charting the aspiring mind

7/29/2019 Charting The Aspiring Mind

1/22

Facultative Development

Preface

Mentoring, Mindset and Machinics:

The Diagram of the Aspiring Spirit

Dearer even than Night reasoning Day is to you.

Nonetheless there are times when clear eyes too love the shadows,

Tasting sleep uncompelled, trying the pleasure it gives,Or a loyal man too will gaze into Night and enjoy it,

Yes, and rightly to her garlands we dedicate, hymns,

Since to all those astray, the mad and the dead, she is sacred,

Yet herself remains firm, always, her spirit most free.

But to us, in her turn, so that in the wavering moment,Deep in the dark there shall be something at least that endures,

Holy drunkenness she must grant and frenzied oblivion,

Grant the on-rushing word, sleepless as lovers are too,

And a wine-cup more full, a life more intense and more daring,

Holy remembrance too, keeping us wakeful at night.

Bread and Wine, Hlderlin1

[I do this work dedicated to Hlderlin, the author, poet, thinker of our age. MHS]

Perhaps the impossible is the only possible chance of something new, of

some new philosophy of the new. Perhaps; perhaps, in truth, the perhaps still

names this chance. Perhaps friendship, if there is such a thing, must honor what

appears impossible here.We are not yet among these philosophers of the future, we who are

calling them and calling them the philosophers of the future, but we are in

advance their friends and, in this gesture of the call, we establish ourselves as their

heralds and precursors.2

Providing you open yourself, trembling, on to the perhaps.3

1Friedrich Hlderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, Michael Hamburger, Tr. (New York; 1994) p.

152 -3.2

Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship (New York; 2005); p. 36 - 37.3

Ibid; p. 70.


2/22

Mentoring: the New Conversation

The work of a mentor brings him or her into a conversation that occupies a rarified

space. The conversation begins when he hears (and if he does not hear this, the mentoring

conversation does not get underway): I feel something stirring in me to move on, to dosomething that is more but I dont know what that is. The conversation that ensues is

neither of a therapeutic typewhere something wrong and so excludes a person from

normalcy -- nor is it of a coaching or career advisement nature in which the goal is clear

but the techniques are yet to be mastered. Two kinds of conversational resources, the

psychological and the paternalistic, are thus demoted in significance. The psychological is

demoted because existing states of affairs, relation, reactions and prospects are precisely

what have been placed in question. Paternalistic guidance is pushed even further down the

ladder of emphasis because the tried and true paths and methods are precisely what bore this

person and has pushed her to the brink beyond which nothing is clear, defined or in view at

all.

But there is even more to the rarity of this situation. The mentor takes up this

conversation in a way that hitches on, not to the available certainties and conventions (good

sense, common sense, psychological verities), but to the mentees vector that is bounding

out from familiar ground. The mentor listens with a peculiar intent, one that takes him or her

out of the usual ways of listening, even empathetically. The mentor is listening in order to

envision the kinds of situations that most aptly accord with this persons expressions of

movement, satisfactions of engagement and valorization of outcomes (which outcomes

matter, the composition of those outcomes, the range of affecting others these outcomes

promise). The mentor, that is, listens for aspirations, the for gossamer wisps that only mark

out the faintest of traces, remainders left in the words that are offered, and, for the mentee,

which, by definition, refuse to appear as her object or objective. This situation, the situation

of the mentors listening, that has brought me to this essay.

The question this essay works within is this: how do we envision and address the

aspiring mindset?

Let me parse that question.

We.We are those who seek to address the aspiring spirit. We are mentors, or

even friends-in-peculiarity, who seek to envision what that mentees drive to the edge entails,


3/22

promises, sketches out for a way forward. The mentor does this by opening herself to fully

listening to what is taking place at the scene of the conversation.

Envision. And the mentor seeks to open her own awareness to the fullest range of her

perspicacity in order to support and an embrace the mentees drive to exceed his present state

of affairs, so as to engage what occurs in his life in a more expansive and more encompassing

way. The mentor is thus seeking for her own sense of aspiration even as the mentee seeks

help in envisioning her own. Mentors always talk about the two-way benefit that comes from

being a mentor. The reason for that is found in this dynamic of two seekings-out of what just

might offer itself, if only4

Address.If only, is not in this question, but it is implied in the address. The

mentor seeks to add tothe framing and elaborations (the dress) of the situation. The intent

is neither to fix this situation nor deflect it in other directions, but to lend a voice that

affirms precisely what has not yet appeared, give it an address, a place, a locale in which it

has some viabilityat least, for now, in the conversation, in the mentors gaze, amid and

with the elaborations offered by the mentors words. If only, becomes demarcated,

delimited, framed, constrained or set free, according to the factors unearthed in the

conversation as either inhibiting or instigating the aspirations of the mentee.

Aspiring.Aspiring is the big word here, the one that defies translation, and

indeed, that the mentor seeks to spare from translation into other terms; for any translation of

this term drags it down, materializes it, renders it as a matter of instrument, method or goal.

This kills aspiration, that most delicate of phenomena. There is only one way to go from

aspiration: down, into production, technique and accomplishing recognition. To address

aspiration is to speak in such a way as to leave it alone, to leave it there, to approach and

4In this envisioning, the mentors conversation radically departs from the therapeutic or

psychoanalytical. In these latter conversations, the mechanisms of process and psychic contexts of meanings,significances, deviations, etc. are set, and the conversation seeks to locate the various places in process that are

disturbed, perturbed or prevented from adequate functioning (equal to or appropriate for the situations in which

the patient is immersed). The mentoring conversation has no recourse to assured and validated mechanisms.Instead, the mentor has to operate with images of mindsets, which perhaps (see Derrida, The Politics of

Friendship (op. cit.); p. 38), apply to varying degrees and have to be continually contested, re-envisioned,

articulated and ventured anew. And, in another difference, the images the mentor employs, if the conversation

is successful will change, and in fact, the mentee will be provided with the capability to undertake that change

on his or her own terms, continually, as necessary. The therapeutic or psychoanalytic operations may indeed be

relevant, and if they are, likely prevent a viable mentoring conversation to transpire at all.

