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Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The Infinity of Essences & the Problem of Similarity

Here is a paper I recently wrote for a comparative literature class:
The Infinity of Essences & the Problem of Similarity
I. Introduction
When all possibility of identity has been discounted—and discounted it has been—there must remain a category that could explain, if nothing else, the appearance of identity, or what is the same thing, the appearance of the dichotomy of essence and appearance. Even setting aside questions of the ontological status of identity versus non-identity, one is confronted with the problem of objective appearance, specifically and most problematically that of the much-derided self-identity. In this paper, I argue that “similarity” (and likewise “imitation” and “likeness”) fulfills this cynical role, offering the possibility of nuanced analyses for projects as diverse as semiology, historical materialism, and even post-phenomenological or post-deconstructive theory. Said more concretely, similarity is the ontological precondition of both identity and non-identity, and is the constitutive reality of self-relation conceived as infinite.
Thus, I will unfold the concept of similarity with respect to three thinkers: Walter Benjamin, specifically looking at the primarily distorting effects of similarity; Roland Barthes, focusing on the problem of self-imitation relating to photography but also to all types of image; and Jean-Luc Nancy, who will feature prominently in the discussions of the previous two thinkers, but who will also be discussed on his own as a final clarification of what is at stake in the problem of similarity.
II. Walter Benjamin: Similarity as Distortion & The Copy
The first modality of similarity I will examine is that of similarity qua distortion in the work of Walter Benjamin. In perhaps the paradigmatic example of this modality, Benjamin writes, “[Proust] lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of resemblance” (Illuminations 205). Proust's undoing, according to Benjamin, was his attachment to the narrative structure of similarity, the contextualization that lends all elements under a single historical heading (and indeed there only ever tends to be one such heading!), a unitary essence. The apparent singularity of the essence is deceiving, however, as this essence is inevitably the barest universal abstraction which in the end can signify absolutely nothing, as written in the official historiography of the bourgeoisie. Proust's illness here stands in for what may be considered the bourgeois pathology, the class necessity of the myth of progress. Resemblance is thus that state of contextualized essentialism that reduces particularity to abstract universality. In this movement, according to Benjamin, what is sheared off is the real context of the thing, in other words, its decontextualized, bare particularity. Nothing less than true history is here at stake, the logic of things as they happen. Perhaps better than particularity, which has a long history of assimilation, and indeed exists in discourse as the subsumed element in the universal, we should say peculiarity. Whereas particularity designates, in Adorno for example, the element that is not taken up into the universal, peculiarity will be used to designate the singularity of essence.
No discussion of similarity can do without the notion of copy, of mimesis, and in the context of Benjamin's thought, of technical reproducibility: “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (Benjamin, Illuminations 221). It appears that this phenomenon is analogous to that of the destruction of peculiarity effected by the narrative structure of bourgeois (or orthodox Marxist) understanding of reality. There is here a bizarre although unsurprising mimesis of mimesi, an imitation of imitations, a second-order movement and not simply a horizontal chain. First of all there is the destruction of difference, of particularity, and then on top of this there exists the wholesale destruction of peculiarity. We shall return to this in our discussion of Roland Barthes. For now, though, it is sufficient to draw attention to the historical connection, wherein photography appears as the perfect outgrowth of the age: Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction” (Benjamin, Illuminations 223). Benjamin here presents the paradoxical insight that every separation is a bringing-close, every separation into original and copy, whether that original exists or not, is a touching, a penetration. In other words, there is always something different between a thing and its copy
But what exactly is lost in similarity? On the one hand, peculiarity is dissolved, that which would be the singular essence of the thing. But there is more than that, particularly when we take the subject of a photographic portrait into account. Benjamin uses the metaphor of the gaze to describe just such a loss in the move between thing and copy: “...the camera records our likeness without returning our gaze” (Illuminations 188). A similarity results, but something important is missing—this lost element is nothing less than the mutual recognition constitutive of self-consciousness and thereby of the human. Further, this is the production of the standing negation of the self as that which experiences firsthand the absolutely negative both in near-death experience and in the desiring of the other's desire. Perhaps alarmingly, the likeness produced by the camera is one that is lacking in both its recognition of the other and, more imporantly, the other's recognition of it—it is lacking in lack, its substance does not exteriorize itself but appears to sit still. Thus the gaze of the photographed subject is decidedly not a human gaze, but rather the countenance of the suffering that is separation, the tremendous pain undergone in the offering of an unreturned humanity. This return is more generally rendered impossible by the dissolving of all stable substance that could go out of itself only to return unchanged to its point of origin, itself unchanging; this restlessness is not limited just to photography, and will be discussed below.
As mentioned previously, the image of the dream world takes the role of the non-symbolic in Benjamin, where the symbolic structures (narrative consciousness) that dominate waking life are absent: “The similarity of one thing to another which we are used to, which occupies us in a wakeful state, reflects only vaguely the deeper resemblance of the dream world in which everything that happens appears not in identical but in similar guise, opaquely similar one to another” (Illuminations 204). Distortion by similarity as was effected by the waking drive towards pompous historiography is here contrasted with what is dubbed a “deeper resemblance”. Unfortunately, the elaboration of this dream world remains difficult, and even, as Benjamin himself admits, “opaque”. The suspension of self-consciousness which is instantaneously produced by the click of the camera tears the viewer of the photograph from the waking world and places him in the confused expanse of the dream world wherein there is nothing but the unwavering gaze of an infinity of eyes, invoking an infinity of associations none of which give the promise of what can only be a reified fidelity. Thus the absence of all context as the real context of a thing does not result in nothingness, as if that absence would imply a void or lack of manifestation. Rather, there exists what may be termed the presence of that contextual absence, the Nancean infinity of sense—the fundamental lack of a ground guaranteed to be such by the restlessness of infinite self-relation. We might say that manifestation would continue manifesting in the absence of all context qua death of singular essence, as the pure negativity of the infinite going-out-of-self. This would be the unending upsurge of peculiarity. Perhaps this is what Benjamin means when he writes, in “The Doctrine of the Similar”, that “the perception of similarities thus seems to be bound to a moment in time... it must be grasped in an instant”. Thus, contra both Wittgenstein and Lacan, there is no limiting regime such as nonsense or the Real which would be unsymbolizable due to its definition as against what can be said, i.e., the symbolic. The dream world (but also perhaps the gestus or the surrealist montage) is not an attempt at the saying of the unsayable, it is not even a frenzied but futile extension of the finger towards unspeakable horror—or rather, it is both those things brought to bear against the tangled mass of existence which has always-already said the unsayable, and which has likewise long since replaced the unsymbolizable with the as-of-yet-unsymbolized, or even the as-of-right-this-moment-unsymbolized.
