Potential

- Larval is right, I am invariably influenced by every text I read. I’m guessing he would also agree that by text I mustn’t necessarily limit myself to written words, but any film, event, piece of music, or even piece of news coverage in how they mould my perception of the world as I grow, how it styles my own personal discourse in an endless process, and – touching on his reference to the idea of eternal return – how the manner of my absorption of each new text must surely be determined by the events and perceptions which preceded it. In other words, any new fact or perception that inscribes itself in me must necessarily enter through the gates of an existing discourse in the subject's mind. Even if one is a blank slate at birth, he is sent on a particular and irreversible direction from the first sensible experience. I remember, for example, how watching films about the Holocaust shaped my perception of myself as a Jew when I was young, in a way that was entirely unintended by the film makers and which went on to affect my reception of any new image or text (more on this in a future post). In other words, we can say that any object has the potential to become many different signs, depending on the subject's already existing mental map. Each individual may react to such texts differently, depending on the utterly unique discourse which they already occupy (I am painfully aware, as I write this, of the crude manner in which I'm expressing myself. I lack the appropriate reading and terminology to convey my thoughts eloquently at this time, so any recommended reading on the topic would be most welcome).


An article in Scientific American from 2004 discussed the effects of different experiences on the the neurological processes which take place while listening to music. It's been a while since I read the article, but I believe experimenters monitored the response of gerbils (could have been some other unpleasant rodent) to certain note sequences, then administering an electric shock to the gerbil each time a note was played so as to completely alter its reaction to the sequence of notes as a whole. This may seem unimportant, but it's just one small example of how perceptions and neurolgical reactions may be dependent on past experiences.






