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The Subject Position

And the Languaging Discourse of History

“Man and humanism, the name of that being who,

throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology

in other words throughout his entire history

- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation,

the origin and the end of play”.

- Jacques Derrida

Humanism and Postmodernism

The contemporary mind still today has many ontological assumptions of the humanism deeply embedded in its worldview – axioms of reality that cannot find support in the discourse of the systemic paradigm. The individual as self-determining, free and rational by nature, and the existence of a metaphysically derivative soul, are such assumptions that stem from the period of the Enlightenment . Jonathan Dollimore states that Western metaphysics inherited and developed within the discourse of three indissociable categories: the universal (the absolute), essence, and teleology .

These three meet in a hope that there is an end to the quest for the absolute essence, and that the ultimate goal is to find reality and final rest in this transcendence. 16^th and 17^th c. gave rise to the process of gradual de-centralization of the human being and its world. Copernicus in a way dislocated man from the center of the Universe, Darwin removed him from the royal position amongst the living species, Marx decentered the individual from the goal of the universe, Freud from one-dimensionality and naturality, and Nietzsche’s genealogy stripped the human being from metaphysical values.

The grounding assumptions of humanism presuppose that experience is prior to its expression in language. Humanists conceive of language as a tool of representation of pre-existent reality devised for communication between unique individuals. Ferdinand de Saussure redefined language as constitutive of reality . It is not a mere tool in service of a transcendental subject, but language (langue) is a set of rules that condition our perception of reality and determine the speaking subject .

Like Marx and Freud, Saussure considered the manifest appearance of phenomena to be underpinned and made possible by underlying systems and structures; for Marx, it was the system of economic and social relations; for Freud, the unconscious; for Saussure, the system of language. By beginning the search for underlying structures, which allow and regulate emergent forms and connections, they disrupted the notion of “man” as the center, source and end of meaning.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the fascinating figures of the 20^th c, whose contributions to human sciences influenced the formation of several different “post”-movements. He showed that in mythology there is no unity or absolute source of myth. There everything begins with structure, configuration, or relationship. In any mythology there is no center, no real end, and the source is merely hypothetical. Themes can be split up to unit-themes infinitely and in anaclastic manner. The absence of a center is the absence of a subject and the absence of an author in myths.

Levi-Strauss reformulated Freud’s and Jung’s concepts of the unconscious and its two parts: the sub- and the un-conscious. His subconscious is similar to Jung’s personal unconscious and Freud’s unconscious, full of psychic content: memories, images, and associations collected during the course of life. The unconscious, from the standpoint of structuralism , was more like Jung’s collective unconscious, devoid of images and full of structural laws. The structural unconscious for Levi-Strauss is what truly creates the rules that the personally collected pieces play out in life. The relation between the unconscious and the subconscious in nowadays terms, can be conceived as a relation between the pure process (correlated rules) and its discourse (the practice of rules).

By 1953, Lacan adjusted this idea of the unconscious as a “home” of the rules, processes and structural strategies, and proposed his three-part system, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The Real, by definition, cannot be known, but it (the Object as such) "attempts to be known." From the Lacanian standpoint, we experience the Real only indirectly. The representations of the objects constitute the Imaginary, while the Symbolic is purely structural and organizes the imaginary representations into meaningful images.

The differentiation between langue and language lead to extending the notion of language to mean any psychic capacity for representation and organizing. The subject-position, the “I,” in this context is a linguistic construct: language assigns possible subject-positions and “we” fill them in with our psychic content. In the act of representation we represent ourselves, and thus we create self-awareness. In relationship to others we embody others’ representations of us for the purpose of maintaining communication; and, we represent to ourselves the Others’ (imaginary) representations of us as a self-image. However, each such act divides us into a self that experiences, and a self that represents what is experienced. Knowledge exists on a precondition of this division between that-which-experiences and that-which-represents-experience. The human consensus demands this continuous act of division, whereupon an individual exists as a set of firmly structured, separate “I”-s on the level of representation, and as mass of unmediated, loosely organized experience on the unconscious level. The representative level enables us to communicate and function through the Symbolic (language), and the unconscious level is the totality of experiential material, where personal and collective, real and imaginary, lose their sharp distinction. This distinction begins to exist only at the linguistic level, where it enables distinct subjects, elements and points in time-space to emerge. The symbolic structure cannot exist but by exclusion of psychic substance, and each subject position is formed in this way. In other words, the speaking subject, in order to say “me,” needs to separate from its unmediated experience, therefore from itself.