Benjamin's stripping of all context from the thing can be seen as the prerequisite for the following arguments based on Barthes and Nancy. In the next section, Barthes' Camera Lucida—the work is lucid only as lucid dreamingwill provide an indispensible view on the double-movement of disappointment and necessity inherent in self-imitation. Following this, Nancy's Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative will open the way to understanding both the always-already of self-imitation that nonetheless supercedes identity and the infinite becoming of all things, which things spiral through themselves and through their uncountable offshoots in constantly splintering teleologies without reference to an end-goal outside of that becoming. It must, however, be kept in mind that none of these developments are a proper resolution of the problem, as that problem's core paradox is the impossibility of resolution into self. Rather, the following developments should be thought of as different modalities of the problem of similarity.
III. Roland Barthes: The Image as Imitation
The second modality of similarity I will examine is that of the image and imitation in Roland Barthes, particularly the self-imitation forced upon the subject of photography by the technical conditions of the medium. This self-imitation takes form as the result of a misidentification, or rather of a confusion of peculiarity for any and all presentation or self-externalization whatsoever. Describing the ordeal of self-diremption effected by being photographed, Barthes writes
In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want other to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit is art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). (Camera Lucida 13)
What is immediately striking is the profusion of similarities, of likenesses, of “selves” one must imitate. Whatever else it may be, it seems that imitation is not gentle, and in fact is likened to a “micro-version of death” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 14). The image, and not only the photographic image, is the locus of a self-differentiation, which differentiation is a dreamlike echo of the problem of essence and appearance, given in technological form: “Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents. For resemblance refers to the subject's identity, an absurd, purely legal, even penal affair...” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 102). The absurd legal affair Barthes speaks of is the paucity of the photographed individual, who is “...neither subject nor object but a subject who feels like he is becoming an object...” (Camera Lucida 14). This becoming of an object is inseparable from the act of self-externalization, from the very production of the image. There can be no externalization, however, with the complementary notion of the internal: “...depth is inseparable from the strength to externalize oneself” (Adorno 106-107). By this (through the lens of my own interpretation) is meant two things: self-externalization is the projection of the image, the positing of the self (this will be important) from which true depth is produced, in which what may be termed the appearance of essence and appearance finds its basis; and the perhaps paradoxical truth that before the projection of the image one is not identical to oneself, insofar as identity is nothing but its own positing, it's own (problematic) presupposition. Speaking of an old picture of his mother, Barthes writes, “She did not struggle with her image, as I do with mine: she did not suppose herself” (Camera Lucida 67). To suppose the self—this is the sin against the peculiar, but perhaps piety is not as easily attained as Barthes might have us believe. The very notion that some picture is a picture of me already implies the violence of the entire symbolic universe. This violence is the dissociation of peculiarity, of consciousness as absolute negativity and hence as freedom, from the given determinations of the individual symbolic subject: “For the photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 12). This self-as-other, it is absolutely crucial to keep in mind, is the identification of the object (the “externalization”) with the subject (the “internal”), appearing in this context as a misidentification that has always-already been made. The immense power of photography in this regard was thus its ability to capture people.
Besides this violent difference-and-identification—which must of course go together on the structuralist model—there is the question of the dream world, of that which would overflow all context, all narrative, and in Barthes' case also all myth. Here is what Barthes has to say about the similarity of the dream world: “The almost: love's dreadful regime, but also the dream's disappointing status—which is why I hate dreams” (Camera Lucida 66). There is always a double-movement with photography, that of identification of subject and image-object on the one hand, and on the other the struggle of the almost, a catastrophic undoing of that identification. Furthermore, the subject-becoming-object in a photograph is the timeless guarantee of failure in the great labor of externalizing the self. Returning to dreams, Barthes has this to say about his mother: “I dream about her, I do not dream her(Camera Lucida 66). The individual in all her peculiarity is only pointed to even in the dream—a bigger failure could not be imagined. Even stripped of all context, even placed gently down into the dream world by the unconscious, Barthes cannot recreate her presence, her peculiarity. The problem lies in the botched transplantation between the waking and dream worlds. First, the sharedness of the world and of sense demands that the subject in reality be a “we”. So it is not as if Barthes cannot dream his mother because there is an uncrossable gulf between people. Second, the dream-image of Barthes' mother could never give off the peculiarity that his real living mother did because it is the nature of peculiarity to be singular, and the identification of the dream-figure with his mother was false by and through that very identification. While Barthes was with his living mother, her presence was externalized and sense was shared between them in their peculiar contact with one another—in death, there was only the dream-image, no better than the photograph; both images are false by their overbearing demand for the conformity of the other, for immediate and total subjugation of the living other to that other's own voiceless echo.
In “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud”, Jacques Lacan famously claimed that “the unconscious is structured like a language”. The unconscious activity of the dream world, however, is decidedly not a language, or rather it is a language that has gone out into its other so completely that the deferral of signifiers to their others for the sought-after meaning happens at one single instant, a static shock exploding out from the darkened void, coursing through the edgeless emptiness, and dissipating into a new zero-point of relations. The dream world may not be coterminous with dreams commonly understood—all the better! The infinity of sense is not something to imagine anyway. Instead, it is a physical contact between bodies, the sharing of peculiarity between them (essence is necessary as the internal precondition of the manifestations that touch one another). Returning to Barthes' distress over his dream-mother, we may say that even the divine gaze able to hold the entirety of all semiological signs simultaneously in view could not produce one single ounce of what is peculiar. For this, the reality of manifestation is needed, a self-differentiation and subsequent identification that does dance garishly on the false surface of the sign. There must be a vertical movement, even if in the end that movement was only the false appearance thereof.
Barthes' cynicism regarding the emancipatory possibility of the similarity of the dream world would seem thus to be the outcome of a (largely correct, I believe) ascription of imperialistic would-be hegemony to the symbolic order, to the always-already invoked sign-chains analyzed so virtuosically in Mythologies. There is, indeed, no such thing as a meta-language, even as there is the movement towards such a structure. It was in this sense that I spoke of the mimesis of mimesi in the previous section—we are now in a position to deal with this concept more thoroughly. Previously, we noted that there was a mimesis, a striving for identity, between the mimesis of bourgeois historiography and the mimesis of the photographic image/copy. That earlier statement, that flawed sureness that the self-understanding of the bourgeoisie was the essence or base of which the cultural (or even technological!) superstructure was a mimetic appearance, brings us to a declaration: the striving-each-into-the-other of meta-language and language (or of essence and appearance). This imaginary limit, this locus at which identity would finally be self-identical, is the mimesis of all mimesi, a universal identification of identifications, but on that account also its own undoing. That which imitates imitation is not on that account less successful, as if there were a ground at which imitation could be definitively separated from meta-imitation. Rather, the success of imitation heightens to the extent that peculiarity and particularity are successively made to disappear. So there is a tendency within things to approach self-identity, which is however negated in the activity of Spirit or thought as separation, or in the supremely powerful act of touching—the more abstract a relation becomes, the more