Public Journal:

Will look forward to it…

Note: I will add some of the relevant quotes below should the reader be interested; but for sake of people’s small windows of time on social media, I will make my point brief by summarizing the book I am referring to:

Steve Brewer, in Origins of the Soul, makes the point (in a dialogue form similar to that of Plato’s (that life basically began through a kind of spontaneous chemistry in which chemical compounds in the primordial muck (hiding in crevices, BTW (engage in a kind of experimentation in which they assimilate various other available chemicals, mix them into their own chemical composition, and look for what works. In this sense, they were engaging in a natural bricolage that eventually resulted in primitive life forms: single cell organisms.

This was an argument made by Max in the dialogue for the sake of his materialist understanding of consciousness as a kind of redundancy produced by the perfectly mechanical workings of the brain. And here we see something very similar to Deleuze’s materialism (via Bergson (that recognizes the inherent creativity of nature. In Deleuze’s case, even being an artist is a matter of letting one’s self be a node within an already creative system of exchange. Still, part of me wonders if Deleuze’s materialism wasn’t just a conceptual convenience, a way of creating a model that underlies (while not enslaving (the many ways in which humans engage with the world.

It just seems to me that Deleuze’s models (w/ and w/out Guatarri (makes room for the possibility of participation.
*
Relevant quotes:

“This pre-biotic stage of evolution is likely to occur in tiny niches amongst crystalline crevices in rocks where the chemical conditions are just right. Now another key component of cellular life, a cell membrane, also forms naturally just by shaking fats with water. It only takes the encapsulation of the contents of such a niche in a membrane and now you have a primitive cell. This can drift off to another suitable niche but now carrying its own self-replicating chemistry with it. A final step is to separate the functions of genetic information into RNA’s closely related chemical, DNA and the catalytic function into proteins. You now have everything needed for a living cell. It’s doubtful we can ever get firm evidence for what exactly happened, but with concepts such as the RNA world, science has explained how there can be a purely natural pathway leading from primitive chemistry to cellular life.”

“Freya: It’s still a bit of a mystery why such an insignificant chemical could organize this soup into the complex chemical systems found in life.”

“Max: It’s only a mystery if you don’t distinguish between the use of the word chemistry and chemicals. Chemistry is the process used to produce chemicals; chemicals are the inputs and new chemicals the outputs. The unique feature about any catalyst is if you change its structure it can carry out new chemistry. This could be just doing the existing chemistry faster or slower, but there’s also the possibility of a new type of chemistry able to produce entirely different sorts of chemicals. Presumably, such a leap in chemistry allowed RNA to combine amino acids into chains and make proteins. Once you have this, the door is open to produce the even more versatile and efficient enzyme catalysts.”

-Brewer, Stephen. The Origins of Self. Kindle Edition.

Hello again, d63.

The above appears credible, or at least more credible then not, in light of the multileverd construction of crystalline patterns of relevance.

Words like crystal clear have borne out a relation to light and enlightenement to firm these relationship of chemistry with established forms of various chemicals.

This is anion to the principles of attraction relate to particle physics, perhaps.

Even more interesting could be to ponder relating to Deleauze’s and Attwri’s conceptual cognitive organization.

Could You touch on some possible linkege here?

Deleuze is always an influence. Attwri is not familiar to me. Thank you for your kind words.

Doc:

Throughout your book, you deal extensively with the nature of consciousness as concerns simpler life forms such as gnats and ants down to single cell organisms. I’ve had a few thoughts about this myself. So please indulge me while I add my own 2 cents to the mix.

It’s a funny story. Back in the 90’s, I and my college graduate friends managed to come across some LSD. (I’m sure you can you guess who managed that negotiation.) Under that influence, we got into a conversation about whether ants could be said to have a sense of self. Their argument was pretty much the same mechanistic one as Max. I, on the other hand, argued that they did. At the time (and given my state of mind), I was mainly taking a position that suited my general disposition.

It wasn’t until hindsight kicked in that I realized two things. First, it just seemed to me that an organism would have to have some sense of self in order for there to be a survival instinct. It would have to have some sense of what it was it was trying preserve. Secondly, it seemed to me that if it were as mechanistic as my friends assumed, you have to ask how it is that such organisms can actually anticipate threats to their survival. If it were as mechanistic as my friends argued, wouldn’t it require that you literally stick a pin into the nervous system of an ant in order for it to respond?

Furthermore, I see the possibility of a self in what I refer to as a perceiving thing: that which makes nothing something through intentionality: consciousness always being consciousness of something. You are reading this. Then you say to yourself: I am thinking about myself reading what D. has written. Then you think about thinking about reading what I have written. And you could go on like that forever. But what you can never do is look back at what is looking out: the perceiving thing: a perceiving thing that is no different (structurally that is (than any less evolved perceiving thing. The only difference, as Douglass Hofstadter points out in I am a Strange Loop, is the complexity of the symbolic matrix through which all perceiving things project into the world.

