Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 01:50:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Inna Runova Semetsky <irs5-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: A/P (for P. Bryant)


Paul -
i confess i am still reading your post but decided to reply nevertheless.
If we take the difference as not in kind but that in degree, then the
whole problematic becomes a false problem, correct?
But wouldn't Deleuze-Spinoza series (as Boundas says) eleminate difference
in kind?
Second, i disagree with deleuze saying that signs can only be felt or
sensed but never recognized. He uses Peirce but quite superficially, not
that Peirce is easily understood. There is contradiction in deleuze
between his stressing teh concept of Fold (inside OF the outside) and in
the same time
denying re-cognition to the sign. 
Third, i came across a curious book recently--you reminded me that it is
on my shelf: John Sutton "Philosophy and memory traces: descartes to
connectionism". He goes against "descartes bashing" -- and here i agree
with him (if not conceptually then intuitively -- which for me is
difference in degree not in kind), simulateneously he "bashes" Fodor as
extreme cognitivist, interesting, ah? But the main point is that descartes
comes out as a naturalistic philosopher introducing the distributed mode
of implicit cognition (i am using contemporary terminology of course).
Especially, he posits an INCORPOREAL intellectual memory. 
inna

 On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Paul Bryant wrote:

> Hi Dave--
> 
> That's the way I'd take this passage, or the notion of
> immanence.  With the fracturing of the I that occurs
> within the Kantian cogito, thought discovers a pure
> outside that's no longer mere exteriority, yet which
> likewise can no longer be described in terms of pure
> interiority.  How to describe this then?  Two linkages
> I'd like to make:  First, the Cartesian problematic
> and the way Kant reconfigures it (which Deleuze takes
> up and reads in terms of the internal return), and
> second, the notion of a sign that can only be sensed. 
> 
> 
> All of us, of course, are aquainted with the Cartesian
> proposition "I think therefore, I am."  I think, I am,
> I am a thing which thinks.  We can reconfigure this as
> follows:  I am = undetermined existence, I think > determination, I am a thing which thinks = determined
> existence.  Descartes moves directly from the
> undetermined to the determined, without inquiring
> after the medium through which existence is
> determinable.  It's at this point that Kant takes up
> the baton...  Under which "form" is existence
> determinable?  It's not difficult to recognize the
> problem here.  How are we to conceive the linkage
> between concepts and intuitions if concepts and
> intuitions are such that they differ in kind?  This is
> a reoccurant question we find in Deleuze, and serves
> to motivate a number of his polemics against Hegel. 
> For instance, we find it occuring again in the
> Foucault book with the question of how the visible and
> the articulable are linked.  It's the question of the
> schematism or morphological essences...  The strategy
> will be to show that all representational grounds are
> themselves based upon aesthetic foundations that are
> absolutely abstract (abstract not because they are
> purely conceptual, but because that which represents
> nothing, pure experience, is the most abstract of
> all).  Kant answers that the self is determinable
> under the form of time.  Consequently for Kant there
> are four rather than three steps:  the undetermined (I
> am), the determinable (time), the determination (I
> think), and finally the determined (I think therefore
> I am).
> 
> Although the shift from Descartes to Kant might appear
> slight at first, they are profound enough to bring
> about the death of God and effectuate the shift from
> ontologies of transcendence to ontologies of sense. 
> The two most immediate consequences of Kant's addition
> of the form of the determinable are 1) the activity of
> thought (determination) can no longer be seen as a
> spontaneous activity of the thinker, but is *only*
> represented as such.  In other words, thought itself
> becomes mediated, it becomes an experience.  As a
> result, 2) I must undergo the *effects* of my own
> thought in time, I must experience myself thinking.  
> 
> Now my suggestion regarding immanence and the sign
> that can only be sensed is that sense (sens) consists
> in determining the conditions of the effects of
> thought within our temporal experience of thought. 
> This is not entirely clear.  What I mean is that the
> transcendental dimension of Deleuze's transcendental
> empiricism consists in determining the spatio-temporal
> dynamisms that animate our experience of thought... 
> And this is done by discovering the limits of our
> faculties of recognition, or the points where
> representation breaks down in order to reveal the
> aesthetic functioning lying at the foundation of our
> cognitive functioning.  This is so, because the
> experience of the limit, of the sublime, necessarily
> engenders thought and creatively sets it in action (as