The efforts to find the fully objective point of observance from whence the observer would be able to take a “real” perspective, knowledge and understanding of reality, gave up in a kind of optimistic defeat, when both the abundance and the unknowability of the Real were acknowledged. Whenever we are able to discern a system, or a set of rules that governs a system, we take an external position of an observer, and we delude ourselves that we can exclude ourselves from influencing that system. Thus reality escapes us again, and what we perceive is always our personal symbolic construct. Each act of observance leads necessarily to interpretation of reality, and not to reality itself. There is no literal language, no “realistic” knowledge, but it is always and ever a metaphor of reality

Post-structuralism and Decentralization

The search for The Ultimate Laws that direct all other rules of existence, the search for the ultimate discourse, the ultimate grammar of existence, is for Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, a myth: the myth of the Pharaoh, who is already dead but conceives his death in the myth of his unattainability. The Center of our world is a point of nonexistence, always shifting, and it functions as an unobservable and ever escaping black hole, where existence ceases as a possibility. The observer cannot reach that which continuously recreates his very possibility of existence; to attain this point would be to die as an observer. Our civilizational quest for the Center, from the standpoint of the Postmodern, is ultimately motivated by the infantile quest for power: to attain the discursive position of the Father/Creator of the Game, Lacan’s phallus, to enthrone ourselves on the position of what makes all the rest possible. Post-structuralism in a way exposed this misleading dream of modernism and basically brought down the hope for all-comprising meaning and final interpretation. Research was then oriented toward “how things function” instead of “what they mean.”

Jacques Derrida views the history of the concept of structure (metaphysics) as “a series of substitutions of center for center.” These substitutions are merely metaphoric and metonymic slides across the same discourse, whose basic matrix is the determination of the Being-as-presence. Gilles Deleuze, discerning between being and becoming, claims that we have confused Being with being-present, because we assume that past is not present, that it has ceased. In his view, the present is not: it is not a being, but a pure becoming. The past never ceases to be, and it is identical with being in itself: “it is the form under which being is preserved in itself,” unlike the present, which is the form under which being is consummated and places itself outside itself. Becoming is a process, an aimed activity which changes into Being as soon as it enters structure, memory and existence. Jacques Derrida defines the center not as a presence-being but as a function with no locus:

“In the history of humanism structure has always been neutralized or reduced by giving it a center, or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center is not only to orient, balance and organize the structure ... but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of the structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form... the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes it possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center... permutation or transformation... is forbidden (interdicted). (…) The center is unique... (it) constitutes structure while governing it, it escapes it. The center is paradoxically within the structure and outside it. The center does not belong to the totality so the totality has its center elsewhere.”

Derrida assigns a breach in human history exactly by the invasion of language on human sciences and the fall of the myth of a center-centered ideology. He attributes this longing for the center, origin and ultimate meaning to the anxiety before the infinite, where no subject or structure can hold, and thus the individual can only cover the impossibility of being under a multifarious game of differences. This play builds up a discursive structure, where the subject can take various positions, create games and take a position of an observer or participant of games, or pretend to take the power-position of the demiurge and the hidden master of the play . The concept of centered structures relies on insecure assumptions that there is such thing as a fundamental ground of the play. Yet Derrida does not undermine the realness of the center without offering a better solution, which is in affirmation that determines a non-center rather than the tragic Romantic loss of the center.

Michel Foucault, another of the key representatives of the Postmodern, strived for freeing the subject from transcendence, for discontinuity of difference without teleology, a possibility to create maps of dispersions without a pre-established horizon, a creative mode of life in anonymity with no transcendence to impose form on the subject, a human being enjoying the creative process without the promise of reward at the end of the day.

The Subject-Position

“Human experience is essentially linguistic.”

