I have instead been doing something quite small – perhaps so small that it seems (or simply is) insignificant, and thus causes a bit of casting about, to see what more significant thing I might have been trying to accomplish in addition. I have been saying only that these particular sentences suggest a common reading of how Marx gets to certain positions, that I have some issues with that common reading, and that Marx becomes a potentially more interesting and useful figure for contemporary critique if read in a different way.

My concluding comments on individualisation were poorly-formed – I was very tired by the point I was writing, and apologise for the impression I gave, as though my comments were directed more broadly than I intended. I was replying solely to the question of whether a focus on self-reflexivity would deprive the observer of their observations: I perceive this as a dilemma only when we are thinking of individual observers. I may well be completely wrong about this. Regardless, I don’t take you in any general sense to be focussing on individuals, or to be using theorists who do so – you have always been clear on this, and you were certainly clear on this in the passage to which I was responding. I should have been clearer on my end that I was making a narrow point, and was leaving much of what you said in that section untouched because I was simply too tired to pick up on it at the time.

The issue of immanent development is something we could discuss further, if you’re interested. I think we agree on reductive historical explanations. I tend to think – and you may or may not agree with this, I don’t know – that anything that arises in a time, reworks elements of that time into its own creative and inventive process, so there will be some kind of temporal trace.

At the moment, I don’t presuppose as a general principle that things can or should be understood in terms of an internal logic of development – I could see this being an appropriate way of characterising certain things, but am agnostic on it as a more general point, but am open to the idea that there would be problems such an approach could resolve, that might not be resolvable with the looser and more ad hoc way that I tend currently to think about such things…

I do apologise if I seemed to be dictating terms of discussion. My schedule is beyond insane at the moment, and so I am writing in rare interstices, and also in a context where I am engaged in a series of offline theoretical debates whose tone may be bleeding over inappropriately into how I’m writing (voice tone can clarify many things in person, but I am generally more careful when I write, knowing such additional information is not available). You are a much valued interlocutor, whose positions I respect deeply – and I am truly sorry if I have not been communicating the degree to which this is the case.

It sounds from what you’ve been writing that I did actually read the Deleuze/Guattari passage correctly: try to stifle your reflex reaction to this comment for one moment, and listen to what I mean.

No, it really doesn’t as the passage under discussion comes from a much broader section dealing with an entirely different issue. The title of the section from which it comes is entitled “A Materialist Psychiatry”. Deleuze and Guattari are there discussing the history of the concept of desire and how it has been understood in terms of lack. They contend that this conception of desire comes from treating desire in terms of its actualized expression, rather than examining the manner in which desire is productive at the sub-individual level. The reference to Marx is an offhand reference that is evoked because of Marx’s conception of productivity. Deleuze is an ontological thinker who conceives being– reflect, read carefully, because you keep jumping the gun to get back to the social when that’s not at all what I’m talking about –not social relations as productive, inventive and creative. Insofar as social relations are a subset of being they have these characteristics as well, but this is not the point. Deleuze and Guattari later have far more substantial things to say about Marx– that converge with what you’re saying above in a number of interesting ways –but what you’re attributing to them here is simply not what’s at issue.

I understand the other points you’re making as you’ve made them to me three times now. That’s not the issue or what originally elicited my comments. Nor is there any disagreement with the thesis that yes, seeing things in terms of sensations can have liberatory potentials. Incidentally, Deleuze and Guattari argue in a nuanced and intricate way something very similar, though not directly with regard to sensation but much more broadly about potentials inhabiting any situation. Again, developing this point would require me to jump in and explain all that material, the concept of deterritorialization, their account of becoming and individuation and I just don’t have it in me, especially after being lectured on rhetoric and what does and does not constitute making a point, or after being told that I’m reducing questions of critical consciousness to the psychologistic perspective of the individual when I cite two theorists that pitch these questions in terms extremely close to what you’re talking about. Perhaps it’s just best to drop the references to Deleuze and Guattari and deal directly with the point you’re making about Marx and social relations. At any rate, I have nothing more to say in this discussion as discussion pretty much ends for me the moment it goes meta and I’m given a set of rules for how to express myself.

