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Here's the course wiki I'm currently teaching from:

http://202c.pbwiki.com

My homepage:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/ada137/

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Perhaps, to reframe my interest in the Phaedrus, what Socrates is haunted by is not writing per say, but the potential of writing to become a technology for the externalization of egoic investment. Deleuze and Clastre find it useful to describe traditional societies as haunted by the spectre of the state form—an organization which through specific cultural mechanisms is held off, dispersed, thwarted.

Socrates, more specifically, is perhaps haunted by the event Foucault describes as the Cartesian moment in which truth will no longer require a practice of akesis as its guarantor, threshold, or preparation. It is the care of the self that makes taking the role of the observer the necessary and preeminent factor in the pursuit of knowledge for the Greek tradition. Derrida’s essay on the pharmakon makes clear that it is not writing, exactly, that is the problem for Socrates in the Phaedrus, but rather a certain understanding or approach that must be avoided.

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Getting stoned, becoming intoxicated, hallucinating is often described as like seeing the world again for the first time. The interruption of the ego, also interrupts, linear time and hence the memory associated with history personal or otherwise. However, to be sure these ecstatic states do not offer us a “pure” return to pre-semantic, pre-egoic, perception of reality. Rather, ecstatic practices and hallucinogenic substances are a mechanisms for interrupting the consensus reality programs installed by culture. It does so through a particular mechanism and by a particular effect which undermines egoic consciousness in a particular way. Which is as much to say that ecstatic experience does not “remove” the filters, repression, or reductions of cultural constructs. It is neither something like Marcuse’s unrepressed libidinal expression, nor does it open up a wider, truer perspective on reality: it is more accurately a decentering or a disruption of perspective. A decentering which allows a becoming other than ego, rather than a discover of pure, original self.

As we know, the set and setting play a primary role in the nature of the ecstatic experience. The set involves a particular ego disrupted. It offers the material that will be disrupted, disorganized for rearrangement and transformation, for the production of new symmetries.

Thus, the repetition of cultural motifs, but also the divergence or idiosyncrasies of individual experience are not surprising. Setting itself can be incredibly powerful and can on its own produce ecstatic effects: a child spinning, the gathering of crowds, or the intoxication of drumming and dancing. The latter an ecstatic mechanism that purely rhetorical and a-signifying.

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Becoming intoxicated with a potential mate is a way of assaying co-evolutionary potential in two senses. First, in the sense of the brain the result of run away process of sexual selection which allows for the sampling of genetic material in compressed fashion through the symmetrical sampling of its ability to order. However, the intoxication adds a second level in which the compatibility of the mates, their ability to become together is assayed. That is, if we follow a Nietzsche, Canguilhem, Bergson, etc. liveliness and health are manifested as the ability to create new norms for living, to adapt, change, transform, become then being able to produce new symmetries through a co-dissolution is the perfect test for sexual selection.

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Lilly often speaks of reordering, consolidating, and develop a hierarchy of programs within the brain. He posits the goal or telos of his particular technology of self as preparation for and valuing of exploration of "inner cognitive space." In preparation, one seeks to successfully integrate, become aware of, and control programs that normally run below or above our consciousness. All of this tendency to order, hierarchy, and control would be troubling if Lilly's actual method and reports didn't so rigorously and consistently undercut it. For example, the locked doors of the room are resolved by shifting the nature of the problem to as topological one. The solution to the puzzle is that the inside is merely a fold of the outside which could be potentially turned out like a pants pocket. Similarly, many of the belief experiments depend on a certain indiscernibility of inside-outside. Positing supra and sub conscious entities is a means of opening up new routes of communication while problematizing the autonomy that is purportedly sought. While the overall strategy here is consonant with integrationist psychological models (and the method fairly Jungian despite the shift of stage from symbolic alchemy to computer programming), we might understand this process as something other than the rigorous and ordered creation of the self. Rather, emptying these rooms and cultivating various kinds of familiars become tools of deterritorialization. In cutting through the rooms with locks, roadblocks to communication are removed. Perhaps, this spaces are not so much integrated as opened up for communication and "traffic." In cultivating a general purpose computer, the task is (as in Kaufman's networks) to create increased connectivity often at the expense of order.

Lilly brackets a series of possible assumptions about the sources of info for metaprogramming states: from one's own head, other beings (nonhuman, outerspace intelligences, esp with other humans. Though presented as a necessity for scientific objectivity (Lilly will not side exclusively with either formalistic or intuitive approaches) this bracketing provides a space of undecidability which works to make indiscernable outside/inside distinctions, as well as selfmetaprogramming versus religious experience, and a host of other distinctions. The method works on the basis of a belief program (wish I had time to discuss James here) which should be recognized as operating within the field of other possible beliefs. Which is to say that it matters that the subject(s) in Lilly's experiments undergo a series of experiences or based on modulating and shifting belief programs. This zone of undecidability allows communication between different (and often thought of as mutually exclusive) relations and complexes which seem to shift their location (inside/outside), emotional valence (positive/negative), and their mode and aim of operation (aliens programming us or us reigning in our own programs). Ultimately, I might describe Lilly's technology of self this way: as a preparation or fashioning of the self, it seeks to remove blockages in the individual's software; it increases communication by removing redundant, reactive, or circular patterns of order. Furthermore, this preparation is a set and setting for cultivating metaprograms as familiars which are engaged through the facility of a shifting series of belief programs that allow communication by creating zones of indiscernability which promote both the possibility of change and cultivate a hospitality to it.