It is the work of this volume to present a schema of such images a mentor can deploy in the

envisioning and experimenting that continually unfolds in the mentoring conversation.


4/22

speak with utmost delicacy and nuance such that the future always promises and beckons,

without prescription or even demand.

If we compare the word aspire, with its cognate cousins, inspire and expire, I

think we can get a clearer picture of what is at stake here. The notion ofspire bears the

connotation of breath, and also spirit. When we are inspired we feel the spirit coming in

upon us. We feel a surge of energy, of realization, crystallization, of far-flung powers and

forces converging into what we allow to take us away, bear us on its wings. When we expire,

we have reached the end of the breath, our lungs are empty and compressed, with no room

for movement. The term is up; ultimately when we say we expire, we mean our own time

is up.

A-spire designates a state of being affected by what is without, by what is not. If

we were strictly sentient beings, which took all our cues and all our conditions of knowing

from material things and materialized processes of knowing, feeling and sensing, being

affected by nothing, by what is not (yet), should not happen,. But it does happen. What

is that about? We dont plan to take up an aspiration, or make time for it when it is

convenient: it comes on us, over us, to usif it comes at all. It does not announce itself as

something that we want, it announces itself as a disturbance of the status quo, and

nothing else. But this disturbance is not an intruder, not at least if we regard the energies

involved as being an aspiration. It is a matter of breath, of our flow and intercourse with

occurrences, and so it is of our own being. In this human endeavor a nothing does affect us,

does color everything we do, and does accompany each and every breath we take. We feel,

innately, without thought or reflection, that this nothing may be traitorous, may impel us into

harms way, but we also sense that it just might also be a good thing. For all its stirring up of

fear, there is also an allure: we a quotient of aliveness while being in this thrall, we feel, once

it is set in motion, that abrogation of this feeling is demeaning, we feel that to deny it is a

self-effected repression of the most pernicious kind.

But still, it is and remains nothing as long as it is a matter of aspiration. We might

rush to name it and assign it as a goal or an ambition, give it a source and a remedy. But by

the time a mentor comes on the scene, many such palliatives have been tried and have come

to naught: the nothing, the a-spiration proceeds apace. So, finally, after a long sequence of

failed attempts at pinning this thing down, we admit, I dont know what this is, what it is

about, where it leads. Its kind of scary. Scary indeed. An aspiration can present itself as a


5/22

failure of ones person or courage, as the direst kind of self-censure, as a colossal collapsing

of the will. These reflections of fear that aspirations incite do not come from the aspiration

itself, but come instead from the deficit one feels in oneself measured against the aspiration.

This nothing of aspiration is still immensely, incommensurably outsized in comparison to the

deficit exerting itself against it. A strange state of affairs, but the aspirant knows it. The

mentor only comes onto the scene in order to displace the deficit, give voice to the strength

that the aspiration itself has evoked, and seems to wish from, from the mentee, and seems to

promise that the mentee is indeed competent to proceed.

What an honor the mentor is accorded when she is welcomed into this space; what a

great responsibility follows in taking up the conversation that has been solicited and

accepted.

And, it must be added, this aspiration, having done its work of moving and impelling

the person onward, leaves barely a trace once the mentee is underway in a new situation.

That very aspiring impelling, whichbound together all the forces of ones life so as to open

onto new plateaus, vanishes. We thus talk, later, of our dreams, our desires, our ambitions

and goals. But talk about our aspirations? The term hardly appears when ones new mission

is underway. And yet, it is but for this nothing that the mentor exists. It is not the unknown

that the mentor addresses then, but unknowable itself. One does not need to know anything

to aspire, but one needs to feel the press of knowing as the most intimate desirenot

knowing in order to achieve certainty, but knowing as the way toward being the most alive,

the most engaged person one can be, as one can imagine oneself being, henceforth. Once

one is ensconced in this knowing, the flow of the engagedlife is all that matters.

Mindset. And so we come to the adjunct word, a word of address: mindset. It

denotes a strange, hybrid territory. It most definitely refers to mental processes, and to those

processes as they are affected by emotions or other dispositions that set ones mind into

a frame and a state of collectedness. It borders on the notion of consciousness, for instance.

But in distinction from that effusive agglomeration of impressions, a mindset pertains to a

gathered set of factorsconscious and unconsciousthat constitute what and how and

according to what patterns and structures one heeds, notices, pays or gives attentiveness so

as to engage, act, think, speak, decide. I am of the mind, one says when speaking of a

mindset that is adopted as one is about to act. It is a term that lies closer to the idea of

mind rather than brain or brain state. When we say mind we are accounting for all


6/22

the affective forces that have risen to the occasion, and we also include in that accounting the

words we use to assess what is at hand, the logic we apply to discern the forces in play, the

images, icons, stories and precedents that give us our own measure of force as we strike out,

and, finally it includes the values by which we have judged what is appropriate to apply

when, and with what varying amounts of vigor to what we are about to undertake.

The mindset is a vast and expansive thing of wonder. A mindset, from moment to

moment, comprises psychological states, and psychological states materialize mindsets, but

mindsets are best comprehended narratively, in terms of the accounts one gives of how ones

life is preparing to proceed into the next moments, into a future for which the mindset is a

setting, a readiness, a context and a gathering force unto itself. Comprising psychological

states, it affects ones attitudes, orientations; comprising ones experiences, it affects ones

sense of space and reach and strength; comprising accounts of ones forebears, it shapes the

anticipations one allows to have affect and influence; being marshaled to the fore in

language, images, icons and metaphors, it both follows a path that is envisioned and cuts a

new path according to the vigor, intensity and integrity of the continuity between ones self

and ones state of affairs. My gathering of the components of my awareness, and this is key,

as I now frame it, characterize it, analyze it, and also as I now give way to what is beyond its

grasp, even as I act. The mindset is what I have for myself as my own state of affairs at the

threshold of my actions. It is thus available for reflection, analysis, and, with labor, can be

laid out, in the form of an account, on the table, as the content of a conversation. And so, the

mindset, and this is also a central notion, gathers me, concentrates my psychic/somatic

resources such that I am a deliberative actor, and so can account for myself.

