure of desire is in mutual presupposition with the whole field of desire, the ‘capitalistic’ organization of libido.

The results of my own self-experimentation lead me to think that the idea of a 'void' is a sort of veil over very complex, differentiated fullnesses. Many of those are complex, differentiated fullnesses of (quite serious) pain. But there are also little pockets of something you might call happiness, or peace, within that pain, and you have to withstand the pain to expand those pockets. — csalisbury

I understand what you say, but however painful and traumatic our experiences could be, they tend to acquire inertia and become masochistic:
“one should assert its underlying principle: jouissance is suffering, a painful excess of pleasure (pleasure in pain),
and, in this sense, jouissance is in effect masochistic… We thus
have two extremes: on the one hand the enlightened hedonist who
carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting
hurt; on the other hand, the jouisseur proper, ready to consume his very
existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment—or, in terms of our society,
on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected
from all kinds of harassments and other health threats; on the other hand
the drug addict (or smoker, or …) bent on self-destruction”. (Zizek,Incontinence of the void")
Both extremes, poles of the spectrum of desire are the necessary products of our society.
We should be able to relate our experiences to our social reality. Likely, it is easier to say than to perform.That is what Guattari tried to accomplish in his therapeutics.

I don't assume that we are different in the same ways, but I think that critical writers (Lacan, Freud, whoever) appeal to creeps and weirdos. I use those term playfully. A small subset of the population maybe just can't embrace various ordinary pleasures without some kind of self-consciousness that gets in the way. Like Zizek can't dance, because it's 'obscene.' — f64

For me the critical writers are some kind of violent alternative self-affirmation that also involves continual self-negation. It's like a drug addiction. And part of that self-negation gets around finally to mocking the master of various useless lingos, useless unless and until one is famous or paid, etc. — f64

You represent a relatively common point of view: all these thinkers are freaks and nuts, having enormous and baseless ambitions. It is understandable and widespread. Yet, this opinion is as old as philosophy itself: Plato has perfectly narrated the story of Socrates.

I will try to explain myself. Of course, I like this kind of philosophical stuff. Yet, there are a few more things. Pleasure, all types of enjoyment and self-enjoyment are everywhere. People aspire to achieve happiness through the possession of material goods and ordinary self-affirmation. Many of them experience joy, maybe at least for some while. Unfortunately, for some reason, I am different. Therefore, I try to apply my reading to reconstruct various behavioral models connected to desire theories and then experiment with my situation. For me, there are two significant philosophies of desire: Lacanian and Deleuzian. My self-observation and experience incline me towards Lacan's model. Yet, it does not give any way out since it prioritizes an ultimate traumatic character of desire. Differently, Deleuze asserts the existence of lines of flight towards the unknown and creative connections with the forces from outside. Honestly, sometimes I doubt that either Deleuze or Lacan and Zizek are still relevant to explain what is going on right now. As you said:" There's no need for us, in 2020, to approach these matters as though we're living in Paris between 1940-1980." 'The matters' are dizzily super-fascinating!

I've found that, for me, reading Zizek (and many other writers of theory) only led to meta-fascination: fascination with becoming-fascinated — csalisbury

People seem to get addicted to the 'discourse', reading about the same cluster of ideas from different angles, never actually changing anything, but going back to the bookshelf again and again and again. — csalisbury

Zizek is right about the link between fascinating objet a and the void. The addictive meta-fascination, going back to the same self-experiencing again, and again, and again indicates the hyper-accelerating motion around the void. But what is this void? It is a mode of death; it is an experience of death or absolute loneliness. Likely, since one cannot find ways out, and since one’s social self-affirmation could fail, one’s self starts to vibrate at the same location forcefully. It could be possible to find here the Lacanian split and doubling of ego, expressed by an intensive inner monologue between the interiorized Other and the imaginary self
of the mirror stage or a similar structure ( Althusser’s interpellation). One becomes governed by some model of death or fear of death. So, it could be about fear and the actualization of the transcendent subjectivation scheme.