> I finally understand what Nietzsche meant when he said “blessed are the forgetful”. I’ve just scared the shit out of my housemate by trying to philosophise with him. He was telling me about a Kiefer Sutherland film where angels of some sort would transform events in real-time, though the mortals involved would be unaware of the change even happening. A man walking down the street may be transported to India and to him it would be as if he’s been in India forever. Maybe it was that I was off my face, but I was fascinated. –‘What if you’ve just been placed here in the middle of this conversation and you don’t even realise it because your memory now tells you that you’ve been here the whole time?’ I asked J. Ideas came rushing into my head from reading and thinking about Derrida so much lately and gradually I became more animated. The more I talked the more excited I got, the more excited I got the more I talked. Lately I’ve been talking only to people with an interest in philosophy, and I’m finding it difficult to talk about other things. This was it, J. was under attack from a maniacal barrage of words and images of me trembling in a fit of geekiness and he didn’t know how to get out of its way. –‘What do you believe in, J.?’
-‘What do you mean?’ he says nervously, as if unsure whether I’m asking an innocent question or preparing the ground for another attack.
-‘I mean what are your interests? What are your opinions or beliefs on anything? I want to get to know you, J. We’ve lived together ten months and I still don’t know you!’ I hate these kind of questions, but can’t resist discomforting others with them. He looked at me for a moment and then began to snigger nervously. J. is scared. What is he supposed to say? What’s the right answer? What does one do in a situation like this? J. was knee-deep in shit and no-one could help him. It’s up to him now. He stutters a little while trying to say something, before managing to force out –‘Well, I like technology. A lot of people think it’s bad and destructive, but I think they just don’t realise how much it benefits us..... I dunno…’ he sounded unsure. –‘No, no, that’s a good answer!’ I assured him. I contemplate this for a moment and continue: ‘Have you heard of Derrida?’ He hasn’t. So I try to explain some Derrida to him and go into binary oppositions, and how in each particular discourse exist binary oppositions which are constructed through language and in which one end of the spectrum is privileged over the other. ‘These all operate unconsciously,’ I assure him so as to avoid sounding silly, and tell him how one side may invoke notions of authenticity or ‘presence’ to justify itself. I can't help but think that any system, anything 'logical' and rational decision or belief is fundamentally based on incommensurable contradictions which must remain hidden for the sake of sanity and order. This makes me think about Nietzsche when he said that everything we do is the result of a myriad wills vying for dominance. I think about how I would get angry and defensive when I was younger each time someone would point out a mistake or contradiction in something I said, or in some way questioned my conduct. I guess every time I felt angry it was because something in me felt threatened, some notion of wholeness, of a unified narrative, ordered and logical, and after all. I am almost tempted to say that if there’s one thing that’s fundamental about every consciousness it’s that something about it aims solely at the creation and maintenance of such illusions of unity. I used to think that whenever someone pissed me off in such a manner it was because they threatened to undermine something of my fragile identity, but now I’m convinced that what’s really defending itself is a logic which knows that underneath it there is nothing, so that when one threatens to remove something of my identity by pointing it out to me some goddamn self-defence mechanism is triggered to try and ward off the assailing thought, this attack on my personal logic or discourse, because if it doesn’t defend itself then it will be exposed for the collection of contradictory wills that it is, grounded in nothing. We are nothing but endless contradictions trying to disguise themselves as unity, because the one principle or need that appears to govern all human-beings is the need for unity, for order, for logic.
By this point I was already half-mumbling to myself, with Johnny sitting in his chair staring uncomfortably at the floor the whole time, until he took his advantage of a short pause to make his excuses and leave. –‘I’m actually pretty tired now. I think I’ll go to bed,’ he said and just left me there with all these ideas. Maybe that Kiefer Sutherland movie was stupid, and maybe these were stupid ideas, but I finally realised what Nietzsche had meant by “Blessed are the forgetful”. Yes, he may have meant it in the context of amor-fati. But isn't amor-fati a demand to remember and embrace rather than forget? What could he have meant by 'forgetful'? It seems to me that the philosopher must be one who can see something new and interesting in that which is most familiar, even the most seemingly absurd points, who no longer views things in as healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, good art and bad art, and I remembered how Nietzsche had written that one day he wished only to be a ‘yes’ sayer and see that which is essential and valid in everything, not merely as amor-fati, I suspect, but as some sort of creative nihilist who, in spite of his nihilism, has more spirituality than the most religious person because he places creativity above all else and sees everything as creative; this is why even a Kiefer Sutherland film will appeal to me as intriguing. I, too, wish to be a 'yes'-sayer. The next day I remembered how some guy in first year asked wouldn’t it be great if we could forget a song each time we heard it so that each time would be the first and last time I heard it, and how fascinating that idea seemed to me then and now it seemed more fascinating than ever, and that all Nietzsche was doing was warn us against overlooking the obvious. I thought about this and I walked through the quayside on a sunny day when a butterfly white as a flapping summer’s cloud got in my way as if begging to be noticed and saying look at me, I carry within me a trace of true beauty! Are you? I thought to myself. But butterfly, surely any notion of beauty is always socially constructed and if that’s the case then what is this trace you carry? Only the infinite trace of earlier conceptions of beauty with no origin from which these conceptions may have originally been derived, because everything, every single concept and event in time is but an interruption of infinity, a time without beginning, a time of time’s absence – everything starts in a moment of infinity, an instant laden with infinite potential where everything is possible, but that spark of infinite possibility can only manifest itself within a system, within a moment of striation, within some finite order, so that discourse works like some kind of filter or sieve , imposing stability and allowing controlled doses of potential inside so as not to upset the system too much, because a system requires stability, but nevertheless the system only survives because it never remains the same, because it is not allowed to stagnate and turn to stone, because it always allows little pockets of difference to seep through the sieve every now and again, and how these pockets of chaos, while being subdued by stability, nonetheless carry with them a trace of infinity, of infinite potential, and a mark of that moment when it passed through the filter, and how discourse, the resonance of ideas, is always marked with each and every single one of those moments, and each idea is thus infinite but at the same time not entirely original, depending on the existing discourse through which it comes into existence, for nothing ever exists without finitude – without finitude there is only existence, there is, il y a. I thought about how it is that changes come about in the first place. Why is it that certain thoughts are allowed to filter through while others are filtered out? Then I thought back to the idea that each system insists on defending its apparent stability and unity by defending each and every one of its multifarious components in an illusion of cohesion.




-Spurious quotes Deleuze and Guattari:

'We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you. Hearsay[....] The 'first' language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse[....] Language is not content to go from a first party to a second part, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen.'