The aspiring mindset is a subset of all the mindsets we conjure up in order to move

into the next moment. We have a loving and familial mindset that we marshal to our most

intimacy-based situations; we have professional mindsets that we adopt when performing in a

discipline-oriented setting; we have a religious mindset that we adopt when orienting

ourselves in a reverential manner; we gather ourselves into a game face, or a competitive

mindset when taking on competitors or adversaries. Accordingly, the aspiring mindset is a

gathering in its own right as well. And, as I intend to show in what follows, it is, in a way, a

mindset apart, a gathering of resources like no other, and this is so precisely because it is an

aspiring mindset, an orientation toward guiding ones life into what has never existed for it

before, and has only other mindset accounts, stories of the lives these mindsets have


7/22

occasioned as a model. The aspiring mindset exceeds the reaches of psychologies for

precisely these reasons.5

It is because the aspiring mindset comprises a gathered state of affairs, at the

threshold, that is amenable to an accountthat it differs from what a psychological discourse

accounts for. Psychological discourses describe to me the states of being my psycho/somatic

mechanisms assume -- according to the latest experimental research, and according to the

validated parameters of brain versus affect I include -- as one action or another ensues.

Psychological discourses are indifferent to any specific state of affairs and can be applied

with equal vigor and validity to any situation that is open and available to experimental,

isolated, definable assessment. A mindset, however, envisions all of these factors being

summoned up in an intertwined, complex milieu in which ones anticipations (states not yet

activated) of ones own resources and the states of the milieu that will be encountered are

envisioned. These envisionings, therefore, are not translated from psychological lexicons or

magnetic imaging of states, but are bare, experimental, speculative and even hope

(aspiration)-inspired accounts that include all the images, verbiage, concepts, prejudices and

intentions one can muster, garnered from whatever sources of story-telling and account-

making are available in order to take that next step.

Mentors and the Aspiring Mindset. And it is to this narrative that spins out what is

going on in the aspiring mindset that the mentor attunes his or her listening. The mentor

makes herself an expert in discerning the aspirational factors in the mentees mindset. The

mentor orients his listening toward the coming into being of the mentees sense of the

character, scope, range and power of her resources, and to the way she organizes her

resources into a force that will be exerted in order to take effect in the situation that concerns

her, as she sees fit to comprehend that situation. I sometimes explain this orientation of the

mentors listening as the E=MC2modality: the mentor hears the mentees account as so

many aspects of pure energies, which, as they slow and take shape in the mentees life, are

given mass in the form of words, relations, intentions and complexes of possibilities. And so,

by means of this detaching of the mentees own account from the immediate imperatives that

weigh the mentees aspirations down, by means of this reduction or epoch, the mentor

5Positive psychologies, that consider phenomena such as flow, as does Czikzentmihialy begin to

touch on descriptions of the situations in which a person is enmeshed in a situation that has aspirational aspects

to it. However, while one can say that an aspirational mindset envisions flow states, such a state would only

constitute a momentary reflex that certain facets of the mindset would desire, but the aspirational mindset does

not require that these moments occur to continue to assert themselves.


8/22

constructs a map, an image of the aspiring mindset that is impelling the mentee into an

ambivalent state of futurity-determined ambiguity and courage-resolute anxiety, to which the

mentees opening statement attests.

Mindset and Machinics

ASPIRATION AND MINDSET.Aspiring Mindset may not be a psychological term,

but neither is it a thing of air. The name points to a psychic/somatic structure-bearing

orientation that operates according to certain principles. This structure provides both the

mentor and the mentee with an opportunity to have a conversation about the aspiring mindset

that proceeds on its own terms. The translations that take place in this conversation are thus

not matters of coalescing states of mind according to another discourses parameters (for

instance, those of psychology or religion, morality or even philosophy, etc.); also, at no pointis any aspect of an aspiration condensed into a biographical instance, nor is it depicted in

terms of natural determinations, instincts, personality or temperament; nor does this

structure translate what is at stake for the mentee into being some output emanating from

mechanical device of one kind or another. Instead, by having an image of the structuring

power of the aspiring mindset, the conversation experiments with images and juxtaposition of

experiences in order to elucidate delineations and demarcations that rise to the fore because

of their resonance with the intentions, logic, meanings and experiential mappings that the

aspiration itself (consciously and unconsciously) takes up, right in the midst of ones living,

in order to become a psychic/somatic force at all. The good news is that these structures do

have coherence, and do take shape according to dynamics we can outline, place in a diagram,

and elaborate in a multi-level schematic. It is to this elaboration this work devotes its

attention.

There are many ways we can envision the way a mindset does its work. We have

name for some of the familiar mindset processes we use in navigating everyday lifes

situations: habit, custom, personality or temperament are some of these. But when it comes to

a notion such as aspiration, it is precisely the familiar mindsets, the ones amenable to habit,

custom and personality, that are placed in the line of fire; it is precisely such mindsets that

aspiration indicates are failing. The habit mindset can be treated psychologically to a great

degree, since the whole premise of habit is the ingraining of certain psychic circuits and

neurologically specified locales. The mindset pertaining to custom can be specified according


9/22

to historical, sociological, anthropological or even philosophical nodes of contact,

development, articulation and adopting or internalization. Personality can be mapped

according to terms that denote preferences for emotional states or preferences for problem

solving in various contexts.

So, what do we do with this mindset of aspiration? How is its mindset articulated?

An aspiration cannot be articulated except in terms that allow for continuing expressions of

more expansive and more encompassing engagements. One does not aspire to do this or that,

or be known for or as this or that. One aspires so as to change, drive onward, open out onto

what has heretofore been beyond ones reach. All one can say about aspirations in terms of a

behavioral referent is that it will encounter certain obstacles and certain supporting

characteristics along its way to expression. One can, then, detect the psychological terrain

through which the aspiration must navigate, and one can detect aspects of the driving

emotions that are gathering in the form of aspirations by various instruments that are

available for surveying personality, temperament and behavioral preferences. But the

aspiration itself remains a mere shadow, hidden somewhere in what might be perceived as

either strength or weakness in the psychological interpretations.

