Thinking about Origins

Along the networks of transductive reading, the following productive co-constitutive readings…

“The beginning is not the same as the origin.  When the beginning emerges, the origin recedes, leaving in its wake a past that becomes our future to form a circle that never closes…It is important not to convuse beginning with origin.  Origins are always obscure even when beginnings are not.”

Mark C. TaylorField Notes from Elsewhere-

“What if, instead of placing self-self interaction at the center of development, we were to posit relation as key to experience?  Relation, understood here in a Jamesian sense, is a making apparent of a third space opened up for experience in the making.  This third space (or interval) is active with the tendencies of interaction but is not limited to them.  Relation folds experience into it such that what emerges is always more than the sum of its parts…”

Erin ManningAlways More than One

bear with me – this is extended, but so merits reflection (I think)…

“What if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the complex interrelational matrix of being and worlding?  Being and worlding depend on the activity of reaching-toward.  Reaching-toward foregrounds the relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world.  This tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level of the sensory-motor.  It happens across strata, both actual and virtual.  A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing.  But not on the skin or in the body.  Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage.  This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world…”

complex adaptive systems diagram

“…In equal measure, the world also tends toward the becoming-body.  Body-worlding is much more than containment, much more than envelope.  It is a complex feeling-assemblage that is active between different co-constitutive milieus.  It is individuation before it is self, a fielding of associated milius that fold in, on, and through one another.  For the associated milieu is never ‘between’ constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders.  Becoming-self is one of the ways in which this folding (body-worlding) expresses itself, but never toward a totalization of self – always toward continued individuation.  ‘To think individuation it is necessary to consider being not as substance, matter or form, but as a tensile oversaturated system beyond the level of unity’ (Gilbert Simondon).  Self is a modality – a singularity on the plane of individuation – always on the way toward new foldings.  These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted human, already-contained, but co-constitutive strata of matter, content, form, substance, and expression.  The self is not contained.  It is a fold of immanent expressibility.”

one more paragraph worth considering?….

senses of self are less bounded phases than fractal phase-spaces composed of interweaving strata.  ‘Once formed, each sense of self remains fully functioning and active throughout life.  All continue to grow and coexist’ (Daniel Stern).  No stratum is ever completely disarticulated from another in the creation of emergent senses of self.  Rather, strata veer through and across one another in the associated milieu’s intensive fielding.  As the infant ages and becomes verbal, for instance, their sense of being a coherent, willful, physical entity – foregrounding strata phasing toward organization – may intermesh with the frustration of not being able to express the feeling-vector of intensity that remains a key aspect of the tending toward coherence – foregrounding the strata phasing toward the virtual or immanence.  Every becoming is tinted with this double articulation.  There is no stable pre- and postverbal state.  There is no stable identity that emerges once and for all.  Becoming-human is expressed singularly and repeatedly in the multiphasing passage from the feeling of content to the content of feeling, a shift from the force of divergent flows to a systematic integration.  This is not a containment toward a stable self.  It is a momentary cohesiveness, a sense of self that always remains colored by the interweaving of forces that both direct and destabilize the ‘self’s’ proto-unification into an ‘I.’  With all apparent cohesiveness there remains the effect of the ineffable that acts like a shadow on all dreams of containment.  For double articulation reminds us that singular points of identification always remain mired within the complex forces of their prearticulation, prearticulation not strictly as the before of articulation, but the withness of the unutterable, the ineffable – the quasi-inexpressible share of expressibility – within language.  There is no self that is not also emergent, preverbal, affectively oriented toward individuation.”

Erin Manning, Always More than One

“That from which I emerge approaches by withdrawing”

-Mark C. TaylorField Notes from Elsewhere

reflections….?

Significant?

Toying with significance, practicing writing by hand.

                 Cause of which:  online graduate school (hybrid) perhaps.  Blackboard (not a blackboard + a hand moving chalk), wikis, MS Word, blogosphere…

                  Writing is a different word than typing (“keyboarding,” “texting,” “thumbing,” “fingering?”)

                  Handwriting – is there another?

Writings is different from typing.

not only pacing.

Significance - Handwriting

Significance

“People exist

to attach importance”

(Rae Armantrout)

Exercise.

Once I had the most beautiful pen-man-ship.  Admired, envied, revered.

My hand now working by jolts and shirts (“stammering”)

Wife says I jerk in the night, in my sleep.  As if the wires were hot and crossed.  “Traumatic,” she says.

Like my father.

Who has elegant penmanship – consistent, beautiful, and flowing.

What I aspired to.

And achieved.

Now interruptive.  Herky.  Stuttering.  Multi-controlled.  Cross-wired.

Muscles, nerves, vision, brain + its fabricating memory and prediction: out of sync.

     I exercise a few moments in which I don’t feel particularly pressured and am thinking about significance.

“I listened with great interest and desire to have it be of no significance.

But you know how it goes.  Significance abounded.”

(Percival Everett)

Now my thoughts arrive sturdier through a machine.  Body – extension – return.  The pen was extension.  The ink.  Dependent on the body.  Embodied, enminded.  Transductive.

“‘transductive’ (a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituents)”

(Gilbert Simondon)

Tools.  Media.

Humanity — technology.

Me : keyboard : thought : language.

Me : pen/paper : thought : language.

Transductive.  Co-constituent.  Interdependent.

Significant?

Dreaming of – imagining – my recovered penmanship.

Therefore, exercise.

Communication.

Transductive.

“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood.  Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention.  Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change.  Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present.  Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning.  Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical.  Even if the language is unknown.  Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content.  Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.”

(Percival Everett)

“A metaphor cannot be paraphrased”

 

Of Goals and Achievements: To be thinking

In considering progress.  In thinking reflexively.  In pondering what humans are as well as what we are able to produce.  Gilbert Simondon, like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, John Deely, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Thibault and many other profound scientists and thinkers, continually examine “human progress” within a conceived totality of systems.  This enables us to reflect, question and surmise.  To be conscious.  To conceive.  The following article, only recently published, provides I think an intriguing overview of such networked and systemic thinking…

Gilbert Simondon – The Limits of Human Progress