Poor expression perhaps, but I simply meant that mathematics unfolds through a series of theorems and problems that it sets for itself, not through social overdetermination. I truly feel that the temporal factors you cite are of little interest where this is concerned, which isn’t to dismiss it in other areas. This form of immanent development is often missed, I think, in your characterizations. Artistic movements often function in this way, as do political and scientific movements. There’s a way in which they close themselves off from their broader context and posit their own unfolding that can no longer be comprehended from the perspective of constitution. There is a dialectical relation here between determination and constitution, but I don’t feel that enough attention is being paid to determination in this discussion. Anyway, that’s all for now.

I took your comments about sensation to be a reductive way of reading the passage in question, that in turn reflected on Deleuze and Guattari and myself, regardless of whether you intended it to. By contrast, I read the passage as focusing less on sensation, and more on Marx implicitly advocating an ontology in which being is understood in terms of production or as production. For Deleuze and Guattari materialism means production in all its forms– for instance, the production of an oak tree from an acorn –which is part of the reason they’re interested in Marx. No doubt this impression of your reading is simply a misunderstanding on my part, though I found myself quite surprised to have the critical edifice I was laboriously constructing being reduced to a very vulgar variant of sense-data empiricism and process, and characterized in terms of critique as unmasking or debunking… Especially when I very seldom talk of unmasking or debunking, but tend to focus on what potentials to pull on in a given situation.

I was actually never making a comment about Deleuze and Guattari – let alone about your work. I’ve mentioned to you on a number of previous occasions that I have an idiosyncratic reading of Marx (not that this reading is unique to me at all, but it’s certainly not a conventional interpretation): basically, you ran into that reading here, so I’ll be coming from a position that may initially be a bit difficult to place. Try to bear with me, bracket what you already know about Marx, and let’s see if together we can make some sense of what I’ve been trying to say.

It sounds from what you’ve been writing that I did actually read the Deleuze/Guattari passage correctly: try to stifle your reflex reaction to this comment for one moment, and listen to what I mean. I took their comment to be based on a common reading of Marx, where Marx is understood – as you’ve again described him above – as a theorist interested primarily in production. Deleuze and Guattari may then expand the notion of production in clever and interesting and theoretically useful ways – all of this is beside the point and not relevant for what interested me in the passage you quoted, and I’m not at all critical of them for riffing on this interpretation of Marx’s work.

What interested me was that I actually think they’ve completely reversed what Marx is trying to do, when he draws our attention to the ways in which we become able to conceptualise material things as objects that are then analysed as intrinsically devoid of social determinations. Most readers of Marx take him to be pointing this out for precisely the same reasons that Deleuze and Guattari appear (in this passage) to believe Marx is pointing this out: they take him to be critical of the practice of viewing objects as devoid of social determinations – and so they take Marx’s normative stance – his critical standpoint – to be a critique of (false) immediacy, offered from the standpoint of mediation.

Now, Marx cares a great deal about mediation – no question. And he will, in fact, analyse just this kind of materialist “immediacy” as a mediation – but I’m asking you to leave this aside for a moment, because focussing on this element of his analytical strategy at this point will confuse a more important issue that is usually overlooked. What I’m trying to draw attention to is that Marx thinks it is important – that it is an achievement – a Good Thing – to begin to view objects as potentially devoid of social determinations – as not intrinsically embedded in particular networks of concrete social relations and practices, as containing some “material” substratum, onto which social determinations are then overlaid. For Marx, it is actually this form of perceived immediacy that has critical potential, because it suggests the potential to break with established social relations. For Marx, this concept that there might be a world of objects – and a world of people – whose essential nature is not caught up in, and fully determined by, some concrete form of social relation, is a very basic determination of critical subjectivity.

The Deleuze and Guattari passage caught my attention because it was inverting Marx’s argument (albeit inverting the argument in a way that is very common), by saying that Marx was, in effect, critical of the perception of the wheat-as-object, and wants us instead to conceptualise the wheat-as-embedded-in-concrete-social-relations. I think Marx is doing the opposite: saying that our ability to conceive the potential for the wheat just to be object, to conceptualise the contingency of concrete social relationships in relation to the wheat, contains the nucleus of an emancipatory ideal.

