Not just a subject but a human being. Is this phrase a label or a description? Take its second word as a gerund, a verbal noun, then the first word is the subject belonging to that verb - as to say that this phenomenon inquiring into itself is (the) Human be-ing, as to say that its existence is act, and the kind of act in question is existential, and what expresses itself through or in that act in every single one of the multitude of instances in which it arises, is a universal subject called the Human, or pure humanness, or something more general still of which the human is an instance. Is the grammar an emanation of the metaphysics or is it the other way around (surely more likely?) that the metaphysics is an emanation of the grammar? But the tendency to think of the grammar as more basic, as say an evolved instrumentalism, begs the question of what it is that makes a grammar, any grammar possible - what is it that puts fire into a syntax so that it can get off the ground in the function of selection, of the ordering of chaos? What enables signs to signify? Say all you want against logos, something still needs to do its job. No metaphysics without grammar, fine, but look a little deeper and you'll see that there's no grammar without metaphysics. Nothing ever gets reduced (away); if you think you've done that you've only concealed what embarrasses you away into the  background. And that's what's happening here, willy nilly, no matter how much distrust you think you bring to the party. 

It's not that complicated, really. Many philosophers have got it just about right. And not only philosophers who might have reasoned it out, pretty well, brandishing the sword of reason, and ruthless with it, but poets and adventurers too, and innocents who've stumbled into it, who have undoubtedly experienced something and are eager to share it with you. All their doctrines, reports, systems or just clever hints, their maps and markings, veritably glow with it. There's a particular tone that's easy to recognise, "the hum of your valvèd voice", what you've always known, vast tracts of childhood come into view, and you go darting after it, scenting prey and down the rabbit hole. Then there are so many twists, and the glow doesn't fade, (or does it get mixed up with other kinds of glow, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary motivations, straight from the heart) it's always just around the next corner, and you exhaust yourself without ever coming face to face with it. The thing that is not a thing keeps arising as a thing, the place that is not a place keeps arising as a place; you want to run through all of them, gather up a glittering treasure, feel you're getting somewhere at last. A life's work, a colossal waste of time.

Why should self-inquiry be modeled on impersonal research, scientific or philosophical? Why strive for precision, unbiasedness, the careful disentangling of confounds, and other scholarly virtues? Why not decide on a political 'intervention'? You ask, 'who?, whom?', that is, you discriminate subject from object; you ask 'cui bono?', that is, expose who it is who ultimately 'enjoys' your experience? These are not abstract questions, everything is at stake in them, you are nothing if not a revolutionary. And you must be ruthless, because if you don't retain the initiative and neutralise your opponent by any available means, then he will do it to you - and you will be left holding on to a futile 'spirituality' and a stinking heap of good intentions.

Every attempt to reason about politics fails through the lack of a non-political starting point - this in common with any discourse rich enough to reflect itself, but somehow more so in this instance, since the reflection is so multifarious. It is not up to an interpretation to demonstrate its freedom from ideology, this could only come about if it were of no use to any party, in other words if it never existed. Nothing is what it appears to be in this context because its being is determined by its strategic utility, which varies according to the pre-existing interest which mobilises it. Whoever gets to it first gets to co-opt it. In this way it provides a severe paradigm for the mind, not its normal state, perhaps, but an exacerbation, a sort of psychotic mode, which can never be ruled out. Less obviously, the mind can't be reasoned about, or reasoned with, because there's no getting outside it. No motives are revealed but there is nothing which is not motivated.

The political, which is neither wholly real nor wholly imaginary, however you want to take it, has the distinction of being immortal, and in that sense belongs to the realm of the gods or the undead. It demands blood sacrifice, endless appeasement, and never forgets. In this sense it is hard to distinguish from the unconscious, both personal and collective. What we see is an endless affray from which voices and faces emerge, fleetingly mostly, but also in horrific ascendancy. Nothing is ever finished with, ideologies are the scarred and vengeful angels that repeatedly rise from the ashes. The unconscious is never emptied out, the system of things that bears a paradiso also bears an inferno, tightly interlinked. The entire system is imperfectly reflected in every node and data and noise cannot be separated, it is the bad infinity behind every good infinity.