Here we come upon that threshold where we cross into a different kind of depiction.

The aspiring mindset requires not only that we move our perceptions and discernments

beyond psychological terminology, but it requires also that we accept that a different quality

and manner of conduct than that of the psychological, is in effect. This operation may only

be a momentary prelude to psychological institution and accomplishment; it may be an

operation that is only rarely sensed as transpiring at all; it may be an operation that we

actually choose to repress and keep from attentive awareness. Still, we are urged to grant

some status to this operation in so far as aspiration is at stake, in so far as we can actually

give an account of aspiration. Here, on this occasion, by granting validity to the notion that

the idea ofa mindset -- even provisionally, in order to conduct an experimentwe have an

opportunity to think differently about how we gather ourselves into states that are ready to

act, speak, decide and engage what matters to us.

MACHINICS VERSUS MECHANICS. The notion that allows us to think through an

articulation of the aspiring mindset is that of machinics and machinic assemblages. As


10/22

explored and elaborated, as applied and validated by Deleuze and Guattari,6

this notion

envisions how organization takes place in such a way as to allow for both viability in the

present and for remaining open to more expansive and more encompassing and increasingly

complex engagements with the surrounding milieu. The idea of applying a notion involving

machines to psychic/somatically-guided life is not all that foreign any more, even to the most

spiritual and humanistic among us. Psychology, as it has labored to model itself on the

hard, physical sciences, has gone far in preparing us and inuring us to the most emotional

and spontaneous outbursts of genius or deviation as still being a matter of the functioning of

largely mechanical, neuroanatomical processes. Even the most narratively oriented of

psychologies, psychoanalysis, is based on a mechanism of processing psychic energy.7

But,

since I am applying the term machinics to processes that I insist are not at all mechanical,

but are generative and creative, I must be thinking of aprocess that as machinic is

somehow different than the mechanical.

Repetition and Interruptions. And indeed, I am. How do we keep the term

machinic separate from the term mechanical? We do so by differentiating modes of

repetition within the concept of the operations of machines and the different status that stops

and interruptions have in the two concepts. Any and all machines imply repetition: pistons

rising and falling again and again in the tight confines of a cylinder, a wheel turning again

and again around a single, stationary axis, everything held in its place, movements defined,

constrained, assigned to its purpose. And all machines do their work until something stops

them; and then all machines, which are in functional order, can be restarted in order to

resume their work. The difference between mechanical and machinic resides in

variations on these two themes.

The kind of repetition cyclic that I call mechanical goes on and on repeating

exactly the same actions until something stops ita lack of energy or an outright barrier for

instance, or internal wear or malfunction. In order for a mechanical device to resume its

work, something external has to restart it; and when it is restarted (for it is a passive device

6These notions are applied in many different ways throughout the two-volume work, Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, including,Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis, MN; 1983) andA Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN;

1987). Guattari applies these notions in specifically psychologically oriented contexts in his The Machinic

Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Los Angeles; 2011).

These works are cited throughout the text that follows, and the logic of their depictions permeate this

text.7

Both Jung and Freud sought to do this, for instance. Jung classifying psychic energies into operations

that contribute to temperament, and Freuds early work attempting to map out a psychic physics.


11/22

as regards this restarting), it resumes exactly the same process that had been previously

interrupted and resumes the performance of the same limited, prescribed, delineated action

on its substrate, material or context that it was designed to do. There is nothing different

about the mechanical device as it passes through its stages from start to stop to restart.8

This is in contrast to the repetition, or re-petition, that the term machinics points to.

First, machinic repetition is an organized, complex arrangement of factors that, by means

of its internal resources, has to continually restart, resume, and recommence in the face of

not intermittent, but continually disrupting cessations. It is auto-affecting, in this regard. It

is structured as a complex assemblage such that it is capable of restarting in the face of a

wide (but not unlimited) range of interruptions. Its main emphasis is on its ability to

continually recommence, by its own impetus, and to do so under circumstances that are

differentfrom the ones under which it had previously operated and then stopped or

interrupted it. Once stopped or interrupted the machinic assemblage, is able exert a force on

itself as well as on a different milieu that reconstitutes its structure, organization and cycling,

even if ever so slightly, in order do resume its work under different circumstances . A

machinic operation has to exert a force on itself in order to change, reform, reassemble the

arrangements within its own assemblage in the face of having to deal with the conditions that

instigated the break in its operating in the first place. It is thus a complex machine that

operates in a non-cycling manner, or a non-cyclic or extra-cyclic repetition, or one might say,

an extra-cyclic non-repetition.9

8The mechanical device operates as an eternally-cycling system, which, in terms of its processing is

indifferent to time.9

The machinic assemblage thus operates as an eternally returning structure. It has stopped, but its

insistence into the situation returns, at a later time, even under different circumstances, It resumes not the

identical cycling of processes, but resumes the continuation of the force that affects, that changes, the locale of

its actions, in light of, in response to the changes that induced the interruption, and now in emerging

encompassment of those changes.

Needless to say, such a notion is dependent on the dynamics of the situation in which the machinic

assemblage operates being richly complex, and on there being a least a critical mass consisting of many

machinic assemblages of the type, kind, or figuration as the one we are talking about here. As theinterruption ripples through the population of these assemblages, not all of them are able to restart by means of

becoming machinically more complex and many perish. Some of these assemblages are of such robustness and

loosely cathected determining elements that a rearrangement, a reassembly is possible. These are the ones thatdo restart. The notion of machinic assemblage, is then evolutionary at its core, in the sense of the survival of

the ones most able to become fit for what affects its way.

This notion then, is also completely temporal in all its aspects as regards the assemblage at issue. The

assemblage cycles machinically in doing it processes, but does so in a milieu, at a site that is changing, being

affected by onwarding at its core, and so that process has a time limit associated with it. Time is marked by the

interruption that ensues, and then by the restarting that initiates a new interval.

