Yes, great thread. About the Fichtean self, or the intermedial and (subsequently) transitive-generative posited ground on which even pre-subjective “immanent” differentiations are supposed as derivative meta-orders of some receded being-itself qua being-in-the-world beyond the confines or reaches of any of that “primordial pre-subjective substantiality”, it is possible to claim this posited sub-realm is that out of which fetal originariness is possible to come (in Deleuzean fashion, ‘BwO’ and so on) in the sense of what Peirce raised as the philosophical problem of identifying the logic of the cause of the possibility for consciousness to exist not saying anything yet about the natural-selective logics by which that consciousness folds into its existences. Is the fetus simply assumed its originary pre-subjective nucleus, as some sort of ontological necessity by way of extension of the fields of the mother, a kind of fracturing, or can we go deeper and posit a ground of meaning beyond even a rhizomatically-structured materiality? Peirce’s distinction between dyadic and triadic relation-structures would at least frame the semiotic as principle of individuation at the site of dyadic rupture, in so far as being becomes self-divided and ‘expansive’ enough (not least in a temporal sense, see Kitaro’s theory of the dimensional vectors-subject) in itself to at least produce logical possibilities for fundentally irreconcilable outcomes. Bergson, Deleuze, these guys are all pointing to the same thing here: self-valuing. A distinction between noise and voice would rest upon a pre-existing capacity for distinguishing differences in sensory stimulation in such a way as to play upon an entire process and universe of possible meaning, meaning in a semiotic and phenomenological sense remaining open to non-enfolded departures and entirely external flows (excess).
In other words where we want to draw the line of fundamental differentiation requires by definition a self-closure of meaning space by virtue of which being becomes inarticulate before the actual contexts and sums of influencing, causal factors by and out of which it is truly being created; furthermore I don’t even think this can act alone as a ground of truth, not anyway until a wider logical clarity is allowed to remake a huge portion of our conceptual spaces.
The entire relationship speaking conceptually needs to be reversed, a kind of return to the Idea, for philosophy is already strained in its concept-making abilities (although S.'s metaphors are very nice). First question, Where do we seat the locus of ideas, ‘what is a concept’ and by extension a logic, a relation, a conditional materiality, a ‘grid’? I’d rather posit difference itself as the ontic quantum, excess therefore being the subjective or materialogical quantum. What do you get if being’s fundament is one of excessivity? Or said another way, if ‘being’ itself is nothing but a derived accumulative representation of an essentially excessive, disjuncted structure?
But the morality here is also reversed, we cannot reject that the kind of building in Heidegger’s sense holds an especially moral-normative place in the existence of being, of beings, even if and especially because of how this building can never get deep enough into the ground or “repair” the abysses which are reflections of that ground. The impossibilities of morality are the conditions of its very necessity.
Private semiologies a la postmodernity and the “foam” (nice visual) has always been the case, even way back when the spheres of the individual principle were way less dimensionalized and far less articulate, far less “art-able”. The inadequacy of the artability of the individual sphere against the domains of possible intersubjectivity available to that sphere (inadequate social construction including mythological and conceptual closures) brought about the necessity for monospherical pre-modern and modern structures, it became possible to produce a shared “dyadic individualism” because the milieu was insufficient to allow artful being in any other sense, thus the formation of comprehensive social-moral codes, the gods, death rites, honor codes, shamanism, etc. Now we have the kind of “end of history” or mass cultural dissolutions “post Europeanisms” (Valery) that express not some Nietzschean will to nothingness but closer to something like the Thanototic pull of the inescapability of one’s own error, of the errors and impossibilities of the structure-positing cultural ego-machines whose ontological limits have been reached in an age where the speed and proliferation of information allows a new secondary kind of excessivity to outstrip the first, more primordial one. This is a “will” only if we choose to examine it only from the perspective of already given ends and from a psychological context already self-bound to the terminating self-reference: Being is a striving for reconciliation which need is produced by the always more basic and disperse self-valuing localities which beings concretize by virtue of the act of “being” at all, by virtue of acting as a loose tethering of disparate materialities; but to merely assume that view would be to hold analysis down to the rock bottom of itself and fail to raise understanding beyond and into the more universal spaces of logic and construction required if we are to really begin framing things “in the real”. It is not enough to merely give passing reference to reality and then bury ourselves in the convenient dirt of already-cogent onto-epistemic formularies. It is “psyche” itself which much also be overcome, not simply the limitations of the common narratives, and a whole new kind of philosophy and vision-capacity is needed to even usher into existence the possibility for something for which the old limits are merely so much detritus, fuel and exclusive value, so much “joyous overcoming” perhaps if we want to evoke Nietzsche.
S. is doing nice work, but I’d like to see him building more toward that future requirement on the basis of which the possibilities for new kinds of philosophy will arise, rather than simply refine the old tools for new problems (this latter is still good work, of course, but truly capable minds are always called to something more noble). But you are more familiar with the body of his work than I am, so please keep posting quotes in here.