And if you barely understand the mind still less so do you understand what the stakes are in political discourse, or the political imaginary. Is one a distorted mirror of the other, and if so which of which? Conflicts of rival powers, arguments about law and the status of law, the legitimacy of the resort to violence, or the need for or the inevitability of revolutions. Reasons, justifications, resentments, alliances, controls, hierarchies and hegemonies - political complexes which depend on narratives and which define and are defined by their agents, the collective identities, which they express by way of complex histories and strategic contexts. Can you ask of your own situations, 'who, whom?'? - it seems as if you do nothing else. A close embrace of the past with the future, ideal and revelation - to work towards the realisation of a vision of what is, or what ought to be possible. The order which exists and which needs to be refashioned, fundamental discontents and the distribution of benefits - you are within the picture but also outside it, being free to choose your idols, to decide which sacrifices ought to be made.   

The more impersonal, the more abstract and the less real. There is an impersonal ecstasy because there is a passion (fatal temptation) for impersonality, but there is no impersonal passion. The particulars of the thing, the most particular are also the most personal, the penetralia. You go as far in as you can, as you dare, there is no limit. Not furniture but flesh of the world, you are neither innocent nor a bystander. It is not mathematics, it's about you, inequivalent, unsubstitutable, personal, neither singular nor plural, and the moment you speak you interpret. But to do so in what you take to be impersonal terms is to tie yourself into knots.

 t

If there is no interpretation of interpretation then time is simple interpretation, fulfilling its role as the inexorable registration of experience, for experience, in experience. It coordinates potentialities, distinguishing a first from a second and a third and an n-th visitation in events. Every experience can be returned to, but the one who returns takes its pass from the registry and if it has a motive, if it is drawn from its circumstance, if it re-quests the pass, then what it re-ceives is stamped with the coordinates of the intention, is coordinated with secondary or ternary or n-ary instance, with the entropic flow of its effective difference in the spreading panoply of interpretation. Because there is a key to every first instance but it is not given to volition to grasp it. This is a way of showing how natural it is that there should be experience of eternal presence, of Proustian memory, of time present in time past, and that it should be delivered with perfect elusiveness, perfect inexperience.

Everything said of intentionality is true of the act of interpretation, or equivalently of signification: directedness, horizon, noesis, noema, and so on, and the besetting flaws in the theory of intentionality dissolve since they arise from its deficiencies relative to a theory of interpretation - for example intersubjectivity or empty versus full intentionality. But a friction remains between the coasts of interpretation and signification, the former suggesting idealism, the latter materialism - a friction that is fertile but not 'deconstructive' - interpretation does not constitute. But this is not said in favour of a theory of interpretation, rather pointing towards the nullity of it since any lacuna or aporia in a world of interpretation is always already a matter of interpretation. Or said another way, there's no point in interpreting interpretation; if you think you have to do so you haven't yet grasped what it is that is happening, or perhaps you err in thinking that some thing is happening at all.

As if things are somehow there behind a veil of signification, or else, not things but their absence in the place where they ought to be, and so on. To peel away the signs and find the reality, the signified in all its fearful sublimity behind their ghostly doubles, behind the unrelenting mind - something like this is one of the aims of art, as if it were a bullfight and you want to feel the horn graze your flesh as it flashes by - but what you take to be the real is not it at all, it is the act of signification, the only thing unrepresentable in a world of signs. The same experience, you say, can be interpreted differently and you want to find the words which will draw its anchor, set it in motion, release it to the currents sweeping over on all sides. But the experience is nothing but interpretation running against its own grain, making things of it, where none are intended.

The term consciousness does not refer to a some thing but expresses a difference in experience, or the coordinated family of such differences. It is something I know that I have because of the distinction perceived or inferred between things as they are and how I take them to be, and again the ground for this understanding is in the interpretation of changes purely on the side of how I take things to be, on the side I call subjective. These include both changes in state of mind, which are changes in the relationship of the constituents of the subjective world, and changes in the perspective determining the subjective world effected by a more or less voluntary change in what is taken for granted, as for example when I move between the natural attitude and the reduction to phenomena. The total situation becomes increasingly complex as the various and inescapable levels of representation are incorporated, and it is tempting to try to resolve this complexity by employing the term consciousness as the unlimited ground for all experience, including my own acts and the 'I' itself (now thought of as improperly inferred). This strategy leaves a gap, or rather, it fails to close a gap, the lacuna residing in the fact that it is always my experience that is sought to be illumined. An alternative strategy then is to take the 'I' as fundamental, as the unsignifyable act of signifying, as pure interpretation without external reference, and consciousness and all of its associated phenomena, experience in short, as secondary, imagined, dreamed or given. The one who would parsimoniously rewrite the cogito as 'thought is' has it exactly in reverse, 'thought' and 'is' are the disposable inferences.