The eternal, of this eternal return then is not at the level of the machine itself, as it is in the case of

the mechanical device (or the human soul conceived mechanically, as it is in classical metaphysics), but


12/22

Un-knowable. Two more facets of the machinic operation can be indicated. First, it

cannot be predicted, at the point of the interruption, what process will be commenced upon

resumption of the machinic assemblages work. There is no way to predict whether the

ensuing process will be more or less robust than the one that was interrupted; there is no way

to predict how similar or dissimilar the new process will be; there is no way to predict

whether some new wrinkle or quirk will be set loose or whether some aspect of the former

assemblage will be lost. And there is no way to predict how these factors and others will mix

and take up proportional allocations, and this is even the case for the assemblage itself. The

machinic assemblage does not resume its operation by executing a plan, it does so as an

assertion of its potency to resume at all, and so it does. Nothing more, nothing less. It is

spontaneity surging forth right at the site, right in the midst of the scene, by that very

operation that had once ceased.

And so, the machinic assemblage comes to itself, comes to life, from seemingly

right out of the blue. It resumes before there is any indication that a resumption has actually

transpired, even if the hiatus is but a flash of a nanosecond. And so, the working of the

machinic assemblage are always out of reach of what can be consciously known or

prescriptively worked on. On the human psycho/somatic level, we can sense that something

is in play that is generating an affect, but we have no control over what has transpired, and

we can only hope to discover what has, indeed transpired; and to do so we have to pay close

attention to what now rises up in comparison to what had never arisen in quite that manner.

One response to that realization, of course, is to cancel it out, or get back to normal.

But from the standpoint of machinics, to attempt to pull the assemblage back into a familiar

state of affairs or means of operation (and it is just that, a reigning in) is a repression, a

rather as viewed from a perspective that affirms the difference and pulses so as to incorporate, enact,

encompass, embrace and take up the promise of what has always already resumed.

This is the spirit in which Deleuze interprets Nietzsches Eternal Return of the Same, in the work,

Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York; 1983), a work of Deleuzes which long preceded that ofCapitalism andSchizophreniacited above. According to Nietzsche, the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical

but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside

science. The principle is that of the reproduction if diversity as such, of the repetition of difference (p. 46);

and, This is why the eternal return must be thought of a s a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimension, a

synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. (p.

48). And then, Why is mechanism such a bad interpretation of the eternal return? Because it does not

necessarily or directly imply the eternal return. Because it only entails the false consequence of a final state.

This final state is held to be identical to the initial state and, to this extent, it is is concluded that the mechanical

process passes through the same set of differences again. (p. 49)

The notion of machinics was already, in an anticipatory, aspiring manner, at work long before the

term, the concept was ready to be constructively articulated.


13/22

suppression and an insistence on the assertion of past ways from which the machinic

operation has just labored to extricate itself. While all the surrounding assemblages of a

complex organism tend to exert such a retrograde or stabilizing force, the machinic quality of

the new arrangement just may, perhaps, persist, anyway, in its unexpectedly disrupting ways.

This persistence, then, for some, ripples through the organism impelling other assemblages in

proximity to the insurgent one, to undergo their own interruptions and resumptions. And so,

another response it to let it all hang out, go wherever the machinic drives in a milieu meander

and drift towards and into. It is in this way that the machinic assemblage drives the constant

working and reworking of the living way, of nature, creatures, including humans. And then

there is another way: when this surging of reconstituting is heeded, when it is accepted and is

taken up as a real call and a real horizon to venture towards, and in a way that also bears

with it the capabilities and valued accomplishments of its preceding states, so as to bring it

all to a new way, a new facultative capability (for instance), aspiration is born on the earth.

Machinic Evolution. When the situation overwhelms the machinic assemblage, it

either accomplishes a shift, a change of its status, enacts a symmetry break, or it perishes.

The machinic assemblage that is healthy resists its obliteration to the hilt, and although it

encounters situations in which it is going to be overwhelmed, it will do everything it can and

is capable of to push the bounds of its operations to avoid that end. An unhealthy assemblage

succumbs sooner, to lesser disturbances than does a healthy one. The machinic assemblage

that is able to respond can increase the robustness of its existing elements, or it can become

more complex, by either adding new factors to its processes or by combining symbiotically

with other assemblages and by communicating with them, including them as factors of its

machinic operations, become more capable in dealing with a greater variety of situations. In

some cases, a complex arrangement of machinic assemblages allows for substitution for

interrupted processes by other processes, until the injured one can gather itself anew, or be

replaced by the substituting processes. Or, as we see in a social context for instance, the

manner of resistance, the ways that the struggling assemblage being did resist can become

information to be applied in subsequent situations, increasing the likelihood of the

assemblages survival and even enhanced survival by encouraging all manners of increasing

complexity and thus increasing the capabilities of the machinic assemblages that are

operating at that site. This is the way of aspiration.


14/22

AN ASPIRINGASSEMBLAGE. We need to continue to fill in this phantasm we have

drawn, that of the aspiring machinic assemblage, fora few more moments. In the context

of human aspiring, this machinic assemblage is both wild and encompassing, like a hurricane

that displaces and deranges even as it surrounds, devours and occupies the territory as far as

one can see. The notion of machinic assemblage frees us from the constraint of needing

existent and observable mechanisms in place that, in turn, accord with the situations we take

to be, in advance of engaging them, within our range of the existing we have conceived as

our state of affairs (as our being, or worse, as our nature). The aspiring machinic does

not require the milieu to remain constant in order to suit us. And it does not require of the

mindset that it tie itself to any formation of or in the milieu. We might say that the aspiring

machinic absorbs the changes and even celebrates the advent, the event, which comes as

vibrancy and the increasing complexity of the milieu unfolds.

Idea. Potency. How is this possible? It is possible because the machinic assemblage

always finds the range, scale, scope and amplitudes of the newly emergent with which it can

do its work. If one scale, or one surge of intensity is too great, the machinic operation roams,

tunnels, scours about the scene to find that locale in which it can take its place, operate and

have its affecting register. The aspiring machinic assemblage is not a macro device

comprising so many parts that exists on one scale only. The machinic assemblage is rather a

operating specification of apotency, one that operates on the most minute and gaseous scale,

and then accumulates, conjoins, symbiotically combines into more complex and macro

levels, all of which act machinically. The machinic assemblage, is an idea, one that aptly

summarizes a process of self-organization that permeates our universe, an idea that offers us

a glimpse into the potencies that render forth a universe at all.

