ch 5 the aspiring unconscious: the "arteous system."

7/28/2019 Ch 5 The Aspiring Unconscious: The "Arteous System."

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Chapter 5

The Arteous System:

Conclusion And Transition

The other is in me and in the midst of my very identification.1

[We] return as far as this structure in itself, thus apprehending the Other as

No-one, then continue further, following the bend in sufficient reason until we reachthose regions where the Other-structure no longer functions, far from objects and

subjects that it conditions, where singularities are free to be deployed or distributedwithin pure Ideas, and individuating factors to be distributed in pure intensity.2

Due to all their procedures, the ambulant sciences quickly overstep thepossibility of calculation: they inhabit that more that exceeds the space of

reproduction and soon run into problems that are insurmountable from that point ofview; they eventually resolve those problems by means of a real-life operation. Thesolutions are supposed to come from a set of activities that constitute them as non-autonomous. [The] ambulant sciences confine themselves to inventing problemswhose solution is tied to a whole set of collective, nonscientific activities but whose

scientific solution depends on royal science [here, Freudian, behavioral clinical andmedical psychology, Kantian/Husserlian and even Sartrian PhenomenologyMHS]and the way it has transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematicapparatus and its organization of work. This is somewhat like intuition and

intelligence in Bergson, where only intelligences ahs the scientific means to solve

formally the problems posed by intuition, problems that intuition would be content toentrust to the qualitative activities of a humanity engaged infollowingmatter.3

Blurred Boundaries: Whence The Aspiring Mind?

By now readers can see how we recognize the workings of the DC, IF and SP in our

ordinary living. Their machinics touch upon all the ways we arrange our relations including, but

not limited to: the ways we identify and order what is at hand by rendering psychic energies into

objects for use; all the ways we inscribe the hierarchies of certainties by which we have the

stuff that we will appropriate, manipulate and make into the artifacts of our living.

But still, for all that commonness and familiarity of their workings, these machinics are

not mechanical devices thatproduce our bedrock verities (or our grounds of knowledge). They

1 Levinas, Otherwise than Being(Pittsburgh, PA; 2009); p. 125.2 Deleuze,Difference &Repetition (op. cit.) p. 282.3 Deleuze and Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN; 2005); p. 374.


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comprise neither our cognitively synthesizing apparatus, nor our absolutizing, certifying faculties

(of Reason, for instance). And, for all the familiarity these machinics place at our disposal, we

have not suggested that the assemblages we have described are located in any organs or named

neuroanatomical structures. This is not an omission. The SP, DC and IF have no regard for the

origination of the surges of energy they embrace. The assemblages we describe do not only

work on energies that are prescribed and limited to sensory-defined data In these assemblages of

the aspiring mind, attention is paid to sensory data but the energies they engender are not given a

higher status than are the affects of the transversals, for instance. Indeed, the course of

emergences that we are following are oriented specifically to engender movements that counter,

contest and off-set the preemptory synthesizing that cognizing faculties and reason impose on our

engagements with occurrences in the milieu. Their machinics do not work on only specific kinds

of P/SS materials. The touch of the finger is as much a contributor to the DCs ingathering as is

olfactory sense or the utterances of other creatures or the words and images of other people. The

IF opens up an expansive domain forboth soundings that are heard as well as for those that are

inaudible but that still affect imagations. The SP selects and orders imagations that have

accumulated all manners of combination in order to accomplish a viable constellation of

individuated singular potencies.

The assemblages we are describing have to be considered to be of a different order. As

emergent P/SS resources that take up on the decision to honor, validate and nurture the

aspirational mindset, these assemblages bring into play, not the drive and will to knowledge and

truth, but rather the competence to enrich the self-organizing impetus. Instead of being oriented

toward knowledge that requires things, objects and proscribed causes, these assemblages discern

and articulate the potencies of singularizing and then individuating which allow for the generative

emergence of what had never been in play before. And then, these assemblages take up the role

of developing structured assemblages that harbor iteratively constrained free play and affiliation

such that the individuating singularization can transpire on the widest and most encompassing

bases that the P/SS resources of this living IS being (that is all of those resources, whose

productions are constituent elements and factors of the emergent assemblages) can muster (is

capable of generating, configuring and sustaining).

The separation between the outside world and its things-in-themselves, or objects

versus the inside comprising mental and emotional processesif such a separation is actually

ever accomplished, even by the knowing cognitive apparatus -- is blurred, and insistently remains


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so. These aspiring assemblages organize energies into engines of desiring and then aspiring life.

Their roles use knowledge and sensory data as one kind of material amid many other kinds that

concern it. Sensory and material knowledge, indeed, knowledge of past conditions of whatever

kind, is useful up to a point. This class of knowledge helps IS beings take their places and remain

there, or survive at that site (by enacting the actions, decisions and speech that these engines

drive) in relation to what has remained constant at those sites (or what these beings have

conserved of past conditions despite all the forces acting to disrupt them). But these assemblages

discern other forces that are in play at the site as well; and so these assemblages develop

competencies that no knowledge (of the milieu or even of the self) can reckon with, take

account of or repress. These extra-knowledge-based forces are the ones that change the attributes

and character of the site of the IS beings emergencethey are forces that determine the

increasing or decreasing complexity (and energetic status) of the site, and that also prey upon any

settled state of P/SS accomplishment or adequation to prior states of that site. Thus the DC, IF and

SP assemblages have to develop competencies that support individuation: that allow the IS

being to give way (give up its prior constitution, to some extent), so as to make way for what

comes, or whatever comes into its sway, while also keeping its singularizing impetus robust and

in an accommodating state of communication with the pressing energies (of all kinds) at the site.

So the best we offer to characterize the SP and its companion assemblages is to say that

the aspiring mind works in tandem with other more psychologically and behaviorally orientedoperations, and does so in a non-local, expansive and non-conclusive way. These assemblages of

the aspiring mind gather any and all manners of energies at the site of emergence and assure that,

to some degree or other, their modes of affecting are sustained, noted and allowed some degree of

expression. After all, it is these hidden, heretofore unappropriated (by knowledge, for instance)

energies that will incite new demands on the next iterations of singularizing self-organization.

