"An example in case, taken from audition, would be the fact that neonates can distinguish recordings of themselves crying from recordings of other neonates crying." There is thus a pre-conceptual, and even pre-relational, self-recognition that precedes and conditions what we might identify as self-consciousness, as if the intimate face of things is already structured in some way, has its own proto-grammar. It seems as if this is related to temporal retentions as a component of present consciousness. For example, in being able to grasp a melody we must retain the prior notes and values in the immediate perceptual field of the fresh notes and values as they arise. Something is enabled to emerge into salience, to arise as a gestalt, or appear in its identity, via a pre-explicit pre-recognition, in a sort of bootstrap process. You don't need to go even as far as music to see this, it is there in the comprehension of spoken language. In this case the temporal moments of the individual sounds are finally merged into the meaning of the utterance, so that the contribution of the individual parts is not fixed until the final part has been completed. In the special and high-level case of the assembling of words into a sentence we say that the synthesis is ruled by grammar, but there seem to be more general proto-grammars that rule over every kind of temporal synthesis, all of which may be parts of a larger and very abstract grammar of experience itself. One might expect that there is something binary at the heart of this, say the first distinction of self from other, or this from that, but this would prematurely definite, and a loss of the inexplicit and extraordinary rich meaning-bearing possibility that is latent in such 'differentiation'. Understandably, language fails badly here - its wavelength is too great.