I wont go into all the ways multiple discourses, from physics to biology to sociology

and economics and, yes, even psychology, have taken up this self-organizing, machinic

paradigm as a template for comprehending what occurs as the events that shape life. I leave it

to the reader to delve into the rich literature that is gathering around this idea. 10 Here, I only

want to emphasize that, in the spirit of contribution to the dissemination of the ideas of

complexity, self-organization and its machinic assemblages, these notions offer us also a way

to envision the aspiring mindset. It is an idea that can be applied fractally: starting from a

10I suggest that Michael Waldrops Complexity is a good start however. And from there I would

recommend anything by Stuart Kaufmann, but especially,Investigations and/or The Reinvention of the Sacred.


15/22

sub-quantum, quantum, subatomic and completely non-materialized level of infinitesimally

minute occurrences (in range and duration), the idea can be applied all the way up to macro

structures of classical bodies and minds. While the names of the specific operations may

change in order to jibe with current forms that are used to explain what occurs in our

common or technical ways, the form of the idea remains the same, and the machinic

operations continue to assert and reassert themselves.

We can see machinic assemblages in action in many different dimensions of what we

know as the human conditionbody, mind, social processes and language. We have

machinic assemblages on a biological level, which impelled humans to stand erect or develop

the larynx, for instance, and, of course, enabled the brain to enlarge, specify and enrich our

neuroanatomy in every locale of its operations. And we have the machinic assemblage of

language, which constantly is broken off at inscrutable sensibilities and inventions and then

resumes with an encompassing way that does reach them. And then we have the machinics

of the human aspiring mindset, that, as this essay explores, drives the forming of new

operations that, more and more, explicitly takes up aspiration itself as its field of engaging.

The Constants. What remains constant in the machinic assemblage, and places it in

the category of being a machine, is a gathered set of terms, aspects, relations and other

factors that it comprises as a force that affects its milieu even as it seeks to take its place so as

to do its work as a constituent of a milieu. And then, secondly, the juxtaposed aspects of the

assemblage interact, either in proximity or at a distance, with respect to one another with one

characterizing action, and one that always involves repetition and iteration. These factors and

interactions remain constant just so long as and to the full extent that their energy absorption

and us, and their machinic capacities and capabilities are sufficient for encompassing and

accommodating the pressures of changing circumstances that present themselves between the

time of being interrupted and the moment of recommencement.

The point that we shall be elaborating throughout this essay is that there comes a

point in the developing of machinic complexity, a point we call the human, when the

assemblage specifically takes up the impermanence, temporality and necessity of machinic

re-petition(ing) in its milieu as an instituted, inscribed task, as a matter of machinic

engagement in its own right. In this consideration, since each moment is an origin and a

death, one might say. The machinic assemblage remains in operation to the extent that it can

encompass these states and move between them, while accepting the differences that are


16/22

presented therein. Recommencing then includes operations that anticipate, account for, and

set in motion the conditions not just for the next inevitable interruption, but for the auto-

affecting capability of recommencing once again on its own terms, in this new context.

When this consideration rises to prominence in ones attention to ones own living, when this

consideration permeates everything that a person senses, imagines, desires and

conceptualizes about oneself, we have before us what we characterize as the aspiring

assemblage, the aspiring mindset.

Singularization and Individuation

Because machinic assemblages do orient all of our considerations in this essay, one

particular set of questions arises again and again, and has to be answered anew for each

asking. And that is: how do structural elements of the aspiring mindset, which are constantlythrown out of kilter, reassemble? And then how do they reassemble, not just putting itself

back together again, to be the same, Humpty-Dumpty-like, but rather, reassemble on bases

that are more expansive and more encompassing? These questionsone question really

are definitive and press hard upon our efforts because machinic assemblages are not

mechanical precisely because their states of accomplishment are always and are continually,

necessarily and inexorably deprived of any finality. This results in the forming of new

structures, in facultative development, and most of all, results in the irreducible impetus

toward individuation, toward becoming more capable in ones ways, by being able to engage

with more expansive and more encompassing aspects of the state of affairs at the site of

engagement.

Machinic assemblages are extensions of potencies,11 of a cosmic scale, which enact

singularization and individuation. Machinic assemblages form their modes of viability in

ways that remain in self-organizing states, and not states of matured stasis. Machinic

assemblages are so because, even when having taken up a place, a form a figure that can

viably operate, they operate in composed manners that have notsettled into either solidified

11I use this term potency in a consistent and technical manner, evoking the sense offered by

Schelling in his most cosmological considerations, as expressed in The Ages of the World(Albany, NY; 2000).

This work influenced my conception of the entire cosmic framework presented here and in myEthical

Cosmology. The term designates a status of dynamism per se in which continuing, irrepressible onwarding and

re-dimensioning inextricably and intrinsically affects all that occurs, arises, and exists. There is really only one

potency: that ofonwarding (which is not improperly expressed as the expansion of the universe in all (at least

four and maybe eleven) dimensions (we know of)), but which as viewed from a creaturely standpoint, seems to

break into two additional potencies: singularization and individuation.