peculiarity is sheared away, but the act of thought or Spirit that bursts forth cleaving substance in two is always the guarantee of symbolic distance, which distance is, paradoxically, closeness and even penetration conceived in terms of sense; the promise of concretion and manifestation is always-already made, and this suffices to unsettle substance for all eternity. Strictly speaking, it is actually quite impossible to move from infinite relationality to the lack of all relation which is the One—identity cannot exist for two reasons: it cannot be at the beginning because there can be no beginning (see following section on restlessness), everything having already begun; and it cannot be at some end because all identity is constituted only as similarity or likeness, of which the prerequisite is self-diremption. Thus, what yet remains the problem of similarity is however through the preceding analysis clarified—similarity is the problem of depth expressed with a slightly different focus and entry-point. The movement constitutive of depth is, to speak clearly, that whereby an essence becomes appearance through self-manifestation (which however does not leave it unchanged). That new appearance soon becomes the essence of a further movement of depth, and so on; the movement by which essence and appearance shift themselves about and flip over each other may be produced by temporal change or by relational changes. These winding movements produce the appearance of a meta-language at given moments in time (when a snapshot is taken or when certain behaviors are carried out as if there were a meta-language—this last possibility of existing falsity deserves a paper of its own), or due to the all-too-common artificial restriction of the field over which manifestation is to be experienced or things are to be thought. These considerations, as noted, open the possibility of treating language and meta-language as vertically-structured, separate modalities of being which demand of themselves their special treatment. As might already be apparent, such a separation is in fact impossible, made painful by its failure, even as it is absolutely necessary: “The separation that is in itself manifestation is each time a singular ordeal. As such, it is pain” (Nancy 41). Mimesis as that which, forever unheeding, gathers all mimesis unto itself, positing itself as the similarity of all similarities in an endless deferral towards the very locus of similarity, that hidden thing that finally is self-identical, the ground or essence behind manifestation which however cannot exist—this rather dense formulation brings the paradox of similarity to an intensity at which the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy absolutely thrives; it is to him that we now turn.
IV. Jean-Luc Nancy: Self-Similarity & Iterative Manifestation
Nancy's thought is marked by several recurring motifs which have special significance for the critique of similarity undertaken here: sense, self, and trembling. Most of these concepts were touched on in the previous sections, however this final section will generalize several of the previously-derived results and thereby provide a somewhat more rigorous justification for the earlier employment of Nancean concepts.
Sense is the term for that unmistakable phenomenon, that everything we come into contact with always-already makes sense. This making-sense is immanent, in that it references nothing pure or constitutive of that making-sense outside of itself, outside of its own self-reference. This reflexivity is a groundlessness, a restlessness which makes up the infinity of sense and causes problems for the interpretation of Nancy as holding either a philosophy of immanence or one of transcendence. Sense is infinite as described by Hegel's doctrine of true infinity, that infinity which is such in its boundless and limitless self-reference, and not in its constant deferral-onto-other, where that other (and therefore that spurious infinity!) would end up encompassing everything in its own self-identification. Rather, Nancy's infinity of sense exists not in a positive or identifying self-relation, but in a negative self-relation which is the precondition of its own groundlessness. Summarizing restlessness, Nancy writes, “The restlessness of thought first means that everything has already begun”. Refering to the problem of the always-already, the structured temporalization that accompanies all thinking of manifestation, Nancy seems at first pass to side with Barthes in his disdain of depth (we will see that this is not exactly the case). Restlessness means above all that one cannot “go back” to the beginning in thought. In other words, there is no such thing as immediacy—A thing is not given but posited, that is, mediated from the very “first” moment, which moment in fact effaces itself of itself in its unfolding.
The concept of self present in Nancy's work is a peculiar one, and this without accident: Self is selfsame: the position of this sameness engages that of a difference, whose movement alone posits sameness. Self is as itself... self must be self as such: and it must be so in taking distance from itself in order to posit something like what it is” (Nancy 43). This is, in so many words, the fundamental problem of identity and difference, compressed into the reflexivity of the speculative remark which is, alone among all the possible configurations of language, gentle enough to preserve something as fragile as the truth. What Nancy means here is that there is an imperative, a (cosmo)logical necessity that each thing come into its own, unfold itself in the expression of its essence. However, this teleology would not be that of appearance-as-manifestation versus essence-as-transcendent-unmanifest. To the contrary, “Neither purely present (and thus evansecent) presence, nor purely absent (and thus imposing) absence, but the absolute of presentation” (Nancy 23). In other words, not everything is manifest, but all is manifesting. There is, it must be stressed, no ground of that which appears if that ground would itself be taken as unable to appear—there is an endless deferral of essence, wherein each thing takes up the thankless task of being an essence, which of course is a burden that absolutely cannot be shouldered, and thereafter the burden is passed on to the next generation, the next iteration of self-induced manifestation. The self, the paradigmatic example of the strive to be essence, must paradoxically posit itself as its own innermost essence, and it is only in this self-positing that the self becomes itself. In the same founding motion the self both posits something and mimetically identifies with that thing, thereby becoming itself. However, this becoming-self is also a becoming-other due to the impossibility of self-identity before the always-already restless—with no posited essence, there was also no thing which might have been self-identical. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the self is anything but a subject all too itself. Rather, this self-positing and therefore self-imitation, by the logic of the previous section, is the very process undergone by the world itself: “It is because the world undergoes itself as a world of separation that its experience takes the form of the 'self'” (Nancy 4). It is easy to see why this is the case, given restlessness.
In this originary self-positing, all positive ground or substance plays no role whatsoever. Briefly quoting Hegel, Nancy writes, In its very first figure, this relation to the other, and, more precisely, this being-self-through-the-other, gives itself as that by which 'substance... is made to tremble'” (Nancy 43). To tremble, that is truly a powerful thing: it is the penetration of the absolute negativity of death into the slave that lies defeated at the feet of the master in Hegel; in Nancy, it is the self penetrated by its own taking leave of itself. Further, “trembling is the act of being-affected”, a paradoxically-stated passive-yet-active happening that is akin to the asymmetrical mediation encountered in thinkers such as Adorno and Benjamin, albeit without the backdrop of the Kantian subject.
In Nancy, the ineffable dream world is transformed into the always-already that refuses to posit a realm of the “unsymbolizable” in opposition to the “symbolic” (this would, in the way we have been speaking, reinstate reified depth), but rather collapses that distinction and posits (a significantly revised version of Hegelian) Spirit in its stead: “Spirit is not something separate... because it itself is nothing other than separation. It is separation as the opening of relation” (Nancy 19). This infinite self-relation of the world, of separation and diremption and of similarity, is nothing but the consequence of the lack of all ground, the lack of any unchanging identity which a thing could aspire to be. Needless to say, the lack of ground, the constant turnover of essences, is the very paragon of the production of peculiarities, avoiding all problems of identification brought up Benjamin in his critique of historiography. So important and fundamental is the peculiar that, ethically speaking, in a Nancean world the squandering of choice on the chimera of self-identity is nothing short of the gravest evil.