What's being got at in that Wilden quote is something I'd describe as 'the structure of fascination.' Fascination is a gravitational force : it pulls you toward one thing at the expense of all other things. Fascination is also an enervating force. It saps your capacity for action in order to sustain itself as fascination.Something seems charged with a mysterious power. It seems important to keep your attention focused on it, to trace its contours, to hum it like a kind of refrain. It's something you always feel like you almost get, but are possibly in danger of losing so you keep returning back to it. You have to trace its outlines again and again to remind yourself of what it is. It's definitely what's important and it's always tip of your tongue. Sometimes you get it for a second, but then it slips away. You know for sure you had it, and you still feel like you almost have it, so you return to it again, wherever you see its form crop up, to retrace it.

I think the most subtle form that fascination can take is fascination with the story of becoming-fascinated.

If you draw your attention away for a second then a kind of thought pops up: 'remember it's important and necessary to pay attention to the story of how one become fascinated'. — csalisbury

It is an excellent phenomenological mapping of our desire. And it resonates with Zizek’s account of our ontological conditions:
” What one should do here is distinguish between the two aspects of objet a clearly discernible in Lacan’s theory: objet a as the void around which desires and/or drives circulate, and objet a as the fascinating element that fills in this void (since, as Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, objet a has no substantial consistency, it is just the positivization of a void).” (Zizek, ‘Incontinence of the void.’) Yet, Zizek does not stop on a mere description or a phenomenological account. Likely, to avoid the lure of the fascinating narcissism, he tries to perform a task of critical analyses.

I also don't think that we can chalk it up to 'capitalism' (Lacan's is one iteration of an ancient structure that far-antedates the late 2nd millennium. — csalisbury

On the contrary, Zizek deals with ‘capitalism’. He utilizes formidable Lacanian, Marxist, and Hegelian theoretical recourses: “this is how the capitalist discourse functions: a subject enthralled by the superego call to excessive enjoyment, and in search of a Master-Signifier that would constrain his/her enjoyment, provide a proper measure of it, prevent its explosion into a deadly excess (of a drug addict, chain-smoker, alcoholic, and other -holics or addicts)… in order to enact the shift from capitalist to analyst’s discourse, one has merely to break the spell of objet a, to recognize beneath the fascinating agalma, the Grail of desire, the void that it covers.” It is Zizek’s project: to move from ‘capitalistic discourse,’ where we unconsciously follow pre-given and pre-programmed affective patterns, to the analyst’s discourse of critical analyses.

There is a sort of retro-twilight beauty to gardening old parisian post-structural fads, in the same way a good historical novelist might play with old intellectual tropes (say, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon) but there's no need, at all, to stay here. If you find joy in it, then it is worthwhile; if not, there is no necessity to remain. — csalisbury

No, for me, it is not about the enjoyment (once again, here is the fascinating narcissistic trap!) of being immersed into “old Parisian post-structural fads.” The discord is alive and actual. Zizek, the most influential contemporary Lacanian, has almost depleted the heritage of his teacher. His re-interpretation of objet-a as the fascinating structure brings him to the discovery of the void behind it, of the ultimate lack and negation. He consistently avoids a recourse to Deleuze’s philosophy of desire or Foucault’s pragmatics
of pleasure. They assert that there is no void behind our intimate experiences, fantasies and imagination. They are in mutual interdependence and presupposition with our social reality. Zizek’s account of desire could be replaced by another one, having positive and constructive dimensions.