Is this not how Heidegger concept of the-they operates? By endless impressions and reflections of impressions? I can sympathise with Plato's notion of the cosmos, and of our world as mere mirage - at best, an approximation.

Spurious goes on to add:

'Not 'I speak', the linguistic cogito then, but 'we speak'. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a 'we', a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to engage the 'one speaks' of language - to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.'

Spurious is right, it’s something between I and WE which speaks. But is it necessarily language of itself? I’m always fascinated by how new words pop up in idioms, how small groups of friends might create their own terms and words. And mostly, how is it that a new word might come about in the first place? Does it not originate in something outside of language? An affect which precedes it? The last time I visited some family in Argentina I was foiled in my attempts at deriding Argentine television by the absence of an equivalent to the word "cheesy". I could not think of a satisfactory replacement. What did people do before they had this word? Did they still feel something similar without having a word for it? Or, and I find this more convincing, do new affects appear in each new era? in each new Heideggerian 'world'? Affects which are singular and could appear only in this 'world'? Of course new words eventually tend to striate, and create a new, more homogenous signification through a process of approximation. But do these concepts not finally settle and striate precisely because it appears in roughly similar fashion in several individuals at round about the same time? A word could not become a concept if it alluded to an affect experienced by just one single person. "Cheesy" is thus a new concept because the affect has only surfaced recently. It may,however, contain many elements of earlier concepts which have become sublated in a new affect conceptualised as "cheesy".

Larval subjects says:

“Deleuze’s account of static genesis, actualization, or individuation allows us to explain the movement from structure to actuality or the mechanics and type of “causality” required by structural thought. However, as important as the idea of static genesis might be, it is nonetheless ultimately dissatisfying as while it accounts for the genesis of actualities it does not account for the genesis of structures themselves.”



> But of course, I thought to myself, each individual contains within himself his own logic and version of discourse, does he not? Then can we really speak of a social discourse? An episteme? It would be tempting to accept that each individual logic is singular, but I remembered my recent conversations with Ibitsu, as we were obsessed with the problem posed by the impression that people’s ideas are not entirely random, that they all seem coherent and as though they’re all alluding to the same thing. How can that be? And then I realised that each logic, while being entirely subjective, nevertheless gives the impression of being objective and timeless, and that this is a necessary condition of any logos or system. How does it achieve this? Any facet of logos or discourse is always reinforced by searching for signs of itself in other people, it looks for marks and traces of something similar to itself. The same, however, must occur in the person being observed as he observes me in return, looking for signs of sameness and approval, so that in fact what ends up happening is that each individual discourse continually feeds off another in an endless process of exchange and mutual shaping. Is this why people appear to be talking about the same thing – because they’re constantly approximating each-other, never quite reaching unity or perfect commensurability because in each individual there occur constant new thoughts beyond his control, instants of infinity which constantly strives for expression? Is this the only way discourse can be said to exist, only through he countless networks of inter-woven relations, logos within logos, creating ever new and endless logoi and possibilities, never present to itself, forever renewing, regenerating? But a renewal which occurs only as part of an attempt at stability and at legitimizing a logos’s own claim to unity and truth.
And how would these new thoughts make their way through a system that aims at stability? I recalled my conversation with Ibitsu about how a musician or performer may introduce a new element to performance which may appear genuinely new yet is embraced by a majority of people. And now I wonder – is a new idea or gesture embraced because there is already something recognisable in it which has occurred in others, or because there’s something truly new about it? I suspect the answer must lie somewhere between the two possibilities. Nothing can be entirely original if it passes through the filter of discourse and is thus marked by it. In fact, it can only be through discourse, through a system, as system and logos, that anything may be produced out of those moments of infinite potential. For that potential to become actualised and manifested it must give in to order and must give up the infinite amount of possibilities open at the time. Could this be something similar to what Heidegger had meant by Dasein’s already being-guilty in every decision it takes, or Derrida’s idea that each moment of decision is a moment of madness. Because at each moment there’s an infinite amount of possibilities, and ultimately no “objective”, fundamental justification for any decision over another, or for holding any belief over another. Beliefs are generally adopted insofar as they are conducive to the reinforcement of one’s existing discourse or belief system. Yet, once taken, no decision is truly mad, for it is made within a contingent discourse which provides the foundation for all decisions. But foundation is always contingent, we say. Perhaps this explains why some ideas may be born in such a manner that appears to almost escape and defy discourse. I’d like to think that these moments are the moments of writing in the Blanchotian sense, where the world falls away and one is left facing the Other. But then again, most trends are embraced precisely because they’re not so Other at all. Surely a shift in paradigm or episteme is something much more severe, yet at the same time subtle and unfelt?