It gets more complicated than this, of course, because Marx thinks that, in the form articulated by political economists, natural scientists, etc., concepts of materialism have become metaphysical – and so he actually will try to show how a certain kind of perceived immediacy (like that expressed in materialist concepts of the natural world) is itself actually a social mediation. But he doesn’t do this to debunk the form of subjectivity expressed in that perceived immediacy: he wants to retain those materialist insights, not unmask and overthrow them. He is trying to ground materialism – to explain why it is valid, in terms consistent with his theoretical approach. He is not suggesting that it would be better for us to conceptualise the wheat in terms of the concrete social relations that produced it and brought it into being – he is asking that we understand how fundamentally revolutionary it is, that we don’t automatically feel compelled to do so. A space has opened up here – a chance for an historical break. Marx is drawing our attention to that potential.

The Deleuze and Guattari quotation suggests they read him (as most people do) as saying the opposite: that it is a bad thing that we can abstract from concrete social relations of production, and that a better standpoint would be to keep these relations in full view. Marx will, of course, get back to the core of what they mean: he also rejects as ideological the concept that materialism reflects a true vision of nature devoid of social determinations, and he will try to analyse what those social determinations are (and here I’m likely to disagree with Marx’s analysis, although I like elements of the way he sets up the problem). So my position was never that Deleuze and Guattari were unmaskers and debunkers, or were themselves engaging in a valorisation of sense-perception: quite the contrary. I was actually suggesting that they were taking Marx to be critical of a materialist vision of sense-perception, when I believe he was actually trying to ground such a position, so that he could justify incorporating this position into his own critical apparatus. In the process, Deleuze and Guattari inverted Marx’s standpoint of critique…

My position intersects in complex ways with concepts of the immanent development of notions.

What does this mean to you though? For me it resolutely does not refer to anything pertaining to history, but is something closer to what’s involved in solving a complex mathematical equation where something new is discovered that wasn’t there in the beginning. Or perhaps a better example would be a musical composition that unfolds according to its own logic. This is why, for me, Hegel is the Hegel of the Logic, not his historical writings, which often bring me to chuckle, or the Phenomenology. The interest of the Logic is the way in which conceptualities emerge out of other conceptualities like the way a crystal grows. Something similar takes place, I believe, in artistic practice, where the artist immanently discovers a certain logos in working through the material.

Unfortunately – and I have to apologise for this – I’ll have to ask a question in turn here: what does it mean to say that the immanent development of notions “resolutely does not refer to anything pertaining to history”? You use the word “development”, so you obviously have a concept that something unfolds in time – “history” is in your analysis in at least this sense of things not always having been the same, of things changing over the course of time. So what are you then objecting to – what are you trying to exclude – when you say that you don’t want to incorporate anything pertaining to history in your analysis?

In a number of respects the issue here is one between determination, or the dynamic internal properties of a thing, and constitution, or the way in which that thing is influenced by what is around it. Talk of history, I think, is seldom carried out well as it invariably privileges constitution over determination, swallowing the thing up in historical determinants and turning the thing itself into a sort of void or empty placeholder with no contribution of its own (I’m using “thing” here loosely, mathematics or a form of art can be a thing). If metaphysics, in the perjorative sense, consists in taking a part for the whole, history certainly becomes metaphysical in this sense. I think, for instance, that worrying over the historical setting in which differential calculus emerged is at best irrelevant, and at worst absurd (if conducted in the way Adorno talks about Jazz, where we say dy/dx represents the alienated bourgeois striving to express himself or something similar). This shifts the meaning of the differential from the differential. But the meaning of the differential is its own. The real task, in my view, is to unfold that new body in its implications and to thoroughly develop it in its potentials. Similarly in the case of a new form of art or a new form of philosophy or a new form of science or a new political movement. I’m speaking more categorically here than I intend, or less dialectically than I should. Clearly a good dialectical account would think the relation of determination and constitution. The problem is that with the possible exception of Foucault’s non-continuous notions of history, I haven’t seen this done which is why I react so strongly whenever it’s evoked. Invariably I see evocations of history as ways of disrespecting the thing itself in its own development for itself. When I evoke history myself it’s generally a mythological history, where I pull on resources from a tradition– say Lucretius or Diderot –that are absolutely contemporary for me as points of identification in what I’m trying to think through. That is, it’s a self-positing of influence rather than a conditioning.