Deleuze & Guattari have all sorts of useful stuff, much of which I love, but they also have a self-consciously radical tone, which, as in a manifesto, loves to play 'this is absolutely bad, this is absolutely good' games... & this is perfectly calibrated, whether intentionally or not, to tap into the psyches of people very hungry for maps of good vs. bad ways of thinking/being/living. — csalisbury

I agree with you; their style is too militant. Yet, they have offered the
the most comprehensive critique of the Lacanian theory.I want to get back to your account:

The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship. — csalisbury

So far, primarily, you are right. But when you write:

The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing. — csalisbury

,
a Lacanian would completely disagree. For Lacan, when the kid enters into the symbolic world,
there is an ultimate and traumatic transformation of a whole system of her relationship with herself and her immediate environment. The transcendent Lacanian scheme manages and directs what

It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways. — csalisbury

Therefore, for Lacan, there is no spontaneous and 'natural' process of learning and development, but the realization of the rigorous transcendent model of production of subjectivity.
Deleuze and Guattari do not merely reject the Lacanian model. They maintain that
it owes its efficiency and workability to broader immanent social determinants.
For example, they claim that wherever we find what can be recognized as a working Oedipal complex, the actual ground is not a failure of 'normal' Lacanian interiorization. It results from the particular 'capitalistic' process of production of subjectivity and organization of desire, responsible for both psychological dis functionality and habitual ways of being in the world. Indeed, the whole complex of the infant's relationship with his mom and various manifestations of our lives follow clear, repeatable patterns.
If they are not governed by transcendent models or 'traditional' cultural determinants, we should seek alternative conceptual frameworks.

The infant has a relationship with its mom. It's a complicated relationship - there's intimate touch, exchange of fluids, face-to-face communication, talking. There are intense feelings: love, hate, joy, fear. The baby knows in many many ways who mom is. There are two people in a very particular kind of relationship. The introduction of 'you' as the kid learns language is another element added to the mix. It's another element in a constantly evolving thing. It can use its understanding of 'you', 'me' and 'I', as it grows, to participate in the world in new ways. As with anything. But the 'you' was already prepared in an exchange of attention. Just a mom and a kid paying attention to one another in a particular way.

Isn't this enough? What do we gain in understanding by adding the rest? — csalisbury

You articulate here 'a common sense' psychology. It reaffirms a 'natural understanding' of a child development, but it can help neither understand our society better nor treat various mental disorders. On the contrary,
Lacan offers both: his model lays the ground for psychoanalyses, theories
of subjectivation, discourses' functioning, and even principles of neoliberal capitalism.
(Zizek, https://www.amazon.ca/Incontinence-Void-Economico-Philosophical-Slavoj-Žižek/dp/0262537060/ref=sr_1_27?dchild=1&keywords=zizek&qid=1606753980&sr=8-27. )
Lacanianism has become the influential source of authority and knowledge. So, I would reformulate your question 'where Lacan starts to go wrong.'
(by the way, it can become an enormous task, considering the scope of what Lacan left). The question could be: why should we reject Lacanianism? Does it reinforce inferiority and the sense of guilt? Should one submit herself to a psychoanalytical treatment? Should she reaffirm her particular self-understanding?
Should she trust the validity of knowledge applied, as well as the authoritative status of a psychoanalyst?

I see what you're saying, but what do these theoretical models and terms add here. How does it enrich? — csalisbury

If we need to challenge the self-sufficiency and truth of Lacanianism, we should seek models that allow one to understand oneself in a broader social context. I am not sure that Sloterdjic’s critic of the mirror stage (according to your quote)
is sufficient enough. Deleuze and Guattari offer up a set of concept-tools for undoing certain habitual ways of being in the world, and constructing our lives, producing our own subjectivity. They aim to dismantle and then reconstruct Lacanian models of production of subjectivity as well as the most prosaic modes of our life. Their paradigmatic example is the bouncing balls from Kafka’s ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’. The proposed model lays the ground for the apprehension of the constitutive subjective split of the mirror stage and the case of ‘Blomfield’.

