Re: Re- habit, brain, machine

On Thu, 12 Jan 1995 14:48:21 Erik Davis wrote: 
 
>Fine post, Anthony, and I think it's right on the money. 
> 
>I just wanted to re*mind folks of the Buddha thread we had here six  
>months ago--so much of this resonates with Buddhist theories of  
>percpetion, subject formation and the pure play of pheneomena that awaits 

>tose who detune their habits of consciousness through meditation--the Zen 

>surface. 
> 
 
I suppose the part of Anthony's note Erik liked (or at least the one that
connects with the subject of "meditation as deterritorialization") was: 
 
> For Bergson (in Matter and Memory) Habit is absolutely necessary to the 
> proper functioning of the mature human being. Habit allows perception to 
> take place because it selects and develops ready-made interpretations. We

> are constantly being bombarded with pure sensation (what Beckett calls in

> Molloy /the spray of phenomena*), but we couldn*t (for Bergson) make
sense 
> of it unless habit were there to cut down the background noise, focus on
a 
> few (familiar) things so that we can perceive, at the same time throwing 
> down a network, which Bergson terms homogeneous space, over what he calls

> the real (which is undivided extensity, like a phylum or a plane of 
> consistency, where nothing is divided, everything runs together,
everything 
> is one). This allows EVERYTHING to be broken up and perceived as THINGS. 

 
This is all fine, of course. The problem starts if we forget that the same
process that yields (through habit) our mental structures, also operate
directly in reality. That is to say,  and to use two of my own examples,
both linguistic and geologic structures (such as sedimentary rocks) are the
historical product of a process of double articulation: territorialization
and coding. (In both cases there are accumulations of raw materials that
have been sorted or homogeneized or transformed into a territory; and both
involve a second operation in which these loose accumulations are given a
more or less permanent form). This is why D&G say that while there are no
internal correspondances between language (or perception) and reality (e.g.
no relation between an essence outside and a concept inside our heads),
there is nevertheless ISOMORPHISM. (i.e. there are stratified structures
inside and outside). So its is not as if  HABIT allowed a reality (which by
itself is a "phylum or a plane of 
 consistency") to be broken down into pieces (as if we were "constructing"
this cut-out reality with our habitual perceptions). That reality is
already broken down by processes which are isomorphic (i.e. involve the
same abstract machine). For instance, sedimentary rocks and plant and
animal species are both strata in the precise sense that they are both the
result of double articulations. {{{ Actually, at very long time scales,
e.g. in geological time, our earthly reality IS a plane of consistency,
mostly of lava but also of DNA and biomass. But not at our time scales.}}}
Anyway, my point, re: Erik's note, would be that even if deterritorilaizing
and/or decoding of consciousness may be one way to make a plane of
consistency emerge in this planet (hard-core meditators may do this
routinely), the REAL problem is how to make this plane emerge OUTSIDE OUR
HEADS. (That is, how to effect deterritorializations and decodings with
geologic, organic, monetary, linguistic etc. materials). 

     ------------------