A non-concept or the critique of the self. Chapter 1??

a draft from March 2022

photo by Guillaume TECHER on Unsplash

"All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made." — Michel Foucault¹

In regular everyday discourse, we talk about "finding a true self," "manifesting a true me," or even “losing oneself” for a minute in the affect of emotions or the routine of everyday life. There is a presupposition that each has an idea of what he/she is, has been, and would like to be—thus a concept of oneself is created. Philosophical conceptions of what one is have changed quite a lot throughout the history. Multiple formalist, teleological, causal, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and structuralist explanations have been proposed, and a number of paradigm shifts have happened—significant is the transition from a genus-species model of early philosophers (i.e. "rational animal") to a human-unique qualitative determination (Descartes' "I Think") to structuralist-behaviorist approaches of Marx, Freud, behaviorism, etc. that emphasize how nature or outside events shape our notion of the self.

I started out this project planning to describe an ontology of what we call a self. I researched contemporary theories about it, primarily in the analytic tradition, and was on my way to constructing a system that would encompass the four ways we can think about the self (metaphysical, conscious, self-as-object of experience, and self-as-subject of experience)—the locus of which should have been the conscious/personal self existing ontologically as a concept/construction. It was to be defined as a mental integration (a unit) of all the possible instances/states of the metaphysical self in the past, present, and future; as an open-ended concept that includes all of one's thoughts, dreams, actions, goals, values, etc.

But then my years-long depression intensified, and following losses my grandmother and great-grandmother to Covid-19, a full existential and philosophical crisis subsumed. ;. It led me to question the presupposition—not in its actuality, but in its necessity. Is it an inherent/pure aspect of the way our mind works, or merely a historical (nevertheless totalizing) contingency that we think about ourselves this way—a historical a priori.² Because isn't a statement “I am losing myself” haunted by an internal contradiction—how can one lose something (himself/herself) that constitutes their existence-essence (or in Heideggerian, their onto-ontological reality) without losing life itself? I realized this conceptual self is a virtual that can only actualize itself as an Other in our thoughts—be it an idealized Other or a pessimist one, depending on one's mental state.³ But why do we then value this concept over our actuality—why we value this absent Other over our actual present?

One of the main objects of twentieth-century philosophy, particularly its Continental branch, was the issue of being and identity. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, structuralists, psychoanalysts, and many others tried to describe what being is and how it exists—be it an inanimate being or a human being—and how to postulate its identity without falling into the traps of representationalism given the category application gap within Kant's critical project. The best solution to the issue that I’ve studied to date was formulated by French thinker Gilles Deleuze who turns the problem upside down and proposes a theory of transcendental empiricism according to which what we actually experience in the world is not the metaphysical primacy of identities, but rather the difference-in-itself (differential dx) that is being repeated with variations in intensities. The concepts/Ideas constructed are thus not subject to representationalism as virtual (ideal but still real) multiplicities that can change and be applied/actualized in different plateaus/planes.

The same pedagogical status of the concept can be found everywhere: a multiplicity, an absolute surface or volume, self-referents, made up of a certain number of inseparable intensive variations according to an order of neighborhood, and traversed by a point in a state of survey. The concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come. Concepts in this sense belong to philosophy by right, because it is philosophy that creates them and never stops creating them. The concept is obviously knowledge—but knowledge of itself, and what it knows is the pure event, which must not be confused with the state of affairs in which it is embodied. The task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give them a new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events.⁴

Nevertheless, while a virtual fragmented whole that "shapes and reshapes the event in its own way"⁵ is useful in explaining our experience of phenomena still in application to ourselves it would present itself as an Other. It's reasonable to ask why that would be a problem given the nature of the concept. The issue is that no signifier, even a fragmentary one, can ever truthfully denote such what we experience about ourselves—our metaphorical singularity. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari touched this problem when in A Thousand Plateaus they introduced the idea of

an abstract machine of faciality (visagéité), which produces [faces] at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but an abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces, or will produce.⁶

Therefore, any concept of the self would necessarily reduce and imprison our inherent singularity with all the differences. Important side note, by singularities I do not mean points on the coordinate axis which can produce a shape when combined (D&G's singularities), rather I think of the gravitational singularities that in addition to being impossible to fully define also break the spacetime itself (rather than merely fold it) and may even introduce a new dimension.