Doc:

Good news!!! Just finished your book today and am about to move on to a recently purchased book on Phenomenology and Marxism. And you know how we intellectual and creative scrappers are lacking the focus that formal training offers: always following the next shiny object. So I’ll likely become a little less of a pest for a while. It kind of sucks for me in that I tend judge any input I take in based on what it gives me that I can use. And by that criterion, your book was a stellar performance. There was so much more I wanted to comment on. Plus that, I had just found (after much experimentation (how to coordinate filling this space as well as the spaces I fill on social media: how I cross-pollinate. And because of that, I hope to return to your book soon. I’m starting to see a potential PN article coming out of it.

That said, I want to finish this discourse (this jam (w/ a general/wide-swipe observation. It seems to me that you (like myself (see the answer in the middle-ground. This seems especially evident in the synthesis you present between Freya (who knows perfectly well what she is experiencing when it comes to consciousness (and Max who represents what I refer to as a metaphysical atheist: to the extent that there is nothing that transcends the physical –that is as compared to the theological atheist that simply doesn’t believe in God. And I see this rooted in the conundrum you point out in the book. On one hand, we have the fanatical materialists who reduce everything to the physical which leads, as you describe, to a kind of solipsism. On the other, we have the Cartesians who treat the mind as something separate from the physical. This (this ghost in the machine argument), it seems to me now, is what leads to misguided notions of perfect free will.

And to lend a little anecdotal support to your model (at least as I interpret it), throughout my history on social media, the two most noxious trolls I have encountered have either been the hardcore materialists very much like Max or the hardcore Libertarians who argue that any failure of Capitalism can only be the result of a failure of the individual to act on their perfect free will. (Oops!!! Got political again. I’ll explain later.)

                                                                                                                     Keep up the good fight, Doc;
                                                                                                                                     Look forward to jamming                                               
                                                                                                                                                                   w/ u again,
                                                                                                                                                        the scrapper.

One of the most beautiful statements Deleuze ever made (and he was full of them (was in the A to Z interviews. He made the point that friendship is a matter of knowing the other’s madness, that unless they know your madness, they cannot be your friend. This is because friendship (much like we might experience with a poem or work of art or philosopher (is a little like (un(peeling an onion until you reach the core: the hermeneutic process.

Now switch forward to Jeffery Rosen’s The End of Forgetting. But first: a confession: I have yet to read the book; but it is on my immediate cue. The main thing here, however, is the main thesis: the fact that (and may the wrath of Professor Strunk rest in its grave (that we, given how much of ourselves we make public on social media, act in our social world in ways that are forever on record.

Might we consider that a mixed package? On one hand, our failures will always be there for others to hold against us. At the same time (given the Deleuzian standard of friendship), social media may well the means by which we achieve a more global form of intimacy. I mean imagine a day when someone we all interact with being caught on their eye cam jacking off to porn and everyone else responding to the video with:

Well…. that figures.

Sorry for the typo. It’s ‘Attari’

Delueze’s concern w/ common and good sense gets at its most obvious when you consider the abstract categories we tend to use when we try to define ourselves: poststructuralism as compared to postmodernism, continental as compared to analytic, art as compared to science, etc.,etc., etc….

With common sense, it is always a matter of correctly designating a given object to its correct category. This is why there are always debates about what banner a given thinker works under or what movement a given artist works under. It’s also why we’ve resorted to adding such prefixes as “neo” and “post”. And to this day, nothing seems to stay securely within the perimeters defined for it. Hence Deleuze’s emphasis on becoming: becoming poststructuralist, becoming postmodern, becoming continental, becoming analytic, etc.,etc., etc….

(And here we should note Rorty’s desire for such a world in which those perimeters are eliminated and everyone just enjoys the fruits of their activities.)

Good sense makes things even worse by assigning value to them. We deal with this all the time on the boards when people confront us with THEIR chosen criteria of a worthy statement as if it was the only criteria. They’re the ones who wear the “scientific method” on their sleeves as if it was a badge of authority –that is when they rarely practice that method their selves. Hence Deleuze’s embrace of univocal being in which all objects of experience can be said to be in the same way: including emotional responses or how our imaginations work upon them.

(And here, Rorty’s dismissal of issues of “ontological status” is telling in that it democratizes the general discourse by shutting down any arguments that something can be seen directly (think: the cat on the mat (is any more real than how we experience it.)

I’ve been enjoying reading your public journal this morning. There are so few writers online. Mostly there are key-boarders and voice-to-texters. ; )

Here I get to what I most like to do on here as my process tends to straddle both the philosophical and the political: apply continental philosophy to a political issue. It just opens up what places I can post in.