In awakening there is the certainty that this potentiality exists unattenuated in 'every sentient being'. How is this possible unless the awakening is integral to sentience as such, is in no way related to the content or condition of such sentience? To the extent that this simple equivalence seems impossible, you are surely mistaking some sort of projected splendour for the essence, looking outward to experience or to assumptions about the objective existence of others. That there is some sort of error in understanding, a confusion of categories, may be true without the consequence that the cause of this is a kind of stupidity, a substantial and negative attribute of beings, a kind of agency or inveteracy. The error is no one's error since it is the attributing of existence and agency to the error itself. But faced with this intuition you still find yourself wanting to do something about it, to find some good use for all your pent-up cleverness.

One idea on seeing how the questions that arise over the act of interpretation call upon further interpretations is of circuits of interpretation without end. The perceivables and conceivables that seem to exhaust the furniture of your world are results of the elusive act of interpretation, which doesn't hold still so as to be itself perceivable or conceivable. Instead you gesture towards a certain deflection, or evasion, too feminine for metaphysics. You draw a wealth of play in this line against the master until long after, when it becomes clear that it is fool's gold and you are the fool trading one master for another. Consider instead refraining from all interpretation; each act is a little window, a transparency, a flush of light, a puncture. And without looking through it, perfectly relaxed, simply see what is on the other side. 

It isn't a story, the aerial view is the only view. You never mistook it, your error was to imagine another (altogether better!) aerial view in some sort of outside that all these faces were telling you about, which had to be the real one, and you bit hard into it. If it isn't a story there's no one in it. Well, have a good look around, do you see anyone? Have you ever seen anyone? If it's happening it must be happening somewhere, if there's an inside there must be an outside too, and you could be standing there watching it seethe like clouds of coloured light, but since there's no such outside there's no such happening either. Call it experience, event, it's all the same. Realise you are completely inside and the inside falls away like the proverbial ladder. Only gestures are left, inarticulate grunts and yawps; the first distinction is suddenly not there, not not there - it's the only thing it could never be: you if any one is left to ask.

How to maintain the dog? It was an old face yesterday, stringing beads on her golden thread. Every new planet drains some vowed fireside haul of splinters. Parade of goatees, subprime aches fingering matinees across as many knees of folded oars. Barking mad shingles over any newcomer gone for fifty-eight. Mirror nylons weighted with confetti establish a bumper year forward to a lake isle. Poor discalced anemone streaks with pebbled glass finally at one. A Sabbatarian roast lingered collectively and washed in new blue inception.

A nest builds a nest in chaos, it stays empty, it's more like a love-nest, it stays empty, the nest builds a nest. There is an invitation to a party and you carry it to the door, but no one can remember who you are or if you were really invited, 'we sent out lots of those, everybody got one'. First find your colours and then nail them to the mast. The wind will lift them, under sun and moon, if only you can find them. The gesture is both delicate and precise, it closes the circuit. Look the circuit is closed, that's why it was called a circuit, that's why the gesture.

This never gets written about, it has no lyric. A kind of vehemence without an iris, it jitters through a buzzing fluorescent ether looking for its shame. That's enough convergence, now let's play. Vomit up all you haven't eaten. Cats and houses, once circled the park, and a tiny avenue of names. The back end of different shades of yellow, never before and never since, dried skin rings in E major, sustained just past breaking rank. Tall robots biting, that was ink. And this now, this now, snow swatter injured bell. The prettiest name for no.

Shadows of trees, gentle featherings of light on the floor. A dusty afternoon of no consequence, detritus of a life, the monotonous hum of a diesel, your foolish heart defeated, falls silent.

De gustibus... Modern relativism when not treating all perspectives and dispositions as freely chosen determinations, or arbitrarily determined choices, constitutive of the self, considers them as wholly private responses akin to pure sensations in the obsolete empiricist sense. If it is less than consistent in simultaneously policing the results with escalating rigour, the contradiction is resolved by subjecting the judgments of consistency to the same uprooting. In all this taste becomes a psychosensory event rather than an index of aesthetic cultivation, although again the two are reconciled in the cult of the gustatory, side by side with the reduction of morality to taste. But what can you say about a discrimination of flavours other than to publish tasting notes, those enigmatic mappings of flavours onto themselves? The exalted place of these 'notes' is the contemporary destiny of the sensus communis(t), bearing in its intimate reflexivity all the metaphysical burden formerly weighing on the 'subject'.   