Even if I produce a Venn diagram with thousands, millions of circles in it, there is still no way it won't postulate an Other to me whenever I would try to use it to explain myself.

In his insightful essay on the postmodern self Leonard Lawlor asks a question “can there be a people that does not do violence to singularities?”⁷ The same question must be extended further—can there be a concept of a self that doesn’t do violence to our singularity?

That problematic is not merely a theoretical issue for an individual to resolve, it has direct ethical and political consequences. As Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, and others have shown the influence of the totalizing discourse formations into which we are born shapes the concepts we may construct and the thoughts and discourses we may have. In the current late-stage of capitalism with its incessant focus on the efficacy and pervasiveness of production and consumption, human objectification and alienation are already ever prevalent—pressuring one into the one-dimensionality of a production/consumption machine. And when objectification turns into self-objectification, capitalist realism appears inescapable as one develops a very pervert case of a Stockholm syndrome toward a socioeconomic regime that dehumanizes one.

We start to purposefully limit our realm of being-ourselves and imprison our singularity. There is no surprise then that some thinkers like Mark Fisher postulate that depression is now a new normality, a new historical a priori for our time.

D&G made the first step by denying the existence of the id. But that was not enough. In the end their explanations still circled back to psychoanalysis and Marxism—the two ideologies subsumed by late-stage capitalism. In their explanation the objectivization of a subject still persisted—now just through its division into desiring machines.

Camus’s absurdism tries to explain the clash between human totalizing tendencies and inherent world chaos, but the even bigger chaos is in some sense the human being itself. And the totalizing tendencies of capitalism clash even more with the chaotic nature of whatever we are. The self narratives one builds—the self-concepts, psychoanalysis, etc—all became the historical a priori of our time, the rules of our discursive formations. The surge of the popularity of mindfulness is a vivid example of our tendency to objectify ourselves—we conceptually divide ourselves into different "selves," one of which is more True than others and to which we should return. Work-family conflict, mid-life crisis, existential crisis, suicidal thoughts—all this and much more is a result of our tendency to not merely to compare ourselves with this concept and judge ourselves based on it but also to identify ourselves with this constructed Other. Thus, even though theories like psychoanalysis may distinguish something true about our condition in the modern world, are a part and parcel of it as they commit the same fallacy. That’s why both psychoanalysis and Marxism lost the emancipatory potential Žižek talks about in his In Defense of Lost Causes, they cannot fully emancipate from themselves—they are now not merely a critique of the existing society, they are its constitutive elements. Deleuze and Guattari were right when they said that psychoanalysis “translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains phantasy.”⁸

We must then, following Kant, start with a critical project: a project that delimits what can be said about the self, diving the entire project into a pure and practical aspects. But in addition to the possible dialectical illusions, it’s important to recognize the historical illusions.

Deleuze again is the philosopher who provided the most pristine event horizon for this singularity when near the end of his life he focused on the notion of immanence and wrote that “we will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing more."⁹ The choice of words is critical here—if he were to write “being” instead of “life” he would have already encircled the depths of a singularity thus effectively desingularizing it. As the preeminent philosopher of difference, he realized that any determination (as Being or One, or Whole) always comes secondary. This essay on immanence some scholars consider to be a moving away from various positions of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project developed together with Guattari, and for a good reason. When describing Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend as a literary example of this immanence, he writes

The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from subjectivity and the objectivity of what comes to pass.¹⁰

It’s clearly discernible that this immanence is totally non-narrational. There is nothing totalizing about it except the immanence itself. All other attempts at formulations of the essential nature of our life had there conceptual narrative limitations embedded into them that shape the real: “I think therefore I am,” “Being-in-the-world"/Dasein, etc—thus avoiding the singularity. If one insists on still having a linguistic signifier to this self-singularity, the closest one would be an avalent verb “be” without any other qualifications added (such verbs dont exist in English but other languages such as Russian or Mandarin Chinese they can be found).

