Sunday, July 11, 2010

self? (part VIII)

After going a considerable distance toward overcoming the Cartesian split by recognizing body as self, that there is a bodily form of memory, and that memory is utterly dependent upon body, the final two species of content reintroduce a bastardized form of Cartesian dualism into the heuristics, the justification being that it is a useful but ultimately false dichotomy. The remaining content types constitute a dipole, with phenomenon acting as the (earthly) engaged, experiential, phenomenal pole and impression acting as the (heavenly) abstracted, higher order, disengaged, mental pole. The Greek word phainomenon means “thing appearing to view.” Likewise, articles within the archive that can be classified as phenomena are literally those living experiences of being that are present to you in the present. These momentary articles of the archive include all of one’s perceptions, are the objects of awareness and reflexive awareness, and in sum amount to the phenomenological experience of being you. Impressions on the other hand are those dispositions, values, fantasies, propensities, desires, fears, beliefs, etc which are each in their own way the byproduct of one or more of the other species. Just as Derrida’s Archive Fever was written in response to the Freud archive but subsequently becomes an ineluctable part of the Freud archive, this fear is a consequence of that memory, this expectation is the byproduct of that perception, this value is the cumulative effect of these memories plus this body plus these prostheses, etc. Upon closer analysis, the dichotomy between the tactility of phenomenal articles and the intangibility of impressional articles clearly breaks down since dispositions, fears, and the like condition experience and one’s phenomenal experience can be synonymous with a fear, belief, or disposition. For purposes of discovery, however, in seeking access to the archive and discovering its contents, these categories will prove quite useful.