Try to respond to me, not to hordes of people who may have nothing to do with me My relationship to the discipline of history was rocky at best – the problems that concern me were not regarded as “historical”, mainly because I’m primarily interested in understanding what things are, rather than in undertaking causal analyses. And I am fairly exclusively interested in historical breaks. So…

Part of what some things are, however, are things that have unfolded in time. If something has unfolded in time – or if we believe it has unfolded in time – and our categories do not capture this temporal index, we haven’t grasped the thing – this is, to me, a form of disrespect, just as the causal reduction of a thing to, e.g., class interests, or social function, or whatever else is also a form of disrespect. Your observation about “the thing itself in its own development for itself” begs the question – here, I think, we’d need a specific “thing” to talk sensibly, as this kind of statement might involve cutting reality at some highly contentious joints – a “thing” has to be of a very specific kind, for it not to be disrespectful to treat it as though it has a development for itself in isolation from other “things”…

In your example of the differential, for example, both positions you sketch sound problematic to me: of course it is reductive to say that differential calculus is “nothing more” than some class interest or social function or similar, but what on earth does it mean to say “the meaning of the differential is its own”??? (Sorry – I don’t mean to tease, but this seems at best an odd formulation, particularly if you’re worrying about metaphysical implications in other people’s approaches…)

When I talk about concepts like “alienation”, part of what I’m getting at is that there is the potential to break something away from whatever aleatory (or, for that matter, structural) processes brought it into being, and do something else with it: if I didn’t think this were possible, I couldn’t actually conceptualise critique within an immanent framework… My position is not “deterministic”. My non-determinism, however, causes its own problems – among them, understanding the tendency for certain patterns of practice to be reproduced in and through what are otherwise quite dramatic historical transformations in the modern era. It’s actually fairly easy to address this question from within a deterministic approach – one of the things that complicates my theoretical work considerably is precisely that I don’t look on socialisation and history as proceeding in this kind of lockstep, causally deterministic form…

This brings me to a second point regarding history. One of the reasons I’m deeply suspicious about historical approaches is that they tend to emphasize continuity rather than breaks, thereby assimilating the emergence of something new to larger historical processes and dynamics. By contrast, I think that history is characterized by discontinuities and do not believe that everything can be explained on the basis of what came prior to that thing. Part of the reason here has to do with the immanence of things to themselves and the manner in which they develop themselves of their own accord in ways that can’t be captured by constitutional accounts. It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something here, but if so you’ll have to explain it more clearly to me.

I’m a critical theorist, not an historian or historicist: critical theory is nonsensical as a project if you are not interested in the potential for transformation, for a break with what is. I don’t personally think “history” is characterised by anything – whether continuity or discontinuity. I see no reason (or basis) to take strong, transcendental ontological positions on the issue. I will comment on the particular structures or patterns that appear to characterise modern history – and I might be happy to take a look at other times, and see whether I think something similar, or different, prevails. But I have no a priori position on what I might find.

Again, general comments about “the immanence of things to themselves and the manner in which they develop themselves of their own accord” strike me as making quite strong, generalised ontological claims – claims that I might be willing to accept in some cases, and not in others – it depends on the “thing”.

Finally, on the issue of the emergence of critical subjectivity I go back and forth. I have strong antipathy towards Kant– the thesis that we must first reflect on our faculties prior to engaging in metaphysics (taken in the non-pejorative sense) –for a variety of reasons. In part this is because it strikes me as a way of disengaging. Such moves strike me as very Kantian. This, for instance, is how a similar move has functioned in the work of Niklas Luhmann where we are enjoined to observe the observer. The problem is that this activity of observing the observer strikes me as divesting the observer of their observations. The observer of the observer trumps the observer by observing how they draw distinctions and pointing out that other distinctions are possible, thereby undermining the distinctions they do make… All the while, the observer of the observer gets to keep his hands clean, never resolutely taking up distinctions of his own and following through on their consequences, thereby occupying the position of the beautiful soul. Meanwhile history is made elsewhere by those who bear the contingency of their distinctions and act on them. On the other hand, Bourdieu, who champions a very similar dictum in works such as Pascalian Meditations and Homo Academicus, has shown how such a form of analysis can reveal systematic biases and illusions that distort the object of investigation. This comes out brilliantly in Homo Academicus where he shows how certain features of the academic’s socio-economic position lead to a distorted notion of practice. As a result, better practice becomes possible.