Thus the problem of similarity, which is in any case the concept of identity problematized for a brutally cynical world, is seen to be approachable from three entry points: first, that of Walter Benjamin's drive towards the destruction of narrative and the elevation of the fragmentary, exemplified in the decontextualized world of dream logic in which resemblances are of an almost mystical, ineffable character; second, that of Roland Barthes' distress over the loss of his mother even in dreams, and the second-order imitation of all imitations which iteratively produced its own falsity through self-identifications that necessarily became less and less concrete and therefore less and less real; third, Jean-Luc Nancy's infinity of sense, seen to be the infinite self-relation of totality and thus the prerequisite of both identity and difference.


Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “Doctrine of the Similar.” New German Critique, No. 17 (Spring 1979): 65- 69. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1967. Print.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" in Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002. Print.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

The Transformation of the Concept into the Dialectical Image

This should probably contain a section at the end on the inadequacy of the image as against the Concept, because it's not a one-to-one translation by any means. I think both are useful in different contexts. Anyway, this is a paper I wrote for a comp lit class.

The Transformation of the Concept into the Dialectical Image

I. Introduction

Time is an important concept for all those who would claim descent, positively or negatively, from Hegel's dialectical philosophy. In the first place, dialectical thought is that which moves by way of the dissolution of the fixed rigidity of conceptual thought, already in fact implying a temporal character of some kind. In the second place, dialectical thought is immanently historical by the extension of this change to encompass the totality conceived of as social. The problem arises when one attempts to explicate the exact nature of this temporal and historical character: according to Kojève's interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, this temporal character of the Concept (the axial dialectical category) is that it is time itself, which therefore is always historical time; for Benjamin, time as time (and therefore as history) cannot be the whole story (so to speak) of time, and thus it is transposed onto space. The major consequences of this spatialization will be seen to be a radical mediation of the immediate and mediation, and a dissolution of the remnants of reification in Hegel's system, of which Reason's march in universal history is the greatest. So these two interpretations of the importance of time—time as time and time as space—overdetermine the concept of history, the former resulting in undialectical Reason and the latter in a dialectical dissolution of Reason itself. The exposition of the dialectical image will be a conceptual one, showing in fact the superiority of the image by the Concept's own immanent demands.

II. Hegel: The Negativity of Time as Time

To understand Hegel's fixation on the negativity of time, we must first relate it to the Concept (Begriff). In his own words, “Die Zeit ist der daseiende Begriff selbst”, and “Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist” (qtd. in Kojève 101). In other words, time is the empirically existing Concept itself, that Concept which is there. In interpreting these phrases, we must keep in mind Hegel's view of negativity as that which is the negation of the given, which negation is none other than the Concept, that immanent anti-given movement of the object. As Kojève summarizes, “The conceptual understanding of empirical reality is equivalent to a murder” (140). The Concept of something is nothing but the always-occurring nihilation of that very something, the constantly-changing negation of that something, whether one believes that change comes from subject or object, or as Hegel believed, from both at once. Time as time for Hegel is Concept, because the subject-object divide of reality which creates movement in the proper sense only comes with the appearance of the Concept on the historical scene, with the advent of human (self-)consciousness. Therefore, Hegel's notion of time is applicable only to historical time—strictly speaking, nature has no time, though this does not discount the possibility of some kind of change. As nature does not have an inner telos, Hegel (according to Kojève) will say that it is not time but space.

The first important consequence of the manifold equivocation of time, Concept, and history is that Hegel's is ultimately a social philosophy. Ignoring for the moment his botched attempt at a philosophy of nature, Hegel proclaims the fundamentally historical nature of all thought and of all human being—indeed, the two are posited to be identical (if only in their immanent movement and not in their present givenness). Further, there can be no society without history—the past of a given social moment distinguishes the possible future in the present from dream or utopia. However, the relation of the temporal modalities of past, present, and future is not in Hegel a simple progression of past to present and then on to future. Rather, Hegelian Time is a movement from future through past to present. In other words, the “Project”, the Concept with a focus on the future, is determined by the historical past, and then becomes the moment of negation of the given in the present. Or again, Desire is Desire to negate the given real, which in that negation becomes past; this manner of past being formed through future (Desire/Concept) is what determines the present. Taken in this way, the temporal modalities cannot really be separated, but the moments are yet analyzable, the present turning upon the tension between future as desire to negate the given and past as that negated no-longer-given.