These assemblages arise specifically to countenance, accommodate and then anticipate the affects

that are coming, that are incipiently and implicitly affecting the IS being, whether it wants to

acknowledge those affects or not.

These assemblages do not constantly assert themselves. The affects of these assemblages

come and go, they are strong some days and are barely sensed on other days; their affects are

sometimes vague and other times they are powerfully clear; sometimes they are dismissed as idle

day dreams, and other times they are taken as a call or a beckoning that cannot be ignored or

denied. And then, when aspirations are felt and are affecting our living, they touch on every


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aspect of what we had taken the world to be or what we had regarded as a viable engagement with

an occurrence.

SOME ORIENTING NOTIONS. These assemblages partake of, are matters of, and are

permeated by (or permeate) the instrumental, intentional and cognitive processes that are already

fully operationally effective. And yet, they are otherwise than these mechanisms of daily living.

They are of a different nature, character and manner of operation than the knowledge, knowhow

and savviness we use to make our way in the social, technical, academic commercial and other

institutional realms of our lives. Instead of assuring us of our righteous certainties, the aspiring

minds machinics refuse to settle for immediacy of any kind, for any length of time, as they seek

out ways to honor the human decision to guide its own individuating singularizing. Aspiration

remains in communication with the more behaviorally oriented P/SS resources, but also stands

apart from them. And so, experientially, we can say, aspirations may accompany other ways we

act out our ways, but usually does not ever completely dominate them permanently or in an all-

consuming way for the entirety of our living days.

And so the images of aspirations drifting in and out of salience, affecting this or that now

and then, sometimes stridently, sometimes subtly, sometimes unconsciously, all serve to

characterize these assemblages character. Not every moment of our lives are determined by

aspirations; not every moment of aspiration is all-consuming; and the rise of an all-consuming

surge of the aspiring impetus does tear us away from granting satisfaction or complacency with

any material or P/SS accomplishments we can claim. This schema thus describes a dimension of

living that is otherwise than, that is far afield from the attitude of going along to get along. It

describes the driving impetus of the desire to live as a viable IS being, the imagination to

envision something else, and the conceptual competence to bring these to expression and form a

site for engagement. That is, it describes the workings of aspiration that take shape as a

discernable and affecting P/SS resource.

In order to characterize the workings of these assemblages, there are images in our

everyday parlance that touch on what we are describing here. But we have reservations about

these nostrums as well.

Soul.The traditional notions of soul and psyche help us somewhat. They serve to

identify some of the feelings that these assemblages generate by binding together what are

otherwise diffused and dispersed (indeed diffusing and dispersing) affects. As metaphors, they do

get at the level, kind and quality of P/SS resource we are describing, that of an enveloping and


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encompassing, but not containing coherence to these affects; but they serve our purposes so

only so long as we resist concretizing them into factors of instrumentality. These notions work

for us by elevating to our awareness the energy and encompassing aliveness these machinics

gather, concentrate and press into the service of individuating singularization. And the notions of

soul and psyche also work for us by providing an of image, frames or arenas within which the

plays of energies vie and contend with each other in order to establish an IS beings way in the

world. The soul and psyche are fields in which vast energies are gathered (by the DC), freely

affect us, beyond our selfs control (in the IF) and then are wrestled into states that range from

acceptance, to equipoise to irrepressible rebellion (in the SP). These renderings thus remain

powerful poetical expressions of aspirations sway on our beings, provided that is, we refrain

from fetishizing them into psychological or mythic-theological figureswhether these be angels,

devils or quasi-parental figures (father, Oedipus, the virgin).In our schema these notions play out

as contestants in the arena of aspiration, standing in for the myriad energies, constellated factors

and transversals that vie for establishing ways toward a viable process that individuates the

beings singularizing, at the site of its taking a place, and in the time that its machinic iterations

encompass.4

Drive.Another way of thinking about these assemblages is in terms of the unconscious,

or pre-conscious psychological or psychoanalytical drives that are said to underlie (undermine?)

our conscious behavior. There is no doubt that taking up singularizing in a manner that includesindividuation constitutes a drive. In the absence of these potencies, the living being dies. Also,

if not for these potencies being at work, there would be, well, nothing (that we would know of, at

least). But once again, we have to refrain from placing this notion in the context of behavior, or of

survival or pleasure. The sense of drive that we can apply in our account of the assemblages of

4 To properly complicate our picture, just as the soul or psyche contend with external forces be they angels

or demons -- the aspiring minds assemblages deal with external factors as well. But these factors at work in these

assemblages are neither concrete nor are they specifically relating to any one being. The aspiring minds external

factors are qualities of energy that we have named, as neutrally as possible, transversals. These factors are not even

spirits, no less devils or demons that war against my own souls pre-determined goods or utopias.The transversals with which the aspiring mind contends are slight, faint, unassimilated nuances in effect at

the site of singularization, which, although of such subtlety as to escape the detection of any instrument, are

nevertheless incomprehensibly, incommensurably affecting, eve as they escape and/or defy any attempts to engage

them adequately or even competently (as in a combat). Transversals are not demons afflicting ones own soul, but are

excessive forces (always exceeding any machinic formation) that drive any and all individuation, for any and all

living creatures. In the case of humans aspirations, transversals present the emergent assemblages with multiple,

indefinite, unknowable and irrepressible demands for continuing the search for more expansive and more

encompassing ways to engage what occurs at the site wherein one seeks to take a place. The transversalsenergies of

other kindscontinually introduce new factors of strangeness and therefore threats to whatever way these

assemblages would, by virtue of their own machinics, accomplish.


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the aspiring mind is that of each being finding itself in the state of emerging, once and again, and

thus finding itself at its site in this emerged state. The IS being is thus pressed into emergence

and by no exertion that it has made. It thus finds itself there as what its own drives have

brought it to.

The assemblages of the aspiring mind do not do more than actively take up this emerged,

emerging and emergent state. What these assemblages do, however is to enact a beings

individuating singularizing by shaping that beings orientations and attitudesas focused

intentfulness, assertive will and inescapable values. These assemblages encompass their emergent

state as widely and as expansively as possible, and give shape to the means for doing so. In this

sense, by taking up this emerging as its condition, as its own manner of arising at the site as a

singularizing being, these assemblages are ourdrives, our own bondingwith emergence.