(And I would apologize to the admins of my philosophy board. I know they try to avoid the political. And my tendency to blur the line between the philosophical and the political might seem like an open act of defiance. I assure them it’s not.)

That all said, Joe Hughes (speaking through Deleuze), in his reader’s guide to Difference and Repetition, points out that as an object of sensibility is reduced to a more finite thing, it becomes more general…

But here I have to backtrack in order to explain. Take a singular raindrop. It is a raindrop like a lot of other raindrops. However, were we mere mortals capable of the god’s-eye/infinite capacity of tracing that raindrop back to the moment it was absorbed from an ocean, or lake, or stream, or whatever, we would know that raindrop as a perfect individual due to its individual matrices of causation. Unfortunately, we are limited to the finite. And the more we understand that raindrop as finite, the more general it becomes for us. It becomes little more than a representative of raindrops in general.

And whether it’s minorities, or immigrants, or members of the LGBTQ+ community, isn’t this exactly what the right is doing? It’s like they’re incapable of seeing such individuals as anything more than the blocked concept, the finite concept they are working with. And is it any wonder Deleuze would hate representation like he did? A product of that blocked concept?

“In short, it is a question of causing a little of Dionysus’ blood to flow in the organic veins of Apollo. This effort has always permeated the world of representation.” -from the conclusion of Gille Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

It’s like I’ve always said about Deleuze: the creative act is never that far from his mind. Here we can see him making the same complaint that the surrealist movement as a whole (given their embrace of pure improvisation (made against Dali: that he was too beholden to classical values.

At the same time, I can see Deleuze actually going deeper than the surrealist insistence on improvisation and into John Cage’s argument that even improvisation (as we generally know it (is not as spontaneous as we would think. It is, rather, a matter of repeating familiar riffs in the hope of getting beyond them: something more superficial than it pretends to be and nowhere near the level of pure difference that Deleuze proposes: his Avant Garde sensibility.

The problem with this approach is something a famous designer pointed out: people tend to attract to the familiar as well as the novel. And while that may seem superficial, you have to ask what good Deleuze’s or Cage’s agenda of pure spontaneity and pure difference is if only a handful of people can appreciate it. In other words, while it is useful for people like Deleuze and Cage to go for the kind of pure difference they did ( a way of breaking us from the same old), there is nothing wrong (that is within the domain of Difference and Repetition (with embracing the familiar while adding touches of novelty to it.

In terms of Deleuze’s understanding of “difference”, one of the main philosophers he takes issue with is Hegel. He mainly criticizes Hegel for offering a false movement (or expression of difference (in his dialectic that consists of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And as I have posted before:

If only things were as neat as Hegel makes them seem.

What Deleuze is mainly rejecting here is Hegel’s inclusion of the negative in the form of the antithesis or contradiction (a symmetrical dialectic) –that is as compared to the vice-diction that Deleuze champions. Deleuze, rather, sees the dialectic as asymmetrical as is suggested by the chapter in Difference and Repetition: ‘Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible’.

But first a disclosure: I have yet to get to that chapter in this particular immersion in Difference and Repetition –in either the original text or the secondary. However, I feel like this particular discovery may offer a little foresight into what Deleuze is on about in that chapter. And I base this on Deleuze’s embrace of Levi-Strauss’ bricolage. Bricolage is basically a dialectic that builds off of itself without a need to contradict itself; it has no need for negation, therefore, it is positive in nature. If any oppositions arise, it will be in terms of the disjunctive synthesis of the unconscious that Deleuze and Guatarri describe in Anti-Oedipus.

Nice topic!

In a footnote from Ian Buchanan’s guide to Jameson, he describes how a public health campaign in 1990’s Australia went horribly wrong when they put up grisly images of car wrecks on billboards in order to discourage unsafe driving practices. What resulted was a kind of romanticism among young men of making it seem glamorous. And, no doubt, the romanticism coming from America in terms of James Dean’s death played some part in that. And I can’t help but feel there is some kind fundamental relationship at work here… But I’ll that explain below.

Now while I don’t have the understanding to attribute it Brecht’s “estrangement effect” (that will take a couple more readings), I can cite a similar experience in America. The anti-drug films we were shown in grade and middle school in the 60’s and 70’s attempted to scare us away from psychedelics with their nightmarish portrayal of the experience -that is with some really cheesy effects. What they failed to understand was that horror was the bread and butter of our entertainment given the limited options available to us. What they managed to do, ironically, was intrigue us with it.

What I suddenly realize is the connection of sensibility at work here between Australia and America. I have, for some time, noted that of all advanced nations, Australia seems to have some important overlaps in sensibility with America: most notably those currents of cowboy-like hubris. The question I have to ask is if there is any connection there with the fact that it has been America and Australia that have mainly continued to embrace Deleuze while western Europe has largely moved on. Perhaps it could have to do with how, as is described in the book, many continental thinkers moved from the collective approach to Marx and on to the individual anarchism that we see in D & G’s Anti-Oedipus.