The singularities or the events which constitute a life coexist with the accidents of the life that corresponds to it, but they are not arranged and distributed in the same way. They relate to one another in a completely different way than individuals do. It even seems that a singular life can do without any individuality at all, even without any of the concomitants that individualize it. For example, infants all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality; but they do have singularities—a smile, a gesture, a grimace—such events are not subjective traits. Infants are traversed by an immanent life which is pure power, and even beatitude during moments of weakness and suffering. The indefinites of a life lose their indetermination to the extent that they occupy a plane of immanence, or what amounts to the same thing, to the extent that they constitute the elements of a transcendental field (individual life, however, remains inseparable from empirical determinations).¹¹

But this immanent project is often sidetracked in Deleuze’s ouevre by his attempt to reintroduce desire as an essential part of human life—thus immediately taking a 2D photo of a person with a camera of economic relations. Example of that is the idea of a Body without Organs—the forever-attaining limit of possibilities of our existence, “what remains when you take everything away.”¹² This BwO is described as “the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it.”¹³ Note that in "Immanence" there isn’t any mention of a BwO. I think it is because later Deleuze understood that BwO is a transcendental field, one of many and one that is specific to an empirical dimension of desire—but “transcendence is always a product of immanence.”¹⁴ While life is a prerequisite for desire, there is no ground for equating life with desire.

“A transcendent can always be invoked which falls outside the plane of immanence, or which attributes the plane to itself. Nevertheless, all transcendence is constituted solely in the stream of immanent consciousness proper to the plane.”¹⁵ BwO, a Nomad, a schizophrenic and other concepts, personae, and planes are merely outside virtuals, constructed and introduced into immanence, that when connected with a transcendent idea try to attribute the immanence to themselves.

BwO is a virtual concept that allows for the expression of the real experience—but it is immanent not to the the pure immanence/singularity but to the historical discursive plane on which it is postulated. In other words, BwO is then just a part of the “image though gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought.”¹⁶ Thus in postulating the mistake of ever saying the id—“everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones”¹⁷—Deleuze and Guattari may have failed their own supreme act of philosophy and constructed a plane of immanence (in itsWP formulation) that hands itself over to the transcendent of desire. In a sense, BwO, just as a rhizome in ATP, is an attempt at a pure concept of the self devoid of any individuality—but as a concept it must still have its borders defined by the historical plane of consistency/discourse formation on which it exists. That is not to say that it is instrumentally useless—no, absolutely not. But an instrumentality cannot be a reason for a self-identity with a concept. A life is devoid of such a border for itself as it is fully immanent to itself, in itself, and with itself. it is not only the fact that we cannot see past the event horizon of a black hole, but also the singularity itself can never see outside of the event horizon as it exists out of spacetime—it is immanent.

If we could imagine ourselves being a parabola y=1/x: we would perceive nothing, including ourselves until the moment a transcendental imposition of x!=0 would happen. At the instance of x=0 there would be just "be"—non defined, nonsymbolized microcosm that spreads over the entire domain of the function itself, but on top of which in certain conditions a transcendental coordinate axis may impose a graph (BwO, rhizome, etc.—D&G's maps).

This is the reason why even their replacement of the idea of desiring-machines with a concept of assemblage in ATP remains a two dimensional map as no flat surface/plateau on which connections of assemblages can be inscribed can even represent singularity. These issues stem from Deleuze and Guattari's general pragmatist approach to philosophy and philosophical books, best summarized in this discussion on ways to read a book:

we consider a book as a small a-signifying machine; the only problem is "Does it work and how does it work? How does it work for you?" If it doesn't function, if nothing happens, take another book. This other way of reading is based on intensities: something happens or doesn't happen. There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It can be compared to an electrical connection.¹⁸

While being immensely instrumental in practice of dealing with objects and thus central to conceptual thinking—which is incidentally why they say the object of philosophy is "to create concepts that are always new,"¹⁹ along with new planes and conceptual personae—this attitude is impotent when dealing with the life itself. While D&G claim that concept as a creation is "always a singularity,"²⁰ it is not a pure singularity as it is "a fragmentary whole."²¹ The absence of a clear theoretical division between pure and secondary singularities, planes, and events is in my opinion a constant missing feature of their thought which allowed it to be reabsorbed and assimilated by the prevailing societal structures.²² In the essay on "Immanence," he says that "the plane of immanence is itself virtual, in as much as the events that populate it are virtualities."²³ That much is true—but pure immanence is not subject to the virtual/actual couple as it is not merely "real" that is being actualized—it is the real, it encompasses both the virtual and the actual at the same time. Hence, its purity—it is not immanent to a certain constructed milieu, but it is immanent to itself and itself only. Applying the notion of virtuality to life actually be creating a "transcendent which can contain even immanence."²⁴