These drives thus comprise the taking up of the states of being that specifically move us

outof our settled states and into the situations our aspirations alone mandate. And so, these

strange drives do produce material results, but not necessarily the ones that our conscious, wise

counseling rationality would allow. And so the drives we speak of are neither instinctual nor

natural, nor an animalistic nature. They are drives in that sense that these forces act on us

beyond the reach of our reasoned conclusions; but they beckon to us from out ofa P/SS

resource that intends to enact more expansive and more encompassing engagements with what

occurs in our lives, and so does not intend to drive us blindly, atavistically into even moreconfining and narrow happenstances. This is the drive to become greater beings, not lesser ones.

Poetry, Myth, Visions and Other Means. And so, is there some traditionally coined

metaphorical figure we can call upon to concentrate our attention? Maybe there is no such figure

that would be adequate. What we are describing is certainly pre-conscious, in the sense that no

conscious factor is in play. And so, in a very specific way, what we are searching for herea

model that combines experience with a language hook or moniker-- is precisely what

cannot be summoned here if we are to keep true to our task of schematizing the aspiring mind.

Certainly people who lived lives in accord with these assemblages of aspiration have language;

but the people who are spurred to shape their lives according to the resources made available by

the machinics of aspirations do not have technical names or consolidated conceptions to rely on.

It is, to some extent or other, exactly such crystallized conventions that they resist. Instead they

express these affects in poetry, or mythic or symbolic forms as being the eternal conditions of

their lives, which they are always in the process of conceptualizing. The great and later myths,


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those of Dionysus, or the Orphic Mysteries represent some of the most sophisticated accounts of

the affects of these machinics as shaping and constraining the powerful forces that drive will,

aspiration and newness onto the face of the earth. The great visions and poetic passions of the

mystics form our more recent testimonies. Personally, I find he obscure and unsettling post-

modern philosophies (Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Blanchot, et. al.) and the great inceptual poets

(beginning with Hlderlin, and following in the tradition are Mallarme, Rilke, Celan, Jabs, and

Char, Stevens and Elliot, to name a few) to be my best guides here. And they tell me, in essence,

we are on our own.

And so, in a way, our depiction is mythic-poetic-visionary as well. We are applying

language and structures to these forces not in the presumption of medical or anatomical veracity,

but in the speculative, philosophical and aspiration sense of envisioning forces by which we are

shaped, but that we now also choose to engage. We are presenting these notions in a way that the

faculties of discernment and articulation that we have can open up to new modes of discernment

and articulation so as affect those very processes and keep them open to our most unsettling

aspirations, keep them open to the transversal that we ourselves have become: the beings capable

of undertaking facultative development.

The Arteous System

If we step back from the component-driven organization of our narrative, we can come to

appreciate that by now we have outlined a set of operations, a set of machinic assemblages that

self-organize so as to enact a bit of magic. This self-organizing process has taken an accidental,

incidental introverted folding of energies to the point of singularizing, and beyond. Not only are

the P/SS resources we are tracing able to establish its singularity in the milieu, but they have

coalesced into forming a capability, a means of organization such that it can affect its own

processes in order to endure and remain in effect as the site of its singularizing changes,

diversifies and becomes more complexor dissipates and dies. It has taken this accidental

forming of a singularizing happenstance to the state of remaining in effect at its site of emergence,

even as that site changes. We can appreciate that this combination of the three assemblages, the

DC, IF and SP constitutes nothing less than an emergence on the order of a symmetry break: this

coalescence constitutes the emergence of a competence that is unprecedented: that of

individuatinglife. By virtue of the emergence of the SP in particular, we now have in play a


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distinctive competence that establishes on the earth a means to discern, mark, elaborate and order

aspects that are most pertinent to enduring and surviving in a dynamic milieu.

Taken together and building on the affects that each aspect gathers, disperses, elaborates

and supplements, a new, single system, a new auto-catalyzing and self-strengthening mega-

assemblage is formed. I postulate that the assemblages we have described so farthe DC, the IF

and the SPare sub-assemblages of a larger system, which I call the Arteous System. This

system gathers all the P/SSs aspiring assemblages that set in motion a fully-fledged (but not

final) and competent way for humans to undertake individuating singularization. Because each

component of the system, each assemblage builds on, amplifies, organizes and stabilizes the

actions of the other, the individuating impetus can take shape in a way that expands and continues

the enhancement of that primal singularizing.

Because these emergent processes organize into a system, individuating singularizing in

the human form takes its place in the milieu. Bit by bit, experimenting in one way and then

another, over eons, this IS way of being also can and does become a matter for discernment,

articulation, production (of artifacts), actions (rites, rituals) and organization (determination of

value and values, laws, norms and practices) for subsequent human engagement. This way of

being takes its place and does unique and unprecedented things. How does this happen? Other

beings, similarly endowed notice these capabilities, recognize them, and name them. This way

thus becomes the way (of the people) and is then articulated, celebrated, ritualized and normalized(made into law), for all to see, comprehend and obey. From then on P/SS resources depend on

these practices as constituting the milieu of its emergence and thus as its conditions for

constellating. Going forward in this essay, we will be referring the established mode of

singularizing individuating that is accomplished by these conjoined assemblages as the Arteous

System.5

THE EMERGENT MACHINICS OF THE ARTEOUS SYSTEM. The Arteous System, as a

coalescing of three assemblages (and several transversals, at a minimum) is a complex site. What

5 Again, since we cannot think of this in terms of a sector of the brain or of a neuroanatomical structure, we

have to approach this phenomenon indirectly, and by evidence culled from other means, we might say. One way to

put this notion into a gathered perspective is to think of it as the mindset that formed the way of life o f early

civilizations and of other non-Western cultures that are still thriving. It is also the way of life of the figure of the

artist: thus the name of this system (the Arteous), as naming the driving P/SS assemblage that brings into a viable

mode of engaging occurrences (experience), an approach that both produces what is able to take a place in the flux of

living, and does so in a way that remains able to instigate more expansive and more encompassing engagements at

the same time, by virtue of the same productions, and does so in ways that always remain open to continuing

interpretation (discernment, articulation, and production).