In this connection I think you can do a better job explaining just why you think this question is so vital and how it relates to practice. At the risk of falling into another rhetorical faux pas, the artist is very little interested in his thought process– at least the ones I’ve known –but is concerned with the doing of his art. Or to put it more precisely, they’re not interested in their thought process in a Kantian sense of conditions for possibility, a priori or historical. Too much self-reflexivity can be detrimental to the doing of their activity. It could be that intentionality is structured in such a way that there must be a necessary point of opacity in order for it to function… This is partially what Lacan is getting at with objet a, where objet a is a blindspot necessarily at work in subjectivity, the tain of the mirror. With regard to political movements I believe that it is important to respect them in their self-description and self-understanding, focusing on the manner in which they develop their potentials which are inventive by nature. Once again, it could just be that I’m not understanding the nature of your question here. When you pitch it in terms of analysis it’s far clearer to me, as how the analyst conceives himself and his relation to his analysand makes a tremendous difference in how the cure is conceived and conducted. However, when you link this to history, I dig my heels in again, as the question here is one of a praxis and is centered on that praxis, and this rings in my ears as changing the topic of discussion. That is, it’s difficult for me to avoid the impression that these references to history aren’t delegitimating, at some level, the object they’re trying to account for. I know you’ve assured me that you don’t think that’s the case, but I find it extremely difficult to escape that impression whenever it is concretely evoked.

My sense here is that you are individualising something I take to be important only on a collective level (even if I as an individual happen to spend a lot of my personal time on it ;-P). Theoretical self-reflexivity for me doesn’t have anything to do with anyone’s individual subjecitivity – once someone goes to the level of the individual, it generally means they’ve plonked themselves in the middle of a subject-object dualism, and they’ll never claw their way back out. So, among other things, I’m not talking about individuals needing to interrupt their political actions of the moment in order to pause, take a deep breath, and meditate on what they’re about to do… I don’t think the problem of divesting the observer of their observations applies.

Theoretical self-reflexivity, for me, is a somewhat technical term that basically just tries to acknowledge and then deal in a rigorous way with the recognition that the theorist isn’t in any exceptional position in relation to the context they are analysing. Part of the drive to engage in this kind of work, of course, is simply consistency and trying to come up with a form of theory that is actually adequate to specific aspects of our moment. I do, though, think there are practical implications – among them, to assist social movements in not being blindsided by dimensions of their overarching context that they might not otherwise recognise are there (just to make a gestural and over-abstract example, I think many 1960s social movements were so focussed on a backward-looking critique of the technocratic state, that they were taken unawares by the parallel critique of that same state by movements with a very different political agenda: the inventiveness of particular movements was not, by itself, sufficient to equip them to navigate their context in a politically effective way…).

In terms of the link back to analysis (and I’ll have to apologise here – I’m realising my discussion is getting more and more truncated and gestural – I’m very tired, and I’m happy to revisit this in a more adequate way, if this ends up not being useful): distortions of various sorts tend to creep in when the theorist exceptionalises themselves in relation to their analysis, and starts to treat society as an object. These distortions desensitise the theorist to potentials within the context (by causing the theorist not to perceive their own critical ideals as a sign of their own imbricatedness in a social context that vibrates with collectively-constituted emancipatory possibilities). This then generally pushes theory in a pessimistic direction, in which the theorist may “exhort” various ideals, but cannot conceptualise these ideals as existing in any concrete relationship with the wider context. Attempts to compensate for this problem by just asserting the potential for rupture, while understandable and in many senses commendable, tend to be quite abstract: again to the example of the 1960s movements – the simple sense that rupture was possible was “in the air”: social movements didn’t need a theorist to achieve this insight – other politically salient dimensions of the context, however, were much harder to see, and systematic theoretical reflection could have cast some meaningful light on such things…

Apologies that I’ve addressed this final set of questions in particular quite poorly – I’m happy to come back to the issue, as you have time and interest. I’ve thought more, and am generally more coherent on the issue, than these passages suggest.

My position intersects in complex ways with concepts of the immanent development of notions.

