Even if what we call consciousness takes its rise from feelings that accompany bodily tropisms this explains no more about it than the way that the feeling of the body provides an anchor for what must be by its nature far more fluid. This other thing remains nameless because it has no world, and indeed it is only through the intervention of bodily consciousness that a world first comes about, so that this latter forms the screen or the frame in which everything is projected. World here has to be understood as the necessary correlative of home, which is perhaps the more fundamental term. We can observe this in simple forms of life with little or no nervous organisation such as worms, ants and snails, and indeed what is a single celled organism but a kind of intentional microcosm? More complex worlds are built up in concentric layers but very strongly mapped one into the other so that although the layers may be distinguished it is impossible to locate any experience wholly within a single layer, or indeed in anything but all the layers at once, including those we do not yet have an inkling of. In this way we have the notion of different interpenetrating worlds, where each world represents, with its own drastic foreshortenings, the possibility of a projection of the unbounded totality. If the external world of objective but relative space and time is a particularly successful refraction of the world of bodily consciousness, achieved not without considerable if largely forgotten effort, like language, it is not the only possibility. The worlds that we inhabit in dreams seem to be located in precisely the opposite direction, relative to bodily feeling, as the outer world which they mirror and parody.

Bodily consciousness is depthless because in it there can be no spatial cues; the various modalities generated by the different ways that one felt content can relate to another, or run off in time, are themselves inner feelings of the same kind as the contents they govern. Feelings which join together simply form molecular feelings without calling forth a need for a space as the domain for their various plays of succession and recurrence. There is however another kind of inwardness that does demand spatiality, and this is of the kind in which the point of observation, normally latent and seeming absolutely constant, undergoes alteration. It may either be experienced as rapidly receding far back from where it was, being loosed from its anchor in the bodily sense of the head or of a tiny chamber just behind the eyes, and now - still a point, but free - rediscovering its native element in a vaster, darker, more living space behind the world, or else its punctilious character is shed and the centre of consciousness, the fundamental self-knowing seems of itself to be spatial. There is a realisation here that the ordinary experience of external space as much as its counterpart the experience of spaceless bodily feelings are stabilised by the notion of a pinhole view, of the witness assimilated to this aperture as if it were not merely the point of a passage from one mysterious mode of experience to another. The external idea of space and even its abstractions in mathematics are seem to only exist as metaphors or reductions of this living space.

The mind feels simple, as if it either outwardises or inwardises, doing one at a time, when actually it does both at the same time by mapping each onto the other, in incomplete ways. It makes partial maps of a field of partial maps, and if each envelops the other the inward does so more readily - which may be the only thing that defines it. But what again is inwardness like? It consists of parts which never exist side by side and so cannot accumulate into a totality, they are plural but the order in which they become salient matters. One inward element forms the fringe or horizon of another, horizonal elements are multiple and form significant combinations in which their individual contributions are merged; a chorus in other words, persistence of the chora no doubt. This chorus is in turn not differentiated from internal bodily feeling reaching back into a sort of active unconsciousness, or waking dreamless sleep. A bodily sensation can be the locus of attention and become spatialised in the perceived body, and this attention will fade leaving only the vital trace of that spatialisation. For the most part inner feeling is a sort of musical copresence in experience. It touches on the paradox that whenever we succeed in exposing what it going on in what appear to be most mindless, ordinary and distracted moments of life we come upon the richest, most poetic contents. Degree zero of waking consciousness, the ordinary unreflective on-goingness, is just this absorption in the music of the body - density without depth.

Most of the time his lucubrations fell into the basket of critique of life. He considered alternatives and made economic calculations, expressed his askanceness and pushed the show further along; it was the characteristic process of a persona, a distinctive inflection of the process of every such one in general. Limited in the power of fresh observation, mind over-drawn, seriously in debt to his brain, he would sink back into internal bodily feelings, being-here as animated stuff, thinning out to infinity. There was a whole subjective cosmos, an immediate and all encompassing gathering of the senses and their 'feeds', vast but at the same time minuscule and placeless. In this way the outer was naturalised upon the consoles, consolation and con-soul-ation, of the inner. Thought too, as much as it was abstract and universal, was just as much the experience of thought imprinting in the felt body, the screen behind every other screen. In this eversion spatialisation was so modified as to be almost abolished; while thinghood in one world was mutual exteriority, overlap, obstruction, invariance, cascades of containment, architectural in short, in the other it was compresence, indefiniteness, unlimited recursions of depthlessness, or musical, as music is understood to thaw and digest all architecture.

 

Critique of life is quite different from phenomenology of life. The former is a creative style of venting, the distinctions it makes are clever and tactical, but haphazard, confined to the context, like sardonic jokes. It provides a sort of comfort, even if it is largely defensive, attitude formation to ward off death, nothingness, helplessness, and most of all dumbfoundedness, speechlessness, insignificance. Reading such works feels to be as satisfying as creating them, its readers feel a special sort of participation in the texts - although the writers may seem quite indifferent to them, having got them out of their system, until the next attack. Phenomenology is concerned with making the most functionally correct distinctions, cutting up the subjective-objective mass in just the right way. The observer in both of these modes is paradoxical since neither can fully accommodate the position from which their utterances are made, but critique can overcome this impossibility through irony, which in this case is an empty pseudo-consciousness. Phenomenology, however, must coexist with it, to the detriment, perhaps, of its style. Phenomenology, falling into an attitude becomes critique, hence in so far as it remains in the purity of its mode of reflection the operative distinction is between a thinking that goes against the current of life in relation to every thing that matters, and one going against it in relation to mattering tout court.

The succession of bodily and mental states seems both robust in its heedless onrush and sensitive to being steered by numerous subtle drivers, all of which which suggests that it is the expression of complex processes which blend thought and the unthought in necessarily unthinkable ways. A notional self, however, is always present, but to different degrees like the background music in a film, and when salient showing up in various relations to the headlong temporalisation: as agent or patient, as victim or perpetrator, judge or accused, sentimentalist or naïf, alazon or eiron, without any great consistency or felt need for consistency. As this self one does not so much do as behave. The attitudes taken to this panoramic but limited exposure of life, via a one-who-is-living, are essential attributes of the notional self in whatever band it happens to be currently arising, and they can be quite reflective and sophisticated, indeed spiritual, if that term names the crossing of a certain threshold of breadth. Still, this self is such as to feel that its reality and its duty relates to a mysterious something called happiness, and for all that it is able to do nothing to found such happiness or align it with its goals, there is a silent knowledge in happiness when it comes unsought which invites its easy surrender.

Under happiness life becomes dreamable; there is resistance of course, but this yields under pressure and in the most delightful way, the object is correlative to the subject but still endows it with torrents of unexpected new content of the same kind, so that this subject-self can remain in harmony with its world and keep going forward with no need to discover that this very world is a mere dream. The happiest dreams invite us to keep on dreaming. Of course this never lasts long, the shock is to find that there is a world out there that we desperately care about, and so the mind streams out through every sense and the centre of gravity takes firm root in the object. The crux was when we found ourselves caring so much about the actions or attitudes of the other after we'd been convinced that the only target of such care was ourselves. To retain the equilibrium of such a self we must care about it, but to do so we need to figure in some way as an object of care. It needs to have a character we can view as worthy, but a character is something staged and anything staged is made up out of borrowed elements, elements we only presume are our own, and anachronistically so, long after they have shown up as more proper to someone else. The world outside can strike us through the heart because it our own alienated self-love that makes it overwhelmingly real.