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are we to make of it? What has it accomplished? Lets summarize what has gone on here in order

to generate emergent machinic assemblages that enact individuating singularization (and thus

engender the actions of an IS being in the process of taking its place as a living creature).

It has captured raw potencies in a centripetal ingathering that is destined tosingularize, by forming an instigating threshold (the DC).

It has separated raw intake from the individuating singularizing processes that willenact its taking its place at the site of its instigating (by the DC).

It has allowed for, and indeed opened up expanses of psychic space (first, the IF)so that captured energies can be enriched by differentials and re-dimensioned energies of

the onwarding transversal and these differentials of amplitude, intent and can be

incorporated into subsequent iterations of individuating singularizing processes.

It has gathered the strongest and most robust factors that support individuatedsingularization into a core that is dedicated to the self-making or selfing process (of the

SP).

It has formed a process in which energies bound for the enunciation of a selforganize and differentiate into regions, orbits of affinities in which certain categorial

relations can strengthen and become determining in their own rights.

It has greatly transformed the sounding transversals (the sounding milieu and thesounding field) into being a vehicle that supplements the surging energies in play,

allowing their effects to linger and thus strike up affiliations that otherwise might not

have been available. These sustained and supplemented energies can then be

communicated along a continuum of persistence and range of affiliations such that

objects emerge and artifacts can be produced. Categorial arrangements, laws and

expectations of conduct and speech can also enter into communicative consideration.

(The process of reflection is set on its way.)

It has given rise to the nascent impetus to form new transversals, s of its owncreation: language and thought. These transversals imbue each constellated moment

with a share of purely differential quanta, such that all the energies of the Arteous System

bear, carry forward, states in which the character of the forming self, its nature and soul,

remain in flux and continue to recalibrate its selective capabilities so as to encompass

wider ranges and varieties of occurrences from moment to moment. Thought, coupled


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with language, becomes a force in itself, pushing into any and every existent

constellation, including that of whatever states the selfing-pole has produced.

THE STRANGE,ASPIRING ARTEOUS SYSTEM. The notion of the Arteous System provides

us with a schema by which we can discern and then articulate an expansive course of

psychic/somatic individuating singularization, a course of development which opens its

formations so as to be able to engage with evermore diverse states of affairs, open to new notions

of its own ways and so encompass and participate in ever more diverse and complex (or more

elementary and reduced, as the case may be) cosmic milieus. The notion provides us a way to

take up the dual questioning human endeavor in a generative way, rather than in a confining,

controlled and prescribed manner.

When we keep our attention fixed on our intent, to diagram a schema of the aspiring P/SS

resource, or the aspiring mind, we can also keep it in view that the Arteous System is not meant to

describe a conventionally behavior producing P/SS resource. As opposed to the psychological

apparatus for action (including the mechanics of knowing and the drives to succeed against the

forces of brute nature), the Arteous System is an assemblage of the aspiring mindthat mind that

takes up the call to engage occurrences in ways that are more expansive and more encompassing

than our current competencies envision. The aspiring mind does not stand apart or even stand in

opposition to psychological mechanisms; the aspiring mind does concentrate, specify, become

directed and focused on executing intentional actions that affect their surroundings. The aspiring

person is, after all, a subject, that takes possession of proficiencies and acts on its objects; and,

taken all together, this subject generates knowledge about a world, takes possession of it, acts on

it, for its purposes, creating a new world in the meantime. The actions that the Arteous System

has to conceive and then enact are therefore most assuredly not the actions of that suffice for

behaving in the conventional world.

The knowledge that the Arteous System produces, for instance, is not necessarily

practical. The views of the world it articulates do not necessarily fit with the status quo; its

ideas are not easily absorbed into the ongoing currents of convention. The Arteous System is

hard to see because it does not stop at or rest content with what can be produced, actualized, or

made real. According to the conventional view, once the creative people have come up with

useful ideas, it is then time to take up these as hypotheses and experimental givens, and then go

to work, executing my chosen courses of action according to my needs and intentions (ambitions

and goals) to make something real. The Arteous System of the aspiring mind never quite gets


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to that point. At most, this mind produces an artworksomething tangible, but that does not

quite fit into pragmatic commerce. Or it produces great productions of otherworldly practices,

which most certainly are valued, even treasured, by many people, but, once again, also require a

large measure of detachment from the hubbub of daily life.

And, so, to the extent that we take the Arteous System of the aspiring mind to heart, as a

viable and insistent P/SS resource, we can also recast our views on other notions that have been

appropriated for and by psychological uses. We might be at a moment in our discussion when we

can draw a distinction between what the conventional accounts of mind and psyche have at stake

and what this account is driving ata distinction that we can grasp and keep in play as our

account proceeds. We can do so by touching on some familiar notions that while sophisticated

and erudite, are symptomatic of the form our conventionalized notions about the mind have

become. These notions include our usual conception of what constitutes an object, what our

unconscious comprises and sends forth into conscious actions, and the idea that combines

thought and reason. There are many other notions we could discuss, but these three are so

prominent in our discussions of the mind that looking into these two notions will be sufficient

to give us some orientation as to the workings of the Arteous System, as well as into the transition

that is on the horizon.

NOT DESTINED FOROBJECTS. First and foremost, it is assumed in the discourses of

science, psychology and philosophy that thepurpose of all of the minds workings is to provide

for realities that are stabilized and normalizedby mechanically repeated and reliably ingrained

psychic/somatic processes. A person can have, and is entitled to all manner of deviations in

dreams and fantasies, but once he or she begins to act, speak or decide, putting the ego into play

in the world at large, those deviations are smoothed out, repressed or at least controlled. Our

social and psychological sciences are primarily devoted to explaining and valorizing the

accommodating processes the mind undergoes as it takes up its responsibilities and exerts its

aggressions in the world. Our classical philosophical mission has been dedicated to valorize the

diversity of experiences (ones that make sense and ones that do not) by these standards of

pragmatic, productive and commercial intentions and values. These concentrations of effort

reinforce the notion of the mind, or an ego as a being a mechanism of reproducing and

implementing the occasional (and not too untoward) innovation. And. oh my, how we do laud and

applaud ourselves for this god-given precocity.