What does this mean to you though? For me it resolutely does not refer to anything pertaining to history, but is something closer to what’s involved in solving a complex mathematical equation where something new is discovered that wasn’t there in the beginning. Or perhaps a better example would be a musical composition that unfolds according to its own logic. This is why, for me, Hegel is the Hegel of the Logic, not his historical writings, which often bring me to chuckle, or the Phenomenology. The interest of the Logic is the way in which conceptualities emerge out of other conceptualities like the way a crystal grows. Something similar takes place, I believe, in artistic practice, where the artist immanently discovers a certain logos in working through the material.

In a number of respects the issue here is one between determination, or the dynamic internal properties of a thing, and constitution, or the way in which that thing is influenced by what is around it. Talk of history, I think, is seldom carried out well as it invariably privileges constitution over determination, swallowing the thing up in historical determinants and turning the thing itself into a sort of void or empty placeholder with no contribution of its own (I’m using “thing” here loosely, mathematics or a form of art can be a thing). If metaphysics, in the perjorative sense, consists in taking a part for the whole, history certainly becomes metaphysical in this sense. I think, for instance, that worrying over the historical setting in which differential calculus emerged is at best irrelevant, and at worst absurd (if conducted in the way Adorno talks about Jazz, where we say dy/dx represents the alienated bourgeois striving to express himself or something similar). This shifts the meaning of the differential from the differential. But the meaning of the differential is its own. The real task, in my view, is to unfold that new body in its implications and to thoroughly develop it in its potentials. Similarly in the case of a new form of art or a new form of philosophy or a new form of science or a new political movement. I’m speaking more categorically here than I intend, or less dialectically than I should. Clearly a good dialectical account would think the relation of determination and constitution. The problem is that with the possible exception of Foucault’s non-continuous notions of history, I haven’t seen this done which is why I react so strongly whenever it’s evoked. Invariably I see evocations of history as ways of disrespecting the thing itself in its own development for itself. When I evoke history myself it’s generally a mythological history, where I pull on resources from a tradition– say Lucretius or Diderot –that are absolutely contemporary for me as points of identification in what I’m trying to think through. That is, it’s a self-positing of influence rather than a conditioning.

This brings me to a second point regarding history. One of the reasons I’m deeply suspicious about historical approaches is that they tend to emphasize continuity rather than breaks, thereby assimilating the emergence of something new to larger historical processes and dynamics. By contrast, I think that history is characterized by discontinuities and do not believe that everything can be explained on the basis of what came prior to that thing. Part of the reason here has to do with the immanence of things to themselves and the manner in which they develop themselves of their own accord in ways that can’t be captured by constitutional accounts. It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something here, but if so you’ll have to explain it more clearly to me.

Finally, on the issue of the emergence of critical subjectivity I go back and forth. I have strong antipathy towards Kant– the thesis that we must first reflect on our faculties prior to engaging in metaphysics (taken in the non-pejorative sense) –for a variety of reasons. In part this is because it strikes me as a way of disengaging. Such moves strike me as very Kantian. This, for instance, is how a similar move has functioned in the work of Niklas Luhmann where we are enjoined to observe the observer. The problem is that this activity of observing the observer strikes me as divesting the observer of their observations. The observer of the observer trumps the observer by observing how they draw distinctions and pointing out that other distinctions are possible, thereby undermining the distinctions they do make… All the while, the observer of the observer gets to keep his hands clean, never resolutely taking up distinctions of his own and following through on their consequences, thereby occupying the position of the beautiful soul. Meanwhile history is made elsewhere by those who bear the contingency of their distinctions and act on them. On the other hand, Bourdieu, who champions a very similar dictum in works such as Pascalian Meditations and Homo Academicus, has shown how such a form of analysis can reveal systematic biases and illusions that distort the object of investigation. This comes out brilliantly in Homo Academicus where he shows how certain features of the academic’s socio-economic position lead to a distorted notion of practice. As a result, better practice becomes possible.