-In reply to Ibitsu on Reading – can we not say that, while one does not experience reading or the work as an 'I', the 'I' is nevertheless irreversibly transformed by this experience? After all, the experience always occurs as a relation, and event, between the text and the reader. On a neurological level, perhaps the relation is an interaction of sub-conscious traces with the text that’s being encountered. Meaning, what really encounters the text is not strictly a conscious and immediate “I” , but rather the collection of conceptions, presumptions, images, meanings and significations which are already found in me, or in the brain (or wherever they may be inscribed) as a result of a lifetime of previous experiences. I think what I’m trying to say is that the “I” of the everyday (which never remains the same) is in someway founded upon and motivated by an endless array of traces, traces with no beginning and no clear or intelligible locus in the body, which make up the "I". In other words, the “I” is founded on, ultimately, nothing. This is not a radical point, Levinas makes it, and even Heidegger does in a way. Every such experience of an interaction with a text, then, occurs on a largely subconscious level, which in turn shapes the way in which the conscious “I” would interact with any future texts or signifiers. Ibitsu points, quite rightly, to the fact that it is never an “I” which experiences the work, and asks: “Is it subsequently this death we ignore when we speak of neurological and psychological impacts of reading, whereby an ‘I’ endures what l’œvre inscribes upon it? Are we not thereby assimilating the il y a of language into the mediating and dynamic logic of the Hegelian Aufhebung?” Ibitsu would say, as is suggested in the above quote (and I can speak for Ibitsu here because we agree on at least this much), that the notion of the “I” has for a long time been a mirage, a construct of language – a simplification of consiousness. What I fear is that Blanchot’s work may lead to an equally simplified misinterpretation by creating a new concept: the il, or the ‘he’, or ‘it’, or whatever you’d like to call this. Of course, this is a non-concept, and Ibitsu is in no danger of reification, I’m sure. What I am afraid of is that with the notion of the ‘he’, we create too clear-cut a distinction between ‘he’ and ‘I’, which may be misleading as to the intricacies and complexities of consciousness and neurological operations. Why make such a distinction at all? Does such separation not in fact reinforce the very notion of the ‘I’ of which we pertain to be so wary? I believe we must begin to assume, or at least entertain the possibility, that no such distinction exists. From day to day and moment to moment, one does not experience things or relations as either ‘I’ or ‘he’, but as something that constantly hovers between the two, sometimes leaning more towards one end of the spectrum, and sometimes towards the other. The spectrum itself is not determinate either. So that in any experience, even in that of reading, and even in the experience of reading or writing in the Blanchotian sense, one does not make a clear transition from one mode to another. The ‘I’ must always be ‘present’, as it were, in the experience, even if only in a marginalised capacity. Thus, the ‘I’ can never come out unscathed. I would therefore have no qualms about using the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, so long as we critically revise its significance to us. It must not be seen as part of a dialectical process pertaining to the Absolute, but rather an endless, and in someway senseless, process of infinite subsuming of trace after trace after trace, each trace being subsumed and absorbed in a manner which is dependent, if not entirely dependent, on the traces which precede it. Ibitsu chooses an eloquent quote from Thomas Wall when he says: “…the “he” who is never anyone-never anyone other than I, myself, but without me.” Indeed, even in the experience of the ‘he’, there is a ‘mineness’. And as Ibitsu himself so aptly and concisely puts it: “A collection of inscriptions from that which we have read, a collection which is constantly renewing and becoming, effected in each singular moment detailing our perpetual overturning of myself. An ‘I’ is penetrated by reading not as ‘I’ qua identity, but as the potential to be an ‘I’."