Time must be in space, and indeed the two mutually presuppose each other in good dialectical fashion. However, for Hegel, time is the primary contradiction, being that which is, however abstractly, opposed to the inert space of nature. Due to the necessary historical nature of time, that time must occur in a historical world, in other words, in space. However, the tension between the two is obvious—the moments of time are not for Hegel transposed onto a spatial world, because of the association of time with history and space with nature. Only insofar as nature exists in relation to social humanity and its history can the sub-categories of time be applied to it. Verstand is the name given to that spatial thinking that is philosophically inferior to Vernunft, one of whose primary categories is the Idea, the utter interiorization of Concepts (this interiorization being the very definition of Kantian or Bergsonian time) which, no matter how contradictory, are always already under the aspect of identity. Space, which is defined primarily by its exteriority, obviously cannot fill this gap (so to speak).

III. Benjamin: The Negativity of Time as Space

Benjamin's project can in some ways be seen as an internalization of what were in Hegel only externally related, namely time and space. Benjamin's preference for space over time is well-noted, as when he positively states, “The task of epic theater, according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions” (150). Here the development of actions corresponds to Geschichte, (narrative) time, whereas representation seems to signify a spatial construction. Geschichte is disparaged, along with all perceived teleologies, as bourgeois ideology. Therefore, rather than deal with time as Geschichte, Benjamin transposes temporal characteristics onto space itself. The dialectical image is the result: it emerges out of the past, but its form and features can only be seen or understood in the non-narrative present, out of its temporal context. Here, though, we learn only about this present from it, not about the past. As an image it is spatial, and as dialectical it is philosophical, the spatialization of the Concept-as-time that was so important for Hegel. However, the transition, the translation from time to space is one whose character is yet to be established.

The obvious change is that from narrative to non-narrative, and this is the ostensible reason for the translation, but yet another consequence is the retention of a certain temporality. Benjamin holds onto notions of past and present and future, moments that are made both intimately internal to one another and at the same time absolutely external. For example, in describing the storyteller, what we may rightly take as a dialectical image, Benjamin writes, “Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him, just as in a rock a human head or an animal's body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision” (83). This distance Benjamin speaks of is a temporal distance, although not only that. Internally-related, the dialectical image contains it's own pastness as an element, related, to be sure, to its future, which is now the present. The present is where the knowledge is gained, where action can take place, where mediation meets immediacy as Hegel proclaimed was necessary. On the other hand, these concepts of past, present, and future are external to space and to each other, in the sense that their relations are dissected and their organs exposed. The death of the narrative is thus assured in this spatial constellation, wherein the immediacy of the present is privileged against the mediation of time. To remain historical, the dialectical image is temporal, but it is certainly not time itself, as is Hegel's Concept.

There remain two questions relating to the dialectical image, that of its immediacy and that of its critical negativity. The immediacy of the dialectical image is, on the surface, problematic. As an image out of context it is obviously not mediated in the same overt fashion as the Hegelian Concept. Context, according to Benjamin, destroys the dissimilarity of the object at hand: “[Proust] lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of resemblance” (205, italics mine). The similarity of things or processes to one another, be it a phenomenal similarity or, perhaps more importantly, a contextual similarity, is false. So we have a theory in which mediation, under the aspect of identity, is distorting and false. But this identity is only a partial one, remaining focused on the mediation of time. Indeed, systemic mediation may avoid the entire problem for Benjamin, in that the constellation of bourgeois society remains for him an important reference point. Following Hegel's dictum that there can be no immediacy without mediation and vice versa, Benjamin takes it upon himself to extract the true kernel of mediation from its time-bound shell. This results, not surprisingly, in the messy mediation of the present, that spatial relation in which the lack of time-context is at the same time the placing of the image into what may be interpreted as its true context. Again, Benjamin is utterly historical though he repudiates history as such, though he opposes immediate context qua context. The immediacy of the dialectical image thus becomes its true mediation. Corresponding to the fragmentation of society, the utter falsity of the bourgeois ideology of progress, Benjamin's fragmented spatial dialectics are wholly justified. From this its critical negativity follows, insofar as the new “immediacy” is in some sense the truth of the old, if only (and it assuredly is) negatively.

IV. Conclusion: The Ideology of Progress and Critical Temporality

The following remark by Kojève appears as the antithesis of Benjamin's understanding of both dialectic and time: “It is by historical memory that Man's identity preserves itself throughout History, in spite of the auto-negations which are accomplished in it, so that he can realize himself by means of History as the integration of his contradictory past or as totality, as dialectical entity” (232, italics Kojève's). It would not be off the mark to level the charge of bourgeois ideology against Kojève, left-Hegelian though he may be. However, the temptation to do away with him on this account must be resisted, and in the name of Hegelian thought itself.

Benjamin writes, “Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past” (262). A better example of historicism could not be found than Hegel himself, in whose philosophy history receives its proper ordering only after the fact, and in which strictly phenomenological knowledge of history and consciousness only emerge in the post-historical world (Kojève 183-4). Hegel's eternal past is one that cannot adequately develop even into an image thereof, not because of the negating-negativity of the Concept, but because of Hegel's hypostasis of History predicated on the undialectical nature of his notion of Reason. Indeed, there is nothing in the character of the dialectic itself that would proscribe the type of transformation that Benjamin has wrought from time to space, as long as that space is properly historicized.