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ADIFFERENT UNCONSCIOUS. These assumptions distort our views of other aspects of

our lives as well. One such distortion, for instance, concerns what we call the unconscious.

Unconscious processes are conceived as producing emotionally charged images (libido, sexually

saturated) to which the ego (mostly) reacts or which it transmits with varying degrees of

adjustment to the world. Unconscious processes are depicted in psychological discourses as

generating images that are either out of reach (as active, as gods or as the phallus, or as passive,

as ideals) or are mangled from the start (by biographical or neuroanatomical afflictions). This

strange realm is accorded inordinate power over our lives, and in ways over which we have no

say, no less control. The unconscious becomes a psychosomatic faculty that is seemingly all-

powerful with regard to spurring on the egos drives into the world, but subjects us to a most

unflattering and unbecoming (of such sophisticated creature) pure animal energy, which does its

work in ways and according to patterns and instincts that while beneath our cognitive grasp also

escapes the machinations of such competencies. Even when this realm is elaborated by

explorations it its collective artifacts, which express categorial relations, emotionally oriented

attachments, and industrializable imaging, they are deemed to be autonomic and untouched by

higher faculties such as reason, or even speech.

If we limit our conception of P/SS functioning to the instrumentalist perspective, this view

of untamed, inaccessible and disturbingly affecting unconscious processes is attractive and

compelling. After all, what does sexual libido or collective unconscious symbols have to do with

producing a good widget, being an obedient wife or a reliable citizen? But in terms of aspiration,

this view is wanting. But if, on the other hand, we highlight the efficacies of the Arteous System

in instigating individuation machinics we get to see that this unconscious or pre-conscious realm

is far from being a matter of animal energy or collective symbols. Instead, in considering the

machinic assemblages of the Arteous System we see a facet of P/SS workings that sets into

action, that ignites our desire, that insists on developing an ability to learn and grow, to engage

our worlds more expansively and more encompassingly by establishing processes of

individuation. These aspiring, Arteous-engendered energies are not channeled into productive

activities constructed by other faculties, but instead are continually thrust into expanses (the IF)

in which they can be enriched by the immeasurable diversity of energiesold, new, gathered and

transversally elusivethat can, might, perhaps will, and by force of habit will not affect us in the

living moments that are on the way. By appreciating the affecting power of the dynamics that are

devoted to aspiration, here the Arteous System, we get to see how the drive beyond satisfaction or


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pleasure is not a death drive or instinct, but is instead, a welcoming of the incommensurable

and completely unprecedented into the fold of what we deign to make happen. It may well be the

case that the instrumentally oriented P/SS faculties are bounded by these sexually and/or

symbolically constrained characteristics, but that is not the case with the machinic assemblages

that gather these energies and constellate them into the force of aspiration. These latter P/SS

resources incorporate energies that re-dimension all occurrences and open P/SS machinics to

accommodate them, however they exert their affects, into the next iterations of individuating

singularization.

THOUGHT ANDREASON. Working with the notion of the Arteous System allows us to

formulate a different a perspective on thought than is commonly presented in the discourses of

pragmatic and productive (classical) philosophy. In the traditional and by now common sensical

notion, thought is aligned straight away with Reason. This Reason/Thought nexus is credited

(along with love and obedience) with exerting the powers of adjudication that unify, in each

moment, sensory data and language forms into viable objects. To do this, Reason brings into play

forces and competencies that are gathered from a realm that is far afield from the immediate

situation at hand. Thought comprises a moment of delay, a separation of unconscious process and

overt action, speech or decision, in which an active, separate, transcendental (if not completely

transcendent) and reflecting intelligence brings to bear the powers of recollection, education,

control and empathetic outreach in the form of categories, ideas and concepts. These humanly

adjudicated and validated instruments are deployed like a net, like a sealing agent over fleeting

events such that sensory matter remains in play in conscious attention, at hand, at the ready for

practical undertakings. These powers then enable a person, even one mal-affected by wounds

inflicted on the tender unconscious, to modulate and accommodate a wide range of influences.

Thought, as Reason, in this context, is thus closely, if not totally, aligned with the most

conformist, leveled, sanctioned and permitted rules that are in effectlaws, if you will. The most

common sense, and commonplace, the most universal of laws are the ones most readily

brought to the fore, of course. A person who exercises expressions that defy some of these

prescriptions is placed on a continuum of people who are outside the norm.6

This notion, of

6In this regard, Deleuze and Guattaris discussion of the alliance between so-called thought and the

State in A ThousandPlateausis most edifying. See pp. 374ff. Thought as such is already in conformity with a

model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs,

an entire organon. The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that interiority a form of

universality The exchange that takes place between the State and reason is a curious one; but that exchange is also

an analytic proposition, because realized reason is identified with the de jure State, just as the State is the becoming


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course, takes up a position completely at odds with our notion of thought as a self-developing

transversal that can never be contained, but only sensed in its differentiating, unsettling and

disruptive potency.

In the schema we are diagramming, that of the aspiring mind, we do acknowledge the

power of Reason, to be sure. I would even go so far as to accept the modern formulation of that

notion, the development of which was set into a torrent of motion beginning with Descartes in the

17th

Century, and culminating in Hegels formulation two hundred years later. But, of course there

is a but, in this schema, the description that culminates in Hegel, and in a form that remains

unsurpassed on its own terms, allows us our aspiring mind to flourish. When we appreciate all

that Reason enfolds and renders steady, vouched safe and absolute (even if only momentarily),

and when we note that our worlds keep changing and our P/SS resources keep moving along, we

can appreciate the need to move on, toseparate Reason from thought.