- Gadamer

Language for Saussure is the underlying system of conventions by virtue of which a notion can mean. Yet, this is not a positive category: a notion can mean something only by defining a negative relation of difference with other components of the language discourse. Briefly, a thing is defined by what it is not, and it is connected to other things by relations of mutual difference. The language-oriented researches of the human being redefined the notion of identity, and passed through a few stages: Structuralism still presupposes a latent center or core which gives rise to surface manifest forms; it strives to establish an objective language about language (meta-language), which is still a language of endlessly slipping signifiers. Post-structuralism gave up the hope for a mastery and explanation of the world through the scientific investigation of sign systems, and took up the enterprise of radical and systematic de-centering of identities.

Identities do not refer anymore to essences and are not discrete but articulated in difference; identities are events in language. To say “me” does not refer to a stable signified: the content of the signifier “I” is not firm, definable, graspable or present. Any attempt to define a meaning of a “me”, alike of words, inevitably ends up in a circularity of signifiers sliding over the continuum of the field of the signified. The “I” has no stable identity outside difference, and thus it is a necessarily negative term that defines itself by what the others are not, and what it in itself is not compared to the rest.

The controversial figure of Jacques Lacan influenced practically the whole Postmodern stage of the French Postmodernism. His famous plays with words introduced the notion of the individual as constructed in the realm of the Symbolic, filled with Imaginary content and thus made subject “-to” or “-of” the constructing rules of the Symbolic realm. The Symbolic constructs its possible subjects. Each language assigns available positions in any form of enunciation, i.e. the position of the speaking subject in any sentence. An individual cannot create new forms outside language but is destined to inhabit ready-made subject-positions in the existing language. These subject-positions are infinite in number and change as the discourse changes, yet are made finite by the linguistic rules that make them possible. Thus for post-structuralism the self which can exist only in the Symbolic is necessarily split, unstable and fragmented, and subjectivity is regularly constructed in language. Jouissance for Lacan or desire for other postmodernists is the passive synthesis that engineers partial identities, objects and flows, and functions as auto-production of the unconscious. While the Symbolic is constructed by the Lacanian lack, desire does not lack anything, for the mere reason that it has no object nor subject. The fixed subject of desire is made by repression, symbolization and stratification of desire.

Consciousness, Identity and Narratives

“For thou art but a form & organ of life & of thyself

Art nothing being Created Continually by Mercy & Love divine”

Remembering that the word “consciousness” has its root in the Latin “to know together”, we can say that in the shared domain of the Symbolic we “know together” and we are able to exist together as symbolic subjects. The Symbolic determines what can be known and how it can be shared. The Symbolic is the discourse of consciousness. No subject exists without its discourse; yet identity in language is the false center of the discourse, while the “true” center is the function that makes both the subjective discourse and the subject position possible to emerge together. This discourse which gives rise to our subject positions, to our sense of identity, is inseparable from the discourse of representational description. This description includes a description of the world: the set of subject positions (of ourselves and Others) inhabitable in the discourse, what can be possible/visible in the discourse from the subject positions, and the relations that connect positions in the discourse. The discourse of description, which is necessarily a function of interpretation, covers time, space and events related to the individual’s world. It is infinite and, to use Bakhtin’s term, it has a dialogical dimension. Consciousness is this infinite discourse of past and future, an unstable surface map modified with each thought and experience; a surface that creates depths and simultaneously flattens the depth as soon as it touches it. As identities, as individuals, we are born within the dialogical discourse of humanity conversations, we inhabit a place within it, we co-create it, and observe it from the inside. Each observance effects with proliferation or confirmation of the discourse. To take a position of observance is to create a point, a node within yet another layer of the discourse. We cannot take an external position without re-creating the discourse, without enriching the span and the possibilities of our mind-ful conversations.

Personal history is one comprehensible form of this dialogical discourse. Being in the world, and being in relationship demands a continuous self-interpretation, a continual effort to define our positions and functions in our relationships, to re-claim the right to inhabit them, and offer discursive comprehensibility of our presence in the world to other dialogical beings. This effort is closely connected to the story-telling function of the minds. The so-called “phi-phenomenon” proved that human beings are inclined to automatically and unconsciously create arbitrary links between unrelated events, and take these links as the basic units of their realities. Thus personal history can be viewed as a discursive practice of linking unrelated events in arbitrary yet sense-making manners – in this way we pose ourselves into a position referent to our historical discourse. Different levels of our consciousness, different subject-positions may experience time, relationships and events in quite different ways. Therefore, at each level of discourse we literally re-create ourselves: a different self-description, a different personal history, enables us to safely attain sane and comprehensible subject positions in the context of community languaging.