But to what extent is Benjamin's dialectical image capable of the destruction of ideology, particularly that of bourgeois progress? Benjamin writes, “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time” (261). Dialectically, things change not by continuous progress, but by violent break—concepts don't approach their opposites slowly and thereafter “run together” until they are unrecognizable; rather, they crash into each other as mighty waves, as the furious demolition of a storefront via molotov cocktail. An obvious “artistic” parallel is the montage, the spatial decontextualization-as-proper-contextualization. This spatial time thereby pointed to is one absolutely antithetical to the Hegelian philosophy of history, which viciously betrays the very character of dialectical thought itself. Only such a gradualist model could declare the “end of history”, or the related claim of the reformists that the groundwork has already been laid, and that all that is left to do is wait for utopia. Hegel claimed not more than this!

Finally, in the spirit of remaining political, we may say a few concluding words about the importance of a spatialization that is both historical and preservative of critical negativity. First, as historical, the dialectical image retains the social mediation of the Hegelian Concept and the Marxian insistence on economic and social practice. Second, as critically negative, the dialectical image leaves behind the problematic Hegelian and vulgar Marxist teleology which would subordinate the particular to the already-assumed individual as universally-mediated particular, which is nothing other than the system of capitalist oppression itself, in all its bloody self-denial.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Print.

All material copyright Nick Beard (except the cited sources).

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Aphorisms II: Immanent Critique and Peculiarity Production

1. Theory for theory's sake, when critical, is nothing but the faith that theory will, if only in the end, emerge, as in a dialectical unfolding, for its other, that is, for political practice.

2. The totality is the infinity of determinate negation, which infinity is the expressive self-containment of the finite--in its own expressive curtailment it penetrates the truth of its own inner void.

3. A concept is immanent to the extent that it is objectively there. This translation is one that typically cannot avoid creating a metalanguage between object and concept, and therefore a metalanguage on thin air--but air is needed to breathe.

4. The self-abstraction of the capitalist system is the hidden truth of bourgeois masochistic wish-fulfillment: to confront the reality of market functioning is enough to invite claims of exception, thereby proving the rule, that reality is indeed a Freudian dream.

5. The immanent critique of capitalist society needs no conscious material on which to work; rather, it is enough that a self-understanding be allowed to emerge from the social unconscious. The concepts contained therein--and surely they are there--are already universals, carrying out their abstractions under the cover of apathy. This is where practice enters the picture.

6. Not particularity, but peculiarity is the mark of the potential for liberation today. The tragedy is that nostalgia has usurped that apparatus which is the infinite machine of peculiarity production, the dream-logic of the inattentive mind. This is capitalism's well-known basis in the ideology of nostalgic progress.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

To The Things Not-in-Themselves!



Positivity is bad faith--this could be the slogan of our times, the latter designation applying to the post-WWII world. Everything turns upon this negation.

The positive as that which is itself in itself, or rather even for itself, cannot be but is. We cannot help doubting the utter inconceivability of something complete, even as we strive for it in all branches of thought, positive or negative as they may be. This is the great paradox, that thought as universal becomes its dialectical opposite, that negation of which the determinateness of all being is constituted. Positivity being bad faith, where does that leave negativity? One cannot be utterly negative, try as Adorno did. The time for that striving for completeness in incompleteness has come and gone. But this criticism is not just one blindly putting forth the positivity in all things due to their givenness--this Hegel destroyed in the very first deduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Rather, what we are left with is the quality of positivity as concreteness. It is the only positivity that still makes sense. But how exactly is it positive?

The concrete is "positive", in that the particularity of the given is constituted by determinate negation. Not that the negation of the negation is positive, but that, on a surface-level, objects are constituted concretely by determinate negation. There is no longer the question, as there was for Hegel, as to whether essence appears and is that very appearance. Rather, our question is different, given our immediate discounting of the question of essence. We ask whether the surface phenomena do not themselves preclude the possibility of themselves, not just of their essences, having a really determinate existence. In other words, we no longer believe in the whole, whether a Concept/Notion (Begriff) or the totality itself, and rightly so. We need a new relation to the whole and especially the totality, a negative and contradictory one. It cannot be such that it is a self-positing subject, as it was for Hegel. Rather it will be a self-negating, truly dialectical totality. It is thus a dialectic that will never cease--the prospect is scary. As Marcuse said: Reason is the truly undialectical element of Hegel's philosophy (paraphrased from Reason and Revolution).

So how to synthesize this with my previous thoughts on the totality relating to the theory of mysticism? Inevitably it has something to do with the nature of determinate negation and its relation to non-duality, and that would work it in nicely with revolutionary politics. So, onward! To the things not-in-themselves!


Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The Saturated Character of Despair

I was thinking today about the problems or ideas that just seize a group/generation/class and lead them onward into uncharted territory. Typically these are present in the history of philosophy as insoluble aporias which must be neutralized by a shifting of philosophical perspective. New concepts must be developed, and new ways of thinking employed. For Hegel's generation the aporia was that between radical Kantian freedom and the embodied expressivist theory of the subject (see Taylor's "Hegel"). For Marx and the Young Hegelians it was rather the refutation by political and social reality of Hegel's Geist, which was disguised by the latter as the "cunning of reason". But what is this problem now, for us? Do we have an animating idea for our age?

It appears we are still stuck in the radical negativity of the Frankfurt School, as far as intellectual consciousness is concerned. Sure, Zizek and Badiou and whoever else have dazzling new philosophies, but I think they have not yet penetrated the age's consciousness. Perhaps in time they will. But for now it still remains: Where do we go from here? Where does thought (and with it radical politics) go? Where can it go, based on the political, social, and economic "parameters"?

I suppose it would be pertinent to ask: Where do I want it to go? What a question! As interested as I am in philosophy, I don't really know. Perhaps in this sense I am a good example of what I think our aporia is. We are directionless. This lack of direction manifests itself not just as an empty field, wherein one could go wherever one so pleases, but as a radical reification, as a chaining to directionlessness itself. If one wants to go somewhere else, one is "a dreamer! An idealist! You can't just change things--it's irresponsible!"

To use Badiou's concept, I think that the current discourse is "saturated". Something must "happen". But how to make that happening a determinate negation? It must begin here, and nowhere else. We live in an age of ideological contradiction, and a major one of these is that between the naive liberal optimism of consciousness and the profound subjectivist pessimism of the sub-/unconscious. The problem is this, that when that deeper level is broken into, when the most egregious theses of bourgeois ideology are abandoned (insofar as these can be), what is there to do but feel despair?