Reason may indeed be an accomplished faculty; and it may be accomplished in just the

way it has been delineated by those philosophers; and it may be that some elements of thoughts

productions can be siphoned off into what becomes Reason forming a valiant affiliation. But

thought, and I mean the active engendering of grasped and articulating thinking, is a far more

vast, expansive, dynamic and powerful force than these philosophies accommodate, as the

protests of Schelling and Hlderlin attest. In the aspiring mind, thought never succumbs to the

settled states that Reason casts as being the case; instead, thought at most concentrates into viable,

energetic missives of unsettling power. It is a psychically complex hybrid of rogue energies,

amenable soundings (affects of already dynamic re-dimensionings that have transpired) and traces

of the singularized context in which they are now situated. These complex missives bear a

message: there is yet coming what has never taken (its) place before. Reasons work is, no

doubt, to always confront and decide what to do with these errant and rogue assertions of psychic

force, but it is never of them, for them or about themuntil, that is the aspiring mind brings those

energies to fruition as viable forces in their own right. It is this effort at nurturing such rogue

ventures that we trace.

of reason. Always obey. Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at the center constituted by the Cogito, is

the State consensus raised to the absolute. It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of thought.

Etc.


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Out of the Arteous System

Our diagram of the Arteous System not only comprises many diverse elements, but it also

partakes of notions of how such diversity is sustained in a dynamically generative mode, auto-

catalytically strengthening itself even as it produces, projects and affects the milieu around it. TheArteous System is complex, not only because it has to account for the many diverse activities we

undertake as contemporary humans on a one-on-one basis. While that is certainly the case, there

would be little reason for a system of this kind, with its spacing provisions and it complex manner

of constellation to form if that diversity were the only issue. Many creatures have dealt with

highly diverse environments without resorting to such extremes. the Arteous System is complex

for another reason: its complexity arises out of an imperative posed to it by the decision which

founded the human endeavor, that no given situation be taken as final and that no constellation of

P/SS capabilities humans bring to a situation be regarded as determined, defined and complete.

The Arteous System is thus a complex resource that has been nourished and nurtured by

the peculiarity that any and all structured specificity in human sway is denied fixity (aspiration

denies it any fixity) and then, this perpetuated state of ambiguity is taken up, not as a matter to be

cured or terminated, but as an occasion to valorize and elaborate. Thus the Arteous System does

not do it work in order to establish correspondences with things in an environment (as does a

cogito, of either the Cartesian or Husserlian type), but instead, establishes systematic relations

that range over states of affairs such that, as insistently whole and intuitively active and

affecting, are anticipated, but not prescribed. it is a capability that rides a wave of a different order

than the physical, the biological, or even the mental or psychological. The Arteous System

regards the same materials as the P/SS resources that give rise to these material orders of

phenomena, but exerts its capabilities along a strikingly different trajectory than that presupposed

by the naturalistic ego. This is a system that drives toward engaging occurrences with

aspiration, in agenerative engagement, which rather than impose prescriptive realizations of

narrowly defined, past-bound prescriptions of a will to power, tat aspires to bring forth what has

not yet been conceived (or was conceived, but was declared to be impossible) and does so in the

attitude of giving way to the promise of these ventures.

The work of the Arteous System amounts to this: what has been unconsciously allowed

the room and the time to enrich with many diverse energies, needs to establish afootingthat is

also competent to produce certain kinds of actions, aspiring actions, that express what they, in

contrast to the more readily available actions, would set out to do. How are aspirations


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transformed from surges of opening and expanding energies into forces of (aspiring)

engagement? That is the problem which now motivates our account. To solve this problem, we

need to make a transition out of the SP and toward the more conscious processes we identify

with ego and reason, self-consciousness, faculties, and then action, speech and behavior. But how

do we solve this problem in a way that remains true to the aspiring mindset and thus does not

succumb to reduced and constrained instrumentality?

The easiest, and utterly wrong, way of proceeding would be to envision these conscious

processes in the ways they are given in behaviorally-oriented psychology or even in classical

philosophies, of either the Idealist (Kant, Hegel), Existential (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger)

or Phenomenological (Heidegger, Husserl) sort. These models derive from Kantian descriptions

of synthetic processes (a priori and a posteriori, as well as transcendental syntheses of the

Imagination) Freudian conceptions of ego (including the Super Ego, excluding the Id), as well as

Husserlian Phenomenological descriptions both of which arose at the turn of the 20th

Century with

the explicit motivations of depicting a psychic process that was as firm as the Newtonian Cosmos

and was firmly reliable as a solid basis for the truth of science and the declared norm for

socially bounded behaviorboth of which took the state of affairs of science and sociality as they

were at that time, as being the true and fully accomplished humanity. These are models of closed

systems. Their premise (and it is one premise) is that the individual human brain/mind/psyche is

enclosed in a container and once the impressions or data from the outside world is captured

by it (or once these impressions affect the individuals senses), there is no further interaction, and

the knowledge that we produced is strictly a matter of our own, god-given perspicacity and

precociousness.

OPEN SYSTEM. In considering the aspiring mind, we depart from any closed system

conception of the P/SS, including notions such as the thinking cogito, or the transcendental or

spirit-composed subject, or even the intentfully constituting man of scienceall figures of the

isolated mind that works on inert, at-hand nature. In its most generalized form, we imagine

aspiring as requiring an open P/SS system: one that in addition to developing competent flows

that orient, direct and carry out executive functions, also is never completely autonomous, and

which, within a range of continuity (but not containment) continually changes its selfing

constitution. The key to making this move is that we accept and envision the aspiring aspect of

the P/SS as operating within a plentitude and overflowing cacophony of surrounding and

encompassing potencies of infinitely diverse characteristics, amplitudes, compositions and


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expressions that never ceases to have its affects, and from which the aspiring mind never

completely separates (although it does pull back from the tumult sufficiently so as to organize to

some level of viable iteration, expansive assemblage formation and then figurally constrained,

facultative competencies).