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Parnet wonders if Deleuze feels at all responsible for people who took drugs, who might have read Anti-Oedipus a bit too literally, as if he might have incited youths to commit stupid acts (conneries), and Deleuze's response is quite moving. He says that they always felt quite responsible for anyone for whom things went badly, and he personally always tried to do what he could for things to go well. He said he never played around with things like that; his only point of honor being never having told anyone to go on, it's ok, go get stoned, but always trying to help people make it through. He continues, saying that he is too sensitive to the smallest detail that might cause someone suddenly to slide over into complete blankness (état de blanc). He never cast blame on anyone, said anyone was doing anything wrong, but he felt the enormous weight of the directions some lives could take, people and especially young people who would take drugs to the point of collapse, or drinking to the point of falling into some "wild" state (état sauvage). He wasn't there to prevent anyone from doing anything, was not serving as a cop or a parent, but tried nonetheless to keep them from being reduced to pulp (état de loque). The moment there was a risk of someone cracking up, "je ne le supporte pas," I can't stand it. An old man who cracks up, Deleuze says, who commits suicide, he at least has already lived his life, but a young person who cracks up, Deleuze says it is insupportable. He was always divided, he concludes, between the impossibility of casting blame on anyone and the absolute refusal that anyone might be reduced to pulp. He admits that it is difficult to figure out what principles apply, one just deals with each case, and the least one can do is to prevent them from veering toward being reduced to pulp. As paraphrased by Charles J. Stivale

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Transpersonal Psychology

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Week 2: Donald and Doyle

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Here’s what I was provoked to re-read in light of this week’s itinerary:

• Nietzsche. Genealogy of Morals.

• Lingis, Alphonso. “The Society of Dismembered Body Parts.” Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy.

• Deleuze. "Michel Tournier and the World without Others." Logic of Sense.

When Donald discovers the emergence of symbolic culture and consciousness in mimetic or expressive cultures, he echoes a philosophical line of thought hailing from Nietzsche who characterizes the birth of as a matter of debt to an Other. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche offers the image of the debt collector who will be satisfied with a pound of flesh. In the mark of debt on the flesh, expressive discovered “that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics” (61). Where Nietzsche would describe the creation of the self as a matter of turning forces against itself, Foucault would speak of a folding of the outside in order to produce interiority.

Donald in several places emphasizes enculturation as imposed from the outside: “the problem is our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside” (32). One of his strongest dramatizations of this fact is his discussion of Helen Keller in which he points out that individuals cannot develop symbolic skills in isolation. I cannot help, but feel compelled to relation this to Deleuze’s essay on Michel Tournier’s Friday, a novel which revisits the story of Robinson Crusoe. In the essay, Deleuze mediates on the difference that the absence of others makes and argues that consciousness, as such, depends on the structuring of the other which produces the dimension of possibility:

"But the Other is neither an object in the field of my perception nor a subject who perceives me: the Other is initially a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not function as it does. That this structure may be actualized by real characters, by variable subjects—me for you and you for me—does not prevent its preexistence, as the condition or organization in general, to the terms which actualize it in each organized perceptual field—yours and mine. Thus the a priori Other, as the absolute structure, establishes the relativity of others as terms actualizing the structure within each field. But what is this structure? It is the structure of the possible" (307).

Deleuze goes on to discuss several stances in modern psychology. Monism, roughly corresponding to the brain-in-a-box theory, posits the categories of the perceptual field as immanent to it. As Donald might put it, higher level perceptual functions are believed, in this view, to be hardwired. Another view, of a dualism, posits a relationship between the “perceptual field and the pre-reflective syntheses of the ego” (Deleuze 308). However, Deleuze will also disagree with this view. Donald, himself, goes to some length in his essay to point out that the development of symbolic skills cannot be thought of as solely individual. To summarize, what we recognize as consciousness is neither found fully formed in the structure of our brains, nor is it purely a latent capability selected for and “developed” by individual experience with the world.

In diverging from these models, Donald argues that “enculturation is the actual source and replicative carrier” of the “functional architecture of literacy and language” (27). Formal logic and language, these are the faculties we credit as human; however, in Donald’s revision they are no longer innate or located within the individual, but distributed and contingent to the programming and programs of enculturation. In Deleuze’s analysis if a dualism can be maintained is between the “effects of the ‘structure other’ of the perceptual field and the effects of its absence” (308). Without sketching out the particulars of the argument, Deleuze postulates two primary effects of the structure of the other. The first is that it carries without the possibility of categorical thought. The structure of the other distributes objects in a field and governs their transitions. Second, the other “assures the distinction of consciousness and its object as temporal distinction” (311). Or, to put it differently: “For my part, I am nothing other than my past objects, and my self is made up of a past world, the passing away of which was brought about precisely by the Other. If the Other is a possible world, I am a past world” (310). If the former provided the means for categorical thought and from it formal logic, then the development of a self with a past is the possibility for mnemonic technologies (and eventually, language). Together, they provide the prerequisites for history and consciousness—symbolic culture.