Sunday, September 8, 2013

The Night in Which All Absolutes are Abstract

The comparison of Brahman with the noumenal is one that is quite easy to make, and one that I have made numerous times in the past. Brahman is like the Ding-an-sich, but non-formal. It is not a precondition for our understanding, but rather an object of experience (as a model?). Brahman can be found, seen, and experienced as the non-phenomenal. A kind of experience of non-experience that is only such because of the initial sundering. It is a concretized process, one of initial unity followed by separation and then the inevitable reconciliation. But this answering in regards to the process still does not adequately answer Hegel's critique of Schelling's Absolute (which applies to Kant's Ding-an-sich of course, being a more formal version of Schelling).

Schelling's Absolute, "the night in which all cows are black" (says Hegel), was one in which  opposition could not be found. It was the naive unity which could not help but differentiate itself and thus undermine itself. This differentiation of the concept is shown to be necessary by Hegel (as in the Greater Logic). However, what if Brahman was not a concept such as Schelling's Absolute, not a non-differentiated and thus empty idea, but a concrete unity, that is, a concept in which both separation (Trennung) and identity are to be found? The explicit working-out of the concept of Brahman ought to be different from the Hegelian Logic due to the non-practical nature of that Logic (while formally the Absolute Idea is not transcendent, I have a certain suspicion that unless one integrates experience and conceptuality explicitly and practically, and not just a formal equation of the two, then one cannot really have overcome the difference; this is where Hindu philosophy comes in handy).

Hegel remarks that "indeterminateness and emptiness of representation" is "altogether the same as what an Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, looking only at the tip of his nose, externally motionless and equally unmoved in sensation, representation, phantasy, desire, and so on, he inwardly says only Om, Om, Om, or else nothing at all. This dull, empty consciousness, taken as consciousness, is just this - being" (Hegel, The Science of Logic, Cambridge 2010 edition, p. 73).

Perhaps it is supererogatory to state that Hegel (and pretty much all Europeans of the day) has no idea what he is talking about. I aim to find exactly why this is true, philosophically at that.


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Maybe-Heaven

Actuality, the Actual Totality, is a meaningless mechanistic conglomeration of cold, dead matter--the dregs cast out from the realm of the Virtual as being unfit to serve; Actuality is what is too bad to be even concrete possibility. The contradictions of past as against future, and of future as against past (this being distinct from the first), assure the present as the greatest contradiction of all, against whatever good reckoning might be brought to bear on the problem. In other words, the actuality of the present is pulled both ways by bullshit (the bullshit of freedom, or is it the freedom of bullshit?).

This is not to say that the Virtual Totality is a heaven. Virtual (symbolic) commitments are eternal, but only so long as we allow them to be. Unfortunately, that freedom only emerges from the self-determined (read: non-determined!). Thus, the Virtual Totality may be meaningful, it may make sense, but, being Virtual, it is anyone's guess whether this is the case. The fact that Actuality is fundamentally shitty (maybe primarily in its relation to the Virtual?) doesn't help one's spirits either. Notice the lack of referent--who's it shitty for? That question is one of the shittiest.

So here we have the closed loop of freedom once again, a loop which is not so much self-determined (as would be a real freedom) as it is determined by planar differences (these being Virtual or Actual as the case may be). A diremption necessary for time, but then again badness is eternally temporal. Reminds me of Benjamin--maybe doubt is truth, in its aspect as the Infinite, that self-determined parts-and-whole which was only so recently the Ought. I believe we are trapped in this Ought, though the dialectic may go on unabated, unheeding.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

I Am Not a Mystic

Let me say right here that I AM NOT A MYSTIC. I don't have firsthand experience of Brahman (yet). I am not a master of meditation. I am only a philosopher (at least I like to think so) attempting to understand different states of consciousness, and applying rationality to the insights gained in what little meditation I have done. There are a few reasons as to why I think this is a legitimate thing to do:

1. Direct experience does NOT translate into correct rationalization, though it may help it along. Many of the arguments and rationalizations of mysticism and non-duality, etc. are unconvincing or missing important aspects or unable to be squared with dialectical Marxism, which I hold at this point as the basis of truth/reality (in other words, I know it works, in whatever non-utiliatarian way I might possibly mean by that).

2. There are certain intellectual aporias that characterize different ages of thought, and I believe ours to be the subjective/objective or identity/difference or whatever name you want to ascribe to the duality. It must be transcended, and this must be done on its own terms, a historical continuity. The question of our historical period must be answered. It must be sublated. This is obviously very difficult and I doubt I can do it, but why not try?

3. I like mysticism and I like Marxism, so that's a pretty good justification, right?

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

A Brief Thought on Antagonism

Homogeneous oneness is outside; differentiae are inside--in the mind. So the idea of the many is the creation of the mind.
So sayeth Swami Vivekananda (from Inspired Talks in The Yogas and Other Works p.543).

In light of this idea, there is a lot of work to be done on a concept of antagonism that does not rely on the typical idea of difference as combated so eloquently by the Swami. Homogeneity has to rub up on itself in a non-different way, producing myriad differences and even subjectivity. Sounds tough, but I'll get to work on it.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

What Is Antagonistic About the Entirety?


Q: What is antagonistic about the entirety? At that level, aren't all distinctions (and therefore antagonisms) unmade?

A: The entirety (Totality/Brahman) is antagonistic in the sense that it produces change. Sure, in itself the whole is eternal in some sense, but from it has been produced the subject and all the myriad systems and distinctions we see around us. Avoiding the problem of the finite emerging from the infinite (classically, there has been a problem with the self-limiting of the unlimited, or the emergence of evil from within the unchanging fundamental goodness) requires a conception of Brahman/Totality/the Unmanifest that is not really unmanifest. Well, it is, but it is at the same time always manifest, immanent within the manifest. Adi Shankara was on to this insight quite a while ago, and much later Spinoza seems to have figured it out. Substance/Brahman/whatever is not external to the universe, but is that very universe from a different perspective (or the primordial "no perspective", which is, still, a perspective).