The aspiring mind thus has imposed demands upon us that are different than those of

carrying out strict and minutely pinpointed calculations and techniques on ever more

nanoscopically measured verities. The aspiring minds operations demand that we encompass

what had not yet been countenanced in our philosophies. The work of the Arteous System can be

regarded as sufficient only when they find, mesh with, and/or resonate with a sufficient range of

potencies in that milieu to assure viable and vital connections and transpiring events so that

anticipations can be focused and then avenues for affirmation and accommodation (by the

existent IS being) are able to be accommodated in a sustained, enduring way. The intent of the

aspiring mind, and of the Arteous System in particular is to form an infrastructure between the

milieu and P/SS, a flow of interchange between the massively large and complex and the

localized and intentfully singularizing, so that certain engagements are raised to prominence,

while others are sequestered from that moments affects. The aspiring mind does not approach

the world as though it were an inert landscape of ready-to-hand materials, but engages it as a

vibrantly and expressive in its own right, comprising dynamics of dimension-opening onwarding

and singularizing, and all the coded, signing strains of place-takings our own singularizing beingexudednot to mention the irrepressible affects of transversals. The Arteous System, therefore,

cannot be considered as an autonomous actor, a subject, or any other kind of monadic entity

that miraculously enshrines and ever-growing encyclopedia of competencies right between its

own ears, within the bone-encrusted confines of its own brain. Instead, the Arteous System

entails a self-comprehension in which our P/SS resource is a sensing, sense-making mega-

assemblage that seeks out, locates (or not) complimentary strains on which competencies can be

mapped (spontaneously and in an exploratory, experimental manner) and then ventured as a

course of procession, projection and production.

This character of the Arteous System drives the account of the aspiring mind far afield

from the psychologically standard models salient features, which we listed above. This will

likely have a disorienting effect on the reader, as it has had on the author. What are we describing

here? What, exactlyphysically, neuroanatomically, psychologicallyare we saying occurs, or

does not occur. What is it that we are envisioning as being produced by individuating


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singularization in the P/SS? What can the materially inured mind, to which we have all been

entrained, latch on to as something that is affected, does something and then produces

something else? What is the hardware, the software? What do we consider to be he substrate, the

machines operations and the product of the operations? The difficulty is that for us these notions

just do not work, and by applying them, we miss the mark. These notions were productive in the

context of the 17th

early 20th

centuries, when, under the spell of Newtonian and monotheistic

limitations, we could envision ourselves as being marvelous and specially elected specimens of

special mission and perspicacity that was destined to have its knowledge encompass all of the

closed, monolithically presented universe.7

THE INTERMEZZO ZONE. we conceive of the Arteous System as doing its work in that

zone or moment of instantaneous upsurge that lies in between the denoted measurements of top

and bottom, maximum and minimum, nadir and zenith, that are depicted by our imaging devices;

we are envisioning those states of transition that a calculus can never quantify, that occurout of

the range of processed realizations that our current facultative constructions allow (no less that

our machines and instruments are able to detect, index measure and plot). When these moments

of transformation, which are escaping detecting measure, can be characterized, we might be

approaching an account that jibes increasing complexity with our physically constrained

instruments and their still atavistic accounts. Until that moment arrives (and it well might), we

have to envision what occurs in those moments, when the P/SS is actively engaging a milieus

moment/complex, by recourse to the notions that arise from self-organization study. These

potencies must only go so far as to form into assemblages highly diverse energies which are

able to affect what occurs in such a way that some measure of their individuated state remains in

effect; and also, at the same time, that means these assemblages are considered to be viable when

they do not require a monolithic and impervious entity (of a self-identified subject or a sovereign

7 I cannot offer succor or consolation to the positivist, materialist, reductively inclined ideologue. In place of

the neuroanatomical, biological, cogitative knower, we are generating a notion of the human endeavor as one that

takes its place, and no more, among (many) beings, forces and complexes, all of which are capable of complex

expression, which are enabled by vast networks of milieu-sensing and territory-forming technologies, and which rides

on vast, streaming and crisscrossing currents of language that gather up clusters of realizations all of which we then

transmit back into the milieu as ventures of new formations for subsequent engagement. While nothing in this

account is strictly biological or neuroanatomical, none of it occurs by means that are other than what those resources

providealbeit at a higher or at least unprecedented (on earth, as far as we know) level of organization, and one

that includes to a far greater degree than those take into account the resources that language makes available. These

processes we envision are, however, completely facultative as we mean that term.


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individual) to exert their affects, but can alsogive way to the larger ramifications they set in

motion and can encompass all of these moments reasonably, if not non-violently.

Beyond the Arteous System

But, as we have said, the process does not stop here. The workings of the Arteous System

initiate the processes of individuation, but the Arteous assemblages do not complete them. The

Arteous System opens onto vistas, but does not move in them toward those horizons. Like Moses

forbidden entry to the Promised Land, the Arteous System does its work valiantly, but remains on

the outskirts of what is on the way in terms of P/SS assemblages and capabilities. At its best, the

Arteous mindset remains in this state of release from reduced and static objectifications, but it

does not act in order to bring this release into a new mode of engaging with occurrences (other

than the articulation of this released state).

8

Now, to be sure, and make no mistake, the workings of the Arteous are completely

compatible with living side by side, indeed inside, the other, more productive, instrumental and

pragmatic aspects of the P/SS. Whole populations, cultures, creative figures and other people

have found ways to accommodate these wayward energies of the Arteous without having them

interfere with everyday production, commerce, morality and conversation. Religion provides a

good sink for these energies; as do intermittent creative outlets. Some people, unfortunately,

transpose these errantly expansive energies into deviant ways that hurt others and tear at the trust

needed to form viable communities and societies.

If anything, these forms of enacting the Arteous ways show both their creative and

generative reach, as well as their inherent flawas far as aspiration is concerned. It comes down

to this: the Arteous Systems drive to constellate around a stable core (of memorializations) finds

itself outstripped by the increasing complexity of the milieu. All the factors that people encounter

in their daily lives are outstripped by all the varieties of production and interpretations of

occurrences that increased population and increased abilities to fabricate new materials and

implement new ideas puts into play. Plus, with the transversals of onwarding and soundings hard

at work on the P/SS machinics themselves, the center of the Arteous constellations just do not

hold. Individuation has more work to do, in other words.