All the splendid negations and negations of negations of the mystics are quite fatuous, whether they are meant deconstructively, that is, intended operationally to paralyse covert metaphysical assumptions, or phenomenologically, that is, metaphorically as indications pointing to the content of states of consciousness otherwise impossible to indicate, as if they were proofs of the moon. The problem is that they presume a scene where a solitary point of view is attempting to orient itself to what is. This picture is at fault not because the scene is begging for negation, but because of the presumption of solitude. Where there are words there is more than one agent: there is the uttering of the words, the forging of sound or meaning and there is the reception of the words or sounds. It is not a scene of instruction but a channel of communication or interpretation which precedes any and every intention that it bears, and the channel itself is not, but is itself meant and so subject to the same predicament. Discoveries are made, but they are necessarily unmotivated, because prior to any one who figures in them, whether in the place of truth or of the adventuring soul.

Repeat any act and it falls away, decays into lifeless habit, a corpse for distractions to feed on. You can piously ask if repetition is possible, and doubtless it never is, but it is enough to think you are repeating something, enough to think you know the way. Repetition, to conjure the primary event back into life, because there's always a first time, but when it occurs you are as little able to know its firstness as you will be to recognise the finality of the last time you enact it, whenever that time comes. If you know that it is the first time then you must have anticipated it, and so when it is happening you are a little off to the side, you overflow the event with your indecorous mind. Or else you only know it afterwards, in which case you are aware of having to carefully construct the story of the event. But it can also happen that what repeats is always the first time, but for this to happen you must have been hungry for a long time, so that all hope of satisfaction was given up.

The frail shoulders of present consciousness are taxed with bearing the entire squabbling and dishonest edifice of the enduring self. It doesn't completely recognise its oppressor, not only because so much of the self is veiled under tangled defenses for all of its official secrets, but because the self has no face, it is mask after mask, some of them even seeming quite trustworthy, but all of them somehow bureaucratic. No wonder novels are so appealing. And the biggest of the self's secrets is simply the fact that it will die. Present consciousness and the self depend for their existence on each other, but the symmetry goes no further; all the needs and drives, all the motives and capacities for endless improvisation, for quests for love or success or singularity or enlightenment, all the plots, belong to the psyche, to the self in action. It is the multi-dimensional world, immense and endless, and yet it still takes some trickery to place at the heart of consciousness the conviction that it is nothing but the leading-edge, the ranger, the agent, wholly owned and identified with its employer, its controller.

Everything is saturated with meanings and yet if there was not some pure sensory element or auto-affective quale prior to meaning then the whole edifice would implode - or so it seems to insist. That there is something direct and prior to meaning is an essential part of the meaning of meaning - to do its work for meaning this directness must already belong to meaning, which implies that there are two kinds of meaning, a positive meaning which is oriented towards coincidence with itself and negative or anti-meaning which is oriented towards the abolition of itself. It seems that these two apparently opposed trajectories of mind support each other in creating the world of your habitation. Naked conception is as impossible as naked perception, but it is the relation of the two which is unnameable. Or what if you allow them to devour each other so that nothing is left - and then look and say what you see! 

The mechanism of repression, or more broadly those of defense, do not function via censorship, that is, by controlling what can pass across a border, but by altering the way in which consciousness functions. It is something like tuning a receiver to a certain frequency, or picking a particular voice out of a cacophany. Alternative neighbouring voices are not removed but merely attenuated, a kind of feedback loop holds attention on the selected thread. If the selection as to what will be brought to the foreground is a functional one made through the feedback mechanism, then it is also subject to the many different variables such as belong to such a feature. Apart from the need to exceed a threshold of coherence, there is the breadth of the window and the sharpness and stability of the central focus. Compare dreaming mind with waking mind, for example you see that the window is far wider and the contents sharper but more evanescent - all this because attentional feedback works differently. As well as this, there are changes in the band to which it can be tuned, which correspond roughly to the (psychological, not political) sense of the terms higher or lower consciousness. The point to see consciousness as a means and not as the end, means that mistakes itself for the end. It makes sense to ask, What is conscious through you? because it is not self-evident at all.

Like intention and purpose desire is another term that can't be flattened out. It's no arrow, it's at an impossible angle. And so there can't be a calculus of desire, or desiring machines, except as catchy titles. So, there's no self without the disequilibrium of desire, and no desire without a body, and no body without matter or mattering. Looked at straight on you are sure it was an illusion, but then it doesn't fade on exposure but grows perversely stronger, like enchantment without a sorcerer. Of course it differs from its civilised cousins, intention and purpose, because it rides you, giving birth to you again and again, in ever more indiscreet forms. It comes at you from the side, from a sacred blind-spot in will, and you don't easily step into it. It is fresher than you are and if you take it on it comes over with a jolt, 'Ah, ...ah!', like suddenly jumping into cold water. Not a warm bath at all, that's reserved for the desireless state, something you can only get to by satisfying it.