We create our self-stories in a similar way to which we create artistic narratives. We use metaphors to select things that are similar and we link them in mutually replaceable chains of components. We use metonymies to establish continuity or association between parts and wholes, elements, events (the genial myth of cause and effect), attributes and functions; we condense the world into useful poeticized abbreviations, which delete, generalize, reconnect and shuffle the world’s actualities. We live in fiction: our self-description connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and connected by cause and effect; we make maps of events ordered mainly on the line of time, where time represents but another useful metaphor. Our incessant narrative foregrounds the selected events and suppresses or deletes others. Yet who listens to our stories and who are our stories for?

Our stories are the speech of the language of human consciousness. The humanity discourse of consciousness gives us common ground for understanding each other, for passing knowledge and for coordinating our behaviors. Yet we are not our stories any more than we are only subjects to this large discourse – we are co-creators of our discourses, subjectivity, history and consciousness. We re-invest our becoming-human in the being of the discourse. To share, to know together, to be conscious, demands that we tell our tales for the others, who, like in myth , are the real performers of our stories. The others simultaneously are the storytellers and we are the performers of their music.

Memory as Strategy

“Time is of your own making,

its clock ticks in your head.

The moment you stop thought

time too stops dead.”

Angelus Silesius

Memory, due to the persistent brain-computer metaphor, is still usually referred to as to a store of information. We can propose an autopoietic view of memory, which would define it as a set of strategies that organize communication: strategies that have previously determined the system’s structure - the structure of its memory.

Personal history is interlinked with the phenomenon of memory, and memory to the notion of duration. Bergson differentiated between matter and memory as between pure perception and pure recollection, present and past. Bergson recognizes two forms of memory: recollection-memory and contraction-memory. Recollection happens immediately with the event of pure perception, when it cloaks it. Contraction happens alongside this process, when that cloak of recollection also contracts a number of external moments. It is the past that creates and cloaks the new moment of perception into a form recognizable by the temporal discourse. In this way each moment necessarily contains the preceding one. We do not recognize an event prior to calling upon our past, so we do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception. This notion is compatible to the autopoietic behavior of systems, where each new form of response and order (e.g. perception and making sense) is determined by the history of the system’s previous structural changes.

Each act of perception-recollection redefines our identity in a slighter or greater degree by means of contracting a set of external moments into a map of relations of differences. “We become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past.” This self-replacement is made in a double movement: past-present and present-past. Whenever a new moment is perceived, the past cloaks it with discursive formations and interpretations in order to - literally - make sense. Then a new discourse is created and a new subject emerges within this discourse and is correlative to it. What happens next is that the whole of the past is re-evaluated from the new subject-position, and in a manner the structure of the past shifts to balance the new contracted moment. The self-description and the interpretation of the self and the self’s history change accordingly.

Each moment in memory is a contracted recollection, which forms a particular region of the past, differentiated in layers. Each layer contains the whole of our past, in a more or less contracted state . Deleuze calls these layers “regions of Being,” and together with Bergson, claims that they are all coexistent and all repeating one another. The idea of coexistence of all past moments in a univocal manner, the contemporaneousness of the past, its continuous activity in the invisible domains of the unconscious, are fundamental features of human consciousness and the work of the mind. Duration is the coexistence of memory (of being) with itself at all levels and all degrees of contraction and relaxation. “The whole of our past is played, restarts, repeats itself, at the same time, on all the levels it sketches out.”

History as Ideology

Personal history (self-description) is the speech aspect of the discourse that enables the existence of a subject-position. Personal history and the subject position cannot exist without each other but are created simultaneously as emergent properties of a single plane. After both are established as visible components of the same plateau, history opens a space-time discourse where a selection of “real” events is interpreted from the perspective of the subject-position. When history is established, the subject can make sense, and can be made sense of. The subject secures connection with his communicating worlds by creating a compatible world. The interpretative function is fundamental for the process of creation and maintenance of the discourse of personal history and the rise of the subject. The discourse of personal history must be recreated continually in order for the subject to have a sense of continuous existence. Personal history cannot exist outside material existence; it needs continual embodiment, reassurance and proof in order to establish continuity. It enables the subject to say “me” and to be interpellated by others as “you” or “we”. Continuity is a precondition to memory, and memory to re/cognition. In other words, the discourse of personal history is what allows re/cognition – the subject can re/cognize otherness and others can re/cognize the subject. It is through discourse of personal history that the subject can create mental space for other subjects to exist, and this establishes a feeling of “real” communication: to believe to understand and to be understood. This belief about the reality of our contact with our external circumstances is essentially ideological.