Nathan Widder, 'A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy
— Number2018

From the essay collection? I've a couple of articles in there, but not that one. Sounds interesting. — StreetlightX

https://www.amazon.ca/Thousand-Plateaus-Philosophy-Henry-Somers-Hall/dp/0748697284/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=a+thousand+plateaus+and+philosophy&qid=1606745798&sr=8-3

There is essay #7, “Year zero: faciality”

@csalisbury

I would go on to further emphasize though, is the necessity of appending to all this a 'materialist' analysis of all this: i.e. the 'primacy' of the one or the other (imaginary or symbolic) should be thought not just in ideal, stadial-teleological terms, but also with respect to the conditions which 'bring out', as it were, the one of the other in a sociological setting. — StreetlightX

Nathan Widder has recently developed this line of argumentation. He tries to
reinterpret Lacan's scheme of a child's subjectivation via Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual framework of the faciality machine. Accordingly, instead of being the product of universal psychological and social determinants, the mirror stage becomes a result of particular machinic and power operations. By Lacan, the Other's voice is one of the stage's necessary operators, ensuring the completion of the process of identifying and a child's entry into the symbolic world. However, this voice acts differently: "The mirror stage is precipitated by and imbued with what Deleuze and Guattari call 'order-words,' which link acts – here the infant's recognition– to statements and serve as redundancies for significance and subjectivity (ATP 79). Order-words effect' incorporeal transformations', which change nothing of the physicality of a body but everything about its sense and meaningfulness: 'that's you!' – the order-word that transforms the infant and paves the way for later stratification by the signifier and the subject."
(Nathan Widder, 'A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy').

by no means does the image in the mirror appear as the first and all-surpassing information about its own ability to be whole; at most, it makes an initial reference to its own appearance as a coherent body among coherent bodies in the real visual space, but this integral being-an-image-body means almost nothing alongside the pre-imaginary, non-eidetic certainties of sensual-emotional dual integrity." — StreetlightX

It is possible to show that all essential Lacanian elements of the mirror stage were present at an earlier stage of child development, namely during breastfeeding. Here, the infant's initial gestalt of the human face occurs and consolidates. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that 'maternal power operating through the face during nursing' is as open to the entire social field as any Lacanian development stage.

I would like to comment on them if you find them interesting as well. — David Mo

Yes, of course.

That it is "neither visible nor hidden" is a paradox that needs to be explained or it will remain confuse. In common language hidden and visible are an exclusive alternative. — David Mo

The statement is not hidden (in Foucault's sense) if we do not need to look for a hidden meaning, to interpret it according to a founding transcendental principle. 'Not visible' means
that we should not look for an apparent logical or grammatical structure. Foucault opposes here the two principal techniques: formalization and interpretation.

according Foucault, because the statement is the same "in itself". In itself? What is the "itself" of a statement? — David Mo

‘The statement is the same in itself,’ is the essence of Foucault’s archaeology. The primary criterion for the existence of ‘the statement in itself” is the manifestation of its repetition, or, more precisely, its inherent variation. The statement repeats itself due to its ’regularity,’ its enunciative function. Does Foucault succeed in avoiding a pure metaphysical founding of the statement existence? And how his method is different from an empirical contextual analysis?Foucault always starts with a limited corpus of linguistic datum. As his later works showed, the chosen datum is operated by and exposes the enunciative function inherent to a field of particular power relations. For example, in "The will to power," the discursive formation of various verbal performances of ''sexuality'' is not hidden nor visible. The statement reflects the intensification and the function of the power relations in our society. It is disclosed, and found out under the chosen phrases and prepositions, behind their ''natural'' meaning and logic. Therefore, the 'initial' meaning becomes transformed.
That should clarify your question

What means the modality of existence of a statement which is independent of its different possible meanings? — David Mo

The surface where the statements appear is discovered and even invented. Likely, Foucault's originality lies in the way he immerses himself into the field of contemporary forces. That is why he refers to '’the foreign element”,” something else'' that lies at the same level as the statement itself. The repetition, the variation of the statement, is maintained by exterior, unrecognizable forces. The speaker may not recognize it, and she becomes ''one'', or ''non-person''. To give a place to "the statement in itself," Foucault eliminates, erases himself as the author of his text. He replaces himself with the anonymous '' murmuring'' of discourse: “Must we admit that the time of discourse is not the time of consciousness extrapolated to the dimensions of history, or the time of history present in the form of consciousness? Must I suppose that in my discourse I have no survival? In speaking I am not banishing my death, but actually establishing it; rather I am abolishing all interiority in that exterior that is so indifferent to my life, and so neutral, that it makes no distinction between my life and my death.”