In this connection I think you can do a better job explaining just why you think this question is so vital and how it relates to practice. At the risk of falling into another rhetorical faux pas, the artist is very little interested in his thought process– at least the ones I’ve known –but is concerned with the doing of his art. Or to put it more precisely, they’re not interested in their thought process in a Kantian sense of conditions for possibility, a priori or historical. Too much self-reflexivity can be detrimental to the doing of their activity. It could be that intentionality is structured in such a way that there must be a necessary point of opacity in order for it to function… This is partially what Lacan is getting at with objet a, where objet a is a blindspot necessarily at work in subjectivity, the tain of the mirror. With regard to political movements I believe that it is important to respect them in their self-description and self-understanding, focusing on the manner in which they develop their potentials which are inventive by nature. Once again, it could just be that I’m not understanding the nature of your question here. When you pitch it in terms of analysis it’s far clearer to me, as how the analyst conceives himself and his relation to his analysand makes a tremendous difference in how the cure is conceived and conducted. However, when you link this to history, I dig my heels in again, as the question here is one of a praxis and is centered on that praxis, and this rings in my ears as changing the topic of discussion. That is, it’s difficult for me to avoid the impression that these references to history aren’t delegitimating, at some level, the object they’re trying to account for. I know you’ve assured me that you don’t think that’s the case, but I find it extremely difficult to escape that impression whenever it is concretely evoked.

Your comments above that you are concerned about reductiveness in my position are substantive, tell me something about how you hear what I say, and give me something to think about and to work with. My impulse would be to respond that reductive approaches posit a kind of separation of thought and practice – history and notion – and therefore find themselves needing to cast about for which horn of this dichotomy is more “fundamental” in some way. I think that I see these things as far more interpenetrating than this – a position which therefore makes it a puzzle to me how history and notion might come to be perceived as distinct, and how a form of subjectivity might also arise that grasps their interpenetration.

My position intersects in complex ways with concepts of the immanent development of notions. I am quite comfortable with Hegel in many respects, for example, but am quite uncomfortable with a more conventional “history of thought” line that might articulate its position in terms of the development of, say, intellectual history in the conventional sense. My discomfort with the “history of thought” line boils down to the suspicion that its concept of thought is far too narrow. My position is that there is a notional content to all forms of practice, which can go unrecognised because many approaches privilege the notions that pertain to only a very narrow slice of (generally academic or explicitly marked “cultural”) practice, and then privilege that slice. With an expansive enough understanding of what might have notional content, there may be little if any difference between your position and mine – this remains an issue to explore…

My sense from various things you’ve written on clinical practice is that, within a clinical context, you would be dubious of approaches that might claim that they could discuss diagnoses or symptoms, without discussing the therapeutic relationship – that you would be sceptical of “asymmetric” approaches that don’t thematise the relationship between the analyst and the analysand, but instead jump straight to some kind of diagnosis, as though it were possible to objectify a diagnosis and regard it as residing in the analysand, who would thus be constructed as a “patient”.

I would suspect that you might also be a bit concerned if you were speaking to an analyst who, while accepting as an intellectual principle that analysis is an intersubjective process involving complex dynamics of transference and counter-transference, nevertheless continued speaking in more traditional diagnostic terms, and suggested, when you tried to turn the conversation back to issues of the analytic relationship, that this discussion, while certainly fine in principle and worth further study, was getting in the way of that diagnosis…

Please don’t hear this analogy as more than it is: you know that I think you have a sophisticated and quite beautiful approach to critical theory, and have thought through the issues we discuss in great detail. In relation to this one specific issue, however, my reaction has some small similarities to how you might feel in the sort of situation I have described above: to me, you look as though you are trying to separate two things that I think cannot be separated – the thought process of the theorist is bound up in the context being analysed, to the degree that I don’t believe it makes sense to separate the analysis of the two, but rather believe this analysis must always proceed in tandem. If we don’t do this, it’s not just that I think we’re leaving something out that, for completeness, we should try to include: it’s that I think we’re distorting what we’re leaving in.

So to me questions of self-reflexivity can never be interruptions within a discussion of the critical standards we apply: I simply don’t believe that we can adequately criticise problematic forms of thought and practice, unless we have also understood the potential for the subject-position of the critic – the study of what we would criticise is also and always and necessarily the study of the conditions of possibility of critique. The two things only make sense when thought together, such that it inevitably distorts our vision of one, when we try to think it without the other…

You don’t have to agree with any of this – I’m happy to debate it. I’m just trying to get across that my conversational interventions are offered from within a theoretical framework that has serious hesitations about what will result, if certain problems aren’t conceptualised as intrinsically interconnected…