Paul de Man writes: “”the pattern of one’s past and future existence is in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world... What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality.” Ideology and history are worldviews created and maintained by interpretation. When we link these two terms, they may offer a better insight of the significance of what we are analyzing now. Personal history defines the ideology that the individual is subject to. In Althusser’s view, the category of the subject is a primary “obviousness” that “It is me” and “It is you” – “it is obvious that we are subjects” (to the same ideology). The ease of this agreed recognition accounts to the effect of all humanity ideologies, which we are all subject to and subject of . Another trait of ideology is that all those (all of us) who are in ideology by definition believe themselves to be outside ideology. As long as there is self-interpretation, a meaningful history, and concern for recognizing, there is ideology. The degree of believing in the realness of personal ideology and self-description measures the degree of distance from the Real.

Rules, Discourse and Objects

Foucault defines discourse as any set of practices that obey certain rules. Around each object or theme there can be a multiplicity of discourses. Discourses do not appear because the object or the theme emerges; they are co-created together, the discourse and the object, by the same discursive rules. The unity of discourse on a particular topic or object would be the interplay of the rules that make possible its appearance during a given period of time; it "would be the interplay of rules that define the transformation of these objects, their non-identity through time, the break produced in them, the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence."

Normally we are inclined to think that the object pre-exists everything, that “it is there,” and if there are any discourses at all, they must come after and around the object. Not quite so in Foucault’s worldview : objects may arise only when a discourse is formed as a set of rules. These rules dictate how relationships can be formed, and only within a complex group of these relationships the object may begin its existence. These relations are not present inside the object. They do not define any hidden underpinning structure of the object, but circumscribe what enables it to appear.

The discourse can function as long as it is obeyed and therefore hides itself behind that which is self-evident, i.e. it is rather impossible to view it from within. The subject formed within a discourse cannot perceive and question the discourse. It is the discourse that creates the rule about which questions are possible to pose. Still, let’s keep in mind that the subject is not the whole human being. The subject is one subject-position within a certain discursive context. The subjectivity of the individual is made of an assemblage of such positions. Therefore, the way to approach a discourse is to question what possible subject-positions it assigns, what kind of subjects it allows and within what rules of connectivity. Another interesting question is: which questions are impossible to pose if the individual is to inhabit a particular discourse?

The self-evidence of the subject-position can be breached and transformed by desubjectification of the individual . Yet, this is not an ideological struggle that leads to some phantom freedom – it is a continuous search and effort of desubjectification. It is a process of becoming. Each shift of desubjectification can re-link the individual to a larger (more complex) discourse whose offer of possibilities allows more diversity and flexibility, and simultaneously includes the minor (less complex) discourse. These shifts inevitably imply transformation of the subject. Although each successful desubjectification leads to inhabiting yet another discourse, discourses are useful. The axiomatic laws of the discourse are forms of continuity: these are the ones that make organization possible. Continuity is essentially a basis of each world model. Each form of personal history is deployed over its particular continuity. The breach is performed each time the subject releases itself from the discourse of a self-description, personal history and/or worldview description. “Once these immediate forms of continuity are suspended, an entire field is set free.”

What does this mean to each one of us? Memory, the being, is a discursive formation. It is not made of objects and themes, but of rules of emergence and connectivity. The experiential-representative material in our memory is rather arbitrary; it is the rules that create, select and change their content, i.e. the rules change the material that expresses them. One corollary is that the underlying discursive rules of memory and being create our experience of ourselves and of the others; they define our personal history, past, present, concept of self, the possible perceptions of the Other, and the overall interaction with the world. The “I” is a direct product of the interaction of our memories, and changes as the latter changes, while the comprehension of the world, the Other, of one’s past/future, changes accordingly to the momentary “I”. What is called “my life” is one view across the individual collection of “I”-s and histories projecting itself onto a phantom future. ”

Foucault’s understanding of discourses can lead us to defining a subject as a singular manifestation point of a discourse, and discourse as practice of a particular set of rules. Briefly, we can recount the postmodern statements: it is the discursive rules that condition objects, allow them to appear, and conduct their connectivity. These rules also condition what is possible to be perceived, within which order it can be stored in memory, in which relations and distribution of qualities it can be laid, and what are the possible interpretations (meaning) of its relations.