See this:

Generally speaking, one can say that a sentence or a
proposition - even when isolated, even divorced from the natural context
that could throw light on to its meaning, even freed or cut off from all the
elements to which, implicitly or not, it refers - always remains a sentence
or a proposition and can always be recognized as such .
On the other hand, the enunciative function - and this shows that it is
not simply a construction of previously existing elements - cannot
operate on a sentence or proposition in isolation. It is not enough to say a
sentence, it is not even enough to say it in a particular relation to a field of
objects or in a particular relation to a subject, for a statement to exist: it
must be related to a whole adjacent field . (AoK: 97)

Warn this: even when isolated, even divorced from the natural context that could throw light on to its meaning (!)

Here there is an implicit recognition (?) that context (could?) change the meaning of a statement. How can it be said that a statement can be recognized without an external context? — David Mo

I disagree.
"Generally speaking, one can say that a sentence or a
proposition - even when isolated, even divorced from the natural context
that could throw light on to its meaning, even freed or cut off from all the
elements to which, implicitly or not, it refers - always remains a sentence
or a proposition and can always be recognized as such ."
This 'means’ that we should avoid doing this: for Foucault, there is no ‘natural context’ that could ‘throw light on to statement’s meaning.’
"On the other hand, the enunciative function - and this shows that it is
not simply a construction of previously existing elements - cannot
operate on a sentence or proposition in isolation. It is not enough to say a
sentence, it is not even enough to say it in a particular relation to a field of
objects or in a particular relation to a subject, for a statement to exist: it
must be related to a whole adjacent field."
All right, for a statement to exist, the enunciative function relates the statement to a whole adjacent field. Yet, this relation, this link is not provided by the evident contextual circumstances. It is the essence of Foucault’s archeology: “the statement is neither visible nor hidden.” Therefore, the statement has to be disclosed, found out under the covering phrases and prepositions, behind their ‘natural’ meaning and logic. The surface, the ‘plinth,’ where the statements appear, must be discovered, polished, and even fashioned or invented. So, 'an external context' is primarily determined and chosen by the statement's formation, by its enunciative function. Foucault’s seemingly meaningless statement AZERT indicates his political and philosophical aim not to consider too meaningful, understandable, and recognizable texts and examples.

Domain of material objects possessing a certain number of observable physical properties, a domain of fictitious objects , a domain of spatial and geographical localizations, a domain of symbolic appartenances and secret kinships;e a domain of objects that exist at the same moment and on the same time-scale as the statement is formulated, a domain of objects that belongs to a quite different present -
that indicated and constituted by the statement itself, laws of possibility, rules of existence.

These are Foucault's exact expressions in The Archaeology of Knowledge which constitute the domain of the enunciative value. Do they not refer to the context of the enunciation? Space, time, location are not external factors? — David Mo

Foucault asserts that "A series of signs will become a statement on condition that it possesses 'something else'(which may be strangely similar to it, and almost identical as in the
example chosen), a specific relation that concerns itself- and not its cause,
or its elements". If so, the relations of a statement with 'external factors' are the derivatives
of the essential enunciative function. The statement is essentially self-sufficient and autonomous.

The concept of the generative function of language does not appear in The Archaeology of Knowledge,. Are you not applying alien concepts in your interpretation of Foucault? What do you mean with "generative function"? — David Mo

