06 October 2008
A rhetorical invitation
At least, at a basic level, everybody projects oneself onto the world. By doing thus, one feels comfortable and familiar. The uncaniness of the world is tamed. However, because of this self-projection one also fails to take delight in the simple discoveries of the world, the things that constitute the world and one's own place in this world. One fails to notice the uniqueness of one's own vision of the world, one's "constructivism," since one has already compromised one's singularity in order to feel at home. One becomes ever so slightly: dogmatic. But then can one avoid this self-projection if one has already limited oneself? And still: who can avoid this self-limitation and still go on living?
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Perhaps, however, projection comes in different flavors, and these differences either close off or open up the possibility for the encounter with that which is wholly singular. Here's an old idea that you have already come across. What if one difference between one's project is understood in terms of extensive and intensive projections. That is, one cuts up the world so that each thing is divided up into quantities or extensive categories. In such a project, one more or less throws oneself forward along a predetermined line. That is, one's experience of getting drunk, to use a silly example, can be seen or understood extensively, as the steady increase in the level of alcohol in one's blood stream; but this understanding makes all new experiences resemble old experiences, with the difference being merely the location along the line, i.e., one ounce of alcohol, 5 ounces of alcohol, 25 ounces of alcohol, etc. But, instead, if one understands or projects onto the world intensively, then one remains open the the crossing of a threshold, and the introduction of something totally new. That is, think of the differences between anger and rage. As a person gets angrier and angrier, it is possible to understand that person as moving along a liner scale from calm to angry to rage and everything in between. Each interval is in principle divisible, and resembles every other interval. But if the angry person is understood intensively, then there is the location of a threshold between, for example, anger and rage. There is a sort of invisible line that is crossed, and a whole new manner of behavior is ushered in. To understand the example of an angry person intensively is to see this process as increasing amounts of intensity that give rise to wholly new actualities. To use a non-anthropomorphic example, think of the ways in which we can understand the changes in water. We can see water as merely moving along a transcendent scale from 0 to 100 or whatever scale is imposed on the actual events. But water can also be seen as the speed at which molecules move. So, as molecules move faster and faster or slower and slower, or, to put it another way, as intensity increases or decreases, there is a certain point at which the water reaches a threshold and undergoes a drastic change and becomes either ice or steam. So, reading the changes in water intensively, as the speed or rate of change (Deleuze calls these becomings), one remains open to the uniqueness as it emerges in the world. Similarly, if one's projection is intensive rather than extensive, maybe one remains open to the murmur of the wholly new rumbling beyond the threshold. Maybe.
Does this difference mean that one can be dogmatically projecting intensively? Sure. But there seems to be a fundamental difference between understanding or projecting in terms of intensities or rates of change or becomings, and extensities or transcendent scales or mere being.
Another way of speaking of this difference is to recall the difference between possibility/reality and virtuality/actuality.
Sure, I agree with you. Not all projections need be necessarily dogmatic. Hence my "invitation" to the other kind of projections. But at the same time, this invitation is an "existential" one... in the sense that it acknowledges how difficult it would be to "actually" carry out such a projection in one's existence, in one's concrete life. The mere conceivability of this kind of projection is not enough, the problem is actually "doing" it. Of course, it is already being "done" in the way water changes to ice or steam or vice versa... such changes and "becoming" are what constitute life's process... and moreover, all the "changes" in human beings could also be "explained" in this Deleuzian way; but the question remains, existenially, not one of "explanation," but of "being."
I don't believe that we can ever avoid our self-projections (or our identities and modes of being) or those self-limitations of which you speak. On the contrary, we must engage them. By engagement, I do not mean passively submit to them or continue to live by naively embracing such dogmatisms; rather, enter into the dialectical struggle to transcend such limits and self-projections. Of course, you are correct that even in such an effort to see anew and uniquely we effect a form and fall back into the predictable dogmatism that imposes self-limitation. But, it is in the process of struggle that glimpses of our uniqueness emerge. In the wrestle to transcend "one's own place in this world" do we approach new horizons of being.
A concrete example would be my first marathon (and everyone since). The struggle to move beyond limiting conceptions of self that told me I could not complete the distance left me fatigued and exhausted in ways I never experienced before. Once I finished, I found myself newly conceived on so many levels. Part of the reason I still pursue marathon running and strive to complete the distance with even faster times is to explore this process of becoming in such a visceral and physical way.
Contrary to the Hegelian ideal of a new synthetic mode of being coming out of the dialectical struggle between dogmatic trends and transcendent horizons in self-projection, I submit that the struggle is the answer. In this way we do not ever escape the dilemma but it is also this mode of existence that defines us as human beings.
Couldn't agree more. Even if my words sound more idealistic than they are. Struggle is indeed the answer, but it is also a question of recognizing that it indeed requires a certain unique *type* of person who is even capable of transcending "one's own place in the world", who is even capable of struggling. For, as you seem to concede, each transcendence is also a mode of self-limitation. And then it is a matter of investigating whether this self-limitation has in itself something which can overcome itself (of course, in the Nietzschean and not in the Hegelian sense) in order to enact this ever-recurrent play of creation and destruction. This unique type of person then could be seen as limiting himself only so that he has an occasion to overcome himself -- expressed more idealistically, this person has not limited himself in a strict dogmatic sense at all.. he has always already gained a certain distance even from his self-projections...
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