17/22

entities or mechanical habituation. The logic or the underlying constancy of composing

encompassment that machinic assemblages enact, localize, specify, externalize and express

we consign to what, in the self-organizing paradigm are called singularization and

individuation. In other words, what we will trace as operations of machinic assemblages will

perform many different actions at their respective sites, according to their modes and forms,

and in service to their roles as assigned, evoked and inscribed as necessary, but all of these

have no other template of enacting, nor other driving impetus than singularization and

individuation.12

This state of affairs, of many different kinds of functioning and/or facultative

arrangements differentiate local enactments of only two potencies (one, really) thus makes it

possible for us to schematically diagram the course of emerging that has brought us to the

aspiring mindset and the assemblages that enact it. The schema reapplies four very basic

notions, and the diagramming displays the increasing complexity that aspiring machinics

engender, all the way from instigating a human way to concentrating that way on one aspect

of it, that is, making that aspiration itself the central driver of that way. While we will

require this entire volume to articulate the emergent machinics that have brought us to this

point, we can begin a description (for we will be elaborating on these throughout the whole

schema that follows) of those underlying dynamics:

Onwarding. This is the one potency that underlies this entire account. All the rest

are localizations and specifications of this one potency. Onwarding points to how it is that

the universe is expanding in all directions, in all dimensions. to put this notion in suitably

expansive terms, and to take away from this expression any endpoint, destination, or

culminating concrescence of potency, and certainly to keep our engagement with this

potency as neutral as possible, as free from any religiously, ideologically or doctrinally

12This, of course, amounts to our philosophical stance. I am thinking along these lines: that while

metaphysics renders operable in the human context what occurs in the form of presence, this account renders

engageable singularization and individuation, and does so by diagramming machinic assemblages as instancesof individuating singularizations. In the case of the human, these individuating singularizations remain dynamic

and in the midst of their workings through what occurs by the insistence of complex operations, of an aspiring

mindset, of which language, thought, feelings, emotions and auto-affecting initiatives on its own structures, as

well as its exertions in the surround milieu (of the occurrence), at its locale. Representation, appearance, logic

and expressions of being are necessary moments of accomplished singularization, but they operate neither as

ends nor terminations or final accomplishments that hold us to claims of certainty, no less absolute

transparency and eternal validity or truth.

What appearance once was in metaphysics and ontotheology, machinics are in this account; what

being and presence once were in metaphysics and ontotheology, individuating singularization is in this

account. While the correlations are not quite so exact as that pronouncement seem to make them, they are good

enough to get the wheels turning in along the same trajectory as this account makes its way.


18/22

restrictive regression, we use the term onwarding. This term only points to a state of

this thoroughly permeating opening, expanding, redimensioning that, in a way that defies any

ascription of being a cause or effect, characterizes what it is that renders forth a universe or

cosmos at all.

This redimensioning onwards, so to speak because it leaves in place, in the wake of

its irrepressible coursing onward, the dimensions it has opened. Our universe is of such a

character that what has been omni-dimensionally opened remains: onwarding does not

obliterate or render into oblivion what it redimensions: what has been left in its wake has

been opened up, and has been further imbued with the character of this onwarding, opening

character.13

At certain locales, this potency, by accident and happenstance that cannot be

accounted for, turns on itself, folds over itself. Some of these folds take on the further

character of folding once again and doing so right into their own previously folded sites.

This introverting folding and refolding process thereby propels a centripetal motion that

comes to designate a site, a locale, a spec that has become of a different intensity and

amplitude than the surrounding milieu.14

This is a moment of singularizing.

Singularization. A singularization that continues to take in energy from its

surroundings and directs it into its folding-on-folding involutions becomes able to take up a

place in the opened dimensions, what we call the milieu, as a viable formation in its own

right. To the extent that this singularizing is able to accommodate and incorporate greater

complexity, that is, to the extent that this singularizing continues in its folding-into-its

folding despite the continuing onwarding potencies acting in and on the milieu, it become a

machinic assemblage.

Individuation. At some point in cosmic time, the milieu becomes so diverse, is filled

with so many modes of singularizations, that to just accommodate the subtle nuances of

13

I have attempted an account of the emergence of this character, even as staging what becomes TheBig Bang, in a work I have entitledEthical Cosmology (Unpublished; available on request). In the spirit and

totally inspired by SchellingsAges of the World(Schelling, along with Hegel, were classmates of Hlderlin at

the Tubingen Academy), I suggest there that perhaps the universe, as a permutation of all the kinds of

proximally compressed potencies in the bowels of a black hole, one such combination resulted in the confluence

of refusing dynamics, refusing of obliteration. I follow the logic offered by Lee Smolin in The Living

Universe. This refusing accumulated (because all the other dynamics had been obliterated) to the breaking

point, and, Whallah!!!, the Big Bang. This same dynamic thus underpins what becomes the universe.14

This folding and refolding might be considered as a continuation of another character that was

instantiated in the propulsive moment of the Big Bang: this event ensued from potencies being compressed

into, onto, and throughout each other into compressed states, and it is these compressed and involuting

potencies that were released by the infinite expansion we call the Big Bang.


19/22

redimensioning at the site of having singularized is insufficient. At some point, singularizing

becomes a sufficiently complex machinic assemblage as to find and then even develop

associations, alliances, symbiotic arrangements, etc. that allow it to individuate, that is allow

it to find a way to assert its viability and place in the milieu under circumstances of increased

modes of variation, increased speeds of change and increased amplitudes of force that would

impede or prevent its machinic iterating. Individuation names a process in which the

singularization is sufficiently complex as to allow an exploration of possible variations that

enhance more expansive and more encompassing modes of machinic assembly so as to assert

the viability of the complex organisms place in the milieu, at its site of enactment.

Individuation marks all aspects ofour milieu that we count as living and as creatures,

including, of course, humans, and the aspiring mindset that is now at stake for them.

Humans as I S beings and Aspiration. However, humans do operate with a

peculiar orientation toward individuation that has become quite distinctive and has set its

capabilities apart from many other individuating creatures. Humans, as we consider them

here are specifically individuating-singularizing beings (IS beings) in that they

specifically have their own manners of individuating, their own ways of becoming beings

that operate so as to be capable of more expansive and more encompassing engagement of

occurrences at their sites, within the larger milieu, precisely, explicitly by choice and

direction of attention and action (including speech and decision), at stake.The more humans specifically address this character, and the more they specifically

take up the individuating impetus that is, like it or not affecting them, then the more they are

in the act of and are more capable of being susceptible to aspiring. The more this is the case,

the more they enact and embody the aspiring mindset. Ignoring this impetus does not end it,

or suspend it or delay it; ignoring or suppressing it only induces states of illness, and

illnesses which reflect specifically the degree to which the resources for individuation have

been developed (i.e., in this account, the Ego Structure), the force with which this

individuating impetus acts on other aspects of the psychic/somatic machinic assemblages

(what we call the Arteous System), and the specific kinds of actions that have to be

developed and then exerted to repress the impetus.