“The statement is not therefore a structure (that is, a group of relations between
variable elements, thus authorizing a possibly infinite number of concrete
models); it is a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on
the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition,
whether or not they 'make sense', according to what rule they follow one
another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act
A series of signs will become a statement on condition that it possesses 'something else'(which may be strangely similar to it, and almost identical as in the
example chosen), a specific relation that concerns itself- and not its cause,
or its elements. The subject of the statement should not be regarded as identical with the author of the formulation - either in substance, or in function. He is
not in fact the cause, origin, or starting point of the phenomenon of the
written or spoken articulation of a sentence; nor is it that meaningful intention
which, silently anticipating words, orders them like the visible
body of its intuition; it is not the constant, motionless, unchanging focus
of a series of operations that are manifested, in turn, on the surface of discourse
through the statements. It is a particular, vacant place that may in
fact be filled by different individuals; but, instead of being defined once
and for all, and maintaining itself as such throughout a text, a book, or an
oeuvre, this place varies - or rather it is variable enough to be able either to
persevere, unchanging, through several sentences, or to alter with each
one. It is a dimension that characterizes a whole formulation qua statement.
It is one of the characteristics proper to the enunciative function and
enables one to describe it.”
Foucault applies here terms of “a function of existence,” and of “the enunciative function.” He asserts that the statement is different from a logical proposition,
a meaningful phrase, or a speech-act. It is a general function of a few variables.
A statement entertains a few links with affiliated spaces of a discursive formation,
subjective positions, concepts, and material elements. His prominent example is AZERT. The meaningless group of letters, listed in a typewriting manual, becomes a statement of alphabetical order adopted by French typewriters. What makes it a statement is the repetition due to the power
that cannot be attributed to external causes or conditions. A statement defines itself
by establishing a specific link with ‘something else’ that lies on the same level as itself. A hidden repetition animates the statement. It is surprising that formally Foucault’s definition of the statement as the enunciating essential function is similar to what Derrida proposed as the fundamental iterability: “The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priory…It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual ‘element’ as well as between the ‘elements’, because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence”.
(Derrida, Limited Inc).
As well as differance, a statement is in itself a repetition, even if what it repeats is ’something else.’ Is there a fundamental difference? AZERT refers to the focal point of contemporary power relations, effectuating the typist’s fingers.

There is no mention of Austin in The Archaeology of Knowledge. — David Mo

In "Archeology of knowledge," Foucault shows how his statements are related to speech-acts. — Number2018

"Can one not say that there is a statement wherever one can recognize and isolate
an act of formulation - something like the speech act referred to by the
English analysts? This term does not, of course, refer to the material act of
speaking (aloud or to oneself) or of writing (by hand or typewriter); nor
does it refer to the intention of the individual who is speaking (the fact
that he wants to convince someone else, to be obeyed, to discover the
solution to a problem, or to communicate information); nor does it refer
to the possible result of what he has said (whether he has convinced someone
or aroused his suspicion; whether he was listened to and whether his
orders were carried out; whether his prayer was heard); what one is
referring to is the operation that has been carried out by the formula
itself, in its emergence: promise, order, decree, contract, agreement,
observation. The speech act is not what took place just prior to the moment
when the statement was made (in the author's thought or intentions) ;
it is not what might have happened, after the event itself, in its wake, and
the consequences that it gave rise to; it is what occurred by the very fact
that a statement was made - and precisely this statement (and no other) in
specific circumstances. Presumably, therefore, one individualization of
statements refers to the same criteria as the location of acts of formulation:
each act is embodied in a statement and each statement contains one of those
acts. They exist through one another in an exact reciprocal relationship.
Yet such a correlation does not stand up to examination. For one thing,
more than a statement is often required to effect a speech act: an oath, a
prayer, a contract, a promise, or a demonstration usually require a certain
number of distinct formulas or separate sentences”(Ibid, pg 83)

the difference between his theory and that of "Anglo-Saxon philosophers" does not seem to be one of theoretical principles, but rather of the backgrounds to which they apply, — David Mo

Foucault proposes that the statement exists as a primordial generative function that does not depend on external factors. The founding principle of fundamental redundancy distinguish a statement from a non-statement. So, a series of letters which one might write down at random would become a statement. "The keyboard of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A,Z,E,R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement".

It would have been nice if Foucault had mentioned the author or authors he was targeting with his criticism. But it is somewhat rare for famous philosophers to critically mention contemporary authors. They probably expose themselves to the discovery that they have not been seriously read them. This is often the case.