The moment we examine going forward is set underway by the accumulation of all those

instants when this being realizes that it needs to take onto itself the task of establishing viable

8 This is the mindset that is most artfully articulated by the Bodhisattva Nargajuna, for instance.


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ways that resonance with occurrences. We examine the fallout from the realization that these

ways that the Arteous has happened upon will not be given to the people any longer, and that

they have to shape ways to follow these traces for traits of viability and more expansive and more

encompassing machinics of individuation. It is the moment when this nascent and emergent IS

being realizes that it must develop techniques and processes that can territorialize, expand,

encompass, concentrate and stabilize its own ways. And that means finding what of its behaviors,

when affected by aspirations can generate affects that suit its new ways and can tolerate the

resistance, push back and inexorable and irrepressible refusal of the milieu to accommodate them.

The Arteous System has already prepared the key for finding and releasing such a

solution, but it will take a peculiar kind of attention to happen upon it. This attention has to be

searching for something quite strange: the solution has to encompass both some measure of

constellated viability that is organized to be robust and able to exert its affects, but also, this

solution has to keep company with the destabilizing aspects of occurrences so as to take them into

account as well. Here is where the energies that swirl, swarm and storm around in the fourth orbit

of the SP come into play. Whatever is assigned to this orbit has defined relegation to stable states

of affairs, and yet, what endures in this orbit, even in its cloud state, has proven to be able to

withstand at least some amount of turbulence and discontinuity such that their affects can mix

with other transversals (especially soundings), and thus can be both noted and constrained. They

may not last long, but some of these endure through a sufficient time, through sufficient numbersof iterations such that they might be accommodated by. Well, what?

And that is the question that drives us into the next stages of our works. For these

sounded-enshrouded, robust and insistent energies are scouts, probes set out in search of workings

not yet available to the P/SS by virtue of the Arteous System alone. These refusenik nomads are

out to singularize and establish their placeas is any constellated force that emerges from the

Arteous Systemand they will find a way to do their work, no matter how limited, how

eccentric, how contrary, how complex their solution has to be.

Here the transversals of soundings and thought provide an incredible (literally)

opportunity for further developments. By virtue of their supplementing and bearing attributes,

these factors allow for the persistence of strangeness, for the accumulation of characters, and they

do so in a way that enhances and clarifies their energetic status (range of affecting potency) such

that organization can take place. These combined factors engender what we might call an

intermediate zone, an intermezzo in which the aspiring P/SS can accommodate both signs that it


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knows and those that exceed it. This zone of differentials, a zone that detaches and departs from

the constellated truths of that the Arteous has rendered activates a search for a capability that is

dedicated to makingsense of change, alteration and strangeness. Here we begin the process that

entails what has been called self-consciousness, or reflection or conscious action, decision

and speech. It is also the time that we are set on our way to philosophy.

FROM CONSCIOUS TO INDIVIDUATING INTENT. What is now being demanded of the

aspiring P/SS is that its selecting processes become conscious and become so in a way that is

able to account for what its own capabilities have produced: the evermore intensive, diverse and

complex milieu of diverse human actions and ways, and especially the rise of language and

thought as loci for disruptive engagements. Individuation now has to develop resources in which

it is cognizant of itself, with which it can reflect on its capabilities and develop what it finds

there as its new nature or material. Of course this demand has been implicit throughout the

emergence of the Arteous System. Why else would a system such as this have formed that

captures and takes account of soundings, of imagations and thoughts? But now, the issue is not

just to discern this capability to do so (and give it away to the gods), but to realize and come to

grips with the fact that this ability has consequences that have to be accounted for in terms that

humans can adjudicate. This is a new demand, and not one that the simple complexity of the

Arteous System (with its one singularizing core) can accommodate.

Individuation that has to become conscious, that has to reflect on and then develop its

own capabilities thus has to engender new modes of selection, such as intentionality, will and

values that are not predicated on factors garnered from an ingathered milieu, but as a matter of a

vibrant milieu, and a process of individuation that, has to both venture and conserve the very

singularized being its machinics have engendered. It has to develop a way such that individuation

can resume at all: a way such that new aspirations can emerge and be taken into account, thus

impelling the IS being out of the concentrating, centering and constellating compositions of the

certain and competent, environmentally inured and scripturally (codifying its soundings) and

ritually (codifying its iterated practices) reinforced being the Arteous System has produced. All

the mind constituents of consciousness we see as so much language-entrained crystallizations

(affairs of State-affects), which, as named and placed into lawful arrangements, first as symbols,

then icons, then as identitiesas veritieshave to be overcome if aspiration is to continue; and it

if is to continue, it has to do its work of opening and re-spiritualizing in an even more robust form

than what the Arteous produced. And, considering how tightly bound and wound these Arteous-


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produced verities are, the resources that are developed will have to powerful indeed, more

powerful than anything that has so far appeared as a human way.

Lest this need for power be misinterpreted, we have to remember the course of

emergences we are following here. The aspiring mind, and thus the human endeavor,

distinguishes itself not as a matter of its technological proficiency at spreading its efficacy into

every nook and cranny of that milieu, of its ability to name and territorialize (colonize) every

manner of its habitat, but rather in its ability to remain an open system despite and in opposition

to any of the ways it establishes its territories, its efficacies, its modes of individuation. Our task

is to comprehend such a mode: one that acts not psychologically, but against any psychology of

its state of affairs; one that deforms its mode in order to reform its modes on the basis of pure

differentials of its own becoming, arising and passing away, on the basis of what it can form as its

thought.

Or we might say, the Arteous System forms the impetus of individuation in order to enact

something more akin to state of generativity, of regenerative potency that accords with its state of

instigation to begin with (at the DC); and so it forms the irrepressible kernel of aspiration that

even as our own capability, we seek to engage competently. What conventions call normal in the

technological sciences, in some of the academic disciplines, in the psychological applications of

common sense normality, we see as being instead, antiquated descriptions of validated states of

repression,psychosomatic shut down, conformity and (socioeconomic, ideological, religious

and State) control. They are not normalin the sense of what the human endeavor envisions at its

most salient edge, they are neither adequate nor productive of healthy and life-engendering

notions; and they are not conducive to a vibrantly responsive and responsible way of living on the

earth. At best, this represents a branchingof one kind of experimentation with human generated

capabilities, taken by one culture (and not by others), that has made some invaluable contributions

along the way, but that now also needs to besurpassed.

ch 5 the aspiring unconscious: the "arteous system."

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