20/22

Individuation, Aspiration and Mentoring

Individuation is not a psychological process we can treat; it is a veritable cosmic

celebration to which we are invited, and too often decline, repress, denigrate or dismiss as

impossible. It is a state that cannot be predicted and cannot be contained. Theindividuating potency deals with the multifarious interruptions and breaks that assail

machinic assemblages, and it does so uniquely, at the site, with all the resources that can be

mustered in the instant, such as they present themselves for duty. humans took on the task of

guiding their own individuation, singly or as a nation or species, and did so specifically,

intentionally and with premeditated foresight, beginning in the age of the Arteous, around

50,000 years ago. Unknowingly, they set out on the most perilous, if not impossible course

imaginable. They set out to gauge the ungaugable, to measure the immeasurable, and to chart

or map out the incommensurable.

Guiding individuation, or aspiration, therefore presses humans into dire relations with

one another. They need each other to put into circulation experiments that seem to answer

the call to what is impelling them into new machinically induced ways; and yet each such

venture poses a dire threat to the ways of life of those others. They need each other to

provide for a safe harbor to which to return after venturing, either to report a triumph or heal

wounds or both; and they need others to carry on with what has been discovered and translate

them into teachings that can become a way. And they need each other to form the fiercest

barricades against intrusions that exceed their modes of accommodation. History is the

account of these individuation-impelled engagements.

But we are concentrating on aspiration and mentoring. In that respect, aspiration

places humans in a dire need of a certain kind of conversation: one that allows the

experimental groping that individuation impels and forces on one to go forward and then be

mirrored back, bounced back, so as to become palatable, if not visible, that allows its

expression to open to the full extent that its onwarding has demanded, if not in so many

words. Aspiring needs mentoring, and no other conversation or relation will suffice for

taking up what is at stake here.

ONLY THIS CONVERSATION. It may seem that this link between machinics, aspiration

and mentoring is forced into the background as we proceed through our schematic

diagramming. But this is not the case. Most essential to keep in mind as we proceed is that

the mindset we describe here is only that of aspiration, and it can be considered, reflected


21/22

upon and written (down or up, depending on your perspective) only because we have, as a

species, happened upon a machinic assemblage that is able to take up its own aspiring as a

dedicated and (dare I say, and be forgiven for using the term) conscious endeavor. I no more

envision this account as being a universal philosophy with Hegelian claims of absolute

knowing than I propose that this thinking would find a home in contexts other than

mentoring the aspiring mindset or that it could be used for psychologically therapeutic

applications.

COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE ASPIRINGMINDSET. If there is any pretense to offering

a discourse that has the pretentions toward suggesting that it has a philosophical value it is

this: Over and over again, as I read even the most radically post-

Hegelian/Nietzschean/Heideggerian of accounts I see again and again that without an

account of an aspiring mindset, their efforts run off the rails and end up in an abyss. That is,

their accounts (such as those of Blanchot, Derrida and Caputo, to whom I am devotedly

loyal, or to Levinas, Nancy or Marion, to whom I offer my deepest respect and appreciation,

or Foucault and even Deleuze/Guattari whose structures of thought made this account

possible at all) end with the presumption of leaps out of our set of conceptualized frames of

living into utterly dark, empty and vast expanses of nothing. My hope is to offer toeholds in

the steep ascents these great adventurers have mapped. The have opened dimensions of

aspiring life and brought them into view; I hope to offer some help in navigating in those

new, unknown heights.

My contribution is to suggest that our aspiring, individuating machinics engage,

beyond our conscious presences, and do comprise a step not beyond, as Blanchot puts it,

and with this (virtual) step we can take up the task of articulating the very heart of our human

endeavor. That is, that the interruptions of conscious mechanisms do not entail just a death or

immersion in an abyss, but rather that the delays, deferments and differences that give us

pause can be occasions for our machinic aspirations, occasions that we rightly name as

moments of promise, occasions of awaiting, moments wherein faith-for giving way takes

precedence. And this is possible, I suggest because, and only because, we have found a way,

a lifes way, a conversation, that offers a third way, a new kind of friend, that opens up onto

the generative onwarding we all share, and so fosters, nurtures, enables our re-petitioning of

what comes, our ante-cipation of what calls, the messianic beckoning of our gift to develop


22/22

a faculty that breaks us out into the generative itself. That conversation is the meeting of

aspiring mindsets we conjure when we engage in mentoring.

This work, then, in every sense of the term takes place in the context of, in the light

of, under the gaze of mentoring. It is offered to those who mentor in the spirit of providing a

framework, a structure, a conceptualizing that keeps the conversation at the level of

aspiration, for both or all parties involved. It is offered to those who seek a mentor as a way

to know that what they are feeling is real, it has its place, and realize they cannot fully grasp

its intent without that special conversation. And it is the mentee alone that can recognize

whether or not that conversation is meeting the demands of the moment, this schematic

account can put the mentor in a position to be worthy of the occasion.

It is offered to those who philosophize in order to envision something more expansive

and more encompassing -- as the human endeavor is wont to evoke, demand and call foras

a task, as the work to be done. And it is offered to all those breakout creatives, all of those

for whom the call of individuating aspiration exceeds any ability to contain it, as a way to be

assured, you are doing the sacred work, the holy work, the work of healing the broken hearts

that have not yet found their mentor.

To you all, I offer my best efforts. If the concepts presented above seem difficult,

please be patient, as they will be elaborated in ever more specific and contextual terms at

each stage of our schematizing effort. I suspect that while these ideas are startlingly new

they seem strange because they elevate to prominence what we had only intuitively sensed,

or had thought of as not having scientific status, and so relegated to more speculative

aspects of our cognition. It might be more a matter of surprise at the status these ideas are

accorded than their newness or controversy that make them difficult. Certainly there are

challenges in exposition and comprehending my style, but I would say, push on and ease up

on your incredulity, while maintaining your critical sense and reservations. This is offered,

after all, as one side of a conversation that can only pretend to have a companion, to seek

one, to speak in a manner as if there was one. This is an invitation, therefore, not a

pronouncement.

charting the aspiring mind

Documents