Experience is an act or performance in which there is an alternation of augmentations and resolutions of intensity. The intensity defines the medium of meaning, the resolution of tension defines self-reference. Everything experienced as objectively known assumes this status because of the place it occupies in that circuit of the self which is the appearance of this act. The stuff of experience, the furniture of the world is this phenomenon of a return of the self to itself. But the self has no reality outside the performance, it is the means by which the structures resolve. Resolution borrowing the character of self-reference because of the prior transparency, the mere presencing which comes to seem as if it is a latent understanding, a pure act of self-presence which we miss-call consciousness. It is invoked as the subject, equally aptly by coarse textures of thought as by fine ones. In the former it is the kernel of anxious or melancholic self-concern, in the latter a detached enjoyment revelling in its superiority to its occasions.