Deleuze in multiple works talks a lot about the pre-individual singularities different and repeating with various intensities—multiplicities out of which we are built and which individuate us—, but what he sometimes omitted mentioning explicitly is the underlying immanent singularity beneath all them. It is not only that death "is inscribed in the I and the self, like the cancellation of difference in a system of explication, or the degradation which compensated for the process of differentiation,"²⁵ but a life is an immanent condition of the multiplicities of difference and of the planes of immanence on which only these multiplicities can appear and function. Even death as an event-singularity is possible only on given a life.

Therefore, while D&G's transcendental empiricism intended to fulfill the immanent ambitions of Kant's critique, it itself wasn't radical enough in its pursuit. While philosophy is a constructivism²⁶, the conditions of the construction (life as pure immanence with difference and repetition as its only inherent characteristics) must be considered prior to the process itself (creation of concepts and laying out of a plane in D&G terms). If in Deleuze, "the principle of “difference-in-itself” is made to function as the genetic element of real experience, from which the relations of identity, analogy, resemblance, opposition, contradiction, negation, and so forth are derived as secondary effects," we need to assert a genetic element of the principle of difference. Immanent principles are still immanent to a pure plane of immanence, and not just to themselves.

What does this mean in terms of a question I posed in the beginning? I must then conclude that if we take philosophy to be a discipline of creating concepts, the ontology of the ourselves is aphilosophical—it is a condition for philosophy and not an object to it. No ontological concept of the pure singularity that does not do violence to it can be created. Any concept by the objectifying totalizing nature of the process of its creation will result in the reduction of a "black hole" of a self to merely its event horizon from a certain angle. This does not mean however that practically such snapshots are irrelevant—on the other hand they may be highly instrumental. But they cannot be a foundation of one’s sense of identity. Merely a limited decision to act/think/behave in a specific manner within specific constraints (planes, formations) for a limited duration of time—let’s a pure nomadology that constantly territorializes and deterritorializes itself for limited spans of time, without ever allowing itself to merge with the territory and its historical a priori—without ever becoming one-dimensional.

I think that this theory of the self has a unbounded radical potential as the only theory which humanizes and “dehumanizes” us at the same time—it is centered around everyone’s inherent value (the immanence of life) and strives to deobjectify every person both in his interpersonal and social relations while simultaneously freeing us from the constraints of a historical conception of what a human being can and might be that exists at the current time. Capitalist realism absorbed many aspects of human life into itself, including anti-capitalist critiques such as psychoanalysis and Marxism, to the point that it feels that it “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.”²⁷ But this seeming transcendental condition is not an immanent one, rather a historical one. Therefore, as long as pure immanence is retained and not fully handed over to the transcendental, the possibility for a new Event still exists as the self remains "a spur to thinking."²⁸

1. Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self: An Interview," Technologies of the Self, p. 11.

2. Defined by Michel Foucault as "not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality of statements." Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 127.

3. See instances of the depressive realism as an example.

4. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 32-33.

5. Ibid., p. 34.

6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 168.

7. Lawlor, "The Postmodern Self: An Essay on Anachronism and Powerlessness," The Oxford Handbook of the Self, p. 699.

8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 151.

9. Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," Two Regimes of Madness, p. 389.

10. Ibid., p. 390.

11. Ibid., pp. 391-392.

12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 151.

13. Ibid., p. 154.

14. Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," Two Regimes of Madness, p. 392.

15. Ibid.

16. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 37.

17. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 1.

18. Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," Anti-Oedipus: From Psychoanalysis to Schizopolitics, p. 114.

19. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 5

20. Ibid., p. 7.

21. Ibid., p. 16.

22. A pertinent example is given in Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 204-205.

23. Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," Two Regimes of Madness, 392.

24. Ibid.

25. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 259.

26. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 35.

27. See Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.

28. Lawlor, "The Postmodern Self: An Essay on Anachronism and Powerlessness," The Oxford Handbook of the Self, p. 712