The entirety is antagonistic in two senses: first, the phenomenal entierty (which is what I initially had in mind when I borrowed the blog title from Theodor Adorno) is quite antagonistic, as I briefly outlines previously; second, the Absolute in itself is antagonisitc in its real emanations. However, at the same time, the Absolute is also in a different sense changeless.

This contradiction should be analyzed more carefully. At first pass, there is a double meaning to the mantra "sarvam khalvidam brahma"--"all this is Brahman". First, everything's real essence, its unchanging base, is Brahman. Second, everything is Brahman--manifestation is an activity of Brahman, and only therein can Maya be based. Brahman is immanent, not separate from the universe. Brahman would exist without our perception of it, and though names and forms are socially-constructed, the immanent nature of Brahman would remain unchanged. The stuff of which names and forms are fashikoned would exist, and in this sense I remain as materialist as ever.

The universe is always changing, and therefore is always antagonistic. Brahman, which is... I don't want to say coterminous with the universe, but it sort of is, is thus antagonistic. The different levels of in-itself and for-itself and what-have-you are begging to be re-evaluated in light of all this immanentism. So maybe I'll do that.

P.S. I reserve the right to completely disown this entire post as the product of my over-caffeinated and sleep-deprived mind. Have mercy.


Picture: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ADORNO_by_LGdL.JPG

Friday, August 2, 2013

Freedom and Security: Society as Phenomenality



So this horrendous Ariel Castro deal led me to some thoughts...

The specific cultural logic in which we live (capitalism, patriarchy, the racial order, etc.) presents itself to us as Reality. This Reality is one of dualism, in other words Maya. The capitalist structure of government and social interaction creates not only opposing (as in logically negated) concepts, but forces concepts into opposition in novel and shitty ways. For example, the opposition between security and freedom that is so often discussed. This rests on a specific and unnecessary opposition between the two concepts, resting on (of course) private property relations. People believe they have the right to do whatever they want with/on their property. Privacy conceptions (as opposed to private property ownership) interact dialectically with the technical level of society, often reacting against the technological development which has engendered a state or conception of non-privacy. Next (or before, as the case may be) the ideology of property comes in, strengthened.

These considerations lead me to believe that opposition occurs due to social context (the old Marxist axiom). Thus they are highly variable. Formal logic's insistence on "logical negation" is contrived on two levels: the way people interact with the world, and cultural logic on a social level, do not conceive of binary negation, meaning there is always a "taintedness" to concepts; second, the individual concept of binary negation is doubly contrived because it is based on social context as well as on a process of dry abstraction which cuts horizontal relations completely out of the picture, thus bastardizing even the social context. There is no such thing as negation on the level of Brahman, of course. Maya functions on the level of phenomenality--in other words, on the level of the social.

So going back to Castro, ideally there would be no ability to do what he did, or to do a lot of related-but-not-as-extremely-shocking things that happen much more commonly and on a much wider scale, because there would be no debate on security and freedom, no conception of private property on which that could base itself, and no socially-defined opposition between the two things that I'm sure everyone wants: freedom and security.

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/8026418953/ 

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Various Undeveloped Thoughts on Various Undeveloped Topics

1. Non-difference, as an ontological category, is based in the idea of difference itself, found between people, discovered through various means such as believing in other minds.

2. Brahman is more "real" than Maya when the former is conceived of as a model. The scale of "reality" of phenomena/experiences only works when the mystical mindset is already in some sense accepted, when one has some portion of "faith", however rational or not.

3. The subject is just an object that disagrees with that designation.

4. Brahman relates to the thing-in-itself in a manner that is precisely analogous to that between Truth and correctness as a formality.

5. Drone music is supremely creative in its very un-creativity. It simply does on the level of the audience what typical music does almost solely on the level of the composer.

6. Conceived of broadly enough, everything is good. Unfortunately, conceived of broadly enough, everything is also bad. Conceived of most broadly, it is neither.

7. The "current of history" or other such formulations are always introduced theoretically after the fact. History is relentlessly objective. This means that the subject ought to become objective to change anything.

8. Objectivity is not just the sum total of subjective conceptions. It is that plus the overcoming of reification/alienation.

9. There can only be an internal world because there is an external one. That both exist is attested to by the ubiquitous conception of duality itself.

10. A little masochism is necessary to prove that one is a living, thinking being.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Thoughts into Words

It's very hard to put thoughts satisfactorily into words unless there is an external force to push up against. This is why it is so important to have good intellectual friends. Typically, one has very little ability to self-judge one's ideas. Not to say that the experience of that idea beyond the veil of language (a very real veil to be sure) is unable to to assessed, but it is true that those subjective experiences typically are quite formless, and must go through a miniaturized process of pseudo-manifestation (not to be confused with the manifestation or formlessness of the absolute).

So, one must have an opposition of some sort or another, against which one's thoughts and modes of subjectivity may take form. The form taken depends on a wide variety of objective factors (and even, indeed, one's subjective semi-formless experience is, as a piece of the whole, determined by these as well). And then again the particular form taken reacts back upon the subjective inner sanctum, in good dialectical fashion, and so on goes the evolution of thought. In fact, the places to which we are led by phenomenal thought are often of quite a different nature than was our initial intuitive understanding. One thing that is often forgotten, especially in spiritual circles, is that the intuition itself develops in dialectical interaction with other, non-intuitive forms of knowledge. The influences of society, of the phenomenal universe, are paramount in shaping how we view both the phenomenal and the non-phenomenal.

The question arises: What is the relation between the socially-determined world of phenomenality/society and the so-called eternal Absolute, non-phenomenality, the Unmanifest? The complete indeterminate quality (or better yet, non-quality), the non-duality of Brahman, leads one to conclude (although prematurely) that Brahman is un-social, eternal in the old-timey metaphysical sense of the word. This, however, is not the case, because of the social construction of the phenomenal reality against which that non-duality is opposed. Of course, this is only part of the solution, namely that from the point of view of Maya, phenomenality. What about from the viewpoint of the Absolute? Is that, then, social or unsocial in its self-understanding? The answer, of course, is that it is neither, because it is beyond distinctions like this, from its own perspective only, however. One would do well to keep in mind that to progress to the non-dual in any sense of the term, and to speak of it of course, we must bow to the inescapable logic of the plane in which we live and work and philosophize.