Notes:

J. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (1984).

Teleology is based on a belief that natural things and events are especially planned for a particular purpose and therefore deals with various worldview that exercise search for the telos, the goal, the aim and the purpose of the human being, the world and life.

“There is nothing natural or inevitable about the way we divide up and articulate our world ways... our world is constructed for us by our language and … “things” do not have fixed essences or cores of meanings which pre-exist linguistic representation.” - Saussure

Roland Barthes writes that the human being (man) does not exist prior to language but “language teaches the definition of man, not the reverse.”

A term borrowed from physics, from the study of behavior of rays: no component is a source of light but each reflects a source of a farther light ray. Thus each component is a hypothetical source of rays.

That the unconscious character of the language in those who draw on it for their speech, which is explicitly postulated by Saussure, is again found in Lévi-Strauss, who states that it is not the contents which are unconscious (this is a criticism of Jung’s archetypes) but the forms, that is, the symbolical function. This idea is akin to that of Lacan, according to whom the libido itself is articulated as a system of significations.

Structuralism as a complex intellectual movement became important in France about 1950, and included such works as that of Levi-Strauss, the literary critic Roland Barthes and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. By the early 1950’s and 1960’s Barthes and Levi-Strauss had extended Saussure’s semiological approach to anthropology, literature and culture in general. Focus of interest shifted from study of signs to a study of how the words and images work as a system of structural relations.

Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969) „The centrifugal forces do not flee the center forever, but approach it once again, only to retreat from it yet again: such is the nature of the violent oscillations that overwhelm the individual so long as he seeks only his own center and is incapable of seeing the circle of which himself is a part; for if these oscillations overwhelm him, it is because each one of them corresponds to an individual other than the one he believes himself to be, from the point of view of the unlocatable center. As a result, an identity is essentially fortuitous, and a series of individualities must be undergone by each of these oscillations, so that as a consequence the fortuitousness of this or that particular individuality will render all of them as necessary.” (Quoted in Antioedipus, Deleuze & Guattari, 20)

Gilles Deleuze, Bergson.

Jacques Derrida in Structure, Sign and Play in the discourse of the Human Sciences (1966)

Ibid. “… a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety (from being caught by the game, as it were at stake) can be mastered.”

FZ, VII: K2, 86

The phi-phenomenon is the name for an interesting aspect of human behavior, which was noted in the following experiment on perception, conducted with a large number of people: Each person was placed alone in a dark room with a single task to observe. Then two unconnected spots were lit flashing one after the other. Almost all people reported with certainty that they had seen a line of light. Some reported colored lines, red, green, etc, and one observer reported with firm assurance a line gradually changing from red to green.

Levi-Strauss: “Thus the myth and the musical work are like conductors of an orchestra, whose audience becomes silent performers...” Dialogue as music/myth performance.

The Book of Angelus Silesius. Vintage Books, NY. 1976. p. 45

Deleuze holds duration as identical and coexistent with memory, and essentially equivalent to consciousness and freedom.

Gilles Deleuze, Bergson, p. 66.

In Deleuze’s Bergson we find an intriguing idea: The present is conceived as the most contracted level of the past. If present is maximally contracted past, then matter is maximally dilated or relaxed past.

Ibid. Further onp. 94 Bergson’s Élan vital is quoted: “Movement is... the insertion of duration into matter: …Duration, to be precise, is called life when it appears in this movement.”

Althusser: “... you and I are always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects.”

Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, p.33

. “the object does not await in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist itself…”, Ibid.

Desubjectification is one of the key life strategies in Deleuze’s oeuvre.

Ibid.

Blake says, “… as the Person so is his life proportioned.” (FZ, IX: K2 , 119)