If Foucault's criticism refers only to the contextuality of meaning, it seems to me that it is not very original. I suspect that there is something else. — David Mo

It was not just about the contextuality of meaning. In "Archeology of knowledge," Foucault shows how his statements are related to speech-acts. Later, he opposes his conceptualization of performative acts to Austin's theory in "The government of self and others.”: “In a performative utterance, the given elements of the situation are such that when the utterance is made, the effect which follows is known and ordered in advance, it is codified, and this is precisely what constitutes the performative character of the utterance. In parresia, on the other hand, whatever the usual, familiar, and quasi-institutionalized character of the situation in which it is effectuated, what makes it parresia is that the introduction, the irruption of the true discourse determines an open situation, or rather opens the situation and makes possible effects which are, precisely, not known. Parresia does not produce a codified effect; it opens up an unspecified risk. And this unspecified risk is obviously a function of the elements of the situation”. Differently from the performative, parresia constitutes a rupture with the dominant significations, an irruptive event that creates a fracture. Also, to accomplish a performative utterance, the status of the subject is necessary, but just as a formal function. What makes “Excuse me” a performative is what one says. Whether one is sincere or not is of no importance. On the contrary, the parrhesiastic enunciation not only produces effects on others, but primarily affects the enunciating subject.

.

to understand Foucault, if such a thing is possible, we should go to p. 90 ff. of The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, Pantheon Books, 1972) where he explains his peculiar conception of "statement".
However, I doubt that it can be understood because he resorts to markedly metaphorical expressions that he does not explain ("field of emergence", "spaces of differentiation"...).

One can see in any case that the description of this enunciative level
can be performed neither by a formal analysis, nor by a semantic investiga­-
tion, nor by verification, but by the analysis of the relations between the
statement and the spaces of differentiation , in which the statement itself
reveals the differences. (Wittgenstein, Ibid, p. 92)

Perhaps someone can explain this Foucaulian entanglement. I would appreciate it. — David Mo

“The statement is not the direct projection on to the plane of language
(langage) of a particular situation or a group of representations. It is not
simply the manipulation by a speaking subject of a number of elements
and linguistic rules. At the very outset, from the very root, the statement
is divided up into an enunciative field in which it has a place and a status,
which arranges for its possible relations with the past, and which opens up
for it a possible future. Every statement is specified in this way: there is no
statement in general, no free, neutral, independent statement; but a statement
always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among
other statements, deriving support from them and distinguishing itself
from them: it is always part of a network of statements, in which it has a
role, however minimal it may be, to play. Whereas grammatical construction
needs only elements and rules in order to operate; whereas one
might just conceive of a language (langue) - an artificial one, of course whose
only purpose is the construction of a single sentence; whereas the
alphabet, the rules of construction and transformation of a formal system
being given, one can perfectly well define the first proposition of this
language (langage) , the same cannot be said of the statement. There is no
statement that does not presuppose others; there is no statement that is not
surrounded by a field of coexistences, effects of series and succession, a
distribution of functions and roles. If one can speak of a statement, it is
because a sentence (a proposition) figures at a definite point, with a specific
position, in an enunciative network that extends beyond it.” (Foucault, Ibid, p. 99)

Foucault implements the double move here. First, he rejects a formal analysis or a semantic investigation to perform a structuralist conceptualization of a discursive formation: his statement represents a group of associated statements with inherent formation and enunciation rules. No statement can appear without the co-existence and co-operation of similar, opposing, supporting, etc. ones. Secondly, he tries to replace the structuralist approach: a family of affiliated statements is not homogeneous. When one operates discursive formation statements, there are different systems effectuated in the same process: observations, descriptions, calculations, institutions, etc. Also, the operating rules themselves are not general permanent axioms; they are variable or optional. They do not determine a structure or a system; any rule applied is primarily determined by a current enunciative context and, simultaneously, changes this context.
The principle of an inherent variation substitutes for formal structuralist
rules of construction and transformation.