> Kant had already indicated in the third critique with
> respect to symbol formation and the experience of the
> sublime).
> 
> It's at this point, I think, that we encounter the
> question of the outside and immanence.  For Descartes,
> the outside had a relation to exteriority, to extended
> magnitude.  The outside was literally the extended
> because extension, as a substance of its own differing
> in kind from res cogitans, was that which limited
> thought or defined its limits.  With Kant, the outside
> becomes such that it is neither the interior nor the
> exterior, but rather a fundamental experience of time.
>  Since the cogito has become fractured by time that I
> must experience the effects of my own thinking, time
> itself becomes the outside.  Or, put otherwise, the
> outside is, in a sense, within (so long as this isn't
> confused with being interiority).  
> 
> Thus, as I understand it, the plane of immanence is
> that which gives us to think by bringing us before a
> sign that can only be sensed or an intensity that
> manifests itself in the experience of undergoing
> ourselves in time.  This is also why we ought not
> confuse the plane of immanence with the plane of
> consistency or a rhizomatic network.  Of course, the
> plane of immanence will have relations to both of
> these things, but it's not simply another word for
> them.  The plane of immanence is like the image that
> gives us to think, that sets thought in motion, that
> disturbs us and poses limits so that we might go
> beyond them...  It's the way were seized by being in a
> sort of delirium that forces us to go further,
> constructing concepts and rhizomes where none would
> have been before.  In this respect, I read the plane
> of immanence in terms of the seventh book of Plato's
> _Republic_ where thought is said to arise from our
> confused perceptions or limit perceptions, rather than
> recognition or the identical that re-presents itself
> in experience.  This experience is a necessarily
> aesthetic moment insofar as it forces us to create, to
> restructure, to develop and to "involute" intensive
> differences.  Hence, it is that which *cannot* be
> sensed from the perspective of the empirical exercise
> of the sensibility, because the empirical exercise of
> the faculty is based on recognition; but also that
> which can only be sensed because it's not a difference
> found within a model or what Deleuze called concepts
> earlier in his career (I take it that for D&G a
> concept later becomes a sense, or a spatio-temporal
> dynamism composed of intensive variations:  The
> example they give of Descartes is especially
> illuminating in this connection).
> 
> This discussion of immanence also gives us the means
> of distinguishing Kantian and phenomenological
> transcendental projects, from Deleuze's transcendental
> project.  Kant and the phenomenologists (apologies for
> my vast generalization here) are concerned with
> *synthesis* which is still related essentially to
> perceptive recognition.  Deleuze, on the other hand,
> wonders how the different forms of synthesis
> (apprehension, reproduction, and recognition) select
> the matter which they synthesize.  It's this question
> that he seeks to answer with his aesthetics of
> sensibility, and which must be developed in terms of
> time (which is a transcendental function) and
> immanence (which is the manner in which the
> transcendental elements of sensibility deploy
> themselves qua foundation of the empirical exercise of
> our faculties).
> 
> N.B.  "Faculty" here is meant in terms of a real,
> rather than a numerical distinction.  A distinction is
> real if two powers can be thought independently of one
> another even if, ontologically, they might not be able
> to exist apart from one another.  A distinction is
> numerical if two thinks actually exist ontologically
> apart from one another.  Put otherwise, a faculty is
> not thought to be an actual entity like the pineal
> gland, but rather indicates a power of experience that
> can be really distinguished from another power, viz.
> faculties of thinking, memory, recognizing, sensing,
> etc..  It's more than possible, and even necessary, to
> talk about these powers without substantializing them
> as organs and such...  Nor do they necessarily
> preclude a developmental approach.
> 
> Sorry, I realize all this is a little vague yet... 
> I'm still working through it myself.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Paul
> 
> --- Desiring Machines <da_sein-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:
> > "The field of immanence is not internal to the self,
> > but neither does it 
> > come from an external self or non-self. Rather it is
> > like the absolute 
> > Outside that knows no Selves because interior and
> > exterior are equally a 
> > part of of the immanence in which they have fused."
> > (ATP.156)
> > 
> > So Active/Passive as the absolute Outside?
> > 
> > Dave X-).
> > 
> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> > David M. Patt, University of Michigan
> > 
> > the trapdoor in the sun  X-).
> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> >
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