“As Jameson observes in his seminal 1978 essay on psychoanalysis, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’, what is problematical about psychoanalytic criticism is not its insistence on the on the presence of ‘Oedipal’ complexes, but rather its failure to pay attention to 'the transformational process whereby such private materials become public. Jameson proposes that this transformational process, aestheticization process, as we might more properly call it, whereby the writer renders their private fancies publically can be understood in terms of Freud’s analyses of the function of dream-work.” -from Buchanan’s guide to Jameson

Oh!!! But it is more than that -as anyone knows who has had an addiction. Any physical withdrawal symptoms are understandable enough. There is nothing about them that should amaze us. What is amazing, though, is how those physical impulses can translate their selves into the kind of mind games that can take us back to our vices. I once managed to quit smoking for 3 years. But towards the end, I found myself having dreams in which I took a hit off a cigarette and found myself panicking in the dream. In other words, the latent content of my addiction (via aestheticization (managed to manifest in very well constructed/cognitive arguments for returning to my vice. You have to be amazed at the mind’s capacity to translate something that base of the brain into something that diabolical.

As I have pointed out before, Lacanian Jouissance (as Žižek points out extensively throughout his writings (is ubiquitous throughout human experience in its recognition of the deep and intimate relationship between pleasure and displeasure. To summarize Lacan: when having sex we experience pleasure at a conscious level while experiencing displeasure at an unconscious one. This is why sex is always an experience of working toward a threshold that will take us out of a place that we’re really enjoying at the time. Lacan then reverses this to recognize that many of our psychological symptoms are the result of experiencing displeasure at a conscious level while actually taking pleasure in it at a subconscious one. And think about it: why else would we keep repeating behaviors that repeatedly give us displeasure unless they were, at some deeper level, actually giving us pleasure?

What I’ve recently come to realize, after reading the Life Explores issue Inside the Criminal Mind: Understanding How Bad People Think, is the extent to which the Jouissance dynamic plays in horror movies. Once again, we have to ask why we keep going back to something that on the surface gives us such displeasure. Why do we repeatedly put ourselves through this?

But the plot thickens when we consider a common trope in horror (an outright form of manipulation when we think about it). A character in the movie opens the basement door and proceeds cautiously down the stairs. We, of course, squirm and think:

YOU FUCKING IDIOT!!!

We literally get angry at the character and may even feel a sense of justice served should that character get killed by whatever’s in the basement. Yet, at the same time, we feel fear for the character. It’s as if the trope manages to evoke hostility, which gives us displeasure at a conscious level, and converts that hostility into fear which also gives us displeasure. But you have to ask how, in the end, this all adds up to a desirable and even pleasant experience.

It’s like I’ve always said: I always base the value of the work of another on what I can use. And by that standard, one of the more interesting articles I came across in the latest issue of Philosophy Now is the interview of Nat Rutherford whose primary focus is on the relationship between happiness and morality. He starts with a deconstruction of the individualistic nature of happiness (since, if you really think about it, our happiness tends to be social in nature (why else would we do what we do on social media? (then proceeds to equally deconstruct the more social nature of morality –that is since happiness tends to also be a personal experience. What he eventually lands on is an Aristotelian mean between the individual and the social. And think about it: no every-man-for-themselves, dog-eat-dog society could possibly survive while, equally, it would be unrealistic and likely unproductive for everyone to be Mother Theresa.

This has forced me to rethink a couple of my own conceptual models. First of all, I have come to realize that while we may have started with the primal mode of competitive evolutionary adaption as one cell organisms and EVOLVED into the cooperative as we grew more complex, this does not mean that our evolution as a species must exclude the competitive. It must, rather, assimilate it and use it to the ends of the cooperative much as we do with sports as well as market forces without the one-sided extremism of Neo-Liberalism. And we should do likewise with the Metaphysics of Power that flowered from the earlier competitive mode and the Metaphysics of Efficiency that blossomed as we became more cooperative.

And yet again I get to do one of my favorite things: establish a bridge between theory (a kind of selfish pursuit: self creation (and the political: a social/political pursuit. The point I am trying to make here has some very real political and policy implications.

Feeling the same vibe, d63. We need diversity, we don’t need echo chambers. What we all do — essentially — is work out our identity, influence our culture…constructively…keeping what works, creating/trying new when it stops working (destructs).

Adding to the above. To only try or create new when something stops working sounds reactionary, but the sort of creativity that is proactive is more about art. What destructs culture is when something stops working (stops being good), but what creates culture is art (beauty). When things stop working, that is about self=other and us=them. As long as those things are working, the creativity that is art has no bounds. Against such things there is no law.